The origins of Junie Jamieson's story aren't hard to figure out if you know anything about mainstream bondage imagery. WAAAAAY before there was porn, guys were getting very into Lois Lane's habit of constantly getting tied to chairs (mostly) by gangsters, necessitating her rescue by Superman, in both the comics and the ancient TV series.
The snoopy reporter who has to get put on ice is a very old trope and if I wanted to use it, I had to figure out ways to make it new. It was easy, though. I just updated it to modern times, and had some fun with the trope while I was at it.
For example, snoopy reporters in the old days were just tied to chairs because that's what you did with snoopy reporters. You certainly didn't shoot them! But I had the gangsters in my story all ready to kill Junie out of hand for eavesdropping on them. The only reason she gets tied to a chair is that a gangster who's doing a little background investigating on her via a laptop discovers her blog and when he tells the boss she's a socialist atheist progressive -- in other words, a looney lefty -- the crime boss decides that killing her is not necessary because no one with any power is apt to give any credibility to her at all. No one will believe her, in short. Especially since her only publication outlet is her blog, which is, as the gangster describes it, "read only by three cows in a cornfield."
Yes, tropes are fun. Also, in the comics and TV shows and the old movies, the snoopy reporter is always rescued/escapes before the Worst can happen. Well, not in my story. The worst happens, and it happens a LOT before she gets away. I mean, a lot a lot. What's more, she ... kinda likes it. A lot.
But that's not where the fun ends. The no-good that the crime boss is up to involves an operation in which he uses a bunch of phony consultants to absorb every penny of the tax money that has been designated to build a network of bike paths in Century City. All the money goes into "consultants" who write papers, but not a foot of bike path ever gets built.
It might seem outrageous, but of course it's not: it's already being done, and on a much grander scale than my dinky urban bike path scam. California has a high-speed bullet train project from LA to San Francisco that has absorbed $10 billion in taxpayer money, and practically nothing has been, um ... built. All the money has gone to consultants. California even hired consultants to oversee the consultants, then commissioned a study on why nothing was happening, one conclusion of which was, California needed to stop hiring consultants to watch consultants ("who might not have the best interests of the state in mind") and hire people who worked directly for the state instead.
Ya don't say, Einstein?
The whole thing is so outrageous that it makes my crime boss' bike path scheme seem penny-ante, though the crime boss thinks he's hot stuff. As he says, "I didn't get to be the crime lord of Century City by actually building stuff when I'm paid to build stuff!"
Yes, writing has its pleasures.
