Darkscribes Blog for The+Mustachioed+Cat

Terror Threshold

February 11, 2008 | No Comments Posted

Been reading me some Duma Key, which appears in some ways to be King's revisiting of It. The connection is kinda tenuous, but whatever. Got me thinking, as Edgar Freemantle went through a certain basket of sketches, about the fulcrum between the normal, the strange, and terror. Where the balance tips one way or another.

Live in a dorm. 'magine me going to the restroom (down the hall) and finding a fellow standing on his hands, right there in the middle of the hallway. 'round 4:00AM. Strange, yeah? S'ppose I don't ignore him. S'ppose I start to noticing how his face is never visible, by dint of long hair and weak light. S'ppose I speak to him, and get no response other than him starting to move in my direction. S'ppose he has a herky-jerky quality to his movement, like an old film missing a few frames.

Another scene. Walking down a slice of suburbia. What you're feeling is a warm summer heat pressin' in 'round you, wet and with the occassional insect. You're thinking on pleasant things, which is why you couldn't sleep. The face of a girl, the way she smiled last night, for example. Maybe you just hit the job jackpot, looking at having some serious scratch flowing in the next few months. Maybe use it to do something nice for Miss Beautiful. You're thinking all this shit, walking down the sidewalk on a nice, summer day, when a bunch of people start emerging from around the houses of the cul de sac a half-block away, moving through the sideyards and crossing over to the windows and front door.

The motion don't catch your eye, not really. You're too busy thinking on all these things. Approaching the cul de sac. Kinda see the people move from one house to another, looking-looking-looking before moving on to the next. What you do notice is when they all notice you, each and every one of them orienting their faces toward you in the same fuckin' moment. And you realize that the whole time they've been there, they ain't made sound one. And you realize, up close, they don't seem to be touching the ground. By the time you marry all that with the certain knowledge some of them are facing backwards in order to gander you, something that should have broken their neck, easy, and some of them seem quite transparent, you've got a half-skip to turn and run as they glide across some manicured lawn toward you. Get a glance, as you turn to beat tracks, that there's someone inside that last home, pressed against the glass, skinless, not movin'.

Scene One, Scene Two. First takes something ridiculous and makes it menacing. Second is a bit more obvious, projectin' itself in zombie language - when there is a group of people all moving the same way, and you don't notice them at first, they are zombies (or, as in this scene, something else). Looking at the fulcrum there, getting a feel for it seems a good idea. Balancing it from one to another - from reader-anticipated terror to something a bit unexpected that the character has to translate - seems a good trick for keeping suspense would nice and tight. Just some thoughts while I was reading Duma Key.

 

Old World Jokes are not Chic

February 9, 2008 | No Comments Posted

So close to a full chapter of TFC I can taste it. I've got one subplot to weave into the second-to-last scene and it'll be done, and I can start writing Shinji's "Great Sayaman" arc. As I sit down, crack my knuckles, and start a read-over, I get a phone call. Why, it is my dear friend, whose relationship have stopped by and offered to take her to dinner!

Naturally, she wants me to run interference. Both visitors are pretty heavy into the Polish front, and she relies on my normal manner of speech confusing them. Distracting them so they won't ask her prying questions. So I close my laptop, treck out into six inches of motherfucking permafrost beneath twelve inches of nasty snow, and go to this restuarant.

I was able to amuse myself through most of the meal by playing a Civilization game in my head. Ethiopia on Huge with Low Sea Level and Tropical Climate. First research to Masonry for Great Wall wonder, then research to Iron Working so I could clear out jungle. Make it to Confucianism with The Oracle giving me Codes of Law research. I was about 15 turns in when I heard the joke, which was to be the most amusing thing I did not contribute to the conversation:

"Jesus went to Galilee to act as a doctor, because, you know, he was a healer. So these men bring in a really sick guy. So sick they had to cart him in on a wheel-barrow. Jesus touches the man and he is instantly cured. The now-healthy man says of Jesus later, 'He touched me and I was made well, but, you know, he never took my blood pressure.'"

That was the joke.

MY contribution, which I found much more amusing, was when they were talking about the corrupt state of Polish government, about how American privitization is ruining everything. I suggested that my friend should return to Poland and run for office. To which she replied 'That job is the most thankless in the world, screw that.'  My answer was to list off all the things she could acquire as Prime Minister of Poland. These things were:

1) A jet.

2) A posh office.

3) Heath Ledger's corpse.

Needless to say, she did a face-fault. I don't think her relations understood. Ah well.

I managed to get to the Renaissance before the check came.

 

Snapshots.

February 3, 2008 | No Comments Posted

I haven't been very productive of late, so I figured I'd come up with an easy way to convey the last month or so in a series of snapshots.

 

Goldfish that live in the alligator-turtle tank, regarding a discarded piece of catfish. Contemplating cannibalism or mourning a relation, I guess we'll never know. This is an image I hastily scribed onto a chalkboard between classes. 

I know it looks like just an ugly mattress, but that's just because you haven't slept in it before. This thing is a fucking rack. It is evil. And it is the only place I have to sleep.

Every night, on every hour, I wake up. Turn over. On the plus side this has had the interesting side effect of making me very good at telling lengths of time without the aide of a clock. On the minus side I no longer enjoy playing X-COM or Civilization nearly as much. Feeling the minutes tick by is just a joy-kill for the whole experience.

It feels like I'm transitioning into what I believe is called a polyphasic sleep cycle, which is attributed to such genius as Tom Edison and that's-about-it, the central idea of which being that you get very small units of sleep throughout the day. The whole idea has since been proven shitty in a variety of un-anecdotal ways, so more and more it looks like I'm headed over the precipe of Sanity Cataract and into the deep gorge of There Are Rats in the Fucking Walls. Which is entirely possible, if you note the white cinderblock in the photograph. That wall is also exterior and about as cold as you'd expect.

Add all this to the fact that the four dorm rooms around me are deserted and you've got the makings of an Asian horror movie. If I found out that hateful fucking air mattress was used as an altar for infant sacrifice during my school's dabbling with Satanic cults, I would not be surprised. If the stretched plastic/cloth bastard material said mattress is constructed of were to bulge outward with features demonic or deceivingly angelic, I would not be surprised. If it became a portal to some hellish otherverse where air is stone and stone is air, where the unit of sapience is as minor as an atom, I would be completely unsurprised. If Monks from Shangri'la showed up right this god damn fucking minute to reclaim their hidden city's foremost torture device, I would kiss their bangled feet and give them tea.

Getting Screwed Over, ect.

January 15, 2008 | No Comments Posted

Well, at CES 2008 it was announced that Asustek would be releasing a new version of their EEE PC, the sub-notebook that had the hacker community by storm. This new model features a slightly larger screen, native WiFiMAX, and most irritatingly: a cost identical to the first-gen model that I bought a month ago.

Crackerjack.

Five hours to my first college class. Got Chinese Language, Politics courses, another on zealotry and one for writing. That done I'll have my triple major squared away, and I can get worrying about JET and CET and whatnot.

Working on a short story involving a girl working in an aquarium. Works to clean out the jellyfish tanks. Finds the boneless, gauzey, glowing bits of tissue creepy.

Also working on the next chapter of The Foregone Conclusion. Going to work in a timeskip and a change of perspective because I'm tired of writing it.

Spent the last two hours playing Civilization 4.