Progress

As far as the fiction goes, I spent the past week finishing up a few things in my 'East Texas Golem Gal' story. I had one plot point that stuck briefly - why didn't the golem turn on the dude who reanimated her? (as usual, the protag is a transplanted Yankee Italian newspaper editor - who'd a thunk it?) but I finessed that one (The secret word, as Groucho Marx used to say, is "Marrano".)

There are a number of times I end us only satisfied as opposed to enthusiastic when I finish a story, but I actually really like this one. I think it's a lot of fun. Of course, that means nothing as far as marketability is concerned.

Meanwhile, I started some research on my next story, an AH about what would have happened if early pagan Viking explorers established a permanent settlement in the New World - not in Vinland, but in the interior. This is a takeoff on the legend of Sanguenay in Quebec. The story will be called "The Sanguine Empire".

I was happy to learn that two crucial plot elements come together - the city of Sanquenay in Quebec, as well as the instance in the 1970s when a mud flow in a previously undetected unstable soil layer wiped off a community on the outskirts of that same city.

That natural disaster is how I would explain why - in our timeline - the Viking empire failed to survive, and only remained as a legend by the time Cartier explored the St. Lawrence region.

I don't know if it is too hokey to survive to the final version, but I have a nice "set piece" where our New York harbor - rather than the Statue of Liberty - has a statue of Thor, hammer raised on high (with 'lightning' beacon) - that was extracted from the people of Francia as tribute after they were conquered by the Norse kingdom as it crossed the Atlantic and subjugated the Old World.