The Delusion Wing

'The Delusion Wing' is the title of the novel I've been writing on and off since 2008 and looking back it doesn't look like that I've done a lot for 2 years work. I've got a first draft of 50,000 words and it is just plain awful. I can't even bare to think of showing another person. Some might argue, "you may think it's bad because you wrote it, but everybody else might actually like it", but really, believe me when I tell you it's a pile of rubbish. But that's a good thing, right? There's good ideas in there and plenty of scenes for me to salvage and repair and it gives me the materials to work with. I've done that for 10 chapters (chapter 10 is draft 2, chapter 1 is draft 7). Not all of it can be salvaged, of course, I mean, scenes after chapter 8 are pretty awful and I don't even know what I was thinking with some of them.

The story is about a young man (who in the original draft was female…originally I felt that a female character would work better, but it changed once I rethought what I was doing) who is living in a totalitarian society, now a theocratic one. Because of the oppressive powers at work, such things as culture, emotions and tradition are all repressed and repression is never a good thing for your mental health, so a part of the story is about his mental health as well as his idealism in trying to 'tear down the establishment', he's young, so he's naïve…but then so am I, which is why in the first draft it became so easy for him to do so! I mean, all it took was for him to produce flyers and have everyone join his ranks and fight for their rights (to paaaaartaay), but no, that's not how the world works. Of course, me being me, did a Hamlet and killed all of the characters in the end…it doesn't matter if I spoil draft 1, you'll never read it. But if you think about it, a great massive oppressor with the amazing ability to influence people to conform to some kind of pre-defined normality is able to be undermined by pirate press? If I wanted to, I could probably have made it believable, but I wasn't really feeling convinced as I was reading it.

For the redrafting I have had to completely rethink everything. I've still got the totalitarianism, but it's more in line with a short story I wrote, in fact, I've taken the antagonist straight from that and developed him further, he's called, "The Evangelist" and he's not a pleasant fellow. All the main character knows is that he's the religious figure at the head of the theocracy he lives in and is responsible for a lot of pain and suffering. The message behind the short story was pretty much, "if we let fundamentalist religion have its way, then we're looking at the worst in humanity's nature", I've researched into the darker side of religion for it and have looked at what practises are kept today and what many bigots in the world today quote to support their views (not just those committed by some Muslims, but Christians too, for example, churches in Nigeria who burn so-called witches because they believe it's what God asks in the bible), but also I have taken note of the accumulative nature of religions that have invaded other cultures, so whilst I've gone for an Abrahamic religion, you'll notice some pagan imagery, like the hammer beneath the words, "The Great All-father" written in Norse.

I don't want to misrepresent any religious beliefs, as there are many moral interpretations of the world religions and I don't think it'd be fair on believers of said interpretations, so in coming up with my new twist, I've refrained from naming a specific religion for the theocracy, whilst it is a spin-off of the 3 Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, mainly because they're relatable and there are dark teachings in all of their religious texts, making the 'new' religion more believable. The fictional religion assumes that Christianity and Islam didn't grow to the size they are today (2bill Christians, 1.5bill Muslims) because of the prevalent pagan cultures refusing to change their ways, so the world its set in is shaped very differently. So, in its place, a new religion attempts to rise in power in a Romanic fashion with the rise of Marces the Evangelist (the first of many) who claims to have a special relationship with God.

The story is set in the equivalent of the 1930s with the current Evangelist (Arxus III) having taken over the last corner of Europe, the corner being Iceland, which is where the story starts. The naïve protagonist, Saefinn Frimannsson thinks he can free the minds of his fellow Icelanders (who a generation before were ready to fight The Evangelist to their graves) by interrupting a radio broadcast with news that everybody has been lied to and it lands him in prison to be 'rehabilitated', which is the beginning of his journey to take back all that he and his people have lost and his path into mental instability, with strange visions, nightmares and ghosts, all originating from what The Evangelist's men did when he was a child to turn him into a believer and for him to conform with society's standards.

However, there's still a lot to be done and this is only an introduction of what I'm writing, as the novel develops, so will this blog. A preview will be available when chapter one is in a fit state to be read…fingers crossed, that'll be soon, there's already 7 drafts of it for goodness sakes.

Thank you,

The Little Norse Prince