Chrestovenator

Would I lie to you? (constantly, without pause or consideration)

I finally uploaded the finished section of my unfinished novel project, "Bean Sídhe", yesterday. The plan was to have four sections of 100 pages or less each (this section is 79 pages), but after beginning Part Two I lost the impetus to complete it and wandered off to other stories (many of which are posted here, as well as on Figment). After re-reading it yesterday I've become more confident in the idea of completing it, pretty much all the plot threads are left dangling in a provocative manner which cries out for further installments.

This section of the novel is set in the Free Isles of Gingu 4 (remember them? I have a map in my gallery) and follows the heir to the throne of Vargøy as he blunders through a series of encounters with highly varied personalities (including other snot-nosed bratty heirs, wise old teachers, and psychotic religious fanatics) as well as some interesting entities of a different sort. Part Two is meant to flesh out some of the details of these "different sorts", as the protagonists family flees their island kingdom to a space station where they will remain safe during the coming war. "Safe" being relative, in this case.

It's called "The Spectres of Vargøy" and can be found hyah figment.com/books/495499-The-S… .

Just... drifting. Like plankton. Caught in currents of unknowable extent. Sooner or later I'll touch shore again. The waters all come back to where they started eventually.

It was brought to my attention a few weeks ago that Deviant Art has a bad reputation for being a wretched hive of pornographers. It is apparently "common knowledge" on the internet that the Literature on DA must be avoided at all costs, as it's apparently nothing but horrifying slash-fiction. I'm well aware that this is not entirely true, that there is a lot of speculative fiction to be found here as well, but folk-beliefs are powerful things. This information made me think "Wait, so maybe it's not that my stories are terrible, but that I'm basically trying to sell fresh fruit from a sewage treatment plant?". Maybe not the fairest assessment, but evocative nonetheless.

So yesterday I made an account on Figment, a DA-style site solely for writers which has a strict no-porn policy, and have already uploaded almost all the stories which I have on DA, and have begun uploading the ones I've never shared before. This was a good idea for another reason, too - many of my works are too long to upload to DA as a single file, but there is no such length restriction at Figment. So some of the works which I have wanted to share but couldn't without splitting them apart can now be shared easily! I plan on uploading all the stories which I haven't shared yet, and maybe if I start getting some feedback I might be able to drag myself out of this "All is hopeless, embrace the darkness and wait for dissolution" mindset I've found myself in. I can sincerely hope, anyways.

So here is the figment.com/users/252536-Kyle-… to my craptastic profile, I won't be posting stories on DA anymore. From now on this account will just be for my drawings and scanned poetry, and of course for continuing to snoop on the many awesome artists on my Watch list!

Every time a vehicle went by on the highway, the larvae wriggled.

Great crumbling slabs of well-weathered granite and gneiss held the glittering ribbon of concrete high above the swift shallow current of the ever-flowing river, its bottom shifted green by the optical effects of the cold clear water. Great river-fishes held thir positions in the central stream, every once in a while pushing themselves upstream with a few powerful strokes of their tails. Overhead an osprey circled, letting forth its keening cry before plunging to retrieve a shimmering morsel from the frigid stream. The far bank was densely forested, the river undercutting the bank so that the roots of the trees dangled through open air before plunging into the underlying water. The near bank was in the form of a gently sloping rocky shingle stretching several meters between the water and the crumbling highway-crowned cliffs.

Stones of all sizes formed an extremely uneven surface, large boulders sticking out amongst a sea of tiny wave-smoothed pebbles and large flat fragments shattered out from the living rock of the mountains. As the level of the river rose and fell through the course of the Spring, small pools were left behind in little sheltered places, in the lee of flat-sided boulders or in little cupped depressions surrounded by large algae-slick stones. In these pools swarmed the larvae.

Delicate and translucent, they fluttered just above the gritty sediment at the bottom of their tiny pools, no more than a hands breadth of water in which to swim and feed and respire. Their tiny gills worked ceaselessly, fanning along either side of their tapered bodies, collecting organic debris for the forward limbs to gather into small masses which could then be passed to the ever-hungry mouth. In very large numbers did they flutter, sometimes darkening their pools by virtue of their sheer abundance. When the sun was at the zenith and the great fishes of the river all took shelter beneath the root-bound overhang of the far bank, the little larvae continued to sit and flutter their glassy gills in their nutrient rich homes, preparing for the distant day when they would haul themselves out on to the slimy surfaces of the exposed stones and begin the final act in their grand drama of existence.

Every time a vehicle thundered past on the high lonely strip of lifeless manmade rock, they wriggled their fragile little forms and scattered into the shadowy corners of their vast and only world.

I have never been on an amusement park ride of any sort. As a very young child, I did want to, but my parents couldn't afford it and did their best to "persuade" me that rollercoasters and the like were simply too dangerous. So as I got older I became genuinely disdainful of the entire idea, thinking "What a stupid waste of money". Now that I'm in my mid-20's it's more like simple disinterest, but I wonder if the old fear still lurks down there.

I have never gone skiing, snowboarding, or engaged in any other similar Winter sport. This was always purely out of lack of interest - even when I *had* the cash to do it, I just didn't relish the idea of performing routine actions when there's A WHOLE FUCKING SNOWY FOREST TO EXPLORE! However, now I know about cross-country skiis, and something that one of my friends refers to as "snow-blades", which are like shortened skiis with more manoeuvrability (holy SHIT did I have a hard time spelling this word!!! God bless Wiktionary). These DO seem interesting, if only because I could have the open unregimented experience of hiking while still being able to shut up all the irritating busybodies who never let me hear the end of "oh my GOD you HAVE to go skiing it's like totally SKIING!!"...

I have never watched "Adventure Time". Yeah, that's pretty recent and minor compared to the other two, but is it REALLY all that minor? Cartoons exert a profound influence on the subconscious mind. Back when MKULTRA was in full swing, the CIA also experimented with non-chemical ways of putting a human mind into a "receptive state", where it could soak up gallons of hypnopaedic wisdom; the most successful experiments involved simple boxes which the subject would stare into, with coloured lights being flashed around the inside and insipid music repeating over and over and over... replace the formless lights with highly-stylized images, and that's a description of a cartoon. The thing is - none of what I just said has ever been a *motivation* for me to not watch assorted cartoons, in fact I only learned about the experiments quite recently. I only bring it up because I have not ever watched Adventure Time - is that part of the reason why I'm feeling so lost in conversation with people in my generation, lately? Are our mental contents too disparate, am I lacking certain memetic triggers which only a good Adventure Timing could provide me? And what the Hell is up with Spongebob Squarepants? That show scares the HELL out of me, all the screaming and tittering and leering toothy maws, it's like a Lovecraftian fever dream come to horribly colourful life...

I have never sat down to purposefully listen to a rap album before. I had a big prejudice against the entire genre because I figured that mainstream rap was representative of ALL rap. I've recently been made aware of the large and incredibly diverse underground scene, and I have been finding artists whose work I appreciate. It helps that several of my friends are pursuing careers in reggae and hip-hop and have been introducing me to other artists. I met the artist Reveal at his show here last weekend, and he gave me a free CD (there was a scheduling conflict, Glass Tiger was playing a venue on the other side of town at the same time so almost NO ONE showed up for the hip-hop show, I was pretty much the only paying customer in the house). So this particular "never" could change at any time, as the unopened CD is sitting on my night stand. His work is deeply concerned with conspiracy theories and "the hate club", which seems to be his response to the whole "don't be hatin' " meme that permeates modern pop-culture these days. I'm not one to actually *believe* conspiracy theories, but I also don't reject them without exhaustive analysis. He makes a good point: 90% of Canadian territory is classified as "crown land", and legally qualifies as personal property of the House of Windsor. So can Canada actually count as a sovereign nation, or are we technically still part of the UK? Is the whole "commonwealth" concept just a case of lawyer-speak drawing attention away from the fact that the sun *still never sets* on the British Empire? Ahhh ambiguity, how I love you.

I have never lived without constant blinding fear. But THAT is already changing. One down, ten hundred billion to go...