Terran Franklin

Earlier this month, I told you about NaNoWriMo and that I’ve already planned a book for it.  Now I feel like talking to you about it.  It’s one of my more famous projects and is fascinating for both furry fans and amusement park aficionados.

Some people have seen how amusement park costumes had progressed over the years, and how lifelike they can get.  For example, Disney now has versions of their Fab Five character costumes with articulated mouths.

What if these costumes can do more than just move their mouths and their eyes.  What if they can practically come to live if you put one on, and live and breathe with you along for the ride inside?  With their own thoughts and personality quite different form your own, or not.  Kinda like a furry version of Venom only without the pathology.

And what if there was an amusement park fill of these characters, with an goal to knock Disneyland out of the water?

And the people who wanted to run it . . . . well, let’s just say that they’re a cross between Eisner’s Disney and Haliburton?

Enter Scarlet Foxfire.  She is originally one of those character costumes who saw things done to the castmembers that could only exist in a Fox Science Fiction series.  Some how she got herself out of that madhouse and into the apartment of unemployed cop Jim Goodlow, whom he took up as his partner.  Or rather, his new identity.  Remember what I said about needing to be put on in order to come to life?

Scarlet becomes the pretty face in Orange County Police’s Amusement Park District, a special branch of the police force that deals with cases that occur in the many amusement parks in the Central Florida area.  Something goes down in Disneyland, Universal Studios, Sea World, and any of the others?  They call this department.

And the cases get more than just line jumpers and lost kids.  In the first book I wrote, there was a Homicide.  In Main Street USA.

“UGH!  Disney and Gore should never mix.  Ever!”

– Scarlet, Murder in Main Street USA

I had two attempts at an origin story in comic book form.  Both of them kinda fell flat, mainly because of the way I felt constrained by the format of a web comic.  I found out that my creative juices flow the best in novel form.

Hence my NaNoWriMo project.  This year, I’m going to take the story and write it in novel form.  Pretty easy to do since I practically have the story already plotted earlier (Both in the web comic, and as a plot deck) and I pretty much know the story by heart.  I just wanted to have it done right, and better to have it done now than ten years down the road, like with Blood and Metal.

I also have a plan on how to publish it.  I’ve been looking into making submissions to magazines and Scarlet PI will be what I’ll be publishing with, and I’ve looked at the various submission guidelines to use.  Most of the magazines allow submissions of up to 20,000 words in length.  I hope to make three 20,000 word stories and make that into a 60,000 word Book 1.  Fair size for a NaNo project.

This is what I’ll be working in this November, and what I’ll be sharing with the other NaNos in the Southern Illinois Region.  You’ll also see me working on it at the new downtown hangout “The Wired Wedge” at Niederinghaus and 19th, across the intersection from the 7-11 and across the street from where the new Cinema is bring built.  I look forward to seeing many of the locals and cheering me on.  I hope.

People who go “Yiff In Hell, Furfag!!11!!1!” need not apply.

I tend to keep track of my word count among all the pieces I make while I’m writing books. And I found out that I’m just at Eric’s entrance into Vintnaos and I’m already at 30,000 words, almost half of the 60,000 words I keep as a first draft limit. I don’t have enough space to put in all of what I have right now. I think I expected this to happen; It ain’t uncommon for someone’s plot not to fit just right into the book you’re writing. (This is why I prefer to do series.)

I needed a little plot bunny where I can fit into the remaining <30K words. And I think I got it with the help of a certain Watchman:

Adrian Veidt: You wanna know my past? Okay. Happily. It’s a matter of public record that by seventeen both my parents were dead, leaving me alone. I guess you could say I’ve always been alone. I mean, they say I’m the smartest man in the world, but the truth is I’ve often felt stupid at being unable to relate to anybody. Well… anyone living, that is. The only person with whom I felt any kinship died three hundred years before the birth of Christ. Alexander of Macedonia. His vision of a United world, well… it was unprecedented. I wanted… needed to match his accomplishments, and so I resolved to apply antiquity’s teachings to our world today, and so began my path to conquest. Conquest not of men, but of the evils that beset them. Fossil Fuels. Oil. Nuclear Power. Like a drug, and you, gentlemen, along with foreign interests, are the pushers.
Business Partner: Now listen.
Adrian Veidt: No. You Listen. The world will survive. And it deserves more than you’ve been able to provide. So let’s cut to it, shall we? Privately I’m worth more than all of your corporations combined, I could buy and sell you three times over, which is something you should factor into your decision should you choose to make out disagreement public. I think you know the way out.
Veidt’s Secretary: The toy people wanna talk to you about some new villains for the Ozymandias line. Seems all the old villains are dead.
Business Partner: Mr Veidt?
Adrian Veidt: I think I have some ideas.

 

Fortunately for me, I have a character in Vintanos who is pretty much like Ozymandias.  I just hope he doesn’t summon Cthulhu anytime soon.  That would be Eric’s job.

The little plot bunny I found came from one of Mr. Veidt’s plans for unlimited and clean energy.  It concerns the source of Vintnaos’ power grid, which is a combination of hydraulic and coal.  My Ozy, who is running that power grid, finds coal as a necessary evil and would be drawn to the Clean Coal technology shown in the magazines in King Acorn’s probe.  He’ll also be interested in using Wind and Solar to supplement the power grid.  This is countered by a couple lizard oil execs who are trying to push oil from a foreign company and get Vintnaos to go to the new automobiles instead of what could be one of the better public transportation systems on Maatla (Two Words:  Cable Cars.  Cable Cars are Love.)

It’s a combination of two of my favorite environmental and civil planning topics.  The first is the popular demand for a clean power grid.  As much as some would want to, a sudden jump from oil to clean power is unfeasible to America.  What could be easier for America is a gradual process:  First off, have all of your oil come from domestic sources—Unfortunately, that means drill, at first.—but the use of the local oil resource can be used as a stepping stone as we make a transfer to the cleaner energy sources, and over time reduce our use of oil in general—domestic and foreign.  To us, oil is a necessary evil, but it shouldn’t be as evil as some environmental fucktards claim it is; remember that they’d rather see America reduced to third world living qualities.  (They even fap to the idea.)

The second part is what I’ve seen in St. Louis History . . . and from other cities.

And an animated/live action film form the 80s:

Doom: Several months ago I had the good providence to stumble upon this plan of the city council’s. A construction plan of epic proportions. They’re calling it a freeway.

Eddie: Freeway? What the hell’s a freeway?

Doom: Eight lanes of shimmering cement running from here to Pasadena. Smooth, safe, fast. Traffic jams will be a thing of the past.

Eddie: So that’s why you killed Acme and Maroon? For this freeway? I don’t get it.

Doom: Of course not. You lack vision. I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on, all day, all night. Soon, where Toontown once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see! My God! It’ll be beautiful.

Eddie: Come on! Nobody’s gonna drive this lousy freeway when they can take the Red Car for a nickel.

Doom: Oh, they’ll drive. They’ll have to. You see, I bought the Red Car so I could dismantle it.

Car companies wanted as many people driving as humanly possible, and sees public transportation as an obstacle to that.  So they buy the public transit systems and intentionally run them into the ground.  We had a decent street car system here in St. Louis during the depression era, but General Motors screwed it up.  Literary.  In the streets.  They forced people to get a car if they ever want to see beyond their immediate 3-4 city blocks, instead of being able to hit the Metro and go anywhere they wished.  The result is congested roads with heavy traffic at rush hours—at times even rush hours before the fucking sun is up; urban sprawl as people started looking into the suburban regions to have some resemblance of a civil life—or to show up on their neighbors and friends; the inability of youth to find a place where they can hang out within walking distance; that’s part of the reason why children are fat, the need to get in the car to go somewhere; and the possibility of gas fumes being worse for the environment than coal emissions because of the sheer number of cars out there.

And that’s not counting the billboards that plague the St. Louis area.  Or all of Missouri, for that matter.

I’m not completely against cars, if you need one, go for it.  If you need an SUV so that you can take your kids and groceries out and about, feel free.  I just say that there should be options to just taking the car everywhere.  In my Metro East home in Madison County, we have a public transit system that’s state of the art, with not only high class busses and bus stations, but also a system of bike routes which the busses assist—they even have bike racks on the busses.  It’s not perfect, but for some people who can’t afford cars or shouldn’t be driving, it’s a good benchmark for other cities to use.

And with this plot bunny, Eric uses this tactic to defend Vintnaos’ street cars, and his friend’s power grids.  I’m convinced that it’ll show a lot more of the story’s main city, and help establish more of the main players in the game.

No Cthulhu, though.  I call no Cthulhus.  Sorry, Ozy.