June | 2012 | Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

30/Jun/2012

Worldbuilding 1: A Radiating Background

Last post in this series: https://zombiesintelligently.com/2012/06/12/ worldbuilding-0-intro/

This is a world about monsters. I’ve decided to have this be a fresh new world, not linked even a little to any of the old worlds. This means no baanklide, even though I love the baanklide and it is the best monster ever. (The baanklide even has a fangirl.) Please bear with me in this post, as I don’t really do segues, but everything in this post relates to all the other things, I promise.

Today I was reading from The Rediscovery of Man (Cordwainer Smith) and it was amazing and I noticed a trend: the stories in this collection seemed to all be about space-travellers who travèlle space and fall in love. This got me thinking to how I would write such a story and then, springing forth like a jack-in-the-box came the idea of something I will call the Great Onebyone. I like to name things.

Recently I had half on an idea called the Ritual of Ophoboshekin. This idea, while alright, doomed itself to fail, in my opinion. The basic idea went: sometime, somewhere, someone is going through a ritual that symbolizes a hangover, because their utopia knows the meaning of fun and pain. I only got a couple of paragraphs in before hitting a halting point.

For The Ritual, which I did not assign a world, got a couple of paragraphs. For The Great Onebyone, set in the Anyverse, I’ve got almost two handwritten pages after about 2 hours of working on it. Maaaajor contrast, right. This is how I arrive at the conclusion that for stories to work for me, they need a world or it’s a lot more work. And that’s why I’m not going to try to figure out a story here when I write these posts, the best of those will only happen in a whoaflash, because that’s how my head works. I will describe the stories afterwards!

With that in mind: Monsters. Humans? Civilisations? Uncivilisations? I’ve been using the word ‘poison’ lately to describe a lot of things, most things of these not actually being poison. So, how about: humans are dying, there is poison everywhere. The poisonbeasts have graciously stepped in to gasmask humans, but everything has a price. They are taking over the biznaz. Like some sort of otherworldly mafia.

Yep. Join me next time (sometime next week) for figuring out how this world relates to our world, where the point-of-departure is and so. Also for maybe understanding what a poisonbeast is, and how they can gasmask humans.

28/Jun/2012

The Day of a Whole Lot of Drabbles!

Helloes! I’m Johannes Punkt, and you may know me from reading my blog just now. I’m not very famous.

Anyway, my long-running drabble-blog will suffer cysts and disease tomorrow, and the exploding pus will shower you all in short stories. A ton of them will go up on the same day and it will be exciting and you should pay attention to this tumblr tomorrow!

It’s been a year since I started the blog, and I’ve published at least one story of exactly 100 words there, every day. I’m pretty boss. From now on, the stories posted there will be rarer. I hope you enjoy the ~~drabblpocalypse~~ ~~drabblvaganza~~ ~~drabblopodës~~ day of a whole lot of drabbles.

http://kewangji.tumblr.com/

22/Jun/2012

The Balance

as it relates to the things I write.

First of all: crud. I have a story with a deadline of tomorrow night (!!!) and I need to rewrite a lot of it.

This post is sort of a ‘me go too far’ post, countering the one where I totally figured everything out you guys with all the neologisms. I need less neologisms, perhaps. Still some, though.

Someone pointed out that I am probably complicating things too much, and being unaccessible in my writing. This is probably true when even I can’t figure out who the hell would relate to that story and feel emotionally compelled to continue on if they hadn’t already spent a lot of time inside my cranium.

This is not to say the story is bad – it’s not. It’s just lacking an element. Like, you have all these ingredients for an amazing salad but the ingredients are on different continents and you have to start a cargo company for others to be able to enjoy this meal. This fantastical scenario takes place in a world where you are the only entrepeneur at all, everybody else just … uh, makes a decent living doing other people’s laundry.

Anyway, posting publically about this so that I will guilt myself into finishing rewriting the story on time. I can do this!

Also to the people who are proofreading the story RIGHT NOW you people are awesome like fond memories or helium balloons or a pill that you can eat that teaches you jazz just like that. Not to devalue jazz. Jazz is difficult.

tl;dr? Even if it sounds awesome, things like “Patterns of electricity, or something smaller than electricity, spelled fear into the lack of an audience.” isn’t an easily understandable sentence and definitely something I shouldn’t put out there without context. And that was something I wrote trying to make the introduction more easy to follow. This might be a long night.

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17/Jun/2012

Rhesus Negative

‘Tis an old, old story, which I fixed a little but not too much.

[Content warning: story starts off with abuse, which then turns out to be more playful bitching than anything else, but it could still seem bad]

“And you’re always with the chewing of those fucking toothpicks. I don’t even know where you get them from. Cut. It. Out.”

Read the rest of this entry »

12/Jun/2012

Worldbuilding 0: Intro!

This might be a series, or it might be a one-off, but I put the (Intro) thing in the title because it would be nice if it was a series. I’m going to build a new world! That is definitely the best part of storytelling. First I’m going to do some analysis of two of the worlds I write in though, because I’m like that. The other worlds are either too small to make comments about, or (in the case of the Vailverse) secret!

Drabbleverse

A lot of the drabbles I write take place in the same universe – henceforth called the drabbleverse –, because it’s fun to have continuity and I wish I was Cordwainer Smith*. There are a few small things that separate this drabbleverse from ours, and they all grew forth pretty organically over the course of the year or so I’ve drabbld intensely.

The first thing of these is fate-days. On a fate-day, everything smells of iron, and you get one chance to change your life. Fate-days are allotted seemingly at random, and one can tell that one is coming up if the rate of coincidences one is encountering. Most people in the world knows this.

The second thing is the Immortal God of Death-Fate, who is channeled through the Machine of Death, which is basically two floating bowling balls with an EKG-line of electricity between them. It speaks directly to our hearts without going through our ears. It’s very cryptic and not very helpful, and follows the rules of other machines of death that exist**.

Another thing is that practically everything has been given agency again. This is not that very present but it is still noticeable in cases such as this one: http://kewangji.tumblr.com/post/12254790760/on-the-7th-of-may-2012-the-sun-found-its-goal, or this one: http://kewangji.tumblr.com/post/24968807842/cosmos-channeled-eyes-toward-charles-who-started. I say ‘again’, because, see, far back in time, through the eyes of humans, everything was given agency – the moon wanted to arc across the sky and the rivers wanted to flow. But with the advent of determinism and stuff agency’s been sort of slowly retracted to something only humans and certain animals have, but even that’s been called into question. Obviously the sun can’t be waiting for anything.

I like that these things exist in that world.

The Anyworld

The world with the variable, the vessel and the vermin. The variable travels the universe and deletes unwitting or sturnfleen races of biologically or technically immortal idea machines. It does so in the vessel, also called the Anywhere Machine. Nobody remembers what the vermin is/are/was/were except that it’s bad for everything. The stories written in this universe are all titled “The Anywhere Machine [something something]”. Only story currently live is The Anywhere Machine, Appendix I – Futureful Skyful***, but believe me when I say that this setting is stuffed. And also dark. Many words have to be invented specifically for this world, like sturnfleen, and dymphnatics, and meaninglet.

So, what makes these worlds fun?

Probably contrast. The contrast of those worlds and the one I exist in right now (just passing through). Hopefully they are fun to read because of this – most everything that makes you want to read anything is contrast; any scene, any sentence needs conflict. And contrast is the confliction of metaphysical concepts. Next time I will think up a few details about this new world. I will leave this topic for a little while, though, and think up exciting subtitles for posts that start “Worldbuilding [x]:”.

Below you can find a list of failed ideas for what this world should be about.

Instead of babies, humans lay eggs.
Extraterrestrials have already invaded and brought us under their yokes: it turns out capitalism comes from space.
Genetic memory is totally a thing, and people’s heads are becoming too large with all that information in their skulls.
The walls of reality are but eggs and literally world-shattering things are waking up.
Monsters.

Actually, that last one is probably on the right track. Next Worldbuilding post will be about monsters.
~

* Cordwainer Smith has a Wikipedia article you should perhaps read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer_Smith

** if you haven’t yet read it, read it: http://machineofdeath.net

*** https://zombiesintelligently.com/vignettes/the-anywhere-machine-appendix-i-futureful-skyful/

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Month: June, 2012