A shelf full of inspiration.
For ease of access, I added a dedicated page on the sidebar for “top stories!” It’s pretty much every one, but I called it that because there’s some stories I posted that are rough drafts of ones in Love&Darkness or, well, just filler from creative writing class back in undergrad.
So check it out to read anew or revisit a favorite:
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Always remember to find your local feeding station online in advance!
Happy election day, everybody!
Yeah… I don’t know too many people who are psyched about the choices for Who Wants to Be the Next POTUS, as this reality show has shaped up. With all the legitimate humor and horror that’s arisen over what both major candidates and their compatriots have (allegedly) done, though, I felt an unprecedented need to write an Election Day story this year. At least, how often does an author get a chance to be so timely? I’d have to wait another four years otherwise!
A Halloween deadline got away from me, what with the new job (and, last week, various celebrations for my 25th birthday!), but I decided I didn’t mind. Because this story, more than anything else, is admittedly just… strange. It’s about the political system, overall, but it’s also about how I feel like the world looks when we question too little, campaign too much, and value our own idea of a cause over any real person who actually cares about it.
So whether you lean right, left, somewhere in the middle, or couldn’t care less either way, assemble your offerings, grab your tickets for the White Womb, and try not to get too much blood on you. November 8th has come, but it’s better known as…
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Well, I had to put *something* here.
Like reading in print? Who doesn’t! Issue 44 of Sanitarium magazine, featuring my horror story “Pruritus,” is now available in paperback from Amazon CreateSpace.
Only $7.99 for mine and like eight other cool scary stories!
Well, outside of college-based publications, that is. But yes: My short horror story “Pruritus” is now available alongside eight other cool authors in Issue 44 of the mad, macabre magazine “Sanitarium“! And for a low, low price to boot!
Check out the purchase links below if you’re itching for a good read on…
And now for something completely different: The short and comedic true story of the time I sort of helped save the family over Thanksgiving dinner (the same day of that blog background you see before you!).
. . .
November 26, 2015. As is traditional, my parents invited the lot of our immediate family—including but not limited to me and my brother, dual grandparents, a great aunt and uncle, cousin, and assorted honorable relatives (which may include two old cats)—to our home in the countryside for Thanksgiving. The house rests on a manmade hill but, around us, shaggy fields and thinned forests stretch for acres. It was a chilly day; the morning sun had looked more like a shrunken moon, and the horizon blushed in the high-altitude breeze.
The meal was a late lunch which extended into dinner, and it covered enough food for both: Tender rows of light and dark meat, salads of both the fruit and vegetable variety, deviled eggs, and a whole sugary spectrum of pastries waiting in the wings. Over amiable conversation, the hours passed as swiftly as my grandmother’s homemade rolls ‘round the table.
To the right of our cramped but lavish dining room, a broad archway led to the living room where many of us made pre-meal conversation. Now, it was simply a blind spot beside where my mother and I sat near the table’s end. It was around three o’clock when, my appetite concluding, fork corralling what sumptuous scraps remained on my plate, a small, dark shape entered my peripheral vision.
I turned my head, and my eyes widened and then narrowed to see a familiar foe encroaching on our gathering: A bee. Not a honeybee or bumblebee, but a black, yellowjacket-like thing, crossing the jade-colored carpet with purpose. I knew all too well that insects, particularly this manner of bee, had a tendency to emerge in our living room more than the rest of the house. I alerted the family, rose from my seat without hesitation, and smote the insect with the sole of my Nike. The plush carpeting necessitated several stomps, but I eventually returned to the table equally flustered and satisfied.
No sooner had I sat down, though, then I noticed another bee flanking his predecessor’s husk further down the carpet. And yet another, adjacent to the coffee table! I enlisted my brother to deal with the escalated threat, and still the same thing happened: we eliminated the pests, only to turn around and spy another hotfooting it across the carpet, or resting on the windowsill, or staking out a set of drapes.
Our raucous attempts to mitigate the invasion began providing an amusing cap for the waning feast. But the mystery remained: where were they coming from? None were present near the AC ducts, or even the old sliding windows—two chief candidates from lesser breaches prior.
That was when I noticed a disproportionate number occupying the marble tiles that shadowed the fireplace. We crouched before it and, sure enough, bees were fleeing by the handful through the cracks and crevices in the glass gate that ostensibly sealed off the hearth. The bees, it seemed, seeking refuge from the pre-Winter weather, were funneling into our underused chimney and spilling out into the warm living room. Sympathetic as I was to their plight, if this would be the Thanksgiving we were besieged by bees, it would not happen without a fight.
The rest of the family was now on high alert. We quickly assented that closing the flue would be but a temporary solution. And so, careful to minimize the flow of bees, my father pried open the grate and ignited a log atop the ashes of Duraflames past. As he stoked the blaze, my mother went outside to check the chimney, hands on her hips as she scrutinized the roof. Taking over for her later, I could confirm the sight of small black dots frantically circling high above our two-story Tudor.
My father knelt attentively in front of the fire all the while, an emergency blanket-like silver rectangle and rag his sword and shield, monitoring the bees’ departure or demise. As a flattened box of Life cereal dribbled ironic sparks, he implored me and my brother to procure further fuel from the garage. We returned with armfuls of flattened cardboard boxes and newspapers, to be distributed within the inferno. My grandmother paced the vicinity with concern, while others sat amused on the furniture, keeping watch and snagging stray bees with tissues.
Within an hour, the bodies piled millimeters high before the waning flame, we deemed the encroachment neutralized. The evening closed without further incident, and we went our separate ways with our bellies full and primal dominance reaffirmed.
Overall, though, it brought me no pleasure to take time out of my day to set bees on fire. Indeed, I do not wish to linger on the image of their passing.
You’re welcome to, though, because it was still kind of awesome.
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It’s just a scary story… what’s the worst that could happen?
Happy Halloween! It’s been a busier one than most for me–in-between prepping for tests, essays, and moot court competitions, I’ve scare-cly found time to even carve a Jack-o-Lantern since… ever? Now there’s a frightening thought!
Yet I still managed to utilize Spirit Halloween‘s generous two-day shipping discounts to assemble a costume. My choice: The Babadook, titular bogeyman of the 2014 Australian sleeper-hit horror flick (now streaming on Netflix!). The most critical element–stage makeup–couldn’t be ferried by plane for some probably-TSA-related reason (are the terrorists just raring to smuggle powdered explosives in canisters of Chaplin-esque grease paint?), but fortunately the local Spirit branch at Ithaca Mall pulled through. Add some black construction paper, and there you have it–instant nightmares:
But onto the main attraction: As customary, I aim to provide a scary story every year for Halloween, even if it’s a matter of hours before November. Since the last story I even wrote was 2014’s Halloween tale (“Pruritus“), I felt especially compelled to produce one for 2015–come hell, high water, or lesser academic obligations.
As such, I present another Nightmare Force “Case File.” When we last checked in with the Nightmare Force, they were (spoiler alert!) busting a child-snatching interdimensional parasite that took up residence in one of Cardinal University’s computer labs. In this installment, we learn a bit more about how they live and interact when they’re on–and off–the job. Where do “DEMONS” come from, and how can any human weapons stop them? What shocking secrets and talents does the rest of Aron’s team have? And just who really leads the Nightmare Force, and keeps their missions under wraps?
It all starts to reveal itself on Halloween night, when a sinister spirit comes calling on one average college kid who read the wrong email…
Guns. Ghosts. Gore. Graphics cards. Time to delete some evil.
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[Source for the original creepypasta of La Muerta Blanca by someone else. In the world of Nightmare Force, the idea is that this story already exists online, though I tried to put a new twist on it for this adaptation. Also, I am the polar opposite of Angela and Rip when it comes to crunching numbers–you’ll know when I probably screwed up, but hopefully the scene’s purpose in the plot will still make sense.]
Happy almost-summer! Since last posting, I’ve finished my first year of law school at Cornell, and I’m currently gearing up for studying international law at the Sorbonne in Paris starting next week. In the meantime, though, I’ve been tending to a smaller project I started when progress on my novel (There’s Something Wrong with the Neighbor’s Cat) got to feeling too daunting in the short term. That project: a short prequel/interquel to a very different novel: Nightmare Force.
Some background, because this is a vignette/”spec script” of sorts: Nightmare Force is intended to be a horror/sci-fi thriller loosely based on “Binary DNA” (by “K.I. Simpson,” I think) and a handful of other creepypasta. The main characters are a team of six Engineering grad students at the fictional Cardinal University in New England; by day, they are the school’s “NetFixerz” tech support group, but by dark they are the “Nightmare Force,” hunting monsters, ghosts, interdimensional beings, and other entities that interfere with our world via electronic technology. Picture a hi-tech combination of The Brothers Grimm and Inception — with imagery drawn equally from cyberpunk and surrealist artists like Zdzisław Beksiński — and you’re not far off.
The circumstances of where the Nightmare Force obtained their skills — as well as how they first met — are mysteries to be slowly revealed over the course of the series. However, while I always told myself I’d never pull a Richard Kelly and assume everybody understood the elaborate universe I created after only sharing a quarter of it, this story features terms and tools that–for the sake of pacing and chronology with the rest of the planned series–I didn’t feel comfortable providing an exposition dump for. As such, I’ve added brief character bios and a glossary below, as well as links to a few relevant songs I listened to while writing. Feel free to read them first to understand what’s going on (WARNING: SOME SPOILERS), or just jump right in and check it later as the mood suits you!
Either way, put on your gloves, secure all the exits, and make sure your screwdriver is good and sharp, because it’s time for…
#NightmareForce
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Character Bios
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Glossary
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And finally, here’s some songs I like that capture the mood and themes of Nightmare Force:
Boy, our problems look so small from up here…
Hey, happy summer! So since my last post, there’s been some considerable developments “behind the scenes” here, which is part of why it’s been so long since there’s been a last post. But in any case, before we move on to the story at hand, the biggest announcement must be made: I have officially graduated from the University of Washington, and I’m also-officially headed to Cornell Law this August!
(Candid shot from my uncle)
Needless to say, the last rush of assignments before the camera flashes and mortarboards started popping was both nerve-wracking and exciting. However, it turned out I managed to stave off senioritis, and cleared my final quarter with two 4.0’s and a 3.9! That latter grade was for English 484, which you’ll remember as having previously produced “Bread and Buttons” and “Day of a New Dawn“, and I can thank the success of my last two assignments for it. The last, last assignment was to reimagine a story from earlier in the quarter in a totally new form (or give it a major text-only revision–but where’s the fun in that?); some conveyed their tales through photography, a short film, or even a cooked dish, but what I decided to do was turn Bread and Buttons into a videogame… minus the actual game. Confused? Well, take a look at these pics I snapped before turning it in:
The basic idea here was, seeing as videogames have been such a big part of Dan Brooke’s life, could he be the kind of guy to see his that life in game-like terms? So though the disc itself contains only a slightly-edited text file of the story, I designed a full PlayStation 2-style cover and brief instruction booklet (it’s shrunken because Photoshop and Windows Photo Gallery can never seem to agree on real-world dimensions) for Dan’s “game of life.”
I can upload some high-quality JPEGs of that later, but I don’t want to hold up the main focus here any longer: my second-to-last 484 work, a “revision” of “Bread and Buttons” based on N+7, a writer’s game of sorts that involves taking every noun (alternatively, verb) in a piece of text and replacing it with the word seven entries ahead in the dictionary. Obviously, “the dictionary” is a broad concept–and the afore-linked program’s identification of nouns was shaky in places–but the assignment’s guidelines permitted keeping only a quarter of the new nouns. So after copy-pasting “Bread and Buttons” page by page, I was left with an utterly chaotic pile of text; in a way, my work was cut out for me by the images formed from the most striking words repeated throughout (“aphrodesiac”, “rosary”, several varieties of flowers), but I still had to make sense of the whole thing. The resultant narrative retained only the loose structure of its predecessor–a lone guy pacing his home and ruminating–but took a totally different turn into…
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I think this story turned out considerably grittier than anything I’ve ever written, but that’s partially because it almost exclusively focuses on characters and situations that I’ve never written about before (an elderly man, for one, but to say more would incur spoilers). As such, I’ll admit/agree with my professor’s comments that it has moments where believability is stretched, and others that come across as a narrative cop-out. However, I wholly invite your criticism! As always, I hope you enjoy it–and everything else I continue to write, as the summer is set to give me some quality time to continue my novel and submit shorter works to academic and creative journals–but I can only get better if someone outside my own head tells me how.
Notes&Sketches 