Ah, language

According to the Lotus Wordpro Canadian spellchecker 'coloration' is a word, yet 'colouration' is not :p

On the naming of characters

Character names tend to come to me from no discernible place. In some cases, they have meaning (for example, I did one novel (well, half-done it at present) where African names were used for everything, from people to nations, and most of the names told you something about the character (Ayo means joy, which tells someone how he views the world). This is the only time I did something like that, and it was fun. It also got me thinking about the actual process, and what process other people use.

For the current novel (Gloaming) I did my usual method of making up the character in my head and going through bits of plot, fragments of dialog and such until a name came to me that just 'fit'. For example: the one MC came into my head as Katie, and fairly feisty at that. Which seemed all well and good, so I decided I really should know her last name, even if it never comes up in the novel. I picked the last name of some neighbours we had, for something that sounds a little off-normal (Holmes). Then, something about the name Katie Holmes bugged me, and I googled it.

So now her last name must change, unless a YA horror is derailed by people thinking about Xenu. The other MC, however, I ended up going with Mike Smith for, due to how common the names are -- as if his parents tried to ensure he'd be average. The only problem was michael just didn't fit, but somehow Kevin did. Then I googled Kevin Smith, and thereafter banged my head into the desk. So I went with Jaylen (a randomly found name via a generator) but it's not working, so it's back to Kevin. And I'm changing their last names.

I just found it funny that, entirely by accident, I managed to inadvertently name two characters after celebrities. It luckily didn't hold true with the third MC,Duncan Hoyle, whose name came from Duncan popping into my head as nice and solid and Hoyle referring, obliquely, to card games and chance. Which means I still end up using names that provide hints, even when I don't plan to...

The Cellar's Voice, Without Rainbows

I do not know how long the human body can live without food or water. All I know is I cannot undo the chains holding me to the wall and I am very tired. And dying.
        I don’t want to die, but I have no strength left to prevent it, nothing left to call. There is a hole inside me where there was hunger, gnawing emptiness and wind that doesn’t blow in this world. Is this death for other people? I do not know. I only know that I am a magician, and we do not die as others die. I know that and this darkness and the fear of those who refuse to call me kin. Everything else changes but the fear remains. Even if I told them it was I who ended -- but it does not matter.
        I am dying, and I have few illusions left the hunger is not stripping away. I still believe they love me, and hope for the future, but I think one can’t live without those illusions; until I die they, at least, will remain. There is a strange kind of peace, if not strength, in having nothing left. They are killing me with their silence, with no food and water, leaving me to starve to death. Perhaps this will reduce the curse a magician makes when they die.
        That wouldn’t be a bad thing; I’d rather not curse anyone when I die. Not even those who deserve it; the world has enough curses without me adding more, and far to much hate as things stand. Or perhaps that is only the darkness speaking, giving its own voice to my pain.
        It is not their hate that hurts, but the places it reaches inside me that hurt. I hate myself because they hate me. I don’t want to, but it’s hard to not internalize hate, when you’re hated like that. For being a magician, for having magic, for being a legacy of those who destroyed the world so long ago.
        And so: fear, hate. I stare into their hearts -- I can do this without power; it’s a trick -- and all I see is their hatred. I want to ask what it does to them, what chaining me destroys in them, but I never have. It would only hurt, especially if it is true. And now I never will.
        But there is enough, in my wishing for another life, to press my thoughts into earth and stone. To make the ground remember what men will forget. In another age some magician will hear my voice, know these words. Perhaps a better one, but from here I cannot see it.

They have not let me out of the room in over a year. The last time was because I wanted to see a rainbow, having never had before. I undid chains and the door and walked upstairs, and they screamed and forced me back down. I said I knew no guests were there, but it didn’t matter. Nothing I could have said would, and doing would only make it worse.
        It was a very beautiful rainbow, though, and I kept it inside me for months until someone asked for it. She’d never seen one, and I’d never had someone speak in my head, magic to magic, wishing to wishing. She’d heard a lot of stories, so I won’t give her name. She told me magicians can make the dead answer for crimes, so I think - I think she never even told me her real name. Not even for the rainbow.
        She took it, though, when I offered it, and she did things. Terrible things, with the sliver of hope it gave her, to give more to her magic than hate.
        They’d removed her eyes, so she couldn’t look at them. And done it again, when they grew back. They did that every single year, and I had no response to that. But I knew hate wasn’t enough, for magic. You needed hope, and the other intangibles of the world. She said that, if we had love, we would have changed the world. Enough of us, enough love -- but we are too few, and too far apart, and she leapt into the darkness between thoughts, between wishes, between people. Years, and she only found me.
        And all I did was get her killed.

I lie. Even magicians lie. Maybe especially -- we’re lied to do often that the truth has no value. Now I’m just being silly-stupid. But everything is getting slower, fuzzy at the edges. And the hunger has come back, and the magic can’t make it go away.
        All things have limits, even magic. Even wishes.
        She wanted to make them pay, though I didn’t see the point. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, since it wouldn’t matter. Maybe that’s why I have nothing left, because I have nothing to try for. She thought so; she’d reached me, not I her. I was younger, and I should have been the one to do it. But I wasn’t driven by hate, and there was nothing else to drive me.
        The drought was only local; no one else will care, it will only be a brief season, not even a footnote in history. But she made it, with her hate, with her anger, to try and take them with her when she died. Maybe she was stronger than I was, to hate them on their own terms. I don’t know. I just know I can’t do what she did; when I see people, I know them. And you can’t hate something once you understand it, even if they never understand you.
        She never saw; I don’t know what her trick was, if she had one. Maybe she lost it with her eyes. I can’t say. I stopped her, though. For the rainbow. Because there hadn’t been any, since her drought, and I wanted to see more before I died. She had anger and hate, and I had nothing. The nothing won.
        I don’t know what that says about her or about me. I just know it took too much, and I am dying now and the drought began to fix itself because she is dead. And people found out about her, from the screaming. My family doesn’t want anyone to know I exist, so I die a slow death I cannot escape from.
        I wish I had magic enough to make it didn’t matter. I wish I couldn’t understand why they fear us. I wish I could hate them. I - I wish the magic hadn’t taken that away from me with everything else. Why can I hate myself and not them? How does that ... how does it .... work?

The wind is deeper, the darkness inside me greater now. Someone is coming down the stairs, and I can smell food. I can smell food. Torment or blessing, it doesn’t matter. I have gone where tears cannot reach, beyond the places where words have meaning. I am only a voice, putting word into stone, making a final wishing real.
        Only this.

And if you, hearing this, can somehow show me a rainbow
        just one
        even
        I might learn happiness
        from

A few poems

We have names

We have names for the masks
Not for what lies under

We only have words for
things we have words for

Every time I dream of you
I forget a few more


A name is

A name is a blow, wound never recovered from;
Who is so full as to be empty?

To whom is it worthy to empty our identity?
One must love without becoming.

His ego, so fragile! forced to steal her name
Who does she not ask for his?


Her Body

They dressed her up as a bride while
I watched, scratching down notes trying
to appear professional, not interested.

I am told it is done to virgins, though
not how one determines that they are
("She was unmarried," I am told, simple,
as if that were answer enough).

Blood is not removed from martyrs here.
burying them with fashion accessories intact
(my definition brings no smiles)

I want to say the bride should be given red,
bloodied: -- Aren't all virgins martyrs? I half-joke.
I'm told only that wives were left that way, dying
for their sins, loving their straying husbands.

Dying for her sins, I am told, undertaker's voice
flint and ebony. I tread still waters: Aids? as if
death needs helpers. A hand waves to compass
the cool room, this silent world.

"This is the disease." I want to say: The world?
but I just take notes, pen stuttering across the page
a lump in my throat, ice in my soul.

Presentation, circa 2040

"Humans don't do the operations. It's not that they -- sorry, we -- can't. We can, even if machines are more accurate. History proves that. And machines have never quite matched human intuition when it comes to odd problems, though that is lightly debated. Presentation, please."

An imagine flickers into existence in front of their eyes, a young boy is sitting in a chair, head shaved, strapped into the table while wired run into his head and IV feeds into his body.

He is smiling.

"Now, as you can see, the subject is approximately seven years old. There's no real reason for them to be this old, but we prefer them over three so that they don't into odd problems with bones later on that could call for surgery and possible downtime. Next."

A robot moves into the screen, with needles, saws and other instruments coming out of its torso as it examines the subject.

"While some will -- and do, make no doubt about that! -- object to the Procedure, the graphs included at the end of this presentation show the decreased cost in running the World go down by at least 30%, possibly as high as 40%. The reality is that our clients pay for complete immersion. It's what their parents wanted for them, and what they decide to want for themselves."

The board members nod and smile, running figures on their own programs. They look pleased.

"The reality of the world is that the System is almost entirely automated now. It is entirely possible for aliens to invade, land, destroy our entire infrastructure and the World to remain. We've run scenarios, for those who care to look. If it doesn't we'll all have died and it won't really matter then, will it? Next."

The robot moves forward, inserting needles and bringing down saws.

"The World is whatever the clients wish it to be. Almost none of them make a utopia, almost all have education implanted into their brains without having to learn it and, in general, their lives are considered as rewarding and fulfilling as ours, even if they do spend them entirely in a virtual world. For those who think we do not, there are interesting studies being done on how the universe is one giant holographic projection and the like in any event. All of which means: we have no leg to stand on."

The images changes on the cue word. The robot removes the boy's legs, sealing the wound, and prepared to take him to a smaller, modified creche.

"Gallows humour aside, ladies and gentlemen and others, they have no need of extraneous limbs. Arms remain useful, in case of unforeseen events and the need to manipulate various equipment, but legs are entirely redundant and useless."

The boy is installed gently into the creche by the robot, tubes moved and placed into it as the lid closes.

"Now, if you will switch screens to F, I've prepared an examine of the modified nutrient bath and the savings in effort and energy down the line from producers and distributors to our end. There is no practical need to put energy and nutrients into limbs that do nothing at all, and there are various legal precedents that shore up any case such a thing is needed."

"I do not believe it will be."

He never stopped smiling.

Neither did the board members.

The Last Spell

She hadn’t seen an omen in over a decade. Nor even anything vaguely omen-shaped (Tea leaves did not count; one could read anything from them. Many did.). But her arthritis was not as bad, this morning as others, and Edwina had not switched any herbs. Further, the old instincts coming back, like falling off a horse all over again, the weather had an unseasonable cold bite to it, and there were more beggars on the streets than normal, when she went to the market.
         She still did that, omens be cursed! Routines could shatter them, or make them true. Edwina did not know which was true, or if either was. But it was comforting to see the same old shops, the same familiar faces two hours before noon, and she bought more than she usually did, and some food for travel out of a habit older than the pain in her lower back.
         The market was bright and alive, but beyond the urchins she spotted more hungry faces, heard the desperation under merchants casual greetings, saw the way people paused to count up coin before paying, the way the few guards in the market kept their hands too close to the blade. Oh, then Edwina knew what was coming. She bought a few other things, lastly, before going home, and cleaned up the small single room flat she considered home, above the shop of a spice merchant who should have charged for the aromas she got for free.
         It didn’t take long, but her body was old and it too longer than she lived before she began to make supper. She went down for some spices, before she was done, to mask the extra ingredients, and was unsurprised at the single knock on the door when the afternoon faded into twilight.
         Edwina stood and walked over to the door, leaving her cane by the chair. It had no power, and she did not want to seem weak. “Welcome,” she said, opening the door.
         The young man standing on the other side of it was tall and pretty, with eyes as cold and empty as the barren seas. He had a sword on either side, no doubt other blades hidden, and his hair was short, chopped ruthlessly above the far too pretty face below it.
         “I am Edwina,” she said, offering up no bow or curtsey.
         “Kel,” he said, voice low and rough. His gaze flicked about the apartment, even hunting into shadows “You expected me.”
         “Or someone like you. Omens, you know. No dead birds,” she added, and he gave her a thin wintry smile but just followed her inside without a word, closing the door. He didn’t lock it; Edwina didn’t ask him to.
         “Food?” he said, surprised, voice almost rising to its normal tone.
         She pretended not to notice, nor the faint blush that followed. “It is poisoned,” she said, offering him a bowl. “Just in case.”
         “Ahhh.” He let the breath out slowly, taking one. “All the dishes?”
         “Not quite.” She poured them both wine, from her meagre stock. “Few seek out a mage in this age. There are few of us left.”
         “I know. But there is something I wish for.”
         “Hmmm.” She drank her wine, noting that he drank first. Courage, or something else? His eyes gave away nothing. “Across the ocean, this would not be done.” He waited with the patience of death, respecting her magic. Or perhaps only age.
         “Warriors marry, in fair Calderon by the sea. It is law, there. To marry, to have children. To fight for more than lords and kings, gods and wizards. I would wish more did that here.”
         “Calderon has fallen to such things many times, has lords who build castles they need to design to defend against their own hired mercenaries. That is not true here,” Kel said mildly. “We do not betray our lords. Not for love nor other things.”
         “A pesky thing that gets in the way of duties and obligations. Yes, yes. I know all the reasons. You should know they don’t matter, who walk and do skilful murder and are nothing else beyond that.”
         “But there is something beyond that.”
         She said nothing in turn, starting on the salad. He followed suit, and broke first.
         “I have married to death, to the battlefield, to the fatalclash of blades.”
         Edwina nodded slowly. “I felt as much.”
         “I have fought battles that would be legend, were their any bards left to speak of them. I have killed mages. Even wizards.” He smiled strangely. “With help, but even so. Two years ago I met my best friend from childhood. We did what was duties sake, and I killed him. He used to be better, but he hesitated when I did not.”
         “It has not been the same since.”
         “It has not. I find I want another path, but I cannot find one. Not alone. And so I have sought a mage, though few are left in our land.”
         “And how many did you have to kill, to find me here?”
         “Only three.” His smile was crooked now, and she was relieved the irony had not escaped him. It was possible to go so far even magic could not save someone. If they did not wish it, there was no magic that could at all.
         “I do not know how many spells I have left in me,” she said. “I am old now, Kel of Orshkar Reach. A mage is not a wizard, to kill others and extend their own life, extend their own magic. We pay with our own years. Surely a wizard could help you more than I.”
         “Wizards -- seek different things, and they would demand prices that would make this pointless.” He began eating the bread. “Many deaths, and always they would hold their power over me.”
         “When did you first kill?” she asked.
         “I was seven. Over this face, and a fool’s jokes.”
         “You could arrange for scarring,” she said mildly, eating the rice.
         He ate some, then looked up. “I tried; it made no difference.”
         “And yet you had the scars healed, hmm?” He said nothing, not returning her gentle smile, and Edwina sighed and stood up slowly. “I will cast a spell for you, then, before I did.”
         “Why?”
         “You remind me of my daughter. I had one, before the magic woke inside me, and now -- well, I doubt she’d recognize me. In five years, I became close to this, and have walked the world since. Her daughter might be alive, but I have not looked in on them.” She smiled into his cold, cold face. “You should know better than to ask questions to which you do not want to know the answer.”
         “I see.”
         “What do you seek with a new life?” she asked as they finished the meal, before the silence became too brittle.
         “A wife. Children, perhaps. A place in the world where I do not have to kill a friend again.”
         She nodded slowly and leaned back into her chair as he reached for the wine. His hand shook, slightly, and he drew a knife from somewhere, swifter than thought and it flew through the air straight and almost, oh! almost true.
         “You should be honoured,” Edwina said as the second blade fell from his fingers and Kel fell over. “Even for one such as yourself, who has made death his bride, it took longer to work than it should have.”
         She stood slowly, trembling a little, ignoring the blade and pain as she had ignored all other pains in over two centuries of being old. “Almost too long. You make wake and remember this, you may not: I do not know. But one cannot be reborn without having died. The poison is only a short death. Your blade a - true one.
         “ Mages die slowly, unless by our own spells. And so few do, because of what we’d return as. Because of what wizards can do to our bodies and spirits. It does not matter: you gave me my death, warrior, and I owe you magic.”
         Edwina reached down slowly, the made moving that little moment it needed, and felt her life’s blood begin to flow from the wound. It was a simple spell, a minor wish only, and she threw the rest of her magic out into the world, to cure the aches and pains of those she’d known in the market a little, because there was nothing to hard now, and no reason to keep it inside.
         Much of the magic had died, during her long time of wandering and wishing to do things other than die. But there was enough for those little things, and she sank down beside the warrior, and wondered as the poison killed her own pain and she drifted into sleep, just what he would think of his beard when he awoke.
         Edwina truly hoped he would not cut it off, but she had put measures into the spell to prevent that.
         “No excuses,” she whispered, or thought she did. “No more, for killing and drawing of blades. That is my gift to you, Kel. Wear it well.”
         And then there was just blessed darkness.

Even

Even lust can be subtle

The wind    only a breeze
a scent of poplars long ago

I remembered a memory
too vivid it could not be real
      in it you sill bit your fingers
      to the quick

Each time I whisper your name
I pretend you listen   hear   know
love

I wish a little thing so small
hoping it small enough to come true
that you were not so far below
      the bare earth between us
      not so very hard

Last Laugh

Nothing we do ends well. It’s not a lie, but sometimes it’s close enough to the irony that seems to run the universe that the differences aren’t all that apparent. Like most things, it holds together if we don’t put it under too harsh a light.
          This isn’t a diary. I expect it to be found after I die. Nor is it a confession, since there’s always things we leave out of that. There are things about me I’d be happier if even God didn’t know. I imagine it’s the same for whoever reads this.
          I don’t know what is going happen, not yet. There might not even be a body left. I can feel the trap, the future, the story, all closing around me with a chill finality. Maybe it’s a mother, or a police officer; I don’t know which. Someone is going to come after me, like in the movies. I think they’ll want explanations, to know why I did it, what kind of monster I am.
          I have no idea what to tell them.
          
I blame Stephen King. Him and ‘It’. I always wanted to be a clown, to make people laugh. Not the kind of humour that’s born from sorrow, but the kind that is taking joy, sharing it on, making the world a better place. If you can make people laugh and not hurt someone in doing so, you’ve done something beautiful.
          It’s all I ever wanted. But somewhere along the way it just fell apart. The kids were always scared of me. No matter what I did, or the jokes I said, they were always afraid. Sometimes they even hated me. Understand: I didn’t learn how to be a clown, didn’t become one, as a means of strength. Too many people use humour as a weapon, a defence -- I just wanted to use it for its own sake, without the meanness of stand-up comics, without the bile of tv comedians.
          I guess it just wasn’t possible. But it was my dream. I started seeing a psychiatrist a few months ago, because I was getting angry with the kids, for crying, or laughing at me in a way that was all mean and hurting themselves. He said that if my dreams had been true, they would never have been dreams at all. I think he’s just angry that he never got a tv show like Dr. Phil.
          Becomes sometimes dreams do come true. The problem is trying to tell dreams from nightmares, at that point. I tried everything, to keep the dream pure and bright, but it never mattered. I tried religion, modern religion (my shrink), new age psychobabble -- none of it helped. Children don’t lie like adults do, and in their eyes there was a harshness adults hide, a light judging clowns and humour and laughter.
          They couldn’t see it for what I could. I’m not sure anyone can. Even children have lost that kind of wonder.

I could have done something else, been anything else, but I’d put too much of myself into being a clown. Too much of my identity, of my longings, of the who and how and why and what of me was in being a clown, and I didn’t have any other me to be.
          It would have helped, I think, if I’d ever actually got around to going past first base with Maria.
          
The first child looked like her. And she laughed, and made jokes. But the party was at her place, and it was horribly easy to get back, to enter, and take her home. I never called it a ‘fun house’. The media did that. It’s a damn trailer, double-wide. There’s nothing ‘fun’ in trailer parks. The only mythologizing done there is the idea that no one is brewing meth.
          It made it easier to hide them, to hide the monster growing under my skin. I even got more work, by scaring the children, letting them see under into the new me, the one they wanted. They’d all seen horror movies, all seen ‘It’: to them it was just acting, just another kind of joke. To them I was just a clown, playing up the darker parts of the archetype.
          Well. No. They never thought it like that. No one really does, I think. But if you pretend to be something, you become what you pretend if you do it long enough. The darkness grew, though I was never dumb enough to dare give it a name. Or pretend it was real: I tried not to give it power, but --
          but you can’t be laughed at, like I was. Hated, like that, by those I had tried to help. You can’t have all that, and not internalize some of it. The darkness grew, and there were always more children who reminded me of Maria. Or other people. Or myself. Eventually, it just didn’t matter. There was a lesson, and they needed to to learn it, that the real monsters are human. Gloriously, terribly, human.
          And that under the mask, I was just like them. And they were all just like me.

But nothing lasts forever. People make patterns, find out clues, follow hunches. For a while, it was as if the universe was on my side: nothing I did went wrong. I don’t know who is after me, but someone is. There’s always a hero, come to destroy the monster. And I am one, now. I stopped lying about that, and things began going wrong.
          Maybe I wanted to fail. Maybe I have to fail.
          Maybe it’s because, no matter how hard I try now, I can’t bring up the kind of humour I used to have, the kind without pain, or hate, or rage, or fear. There’s nothing noble to me now, only a darkness I keep on feeding, and I’m trying to save the children from it now. I am being. And becoming.
          I hope the darkness can die. Every time I look in the mirror, I don’t see any shadows on me. It’s gone deep, and something is growing in my soul. These aren’t the words, but I don’t have words. Judgement is coming. I hope someone stops me.

There is crying, from the spare bedroom. I could make my nose red again, with her blood, before judgement comes. I can hear sirens. I can feel thunder, even though there is no storm.
          The girl is crying, and she reminds me more of Maria than Maria did.
          I just want this to end.
          And I hope they hurry, before she stops crying. Before my nose needs to be red again. Before I smile, and tell her jokes, and laugh.
          It is getting to hard to think, to write. Whoever comes, save me. From the Clown, please save me.

I really should update this blog more often

Consider this an update.

Because there should be more to us

It's not a thing of equals, but the books
all say love has to be, bold faced,
with CAPS and with EXCLAMATIONS!!

I want to write to them, to say: "This.
This is my life. It's different from you,
from your manuals." And I'd tell them,
clearly, cleanly, about you, and me,
me and you, how much I love you --
no, I'd show that. With videos of us,
friends testimonies, the poetry I wrote you
on the back of napkins, never shown.

After I would say: "There is nothing equal,
not in this." I would tell about your eyes.
About how I bare my soul, look into yours,
see only a mirror. I'd ask them what to do,
when I love more than you love in return.

We never talk about it, never bring it up.
I bring you more flowers (for no reason)
and love in in those little things, that when
you are not with me, I think of you
sometimes for no reason at all, but just
because you are you. And I think, I think
you worry about board meetings instead
and other mundane things. And I think
they should pale beside love, in poems,

but -- I am me, and not you, and you love me
not as I love you, and whenever you say
"I love you", it feels like a a favour, like
the giving of a gift, and not how the words
mean more than they mean, but I love you
too much to leave you, even if your fire
barely burns next to my own. The books,
the books I've read, then never said how
it was possible to love too much, not and
still have a normal love. I think, my love,
that they were all the loved, not the lover;
there is a book inside I could not write
without breaking my heart on your eyes.