“Right, so let’s look at your final score shall we?”
“What?”
“You started off with a perfectly adequate planet. Great living conditions. Stellar views, if you’ll pardon the pun.”
“What?”
“What seems to be the confusion?”
“Like, where the fuck am I?”
“You died.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that.”
“So, what’s the deal now? Is it heaven, or… you know, the other place?”
“No, I don’t think you understand. You died.”
“Alright-“
“So as I was saying. Final scoring and all that. You let the world go to pot, destroyed the ozone layer, ran out the natural resources, murdered large swathes of the population, enriched yourself and-“
“Wait, I think there’s been a mistake? I’m a manager at a Co-op? I do spreadsheets and shift rotas for a living. I order food.”
“And?”
“Well it sounds like you’re blaming me for the state of the world.”
“Well it was your world, innit.”
“What?”
“Look, one life, one soul. Got it?”
“Um, no, not really?”
“Alright. Imagine a bunch of postboxes in a large apartment complex with, say, 18 units.”
“Okay?”
“Okay. So there are 18 post boxes, but on any given day there’s only one letter in any given postbox.”
“Right.”
“Right. So, that.”
“What?”
“What are you not getting? You’re the letter. It goes from postbox to postbox.”
“I’m a letter?”
“No, you’re a soul. One soul. One life, one soul. All of humanity, across eons of time, that was you.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. The good ones, and the shit ones. And let me tell you, there were a lot of shit ones. And now you’re dead. Like, properly dead. Kaput. Finished. The End. Do not pass go, etcetera. No more 4th dimensional being occupying 3 dimensional space.”
“Oh god.”
“Not really. Just you. The murderers, the fiends, the capitalists, all you. You let your base nature get the better of you and now the world’s properly fucked. No more humanity. It’s a relief, really. I wasn’t sure I could take much more.”
“So, um, what happens next?”
“Well, now I get to fuck off, and you have to wait and see. Here’s my clipboard, I’m keeping the pen. Don’t forget to take notes. Try not to be too hard on the poor fuckers who inherit your mess, they’ll probably be along in a few thousand years if the weather ever stabilises. If not, well I guess you’re here until the sun burns out. Bye!”
Dead reckoning
I just had a long (and fairly one-sided) conversation with my dad about therapy. I think it could really help him, but he’s resistant to the idea.
Anyway, it didn’t end well.
I told him, “Dad, just because you need help doesn’t mean you’ve failed as a person. Imagine what you could do if you didn’t feel so angry all the time, or if you didn’t feel like you needed to drink.”
The way he ended the conversation is still ringing through my mind.
“Who are you trying to convince, Kris? Your dead dad, or yourself?”
I can’t remember who wrote this thing I saw on twitter, but it’s leaked into my brain and settled there for a bit. It was this:
In order for others to find value in your work, you have to first discover its value for yourself. Not in terms of how much to charge for content, but in being able to create without seeking validation for it.
I’m probably screwing it up, my brain is far from perfect – especially these days – but it’s something I really needed to read, and hopefully absorb, right now.
Here’s to knowing the value of your own work.
a draft left unpublished
thirteen days sleepwalking
thirteen days
almost two weeks
sleepwalking, wondering/not-wondering
where I’m going.
Stumbling, close-eyed,
who knows where one unsteady foot leads.
I don’t.
This maze is my whole life.
Like everyone else, I’m lost
and won’t be found.
God help me,
I’ll not find myself.
Zombie Love
I just this minute realised – while looking for it – that I’d posted this short short about zombies on Schlock Magazine (an online lit/weird fic journal some friends made), and not on my own site. So here goes:
Trees and stuff…
I wrote a silly little board game that fits on a single sheet of A4 and pretty much encapsulates how I feel about the tree situation on this island.
It’s called The Government versus the Trees, and it’s free and you can have it and spread it around and even try to play it if you like. Fair warning, it’s unplayable.
More Blades in the Dark thoughts
I was thinking about Blades in the Dark, which is a thing I think about a lot, and most of those thoughts revolve not so much around my own hacks (I’ve a few ideas, but I’m really not very good at focusing) but around divorcing the core mechanic from the structure of the game.
Mirrors of Suspire, part two
Elin Asara fought every step of the way to stop herself from looking back over her shoulder. She had seen the way that Tharn had stepped through the window – as easily as walking through a door – and she was afraid. They had warned her, her employers, that he was a master. Only now that she had seen him at work, she suddenly doubted their plan.
Mirrors of Suspire, part one
A friend of mine over at 52 Tales is challenging herself to write a short story every week in 2018, and I’ve agreed to take the challenge with her. There aren’t any hard and fast rules, no word limit, the aim of the exercise is to maintain a discipline and produce an bank of creative work by the end of the year.
My first entry this year was The Walk, and you can find that here. I cheated a little last week, because I didn’t finish the story. I got to a natural stopping point, and decided it will be a two or three part serial, so here’s part one of Mirrors of Suspire.
There were only three people in Suspire who could work mirrors like Hederac Tharn, and he was all three of them. There had been more, once. Not version of him, of course, but other sorcerers, well versed in the art and science of reflection. Learning the rituals and applying them was just a matter of book work and practice. The grand library at Three Sisters held more than two dozen volumes accessible enough that a complete beginner could capture, seal, and interrogate an image within half an hour of cracking open the covers. (more…)
The Walk
This story was inspired by this article https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/sweden-year-walk-arsgang
Redistuo 