One of Those Days

...the ones where nothing seems to be firing, particularly: Not in my brain, anyhow. I keep opening up Chapter Thirteen and staring at it, but not much happens. I may have to simply declare this an amnesty day for Work in Progress, go out and spend some time sitting in a coffee shop somewhere, scribbling notes/answering mail/cleaning out my bag/reading a good book (like Gary Braunbeck's latest, Far Dark Fields, for example). Doesn't help that I eventually have to go over and pick up Cal, run him back here by 3:30 PM, and do the second official OT meeting, either...

Still: As per yesterday, I've been thinking about females, and that's useful--because while yes, Tongues and Rope are sadly good chick role-model free, there are potentially quite a bunch of long(ish) projects I already have organized around characters who happen to be women, even aside from stuff like Blood from the Air (both main characters are women, most important relationships are between children and mothers) or Last Things (both main characters are women, as are several subsidiary characters). These are--

A) The two other novellas involving Samaire and Dionne Cornish: "Kryptonite", from Dionne's POV, and "Montezuma Was A Man Of Faith", from Samaire's. They definitely come with extra A-Cat Chatwin stuff attached, and I think if you add "Crossing the River" in on top, they'd all three make a pretty cool small novel. (Three female main characters, two "heroic", one anti-heroic.)

B) Three more Five Family Coven novellas: "Helpless", in which Carra Devize helps rescue Galit from the Dourvale brugh; "History's Crust", in which we discover the ancient enmity between Glauce Lady Druir and Euwphaim Glouwer; "Under These Rocks and Stones", in which that enmity is finally expiated. Stick all extant Five Family Coven material together and, again, you get a pretty good mini-novel.

C) Plus, thrown in on top: I've been thinking about writing something from Sister Blandina of the Ordo Sorores Perpetuales' POV for quite some time now. Call it "Furious Angels". It would revolve around how she becomes war-leader of the OSP, after Mother Eulalia is taken out of the equation. Definitely the same universe, but does it really qualify for Five Family status?

D) And finally, there's The Dumb Supper, a noir with lots of strong females and only a marginal supernatural element--or maybe a bit more of one than I'd originally thought, because the more I consider it, the more it reminds me of Tom Piccarilli's Headstone City, which plays like The Sopranos crossed with Angel Heart. Our main character is a woman--Carmen Durbin, too-brainy ex-goomarr to a dead mobster, who's parlayed her inheritance into a small "consulting" business which allows/enables her to do P.I.-without-a-license work on the side, because the neighborhood still regards her as someone qualified to intercede on their behalf with the people she used to "work" for. As in Brick, Carmen's main powers would be memory, out-thinking, honesty and the ability to take a beating without caving (though she'd prefer not to); I'd like to steer away from the femme fatale trope, instead setting up a series of hommes fatales for her to interact with. Also, I recently realized that the most exciting non-sexual relationship she could have would probably be with her scary "sister-in-law", the dead mobster's actual widow: Stella "la Strega" Volpe, who trades on people thinking she's a witch (and even if she isn't, she certainly does seem to be able to both know stuff you wouldn't think she could and kill long-distance, so who knows?).

So, yeah: Chicks a'plenty on the horizon. All I have to do is get through my two-part frontier dickfest, and I'm laughin'.