Jackalopes chapter 13

Despite this being an epic tale of fighting for souls lost in the underworld I also want to capture the everyday life of being a jackalope. The scene in one of my old blogposts detailing Jane´s little look into the kitchen of a pylon has already been mentioned. In both Harry Potter and Lord of the Ring we get to see, in between adventuring, the everyday life (such as it is) of our heroes. In The Lord of the Rings it is mainly trudging through dreary landscapes and recite poetry and in Harry Potter it is mostly about surviving bullies, casual racism, really unsafe lodgings and teachers who do not have to show any credentials whatsoever.

In jackalopes everyday life is mainly taken up with studying guarding and getting rid of dangerous creatures. The studying is somewhat based on my own workplace experience. I have the kind of job that you never really fully learn, you always have to stay curious! It is also important to use “dull” moments to bring forth the characters personalities by showing their reactions to the monotony. After a dangerous mission Jane feels simple guard duty to be quite calming, but after a week or so she begins to find it boring and so wanders of and stumbles into some kind of forbidden secret or conversation and finds out new things, like heroes (and heroines) are wont to do.

I want the first jackalope book to be along string of scenes that shows us all aspects of “life” in the underworld while still giving an overarching story. As for cleaning, the underworld is infested with parasites, beside the demons that eat the soul of the dead. One of them are the cirripedias. In one of my favourite scenes Jane and her two mentors cleans the wall of a pylon from an infestation of these large barnacle-like creatures. Jane is thought how to remove them alive and store up their juices. These are later send to the weapon-developer of the underworld (she has a short but sweet scene so I won´t spoil more here). Jane later gets a weapon of her own. It is the fabled Glambling, the pimped out sword of the west!

Link chapter 13:

http://www.tymorthetrickster.com/Jchapter13.html