Has It Been So Long?

Almost a year since my last post? Dear Lord. I apologize. School has been interesting this past year and I've been busy. Anyway, I intend to attack this blog with renewed zeal now that summer is coming back around. Juli and I are moving in a couple weeks, so there will be a lull while we get settled in, but anticipate great things in the future for this blog!

Take care, see you soon.

Summertime!

It's become seemingly customary to open my postings with an apology about how I haven't been on recently; I do apologize about not being able to keep up, but now school's over. Despite a couple of nail-biting weeks and several exams, I'm still here, and on the road to recovery!

I've finished my post-apocalyptic and Flannery O'Connor classes. Both went well enough, and the last book we read for Comparative Lit was Life and Times of Michael K. I can't say I found it particularly post-apocalyptic, but it stuck to the themes of humanity in the face of overwhelming obstacles, which was more or less the point of the class.

But enough about school. Summer's here and with it comes plenty of time for new reading and writing! I picked up a few great books for my summer reading list, and grabbed a couple others as a spur-of-the-moment decision. That said, the following books are on my list thus far:

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Collected Fiction by Jorge Luis Borges
Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

If you can pronounce that last author's name, it's about as difficult as his reading gets, which isn't a bad thing at all. I started Infinite Jest a couple weeks ago, but I need something a bit lighter to wind down from all my school reading. So I'm trying Memories of the Future, which is a collection of surrealist short stories written in 1920s Russia. I've only read one of the handful of short stories and novellas thus far, but Krzhizhanovsky's writing style is absolutely engrossing, even in translation. He reflects a lot of what I enjoy of the little Borges and Kafka I've read, though Krzhizhanovsky wrote well before Borges and only read Kafka at the end of his own literary career. Give it a look if you come across it; it's worth it.

As far as writing, I'm still wandering around with that pile of ideas in my head. Now that school's out I hope to dedicate a lot more time to getting some writing done. I'm toying with a sci-fi piece that is a bit difficult to describe as it isn't quite put together yet.

I'm heading to a wedding in California next week, but if all goes as I hope it does I'll be around a lot more often between now and September. Then I start a fifteen credit semester. Hoo boy.

Anyway, hope your summer goes well, and keep an ear to the ground!

Spring Cleaning

So I was rummaging through my old stories on my computer. Really, they're more like fragments that I just write as they come to me. One day they may be cohesive pieces that belnd together, but right now they've got a real Magnolia meets Waking Life kind of feel in that they're just snippets of life from different people. Anyway, I came across a piece I wrote back in January that I honestly more or less forgot about. So here it is.

She came in from the cold, her jacket seemingly alive with the scent of new fallen snow. All at once he was reminded of a time when he used to sit in front of his old television. Just as he turned on the tube there would be a characteristic clicking noise and a subtle crackling as the dust on the tube became polarized by the static electricity. He would run the back of his hand across the screen, less than an inch away from the glass. When he pulled back his hand it was saturated with the oddest scent; so fresh and yet musty. The smell invaded his nostrils, rejuvenating his senses. There was little in the world that compared to this scent, but there was snow.

So her jacket gave off tufts of this static smell, gently wafting off her with every minute turn of the shoulders or shivering sigh. He watched her and smiled at how truly beautiful she seemed, cheeks flushed with color against the chilly air outside. Her glasses fogged up slightly and she crinkled her nose in that cute way she usually feigned frustration, her eyes beading together as her eyebrows furrowed, the hint of a smile evident on her face. He chuckled slightly, getting up from the couch to take her coat.

"Work was hell today. Absolutely unbelievable. God, I wan--"

She stopped her sentence short. They both knew what she was going to say and, though she knew it was better for her, she still cast accusatory glances his way whenever she came home from a particularly stressful day, knowing how he would react to the faint scent of nicotine sloughing off her short black hair. She loved him, really. From time to time she just missed the woman she used to be.

"So work was tough, then?" he asked after a brief silence during which resentment and forbidding emotions hung in the air.

"Yeah." For a moment she stood in the doorway, not wanting to make eye contact with him. It was a childish tactic, but it got the job done. Starting back to life, she held her arms and rubbed them, shivering. With measured detachment, sure to strike just the right nerve of guilt, she said "I'm going to take a bath." She then disappeared into the bedroom, flakes of melting snow falling imperceptibly from her clothes, patterning the carpet like tears.

So there's that. But I'm not here to rest on the laurels of stuff I wrote a long time ago. That short piece I promised in my last post is here. It's post-apocalyptic, and it came from a writing prompt that I enjoyed. So here's this, too. I tried to write a Flannery O'Connor-esque ending to the piece, but it seems forced. I'm going to have to start polishing pieces before I post them.

They hadn't seen light in days. They traveled the flooded catacombs in darkness, eyes straining for the slightest sign of movement. Rats swam past like greasy fish, claws occasionally scratching against the boat. The scratches were amplified by the otherwise impenetrable silence, bounding and increasing in intensity until becoming a dull roar hidden far beyond them, a great beast lurking just out of sight, waiting.

Eric had been quiet since The Flare-Up. He had been at choir practice. Claire was watching him, smiling at the angelic voice she could discern from the wave of singers in a way only siblings can. The slow, melodic piece was building to its crescendo, and in the top corner of the bleachers Eric was preparing to be led into his solo. Claire remembered feeling pride as Eric smiled, squaring his shoulders and raising his songbook. Then the church burst into flames.

There was no lingering smoke, no candle left conspicuously close to any of the ancient yellowing drapes. The flames just appeared, as if a switch had been flipped. The immense Gothic pipe organ behind the choir burned, air whistling through the pipes in unholy wails which intermingled with those of the panicked choir. Robes spontaneously combusted, engulfing the singers in flames as they blindly stumbled for an exit. Eric stood mortified as his world was quickly turning to ash. Claire moved to grab him.

"Come ON, Eric! We need to get out!"

The flames licked the tears from Eric's unblinking face, leaving salty trails down his cheeks as Claire half-dragged him through the rapidly deteriorating church, the wails of their fellow churchgoers echoing behind them.

Claire and Eric staggered to the exit, coughing ash from their lungs. They checked that the other was okay, then looked out on the city. Eric gasped.

The entire city was ablaze. Every building was engulfed in hellish fire, every car a rolling fireball. People were running through the streets with their burning clothes falling away from them like insect skins, only to find their very flesh on fire. From Eric and Claire's perspectives, they almost seemed like ants. Their collective wails of torment, with the subsequent collapse of the church behind them, sent Eric into a catatonic state from which he had yet to recover.

Claire knew Eric had taken a break when the rowing got substantially more difficult. She didn't want him to know just how scared she was that they were stuck down here, no real way of finding their way back to the surface (and no real reason to, either). Every trace of civilization was charred away. Not a house, not a building, not a single mailbox was now anything more than a handful of ash waiting to be tossed upon the wind.

Nature had not been harmed, though. Despite the raging inferno all around it, there wasn't a singed blade of grass or browned leaf in the city. Perhaps this had been judgement, Claire thought to herself. Perhaps we're not alone. Maybe only the pure were saved, and God kept the world as a new Eden. After all, He only promised never again to purge the world with a flood.

A small rectangle of light directly ahead snapped Claire from this reverie. They had made their way back to land. Claire smiled. "See Eric," she said, "I told you we'd be fine."

She turned to smile at him, but as soon as she did she gasped, stifling a scream in her throat. Suddenly it was clear why Eric stopped rowing with such noise, dropping the oar against the canoe with what Claire mistook as frustration. She understood why she hadn't heard him move in hours.

A fat wet rat glared at Claire through one of Eric's pale white eye sockets, its pink tail curling out of his lipless mouth. Eric's face had been completely eaten away.

Claire screamed, a peal of terror that echoed back into the catacombs, doubling and tripling on itself, snowballing away into the distance, then striking a wall and returning, not one scream now but dozens, barreling back up the watery corridors like cerberi, their barks endless and maniacal laughter.

So that's where I am right now. I'll be getting more posted in the weeks to come. I bought a collection of essays by Flannery O'Connor, so I'll be employing more of the Southern Gothic style into my pieces, to be sure. Stick around!

...

It's been a month. Sorry for not being around at all; school's kicking into high gear and the blog's fallen on the back burner. I'm still writing. My penance will be to post my newest attempt at a short short story I wrote for a prompt I found online. It's post-apocalyptic (of course) but I think it's also got some real influence from Flannery O'Connor, at least in the last few sentences. I'm drawing on her writing style a lot--in case you've forgotten I'm taking a class that studies her works exclusively--and when I start reading her collected nonfiction in the coming weeks I'm sure I'll be employing advice she dispenses.

My novel's still in brainstorming, though I've gotten a few more blurbs written down (including a nice piece about a woman screaming in the distance, with her scream dissipating away into nothing). I'm interested in a new short story idea I'm working on, with a young couple in an apartment fire. Bits of the imagery I have for that story appear in what I'm posting later this week.

Again, sincere apologies for not being on more often. This should cease being an issue when summer rolls around and I've got more time to dedicate to writing.

Stay tuned!

Those Rough Pieces I Promised

So I just noticed that I never actually put up those ultra-rough drafts I promised. My apologies. I've rummaged around my notebooks and found a couple that I'll just put up exactly as they are in my notebook (so don't be surprised if they're disjointed or end kind of abruptly). These are works I may have scribbled down while at the bus stop or at home with a few extra minutes. In any case, here you are.

The first piece is the one I alluded to a while ago, the dystopic fiction I was trying to flesh out into a tangible idea.

Elias still marveled, as people unabashedly buffaloed their way past him and into the shelter, at how damn efficient the whole thing was. Not five minutes earlier he had been sitting quietly at his kitchen table, paying his bills while the Animals gently crooned about how their father had been a tailor. Steam was lazily wafting from his mug of coffee, spiralling away in long curling tendrils of heat before dissipating into the kitchen air.
Then he heard the unmistakable static crack-pop of a loudspeaker turning on, followed by the rising wail of the air raid siren, urgent yet detached, almost uninterested. It wasn't until he looked out his window and saw entire buildings flooding people into the street that he knew this was no drill.
The crowd was silent. They had run this scenario so many times it had lost any novelty or urgency; it had become a matter of routine. Innumerable rows of shoulders slouched forward. Countless dull eyes, soft and lamblike, watched countless worn feet tramp across the asphalt. There almost seemed to be a resignation, perhaps even a grateful thought or two that the damn thing was finally decided.
Elias straightened up, stretching his back with a groan. Exhaling deeply he let his arms fall to his sides as he looked around the apartment he'd called home for nearly a decade. Almost lazily he conjured an image of the entire place engulfed in flames. He watched red-orange fingers as they scrambled up his aged parlor drapes, growling and snarling across the shag carpet, hissing through his heating ducts.
A low rumble was beginning to gather itself to the north, a single guttural noise slowly snowballing into a great swath of fearsome droning moving closer and closer.

Not too shabby. In my opinion, anyway. But I'm biased.

This other piece didn't really stand for anything larger; it was just a sort of snapshot I sketched out while at the doctor's office a while ago. A nice little moment with some imagery I really like.

"Did I ever tell you about the man I once saw in the laundromat? Of course I did. I did! He came into the laundromat and without a word stripped down buck naked and threw his clothes in the washer. Poor guy just stood there in front of the machine shivering. Scrawny little guy. He got arrested, of course. A mother came in with her daughter, took one look at him, and turned around so fast you'd think she'd been slapped across the face.
"But only one set of clothes, can you imagine? Isn't that something?"
Mitch had no response. Snow continued to fall in great thick heaps, like feathers pouring from a goosedown pillow. The sky was slipping into a blue-black, chasing away the last red hues of the sunset like air rushing out from under a falling blanket. The interstate was thick with cars returning from the airport, families briefly united as they gabbed incessantly to kill the time.
The long black scaly leech of traffic lurched forward in segments. Mitch briefly thought of longitudinal waves along a slinky, drew the connection back to school, and immediately abandoned his train of thought.
Joan was growing increasingly uncomfortable. Mitch's forehead hadn't left the window since they left the airport, and he just carried an aura, an ennui she couldn't seem to penetrate.

Thanks to Juliana's mother for the anecdote that not only led off this story, but was also responsible for what there currently is of it.

So that's that. Incredibly brief and rough works that hopefully satiate you for a while. I'll be putting up more as it gets written, but that novel's becoming pretty promising. I can't escape it, especially considering I'm in a class that deals specifically with the Apocalypse and humanity's response thereto. Hopefully the novel will have an outline within a couple weeks, soon as I figure out how I want the characters to be. I'll also need to do some research for factual accuracy. I'm so excited!

Take care, and come back!

I'm Planning a Novel!

Dismissing the usual apologies regarding my inability to keep this thing updated more than twice a month, I've got some news...I'm going to write a novel!

Perhaps I should make an elaboration here; I'm planning on writing a novel. I was at work a week ago or so and an idea just sort of walked into my head. Nothing revolutionary as far as plot goes but definitely something that explores the ideas of humanity and compassion in dire circumstance.

Without giving too much away (not that I don't trust you, but this is the Internet) it's going to be a post-apocalyptic story following two families as they attempt to survive a nuclear winter. I can already tell there's going to be a great amount of Cormac McCarthy's The Road present in this piece, hopefully just as a sort of mood establishment. I'll be updating sporadically throughout the process so that you can see where I am in the novel-writing thing. Who knows, maybe you'll even be inspired!

Well, I'm off to class. I had a couple minutes and got out what I want to say. Take it easy!

I Haven't Forgotten About You

It's been almost 2 weeks since I posted last. Sorry about that. I'm just throwing this up really quick before class, but as a form of penitence I will be posting some VERY rough drafts of some stuff that's just been sitting in my various notebooks. A couple of them could be rather nice stories, but I just haven't had the time to expand them at all (working 24-28 hours a week on top of being a full-time student is surprisingly taxing).

But anyway, as I said I'll be tossing up a couple new pieces shortly, just because I like you guys so much. They should be up this afternoon. Happy belated Valentines Day!