1,000 Words: The Coyotes of Silver Moon

Okay. After yesterday’s little trip to Neverland, it’s time to get off the crapper (as it were) and on the ball (as it is), and get back to South Dakota (as I will do right now).

Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty.

…

Yeah, okay, so I suck. I just spent the past… what, maybe an hour… trolling the internet, seeing if I could find old friends on MySpace (what a waste of bandwidth THAT is) and generally avoiding work (which is, after all, what I do), when I should be here trying to figure out how John and Custer and Roswell get out of the situation with the Lakota, and then playing a few hands.

And my Suisse Ball needs inflating.

Okay, John and Custer are in the Lakota camp. Roswell is missing, and they’ve had a VERY trippy night wherein they were led on a merry romp by Coyote, capital C. When they awake, Roswell is still missing, but they will see a Lakota woman in a tailored American dress. Her name is Sings in the Tree, but her American name is Mary Tree. She is a serious woman with a broad, flat face, and looks unnatural wearing the dress. She lives an American life with her husband Henry, but was raised Lakota. She will act as liaison between the Fultons and the Lakota, but basically, all she says is that Coyote has been visiting many people recently, and the Lakota refuse to do anything because Coyote will do as he will. To do anything else would be to unbalance the natural will of Mother Earth.

So basically John and Custer leave worse off than they arrived, with no idea how to stop these were-coyotes, and now Roswell is gone. Nobody in the camp seems to know who might have taken him. Definitely sounds like a Lakota Indian picked him up, but nobody is missing from camp, so what can they do.

They let John and Custer leave with an escort of mary and Henry, but also with a warning: There will come a time when the Lakota will not let the White Man herd or pen them the way He has the buffalo. And maybe Coyote is tormenting the White Man because of the White Man’s torment of the Lakota. Maybe that is why no Lakota has been affected, but local towns and trading posts have.

Okay, I think maybe I have my bad guy right here. Or bad guys. Or bad guy and bad girl: the Trees. I got a feeling I’m going to have to change that name to something or other. Garoup or some such.

Okay, I don’t know where I’m going with this, but let’s say that Henry Tree is not just a French Trapper (okay, maybe it should be Henri Tree), maybe he’s also smoething of a medicine man of himself. But, maybe, just maybe, he’s also the Lakota Trickster God Coyote himself, doing exactly what other have said he would do. Maybe he’s making the White Man pay for moving so many of his Coyote (capital C) brothers around, forcing them to make war on each other while the White Man simply takes what he wants.

Henri would have to be something of a scrawny fellow, himself, but be able to dress his woman in fineries of the American fashion. He’d think that’d be funny. He’ll even join them on their quest to find ‘Brother Roswell,’ while in fact controlling things from backstage.

Mary Tree would, of course, know who he was, and be terrified out of her mind. He blames her for not giving him any heirs, but she knows that Coyote (Henri) is dying. His time has come to an end because the White Man’s Sun God is moving in. He’s calling all of his children to him, all of his natural born and his chosen, who will lead the attack against the White Man’s God.

My problem now is how to dramatize that.?

And more importantly, what am I supposed to type for the next… 241 words?

I’m exhausted. Whipped, really. But I have to get past that 1,000 word mark. I can’t even think straight right now. I’m about THIS close to just cutting and pasting “All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy,” out of The Shining. But I’m going to try to stand firm, if for no other reason that I’ve already copped out the day. I just want to crawl into bed, but I’m not going to resort to cutting and pasting or doing something cheap like that because, well, I’d like to consider that I have SOME standards for myself. So, instead, I’ll just ramble for the next 100 words or so (123 at this point, to be exact).

Or I could ramble on about another project I’d like to get started someday, called “Superman: Truth, Justice…” where good old Clark gets back to his Golden Age Roots and realizes that The American Way™ ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s about him rediscovering his role as an avenger, a righter of wrongs, and someone who will severely kick your ass and damn the justice system if they can’t get it right. That would be something I would buy, because there are so many writers who only see Superman as the pawn of The Man, the guy who enforces the Status Quo for Middle America.

Yeah, that’s something I’d like to read, but that’s nothing more than fan fiction, and right now I have a short story to finish and submit in the next few weeks.

But I’ll do that tomorrow, because THAT’S my 1,000 words for tonight. So there.

I dreamed last night…

I don’t normally dream, or at least I don’t remember my dreams, but this morning I woke with fragments from at least two dreams last night.

In the first, I was having a birthday dinner with a large group of friends and/or family, and I opened a birthday card with The Incredible Hulk on the front. It said, and I read aloud, “HULK WISH YOU A HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” I opened the card and it was a gatefold cover with paragraphs of text printed on it. “Hmm, and Hulk evidently very literate, too!” I said, which got a big laugh, and suddenly I realize this isn’t my family, it’s an audience at a comedy club.

I don’t recall anything else from that.

The second dream I know I’ve had at least one other time recently, although I may not have remembered it at the time. I’m either in the far, post-apocolyptic future or some sort of sword-and-sorcery fantasy setting. There’s a runaway donkey and cart that I have to stop. I know it’s the third one I have to stop, although I don’t remember stopping the first two. If I don’t stop it before it gets to town, the town will blow up. One the side of the cart are three symbols. I can’t see the first two now, but I know the third is the symbol for radioactivity, the thing that looks like a spider. This whole second dream feels very “PS2″ ish to me upon reflection.

Now, I’m not one to look for deeper meanings in dreams, but there are a couple things worth noting:

1. My birthday is coming up. Less than two weeks now, in fact.
2. Both of these dreams dealt with radioactivity in some fashion.

Make of that what you will.

Where are all the Christian Superheroes?

While I know that Marvel actually published a couple of Christian specials back in the 80s or 90s, (“Lightbringer” or something like that), I seriously doubt that any of the larger companies would be willing to take on a Christian character for the same reasons that there are so few gay characters: Christians are too polarizing, and if there were a Christian character, then they’d have to deal with the issue, and nobody wants to be the first to do that.

To have Christian characters means at least one of the following three things: 1) The character will be a pushy blowhard who will be shown having worse morals than other characters; 2) The character will be thoughtful and truly spiritual, which means either 2a) eventually there will have to be a serious conversation about faith, which nobody wants or 2b) the character will be Ned Flanders, and the character will be a point of derision IN SPITE of his good faith; 3) something will happen that will cause the character to walk away from his faith.

The entire nature of superheroes is humanistic (“I will avenge this person’s death and bring the villain to justice!”). And the passivity preached in the New Testament doesn’t lend itself to action scenes.

Plus, it’d be difficult to write such a character accurately if you personally don’t have faith or don’t explicitly agree with your character’s faith, which would then be seen as proselytizing. And you’d have to get the characterization past your editor and publisher, either of which may disagree with your views or just be nervous about the can of worms you’re opening.

Now, having said that, there are a few out there by DC: The Spectre and Grant Morrison’s angel Zauriel are two characters who are explicitly tied to a Christian God. And I remember a scene in Infinite Crisis where several heroes gather in a church to pray before the final battle. But for the most part, it ain’t happening.