Happy St. Stephen's Day. Whoever that is.

Read on to find out!

It's St. Stephen's Day here in Ireland. So happy him day I guess. Truthfully, I only know this day as when me and friends would REALLY drink ourselves silly. Christmas Day was a day for family and presents and all that fun stuff. The day after was when you would meet your friends in the pub as early as possible and walk out of nightclub as late as possible, on your way to a house party where more drink could be had.

Nowadays, specifically this year, I spend it editing an episode of the Tyrants In Training podcast, finishing the next genre short - WHODUNIT - and writing this blog.

Here is the links for the Tyrants In Training podcast. The latest episode features my fiancée Celine creating a funko pop figure loving country that goes to war with Australia over good shopping center trolley etiquette, and almost cancelling Christmas.

Spotify Link Here

Podbean Link Here

As I am curious myself, I googled St. Stephen to find out why he has a day where a younger me used to drink quite a lot. I should also point out this is called Boxing Day elsewhere but I haven't watched the sport in a long time. St. Stephen is known as the first martyr of Christianity. He angered members of various synagogues by his teachings, accused of blasphemy and then stoned to death. I have to find out what his teachings were so I can wrap up this little side quest before I blog about my writing for the last week....

OK, admittedly I am not digging into this thoroughly but a very quick explanation on why St. Stephen seems to have become a martyr is:

Some groups didn't like him. He was better at debate than them so would defeat them. Eventually he was called to a sort of council of rabbis to explain himself because he had a slightly different view to them. By the way, everyone had a different view to each other. This time in history in that part of the world was full of religious groups disagreeing over various aspects of one god, multiple gods, how to live and how not to. Anyway, Stephen disagreed on parts of Israel's history and whether God only dwells in one particular temple or elsewhere too. Stephen it seems got a bit ahead of himself (to say the least) and started declaring Israel was disobedient to God. From the Book of Acts, he apparently blurted this out "Was there ever a prophet your ancestors did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him."

Ooh Stephen, no Stephen. You can't be saying that! Anyway, he was stoned to death pretty quickly after that. My main interest in this is just how volatile it all was at the time. He was born five years after Jesus's death and he himself died around thirty years later. There seems to be a lot of bloody infighting with the early Christian church. Sure it came from the world they all grew up in so I can't really criticize them too much. Just interesting to remember that once Jesus died (or rose from the dead if you prefer) the early Christians didn't band together as brothers and sisters to overcome the evil pagan Roman Empire. They were as bloodthirsty as everyone else. Say the wrong version of Christianity to the wrong Christian and you were destroyed.

OK, I had to go find out why exactly does the first martyr have his day a day after Jesus's birthday. Keep in mind I'm fairly sure Jesus's birthday is only claimed as 25th December because the early Christians, or early Christian Roman Emperor(s) wanted to make a smooth transition from paganism dominating the world to Christianity doing so. So they remodeled pagan celebrations into Christian ones. This would seem to be backed up by information Irishcentral.com. This day, following the celebrations of Christmas, is to celebrate the first Christian martyr St. Stephen, who was stoned to death shortly after the Crucifixion. However, the Irish celebrations on this day have little to do with the Saint himself.

Historically, this day was also about “Going on the Wren” or “Hunting the Wren” as ancient Celtic mythology remembers the days following Christmas as when the robin, representative of the new year, killed the wren, representative of the old year.

So there you go, now I'm really not sure whether drinking all day and night or writing all day and night does more to celebrate St. Stephen. I guess I don't really care either but nice to know why he has a day named after him.

Finally, onto some of my own news which requires slightly less research.

I've less than four hours to work on a WHODUNIT short. I have been trying to decide whether I should set it in a sci-fi world or a fantasy setting. I think of Whodunit stories as Agatha Christie or even Knives Out, to give some few examples. A detective, usually one main location, multiple suspects to investigate. I want to add some twist that feels new to me. So I figure if I set it in a fantasy world (whether Sci-Fi or more Tolken-esque) then I start to differentiate it already.

For the sci-fi version if would be a hotel. The outside world suffering some sort of dystopian nightmare. My idea was, to vaguely explain, a computer voice repeats several names over the hotel loudspeakers as an emergency command to name all living beings within the hotel. One person (our Hero) tries to leave the hotel but is nearly killed by a dead human (we call a GHOST) Escaping the ghost our Hero has to uncover who helped turn his attacker into a ghost. The names repeating would shorten every so often to indicate a person has been killed. The twist at the end would be that all the names were imaginary and this was all in the Hero's head. The ghost was a friend of the hero who died within the hotel. The two of them had been the only two there for some time. So they were the only actual two people in the story who were real...

...Something like this...

But I think I'm moving onto the Tolken-eque version. An elf searches old secret stashes and clues in the forest for which one of her elven friends released the nightmarish spirit that destroyed her kingdom and now inhabits the forest.

A whodunit - fantasy - horror I guess.

So I'm off to write this now.

Sigh....OK, genuine anecdote to write before I go. I thought it might be nice to call a character in the short after St. Stephen. Maybe the nightmarish spirit?! So I googled elf name generator and planned to enter his name and whatever elf inspired name came back to me would be the spirit and antagonist. I had to substitute a second name (because Stephen isn't telling me what his second name was) for Stephanos (Greek for Stephen) and low and behold I clicked enter before realising this was a Elf - Santa's helper generator. And I received...

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SWEETIE PRICKLYBUMS

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God damn it. No. I'm not taking this script in that direction.

Pleas enjoy having a good holidays and thanks for reading

Silly Kevin