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edenfalling1. I have a dark AU Harry Potter story called "Strange Likenesses," which I had not worked on for two years or so, partly because I got distracted by shiny things, but partly because I needed to look up some information from somewhere in the middle of HBP and DH, and so help me, have you looked at the length of those books lately???
Anyway, I checked the relevant issue a few days ago. It turns out that Dumbledore was a close-mouthed bastard and did not tell Snape certain things, which means my tentative plot is good to go. So I have been fiddling around with ch. 6 and may get that done by mid-April-ish.
I am still not sure if I'm going for 'rocks fall, everyone dies' or just 'rocks fall, but half the party survives and will have fun dealing with hideous injuries and survivor's guilt for the rest of their lives' (probably the latter, in some form), but either way, this is not going to end happily ever after. The set-up precludes that.
Deaths start in ch. 6, incidentally. Emotional trauma is ongoing. :-)
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2. I had a deeply weird dream Tuesday night.
I had a friend (not a real person, let's call her... Karen), who had a son about five years old. She was suffering from something -- probably chronic back pain or chronic depression -- and started looking into a lot of non-scientific and peculiar approaches to dealing with her issues when normal medical treatment didn't help her. She ended up joining a religious cult.
Said cult was led by a man who called himself Jonathan Branch. His schtick was that the Bible was accurate up to 1 Samuel 15:10*, at which point a demon began masquerading as God and speaking lies to Samuel. Therefore, said Branch, Saul never lost his divine right to be king of Israel; David was a demon-inspired usurper, and his presence led to the death of Jonathan, the rightful heir. The demon (which might have been the Gnostic evil god of the material world, vs. the good god of the spiritual world) continued to lead the people of Israel astray under the guise of righteousness. Jesus was attempting to lead people back to the proper God, but he was coopted by the demon and proclaimed the heir of David.
So this cult leader called himself Jonathan Branch, to say that he was the true Messiah, of the house of Saul by way of Jonathan (spiritually, I guess, rather than literally by blood inheritance).
All of Karen's friends were like, "What the hell has gotten into you? This man wants you to move out to a commune in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fanatics, and that's no way to raise a child." And some of us called Branch "Bush," because his original name was something like Charles Bush, and apparently my dream friends were making nasty political jokes.
Karen's response was something along the lines of, "Stop mocking my religion! Jonathan has really helped me, and this means a lot to me. And call him what he wants to be called, for goodness' sake -- don't be jerks."
And there were a lot of stupid, circular arguments, until the Ithaca Journal ran an investigative report that linked Jonathan Branch to the cocaine or heroin trade, and somehow Karen's son got kidnapped by either drug dealers or some of Branch's more fanatic followers, and Karen was frantically trying to convince her friends to help her while some of them were still sitting around going, "Didn't we tell you so?" and she was in tears--
And then I woke up.
...
Apparently I now dream in Dan Brown novels as well as in fantasy epics. Who knew?
*I do not know the Bible with anything even vaguely approximating that level of detail. I just thumbed around until I found the point where Saul and Samuel had the falling-out that led Samuel to find and anoint David.
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3. Tomorrow I think I will buy a fish fry from Hal's Deli for lunch. I find myself with a mad desire for fish-and-chips (or the closest American imitation I can get).
Anyway, I checked the relevant issue a few days ago. It turns out that Dumbledore was a close-mouthed bastard and did not tell Snape certain things, which means my tentative plot is good to go. So I have been fiddling around with ch. 6 and may get that done by mid-April-ish.
I am still not sure if I'm going for 'rocks fall, everyone dies' or just 'rocks fall, but half the party survives and will have fun dealing with hideous injuries and survivor's guilt for the rest of their lives' (probably the latter, in some form), but either way, this is not going to end happily ever after. The set-up precludes that.
Deaths start in ch. 6, incidentally. Emotional trauma is ongoing. :-)
---------------
2. I had a deeply weird dream Tuesday night.
I had a friend (not a real person, let's call her... Karen), who had a son about five years old. She was suffering from something -- probably chronic back pain or chronic depression -- and started looking into a lot of non-scientific and peculiar approaches to dealing with her issues when normal medical treatment didn't help her. She ended up joining a religious cult.
Said cult was led by a man who called himself Jonathan Branch. His schtick was that the Bible was accurate up to 1 Samuel 15:10*, at which point a demon began masquerading as God and speaking lies to Samuel. Therefore, said Branch, Saul never lost his divine right to be king of Israel; David was a demon-inspired usurper, and his presence led to the death of Jonathan, the rightful heir. The demon (which might have been the Gnostic evil god of the material world, vs. the good god of the spiritual world) continued to lead the people of Israel astray under the guise of righteousness. Jesus was attempting to lead people back to the proper God, but he was coopted by the demon and proclaimed the heir of David.
So this cult leader called himself Jonathan Branch, to say that he was the true Messiah, of the house of Saul by way of Jonathan (spiritually, I guess, rather than literally by blood inheritance).
All of Karen's friends were like, "What the hell has gotten into you? This man wants you to move out to a commune in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fanatics, and that's no way to raise a child." And some of us called Branch "Bush," because his original name was something like Charles Bush, and apparently my dream friends were making nasty political jokes.
Karen's response was something along the lines of, "Stop mocking my religion! Jonathan has really helped me, and this means a lot to me. And call him what he wants to be called, for goodness' sake -- don't be jerks."
And there were a lot of stupid, circular arguments, until the Ithaca Journal ran an investigative report that linked Jonathan Branch to the cocaine or heroin trade, and somehow Karen's son got kidnapped by either drug dealers or some of Branch's more fanatic followers, and Karen was frantically trying to convince her friends to help her while some of them were still sitting around going, "Didn't we tell you so?" and she was in tears--
And then I woke up.
...
Apparently I now dream in Dan Brown novels as well as in fantasy epics. Who knew?
*I do not know the Bible with anything even vaguely approximating that level of detail. I just thumbed around until I found the point where Saul and Samuel had the falling-out that led Samuel to find and anoint David.
---------------
3. Tomorrow I think I will buy a fish fry from Hal's Deli for lunch. I find myself with a mad desire for fish-and-chips (or the closest American imitation I can get).
