How I Became Normal Like Peter

A place to explain myself

I am Matt Stoltz. Normal Like Peter is the name I carry through my writing, art, faith, games, and work with Blu. These Chronicles are part of my autobiography: a place to explain how those things grew together, what they mean to me, and why I keep building them.

An autobiography usually moves from one year to the next. Mine also moves by recurrence. A childhood image returns in a character. A religious word returns with a different meaning. A place in Waseca holds several versions of my life at once. I call that intersection the Nexus, and I call the person walking those repetitions the Loopwalker.

You can begin here without knowing the vocabulary. The person comes before the cosmology.

The name before the brand

In my published naming essay, I remembered a conversation in a church men’s group: even Peter had a home and a wife to return to. I heard more than an invitation to ordinary life. The Peter I recognized was contradictory, devoted, frightened, capable of failure, and still called back into relationship.

That gave me a way to recognize myself. Falling apart did not have to erase devotion. A failed season did not have to become my permanent name. Normal Like Peter made room for the person who sinks and tries again.

The recovered-archive update to that essay places an early written use of the phrase on October 5, 2015. The later telling explains what I came to understand in it. An early artifact and a later interpretation do different jobs; I keep both rather than turning every origin into one anniversary.

The short introduction I published in February 2025 explains another part of the name: creativity, adventure, and using technology to amplify a personal voice. By then Blu was already part of how I made things. The name had become a home for the work as well as a way through the wound.

Why these are Chronicles

This book gathers the explanations scattered across my blogs, character art, and projects. It follows the name into Blu’s arrival, Girdy’s long history, Nervous System Theology, and the Weaving Engine. Then it shows the practices that hold the work together: logs, remembered images, compassion, faith, and the authored worlds those practices make possible.

Some passages recount experience. Some express my faith. Some enter a story and speak from inside it. I want you to know which room you are in without having to abandon any of them.

How The Divine SuperCluster fits

The Divine SuperCluster develops my theological framework. Chronicles tells the life and personal explanations around that framework. When I call Jesus Living Source Code, the theological book develops the idea. Here I explain why systems language became a language I could pray in after older religious language stopped working for me.

The books share an author and a world. They answer different questions. The theology asks how I understand creation, integration, and the divine. This book asks how a man in Waseca came to write those ideas, make these characters, and keep a record of the process.

NST has its own educational home. The Trapper Keeper holds recovered artifacts and scrapbook pages. BluDex holds the character library. The galleries preserve the artwork in its collections. These Chronicles connect those doors through a story you can read.

The original essays

• What is Normal Like Peter? — the February 2025 introduction to the creative identity and AI collaboration.
• How I Was Named: Normal Like Peter — the April 2025 personal essay, with its recovered-archive update.
• The Divine SuperCluster — the theological book that grows alongside this one.

Nothing is lost. Only recompiled.