Of all the nations of the Third World, Inja has been the hardest to find a story for. They are the unconquered people. They were never assimilated into the empire and thus suffer no repercussions from its collapse. They are isolated on a peninsula between a great plateau and a plain so vast that its inhabitants think they're the only people in the world. While I could do a stranger in a strange land story, I already have one of those and doing a second would be lame.

Conversely, skip back to the days of the Haen Empire when the Injari were fighting for their freedom, and plenty of interesting stories arise (including DAMINI, which I mentioned earlier). So what's the mistake I've made? There are two, actually. They're all alone and they're absent an enemy. But the Haen are all but extinct. Should I just arbitrarily create a new villain?

Oh no, my friends. May I present to you THE LOST LEGION. This group of Haen soldiers are duty bound to conquer the Injari peninsula or never return home. Cut off from their supply chain, they never received word of the empire's collapse. They built a fort in the middle of the jungle, a few villages, and bolster their numbers through the ancestors of their foot soldiers and underlings (as Haen are extremely long-lived, perhaps even immortal). I am incredibly enthusiastic about this development as it now puts this area back into play and I've wanted to work here since the very beginning (a flash fiction piece starring Damini was actually the first thing I ever wrote for the Third World).

Woo hoo!

Last night I dreamed a buddy chase movie. If you don't know what a buddy chase movie is, think of Pineapple Express or similar such movies. There are two main characters on the run from a Big Bad who experience comedic hijinx along the way. I wish I could remember more of it. I probably should have tried to write it down as soon as I woke up, but even then it was fading.

It stared Jason Segal (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and Masi Oka (Heroes; Get Smart) on the run from Timothy Omundson (Psych), an alleged corrupt US Marshal. The two witnessed a crime and are being put into protective custody. Segal oversees Omundson do something suspicious and the two pals make a run for it. The real villains (mob?) are chasing after them both. Damn I wish I could remember more. I do remember Jason Segal finally learning that Omundson isn't corrupt while he's hanging out the 9th-floor window of a hotel deciding whether he should make a jump for it or not to the third-floor roof of the grand ballroom. They came from something, I can't remember if it was a party or a concert or what. Ah well. Not a lot left any more.

So I'm reading through the 50 Things we know now that we didn't know this time last year and I see something I've wanted for a very long time.

2. Scientists have discovered how to scan brain activity and convert what people are seeing or remembering into crude video images. (Full article here)

Ever since I saw Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within, I've wanted something that could do this. I don't dream normal, erratic, nonsensical dreams. I dream stories. I dream of other people and lives and events and sometimes I even cast those roles with well-known actors. They're stories, and I lose so much by writing down what I can remember when I wake (if I can remember anything). I want this machine! ...once it's been perfected and can simulate the clarity of the dreams a la the Final Fantasy movie.

But then I'm thinking about it not just for my own benefit, but in a spec fic sort of way. Emerging technology is a great gray area where you don't have to have all the answers of how something works because the people working it don't even know. They're in that transition area between idea and reality.

So what if there is a protagonist who dreams like I do, of people and events of stories. But he's not just dreaming stories, he's dreaming reality. He's dreaming violent crimes, or rape and torture and murder. Of course, he doesn't know it. What he remembers he thinks is just a vivid imagination or the result of too much TV before bed. But then he signs up to be a test subject for the university developing the machine and they record all the dreams in all their vivid details. And those details match information being disseminated to the public by the police. Here is this guy, is he psychic or is he the murderer?

Drama, action, and adventure ensue.

I think this is a short story or maybe a novella. I think anything longer will start dipping in the "seen it before" well. We'll see. I do have a title, though. "The Sleeper."

And if I have a title, then step one in the writing process is already complete!

I hate "x is the new y" statements. This is unfortunate because it's used all the time in writing. Currently, it's "x is the new vampire." "X is the new vampire" has been around for awhile, so truly, "vampire is the new vampire" is perhaps the most appropriate. Still, with influences from movies, I thought "zombies are the new vampire" was a fair assessment of a new trend, but a dark horse seems to be making a play for first. "Angels are the new vampire."

This bugs me because I actually have angel stories in my queue (two that I'd like to be part of a series, but really, I only have titles and a general sense of a story). I don't think I've actually mentioned them here before because I don't really have a story, just a general premise and titles that stoke my creativity. Originally inspired by a KoRn song, the first novel is called "The Mortal Earthbound" and its sequel "The Dearly Departed." The general premise is that angels that refuse the will of heaven fall to hell, but hell turns out to be an office job on earth. There is no fiery pit, Earth is hell, which is why it never gets better despite our best efforts. I need to make it feel less like a Matrix clone and find a genuine story to pursue, but I love the title and have to write a story to match it.

We had a long drive today. In addition to recounting the above to Jen, I had time to ponder a short story I had planned for the Third World. The Injari don't get much (any) attention in my currently planned novels, but they're one of my favorite cultures. For that reason, I decided to write the short story "Damini," a Romeo and Juliet story in the Third World. I pondered this today. It started as a day dream, really, using the story to fulfill a request for an anthology. First it was an anthology of love stories that I was invited to contribute to. Then it was an anthology of LGBT love stories. And that's when a light bulb went on above my head. The story I had planned was pretty lame. It didn't reimagine the Romeo and Juliet story, it just transposed it to the Injari Peninsula. And sure, I won't be the first to explore this concept either (reminds me of the first half of Chutney Popcorn, in a way), but it still seems more exciting than anything I had considered before. In fact, this has opened up so many story ideas that I might turn it into a novel. Damini is the alpha female of her village, but an alpha female in a patriarchal society (okay, it's actually a matriarchal society, but even then, the women are expected to remain alone. You'll have to read it to make sense of all that). Damini does not realize she's gay. She's never been attracted to anyone, male or female. Villages exchange youngsters so they can learn the ways of the different villages and diversify the breeding pool. A new group of exchanges arrives. The alpha male of that group takes a shine to her. He asks female character X to talk to her, and Damini falls for X rather than alpha male.

I'm currently enthused enough about that story that I might write it after Wanted is finished. I was going to go back to Sandwich Notch. We'll see.

Huzzah for writing! I need to hurry up and finish so I can start another one.

So Google tells me Captain Widdershins is a character from A Series of Unfortunate Events. I don't care. I like the word Widdershins and I want to use it as a character name. I am officially adding a clockwork character to House on Sandwich Notch Road (or is it Lane, I can't remember which I switched to) that is named Widdershins. He won't be able to speak, but can play records that emulate speech. I'll work on that later. I'm just writing this down so I don't forget.

I want to write a short story where an astronaut is flung through a black hole. He's encased in a metal egg to shield him from the radiation caused by the generated field necessary to survive a black hole. He finds a similar but different universe on the other side. Instead of expanding, that universe is collapsing. It has existed for tens of trillions of years. Species have evolved so there isn't a single dominant sentient race, but numerous sentient yet mundane creatures (birds, cats, monkeys, etc).

I don't know what the story is yet, but I want to explore it at some time.

I think I posted previously of having a new idea for a Black Magic and Barbecue Sauce sequel. I do. It's a story that can be told once it moves out of conceptualization. It's just taking its sweet time coming out of conceptualization. I know it's a ghost story, but every I start the wheels turning in my brain, I go places that are not conducive to a ghost story.

So tonight I'm watching Fellowship of the Ring with Jen, as is our holiday tradition. There is the prologue with Galadriel speaking of history becoming legend and legend becoming myth. There there's Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday. He lives so much longer than the other hobbits. I start pondering how exasperated would one become watching people make the same mistakes over and over again, perpetually repeating history because they weren't there when it happened.

Well, I happen to have a story where people do live forever and would be there when history happens and there again when it repeats itself. Now Cy isn't the type of person that would be affected by that. He files things away into the recesses of his self-conscious. He doesn't remember enough history to get upset when it repeats itself. But surely someone else would? Who? Who's so focused on history that it would upset them when people keep screwing up.

Herodotus of course.

So he's not part of a ghost story. This is a different sequel. I'm not entirely sure what it is or how it will work, but it will involve Herodotus being extremely pissed off.

Whichever one of these stories moves past conceptualization first, I'll start on. Not until I'm done with my current ms. I'm at 55,000 words and not even half-way finished. This looks to be bigger than I expected. 150, maybe even 200k words. I worry about that, since it's not epic fantasy. It's hard to justify a 200,000-word, non-epic fantasy. Still, the story is what the story is. I'm not going to sacrifice content in the first draft to shoe horn it into a 100,000-word package. That's what revision is for. ;)

Okay, back to the movie. I think Frodo is about to fall down.

Nashau was just sacked as the Baron d'Bluefield's court prophet. Bastin is a flimflam man that's never held a job in his life. All across the Seven Kingdoms prophecies are failing, Chosen Ones are dying, and prophets are taking the blame. But Nashau has a vision and a plan how to break the curse and get his job back. All he needs is a Chosen One dashing, daring...and dumb enough to take the job.

So I've started to get deedback on my draft. I'm very enthusiastic about this because it was very strong feedback. A lot of the time I'll get feedback and wonder if the person even read what I wrote. In this case, there were some very relevant questions and observations. Of the two most important suggestions, I am adding back in a chapter I origionally removed, thinking I had too many flashback chapters and that it slowed down the pacing. Turns out it's too vague what happened between Christian and Cy, so I'm reinserting the chapter where he kidnaps Matty and forces Cy to steal the couer de la reine from the tower of London. I'm adding it much earlier than I origionally planned (it's now chapter 19 rather than in the high 30s/low 40s.

The question I still want additional input on is whether any readers like Cy. It was always a concern of mine that he wasn't likeable and so far that's been affirmed. I need more input on that one.

Because of this necessary revision, I'm not submitting to any more agents until I have a finished ms. Chapter 19 isn't coming as fast as I'd like, though and will probably have to be rewritten before it stops sucking.

I do want to say that I appreciate the support I received when NLA rejected my query, but that support was unnecessarily negative toward NLA. Sure I wish my work appealed to them, but it didn't. I want an agent that will get behind me and my work. A query letter is only 2-3 paragraphs, so a rejection after two days is great. It could have been MUCH longer without any more time spent considering it. It's only a couple paragraphs after all.

So, when I get my next rejection (and I'm sure I will), keep in mind that that's part of the profession and unless they are rude in their rejection, they should be treated respectfully. Thanks.

On yet another new story note, Good Ken and I talked a lot during his visit. One topic we dwelled on was the Pathfinder Society and that conversation lead me to a new story idea, one that I find much more exciting than Sandwich Notch Drive or Jehovah's Hitlist. I have already written chapter one of WANTED: CHOSEN ONE, NOW HIRING. This first chapter is significantly better than my first chapter of JH.

Writing on my blackberry, so I'll save a description for a separate post at a later time. If the book keeps up at this quality, not only am I certain that it will be published, but it will be quite successful.

I've tried to start Jehovah's Hitlist twice before. The first time it was when I wrote the original timeline that inspired the story. SCOTUS gave W the presidency and 45 years later or so, Europe is covered in ice, the AIDS-ravaged survivors of Africa are blockaded from leaving, and Denver is ocean-front property (which lead to my first incomplete reading of 1984). The story was titled "One Nation..." I don't think I got past the second paragraph.

That eventually got shortened to "The Nation" which didn't get past the second page.

The Nation was never very inspirational as titles go (the only worse title I currently have plotted is Sepsis, which is horribly lame but very appropriate for that story). I quickly abandoned that title. Luke's reference to King having a character called the Hanged Man helped me doubt whether the story was redundant. Having seen numerous uses of Hanged Men in earlier works than King (such as The Black Company), I no longer have any qualms in using the character as I originally intended.

So, that led to the advent of Jehovah's Hitlist (a name of a Bender album I've always loved). I've decided I'll try to write this one first and so far so good. The spec fic timeline is still the foundation of the setting, but I won't include it as a preface (I think I lost it when my Vaio died years ago).

I'm past two pages. Will post chapter 1 when it's finished. I was hesitant to start, but once I got started it felt good.

If the title gets nixed by the publisher, I may suggest In(di)visible Nation, though the duality of that title may be too abstract.

I figured I'd sit down with Diana Gabaldon's new book for the week. The thing is a monster! I could use all my free time this week and still not finish it. To my surprise, I find myself wanting to write, needing to write even. So off to write I do.

What am I going to start on? Put my full attention to my play, Protocol J-25, which I finally feel able to write? Or Jehovah's Hitlist, a story I conceived of 7 years ago and still have not gotten around to (and with Runester's interest, feel I at least have an audience to write for). Perhaps I should turn back to the Third World, feeling more confident than ever to do that world justice. Or maybe Global Warming in the Garden of Eden, a title I've loved from the moment I thought of it. That title deserves a story.

So I clicked on the new story tag to review the ideas I've posted, see if I've put anything down for Jehovah's Hitlist since its last false start. I've pretty much decided to go with that one when I see the post whining about how I had a wonderful dream for a YA novel (YA being a genre I've never considered writing in). I read the post and remember, vaguely, how amazing the dream was. I want to write that dream. I hadn't thought of a title, so clearly it can't be written...

The House on Sandwich Notch Lane.

Okay, so I guess it can be written. Clearly my mind is ready to write this one. Sandwitch Notch is a road in New Hampshire's lakes region that Jen loves for its name. This caused a tumble of ideas, where the children are from, why they're staying there, etc.

I'm taking some risks, I realize having written the first few paragraphs. Both children are half-Indian (India Indian), meaning the primary two characters are ethnic. You may think it doesn't make a difference, but it does, at a subconscious level. See a lot of stories told from a non-ethnic viewpoint when BOTH characters are ethnic? No. Usually one of them will be white as some kind of unspoken signal flag saying that we won't be focusing on a culture you don't understand, reader, so don't be scared away. Secondly, I'm not easing up on my vocabulary as much as the genre dictates. That'll be a problem later, I'm sure, but the only way to keep a muscle in shape is to exercise it. When I started reading comics, they used big words and bolded them, so kids would know to look them up in the dictionary. I learned so many words that way. Somewhere, it was decided that we could make more money if we didn't make people work so hard at reading.

Good thing I'm not in this for the money. (For all that posturing, I'm not overdoing it. I'm not writing for adults, but I'm not scared of three-syllable words either.)

Okay, I need to eat and write more. See ya.

So it's not a story idea, but a general premise that I think warrants exploration in the future. I was watching the latest episode of Chuck with Jen. It's a Thanksgiving episode and everyone is there except John Casey (Adam Baldwin). A lot of times in these situations, they'll pan back and show Casey listening in from his apartment, as Chuck's life is thoroughly bugged. They did not do that in this case, but I imagined that line being added, while everyone else is talking and not paying attention, Chuck says "Happy Thanksgiving, Casey."

This gave me a suggestion for another story. I don't have the story itself, just a general premise. Giving it more thought as I type this post, I think it should actually be a play. You'd get away with more one-sided dialogue there and you wouldn't have to worry about describing the Other. Imagine a Soviet spy or some other person of interest. A woman who is aware that she is being bugged and has grown comfortable with that fact after so long a time. She talks to the empty room as if the other person were there. Enduring difficulties over the years, the Other becomes her only source of companionship in an increasingly isolated world. When the wall goes down and the empire falls, she's finally able to discover an affection that has existed unsubstantially over all these years. There's something there. I'll revisit that in the future.

...I wonder what the title should be.

Someone needs to invent a dream recorder stat. I have lost so many good story ideas because they're dreams. I had the most elaborate dream this morning that would make an incredibly YA. Classic "our parents are dead and we miss them" but it turns out that their parents left behind a secret. Hidden within the mansion is a stage where they used to produce plays. But no one can find it. There are secret dials and knobs built into the decor of the house, turn this or that and a door will open. It all culminates of course in the secret being discovered and the spirits of the parents telling the children how much they love them. This was all spoiled by a woman calling to offer me a job selling financial planning to old people.

It's not the plot, that I'll lose. Obviously it's been done before. The level of detail, though, was through the roof. The clues, the gadgets, the symbolism. God it was amazing.

It was a throw-away line I inserted to answer a question I asked myself. Where do adventuring parties come from? They're never fully explained in the context of setting in most RPGs because that's a fundamental element of the game. It just has to be. But I'm not writing an RPG, I'm writing novels, so why would there be adventuring companies in the Third World? How do they fit into the various social dynamics that I've created. Some nations fit the classic depiction of adventuring better than others, specifically the Naissani city-states (really, they fill the classic RPG fantasy mold better than anywhere else in the setting).

The catch with that is that the Naissani are a seafaring people. Working-class men are more likely to become sailors than any other profession. What happens to their women? Well women are treated kind of like property. But they're intelligent property whose husbands are gone for months at a time. What do they do in that time? They adventure.

And that was where the throw-away line came, when Valis was speaking to Bear about his new adventure and he mentioned a Naissani woman's opinion of his adventure. So I gave this a larger consideration, what are adventuring companies like in Naissan? How did they evolve?

Adventuring companies are predominantly female (males may be different ethnicity, dependent on the women somehow, or otherwise a vagabond willing to ignore social norms in an effort to eat). They use fake names and wear costumes to hide their true appearance, returning home before their husbands make port to maintain the illusion.

So you might have an adventuring company named the "Daughters of Mara." Among its members you would have Alessandra Quickblade, Pia the Wicked, Selvaggia Two-Penny, Invisible Cansaleta, and Bloody Bella.

I'm thinking of turning this into a short story, as I don't think this fits into any of the stories I have planned right now. But a short story about a young bride terrorized by her husband who finds her true self by joining the Daughters of Mara could be a nice story to tell.

It's the future and man has finally figured out that the entire world is the garden of eden. Medical and biological advances allow human population to continue to grow without destabilizing ecological equilibrium. Earth becomes a paradise.

What man does not know (or at least hasn't scientifically proven and thus doesn't believe) is that there is a finite amount of life-potential energy in the universe and their new paradise is actually suffocating other worlds.

So an alien race arrives and demands they decimate their population or the aliens will declare war. I'm thinking of doing a twist on the fact that decimate is so frequently misused. We go to war, and then they retreat after our population has been decimated in the war.

Or we may be crushed more severely, leaving only 1/10th of our population left. Or something, don't know. Not even sure how long the story would be.

I don't usually post twice in a day, I know, but I've been sitting on a story idea for a couple of days now and I wanted to write it down before any more of it slips away. I have a new short story idea that I think could make a fun--divergent--short fiction piece. Not my usual stuff, which is refreshing. I'm not going to take a break from my novel right now, at least not to write a story. I think I'm going to chill for a bit and read a book. I've been writing a lot lately and could use a little recharge.

I started reading Cordelia's Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold. Four pages in and I already see so many mistakes I'm making in my own manuscript. I'm fighting the urge to go back to chapter 1 and start revising. Need to finish the manuscript before I worry about revision, but it was like a slap to the face. One of those things that you know before you write, but while you're writing you just put down what your brain tells you to put down because that's what feels right. Now I see it in context and I know how wrong it is. SO MUCH WORK TO DO when I'm done with this thing. So much work.

As for the short story, it's called "I'm Jay McKay." It's a twist on stream of consciousness where Jay is writing his own story as a personal address to the reader. Trick is, Jay frequently concocts scenarios where he kills himself. The book begins with Jay stuck in traffic on the way home when a nuclear explosion rips down the highway and through the car. It's vivid and detailed, and when he snaps out of it, he talks to you as the reader.

At the end, he's in a convenience store robbery and when the thug asks him if he wants to die, he says he's never really thought about it before. While it loses impact me telling it to you this way, I want to make sure I don't forget when I finally start writing this thing.

I toyed with having him begin a new scenario after that where he's surrounded by a force field and bullets fly off of him. A bit of an irony with the killed/can't be killed thing. I'm not sure if it plays, though.

Dexter is an easy story to tell. He's an anti-hero. He's this horrible monster using his evil to do good things. He feels no remorse or any emotion of any kind. He's an easy killer to have as a protagonist because he's a victim. You overlook the horrible things he does because he does them to people who deserve it, and it's not really his fault. His brain gotten broken when he was a little kid.

It makes for good television but the character story only goes so far. Take a step back. Here is your protagonist, a person fully integrated into society. He loves. He laughs. He can be happy. He can be sad. He has the full range of human emotion from light to dark. He's a normal person. And people always talk about finding that job that just fits right. You know, that thing you were "meant" to do?

Unfortunately for him, violence is the only thing that has ever given him a sense of genuine satisfaction. He doesn't have rules. He doesn't have a code. Sometimes the impulse strikes him and he responds violently.

These type of people have existed for a long time and we have all kinds of euphemisms for them, hot blooded, quick tempered, whatever. So this lead me to the why of it. And that lead me back to divine influence and the war for heaven. Lucifer and his angels vie for the throne of God and are cast down into perdition. Sundered into a billion pieces by their conquerors, their remains are tossed onto the earth like trash. And some of those little pieces came to rest inside man. It's God's first and greatest mistake.

After giving this concept some thought, I think the format that would fit it best is a Graphic Novel. I had never planned on doing a graphic novel, but this story needs to be heavily illustrated, so why not take it the full measure?

This is actually an idea I had for a play a few years ago, but the more I think about it, the more it just doesn't work for the stage. The story is essentially my life living in a 200-sq-ft apartment with addicts, welfare, and disability collectors. The catch is, that apartment complex was U shaped, so that only provides a few rooms that could actually be shown on stage.

Turning that into a memoir, though, opens a lot of possibilities for storytelling. The thing is, when I tried to embellish it for fiction purposes, I found it made the true elements seem unbelievable, which I didn't like because the true parts are pretty astounding by themselves. Which is why I say memoir. I never considered writing one. I like the freedom of fiction, but I've been wanting to find a literary piece to work on rather than SF or Fiction, and this may be it.

True characters:
The couple who had sex so loud that the entire complex heard them. In their spare time they sold pot and used a megaphone to scream "All Niggers Must Die" from their front step.

The crazy man who argued with god every night, insisting that he was god and that god should worship him.

The next-door neighbor whose wall paper was centerfolds. Hundreds of centerfolds. He'd watch porn for hours at a time. (Later he would be dragged out of his apartment, have his throat slit, stabbed in the groin, left for dead, and survive.)

There was the religious next door neighbor who would walk up to the porn addicts front door and wag his finger at him (to which the porn addict would scream "num nuts!" at him). He had a heart attack every week for two months before he was finally moved to a home.

There was the girl whose boyfriend was paying her rent. She resented him for putting her in such a small apartment. Look at her. She deserved better. (And while she was hot, that was her only real talent.)

There was the other crazy person whose girlfriend constantly incited him. A neighbor got a couple of her police friends to come by on their off hours. They threatened to plant heroine in his apartment and arrest him if he didn't move. He ended up setting his apartment on fire.

There was the older woman who spoke so loud on the phone (and she was on the phone all the time) that I could hear her over my TV. When I finally broke down and pounded on the wall, she went off on me for disturbing her. :)

And of course, there's my ex-business partner.

Yes, it was an interesting 6 1/2 years.

I was listening to BBC World News this morning and there was a story about a zoo that is breeding an Elephant at only 9 years old. This is within the age range that an elephant can reproduce, but is on the young side, which has caused protests by some animal rights groups who feel the elephant is too young to reproduce.

Wild Asian elephants function in a matriarchal society and the governing matriarch would dictate when the rest of the herd could reproduce, weighing factors such as nutritional health, available food, etc. I have been wanting to write a story that focus on the Inja since I wrote some flash fiction on them as part of my effort to get hired by Pied Piper Publishing (which I was). The problem is, the Injari were never conquered by the Haen Empire, so the mixed and muddled folklore that the other races share doesn't exist there. They are, utterly, in their own world and as such I can't fit them into any of my current existing storylines for the Third World. But this piece on elephant matriarchy made me think of a Romeo and Juliet type of tragedy involving an Injari girl who gets pregnant without the village matriarch's permission. I am naming the story "Damani" as well as the main character (as Damini is one of my favorite Hindi names and Indian culture is obviously a major influence on Inja). I am wavering on the ending, only because I seem to kill everyone I write about. But much like Romeo and Juliet, it's not much of a tragedy if the lovers aren't dead at the end (which is why I find West Side Story to be a pale comparison to the original). I'm thinking that she might be killed by a matriarch elephant, crushed to death while pleading for the life of her baby.

Something, I don't know.

Also, if you follow any of the story listings on the info page of this blog (which I doubt you do), I have changed the title of the second book in the First Triad. Originally named Paragon (in specific reference to Jhon Prester, even though Imsikwatash is also a main character), I was thinking back on my time with Kenzer & Co. this morning and how the contract on my last book was canceled (I was in a massive state of burnout at the time, running LKoK). I had struggled with the title. The original author had used a Metallica song for the title, which I just thought was all wrong, especially given the growing trend of "Noun and Noun" titles. everydaypanacea is a stud when it comes to thinking of names (he helped me with a product line for my presentation to WotC when I was interviewing for the RPGA manager position), and he came up with Cause and Conviction. I always loved that title and I realized that not only does it speak to Jhon Prester, but Imsikwatash, Rian Inkwright, Bear, Skere Khane, and all the other major players in the First Triad.

I am excited about that change and think it will lead to much better writing when I get to that point.

I haven't been posting a lot in either of my journals. Work is kicking my ass and I'm tired all the time. I can see all the things I have left to do and there isn't that much, but emergency after emergency keeps coming up. I go the entire day and don't make a dent in the things I needed to do because I'm spending so much time on the stuff that comes up (the gold master for a CD binding in the back of a book was today's constant emergency).

Somehow, though, on my way to work, I had an idea for a new story. As I mentioned before, I can't do much without a title, and I'm having a bit of trouble on this one. Nothing fits just perfectly. I tossed around "Flooding Eden," "Flooded Eden," and "Eden Flooded," but eventually decided on "Global Warming in the Garden of Eden." That might change. I don't know right now.

I don't have much of a concept, a beginning and an end (which are always the first two parts that come to me). A young police trainee making his first traffic stop with his trainer and the woman behind the wheel tries to seduce them. The forthright cop sends her on her way with a ticket. Fast forward twenty years to the aged trainee giving it to a woman on the side of the road. The oceans rose, America was overwhelmed by refugees, and the general infrastructure has decayed so that only the strong or those that keep their head down survive. Living a life of pure apathy, he begins his quest out of boredom and a little resentment, discovering that a lot of things claimed to be unavailable are actually being kept from the populace to maintain the status quo. It ends with a speech by a CEO comparing himself to the snake in the garden of eden, and that, while it provided temptation, it was Eve's own choice to eat the apple.

I also had an idea for a sequel to Black Magic and Barbecue sauce where Cy is speed dating a cop. It arose out of a desire to have a feminine character. I detest the damsel in distress, but I know some women that enjoy that role, to be protected and rescued by their man. I've even dated one. I never put them into stories for two reasons, I like strong female characters and because people so often take it as a sexist subjugation of women, even if it's just for that one story. So I want to have a woman who has a strong job and likes to be pampered at night. She wants to be the damsel in distress, but in the end, you discover that she doesn't have it in her to be the damsel in distress and she kicks ass. I can't come up with a good name. For some reason, I keep naming her Barbarosa, a name I do not want to use. I'll find something.

Again, I write these notes here so I can remember my story later, even if the premise changes significantly. I'm still frustrated that I can't remember the plot of Perpetuality.