Prep Work

Me: I need, like, a book to keep this all in.

Beth: So, you need something like a bible?

Me: Yeah, I need a world bible. Look at all this paperwork I have.

Beth: For two books, you have three sheets of paper. Oh, honey.

Me: Don’t ‘oh, honey’ me, like I’m being cute or something!

Dorian: *drops a book into my lap* That one is Beth’s bible for a world she dabbled in one time.

Beth: my favourite world has three books and multitudes of sheets for every time I jotted down random information. That doesn’t even include maps, since the face of the world changes so much.

Me: You mean, this is a thing?

Beth: Yes, it’s a thing. Dorian said you’re planning a masquerade, I’m guessing that’s for a book, since I didn’t receive an invitation?

Dorian and I went to Beth’s to help her set up her desk  While there I continued doing some work, filling out some odds and ends that I might never use in the story itself, but will probably mention at some point. Kind of need that information available, rather than searching for it in the middle of a scene and forgetting where I was, let alone where to find the information.

I can start writing around 2PM today. Why such an odd time? I don’t know, ask Dorian. That’s also about the time that my office gets finished, so that could have something to do with it.

He has promised me alcohol. Something I’ve not had in several weeks and have been craving all this week. Vacation and birthday are drink occasions.

Except when you get real depressed around your birthday and the last time you drank on the day, you ended up bawling your eyes out and drunk dialling your ex while sitting beside your current boyfriend.

Thankfully I had warned Dorian ahead of time, though he didn’t believe me until he had to take the phone from me and put me in bed.

All last night I was planning a masquerade. I’m getting pretty close to done, which is fantastic. The colour theme is white and gold, with trimmings of silver. I was going to go perverted with the servers, but I’ve decided to dress them all in white with Moretta masks.

A string quartet, canapes for food. White and red wine to drink, though the Alphas won’t necessarily be participating in the wine. There will be drugs and other alcohols available because it is an excess, kind of party thing going on. There’ll also be an after party which will probably degrade into an orgy.

Alphas are very sexualized beings. The way they claim things is to come on them, especially people. Beats urination, and apparently there’s this belief that if it stays still long enough for you to come on it, it must have submitted to your will.

Which gets really… tricky… when the females are born because they can’t exactly claim things like that.

I’ve now got the male and female pronouns written up, and the designations for last names. The Alphas take on a bit of a tradition that I heard the Welsh (maybe?) once used, altered of course. Where their ‘last name’ is their father’s (or mothers in the case of female alphas giving birth) with the designations Ap/Ep, Ad/Ed, Ab/Eb, Ag/Eg depending on their status.

Their companions also have the Ip, Id, Ig, Ib pronouns, but are attached to their alphas. There are even special titles for random alphas, though the only one that’s really still in use widely is ‘Da’ which is an alpha’s way of bowing to a stronger alpha and insinuating the alpha is his father, but not necessarily so. Not using the term is an invitation to a challenge.

And if challenged, one who is supposed to be given the title of Da will… you guessed it, come on the offender.

Fathers and sons never have this problem. If the son stops using Da, the father will put him in his place, but if the son wins typically the father is killed in the process. Sons were once forced out of the home and only returned to claim the territory after their fathers died but in modern times it was altered.

The research going into D.o.t.A is a lot different than what went into Contracted.

For Contracted, I did research some BDSM. Sure I participate, but I’m not an expert and wouldn’t claim that the story is perfectly researched, but I like how it’s turned out. For D.o.t.A. the research has mainly been for masquerade balls. The rest has been set up because this is a whole new world.

It might count as urban fantasy, considering it is in a similar world to ours but different all the same. Contracted was the same world, just about two hundred years in the future. So I could literally write using whatever bits I wanted to and any flaws in the law system, etc, could just be because it’s a new era.

Though, D.o.t.A. is a new era as well.

I ramble about my worlds sometimes. Especially when I can’t write them right at that moment.