Spooktober 2024, Day Three

SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.


SPOOKTOBER DAY #3 — DARK FANTASY
(× Imprisonment or Revenge or Cats)

TITLE:  The Claws

PREMISE:  Culgrum was cursed by the Vizier of Thrax (Dark Fantasy), transformed into a cat (Cats) and fed to the rats.  His sister Culpepper was a harem girl that secretly learned sorcery from the vizier’s books and managed to at least turn Culgrum into a man-sized cat-thing, which could easily trounce the rats.  The vizier got even crankier and sent all his goons after them, and they escaped into the wilds.

Now it’s kill or be killed, an eye for an eye for an eye (Revenge).  The vizier presses some desperate assassins into his service, Spinky Binch and Cloub Strofe, by holding their child hostage (Imprisonment) in the form of a nervous songbird that could die of a heart attack at the drop of a pin.  Spinky and Cloub join forces with their would-be targets to get vengeance of their own.

HORROR ELEMENT:  I don’t know I’m doing this way past my bedtime.  Maybe all the magic involves turning your body inside out and the vizier seems like the voice of reason while he does horrible things.  Being a cat probably sucks sometimes?  Spooktober fail.

Spooktober 2024, Days One and Two

SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.


SPOOKTOBER DAY #1 — DEVILS AND DEMONS
(× Retro Neon/Synthwave or Apocalypse or Teen)

TITLE:  Malcolm Hyperian vs. The Fiends

PREMISE:  I happened to already have a (Retro Neon) (Teen) (Apocalypse) or three up my sleeve.  This is the same setting as my unfinished novel Love is Torment, the far future world of Breana IV, where a world-spanning city is mostly inhabited by monsters, the only humans living in enclaves where ancient technological barriers against the supernatural still function.  Powerful monsters are called fiends, weaker ones ukubien (Devils and Demons).  Humans with powerful enough psychic abilities and combat skills go out in the wilds to make trade happen between enclaves.  Most are mercenaries working for tribes, some work for a fascistic government that rules the largest enclave – the closest thing to a city that’s left.  That’s Ißbanbat, which has an aesthetic somewhere between the Empire in Space Shooters and the Hell’s Angels.  The tribes have accidentally’d into a semblance of early ’90s R&B aesthetics, where all celebrations look like proms in bright tacky colors.  This was all an elaboration on a dream I had a long time ago, inspired by playing an old RPG.

Anyway, Malcolm was originally Molly but I’m a changed person and fuck it, trans all your old OCs.  Malcolm is a hetero trans dude on that harem anime bullshit, where three weird girls love-hate-love him.  He and one of the girlfriends are in the academy at Ißbanbat, the other two girlfriends are just civilians.  The civilians stray too close to the wild and get seduced into becoming fiends.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The girls find out their fiendhood was just part of a scheme to penetrate the city’s protections and feast on humans.  They betray the fiends by letting Malcolm know about the invasion, but it’s too late, and all four of the youths end up in the middle of a prom gone bad, attacked by demons.  Malcolm augments his fists with telekinetic energy and beats their intangible asses.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #2 — FOUND FOOTAGE/EPISTOLARY
(× Paranoia or Big City/Skyscraper or Erotic Thriller)

TITLE:  The Stairwell Letters

PREMISE:  In a big old building three young ladies live alone in their own separate little apartments (Big City), while working as secretaries or nurses or whatever in a more sexist time.  They are genial with each other, but have very incompatible shifts – one on a day job, one working two jobs, and one on-call for a hospital.  Ships in the night, they leave each other little notes in the stairwell (Epistolary).  They have secret spots where other tenants should generally not happen across them.

HORROR ELEMENT:  It’s all cuteness and light, if in a sorta depressing milieu, but things get weird.  Linda and Sandra begin to fall in love, but Roberta becomes obsessed with Sandra, and has a weird kind of dubious sexual magnetism that lets her initially get away with seducing each of the other ladies in turn (Erotic Thriller).  Feeling ashamed about having been involved with Roberta, and therefore unable to compare notes in a way that would reveal her malevolence, Linda and Sandra fall prey to a thousand little tricks and torments (Paranoia).  How bad could it get before the truth is revealed?  And even when they find out, it’s not like they can call the cops and out themselves as sexual deviants.

 

Glory Be

We are returned from the shadow realm!  Hail!

While the website was down, I had a few queued posts, so somehow, the streak continues.  Go ahead and read those, if you please.

As for me, I’m so tired I’m just gonna lay down dead now.

Wait.  I wish I could remember this dream I just had better.  Super detailed, something about young ladies that were friends, but one of them was an aquatic creature with properties of or kinship to cnidarians, even tho she looked fully human.

That amateur porn contest a local weekly mag used to run was involved, and some hijinks with the law.  Banana cream pies?  Fear of heights?  Was jellyfish girl trans?

She reproduced by cloning at the end of the dream. Some of her new selves got tangled and died, mute and mindless.  She got away.

I feel like both girls were parting ways to chase down love and glamour in their own particular ways, and one was meant to feel uplifted about it.

The main run of the plot is gone.  I cry.

Elric Report

So I’m three and a half volumes into listening to the Elric books by Michael Moorcock and I haven’t been Inception’d into the sensory deprivation tank full of urine yet, so I thought you might wanna know my thoughts.  Spoilers?  Not very big ones.  Also these books are old as hell so who cares?

Reminding me of Vampire Hunter D by Hideyuki Kikuchi.  The writing is a lot more blunt than I would have imagined for the towering gothickal shadow he cast over the genre.  Kikuchi’s book may well have been influenced by it.  Indeed, the dispassionate kinda evil pretty men with long white hair that recur in anime might all be descendants of Elric; I don’t know enough deep cuts of Japanese culture to be sure.  That said, Elric is a lot more emotional than Sephiroth or Sesshomaru or Benten or etc etc.  One emotion in particular: Fear.

It’s really common for writers on both sides of the Pacific to characterize a cool badass character as never feeling fear.  I get where they’re coming from.  Cool, badass, it’s a power fantasy, and we’d like to imagine ourselves in hardcase mode as immune to all such weaknesses.  But this trope does feel pretty damn stale by now, and it always undercut the ability for the story to feel like it has real stakes.  If the worst a hero would feel in defeat is annoyed or angry, that’s a lot less intense than him feeling afraid of serious injury, torture, whatever consequences.

So that’s kind of nice, even if the character is still an outrageously special specialboy.  Ladies love Elric.  Apparently he can lay pipe with the best of ’em.  Dickmatism as the kids say.  The stories are not at all explicit about it, but one gal is a queen and is like “i know u killed my bro but take my kingdom, just gimme that somethin somethin.”  He’s characterized as having poor health, in the first book only sustained by drugs, and this specifically manifests as weakness.  What’s his stroke game like if he has no stamina?  He manages to say no to drugs by getting a cool demon sword that sucks souls and gives Elric the life energy, but in at least one of the subsequent books he still needs the drugs.  Had he gone too long without soul sauce?  Book didn’t say.

One disappointment is that he doesn’t show near as much skin as he does on book covers.  About half the search results for Elric art, he at least has his arms and leggies out.  If u got it flaunt it, boy.

Oh, I didn’t really say what I meant by the writing being blunt.  Let’s put it this way:  If this were a movie, almost all of the dialog and much of the characterization would have to be original.  It could not rely on the source material.  In the books, Moorcock just tells you things about Elric.  In a movie, you’d have to show them.  The pivotal character moments have no real buildup, they’re just plopped on you.  It feels like short stories, where there’s no time to characterize through prose and you really just need to spell out what’s going on, if the plot has any complexity at all.

I once wrote a short story wherein I earned the love story through writing, really hard pressed to keep it under 9k words.  I do think the Elric books started as short stories and were collected, at least some of them, so that’s probably why it’s like this.  It mostly feels heavy-handed in the first scene of the first book, where his whole backstory and main conflict are just dropped on you like some Acme traps on Wile E. Coyote.

I wonder about Moorcock’s monster inspirations.  How original are his beasters?   They seem pretty original, but some people know more obscure monster lore than I do; maybe they aren’t.

Oh yeah, and one more thing struck me funny.  One of the books is called The Weird of the White Wolf.  The White Wolf is Elric and he’s having a weird.  But the book doesn’t tell us what the fuck a weird is.  The weirdest thing in the story is how he makes a bunch of really bad decisions for no obvious reason.  The worst is when the dragons come out and he is just totally unprepared for that.  He knew the dragons were there.  Even if he was like, fuck it, let’s do this even tho we’ll be dragonbait, he should’ve been bracing for it the whole time.  Instead when they come out it’s like Moorcock remembering they exist for the first time in pages.

But it’s all big dark fantasy bigness.  Sleesh slash.  Kill the guys, win the prize.  But feel empty inside.  That’s all I’m there for anyway.

Ever See a Dead Body?

I’ve never seen a dead human body before.  Many people have; I may be very privileged in this regard.  I’ve heard it supposed that the advent of modern ambulances – whisking away the dying to hospitals and filing them out of sight into a refrigerator – has had the result of far fewer people seeing their family members after the moment of passing.  Same person suggested that this may have increased belief in ghosts, as the person’s absence would feel less final without the experience of seeing them gone.

If this is too grim to deal with, please do give the post a pass.  If you want to talk about your experiences of seeing death or its aftermath, and the way it made you feel, comment away.  Personally, it’s hard for me to imagine, save that I expect it’s pretty gross.  I’ve seen glimpses of lethal violence because edgelords prowl  the earth trying to spring shocking content on you for fun, but I’m pretty good at averting or unfocusing my eyes – have only the vague impression of what goatse looks like.

I bring this up because of my recent posts about murder got me feeling some type of way.  Been fortunate it always missed me.  I guess it always does until it doesn’t.  I say my hail satans and pray my body and mind last long enough to have a decent retirement.

Proximity to the Scene of the Crime

content warnings: domestic violence, murder.

I recently related the tale of how I met a murderer IRL, before he did his misdeeds and died sad.  In another post I have mentioned the murder and attempted murders that transpired in my last apartment complex.  Got one more brush with true crime, which I shall presently illustrate.

The last place I lived with somebody other than my boyfriend was in Everett, Washington, living with my father.  This was during the last of my time in art school, the era of the messed up pants.

I actually loved that area.  It was a mid century -lookin suburban feel, tho considered downtown-ish, on top of a huge hill.  Just over the hill was a view of Puget Sound, just north were some plain but pleasant old brick buildings, just east down the hill were a few places to eat and get groceries, plus a transit center with only a touch of racist graffiti (“all faraners must go home or be hunnt”).  The streets felt clean, the skies were often blue, and the blustery winds felt elemental.  It was far enough north there was more snow than Seattle gets too.  Just my memories, possibly distorted.

This was the last place I ever saw the first boy I loved too, in those random moments of our lives when our paths crossed, as he was working for the navy and drinking half a box of wine a day.  Melancholy low key hangout, then vaya sin dios.

Me and my father were living in a shotgun shack at the place where the pleasant little houses gave way to ramshackle creepiness above the fast food joints.  There was a “basement” which was too exposed to be of real use.  Everything we made the mistake of storing in it was covered in mildew and rat droppings.  But the owner was low key and the place was uncluttered.  Life was lonely in a way that’s easy to romanticize.

My room faced the alley behind the house and one time I was awakened by the sound of tweakers breaking the window of my dad’s van to steal his painting equipment.  I ran out shirtless and yelling, and scared them off.

Another time somebody sent a jacked-up bb thru our bathroom window, shattered the glass window of our shower.  The shattering unfolded in slow motion, radiating from the site of impact before total collapse.  It sounded like a glacier melting in summer.  Just malicious mischief, zero priority for cops, tho it would have been trivially easy to find which neighbor’s house it came from.

Very near the end of our time there, a young couple moved in next door, to another property owned by the same guy as our shack.  They seemed a little squirrely, but affable.  He was a veteran fresh out of a war, she was somebody I never met, though my father had some brief interaction with them.  Recalling my last murderer was also a vet and the stats on spousal murders, you might see where this is going.

Soon we moved out.  I got the last of the cheap studio apartments in Seattle before those ceased to exist (no rent control so when it was done being cheap i was done with it), my dad used a bit of an inheritance to buy a trailer and go help with cleanup in Katrina.  That venture didn’t end well; my dad had atrocious business sense.

So neither of us was anywhere near there when it happened, but my dad found out (probably from our former landlord) the very day after we moved out, the young lady’s body was found in the same dumpster where we took out our trash.  That’s all I ever heard of it.  Don’t know if it even made the news.

So Many Magical Mysteries

Remember the audiobook snorings?  I chanced to look at the rest of the videos on that channel and a huge amount of it is devoted to the ostensible health benefits of urine.  Drinking it, soaking your feet in it like a vulture or a slender loris or a binturong*.

So here’s the mystery.  Is the thespian the piss drinker?  Or did he merely mirror videos produced by another content creator?  I could find out by playing a peepee video, listening to the man’s voice, seeing if it matches.  But I am not doing that, thanks.

*why nature so into water sports?  and why did i have this knowledge on tap?  i know not.

Dreamposting – Gun Culture

Had a dream that I was a security guard again.  Some kind of mayhem had transpired in Seattle in the night, wherein a gun had been discharged in public.  We were all under suspicion, but one specific guy had done it, and copped to it before we got into real trouble.  Even so, there was so much going on that I wasn’t aware of his confession until it had already transpired, and was running around trying to sort out defense evidence along with my home boy Clark.  Some seagulls had been killed, and during the course of events I found their bodies floating in water, gelatinized and translucent…

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Keys Mash

l;si;efj;oirejfoirjegfporwkgpokdpcodcp[okwrogkprwokvco;dlsl,qwpeoijfepiojf!!!!11!!!!

From one day to the next things look doable or not or yes again.  I took the last two days off work.  I dunno, I’m trippin.

Got a busy Octubre coming up.  Plan on doing Spooktober again, gotta get married and honeymoon, gotta have a Halloween, and the month after that is (unaffiliated) novel writing month.  Might have some hairy-scary nights ahead.

I’ve been doing one post a day for some weeks now, and just don’t know how sustainable it is, the way my life be.  Maybe I should officially stop doing that and maybe start up again next year if that proves less hectic.  Well, we’ll still be in home improvement hell until 2026, I’m sure.  Maybe then.

Yeah.  Yeah, I give up.  I’ll be around about as often as I used to be, which is much less than PZ and Mano, but much more than the average blog in the sidebar.  What was I averaging before, one a week?  We’ll see…

Here Also Be Dragons

St. George can fuck right off.  St. Patrick with him.  In this house we dig the subjects of herpetology, reptile and amphibian.  Sadly, in their season we can barely hear the frogs from our cul-de-sac, most of the time my boyfriend can’t hear them above his tinnitus.  Also, though I know garter snakes are common in the area, I haven’t seen any since we moved in a year ago.  Certainly, I never expected to see a lizard.  I haven’t seen one since I was last in Kansas, half a continent away.

Now, like Charly on the other side of the planet, I’ve seen a drab brown lizard in my yard.  People further south could surely not give a shit.  Even in this state, east of the mountains in the plains, they would not be impressed.  Floridians whose houses are low key infested with invasive wall-crawlers would tell me to take my happiness to hell.  But no, this is cool and special.

There is an invasive creeping wood sorrel of the purple-leaved variety growing from a crack in the sidewalk between ours and our neighbors’ doors, which are right next to each other.  My boyfriend was stepping out to check on the sunflowers he’s growing, when he noticed a movement in the sorrel.  As the surprised beasty moved, his mind ran through possible identities – slug? snake? – before realizing it was a lizard.  He called me outside in time to see it, though if I’d gone for a camera, I would have missed it.

We did not have an amazingly good look at it, but enough to be confident it was a brown lizard about seven inches in length (18 cm) with no obvious markings. Based on the area where we saw it, range maps, comparisons of different boring brown lizards, we are moderately sure it’s a northern alligator lizard, northwestern subspecies.  I don’t know shit about lizards and presumed, wrongly, that I’d never see one on this side of the state, at least not here in the very developed suburbs.

It eats crickets, and I’ve noticed the crickets are less noisy this year.  Lizard population increasing?  Or did I just see lizard on the move because insect decline got them being more bold in searching for prey?  They also eat slugs, and I hope they do.