An ending without a story

“It is important you strike at the edge of the market,” Valian said to the Brothers Urgo. “I will set heel to horse and take Lady Ginelle away to safety. You can take what pleasure you will with Sebastine, as long as he is dead when you’re done.”

The Brothers Urgo were the most muscles one could by for ten silver fellarins. They had been banned from every tavern in the city, having killed at least one person in drunken brawls at each of them. They sat now with Valian in the attic room of an inn. The single candle that sat between them made shadow dance across the kindling he’d used to make a crude map of the market.

“Lady Ginelle’s affection for the rogue will bring us back to the market. I will lead them away as far as I can before we’re forced to turn back. Take what you will for him. It will only make it more believable that he was set on by someone come to collect his debts.”

Valian saw the brothers’ eyes go wide before he felt the steel against his throat. He heard neither steps nor breathing. The increased volume from the street below was the only evidence that the window was open.

“Do you share common cause with this man or are you hear for the money?” Sebastine asked.

Frar—or Fjor, Valian could never keep them straight—laughed and elbowed his brother in the side.

“The money,” he said with a half-grin.

Sebastine ripped Valian’s purse from his belt and threw it to Frar.

“You are paid. Be gone with you.”

The Brothers Urgo wasted no more words for Valian. They snatched up the purse, scrambled to their feet, and raced out the door. Valian leaned forward, expecting Sebastine to lower his knife, but the blade cut into his neck, and blood leaked down into his shirt, tickling his chest hairs.

“How did you know,” Valian asked.

“I didn’t,” Sebastine answered. “We are both damned to be the men we are. Ginelle begged mercy for you, and for her I granted it. But she is not here, and that mercy remained with her.”

“She will never forgive you. She will never love you with that smile that puts the sunshine to shame. She will know you are no better than me.”

“She will never love me,” Sebastine said. “To her benefit. She is too smart to settle for someone like me. As for you,” Sebastine drew the knife across Valian’s kneck, carving from Adam’s apple to shoulder. “She will never know.”

Valian gasped. They had played their games for so long. He had expected more time. He had more to say. He had more to prove. He was the better. He was worthy of Lady Ginelle’s smiles, of her longing stairs, of her soft lips. He was the hero of this story. He was supposed to win this time. Not Sebastine, him.

Valian fell to the floor. He watched Sebastine lean over him, only to wipe the dagger on Valian’s favorite shirt. He walked out of view, back to the window. There was a metallic thud. He’d kicked over the candle into the little kindling market. The flames crawling onto him were the last thing he felt, the oily black smoke the last thing he saw.

An Interesting Backstory

I’m watching the new Shogun limited series. I’m in episode two, right at the beginning where the old emperor is dying and his son is asking how he will find him again. This gave me an interesting idea.

The villain is a raider. He travels from town to town, sacking and burning, killing everything in his wake. It turns out the raider is the rightful heir of a fallen house. The father of the main character from the “good” household tried to have the villain assassinated as a child to consolidate his own power. The boy’s parents were killed, but he survived. And when the boy’s mother/father lay dying, he asks how he will find them again. They say to light a candle and follow the smoke to the next world.

Grown into maturity, this concept has warped so that he believes the more smoke he creates, the easier it will be to find his parents. Thus he burns the lands of his enemy.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I admit that this page is mostly a notebook at this point where I write ideas I can revisit at a later date. I’m okay with that. 2019 was a year of illness for me. I developed agoraphobia that kept me inside for over three months and I’m chalking most of the year up as a loss. I’m healthy (and able to go outside again), but the pandemic has made writing more than a challenge. I’m currently getting through my days learning how to mod Skyrim.

That said, when I have an idea that doesn’t pertain to my current WIP, I still want to write it down so that I can revisit it at a later time. Today’s light bulb came as I was scrolling through Twitter and someone posted a line from their new book about a girl hovering on top of her dragon. My immediate thought was, how does a dragon hover? It’s size and weight would require its wings to move at a speed that would likely prevent anyone riding it. Or, depending on how its fire was generated, maybe it was full of lighter-than-air gas like a zepplin.

From there I bounced to the girl. I rarely use dragons as anything more than a figure of power of an age long past. Having a dragon at your command is like having a battalion of tanks. It radically changes the power dynamic of the world in a way that I don’t think everyone plays out fully in their heads. Not to mention, it implies that either dragons have been domesticated to be ridden, controlled somehow to be enslaved into being ridden, or have agreed to be ridden as a sentient relationship.

Now isn’t that interesting, a sentient partner, a girl and her Other. I’ve seen that in a number of books, but rarely the other as a dragon. But what if the dragon isn’t with her, walking around like a living nuclear bomb but a voice in her head. I have a bad habit of writing solo characters who have no one to speak with. What if the dragon was a magical symbiote that lives inside her. Oooo, what if her people are shapeshifters and everyone has a dragon—or maybe some other animal kind of like the Dark Materials daemons. Oooo, and what if no one knows how to shapeshift anymore, so these totems or whatever they’re called are inside them almost as spiritual advisors, but if that talent were rediscovered, you’d have the dragon take shape and the girl would be the voice inside its head.

Hmmmmmm…this definitely bears exploration!

Kingdom Death

Legacy games are all the rage in the board game world at the moment. My Tuesday group has already completed Seafall and Gloomhave and are 7/12 through Charterstone. I even have my own that I worked on over Christmas that I hope to devote more time to if work wasn't trying to kill me (believe those articles about how the 40-hour week is dead). I've had the wonderful opportunity to sit in on a friend's campaign of Kingdom Death a couple times, and I have to say it surpasses all the other legacy games I've played in story and atmosphere. Seafall and Gloomhaven had their strong points, but both suffered from weak endings ("Wait, what?" and "That's it?" respectively). And granted, perhaps I will be disappointed by Kingdom Death's ending, if I should ever experience it, but for now, I'm reveling in the creative doors it's opened in my mind. So, despite being sick for the bajillionth time this year, I sat down for a quick wind sprint to excise the opening that has been playing in my head since Friday when my character was killed during the end-of-game reward phase. That's right, I was killed by post-game box text, and it was glorious.

So, with the self-conscious caveat that I've been writing academic papers for the past three years, here is a small wind sprint on Kingdom Death.

CHAPTER 1

The first thing you notice isn’t the light, the cold white glow in the distance that illuminates a black lamppost that would otherwise be lost in the absolute darkness that surrounds you. The first thing you notice is the quiet. There is no breeze, no air, no sound of birds or bugs; the world holds its breath endlessly. The silence lasts for so long that the world around you feels dead, and you wonder if you’re dead, too.

Turning about brings no comfort. Away from the lamppost stretches an endless night without stars to twinkle or moons to glow. In every direction there is absence, in every direction but one. You head to the lamppost, the single white beacon calling to you like a fishing lure. You take comfort in the crunch of your footsteps. Dry grass, brittle like hay, pokes your bare feet. You accelerate your step, relishing the painful stab of each sheath. It says you are alive, and you beat that message to the world around you for all to hear.

If you were not alone.

The Dreams are Back

When I don't write, I have REALLY vivid dreams, stories I should have been putting to paper but instead let bleed away at night. Grad school has done a pretty good job of mitigating this, offering me a different creative outlet. But now that I'm near the end of the program and the work I'm doing is very much plug-and-play, the dreams have returned.

1. I'm wicked tired.

2. I'm having some really cool ideas. And not only when I'm sleeping. My brain is cycling back up and story ideas are popping up at the most random times.

Yesterday I was watching the opening cinematic for Dark Souls III and as it turned right, I turned left. Your main character is resurrected to kill stuff and gather souls. But I thought of a kingdom under attack, at the verge of collapse. King dead, queen dead, the princess that has been leading her people turns to a forbidden right that hasn't been done for hundreds of years: necromancy.

But the reality isn't like the stories and her champion never comes. The kingdom falls and she is imprisoned. Her hero, the great warrior _______, is born again, but as a baby. Unable to be killed, ________ becomes a champion of the oppressed and fights to free the imprisoned princess 18 years too late, never knowing how they came into existence or why it seems impossible for them to die.

More Dream Chasing

Last night I had a Cloud Atlas-level of complexity to my dream. It was amazing! So much so that I did not make the effort to try and remember it while I was sleeping (I'm a lucid dreamer) because I didn't want to miss anything. Actors I recognized were Liam Neeson, Nathan Fillion, Paul Dano, Morena Baccarin, and I think Charlize Theron. That last one is fuzzy.

It's not post-apocalyptic but post-societal collapse. Technology still exists but people can't create more and can't maintain it in the way it previously had been. I don't know why, if there was a power grid collapse or something along those lines. There were definitely electric lights, but on a smaller scale, like they were powered by localized hydroelectric power. It's almost a pantomime of modernity. Think the social construct of the Firefly universe mixed with the aesthetic of Bioshock--a '50s like faux-utopia/surviving on the frontier blend.

God I wish I could remember more! The final bit is freshest in my head (though Paul Dano's scene at a rickety tavern atop a waterfall was intense and Morena Baccarin flashing her breasts smacked of unnecessary Hollywood sensationalism). Liam Neeson's character was presumed dead, but he was actually a wanted criminal simply called the Arms Dealer. He'd lost one hand (no pun intended) and had an Aquaman-like harpoon prosthetic. Charlize Theron was his wife, who knew he was still alive, and was taking care of their kids. They lived under a bridge and it was intensely important that the kids know how to get in because the path was secret. I don't know what the danger was. I think Neeson was the "bad good-guy" trope.

I think I've already lost the rest of it. Ugh. I hope I dream this one again. I think it'll make a pretty intense story.

Dream Chasing

I was in the mood to overwrite something tonight. I had a glimmer of an idea during a drive to New Brunswick that I'm letting percolate in my brain. I thought I'd do a quick wind sprint and make it as thick and sappy as I could.

DREAM CHASING

Amid the darkness of sleep, dreams illuminate sight and sound, a match-strike of fantasy that fades as quickly as it burst into existence. Come dawn only smoke remains, a phantom of the light in which we played. It fades into oblivion with the first gentle breeze, and our memory of it fades with it. When our parents tell us to chase our dreams, they tell us to change the fleeting. By the time we catch it, we will no longer remember what it is. They tell us to chase our dreams so they can convince themselves they did the same, and what they caught was what they wanted.

The twist is, sometimes the light doesn't fade. Sometimes you you remember your dreams. That bright flash of fantasy burns onto your brain, and you chase it with every breath. And if you should be so fortunate to catch those dreams, they'll tell you those aren't the dreams you should have caught. Try again. Chase something more realistic, something more prestigious that will pay the bills or that you can tell your nuclear family about someday.

When our parents tell us to chase our dreams, they're full of shit. That's why I've stopped listening to them.

Reincarnate

So I'm working toward my Masters of Science in Instructional Design and Technology (how to make education better, basically) and I've found that I can't write a research paper every week, do my regular job, and write a novel all at the same time. However, I have a three-month break coming up, starting next week, and I'm anxious to start a new project. I had an idea a couple weeks ago for my very first literary fiction novel. I was itching to write tonight, so I popped off 250 words. Here's a taste.

Where do you begin? It's not an easy thing, when a person asks you “Where do you think it went wrong?” With thirty-plus years under your belt, how do you pick out a day, an hour, an instant and say, Yeah, this is where it went wrong. You could pick this fuck-up or that one, but rest assured there was a whole host of fuck-ups that preceded them. So you say, I don't know. It just happened, gradually, because that's the kind of sage-like cliché that resonates with people and they don't push.

And what's galling is that if I truly had to pick one moment where it all truly went wrong, it's not even my fuck-up that I'd pick. It's my twin brother, Danny's. We were fifteen when he got into his accident and I realized how quick it all can be taken away from you. I got a sense of my own mortality, or whatever. Live each day like it's your last because holy shit, it just might be.

They say no one should die a virgin. They said it, and I repeated it to my girlfriend, Emily, and she agreed with them and me. They also say it only takes one time, which turned out also to be true. So if you want to know where it all went wrong, blame Danny. What we he doing, skateboarding without a helmet? That was stupid.

Pregnant at fifteen, married at sixteen, sometimes I think Danny's the one that got off easy.

The Bound God

My wife and I are big fans of the Starz original series, Black Sails. She's never read Treasure Island nor played Assassin's Creed: Black Flag (which we'll count as research for purposes of this show ;) ), so it's all new to her. But seeing Flint, Silver, and Billy Bones all together is wicked exciting. In addition to piratey goodness, the show has an amazing intro.

From the depths of the blackest water come the opening credits to Black Sails. A masterpiece of macabre, the intricate sculptures (created entirely with digital special effects) are captured in the midst of an epic battle; skeletons and pirates, locked in a conflict of the ages.

It's not just the music, even though the music is perfect. It's the iconography. I watch that and I see the story it's trying to tell, but in my mind, it's an entirely different story. It's my story. 

0:20 Aditi, mother of the gods
0:22 Lakshmi, Aditi's 1st granddaughter, plays the song of fate for prophets to decipher
0:24 Govinda, Aditi's 1st grandson, shepherd of the demi-gods and anointer of champions
0:38 Sumati, Aditi's 2nd granddaughter, patron of scientists and intellectuals
0:42 Mani, Aditi's 2nd grandson, patron of artists and lovers
0:46 Durga, Aditi's daughter, ruler of the Overworld
0:51 Dipaka, Bhima's son with a mortal, a warlord
0:52 Jaya, Aditi's son with a mortal, an adventure
0:55 Savitr, Sumati's son with a mortal, a politician
0:59 Bhima, Aditi's son, ruler of the Underworld
1:06 Mehesha, Devaraja's son with a mortal, a general
1:12 Lakshmana, Mani's son with a mortal, a prince

Here's the breakdown as it came to me after watching that intro a few times. Bhima falls in love with his sister, Durga. When she refuses to reciprocate, he kidnaps her and submerges her to the Underworld. Devaraja (not featured in the Black Sails intro) forbids the match. Enraged, Bhima kills his father. Mahesha rallies the forces of the world and captures Bhima, binding him so he can never escape.

Years later, without the Father or her children, Aditi falls into an endless slumber and the world begins to fall to ruin. Savitr, thinking Aditi will wake if the world is again threatened by her children, reveals to Dipaka the location of his father's prison. Dipaka attempts to free Bhima, and in so doing the dead begin to walk the earth. It falls to Jaya to stop him before the Overworld is dragged under and Bhima rules over a new land of the dead.
 

MY Battlestar Galactica

Like most geeks, I hopped on board the 2004 Battlestar Galactica sensation. Like fewer, I was still a stalwart fan of the original series. And perhaps on my own, I still prefer the original to the reboot. The original series was what it was and it did what it was very well. The reboot showed a whole bunch of promise early on and then puttered out before limping to a conclusion. I only made it a few episodes into season three and while I've tried repeatedly to finish the series--starting at the beginning, starting at season three, choosing those episodes people tell me are the best--it never holds my interest. It had great potential but that isn't enough, in my opinion.

Today I was rewatching some episodes of the original series while I worked and a thought popped into my head. In the original series, the cylons were not the folly of man but of a reptilian race that had died out and the cylons were now their own expansionistic empire, a more classic invading "other" like the Mongols. In the new series, the whole "sins of the father" premise features  heavily in the seasons I watched. I really liked that notion. It was one of the things that really drew me in early on. But at the same time, the longer the series went, the more the cylons came across as whiny (until the story diverged with the skinjobs and things go weird.)

A trip to Wikipedia to see the rest of the series that I never watched reveals that Earth was populated by a different cylon race thousands of years before that had created their own cylon servant class and the resulting war wiped out the planet. WTF? Man is destined to create cylons? Is that the theme we're going for here? Because how do planets separated by so much distance suffer the same fate?

This kind of bums me out because the purpose of this post began as my own notion of how I would do BSG, which now is too similar to the reboot to be worthwhile to pursue as fan fiction. In my version, the cylons are still the invading other, but they weren't created by a reptilian species, they were created by humans on Earth. Rather than Earth being the 13th colony, it is the origin of the human species and the 12 colonies are just that, 12 colonies. Through the confusion of time, Earth has become a lost colony rather than a homeworld and when the cylons discover and attack the humans, the refugees flee to the lost colony. But when they get there, they discover that it is the origin of not only their species, but of the cylons as well.

Because the reboot did something similar, I don't know if I'd have Earth be wiped out in the resultant war or maybe it would be the cylon homeworld. I won't develop it any further than this post, I think. I love BSG, and I love the potential of the world (fiction-wise) that it's created. I'd love to tell stories there, in my own way. Neither series fully realizes the setting as I'd like to see it. But as soon as you start talking about the final five, I will stop listening because I really don't care. Even so, how earth plays into the setting could be interesting. (Certainly better than a cast off of cylon vs cylon apocalypse or arriving at a planet in the early '80s and knowing all the customs and how to ride a motorcycle.)

Venn Diagrams

I don't look forward to the day physicists figure out what dark energy is. Right now it's this "We know it's there, but we don't know what it is" thing, so writers can make it whatever they want and only "You can't do that with science" assholes will get upset. This must be like how it was when they had measurements proving microwaves existed but had no way to detect microwaves. Work progressed and we became able to measure them, but there was that gray area in between. I like playing around with dark energy because it's like a connect-the-dots drawing without any instructions telling you which dots connect to which.

I also like Venn diagrams. I can't really explain that one so much. Who doesn't like Venn diagrams? It gets a capital V and two Ns and that's just fun. Plus you can shade the overlapping areas in different ways. Different colors, combined colors, hatching, cross-hatching, who knows! Go crazy!

Then yesterday, looking at the platypus/keytar Venn diagram that pops up on Faceboom every now and again, I started thinking about dark energy. Because those things clearly go together. It's not the first time I've imagined dark energy being the energy of the infinite multiverse, the layers upon layers that are so close together as to appear singular but so far apart as to accommodate all the influential choices that a person might make. This time, I started imagining it visually rather than mathematically. If the universe is flat (which it is) and we looked at it as a horizontal plane and then zoomed WAY in so that all these levels of dark energy multiverses could be visible as parallel lines to our universe rather than a singular line, you would be able to see the gray haze of energy that connects them all.

The space between universes is effectively a Venn diagram, a mingled space of energy that can be colored or shaded or cross-hatched or whatever you want. And now imagine if things occasionally passed through that Venn diagram, slipping from one universe where it belonged to one universe where it didn't. It's a common thread in sci-fi (SyFy?) TV shows where you have an agency or secret organization that deals with the fantastical that doesn't belong.

But imagine if science had successfully measured and quantified the different universes (or at least some of them) and you had specialists dedicated to the oddities of each one. The government/secret organization has a building and each floor of that building is dedicated to a different universe. The secret isn't just keeping the truth from the public (X-files style), but keeping the truth from yourselves. The 6th floor doesn't fraternize with the 7th floor because the one deals with ghosts and the other deals with aliens. What happens when you go on a blind date only to discover the person you're with works on a different floor? What happens when you discover an outbreak from two floors at once? What happens when you discover a new universe that warrants a new floor?

This is as far as I got in the ruminating department, but it feels like it could be fun. I will explore it more in the future.

I Dreamed a Dream

I've been watching a lot of old episodes of A Show with Ze Frank on YouTube. As part of the show, an artist animates dreams submitted by viewers. Their experiences are SO different than how I dream. I dream stories like I'm watching a movie or sometimes living as one of the characters but always as part of a narrative arc.

Yesterday's dream involved a homicide detective investigating a series of infant deaths. Rather than a serial killer, it turns out to be part of a human trafficking ring. Apparently the adults had fled but those sending the abducted babies did not know, so they kept shipping them to the location. A young child lived there and she feed the babies the way she feed her stuffed dinosaur, with small candies that went down a hole in its mouth. The infants weren't murdered. They were starving to death.

Then my wife woke me up.

First Paragraph for One of the Good Days

I've been bumbling around a concept for a few weeks and while I was watching "Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries" (which you should totally watch, because it's awesome), a few lines popped into my head and I figured I should write them down before I go to bed. So here they are:

Victoria wasn't always like this. Once upon a time, she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. That's one of the problems with living so long, things don't last. They age. They whither. They get dirty. And the pricks at city hall throw you a rag and tell you to clean things up, but the rag they gave you is just as dirty. Victoria was the love of my life, but this city's gone to shit, and I don't think I can love her like I used to.