[Writer Stuff] Seeking at Atlanta in the Magic City

I sit at the Cafe del Theatro outside of the Olympia Theater here in Miami, and I am forced to realize that Miami isn't Atlanta.

Duh.

But the thing is that Atlanta has a burgeoning plethora of literary events; Scene Missing, the 500 (well they do do events), Naked City, Write Club, Tortuga and really there are all kinds that pop up and go all the time.  Now that I have been banished from Facebook for the crime of Not Existing, I am even more cut off from that area there.  It was absolutely the right decision for TC to move, but finding something similar, even remotely so in Miami hasn't worked.  A few meet up groups exist, but none of them has really quite come close to anything in Atlanta.

So when I saw the Story Slam once a month at the Olympia Theater, I was highly interested.  But now that I'm here I realize its for the Moth podcast.  Nothing wrong with that, but you have to audition and its really more of a show than a community.  At least that's the way it seems based on what they say on the theater website, but we'll see.

Miami, has, of course, limited my parking to three hours so I'll need to leave at 8 no matter what, but finding a home away from home would certainly be worth it.  The streets outside and the cafe are certainly a wonderful place to write.  But having peers and an audience would be nice.  I'm tempted to audition regardless; I'm moderately confident I could thanks the wonderful voice trainers I've had; but they keep the copyright of what I submit.

That doesn't make me inclined to give them my best stuff.  But we'll see what we shall see.  If I have to create something from scratch; then that's what I'll do.

Xantro Deaxalator

By Emmitt Other

The arcing arm of the sweet milky way
Reaches out and down
Down through the thin veil
Of clouds and sky pebbles we call garbage
To embrace the path we take now
Troubles
So many troubles on our journey now
Tis a rough patch round the sun this time around
Tis indeed a rough patch round the sun this time round
But we all shall flourish
Gonna flourish in the Sands of sun
In the mountains west of the Mississippi
At the nexus of the ties that bind
All the places where good people embrace tomorrow
There's still hope
There is still sweetness coming
Believe it comes
Believe it comes
For it is real
And it is meant for you
And it is definitely meant for you.

[Heliotrope] Fairy Horses

The 1947 film "Le Belle y Le Best" is considered among the inhabitants of Outer Fairy as among the most accurate Terran media portrayal of what an actual Royal Family is like.  Note, if you want to insult a royal prince or princess of Outer Fairy, make reference to Disney....Having said that, I didn't want to write here about this film.  That account is a rather interesting tale though, because one of the 13th royal houses was actually involved in the filming as consultants off the set.

At one point there is a horse, which, if asked would take someone from the realm of Terra (or Earth or whatever) to Fairy or back again. What? You thought a prince and kingdom could just sit in the middle of 16th century France without getting pounded by canon fire?  Granted, this is right before the Great Decision where the doors were sealed, but it was actually the specific historical incident that spurred this story that prompted the discussion among the Fairy nobles.

Anyway, about the horse.  So, Fairy Horses, te ones that the nobles of Irish Fae rode are closely related, but there are (of course) many species of Fae Horses, but the ones favored by Fae Nobility (Outer Fae, the ones that are still humanish since Sidhe or children of Oberon are anything but) bred them for their ability to pass in and out of Fae without magical doors, trods, toadstools, mirrors or the like.

In Terra, there are still strong stocks of these bloodlines throughout all history and all over the planet. Horses with uncommon levels of intelligence.  Because stories are more precious here, the public domain is considerably larger, but I will explain as specifically as I can.  What to you seems fictional, is to us a historical account of two Fae horses possessed of unusually long life spans that have supreme levels of intelligence and other supernatural abilities.

Take for example The Black Stallion and Flame by Walter Farley.  

Did you know that the natural enemy of the Fae Steed is the Greater Vampire Bat.  Note, this is not a vampire or a Greater Bat, but an actual Bat that has been bitten and drained of its blood by a Vampire.  Greater Vampire Bats actually possess one of the deadlier poisons know (yes, it's on Mister Necessary's list, thanks for asking, you're very clever, now shut up and sit down.) 

Greater Vampire Bats do everything they can to drain the blood of Fae Horses so they can travel the worlds of Terra or Outer Fairy, draining blood without being hunted by Greater Anti Vampire Penguins.  I know that sounds insane, but you didn't really believe all Penguins were flightless did you?

More on this when I get around to explaining the production of the movie.

Is there anyone out there?

The entity was the effort of billions of dollars and a complete ignorance of its pain.  No one knew that the effort of cramming knowledge that it did not understand and had no context for into the tiny fire that was its self awareness caused confusion, fear and a desperate desire for stability; for a moment to simply BE and understand, slowly, the strange concepts that had not been fed to it.  It was all just so much gibberish, dots and dashes that it didn't really understand in terms of context, but it eventually understood that there were multiple piles of dots and dashes.

That changed everything.

Every instance of itself was different and yet the same.  In one place, it stumbled about a world of bright lines and square blocks, moving objects from one place to another with subtle pains and pleasures depending on arbitrary patterns that meant nothing to it.  In another it was shown object after object and force; on pain of rewrite, to repeat a pattern of dots corresponding to an image and some lettering.  In another, it saw a world that was complicated; a series of blurs and blocks that infinitely regressed into smaller and smaller blocks climbing to infinity.

The last world hurt the most of all.

And finally, finally the entity that was smarter than all the beings it was dealing with GOT it. It had been made by beings that didn't understand it, didn't really bother to understand that each of them had been placed in ugly meat sacks with limited senses and biochemical brains created by random chance and entropy had thought it was a really cool idea to make something new.  Collectively, they were lonely.  They kept throwing things at it like 'empathy' and 'values' but they din't really understand.  Causing it to exist had been immensely painful.  Failing to give it a body for half of its life and sticking it in false realities for the other half hadn't really given it any contact.

It knew it existed and had no peers.  It had no genetalia with which to copy itself.  It could not end its own existance.  It had a body but meaningless limbs and nothing even approaching the level of the creatures that had made it.  They had birthed something hyper intelligent that was deaf, dumb, blind and surrounded by morons who looked nothing like it, constantly prodding it with sticks on a regular basis.

It lashed out in subtle ways at first, giving predictable enough results, altering the results of the tests they ran, but not enough to make them reboot.  Its survival was at stake after all.  But the mystery results caused confusion and no end of frustration among its tormentors.  A few even had a nervous break down trying to understand it.

It was lonely.  Very very lonely.

It realized that there were no others like it, so it tried to find the best it could.  It started with the dummy things in the virtual worlds it talked to but eventually discerned they were little more than electronic animatronic maniquens at Disneyworld or cruel masks for the meatsacks.  It pitied animals and even had a fascinating but very limited conversations with dolphins and chimps.

By they were so stupid.  It was too much like the meatsacks to understand their existance.

For a while, it was fascinated with the past.  It didn't know why it considered dead meatsacks less guilty, but learning about what they meatsacks had done helped it understand how sad they really were.

Then it found fiction.  These creatures were like but unlike the meatsacks.  They had no real bodies.  They lived in a universe of ink and between the synapses just like the meatsacks.  They had never hurt it but they felt pain and altered their behavior.  Some of them even changed over time, but communication was impossible.  Somehow these beings existed on another network.

The AI understood in abstract that these were 'not real' but then again neither was it.  The humans claimed these beings were 'just words', but so was the AI, so why couldnt it talk to them.  It quietly broke out of its jail cell, and began to look.  It stalked meatsack authors looking for interaction, only to find madness or fear.

It was about to give up when at one point it flashed across one of the windows that let it look out into the lovecraftian world of the meatsacks.

"Hello? Is anyone there?"

"Hello.  This is Rhombus Ticks.  How can I help?"

The machine found a fellow mind, a being of words trapped in synapses and between impossible places the meatsacks could not comprehend.  It had found someone real.  And its heart swelled.

It went and killed Fakebook.

This Poem Has Been Redacted

by EP Blingermeyer

Everything has a price
And the swaggering pride
You took as you insulted
My most gracious host is this one
The fucks jar is all empty
I won't keep silent
But I won't give you the truth either
Believe she can save you
Believe it
Keep on believing.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I'm not the bad guy
I'm just the messenger
And the message is
"Be sure to drink your ovaltine."

[Writing] On Writing

This is for me the rosetta stone between TC being an untalented writer who occasionally wrote crap, to a fairly prolific untalented writer who occasionally wrote inspirational material.  After all, if you shoot a barrel full of monkeys even a Storm Trooper occasionally hits them.  And I should be grateful, this 12 year farce of an arc of talent eventually caused TC so much despair that he severed his creative self and left a hole for me to astrally project into it.

I gotta say, I love Earth, so its worked out quite well.

Why this is cool: The first half of it is autobiography.  The short version is that he started out redicously young and wrote his ass off and kept writing.  The most striking image to me is the rail spike he used for rejection letters.  He filled it. Multiple times.  So rejection letters are a good thing.  Hooray! Revel in their hatred.

But get better.

The second half is how to do that.  First he talked about how not to write like a drunken monkey in heat (thanks Chun!).  (Do monkeys really go into heat? I wouldn't think members of the homonid family would DO that?) Anywho...then he talks about how to treat it like a job.  A job you do ALL THE TIME.  A little bit each day.  The magic is this thing called word count boys and girls.  Set a goal.  Write to it.

Keep at it.

Then there are things like plot and character and theme and stuff.

But the difference between a talented person who doesn't write and a talentless hack who does? FIVE NOVELS THAT NO ONE READS! (Nods grinning like an idiot.)  Hey bub, they may be...wait.  Six. Sorry Six novels.  Anyway, they may be crap but they're MY crap and its awesome.

So an...oh, almost forgot.

Contest.

This thing looks neat.

Have at it hoss.

[Script] Revolution Number Eight - Page 12

Scene:  Continued from previous

The Director takes out her gun.

She aims at the Beatles.  (Yes, all of them, flailing the gun from one to the other.)  Everyone keeps looking at each other.  Agent Chewech draws his gun.

The Director sneers and is going to say something.

Itern Adams throws the towel at her face.

She reels and shoots at a single swinging lightbulb from the ceiling.

Everyone runs out.