I've got a lot to say this week (apparently this blog is weekly now! it's settled), though I don't feel like doing a megapost, or a postapalooza. My observations are split into two distinct categories, though, of things I have to say, so here's part one, and I'll have another post later on this evening as well. Sounds good to me.
on coinages
Scavenging through all the bins in the garage in search of old notes/drawings/papers of mine that could be put up to better archiving elsewhere, there were miscellaneous (I'm gonna say) RPG-material papers, drawings of coinages that separate fantasy races had. You know, like, this is what a gold coin minted by Hobbits is like. You could tell that I'd just made the whole thing up because it's got some races I'd invented for my own purposes (I don't know, I was a strange kid...?)
One of the races that the coinage sheet lists is called "necrominion." I really don't know what that means, and while on one hand I think the coinage is far too clever for me to have invented on my own (the word coinage, that is) on the other hand I can find no listings on the internet for the word being anything other than an apparently quite common misspelling of necronomicon, aside from the odd screenname. I must have come up with it on my own, then, I suppose? I've been known to surprise myself, if that makes any sense, so, cool, necrominion is a thing now, then. And it's my thing. We've got a race called necrominions now. Canon. Who they are and what they do, I've got no clue, but... It's clever enough for me.
the Laundry Files
Aside from that, and the NOC Necronomnicon stuff, and the odd eldritch abomination like Smith and the Rule 63 Cthulhu, we're steering away from anything too overtly Lovecraftian. Plunging into that would prove too distracting from the actual plot, since there are a lot of relevant tropes absolutely necessary to dealing with cosmic horror, many of which are at odds with the tone we're setting in the adventures of Agent Moone, of course... plus, turns out that cosmic horror secret agent urban fantasy comedy is already covered, devoted to exclusively by Charlie Stross's brilliant Laundry Files, which I only discovered immediately after doing last week's post, and which I am ashamed of not hearing of sooner. (Proving my point of setting Agent Moone's main series in the '90s, Mr Stross seems to run head-on into failed present/future status quo predictions with hilarious frequency, as he blogs about here.)
There's still room in the market for espionage-related urban fantasy, of course (the Laundry series is focused more on the pencil-pushing agency-work side of keeping cosmic horrors under control;) we'll still have cosmic entities, of course, because it's cool, but it's always been my intention to regulate that a lot to the background. The purpose of that stuff is to imply greater deepness to the universe, without dwelling too much on it, and also kind of make friendly fun of the genre.
What are we calling this race of heathen gods from beyond space and before time? The Underthings. Yes we are.
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