"White Rabbit Society" out in four days!
I just sent out the e-book of "White Rabbit Society Part One" out to my Patreon backers very early yesterday morning, and as of today it's available for preorder on Amazon. So we're getting pretty close.
Because this story is such a big hodgepodge of different genres and styles, I've had trouble nailing down landmarks to use when I'm describing it. There's a lot of "this one specific aspect of this one obscure thing, ripped out of its original context and welded together with this other specific aspect of this other obscure thing also ripped out of its original context". But there's one solid predecessor to many of the characters and themes in WRS, one I wasn't super familiar with when I started writing the story more than a decade ago but which quickly became a really big deal.
John Fucking Constantine. Created by Alan Moore, perfected by Garth Ennis, and executed terribly by a zillion other writers. Don't even get me started on the movie. Mention television if you've got some furniture you need destroyed.
I can't help but be a snob about this subject. If Urban Fantasy is a concept you think sounds good, you need to read every issue of Hellblazer written by Garth Ennis. Every other version of the character, and really every other treatment of the general concept, is weak tea in comparison.
That concept being "scary magic in the real world". HB by GE reaches the heights that it does by hitting every part of that statement as hard as it can. People look and talk like real people. They want things that real people want and have all the limitations that real people have, and they live in places that you could go and visit if you wanted to. When the magic comes in, it's not a convenient superpower or cheap power trip thrill. It's unpredictable and scary, and it's made only more unpredictable and scary by it's interaction with the aforementioned flawed human beings.
None of the characters in WRS are exact John Constantine analogues, but a couple come awfully close, and really the majority of the cast could be related to him in a second-cousin kind of way. If you need a good general description of WRS, one of them would be "scummed up Harry Potter with no safety net". Another would be "a dozen different variations of John Constantine get locked in a closet for a few years and then we open the door to see who survived."
That's it for now. More tomorrow. Love you all.