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puellafuriadarkmagica · 18 days

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Chapter 4

Chapter 4: The Coffee's Rubbish and the Bacon's Always Hard to Chew

This one's named after Seth Sentry's Waitress, or the Waitress Song, or something to that effect.

The opening quote to this chapter is 100% because I couldn't get out of my head how good a drag name "Camilla Highwater" would be. I figured, well, I don't do drag, so it's gonna be wasted unless I get this down somewhere.

As far as life experience had informed her, Marie was much like most seventeen year old girls, especially with regards to her age and gender.

I used up this banger of a joke waaay too soon. Now I've got to come up with "new material" or some shit.

I don't think the rest of these few paragraphs is very good though.

"Hey, Dad. Morning." "Oh! Hello, Marie. Happy New Year!" He forced a grin. For some reason, smiling had never seemed to suit him, which was much to Marie's chagrin because he did it rather often. He stood out in the backyard, mug of coffee in one hand, the other hand bearing a watch he would often impatiently glance at for no reason at all. He stared out at the Sydney skyline in the distance, occasionally exhaling a silent chuckle and shaking his head. "So this is the life," he thought to himself, because he remembered someone telling him this is what successful people think. Thomas Crawford was, in the words of the people who had worked for him, "a cheerful, eccentric, and very personable businessman", which was a polite way of saying "complete maniac". For the last twenty-five years, he had made a fortune off of his own real estate company, of which he was owner, director, and bearer of many other similar titles, most of which he'd come up with for his own amusement. "Marie, would you mind go waking your mother up? She's gonna miss the best part of the day."

I do like Thomas's introduction, though, especially for a character who doesn't matter at all. I tend to give those ones the best introductions, I think. Keen-eyed readers might recognise intentionally very superficial similarities to the start of PMMM's first episodes (and keener-eyed readers still might recognise the similarities of the first initials of each scene's subject family's members to one another).

Marie ignored his presence as vaguely as she could, and opened the kitchen cupboard to help herself to... well, that much, she wasn't sure, and she didn't really care either. She certainly wasn't expecting to find Kyubey perched atop the cereal box, though. Obviously, it followed that he wasn't. Marie had picked up on his mannerisms over the last four years, and he rarely acted in a manner which differed from her expectations. He was actually sitting behind it, and jumped out when she lifted it up.

I even got myself with this switchup just now. If only the series played with your expectations facetiously like this more often.

That in mind… would you even notice if it did? If I were doing so right this moment, how would you even know?

Stay vigilant.

Marie made a point of only getting out one bowl from the compartment above the kitchen bowl. "Not while Toby's around. I'll feed you later, alright?" "Future possibilities indicate this is unlikely."

Remember when Rebellion just sort of mentioned offhand that the Incubator has some sort of probabilistic future sight? Why did we all just let that slide? Why did we not take that as an immense moment of characterisation?

Tucked away in the unremarkable corners of the half of Sydney to the south of the harbour sat a faux-modernist street corner café, named The Meaning Of Life after the revelation which had led its founder to bring it about six years prior. It was a small-ish and plain-ish establishment, with an atmosphere so relaxed it was impossible to sincerely refer to it with any adjectives sans an "-ish" lazily suffixed to curb the magnitude of conviction any other description might imply it inspired, or indeed had gone into building it in the first place. It was the kind of café where gentrification had set in about halfway, before giving up to do something more interesting in the lives of businessmen who stare at the city skyline and tell themselves that what they are experiencing is, in fact, the life.

One of the biggest pieces of writing advice that I've discovered for myself and always tell other people is that unless your scene is going to pivot in tone or mood partway through, your setting of the scene should be the most emotionally powerful part. If you're writing comedy, that means your best jokes should go here.

A certain Attendant and a certain Sydney community representative - no prizes for guessing who -

God, it was excruciating to pull off the first six chapters without Marie or Lara ever finding out what each other were up to. I needed to hamfist these near misses.

Danika leaned against the Meaning of Life's outer wall and watched the clouds, most of which seemed unsure if it was time for a sea breeze yet. "I feel sorry for her, honestly! With Lauren gone, she and Hope have been like sisters to me. Ha! Honestly, they deserve the world for putting up with someone so much younger than them asking them so many questions all the time!" "You're younger than Phoebe?" "Yeah! Yeah, I'm... oh, I must be going on six or seven days old now?"

A lot of people were confused about this, but the explanation is pretty simple by now, I hope. I didn't remember the whole "less than a week old at the start of the story" thing, though. Gosh, that's a bit revealing about how much attention I pay to my own story.

"Do you? That's strange, but we don't care. Keep up the good 'experiencing emotions', by the way. You are doing an outstanding job. And Marie, if you ever want to aid the effort…" "I'd rather not." "I understand. I will ask again later." "I really wish you wouldn't do that." He craned his head to one side. "Would you be willing to exch-"

It's funny, one of the most common comments I get on early PFDM chapters (either explicitly or implicitly) is how well the Incubator's written. Looking back, I agree. He's a lot of fun here. I think she's even more fun as she is in more contemporary chapters, though.

SOUL PHYSIOLOGY The breakdown of the human body into distinct but interconnected systems is common knowledge, as is the function of each. Even a human, of all things, might proudly demonstrate the knowledge of how a muscular system differentiates from a nervous system and a digestive system, and so forth. It is significantly less common knowledge among Terran mortals that the soul operates in much the same way. What is, perhaps, most impressive is that only one culture among them has ever approximated a complete image of a soul's components.

You need to be reading all these end-of-chapter anecdotes in the voice of the narrator from Look Around You, I'm only now realising that's what I've been doing the whole time. If you're not familiar with Look Around You, I recommend checking it out. If ever you had to watch any sort of video whatsoever for a science class in school, you'll probably be pretty familiar with the vibe the show's riffing on.

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Wow, this chapter was shorter than I remember. This is the amount of content I gave you all in the early days? And you were all just okay with that? Bizarre.

As always, seeya 'round next time - in this instance, for the delightfully Marie-light fifth chapter.

#pfdm reread #Youtube

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puellafuriadarkmagica · 18 days

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don't forget about the chapter 4 reread ^_^

oh shit thanks mate

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puellafuriadarkmagica · 21 days

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oh crap i forgot to post the chapter 4 reread. someone remind me to do that later

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puellafuriadarkmagica · 1 month

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Chapter 3

Chapter 3: A Tree in the Storm Like the Breath of a Child

I remember this title is from something by the Bee Gees, but honestly I don't care about them enough to remind myself which track it actually is. My very own father attests that the Bee Gees are the greatest disco band of all time, and frankly, I think he's nuts for it.

"Beauty endures only for as long as it can be seen; / Goodness, beautiful today, will remain so tomorrow." - Sappho of Lesbos

This was about Thalia, obviously, but now I'm not even sure if I'd call her strictly "good" either. If I had to sum up where she's at in a word, it would probably be more like "bewildered".

I'm getting into reading the chapter proper now, and it feels a little strange to do so. I want to stress that I consider chapters 1-3 one "episode" of PFDM, if you will, so to do this days apart from when I read the first two feels quite unlike the intended experience. Yes, I released it weeks after chapters 1 and 2 in real time as well, but that's because (as I hope is obvious by now) PFDM really has a target audience of one, and that one is me. Your collective experience doesn't matter to me at all, and in fact, doesn't exist.

That's the sickest twist of all! PFDM is stored entirely on my computer! I never at any point actually published any of this, and you're all just vividly dreaming up what I would have posted. Your dream sucks, by the way. You think that's the best I could write? I promise you, the real PFDM, which you will never see, is actually much better.

wait where was i going with this

Right, so chapters 1-3 are one whole sort of thingy to me, and I actually wrote all three simultaneously. I would have roped chapter 4 into the mix, but this was the best I could do before New Year's/ In a sense, this was the pilot. So I really had to refine the tone and style. I think I missed on some of the finer details, but there were a lot of jokes these chapters had originally that ended up cut because I didn't think they really felt like PFDM, you know?

Thalia winced beneath the hood of her jacket as yet another firework let out a deafening flash too directly overhead for her liking. She wasn't the type to fit in.

Completely forgot how long I kept her physical appearance under wraps for. Not long in the grand scheme of things, mind you, but back when the chapter count was still knocking single digits it felt like an eternity. I guess you had to be there. Now every chapter individually feels pretty minor, all things being what they are. Well, in hindsight. When it comes to forthcoming chapters I'm kind of raving madly at how to arrange them, especially since part 3 is nearly [REDACTED] of the way done, and there are only [REDACTED] chapters left after that!

Thalia shivered when she locked eyes (or eye, in her own case) with the girl who had just tapped her shoulder.

I've gradually come to imagine Hope as a fair way shorter than I originally did, which makes this more difficult to imagine. Is Thalia slouching? Are they going down some stairs? Is Hope actually tall? I don't know. Send your answers to 4 Mianga Avenue, Engadine, New South Wales, C/O puellafuriadarkmagica.tumblr.com.

The Incubator took this as an opportunity to butt in with an explanation. "Phoebe stepped in to stop two enemy magical girls from killing each other. She wanted them to understand each other's point of view. To make a long story short, all three girls share the same body, gem, and for the sake of convenience, name now." "…Wow. What's that like?" Phoebe laughed. "I suppose it depends on which one of me you ask!"

So I'm pretty sure I plural-coded a character here without actually intending to do that, understanding that this was what I was doing, or being aware of the ramifications of doing so. If she comes across as pretty two-dimensional rep for that, I apologise. That straight-up wasn't even my plan.

"It's cool, it's so cool you could hold it on a swollen eye and numb it,"

This line I can mark up to the fact that I think I was showing my partner Hitchhiker's at the time, and it ended up coming out like one of Zaphod's chronically uncool quips. That's probably good, actually. I don't think Phoebe is very cool very often.

I also want to point out that the name Deckard is an obvious hat-tip to Do Androids Dream and Blade Runner. The Attendants all calling each other by last name but the citadel residents being on a first name basis is also very Blade Runner-y, but I don't remember the book well enough to be able to say that they do that in there too.

Though it was growing late and he found himself accosted by the looming inevitability of sleep, Bill stayed as awake as he could. He was an artist, as it happened, and though she couldn't muster a single cent, the attentive looming of his biggest fan spurred him on to make manifest the visual abstractions of his thoughts and feelings he had set out to make. This, he believed, was his duty as an artist. This was his raison d'être, and even if he was only doing it for a penniless, quiet teenage girl with a tattered coat and a face only a mother who was looking at something else could love, then he was doing it nonetheless!

No joke, Bill Campbell was introduced here because I originally planned for him to have a part in a climactic moment in part 4. I've since decided that that's pretty fucking stupid. He might be another one-off character, I'm afraid.

Unbeknownst to Bill, this was the second time a complete stranger had shouted this at his sole fan in the last twenty minutes, and the second time that stranger had been a magical girl. It was, perhaps, just as well that he didn't know, because learning this would have had no bearing on his life whatsoever and completely wasted his time.

Where did the early-game jokes like this go? I kind of miss them. They don't feel like they're around so often anymore. Maybe they are and I just don't notice.

"Her?" He spluttered. "She wouldn't hurt a fly!" "I'd be impressed if she could, though." "How's that?" "Insects don't feel pain, sir."

Genuine contender for a top ten spot in a list of PFDM jokes, I think.

I don't think Phoebe's transformation sequence is very strong, because I hadn't got my bearings yet. I'm glad if anyone got the dud one, it was her.

Thalia crept out from behind a concrete pillar. She wished she knew some curses so that she could whisper them to herself. She had been hunting the collector witch, and along came these happy-go-lucky hotshots and claimed the battle for themselves? How despicable.

Once all this is over, I might post all the witch names and titles somewhere. They probably won't all fit in the story (the important ones still have so far, and will continue to, however).

I've said it before, but the labyrinth sequences are based on the mid- and late-career works of the playwright Sarah Kane. Those are definitely worth a read if you've got the fortitude for them, but they get heavy like nothing else I've seen. Particularly 4:48, for reasons which I hope are obvious.

Now that I think about it, I guess I can't let that one sequence from Evangelion episode 22 not crack a mention. Best episode of the show, quite frankly. One of my beta readers is going to very very strongly disagree with me for this, but it's better than End of Evangelion. But what would they know? They're not writing PFDM.

Crucial addendum: I am being tormented.

A smile on her face and the usual dose of nightmare fuel in her mind, Marie turned and left at what happened to be precisely 11:59:50 P.M.

This sequence is a bit cliché, but it's still a personal favourite of mine. It was really meant to be one big sign off to this kinda-sorta pilot, and I wanted that to be a grand cross-section of where PFDM has the potential to go. I hope it works?

Ruth sat forward in her armchair, as if sheer force of will could clear the picture quality on her television. She cast her mind back to this day twenty-two years prior, before Sarah had wound up in that fight that left her in her current state. Before Graham - the right proper piece of shit - had announced that he couldn't love his own daughter anymore and run away. For sixteen years, New Year's Day had cemented itself in her mind as a family occasion, and it had never quite stopped feeling that way. Then again, her daughter sitting silently by her side had always been the only family she ever needed.

Take for instance our first look at Ruth here. You get next to nothing about her, and were it not for the narration's mention of her in chapter 2, you might be forgiven for thinking she has nothing to do with the rest of this story. But I've established that (very tenuous) link already, so it should be pretty obvious that all of these are interconnected. Again, I don't know how effective this actually is, because I already know everything that's going to happen. But I remember being pretty shitting pleased with myself at the time, and I pretty much still am.

Lara stood up the back of the crowd by the Harbour Bridge, still grinning with relief. The countdown had been timed perfectly. Her sister had just asked her why the back of the jacket had said what it did, and she was mortified by the possibility - the All-Permeating Abyss in all its infinite dark majesty forbid! - that she would have had to provide an answer! Life wasn't about answers, in her opinion. Life was about a black leather jacket with "Do Not Resuscitate" stitched on the back. Life was also all about flirting with Madeleine, she supposed, but at least Sisyphus took breaks to let his boulder roll down the hill. She could wait.

I'm really rapid-firing these nods to characters you haven't met yet, and there's so much for you to chew on. You already get mentions of Lara's thoughts falling to Sinead Macquarie and Madeleine Whitman, without - and this is crucial - ever once exposing the fact that Lara is the Macquarie that Marie was thinking about in chapter 1. Then I go ahead and name drop the Abyss for funsies. I'm on a roll here.

Hours later, on the other side of the world, Margaret leaned back in her diner chair whose creak in response suggested that it was the elder of the two. The look on the face of the girl across from her said she would really rather be anywhere else, but if she had any intention of speaking as much aloud, it was cancelled out by her embarrassment at the absurdity of her situation. Besides, the two of them had a very important job in the days ahead, and work only became more pressing in the festive season. "You could at least get your feet off the table," she telepathized. Margaret pretended not to hear.

I don't think anyone picked up on the fact that this scene probably takes place in the United States as given by the fact that it uses American spelling rules, but it was there. Wait maybe Americans say "canceled"? I don't understand how they treat double Ls.

Wai-Fong braced herself a mere fraction of a second before she burst shoulder-first through the seventh-storey window and hurtled toward the street below in a shower of glass and blood (mostly not even hers!). Time slowed in freefall, and a jet of flame from the explosion spewed forth from her impromptu escape, very narrowly missing her head. As she turned to look, three enormous, bony arms clawed their way out of the building's exit wound. She winced. No doubt the witch that used to be the girl she was just fighting. As she readied her weapon, she felt a small degree miffed at forgetting until now that she said she would be studying for her finals tonight.

And back to British spelling rules! Plus a character with a Cantonese name. I really don't think guessing where this one was set was anything resembling a challenge. Also Wai-Fong was a character I really didn't have any direction for at this stage: I kind of winged her early chapters. Which honestly surprised me, because now she is, in my opinion, one of the characters with the biggest personality in the story.

Hüriye's eyes snapped open. She stumbled backward into her turntables and stopped them silent. Instantly, all eyes in the room were upon her. She grinned. Her mind swam with the infinite possibilities self-realization brought. She knew the way to a joyous and fulfilling life. She loved herself, and she knew that the corner of the universe she called a self loved her back. She knew that when she woke up tomorrow, it would be to the first dawn on a perfect life, one where she could- Huh? Oh, shit. The music.

I think Hüriye's pronouns here versus in the rest of the story serve as a pretty big hint for what their realisation might have entailed before they outright say it soon after their proper introduction. Honestly, if I were you and I hadn't figured this out, I'd be kicking myself a little. Just saying. Not even to be rude or anything, I'm just saying.

The youngest daughter of an eons-ancient force of destruction stirred from her sleep, woken by the counting down of the humans ignorant enough to believe themselves her parents. For a moment, she thought she saw a shadow by her doorway - poised like a cat, but with longer ears and a bigger tail - but when she rubbed her eyes and blinked, it was gone. She was hungry. Hungry in a way she didn't know other people weren't. She didn't understand what the urge really meant she wanted. This feeling was normal to her, but she had never quite satisfied it, and she assumed it was something that would come and go as a standard part of growing up. In a sense, it was. Every child on the path to becoming a teenager wanted to destroy the universe. What made her so special was that she could actually pull it off.

Now you're probably wondering, "Hey, DARKMAGIC313, why are we seeing this kid whose relevance still hasn't come into play, and not a character I actually care about, like Adia Musyoki?" Well, first of all, that's not my real name, but it would be sick as hell if it was (were?). Second, patience. You'll like this kid, I promise. Third, as I hope is obvious by now BUT IF IT ISN'T DON'T READ THIS BIT, STOP READING THIS PARAGRAPH AND SKIP AHEAD TO THE NEXT ONE, countdown numbers six through three are all showcasing a tangentially relevant character introduced in parts one through four respectively. And fourth, and perhaps most embarrassingly, I hadn't come up with Adia at the time. Yeah, go ahead and laugh. This is a self-parodying, over-the-top political thriller, and I didn't even plan for it to have a hacker character from the very beginning. Shame on mother fucking me.

Beyond the limits of the universe as all of the above understand it, untouched by the white lies called time and space, a brilliant deity draped in a flowing black cloak writes by the deep blue light of her soul gem. Her words are inert as she pens them, but their meaning is alive and dynamic, shifting into the shape of a cosmos. This cosmos, too, is filled with life where she wills it - or does it will her to write? Which one informs the other? - life which understands itself through the words she builds them from. She is the speaker-god, and her words and the universe are one and the same. And she's mighty humble, too.

I do like how quickly we dropped the title of speaker-god. I've been doing a lot of this thing where the narration strips a character of their titles when it becomes apparent that they're undeserved. Maybe I'm not doing that as much as I think I am, actually. I can't think of any other example except for the bit in the most recent chapter where the narration takes to calling Whitman "Madeleine" when Marie starts humiliating her. Still, even if that's only two points of data, that's something.

PART 1: UNTIL THE DARK

The part names are also lyrical quotations, and in fact, all are connected to the titles of their first chapters - part 1 shares an artist, part 2 an album, and part 3 an actual song. The logical conclusion is that part 4 would be exactly the same as the title of the first chapter in it, but for some reason I'm a little doubtful I want to do that. I have a much better name for it in my head anyway. Maybe even a few much better names.

PRETTY OBLIQUE SPOILER ALERT: I also want to point out something I deliberately kept hidden in my part retrospectives - PFDM actually draws a lot of parallels to Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (for more or less the same reason PMMM proper draws a lot of parallels to Goethe's Faust - it's pretty emblematic of an entire artistic movement whose vibes PMMM is jacking). The first that I make apparent (to my recollection, anyway - I may have missed something) is the part titles loosely paralleling those of Gravity's Rainbow. Until the Dark : Beyond the Zero The Champs-Élysées is a Busy Street : Une Perm au Casino Hermann Goering (really naming a location in French is the only connection here, but I only had so much to work with to keep the part title-chapter title connection working. I did say the connections were loose.) A World of Twenty Thousand Girls : In the Zone (this one pretty much only makes sense on top of how otherworldly Gravity's Rainbow's Zone actually actually is.) I feel like me telling you all this is maybe a pretty hefty giveaway about the trajectory of certain narrative threads and framing devices, but I don't know how much you guys actually investigate this kind of thing. Maybe I can say all this and get away with it just fine. Maybe I was overly cautious in neglecting to point any of this out in the part writeups, and/or maybe where this plot differentiates from that one is enough to keep you thrown off the tail, and/or(!) maybe even if I give you this hint, theorising about where I'm taking things will be no less, or maybe even more rewarding! Again, the curse of actually writing this is I have no way of knowing for sure how the audience feels.

Dark magic has been a phenomenon observed among magical girls since before the evolution of the modern magical girl (Puella Furia)

I am pretty sure that this was a hell of a bombshell to drop though. I think we're still dealing with the ramifications of these magical girls being further along the evolutionary chain than their counterparts in the source material.

Dark magic, true to its name, does not interact electromagnetically, and thus cannot be observed by an individual who is incapable of perceiving their surroundings without a body's sensory organs. Typically, this restricts observation to magical girls (in the various stages of their life cycle) and those similarly aware of their souls as in, for instance, the Incubator.

I deliberately avoided also saying wraiths here, even though I'm pretty sure that this early on I knew that they were going to be showing up in part 2.

As advances in the understanding of dark magic continue, the phenomenon's discovery is misattributed to significant contributors to the study of magic. These include Penelope of Skyros (310 BCE - 291 BCE), for her use of it in elaborating on the Aristotelian conception of a "fifth element", Aisha bint Hassan (703 - 739), the first person to write the equations for dark magic stability and its relation to emotional energy usage when her trail of thought became derailed while she was trying to figure out how to fit a rolled-up rug through the front door of her house, Anneliese Holzknecht (1828 - 1871), whose extensive writing on the matter had resulted in the SI unit for dark magic being named the Holzknecht (abbreviated as Hk), and who had invented both the time paradox and being found dead 7000 kilometres from the last place you were seen, and Rachel R. Parker (1981 - 2002), who had actually coined the term.

The saddest part of writing PFDM is how short I have to make everyone's lifespans. Except Anneliese Holzknecht, who I hope is pretty obviously a pet favourite of mine at this point. Actually, a very VERY early version of the story plan (i.e. before Macquarie and all that) was going to have her be part of the main gang, and also immortal. I since decided that was patently ridiculous, and that I ended up finding her more interesting long-dead than alive (although she did live for quite some time!), so I kinda-sorta moved her immortality across to Whitman, and changed it more to an immunity-type power. More recently, I've started reading You Bright and Risen Angels by William T. Vollmann, which incorporates centuries-old immortals into its main cast much funnier than I would have anyway.

Parker's coinage of the phrase came about in 1998, in response to the discovery of "dark energy" named to suit the nomenclature established by dark matter. She had come up with it during a game of table tennis, wherein she had joked that if the name ended up sticking, the entities whose bodies were comprised of dark magic would have to be renamed to "witches" and "familiars" and was shocked to discover the following week that this was exactly what had happened. What she was not shocked to discover, however, since neither she nor anybody else ever knew this, was that mere days after she made this joke, a woman in another country altogether was giving birth to an immaculately conceived child. Had she known, her entire understanding of consciousness and free will would have been thrown into question and it's entirely possible that this would have made her feel less bad about the joke in comparison.

I have no doubt in my mind that the name "witch" only being a decade old has caused hella plot holes in the historical sections. If it has, I'll probably patch these up. Not entirely sure if I care enough to, though? We'll see.

Anyway, that's all for now. See you next time for chapter 4, the first chapter I wrote live as we were updating!

#pfdm reread

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puellafuriadarkmagica · 1 month

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Chapters 1 & 2

So here's what's going to be happening: I'm going to be rereading PFDM for really my own convenience; I forgot a lot of important things in my eight-month hiatus and can hardly even decipher a lot of the notes I've kept to remind myself what's happened so far and what will be happening. I thought it might be the case that if I were to reread, and share my thoughts, it could be an entertaining behind-the-scenes kind of cross section of how I see my own writing.

Everything I write here is going to be copy-pasted onto Tumblr. For the people keeping track on Tumblr, right now I'm writing all this in a Discord thread just to keep it sort of stream-of-consciousness. In my first sitting, I'll probably get through chapters one and two combined seeing as they're both very short.

At time of writing, the most recent chapter is chapter 51: Alive in That Kandinsky Painting. Each time I do one of these in the wake of a new chapter, I'll note the title of the most recent one. I'll probably spoil everything up to and including that chapter in doing this.

Chapter 1: Inkstain Panic Stricken Five-Star Heathens

I really gotta shoutout Pat for the cover image. Not just for how good it is for its own merits, but because I can use it to trick people into thinking Phoebe Deckard is important enough to be called part of the "main six", which I think I privately mentioned being a thing around that time. I think My Little Pony's cast has a concept homophonic with "main six", but I was pretty much brought up exactly between generations of that franchise so the whole thing basically passed me by. Anyway, PFDM was going to have a secret "main sixth" or whatever when I got around to unveiling Mækiu, but by that point Whitman ended up taking her fair share of the spotlight. So it's an unintentional seven now. Anyway give Pat money and he will make cool art for you. Especially if you're a furry, which I'm not, so his talents are pretty much wasted on a fool such as myself.

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This chapter's title is taken from the lyrics of the Presets' A.O., which is pretty much the only redeeming feature of their worst album (and their most popular, ain't that always the way). There are a few chapter titles which fit so well that it served to justify this whole gimmick, and this is probably the one I can most clearly point to. For those not in the know, fanfic chapter titles from song lyrics is a cliché I honestly kinda dig, only I wanted to pull the twists that 1. each chapter took its title from a song by an artist from the country in which that chapter was mainly set, and 2. I never used the same artist twice (although different bands that share members are allowed. So for instance, chapter 10 takes its name from Lover by PNAU, but if I wanted to pull a title from lyrics by Empire of the Sun or the Two Leaves Project, that would be totally allowed even though Nick Littlemore is a member of all three). The "no repeats" rule also applies to chapter quotes, although naturally that's much easier to pull off since I make most of them the fuck up.

The two exceptions to this rule are that 1. chapters not set in any country must be named after a duo of some kind, (because a. PFDM has a love of Gnostic symbology and by extension dualism, and b. I can't imagine the final two dualism-titled chapters being called anything other than what they will be) and 2. the book clubs are simply numbered. I figure if you've been reading these are both pretty obvious at this point.

"This self-centredness is ingrained in human nature. It can be overcome but it needs constant conscious effort to overcome it." -Tim "Exile" Shaw

Tim Exile's always been the kind of musician whose sheer quirkiness I've aspired to. I used to be part of what was called a laptop orchestra, which was a group that really interrogated why and how we should still perform live music when everything can be pre-programmed and pre-recorded on a computer. When I wrote music for that, live electronic music advocate Tim Exile was kind of someone whose way of thinking I looked to. Also I've got all my friends hooked on his album Listening Tree, which I definitely recommend to people who have ears.

I'll see if I can track down a recording of my work for the laptop orchestra, I did this big, sprawling piece where different members of the orchestra played back loops I got musician friends from around the world to record and send to me. If you guys would be interested in seeing that, let me know.

2008 was a long year. By the end, people were rather fed up with it as they might have been before with lice or heavy traffic. Not that they particularly disliked the year - they recognised its merits, they understood it served its purpose as a follow-up to 2007, and so forth - but it lingered in a frustrating way. Most people had figured out the point back in May or June, and the remainder thereafter just seemed like worthless filler. "We kind of get the gimmick now, it's not really that funny anymore," everyone thought. "It's hard to believe that the same inexorable progression from past to future that would give us such masterworks as early-mid February and last Tuesday would deliver something so mediocre." The passage of time gave eventually, as it was wont to do. "Fine," it conceded, "you can have 2009, but just this once."

Yeah, I'm not gonna mince words here. I have some gripes with early PFDM here and there because i was still finding my bearings, but this was gold right out the gate. One of the best jokes in the whole thing, if not the number one spot. It's my mark to beat and I'm having a hard time recalling any instance of me actually doing so.

2009 still a few hours away, but its looming presence palpable, four and a half million pairs of eyes and ears took in the pyrotechnic display over the heart of Sydney. One pair of eyes about ten kilometres North belonged to Marie Crawford. The other pairs of eyes belonged to other people, but that much wasn't out of the ordinary.

This one was a little forced though.

"Damn, dude," she groaned. "Where have you been all night? I've been getting lonely out here, and the party down the street is playing Walking On A Dream again. If I have to listen through it one more time, I'm going to lose it."

This is the first hint that Marie is an unlikable protagonist because frankly that's one of the greatest synth-pop hits of its generation.

"We have reason to believe we're close to determining the cause of the dark energy discrepancies in our latest measurements. We intend on doing so as soon as possible, and the next three hundred and sixty-five days would be a likely time frame for our investigation to conclude."

Have I revealed the answer to this mystery yet? Obviously I know what it is, but I've forgotten if it's been presented to you yet, dear reader. Hopefully this reread will serve to remind me of which questions I have and have not answered yet.

"…Jeez. How many times have we had this conversation before?" He turned his head to an odd angle for a moment, before his glare snapped right back onto her. "Three hundred and thirteen."

I try to slip this number in where I can regarding Marie, at first by what I thought was an interesting coincidence, and then more extremely when I expanded on her name. There's the whole bit with the gun in like chapter 15 or so, her birth date of MAR 13, the isopsephic value of her full first name, the way the first three letters of her middle name ELEASHA look, you get the picture.

She took the hint but made no act of pretending to enjoy it. "Gosh! What are you, my dad?" "Not really." "It was a rhetorical question." "It was a rhetorical negative."

This was a joke I thought was pretty funny, but I don't know if anyone else did. Shame, too, because a lot of stuff this chapter I think isn't as funny has landed a lot better with the audience.

I think generally the first end-of-chapter note is a good primer to the kinds of worldbuilding PFDM readers can look forward to. Most people take it as a strong hook into what's possible in this world, and in fact reading it I find myself getting a little nostalgic about that seemingly limitless potential, even though I don't even know if it would be in my top ten favourite end-of chapter parts. It also mentions Sylvia Carlos, who is frankly a character I like enough to deem my past self correct for calling her deserving of a chapter one mention.

As an aside, I do want to confess as I probably have before to stealing the idea for these post-script anecdotes from the comic Kill Six Billion Demons, which was hardcore enough in its early days to do like one every page. I could never do that much.

Chapter 2: Eye on the City like a Cyclone

youtube

Briggs's body of work has pretty much laid the groundwork for what rap music in Australia is today, which is pretty crazy, because he's only put out two full-length albums. The guy's impact is just that immense. It's a shame that PFDM's set in 2009 - if it were any more contemporary, Hope's ringtone would have 100% been Briggs's Let It Be Known, but she would miss a ton of calls because she'd forget there's the quiet, reverb-drenched Snoop Dogg sample before the song actually starts.

By the time Hope Fearnley made it to Abject Permanence, it was almost midnight.

Hahaha this bar name is so stupid.

She'd never even left New South Wales before,

Actually I remembered Hope had never been overseas (this is a deliberate part of the joke of her having Malaysian currency in her pocket in the latest chapter), but I forgot she's never been interstate either.

"And the other Sydney leaders?"

Remember when they were relevant? Me neither. Joking aside, I guess I've sort of been tossing up bringing them back into the fray more or less around where we are in the plot these days, but I'm honestly not really sure they're that interesting. I play favourites, and I play favourites to win.

"You know," she took to trying to remove the juice's lid, to no avail, "you really shouldn't drink. Do you know how many health problems it's linked to?" "Probably nothing I don't already have." "You'd be surprised." "What, about the alcohol, or just in general?" Lara half-winced, and the lid came ever so slightly loose. "Bit of both. The world's a surprising place."

Lara stopped acting like this pretty early on. I'm not sure how much of that is due to the fact that I hadn't singled out her character voice yet, how much is because I could never think of material is wacky as her debut, and how much is because she's found herself continually taken further and further down the list of "weirdest things going on in PFDM", and she knows it. Probably a bit of all three.

"Zero? Oh, Fearnley, Fearnley. You underestimate me. What if I told you I actually had the capacity to do this? I'm on the cusp of wielding a whole new kind of magic. Nothing you'd understand."

I've spent a long time worrying about how much this plotline and the whole self-contradicting metaliterature thing going on has been slowly creeping into becoming PFDM's main plot, when all along I wanted it to revolve primarily and secondarily around the constant political thriller, and the Concordance's effect on human history, respectively. Largely because I worry that if the whole plot with the Narrator and the Knight and that calibre of heavy hitters takes the spotlight, the payoffs you're gonna get would be remarkably unimpressive, based on how silly and out-there and self-referential and sarcastic the trajectory that plot's taken has been. But I don't know, I think it's become that people do actually really like that sort of story, even when it starts to take itself very seriously. For instance, the book clubs get far, far more serious, and those are basically one very drawn-out joke. They're some of the most popular PFDM has been! So I'll take that as a sign not to worry; whenever the narrative wants one plot thread to take the lead, I'll let it. When it wants another, I'll let that one. And so on.

The tactile sensation of finality between thumb and red button served as a beat in Hope's thoughts, a fixed temporal point dropped like an anchor from the drifting of her reverie. Lara knew more than she'd let on, for sure, but she'd let on far more than Phoebe would have. It was a blessing and a curse, in a sense. If she was telling the truth, then Hope knew something was happening ahead of time, and could deal with that. But what time would that be? And what if it was a bluff? This early in Hope's leadership, failure to accept it could get people killed, or worse. Failure to call it, on the other hand, would have her dismissed by the others for overreaction, and the city would fall into the clutches of the incompetent, or the negligent, or… how had Lara put it?

I really liked the idea of Hope's introspection slowing the narrative down, and still use it to this day where appropriate. It's harder to notice now, though, because the style of pretty much every part of the story is incredibly slow now.

The trio took the organisation's name from an ancient Byzantine poem by Julia the Voyager, which featured a powerful knight clad in brass armour which wailed like horns in the breeze. In the poem, the knight would wander eternally through a desert, looking to stoke a fire only referred to as the deep light.

Okay, now I may not remember much, but I do remember that we get to see this later on. So that's good.

After the cleaning out of Petiere's office, a statue was erected in her honour just by the front door, although nobody knows who made it or why.

Honestly kind of disappointed that nobody got the joke here. It's another one I thought was a total classic but didn't land.

Alright! It's kind of weird to be reading some of my own work. A lot of stuff I've got that's older than this sort of disappoints me, but I didn't really dislike this experience. Not enough to revise it, at any rate, even though there's some overarching stuff I'd have liked to have done better than I actually did. Fingers crossed that with me working to a less restrictive schedule everything's going to be planned much better than it used to be. Most of my pre-PFDM stuff I've flat-out deleted out of sheer disappointment, so my seeming indifference is actually the equivalent of a standing ovation, all things considered.

Next time, chapter 3. Chapters one through three really function as a "pilot episode" in my eyes, after which the story properly opens up. Actually, I tried to write as much as I could before NYD 2021 when the story kicked off and only managed three chapters. Despite all that I somehow convinced myself I could have this story finished in two years. Hilarious!

See you then.

#pfdm reread #Youtube

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