New story

[kathryn_scannell]

I'm happy to say I've just received the contract for a new story, "A Hidden Battle" which will be part of Torquere's annual Charity Sip collection. The theme this year is Men in Uniform. My story involves a pair of American GI's in WW II who have been assigned temporarily to the Special Operations Executive, who are mounting magical defenses against Hitler's occult operations.

If you've read my current charity story, Heaven's Heretics, this is sort of a prequel. The guys in A Hidden Battle will eventually go home after the war, be unhappy trying to integrate back into civilian life, and join up with some other veterans with talents in a motorcycle club that will grow into Heaven's Heretics in due course.

The new story will be out in September. Sales will go to benefit Out-Serve SDLN (www.sldn.org/), a group which supports GLBT service men and women with legal problems.

Comments

[julian_griffith]

Not in the least - I'm usually all about the Age of Sail. I kept my research really constrained for this one, by my standards. I knew I wanted them to survive a bomber crash in the Pacific, so I started looking at bombers. I found an actual B-24 crash to base mine on, & read the pop history book on it up to the crash itself & the life raft bit, and stopped reading when they were captured by the Japanese because my guys got rescued. Then I did a little bit of web searching to understand the layout of the B-24 with the different crew stations and crash exits. And that, aside from a few side trips into Golden Age comics and how the hell did a Mae West life vest fasten and how waterproof were their watches, was it.

Luckily I won't have to become an expert on WWII for their later stuff either. I'll have the much richer field of midcentury Manhattan, plus gay/subcultural history therein, to play with. (But NOT the Beats. I don't LIKE them and nothing says I have to play with them.)

[kathryn_scannell]

Thank heaven for Google. I'd fortuitously just finished reading the biography of a WW II era occultist (W. G. Gray), and then picked up the war era letters of Dion Fortune (The Magical Battle for Britain) which were basically instructions for coordinated magical workings which she sent out to anyone who expressed an interest during the early years of the war.

Then it was just a matter of getting a few details like an appropriate SOE location, a model of gun, and a motorcycle.

[julian_griffith]

If I spent all my time writing 3-8K shorts, I'd spend a lot less time in research.