n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your ownāpopulated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited crazinessāan epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that youāll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
about you: iām a pikachu and shantotto enthusiast, playing dissidia nt 24/7. i just dove deep into five fiction festivals that might cost me 75,000 words at the end of this year. also, coding and writing are my pashun?
favourite harry potter char: hermione granger.
favourite plots: oh, angst. and darker side of marauders for sure! the tragedies that come with the brewing war, iām living for such tropes.
personal goals for the site: i wonāt be too ambitious, iād like to develop my character and stay as long as it lasts!
Iām talking about compassion. Compassion means āto suffer withā: to suffer because someone else is suffering, to endure with the other, or in place of the other.
You have no idea what that even means.
Margarita Karapanou, tr. by Karen Emmerich, from āRien ne va Plus,ā
like this: send the pain down below. incisor mouth. stalactite teeth. a tongue that does not praise the gods. in heaven. in hell. on earth. on this forgotten nebula crafted out of skyscrapers, its streets veined along the line of its bodied intents. silt of its stomach speaks of incessant maladies, swelling in europolis like the foreboding downpour. acid rain. vitriol lies. he came, he saw. he conquered.
a smoke-stained tune that rippled at the balcony of a mansion in magatama. inquired himself, if the home of his ancestors would taste like this against his palate. the artifices were pungent, coloring his insides with decapitated splatters. it was plastic; couldāve fooled the boy, but he knew that these strangers did not chant prayers. there were no gods residing among the faux galaxies, each millimeter of them expanding into territories of the atheists. what is a god to a non-believer?
there was a kanji ( ē„ ) at the tourniquet of the house that he never learned the meaning of, apart from the fact that it was derived from his name. it was forgotten, archaic. like ryujin, like him. father wore this like gauze around his knuckles, metaphorical walls against his fists. sometimes, ordained fingers, with his fingernails filthied from the entropy as foretold by the people whose words carried too many beasts. father contained the weight of the world on his globed shoulders, scavenging lives for spines that did not straighten. and he was a genius, even as a little boy, tracing the mementos of lumbar punctures down his fatherās weary eyes and crinkled smiles. he did not believe in the lies the vultures whispered. father was a liar.
mother was an addict. the pale of her skin reminded him of sandpaper reveries, and she would stroke his face when she was not inebriated, tremors reverberating in her withering organs. she was sick. he did not know of what. but. viscera of her being too translucent. there was death written everywhere in the fracture of her syllables. she spoke in riddles. he did not return in answer. it did not make sense ā someone who was alive would not proceed for personal manslaughter without any good reason. later on in life, he discovered that it was called suicide. but was it?
divinity was something to unlearn, undo. knot by knot. ridge by ridge. after motherās funeral, he washed his mouth three times. his hands, ten. he called it a suicide.
ēćē²ę.
he is a body martyred from baptismal waters, with their weight drenching his clothes, clinging to his skin. or perhaps, their weight soaking his skin. seeping, sleeping in the pores, with the mechanism of a forgotten religion ticking like a clockwork in the background. heās done believing, heās done devoting. thereās a form of ennui blooming against the back of his mind as he recalls what it tasted like to trust, and then, and then, and then, what it tasted like to lie. he likes the latter better. perhaps itās the subdued peroxide that litters his mouth, rinsing it off the dissidents imprisoned among his tooth gaps. either way, thereās no hope in beliefs. no shrine in the wild, as they all once said.
what is a god to a non-believer? naught, it all comes down to zero sum.
father is riveting ennui that always expects him to revert to the boy he once was. reminds him of this: the culture of this oxblood is a fate determined by the corporation. he would smile, and nod. of course it is, of course it is. he has climbed to the pyramid of fallacies, too high in the sun for his father to reach. untruth: he grew up in the norms, following each rule by the pints. in this colossus of hierarchies decided on the rationed bloodlines, his paths were written for him way before his birth. and father has always been a tool, but he isnāt.
forked roads led him here, but he paved the second himself. in here, in the construct of mechanism that reaps for the rich, from the poor, he unstitches his ribcage one by one, liberating himself of the social confines that became the insignia to the wati corporate. at this height, he is invisible. and so, exploits it to the last drop. he is an addict. an apple does not fall far from its tree, and he is the rotten fruit shed from his motherās last breath. except he does not down for additives, he kills. slowly, softly. this is the art of becoming.
ē ē²č .
like the parasite that he is, he clings onto the intended victims, descending drought onto their thieved veins. blackmails become common normality; he likes listening to them writhe, the stench of fear bleeding into their voice through the encrypted calls. his own is cool, smoothened into a flatline. heās heard of his victims, casualties. hung like chandeliers, swinging gently against the morning breeze. no amount of work would be able to pay off debts for the precarious bionics he sold them. effortless balances at first, enticing promises after.
his designs are branded with corruption, embedded into each like how he is. calls himself with the kanji ā jin ā for a long time. he is a god. itās not a game anymore; he is made into a god in this epoch of technologies. thereās no signed contract like how he would do it in wati; instead, thereās a stamp of hushed tones. he pushes his limits, with far too much detachment added to his emotions. psychopathy, many would call it, but is he when he feels vicariously, distilling trepidation into his own satisfaction? he would agree to disagree, but nods anyway when it comes to the therapistās words. brands him with a plea of insanity; but is he?
therapies, after all, are afforded to show the latest brand of old money.
this holocene rips into an emptied vessel of his body, draining memoirs siphoned out of his fatherās untruths. he has become like his old man, if not twelve times worse. but what difference that it makes, apart from the fact that his father falls on his knees, bowing to the gods that do not listen? he, instead, turns the cogs for himself, ascending into the graffitied edges of lethal theologies. he is their god, all these lonely limbs with their victimized dreams. looks at them without pity, knowing too well that humans are driven by the things that scare them. heās doing them a favor by becoming one. it is not a murder when the deaths are ruled as suicide, the retrieval of his bionics done by the cleaners he paid a bit too much.
and at the end of this street, there will be a man that sinks into the capillaries of the skiesā horizons, his hood drawn as he listens to the recorders that bloom in secrets. named after a god, so a good he becomes. in your wildfires, you will remember him, and pray that he wonāt eat you alive with the phantom hands that you donāt remember having, and you donāt remember not having.
Full offense but your writing style is for you and nobody else. Use the words you want to use; play with language, experiment, use said, use adverbs, use āunrealisticā writing patterns, slap words you donāt even know are words on the page. Language is a sandbox and you, as the author, are at liberty to shape it however you wish. Build castles. Build a hovel. Build a mountain on a mountain or make a tiny cottage on a hill. Whatever it is you want to do. Write.
Yes, I do teach creative writing: your opening scene
The opening scene is the most important piece of your novel. This scene determines whether your reader is pulled in or puts the book down. Here are some important doās and donāts.
DO write it as a scene, not a data dump. You may have a fantastic premise, a marvelous alternate history or post-apocalyptic world or magical realism to die for, but if you donāt engage your reader in an actual scene, you will bore them.
DO write a scene that immediately introduces a character that the reader can root for. Yes, I know Stephen King has had great success introducing victims that are then shortly afterward killed off. Thatās a horror trope and we expect it. But if you are caught up in world-building and havenāt dreamed your way into a character who is worth following through 100,000 words of writing, your story is pointless. I have read many pieces of fiction by would-be writers who canāt grasp this essential concept, and without exception, they fail to engage the reader.
DO introduce the stakes right away. In case thatās a challenge that needs some exposition to develop, create some immediate stakes (a life threat works) that keep the tension high and the reader engaged until you can lay out the larger stakes.
DO begin in medias res, which meansĀ āin the middle of things.ā Most beginning fiction writers make the mistake of starting too early in the plot. Meet the monster on page 1.Ā
DONāT include a flashback in the first chapter. Work on a scene, which means time is NOT compressed. It should include dialog, action, description, setting, and interior monolog. Keep everything happening within that scene for at least the first chapter. You can bring in a flashback in Chapter Three.
DONāT shift points of view within a single chapter. Let the reader establish a strong bond of interest (even if itās with a POV villain) over the course of a whole chapter.
DONāT open the story with your character waking up unless itās because sheās got a gun in her face (or a knife to her throat ā you get what I mean). We donāt need to follow a character through their mundane daily routine.Ā
DONāT be coy. Beginning writers often have this idea that they need to hold back on revealing all their secrets ā whatās in the box, whoās behind the curtain, where theyāre going next, etc. Their well-meant plan is to slowly reveal all this over several chapters. Trust me on this one: tell your readers instead of keeping it a mystery. You WILL come up with more secrets to reveal. Your imagination is that good. Spill it now, and allow that revelation to add to the excitement.
āRecently, my son said to me after seeing a ballet on television: āItās beautiful, but I donāt like it.ā And I thought, Are many grown-ups capable of such a distinction? Itās beautiful, but I donāt like it. Usually, our grown-up thinking is more along the lines of: I donāt like it, so itās not beautiful. What would it mean to separate those two impressions for art making and for art criticism?ā
ā ā59. itās beautiful, but I donāt like itā fromĀ 100 essays I donāt have time to write: on umbrellas and sword fights, parades and dogs, fire alarms, children, and theater, sarah ruhlĀ
trigger warning: parental death, guns and other weapons, drowning, gore, body horror, mental illnesses, suicide.
people talk too much in metrics: this is a pint of untruths, spilling glasses of diluted honesty. siphoned blood from the freshly severed veins. in this finality, liminality, clauses donāt matter anymore when you cannot muster pleas of help because of your sinking throat. itās like the ocean, but it comes in a color so polluted it reminds everyone of that one homily about the inferno. youāre drowning, drowned. not in water, but flames. all that there is becomes the culture of epistemology, as accompanied by your accrued scar tissues. welcome to mayhem of a mind, soul. existence is a form of option.
Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā ā½ / ā¢ / ā³
smells like soft rains, together with a smoked cigarette with dying ember after previously billowing in all its tacit glory. thereās something high about the petrichor that strikes in the gentle hour, and it speaks volumes about how he hasnāt always been playing a role in this strife-ridden desert. from afar, his mind pictures a crevasse that halves the sand dunes, assuming that thereās another bout of monstrosity contained within the depth of its stomach. he fathoms, he always does. thatās what he does best, as he sits behind the desk, top full with foliage of papers prescribed in opposition to peace.
at the end of the day, peace is another illusory, fleeting thought that he would entertain every now and then for cathartic purposes. the truth, however, lies in how much he can muster self-imposed ideologies to craft yet another epitome of art. for some, abomination fits better. it depends on whose palate it is under, after all. he doesnāt create anything if it isnāt ambiguity, standing in the grey area which shades grow darker by the day. the conscious of his doesnāt always want to admit this, justification that comes in filters. yet, it is another day to propose the conception of warfare chronologies.
Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā ā½ / ā¢ / ā³
he was birthed in the year of another bloodshed, and that corrupted his insides. carbon-dated back in the middle of bullet downpours, he has never once doubted why he held the guns so early in his childhood. papa spent more time carving holes in mamaās sternum, piece by piece peeling layers of her skin, but when papa was home, he taught atticus how to alter his innocence for violence. in retrospect, heād say he does not comprehend the mechanism of a merchant owning a plethora of firearms in his basement, but alas. papa was an enthusiast, he would say, but he knows papa was so much more than that. self-indulgence in patriarchal hands of synthesized delight did not escape a man with such grandiose.
mama passed three days before his tenth birthday. there wasnāt a tear shed. he could not understand the woman who had been a ghost a long time before she died. papa held his hand in the funeral, all black with the anchoring earth scent. mama became one with the landfill, at last. her neuroses brought her to the demise, but what could a son do besides blaming her for the carried askew genes? he did not ask to be born from that womb, yet here he is, sharing the same shade of distorted red. if heād ever been coherent enough in all these psychological tests, heād pinpoint the mistake with ease.
the sublimation of insanity did not come with the same sense of seamlessness, however. heād say his upbringing hardened him, but wouldnāt that be a blatant lie? he was shaped of cartographic movements, from city to city, sometimes small towns, never making a solid friend. his only company was a nanny that spoke in teething riddles. she was too old for her age, mentally tilted. reminiscent of mama, really. she did not bat an eye on how that a fourteen-year-old would retrieve that battered gun from his fatherās drawer, filling the cartridge with trained hands.Ā
now, he would say that he inherits papaās intelligence and mamaās abstinence. impossibility was a ruse for papa, just how it was with sanity for mama. yet, papa was done with him at sixteen. he was housed in a private schoolās dorm, teaching him how to behave in ways subscribed with methods and manners that he learned were nothing if not formalities. in these ripe years, too, he discovered love cultivated towards scientific means. he was a quiet student, with a superficial charm that he exploited to a good extent. discarding friends had always been a habit. gone in the midst of parties to read poetries, he became the quixotic essence of a model student enrolled in an ivy league university.
Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā ā½ / ā¢ / ā³
in all the interviews that heād gone through with the curious mouths, he would always say that all the adolescent tales were tedious. heād speak of it anyway, utterance commonly deprived of monotony. of course, heād omit parts. whatās the purpose of telling a story that wouldnāt contribute to his aims? back to stage one, marked with the phase of how he hailed from a loving, innocuously wealthy family of three. often, heād stub the bottom of his smoke in an integrated pause, before telling the part where an illness took away his mother from the family. the father that cared too much, bringing atticus away with him to evade the pervading memories. trips after trips, seeing cities in different lights.
how heād ended up within the crux of the facility, only he knows the motives behind it: perhaps a tad of wishes to play god, to some extent that can be justified by the ripples of excuses. he doesnāt say much, most of the time. itās a classic case of introversion, if he can say so himself. judgments pass him by in liminal thoughts, mind often cluttered with how he can sear wounds into the expanse of this cryptic world. the anathema of it all finds itself in the nooks of creative abilities to merge between weapons and substances. he chases after the horizon in the form of crushed ethics, manifesting his narcissism in a project that submerged its feet into all the wrong places.
he does not understand a life that does not proffer a challenge.
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