Writer's Journal

It wasn’t really an earthquake, it was something much more profound.

Noland sat on the porch, and tried to ignore the world shaking beneath him. He remained still and paused in tuning his guitar.

When the shaking was finished, he went back to his task and kept at it.

Not three minutes later, whistling sounds could be heard from the distance, and shooting stars ringed the horizon. His roommate Phillip pushed out the door, and said:

“Dude, you have to come look at the news.”

So Noland stood up and walked inside, to look at the television. A news anchor with wide, disbelieving eyes smoke to the camera without seeming to pause long enough to breathe.

“…and so it seems that, somehow, the world has unfurled and became flat. Now, Satellites are beginning to fall from the sky and crash to Earth, but we have a photograph of the Earth unfurling.”

The screen changed to a picture not unlike a map, but with the edges crinkled, and reaching out to connect to…something else. A strange and unknown map that appeared from nowhere.

The news anchor appeared again, holding a paper bag to his mouth and inhaling and exhaling into it. After a moment he lowered the bag and closed his eyes, trying to steel his resolve.

“It is unknown what caused the Earth to become flat, and it is unknown why this happened. We have received several reports that bridged of unknown make and construction have appeared around the perimeters of the known world, leading into the unknown territories outside….”

Noland got up, went to his room, and started packing his things. He took his bags down, and tossed them into the back of his car.

“What are you doing?” Phil asked.

“I’m going to go explore.”

The first unknown territory that he entered was a massive labyrinthine highway wreathed in hedges of thorns, each thirty feet high. At an abandoned gas station, he picked up a three-eyed hitchhiker in a white suit who asked him if he had found Jesus.

Noland dropped him off at the next possible stop, and gestured for the man in the Viking helmet and leather jacket waiting there, who asked if he’d found Odin. Figuring that this was at least something new, he drove the Viking evangelist for a while, and listened to him talk about the Aesir.

The Viking got off in the land of the giant cockroaches. Noland rolled up his windows and pressed on, doing his best to ignore the giant insects, and trying to put the thought of the Viking evangelist talking to the natives from his mind.

The next hitchhiker was a green-skinned woman he picked up at a gas station run by something that looked like a jellyfish wearing overalls.

“Za land of za blind, please,” she said.

“Which way’s that?” Noland asked.

“Take a right at the next fork. It’s only four-hundred miles.”

“You going to get this tank of gas?”

The woman nodded, and pulled a roll of bills from inside the flannel shirt she was wearing, and he caught sight of emerald-green cleavage when she did.

He realized she was a mistake when she began messing with the radio. She put on something that sounded like Tuvan throat singing backed with droning flutes.

He turned it off and tried to start a conversation with her, but her grasp of English was poorer than he’d anticipated. After a moment, they lapsed into silence.

The land of the blind was so dark that he had to use his high-beams.

“Zis is guut,” the woman said, and Noland pulled over to the side of the road. She got out, smiled, and held up her hand, folding down her fingers while keeping her arm rigid in the strangest wave that he’d ever seen.

Continuing on, he drove through a kingdom where knights rode reptilian mounts, a strange Grecian city-state where pigs wore togas and argued in grunts and squeals, and a country where wheeled men and women continued about their lives, drinking gasoline and tending fields of oil derricks.

After three weeks of driving, Noland pulled over for a hitchhiker that turned out to be Elvis Presley dressed in the worst Abraham Lincoln costume he’d ever seen.

“Hey, man. Want to see something awesome?”

“Sure.”

“Go left at the next fork. Then hang a right at the first turnoff. It’s a turnpike, but they accept quotes from old movies.”

Noland followed Elvis Lincoln’s directions and pulled up to the toll booth.

“Seven hundred rupees or two quotes.”

“Here’s looking at you, kid,” Noland offered.

“It’s only a flesh wound,” Elvis said.

They continued on down the road, passing under a canopy of trees where octopi swung and somersaulted overhead. Into a tunnel that wound down through the bowels of the Earth. Down into caverns filled with troglodytic things that had never seen the light of day, pale gray people with milky-white eyes.

“So what’s with the get-up?” Noland asked.

“Going to a costume party after I blow your mind.”

“Need a ride there?” Noland asked.

“Nah, man. I got a helicopter meeting us at the end of this tunnel, but you’ve got to see this man.”

There was a parking lot at the end of the tunnel, inside a cavern, with a booth in the middle.

The troglodytic operator inside the booth spoke into a microphone:

“Is this all?”

“Yeah, man, this is it,” Elvis shouted.

“Good to hear from you, Mr. Lincoln,” the operator said, and hit a button.

The ceiling opened up, and the parking lot began to rise at an incredible speed.

After three hours of rising at an absurd speed, they emerged into open air, on top of a mountain.

“Don’t worry, the air ain’t as thin as it should be, up here. C’mon, man, you gotta look at this.”

They drove to the viewing deck on the edge, and looked out.

The world stretched out forever and ever, mottled with colors like Noland had never seen.

“Have a good one, man,” Elvis Lincoln said, and walked across the parking lot to the helipad that sat on the other side. A small helicopter was waiting for him, and he climbed in, shooting Noland a thumbs-up sign.

Noland got out of his car, and grabbed his guitar. He sat on the fender of his car, and began to strum out a tune.

Before you ask, yes, there will be a season 4.  The rough outline in my head has been unchanged but for minor details for a while, now.  It’s only the particulars I iron out and muddle up a little bit as time goes on.

That being said, sometimes you make a mistake and it gives you something new and interesting to work with.  I now have ammunition for my anagorisis that I didn’t think I’d have for a week or two more, at most.

While plotting things out is of utmost importance, in my opinion, sometimes your mistakes and little deviations reveal another layer to the story that you can get some good mileage out of, provided you recognize them.  Sometimes they fall flat, and sometimes they give you something good to work with.

We’ll see how it turns out.

After a short (probably 3-4 week) interlude, I’ll return with the final season of Cicatriz.

The a supervisor was the first to arrive Monday morning. He wore a gray suit and had graying hair framing a gray face with blue eyes; he was short and wide. Walking through the rows upon rows of cubicles, he saw that there was no one here.

Soon, temp workers would flood the floor, going to their cubicles, and sitting at their desks to enter numbers into spreadsheets and send them off.

At the end of one row, he saw that one computer had been left on, against company policy. The supervisor, annoyed, stepped into the cubicle, looking at the calendar with days ticked with “X” marks and the nameplate:

“Samuel Gregory.”

The supervisor wiggled the mouse, and looked at the screen, where the word processor was open. Line after line of text greeted his eyes:

…I DREAMT I WAS A BUTTERFLY I DREAMT I WAS A BUTTERFLY I DREAMT I WAS A BUTTERFLY I DREAMT I WAS A BUTTERFLY I DREAMT I WAS A BUTTERFLY I DREAMT I WAS A BUTTERFLY I DREAMT I WAS A BUTTERFLY I DREAMT I WAS A BUTTERFLY I DREAMT I WAS A BUTTERFLY I DREAMT I WAS A BUTTERFLY I DREAMT I WAS A BUTTERFLY I DREAMT I WAS A BUTTERFLY I DREAMT I WAS A…

Blinking, the supervisor grimaced, wondering what this meant. He looked around the cubicle, wondering about Mr. Gregory’s character. A coffee mug stained with a yellow-brown ring on the bottom sat by the keyboard, a perfectly sharpened, new pencil sat on the other side.

Looking up, he saw that one of the ceiling tiles was askew.

No one was here, and perhaps Mr. Gregory had hid something up there.

The supervisor stepped onto the unstable chair, then to the rock-solid desk. Standing on tip-toes, he turned, glancing through the space above the ceiling.

Clinging to the underside of the floor above was a giant, cylindrical object. It had a fibrous texture, and it was colored a milky white, spotted with brown.

The supervisor could see it pulsing and wiggling slightly, as if alive.

His eyes grew wide, and he shrank back. After shifting the tile back into place, he stepped down, resolving to give his two week’s notice that afternoon.

(this is an attempt at writing something that is simultaneously believable and vile.  I think I succeeded, for certain values.  It probably needs more description.)

It took him a while to work up to real villainy.

He started by taking scissors with him on the bus, and clipping stranger’s hair and putting tears in their clothing. He was fast enough to avoid being detected. As soon as he could take a clipping from a stranger’s hair in the middle of a crowded bus without being seen, he felt he was ready for the next level.

Cruelty to animals was laughably easy. His neighbors never suspected that he was stuffing their pets down into the storm sewer. He sat on his porch and drank a cup of coffee as they combed the neighborhood for their missing animals.

“Have you seen Fluffy? Persian cat, about yay-big?

He thought for a moment, began to shake his head and then acted as if a revelation hit him, and pointed off down the street:

“I think I saw her over that way.”

He felt a twinge when he put a child in the storm sewer, chloroforming him and stuffing him down. But, when he tried to think of why this should be, why it should make him uncomfortable, why he should care…there was nothing there.

He couldn’t think of why it should bother him at all.

Realizing what he had done, he began on all the stages he had planned to happen before murder. He began robbing people walking alone, holding them at knife-point and taking their wallets. He didn’t spend a cent, though.

Burn the money.

Burn the photographs.

Leave the wallet in the ditch.

Sometimes, he would chloroform someone for the hell of it, leaving them sprawled out on a lawn or park bench. Sometimes he would snip their hair, sometimes he would take their wallet. Sometimes he wouldn’t do anything of the sort.

He began working on his masterstroke.

For a start, he began to sew a unique mask. Something to hide his identity more than the anonymity of the crowd would give him. He kept it in his glovebox and would sometimes work on it during his lunch breaks, if he wasn’t feeling hungry.

He began gathering raw materials. Cleaning supplies. Fireworks. Remotes from radioshack.

He chose a day, and called in sick.

The bank didn’t suspect anything, and everyone was shocked when he shot three hostages at random, without a second thought. They cooperated after that, filling up a large sack with money for him and sending him on his way.

That’s when he hit the power button on the device in his pocket, setting off his bombs.

The explosions weren’t the real danger: he’d built the bombs so that the charges would break the two containers inside: one of bleach, one of ammonia, in large enough quantities that the resulting cloud of ammonia would make people ill.

In the confusion, he escaped with most of his money.

He took the money, and sat on it for a while, letting the trail go cold. He burnt some, and gave the lion’s share to an orphanage in an anonymous donation.

Then he waited.

And waited.

And watched as they built a new wing.

Then, one evening he took a gas can and some chains and secured the building except for one door, and doused the bottom floor with gasoline. He lit it aflame, and sat on the back hood of his car, drinking a bottle of Old Crow and watching as the orphanage went up in flames. When the fire department got there and tried to put out the gasoline fire with water, he laughed.

That was when the police decided to put him in cuffs.

He confessed to everything, and suppressed a grin at their looks of horror and disgust.

“Why? Why would you do those things?”

He blinked twice, and tried to come up with an answer. When none came to him, he just smiled and shrugged.

I’ve developed a new technique to write Cicatriz, and I think it might be one that I reuse in the future. The whole thing is directly related to the conceit that Cicatriz is set up like a television series, divided into “seasons.”

As a result of this, I’ve plotted out each season individually, without starting on the next one until the current one is finished. This allows me to treat each one as a novella, while still keeping it all organized into a coherent whole.

It’s also a nice balance between the “completely plotted out” outline-derived novel, and the “improvised” nothing-planned out way of writing. Both have their benefits and pitfalls.

The first is easier for a beginner to use, easier to get started with, but because there’s no real process of discovering the story for yourself, the writer might lose interest, should they not move fast enough. Of course, you already have a starting point and an ending point, as well as a laundry list of things to happen between point A and point Z.

The second requires a great deal of raw creativity, as well as a great deal of revising after-the-fact to shape it into a coherent whole. While it has its benefits, I’ve never really used it for anything I ended up feeling comfortable showing anyone. It can work, but I’ve never been able to get it to.

As such, it’s my opinion that you need enough plotted out at the beginning to make the whole thing possible. That was the real problem with White Knight, for me—I wrote an outline, started writing it because of the deadline, and eventually passed the outline in my writing, which is why the first three chapters read better than those that followed them.

On the other hand, the characters of White Knight felt a bit more real to me than the ones in Cicatriz. It’s a bit of a problem, honestly; though, in all fairness, I am using this as an opportunity to hone my skills, just as I say in the sidebar.

More exposition.  Of a sort.

Cicatriz Episode 3×04

comes later today.

My typesetter for Behemoth (S.T. Johns) once commented on the prevalence of the whole netherworld thing in my writing. Now, after months and months of writing, that trope has appeared in Cicatriz. To be fair, it’s the first time I’ve used it in the sense of it actually being hell.

This brings me to a certain topic: pet concepts.

You know what I’m talking about, ideas that reoccur in the writing of one particular person. Things that they always seem to go back to.

You know, like naming a cat in Haruki Murakami’s writing.

Or the odd typesetting in an Alfred Bester novel.

Or Immortality in Roger Zelazny.

Or the itinerant worker in John Steinbeck.

Or the white adventurer in Ernest Hemmingway.

You get the idea.

For me, it’s the otherworld. The dark mirror of the real world. It shows up in mythology, but I like to think it’s becoming a signature of mine.

Arrogant, I know.

So, here’s the thing: these aren’t bad. Having a standby symbol, something to which you can return over and over and still remains meaningful, isn’t a problem. You shouldn’t use it in the exact same way, each time, or even describe it the same way, but if the concept remains the same and the clothing it’s dressed in is changed, then there’s no problem. Present the idea how it comes to you, use it how it wants to be used.

And since I’ve been copping to influences, lately, the sequence where Wade is facing off against the shades of those he’s wronged borrows a bit from J. Michael Straczynski’s comic Midnight Nation, which I thought was brilliant until it turned explicitly Judeo-Christian, though even then it’s still excellent.

Fun little pulp story I’ve been tinkering with a bit.  It’ll make a fine interlude while I’m working on Cicatriz 3×0

Acting as a Wave 1

The ice cream man sat with his feet up on the counter, a copy of Civilization and Its Disconentents in his lap, and a hand-rolled cigarette in his right hand.

“Can I have a bomb-pop?” a kid asked.

“Screw off. It’s my break,” the ice cream man said.

“When will your break be over?”

“Fifteen minutes or next stopping point. Whichever’s first.”

“Okay.”

The kid turned around, and crouched against the side of the truck, fist clenched around the five dollar bill.

Page turn.

“Hey, watcha got there?” a voice asked. A man. Middle-aged.

Flip back, reread that last sentence.

“Just waiting for him to finish his book so I can buy a bomb- pop, Mister.”

“I’ve got some bomb-pops in my freezer. If you want, you can come with me and I can give you one,” the man said.

The Ice cream man folded down the corner of the page, and breathed twin jets of poison-flavored smoke from his nostrils. He tossed the cigarette butt onto the lawn by the man’s feet, and placed his hands on the counter, giving the man a heavy-lidded flat look.

The middle-aged man sidled back, looked down, and walked away.

The Ice cream man retrieved the bomb-pop, tossed it to the child, and said:

“Go the fuck home, kid.”