Writer's Journal

So, this is prompted mostly by Shell’s comments on Cicatriz 3×05.

In short, I need to let you all know that Cicatriz goes up with barely any revision or editing.  As soon as I complete the chapter (which usually happens early Friday) I put it up here.  This is hardly ideal, though the story’s coherence is assured by the outline, which I follow scrupulously.  Nonetheless, there are obvious flaws.

On the other end of the spectrum, there is my other project, Behemoth, which is sot of like Cicatriz’s sociopathic older brother, which I built off of a simple outline, and which I’ve been editing off and on for a while (I’m on the last revision/editation, though.  It’ll be ready soon.)   This difference could easily have been flipped, I could have made it Cicatriz and Behemoth instead of Behemoth and Cicatriz.  I chose to do it this way.

Now, obviously, if you’re writing something and you don’t care too much about deadlines, then editing should be a major concern.  As should revision.  Especially if you intend to pursue publication.  Revise and Edit.

Between these two processes and outlining, very little of the actual process of “writing” as people think of it, occurs.  It’s much less creating on the page or screen, and more about laying groundwork for it, then shaping the final product after you get the Everything out there.

A good analogy would be constructing a building.  First, you’ve got to dig a giant hole and lay a foundation–Outlining.  Once you’ve got the foundation, you put up the structure, the electrical work and plumbing and whatnot–Writing.  Then, once you’ve got that all done, you’ve got to make sure everything’s in its right place and that everything works–Revising.  Finally, you make sure that the damn thing looks good, which would be putting up the facade, installing floors, putting up the walls–Editing.

Now, this is obviously a quick and dirty analogy, because oftentimes, you can edit while you write and revise.  But, if you’re just starting out, it sometimes helps to consider them each as a distinct stage.

(I think this might be expanded, later on.)

His new eyes worked better than expected, better than they should have.

Daniel sat on a park bench, enjoying the sun for the first time since his original eyes had to have been surgically removed. Six weeks ago, the experimental prostheses had been put in. Two spheres of clear plastic, made up of transparent cells that reacted to light by emitting a wireless signal and propagating it to its neighbors behind it.

The wireless eyes were three dimensional. Most people’s eyes only had a two-dimensional surface that reacts to light. The wireless eyes went far beyond that, and were able to see into a higher dimension.

He glanced around, looking at the three-dimensional slice of space that the joggers and dog-walkers were aware of.

They were unaware of the unmowed grass to either side of their feet; in fact they might as well be light-years away, despite their passage raising a wind that whipped the grass.

He turned his head, and considered the wilderness. Sometimes, he would see things moving in the grass. They ignored him, and he couldn’t really tell much about them.

Turning his eyes again to another three-dimensional slice, he saw an abandoned asphalt parking lot, where some young men playing basketball. His park bench was out-of-place here.

The basketball landed at his feet.

“Hey, man, little help?” one of the players asked him. He picked it up, and tossed it back, before turning his eyes elsewhere.

Daniel hadn’t driven since the accident, and thought about how he would go about it, now, perhaps there were roads that others couldn’t see, lying in one of those two directions. Perhaps he could go where others couldn’t.

“Excuse me,” he asked a dog-walker, “could I ask a favor?”

“Depends, what do you need?” the young man answered, pausing, and pulling his Labrador into a sitting position.

“Just tell me what you see when I do this.”

He turned his eyes to the wilderness, and grabbed a wildflower. Something in the distance screamed.

When he turned back to the park, the young man and his dog had run off.

The interns surrounded the building, a two story commercial structure, with a ring of salt, making sure to bubble it out around the truck parked in front.

In the back of the truck, the three operatives were laid on palettes, and given an injection into the common carotid artery. Their eyes turned glassy, and the breathing tubes were inserted to keep the meat fresh.

The three individuals—two men and one woman—awoke in a chiaroscuro world. An impassable wall encircled the truck and the building, and they sat in a rusted truck with rotten upholstery.

“No problems,” the first man said.

The woman checked her watch, looking at the inside of her wrist.

“We have fifty-nine minutes,” she said.

The second man wordlessly stood, and opened the back of the truck, he hopped down and helped his two companions out.

The building was awash with watery light, a shade of pale blue in the gray.

The first floor had been a restaurant. There was a dining room with a counter in it, and a kitchen. Things slithered under the floorboards, chittering and muttering.

“Let the records show, that we began the extermination at 2207 hours, Thursday Evening,” the woman said.

The first man pulled up the floorboards, and looked down into the space beneath. Cockroaches as long as a man’s forearm looked up at them with too-human eyes.

The second man pointed at the nearest one, and his finger shifted, changing into the barrel of a gun. He extended his fingers one by one, and each changed.

With an effort of will, he tracked the five he could see, making absolutely sure he could hit each one.

One of the giant roaches screamed, before being silenced by the sound of gunshots. They dissolved into a wriggling mass of meat.

“Gestalt creatures, results of extermination that survived and ate leftover scraps of identity. We don’t need to worry about these,” the woman noted.

The gunman grinned.

“I disagree. It’s fun.”

“We don’t have time,” the first man said.

The three checked the kitchen. The stainless steel surfaces were rusted, the pans pitted and burnt. Hanging from one wall was a long row of knives, seemingly in pristine condition.

“That’s unusual,” the first man noted.

“The knives? Yes,” the woman said.

“It’s upstairs,” the gunman said.

“How do you know?” the other man asked.

“Listen. Feel.”

There was a high-pitched but organic-sounding whining noise, and the first man looked down, and noted that the hairs on his arms were stirring, as if in a wind.

“Upstairs,” he noted.

He reached into his coat, and pulled out a knife, and the woman pulled a lighter from her pocket, setting her left hand alight.

“Okay. Everybody ready?” he asked.

The woman and gunman nodded.

The three found the door to the stairway, and the knife man jimmied the door open, going in first. The gunman followed, and the woman brought up the rear.

The stairway was dark, and a cold wind blew through it. The light from the woman’s hand revealed bloodstains on the stairs and the railing.

“Something bad happened here,” she noted, before amending, “is happening here.”

The floor itself was devoid of internal walls. A single figure sat in the middle, the target of the extermination. The being was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the building, resting its hands on top of its distended belly.

It had gray skin, and its hands only had three fingers, but the most inhuman trait of the figure was its head. Instead of a flesh-wrapped skull, it had a sphere of dead black, from which the whining noise emerged, pulling air and dust into it.

The figure hopped up and skittered toward the three in a crouch.

The gunman began to fire, and it began moving sideways, dodging away from the hail of gunfire.

The knife man stepped back as the thing approached, and slashed at it, cutting into its shoulder. The flesh parted and wept a dead-black fluid.

It plunged its head forward, and kissed the man with the edge of the black sphere. Where it touched the man’s face, the flesh disappeared.

The gunman took this opportunity to fire into the thing’s side and back, tearing great jagged holes in its body.

The thing dropped, jerking and twitching.

“All yours,” the gunman said.

The woman nodded, and seized its foot with her left hand. The fire spread along the gray thing’s body and consumed it quickly, leaving only a small black sphere that fell through the floorboards and down, down, down.

The woman breathed a ragged sigh.

“Operation complete. 2231 hours.”

Cicatriz Episode 3×05

Here we are.  Take this.

Tesla looks on, as his device hovers on a cushion of crackling electricity, slipping the surly grip of gravity, yet maintaining its position in regard to the surface of the earth. He prods it with a rubber-wrapped rod, and it drifts. The inventor smiles…

The 30^th of April, 1945. The Red Army poured into Berlin. As soon as the news makes its way to the command center, and the Luftwaffe begins their countdown. The roof of the bunker pulls back, revealing a nose-cone. The largest rocket even constructed was revealed to the world, and launched, shooting off toward heaven on a column of fire. The Soviet Air Force pursued, a wing of P-39 Airacobras followed the Reichsarche, peppering it with machine gun fire. The rocket climbs higher and higher…

January 30^th, 1948. Mohandaas K. Gandhi killed by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist.

The 12^th of January, 1952. A space-to-ground rocket carrying a primitive nuclear device lands in the outskirts of London. Another is detected, several hours later, flying toward Washington. The United States scrambled a wing of F-86 Sabres, and managed to shoot down the missile sixty miles south of Washington, D.C. The point of origin of these missiles is determined to be on the Moon, on the edge of Mare Imbrium. After attacks on Beijing and Petrograd, NATO and the Warsaw Pact band together, and declare war on the Lunar Reich…

The 19^th of October, 1966. First contact with the Martians. A joint Soviet/British expedition landed near Valles Marineris, and began a three-month anthropological survey of the lowland Martians. The Cricket-like Martians prove adept linguists, but, much to the chagrin of the Soviet component of the expedition, are highly individualistic, and find the concept of socialism to be offensive, but the natives are greatly interested in human technology…

The 21^st of November, 1966. First men land on Venus. The Jungle planet is visited by an American expedition, and two species are discovered: the Low-Landers, giant crustaceans with multifaceted, naturally philosophical consciousnesses and a voracious appetites, and the Green Folk, simple para-hominids with symbiotic algae in their blood, native to the plateau forests where they are safe from the Low-Landers and their terrible hunger. Recognizing the Green Folk as cousins of a sort, NASA sets up permanent outposts on Venus in early 1968, training the natives to fight the terrible monsters in the deep valleys…

November 22^nd, 1968. The Beatles release the White Album.

Diseases from the neighboring planets ravage the population in the early 1970s. Martian Flu and Venusian Herpes. The population of Earth drops by one-third. First Martian visitors to Earth. Mineral rights for certain areas of Mars are sold, and exchanged for human technology…

March 11^th, 1971. U.N. Expedition, made up primarily of Indians, Canadians, and Japanese, visits Mercury. The surface of the planet is dead, but it is riddled with passageways, filled with strange forms of life that have never seen the Sun. One of the Canadian members eats a strange variety of lichen after being separated from her team, and develops temporary extra-sensory powers.

May 20^th, 1971. The Green Folk eliminate the last adult Low-Lander. The last of the species are preserved in a containment facility in the San Diego Zoo, and prove to possess a form of genetic memory, and a basic understanding of human language…

June 1^st, 1973. First contact with the Intelligence of Europa, a vast living thing living in the oceans of Jupiter’s Icy moon. A telepathic leviathan, observed to be in possession of a living body that rivals several of Jupiter’s smaller satellites in mass, but lacking the ability to reproduce. The Intelligence is vast and slow to act, but relatively peaceful, never knowing competition, and feeding on the radiation of Jupiter’s Van Allen belts. The first human mind to be touched by the Intelligence, however, is rendered mad, as the pilot’s body experiences all of the capillaries in his brain bursting open, the Intelligence being much more telepathically potent than anticipated…

September 13^th, 1977. Martian War begins. No governments involved, a war between the ever-shifting Martian tribes and human corporations. No racial lines in the conflict, but the rights to land on Venus and several asteroids changes hands, as does ownership of 112 square kilometers in Antarctica…

August 16^th, 1977. Elvis Presley dies…

January 1st, 1980. The U.N. establishes the Solar Corps, men and women from every nation on Earth, meant to intervene in any interplanetary wars. Each one is fed regularly an Mercurian Lichen, and sent to meditate with the Mind of Europa…

May 11^th, 1980. The Solar Corps explores Titan, meeting the native “Slow People,” semi-gelatinous spheres that slide across the landscape, occasionally extending milky-white tentacles to handle tools. They have not discovered fire, but managed to selectively breed many animals found on their world into usable forms….

1980-1991. Pax Solaris.

August 1991. Fall of the Soviet Union…

1992-1996. First contact and War with an extrasolar culture. The Artists of the Void (best fit translation) attack and decimate Solar Forces, gaining many victories due to their unorthodox tactics (primarily their insistence on never approaching the same problem the same way twice.) Unfortunately for the artists, the Humans, Martians, and Venusians were all perfectly happy to give repeat performances and eventually destroyed their “Carrier” ship, which allowed them to travel between solar systems. The remaining Artists were confined to internment camps in the Gobi and Mojave deserts…

September 11^th, 2001. Terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center…

The dwarf straightened his bow-tie and grinned with tiny shark’s teeth. He wore a dark gray suit with an unidentifiable red flower for a boutonniere.

“Come on in, have a seat,” he lisped, gesturing to the leather chair positioned opposite of him.

A woman in a red dress stood behind him, with a gray scarf tied around her left bicep. Other than her arm, she was the picture of a film noir femme fatale. Beneath the scarf, her arm was a mass of red flesh encased in electrum plates. Her hand had six long, long fingers that terminated in long, curved claws.

That hand held a tray with a simple silver cigarette case sitting in the middle of it. Her right hand had a half-foot-long cigarette holder.

She walked over to the guest, and offered him the tray. The man wore a jean-jacket with a flannel shirt under it. He nodded in thanks, before opening the case, and removing the only cigarette. He also pulled out the small scrap of paper inside.

The dwarf stepped back and hopped onto the leather chair behind him.

“Do you know why you’re here?”

The man shook his head, and put the cigarette in his mouth. A feminine left hand raised a silver lighter and lit the cigarette. He took a puff, nodded to her, and looked down, seeing only the right hand, with its holder, and the tray in the electrum claw. She smiled, and assumed a position behind the dwarf.

“Well, we know why you’re here,” the Dwarf said, “and so does our boss. Look around, would you?”

The man did so. He was in a tavern, the hangings draped in white linen sheets.

“Our employer needs you to do something for him.”

“Why should I?” the man asked, his voice sounding distant and hollow.

“Because of services rendered.”

The man took a puff off his cigarette, and the smoke in his lungs turned to memories, playing out before his eyes like a silent movie.

He was in this bar, but the dwarf and lady in red stood behind a slender man of exceptional height, whose head was hidden in shadows.

The man produced a wooden container the size of a shoe box, and handed it to him.

“I recall…”

His eyes dilated.

“What are you holding?” the dwarf asked, the grin not leaving his face.

The man looked down at the paper.

“It’s my name.”

“What does it say?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“Why?”

“Because I know that if I do, you’re going to make me do something terrible.”

“Say it,” the Dwarf commanded.

“Jackson Welles.”

“One of those unfortunates with two last names, I see,” the Dwarf said, before looking at the woman, “the ledger, please.”

The woman held out her tray, which now had a large leather-bound book on it. The Dwarf took the book, and opened it.

“Jackson Welles. A very valuable service was rendered. You remember what was in that box?”

“No.”

Jackson thought for a long moment. He could remember everything up until he opened the box.

“Well, the contents of that box killed you. You didn’t give it the proper respect, and now it’s time to pay up.”

“But I’m alive,” Jackson protested.

“So you are,” the Dwarf admitted, “I never said you were dead. Just that the contents of that box killed you. You people. Always with the whole unidirectional time business. I find it a little vulgar.”

“I’m sorry?” Jackson said.

“Apology accepted. Now. Do you accept your situation?”

“Owing you and your…employer…a costly, unspecified favor?”

“That is correct.”

Jackson looked down, squeezing his eyes shut.

“Do I have a choice?” he asked.

He felt six sharp points run over the back of his neck, gently grazing the skin there. Looking up, he saw the woman in red standing behind him, a small half-smile on her face.

“No,” the dwarf said.

“Tell me what I need to do.”

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.

The Sheriff stood by the side of the flooded quarry, watching as the divers came up, reporting to the deputy that waited by the side of the hole.

Danvers looked up at the sheriff and shook his head.

They’d found the boy’s truck. It had had an open door, but the boy, himself was nowhere to be found. Not at home, not at his girlfriend’s, nowhere.

The divers had been combing through the quarry for signs of him for six hours, now. The bottom of the hole was riddled with caves that were the reason it was filled with water. The mining company had blasted through into a network of caverns filled with brackish muck that had welled up from god knows how deep.

The Sheriff got off of the bumper of his car, and stretched his bad leg.

He waved Danvers on up, and watched as the man edged along the sheer face of the quarry, upward.

When the younger man reached him, the Sheriff pulled off his aviators, and looked him in the eye.

“Danvers, you tell the Divers to pack it on up. I don’t know where he is, but that boy won’t be found down in that hole. Must’ve abandoned his truck and run off.”

Danvers nodded, and headed back down into the quarry.

“You really believe that?” a voice asked from behind the sheriff.

He turned, and looked at the intruder.

Deputy Connors was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, with a canvass jacket that bulged with the shape of his gun on his left breast.

“I thought you’d be lurking around,” the Sheriff said, “How’ve you been?”

“Decent. I’ve been looking into a few things. Investigating.”

The Sheriff looked over at him with serious eyes wreathed in wrinkles.

“You never learned when to leave it alone, or ask for help, did you? If you have, we might have a place for you.”

“Just the opposite. I’ve been discovering things, learning more and more. Been coming here every night to think, and I think I know what happened to your boy.”

The Sheriff slipped his glasses back on.

“Proceed.”

“I was sitting on that log over there, just opposite the road. I like the look of the moon on the water. Sometimes, it’s bright enough to see by. Sometimes, I can see fish down in the quarry.”

“Quarry ain’t got no fish.”

“Pardon me, but it sure as hell does, Sheriff.”

The Sheriff’s mouth quirked, but he didn’t say anything.

“So, last night, this Ford truck…an old one…eighties, I’d bet…barrels off the highway over there, ramps up the hill, and shoots off at an angle–” Connors pointed an arc across the giant hole “–before hitting the water, and beginning to sink.”

Connors stepped back a few steps, until he could see the route Danvers took down to the side of the hole.

“I saw the boy struggling, trying to get out, and I began to head down to the hole. I edged along the side of the quarry, facing out.”

Connors looked back towards the Sheriff.

“He got out of the truck just fine, Sheriff.”

“So what happened to him?”

“I was going to help him out, but he never made it close enough to the side of the hole. He never got out of the water. There was this…thing…this giant fish.”

Connors looked down at his feet, a manic light in his eyes.

“It was like a catfish, but all pale and milky-eyed. Must’ve been ten feet long. It came up from below and swallowed him whole, before swimming back down.”

“Bullshit,” the Sheriff declared, “there aren’t any fish in that hole, and we would’ve seen something that big.”

“I remember hearing about this quarry, Sheriff. No one knows where the water comes from, it wells up from way down deep. Why shouldn’t there be fish in those rivers? Just because they’ve never seen the light of day doesn’t mean they aren’t down there, miles and miles below our feet.

“Then, one day, some dynamite blows the roof off one of those rivers…well, it makes sense that something would swim up, at some point.”

“Well, what am I supposed to put on the death certificate? ‘Eaten by catfish from hell?’”

Connors shook his head.

“I shouldn’t have to tell you, Sheriff. Don’t you have a whole stack of forms with ‘missing, presumed dead’ already printed on them?”

The tech chewed bubble gum as he looked over the CT readout.

“That’s weird,” he declared, blowing a bubble.

This declaration was, of course, fairly low on the list of exclamations and comments the patient was hoping to hear. Though, of course, it was nowhere near so loathsome as any number of diseases that might have been spotted on sight:

“Cancer!”

“Aneurism waiting to happen!”

“It’s being eaten by moths!”

As things went “That’s weird,” could be fairly benign, though it could also mean that the doctors didn’t know how to handle whatever the hell was wrong. It certainly didn’t explain the headaches.

After a long moment of contemplation, the patient asked:

“What is it?”

“You’re empty,” the tech declared.

“What do you mean ‘empty?’” the patient asked.

“Try not to move.”

“Sorry…empty?”

“Here. Let me save this image,” the tech said, blowing out a bubble and then popping it on his teeth, “climb on out, and have a look at this. It’s goddamn weird.”

“That isn’t very comforting.”

“Well, I mean, you just got to look at this.”

He scrambled out of the machine, and walked over to the computer, his backside hanging out into the frigid, sterile air.

There was the eggshell of his skull, and there was where his brain was supposed to be, the spot inside that bubble of bone.

“See? Nothing. You’ve got no brain. Just these metal bits holding your skull in place and then….zip. Nothing.”

“How can there be nothing?” the patient asked.

“I’unno. You’ve still got nerves and everything. They feed in there, just don’t have anything to attach to.”

The patient stared at the screen for a bit longer, and licked the inside of his lower lip, thinking.

“Well, what are the doctors going to do?”

“Probably slice you open and look at it.”

More exposition.  Of a sort.

Cicatriz Episode 3×04