symbolic 60: what have you got?
I've got Nazis. They're handy. You can always rely on the Nazis when you need villains. Of course, we're getting far enough away from WWII that any survivors of that conflict are going to be doddering old men. Another decade and you'll be lumped into the historical fiction section when you say, "I've got Nazis."
Operation Paperclip was a clandestine plan by the US to recover Nazi scientists from Germany before Russia acquired them, ensuring that we got the smart kids working for us during the Cold War. Now, because my brain is hard-wired to see the Illuminati in the shadows, I've got to ask: why not extend this possibility to the occult practitioners of the Third Reich? We know Hitler was cuckoo for cocoa puffs when it came to the occult. Who is to say that he didn't know something that the rest of us didn't and there wasn't some occult reason why things went awry. And, if we run with this theory, then it is possible to read that the occult armies of the victors participated in the same sort of people salvage that Operation Paperclip employed.
It has just occurred to me that the British would want to be involved in this sort of salvage, being more primed for this sort of knowledge than the Americans. While that would follow, I'm inclined to see this as America's attempt to get in the game. If they could salvage the occult arm of Nazi Germany as their own, then they would have the stuff to level to playing field with England and Russia. We were (and still are in a depressingly anachronistic fashion) always trying to be acknowledged by the rest of the world as being the coolest kid on the playground.
We'll call them ACE -- the American organization tasked with the recovery and extraction of the occult secrets of WWII. Do they know what they're getting or are they just children, eager to play with the toys of adults? How long before they hurt themselves with these toys? How long before these toys start controlling them?
Sixty years later. What happens when someone starts asking the wrong sort of questions? Who is left to get nervous about the exhumation of old policy and older mistakes?
Reading back over other SYMBOLIC entries, I can see that this is really all that I have. The rest is ephemeral, extremely mutable and quixotic. This is the core idea that I want to play with. I know who and what ACE recovers from the war, and I'm not going to reveal either here because I want to keep at least one secret from you until the book is done.
I don't know why I keep being timid about this. If I'm going to play with occult histories of the world, I might as well do it right. All this fucking around in the shallow end of the pool is just silly.
Deep breath now. I'm diving for the bottom.
writing
This is a reasonably comprehensive list of my published work, both virtual and physical.
THE MISFIT LIBRARY
I am Nine of Thirteen, one of the members of the Misfit Library, a writing collective which puts out a quarterly journal of our respective work. We are scattered across the globe and determined to change the face of the planet one story at a time. The link above will take you to Misfit Central where you can acquire copies of the journal as well as read exclusive online material.
SYMBOLIC
I wrote a column for OPi8.com's Transmit blogs: journals of the new dark underground. SYMBOLIC tracked the novel I was working on, referencing the process and the research materials which mad up the backbone of the work. In addition, SYMBOLIC busied itself with ruminations and considerations on the nature of language and communication. And a wee bit of mythology. The first 100 entries of SYMBOLIC can be found here on this site as well as at OPi8.com.
LITERARY REPRESENTATION
I am represented by Scribe Agency as my literary agents. Please contact these gentleman if you have any queries about my work.