It's Cold Here

It’s cold here. It’s been cold for a long time. The world was getting warmer but now it’s cold and getting colder. When I spit it freezes before it hits the ground. I piss yellow slush. Even sound is different.

It’s fucking cold here.

I think it’s because of the sun but that’s just a guess because the sun is fucking gone.

It vanished a while back. Well I think it’s been a while. With no sun there’s no days.

My watch tells me it’s been 9 months but the thing is old and doesn’t always work. Whatever it uses to keep ticking depends on moving around and it’s usually just too cold.

Can’t use my cell phone because it’s just a brick now. When the sun went away so did GPS, the internet, and the power grid.

If I’m honest though time doesn’t really matter all that much anymore.

Eventually I’m probably going to freeze to death.

Me and the rest of the assholes.

Well, not the rich assholes.They’re probably in bunkers somewhere huddled around nuclear reactors and converting their piss and shit into potatoes and chicken wings. They’ll keep on going for centuries.

Then again maybe they won’t. Maybe I’m just inventing them to keep myself from walking into the cold and never coming back.

Maybe I shouldn’t worry about hypothetical assholes and worry about real assholes like you. I mean you definitely should have been worried about me.

It’s going to be okay.

Well, okay for me.

For you, not so much.

At least with the cold you’ll last.

You gotta look on the bright side even when there’s no sun right?

A Little Something

The thing coiled in his chest. He could feel it moving. It was restless and had been for weeks. He wanted to hate it but he couldn’t. It gave him power and made him strong.

The pile of gore cooling at his feet was proof.

He smiled and it pulsed. There was pain but he didn’t cry out. It felt good and his smile widened.

“Not long now…”

The words came from his throat but they weren’t his.

His smile faded.

The Fight

I pushed against the darkness and something gave. There was a rumble and I felt chunks of stone bounce off my metal skin. Light poured in and I pushed harder. Broken concrete and brick fell away and I stood.

There was a massive hole in front of me but at least the rest of the building was still standing. Luckily I hadn’t struck anything load bearing. I don’t want more dead people on my conscience.

Nothing hurt, it never did, but I felt a couple new dents along my shoulders and neck. Nothing a decent meal couldn’t fix but there was no time.

I heard the sirens in the distance so I went out through the hole and stopped cold. There was three hundred feet of torn up roadway, a bunch of burning cars, and the crumpled halves of a bus scattered in front of me. There were people pulling up debris and I could hear screaming from the wreckage.

“Oh...God…”

My world fell away and all I knew was panic. I checked my body, my arms, my legs, and tried to twist around to see my back. I was looking for blood, for gore, things that could only come from others. I remembered the desert, the maniac with the knife, and diving off the SUV at 70 miles an hour. Nothing, no blood, just tar and dirt. My world came back by inches.

“Just...just walk…” my voice was ragged and weak but at least I was talking.

I forced one foot in front of the other and followed the destruction.

I heard a massive roar and one of the sirens shifted into a warbling sound that seemed to get closer.

“Shit!”

I looked up and saw the tumbling patrol car. It was bent in half and seemed to be barely moving as it got bigger. Behind me I heard people digging. I turned my head and yelled at them.

“Move!”

They looked up and I saw their fear but they didn’t stop. There was an arm sticking out of the ground at their feet.

I swore. I know, heroes aren’t supposed to, but if you had been there you definitely would have. I gauged my position, took a step to the left, dug my feet into the ruined asphalt, and braced myself.

The car struck and I flexed as I caught the thing. My feet didn’t budge. The car felt as light as cardboard to me and I put it down as gently as I could. I looked inside but it was empty. My relief was a solid thing.

Reploid didn’t care who he killed. Didn’t care what he hit, what he tore, or what he ate.

I took a step, then another, then another.

I was charging towards a monster...is that what makes someone a hero?

The Process - The World Building Trap

I write science fiction and horror.

I love it, I really do. Inventing worlds, creating monsters, and portraying the fantastic. These things are pure joy.

That said, it’s a freakin trap!

What do I mean?

Well, it’s seductive. It’s much easier to write background material than to actually write a story. After all, the only audience is you so why the hell waste time on polish, presentation, or coherence when you can just type away? These documents are your personal notes so it doesn’t really matter. That’s why there’s a certain comfort in creating encyclopedic write-ups on obscure and “super cool” things that you’ve come up with.

Hours, days, months, even years can be spent down this rabbit hole of invention all before you get the first paragraph of a real story penned.

That’s when the true horror of the trap reveals itself. You can spend so much time exploring your fascinating invention that you have no more stories to tell. You wrote all this background history where crazy awesome things happened but you resolved the conflicts before your story started. Or, perhaps worse, you were so in love with exploration that you didn’t write inherent conflicts and story hooks that would create an actual narrative.

By the time you feel you’re “ready” to start your actual story there’s nothing left in the tank.

So if that’s the danger, why bother with world building at all? Why not seat of the pants the whole setting while you tell your story? Why not boldly plumb the depths of your imagination while in the grips of your daring tale?

Some people do that very thing and it CAN work for them. However that creates a couple of different potential traps that, in my experience, are a just as deadly. You can write yourself into a story ending corner or you can be paralyzed out of a flow state because you can’t think of what’s around the next bend when the characters are doing their natural thing.

The truth is that you will always need to invent stuff for your world and it will burn mental cycles. It’s part of the whole telling a story thing. Given my focus on trying to stay in a flow state I’d much rather burn those cycles when I don’t have to stay in the moment. I’d rather know how the nanites in the protagonist’s blood work before the bad guy hacks them. However that leaves me vulnerable to the trap and that cannot stand.

The solution, like for most things, is probably in following a middle of the road approach. For a specific idea I’ll do a small amount of world building or world refining along with structure work before starting the actual story. However I start writing the story when I’m only 20-50% through the building bit. That way I can work on tone, mood, and voice without falling into the endless building trap and actually generate content in the process.

I just can’t do a seat of the pants story to completion. I’ve tried. Anything more than say 500 words needs some outlining and building before I can get it into a reliably complete-able state.

Silver lining though if you have fallen into the world building trap: All that stuff you built? You can strip mine the hell out of it to make other stories so the effort isn’t totally lost.

The Process - Just Write!

Over the last year I’ve taken my writing much more seriously. First I worked on the process, drilling down into what motivates me to create, trying to narrow down the things that get me into a good flow state, and separating out the things that pull me out. I read more. I listened to more podcasts. I communicated with other writers more. I did a lot of things but the process improvements are what have really stuck.

The best piece of advice I got was “just fucking write.” That sounds ludicrously stupid I know. After all, if you’re having a hard time writing, how the hell can you just do it?

Turns out it’s the anxiety and the pressure that’s the problem for me. If you are trying to create perfect prose every time you sit down at the computer you will only type out what you think is perfect. You will lose precious time and creative energy stressing about just the right turn of phrase when you should just be getting your ideas on the page as rapidly as possible.

There are many methods to help with this kind of thing and I tried several to figure out what would work. I tried to have a more efficient computer. I tried typing on portable options like my iPad. What ended up working consistently though was about the lowest tech and cheapest approach I could find.

It turned out that handwriting IN PEN in a composition book was the best way to get stuff out of my head and onto the page at a good clip. With pen there’s no chance to edit, well no easy chance, and you are forced to move on instead of getting stuck trying to make things perfect. I ended up generating and finishing stories at a rapid pace because I was writing every day without anxiety or worry. My notebook also lacked distractions like Facebook or video games.

The trouble of course was digitizing my handwriting later. I can’t afford to do much in terms of scanning, voice recognition, or otherwise letting a computer do the work. I had to manually enter the text I’d written. That forced me to face the horror of my handwriting especially if I’d put off digitizing for a few days and what I’d written wasn’t super fresh in my mind.

This is the writing process. This is what’s let me get to the point of actually submitting work to various markets. This is, hopefully, the path that will get me finishing my novel.

Luckily editing is comparatively easy for me once it’s in the computer and I can do it without needing to be in a flow state. Now I must figure out how to push through the fatigue and keep that state going even when I want to stop and do something else.