Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza

It's been far too long since I was able to share my non Tolkien related works with you guys and gals. I spent many a meandering hour reading through everyone's poetry threads, envious but enthralled by the scopcræftsmanship displayed by the myriad talented masters. I was always able to give humble offerings of poetry that, looking back, where rather typical of the angsty teen I was. Over my years away from the Plaza, I sharpened skills here and there, learning to be a better writer, poet, and storyteller. I missed the Plaza, I missed all the writers and poets coming together and sharing what they had created in a nurturing, growth inducing environment.
Over the years too, my styles morphed, changed, and shifted. I began to focus on horror stories, weird stories, stories about things happening to people that defied explanation. I even learned how to write a short story instead of believing everything had to be an epic length masterpiece. I learned to tell stories with as few words as possible.
The story below is an example of all those, I hope. It's unlikely to see publication anywhere at the moment, flash fiction being notoriously difficult to sell, so I thought I would give it to you guys, as a thank you for all the years that you've inspired me and urged me to do better.
Hopefully this new thread will find me writing some new poetry that isn't quite so angsty but has that same powerful, dark voice. Thank you all once again!


My father and I are avid hikers. We’ve done nearly hiking trail in New Mexico. We started early, one of my first memories was camping out in the Sandias. My dad is an instructor at the local junior college. He teaches backpacking and camping. He’s the type of man that can disappear into the wilderness with little more than a jug of water and a good pair of hiking boots and reappear a week later at the opposite end of the state with a smile on his face.
Anyways, we were going to go for a backpacking trip to celebrate the new job I had gotten that Friday, I was going to be the head Librarian for the El Paso Public Library System, my dream job. We were going to hike Wheeler Peak and have a glass of rosé at the summit. We hadn’t been able to see much of each other in the last year so I was excited for this trip. I had canceled plans with my girlfriend in order to have the weekend clear. I wasn’t sure when the next time I was going to be able to go off for a weekend like this. I was going to enjoy this.
We started early in the morning. We were going to have a long drive from Lovington to Taos. We were up at 4:00, packed and ready to get on the road by 4:30. For the first hour or so, we didn’t talk. He drove and I sat in the passenger seat and watched the world go by. The country through central New Mexico isn’t really remarkable in the daylight; it’s flat, vast, and empty. Every now and then I could see a great hulking tumbleweed rolling and bouncing across the road. We stopped at a gas station and filled our coffee cups. The sun was came up and finally we began to speak. That was our ritual. We never spoke while the sun was down. I wonder why that is. We never really spoke about anything with substance, no deep philosophical debates or anything We might talk about sports, about the current trend in science fiction, or stories from our last hiking trip.
This time wasn’t any different. Looking back, I wish we had talked about something. Anything. I wish we had talked about my new job, or what my plans with my girlfriend were, or what he wanted to do after retirement. Well…
We drove on for a few more hours, driving through the countryside and Artesia, we planned on stopping on Cloudcroft on the way up to Taos. There’s a restraunt that sells the most amazing pies but the lines are so long you have to get there super early, otherwise you’ll be standing around for hours. We got there, got a cherry pie and put it in the cooler. We were all set for a great trip. Until we came to Hope. Hope isn’t a place most people have heard about. Barely anyone here in Artesia knows anything about it. It’s barely a blip on the radar. Looking back, it’s really ironic name. For my father and I though, it was a great stopping place. We pulled into a parking lot beside the firehouse. It was empty. The whole town was empty. Hope was a single street with a firehouse, a grocery store, something that might have passed for a school, and a few houses. Nothing was open. There were no people. There were never any people. It wasn’t a ghost town, supposedly there were people that lived here, but we never saw them. We made a game of it once, the person who saw a living person in Hope would get to choose lunch and dinner for the entire trip.
My dad stepped out of the car, lit a cigarette, and began walking around to stretch his legs. I stepped out too, finishing off the last few drops of coffee while watching the sun rise in the sky. We talked for a moment about what the plans were. He was like that, he would plan and plan and double check and triple check. We would hike through the morning, set up camp at the base of Wheeler Peak, and make our ascent. We’d be at the summit in mid afternoon and back at basecamp for dinner.
I watched the sky again, it was a cloudless morning so it seemed to stretch on forever. I think I understand why they call it Big Sky Country up north. If you look at it too long, you could wig out and lose your mind trying to understand how big it is. The sky was so blue, bluer than I can remember ever seeing it. I wonder, now, if that should have meant something.
I turned to look at my dad, he was nearly finished with his cigarette. He took a last, long drag on it and flicked the embers out.
Then sky opened. I don’t know how to describe it, saying it opened isn’t right but I don’t know what is right. The sky just opened up behind him. I tried to call out to him but there was a lump in my throat. I couldn’t shout. I couldn’t even breath. I just watched as my father was just swallowed up. That’s not really the right word, but I don’t know the right word for what I saw. You’d think I would, being a librarian, but what I saw, I couldn’t understand, I can’t put it into words. The sky just swallowed up my father. He was there one moment, smiling in anticipation of getting back on the road, and then he was gone. There was no wind, no thunder. There was a whoosh of sound, and then nothing. He dissolved, melted, evaporated. I don’t know the word. None of it is right. It didn’t make any sense. He was just gone.
I don’t know how long I stood there. It must have been just a moment. I was in shock. My father had just been swallowed up by the sky in front of my eyes. How was I supposed to act? Once my shock wore off I searched the area, called, screamed my head off. Nothing. No one came out of anywhere. I was completely alone. I broke down and cried, again I had no idea what to do, I had no idea what had just happened. There was no sign of my father, nothing but the very tip of the cigarette, still smoldering.
I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. I can’t think which is worse.
I can’t look at the sky anymore, I’m afraid of what I might see.

So I've never been a horror fan-- but granted I mainly mean mainstream horror, and things like Saw, etc. My over active imagination means I don't sleep if I watch things like that-- but I've always been intrigued by the more sci-fi, strange, absurd, thriller / mind games type side of things.

I've never really mastered the short story-- I keep plugging away at novels, and I think I've written one or two short stories in my time-- but I really appreciate getting to see more examples of the form. I really enjoyed this. I mean, that's odd to say about something that captured such a feeling of emptiness and blank horror-- but this kind of thing is fascinating. The ghost town like feel you describe here also reminds me of when I took a road trip to Red Rocks Nevada for a rock climbing trip one spring break. And that feeling of going through a mostly empty town, especially one that feels like it once was, in the middle of nowhere.. erggg.

Also-- I haven't actually read anything on this site yet, so maybe it's foolish to recommend it, but my partner has been really enjoying it and occasional shares some of it with me. It's on my list to dig into; and based on your interests, I was curious if you've stumbled across it before?

I reeeeally like the way all of the ordinary comforting details in the first half of this piece lull you into a false sense of security. You get a sense that everything might be okay--maybe this is just going to be a story about a guy and his dad taking a nice hike and connecting a little with each other. I had honestly forgotten about the title by the midpoint and settled in. But then the ghost town tips you off that something is not right, only to have that final moment creep right up on you.

This was a really effective piece--well done on the understated tension and that subtle build right from the beginning to the endpoint. Pacing like that is something I'm forever trying to achieve, and it's *hard*!

I kinda forgot I had this little thread up. Whoops!

@Lucifer it might surprise you to learn I hate a lot of modern horror like Saw, Final Destination, all the slasher film series. None of them have any sort of interest for me. Now films like the VVitch, Midsommar, and Lighthouse? Those are my jams! The more I try to write, the more I've actually come to realize short stories are a lot easier to deal with. I don't have to devote myself to a ton of backstory and detail and worldbuilding. If I can make something tense in 10,000 words or less I feel like I've done my job. I haven't seen the site before but it can't hurt to check it out. :smiley8: Thanks for stopping by!

@Thalionwen This is probably the only piece of flash fiction I've done that actually has a good sense of pacing I agree it's reeeeally hard to get that right. It's nice little train ride through rural New Mexico then boom! The sky wants to eat you. It's Weird, but in a good sense. And of course, it's based on a true story. :smiley10:

Up next, if possible with the way my brain is working, I'm going to try my hand at a few sonnets. Stay tuned!

Glad you meandered back in again! XD

I haven't watched those that you mentioned, but I think (if my overactive imagination can handle them-- I'll do daytime watching and hide behind my cats or something), the films you mention sound a bit more up my alley. I've really enjoyed things in the psychological vein, and just eerie and/or fantasy/sci-fi stuff. X-files, stuff like that. Don't know that many of the things I think of would directly be horror, but I like things that are horror adjacent, if that makes sense?

@Frostbite
As a fan of Ray Bradbury and scifi/thriller shorts, I really enjoyed this one. Your details at the beginning made me think it was your memory, or at least places you're familiar with. Everything was calm until the event, which I was not expecting. In the end, I wish there was more, I wish there were answers, but the main character never really got answers either. I hope to read more from you later.

@Frostbite - I loved this. I honestly got lost picturing New Mexico and was wondering how much this is based on reality when WHAM. I love that the reader gets to experience the shock in a way that mirrors the narrator's. Also, really nice play on "the sky opened"! I was expecting a storm for sure. Pls share more!

I've honestly been meaning to comment on this piece for *a while* and then... *waves hand vaguely at all the rest of life*

I do have some more technical constructive crit I could give you if you want, but it's a bit detailed for posting in a comment on the Plaza. So if you want that, shoot me a .doc/.docx copy of this (email or discord is fine) and I'll do an actual critique.

I love all the little details you drop, about the trip, about the scenery, about the places that they stop on the way to their destination. And I love that you don't try to explain what happened, just let the character's confusion and shock tell the horror of it, vs. actually trying to describe it. Sometimes that gives the actual greater horror effect (though I'm sure you know this well). Well done!

@Eorlana Corvys I'm a huge fan of Bradbury too! Being compared to him at all is flabbergasting so thank you so much! A lot of the story is actually based on a trip I took with my dad a few years back through the same "living ghost town" in the story but thankfully the sky did not open and swallow either of us.

@Silmarë I used to think I spent too long trying to set up the "oh crap!" moment but if it works for the reader then who am I to argue?

@Taethowen I will absolutely take up on that offer, but probably not for this story. I wrote it and set it aside for a while then found out it was very, very similar to an episode of "The Magnus Archives" coincidentally enough so I think trying to do too much polishing on it might end up being for naught. I think Christoper Lee said it best on the FOTR commentary track when he said "what goes unseen/undescribed is often more horrific and terrifying"

I actively forgot that I had a few stored imagines on my computer from one of my many hiking trips up to Colorado and since photography is the coolest medium on CoLP I thought I might as well show you all what I've got. It's not much, I have little to no skills when it comes to photography and even less when it comes to equipment (this was taken with an iPhone 8).

A little bit about the photo: this one was taken in the summer of 2019, I think (based on the surroundings) this was taken in Lovell Gulch near Woodland Park, Colorado or perhaps it was taken a little further down the road in Mueller State Park, I can quite remember which location.

Anyway, there it is!

I think you spent the right amount of time on setting up the scene - I was immersed and then totally shocked!

Yay you for posting photos in the Cottage! I love that this is in black and white - somehow, it makes the textures stand out a lot to me. I miss piney hikes! The closest I've been to this spot is Mt Cutler near Colorado Springs. Such a lovely area for hiking.

Ditto what @Silmarë says about the textures really standing out in black and white! I also love the blurry bit of rock right at the bottom. It makes you feel like you're peeking out to see the landscape.

It started on Monday. I blearily drove my car through the winding streets of the neighborhood, my eyes barely able to focus on the road in front of me, let alone anything else around me. It was 4 in the morning, the coffee I’d drank hadn’t kicked in yet. I was running late for work. Sometimes I notice how dark it is outside, I didn’t today. The neighborhood I live in is new and developing, so it’s sparse, with long passages of darkness from streetlight to streetlight. Every now and then I swear I can see something shift and move under those lights, I swear I could see something running or waving at me but by the time I turn around to look, everything looks normal. Just the interceptions of an exhausted mind, right? It must be. I made it to the first or many stop signs. It’s the middle of the night so there’s no one coming or going but I’m the cautious type that still obeys all the traffic signs. As I pulled to a stop, my headlights caught something, something big. The thing was huge and misshapen, asymmetrical and looming. But then the light shifted around and suddenly it was just a rock. Just a rock. The size was all wrong though. What I had seen was much, much larger than this rock. This rock was linear and definable. The thing I had seen in the darkness? It was neither of those things. I turned onto the highway and the shadow, the thing I saw out of the corner of my eyes melted as the streetlights became more and more common. Light drove away the thoughts of the strange and the uncanny. Work was normal, boring and formulaic. I went home, ate, went for a run and went to bed.

Then it was Tuesday. Tuesday I was a little less tired and the coffee seemed to work a little faster. I went down the same empty, winding roads. The winds were particularly bad this morning, a consequence of living closer to the mountains I suppose. There were times I thought the wind actually had a voice in it. I slowed the car and turned down the music. I didn’t believe there was anything in the sound of the wind, of course. But it was just unusual enough that I felt like I needed to examine it. I was in a hurry though and couldn’t slow down for too long. I had taken too long getting dressed and as it stood, I was going to be at least ten minutes late. My mind was too focused on getting to work, driving through the great, yawning emptiness of my neighborhood. It wasn’t until I got to work, got behind my desk and turned on my computer that it really dawned on me. I had heard something in the wind. I remember the car getting buffeted by a roaring gale and in that blast was… the sound of my name. It was impossible, illogical, and foolish, but I was certain. So certain in fact that for the rest of the day I was jumpy, nervous, and irritable. I managed to finish my notes for the meeting on Friday, but that was it. On the drive home I was a nervous wreck. I cut a few people off, got honked at, and nearly ran a red light. Once I got home, I popped open a few cans of the local brewery and tried to relax, to tell myself that I hadn’t heard anything, that my overactive imagination was just looking for an outlet.

Wednesday. I slept fitfully the night before. I remember staring at the ceiling, turning onto my left side, then my right, the back to my left then the alarm on my phone told me it was time to wake up. I could barely see anything as I stumbled around my house. The walls felt like they were in the wrong place. They looked at me differently like I was the one in the wrong place. I had my coffee, but in my tired state I couldn’t finish it before it got cold. I hate cold coffee. The drink was slow and dark. The streetlights flickered at the first stop sign and I could swear I saw something behind the pole. It was barely for an instant, but it was big, at least ten feet tall, and wrapped up in the blackest shadows I’d ever seen. I felt like I was going to throw up. My stomach lurched. I blew through the other three stop signs, driving as fast as I could manage without careening off the road. It was probably just a trick of the light, but I was in no mood to debate myself about the validity of what I’d seen or hadn’t seen. I just wanted to get out of there and into the city limits. Once I was there, I would be safe. I don’t know why I thought that. It came from the same irrational place that told me that I had seen something behind a streetlight, heard my name being called by an angry wind, and seen something hulking beast that turned out to be a rock. That day I felt like I was moving through molasses. If I didn’t know any better, I could have sworn I was still drunk. My reactions seemed to move half as fast as everyone else. I wanted to be out of there as soon as I could. I didn’t respond to any of the emails I received; half a dozen were from my supervisor, checking in and making sure I was ready for the meeting on Friday. I had forgotten all about the meeting. But by the time the clock told me it was time to go I didn’t care. I just wanted to barricade myself inside my house and shut out the world and whatever was out there, lurking just outside the edge of my vision, breathing down my neck and whispering things just garbled enough to misunderstand.

Thursday was terrible. My nerves were shot from the myriad nightmares I’d had the night before. I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin, I couldn’t sit still but I didn’t want to move. The house was completely alien to me. The walls were not only in the wrong places but were the wrong color and texture as well. The light fixtures were all wrong too. They have off too much light, blinding my already fragile psyche. The coffee tasted more bitter than usual, I had to pour it out. I hate wasting coffee like that. I was halfway started on making another cup when I realized the time was getting too late. I should have called in, said I was sick with the flu or something, but that thought didn’t occur to me until I was already at work. A few of my coworkers noticed and decided it was necessary to tell me I looked like shire. Thanks guys. There was someone watching me all day. I swear it. The hairs on the back of my neck never settled. I was so anxious that the blinking lights on the side of my computer made me think there was something inside it, moving around, watching me through the screen just as I was staring at it. My head hurt, my skin was cold, I wanted to find a closet somewhere and sleep for an hour. The sensation of being watched followed me home, from the office to the gas station to the liquor store to dry cleaners and home. People looked at me differently. They looked at me like I was half there, half not there, like they couldn’t quite decide if I was a hallucination or not. The girl in the liquor store looked like I was about to jump over the counter and grab her. I barricaded myself in my home again and drank an entire bottle of whisky. My gut was churning but I wanted to get rid of that awful sensation of being watched. I checked everywhere in my house, ever closet, every room, every cabinet. I was alone. But I wasn’t. Even at home I felt like someone was looking over my shoulder, breathing down my neck. A dinner of cold pizza over the kitchen sink and I locked myself in my bedroom to sleep.

I woke up Friday and didn’t know where I was, didn’t know who I was. For a terrifying minute I wanted to scream and hide under the bed. The room spun around me. I tripped and fell, stumbling into the wall with a hard, bone shifting thud. I wanted to cry. It hurt so much. I stumbled my way to the bathroom, then back out. My house was utterly foreign to me. I didn’t recognize anything anymore. Was I still in the same house? I managed to make a cup of coffee that tasted decent, even managed to shove down a bagel. It was a big day after all. My gut was roiling by the time I got dressed and headed out. It was raining. Each time I tried to use my windshield wipers the water smeared more and more. I had to slow down to a crawl just to feel like I wasn’t going to careen off the edge of the road and into the arroyo. The streetlights were flying saucers, beaming alien light down onto the distorted sidewalk. The rain made it look like I was moving in and out of this universe, passing halfway into another reality. My breathing was already ragged, the asthma was acting up in the worst way at the worst time. No matter what I did, I couldn’t take a full, deep breath. The sensation of being watched was back. I could feel it with every fiber of my being. My skin was goosefleshed and clammy. I swear I could feel something in the car with me. I passed through the first stop sign, looked at the streetlight where I thought I’d seen something a few days ago and, in a flash of lightning, saw a horrid, disembodied grin. I wanted to scream but all that came out of my lips was a desperate whimper. I came to the speed radar that usually told me I was driving 5 to 10 miles over the prescribed speed limit. Today though it told me I was driving almost 10 miles under the limit. As I neared it, the numbers began to change. They went up rapidly from 30 to 40 then to 50, I looked in the rear-view mirror.

I grinned back.

I checked everywhere in my house, ever closet, every room, every cabinet. I was alone. But I wasn’t.

As someone who can be quite jumpy when alone, I related to this part so hard. In seriousness, I love how you built a rising sense of paranoia and panic throughout The Hidebehind. Like the narrator, I had no idea what was what by the end.

And, of course, big for the sonnet! "Creeping, creeping, slowly it sloughs forward" is *such* a good line!

@Tarawen thank you! A lot of stuff in "The Hidebehind" is based on little inconsistencies I see from time to time in my own life, a weird shadow here, a blur out of the corner of my vision there, a feeling of being watched, the not knowing who or where I am has been happening all too frequently so I thought it best to try and de-internalize that trauma and write about. Is it successful? Jury's still out

Anyway, I found another photo and decided to play with the color a little bit. I might not be as bone deep bad at this as I thought I was (unless it's trash in which case I am as bad as I think I am). I tried to turn the background to black and white and leave the little bear in color, unfortunately the bear is pretty light in color so the contrast might not pop as much as I was hoping it would.

Post-Blip Edit: I think my intention with this piece was to both give props to all the creepy characters that I love in literature and detail how they effected me but at the same time give the reader a creeping sense of "this writer is not right in the head" and uncomfortableness. In the end, this was a rough draft but I think overall the story worked okay. I need to do better with the transition from autobiography to fiction. The first three letters were pretty good, but the last three weren't a strong (maybe because they aren't actually literary characters) and I need to try again and blend them all better. What do you think?


Dear Sauron,
You were the first that I encountered, curled up on the couch watching the Rankin/Bass version of Return of the King. You were nebulous, scary, menacing, and enigmatic. I wasn’t scared of you though. I never have been. I knew you were “the bad guy” but I never quite understood the reasons for that. You had orcs and ringwraiths and trolls and spiders but what did that all mean? I was 8 at the time so I had no idea what it meant. But you took a piece of my soul that Saturday morning and I’ve been following your story ever since. You’ve never grown less enigmatic and twisted, no matter how much I look into your story and try to unravel the psyche that is you, the Abhorrent One. What makes you so abhorrent? What makes you so vile? You were the first encounter I had with the shadows. I found them welcoming, thanks to you. Other people ran wild, screaming with terror, but I walked forward, curious and inquisitive. My parents thought there was something wrong with me that I connected more with you, with Gollum that with Frodo or Aragorn. But they didn’t understand the shadow, not the way I do. You woke up something in me, something that craved the darkness, looked for answers in the Void rather than the starry lights of heaven. They call the shadow you cast evil, but what is evil? No one can give a satisfying answer. You live inside me now as a mythical figure, something vaguely human shaped but without the trappings (and failings) of human morality and ethical quandaries. You have more in common the beings of Olympus that you do with the characters of Middle-Earth. You are real but bound up in archetypes and foils and parables.

Dear Cthulhu,
I was older when I first met you, older than most that encounter you. I had passed my “angsty teen years” by the time I picked up a copy of Call of Cthulhu. The draw you had on me was different because of that. It was not an immature, sophomoric urge to sow destruction and nihilist chaos that fascinated me. You were something other, something beyond. Your tentacled mass of corpulent madness was a glimpse of shadow that I had not encountered yet. Sauron, in his infinite mystery, could be quantified and measured. You could not. You are utterly definable being, a creature beyond creation and beyond comprehension. The man-made myths of Satan and Hades and Ereshkigal were pale imitations of you, facsimiles of facsimiles meant to shroud the truth of a nihilistic, uncaring, turbulent world. You are the shatterer of myth and illusion. The world crumbles before you, reality shimmers and ruptures with you. I, too, shimmered and ruptured. You took a piece of my soul as I read the story, stole it away while I was distracted by nested storytelling troupes. You’ve never left my mind, always lurking in the darkest recesses, so emmeshed in shadows that it is difficult to tell where they end and you begin. You built an uncomfortableness in the shadows, you infused my reality with truth, horrid and unfathomable as it is. Madness like clacking marbles, teeth like horns. And yet, even you are but a dim cascade of matter compared to the forces of creation and destruction. You, like me, are a reveler in things we cannot fathom, but hope to touch. We commit unspeakable acts in the darkness, hoping to be seen by the emptiness around us.

Dear Judge Holden,
You wear the shape of a human, speak with a human voice, but you are less human that Sauron and Cthulhu. I encountered you in academia, in a college course on Southwestern Literature. You were the antagonist of my favorite novel, Blood Meridian. Unlike the entities before you, you scared me, you deceived me, you made me uncomfortable to read about you. Yet I did, I still do. There is something immeasurably evil about you, as undefinable an evil as those that came before you, but darker and more vibrant. You were nominally human, you speak with authority and tenacity on subjects of morality, death, entropy, and destruction as if you created them. I am not certain, years after reading and rereading and rereading, that you did not create them. Are you Satan? The accuser and opposer of mankind? Are you merely the manifestation of the ills of mankind that it visits upon itself? You are the oil stain on a beautiful canvas, but you are more real than anything than can be painted. Even in your unreality, you are more natural a thing than the trees of the forest. You are malignant inevitability, the crawl of humanity toward an intractable and ignominious end. You rejoice though, in our decline. You predict and pontificate, but you are the driving force of that destruction. Or are you merely our collective consciousness made manifest to callously warn us? You terrify me because you are real, you are palpable and tactile. You are the heart of mankind, and the heart of the Southwest, that place I call my home. You are the violence inherent in this bloody land, but you are the comfort we seek at the end of the day as well. You took a piece of my soul and you twisted it. Where once it was a prism, reflecting light into a thousand shades of life, you cast shadow and my soul reflects the emptiness of the natural and metaphysical landscape.

Dear Tiamat,
You are being with beginning and without end. You are chaos and creation and annihilation. You are the ancient consciousness of man, the fear they held up to the stars and questioned why. You are the dragon that devours, the Ouroboros that keeps the world moving, the conqueror worm that will always have the last laugh. You are primal and feral, you are the entity that birthed the concept of doom into the world, a mighty force of cosmic nihilism. Formless and bodiless, you have existed for so long we can no longer picture what the universe is without you. Chaoskampf, the struggle against chaos. It is what we are told we must contribute to, from our birth to our death we are told we must constantly push against the shadows and the emptiness behind them lest we be overwhelmed and devoured. Yet at the same time, we are told that chaos has already been defeated and order has the rule of the day. How can one, or either be true? There is no order without chaos, there is no life without death. You are the challenge to reality. You were slain to create the world, yet you were already of the world. You are the fly in the ointment of establishment and reason. You are vibrant chaos and disorder, disunity and destruction. You have a piece of my soul, and you whisper words of uncreation to me in the bleakest moments of ecstasy. You are the creation of destruction, the progenitor of emptiness and the myriad ways of death and denial. From you springs forth the magnificent black pools of eviscerative cosmic decay. You are the path of unknowable entropy, the only force in which creativity can thrive.

Dear Faeries,
Everyone thinks they know you, thinks they know who and what you are, but the truth is (if truth is something that can even be gauged) no one knows you. Nothing knows you. You are beyond this world as much as humans are beyond the ants. Imperceptive and intractable, you sway in shadows and watch us. I once thought of you as benign, leftovers from mythology, only to be mined for moralistic lessons on unacceptable adolescent behavior. Yet I was so wrong. My eyes were opened when I read The White People. You are the might watchers, the forms within the shadows that we so desperately want to see. You are the movers and shakers of the earth, but being of a different world, your curiosity can only be sated with our destruction, the more amusing the better. A hint here, a whisper there, you sow seeds of mischief and chaos as though they come naturally to you. You are alien and fascinating, endlessly complex and endlessly unknowable. To try to understand the standards by which you exist is an exercise is foolishness. The endless spiraling labyrinth that is the fae is madness to the mortals you toy with so deliciously. You took a piece of my soul and enshrouded it in darkness so bright that it leaves me breathless. The world of up is down the world of light is shade, the world of reason is madness. You are not wicked or evil, for such mundane terms cannot define such beings of a race that predates the universe that humanity has created. You are the eternal drivers of the wheel, intent on driving us off a cliff for naught but a hearty joke amongst yourselves. You are the chittering, giggling voices we hear in the darkness when we think we are alone, pushing us ever further down the path of gibbering psychosis.

Dear My Own Reflection,
You are me, and I am you. Yet you are not me, and I am not you. You are a being of the past and the future, and I am a being of the present. You are beyond me, existing as an idea and an echo, yet I am beyond you, existing as a physical being. What are we to one another? Rivals, allies, predator and prey, or victim and fool? We cannot exist without one another; we are insoluble and inconsolable. Yet we seek to destroy one another. I wish to destroy you and regain the piece of my soul that you stole from me when I first, naïve and full of light, looked upon a mirror. You were there, hungry, starving, ravenous. You stole a piece of me, and you have used it to watch me, to learn my secrets (even the ones I keep from myself), to mimic my thoughts and emotions. You are a clever creature and I am a foolish golem. Are you me? Am I you? At what point does the poison from the mirror world seep into the waking one? What can you touch, oh malignant monster? You are more terrifying than all the entities before you. You have always been there; you have always seen me. I cannot escape you. You are the shadows that devour, that replace. Are my wrongdoings because of you? Are my triumphs owed to your mechanization? You are silent but you are so loud within my thoughts that I cannot hope to drown you out. Your eyes follow me, reflections of mine, inverted and twisted and sinister. You are not here, yet you never leave my side. You are always a breath away. Yet you are not real, no more real that Cthulhu or Sauron or the characters and myths from stories. Yet you are more real than I am. I know one day you will replace me, one day you will reach through the Loki Glass and touch me. Your touch will burn and freeze, give life and impart death. You are my destruction, yet my salvation must pass through you. You are the emptiness of my soul. You replaced that piece of me you stole with something of yourself. Though you be incorporeal and unreal, you are more present within me than I am. You see through me; my eyes are yours and not my own. You are the reflection, but you are the real me. I am naught but an occupied vessel, build to exist within reflection. I am nothing, you are nothing. We are nothing but air and light and color, given meaning but outside forces beyond our control. You are me, and I am you. Yet you will be the death of me, the death of the entire world.

Post-Blip Edit: A play on the old spiritual "There is a Balm in Gilead", this attempt was meant to turn the premise of the song (and the biblical scripture that inspired it) on it's head. There is no peace or love and solace at the end of the journey when the journey ends at the feet of an unrepentantly cruel deity. There can only be peace in the world of nature, where oneself is the ultimate end of the journey. I couched it in lots of frontera metaphors because, well I'm from La Frontera and it's a landscape that I understand intimately. I think the poem works. I would like to make it longer without tiring the "there is no balm in Gilead" phrase out before the end, turn to poem into a narrative of a protagonist who goes through exactly the sort of transformative experience I described above. I know it needs some work, but in general I am proud of the idea.

One autumn afternoon, Moon Bear was walking through the forest with his friend Panda Bear. They were having a lovely time watching the leaves turn orange and red and brown. They sat by the stream, getting ready to eat lunch when Koala appeared.

“What do you want Koala?” asked Moon Bear, covering his food so that Koala could not steal it.

Koala smiled sweetly and looked at the sun. “I am going to climb this tree so that I can reach the top and eat the sweetest fruit.”

Moon Bear looked at him suspiciously. “Why do you say the sweetest fruit is at the top of the tree? Is it not so that all fruit is sweet?”

“Oh yes,” said Koala who started to climb. “But the sweetest is at the top. Don’t you know this?”

Moon Bear was crestfallen. Moon Bear could not climb trees like Koala. He had never been able to find the fruit at the top of the tree. Yet he did not believe that Koala was telling the truth. Koala was a notorious liar and trickster and magician. He stole the ability to climb trees from Squirrel and changed his name to Ground Squirrel, telling him he was no longer allowed to climb the trees and scamper through the woods.

“I cannot climb trees,” Moon Bear said at last.

“But you do not need to climb trees, dear friend,” said Panda Bear. “We are happy on the ground where we can frolic and roll to our hearts content.”

“But you would like to climb trees, would you not?” said Koala with a devious smile.

“Oh yes I would!” cried Moon Bear. “I would love to climb so I could touch the Moon and say thank you to him for giving me the white mark on my chest. I think it is most handsome.”

“It is indeed very handsome,” said Koala who was crawling over to Moon Bear and Panda Bear. “You should be able to climb trees and see the Moon.”

“But how would we do that?” asked Panda Bear? “Are you going to teach us how to climb?”

Koala laughed cruelly at Panda Bear. “Of course not. I cannot teach you how to climb. And what would be in it for me if I could?”

Moon Bear was perplexed. He so wanted to climb. What could he offer Koala?

“Give me the name Bear, and I will make you able to climb,” said Koala who was now climbing a tree again.

“Give you the name Bear? How do we do that? Shouldn’t you go ask Tiger to do that? He is the king of this land after all.” Panda Bear and Moon Bear both looked enviously as Koala climbed the tree and came back down with a sweet piece of fruit.

“Do you really think I should have to ask Tiger to change my name? I do not think so. He does not like me anyway. I tried to borrow his stripes one day and he cursed me instead to be small and vulnerable.”

It was true. All the animals of the jungle knew about what Koala had tried to do to Tiger. He had tried to steal his stripes and call himself the king. Moon Bear was growing flustered.

“I cannot give you the name Bear.”

“Oh, but you can Moon Bear. If you give me the name Bear, I can make you climb trees.” He continued to eat the fruit from the highest spot on the tree. Moon Bear was getting very hungry and very distracted.

“How can you do that, Koala?”

“It is the magic of exchange, Moon Bear. If you call me Bear, I will be able to make you climb trees. I promise you.”

“How will we know that we can trust you?” asked Panda Bear.

“Because I am promising,” answered Koala who looked wicked and sincere at the same time. “I would never lie to you.”

“What do you think?” Panda Bear asked Moon Bear. “Should we give him the name Bear and be given the ability to climb trees?”

“I think we should,” answered Moon Bear, who desperately wanted to see the Moon.

“Then, dear friend, I think we should.”

They turned together and looked at Koala. “We give you the name Koala Bear.” They both said in unison.

Koala Bear smiled and began climbing the tree. “Why thank you. Goodbye now.” He began to climb faster and faster.

“Wait!” cried Moon Bear. “You promised to give us the ability to climb trees!”

“I did no such thing,” answered Koala Bear who continued to climb.

“Then we say you can no longer come to the forest floor. You will be slow and awkward, and you may only eat the leaves of the tree you are climbing on.”

Koala Bear sneered and tried to eat a piece of fruit. But he was climbing a eucalyptus tree and there was no fruit for him to eat anymore. There were only leaves. He laughed at Moon Bear and Panda Bear. “Is that all? I would have thought bears would have devised a better punishment for being tricked so easily. You will never catch me because I am leaving the jungle. I am going to go to my own island.”

“And on that island, there will only be eucalyptus for you to eat!” said Moon Bear. “And you will never be able to come back because we will all know and tell you that you are not a real Bear, but a trickster who stole the name and was banished.”

Oh my! This is so brilliant! I love the way How the Koala Stole the Name Bear is written; it's very vivid despite how short it is and I can imagine this story illustrated and published. And if I had any drawing skills I'd love to illustrate this. Alas, I do not, but I might try to read this to my niece and nephew - see how they react to it. But this is a wonderful bear story and I'd like more bear stories, please.

Thank you both for your comments!

I'm not certain what I will try to post next. I'm torn between a rough draft opening chapter of a horror novel, some more "poems" or re-adding the edited nature shots from my hiking trip last year. Either way it's certain to be weird and/or bad

No horror today, unless you consider any attempt at poetry horrific and terrible
-------

Spiteful, uncanny
Winds tear across open fields
Malignant, sunlit
A polychromatic scar
The devil has come for tea

My first (perhaps rushed) attempted at a waka poem

For today's exercise in screaming into the audient void I thought I would try something a little different. Right before the palingenesis of NuPlaza in the halcyon days of 2020, before realized just how bad things could actually be, I took a short story class on LitReactor. I highly recommend everyone who enjoys writing, i.e. all of you people, to look into the classes they offer because there is something there for everyone. I'm getting very off topic here, Jorgy is taking control today apparently. Back on topic though, one of the first things the instructor had us do is write 5-6 hooks for different short stories. The hook is the first sentence or two of a story that is meant to capture the attention and push the reader along. I managed in that first assignment, to come up with at least two that weren't terrible (the instructor's words not mine). While I'm not taking the class again (because it's not being offered right now <Frost Edit I lied, apparently, there is a class about to start: Short Story Mechanics>) I still have access to all the assignments from the class so I thought I'd grace you all, or subject you do depending on how you feel about my writing, with some hooks to short stories I've been working on and you can all be my slaves beta-readers. Deal? Hello? Hello? Is this mic on? Dammit, someone unplugged the mic! Oh well, here goes nothing.

Click-Clack
Donnie watched with unblinking eyes as the clothes as the dryer went around and around, around and around; to the outside observer he might have looked hypnotized by the repetitive noises at the laundromat, but he was far from hypnotized, he was focused on the message the sounds were giving him, that's how they contacted him.

A Running Partner
In El Paso there are hundreds of miles of sidewalks and roads perfect for running, jogging, or walking; there are also some areas best avoided. When it comes to recognizing the paths one should not take, it can be hard to see the signs until it is already too late. Nacho finished lacing up his shoes, did some stretching, and was out the door before having decided where it was he would run.

A Bowl of Menudo
In La Frontera, there are many things mothers warn their children to look out for: La Llorona, El Cucuy, the Chupacabra, but the most dangerous of all, the most insidious and the most present, is La Perra Blanca.

Our Lady of Dis
Growing up, I idolized my aunt; she could stand toe-to-toe with the meanest bikers, quote Shelley and Anzaldúa, and out shred any pot-smoking garage band guitarist within a hundred miles. She died when I was a freshman in college; I received a letter, written entirely in Nahuatl, nearly a year later telling me she was alive and that I shouldn’t trust my parents.

The Mardröm
It looked like a child with a skeletal body and a disfigured pair of feet, nobody knew what attracted it or where it had come from, but when it appeared outside Alvin's Diner and walked all the way to the Acevedo house and plopped down on the grass, people knew it was here to stay.

Amethyst Webcap
There's a reason no one actually hears about zombies, if something happened in a big city-- well everyone would know instantly, but there are a hundred thousand little towns with less than a thousand people in them and no one ever hears about anything happening there, ever.

El Paso, Uvalde
Cities whose soil I have touched
Twenty-three, nineteen
I can’t do this s(hit) anymore
These names are too familial

He didn't believe them when they said they'd string him up from his crime, he didn’t believe them when they placed the rope over his neck. Witchcraft wasn't a real crime, not in the 21st century. His shock at the sudden drop from the platform was only mitigated by the awful snap of the rope that threw his near lifeless body to the ground. His survival and the subsequent panic it sent the yokels into served as a soothing balm for his not inconsiderable wrath. He was not a witch, not exactly, and this town in the middle of the New Mexico desert was about to learn what he really was.

It felt like he had been laying there for hours, his muscles suddenly forgetting what they were and how they functioned. He wavered, hunched up and curled over like a gargoyle. The screams, shouts, and alarm of the townsfolk created a protective shell around him. Within that hysteria, despite being the epicenter and cause of everything, he was invisible. Finally, like the snapping of a tree branch, his muscles regained their life and he was moving again.

The wound on his neck throbbed and pulsed. He rubbed it gingerly, wincing as bolts of electricity down his nervous system. Would this injury impede his power? The question that hung in the desert air made him shudder. He raged, trying to send out waves of power into the surrounding air with his mouth contorted in a howl, but nothing came from his throat but coughing air. Pain shivered like cactus needles down his spine and he lost his footing, falling to his knees. One heartbeat. Two. The pain subsided and his breath evened out. In the distance, barely a smudge out on the vast Southwestern horizon, something caught his eye as he stood: a storm was coming, and something was inside it.

He had faced these things a half dozen times now and he was barely into his thirties. They were rare, rare enough that outside a small conclave of troubadour-wizards, no one in history knew they existed. He could feel the hunger from here, a vague sense of greed gnawing at the back of his mind.

Suddenly, he was back in the room with the blue paisley wallpaper, he was ten years old. Sickness was heavy in the air, strangling all sense of hope with a dreadful stench of dry decay. All sound seemed muted, like it was covered by a hundred feet of earth. His uncle was in the bed, papery thin skin covering his cancer ridden body. His uncle was a living corpse. A trembling hand beckoned him over, out of the doorway where he hung back, afraid. He did not want to move, but inexorably he felt his body responding to the summons.

The words of his uncle, wafting through vanilla-scented cigar smoke and heavy with desperate purpose, rang in his ears, surprisingly strong for a man with no life left in him. “It’s our power, your power, that holds them back. That’s your legacy, your meaning.”

They had been over this many times before. He remembered all the stories his uncle told him, about ships that had their whole crew eaten up during a hurricane and the hulk had been left to drift, about towns on edge of a forest that vanished wholesale after falling prey, hikers that got lost up in the mountains, pinned down by bad weather that turned out to be more than just a random thunderstorm. His uncle even tried to connect the Roanoke colony story to the power of these things, an entire colony gone without a trace.

He told him stories about their ancestors too, men and women blessed with the ability to use music as a source of magical power. He went on about the Pied Piper, about a link the god Pan, and someone named Zann that he could only find mention of in a Lovecraft story. He claimed that Nero did indeed fiddle as Rome burned but he did so because the fire was one of these things, an entity that evolved beyond that of a thunderstorm. A group formed back in the old country, France or Germany or someplace, the details often changed, that dedicated itself to fighting the monsters that lived in the maelstroms, a cosmic calling from something beyond to protect the world.

His uncle had forced him to learn an instrument, despite his reticence and distaste. His hands still bore the marks of those early failures, lessons writ in red welts and cigar burns. He had hated his uncle for years. The man was possessed of a single-minded cruelty fueled by a sense of divine fanaticism and he poured his faith and sense of duty on the boy until he was sure he would drown in it. He had virtuoso talent for the violin, but not with people.

Then the cancer came; liver, pancreas, and prostate. A fitting trifecta. It ate away at him rapidly, leaving him an insubstantial husk in less than six months. The boy thought he was about to be rid of his uncle and his cruel music lessons forever.

However, the previous night, a hundred miles away, as his uncle was being devoured, a tornado struck his Oklahoma farmhouse. He had thought it just another storm until he saw the shapes the lightning illuminated in the clouds. He had never known such panic before, he wanted desperately to believe that it was just tricks of the light, his imagination running wild from his uncle’s stories, but he knew. He knew they were all true in that moment. The lightning backlit something huge and terrible, something that this world could not contain. He watched as a dog, barking defiance at the thunder, was suddenly gone, evaporated, dissolved into nothing as he watched. With nothing left to do, he grabbed the nearest instrument he could find, a mandola. It was old, the varnish long worn off, the frets were faded, and the nylon strings looked brittle but it would have to do. It was a family instrument, his mother had played it back when he was barely able to walk, he remembered the songs she would sing with it, old songs in Italian. It called to him now, the caress of the wood felt warm and familiar.

It warbled to life as his fingers danced, twisted, and curled along the instrument’s neck, creating the foundation, a drone that would stand against the power outside. It barely worked, the sound was small and pathetic compared to the claps of thunder that countered it outside. His fear made his hands tremble and the music faltered. The storm grew, he could feel the thing inside reaching for him, fingers from something outside his reality clutching for him. The welts and burns roared to life and his rage ignited for the first time. A fiery brand against an onslaught of darkness, he poured the rage into the music he was creating, the mandola hummed and droned, textures came into his thoughts and expressed themselves through the chirp of the electronic instrument. The storm lessened. His rage, at his uncle and his opponent, continued, howling with life and ascendancy. His power soared and beat it back, pushing it back and swallowing its counterattacks with counterpoints of his own until it died. He believed then.

"You’ve seen them now,” his uncle had said, his voice phlegmy and thin. His eyes were lasers, boring into the boy’s soul. His uncle grabbed him with a desiccated hand. “You know! You know! It’s your duty! Fight the storms! Fight them with your sound!” The dying man broke into a coughing fit so intense the boy thought it would break his frail back. Nurses poured in from nowhere and rushed him out. That was the last time he would see his uncle. That had been two decades ago.

A low rumble brought him back out of his reverie, a sound like the footsteps of a giant. He stared at the dark clouds, still barely a smudge on the horizon for a long moment, he watched as flashes of purple light ignited somewhere within its depths. It might be mistaken for beautiful. He came out of his reverie bit by bit until the screams and shouts of the people around him became almost too loud to bear. He looked up, his eye searching desperately. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for until his eyes locked on a transformer nuzzled into a telephone pole. He sneered, reached out, and closed his fist. An explosion of sparks drowned out any human sound in the area. The low remnants of laughter, tumbled out of his mouth. Another transformer sparked and exploded, then another and another going up the street. The people around him screamed and ran, forgetting the target of their mob rage in their panic. He slumped to the ground, exhausted from his effort.

He only had seconds, he knew, until the town remembered he was there. His throat throbbed as he swallowed, the pain was glass sharp. He stood up falteringly, his legs nearly giving way beneath him again. He stiffened and flexed his back. They had dragged him to the park in search a tall strong tree barely two blocks from the gas station where his car had been left unattended, he could even see from this angle.

He raced to his car on tired feet, dodging into an alleyway and behind a dumpster whenever he heard the sounds of people. Their voices were garbled and indistinct. He was nearly to his car, less than a hundred yards. He took a deep breath, winced, and ran as fast as he could. He was blind to everything but his faded silver car. He couldn’t hear or see anything else around him. The space between them grew smaller and smaller, but in his exhaustion it felt too long, the space expanded and contracted until he overshot the car and ran hard into the gas pump. He howled and kicked it.

Ducking into his backseat, a thought came into his head: leave these superstitious nutbag yokels to their fate. It was moving fast, it would get here soon and begin to feed. Why shouldn’t he let it? This whole ordeal started when child and a middle aged blonde woman had seen him utter a few indecipherable words and make a few peculiar gestures to a broken gas pump that caused part of it to crumble. Accusations flew like wildfire and before he had had a chance to get his bearings to either escape or blow them all to great yucca plant in the sky they had him strung up. These hinterland morons didn’t deserve his protection, his magic, his power.

The thought was honey-sweet and liberating but it was poison all the same. Say he did leave them to their fate, this cloud abomination would devour them and it would grow more powerful, it might even change its form, something he couldn’t track down, couldn’t find again. No, he’d save them from this thing because it was his enemy. He would burn this town to the ground in the aftermath though. This one stop light town would pay the price for his wounds. He chuckled, savoring the thought, but the sting of the wound threw him back out into the real world.

His mandola sat next to him, his only companion for the last twenty years, a massive crack splitting the neck in half. The strings, customized bronze with charms inlayed, had been ripped from the pegboard and hung limp. He stared at his instrument, his only connection to his mother, in shock, his body went cold and his stomach twisted in disbelief, a whimper escaped his dry, cracked lips.

His rage, no matter how potent, would be completely ineffectual without its conduit. The warm rhythms, the dry drones, melodies woven with centuries of tradition, were all gone, their power with them, his instrument was unplayable. How had this happened? Had the mob done this in the struggle? Was it the thing building on the horizon, exerting its power?

A sullen, despondent eye was case upon the old leather violin case, caked in the dust of years. He kept the case, and the instrument inside, only out of respect for his uncle. It had been his instrument, the conduit for his own power. His hands winced away from it as welts and cigar burns, decades gone, formed on his hands as if they had never healed, he could hear angry words in German shouting at him.

He cursed and opened the case, flinging the locks open to reveal the richly dark body of the violin, at least sixty years old now. It was worn, spiral lines of dust coated the pegboard, down the neck, and over the body. He took it in his hands, testing its weight. It was well balanced, he placed it beneath his chin. It was cool to the touch but otherwise felt unremarkable. He sighed, casting an eye to his mandola. This was going to have to do. A rumble outside the car forced his attention away. The tempest, only a smudge on the horizon before, was now much closer, moving supernaturally fast. He cursed again. He needed to get a place with a good vantage point, a place that his performance could counteract its strength.

The general store, across the empty street, was at least three stories high. A ladder, untrustworthy with rust and age, dangled on the side. Without taking the time to think, he was out of the car, leaving behind the protection it offered and into the open, exposed air.

His muscles ached and groaned from the climb up three stories on the ladder. The roof of the general store was a chaotic mess, trash flittered about, faded sheets of paper swished and crinkled in the wind, brushing over the dry gravel. Spider webs, haunts of fiddlebacks and black widows, stretched over the outworks and into the shadowy corners. The whole place smelled of decay, dry and hungry. He wrinkled his nose involuntarily. He could still hear the angry, frantic hum of the people below him, searching for him. It might have been an enjoyable buzz, a drone that would have been at home in any industrial ambient album. He smelt the air, rain was coming. It was almost pleasant, but there was something rotten in this petrichor. The orange sky roared, wind picking up and blowing a harsh, gritty handful of dirt into his mouth. It tasted of moldy and dry, with hints of electricity. He spat, trying to rid himself of the taste, the wind nearly blew it back in his face. He hardly noticed though, a gigantic black mass was hurdling toward the town, a slice of void cutting into reality itself. It was still miles away, but the flat land all around the town made the distance deceptive. The air pressure changed, dropping so suddenly that his ear popped and sent shivers of pain down his neck. Lightning crackled and fizzed somewhere in the monstrous wall cloud, sending out waves of thunder, whose very sound sent shockwaves ripping though the building, causing it to creak and rumble.

The storm was massive. Tornadoes were uncommon out here in the desert of New Mexico, the elevation making the air too thin for them to form regularly, but the colossal wall-cloud was much larger than anything he had ever seen during his youth in Oklahoma. Within just a few minutes it had grown from a smudge, a blip of dark cloud to a monster than tore the horizon apart and blotted out the sun. He was terrified; it was far, far larger than anything he had ever faced. It was a grizzly bear and all the other entities he had faced were mere teddy bears. He felt small, tiny, utterly meaningless and insignificant. His shadow shriveled.

He lowered down to a crouch, cradling the violin as if it were an infant. His hands shook as he placed clumsy fingers on the tuning pegs, shifting them infinitesimally up and down. The strings, catgut as far as he could tell, were still in pristine condition, they hummed with life, with rich vibrant sound as he plucked them, testing their tune. They were charmed, he knew. That was good, he was going to need all the help he could get. He stood back up, but his hands and knees still wobbly.

Below him, the sounds of people shouting in anger turned to people shouting in fear. There was no way to ignore the strangeness of the weather, even if they had no idea what it was. They feared it. He could feel the waves of fear reverberating up from the ground, a thrumming aimed directly at the clouds as they came barreling in. With each wave of fear the tempest consumed, it grew larger, more monstrous, the pitch-black night that suddenly fell on the tiny desert town grew darker. Soon, it was not shouts of fear, but the shouts and cries of sheer panic. He knew that kind of fear, it was the same he had felt in his first battle. The waves came faster and stronger now, he nearly lost his balance as they buffeted past him. It licked up each wave.

He rested the violin on his shoulder and drew the bow across the strings. The sound was rich and velvety, the drone was warm and light, the air about him felt more at ease, the dread, at least within his small radius, dissipated. He fixed his mind on the sound, held it and drew it out, using the magic his uncle had taught him to amplify and shape the music as it came from him. He fed his rage into it, another draw, his fingers flying across the neck to play new notes, the sounds mixed in the air, hung heavy about him. He fed his confidence, weaving melodies that lilted across the roof top.

He created a barrier around him, a shield against the onslaught of hunger, entropy, and fear. He gritted his teeth. This storm was strong, it was still miles away yet he could feel the battering of the wind against the shield; he could feel the sound of ice shard ripping into him, in the shield. Another note warbled from the violin, lashing out against the wind. It hung in the air, he poured his rage into the note letting hang in the air much longer than it should have, increasing its volume and its range. A smile played over his sweat stained features. He was putting up a good defense.

Then the rain began to fall.

At first it was just a few drops, cold but isolated, but the torrents began soon after. Hail blasted him, pummeling him with body blows. He faltered, his knee gave out and he nearly tumbled. He caught himself, just barely, bowing a low note, so low that even he, with his keen sense of sound, could barely register its existence. The thrum from the note resounded off the rooftop, bounding through space as it crashed against the rain. The building next to the general store, a boutique of some kind, suddenly melted, dissolving into ash that spend upward into the cloud. He gulped. Screams began, a cacophonous accompaniment to the thunder and lightning. He felt their fear, understood the abject terror that was ripping through the city. Another building, several blocks away, vanished. Glass shattered. He spared a heartbeat to look down and a saw people running, screaming, desperately trying to reach shelter. A bolt of light flashed and they were gone, ripped out of the fabric of the universe as if they had never been there.

A lightning bolt struck the roof, cracking the air and sending waves of malignant hunger into him. His neck wound began to throb, it pulsed with a life all its own. He could feel himself getting weaker. His rage fueled him, but it was wild and unfocused, it was ebbing . It did not come from a single source, it wasn’t as pure as it should have been. With such impurity, his power drained fast. He played on, frantically letting his fingers skip and jump across the strings. He couldn’t keep track of all the notes in the air, desperately pulsing against the powers of his opponent, it was all he could do to defend himself against the feeding frenzy.

“You know! Fight them with your sound!” The words of his uncle came to his mind, and with them all the memories of pain, humiliation, helplessness, isolation, and frustration. And, like that, his rage had a focus. His hands burned with the welts, long healed, but long remembered too. Cigar burns up and down his forearms surged to life, their fire never fully forgotten. He raged. He howled as he played, his voice surging forth in an onslaught, the pain in his neck was no barrier for this rage. This rage was aged like a fine whisky. It burned as he poured it into the air, leaving a cinnamon flavor in his mouth. He smiled, his arms were tired, his fingers burned with exhaustion, but the exhilaration was in him, fueling him. He howled at his uncle, at the abuses he suffered at his hand. He played a melody that danced and vibrated, surging downward to the streets in an almost visible hue of pink and purple.

He felt warmth in his muscles, in his bones. Exhaustion dripped away as sounds stitched themselves together, given life by his rage to form another barrier against the maelstrom. Finally, he was pushing it back, starving it. He laughed, a high pitched ululation that mixed and began a counterpoint to the hum of the violin, the two sounds, like elegant ballroom dancers, moved in unison, throwing off waves upon waves of power. He watched as the black clouds gave ground, moved back, retreated. He drew the bow across the strings a final time, using the rest of his energy to build a melody that would eat away at the gloom. With tears in his eyes, he collapsed.

The clouds broke, scattering. Sunlight, weak, began to peer through, snaking its way through the maze of sky until the town was once again illuminated by the vibrant noon sun, expelling the void back to its primordial prison. Voices, indistinct and muddled, began to fill the air, voices filled with relief and consolation. The air was sweet, tiny waves of hope filled the air, banishing shadows and nightmares. The sound was a soothing balm.

His neck throbbed, but the pain felt distant. His rage was gone, spent. Rage was a strong fuel, but it burned quickly when unfocused. Whatever ill will he had harbored against the people of this town had been consumed by the storm, he had none left. It would be for the best. Everyone here had suffered and would still suffer from the terrors they saw in the shadowy mass of thunder and lightning. They had seen their friends and family eaten by wind and rain, their homes dissolved into nothing. That was a harsher punishment than he could have meted out.

The he felt the town collectively exhale, and so did he.

I have to ask.. what significance is the violin to you? Do you play it yourself?

Windy: There's no real significance of the violin to me personally, I like the way string instruments sound versus woodwinds or brass instruments, they have a more emotional resonance a better chance of sounding creepy or sinister given the mood. And they look better than a flute or a theremin against the backdrop of a storm. (also thank you to the NPF).
Aik: much appreciated! the story was written about two years ago when I was doing a short story course from LitReactor. The inspiration for the story came from the Lovecraft story "The Music of Eric Zann" more than Tolkien, but anything with creation via music is an inspiration in a way. Short story writing, too, is quite different from plaza writing in form and technique. I'm glad you liked it.

Well it worked, even if it isnt all that significant :P <3

Aik: Thank you for your kind words. There is an Abyssal Sonnet #1, right here in fact. This sonnet in particular was inspired, in part, by my own anti-religious sentiments as well as the vernacular and syntax of the latest Zeal & Ardor album.



May 24th, 2022. It should have just been a normal day. The school year was nearly done, and the kids should be anxiously awaiting the sound of the bell signifying the end. They should be doing their best to not pay attention to anything the teacher is saying, passing notes, scrolling through Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok. They should be thinking about tomorrow, a week from now, a month, a year. That didn’t happen. None of that happened. Someone walked into Robb Elementary and, well I don’t need to remind you what he did. The police, on the other hand, did nothing. For hours. Nothing. They were scared of the guns the shooter brought with him. The police were too fuc.king scared of the guns. So, they let children no older than 10 die. This has become an all too familiar scene in America these days. What sets Uvalde apart? Semantically, nothing. Except for one thing. I have a connection to Uvalde. A very strong connection. My partner is from that town, my new little husky puppy is from that town. I’ve been there. I’ve driven the streets, eaten at the restaurants, had a few personal encounters with the police there. I knew what Uvalde was before everything happened. It was like so many small Texas towns that no one has ever heard of, deeply conservative, mistrustful of government, very Catholic. It was named after Juan de Ugalde a former governor of Coahuila. His name is erroneously remembered as Juan de Uvalde. Ugalde, as it turns out, is a Basque name, not a Spanish one. That might be what’s led to so many different pronunciations of Uvalde. Some of you might pronounce it (now) as You-Val-Dee and you wouldn’t be wrong, some might pronounce it as Eww-Val-Day, or even Eww-Wall-Day. Most of my partner’s family, and thus I, pronounce it as Eww-Val-Day. It’s a small town about an hour out of San Antonio in the hill country near the Texas-Mexico border. It’s not a bad town, it’s small and thus has all sort of small-town issues, but overall, it’s not a terrible place. They make great menudo in several of the Mom-and-Pop stores, great tacos too, with homemade tortillas. It hurts me deeply knowing that people that I have encountered, people I have seen on the street or in restaurants, people I have waved at or said “good morning” to have been affected by a tragedy that is unimaginable. I say this as a person who is from El Paso, some of you might remember the shooting a few years ago at a Wal-Mart here that killed more than twenty people, a deliberate attempt to hurt the Mexican community of the place I live. I see “El Paso Strong” stickers everywhere, I’ve seen hundreds of varieties and each time it makes me hurt. Now, when I see my partner’s family, I see “Uvalde Strong” stickers and I want to both curl up and scream as loud as I can. Nothing substantial has been done, and nothing will. Politicians on both sides of the divide used the tragedy to push messages, messages that become muddled by the mud slinging and finger pointing. Whose fault is it? That’s a loaded question without a real answer. It’s the shooters, fault, it’s the gun lobby’s fault, it’s the Uvalde Police’s fault (ACAB), its open door’s fault, and on and on and on until the weeds are so high you can’t see anything.

I won’t recount all the children’s names. You can look them up yourself if you’d like. And you should. They were people. They mattered. They still do. Uvalde still matters. It’s been a year since my world again shifted on its axis. It feels selfish to say, since I’ve only been secondarily or tertiarily effected by the events of Uvalde and El Paso, but it feels like something is coming closer to me and my family, trying to pick at us and hurt us. In those moments I feel utterly lost and despairing. It’s never going to stop. People only care for ten minutes, long enough to make a “thoughts and prayers” post on social media or mock those posts or spout something about gun control and call it a day. They aren’t actually affected; they don’t really care. They can’t. They won’t. For myself, I don’t know what I can do. I can’t convince a sociopathic Texas government to care, I can’t make changes on a fundamental level. I can, though, care about the people closest to me, I can do what they need me to do, I can listen, and I can keep moving.

Don’t forget about Uvalde. Even if you have no idea where it is, don’t forget it. Please.

Aik, I appreciate your words. Uvalde is indeed a real place. A little over a year ago now, there was a shooting that took place at one of the elementary schools. It killed over twenty people, most of them children around the age of ten. It's significant to me because my partner is from this place and I know the area personally.

Actual play podcasts blur the line between audio dramas and traditional gaming. They’re on the rise as well. I don’t have the exact numbers and stats to back this claim up, but they are nearly rising in tandem with the audio dramas in the audiosphere. All one need to is open Spotify, Google Podcasts, or PodBean and even the most basic search will leave one inundated with suggestions and recommendations. With an ever-growing number of actual plays, how do the Bearchives select which ones it will archive and which ones it will leave by the wayside? What makes one special and another cliché? In this essay I will outline the basic tenets that make an actual play an actual play by devising my own, imaginary podcast. This essay, while I hope it will be informative, should not be seen as the work of an expert giving advice of any sort of finality. I have been listening to actual play podcasts with extreme regularity since 2017, amassing hundreds and hundreds of hours. This essay will be a compilation of the things I believe make a good actual play podcast, but I must emphasize that this is all personal opinion. I have never made my own actual play podcast, nor have I taken part in one. I am purely a listener at this point; perhaps at some point in the future my perspectives and opinions will change given new data and I can revisit this essay.

Game Played
The most important (and obvious) decision to make before starting an actual play is deciding what game you are going to play. It sounds simple but there are literally hundreds (with an ‘s’) of TTRPG games to choose from. Dungeons and Dragons in the most obvious choice here. Despite recent events with Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro, D&D still accounts for more than half of all TTRPG games and supplemental material sold. Everyone likes D&D; even the ones that say they don’t have played it enough to know and understand it. Actual Plays came to prominence because of a Dungeon and Dragons game (I’ll give my thoughts more thoroughly later in this essay about that particular show). For that reason, I recommend, no, I beg you not to pick Dungeons and Dragons. There is a sea of dead actual play podcasts that tried to break into the audiosphere playing the same game every other person was playing. Why? Why should you play the same game everyone else is already playing? What is going to make you stand out? With Dungeon and Dragons, there is very little to do with the game itself that will make you rise above the waves.
The Bearchives has more than a dozen already archived and ready to be annotated. In fact, I have so many that I’ve put a moratorium on getting anymore unless they have something that pushes them above the rest. Is the setting unique? Is the GM unique? Are the players unique? Is there something, anything, that makes this particular podcast more interesting than any of the other dozens I could blindly poke a stick at? Shows like “Flintlocks & Fireballs”, which takes place in a fantasy Napoleonic Age, “Rogue Runners” which utilizes the setting of Hades to, “Godsfall” whose GM, Aram Vartian, is the best I’ve ever heard, or “bomBARDed” in which all the players (and GM) are members of a real rock band, play real instruments, and play bards, stand out, they rise above the others because they are unique despite playing a game that dwarfs anything else.
There are so many other systems out there, so, so many. There are traditional fantasy TTRPGs like Pathfinder or Dungeon World, horror systems like Call of Cthulhu, Army of Darkness, or KULT. Why limit yourself? In the hypothetic game I’m putting together, I am going to go with Monster of the Week. Of all the different actual plays, this system draws me in faster than any other. If you enjoyed shows like Buffy or Supernatural or X-Files, you will get the premise of the system quickly enough. I’m not going to go into the rules here as that goes somewhat beyond the scope of this essay, but I will say this: at my current interest level, I will search out a Monster of the Week show at random, and it will have a better chance of entering the Bearchives than a random Dungeons and Dragons show. It’s less rules heavy and more freewheeling than a game like Pathfinder or GURPS and doesn’t require a ton of stat keeping. It’s heavier on the roleplay aspect which is something I enjoy. Giving players the freedom to be dumb is a powerful tool. There are cooperatively creative aspects to this system that just don’t exist in any other system. The shows I regularly listen to, “Shrimp and Crits,” “A Horror Borealis,” “Roll Weird,” and “Memester of the Week”, engage me mentally and emotionally the way a standard, no-frills Dungeons and Dragons game never could. It’s a no brainer for me.
Test out different systems and genres, look at rules heavy systems vs roleplay heavy. What makes you more comfortable? What engages you? What sort of system would you use to share your story with the entire world?

The GM
The next big thing to consider for your actual play is who, and what, the GM will be. The GM (alternatively DM, Keeper, etc.) is the most important person in the game largely because it is through them that the game itself is played. They interact with the party as the NPCs, the voice of god, and the story itself. They are not, as some people might characterize them, the antagonists or the person to “beat” during the course of the game. On the contrary, it is this writer’s opinion that they are just as, if not more, invested in victory as the party itself. What makes a good GM? What makes a bad one? There are so many examples, so many guides, so many role models to chose from that honestly, this writer would not blame anyone for passing the buck onto someone else. It’s the hardest of all the roles in the game, it has more stress, more to keep track of, more to invest in, not to mention trying to get players to go where they need is akin to herding half a dozen orange tabbies. There is a very famous example of a decent GM which will go nameless for this section of the essay, but I would warn caution in trying to emulate anything they do. Yes, they do some wonderful and diverse voices and accents, and they have decent improv skills, but in and of themselves, these two traits are the least important. They are the flashiest and easiest to recognize, but any seasoned listener or player will know what really makes a good GM. A GM that incorporates lines and veils is a GM that listens to their players which, far and away, is the most important. A GM who listens is a GM who can craft wonderful stories tailored to their players.
Personally, I prefer a direct approach to GMing. What does that mean? It means I’d rather a GM that has a story in mind and pushes their players along the path to that story and allows them to react and engage with the story. There are GMs that prefer the sandbox approach which is basically “so what do you do?” While there is nothing wrong with this approach with the right players, it is not one I think is conducive to good story telling. Meandering and goofing around can be fun, but ultimately, I believe there is a story not being told. There are positives and negatives to both approaches, this is merely my opinion, I must restate once again. There are those that swear by sandboxing and believe it is the best way to tell an engaging story (one that engages the players and the audience since we are creating a podcast here) and if they can do it, I say hats off to you, I wish you nothing but the best.

Number of Players – Diversity
How many players should a game have? I’ve listened to a podcast that was one person playing a GM-less game and it was fantastic, “A Game of One’s Own” if you are inclined to search for it, Maddy Searle is wonderful. I’ve also listened to podcasts with up to half a dozen different people. Personally, I think that many people will lead to boredom among players, confusion among listeners, and stress among GMs. In my imaginary podcast, I’m going to go with four players. Not so many that the story gets bogged down and everything turns into a slog, nor so few that the content feels thin.
Importantly, and obviously, the players need to gel, need to be able to communicate and work with one another. I’ve listened to a few shows where a certain player dominates the game, countermanding the GM, and basically forcing the story to go in the direction they want rather than the consensus of the group. Boundaries are important, lines and veils are not just for GM and players, it is just as important for player and player.
Additionally, as a listener of dozens of actual plays, I feel it is important to address the need for diversity within the genre. I’m a cis white guy (shocker I know) and I have opinions! Seriously though, I want to see more diversity of gender, ethnicity, body-type, and sexuality in the actual plays I listen to because there is only so much “four white guys trampling around doing the things” I can stand. It’s a flavor that gets old and stale very quickly. Why not add some variety and spice? The diversity of your players goes a long way to enrich the stories you all end up telling because there are different perspectives, different values, different interests that will make your podcast stand out. I remember the first few episodes of “Godsfall” when Aram asked the only female character what she was wearing. In context, the scene they were playing out was at a masquerade ball so it made sense, but it still opened up the discussion about disparity between what we expect of women players versus men players and I think the show, and my understanding of dynamics, was better for it. I doubt this conversation would have taken place in an all-white, all-male group.

Length of Episode
For the love of god! Okay, this section is one I have strong feelings regarding, I will not hide it. Yes, that nameless actual play podcast has episodes that average about three hours. Why does anyone else want to emulate that? Three hours might not be a lot for players on a livestream, I don’t know I’ve never done it, but it’s a lot for a listener. In fact, in my attempts to get people to listen to actual plays in general, the number one obstacle is the length of the episode. Three hours, for a podcast, is too much. No if, ands, or buts. I don’t understand why it has become the norm to have episodes run this long. Okay, no, I do know why but I think that’s not a good reason. If you want to engage your audience from opening credits to closing, you need to have something shorter. This is not an indictment of listener attention spans, not in the least. I can sit through all eleven and a half hours of the Extended Lord of the Rings Trilogy without issue at the drop of a hat, but I find it difficult to maintain enthusiasm for a three plus hour podcast. When at least a quarter of a podcast episode is taken up by metacommentary and rule negotiations, nearly all of which I do not care about whatsoever, my engagement is going to be quite low by the end of the episode and there is a strong chance it will be a while before I come back to that particular show. Which is unfortunate. Sometimes an episode needs to be longer than normal, but three hours is too much. Trying to get to this length is not a feat any party or GM should be reaching for. The Bearchives only has room (and patience) for a few of these.
How long would my imaginary episodes be? There are several factors to consider. How much combat versus NPC interactions will there be? Is it a “shopping episode” (I’m not a fan of them but sometimes they’re necessary)? Is there a task the players need to accomplish? What if they reach that goal too soon? What system are you using? My sweet spot is anywhere between forty-five to seventy-five minutes. This leaves time for nearly everything (save some kinds of combat). Half an hour is too short unless there are outside time constraints, or the players simply accomplished everything they needed and really anything over two hours is unnecessary fluff. Kill your darlings everyone, there’s no reason this listener can think of which excuses three-hour long episodes. Even if the episodes are merely the audio versions of Twitch or YouTube streams, there is nothing a good audio editor can’t to do trim and divide into two episodes. Give the option for your listeners to binge multiple episodes, don’t force them to in order get to though one episode.

Short-form vs Long-form
Should your podcast be an epic adventure with two-hundred episodes under its belt? Or should it be a tight, expertly told fifteen-episode arc? There are pros and cons to both, obviously. I happen to love both forms and have no strong feelings one way or another as to which is better. Long-form allows you tell “all the stories” within your scope, allows you to explore any and all random bits and bobs the world has to offer. We love games like Final Fantasy and Dark Souls for a reason. Alternatively, sometimes it’s nice to have a group of players not get sidetracked by any goofy NPC or side quest that happens to fall anywhere near them (on that note you should listen to the audio drama “Sidequesting” for a show that is nothing but side quests with the main thread nowhere in sight and it’s delightful). It depends on what system you’re playing with. Dungeons and Dragons lends itself well to long form, epic length campaigns that take years to complete. Pathfinder, Dungeon World, and GURPs can also fill this role (If you’re a fan of the novel series “Malazan, Book of the Fallen” you know it came out of the author’s GURP games). Systems like Call of Cthulhu, Monster of the Week, Nibiru, Kids on Bikes, etc. work better for smaller arcs and short-term goals.
This is not the rule by a long shot. Shows like “Realms of Peril and Glory” tell tight, singular event narratives in less than twenty episodes while “Thornvale” has nearly three hundred episodes under its belt.
Do you like indie films or twenty season medical dramas? Do you like both? It all boils down to what you and your players have the patience for. As I love both, choosing which to do for my imaginary podcast will be difficult. Do I want a “Wheel of Time” or “Stormlight Archives” adventure or do I want a short story anthology? Since I have to choose for this exercise, I will go with the long-form. Much like “Thornvale” I believe episodic adventures over a longer period of time works to my benefit here.

Editing, Music, and Sound Effects
Editing. You love it or you hate it. There’s no real middle ground when it comes to the nitty-gritty, time-consuming minutiae of podcast creating. Personally, I’ve never done it so I can’t say whether I hate it or love it and my personality is weird enough that without direct experience it could go either way. It is, however, essential. So essential that neglecting any part of it could and will result in doom. I’ve heard podcasts which had great concepts, great GMs, and great players, only to be ruined by bad editing. Aram Vartian is probably the best actual play editor I’ve ever heard and even he had to go through some learning curves. The early episodes of “Godsfall” were a bit rough but his progression throughout the series is easy to spot. If you don’t feel up to editing, no shame, but hire an editor. It will be a worthwhile expense.
What sort of music should go in a podcast? Well, if you’re asking me (because of course you are) I’d go with anything ever released by Cryo Chamber, the premier, top shelf dark ambient label bar none. Seriously, go to their bandcamp page and pick something at random, you will strike gold, or at the very least electrum. Dungeon synth, my darling music baby, is another good option but it’s so de-centralized that it’s going to take more effort to find the exact kind that might fit your game. Yes, I would be happy to offer recommendations based on my extensive knowledge of the genre. If you’re “bomBARDed” then you can incorporate rock and punk music into your soundscape but it’s trickier and unless its plot relevant I might stay away from it.
Sound effects are, in my listener opinion, unnecessary. Unless you want to make a podcast that really blurs the lines between audio drama and actual play like “Dark Dice” and have a very good editor who knows how to use good foley, I would stay away from it. It doesn’t add much to the experience, in my listener opinion, and if used too liberally, can actively detract. The GM making goofy noises is better in all universes.

Funding
The bodybuilder Ronnie Coleman once said, “Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.” That’s fitting for this less than fun part of podcast creation. Everyone wants, and deserves, to get paid for the work they put into creating the actual play. GMs, players, and editors (and anyone in between). Podcasts are usually free to listen, but they are not free to create. I will be honest here, this is the section I’m going to tread the lightest because I simply don’t know enough and even in the best of times, funding for shows is a sticky-wicket. Listeners don’t want to be bombarded by ads or appeals to join a patreon but honestly what other options are there? Merch? Joining a network? Pre-season crowdfunding? Twitch revenue? All these are options, but each have their pitfalls. I’m really at a loss here because I honestly don’t know how to solve this problem. And let’s face it, if anyone at all is looking to someone like me, a listener, then we’re in trouble. Funding audio dramas in general is incredibly difficult and weirdly controversial, but that does not mean you should not be doing it. You deserve to be paid; everyone you work with does. Find ways that work for you and run with them. “Stars Are Right” has a decent looking system, a patreon with exclusive episodes, material, and opportunities and a decently sized merch store. The only criticism I have of the show in that regard is their midrolls can happen right in the middle of a sent… you get the point.

Too Critical Role
As promised, here is my take, rant, diatribe, on Critical Role. While it is without a doubt the current boom of actual plays owes a debt to Critical Role, the show itself is nothing if not formulaic. Matt Mercer, the DM, is considered the best because his impressive array of voices and how well he reacts to his players. Credit where credit is due, he’s pretty damn good at that. However, I think any DM trying to model after him and do the things he does is doomed to fail. Not only will you fall short of what he can do, you are ignoring your own talents, some of which might surpass Mercer. He’s not the best worldbuilder and he’s not great and corralling his players into going where he needs them to go. In addition, some of his players are the kinds of players I said to avoid, the kind that railroad the game into following what they want to do and how they want to do it. Coupled with the myriad social miscues and cringe moments, I personally don’t find Critical Role to be a necessary part of the Bearchives Canon. To make an analogy, Critical Role is like Rolex: yes the brand is very good, very popular, and a sign of taste, however it is not the best produced, most engaging, or most forward-thinking. Who is the Breitling or Vacheron Constantine of actual plays then? For my money it’s shows like “The Infinite Bad,” “ROGUE RUNNERS,” and “Dark Dice.” This is all, of course, my own personal, unaligned opinion. I don’t expect anyone to agree or disagree or follow my advice as gospel. Enjoy what makes you happy while blazing your own actual play path.

And so, in short, what makes a good actual play podcast? What sorts of things are the Bearchives looking for? I want to see unique concepts, things that haven’t been repeated a hundred times, I want to see uncommon and rare systems used to tell singular stories, I want diverse GMs and players that gel and work together to create a narrative that is satisfying to all parties, I want well-produced, well-funded podcasts that aren’t afraid to enjoy themselves and be a little silly now and then. I don’t want the next Critical Role or the next Adventure Zone. I want to see the diversity this world has to offer through the lens of roleplaying games.

The above is the rough draft of essay that is been plaguing my thoughts for weeks on end. It's not a particularly important essay in the grand scheme of things (like most of my work), but I think it might help gather my thoughts on the subject as well shape the mission of the Bearchives. Naturally, I welcome all notes and feedback, positive or negative.

Aik: I don't blame you, Spotify, PodBean, and Apple Podcasts all have some serious issues and I'm constantly yelling at my phone because they aren't working correctly (Patreon is worse somehow which says something). YouTube is a wonderful way to engage but I've found myself drawn to audio only because it's hard to watch a 3-4 hour video without losing my mind.

I can respect your opinion about aesthetics and diversity, even if I heartily disagree with them. It isn't necessarily what they play but how they play that matters to me and I think diversity has a big pary to play. Still, I can see where you are coming from so I will not say you are wrong to think as you do.

BBC has many decent audio dramas and historical podcasts, they are one of my mainstays when looking for something new, particularly their horror podcasts.

Aik: I have been working on it a little bit here and there when I have the energy. This version is only a rough draft, I want to add a few things like a works cited, do some research to back up my thoughts, and maybe a few other things to make it more appealing. I think it's good for what it is.

Sadly, my November did not go as planned and fiction writing was the main victim of a very hectic month. I still want to finish it on the Plaza as I have much of it planned out in my head (should probably get it on paper at some point before I inevitably forget) and at least one person besides me is interested

I'm gonna try a little experiment. I've been doing some writing and (re)writing lately of short story ideas I have. I know, I'm finally getting around to it because I finally have the time (post-move, pre-new job). I'm starting off by writing (re-writing in some cases) the first 200 or so words to the story then moving onto the next one. I want to let them sit, percolate, mold, decay, fester, all that good stuff, before I look at them again and start dissecting and rearranging them. I also thought, why not get a little feedback from some folks? Worth a shot.

Aspire, 2024

The sun bore down on the inhabitants of New Mexico like an eldritch deity. The air sizzled and the dust clung hot and heavy to any pair of boots that dared pass. The cacti watched implacably. There was a slight breeze, blowing from the east, whistling a cheerless tune. There were no clouds in the sky, too afraid of the boiling, angry beast above them. It’s hard to hide on a day like this, not even the faded sign reading “cold beer and tacos” could offer much solace. The bugs were in hiding too, except for the ants, the mechanized formicidae trundled on under the relentless heat, unaware and unbothered. A coyote watched from beneath the sparse shade of a mesquite as the cars passed by, sometimes in two and threes, sometimes none at all for a half an hour. The world of New Mexico, today, was a vast, empty one. It was barely ten o’clock and the thermometer was already bloody.
A taqueria sitting at the intersection of US 84 and 285 did its best to ignore the oppression. It was, if not lively, alive. Seven cars filled the dirt packed parking lot, most of them faded pickup trucks with the tailgate conspicuously missing. The smell of cooking meat and flour hung outside the restaurant, mixing with the familiar vacant smell of dust and heat. The lunch rush, such as it could be in Artesia, New Mexico, wouldn’t be along for another hour and the breakfast crowd had mostly cleared out. At a table near the front window with a faded tablecloth sat three men: two older with cowboy hats perched in front of them and greying hair, mustaches, and bolo ties, and a younger man in a plaid work shirt and spectacles, his hair was an unkempt black.

Southwestern Drone, 2024

Witchcraft wasn't a real crime, not in the 21st century; but that did not stop the residents of this barely named town from throwing a rope around his neck. He was not a witch, not exactly, and this town in the middle of the New Mexico desert was about to learn what he really was. The agonizing pain at the sudden drop from the platform was only mitigated by the awful snap of the rope that threw his near lifeless body to the ground, an awful cloud of dirt exploded around him, obscuring the semi-circle of onlookers. His survival was proof positive that he was a witch; the pastor, a man who barely read the Wikipedia entry on the Malleus Maleficarum, confirmed. As his muscles seized and spasmed, he wished he was a witch. Being a witch would have made all of this much easier. Perhaps he would transform into a thunderbird and eat them all or send a plague of cicadas down on their heads. His skull throbbed against, pulsing in arrhythmic beat with his heart. His lungs burned, stomach acid boiled up and seeped in as he coughed, causing waves of agony.
What was only a few moments felt like hours. He could barely breath, barely move. Every attempt sent lightning bolts through his body. The world outside him was in a chaos of frantic voices, Spanish and English, but he heard none of it. Finally, he pulled himself into a crouching position, hacking and coughing. He raged, sending wordless cries into all corners of the town, the streetlights went haywire and exploded.

The Sotolero, 2024

The victim’s name is John Dieguez. He was a well-built man in his early sixties, a slight ponch, with a thick head of slate grey hair and grey eyes. If not for his last name, the man could have easily passed as white. He was found by his housekeeper at nine o’clock in his study. The shades were open by the window was closed and latched. The only items on his desk were a highball tumbler and a bottle of “Anayáhuari” sotol, at least three quarters full still. He was found slumped over, his lips and tongue a shade of blue that could indicate poisoning; I will have to wait for the toxicology report, but I am confident. Mr. Dieguez had a surveillance system we were able to monitor but found no one entering or exiting the study aside from Mr. Dieguez himself. There is no camera in the study. Additionally, an accounting ledger was found on Mr. Dieguez's desk. We have sent this to Mr. Simon Eschel, our forensic accountant to look over, I suspect we will find several suspects within the pages. Mr. Dieguez was dressed in an expensive three-piece suit, tailored. Will have to track down the tailor. There are no signs of forced entry into the study and nothing is missing, the housekeeper, Mrs. Flores was able to account for everything. I questioned her in the kitchen. She comes in every weekday at nine to begin cleaning. Mr. Dieguez is one of three clients. She also cleans his business offices downtown. She saw nothing out of the ordinary as she arrived. She cleaned the kitchen first, then moved to the dining room. Mr. Dieguez had guests last night, half a dozen at least. Mrs. Flores gave me the name of the caterer Mr. Dieguez uses. I will set up an interview with him later. I let Mrs. Flores go after the interview. My initial intuition is go look into the person that gave him the bottle of sotol. There is a high end liquor store across town I can visit. I will need to ask for Tarot’s assistance. I am loathed to do so, but I feel out of my element here.