Episode #185: A Unique Culture Always Enriches The Story {1}

Somebody decided to be a bit cheeky and left behind a very grimy glove with a cheerful demeanor on the rusted out chain link fence post the other day. Kind of reminds me of the lyric, "You say goodbye, but I say hello!"

I thought for the next few posts that I would do a deep dive on what I had chosen to use as background character info and the like, for my trilogy project Hot Mess. I figure that this would be a great way for you the reader to acquire a more fuller and detailed picture on what I write and why I decided to take the trails less traveled to begin with.

For today's post, the topic of choice is background. Specifically, the personal background for which all of my characters were created from. In this post, I'm going to only describe the basics, as I want to save some of the odder details about each one for subsequent posts.

As most of you probably do not know, I am fond of creating businesses/corporations out of different kinds of concepts/cultures. I first became enamored of this idea after watching the movie, "Defending Your Life". I found the concept of the afterlife being like a judicial system very intriguing, so I decided to employ this concept to my stories. This has been going on sporadically for about a decade, and so far I have applied this idea of making concepts/cultures as conglomerates quite satisfying {one of my slushies features Heaven, Hell & Purgatory as large mega-conglomerates}.

With that being said, in this story, I decided to turn one of the cultures that I use as background info for two of my MCs, the Aztecs, into a large stable city-state conglomerate (think of the Italian city-states of the Renaissance era). Complete with all of the usual trappings associated with the Aztecs, I also added to the mix a debt collection business, which is run much like a bail bondsman's business, to be their primary source of income.

For another two of my MCs, I shifted gears just a little by going further south into the Americas, and chose the Incans to be their particular base of operations, as well as their ethnicity. Did quite a bit of research into the culture, so that the characters would be as realistic as I could write them, which included some customs, language and mythology, among others.

For a different set of two MCs, I decided to take a tiny shot at the concept of world building. I've read about it before, but never really had the need or desire to create one, since up until I started writing this trilogy, my stories never required one, as all of my previous stories took place on good old planet Earth. The basic idea was that some kind of palatial residence/kingdom was needed, since those two characters are privately and publicly called "My/Our Queen". The one serious plot twist that I applied to this concept, because you know that's how I roll, was to make this modern/misogynistic monarchy strictly matriarchal. This concept, along with a multitude of tangents, will be expanded upon in future posts.

Finally, the last concept that I decided to have some fun with in this trilogy, is genetics. One of MCs is a mother to the other. Sounds simple, right? How about we throw into the mix that the mother is actually the originator of the genealogical line and that her daughter is the actual end of the line? How about we throw in anywhere from a half to a full millennia into the mix as a beginning and end? I'm sure you're asking the screen, how does that fit? Well, the mother is a stereotypical Scandinavian, yet the daughter either originates from the Iberian peninsula or from the Americas, which can feature people who are not Caucasian.

The few remaining MCs and SCs (I think maybe six in total) origin base is good old U.S. of A., with a breakdown being the military and urban decay. So the only thing of note to elaborate on is that I did a tiny bit of research on the military and had some general knowledge of urban decay. The urban decay was a little easier to deal with, simply because we've all dealt with it in one form or another, with my case being that I worked in the south end of the city capital for a number or years (like almost 20), so I had a good grasp of the bad and the fugly.

That about covers the main background choices for about all of my character origins, save for the horses and some other peripheral secondaries. Next week's post will touch upon a few sensitive topics that may or may not offend you, depending on your personal view points.

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