A to Z: Frustratingly, Fergus

    So, I thought surely I had plenty of characters with F- names when I decided on this theme.  After all, even if none of my original works contained any, all those Velvet Goldmine fanfics set in the 1970s and 1980s surely had to have some, especially since there's actually a character in the movie named Freddi!

    Well.  In those fics, there are at least two Freddies, as well as a Fred (Americanized nickname for a Friederich), but they're all minor characters that I have nothing to say about.  (And, weirdly, none of them are the character from the movie.  I guess I hadn't been aware of his name...?)  It seems like "Freddy" is sort of a go-to name for me when I don't know what to name a man in a modern American setting.  Not sure why that is.  🤷🏻‍♀️

    Anyway, since that would hardly make an interesting post, I'm going to have to post about an untitled work that's gone through two radically different first drafts...and will need another before it can even think about being shown to anyone else.  😫

    Initially, I wanted it to be steampunk, but it ended up being a strange hybrid genre, sort of a low fantasy world that's trying to become a steampunk-with-some-magic world.  (Appropriately enough, given how hybrid the genre is, I'm thinking my best bet for the presentation of the story would be to do it as a hybrid visual novel/strategy RPG.)  Some things are constant between the two drafts, though, ranging from the airships (carried through the air by an assortment of flying animals, including winged horses, giant eagles and dragons, among others) to most of the world-building (though it needs so much more!) to some of the cast.  Three of the principle cast are actually loosely inspired by Velvet Goldmine characters, while the rest are original.

    One of the characters who both is and isn't in both drafts is Fergus Hughes.  In the first draft, he's a dead character from the past of one of the two leads, the pretty young Elliot (who never actually had much in common with Arthur Stuart, now that I think back on it, except for how I pictured him looking).  Original draft Elliot was...a problem™️.  He didn't really do much, was helpless and...there just wasn't much to recommend him all around, but fortunately I had a beta reader who told me so, and thus I went back and rewrote the whole draft, radically changing a lot of plot beats, and it worked much better in the new draft (which was so different that I consider it a brand new first draft, rather than a second draft).

    So, in the new draft, Fergus is still alive, for starters.  Originally he was Elliot's 'true love' who had gone off to investigate a mysterious island (and Elliot begs the other lead, Cal, to take him there only to find a grave rather than the living person), leaving Elliot to get himself tangled up in very stupid circumstances.  In the new draft, he was just one of many customers that Elliot had had in his time as the sole male prostitute at a brothel not too far from the airship docks, and although a lot of the female prostitutes assumed Elliot was sweet on Fergus and that he was therefore sad that Fergus had left town, he really wasn't, beyond being glad of having had a steady customer who tipped well.  They still head to the same mysterious island, but now they do so because of a letter stolen from Fergus in which one of his colleagues (they're both professors) is telling Fergus, in code, about a valuable treasure.  So Elliot and Cal go to get the treasure and make a fortune, only to have things go awry.  Like really, really awry, because the treasure in question--which was knowledge, not the gold and jewels they expect to find there--was being guarded by a secret, powerful and very vicious group, and...well, that probably gives you a pretty good idea what the main thrust of the rest of the plot is.  🤣  Anyway, they do eventually go to Fergus with what little they found that they were able to take away with them.

            On entering the office, Cal found that Elliot was enveloped in a huge hug from this Fergus character.  The man was tall—about half a head taller than Cal—with dark hair and a neatly trimmed little beard, almost more of a goatee than a proper beard.  He was pretty good-looking, and either muscular or a bit chuffy (hard to tell under his voluminous professorial robes), and quite young for a professor, probably early forties.
            “Oh.”  Fergus let go of Elliot with a disappointed expression as soon as he saw Cal enter the room.  “You’ve got a—”  His voice trailed off as his eyes widened.
            “How many people have seen that [expletive]ing wanted poster?” Cal asked, finding his voice approaching a growl without his consent.
            “One was passed around at the last staff meeting,” Fergus answered, then looked at Elliot.  “I didn’t realize you were interested in the…dangerous type…”
            “It’s a business arrangement, not a sexual one,” Elliot said, shaking his head.  “Look, uh, we don’t have time to talk.  I…”  He bit his lip, then pulled the diary out of a pouch on his belt not dissimilar to Cal’s own pouch…and probably appropriated from Cal’s closet.

    Then--and I figure I can spoil this plot point because it's likely to change when (if?) I get a finalized version of this out there--Fergus reveals that he's part of a different secret organization, one opposed to the one that they had to escape from earlier (and are still trying to escape from by the point they meet up with Fergus) and stuff happens and Fergus not only kills someone right in front of Elliot but also uses the same mystical doodad the bad guys had been using to hypnotize people into doing horrible things to hypnotize Cal and his crew into not trying to use the mystical doodad ever, under any circumstances.  (Elliot is immune to its powers because plot reasons.)  This enrages Elliot, of course, and turns him against Fergus, probably permanently.

    So...yeah, Fergus kind of remains more of a plot point than a character.  😰  I just didn't have anyone interesting to talk about under the "F" category.

    I'll try to make up for it a little bit by talking about one of the big problems I foresee in trying to launch into yet a third massively altered draft of that novel.  It's about the world-building.  See, each nation in it is directly based on/inspired by a real one, all from various different time periods, with their technology increased to basically 19th century levels.  The first novel takes place in the equivalent of England, and Cal is from the equivalent of Rome (specifically Imperial Rome at the height of its power, but also in the middle of a decades long drought so combined with a lot of firearms it's also kinda got a Wild West vibe to it), while the third member of the crew, Ouden, is from the equivalent of Sparta from the classical period, so the place is really deeply problematic because it's a slavery-based society.  (Non-ethnic slavery, as in ancient Sparta, but that doesn't improve the situation.  Ouden's parents had been fighting to put an end to slavery, and ended up killed because of that.)  At the moment, there's also equivalents of France, Germany, (ancient) Egypt, China, Japan, India, Inca, Aztec, Maya, Polynesia, some form of Mesopotamian culture and I hadn't picked out which cultures yet, but at least two or three North American indigenous cultures and at least two or three more African traditional cultures would also be represented.  (I have recently decided to help reduce the over-representation of Europe by replacing France and Germany with the Franks, but that still doesn't fix the problem enough, so ideally I need to add more non-European cultures all around as well.)  While they're just inspired by the cultures, all would of course be researched sufficiently to do a decent job of it and I'd make sure to be respectful and not present any cultures as inferior to any others.  (It helps that the world of the novel is one that is without any form of imperialism or colonization, in part because they only just rediscovered the idea of war within the last hundred years.  (It had been magically erased from the human consciousness.)  Also that since every nation has airships powered by various giant animals, all technological advances tend to get around the world pretty quickly, so everyone's on more or less an even footing.  Uh, every culture is, that is.  Individuals not so much; there is definitely the suffering caused by social stratification.)

    Anyway, so that all sounds fine and dandy, right?  But the problem is that I had originally had the plan that these cultures weren't merely inspired by the various Earth cultures, but actually descended from them, because these magical super-beings (sort of like elves, only evil) had abducted large groups of people from various cultures across Earth over the course of a thousand years or so, and although no one remembers that fact (in part due to the same magical memory erasure stuff) their ancestry was on Earth originally.  Which adds in so many layers of complication.  (Beyond the fact that I have no idea how I was going to communicate that idea to my readers.)  It would also beg the question of if these alien elves (as it were) had kidnapped all those humans to be their slaves, wouldn't they put the ones with the cultures and languages most like each other as far apart from each other as possible?  If so, wouldn't that make everyone extra confused about why cultures so far apart from each other were so similar while cultures that were neighbors were nothing like each other?  If, on the other hand, I abandon that "former Earthling" idea, then does it make it more or less a good idea to have the similar cultures inhabit a map roughly similar to the real world's?  Like, having the England-analog be across a short strip of ocean from the Franks, the Japan-analog being across from the China-analog, etc.

    Those kinds of questions--and a general uncertainty about exactly how I want to resolve the final confrontation of the series (yeah, it was supposed to be the first novel of a series that was probably gonna be pretty long given how many countries there were in the world)--are a large part of the reason that reworking this novel is very low on my list of future projects. 😰

    In other F-related character stuff, there's a really great F-named character that I want to write about.  I want to write some fanfic for the game My Time at Sandrock because the fanfic already up on AO3 for that game is almost all straight, and mostly focused on Logan.  I mean, I like the guy, but I don't see why everyone's that hung up on him.  Anyway, I want to write about a male player character (heavily inspired by Wei Wuxian) falling in love with the town doctor, Fang.

    See?  Who wouldn't want that?  (Though it would be better if I had a screenshot handy that was taken since the recent update to the Switch version of the game.  The graphics got a pretty hefty improvement.  Only I forgot to grab one of Fang, 'cause I haven't played much since then, since I'm pretty much winding down my first playthrough, but I want to play some other other games on my backlog before I replay Sandrock.  The second one is going to be the one where I'm playing as a guy, and his whole character will be tailor-made to be the perfect man for Fang. 💕)