2003-11-24 - 10:20 a.m.
Oh man. Teething babies.
That's all that needs to be said about my last hiatus. That, plus the demands of research time at work, and just a general mundaneness of things. There's a lot of political stuff going on, both in the Barony and in the world at large, but I'm not going to talk about that. I've pretty much dropped out of the SCA, except for a couple of mailing lists. Politics… well, read Agonist.org for today, and check out what General Tommy Franks has been saying.
Kevin, the danger is not from the radical left trying to take away people's guns. It's from people who don't consider the Constitution to be inviolate.
After reading all the fun that Kung Fu Kitten has been having with NaNoWriMo over the last 2-3 years, I've decided to toss my hat in for next year. I've got an idea, and by next year I should have all the characters defined, the plot mapped out, the research completed, and my wife's permission secured.
I probably won't make it, but it should be fun stuff.
Here's the idea:
St. Louis is being terrorized by a serial killer who carves the Blood Eagle into his victims. Police resources are being diverted by a rash of hate crimes and their attendant repercussions (back-and forth assaults between racist skinheads, various ethnic gangs, and straight-edge skins). It doesn't help that these skinheads seem to show unnatural strength and speed. Later on it is established that these elements are related: the murderer is a nutcase who's mixing Goebbels with Crowley and a shot of Gardner. He's raising power through blood sacrifices in order to start a race war. The power goes partly to confuse the police, and partly to imbue his followers with the berserkir rage.
Of course, there's got to be some good guys. The protagonist is jarred out of his boring routine when he gets into an argument with a couple of neo-Nazi types. He gets out of it alive partly due to his mad kung fu skillz and partly due to the intercession of two guys who just happen to be passing by. They ask him about his style (Bamboo Forest Temple Southern Praying Mantis, ha ha), and invite him to join "an informal group of martial artists who get together to trade ideas and concepts." Later on it turns out that this group is also a sort of magical fixer squad, led by a sort of Diana Tregarde/Anita Blake type. It ends up as a magical faceoff between the evil neo-Nazi wizard and our intrepid heroes.
I'm having fun coming up with details for the main characters. Like any good author, I'm stealing pretty heavily from people I know or have known. The magical fixer squad is based partly on my experiences with a group of diverse pagans I ran with in New York. That was a very intense time in my life, and I'll probably write a separate journal entry about that soon. I'm giving these guys a very diverse religious background to get away from the "magician=pagan" equation. There will be pagans of various flavors, but also Jewish and Christian magical badasses as well.
Should be fun.
