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Experiential

I’ve had lots of experiences in my half-century. Many, many good ones and a few very bad ones but what’s life if you don’t take time to truly experience it?

What’s In A Name?

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes. ~Oscar Wilde

It’s another busy Hump Day and I’m so sore I can’t stand it. Literally. Standing up and walking around hurts like holy heck.

It would seem that old experiences are coming back to haunt me.

Apparently, my current condition causes me not to heal as effectively but I wasn’t aware that all the old aches and pains would resume where they left off. Yikes!

That being said, my life has had more ups than downs. Between my travels, college, getting married, having kids and many other wonderful experiences, it’s been a pretty wonderful life so far.

Are You?

Jimi Hendrix – 11. Are You Experienced

There’s rarely a time that a bit of Jimi Hendrix can’t make even better. Here’s a classic for your listening pleasure.

Immersive Experience

A rebirth out of spiritual adversity causes us to become new creatures. ~James E. Faust

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve got a collection of viewpoint characters in the first book of The Sentinels series.

The purpose of this is to provide an immersive experience in the milieu and to explore a variety of character arcs. Some will be growth arcs and some will be destructive.

To be able to watch these happening concurrently to people who know each other should be interesting. The relationships between the characters will color how they respond to the changes in each other.

I think that this will be a draw for people who aren’t necessarily interested in the superhero genre.

I’ll have to finish it to find out for sure.

One of the characters who I haven’t been spending as much time concentrating on is David Harz. He and Claudia Barlucci actually featured in last season’s Holiday Season Serial Romance, All I Want.

Granted, that’s a bit of a spoiler on how their character arcs turn out but the Holiday Season Serial Romances take place in the year in which they are serialized while the novels start in 2005 and span over a decade of team growth.

David is a likable guy with good intentions who discovers a dark family secret. Obviously, there are countless stories with this premise and it could easily go either way.

Since David was a bit of a villain in 2020’s story, we already know that things don’t necessarily go his way, but we don’t know what that consists of. Well, I do (partially) but the readers won’t know until they read it.

The challenge for me is to make it possible to make it seem inevitable while providing him opportunities to break free from what seems to be his fate. The decisions he makes will draw him inexorably into his moral decline.

I intend for David to become an anti-villain. From the perspective of the Sentinels and from the average joe on the street, he seems like a stock comic book supervillain but what he does is in pursuit of the dissolution of The Conclave. He sees himself as a kind of monster hunter.

He can justify to himself the seemingly (yes, actually) horrible things he does because he’s well aware that worse people have done worse things and he’s trying to stop them.

I still need to work on his “code”. The goalposts will be sliding rather significantly from the nice, well-meaning chap he starts off as and the ruthless cad he winds up becoming. Even ruthless cads have some lines they won’t cross, well, maybe sometimes if they really have to.

Villains’ values tend to be a bit murky, don’t they?