Allow me to introduce myself...
I am the god-Prince Django-Ra. To my face, you should call me "Your Highness" or "Sir". Behind my back, I presume you will call me "Django" pronounced "Jan-GO"... The D- of Royal names is silent.
So, little Earthling, you are cautiously curious about me.
Know, then, that I am exceptionally gifted and exceedingly dangerous. I can read or wipe minds with ridiculous ease, just as I am reading yours. I play god-level chess, and am one of the most formidable Duplicate Bridge players in all the galaxies. Certainly I cheat. A god-Prince must be seen to win!
What's that? Ah, yes! You may well wonder whether or not I can read the mind of my favorite great niece, Electra-Djerroldina, the Volnoths' queen. She wears the most perplexing… Hah! but I will not tell you.
As you see, I enjoy excellent health –yes, sexual vigor, also—despite my advanced years. In my day, I was a superb star-fighter pilot with many kills to my credit... and to my discredit. Friendly fire is such a useful expression, isn't it?
Of course I have killed friends. And family. And lovers. We all do. It is inevitable. The Djinn bloodline is almost extinct. There are desperately few full Djinn females left for us to fight over. Those that there are, are taken. Alas! Which leaves lesser beings such as yourself, whose innards are not strong enough to endure multiple impregnations by a Great Djinn.
You are skeptical! Consider my great-nephew, the Crown Prince Tarrant-Arragon. He searched the galaxies for gestates. Yes, gestates. In our World, we measure time by the female cycle, and by the duration of a Royal pregnancy. His new Mate –or "wife"—is half-Earthling. He is beside himself with worry that she may not survive the birth of his heir.
Have I confused you? Every book has a genealogical table either in the front or at the back. Or visit the official family tree at http://www.rowenacherry.com/familytree It is…ah, economical with the truth. My own bastards, for instance, are not attributed to me.
Why do I do… what I do? I daresay I have bad Djinn genes. I enjoyed a deeply disturbing childhood. My twin brother died in what you would call his crib. I had nothing to do with his demise. It would have done me no good to expedite his departure from this life. We had vigorous, older half-brothers who were Heir Apparent and second in line to the Imperial throne, and it was beyond my strength and powers to remove them from my path.
Indeed, I was obliged to feign an interest in lesser-being members of my own sex in order to bask in the variable star-shine of my big brothers' tolerance. As long as they thought me "peculiar", they did not see me as a threat. Eventually, as you see, I...ah... outlived them.
Their untimely deaths brought me no particular joy. I did not get what I've always wanted.
What's that? I want to experience the Great Djinn rut rage. Earthling, do you understand what the rut-rage is? It is a drive, a sexual madness, a mating frenzy. Pure Great Djinn males, such as myself, have saturniid glands that can smell a full-Djinn female who is approaching oestrus from as many as fifty of your miles away. We then fixate upon that "scent love" sight unseen, and become obsessed with her.
Did I once have a "scent love"? Yes, but I never was in a position to claim her. My muscular half-brothers had Helispeta, consecutively. I, alas, would have gladly stood in line but Djohn Kronos and Devoron-Vitan made war over her, and Helispeta took sanctuary on your planet, Earth, beyond my reach. Not that she ever knew of my passion.
After she was lost to me, I tried to experience the rut-rage with others, even with my nephew's Empress, Tarragonia-Marietta, but met only with frustration. You may read my great nephew's love story, Forced Mate, and also Insufficient Mating Material for a less subtle view of my exploits.
Hmmmm. I believe I smell heightened excitement. My foolish, frivolous great-niece Martia-Djulia's forced Mating Ceremony must be about to begin. You will excuse me....
*****
One half of all royalties earned by sales of Cat O' Nine Tales are donated to Alley Cat.org. This tradesize book, is a perfect Christmas gift for that cat lover you know, and you will be helping a worthy cause when you give a copy.
So an interesting thing happened last night at The Haunt... We were having a lovely chat and celebrating the holiday when I started an email and--as is common--I got completely distracted by something, but my fingers kept going. Has that ever happened to you? You're still typing and you have an idea of what you want to say, but you end up typing a word you here on TV or in a song.
By Brenna Lyons
Every author comes to this moment eventually. The moment in question is the moment when you realize that truth really is stranger than fiction.
When you write an incredibly complex and seemingly nonsensical series of choices, made by a character or group of characters, that lead to an odd end...and you're not writing some sort of parody, you're told it's too outrageous, and no one will believe it. But, when someone really does makes that series of nonsensical, complex choices, it's fact...and while readers of the news reports still can't believe it happened, the facts are there, and it did.
How is an author to win, in such a situation? We get slammed for writing characters that are TSTL (too stupid to live), but people like that really exist. We get slammed for writing characters who are too two-dimensionally simple-minded and/or petty, but they exist. We get slammed for writing characters who are wholly evil and just get off on making other people miserable, but that's your basic emotional vampire in the flesh.
This is an almost comical hole in the idea of book realism vs. book fantasy world. Even books set in the "real contemporary world" and billed as being "non-fantasical" have elements of fantasy to them. By insisting that authors not write people as screwed up as they really are, we often create a fantastical world, even in books that aren't supposed to be fantasy.
Anyone who says a character can't be that stupid needs to read the military accident reports I used to get. Better yet, read the
Now, I'll be the first to admit that characters like these aren't your typical hero/heroine material, unless you want to write the stereotypical hapless idiot hero. But, that doesn't mean that these characters are somehow unreal. In all actuality, an entire world full of competent, intelligent, nice people is about as unreal as you can get.
Oh yes...I've written that world, come to think of it...
