fiction

[Against Stupidity] Still Alive!

Against Stupidity

Howdy!

I just wanted to check in and say that I am still alive, and about 70% of the way done scripting. I’ve been hitting the beta draft of my novel pretty hard, since I want to have it done and out to readers by the end of the month. (Incidentally, if you’re interested in beta reading, send me a message with this site’s contact form or leave a comment.)

As a result, I haven’t had as much time to work on Against Stupidity as I would like. Once I’ve got the novel out the door though, I’ll be able to work on the comic again without risking artistic burnout. I anticipate that this will start by April.

Apologies again for the delay. (Screenshot is from a wonderful writing platform I made called Pathfork. Feel free to sign up for it, if you’re interested. It is and always will…

View original post 3 more words

Free new writing tool

Howdy folks,

I wanted a better way to organize my stories as I was writing them, so I sat down and made a set of features that I’d like to see in a website, and then I made it. It’s called Pathfork, and it’s free, and it’s here. You can write and organize your chapters, notes, settings, and characters, and tag characters and settings in and out of sections and works like you would tags or categories on a blog post.

It’s free to use, so if you’re interested, by all means take a look. Happy writing!

Writing exercise: if I’d known then…

We have a creative writing club at work, and we recently switched from talking about texts that we’re currently writing to doing little writing exercises and talking about those instead. I think it’s a good way to focus more on the craft and help each other out. Plus, this way, if somebody doesn’t care for my or somebody else’s longer text, they don’t have to keep reading it week after week.

We’ve got our first meeting in this new format tomorrow.

Anyway, the prompt this time around was 500 words on “if I’d known then what I know now, I never would have…”

This was mine.

If I’d known then what I know now, I never would have shot that damn squirrel. I wouldn’t say it was bad karma exactly—I don’t believe in that stuff—but sometimes things happen that make me question. Like, you give a bum a dollar, and then later that day some stranger buys you a round.

I can’t blame the squirrel. I wouldn’t’ve been out there in the yard with my pellet gun if I wasn’t in a foul mood to start. I have these cans strung up from this old scrub oak in the back. The plan wasn’t to do anything more than take a few plinks. Helps me relax. My hippie friend Jim says it’s something akin to to zen meditation. He’s a good guy. I’m crashing on his couch now. He doesn’t let me have the gun in his house. It’s in a storage locker along with everything else I packed. Not that Jim has any cans strung up out back to shoot at anyway.

So I’m there shooting at the cans. Each one I hit goes flying on its string with a nice pa-ting! sound. It’s like the sound in the old cartoons when they spit into a spittoon, only not. I’m focusing on a can off to the left when I see the squirrel in my periphery up on the fence. It looks like, well, a squirrel, no point describing.

I’ve only got a few pellets left. I figure I’ll try and hit it, and I’ll miss, and then I’ll head back inside and finish my episode of CSI . Except wouldn’t you know it, I hit the damn thing, and it goes running off. I winged it in I think the tail. I’m not a great shot, to be honest.

So it runs off trailing blood along the fence and scampers over the other side. The neighbor’s yappy dog goes nuts, barking its stupid little head off. Neighbor comes out, must see the dog barking at a bloody fence, peeks his head over the fence to see what’s up, but I’m already dashing back inside. The neighbor figures correctly that something’s happened and yells a nosy question at me.

But I don’t get a moment’s respite because my wife starts up the fight we were having again. Oh, now you’ve done it, she says, and goes on about me having anger issues and never taking responsibility for my actions. And here I am, spooked and staring a little wide-eyed, deserving maybe of some sympathy. I point at her. Look, I say, you’ve no business, and at a time like this, too! And she rolls her eyes, like I’m not even having an acute problem with the neighbor here, and jerks her thumb over her shoulder. Out. Just go.

So I pack a bag and I go. I text some friends for a place to stay, but where I actually go is to the bar. No stranger buys me a round. Jim, the hippie, gets back to me, says I can crash with him. And the rest I guess is history. Here I am, still in a foul mood, and no gun with me to shoot and no cans to shoot at anyway.

Damn squirrel.

Tattooed Characters

As you may know I love procedurals and mysteries. Over the summer and fall I watched a lot of House, which is essentially a police procedural set in a hospital, and then when that ran out I wanted something lighthearted that I could stream before bedtime. For now I’ve settled on Rizzoli & Isles, which is sometimes dreadful but always soporific.

Anywho, the episode I watched last night involved a character who had a tattoo of a QR code. (It was actually a pretty good episode, too.) It got me thinking about tattoos on characters more generally. Marked bodies have relevance in all kinds of fiction, though the one I’m most familiar with is Germanic mythology and Norse sagas. In both, but especially in the sagas, very little physical detail about characters is given. When a detail is given, it’s one of the ways that you know that a character is not only important but different somehow. For instance, Odin only rises to his highest level of significance after he trades an eye for a look into the future.

This is an extreme example of conservation of detail, where you only mention things that are, in one way or another, relevant to the story. These can be scene-setting details and grounding details, or a way of getting to know a character better. In some genres, like historical fiction, a lengthy depiction of the setting is part of the form. In a Victorian Briefroman, an overly-formal description of characters and customs, even if not at all related to the plot, is expected. (I don’t care for the latter specifically because of this, but that’s merely a matter of personal taste.)

This is especially true in time- and space-limited formats like an hour-long mystery. You literally only have time for clues and red herrings and a bit of verisimilitudinous detail. So when this character was tattooed, it was important, especially because it wasn’t the sort of person you’d usually associate with a tattoo. A QR code is also something that contains explicit data, and probably isn’t just an asethetic throw-away. Unless it’s part of an extensive description of Maori tattoos or something else genre- or setting-relevant, then, a tattoo is a pretty important thing to put on a character.

I don’t currently have any characters with tattoos. I’m sure that I will soon, especially in the urban fantasy story that I’m working on (more on this to come!).

Finally, some random questions.

  • If you had a tattoo of a barcode, a normal barcode that represents a number, what would it be?
  • What about a QR code, which (usually) represents a URL?
  • I’ve long thought that a regular expression would make a fun tattoo. What pattern would you match?

Lampshades

I had an episode of House on in the background last night on Netflix while I was messing around on the Internet. After what would have been a commercial break, it shows House and Kal Penn’s character doing a walk-and-talk and Kal Penn summarizes what they’ve learned about the patient over the last ten minutes or so of story. House looks at him irritably (though does he do it in another manner ever?) and says, “what is this, some sort of recap?”

I find these things amusing. I also find them annoying if they’re overdone, but this just happened once, so it’s fine.

The end. 

Your Body Is Horrifying, pt. 1

Warning: rambling. -Ed.

It’s common, in trope-y writing, like horror or sci-fi, to intentionally make the reader feel a certain horror in or about their own body. This can also come up in authors who inhabit the ‘weird’ spectrum, like Borges or Murakami.

The thing about this is that it’s so easy. All I have to do is point out that you have a body.

We don’t like to think of ourselves as inhabiting a body. This comes in many flavors. Dualism is an extremely popular one. Your body is separate from your you. Your soul, your spirit, your whatever-you-want-to-call-it: your mind is not a part of your body, so your mind is not made of meat. Things made of meat are gross. We eat things made of meat. But your mind, which you’ve managed to separate from your body just by thinking about it (thinking is magical!), is still, you know, physically bound to your body. You can’t go anywhere that your meat doesn’t let you. You’re born meat, and you die meat.

Gross, right?

Now, there’s a second aspect to this. Bodies die. So we come up with elaborate mechanisms for which our bodies might die, but not us, not really. Dualism is a very strongly held belief in basically every school of thought, even atheism. So it’s not just that meat is gross–meat is mortal, too. Like I said, a lot of us eat it every day without really giving it a second thought. Any notion that your you-ness is all tied up in this meat nonsense is horrifying.

So how can I make sure you feel this? First, I can just tell you. You are mortal. You are made of meat. Like in this hypothetical children’s book from the inimitable Ryan North:

comic2-531
Or this gem, which Neal Stephenson sort of randomly plops down in the middle of a scene in Cryptonomicon:

The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy.

Isn’t that fun? In the first example, North just points out some meat and mortality; in the second, Stephenson makes it super gross. They’re not especially horrifying, I suppose, but they certainly make me nervous and a little squicked out, which is the point.

One thing that is horrifying, in its own special way, is a sci-fi short story (and a wonderful short film version) that does just this (linked above as well), in which the fact that we’re made out of meat is described from the point of view of somebody who is just now discovering that it’s even possible for something sentient to be made out of meat:

“They’re made out of meat.”

“Meat?”

“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”

“Meat?”

“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”

“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”

“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”

“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”

“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”

“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”

“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they’re made out of meat.”
[…]

This upsets the aliens enough that they decide to declare the sector uninhabited, erase all records of humanity, and move on. Later, they muse about how lonely it must be, thinking you’re alone in the universe, except they’re talking about an intelligent crystal or something or other.

So, in order to make you feel weird about your body (which is of course all you are and ever will be), I can:

  • Remind you that you’re mortal
  • Describe your body in excruciating detail
  • Talk about your body as though I’d never seen a body before

And we haven’t even gotten to the part where I have you imagine anything even happening to your body. All of these examples so far are just descriptive.

In Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, one of the characters has a scar on her face and something wrong with her leg. He tends to mark his characters like this. In 1Q84 one of them has a weird ear. Body marking is also very important in the Germanic epics and sagas. This is the realm of injuries and minor mutilations. It sets people apart as different, or important, or both. That’s all another post though.

For now, man, how weird is it that you have a body?