It's 17:25. I've done 630 words so far today, and I do most of my writing at night.
I chose the name Ash for my crime lord because I wanted something slightly funeral. I'm changing it to Sterling because I want something classy and rich sounding.
I need to tidy up my religion. My MC is the son of a bishop who has four adult children. So the family is not Catholic. Yet in times of stress, they light candles.
I tend to do my words in a panic around 11:20 pm, trying to get 500 words by midnight with enough time to spare to enter the updated number on the NaNo site.
Ash is the name of the main character in
The Crow: City of Angels (loose sequel to the original Crow movie). The other protagonist is Sarah as an adult (she was a child in the first movie).
As for religion... from all my posts in OT, you'd think I would make every last one of my characters an atheist, right?
Nope. My Fighting Fantasy character worships a mix of both Allansian and Old World deities (mostly the god of warriors and the goddess of justice). I based this on information in the Fighting Fantasy sourcebooks and in the gamebooks I adapted.
There will be a
very brief mention of native religion in my Park Ranger stories, but none of the characters are particularly religious.
Now... how to handle religion in the King's Heir stories? Well, there's a scene in which the heir's parents marry in a church ceremony that looks Catholic on the surface, but there are a couple of pagan elements in it as well. So I've decided that Griffinvale is a more cosmopolitan, diverse place than was strictly historically correct for northwestern Europe in the 11th century.
Blame that partly on the mishmash of cultural artifacts in the game itself. The characters speak with a variety of British accents, the main protagonists have a German family name, British/Viking first names (I gave the father a first name because the game developers neglected to do that, and I made it Scandinavian), and their clothing is a mix of Celtic styles and somehow the father is wearing 19th century suspenders (I plan to write a brief scene in which it's made clear that in this universe they were invented a millennium earlier). I'm no expert on 11th century armor, but I'm sure it's equally as much of an anachronistic mishmash; the only absolutely right thing the developers did was have no stirrups on the knights' horses, because at that time, in that place, stirrups were a newfangled thing that not all knights/cavalry had.
So how that relates to religion, I decided that if everything else is a mix of different cultures, I would just make up a religion for them that took various elements from various cultures and add in my own 5 cents' worth. Part of the reason for this is because the developers added an element of magic, in the form of a crown imbued with the spirit of a long-dead king; this crown is very particular about who is entitled to wear it. So whatever religion they follow can't have an intolerant attitude toward magic and spirits, or they'd have to burn their own king at the stake! The way I see it, Griffinvale is to some extent what would have happened if Christianity and the old pagan religions had gotten along instead of clashing and one trying to destroy the other.
That said, everything isn't roses and sunshine. I gave the intolerant attitude to one of the neighboring kingdoms in the alternative story. As Mary said when I was telling her my ideas for that story, it sounds bleak anyway, so I might as well make it bleaker.
As for your character, just remember that in real history, Pope Alexander Sixtus had at least 7 children, the first three of whom have mostly been forgotten to history, and two of the remaining four were Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia. While Rodrigo Borgia (his name before being elected Pope) finagled some kind of on-paper parentage for his children that named another man as their father, it was an open secret everywhere that they were really his own children. Nobody really cared except for the Borgias' enemies and those who took it seriously that Catholic church officials weren't supposed to have sex, let alone father any children.
You don't have to be Catholic to light candles. There are other belief systems where candles are a part of various rituals. And come to think of it, I didn't make candle-lighting part of any rituals in Griffinvale. Being practical people, they use candles to see, and also as clocks in some situations (an idea I borrowed from a Classic Doctor Who story, "The Sunmakers" in which candles are marked in hour-long intervals; as the candle burns down to each line marked on it, it means an hour has passed).
I've been trying various ways of getting my cyclops into the story, but it just wouldn't go. It finally contorted itself into another story entirely--a crossover between the Odyssey and Star Trek/Galaxy Quest. 
I tried a couple of beginnings for this new story, but in the words of Truman Capote, "That's not writing. That's typing," 
I've realized that "Who Mourns for Adonis" notwithstanding," Greek gods have no place in a far-future star-faring tale. Without Poseidon to block Odysseus' way home, I need another nemesis. 
I chose...um...Helen 
and to a lesser extent Menelaus 
.
However, my MC Spider is in prison. Spider's niece shows up and volunteers for the heist. 
Her attempt goes horribly wrong when a cyclops (?) eats her. This takes us back to the beginning of my original Chapter 1, wherein Ash breaks Spider out of the dungeon by going through the catacombs. 
