Red Stitch

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For fun, I thought I'd post a slice of a different short I've been tinkering with. It's nothing serious, but it's fun.

"It was cold in that place, and he felt terribly alone, but he couldn’t stop. If he stopped he might remember that he was tired, that they were all gone, that the beast stalked the night, and that he was afraid to die. But most of all he was afraid of the dreams because in dreams things were good and sweet and whole again, and he knew that they didn’t matter anymore.

Red dust and gritty clouds slithered through the sky. They hovered like grimy specters in the twilight, and as Threads scrambled over the rubble, he did all he could to avoid them. He was a wiry, thin young man who frequently tripped but seldom fell, and he kept throwing looks over his shoulder. He was ragged and disorderly, with heavy patches in his clothes and an angry cut in his left cheek. Poles and lines of yarn and wire and hooks poked from his pack, which lay like a run-over turtle shell on his back. It gave him the dreary look of a lost explorer.

Eyeing the mass of red fog, he pressed a rag to his mouth before clambering over an obliterated wall. Specks of gravel lay quiet in the ground, and some crushed to sand beneath his sneakers. He continued through a forest of twisted metal rods and discarded tires, stopping and starting, with his heart beating like a leaky engine. Somewhere out in the city prowled the beast with slobbering teeth and shining claws.

Walking gave him only the comfort of movement, that he was doing something. He wasn’t actually getting anywhere. Tick was the navigator; Tick could lead them to safe places because he always knew how things fit together. But Tick was dead and Threads was alive, and Threads had no sense of direction. Someone’s mother might say he’d get lost in his own closet, and if he had a closet perhaps he would, but it was more likely that he’d hide in it and never come out again. Regardless, he wouldn’t find anything good while going like this unless he fell over it. He had to get higher, to see what was around, and go from there. Ridges of trash and debris, old cars and decayed machines towered all around him. They blocked him, kept him hidden, but they also obstructed him. At the thought of standing in the open, naked for all the empty world, his spine went numb. If he fell, no one would catch him, and if the beast came, no one would warn him.
But darkness crept in from behind the clouds, and he knew he had to go, so Threads climbed.

Bits of wood crumbled away from his palms; rusty helmets clanked when he used them for foot holds. Ash and dust tumbled into his face until he felt half blind and hacked into his jacket. He could see the sky while meandering, and he found it orange and heavy. Threads did not often look at the sky anymore, but sometimes he caught himself searching the plumes of smog for something. He could hardly remember what.
A metal finger, perhaps once a television antenna, snagged a loose line from his pack. Threads felt a tug and wrenched away in panic, feeling hot breath on his neck and claws at his throat. He wheeled around, arms thrashing, and nearly dropped to the ground, but at the last moment he pressed himself against the wall. All around him, things fell and crashed, but he had his eyes shut tight and bit into his arm to keep from screaming.
It went quiet, after a while.
He moved to test his luck and felt the tug once more. Behind him, he saw one of his pack wires coiled around the antenna. Red faced, he worked quickly to set it free, and though his hands trembled and the knot pulled tight, he released it and set upward once more. Tick once said that Threads had a surgeon’s hands, and Threads, who always found compliments rather awkward, never thought much about it. But in truth, he was always good at unraveling things. And fixing them, if possible.
He came up over the ledge and crawled atop a slab of cement. It was luke warm and splotched with grey sludge. At first, he did not look around, not because he was ignoring his surroundings but because he took to drawing little things in the dust. He spelled his name and wondered how long it’d stay. Satisfied, even prepared, Threads looked out into the wastes.

The horizon bled into the backdrop of a grey sky pregnant with ash. Sick yellow lights flickered beyond the clouds, like fire, or the pale glow of a bar. Some people said that the sun was exploding, back when it started, but Threads didn’t think so.

The streets were murdered by some tremendous force. Black slabs were flung on top each other, forming mutated shapes and inbred facial expressions that grinned and snarled. Buildings loomed over the sidewalks—shops with heavy metal doors and apartment complexes with rotten boards crisscrossing in the windows. They were old, tired buildings, rising up in a cemetery of machinery, brick, metal and stone. Tanks and missiles and useless guns clotted the city and spread out bullets like candy. Dirty clothes and paper fluttered like mock birds through the air. They spun and twirled and danced and no one except for Threads watched. Newspapers were everywhere, soggy with oil, the ink on the pages running together into grotesque shapes. He saw a noose in one; the beast in another.
Nothing else moved.
Threads sighed. Specifically, his eyes sought well founded buildings that were least likely to fall on top of him while he slept. He lived inside rotten houses before, and it wasn’t only the danger of a cave-in that unnerved him. There was something twisted about a wounded house, like they took the damage personally, like they were going crazy with all the ghosts hiding in the attic. They were predators, and he was always afraid they wouldn’t let him leave. The door would slam shut and no matter what he tried he’d never get it open because the house wanted to gobble him up.

Few of the buildings looked sturdy, but the most wholesome stood to the north. Threads estimated five miles or so of hiking over crap piles and about an hour of light to help him. He thought maybe he could get there without trouble if he hurried."

This post's featured artwork, seen below, is by Avid. It's also how I feel right now. Click the image for a bigger view.

Nature's Nature

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This is gonna be an odd one, so bare with me. You might need a few swigs of coffee.

First, entertain the idea that everything has a nature. 'Nature', used in this context, is the collection of qualities for which something is known. You may simplify this to the utmost basic- the 'meaning' for a given thing's existence. You can apply it to anything, though non-living things are easier.

I.e. the nature of fire is to burn.

Unsimplified, 'nature' becomes a complex web of emotions and intelligence that forms who we are. Our personalities, our morals, our outlooks, our emotions. Our identities. You might even stretch to call 'nature' the manifestation of a soul, if you were to look at it spiritually. If not, than our 'nature' is the essence that makes us human, spirit or not. I.e. according to Professor John Z., the nature of Marissa Smith is smug.

But 'nature' is also the natural, physical world. Not just our earth, but the entire cosmos. The known universe. 'Nature' is not just the forest, not just the animals. 'Nature' is the driving force behind these things, even, perhaps, behind ourselves.

So what is the nature of nature?

Our perceptions of the world warp and molt with each situation. Writers, artists and politicians are masters at warping perceptions. Just a single tweak of a word can change a pleasant scenario (the dog sang to the wind) into a wretched one (the dog screamed to the wind). How we view nature is a whirlwind of emotion and instinct.

Lets say you go for a walk into the woods. It's sunny, the path is well displayed, and small animals scurry into the undergrowth. A dog barks far off, and birds bounce in the tree branches. Then it gets dark. A fog rolls in. The path is obscured by shadow, and the animals in the undergrowth seem larger, much larger. The barking dog becomes a howling wolf, and owls swoop low above your head.

Suddenly nature is not so reverent. Suddenly nature is scary as hell. And does it care what happens to you? Does it honestly care that you respect it, adore it, cherish it? Does it care that you're scared? That you hate it? That you want to destroy it? Probably not. I think the result would be the same no matter what YOUR 'nature' is.

But the sun does come up again, after your night in the forest. You are alive, and you have a choice to make. Is the nature of nature how you thought of it when you first walked into the trees? Is it full of light, goodness, benevolence? Or is it a dark mass full of monsters?

Maybe it's both?

The nature of nature is neutral. It is the grey area comprised of awe's and horror's lovechild. We, living things, aren't 'pawns'. We're different natures existing within one giant nature, a grey one that endures and survives no matter what, no concern for what happens to us in the process. How uncomfortable!

But, you know? We love stories. That's why we use pieces of nature as symbolism. Maybe it doesn't really matter what the nature of nature is at its most basic level. Maybe it's how we spin it.

It's not like we can escape nature anyhow. Might as well make it pleasant to live with.

This post's featured artwork, seen below, is by, Aaron Pocock. Click the image for a bigger view.

Recommendations

See my own artwork here. The image above was drawn for Droemar, who was featured in my previous post. The dog and the horses are characters from her in progress novel.

My friends and family members have learned, over the years, that I should not roam within three miles of a bookstore. Especially if I'm on a money saving record. A good buddy of mine gets absurdly excited whenever she passes a candystore, which I've witnessed at least a dozen times and have been dragged into it at least a dozen more.

I don't like candy all that much, no more than any regular person, so I guess I had to make up for that addiction a different way. Books are to me as chocolate is to my friend, and like my friend, who prefers very specific brands and so help you God if you don't carry them, I have a particular taste.

Most of the literature sporting my shelves are the types of things snobs balk at. Stephen King himself might as well live in my bedroom. There's also a bit of Tad Williams, Philip Pullman, Peter Benchley, Michael Crichton, and I just recently bought a book with a giant shark eating a t-rex on the cover. Sitting on the floor is a little bundle of Goosebumps by RL Stein, a relec from my childhood. Similarly, I own almost every one of Paul Zindles gory short novels. I read them when I was in 5th grade, however old that is. And, of course, Harry Potter. There's also a growing stack of Neil Gaiman that doesn't exactly rival all of King's stuff, but well...

The first thing Travis Baker, my professor for creative writing in my freshmen year, asked me and my peers was this:

"What do you like to read?"

Gaiman wasn't on my list then, but most of the above were. I stressed King and Crichton. Crichton made me sound smarter, and if I didn't mention King it'd feel like a lie. Professor Baker said something to the effect of:

"That's a weird reading list for an environmental writer."

Yeahhh... I guess so. Then again, Crichton wrote Jurassic Park and absolutely loves stories where humans mess up somehow and have to deal with the plague of crazy they've unleashed upon themselves. Plenty of King's stories follow a similar pattern, especially the long ones where the world ends. There's plenty of environmental undertones in The Dark Tower series, for example (which I'll admit I haven't finished yet).

Anyway, I almost forgot the point of this journal entry. Here's a bunch of book recommendations by yours truly. You might notice a trend, mainly that I seem to like horror, fantasy, and strange things. Check them out on Amazon to see if they're your flavor.

Fire Bringer by David Clement-Davis (Deer. Red deer, to be exact, from ancient Scotia.)
His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman
The Dark Tower series by Stephen King
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
Tailchaser's Song by Tad Williams (this one's about cats. The most awesome cats to ever exist. The folklore and world Williams set up is incredible.)
Peter and Max by Bill Willingham (follows Peter Piper and his lesser known brother, Max. This is a very dark story but a real treat if you enjoy fairy tales.)
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The War of the Flowers by Tad Williams
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
Eye of the Dragon by Stephen King
Dreamcatcher by Stephen King
It by Stephen King
How To Survive a Horror Movie by Seth Grahame-Smith

Oh. Just so you know... Jaws is an absolutely terrible novel. See the movie instead.

What types of books would you recommend?

This post's featured artwork, seen below, is by, Bluefooted, who is an awesome and obvious inspiration for me. Click the image for a bigger view.

Out with the old

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Here's a scrapped opening to my current project, To Chase a Rabbit. You might compare the weirdness of this version to the still-weird-but-more-coherent version I posted earlier.

"If you, dear reader, have the pleasure to accompany a child at any point in your life, he may turn to you one day and ask the most important question to ever linger on thirsty lips. It will dangle at the edge of his mouth just as he dangles at your pant leg, tugging for your waning attention. When you finally turn to him and inquire what could possibly demand a chunk of your dwindling time (you are dying; after all, tick tock, tick tock), the child will breathe these words:

“Where have all monsters gone?”

Do not let your ignorance strangle your answer, for the amount of truth in your response may save the child his throat. When the child says monsters, he does not mean rapists, murderers or unfair employers who dock pay wages for messy uniforms. When the child says monsters, he means monsters. As in, where are the vampires, who drink from bleeding hearts? Where are the werewolves, who scream in the moonlight? Where are the kelpies, who drown gullible children? Where are the giant beasts? Where are the fairies? Where are the hags, the ghouls, the boogymen?
They mean: where have all the monsters, beasts, and ghouls from fairy tales gone?
You may present the child with any number of vague, philosophical answers, or perhaps you are even adorably naive and tell the child that such things have never existed (I assume you also say the same for rapists, murders and unfair employers). Perhaps you will explain all possible geographical locations, including maps and other physical aids, where these creatures might have fled to over hundreds of years. Perhaps you have your own theories, which may or may not involve extraterrestrials, the holy trinity or the government.

Someone’s mother once said that ‘the simplest answer is the best one’, and as an adult you may pile thousands of counter examples to defy mother’s wisdom, but in this case the answer with the shortest syllables and the closest accuracy is one in the same. The answer is: Silvereye Forest.

If you are the map user from above, you could explain that Silvereye Forest is a small patch of woods roughly a mile from a bustling town filled with old people and snotty teenagers. It’s flanked by suburban houses created in a similar fashion to those little plastic toys in coin machines. Compared to the sweeping stretches of wilderness shown on television, Silvereye is a miniscule blotch of shabby trees and bramble patches that probably holds little economic value except for people who catch feral kittens and sell them to pet stores.

I don’t like map users. They never see anything properly.

For one, there are not many sweeping stretches of wilderness shown on television that have ancient stone walls coiling around them. Slabs and slivers of grey stone, slotted together like a crude jigsaw puzzle, shepherd the creeping vines and trees into a sloppy oval. It cut deep into the earth, for no wind could ever topple it, but rose only three feet above the dirt. Cracked with age and speckled with soft, green moss, the wall resembled the spine of an enormous, abandoned skeleton.

No historian could explain who built the wall. They considered natives, vandals, artisans, farmers, extraterrestrials, the holy trinity and the government, but since no one could come to a consensus it was the voted opinion that no one cared who built the wall, and why should anyone ever ask anyway?

The only person who knew anything at all about Silvereye was a widow named Hannah Feverfew, who lived in a field on the western shadow of the forest besides. Hannah was an old, willowy woman and was always engulfed in a mountain of shabby clothes. Coats atop coats consumed her body until she looked quite like a ragdoll without any stuffing, and while she never wore shoes, her feet and legs were swallowed up by socks that dangled well over the tip of her toes. Her hands were covered by sleeves, and her ears by a wild nest of graying hair. In the rare instance where bare flesh lay exposed, it would be etched in spidery, blue veins. Over her face, she wore a mask in the shape of a cat. No one in the town had ever seen beneath it.

Hannah’s home was little more than a shambled hut.

Most parents in the suburbs told their children to stay clear from the field, for Hannah was reckoned a witch or a hag and none of them wanted their darlings turned into toads. Only one mother never cautioned her boy to the snaky mannerisms of such women, and she only did it because she often forgot that he existed. Her name was not important, but during the day our story begins, her boy was wandering outside Hannah’s kitchen window with his hands in his pockets and a thoughtful frown on his face. He trailed a red kite through the soggy jungle of untrimmed weeds and grasses.

This boy’s name was Will Brier."

This post's featured artwork, seen below, is by, Droemar. Click the image for a bigger view.

Tiny Phrases

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Those who have graciously read my previous post might recall something about a scrapped beginning of my current project. I'll be posting some of that eventually, but I'm going to completely derail myself for a second here and talk about prompts. I love them about as much as tic tacks, which is a lot. I have a couple saved on my hard drive in case I ever need to explore a character or just write for the hell of it, so I'm going to share a few with you. They're mostly sentence fragments, but that's the fun. You make something from nothing. It doesn't take very much to start your own idea, so maybe they'll even become springboards for you.

stuck in a ditch

trying to be inconspicuous

morbid curiosity

limping home

trying to dredge up some courage

split-second choice

waking up in a hospital

metaphors involving fish

cafeteria mystery meat

"Do you miss me?"

sliding glass door

the smell of pond scum

airplane diorama

where did the bees go?

wandering alone but feeling surrounded

"I am going away."

If you write anything about them, please feel free to reply in the comments section. I'd love to read.

This post's featured artwork, seen below, is by, B1nd1. Click the image for a bigger view.

Kite chases a rabbit

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Hi! I'm in a good mood. There's snow and it's cold and everything is just wonderful. It's the perfect time to write creepy stories where small children get lost in the woods. And witches. Maybe a rabbit too.

I mentioned in my last post that my current project, those in Professor Kate Mile's writing for publication seminar can relate, is devouring my time like those giant toothy hairballs from the Langoliers. This project was supposed to feature a hitchhiker (I steal from myself, I guess) dropped off at the edge of a shady looking forest. His night traveling through it should've offered plenty opportunities to explore the hazy truth about the nature of our environment: what is it's very basic level of functioning? If the nature of fire is to burn, what is the nature of nature?

Well, it didn't turn out that way. Instead of a gruffy, irritable boy who probably has mommy issues dominating the story, it, uh, was taken over by a little kid of questionable age* who wanted to know where the savage beasts from fairy tales go once the stories end.

Once I started playing around with the idea, which I liked better anyway, I completely scrapped the original draft and began fresh. I churned out roughly four solid pages before realizing the style didn't suit. Originally, a sarcastic, omnipresent narrator was speaking directly to the reader with back-handed, child rearing advice. This version snarked at the audience for a little while before leading into Hannah Feverfew. Kite came afterwards.

After trashing that version too, I tried one more time. Three's a charm, right? In this case, the cliche is jumping for joy.

(* I wasn't even sure what age he was, but my classmates decided on 8 or 9, which I think is the best fit in anycase)

Here's an unedited snip of the beginning. I'll post the rejected version of Kite's story next time.

"Will Brier had once tried to ask his mother a very important question. He stood with his hands fidgeting behind his back while she buzzed around the living room like an agitated dragonfly. Wielding a rag and a bottle of Windex, she was preparing for the arrival of an obscure uncle from across the country, waging a battle on crusty dust and embedded dirt for the first time in a month. Will did not understand the special occasion. Obscure uncles liked to pinch your cheeks, and they often smelled like cigar smoke and moth balls.

Waiting for her blue-moon cleaning spree to pass, he peered at the television. Wild forests swimming in grey mist flew across the screen. A man in a helicopter explored forgotten patches of world, filled with weird creatures.

Only when mother stopped to scrub furiously at the glass (her hair—a black, frizzy mess— stuck to it), he inch forward. He had time enough to open his mouth before the front door crashed open. A storm of five laughing, howling and braying boys surged into the house, tracking mud deep into the steam-cleaned carpet. All of them shared the same wind-blown black hair, but not one noticed the danger ticking across the room. As they cheered and barked greetings, Will stepped away from his brothers immediately to spare himself the enviable fury.

Their mother, crouched low to scrub the table legs, turned on them in an instant. With her teeth bared and eyes swarming with jittery rage, she looked remarkably similar to an angry squirrel. The boys hesitated in the doorway, probably debating on whether they should run or not. Grime dripped off the tips of their boots, dying the carpet swampy brown.

“Hi mom,” said the eldest with a shaky grin.

“GET.OUT,” bellowed their mother, threatening her sons with the Windex’s nozzle. “OR I’LL-“

But they never heard what she’d do, because at once they all barreled out of house and tore down the driveway. Specks of grit flung out behind them, spotting Will’s face with little dribbles of mud. Their mother hissed from between her clenched teeth and stomped to the blotched mess on her otherwise spotless house. She dropped to her knees and proceeded to beat the stains out of existence.

Will waited several minutes before trying again. Just as mother stood and wiped her brow on the sleeve of her tattered sweatshirt, the boy tugged tentatively at her pant leg. She startled and glowered at her final son.

“Kite! I didn’t see you there,” she said.
Kite, which was what everyone called him, only shrugged. Adults had this bizarre tendency to overlook him, as if he were a ghost with only partial visibility. During one of his obscure-uncle’s visitations, Kite had stood in the middle of the floor and accomplished three perfect cartwheels before the man looked up in confusion and said, “Did you hear something?” Even his brothers were apt to it; they sat on him daily, not because of sibling domination but because they simply did not notice him. A muffled squeal of pain usually sent them jumping off, and when they wheeled around in surprise to see a flatter version of their littlest brother, they (usually) apologized profusely.

“Mom? I have a question,” he said, fiddling with his over-sized sleeve. Nearly all of Kite’s clothes were a mishmash of hand-me-downs, and they swallowed his scrawny body in a pool of folds.

“Shoot.”

“Where do all the monsters go?”

The evolution of the title is worth mentioning as well. First it was 'Chasing Rabbits', but one of my classmates brought in her project, titled Chasing Beauty (an amazing idea, if she makes a blog about it or something I'll link it), and I decided to change it. It flopped between The Rabbit in the Snare and Rabbit in the Snare, but neither had the right ring. I eventually just settled for a revised version of the first one; To Chase a Rabbit.

This post's featured artwork, seen below, is by, Solchaser. Click the image for a bigger view.

Free Samples

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Today, I have mind to give you a bit of a tour. You are, after all, currently wandering around in the surreal representation of my mind. To make sure you don't fall through any gaps between one strand of logic to another, here are a few introductions to the head-people/animals/things you may encounter while trudging through the grimy grey meat between my ears.

The largest project I've been tinkering with since before freshmen year is a tangled mess of a story that will, at some point, become a novel. I say 'tangled mess' because I had a great deal of difficulty understanding the main character, his objectives, and his nature. To remedy my flimsy handle on the character, known only as the Hitchhiker, I wrote numerous 'exercises'. Most of these character wreck diving explorations will probably not end up in the finished tale, but the mood and tone are the same. Below is an exert from one of these; it's been unedited for the most part, so please excuse the glaringly obvious symptoms of a first draft.

"The Hitchhiker slept in the gutter for three nights, and on the forth morning of his arrival in the city he leaned over the edge and spat blood into the gritty little run off. It bubbled and foamed all the way past the drain, and once it ran down the city’s throat he stood up. His clothes, layer after layer, felt stiff and thick with sweat and rain water. He bent his arms and with every little movement of every little muscle, his spine and neck crunched like rusty silverware. Beside him lay an old, toothless German shepherd itching at the makeshift bandanna around its neck.

“Mornin’, John.” Said the Hitchhiker while brushing the street sand from his filthy black hair. The small pieces of dirt and stone and glass pattered onto the asphalt.
John kept his head between his paws, but his tail thumped the chipping sidewalk, mimicking the boy’s syllables.

The sky above stretched out in a flat, sightless ocean of ash. No pregnant clouds this time, just a grey haze of apathy and a shroud of cataracts. People dressed in rags walked the streets. If a single man among them wore bright colors untouched by the damp fade or slimy residue of their lives, he was an earthbound God. But the Hitchhiker could see no one among the countless dirty faces who’d rise to meet that. Earthbound Gods, unless they had some form of protection other then pieces of paper and vocal threats, never lived long in the rat holes of these passerby cities. The people would descend upon them in an instant, clawing and screeching, and they’d leave nothing but bloody pulp. They’d even take the hair. The hair of a God fetches a high price. In this place, only the tired and the angry slept."

The smaller, more manageable project that's absorbing my attention is a shorter story about a little boy named Kite who asked his mother a very simple question. Her answer shepherds him into a dark and dangerous world just beyond his backyard. Information on that one will come up shortly.

Do you have your own projects? Artwork? A novel? Poetry? Short stories? Songs? Give us a taste, won't you?

This post's featured artwork, seen below, is by one of my favorites, Andoledius. Click the image for a bigger view.