A Flurry of Feathers and Wings

23. How long does it usually take you to complete an entire story—from planning to writing to posting (if you post your work)?

You want to know? You and me both.

Okay, not quite true, but I don't entirely count short stories as the ones that I do write aren't planned and work out more as exercises than what I'd consider actually writing. I think the longest short story I wrote took about three days, on and off, with about two hours of planning.

Planning can take- has taken years on some projects. Others I'm coming into months, and others are just days out. Progress, I not has it.

Writing, eh...

Posting, well, I've posted excerpts, and a few early chapters of some things, but (after learning these things from limiinal and jkoyanagi) I probably won't post much of what I consider to be actual story material online, at least not without friend-screening. Apparently public posting stories is a bad thing for future publishing ambition; good thing to know.

To my credit, when I came up with that idea Bruce Almighty hadn't come out yet.

In another installment of Forgotten Idea Theatre, I will expond upon an idea I had for a movie. Why a movie? Well, because that's how it worked out. The characters were based on real people (ie actors... do they count as real people?) and that's just how it went.

This is also one of few times I can easily identify outside sources for inspiration, namely Kevin Smith's Dogma and Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. Both have fun ideas of how God(s)(ess)(es) interact with humans, and I wanted to be like the cool kids.

What it breaks down to is, a normal human guy is roped along by the God of War to visit a bunch of human counterparts to various gods, angels and so on. At the end, he wonders why he was shown them; GoW shrugs, says someone's gotta know, and it's up to him to decide if anything is done at all.

God of War, Mars, the Angel Gabriel, in this case looks like a black chick with dreadlocks. She can tap dance on a car without setting of the alarm, and at the snap of her fingers start a bar fight.

Part of the point of this piece of work is a loose idea I have of religion, which is everyone is right, they just see it differently, which is why GoW has so many following names. Everything is tied together, it just that each culture sees things in different ways, so how they come about to whatever it is they do is dependent on them.

Looking at it from the advantage of time, there's not a lot stringing the whole plot together, it's really just a bunch of meet and greets with no real overall sense of purpose, beyond showing what all these gods do nowadays. But I like them so much!

Aphrodite, I picture played by Kathy Kinney, the woman who played Mimi Bobeck on The Drew Carey Show. She runs a whorehouse. And is cranky as hell about how the perspective of beauty has changed from back in the day. Being the Goddess of Love, one of the things she can do is look at a person and know everything about their sexual life; their kinks, how many times they've had sex, what their sexual organs look like, and usually uses it to make others uncomfortable because she finds it funny.

Satan is played by Ian McKellen. Why, I don't know; maybe because I have the Devil be gay, and the first thing our human-person sees is him kissing his younger boyfriend good bye. *shrug* It's the way it went. Here is where the Sandman has it's most obvious affect, in that Lucifer isn't a bad guy, he's just the guy stuck with the job of watching over all the people who decide to go to hell. It's not his choice (...all the time), they make the decision themselves that they believe they need to suffer torment for whatever precived sins they have. He's simply the landlord, not the ringmaster.

He meets a few others, I have notes on it somewhere around here, but that's the jist of the whole thing. Playing on the perception of what that god(dess) is really like, how they interact with the real world, and so on. Jesus, as the title mentions, is a older black gentlemen who spends his time playing chess in the park. And it's like his fifteenth time back on Earth. This was one idea I wanted to play with, that Jesus, forever prophesied to some day make his return, actually has several times over, we've just been too stupid to realize it. Sometimes it's as historical figures of note, sometimes it's just as some guy.

I forget what the whole point of this was; maybe it was just an overblown idea that had headshots attached. It needs more than just, "Hey, lets go to [x] place and see [x] person!" Maybe I'll come back to it someday.

Ooh, God, I forgot about the big G. He's....she's....well, really, s/he's whatever s/he wants to be. Literally, I remember one final scene where War sits on a park bench, watching as our squishy human walks away, and starts talking to herself; then we pan to the person sitting next to her. There is no headshot of God, because throughout the entire conversation, God turns from one person to another; a business woman, a teenager, a littel girl, a Yankee's fan, a priest, all within a five-or-so minute chat. God apparently has the attention span of a hummingbird on a sugar rush. Who knew.