Zach MacDonald's Blog, page 3

r/WritingPrompts response: “Political Pie”

Prompt:
A month ago a mysterious, indestructable robot started appearing at political rallies of international leaders. He does nothing except humiliating them by throwing pies in their faces. You are the leader of a small island nation and the robot announced to visit you tomorrow. (u/NigelWithCheese)

Response:
I am loathe to admit that I am frightened by anything, especially not to the hungry ears of those who would spread word amongst the populace. I didn’t gain the presidency of Perimonia, this fertile island of my birth, by showing fear.

But I do feel it.

That robot scares me.

No one knows where it came from, or how it crosses borders. Some say it can walk along the seafloor, emerging at remote beaches and marching to the rallies from there. It’s believed it can navigate the wildest forests and tundra, and it has been known to cross through the Himalayas to reach China from India. It must schedule its travels precisely using some combination of AI and online access to rally schedules, taking into account the time needed to traverse the many environments between it and its next destination.

Tomorrow it will arrive. Nothing will stop it. Its exterior, hypothesized by scientists to be made of woven carbon nanotubes, titanium and diamond, cannot be impacted critically by any known physical weapon. In addition, there is a belief that even if a military managed to destroy it, its destruction might automatically trigger something dubbed “The Last Pie,” which could be anything from a nuclear launch on the capital of the offending nation, to indiscriminate chemical weapon attacks on the populace.

Yes, I fear that godforsaken robot. That menace. But not for the pie. I do not fear pies. I do not fear losing face to a creamy dessert. The approach of the robot is an inevitability, yet that is not how my supporters feel, nor my party. No. For them the idea of me getting hit in the face with one of those pies is unacceptable. It’s true that many world leaders and prospective leaders, even of the most powerful nations on Earth, have taken the pie – but Perimonia is different. Her people are different. Passionate. Proud. Political. Immensely, immensely political.

No, I do not fear pies. My fear is of what the robot will do to reach me. Its programming is cold, inflexible, and its calculations cruel. If people stand in its way, if they act to impede its progress – or, God forbid, attack it…

Beijing, Dallas, Calgary, New Delhi, Warsaw… We all saw what happened. Who can ever forget? Even when most of the carnage was removed from the main social media platforms, the videos still existed in mass all over the internet. Gore sites loved them in particular. A Tor browser could you get any angle you wanted. So many phones recorded what happened in those places, and, when their owners were left as glistening trails of guts and screaming torsos and piles of bone and sinew, those phones were still found and collected by the sneaking ghouls of our societies. It’s amazing how many people’s passwords consist only of the number 1, but even more amazing that there are people that will force the severed upper body of a dying human being to press a thumb to their own dropped phone before they expire. All to get that footage shot from inside the crowd. Footage of the robot’s slaughter.

People had stopped standing its way after Warsaw, of course. Warsaw totaled more than 100,000 dead. It took the robot less than five minutes. Then it strode up to the podium where Prime Minister Kaminski stood in the shock that would later give way to his utter madness, removed a perfectly chilled coconut cream pie from its inner cavity, and lobbed it into the man’s face.

I’ve begged my people not to stand in the way of the robot, whether they are followers of me or my rival. I’ve pleaded on national television for them NOT to deter that machine! Yet they are full of pride! The pride of our stalwart island! Our ancient home! They say this is war. Armed with machetes, guns and steel chains, they are convinced they can put an end to this robot once and for all, to protect their leaders from humiliation.

And despite my grief, I must admit: I am proud as well. Proud of them – of these people that have defended this mountainous, generous land, glowing like an emerald in the vast sapphire, ever since our ancestors landed on these shores in the time of the gods.

I will watch them – all who turn up tomorrow. I will do them the honor of watching them die under the robot’s many blades, its bombs, its lasers, its ultrasonic weapons that scramble brains and shatter skulls. It’s the final and greatest act of respect I can offer. And then, like Kaminski, I will take my pie.

(u/PrimitivePrism)

Photo by Owen Beard

The post r/WritingPrompts response: “Political Pie” appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

Forget-Me-Not

Prompt:
Every God or supernatural being is born when humans give them enough faith, and then die when they are no longer believed in. You are surprised when one day you come into existence as an all powerful being, only to find that just one person believes in you.

Response:
I saw how they bullied her. I saw everything, really, since her faith had given me a power beyond that of human beings or any other mortals. Ironic, I think now, here in my final hours, how an all-powerful being’s existence can depend so directly on a single 90-pound waif of an intelligent being.

When I first awoke, hovering above her in the ether that living creatures fail to detect, blood was pouring from her nose, and from a cut beneath her eye. I knew why they’d antagonized and beat her, because her thoughts and memories of those moments of anguish had spawned the foundations of my own consciousness.

She wasn’t beautiful, in their eyes. Young animals are cruel to their weakest peers, to the physically unfit. Her features lacked symmetry. Her face was already pockmarked by the scars of early acne, even at 15 years old. She was stunted from malnutrition, and her hair was brittle and thin.

She had fled to the edge of a sun-drenched field after the beating, where I found her sitting, in a patch of wildflowers, with the hunched shoulders and hung head of a rag doll. She had picked a small bunch of forget-me-nots, lying them on her palm. She fingered them gently as she sniffled, admiring their soft sapphiric beauty.

That was how I came into her world. My arms are leaves. My heart is a severed stem. My eyes are yellow fornices. I am the Forget-Me-Not god.

That day was only the first time they ganged up on her. Their blows and scratches were bad, their violent tugging of her brittle hair – weak at the roots – even worse. Most terrible of all, though, was not their physical attacks, but their social punishments for her poverty and ugliness. Their words crushed her more than fists ever could, shivering my petals. The isolation they imposed on her dried me out. I stayed vibrant, still, because something in her did as well. Even when she wept at night, her vibrancy lived inside her, and in me.

I tried to stop her attackers, but gods are not all-powerful to all people. Gods only hold power over those who believe in that power, when there are enough of them to enforce allegiance among themselves, and those attackers were fearless of all but retribution from their peers. They were afraid of the snake that eats itself, of the fanatical mob that runs out of prey and turns on its own.

Eventually she left school, but the demons that had been bred in her followed. She didn’t know it, but they had trained her to destroy herself, slowly, and I felt contaminated water seep up the old severed base of my stem. The poison she chose was heroin. Then methamphetamine. It dulled her pain after she left home, ashamed to reveal to her mother that she was living on the streets, on the filthy concrete outskirts of a city of steel and mirror-like glass that rose to the sky.

On some days, she thought, when those distant skyscrapers reflected the blue sky, they became the color of forget-me-nots, and she longed for the field of her teenage years where she’d sought refuge amongst the wildflowers. I knew these were her thoughts, because I breathed them in as they floated out of her. I was her god, and she was my one believer. I existed because she convinced herself that those flowers of bygone youth watched over her, despite the slow shutting-down of her body.

I have been withering for years. My destruction is almost complete. The crystal meth ate away at my believer’s brain, and she has begun to forget her god. I will disappear when she does. I tell myself I’m not scared, because she has told herself her whole life the same thing – but in truth I am. I silently beg her not to forget me. I wonder, sometimes, which of us is the supreme being after all.

Today the sun found her curled up at the base of an ancient oak, near the long grasses in a ditch where she’d fallen asleep. She’d drifted off at sundown while picking the fleeting wild strawberries that grow along that strip of green. She is starving, skeletal. She has forgotten not only her god, but life itself. My vision grows grainy as she dies…and then clears once more.

I am not gone. Yet I know for certain that she has expired.

Suddenly, for the first time in my existence, I feel cupped in warmth. I feel lifted, against the crystalline soup of the ether, and find my believer staring down at me. Her eyes are bright, filled with wonder and warmth. She radiates light, her gaze upon me so beautiful and full of love that a feeling from some unknown well of the great universe rises in my stem: love, hope. I love her. She is hope.

Her body has died, but she is still here. I am still here. She has forgotten me not.

My god lifts me to her face, and her fingertips graze my petals, vibrant and bright blue once more. My god is here. My god has granted me salvation.

The post Forget-Me-Not appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

r/WritingPrompts Response: “Forget-Me-Not”

Prompt:
Every God or supernatural being is born when humans give them enough faith, and then die when they are no longer believed in. You are surprised when one day you come into existence as an all powerful being, only to find that just one person believes in you. (u/Kampaigns)

Response:
I saw how they bullied her. I saw everything, really, since her faith had given me a power beyond that of human beings or any other mortals. Ironic, I think now, here in my final hours, how an all-powerful being’s existence can depend so directly on a single 90-pound waif of an intelligent being.

When I first awoke, hovering above her in the ether that living creatures fail to detect, blood was pouring from her nose, and from a cut beneath her eye. I knew why they’d antagonized and beat her, because her thoughts and memories of those moments of anguish had spawned the foundations of my own consciousness.

She wasn’t beautiful, in their eyes. Young animals are cruel to their weakest peers, to the physically unfit. Her features lacked symmetry. Her face was already pockmarked by the scars of early acne, even at 15 years old. She was stunted from malnutrition, and her hair was brittle and thin.

She had fled to the edge of a sun-drenched field after the beating, where I found her sitting, in a patch of wildflowers, with the hunched shoulders and hung head of a rag doll. She had picked a small bunch of forget-me-nots, lying them on her palm. She fingered them gently as she sniffled, admiring their soft sapphiric beauty.

That was how I came into her world. My arms are leaves. My heart is a severed stem. My eyes are yellow fornices. I am the Forget-Me-Not god.

That day was only the first time they ganged up on her. Their blows and scratches were bad, their violent tugging of her brittle hair – weak at the roots – even worse. Most terrible of all, though, was not their physical attacks, but their social punishments for her poverty and ugliness. Their words crushed her more than fists ever could, shivering my petals. The isolation they imposed on her dried me out. I stayed vibrant, still, because something in her did as well. Even when she wept at night, her vibrancy lived inside her, and in me.

I tried to stop her attackers, but gods are not all-powerful to all people. Gods only hold power over those who believe in that power, when there are enough of them to enforce allegiance among themselves, and those attackers were fearless of all but retribution from their peers. They were afraid of the snake that eats itself, of the fanatical mob that runs out of prey and turns on its own.

Eventually she left school, but the demons that had been bred in her followed. She didn’t know it, but they had trained her to destroy herself, slowly, and I felt contaminated water seep up the old severed base of my stem. The poison she chose was heroin. Then methamphetamine. It dulled her pain after she left home, ashamed to reveal to her mother that she was living on the streets, on the filthy concrete outskirts of a city of steel and mirror-like glass that rose to the sky.

On some days, she thought, when those distant skyscrapers reflected the blue sky, they became the color of forget-me-nots, and she longed for the field of her teenage years where she’d sought refuge amongst the wildflowers. I knew these were her thoughts, because I breathed them in as they floated out of her. I was her god, and she was my one believer. I existed because she convinced herself that those flowers of bygone youth watched over her, despite the slow shutting-down of her body.

I have been withering for years. My destruction is almost complete. The crystal meth ate away at my believer’s brain, and she has begun to forget her god. I will disappear when she does. I tell myself I’m not scared, because she has told herself her whole life the same thing – but in truth I am. I silently beg her not to forget me. I wonder, sometimes, which of us is the supreme being after all.

Today, the sun found her curled up at the base of an ancient oak, near the long grasses in a ditch where she’d fallen asleep. She’d drifted off at sundown while picking the fleeting wild strawberries that grow along that strip of green. She is starving, skeletal. She has forgotten not only her god, but life itself. My vision grows grainy as she dies…and then clears once more.

I am not gone. Yet I know for certain that she has expired.

Suddenly, for the first time in my existence, I feel cupped in warmth. I feel lifted, against the crystalline soup of the ether, and find my believer staring down at me. Her eyes are bright, filled with wonder and warmth. She radiates light, her gaze upon me so beautiful and full of love that a feeling from some unknown well of the great universe rises in my stem: love, hope. I love her. She is hope.

Her body has died, but she is still here. I am still here. She has forgotten me not.

My god lifts me to her face, and her fingertips graze my petals, vibrant and bright blue once more. My god is here. My god has granted me salvation.

(u/PrimitivePrism)
(Photo by Krzysztof Kowalik)

The post r/WritingPrompts Response: “Forget-Me-Not” appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

Milk

Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)

Prompt:
You’re just living your life. Calling friends, doing your job, getting groceries. Alas, your narrator is unbearably pretentious, and is trying their best to frame this as a deep metaphor for the human condition no matter how much you try to make them stop.

Response:
Ryan Greene tosses another empty milk carton into the yawning, unsatisfied mouth of the trash bin. There’s never enough trash for it, even when it’s near to overflowing. It is glutinous, greedy, hungering for those emptied vessels that have served their purpose – those vessels once filled with that artificially chilled mother-milk of the imprisoned bovines of the planet, which keep the lattes and cappuccinos coming for a stimulant-addicted American people who must have their bitterness tempered with frothed excretion of the slave-cattle’s mammary gla–

“Y’know what?” I told the narrator. “No. Just…seriously. I’m tired tonight. It’s been an eight-hour shift and I had to work the cash through my lunch break because Peter decided to just not show up today.”

Ryan tells himself that he’s enraged at Peter for his absence. In finding fault with the absence, he discovers that he in fact found fault with nothing at all, for the void of that employee’s absence is one of Ryan’s favorite scapegoats. It is always the person not there, the unreturned call, the ghosting on Tinder – always the absence at which he rages, because to place his anger where it might be seen for what it is – where the pale, sunless roots that crawl in the cellar of his soul detect the light that might nourish them at last – would be to face the inevitable growth that would stretch and tear at his sensibilities. Those growing pains would be too great. The animal mind is desperate to avoid them and so i-

“Can you shut-up for a second? I clocked out 15 minutes ago and I’m at FoodSave, for fuck’s sake.” I listened for a moment, pleased that the narrator had indeed fallen silent at my bidding, then went back to staring at the two cereal boxes in my hands. The Brown Sugar Wheat Twists box stated there was 445 grams of cereal inside, and the price was $4.99, but the Honey-Choco Bombs had only 390 grams total, yet the price was $4.49. I tried to do the mental math, but unable to arrive at precise figures, turned the box over to see which one listed the most essential vitamins and minera-

Of course his feet had taken him straight to cereal aisle! For what is cereal without his precious milk? The milk he froths for a living? The pasteurized milk whose vessels he’d tossed into that voracious maw of of the trash bin. It was that milk that his anger had a foundation in, for his whole life he’d been seeking the rich milk from which he’d been weaned so early. It was his anger at being torn away from the nipple – the anger that resides in the heart of all men and women from those moments of earliest childhood when the breast dries and food mash is spooned into their stubborn mouths. Vegetable mash, fruit sludge, WHEAT – devoid of nutrition in comparison to that sublime mother’s milk. Thus they seek out the milk of others! They bend their will to the domestication of cattle, to artificially induced lactation, seeking forever to RECTIFY THAT ABSENCE at which their anger forever boils! That absence of mother’s milk! What wretched, frail creatures are we, sucking on the tits of beasts! What wretch is Ryan, as all his fellows are, who cannot eat his dried wheat without soaking it in that stolen, soulless MILK…!

The post Milk appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

r/WritingPrompts response: “MILK”

Prompt:
You’re just living your life. Calling friends, doing your job, getting groceries. Alas, your narrator is unbearably pretentious, and is trying their best to frame this as a deep metaphor for the human condition no matter how much you try to make them stop. (u/Urbenmyth)

Response:
Ryan Greene tosses another empty milk carton into the yawning, unsatisfied mouth of the trash bin. There’s never enough trash for it, even when it’s near to overflowing. It is glutinous, greedy, hungering for those emptied vessels that have served their purpose – those vessels once filled with that artificially chilled mother-milk of the imprisoned bovines of the planet, which keep the lattes and cappuccinos coming for a stimulant-addicted American people who must have their bitterness tempered with frothed excretion of the slave-cattle’s mammary gla–

“Y’know what?” I told the narrator. “No. Just…seriously. I’m tired tonight. It’s been an eight-hour shift and I had to work the cash through my lunch break because Peter decided to just not show up today.”

Ryan tells himself that he’s enraged at Peter for his absence. In finding fault with the absence, he discovers that he in fact found fault with nothing at all, for the void of that employee’s absence is one of Ryan’s favorite scapegoats. It is always the person not there, the unreturned call, the ghosting on Tinder – always the absence at which he rages, because to place his anger where it might be seen for what it is – where the pale, sunless roots that crawl in the cellar of his soul detect the light that might nourish them at last – would be to face the inevitable growth that would stretch and tear at his sensibilities. Those growing pains would be too great. The animal mind is desperate to avoid them and so i-

“Can you shut-up for a second? I clocked out 15 minutes ago and I’m at FoodSave, for fuck’s sake.” I listened for a moment, pleased that the narrator had indeed fallen silent at my bidding, then went back to staring at the two cereal boxes in my hands. The Brown Sugar Wheat Twists box stated there was 445 grams of cereal inside, and the price was $4.99, but the Honey-Choco Bombs had only 390 grams total, yet the price was $4.49. I tried to do the mental math, but unable to arrive at precise figures, turned the box over to see which one listed the most essential vitamins and minera-

Of course his feet had taken him straight to cereal aisle! For what is cereal without his precious milk? The milk he froths for a living? The pasteurized milk whose vessels he’d tossed into that voracious maw of of the trash bin. It was that milk that his anger had a foundation in, for his whole life he’d been seeking the rich milk from which he’d been weaned so early. It was his anger at being torn away from the nipple – the anger that resides in the heart of all men and women from those moments of earliest childhood when the breast dries and food mash is spooned into their stubborn mouths. Vegetable mash, fruit sludge, WHEAT – devoid of nutrition in comparison to that sublime mother’s milk. Thus they seek out the milk of others! They bend their will to the domestication of cattle, to artificially induced lactation, seeking forever to RECTIFY THAT ABSENCE at which their anger forever boils! That absence of mother’s milk! What wretched, frail creatures are we, sucking on the tits of beasts! What wretch is Ryan, as all his fellows are, who cannot eat his dried wheat without soaking it in that stolen, soulless MILK…!

(u/PrimitivePrism)

The post r/WritingPrompts response: “MILK” appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

Author Interview #1: Lauren Messervey

I want to get into talking about your 2018 release, Crestfallen, but first could you tell readers a bit about yourself, including when and how you got into writing?

Oh boy… writing was actually the first thing I loved doing as a child, but it wasn’t something that I considered doing professionally until I was in my mid-twenties. When I moved to Toronto in 2012, I thought that I would take a real shot at journalism and copywriting. However, creative writing – prose and screenwriting – was always the goal. This past year has heralded the inception of some pretty wonderful upcoming creative projects that I can’t wait to share. As for the writing itself, the horror genre is my long-standing passion. I’m so excited to continue on in that vein, moving forward!

Lauren Messervey

Well on that note, your passion for horror rings loud and clear in Crestfallen. I had a blast reading this novel. Where did the idea come from to center monstrous and evil forces on a run-down apartment building?

Thank you so much!! It’s funny – I’ve always found apartment complexes to be eerie and disconcerting. Years ago, I lived in an apartment complex and one of the neighbors (who likely worked in a bar) would come home at 3:30 AM every night. On the dot. I’d hear his footsteps late at night, and sometimes he’d be whistling. It always ran shivers up my spine for some reason. I wanted to capture that dread I felt, the terror of not knowing your neighbors and being unable to escape from that feeling that something could be very wrong. And then what if something was wrong with them? It all spiraled from there.

As an aside for those who aren’t familiar with this book yet, each chapter features the account of a different inhabitant of Crestfallen Estates, and their encounters with (usually) supernatural forces that seek to trap them there in some manner. These run the gamut from being grisly to downright haunting. Without explicit spoilers – unless you choose to give one – which of the stories do you personally find scariest?

Allison’s story was the scariest to me. Without giving too much away, the story was about a girl who is slowly replaced by another girl who lives down the hallway. That story represents the desire to disappear – something that I think everyone can relate to at one point in their lives. My husband read that one and asked me if I was OK, which is always a sign that I’ve tapped into something grotesque.

What was your writing process for this novel, and do you have a process that you employ generally  in terms of concentration, creativity, and so forth?

This is going to sound like a cop out, but I don’t have a defined process: I get a spark of an idea and then I just start writing. As long as your pen (or keyboard) are moving, you’re doing the work. However, there is one thing I always do, and that’s write the ending before I write the beginning. I kind of work backwards that way. Once I know where I’m ultimately going, the rest of the story follows.

Are there any novels, short stories or authors that have been a big source of inspiration for you as a writer?

Gillian Flynn is probably my biggest influence. Her protagonists are highly realistic in that they are never virtuous and often unlikable – they’re flawed human beings who get sucked into problematic behaviors. It’s both engrossing and refreshing to see such honesty in her storytelling. Aside from her, the novels that I believe most influenced me are American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, and Pet Sematary by Stephen King. (Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn would also be in there).

I’ve heard tantalizing whispers of an upcoming novella from you. What can you tell us about that?

Yes! It’s called Mantis and follows the story of a young woman who is gang raped by a group of boys at a party and exacts her revenge by enacting the mating rituals of praying mantises. Basically your classic coming of age tale… In all seriousness, I’m excited about this one. It’s a weird tale that is very much a reflection on rape culture during the #metoo movement. It’s out in 2022!

In the meantime, where else can we get our eyes on your writing, fiction or otherwise?

Crestfallen is on Amazon! As for the rest of my writing, there are some cool things in the mix, but in the interim, you can check out my journalistic side at Huffington Post Canada.

Lastly, here’s your wild-card question: Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?

Oh great question! I do! I’ve had a few spectral encounters in my day, though nothing nearly as malicious as the things I write about. The world is a strange place, so why wouldn’t there be ghosts?

. . .

Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Lauren Messervey is a writer, screenwriter, and journalist who now calls Toronto, Ontario home. When she’s not writing, she enjoys bizarre horror films, spending time with her husband, playing with her adorable dog, and Schadenfreude.

Twitter: @laurenmesservey
HuffPo: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/lauren-messervey/

The post Author Interview #1: Lauren Messervey appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

r/WritingPrompts response: “THE WHEEL”

Prompt:
You wake up one morning and realize that you now possess the memory of every person who has ever and will ever live. In a cold sweat, you come to understand that you don’t just have their memories, you used to be all of them at one point. You are humanity and this is your final reincarnation. (u/Sushi-and-Sax)

Response:
Knowing I was the final incarnation came naturally, once I discovered the Upload. Once I made my plan. I knew it with the same surety with which we are imbued about our surroundings in dreams, and I know now, too, that every dream was a remembered glimpse of a former life, in another time, another world, another dimension in the great samsara of the universe.

I felt terror the day I awoke with the memories, though by the same virtue I simultaneously understood that this revelation – that I am everyone – had come from uncountable numbers of myself probing, prior to this incarnation, into the mysteries of the universe that had been ignored in all parts of the great Wheel, save the era of my earliest lives, when I tried to understand reincarnation, and the Dreamtime, and the journeys of the departed spirit. I had unlocked the door to the whole of myself, to the repository of my own history that comprises my true being.

In every life I interacted with myself in every other life. Hundreds in a lifetime, then thousands, then millions as I came into being in the world in which I had developed the technological infrastructure to reach out to my other incarnations – to myself – across the earth. The internet connected us all, then the hypernet as we – as I – colonized the solar system, and when I arrived at Alpha Centauri, and beyond.

I remember when I came back to Earth, plunging through time and space via the wormholes that hundreds of thousands of my incarnations had spent a millennia of Earth years opening and securing. Evolution had wrought changes. Larger eyes than those of my ancestral self, the pupils expanded to fill them with blackness and drink the scant starlight and dimming outputs of my fusion-powered illumination systems, a thin and diminutive body, hairless, cranium enlarged as per my genetic manipulations. My ancestral incarnations called me greys, not recognizing themselves in the glimpses I allowed them. I, all of me, understood that I, all of me, was extraterrestrial. I was no longer of Earth.

But I would go back. I would be an Earthling again a billion times, because a billion times I’d fall into the Earthling era of my existence in the great Wheel. I learned of its non-linearity not through memories, but through the sciences, yet my memory of all my incarnations now proves the theory I knew to be the only answer to the mysteries presented by the more powerful wormholes – the ones that sent millions of myself to other galaxies, into encounters with others who ride the Wheel. Yet I never imagined in all my theorizing that it was only I, the human, and they, the others: a handful of souls circling throughout the universe. Eventually I grew apart from them, as I planned my escape from the Wheel, from mindless, implacable samsara.

I know I’m the final incarnation, because I know my plan will work. All of my lives have led to this moment. It’s why I am here, in existence – and I state that whilst not truly believing that there is a why to anything, but merely a how. I need to believe in why, though, even now. I, humanity, has always needed a why. If there is a reason to it all, I will only find out on this journey of my last and supreme incarnation.

I can’t say I will become non-material. I have always been non-material, inhabiting a trillion material bodies, on material planets, in a material cosmos. I am soul. I am the soul of humanity. I am the ghost that haunts the Wheel, and only between incarnations have I ever been free.

I will stay free this time, when I upload into the ether of dimensions beyond matter. I will not only travel the Wheel, but leap from it, to learn at last what lies beyond.

Beyond. To new realms beyond my dream-memories of all other lives. Beyond dream. Beyond imagination.

To the outer reality.

Perhaps, I hope against hope, to find out why.

(u/PrimitivePrism)

The post r/WritingPrompts response: “THE WHEEL” appeared first on Zach MacDonald.

r/WritingPrompts response: “CHICKEN”

PROMPT:
“The chicken has crossed the road! I repeat. The chicken. Has. Cros-” The line went dead as the rumbling began. ( u/TheLettre7)

RESPONSE:
We knew it would happen eventually. These things are not a question of if, but when. Grand forces of nature, whether freak natural disasters or true doomsday scenarios – all are inevitable given long enough time scales.

Our governments, especially those of the spacefaring nations, had been criticized for years for their lack of potential deterrents for killer asteroids that showed up on our planetary doorstep. In the U.S., effective evacuation plans were lacking for a hypothesized supervolcanic eruption at Yellowstone, should the earth give little warning before the event.

But in the deepest halls of power – from Beijing to Moscow to Washington – a greater threat has always been known, more dire, even, than all the city-killer sized chunks lurking dark and silent in the Taurid swarm. For two millennia the secret knowledge has been carried on in the secret channels that run like translucent veins through the cacophonous body of humanity and its relentless march of progress. The Illuminati and the Master Masons structured farming principles around the threat, so exquisitely that Western Man thought his methods had developed organically. The Star Soldiers rose in storied Tenochtitlán and ranged even beyond the very boundaries of the Aztec empire to protect against cataclysm. A branch of Ninja whose title has been lost to history – if indeed they ever allowed it to be recorded – allegiant to no one and nothing save all human life on Earth, worked in shadows with the Shoguns to influence how fowl were raised across the Japanese archipelago.

Humans seldom wonder why chicken farms are kept far back from the major highways, those central thoroughfares of a civilization that run so much like Ley Lines across the Earth.

The fact is that those great thoroughfares, unknown even to their builders, were unconsciously laid, indeed, across the existing Ley Lines. The ancient Ley Lines: those lines that predate the rise of mammals, running invisibly across the planet like a net of energy that constrains gravitational forces our mainstream scientists cannot even guess at. Our core spins too fast, with a density exponentially greater than is commonly thought. The Earth tears at the seams where the Ley Lines break.

No one knows why this domesticated organism, a common chicken, has the power to sever the Lines. The straggling survivors of Pompeii, though, didn’t require any explanation beyond their frantic gibbering about the “Cock of Doom” that escaped its pen and strutted across the trade highway at the edge of the city. Vesuvius wrought a terrible lesson that day.

We use landlines only for our phone communication. Wireless signals are too easy to intercept, and the panic would be too great if seven billion humans knew of the reality that we do. Panic would be instantaneous. A mass chicken extermination would begin, and in the chaos one of the birds would undoubtedly escape and cross “the Road” – our term for any of the Ley Line highways, enshrined in a common joke for over 1800 years since it was first spread by the nomadic bearers of the Ark of the Covenant.

Besides, fried chicken is the bomb and a suitable synthetic meat alternative hasn’t been developed yet.

So the question I ask myself, now, was whether that taste was worth it. Should we not have destroyed them all after Pompeii? Was risking all human life worth it? I’m not responsible for the decisions of my ancestors, it’s true, but I carried their torch.

“The chicken has crossed the road! I repeat. The chicken. Has. Cros-“

When the line went dead, I knew that the Earth had begun to heave, upset by titanic forces that none would escape. The rumbling had already begun, and louder and louder it grew.

“Goddamn you,” I whispered silently to that unknown and unknowing chicken.

We flirted with destruction. We were greedy for satiety. We’ve run afowl of our sins at last.

(u/PrimitivePrism)

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The Next Novel (and other wonders)

A year-end update

It’s been months since my last blog post. With the tumultuous nature of my 2020 (held together with spit and twine would be an understatement), it’s been easy for the days and weeks to whiz by in a mad blur – but I’m aiming to get back to this blog more regularly. Considering I’m writing this on December 23rd, I’ll consider it a New Year’s resolution.

On the writing front, I’ve been editing/finalizing the manuscript for my Asia-based short story collection, currently titled The Time of the Cassowary and Other Stories from Asia, which consists of my favorite of such stories that I’ve written throughout the years (a number of which are up over on the Stories page). I’ve sent it out quite recently to some select publishers, so I’ll see if there are any bites there. I’m not at all opposed to trying my hand at the self-publishing route either, so I’ll see how this plays out in 2021.

And then there’s my next novel, Whale Bones. This one has been in the works for years now. In fact, I just checked the creation date of the original file and actually feel guilty about how long ago I started and evidently how sluggish I’ve been with it. I’m not sure this one is meant to be completed that quickly, though, if it’s to properly become the final product that I envision – like Itsuki before it, it’s growing with me. In fact, I’ve now sunk myself back into it after quite a hiatus this year, and have found myriad things – even whole chapters – that just don’t work for me anymore and which won’t serve where I want this to go.

Whale Bones is a story about a fictional Nova Scotian fishing community. It contains dozens of characters. I’m trying to bring an entire small town to life, and though it’s a place out of my imagination, with its own traditions, intrigues, local legends, quirks (even absurdities), strife and geography, I’m nestling my own hometown into it, and small towns from all across Nova Scotia, and – I dare hope – familiar elements, little ghosts and shades, of small towns everywhere. I lived and worked for years in a small town in South Korea, with its quaint Main Street, babbling river, and cast of locals that gave it all its character, defined it, made it precisely what it is, and so I can say without a doubt that there are traits of the small town that are universal.

We’re also living in a world in which, in many cases, small towns are drying up – dying, to put it more directly. In our increasingly competitive economies, young people flock to the cities, or leave for work opportunities and new lifestyles elsewhere in their country, and even abroad. In Nova Scotia, at least, this combined with the decline of traditional industries have left many small towns and communities (not my own, I can happily report) with dwindling numbers of residents, aging populations, abandoned storefronts and all the rest. The community in Whale Bones is facing this – and yet, hope may rise and tides of fortune turn by the discovery of an immense rarity – in the form of a fossil – buried in a local cliff. In the end, it may come down to the history of the town, the personal histories of the people themselves, and whether the strength of its social fabric can hold, to determine whether ultimate decline can be mitigated.

One reason I’m laying all this out, admittedly, is that by publishing this information I hope to spur myself with a little self-imposed pressure to plug forth on Whale Bones and finally complete the first draft. It’s happening!

Concerning the blog itself again, there will be two new types of post featured in the coming year: Author Interviews and r/writingprompts responses. The interviews will happen when I’ve read something I like, reach out to the author for a chat, and conduct a written interview with them if they’re up for it (read: if they even respond to me). I’m looking forward to getting in touch with more writers through this and posting interviews here that will let readers get a peek into their thinking and their lives. The other feature is quite straightforward: I’m active in a great community over on Reddit called r/writingprompts in which anyone can post a writing prompt and anyone can respond to it by composing a short piece of fiction (typically in a more or less spontaneous manner). I have a lot of fun over there, so I’m going to share it around by reposting some of my responses and their corresponding prompts here. You never know what you’re going to see with those – like, literally, they could be anything.

Lastly, 2020 was the year Itsuki finally made its way out into the world. Despite the (ironically-timed) pandemic and all it has entailed, that made this year a really special one. Thanks to all who have read it so far, or who may read it in the future.

All right, enough year-end shop talk. Back to my word processor.

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Lovecraft and I in the Time of Plague

It’s something I’ve picked away at since April, but I’ve just finished reading the entire collected works of H.P. Lovecraft.

Prior to beginning the collection, I had never read a single Lovecraft story, yet for a number of years now I had been meaning to. I was of course aware of arguably his most famous creation, Cthulhu, the god-like “Old One” with its iconic tentacled head, slumbering through the aeons below the Pacific. What had really got me interested, however, was a synopsis I’d read of the story The Shadow Out of Time, which awakened me to the true wonders of Lovecraft’s imagination–it occurred to me that this horror tale had a pronounced sci-fi element to it, which I hadn’t expected. I wondered at how no story I could think of from this master had every found its way into my hands. I now realize, even, that a semi-obscure video game I loved on Gamecube, Eternal Darkness, was Lovecraft-inspired to an enormous degree–right down to its story being centered on a house in Rhode Island–the author’s birthplace (you’d be hard-pressed to convince me it’s a coincidence).

No matter. With the lockdown flying into effect here in Thailand, and my travel plans for April with family cancelled, I downloaded the complete works to my battered and faithful old Kindle and delved in.

I doubt I could write much about any individual story that hasn’t already been covered by untold legions of Lovecraft fans and scholars in the 83 years since his painful and untimely death from cancer. I use his death as a marker because his true fame grew posthumously. His final years on Earth were, in fact, spent in relative poverty, the renumeration for the stories he published insufficient for even his basic expenses.

What I was most surprised and delighted by was the unexpected variety across his works. A sense of cosmic horror forms the underpinning of his writing, spanning a veritable pantheon of monstrous creatures, extra-cosmic beings, gods, and virtually indescribable lifeforms and other fiends (indeed, unnameable and supposedly indescribable horrors are a common features in these tales)–from the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, to Cthulhu and his ilk, to alien interlopers, to the Earth Gods of a sprawling Dreamland, to the terrifying Other Gods, and beyond. I loved the lore he created, added to piece by piece across multiple stories, stretching back through a vague history of the earth and its many (non-human) civilizations that have dwelt upon it since primordial times, their ruins now buried beneath the earth and sea in the deep and remote places of the world. Referenced in tale after tale, the widely-suppressed and deathly taboo Necronomicon, a fictional ancient book composed by the “Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred, is a great element to draw the reader into a literary universe teeming with forbidden elder knowledge.

Then there are the stories of his Dream Cycle, taking place in Earth’s Dreamland, explored most extensively in the wonder-filled novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. The journeys through dreamland, often undertaken by characters escaping a dreary Earthly existence into a wondrous and adventure-rich non-corporeal world, are described beautifully. Lovecraft was able to create a sense of cosmic dread–fear for the very experience of the human mind and soul in the face of truths and realities so extreme in their alien-ness and horror that they drive it to utter madness, in addition to mortal terror–but he could also capture through prose a rare and fleeting sensation such as we get in those dreams, often as children, in which we find ourselves for a time in unknown worlds of limitless beauty, mystery and joy.

I sensed a sadness in these works of the Dream Cycle–in the sense that Lovecraft was very much each of these dreaming characters. Aided by a clearly vivid imagination, I feel it’s likely he was bent on escaping all that frightened him throughout his life, including his general fear of the unknown (the insane chaos that exists infinitely outside the sliver of order found in modern human civilization), deep insecurities about his own abilities or lack thereof (he met with relative failure holding regular jobs and was very sensitive about how his written work was received), and other races and foreign cultures (distrust, disgust, and disdain toward non-Anglo-Saxons can be gleaned from the language and plot of a number of his stories, not to mention a horrendous poem; a common theme is an idealized image of the beauty and purity of Anglo New England, under which hidden occult and ancient horrors lurk, oft-facilitated by shifty and secretive people with dark complexions or “foreign” faces).

Yes, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, from what I’ve learned whilst tackling this collection, was a deeply flawed person. His life, as I understand it, was fraught with its own challenges and deprivations. His way of coping with the world as he saw it, and thus ultimately with himself, was to write stories of lurking horrors, gruesome abominations and fantastical dreamscapes, of death and gloom and shimmering glimpses of his own ideals. Though our views and perspectives differ greatly, that need to write, to navigate a complex world through the creation of stories, is something that I understand to my core, and in that I feel a connection with Lovecraft from across the decades–as I read his works here in 2020, during this unexpected and chaotic time of global plague.

Lovecraft not only takes his readers through the hidden (often subterranean) recesses of fictionalized New England locales, but as far as the unexplored wastes of Antarctica (one of my favorites, At the Mountains of Madness), to Australia (The Shadow Out of Time), to the Congo, to various corners of Europe, to the depths of the ocean, to vast cities that rose on Earth before the evolution of human beings, to the edges of the cosmos and beyond, and to the furthest reaches of Earth’s Dreamland. But it was something very concrete, tangible and grounded that captured my attention just as much when I stumbled across it: the first page of the first draft of his aforementioned phantasmagorical epic The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

First manuscript page of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

Obviously Lovecraft didn’t have a computer and a trusty backspace key, so here we can see his edits. We can see where he was dissatisfied with his word choices, sometimes scratching out whole sentences, obsessing over every detail. Who knows how long or he lingered on this single page, or how many times he returned to it? I recognized this immediately, and I’m sure just about anyone else who writes will too–when I write a story by hand in a notebook, it ends up as a mess looking just like this. That was the second time I couldn’t help but feel some affinity with Lovecraft across the years. He was unsatisfied with his written work. He probably cringed at his first drafts. He wanted to get it right, just like all of us. He knew he was imperfect and utterly human–but he scratched and scribbled and frowned, wanting those words to be as perfect as they could be, perhaps because he hoped that his story would live on long after he was gone.

It did. We’re still reading.

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