Tag: family

Succession (1/5)

Working on my next short for my third collection. Successions and coronations should be as boring as possible. Extravagant, sure, but boring. A non-boring succession is called a civil war or revolution.

As I alluded to in the manuscript of The Fallen – now entitled Martian Wonderland – Empress Fussy is retired. A bit curious as to how that happened, I began to make some notes. Those notes are turning into this story. However, who wants to read “boring”? As an old friend gifted me: ”start killing people and blowing shit up.” Okay, I’m pretty good at that. So, this will start tamely, get some foreshadowing going in the next installment, then the blood will start raining. Works for me.

The fundamental tension shall be two-fold: Faustina built her imperium upon military force and the conquest of first the Deep South and later the northeast up to the Northern Federation. Being demi-human, her rule is hands-off (subsidiarity) yet personal. Handing her legal and extra-legal powers to another woman – another older woman in the eyes of many humans – is a provocation. You can read in Ice Inundation Intelligence where Robert talks about factions inside the imperium who want a return to a republic and chafe at being under a family sprinkled with “more human than human.” The succession is when it comes out into the open.

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“The Fallen” Ep/2. END

Fork. Stuck. I wanted closure for both two important points: the first, of course, is that Allie – and maybe her alone but more likely with some Life Guard (in the military, not swimming, sense) with her, are the one’s to enter Wonderland. Do I skip over securing the shrine? You bet I do. ”Some things Man was not meant to know,” is a phrase which exists for a reason.

The second is something touched on by Aurie first which even young Allie picked up on. For someone such as Fussy, accustomed to autocratic power her whole adult life, NOT acting along those lines would be very odd for her. So, in the midst of hinting at more wonders beyond that wall Allie could not – then – pass, she puts her great-grandmother very firmly into her place.

The end. Thanks for reading and thanks for those with comments and suggestions. I hope to have this published in 6-8 weeks, following editing and copyediting and formatting. Deus vult.

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“The Fallen” Ep/1

I think the Epilogue will be wrapped up in two parts. Well, maybe three, but the third will be really small. Allie gets the personal approval – and laying on hands – from anyone who matters on Earth, while at the same time trying to be older as to what her new role is.

I was pleased to learn Rome is back in Western hands. The loss of Italy some books ago bothered me. As an ethnic hodgepodge of the 1860s, I’d imagine the Imperial Danubian Federation creates a similar federal system of a recovered Italian peninsula, rather than a single nation-state.

We get to meet one of Empress Aurie’s grandchildren!

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“The Fallen” 5/14

Good place to pause, going into a weekend. There’s a bit more, but I’m not sure if it will be in Part 5 or the Epilogue. I’ll have to see where it best fits.

You have to admire the subtlety of what is being done to Allie. The Great Powers of the Polar Alliance cannot trust one another with the full ramifications of the discoveries she made, so it became a matter of “it’s your problem now! Good luck!”

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“The Fallen” 5/13

Thirteen days to go. Churning out about 1200 words per day (had to deck the damn tree yesterday; humbug). As you can see from the end of this segment, things are about to get very politically dangerous: a mention of the Jap spaceforce – as large as the Rus and imperium, combined (imaging me writing that on Pearl Harbor Day) followed by the elephant in the room; that is, the device behind the waterfall in the cavern. This is rather like the penultimate scene in “The Good, the Bad, the Ugly”: who shoots first?

As I have broken through my 50k word ceiling for this story, it’s a matter of wrapping it up and editing the crap out of it. That should leave me five months to write two more. I think at least one will be another collection but with a novella at its core. I’d like to write about the sorely neglected Habsburg Empire, but will do what I’m told.

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“The Fallen” 5/11

Another busy day for our hero, getting a bit more and more unsettled by the culture shock of Old Home, as she calls it. Politics continue to play a role and Aurie hints as something of a trial ahead for Allie. I was surprised that slightly chonky Annie from Part Three of Obligations of Rank has put Reina (and yes, that’s her on the cover) into her place; and more than once. Makes me wonder how many kids she and Pavel have now (recall we met part of her first son, Ivan, back in Part 3 of this MS, Tay being their adopted daughter).

I love road stories; it really makes writing so much simpler. The only thing easier are dinner scenes.

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“The Fallen” 5/10

Going into last weekend at a bit of a loss, I, per normal, went to Mass early to pray and listen. I now think I know the rest of Part 5, so it is just a matter of writing it down.

While an interplanetary war would be kind of interesting to write, it would also mean at least of month of research and I want this MS done now, not in January. So, maybe next time. Allie will be at the center of a political resolution to all of this – barring just blowing the damn shrine up – but does not know that yet. Demi she may be but is still fifteen, and Aurie, Reina, and others have plans and schemes she cannot imagine.

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“The Fallen” 5/9

Another larger segment going into the weekend. Realizing that I’m not finishing in 2-5k words but closer to 10-15k, I need the story breathing down my neck to keep me motivated. Ideally, I’d like to ship this to my copyeditor no later than December 31. That will give me five months to write two more – one of which may be another short story collection; there are loose threads everywhere, and one thing I DO NOT want to is get any further into the future. It’s just too complicated.

Allie finally walks on a new world – for her. Between the cavern, the building, the fish and leaves, and Squiddy, I understand Aurie’s caution: there’s no telling what the Hero might be inadvertently carrying. I suspect that, as I have done before, I’ll skip the speech (for anyone reading along, it would be a boring recapitulation, and we’ve already had one, which is enough) and move directly into first family politics (Aurie’s husband, Jimmy, is 2 yrs older, so a solid 70, but he, too, has been around Henge and, of course, very close to his wife) and then how international politics about the shrine are shaping up. That will act as an outline to me for everything up to the epilogue.

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“The Fallen” 5/8

From where I started in the summer, this story continues to surprise me. I’d planned an intergeneration novel about the colonization of Mars, followed by some catastrophe where one or some of the demi-humans went feral. Obviously, they had other ideas.

This segment was what I was shown Sunday morning, and it, too, came out of left field at me. I thought I would have some scientific convos with Kira and politics with Fussy. I never envisioned Allie leaving her home world, but here we are.

May have to do a little research for what comes next. Writing “hard” science fiction, I cannot ignore Allie’s bones and muscles being weaker from growing up in a shallower gravity well. Heck, I’m not even sure where she lands: a demi of the Hartmann family in a Jap spaceship bearing news of aliens under Rus territory. It’s a mess.

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“The Fallen” 5/7

This is the next shoe to drop: Anton, as a soldier and diplomat of a minor power, sees what will come next: the shrine, the device behind the waterfall. Unlike the one Aqua hid, this will be in Russian hands in less than a month, with the potential to destabilize everything generations of humans, demi-humans, and Machines have worked so hard for.

The latter half of this segment did not exist until Sunday morning: Mass, again. This story is about to go off in a direction I never anticipated.

I would also like to formally thank Kalogeros Stilitis of Gab for his help with the Greek. I taught myself some koine Greek when I was 25 years old, but that was a lifetime ago and I recall almost nothing.

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