Follow me to the reckoning of all things.

I've got Mastema on the mind. This is an ongoing thing: I've been semi-obsessed with her story since high school, and have written her in short stories, films scripts, TV scripts, and now in a potential comic book.

Over the course of all this I've written several different versions of her. All of them are hot and vicious and snarky; this is immutable. Beyond that, though...I reread the opening of the film script that I wrote a while ago and was struck by how much more human she was.


WIDE ON the kitchen. It was porn set, but now it looks like a horror film. Dead bodies lie everywhere, including the SLUTTY WAITRESS, the DIRECTOR, and the CAMERAMAN. It's a grotesque mess of camera equipment, nudity, broken limbs, and blood.

ANGLE ON Paul. His own chest is stabbed to bits. He stares.

PAUL
(whimpering)
Oh my God...

By now Mastema's got a neat little row of plastic forks in front of her. She looks up at Paul.

MASTEMA
No. No God yet. I need you here.

PAUL
Who are you?

MASTEMA
My name is Mastema.

PAUL
What happened?

MASTEMA
You died. More to the point, you were murdered. I brought you back.

PAUL
How?

MASTEMA
Magic.

PAUL
Really?

MASTEMA
No, not really. I just don't feel like explaining it to you. Did you see who killed you?

Paul's not listening; he's staring at the holes in his chest. Mastema leans forward and SNAPS her fingers at him. Paul jumps.

MASTEMA (CONT'D)
Paul. Focus.

PAUL
How do you know my name?

MASTEMA
Magic.
(off his look, irritated)
No, not really. I went through your wallet while you were dead. Who killed you?

Okay, so not a WHOLE lot more human - but she has moments of such vulnerability in the movie version. Basically she's this immortal spirit who's been forced to take human form in order to escape a twisted science experiment, aka Heaven. In becoming human, tho, she has to contend with pesky things like pain and hunger and fear and being stupidly, achingly in love with someone who (at the time the script starts) hates her guts. She looks down on human beings a lot for their many flaws, but at the end of the day she's just as messed up as everyone else.

TV-Mastema was a lot harder, a lot meaner. She had to be: I'd set up a typical TV cast of secondary characters around her (a single main lead would never work in the 14-hour workdays of television), and populated it with similarly cutthroat, duplicitous demons. She was swimming with the sharks, and she had to have more teeth than anyone else around. It was kind of a pointless viciousness, tho: she was very much at the beck and call of the angelic host.

The comic-Mastema that I've written so far is a lot colder than movie-Mastema, and a lot more calculating than TV-Mastema. She has an endgame and she's more than willing to sacrifice other people, including those closest to her, in order to further her goals. And yeah, that ultimate goal is a doozy and worth the sacrifice, but I don't know how much readers are willing to stick with that sort of character...particularly, I have to say, that sort of female character. Which was kind of my motivation for writing her that way, but I have to also be realistic about my audience, here. Walk that fine line and all.

The long and the short of it is: I think I'm gonna try rewriting the Mastema comic to reflect more of the movie-Mastema characterizations. It means scrapping a lot of work, but I think it's for the best - and hey, that means I won't be abandoning the whole movie script that I wrote.