‘Sucks’ to be you!

So I write fiction in my spare time (although I haven’t put anything to paper in 2 years! I’m working on a lot of if in my head). So, consequently, I have a lot of kooky stuff rattling around in my noodle. New characters, new plotlines, snappy dialogue . . . Prolly explains why I have so many weird dreams. But I digress . . . I am going to be introducing a new character into my coven of witches (the central group of my current story). His name is Sebastian (or Baz, as I like to call him). Sebastian is a vampire (you had to see that one coming, I mean I write about witches for crying out loud). But thinking about Sebastian, where he comes from, what he does, got me thinking.

If you’re a vampire, following the traditional rules of fiction, summertime SUCKS for you! (Oh the PUN!)

I mean, you have, what, maybe 6 hours of darkness at best?? How does one rule a large conglomarate of vampires, run a business and do his grocery shopping all within 6 hrs of darkness in the summer?? Impossible!! (Although some of you may think that the whole idea of a vampire is impossible, to me, it’s just another literary device to get my story told)

Lucky for me, I am god in this crazy universe so I can bend the rules. This time, I’ve simply changed the rules. Baz and his hoard of vampires simply prefer the night, but can be out and about during the day. Much like us mortals who can be out in either day or night but have made a choice to make daytime our preference, Baz and the vamps prefer the night. The ultimate night owls, or bats, as the case may be.

Even though I have outrageos plotlines and insane twists in my stories, I’m a practical girl at heart. My characters are frequently seen in the grocery store buying milk or grousing that they have no clean socks because with all the running around killing people and stealing sacred artifacts, laundry day fell to the wayside. They stop to eat, they bitch about waiting for public transit, they spill spaghetti sauce on their shirt at lunch and have to go the whole day with a large marinara stain on their shirt, despite the fact that they are the most powerful people in the world. I think it adds a sense of quirkiness that you could burn an entire forest down with the snap of your fingers or shapeshift into a bird, but spill your latte in your car, and you’ve got to get it to the car wash before the milk goes bad. Or the whole things will smell, despite the fact that you are one of the most powerful creatures in the universe.

Why has no one else addressed this in previous vampire novels? Why does no one make mention of the fact that you have 6 hrs to get all your pillaging done before you get all crispy? It irks me when published writers don’t address what I consider to be serious plot holes. Is it winter all the time? Do they live in the North Pole? (Discussing this with my chiropractor, he said that if he were a vampire, he would live half the year in the north pole, half in the south pole, that way he could go out whenever he felt like it!). Do vampires get shack-wacky in the summer? Suffer a form of Seasonal Affective Disorder because they are trapped inside for most of the season? (Wait a minute – this could be a whole other book!)

Does anyone care but me??

Anarchist Catholic

Used to be, if someone like me was going on and on about issues they had with the Catholic Church, they would fit me for a nice oak backbone before they burned me at the stake. Now, they can’t even be bothered to know who I am long enough to excommunicate me.

It’s not that I’m not religous, or don’t believe in the Big Guy. I just have a real problem with his adminstration. I mean, I don’t get to choose who my pope is. I don’t get to choose my representatives. The Vatican is not a democratic state! So I’m left to trust that the leader of my faith is appropriately chosen by some really old, right wing guys in funny hats who don’t seem to know what is going on the world today. Guys who still think that a woman’s best place is either a: by her husbands side churning out hoardes of Catholic kids or b: wearing a habit dedicating her life to the Guy Upstairs.

And we’re all waiting for the second coming, but let’s be honest, if Jesus did come back, we’d probably look him up in an insane asylum because we wouldn’t believe him.

Like I said, I believe. I pray. St. Anthony (patron saint of lost stuff) has never let me down! But it’s the organized in organized religion that I have a problem with. Where do these guys get their decisions from? It’s not like they have a special red phone in the Vatican that links them directly to God, like Commissioner Gordon had for Batman. And the truth is, alot of our cornerstones are choices that were made for political and financial reasons in days gone by but now we’re stuck with them. No marriages for priests? – Financial decision by the Church so that they would not lose incomes to any potentials heirs that may arise from the union. No women in the higher echelons of the Church? – Well I don’t recall that being in the Bible (although I may be wrong). That’s because we have traditionally lived in a patriarchal society.

I mean, the used to make you pay for forgiveness for crying out loud. If you had a government like this, you would be outraged!! Forming underground movements! Calling on other leaders to pressure your government for change!

But you’re Catholic, so you sit down quiety and feel guilty about it.

So, what’s a girl who wants to believe to do? Overthrow the administration? Form an anarchist Catholic state? The other uber-catholics would most likely be the ones to burn me at the stake then (or send me hate mail – What is with that? The ones who claim to be most religious always end up to be whack jobs. – God save me from religious zealots!), but I still doubt that Benedict XVI would even know or care who I am.

So I put my faith in the Big Guy upstairs and hope that when I finally do croak, St. Peter doesn’t meet me at the gates and inform me there is a GOD-Phone identical to the Batphone and God has been phonings his decisions in (or voting by proxy) for the last couple hundred years.