So let's review, shall we?

Its 57,000 words into this novel. Making it, quite simply put, the longest project I have ever worked on. Also roughly 57% of the way to the target word count.

And I am stalled.

There's not a particularly great reason for this, story-wise. My outline has been working. When I get into it, it flies by. I can see it, hear it, *taste* the damn story, which are all good signs.

And yet, I've got nothing.

Why?

I look at this project, and my mind shies away.

It's a great beast of a thing. If I finish it, I truly believe that it will be the best thing I have ever written.

It may, in the process, reveal a hell of a lot more about myself than I might otherwise like.

And that, I think, is what terrifies me about this project. In some ways, this has ceased to be me writing a story. It has become, instead, me writing a story that is also me.

Which, frankly, is kind of a scary thought.

And also means that I'm on to something. Something that's working.

Because if it wasn't working, it wouldn't freak me out this much.

So what to do, then, about my inability to write?

The answer is kind of duh.

Write.

Because if I write, then I can't say I can't write any more. And then I write.

And then, well, there I am.

It's as good a plan as any, I suppose.

Time to get back to it.

Note to self: zombie fairy tale, about an ugly human girl who wishes that she were one of the zombie overlords, and her Fairy Zombmother tells her that, one day, her sweet prince will come and bite her in the brain, and then she will be a princess.

Titus X. Lowman

You're going to smell a horrible burning sound.

Like an orc in a 10' x 10' room, I shall guard your chest with great enthusiasm, if no skill.

Though the Spartans needed 300 men to guard a narrow divide, I shall defend your cleft with just 1 because baby, I've got 5 points of Potence and 7 in Stamina, and I can blow your Mind 4 Matter 1.

I'll paint it red if it makes you come faster.

Lessons Learned: the subs warning klaxons emulate Cthulhu's mating call qhite well. Consider changing it once the clanging stops.

Los Organistas: Underground purveyors of organic foods, on the run fromt he FDA for crimes against food production.

Fists of Passion

Cape of Good Point

Electromorph Sized Homoplasy

Anadromous Fish

Help me, I'm French.

Memetic Thought Bomb: the memetic equivalent of planetary super-mutation.

I smell a smell as of a hundred corpses being eaten by a thousand rotting fish.

Ma'am, if the truth were a camel, I wouldn't have humped you.

I killed her and ate her flesh. It wasn't very healthy.

He was about to blow a cork, like one of them wine bottles.

Alright, so, Manias and Dirch come to town.

They go to the inn, they have a snack,

What's the story with the innkeeper?

The innkeeper would know it's his (hers?) responsibility to feed Dirch, but is she happy about it?

Alright, so a Katakaw woman running the inn. How do we want to play this?

Which rages the larger question: what is the roll of Katakaw women in their society?

We're talking backwoods hill dwellers. What if we went with the Mad Men dichotomy: women get called "woman" or god knows how many pet names, kitten and the like, but have reasonably close to equality.

Or is that a cop-out?

Would this town have a whorehouse?

I guess that raises the larger question: how many men brought their families?

In the actual west, you had whorehouses because men left their women at home and said they'd send for them once they were set up. If you've got teenage boys and girls, that clearly hasn't happened. Presumably, call this a Katakaw thing: shit, they've all worked hard before, they're not getting out of working just because Dad's moving.

So you would have men moving out with their wives and children, which would make the whorehouse somewhat more precarious in the community.

You might have whores, and everyone might know who they are, but it might be more in the realm of "that woman out in that house" rather than "the whorehouse." Although that might make it rather more difficult to go see a whore. Everyone would know who you went to see, what house you went into.

Which is a decent sized problem for any whoring in a small town. Everyone knows who the whore is, and everyone knows where you've been.

Except.

Supposing that when people moved here, they assumed the Nilfamites were gone for good, and houses got built Kansas style: outside of town a ways, out on the farm.

This would leave several things in town: general store, blacksmith, church, and a handful of boarding houses and other houses rented out to hired hands. Because there's always some variety of migrant workers.

Those are the guys who would want a whorehouse.

The ladies of the town could choose to ignore it, since it's in town so they can pretend they don't know it's there. And the hired hand types are the sort you don't want your own daughter marrying, so the whores could keep them busy and that's better than the alternative.

Plus, they'd be the majority of people at the inn, since they would have no woman to cook for them and no home of their own.

So we're talking classic farm women: a ton of responsibility, a ton of work, but it's a different kind. Men work in the fields, deal with animals, wander around. Women cook, clean, help with work outside when needed, can, distill, etc. Socially, they wouldn't leave the house much, except for church.

You're going to need to know something about what a Bookist worship service looks like. And/or how it would differ from what Manias might want it to look like, if they weren't in this area.

But that's neither here nor there just this moment. The question is: if women normally run things around the home, would it be a natural extension that a woman would run the inn? Or, being a business, would it be a man's work?

Or perhaps a married couple.

Now that's a thought. A married couple that runs the local brothel.

It could give them a modicum of respect: they board young girls, out in the plains to find a man to marry.

Even if every woman in town knows that's not the case, they might not say anything.

Young men can go there, and their mother's will sigh and say they can find a better woman, but figure that it's better than knocking up the neighbor girl. They can still bitch at their husbands, asking them if they're going to find a new wife. Everything that needs to be said about a whorehouse can be, and their farm hands can claim that they're just trying to find a wife.

For that matter, "find a wife" might become something of a euphemism.

Who rents out the houses? Seems like the Magistrate is an obvious choice. Explains even more his power in the city, if he controls the labor pool.

So you've got a husband and wife running the inn. Do they have children?

They probably would. And that might make things complicated for certain women in the town: do you deal with the fact that there's a whorehouse for the sake of the children?

It would probably be that no one would talk about. But it would get not talked about very, very loudly. The couple might be prosperous, every young man in town might owe them a debt of gratitude, but that wouldn't get them invited to dinner. It would get their children cast out.

How many kids?

Maybe 5? That would be conservative.

And if they're old enough to make the trip (which would be the trick for all these families), you would have some teenagers.

Are they the family business?

No. Too simple. There's a nice tension to them being a nice couple who only want their daughters to do well for themselves, but can't farm. So they start an inn. But the inn by itself doesn't quite make enough money to pay the rates Kettle charges to bring in Brain Pounder, though they have at least paid him enough to have a monopoly. Which they would need to do, or everyone would just buy it from him (or at least a lot of people would).

The prostitution might start as a separate thing. A woman comes in, thinking that she can make some money. She needs a place to stay, and they figure they can take on a border and aren't too picky about what she does for a living. Over time, that girl brings in friends, they perform other services to protect them, take care of them, take care of the resulting babies, that sort of thing. Eventually, they need more room, and they expand the inn to accommodate them. And now they're in the whoring business.

And their youngest boy, maybe 5 or 6, just knows that he has a whole bunch of mommies, and a lot of people like them.

But the oldest three, all daughters, or at least one of them might, (so ages 6, 12. 14, 15, and 17?) might all look up to them. They might find them glamorous, want to be just like them. Which isn't what their parents want at all.

And at least one of them might have gotten the idea to go make their share of the bandit treasure. So they're out there. (The two youngest wanted to, but the oldest just went to take care of them, perhaps, figuring she could help them?)

So the mother, at least (or possibly the father more. Not sure.) might have a tremendous desire to put a stop to it. Hell, they might have been the couple that brought him in in the first place, though they might not admit to it.

They just wish their daughters would grow up, move somewhere that no one knows who their parents are, and find a decent husband. That's what they've heard is going on in Darius's camp.

They wouldn't think their daughters would get into the possession crap, but who knows? The might.

Mostly, they want to know that their daughters are okay.

So yeah, they'll feed Dirch. And they'll be careful that nothing obvious is thrown in that isn't supposed to be there.

But the liquor might be from a higher shelf than it ought to be, and he might find his room a little better stocked than he might expect, with a girl who just wants to help out the nice couple that takes care of her, and they'd like her to make sure he knows how important this is.

And that whore's going to need to have a name.

So, what order do things happen in:

Dirch and Manias go to Pisswater. They learn why it's called Pisswater.

Being a whole town, Dirch collects his food at the tavern on behalf of the whole town. He'll mention to someone why he's there. Word will get around, too.

(Would he be recognizable? I'm not sure he would be, though they'd probably know who he was once he introduced himself.)

Before he's finished, the Magistrate will show up with the local priest in toe. The priest will be there to serve as a witness and be able to read, something the local Magistrate can't actually do.

This would make the local magistrate a local guy who's particularly important in the community. Probably a guy with money, so what does he do that makes him his money?

Merchant would make sense. He could run the local general store and shipping monopoly, which would probably involve having a monopoly on importing Brainpounder. Since there's no money, the only way to pay him would be with labor. So he's got a bitching house, well worked land (and probably an infinite supply of uring, for what it's worth), and everyone owes him the next time they have money.

Which would also make him hated. If someone were to take him out, there might not be much in the way of complaints.

But he also has the mandate of Eethres. And this is out of civilization, so killing your magistrate might not be *as* bad, but that doesn't make it something that's going to be ignored. So it's a situation where no one would cry to see him dead, but no one is going to kill him.

From Dirch's point of view, they have the same goal. They both want things calm. Dirch feels that will happen just as soon as he kills this devil. The magistrate feels that he's got it under control, has some idea of how precarious his position is, and doesn't want to give up even a small modicum of power to try and deal with this problem.

The trouble for the magistrate is that he stays alive because of the power of Eethres. Dirch has a writ that Eethres says this is okay. So he can't say no. Or rather, he could, but then his mandate is gone and he's left at the mercy of his debtors. And they play punch face in their spare time.

So what does the magistrate want?

His wife wants their daughter back. The magistrate wants that, too, but really does take his responsablities seriously, even if they are for selfish reasons.

So, then, assume that he is self made. That, basically, he's living in a town with people who knew him as a shit face 14 year old. They would think he's gone uppity. But he simply sees himself as genuinely more suited to the task at hand, *because* he's been successful with his minor shipping empire. And he knows that a whole lot of kids have disappeared, and that those kids have gone bandit in some way, and doesn't want anyone looking into them. He understands it, too, because he woudl get better news than most of the people in town. He knows that the drought isn't just here, that it's everywhere, and that it's not goign anywhere. So he'll turn a blind eye to them as long as they leave the locals alone. And they do, so he does.

He knows that his daughter has run off with the bandits. And that worries him.

And he's heard the devil rumors, but those don't worry him as much. They're just rumors. They're not solid. So what if one of the kids went devil? Or if all the kids went devil, or whatever. They're the future right now, and he doesn't want their future endangered by some reckless devil eater that isn't even a proper devil eating woman.

But he needs Eethres's support, so he has to take Dirch.

Which means that he'll want to feed Dirch a devil. And he has contacts within Darius's band, and can try to do it.

Except that Darius gets wind of it, and Darius won't let it go at that. He'll protect his own, and the Magistrate be damned. (Is the magistrate Kettle?)

So that's how Dirch manages to pick up a trail, how he ends up fighting one devil (who might even know what she's in for. But if put properly, she might be willing to die so that Dirch doesn't have to know about Darius) and how, in the canyons, Dirch ends up finding himself face to face with a shitload of teenaged kids, ready to kill him if necessary, but equally willing to let him go. He didn't know about the set-up, and they know that. So they'd be willing to let him go.

Provided he agreed to let them go. Which he might not be willing to do.

Huh.