Microstory 2435: Bloodbourne

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Gemini Pro text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3

This dome is scary, even though you know that you’re technically safe. I won’t go into specifics, but it’s heaven for fans of the horror genre. While Zombie Dome has its niche, due to its broad appeal, Bloodbourne takes care of everything else in the genre. Ghosts, goblins, evil demons, and other monsters. If you’ve read about it in a book, or saw it in a movie or show, it’s here...somewhere. Lurking. Waiting to pounce. Some are trying to kill you, some are trying to scare you, and some have more bizarre motives. Bear in mind that the safeguards are extremely strong here. If you go in there with a regular human body, nothing is going to hurt you. I even think they’ll lower the scare level so they won’t even give you a heart attack, though I don’t know how they ensure that when everyone’s personal constitution is different. If you’re wearing a sufficiently mechanical or strong substrate, you’re fair game. The monsters can kill you, and they will. They follow whatever rules they’ve been programmed to follow, based on their nature in the source material. If you see a guy in a mask holding a knife, you better run, or try to fight. That’s another important note. Even though you may be in a mechanical body, it’s not superhumanly strong. You will not be able to bat the hostile force around like a cat with a ball of yarn. You’re meant to be in a simulation of what the horror would be like if these characters were real, and that goes for the victims just as much as the bad guys. Your body is capable of bleeding, and it’s capable of dying. Of course, you’re consciousness will survive, but getting back into the scenario is difficult. I think it should be easier. They could treat it as a learning experience, where you get to try new tactics, but I guess they think you should have to choose a different scenario to keep going. That could change in the future. That’s why feedback like this is so important. I hope they read them. Now here’s the question, can you play one of the bad guys yourself? No, you can’t. I think that’s a shame, and they should change that too. My mind can just as easily be uploaded into the body of a psychopathic killer as a scream queen. I wonder if they just have an issue with potentially targeting people who are already psychopaths, and just haven’t had the pleasure of living out their wildest fantasies. People have been debating these things for centuries, because virtual reality affords us the same opportunity to be our sickest selves completely free from punishment or other consequences. We still haven’t found an answer, though some black market stuff can be really disturbing, so I think we kind of have settled on some boundaries. There’s something very different about doing it in base reality. Maybe that’s just taking a step too far. I’m not sure. See? This is why the debate is still raging after all this time. Draw your own conclusions. In the meantime, enter the scariest place on Castlebourne...if you dare.

Microstory 2114: Dream to Fiction

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Gemini Advanced text-to-image AI software, powered by Imagen 2

Let’s set aside for the moment the fact that I’m a traveler from another universe, and that all of the characters that I’ve written about are real people, living somewhere out there in the bulk. Let’s suggest that I’m just a normal creative storyteller whose stories come out of his mindbrain, just as they would for anyone else. Let’s talk about how this process began and developed over the course of more than two decades, and let’s pretend that I never left my world of origin. I was thirteen years old when I officially became a writer. My local radio personality would say that I shouldn’t be allowed to call myself that because I’ve not published any books. But that’s not the definition of a writer. That’s the definition of an author, numbnuts. I was struggling in eighth grade science class, specifically the chemistry portion, which was particularly disheartening, because I wanted to grow up to be a biochemist. Seeing that letter F on my report card told me that I would never realize my dream. It was unrealistic, and I would have wasted a lot of time, energy, and money on the fruitless pursuit. Fortunately, I had this other idea of telling stories, so I started really leaning into that. About two years later, I started work on my canon. I didn’t understand that I was doing that, but the story I came up with in the summer of 2002 has survived today, so I ended up retroactively marking this period in my life as the beginning of my franchise. It was about a boy who was on a boating trip with his fellow scouts. He gets separated from them after the tragic deaths of all of the parents on board, as well as the crew, and ends up on an island full of mythical beings, like elves, dwarves, and mermen. It was quite derivative in the beginning. I’ve rewritten the majority of this book at least four times, and revised it any number of times in between. It’s taken as long as it has to finish because I have never stopped growing as a writer, and perfecting my skills, technique, and personal voice.

As I was saying, I wasn’t familiar with the concept of a canon in the early years of my work, but I did have this compulsion to tell stories that exist within some kind of established continuity. They might be thousands of years apart, or even in different dimensions, but the potential for crossover had to be there, whether it ever actually happened at all or not. I came up with the premise for dozens of stories over the course of the next several years, nearly none of which remain today. The ones that have survived have transformed so much that they would be unrecognizable to anyone who happened to hack into my computer to read the originals. I never published a word, of course. In 2004 or 2005, I came up with a book and its television follow-up that I don’t even want to talk about, because they were rooted in my anger and violent tendencies. I wouldn’t even mention it, but I feel that I have to, because that was my first TV show, even though I wish it wasn’t. My second show, which I conceived of in 2007, was about a group of people with special powers, and from there, the universe expanded. By then, I had already decided that the dimensions from my original concept would be temporal, instead of spatial. That is, they just happened at different points in the long history of a single world. I came up with several other shows that fit within the timeline on the one planet, and then I came up with several more which took place on nearby star systems, and in other galaxies. It was 2012 when I came up with The Verge Saga, which took place billions of years ago in another galaxy. The number of TV shows that I had created effectively doubled overnight to around 60.

For a couple of years in my adult life, I had a recurring dream. Well, maybe that’s not the right word to use. Continuous would be a better choice, because I wasn’t just reliving the same thing every night. The story kept going. I could wake up, go about my day, and then go back to sleep to revisit the characters right where we last left off. I don’t know about you, but I’m only in about half of my dreams. A lot of the time, I’m observing other people’s lives, and this particular one felt very much like something that could be adapted to fiction for public consumption. I even had the perfect title for it, but the problem with it was that it inherently took place on Earth, where that established continuity I’ve been talking about bars such world-changing events from occurring. Basically, if I wanted it to take place on Earth, it had to be a different Earth. This was when my canon exploded. I suddenly had access to a dozen new universes, which could have their own independent histories that I didn’t have to worry about conflicting with each other. My list of TV shows approached 80, and I was unstoppable. That’s when Salmonverse was created, but that’s not when I thought of my first story for it.

On December 27, 2012, my first dog, Sophie Love was put to rest at a 24-hour animal hospital after a short but brutal and cruel battle with liver disease. Shortly thereafter, I had a dream (not again; this one came first). I woke up to find my dog alive downstairs, where she should have been all along, and then I realized that I had traveled through time to before her death. Of course, my dream turned into a nightmare when I jumped back in time again to not only before my dog was born, but also before we lived in that house. Someone else was living there, so I had to escape without disrupting their lives too much. Samuel Bellamy took over this role when I converted this dream to fiction, making him the first ever resident of Salmonverse, but like I said, I didn’t come up with that until 2015. Everything I wrote until I built my website just sat there in my files, never to be seen by anyone but me. That’s why these things have weird temporal values, because I regularly come up with a story, or only a premise, or even just one character, without having any place for it yet. I guess normal writers conceive an idea, and then just with it until it’s done. I often develop all aspects of a new story all at once before I so much as write the first word of the actual text. This process might inspire sequels, prequels, multimedia follow-ups, and crossovers that I will also work on without necessarily having written anything substantial. I dunno, maybe I’m doing it wrong, which is why I’m over here with a personal website that no one reads, and George R.R. Martin is a millionaire. He too has taken forever to write his latest book, but people are actually waiting for it. Hopefully I’ll finish the new edition soon, but I’m pretty busy. Unlike how it is for Martin, this isn’t my only job, and as aforesaid, I don’t make a dime off of it.

Tomorrow, I’ll get more into the details of my website; how it got started, and how I prepare for upcoming stories. There’s a lot. It takes a lot to keep this thing running. Like, you don’t even know. Slipping back into character, I’m surely in jail now, awaiting trial, or whatever step comes next. I scheduled this to come out just so I don’t leave you with nothing, but I’ll eventually run out of these too.

Microstory 2072: Turtles

< > Table of Contents

Generated by Google Workspace Labs text-to-image Duet AI software

Yesterday was a long one, wasn’t it? I usually find it harder to talk about myself than to write about fictional characters. I can always keep making things up about them, but it’s not so simple with my real life. But Nick, you claim that your stories are real, and you’re just relating them on your website. Yes, I did say that, didn’t I? It’s sort of a chicken or the egg situation. Except that there’s an obvious answer for that conundrum. A chicken can’t exist unless it was born from an egg, and an egg can’t exist unless it was laid by a chicken, right? That’s the whole thing, which of course ignores how evolution works. So all things being equal, the answer is that the chicken came first since a chicken can survive on its own, but an egg needs to be protected. That’s its advantage for the best answer. I came up with this when I was a little kid, and I’ve yet to hear anyone else make the same argument. Now, you may be wondering why the title of this post is Turtles when it appears to be more about chickens and eggs. That’s because I didn’t want to come up with a title for it, and I always use Turtle as a placeholder until I think of something else. You see, I write these in a word processor, so I can organize them how I like, and then copy each one over to my blog when it’s ready. I have to do a lot of formatting to make it look right, which takes nearly as much time as the writing itself. I tell you, it’s exhausting. Oh, why, do you ask, is Turtle the placeholder? It kind of sounds like the word title. Don’t overthink it. I’m not that complex. For the body of the story, until I’m ready to write it, I use Something.

Microstory 1700: Introduction to Constellations

< > Table of Contents

Ah, constellations. What good are they? Well, they’re great for navigation. Before GPS, I don’t know how people got around, especially not across the sea. Yet they somehow figured it out. I’ve never been that interested in the concept myself, however, as I was born in 1987, and I’m not a sailor. I couldn’t look up at the sky, and name a single constellation for you. I don’t know where the big dipper is, or how close it is to the little dipper. I really don’t know much. As a science fiction writer, they’re not that useful to me. My stories take place on many planets, all over the galaxy, and beyond. Constellations mean nothing at that point, which is my main gripe with my favorite franchise, Stargate. The stars that you see as being lined up aren’t necessarily anywhere near each other, unless you pretend that the celestial sphere is two-dimensional, and only when looking at them from a particular point in space, which has traditionally been Sol. In the future, they’ll become just as insignificant to us as they are to an alien race. Obviously they hold significant historical value, and they’re really important to a lot of people, so I can’t just act like they’re not at all meaningful. They’re just not meaningful to me, because I don’t see shapes when I look up at the night sky. I only see dots. The series you’re about to read is inspired by the 88 modern constellations, as codified and standardized in the 1920s. I did have to add an extra thing called a dark nebula to reach the weekdays left this year.

Anyway, each one probably comes with its own mythological story. This demi-god did that, and as punishment, his father glued him to the sky, so he’s forced to suffer whatever torment for eternity. I don’t care much about these stories either. So I’m going to make up some of my own, based predominantly on the names. There appears to be multiple names for any one constellation, which gives me some options, in case one of them doesn’t inspire anything in me. The stories may be canonical, or they might not be. The first one, for instance, is called Andromeda, and I already have a character with that name. I named her partially because of Lexa Doig’s character on the titular scifi series, and partially because I like it. So I may write a new story about her, or I’ll come up with a company or place that shares the name, and have it be completely unrelated. I could also just call it Princess of Ethiopia, and use that as my jumping off point. Nothing has been decided. The point is that you shouldn’t get hung up on what you know about these constellations, or the preexisting stories that supposedly explain how they got up there. This has nothing to do with any of that. This series will get us to quite near the end of the year. Afterwards, there will be a very special standalone microfaction story that will tease you with some major changes that will be happening next year, and through much of 2023. I tell you this so you know that I don’t just make things up as I go along. My long-term plans are longer than the ones that Marvel Studios makes. It’s like a shared universe, except that there’s no one else to share it with, not even an audience. Assuming you do exist at some point, though, please enjoy these starry originals.

Microstory 1340: Focus Group

< > Table of Contents

Focus Group Moderator: I’m Focus Group Moderator, but you can just call me Mod. I want to thank you all for coming in today to get a first look at our brand new series, Ya Basic.

Teen 1: Ya basic.

[Laughter]

Teen 1: Sorry, I didn’t mean you, specifically. I was talking more about the garbage people who wrote this.

Mod: Oh, I’m saddened to hear that.

Teen 1: Well, they can’t all be winners, can they?

Mod: I guess not. ‘Kay, so—

Teen 2: CHEESE!

Mod: I’m sorry?

Teen 2: You said queso. I felt it was my duty to translate for everyone in the room who does not speak Spanish.

[Laughter]

Mod: Okay. Well, thanks. The first thing I want to do is get everyone’s general impression of the TV show they just watched.

Teen 3: I didn’t understand it.

Mod: All right, so it was a little confusing.

Teen 3: I wouldn’t say that. I could follow just fine, but the story didn’t make any sense. Why was the sister doing his homework? She was established as the dumber of the two, and they never explained her motivation, or his, for that matter.

Teen 4: Yeah, and the dumb things she said didn’t make sense either. It felt like all her lines were written for a boy, but then a network executive came in and said they should gender-swap it in order to be edgy and woke.

Mod: I can neither confirm, nor deny, the network’s direct involvement in creative decisions. But this is good, it’s very good. Would you characterize this show as woke?

Teen 5: Absolutely not. Her character was just as offensive as it would be had she been a boy. And just because the kids roll their eyes at their racist uncle, doesn’t mean the writers understand why it is his racism would be a bad thing in real life.

Teen 4: It felt like the uncle was supposed to be loveable and sympathetic, but the things he was saying weren’t even relatable.

Teen 6: A lot of random, made up stereotypes.

Teen Collective: [moderately in unison] Yeah, yeah...

Teen 7: All Asians are gay?

Teen 4: Yeah, what was that? Did a producer hear the word gaysian, and extrapolate too much from it?

Teen 3: Racism aside, I didn’t get why it was called Ya Basic. Who’s basic? It’s not the sister. That word doesn’t mean low intelligence, and I actually otherwise found her rather interesting.

Teen 5: I didn’t think she was interesting. I thought the whole thing was stupid, and I had a hard time paying attention to it. It was built like a sitcom, but it’s an hour long. It didn’t need to be. Half the time a character learned something, they repeated it again a few minutes later, as if you thought we’d forget.

Teen 1: Was there any significance to the banana? The character—and, thusly, the camera—stared at it for, like, thirty seconds.

Teen 2: Banana, banana!

[Laughter]

Teen 6: Teen 2 is right; that was a reference to a completely different franchise, made by a different production company. I looked it up. And that one was for kids.

Teen 4: Was this one not for kids? I certainly felt too old for it.

Teen 7: I felt too young for it. Didn’t anyone else think the banana was a phallic symbol? The kid cracked a joke about his stamina right after that.

Teen 3: Oh, yeah, probably.

Mod: Okay, perfect. Thank you so much for your answers to these survey questions. This will greatly inform how we proceed with this production.

Teen 1: By proceed, do you mean stop?

[Laughter]

Microstory 1206: Quincy Halifax

< > Table of Contents

Quincy Halifax was literally not from this world. He originated in a different universe entirely, but he was born with a special ability to crossover. The truth is that everyone capable of dreaming is also capable of traversing the bulkverse, which holds an infinite number of universe branes. A dreamworld has always been considered a mental collection of thoughts and memories; one that is abstract, and does not exist on its own. Actually, it does exist physically, within the hyperdimensional construct we know as collective reality. Most dreamworlds don’t last beyond the dreamer’s sleeping state, but for the ones that are stable enough, Quincy can access them. His is a long bloodline of dreamwalkers, who have used their abilities to accomplish various ends. Some build constructs where others can visit while maintaining full lucidity. Others travel the bulkverse, helping the people they find there, in whatever capacity they can. One of the more common uses for lucid dreamworld generation is to aid in people’s learning. By doubling up on the productivity for the fraction of the day that’s otherwise used for only one thing: sleeping or learning, participants can spend their waking hours doing whatever else they want. Quincy did end up becoming a teacher in Atlantis, but he did so using more traditional techniques. He actually didn’t use his ability to teach his students. He had no particular reason for this; it simply didn’t occur to him. He never thought he would soon be expected to use it for them in a unique way. Rather, he would expect it of himself. Some of his students found themselves in possession of very powerful technology, which could manipulate the events in other universes. Had he realized they obtained it in time, he could have stopped it, but once they started using it, there was no going back. His only option at that point was to enter the universe they were manipulating, using his own ability to crossover, and help the people living there as best he could. He chose to become a gravedigger, as unglamorous as that was. He figured he wouldn’t be able to alleviate much of what his students were putting their unwitting characters through, so any attempt to help any one person—or even a group of people—would be too myopic in thinking. He decided the best way he could help was to bury the dead. He didn’t bury everyone in the world, of course. The natives were generally responsible for their own practices. He was only in charge of a specific class: those who experienced nonlinear time. He chose this because, while there were billions of individuals in the universe altogether, his students were only having a direct impact on these relative few. He felt that this made them the students’ responsibility, and by extension, his. He wasn’t naturally immortal, but he knew he had so much work to do, and he couldn’t risk dying himself before it was done. Fortunately, he had a literal god’s eye view of the world, and was able to procure the necessary ingredients so that his mission would never be interrupted.

Microstory 1179: The Archivist

< > Table of Contents

Nick Fisherman IV’s name came from Nick Fisherman III, who unwittingly took it from Nick Fisherman II, who adopted it in honor of the original. He didn’t much like the name, or rather he didn’t like that his parents felt they had no choice but to give it to him. He was pretty much always aware that he was a character in a story. That didn’t mean he wasn’t real, but it made him feel like he wasn’t in control of his life, which he wasn’t. For some reason, most people he met just assumed that he was a choosing one, who volunteered to keep track of all the temporal manipulators, and their associates. In reality, he was nothing more than a salmon; bound to his duty. His only escape from this responsibility, he felt, was alcohol. Unfortunately, from his perspective, it took a lot for him to get drunk, and even more for him to wake up hungover. As a salmon, the powers that be protected him from certain threats to his wellbeing, including intoxication. He could do it, but he had to drink a lot more than other people with his metabolism for it to have any effect. When he wasn’t drunk, he actually preferred to be hungover, because focusing on the physical pain distracted from his psychological pain. It was his job to create and manage every file for every individual, and he hated it. It was dismally tedious, and people didn’t take him seriously. He had this idea in his head that they were enamored by The Historian, but the truth was that few cared enough about either of them. For most, history and staffing just weren’t sexy. The Archivist chose to do his work poorly, hoping the powers would get frustrated with him, and replace him with someone else. They never did, though, because as it turned out, his incompetence was quite entertaining. Many problems could be solved with the right intelligence, so if it was too easy to gather this intelligence, then the universe wouldn’t be very interesting. He had no choice but to make the best with what he had, as boring as that was.

Microstory 1100: Salmonverse Profiles Introduction

< > Table of Contents

Back in 2007, I came up with this story about a group of people with special abilities. Several of the characters I just thought up myself, because of my previous exposure to superhero movies. Those became my core characters, but I wanted to have dozens of others, so I did a lot of research. The idea was to focus on the main group for the first season of a television series, and then start exploring the others, one episode at a time. I ended up with roughly a hundred in total, which ultimately proved to be perfect when I was trying to come up with a series to do for this website. I have a lot of mixed feelings about Bellevue Profiles, though. On one hand, I had a solid idea of who these people were, and their backstories were predetermined; I just needed to fill in some detail. On the other hand, I felt like I was locking myself into canonical plot points, and I didn’t have a whole lot of freedom to come up with some more creative choices. I think it worked out, but by the time I was done, I was already regretting the decisions I made for some of them, and have had to find ways to incorporate the developments into the larger mythology without ruining the overall vision. Anyway, my salmonverse stories are set in an entirely different universe, which I never thought I would create, and they’ve come with an explosion of new characters I never thought I would have. I decided it would be fitting if I revisited the idea of posting profiles for each character. The problem is that I have a hundred and sixty-eight slots for the series I’m introducing to you now, but I’m still in the middle of compiling every character, and I’m already at two hundred and forty-two. I don’t want to profile characters we don’t really care about, like say, a retailer who tries to cheat the main character, but whom we never see again. I also don’t want to profile characters who are already important in their own stories, because I don’t have the room, and they’ve been taken care of anyway. I have to make sure no one is left out who should be there, or included who shouldn’t.

Seeing that none existed on the internet already, I had to devise a way of codifying a sliding scale of character importance. A character coded at Zero is not really a character at all. They surely must exist, but only to serve the existence of some other character. Examples include parents, or the teacher of a class in which the main character recalls learning something vital. Generalized terms like classmates or even parents itself fall into this category, since they’re dismissed as unindependent and irrelevant collectives, so they can’t qualify for true character status. Level One characters are mentioned, but unnamed (e.g. security guard, bank teller). Level Twos are mentioned by name, but only because the context of the story requires they be named (e.g. ancillary students called out at a graduation ceremony). Level Three is for characters who appear, but are unnamed (e.g. a flight attendant who notices a weapon, and has to seek help from the air marshal). Level Four characters are named, but they’re one-dimensional, and hardly worth remembering. Level Five characters have a greater impact on the story, but won’t likely last long, and aren’t likely to return once they leave the narrative. Levels Six, Seven, and Eight are reserved for tertiary, secondary, and primary characters, respectively. The lines between each of these are hard to pin down, and can fluctuate. Spinoffs, for instance, often come about when a secondary in one story is ascended to primary status in a different story. I still have several stories to read through, so I can get the entire list of characters I’ve even so much as mentioned since 2015, and am only excluding Level Zeros from this list. I then need to determine which category they fall into, and figure out which ones out of those will get profiles. There’s still a lot of work ahead, and I don’t even know which character gets the first profile, but fortunately, I have all weekend. I have a cold, so it’s not like I would be able to go to a movie.

Microstory 1009: Ira

< > Table of Contents

No, Bertha didn’t say that, did she? What a jackass. I’m glad she finally recognizes how terrible she is with people, but she’s living in a nightmare world if she thinks I am too. It’s true, I read and watch a lot of science fiction, but I’m smart enough to know the difference between a character, and a real person. Fiction is a great resource for understanding how other people work. Simply seeing that it’s possible for a separate individual to have a different perspective than one’s own can be enough to fuel your empathy for others. Writers take a lot of liberties when it comes to characterization, but just because the character is made up, doesn’t mean we can learn nothing from their experiences. Each character is created by a writer, and at the very least, that writer is drawing upon their own lives, and those of the people they know. So, let’s just assume every character a given writer comes up with is essentially the same person, because that writer somehow managed to become successful enough to get their work out there without anyone noticing how one-dimensional their stuff was. There are still thousands upon thousands of other characters in the world, created by different writers. Compound that with the fact that most that are created by the same artist are going to have different perspectives. Now compound it with the number of people who contribute to that characterization: writing partners, producers, actors, editors, etc. A lot goes into making a piece of performance art, or a written work. There’s a lot more collaboration for the former, but that doesn’t mean the latter type doesn’t hold its own lessons. Plus, any given story is going to be interpreted differently by each audience member, and now with the internet, it’s not only easy to share these thoughts with others, but helpful. I’m doing just fine in this world. I have lots of friends, and though I probably couldn’t have counted Viola as one of them, I’ve still been impacted by her death. Sometimes I use nomenclature that makes it sounds like I see the people around me as characters, but that’s but an extension of my love for art, and does not reflect an indifference to them. Like I was saying, I didn’t know her well, but I did know a lot about her. Socially, she was a lovely person, who was nice to most people. If she didn’t like you, she surely had good reasons, and that should give others pause when considering their own feelings towards you. She loved people, and always seemed to try to give them the benefit of the doubt. She was a lot like me in that way. I try not to judge people until I know more about them. I’ve known Bertha most of my life, which is why I can tell you with absolute certainty that she has a lot of growing up to do. I know I talked a lot more about myself than Viola, but I hope it helps. I’m looking forward to reading your story.

Microstory 994: Research and Planning

< > Table of Contents

I once estimated that, using my own personal style, writing requires 83% research and planning, 11% actual writing, and 6% marketing. These numbers were chosen mostly because of their symbolic value, but the general ratio holds up. When I know where a story is going, typing it up doesn’t take all that long, and until I started this website, I didn’t do all that much of it. I also didn’t market my work before, so those last two numbers should have probably been even lower. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve spent years working on my canon, sometimes to an outrageous extent. Before I started writing the third major arc for this year’s volume of The Advancement of Leona Matic, I used an architecture program to design the basic layout of the arcology they would be spending a lot of their time in. The other day, several weeks after the arc ended, I came up with what I believe to be a superior design, and reworked the whole thing. Will my characters ever return to one of these structures, and if they do, does it matter exactly how far the 3D printer would be placed from the door? The answers are maybe, and not at all. My attention to detail has benefited my stories greatly. You could ask me what a miacid is, and I would be able to explain it to you, even though I only mentioned the animal two or three times, and mostly only in passing. I know all the names of the fictional uninhabited planets that share the solar system with the habitable ones my characters live on, and at some point, I’ll probably number and name the moons. The idea is that, if I can spout random trivia about the worlds in my stories, then you can better suspend your disbelief that this is real. Hopefully it will feel less like a made up tale, and more of an account of actual events. I think it makes it easier to empathize with my characters when you can imagine them actually existing.

Of course, all this work comes at cost. The target date for what was originally meant to be my first book was Christmas of 2004. As the years passed me by, I altered the storyline accordingly, working in time jumps to 2008, and later another one to 2012. I would be doing the book a disservice if I wrote longer or more time jumps now that we’re coming up on 2019, so if I ever manage to get it published, you’re just going to be reading it without an understanding why I wrote it as a period piece. The truth is that the main character’s parents have their own stories to tell, which take place in a fixed time period, as does stories that come after. So I can’t just find and replace every date reference to bring them closer to present day. Just think how absurdly old Tony Stark’s father would had to have been when he conceived him in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but his and Steve Rogers’ stories are inextricably linked to the Second Great War, so the timeline can’t ever work out as perfectly as it did when the comic books were first being written. I don’t like jacking with narrative timelines, so that story ends with an epilogue in 2013, and the hint of a follow-up, and readers will just have to be okay with that. It’s not the only one like that either. All of my researching and planning has also contributed to a profound lack of progress, which again, was only recently alleviated by this website. I’m basically my own worst enemy when it comes to producing content that’s both good, and timely. I would like to think that this all works out for me, and the entertainment chapter of my life will end on a high note in the late 21st century, like I had always intended, but I can’t say that for sure. I’m only now recognizing how dumb some of my stories will seem if I wait too long to release them. Self-driving cars were a futuristic concept when I first came up with Detectives of Science, but I can’t treat them as a new technological development if it doesn’t come out for another twenty years, can I?

Microstory 993: Television

< > Table of Contents

Tonight, I finished watching the annual crossover serial from the Arrowverse on CW, which this time lasted three nights. For those of you not in the know, that’s when all (read: most) of the DC comics adaptations come together and fight a big bad together. I also watched The Kids Are Alright, but I’m trying to get to bed earlier, so that’ll be it. The funny thing about the latter show is that this latest episode was about the family receiving a far too generous gift from the cool uncle in the form of a quite expensive television set. I promise I did not do that on purpose, because I am not allowed to use my power to see the future for my own personal gain. I get a lot of judgment from people for how much TV I watch. What those assholes don’t realize is that watching TV has been a bonding experience in my family since before I can remember. We don’t just sit there with blank looks on our faces, and then frankenstein monster our way to our beds. We laugh together, and discuss what happened. We critique the style, and predict where the story is going. Thanks to DVR technology, we can now pause any program, and talk about it in the middle of it without missing anything. Sometimes my mother and I will spend more time with an episode paused, talking about things—prompted by what we’ve just seen or not—than it would have taken to just watch it straight through. I’ve always loved TV, and I won’t apologize for it. It’s a beautiful form of entertainment, and I challenge you to come up with non-judgy, legitimate arguments against that. A good piece of television has smooth narrative structure, interesting characters, a driven plot, and compelling motives. What’s different about it than other performances, like films or plays, or musicals? Why is it that this one type of content is lesser than the others? Because it’s newer? New does not equal bad, therefore...no valid conclusion.

I once met a guy who only watched a single show, Chuck. I didn’t feel comfortable pressing him, but I wanted to know how that worked. How did he find out about it, and more importantly, if he liked it, what gave him the impression there weren’t any other shows he might like? It didn’t sound like he ever tried anything else, and now that the series is over, is that just it for him and scripted television? Has he spent all these years only watching sports games, and not even bothering to see what else is out there? In contract, at one point, I was estimating my television watching habits at sixty to eighty hours a week, depending on how busy my life was at the time, or which season it was. The advent of internet video has made the estimation much more difficult. I now watch content on YouTube, Netflix, and I do have a history of illegal streaming, but I imagine the number hasn’t changed much. There’s so much more to choose from than in years past, but I try to be more selective than I once was. I didn’t just watch things I didn’t like to punish myself. I was using it for research, and I don’t regret the things that I learned. It’s made me a better writer. Everyone loves Ernest Hemingway, but the man only ever wrote about himself. His life was pretty adventurous, which is great, but it was still impossible for him to relate to others, because he didn’t have the opportunities that I do. I know a lot about how people work, because I’ve spent all this time observing; much of the time with characters. Anyway, I’m getting a little off topic, and repeating information I’ve already told you in other stories, but the point is that I love television. I always have, and I always will. If you don’t, then fine, but you’re missing out on some really great stuff.

Microstory 960: Marvel Cinematic Universe

< > Table of Contents

In 2008, a little movie called Iron Man came out. It was soon followed by The Dark Knight. These two films, though in separate franchises, would collectively prove that it’s possible to make a good comic book adaptation. What audiences would discover was that the main purpose of this film was to begin a new shared universe, done in a completely new way. Of course, Marvel did not invent the idea of a franchise—nor did it come up with the first shared universe—but it was done a lot more deliberately. Though not perfect, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is well thought out and cohesive. There are some timeline contradictions, which can’t be resolved, no matter what the executives claim. And not every Thor movie is the greatest. But in the end, it’s become one of the strongest franchises in the industry. It’s become so successful that other studios have attempted to recreate the magic, to varying degrees. We can all agree the DC Extended Universe films are generally pretty terrible, with only one glimmer of hope in the first Wonder Woman. The CW DC universe is much better, though there’s a clear hierarchy of quality entertainment that begins with Arrow and ends with Legends of Tomorrow. Universal Studios tried to do the same thing with their various monsters, but the only reason it worked the first time around is because it wasn’t advertised as such. They were promoted independently, and that the fact that there was some character crossover was something only certain members of the audience noticed. I too have incorporated a lot of the same strategies with my salmonverse stories that Marvel Studios uses, and comic books before them. Of course, I don’t share the universe with other storytellers, but I do cross them over in similar ways, and have ideas for over a handful television serials from this universe alone, which I would never be able to make myself. In only three and a half years of my website, I’ve come up with hundreds of characters across dozens of stories. Characters will appear in each other’s stories, then spin off into their own, or they will begin in their own, and make later appearances in others. I try not to think too hard about this. If a character possesses a special trait or skill that I need at a certain moment, I’ll bring them aboard. Their background fills in itself as time goes on, and the story develops as a whole. I owe a lot to the MCU; possibly as much as I do to the Stargate franchise. I could go into each film, and tell you what I did and didn't like about it, but I’ll just sign off here so you can watch them all again. Wakanda forever.

Microstory 781: Sawbuck

< > Table of Contents

Jane Brown hated her name. At least if she had been Jane Johnson, or Jane Jones, it would have been alliterative, but this was the most boring combination her parents could have come up with. She suffered through it her whole childhood, witlessly playing into her own insecurities on the matter, which only convinced those around her that she herself was boring. She ended up being admitted to a college on the other side of the country, though, and decided it was high time she reinvented herself. So, she took a gap year to earn a little extra cash, and start the relatively slow process of legally changing her name. She knew it would take a long time in her case since she would have to convince the court to allow such an unusual change. She had landed on the name Sawbuck, for no particular reason, except maybe she saw an advertisement for a sawhorse earlier that day. She would never know for sure, but it sounded perfect for her, because she wanted to become someone interesting; someone people talked about, and asked after. By the time her first semester started, she had completed all the paperwork, and was fully approved. She was now Sawbuck. Sawbuck Honeyglider. Her classmates and dorm neighbors would ask her about it, and she would never tell them that she made it up. She came up with a lie to explain where her family came from, and every time she told the story, she’d add more and more flourishes. She never contradicted herself, though, so if her victims spoke to each other about it, they wouldn’t catch on to the fib. She got so good at it that she realized lying was her true passion. If she could weave this one incredibly intricate story about herself, maybe she could do it with some other story. So she sat down at her computer, and got to work. She came up with plausible falsehoods, but she didn’t incorporate them into a novel or short story. She didn’t write films or plays. She just wrote lies, and she found a way to spread them on the internet. Using what she had picked up on about law when she changed her name as a foundation, she taught herself how to set up false identities, and plant information in such a way that it looked like her characters had always existed, and that they had gone through all these harrowing or tragic experiences. She created an entire secret history of the world, all from her laptop, generating belief amongst even the most skeptical in the world in random, pointless, and sometimes innocuous things. Her reputation began to spread along with the lies themselves, and certain underground peoples began asking her for her help. This was how Sawbuck ‘Plain Jane’ Honeyglider turned herself into the infamous Fabricator.