2003-11-24 - 11:35 a.m.

Ropes.

I was talking with a friend of mine and we were discussing how complex Neil Gaiman�s, Sandman was. How there is foreshadowing of the plot in Volume X in Volume II. X being the last Volume. A half dozen years and 2500+ pages later. Brilliant.

Then she wondered how he�d do such a thing. I think I have the answer.

Sandman Sidebar: For those who don�t know what Sandman is about, lets say it�s a story about stories. The main plot being that of the Lord of Dreams, Morpheus. The Dreaming is his realm. Surrounding this guy are a cast of hundreds ranging from eyeless-eyeeating rampage nightmares, to a suave Lucifer who quits Hell to Fairy Tales to historical stories and legends � the sky really is the limit and Gaiman uses all of it.

But even though there are hundreds of stories in Sandman, it really is, from beginning to end, the story of Morpheus and his burden of responsibility and consequence. A story that was cleverly told over 2,500+ pages.

I think Gaiman had this story for a long time before he published it. I bet that he sat on this story for so long that other stories started growing on it and fell in place one by one until it became something so malleable that writers even today have adapted singular ideas into entire wonderfully well written series�.

I call it a Rope story. Ya take a single plot idea, you know where it begins and where it ends but the in-between is fuzzy. So you start telling the story � the main thread � and you weave in a story about a secondary character�s background, then a story about cats worshipping Bast in the night, then maybe a Viking legend. All the while inserting these threads into the main one.

It becomes a thick and complicated weave and that�s what makes it so fucking well told. It�s a great storytelling method for people with too many ideas. Or limited attention spans. Like me.

The Turning Game is about the impending rebirth of a Creator - after attempting to wrest control of this Creation from Our Creator, he was smoten and banished to the Realm of All Things Forgotten.

But there�s a catch. A prophecy that tells of the rebirth of that Forgotten God. ��and the father shall be forgotten by the Seventh Son and That which is Forgotten shall be remembered.�

The protagonist is that Son. Protected by a Creator�s Guardian, they are to seek out and kill his 4 Brood Host cousins.

That�s basically the main plot. But of course there�s more fleshing out the �in-betweens�. Like the fact that the �God� we worship isn�t The Creator at all. It�s The Creator�s Proxy to Earth�s Heaven. He used to be Loki.

Loki/Yahweh hired the renowned Celestial Recruiter/Investigator For the Right Cause, Ash Medai � also known as Asmodeus, Lord of Demons and Board Member of the High Council of Hell � to recruit the protagonist, the Seventh Son, but Ash (an Arab Humphry Bogart kinda character with an ebony Rita Haysworth Nemisis) but is foiled by the Guardian. For some reason, The Creator has taken a slight interest in this person � enough to send him a Guardian which was the Scrubbed and Torture Tested soul of the protagonist�s very capital �E�vil father.

They pick people up and kill things as they go and freaky shit happens, like the prot�s skeleton slowly being replaced by angel bones via a hastily, Guardian inserted angel�s tooth (Yahweh�s angel Gabriel to be exact) that does some cool shit for him.

There�s a Fairy Tale with wolves and Evil Dwarves and magic.

There�s a mystery written in Film Noir starring Asmodeus and his uber-powerful and uber-feminine secretary, Nemesis. They�re trying to figure out what Yahweh is up to. But Asmodeus likes to do his investigating with a human�s form. He enjoys pushing himself to constrain his thoughts to the microscopically limited scale of �human consciousness.� He�s sort of bored of being a Devil. Humans are newer to him.

And I know how the story ends. It ties it all up nicely. In one of a couple different ways. But that�s such a fucking LONG way off! There�s so much more to get to. I�m gonna be 78 and on an iron lung before this fucking beast gets told.

Fuck it. It�s fun. Maybe I�ll move some of it from pad to pixels soon. Makes it easier for people to read. Maybe I�ll post some here.

Who fucking knows?

0 of you fuckers have been accounted for.

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