Camp NaNo Day 16: Bane of the Black Spork

Tomorrow is Norwescon 2014, and the guest of honor will be Michael Moorcock.  I was going to dig out one of my Elric books and read it -- but apparently I don't own any of them.  This is odd because I know I owned all six of the original DAW books when I was young, and I have virtually never gotten rid of any books I've bought, but I couldn't say when the last time was that I laid eyes on these particular books.  They may well have been missing from my collection for more than 20 years, or maybe I lost them two months ago when I moved.  No idea.

So anyway, I decided to write a Grandpa Anarchy story that played on the idea of the famous albino antihero.  I did some research, and I actually wound up downloading a few songs by Cirith Ungol, a metal band from  the early 80's that liked using Michael Whelan's covers for the DAW publications of the Elric books for their own album covers -- which is cool, the cover for Stormbringer is an awesome picture, a classic image of sword and sorcery art, and probably the reason I ever picked up a Michael Moorcock book in the first place.

I created a playlist called Bane of the Black Sword, which includes three Cirith Ungol songs (including "King of the Dead" which is the title of one of the Wheland paintings, and also two of at least three Blind Guardian songs about Elric, and some other Tolkien-inspired fantasy songs and some similar stuff that I like.

And I wrote my story -- The Bane of the Black Spork, (because:  spork) which came in at 1,070 words.  This was a fun one, I had the plot almost immediately.  My villain Death Medal is just very clearly a huge, huge fan of Elric and of all the heavy metal tie-ins.  I had to change the names and concept a bit to protect myself from directly ripping off Mr. Moorcock, but Alaric, culinary chef-king of Dragon Isle with his demonic spork Stormbroiler should not be hard to spot the influence on.  I had fun with all of the bands that have written about him or used his image for their covers too.

I'm a day behind since I still haven't finished Grandpa Anarchy the Musical Act Two.