Tag: My Fiction

Dunwich in the Time of Mud

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Spring has arrived with its endless supply of muck and slop and just in time with it the town has gone topsy turvy.  Revolution has broken out.  The Old Guard and the Young Turks are having a set to and I’m caught in the middle.  I’ll be working more and making a little extra money but being of an extremely lazy nature I’d prefer the opposite.  But there are some interesting aspects to this turn of events.  New England town democracy in action is a bizarre force to observe.  The fact that the Old Guard is putting up a fight is almost unheard of in this neck of the woods.  I’ll have a ringside seat for the proceedings so it may make an interesting story when all is said and done but I expect that much angst and hard feelings will spill over into everyday life.

But at the same time, it will also cut into my blogging time, in fact it already has.  And on top of that I’ve mended my ways and now have begun applying myself to my fiction writing.  I cranked out four thousand words over the last three days and that has also cut into my posting.  But that’s all to the good.  The story is expanding and becoming more interesting.  I’ve definitely decided to nuke my hero’s base at some point.  I mean what’s a science fiction story without an atom bomb somewhere?  No one calls them atomic bombs anymore.  It’s nuke this and nuke that.  Thermo-nuclear.  Who came up with that name?  Thermo- implies heat.  Are there any cold nuclear explosions?  I guess if they ever figure out an actual cold fusion process, we could talk about it but anyway I think I’m going to nuke my base.

I’ve had to write some personal scenes into the book.  The hero gets to see his family for the first time in a long while and there are grandkids and his son’s widow and that was tricky.  I think I did alright which surprised me.  I’m not a very touchy feely kinda guy but I could see that leaving out his relationship with his family felt fake.  So, there you go, human interest.  What’s next, an Oprah interview for our hero?  I’ve even added an AI character.  That’s actually kind of fun.  It’s funny once you get going these things kind of write themselves in.  Anyway, the story is percolating along.

But all this stuff really just enhances the blogging.  You can’t just write about national stories all the time.  It’s just too much of the same thing.  We’ve got to be in the story too, or what’s the point?  I could just listen to Tucker Carlson or some other talking head.  That’s why I like when some of the guest contributors have something to add.  I like to get some other angles on things and I’m sure that’s the same with everybody else.

I think the whole Trump indictment story is both a ridiculous joke and at the same time an important object lesson.  It’s important that everyone on our side realize that this is not our country anymore and it doesn’t work by the rules we were told apply.  The people in charge change the rules as needed.  They don’t play fair and they play as rough as needed.  And if the January 6th prisoners aren’t enough to convince you of that just wait till Donald Trump gets his treatment.

So anyway, busy, busy, busy but still keeping my nose to the grindstone.  Wow, that sounds painful!

Another Snippet from My Book

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I’ve been trying to speed up my writing but there’s always something distracting me.  but I thought it would be fun to post a little part of a scene.

“After the meeting, Director Sparks called Chastain and told him to meet him at Sparks’ temporary office in the Pentagon.  When Chastain arrived Sparks briefed him.  “We can’t play around anymore.  I’ve been given unlimited resources to catch this man.  I want you to act as the lead.  There will be three separate teams.  One will investigate the physical evidence at the Hoover building site to figure out what the hell we’re up against.  The second team will pursue the cyber trail of whoever released the video.  That leak must be plugged.  But most important, the third team will find Boghadair.  You will have first priority on all the surveillance infrastructure, public and private.  You can write a blank check for whatever you need but I want that man in custody within the week.  If not, your head is on the block.  And that’s not a joke.  If Boghadair isn’t in shackles in a week from today you’re done.”  Chastain bit back some bitter words and said, “Okay, I’ll need a command center with a room where I can crash; bed, shower, kitchen.  Tell me the cost center numbers I can charge to and give me the contact information for my three team leads.  I’ll find Boghadair for you or you can have my job.  But I wonder what else I’ll find.  Apparently, this thing is a lot bigger than one man.”

Sparks handed him a briefcase.  “All the documents are on a drive.  There’s a folder with all the contact information and the codes you need to access the databases and the systems you’ll need.  I also want a list of government officials that Boghadair might target and conjecture on the order of attack.  I want that list by tomorrow morning.”  Chastain nodded his head.  Sparks growled, “That’s all.”  And Chastain left the office and walked out of the building.  As he was leaving the building he thought, “You’re at the top of that list you fool.”

As Director Sparks left his temporary office that night that very idea occurred to him.  He was headed home to a gated community in one of the most expensive suburbs of Washington.  And he was scared.  He decided to travel back to his home by a different route.  Taking this circuitous route and seeing no cars following him he slowly calmed down and by the time he was within a mile of his home he felt foolish about his fears.  When he was caught at a red light that usually never changed on him he was a little confused.  Then he noticed that the video display on his dashboard shifted from the typical menu view to a video feed.  He could see a man in the driver’s seat of a car.  After a second or two he realized he was looking at an image of himself.  He was for a second stunned and by the time he comprehended his peril the bullet was already entering the side of his head.  When his foot slipped off the brake his car rolled into the intersection and was struck by traffic going through the intersection.  The local police were on the scene rather quickly and alerted the FBI based on the car’s license plate number.  Late that night the report reached George Chastain and his first thought was, “I guess I should let the Attorney General know he’s next on the list.””

Gee, it’s fun killing bad guys.  It just feels right.  Well, on to the Attorney General.

Nuclear Armageddon as a Plot Device

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Recently Joe Biden made the news when he reversed a campaign vow and stated that under his administration the United States would maintain the right to nuclear first strike as a military option.  Now the idea of Dementia Joe mistaking the nuclear football for his tv remote and ordering up an all-out nuclear blitz on Russia and China while trying to access some kind of hair fetish programming is obviously concerning.

But really this article is more about fiction writing.  In a story that I have been working on (forever) I reached a point in the story where I considered that the best way to escape from the corner I’d painted myself into was by having thermonuclear war break out between Russia and the United States.

Admittedly, that seems like a sad statement on my writing abilities but in point of fact it provided a definitive solution to multiple plot problems I was faced with.  After all, there aren’t many scenarios that can put the US federal government on its heels.  But three 20-megaton thermonuclear ICBMs detonating over Washington is a leading contender.  So, I will confess that I considered the scenario very carefully.

One thing I noticed though is that the impact of a nuked United States is extremely disruptive to a storyline.  Even the most tyrannical US administration looks quite different after the mushroom cloud sprouts over it.  Because now all of a sudden millions of Americans are dead and the ones still living are stunned, scared and desperate for a path forward.  At that point they’d follow Satan himself if he knows where to get food and fuel.

So, everything in my story is turned upside down.  Instead of the plucky rebels fighting the evil feds in a series of hit and run attacks, suddenly they find themselves wondering how they’ll survive without the now non-existent FEMA agency to save them from starvation and hypothermia.  Now what happens to my rebellion story?  All of a sudden enemies need each other just to survive.  Freedom and independence suddenly don’t mean much when staying alive requires all hands-on deck.

So that’s the change in the atmosphere, the feel of the story.  Does it still make sense?  Can the story survive the change?  Not as originally conceived.  I was looking at a series of stories with the rebels taking on the Deep State one step at a time with the rest of the country sizing up the battle and the balance of power gradually tilting toward the rebels.  But now the battle is over but without the dramatic tension and the action.  Instead, we have a tale of catastrophe and dissolution.

And to make that story work will require a change in emphasis.  Now instead of a slowly building wave of battle we have a nuclear wipe out and a tide going out.  Instead of a war with winners and losers we have the flotsam and jetsam from a deluge struggling to survive and trying to rebuild some kind of patchwork of settlements.  That’s a totally different thing.  It becomes a bunch of smaller stories at the village level.  Instead of armies we have farmers and mechanics, men and women and their children trying to survive without supermarkets and gas stations, even without electricity.  It’s nothing like the story I was envisioning but somehow it makes sense.  Because even though we may have forgotten about the atom bomb it hasn’t gone away.  It’s still there and it has its own internal logic that makes it the executioner of last resort.  If we decide that the arc of history bends in our direction and we can do as we please no matter what, we may find that the arc is just the ballistic track of an ICBM.

So inexorably I think the story is telling me to make a turn.  Even as a fictional plot device it does make one pause.  Imagine the largest fifty American cities reduced to rubble and charred bodies.  Imagine fallout killing off a quarter of the survivors.  And food and fuel gone for the rest of the survivors.  The grimness of such a tale is hard to overstate.  How do you tell such a story so that people will want to read it?

Well, that’s a subject for another day.  But this one has helped me get my thoughts in some kind of order.  Okay, hit all those buttons!

Per Un Barbiere di Qualità!

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Princess Sack-of-Potatoes’ birthday party was a great success.  My daughter’s in-laws were very congenial and we all good-naturedly performed all the kids’ party rituals.  We dutifully sang off key to ‘Happy Birthday” and applauded the blowing out of the four candles.  We watched as the cake was cut and the opening of the presents and even a spirited game of pin the tail on the donkey.  Only for some unknown reason it was tape the nose on the clown.  This particular clown looked like some kind of nightmarish psychopath which I found quite disturbing but the kids were unperturbed.

When we had all eaten enough burgers and potato salad and cake and ice cream and all the presents were opened the parents gathered up their kids and headed home.  Camera Girl agreed that the event was a great success and we began some of the clean-up.

But I was in the mood for something interesting.  Lately I have been watching YouTube videos of the operatic aria “Largo al factotum” from the Barber of Seville.  It’s the song that everyone remembers from various classic cartoons of the 1940s that has the famous stanza, “Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ipb9xbXSAY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJIpVj_YkNo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKDXr_fimQ8

I watched about a dozen different versions, some going back to the 1920s.  And it occurred to me, “What an interesting character Figaro is!”  Here is the swaggering braggart.  He is a big fish in a little pond.  In his own mind he is a hero, a Hercules of a thousand great labors.  He is always in demand and always acclaimed by the crowd.

And of course, he is merely a legend in his own mind.  His actual trades are barber, dentist, wig maker and a sort of go-between for couples in love.  He passes love notes and such things.  So, he really is a nothing.

But he has a quick wit, the gift of gab, a way with women and enormous self-confidence.  And putting those things together creates a formidable character.  Some people may recognize someone like this.  I knew someone of exactly the type.  They always have a treasure trove of amazing personal stories.  And their personal lives tend to be an awful mess.  They combine recklessness, selfishness and even a bit of cruelty along with their natural abilities as a clown, a skirt chaser and a leader of the riff-raff.  In many ways they are fascinating personalities but they leave a trail of angry women in their wake and never seem to grow up.

And it occurred to me that is why I enjoy the aria.  I recognize the type that Figaro is the symbol of.  And the scene captures that reality splendidly.  And the music is wonderful.

And what a great character he would be to put in a story!  Somehow, I’ve got to have a swaggering braggart in one of my stories.  It would just be too great a thing to ignore.  And in fact, I need him to be a recurring character in a “world” that I make.  It will be a sort of an homage to an old friend that I knew long, long ago in a place far, far away.

Ah, bravo Figaro! Bravo, bravissimo!  Fortunatissimo per verità!

Pleasant Fiction and Painful Reality

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Today was a fiction writing day.  I made some good progress on the plot.  But I was stymied on an aspect of the story that only recently occurred to me.  What I realized is that one of my main characters doesn’t have enough back story.  He has a reasonably well-defined personality but he’s floating alone in his little bubble of the story.  I need to tell the readers why he is the way he is.  So, I started making up this past in my head but then I realized I need a way to have him tell this info to the readers.  That’s an awful lot of exposition.  So, what I’ll do is come up with a situation where the protagonist and this character are involved in some scene where they’re trapped together and forced to wait for some crisis to pass and that’s when I’ll have them swap histories.  To make it more natural I’ll have them both talking about their pasts.  In the context of both of them not knowing if they’re about to be killed it makes it a little more likely, emotionally, for them to be talking about their lives.

And one other problem remains.  Where does the story end?  This will be a series of books and I want to end the first book with a bang but I have to make sure that the empire will be able to strike back.  So, I have to leave enough villains to allow them to regroup.  Maybe there’s more to this writing thing than I thought.

I saw a news article that said that the FBI took Trump’s passports.  Isn’t that just too cute of them?  Apparently, they’re pulling out all the stops.  I think that’s good.  November should be the perfect storm.  We should know for sure whether there’s any hope of fixing the system.  And if the Deep State commits themselves to every banana republic tactic and holds nothing back then we’ll have no doubt about whether this is our best-case scenario.  If the mid-terms aren’t a referendum on Biden’s incompetence and the Deep State’s unconstitutional behavior then there is no conceivable way, we’ll ever push them out of power.  And it doesn’t matter whether it’s an honest election or not.  A loss for us either way says to me that it’s all over.

And I don’t say that in a melodramatic way.  On Wednesday November 9th if the Democrats still hold the House and Senate, I won’t be donning sackcloth and sifting ashes into my hair.  I won’t even put a for sale sign up in front of the Compound.  But I will be weighing my options and making some changes.  After all, living in a country that is run by an oligarchy that is proven to have an unshakeable lock on the levers of power and is also clearly working to disenfranchise your family isn’t necessarily the best option, even if it is the richest and most powerful country on the planet and has always been your home.

So, I’ll think long and hard about what’s best for me and mine.  I’m sure I’ll have plenty of company in that contemplation.  The 2020 election fraud was a shock.  But with the COVID lockdown being used to allow all kinds of irregularities it left a question as to whether the fraud could be reined in afterward.  If it’s repeated this year then it can be repeated indefinitely.  If the Justice Department can run two kinds of “justice” then we’ve already ceased to be a legitimate state.  So, many people will be reflecting on these facts.

But, enough of that gloomy talk.  Tomorrow is Liz Cheney’s Primary Day.  I intend to enjoy that event to its fullest.  Maybe she’ll give a tearful concession speech or a defiant vow to be back on top someday soon.  But either way I will savor the moment.  Quoting Khan Noonien Singh (or actually Herman Melville) “to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee,” I revel in the spite inherent in punishing the RINOs.  It’s the only thing that we can do to redress the injuries these people inflict on us every day.  The least we can do is celebrate their defeat.

Here’s a Sample From My Unfinished Sci-Fi Book

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Here’s a sample of a book I’m currently about a quarter of the way through.  If you look at the Header of the website there’s a new link to “Stuff to Buy.”  That where I’ll embed links to books and photogrpaphy I’ll have to sell soon.

 

 

The American Archipelago

Book 1 – The Sniper

Chapter 1 – An Object Lesson

Joseph Boghadair was set up at a loophole in a small prefabricated metal building at the top of a mountain that contained the Icarus Mine.  His .50 caliber sniper rifle was trained on the narrow road that led up to the mine.  He could see a line of black SUVs about a mile and a half down the road and he was getting ready to start firing on the convoy.  His first shots took out the engine of the lead vehicle thereby halting the convoy.  His second volley took out the engine of the last car in line thus trapping the rest of the vehicles between.  Then at a more leisurely pace he took care of the other eight vehicles.  By this point the passengers were crouching behind their disabled cars and randomly firing handguns and assault weapons in Joseph’s general direction with almost no discernible results.

After about half an hour a few of the men in black body armor attempted to reach a stand of trees about 300 yards away to their left.  Joseph put a few well aimed rounds in front of their path and they quickly retreated back to the supposed safety of their not so mobile autos.  Joseph snorted wryly at their shyness.

An hour after that a helicopter approached the mountain from the opposite direction to Joseph’s loophole.  Walking over to a window on the other wall he could see a distant Blackhawk approaching at relatively high altitude.  Joseph then began his preparations for their reception.

Between crew and troops, the Blackhawk had a dozen men on board.  And more importantly it had a couple of hellfire missiles.  From a very safe distance away it targeted Joseph’s position and fired.  The missile struck precisely on target and obliterated the steel structure almost completely.  All that remained was the foundation of the structure around the mine shaft, now clogged with debris.

The Blackhawk landed about three quarters of a mile from the mine entrance.  At this point the agents hunkered down behind their vehicles began to stream toward the helicopter.  By the time they reached the aircraft the troops had exited and were waiting for their rescued brethren to arrive.

FBI Special Agent in Charge, George Chastain assembled both teams and briefed them on the updated mission plan.  “We will proceed to the mine head and look for any human remains.  We will collect whatever we can retrieve for lab analysis and attempt to seal the mine head until qualified personnel can be assembled for recovery operations.  It is presumed that the target, Joseph Boghadair was killed by the missile strike but we will take no chances.  He was an extremely dangerous individual and should not be approached by anyone without backup and prior approval from leadership.  In addition to his war record it is believed that Boghadair is responsible for the shooting deaths of forty-six people in the last six months with thirteen of those people being FBI personnel.  No one enters the mine until remote sensing equipment is brought in.  Alright, proceed.”

The agents formed two groups.  Apparently, SUV agents and helicopter agents must not bond very well.  But before they were more than a hundred feet from the helicopter a series of incredibly powerful explosions shook the ground and knocked them off their feet.  And while they were holding onto the ground for dear life, they could see that the high ground where the mine head was located collapsed into the earth.  The roar of that collapse was more frightening than the initial earthquake and some of the agents hid their heads under their arms in abject terror.  When the mountain stopped shaking the men started to collect themselves and stand up.  When they looked around them, they were astonished.  A circular pit had opened up centered on the mine head.  It was a thousand yards in diameter and so deep that only blackness could be seen at its center.  Several cracks had formed outside the circular pit.  One of these had nearly swallowed the Blackhawk.  It was on its side and half buried in the crevice.  Its rotors were fractured and it wouldn’t be flying away from this landing.

Chastain went over to the edge of the crater and just stared down into the blackness below.  Then he went back to his team and started giving orders to begin a retreat from the stricken mountain.  He was trying to think of what he was going to tell his boss.  Nothing reasonable came to mind.

02DEC2021 – Dunwich Complainer – Local COVID Actions

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Here in Dunwich as everywhere in America, COVID has been a scourge.  Of course, the spread and the symptoms in Dunwich are atypical and highly disturbing (as is everything here).  The disease is completely restricted to a one-mile radius around the historic home of Zebadiah Cobblestoner the legendary Whaling Fleet Magnate.

Zebadiah was known in the early nineteenth century as the whale prostate king.  His company sold pickled whale prostate throughout the New England region where its healing properties were much in demand.  And with the proceeds of this lucrative trade Zebadiah built a magnificent mansion in his native town Dunwich.  And there he lived in great opulence until the great whale prostate crash of 1841.  In that year the medical profession actually investigated the “healing effects” of whale prostate and discovered that its only effect on humans was to imbue its users with a decidedly bright blue coloration around their private parts.

Needless to say, Zebadiah’s fortunes fell on hard times.  In addition, a local witch named Hepzibah Goodbody was so outraged at the coloration she had contracted that she put a curse on Cobblestoner that not only killed him but rendered his mansion a nexus of contagion and miasma ever after.  At first this miasma was restricted to anyone foolhardy enough to inhabit Zebadiah’s mansion.  But over the years the contagion grew until now it had reached out to all the inhabitants of the formerly prestigious Toenail Hill area.  The malady starts out as general abdominal discomfort but in its terminal stage it presents as an exaggerated swelling of the lower abdomen followed by detonation of the prostate which usually leaves only the legs and upper body of the victim intact.  Surprisingly both males and females are equally afflicted in this syndrome.

Now you may be asking yourself how a nineteenth century witch’s spell that causes people to explode could be diagnosed as COVID.  Well, it turns out that the federal and state governments have provided, let us say, inducements to local governments for finding COVID cases in their areas.  And let’s face it, it’s not cheap cleaning up the biohazard when someone’s pelvic region explodes so First Selectman Cthulhu worked it out with the Dunwich Department of Health to sort of roll the Cobblestoner Curse victims in with the COVID census.

But with the recent state budget cuts the “subsidy” for the COVID cases has dried up and so the Board decided something should be done to clean up this problem.  I was contracted to do it.  And it was stressed that I could employ all means necessary.

Using satellite imagery, I was able to triangulate the source of the miasma to a corner of the Cobblestoner estate.  In fact, it turned out to be centered around Zebadiah Cobblestoner’s private cemetery.  I brought along one hundred tanker trucks, each loaded with 6,000 gallons of aqua regia which is a combination of saturated hydrochloric acid and fuming nitric acid.  My team excavated down to one hundred feet where we started to uncover a stone-like mass of enormous size finally we could see its shape was spherical with a diameter of over a thousand feet.  When we reached the bottom of this structure, we saw with horror that it was attached to the centuries dead but normal sized corpse of Zebadiah Cobblestoner.  We had uncovered his decidedly malign hypertrophied prostate bulging out of his body!

We climbed out of the excavation in a panicked rout but before following my team in a sprint for the hills I slammed the valve actuator that released the veritable lake of hyper-corrosive acid into the pit.  As I panted from the effort of escaping the scene, clouds of acrid fumes spread along the ground.  Earth tremors made it difficult to keep my legs under me but I finally reached a ridge about a mile off from the pit.  And there I witnessed a sight that has shaken my sanity and left me a shell of the man I was.

The ground around the pit convulsed and swelled.  The prostate swelled up to ten times its size and glowed a bright yellow.  Then the prostate shrank down and disappeared below ground.  But suddenly the corpse of Cobblestoner took its place swelling up to the size of the prostate and even larger.  Its face was distorted with pain and rage and I feared something truly horrible was about to occur.  All at once an enormous flatulence erupted from the nether regions of Cobblestoner.  A hurricane of unbelievably foul air stormed past me.  But almost as soon as it arrived it passed and a look of angelic peace suffused Cobblestoner’s face and then he slowly shrank back into the pit.

After a safe period of time had elapsed, I dared to return to the top of the pit.  There was no sign at all of Cobblestoner or his cursed prostate.  The area had been miraculously cleansed by the potent acids and the miasma was gone!  There are signs in the last few days that Toenail Hill is once again a healthy place.  I’ve notice that Zillow has quadrupled the value of all the local real estate and speculators have snatched up all the likeliest properties including the Cobblestoner mansion and gravel pit.

One other salubrious result of the exorcism is that for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic not a single COVID victim has exploded.  That means I’ll probably get paid for my efforts by the Town of Dunwich.  And I call that a win.

Thanksgiving in Dunwich

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I’ve been so busy with my own personal Thanksgiving plans that I lost track of what the town of Dunwich was planning for the holiday.  Last year the COVID lockdown put a damper on this but this year First Selectman Cthulhu and the rest of the Board were determined to get things back to normal.  So, to get the ball rolling Cthulhu invited fifty of the wealthiest and most influential Dunwichians to his house on Monday for a sumptuous dinner.

Of course, there was a misunderstanding.  The guests assumed they were going to eat instead of being eaten but you can hardly fault the First Selectman for that.  He was specific that the menu would come directly from his favorite cookbook, “To Serve Man.”  When I spoke to him, he was still recovering from overindulging but after a couple of barrels of Alka Seltzer he was feeling much better.  He told me his favorite moment was when the guests walked through a doorway and after failing to find any light switches on the walls used their phone lights to determine that they were inside their host’s mouth.  Their screams of terror made the meal all that much more enjoyable.  Oh, that First Selectman, he’s incorrigible!

I read an advertisement in the Dunwich Complainer that a town fair was going to take place on Wednesday.  There would be the usual pie contests and a silent auction for the various crafts that the townspeople would donate.  There were also supposed to be games.  The one that interested me the most was the sack race.  In most towns this is a pretty straight forward affair but the twist that is employed in Dunwich is that Cthulhu alters the geometry of space in the playing field.  This makes moving in a straight line rather tricky.  Three years ago, Josiah Bishop ended up falling through a portal and landed inside of Azathoth’s gallbladder.  He reappeared three weeks later in pretty horrendous condition.  His ears had pretty much melted off and his hair was orange.  When asked what happened he said, “Outside the ordered universe is that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes.”  A lot of people just assumed Josiah had just stomped off because he’s a sore loser and because Jenkin Brown took the prize and they’ve never gotten along.

But by far the oddest story I’ve heard this week was from Arthur Birdsong.  He was walking through some of the more overgrown areas of the northern hills of Dunwich when he was caught in one of the frequent thunderstorms.  Searching for cover he saw a very dilapidated house and ran to it.  The door wasn’t locked so he let himself in.  Finding a fire in the living room he warmed himself and then looked around at his surroundings.  There was a very old book open on a table and he saw that the book was describing cannibalism among certain tribes in Africa and an illustration showed a butcher’s shop with human body parts for sale.  Arms, legs and organs were grouped on tables.  Suddenly he heard a door open above and a white-haired man in 17th century garb walked down the staircase.  The man saw that Arthur had been interested in the book and he began a long meandering tale, the gist of which was that he had come to the notion that feeding on human flesh would enormously extend the human lifespan.  Just then a drop of blood from the ceiling splashed down in between the two men and Arthur looked up and saw an enormous spot of blood on the ceiling and realized that the horrid old man was a cannibal and had just been butchering of one of his victims upstairs.

At first Arthur was hoping that a bolt of lightning would burn the house and the cannibal in the righteous fire of heaven.  But when that failed to happen, he asked the old man what time was dinner.

Arthur had to admit that human pot pie wasn’t bad.  A little gamey and fatty but no worse than mutton.  And the old fellow even threw in some pretty decent hard cider.  So, they became pretty chummy and after dinner they stayed up late chatting and Arthur discovered that they had both gone to the same prep school.  So, they sang school songs and Arthur invited his new friend over for Thanksgiving dinner.  He had been planning to serve a turkey dinner but in light of his new perspective on health food he decided to invite his least favorite blue-haired feminist wine-auntie over and serve her up instead.  I told Arthur that was splendid and I hoped it became a family tradition.  He sadly informed me that he only had three wine-aunties so it would be a short-lived tradition.  I told him to cheer up.  I have dozens of relatives that need eating.  I told him I’d donate one of mine every Thanksgiving for the foreseeable future.  Well, this brought tears to Arthur’s eyes and he declared it a “Thanksgiving Miracle.”  I said, “Nonsense, it is always better to give than to receive.”

So, you can see we here in Dunwich have a lot to be thankful for; friends, family and meat tenderizer.  Here’s hoping your Thanksgiving allows you to enjoy your family as much as we intend to enjoy (parts of) ours.

15OCT2021 – OCF Update – This ‘N’ That

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It’s funny.  It seems like even the Left is starting to admit that Biden has made a shambles of the country and maybe some of them are starting to sound kind of scared.  Still too early to say if it will effect the outcome of the congressional votes on the gazillion dollar reconciliation bill.  I assumed that all the skullduggery planned was a done deal.  Maybe I’m wrong.  We’ll have to see.

But we will be going through some extended bad times as I mentioned in my last post.  I’m starting to look at my own finances to see what cutbacks I should make.

I was listening to the ZMan’s Friday podcast.  It was on organizing and near the end he was talking about negativity.  And that clicked for me.  What we do has to be building things and living.  Just fighting our enemies isn’t enough.  It’s too long a battle to just hold your breath till the end.  We need to make our thing about living and enjoying our lives.

I’ve been writing this story about a sniper who is taking revenge against the FBI.  I have to admit it’s a lot of fun writing about revenge.  But I want the story to be embedded in a larger frame about building something bigger than revenge.  I want to have it about building a community that’s hidden within the current United States.  So this fictional story corresponds to how I think about the world I’m living in.  And that is helpful when thinking about real life.  The things I write about are larger than life.  We can talk about underground bases and new technologies and secret organizations but even the little things we do on-line can be positive and enrich our lives.  We talk to people and we share ideas and maybe we help each other solve some problems.  And if nothing else we act as sounding boards for people who don’t have one.

So today I am doing some story plotting and re-writing.  It wasn’t strong enough or tight enough.  I punched it up and cut it down and I like it a lot better.  It’s another beautiful day and I intend to go out and take some photos of the fall.  A couple of days ago one of the dogs found a big old Northern Water Snake sunning itself near one of the gardens.  I got some good shots of it and I will probably put it up later as a post.

Fridays are usually pretty quiet on the site.  I’ll put up a post later.  Maybe I’ll review another season three trek episode.  I’m getting impatient with them but considering Shatner’s recent trek into almost-space I guess I should do my part.

Camera Girl is an inveterate crime drama reader.  She reads about fictional crime fighters like Jack Reacher and Harry Bosch and Jesse Stone.  Well, we recently started watching a tv series about Harry Bosch and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how well it’s made.  Not everything is to my taste but it’s a quality series.  So at some point I’ll be reviewing it too but I must keep my nose to the Star Trek grindstone.  Duty is duty.

I’ve been listening to Larry Correia’s podcasts on fiction writing, “The Writer’s Dojo.”  and even though not all of the information is specific to what I do I find the experience of listening to these two writers talking about their mindset when they’re writing to be energizing.  For instance, they were talking about villains recently and it occurred to me I was wasting an opportunity by not beefing up the character of one of my villains.  After all good villains are sometimes even better than the hero.  Look at the Joker in Batman.

And this weekend we’ll have some grandkids coming around and that’s always fun.

So bear with me.  I’ll have some good stuff soon.

On Killing Off Fictional Family

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I’m working on a fantasy story.  And I’m at the point in the origin phase where the protagonist needs a crisis to propel him into a new and horrible life.  And I’m wavering between some deus ex machina scooping him out of his normal life or a horrible injustice killing off one or more of his family.

And the funny thing is I feel bad about killing off his kin.  I mean, they’re good people and they’ve never done anything to me and all things being equal I might need them later.  So, I’m vacillating and trying to thread the needle.  Can I just kill off his father?  But I kind of need him for later.  How about his mother?  The murder of his mother would be a great catalyst.  There’s guilt and rage and despair and hunger for revenge and all sorts of mixed emotions.  That could work well.  But it feels like a cheap trick.

I could kill off his newlywed sister.  It’s going to happen at the wedding reception anyway.  But that’s even more conflicted.  There’s the bride groom and the other sisters and then the parents won’t be distracted by one of them dying so the protagonist will be dealing with all kinds of messy emotional baggage.  Everyone will be whining for a hundred pages and I don’t need that.

I’m planning some kind of mob hit.  I’m undecided between a shotgun blast coming out of the reception or a bomb thrown through the window.  Either way it’s not ideal.  Very messy.  Definitely not the beautiful death.

So, as you can see there won’t be any easy way to write this.  All kinds of angst and messy follow-on consequences.  But let’s face it, murdered family has been a great plot device since Cain killed Abel.  I’m already trying to work my way through a father with conflicted feelings about the son whom he loves but who is responsible for the death of his wife.  That’s got all kinds of possibilities.  As I said I need the father around later and his grudging cooperation in some plot devices would add a nice amount of resistance to some scenes that would otherwise lose all tension.

So, she has to go.  But I am grateful for her part up to this point and I will give her a nice close-up scene before the finale.  She’ll get to talk to her son and they will share something personal before I finish her off.  Then she’ll upstage her oldest daughter’s wedding.  What mother could ask for more than that?

So, as you can see, for me the characters in my story take on a life of their own and I have to think carefully before I bring anyone in.  The butterfly effect is in full effect and especially when my character has a very long-life span, I have to be careful about cutting off all descendants of present characters because I might need their grandchildren or even great grandchildren at some point.

And finally, this action is meant to cut off his normal life and send him forward into a future where many of his actions are going to appear to him to be pretty evil.  To make that happen I’ll need something to disorient his moral compass.  The random brutal death of someone who symbolizes normalcy and happiness to him is just about right.  Add in a feeling that he is culpable in the death and I think I can work that into a tragic figure.  Will Shakespeare, hold my beer.