I Am Completely Serious

Every once in a while I’ll have a dream of a type I think of as an Ur-Dream. These are dreams that have a moderately coherent story, are aware that they’re dreams, comment on something I’ve been thinking about or reading, seep into/out of whatever I’ve been writing recently, and about which my lighter-weight dreams will henceforth write lots of fanfiction. The Two-and-a-Half Apocalypses Dream was one of these - it contains a lot of complaints about stuff I was working on at the time, and some of the characters and settings have shown up in another dreams since.

(They have titles. Some of them have credits and dedications. The Lightning Key Dream was scored by Bjorn Lynne, with character design by Himekawa Akira and environmental design by Abe Yoshitoshi and CLAMP. The Memory Witch Dream was dedicated to Jim Henson and Tanith Lee, and included appearances by Getting Lost In The Back Yard, Accidentally Sleeping Through Most Of Autumn, and The Confused Sick Person Whose Jacket Is Getting Thin At The Elbows, regular presences in my dreams since grade school.)

This is one from high school. I’m pretty sure I had it around the time I first read Kaori Yuki, because the Count Cain read-through made me think of it and dig my write-up out of the hard drive.

-

A certain wizard has many towers, can make another by blinking, and each comes out slightly different from the other, but he cannot make a perfect one. Once he has thrown away into a sun enough to fill a small city, he stops making them, because they come from nowhere and he feels the universe will collapse if too much matter unaccounted for comes into it. He keeps seven, in a t-shape, and lives in the center one, which has a library on the bottom floor out of which he has moved all the books, then sat down in and grown depressed.

The wizard and Bianca love unwisely; or rather, those who love Bianca believe that she is unwise to love him, young and powerful as she is, because he is a doddering old fool who can only make towers. Later, Bianca becomes older and sadder, and he can no longer keep her attention.

Continue reading “The Dream City”

We’re required to write a speech in Japanese for this speaking contest the school has. Apparently it’s not optional? I had a sore throat and was feeling kind of gross the day it was due, but nonetheless worked very, very hard on it. When we got them back today, it was gently suggested to me that my speech Would Not Do.

Bullshit. It’s a great speech. Here, look, I translated it for you guys:

Continue reading “The Terrible Secret”

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( Spoiler-cut )

Continue reading “Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle ch. 156-158″

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The last class of my college career was Wednesday. ( Here are my notes in full. )

Continue reading “Studious”

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(What, is it the Feast of Boris again yet?)

In honor of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, I give you a thingie. It’s presumably not publishable-quality, seeing as no one’s published me yet, but I’m posting it anyway because I think I’m done with it for a while, and it’s distracting me from working on other things.

It’s the prologue to The Nebulous Video Game In My Head, “The Ashdocks”, which is kind of a puzzle-RPG - the plot involves boats, ghosts, swamps, fairies, and people being political, and the gameplay involves a few standard turn-based battles, and a lot of puzzles where you manipulate plants and fungi in various ways to affect the environment, hurt people, heal them, and create new items. You get a limited number of certain types of seeds/roots/etc per stage, and can buy more of others, and all that good video-game-economics stuff.

Because this isn’t Harvest Moon, you can also manipulate the passage of time to get the plants to grow immediately, though there are sometimes side-effects to doing that - grow too many explosive mushrooms in a certain place in such-and-such a space of real-time, and you wear out your soil so that it’s only fit for growing zombies for a while. Which you may or may not want, depending on who you’ve killed recently and what level you are.

(Except that I don’t know how this system works yet, hence the word “nebulous.” This is why I’m never actually going to be a video game designer. The “game” part kind of stumps me.)

( If this hasn’t all scared you away, the script is behind the cut. )

I hope you found that a nice, macabre way to start your Monday!

Continue reading “Happy Made-Up Internet Holiday!”

MALCOLM: I’m going to kill myself.

HIDEO: - what for?

MALCOLM: They keep saying stuff about their souls, I don’t know how you figure out what color and texture your soul is, and if it’s shaped like a little star…

HIDEO: So you are going to kill yourself - not because of all the horrible things that have happened to you - but because there is a religious program on the radio?

MALCOLM: Yes.

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I am writing a short story to submit to this anthology! I have had a poor attention span all this semester due to stress and death and panic and self-castigation over my failure to get at least fifty pages of the Worst Cleric Ever book finished by the end of February despite my vow to do so two months previously!

Thus I am posting my unfinished short story here! Here on this Livejournal! Its presence in public where other people can see it will, it is hoped, cause me to immediately see every single one of its flaws in glaring detail (as has been the case with my senior research), allowing me to correct them and understand in a blinding flash of semi-competence how it should be structured! And then I will hurt myself banging my head against the wall but at least I will have finished the stupid short story!

Please do not attempt to tell me things about it! That is not the point of this exercise! The comments are turned off! If you wish you may insult me in two weeks about my discomfort with the first-person POV and its result which is my heroine’s over-the-top “salty”-as-it-is-called language, because in two weeks there will be two weeks left before the first deadline!

Do not tell me I am wrong about things about Sweden! That is also not the point!

( ‘IN THE SNOW’ )

GRRRRAHHH ALL SHORT STORIES END IN A ROAR OF EXISTENTIAL RAGE YES YES I SEE IT

(It probably will not actually end in a roar of existential rage!)

This entry may disappear at some point!

Continue reading “THE SACRED ACT OF CREATION FILLS ME WITH HATE AND EXCLAMATION POINTS”

Rigsin was in the doorway, breathing hard, his steel eye drifting dazedly. It took him a second to summon up language: “There’s a demon outside. I’m a little confused.”

Everyone looked immediately at Teo. He had slammed his book closed. Illogically, he snapped, “I don’t know why you all think it’s about me -”

“’s not about me!” protested Rigsin. “I asked. (I don’t like talking to demons, you know.) You need me to distract it and you go out the back?”

“- no, I don’t need - I didn’t do anything, damnit -”

Scowling thoughtfully into space, Lyssa asked, “Do demons care if you do something else with bird hearts, do you think?”

Teo stared at her for a second, then said carefully, “Perhaps you’d better stay inside, just in case. I’ll go,” he told Rigsin, standing with a wince and pocketing his book. “It talks?”

“Not so good at it -”

As Teo closed the door, he heard Scarlet saying, blank with hysteria, “‘Something else?’”

Goddamnit! “The Celery Queen” sounds like “Ellery Queen!” And Ellery Queen’s a mystery writer! I can’t name my Wispy Clairvoyant Agoraphobe (TM) something that sounds like a mystery writer, it’s… it’s inappropriate.

- but I’ve been calling her that for like two years aaaagh how the hell am I supposed to remember another name now?! -

I must’ve seen the name on a bookshelf and let my brain latch onto it. I hate my brain.

Jicky the Slightly-Self-Actualized Abomination of Science: It would be easier to make a sandwich if my hands weren’t all burnt - all right, there they go. I always have remind my self-healing powers…

Casey the College-Educated Berserker: …okay, look. Are you bored over there?

Jicky: I can’t tell. What do you want me to do?

Casey: Can you work a computer?

Jicky: I’m from space.

Casey: Do they have Windows in space?

Jicky: Yes, but one mustn’t open them.

Casey: …

Jicky: I’m really very sorry. I don’t know why I said that.

The last class of the semester was comm. Here are my notes in full:

I spent about fifteen minutes trying to decide what he was saying, and then the school year was over.

“- you - you told me to marry her, you didn’t specify *where* or *how* -”

“I told you to marry her within certain obvious unspoken constraints! Don’t ask her to say “obey,” don’t kill her after, find out her last name, and *invite me*! *You dick.*”

-

I will never finish this book, because I would rather come up with snippy dialogue than figure out the plot.

Filenames in the “Magus Anmere: Cyborg Werewolf” folder:

eye
password
yourcreator!
Alignments
claws
cookies
goldenwings
pyramid
hair
tree
hunt
buses
murdermystery
outerspace
six
fairies

I’m tired and was having to open them to figure out what they were just now. If stuff can surpass its maker and go rogue, my filenames will shortly be rising up against me.

I think the tempo of songs stretches out in the time they spend sitting on CD’s and hard drives. In a thousand years, an advanced civilization will discover the last remaining open Apache server, and be unable to recognize its contents as music, its pace will have so slowed in the intervening centuries.

Status of review of The Hidden Stars - still too sad

Status of Green Lion re-read - half-way through third book; convinced world needs Ceilyn/Tryffin slash

“- they’re depressing mountains,” Hero said uncertainly.

Nera had been waiting for him to say something, and this clearly disappointed her. She corrected, “No. They are oppressive mountains. They are coming this way.”

“…sometimes mountains do that just, naturally. Because - there are these plates underground that kind of ram together and -”

“These mountains appear one by one. A dense, wet fog appears in a place where a new mountain is being formed, and something huge and black falls into the fog with a clang like a great bell. Sounds of chisels echo from within - and they echo even when they shouldn’t. Those who enter the fog are lifted up and dropped at random places far away with headaches that linger for up to a year. The fog and the sculptors remain for two months, until one morning the fog lifts, leaving a new mountain already covered with lichen, sparse bushes, and goats, and signed somewhere around the base by its designer. Most of the recent ones are by someone named Chethura; I am told he has admirers in the cities -”

“All right, all right, yeah. Tectonic plates don’t really, have goats.”

“Haven’t you got a brilliant plan yet, Teo?”

“Several, but thus far they’re all contingent upon the rest of you being rendered unconscious and the moral rectitude of the room so being reduced to tolerable levels.”

Scarlet snorted. “…tolerable…”

“You think I am joking, but I am not. I have a very low tolerance for ethics recently. I was ethical a couple of days ago, and suffered an acute attack of the Violent Illiterati.”

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That Woman came up to me after and said, sounding kinda surprised, “That was actually quite good.” Soon I shall feast upon her entrails. Of *course* it was a fucking good presentation. It’s because I am fucking *eight million times* smarter than you, you *bitch*. You are a *shitty art teacher* and I am a *genius* who is such a *sophisticated internet user* that I use *asterisks* rather than CAPS LOCK to lend *emphasis* to *words*.

( Disclaimer: I am a snob and am about to be completely unfair to my classmates. (But not to the professor, I don’t think.) My excuse is that I’ve hurt my foot and my head feels like gnomes are hammering and sparkling their way out of it. But still, take note - I am going to be an asshole here. You might want to go read a Janet Kagan book or something instead if, you know, you’re not into that kinda thing. Eat some chocolate. )

…Okay.

My notes also included a picture I drew of Generica Villainous forcing our hero Casey the Overeducated Berserker to kneel before her, which I maintain is within the scope of the class because it was part of a larger narrative, and that narrative also has a ninja in it, and ninja are Japanese. *Asian narrative art*, people.

Continue reading “So I gave an awesome presentation last week.”

There is a square house arranged in three rings - the rooms along the outside walls, a red-carpeted hallway, and the inner rooms. There are small alcoves set into the inner walls in the hallway. One has a clock in it. The others are empty, and every time the clock strikes, something will come out of one of them somehow, and move in circles around the hallway for an hour until its shift is over and something else comes out. There aren’t twelve alcoves, there are maybe five or something, and anyway the clock strikes thirteen once a day. Usually that happens after midnight, not after noon.

The monster that comes out at eleven at night is the patchwork girl. She’s shaped like a human, not like a rag doll, though she’s underweight and you can see the wire ribs that keep her shape pressing out against her worn cloth skin. If you punched them she would dent.

Her patches look from a distance like they might once have been all different colors, like you’d expect with a patchwork girl, but actually they’re all pretty much the same shade of dull yellow; some of the fabrics have patterns in them, little flowers or ducks in darker or lighter yellow and brown, but in general she’s just yellow. All the patches are different shapes - some are round and some square and some star-shaped or triangles - and a lot are velvet. She has a coat or robe down to her knees on, the belt untied and bouncing along after her, and it’s made of the same stuff as she is.

She always skips instead of walking, and when she skips you can hear her squeaking. She’s probably filled with that styrofoam stuff like they use in crane machine dolls. That would explain why she holds her shape so well, too.

Her hair is just a yellow patchwork veil, attached at a single point at the center of her scalp. It’s not sewn on very well and sometimes gets twisted around in front of her face. She does notice when this happens, and tries to push it back, but when she moves it’s just a gesture - when she pushes her hair back it’s more to be pushing her hair back than because it bothers her that her hair’s in her face. So sometimes the veil stays in her face for a while before she gets it fixed. She giggles more than usual when she’s pushing her hair back.

She’s always giggling. It seems like she does talk a little sometimes, but she never stops skipping or giggling for anything. She’ll seem to raise her head a little to you when you talk to her, though it’s hard to tell because she’s still skipping, and she’ll gasp something out, like, “- yeah, I *know*, well -” And then she’ll collapse into giggles again and wave at you because she can’t help it, something about it’s funny. If you ask her something, she will seem to be amused that you don’t know already, or that you even care. If you’re scared because you can’t find the door or because of the tree or something, you’ll get the idea she thinks it’s absolutely ridiculous to be scared. If you are, it won’t reassure you. She probably wouldn’t really notice if you followed her around for her whole hour - she might look back over her should and wave sometimes, making you think she wants you to come up to her, but she won’t have anything to say if you do. She might wave at you again when it strikes midnight, and she goes back into an alcove and is gone.

You know that she’s never, ever going to do anything other than skip in circles and giggle, until she finally gets torn apart by someone who’s angry she doesn’t answer questions. She can’t do anything else. But still, she somehow seems very dangerous.

Her boyfriend had schizophrenia and had some sort of evil, twisted personality that would come out often — she could tell when this happened because he changed his font color.

-someone on GAFF

-

“And so,” said the Magician, “Begins the requiem for Prime Minister Haz. Such an *inspiring* sound.”

She paused, and added gently, “You’re supposed to say, “I don’t hear nothin’.”"

The Goon said, “Don’t start with me today.” She looked carefully in both mirrors and over her shoulder as she switched lanes - hoping to provide a salutary example for her colleague, maybe, Jessica thought. The cars moving past seemed unusually loud and fast, and Jessica’s head hurt.

The Magician, stretching out in the back seat, looked smug and comfortable - she had probably had a bad day once or twice in her life, but preferred not to let it get around. “Oh, come now, humor me. Do you not know what a requiem is, is that it? Do you think it has to do with goths?”

“I said don’t.”

Rooms tend, when they reach a certain stage of cluttering, to become occupied by the Chairs that No One Should Sit In. They insinuate themselves close to the doors, gathering piles of papers in their seats in an attempt to pass themselves off as genuine office equipment. They may later, once secure in their position, begin to eat the paper, though this has never been observed firsthand; they may also make more of it. The lights tend to stop working properly once a Chair has moved in - and if they were not flourescent before, they become so.

The Chairs are always black or brown, and often naugehyde. They have headrests, but they are positioned badly, and sometimes spin all the way around. They are set low to the ground with seats that are tilted inwards and backwards in ways that subtly bend the laws of physics - it is impossible to draw an accurate image of the Chairs as seen from above. It is, in fact, very difficult to position oneself above the chairs, as their structural peculiarities become contagious after a certain amount of time, making other furniture in the room too unstable to climb on. In particularly extreme cases, the occupants of Chair-infested rooms have been known to stick cardboard under all four legs of a table. It is assumed that the Chairs are attempting to bring other things down to their level; there is evidence that they are a type of mushroom.

The inexperienced will sometimes, upon the introduction of children to their workspaces during a particularly hassled moment, feel the urge to clear off a Chair and tell them to sit in it and wait. The child will be reluctant to do so, not being able to see to the bottom of the chair, and if forced will become surly and throw up in a car fairly soon afterwards, and possibly, if exposed for long enough, bring home a C later in the week and refuse to talk about it. It is not clear what benefit the Chairs derive from this interaction, but as they all do it at least once in their lifespan, it is assumed to be important.

There is only one proven method for removing a Chair, and that is cleaning up the damn room.

When they do obituaries for people who have done something big and important, the fourth paragraph or so starts, “It all started with [a story his five-year-old daughter told him/an idle thought during a TV show/a slight sports-related urethra injury/other innocuous things, I'm tired right now, okay].” I was reading one today and not totally paying attention, and thought the “it” in “it all started” meant the guy’s death, like the “casual comment made by his wife” set off a disturbing chain of events that culminated in the discovery that his life had been meaningless, and he declined, shattered, into a state of gray apathy fading into a dry death indistinguishable from any other moment.

Haha, that Junichiro Tanizaki sure was a funny guy. OMGWTF. I actually couldn’t remember what that acronym meant for a second just now.

So what do you think, is it really in character for the Imperial Wind Dragon to *help* bury the Mad King alive? I’m still thinking he might back off and leave the mafiosi dude to it, not dirty his talons and all.