A writing Prompt Thing I guess

Via a friends writing blog, I ended up doing a post about Peter the Great and some quick research on him. It being the internet, I ended up on the mad monarchs site and reading a fair bit of it.

What struck me as fascinating was how many rulers in Russia managed to rule -- if only by proxy -- despite being either physically or mentally unfit for the throne. Rulers of other countries would refuse to sign anything, wallow in their own waste and the country grind to a halt. And yet no one took matters into their own hands to end that, which strikes me as a little puzzling.

Is it fear of retribution? Divine rights of kings? I figure it's more that having a ruler is far better than the chaos that can follow not having one, with various parties battling over a throne. Which is the prompt: Have a king (or queen, prince, princess) who is liable to get a throne despite being "unfit", and follow through with where that leads a plot. Even if it's only background to the major story, it could be quite interesting to follow through on.

Worked (also: a rant)

The old alcar.blogspot has been incoporated into this, which probably means some of the older posts will have weird formatting but should be readable anyway. Said blog has been deleted in its entirely. The nice import/export feature did this.

After the fourth try. Because of 'catchpa'. Which seems to assume that anyone can read writing that seems to foil humans more often than spammer. And, if they cannot, can hear the so-called handicapped assist thing. I almost gave up entirely, on both of them, and would be quite, quite happy if catchpa was tossed into the bin of useless internet things.

Things one should not read while doing up notes for a novel on exorcism

Sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church are proof that that "the Devil is at work inside the Vatican", according to the Holy See's chief exorcist.

Father Gabriele Amorth stated that the consequences of satanic infiltration included power struggles at the Vatican as well as "cardinals who do not believe in Jesus, and bishops who are linked to the Demon." The devil is also apparently pure spirit and "At times he makes fun of me."

[Amorth] was among Vatican officials who warned that J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels made a "false distinction between black and white magic". He approves, however, of the 1973 film The Exorcist, which although "exaggerated" offered a "substantially exact" picture of possession.

And the devil makes fun of him. Colour me not surprised.

Rites of exorcism 3.0

Or something like that. I did one version to 20 pages, redid from scratch to 80 pages (35K and change) and realized I'd have to change a fair bit to get some characters feeling believable. Shelved it for current project, but it's nagging me again. This time with a solution: take the Rites 2.0, finish it in my head. And make it the back story to another novel. The only thing I need to keep, really, is the stuff with Aiden's grandmother. A lot of other things will make more sense, Brooke and Sal attempt to deal with their odd relationship as twenty-something's and I'll see where it goes from there.

magnetic fields.

"Early Earth's Magnetic Field Was a Weakling"

If only it knew that in 3.5 billion years people would say such things, it might have tried harder.