Legends of Avongard: Stick Figures and Boxes

My sophomore year in high school, some of my friends and I tried a collaborative writing project to write stories for the fantasy nation of Avongard. Aside from some generic sword-and-sorcery stories about plant zombies, I didn’t contribute much. But I did write a little vignette in the group chat that I’m still pretty proud of. For background, someone had just suggested that all of our stories should have accompanying illustrations. It was a great idea for certain groups members, who were truly astounding artists, and less good for me, since my artistic oeuvre is made up entirely of stick figures and boxes (see above). This was how I picture a kingdom illustrated by me would turn out.

It gets depressing, being a stick figure. I don’t have a face or any features beyond my head, torso, and basic appendages. And one of my arms is shorter than another, which is kind of irritating, especially when I’m trying to pick up a box. I see a lot of boxes, which is similarly irritating. I’d like see something a little more complex than four lines that don’t even connect all the way.

I live in a stick-people village, which isn’t too great either. We live in box-houses, with little rectangles on them that I think are supposed to be doors, but it’s sort of unclear. I’m not sure which one is mine. They all kind of look the same.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if I lived in my own stick figure universe. But, if I go to the very edge of my pencil-line village, I can see the expanse of Avongard in all its glory. The humans killing each other to appease the blood god. The elves killing humans who use lumber to appease the elf God. The streams and brooks and vast emerald forests. The little towns and cities dotting the hills, torches making pinpricks of light when the sun vanishes in the east. The mountains off in the distance, with treacherous trails leading up to snow-capped peaks. The fascinating and beautiful and endlessly detailed world. 

Then I look back at my village. I see stick figures and boxes.

Even if we were left alone things might be better. But every once in a while the humans or elves or dwarves come in, seeing us as another civilization to raid. They chase us around, kill a few of our number, then realize that we don’t really have anything besides worthless boxes and sort of stare at the ground and mumble apologies. Luckily, each group usually doesn’t try to conquer us more than once, except for one dim-witted group of orcs, who keep forgetting there’s nothing they can take from us. I swear, those guys have the memory of a goldfish.

I also see shape-shifters off in the distance. Sometimes I convince myself that I am one of their kind, just slightly out of place, having accidentally turned myself into a stick-figure and unable to return to my past glory. So I spend day and night trying to transform, to become something glorious and beautiful, something other than this dismal drawn into being out of sheer boredom. 

It never works.

Is there freedom in having nothing to lose? I say no. For even though my life has no worth in any way shape or form, things could have been worse.

I could have been a box.

Sacred Grosse Pointe

Vernier Road in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, ends at a black metal gate. Beyond that gate is the Yacht Club. Beyond the Yacht Club is Lake St. Clair. And beyond Lake St. Clair, you can just barely the foggy outline of Canada. On that black metal gate is a yellow sign with black arrows pointing to the left and right. I’ve always thought of that sign as the beginning of the universe. In Sunday school, I imagined that the garden of Eden looked a whole lot like the Yacht Club, and that the yellow sign, identical to the hundreds of thousands of others at roadends across the world, had been there since the start of creation.

My family moved away from Grosse Pointe when I was three years old, the age when your brain goes through some serious retooling and all of your earliest memories usually get lost in the mix. But, even though my memories of Grosse Pointe aren’t any older than my memories of Waco, it’s always felt like a sort of sacred place, where all the details stand out sharper and little things like gates and roadsigns take on holy significance. Part of that might be that my grandparents’ house, where I stay whenever I’m in Grosse Pointe, is a pretty interesting place to walk around noticing things. There’s this creepy bust of a head copied from some old Greek statue in the living room, with blank eyes that seem to follow you if the light hits them in the right way. My cousin used to tell me that, instead of coming through the chimney, Santa used an interdimensional portal through that marble head to get to our house on Christmas eve. And the walls are filled with my grandfather’s paintings, oil-painted portraits with so much individuality and subtle expression that I never would have been surprised if they started moving and talking. But even the unimportant details seem sacred: the little crack in the stained glass window in the bathroom that makes it just slightly asymmetrical, the weather-clock in the hallway that doesn’t work anymore and probably never did, the exact shade of green on one of the bulbs of Christmas lights surrounding the tree that just seems so perfect. And even outside the house, the aura of importance remains. The whole town is flat from end to end, as if it was made before the world had gotten all rough and complicated. There’s a long beach of broken concrete along the shore of Lake St. Clair that has always seemed like the place where life first crawled out onto land. It’s a nice place to visit, but I don’t think I could ever live there. I couldn’t stand up under the crushing meaning.

I’m almost 500 words into this post, and I’ve just now realized that I’ve written the kind of essay that I always reject on sight when they show up in the submissions folder of the literary magazine I work for, an essay where all the writer does is walk the reader through a place personally important to them. Maybe there’s an anecdote thrown in here and there, but it’s never a narrative so much as a collection of details. And the whole way through, it’s like the writer is yelling “PAY ATTENTION, BECAUSE THIS IS ALL VERY, VERY IMPORTANT!” at bullhorn volume. And I can’t pay attention or see its importance because I haven’t lived there. If you aren’t a member of the Osler family, you probably feel much the same way about the past 500 words. You probably think that it’s hyperbole to say that the yellow sign with a black arrow pointing left and right is the beginning of the universe, even though it isn’t. If anything, I can’t summon up strong enough language for how I feel about that sign, which I guess is the problem in the first place. If I had the language to describe it, you’d probably feel it too.

This idea that my experiences aren’t universal has been bothering me for a while now, especially when we drive out to the city of Detroit. There are blocks where all the buildings have burnt and long yellow grass has grown up around the ruins so that it looks like this whole neighborhood is just some rural patch of undeveloped land where they lay down a grid of roads for some reason. Even the parts that are built up, the parts that have running businesses and people milling about on the street, feel like a sort of awkward addition to Grosse Pointe, as if Grosse Pointe is the real city and this is all just urban sprawl trying to capture some of Grosse Pointe’s essential power. But that’s not even close to the truth. Detroit is the real city, Grosse Pointe is the latecomer. And to far, far more people, the city of Detroit, even the weedy fields of burnt-out houses, are the beginnings of the universe.

I can’t help but think that it’s sad. That yellow sign is just a sheet of metal to most people, just another object. And all those people have their own sacred spaces and things that I’ll never properly understand.

But really, these details aren’t important on their own, and maybe it isn’t quite as hard to describe what it is that makes them so meaningful. The yellow sign probably would’ve been just a sheet of metal to me too, no mater how many times I saw it, except that it was the signal to that we were only a few blocks away from my grandparent’s house. And there the people I’d known all my life, the really beginning of my universe, would be waiting.

Midnight in Burling

This is a piece of flash-fiction I got published in The Grinnell Review this week. It’s sorta fitting that it came out during finals week.

I’m on the top floor of the library, reading something I can’t understand.

The library is empty and dark. The glare from my lamp turns the window in front of me into a mirror. Every so often, when I don’t think I can take another five syllable word, I look up for a moment and wish I had less acne. 

I hear a train whistle squealing somewhere off in the cornfields outside of town.

A kid broke his leg last year trying to jump on an empty boxcar during finals season. He’d planned to run away and live like some vagrant in the 1930s. I used to wonder how someone that dumb could get accepted into this college. Now I sort of see where he was coming from.

I look up at my reflection again. Maybe I’d have less acne if I worried less. That’s not happening any time soon, though, so I just resolve to get some acne cream tomorrow.

There’s that train whistle again, softer and almost sweet. It sounds like it’s coming from inside the library, hiding somewhere back in the shelves.

“But what of misnorziac if flimpner ishnith tempremium albanakme?” This passage seems confusing enough to be important, so I try highlighting it, but the marker blurs the words into a stretch of faint grey ink. I try highlight it again and the words disappear.

Now the train whistle sounds like it’s coming right over my shoulder. It’s just one long note, high and pure, like a handbell. 

The sound rises, and my lamp flashes off. I look through the window and see ethereal white lights, like stars, but brighter and closer, blinking on and off as they drift in and out of a swirling black nebula. The ground is nowhere in sight

It only lasts a moment, then the light flickers back on and I’m staring at my own ugly, awestruck face again. The whistle more glorious than I can comprehend, and it seems to be coming from somewhere inside me.

I click off my lamp and feel myself drawn into the intermingling light and darkness. There is no window, there is no me. I am part of the cloud, just another point of light, floating in perfect serenity.

I can almost feel my cheek pressed against the paper, almost taste the sour drool that soaks out the pretentious words no one understands. I don’t care. I am part of the night sky, trapped like a fly in amber, and I couldn’t be happier. 

First Drafts

Even though last time I finished a novel the announcement post got over a hundred likes on Facebook, I’m ambivalent about admitting that I finished writing another one just last night. I can’t resist mentioning it, because it feels like I should have the right to brag after working on something for two and a half months (three and a half if you count planning) and writing 98,005 words (315 pages). But I’m scared that people won’t take me seriously as a writer if they hear how much I write, compared to how much I ever return to once I’ve got a first draft. The real work of writing, as I’ve heard repeated on an infinite loop in creative writing classes and workshops, is revising. In my life, I’ve written six full-length novels, only one of which has ever made it to a second draft. That’s not a great track record. It doesn’t help that, for at least half of them, I’ve considered burning the paper copies and wiping the files from my computer.

It takes no commitment to write a first draft, really. Sure, you need enough determination to stay focused on a few characters and keep them attached to something resembling a plot, but you never have to look back on a scene after you’ve written it. It’s probably best if you don’t, actually; looking back at something you just wrote is the writerly equivalent of looking down when crossing a canyon on a tightrope. What takes grit and skill is revisiting a scene you aren’t happy with over and over and over, until you either find the strength to destroy something you spent so much time on, or shape into being something better.

I’m honestly scared that I’m getting addicted to first drafts. It’s so fun in the moment to get to know a new cast of characters and explore the new world as it unfolds in your mind. I’ve started to notice physical differences in myself when I’m deep in a first draft, even. Running becomes easier and more fulfilling, because it’s a chance to meditate on what will happen next. I tend to avoid social engagements, because I need so much time to write, but when I do go, the conversations seem to have a poetic flow to them, and little moments that would slide by unnoticed otherwise all seem deeply meaningful. My dreams become more vivid. They’re often terrifying, but even when they’re nightmares, there’s a certain satisfaction in the way that the intense imagination that I’m pouring into my story carries over to my subconscious life. The writing itself is actually more like dreaming than I would like to admit. When I’m in the midst of it, it’s a burst of strange, overpowering emotion that puts the world in a whole new context. And when it’s over, it’s gone and forgotten, maybe forever. Gritting your teeth and reading through typos and plot holes in old work is hard, it’s so much easier to pick another bright, shining story idea and get working, to fall back into the pleasant rhythm of daily writing and let everything that came before fade away.

It’s tempting to get lost in this cycle of creation and abandonment from day to day, and tempting to get discouraged by it if I ever take the long view. But every writer has their own process, and maybe mine features a little less line-by-line edits and a little more writing from scratch. After all, my last two novels didn’t just come from nowhere; they were both adaptations of shorter pieces that I wrote years ago. They didn’t share a single line of prose with the originals, but that might be okay, so long as it works for me.

At any rate, I think that to improve as a writer I need to get over this knee-jerk evasion to anything I’ve already written, and I read an interview with Louise Erdrich recently that gave me an idea for how to get started with that. She claimed that she never has a master narrative in mind when she starts writing. Instead she writes bit-by-bit, sometimes prose and sometimes poetry, until she starts to see patterns between the fragments and weaves them into a story. Other times she takes completed stories that she doesn’t like and scraps them for individual short stories or transplants parts into longer works. I’m not sure that I could ever write an entire novel with that method, but I like her idea that old works still have value. All of the old stories that I thought were better off forgotten now seem more like my family’s basement: full of garbage, sure, but with some real value hidden deep inside it. That’s part of the reason why I won’t be doing archival Monday posts regularly anymore: my old writing suddenly seems a lot more precious than I thought when I started this blog, and I want to hold onto it.

As for the novel that I finished last night, I put the final draft and all my notes in an old shoebox, sealed it with duct tape, put a warning on the top telling me not to open it until December 2019, and put it in my closet in a place where I hope that I won’t notice it. It might seem like I’m falling back on bad old habits, putting it out of my mind for the next year, but sealing it away actually makes it feel like to a promise to myself that I’ll return to it, eventually. And then I’m going to make that damn story work, I swear.

Mutilated Text

Back in October when I wrote nineteen opening lines for a writing prompt, when I was running out of ideas midway through I just rearranged the words on the back of my student ID. Since then, I’ve tried experimenting by making reordering sentences into something new. I let myself change various elements of a word like form, tense, or pluralization (for example, the noun “players” could become the verb “play”), but kept myself limited to the words on the page. The results probably aren’t too impressive in themselves, but it’s an exercise I’d recommend for any writer. When you take out a blank page or open an empty text document, you have hundreds thousands of words to choose from. So many options can get intimidating, so we writers all too often fall back on clichés in language or storytelling. Constricting myself to a couple unpoetic words on the back of a napkin forced me to look carefully at every word and consider its value in a way I don’t think I ever would have otherwise. Anyway, here they are:

• Mica plates the loose clergy and offers all as food for the cash-funded pious. (From the St. Paul’s Episcopal Church bulletin)
• Manufactured friends offer free college! (From the text on the back of a Grinnell College Napkin)
• The key guard’s beltings surpress gnome waggling rings. (From page 94 of The Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook: Fifth Edition).
• Control your creature-horrors, and you control Critchlow, liege of the blue and green coast. (From the Magic: The Gathering card “Murkfiend Liege”)
• Speak legendary, Zegana! Speak among the creatures, on the battlefield, with the greatest power, the greatest control! (From the Magic: The Gathering card “Prime Speaker Zegana”)
• Sacrafice the library, search the land, the wilds, and find the shape of nature. (From the Magic: The Gathering card “Evolving Wilds”)
• Why ask for trust and money in Tobias? Remember, he has left  Gabael in rage and death. (The book of Tobit, 4:1-2)

Anticlimax

In an odd coincidence of scheduling, I’m going to be writing the final scenes of the novel that I’ve been planning and writing for the past four months at the same time as I’m taking finals. At first this seems like a nice way for things to work out: just as all the plot threads and characters arcs that I’ve spent so long planning converge in the climactic episodes, my classes will be reaching a similar kind of conclusion. But I’m not exactly looking forward to it. Part of the reason is because I tend to get into high-intensity writing binges during the end of the story, and I just don’t have time for that during finals week. The larger reason, though, is that I know that the two won’t line up as nicely as I would like. Unless I veer wildly off from my plot map, my story is going to follow a nicely laid out wave of rising and falling action which will hopefully leave the reader, or at least me, with a firm sense of closure. If that’s what I’m hoping for my semester too, then I’m damned to disappointment.

The disconnect between stories and real life has been bugging me ever sense I started reading the Harry Potter books back in elementary school. While I understood that the magic was fiction, I unconsciously expected that my school years would follow the basic plot beats of the novels. And for the most part they did: summer ended, I went to school, I took some classes, there was some drama between my friends and some vague foreshadowing of dark events just outside of sight. But then the last days of school came and went without a master of evil magic arriving for a showdown that tied up all the themes and mysteries of the past year. Instead, final exams came and went, I got stressed and then calmed down, and things ended.

I know that it shouldn’t be surprising that life isn’t particularly well paced, since there isn’t any writer watching over my life to make sure that it conforms to the three-act structure. But, when you live surrounded by stories from childhood, you start to expect that life should follow the tropes of fiction. Sometimes it felt like I was stuck in a poorly written world, waiting for whoever was in charge of my story to die so someone with an iota of narrative intelligence could take over.

And, when I realized that my writer, pathetic as he was, was going to cling onto his worthless life with everything he had, I started trying to write my own climax into my year. I would pretend that final exams were the difference between life and death for me and listen to the soundtrack from boss fights in video games as I studied. I would even try to identify the villain in my year’s story who it would be my duty to confront before things wrapped up (though usually I chickened out before actually facing them, which is probably a good thing, because most of my villains turned out to be pretty decent people in the long run).

I lost sleep and sanity worrying that finals week would be the moment that my whole life had been leading up to. When I turned in my last exam, it really did feel like I’d slain some kind of monster. But the feeling only lasted a couple of seconds. In minutes I was just looking forward to having an evening free from studying, and within a week of vacation I was already bored.

It should go without saying that I’m glad that I don’t live in a story. Most characters in the fiction that I read and write go through more trauma and stress than any human being should ever have to suffer. Moreover, if my life were a story, then what happens after the last page? Even if it was happy ending, there’s no way that I could live in the kind of euphoria that you feel at the end of a novel forever. Eventually, it would get boring.

I suspect that I’m the only one who has grown his life around expectations that life reflects fiction. Actually, I know that I’m not. In my Victorian Literature seminar, I learned that nearly every novel written in the Victorian era ended with a marriage, especially if the protagonist was a single woman. I might think that the way fiction brainwashed me is bad, but it must have been worse for a Victorian woman, learning from the cradle that marriage is the culmination of everything in your life, only to be left wondering “What comes next?” after the ceremony.

I don’t want to say that fiction is evil or manipulative or that we’d be better off without it,  and I really don’t want to discard the concept of the linear plot entirely because, even if it doesn’t  perfectly reflect life, it’s so damn satisfying. Maybe all that I can say is that it’s worth it to think about these things every so often, and to give a little thanks that life keeps on going, even after the final scenes of the latest arc.

A Memorial Service For the Novel That Philip Kiely and I Tried to Co-Write

For the past two months my friend Philip Kiely and I have tried to write a novel together about a group of college students who run a semi-popular Youtube channel and discover a hidden community of aliens. We did a lot of planning and had an very detailed plot worked out (I think the plot-map shows that maybe we went a little overboard on that front), but we still couldn’t get the project to work out. Last night we had a conversation about it and realized that, as much as we both loved the story, taking on an expansive collaborative novel as novice writers was like skipping to the boss battle before you finish the first level of the video game. So, in honor of our novel’s untimely passing, I’m posting my prototype for the first scene. I wrote the first draft and Philip cleaned up the prose and made the technology more realistic.

Nick Pecka learned early on that you can never get rich enough that you don’t have any problems, since as soon as you have enough base wealth to cover food and water and shelter, you start making up really silly needs for yourself, like love and self-actualization and the creation of a flying airsoft gun/infrared sensor shaped like a cyclops-bird’s head. Even being around people with enough money to choose their own dilemmas can bring your own needs into a new tier of silliness, as Nick found out when, in March of that year, he had been recruited by his affluent friends and became immediately invested shooting video to chronicle extravagances in engineering such as their flying, shooting, one-eyed bird’s head project. He had spent the summer wandering around the edges of the group working in the abandoned bank they used as the headquarters for their engineering Youtube channel and made vague noises and hand gestures to make it seem like he was helping. He couldn’t help, because making a propeller-headed attack bird requires a lot of engineering and artistic knowledge, none of which his three years of studying Romantic-era poetry gave him.

There was something deeply satisfying in seeing them work. There was Jeff Nash’s technical jargon about PSI and RPM and Brook Gramarosa Ziegler’s artistic jargon about the surreal fusion of organic and mechanical elements and such artistic language that didn’t mean anything from the interns, who were pretty clearly just contributing enough brain power and muscular strength to get paid. It hadn’t been clear to him at first, but after the long summer Nick understood that Teresa Williams wove the whole thing together, synthesizing all the random ideas into a single vision, a single product, a single, supremely disturbing bird’s head. It was subtle, the cutting motion of her hand to stop someone when they were rambling or lightly nudging one idea a little closer to another, but Jeff could see that she was playing them like one of those mob bosses in the in infinite stream of 1920s crime novels he’d been subjected to by well-meaning grandparents while growing up.

“What do you think of Bella’s new hairstyle?” Brook asked, petting the drone’s green mane.

“You’re not really calling it Bella,” Nick said.

“Yeah, the name really speaks to me,” Brook said, “have you been calling it something else?”

“That creepy flying nightmare,” Nick said, “or, Deathbird. Winged felt-of-hell. Birdman Cyclops.”

“You’re just jealous that she looks prettier than you,” Brook said. Nick winced.

After another few minutes of tinkering, Nick had his shots framed and the others had the disturbing thing running. It would look pretty weird if it were just the functional parts: a four propellers sticking out of a mess of metal and plastic, with the lens of an infrared sensor settled just below the rotor and the orange-tipped barrel of an airsoft pistol just below that. But Brook wouldn’t settle for purely functional, so she’d fit a sharp, slightly open beak over the pistol barrel, made the lens look like a single bloodshot eyeball, and covered the rest of it with furry green fabric. The end result was a beheaded cyborg monster, pure nightmare fuel. This was Brook’s surreal style, and by extension had become their channel’s style, which made it a little less family friendly than some of the other builders on the web, but a whole lot more distinctive.

The idea was that the bird’s head would detect signals coming from small circuits inside balloons and shoot and pop them. In its final form, the drone would zip across town and shoot balloons miles apart, but they hadn’t found the time to navigate the legal and moral grey area of sending a dangerous, unregistered, and deeply unnerving automated flying machine out into a highly populated area, so for now they were keeping it to a limited test: four balloons, one in each corner of the bank. The creepy robot wouldn’t have to fly more than a couple of feet to hit each target.

“Hey, wait,” Nick said as the group set up for the initial test. “You know we don’t start until the camera is rolling.”

“It’s not really that important,” said Jeff. “It’s just a quick test.”

“Yeah, but say it goes psycho and shoots Teresa’s head off?” he said. “Don’t you think that’d fit pretty well into the blooper reel?”

“Sure,” Jeff said, “I’ll go get the mop.”

As Jeff headed for the large plastic bin labeled “cleaning” in the stacks against the wall, the interns filled up balloons, Teresa readied the drone, and Nick got the camera trained on Teresa. The lighting was a little too dim, so he propped open the door out into Meredith main street. 

“You ready?” Teresa asked. Nick nodded, started the camera, and Teresa turned on the drone.

It rose into the air, then just hung there for a second, rotors whirring but everything else completely still as its turret and eyeball stared Teresa down. Through the high-definition preview lens on The Good Camera, Nick saw little parts began to break away from the machine’s tiny vibrations. The thin material that made up the eyeball cracked, slightly at first, then deeper, so half of the white hemisphere hung off, revealing the mechanisms underneath. The green fabric that made up its skin tore in random spots. The bottom jaw of its beak clattered to the bank’s marble floor.

Teresa turned to the camera, an unusual note of concern in her voice. “Should we-”

Then the drone shot forward. Teresa screamed as the rotor tore a bloody streak across her cheek, more in shock than pain. The rest of the crew was paralyzed as the bizarre little machine went rogue, but, acting on pure adrenal instinct, Nick sprinted after it as it whizzed out the door. On his way out he picked up a second airsoft pistol, one that they’d bought when they considered making the bird head double-barreled. There was something unusually natural in his action, like a machine working just right for the very first time, as he slipped the clip in, cocked the gun, and flipped off the safety in time with his step.

In a few long-legged strides he was out on main street. The drone hadn’t gone very far horizontally, only across the road and over to the next sidewalk square, but it had gained two stories of elevation, going on three, and soon it would be disappear above the roofs and their project would be lost to whatever error in programing the stupid thing was following.

It was still all new instinct for Nick, pleasant instinct, as he stepped out into traffic and raised the gun. The screeching brakes and honking horns and swearing drivers shouting that they’d almost run him over were just background noise, a cinematic score to set the mood. The only sound that really mattered was the sharp pop as the plastic pellet sped from the gun into the drone’s rotor and the crash, muffled somewhat by the drone’s artificial flesh, as it hit the sidewalk. 

As Nick approached it, the sounds around him faded from pleasant noise to simply void. His victory was silent, save for the mechanical whirring from the dying machine’s weak spasms. Nick picked it up by the rotor the way you’d hold a freshly caught fish and, smiling, showed it off to his friends, who were gawking from the bank’s open door. In a surprising show of quick thinking, Jeff had picked up the camera and aimed it straight at Nick. Even if he never put the footage online, Nick was glad it existed and hoped that Jeff had caught the badass moment of him standing in traffic and making his perfect shot.

Then a single, slightly wary voice punctured all the glorious silence. “Sir, could you please drop the weapon and the, um, whatever the other thing is.”

“Yeah,” said Nick with a sad smile. “Sure, officer.”