The Diamond Island

What is turning? This strange cyclical spiraling galaxy inside the barrens of my heart springing forth to leap with explosive lightning rumbles and buzzing, billowing clouds of expanding ruptures in the stale tranquility of nothingness?

Missing my friend and hek-sistah Xtine.  Alexi is off into the big dude final battle of ultra-mech lightsaber duel or die.  Hexe is softly treading inside her marvelous hut and making wondrous treasures which only those who recognize their own bones get to behold.

The other day another miracle swept over me from an unexpected corner.  Knowledge, understanding and healing in a triple powderkeg of true being and passion. Lion and maiden over creepers in balance.   Just like that, all is made clear, and flowering, fruitful release, birds in great number swooping over bridges of thought past the decrepit stumbling we call progress.

Feeding the sphinx from my hand, struggling hard to do this strange impossibility with the respect it takes, when all my dullest senses clutch at me to revert to the cruel and ugly, the default.  Ain’t misbehavin’, but not giving in to the temptation to reject beauty because it closely resembles the big come down.  Back and forth, slack hand on the reins, tight grasp on the reins. Not fully in the driver’s seat when it’s me myself and I.

Done my thing, kept my promise, barely. Now I am to do another thing. This time the task is on the unlived and unaccepted parts of me.  There’s work to do, and I am treading towards the wondrous majesty and fabulous revelation breaking out and bursting outwards from the inside uncounted depths I haven’t ever known until I would.

Yo! Yucky flounder kid! There’s water flowing, get ready for this.

So, what’s going on in doomsville? Been a while since I took a seat and rapped on the corner side here. The menagerie is alive and well, if at times it seems to have sprouted wheels and is sighted all about town.

I’m working on book two.  Book one is in a final stage of transformative elation text-wise; I promise to have the Gimmie Stuff page updated as soon as that is complete. Also working on a cover for the souvenir physical version.  Once that’s done I’ll look into converting for e-book files. My brain stem is acquiring all manner of new knowledge during this feisty process of refinement!

Seems like the planetary forces have been all stirred up.  Meteor showers, solar flares, floods and earthquakes.  Hek even on the metaphysical plane we got Cardinal Climaxes lined up, not to mention a heavy dose of psychic interference from all manner of weirdzo dimensions and denizens.  I’m having to expend a lot of mental energy keeping my health and my attention up to snuff.

The summer is a scorcher over here in the central wastes of indecision land. The garden is taking a lot of supply runs to keep going. Those bio-nutrient counteractants come at a high price in mosquito bites, sunburn and poison ivy, let me tell you! Onions, potatoes, basil, and tomatoes are bringing in the reinforcements in small amounts; hey whatever margin of survival we can manage we will. Corn, sunflowers, and peppers bringing up the rear.

The cats are in hyper reorganization mode, which is good. No news is good news as they say. As long as they are able to keep the hydroid bombers at bay with lazors, hey that’s good pattern.  Michael has a new nickname though: Tarball.  He’s big, he’s fat, and he needs to protect you from yourself by laying on you until you get the picture. Is this what Mad Max survival has been reduced to? No cool car chases here, just scavenging eroded out gas tanks on hulking wrecks, hoping to score some ten year expired dog food.

The crummy spaghetti and stir fry recipes we’ve been working on have been refined to our tastes. It’s helpful to have new fall backs we can hit the automatic switch with and get something to eat without panic. Have to say its a success. Though we still need more do-fers in our bag of tricks to make it more complete a meal plan. Still, anything that is cheap and easy and healthy is good. Keeps us out of the McFood troughs.

Long drawn out patrol while repair and reprogram procedures are refined and worked on. Lots going on in the furnace, just no heat yet in the hallways. The trans warp warm up takes a while.

Vinah’s last vestige of development faded from sight.  The landscape became an undulating terrain of cheap, one-story homes connected by borders of trees and scrub.  Traffic dispersed into wider intervals of encounter.

Wesa exhaled a sigh, tense.  She searched the roadside with brief glances in between the business of steering.

Stara blinked her eyes once, then three times in quick succession.  “Which way to the coast?”

“I’m not sure,” said Wesa. “There’s an intersection off to the side of this road. The map says it goes through some national park forest or something.  IC5 is on the other end.”

“Looks like that’s it.”  Stara gestured towards a side road running at an angle away from the main one.

Wesa put on her signal and slowed down to take the turn.  A dark gray sedan in the rear-view mirror loomed close, slowing as it swooped into a tailgate.  She turned onto the winding road, snapped a glare at the woman driver speeding by.

The trees and brush grew wilder and crowded closer to the side of the road.  The one-story homes disappeared in favor of small fields and old, worn farmhouses.  They passed a campaign sign encouraging participation in an approaching tribal election.

As her eyes drooped, a blank expression took over Stara.

With a sudden rush of gargantuan presence, a forest loomed up out of the hills and turned the light to soft shadows.  A hush absorbed the two girls in the car; their senses dulled and enveloped by a sleepy drowse.

The road wound in a twisting series of curves, rises and descents.  Wesa noted the lack of a rail between her car and a ten foot plummet into a stream gully on one side, and the overgrown sheer slope on the other.  She shifted down and took the turns carefully, fighting the drowse with firm nibbles on the tip of her tongue.

The speakers played a new track of slow and regretful drums.  Stara dozed off into a disassociated state of half-awake dreams.

As the heartfelt refrain began, Wesa turned the music off.  The quiet rhythm of the drive lulled at her; she imagined kicking Julio in the butt and out the door of her room.

The smile on her face turned into pursed lips.  She blinked once, then her eyes swelled with blushing tears.

Wesa opened her mouth and struggled with words.  “Stara, I just had a daydream.”

Her friend jerked awake with a start, “Wha?  What was that?”

“I had this daydream.  I watched this guy riding in a car with some girl.  They were driving to the coast like us.”

Stara rubbed her eyes and said, “You want me to drive?”

Wesa said, “You don’t have a license.  This guy.  He was so sad, I saw that he’d given up hope.  This girl really dug him, but he was like a total buttmunch.”

“Great, a hopeless road.”  Stara cleared her throat and blinked herself awake.

“No, it wasn’t this place.  It was like the trees were telling me something they’d known from way back.  I wanted to tell this guy it was okay, he would be okay.  But he wasn’t listening.”

Stara said, “All sorts of people are like that.  They never listen to anyone when they’re depressed.  Dudes like that draw nurses  from all over—drag them through the mud.”

Wesa said, “Why did I have that daydream?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe you picked up on something that was really strong.  People leave marks on places when their lives get messed up.”

“That must be it,” said Wesa.  “There was this deep, timeless ache to this guy’s feelings.  He kept going on and on through this moonlight darkness, along a never ending road with this girl.  It wasn’t extreme; it was vast and hollow like an endless horizon of sadness.  All that guy could do was fall into it forever.”

Stara hissed.  “Damn, Wesa.  That’s messed up.  You had this just now, wide awake?”

Wesa took a sharp curve slow and easy.  “Totally.”

“This like that stuff you told me about, how as a kid you used to go places in your head?  Talk to people in their minds?”

Wesa made a puzzled face.  “No, not like that.  But kind of.  I never got feelings like this.”

The road straightened out and passed between two waist-high walls of flat, piled rocks.  The trees trended sharply away from the side of the road and evening light returned, bathing the girls in reviving expanses of vision.  Through the trees on the right, a well-tended farmhouse nestled at the foot of a steep hillside.

Stara said, “You sure we’re on the right road?”

Wesa eyed her friend, then huffed.

I’ve heard tell that the force beneath the earth’s surface is like a dragon, and that if one doesn’t use their scientifically engineered tools of reason just right, there is a kick in the trousers.  What will people do when the sulfuric alchemical mistake goes up the drain and bathes the unconscious of the planet in hostile, un-adapted impulses of monstrosity?

Mentation-based living systems are tested to the point of migration or disintegration.  Specialist primates find their commerce-based systems of non-participation eroded to the core meltdown of mindless primitive operational procedure.

At the baseline, it really does come down to the food chakra.  Ingest and excrete, watch Mother Nature show us how it happens on a localized geologic scale.  Her sphincter is letting it blow and we get to watch the capacity push organism tolerance levels to the end of the indicator needle.

The baby-talk that “consumers” are to blame is boring, turn-of-the-century diaper scratch-and-sniff.  The alpha primates of the Hairless Ape chapter of Mammon Intergalactica didn’t give the beta and gamma primates a choice.  There was no town meeting, student gathering or community involvement in how the public would decide to use its resources, or even whether to use them at all. The public was never consulted.

There was no choice because there is no system of participation.  You push a lever every now and then to ratify choices already made for you, through a system that alpha primates dance a poop throw for themselves in the country club at your expense.

The idea that you can just say no to TV and automobiles is more baby-talk by delusional betas and gammas working on the alpha payroll.  The reward cycle of society doesn’t promote alternatives; in order to stop driving you have to exist: A) outside the system, and B) in places where legal ordinances permit you to have things like solar panels.

So while it may be fun and easy to turn one’s ire on fellow beta and gamma primates who “choose” to drive a faux tank and imagine themselves as powerful as their false-idolized weakling princes, it’s ultimately blaming the content and not the context.  It produces late-night comedians who can mock celebrities but not General Electric.

What is the “public” guilty of then?  Who said they were guilty at all?

The alpha primates, the ego-appointed weakling princes of our unconscious projections, are quick to dodge individual responsibility for their mistakes.  They project their own cowardice onto the imagined specter of an unruly mob of irrational public citizens who are really “at fault” for making them commit acts of irresponsibility, arrogance, and childishness.

Mother Nature has come down hard on them with a wallop.  Their relevant toys of in-duh-stry, all out of proportion from human dimensions, are about to have their allowance stripped.  Anyone with sense would do well to step well clear of this catastrophe of infantile dependency and meditate on what it means as a hero to encounter one’s limits.

I certainly am not hip to seeking out sphinxes.  Like I would know what to do if I were faced with a riddle.  That scene in The Hobbit with Bilbo and Gollum dueling wits was way cool.  To watch, that is; I’m not so sure I’d be too excited to be in the no-takebacks gameshow live and on no-camera like that.

The echo of a thunderbolt a year ago resounds. I’m waving my slapstick and candle about as best I can. Looks like ol’ RahRam his/her self comes into view while I’m just shining for a friend.  Poop on a stick, what was the name and the name beyond the name again?

Have to rapid-search my old manuscript for that one.  But go figure, ol’ sphinx buddy isn’t here to guard the threshold.  The Devil’s due this time around is the scoundrel getting to bust a gut at my foolish face as I saw the holy monolith of all soul beatdowns rolling into my karma main street.

Soul beatdown as in Robot Carnival death explosion parade vehicle up close and personal, that sort of thing, only on permanent re-play.  Kali means business, you know.

Eegah!

What the Hek.  Many times we have to take at least one foolish step forward for the trap to spring.  Yet, if you don’t give Scratch his die to roll he’ll take it anyway.  All I got is a lucky penny I found on the floor to flip dude, it’ll have to do.

I spent so much time cowering like Cringer over sphinx beatdowns and dodging the riddle adventure I got no brains for, that I never imagined I’d just be using the cat bus version to get to Sesame Street.

It’s a wicket gate for many people, but for some it’s an open avenue out of mind. Whatever way, we need a formula, plot device, or token to allow ourselves permission to pass beyond to that which we imagine ourselves unable or unworthy to experience.

My candle ain’t the only light in the night, where firefly torches and gleaming facets line every inner space with drowsed and dreaming heat.  Nor is my slapstick the only advanced mechanism for recreating the center.  There exist many costumes, voices and other assorted props ready for a dedicated intent to wield with the insight of the most holy of lowly performances.

Not to mention random life encounters!

There are rains coming. A blockage to knock loose and drainage to restore. These images soak into my mind from some weird brain thought-age. Yeah sure, I’m like the Ghostbusters of psychic energy beings and that’s what I do—troubleshoot with my clown powers. Super-fool to the rescue, maybe!

Takes real world people imagining this stuff to make it happen. The heavy lifting has to be based in meatspace for it to impact what’s going down in the witching hour of the unknown.

POW!

Like smacking a tennis ball down the lane of a bowling alley.  Wow, that sucker sure was stuck for a long time.  Maybe now the sluice will operate properly and let the waters run free.

Oh wait, that’s where I’m standing! Better make haste and make my way down the rest of this walk down the strange way of inner space. Look in, Sphinx; here we go!

Been listening to special instructions and watching interstellar phenomena within the soul.  Training under the patient and wise gaze of Lucerna, Mother Mary’s Personal Assistant.  She keeps nudging me further into the cold waters of trans-personal warrior training.  It’s a side of me I’ve only just now started experiencing and accessing with an inner eye.  There’s a large shadow cast by the cloud over parts of me I never recognized, but the weather has changed and colors are clearer and sharper than I ever would have believed.

Floating around my pillow are a number of texts I’m reading, grab and seek the new game of play.  Reasoning and meditation as making mud-pies in the brain.  Themes emerge along the dream like an ultraviolet glowing cellphone from the beyond giving me the ring-tone of my self in a new looking back.  Seeds are always sprouting just when you thought the land had given up on you.  I picked up the phone even though I was busy and flipped open the communicator to the starship everywhere.  I’m busy so I’m available.

Dreamtime might be overrun with plastic shamans, but they’re an outer characteristic of the inner journey.  We all have to do time with our imagination until it can grow to fill the form we can’t see with our little light.  I’d forgotten about a sizable chunk of my New Age explorations not too long after willingly suffering The Nightmare Maize Of Singular Violation to finally understand what I was missing.  Some things you leave behind in the guiding of the divine back to the outside world.  I do appreciate the Dark Goddess returning my backpack!

I read about the Sioux keeping and releasing of souls, and reflect.  Their ways and understandings are a sound in my being rich with clues, stimulating thoughts of what a dedicated clown might accomplish despite being dazed and befuddled.  The recognition of death as an opportunity for those alive to recognize their sacredness and experience purification beyond our experience.  That to move beyond bodies—created out of the nothingness of unfathomably unlikely chance in time and space—into a larger comprehension of being as a form of non-being is natural and joyous, even though there are tears and pain.

Our dullard senses stumbling with such vast experiences of awareness, perhaps some compassion is in order for our falling down and skinning our tender mental knees and scraping of heartstrings with a rough clasping.  Our helplessness and inadequacy are stunning to those outside time and space, and evoke mercy from the most mysterious of depths; do we not ourselves rush to the side of a stranger as if they were ourselves at unusual moments?  As above, so below, as within, so without.  A mote of fire in the gloaming of our chemical stew of a brain.

I’ve been grieving and mourning, welcoming inside and treasuring, coming to the place where there is the happiness of dawning and dusking inevitable.  In a sense, this long period of overwhelmed underwhelming has been a new idea breaking out of its shell and evoking my response.  Some ecstasies are vast and immeasurable, like the numbing flash of a dunk in cold water.  I can see Molly on a beach with an empty and dripping bucket, laughing.  Yoshie covers her mouth and makes a giggly face.

Hey!

Now for pizza…and margarita shooters!

Sometimes it doesn’t pay to order out.  You still lose a turn and get the beat down.  I’ve been trying to get back into the process of generating new and exciting adventures on the Paulie channel.  Alas, real life has been demanding tribute in the form of everyday banality in the name of mere existence.

Maybe it’s the crummy summer solstice.  The height of the light in which the darkness is reborn and winter begins to regain its strength.  People have just been down.  The gnats and mosquitoes are out in force now and vicious in their quest for eyes and blood.  The weeds are thick and virulent, wide-awake drunk with the power of full-fledged summer tangle.  The humidity and searing heat of the long days drags on and on, bearing down on us with the ripeness of life as surely as the bleakness of cold twilight at the other edge of the scales.

I’ve been trying to get the full PDF of Diamond of Darkness up in the Gimmie Stuff page, but failure seems to have been on an auto-repeat for me and it’s all I can do but stare in horror as my blog posts and other projects twist like tendrils of cat puke in my hands.  Stuff is totally resistant to conscious intentions; I am in a moment of pause.  Come back later KTHXBYE.

World keeps on turning though.  Anybody want a slice?

A gal over at one of my watering holes started talking about plot, mentioning it as a process. I keep seeing plot mentioned in and around the stellar chatter of the interweb system channels, so I figured I’d tackle this one.

Simply stated, plot is “what happens”.

Not to be confused with premise, which is “what it’s about.”

I wonder about the aversion some people have to formulaic plots.  I don’t believe that’s what people object to exactly.

For example, I think of the TV show House, which is the same plot every episode—cranky doctor solves medical mystery despite obstacles.  Even though it’s the same thing every episode and the premise is never actually addressed—it’s better to be an honest jerk than a well-meaning phony—I still see it as an interesting show because it is reliable.

I think what people object to is the use of writer force to override viewer authority.  In other words, bad technique.

Plot, like light, is actually both a wave and a particle. It can be both a thing and a process.  The question is whether we are dealing with prep or improvisation.

Plot emerges from the work through the resolution of situations (character plus setting equals situation).  When it’s a process it arises from the working out of the story.  When it’s a thing it is exerted upon the story as a planned phenomenon.

Both have an underlying structure, a platform in which they emerge on-stage.  Both require practice in order to put on a good show.  Both have strengths and weaknesses it pays to spend time understanding.  Both are legitimate courses of exploration that can be adjusted to fit the project.

I’ve kept my promise and let myself come out of the tomb to speak with the tools at my disposal. There’s still much work to do before this first novel can be considered fully complete; developing that aspect as I work on the next novel in the series, as well as other things I have in the creative hopper that need their turn.

This shipping out of chapters has been a sort of withdrawal for me; all my other usual artistic activities have strangely gone quiet and invisible.  The release of this first effort has taken a long time to arrive at, and letting it go has required the utmost of courage to undertake.  I decided to lower the cloaking shields and let the principled search engines in to catalog my site; it really is out there now for all to find, three years of internalized contemplation.

So much has gone into just this single act of a novel that I’m now in uncharted territories again. I have worked it as much as possible given the huge obstacle of just doing it. I had no idea how long it would take, even given an impeccable commitment. In a sense, this is where the real work begins; because having done it once, now I commit myself to further developments.

While I was releasing the chapters, I had a dream:  The universe recognized my offering and liked it, told me I’d done a good thing.

08-24-10 Update: A PDF of the complete novel has now been moved to the Gimmie Stuff page.

• Preface: Nervous Tremors—Dedication, TOC, and in which we eavesdrop on a conversation between strange beings.
• Chapter 1: A Last Revel—In which we are introduced to Rordan, his foster-brother Fikna, and their immediate social group.
• Chapter 2: Bungled Romance—In which two friends miss their chance for a more personal connection.
• Chapter 3: The Mirthy Mermaid—In which Rordan and Fikna embark on a journey by water together.
• Chapter 4: Nixed—In which Rordan has an encounter with the unusual.
• Chapter 5: Close Call—In which the travelers on the Mirthy Mermaid negotiate a water hazard.
• Chapter 6: An Odd Companion—In which Rordan takes a most peculiar vagrant under his wing.
• Chapter 7: Two Breakfasts—In which the brothers, with Borus in tow, consider their predicament.
• Chapter 8: Dangerous Island—In which Rordan makes discoveries both wondrous and alarming.
• Chapter 9: Bad Feelings—In which strains between the travelers start to show themselves.
• Chapter 10: Regol Coros Academy—In which a destination is reached and troubles multiply.
• Chapter 11: New Friends—In which Rordan meets the knowledgeable Glenys.
• Chapter 12: A Winning Hand—In which counsel is shared and friendships are strengthened.
• Chapter 13: Magic At The Grill—In which Rordan meets a strange being and an extraordinary songster.
• Chapter 14: The Council—In which an invitation to join a cause is extended.
• Chapter 15: Last Warning—In which a villain is revealed and Rordan makes a fearful decision.
• Chapter 16: A Brother’s Ordeal—In which Fikna sees more than he might have wished.
• Chapter 17: Nightmare Tree—In which a terrible foe demonstrates his strength.
• Chapter 18: Into The Woods—In which Glenys risks opening up to Rordan and Fikna.
• Chapter 19: A Poisoned Kiss—In which Rordan faces the sentinel of the fantom forest.
• Chapter 20: Some Secrets Come Out—In which Kea forces a decisive confrontation.
• Chapter 21: Fear Of Failure—In which Rordan is dealt a low blow, yet finds a new voice of friendship.

After three years of semi, self-directed nonlinear exploration, the current novel is ready to be shared.  I’m not abrogating any of my rights by posting this material.  I’m exercising them by making a creative statement in this fashion.

This is as good as I can make it given my present resources, circle of contacts, and skill level. I’ve striven to attain a level of readability that allows general standards of understanding, though I recognize and expect there will be gaps sharper and more experienced eyes will notice.

I dispute the position that if you’re not a published writer, not making a living at what you’re doing, and not up to the standards of professional markets then you’re a failure and what you’re doing is a complete waste of time.

Before you read, keep in mind that in my writing I have consciously chosen complexity over accessibility, introspection over immersion, and innovation/subversion over conventionality.

After starting with a PDF of the preface and first chapter, I’ll post a link to a chapter every few days.  After the whole thing is posted, a few days later I’ll post a PDF of the complete novel.  A link to that PDF will go in the Gimmie Stuff page.

This is the text for people who want a story.  For those who want an object, I plan to make a physical book available by way of POD as yet to be determined.  For the interested, there will likely be a limited special edition with a map, black and white illustrations, and a glossary.  I’m still working on those extras.  I’ll look into an ebook version too, what the hek! And if I can get my courage up I’ll make an audio file in addition, whee!  All stuff, all the time.

Diamond of Darkness is a young adult fantasy adventure, teenager coming-of-age story during a time of magical upheaval.  You get to hang out with Rordan the protagonist and know his thoughts while he struggles with his destiny.

As my friend Turtle would say, “Enjoy your meal!”