The universe according to Maximillian

I went through a phase, while fleshing out the ideas of the boy's world in my head, of not being sure which parts of the universe he exists in to visit and discover. So I ran a series of requests, inviting people to give me titles which I'd then write a story from. I got three replies, which were the next three stories. After the third the story was trying to escape from even these little constraints, wanting to reflect the events in my life, and the characters were asking me to develop them in new and darker ways: naturally powerless to resist, after the third 'request' story I gave up on asking for more and instead began to take titles from my mind again.

Still the three request stories are quite important in their own way, reflecting on interesting issues, and they provide a good metaphor for that lull that always seems to set in my life about the time that I wrote these. It's a strange mish-mash: the feeling of boredom from no crises to deal with; the nagging feeling that one should be doing something; the worry that something's about to go really bad; the hidden frustration at having nothing to do; then comes the realisation that so many things have happened, that you've not noticed them happening, but they've all come up behind and underneath you, and now they're crashing over you and you're drowning in the mess and you curse the lull which you were in not five minutes ago and which you wasted not preparing for this eventuality and you strike out desperately to swim or sink.

It always happens.

"Sheep" was written for Alice Briggs (because it's better than her sister's idea which I recall was "Cinderella III") and was a more intellectual story. Less emotionally charged. Incidentally, the boy would later vote Alice as "Best New Friend of 2007".

( Sheep )

Whoof...

Well, NaNoWriMo is over, and congratulations to all this year's winners, and for all those who didn't do it there are many more years to come ;-)

With "Nobody's Angel" then to its bloody, fiery and furious conclusion, I had a bit of a look over the boy's history before I launched myself into that 50,000 word goal. For those who read "The Watertight Box" which I think was the last one I posted, I did deliberately include a scene where he revisits the same location to find what's changed. There was more building on some themes that I'd raised in "Sheep" and "It Never Rains, But It Pours" (both unpublished) and obviously, NA really just is the very long sorting-out of all the issues that've been running through in a sequence from "At The Bottom Of My Garden" through "Broon's Bane" to "Good Enough?" (all similarly unpublished). But I couldn't find anything linking back to "When He Was Young" which was the first story to properly introduce all four of the other main characters, apart from the boy himself. And I did wonder about this for a little while, but then decided it perhaps wasn't so odd because basically this one I'm about to put up, "When He Was Young" is the first snapshot of the city and what's going on within it. It doesn't tell you as much as later stories do, but relative to the situation at the time it tells you more than all the others put together, because it's the very first one to tell you anything at all.

It's told through the kid's viewpoint, which is something I feel awkward doing and is hard to write convincingly sometimes, but I liked it more than perhaps any of the stories I've put together, mainly because I had such a strong and consistent mental image of the entire story. It also did teach me a lot about the world I'd created - don't ever claim that the author knows everything, because he doesn't, he creates worlds but then has to find out about them just the same as any reader - mainly through the comments that people left when I first Myspaced it. One in particular which was good was from Brendan:

"I particularly like the way they're fighting for the city as if it's theirs, and it's all they have left, and there's no-one left to fight for it but them..."

That resounded in me a lot and I've never quite forgotten that idea.

A lot more went into this story. My love for post-apocalyptic shooter games certainly shaped how I envisaged the city in its war-torn state, and the music of the first half of the album "Sam's Town" shaped it too, as you can probably tell from the title. It's shorter than I remember too - only 1332 words - but it gets across what I want it to. It's like a ten-minute snapshot of another reality.

But without more ado, here's the story.

( When He Was Young )

The Catholic priest for Our Lady Of Victories' parish in Lutterworth, Father Feeley, has a number of phrases and complaints about the state of affairs today which he likes to bring out. One of these is the attitude of several Catholics and other Christians - indeed, a lot of supposedly religious people - towards God and their religion in general. I think the phrase is "putting God in a watertight box, bringing him out every Sunday for an hour of Mass, and then putting him away again." Despite probably being one of the people who he's complaining at here, I do feel his point strongly. You shut something away in a "watertight box" and only bring it out to fulfil obligations... you're not really treating it with any emotion, with any love, you're just using it either as a tool to fulfil a necessary purpose or worse, you're seeing it as a burden that you have to get over. Not how devout religious people are supposed to treat God (I guess there must be some leniency for those of us who have somewhat weak faith anyway...or at the least, weak religion).

I was thinking about this imagery about the same time that I was thinking about the "piece of my heart" metaphor. "Oh, you'll always have a special piece of my heart." Well, is that an actual physical piece? After all, your heart is a critical circulatory organ as well as the metaphor for your emotional centre. And then you have heartbreak, and a damaged heart, and heartburn, and emotional scars, and bla bla bla... Before you know, all these different imageries had combined, taken on a life of their own within the metaphor, and therefore formed the perfect basis for a story set in my usual surrealistic universe.

By the way, though "the girl" is a non-specific amalgam of all those that the boy has romantic and/or sexual feelings for, I did have a specific girl in mind when I thought of the scene involving the car, and I wrote it with that girl in mind.

( The Watertight Box )

This one was really very short. It was me bored in front of a computer thinking about the human imagination, and how when I closed my eyes everything went black... then considering that it wasn't exactly black because my memory and my imagination would always imprint images onto the blackness, and then my usual random wanderings through the world of insanity.

So here you go, for completeness's sake...

( A Room Full Of Everything )

For those of you who don't know (some of you might) I write quite a lot of stories.  They're generally set in their own, somewhat vague and surrealistic universe.  It's now about a year since I wrote the first one, an anniversary which I am celebrating by writing a very long and complex one called "Nobody's Angel" which'll be my entry into NaNoWriMo.

These stories usually have a prompt which'll be something that happened in my life which I decided to express in a creative fashion... although there are less emotionally charged ones which came about purely because I wanted to write a story and asked someone for a title for one.  They are almost entirely metaphor, but it's a metaphor so deep and complex that it has its own twisted reality.  And there is a key to decode all the metaphors... but the key is my mind, which none of you can really ever access fully.  So sorry.  You'll have to read and draw your own conclusions as to what each thing means...hopefully, though, that's something some of you at least will enjoy.

Without further ado, anyway, here is what is technically the first one.  It somewhat sets the scene for all the later ones though it doesn't quite fit in with them.  The prompt was me considering if I could actually be insane - or at least severely mentally ill - without realising it, and this short story grew out of it.

(And yes, most of these can be found on my Myspace page... but not all of them, and as time goes on that'll become even less, as this is a rather more fitting place to keep them online.)

I can now finally post to LiveJournal!

It's like my birthday came early.  Two days early, as LiveJournal so kindly pointed out to me...  :-p

So yeah, that's all.  I'll work out how this particular social networking site varies from all the others and then start posting stuff...