Conquest

The man sat upon his white horse, overlooking the city as his man ran through it, torching the buildings, cutting down civilians, and taking the small bit of wealth it had for his own ranks. The city was just a stepping stone as far as he was concerned - he watched with a smile on his face as his men took the women for their own, using them to create new children to be bred to take more towns and wealth and power. His army needed not win any battles - they needed only to destroy everything that they were placed in front of.

Night fell, but their camp was illuminated by the burning city they left in their wake. Men enjoyed their new women, they feasted on the food they had taken from the city, and they laughed at the stories some told of the few who had tried to resist them. The way that men had simply been crushed under their boots as they marched forward, the screams of the weak as their homes burned, and the blood that had been spilt into the streets. They laughed, they made merriment, and the made children. And their commander stayed atop his white horse and smiled.

Day in and day out, the men marched, and they torched the land, killed the men, and took the women. Their commander never grew tired of watching his men carry these actions out day in and day out, and the men never grew tired of the rewards they were repeatedly given upon a successful conquering. They were all strong men, selected for their muscle and their lack of concern. They were lustful, greedy, and competitive. At times they fought amongst themselves to see who was stronger, or who had conquered the most women, and their commander only smiled and watched, and rewarded the winner when he killed the other.

But the size of the army never changed. As men were killed, the commander on his horse would always find more to take their place. There were always men searching for power and fame, and they were easy to convince to join his army. They were accepted by the others before they had even finished their first burning.

The man sat on his horse as they marched, glancing back occasionally, seeing the path of flames and destruction he left behind him, and he smiled. He loved how much he was destroying. He would conquer the world, and when the world was his, he would conquer his own army. And all of the women and wealth they had gathered would belong to him and him alone, and only the powers of actual war, famine, or death could stop him.

John

For the most part, it had been a pretty normal day in the office for John - he had come in to a load of paperwork, several notes on his desk for things he needed to get done, and a computer that took a good twenty minutes before it would even allow him to input his password, much less get to work. His coffee was bland, but at least it woke him up, as he nodded irreverently at the repeated greetings of "John." They had all worked in the office for years - pleasantries had vanished quite some time ago.

He sat down at his desk to see the familiar "Good morning John" greeting on his desktop, accompanied by the password input. He typed it in mindlessly, sipping at his coffee, hoping it would wake him up faster, and picked up one of the sheets of orders as he waited for the computer to finish booting up. "You're better than this John." Typical, ungrateful notes from his boss. He decided to ignore them for now and get to his main workload. He didn't feel like being criticized before lunch.

He could only stand working for so long however, before the coffee sent him to the john. He stood alone, in silence, doing his business, hoping that the boss wouldn't walk in and try to talk to him while he was peeing. "John," he could practically hear in his head, "did you get my messages this morning? You look tired, John. You should really wake up."

The numbers on his computer screen were beginning to blur together as the day went on. John didn't understand why he was so tired. He had already had three cups of coffee, which had sent him to the John five times. It wasn't even lunch yet. He heard his co-workers talking. "John looks so tired. Why won't JOhn wake up. We NEED JOHN."

He jolted upright in his seat as they started screaming. His head was suddenly pounding. He looked around as JOHN words slammed into the walls like enormous JOHN birds slamming into JOHN car doors. He JOHN WAKE UP didn't know what was happening.

JOHN THIS CAN'T CONTINUE.

JOHN COME BACK.

JOHN.

It had been a fairly normal day in the office for John, for the most part. He had come in to a lot of work, multiple notes from his boss, a computer that wouldn't boot for a solid thirty minutes, and a terrible feeling that he needed to get out of the office.

The cab

Dan slipped into the cab, out of breath from running around trying to signal one down, and handed the driver a slip of paper with the address of his house on it. He had found in the past that cab drivers often were not really listening to what he said and would go in the wrong direction or stop at the wrong place, which frequently resulted in him having to pay more because they had to travel an extra distance. He had had much better luck when simply handing them the address - though he still had trouble. Some cab drivers were simply incompetent.

And, unfortunately, his current driver seemed to be one such. Despite having clearly looked over the address, the driver was going in the completely wrong direction, away from his home, and was not using any kind of gps to navigate. Dan tried to correct the driver, to tell him that he really needed to go the other way, but the driver just waved him off, as though to say, "I know what I'm doing." Dan slumped in his seat, angry at what was happening, but he knew better than to try and just get out, especially when they were already on the freeway. He had no choice but to let the driver he take him where he would.

At some point, Dan must have fallen asleep, because the bump in the road jolted him awake, and he realized as he whipped his head around that he knew exactly where he was - and it was not home.

"What the hell are you doing?" he demanded of the driver. "How do you even know where this is? Why are you taking me out here?"

But the driver just looked back at him and smiled, his car unyielding.

They came to a stop in front of his uncle's house. Dan hadn't been there in years, and the last time he had been, he had run away from it. He had been young, and desired to get out of the country, away from the farm, and to see the world. He was tired of being a poor farmer's boy. He was tired of living with his uncle after his parents' death. So he had run. And he had never looked back.

His door open, and his driver got out of the car, quite clear in his intent not to keep driving. Dan growled and got out of the car. "I'm not paying you for this," he said hotly. The driver shrugged, clearly content with his passenger's statement.

Dan walked slowly up to the old house. It hadn't changed over the years. The farm was still bumbling along. There were a few animals mindlessly chewing at the grass. Reluctantly, he knocked on the front door. A minute passed before it slowly swung open, his uncle standing behind it, confused at having a visitor. But when he saw who it was, a look of shock overtook him.

"Hello, unc-"

And his uncle was on him, arms wrapped around him, holding him tightly.

Sleeping on the plane

About a month ago now, I wrote about how my mom was sick, and how she had a severe heart attack, and about how I wasn't sure how much writing I was going to be doing in the future because of how hard that rocked me. Fortunately I pushed myself through it, as did she, and now she's fully recovered and moving on with our lives. But that night, as I flew out to see her, I cannot accurately put into words how tired and afraid I was.

It was already pretty late when I got on the plane. Or, at least, it was pretty late for me. I've been working a very early morning job for about a year, which means going to bed several hours earlier than most people, and by the time I was getting on the plane it was well past my bed time. I remember hearing the flight attendants reading their sheets about plane safety, telling us about buckling our seat belts and where the emergency exits were. But I don't remember them exactly stopping talking about it. One second I was there, on the plane, listening, my eyes starting to droop, and then it was black and silent.

I've always been good at sleeping in vehicles. And by that, I mean that being in a moving vehicle for about a half an hour or more just puts me straight to sleep. But I'd never fallen asleep before the vehicle even started moving like that before. I never felt the plane take off. I never heard the roar of the engines. It wasn't a gradual thing like it sometimes is for me, giving me time to adjust myself in my seat to be in a more comfortable position. I was just out.

The bounce as we landed was what woke me up, and it scared the shit out of me. Having not been awake during take off, I thought we were taking off. I thought something had gone wrong. I had gone from still motion to full speed landing, and it felt like we were going fast. Too fast. And we weren't leaving the ground. The bump had felt like something had gone wrong, and the fact we were going so fast but felt like we were trying desperately to slow down made it seem like we were going to crash.

My head whipped violently back and forth, trying to see out an open window, and was surprised to see how calm the other passengers were. My heart was pounding out of my chest, and yet no one else was in the least concerned. It took me too long to realize what had happened.

I had enough reason to be rushing off the plane as it was with my mother, but my chest was still hurting from how hard my heart was pounding, and I wanted off.

Warning

Matthew sat at his desk, head cradled in his hands, pounding not for the first time. Mathematical equations rushed through his brain, threatening to overtake his consciousness and turn him into a human calculator. There were too many variables to calculate, too many possibilities he had to account for. And that was merely in the theoretical stages of the experiment. There was still the tests to be run to determine what materials would actually be usable in order for his creation to be successful, and then the full construction. And then there would be the tests to see if that construction would be successful when constructed.

There was a reason that time travel had not been constructed. The amount of energy required to fuel a tear in the space-time continuum was enormous, and not even a thousand nuclear power plants would be enough to sustain it long enough to make a single leap, much less a return trip. It would need to be enough to be accessed remotely as well if one wished to be able to return to the time they had originally leaped from. And this was all assuming that the tear one made in order to travel would be clean - like metal, any stress fractures or cracks it created could potentially lead to the very structure of time shattering, destabilizing the very existence of the universe as they knew it.

Theoretically, prodding at the fabric of reality like that in the first place would be a make or break deal. Too many failed tests would lead to the same results as finding a sketchy success. But there was a time and a place for risk, and with all of time and every place at his disposal, he was sure he could find one as an excuse for his experiments. But it would take time to complete. Matthew could only work for so long at a time before the mental strain was too much and threatened to shut him down.

He stood from his chair, intending to go upstairs and into the kitchen to make himself a pot of tea, when there was a sound like a sonic boom barely a dozen feet behind him, nearly tearing apart his eardrums and knocking him to his knees. He looked back to see the air itself torn apart, a black void floating in the air, and an aged version of himself stumbling out of it.

"It worked!" he exclaimed, though the pain in his ears meant that he could barely hear his own voice. He was looking at himself from the future. His experiment would be successful. He would invent time travel.

But the future him was trying to speak. He could see his own lips moving, but he could not make out the words. His ears were ringing - they felt wet. The future him looked... angry? Upset? He wasn't sure. But he kept pointing at himself, and back at the space where he was planning to build. Did he want him to build elsewhere? In that spot? His brain was too tired to comprehend.

And then it was as though there was a heavy wind blowing towards to void, and the future him was having trouble standing his ground. His feet left the earth, and he tumbled back into it, and then they were both gone.

Matthew's ears were still ringing, pain tearing through his head. He needed his tea. That was the only thing that could help him focus in that moment.

Traffic

There was silence in Mike's car as he impatiently tapped his finger on the steering wheel, staring angrily at the stopped car in front of him on the freeway. They had been stuck in stop and go traffic for well over an hour. He had mismanaged his battery life on his phone, killing the battery, and the fact that all of his usual radio stations were well out of signal range, meant that he had nothing to listen to. He was traveling by himself on a business trip, so he had no one to talk to. There was really nothing to distract him from what was going on in front of him on the road. And that wasn't very much.

He really should have known better than to set out at this time. He should have left hours earlier if he wanted to avoid this kind of traffic, but he had been lazing around in the big city, seeing the sights. He wasn't exactly a city slicker, but he wasn't a bumpkin either. He lived in a fairly small town, where he managed the power plant, which was why he had headed out of town for the weekend. There was a conference going on where people were gathering to discuss better ways to manage electricity, and by some fluke he had been invited to attend. It was a good opportunity, and it let him get out to see more of the world, which was something he had often thought about.

But if he was going to do it again, he certainly wouldn't have driven. The amount of time he had been staring at bumper stickers while not moving was agonizing. The number of drivers who had cut him off, only to hit the brakes and lean out their windows to yell at him as though he had been the one to cut them off. He had dreaded every time he had to get in his car, which was why he had waited so long to leave - any excuse he could come up with to not be driving again he took. Which, of course, had only made it that much worse when he did get back in the car again.

He was glad he had printed out directions before he left, because he would have been lost otherwise, but he questioned if they really were the fastest. They probably hadn't taken into consideration how much traffic there was on the road. But the alternate path probably would have taken him up and around the mountains on either side of him, and he wasn't sure how comfortable he felt with doing that. He had already made that mistake once before, and his brakes almost hadn't held him in place when he had had to stop while going uphill. That had been a terrifying experience.

The brake lights on the car in front of him turned off, and the joy was overwhelming. He moved forward about five feet in total before coming to a stop again.

He wanted to die.

Burning arrow

It was dark, with a light drizzle falling from the sky, and Laura had been out in the rain just long enough to be soaked to the bone and freezing. She had been making her way around the supposedly deserted island for three days, fighting for her life the entire time, trying to keep her skin and muscle attached to her bones, much to the resident cannibals dismay. They were no uncivilized, primitive tribe as the movies may have led one to believe. They were armed to the teeth with modern weaponry, machine guns and ammo aplenty, whereas the only reliable weapon she could hold on to was a bow and a quiver full of compound arrows she had found in one of their camps. She could use their guns as well, but she did not have access to their supply of ammo, whereas the arrows were well made and could be retrieved.

She was overlooking one of the more advanced outposts, contemplating how she was going to infiltrate it, and what she would do once she had. She knew she had to get off the island. Her plane had crash landed on it during a storm, destroying her navigation and communication systems, and she had been fortunate to stay conscious long enough not to be found by the inhabitants. She didn't know if she was thankful the deserting of the island had been a myth - it gave her a chance at survival, but she wasn't exactly fond of the thought of being eaten. Perhaps in the outpost she would be able to find something she could use to send out a radio signal as an SOS. Even then, she would have to be careful - if someone did pick it up, they would be going directly to the source, meaning she would have to stay near the outpost. And while she may be able to infiltrate it, there was no way she would be able to completely overtake it.

At least, not while it was in one piece.

She wrapped the end of one of her arrows with a piece of cloth that she had soaked in gasoline she had saved from one of the other outposts. Only a small bottle of it, but she had thought it might come in handy for this kind of scenario. It took a few tries, but she was able to crack some sparks off of two steel arrow tips, igniting the cloth. Quickly, she knocked the arrow, pulled back, and fired.

She watched the flaming arrow arc through the air, the gasoline preventing it from being extinguished by the rain. It struck true on her target - a massive gas tank that was powering the outpost on the western side. It pierced the side of the container, and for a moment, there was silence. And then the tank exploded, releasing a bright flash of light, and the power immediately died.

She would be down another arrow. But hopefully it would be worth it.

Burning time

The sound of pounding steel and roaring flames was deafening. Rory's shirt was drenched in sweat when he walked away from the kiln, only to dry anew as he shoved his half forged blade back into the flames, the hair on his arms nearly singed as the fire leaped out from the new opening he made to insert his metal. He was exhausted, but he chugged what little water he had, and kept pushing. He only had so much time to forge a knife in order to satisfy the judges. Time was ticking, and his opponents were well along in their forging as well. He knew he didn't have to make one faster, just better - but seeing and hearing their process only served to push him to move faster regardless.

Each time he pulled the red hot steel from the flames and ran it below his hammers, its shape was drawn out, thinned, and strengthened. It was a careful process - beating the steel when it was cold would not only make forming more difficult, it would weaken it, breaking the bonds between the molecular structure of the blade, making it more likely to crack or break once fully formed. Too hot, and the steel would burn, creating charred bubbles in the metal, effectively making it useless. Drawing the blade too thin would cause it to bend, warp, or break, while leaving it too thick would make it unwieldy, or unsuitable for cutting. It needed to be a precise size and shape if it had any hope of being useful, much less good.

But being on a time limit made that difficult. They had only been given a matter of hours to melt down materials and forge their blades, when normally it took a matter of days if they wanted to maintain any sense of quality. This was a single shot - if anything went wrong in the process, there was no time for second chances.

As the second hour passed, Rory witnessed this happen to several of the participants, and slowly the number of smiths dwindled as one blade after another failed them somewhere along the forging process. But Rory pressed on. His blade was far from perfect - it had two cracks near the middle of the blade, though they were minor, and a very slight warp as well. But these were problems that could be fixed during grinding. Warps could be bent back into place, and cracks could be strengthened or eroded, depending on how deep they ran.

The pressure was almost as intense as the flames of their fires, but the reward was worth the sweat and pain. A lifetime of being the king's blacksmith meant a lifetime of work and comfortable pay. Rory would gladly participate in this competition a hundred times for those honors.

Deviation

The sound of approaching footsteps alerted the beast to the hunters' approach. It turned toward them quickly, well accustomed to the sound of their metal encrusted feet, weighed down by their heavy weapons and the skins of its fallen comrades. It had survived for many years, evading the hunt, and crushing those who were able to get close enough to slash and bash. The scars had taken much time to heal, but seeing how the hunters fought, and what they aimed for, and what they were most hurt by, had allowed it to grow. It was no longer the monster they had once sought. It was something more.

The power of its roar sent the hunters tumbling to the ground, their hands desperately clutching their ears in an attempt to keep their eardrums from shattering. Instantly the beast let its rage fuel its body. The veins running along its wings pulsed and throbbed, their color becoming visibly rage as the adrenaline rushed through its body. It dug its claws into the stone beneath, sharpened long ago after years of battle and digging, preparing itself for the oncoming onslaught.

The one with the hammer was the first to recover. He must have been wearing some kind of earplugs. That was something the beast had witnessed many a time. That was the reason it had spent so much time strengthening its lungs and throat to empower its roar further. It willingly took the first blow to its head, knowing it could take it, waiting for the other hunters to recover as well. It wanted to draw them into a false sense of security. As the others approached, it dug its claws in deeper, then ripped forward with one, sending its body spinning with high velocity in a circle, free claw and tail ripping at the hunters faces and backs. A few managed to dodge out of the way, but it expected as much - which was why it ripped again, sending itself around a second time, knocking those few around as well.

It was an exhausting move, however, and it took a second to recover afterwards. It could see the hunters moving in again, undaunted by its attacks, and dug one claw in once more. But this time it dug deep, getting down to its elbow, before pulling straight back up, tearing a huge chunk of the earth free and into the air, falling on the hunters heads and crushing them like grapes.

It threw itself backwards twenty feet through the air, building space between them as the hunters pulled free from the earth. But it was done. It had survived too long to be hunted now. Another roar, sending them tumbling to the ground, and then he was off, ascending straight into the air.

Fashion

I've never really been one for fashion, although I do thoroughly enjoy older fashion styles - Victorian to be specific - but I have slowly been learning a little bit about it as I have explored what I like to wear and how I like to look. It's a pretty foreign concept to me, which is probably a weird a dumb thing to say being in my twenties, but it really is. I've never spent any time thinking about how I look or what I wear, other than when I dress up in something extravagant and crazy, but that's a pretty special occasion that doesn't come around very often.

Unfortunately, this kind of thing has actually affected my writing over the years as well. Not knowing what looks good means not knowing how to describe what looks good. Not paying any attention to how I look means not knowing how to describe how I look. And not knowing how to describe how I look means not knowing how to describe how my characters look.

Descriptions have never really been my strong point, which is probably because I've never paid much heed to how you would describe something. I can say that things were blue or red, big or small, even say that something was beautiful. But if you asked me to describe what made that thing beautiful, I would have no idea of what to tell you. So to say why someone is handsome, intimidating, scary, beautiful, or entrancing really doesn't go much deeper than that. But it really should. A reader won't really believe that a character has that trait if you can't explain why it is. It's not like telling a joke or doing a magic trick. The point isn't to keep things hidden. The more you can put on the table, the easier it is for a reader to envision what you are giving them.

And in my case, I spend a lot of time talking about knights and royalty. Going into battle, doing espionage, hiding from adversaries, and even going to balls or other formal events. One's attire in these situations is incredibly vital, and I have a hard time describing it. It's problematic. It's not enough to say that the princess was wearing a red ballgown. I should be listing what it was made out of, what kind of designs it had, where the pieces of it fell, what jewelry she was wearing to accompany it, how she had done her hair and makeup. But I know absolutely nothing about any of these aspects. I just know that I have an image in my head, and for a long time, I just hoped that the actions the characters took and how they spoke would get across the descriptions of what I was thinking.

But that's not a wise way of doing things. It doesn't matter how good you are at writing, saying that they danced well doesn't tell you whether their shoes were black or white or blue. Saying that they looked out of place doesn't explain how. You can't expect to skip over a piece of the puzzle and have the other pieces fill the rest in. It's an all or nothing sort of deal. And I still have a lot of pieces to place.

Of String

When I was a kid, I spent a lot more of my time in my own head then I did in the real world. I remember sometimes saying that I had five real friends and a hundred imaginary ones. I would have conversations with people in my head constantly - which is not something that has changed, mind you - and I would tell them about the things that were happening in my life, and I would listen to them telling me about theirs, and we would play games together. They would come and go out of my head like friends and family walking through the front doors of my house. It wasn't very awesome that I felt alone in those days, but when I did, I had this idea that in my chest there was a string of threads, and they would extend out to the people I was connected to, and the special people to me had strings made of gold that could not be severed.

This isn't really something that I do anymore, but it is something that I reflect back on from time to time. Not in such a way that I miss it, but I think about how I can use that today. Specifically, of course, for writing stories. My idea wasn't that certain strings were gold from the get go, because you obviously wouldn't know if they were a life long, important friend when you first met them, but that over time they would coat themselves in gold to show how important they had become. And I also knew exactly which strings went to which people, though how exactly I would have kept track of them I do not know.

And I feel like that would be what could make for an interesting story. The concept of being able to see these strings tying people to oneself, but not knowing which strings went to which person, and having to witness them connecting to people and being coated in gold while not necessarily near them. Certainly, ninety-nine percent of the time it would be obvious when a string is being made and connected, or when it is being coated in gold. But to see a string forming when you are alone, or being coated in gold, and having no idea who or why. And then, later, to see a person you have never met before connected to you for no apparent reason.

It could almost be a mystery novel. Perhaps if one string broke and was replaced with another while you were at home, or if an unbreakable golden string suddenly snapped clean in half with no evident explanation. What happened? And to who? Why?

Of course, the hardest part to explain would be why those strings exist, and why they are visibly, presumably to only the main character. Are they corporeal? And if so, are they only corporeal to him? One would think so, or else people would randomly be tripping and running over invisible strings.

I really don't know what to do with the idea, but it's a fun one to tease. But I somewhat doubt I'll ever go anywhere with it.

Late

Michael leaned against the wall outside of the movie theater, trying not to glance fervently at the watch on his wrist to check the time once again. He knew it was getting close to half an hour past when they were supposed to meet for their date. Everything had seemed to be going good up until an hour before their date was supposed to start. They had been texting, the conversation had seemed to be going good, but when he had told her he couldn't wait to see her that night, she had simply never responded. He had tried not to let it get him down, and had arrived as planned regardless. And he had waited. And waited. And waited. He probably should have stopped waiting a while prior.

It wasn't the first time he had been stood up. It probably wasn't going to be the last, either. But everything about this one had seemed to be setting up extremely well. He had never had so much of a vibe going on with any of the other girls he had tried to date, so much chemistry. They had so many things in common, and the things that they didn't certainly weren't things that he didn't feel they could work on. Nothing had been a deal breaker between them. At least, not on his end. But then again, with all of the experience he had had, he supposed he couldn't really tell what should be a deal breaker and what shouldn't.

He watched a large group of people exit the theater, and knew that that meant the film they had come to see would be starting soon. He had two tickets sitting in his jacket pocket, and though they were virtually weightless, he felt as though they were weighing down on him like stones on his chest. If she didn't arrive soon, he wasn't sure that it would even be worth going in to see the movie on his own. He would just feel too crushed.

Couples walked past him frequently, as though rubbing it in his face just how unsuccessful he was. He didn't want to sneer in their faces in anger, or curse the heavens that they should be so lucky when he was not. He felt no anger towards them, nor frustration towards himself that he could not be where they were. Just sadness. Sadness that this was evidently something that he would not experience.

When he succumbed to his watch and saw that his movie had just began, he called it quits. She wasn't coming. And he began to shuffle off, dejected, when he heard the pounding of feet on stone from behind him.

He looked back to see Jessica running up to him, face flushed red, and breathing hard. "Michael!" she cried out. "Michael, I'm so sorry!" She stopped just in front of him, leaning down to rest her hands on her knees and catch her breath. "I dropped my phone and it broke, so I couldn't respond, and I had been counting on that to have directions to get here, so I had to find some online, but the ones I found didn't take into account the road construction, so I was trying to find a way around and got lost, and..." She had to stop to breath, and that was when she saw the time. "God, I didn't even make it in time for the movie. I'm so sorry. I ruined everything, Michael."

But his arms were around her, pulling her tight to his body in a hug. She was surprised, but hugged him back, almost without thinking about it. "It's alright, Jess," he said. "I'm just happy you're here."

Abandoned

Jermal lifted himself out of the blasted open hole in the concrete wall of the bridge which he had called home for the last fifteen years. The world had changed in those fifteen years. It had begun with war. Some had called it the new world war, but it had been unlike anything humanity had experienced before. Most of the city-wide damage had been done by small time trouble makers, either in protest of the war itself, or in an effort to spread fear. Not that that had been necessary. Most of the real damage in the war had occurred via biological weapons, some released publicly and quickly, others working slowly from behind the scenes. People didn't die fighting. They simply died, in the middle of streets, in their homes, completely alone from the rest of the world, with nothing they could do to stop it.

Very few people had survived the first year. Infant mortality rates skyrocketed to the point that a child making it to its first birthday was newsworthy. The few who did survive did so more by luck than any other factor. It wouldn't be discovered until long after the war had ended that they carried a DNA strand that made it easier for them to adapt to the change in atmosphere. Because of how slowly the biological attacks had been introduced to their immune system, they had resisted its effects and become immune to the toxic air that had become common place in their world.

Looking over the landscape, Jermal couldn't help but remember what the world had once been like. To be honest, not much had changed at a glance. The buildings hadn't been destroyed. There were still cars parked on the sides of the road. After the biological strikes had ceased in frequency, the sky had eventually turned to a mostly blue color. But all of the metals were now covered in rust, and plants had slowly broken through the concrete and were growing incessantly up every wall the eye could see. Age old graffiti went unwashed, and had persisted for so long that it now was fading away, and most of the colors were already gone. The world had become a much duller, paler place.

But moreso than that, was the lack of people. At one time, the streets and sidewalks would have been crowded with life, loudly filling the air with their talking, their arguing, their laughing. Lights would have been frequent in the sky, coming from and around buildings to keep the life alive even as the sun went down. Cars and bikes would have traveled at high speeds up and down the streets. Workers would complain about the jobs that kept food on their tables.

They had no idea how nice their lives had been back then.

Premise

Before you can even start writing, no matter what kind of writing you are trying to do, you have to have some kind of idea of what topic, genre, or focus you want to write. And that's a hard thing to decide - especially when you're writing fiction. We've all seen movies or tv shows where half way through, it seems like the writers forgot what exactly was going on or where they had come from, and just started throwing things together because they thought it would be cool. I can't blame them if they wanted to change things up, or wanted to put specific scenes into their creations, but lord help me, it would have come out a thousand fold better if they had actually made it fit within the story. You need to have your story feel realistic to the premise that you started out from.

The premise itself, however, does not have to be realistic in the slightest. I think most cartoons, be they western or eastern, are perfect examples of that. I was recently reminded of a series I used to watch when I was young, called YuGiOh, which was based entirely around a children's card game. And yet there was intense drama and action that came out of that card game, and the things that happened to the people who were involved in the games was bone chilling. Or at least, they were when I was a kid.

Looking back, I can't help but realize just how terrible the show was. There really wasn't any logic to what was going on, and especially the fact that problems could somehow be solved by playing a card game. I mean, when you have good guys going up against bad guys, the good guys have to have some way of ensuring that the bad guys do as they say they are going to. In more realistic settings, this is done with a weapon - from a sword in the middle ages to a gun in present time, the good guy having something they can point at the bad guy that can take their lives as they make demands gives the bad guys reason to keep their promises. But in YuGiOh, there's no discernible reason why the bad guys should actually do what they said they were going to after having lost a game of cards.

And yet there are other animes, likes Fullmetal Alchemist, that have equally bizarre premises that are executed beautifully, and give serious depth and interest to every event that occurs. In what way is being able to turn lead into gold after clapping one's hands any more realistic than retrieving the soul of one's grandfather after beating someone in a card game? It's really not, but Fullmetal had a set of rules to its universe, and people would try to cheat those rules and face the consequences, and those consequences had extreme severity at times, and it made sense within the world's rules. Everything about the premise was constantly being played to, and if there was ever any question to what was happening, there was usually a reason for that that actually came up in the show.

Sticking to a premise like that is definitely not easy. I'm not saying it is. But it is important, and it's what gives one's story credibility. If you want to change up the premise, you can't continue writing the same story. You lose any interest and momentum that you've built. But a lot of people forget that, because they're so attached to their characters and the worlds that they've created. I should know. I've been doing that for years.

Shop

Omar lifted one of the older crafted swords off the wall and looked it over, checking the edge to see if its sharpness had eroded at all from how long it had rested in its display. He was surprised by how many customers would come in, surprised to see him sharpening a weapon that had been there for some months. They seemed to be under the impression that a weapon was only dulled by use. Rust seemed not to be in their comprehension.

He wasn't a blacksmith by any means - that's what he had his brother for - but he had an eye for details, and a mind for numbers, so he was good at being the front man to their store and doing all of the business. He kept the merchandise pretty and up to standards, so that if someone were to get into a fight the moment they walked out the door, whatever they had just bought would be ready to go. The armor would be strong enough to save them, and the weapons would be solid and sharp enough to cut down their opponents. Omar's brother was very good for that kind of thing. To create weapons and armor that would last.

They also were open to buying things that adventurer's found out in the field. They could repair the old and rusted items, or if not, melt them down to use the raw materials in new weapons. It was often a much cheaper way of getting the metal they needed to continue expanding their inventory than going out and getting the material raw. After all, most adventurer's were just happy to be getting paid for mostly unusable weapons and armor. They didn't need to know how much they were actually worth, and it wasn't like most of them knew the true value of the raw materials that went into their equipment. That was why they were shopping for their weapons. They couldn't forge their own.

Omar was sharpening the blade he had pulled down when he heard the sound of someone entering the shop. He glanced up to see them holding an old, rusted blade, caked in mud which he assumed was made from dirt and blood. He lifted the sword he was working on and put it back on its display in anticipation, and sure enough, the man placed the sword on the table.

As he examined the blade, he noticed something very familiar about it. It took him a bit to recognize it, but near the hilt of the blade, there was a nearly scratched out marking of its forger. A marking that Omar had not seen in some time, because his brother had changed his marker some years prior. But now that he looked at it, there was no mistaking it.

This was his brother's blade.

Someone they had sold a weapon to had died.

Omar felt a little sick in his stomach.

Drive

It's been a long time since I've written a post like this, and I was rather hoping that I wouldn't have to. I was doing really good recently on writing, and I was closing the gap between fiction and real talk posts being where I wanted them to be, getting a lot of fiction written. But I've really been running out of drive to write recently, and I hate that, because I have a friend who is constantly trying to inspire me, and I've made a lot of promises to people about continuing to write, and I love writing. But I've just not even been wanting to recently.

There are some things that have been happening in my life the last couple of months that I could easily blame the lack of drive on. To say that they don't have any impact on it would be blatantly lying. But I don't want to lay the blame entirely on those things, because there are other things in other aspects of my life that I have been able to keep pushing myself on and making progress in. So if I can push myself on losing weight, and eating food I'm not particularly fond of and completely depriving myself of the unhealthy food that used to be a staple of my diet and gave me comfort, why can't I keep writing?

And you'd think some of the accomplishments I have made recently would help me push forward. I just recently crossed the threshold of six hundred blog posts, and I have surely not missed a single day of writing in well over a year. At this point, it is possible I am even getting close to having done so for a year and a half. Many of those have not been as good as I want them to be, and lately I've found that I don't concern myself as much as I used to with whether or not my posts hit the five hundred word goal that I once set for them. It's not that I'm not trying to get that anymore, or that I think I know when I have hit that without having to check. It's just that I would rather feel that what I am trying to write is done, rather then that they are at a specified word count.

Realistically, that's probably a better way of thinking about my writing. It gives me a little more freedom, and makes me feel less constrained by numbers. That means that if I fall short by fifty words or something, I don't feel like I have to add an extraneous paragraph just to hit my goal, which in the past I have, and has made me feel like I'm adding something that I don't want to actually add. Not that I think my writing before that is perfect in any sense of the word. But there is a reason that in editing you typically do a lot more cutting than adding.

Nicknames

Joe was late to the party, having been working on forging his new lance. He was new to the whole hunting business, and his friends had been helping him along the way, teaching him what weapons and armors to prioritize, and showing him the weaknesses of monsters. Oftentimes they would have a quest ready for him when he arrived for the day, and wouldn't tell him much about it, other than what kind of weapon to bring. Today, though, they had just told him to bring the strongest lance he had, and thick armor. Whatever they were fighting was going to be strong, that much was clear.

"Yo, Joe!" Michael called out as Joe came into the guild hall. Michael had been hunting the longest, and was the most relaxed about the whole thing. He fought with a simple sword and shield, but he moved swiftly and adeptly, and almost never got hit. "Today's a big day for you, my friend. Today, you're going to fight the pickle."

Joe blinked, confused by the statement. "The pickle?" he asked. "What's so impressive about a pickle?" But as he looked at his other two friends, he saw that they weren't as relaxed as Michael. They weren't even as relaxed as they normally were. They seemed to have a grim air about them, as though they were dreading what was to come. Matt usually brought a hammer with him, which he used to crush the heads of their foes, but was wearing a massive great sword on his back instead. Ian was still wearing his long sword, though he had also upgraded to a more powerful looking one, as Joe had.

"You'll be glad you fought the pickle when we're done," Matt said, his voice heavy. "But I'd really rather not go through this again." Ian silently nodded his agreement. Michael just kept smiling though, and rushed them out of the hall and into the field.

The air about Matt and Ian was tense as the group headed into the forest, Michael leading the way, knowing the pickle's nesting grounds. The slipped into a cave deep in the forest, and as they passed through the darkness to an open area where the sun shone through, Joe saw it.

The beast was massive, easily three times as tall as he was, and seven times as long. It was covered in green scales, though it had some kind of red and yellow sponge substance around its enormous jaw. As hard as its scales appeared, it was also covered in a layer of slime that oozed off of its body and onto the ground, leaving disgusting, mucky pools around the area. It had crushed a deer as they were walking in with its chin, and unhinged its jaw to scoop the innocent creature into its mouth in a single motion, slobbering as it chewed the flesh and bone.

Joe could see that it would not be an easy fight. He could see why his two friends were scared. But he could also clearly see that it was, in fact, a pickle.

Of light and dark

I've talked before about the first story I wrote, Power of the Balls, which was a horrendous pile of crap and everything that I hate in writing to this day. And I wrote a few other stories after that, though I concede that I do not remember them nearly as well - probably because I did not make it as far in those stories as I did with Balls. However, when I was starting in boy scouts, around the seventh grade, I had an idea for what I would try to make into my first book series. It was to be a four book series, with each of the first three based on a character born in light, darkness, and twilight, and a fourth book that brought the three together.

Theoretically, it was a sound idea, if a bit cliche. And I got through the first two stories, though to call them books would have been a bold faced lie. They were separated into chapters, sure, but I imagine that two chapters at the time would have easily fit into one of these blog posts, and I can barely get a story told half the time with the word count that I have set for myself. I did not have the mind for details and descriptions that I do know, which is pretty sad considering how terrible I am at that now. Then there was the fact that the stories themselves just weren't that interesting. The light story, I remember, barely made sense, and was creepily hinting at rape in order to create darkness. Darkness on the other hand was merely bland - a soldier born into evil becomes good because of a girl and sacrifices himself, blah, blah, blah...

Unlike Power of the Balls, however, these stories are still accessible. Easily, in fact. At the time, deviantArt was becoming popular, especially among kids my age, and I posted my stories there freely. My account still exists to this day, and I have never removed anything from it. What I wrote there is bad - really, really bad - but I feel like they should remain as a testament to where I came from and the progress that I have made. Though I do not know that I could ever stand to read them. I can not stress enough how bad they were. I think that I would physically cringe if I were to read them now. Lord only knows how I'll feel about them in ten years.

To be honest, I don't remember a lot of the thought process behind the stories. I know that the story with the light main character was to be darker, and that the story with the dark character was to be lighter. I don't remember what the twilight character was going to be put through, and I have no idea how I was supposed to bring the stories together. I probably didn't know at the time either. If given the chance, I don't know that I would ever try to rewrite these stories. Today, I don't find the ideas that I had very interesting. I feel as though I was just writing what a 12 year old would think was cool. Probably because I was 12.

Antihero

Antiheroes are kind of a concept that come and go in story writing through the ages, though with increasing frequency as we grow closer to the current day. If you don't know, an antihero is pretty self explanatory - they're a main character who is anything but a hero. They're not exactly a villain persay - they are still the main character, and we as readers may even be cheering for them to defeat some other evil. But they are rude, thoughtless, careless people, who are far more interested in themselves and their own betterment than anyone else around them. The only reason they would step out of their way to help someone is if they believed that they had something to gain by doing so.

I'm not a particular fan of antiheroes, though I can certainly understand their appeal - all too frequently, heroes in stories are unattainably perfect, and how unrealistically righteous they are can drag you out of the story. I'm a cynical, frequently hateful person, so I can understand that it's far easier to connect to an antihero than a hero if you are in my shoes. Personally, I don't want to connect so much as I want to experience, so having a character close to my own shoes actually takes away the enjoyment for me, but I know that I am a rare case in this instance, and am more than willing to recognize the importance of antiheroes.

That being said, I think there is a difference between an antihero and a complete and utter asshole. Many of the books I read in high school and college starred antiheroes, and while I didn't like any of them, I found some to be far more irritating than others. None of them were as offensive to me, however, as the game God of War was.

God of War was a game that I never particularly had any interest in to begin with. It wasn't really a gameplay style I was into, and everything I had ever heard about it made it seem like something I wouldn't enjoy. But it was a massively popular and highly praised game, and as I grew older and decide I wanted to expand my gaming repertoire, God of War seemed like one of the games I should try and play. I found the game fairly boring, the combat uninteresting, and many of the sections didn't feel like they controlled very well or were overly difficult. Overall, though, that would have made it a mediocre experience, but I downright hated God of War, which was entirely because of the main character.

Kratos is a character who wishes to fight the gods of Olympus because he is bored and because one of them tricked him into killing his wife and child. The latter reason would be a perfectly acceptable reason - except it's only lightly touched on, and only explains one god. But Kratos kills every single one of the greek gods, purely because he's an asshole. He violently tears them apart, even when they are trying to help him, and uses innocent bystanders as ways to jam gears and destroy obstacles. He's angry, spiteful, violent, and doesn't have a single redeemable feature about him. In any other game, he would be the villain. And his attitude and behavior took any enjoyment I might have gotten from that game away.

Like anything, there needs to be some kind of balance. Wanting to take revenge for his family was good - it just wasn't utilized. To have some reason to be angry and hateful, or to at least have a line you won't cross. That is all that I would ask.

Demon heart

"Was that not your mission?"

Thraul's face was blank as he held onto the cold and lifeless body of the human girl, cradling her corpse gently in his arms, her head resting on his shoulder and her eyes long since closed. He knew. He knew that it had been his mission to kill her. To follow her in her life, and to snuff out her life in the very moment it reached its peak of joy, so as to make the world that much darker and colder by stealing away her brightness and warmth. He had even stepped in when it was necessary to make her life brighter, just for the express purpose of making her death that much more painful on the world.

But it had become painful for him as well. He had been forged in the pits of hell as a demon, born for destruction and the spread of chaos, and yet being the presence of this woman had born in him a heart which he had never been intended to have. Seeing her grow, and the love and kindness that she gave to people, made him long to be on the receiving end of her smile. It was almost physically painful, these feelings, and he couldn't entirely understand why. He barely understood them to begin with. But as he watched her, and listened to her words, and the words of those around him, he began to slowly understand. Though it had been a difficult thing to learn.

"It was," Thraul replied. "But things happened out there in the human world, Drasin. Things the Maker did not account for. Things that should not have been possible. But they happened."

"You did not fall in love with the girl." There was anger in Drasin's voice as he spoke the words as though they were undeniable fact. And well they should have been. But Thraul could not deny the pain in his empty chest. The void that had been made when the poison had drained the girl's life away in an instant, laced in her food by his own hands. "You are a demon, Thraul. Born to kill. Born for corruption. I will not let your body be tainted by such silly things as emotions."

Thraul glared at his once friend, angered by his statement. "And what will you do about it?" he demanded. "If the Maker himself could not prevent me from loving this woman, what makes you think that you can? You are not stronger than I am, Drasin. Were we to fight, we both know who would win."

"I will tear out your so called 'heart' from your chest and crush it before your eyes."

"You will try, Drasin. And you will fail."

Tent

Martin's waking moments were slow and muddled. He was accustomed to awakening to darkness and the beeping of his alarm, but he had neither. It was bright every way he turned, aside from burrowing his face directly into his pillow, and had been the past few times he had briefly regained consciousness. And it was quiet. The only sound was a gentle breeze blowing through the leaves of trees and bushes, and the distant running of water. But as Martin became more aware of what was going on around him, and the fact that he was awake, he began to realize just how hot he felt and how much he had been sweating in his sleep.

He was still groggy, and he struggled to move around enough to actually reach the zipper of his sleeping bag and get out of it. The sound of the zipping was frustratingly loud in the silence, and he wasn't sure if it was better to go faster and louder, or slower and quieter, given how long the sound would persist. But the moment he was out of the sleeping bag, the air on him was frigid cold, and he regretted climbing out of his sleeping bag. He tossed the opened flap of it over his legs, but the aura of heat hadn't left it yet, or the slickness left behind by his sweat, and it was utterly uncomfortable in either way.

He tried to sit up, but he had forgotten just how short the ceiling of his tent had been, and he bumped his head into the mesh wall. It wasn't hard, but it caught him off guard, and he jolted away from it roughly. He reached up - carefully this time - and patted his way around the pocket hanging from the ceiling where he had left his glasses until he managed to find them. The metal of them was cold, and the glass fogged almost immediately, making him only that much more uncomfortable.

He had a feeling it would only make him colder, but he didn't have much of a choice. He fumbled around until he was able to find the zipper for the tent door, and opened it up, another wave of cold washing over him, as well as a wave of heat from the sun. The sensation was strange and not entirely comfortable, but it jolted him into the final stretch of being awake. And after a few moments, the fog on his glasses faded and he could see the view.

The tent had been set up about a dozen feet away from the side of the mountain cliff, and Martin could look out into the valley. The sky was a vivid blue, with milky white clouds floating sparsely in the air. The world seemed to stretch on forever, and it was full of life and beauty. Slowly, Martin leaned back on his shoulders, sleeping bag half thrown over his legs, looking out on the view he had.

That made the wake up worth it.

Being a hunter

Though this only occurred within the past couple years, I am a big fan of the Monster Hunter games - specifically starting with 4 Ultimate, and recently with Generations. I tried once to get into 3 Ultimate, but I really didn't understand the game, and I didn't enjoy it in the slightest. In fact, I hated the experience, and swore off the games. When 4 came out, I saw how much fun some of my favorite youtubers were having playing the game, and seeing as there was a demo available, I reluctantly decided to give it a second shot. And I hated it. I told myself I would swear it off again, but I kept seeing how much fun people were having with it. So I tried it again.

This occurred a total of five times. Five times I tried Monster Hunter, and four times I despised it. I hated everything about it. I hated how long hunts took. I hated how slow I moved. I hated how long animations lasted. I hated how throwing out an attack locked me into position for so long, and left me open and vulnerable. But I kept trying different weapons, because unlike so many other games I have played, the different weapons in Monster Hunter all play vastly different. And on the fifth try, I found a weapon that clicked with me. Finally the game made sense to me. And having finished a single hunt with a weapon I actually enjoyed, I decided to buy the game.

I sunk over a couple hundred hours into Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, and I didn't regret a second of it. I loved the constant sense of progress as I made new weapons and armors from the monsters I utterly decimated. And the longer I played the game, the better I got, and the more I understood.

Eventually I went back and tried some of the weapons that I had passed over before. Where they had once been aggravating and useless in my hands, they had become fun and varied and deadly. Some of them I still did not enjoy, sure, but my eyes had been opened from so many. When I switched over to Generations, I had gone from having only a single weapon I had any interest in to wanting to use roughly half of the ones available. And that's a lot of time, money, and resources you have to sink in order to play like that. But it is so worthwhile to me I hardly give it a second thought as I trudge onwards.

I realized recently that this is the progress that I need to make in my real life. It sounds weird to say that, that I learned a valuable life lesson from a video game, but I really feel like I did. As many of the fans of the game say, I need to "git gud." I need to not expect to have my hand held along the way. I need to take each failure as a learning experience, and push on, ever fighting the good fight to move forward until I am a paragon of my craft. I need to be willing to try new things, and things that I once hated. To give them a second try with an honest mind and open eyes. I need to be ok with the possibility that I was wrong about them before. And perhaps a third, fourth, or fifth try. To be determined to accomplish what I set out to do, and let nothing stand in my way of doing so. To see the new obstacles that appear suddenly and without warning in my life as new challenges to which I should throw myself and overcome, rather than running away in fear.

In short, I need to be a hunter.

Elements

Dresdin woke up with a pounding headache, only amplified by the various beeps and flashing lights coming from the panel around his head. There was a heavy pain in his gut, which made him want to stay curled up in a ball on his chair until it went away. But the longer he sat, the longer it hurt. He didn't entirely remember what had happened. He knew he had been flying, making his way through space on a pulse jump as usual, headed towards the beacon that had come up during one of his scans. There wasn't much intelligible information in the beacon, but life was somewhat rare out in the galaxy, and he could at the very least use somewhere to off load some of the materials he was carrying with him.

Something must have gone wrong as he entered the planet's atmosphere. Perhaps the pulse jump had not properly disengaged. That would have meant entering the atmosphere at the speed of light, which would have been slowed considerably by the abrupt application of air friction. The ship itself would have combusted, and the extreme heat could have cause Dresdin to lose consciousness. The alloy the shell was made of would have been strong enough to survive the crash, but it would have severely damaged the engine. That would explain all of the emergency alarms going off simultaneously in his ears.

He tried to push back and found that the pain in his gut was amplified by the movement. He looked down to see his medical kit piercing his abdomen. How beautifully poetic. Carefully, he removed the broken box, doing his best not to scream as he did so, and quickly covered the wound with his hand to try and stifle the flow of blood. It took some effort to withdraw clean tools from the box with one hand, but he was able with time to make a rudimentary patch for the wound. It still hurt to move, but at least he could.

Getting into his exosuit was a pain, but it was surprisingly undamaged in the crash - though perhaps he should not have been surprised, seeing as most of the damage inside the ship was mostly due to shaking from the impact, and his suit was tightly packed away in a holding tube. The suit would be able to repair the damaged muscle and skin, but it would need carbon in order to do so.

His mining gun would allow for that. Its laser beam would collect the elements that whatever he mined was compounded of, collecting them and separating them for later use. He just had to find something with carbon.

Should have been easy enough.

Hook

James slipped behind cover of the broken wall, a grenade in his hand, pin already pulled. He knew exactly how much time he had remaining until the gunpowder was shot, and exactly how large the explosion it caused would be. He had five seconds to throw it before he would be caught in the blast - five seconds with which he listened to the footsteps of men running in panic, looking for the intruder who was slaughtering their men. A casual toss over the shoulder, a pause, a shout, and then an explosion. And James was on the move again.

Most of the guards were unconscious or dead as he made his way through the destroyed hallways. He had entered the newly defended castle ruins an hour ago, and his presence was well known. It was hard to ignore the constantly decreasing amount of chatter over the radio, the sound of gun fights and explosions, or the discarded bloody bodies left in his wake. He knew he had had to take his time in order to prevent being overwhelmed by their numbers, but he was beginning to need to speed up if he wished to finish the job before reinforcements arrive.

The castle ruins had proved to be challenging to navigate. Many of the stairways had fractured or become useless, and the ladders that had been there to assist ascension when James arrived had been broken or burned to stop him. Fortunately, James had brought a tool with him to allow for just that occasion. He slipped the rope and hook out of his pack, wrapping one end around his wrist a couple times before tying it off with a clove hitch. With the other, he begun to swing the hooked end through the air, gathering speed, as he eyed the top of a tower. He was standing on the ballista perhaps a dozen and a half feet below the top of the tower. The intelligence he had gathered told him that this was the tower that the blueprints he required were kept in.

The hook flung up high, pulling the rope along with it, as James watched it fly. It dropped for only a moment before latching onto the stone up at the top. A couple tugs ensured that it wasn't going to move. He dropped over the edge of the ballista, falling a few feet before the rope grew taut, holding him in place. He placed his feet firmly on the wall, placed himself perpendicular to its stone, and began to walk, slowly curling the rope around his wrist to keep it tight.

There was a distinct risk of being seen this way. He had eliminated many of the opposing forces, but certainly not all of them. And there may be someone watching at the top of the tower, who could kick his hook loose. But James did not have time for such concerns. And besides - if he was going to go out, he was not going to go out alone.

Prison

Marcus sat behind the iron bars of his cell, on a painfully stiff bed that he had been assured was the highest quality the prison provided. There was nothing to decorate the walls. No way of telling time, or seeing what time of year it was, or even what year it was. Anything he could have used to mark the walls with had been taken from him, and he was frequently searched to make sure he wasn't trying to smuggle anything into his cell. He wanted to say it was about five months since he had been put away, but he wasn't entirely sure. But if he was right, it was getting close to time to get out.

He had been sealed away for his involvement in a political uprising to overthrow the currently racist government. The government officials had frequently passed laws that were detrimental to those of the populace that had magical powers or backgrounds, and while Marcus himself was a non-magical individual, he had several friends and distant family members whom he had witnessed disappear over the years as more and more of such laws were passed. There were always excuses of some law they had broken, that magic was mystifying and deluding so as not to be clear, but Marcus was growing ever frustrated with the laws, and became increasingly certain that it was merely a matter of race. So when the rebellion group had formed, he had proudly been one of the non-magical individuals to join it.

It had been established early on that any of the rebels that were caught would serve some sentence, so as to make it appear to the government as though they were successfully squashing the rebellion. This would allow those still in the streets to move more freely, and gather more members with which to succeed in their uprising. But most of the captured were sentenced to death by heart impalement, which would distill any magic the person possessed and free it, unable to be passed on to another. That was less than desirable. So, in secret, most of the rebellious prisoners were rescued, replaced with a lifeless doppelgänger in the night that would deteriorate over time, making it appear as though the prisoners had died before their sentence could be set out.

Marcus knew that that night was coming, and he had begun staying up later in the nights, waiting to be freed. It made the days more difficult, and it meant that he was harassed and punished by the guards more frequently, but he would have time to recover. He wanted to be ready when the time came.

He was almost ready to give up and go to sleep when he heard soft footsteps coming down the hall. It was certainly not a guard - their steps were heavy, metallic. He stood up from the bed and approached the bars, trying to look down through the darkness to see who was approaching. A face appeared in front of him the moment the footsteps stopped. He had expected to see one of the soldiers, ready to fight their way to freedom and tear the bars away. He had not expected a single, frail looking girl with bright green eyes.

"Get back from the bars," she whispered, no patience in her voice, and no introduction or pleasantries. Marcus did as he was told, and he could see the girl reach out her hand as a small, glowing orb appeared between her fingers. Silently, the iron bars began to disassemble themselves and disappear, shrinking and flying into the orb. It was only a matter of seconds before the bars were simply gone. The girl urged Marcus forward, the orb still in her hands, and he shuffled past her and into the hallway. The bars flung back out of the orb, rebuilding themselves, and after only a few short moments, it was as though they had never been gone.

"Let's get moving. We don't have time."

Context

I recently went and saw the new Star Trek movie, which up to a few days prior to seeing it, I had heard nothing but good things about. It seemed as though everyone who had seen it had loved it, and I heard a few people saying that it was the return to the original series they had been waiting for. Now, I'ge never been a Star Trek fan. When I was a mid, the first episode of Star Trek I ever saw was from the middle of Enterprise, and involved a man getting pregnant with alien cancer. If you don't believe that, google it. It'll be the first result from the Star Trek Wikia. I've checked, just to make sure I wasn't crazy. 

Being surrounded my entire life by people who are in love with the show, however, I have in recent years tried to give the show a second chance. It's still not really my thing, though there are a few episodes I really enjoy, but I can see the appeal of the show, and I would love for their to be a new creation that can touch that space that the old show did. The new Star Trek movies are very much not that creation. These movies are all of the things that disinterest me about science fiction - quickly explained bullshit science, traditional fight scenes with special effects to make them look more advanced, and excessive amounts of explosions. There are elements of what once made Star Trek great, surely, but they play a back role to the action and excitement. 

And I don't think the movies are bad, don't get me wrong. They're fun, they're (for the most part) interesting. They just aren't really what Star Trek is. But I think they could be, if they just had a little bit of context. Some in between scenes that let us see the lives of the ship's passengers, and what makes them tick, and what kind of trouble they get into when not in the middle of battles for the sake of the entire universe. And of course, in the movies they only have so much time, and I understand that, though I do think the latest in particular could have easily been trimmed down. So how could they manage to get this kind of context?

Well, the way the originals did. With a tv series. 

After all, apparently it's been three years since the first movie and Kirk becoming captain. Apparently he's being considered for the position of Vice Admiral. I understand he's saved the Federation multiple times, but there's got to be more to it than that. What has he been doing in the interrum? What kinds of things has Spock learned about being both human and vulcan? Why did we only just learn Sulu is gay and has a daughter, and why is no one in-universe surprised by this? These kinds of things come up in daily conversation. You can't just skim over them, or everything else loses some of its meaning. 

After all, if every day is filled with universe threatening villains, destroyed ships, and deadly planets, why should the characters be afraid of them, and especially the audience? Why should they be afraid of losing their comrades when the threat comes up every day? If there's no normal life for these events to disrupt, then it's not really a conflict. It's just business as usual. And business is boring as all hell. 

That's something I sometimes struggle with in my own writing as well. I won't pretend like I don't. But if I can recognize it, that allows me to act on it, and I can improve. So no, sometimes it's not enough for me for something to be fun. Because if I can figure out how to make something both fun and interesting, why the hell shouldn't I?

Eye of the storm

Arianna stood her ground, though every pounding of the ground shook her to the bone and made her rattle in her skin. She remembered this power. She remembered this feeling of dread, of oncoming unstoppable doom and destruction. Every time before that she had felt it, she had run for her life. She had had no choice. But this time would be different. Now was the time to stand against the walking storm. If she wanted to protect her home, her kingdom, her people, then she would have to stand here and now and stop him before he entered once more into her kingdom's lands. 

He appeared from among the trees, his fists clenched, his eyes drawn tight as he glared at the princess. She knew that in his eyes she was nothing. She was but a target to be crushed, tossed aside to be trashed with the rest of the filth that had stood in his way. She had learned of his Araxian heritage, his rage for what her grandmother had done to his people. She knew that he wished his revenge upon her. That he believed destroying her would be enough to send her kingdom into turmoil, tearing them apart from the inside as he had witnessed of his own people. Arianna did not know if he was correct in that assumption, but she knew that if he discovered he was wrong, he would simply move on to another target, over and over again until his dream was accomplished or there was no one left. It was best he was stopped sooner rather than later. That was what Arianna had trained for. 

A dark aura appeared to lift off of the man's arms, as if a thick oil dripping from his skin. It was blacker than any black Arianna had seen, and it was almost a palpable anger coming off of him. Arianna could feel her skin standing up, the hairs trying to tear free from her, but still she stood her ground. She knew of his power. He was strong beyond human capabilities. He could bust through three foot deep stone walls with his bare hands without breaking a sweat. It required sharpness to do any damage to him - she had seen that when the wolf had assaulted him and torn through his skin. That had slowed his stalking for some time. 

She could only see him approaching for a few moments before the power shifted down into his legs and he bolted forward, each step launching him through the air and pulling him ever closer to the princess. And still, she did not turn and run. She could see the blinding hatred and anger in his eyes, the prayed for death of her, the irritation that she would not show fear. And then, as he fell upon her, his arm swung wide, aimed directly between her eyes. 

But his fist caught only air. The princess was gone, her clothes falling to the ground. And then she was there once more, a dozen feet back, naked as the day she was born, the defiant look in her eyes stronger than it had ever been before. 

She had stared into the eye of the storm and escaped to the other side. Now she just had to do it a dozen or so more times. 

Payment

Brandon ran his fingers back through his hair, head supported by his elbows on the table, his eyes shut tight as he tried to will the headache away so he could think. It had been a stressful enough month as it was, and he did not need the pounding in his brain as he was trying to focus to make it any worse. It had been three weeks since he had been fired, and two weeks since his last paycheck. He had been searching tirelessly for a new job, but all of that effort did nothing to pay the dues, and his landlord didn't care about what Brandon was trying to do - he was just concerned about getting his rent payment. 

But his savings could only last for so long. He knew he could get by for a while on what he had saved away, but he had saved that money with the goal of being able to get his own house one day, and it had taken him a lot longer to build those savings than it would take to burn through them. There were a lot of things that he wanted to be able to do, and a lot of those things required money. On top of that, he had no way of knowing how long it would be until he had a job again. It didn't really matter how many applications he put out if he didn't get hired, after all. And there was no guarantee his pay at whatever place took him in would be as high as his last job.

He needed to figure out where he could cut his spending without losing too much. Eating out less often was an obvious one, but he'd never been much of a cook, and any food he didn't get around to using before it expired was effectively trashed cash. He could try to walk or bike places more often in order to cut down gas money, but there were only so many places he could reasonably reach that way, and he'd definitely still need to drive in order to get groceries. 

As he was thinking about it all, he felt a hand rest on his back, and he glanced up to see his wife, Rachel, standing over him with a soft smile on her face. He hadn't even heard her enter the room. "Still stressing over bills, sweetie?" she asked. "You know I still have a job, right?"

Brandon sighed, but couldn't help the small smile that crept onto his lips. Rachel just made him feel better by being around. "Of course I haven't," he replied. "But I don't expect you to carry all the financial weight on your shoulders. Nor do I want you to. And if I don't get a new job soon, we'll have to push back things even more. How long are we going to live in an apartment?"

Rachel shrugged with a hum. "As long as we have to, I suspect."

"That's not really a good answer."

Rachel chuckled and shook her head. "No," she said, "I suppose it's not. But it's the only answer I have for you." There was a pause between them for a moment, before Rachel smiled mischeviously, making Brandon lift an eyebrow. "I didn't marry you to share a house with you, you know."

Brandon couldn't help but chuckle at that. "Then what did you marry me for?"

Rachel hummed, playfully rolling her eyes to look away from her husband. "There was something else I wanted to share with you..."

"Oh? Like what?"

Rachel glanced back at him with a grin. "A bed."

The editing process

I've written before about how I'm not a very good editor, and how important editing is to a story, and all of that good stuff. And I don't know a whole lot about editing, because I've never been good at it or even really tried to get myself to go into it very hard, so I can't really say a lot about it. But I've been really trying to recently, getting down into the nitty gritty of trying to edit the book I wrote back in November for Nano, and while I haven't made it very far through the story, I've learned a lot about editing just because it's the first time I've really tried to focus on doing it. That doesn't mean any of my edits are any good, of course, and I definitely have a lot more appreciation for just how many times I'll have to go through and edit this, but I have learned a lot.

One of the things I've learned is just how hard it is to actually edit. And I'm not even talking from the technical details of what and where to change, and how to make things sound good, all of that stuff that you think of when you think editing. I'm just talking about the action of editing. Because, as I've been going through and working on this, I frequently find myself just straight reading the story and forgetting to even think about what and how to change things. And this is for something that I wrote. I already know what happens! And granted, it's been like half a year or more since I wrote the story, so I don't remember all of the details. But these are literally my own words. And I recognize as I'm reading that they're not that great. And yet at times I just forget, and I read.

So every once in a while I have to back up and reread things, and reread them again, and make sure that they do actually sound at least something like what I want them to sound like. And that's just on my first go through. I can only imagine how much harder it will get on each subsequent go through of the story, as the story gets slowly more and more refined, and closer to something that I want it to be. And especially if I take as long between each edit to actually getting around to doing it. Hopefully I can get other people to look at it as well, and that will help to speed up the process, and fresh eyes should hopefully be able to catch things that I can't.

But it's interesting, because I always thought of editing as cutting down, and making things shorter. But as I've been going along, it is certainly shorter than it was when I started. But that's because I cut out the entire prologue to the story. And from there, as I've been going along it has slowly been climbing its way back up, which means that the story is actually getting longer. And that's before having even reached the part of the story where I had planned to add a few more chapters. So clearly, my preconceptions of what editing is were wrong. And that's probably a good thing. It makes it more encouraging a process for me personally, because it means my story is growing, rather than just being refined. And the bigger and better my world can be, the better.

Hospital

I've spent a lot of time throughout my life in hospitals - not because I was having troubles or personally needed to be in them, but because the people around me did. I've pretty much always just been a visitor, with the obvious exception of health check ups and the like. I've never experienced what it's like to be laying in the bed, hanging on to life. But I've watched it plenty of times. 

I understand that they're places of healing, and a lot of the time the fact that a person is in the bed and not in the ground is a very, very good thing. But that doesn't change the aura of sadness and coldness that pervades every floor. The feeling that, every time you walk the floors, walk past the different rooms, you might just witness someone's passing on. And that the one doing it might be the one you came to see.

Sometimes you'll come at night, and there's an eerie silence across the halls that only serves to amplify that feeling of walking into the land of the dead. The only sounds that remind you you're still alive are the slow and rythmic beeps of life support systems, machines running, and the quiet whispers of doctors talking about what to do with each patient. You wish that there was anything to make a little more noise, a little different noise. Then you come back in the morning, when there are more visitors and more doctors, and it's easier to overhear them talking about the failing conditions of patients, and you start to miss that eerie silence from the night before. 

And actually visiting doesn't really help. It would be one thing to visit someone with broken bones, but it's another thing entirely to visit someone on the brink of death. To see their bodies failing them, and to feel how weak they are, and to hear them barely be able to talk or breath. 

I've been visiting my mom today, who had a severe heart attack. Her lungs only barely managed not to fail her. I watched her, riddled with tubes, try to cough. Her body shook like she was having a seizure, the machines couldn't read her pulse, and for a good five seconds at a time as she repeatedly tried to cough, her breathing ceased entirely. Each time, I wondered if this was it. If this was the end. 

Taking her breathing tube out wasn't any better. The doctors assured us that she should be strong enough to breath without it, but it had also been well established that if she could not breath without it, my mother did not want it to be put back in. She was certain that she would rather die than go back onto that tube. And while I couldn't blame her, that put a real haze over the whole procedure. This was quite literally do or die. I was in the room, watching, half expecting my mother to die becore my very eyes. 

Fortunately, that was not the case. And accordingly, she's feeling much better. But that wasn't the end of the road. She's got a lot of recovery ahead of her, and if I know my mother, she's going to complain every step of the way. And it's a very real possibility that this will happen again. Soon, even. And she may not make it that time. 

But she did this time. And as much as I don't like being in them, and as much as my grandmother may think otherwise, we have hospitals to thank for that. 

Break

I think about taking a break from doing the blog a lot, and I've talked about why I don't several times in the past, which for the most part is still the truth as to why i don't. I don't want a break to extend to a point to where I'm just not doing this anymore. My writing is important to me, and while it may be slow, I feel as though it is in fact helping my writing. Even in a span of about eight months - which may seem like a long time, but in terms of a life time of writing is not bad - I have noticed a notable difference in my writing, which is good to know that on some level I am progressing.

Today was the first time in a while that I seriously considered taking a break, however. Like I said, I think about it a lot, but it's usually just a "Man, this is such a time sink" before I move ahead and do it. But today, life decided to kick me in the nuts, and I'm kind of having to figure it out in a very short amount of time. If you didn't notice, the Sickness post I made a few days ago was non-fiction, meaning that that was a real thing happening in my life. Today, I learned that my mom has asked to be let off of the machines that are keeping her alive, and to just let her die. That was after an absolutely awful day at work which is going to lead to a horrendous week of work, and that was after a pretty crappy night of sleep and uncomfortable dreams. Life decided to take the not so great, pile some bad on it, and then top it off with some really terrible.

I concede that I have been a pretty shit son to my mother throughout my life, and the last few times in particular. I've been very irate about the way she treats me, and the way she acts with the people around her, and her general distaste for doing the things that would actually help her improve. Her involvement with my grandmother has not helped either, who seems to believe that she knows health better than doctors, and generally tries to tell me not to do or enjoy the things that I do. But that's probably not a good excuse for how much I have actively tried to avoid and ignore her.

But I still didn't expect the news to hit me as hard as it has. I feel like shit, I've been crying a lot, and while I do believe that her going off the machines and ending her suffering of the last sixteen years is the right decision, it's a weird and upsetting feeling to know that your mother is dying, especially when you're still young. To know that the person you owe your life to won't get to see so many of the things that you still haven't gotten to do. That she will miss out on your marriage, your graduation from college, your finding a life job, your kids. Sure, she may not have been that involved with any of it. But light involvement is a whole lot different from missing out.

I don't know that I'll be writing over the next couple days. I'd love to say I will be, that I'll keep doing it because it's something I know she would have wanted me to do, but this has been one hell of a day that will rock me for a while, and it feels like it's only just started. So we'll see.