I'm kinda looking for someone to give me an assignment (group of research tasks) that I should complete over the winter, and then no hard feelings if one of us gives up before spring. If it's the volunteer that can't commit to spring, please tell me how to make things easier for the person I might beg for help then. I'm used to writing "things happen" stories where I just have some characters encounter a problem and try to solve it. I think I have something bigger. I'm willing to write stretches of "things happen" with the idea that they are unlikely to be published, but somehow I don't know how to write a novel-structure. I had a dream where I was writing a fan-fiction in the Legacy of Kain universe. It started with a random vampire burning down a random church that was just being built. (Wood construction, worse craftsmanship than an Amish barn.) I could make the story work in the LOK universe, but there are plotholes in the original canon that you could drive a truck through, and I'm sick of fanfiction. In my fanfiction, Kain had good reason to stomp out the newest cult of Cthulu. I'm trying to bring it back to how vampires fear the religious symbol because it once caused an apocalypse akin to the fall of Rome. I was thinking of how maybe the Rapture caused society to have a TEOTWAWKI event, and since all Christians above the threshold were gone, and all of the Christians below the threshold converted to Atheism... (Agnostics didn't start appearing again until 15 years after that.) I guess I could mess with the concept of a goddy-thing that doesn't need its followers to know its name, but I like the idea of psychic focus being necessary.
