Lens On: The Rusted Mall

The Rusted Mall, I admit, was directly inspired by the seemingly unrelenting news of public mass murders in America during the time of its writing.  I have a number of opinions about these events that I don't think I'll share here, except for the one alluded to in the writing.  I don't think the murderer's pictures, names, motives, friends, should be a center of celebrity attention the way they often are. 

The character, Shannon Vega, is someone I envisioned having to grow up knowing what her father did, but sharing my views of disdain on the sensationalizing of it.  In my head she's devoted a lot of her young adult life shooting portraits of the survivors, and she donates any money earned from that to various prevention and recovery charities.   It always irked her, though, that there was a memorial painted in the mall that got shot up, so she had to go take care of that, too.

The setting was the prompt, I believe - just the abandoned mall setting.  I've always had a fascination with abandoned and derelict places, with graffiti that outlives the scrawler, and other tiny things.  I wish that I was brave enough to explore these places for myself, but I think it's okay for now that I can just build them up in my head.

Lens On: More than Enough

When I was little, there was a junkyard nearby.  Very nearby.  So nearby, in fact, that when a lightning strike to a junked car created a ball of St. Elmo's fire, the blue alien light caught my eye through my bedroom window and I watched it drift upwards.  No one believed me.

I can't say I had a particularly privileged childhood;  I lived with my mother and her mother.  My grandmother was retired, far too early, and my mom worked in a shop, holding things together with hair pins while raising two children.  A lot of our toys were handmade, but mom made a point of getting us store-bought things, too.  

Mom talked a lot about her dad, who had died when she was a child, and about all the things he wanted to give his children and couldn't.  Sometimes she'd do this over a box of a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts that she'd splurged for and brought home, and we'd listen with sticky lips and fingers, enjoying the rare treat.  

Also, nearby, when the junkyard had metamorphed into a small strip of constantly changing shops, there briefly existed a small ice creamery.  It smelled of bleach, and a little bit of pee.  Mom would take me there to get a banana split very rarely - I think I only experienced it four or five times while the places existed.  They had "real cherries," which is a strong memory for me even though I can't for the life of me think of what I considered fake cherries.  They had a wooden pachinko machine that ate quarters and sometimes gave gumballs that tasted like dye.  

Mom also had (and still has), a flaky old wallet.  It's not leather anymore - if it ever was, all the skin is gone now, leaving just the cloth mesh it had been stitched too and a few grey, tattered whisps of unidentifiable material.  She always says she'll get a new one.  She never does.  It wasn't her dad's - she had other things from him that she treasured.

Still, all of this wove together for the story, which came up when I was challenged to do flash fiction about a wallet and a donut shop.  Mom recognized either herself or her dad in it, which was a better prize for me than the acknowledgement I got for a win in that contest.  

Lens On: Mr. Bends

So a little while ago I posted about Mr. Bends.  He lives in Blue Holly Wrath (aka Blue Holly's Wrath,) a town I created in my head after my roleplaying group fell apart and I needed to have a place to store my cast of OC's.  At the time, Mr. Bends didn't exist.  The star players were, and still are, remnants of that original cast, but after a while a standing quirk I have with my characters threw up the idea that they'd need some sort of curse-breaker in town.

The thrust of Blue Holly's Wrath is that it's where heroes who do not want to hero, or who currently cannot hero, go.  Sometimes they go to recuperate, sometimes they go there to retire.  The quirk I have is that all of my OC's really need to have some sort of day job.  A skill, a craft, or a willingness to do something that people will regularly pay for.  It irks me to no end when an adventure's only job is "adventurer."

I also wanted to give my favourite OC, "Illiandi Bondsmiller," someone he'd like to deny citizenship to but, at the end of the day, couldn't.  Undead folks bug that guy to no end for obvious reasons as well as personal ones, and I thought it would be fun to introduce an undead that was unassuming, hard working, and necessary to have around.  That Mr. Bends is a gem-cutter (sortof) wasn't enough to really justify him - roleplay communities are full of characters that make endless bead and bauble stuffs, so I started to think about where he was getting his gems from.

Blue Holly's Wrath is a tiny little seaside town inside a free-floating liminal bubble.  It drifts around and settles up against other realities for short periods of time and has a minor population change while the gates are open.  This makes most supplies tricky to obtain, so I figured that he'd have to get them from the population themselves, somehow.  After all, most heroes have enchanted blades and sacred stones and whatnot.

This, in turn, coincided with a recurring dream I have where I expel and illness or sadness by physically ejecting a pearl-like object (usually by sneezing!) and I decided to just hand that over to a zombie who wouldn't think it too disgusting to deal with.  After that, everything started to settle into place, including how he has to be sort of relegated to a side-alley.  My own psychiatrist is down a long, narrow alley gated at both ends by wrought iron, so I figured he could be, too.

I like it when things I write come from the dog-ends of experiences I've really had, or fragments of unconscious obsessions I've never been able to pin down.  I also like Mr. Bends.  I think he could be a useful side character in many stories, because so much of what he does and is can be frowned on by different communities, and because he's ultimately so useful.  I hope he shows up again in my writing some day.

Sometimes my writing comes to me problem first, or setting first, or character first.  I think Mr. Bends is one of those that cropped up from the setting rather than on his own, since he was formed largely by how he'd fit in, or not, with the people and place around him.

A Promise I Won't Keep

Hi.  I'm Kaji.

I currently have a job that I love, I have people I care about, and I have a comfortable home.  I have a couple of cats and a fish, a lot of unfinished writing and art projects, and relationships too complicated to boil down in light conversations at parties. 

Not that I go to parties.  I'm terribly introverted and might suffer just one of those a year, if bribed financially and given professional incentive to stay.  I like dark, quiet places, a lack of small talk, and something to put my feet up on.  Everyday life tends to take a lot out of me.

That's mostly because of my mental illness.  Diagnosed with social anxiety with a sprinkling of entertaining hangers-on, I've apparently been working with a smaller toolkit than most people all of my life, though I didn't really know it until a few years ago, when I went to a few doctors about it.  It's one of the best things I've ever done, and I share the relief so many people feel when they realize that they feel crazy because they're actually a little crazy.

And boy, does it help me make sense of things.  I can understand now, why certain sounds make me rage even though I rationally know they're harmless and not even that irritating.  I can understand now why I would sabotage my nascent musical career (and writing career, it seems!)   And now that I can understand it, I am more equipped to know when and how to ignore the little voice in my head telling me that everything is going to go wrong, and that I ought not bother.

My head was such a tumultuous place for such a long time that my body had a stillness to it.  People though I was calm.  They thought I was relaxing to be around.  Mostly, it was just that so much was going on inside that I couldn't spare the energy for normal motor functions.  I am a champion waiter-for-things.  I tend to think before I talk.  I watch and I listen.  It hasn't been all bad.

In fact, quite a lot of my life has been good.  While I've experienced abuses, traumas, set-backs, bullying, and other horrible things, it hasn't been so unrelenting that I haven't been able to recover.  I sometimes feel like I have so many interests and so much curiosity because a lot of zigs and zags happened in my life to help me cope with whatever was going on. 

Anywho, this is the latest thing.  It's a blog about not knowing why I'm blogging.  A few people who mean well have been asking me to try to boot one up, thinking it will lead me to being published or some undefined "good" they haven't really been able to put into words.  I anticipate that sometimes this will be writing, sometimes this will be bitching, sometimes this will be psuedo-philosophical bullshit, and therefore I anticipate that this is going to be a pretty unremarkable place. 

Marketing has never been my strong suit.