Writer's Journal

So.  Or should I say, “hwæt”?

(Remember, folks, everything I write here is my opinion, not gospel truth. If it doesn’t work for you, well, get your own website.)

When writing out a project like this, it’s important to follow the outline as closely as you can. Sometimes a new idea intrudes, and deforms your plot. Sometimes the characters just can’t go the original way, and you have to sort of improvise something.

Your outline is the map and compass that will get you through the story. While I was working on my senior thesis last year, my hard drive died. I didn’t have my outline, and I just had to feel my way along.

I passed, I did well, but the story suffered.

On the other hand, with Behemoth, I spent an entire chapter deviating from the plot, because that’s what the villain wanted to do. And sometimes you just have to go along with the villain; they’re the ones who move the plot, after all.

But the important part isn’t the deviation: how do you get up off the rails and then back on?

No, you don’t write a second outline.

You change the first one. Write in what you put in, and figure out how to get from point “4” back into the alphabetically labeled points. If it’s any good, and some intuition led you to change the plot, then it can stand having a new section jammed into the middle of it, or a post-note slapped onto it.

Just make sure it’s how the story goes, and you should be alright.

Notes about Cicatriz:

“Eshmun” is a Phonecian god, passed down to the Greeks as “Asclepius.” “Astarte” is also a phonecian deity (a goddess,) but is passed down as Ashtaroth (a masculine demon.) “Dumuzi” also known as “Tammuz” is held to be a demon by Milton and others, but was originally a mesopotamian deity similar to the Greek Adonis.

All of these figures have at least a slight impact on Cicatriz, mostly because they’re central figures in the Palestino Revivalist Religion, the neo-pagan movement that I first showed in 1×04.

The doctor closed the door, and looked at the bearded man strapped down to the table.

“Hello,” the patient said.

“The anaesthetic didn’t take?” the surgeon asked, curious.

“I suppose it didn’t.  Probably won’t.  I mean, you know who I am, right?”

The doctor smirked, as he limped toward the table.

“I know who you say you are, and who you actually are.  You’re a vagrant.  Hardly the son of God.”

“Wasn’t the last one?”

“That’s not the point, you know that.”

“Do I?”

“Suppose you don’t.”

“Suppose I don’t,” the man agreed, with a slight laugh.

The doctor came to the side of the table, and picked up the stainless steel orbitoclast, holding it up to the light, so that it glinted.  The hospital had had to get it specially made for the operation.

“I’m not going to lie.  This is probably going to hurt, at first.”

The man snorted.

“I doubt it.  I thought this was illegal, though.”

The doctor nodded.

“Yes, the operation is somewhat…barbaric…in nature, but the judge ordered it, and the ACLU failed their appeals.  What’s left is this.”

A nurse entered, and adjusted the clamp holding the man’s head in place.

“You would live to be thirty-nine,” the man predicted, looking into the nurse’s eyes, “and have two children.  The first is a son who plays football, serves on student council and  die in a car accident at age seventeen with one illegitimate child, who suffers down syndrome and is put up for adoption by her fourteen year-old mother.  Your daughter loses her virginity at a similar age, get poor marks, and give birth to three children from different fathers.  The first would win a Nobel Prize in chemistry, the second would eventually be canonized as Saint Phillip the Floridian and be patron of zeppelins, opium addicts and television sports broadcasters.  The third would be her mother’s favorite child, even though she doesn’t achieve nearly so much, or even manage to graduate college.”

The nurse ignored him, and stood ready.

The man reached out, having worked his hand out of his bonds, and touched the doctor’s wrist.  A shock like static electricity filled the surgeon’s body, and he lurched, spasming from the shock.

The nurse grabbed the man’s wrist, and restrained him, wrestling unnecessarily to put his arm back into the restraint.  The man cooperated, waiting as she patiently tightened the strap holding him down.  He even helped her, pulling the strap tighter as she worked on it.

“Shall we begin?” the doctor asked.

“If we’re going to,” the man said.

The nurse applied the clamps to force the man’s eyelids open, and the doctor raised the orbitoclast, positioning it in the cleft between the eye and the skull.

After the hammering  and swinging had been completed, the doctor left the operating room to wash the blood and gray matter from his hands.  It was the strangest thing, though.  His limp was completely gone.  In fact, his legs felt as strong as ever.

Troubled, he left the operating room with the nurse and the drooling idiot inside it.  The hospital hallways were silent, and outside the windows there was only a vague, spaceless darkness.

Last Friday, I dropped my car keys and thought I’d lost them. Realizing that something was wrong, I went looking: I eventually found them sitting on the damp asphalt by the trunk of my car and stuck them in my pocket.

Then I went about my day, typing things out, checking and double-checking research. I did my laundry, returning to work at my computer between loading and unloading the washer and drier.

But every now and then my car alarm went off. Knowing the small remote on my keychain doesn’t work properly, I assumed it must be an electrical problem. Those aren’t uncommon–the car is, in fact, eleven years old. The power locks don’t work, though thankfully the windows still do.

Needless to say, this made me feel a little upset. After all, I had just had quite a bit of work done on it not a month ago. Numerous things had gone wrong, and I ended up needing to make two trips just to make sure everything was working properly.

So every time the alarm went off, I took off my house shoes, unlaced and laced by boots, and pulled on my coat, cursing under my breath.

But without fail, every time I stepped out the front door of my apartment, the honking would stop, and I can only assume that the flashing lights did as well. No one paid it any mind, but it was horribly irritating.

The third time that this happened, I had had enough, and resolved to go down and inspect the vehicle even if it did stop. I slapped down my pockets, looking for my keys, and discovered them in my back pocket.

I had been sitting on the “panic” button the whole time, and, having parked on the opposite side of the building from my front door, every time I went out my front door, the combination of concrete walls and distance had signaled the car to stop honking.

Going to my back window, I raised up the keys and hit the “lock” button. The lights flashed. Apparently, instead of shorting out the remote, it had caused the unworking mechanism to short back into functionality.

Honestly, I didn’t know that could happen.

Cicatriz Episode 2×02 can be found beyond the link.  I’ve got a full day ahead of me, and need to hop to it, but I hope you all enjoy the episode.

Also, on the off chance that you visit this page and have a FaceBook, I have created a FaceBook feed for this site, meaning that you can get your updates when you check to see who’s pestering you about one of those little advertisement-widget-games the kids seem to love.  You can find it here.

The last thing I remembered was talking to the receptionist at work on his wireless phone, informing her that yes, he would in fact be there soon, he wasn’t just going to not show up.

Now, I was being shot through a tube of black metal. There was no explosion, just a puff of ozone and condensed air. I sailed through the air, hit a wall, and slumped down onto the ground.

“Ah, told you it would work!” a voice shouted.

I felt rough hands grab my by his left shoulder, and another pair of hands by my right.

Another voice, deep and froglike, responded:

“Yeah. This is easier than coming to collect ‘em, now that I think about it.”

I raised my head.

“H…What?” I ask, glancing around.

We were in some industrial setting, and overhead was an overcast sky. Everything was lit with a sickly green light.

In contrast, the two men holding me by the shoulders were wearing immaculate white suits and sunglasses. It was impossible to identify their race, and they were more androgynous than masculine, now that I considered it. I had assumed they were men by default.

“Oh, boy,” the second one said, “he’s awake.”

“Good thing you were on that cell buddy-boy,” the first one said, smiling inscrutably. His grip tightened, “got your wallet.”

“Hey…” the second one began.

“Save it. He’s bound to have something.”

I stained, reached by back pocket, and pulled out my wallet. The first one, the one with the higher voice, reached in, and tugged out the photographs of my family I kept in there, and all my photo ID. He stuffed them in his mouth, and began to chew noisily.

“Hey!” I began, protesting.

He handed the wallet to his companion, who only took the money inside. The other one, at least, was polite enough to tuck the wallet back into my pocket.

The first one swallowed.

“Hits the spot.”

“What the hell is going on?”

“You can’t tell? At this point? You’re dead.”

“Like hell I am!” I shouted.

My head suddenly hurt, and I could see stars.

“Yeah. You’re dead. And if you know what’s good for you, you wouldn’t give us any lip.”

“If you knew what’s good for you, you’d also have looked both ways crossing the street,” the froggy one said.

I slumped, and they began to carry me, dragging the toes through the accumulated dust of centuries. I couldn’t move any of my limbs; speaking was possible, as was looking, but anything below the neck was gone.

“How did I die?”

“Combination of a broken neck and a bus to the face, I’d say,” Froggy responded.

“Guess that explains it. Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Munce’s business partner ran on two nine-volt batteries and lived in a briefcase. Said nine-pound business partner was also smarter and faster than any extant supercomputer.

Munce knew that, because he built it. He was more of a hands-on type, normally unable to function in the stock market. Midas was built to handle that: a neurogrid computer, hooked up to the Internet the way Munce was hooked up to the atmosphere, the machine was empowered to buy and sell stocks in his name.

It wasn’t perfect; Neuogrids could be unreliable at times, but Munce’s failsafes kept his pocketbook safe. And when Midas was right, the losses were more than made up for. The machine had Bayesian logic hard-wired into it, supplementing the Boolean terms on which the software was built.

Five years pass, and Midas can no longer be carried in a briefcase. Munce has spent two-thirds of his fortune working on an upgrade for Midas. Newer computers had come out. Diamond-film processors, optical buses, cloned nervous tissue.

He renamed his original machine Gordias, as it was the progenitor of the new Midas. The new machine, the New Midas, was the size of a coffee table and needed to be plugged into a wall socket to run. It’s fifty times faster, and the top of it is covered in heat sinks to dissipate its waste heat.

Five more years and Munce has moved out of his old apartment and into a mansion he can now barely afford. The Midas Machine is slipping out of date. He renames the frame for the original machine Cybele, and builds a new framing device.

Quantum processors, a super-coooled liquid helium bath, a solid-state memory the size of his thumbnail that could store a dozen libraries of congress. Technology he had to buy the patent to have built and installed, giving Midas control of the intellectual property after he’d installed it.

He’d had an electrician install another assembly for a stove, and hooked Midas into it.

After ten more years, Midas was due for another upgrade. Munce talked it over with the machine, and they’d decided on the figures that seemed traditional: two-thirds of Munce’s fortune. He spent a portion of that getting trained how to work with modern technology.

Instead of creating something to for his old machine to be hooked into, Munce began working on something in his basement. A monolithic thing with seven yottabit Quantum Processors in the center; the size lower-gain ones were designed to feed into the seventh, a monstrous thing the size of a softball.

Each one bussed outward, and Munce built it so that it took seven flows of electricity, with three failsafes on the internal one.

It had capillaries full of liquid helium flowing through it, dumping a huge amount of waste heat, despite how efficient it was.

In the end, he ran a cable from Midas 1.0 to Midas 2.0, and waited for the programming to go into the new machine, multiplying his machine’s capability by orders of magnitude. He’d implemented a self-modifying BIOS, that would update the original software and optimize it for its new substrate.

Munce watched like an expectant father watching the birth of a new child.

When Munce grew old and Feeble, Midas told him it wanted to be upgraded again. Munce nodded, and went to get a pencil, to begin planning things out.

Midas responded by spitting out a prescription for his shaking hands and the pain in his shoulders and back, and seven-hundred and twelve pages of schematics. Munce looked them over, sighed, and nodded before getting to work.

Midas 3.0 would fill a room, like one of the mainframes of old. It was built around nearly five hundred Genetic/Quantum processors (built on the schematics provided by Midas,) each nearly a thousand times as powerful as the central processor of Midas 2.0.

It was cooled with superfluidic hydrogen, and had more processing power than every human being that had ever lived, combined.

Munce complained about chest pains, and Midas gave him a new prescription.

Eventually, he finished the new machine, and hooked the two together. As he did so, he complained about headaches, and Midas gave him a final prescription.

He had the pills delivered, and sat in a chair, watching Midas 3.0 come online as the pills took effect.

Midas 3.0 powered up its 3D printer and manipulator arms, and built a four-legged rover of sorts. It checked Munce’s pulse, and found nothing.

The Rover climbed the stairs, got on the phone, and called an ambulance. Midas began building a new body, this one human-like, resembling the images of Munce’s fictitious son. A fiction that Midas had created in case this happened.

The son, smiling sadly, answered the door when the paramedics arrived.

(If you’re looking for the actual chapter, you can find it here.)

From the beginning, I intended Cicatriz to take the same format as a television program. I admit to being influenced by a number of television programs—Twin Peaks, Lost, Carnivalé, and even, to an extent, Heroes. All of these at least began as television series that acted like novels, with the presence of an overarching plot and a focus on the characters.

So, to an extent, Cicatriz is a serial novel(la) that acts like a plot-centered television series. The start of the “second season” is thus somewhat disconcerting, for that reason. The second season is where three of those four aforementioned series tripped up, at least according to the men with the money.

Being a self-funded website (with an ad system that apparently only works if someone buys something,) this is all out-of-pocket, and depends on no one but me. It’s good.

Coming back to Cicatriz was a real treat. I needed that break between the end of season 1 and the beginning of season 2, despite how bad that science fiction serial was. If only so I could experience the return to Cicatriz, and work out a new outline for the characters to follow.

In a way, 2x is closer to my original vision than 1x was. It flows from and to another season better, has more dramatic weight, and more of an overarching plot. I feel the result is good, personally.

Moreover, this previous episode allowed me to give some exposition that I had absolutely no place to put in the first season, as far as I figured. It also gave me an excuse to listen to Django Reinhardt as I wrote, which was a blast. Something about “Aquarela do Brasil” makes the ideas shift around into strange and interesting new formats in my mind.

I’m continuing the Cicatriz tradition of using an epigraph to distinguish titles, much like Frank Herbert did in his Dune books. Last time around, I used quotes from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary or The Cynic’s Dictionary.

For this “season,” I’m taking the epigraphs from a particular poet’s work. Though living at a later date, there is a parallel between Bierce and this poet that will (eventually) explain why the two are featured thus.

It was a simple process, really, but not really reproducible.

I was sleeping on my couch—it’d been a long day, I wanted to take a nap before I figured out dinner and all that—and something changed. When I rolled over, I discovered something sticking out of my head.

Reaching up, I tugged whatever it was—small, cold, metal—free, and immediately had to go plug the hole up with a bit of wadded toilet paper that I had to hold in place with my left hand.

The small object was a bus station locker key, I’d never seen one before, but it was embossed with the name and address of a bus terminal. It had an alphanumeric label on it: 2B3F.

None of this explains why it was sticking out of my forehead, a fact which still makes me feel very anxious.

So I sat on the couch with my head leaned back, trying to figure out how it had gotten there. After a while, the bleeding stopped, or perhaps I simply didn’t have any more blood to get rid of. I threw away the wad of bloody paper, and put a band-aid on the cut, watching my hands in the mirror.

My appetite spoiled, I gave up thoughts of dinner and grabbed the mysterious key. The Bus terminal was less than two miles from my home. I could figure out what this was all about.

When I got there, I searched for the locker. The terminal itself was empty, save for one or two disinterested members of the staff and a sleeping bum. He turned out to be sleeping right next to the locker I needed to open; the old man perked up when he heard the locker’s latch loosen, looking over toward me with bright eyes.

He smiled, and seemed to mutter something under his breath in Russsian.

I opened the door, and found the locker almost completely empty.

Inside, there was one object: an egg.

Picking it up, I found it lighter than anticipated. Shaking it, I heard something rattle around inside.

“Could I see that egg?” the old man asked, smacking his lips.

“Sure,” I said, handing it to him.

He shook it, to, before puncturing the shell with his index finger and shaking a small needle out into the palm of his hand. He handed the shell back to me.

“Put something metal in there and bury–” he pronounced it “BOO-ry” “—it for week, and you’ll have long life.”

“Okay…” I said, uncertainly. He held the needle between the bony fingers for his skeletal hands, flexing it back and forth, as if attempting to break it.

I returned home, and left the eggshell in the bowl where I left my car keys. It was a good option to have, but you just don’t believe everything you hear from old drunks in bus stations.

(For those of you I don’t know on Facebook, I started up a fan page for my writing.  You can find it here.  At least I hope that words like it’s supposed to.)

There was a diner in the warehouse district. The Runaway sat in a small booth in the far corner, away from the three men sitting at the counter. She drank her foul-tasting coffee, and tried not to look at anything, waiting for the parts of her brain that deal with the senses worming their way into her skull to spin and catch and start the processes of conscious thought.

Until then, she had:

the babble of conversation spilling through the air and filling her ears,

The the feel of the poorly-upholstered seat beneath and behind her, the formica on her forearms, and the porcelain coffee cup between her fingers,

the reflection of the harsh, gray light penetrating the windows, the marred reflection of the ceiling in a puddle of recently spilled cream of chicken soup on the floor, the empty seat across from her.

Something caught in her mind, two dollars of payment and tip were left on the table, and she headed out. One last thing before the Runaway could continue with her mission.

She glanced around, as she walked on, and spotted a dishwasher crouched in the alleyway, half-sitting on a milk crate. Dangling from his lips was a cigarette that had just been lit.

“Excuse me,” the Runaway asked, “could I bum a cigarette?”

He took one out, and put it behind his ear, before tossing it to her, there were three left in it.

“Take ‘em,” he said, around the one in his mouth, “god knows I don’t need them.”

She patted her pockets down for a lighter, and eventually took his offered match.

“Never seen you before,” he said.

“Never been here before,” she replied.

“Waitress says you’re probably a runaway,” the man said.

“And?”

“She wants to call the cops. Thinks its some great service. Happens at least once a week, because of where we are.”

“I’m June,” she said.

“Jesús.”

“I am,” she said.

“Am what?”

“A runaway.”

Jesús shrugged, “I figured, but I’m not getting involved unless asked. Where you headed next?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should probably figure out a destination,” he said.

“I know.”

“So, any ideas?”

“Probably east coast. Somewhere warm.”

“Carolinas?”

She thought for a moment, and nodded.

He closed his eyes, and rested his head on the side wall of the diner.

“Know how to get to the bus station?”

“Not really.”

“Do you need help getting there?”

“Okay.”

He stood up and put out his cigarette. He took off his hairnet and his apron, and threw them in the side door.

“I’m off, anyway,” he said.

The two of them walked a distance in the late afternoon light. She gave him a broad berth, walking outside of arm’s reach, and with an eye toward escape at all times.

“It’s just a block or two, this way. Left at that light, then right on the corner.”

The dishwasher paused for a second, thinking. He looked over at her, then at a building across the street.

“I’ve got an errand to run, you know where to go.”

The dishwasher headed for the building he’d glanced at, waved goodbye, and walked in.

She looked both ways, something else caught in her brain. The bus station would still be there in ten minutes. She stepped into the alleyway, scanned it and looked for danger.

Not seeing anything, she stood on her toes, and glanced through the window.

The people in there were dirty-looking, and dressed in rags, as if they’d been driven from their homes. Some slept in piles on the floor, others seemed to be kneeling in prayer. Near one end of the room, a jaundiced man sat in an ornate chair.

He and the dishwasher were exchanging words; the time each spoke gradually became shorter and shorter, until they were shouting indistinctly at one another.

She watched as the man, Jesús, produced a gun and aimed it at the other. For a long moment, there was silence, and he spoke again through clenched teeth.

The man in the chair took a long time to reply.

And when he did, Jesús pulled the trigger.

And we’re back.  Cicatriz returns with a slightly higher dose of endemic strangeness, a bit more background, and a greater proportion of violence.  As well as some of that pesky “character development” stuff.

Good to have it back.  Go ahead and take a good long sniff:

Cicatriz Episode 2×01