Madness Dreaming of Normalcy

Eva muttered and shook against the shackles. The chains rattled around filling the room with a metal grating sound. It really got me on edge when she did that. "Why can't you just behave?" "They walls are talking. I don't like when they're talking." I rolled my eyes at her and pulled her forward, yanking the chain that gagged her around the neck. "Come on, Eva. We have work to do." "I like work. Work helps me keep away the voices." "I'm sure it does, kiddo. Are you ready?" Eva nodded vigorously, almost succeeding at separating her scalp with her neck. "Pineapple." Whatever that means.  I nodded to her and began the mantra. "Whom so ever is broken..." "...Can be fixed." As the words left her mouth her eyes grew a deep blue from their normal brown. Her hair turned to white and she floated just a few inches from the ground. "Whom so ever seeks help..." "...Sha...

So, I'm not sure how or why, but I decided that for some reason I stopped making updates. I had a shitty birthday and well, I sort of shut people out for the most part. It perhaps wasn't something that I should have done, but I did it anyway. Moving on from that. I've been having strange dreams lately. Not necessarily Lovecraftian style dreams, (I see enough of that during my day dreams.) I see things more along the lines of: I've been diagnosed with cancer and have six months to live. So, naturally, I freak out a bit. But if I had to measure my life in a manner of six months from this point I wouldn't use that six months playing video games and writing software. I'd sell every possession that wasn't nailed down (sans my computer and my writings). Anything I couldn't or wouldn't I would offer to friends, anything that survived would be given to charity. Then, I'd write. I'd write for hours a day every day until the end. I would write wi...

I love the comics on smbc. I'm not sure why, but sometimes I think of concepts for smbc comics that never happened. This next story spun off of one of those ideas. Lucy sat in the waiting room. She arrived early at the Bureau of Reproduction. "There's always a line at the BR. It's what hell must be like," some people joke. She's waiting for the numbers four and two to illuminate on the screen, signifying it is her turn to be served. Today is the day she gets to find out if her and her husband get to have a child. An elderly lady sits down near her. The people seem to be moving at a relatively quick pace. Every now and then she'd hear numbers being called out by an automated system. "Number... TWENTY SEVEN... Please come to the front counter to be served." Lucy turned to the woman next to her, "Hello." The woman nodded politely. "Hello." "So, what number did you pull?" "Forty six." "Ah, y...

You know I never really know what to title a piece until I finish it. I always feel like the title is a bit of a ribbon or a thread that ties a story so close together that to remove it takes a deep part of the package away. It's exactly like the bow on a Christmas present. It catches your eye, it's shiny, but it's not the present. It's not the thing that you're really after. Without it, the Christmas present falls flat. It's just not the same. It's paper surrounding a box. Or in the case of a story, colors surrounding letters. "Dude, you did not see an angel." "I'm telling you, he came to me in a dream last night." John said as he walked with Jean to class. "And I am telling you. You did not see an angel. You're starting to scare me a little bit." "He told me that I'm going to become the best writer of this century." "You? The best writer of the century? What was the last book you read bes...

I hope you enjoyed intermission between the two new posts. I'd be lying if I said I had a concept for this story, so I might just start free writing and see what pops out. I don't know if I'll like it or not, but I'm just going to go at break neck speeds. "The first time I heard of the concept of an alternate reality game. It seemed like a really cool concept. A few hours later I was bouncing around wikipedia investigating all manner of interesting puzzles that people actually solved within the community." A man stood at a podium speaking out to a sizable audience. Most were silent and gazing, a few speaking to others in soft tones. "So, of course after a while I arrived at the inevitable question: That I could train a computer to solve these games. The craziest part was that I did it." The crowd gave a polite applaud. "Today I am here to show you the worlds greatest learning AI. Kentaro." A screen appears before the audience and a ...

So, I'm a bit behind. But that'll be ok. Today will be a double feature for stories. That should catch me up well enough. The idea for this story came to me at a denny's this morning. I liked it enough that I'm writing it. "And we're walking, we're walking... Stop here. Can everyone see the exhibit?" A voice said into the minds of all of the museum goers. It's voice expressing the sentences with perfect precision and articulation. "This exhibit is about the age of the internet. It's history is a bit lost to our current archivers, as it was completely dismantled in the early 2100s. A lot of the data that was produced in the century following its invention was unfortunately lost, however we have recovered many artifacts from it's early stages." The holographic hand of the tour guide waved toward the flat surface behind it. The wall acted as a display showing different images and text along it in a slide show format. "Based...

So, for the remainder of May I am going to use my blog as the launching post for a brand new challenge . You get to be along for the ride and see how things turn out. I am technically writing this post (and subsequent story) on May 2nd (not May 1st) but I worked my job for 12 hours. So... sue me. Usually when I write stories (see Day 4 ) I'm someone who needs to explore who my characters are and what they're doing in the rough draft. Rarely would a writer of any repute use most of my exposition in a "real" story, but that's just how I write. I have to know where I'm going through exploration. I don't like being told where to go no more than I like planning where I'm going early on. So, in the next month you'll have to forgive me while I flood this place with fiction. I won't apologize for it though. Finding her was the easy part. She had left a trail for me, so long and narrow that I almost believed I was being lead to her. Perhaps this is ...