Some links may be affiliate links. I may earn money if you buy something or take an action after clicking one of these links on this site.
Rob Knowlan is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
Bride of Chaotica
As much as I love seeing my beautiful wife naked, what I dislike almost as much is getting roped into her batty projects.
If you’re wondering about the post title, it’s a reference to one of my favorite Star Trek: Voyager episodes. The Bride of Chaotica! is a case of a holodeck program that got out of control. Unfortunately, this tended to happen a lot on the USS Voyager. Whether it was Harry Kim‘s Beowulf simulation getting out of control or the good (yet imaginary) people of Fair Haven deciding that the Voyager crew were wicked fairy folk, things tended to go awry on the holodeck.
VOY 5×12 ‘Bride of Chaotica!’ Trailer
This particular mishap pointed out how easily Doctor Chaotica could be led to his own doom by his enchanting counterpart, Queen Arachnia of the Spider People.
In like fashion, my own beloved wife whacking away at our floor in the pursuit of installing a laminate naturally drew me (quite against my will) into the preposterous process of getting the job done in something vaguely passing for “right”.
I’m usually able to stay out her way when it comes to projects, but this was getting entirely out of hand.
Bah, humbug!
Nightingale Floor
In the Age of Feudalism in Japan, one of the features of a classical castle was the Nightingale Floor. As you can hear in the video below, the boards are deliberately chirp like a bird in order to alert the guards that people were walking around. It was a skill the Ninja had to develop in order to pass over such a floor without alerting the guards so they could carry out their missions.
Nightingale floor “Kyoto Trip” 音が鳴る鴬張りの廊下
Our nightingale floor is very much not on purpose. The boards didn’t fit together exactly right and I’m not that great at cutting straight lines with a jigsaw. There’s a little snap, crackle, pop involved in walking over this new floor of ours. Unintentional as it is, it simply is what it is. We did what we could and now we’ve got a new bit of floor.
There are a few last bits to wrap up but I’m not enjoying the process. I’m tired and sore and lacking in enthusiasm for this exhausting project. One might think to chide me for the loss of heart so close to the end, but I didn’t actually want to be involved from the start, so…
Super Speed
Bruce Lee – Amazing Superhuman Speed
There won’t be a speedster character in the Sentinels series until much later, but the main character of the first book is a Krav Maga practitioner with a superhuman reaction time like Bruce Lee.
Sculpting Chaos
Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos. ~Stephen Sondheim
Just as the creation of art is the manipulation of chaos, the Sentinels book series is the tale of their struggle against the forces of chaos.
The process of creating a window onto a world that exists only in your head is one of the greatest challenges a writer can undertake. A lot of people write from personal experience or at least stick to “the real world“.
Adding superpowers to the mix only complicates matters. Of course, that’s half the fun. Trying to guess how someone would react to a having a gun stuck in their face is one thing, adding a lifetime of training and superhuman reflexes answers the question nicely.
Thing is, she’s not Supergirl. She’s not bulletproof. She can’t fly. She can’t shoot beams of heat vision.
She’s just a nice Jewish girl from the Lower East Side of Empire City with naturally blue hair and intense training in Krav Maga from a friend of the family who is a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces. The story begins a few months after she discovered that she had developed superpowers. Go figure. Who’s got naturally blue hair?
She first saw the Sentinels at a school assembly in Second Grade and decided she was going to be a professional superhero when she grew up. It seemed an audacious goal but if Black Widow or Batwoman could be superheroes without powers, so could she. She took the name Blue Banshee, not because she’s got a super scream power but because her best friend since Kindergarten called her this for scaring away some guys in the street who had been catcalling her.
Actually, most of the Sentinels took their superhero handles from nicknames that had been given to them by friends or family. Since there are so few superhumans at the beginning of the series, this worked out fine. As the number of supers increases due to the actions of the Chaosians and things get more like the comic books and movies, the Sentinels will start taking code names more deliberately and theme-oriented.
The pen is the tongue of the mind. ~Horace
So, there you go. A project I wanted nothing to do with that’s still not over and an artistic endeavor that I want everything to do with that will be going on for years to come. There’s a window into my addled brain. I hope you enjoy the view.