Beans, grass, and NEPA Gothic

I made my fifteen bean soup today. I've made it once before, then bought a second bag, which is just a whole bunch of different types of beans and a smoked ham flavoring packet. Last night I spotted it in the clearance section of the local supermarket, so I bought four more. Frankly, it looks more appetizing as the raw beans than the finished soup, which is mostly a gray-brown mush. But it tastes pretty good, and is good for you.

After having a lunch of fifteen bean soup, I mowed the lawn at my mom's house. This is a fairly big task, and I was able to do it all in one push with no breaks except to empty the grass catcher, scrape the grass out that was clogging the deck, and add more gas. This was because for the first time this season the temperature was cool and the grass was dry. Few things make lawn mowing more of a tedious, exhausting chore than high temperatures and wet grass.

While I was mowing the lawn I developed a story idea into a full-fledged NEPA Gothic horror story. I have long found Northeastern Pennsylvania sadly lacking in legends and traditions. The native tribes whose names we have adopted for local places were mostly just passing through, using the area for hunting and fishing but not living here year-round like they did in upstate New York or in Delaware (as did the Nentego tribe, arguably the coolest and most badass of all, from whom my hometown of Nanticoke takes its name), and many of the myths and legends of the immigrants who came to this area were lost several generations ago.  So I am trying to spin my own legendarium from elemental forces, native animals, embodiments of the terrain. Even if these spirits were able to come to some accommodation with the natives who lived (or at least walked, swam, hunted, danced, and sang) here for thousands of years, and with the newcomers who have made their own homes here for hundreds, how did they react to the rise of industry, of coal mining, steel production, the laying of railroad tracks? And what do they think of fracking and all the changes it has brought to the area?

The problem is, the central villain of the story (who eventually gets his comeuppance) is an excessively foul-mouthed, abusive S.O.B. He's based, not surprisingly, on someone I know in real life. (Well, not exactly "real" or "life", but close enough, and too close.) I'm trying to reign in his nasty mouth without destroying his speech patterns, and also trying to dial back his cosmic justice to something not quite so graphically horrible. If I can get through this, it may be the key to writing several other stories in a similar vein.