Christopher B. Wright's Blog, page 8

The Points Between: Chapter 15

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The Fourth Way

The sun beats down on the back of Matthew’s neck as he bends over his tablet, pencil scratching against paper. He’s drawing today, and drawing is different from painting. For Matthew, it’s almost the opposite of painting. He paints when he knows what he wants to capture; he draws when he wants to see what he might find. Today he sits on a bench at Bridge Road Park and draws because he ...

The Points Between: Chapter 14

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Gray Walker

Matthew stands in the motel parking lot, staring into the pre-dawn mist.

He gave up on sleep hours ago: the news of the sale, his missing car, his relief at being out of the hospital and his unease over the memories of the sickness and the attack all contribute to what he can only describe as a restlessness of spirit. He spent hours lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling. Now he’s gi...

The Points Between: Chapter 13

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Benefactors

Dust.

He stands in the middle of a vast field of dead, withered grass, watching dust fall from the sky. It covers him like ash, clinging to his skin; he feels it settle on his eyes yet he does not blink. It clogs his nostrils, yet he does not choke.

The early morning sky shines dull gray as the slightest hint of the sun rises in the distance. As it climbs slowly over the horizon, a ...

The Points Between: Chapter 12

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Convalescence

Before anything else, Matthew is aware of the smell of disinfectant: it’s strong enough to make him lightheaded. He opens his eyes to a blurry curtain of pastels and a few patchy darker colors that might be people.

“Hey, look who’s awake.” One of the patchy darker colors, tanned blur with yellow patches on the top and bottom of what might be a face, peers down at him.

Matthew open...

The Points Between: Chapter 11

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The Tower

By late afternoon Matthew has given up on the painting entirely. His conversation with Deke put him off, and he can’t get back into his work. As the day wears on, he starts to feel worse: dizzy, shivering spells, and eventually a persistent buzzing sensation in his forehead and cheeks. Finally, he decides what he needs is sleep. He throws away the last of his coke, still unfinished, empties...

Deke and the Problem of the Magical Negro

Image by Jenny Shead from Pixabay

There’s no question that The Points Between is the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to write. I can think of plenty of authors who are better suited to writing it than I can, but I’ve waited patiently for someone else to tell this story and nobody has stepped up so here I am, trying to use muscles I don’t really have. Because this is a story that’s hard for me to get right, there are many, many opportunities for me to screw it up. So very, very many opportunitie...

The Points Between: Chapter 10

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The Deacon

Matthew sleeps in, but not long enough: he wakes feeling feverish and weak, it hurts to breathe, and if he inhales too deeply he breaks into fits of dry coughing that leaves him doubled over. Light hurts his eyes; when he moves, his arms and legs respond sluggishly, as if tied down by weights.

It feels like a hangover combined with the flu.

He stoically accepts these new infirmities ...

I’ve Been Thinking About the Roald Dahl Thing Lately

What the title says. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

The “whole Roald Dahl thing” is basically that his estate is re-releasing a number of his books, only they’re editing those books and changing some of the language he used in them. For example, the phase “enormously fat” is now changed to “enormous.” Oompa Loompa’s are no longer described as “small men” but are now “small people.” The idea, I suppose, is that someone who is self-conscious about their weight might feel as if they were...

Hi Ren

Hi Ren, by Ren (YouTube channel)

When you are so moved by art that you feel compelled to talk about it, but so overpowered by it that words fail when you try, you wind up getting something like this post.

Earlier this week a friend of mine posted a link to a YouTube video I didn’t recognize, with the comment “Not the common light-hearted fare that we often embrace in this chat, but wow!” I clicked it not knowing what I’d see. What I saw was the video I’ve linked to above.

I can’t get...

You Must Unlearn

This work is distributed under a
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 License. Comic Transcript

PHIL: No… that isn’t right. Do it again.

BINKY: OK, Skipper!

ALEX: What is going on?

PHIL: AI Development. Very cutting edge stuff.

BINKY: How’s that?

PHIL: No, Binky. Look at the reference and try again.

ALEX: “AI Development?”

PHIL: Yeah. Everyone else is training their AI to draw, so we’re trying to teach Binky as well.

ALEX: So you’re, what, dumping thousa...