NaNoWriMo: The Kairos

An excerpt from my NaNoWriMo novel The Building. This one came quite literally out of nowhere. I'd had a loose idea of a personification of the Kairos on a stationary bike, bubbling ideas up into a pool because I'd always had my best ideas and done my best thinking while swimming in my own building's pool. The image of the kairos as a "small, bald, mecurial man" is a gift from Michael MacDonald, one of my third-year rhetoric profs at Waterloo who always seemed more interested in ideas and discussion than marking. How MacDonald's Kairos came to be crossed with a disheveled Danny DeVito, I'll never know, but in that persona he wrote himself. That being said, I made schizophrenic attempts at communicating his voice using creative spelling, and I haven't really gone back to make sure it all lines up with itself. ごめん、ね！

“What’s his deal, anyway? He makes this big ol world; he makes me as a part of it, and then he’s gotta keep me down here: chained to a bike, keeping the pool running. The last of the Kairos. Kept here, in this leaky friggin dungeon so he can come back and steal my ideas from time to time. You’d think that a creator just might take stock of what’s to be found in his creation. All of you kids—his glorious children—all you do is come up with these crazy ideas, and he should be taking notes. I seen you around Michael. I know how you work. You’re here because of that wonderlust in you.”

“Wanderlust?”

“What? You think I got a speech impediment? Or you just going deaf? No, numbnuts. Not Wanderlust. Any schmoe can catch a case of Wanderlust. You got something way more terminal: WONDERlust. You wander around swearing to yourself that all the crap down here could be real: dragons and giant trees and worlds behind the world. Christ, He could have just pulled it all from your brain to dress up what’s really down here. You’re searching for all of these unbelievable wonders when the rest of your race out there is a freakin’ wonder generation engine.

“You keep coming across them and forgetting them: the bimini road. The mad trapper. The disembodied feet washing up on the shores of British Columbia with the shoes still on. Friggin Atlantis! God, I can’t count the number of times that I’ve wandered in on one of your wet dreams about the forgotten continent. All of this stuff is out there, waiting for you to wonder about it, but you’re chasing dragons in the basement of an apartment building.

“Fine. You want to know what this place is all about? I’ll give ya a little run-down.

“There is a guy on the twelfth floor who thinks he can control light but is actually in the process of becoming a star. But alls he’s ever wanted was to be a man. He’s got these eyes…Christ. You should see those eyes. One day somebody’s gonna describe them as like looking at the North star through a…through a nimbus of snow clouds, those eyes. And that one will be one of mine. It’s probably those eyes that got him into all of this: they let him see more parts of this world than you and me we could ever imagine. Spectrums, eh? He sees ‘em all wit’ dose eyes. That guy could probably see clear across time if he thought he needed to. It’s gonna be dose same eyes that end him. He’s a gonna look up at a star, and…poof. Gone. Man no more.

“Jeez. Lookit me. Smartest guy on the planet; all these big ideas, and I can’t keep a lick of it for myself. I gotta give ‘em all to shmoes like you who wind up wasting half of them because you’re no better than me at keepin’ them all in your goddamn heads. Gotta write it all down or type it all up or it just goes out the window. I remember the good ol days, I tell ya. Back then, ya had some story tellers. Homer’d hold whole epics between his ears, and even when he forgot a bit, he still kept the most important part of it all sandwiched in there: the bit that birthed all the rest of it, the bit that let him make up for the forgotten parts on the fly. You wise guys, always chasin’ after dames, you called it a Muse, and you dressed it up in something sexy and slinky, and you put it on a pedestal, and when you did all that you made sure you’d never have it back where it was supposed to be all along: sandwiched in your brains.

“Lemme drop some wisdom on you: there’s a little thing out there called ‘true names.’ They’re tied in wit’ the souls or the essence or the animating gas of everything on this planet. You happen to stumble onto something’s true name, you get power over it. Simple as dat: done. It’s yours. Do with it as you will. And so long as you don’t know something’s true name, you can’t ever really get a hold of it. Sure, you can chain it to a bike, in a leaky basement, and you can make it run your waterworks, but so long as you haven’t got its true name, it’s still going to have a part of it, squirreled away in its brain somewhere, that you can never touch.

“But there’s a problem, see, because when you start calling something by other than its true name, and you do it for long enough, that something can lose its name and start believing in the one you gave it. And, when that happens, the thing that you’ve chained: the thing that you’ve tied up on the back step of your house, it starts forgetting what it was meant to be—what it’s true name was indicative of. Its brain gets empty of everything but what you fill it up with. It stops being what it’s meant to be, and it starts being what you think it should be.

“This happened with stories: with inspiration. You started calling it Muse, and you started dressing it up in flowy, see-through robes, and you started saying that it was a lady, and it hung out with all its lady friends in the woods, and if you were cunning enough, you could capture it. Chain it. Make it YOUR inspiration. If you’d a done it these days, you’d a copyrighted the friggin thing and turned it out to your friends for a tidy profit. You’d a pimped out something that naturally existed in your brains and only ever wanted to take care of you. Only ever wanted to expand your world with ideas you can no longer fathom.

“There’s things that ain’t never meant to be owned: ain’t never meant to be copyrighted or protected or limited. You leave them alone in the world to do what they’re doing, and you might be surprised with what they come up with. But you guys. You guys with your big ‘ol brains full of logic and reason, and what have they got ya? All they’ve ever succeeded in doing is limiting a world that is, by nature, limitless. You and that Luc guy sit back and you moan and moan and moan about “oh, there are only nine stories to tell! Oh woe is we!’”

He stopped pedaling, leaned back and squinted at me, shaking his head.

“Well what if you’re wrong.

“Sure, Babylon only ever had nine branches, but those nutjobs at Babylon were already so very far gone from what you all once were. They’d started writing things down; putting them into books and making it all so solid: so defined.

“But back before Homer, it was all in your head. It was all living stories that walked out of those big ol thought boxes of yours from time to time, toured around a bit, gave some people some ideas, then went back in there to grow some more, to change, to evolve. There never was a definite number of stories. Sure, now there is, but back then…everyone was inspiration. Everyone had one of me living inside their brain buckets, riding my little bicycle and whispering in their ear about how this world was all that you could make of it. You start talking this shit about nine stories, and you tell your friends, and they start talkin’ it, and eventually enough people have heard you flapping your gums that they assume you must have proof, and something that was a shady matter of opinion becomes fact, and you do that for long enough and you’ll never be able to go back.

“I’ll leave you with this little nugget.

“You.

“You humans.

“You brilliant friggin monkeys. You made me. You made all of this.”

He took the cigar from his mouth and gestured at the ceiling with it.

“You made Him, and you made the Other One, too. You made them so long ago that even They can’t remember it, and you did it all with those brains of yours: through will without thought. Through emotion without logic. You were picking ticks off each other and scratching your asses, and all you ever wanted was for someone to love and protect you. To watch over you and to make sure every little thing was going to be just swell. You thought it, and enough of you thought it together, and eventually you made it happen: the prodigal immaculate conception.”

“You get these smart friggin’ guys in white coats telling you that you only use 10% of your brains, and yet no one really cares, and no one ever asks where the other 90% went. What that other 90% was capable of. You keep asking all these stupid friggin questions about ‘what’s so special about the Building’ and ‘how can these people do these things in the Building.’ Well, Einstein, welcome to that other 90%. They ain’t psychic, and they ain’t superheroes, they’re just the living breathing presence of what you’ve all been missing for so long. They’re the filler to the absence that makes the rest of you so common.”

He leered at me from atop the stationary bike, his face flushed red and his legs spinning around so fast that they were almost a blur. Sweat soaked the white tank top that was stretched across his pot belly. He looked back into the distance and started muttering to himself.

And then he stopped.

He kept staring off into the distance, and his eyes began to scan idly as if he were listening to distant music. His face pulled up into a grimace, and he snorted out a laugh.

“Huh. How do ya like that? Apparently I’ve displeased the figment of your collective imaginations.”

And with that, he kind of popped—like a water balloon in the shape of a small man, except when the water of it fell to the floor and sluiced into a drain, there was no longer any trace of a water balloon or a man, just a disembodied grumbling that faded away down the long corridors of pipes.

Tiny False Prophets

The Yuki Mushi clamour in the air most days now, crying snowy WOLF to anyone who will listen. I barely notice them at all these days, or I dismiss their existence spitefully. I see what were once romantic harbingers now more as aggravating liars: tiny false prophets who will swarm your eyes and your nose and your hair to tell you...

nothing.

For there is no snow for them to herald, and all we've got to show for this end of November is a drawn-out, leafless indian summer. Under icy nights so clear as to cause the stars to pierce your eyes like pins, I pray to the full moon in the cloudless sky: that the cold she brings in the midnight hours should seep int the days; that it should cause all of this rain to fall in unrelenting curtains of white on the mountains; that its icy claws should ply our autumn coats, sneaking in through cracks and gaps until it forces us to once again pull on our woolies.

NaNoWriMo: A Benign Haunting

An excerpt from my NaNoWriMo novel The Building. This was one of the first stories to come to me in all of this, and it is still very much the one I'm most in love with. What's more, it's very loosely inspired by very true events.

Upon later reviewing the newspaper articles around the event, I built the following timeline:

The elderly mother and father had been out shopping for their Christmas meal earlier that day. They’d been running errands from place to place, picking up all of the various parts of the dinner, when their car had been blindsided by an 18-wheeler that had failed to stop at a red light. It was unclear how far they’d gotten in their errands or even at what exact time the accident happened as no groceries were found in what remained of their car at the accident site, and charges were registered on their credit cards immediately following the projected time of the accident.

I’d run into the couple in the apartment building a few times before, and it got to the point where I could tell when they were expecting their family to visit as they’d be positively aglow with anticipation. The love I saw in them…it was very clear that they lived for their children and their grand children.

And what if love was enough? What if it could make you live for the ones who meant most to you?

What if that elderly couple did live for their children and their grandchildren? What if that crash that was so sudden and such a surprise somehow went unnoticed. Though their physical bodies were ended in a pile of scrap and glass, what if their minds and their hearts continued on the vector they were already following: like momentum. They were so wrapped up in the errands they were performing and in the Christmas dinner that they had been so looking forward to that they didn’t want to miss it for anything.

So they didn’t.

The errands were run and the groceries were bought and brought back to their apartment in 2306, and they made a feast for their family. Their intentions were so pure that there was no distinguishing them from actions. Their family expected them to be there in that apartment, with a feast prepared, and the two of them wanted nothing but the same. And somewhere in that mess of emotions and expectations, an act of faith occurred. They were there, and the family did come, and it was a Christmas like any other.

The family left their parents that night, got on a plane the next morning, and were gone off on their one-month winter adventure. They missed the news reports, they missed the police calls, and they missed the disposal company trying to deliver the contents of their parents’ apartment. There were no life insurance policies, and there were no wills. By the time the young family returned home from their adventure, their parents’ case had somehow slipped through the cracks. When it came time for Family Day, when it came time for Easter and their daughter’s birthday, the young family visited their parents, and their parents were there for these family events that had always been observed so unfalteringly as to have become more than just routine.

What happened or where the parents went when the family wasn’t visiting, I don’t know. Maybe they still lingered in that apartment, living out the lives they’d forgotten to die at the end of, in some way we can’t understand. I know only that when I peaked through that mail slot, I recognized their furniture, and when the property manager took me into that apartment after I’d questioned her about it, there was nothing in it but months of dust.

Is it possible that you could become so wrapped up in something: so tenaciously invested in it that it could eclipse all else in your mind, even cause you to miss or forget your own death? Yes, should your body be destroyed, you would be dead, in a sense, but could the right impulse for love or justice or closure at the exact instant of death be what makes a ghost of you: what sets you off a-haunting?

Though the previous tenants were, in a way, forcefully evicted when their family, the last of the people who believed in them, were forced to face the truth, there is some evidence that some part of them lingers still. When questioned about how the whole story had made the new tenants feel, one of them said the following to the newspaper reporter:

“I don’t know. There’s just something about this apartment. Every time I come home, it feels warm. I’ll wake up in the morning and swear that I had just smelled fresh-baked bread and hot coffee. I feel safe here, even when I’m alone. Come to think of it, I’ve been living here for four months now, and even when my roommates are out, I never really feel alone in here.”

If you don’t believe me, go and ask her.

NaNoWriMo: Maiden on the Stair

An excerpt from my NaNoWriMo novel The Building:

“Do you remember those stories you used to hear when you were a kid? The ones about the evil witches who’d cast enchantments on innocent young maidens? They’d turn them into trees or toadstools or warty crones, and they’d be cursed to never know the touch of a man? This is like that, except without quite as much hocus pocus…” she smiled wickedly “…or the innocence.”

“Your boyfriend’s a witch?” I said, using my typical boy-in-presence-of-disarmingly-cute-girl wit.

“Yeah. Sure is, genius. Right down to the broomstick and the pointy nose.” She looked down her nose at me, giving me a deadpan stare. “He’s not a witch or wizard or even a particularly skilled parlour magician. He’s just got me trapped, sort of. I can’t really say what it is. It’s taken me years to figure out that it was even there.”

“So, instead of turning you into a toadstool he’s…what? Made it so you’re invisible to every man but me?”

“No. It’s not just you, but it’s worse than being invisible.” She paused, changing trains of thought. “We met in this laundry room, right?”

I thought back a bit. “Right.”

“Except we didn’t. I’d seen you at least a dozen times before we ever ran into each other in here. I’d even had a conversation with you once outside the lifts.”

I looked at those green eyes, at that straight, brown hair. “Nan uh. I think I’d remember that.”

“You can’t. You couldn’t possibly. That’s why this is all so messed up. If I was invisible, that’d be one thing, but the reality is that everyone sees me. They look right at me. They have conversations with me. They just never notice me. I only ever hang around in their very shortest of short term memories.”

I just blinked at her, wide-eyed. “But I remember you. How else could I come down and meet you here when I do?”

“Yeah, sure you do. But just here. Haven’t you ever wondered why we can only ever be together in the Laundry room?”

“Well, yeah, but…” I had a reason, I just couldn’t put my finger on it anymore. “I assumed it was because this was a place he never came,” I suggested, though I after realized that was the first thought I’d ever given the matter. “So then why here?”

“I think it’s a mistake…or I guess a miracle, from my perspective. I think it’s a loophole in whatever he’s got me trapped in. When people come over to visit our apartment, they see me and they talk to me like normal. It’s only outside the apartment that I go unnoticed.” She shivered slightly. I put my arm around her.

“He’s a pretty traditional guy, you know? I’m guessing you got that impression from the kind of stuff I’ve told you about him so far. He’s got these ideas about how a woman’s proper place is in the home. I think it’s tied into that. I think that, whatever he’s doing, it only lets me be me so long as I’m in our home.”

I nodded. It all made the kind of disparate sense that things in the Building usually made.

“Except an apartment isn’t a home. It’s got all the parts of a normal home, but they’re spread out. Like, I think I got noticed by a guy while I was taking out the recycling one time.”

She laughed. “I was staging some kind of passive aggressive rebellion, I guess. I decided that, even though it was the dead of winter, I was going to take out the trash in my underwear. It was when I’d was only starting to understand what was going on, and I guess it was kind of a test. If anyone was going to notice me, I was betting that being half-naked would do the trick. So, I left the apartment in my underwear with a box of recycling, and I waited for the lifts. When the door opened, there was a guy inside carrying a bag of cans. He glanced at me when I got on, seemed like he was about to say something, and then he went back to looking at the blinking numbers. I kept trying to talk to him in the lift on the way down, and he kept half turning towards me before getting distracted by something and turning back to the numbers that were counting down to ground.

“I got frustrated, assuming that was all the proof I needed, and when we reached ground, I followed him out to the dumpsters without saying a word. We passed some people in the lobby on their way in, but they gave me only the same passing glances. So I followed this guy out into the cold, and I cursed my stupid idea all the frigid way to the bloody dumpsters. We both went in through the wooden gate, he hefted his bag of cans in, and turned back towards me. I was about to slip past him to dump my box, but I froze. He was staring right at me, looking real confused. All he could come up with was ‘what are you doing?’, and I was so surprised that I couldn’t think of what I was meant to do when and if someone DID notice me that I dropped the box of cans and just took off, running back to the apartment building. I looked back once, and he was standing just outside the wooden paddock where they keep the dumpsters, looking confused as hell."

“That was a while back, and I’d pretty much given up hope by the time I met you in here that first time and you blushed at my giant load of underwear.”

“Oh crap. You noticed? And here I was thinking I’d been so slick.”

“Are you kidding? You made it so bloody obvious that you’d noticed me by that bumbling stream you tried to pass off as small talk!” She smiled from ear to ear.

I endeavored to change the subject.

“So where do we go from here?”

NaNoWriMo: Dregs

An excerpt from my NaNoWriMo Novel The Building:

A wooden cork had been left in the bottle, and when I swished the bottle around, there was still some liquid left in the bottom of it. I twisted the cork out and smelled the base of it. It smelled sweet and musty. I handed it to Magda to sniff while I put my nose to the bottle. I almost keeled over, and she erupted in a fit of giggles.

“Gah! It’s like someone left a gym sock in a vat of honey,” I coughed.

“Lemme smell! Lemme smell!” Magda put her nose to the bottle, took a tentative sniff, and then shot out her hand that was holding the bottle with a force that I thought would surely fling it across the room. She made like she was dry heaving.

“Nasty, eh,” I questioned.

“Completely,” she agreed. And then there was more mischief in her eyes.

“We should try some!”

Before I could protest, she went bounding off into the kitchen and returned with two shot glasses. She thunked them down on her modest dinner table and started pouring out the vile alcohol into the two of them. It flowed more or less like wine, but where it splashed up against the edges of the glass, it would ooze down slowly in a way that reminded you that you were dealing with honey.

The stuff hit the back of my throat, and it was like warmth all throughout my body. The warmth spread to my eyes, and Magda and I were standing out in the middle of a blizzard. Spires rose all around us, and I couldn't tell if they were mountain peaks or the beginnings of glaciers. Away on a hill in the blue grey dark, a huge old wooden hall blazed with yellow light. But we had no need for it for we seemed to be warmed by the very blizzard's bluster. Magda stood before me, but the little auburn in her hair had set the whole of it alight in a deep red, and her curls were slowly distending: unfurling and flowing outward like boas lazily unfurling. I looked in her eyes and beheld myself. The faintest tint of rust in the scratchy thing I called a beard had spread, and it stood out in livid orange on forearms like tree trunks and the back of my meaty hands. There was something wild to me, like my ancestors a few generations back may well have been eagles or bears. Through her eyes, I looked back into my eyes, and it was an infinite regress of a universe seen clearly. In the tumbling reflections, every particle was numbered, and their chaotic paths mapped out in a web of fine filaments, which wound all back together into only a few thick strands beneath the world, where three women with one eye between them sharpened a set of bone shears. Threads that were also roots in a universe that was also a tree.

Who was the one that planted the seed?
Who was the one that sparked the fire?

"WHAT the hell was that," I exclaimed as if coming up for air.

It took Magdalena another minute, and I watched her twirl her hair like she was spinning it on a wheel for a moment, a look so far off in her eyes as to be completely absent, before she, too, froze and came back out of it, seizing what little of her curly hair there was up into a hand and inspecting it as if she thought it might have been alive.

"woooaAAAHHHH!" it built from her as she became more aware, a movement from amazement into panic. She looked at me with wide eyes, and I shrugged violently to let her know that I didn't have the first clue what had just gone down.

"Did you...?"

"Hair. Snow. A galaxy in a spiderweb."

"Yeah! Me too!" her mouth hung open for a moment as she tried to remember the sound that was meant to follow.

"Wooooah!"

The Viking boomed again on the other side of the wall, hurling curses in his lilting language. “I guess we know where he gets it from,” I said, staring wide-eyed at the dregs in the bottom of my shotglass. “That stuff is STRONG!”

NaNoWriMo: Pandora's Dark Curiosity

An excerpt from my NaNoWriMo novel The Building. Point of interest: I wrote this bit while participating in a race to 1,000 words at our NaNoWriMo write-in at the Benscotters' in Muroran, so I'll post it to that date. Further, this piece deals in my mild obsession with the idea of a gothic secret. Unfortunately, I'm not sure it's got legs.

It sat like darkness in the middle of the room. No one could tell me how it had gotten there, or how long it’d been, or even who it belonged to. It just was, in this vacant apartment. I’d once asked the Super about it, about how the apartment was vacant and what they were planning to do with it, and he came in, took a look around, said he should probably see about having it disposed of, and then his gaze just kind if…slid off it. He turned around, started talking about something else, and walked out of the room, closing the door behind him and leaving me alone in the room with it.

I talked to Luc about it because he’s the kind of guy you talk to about stuff like it. He’s the kind of guy that pulls out the esoteric knowledge that you didn’t know you needed. He walked in, took one look at it, and all he said was

“I don’t know. It makes me uncomfortable.”

“But it’s gotta be something, right? Sitting alone in a room of the Building? I’ve had the Super in here to look at it, except he can’t really look at it. He takes one glance at it, and then he just—I don’t know—gets distracted or something and wanders off. I’ve never seen him like that before.”

“Maybe it’s because it’s not important, Michael.”

“It’s gotta be. The Super can’t see it. I’ve asked some of the old ones about it, and all they can tell me is that no one goes to the 21st floor, but none of them could tell me why. I asked them if any of them had ever seen a black box sitting on a wooden chair in the middle of a room, and when I did they got distracted.”

“Maybe they were trying to be polite, Michael: feigning disinterest to hint that it wasn’t a line of discussion that they wished to pursue.”

“No. You didn’t see them. It was something in their eyes. It was like…like the Super. It looked like they couldn’t hold it in their head. You’ve got that collection of those weird, mystery articles about the building. Tales of the Building, wasn’t it? Is there anything in there about this?”

“I can assure you without a shadow of a doubt that there is nothing in that particular collection about anything like this.”

“But…don’t you want to know what it’s all about, Luc!? Don’t you want to plow through your books and come up with some explanation about how it’s a Babylonian wotzit?”

“Summerian. If it’s anything, it’s Summerian. But, no. I’m not interested. I’m quite sure I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

He kind of shivered, turned around, and then left. I stayed there in the empty room, wondering at Luc not being interested in something. Since I’d met him, I’d often come to him to bounce things I’d seen in the Building off him, and he always took them way more seriously than I’d ever intended to discuss them. I’d come to him with the most banal things, and he’d always seem riveted. I’d never seen him disinterested.

* * *

Some nights, I’d get bored, so I’d walk down the stairs to 21. The door would be unlocked, like it always was, and I’d open it and just stand there in the doorway, staring at the way that the moonlight and fluorescent offglow of the city would fall around it from the windows, never actually touching it; never casting any kind of shadow other than the one that always hung around it.

I watched it over and over again for the space of a week. I couldn’t really tear myself away from it. In my empty moments, I would just wander downstairs, open that door, and stare. Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, I’d just wander down there and stare at it. Sometimes in those midnight hours, I’d think I heard whispers in the room, filtering down from the tenants above or up from the ones below. Eventually I realized that they were coming from the thing itself: whispers in no language I’d ever known. I couldn’t turn away, but gradually the same odd creepy vibe that Luc seemed to get off it began to seep in around the edges. I was intrigued about everything that it was, but I become more and more uncomfortable with it with every visit.

All at once, I realized it wasn’t right. That the thing that had so intrigued me about it all of this time was the realization somewhere in the back of my mind that it shouldn’t be there: that it was somehow living in a void or a gap or a tear in what was normal and right. There were a number of things that I’d run across in this building, and they’d seemed odd or unbelievable, but, for some reason, despite all of their oddity they all just fit in the building somehow. They were odd, but they were the kinds of things that couldn’t possibly exist anywhere else. They all had the same timeless quality as the building: the same undeniableness.

But this thing wasn’t meant to be here. Someone or something had put it here, and they’d counted on that way that it was able to wrap the shadows around itself and cause the people like the Super and Old Ones to just forget about it to protect the thing: to keep it here to accomplish whatever it was meant to be doing.

NaNoWriMo: Alys and the Grey Lion

An excerpt from my NaNoWriMo novel The Building:

“So they’ve got active imaginations?”

“No. It’s more than that. They can create these worlds, but they can also make you believe in them. The story of Lewis Carrol and his Wonderland is only one of the most famous examples. There are some who believe that Scheherazade—Arabian Nights Scheherazade—was an Alys, and that is how she managed to survive for so long. Every night, she was able to tell stories so real that the sultan forgot to execute her. I guess it’s supposed to be like seduction or maybe suggestion? It’s creation and its hypnotic. Lewis Carrol claimed that he just wrote down the fabulous daydreams of Alice Liddell, but some believe that, being in the presence of an Alys, he was powerless to do anything else.

“The strongest believers in the Alys seem to also be some kind of Neo Feminists. They wrap the abilities of Alyses up in the feminine archetype. The ability to bare life into the world; the ability to control men with their hormones/body/femininity: they mash it all up into their concept of the Alys. Just as a woman can create life and hold it within her biologically in a way that a man can only ever dream of, the Alyses can create and hold whole worlds of life within their minds with an attention to detail that the most creative of men can never hope to achieve. These people believe that, even if it is never born into the physical world, this life is no less real than the life of a fetus. The reason the Alyses can describe this created worlds with such detail is that the characters within them live and die within their minds. Should the Alys ever stop creating and maintaining the world, the ending of the life within it is no less real than the end to life that comes with an abortion. Further, these individuals believe that, just as women have been known to control men by taking advantage of sexuality, so, too, can an Alys seduce the mind of a man by impregnating it with these fertile ideas. The man in question becomes a slave to the worlds and the ideas, and about all they can do to overcome them is to set them all down on paper.”

* * *

“Are you an Alys?”

“I don’t know what I am. I know that there are places and people who live in my mind like memories, and I know that I’ve never met them. I know that the worlds that he wrote about were my worlds, and the people who populated them were my people. I know that from an early age he had more of an understanding of what I was than I did, and I sometimes wonder if all of that homeschooling—all of that religious study—wasn’t some attempt by him to try and influence the development of the worlds within me. There was a lion, and that lion was him. I never created it; it just came to be within my world, and it spoke similar truths to the things he taught me in our lessons. It shaped the worlds by influencing the people who lived within them. By the time I was old enough to guess what was happening, the Lion had already inculcated itself so deep within the world that I couldn’t remove it. I tried, though, and it lead to a war in my mind. I tried to take back the world I created, but the people I had created fought for the Lion, and no matter what adversaries my mind could create to oppose them, they triumphed.

“Eventually, though, I found a way to end it: to end the world and all life in it. The act of it felt like a minor suicide: like ending a very vital part of my body, but my body still going on despite the death. The part of me where all of that glowed and lived and kept me company was empty from then on. No matter what I tried to create to fill it, it still stood empty. He would beg me to tell him about my dreams: to tell him how the battle ended and who was victorious. Did the forces of good triumph? Did the forces of evil? Were they forced to except The Word? And what of The Lion?

“I told him I didn’t know. I told him it was all just gone. I think he might have suspected it. He had been writing it down all along. He had been preparing it to publish, and all he needed for his grand, epic story was that last battle: to know how it ended and who came out on top. When I wouldn’t give it to him, he had to come up with it himself, and I gained my small victory in the fact that it was never the same."

NaNoWriMo: A Library and A Book

An excerpt from my NaNoWriMo Novel The Building:

There’s a book out there that you’re not meant to read. It answers far more questions than any book was ever supposed to address—far more questions than any one, right-thinking individual would ever want to ask. Some people have postulated that book and this book to be one and the same, but that would be a rather difficult reality to sustain. For, you see, that book of Answers To Questions Unposed exists in a library just as impossible as the volume itself. It’s a library that seems to make a habit of bringing together answers and connecting threads. In that respect, it is rather un-librarian.

Libraries were created as repositories: Huge halls of stacks for lumping together the disparate trains of thought of whole language societies. A librarian, or perhaps the Duey Decimal System would have you believe that libraries are very organized places, and they would try to use the very official-sounding language of numbers as proof of their organization. However Fiction and Non Fiction and Fantasy and Do It Yourself are vain attempts at classifying a multitude of volumes whose only common trait is entropy.

This impossible library that is home to the impossible tome is distinctly un-librarian in that it actually succeeds where all the libraries that have come before it have failed: it organizes a dizzying number of disparate volumes into a more or less cohesive whole. Even where the individual texts differ, its overarching organizational structure of departments or genres is truer than any traditional library. Whether that makes it un-librarian or proto-librarian—the library of the world of Forms, the Library Archetype—is not for me to say, but it’s the case that it’s the only library to ever get it right.

That’s because, as some wise man once said in the annals of history, there are only X original types of stories that mankind have ever succeeded in telling. That X has varied between different wise men from X=2 to X=7. The truth is that the X should = 9. There are nine original forms of story, from which every single written human endeavor has descended. This impossible library had only nine genres within it, and they were one and the same with these nine original branches of story.

It’s not much use in cataloguing them, though, as the library was so impossible that it could be argued that it was responsible for its own fiery end. Any discussion of impossible volumes or impossible collections has been rendered moot by immolation. It’s for that reason that this book couldn’t possibly be that book, so do yourself a favour and quit hoping.

Service Interruptions Likely

Well, I can't exactly say that service on here has been regular since that whole Epic Four Points Deally, but this is just a post to say that the month of November will, likely, be a write-off as far as blogging is concerned. I'll still be doing stuff, but when I'm not off and doing it, I should really be off writing.

After years of putting it off, I finally signed up for National Novel Writing Month. I'm now engaged in the process (well, I'm currently behind in the process, if you want to be accurate) of attempting to write 50,000 words--a novel-length work of fiction--in 30 days. I had thought that with all of the prep time afforded to JETs teaching in Japan, the process would be a breeze, but of late I keep getting distracted by work and volunteer responsibilities for HAJET, and, of course, The Doctor.

But, even if it's a little behind where it should be right now, the work is coming along well. It's a still-fragmented something about gods and monsters and buildings, and the hapless, very human tenants tasked with making sense of it all. There are libraries and lions and men who just might be turning into stars. There are gods above and below on undeniable collision courses. There is fiction, and there is experiential fact, and despite the many threads of story I'm trying to weave separately, there is already a terminus: a nice, convenient domino of persistent plot elements that will, hopefully, tie it all up in the end.

So, with that explained, I should probably be getting back to it, but here's an introduction to the idea behind the book:

Tenants in apartment buildings live, more or less, in a community with hundreds of complete strangers. Neighbours only ever see each other for so short a time, and the relationships that develop are one-dimensional: phatic. From the few points of contact with these people, guesses can be made to extrapolate the shape of their lives, but, what is the truth of the other 98% of the time when they go unseen? Are they just people, just as boring and quotidian as us all, or could they be gods and monsters.

Oh, and there's still no snow in Hokkaido--well, at least not in the low parts. That being said, the weather is odd today, and there seems to be hope in the high places. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the possibility of boarding to celebrate the national holiday and the birth of The Season on November 23rd.