New Rag & Muffin Short Story: 'Prelude to a Fall'

I realize I haven't posted in quite a while, as my work situation is currently somewhat odd and I'm busily editing my recently completed novel.

But if you'd like to see a small teaser of what I'm up to, you can now read a brand new Rag & Muffin flash fiction story, "Prelude to a Fall," featuring some of the same characters as my novel in progress, over at the Catholic Flash Fiction website. Here comes the introductory hook paragraph:

Her name was Mademoiselle Anne Defoy, but to the criminals of Godtown, she was the Ragamuffin, or “Rags” for short. By day she was a fourth grader at Valhalla Primary, but by night she was the temple city’s most feared preadolescent dispenser of vigilante justice. [more . . .]

'Rag & Muffin' Rough Draft Complete: Well, That Was Easy

I just finished the rough draft of Rag & Muffin: Tales of a Fourth Grade War Goddess, the novel I like to believe will open up a new sub-genre I call "magical girl noir," except it won't really. It's a magical girl warrior story in an exotic setting with elements of Dungeon Punk and lots of angst with some odd twists caused by my magical girls being different from the usual: they're sort of like a cross between a Nepalese kumari and a Little Sister from BioShock, with magic powers.

That gap I mentioned . . . it filled in rather easily. That probably means I'll need to rewrite that whole section, but still. I'll give the thing a first go-over right away to fix the most obvious weak parts, grammatical errors, and continuity problems, but then I'll probably inflict it on some poor beta readers and put it away for a month so I can look at it fresh when I make the next draft.

I'm sure it has some continuity problems to fix. I'm reasonably certain I accidentally gave at least one character Hollywood-style infinite ammo for her AK-47. I actually mean for the characters to be limited in the amount of ammunition they can pack, but then again, this particular character can blow people away with an assault rifle while listening to heavy metal and playing blindfold speed chess at the same time, so maybe she deserves infinite ammo.

At any rate, this seems to be a good time, at least to me, to check whether the rough draft is sufficiently awesome. If the awesomeness appears insufficient, I will have to jot "add more awesome" on my list of things that need to be done in the second draft.

Let's take a look:

Click to enlarge.
(Stolen from here.)

So there it is, the Periodic Table of Awesoments.  The rough draft, as it presently stands, includes the following:

• Bacon. One character eats twelve slices at once.
• Ninja. That's a stretch, but ninja are mentioned in the dialogue.
• Sniper.
• Explosion. (That goes without saying.)
• Grenades.
• Assassin.
• Bombs.
• Christopher Walken. Okay, not really.
• Proximity Mines. Whoa. I almost can't believe I actually worked those in there.
• Minigun.
• Kung fu. They call it something different, but it's basically Hong Kong wire-fu chop-sockey.
• Helicopter. Magitek airships, actually, but I think they should count.
• Sword.
• Tank.
• Moon jumps. I'm not really sure what this means, but if it means using your awesome Kung fu to jump really high, then that happens a lot. My characters are practically living super balls.
• Mecha. Not just mecha, but demon-possessed mecha that can drag you to hell.
• Lightning.
• Fire. Goes with the explosions.
• Liquor.
• Robots. Not just robots, but demon-possessed robots that can drag you to hell.
• Motorcycle.
• Storms. How 'bout a whole frickin' monsoon?
• Ribs. Not sure if this means any old ribs or ribs prepared for eating, but ribs play an important role in the story one way or the other.
• Fortress. Not just a fortress, but a temple fortress. And it's a transformer.
• Metal. Not sure if it means any old metal, or the music. One way or the other, we have both.
• Money. Yeah, it gets mentioned.
• Dinosaur. Also a stretch. Mentioned in dialogue.
• Dragon. The "Muffin" of the title is the name of the heroine's pet dragon.
• Cheetah. Do anthropomorphic furry cheetahs count?
• Skulls. Of religious importance, no less.
• Scars. When you look at everything else on this list, somebody is going to have to get a scar sooner or later.
• Sunglasses. Worn at night, even.
• Guitar solo. Believe it or not, I worked one in there.

That's not too bad, really. If I can throw in a penguin, mention cheese, and give somebody a cup of coffee, I should be able to make this even more awesome. I actually had a stuffed penguin in an earlier version, but eventually I needed to replace it with something else.

Yet Another Narcissistic Update

I am work on the rough draft of Rag & Muffin: Tales of a Fourth Grade War Goddess, a novel I have been working on, sort of, for just a little over four years. I say "sort of" because Rag & Muffin has gone through so many mutations in that time that the only constants have been the title, and the fact that it's about a girl with a fuzzy companion, and that it takes place in a city. Everything else has changed, and I've written probably over 4,000 pages just to get to the point of having completed the rough draft of a 100,000-word novel. I guess I'm not an efficient writer.

Except it's not quite complete yet. One chapter still has a gap. Not a huge gap, necessarily, but a gap. It needs filled in, and I have only to the end of the week to meet my self-imposed deadline of having an R&M draft by the end of the year.

What to do with that gap is admittedly flummoxing me. Except for the normal bout of weariness at the midway point, I have had the experience of watching this draft come together absurdly quickly and--at least in the not-so-humble opinion of an author writing his rough draft--absurdly well. But that of course is because it has four years of work behind it, and many of the scenes were ones I had already written and polished when I started, albeit in a different format. Most of the time, when I got stuck, I could simply open an older file and use dialogue and situations I'd already penned.

Nonetheless, this one scene (or two, or three) in the middle of one of the latter chapters has me a mite stuck. It has no precedent in anything Rag & Muffinish I've written before. It is new territory, and I must explore it before the end of the week.

Also, I'm still of two minds about the kooky one-liners I've thrown into the action sequences. Some of them will stay, I'm sure, but I'm debating whether or not to take the parodic references to "all out of bubblegum" and "that's not a knife" out of the second draft.

Because You Don't Mess with Santa

Nooo!!

Science Fiction Sermons

Not very long ago, I read and forgot to review George L. Murphy's Pulpit Science Fiction, a collection of science fiction short stories meant to illustrate biblical passages, which Rev. Murphy had preached from the pulpit. I was recently reminded of my fault when Dave Maass, of Syfy's Blastr blog, kindly sent me a post he had put together, rounding up videos of actual sermons using science fiction as illustrations.

Here's his post, and a big thanks to Maass for sending it our way.

I leave you, then, with no comment besides this: I like sermons, and I like science fiction, but I don't particularly like them together. I don't like preachy science fiction stories, and I don't much care for science fiction stories in my preaching, either. In fact, all though a few of the stories in the aforementioned Murphy collection were not bad (none of them were stellar), I thought the short explanations he wrote after them, to explain when he'd preached them and why, were more illuminating than the stories themselves.

You see, the Mass or other church service already contains storytelling: it's in the biblical readings. The job of the sermon is to illuminate the biblical passages and explain what they mean. Storytelling is great, but the purpose of the sermon is to comment on and illuminate the stories already told. Using the sermon to tell yet another story is likely to be obfuscating rather than illuminating. And inviting people to wear sf costumes to church is just kind of stupid.

And as for sci-fi illustrations in sermons, well . . . that might not be so bad, but it stands a good chance of coming across as flip or silly, and may fail to make the point intended.

Disney's 'Sofia the First'

According to The New York Times, Disney is hard at work on a new animated television show, featuring yet another princess, this time aimed at the younger crowd: the show is entitled Sofia the First, and the protagonist is apparently around five, Disney's aim apparently being to attract the youngest viewers.

The character looks cute, and her show will probably be more wholesome than those teen shows that the Disney Channel has been turning out in recent years, and since I try to avoid indulging in the Disney-hate popular these days on both the right and the left, I wish the show's creators all the best, though knowing Disney's history, I doubt Sofia the First will manage to come up with any important life lessons aside from "Believe in Yourself, Whatever That Means."

Image Blatantly Stolen from the Source  because This Is a Small Blog and I Can Get Away with That.  Also, Awwww.

The image attached to the article looks like a real actual cartoon character instead of that CGI stuff I'm officially sick of, so that makes me happy. Maybe I'll even check out the show myself. I rather like children's cartoons as a general rule, though I don't seem to be able to handle the ones aimed at preschoolers; I tried Dora the Explorer once or twice, and she kept repeating stuff, and she apparently wanted me to talk to the screen or something . . . anyway, I couldn't handle it. I was just sitting there, watching this little girl say the same thing over and over again, and finally I was just, like, "So, is she ever going to pull out an Uzi and blow up something, or what?" Back in my day, children's cartoons involved senseless violence, even the ones for girls. Anyone seen the original My Little Pony? That thing was a gore-fest, or at least that's how I remember it. Speaking of which, this:

TV & Movie Spoofs Channel
Tags: Atom.com | Funny Videos | Tournament | Upload

Whoa, one of those has already actually happened since that parody was made. Well, considering that the film adaptation of Battleship is coming out in the near future, this seems apropos. Also, I just want to mention that I thought Care Bears was hella lame, even when I was a kid.

Where was I? Ah, yes. The real reason I'm posting on this topic is because I'm creeped out--again--by the comments appearing under the article. The article on Sofia the First, I mean, which I was talking about before I got off track. Joyless politically correct types, or maybe just people who enjoy the ever-popular sport of Hatin' on Disney, are angry at this new show, even though it doesn't exist yet, because it's about a princess. Yikes. If nothing else, we can say that political correctness is no fun.

I don't really understand the complaints being made. Princesses are bad role models, or something, and little girls only like princesses because princesses are presented to them in their entertainment, and little girls would like exactly the same things as little boys if only we didn't give them little girl entertainment instead, or something. The idea that girls might dream of being princesses or enjoy girlish things because they're girls is apparently too much for the PC types to wrap their minds around.

If I had George MacDonald in front of me, I'd quote him, but I don't, so I'll paraphrase him from memory instead. In the original serial publication of The Princess and the Goblin, he has a footnote in which he imagines a frustrated reader asking him why his protagonists are always princesses, and MacDonald, being a wise man, replies that he wants the reader to understand that every little girl is a princess. Looking at the angry objections to Sofia the First offered before the first episode has even come out, I'd say we need a good dose of MacDonald's wisdom. Just to give silent support to the project over and against the naysayers, I might even be there to catch the pilot episode, though I make no promise that I will last longer with it than I did with Dora . . .

However, if they ever have the Very Special Episode in which Sofia meets up with Dora to find some crystal in the deep jungle, and they end up in a running gun battle or something, call me. That's what children's cartoons should be like.

Portlandia on Battlestar Galactica

 I really didn't think it was that good. In fact, I thought the original was better, so there.

News from the Fish Bowl Extra: Party on a Space Station

The Deej got this from a reader and gave it to me, so here it is.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Astronauts on the International Space Station are planning a big holiday bash to welcome three new crewmates, who are slated to arrive just before Christmas.

The addition of three more spaceflyers on Dec. 23 will double the population of the orbiting lab, bringing it back up to full operational strength after a month at skeleton-crew levels. That's good news for scientists keen to maximize thespace station's research potential, and it'll make the holidays a little less lonely 240 miles (386 kilometers) above the Earth's surface. [more . . .]

Weird Maintenance Issue Involving Sharing Buttons

Nobody uses these things anyway, at least not around here, but I've been trying to adjust the sharing buttons you see at the bottom (formerly at the top) of each post. The Google +1 button is a funny, temperamental little beast:  the code from the third-party sharing button provider I use had stopped working for unknown reasons, and so I went straight to Google to get code for the button and found their site was only for people already completely fluent in Java script, so I ripped off a piece of code from somebody else having the same problem. I discovered that the button will disappear or reappear depending on where I put the code; it will only show up if it's placed right before the Pinterest button, on the same line, yet the button itself shows up on the end of the line . . . go figure.

Anyway, I know this sounds like a way of tricking you into using my sharing buttons, but I'd appreciate it if anyone would tell me whether he can or can't see the Google +1 button, and whether it works. Thanks.

So have fun with that. Now I'm going to go see if I can figure out why the buffer around the Facebook Like button is so freaking huge.