Writing Exercises – Imperative

The second of the writing exercises I’m working on today is “Imperative.’ The goal is to write a story fragment that is 500 words long, but that only uses imperative commands. I though this exercise to be an act of punishment by some far off person who claims that this will bring me some kind of unexpected result.

It kinda did.

The exercise forces me into a particular structure of narrative. It forces things to move along, sentence by sentence, which as the author of the book I’m using notes all writing should do – one sentence takes you to the next in a progression that’s always moving forward.

It belabors the point a bit, but I can see what he’s getting at.

So here’s the snippet I wrote. It’s a part of some of my upcoming surprises.

Please step forward. Please remain still while our diagnostics take count of your various biometric data. Please inhale deeply, then exhale. Now, provide one sample for each of the labeled samples in the seven containers in front of you. Take as much time as needed to complete this task.

Please remain seated for the next several minutes and confirm all information on the touch screen in front of you. Be sure to sign off on all documentation with your approved fingerprint as use of any non authorized fingerprints could result in the activation of the countermeasures agreed upon in your employment contract.

Stand and go to the decontamination shower unit adjacent to the intake center area. Wash everywhere thoroughly, rinse, then repeat on more time. Do not wash and rinse a third time as this may scrub off trace elements that we will need to continue monitoring your wellbeing within the facility.

Please walk through the exit and into the dressing room area. Change into your approved clothing as seen in the bin at your feet. Be sure that all sleeves and pants tuck neatly into your gloves and boots. Fasten your headset firmly to your crown, placing the earpiece in your right ear. Adjust the microphone to a space approximately two inches from your mouth. Test the microphone by saying: Hello, my name is ___________ my employee ID is _________. Do not take this instruction too literally. Say your full name in the first blank and your ID number in full in the second, as leaving the blanks empty may also activate the countermeasures outlined in your employee contract.

When you hear the beep in your left ear as a low noise, raise your right hand. When the noise becomes unbearable, put it down. Repeat this again upon waking if you have gone unconscious as a result of high sonic resonance Lower your right hand before it reaches the previous threshold if unconsciousness has occured in prior hearing calibrations.

Remove your headset now, and do not wear it anywhere else but in the listening facility at the end of the hall. Proceed to your Medical Overseer. Provide him or her with any information he or she may request.

Please provide one secret to your Medical Overseer that no one else knows. Write this down in your provided spiral notebook with your approved number two pencil. Do not include the names of family pets, spouses, prior addresses, or the name of your god unless they are one hundred percent uncompromised and secret. Once your secret has been extracted, proceed to your Floor Manager.

Please read today’s instructions extremely carefully. Do not skip any text, no matter how boring it looks. Especially be sure to review the countermeasures of your contract as they may be deployed at any time for failure to comply with facility bylaws and regulations.

Proceed to your listening station. Make sure that it is kept orderly and tidy. Please place your listening gear back onto your head, plugging the jack into the port provided on your desk. Ensure that your spiral bound notebook contains no traces of your secret. Rub your number two lead pencil over the top page until you are sure there are no secret traces remaining.

Make sure you are comfortable.

Please begin listening to your assigned transmissions and allow the Harcourt Group to welcome you to your new home at the Transmissions of Interest Program.

May 3, 2017 0

Writing Exercises – The Reluctant I

When my girlfriend and I started dating, she knew that what I wanted to do was write. She read my work, gave a lot of good observations from the reader point of view, and encouraged me to write more. As I did, she observed that I was always looking for ways to sharpen my skills.

So she bought me a book called ‘The 3 A.M. Epiphany‘ by Brian Kiteley. It’s mostly a series of exercises with some explanation on writing process and expansion on said exercises. I’ve used it on occasion with some random exercises where I thought I could use the lesson being taught, but I think I’ll start going through them sequentially now that I’ve got some time on my hands.

I decided to do one this morning called ‘The Reluctant I.’ The goal was to pop out a six hundred word piece in which the writer is not allowed to use the words ‘I, me, or my’ more than a total of three times. The goal is to have a narrator who is less interested in his personal feelings or thoughts, and more interested in what has occurred.

I decided to do this in the form of a witness statement being given to a police officer by a security guard who got brought in on an odd call.

I figured I’d share it here. Enjoy.

Incident Witness Statement: 7204-028

Witness: Brendan O’Niell

Crime Scene: Castro’s Convenience, corner of 17^th and South St.

Look, you’ve asked three times already between two officers. But, sure. We can discuss this again if you want. The facts ain’t gonna change though.

The store was a mess on arrival, okay? It was fucked up when I got there. You can tell the pricks in the company’s liability department that. The security gate on the convenience store window is busted in like it got hit by a truck – no big surprise the burglar alarm went off. Glass is all over the place and the alarm is blaring. The lookie-loos aren’t out on the street – not yet. But, people are lookin’ out their windows, both from above the storefront and across the street. There’s stuff all over the place. Cheetos, soda, cigarette lighters, smokes, and that vape shit that’s got so popular. Junk’s everywhere. You can’t walk around without hearing something crunch underfoot. Protocol says that it’s required of all guards to take a look around the place before shutting off the burglar alarm. It’s policy and procedure. Standard stuff. So the book gets followed, no matter how fuckin’ weird the call site looks.

So there’s a mess, but it ain’t so bad that a walkthrough can’t be done. Anyone who comes in to do anything afterward is gonna make the same kinda disturbance. Sure, it’s dark – whatever made the impact knocked the shit out of the fuse box – but that’s what the maglite’s for. And yeah, the pistol for anything unexpected. Totally legal, permit and everything. Book says guards on call can carry licensced sidearms if they want with client consent, which is also in place. Check with the company. All above board.

Anyway, gettin’ further into the store a smell comes up. Not exactly sure at first what it is. Then it hits: ozone. That smell you get when you have a bad storm comin’ on.

That’s when shit got weird.

Cause, there’s this guy in there, behind what’s left of the counter. He’s not easy to see, right? Like a black human outline surrounded by, no shit, little bolts of lightnin’. Raisin’ the gun isn’t a question – that happens as a reflex. There’s some yellin’. Might have called him a motherfucker. Understandable though. Dude shows up lookin’ like somethin’ out of a comic book, some f-bombs are gonna drop. Harsh language ain’t against the law yet.

Then the second guy swoops in.

The other dude is dressed up in some kinda ninja outfit. He’s got a pair swords in his hands and he tackles the guy who looks like the end of a severed livewire. The lightnin’ arcs off his swords, and it’s runnin’ over his arms and legs and… fuck, how is that even possible? We both know that ain’t possible, but… shit. God’s honest truth.

They tussle. Lightnin’ guy gets tossed over the counter with the ninja guy wailin’ on him to beat the fuckin’ band. The swords aren’t doing shit to lightnin’ guy. They’re bouncing off the bolts like goddamned Nerf blades. Then there’s this huge jolt of electricity and I go blind. But they’re still goin’ at it, makin’ a racket like you ain’t ever heard. Next thing it’s totally dark. Musta passed out or somethin’. EMTs are there, askin’ about injuries, doin’ their thing. Someone gets a gurney while they start askin’ about vitals.

Look, it sounds crazy. I also understand that the body cam the company mandates is all fucked up. It was next to a guy who looked like he shoulda been playing dress up as one of Thor’s fuckin’ brothers. But honest, man: that shit happened. So you do what you gotta do. Send in the headcase guys, make an arrangement with a psychologist, reserve a padded room if it makes you feel better. If the cameras in that bodega are still working, they’ll corroborate the whole thing.

Those guys were real.

Real and dangerous.

And beside – you got all of the people who were standin’ out there when the EMTs came on scene. Ask them. They’ll tell you the same.

May 2, 2017 0

The Pacific Northwest

An odd entry you might think. A whole year of writing short stories one a week, with a note to blog once a week and… we’re talking about regions of America?

Well, there’s a tie in.

I’ve never had the opportunity to go to the Pacific Northwest, but I feel like I’ve been there. The region calls to me to be perfectly honest. For about a year, I was seized by a kind of madness. I did a lot of research into the Portland area. It seems like a place where the arts are feasible as a way of making a living. Weird stuff comes from it. Most importantly, it’s where Powell’s Books is – a kind of mecca to the passionate bibliophile. I’d love to live there I think.

But if I want to be really honest, I’m attracted to the Pacific Northeast because of Shadowrun. The Emerald City is the nexus for all things Shadowrun. In the continuity of Shadowrun, Seattle is a unique city because it’s a treaty city. It’s surrounded by mostly unsympathetic new nations (most of which administered by Native American Nations that rose to power in North America on a waxing tide of magic), and extraterritorial corporate holdings. It’s a smuggler’s paradise and home to corporate intrigue because of nothing more than proximity to extralegal oppotunity. I spent years of my life playing RPGs set in this universe and came to identify with the Native American art that came from it (extensively featured in early editions of the game), the literary genres that it espoused (both sci-fi and fantasy), and the wariness of trusting anyone with too much power or ambition (never, EVER, deal with Dragons).

If that wasn’t enough, a top five favorite series, Dead Like Me, is also part and parcel, a Seattle-centric thing. The tale of Georgia Lass becoming a Grim Reaper is set among the fir trees and moss covered shingles of the Seattle area.

Top it off with my new found interest in a show I missed as a kid, Twin Peaks, and you can see why I turn my eye repeatedly to the region. It’s a place I have seen in film, television, and culture (RPGs are a cultural thing – just accept this) that it’s a place I should like to go to sooner rather than later.

It’s a place with good stories behind it (did you know there’s an entire, somewhat preserved city beneath Seattle proper?) and good stories set in it (Like Stumptown, a crime comic set in Portland).

Maybe I can get some inspiration if I head out there and see it for myself. I think it’s a goal I should set for the next two years – get to the Pacific Northwest. My girlfriend can visit her family out there and we can see the sites.

We’ll put that under the resolutions column and call it at that for now.

But, more than anything else, I have stories from there even though I’ve never been. That’s the power of good stories I guess – being able to take the reader to a place they have never smelled, or heard, or touched but make it still feel tangible and brimming with potential, and maybe even bring them there to see it for themselves. I try to get a little of that with my stories too – I want you to see the strange and alien vistas in my head. Kowloon-M, the world of the Rigored, the Servants of the Road, Ossua itself. I think that people might like these places I’ve created and fostered behind my eyes and between my ears.

Maybe they could become your Seattles.

Let’s work on that shall we?

I’ve set out to edit both Haints and the R’yleh Anomaly this weekend – one with a world estranged from our own, and another where the familiar hides only the unfathomable. If it is successful, those stories will come down from the site and the shopping process will begin.

And that’s what I have for the week, folks. Read in good health.

January 8, 2016 0

Writing Challenge Wrap-up or: What Have I Learned From All of This?

Back in 2014 I found myself in a weird place. I knew I wanted to write. I’m told by some of my readers that I’m not half bad at it, so I keep doing it. But, I felt like I was neglectful. I wasn’t writing regularly. I’d completed two manuscripts and stalled out on a third. It was torturous kind of work. I loved the spinning of the tale, but often I’d feel like I’d written myself into a corner. Or that I’d been spewing out so much work that no one would ever want to read any of it.

In 2010-2011 I believe, I was involved with a few creative writing classes from the Liar’s Club. I took two of their classes – Novel In Nine Months and a short story workshop. I learned a lot in both – but the short story class really got me going. I worked regularly. I really enjoyed it.

So, as I slid half-drunkenly into 2015 I thought that maybe it was time to try something new. The short stories came easily and often left room for larger ideas. And more importantly, writing short stories was really, really fun.

With that in mind, I decided to make a resolution right there and then. Some people resolve to lose weight. Others to stop smoking. Some even go to wholly redefine themselves.

I wanted to refine myself.

All for one reason.

If you wanna be a writer, you gotta write. And I wasn’t writing enough.

So I came up with some starting rules:

1 – Write a short story for every week of 2015, with 52 stories in total.
2 – Keep them as short as you can. 3,000 words max (learn to kill your darlings)
3 – Publicly post my work to keep me on track and honest.

And so began a year of work. Here’s what I learned 145,140 words later.

Rules Suck

Not gonna lie – those first weeks were hard. Really hard. I banged out three stories in the first week and thought I’d gotten a good head start. After that, it became a kind of race. Sticking to the rules was not always easy, and sometimes, they changed, got bent, or all around became unrealistic. When my grandfather was on the edge of death in February and when he eventually died later that year in August, those deadlines became impossible. So I had to adapt the challenge if it was going to work.

Guidelines are Better

I decided that Wednesdays were going to be my target story release days if all went well. It didn’t necessarily matter if the stories came out each week – it was more important that I had fifty-two stories (one for each week) at the end of the year. Additionally, the rule to keep stories short was a good one. Those first few weeks I was actually stricter than I thought. I’d set the rules for 3,000 words max but was paring down to below 2,000. It taught me to keep things concise and to get to the point, but once I got that down, I let the words come back slowly – I just tried to make each word count and it’s immensely helped.

I Hit Consistent Goals

Looking back on things, I realize that I achieved what I was looking to attain. There’s fifty-two stories, and when I take the total number of words (145,000 approx.) and divide it by fifty-two weeks, you get an average word count of 2,788 – which is beneath my desired 3,000 per story word count. I have some that go over (highest I think was a bit higher than 5,000 words) but some were in the 1,800’s when I was really learning how to cut out unnecessary crap. Obviously I have fifty-two stories. Plus, I kept the world informed of progress while I did it.

This is one of the first times I’ve made a plan and stuck with it.

I Failed a Couple Goals – And That’s Okay

I did of course meet with some failures.

The most consistent personal failures I feel came in terms of some stories not feeling like fully fledged stories so much as a glimpse into a larger world. Nano Noir and the Road stories come to mind – but the good news is that in these vignettes, I do feel like I latched onto something larger. There’s a deeper story waiting to be told about Kyle, Butch, Slim, and Auntie Bellum. Nano Noir has an entire arc all ready in my head to be laid out and tweaked.

Additionally, I feel like I sometimes phoned the work in. There are some weeks I just didn’t feel creative as I’d like. Sometimes the Script I used to create stories didn’t jive or I’d start writing them and have to junk it when things didn’t work out right. I could expound on which stories to me were awful – but I’d rather not. You can figure that out on your own I imagine, reader. And, like my dad kept telling me: “Don’t preface things by saying ‘this isn’t my best work’ because no one will read the damn things.”

So, from those failures, I have learned lessons and can begin to correct them.

I Found Out a Lot About My Shortcomings

There are things I am goddamned terrible at. I’ve learned that for some reason, my body is trained to say the same thing twice – sometimes three times – under the false pretense that it adds emphasis. It’s a bad habit I have no idea where I picked it up from. The challenge helped me find it, recognize it, and start gunning it down. It still crops up here and there, but I’m getting better at it.

I also know my most villainous typos, common turns of phrase, and that a lot of the time my first person perspectives often sound too alike.

The great thing about finding out your shortcomings though is that once they’re out and running around your keyboard you can smash the little bastards with a hammer, then get back to writing.

Quite A Bit of My Effort Is Pointless

I sat down with one of my alpha readers at a book club meeting and we got to talking about process as we often do (he being a creative as well). He was really kind of surprised when I told him one of the big things I learned: write the story, then take about the first thousand words out and start there.

I remembered having the same reaction the first time I heard this myself back in the Liar’s Club classes. Can’t remember which teacher told us this – but it’s true. My first thousand words are almost always warm up that doesn’t really convey anything important to the reader. By the time I’m a thousand words in, that’s where interesting stuff is finally happening. Scene setting (different from world building) for me isn’t really important as it was to me any longer. Start with action or dialog. Get people invested in that first paragraph. Sometimes I can hack that stuff out from the get go, and other times I have to murder a thousand words to get things right.

I have learned a lot about killing the proverbial darlings in my life. And I’m getting better every day.

The World Can’t Be the Only Thing Fantastic

Another friend of mine at that very same book club meeting had read my published short stories Kowloon-M and Halfway House and honed in on another realization.

I’ll paraphrase him here – we had all had a beer or two by this point (great benefit of meeting for book club at a bar). He said: Kowloon-M and Halfway House are great setting pieces – but your characters should come through just as developed. Shift your focus a little. Take as much time building them as people as you do building the fantastic circumstances.

He’s right too. When I look back through my stories, the setting and world build the crux of the story while characters facilitate it. To do better, I need to turn that equation around. Let the characters drive through the world and expose it. And make sure those characters have more drive and motivation. Short stories don’t give a lot of room for development – but it doesn’t mean it can’t be done and it’s a goal.

Apparently, I’m a Horror Writer

This is something I think I always knew, but the challenge brought it out where I could see it. As I’ve been writing these stories, I take the finished process and collate them into Scrivener which manages all of my serious work in a manageable format. It’s how got my final word count and how I divided my efforts up into three general categories: fantasy, science-fiction, and horror.

Surprise! Horror was the biggest category by a landslide. Twenty-three of the stories – almost half – were based around a concept rooted in the macabre. I had one reader actually tell me that when she read ‘Now, Watch,’ that she couldn’t get past a particular scene where there was a rather detailed and gruesome description of someone unsuccessfully trying to keep a nasty wound closed. Another told be they got goosebumps at the end of ‘Take Only One.’ Clearly, I have the capacity to give people the willies.

And, weirdly enough, I enjoy writing those stories. That may sound pretty messed up – but there’s something very cathartic about the horror writing process. I learned a lot about horror these past two years. My girlfriend almost died of a severe pulmonary illness. My mother was struck by a car and developed severe problems with vertigo. Both grandparents rapidly deteriorated and ended up in hospice care or nursing facilities, then died. So much fear and dread and terror built up in me. If I have to have those wretched experiences, I figure I ought to make them useful. These topics and more, old anxieties, unspoken fears, and my always present fear of the unknown pour themselves out into the pages. I’ve learned that if you want to scare the living shit out of people, you have to write about what personally scares you. Death itself, the process of it, loss of control, watching people change suddenly and drastically – it’s bad enough I have these fears, but letting them cling on uselessly?

I plan to chain those things up in words. Put them out there where I can see them like I have with my shortcomings in craft. There’s something about the idea of everything in the process, including my fears, being out in the open that appeals. Because once you can see a thing and can label it, you’ve taken the power of the unknown from it. They’re just as ugly of course, but once everything’s in front of you… you can start dealing with all of it.

You Have To Let Yourself Write What Feels Like Crap Some of the Time

This was hard to learn. But there came times when a story had to come up because it was deadline time, or I was already a week or two behind. Part of the challenge was accountability, and when you are forcing yourself to write, you sometimes don’t come up with the best stuff.

I’ll be the first to admit – I hate some of these stories. I won’t go into specifics, but I really didn’t like some of what came up. Some of my readers did – which stuns me a little. But, it has come to show me that even if it’s not your favorite, people may love it. I’m told that Tchaikovsky absolutely hated The Nutcracker Suite and wished he’d never written it, but every damned Christmas, the world pulls it out and parades it around. Perhaps I’ve written a few Nutcrackers of my own.

But, this bridges into…

There’s Nothing You Can’t Edit Later

I’m multi-disciplined when it comes to creative stuff. I went to school for training to become an Animator. I have always loved the visual arts (my first artistic love as it were). I’m trained in design. I can draw. If you put a gun to my head, I might even be able to paint you something in acrylic. I’ve done graphic design for print and television, I can take pretty good photos without a big need for equipment. But, all of those mediums seem harder to fix in post than with writing.

I can’t count how many times I had to crumple up a paper or throw away illustration board or waste a canvas because I messed something up so badly it could not be fixed or covered up. With writing, if I have crap in front of me, I can fix it. In writing, turds can actually be polished with enough drafts. There’s almost never a need to entirely go back to the drawing board because you can raise the corpse of your present story. Amputate its limbs, cut off its head, and rebuild from a tiny sampling of guts – it’s not always easy, but nothing ever worth doing really is.

I Love This

This is something I already knew, but it drove it home. I love this. You can’t be a writer without loving the act of writing. You wouldn’t spend several hours over the course of a week doing it if you didn’t (time in schooling being discounted, mostly). There’s so much other stuff you could be doing – but you find yourself writing, putting one word down after another and you feel something inside you stretching and moving and being born. Sometimes it’s like pulling teeth, other times it’s like taking a piss after drinking half a six-pack. But, in both cases, I’m never quite as happy as when I’m in front of a keyboard for the explicit purpose of writing things that I hope people will enjoy.

I want to make this my living some day.

New Goals

And it’s taught me that I need to set goals. I work better with deadlines. I work better with accountability. I work better with friends and family reading my work as I go forward. So I’m going to take what I’ve done this year and run with it. I think I have enough work in here for at least two anthologies and I’m setting out my goals here.

In the first three months of 2016, my goal is to select twelve of the stories seen on my Writing Challenge page. I wish to pull them down from the site (sorry – this is a part of the process that has to happen) and get to tweaking. To making them the best stories I can possibly write.

In the fourth through sixth month, I intend to format them, then shop them around. I want to be able to have an anthology of my favorites – most likely from the horror category.

After that, I guess right now the goal is to keep writing. To keep the momentum moving. I may not be placing the stories here, but I want to do an article a week to go over progress or any daft notions that come through my head about the craft of writing or my process. I want to be out there with people from the Delaware Writer’s Group, to Reconnect with the Liar’s Club Coffee House. This should be the year of trying to become a professional at this.

An Invitation To Come With Me

Come with me through the process – because writing shouldn’t be a solitary process. As I’ve also discovered, it’s good to be with others doing the same as I have come to most Monday nights over at a friend’s place.

Thanks and Acknowledgements

There are so many people I really need to thank for the past year’s support and encouragement.

Mom and Dad – Dad, you always get around to the stories and you always have some kind of feedback, good or ill. Mom, you don’t always read the stories (sometimes, this is a good thing) but you always are on me to keep doing this because I love it.

My Girlfriend – You’re always willing to read my stuff right after I write it (unless you’re already asleep) and always ready to tell me without any reservation what works for you and what doesn’t.

Steve Myers (Premiere Alpha Reader) – For extended review sessions and telling me what I need to hear sometimes. Your input is always appreciated!

The Extended List of Alpha Readers – God there’s a lot of you. I’ve received a lot of feedback from the following folks: Dan Bogart, Jacob Jones-Goldstien, Nick Leamy, and Dan Lynn to name a few.

My Teachers – Janice Gable Bashman, Don Lafferty, Marie Lamba, Jonathan Maberry, Jon McGoran, and Dennis Tafoya to name a few.

The Monday Night Crew – Patrick Conlon, Marcella Harte-Conlon, Jacob Jones-Goldstein, Nick Leamy and Steve Myers (Double dipping here to be sure – but they’ve earned it).

December 30, 2015 0

Ghosts of the World

I promise this is about Ghosts. So just keep reading.

So, I’m a mutt. My heritage is basically a strange amalgam of people whose branches started in Eastern Europe and what would become the United Kingdom. These people then screwed their way across a landmass until they found each other, then found an ocean to cross, then continued screwing away on the other side of it.

Mayflower — Probably on the boat too. Not even gonna lie.

This means that Europe is where my inherent world views sprang from. It’s no one’s fault – it’s chance. I happened to be born from those branches of human culture. This means I carry the baggage that comes with it, culturally speaking. I grew up with European stories and mythologies. I learned about what the early European settlers carried with them and what grew out of it. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow to The Fall of the House of Usher to the latest Stephen King novel have come to inform my reading and writing choices when it comes to horror and the supernatural. We get Faeries, Vampires, Valraven (this concept is as fascinating as it is gruesome), Ghouls (though technically these came from Arabia), and probably a hundred different kinds of ghosts.

As I’ve noted before, the idea of Ghosts has gripped me firmly since childhood. I have always been fascinated with both the idea of cheating death (who hasn’t, really) and the idea of the spirit lingering on in the world toward a singular purpose. Of course the stories aren’t all that way. Improper burial, desecration of grave sites, or committing brutal crimes in life could all get you sentenced to a maddening half-existence where you are present, but ineffectual at causing anything else but misery and fear.

cubicle — Meet the new life – same as the old life.

But, the myths do leave some room for interpretation in Europe. Not all ghosts are necessarily evil. Some come to portent events that can be altered. Some reveal the nature of crimes done against them in life so that justice can be served. Others linger to protect loved ones. It’s all definitely creepy, but not all based on ill-intent.

hamlet's dad — Hamlet’s dad, his heart was in the right place. I don’t think he wanted THAT MANY people dead.

Now, my girlfriend on the other hand, her cultural ghost interpretations are entirely different.

She comes from two cultures that pretty much define ghostly existence to be absolutely the worst thing that could happen for all parties concerned. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Japanese take on ghosts. Because they tend to go something like this:

And this…

These… are decidedly unfriendly ghosts. The concept of Casper doesn’t fly in Japan I’m told. Ghosts are there for one reason only: to torment the shit out of the living. I am led to believe that this impression, J-horror films aside, is not an outlier. This is straight up what ghosts do in Japanese folklore. Kami (the revered spirits of the Shinto religion) can be beneficial. But Yurei (a Japanese catch-all word for ghost) are straight up torture and murder machines. Take a look if you like. Ghosts are all about wrath or unfulfilled lust it would seem – the more the better. Certainly every portrayal of a Japanese ghost I’ve seen leads to at least one more dead body to add onto the pile.

The other side of my girlfriend’s heritage is that of Native North America, specifically the Lakota people. I’ve not had much experience with Lakota folklore and tales, but she assures me that generally speaking, Lakota culture is generally anti-ghost. Any spirit of the dead who is hanging around the living is manipulative at best, and is more likely to be angling for someone to follow them into the land of the dead with them. It is exceedingly rare that a dead human’s soul would hang around for any kind of good reason she tells me.

When I write about ghosts, I tend toward the cultural tones I see on my side of things – though it certainly benefits the craft when I expand the repertoire. It’s also why ghosts are such great subjects for stories, at least in my own opinion. given my interest in the topic, it sometimes puzzles me why I don’t write more stories about ghosts. It’s clearly something I love reading about.

I guess a part of it is simply being scared – not of the ghostly aspects of things. Clearly I’m okay with writing about horrifying things on occasion. But the fear I think comes from being able to fully live up to the stories from all of the cultures I know of. I rarely do it (though one of the preceding links contains a rare example where I do).

I think I ought to do it more.

I had an idea recently in the middle of the night – which is the perfect time to be thinking about ghosts – so maybe I sketch that out a bit more. See what falls out.

March 31, 2015 0

Automaton

There’s something about just unchaining your brain and letting stuff leak out. Don’t format it beyond making it readable, just let it all come out. Become an automaton whose guiding hand has gone absent. Let the output flow out. It does a little bit of good from time to time.

I first learned of Automatic Writing when I was about sixteen years old, not in an English class, but in a French Class. Our teacher was not only in it to teach us about the French language (most of which lays rusty and unused in the cellar of my mind) but also to give us a little insight into French culture. A lot of that was the arts, both visual and otherwise. Apparently there were a couple of French surrealists who dabbled in Automatic Writing, which, depending on who you asked, was either letting the subconscious come out to play in the written word or some external force acting upon a relaxed mind to send out messages in text. I’m thinking that the external side of things is probably not true – but overall, I have engaged in Automatic Writing from time to time as a result of a well rounded public education. The subconscious can sometimes give you keen insights into your own mind that are both terrifying and liberating. It’s often also extremely intimate and personal. So much so that it is frequently inappropriate to even release such writings into the wild. I haven’t the streak of exhibitionism necessary (just enough to have a blog) to place it all out where people can see it.

But the process is simple enough for anyone to try. Pull out your preferred medium for writing, be that a notepad on your desktop, an actual notepad and a pen, whatever you need to relax and just start. It can just be scribbles if you have to start that way, or start with one word and see what chains onto it. There’s no need for punctuation, no grammar. Just write what comes to mind. Stop when the words do. Pushing out more than what’s being brought to the surface is planned writing. If you had to pause for more than a moment, the exercise is over.

automaton - scribbles — Though one could make the case that legibility is perhaps useful.

I find that on a word processing program I can bang out about 150-200 words before something switches me back to conscious thought. But, with practice you can go a lot longer and you can pluck out a few gems here and there that you can then place in conscious work. All fodder for the work.

Being an automaton doesn’t have to be all bad after all.

January 13, 2015 0