I’m so inspired by my birthday week of conventions – Flashback Weekend last week, seeing the awesome Rose McGowan, and then this weekend FanExpo, the first day of which I just got back from – that I came up with an idea for The Downward Spiral, part 2 of the Sickie Souse Quartet. In the sequel Warren is somehow involved with this sordid disgusting sex-addict director loosely based on a real Hollywood director who millions of people have heard of. This director is a virulent misogynist who has his minions sabotage movies so that he will be called in to “save” them by re-editing them, leaving out scenes where women are portrayed sympathetically and rewriting endings around his own pathologically disgusting idea of male bonding. So there’s a move based on what happened with Aliens 3, where they killed Newt. There’s a young female character that everyone in America loves, just like Newt, and then this freak director directs his minion Warren to sabotage it, and he comes in and kills her and humiliate the lead character, and the lead actress by making the whole thing an exercise in sexual horror like Aliens 3 or The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. The whole novel is to examine how the entertainment business in the 90s became a breeding ground for disgusting sex and drug addicts who don’t care about audiences at all.

Also, I’m wondering who Warren really is. I may switch up and make Derek the slimiest villain of The ArtIC Circle. Maybe Warren will be the evil adult director, who has this ranch where he has these sex parties where he directs “Warrens”, which are orgies of naked gay men forced together into small spaces, simulating the hellish paintings of M.C. Escher.

But the new idea I got tonight is that a major piece of it is a story based on the travesty of Aliens 3, and whether the friend is Derek or Warren he somehow involves the Sickies in it, and it’s a very dark battle with a sad ending like The Empire Strikes Back.