A ghoul and his mother, a conversation

"This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes."

Terry held the phone in his hand and said nothing. She always answered the phone like that, a family joke that now seemed strange, forced now that her husband was dead.

"Terry, I know that's you," his mother said on the other end.

"How?" he whispered.

There was a brief pause. "Call display. What did you think?"

"I don't know. Sandra called, about dad."

"And?"

"You know." Terry took a breath. "His body was missing."

"Ah. Missing."

"Mom," he began, the urge to confess choking his voice.

"Don't," she snapped. There was a longer pause. "I did tell you this call may be monitored, didn't I?"

"That's always a joke," Terry said reflexively, mind racing over the conversation; he didn't think he'd said anything incriminating yet, and nothing to tell people he'd eaten his father's corpse. He remembered to hang up a moment later, fingers trembling a little. Real police work wasn't hollywood; Ethan had told him that long enough. They'd have traced him, if they wanted to.

He set his phone down on the counter carefully and turned. His fist hit the wall before he'd consciously considered it, drywall cracking as he hit it again and again until bones broke, the smell of his own marrow easing something inside him. Terry shuddered slightly and watched the hand mend itself and pretended his tears were only from the pain.

Comments (for 2010)

Anonymous commenting has now been disabled, due to spam. (Catchpas isn't enabled for comments, because I hates it.) Not that too many people do ever comment, but even so.

Mister Disaster

(In response to writing prompt 167.)

Mister Disaster doesn’t know he has that name. In folders that are classified 36 levels of security above the President (and this is the real one, not the show one that gets elected), there is a very thick file with his real name on it, and this one as well.

The file contains every trip he has taken in his life. And at each one, precisely two days and six hours after he leaves, a major natural disaster happens. No one knows why, but he had been awarded ‘free’ vacations in the mail and sent places the secret government wishes to damage. Sometimes he goes, othertimes Mister Disaster does not.

Despite the danger he could be to both king and country (and there is always a king, as long as there is a country), no one has ordered Mister Disaster suicided, because there are levels of government more secret even than that, where nothing is written down and only steel-trap memory records their comings and goings; and there, they worry Mister Disaster is something far more than a mere man, and keep a careful watch upon him.

And, naturally, they never vacation where Mister Disaster goes.

Novel research

Useless fact of the day while researching surnames for novel: Parents are not permitted by Urhobo cultural practices to count their children. The number of fingers often represents a count of one's children.

What the heck? you wonder, and rightly so. All I needed was to find out how common Johnson is as a surname in Canada (I was pretty sure it was #2 in the USA, though did check to make sure that was actually correct). Which led to the interesting oddity that the Canadian Census does not release that kind of information, that Li is the most common surname in Canada, and from that to the reason behind the few Chinese surnames, and from that information about Welsh, British, Irish, Urhobo and Byzantine naming conventions.

I surfaced from that with a deeper understanding of some oddities in such conventions, how they change over time and if the next fantasy world I do will even have surnames, beyond son of X and so forth. (Probably not.) The Chinese practise of giving everyone kin region C the same surname made me wonder about applying that to said settings but for now it's going to the back corner of my mind and the MC's last name is, simply, Johnson.

Mostly because another main character has Smith as hers and she's going to complain about it a fair bit, while it's never occurred to Terry to even really think about his.And for this little tidbit of characterization, the internet stole half an hour of my life :)

Statutory Holiday Haiku

A day off from work,
Spring wakens flowers and trees --
Sadness: shops are closed

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.