Act Three Chapter Title Explanation

Well, we're due for this with the last chapters of Act Three going up earlier today...

It's No Good by Depeche Mode

My hands down favorite track from De'Mode and the third track from Ultra that shows up as a chapter title in Philly by Night. Only real reason I chose it is because I like and decided that Michael would play it in his band in this chapter.

And We Danced by Hooters

Hooters is a quintessential Philadelphia rock band from the 1980s. Seeing as the first two chapters of the act are playing catch-up with the time gap between Acts Two and Three, this song is, like the previous chapter, mostly just a fluff choice. It fits the Philly environment nicely.

All the Things She Said by TATU

This one is a little anachronistic, since it was released in 2002, but given the rep of this Russian band as "lipstick lesbians," it fit nicely with Sarah's exploration of her sexuality now that she's a part of Michael and Rebecca's "trinity."

Something in the Air Tonight by Phil Collins

Oh, yeah. Cliche as hell, but still this track is just so cool (even if Phil has not quite the artist he was in Genesis' heyday.) It helps set the mood as the main characters start to realize just how big things really are when it comes to the Dark Brotherhood and who (or more accurately what) is behind them.

Gangster's Paradise by Coolio

I really don't like rap. There are very few rap songs that I like. All that said, I LOVE this track. It fits nicely as Michael begins to expand his criminal empire through the city.

Spirits in the Material World by the Police

Spirit magic is at the heart of this chapter as the main characters race to unlock the secrets of the Brotherhood's new weapon. So, of course, we go to this Police song for our chapter title.

A View to a Kill by Duran Duran

Stealing a James Bond song, the title is really where I found the appeal of this track for this chapter. Given how many people die in this chapter, it seems fitting.

Of Wolf and Man by Metallica & Wolf Moon by Type O Negative

Two chapters back to back that focus on Boar's efforts to use the werewolves to help Michael's ambitions. So we got two wolf themed songs back to back.

Creep by Radiohead

I've been playing coy to some degree with Michael's predatory sexuality. In this chapter, we really confront this ugly element of his character and seek to establish the boundaries of where he will or won't go. Radiohead's song is a perfect description of Michael here. He is a creep, but he's trying to not be quite as creepy as some of his allies (e.g. Monroe.)

Sister of Night by Depeche Mode

Our fourth and final Depeche Mode song from Ultra, this song is about Ai'ma.

The House of the Rising Sun by The Animals

This old classic is about a house of ill repute in New Orleans. Our chapter is about the Tong prostitution ring and Michael's attempted takeover thereof. Given that the phrase "Rising Sun" makes me think Asian (albeit towards Japanese culture rather than the Chinese of the Tongs in the story), it's a nice fit for this chapter.

The Sorcerer's Pledge by Candlemass

This somewhat obscure song fits nicely with Zao finally giving his consent and presence to an attack on the Brotherhood. He is a sorcerer making a pledge to support Michael's assault.

Hotel California by The Eagles

Long misinterpreted to be some manner of satanic tribute, Hotel California is really about the music industry. But I don't care about the truth here, I'd rather go with the misread for our purposes. The Hell Hotel really is a place "you can check out anytime you like, but can never leave."

Carmina Burana: O Fortuna by Carl Orff

I normally do pop or rock songs as chapter titles. But this piece of classical music (which is super overused in modern film) is too fitting here. The whole operatic song that makes up this track is an ode to the whimsies of fate. Given Zao's destiny at the hands of the Brotherhood, it was too fitting not to use. It's really haunting and it fits also with the atmosphere inside the nightmarish Hell Hotel.

Bloodflowers by the Cure

Off of The Cure's late 90s masterpiece album of the same name, this song is all about the capriciousness of life and death. Michael wins a huge victory, but at what cost? So many dead. Was it worth it?

Well, moving right along...

Act Three of Philly by Night is finally done and posted. Now for the climax as Michael makes his final moves on Prince Walsh and his allies. Of course, there are a lot of loose ends: Ernie, David, Monroe, and (of course) Michael and his own predilections. What will happen next?

Well, I'm working on it. I've had some serious personal shit go down lately. Spent a week in a hospital. Had a month off work to recover. Spent a good bit of it watching the new Marvel TV series on Netflix, Luke Cage.

If you haven't checked it out, you should. It's really good.

It's also helping me with a bit of a problem I've had with my narrative. Philly is a majority-minority city and it has been for a while. I'm just some white dude who likes vampires and the city of Philadelphia. I grew up in rich people's neighborhoods, so I don't really know squat about inner city life. But I want to make the story have some feeling of authenticity. Only way to do that is to give the narrative some color, some street, and I've got a lot of work to do to pull that off.

So I'm doing some revamps of the story to bring in some elements similar to Luke Cage. Hope that'll give the story some meat along with the primary narrative. Hope you like the end results.

Some changes

I've largely left this story fallow for most of the past year. I've had little inspiration to work on it, little motivation.

That's largely changed. I've mentioned before I've used this story as a bit of personal therapy, doing some exploration of my real life dark side and asking the questions: Why do I do what I do? Why I am the person that I am? What if I stripped away my moral code? And so forth.

Those questions are becoming important to me again. In large part because I'm considering opening this story up to people I've previously hid it from.

I know, at best, only a handful of people in this great big world have ever stumbled onto this blog. And those handful don't know me from Adam. I'm just some guy out there who writes a kick-ass vampire story based on his VTM campaign and his own personal demons. But, to let people who actually know me in real life into this world is another thing entirely. To let them see my darker impulses, well, that's a little scary.

But it may be necessary for reasons I won't go into here.

Either way, I'v decided to change things up as part of my rededication to finishing the story line. I've dumped most of the references to PbN2012, because I have no idea if I'll ever get to that part of the story and so I'm not going to pretend anymore that's a realistic goal. What I really want now is to just finish PbN1999, which I think I can do.

I've also changed the background image (beautiful picture of the Philly skyline at night I found via Google search. I've given credit to the artist in the blog intro.) I've also changed the quote that introduces the story. This one fits better Michael's character and the goal of why I'm writing this.

We'll see what happens from here.

I wasn't going to do this...I really wasn't.

I'm almost done with my reread of Act Four. When I set out to do this, I wanted to do two things. One was to see how the story read as an actual novel instead of a series of blog posts and it holds up pretty well. Two was to catch various editing errors: grammar, spelling, and places where the text was just awkward and clunky.

I was not doing this to find plot holes or errors in the story. I was not planning to do any major rewrites at all. I was going to let the story stand as is, warts and all. But now I've stumbled onto errors that I feel need addressing, that I can't ignore. And by opening this door, I'm not sure if I'm going to stop.

Error #1 is pretty minor. There's a throwaway line from Solomon somewhere in Act Four where he talks about how surprised everyone was at Mathias' obsession over Deborah. Given that the story up until then does a very good job of establishing what an open secret Mathias' perversions are, that's a pretty glaring error. But correcting it is easy. It's one line. Fix it or remove it and we're done.

Error #2 is not so simple and it's one of the great unanswered questions of VbN. Why does Cranston spare Sarah instead of killing her? This suffers a bit from the same critique I made of Act Two in the first of these posts: something happens because the plot demands it so, not because it's logical or rational. Sarah has to be alive to go to Philadelphia, but she doesn't follow Michael back to Blacksburg. Therefore...Cranston has to "kill" her, but not really. I can live with the fact that this mimics Rebecca's fate in Act Two (She's dead, but she really isn't.) But that had an explanation behind it with The Djinn's scheming. Sarah's removal from the picture does not.

I do have a way to explain this, but it'll require a rewrite of a pivotal scene in PbN Act Two. Since that's still a work in progress, maybe that isn't so bad.

Error #3 is somewhere in the middle. There's a conversation between Deborah and Rebecca and a later internal monologue in Rebecca that is much more negative towards Michael than it should be. It makes Rebecca's later forgiveness and embrace of Michael in PbN somewhat jarring. Those passages should be more ambivalent, written in such a way that makes you wonder how Rebecca will truly react when she meets Michael again. As it stands, you'd expect something completely different than what happens.

So what am I going to do about this? I've got some time this afternoon to work on some of these and it's actually kind of nice that I do have time to dedicate to the story again. I'll probably take advantage and do some rewriting. I know I said I wouldn't, but hopefully I can find a way to remedy this.

The Kindle Re-read Project Part Two

I'm into reading Act Four of VbN by now and I have further observations.

• This is becoming as much an exercise in editing as much as anything. I need to fire my editor, so many errors I'm finding. I said last time that I was surprised at how few spelling and grammar errors I was finding. Not anymore.
• One of the weirder errors is something that must be happening somewhere in the transfer from website to document to PDF. A lot of proper nouns are losing the spaces either before or after. For instance, people are "fromRoanoke" or reading "Game of Throneswhen." It's odd and I'm spending a lot of my new editing energy fixing these.
• I'm really pleased at how well I telegraph future plot developments. My biggest worry as a writer is creating characters that are inconsistent and unrealistic. I have not failed at that here. 
• Michael is very much the sexual predator he self-deludes himself into believing he is not (I've lost count the number of times he deliberately seduces a under-the-age-of-consent minor. No children, but he rides that line as close as he can.) 
• Sarah's jealousy is well-established. 
• Rebecca's fondness for Michael and her willingness to forgive him in PbN is nicely set up. 
• Hell, there's even a throw-away line in the very beginning of VbN Act One that mentions Michael's sister, so her arrival on the scene in PbN Act One isn't as jarring as I thought it would be.
• It's interesting how you can see I shifted my approach mid-stream. VbN Acts Three and Four are really not parts three and four of a single Virginia by Night novel. They're really written as separate 150 or so page novellas. In some ways, the story is presently structured like so...
• VbN Act One & Two = Part One
• VbN Act Three = Part Two
• VbN Act Four = Part Three
• PbN 1999 = Part Four
• The above is really sloppy writing, but again going back through and fixing this problem is really beyond the scope of my time and energy right now. PbN Act Three is huge and between work, family, and Warlords of Draenor I don't have the time I need to dedicate to it. Let alone anything else.

The Kindle Re-read Project

In addition to working on PbN Act Three, I've also begun converting the text of VbN into PDF to read on my Kindle. It's interesting to read through the story like it's an actual book. I've gotten through Act Two so far and I'm enjoying it, but I have noticed a few things...

• More than a few spelling and grammar errors, but not as many as I expected.
• Pretty much every African-American character that appears "on-screen", major or minor, is half-white. I had forgotten Boar is such, but so too is the big basketball player Rebecca tries to pick up the night she's discovered by Deborah and so is little Matthew (Leigh's son). Probably need to remedy this at some point. I'm not sure I like the statement it makes.
• Act Two feels more problematic than I remember it. I know where it comes from. Act Two was really an effort in avoiding things-happen-because-the-plot-demands-that-they happen and it was not entirely successful. I'm not sure what, if anything, I can do about that without a major rewrite (Something at this point, I'm not keen on doing while I'm working on PbN.)
• Overall, I can see my writing style evolve chapter by chapter. That's kinda cool.

Yay, I'm ready to start!

Well, technically, I have started on Act Three, writing most of the first three chapters. Given they were little more than extended "Last time on..." scenes to advance the timeline forward to March 1999, they didn't take much planning.

The rest of Act Three, as predicted, took a lot more work.

At present, I'm attempting to interweave no less than six major plot lines dealing with Ernie, the werewolves (including a new werewolf villain), TFV (yes, they're back), the Malleus (and a new villain here too), Walsh, the Brotherhood, the Consilium, and (oh yeah) Michael Allens. It's what I wanted, an Act Three that was at least as epic as Act Two. I've done better than that. It's more epic.

And it has an epic body count to boot. I'm still a long way from matching my idol (GRRM) in that department, but it's a good start.

Now, it's time to put pixel-to-screen and get these plot lines written rather than just outlined. That'll take time too, but I've got 2015 on the horizon and plenty of time and energy.

P.S. One change I'll be making retroactively is to rename Quentin and Alice. When they were initially created as one-off cameo characters, I didn't mind lifting their names directly from The Magician's trilogy. Now that they've evolved into major characters in my story, I'm much less comfortable with that so I'm going to rework the names to look less like a blatant rip-off.

P.P.S. Speaking of renames, there's also a character that was introduced briefly way back in Act Two Chapter Nine of Virginia by Night that's going to make a major impact on Act Three and Four of Philly by Night. Problem is, I keep duplicating male names, particularly those that start with the letter D. Having multiple Darrens and Darrels (Daryl?) was getting annoying. So Michael's old childhood friend Darren is now David and the old chapter has been updated appropriately. I don't like going back to do retcons, but this one was a pretty minor one that'll pay off later. (This proved to me more major than I though. "David" showed up in casual mentions in several locations outside of his initial appearance. I also found numerous places where the real Darrel [primogen in Va Beach] and Darren [mage apprentice in Blacksburg] got their names jumbled up. All is now corrected.)

Act Two Chapter Title Explanation

Well, the last two chapters of Act Two went up today. Time to give you the run down on what the chapter titles mean and what songs they draw from...

Philadelphia Freedom by Elton John

This one should be really self-explanatory.

Welcome to the Jungle by Guns-N-Roses

"The jungle" of the song is a wild, decadent, and dangerous city, which fits very well with Michael's first nights in Philadelphia.

Drive by The Cars

This is one of those wonderful slow dance songs from the 1980s. It just works for a chapter with a Halloween party where our heroes are all looking to "drive someone home," sometimes with rather dire consequences.

Criminal by Fiona Apple

It was pretty much a universal opinion among my college friends that this was one of the hottest music videos ever filmed. The lyrics fit nicely with Mitch's predicament.

The Perfect Drug by NIN

A few ways you could go with this one. One is Noble's perversity now coming back to destroy him. Two is the return of the temptation for Michael to derive sexual pleasure in murder and death. Three is his surrender to Sarah's demands for their relationship (making her his "perfect drug.")

My Own Prison by Creed

I hate the music to this song, but the lyrics work too well for this chapter. A song of contrition and regret, which fits Michael's mood and the new circumstances of his relationship with Sarah.

Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover by Sophie B. Hawkins

And speaking of hot songs, there probably isn't a single human being out there who hasn't felt like this. It also fits the theme of this chapter, with a number of budding relationships emerging here. Janice wanting Kyle, Boar wanting Natasha, Mitch wanting Trisha, Paul wanting Kathleen, and Kathleen (thanks to Ernie) wanting Michael. You can pretty much imagine any of those characters singing this track.

Disappointed by Electronic

How can you go wrong with a band made up of Johnny Marr (The Smiths) and Bernard Sumner (New Order) with singing on this track by Neil Tennant (Pet Shop Boys)?

Given this is the chapter where Michael receives his first real setbacks in Philadelphia, the idea of being "disappointed" fits nicely. But much like the song (which is about NOT being disappointed), there is a lot happening here that is working to Michael's favor.

The Chemicals Between Us by Bush

I was first introduced to this song via an anime music video I saw at one of the cons I staffed in the late 90s (don't remember precisely which one.) In the video, the "chemicals" are the bond within family. I liked that interpretation. I was quite delighted to find that exact same anime music video on YouTube which is where this link goes.

For me, the "chemicals" are anything that bind us together, sometimes painfully. This chapter was one of connections, Zao to the Brotherhood, Walsh to the Malleus, and related to the music video, Paul to Janice.

Blue Monday by Orgy/New Order

The Orgy cover of this New Order classic would be contemporary with the time of the story, so it's the one on the link.

I've always seen this song being about second-guessing, which is happening a lot in the chapter. Trisha and Mitch fall apart rather spectacularly, Martin pulls a very underhanded trick on Anna, and Michael struggles against Kathleen's obsession and Sarah's schizophrenia.

Yesterday When I was Mad by the Pet Shop Boys

Another somewhat self-explanatory choice. Take your pick as to who this is about: Kathleen, Sarah, or Ernie.

With or Without You by U2

We all know this song and it fits Michael's dilemma nicely. Rebecca or Sarah? He can't live with both and he can't live without them either.

Home by Depeche Mode

Second track from Ultra (out of four) that appears as a chapter title in PbN. As Michael, Sarah, and Rebecca try to forge their "trinity," they all find a certain degree of peace with one another.

The Kids Aren't Alright by The Offspring

As we get a glimpse of Thomas Monroe and his thralls, this could not be a more fitting song. These are some seriously fucked up people.

New York City Boy by the Pet Shop Boys

This is a song about finding a new start in the big city, which is fitting for the closing chapter of Act Two (even if the city in question is Philadelphia and not NYC). It's also something of a gay anthem (the music video couldn't be more gay if it tried), which also fits the aftermath of Michael's encounter with Angela and Rebecca's sexual preferences.

More thoughts...

I just finished the third and final novel of Lev Grossman's Magician's trilogy. It's easily shot into the top three books/book series I've ever read, rivaling Lord of the Rings and Song of Ice and Fire. This is largely because I read it at this point in my life. A lot in there that I'm still trying to process, a lot that speaks to me where I am in life right now.

One of the key themes in the trilogy was the idea of growing up, which is something I've been going through in my own life. Better late than never, I suppose. Hours of therapy and head-shrinkage have gotten me to the point where I am finally, perhaps 20 years too late, emerging as the adult I am supposed to be. Part of that process is learning to deal with life and discovering how life has influenced you in ways that you were never quite aware of before.

If that sounds a little arcane, I'll explain more concretely.

That's me about 15 years or so ago (I'm on the right) at one of the anime cons I used to staff (Neko-con, from the look of the badges). In the photo with me are two of my good friends.

The dark haired guy in the middle is James, Ernie's player and the "inspiration" for Mitch in VbN/PbN. I have to confess I spend much of my 20s in great envy of James. During our college years, he was quite the bon vivant libertine that Mitch is portrayed in the story. I envied him his smooth confidence and his good fortune with the ladies, things I've never been able to master even now.

James and I are now largely estranged from one another, mostly due to the fourth person in this picture: his wife, one of the most miserable and unpleasant people the universe has ever spawned.

How do you live when one of your best friends isn't there for you anymore? We all have those people who drop off the radar. What does it mean?

The fellow on the left is Dan and he was much like James, a man with a massive lust for life. I didn't know him as well as James, but we worked con staff together and had a good time of things. He was one of those rare folks that you just couldn't help but like. A great guy, a lot of fun, a good heart.

I learned yesterday that Dan passed away in his sleep on Halloween. There's something fitting about that, given his fondness for cosplay and burlesque. But I'm still in shock from the news. He was my age, far too young to go.

What does it mean to lose the people we care about? That happens to all of us too.

In many ways, these two guys were two of my heroes, two people that I aspired to be like and never achieved. I admired them. I wanted to be them. I don't know what all this means, but I'm asking the question where I didn't before. Maybe that's part of this whole growing up thing.

But it also has a pragmatic element to what I do here on this site. They say the best way to become a good writer is two-fold. 1) Read a lot of good writing. 2) Have a lot of good experiences to write about. At this point in my life, on the cusp of my 42nd birthday, I suppose I've done both. I've read a lot of books, good and bad. And I've struggled in life. Lost friends. Waged the war between who I really am and who the world wants me to be. Come to terms with my family's expectations and failures. Made mistakes and learned from them (or not, in some cases.)

Whether that makes me a good writer at this point, I'll leave to the judgment of my readers, but I can say that I am far better than I used to be.

Good enough to not be satisfied with where the plot for Act Three of Philly by Night was going to go. Largely because of Grossman's trilogy and a few other books I've been reading lately, Act Two very much so lived out the old saying "tales grow in the telling." I vastly expanded the roles of the mages and werewolves in the story, added a lot more background and characters to those sub-plots.

Not surprisingly, those new characters are all aspects of who I am as a person. There's no secret that Michael is a different interpretation of me and always has been, one far more confident and ambitious (and less moral) than I am in real life. But so too are Sarah and Boar and Quentin and Cortez and Rebecca and pretty much everyone else that has more than a single scene in the story. They are all mechanisms by which I continue to explore the craziness in my own head.

That being true, I have to see this through to the end. If loss and letting-go are part of life and my story is a dark reflection of my life, then these things need to be a greater element of the story. How that'll play out I'm not quite sure just yet. But it does mean I'm back to the drawing board with Act Three.

The last few chapters of Act Two will be posted shortly. Realistically, I expect there to be another long hiatus after that, as I figure out where I want Act Three to go and how I want to speak to both the needs of the plot and of my own literary therapy. In the end, I hope the final product will be worth the wait.

Random thoughts...

Not much to say, but a bunch of updates...

1) Added another section to the Primer post, this one talking about hunters. It makes sense. Like the mages and the werewolves, they're starting to have a much larger role in Philly by Night than I originally planned. That's fitting, given that Philly is the default city setting for Hunter The Vigil.

2) Updated Emmanuel Noble's portrait in this post. He wasn't quite sinister looking enough for my tastes. (He's still not quite there, but Sims 4 has its limitations.)

3) Act Two of Philly by Night is nearly done being written. I just finished today the chapter I've been looking forward to writing for forever: the inevitable encounter between Michael and Rebecca.

More thoughts...

Back in July, over on my Star Swords page, I wrote a quick essay about the use of rape and sexual violence in fiction. I mentioned there that the reason I preserved the rape scenes at the end of Star Sword Forged was out of respect for the person who helped me write those stories, a survivor of domestic violence herself. I also said I would be very reluctant to write such a scene again.

And now, as the plot of Philly-by-Night advances, I have broken that very rule. Sarah is raped at the end of Chapter Four by Emmanuel Noble, one of the vicious mages of the Dark Brotherhood. It is not a fake rape like the two previous scenes in the story (Michael's "rape" of Deborah in VbN Act One and a random predator's "rape" of Sarah in VbN Act Three.) This one is real.

And there is also the Dark Brotherhood itself, among some of the nastiest villains I've yet created. We got our first glimpse of them back in Act One Chapter 3, where two college students are seduced, murdered, and then (as it is strongly hinted) devoured by Brotherhood members. Although the crime in that scene is more murder than rape (a trope that'll be repeated in Chapter 6), there is obviously a sexual element to this violent scene as well.

So why did I break my own rule? I'll address these examples in turn.

Sarah continues to be the most controversial character I have ever written. I no longer debate about whether creating a lolicon character was appropriate or not (although her youth is somewhat mitigated in PbN by her efforts to appear more adult.) She is strong, beautiful, intelligent, mysterious, and complicated. She is also flawed, insecure, and obviously a little bit crazy. She has dreams and hopes and loves. In short, she's real. She's a lot like a real person would be. Not perfect, but very human.

And here I am using her to court some controversy again. I've been reading Lev Grossman's Magicians Trilogy over these past few weeks, as well as dealing with some new and very invigorating developments in my own real life marriage. These are having an impact on my writing here in a big way. I've cranked out chapter after chapter in a handful of weeks. Call me inspired.

And one element of that inspiration is a question. "To what lengths would one truly go in order to win back someone they love?" Sarah and Michael are clearly falling apart in Act Two. She's cheated on him with Mitch. He's cheated on her with Kathleen. They are both hurt by and furious at one another. But behind all their anger and hurt is the simple fact that these two people love one another and neither of them wants to lose the other.

Sarah comes to her senses before Michael does. She recognizes that they are racing towards a cliff (Her statements to Michael in Chapter Five highlight this), so she decides to gamble with her very life to pull them back from the brink. She goes to Noble, fully aware (after reading his mind) of what he is capable of. She is fully aware that she is not likely to escape him without being sexually violated. She goes anyway and all her worst fears come to pass. But she regards it as worth it because Michael and his ambitions are that important to her.

To wax theological for a moment, in a lot of ways, I'm using the core story of Christianity metaphorically here. According to the teachings of that faith, God loves humankind, despite all their efforts to reject, rebel, and hurt him. He incarnates as a human being and literally dies in order to win them back. Sarah can't die at this point since there's still a lot of story to cover, but she can still make a pretty radical sacrifice for the sake of the one she loves. She can endure a violation that is almost as bad (and, in fact, perhaps worse) as dying for Michael's sake and she does.

That's why the rape scene stands for Sarah, but what about the sexual violence of the Brotherhood?

One of the overall themes of PbN is temptation. There's another question that's been inspiring me. "To what lengths would one go to see their every ambition come to pass?" There's no secret that Michael has an ambitious streak. He wants power in order to gain his desires and to protect those he cares about. But power does not come easy in the World of Darkness. What compromises is he willing to make to get it?

Michael's going to encounter a number of groups and individuals throughout the story that represent his possible futures. If he gives into temptation in this way, he will become like this group. If he gives into temptation in this other way, he'll be like this person. The Brotherhood represent one of those dark outcomes.

Michael has already struggled with his own temptations towards sexual violence. He is a lustful character and he is a violent character, and he is ever tempted to merge those two aspects of his personality together. Way back in Act One of VbN, Kris essentially offers herself up to him. He gets another such offer in Chapter Five of PbN from Amy. Fuck me and kill me please.

Michael recognizes there's a danger in the fusion of those two parts of himself. The Dark Brotherhood symbolizes that danger. They are people who have crossed that line and they will tempt Michael to do the same. So the Brotherhood remains, a dark mirror to what Michael could become.

That's probably as in-depth a window into my thought process behind this story than I've ever given. But as I said in the Star Swords essay, these are touchy and complicated subjects. They merit a bit more nuance and explanation than pretty much anything else I'm doing here. Perhaps it's a conceit that I'm incorporating genuine literary elements like meaning and substance into a goofy story about vampires, but it's my story and I'll show conceit how I choose.

I'm having a blast writing this and I'm not slowing down now.

Random thoughts...

1) I've been reading Lev Grossman's The Magicians lately, based on a review I saw on a website. Very cool novel and it has more than a few (at least for me) "punch you in the gut" moments. (As you might guess, the somewhat grim title and topic of the review itself is what led me to look into the novel.)

2) Thanks to one of those "punch you in the gut" moments, I caught a spurt of inspiration for PbN last weekend. Over about 48 hours I polished off two new chapters, over 30 pages of material. I NEVER write that prolifically under normal circumstances. That's just insane and even I'm wondering what the hell came over me. If I could sustain it, I could write this whole damn thing in less than a week.

3) This image has been making its way around Facebook and some other political websites I frequent.

My first thought when I saw it? "Holy shit, Bill O'Reilly wants to create WAS." That was the James Bond-like spy/commando organization I created back in junior high school for a role-playing game and some of my first forays into creative writing. (Also the origin of our TFV agents Alex and Mariah.)

Of course, anyone who thinks the same idea as one come up with by a hormone-addled 13 year old is good for real public policy is probably off their rocker completely. But that's not much of a stretch for Mr. O'Reilly. WAS was a cool idea for a fictional adventure story. I'd never imagine it working in real life.

Good news everyone!

I'm probably only about six paragraphs from finishing Act One of PbN 1999. Woohoo.

While I'm thrilled at my progress this summer, I'm also a bit intimidated by the next few steps in the story. As some of my comments throughout various posts have implied, I'm trying very hard to avoid playing to stereotypes (thus far, particularly about homosexual persons).

That's going to prove a little tricky in the chapters to come. Philadelphia is a majority-minority city (i.e. most of its population is people of color.) I'm a white guy from the mountains of WV and while I did live in Philadelphia for the better part of four years (not coincidentally around the same time as our story here), I'm far from an expert on things urban. I know only the barest hints of what life is like for an urban black or Latino person and yet I'm going to start writing about it as background and window dressing for this story.

My problem to solve, but it may slow my progress a bit.

On another note, I'm still playing that anime game I mentioned a few posts back and I've got some more lovey-dovey screenshots for you.

Michael and Deborah (These are from a different save game than the last, so Michael looks a little different.)

Michael and Leigh Tyler (You can probably guess what he's doing with his hand. I did mention the game was a bit on the risque side.)

Michael and Rebecca.

And, of course, my favorite couple of the series: Michael and Sarah. (Spoilers if you haven't read the chapter I just posted a few minutes ago.)

Random Thoughts

Thought #1
I set myself a goal this summer: Write 2-3 pages each day. I did this in part because I have one friend who's gotten into creative writing as a hobby and he's been asking for advice. I have classmate from high school who is now a published author. I was beginning to feel a little left behind.

So far, so good. It's helped me immensely to plow through the opening chapters of PbN 1999. I'm also still posting Star Swords material on my other story page.

Thought #2
And speaking of Star Swords and other throwbacks to my past writings, I made the decision to incorporate some of my old WAS characters into PbN 1999. WAS was a near future sci-fi/political thriller role-playing game that I made in high school. It was basically James Bond's universe with giant world-spanning conspiracies, megalomaniacal super-villains, and cool gadgets, with suave super spies and assassins as the heroes. I wrote a series of mini-novels centered on some of the characters (some of my very first forays into creative writing).

About 15 years ago, I gave some thought to reviving the franchise. I made some notes on a possible revamp of the universe, taking out some of the more fantastical elements, changing character names and backgrounds, and coming up with a few brief plot ideas. What emerged would have been a pretty cool set of stories, but I got distracted as I often do and that material has laid fallow ever since.

Enter Hunter: The Vigil. When I started doing background work for the Reign of Terror in Act Four of VbN, I started reading a lot of HtV sourcebooks. There I was introduced to Task Force Valkyrie, the government agency tasked with dealing with supernatural threats. I started using them as minions for the frighteningly well-connected Damian Drake. Now, in PbN 1999, they're going have a larger role.

But I ran into a problem. Michael's author alias is "Alex McCoid," which is the name of the protagonist in the WAS stories. I wasn't using the name for anything so I simply stole it. Now I'm debating whether to keep that as Michael's pen name or swap it for something else so I can introduce the "real" Alex McCoid as a TFV agent.

*Sigh*

This is what happens when I don't think things through.

Thought #3
Made a quick stop at IMDB today. The little front page trivia bit was about True Blood.

"Each episode title is also the title of a song from popular or Christian music."

Fuck! Here I was thinking I was doing something unique with the chapter titles of my story.

Thought #4

I've been wavering again on the lolicon aspect to Sarah's character. Only this time, I wavering towards making her look more juvenile rather less. 

I've always been torn about this particular issue. There are very few things in our society more taboo than pedophilia, so I've been questioning how much I want to court the controversy here. Of course, Sarah is not actually a child. By the end of VbN she would be very nearly 30, but looks somewhere around 12 because of when she was embraced as a vampire.

But I've got a particular plot point in some upcoming chapters that really only works if Sarah truly looks her age at the onset. She has to look 12 or the changes that she's about to undergo won't have the impact that they're supposed to, on either the characters in the story or you as the readers.

So I'm shifting her appearance younger again and taking my chances with the "Eww! Gross!" reaction people will likely have when she and Michael get busy.

Some quick commentary...

I've got three things I want to post tonight (the first already went up: Deb's new portrait). But I also want to let you know what's going on with PbN. I posted the first chapter a little while back and I'm now well into chapter 5 of the new story. I'm going in order, which is not always how I do this.

I was originally going to treat Philadelphia by Night 1999 as a single stand-alone "act." But as I've been planning out the plot in greater detail, it's become clear to me that I'm really dealing with a multi-act story here. So I'm going to revamp a few things here on the website to reflect that. Don't worry too much. This is more bookkeeping on my end than anything else.

Chapter Two goes up next, so you'll have that to chew over.

I'm still alive, I swear...

...and I have good news.

Act Four is finished, save for some editing and minor alterations. Finally got two things that I've been lacking this year: A) motivation and B) time.

Motivation came in the form of a question from a friend of mine. Apparently, one of my buddies has decided to get on the fiction-writing bandwagon. That got me thinking, "Damn, if he's doing it, why am I just sitting on my ass?"

Well, the reason for that (in part) was lack of time. A work colleague of mine once commented that "You will never be less busy than you are now." Boy has that ever proven true. But, I have found some gaps in the schedule, enough to cram out a couple of troublesome scenes that I just wasn't all that enthused about writing. Once those were out of the way, the rest of Act Four just flew by.

I'll be posting the rest of Acts Three and Four over the next few days. I've also begun a new blog where I'm posting some of my old BattleTech fiction (not-coincidentally, the very novels that Michael writes in this story. Kinda meta, I know, but fun.)

Enjoy!

Cleaning Up Part Two

Yeah, I know. I haven't posted in ages.

But there are a couple of things you should know...

1) The story draft on my computer is always a good five or six chapters ahead of where the story is online, so I'm almost done completely with what I'm calling "Virginia by Night" or "Roanoke by Night." That is to say, all the pre-Philadelphia material to Michael's story.

2) I tend to work in spurts. I'll go weeks without touching the manuscript and then I'll have days like today where I spend a good ten to twelve hours straight doing nothing but writing. That's like what real authors do when working on a manuscript. I do this as a hobby, so those moments when they come are pretty intense.

Anyhow, you get to see the fruits of my labor immediately, since nearly all of those hours was spend doing what I said I was doing in my last "Cleaning Up" post. I've revamped a ton of material in the Prologue, Act One, and Act Two. Some of this was to clarify world-building material like I said I would do last time. Some of it was to plant tiny seeds of plot that will grow bigger in later Acts and Chapters. Still others was to clean up language and grammar errors that I missed before. It was a lot of work, but worth it I believe. The story is really turning into what I had hoped it would be.

Oh, and I dumped the music playing sidebar. It was annoying me.

Cleaning up

I've been working on chapters for Act Four in what little spare time I have. One of the things that keeps popping up is that I have to explain some aspect of vampire society, some element of the VTR universe, and it occurred to me that I shouldn't be introducing standard elements of the universe that late in the story.

So I'm going back through Act One and making some edits to put these explanations where they belong in the context of Michael's own introduction to his new world. Along the way, I'm finding a number of plot holes and errors that needed correcting (For instance, Andreas at one point tells Michael the Mad Bishop is from Richmond instead of Lynchburg.)

So, if you've already read Act One, there are a few changes here and there. Hopefully the story will flow a little more smoothly now.

Tales Grow in the Telling Part Deux

It occurred to me after talking about the evolution of the Sarah Cobbler character that the whole story in many ways has evolved from its original incarnation. Here's just a short list of changes that I've made over the years from its original form as a VtM campaign.

1. Michael Allens was a Toreador (10th Generation)
2. Deborah Means was originally Michael's "sister" (i.e. embraced from the same sire) instead of his sire. She was also not an important character until after Michael's return to Blacksburg (what is now Act Four of the current story.)
3. Mathias and The Djinn were Sabbat vampires (Nosferatu antitribu and Assamite antitribu respectively) and something of a shadowy evil in the background. Obviously, they were not sire and childe.
4. Roanoke/Blacksburg was populated by a whole host of Kindred, almost none of which made it over into the current story.
5. Ernie was a Malkavian (8th Generation). No surprises there.
6. Michael's embrace of Rebecca coincidentally took place around the time when Mathias made his move against Michael's sire (again not Deborah), but the two events were largely unrelated.
7. Rebecca's boyfriend, Shawn, was not killed when Michael embraced her. He fled and would become one of Michael's most persistent hunter foes. 
8. The clans of the Tidewater vampires were often different from their current incarnation.
1. Guy was Toreador (now Daeva) as was Raoul.
2. Lazarus was Tremere (now Mekhet)
3. Sarah was Tremere (now Ventrue). She was not, as mentioned in the previous post, a romantic interest for Michael.
4. Michelle was Setite (now Daeva)
5. Shakespeare was a Malkavian (now Ventrue)
6. The Mad Bishop was Malkavian antitribu (now Ventrue)


9. As you can guess, the Mad Bishop was a Sabbat. He was the Malkavian Justicar and summoned to Tidewater to help prevent Sabbat retaliation for the failed coup in Roanoke. Obviously, his status as a highly placed sleeper agent came as quite the surprise.
10. Once the Mad Bishop took over, the Camarilla vampires (Michael and his allies) fled to Washington DC, where they rallied new allies including Damian Drake.
11. Guy was in Tidewater from Day One. Also, since Lazarus was Camarilla and opposed to the Sabbat Mathias, he gave Michael a much warmer welcome to Tidewater.
12. Solomon was briefly made Prince (Regent in the current story) of Tidewater, but he lost this position not by being beat into torpor, but by being exiled by the Sabbat Mad Bishop.

Just a small sample of how much this story has changed. Many of these are due to the change from VtM to VtR, which I believe has actually enriched the story. Going from a setting with two opposing vampire factions (Cam vs. Sabbat) to one with five rival factions has definitely made things more interesting IMHO.

Tales grow in the telling...

Now that's she's been fully introduced, I want to talk about the character of Sarah Cobbler.

When we did the Virginia Beach VtM campaign way back in college in 1994 or so, I needed to fully populate my newly created city. Either lacking a certain creativity or being lazy or both, I pulled out my Vampire: The Eternal Struggle cards (then still called Jyhad) and found one of my favorite vampires...

This cheap little Tremere vamp was a solid food-soldier in my VTES deck, only 4 blood to play with advanced Thaumaturgy. So I included her as an NPC in my VtM game. (Lazarus, another VTES card, also got brought in as the soon to be demised Prince.)

I didn't really do much with her at first, but I always liked this character. Her potent abilities in the VTES game matched up with her intriguing youthful purple-haired appearance provided by artist Daniel Gelon made her stick in my mind as someone I wanted to make further use of in the future.

So, when I was in grad-school in 1999 and dusting off my campaign notes for the first Philly by Night campaign, I brought Sarah back. She would be part of Michael's coalition to invade Philly and she became a major player in the plot of that campaign.

After another ten or so years had passed and I decided to put proverbial pen to paper to write down all these stories I'd created for these games as a web novel, I needed to create a reason and a rationale for why Sarah would attach herself so closely to Michael's cause.

So, she joined the cadre of Michael's many and various lovers, secondary as they all were to Rebecca and Deborah. I also had to convert her over from VtM to VtR, so she shifted from Tremere to Ventrue. That opened another subplot avenue in that she would be a childe of Ernie. Her knowledge of the occult remained and that gave me my context to introduce her and Michael. Voila, a reasonably well developed side character for the story.

But I wasn't done.

No, there was Dance in the Vampire Bund and that sneaky and potentially risky idea to introduce something of a lolicon character into the story. Sarah was the perfect fit for that experiment. So she went to being really youthful, as in early teen youthful.

Now, I'm fully aware this road has been trod before by far-more famous and accomplished authors. Anne Rice did an exceptional job of weaving together the love story of Louis and Claudia in Interview With a Vampire, an adult male with a child female, both vampire and both far older than their appearance otherwise suggests. But in Rice's universe, vampires are essentially sexless, so their romance was chaste. That would not be the case with Sarah and Michael in my own story. And I knew that would be risky.

But I still wasn't done. No, the story had taken on a life of its own. As Sarah became more developed as a character, it became obvious that the plot was demanding that she be more than a mere throw-away conquest. The logical next step was to make her into a true romantic counterpart to our anti-hero. Now she would be an equal to, or even perhaps supplant, Rebecca and Deborah in Michael's heart.

What would that mean for the story?

Well, I'll leave that part unspoiled, as I've not posted it (or even written all of it) yet. Suffice to say thought I'm very amazed at what has happened with this single character. She went from functional window dressing to potentially the most important side character in the whole story. I never expected that, but that's part of the fun of doing this. Sometimes, these things truly take on a life of their own.

I'll leave you with her Sims 3 portrait. This'll be the last of the Sims 3 character pics that I've done on my own. All future pics will either be "borrowed" from others or created in Sims 2.

Not quite the same as the VTES card, but maybe I'll give her purple hair back in the future. Who knows with this character?