Okay, at Starbucks, just hanging around until it’s time to head out for dinner theater. Promised myself I’d finally get some planning done, though by “planning” I currently mean freewriting and hoping something decent comes out of it. I have a Grande Skinny Cinnamon Dolce Latte by my laptop, and a book to read in case I really luck out with planning. But hopefully that won’t happen, as we’re now 10 days away from the start of NaNo, and I still only have a basic plot.

I have thought, though, that my Big Bad is going to be Neptune or Poseidon or a decendent. Motivation on his (or her, if decendent) part can be to get the Stradivarius as the power of the siren spirits inside it can help reestablish the Big Bad’s precendence/godlike status–or become a god in the case of the decendent?

I do keep saying I want to have kids, but there is currently one here who is a babbler, a high-pitched babbler, and [redacted] the child is annoying. Very annoying.

Anyway. Descendent would want to become a god, or Neptune/Poseidon wants to get back to the old status. I’m currently thinking the Big Bad will be a descendent–seems to fit better. Rich, probably, because she’d need the resources to hunt down this Stradivarius in particular.

And I’d turned off my Internet in order to save battery, but I may need to turn it back on–can’t remember what connection, if any, Neptune/Poseidon had with the sirens. Or even which one is Greek. If I’m going to go with sirens, might as well use the Greek version of the sea god, hey?

Or the Big Bad could be Athena or Aphrodite or whoever it was who supposedly sprang out of the ocean foam. Or a descendent, as the drill goes.

Ah, good! Poseidon is the Greek version. I was thinking I like the name better. Which isn’t as much of an issue if I go the descendent route, but still.

Got the Internet going again. Poseidon fathered Orion, looks like, and he raped lots and lots of women. So maybe my Big Bad is a descendent of Orion, a little more happy than being descended from, say, the “Giant Sinius,” and she’s got a sort of nobility complex, so to speak.

Whoops, looks like Orion was a rapist, too. Okay, so my Big Bad has issues with being descended from a line of rapists. Maybe she’s not quite a man-hater, but she doesn’t particularly like them–well, maybe she prefers women all the way around. Hmm.

She’s not directly in this book, anyway. Or at least I don’t think she is. But at least I’m thinking about the backstory. It’ll help the series (oh, am I seriously thinking series before I even know if the first book works?) go more smoothly.

Okay, looks like Aphrodite was the sea-foam goddess, but I don’t immediately see that she had much connection to Poseidon. For that matter, I’m not sure how much connection Poseidon had with the sirens. Though it’s my world, so I can do what I like.

Another issue is what I want to do with whole Greco-Roman bit. If I get into the whole Pantheon, am I saying that all the gods/goddesses are single, with the two names, or that there are (were) different entities?

Right now I’m thinking just the single set. I suppose in the backstory the divergence of the Greco and Roman gods could’ve resulted in split personalities–the whole “followers’ faiths giving rise to gods’ mainfestations” bit that comes up with decent regularity. But I’m not 100% sure about that.

And yet another consideration is how God in Judeo-Christian terms comes into things.

Loud baby is gone now. She was cute when she wasn’t going “Ah ba ba ba ba!” at the top of her lungs.

Anyway. My God. I hate to say that my God doesn’t exist in this fictional world. And Shay sings in a choir. The gospel songs soothe her and that deathsong thing. So there’s a definite place for the Judeo-Christian God–and I hate referring to him like this, since he is my God and I am a Christian and I hate trying to figure out how my faith, exactly, fits in with the things I write. Which is a terrible thing to write–I shouldn’t hate it at all. But it doesn’t come easily to me. I don’t have it in me to write quote-unquote Christian fiction. It’s hard, hard, hard to do well.

Or maybe that’s just an excuse to make myself feel better for not writing stories involving the love of Jesus.

[Redacted as I went into a long discussion about my obligations as a Christian and as a writer to myself, my audience, and the story that had nothing to do with NaNo plot development. Though it may make for an interesting post if I can get some cohesive and coherent thoughts together rather than brain-vomit.]

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And I’ve got another three pages where I delved a bit more into my main character and tried to name my male MC, but three pages single-spaced is a bit much for a single post.

Bear with me, readers-that-be. Next week we’ll actually be into NaNo, so theoretically I’ll have an actual excerpt to post, which should be more interesting.

Theoretically.