Here: I've made a playlist to write (or read) a bit of the ol action horror ultraviolence by. It is awesome. Granted, it's a little heavy on Rob Zombie and The Prodigy, but then again so too should your life be.
The palms whipped in the wind, announcing the coming typhoon. Francois put his hands behind his head, tried for nonchalance as the hammock strung between the tree trunks. It wouldn't do to show fear for this client... wouldn't do at all.
Without thinking about it, he glanced at the mounds of sands where he had buried the sea glass bottles.
The waves exploded in the flashing of numberless fish. The beach was soon covered in a carpet of crabs marching in with the tide. Typhon always arrived with a distracting amount of fanfare. Well, what did Francois expect when dealing with the Gods?
Even though Jimminy perched himself in an alcove half a block away from the bend in the alley where the deal was taking place; he could still hear the fool buyer's booming voice filling the street and drawing attention. 'Great.' He thought. 'This idiot is going to attract half the city's militia...' He spent his twitchy time as lookout straining his eyes to watch and his ears to listen. The telltale chink of coins being counted rang out just as a row of ordered piketops crested the roof of the building across the way.
He chirped three times as a signal, then snorted the pixie dust from the small bag around his waste. Jimminy floated in the air, guiding himself by angling his umbrella. His body relaxed as he saw 'Nochio rising slowly, weighed down by a bag of coin. The trade had gone about as well as he could've hoped.
The Carne Asada sizzled on the grill as Mariachi music filled the kitchen. Juan sang along with it, subconsciously timing the chops of his spatch to the rhythm. As he wiped the sweat from his brow, gravity fell to .25. Feeling the change, he pushed off; sailing away from the griddle and the popping deep fry grease. Lingering in front of the bubbling oil when it wasn't clamped down by standard gravity was a great way to coat your face in third degree burns. He checked his arc before he smashed his skull against the ceiling... which'd be better than than melting his cheeks off but would still be less than ideal.
Juan heard frustrated noise from the seating area outside the kitchen as he hit the emergency off, cutting power to the fryer and the grill. He wondered when grav would be back, eyeballing the yellowed splotches on the walls. Between cleaning, and resetting/restarting the deep fry, he would have an extra hour of work tonight before he closed up.
"Yo Maria!"
"Yeah, yeah. I'm updating the menu."
He watched as the bubbling cooking oil cooled and stilled; just another day in paradise.
"What is power?" asked the Tutor to the King's children.
"Blades. And the fealty of men who can use them." Said Rivers the oldest.
"The Ancient Magics that hold the world together?" Answered Terrel, second son.
The Tutor shook his head, looked towards Johso the third child.
"Power is being trusting, being confident and having this bare out experientially. Or at least that's the kind of power I'm searching for."
Without any sort of telegraphing the tutor punched Johso in the face, knocking her out of the chair.
"And how's that theory working out for you?"
Johso clenched her teeth smiled as blood dribbled from her split lip. She wouldn't let him rile her. She had to prove herself to father, or none of it would work.
(So I'm retitling my 'world a day feature' as 'world a day' as I don't want the google keyword 'world')
The day began, my life had become a cliche and it repeated itself yet again. Dodged out of the way of a giant titanium spider leg, the ground quaking as several tons of sugar addict lumbered in on his mechanical transport. I triggered alarm number 147 through a custom series of hand movements. The candy bowl was instantly shielded by an orb of tungsten carbide. This was one of the newer features of my job; the ultra court ruling a few months back making the bank liable to take much more drastic counter measures to keep the sugs from doing more damage to their lifeweight while not 'unduly changing standard business practices so as to suggest discrimination of addicts.'
The bowl shaped hippo of a man bellowed before stomping off. He must have been pissed, because he deliberately flattened half a dozen nimh rats. The little buggers never had a chance, and the survivors kept waiting in line as their cousins were ground into a furry red paste (Nimh rats had decided as a race that jumping to press buttons was degrading). Rats -like most of the recently uplifted- for the first time had to deal with credit scores and individual futures on the open market.
Here's my plan: I'm going to learn and practice and learn some more. I'm interning for my good friend Miguel, watching how he has managed to create and maintain an awesome group of friends/fans in exchange over at Monster Island Resort. I'm taking tutorials and reading articles (even if they tend to be so peppy and painfully optimistic they make my eyes bleed red streams of high fructose corn syrup). I'm doing and will continue to do the work (writing), now I have to learn how to work just as hard getting people interested.
And as far as I know, when you strip away all the bullshit the whole ruling the internet bit is stupid simple:
Step 1: Work hard making something that is as awesome as possible.
Step 2: Work equally hard telling people about that awesome thing you made as creatively as you can.
Step 3: Encourage people to talk about the awesome thing you made.
and then maybe
Step 4: Figure out how and why people could/should pay you.
Although maybe I should go with this plan...
And that's it! There are tricks, short cuts and best practices; definitely. But when it comes down to it, I can't trick someone into pretending to like my art. There's too much great stuff out there. I truly and honestly believe that I'm making awesome things, things people will love (note most of those 'things' are awesomely violent stories wholly unsuitable for children) and I need to act accordingly.
That said, for anyone reading this I would be very grateful if you left me a comment or shot me an email. Encouragement is like beer, manna from heaven and sex all rolled into one. I will probably live without it, but why on earth would I want to? Additionally, if you like what I do, share it! Share it however makes sense to you with whoever you think would be interested (remembering, of course, that everyone hates spam). I literally can not succeed if you don't. I have nothing I'm selling at the moment -I'm not at step 4, yet- so if I've given you anything of value you can repay me via word of mouth.
If you are one of CHEMO's beta readers, I would love to get some feedback by June 15th. My goal is to start querying agents by the last week of June.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for the comments and likes. I will keep writing my observations about the process of 'self promotion,' probably attempt to make it into a regular feature. Hopefully, I'll keep making stuff you think is awesome. As always, if you let me know how I'm doing or tell a friend... you'll make my day.
He didn't know the codes of this city: the lattice work of wealth, art and social obligation emerging from a million consulting poets slinging repackaged hippy branding. The pedestrians and cyclists were fearless and insulated as exotic isalnd birds. They ignored the cars circling and scavenging for any tattered scrap of parking. This was a place dreampt up by beats and gays, naval officers and expat chinese.
Search Engine Optimization, Stats and Mailing Lists are not a new fangled notion, at least not by internet standards. Everybody's doing it, in fact everybody has been doing . And nobody will shut up about how to leverage social networking for pan-viral brand synergy to the power of 39. Well, 'everyone' except me. I'm not late to the party, I'm fashionably late to the party.
Technically, I (previously) would argue that I wasn't interested silly little things like 'metrics' or 'success' because I claimed I didn't want to be sleezy used car salesman type of the interwebs, didn't want to have that sort of relationship with an audience. In actuality, I just didn't want to fail measurably.
But, since I want to make my living selecting the order of words (and then obsessing with and tinkering with that order), I need an audience. I need fans. I need readers. I need people who can honestly recommend me to their friends. And I need to do this without sounding like a painfully cheerful blowhard idiot.
Pictured: The personification of 99% of self promotion...
With that in mind, I'm throwing myself into this whole 'making a popular website thing.' Within a year, I want to own a couple of favored search terms (Action Horror is my next conquest). I want to increase my web traffic exponentially. I want a thousand fans on facebook. And I can't do any of this without you. Now I need to follow the plan...
This post will be continued tomorrow in 'A Writer's Adventures in Self Promotion: The Plan'
(Thanks a lot for the super simple word suggestion Ben... my writing tends to veer towards an esoteric vocab lessons without you helping the process along you sonofabitch. Here's a link, since I had to look up what Antidisestablishmentarianism meant.)
Gregor looked out the window towards the milling herd of protesters. Their signs flapped about in the air, some scant few of them approaching clever. One read 'Pagans for Progress' and the ridiculousness of that made Gregor chuckle in spite of himself. Still, the vast majority were endless, humorless redundancies of three basic themes: 'Down with the church' 'Keep your God out of my house.' and -most ignorant of all- 'Read the constitution: Separation of Church and State.'
That last one particularly distressed Gregor. The whole concept of 'Separation of Church and State' was -in fact- not present in the constitution. At best one could argue that the first amendment applied... but (as president) he was not part of congress and (more importantly) he was not making laws concerning the establishment of religion. President Gregor McKinley forced his faith on no one because, as every christian knew, that would be impossible. The unsaved either would accept Jesus or they would not. They would either live in sin and risk damnation or they would find freedom in service to Christ. In his years as a lawyer, before he heard the call to ministry and then to the presidency, Gregor was ever dismayed by people's complete lack of knowledge concerning the law.
No, he didn't tell people 'what' they could worship or how. They were organized because they were upset at the way he was changing society. And he most certainly was changing society... or trying to whenever unstymied by the militantly agnostic holdouts in the Senate or the Supreme Court.
He worked from before sunrise to well after moon rise every day, doing all he could to realign the country with the oldest and best value system known to man. If all the Atheists and Budha worshipers could not accept the word of God for what it was, the least they could do is admit the fact that judeo-christian values were what had made the country great. Moreover, they should have to concede that the reaffirmation of those same values were what could make the country great again. But sadly, that was too much to expect of a fallen and decadent people. The protesters were an ever present reminder that the hearts of men were hardened against God even in the face of overwhelming truth.
His thoughts drifted away from the yelling fools as he got on his knees to to pray. Then, he got to the business of being president: 9 am briefing, 11 o' clock meeting with the Chairman of the FCC about the campaign to discourage the consumption of internet pornography and the complications arising from court actions, after lunch was the informal strategic planning session on the varied state and local efforts to reinstate the gutted sodomy laws and at 3:15 there was the counsel session with Joint Chiefs about long term strategy for the continuing occupation of the holy lands... or rather the peace keeping efforts in Israel, Palestine and Syria as his administration referred to it in public.
And so endless complications stretched him till long after the sun had set, he barely had an hour and a half to read the bible before joining Margie in bed. As he buttoned his pajamas he thought back on work of the day. Christians faced persecution from all over society, so it was no surprise that he didn't always get his way. More importantly, he didn't feel God's direct influence in every thing he did and sometimes he wondered... But Gregor knew he had done his best based on the core values had guided his life for the last thirty seven years and that God would forgive him for any mistakes or errors that he made. Even if there were some things that felt like setbacks and defeat, victory was inevitable. He relished the fact that tomorrow was the sabbath. Barring emergency, there would be no meetings, no briefings. He could spend the whole day focusing on growing closer to God.
President Gregor McKinley had a smile on his face as unconsciousness finally claimed him.
(Do you think I pushed any buttons with this one?)
Stephen's TV didn't work so good anymore, but he didn't mind. Everyone told him to upgrade to some HD my cdl bullcrap, but he was happy with his blasted out colors of his thirty year old RCA. Horror movies were scarier through the snow, the news of awful things felt more distant... less real. He saw something about an update to digital and some kind of converter he needed to buy to keep getting signal; but Stephen wasn't some kind of nerd and he didn't pay attention to all that huckey.
Sure enough, a day came and now the TV spat nothing more than static no matter how much he jiggled the rabbit ears. Unwilling to give up his habits, Stephen sat watching the new shifting kaleidescope colors and patterns while he ate his cereal. It was almost soothing, the tide of white noise sounds and sometimes he noticed patterns and sometimes it was even pretty. After three weeks though, Stephen began to understand the pictures and the message that waited below the wash of static.
After that, Stephen spent a lot more time staring at the screen.
(This is the first chapter to the novel I'm currently writing)
Planetfall's a bitch. At least atmosphere here is a little shy of standard, that keeps this from hurting too much. Still, nobody ever described reentry as 'pleasant.'
Hitting terminal at about 1000 kpm, I have a minute to muse about the archaic taste of the word 'reentry.' Reentry: back from when there was just earth, when anything that went into space came back to the mother planet or left forever. Technically, this isn't reentry. This is entry.
Impact deafens my idle thoughts. My bulk pulverizes stone into sand, fills the air with haze. Three tons of man and rig tend to leave a decent sized impact crater, like the planet had some terrible acne in its awkward teenage years. There's a small comfort that there are -or soon will be- five other carefully spaced identical craters dotting the planet’s surface. I wish I could remember its name...
The rig stabilizes, finishes a dozen diagnostic subroutines and begins to dig. I burrow like a tick into the skin of the world. I vibrate through no less than a kilometer of dirt, rock, aqua-fir and ore... 'headfirst.' I've little to busy myself with beyond monitoring analog gages and digital overlays. They're for my own peace of mind really. At best, the read-outs would grant me a five second advanced warning that I'm about to die.
The shaking makes it hard to think, seems to rattle my brain. I struggle again to remember the name of this planet. They only told it to me yesterday, and there was a lot going on at the time. My teeth chatter as I move.
I'm sure the rigs could dig us 'feet first.' Might even be safer... But then the company might not learn of a critical flaw or structural weakness in the system until later, when they couldn't do anything about it. If something's wrong, T.H.E.co wants me to die now when the pathway is still open. Otherwise, a tectonic shift or some other such bullshit could finish me off when they've closed the wormhole; and then they'd be shit outta luck. Stakeholders wouldn't want to be left with less than a full 'toon to protect their interests.
My overlays blink green. I've reached an appropriate depth. My systems read out ok. The rig starts draining me of fluids and pumping my jerkyfied flesh full of sedatives. Safely underground, I sleep the sleep of the dead...
...and wake to the pressing, claustrophobic knowledge that something is not right.
*Deep Voiced Trailer Narrator Begins Talking over a background of an gritty urban cityscape at night*
Narrator: In the city, there are many games played for respect, for honor and for power...
*cut to a group of intimidating men, yelling and slapping down money for bets. You can not see what they're betting on because their circle obscure what's at its center*
Narrator: But there is one game that rules the city...
*Obviously villainous man walks into the warehouse, a sneer on his face and a silver briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. Twin bodyguards flank him, glowering as they swivel their heads this way or that*
Narrator: One game that makes the gutters flow with blood...
*A loan shark pushes a client up against the wall, holds a pistol to his head*
Loan Shark: Where's my money? Where's my money???
Client: I'll get it CJ... I promise. I just need a little more time.
Narrator: One game where fortunes are made or lost
*The obvious villain walks forward, the circle of cheering men parting for him. The underdog hero sits on the ground, looking up determidly. Obvious villian open this briefcase for the big reveal just as the narrarator says *
Narrator: POGS!
*cut to a montage of people playing pogs with reaction shots put together with gratuitous closeups and slow motion. People use the big 'nooooo' as the pogs flip through the air. Dramatic music plays in the background.*
Narrator: POGS Coming to a Theater Near You Summer 2012
Krale walked amongst the fields of budding stalks, picking out the bulbs that were ready for harvest. Every once in a while, he would use a brace of his meter long talons to pick some particularly ripe morsel. He would pop the little berry like orb of human inventiveness into his mouth; savoring the juice as it flowed down his pseudo-throat tubules. Not as good as the wine they would eventually press from these bulbs... but still refreshing under the thousand sunned sky.
As the idea farm field hand moved through his alloted rows, he discovered a stalk that seemed to be beginning to wilt. The face of vines and roots at its base seemed, pensive... troubled. Not full of rage, or sorrow or terror; any of the useful feelings which would help the stalk flower, self germinate and bud. No, the face indicated emptiness.
Krale summoned his foreman Hrang.
"This one seems drained." He said, gesturing with one of his tertiary thumb.
Hrang stood, stroking the knots of flesh below his teeth thoughtfully.
"Should I fertilize?" Krale hoisted his onyx can of muse slurry. A splash of this would refresh the human soul that fed the stalk, would help neural nodes reconnect into fucxing diodes to grow more bulbs for collection.
"Nah," Said Hrang. "This one's about done." With a grunt, he uprooted the growth to cast it onto the ground. "Another for the fire." Krale grunted his acknowledgement as he squeezed out another bulb to dribble the mematic extract into his mouth parts.
---
Far away, in the human world, the screenwriter looked at his screen. The words just wouldn't come... and they never would again.
George sat on the chair, waiting as the peroxide drained the color from his hair. After this, there would be no going back. No, the point of no return had happened before this: little bit by little bit he had become a Golden Lord. The hair bleaching was only the outer indication of the inner truth.
Joining the Golden Lords meant many things: respect, money and power. But more than anything, it meant he wouldn't have to be afraid any more. That was worth stabbing the old lady in the alley, worth feeling the blood dribble down his onto hands and the look on her face as she died. Not having to be afraid anymore was worth everything that they had asked of him, everything they could possibly ask of him.
(I wanted to write a semi serious post about the Golden Lords of Meteor Man. They're pretty awesome bad guys.)
Advance autocorrect: auto correct to passive aggressive advice, auto correct to the complete works of shakespeare, auto correct to horrendous teenage poetry, etc
Extreme bathroom attendants: bathroom attendants inside the stall, to the side of urinals
A New Genre of fiction: Bromance
What happens in vegas ad, dude with blood on its hands saying oh god, oh god (I am absolutely certain that has been done)
Awesome Book Title Idea:
Losing their Minds but Keeping the Cash - A book about Baby Boomers
I know that you feel ennui regarding your prospects. Lack of a hyper-spatial awareness is not a problem any more. You have options! You can live the life of your dreams.
Here's the contact information: In side the solar system : 134-986.2-934875.7 Outer rims : 1+134-986.2-934875.7 You have to call them, leave your name and your satellite number (with your asteroid/planet code) and they will relay you back soon. The augmentations and relay access of your dreams awaits! It is a perfect decision in your situation.
These are my top picks for video games that manage to give you all the action you could want while while making you piss yourself just a little. If I'm being honest; more than movies, more than literature it is video games that are my first and greatest influence in how I approach and understand story.
(Note: I'm encompassing survival horror under the banner 'action horror' cause... well, I want to.)
5. Resident Evil:
Or 'Biohazard' as it is known in Japan. One of the first games to do justice to zombies. Forget the increasingly terrible movies and remember instead the 'holy shit' awesomeness of running and gunning the T-Virus infected dogs... because Umbrella help you if all you had left was a knife. Seriously Resident Evil, thank you so much for ensuring I never, ever had enough ammo. Bonus points for the series giving up its addiction to camera angle scares (starting in Resident Evil 4) but staying just as scary.
4. System Shock
This game did not get the wide adoption it deserved. Probably one of the best examples of video game writing I've ever seen. All you have is your weapons, your wits, and your psionic powers against an army of I don't even know whats and the psychotic AI that's managing it it all. Unlike a lot of the games on the list... SS remains almost entirely out of print today. Which is too bad.
3. Bio Shock
This spiritual successor to System Shock definitely lives up to its pedigree. An Ayn Rand flavored under the sea extravaganza which with so many delightful vignettes courtesy of the deranged 'splicers' of Rapture. Granted, I do think that the final boss was a little... silly; in the way that all super steroid final bosses are. But everything up till that point was pure gold. Love the tension of weighing 'should I or shouldn't I attack that eight foot tall armored mutant over there to suck the life essence out of the little girl he's protecting.' Decisions, decisions.
2. Half Life
Still one of the pinnacles of the first person shooter genre. The level of polish and care that went into the game shames 99% of the first person shooters out there. One word: headcrabs. Nowadays, we have two words: poison headcrabs. Recently found out the 'zombies' sounds are actually a man's screaming voice begging for help. Neat! Now I have more things to have nightmares about.
1. Doom
Ahh doom, you will always have a special place in my heart. With the exception of the film Aliens, this is why we're obsessed with with space marines battling unimaginable horrors in spaceeeeeee *echo, echo, echo*. Looking back on it now, it's easy to forget that the demon design used to scare me. But they really, really did. I remember grabbing an 'unprotected' key only for the walls to lower and five of these guys come rushing out throwing fireballs and making my soundblaster contort itself into the low-res language of hell. Good times.
Honorable Mention:
Left 4 Dead 1 & 2: Great game(s). Pitch perfect take on the 'infected' style zombies. Amazingly designed to force you to work as part of a team. More homages than you can shake a chainsaw at. The director AI is a thing of beauty and why I'm still playing these games a two years later. Still, I didn't include it primarily because there's something about getting the opportunity to play as one of the infected that drains the horror from the experience.
So what did I miss? What would be on your top five list of Action Horror Video Games?
The place was narrow, like four or five hallways side by side. They called it a 'coffee shop' mainly because that's what the sign outside said it was, but really it exists by renting computer time and providing a forum for hackers, militant atheists, anarchists and libertarians/'statists'/lost republicans harried for not being 'logically consistent.' Before you get to any of that though, there was the small matter of a moat like art gallery that claimed the first 150 sq feet or so followed by a moat of an anarchocapitalist library/book store. Every night the stage and chairs in back were filled with some manner of amateur noise: improv comedy, jazz, or intellectuals/geeks pontificating on this or that or the other thing. And for the most part, he loved it.
He sat there, waiting for his writing partner... extremely grateful that he didn't bother calling himself a libertarian anymore.
"Well they are useful for dating the strata..." his coworker responded through the speaker.
Jacob snorted at his partner's perpetual optimism, adjusted the prongs and pushed deeper.
"But, you know they're not worth anything and they just get in the way of our quota." Jacob argued.
"It can't all be mp3 players and plasma tvs, Jacob." Came the voice through the speaker, evincing the strange clippings and delays of machine translated English. Jacob snorted again, scanning through the rotten conveyer belt offering as quick as he could. He wished he could be home and sorting through his feeds instead of out here in the sieve, sorting through trash. But the quicker he met his quota, the quicker he could go home.
It used to be when you were on subsistence ration you'd have contract work every day... something interesting maybe. But the ais had gotten better and the Bangladeshi market had opened up for projection work. And now the only subsistence job was sorting through the endless stream of trash that the ais had picked clean months ago, looking for whatever scrap of value would help you identify your quota. Jacob was pretty sure his coworker was a projected Bangladeshi, but then it could just as easily be a gray market ai pretending to be a Bangladeshi, or a Sudanese equivalent black market type posing as a gray market AI posing as a Bangladeshi.
Jacob knew there were other, weirder gnarls to the reversing game of pretend but his head was starting to hurt and he ad the sieve to operate. He increased the spinarette's revolution and focused.
"Every day in every way we're getting meta, meta..." he sang the words to the pop song. Jacob was forced to admit -to himself- that his partner had a point about dating the via the defunct yellow pages. They counted off the years in layers of waste nearly as consistent and reliable as tree rings. And all the good stuff was between 1980 and 2020. Sure the fifties/sixties had more metal junk, but from eighty onwards you get CD players and the endless parade of planned obsolescent electronics. Scoring a handful of LEDs wasn't like identifying a fridge, but slow and steady won the race more often than not.
Jacob sang and sorted through more trash, hoping to locate the wayward heavy metals trapped in discarded electronics. Then he could get back to his feeds.
This, this was a good land. A good hex. A village founded here would grow and prosper. The surrounding terrain contained good pasture for ranching sheep, harvesting and digging clay for brick making. But most important was the iron to be dug from the mountain. Because -as every settler knew- it was iron that fueled the economy of Catan. It was iron that would allow a village to become a city.
The years past and the village prospered. There were fine harvests, and the brick maker's became famous the world over: but they seemed incapable of mining iron. Every season, a new calamity befell: the mines would collapse, or the workers would or the tunnels would flood. It was almost as though the gods who controlled such things amused themselves rolling low dice every season. Worse still, the village's neighbors were never interested in trading as they were busy smelting metal to build higher and bigger than could possibly be done with clay brick and lumber alone.
But then, for three straight seasons, the ore flowed out the mountain. The village celebrated, as they were ready to expand. With expansion, they were finally ready to challenge the harbor towns and centralized estates for the economic destiny of Catan.
(This piece of somewhat prosaic fan fiction is based on this superb board game, which you should really play if you aren't already.)
Make sure you watch this short video before reading the story. If you're viewing this on facebook, you can click here http://www.strugglingwordguy.com/2011/05/world-day-spirits.html
"So, are you sure you want to begin training? It might be... unpleasant at times."
"Yes."
The guru nodded, opening up his laptop. "Alright Paige, I want you to watch this video and we will discuss it afterwards." She pursed her lip, confused and a little disappointed. This isn't what she had expected of a guru when she responded to the ad; this skinny white guy sitting crossed legged wearing an 'Iron Maiden' T-Shirt.
The video began to play. Captions read: Count the number of times the basketball is passed by people wearing white. Six people, they looked like college students students, began lobbing an orange ball back and forth to one another, moving and interweaving. Paige counted for thrirty seconds or so, reaching 14.
Then the video said the correct answer was fifteen, but asked if she had seen the gorilla?!? Paige watched, amazed at a replay showing a man in a gorilla suit walking amidst the basketball players -beat its chest- and walked off. Paige had been so fixated upon the basketball that she'd remained completely oblivious.
Frank closed the laptop with a clack of plastic. "So, why do you think I showed you this video?"
"Because you want to show how limited human senses are..." she guessed.
"Quite the opposite actually, I wanted to you to see this to illustrate how amazing our perception is. We can choose what we don't see."
She titled her head a little.
"Look, scientists made this video because they want to show how most people don't see much, how if you're fixated on the basketball you never see the monkey. What they don't realize is that everyone has this problem all the time. I don't see what I'm not fixated on, same as you... that is unless something bad happens." The guru shuddered a little as he continued. "Most the world, scientists included, are fixated on the movement of the basketball; aka the real world. And that isn't a bad thing. Money, relationships and all the stuff we need to acquire to survive and show off: that's the movement of the basketball, thats the flow of pents. But the point is, there is other stuff out there. Stuff that most people will probably never see, but stuff I can gauruntee they won't see for as long you're mesmerized by the movement in front of your eyes." Frank stood, lifting his arms to stretch out his back.
"Ok Paige, that's lesson #1. We'll go with lesson # 2 tomorrow. Think about what we said and we'll meet at the same time tomorrow night."
Paige walked home, thinking about what had been said, and what she hadn't noticed in the video. And without really trying, she began to see them out of the corners of her eyes.
"Alright folks, so what we're doing today is pretty simple." Bribri said to the small crowd. He had rebrandered his name a decade and a half ago with mixed results. He didn't like to think about it, too many connections had already developed and it was too later to change now.
The transmediator stood 6:9 and wore an ironic suit contrasting sharply with his ultra hip face glyphs. The gaggle he addressed was comprised mostly of teenagers. As they stood their fingers on the pedest claimed pavement they twitched, their bodies shook in a hundred little rhythms as they carried on a hundred different conversations and massaged their feeds. They had been selected to be 'consultant testers' by Postwave Media Inc because they were the middling sort; book scores indicated that had some manner of influence... but not enough to be cost prohibitive. Moreover, statistical certainty held that these 'netizens' were bribeable at a level that made economic sense. Still, the tall man hoped that wouldn't be an issue.
Gawkers on bicycles rubber necked, little ripples of net traffic surging in the corners of Bribri's vision as the passerbys searched geotags and branded rdif bursts for identification of what was going on. 'Good' Bribri thought as he skimmed through the stats 'That's buzz at a couple points above projections.' While he consulted the hits and queries, he resumed his spiel.
"So what's gonna happen is, we've reserved a couple blocks for this case study. This place is known for vagrants, protestors and tagging: a urban boho-real ripe for gentrification but resisting it through sufficient street crime that the middlings don't feel safe." The teenagers all chuckled at the hapless 'middlins'... a demographic group to which they all belonged but none would fess up to. "In the meantime, we've also paid some very fine actors, sigil artists and masters of brand to infiltrate this urbcology you see around you. They've subtly altered things based on our parameters. What we're testing today is to see how well we've managed to chameleon our assets and what you help us learn today will be used for designing the most successful ARGs and transmedia properties of the next quarter."
The teenagers whooped and Bribri showed his teeth. He had them.
"So get out there, flag anything that has the slightest whiff of the inauthent. Let's get to work!"
The teenagers fanned out, smug in the knowledge that they had been selected as taste makers. Kids were always so predictable. Today's 'exercise' would help them sell marketing penetration to this "vibrant, organically emergent part of the 'natural' urbanity." Because if they could get people believing that any part of this neighborhood was bohoreal, and not the corpofake place it was, Bribri was going to make a lot of money licensing the market rights.
She stood in the square. With unblinking eyes she watched the world flow by through bird droppings, through rains, and through seasons innumerable. Men were born and men died, men filled the square with their shouts and men were shot down by soldiers; all in their own time. Many, many years ago, she had been young: a goddess in beaten copper that gleamed golden red in the sunlight. But as the sheets of stillness settled upon her, she tarnished blue green.
And then he began to come to the square.
There was something to his eyes, she would think later, eyes that day after day stared directly into hers. For a week, he did nothing more than look. Then he started talking, with words numerous and quick as darting mice. This... talking troubled her. In the endless centuries of vigilant emptiness she had lost most of her capacity to understand. But there was one word she understood, one word that pierced her like no weapon ever could.
"Why?"
Why had she given up? Why had she stopped? Why had she stood still, doing nothing more than watch the world writhe in agony? There was nothing she could say to the man, because she herself had forgotten the reasons for surrendering to silence and stagnation. So a month after the homeless man began muttering at the statue; she simply shook off the rust and stepped forward from her pedestal. There were no news crews, no machines of war, no supplicants that day. Those would come later. No, on the day she began there was only the gaping babbling man, awed into speechlessness. She walked past him towards the closest leyline.
Now that she had ended her exile, Gyrwen had much to do.
Karl was a paunchy, past prime column of a man who loomed over his friends and neighbors without really trying. He was most definitely fat, but that didn't mean he wasn't stronger and faster than most people realized. And then there was his background... but Karl didn't like to think about that. This meant that, unless he was careful, most people tended to be wary of Karl.
In a culture that so often presented men as monsters primarily interested in rape, molestation and murder it was difficult for Karl to avoid intimidating just about everyone he met. So he worked hard at 'softening' his image. So He did his best to downplay his size by hunching over. He smiled reflexively and did his best to mean it. He spent an hour every morning curled up around the bathroom sink doing his best to keep himself immaculately groomed. Much like Rottweiler/Pitbull mix wearing a bright floral print handkerchief, Karl did his best to keep from scaring people.
All that bullshit stopped tonight. They broke the rules, not him. The bastards had made the mistake of trying to fuck Karl son of James.
His hands trembled as he readied himself. He had spent fifteen minutes punching holes in the drywall, giving his knuckles a small taste of what was to come. He'd opened the little matte black box of a gun safe, retrieved the .45, the wad of cash and his big knife. He took a deep breath. What came next would be harder.
Breathing heavy through his nose, he drew the blade across the palm of his hand. He suppressed the urge to wince away from the blade. Succeeding in keeping the cut shallow, he squeezed his hand into a ball to force blood into the saucer he had placed on the table.
With a fingertip, he began to trace the rune shapes in red: Uruz along his right arm for strength, Dagaz along his forehead to break through any barrier that stood in front of him and Algiz along his left forearm to protect him. Almost as an afterthought, he made Teiwax -the mark of Tyr- three times along the barallel of the gun and the flat edge of the knife. He poured the remaining blood onto the top of his head, slicking his thinning hair back across his skull.
For the first time, he didn't care what the neighbors thought of him because -no matter what happened- he would never be coming back home. And so Karl the son of James began his trek down the path of war. He didn't know if he would survive the night. But he knew for a fact that none of his enemies would.
Karl smiled through clenched teeth as he stalked out into the night.
(Now that I've gone and scared everyone away... comments? Comments anyone?)
I write Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror. But what I find myself writing most is Action Horror. I love a story where someone shoots a fucking vampire in the face. Speaking of which...
Some of my favorite examples: Aliens, World War Z, and innumerable chronicles about creature hunters. Sadly, Van Helsing has to be included in this list... but don't hold that against the genre.
Think every zombie movie ever made. Think space marines vs xenolife. Think the Thing's R.J. MacReady testing the blood of his coworkers.
If I wanted to be literary, I would claim to be carrying on a three thousand year old tradition. That is to say, I want to retell Beowulf over and over again because goddamn do I love that story. If I want to be crass I say I like stories where people kill cool looking monsters in endless varieties of awesomely violent ways. I'm sometimes afraid to admit that I write 'horror' because the strongest association in people's head nowadays is torture porn (a la Saw, Hostel and innumerable others incarnations).
Exact definitions are difficult because you could conceive of all horror stories as 'action' (running, screaming for help, or even begging for help are all 'actions'). I just look at what I like to write as one part of a continuum. On one end is torture porn (which focuses on victimization and -well- torture) and on the other end there's action horror (where the emphasis is on plans, the skills and abilities of human beings faced with an impossible situation). And it's the latter that generally interests me.
I adore considering the best laid plans of men battling nightmares. It doesn't matter if they're soldiers, obsessives or ordinary people who 'peaked behind the veil.' They might not live through the night, but they're not going to go down without a fight.
(Comment! Commenting is awesome. If you like great stories you can read my fiction CHEMO: Town of Golden by clicking here or listen by clicking here and skipping to the 22 minute mark.)
If you have previously subscribed to Struggling Word Guy's posts, or even if you haven't, I wanted to mention that the site has a new RSS feed for all my posts. http://feeds.feedburner.com/StrugglingWordGuy Thanks!
The tendril swayed in the breeze, the wind shivering a thousand tiny hairs that grew along its edges. It tasted the air in shallow pits that dotted its underside as it searched for methane, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. After swaying, growing and tasting for a day and a half the shoot found the body.
Immediately, it began to release a noxious gas to shepherd anything that might challenge its claim of the corpse. The tendril unfurled, wrapping itself around the cadaver. It slithered in up the chest and in through the nose. Threading its way through the lungs and between the organs, it secreted a complicated enzyme chain to speed decay and bacterial growth. By now more thin tendrils had found the body, and the corpse was stitched with half a dozen of the things. Within three days of coming in contact with the shoot, the interior of the corpse had liquefied. The skin and hair now draped the bones like an empty sack. The tendrils pumped the fluid feast through a series of tubuoles to feed the bulk of the fungus, growing and bloating half a meter underground.
Blood Gourds always sprang up on battle fields after the fighting had finished, thousands of tendrils weaving paths over tattered banners and rusting, broken armor.
Jack sat on his couch tapping away at the laptop and occasionally glancing out the window. Every fourth minute or so, he would get up and make some busy work for himself: rearranging the bottles, finding some new corner to dust or stirring the queso dip. The sun set, and the moon moved across the sky as he waited for the guests to arrive.
He waited four hours before he began drinking the beer. Eight bottles later, he drifted towards unconsciousness. His last waking thought was, at least this wasn't the worst party he'd ever thrown.
(www.strugglingwordguy.com doesn't throw parties like this... but whenever he throws one he suffers 'brief' moment of terror that no one will show up.)
I've been thinking a lot recently about productivity. As a 'full time writer' *cough* unemployed lazeabout *cough* I often don't accomplish everything I would like to. (No way in hell I'm getting the first draft of Burrowed like Ticks done by June 1st.) I realize that one of my big problems is the debilitating isolation of working alone. I'm a pack animal, and I function best as part of a pack. My advice, to everyone trying to do any manner of noncorporate work, is to find other people who have similar goals and bind yourselves together through encouragement, competition and simply giving one another 'permission' to work on the things you really care about.
Ideally, I would want to part of a Union of the Unemployed with regular status meetings/bullshit sessions/et al. I'm pretty sure I stole this idea from Time Management for Anarchists. Haven't been able to systematize anything (as most people I know actually work for a living and to get such luxuries as retirement accounts or basic healthcare) but I have managed to find a couple writing partners which has been great. Still, I'm always looking for more ways to stop (not)working alone.
Doctor Richardson felt the bite of the leather as he pulled the strap taught across his temples, the buckle gnawing into the back of his head. If he wasn't careful it would rub the skin there into a semicircle of hairlessness, leave him uniquely bald. He blinked back tears, the pungency of of the herbs clawing the insides of his nostrils. Still, better to cry and weep from the mint and vinegar than suck in the miasma the crept about the city killing without discrimination for class or rank or age.
He donned his wide brimmed hat and overcoat, sealed the cuffs and seams with fresh melted wax. Stiffening his spine and clutching at his walking stick, he marched out his back door into the quiet alleyway behind his shop. As he moved through the blackness the only noise he heard was the clacking of his staff upon the cobblestones. He turned the corner and found himself on the city's central boulevard -as ever- filled with the smears of night soil and the silent half dance march of the penitents who were busy whipping their backs into bloody tatters. As he moved North, he avoided looking into the odd cart that trundled past him. The only industry the city engaged in anymore was the digging of pits and the production of corpses with which to fill the holes.
Better to think of his tasks though, than consider the carts and what they contained. Tonight he would try a new pestilence medicine, the one ground out of roasted shells and marigold petals. He had witnessed no real improvement from the endless weeks of bleeding or lancing, making them as useful as prayer and self flagellation. He smirked behind his mask at the heresy, thinking unchristian thoughts was as close as he could come to humor nowadays.
But it didn't matter if God had abandoned the world as some men said: Mathew Richardson had a job to do. He was a Doctor and that title meant something. Even in these darkest of times. Even at the end of the world.
Every Tuesday and Thursday, he went to the Educational Cultural Complex.
His networking class was maybe 35% white: light skinned male students and instructor all equipped with waggling paunches emblematic of their geek leanings and vocations. From there, the class diversified: olive skinned immigrants from vaguely east of europe, pant suited black women with straightened hair and Thai, Vietnamese and Cambodians. All of them scribbling notes and chewing their lips to learn how to read binary and manage the numberless specie of internet vertebrae.
When he left class to wander the courtyards he typically found himself the only white person around. He thought about how -for most of his life- he had been taught to avoid places like this. The synonyms and code words were legion: 'working class neighborhood' 'barrio' 'ghetto' 'the wrong side of market' ect. Even if he hadn't been so instructed, he probably still would have subconsciously avoided being a minority since he had so little practice at it.
He grew up in one of the whitest places imaginable. The segregation lines between commuting, suburban property owners and mexicans who took care of all the physical necessities was firmly established: 'they' stayed in Santa Ana and 'we' played old timey aesthetics, lusting after the era that never was in 'old town' Orange. In high school, the esl brown kids took everything north of the handball courts. He stayed on his side, floating about the campus in a clique of honors class/asb/club president asians. He played football with everybody.
Nine years, a marriage, a degree and a handful of truncated jobs later; he found a place to sit and eat his low cal sack lunch at the Educational Cultural Complex (ECC for short). A table over, a group of black teenagers freestyled over a sallow beat leaking from their cell phone. He admired their skill, but wished they had something more to say in the endless stream of rhyming couplets beyond 'I'm awesome,' 'I'm amazing at sex and -in fact- have sex all the time,' and the ever popular 'I'm getting rich.' More importantly, he wished he could talk to them. Well he could -obviously- but he didn't. As a child, he had been taught not to talk to strangers. Somehow, he had gotten the impression that this was especially true if the stranger was a different color or -more specifically- if they were a different color and seemed to have a different culture (or any 'culture' at all, the way most white people thought about it). He wanted to tell them that his brother in law made beats, maybe point them towards his website.
But for now, he sat grinding up his mostly lettuce sandwich... vowing 'next time.'
'I really should learn go,' Brian thought as he moved his bishop to trap white's king and force a queen sacrifice. Either that or start using just pawns... Everyone always presented Chessas this grand art: this sum of human intellect. Being a chessmaster was supposed to mean that you could out think anyone, maneuvering people as readily as you ordered your rook to b4. But it didn't happen that way. Being good at Chessmeant exactly that, that you were good at Chess. And for what? Win a couple tourneys and bitch about the computers. Brian bit his lip as he moved his knight, affecting a small 'tell' that he was in trouble. Better think about these things after he won. After all, winning meant paying rent. He had more use for the metagame nowadays, all the subtle signs and tricks to goad an opponent into ever larger bets than he had for the little battle of black and white on the board. He had mastered the little game when he was twelve. The big game... the big game he was still learning.
Gregory didn't tug at the rope, didn't look towards the mesh of partially melted plastic bags. The gull circled for another two minutes before finally landing. The white faced bird danced back and forth. It wanted the fish guts Greg had left out for it. But it didn't want to be dinner for the starving people of the city.
As he walked back to his family, Gull dangling in his hands, Gregory thanked God that the Gull had been hungry as he was.
Welcome back to North Continent's hottest reality show eight turns running - Who Wants to be a Dolphin's Concubine?
*Applause* To recap, we sure has been given a treat this cycle. Whether watching the contestants compose poetry in *untranscribable series of clicks*, or practice cetacean seduction swim dances or even competing in a trivia contest to test their knowledge about our new, dolphin corrected history we've seen some amazing performances from all our great competitors. But the highlight of this season had to be when the contestants rode helicopters through the radioactive ashlands of the Nipponese Demon Islands, seeing who could rack up the most confirmed kills of the cursed ones that still eke out a living there. I am legally obligated to remind you, when dolphins nuke a country... they do it right!
*Applause, not as loud as before*
Host: And we will miss all the men and women who have failed to receive one of Dolphin Lord SqueekClickClickSqueek's coveted golden mackerel's or died in one of the competitions. *The host lower's his head to initiate a moment of silence, before springing up to rally the crowd once again.* But now we've moved onto the next exciting leg of the competition! Surgical augmentation to increase our suitability to the lord's preferred habitat!
The screen behind the announcer changes, swirls like the flow of water to reveal various view of contestants discussing cosmetic options with Dolphin plastic surgeons and their human assistants.
Host: Well it's going to be an exciting one tonight, stay tuned as the Doctors correct oxygen pathway placement, reform appendages and whatever else the contestants can dream up to please SqueekClickClickSqueek, our lord and master. Stay tuned, cause -you know- you have to!
