Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Month: January, 2013

31/Jan/2013

Georg

Once upon a time, a man fell in love with a dead woman. She died in front of him every night and became more and more beautiful. One morning, after a storm, he made his way to the damp alley where she lay, mouth open, face gone. He found her behind a trash can and he cried. She had not got to her feet and walked away like an angel.

The city was besieged. It rained fire and black death. The man stayed with the dead woman, his obsession. And she took one last breath, and her soul possessed him.

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28/Jan/2013

Open Letter to Ken Woodruff

[Trigger Warning: rape, bad police officers, torture]

[Spoiler Warning: uh, season 2, episode 14 of The Mentalist]

Hello Ken,

I hope you appreciate feedback. This open letter concerns an episode, Blood In, Blood Out of the hit show The Mentalist, an episode which you wrote. More specifically it concerns the ending of it, which I felt was handled very very poorly. I know it is an old episode, and I hope that your writing has grown since.

When you (general you) do writing, you generally write about what’s important to you, and ignore what is not important. I think there was a scene in your episode where you (specific you) overlooked something very important, and I am going to explain why. Do excuse all this build-up before I get to my actual point. It is here so that you (or other readers of this letter) do not misconstrue my critique.

It was a well-told story; you explored a new side of Kimball Cho [an agent of law]; you tied everything together nicely at the end; there were some cool scenes with guns in them.

Read the rest of this entry »

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24/Jan/2013

Profession

Sergeant Maier displayed very specific sets of aptitudes and ineptitudes. On active duty, James kept himself one mistake away from a dishonourable discharge. He lost most of his toes on purpose.

A General by the name of Baumgartner noticed his aptitudes, finally, when one day the Sergeant held his hat to his chest perfectly. It all just made sense. Thus James got the position, without ever having asked for it. Because, who asks for that?

Limping a little, hitching rides, James embarked on a fruitful career. He travelled the country, visiting the relatives of soldiers, bringing them the bad news.

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21/Jan/2013

Plots You Can Have #5, Ambiguous Monsters Edition

[Content Warning: suicide, human sacrifice]

Previous part here: /2012/10/31/for-the-undecided-plots-you-can-have-nanowrimo-edition/

First part here: /2012/08/20/a-few-plots-you-can-have/

~

The Dalmour Parasite

a parasite that only infects suicidal people and turns them into psychopaths to make their lives better

Neil Ruthsmoke is a man who makes his friends suicidal. He cannot help it; it is not to do with his personality per se, it is just that his particular body odour trips bad wires in people’s brains; he is a freak of nature undiscovered by science. He is also quite depressed on account of this. Story is about how his psychologist both tracks the spread of the parasite and how it starts to take over hir. There is research into Ruthsmoke’s life, and the point where his friends stopped killing themselves and started becoming sociopaths is found. Good scenes might include: when the psychologist puts forth the idea that maybe, possibly, it’s all Ruthsmoke’s fault; when a friend breaks the pattern by topping hirself; when the psychologist realizes ze has probably been infected hirself.

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17/Jan/2013

Home without Books

Your body will go on living after your death. You wake up in the darkness, shivering, from a nebulous nightmare; that cold spell is what it feels like when you are let back in. It is confirmed since long ago you are superfluous, the body has shut you out before.

One day you will haunt your own home. Your body will explain to the exorcist, the slamming of doors and sackcloth unthreading itself. The exorcist (he will wear a cape) will nod – he has seen it all before – and ask your body to leave for now.

You will be banished.

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13/Jan/2013

2012 NaNoWriMo Excerpt #2

Another excerpt can be found here: /2012/11/12/nanowrimo-excerpt-1/

(This takes place before that one.) Comments appreciated.

~

The Information Market bustled. The woman used to take the way through it home because it was quicker.

The ceiling here speckled with stars, also had tiny disclaimers about ‘accurate representation’.

“Young lady!” screamed the man in the hat. He wore a garish reflecting suit and he bought and sold information for a living. He grabbed at the young woman’s neck with his hooked cane and eventually dragged her to his dais, where he knelt with one arm on his knee and looked into her eyes. “You can’t fool me. I know you were there, I saw the incident report with my own eyes. How’s about we make a deal?”

She wriggled loose from his cane (the only way to do this was unfortunately to move forward just a bit, and then duck; the Garish man smiled at her when they were this close) and rubbed her shoulderblades. “How about no, leave me alone.”

“You’re never gonna get a deal as good as this, I promise you. I have some bona fide ancient information, it arrived here from the Divers just a moment ago – I swear, this is the hot stuff! Tell you what, free of charge I’m gonna tell you the first bit, if you just will tell me your name, pretty one.” Read the rest of this entry »

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9/Jan/2013

Multiforms

This is the room of ever-changing doorways. The one you came from is open, static. Only one can be open at a time.

That one is the ladder inside a well, turning into the baleen-plates in a great whale’s mouth. This one here is two trees in a black forest.

You close the door on bright lights and tourists, the square door turns into the scorched chimney of a ramshackle house. It stays like that until you blink, which is when you lose your chance. The abstract doorways turn back into concrete shapes, none of which are the way out.

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6/Jan/2013

Miscellanea

Berlin Confidential (berlinconfidential.tumblr.com) has just started updating again and you would be a fool not to read it. If you haven’t read it before, I urge you to start from the beginning: …/story/oberwelt. To summarize, which is impossible, it is about a bunch of strange murders in Weimar Germany and then things get weird. It is amazing; I can never recommend it enough.

~

The very awesome @drakekin has worked a bit on his version of the Cekno Idiosyncrasy, and his musings and conclusions can be found here: ministry-of-plenty.co.uk/2012-12-19-conlangging-for-the-stars.html & …/2012-12-26-alphabets-and-the-grammar-of-stellar-bodies.html. They are full of interesting, and my own musings have not got nearly as far as his. For shame, Johannes.

~

I saw the Hobbit and it was very Tolkien. A magical, inspiring, breathtaking, and unnecessarily drawn out sausagefest.

I purchased Norstrilia and it is a gorgeous book.

~

I GM’d a game of Hitman on a Budget; a few highlights:

(Link to rules: machineofdeath.net/about/games; tl;dr: it’s a game where everybody’s a hitman and it all takes place in our collective imagination.)

The city of Gangsterdam, which has always been at war with Mafiastan.

Fraudulent papers consisting of a childish drawing of a smileyface on a card.

Demonic tattoos spreading in cardinal directions; regular syphilis spreading in carnal directions.

Rob the Collateralist, who laced botulism on all the candy to kill one man.

Drakekin, in an attempt to kill a dude, stops a war and saves a thousand lives.

Terrible in-sewer-ants.

Richard Dawkins killing a fake santa by dying.

Making “tuna” out of people.

The zombie apocalypse.

Kraken respects your boundaries and keeps his tentacles to himself (or just kills you with them, you perv).

~

I’ve been enjoying Broodhollow.

broodhollow.chainsawsuit.com/2012/10/08/broodhollow/

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2/Jan/2013

The Glum Thousands

They found Lewis with his throat slit like a second smile. Lewis worked for the big people; he supplied the good stuff. He canned the laughter of daytime sitcoms– any one of ten thousand people could have murdered him. The glum thousands, they were called, and each one was called in for questioning, and the interviews were long. Grey, drab rooms. The prime time interviews were the worst; that was when their laughter was in use and at any moment the interviewee could burst out laughing while their eyes kept this bored, dour look. Lewis McCannigan’s murder was never solved.

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