Crafting Alternate History

Since our Kickstarter for Wild Skies: Europa Tempest was successful back in October last year, Brandon and I have been working on the book. Most of the rules have been at last ironed out (more on that in time) and it is time to turn back to our setting and get it all fleshed out. That is what I have been mainly working on for the last two weeks. It has been great! I love crafting alternate history. From the beginning our jumping-off point was always, “What if the First World War never ended?” With that as the basis it's been my job to turn that core idea into a description of the dozen or so years since the 11 November 1918 date we are familiar with from real history.

We are well aware we are not the first to offer an answer to the question, “What if the First World War never ended?” Harry Turtledove, Michael Moorcock and the makers of Tannhäuser, among many others, have all been over this terrain before. Throughout these last two weeks, I have been thinking a lot about one of my literary heroes; Lawrence Watt-Evans. He once wrote he's never been into writing historical fiction because he's always troubled by the why. Why that particular divergence point in human history? Why that particular version of events from the infinitely many possible versions? My answer can only be; we wanted to create something broadly familiar, but unlike other story worlds we have seen before. We started with a few assumptions about our setting. The first being the on-going war led to revolutions in all the major participants. From there, we assume Bolsheviks would not win the revolution in Russia (at least not outright) and fascists would win a revolution in France. We didn't want Germany to be the Third Reich ten years ahead of time. We did want Britain to lean Orwellian. The United States never entered the Great War.

Excepting those basic assumptions I have been digging through histories of the era and looking at events which followed the Armistice to find little incidents and factoids both to justify and to inform our setting. In our previous projects Brandon and I have both taken echoes of real cultural fragments and recast them in new ways within our fictional settings. Working backward through the list above we take the pro-Wilson 1916 campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war,” and just say he did. Not even the sinking of Lusitania brought American troops to Europe, thus everything which follows is different. We have a lot of ideas for America, but they will not be the focus of Europa Tempest.

The countries of Europe have been our biggest focus. As I said, I'm very happy with the way things have come together. Churchill, famous for his role in WWII, was also in the government during WWI. He fell from power over how the war had been fought. Now take that to the extreme. If the whole government of 1918 is replaced because no one in the country is happy about how the war has turned out you become able to posit the kind of drastic changes Orwell envisioned thirty years early. With Germany we have focused more on a return to pre-war war fever than moving forward to the Nazi bugbear. Kaiser Wilhelm II left at the end of the War. In our setting he has returned to power as an bit of an older and wiser figure. He's not as eager for war in our 1930s setting as he was in 1914. He's the voice of reason now trying to keep in line the newer generation eager for war. It's this reuse in a different form of all the part of history you may have heard of that really gets us excited as creators.

Our inspiration for our other main countries comes less from inversions of specific people and more from ideologies. The basic inspiration for a fascist France comes right out of the Second World War period. I read a few books looking at the tensions within the Third Republic and the origins of the Vichy regime. To make the story very short, the same kind of militant nationalism which became fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany existed in France as well. It is not hard to imagine a cadre of young fascists forming in France during the war and not much harder to imagine an opportunity for them to seize power in the aftermath of the war. Speaking of cadres seizing power, in Russia we have declared the civil war following the October Revolution is still on-going even into the 1930s. Reds and Whites and many other factions are still trying to work out who will win. Our vision of Russia is perhaps the least possible because we haven't pushed anything which helped the Whites or which hurt the Reds. We just want it this way.

I haven't explained much about the setting, I know. This was only supposed to be the briefest mention of some of the bits of the story I've been working on recently. If anything mentioned here does interest you, please have a look at the Kickstarter page. This project is funded and moving along and you can still jump on by contacting us there. Until next time.

A Review: Lovecraft: A Look Behind the “Cthulhu Mythos” by Lin Carter

4/5 stars.
I am by no means a connoisseur of H. P. Lovecraft. I've read maybe a dozen of his stories. I don't particularly care for Lovecraft's ponderous writing style either. There is also the inescapable problem of his xenophobia. All that said, however, there is something interesting and worth reading in Lovecraft's stories. To be overly brief, he posits a universe of immeasurable vastness in both time and space and populates this universe with beings for whom humanity is below notice. The terror in Lovecraft is that humankind is irrelevant. Almost all his characters are assuaging that terror in some way; they embrace madness or deny the truth they have glimpsed or seek relevance by allying with the more powerful beings. These human responses to fear are what make Lovecraft's stories interesting to me because humans still struggle, over 100 years after Lovecraft began writing, to make meaning for themselves in a universe we know to be even larger and even more impersonal than he described.

Lin Carter was a fantasy and science fiction writer who also worked as an editor in those genres. He also wrote three non-fiction studies of fantasy fiction and its origins. This is the second in the series. They aren't exactly scholarly studies, but Carter was clearly very well-read and he knew what he was talking about. He also has the distinction to be among the first to examine the fantasy genre as it was first emerging so his comments form an interesting time capsule of sorts. The first “A Look Behind” book took on Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings in 1969 just after the publication of the first paperback edition had made Tolkien a household name. Though I like Lovecraft less than Tolkien this follow-up book by Carter from 1972 was a much better read. Carter knew many of the people involved in the story of Lovecraft's failure to flourish in his own time and in his long, slow rise to posthumous popularity. Carter essentially says because of his professional and personal relationships he was in a unique position to actually take a look behind the origins of the “Cthuhlu Mythos.” Those connections show through in the book. Carter himself met Lord Dunsany, who had been one of Lovecraft's major early influences. He exchanged letters with Lovecraft's ex-wife to get her insight. Carter even had his own Mythos stories published by August Derleth, Lovecraft's main literary successor. These sorts of near-overlaps with Lovecraft give Carter a certainly unique and seemingly well-informed perspective. Carter writes with clarity and authority and the book is very readable.

Carter follows both Lovecraft's biography and his career. I found all of this information interesting because I knew so little of it already. Yet, Lovecraft: A Look Behind this is not really a biography nor is it a deep investigation into the themes of Lovecraft's oeuvre. Carter focuses on the fifteen stories he identifies as connected to each other in the “shared universe” of the Cthuhlu Mythos. He gives dates of composition and tells where and how each story came to be published. Carter sometimes relates anecdotes connected to the tales taken from Lovecraft's enormous correspondence or related directly to Carter by people who knew Lovecraft. This is the main point of the book. It traces how one chance mention on one early story was built upon again and again in later stories to create the cosmos-spanning Mythos. The only real weakness of the book is the tendency of some of these sections to read as simplistic lists following the format: “Then Lovecraft wrote X story, which introduced Y tome of lore and Z elder god.”

In large part the tale of Lovecraft's work is a tale of two publishers. First, the pulp magazine Weird Tales, which seemed to be the first and only magazine Lovecraft considered submitting his work to. A rejection from Weird Tales (often for length or for the simple fact he usually submitted single-spaced, hand-written pages!) usually meant a finished story remains unpublished until after Lovecraft's death. Lovecraft accepted Weird Tales' tiny paychecks and never looked for work elsewhere even as other magazines with wider circulations and better pay rates entered the market. Lovecraft's inability or unwillingness to turn his ideas to profit led to a life of poverty which in turn contributed to his early death from ill health. This also means many of Lovecraft's stories are no longer under copyright because Weird Tales eventually folded and the rights passed to the public domain. After Lovecraft died one of the many literary friends Lovecraft had cultivated from the Weird Tales circle committed to putting Lovecraft's work into hardcover form. This was August Derleth and he launched Arkham House, named for one of Lovecraft's fictional towns. Derleth became a successful publisher as well as an accomplished writer and his goal of collecting all Lovecraft's stories and keeping them all in print was accomplished. Lovecraft's stories have always been both held up as worth reading and easy to access so they continue to be a source of inspiration.

Something I didn't expect is that Lovecraft's large circle of fellow writers considered creating the Mythos as something of a game. The vast number of old books containing forbidden knowledge strains creditably from a certain point of view. How can so many rare and dangerous books be in so many collections without becoming just another part of the standard body of human knowledge? But that logistical complaint comes from the modern era looking back. For the original members of the Lovecraft circle, inventing a new half-mad scholar with yet another collection of arcane formulas referencing some formerly unknown semi-deity was like telling a good joke. They competed with each other, turning each other's names and hometowns into data points in the shadowy background of the shared fictional world they all created. The Mythos was always open-ended. New people were always able to add to it and so many have over the last century. Unfortunately, many people don't seem to have realized the joke part of the whole operation. Robert Bloch told Carter when Lovecraft died he didn't have the heart to tell any more of the jokes because the person they were for wouldn't be able to enjoy them. Somehow it warms my heart to know the man who has become nearly synonymous with dark and horrible and wrote about earth-shaking and mind-shattering beings from the stars was really just having a laugh with his friends.

I did not really learn anything more about the Cthulhu Mythos than I already knew from the dozen or so Lovecraft stories I've read and from what I've picked up via cultural osmosis. However, I did learn quite a bit about Lovecraft and the constellation of writers surrounding him. I've added a bunch of names to my reading list. There's a lot of works about Lovecraft out there these days, but this still serves as a great introduction. I think after Lovecraft: A Look Behind am ready for one of the more substantial Lovecraft biographies out there.

Here is Carter's list of Lovecraft's “Cthulhu Mythos” stories with links to them all on Wikisource. Go read all them yourself, if you haven't already.
1. "The Nameless City" (1938)
2. ”The Hound” (1924)
3. "The Festival" (1925)
4. "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928)
5. "The Dunwich Horror" (1929)
6. "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1931)
7. The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936)
8. "At the Mountains of Madness" (1936)
9. "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1933)
10. "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1937)
11. "The Shadow out of Time" (1936)
12. "The Haunter of the Dark" (1936)
13. History and Chronology of the 'Necronomicon' (1936)
14. Fungi from Yuggoth (1941)
15. “The Challenge from Beyond” (1935) – written with A. Merrit, C. L. Moore, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long.

A Review: The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

3/5 stars.
I don't remember how I learned Mark Twain covered a visit to Pompeii in this travelogue. I generally enjoy reading old travelogues because they describe a world which doesn't quite exist anymore. To me, it is akin reading about a fantasy world. There is also an historical interest because the author inevitably talks much about his or her own sentiments and ideas. Thus the modern reader learns something not only about the place the writer visited, but also something about where the author is from. All that being said; “Mark Twain goes to Pompeii” seemed like something I should read in my series of books about Pompeii.

First off, there is very little about Pompeii in this book. The book covers a five month cruise all around the Mediterranean, so the buried city only forms part of one chapter (XXXI). About the only thing of note he mentions (revealing something of what was commonly known at the time) is when he thought about visiting a buried city, he imagined it as still buried and exploring it by torchlight after climbing down into the mine-like excavation. He was surprised to see it was all uncovered and open to they sky. I find this odd. Twain makes frequent mention of the guidebooks to European and Near Eastern travel the “Innocents” he traveled with had to hand for their journey. How had he missed the fact the city had been completely uncovered even though he knows of the upright soldier mentioned by Gell? Twain writes:

We never read of Pompeii but we think of that soldier; we can not write of Pompeii without the natural impulse to grant to him the mention he so well deserves.

Apparently, we still cannot.

Beyond the single chapter for which I read it, the book was just alright. The pleasure cruise Twain went on took place in 1867 and many of the chapters were sent home as newspaper reports. The book is a reworked version of these newspaper pieces together with many illustrations and Twain's fuller reflection upon the events of the trip. There are many incidents which strain credulity, but this is hardly surprising from a man who is remembered as a satirist. I particularly enjoyed his discussion of Venice (XXII), his night time visit to the Acropolis of Athens (XXXII), his luncheon with Tsar Alexander II in Yalta (XXXVII) and I liked the perspective he brought to his horseback ride through Syria and the Holy Land (XLII - LVI). There were also moments, most strikingly in Chapter XVIII, where Twain wonders off into memories of his childhood and youth. I want to know more about the person he describes in those fleeting moments. I have added Twain's autobiography to my reading list.

These enjoyable moments are scattered throughout a large book full of a lot of bad-mouthing of everything. He lampoons his American shipmates and himself, but he gives his worst to just about every else. He goes on about how the Old Masters weren't so great. He points out how nation after nation is run down and reliving old glories. He describes the French and insufferable, the Italians as beggars, the Turks as barely human, the Syrians as dirty and on and on. The American newspaper audience of the late 1860s seems to have had quite the taste for this sort of ruthless dismissal of the Old World, but I do not.

I am at a loss to guess how much of what is in this book is the real Mark Twain and how much was what he felt he needed to say for the papers. (I am aware there is some irony in asking what is real when talking about a man who created a fictional persona for himself.) This book was written early in his career when he showed promise as a writer, but before he became famous. Hints of the biting social criticism he later became known for are evident in this book, but he doesn't yet seem to know how he wants to wield his voice. Again, I want to read more of Twain to see how that development occurred.
In his conclusion, Twain says this:

It would be well if such an excursion could be gotten up every year and the system regularly inaugurated. Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

I couldn't agree more.

AMPed Up!

Another project of mine has come to fruition. Third Eye Games has just published United Human Front: Affiliation Guide for AMP Year Two for its AMP: Year One game line. In the game, AMP stands for Accelerated Mutant Potential. When the game first came out I wasn't too interested because I'm not a huge superhero fan. I miss-understood things. AMP is not a superhero game, it's a super-powers game. Maybe it's not that big a difference, but it's an important one. AMP has plenty of “faster than a speeding bullet” without a lot of spandex costumes. When Eloy asked me to write for the game and I actually read the book I liked how dark it was. AMP is full of 1990s-era Marvel-style angst; “they hate us, yet we are dedicated to saving them from themselves.” It's also full of government distrust, secret machinations and downright nastiness which seem to have been pulled from the headlines of recent years. A good setting for a game.

I was asked to write a guidebook for members of the United Human Front. These are the people doing the hating of the AMPs. Explicitly. At first I was not excited. No one wants to be stuck writing about the one-dimensional “bad guys.” Well, I didn't anyway. I took it as a writing challenge, how can I make the anti-mutant faction in a mutation-based super-powers game into something which seems positive? How can I make the UHF a viable option for players picking their character's affiliation? How can I make this faction into something more than a stereotype?

I decided to focus on two things. Conspiracy theories and the kind of anti-government domestic terrorism America saw in the 1990s. McVeigh, Kaczynski, Koresh; they all came from within American culture. That part of the culture hasn't gone away, either. There are even more conspiracies afoot than ever these days. I tried to present the UHF members as thinking people (maybe thinking too much). They have looked at all the evidence and come to their own conclusions. Two members don't have to agree on what AMPs really are, or who created them in the first place to agree they are a potential threat to decent folk everywhere. AMPs are people who can turn into fire or smash rocks with their hands and who are drawn to fight with each other whenever they meet. That's dangerous! The United Human Front is circling the wagons and defending what they know. It's a noble position, in a way. I've also put out the idea not everyone who looks down their nose at an AMP is actually a member of the official UHF organization. This lets GMs use human antagonists claiming UHF affiliation who aren't actually acting by the more careful and deliberate means of the UHF hierarchy. Since the game establishes the UHF was founded by a geneticist, I played up that element too. The UHF top tier people know AMPs are different on a genetic level. It's not technically wrong to say they aren't human. Maybe the man on the street uses it as a cover for racism and fearmongering, but not all members of UHF take the same lessons from the founder's genetic tests.

I've tried to weave the idea of conflicting views of reality into the adventure which forms part of the Affiliation Guide. I have crafted stories as a GM for my weekly game group and I tried to write part of a choose-your-own adventure one time, so I didn't think an RPG adventure would be hard to write. I was wrong. I've not written an RPG adventure for publication before and I found it difficult to present a story where the players were forced to question their own definitions of human and mutant. My first attempt was roughly twice as long as it was supposed to be! I had trouble creating characters players were supposed to care about. I had trouble accounting for everything a group of players might do. I wanted to have multiple paths so different UHF groups with different visions of what it means to be “defenders of humanity” could enjoy the adventure. Ultimately a lot of the branching pathways had to come out to bring the thing down to size. The manuscript I delivered has been polished to a nice gleam by Eloy and the rest of his team. It can only improve when the creators of the game give it a once-over, right? I love seeing ideas I labored on over my keyboard turn into pages with proper layouts and illustrations. Well done, Third Eye Games!

If you want to check it out, the United Human Front Affiliation Guide is available now.
If you want to get started with the AMP game, check out AMP: Year One.
You can also back the Kickstarter for the latest book in the series; AMP: Year Three.

A Review: The Last Days of Pompeii by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

4/5 stars.
The next in my series of books about Pompeii is my first work of fiction on the subject, and possibly the first ever fictionalized account of Pompeii. The Last Days of Pompeii was published in 1835, and coming so close in time to Pompeiana, I expected it to pull liberally from Gell's descriptions. It did. In fact, Gell and the etchings from Pompeiana are explicitly mentioned. Bulwer-Lytton was clearly not bothered by inserting his authorial presence into his narrative nor by breaking into the ancient events with comparisons to the modern day. Asides such as “and you can see this same room when you visit the city today” or “they had a meal much like our own afternoon tea” stand out in sharp contract to the tale Bulwer-Lytton has crafted. He goes so far as to mention he can see the Bay of Naples he is describing from the desk where he writes the book! The mansion on the street of tombs just outside the city, the gladiators, the stalwart soldier whose skeleton was found still erect at his post and numerous other things mentioned by Gell are all folded right into the novel. Instead of being a real distraction from the novel I found I got used to Bulwer-Lytton's style and came to enjoy the specificity of his writing. “You can see the spot I'm describing. You know the type I'm talking about.”

I also enjoyed the actual story of the book. Not so much for the main story, which is what I would call a novel of manors, but for the numerous side stories which are woven together. The main action of the story is a tale of young love between Glaucus, a young Athenian nobleman, and Ione, an Italian-born woman of Greek heritage. Around these two are a constellation of other characters. Ione is the ward of the Egyptian priest Arbaces, who fancies Ione for himself. Ione's brother is Apaecides, who serves Isis with Arbaces but converts to Christianity. The blind slave girl Nydia sells flowers and fancies herself beloved of Glaucus. The rich and spoiled Julia also wants Glaucus for herself. Further from the center of action are the other Christians of the city, the gladiators, Glaucus' vapid friends and a Witch of Vesuvius, living in a cleft on the mountain. I don't generally care for stories where nothing “happens.” There is little which happens in this book. Most of the text is about the way people feel and how the scene looks and the history of Roman culture which explains why people are doing what they are doing. Taken all together, the story becomes more than the sum of its parts. Pompeii, as preserved in ashes in 79 C.E. is a crystallized moment in time and Bulwer-Lytton has taken pains to explore every facet of this chunk of Pompeiian amber from every angle. He has woven his tale into a vivid portrayal of the life of the city itself. I like the approach.

The novel explores many different point of view, but I found two perspectives particularly interesting. The first is the way the Egyptian and Greek characters feel about the Romans. Arbaces the Egyptian is an astrologer and rumored sorcerer. His contempt of everyone around him comes from his feeling of superiority as he views Egypt as the Mother Race and all these Mediterranean usurpers as mere children to do with as he pleases. His hates the Romans and mocks their accomplishments, yet he lives in a Roman city, enjoying the finer things. His views seem to mirror more the ideas of the Nineteenth Century than the facts of the First, but that isn't really a surprise. Through Glaucus, the feelings of the surpassed Greeks are also explored. He is also described as living a life a pleasure, always seeking to forget the fallen cities of Greece. From reading Mommsen, I have a general sense of how the Romans interacted with and treated both the Greeks and Egyptians so I find it fascinating to explore some of how those people may have felt in their day-to-day lives.

The other perspective Bulwer-Lytton explores at length is the nature of early Christianity. Apaecides, who rejects Isis for Jesus, is led in his conversion by Olinthus, who is presented as a passionate preacher and something of a zealot for his young faith. Olinthus is, perhaps too stereotypically, sentenced to face a lion in the arena after he is arrested as an atheist for denying the existence of the Roman pantheon. Other Christians are presented as a bit more calm and contemplative, but all of them conduct themselves with restless energy and powerful certainty. Bulwer-Lytton points out this fresh fire has been somewhat diminished in the present. He doesn't seem to be opposed to Christianity in principle, but he is critical of the methods of the early believers.

As the novel goes along the cast gets more and more intertwined. Their fates all march forward to an ending in ashes. Even if you didn't know about the Vesuvius eruption and the way the city was buried, the title The LAST Days of Pompeii should clue you in something is going to happen. Bulwer-Lytton has done a great job a working in hints of the coming destruction which the reader can hardly fail to miss but which the characters consistently mistake. They laugh off omens or produce talismans against the evil eye as if they can be saved. For instance, early on Arbaces reads in the stars he is in danger from a falling rock and he is indeed smote by a falling statue during a scuffle with Glaucus, but lives. He thinks all danger is past, but from then on I expected him to be killed by a falling chunk of rock from the volcano. It's these little touches which make this book more engaging than its conventional tale of young lovers would otherwise be. The threat of doom looms over the story and as a reader nearly 20 centuries later you know it doesn't end well. Early on, I hoped the book would come to an end before the story was told. I hoped the author would leave his story unfinished to mirror the sudden end to all the stories of the city.

I got fully wrapped up in the story. This was perhaps helped by not actually reading the book, but listening to it through LibraVox. It is nearly seventeen hours long. There is a wide range of volunteers who read the chapters and their diverse pronunciations of the Greek and Latin names can be a little bit distracting, but overall it is nice to lean back and let other people deliver the story to my ears.

A Review: Pompeiana by William Gell

3/5 stars.
A few years ago I went to an exhibit in Cincinnati of artifacts from Pompeii. I've known the basics of Pompeii, as I assume most people do, my whole life; Roman city, buried in volcanic ash, found centuries later, the forms of dying people preserved where they fell. Seeing the exhibit, though, gave me a new sense of the value of the site to our understanding of the early Roman imperial period. Pots and statues, graffiti as aggressive advertising, the bread, olives and figs they ate: all of it preserved for us to study or gawk at, depending on our skills and interests. Of course, the paster casts of the hollows where people fell were arresting. Literal moments frozen in time. It was amidst all this archaeological wonder I found one sign which mentioned the first book written in English about Pompeii was Pompeiana from 1817. I resolved to read this book. Thanks to the wonderful people who digitize old books, it wasn't that hard to find online.

I have the impression, based on I don't recall what, the book was going to be a tour guide of the city. I expected it to describe both the city and the methods by which fancy English gentlefolk on the Grand Tour would get to and around the town. I wanted to read about Sergio who has the best and most reliable mules in the area and about Momma Caglione who prepares the finest meals. There was none of that sort of tourist stuff. It was just about what a person will see in city. I suppose I should have guessed that from the full title: Pompeiana; the Topography, Edifices and Ornaments of Pompeii.

The book is actually rather short. It goes over the known and supposed history of Vesuvius' eruptions. Then the major parts of the city as known at that time. I read the second edition from 1824, which says it has been updated in include some recent excavations. Even so, there wasn't much of the city known at the time. The amphitheater in the east was known but the middle of the city was still buried. Gell instead covers the buildings on the western edge of the town. The tombs and large houses on the main road outside the Herculaneum Gate, a few of the crossroads, a few of the temples; these things he discusses in detail giving count of rooms, supposed uses and any curious artifacts found in each. The frescoes and mosaics one would see in each building are also listed and described. What I liked best about the book was the numerous plates throughout. About every house and building described is also figured by good quality lithographs and many are given a numbered plan as well. The over-all impression of the book is to put the reader “there” in a very literal way.

The book serves as a time capsule because it shows things in Pompeii as they looked in the early Nineteenth Century. Gell laments the exposure to the elements which had already at that time damaged the colors of frescoes and the stucco covering some of the buildings. I expect this tension between uncovering and discovery of the ruins and the further damage the ruins are thereby exposed to will continue to be a major theme of the other books I read about Pompeii. Pompeiana tells everything which was known about a particular house at that time. I expect to see in the other books I read both a long shadow from this work and how understandings changed over the next two centuries.

NaNoWriMo Victory!

For the third time in the nine years I've attempted it, I have won National Novel Writing Month. With the health set backs I had early in the month I wasn't sure I was going to make it but I managed 2,000 words a day or more for almost two weeks right I the middle of the month. That but me back on track. I traveled out of town for the Thanksgiving holiday, but unlike other years, this time I had a laptop so I managed to get some work done every day of the trip. Another big help. So, I did it! I said I felt like a had a win in me and I did. Good news!

But is the draft I've slipshod smashed together any good? Maybe. I must admit when I was writing the end I wasn't happy. The diary format limits my ability to actually describe the climax of the story. I was never convinced by the stupidly long letters and diary entries which give all the details in Stoker's Dracula so I wanted to keep my pretended entries shorter. I decided, perhaps wrongly, to make the final events occur after the last entry. Rasmus talks about what he thinks will happen when signs off never to make a follow-up report. That got me to the end of my word count, but it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. If I return to this in February or so to revise it, that will have to revisited. There are some other problems with the plot. I'm not sure I like the direction I ended up taking with more and more people getting involved in Rasmus' project. He becomes the administrator and star surgeon of a hospital. Would he really go from quiet, private academic to that kind of leader? Maybe, but I would have to develop that more in revision. Lastly, I read about one paragraph of background information so to have things accurate to 1640s Prague will take a lot of work.

Is there nothing good about it? Well... I still like the idea. I could try another project with the same format. I think I am most proud of the character of Penemue, the fallen angel. In a way this is that being's diary as well and most of the things it tells Rasmus about sitting before The Throne in the days before the rebellion and watching the first human civilizations and how the exiled angels built a city inside the chasm they were thrown in can be assumed to be true. Though it is using these stories to corrupt Rasmus they are really how this particular angel feels. It joined the rebellion and ended cast out of Heaven, but it still remembers its days of glory fondly and truthfully talks about how bad Lucifer is. I have, in Penemue's parts of the diary, sketched out mechanics of heaven, the progress of the rebellion of Lucifer, the conditions of the thrown-down angels' imprisonment. All of this can be improved upon and turned into another found document it its own right or used as the basis for some other project involving angels.

Here's a section written by Penemue:

Simply stated, yes, that high angel to the depths fallen you have named was the leader of the defeated forces. I mention not that name lest the one to whom it belongs visit some vengeance on me even now. Little all your human wisdom has drawn so far from the aether about that contest. It happened not before the world was made as you suppose. It happened afterwards when humanity had already begun to fill the earth and make names and kingdoms for themselves. That was when certain of my kind first mingled among you. Wives they took to them after the fashion of the tribal rulers they emulated. At first those great men who were born of those unsanctioned unions were famous and their tales were long and filled with great glory, great woe and, above all, great deeds. Little remnant of those tales remains, if any, even in the learning of the very wise for it was long ago. So this is what provoked the war. The faction named later the rebels wished to continue the relations between man and angel as they had been. To shape further the fledgling kingdoms after the full potential of the human minds and limbs they had found, always driving those simple kingdoms on to new greatness. Even as I told you about Eden so it happened in those early civilizations. Though founded upon the original principles of Creation, such strong pushing by the angels and such rapid advancement by the men was not the design of the Enthroned and a ban was issued which in turn provoked the rebellion. On both sides it was for mankind we fought. Any history you read which does not run in this manner is not founded upon the events of those days, but upon later speculation and guesses.

Thus to your next theme. Indeed is the Almighty named rightly. Indeed that loyal host was victorious. So why sit I here confined instead of in my former place before the Throne? I have often wondered this myself, be assured. I know not an answer and I have but few thoughts as consolation. Since my rescue could surely be affected that it is not must also be a part of that sacred will which is not revealed even to the angels. Maybe I am here to work upon this epo I have here composed. Maybe when it conveys all that was done and felt in that lost contest I will be welcomed home to deliver my labor and hear it read before the captains of those days as I intend it to be heard. Maybe I am here to learn something of confinement the better to be sent on a future mission by my master. This last it perhaps slight comfort to you who are of different nature than I, but it is possible I am no longer needed or even considered by the one who made me. I was made to serve and if I am no longer of use what obligation has the maker to the useless tool? Every right there might be to set me aside. I know not the state of heaven since I marched forth. This I can accept. Your question shakes me not.

My final, verified count was 50,161 words.