'L' is for 'Lonely Giant.'

‘L’ is for ‘The Lonely Giant.’ This is the greatest prison of the Human Age, built upon the remains of the world’s oldest surviving monastery. It is set in the southern plains of The Empire of Gold and Jade, as far away from civilization as possible, where only fringe farmers work. There is a psychological comfort to knowing The Lonely Giant’s inhabitants are impossibly far from where you live. The Lonely Giant is used to house monsters.

There are the typical creatures – rogue all-chemists, serial killers, nine-legs, that sort of thing. But there are also greater beasts, like manticores and plants that would otherwise overrun entire cities. There are immortal and amortal creatures, such as succubae and golems that humans couldn’t figure out how to slay. There is even record of an astral being which was accidentally summoned to our world and imprisoned within meat.

Some critics question why all mortal offenders are not simply killed. To this, government employees respond that there is a certain comfort to knowing The Empire of Gold and Jade can contain its threats in one distant place.

Some critics also question if the government isn’t doing more than merely containing these creatures. During The Lonely Giant’s history, the Empire of Gold and Jade’s military has attained unusual weapons, including invisibility and the telewire, which were previously thought exclusive to exactly the kinds of monsters they might now be dissecting and studying.

Some critics have to be imprisoned.

‘K’ is for ‘Ky,’ OR, Splendid Master in Hiding

This post is a mash-up between the A-to-Z Challenge and Friday Flash. It's a flash story set in the Empire of Gold and Jade, centering around one of the many people named 'Ky.' 'Ky' is the name you swap to if you're trying to get away from your family, debts, or in this case, fame.

It took the boys three seasons to find him. He’d gone reclusive in the modern wilderness: slums. It would have been easier to track of the man on a mountain top or distant island. In a sea of scrawny, old foreigners, with names in another alphabet, he was almost invisible. Having stripped himself of his wealth and proper name, he wore only the rag of an honorific, “Ky.” There were over two thousand others named “Ky” in the slum, and forty-two in his apartment building.

That was on purpose. Ky refused to train them, even when they offered him their entire inheritances. They sent him ten newly-sewn suits, and ten handmaids, and ten immaculate meals from the master chefs of the Cloud Hills. He left their gifts unworn, unsullied, and uneaten. The boys found their food rotting in the alley, supped upon by stray imps and tentacle monsters.

They did not give up easily. They accosted him every time he stepped outside – for the latrine, for his morning walk or sunset meal. He ate once a day, and refused anything but the smallest container of raw rice, and he refused conversation when they took supper alongside him, spurning their money.

On the third sunset, while he was out at his meal, they bribed the landlord and broke into his apartment. Ky returned home to find no cracks in his ceiling, no vermin in his walls, and for the first time in twenty-one seasons, that his lonely lantern actually glowed. They’d left it on for him. He sat up with the light on all night long, though he did not invite the boys in.

He invited them inside the next morning. Their Splendid Master Ky would begin their training just as soon as they donned more practical clothing.

The first lesson was of Stamina. The boys would pick up every piece of trash in the adjacent street, which stretched for four empirical lengths. No clod, turd or broken bowl could be left behind, and they had only two hours to collect all of it. Being boys of unfairly fair youth, they managed it, even if they collapsed at the end.

They thought it unfair until the next day, when they were assigned the second street over, and only an hour and a half. Every consecutive day drew another street of waste.

After four days of the exhausting work, Splendid Master Ky added a second lesson: Perception. The police of the city were needlessly abusive to non-human parties, running them out or collecting extortion from triclopic shops. The boys were not allowed lunch until each could find at least one police-servant who had broken the code of conduct and reported them. In a week, he increased their assignment to three a-piece. In three weeks, they found it much harder to find such police-servants, much as the police-servants found it quite difficult to retaliate against the children of the rich.

Every day they had their lessons in Stamina and Perception. They chaffed to learn exotic fighting styles, of the Charred Fist and the Unknown Walking. Yet as quickly as they could clear a street of refuse, this Ky said they were not ready. He introduced the third lesson: Agility. It seemed that serpents and rats infected with tentacalia had beset the slum in recent seasons, and were often snatching babies or otherwise tearing up tenement ceilings. The only way to combat them was to scale the very structures they tormented.

Building upon their existing stamina and cleverness, the boys had to dispatch a dozen tentacled fiends per afternoon, and doing so meant either flying along scaffolds or swinging from ropes. Often Ky took his sunset meal on the sidewalk while watching the boys in their spectacular fights with the tentacle monsters. He was seldom alone; they drew great crowds of the poor, myriad Ky-folk who could always use a little more entertainment.

Their Splendid Master Ky was the only one not enjoying the spectacle. He had to make up a fourth exercise for them before they got too good. Eventually the boys would realize what you already have, and they would be quite angry about it. Perhaps some mysticism about Patience? He hoped that would take, or if it didn’t, that they finished cleaning up the slums before killing him.

‘J’ is for ‘Jangs the Sphere.’

‘J’ is for ‘Jangs the Sphere.’ You won’t find him in any history books, because he helped author most of them. He helped steal the printing press, then eliminate its inventors so that it would seem like it was The Golden Emperor’s work. He then ordered every book they pressed be about the royal couple. That was his Monday.

Jangs the Sphere was, to put it impolitely, The Golden Emperor’s P.R. ninja. He had infinite resources to assure that the public never saw any flaw in The Golden Emperor’s work, from silencing famines to eradicating terrorists. And when he eradicated terrorists, he typically eradicated everyone who knew them. It was the best way to keep one version of a story in public. The portly diplomat was so good at his job that he had only one rival: The Jade Empress’s P.R. ninja.

It’s been wiped from history, but the royal couple never liked each other, and constantly sought to undermine their spouse in order to raise themselves up. The Jade Empress employed Chuan-Ro, an all-chemist and poet, to do most of her assassinations and smear jobs. Jangs and Chuan-Ro spent most of their time undoing each others sabotage in a unilateral game of Spy Vs. Spy. More tragic, then, that the two were utterly smitten with each other, and forbidden to ever court. The few people who know Jangs and Chuan-Ro existed think they may have spent their final years together before being eliminated by their successors, but no one can confirm. After all, there’s not a word of written history about them.

I very nearly wrote a book about this duo in 2012, but went with a different time period. What do you think. Should they get the light of day and the press of a novel?

'I' is for 'Imps'

‘I’ is for ‘Imps,’ proud owners of the previous empire before the Human Age. Diminutive by conqueror-species standards, they are about crotch-height on a human. They began their existences in The Cracks far out west beyond The Uncanny Valley, where they were collected by gremlins as popular pets. Gremlins bred the imps mercilessly, crafting races without mouths, eyes or many of the internal organs the typical biological organism considers comfortable. Today, the surviving breeds of imps often require repeated surgery in order to successfully eat food.

After the gremlins destroyed themselves in a selfless effort at defining hubris, the imps seized their remaining technology for personal conquest. They had the additional benefit of naturally enchanted bones, particularly horns, which manifest in them not unlike acne and tumors in other species, and enable amazing feats of conjuration. They may be one tenth the body of a triclops, but they can shoot lightning at him, and this levels the playing field. 

Their feats of magic climbed in scale until they attempted to summon their transcendent ancestors, a tribe most people refer to as “demons.” The summoning went very successfully if your goals are to set half the world on fire. The Apocalypse of Demons sapped most people’s sympathy for any slavery the gremlins put imps through, which imps consider insensitive, because it cost them their empire. Post-empire, imps spend most of their time screwing each other over, since cooperating went so poorly.

‘H’ is for ‘Humans.’

‘H’ is for ‘Humans.’

Artist's rendering.

A historically underachieving species, they were widely regarded as a knock-off of the triclopes. As opposed to the triclopes, they have only two eyes, possess weak senses of taste and smell, have particularly weak hide and muscle tissue, heal very slowly or not at all, gestate for less than a year. People who use economic trends to study the world cannot fathom how cyclopes can be so enormous and durable when, eye-wise, they ought to be the next step down from biclopic humans. People who use economic trends to study the world and phrase things more sensitively believe humans achieved their modern dominance by gestating so quickly, thus flooding the market with their brand.

After imps managed to conquer the known world, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that humans could. The bar for domination was low enough, and they were a hungry enough species to try science again. Most species thought, given that science had literally eaten the Gremlin Empire alive, it was a bad idea. Humans considered that a very interesting philosophical point that they’d think over after using science to conquer everything. It’s worked out well so far.

It’s an unwritten rule of many universes that humans make great protagonists. It’s unknown as to why, but humans are prone to heroism, if for no other reason than because if another species did it instead then humans couldn’t be the center of attention, and that’s unacceptable in fiction. Humans are even the protagonists in most Godzilla movies, to the chagrin of everyone who enjoys Godzilla movies.

I enjoy Godzilla movies. I named two species after his nemeses.

‘G’ is for ‘Golems.’

‘G’ is for ‘Golems.’ 

Allegedly invented by servants of the Jade Empress about 270 years ago, they are classified as non-sentient constructs with no internal source of motion or determination. The most common kinds of golems are ‘clay’ and ‘hair,’ though there are allegedly more intricate golems in the Cloud Hills, including legends of gargoyles and walking suits of armor.

In the early period of the Human Age, golems were essential replacements for beasts of burden, in clearing rubble and toxic materials spilled by exploded demons. Even today they are used primarily as sentries and transport, and appear exclusively in the east, serving The Empire of Gold and Jade.

Only human wizards and all-chemists have yet figured out how to construct golems. Three of the four inventors of the original golems were slain by their creations, giving us the popular legend: if a golem consumes the body of its creator, it is granted free will. Not possessing minds of their own, golems tend to go insane upon achieving this free will. The most notorious case was 120 years ago, when The Golem King attempted a revolution against humanity. It and its movement were driven into the World-Ocean and destroyed by the Empire of Gold and Jade (see 'E'). This is considered the first potential apocalypse that the Empire stopped.

Many people, human and non-human, are uncomfortable with golems because of their similarities to the gremlins’ mechanical Automatons. Even though golems are magical in nature, the stereotype of the biological-consuming monster persists. The Empire of Gold and Jade has a policy of destroying any golems exhibiting free-will, though there are rumors that some are collected for study at The Lonely Giant, a prison designed to hold and study monsters (see ‘L’).

Waiting for a Day of Rest

Well, my first week of the A-to-Z Challenge went pretty well. Posts all went up on time, and only one had catastrophic formatting issues. I actually used an image on Saturday. Almost almost to the Bronze Age of the internet, which is pretty good considering how my physical week went.

Friends know that last weekend I had to travel out of state for several days to take care of my grandmother. She had a terrible health scare, and while I won't repeat everything that was hypothesized, I will say how relieved I am that most of it was false. She's in stable condition now, under 24-hour care, back on solid food and much more lucid. She loved having her grandkids check on her over Easter.

But spending the weekend at the hospital wing is hazardous for someone with my syndrome. By Day Two, my immune system tanked and I was sniffling. I barely returned home on Monday before collapsing from what I thought was a chest cold. It turned out to be a chest cocktail with a key ingredient: a lung infection.

I'm sorry if my Twitter or blog comments have read loopy. It's certainly thrown a kink into my fiction submissions, but I managed to get all my posts in. My mother was kind enough to drive me to and from the hospital twice during this mess.

Today Mom called with a frog in her throat. Looks like her kindness was rewarded with a lung ailment of her own. We can guess where she got it. So I'm driving her to the hospital Monday morning.

"No good deed..." That stupid phrase really picks up momentum as you get older.

How was your first week? And how did you think I did?

‘F’ is for the ‘Frontier.’

‘F’ is for the ‘Frontier.’

The Frontier refers to all lands west of the Uncanny Valleys. Not settled or developed by the humanist Empire of Gold and Jade, it is home to the highest populations of most other intelligent species, including imps, nine-legs, triclopes, dorads and centaurs, as well as most of the largest life forms, including sauropods, gryphons, land-squid, cyclopes and biollants.

Natives.

Most species band together in The Frontier, requiring co-existence for survival in harsh climates. The Frontier experienced most of the damage in the recent Apocalypse of Demons, and is something of wasteland. Most of the existing city-states are built in the remains of ancient sites, such as God’s Lap, built around the last surviving skyscraper from the Gremlin Empire. Clemency is an avidly lawless city-state built in a crater where a great demon once exploded.

Most thriving city-states form The Red Crescent, a crude travel route with open-door policies to the Red Brigade (see ‘R’). The Red Brigade is a militant sect of a disorganized religion the Empire of Gold and Jade pushed out of the east. According to their treaty, the Red Brigade own The Frontier. No one in The Frontier cares. The Empire of Gold and Jade has spent the last forty years reneging on the deal and invading.

The north-east of The Frontier is the ancestral home of triclopes, who hold largely homogenous strongholds and mining colonies there. This includes the northmost reaches of the Uncanny Valley, which are at their most shallow and least populated by giant monsters. The Empire of Gold and Jade makes frequent attempts to cross the Uncanny Valleys here, and is in a perpetual conflict with the triclopes over the region.

The Empire of Gold and Jade may well be coming east for all the tourist attractions. Allegedly it still rains shards of metal in The Sarlund. The Red Brigade patrols The Z (see ‘Z’), the world’s only remaining zombie reservation. Travel far enough west, and rumor has it that there are tears in the fabric of reality. No one has ever come back from the deep west to confirm such rumors.

Bathroom Monologue: Birth of the Human Age, OR, 'E' is for 'Empire of Gold and Jade.'

So this is a cross-post. It is both my #fridayflash for the week, and my 'E' entry for the A-to-Z Challenge. 'E' is for the 'Empire of Gold and Jade,' the first, only and reigning human empire.

Everything noteworthy around here begins with an apocalypse. Theirs was the Apocalypse of Demons, when the womb of the world was torn asunder, imps stoking The Cracks in the distant west until their ancestors roused. Then emerged the demons, intangible and vast, and rather than bestowing the imps with an infinite kingdom, seeking to add our world to their blessed charnel. What magic the imps possessed was corrupted, and their bodies pulped into titanic corporeal forms for their ancestors to roam our plane. So ended the previous tyranny.

Their slaves, the humans, fled into the east like water amid fingerprints. Away fell the nine-legs and triclopes. No one could survive the breath of demons, so toxic it reduced the largest sauropods to skeletons. Nine-legs, which many thought did not even have lungs, choked to death under the long strides of titanic demons. Deserts quaked, sinkholes supped upon cities, and the skies rained a burning wine. It was a most glorious apocalypse.

Only as they approached The Uncanny Valley did any opponents stand unyielding, the work of humans and not yet humans, the golems, the bodies of granite and brick, and within them all, hearts of jade. Secrets stolen and perfected by the cleverest slaves, these were the creations of the Jade Tribe, commanded by a voice that rose above the howl of demons. Her golems clung to their ankles, and then to the knees, dragging them to the ground where they could be pried apart.

Yet not all demons took to land, many sitting astride the clouds and hurling comets at the foolish mortals. Here came the Golden Archers, all-chemists who summoned power from without, not within, taking up the wand and the stave. Wizard snipers shot the demons out of the sky, cleaning heaven by making war. Surviving triclopes and imps hid in the shadows of humans for mercy.

Of those fallen demons, the majority exploded upon impact, maiming the land. Those demons who fell without combustion were made the campfires for the brave Golden Archers, and their chief, who will be marked as the Golden Emperor, climbed into the hull of the greatest fallen demon, and carried out from its sundry fires a breastbone of unparalleled magic. This he offered as a wedding present unto the chief of the golem-makers, she who will be marked as the Jade Empress. The bones of demons formed unparalleled golems, titans in their own mindless right, a bulwark against the inferno. No fire passed east of the humans’ brave army, and it unfurled west until the demons were extinguished, and all that lay behind it was a kingdom awaiting two thrones.

In the first dawn of their campaign, he who will be marked as the Golden Emperor and she who will be marked as the Jade Empress were wed, as were their retainers, and where the Golden Emperor had three additional retainers, so they were wed to the Jade Empress’s eldest sister and two brothers, and so were their generals wed, and where the Jade Empress retained two additional generals, these were wed to the Golden Emperor’s aunt and eldest blood brother. They wove their peoples together so that no tide could sunder them. It is recorded by every poet worth reading that together these two carried culture out of the fire.

And that’s how the latest tyranny began.

‘D’ is for ‘Drones.’

‘D’ is for ‘Drones.’

The Drone-class of automaton is the most common in the world. Once upon a time they were cleaning and maintenance drones, sometimes used for defense or transportation, easier to manufacture, store and replace than slave labor. They are land-based and spherical, running on a sort of combustion engine that can utilize various compounds. For reasons no one has yet identified, they actively seek to combust biological compounds. They started with their creators, the gremlins, and have never let up. They are often found in packs, flocking around larger automatons, such as the Mammoths, former construction vehicles that have turned carnivorous.

I originally derived the name from ants, never anticipating the U.S. drone program to get so prolific and ugly. I’ve gone back and forth over this name. It’s perfect in-world, and honestly, the U.S. drone program is so heinous that the thought of the name now being applied to an unmanned killing machine that wiped out its originating society is artistically appealing. I’m inclined to keep it, but I’d love opinions on the topic.

Tomorrow: ‘E’ for that obnoxious empire the humans are building.

‘C’ is for ‘Cartography.’

‘C’ is for ‘Cartography.’ As far as the Human Age is concerned, there is no comprehensive map of the world. Gremlins were the only species that ever made it far in cartography, and they were wiped out by their own technology in one of those pesky apocalypses. The technology is still around in the form of automatons, but it’s unknown if they’re mapping the world. They tend to consume and combust any people who ask them about it.

Still, a compass is a good idea. It’s common knowledge that there is at least one continent on the planet: this one. It is surrounded by what is lovingly called “the World-Ocean,” though no one has ever gotten to the west coast of the continent, and some people believe there is no west coast. No one who has gone to check has ever come back to confirm.

Other fun facts if you should take up cartography:

-The planet seems round. People cross a horizon as they walk far enough away from you, making it fairly obvious to every culture that has ever lived. Most have not cared.

-It gets warmer if you go north and colder if you go south.

-The middle of the continent is split by The Uncanny Valley (see ‘U’), a titanic canyon that spans the entire land mass. It's presumed the result of an ancient apocalyptic quake and is a favorite vacation spot for dinosaurs and hungry robots.

-The Empire of Gold and Jade (see ‘E’), the present human empire, rules everything east of The Uncanny Valley. They would like some of the west soon, if you don’t mind. It is relatively developed with irrigation, manmade rivers, agriculture and cities with artificial lights.

-Everything west of The Uncanny Valley is referred to as “The Frontier” (see ‘F’) Here you will find most of the surviving automatons, sauropods, sentient non-human species like triclopes and dorads, and most of my recent protagonists.

-There is a vast archipelago to the east of the continent, where people go if they’re hoping sit out the next apocalypse. The bet is that the land masses are so small that it wouldn’t be an apocalypse if something terrible happened there, thus making them the least likely target.

Tomorrow: ‘D’ is for ‘Drones.’

‘B’ is for ‘Bacteria.’

‘B’ is for ‘Bacteria.’

If there are only two life forms left on the planet, one of them will be bacteria, living off of the other. There will never be only one life form left, because virii and bacteria are brilliant at finding a host and sticking things out. It’s believed that the first apocalypse was probably a massive disease, because all the world needed was a population, and some bacteria. Since then bacteria has caused numerous additional apocalypses, being the only scientifically plausible explanation for the rise of zombies, and later vampiria and tentacalia. Zombieism is just a bacterial reaction, after all. One hundred percent normal, scientific, perfectly magical bacteria.

It’s unsurprising that bacteria were the first magicians. They did almost everything else first, and once they got a little magical potential, their hosts lived longer, hosted them longer, and spread them farther. Imps have the highest magical potential because their uniquely screwed up physiology allows for so many simultaneous magical infections. Just as bacteria evolved to assist digestion and boost height, it thrived in hosts where its magic could do the most good.

It’s unknown if bacteria have ever suffered their own apocalypse. Perhaps some day all diseases may disappear in one great catastrophe. If so, though, it’ll be a problem for more than just the common cold.

Tomorrow: ‘C’ is for ‘Cartography.’

'A' is for 'Apocalypses.'

‘A’ is for ‘Apocalypses.’ The fiction of The House That Nobody Built and The Last House in the Sky is unique in that it’s a Post-Post-Post-Post-Apocalyptic world. The citizens have had to handle giant meteors, and then an enormous flood, and then the zombie uprising, and then the dinosaurs coming back. Let me tell you: zombies get passé after a t-rex eats your dad.

No one knows if there's a common reason or cause to the catastrophes. We know they happen every 200-300 years, with exact chronology being difficult to chart what with meteors and hungry robots consuming all the charts every 200-300 years. But everyone more or less acknowledges that the first really good apocalypse was The Apocalypse of Sauropods, when dinosaurs decided to roam the land again. They’d been extinct for so long that they were considered myths. Fans of mythology were very upset with the unexpected feathering. Everyone else was upset that they were being trampled to death. The diseases they carried with them alone overturned entire biomes.

About 250 years into their reign, the gremlins launched cities into the sky. This put them out of biting range, and with their manipulation of lightning and mechanics, into very good conquering range. They were so technologically advanced that they turned all the (literally) lower cultures into reality television and entertainment. Their obliteration of lower people for amusement was viewed by others as the Apocalypse of Gremlins. In under 300 years they mastered alternative energy, levitation and prosthetic bodies, and began to unlock the secrets of artificial intelligence and inter-dimensional travel. Very good until the artificial intelligence turned on them. That was the Apocalypse of Automatons, which crashed all the flying cities, and set robots roving the landscape to consume all biological life forms. As far as we know, gremlins went extinct, and technology has stalled out at the “push broom” level ever since.

The automatons didn’t have a real empire, but rather, more of a buffet. They were the new apex predators, able to prey upon sauropods, gryphons and manticores, forcing sentient life into smaller groups, underground, or to the fringes of the west and the icy south. Automatons became so dominant that, naturally, 200 years later, they were the victims of an apocalypse. The Apocalypse of the Shock was a freak lightning storm an entire continent wide, which fried over 95% of all automatons. Evolution kicked in a few bucks and taught the t-rex to hunt robots.

In the previous period of largely underground civilizations, the imps grew in political and magical power. Previously a species gremlins bred as pets, imps possessed keen intellect and inclination for elemental manipulation. With the automatons out of the way, the former inbred slaves created their own proper empire, consuming much of the west, and enslaving triclopes and humans for their labor. Rather than technology, they studied the primal forces of the world, believing their demonic ancestors were a better route to power. Within 230 years, they opened a rift into what theologians might call “Hell,” in order to summon those ancestors. Those ancestors promptly set the planet on fire in what non-theologians refer to as “The Apocalypse of Demons.”

It was a great war that required all species to band together and fight off the fiery tyrants. Never in recorded history had there been such a moment of pan-culturalism. And then the moment past, and since more humans were alive than any other species, they declared their own empire, swearing to get it right this time. We’ll find out about them at ‘E’.

We still don’t know if there’s a singular reason or pattern to the apocalypses. We only know that oral traditions have them running back to the beginning of time – presuming that the beginning of time was an apocalypse that savaged nothingness. Upon inventing the telescope, many gremlins lapsed into hopeless nihilism upon discovering apocalypses had apparently already blown up every other planet out there.

Tomorrow: ‘B’ is for ‘Bacteria (and will be way shorter).'

A-to-Z Challenge Prep

My preparation for the A-to-Z Challenge is definitely off. Expecting a weekend to proof and prep posts, instead I only had whatever material I wrote on Wednesday before rushing for my grandmother's emergency. I ought to be in transit home today, God willing with some better news for once. We shall see.

But my worldbuilding A-to-Z Challenge is on. Three posts are already set for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and if I'm not in transit today, I expect to have some kind of internet by Wednesday with which to participate. I'm hoping to find some inventive Fantasy writers in the 1,200+ crowd.

I'm also looking forward to learning what it's like to post on the same topic for a month straight. I'm curious if I'll be able to keep it comprehensible and entertaining. I know Monday's post is going to get pretty weird.

How? You'll see very soon.

Hope you all had a better weekend than I did. Here comes April.

Bathroom Monologue: Dialogue on Drunkenness

Randy: What would you do if someone whacked Ninx?

Vineguard: Pardon?

Randy: Hypothetically. And she wasn’t around for you to glom on anymore.

Vineguard: It wouldn’t happen.

Randy: Hypothetically, it happened.

Vineguard: Hypothetically, I stopped it. I beat the assassin about the head and shoulders.

Randy: But let’s say there’s five assassins. You’re knocking around the first four, but then the fifth whacks her.

Vineguard: That’s preposterous. She’d strike him in the neck, or crush him between boulders.

Randy: Nine assassins. And you knock around the first four, and she knocks around the other four. But the ninth slips past you both and shanks her. One poke, one kill, quick as anything.

Vineguard: Neither of us saw him?

Randy: He was very good. She was very dead.

Vineguard: She’ll love knowing you think about these things.

Randy: So what would you do?

Vineguard: Where we you for this?

Randy: Oh, drunk. Very drunk. Slept through it like a coma.

Vineguard: That does seem plausible.

Randy: So? What would you do if the ninth guy whacked her?

Vineguard: I’d imagine I’d kill him on the spot. Cut him into… five even pieces? Hypothetically.

Randy: I mean with your life, you sissy.

Vineguard: I’d mourn her. Collect her remains, observe her family’s funeral rituals. Visit her mother and sisters, make peace.

Randy: A little late to win them over.

Vineguard: Gather any remaining plans she had for heists. Carry them off, perhaps mark her resting place with the prizes, except those too garish.

Randy: You’d spend the rest of your life decorating her?

Vineguard: I imagine I’d live longer than that. With all her remaining heists carried out, I presume enough time would elapse to find the genealogies of the nine assassins who attacked us on the hypothetical day. They themselves would be long-rotten, but they would have families. Parents, spouses, siblings, spawn, assorted aunts, uncles and grandparents.

Randy: …What?

Vineguard: Surely they weren’t immaculately conceived. With the genealogies mapped, it would only be a matter of finding their localities. I would start with those most dearly and closely related, in that priority, and execute everyone in their localities.

Randy: Hold on. Hold on. “Everyone?”

Vineguard: Unless they lived solitary lives, I presume there would be other folk around.

Randy: Innocent people?

Vineguard: True love does not short-sell.

Randy: And you’re not afraid a militia’s going to stop you?

Vineguard: No, because it’s not going to happen.

Randy: You would go after militias that never did anything to you just because someone stabbed her?

Vineguard: They’d have to go first, being practical. Strike a few hours after midnight when the watch is flagging and the sleepers are not yet rested. After that, fairly certain I would have the skill. If they took my life, then so be it. Otherwise, old age would have it.

Randy: You don’t know how to make hypothethicals fun, do you?

Vineguard: Of course I do. Don’t get drunk, Randy. 

The Only Thing Worse is the Cure, Finale

This is the conclusion of a weekly serial. You can begin at Part 1 here.

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4
Part 5 
Part 6

Ladies and Gentlemen, step onto this platform and experience the last miracle of the Modern Age! I tell you that I was born with one lung and a withered leg, yet today I stand as tall before you and with as deep a voice as any among us. You must be asking yourselves: why is he so firm for an invalid?

I answer you: it is the dust I have for sale in these here jars. Take a pinch of it in your tea. Wrap it with your tobacco, or rub it into your gums. It works in all mysterious ways, Ladies and Gentlemen, and I have made it affordable because miracles ought to be affordable. You can taste the quality.

Who would sample these wares? The first miracle is free. Yes, yes, the Young Madame has the intrepid spirit, and may I say, that is a distinguished parasol. Here you are. Yes, into the gums, or past them, whatever is your fancy.

There we are. And how does the Young Madame feel?

What’s that?

Invigorated!

Do the ashes not possess a certain savoriness? Yes? Maybe? You say…?

A yearning! Yes, I like that. The Young Madame is right – these invigorating ashes do possess a certain yearning! That is the very verb that stirred my being when I first crossed them, and you all must be asking yourselves: from whence did this Gentleman retrieve his miracle ashes?

I was traveling along the coast for mercantile industry when I spied a thousand ribbons of smoke rising to the heavens, and followed them unto a peculiar beach, upon which there lay the wreckage of a flock of ships. A veritable flock, I tell you. Not one, nor two – fifteen if there were five, all mashed up together among the shoals. What a storm must have squalled those men, what holy war at sea, I dare not imagine, and naught to help them save an island with a few shanties offshore, and it with no lighthouse. You’d think such a colony would want to help sailors in such need.

Now these ribbons of smoke had not emanated from the ruined ships. So afeared of another war in these plagued times, I hesitated upon the beach and trampled a fine suit of clothes. Then another. Another, and another – perhaps several hundred pairs of shirts and pantaloons, and guns as any nation would envy, all splayed out as though an army had mounted there, and decided to call off its war, instead stripping its uniforms in favor of a swim. This militia of fashion formed a crescent around the beach, leaving a single bald patch, where there lay a simple sack cloth, as a monk might wear. It was pierced at least thrice with shot, though worry not, for there was no blood. In its place?

For within the sack cloth, I took a handful of ash, and lo, I had never breathed so painlessly in my life as when I held it. The two juniors I had with me also claimed to have lost acute tooth pain an amorous predilections, and they have taken more jars of these ashes for sale in the north, and perhaps to Jerusalem. Smelling char about the sack cloth and the sailor uniforms, we set about examining them, and found indeed all those ribbons of smoke had risen from this spot, and that such miracle ash was deposited within the collar of every uniform on the beach.

Ladies and gentlemen, my news may disturb, yet it is indisputable: the Rapture had come upon us, and few were called. Those few gave unto us one sweet parting gift, a gift which grants health that you have witnessed both in myself, and in this Young Madame who, as you can see and she can attest, has improved in constitution during the brevity of my tale. They possess, as she called it, that certain yearning. That we were not summoned does not mean we are forsaken, for these ashes can be the path to a better life. And I am selling them by the tenth-pound. Now what do you offer?

Fin.

Neuropathy, a Stroke, and While I'll Be Gone for a While

Wednesday was not the day I bargained for. The neurologist has no theory on why my legs are losing feeling or motion. Her best advice was to stop crossing my legs since that might be damaging circulation - even though the tests she held her in hands said there was no such damage. Even as I went in for the consultation, I joked that this wasn't so bad. There are, in fact, many worse things in the world than losing use of a limb or two.

God didn't think I was sincere enough.

I came home to discover my grandmother had collapsed, gone to emergency and was in hospice care. Was it a stroke or heart attack? Complications from influenza? My sister didn't know, but had heard she was so disoriented that they suspected acute dementia. At 95, anything is serious.

Old friends of mine know that I hate Easter because my grandfather died on it, just a few months before I was born. I'm named for him, which always feels like a crumby legacy this time of year. Now my grandmother might go out on the same holiday.

I'll be gone for a few days. My #fridayflash is already cued, the finale for The Only Thing Worse is the Cure. I had the first three A-to-Z Challenge entries set, too, so daily posting will go on without me, though I may miss the beginning of the blog hop. The composition end is all I can hold up right now. I've got to be there for my family.

May you all have splendid weekends. Remember that it matters less what you haven't done, and matters more what you do for those who remain.

Bathroom Monologue: Guilty, Not Guilty

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I don’t see how you can find Nidia guilty. The smallest crime the Prosecution allows will put her in prison for ten years. That is ten years of abuse by guards, cruelty and politics with inmates, an infectious drug culture, and deprivation from the outside world. Inmates are astronomically more likely to commit crimes once they leave jail. Prisons are devastating environments where innocence is shredded. You can’t fix them from the jury box, but you can decide who belongs there.

What is she supposed to learn in jail? That leaving an infant unattended can be fatal? You’ve seen her and heard from her psychiatrist. She needed to spend the first two weeks of this trial under restraints. She learned what was wrong before she turned herself in. There’s nothing to reform about her. There’s nothing about our prison system that is going to make her less likely to harm a child again. She can’t even look at one without going into hysterics.

The Prosecution will not cut a deal. I’m not legally allowed to speculate on the quotas for convictions that is causing him to refuse a plea bargain, but Nidia needs psychiatric care and compassion. Some of you may not want to feel for this woman, and want to punish her for the death she’s caused. She broke one of the most sacred trusts in life: that of a mother to her child. That she’s already suffering doesn’t allay your outrage, and I understand that. But if you convict this broken woman, you are creating a criminal. If you don’t, you’re giving her a chance to one day be able to look at a child without sobbing.

That’s the choice you’ve got today.

Bathoom Monologue: Slasher Parody

Has there ever been a Slasher parody where teens realize the virgins in their town are being sacrificed, and so they all throw a party to lose their virginity and become safe? Over and over again, hooded cultists would sneak up on their young victims, only to find them copulating and thus off bounds, forced to slink back into the shadows in depression. Could even climax by whacking the survivor girl, thus summoning Satan, who throws an infernal kegger at which all the surviving horny teens are welcome.

Alternate ending where it turns out they’re all pregnant with Satan. Whoops!

A-to-Z Challenge?

So I'm considering joining to the A-to-Z Challenge this year. Every April this group of bloggers attempts to post every day, corresponding with a letter of the alphabet, and hop around to see each others' progress. While I've been posting daily for years, I've never done an entire month on one theme.



Themes are arbitrary to the challenge, beyond the obvious one of the alphabet. My friend Beverly Fox is going to try blogging about photographs. I've heard someone is going to do dinosaurs, which will at least garner my daily traffic. I want that challenge for the same reason I tried to serialize The Only Thing Worse is the Cure: I don't know how, and I'd like to learn.

The only theme I'm craving, though, is worldbuilding, and particularly exploring the world of my novels. I'm waiting for betas to get back to me and haven't undertaken another huge task yet. So I figure I'll ask you, generous readers: would an April about the A,B,C's of The House That Nobody Built and Last House in the Sky interest you? Getting to know the history of its disasters, its populations of hungry robots and sauropods? Visit not only civilization, but the wilds of The Frontier and The Uncanny Valley? Maintaining that, whatever letters fell on Fridays, would simply force me to write flash fiction for those bits of my world.

I already know that 'A' is for "Apocalypses."

Interview with Chandler Klang Smith

Chandler and I met in the Lit classes of Bennington College. She's been furiously pursuing fiction ever since, and her debut novel has just come out with Chizine Publications. It's unusual take on circuses called Goldenland Past Dark. I'll let her tell you what it's about.

John: For newcomers, what is the plot of Goldenland Past Dark? 
Chandler: Goldenland Past Dark starts out as a coming-of-age story of sorts, about a sixteen-year-old hunchbacked clown named Webern Bell who runs away to join a ramshackle circus lead by his friend and mentor, the ringmaster Dr. Show. Despite his successful escape from home, though, Webern is still haunted by memories of his dark family history, which become creative fuel for the surreal clown acts that come to him in dreams. But when heartbreak, grief, and the reappearance of his sinister sisters send his life into a downward spiral, the already thin line between fantasy and reality blurs, and the world of his imagination threatens to consume him completely.

John: What attracted you to a traveling circus for this novel? Did it start with them, or with a character idea who wound up fitting in one, or something else entirely? 

Chandler: It was a bit of a combination.  Originally, I started out writing stories about Webern Bell's childhood (some of which you can read on my website here), but I always knew I eventually wanted him to become a clown; I just didn't know that part of his life would become the subject of an entire book.

Circuses appeal to me as the subject for fiction because they're families of misfits -- people held together more because of their shared status as outsiders than because of any real commonality with each other. Writing about one gave me a great license to create a variety of characters, and to put them in conflict. I also wanted to explore the practice of a dying art form -- in the 1960's, when the novel is set, the circus was no longer as important to a culture increasingly gravitating toward television and the movies for entertainment.  As a writer, I suppose there's something I identify with about that.

John: There’s a deal of fiction about circuses. Are there any tropes or traditional representations you wanted to explore or subvert? 

Chandler: The big thing I wanted to get away from was the cliche of the creepy clown. John Wayne Gacy and It by Stephen King have created an indeliable impression in people's minds, and that's understandable, but clowning/mime is a form of artistic expression that dates back to the earliest forms of live entertainment, and when you look at performances by greats like Emmett Kelly, Marcel Marceau, and Charlie Chaplin (just to name a few who are easy to find on YouTube), you see that they're able to convey a whole world of expressive emotion within its time-honored constraints.  It strikes me as so dismissive and wrong to look at all that and just say, flatly, "Clowns scare me."

What I do think is spooky about clowning is the same thing that's spooky about any imaginative endeavor: the way it offers escape into an alternative persona and an unreal realm that may seem seductively more appealing than the artist's real life.

John: What is your favorite thing about the book? 

Chandler: I like Webern's clowning dream sequences; I feel like some of my strongest prose is in there.  I also like his romance with Nepenthe the Lizard Girl, and where it ends up going, but I'll stop there for fear of spoilers.

John: That's fair! So how did you come to work with ChiZine? They’re fantastic. 

Chandler: They are fantastic!  I actually discovered them on the Poets & Writers small press database, and as soon as I started looking at their website, I realized that their aesthetic was right up my alley.  It was a real eureka moment.  For folks reading this at home, I highly recommend checking out any of their other titles, especially Hair Side, Flesh Side by Helen Marshall, The Inner City by Karen Heuler, Chasing the Dragon by Nick Kaufmann, and Sarah Court by Craig Davidson, just to name a few of my favorites.

John: How is ChiZine helping you promote the novel?

Chandler: I've been doing a bit of a blog tour, and they've been great about getting advance copies to reviewers.  So far I've been reviewed in Library Journal and Publishers Weekly, so I'm pleased about that.

John: Were there any key influences on you in writing Goldenland Past Dark?

Chandler: The most important was easily Steven Millhauser; I'm consistently blown away by his ability to translate visual images into luminous, breathtaking prose.  And not just static images either; he can show you a magic trick, a knife-throwing act, a Saturday morning cartoon, all with a grace and eloquence that feels just effortless. 

I was also definitely influenced by Angela Carter, particularly her stupendous novels The Magic Toyshop and Nights at the Circus.  And I owe a debt to The Tin Drum, with its similarly stunted protagonist.

John: This is your debut novel. I'd love to wrap up asking: do you know what’s next for you?

Chandler: Another novel, about an alternative reality version of New York City under constant attack by dragons.  You can read a short excerpt from it here.

In addition to bringing an excerpt of her next novel, Chandler is also running a giveaway for Goldenland Past Dark. You can enter for free right here.

Challenge: How Many Books Can You Hold?

Mark Lawrence recently posted a challenge: how many Speculative Fiction books can you hold up, covers facing forward and visible?

It took me a day to get someone to photograph me, as there was no way I'd pull this off on my own. Our top score was 13:

Jim Butcher might as well have sponsored this, since I was holding Storm Front, Summer Knight, Grave Peril, Death Masks and Fool Moon, none of which I've actually gotten to read yet. I guess I owe him now. In addition are old and worn copies of Michael Crichton's Sphere and Jurassic Park, Dante's Inferno, H.G. Wells's Time Machine, and Stephen King's Needful Things and The Waste Lands. Down in my hands are the equally lovely Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis and From Dark Places by Emma Newman.

The Only Thing Worse is the Cure, Part 6 of 7

This is Part 6 in a weekly serial. You can begin at Part 1 here.

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4
Part 5.

It strikes as though I’ve always lived as hearsay. Overheard, admired without substance, dreaded without context, all things that delivered me safely to that fetid cemetery. I disembarked from our island with fifteen heralds, all of us in identical hoods. At the shore, we split into eight. At the second fork in the road, we split into four. Any group could have held the king of lepers. After two villages, only Helen was with me, her clinging to my cape, and those mariners far too confused to follow the correct band.

In my haste to meet my author, I brought nothing save money. Helen carried with her the fruits of her garden, and a pillow. I ought to have asked her why she carried that. I wish I could ask her now.

Helen departed me at the third village. Every one of them was damned, tainted, stinking of human rot, even though every denizen looked upon me with clear eyes. She sobbed that their clarity would not last, that those villages we had passed were already lapsed to such doom, and that the plague would swallow these souls without her help. She lingered to feed them with the fruits of her garden. She had a force of will about her.

All I ever asked of them was to find me a book, yet my heralds discovered the author instead of his work. Locals still spoke of the lynching, boasting that slaying a witch had saved them from the plague that swallowed so much of the mainland. For their rumors, I was happy to repay them with malignities. Their private waters streamed into the gutters as I mounted the outskirts of their cemetery.

Cemeteries have always been of unparalleled comfort to me. There sleep no leeches. No one to take healing from my person. Only Cecil ever appreciated the exhaustion of carrying so many ills. I prayed over the grave for a night, until I was certain this was the particular Arab. He and his family were murdered by Spaniards and heaped into a single casket. By my miracles or his, the bones of his fingers were prying at the lid of the casket. I comforted myself briefly that it was not I who raised him from death, for the woman and three children beneath him appeared as still as the day they were planted. I apologized to their memories as I rummaged through their person in hope of finding a book about myself. They lacked even a scrap of paper.

Such a somber march I made, misstepping and returning for Helen’s village, hoping for her solace, for her to define what I was. My self-pity deserved to die. Locals had torn her apart and eaten her flesh, having exhausted her fruits of their miracles. Even her heart failed to cure them, and the cannibalism attracted crusaders. They set such a blaze to burn me with the sin. I abided in the last house, breathing what air I could through Helen’s bloody pillow, until the crusaders became so ensickened that their private waters ran out through their eyes. Unseen, I flew for home. And that was the worst of my decisions.

What is a field without rain? What is a lantern without pilot? What is a rumor with no…

They lay in the dirt, and their filth, and their beds, and some drifted in the tides. Decades of diseases finding opportunity at once. Cecil sat in his rocking chair, though it rocked no longer. Lydia, Ruth, Old Gregor, Geraldine, Saul… A hundred martyrs for a failed son. Oh, Cecil. How I fought to make your chair move again.

Of them all, Mallory was alive. He danced on the docks and raved about demons waging war on nests of angels in his palm, until my boat moored nearby, and his pitch remained equally fervid, words merely running canny, now arguing what a good thing my departure was for my sundry works to come. Both mad and unmad, he ignored the dock workers who had perished all around him in favor of chanting that I ought not to have returned, and fell upon me with a knife to compel me away.

I dragged Mallory into the tide myself. His hands clutched at my wrists like the Arab’s fingers at the lid of his casket. I cannot raise the dead, but I can lower them.

There were fifteen fat vessels loitering as I labored, voyeurs armed with spyglasses. They fired cannons at my feet, dashing the tides, as though I could be crippled. Mallory became as smoke between my fingers. They’re coming with their muskets and clerics and cleansing blazes. Already the island reeks of incense. I’m a story coming to an end. Soon I’ll lapse into hearsay again.

Am I only the result of a thing a man once wrote? Is all this?

And what gave him the right? What gives any? Who is any more than the result of something two people once did?

Tonight I’ll eat from the garden that an enormously wise girl once believed healed all ills, and sit beside the rocking chair of the kindest man I’ve ever had the privilege to know. The supper may cause my people to rise. My presence may cause them to rise. Or, I may be a failure.

Regardless, the ships will come in the morning, and I will not be felled. I will meet them. I will cure them of their blight.

This serial concludes next week,

on Friday, March 29^th,

with The Rhapsody and The Rapture.

Bathroom Monologue: Do Not Call

"It's getting late..."

"Yeah. Want to grab dinner?"

"Actually, I'm pretty tired."

"Coffee? Starbucks is on me."

"I'll see you in class Monday."

"Okay. I'll call you later."

"I didn't give you my number, so if you call, I'll know you're a creep."

"...Damn. Check mate."

"What was that?"

"Have a good weekend! See you in class!"

Bathroom Monologue: Eulogical

Ali was a great man, and everyone here will miss him. He was one of my closest friends. I met him in college, where he was screaming at the Dean of Studies. I was waiting next in line, to get her to sign something. I think he was fighting either about Affirmative Action or letting the Kung Fu Movie Club back into the campus theatre. As soon as Ali stormed out, I ran in and got her to sign the form, and then hustled after him. I bought him dinner at the crappy campus café, just to talk to him and learn how you could have balls of that size. By the end of our nachos, he was screaming at the bar tender for his taste in music. It’s not a big surprise that a heart attack killed him.

So next week, I imagine, Ali will cure heart attacks. It will likely be the first medical innovation based on offensive medicine. Attacking hearts, probably. That’ll be why no one thought of it before.

By the end of the year, he’ll have used his fame to found the world’s largest television network devoted to martial arts movies. It will spur a renaissance in the genre, and he will probably star in one where he fights social injustice with compassion and Capoeira.

Having both won the Nobel Prize for curing heart attacks and won the hearts of the world with his digitally enhanced fists, Ali will ride superstardom to political office. There, he will do what he told us all he’d do for the last twenty years: get those Washington assholes to listen to reason. I’ve had hundreds of political discussions with Ali and I’m still not entirely sure what that means, but I know that as soon as he gets into a room with those Senators that he hated, he will fix the entire system overnight.

His newfound axis of social policy will change the world we live in. He will revitalize our space program. He will, I think, make both Israel and Iran extremely unhappy, and pride himself on it. Surely in Year One of Ali’s reign, he will force Axl Rose to stop ruining Guns ‘N Roses. Given how many impossible problems Ali believed could be solved by people ceasing to be stupid, I imagine he’ll have fixed the world before the midterm elections. We’ll all be so grateful that he’s still with us.

That’s what I’m going to imagine Ali’s future is like tonight. I invite you to join me in a well-earned delusion for a dear friend. It’s not fair that he’s gone, and I think the least we can do is lie about what could have been for a while. Let Ali have his way tonight.

Bathroom Monologue: God of ____, Redux

Ares was the god of war, Aphrodite was the goddess of love, but Apollo was the asshole god who wanted to take seventeen majors in college. Apollo was a very presumptuous god. He was a sun god, even though Helios already did the sun and Zeus did the sky. He was a medicine god, but also a bringer of plagues. He was both a war and sports god, making him a professional and hobbyist ass-kicker. He was the patron deity of shepherds and colonists, making him both God of Protecting Your Stuff and God of Taking Your Stuff. His oracles at Delphi were the most reliable and salient, making him a knowledge god, and from there he became more powerful than the muses at inspiring music and poetry, making him an arts god. And we can't forget that he was randy, though that was more a "god" thing than an "god of" thing. The gods were fucking nuts. And by "fucking nuts" I don't mean "crazy;" I mean if they found a cashew arousing, they'd turn into an ox and find a way to penetrate it.

Happy Birthday Danni! John narrates Pride & Prejudice

Happy birthday to Danielle La Paglia! For her birthday, Danni asked me to record the classic opening chapter of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice. It turns out that I am absolutely awful at this, but if you'd like to hear me be awful at it, you can listen below.

If you listen very carefully, you might hear me arguing with someone about how to pronounce one of the words.

Bathroom Monologue: Give Me Your Daughter

Everyone in the camp knows at this point. This thing, this monster is going keep attacking us every night, killing a new victim until we give it my daughter. I thought you’d get it last night, but this morning there’s a new widow, and I hear people murmuring that he died instead of my girl. That’s not an exchange a father ever wants to hear murmured under breaths while he’s taking a piss. Now I hear you might consider giving Cornelia over.

Understand that you’re not giving that thing my daughter. Give it me instead.

It goes for stragglers. People too near the perimeter, or who don’t think there’s safety in the group. It’s never killed a group, has it? So tonight you build fires, and you set traps, and you sharpen all the fucking pointy sticks you can make. And you get everyone into a single group. You scare them with stories about what’s been happening – what happened to that pardoner who thought he could do better alone last night. You tell them his bloody tale so they get theirs into camp.

And an hour after dusk, when no one’s left the campfire, and everyone’s armed, I’ll start an argument with you. I’ll shove you, and you’ll hit me, and I’ll storm off towards the conifers. I’ll piss on them, and complain to myself, and pray like I’ve been doing, none of it too far from you. I’ll be the only easy prey the monster sees. It’ll have to kill me eventually to make good on its threat.

You wait until it’s eating me. Until I’m screaming in pain. Then you bring everyone down on that thing and you kill it, cut off its head, tear out its lungs, so that it never bothers anyone again.

Then you don’t have to worry about it killing us in the night anymore. Then you just got to worry about raising my little girl.