Notes for Chapter Eight

This has been an intensely eventful week, and as a result, these notes are going to be a little bit short. My friend Dawson -- whom Blood Engines is dedicated to -- has been in town visiting, so the week has involved a lot more socializing than writing. The day job was pretty rough this week, too, with lots of running flat-out toward our deadline next week. I'm left here on Sunday feeling a bit wrung-out, but I'll cast my mind back, back to those faraway days of less than a week ago when I wrote this chapter...

Thanks to all the people following me on twitter (where I tweet as timpratt, by the way, if you're interested in that sort of thing) who helped me out with dirty euphemisms for sex to aid in Artie's opening monologue. I wound up cutting that a bit short, because this chapter was already on the long side, and I didn't think the chapter ultimately benefited from another 200 words of filthy metaphors.

The festival of the iron phallus is better known as Kanamara Matsuri, and it's pretty interesting, with an origin story that involves vagina dentata and demon-destroying dildos of steel. (Which would, I submit, be a good name for a band.)

This chapter has foreshadowing. I hope you don't notice the foreshadowing I'm talking about -- if you do, it was too damn blatant. But I tried to quietly plant some emotional landmines that will later explode with cataclysmic results. I hope.

Back to Chapter 8