Don’t Miss Posts.  This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing.  Just look at the posts before or after this one.

MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept.  As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance.  This year, I’ve been trying to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program.  While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, there are advantages to doing it the older way.  There’s a lot less control of where and how the text is placed, and what it looks like.  Surprised I’ve kept up the effort this long; looks like I’m gonna go all the way with it.  Although I did run out patience for getting accent marks into my name properly on this one.  I’m just gonna finish it out like this out of compulsion.

MONSTER HEARTS DAY TWELVE:  PARASITE

TITLE:  DAMNED MINNEAPOLIS

CHARACTERS:  Cleavon White: an Early ’90s Funk Musician, Komla Abasom: a Vampire.

PREMISE:  Parasite is the vampire category and I tend to not do straightforward vamp stories.  Early results in seeking a cover for this one yielded nothing but white people, and per Billy Martin’s most recent word on race in gay vampires, I banged on this one until they were black.  Now, to come up with a story that justifies the image, and is at all interesting.  Let’s see…

In the last days of Minneapolis funk, a drummer and keyboardist named Cleavon was part of the never-ending scene rotation, trying to form his own bands or dropping in on somebody else’s thing, and nothing was sticking.  The crossover with hip-hop was promising, but rappers could find success without the effort of a real instrumentalist behind them, and those projects also fell flat.

Mysterious businessman Komla said, “It’s all who you know,” Cleavon said, “I know,” and Komla said, “Get to know me.”  Soon he was able to get studio gigs for cool rappers, and reel in some dollars.  But music success wasn’t the only thing Komla had to teach.

THE HOOK:  This rap villain is here to make a killin’.  Komla liked repping rappers because their dangerous lifestyle added life insurance payouts to his revenue – and because nobody would question why the blood kept flowing.  But more sophisticated music moved what was left of his ancient soul, so he took Cleavon under his bat wing.  How far are you willing to go, funk man?

–