Status Updates June & July 2018

June 2018

They replaced poetry

With an app one day

And we only noticed

– I kid, we never did

Every photo of you has you hugging a stranger in it, only you’ve never met them before. But you keep seeing their pictures in the paper the next day, and they’re all missing.

You find all the memories you’ve lost in a scrapbook in a used-book shop. The owner only asks to keep the first 20 pages. And smiles at you.

The pride of lions joined the parade.

Once upon a time there was a ruler who refused to recycle, believing that any populace that valued recycling items would sooner rather than later apply the same philosophy to their sovereign.

We live in a world where even the politicians no longer want to be politicians, but that is only because they wish to become lobbyists.

The real estate development listed the second phase as almost done though no one was able to find half the buildings.

“You trust your books more than you do me.”

“They’ve never lied to me,” he said.

She laughed, short and sharp. “What else do you think words do? Why else chain them between bindings?”

And to that he had only a furious silence.

“This is a gift for Father’s Day,” she said, even though it was early.

Even though I am not a father.

Even though I have no children.

In the end, it was easy to let go of everything save for hate. And they wondered why ghosts exist.

The only thing important about the story was everything that never ended up on the page.

Proof that cats are better than dogs: you’ve never heard of a dog scan.

You said it was a gift, but you made certain I knew the price.

“Hatred doesn’t help.”

“Most things don’t, I’ve found.”

“I know one thing that helps me.”

“Hatred Lite?”

“You.”

“...”

“Van Helsing, Van Helsing, Van Helsing. Really? Your family is still coming after me after all these centuries?” Dracula let out a sigh, a feat for one so very undead. “I have killed yes, to sustain myself, as you do. And I admit I am a monster, but I do not think I am your monster, not anymore.”

“Your lies will not avail you, prince of dark –.”

“Come now. I am centuries-old, yes, but I would have to work for a very long time to accomplish the same evils your politicians do in mere decades. I understand your desire to see the other as inhuman. It is a very real desire. But I suspect the monsters you should be hunting are abroad in daylight as well as darkness, and wear suits far better than my own.”

You said dreams could become real, but the cost to the real is always too much. No one talks about the price others pay for their dreams to come true, and sometimes I think it’s the only conversation worth having.

I said I had no secrets from you.

And I still don’t know why that made you weep.

The secret agent was so secret that she didn’t know she was an agent.

And after it all fell apart, I carried each piece despite the lessons everyone thought I should have learned.

Considering keeping this phone-made typo in:

“You’re not a bear?”

There is a pause. “Not right now?”

I gesture wirelessly to the cavern.

... wirelessly, wordlessly. Same thing, right?!

Apparently there is a surveillance car costing $5 million that can hack iphones. I suppose that's one way to get around the pervasiveness of cell phone use in modern stories...

"What do you mean, EVERY gang in the city has one?!"

“Use your power for good.”

“I have no power.”

The magician smiles. “Then you can be really good.”

“Why do aliens keep crashing on our world in spaceships that can travel light years?”
“Heh. What makes you believe any of them really crash?”

"The problem with power is that you are responsible for your power every moment of every day. What you do, what you fail to to, what you incite and support. Everything power does has consequences, and only a coward tries to pretend otherwise. You must always guard against yourself, unless you are a fool. In which case everyone else must guard against you.”

“Or you are cruel without kindness, and other powers must destroy you,” I say slowly.

And after the lion in the wardrobe savaged all the children, there were harsh words with the local zoo.

July 2018

Starting a deliberately bad fantasy novel is an interesting experience.

The silent forge the blade that only the speaking may sing to life, but every blade cuts two ways.

- from the Proverbs of Mount Asl.

A cold wind whipped through the southern stepped of Westrin, the mountains holding the winter despite the Juvery air. Farmers huddled with their dhari against the wind, careful not to touch the fur that would burn with a fierce itching. Lonely towns lay scattered across the scrub fields, kin to fingernails of some long forgotten monstrosity that did not wear the skin of civilization. From a distance the steppes seemed almost steps, as though they had been carved in another age to reach a plateau that no longer existed. The past lurked about with promises, unremembered and unknown.

Threads of music played from the taverns of the town of Molsk, the famous Molsk brewery now only a distant memory to locals if they knew of it at all. The threads formed skeins into the lonely night as though they could lighten a sky that would be gunmetal if guns existed but settled for a dull grey instead. The impression of Westrin to others from the Three Kingdoms is that many things just settle, but what is settled to one can upend the cart of another.

The third compline in the waning of Juvery bore witness to the changing of the gods, the wind promising rain and cold in the coming months of Nanomber, Mapil and Arch. The huddled farmers eyed their flocks and began considering what ones to shear, the fabled dhari fur able to insulate as only glass wool could despite the ways it irritated the eyes, the skin, and the respiratory system. The moon waned in the sky unclaimed by any god of the Westrin pantheon, pale light offering some protection against the shadows cast by the mountains.

The taverns and inns of Molsk all claimed connection the ancient brewery that had given the town its name for generations, the name remaining even though the breweries were long time. Becoming a placeholder between the present and the past, as though then world were a book one could mark and definitively draw lines between one age and another. The inn was alike as any other, shutters rattling as the shinoo wind of the southern mountains played a gentle beat that seemed almost in time with the last of the songs from the tavern below.

Above the sky, the stars spread out across the night ways. Too many to be eyes even of the gods, despite how many gods lay in Eastphalia to the east. The eye of Akashic formed from a dozen stars looked down, those born under its ascendancy often said to call the attention of the gods. In time the eye would be gone, the stars shifting into different patterns and promises. Proof that even the distant hand of fate changed with time, that even the stars could touch destiny only with a fleeing grip like the pale of the false dawn seeping through the window.

I am having too much fun writing this story...

“The nature of a god is to know knowledge as a burden rather than a blessing.”

“You expect me to do a quest I do not understand?” Protagonist asked.

The god of the hearth smiled within the confines of gentle flame. “It would be a poor quest if you understood the ending before it had begun.”

“I am mortal. I already know how my story ends.”

“Well. With an attitude like that, perhaps you do!”

I am not a god, the narrator said, even though it spoke without a voice.

Part of the fun of writing Protagonist: a novel is the headers. Such as:

Sometimes we drown not because we cannot swim but because we forget we are in water.

- from the collected wisedoms of the wizards of Eastphalia

“I admit to finding that a little puzzling. Why are they called the mysterious caverns when there are many such caverns throughout Westrin alone?”

It was questions like that which betrayed Page’s ignorance. Mysterious caverns was a modern translation of mysterious’caverns in old Westrin, which has a very localized meaning in the southern steppes.

“The words are mysterious’caverns – with an apostrophe between them – in old Westrin,” Protagonist said after a short pause. “I imagine that makes all the difference.

“You would kill me?” Antagonist asked.

“You ask it like that, without fear. Why?” Protagonist pressed.

“We all die, even wizards. The least we owe this world is our bodies. I would rather live and pay back more than was given.”

The supervillain’s power to destroy poetry scared almost no one.

Not until they turned their attention on love.

Not that Protagonist had any use for ghosts: one of the older monks at the library, Name Later, had told him that if the dead could haunt the world, we would all be drowning in regrets. The idea had stuck with Protagonist for some time, though he had no idea why Name Later had been so insistent on that truth.

...Name Later will, of course, be very important to the plot. Later.

Molsk was a small town situated well away from any major trade routes, the cluster of wood and stone buildings organized around the central well and market that typified small towns in the country. Not that travellers from outside Westrin ever went to many podunk one-syllable places, none of which had combined with other towns to attain a second syllable. The comparison faltered against reality when one recalled that the towns of Po and Dunk had merged to become Podunk over a century ago, an alliance formed from both geography and trade routes more similar to the arranged marriages of Eastphalia than anything else. As little happened here, the destruction of the old fort on Guffin Hill had drawn people from their homes, even though an old stone fortress being reduced to little more than dust and shadow-scars of what it had been would do that most anywhere.

Protagonist slowed his horse. “What was that?” he asked, though no one responded. “You are responding. Whatever god this is, I do sometimes hear your voice. I am just trying to find out why you insist on telling me things I already know?”

The news is, after all, everything that is not normal. If it was normal, it would not be newsworthy.

But sometimes it's hard to remember that.

“Everyone has a power they should never use. I knew a woman once who could destroy any faith with logic and leave nothing behind; she never spoke in all the years I knew her. A man in Bangladesh who always got bargains. Even, his family claimed, from death. But the worst is when someone doesn’t know they have a power. When they unite the world for all the right reasons, in all the wrong ways.”

“You mean the pres –.”
“I mean that meme you started two weeks ago.”

“Sometimes I think you’ll forget me. That I’ll turn around one day and you’ll be gone and everyone I meet will be a stranger who looks like you but doesn’t know me at all.”

“I’d never forget you. I’d have to know your name first.”

“We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

Protagonist did not pause a beat. “Of course we are. What else is being alive for?”

“I meant,” Page said from between clenched teeth, “right now.”

“Oh. In that case, I rather hope not.”

Proposed solution to the climate catastrophe:

Move to the underside of the flat earth, where a new world awaits us.

“Sometimes,” he said, “to save a thing you must destroy it.”

And I backed away because no one sane said anything like that.

Me: "Oh, right, I need to do that prompt about things overheard when eavesdropping."

... proceeds to write a short story about someone wanting to use an interstellar mining vessel to help with apartment renovations.

And all your kindness becomes undone

By the monsters who work above you

To see only good is to be complicit

In evil that seeps through every crack

Protagonist and Page rode their horses for hours without rest, stopping briefly for the night to continue onward the next morning. By the second draft, they would be stopping and switching out horses every hour since horses are hardly cars. By the third, the author will be grappling with the fact that a horse doesn’t actually equal one horsepower. By the fourth draft, at least one horses will be called Hoof Hearted and the author will be wondering why anyone would take long journeys on a prey animal prone to spring from imagined danger with all the grace of the springs in a broken mattress.

It is not an easy thing to get book fairies into your home. A library is not enough – some of the greatest libraries in the world have never seen one – but sometimes it does happen. Firstly, one must not have a library. By which I mean: books one has never read. A library full of unread books is a deep sadness and not a true library at all. You will know one by the volumes with bent spines that have never been read. Secondly: one must have an infestation of book worms in your home. Thirdly: one must be kind. To books, to people, even to the book worms.

If you wish them removed but cannot bear to harm them – for they, like all things, must eat to survive – the book fairies may arrive. Unfortunately, the book worms are often drawn to the books one loves best. But if this happens, and the fairies come, you will never have dusty books again and book worms that will only eat books one no longer needs. (It is hard to think of such a book, but it must be done.) The book fairies are fed by leaving fine ink in inkwells overnight and not minding if they take some books to read for themselves. And that is all that one must do, as easy as all difficult things can be.

“The problem we have is that I cannot do it. I cannot imagine a world in which you don’t exist, for I fear if I do that I will not be able to live in a world in which you do.”

you asked me to write a poem

and this is

almost

that poem

First Contact turned out to be a nightmare when it turned out that the alien name for themselves, translated into English, was ‘Hashtag’ and they were very, very baffled at the things humans said about them. #woke

“The results are in from our experiment, sir. It turns out that it’s easier to make people believe the Earth is flat than make them believe that politicians will act in ways that benefit the public.”