Backwoods Barbarian

***BACKWOODS BARBARIAN***

With American Darkness 3 suspended and Poison Tongue Tales 3 not even a possibility, I need something to work on to keep me busy and to keep my creative juices flowing. I originally wanted to do a modern day drama about fat-shaming called “Hulk Logan”, but I couldn’t pre-write it past the fifth chapter. I was hesitant to do the story I’m going to talk about in this blog entry, but then I realized something along the way. Though it could be categorized as fantasy, it’s actually a deconstruction of the violent messes Poison Tongue Tales, Demon Axe, and Occupy Wrestling have been. Yes, this new story will have plenty of fight scenes, but they’re not a means to an end.

I’m talking of course about Backwoods Barbarian, an environmental fantasy I’ve developed all the way to chapter twenty. Yeah, I know, everything has to be about barbarians. All barbarians 24/7. It’s all I ever think about, yada, yada, yada. What good is a barbarian’s rage if he keeps losing his fights and getting himself into trouble? This barbarian can’t win with brute force alone, because there are other fighters out there who are more powerful than him, particularly a dwarf monk named Sabin Rex and a werewolf assassin named Gray Miller (both characters I’ve used in past stories).

Who is this barbarian? Well, he’s not Deus Shadowheart. He’s not Brutus Warcry, either. In fact, if I reveal his name, it might be a tad upsetting to the originator of this character given how the barbarian was once used as a killing machine D&D character. His name is Agrusk Xis and he’s an orc who makes his solitary home in the woods.

He was once owned by an online friend named Timothy. He was also a former character in an attempted dark fantasy novel of mine in 2014 called Fireball Nightmare. I asked Tim if it was okay to use Agrusk in that manner and he said yes. Given Agrusk’s new role as a bumbling brute, Tim could possibly want to think twice about letting me use his character. If he wants me to withdraw Agrusk from Backwoods Barbarian, I’ll gladly do so and swap him out with another character.

If Tim should happen to say yes once again, then Agrusk will be a part of something greater than himself whether he uses brute force or not. As I’ve already established, Agrusk is an orc barbarian who lives in the woods hunting meat and picking fruit. His forest home is about to be chopped down for urban development thanks to the political strategy of Flora City Mayor Annette Cote. Agrusk just wants peace and quiet in his forest home, so he tries to muscle his way into keeping his solitary residence. Needless to say, he’s overpowered and outmanned.

Agrusk meets two environmental protesters along the way: an Amazonian Viking “singer” named Johnna Larson and a bagpipe-playing bard named Julie Piper. Throughout the novel, they teach him that using debate tactics and peaceful protest is more powerful at affecting change than anything he could do with an axe. The whole novel is one big internal battle between Agrusk and his conscience. Can he keep his temper under control or this hothead screw everything up with one moment of impatient rage?

I’ve tooled with the idea of an environmental fantasy before where the plot centered around the government cutting down somebody’s forest home for urban development. I wrote a 2010 D&D-style movie script called Tree Party Nation, where the forest was an eco-terrorist group’s base of operations. As I’ve mentioned earlier, in 2014 I wrote Fireball Nightmare, where the often-recycled Gary-Stu barbarian Deus Shadowheart protected the forest under the command of a living volcano. It’s 2018 and the third time will be the charm. Backwoods Barbarian will be the one that gets this concept right. Watching a “Terrible Writing Advice” You Tube video on environmentalism helped me figure things out.

So that’s it for now. Backwoods Barbarian is officially my next long-term project. It’ll be a departure from what I usually do (barbarism aside), especially considering that I’m shooting for 2,000 words per chapter instead of 1.500 like I normally do. At twenty chapters, that’s an even 40,000 words, which is the generally accepted minimum for a full-length novel. Wish me luck, guys. We’ve got ears, say cheers!

***TELEVISION DIALOGUE OF THE DAY***

JERRY: Hey George, ask that guy what street we’re on.

GEORGE: Excuse me, where are we?

STRANGER: Earth.

JERRY: Hey, we’re on the phone with the police!

-Seinfeld-

The Nightwolf Twins (Electra and Sandra)

What do you get when you combine the hotness of the Bella Twins and the aggressive and barbaric fighting style of the Uso Twins? You get Electra and Sandra, the Nightwolf Twins. In case that reference flew right over your heads like a Frisbee, Electra and Sandra, can kick the shit out of anybody they want and look like a million gold pieces doing it. Wait a second, did I say gold pieces? What kind of fantasy world uses that currency? I pretty much answered my own question there: a fantasy world, particularly of the Dungeons & Dragons variety.

The twins got their start in the Middlesex Campaign I did with my online friends Heather and TJ, the same one that included the human barbarian Brutus Warcry, the half-orc barbarian Agrusk Xis, and the elf wizard Darthania Gaveston. As a reward for protecting the mayor of Middlesex, Brutus and Darthania were given the services of government sanctioned bodyguards to make sure they didn’t have to live in fear of criminal gangs anymore. When one of them was murdered by an MMA fighter (outside the cage), the Nightwolf Twins were his replacement. I’d say they were a huge upgrade, but that would be disrespectful to the memory of Chris Bryan, the one who was killed.

The twins proved to be more than useful and have earned their money in spades. They beat the asses of any gangster who had a price on Brutus and Darthania’s heads and they…well…here’s where their services get a little X-rated and off the clock (I said clock, you perverts). While the two of them were in a bigamous relationship with another government paid bodyguard (an elf paladin named Windham Farrell), the X-rated action wasn’t limited to those three. It got pretty interesting in the Gaveston-Warcry household. They spent more money on cleaning supplies than a subway janitor. I’ll let you all figure out what that means.

Now that you know the shallow meaning of the Nightwolf Twins (fighting and fucking), it’s time to dig a little deeper into their souls. You see, the Nightwolves and the Warcries (two barbaric tribes) didn’t always get along. In fact, they would go to war with each other and murder several warriors. Brutus’ girlfriend at the time, Kai Nightwolf, had her head cut off by two of his fellow tribesmen, Titus and Cabal Warcry. Brutus has since moved off of the Warcry Reservation and into Middlesex out of spite for his fellow tribesmen. Although the Warcries and the Nightwolves eventually made peace with each other, Brutus can’t get Kai out of his mind. Therefore, when Brutus is doing…things to Electra and Sandra, he sees Kai in both of them. It’s kind of a sick consolation, which means Brutus still has issues to work out.

Electra and Sandra had the same issues with their own tribe that Brutus had with the Warcries. The twin sisters didn’t know who to trust at that time, so they moved to Middlesex and got jobs as government protectors. Normally, there would be all of this rhetoric about not being able to trust “big government”. The mayor of Middlesex, Shawn Simms, disproved those insecurities by being the one responsible for bringing peace between the Nightwolves and the Warcries. If Electra and Sandra couldn’t trust their own people, they could find solace within the payroll of Shawn Simms. And the rest, they say, is history.

　

***WRESTLING QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“We have a food fight every Thanksgiving…with canned goods!”

-Jerry Lawler-