WP - 007 - Four Aces

Every day, I go to "new" page of reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts (I apologize in advance if you were previously unaware of Reddit) where I select the latest prompt - whatever it is - and write it out.  I've decided to post those here.  Hope you enjoy it.  Today's Story is:

MISUNDERSTOOD

[WP] The Four Horsemen have arrived on Earth. Mankind tries to bribe its way out of the Apocalypse.

This one kind of got away from me before I could get to the deal making. Ah well:

Four Aces was a hole in the world - the Armpit of the desert Craig called it; but Jonas had been coming to this dingy, stupid diner for nearly sixty years now. He wasn't about to stop because the tourists thought it was a dive.

Craig wasn't actually a tourist. For the last four years, Craig and the bad coffee were the only stable elements of Jonas's morning routine. He and Jonas had been friends and enemies for nearly 20 - ever since Craig moved down the road a bit and started coming to pester Jonas (and whoever was doing the cooking) with his hippy-liberal bullshit. Charlie - who used to own Four Aces - died pretty suddenly, and his wife Marlene had let her boys run it right into the ground.

Not that it had that far down to go. Four Aces was a lonely place, out on the desert highway. A gas station and convenience store with a small, greasy diner on one side and a dinky, six-room motel on the other. Jonas stayed in the hotel for a couple weeks after Harriet died. It smelled like the 1970's.

Since the youngest boy, Nathan took over, the place had settled down; but when his older brothers were in charge, turnover at Four Aces was terrible. There was one spot, back in 2012 when there was a new waitress behind the counter every morning for a week.

Through it all, though, there was Craig. The two men were arguing now about Obama-bin-laden - so called President of these United States of America. Craig, as usual, was spouting some horse crap about fact-checking and racism; but Jonas wasn't having any of it. The man was a Muslim - a foreigner - and a damn communist to boot! The two men were going back and forth, while Mercedes - the nineteen-year-old brunette behind the counter, sat on her little stool chuckling.

The argument was broken by the sound of motorcycles. Loud motorcycles.

They drove up and parked in front of the diner. Four of them. Serious looking men, too. Thick with leather, and visibly armed. Jonas muttered a prayer under his breath.

The bikers sidled up to the counter and sat down. There were just enough of the red seats that there was one between Jonas and the feller sitting closest to him. A goddamn Muslim. He was wearing a blood-red hoodie, with a black tactical harness over it. He wore a machete at his waste like he was a knight with a sword. There were pistols and a rifle strapped all over him. Jonas - wide eyed, and shaking in fear - counted three grenades.

Bald-headed, with a thick, wiry black beard, the Muslim made a kissing face and turned to his comrades. They spoke some language, Jonas didn't understand. Craig either, once he was asked.

Beside the bald Muslim, there was a man in a bird mask. Big goggles, red leather and brass. He looked like one of those bird man doctors from the dark ages. Jonas could see there was a faint mist slowly emanating from the vents on either side of his mask. The black eye plates in his goggles hid any expression. His muffled voice spoke the same middle east language as the other.

The third man wore a dirt-black suit underneath his black leather duster. He looked slick, with dark hair, and a neatly trimmed Van Dyke Beard. He was pale though, sickly. And his eyes almost seemed to glow red, they were so shot-through with blood. At the end of the bar though...

Jonas had a grandchild, Toby. He liked this really stupid movie about a skellington biker with his head on fire. Jonas never understood it. The actor from the Rock was in it (the one with Sean Connery); but it wasn't anything like a Sean Connery movie.

This biker looked like that, though. His skin was so thin and tight, he looked like a skellington. His hair was thin and fading; but bright orange red, so that when it caught the sunlight, it looked almost like fire. His eyes were sunken in too far, and his grin looked downright evil.

Jonas said another prayer. The whole time he'd been watching the men, Mercedes was taking their order, they spoke in that weird Arab-Talk, but she just went right on writing it down. Mitch came out of the back and took the ticket, he made a face.

"What is this?" he said, angrily.

"Just fucking make it," Mercedes said. When Mitch looked back at the ticket again - I swear I could see it in his face. He had no idea what she'd written down, and then understanding dawned on him and he just turned around and started cooking.

The bikers were talking and joking. Craig tapped Jonas on his arm.

"Hey," he whispered. "You all right, old timer?" Jonas turned to his friend, took another look at the bikers, then turned back.

"I don't know," Jonas said, gravely. "Something doesn't feel right."

"Well," Craig said quietly, "don't go antagonizing the crazy biker gang by staring at them."

Mercedes came over to where the men huddled together - Jonas snatching quick glances at the hard men over his shoulder.

"What language was that, you were speaking, Mercedes?"

She chuckled, "what are you talking about, Joe?"

She was sweating, though. And the Mitch by the grill was shaking as he cooked steak and eggs, hash-browns and bacon.

Jonas looked at the bikers again, and the Muslim caught his eye.

"You have a problem, child?" The Muslim spoke English with Western Nevada accent. His head cocked to the side.

"I-I ain't no child." Jonas replied.

The four men stood up at once. Before he even realized what was happening, the Muslim was sitting in the seat beside him, and the other three were hovering over him, like the evil bikers in an old 1960's road trip movie.

"Are you a man," the Muslim said.

"What are-" Jonas began and couldn't finish. "I don't even... of course I'm a man."

"What makes you a man?" The other bikers were staring at him intently.

"What do you want to hear? Please. I don't want no trouble."

"I am afraid to tell you that we are trouble," the Muslim said. "Trouble and pain and the harbingers of the end." He studied Jonas's face. "But you say you are a man. And I don't really understand what it is that you mean by that."

The bone-faced man with the fiery hair leaned in on Jonas's other side and spoke in his ear, "what is a man?"

"Hey," Craig tried to muster up his courage. "W-Why don't you guys go sit back down. Leave the old timer alone."

Bird-man stepped away from Jonas and stood in front of Craig instead. He didn't speak, but he stared at the younger man through those black, round eye holes. His head moving around like a bird's as he looked the man over.

"I am not bothering you, am I, human?" The Muslim said, then. He placed a hand on Jonas's shoulder. "I am not come to scare you. I - we," he indicated his posse, "we have tasks to perform. We have always known we would perform these tasks. We have always known the hour would come; but this is the first time we have been this close to humanity."

Bird-man reached up and brushed the stubble on Craig's cheek. Craig squirmed away, but Bird-man grabbed his chin and held it fast, leaning in close to inspect the man's skin, his mouth, his nose.

"L-Leave us alone," Craig protested.

"No." Skull-Face said.

"Answer his question," the slick businessman behind Jonas said. By now, both Mitch and Mercedes were backed into a corner on the other side of the grill. He pointed at them. "Our food is going to burn. You will do your job, or suffer the consequences."

He looked back at Jonas again. His red eyes following every twitch and tick on his face.

"I-I don't know how to answer," Jonas said. "I don't really know what you want to know."

"What is your name," the Muslim said.

"Jonas."

"Jonas," he seemed to mull it over, to consider it. "Jonas," he said again, "Ee-Oh-nass. The dove. A sign to the people. Are you a destroyer, Jonas, an oppressor of men? Or are you a gift from ████."

The tears ran down the old man's face. It was the Name of God. Craig also was crying. Mitch and Mercedes turned to stare at the man who had uttered the WORD. The Muslim smiled.

"Are you a man, IONAS?" Everything that Jonas was, or would be in the coming days was tied up in that question. Like the name of God, the Muslim spoke Jonas's true name - more than a word. More than a label. It spoke of failures, successes, loves lost and regained. Dreams and plans now long forgotten, abandoned in the face of time.

Jonas wept openly now. "You say that, and you ask me to explain it to you? You know all that I am." He collapsed forward, and the biker allowed him to cry into his chest, like a mother holding her child. "Yes, I am a man. I am a male child of God. I have faith. I -" Vaguely, he was aware of another motorcycle approaching.

"Calm yourself, man." The Muslim patted Jonas on his shoulder. "I think I understand more of you now." He pushed Jonas away, so that he sat upright again, "dry your tears."

"What of you," Bird-man's words were muffled through his heavy mask. "Are you also a man, CRAEG?"

"Yes," Craig fought back his tears. There was shame in his true name, just as there had been shame in the name of his friend, but it was easier to bear after hearing it in the other. "I am."

The four men laughed and returned to their seats. Mercedes and Mitch scrambled to get their plates in front of them.

The door opened. The man who walked in was short, another Arab, with a friendly face. He wore loose clothes, and a one-handed sword strapped to his waist.

"Hello," he said. His English was also Western Nevadan, but Jonas now realized he wasn't speaking English at all. He walked over to the two men, and placed a hand on their shoulder. "IONAS, CRAEG. I've been wanting to meet you two for a long time. He looked passed them, behind the counter. MRY, who calls herself Mercy, and MIKHA'EL... MIKHA'EL, you and I are going to have to have a chat before we leave this diner."

"Ar-Are you," Jonas started.

"I am," He said. "MRY, I would very much like to have something to eat while I discuss things with MIKHA'EL. Would you please tend to the grill for me?"

WP - 006 - Misunderstood

Every day, I go to "new" page of reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts (I apologize in advance if you were previously unaware of Reddit) where I select the latest prompt - whatever it is - and write it out.  I've decided to post those here.  Hope you enjoy it.  Today's Story is:

MISUNDERSTOOD

[EU] You are a Common street Magician, who has been misunderstood is dragged to Hogwarts against his will.

"What is this, doing here?" I can't see anything. The bag over my head is completely opaque. The voices sound almost cartoonishly evil.

"I caught the filthy creature pretending to do magic." The room erupts in laughter. Someone kicks me in the chest and I fall on my back with the wind knocked out of me. Shit. Shit.

"Filthy muggle wants to pretend its a wizard? Get it to its feet!" I'm stood up by with by a rough, powerful male. Muggle?

"You brought a muggle to Hogwarts!" A second female. This one with a shrill and aggravating voice. What? Hogwarts? Shit.

"Not to worry, Delores," the male by my ear says menacingly. "It won't be alive very long anyhow."

"Take the bag off its head," the first female says. "I want to see its frightened, filthy face!" More laughter and the bag is ripped from my head. The woman is a brutish looking redhead in black robes. The smile on her face twists in into a sneer when she sees me. "Thought you could just pretend to be a wizard, and no one would notice?"

This is ridiculous. The man beside me shoves me to my knees in front of the woman. Turning to look at him, I see him to be a hunched, doughy thug. Not dissimilar to the woman. He points his wand at me and shouts, "Crucio!"

Ten-Thousand fire ants crawl through my veins, biting as they go, their acid venom snaking its way through my body. Wrapped in barbed wire that tightens and constricts with every convulsion, I kick and scream against my bonds, which - mercifully - are not tied well, and break.

When the curse subsides, I am lying on my back. Between the two. "Who said you could look at me, muggle?"

The second woman is standing off to the left. She is a squat, pink woman in gaudy, pink clothes. She is smirking at me; but my hands are free.

"Silencio!" It takes a lot of will without my wand; but I feel the magic work through me. Every muscle, and joint aches with the remnants of the Cruciatus Curse flowing in them; but I roll to the side and throw a "Stupefy!" at the redhead. My roll brings me close enough to the woman to knock her from her feet with a leg sweep. "Accio Wand!"

I try to hold my concentration, but the two who can are moving quickly. "Finite," I hear the man cast. "Avada-" A well placed strike to the throat knocks the pink woman back a few feet and spares me a terrible death. My wand is a long way away.

"Avada Kedavra!" the man shouts at me, and I only manage to get out of the way of the killing curse by dropping to the ground.

"Levicorpus!" The man is in the air.

"Avada-"

"Abracadabra!" I shout, and throw a flashpowder bomb at the woman before she can finish her own curse. She screams and leaps out of the way. The bomb lands behind her and explodes in a brilliant flash of light.

The pink woman gasps on the floor, clutching at her throat. The man tries to cast another killing curse from his position hanging in the air by his ankle. His aim is terrible, thankfully.

"Crucio," the woman yells at me again; but I manage to throw the pink woman in my way. She cries out in agony as I roll away from her.

Sitting up I cast, "Stupefy" again. My power is waning. I duck behind a column, and catch my breath.

I can feel it before it arrives. Oak, nine inches - a single strand of hair from the tail of a unicorn within. I snatch it out of the air and leap out from behind the column. "Protego," I cast to counter the "Expelliarmus" aimed at me by the upside-down wizard. Then respond with a dispelling charm of my own. His wand flies through the air.

Miraculously enough, it flies through the air right toward me. I reach up to grab it, for some reason.

"Avada Kedavra!"

It must be the end of me. As life fades, and my soul leaks out, I am vaguely aware of another Cruciatus cast upon my cooling corpse. And another.

The blackness folds around me, and then light. I am in the Floo Hall at the Ministry. Everything is white, though - too white.

"Where am I?"

"I'm afraid," someone says behind me, "that it is over."

"Dumbledore?" I turn to face the old headmaster. "What are you do- You died."

"So did you, David."

"Ah." I sit down on a bench. "I was battling a trio of wizards at Hogwarts."

"Yes," the old wizard sits beside me. "I would guess that is why your subconscious summoned this visage of me to offer you comfort and guidance on this next, great journey."

"But there are Death Eaters at Hogwarts!" I didn't know things were so dire. If I had, I would've come in. I would've helped.

"Your job was not to protect Wizards, but to look after muggles. If you joined the fight, you may have made a difference, or you might not have. How many did you save by operating in secret."

"If you're a construct of my subconscious, then you're just me telling me what I want to hear."

"Most likely."

"Well," I look around. "Is this it then? Is this the afterlife?"

"No. Just a Floo Network." He motions to a grand fireplace I've never seen before. Of course not. The wizard beside me chuckles. Together we walk over to the fire.

"There's no floo powder." He just looks at me incredulously. "What do I say?" He smiles and disapparates. Of course. I step into the flame, and I am cleansed. It is over.

But it is not the end of me.

Patchwork Quilts and Procrastination

I'm beginning to think that choosing to write a weekly serial here on my blog was a huge mistake. I'm already kind of disappointed about the number of unfinished drawings that appear here. I don't want to add more unfinished work to that collection, and while I have a (very) basic outline for where the Mirror Soul story is going - there's a lot about Decker and his world that I haven't sorted out yet.

One of the reasons I've laid out my blog like this, with all sorts of different products on all sorts of different days, is because of the way I work (when I work, but I'll get to that later).

My mind is always racing. When I'm not drunk, I see novel and short story ideas (or things to draw or stories to run in D&D or Star Wars or whatever game we're playing next) in the world around me. I guess I'm lucky that my brain seems to have come equipped with an automatic plot generator attachment; It's never been hard for me to come up with ideas. Only to follow through with them.

Of course, there's a down side. I get wildly passionate about every idea that springs into my mind; I really believe in every story that passes through me - finished or not. The "David Wright" section of the Great Library in the Dreaming is full of some of the best novels never written.

I end up abandoning one project for another. Drawing this, writing one story instead of the other (which I was half-way through), ooh! What if I ran a D&D game based around the Tarrasque? Shit like that.

Happens all the time.

For instance. When I sat down to write this, I got an amazing idea for a GURPS campaign, wherein the Players run a band of Samurai making their way through the old west in search of the [MacGuffin], encountering cowboys and indians and getting caught up in all manner of Wild West Shenanigans. I actually started working on a Samurai Template before I remembered what I was supposed to be doing.

Truth be known, even ths blog is a distraction from the novel I'm supposed to be working on (although, today I have the excuse of being at my Mother's house and not having internet access, so I can't reach Google Drive, where I keep my manuscript and notes).

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that I've been letting my imagination stop me from doing any real producing. I ought to keep a file on my computer (or phone, or Drive) that lets me record all these good ideas and then forget about them; instead of working a little bit on this and a little bit on that and doodling a little bit here and there.

My hope is that this blog will allow me an outlet for my desire to work in patches of this and that, so that I can focus on one big project at a time.  What worries me about the serial, Mirror Soul is that it really is a big project - even though I'm attacking it in pieces (posting 2-4,000 words a week). I find myself thinking and working on this "small project," rather than the novel (which is supposed to be finished in less than 20 days).

I don't think working in patchwork is necessarily a bad thing, so long as you keep your focus.  So I guess that's what I'm going to try and do.

Farging ice hole

I am really bad at this blogging thing. Case in point: I've been freaking out all day today trying to draw something, to post up here that doesn't suck and isn't half-finished.

Nevermind that Thursdays are when I'm trying to upload new art and today is Wednesday.  Yeah, I'm an ass.

Today I want to talk about drawing from what you know.  Whether your writing or drawing or making up some lame excuse on the fly, you're going to do your best work, working from experience.

That's what they tell me, anyway.

Mostly I'm talking about writing here, because I'm trying to sift through my process to clear the chaff and find some way to spur myself on to more productive things.  Part of what keeps me from doing the work is my lack of faith in my ability to do so.  So I'm trying to become a better writer by analyzing how I write.  I'm doing it here just in case it can help someone else.

For instance, I find it hard to "write what I know," unless I make the focus of my fiction the characters and not the story.  None of this stuff I write about ever happened to me.  It's not even stuff I'd want to happen to me.  Even so, when I try to focus on the characters, I often find myself in over my head.

Take this vampire story I'm writing.  The original idea was to write a vampire novel that would kill the vampire fiction genre.  Yes, I am often just that full of myself.  It won't be hard to see that original thread in the overarching plot of the finished book.

As the story progressed, however, it became less and less about killing vampires and more about addiction.  But what the fuck do I know about addiction?  I smoked cigarettes for a few years and quit.  I drank copious amounts of alcohol in the Navy (it's a requirement for advancement), and quit.  I'm not addicted to drugs or sex or anything, really.  I often wonder if I can't be a great writer because I'm content with a glass of Scotch in the evening, and I don't need to get shit-housed to put pen to paper.

Coca-cola. I'm addicted to sodas; but that's a helluva lame thing to base a novel on.

I keep writing anyway, however, because I believe in the story.  I know it can be good; and the farther into it I get, the more I realize that its all metaphor.  Its not about addiction at all. No more than it's about vampires or teenaged angst. I'm getting pretentious again, but now I understand my characters better.  I have some idea where they're all going and why.

I've been writing what I know without really knowing it.  Or - more likely - my experience has shaped the story and my perception of it.  Someone else might read a story about killing vampires, it might still be about addiction or depression or any of a number of different things.  I'm actually happy with that.

I guess what I'm saying is, don't worry about trying to only write what you know.  I write mostly fantasy and sci-fi; but I've never encountered a vampire, or a talking frog, or the ruins left behind by an extinct race of interstellar humans from before the dawn of history.

Write the story you'll want to read and let your natural inclinations guide you through to great storytelling.  Drawing from what you know doesn't mean writing only what's happened to you or around you - but it informs your work with the experiences you've shared in.

Adding in the "what you know" helps bring your characters to life and adds believability to your plot. At least I hope so. I guess we'll find out when the book's done.

Now if I could only work out how to do characterization and plot, I'd be on my way.

On Writing

Not so much a workshop post, as a "why I keep trying."

I had a teacher once, who told me I would make a great storyteller. She was talking about stage presence and my reading voice, hearkening back to days of yore when people would get dressed up and go and see someone read a story (like we used to do when we were little kids at the library).

My ego was too big to imagine making a career out of reading to kids in the library (I personally think younger me was an idiot, and that, that would be a fine occupation); but it was a seed planted in the soft peat of my brain.

I went to my old High School in Georgia once, to wax nostalgic about my youth and visit a few Teachers i wanted to thank for a job well done. One of those teachers, I can't for the life of me remember her name - Mrs. Brown (thanks, Brian), had kept a short story I'd written and read it to her classes as an example of what she was looking for.

I would have swelled to bursting with the pride of it, if I hadn't immediately realized how many people were being subjected to something I'd written. It was about bunnies and a skull, inspired by a piece of carved ivory my step-father had owned. I don't recall anything else about it.

It was scary as shit to me that people knew - or at least had heard a story I'd made up - for whatever reason. Plus, somebody thought it was good. Mrs. Brown, had liked it well enough that she not only gave it a good grade, but she kept it and shared it. Holy shit if that wasn't a little water on the seed.

My senior year in High School, I was writing this sci-fi story inspired by the letters and notes of Bram Stoker. It detailed the correspondence between a Marine discovering the existence of extraterrestrials, and our government's complicity in their subjugation of our world.

My dad told me one day, "I have a confession to make: I saw the letters and thought they were love letters back to Georgia, but I was curious so I read them. I was a little weirded out at first, but you have the makings of a really good story there."

Now, obviously, praise from a parent can be a little suspect but the way he went about it made me take him at his word. A little more water, a little more fertilizer.

Then I discovered (or rediscovered) the wonderment that is game night.

Dungeons and Dragons, Vampire the Masquerade, Star Wars, GURPs - a half-dozen different venues with which to express my desire to tell stories (and the germination of quite a few novels floating around in piles and piles of notes and ideas).

When I left the military I had this vague notion about tending bar and writing the great American novel. Over the years I've toyed and played with the idea - written the first few chapters to a couple dozen different stories, dabbled in fan-fiction (I'm sorry, I'm so sorry), short stories and comic book and film scripts. I've been tending this garden now for a long while with no real fruit.

(You can download a copy of my short story, Chaucer at Amazon; if you can't find it anywhere else free).

It wasn't until a gamer friend of mine challenged me about what I was going to do with my life that I started thinking about writing seriously. He asked me if there wasn't some way I could turn my passion for gaming toward more lucrative ends.

I admit I am still paralyzed by that ever present enemy of the writer of fiction, doubt - but my friend was right. Of all the things I've wanted to do with my life, writing is the one thing that has consistent brought me pleasure and fulfillment. It's the primary lynchpin in gaming that holds me so tightly in its grip.

There's almost nothing I like better, creatively, than telling a story well (drawing often comes in at a close second).

It's kind of the reason I'm here. Let's hope I'm good at it.

Anyway... the thing is... what I really mean is that my reason for writing is because I feel like I have to. I have this need in me, built up over twenty years or so, to tell stories as best I can, anyway I can. It's fun, it's fulfilling, and it helps keep me in the illusion that something I do might last - or at least bring good to people around me.