lackofwhimsy

[lackofwhimsy]

I dreamed I was no longer real:

A phantom of shadow and dust

A thing that no one could feel

In a world of concrete and rust

I looked at those I held dear,

And saw only empty eyes -

In them indifference was clear -

Not even comforting lies.

Yet, what if everyone felt like a ghost?

Is that not a world that needs a warm heart the most?

what's your biggest fear?

i used to think it was dying alone. that felt poetic enough to be palatable, and tragic enough to sound profound. people nod at that kind of answer—solemn, understanding, relieved it isn't theirs.

but no. it's not death. not really. not even solitude, which has become more of a habit than a hardship.

it's the slow, creeping realization that nothing i do matters.

not in the grand, existential sense—i've made peace with being dust in the universe's nostril—but in the small, human way. in the way where you speak and no one listens, where you try and nothing changes, where you exist and somehow still feel like a rumor in your own life.

my biggest fear is being remembered wrong.

that someone will take my softest moment and twist it into weakness. that someone will quote me after i'm gone and get the tone all wrong—turn irony into sincerity, or worse, sincerity into a joke.

i fear becoming scenery in someone else's story—the kind they pass by on the way to something more important. i fear being tolerated. pitied. archived.

and if i'm being devastatingly honest—

i'm afraid that one day i'll laugh, and no one will laugh with me.

not because the joke is bad.

but because i'm no longer someone worth laughing with.

[lackofwhimsy]

Don't know who else might find this useful, but one thing I do while writing is to keep a separate outtakes file alongside the manuscript.

It helps immensely to get the silly out when you need to write Serious Shit and to get the edgy out when you need to be lighthearted.

Plus, for me at least, giving my characters latitude to ham it up when they feel like it makes them less flat than they might otherwise wind up being. It's hard to see someone as only the BBEG when they're sneaking around in a scene they don't appear in tying people's shoelaces together, for example.

You might say, "Okay, but I don't need a separate file for that."

It's worth saving those moments. Let the fictional people be more real.

[lackofwhimsy]

Skill issue.

Language doesn't communicate. Language says what we don't want it to say, and keeps hidden what we do. Violence, art, sex (in that order) are what happens when language fails.

[lackofwhimsy]

He stared at the screen. It didn't blink. He typed some words. He typed some more words. People that didn't exist and yet were more real to him than the overwhelming majority of humanity did things and had things done to them.

He cursed, erasing a city block and a week from existence. It got in the way. He crafted a springboard of words to get to the next place, a vivid old house. Had he lived here? Worked on it? He stole a minute to think about it and the memory came to him, seventh grade and a pretty girl with hair so black it was blue. They had done homework.

He laughed, "We really did just do homework, too. I think her brothers were actually disappointed."

Still chuckling, he put her in the house, adding her to the story without a clue of where she would go or what would happen to her. He typed more words, typed faster and faster (the other fictional people really liked her, too.) He slowed, remembering what had to happen next. Maybe...no. No. It had to happen. Had to happen even more, now. He stopped typing the words.

He stared at the screen. It still didn't blink.

At length, he typed more words. Haltingly. The vivid old house, its layers of wallpaper, its creaking floors, its tall windows, all its charm was wiped from its fictional existence. The pretty girl went with it, and her briefly sketched family - erased as quickly as they'd been conjured up in a fireball whose heat and pressure he could nearly feel. His typing evened out, became more methodical. He shepherded his surviving characters to the next scene and left them there for the time being.

He froze the universe in its tracks and went to have a drink and think about the girl he hadn't thought about in decades and yet had doomed to a horrible, painful death with barely a second thought because it would make the scene hit harder.

Surely he shouldn't be trusted with this kind of power.

[lackofwhimsy]

And then they proceed to napalm that orphanage anyway.

don’t forget your villain is a poet too. let them monologue under candlelight. let them fall in love with the protagonist's handwriting. let them cry in the rain and say it’s strategy.

[lackofwhimsy]

You ever just sit there and marvel at the ridiculous confluence of events that lead to a thing? Like I'm staring at a slice of pizza. People grew and harvested the grain, the veggies, the spices, someone raised the animals, more people slaughtered and processed them, still more packaged them and moved them, yet more combined them into pizza and cooked it and sold it to me and even brought it to my door.

There's thousands of years of history and the handiwork of countless people in my hand.

I'm going to eat it.

[lackofwhimsy]

The Cost of Chivalry

The walk home was always depressing. Randall was tired, having been on his feet eight hours stocking shelves - stocking shelves at a grocery store at his age. Fuck. The closer he got to home, the more decrepit the buildings became. They had been large stately homes in their prime. Over the years they had been divided into apartments. Badly maintained if they were maintained at all. Home to people poor enough they were probably going to live in similar places until they died.

His aching feet dragged a little, causing him to stumble. As he straightened, he paused. He had heard something unusual over the pops of his protesting spine. Voices. Didn't sound like any language he had ever heard. Coming from the alley that yawned dark beside him.

He heard a woman's voice cry out in pain, those weird foreign voices again.

"Not your problem," he told himself, "You're too old to play the simp."

His feet were already carrying him into the alley. Dammit.

Five goblins were assaulting an elf.

"The fuck?" he mumbled, rubbing his eyes.

No, definitely there. Five little green guys, pointy teeth, scrawny beneath their cheap suits. A couple carried bats that stood nearly as tall as they did. One had brass knuckles. One was currently holding the point of a butterfly knife against the elf's pale throat.

As he watched, she spun on one stiletto heel, pulling away from the knife and snatching a handgun from her little clutch purse that was patently too big to have been in there. All in one fluid move that was done before he could blink. The gun roared, the muzzle flash blinding in the dark.

Two more times the gun spoke and two more goblins went down before Randall's vision cleared, but then the other two had pounced on the elf, tackling her to the ground. Apparently they were stronger than they looked. The gun flew out of her hand into the shadows.

Yelling unintelligibly, the goblins attacked, punching, kneeing, biting. The elf screamed at them in a different language, fighting back as best she could, but her strength was fading.

Randall found himself picking up one of the fallen bats and swinging wildly at a goblin, the sickening crunch of impact nearly shaking the bat from his grip. He swung at the other, but it ducked and pulled a switchblade. He didn't feel the wicked little blade, but rather the impact of the stabs, like he was being punched. Repeatedly. He tried to swing the bat again, but his arms felt like lead. Dazed, he saw the elf's slender hand draw the blade of a gleaming combat knife across the goblin's throat, but then the ground was coming up to meet him. He fought off the encroaching dark, looked up.

The elf was staring down at him, that impossibly beautiful face regarding him with distaste and annoyance. He took a breath to tell her to fuck off then, but there was something wrong with his chest. He felt cold. Then he didn't feel anything at all.

"You'll live," he thought he heard the elf say, before darkness took him, "Asshole."

Had bits and pieces of this story rattling around in my head for a while now. They refuse to fit into anything coherent. Maybe one day I'll manage to find out how they fit together and what it means. In the meantime, enjoy the process along with me.

[lackofwhimsy]

What do you do when you begin to rediscover that childlike sense of wonder? I feel like someone deposited a billion dollars in my account by mistake only it's been a few weeks and the bank hasn't taken it back and no grim men in suspiciously bulging windbreakers have shown up at my door.

[lackofwhimsy]

She perched on the table. No, perched was the wrong word. Too tentative. She didn't do anything so passive as sit on the table, either. She lurked on the table: a deceptively relaxed blob of pitch-black fluff. Tail gently twitching in time with some demonic melody only she could hear.

A languid paw stretched out.

A glass was pushed ever so gently to crash to the floor below.

Wretched creature.

[lackofwhimsy]

He steeled himself, knowing this was the hardest part. As it turns out inertia is present in damn near everything. One little push to get something started, and then Whoosh! Off to the races.

He took a deep breath. Found his center. Stilled his mind. Realized that he had realized that he had stilled his mind and got lost in existential quandary for an unspecified amount of time. Took another deep breath. His hand moved. His fingers brushed the keyboard. Words appeared on the formerly blank document.

The wrong damned words.

Screw it, they were still words. Time to fix them later in editing. For now it was time to Get The Thing Moving.