diff question for u: do you have any dream roles fr the dads that youd like to see? eg ian mcshane as a sleek mob boss, clancy brown as a grubby car mechanic, i could see ron perlman as a wild vegas party type, etc etc....
WHAT A WONDERFUL QUESTION.
I have a big personal project that I’ve been chipping away at for over a decade now, and in a world where I’ve finished the trilogy and three different film studios are fighting over the rights to it so they can make it into the best-selling movie series of all time, I have all of my favorite dads already cast.
The story is called Demonologue, and it’s about this young girl named Seth who has to do her part to bring the world back into balance during a war between various supernatural forces. It involves angels and demons, but they’re not on the sides, and they don’t have the motivations, you think they do.
Ian McShane is Lucifer. How could he be anyone else?
Clancy Brown is Father John Silver, one of Seth’s chief allies and a member of her found family.
Ron Perlman is one of the princes of hell, disguised as a Hell’s Angel. Like you do, right?
Peter Stormare is another prince of hell, disguised as a softspoken college professor.
But no, I really haven’t given this a whole lot of thought, nah.
Thank you @lilamina for tagging me! You know I’m a slut for memes.
What are the themes in your story/current WIP(s)?
Well shoot I’ve said this a few times, but in Demonologue I basically do a lot of common tropes and themes my own way. Good vs evil, humans’ hubris causing their downfall, apocalypse, coming-of-age, the dangers of (not just religious) dogma, the chosen-one trope, christian (and jewish) mythology.
Why does your novel/current WIP(s) matter and in whose voice is it explained?
Why does it matter? Well fuck, in the grand scheme, it doesn’t fucking matter a bit. The story matters to me because it’s one of the ones I need to tell. It matters to me because it’s the vehicle that will, at the risk of sounding too much like one of my own characters, transport my own gospel to the world. It matters to me because the characters are very near and dear to my heart. Does that mean it’ll matter to anyone else? Maybe not. I stick to mostly Seth (my main character) as a viewpoint character in the first book (3rd person limited), but it expands to other viewpoint characters in books 2 and 3, and 3rd person omnisicent, with breaks into 1st person.
Where would your readers find your book/current WIP(s) in a physical bookstore?
Uuuuuhhhhhh well it’s. Not really YA, even though Seth starts out at 11 years old and ends the saga at around 19. It definitely has some elements of horror and drama and fantasy, so if I’m being incredibly vain (and transparent), they’d put it in the same section as they’d put Stephen King.
I know I talk about Demonologue a lot on here but y’all have seen approximately .00001% of any actual content. That’s on purpose. I’m fine whoring out my fanfiction, but I’m quite leery of posting any original works for which I haven’t been paid, for lots of reasons.
But am I leery of talking ad nauseam about the story?
ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT. To that end:
Are there any particular themes present in your story? What general feeling does the story as a whole give off?
Well shoot I have a whole list of themes I’m trying to work into the story!
- the blurring of the line between good and evil
Subthemes therein (not an exhaustive list):
- Power, originally used to do good, corrupting a person
- When and to what extent the ends justify the means
- “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”
- What realistic roles neutral-aligned characters play, and how their desire to stay neutral can shift the story to one side or another
-the psychological, cultural, societal, existential functions of monsters/demons and how they represent us (not just the parts of ourselves that scare us)
-Judeo-Christian mythology and how it has shaped (warped) our morality and senses of self
- abuse, trauma, and how different personality types cope (or don’t)
- coming of age
-apocalypse
-an aggressively obvious commentary on how everything in the world is connected, so if one part is sick, the whole is sick
-an exploration/overturning of the hero/ Chosen One trope
-misanthropy and how it interacts with heroism
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it hits the high points. As far as a general feeling to my story, that’s pretty much what tone is. And that evolves. It starts out pretty bleak, because my main character is jaded, misanthropic, angry, and depressed. It keeps that throughout the story (which is, by now, on track to encompass at least 2 novels), because this is an apocalypse-story. But there is uplift. Things get weird, and the tone shifts to uncanny-bizarre with an undertone of manic energy. Then once Seth stops fighting so much with herself, it gets less bleak. But by then I shift the story to multiple viewpoint characters, so each of them carries with them their own tone. But the bleakness remains throughout until the very end, and is balanced by a feeling of dogged, exhausted, unconditional determination that crops up within the first 5 chapters. If that sounds familiar, good. It should.
Hey I know I don’t follow or am followed by a lot of hardcore writeblrs, but if you have a story you’d like to talk about, please do this! I’d love to hear you talk about your works. <3
Dear Tumblr dot com, Fuck You for eating asks sent to my writing blog.
OH BOY A CHANCE FOR ME TO TALK ABOUT DEMONOLOGUE INSTEAD OF WRITING IT YAY <3
1) describe the plot in 1 sentence. A girl named Seth finds out she's been pressganged into a lifelong job as shepherd of reality, then she finds out it's like herding a universe full of cats on cocaine; hilarity and apocalypse ensues.
3) which 3+ songs would make up a playlist for the novel? "Right in Two" by Tool, "Devil's Resting Place" by Laura Marling, "Still" by Alanis Morrissette, among MANY others. Lol that playlist is about 300 songs big by now.
17) pick a color to represent each character. Actually I do pick out colors/palettes for each character, which I kind of think of as their auras. If you've ever read Insomnia by Stephen King, you'll know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, think of auras as a simplistic, colorful representation of one's personality that each character walks around in like an invisible bubble. Seth's aura is one of the very, VERY few that change colors over time. She is born with a dark nightsky-blue aura fading to lighter blue around the edges. Over the first "book" of Demonologue, it becomes uniformly dark and grows an inner core of bruise-purple. As she gets older, it lightens first to navy blue, keeping the purple core, then to denim blue, with sky blue around the edges. The dark purple core stays. Angels and demons don't really have auras, but Seth runs with an angel called Samsariel for a while. His color is rust orange. Lilith is around too. Her aura is pale pigskin pink around the edges, darkening to salmon in the center, with flecks of bright candy apple red flitting through it. Mammon's color is the sickly green-yellow of an old bruise, of gangrenous pus, of the sky right before a wicked storm. Lucifer's is the soft, pale yellow of an early sunrise. Those are pretty much the main characters that I write directly that would have auras/colors.
18) pick a font to represent each character. Seth: something only in outline, sans serif. I don't have a specific one in mind. Lilith: This one. What a fucking edgelord. Samsariel: Century Schoolbook. Bless his heart. Mammon: The most scripty old church-style script you can possibly imagine. The more illegible the better.
19) Which character most fits a character trope? which trope? They all fit different tropes in their own way. I originally wrote Seth to be a Chosen One, but since I now loathe that trope with all of my soul, I'm figuring out how to get around that. Samsariel fits the sidekick role for a while, and turns the guardian angel trope on its head because Seth ends up needing to basically parent him. Bless his heart. If anyone fits the guardian angel role, it'd be Lilith. Lucifer is as much good-guy-Luci as I can make him and still make the plot work. There are others, but a) I could talk for days about this and b) I don't want to spoil too much.
One of my favorite myths is that of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I’ve been fascinated with it since I was a kid, and have designed and written about (and drawn!!) what must be by now dozens of versions of the Four. What follows began as a warm-up exercise but turned into a rewrite of an old piece I did in my Demonologue ‘verse. What the Four talk about may not make sense to you; that’s okay. It doesn’t make sense to Seth either. This incident happens later on in Seth’s story, when she’s in middle school (7th grade). As you may have guessed, Seth is a kind of medium, able to see and interact with beings not on this level of existence. At least, that’s all she knows she is so far. In this piece, she gets the first explicit hints that she’s much more than just a girl who can see demons and gods and spirits.
The book Seth reads is My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse.
The Library Incident
Seth flumped into the beanbag chair and it made a soft leathery grunt in the silence. Even the librarian booked it (she chuckled at her own pun) out of there at the stroke of 3:20. Her loss. She'd spent the entire day hissing for silence and when it finally arrived, she was never there to appreciate it.
Grownups.
An unconscious smile crept onto her haggard, pale face as she tucked her legs under her and opened the book she'd begun in fourth period.
“Sir?” said Jeeves, kind of manifesting himself. One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He’s like one of those weird chappies in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them. I’ve got a cousin who’s what they call a Theosophist, and he says he’s often nearly worked the thing himself, but couldn’t quite bring it off, probably owing to having fed in his boyhood on the flesh of animals slain in anger and pie.”
She was jerked from the pleasurable and liberating slip into the vanilla-spiced world of the book by the clatter of approaching hoofbeats in the hall. The smile fell from her face and a cold rat of fear scratched up her spine.
Not a lot rattled Seth.
The double doors separating the library from the hall banged. The hoofbeats were muffled--not by much-- by the hard, nappy carpet of the library floor. She was hidden from the door by several stacks and a corner, but she knew as surely as she drew breath that the Four would find her.
Not a lot rattled Seth, except for the Four. She'd only seen them once before, when she was six, just a baby...
Metal jingled and rattled. The sharp quick thuds of hooves drew closer. Seth froze, fear turning her muscles to steel rods and her veins to iced lightning. Her hands on the book turned to claws.
Please don't let them see me please don't let them find me please just go away just go away please go away pl--
The hooves stopped behind her. A horse blew explosively. She smelled burning flesh and gunpowder. Warhorse.
"Lots of books in here."
"Words are truth and lies; armor and arrow. Everything in between. Of course she's here."
Neither voice was human. Neither voice spoke a language Seth could understand, but the words richocheted off the inside of her skull like bats in a cave. The first voice was wardrums; battle cries; the pounding of boots rendered verbal. The second was softer but no more pleasing. It slipped through the seams of her skull like venom and sizzled there.
Seth took a deep, shaky breath and turned slowly. The beanbag groaned.
Famine, who had not spoken, raised a hand and wiggled his fingers at Seth. His grin was lipless and terrible. His skin, sloughing off his skeleton in gory patches, waggled as his horse shifted. Blight was little more than a patchy black hide stretched over bone, yet Seth was washed in the avid and terrible life that emanated from them like alien heat.
Like two lodestones drawn along a current, Seth's eyes were drawn to the figure astride a horse the color of cavedwellers' eyes, of deep-sea creatures. The horse flared black nostrils, as if its lungs were coated in soot. Its eyes were black, shineless, staring; the eyes of a dead thing.
The figure sitting the horse was draped in a greyblack robe and cowl that moved like smoke and obscured every feature except the hands stacked on the raised pommel of the saddle and the eyes.
Death's eyes were black scribbles in her head, as if a child made a mistake while drawing them and had scratched over them angrily.
Seth's gut clenched. She swallowed hard. "What are you doing here?" She asked Death. Thankfully, the words came out much braver than she felt.
The figure on the flame-red horse blowing twin clouds of swirling black fume from his nostrils removed his knight's helmet in a clatter and scream of rusty mail. His face beneath could have once looked human, but now it was a pulp of flesh and teeth and chips of bone. One eyeball hung by its nerve on War's chewed cheek. The other rolled lidless and bloodshot. War's mouth was a drooling hole in the meat of his face, but his voice was clear and deep and charged her ears. "Wanted to take your pulse, little Errandgirl. A check-up."
Famine's voice was the weak wet click of a death rattle, as unavoidable as War's growl. "We won't take your pulse. You can keep that. You'll need it."
Conquest's white horse, smaller than the monstrous red bulk of Warhorse beside him but still sleek and smooth and dangerous, dripped foam from his curved fangs, which sizzled on the carpet. Eminent's slitted yellow eyes rolled. Seth's eyes only rested on him for half a blink, then returned to Death's cowled blankness.
"Tell me why you're here. Did Lucifer send you?"
War chuckled: the sound of rolling tanks.
Conquest leaned forward chummily, clad in a moldering black suit stained maroon with blood and wine, and, with eyes and mouth closed, out of the corner of one's eye, he could have been handsome. But his pupilless ice-blue eyes and his needle-fanged mouth were never shut. He tipped his filthy top hat. "Time and time, little Bringer." He waved at the stacks and shelves of books. "We-- you-- answer to no master but time."
Famine raised one bony finger. The nail hung off it by a bloody flap of skin. "God creates man," another finger, "man creates time," another, "time enslaves man," another, "man kills God."
Conquest shook his head and held up a finger. "Man creates God."
"So God sent you," Seth said to Death. "I find that hard to believe."
War struck the raw hamburger of his forehead with his palm. Plrp.
"Listen, listen, little Err-and-girl," Conquest singsonged, and Seth cringed.
I thought the librarian's hiss was bad.
"God never sent. God only received. And we--you," Famine pointed to Seth, then back to himself, "we--weren't the ones giving."
"God was a glutton," War snarled.
"Ate his own sins," Famine gurgled.
Conquest grinned. "A glutton for love. Begged for it. Like a junkie."
"He needed it. Starved for it. Existed on it." Famine.
"Two thousand years ago God snorted too much love and died on Lucifer's toilet and you know what happened?" Conquest asked.
Like last time, Seth could no more look at War, Conquest, or Famine than she could rise from the beanbag chair and tweak Blight's black ear. But like last time, the other Three seemed not to care. "What?" Seth asked the two scribbled-out eyes in the blank black pillar that was Death.
Conquest answered. "Nothing. Nothing rose from the Great White Throne. There was no third day because God’s son was man’s son and God is the son of man and everything is the sour breath of a great cosmic cackle."
"Man created God and God created man and everything is circular logic, circling the Great White Toilet Drain. It's going pretty fast now." Famine swirled his bloody finger downward.
Inky and thick, twin clouds of diesel smoke pumped from Warhorse's nostrils. "Not born, but unraveled from the great unraveling that burned and turned us all into what we were and what we are," War said. "Unmoored, waiting on the lip of things; waiting in the wings, for that which brings not fire, not pain, but a great contracting knot."
"Aren't you?" Conquest purred.
Seth shuddered.
"Yes," Famine said, squatting naked on Blight's back like an ape. "You're like us, little Bringer. Bring and fetch, bring and fetch, an errandgirl scampering across a sky of dead gods."
"I'm nothing like you," Seth spat weakly, her head whirling with Warhorse's stink, Conquest's voice, and the words which made no sense and made it violently.
War facepalmed again. Blup.
Conquest glanced at Famine. "After all this time..."
Famine shrugged helplessly.
Seth watched Death sit her horse, a black chess piece with long fingers dripping heavy off the hands on her saddle.
"We've been shucking and jiving around these parts for a good long piece, but not as long as you, little Bringer," Conquest said.
"Errandgirl," War rumbled.
"Err-and-girl," Famine croaked.
"Unraveled, unmoored, a girl in waiting. Waiting to be loaded and shot." Conquest said.
Suddenly the fluorescent tubes overhead were piercingly bright. Seth's head pounded savagely. She passed a hand over her eyes. "You're mixing your metaphors."
"Waiting to tie the knot," Famine said.
"Or untie," War said, and they laughed. It was the sound of a thousand earthquakes and a million dying souls. The sound flooded Seth's mind like a sick tide. She made a strangled noise in the back of her throat.
Death did not laugh. She and Scythe were still and silent, her mistake-eyes blank and Scythe's oilslick eyes burning a hole in the center of Seth's chest.
"The earth's heart is sore," War said. Warhorse tossed his head and his dented, bloody armor rattled, drilling pain into the space behind Seth's eyes.
"Soon it will break." Conquest grinned and something yellowgreen dripped down his chin.
Famine nodded. His skin flapped. "Crack wide open, and take their heaven and their hell with it."
"Cold be hand and heart and bone and cold be travelers far from home. They do not see what lies ahead when Sun has faded and Moon is dead," Conquest singsonged.
Red rage sparked in Seth. "Oh come on, you got that from Lord of the Rings!"
"Proper for you, Err-and-g--"
"Shut up! Just shut up and leave me alone!" Seth screwed her eyes shut and clapped her hands over her ears so hard it hurt.
And then the Four were upon her, their presence a scream caught in a hurricane wind. Realization came on a burst of sheer terror: in the universe of open eyes and ears, the Four were present but diminished, as if existing beyond a sheet of frosted glass. But here-- wherever here was-- they were whole, and they would drive her out of her mind.
The fluorescents buzzed like a plague of maddening skeeters. Eminent's steelshod hooves ground the threadbare carpet. The smoke belching from Warhorse's iron chest choked her. She saw the streaks of brown decay in Famine's broken fencepost teeth. They laughed like torture. Each stamp of a hoof was a nuclear detonation. Death sat her horse, the unmade wind pressing her robes against her skeletal frame. Her scratched-out eyes pulled Seth to her with an annihilating gravity.
I'm going to die, Seth thought clinically, and screamed.
Something like a spider crawled across her face. She shut her mouth and opened her eyes in a mighty jerk, and in the same instant, felt her mind violently severed. The bottom half remained in the storm of terror; the top half floated in a serene airless whiteness.
Death’s black cobweb veil feathered over Seth’s face. Beneath the veil which was substanceless yet so very heavy, the angled grey plain of Death’s face was marred only by her scribbled eyeholes.
Your mouth is gone, Seth thought with the top of her mind.
You know me.
Death's voice was her mother's, or what it should have been. It was her grandmother's. It was voices she thought she knew. It was a thousand voices called up from the unremembered depths of time to ring one tiny little bell in one tiny room in a back hallway of Seth's brain.
Yes, I know you, Seth said. I think.
You know me as all living creatures must, and you know me as an artist knows her work.
What?
You do not understand, but you know.
No, I... I don't.
You will.
Tell me now!
I cannot. My mouth is shut.
Her mind knitted, but the storm had calmed. She blinked and glanced at the other Three, nearly eclipsed by the black moon of Death’s face. They watched her, grinning and avid.
"The way is shut for you, little Errandgirl," Conquest said.
Famine sat astride his horse again. "You have to wait."
"For the tying, or the untying." War said, hitching his reins up.
Death sat her horse.
"We wish you well, little Bringer." War made a flourishing bow in the saddle.
"We wish you wells gone dry." Famine cocked his head. Bones ground against each other.
"When the logic of this world eats its own tail and you've run out of rope, we'll see you." Conquest cued Eminent into motion. He tossed his head, spraying pale green ropes of drool against the shelves near him, and turned. Blight and Warhorse followed. Warhorse blew smoke and turned laboriously, armor on horse and rider clattering.
Death remained for a moment. She and Seth regarded each other in the silence broken only by the gentle hiss of Eminent's foam eating into the shelves. Then she turned her head toward the library doors. Scythe, bridleless, followed her lead and plodded sedately out. The hoofbeats faded into nothing.
Seth counted twenty, fifty, one hundred heartbeats.
Then she leaned over the book still open in her lap and vomited.
After that was done, she hoisted the stack of books she'd chosen and took them to the abandoned checkout desk. She stamped each card herself, locked the desk drawers, and turned off the lights.
The librarian would find a note on her desk the next morning:
Dear Mrs. McInstry,
I threw up on the floor in the nook beside the Classics section. There's also some demon horse drool Alien acid spit acid burns dirt on the H-K & L-P shelves & the floor. I'll have that cleaned up before you come in tomorrow (today by the time you read this). I'm sorry. I had a rough day yesterday. If things aren't right you can blame me. Mr. Allchurch will believe you. I have a record.
Sincerely,
That weird kid who thinks she lives in the library
P.S. I hear you talking about me.
P.P.S. It's okay; I don't mind.
P.P.P.S. My name is Seth.
