Jehovah's Hitlist
There is a little-known band that came on the tail-end of Nu-Metal's explosion on the airwaves. Bender had a single radio-play song that I don't even know qualifies as a hit (although I like it) called Superfly. It is from the album Jehovah's Hitlist.
One of Clint Eastwood's many spaghetti Westerns is Hang 'Em High where, unlike most of his movies, he tries not to kill people rather than mowing them all down. At the beginning of this movie, he's lynched but survives.
I watched Hang 'em High and thought of a character called "The Hanged Man." It was a nice play on Hang-Man the game. And I just liked saying it. The hanged man. It rolls off the tongue. Only a couple days later, Superfly came on my iPod. I thought how interesting it would be to have a son named Jehovah. Some cultures name their children Jesus, why couldn't I name a son Jehovah? That would just be fun.
All this stirred in my brain like ice cream and topping at Cold Stone Creamery, tumbling on top of one another into a delicious mix of ideas. Eventually, what spilled out was a reincarnation of a story I had proposed three years ago.
"The Nation" (shortened from One Nation, which was shortened from One Nation with Justice For All) was a pseudo-post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting that I wanted to create for Savage Worlds. The election of George Bush triggers a series of events that lead to the collapse of modern society into a shadow of itself with class separation becoming so distinct that the wealthy live in a created world of highrises above the degraded cities below.
It evoked more than one comparison to 1984, which admittedly I had not read at the time. Thanks to hunter_burgess giving me a copy, I have since educated myself. I can definitely see a LOT of similarities between the two (don't you hate when that happens?). Thankfully, a lot of new horrors are now possible so I can change the catastrophes that existed before and essentially remake the world. Instead of a unified Europe being the powerhouse of the world while Africa is barricaded because of the AIDS virus, Europe will now be destroyed, the result of the ice shelf of Greenland falling into the Atlantic and triggering a mini-ice age.
People in America (which destroyed itself trying to "secure itself" after more terrorist attacks and a possible cataclysm in California...or perhaps a Mexican invasion) are not just separated by money, but by race. Christianity is the official religion of the state, so everyone professes to be a Christian whether they are or not. Following the race riots and the Immigration War, racial groups in the cities are more segregated, blacks with blacks, Jews with Jews, Arabs with Arabs, etc. all of which have formed into gangs to prevent and exacerbate the lawlessness of life below. The protagonist of the story will be a Jewish gang leader named Jehovah. I don't want to spoil the rest of the story, but unlike A Circle of Crimson Stone that reminds me a lot of Howard's writing of an event that happened rather than an arcing story, this has more classical dimensions.
What I'm running into is the question of whether it has the body to fit a full novel. It isn't a short story by any sense of the form. There's too much there. But is there enough there? I don't like novellas. Novellas feel like novels that fell short. I guess the only way we'll find out is if I write it. But I insist on finishing BBQ first. It's too easy to abandon a story with a stroke of new inspiration. If you don't finish anything, you're not actually writing.
Still, I'm anxious to get started. (What I found most ironic is that I far prefer fantasy over science fiction, yet so frequently have sci-fi ideas in comparison to fantasy ideas.)
What I'm faced with, though,
One of Clint Eastwood's many spaghetti Westerns is Hang 'Em High where, unlike most of his movies, he tries not to kill people rather than mowing them all down. At the beginning of this movie, he's lynched but survives.
I watched Hang 'em High and thought of a character called "The Hanged Man." It was a nice play on Hang-Man the game. And I just liked saying it. The hanged man. It rolls off the tongue. Only a couple days later, Superfly came on my iPod. I thought how interesting it would be to have a son named Jehovah. Some cultures name their children Jesus, why couldn't I name a son Jehovah? That would just be fun.
All this stirred in my brain like ice cream and topping at Cold Stone Creamery, tumbling on top of one another into a delicious mix of ideas. Eventually, what spilled out was a reincarnation of a story I had proposed three years ago.
"The Nation" (shortened from One Nation, which was shortened from One Nation with Justice For All) was a pseudo-post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting that I wanted to create for Savage Worlds. The election of George Bush triggers a series of events that lead to the collapse of modern society into a shadow of itself with class separation becoming so distinct that the wealthy live in a created world of highrises above the degraded cities below.
It evoked more than one comparison to 1984, which admittedly I had not read at the time. Thanks to hunter_burgess giving me a copy, I have since educated myself. I can definitely see a LOT of similarities between the two (don't you hate when that happens?). Thankfully, a lot of new horrors are now possible so I can change the catastrophes that existed before and essentially remake the world. Instead of a unified Europe being the powerhouse of the world while Africa is barricaded because of the AIDS virus, Europe will now be destroyed, the result of the ice shelf of Greenland falling into the Atlantic and triggering a mini-ice age.
People in America (which destroyed itself trying to "secure itself" after more terrorist attacks and a possible cataclysm in California...or perhaps a Mexican invasion) are not just separated by money, but by race. Christianity is the official religion of the state, so everyone professes to be a Christian whether they are or not. Following the race riots and the Immigration War, racial groups in the cities are more segregated, blacks with blacks, Jews with Jews, Arabs with Arabs, etc. all of which have formed into gangs to prevent and exacerbate the lawlessness of life below. The protagonist of the story will be a Jewish gang leader named Jehovah. I don't want to spoil the rest of the story, but unlike A Circle of Crimson Stone that reminds me a lot of Howard's writing of an event that happened rather than an arcing story, this has more classical dimensions.
What I'm running into is the question of whether it has the body to fit a full novel. It isn't a short story by any sense of the form. There's too much there. But is there enough there? I don't like novellas. Novellas feel like novels that fell short. I guess the only way we'll find out is if I write it. But I insist on finishing BBQ first. It's too easy to abandon a story with a stroke of new inspiration. If you don't finish anything, you're not actually writing.
Still, I'm anxious to get started. (What I found most ironic is that I far prefer fantasy over science fiction, yet so frequently have sci-fi ideas in comparison to fantasy ideas.)
What I'm faced with, though,