Well, it hasn’t even been 24 hours and my subscribers have more than doubled and some have even already pledged money, which made me have to quickly set up the payment processor thing. So, indeed, you can now sponsor me to the grand cost of $8 a month, $80 a year, or $120 as a one time founder fee (if I read it right). I think founder fees will get you at least a cameo in one of the stories if not a continuing character, subject to:
You agreeing to it (I will need the name you want me to use) and an email or something in writing telling me you are ok with it.
You understanding that your character has no guarantee of being a good guy, not dying horribly, and so on.
Of course, if you wish to have a character with a major story plot/line/good-guy (or evil villain for that matter) you can certainly fund it by sending me a brief synopsis and a payment commensurate with how much work/detail I have to deal with.
Now that we got the vicious subject of gold out of the way, allow me to give you a brief glimpse of my creative process. Please don’t despair if you think you will now have 16 paragraphs detailing how I am a wordsmith and each word is forged with the loving care of a pregnant hippo and the tears of angels, mixed with the neighing of unicorns from a meadow of rhododendrons filled with perfect snow-crystals.
People who use the made-up word “wordsmith” should face a firing squad without benefit of a last cigarette as far as I am concerned. If you care about that crap, you can read a post I wrote literally a dozen years ago on my way of writing, here.
Here, I shall reveal the true secret of how I make my stories come to life. Ready? (Drum-roll please)…
I make it all up as I go along.
Literally.
The characters sometimes drive my initial story off a cliff and a whole different one has to come up. The Overlords of Mars trilogy was pretty much the only series of books that I had a specific and laid out general idea of where things were going and the big plot lines from the start, but even then, my characters (like players in an old style pen and paper RPG) keep going off track, falling in lust or love with the wrong characters, get shot, possibly start and intergalactic war, and God only knows what else.
The more recent In the Shadow of Monte Castello was started simply because the opening scene of the story is an image/scene/idea I had while walking on my farmland at 3 am and thinking, how cool would it be if… Well, I don’t want to give you any spoilers, since it’s a new book, but honestly that was it. I only had this one flash of a scene in my head. No plot, no story, no idea where it might go and so on. And I thought, you know what? I am not even going to worry about it. So I just wrote it for fun, And I was done with the rough draft in a week and the finished thing in the second week. I have now completed book II of that series in rough draft and hope to have it out in a week or so. It took a little longer because it is about 50% longer and also I had to remember and check on port-plot-lines from book I in order to keep my continuity going. But let’s get back to Inspektor Kord…
We know he has black hair and brown eyes, is about 28-29 years old, effective and efficient at his job and normally is not required to dress in uniform.
I’m going to say he is somewhat partial to a very light leather or faux leather jacket under which he carries a shoulder-holstered pistol.
Being as we are on Luna and essentially a full extension of Nazi Germany on it, I am also going to make some assumptions. This is the only post where I will take the time to explain to you all my mental processes of how I am starting this story, just so you can see, I am literally making it up even as I write these words.
The usual service pistol of the police in Nazi Germany was either the PPK which literally stood for Polizeipistole Kriminal: police pistol criminal “office”, in 7.65mm (32 ACP) or the Walther P-38 in 9mm Parabellum. The Luger was generally more for military officers but might have made an appearance here or there, as might have the broom-handled Mauser, which however was quite massive and officially usually just for military personnel. On Luna, the “subhuman” elements should have been done away with for the most part, nevertheless, military officers and so on, certainly go around armed as a standard practice, so it is conceivable that an Orpo Inspektor, might find himself having to question or arrest an armed person, even in the utopian aryan Luna. So he needs to be armed. And he will be with some space-equivalent of a PPK. So it will be a smallish, high-tech, low-capacity handgun. Now… just what precise look and feel and most importantly, ammunition are we going to say it uses?
Well… advanced tech… German Nazi stuff… it’s not going to be limited to a single type of ammunition. I would begin to equate it with what in the Traveller RPG was called a Snub Pistol. Designed to be able to fire in vacuum too, it was a standard shipboard weapon that could fire Flechette rounds, normal sabot (solids), High Explosive, or High Explosive Armour Piercing rounds. So we’re going to say that is what the standard Orpo issue sidearm for an Inspektor is (although I already have it in my head that the special ops version of Orpo, will have a bigger handgun with selector switch that can fire in fully automatic mode…but, no, no, must not get side-tracked…).
I will say it has a seven round capacity, just like a PPK and that it can indeed fire a variety of rounds:
Taggers - A mixture of paint and tiny electronic tags that embed themselves in the clothing/flesh of the target to make tracking them extremely easy.
HEAP - High Explosive Armour Piercing rounds (to defeat personal armour or shoot someone behind certain type of cover).
HE - High Explosive rounds; frowned upon if used in civilian spaces as the fragmentation could injure innocent bystanders. Can be useful in non-civilian spaces or strategically when there are multiple opponents or they are hiding behind cover.
Solid rounds - A standard metal slug.
Taser/Electrocution - A charged slug that releases a large electro-magneto-psychotronic charge. There are two types, a “stun” round that tends to put people to sleep with usually non-permanent neurological damage, and a “lethal” round that tends to fry all neurone links and reduce a brain to instant death and little chance of even PSI enabled people to read anything off the dead/dying brain.
And he carries two spare magazines to balance the weight.
Loaded as follows:
Magazine in the gun
Taser Stun
Slug
Slug
HEAP
HEAP
HEAP
Taser Fatal
Spare 1
HEAP
HEAP
HEAP
HEAP
Taser Fatal
Taser Fatal
Taser Fatal
Spare 2
HE
HE
HE
HE
HE
HE
HE
And for those of you that think this is WAAAAAAAYYY too much thought process to spend on just the guy’s gun, well… you, sir, (or madam), clearly don’t understand the subtleties one can glean from an inspector’s weapon and the specifics of his carry ammo.
He also carries a lockable blade relatively small knife, with tanto-shaped blade, but mostly uses it for practical things, not as a weapon.
So I now have all I need to start. No… wait, when working Kord also carries a small photo/video/audio recording device he can also dictate into and will translate things to text he can have printed out back at the office. He uses this as a general notepad, day-planner, interview recorder, camera for taking pictures and so on.
Right. Now, we are ready to start.