March 6, 2016
“And here,” said the guide, “we have Tel Ashrad, a strategic site that has been destroyed and rebuilt more than 50 times, including the present-day city you see around you.”
“Dammit,” said God. “You think they’d have gotten the idea after a thousand years. I want that spot for a cedar grove.”
March 5, 2016
In the realms of creatives such as we all fancy ourselves to be, there is nothing sadder than a work that is left unfinished. Dickens left one with the Mystery of Edwin Drood; we never did find out who the murderer was. Robert Louis Stevenson and F. Scott Fitzgerald both left novels incomplete when they croaked, though not so incomplete as to escape publication, of course!
But I’m seeing an increasingly vile trend, especially in moving pictures, that represents a completely different form of incompleteness: the incomplete original. That is to say, a movie deliberately left with more dangling threads than a bad tailor specifically because they will be picked up in a hoped-for franchise. It’s not a new thing, of course, but a lot of the old movies that seemed to be waiting for a sequel to resolve things were really just being coy and 1970s bleak with their audiences–The Italian Job comes to mind, the original one, not the glitzy remake.
No, the earliest movie I can think of is The Golden Compass, which has no ending at all, just a setup for two sequels that poor box office never saw materialize. You could argue that the book it was based on had no ending either, I suppose, but that’s immaterial. The Harry Potter people were able to conjure one out of whole cloth when they split their bloated seventh book into two beached-whale movies.
In fact, the young adult genre is littered with would-be franchises that didn’t give the audience the benefit of an ending. City of Bones, Beautiful Creatures…all based on series of books that confidently left people haning without even a perfuntory wrapping-up because the posers-that-be were so confident they’d be the next Hunger Games (which, not incidentally, actually had an ending on the first one, if not so much the following two). I’m sure there are a dozen more in production.
Unless your movies are being made back to back, there’s really only one way to do things: the Star Wars way. That is, the way the first movie handled things, before anyone knew it would be a multitrillion-dollar juggernaut: wrap up the story but leave a few hooks for a possible sequel. In Star Wars, there is exactly one such hook: Darth Vader survives. If the movie hadn’t been a hit, that would have been that, but the movie still tells a complete story and if nothing more were to be made, that would be fine (don’t talk to me about Splinter in the Mind’s Eye, I don’t even know if that’s canon anymore).
I guess what I’m saying is…the transition from book to screen gives all sorts of opportunities. You can make things better than the original or merely rearrange them so that they fit better. If Star Wars, the greatest media property of all time, was willing to put some sort of a bow on its first installment, you should be too. Even if it means changing things a little.
March 4, 2016
Newark. The name sounds like a strangled, abortive attempt to say New York, with most of the letters in their proper places but the sound coming out like a drunken hiccup all the same. People make jokes about New Jersey’s lack of sophistication as compared to its neighbor across the way, and it’s Newark where those jibes find their fullest expression: the miniature skyline, the LaGuardia-in-a-can that is their airport…it’s like a Manhattan where all the positives are stunted and all the (many) negatives cast giant shadows.
As a native, I feel justified in talking about my hometown this way, and I’m not alone. You don’t see people with the Woody Allen/George Gershwin attachment to Newark that you do in our cousin. For the record, if it helps, I think that attitude toward New York overlooks a whole of of rotting garbage on the sidewalk and knifings in the park, but people seem to be content in letting them have their delusions, so I won’t argue.
If New York is the abusive codependent that you keep crawling back to no matter how it mistreats you, Newark is the uncle that hits you with his belt but also draws the only paycheck in the family so he gets away with it. My hometown gets things done, shipping and flying and such that beknighted Manhattan wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. We take in people who can’t afford the dream across the river, give them menial jobs, and spit them out like used chewing gum.
It was at the tail end of my own personal chewing and spitting that I was asked–well, told–to move something rather sensitive from the airport in Newark to a waiting fancy hotel in lower Manhattan just off Wall Street. I had one hour.
March 3, 2016
The Sepulcher of the Creator is the primary religion of Pexate, specifically the Revelationist branch as opposed to the Incarnationists prevalent in Layyia. “Sepulcher” is a word for tomb, and that is in fact the purpose of the various religious buildings dotting Pexate, from the Grand Royal Sepulcher in Simnel to the ramshackle “barn Sepulchers” in Ioxus.
As detailed in the Epitaph, the Creator fashioned the world-that-is out of abiding love and the desire for something to lavish that love upon. Neither male nor female, It was all-powerful and all-knowing and all-good, and It wrought many beautiful works. The Creator worked alone and was Itself self-created–the details on that point have never been particularly important.
At one point, the Creator decided to fashion a group of Children for Itself. Rather than the children that were every living thing on the world, these Children were far closer to the Creator in nature. It took aspects of Itself and made them independent, using these children as servants and confidants in ways that mere mortals never could be. The Revelationalists believe that It was trying to create new worlds, each with their own Creator, as a final and logical next step after the triumph of creation. The Incarnationalists insist that the Children were an experiment, preparation for raising mortals to the level of demi-Creators themselves.
In either case, it was not to be. The Creator’s Children rebelled against their progenitor, to a one, and elected from among their number one to lead them against the Creator to unseat It and take control of the world-that-is for themselves. This Child was the only one of their number to have the audacity to take a name and a gender: he became known as Muolih the Spreading Darkness, and in this act severed the silver cord that had once bound him and his fellow Children to the Creator.
Sorrowfully, the Creator did battle with Its rebellious Children. One by one they were slain in great battles spoken of in the Epitaph, until only Muolih himself remained. In the fair fields of Noaad, they met one final time. After combat lasting a whole year, in which the land was blasted into a barren desert, Muolih and the Creator each struck a final blow simultaneously. They killed one another at a stroke.
Before the battle, though, the Creator had appeared in a vision to St. Xarius, the founder of the modern Sepulcher. The Creator, having forseen Its own death, assured Xarius that It would not truly die but would, instead, dwell in deathly dreams for an eon until, healed, It would return. The Creator promised that, even in death, it would hear supplications. On the day of Its rebirth, all would be granted, and all souls who had waited in the afterlife would be ushered into paradise. Until then, the Creator promised to work only subtly and dreamily for the betterment of Its loyal children.
St. Xarius took these visions and collected them in the Epitaph, bidding all those loyal to the Creator to build It grand tombs that It might not fade from their memory. And, in turn, adherents claim subtle miracles worked by the dead and dreaming Creator on their behalf. Of Muolih, nothing more is written: if the Spreading Darkness had a similar plan, it was lost or hidden. But to this day, the Sepulcher of the Creator forms the largest belief system in the world-that-is. The elven Eternal Way and the dwarven Dual Throne do not proseletyze, nor do the goblins who revere Muolih as their fallen champion. Only the orcish Hamurabash and the Way of the Three rival the Sepulcher, and many would argue that neither is a faith in the same sense.
March 2, 2016
I’m a ranter by nature. That’s my thing, my raison d’etre. I don’t often rant about politics, mostly because I am far outranted there. Anything I can say has been said a hundred times better and a hundred times louder.
But today, reading the news idly and watching horrifying news trickle in from the various elections, I had a thought. And it’s one that I haven’t heard articulated before, so forgive me from departing from my usual spiel for a moment. I promise I’ll be back to ranting about pop culture and movies soon enough.
Andrew A. Sailer is a registered Republican, which often surprises people as I travel in circles where saying one is a registered Nazi would generate less scorn. The reason for this is coming of age in the Clinton era, when there seemed to be no accountability for any number of moral and ethical failings so long as the stock market stayed high. I stay thusly registered because of a strong streak of contrarianism–telling me that all the cool kids are doing something is a great way to get me to never try. I also have a strong fiscally conservative streak.
But that’s neither here nor there. My point is that because of this iconoclasm, I often get told exactly what people think about the Republican candidate de jour. And it’s usually that the candidate is a dangerous radical who will start a world war the second their finger is on The Button. I’ve heard it said that everyone from Reagan to McCain was a trigger-happy fundamentalist, even such milquetoasts as Mitt Romney. It’s become such a staid refrain that among my relatively few friends on the right, being vehemently attacked has become something of a badge of honor: if you’re being shouted at by people you disagree with, you must be doing something right.
But something’s happened now. My pals on the left have cried wolf once too often. So now that there is a candidate who really is their worst fears given life and physical form, they’ve got nothing. He’s as trigger-happy as they said Reagan was, as intolerant as they said Bush was, as bullheaded as they said McCain was. But since it’s all been heard before, and hollowly, it falls on deaf ears. It seems like the old refrain of “if they’re attacking them, they must be onto something.”
When you cry wolf one too many times, no one heeds you when the real wolf is at your political door. And then, ladies and gentleman, we are all devoured.
March 1, 2016
An ocean of clouds, undulating quietly beneath a single vessel. From above, starlight to dapple a subtle silver light. Coyly, it shrinks from any other illumination within or without, turning to ink. From below, lamplight like phosphoresence, the outline of each town clearly painted in warm oranges. When on a still tropical night you look down in the darkness, it is this. Even on chilly nights, even with trails of ice winding their way across the windows, it is this.
From below, we are invisible. A boat on the waves, an opaque night sky turning back all upward gazes. From above, we see only the archaeology of light. Remnants of dead stars vie with reminders of departed moments along city boulevards. Our light surely cannot reach them, surely will not reach them, but in each pinpoint a reminder waits. What creature on som far-distant sphere or deceptively close pavement has not shed light sadly, thinking it means nothing?
Our reminder is as fresh and twinking as starlight, as city lights. The light you shine now goes further than you know.
February 29, 2016
Blame can be neither created nor destroyed. It can only be transferred.
–Sir Isaac Newton
February 28, 2016
“Well, transdeath rights are in a pretty good place right now, but most people only think of vampires and zombies, you know? They don’t even know the difference between a zombie and a lich and a revanent and a ghoul, and they sure aren’t giving us extra points when it comes to hiring.”
“Why don’t you do something about it, Kershaw?” The voice from beneath the grave sounded sad, almost tremulous.
“Well, I try. I run a support group for ‘underserved undead’ out of the community center on 7th. But I’m the only regular attendee since Alan the Barghest died of the rot, and we’re lucky to get three attendees on a good day.”
“That’s…really sad.”
“We have a hard time with those ‘Life Ends at Death’ protestors,” I said. “I’m sure you know how it is. People are scared of the unknown and the unfamiliar, always have been. I don’t blame them and I only light them on fire a little bit, but I think we get targeted a lot because it’s not politically correct for them to pick on zombies or vampires anymore.”
“Would…would you let me come to your support group? Even if I arose as something like a zombie?”
“Of course,” I said. “I’ve never turned anyone away except that one freak in makeup.”
February 27, 2016
“Well,” I said, “Gyles Kershaw fled England and Cromwell’s dogs hoping for a place where his alchemy lab wouldn’t be burned down every other fortnight.”
A thoughtful pause. “I guess…he didn’t find it?”
“Oh, he most certainly did,” I said. “He unlocked the secret of life eternal, in point of fact, and was able to achieve powers unthought-of by mortal man through dark elixirs and covenants with the lords of shadow.”
The grave was silent a moment. “Well, speaking with the dead was clearly one of them.”
“I chose the powers I was sure would be the most useful, and would strike fear into the hearts of mortals. The ability to speak to people over long distances without error. The ability to imbue any vehicle I chose with motive power. The ability to cause terrible wounds at a distance. And of course conjuring light and flame at will.”
Maddy was silent from below again. I thought that she was being timid, but after a moment I realized that she was struggling not to laugh. “So…cell phones, cars, guns, lighters, and flashlights?” she said.
“It was a lot more impressive in 1692,” I snapped. “How was I to know that human ingenuity would render each of them meaningless in less than 400 years? Deathlessness was not something I had the training for, and the shadow lord gave me maybe five minutes to choose my powers.”
February 26, 2016
IV. The Sigil Visits Destruction Upon All
Sirens blared as the building’s curtain walls collapsed in upon themselves. Firefighters continued to arrive as more and more stations were added to the alarm, but all they could do was spray helplessly at an inferno so intense that it began bubbling the paint on their engines.
“Holy wow,” said a kid, looking at the conflagration. “Did they all get out?”
“No,” said Mirabelle, smiling. “No they did not.” The limp form of a spray-stained template fluttered silently by her side.
Excerpts From Nonexistent Books 