Note the search terms that brought people to this site!
Happy New Year Everybody!
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,200 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 20 trips to carry that many people.
Boy, not much changed here from the rough draft. I cleaned up a ton of spelling errors and reordered a few paragraphs.
I only added maybe eight lines?
If anyone is reading this, please leave as many thorough comments as you can. I really appreciate any feedback. Even if you just say, “This sucks!” I can delete this and at least I might save myself from future embarrassment by not showing it to anyone else.
Still need a good name to replace “SMRAM” with.
***
But it is no use. I must confess if I am to be honest with myself that I am otherwise occupied this evening. No, the lively debate tonight at the club over the latest findings in all the fashionable scientific journals was not so lively after all. Not for me at least.
Truth be told, my mind was elsewhere tonight.
I have long considered myself to be a man of science. It was of course my love for empiricism and the scientific method that led me to the SMRAM clubhouse. Its great crackling fireplace and the shelves and shelves of books that lined every inch of its dark stained wooden walls seemed to me a bastion of rationality in these times of new age mysticism.
It was there that I met many of my closest friends and also where I made several of my dearest enemies. I can admit now, in hindsight, that I must have been an insufferable lout at times. My passion for the natural sciences often outweighed my courtesy and patience for those members of the lodge whose views of the world were aligned more with the paranormal.
I can call it that now without gritting my teeth. Or the preternatural or super-mundane While back then, of course, I would have used the words occult, even eldritch or simply weird.
It was one of these more fanciful members of the clubhouse whose story I will relate tonight.
Although they tell us that pride was the first sin, there is still a part of me that hopes that this journal will be read by some future generations, whether they be my own progeny or, forgive the hubris, students at university. I record Mr. Mecium’s tale tonight as a cautionary one for whatever audience this log may find.
Listen to it well and take heed, for although it may sound fantastical, even ludicrous, remember that I do have in my possession a physical bit of evidence that lends it a certain air of credibility and phenomenality.
I am certain I must have mentioned Mr. Mecium in this journal previously, but I will introduce him here again for ease of reading and for clarity. Mecium is one of those “more fanciful” members of the lodge “whose views of the world were aligned more with the paranormal” that I have mentioned. I found him to be an affable fellow, well spoken and intelligent, despite the mania he was subject to regarding the singular incident which seemed to consume his scientific curiosity and drive his research well into the questionable areas of the pseudo-sciences.
Upon our first meeting, he described to me a night, spent alone in a remote research station in the north on what seemed to have started out as a legitimate scientific expedition. In the thin hours of the pre-dawn darkness, he claimed he awoke and saw seven luminescent shapes, vaguely regular in size and shape and roughly equidistant from a center axis about which they spun for several minutes.
I of course immediately provided him with no end of explanations. Mirages, the bending of light as it transitions through media. The tricks a sleeping or near-sleeping mind will play on itself especially in the darkness. The random flashes of “light” self-produced by photo-receptive cells when devoid of stimulation for distinct periods of time. The many phosphorescent and luminescent creatures that inhabit the climes similar to the one he was stationed in.
It was of course no use attempting to dissuade him.
I initially wrote him off as an imbecile I am ashamed to say. Later, I discovered that, when steered away from his one fascination, he was capable of intelligible and profitable discourse on more concrete subjects: astronomy, physics, calculus, classic works of literature.
I came to regard him as a friend. The subject of his mania – once a source of derisive laughter from me – became merely an endearing quirk that I happily side-stepped during the many hours of conversation that we partook in.
Mecium, a true gentleman, was all too happy to leave the offending subject behind and to focus on our more mutual interests.
Only once, after our initial meeting, did he bring up the subject again. It was on what was to be our last meeting at the SMRAM club and our very final meeting before the strange encounter I had with him earlier this evening, a chance encounter in the streets.
When I arrived ta the clubhouse, Mecium was on a roll, chatting excitedly to six or seven of the the members about a new group he had recently attained membership to: The Kauffmann Society. To hear him talk, this “society” was a pale imitation of our SMRAM club, dedicated solely to those notions of Mr. Mecium’s that I found undesirable: the exploration and discussion of the weird and the inscrutable.
When he realized that I had joined his circle of listeners, he gradually let the subject die. But before we turned to a discussion of the latest scientific breakthroughs of the conglomerations of the new continent, I heard him relate a few tales of the other members of his Kauffmann Society.
Privately I labeled these stories as pish and posh alternately, but kept my mouth shut out of respect for my friend.
When I met Mecium on the street tonight, he was near panicking, hysterical. I suggested he let me take him for a drink, but the idea seemed to agitate him even more. He nearly ran off. Would have, I am certain, had I not grabbed him brusquely. If he would not join me for a drink, would he not come to my home and tell me what was troubling him? No, even that proposal was met with disdain. In the end, I convinced him to tell me his tale only after agreeing to stand and listen to it in the public street and after promising to let him leave, alone, after its telling.
I agreed, would have agreed to a hundred more such demands to only hear my friend’s story.
“You will recall my friend Mr. Fuligo, whom I mentioned to you a few times in passing at the SMRAM club.
“Mr. Fuligo and I formed a close friendship in meetings of the Kauffmann society. All of the members there had been brought together over a shared interest in what you would laughingly, I’m sure, call the “weird”. No, don’t deny it, and don’t think I bear you any ill will over it. Any man of science would be right to scoff had he not had the same experiences that we of the Kauffmann Society had. Or rather, the experiences that Fuligo had. My own… Flashing lights! What a fool…
“But I’ve gotten ahead of myself…”
“Fuligo and I found kindred souls in each other. Not over our interest in the paranormal, but in the mundane.
“I know you scorn any views concerning the occult or supernatural and as such, you must include me in that scorn. But I am a proud SMRAMer too and in applying the stern whip of science to the nebulous and often fanciful tales of the supernatural, I often find a previously hidden nugget of truth.
“After all, what was electricity a mere hundred years ago if not magic? To our ancient troglodyte ancestors even the sun rising each morning must have been an hideous occult mystery.
“Ages ago, talking to the dead was an unattainable dream. But with the arrival of the written word, we are able to leave transmissions for our descendents a thousand generations away.
“Certainly, they don’t speak back yet, but might that not be just a matter of time? Aeons, you say, if ever, but change your perspective. We have long known this world of ours is old beyond our understanding. Oh, we can measure it, but can you truly understand the weight of all those ages? And relative to those ages, life has existed here only a blink of an eye!
“But, what point was I making?
Mecium paused here to collect his thoughts. I suppose it was the mention of “speaking through time” to our descendants that spoke to me, that made me pause to take his nearly babbling rambles seriously. For did that not describe the exact purpose of this journal I keep? Although I had always treated his esoteric theories with disdain and had even been on the brink of bidding him a good night leaving his story unfinished, I now bent a newly pliant ear to his tale.
“It was in Fuligo, more than the other members of the Kauffmann Society, that I sensed a similar longing for fresh mysteries, for the chance at exploring the unknown.
”You, I know, believe that our universe has been neatly categorized, observed and labeled and placed on orderly shelves. I for my part believed and know now certainly, and Fuligo too, oh yes he knows now too that true knowledge is no more than the opportunity to discover even larger mysteries.
“Opportunity…?”
Here Mecium chuckled at his choice of words and I was quite unable to calm him down until he had shaken himself with paroxysms of laughter. I looked about the street corner nervously, but no one seemed to be paying us any mind. Presently Mecium gained control of himself and continued his story.
“Fuligo and I corresponded for quite some time, speaking in our missives of much the same topics that you and I would discuss when we met at the clubhouse. The latest advances, the research being done, the strange new discoveries being made every day here at home and abroad.
“The key difference was that instead of chip-chipping away with these facts at the stone and mortar of the universe in an attempt to uncover the secrets held within, we used these new data as road maps. We followed them outward in the hopes of expanding our knowledge of our world ever farther.”
“These were golden days for me. I learned so much from Fuligo who had been on this path of discovery far longer than I. He pushed me ever forward to new experiences I had never imagined, new thoughts I had not dared to think before.
“In our missives, I wrote repeatedly about the strange lights I had seen, the ones I have told you of. At first, I hoped Fuligo would have an answer for me. But when it became apparent that he did not, I hoped at least that sharing my own experience might inspire him to share his own with me. It did not.
“It was only after I mentioned to him my building fascination with the northern reef that I began to catch a glimmer of his story. Normally verbose, he was oddly terse on the subject of the reef. I thought nothing of it until reading some journals on the subject, I came across the name Fuligo, one of the explorers in the last expedition.
“When I confronted him about it, Fuligo admitted that he had indeed been to the barrier reef, had returned home from it a changed man.”
“And for quite a time, he would say no more than this.”
I must interject here to state that my ears perked at the mention of the great barrier reef.
Arriving home tonight, I consulted all the news correspondences and confirmed Mecium’s story:
Fuligo was THE Fuligo. The one I had been reading about week after week only a few years back. The one that had headed the expedition to the great barrier reef to the east, one of the last great mysteries in our modern age. All attempts thus far to cross it had been fruitless and behind it lay literally, the last unexplored frontier.
I had to confess to myself that my head swam with giddiness and fantasies of what lay beyond that reef none too dissimilar to Mecium’s ravings concerning the lights he had seen.
Mecium continued:
“The mention of the reef was a catalyst in Fuligo. It was as if a dam had broken inside him and allowed his true mania to pour out, gushing ever harder as it continued to tear away the barriers that it had hidden behind.
“His communications grew more and more intense. Whereas before we had discussed strange and hidden pathways of knowledge that we one day hoped to open in a purely academic fashion, Fuligo now added concrete details.
“Vague references to places of power or thinness between worlds were replaced with cities, street names in some cases. He produced, or told me where to procure, totems and antiquaries when before he had been content to speculate on the existence of such. He generated schedules and time tables. Begged me to meet with him on specific dates, urged me, finally demanded it of me.
“I have seen that derisive, scornful glare usually reserved for lunatics, but occasionally re-purposed for my brothers at the Kauffmann Society. A hypocrite, I employed it now myself toward Mr. Fuligo and his ranting letters.
“Hypocrite and more: coward. It was all well and fine to discuss such things in letters, leaving them as indeterminate “somedays”. But to search them out? To pursue them actively? In the light of day, it seemed absurd even to me.”
“He must have sensed my disdain for his behavior for his next letter to me took on a different tone. One almost of a confession. In it, he told me finally of his initial encounter with the bizarre.”
Mecium recited Fuligo’s letter here. As he talked, he assumed the air of one reciting a memorized piece of work. He must have read Fuligo’s letter a dozen times or more. Having heard it only once from Mecium, I will fail to capture it here verbatim although I will try my damnedest.
It was on my expedition to the Great Eastern Barrier Reef, of course, when it happened. Amazing to realize how recent that trip was; I can scarcely recall my life before it.
The reef is mind-boggling. Awe-inspiring. Its IMMENSITY. The sheer SIZE of it! It is truly the handiwork of Our Great God, I thought.
Then.
I was collecting samples from the reef. Its consistency was stiff, but pliable. It was wearisome work due to it being exacting and painstaking, but only light physical labor.
It was during this process that I was over come with a wave of – I lack the word for it. I will call it realization. There was nothing mystical about it, merely a-
I suppose it was nothing more than a change of perspective.
I saw myself dwarfed past insignificance in the shadow of the reef, but at the same time – superimposed on that image – I saw the reef, cyclopean in my eyes, micrified and belittled by still a more prodigious bulk. A hideous domino effect occurred: I saw each magnitude scream its size past the very limits of my mind then suddenly dwindle to nothingness in the wake of the next immeasurable immensity forever ballooning upward and outward past forever in an infinity of infinities.
But that wasn’t all. In the other direction, I watched my own form grow in stature to surpass that of the reef and all around me I observed miniscule bodies wondering at the size of me! My vision swam and dove down through the very atoms that composed my own body. Past atoms. Electrons, quarks, bosons and then…
Emptiness? No, of course not. Nature abhors a vacuum. I found the pattern repeating: infinitesimal quanta shrinking away approaching zero only asymptotically. Forever diminishing. Spiraling endlessly toward forever in the opposite direction.
I lurched then, gasping for breath. I might have swooned even.
But for just one instant, I looked ta the reef and I saw…
But, no. Even after my vision of enlightenment, I denied the truth bestowed upon me.
I fell ill then. My companions managed to carry me through me convalescence back to my home.
Our research was necessarily abandoned. The only proof our expedition ever occurred is a few journals filled with dates and measurements.
And the sample I took.
It sits here as I write to you. Mecium. I believe it to possess some psychotropic property. It was my contact with the reef, I am certain, that caused what will no doubt be termed “my hallucination”. Perhaps even you will not believe me although I trust in our friendship enough to be certain that you will give me the benefit of the doubt.
Tomorrow, I will see this message sent to you, and then I will ingest a portion of the sample. If you hear from me again, it will be with details of my experience.
Yours, truly, S. Fuligo
“He wrote his next letter two days later. I could tell by the post date. As messages were sent only weekly, I received them both on the same day. Reading them in order, I read the message I have just related to you.
“My first thought was to send a message back to him immediately begging him to hold off on this experiment. I cannot express the dread, the hopelessness I felt knowing I was already too late. For long minutes I eyed the second message before working up the courage to open it.
“In it, Fuligo confirmed all my fears and surpassed them.”
My dear friend,
I write to you now while some part of my mind still remains. I fear now, utterly, for my sanity. You will think me mad, and you will be correct, for what is madness beside the spurning of all society’s knowledge. I have attained a doctrine and wisdom forborne by every certain fact taught to every member of our species.
The sample I took from the reef; I am convinced now of its hallucinogenic properties.
And the reef itself. What am I convinced of it?
But where to start? As I ingested the sample, I immediately felt lightheaded and overcome with fugue. I attribute these initial effects fully to the placebo effect, but I mention them here for completeness’s sake.
Soon, though, these vague discomforts passed and were replaced with that feeling – that notion of scale – that I described during my initial exploration of the reef. Again, I saw myself as no more than a link, chaining together on either side of me the LARGE to the SMALL.
The reef came to me then. Had it moved physically? Sought me out? Or had my new-found perspective simply dwarfed the distance between us to a meaningless nothingth of an inch?
Regardless, I beheld the reef and knew it suddenly to be no inert landmass, but a living creature, the same as you or I.
I say the same as you or I, but nothing could be further form the truth.
This – even creature is an inaccurate term, for it certainly was not spawned by the same Creator that we were – this THING, was an insult to my very biology.
It was FOREIGN in every aspect. Our own bodies are simple and elegant reflections of the Lord that created us all in His image. Each member of our person is a fully functional and capable piece of our very selves. A spiraling fractal extension, the whole contained in each of its parts. Any pseudopod we spread out is capable on its own of extending our will out into the universe through action perfectly in sync with our over-all drives.
This reef was an immense gestalt. An amalgam. A great, impossible composite multi-creature.
The individuals that comprised it were less than complete. Each one a mere cog, a stunted slave, functioning, serving only a part of the greater purpose of the whole. Any one, if cut off from the rest, would whither and flail wildly until death.
But separation could not occur, I saw. The organisms that made up the thing were bound together inextricably like the organelles trapped within our membranes.
And bound even more surely than that! For they were dumb and brutish. No more than automatons. Their wills bent to that of the awful compound reef creature.
My mind filled with words I could not know. Will never comprehend. To pronounce them, I would need a flapping lump organ; taut-stretched chords of tissue to bend air through.
alkaloids, polyketides, haploid
Spitzenkörper
terpenes
mycelium and hyphae, both septate and coenocytic
Spore
This one rang out above the others to me: Spore
Its sound was a sickness, a miasma, in me, but soon I deduced its meaning.
It was the sample I had taken. The life-cycle of the reef-thing was revealed to me! Rather than the perfect exponential multiplication of our kind, the composite-creature bread some of its bodies for no other purpose than to reproduce itself. These sex-lumps – the SPORES! – were culled from the other portions of the conglomerate and robbed of sense or locomotion or any will other than the drive to reproduce: to create MORE of the insane reef things!
My mind shook and cracked a bit then, for I saw myself out of the eyes of the barrier reef. The properties of my own body, which I had considered to be elegant and satisfactory, were, to the creature, simplistic and backward.
It looked at me with the disdain I might reserve for viri, those mindless protein factories.
I saw the ripples of my life, the net effect I would leave on this world dwindle down past nothing in the wake of the watching, frothing, consuming, growing, slouching, oozing, slavering, weeping, spurting, hemorrhaging, eliminating, intent, unflappable, disgusting, terrifying…
Mecium laughed as he trailed off, ending Mr. Fuligo’s tale.
“You were quite right,” he told me. “You sussed it out with your very first guess!”
When I confessed to him that I did not understand what he was trying to tell me,he began to shout: “The LIGHTS! The lights I saw! Mitochondria, you told me. Nothing preternatural or sublime about it. In fact there is almost nothing more natural. My mind playing tricks on me! Seeing what it wanted to see! The warm, life-giving fusion of the internal furnaces of every living thing on earth! Or, so we thought… Here!”
He grabbed my pseudopod in one of his and pressed a small lump into it.
“Fuligo is a wreck: a shadow of his former self. He spends his days muttering in Asylum. I’ve been to see him saw the Spore, he spoke of, managed to sneak it out past the doctors, they had no clue.
“Take it! I haven’t the will power to destroy it and sooner or later I will ingest a portion of it myself!
“My dreams are already haunted by Fuligo’s horrible synthesis.”
Here, Mecium twitched and translocated off at breakneck speed, his flagella waving furiously.
What could I do? I returned home.
Now I sit here recounting this tale. The long protein strands seem to flow forth from me of their own accord, forming the chains of generational memory in the RNA helices I will pass down to my progeny. Distracted momentarily, I find that they have spelled out the visions of Mecium’s tale that I cannot banish from my thoughts.
The horror of that creature! My mind reels and rebels against the image of the thousand thousand unfinished, embryonic, compound bodies that comprised it. Each one joined as inextricably to the others as surely as I was to my mother-sister during that furrowing moment of my mitosis.
Mecium is dead. His desiccated corpse will be found floating in the alcohol sea(droplet!) to the west. The remaining portion of the reef creature that he left me sits here, contained safely inside a vacuole. I will phagocytize it one day when my curiosity overcomes my caution and learn what he and Fuligo learned. Perhaps I will pay the same price for the knowledge that they did.
One last thing Mecium told me before running off: a series of mumbled, incoherent ramblings. I dismissed it as nonsense when first I heard it, but I think it found a home lodged into my subconscious, for it has been repeating itself endlessly tonight, ringing throughout my mind. The words – unearthly sounds, impossible to recreate, meaningless – resolve themselves into meaning as I write this:
RATE-SK IN’GLINGO RGEF ROUSINSU MEDB REMBIO FTHUNGHUS NM A’NISMS
“On the backs of the dead is borne a new life for FTHUNGHUS”
- P. C. Carolinensis
Guys!
Sorry if you just got 1000 emails saying I posted a bunch of updates. I was rearranging the site.
You can get an overview of all the things I’m working on here.
Particularly, check out the outline and rough draft for A Matter of Scale.
Thanks!
NaNoWriMo: 50,000 words in 30 days. This is my second year attempting to write the rough draft of an entire novel in one month. It averages 3.5 typos per word and the plot is more hole than not, but it’s here for you to view in its infancy.
When I fill out the story and clean it up a bit, I will post a revised “First Draft”. Until then, read away so you can tell people you were a fan back before I was a rich handsome popular published author.
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17
Day 18
Day 19
Day 20
Day 21
Day 22
Day 23
Day 24
Day 25
Day 26
Day 27
Day 28
Day 29 Pt. 1
Day 29 Pt. 2
Day 30 Pt. 1
Day 30 Pt. 2
Reciprocation
Afterthoughts
01-01 Ben to Amaya
01-02 Amaya to Kelly
01-03 Kelly to Ben
01-04 The Demonizer, formerly known as The Evening Star
01-05 Counter-Strike!
01-06 Alive in the Tunnels
01-06b Alive in the Tunnels pt. 2
01-06c Alive in the Tunnels pt. 3
01-06c Alive in the Tunnels pt. 4
01-06c Alive in the Tunnels pt. 5
01-06c Alive in the Tunnels pt. 6
01-06c Alive in the Tunnels pt. 7
01-06c Alive in the Tunnels pt. 8
01-06c Alive in the Tunnels pt. 9
02-01 Lunch and Bad News
02-02 First Flight
02-03 The Rescue
02-04 The Argument
02-05 Back into the Flames
02-06 Rescue Redux
02-07 Race from the Blast
02-08 Too Many Trains
02-09 After the Crash
Here is my initial idea and synopsis for A Matter of Scale.
Introduction – 250/500
A journal entry
Desc: The narrator introduces the bizarre, unnerving story he heard from a friend
Despite it being an out of character entry for this journal, the story was simply too fantastic not to include on the off chance this journal may be read by any others in the future.
Rising Action – 375/750
Mecium tells his tale
Desc: Mecium recounts the tale of his brush with the supernatural.
An evening alone in a remote country, Mecium sees a swirling, regular pattern of flashing lights.
* * *
Mecium finds others that share similar experiences
Desc: Mecium joins a gentleman’s club, The Kaufmann Society, the purpose of which is the exploration and discussion of the weird and the inscrutable.
He mentions a few members’ names and brief summaries of their supernatural encounters.
Progress – 625/1250
Mecium meets Fuligo
Desc: Mecium tells of the man Fuligo, a member of the same club.
Though Fuligo is an intense and brusque fellow, Mecium comes to respect him as an authority in scholarly affairs, both scientific and occult.
They begin a professional correspondence.
* * *
Fuligo keeps his mouth shut
Desc: Fuligo is strangely silent concerning the encounter that sparked his interest in the occult.
Despite several of Mecium’s attempts to get the story out of him, he will not talk
* * *
Fuligo grows restless
Desc: Fuligo grows more restless and insists they take their investigations/experiments to the next level.
Mecium grows nervous, not wanting to disappoint Fuligo, but feeling like things are getting out of hand.
Raising the Stakes – 625/1250
Fuligo recounts his moldy encounter
Desc: Fuligo finally tells the story of the adventure that sparked his interest in the occult.
While out exploring and cataloging his finds on the great barrier reef to the south, he touches the reef and has a brief moment of shocked perspective.
He pries out a chunk of the reef and takes it home with him.
He has been brooding over it and studying it for quite some time now.
He believes that ingesting the chuck he extracted will open his mind to a higher level.
* * *
Mecium chickens out
Desc: Mecium replies to Fuligo that he doesn’t believe the substance to be safe.
He urges Fuligo to throw it out and forget about it.
* * *
Fuligo takes the drugs
Desc: Annoyed with Mecium’s timidity, Fuligo takes the drugs alone.
This letter, to be his last, recounts the effects of the drug.
Final Push – 500/1000
Fuligo tells his tale
Desc: Fuligo tells the tale of his experience with an immense, multi-cellular amalgam gestalt, an impossible composite multi-creature.
Here he describes the differences between himself and the creature. It becomes apparent that Fuligo is a single celled organism (dog vomit slime mold?) encountering a more complex lifeform(mold. possibly one hallucinogenic dust spores?).
It is not the simple and elegant bodies of Mecium or Fuligo.
The individuals that made it up were twisted slaves, warped into mere functioning cogs, serving only a part in the greater purpose of the whole. Bound together inextricably, their wills bent to the awful compound creature.
* * *
Mecium runs into Narrator
Desc: Mecium, panicked and wide eyed, runs in to his old friend the Narrator.
He tells him of Fuligo’s letters and experience.
Tells him how he has just come from the asylum where Fuligo, now a gibbering idiot, is being kept.
Mecium presses a small package into the Narrator’s hands. He runs off.
Denouement – 125/250
Narrator’s ruminations
Desc: The journalist remarks that he is unnerved by the story he was told.
The next week, the Narrator reads of Mecium’s apparent suicide.
He reveals that his “journal” is really the stringing together of cellular level memory RNA protein chains.
He shudders at the tale and remarks on his newly discovered insignificance.
Eyes the package of mold spore/reef chunk/hallucinogenic drugs.
Here is the rough and very ugly draft for A Matter of Scale.
It’s not perfect. Not Great. Not even good, really.
But it’s a complete draft. Start to finish. There’s a ton of work to be done, but no new scenes to add. This is a big milestone for me!
Introduction – 250/500
Ah but it is no use. I must confess if i am to be honest with myself that my mind is otherwise occupied this evening. No the lively debate tonight at the club over the latest findings in all the fasionable scientific journals was not so lively after all. Not for me at least.
Truth be told, my mind was elsewhere tonight. And its location is a source of quite a bit of embarrassment for me. Writing this, I fairly blush like the heroin of one of those insipid “novels” my housekeeper is always leaving about.
I have long considered myself to be a man of science. It was of course my love for empiricism and the scientific method that led me to the SMRAM clubhouse. Its great crackling fireplace and the shelves and shelves of books tat lined every inch of its dark stained wooden walls seemed to me a bastion of rationality in these times of new age mysticism.
It was there that I met many of my closest friends and also where I made several of my dearest enemies. I can admit now, in hindsight, that I must have been an insufferable lout at times. My passion for the natural sciences often outweighed my curteousy and patience for thos emembers of the lodge whose views of the world were alligned more with the paranormal, i can call it now without gritting my teeth. Or the preternatural or supermundane. While back then, of course, I would have used the words occult, even eldritch or simply weird.
It was one of these more fanciful members of the clubhouse whose story I will relate tonight. This journal was instended as nothing more than a simple record of my thoughts and discoveries, but Mr. Mecium’s tale is simply too fabulous not to record here. Although they tell us that pride was the first sin, there is still a part of me that hopes that this journal will be read by some future generations, whether they be my own progeny or, forgive the hubris, students at university. I record Mr. Mecium’s tale tonight as a cautionary one for whatever audience this log may find.
Listen to it well and take heed, for although it may sound fantastical, even ludicrous, remember that I do have in my posession a physical bit of evidence that lends it a certain air of credibility and phenomenality.
I will attempt to capture the words and feel of Mr. Mecium’s retelling to me. It should be stressed that he was in a rather aggitated state when he recounted it to me. Any unclarity in this journal, therefore, must be attributed to his mannerisms and not to my own.
Rising Action – 375/750
I am certain I must have mentioned Mr. Mecium in this journal previously, but I will introduce him here again for ease of reading and for clarity. Mecium is one of those “more fanciful” members of the lodge “whose views of the world were alligned more with the paranormal” that I have mentioned. I found him to be an affable fellow, well spoken and intelligent, despite the mania he was subject to regarding the singular incident which seemed to consume his scientific curiosity and drove his research well into the questionable ares of the pseudo-sciences.
Upon our first meeting, he described to me a night, spent alone in a remote research station in the north on what seemed to have started out as a ligitimate scientific expedition. In the thin hours of the pre-dawn darkness, he claimed he awoke and saw seven luminescent shapes, vaguely regular in size and shape and roughly equideistant from a center axis about which they spun for several minutes.
I of course imeeditely provided him with no end of explanations. Mirages, the bending of light as it transitions through differning densities of atmosphere. The tricks a sleeping or near-sleeping mind will play on itself especially in the darkness. The random flashes of “light” self=produced by photoreceptive cells when devoid of stimulation for distinct periods of time. The many phosphorescent and luminescent creatures that inhabit the climes simliar to the one he was stationed in.
It was of course no use attempting to disuade him. I initially wrote him off as an imbicile I am ashamed to say. Later, I discovered that, when steered away from the subject of his fascination, he was capable of intelligeble and profitable discourse on more concrete subjects: astronomy , physics, caluculus, classic works of literature.
I came to regard him as a friend. The subject of his mania – once a source of drisive laughter fromr me – became merely an edearing quirk that I happily side-stepped during the many hours of conversation that we partook in.
Mecium, a true gentleman, was all too happy to leave the ofeending subject behind and to focus on our more mutual interests.
Only once, after our initial meetiong, did he bring up the subject again. It was on what was to be our last meeting at the SMRAM club and our very final meeting before the strange encounter I had with him earlier this evening, a chance encounter in the streets.
When I arrived ta the clubhouse, Mecium was on a roll, chatting excitedly to six or seven of the ther members about a new group he had recently attained membership to. The Kauffmann Society. To hear him talk, this “society” was a pale imitation of our our SMRAM club, dedicated soley to those notions of Mr. Mecium’s that I found undesireable: the exploration and discussion of the weird and the inscrutable.
When he realized that I had joined his circle of listeners, he gradually let the subject die. But before we turned to a discussion of the latest scientific breakthroughs of the conglomerations of the new continent, I heard him relate a few tales of the other members of his Kauffmann Society.
Privately I labeleed these stories as pish and posh alternately, but kept my mouth shut out of repect for my friend.
* * *
One member’s story stuck with me, however. Despite sharing no tale of the paranoral of his own, he displayed a most keen interest in the others’ stories. He was an explorerer like Mecium, and Mecium openly surmised that , while the other man had shared no story of his own, certainly some weird occurance must have taken place while he was out on his latest expidition.
My ears perked at the mention of his name, a Mr. Fuligo.
Arriving home that night, I consulted all the news correspondences and proved my suspicioun correct:
He was THE fuligo. The one I had been reading about in all the news correspondences. The one heading the expedition to the great barrier reef to the east, one of the last great mysteries in our modern age. All attempts thus far to cross it had been friuitless and behind it lay literally, the last unexplored frontier.
I had to confess to myself that my head swam with giddiness and fantasies of what lay beyond that reef none too dissimilar to Mecium’s ravings of the lights he had seen.
Progress – 625/1250
When I met Mecium on the street tonight, he was near panicking, hysterical. I suggested he let me take him for a drink, but the idea seemed to aggitate him even more. He nearly ran off. Would have, I am certain, had I not grabbed him brusquely. If he would not join me for a drink, would he not come to my home and tell me what was troubling him? No, even that proposal was met with disdain. In the end, I convinced him to tell me his tale only after agreeing to stand and listen to in in the public street and after promising to let him leave, alone, after its telling.
I agreed, would have agreed to a hundred more such demands to only hear my friend’s story.
You will recal my firend Mr. Fuligo, whom I mentioned to you a few times in passing at the SMRAM club. You were correct, he was THE Fuligo, the one who journaeyed to the barrier reef, the one who – but, but then, that will all come later.
Mr. Fuligo and I formed a close friendship in meetings of the Kauffmann society. All of the members there had been brought together over a shared interest in what you would laughingly, Im sure, call the “weird”. No, don’t deny it, and don’t think I bear you any ill will over it. Any man of science would be right to scoff had he not had the same experiences that we of the Kauffmann Society had. Or rather, the experiences that Fuligo had. My own… Flashing lights! What fool…
But I’ve gotten ahead of myself again.
Fuligo and I found kindred souls in each other. Not over our interest in the paranormal, but in the mundane. I know you scorn any views concerening the occult or supernatural and as such, you must include me in that scorn. But I am a proud SMRAMer too and in applying the stern whip of science to the nebulous and often fanciful tales of the supernatural, I often find a previously hidden nugget of truth. After all, what was electricity a mere hundred years ago if not magic? To our ancient trogolodyte anscestors even the sun rising each morning must have been an hideous occult mystery.
Ages ago, talking to the dead was an unatainable dream. But with the arrival of the written word, we are able to leave transmissions for our descendents a thousand generations away. Ceratinly, they don’t speak back yet, but might that not be just a matter of time? Aeons, you say, if ever, but change your perspective. We have long known this world of ours is old beyond our understanding. Oh we can measure it, but can you truly inderstand the weight of all those ages? And relative to those ages, life has existed here only a blink of an eye! But, what point was I making?
Mecium paused here to collect his thoughts. I suppose it wa sthe mention of “speaking through time” to our descendants that spoke to me, that made me pause to take his nearly babbling rambles seriously. For did that not describe the exact purpose of this journal I keep? Although I had always treated his esoteric theories with disdain and had even been on the brink of bidding him a good night leaving his story unfinished, I now bent a newly pliant ear to his tale.
It was in Fuligo, more than the other members of the Kauffmann Society, that I sensed a similar longing for fresh mysteries, for the chance at exploring the unknown. You, I know, believe that our universe has been neatly categoriezed, observed and labeled and placed on orderly shelves. I for my part believed and know now certainly, and Fuligo to, oh yes he knows now too that true knowledge is no more than the opportunity to discover even larger mysteries.
Opportunity…?
Here Mecium chuckled at his choice of words and I was quite unable to calm him down until he had shaken himself with paroxysms of laughter. I looked about the street corner nervously, but no one seemed to be paying us any mind. Presently Mecium gained control of himself and continued his story.
* * *
Fuligo and I coresponded for quite some time, speaking in our missives of much the same topics that you and I would discuss when we met at the clubhouse. The latest advances, the research being done, the strange new discoveries being made every day here at home and aborad. The key difference was that instead of chip-chipping away with these facts at the stone and mortar of the univerese in an attempt to uncover the secrets held within, we saw these new data as road maps. We followed them outward in the hopes of expanding our knowldedge of our world ever farther.
These were golden days for me. I learned so much from Fuligo who had been on this path of discovery far longer than I. He pushed me ever forward to new experiences I had never imagined, new thoughts I had not dared to think before.
In our missives, I wrote repeatedly about the strange ligths I had seen, the ones I have told you of. At first, i hoped Fuligo would have an answer for me. But when it became apparent that he did not, I hoped that sharing my own experience might inspire him to share his own with me. It did not.
It was only after I mentioned to him my building fascination with the northern reef that I began to catch a glimmer of his story. Normally verbose, he was oddly terse on the sujbect of the reef. I thought nothing of it until reading some journals on the subject, I came across the name Fuligo, one of the explorers in the last northern exidetion.
When I confrented him about it, Fuligo admitted that he had indeed been to the barrier reef, had returned home from it a changed man.
And for quite a time, he would say no more than this.
Raising the Stakes – 625/1250
But the mention of the reef was a catalyst in Fuligo. It was as if a dam ahd broken inside him and allowed his true mania to pour out, gushing ever harder as it continued to tar away the barriers that it had hidden behind.
His missives grew more and more intense. Whereas before we had discussed strange and hidden pathways of knowledge that we one day hoped to open in a purely academic fashion, Fuligo now added concrete details. Vague references to places of power or thinness between worlds were replaced with cities, street names in some cases. He produced or told me where to procure totems and antiquaries when before he had been contant to speculate on the existence of such. He generated schedules and time tables. Begged me to meet with him on specific dates, urged me, finally demanded it of me.
I have seen that dereisve, scornful glare usually reserved for lunatics, but occasioanlly repurposed for my brothers at the Kauffmann Society. Hypocrite, I employed it now myself toward Mr. Fuligo and his ranting letters. Hypocrite and more: coward. It was all well and fine to discuss such things in letters, leaving them as indeterminate “somedays”. But to search them out? To pursue them actively? In the light of day, it seemed absurd even to me.
He must have sensed my disdain for his behavior for his next letter to me took on a differnt tone. One almost of a confession. In it, he told me finally of his initial encounter wit hthe bizarre.
Mecium recited Fuligo’s letter here. As he talked, he assumed the air of one reciting a memorized piece of work. He must have read Fuligo’s letter a dozen times or more. Having heard it only once from Mecium, I will fail to capture it here verbatim although I will try my damndest.
* * *
It was on my expidition ot the Great Northern Barrier Reef, of course, when it happened. Amazing to realize how recent that trip was; I can scarecly recall my life before it.
The reef is mid-boggling. Awe inspiring. Its IMMENSITY. The sheer SIZE of it! It is truly the handiwork of our great God, I thought. Then.
I was collecting samples from the reef. Its consistecy was stiff, but pliable. It was wearisome work due to it being exactling and painstaking, but only light physical labor.
It was during thios process tha I was over come with a wave of – I lack the word for it. I will call it realization. There was nothing mystical about it, merely a-
I suppose it was nothing more than a change of perspective.
I saw myself dwarfed past insignificance in the shadow ofn the reeef, but at the same time – superimposed on that image – I saw the reef, cyclopean in my eyes, micrified and belittled by still a more prodigious bulk. A hideous domino effect occured: I saw each magnitude scream its size past the very limits of my mind then suddenly dwindle to nothingness in the wake of the next immeasurable immensity forever ballooning upward and outward past forever in an infinity of infinities.
But that wasn’t all. In the other direction, i watched my own form grow in stature to surpass that of the reef and all around me I observed miniscule bodies wondering at the size of me! My vision swam and dove down through the very atoms that composed my own body. Past atoms. Electrons, quarks, bosons and then…
Emptiness? No, of course not. The universe detests nothingness. I found the pattern repeating: infinitesimal quanta shrinking away approaching zero only asymptotically. Forever diminishing. Spiralling endlessly toward forever in the opposite direction.
I lurched then, gasping for breath. I might have swooned even.
But for just one instant, I looked ta the reef and I saw…
But, no. Even after my vision of enlightenment, I denied the truth bestowed upon me.
* * *
I fell ill then. My companions managed to carry me through me conveaescence back to my home.
Our research was necessarily abandoned. The only proof our expidition ever occured is a few journals filled iwth dates and measurements.
And the sample i took.
It sits here as I write to you. Mecium. I believe it to possess some psychotropic property. It was my contact with the reef, I am certain, that cause what will no doubt be termed “my hallucination”. Perhaps even you will not believe me although I trust in our friendship enough to belive you will give me the benefit of the doubt.
Tomorrow, I will se ethis message sent to you, and then I will ingest a portion of the sample. If you hear from me again, itwill be with details of my experience.
Yours, truly, S. Fuligo
* * *
He wrote his next letter two days later. I could tell by the post date. As messages were sent only weekly, I received them both onthe same day. Reading them in order, I read the message I have just related to you.
My first thought was to send a message back to him immediately begging him to hold off on this experiment. I cannot express the dread, the hopelessness I felt knowing I was already too late. For long minutes I eyed the second message before working up the courage to open it.
In it, Fuligo confirmed all my fears and surpassed them.
Final Push – 500/1000
My dear friend,
I write to you now while some part of my mind still remains. I fear now, utterly, for my sanity. You will think me mad, and you will be correct, for what is madness beside the spurning of all society’s knowledge. I have attained a doctrine and wisdom forbeared by every certain fact taught to every member of our species.
The sample I took from the reef; I am convinved now of its hallucinagenic properties.
And the reef itself. What am I convinced of it?
But where to start? As I ingested the sample, I immediately felt lightheaded and overcome with fugue. I attribute these initial effects fully to the placebo effect, but I mention them here for completeness’s sake.
Soon, though, these vague discomforts passed and were replaced with that feeling – that notion of scale – that I described during my initial exploration of the reef. Again, I saw myself as no more than a link, chaining together on either side of me the LARGE to the SMALL.
The reef came to me then. Had it moved physicallay? Sought me out? Or had my newfound perspective somely dwarfed the distance between us to a meaningless nothingth of an inch?
Regardless, I beheld the reef and knew it suddenly to be no inert landmass, but a living creature, the same as you or I.
I say the same as you or I, but nothing could be further form the truth.
This – even creature is an inaccurate term, for it certainly was not spawned by the same Creator that we were – this THING, was an insult to my very biology.
It was FOREIGN in every aspect. Our own bodies are simple and elegant reflections of the Lord that created us all in His image. Each member of our persons is a fully functional and capable piece of our very selves. A spiralling fractal extension, the whole contained in each of its parts. Any pseudopod we spread out is capable on its own of extending our will outinto the universe through action perfectly in sync with our over all drives.
This reef was an immense gestalt. An amalgam. A great, impossible composite multi-creature.
The individuals that comprised it were less than complete. Each one a mere cog, a stunted slave, functioning, serving only a psrt of the greater purpose of the whole. Any one, if cut off from the rest, would whither and flail wildly until death.
But seperation could not occur, I saw. The organisms that made up the thing were bound together inextricably like the organelles trapped within our membranes.
And bound even more surley than that! For they were dumb and brutish. Nomore than automatons. Their wills bent to the awful compound reef creature.
My mind filled with words I could not know, will never comprehend:
alkaloids, polyketides
haploid, Spitzenkörper
terpenes
mycelium and hyphae: septate and coenocytic
Spore
This one rang out above the others to me: Spore
Its sound was a sickness, a miasma, in me, but soon I deduced its meaning.
It was the sample I had taken. The lifecycle of the reef-thing was revelaed to me! Rather than the perfect exponential multiplication of our kind, the composite-creature bread some of its bodies for no other purpose than to reproduce itself. These sex-lumps – the SPORES! – were culled from the other portions of the conglomerate and robbed of sense or locomotion or any will other than the drive to reproduce: to create MORE of the insane reef things!
My mind shook and cracked a bit then, for I saw myself out of the eyes of the barrier reef. The properties of my own body, which I had considered to be elegant and satisfactory, were, to the creature, simplstic and backward.
It looked at me wit hte disdain I might reserve for a virus, a mindless protein factory.
I saw the ripples of my life, the net effect I would leave on this world dwindle down past noithing in the wake of the watching, frothing, consuming, growing, slouching, oozing, slavering, weeping, spurting, hemorrhaging, eliminating, intent, unflappable, disgusting, terrifying…
* * *
Mecium laughed as he trailed off, ending Mr. Fuligo’s tale.
“You were quite right,” he told me. “You sussed it out with your very first guess!”
When I confessed to him that I did not understand waht he was trying to tell me,he began to shout: “The LIGHTS! The lights I saw! Mitochondria, you told me. Nothing preternatural or sublime oabout it. In fact there is almost nothing more natural. My mind playing ricks on me! Seeing what it wanted to see! The warm, lifegiving fusion of the internal furnaces of every living thing on earth! Or, so we thought… Here!”
He grabbed my pseudopod in one of his and pressed a small lump into it.
“Fuligo is a wreck: a shadow of his former self. He spends his days muttering in Asylum. I’ve been to see him saw the Spore, he spoke of, managed to sneak it out past the doctors, they had no clue.
“Take it! I haven’t the will power to destroy it and sooner or later I will ingest a portion of it myself!
“My dreams are already haunted by Fuligo’s horrible synthesis.”
Here, Mecium twitched and translocated off at breakneck speed, his flagella waving furiously.
What could I do? I returned home.
Denouement – 125/250
Now i sit here recounting this tale. The long protein strands seem to flow forth from me of their own accord, forming the chains of generational memory in the RNA helices I will pass down to my progeny. Distracted momentarilly, I find that they have spelled out the visions of Mecium’s tale that I cannot banish from my thoughts.
The horror of that creature! My mind reels and rebels against the image of the thousand thousand unfinished, embryonic, compound bodies that comprised it. Each one joined as inextricably to the others as surely as I was to my mother-sister during that furrowing moment of my mitosis.
Mecium is dead. His descicated corpse was found floating in the alcohol sea(droplet!) to the west. The remaining portion of the reef creature that he left me sits here, contained safely inside a vacoule. I will phagocytize it one day when my curiosity overcomes my caution and learn what he and Fuligo learned. Perhaps I will pay the same price for the knowledge that they did.
It occurs to me that, even though Mecium made no mention of it, the creature’s name has been made known to me. It is a terrible name, unknowable by any God fearing protist or eukaryote. Stranger and more alien than the words Fuligo gleaned from his confrontation with the reef, its name is unpronounceable, unrecordable, but I will attempt to approximate it.
It rings in my head like the sound of a nightmare upon waking:
FTHUNGHUS
- P. C. Carolinensis
“Oh, Kaiser! Why haven’t you been updating?” I hear the masses clamoring.
Well, relax, babies, I’ll be back soon.
I absolutely intend to finsh and polish up An American Warlock in R’lyeh. I’m very pleased with how the NaNoWriMo project turned out and I hope to develop it into a full fledged story some day.
However, I found a new project, one with a non-self-imposed deadline. You can learn all about it here.
So the new, short term goal is to produce a complete, finished, edited and polished, near 5000 short story by February. Then I intend to submit it for possible publishing in a book and I further intend to be paid for it.
Eek!
I will need as many volunteer proof-readers and editors as I can get. For anyone else out there writing, I will offer the same in return. For non-writers, name your price and we can negotiate.
In other news, this blog was nominated for a prestigious internet award by the lovely ladies ( and Mike and Aaron, lovely in their own way, I’m sure ) of limebirduk.com.
At the moment, I’m at a farm in the country and BLOGGING ON MY PHONE (suck it, the past)!
It makes proper posts awkward and tedious, so an official response will have to wait until I can get to a real computer.
Thank you all for tuning in. I will keep this site updated with my progress. Hopefully, I can keep it interesting!
Well, NaNoWriMo is over: 50,000 words in 30 days. If you really want to get technical, I probably cheated with “review sessions” a few times. So not all 50,000 of those words were fiction, or part of the story. Still I think it was all in the spirit of NaNoWriMo and I’m counting this year as a win. Now, to print out a certificate and write my own name on it!
The bad news is that this story is far from finished.
The good news is that the rough draft of this story is pretty close to finished. Close enough that I think I can finish it up this month, December, without having to cram in a full load of 1667 words a day.
There’s a few parts missing, where I just announced, “Some stuff needs to happen here which will bring us to…” and then picked up the story a little later.
There’s a few parts that I ret-conned later and need to correct to fit in with my final idea of the story.
There’s a few places that need expanding. A few characters that need plumping up.
But, all in all, this is more more of a thing than Furnace Winds ever was. An almost complete story with a beginning and an end and most of a middle.
So I’ll bring NaNoWriMo to a close with a few “interesting” facts about my story.
Roland Cooper is a combination of Roland Banks, the Detective noir character from Arkham Horror, and Special Agent Dale Cooper, the coffee swilling, pleased as punch to see you, but knows something you don’t FBI agent from Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks shares a lot of the imagery and style (and was probably a heavy influence on) the defining moment of horror in my life: Silent Hill. The game, not the movie, although that was perfectly adequate. And, of course, just the first game.
I did not intend for Roland to be crazy throughout the entire story, but… it works. I wouldn’t change it now. I tried to crazy him down when he wasn’t immediately in the presence of O’Malley at the murder scenes, so that the reader could hopefully come to relate to him a little better. I think that’s unnecessary now, with an entire flashback sequence in which he’s sane OR IS HE!?!? I need to crazy him back up in Denny’s. The scene where he’s home alone struggling to sleep or paint is close enough to crazy.
Irina’s name comes from a variety of sources:
Irina Voronina, the respectable actress.
Andreevna was the patronymic of a Russian girl I knew in college. Spelled correctly? Who knows? It’s pronounced: Andre(as in the giant) Eve Na
Tikhonovich was the name of a teacher in high school who was obsessed with tryin’ to make us learn a skill.
I thought all together they sounded pretty great. A little more Russian-y than Transylvania-y, but close enough.
Irina and Kurt both came from a different story that has been bouncing around in my head for a while now. Irina was about 400 years old and half vampire – dhamphir – like D. Kurt was a victim of simultaneous bites from a White Wolf style Gaia’s servant werewolf and a zombie. The two opposing natures reached an equilibrium in him forming a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Originally, they boned until finding out that they were half brother and sister through their father.
Were they happy to find their way into a detective novel instead of a necro-beastial-incest fest? Probably Kurt was relieved. Irina, I think, just might still have that in her.
True story: You may remember a review session where I considered cutting Kurt and Irina, or whittling them down to mere humans. Well, not long after that, I dreamed of an absurdly proportioned, pint-sized blonde. And what she commenced to bite was not my neck, you understand?
At the instant of no return, 99.99% there, she woke me up and left me with an impossible choice: shiver, breathe shallow, don’t move and lie awake until morning with an aching dick-root, or take matters into my own hands, fantasizing about an imaginary woman while my wife slept next to me.
“Don’t write me out of this story,” she was saying, “I’m too cruel to cross.”
Call me Mr. McGee: I didn’t like her when she was angry.
She won’t be cut. I think I better develop her a little more thoroughly.
Robert W. Chambers wrote The King in Yellow, probably the biggest single influence on this story. I tip a hat to him in the name of the asylum that Roland stays in.
The genre of this story would have been called “Chamberian” if “Lovecraftian” didn’t sound cooler. Chambers came first and at least had some impact on Lovecraft’s writing since some of his names make their way into Lovecraft’s stories. Of course, he got a lot of stuff from Ambrose Bierce, but this cycle of crediting could go on and on, I’m sure.
Castain – O’Malley’s real name – comes from Hildred Castain, a character from Chambers’ “The Repairer of Reputations”, the first – and my favorite – story in The King in Yellow.
Galatine and Gamaliel are words that have been in my brain since at least 1998. They showed up as cities in Furnace Winds, but I think I found their true home with this story. Pronounced: GAL-uh-teen and GAM-uh-lee-uhl, did that come across? I’m pretty sure I spelled Gamaliel differently several times.
Some of you will recognize Signorelli as your mother’s maiden name. I feel like your mother would be super-excited to hear that she made her way into my story, but maybe just don’t tell her what it’s about? And gloss over the dick parts.
The tentative title, An American Warlock in R’lyeh, what do you think? Too cheesy? Does it give too much away? Can you really consider Roland a warlock? R’lyeh is, of course, where dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. Carcossa would make me happier, but I think R’lyeh is more immediately recognizable.
Originally, the flashback sequence was going to be unrelated to the GOO. It was just a way to help Roland get a clue that the horrible murders and corpse mutilations were just a distraction. I’m feeling like it makes more sense to have the flashback reveal what happened to Roland in the first place. I think it works better as a flashback interjected into the main story rather than starting with the past and progressing chronologically, because – here’s a little horn tootin’ – I think the first few days were a pretty good opening. Maybe the flashback could be interleaved into the present story? It might be jarring hopping back and forth, but I think that might be a good thing in this story.
I need a little more time with Roland in the outer dimension worlds between the Twin Cities.
Here’s what I think should happen:
At the end of the flashback, Roland meets the GOO, the Thing in the basement.
We immediately get dry, professional doctor’s notes and police reports.
We see Roland in those foreign lands with Celleria seeming content and being wrenched away from her as he regains his sanity here on earth.
He’s released from the mental institution, then immediately sucked back into the GOO’s devices by the O’Malley murders.
He visits the GOO again.
Immediately we get doctor’s notes and police reports. We’re sad to see Roland nuts again. He won’t survive another thirty year convalescence. But… things seem off this time. The psychiatrists and reporters seem unsettled, can’t remain professional. Roland’s wounds are horrific and impossible. We get a little creeped out.
We see Roland walking through the wastelands to Galatine and Celleria. We cheer up a bit: sure, Roland’s insane, but he gets to spend his remaining insanity fulfilled in the place he been searching for for so long.
But then, even that comfort is taken from us.
The book ends with the words “horror horror horror”
That’s the feel I want at least. That’s the roller coaster I want to produce at the end.
Well, pipe up in the comments.
What was your favorite part? Least favorite?
What’s missing? Do you have any unanswered questions?
Where are the remaining atavisms that I need to update to fit in with the final storyline?
Maybe most importantly: did you like it?
I know there are four or five of you out there that read my NaNoWriMo entry this year. Maybe even two or three that aren’t my wife. This post is directed at you.
If you derived any enjoyment out of this story, out of one entry, even one cleverly turned phrase, you owe me.
And here’s your chance to settle your debt before I have to break your kneecaps.
The Voice of Rage and Ruin: Werewolf Fiction that Goes for the Throat!
Guess who met a kindred spirit over the internet and bonded over their shared interests. Plenty of people.
But guess who managed it in a completely non-creepy way. That’s right: me.
My close, personal friend Hope Sullivan McMickle, published author will be posting your werewolf stories every month on the Full Maa-HOOOOoooon!
The minimum requirement is a five word flash fiction piece.
Five words?
“That’s a bar so low, you could sleep over it!”
-Deal
I can’t imagine any valid excuse for not heading over to blackalchemy.wordpress.com and dropping off a quick entry in the comments. If you have something longer you’d like featured, you can send it to lycantails@gmail.com
And, hey! Don’t you like prizes? We will be mailing out awards to random participants in the 5-10 words, 11–30 words, 31-50 words, 51-100 words, and 101+ words categories.
So, you: get drunk and write a werewolf haiku.
And you: wouldn’t a werewolf be just as great to marry? Given that he was still a millionaire, of course.
And you: pretend you’re on fracation, pound out some efficient werewolf erotica, and really put the “whore” in “horror”.
And you: I expect “Harvey Wolfman, CPA” on my desk by Monday morning.
“Fangs” for your support!
