#bibles

[cuties-in-codices]

bird marginalia

from the bible of borso d'este, illuminated by taddeo crivelli and others in ferrara (italy), 1455-61

source: Modena, Biblioteca Estense, MS.V.G.12 (= Lat. 422)

[theinternetarchive]

gothic bible (volgate) with text in hebrew and greek; ink, tempera, and gold on vellum, southern france, toulouse or avignon c. 1275-1300.

In the 13th century, the bible was, for the first time, produced as a single volume with an officially sanctioned sequence to its books and chapters as illustrated by this example. The very extensive decoration of this bible is arranged hierarchically to indicate the relative importance of the various texts so that full or almost full-page initials mark the openings of the first prologue, Genesis, and the first Gospel; historiated initials mark the beginning of each book and illuminated initials mark the Prologues.

[dduane]

I have been trying to write fic (well, smut) set in a world where certain things are slightly different to serve the fic's plot.

However, each time I try I have run into a problem: my head insists I need to justify the changes - I need to know comprehensive details about how the world works so I can ensure everything is consistent and not too f'd up.

So I get bogged down, and don't write a word. What do?

In your position, I’d sit down and write myself a bible.

This is how I did my prep for Barbie: Fairytopia.* And how I’ve done it for various works of fic presently on AO3… and how I’m doing it right now for the new Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rats of Sumatra III project. I was taught this art by my animation story editors at Hanna-Barbera, and it’s stood me in good stead. (Peter and I pulled down our first miniseries assignment from a company that told us “we gave great bible.” And that was true.) 😄

When I say “bible” I don’t necessarily mean something that thick! (Though some of mine have been pretty hefty, with one TV project’s bible running more than a hundred pages… because I knew I had skeptical and underinformed TV execs to convince about something historical.) For the kind of purpose we’re describing here, your prep bible could be quite short: maybe looking like a bullet-pointed “shopping list”, five or ten pages long. It can be just as long or short as it needs to be to cover all your salient points.

The idea is simply to put down, in concrete form, a list of the main “different things” you need to know and remember about your alternate universe when you’re working in it. This is where you do your justification work, in as much or as little detail as you need to convince yourself you’ve got the necessary bases covered. The virtual “stage manager” who sits at the back of the theater of the Writing Department in your mind, judging when things are right, will be your guide here, and will advise you as to when you’ve got enough and it’s time to stop. And once this stuff is down on the page, you’ll be a position to judge critically whether everything makes enough sense to work with, and slots together correctly.

This is also a bit like (for the prose part of a project) outlining, in that it’s incredibly freeing. Once you’ve got this background nailed down, you know you can safely turn your attention away from it and get down to the serious business: drama, and the character interactions that express it. (And inevitably as you’re doing the bible writing, you start getting ideas for how the substrate you’re laying down is going to affect the conflicts between and among the characters. The bible stage can be incredibly fruitful this way.)

It would be facile to describe the bibling process as “getting the easy part over with first”. Because sometimes it’s not easy! But it’s worth doing first, because having done this first relieves you of the ongoing anxiety caused by knowing you may have to keep inventing or rationalizing stuff on the fly. (Which can produce the kind of micro-blocks that a writer can generally really do without.) …Not that you’re not going to be inventing things on the fly anyway: that’s a normal part of the writing process. But the biggest and most obvious issues will have been handled already, and you’ll know they have; which is always a weight off one’s mind. And the fewer of those weights you have loading you down, when you’re in the midst of the labor of composition, the better.

Anyway, give it a shot and see how it works for you. And then you can, like the rest of us smut writers, get on to the really pressing business: making sure you haven’t lost track of where all the characters’ arms and legs (and things) are when you’re writing those hot steamy sex scenes. 😏

Hope this helps!

*ETA: My remit on this job did include creating a bible for them. But I write a rough-draft one for myself first, including various meta that I needed but they didn't.

[animentality]

[luxifers-light]

Perhaps you’ve done this in the past, or you know someone who does it, but Christians praying for advice then proceeding to flip the Bible open to a random page and pointing to a verse and relating it to their situation is pretty much how tarot works

[saywhat-politics]

Some Oklahoma schools received Trump-backed Bibles with outdated U.S. Constitution. Here's context

Bibles in Oklahoma classrooms allegedly included a version of the U.S. Constitution without the 11th through 27th amendments.

Claim:

In 2025, Bibles sent to Oklahoma public school teachers by state Superintendent Ryan Walters included copies of the U.S. Constitution without the 11th through 27th amendments.

True

Context

Copies of the U.S. President Donald Trump-endorsed "God Bless the USA" Bible provided to some Oklahoma teachers by the state's Department of Education included the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights — the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. Walters resigned from his position to lead an anti-union conservative teachers' advocacy group in September, and the new superintendent has said the Oklahoma Department of Education will not continue to distribute Bibles to Oklahoma classrooms. It was not clear as of this writing how many Oklahoma schools received "God Bless the USA" Bibles.

[duvalpete]

Kensington. September 2025.