On Writing
I for one love hearing how authors come up with their stories, so here's a list of mine as of this date and what inspired them.
Rusted Bones
This is by and large my favorite story that I've written so far. It was an expirement on my part, so it gets pretty trippy and choppy at some parts, but that was on purpose and I like it even though it might be hard to understand sometimes. The inspiration largely came from a random online summary of Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. I haven't actually read the book, but I did read an excerpt of his where he described a drug called black meat made from giant centipedes (not sure where it's from) which inspired the black meat in this story. Also, I generally wanted to make a fleshier twist on the cyberpunk genre. A theme I wanted to explore is the idea of "the flesh" and bodies. The more you think about your body, the weirder it is. Most of the time, I think of myself as being only my mind, or my soul if that's how you want to think about it- essentially, a bunch of thoughts floating a couple feet off the ground, carrying along on stuff like willpower, feelings, smarts, etc. But then I get sick, or I sleep poorly, and I realize how much I am my body. I'm a network of blood and bones, all of which dictating my will, emotions, and thoughts more than I could ever imagine. My mind, my spirit, is subject to the weaknesses of my flesh. I tend to see my arms and legs more as tools than myself. I translated this detachment to Frank, who disposes and replaces his body parts as needed, like they are actual tools. After becoming more familiar with Burroughs's work, I realized I unintentionally stole the "not dying by just replacing organs" thing from him as well ("Immortality"), but that's another important concept in this story. We are our bodies, and eventually our bodies fall apart. In a weird way, I find the idea of my immune system comforting. That all my white blood cells would die fighting for me, that all my blood cells keep screaming through me despite everything, even when I don't feel like staying alive or when I've disappointed the whole world. Yet, one day, even this system will fail, and I will die, slowly if I'm unlucky, of Alzheimer's and Dementia, of liver cancer. Well, in "Rusted Bones", as fanatic as things have gotten, this is a thing of the past. Your mind can be stapled together with microchips to keep it running, and a faulty liver can be carved out and swapped for a fresh lab grown one. Burroughs considers this an abomination in "Immortality", but I have to admit it doesn't sound that bad.
Changes: All my writing ends up being way longer than it should, so I might trim this one down a little. Then, there's a tense switch halfway through that was not intentional, but it sort of fits the general vibe, so I might keep it, I might not. A general pass will be good too, of course, to fix a little thing here and there. The world around this one has a potential to be a much longer work, with this story being the first one or two chapters. I've even written a prologue for the book it might become, which I might upload later.
Snowfall
I read a book, or maybe saw a movie, where characters were slowly freezing to death and started burning everything in sight to survive. Combine this with those barrels full of fire you always see in movies with homeless people hanging around, and I had the city scene from this story where people start a colossal fire in the street to stay warm. The story built up from there, sort of like the snow itself. It's a very mundane thing to go out to, the snow piling up and temperatures dropping, and dropping, and dropping, all the way to absolute zero, but it's also got a feeling of inevitable dread to it.
Changes: This one's short and sweet, which I love. There's not a whole lot of fat to analyze, and if I started cutting I'd just horrifically mutilate it. So I think I might leave this one untouched.
Moldy Thoughts
It takes something like eleven seconds for someone to go full zombie in the World War Z movie, as proven at the beginning by the convienently positioned Subway Sam. In the book, which was much more horrifying, the process is slow. You get sicker and sicker, until one day you get into bed and it's the virus that gets back up. I think this is a more plausible spread scenario for a virus, and it got me thinking, what's going through your head as your body succumbs to the virus? You can't ask the diseased, for obvious reasons. Hence, a journal. My version of the virus is a lot slower, and I think the whole personality change to extroversion is one of the best ideas I've had in a good long while. Plus, the idea of zombies that act at least somewhat like normal people is absolutely horrifying, and for some reason I haven't seen many works exploring it. (In case you are looking something else that does play around with this idea, there's one short story called "The End of the Voyage" by Bora Chung and a movie called The Sadness.)This mold grew from some urbex videos I watched a while back. Mold is a huge danger for that sort of occupation, but what really kicked me off was one video where the explorers encountered a squatter in some abandoned parking garage. This image rolled around in my head until the squatter somehow became a mold zombie dwelling underneath the crumbling ruins of society. In the Moldy world, Earth has been abandoned due to the infestation, so all sorts of abominations prowl the rubble, AJ perhaps among them. Maybe those who recovered his journal even had to fight his infected self for it.
Changes: More trimming, a look over or two. It could definitely be shorter. There's a whole developed world around this one, too, but I won't get to expanding it, probably for a while. There will be a White Death article in the Encyclopedia, though.
The Babylon Engine
Like Snowfall, a single image inspire this one. I believe I was listening to the Felsman+Tiley track Solitude, thinking about space as is good and right when listening to that song, when I saw a vivid picture of someone taking off their space suit in space as they accepted their fate before some huge event. Exactly the project overseer at the end of The Babylon Engine. The rest came about along the way.
Changes: Oh boy, the changes. Trimming, making the dialogue better, changing the whole opening sequence, etc. Basically, I need to go through it and really take my time making it. I rushed my way through this one for sure, because I had just finished Moldy Thoughts but seen an online competition for a sci-fi story. The prize was life-changing amounts of cash (100$). I didn't think Moldy Thoughts would fit, so I blew through this one in a week. In the end, a friend suggested I put Thought in after all. I did not win. Which is okay. But I should have gone with Babylon.
Keaton's America
I saw a bumper sticker once, "Kill your local pedophile". I had already written "Keaton's" by then, but it originated from a similiar sort of violent feeling. So I came up with a president, a deranged ex music teacher, and a guy who goes along with his friend's plot to make torture porn because his life's apparently not interesting enough. My main characters tend to be purposeless losers, which is for two reasons. One, I used to be a purposeless loser and though it seems funny to me now, I still remember what it was like, and they say to write what you know. Two, as seen in this story, a purposeless loser can very easily be given any sort of purpose without them asking too many questions. Kevin bursts in one day, covered in blood, and Cullen just decides to tag along without me having to write a long "Oh my God what do I do" mental debate. Anything would be better than his life right now. Something I think about a lot presents itself here: how much do people "deserve" to be punished for their crimes? At what point does justice become monstrous? Obviously, some is undoubtedly deserved. Actions have consequences, this much is true. I'm not going to pretend like I know anything beyond that.
Changes: It's not as fat as other pieces, so I don't think I need to change anything on that front. Some more sharpening and focusing could do this one good, though. Overall, it's not so bad.
The Edifice
My latest piece. Money is power, but what if it could literally reshape reality? So I made the universe digital and made money the same thing as code. This idea of money literally giving the user reality warping god-like powers is a pretty interesting concept if you ask me. I also got about halfway through the story without realizing I never gave the dude a name, so after that Id decided to roll with it. Our protagonist remains nameless.
Changes: This one's okay. Definitely some sharpening in order. Rushed the ending, so work there would be beneficial. It's pretty two dimensional right now, so maybe making a more clear theme for it may do it good.
The Straight And Narrow Path
Saw this meme somewhere:
Thought it was a cool concept. Came up with a story around it. Voila. The title comes from a plan I had originally to have a character monologue about how time is so much more than a simple linear path, but I couldn't figure out where to put it in. It still sounds cool, so I'm not changing it.
Changes: The usual. Thinning the fat and all that. Maybe I could also try to clear up some of the more complicated plot points.
I was also going to add a section at the end here discussing my thoughts on writing as a whole, but this is already getting pretty long, so I'll just write down what updates I made to the site as of 8/21/26:
-Updated journal entry look, as you may have noticed. I was going for a lined paper look, so hopefully this more or less evokes that effect.
-Created a template for long works and linked The Eternal City on the main writings page. Right now it's blank, but I'll upload the first couple chapters I've written once I've edited formatted them for the site.
-Attempted to make the Encyclopedia home page. The logo is really pissing me off right now because it just refuses to go to the center of the page. It's really funny to me that something as simple as that is tripping me up. But it's only temporary.
-Uploaded The Edifice, Keaton's America, and The Straight and Narrow Path.
-Expect the Encyclopedia templates to be finished in the next two weeks, followed quickly by the first article, and the first couple chapters of Eternal City uploaded by the end of the weekend.
I'm less than halfway done with the August story because of poor time management. My plan is to continue working on it until the end of the month, then, whether or not it's finished, burn through a short one for the start of September and go right back to finish this one.
That's all for now,
