Jaycee Woods

After a break, I resumed drafting _Boudica and The Butcher_, 2nd American Civil War, story; 265 new draft pages. I took a break because of the Israeli invasion of Gaza as the siege and decimation in fiction could have been too parallel to reality.

In retrospect, The Butcher’s fictional old-school tactics of famine & disease remain worse than the reality of the contemporary conflict. One of The Butcher’s explicit planned milestones in the siege is to reduce the rebels in the city to cannibalism so other rebel cities are terrified of his brutality & surrender without a fight.

Since I have decided that the besieged Great Lakes city in the story is Cleveland, which the rebels renamed Pilgerruh, in honor of the Lenape who took the land from the Seneca who had taken the land from the Erie. Yes, that is a joke based in truth about Leftist land acknowledgements and the history of intertribal conquest.

In addition to figuring out the location, during the break, I drafted 17 teaser short stories set in the BaTB story world. These teasers were part of my world building effort as characters, settings, and events from a teaser can be folded back into the edited novel.

For example, the female assassin recruited in a teaser short will be the one who nearly kills The Butcher, sending him to his parents’ farm to recover. In that short, the city’s rebel leader Cleaver makes an appearance although he is also referenced in a teaser short about a captured merc.

Additionally, the female rebel medic who found Boudica dying on a battlefield in a teaser short later in the novel treats The Butcher’s neglected wounds after he collapsed outside his tent. That teaser may became the first chapter in the novel as it establishes The Butcher’s character, creates sympathy for the unconscious Boudica, and discloses that he was the one who almost killed her yet acted to save her life.

One teaser offers a feature on Miles, the bespectacled short bulldog of a fighter who protected The Butcher’s blind left side during the fight on the ramparts around the smugglers’ supply depot.

Before I could get back to drafting I have to finish rereading the 170+ previously drafted novel pages to reconnect to the whole story. For example, I had a forgotten note in the middle of the draft about a separate flashback story focused on Boudica’s parents which would dramatize the ideas leading to the civil war.

So far I am surprised with the insightfulness of the dialogue by Boudica’s mentor Olga, who gives a feminine perspective on the war. Olga is capable and intelligent so completely different than the ‘strong empowered woman’ archetype in a Hollywood story corrupted by “the message.”