Last May I participated in the Fediverse’s “Writing Wonders” challenge, a prompt for each day. However, it didn’t occur to me to collect my posts for the month for my website.
So I’m going to do things backward. This month, my answers to each prompt will be on this page, and I will repeatedly share the URL with a post containing the day’s answer.
The post is dated 6/2 even though I started on 6/1 because it took that long to do every prompt and my day job was particularly hectic yesterday.
prompts by:
6/1: intro day / You’re transported into your WIP’s world. Where is the first place you’re going. Why?
intro
If you’re not familiar with me and my schtick, I’m a long-haired metalhead who codes for a living. I’ve published some other work from my Starbreaker saga before, and I’m working on a new novel called Spiral Architect. All of my answers for this month will be based on my WIP.
destination after becoming an isekai protagonist
Chances are I won’t be going anywhere immediately if I get transported to the Starbreaker setting. US dollars might as well be toilet paper there, so I’ll need to find work as a programmer or sysadmin so that I can afford maglev fare to New York City. Fortunately, techies are unionized in my setting, so I’ll at least get time and a half for overtime.
6/2: Were any of your fictional locations inspired by real world locations?
I pretty much took the real world, filed off the serial numbers, and messed with its history to create the Starbreaker saga. For example, first contact happened over 10,000 years ago, most of the patheons of polythiestic belief are based on this contact and the old gods still live among us, and Canada broke with the UK in 1812, annexed the US, and freed the slaves by claiming them under eminent domain, emancipating them, and assassinating any of their former owners foolish enough to object.
6/3: Share art, pics, and/or mood boards of your WIP’s world.
I actually have a couple of Pinterest boards so I can visualize fashion for my setting and major characters. Though I suspect my wife Catherine does more with these than I do.
Also, here’s some promo art by Sara McSorley that my old publisher had commissioned for Starbreaker back in 2012.
And artwork I had commissioned from Harvey Bunda in 2012 and 2013.
Art and mood boards aren’t really my thing, you see. Other people visualize; I think mainly in plain text and I only dream in infrared.
6/4: (MC POV) When was the last time you traveled? Where did you go? Why?
- Morgan Cooper
- I’m supposed to be on my way to London. My friend Claire is worried about her bestie from university and wants me to look into it. Hopefully in my official capacity as an Adversary, no doubt.
- Naomi Bradleigh
- I’m staying in New York since the band I’m in, Crowley’s Thoth, is supposed to perform at Carnegie Hall for Winter Solstice soon. It would be nice if Morgan showed up for rehearsals, if only so that Christabel would find something else to gripe about, but he knows the material and we’re tight enough that we can afford for him to miss a couple of days of rehearsal.
- Christabel Crowley
- I could understand Naomi not showing up for rehearsals because she had to get here from London just like me, but Morgan? All he has to do is take the bloody tube down to Greenwich Village from the Upper West Side. How hard can it be?
6/5: What is the meaning of your MC’s name? Does it fit their personality?
Morgan’s adoptive parents, the Coopers, weren’t sure which flavor they’d get, so they went with a gender-neutral name. They used to tell him to be grateful they didn’t settle on “Alice”. Though, given that Morgan moonlights as a rock musician, that would work if it hadn’t already been taken.
The name “Morgan Cooper” probably doesn’t fit his personality, but why should a name assigned at birth fit the personality of the adult that baby eventually becomes?
6/6: Does your MC have any nicknames? If so, how did they come by them?
He’s got a couple. “Morgan Stormrider” is his stage name; Christabel Crowley saddled him with it because she didn’t want people displeased with what he did at his day job showing up at Crowley’s Thoth shows with lots of guns and no bubblegum.
Those who have cause to fear him in his official capacity as an Adversary sometimes call him “Triple Six”, because he’s the last of six hundred and sixty-six combat androids created by the AsgarTech Corporation for the UN and called einherjar. He bears the number of the beast, which is fitting for a knight in Satan’s service sworn to oppose all tyranny.
6/7: (MC POV) Name one place in your world you try to avoid. Why?
- Morgan Cooper
- I haven’t been back to my old neighborhood in Queens since I began my training to become an Adversary, except as duty requires. Most of my memories of that neighborhood are of loneliness and poverty. I’ve made a better life for myself, and there’s nobody there that I miss.
- Christabel Crowley
- Morgan doesn’t know this, and I’d gain nothing by telling him, but I grew up in the same neighborhood as he did. I avoid visiting because people there don’t remember me as Christabel. Whether I broke character or not, visiting would just raise a lot of questions I can ill afford to answer, let alone allow anybody to ask.
6/8: How are weddings celebrated in your world?
Depends on the culture. There’s no one way to celebrate a wedding in the Starbreaker setting, and I haven’t given it much thought lately because it hasn’t been relevant to plot or characterization.
There is, however, the chemical wedding. When somebody in a long term relationship dies and is cremated, they can request in their wills that their ashes not be immediately scattered. Instead, they are kept until their partners also die and are cremated. The ashes are then mixed and either scattered or used to plant a tree in their memories.
You can blame Bruce Dickinson.
and so we lay
we lay in the same grave
our chemical wedding day
6/9: Do natural calamities play a role in your story?
There really isn’t any such thing as a “natural calamity” in my setting. Even the stuff insurance adjusters would call “acts of God” to avoid paying up are at least influenced by human activity. For example, the setting’s been going through a little Ice Age because geoengineers trying to cool the planet were a little too effective. The resulting climate shifts and famines helped cause the social/political/economic collapse the survivors remember as Nationfall.
6/10: How would you describe your story: funny, epic, dark, sad, etc.? Why?
I’d call it human, since it’s fundamentally a journey toward individuation. There are comedic moments, tragic moments, light, darkness, sadness, and even acts of epic defiance. My ambition most likely grossly exceeds my skill, but what good are stars if you’re not going to reach for them?
6/11: How do you feel about killing characters?
Sometimes they really have it coming, like the Pinkertons in a new first chapter for Spiral Architect that I haven’t put online yet. They were trying to kidnap a kid on the claim that he was artificial and thus corporate property. Morgan wasn’t having any of that, and when three of the four Pinkertons involved shot at him he returned fire and killed them all.
6/12: (MC POV) How do you feel about marriage?
- Morgan Cooper
- Does it really matter how I feel about it? Who would I marry, anyway? Christabel? I suspect merely proposing would result in her dumping me and breaking up Crowley’s Thoth to be free of me.
- Christabel Crowley
- We’re at the stage in our relationship where Morgan might propose marriage not because he truly wants to be with me for the rest of our lives, but because he’s forgotten how to be happy without me. I’d hope to God that he doesn’t, but Isaac Magnin showed me what I used to pray to as a little girl and I don’t want its attention. And, frankly, Morgan deserves better than me.
- Naomi Bradleigh
- My adoptive parents have a happy, affectionate marriage and have been together for over forty years so I don’t think there’s anything wrong with marriage per se, but I’m not convinced it’s for me. I still haven’t found somebody that I’d want as a lover for more than a few months and is available.
- Claire Ashecroft
- I wouldn’t mind having a harem of bangmaids and a fuckbutler or three, but if marriage isn’t a good idea for a serial monogamist like Nims then it’s right out for me.
6/13: Is there a corruption arc in your story? If not, speak about any other arc.
You could say there is. Morgan begins Spiral Architect in a state of moral agony. He knows he isn’t living up to his ideals. He castigates himself over killing three Pinkertons in self-defense and to rescue a child they were kidnapping because they had been told the kid was artificial and corporate property, even though any other Adversary in his position would have been praised for quick thinking in the face of a clear and present danger to not only their own lives but those of innoncent civilians. He’s sacrificing himself in his personal life by remaining in an emotionally abusive relationship. His journey toward individuation as a man and a human being is stalled by his misplaced altruism, and it is by becoming more the egoist and realizing that his life matters as much as anybody else’s that he resumes the journey.
6/14: What kind of character arcs do you like writing?
I tend to gravitate toward self-actualization arcs and arcs where people realize they’re not living up to their chosen code and take steps to bring their actions in line with their beliefs. Sometimes this means accepting that their beliefs are no longer worth holding and should be discarded.
6/15: What’s your setting: urban, rural, natural, something else?
Mostly urban; I’m a New Yorker and have been to London, Paris, and Melbourne, so even though I live a surbaban/rural area I dream of cities.
6/16: What was your process to create this setting and make it realistic?
Given that my setting is a variation on the theme of reality, it’s realistic by default; the fantastic elements are things I added or tweaked. While I’ve read David Shields’ Reality Hunger, I had had my fill of reality before I ever started writing. Therefore, I’ve got soul-searching androids, swashbucking soprano catgirls, and demons from outer space. Fuck realism; this is métal hurlant, or shrieking metal: libertine science fantasy inspired by heavy metal.
6/17: (MC POV) Somebody threatens your loved one’s life. How do you respond?
- Morgan Cooper
- The last time somebody pulled a gun on Christabel, I provoked them into wasting their ammunition on me. As one of the einherjar, I am built to take abuse that would kill an ordinary human. If you want me to stay dead, you’d have to cremate me or feed me into a meat grinder and use me for chum. But I didn’t stand up and fight because Christabel is my girlfriend. I did it because as an Adversary I’m oathbound to oppose tyranny wherever I find it.
- Naomi Bradleigh
- Not that he’d need me to protect him, but if somebody threatened Morgan I would at least want to fight by his side. But then I’d have to admit to having been an Adversary myself, and explain why I left service and eventually returned for an ongoing mission I wouldn’t trust to anybody else.
6/18: Have your friends and/or family read your books? Why/why not?
My wife of almost 19 years has been reading my fiction – and making good suggestions – for almost 23 years.
My parents read my first novel when I published Without Bloodshed a decade ago. I don’t know whether my mother still has the copy I gave my parents. When she was packing up things to sell or give away as my father was dying, she picked the book off the shelf, looked right at me, and said to my wife, “Oh, look. Some asshole wrote a book.” We haven’t spoken in almost two years, and I am content to let that state of estrangement continue.
If she doesn’t like the man I’ve become, she and my father should have done a better job of raising me.
6/19: Who was your MC’s first friend and how did they meet?
Morgan’s first friend and first crush was Naomi Bradleigh, who is seven years his senior. He was 16 at the time, and working as a bouncer in a dive bar where Naomi was singing torch songs for tips.
6/20: Do you have any LGBT+ characters in your story?
Quite a few.
- Morgan Cooper is demisexual and demiromantic.
- Naomi Bradleigh is demiromantic.
- Edmund Cohen is heteroflexible.
- Claire Ashecroft is pansexual and aromantic.
- Elisbeth Bathory is bisexual.
- Polaris is nonbinary.
6/21: How does your day job or life affect what you write?
I’m a software developer and sysadmin, so I’ve probably given more thought than is healthy to how computers work in my setting. Among my other tweaks to the real world that I made for my setting, UNIX is ubiquitous since Microsoft tried to build on 4.2BSD instead of creating DOS and lost the PC market to Coherent, which in turn got its lunch eaten by GNU/Linux.
The Gopher protocol and software got BSD-licensed, and CERN tried to monetize the WWW, so the web never took off and the internet didn’t get commercialized and turned into cable TV with a comments section. Social media consists of IRC and USENET, and “influencers” are considered spammers and flamed accordingly. UUCP is still in use to transfer data between Earth, Luna, Mars, and artificial habitats scattered throughout the solar system.
Also, the whole thing about Adversaries cracking down on corruption and abuses of power arose out of my long-standing frustration with US politics, the Republican party, and the general corruption of corporate America.
6/22: What sort of transportation or vehicles does your MC use?
Being a New Yorker, Morgan is fine walking or riding the bus or subway. If he has to leave the city, there’s usually a maglev that will get him where he wants to go. Of course, there are no maglevs to Armstrong City on Luna, but Crowley’s Thoth only toured the inner solar system once; Christabel wasn’t willing to spend weeks or months in space between tour stops a second time.
6/23: Would your MC/hero stand out in our world?
Probably, if only because he’d probably gain a reputation as a session musician pretty quickly and end up in a band again. Also, because he might decide that it’s time somebody declared open season on fascists with no bag limit because who’s going to stop him? The only reason he doesn’t dodge bullets is that he has an aversion to collateral damage. He tends to bring swords to gunfights for similar reasons; he thinks violence should be personal, not remote. “Einherjar” supposedly means “army of one” or “one who fights alone” in Old Norse, and Morgan can live up to either definition if he ever decides to stop pussyfooting and go all-out.
6/24: (Antagonist POV) What do you think about the MC?
- Isaac Magnin
-
For somebody bearing the mark of the beast, Morgan Cooper acts rather Christian. If he learned to love himself and place as much value on his own life as he does those of random strangers who happen to be nearby when he’s called upon to fight, I might find myself unable to manipulate him, let alone control him.
6/25: Do you have any characters over 50 in your book?
Edmund Cohen is almost a century old, but still carries on like a man in the midst of a midlife crisis. He’s had a whole bunch of organs replaced, and because of his drinking has voided the warranties on two artificial livers. He’s also worn out his second dick.
Isaac Magnin, the Mephistopheles to Morgan Cooper’s Faust, is around 4,000 years old. The demons who inducted Magnin into their order are over 100,000 years old. They all tend to stage deaths every 75-85 years and transfer their property to new identities to avoid government scrutiny.
6/26: Does your book pass the Bechdel Test?
Spiral Architect doesn’t, yet. I am confident that both Without Bloodshed and Silent Clarion do, but making my current WIP Bechdel-compliant might be a little complicated given that the protagonist is a man and I plan to write the novel from his viewpoint. Perhaps I can show him listening to a recording of a conversation between two women that don’t mention men as part of one of his investigations.
6/27: (Antagonist POV) What do you care about?
- Isaac Magnin
-
I want to see my people liberated from the tyranny of demons. If homo sapiens is likewise liberated, so much the better. For too long the ensof have offered the same choice to every sufficiently advanced species of biological intelligence they have encountered: become one of the ensof, a post-biological collective entity, or become extinct. I have pledged not only my life, liberty, and sacred honor to the cause, but have become a demon in my own right to fight these demons. The abyss stared back at me, and blinked.
6/28: If your MC could live anywhere in our world, where would they choose?
Morgan Cooper already has a brownstone in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in his world. He doesn’t need digs in our world.
6/29: How would you feel if your book got banned?
If Moms For Liberty got my book banned in even one podunk school district where nobody ever got tarred and feathered for teaching creationism in biology class, I’d send them flowers and a card: “Thanks for the free publicity, you fucking dolts.”
I’m dead serious. Censorious fundies are a writer’s best friend as long as they don’t try to prematurely end your career by assassination. Just ask Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood.
This is the Devil’s honest truth: I would laugh my ass off and publicly mock the fascist Karens who were so evidently scared shitless that their kids might read my fiction and encounter characters who express worldviews and lead lifestyles not approved by evangelical Christians. I’d use the ban to promote my work and give away free electronic copies to any kid who emailed me from a jurisdiction where my work is banned.
Hell, I’d be disappointed if I died without one of my books getting banned if I ever got something published with sufficiently wide distribution for copies to end up in school libraries.
However, if a school district tried to make my fiction required reading the superintendent and Board of Education would get a cease and desist letter in short fucking order. I write libertine fiction, and I do not want a captive audience.
6/30: Do you have a playlist for your book or MCs that you’d like to share?
I’ve got essential albums for this book and for the Starbreaker saga in general. Here’s a top eleven. Look them up with your favorite streaming service, and buy copies if you like ’em.
- Black Sabbath: Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
- Blue Öyster Cult: Imaginos
- Queensrÿche: Operation: Mindcrime
- Therion: Deggial
- Judas Priest: Stained Class
- Iron Maiden: The Number of the Beast
- Renaissance: Ashes Are Burning
- Paradise Lost: Draconian Times
- Metallica: …And Justice For All
- Demon: The Plague
- Blind Guardian: A Night at the Opera