The Bloods, The Crips, Cyber Italia.

At the moment I'm in Cyber Italia down on campus. It's this pizza restaurant with loads of computers where you can do your course work. It's really convenient, because it's open 24/7, so no matter how much you're procrastinated before starting your essay, you can come down here and actually have to be quiet and do your work. Or write a blog post, what ever.

The essay I'm writing is for the module called Portrayals of Crime and Deviance. It's not that difficult, but the first half is supposed to be a fictional story and since I haven't written a fictional story since year 10, which is four years ago (I feel really old now by the way), it's taking me for ever to write. The story is supposed to incorporate all the things we've learned about in lectures, like for instance the language of crime, the relationship between criminals and law enforcement and depictions of organised crime. In other words, the story has to show how criminals, especially criminals with history of gang crime and other forms of organised crime. I have to show the relationships between the gang members in one gang, the relationships between gang members from different gangs and the relationship between gang members and law enforcement. It's harder than it sounds, but now that I've done a bit of pre work, like writing a background for each character and deciding to use the location, name and criminal history of real gangs to limit the amount of information I actually have to torture my imagination to come up with, it all became a lot easier. Maybe I'll post the story on the blog when I've finished it?

The gangs I've chosen to work with are the San Francisco gangs, The Bloods and The Crips. Apparently, after a quick google search, they are rivals. Which is perfect, because the older brother of Chris, the main character in my story, was killed by a rival gang member. The start of the story is the dialogue between Chris and the police detective that brought him in for questioning after a 16 year old girl had been killed when she tried to run away without paying her drug dealers. So far, so nearly good. Meaning I've already finished that part. Later on, I was thinking I could do a time jump to talk about when Chris' older brother was killed and then go to the conversation between Chris and the gang leader, who hasn't got a name yet, to show the relationship between the gang members of the same gang. The gang leader tells Chris that The Bloods wasn't running any drug deals that night because their shipment didn't come through, so they were out of stock, and go on to say that it must have been a member of the rival gang, The Crips, that was dealing on their turf that night, trying to infringe The Bloods. Don't know how well it'll turn out when I can only use 1250 words, but time will tell!

I think that's enough procrastination for now, hopefully I'll get this done tonight. Deadline is on monday, and I can't be bothered doing an all nighter tomorrow..