New Children's Book Character!

I've been a little bit neglectful of the blog recently. "Recently" as in, the last 3-4 days. Busy with other things, it seems!

Junk, primarily.

But to heck with that, check out my new children's book character: Slaughtermouse 5!

Background: In a far-off dystopia, one of a series of hyperintelligent (for a mouse) bionically-augmented rodent commandos being developed for covert-insertion warfare is involved in a freak accident in the lab and becomes unstuck in time. Upon discovering that they are still able to communicate with him in a rudimentary way through his quantum transweb neural link, his altruistic scientist handlers realize that this is may be their golden chance to right past wrongs and so - possibly...! - prevent the current horrible dystopia in which they live from ever occurring (the book is set in 1980's England).

And so, Slaughtermouse 5 is set loose on the unsuspecting pages of history as a 1-rodent administrator of mayhem! As he appears and reappears seemingly at random but pivotal moments, his handlers scramble to determine precisely who at that particular moment it would most benefit humankind to have snuffed out. Meanwhile, Slaughtermouse 5 sniffs around, using his survival and infiltration skills to interact and blend in with that period's mouse population while jerry-rigging weapons from the period's available tech detritus, in anticipation of his next assignment. His only connection to his home time - Chee-ZAR, a hallucinatory hunk of cheese that gives him cryptic instructions from the future, and rewards him for each job well-done by powerfully stimulating the cheese-receptors in his mouse-brain.

The drama unfolds as Slaughtermouse 5 feels the tug of an ordinary mouse life he'd never known, and begins to question the automatic loyalty that has been bred into him. Yes, he is a hero - but is what he's doing right? And will he ever, ever stop being yanked from one time to the next, in a never-ending quest whose final purpose even his creators can't guess?

These days, the kids like it a little bit dark.

That's a very rough, very preliminary character sketch.