Posts Tagged ‘writing’

The Strange Happening Where This Giant Plant-like Thing Rips up the House and Tosses it Around a Bit

Monday, August 31st, 2009

Just realised that National Novel Writing Month is coming up again pretty soon in November. Every year I keep telling myself that I’m not going to put myself through that again, but it seems I’m always a sucker for punishment when it comes to writing fifty-thousand words in thirty days.

Thought I’d post up chapter two of last years, just for kicks. Who’s with me this year? Oh and just a warning, I was at the time going through a period of watching a lot of The Mighty Boosh.

Chapter II:

Second chapter already. Didn’t take long now did it? Now just sitting here on the front steps, the daily burn and draw, taking in the scenery. Far right in the distance there are those gigantic towers that make up the skyline now. One day they just shot straight up out of the ground and took over the skies. Does my head in sometimes thinking about how they did that, but really I’m not that much of a thinker. I’m more of a ponderer I’d say. There’s a pond down in the park, all dark and dirty, filled with all kinds of pond scum and the likes. I go down there sometimes, try to fish a little, but the fish in there are the super-intelligent kind, from hundreds of years of evolution. They know exactly what to do with a hook when they find one. They’re the real thinkers.

Sometimes when I throw my line in, I’ll find that one of them just slowly takes my line and wraps it around a giant chunk of wood, then they pull on the line thrice, three times that is, and wait until I’m certain I’ve got one hooked and then I yank and yank my guts out and end up snapping the line in two, while they sit there in their little swimming circles, chuckling away to themselves, sipping on their iced seaweed daiquiris and discussing notes on Captain Ahab and their hero who thwarted that monomaniacal maniac.

Other times they will write you a note, cleverly unhook the bait straight off the hook and then attach their little condescending notes to the line. Not on the hook most of the time mind you. It’s mostly tied up using some kind of double hitch half-knot or something like that anyway. I’m not too good with knots. The note will always be along the lines of:

Ingenious fish-catching device you have devised there old chap.
Most a pity however that it seems that the fish community,
Is today unable to aid you in your little games,
As we have prior engagements to meet our friend,
Billy the Six, the six armed octopus in his garden
For high tea this afternoon.

You are of course more than welcome to join us monkey boy,
Should you be so inclined. We do hope you won’t mind
Getting your toes wet just a little.

Sincerely yours,

Huckleberry Finn

Quite a hilarious show of wit and sarcasm. Sometimes I go down there for that alone.

I am not however here to tell you about the pond and the fish in the pond tonight though. I’ll leave that ditty for another, more appropriate time. Tonight we also leave our strange tale of the record from Luci and the quest for New Emitex. Rest assured we won’t leave you hanging for too long on that one either. But for now our story will descend into a darker time, a night much like tonight, around the same time, the moon had fallen asleep behind one of the towers to the right skyline to dream about unthinkable things, cheese and wet dreams, just like tonight, and I was asleep. Actually that part is different, because I’m not quite asleep right now, though for all intents and purposes, I may as well be.

To get on with it anyway, I was asleep, and so was Falcon I assumed in the other room. I was having this weird dream about working as a checkout chick in a normal supermarket and there were all these people just buying groceries and I just kept scanning all these groceries though the checkouts and putting them in plastic bags, over and over again; real trippy stuff. But yea, so I was asleep, dreaming, until I hear like this strange creeping sound, the sound that those creeper plants make while they’re growing up your wall. You know? That low rumble, almost inaudible, but this time it was clear as day, and there was no mistaking it.

I climbed up from out of my bed. I was in the depths that night, sunken at least six feet under. It took me a little while to wade through all the extra pillows that had somehow fallen on top of me. I pretended like a was one of those cute little blind molerats that they’re always showing on those nature documentaries, burrowing my way though, until I was finally free. I was still blind however, having somehow misplaced the light switch. In my pocket I’d put a lighter. I knew I had a lighter. Westy the trout was keeping it safe for me. Westy had a terribly well developed habit for the pipe, so he used it far more often than I ever did anyway. Still, you never know when you might be in need of a lighter I always say. Like just say you’re out at a bar some night and some really cute bird asks if you’ve got a light, then there’s no need to feel like a twat, digging around in your pocket, pretending like you’ve lost it. You just say, “Hey Westy, you got that lighter I spotted you before? It sure is dark in here isn’t it?”

“Oh hi hi there Mr Fisher, sure thing, I’ve got it right here. And yes, it is quite dark in here now that you mention it. What’s going on then?”

“I think I heard something outside.”

“Outside the house, there’s always something outside the house.”

“No Westy, inside, out in the lounge or something, like a low rumbling, you know like a creeper vine climbing up the side of your house.”

“Oh, yes of course!”

So I got the lighter anyway and lit it up. One of those new models where it can light up the whole entire room. A LIGHTer brand lighter. The jet flame extending about seven inches from the tip. Whatever, I’m getting off track here. Just kick me or something when I start to linger too long on a subject. It’s a tendency I have sometimes, especially when I’m really tired like I am now. This is the good part anyway, so don’t quit on me just yet.

Behind the door I knew there was something, but I didn’t know what it was, so naturally I opened the door. I’m not one to just sit behind a door while I know there’s something interesting behind it. It was still all dark behind the door when I opened it, but what hit me first was the smell, real jungle, or more closely, like a deep tropical rainforest delight. I reached around for the light switch and was hit by a flurry of green light, but coming slow, almost trickling down at a plodding pace from high up above and behind the green canopy. After about a minute or two, it had fully engulfed me and the room and I could see that the whole room was a gigantic overgrown mass of growing and decaying plant matter.

Far out it was good. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, and I almost wondered if I was still dreaming, but no, this was too real, not like my dreams.

When my eyes became accustomed to the light I started to notice all the little details presenting themselves to me, the tiny flowers that were springing up right before my eyes, quickly budding, blooming, and then turning to tiny helicopter seeds that took off with their tiny piston engines in search of a new land. There were hundreds of them, thousands probably, and perhaps even a hundred thousand or more. I could hear their miniature rotors heaving and hoeing though the air, lifting them to dizzying heights around my nose. I almost breathed one in, but merely sneezed a bit, the force of which toppled me over, and I fell with an almost inaudible thump down to the moist ground below.

It was all mossy and wet, slippery and soft, so nice to sit on. I saw, glowing on the ground, the incandescence of a few neon mushrooms. “Rare delicacies these are!” thought I, carefully harvesting the few brilliant specimens. “They’d go great with a spot of jagger root tea.”

The kitchen was relatively unchanged, and I boiled Mr Kettle just like I always do, and poured his hot juices into the cup for a perfect jagger root and neon mushroom tea. Blowing the steam away to cool it down I returned to the rainforest within, only to find that I wasn’t alone.

There, perched upon the sill of the open window was a little green man. No, not an alien or anything like that. He was more like a goblin or something, but he had all this grass and leaves and moss growing all over him and twigs and bits of branches sticking out everywhere from his body. He was really ugly looking, and could certainly have done with a haircut. That grassy, unkempt mane certainly couldn’t have been doing him any favours with the ladies, if you know what I mean.

“So who are you supposed to be then hey? The Green Goblin?” I asked him in a casual tone — the tea was starting to kick in around that time I think.

“My name is Bartholomew Pumpernickel. I am part of the Spirit of the Forest.”

“Part of the Spirit of the Forest? Which part, the bleedin’ left pinky toe?”

“We are a collective conscience of myriad individual beings”

“You’re a what?” Yep, it was beginning to kick in.

“Never mind puny mortal. I am simply here because I used to live on this very spot and I was just driving past with my friends and wondered if I might be able to get a photo with the house. Here, here’s my camera. Watch it though, it’s an old style film camera, so you have to wind it and look through the viewfinder.” He gave me the camera with the utmost of care and relaying a few more thousand instructions on how to use it properly.

“Oh right, I thought maybe you were going to have a go at us for destroying like the natural habitat or something. I would have told you that, you know, it wasn’t us, it was whoever lived here before we moved in, but hey, that was you wasn’t it?”

Young Bart isisted that I take a shot from outside the house, that he had a little trick that he wanted to catch on camera so that he could show all his other forest spirit buddies. I was still only in my jocks and socks, but I figured that it was the middle of the night, no one would be around, and I’d only be outside for a few minutes anyway.

So I get outside and begin to go through the instructions on how to work this great big old wooden camera, when I notice the house begin to shake there in front of me, and start to lift up from its struts. Something was growing from under the house, and growing fast, and before I could do anything at all, the giant fig tree from below had lifted the house clear off the ground about ten metres in the air and had it swinging around quite violently from side to side.

It was then that I saw Bart hanging from the front porch screaming something down to me. “Take it! Take it! Take it now before it’s too late!”

But before I could finish winding the film, taking off the lens cover and lens hood, set the shutter speed and focus, I noticed the little green man come hurtling down towards me. It was Bartholomew of course, behind him, a dazed and confused Falcon, wondering what in all hell was going on.

Letting Things Out

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Lent out a manuscript copy of my first NaNoWriMo novel the other day, somewhat against innate introversion tendency. This here is an exercise in letting things out, letting things go. Also testing out document embedding through issuu.com.

So below is the twelfth chapter of Tales of Andrew Waters, a chapter that stood out to me for some reason, written in the month of November 2004. Below that is the full book.

Chapter 12 – The Dream

I don’t usually dream really that much at all. They say you’re always dreaming while you’re asleep and it’s just that you don’t always remember your dreams half the time when you wake up, but I’m not too sure about that really. If dreaming is always that same process, where your eyes begin to go darting crazy all about in rapid eye movements and all and they measure the same difference in your brain waves and everything, then why would some dreams be remembered and others forgotten? Maybe it’s just the way certain dreams interact with the reality of your mind that really makes a difference. I have no idea. When I do dream, the ones I remember after I wake up, they’re always really vivid and all like it’s not even really a dream or anything. There’s also always all these strange things happening in the dream that wouldn’t usually happen in real life, just little spots of incongruence, but it’s like I just accept that they’re happening and all and don’t even worry about it too much, just going on with whatever I’m doing and just put everything in place, even the things that don’t seem like they would fit. I think it’s strange that sometimes after you’ve just woken up, you can remember just about every part of your dream, but then as the day goes on, you keep on losing more and more of all the details and everything. I sometimes wonder where those details go when they disappear from your memory. Is it possible that they just don’t exist any more? I think it’s more probable that they’d most likely just migrated over to another part of the brain or something, because sometimes when I remember something, like things that have happened to me and just trivial daily events, I’m always getting this weird feeling like I don’t know if what I’m remembering really happened or if it’s maybe just part of some mundane dream that’s just gotten all mixed in with reality.

Anyway, the dream I had while sitting up against that dirty, old tree in the alleyway, was like no other dream I’d ever had; I’m not kidding. And I can still remember just about every small detail like I’d just woken up from it, still thinking it all over in my head and everything. Usually my dreams are not at all that exciting really, about just things I’d done during the day or various things I’d been thinking about and all, but this one seemed different, like all profound and significant and everything, like it could have had some kind of meaning in it or something. Everyone is always saying how dreams can have all these hidden meanings and messages and whatever and that they are a door to your unconscious mind and all, like that weird, old, crazy psychologist over in wherever who thought that just about every dream you ever have symbolised something dirty about your mother or whatever. What a nutcase. I don’t really believe in all that too much though.

Anyway, I remember it started off in this really wide open space with blue skies and rolling hills and all that rubbish and I was lying down on my back on top of one of these really green grassy hills, just watching the clouds pass on by and seeing what little fuzzy animals or whatever I could make out from the billowing shapes. It was also almost like I was somehow looking down on myself lying on the hill and also looking at the clouds from the hill at the same time. I leaned my head to the right and saw there in the distance, all these really tall buildings and everything, like this giant city metropolis lining the horizon and I thought how nice and peaceful and everything it was to be up on my green mountain like I was, just breathing the cool morning air and all. I looked up again at the clouds once more to see what I could see, but after lying there staring at the shapes for a few minutes, it was like my mind just refused to see any more fuzzy animals and all the clouds just kept looking painfully more and more like plain old stupid clouds.

I began to suspect that something wasn’t quite right and looking down, I suddenly realised that I wasn’t wearing any clothes. It was okay though. There wasn’t anyone else around anyway so I wasn’t embarrassed or anything, but I noticed that on my hands and on my feet and everywhere was growing like all this dark fur and it continued growing until I was pretty much covered from head to toe in this thick furry coat. Then it became apparent what was happening to me. I was evolving, only kind of reverse over millions of years in time and lying there, slowly becoming more and more like some kind of apeman or whatever, I thought I’d better try to get up. I rolled over and pushed myself up on my hands and feet and then tried standing, but found, no matter hard I tried, that I just couldn’t keep upright properly for very long and had to keep setting my furry hands down on the ground to stay balanced. I looked to the right again to where I’d seen the big city before, full of buildings and everything, but now instead there were all these trees everywhere, a huge forest that looked as though it was spreading all over the countryside like some kind of mouldy green growth on the bark of a tree. There was no mistaking it, it was indeed coming closer and before I knew it, there were all these trees, springing up everywhere around me, turning the lush green hill into this dense, dark rainforest and all, with the squawks of birds and everything coming from high up in the trees.

I noticed that I’d grown this really long curly tail, I was quite a bit smaller than I had been just a second ago and was now down on all fours looking around with large beady eyes, when I got this sudden urge climb up one of the trees and so I did. Before long, I was swinging around from tree to tree having a hell of a time in the canopy. I felt myself changing once more and this time, I turned into this little rodent creature that was apparently not very good at climbing because I fell right out of the treetops and landed in this real disgusting mud next to a large riverbed that smelled really bad, but somehow I didn’t really care too much. I had a good little shake, just like dogs are always doing to dry themselves after they’ve just had their weekly bath, that seemed to come just naturally to me, like it was instinct and all, but before I had a chance to start licking my fur and everything, I turned into some kind of scaly lizard for a second. Then I became this really slimy creature that looked like a squishy grey frog with a tail, hopping all around the mud and the edges of the river and then I was this really weird fish, using my little front fins to trudge through the muddy water of the riverbank and then at last, when I got to the water’s edge, I dived in.

I had never been a terribly good swimmer in real life, but it came just about as natural as anything where I was and I was having a hell of a great time zipping around the great lake, and then, all of a sudden, I got this great urge to just follow the current and swim out to sea. I felt all my fins and whatever becoming all streamlined and everything as I began to dive down into the depths of the ocean and then race back up again over and over until I got the fright of my life when my seeing, hearing and just about all the feeling in my body just simply vanished like that. I was like floating, just about dead in the water with my long jellyfish tentacles trailing behind me and no matter how hard I tried, all I could do was float there, virtually at the mercy of the ocean currents, flapping my body to say afloat and this strange craving, like I was just dying for something, anything to just brush past my trailing arms.

The end part of my dream was kind of weird, stranger than the rest I mean. Missing most of my senses, all I can remember are all these different sensations as I felt myself progressively became smaller and smaller, an amoeba type thing, then a little single cell bacteria type thing, then I could feel absolutely nothing, but I imagined I was some kind of amino acid or something floating in my primordial pond of goo, completely at the whim of nature and everything. Then strangely, right at the end of my dream, just before I woke up to the alley way under the moonlight, I felt this odd kind of feeling like I was nothing, but then not just nothing. It became like almost that I was nothing and everything at the same time and then it was more like the very concept of nothingness or whatever never even existed. I know it sounds really stupid and all, but there’s no way I can convey to you what it felt like because I can’t really explain it all that well in words. Anyway, so that’s when I woke up and saw that the moon had disappeared, dark sky had become a touch lighter and a few early birds had sensed that the sun was on its way and were beginning to call in the new morning.

Time Out with Walter S. Fisher III

Friday, November 7th, 2008

With the absent-minded, and somewhat pathetically ignorant thought of starting this thing off — whatever this thing actually turns out to be — with a peculiar statement somehow pertaining to the fallacious assumption that I am in some overarching way, different from everyone else, I, Walter S. Fisher the third, it seems in actually fact, to be merely delaying the inevitable: the eventual forgone conclusion that this is in all likelihood, not the case at all. We are all unique in our indifference. That will be perhaps, to everyone’s relief and wellbeing, my first and final attempt at humour in this brief account of whatever it is I am supposed to be accounting for.

In fact, there is more than probably a hundred million young boys — and what the hell, girls as well — who look, think, and act just the way I do, and what’s more, who somehow emperorishly believe themselves to be one of a kind, a snowflake, an anomaly of nature, that no one knows what it’s like to be the bad man, that no one understands. A snowflake however is a snowflake is a snowflake is a snowflake, just as a duck is a bird is a plane, is superman. Ok I will stop now.

Of course, that being said, there always remains an inkling, a sinking suspicion — call it a minor defect of consciousness in its quest for self-promotion — that there is that certain special something, the differentiating quality lying dormant deep within the soul somewhere.

It’s the same in us all.

Fueling Prophecy of the New Evolution

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

The periodic reading during hurried lunch breaks of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius seems to have spurred on previous ideas — ideas that up until now had been lying dormant — to take on something new, a new project, or whatever it was that had built itself up in my head as what would seem like a good idea to spend a good deal of blood, sweat, and tears on for a considerable period of time, in order to reap the perceived extensive existential gain, whatever that may or may not be.

The idea is simple, and It’s been brewing away for probably months, or maybe even years, up there in Neverland: to pick simple, everyday things, things you may not think twice about, and write about them analytically in terms of their evolutionary existence, etc, mainly in order to offer an alternative view on our perceptions of the things around us — something like that anyway. We’ll see how it turns out after things begin to take shape.

So what I’ll do is I’ll pick something, something from the day, or something that occurs to me during the day, and then I’ll write about that, just to make it a little personal. That single object will most likely then get expanded into its basic form, or what it is, like my tambourine over there on the bed is a member of the percussion family of musical instruments — stuff like that, all biological, and trace the history and origins and study its continued existence in the universe. Follow?

This will be it, and I’ll do it every day for a hundred days, or more realistically, as frequently as life allows for however long it takes for me to throw the towel in. That should theoretically fill a book; I’ll publish it, and BAM! thrust skyward towards ongoing influence and memory in high society, to an escape from a weary workaday worldliness, while at the same time helping a few lonely souls along the way reach the fabled “new” perfect bliss and enlightenment.

I have no idea what I’m going on about… or do it? It really depends upon the state of evolution that this sentence you’re reading now has in your mind at this given time, or down the track, or before you even read it, while I’m typing it now.

Self-fulfilling prophecy. Who knows?

Revelations From A-Top The Hill

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

When a man gains the high ground, an elevated position upon which to perch, and to cast a firm gaze over what was once his incomprehensible surroundings, he begins to see things in a new light. That is, those things that once surrounded him and dazzled his senses become arranged in a new way when reconstructed and rethought.

This may well be fiction, as may any string of words you should come to hear in all your days. In the end, I sometimes wonder, what’s the difference? A recent venture to the top of the hill did not meet with a genuine imparting of the divine. Not at all in fact. What was I thinking?

In truth, an idea has been kicking around the insides of my skull for quite some time now, and it seems this idea is attempting a prison break manifestation in any shape or form it can persuade my body into creating. I did have a kind of revelation in the shower before. Never start from the beginning, so I’ll be certain not to even try.

Restless wanderer waiting to be free, awaiting release, it seems you must stay, as least for a short while longer. Shapeshifting mist of a beast, settle on a more permanent form, solidify your existence, that you may be released, and your institutional torment ended at last.

An Automatic Poem

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

Written at lunch, streams of words.

When the terrors of the night come wandering by
I know for sure that we all someday must die,
For the walls are painted with a million shades of grey
Telling a story of when the wind ran away.

Into the ocean, into the sea,
We alone will believe what no one else will see.
Try as you might, you will never walk down
All those paths in your lifetime you might not have found.

Actors and agents they claw at my door,
But letting one in means they all must want more.
Today is the day that they all throw you back
What news do you bring from the old weathered shack?