Whew, that was a lot, wasn’t it? In the introduction for the Taikon series, I lamented my inability to remember where exactly I came up with that word. I told you then that we would fix it in my post, and I was totally right. Here we are at the post-show installment—designed to bridge us to my current microfiction series, which will go until the end of the year—and I can tell you the answer. Taikon is a portmanteau of token and icon. When I transferred the notes for the television series that these stories are based on into a spreadsheet, rather than a document, it made most things a lot easier to read, but some of the longer paragraphed text gets lost in the scrolling. Anyway, I hope the taikon stories were entertaining to you. They were fantastically difficult for me to write. Like I said, these belong to a television series (my favorite one, actually, at least in the recursiverse). I need to be extra careful about how I tell the story, because of the nature of television writing. My biggest draw to the industry is the amount of collaboration that kind of art requires, especially when compared with novels and short fiction. I wasn’t concerned with giving secrets away so much as I was worried about including plot points that could one day conflict with some hypothetical brilliant idea someone on my writing team might have. I’m still worried about that. I’m pretty happy with how they turned out, but I will be so relieved next year when I’m not constrained by a canon I’ve not yet figured out. As I’ve told you before, I plan my website far in advance, ya know, except for this one, which I came up with all the way back on Friday. Please consult this post here, which first outlines what I’m going to detail in this series here. I came up with four of those conventions on the fly, then upon realizing that they all shared the same first two letters, I consulted my trusted source in RhymeZone.com for related terms that fit the parameters. I found eleven more, and was satisfied with that being as far as it went, because I was merely trying to illustrate the outrageousness of your stupid religions, and all your stupid ideas that can be applied to practically anything else. A set of fourteen arbitrary conventions that don’t so much as begin to codify the complexities of moral improvement is exactly the kind of thing religions love to leverage against the rest of us. As the writer responsible for a particular quote spoken by the titular character, Donnie Darko once said, “okay. But you’re not listening to me. There are other things that need to be taken into account. Like the whole spectrum of human emotion. You can’t just lump everything into these two categories, and then just deny everything else.”
Meanwhile, I’m sitting over here with a set of 24 extra weekdays in 2017, trying to come up with an actual story behind the concept of 24 consecutive hours, and I got nothin’. I generally collect these stories into groups of 100 (this last one being a major exception) which makes the beginnings and ends of the calendar year uneven. I went to Wikipedia, and tried to look up what things in the world can be broken down into 24 parts, and nothing really fits, except for the fact that this is how we organize our solar days. Blech, whatever. Fortunately, the Consociation Credo fell out of my butt just in time to finish last Friday’s story, and I decided to use it again. It was a little awkward fitting 14 tenets into 24 installments, but I figured it out. Most, but not all, tenets will be given two installments because I’m hoping there’s enough content to fill that space until I get to Wild Cards in January. I plan to do my level best writing them in the same cadence that your precious “proof” texts use, with somehow both flowery and prosaic language, and vague generalizations that don’t really mean anything. And thus begins a series of excerpts from the new divine tome, The Book of Darkness.
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