authoring destruction

I've also started working on Skin Game again, which I haven't looked at in a couple of years. I'll try to keep up with posting the re-write as I go in an attempt to keep track of it... eek. This is oooold. But I like this character; really all of them. They're a fun little group to write about, specially since they're all trying to eat eachother alive.

It was originally conceived by my teenage self to be a story about a powerful vampire (Baronir Calthan, as mentioned here) and and organization of pseudo-divine hunters/slayers/whatever. Now, even then, I had enough sense to be doing it with a little more interest (if I may say so myself) than... I necessarily could have been. It's always been more about a character thing than an archetype thing, or whatever. Unfortunately, I can't escape the feeling that Buffy and Anita Blake have really done it in on this front, and I never really got to any of the particularly interesting bits that would have set this story apart from that (no disrespect, I just don't want to write those stories over again). So... my thoughts are leaning toward changing the whole business of Calthan and his posse being vampires. Aurrin, Bane, Morningstar, and the rest are still going to be, as it were, celestial (Asthetim, particularly, which is another thing entirely I've been playing with over the last couple of years as a world-building thing but we don't need to get into that here and now, I haven't ironed out all their kinks yet). Ash is still just your good old human junkie. But what do I make the bad guy? And why are we expending such an effort to hunt him down? It's not like my 'protagonists' are a set of the most savory people in general. The other Asthetim I've set up to write about (a story called the Summer Prophets which is still in the unsuccessful brewing phase) are evil as shit. And besides, even when it was going to be angels vs. vampires or whatever, my goal was for it not to be a struggle of 'good' against 'evil', once the day was done.

I think I have too much going on; I'm feeling a little guilty about the division of my attention especially among the writing projects >.