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elfsSo yesterday I was plot noodling with pen and paper, since that's mostly what I have when I'm not sitting at my desk at home and since I don't dare put any of my fiction-related intellectual property on my machine at work for all the usual reasons.
And I hit upon this rather silly idea. There's a place in chapter three of my Romanesque fantasy where the captain of our (anti-)hero's commerce vessel, says as an aside, "I have seen the cat people of Southern Egypt." They're never mentioned again and they don't appear anywhere within the first ten chapters, and I have my doubts that I'll ever use them, except perhaps as color, in the stories.
One of the common ideas of the novel is that magic is weaker now than it used to be. There is a wholly naturalistic reason for this, too: the solar system is currently passing through a region that conveys upon conscious beings the power to change the configuration (but not the nature) of reality through sheer force of will. (This is not like the magic system in Aimee', where there also exist supranatural conscious forces and a lot of magic is done via negotiations.) By the opening of the novel, we have started to move out of that region.
So, anyway, while I was playing with ideas I had the notion of a fin de siecle story, using the "cat people of Southern Egypt" as a focal point, and involving the return of magic to the world. This would not be Teenage Catgirls in Heat, although obviously sex and catgirls would be features. But I figure that I might be able to handle it more seriously, more sensitively; what would it be like to be the most minor of minorities? I think most people can agree that, in America after the Civil War, there was very little "exoticizing" of other races in the midst, but what if there had been?
So now my thougts have exploded into a three-way storyline featuring a young catboy whose mother has talked her wealthy American keeper into providing him with schooling; a young catwoman who is the kept plaything of a Paris art financier; and a pair of British explorers in Africa who have stumbled upon the last "wild" catperson tribe in the world.
And then the magic comes back...
Must write faster.
And I hit upon this rather silly idea. There's a place in chapter three of my Romanesque fantasy where the captain of our (anti-)hero's commerce vessel, says as an aside, "I have seen the cat people of Southern Egypt." They're never mentioned again and they don't appear anywhere within the first ten chapters, and I have my doubts that I'll ever use them, except perhaps as color, in the stories.
One of the common ideas of the novel is that magic is weaker now than it used to be. There is a wholly naturalistic reason for this, too: the solar system is currently passing through a region that conveys upon conscious beings the power to change the configuration (but not the nature) of reality through sheer force of will. (This is not like the magic system in Aimee', where there also exist supranatural conscious forces and a lot of magic is done via negotiations.) By the opening of the novel, we have started to move out of that region.
So, anyway, while I was playing with ideas I had the notion of a fin de siecle story, using the "cat people of Southern Egypt" as a focal point, and involving the return of magic to the world. This would not be Teenage Catgirls in Heat, although obviously sex and catgirls would be features. But I figure that I might be able to handle it more seriously, more sensitively; what would it be like to be the most minor of minorities? I think most people can agree that, in America after the Civil War, there was very little "exoticizing" of other races in the midst, but what if there had been?
So now my thougts have exploded into a three-way storyline featuring a young catboy whose mother has talked her wealthy American keeper into providing him with schooling; a young catwoman who is the kept plaything of a Paris art financier; and a pair of British explorers in Africa who have stumbled upon the last "wild" catperson tribe in the world.
And then the magic comes back...
Must write faster.
