Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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 »

2 Comments

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.

Leave a comment

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/

Leave a comment

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.

Leave a comment

16/Dec/2012

Abigail

One of these days you will hurt someone. That day is crawling closer like a half-dead frog. She’s going to look you in the eye and say, that was wonderful. Your chest will heave and there will be the slightest hint of a blush on your pale cheeks in agreement and she will kiss you and you will smile and then the question.

You will answer.

And part of her will sting, her stomach will feel like it has shipwrecks in it, and her tongue will stick to the roof of her mouth and she will want to feel cleaner.

Leave a comment

14/Dec/2012

Thoughts on Conlanging

So, I wrote this story a long while ago: /vignettes/the-anywhere-machine-appendix-i-futureful-skyful/

If I were to construct a language, I would try to construct the living sun’s language and I would try to write the poem that I alluded to.

The Cekno had a language that grew from hir necessity to organise hir own thoughts, to cope with the dread that every aware enough being feels. As such it is not a good language for communicating with other entities, but good at writing poetry and arguments in. The writing would be constructed in circles, with characters (that could correlate to sounds if one wanted to speak it aloud) being the highs and lows in the wave that the circle is made of. Presumably, to write it, it would be easier to draw it as a line and then draw it once more as a circle. Eventually, people who learn the language would try to read squiggly lines and circles and it will be amazing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a comment

11/Dec/2012

Red Tape

The Bureaucracy descended 30 years ago, devouring and mycolising all the northern hemisphere governments. There are maps of it but they do it no justice; not this self-duplicating, self-non-contained monster of a complex, that which laughs at wisdom and knowledge as we knew (thought we knew) it. The Bureaucracy always grows, and any attempt at finding out how it works further complicates it, for three new departments (heads) grow every time we define (cut off) the use of one department. That department then withers. The more necks it grows, the more blood simply fills them, that is how it works.

Leave a comment

1/Dec/2012

NaNoWriMo is over

The old Romans partied so hard at the end of the year that they had to have a few monthless months between the end of the old year and the start of the new year. Winter was the of the world. The old are not people to look up to.

I got some useful writing done. Certainly, more useful writing than I would have got done, had I not NaNoWriMoed. Now,about 20,000 or more of the 50,016 words I wrote are complete unredeemable bollocks, but a 2:3 useless:useful ratio ain’t half bad, I hear certain actually publisehed people hang around at 5:1. I might be misrepresenting interview snippets to make myself look better.

I didn’t go with The Great Onebyone very far. I had plotted at least 30,000 words and figured I would do that famous seat-of-the-pants thing that many writers do. I seem to suffer from brevititis, however, an at 6,000 words I was almost out of plot. Next year I will bring bullet lists and diagrams. I am still not sure how I managed to write >50,000 words on a single project in previous years, but somehow I did it. If I plan obsessively until next November, I might be able to make one idea stick for that much. The brevititis must be fought back though, so I better plan for thrice as many words as that. (Thank you, Jaymes.)

I inspired people and was inspired. I made friends. I made some terrible puns. I made some terrible puns at friends. I failed at creating trending hashtags on Twitter.

Shout out to Evan and the Ghost Bear, Eros Fountain, the Ministry of Plenty, Tiaxint, and a bunch of other things whose creators I respect a great deal.

Leave a comment

29/Nov/2012

Salt

The sea attacked the shore with its whole self; kissing it again and again. The shore tried to shrug it away and then push it, it tried to say it only wanted to be friends (and it worried about the status of their friendship; people take this sort of thing rather seriously, especially with entities so contiguous as they). But the sea continued, lunatic and obsessed, until it wore it down, until the shore was nothing but hard, cold rock. The sea threw itself still, asking for another kiss though it could not reach the top of this new formation.

1 Comment

28/Nov/2012

Paramedic

There is a creature made of ambulances roaming our city. It likes to watch people die. Its sirens sound too muffled; its shadow moves too much; the ambulances have no drivers. Cell phones stop working near them.

It makes sure to not be the first to arrive at an accident scene. It’s a living museum, made of the rusty, broken ambulances of old. If one climbs into one of them, one falls asleep to wake up somewhere else.

Individual ambulances can stand being apart from the group a few hours, but start to fall apart if separated for too long.

Leave a comment