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I wrote the Bashu King in two months! Unbelievable I know but it just flowed. I believed and had a clear idea in what I was writing. I take the Ray Bradbury approach to writing. He said that he was just as suprised about what happened in chapter 2 as the reader. That's how I write.
I originally came up with the idea of a serial killer who kills serial killers, about a year ago. I guess it was time. I began to read old mythology and found the story of Bellerophon and the Chimera, a beast that would descend on Lycia, in ancient Greece, at night and steal the women and children, leaving their bones amongst the hills. It was then that I realized that this could very well be talking about serial killers of their day and that the myth could actually be talking about a historical situation. So I started to do research on other mythologies. In China the flesh eating monster was the Taotie. And in almost every culture there was a myth about flesh eaters. Thats when I began to get the idea that those kind of people have been around for a very long time. Thats when I developed Allen and his growth as a hunter, in the alias of Bellerophon. I drew on the traditions of several cultures. Such as the mask of Barong. Barong is the protector of Bali and he always fights Rongda the evil demoness. And I selected Kali for obvious reasons. But, then I created Master Yang, who trains Allen in the art of hunting them. He teaches him how to project out of his body into "projection world" a dimension very close to our own. Master Yang is an old soul who has been hunting them as well. But there is a long line of hunters from way back, as Allen discovers.
The Bashu King is a tyranical organizer of the serial killers. He calls them the Bashu. He is making moves to take over LA, first by infiltrating the police department then other positions of authority.(Saddam Hussein is a Bashu, a tyrant who had his own personal killing field. He killed hid first person when he nine, went home immediately, out the gun under his bed and went to sleep. He had satisfied his need to kill. Hilter was the same, look around their everywhere, Darfur! What in our species could produce such brutality except them, the serial killers, who come to positions of power! They are the embodiement of the aggressive instincts of humanity) and that's what the Bashu King wants is to have his own personal killing field.
I guess one of the things I enjoyed about this was the potential history involved. I follow some of the Taoist philosophy in that for every Yin there is a Yang. Throughout real human history one can find these things being refered to. Whose to say the Minotaur is not a serial killer. What if there was a world war going on around us between the Hunters and the serial killers? And what if it were world wide and it's history deep. Fact, in the US 800,000 people go missing each year, some want to be missing but what happened to the others. In LA county 25,000 people go missing. In China there has been a resurgence of serial killings for the first time in a long time. The fact that there are those of our species that pray on their own and that there is an organized effort to fight them, is the broad premise of The Bashu King. Read it and let me know. |
