I was dreaming this morning (because I had already opened my eyes once to check the time and deemed it unacceptable to be awake) that I was running deliveries in this really cool town, with all sorts of historic buildings and interesting streets. I was zipping around in some sort of one person encased Segway. I had to take in out into the country for a delivery. It was getting dark, and the dumb thing had no headlights. I was coming around a corner in a wooded part of the country lane when I ran into this young black guy on a bike who had stopped in the road. I got out and checked on him, and asked him if he was ok as this car comes up from the opposite direction. The man in the car was like "Trevor! You get out of here! She's not gonna fall for this crap. Go home. You aren't even hurt." The kid, Trevor, got up and ran back down the road toward town. The guy in the car explained that Trevor would lurk around that bend in the road and throw his bent up bike under the wheels of passing cars, fall to the ground and pretend to be hurt to scam people out of money. 

Stained Glass Wings

The early 2000's seemed like a rough time for me. I don't remember much. Mostly because I suppressed that bitch like you wouldn't believe. I wrote this in 04. I found it in one of my many journals that I kept. Apparently, I went through a phase in which I wrote my journals like I was talking to someone. It's very strange. I was a bizarre yet creative child.




I'm still a part of yesterday
Asleep but not quite dead

Sustained by all the visions
Flying on wings of glass
soaring through the hail storm
praying I don't fall

I Dream of Nuka-Cola

I fricken love the Fallout series. Here's some fricken Fallout fanfiction!!!!!

She bit down on the leather belt in her mouth. This was gonna hurt. She poured half a bottle of whiskey over the wound in her thigh. It burned like the sun. Black dots swam before her eyes but she managed to keep from fainting. Next came the forceps. She steeled herself and began working at the wound. God, it hurt. She screamed around the belt and kept digging. There! There is was.She grabbed it and pulled it through the hole in her flesh. Just as she thought. 5.56 mm round. Thankfully, not a hollow point. She poured the last of the whiskey over the wound and bandaged it up. She slumped against the smooth, cool wall of the drainage tunnel. Long ago, someone had walled it up to make a shelter, but whoever they were, they were long gone. A single lantern, powered by an old car battery, lit the tunnel. She had thought about moving some of the sandbags that made up the back wall to see if there was anything worth scavenging, but the bullet in her leg and the odd, infrequent skittering behind the sandbag wall quickly dispelled all notions of exploring.

She reached over to the light and unhooked one of the wires. The tunnel became darker than night.

Tomorrow, she thought, I’ll head back to that town I passed. Maybe they have a doctor there. 

She wasn’t about to lose a leg to those god damned raiders. She had dispatched all of them, but even in death she wasn’t about to let them have anything of hers. She worked her jaw, removing the belt from between her teeth. She turned on her pipboy’s light to check the trip wire she had set. Yup, still there. She was sure that if she were able to stand and look around the bend in the pipe, she’d see her mines too. Nothing was sneaking up on her tonight. Not in her condition. She lay down on a stained, dirty mattress. It was better than a couple layers of cardboard on the concrete, but only just. She closed her eyes and drifted to sleep immediately.

Birthday Boy

Reinen came about as a need to balance out Baine. Weirdly enough, they used to be the same character. Reinen is reserved, while Baine is boisterous. Reinen is more thoughtful, while Baine is impulsive. I try to give them separate voices when they speak, but because ultimately it is my voice that speaks through them, occasionally they sound like the same person. Reinen settled into a set personality while I was writing a lot of co-opted anime fanfiction with my friend Hannah, so he has violet eyes and blue hair. Very kawii!      (I'm sorry.... so very sorry for that last sentence...)

This little bit I like to use as a starting point with people who are not familiar with my writing style. It gives them a sense of the worlds I like to write about. And, I feel, that starting them with one of my more mellow characters help acclimate them to what or who they might meet eventually. Sometimes there is variation, like sometimes I put a lot of detail into it, sometimes I sketch it out really fast to water down my style for the other person, or just for time's sake. Here's the basic way it usually goes...

Reinen locked his office door, eager to be home. The day had been long and mostly uneventful. As, uneventful as a day at a hospital could be at any rate. He just wanted to go home. His shoes echoed hollowly in the near empty corridors.

“Good night, Doctor McArta!” The secretary chirped as he passed. He had never been sure of her name. Jenny, or Penny, something childishly sweet like that. He smiled and nodded back to her. “Oh, Happy Birthday, by the way! Have any big plans?” It was his birthday? It was. Thirty-five. He marveled at how time had gotten away from him.

“Uh, no not really. Going home and feeding the dog.” He made a small apologetic smile in her direction.

“Really? A good looking doctor like you, not having plans for his birthday...” She grinned. She was flirting and he knew it, but he didn’t care to acknowledge it. He just raised a parting hand and bid her good night.

He sat in his car for a while after that, staring out across the darkened parking lot. A soft rain had begun to fall. Drops splattering across his windshield at regular intervals. It was his birthday. He suddenly didn’t feel like going home. Maybe a drink. Just one. Then home. Yeah, that would be a good idea. He started his car and rolled out into the deepening night. He knew a place.

Samson’s was small but lively. It had been the same as the day he turned twenty-one and his brother had bought him drinks until he was slouched on the curb outside emptying his stomach of everything he’d ever eaten. That was a long time ago. Tonight it wasn’t busy. Partly because of the rain, partly because it was the middle of the week. The aging, round proprietor waved at him in greeting as he walked in. Reinen took a stool.

Samson lumbered over. He’d never been a small man, but the grace of his movements suggested that most of his bulk was not fat. The man looked like a viking lord of old. Round and sturdy. Blonde hair receding in the front and a full, thick beard cascading down his barrel of a chest. He always had a smile and a story for everyone who walked in.

“Oh, ho! Haven’t seen you here since... well, for a long time anyway. Still the regular, right?” Samson grinned at Reinen. His teeth spoken of dentures. Reinen nodded and Ole Sam deftly poured him a pint from one of the many gleaming taps.

“How you been? Heard you’re doing pretty well for yourself. Can’t say it’d be hard, seeing as you’re a doctor an’ all. Old Greg Cummins said your brother’s wife just had another baby. Good to hear...” Samson rambled on. Reinen sipped his beer, nodding when appropriate, then the inevitable question, “What brings you in tonight?”

“It’s my birthday.” Reinen replied. Sam laughed uproariously.

“Well, then boy! I gotta get you something special! You’re drink’s free. Lemme get Martha to make you something. Martha!” He called through a tiny window behind the bar into the kitchen to the mythic Martha, who Reinen had never really seen, except glimpses through the tiny window. “Make the young doctor something nice!” Samson turned back and continued his artful small talk. Shortly a little paper bowl filled to the brim with fries and sauces appeared in the window. Sam placed the steaming, greasy, dripping concoction in front of Reinen. He rummaged under the counter and emerged with a tiny flag on a toothpick. “Ain’t got any candles...” He said and jammed the flag into the food like an explorer claiming a mountain. Reinen thanked him and stared doubtfully at the fries. His stomach grumbled at him. He knew that it was far from healthy but what the hell, he began picking at the saucy bowl in front of him.

Habilious

I've always loved scifi and fantasy genres. I grew up on Star Trek and played the ever loving crap out of Mass Effect. I've kind of been wanting to contribute my own ideas to a space aged adventure. This one is from a couple of years ago. I like to try to engage my friends in collaborative creative writing, and this was how I started this science fiction story:

Habilious

           Theo sighed and shifted a stack of dockets to the other side of his desk. It was going to be a long day. The shipment of cadmium bound for Hecate had to be scoured after a dock man had discovered Vemiccian weevils in the hold. The freighter, Cassius, was late… again.  Abraham and his lot had been caught trying to smuggle "refugees" for the third time this cycle. And to top it all off, Theo hadn't had a chance to eat his lunch yet. A fine day to retire.

His bad knee creaked as he stood to stare out the window at the ships at their soft dockings. Habilious, what a shit hole. It was the one station in the sector big enough to accommodate a shipping depot worth a damn.  That alone made it a magnet or every type of vermin from every corner of the sector. Thieves,  refugees, disease, and any other dirty, illicit or plain old nasty thing you could think of.

Theo had no sympathy for the poor sap the bureaucracy had lined up to take over his position. Being shipping director wasn't a hard job by any means. It was dealing with the miscreants that made Theo glad to be going. A few of the dock men had tried to throw him a going away party, but he would have none of that sort of foolishness. Not when there was shit to do.

He sighed again. Habilious was a shit hole. There was no arguing that, but it had been his home for the last 25 cycles. Tomorrow he would climb aboard one of those rusty tin cans and head back to… "To what?" He mumbled to himself  "To smog, war and disease?" Habilious may be the unwashed back-end of forever but at least on that chunk of floating refuse he wouldn't have to worry about some ass hole politician dropping a damn Nuke on his head.

Theo rubbed his eyes wearily. It was going to be a long day indeed.

Mirages

Baine is a character I write about a lot. He's a remnant of all my high school angst and everything I thought I wanted in a potential life mate. He formed as a way of expressing what I admired in others and would look for in someone I thought, at the time, I would want to date. As he evolved, he became more and more a reflection of myself and my inner struggles. It's kind of weird to think that I would personify myself as a male, but that's just how it came to be. He has gone through many transformations before settling into a character I felt had become full realized. He used to be Jason, then Reinen, then Reinen became a different character, and Baine settled in. It's kind of hard to explain....
 Anyway, here's the start for an RP that I made that was inspired by the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. This one, I started in 203? I think? I've always had an odd fondness for westerns...




Baine stared out across the hard-pan. His waterskin dragged behind him in the dust, empty and useless. Heat danced across the horizon. How long had it been since the  Holland Gang had driven him out onto the dead lake, dumping him, bound hand and foot, to die like a bug in an oven? He couldn’t tell. He wiped sweat from brow and tugged his battered hat lower onto his head. The sun was too hot.

“This is it..” he said to himself. His voice little more than a husky growl. “I’m gonna bite the big one out here. Tell momma I love her and all that” He chuckled to himself. It was a  mirthless sound. He smiled (grimace) as the hard-pan suddenly rushed up to meet him. He was momentarily baffled by the grit on his face. His mind told him to get up, to keep moving forward. “But why...” the church steeple that swam in the heat-glamour was nothing but one of those “mi-rajes” he heard about from old cowboys and educated eastern folk. So must those bells. Church bells. He closed his eyes. Maybe they were the bells  of heaven. He laughed again. If he was going to heaven..

I had a dream last night. I was on an adventure with my friend Jake. We were trying to make it through the night, for whatever reason and someone said to us "go to the light, the light of healing that shines in the sky" meaning the sun, but Jake was like "Yes, I see it" and started walking towards the McDonald's sign. Jake, no! XD

More Zero Hour Found!!!

Yo! I knew I had more than just that! I found an alternate start that's a lot more detailed, but definitely takes place in Washington DC and I'm not sure I like that. I will do my best to try to find more notes and alternate scenes and pull them all together in a mega post.

Zero Hour Chapter 2

       Grace sprinted as fast as she could down the nearest alley. Before she knew what was going on  she was several blocks away from the Presidential Palace. Apparently, her body didn't care if she still wanted to watch or not, and hauled her right out of there. An gigantic armored vehicle rumbled by on the avenue, probably toward the Palace, which was the exact opposite way she was going to go. People rushed about in every direction in panic. It was understandable, considering the comfortable lives they had been living had suddenly imploded in a hurricane of red coats.
She could hear the faint whirring of helicopter blades and watched as four sleek black helicopters rose into the sky. Many on the street stopped and stared after them, too. It was a clear sign that whatever coup had just taken place was a success.

Now what?
 
A woman down the street from her collapsed in sobbing. Grace decided that she wasn't going to follow suite and kept hurrying along away from the Palace.



There's a bit more, but it's very convoluted. I can't even figure out what I was meaning by half of it. It happens a lot. I know there was supposed to be something about Grace meeting the resisters, having their hideout raided and almost drowning, she somehow gets captured, tortured and turned into weapon, and only escapes after setting literally everything on fire. I kind of liked the idea of her being killed, but also reborn from both fire and water. I wanted to play with the symbology of water and fire, where the Usurper was the fire that burns everything away, and Grace is the water that returns life to the ashen wastes. I kind wish I had written down more, even if it was just notes.

Me:

Cursedly aware of my own inability to focus on something for more than ten minutes at a time...

Clockwork

I had this idea for a little bit about revisiting the Pinocchio story, and make it about a clever young clock maker who builds an automaton. I don't remember exactly what I wished to accomplish with it. Something along the lines of a Tin Man kind of story. The automaton learns to love and saves the clock maker through the power of friendship or something. Then it got kind of dark, and the ideas became more about the clock maker fashioning himself an automaton companion to spend his life with, but ends up abandoning it when a witch curses him, because he won't sell her the automaton. He falls into a zombie servant kind of curse to serve the witch for the rest of his life and the automaton is abandoned to rust, because it doesn't understand why it was built and it was powerless to save it's maker. I don't really know any more. It's been too long. But here's Two different intros I tried out:

On a cliff by the sea (in retrospect, an awful place for a clock maker) stood a well built house. In this house lived a clever young clock maker. His name was Ivan and he could make anything you could imagine with cogs and springs. He made clocks for anyone who would buy them, He also made toys for children and adults alike. He once built a clock for the mayor that chimed every hour. And at six and twelve, it would put on a tiny, mechanical play. Ivan loved his work but was very lonely in his house by the sea.... 

Ivan sighed. He would never finish the Mayor's clock on time unless he worked all night again. He pushed his work spectacle up his nose and went back to fitting the minuscule gears into the tiny figures that would pop out of the clock every few hours.

"It will be an obnoxious piece, that's for sure," he muttered to himself. The Mayor had commissioned a huge, flashy piece, to put on an intricate, mechanized skit at six and twelve, and no bell or whistle was too much... 

"Never isn't ever as long
as you think it is"

OK, well, that's new

I guess people actually read my stuff now. Oh boy. Prepare your anuses for more shitty writing. Don't judge me!

Fragment 2

Sitting benieth the dead tree
Spinning songs of smoke and dreams
the moon sets in the east
and the road home is oh so very short

Booked!!

A few years ago I kept a sort of idea journal, a bit like what I'm doing now with this blog, except that I carried it in my bag and whenever I had a little piece of poetry, or a whole story I wanted to tell, I'd write it down, time stamp and date it. For a long time, I thought I had lost it. Turns out, it was just packed away from one of the like five times I've moved since I lost track of it. Maybe if I try really hard and concentrate on these abandoned stories, I might find motivation to write new stuff again...

Forgetting

Every know and then something tickles my memory. It's like I should remember something, but I can't quite figure out what. I guess I wrote this in like 2005 as a sort of testament to that kind of frustration.

I sing a song at the end of the day
the tune is familiar
the words stay away
I search for the rest
but it's gone in an instant
Why won't it come to me?

I almost catch it but it slips away
Where did it come from?
Why won't it stay?
Reaching through cobwebs
that clutter my mind
Why won't it come to me?

Snatches and snipets
it's here then it's gone
Why won't it come to me?
Why do I feel that my life is this song?
Why won't it come to me?

Rascally Jones

I can't really defend this one....
It's super cute though.


There once was a weasel, a rascally weasel
a weasel named Rascally Jones
he stole and he theft
and was hardly bereft
and ended each day with a smile

Oh what a weasel, that rascally weasel
that weasel named Rascally Jones
a con and a crook
hearts and coins, he took
the rascally Rascally Jones.

Fragment 1

I'll leave a light on
to lead you home
through the darkest night
and the hardest storm

Peacock

Dang! I had a whole notebook dedicated to awful poetry. Some of it has dates, some of them have titles, some aren't half bad. I'll post some of the not-so-cringe-worthy poems. Like this one:

You're so beautiful
In the mirror, in the streets
From your gorgeous head
to your perfect feet
yet, you're never good enough
and you go through so much pain
to be the perfect beauty
but you're never you again

The mirror lies
the powders conceal
a beautiful mask
and the sadness you feel
but you're the only one
who sees the ugliness inside
so you drive yourself insane
trying so hard to hide

Zero Hour

I don't remember exactly what prompted my wanting to write about a young, female rebel leader back in... looks like 2006? I know some of it had to do with a couple of weird dreams I had had around that time. I guess the universe was crying out for role models for young ladies because I think that was about the same time Hunger Games came out. I was all about the scifi during this period, and had read the absolute crap out of Maximum Drive. I've always been fond of solid female leads. I guess this was part of my need to feel important. I was going through an epic fuck ton of average teen girl crap, and trying to find meaning in my life. I had always kind of felt that I needed to be important somehow and that the endless stretch of featureless time ahead of me couldn't possibly be my destiny. I was a hero or a space princess secreted away on Earth or something other than this meager speck of flesh crawling around on a giant, watery dirt ball fly through space. I'm still kind of struggling with that on some levels, but adult apathy has dulled some of that and has taken the edge off the existential break downs I occasionally still get. Anyway, here's this little story I tried to make sense of. I will reiterate, I didn't read Hunger Games until 2012 when the first movie came out. I read it before I saw the movie so I'd know what was going on, because the trailers looked hella rad. It's interesting how themes kind of permeate everything...

Grace watched people pass her as she rested her feet for a moment. Many were tourists, taking in the sights and sounds of the Capital. Some wore suits and carried brief cases, scurrying to one meeting or another. Others just lived, not doing much of anything but doing so much more than the rest of them. Grace counted herself among those few. She felt that she was one of them for about three months now, when she could finally shed the chains of her old life and breath again.
She sighed and let her head fall back to revel in the decadence of the early spring sun. She shook out the dark curtain of her hair, feeling free at last. Mother would miss her, but that would always be expected with mothers. She scoffed at that thought.
"Yes," she said to herself. Mother would miss her little scapegoat, wouldn't she...
Thinking of her mother fanned the smoldering ember in the back of her mind. If she left it linger too long, it would blossom into anger and ruin a particularly lovely day. Grace doused the ember in the cool, quenching memory of the feeling of freedom she had felt when she had stepped off the train and onto the cobbles of the Capital three months ago.
But the mean little ember wouldn't be quenched. It reminded her that Mother always found her, and that her darling brother and beloved sister would stand beside her and look lovingly away as punishment was brought down upon her.

A bird pecked at a crumb nearly under her toes. The bird distracted her enough to break her from her reasons for leaving and remind her that the day was moving along without her. She'd have to get going if she want to see any more of the capital.

The Capital was a maze of gleaming marble. Every intersection of broad avenues was punctured with a fountain or monument of some kind. The domes and colored glass glittered like jewels in alabaster settings.
Near the Presidential Palace several groups of protesters gathered and chanted and sung. She observed them from across the plaza at the gates of the palace. Nearby, three men in black stood, glancing about. She heard one of them say something 
".... in just a few minutes...."
What? She studied them cautiously. Two of the men engaged in some sort of whispered dispute, but the third, scanning the crowds, caught her stare. He smiled. It was the kind of smile a cat might give a mouse before pouncing. The kind of smile a bomb might make before it explodes...

RUN! RUN RIGHT NOW!! Her mind screamed at her. She had to get as far away as fast as she could before the man stopped smiling at her. She could see them now. Groups of twos and threes in coats too heavy for the warm spring day standing tensely among the protesters. Of course they'd wear that. They have guns.
Some of the others in the plaza began to notice the pockets of calm among them. 

Three black helicopters swooped out of the sky. They speed low and fast straight toward the Presidential Palace. They gleamed like sharks in the sky. They landed, almost delicately on the pristine grass of the palace lawn behind the tall wrought iron fence. The calm people watched the helicopters intensely. 
Men leapt from the hovering crafts and advanced on the Palace. They all wore the same red, crisp jacket. As the men advanced, those in the crowd shed their coats, revealing the same red jacket. They drew their weapons. Some herded the protesters out of the plaza while the rest formed up. 

She needed to run, she had to get out of there, but what was unfolding in front of her was far too important to not witness...
Police and Presidential Guards began to make their defense on the lawn. The gun fire was much louder than Grace had anticipated. Her senses reacted before she knew what was going on. She found herself taking cover behind a stone trash bin. 
Bodies began to fall to the ground and yet another hovering, metal contraption roared into the plaza from the sky. This helicopter was black with red markings along the body and tail. It landed behind the red men. Several more red men clamored out. The last one descended with an eerie calm. His jacket was much longer, and he wore shining black boots. He bore some sort of insignia on the breast of his coat.  
Something exploded, ripping the fence apart like paper. The men in the plaza rushed through the breach. She had to get to safety, but this was going to be history...
The red man in the long coat swept his gaze approvingly over the plaza. Grace hoped he wouldn't see her, but his victorious, burning amber gaze found her wide, pale eyes. His eyes quickly swept past her, but in that brief moment of contact, she swore he had learned everything about her.
The battle was being won by the red men, and they soon overwhelmed the Presidential Guard. The man in the long coat walked calmly between the gun fire and lead his men toward the Palace. As Grace watched his coat tails flutter through the doors, hanging drunkenly on blasted hinges, she was filled with an unreasonable hatred for that man in the red coat. She wanted to hurl the stone bin right at his head. She nearly missed noticing the remaining Red Men turning back toward the plaza. They opened fire on the bystanders still lingering on the edges of the plaza, like she had.




More in Chapter 2

A beautiful day

Wednesday, December 14

This was from 2005, I was a Sophomore in high school. I thought I was edgy. Being emo wasn't a thing yet, really. I kept a lot of daily journals during high school. I'm not sure why I don't do that any more. Any way, here's an excerpt. I'm using the other three girls' intitials. Anyway.  Forgive me...

"In psychology, KK and AE passed a note thing back and forth with SO and I. The first question on the sheet (I guess it was the class work for the day) today was  'it's a beautiful day when...' and they said stuff about sunshine and being naked in it. I said:
 '... a cold wind blows from the east and the clouds lay suffocatingly low in a bleak grey sky. Flocks of ravens roost in the branches of the naked trees who stretch their black limbs to the oppressive sky. A frozen rain falls and the earth sings a song of death while she prepares herself for the ravages of winter...
or when I'm home by myself doing whatever the hell I want!'

AE was like, 'it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood', and I'm like,' .... said Edgar Allen Poe!'"

God damn, that's some edgy shit.

Let's begin

Wednesday, November 8

I'm assuming this was in 2006, this particular Wednesday. I really don't have a lot of context for this one. I figured it'd be a good jumping off point.

I leave pieces of myself in the pages that I write
By chance, something I pen may catch someone's eye
and a part of my mind will live on in someone else
so that my dreams of immortality may one day come true.

Preface

For a while now I've been writing down little snippets of things rolling around in my head. I used to carry a journal with me and write everything down. I've kind of grown out of it, I guess, but I still have these little pieces laying around. Some are a good fifteen years old, from when I was but a wee child in middle school, and some are from more recent times. I'll do my best to spare you the awful emo poetry I used to write, but I will do what I can to preserve exactly what I wrote in all it's cringe-worthy glory. Edits will happen, and many fragments will be introduced with a bit of context, like how old I was, when I originally wrote it, and why I wrote it in the first place. There is no way I could possibly put it all down chronologically without pulling out literally everything I still have and laying it all out, which, of course would be next to impossible for me. Occasionally, I will add fresh produce, but for the most part, I just want to document some of the better things I've written and some of the things that hold a lot of sentimental value to me, you know, just in case of like a fire or flood or whatever.... not that I think it is going to happen, but just in case.

Well, here it goes, I guess....