Nightmare

It was the first day of school, and Jeremiah was already late. His parents dropped him off at the front of the school, which was desolate and eerie in the early morning fog. His backpack was stuffed to the brim with textbooks, pencils, pens, papers, rulers, crayons, colored pencils, erasers, folders, binders, his pet gerbil, and three pencil cases. It was probably more than he needed, but he wanted to make sure he was ready, and he was certain that if he had left any of it behind, he was going to end up needing it after all. The weight of the pack was straining against its own straps, to say nothing of his back and shoulders. It weighed easily fifty pounds. Possibly a hundred.

He was worried that the moment he would walk into class, his professor would stop everything in order to yell and lecture him about why he should have been on time and how being so late was detrimental not only to him, but to his classmates as well. What kind of employee would he be in the real world if he couldn't be bothered to show up on time to his own education? But by the time he was getting to class, recess was starting, and the other students were rushing out the doors towards the playground, nearly trampling him along the way.

He dropped off his bag at his desk and ran after the others. He found a group of them playing war on the field and decided to join them. He was handed an M-16 and told to get to work mowing down the scum on the other side. He pointed and pulled the trigger without asking twice. Bullets flew from the muzzle like wildfire, falling down on unsuspecting victims, painting the ground left and right red with their blood. The ammo belt around his shoulders ran endlessly through the chamber. And then he watched as one of the bullets ricocheted off of one of the storage containers out in the field and flew back at him, piercing himself in the chest.

His father was kneeling over him as he lay dying in the grass. He was trying to speak, but the child could hear no words. Only the beating of his own heart in his eardrums, threatening to deafen him and sending careening into the ravine with each pounding smack against his ribs. Jeremiah looked down at the child in his arms, filled with remorse and regret for all of the things that he had not yet taught him. To have his child stripped away from him before the boy had ever had a chance to grow. To see that blood spilling down and staining the snow as it fell around them.

And then the doorbell rang, and he answered it to see his friends there waiting with smiles on their faces, ready for the party. He invited the six of them in, excited for the fun that the five would have. He had laid out four seats at the dining table so that no one would go without. And after dinner, the three proceeded into the bathroom, where there were two tvs, so that it would be easy to play the single player game.

The dark was abrupt and intense. It felt like it was trying to consume him. And then it did.

Nurse

The tent had been raised hastily, but it was serving its purpose well enough. Even just approaching, Samantha could hear the groans of easily over two dozen men coming from within, each in pain and calling for help. The battlefield was brutal, even in smaller conflicts such as this one. Men on both sides were brutally injured if they were lucky - they would have to have the hand of god on their side to leave the field untouched. Assuming they actually participated, of course. It was no secret that some of the soldiers were too scared to actually fight. The more times they escaped the field uninjured, the easier it was to tell if they were that kind of man.

Samantha slipped into the tent and her eyes were immediately zipping back and forth, taking in information about her patients. She saw broken and missing limbs, excessive amounts of blood, and people who were newly missing one of their five senses. She had a lot of work ahead of her. Carefully, she pulled her necklace out from under her robe, a small bottle of glowing blue mist tied to its end. She muttered a prayer under her breath and carefully removed its lid.

Dozens of ethereal blue hands soared out of the bottle, swirling around the room, bringing with them a cool breeze that permeated the air. The groans of the men fell quiet as the hands presence eased them into a gentle sleep. And as the last injured man closed his eyes, the hands descended down, tending to the many wounds present. As they worked, Samantha walked amongst them, keeping an eye on their progress, whispering quiet words of peace to the sleeping men, and encouragement and thanks to the hands. They were not under her direct control - she had worked for many moons to collect them and gain their trust, so that they might help her keep the men whom she cared for alive at the end of their battles.

The hands were undoubtedly magic, which was why she kept them concealed under her robe. This war had started over the use of magic, and she stood on the side that was for the liberation of man from the very force that she was using. But she needed the power to keep her men alive - it was not something she could do alone, but there were very few who were willing to work in the medicine business these days. But they could not bring people back to life, or rebuild lost limbs or other extremities. They could only ease the pain, and work to close wounds and keep them from reopening.

And that was really all she needed from them.

Cozy

Johnson took a hard swing at the log, splitting it clean in two before wiping at his forehead, trying to keep the sweat out of his eyes. He'd spent a good fifteen minutes splitting logs for the fire. He'd had to do it in the backyard, of course - Susan would never let him do shit like that in the house. Not even in the garage. It was freezing cold outside, but the task was hard work, and he'd already worked up enough of a sweat to discard his shirt. He knew she liked to watch from the window, inside where it was warmer. He also knew she thought he liked putting on a show, seeming so strong and resilient, showing off the muscles that he'd worked so long to build for her. He'd been doing it for himself all along, of course, but he wasn't one to argue with her.

He lifted the basket that he had been putting the cut wood into and carried it back into the house. With a heave, he lifted it into its place next to the fireplace and began building the shape for a fire. Susan watched silently from her spot on the couch, artbook in her lap and a smile on her face. She loved watching Johnson be all manly. He didn't do it very often - he was a big goof, and a gamer - but every once in a while he reminded people of just what an intimidating figure he had, and that he was a force to be reckoned with if you got on his bad side. There had not been a single block of wood that had taken more than two swings for him to cleave in two.

When he was done, Johnson grabbed a towel and wiped himself off of sweat before pulling his hoodie back on. He lit a match and tossed it into the fireplace before shutting the pane, which was designed to continue to let air in, but keep it from escaping so as to circulate the air better within the space and build the fire faster. He walked over to Susan and lifted her up slightly, sliding into his spot behind her and resting her back down with her head against his chest. She snuggled into him for a moment before turning back to her notebook and starting to draw.

With the fire starting to burn, Johnson picked up his controller and turned the tv on, resting his hands in Susan's lap as his game booted up. She giggled. "You're gonna go and ruin a perfectly romantic moment by playing your games?" she asked.

"I'm not ruining anything that you aren't already ignoring," he said calmly, his eyes already glued to the screen. "You already stopped snuggling. You draw and I play. That's what I love you for."

Susan laughed out loud at that. "Oh, is that all?" she asked teasingly.

"Yes. Now get on it so I can love you."

Making shit up

It sounds weird when you say it like this, but when you're a writer, you have to have the unique ability to make shit up. I mean, in a way that's kind of a given. For the most part, in writing a story you're trying to create something from nothing, and you're just taking these words from the aether and putting them together until they mean something. But I think the thing that people don't realize or think about a lot of the time, even when they've been writing for a while, is that you don't always know what's coming next. Sometimes you only know what's coming after the next scene, or what's coming further on down the line, but where you are right now, how you're getting to that part that you do know, you really have no idea what's going on.

And some people can skip around to the parts of the story they do know, and they can keep it straight what happens when and where and how, and that's awesome. But sooner or alter they have to come back to that scene that they skipped over because they weren't quite sure how it was going to go. Sooner or later they have to face something that they aren't already intimately familiar with. And by the time they get around to some of those scenes, maybe they have figured out some of what was happening. But they probably haven't figured it out entirely. And that's when they have to just start making shit up.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing. If you ask me, it's both the most exciting and scariest part of telling a story. When you don't know exactly what's going to happen, and so you're figuring it out as you go. You just start throwing words at the screen hoping they make sense, and sometimes when you look back on them they really don't. They make absolutely no sense. And then sometimes you look back and you're utterly amazed because there's no way that you wrote that, and there's definitely no way that when you were in such a bad spot. It's utterly incredible what you just read.

Nanowrimo is made for these kinds of moments, and reading about other people experiencing them is kind of this big thrill for me when November rolls around. Just a few days ago, I read this great line from a budding author who said that "a few minutes ago, my main character and I both realized that he had been dead for five minutes." And that sounds so utterly bizarre, but it's absolutely a thing that happens to writers all the time, and it's the kind of feeling I strive to experience when writing - especially during Nano. That feeling of "Did that really just happen? Did I really come up with that?"

I love making shit up. It's literally what I live for. And man, I have been doing it for four days now, and I could not feel better about it.

Snowboarding

Jacob looked down over the mountain as the ski lift slowly lifted up the steep cliff face that he would soon be making his way down. This was his least favorite part about snowboarding. Sure, it was a nice view, but seeing the other people already making their way down, and the slow pace of it all made him feel skitchy. He wanted to be carving. He wanted to be zipping down the mountain, weaving back and forth between the trees, feeling the icy wind rushing around his face with nothing to keep him safe but the board beneath his feet and his own skill. It was an exhilirating ride - it never lasted long enough.

He had been snowboarding every season since he was ten. It had taken a long time before he had been able to move up to the black diamond level, and he'd never wanted to go back. He'd tried a time or two, mostly with friends who weren't quite as high leveled as he was, but it just didn't give him the same thrill that he got riding down a black diamond - or better yet, a double black diamond. Knowing that if he made a mistake he could end up off trail and out in the middle of nowhere alone, or that a fall could send him tumbling down hundreds of feet over ice and rock, and yet having the control and the skill to make it safely back down to base. He'd yet to find anything that gave him that same feeling.

The other problem with the ski lift was that his foot was getting tired. He had to keep the board on one foot so that he could safely ride off when he got to the top, but that meant having an extra 12 pounds hanging off of that one foot, and the fact that it was lopsided and dangling below him certainly wasn't helping. He tried on occasion to prop the other end of the board up on his free foot, but to be honest, it didn't help all that much. Sure, it made it feel a little lighter, but the way he had to position it was painful on his ankle, and it really just meant that he had extra weight on both feet instead of just one.

Sliding off the seat when he reached the top and sitting in the snow, looking down over the mountain as he bound his free foot into its position on his board, though. Knowing what he was about to do. Getting the pre-game adrenaline running through his blood.

That ski lift ride was worth it every time.

Side characters

I've talked before about how I'm bad with having multiple characters in a story, and how I tend to keep my number of main characters down because it makes it easier for me to keep track of what's going on. The problem that arises out of that is that I'm not particularly great at making side characters to exist around them, either. Like, I can say that a character is in a crowd of people, but if they had to pick one character to focus on for whatever reason or another, and that character wasn't integral to the plot, I would struggle. I'd want that character to have a purpose to being in the scene, to have a name, to have a history. All of which are things that I struggle with keeping straight in my head as I add more and more to a story. And if I add a character into a scene, well, why wouldn't I bring them back in a later one? I went to the trouble of giving them a name. What's the point of just letting them go after that?

There probably is one. It's probably the fact that it makes the world feel more alive, and like it exists for more than the express purpose of giving the main characters a plane in which to have their story told. I can't really argue with that, because it's true, and the more real the world is, the easier it is to get engaged in the story. But that doesn't make it any easier to make myself do it.

The simple fact that I'm not good at coming up with names is probably a huge part of it. It would be easier to make side characters if I could just pull names out of my ass that didn't sound samey, generic, or completely batshit insane. Those are my three modes when it comes to story writing. Which is why lately I've started to resort to stealing names from people I know, but that's another story.

This became increasingly obvious to me as I started working on my Nano novel this year, which started in a bar. There are all kinds of people in a bar, doing all kinds of things, and who did I name in it? The main character and the bartender, who I have full intentions of making into a secondary character. I could have named a bouncer, or some regulars, or the DJ, or any number of people who were there in passing, but I didn't. I talked very generically about other people to make it seem like there were people around, and then I went on to focus on the main character like I always do.

I suppose that's something that might be easier to fix in editing, to be fair. But it's probably something that I should think about more often.

Impurity

Daria made her way down the winding cave passage way, her long robes dragging lightly across the ground as she used her long, wooden staff as a walking stick. She was getting too old to make these kinds of journeys, but if she wished for her kingdom to remain as prosperous as it currently was, she knew this trip would have to be made a number of times more. It wasn't the trip down that was so bad - it was coming back up, after draining herself of nearly all the energy she had to complete the task that had been left to her. She was in desperate need of an assistant and a successor, but she had yet to come across anyone who was powerful enough to serve as such. They needed magic beyond the capabilities of the average mage, or even of the higher ranked sages. She needed another archsage. But those were difficult to come across.

The passageways lead into a massive cavern, with magic fueled torches placed all around that burned unendingly. The floor gave way in the center to a hole that went deeper than the light could reach, though it little mattered whether one could see to the bottom of it. It was more important that one could see the enormous beast that was trapped within the hole. Its body stretched up from the depths, twisting and contorting, covered in dirt and moss from decades of imprisonment. Where its torso should have been was a face with a gaping mouth, dull flames burning within. Arms stretched out on either side, though they had long since been frozen in place, reaching out to grip the walls for support. Its head was but a mass, covered in vines and stones, though one lump of the mass in the center looked almost as though it could have been an eyeball.

Daria approached the ledge before the hole and looked up at the massive monster in disgust. It was not the first time she had seen it, nor would it likely be the last, and yet every time she approached it she could not help but reel away from its hideous form. Once, many centuries prior, it had been a king of her fair kingdom, who had searched too heavily for power and wealth. He had sold himself to demons, who had given him everything he wanted - for the price of the lives of his people. His lust for power was so great that he accepted these turns. It was only thanks to the court wizard at the time that the people were saved. He captured the raging, hateful king in this very cave, preventing him from consuming his own subjects.

Daria had been tasked with making sure that the seals went unbroken and unweakened. Once a year she traveled into the depths for this task. Once a year she came face to face with the demon who had once been a man. And once a year she strained every ounce of magic in her body to make sure that he would never complete the task he had been given, and never grow to his full power. For as large and powerful and terrifying as he was now, it was only a fraction of what he was supposed to become.

She was getting too old for this.