30 Second Fantasy

I made an EVE drinking chalice inspired by the BioShock video game franchise. I posted the designs online so you can print one too.

Over the past few weeks, two of my friends and I have wrapped up the most fun fantasy collaboration project I have ever had the opportunity to work on.

My talented friend Jeanette Denham @xmachinacosplay, of Targaryen fame, asked me if I could teach her how to use CAD (Computer-aided design) software. Since I have been using SolidWorks both in and out of work for the past nine years, I promised, without hesitation, her that I would teach her how to use it.

Before we started going through the program, she let me that she wanted to learn how to model in 3D was to recreate the bells from the Old Kingdom series by Garth Nix. I had never read the books and had no idea what they looked like, so I started out a little wary about what the project would entail. Fortunately, she pulled up the Instagram of concept artist Josh Wong @joshwongart, and lo and behold; he had seven bells rendered in 2D.

Photo Courtesy of Josh Wong

Without even knowing the Old Kingdom series, I was floored by how gorgeous Josh’s designs were.

Jeanette had already taken the initiative and reached out to Josh asking for permission to use his designs in a cosplay she wanted to wear to Dragon*Con 2018 way before she even asked me about learning CAD. I thought she lucked out and found someone who had designed the bells as a fun side project. Little did I know that they were part of a portfolio’s worth of concept art for the entire book Sabriel, but more on that later.

After staring Josh’s renders for a bit, I fired up my computer and launched SolidWorks. Since Jeanette wanted to model seven bells, I figured working on one bell by myself would be a proper intro to the program. So I started on the first bell, Ranna as I learned of its name later.

The modeling lesson went well, going over revolves, extrudes, cuts, patterns, and everything, until… we got to some wavy lines along its sides. Stumbling around through menus and options for the better part of an hour, I had to take a break. Jeanette needed to go home, and my face was getting a blue-ish tan from staring at my screen for so long. 

The next day, Jeanette and my wife had plans to go check out a sewing art exhibit to scope out other techniques for a different cosplay. So I had some time. It took another two hours of searching through Youtube looking up “how to make a sine wave in SolidWorks” and “nonuniform line around an irregular surface.” SolidWorks was not behaving. Finally, I found a tutorial on how to make a sine wave in a ring. A few more commands later, I had a sine wave on a dome. It only took five hours. The next one took twenty seconds because I copied and pasted the first. SolidWorks behaves well sometimes.

 Jeanette was thrilled. She showed Josh, and Josh became ecstatic. I begged her to let me do the rest of the bells. She obliged. It took about twenty hours of sitting in a chair and looking up how-tos, but I got them done.

I sent the data to Jeanette for 3D printing and painting. She was able to transform a layer cake of black plastic into bells that looked identical to brass.

I could not have asked for a better group to work with for the project, and it also turned out being the most gorgeous thing I have ever worked on. Double win! And it convinced me to read Sabriel as well. Triple win!

The human’s skull crumpled beneath my talon, like a hydrangea under a scythe. Before the nearest human could squeeze the trigger of his pulse rifle, I tackled him and mixed the remains into the dirt. Had I been this weak before the adjustment?

Their ranks began to break as I slipped between, and sometimes through, the men and woman defending their home. My brethren, my new brethren, marched across the new front I had made. A part of me might have felt sickened as I allowed them to continue onward, taking samples when they pleased. But, they had removed the part of me that cared.

They had removed so much of me.

But not the part that knew how the humans acted.

One of the human’s windows had bars on it, instead of steel plate, so I dove into it. The glass shattered inward and the bars became a lily in bloom.

The humans up here did not seem as terrified as their friends below.

Without pause, I leaped towards a group. But before I could paint the walls with them, I heard an unusual sound.

I dropped a talon on the floor and pulled myself from the air a yard away from the group. One the men had wet himself, and I laughed.

That was strange. I had nothing to laugh with. No vocal cords or even a speaker, but I still tried to laugh. It was then, in my confusion, did I notice that the sound that had stopped me in my pursuit was a song. And not just any song.

It was the one that played at my wedding.

My husband had been smiling with his hands placed atop mine as it played. We had been pronounced man and wife and all of our guests, human guests, stood and clapped for us. I cried. I couldn’t not cry. What would I have been if I couldn’t?

A crackle of electricity swept through my brain. I was back in the hallway, and it stank of piss.

Another zap hit the back of my brain, and I felt my talon leave the ground, letting me stalk towards the group.

My wedding guests had been delighted to see me. My new guests had furrowed their brows.

“Make it louder,” one said.

“And blow our cover? We were lucky enough she found us,” another replied.

Apparently, the bars had been a trap.

My body lurched forward against the music. The humans were there to be killed. I knew that. My body told me that. The song was moving air. Nothing compared to what I had to do.

I hesitated.

And was shocked again.

“If you can hear us. Help us,” a woman said.

I took another step. A pulse of electricity crackled down my back, making me want to throw up with a stomach I did not have.

“Faster. We should try faster,” the woman turned a dial on a device the song came from. The tune’s pace picked up, and I felt my body tense.

It would have been so easy to give into the shocks. To spend a few moments and break everything around me. As I had done outside. As I had done over the past month.

My wedding only took half an hour.

I could have killed my entire guest list at least ten times during those thirty minutes. This group would only take seconds.

Another shock hit me, but instead of yielding to it, I turned away and crawled to the shattered window.

The distance made the song fainter, but still, I knew what it meant. At least for me, I knew what it meant.

One more shock and I ripped out a chunk of back and flung it to the floor. It sizzled and popped as it tried to electrocute a body to which it was no longer attached.

The woman nodded to me, and I nodded back.

One pill was left in the box. It was from a box of thirty, Tyler knew. They came in thirty packs on months that had thirty days, thirty-one on the others, except for a special edition for February. They always had the right amount: never more and never less. But yesterday was April, and today was May, and there was one pill left.

Tyler gripped at his shirt to make his hands stop shaking. They began to rub his chest raw. One pill left must have meant he had forgotten to take it yesterday. God, he should have stayed in. The delivery boy didn’t come yesterday, and he had been hungry. Starving more like it. So he broke his routine and went out. And forgot to take his pill.

Tyler slumped into his chair, knocking over a tower of take-out boxes. He had killed himself. Everyone had to take the pills. Take them, or the disease got them. And everyone had the disease. Oh God, why couldn’t he have just gone hungry for one day?

His chair absorbed him. He was going to die. Someone would smell him and eventually break in. Not to check on him, but just because he was dead. He couldn’t defend his home if he were dead.

What did that matter though? He would be dead. His chair and television wouldn’t die with him. They would get along just fine without him.

Tyler sat up slightly. The thought of his chair and television existing beyond his death raised his spirits.

It was best not to mope. Tyler was no moper, damn straight. He un-stuck himself from his chair. Death would find no moper in Tyler’s home. He sat on his hands to make them stop shaking. No, Tyler would be brave. Like movie hero brave.

He puffed out his chest and waited for the disease to take him.

And he waited.

And waited.

And waited a little more.

Night came, and Tyler found his back aching from sitting upright for so long.

He was still alive. Nothing about him hurt. Well, he was a little hungry, but nothing else besides that.

Did he not need the pill?

Tyler shook his head so hard a muscle stiffened in his neck, and he was left gasping for air. Ridilicous, Tyler needed the pill. Everyone needed the pill.

But what if they were right? ‘They’ being the people on the channel that Tyler’s television was not supposed to receive. Through the static, they said that no one needed the pill. When he first heard that, he immediately changed the channel to something more approved. Still, he switched back to it now and again. But just for a second or two. Tyler didn’t believe them, of course. Becuase after a few days of furtive glances at the channel, it stopped broadcasting. It made sense that they had died from the disease.

But Tyler was still alive.

Were they right?

Could he still die?

His fingernails dug into his scalp and came away bloody and filled with hair.

A single loud thud resonated from his door and a package fell out of his mailslot.

He knew it was this month’s dosage of pills.

He scrambled over to the door and tore the package open. The plastic bubble containing the pill crackled as he popped it into his hand. He had to take it. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to end up like the people on the fuzzy channel who said they went weeks without taking their pills. Tyler opened his mouth and threw the pill towards it.

But he shut his mouth, and the pill ricocheted off his teeth. It snapped in two as it hit the floor.

He placed the box on his end table. He wanted food. His body may have been dumb and didn’t know what Tyler wanted half the time, but it knew he needed food. Not once had he ever craved the pill.

Puffing out his chest, Tyler picked up the box of pills and tossed it into a garbage pile. He opened his door, hands steady-much to his surprise-and stepped out into the night. The fresh air filled his lungs with vapors of burning tires and gunpowder. A burger place existed down the street, or it had when he was much younger. A greasy pile of meat and cheese between two buns called out to him. The pills were in the trash now and no longer called on him to stay home.

He could go anywhere. Do anything.

Hello everyone! 

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve posted anything publically. I’ve been spending a lot of time working on getting my long form fiction to a point that I am satisfied with. 

That being said, I am at a point where I need feedback on what to write next. If you wouldn’t mind spending a few minutes of your time and answering this survey, I would be most grateful. 

Thanks in advance,

Here’s a rating system for books based on the 5-star scale. There are better rating systems out there, but since Amazon and co. require you to give a star rating I like to be consistent whenever I do give one. 

5 - This book was amazing. It did things so creatively and the writing was so distinct that it evoked salient emotional responses from me throughout reading. I will talk about this book often, and try to convince all my friends to read it.

4 - I really liked this book. It made me think about its world a great deal afterwards, and either left me craving for more or completely satisfied.

3 - This book was OK. It told a story and was somewhat entertaining.

2 - I barely finished this book. It was a struggle getting through and had major flaws in its story or did an extremely poor job communicating its ideas.

1 - I could not finish this book due to overwhelming flaws in grammar, spelling, or other technical parts that made it unreadable. 

Everyone will probably rate their reads differently than how I do mine. Ratings as a whole, and especially for books, are extremely subjective and relative to how the rater was feeling and what they have already read in their lives. So no two people would have the same system.

Inspiration comes in all forms and shapes, and it comes at you like a sudden slap to the face from who knows where, or at least it does for me. This brings me to My5, a project put together by one of my favorite authors, @kmalexander to spread the word about other participating author’s 5 main sources of inspiration for their writing.

My project 30 Second Fantasy needed at least 365 different sources of inspiration, but there were some that spun off multiple stories or at least provided the groundwork for starting a different story every day. Without further ado, here are My5 things that inspired me the most while writing 30 Second Fantasy.

Tabletop RPGs

I have been playing tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder for nearly ten years now, and they are a surging wellspring to catch inspiration from. The settings are varied: I’ve evaded a fang-toothed monster on a space station, solved mysteries in Lovecraftian 1920, and even fought an animated character on the deck of a plywood pirate ship set from a Saturday morning cartoon. You can go anywhere and do anything in an RPG with only your mind’s imagination as your limit. As broad and deep as the settings can get, I pull most of my inspiration out of RPGs from the characters played by other people.

Writing characters is hard, and writing characters that people actually feel sympathetic with is extremely difficult. Every now and again, someone will do something odd, say... A paladin killing a priest after promising to help him and then burning their body on the spot, and that leaves the whole table mouth-agape. The things that seem so ridiculously out of character, but suddenly make sense when the person can explain their true motivation like... the priest's vampire son would have killed him anyway, and killing the priest now ended the priest’s suffering while starving the vampire. It’s the little things like that which really make characters shine, and tabletop RPGs are full of them.

Hong Kong

Hong Kong is one of my favorite cities in the world, and I have been so incredibly lucky to get a job that lets me travel there a few times every year. There’s nowhere else on Earth like Hong Kong (which is a little biased, considering I haven’t been everywhere on Earth to compare). Everything about it seems contradictory and opposed. You’ll see towering skyscrapers that have skyscraper-sized holes in them (seriously, look up The Arch) and a 10-minute bus ride away you’ll find a lush park with nary a building in sight. Hong Kong also has a pretty wide wealth disparity, with some buildings ranging from $5000 to $10000 per square foot with floors owned by a single person or company, and then you get places like Chungking Mansion and the Kowloon Walled City (demolished) with multiple families living in a single room.

These opposing features serve as fantastic jumping-off points for generating story lines. The city itself could be the setting for dozens of urban fantasy novels with each novel seeming like it took place in a distinct world. Despite being only 426 square miles, Hong Kong packs a punch strong enough to knock out thousands of authors with inspiration.

The Lies of Locke Lamora

A quick note: I took the picture above while I was in Florence, Italy, not a preview shot of a Lies of Locke Lamora movie (and what I would give for one of those).

The Lies of Locke Lamora is one of my favorite on-going fantasy series. The cast of characters is deep and incredibly interesting. Thieves, psychotic mages, gangsters, the list goes on and on, and all of them feel like fully-fleshed out people that really pull at your heartstrings when they bite the dust. Not a spoiler, people die in this series, it’s what makes the stories run with their stakes bare for all to see.

Then there’s the setting, which can best be described as an almost-steampunk version of renaissance Venice. When I read the series, I got the same kind of at-home feeling that I felt when Harry first started to explore Hogwarts: a feeling I’ve been trying my hardest to replicate in my works whenever possible.

While I try not to borrow too much from The Lies of Locke Lamora and the rest of the Gentleman Bastards series, it does creep into my writing, but that’s only because I aspire to write something as good as this series.

Product development

What you see in the image above, is a quick sketch of one of my greatest inventions, the world’s first connected banana. It has Bluetooth, a fitness tracker, micro transactions, and is even Amazon Echo-ready. All jokes aside, my day job is to develop products (albeit slightly more serious than the connected banana), and of course inspiration from work sneaks into my writing.

Problems pop up all the time when a product is developed, and by all the time, I mean, every hour, on the hour to the point where a dozen or so emails explaining how there’s a problem that needs to be fixed immediately is a typical day at work. As frustrating as that is in real life, it’s a bit cathartic to put characters in my stories through the same stuff.

Marketing

And finally, the last major influence on my writing is marketing. Marketing goes hand-in-hand with product development, so I get a good bit of it at work (although not being in a customer-facing position, I get shielded from the brunt of it), but the ads out in the wild and how the ads are supposed to affect you are prime inspiration breeding grounds.

The final product of an ad, either the graphic design or visual effects in a commercial, can be so ridiculous that they transcend whatever is normal and logical. This ridiculousness makes for great starting points in stories and plots.

Marketing appeals, like bandwagon, fear, etc.. also serve as phenomenal character motivations. There’s something instinctual about them, and they’ve been used for centuries to get people to buy stuff. Naturally, this extends to stories and getting characters to do things that don’t create that ‘out of character’ feeling.

Inspiration for writing will vary from person to person, and is always worth talking about. Here are a few more authors who are participating in the My5 project with posts on what inspires their writing. You should check them out and see if you can find any new ways to get inspired for your work, or for what to read next.

K. M.'s #My5: The Bell Forging Cycle

Laurie's #My5: My Five Writing Influences

Mike's: #My5: The Verdant Revival

Trying to see if audio books are for you, or waiting for your next credit on Audible? No worries, here’s a list of where to get free audiobooks, risk-free. 

LibriVox - Free audiobooks, in the public domain, read by volunteers. 

Open Culture - Lists on lists on lists of free digital content, including audiobooks.

Podiobooks - Quirky books, mostly from indie authors. 

Audiobook Boom - A mailing list with audiobooks you can get in exchange for reviewing the book. 

Most Public Libraries - Check out the website of the library closest to you and see if they have audiobooks. This is probably the best resource to get popular audiobooks. Breadth and depth of catalogue will vary depending on your location.

[WP] Satan is real and he has come from the Underworld to spread hate and evil, as a 14 year old mall goth who relies on his parents still.

Satan, Lord of All that is Dark and Awful, Captor of Souls, Torturer Extraordinaire, came to Earth on a day that reeked of fresh pine and peppermint. Lamentable smells that Satan attempted to purge from his nose, spraying a string of snot that stuck on the front of his black shirt in such a way that reminded him of a cobweb. The smell was only outdone by the screech of children running from house to house, bellowing songs at homeowners that lauded the exploits of his greatest enemy, the anti-Satan. It was two days before Christmas, and of all forms Satan could have possibly slid into, a fourteen-year old boy being driven to the mall by his parents to shop for gifts, was the last one he wanted.

“Brimstone and hellfire to the both of you. Let me out of the car so that I may wreak havoc unto your world,” Satan said.

“Is that from a Black Sabbath song? How does it go again?” Satan’s presumptive father began to make percussive noises with his mouth, while his mustache bounced along with the rhythm.

“It’ll be a Black Sabbath for the two of you if you don’t let me out right now!” Satan said. He tried to open the car door, but as soon as he touched the handle, his presumptive Mother began to scream.

“Dammit Ricky! Touch the door again, and that’ll be it! I. Will. End. You,” she said.

Whether it was her tone that was on-par with the mightiest general of his demon army, or her eyes, which were filled with the same desperate longing for something else of the souls that fought against him before he tossed them into a pit of eternal fire and pain, he removed his hand from the door and laid it in his lap. It was at that point, he decided that he liked his mother very much.

Satan’s father fought tooth-and-nail with an elderly woman in a powder-blue Buick for their parking spot nearly a mile away from the mall. The woman slammed on her gas, and drove off after Satan gave her a knowing look that plainly said ‘I’ll be seeing you soon.’

“What’s her problem?” Satan’s father asked.

“Mortality,” Satan said.

“Zip it mister,” Satan’s mother said, “Carl let’s go. I want to get out of here before nine this time.”

Satan sank into his seat, and eyed the door handle, greatly aware of the anger it brought his mother whenever he touched it.

“Come on Ricky, let’s go. Now!” she said.

Satan fumbled with the handle, and spilled out of the door onto the asphalt. It bit at him with teeth as cold as icicles. His mortal body began to shiver, and plumes of white breath escaped from his mouth. He wrapped his arms around himself, and began to wish that he brought a little hellfire with him. He cursed Beelzebub for recommending otherwise, stating that it would draw too much suspicion if he really wanted to destroy humanity by eroding at their core moral values, he said in the standup meeting before Satan’s trip topside.

“If you wore clothes like a normal person, then maybe you wouldn’t be so cold all the time. It’s winter, Ricky. Put on a sweater for god’s sake,” his mother said.

“Damn you woman.”

“YOU WANNA GO RICKY?”

“Mary, it’s just a phase. Let’s go,” Satan’s father grabbed her hand, and pulled her towards the mall. He struggled for about six steps while Satan’s mother glared at Satan, before she relented and walked towards the snow-covered building. Satan shivered the entire walk and nearly slipped no less than six times on black ice, but he eventually made it to the mall.

It was glorious.

Satan felt a little overwhelmed, but spread his arms to embrace the sin oozing from every brick of the building.

Signs exclaiming savings of 70-80% off enticed people overcome by their greed into swinging fists wrapped around coupons and cash towards cashiers. Satan saw one of the cashiers take cover as one patron at a soap store hurl a basket full of soap bottles at a woman trying to take the last limited edition, celebrity-designed brick of soap from its display.

In another store, there were people cramming their faces full of free samples. Satan listened close and heard sighs and moans of ecstasy as each patron shoved another piece of pecan fudge into their mouths.

A soap bottle slid past Satan, and he smiled at the sight of the soap store breaking into a full-blown brawl.

Satan marveled how each store, and even the small demi-stores selling outdated phone cases and promises of Caribbean vacations, worshipped sin in their own way.

[WP] You have just died. You find that there's an option in the afterlife to revert to your last save. You discover that each "save point" was whenever you hugged someone.

Inky black, the type of darkness you can only really get when you grind the palms of your hands into your eyes, surrounded Chelsea and wrapped the horizons in a blanket of starless night.  In front of her sat a podium, and atop that, a golden button. She had been expecting clouds and harps, or pitchforks being carted around by little red devils. The button was strange enough, but the words labeling it in gold letters, all caps and oppressively serifed, made her feel uncomfortable.

“Revert to last save?” the letters read.

It read like something out of a video game. Something she could have chuckled at given the situation, but she couldn’t find the laughs. She thought that the act of dying could have stripped the humor from her, but really, she wasn’t in a laughing mood, she had just died after all.

Her hand twitched with anticipation. The button was a good button. You know the type: found in the back of a pizza joint on a cabinet that could only play golf games from the late nineties, whose monitor scrolled endlessly with three letter swears to the point where ASS became a blurred fixture burned into the screen. Those cabinets had good buttons, and Chelsea could have gotten a little teary-eyed about it, had she not died moments earlier. That shock was still trying to settle into her.

The podium and its old-fashioned arcade button were an odd sight to see in the afterlife, or the afterdeath as Chelsea thought was more appropriate, but they were still outdone by what else was written on the top of the podium.

“last hug,” was scraped into the black veneer of an otherwise immaculate surface. The letters looked like a fingernail had dug them out, which made the tips of Chelsea’s fingers a little sore just thinking about it.

Chelsea squinted her eyes and scanned the endless horizon to find evidence of someone else there with her, but no, she was absolutely alone. Unless you counted the podium and its button, but Chelsea chose not to.

Alone, with just a button, for who knows how long. Chelsea felt her hand twitch again. How long could she hold out here? Days? Months? Eternity?

“Why the fuck not?” she said, quietly.

She slapped it with an open palm, and she opened her eyes before she had time to clench them shut.

Isabel’s screaming came first, followed by the smells of burning plastic and steel, and the strobing light of flames eating away at the hood of their car. Tears streamed down Isabel’s face, as did something else that Chelsea chose to ignore.

The urge to scream filled Chelsea, but it couldn’t manifest as Chelsea tried to gather her bearings of the situation. Had the dark place been a dream she woke from into a burning car with her arms entwined with Isabel’s, or was it the other way around? Her boyfriend was still hanging from the driver’s seat, his arms criss-crossed in a sort of broken yoga across the ceiling of the car. She remembered that she had tried to shake him awake, but the only good that did was show Chelsea how loose the connection was between his head and his shoulders. The thought of his wobbling head made her feel sick, so she directed her attention towards Isabel instead and tightened their embrace.

The warmth turned into a painful heat, and Isabel cried harder.

“It’ll be alright,” Chelsea said. It seemed fitting given the situation. Chelsea knew better, but Isabel’s eyes, oh her eyes, made the lie worth it. Isabel calmed, and she stared intensely at Chelsea. Her eyes were pure sapphires that mingled with the reflections of orange and red flames, turning them into plums. A ridiculous thought, plums for eyes. The weight of blood on Chelsea’s brain and the heat had finally gotten to her.

And then Chelsea was back in the darkness with the podium and its singular golden button with its words “Revert to last save?” almost as if they were there to greet her upon her return.

Chelsea was alone. From horizon to horizon, there was nothing but her. Her calm abated and was replaced with an intense loneliness that made her eye the button apprehensively.

Revert to Last Save must have been a warning.  

But that didn’t stop Chelsea from hitting it again.

And Again.