The Eternal City.

Calvin Teo, Wiki.

Butch was a black figure, sucking up all light, and yet he saw himself from outside…he turned a corner and went up the stairs, but the faded wall-paper did nothing to reflect light back upon him or illuminate who he was.

He was a shadow with a fedora, and he rebelled at the sight. It lasted but a second, and then there they were.

Everyone was watching him, and yet all was darkness. There were a thousand eyes upon him, and he felt them, and he knew them. They were invisible in the darkness. He could not put a face to a feeling, nor a name to a vibration that was each and every one of them. Their existence was undeniable. Invisible hands and feet buffeted him. There was shocking reality in the pain from their hits. There was real joy in the pain which he dealt out in retaliation.

Separate and distinct, and alone among all others, each unique in its strengths and weaknesses, together they were formidable, and he despaired. It was happening so fast, all seemed hopeless, and still his spirit remained. It could not last forever against such an onslaught.

What they fought for no one could say, and he never even asked. There was no time. All were upon him, they who seemed like they must once have been good friends or harmless, friendly strangers from a whole new world.

Even in the struggle, held down by the weight of them, he marveled at their vulnerability, and struck out with force and effect, for they had laid themselves open for it.

He was very strong, Thrown off effortlessly, they swirled about, never quite able to conceal themselves or hide their own true essence from him. They wanted him for some reason. It meant nothing to him, and he looked inside some of them. It was something inside of him that resonated. Something was isolated and he got inside the heart of one of them for one thin slice of time and then he at least knew something about them. No one was touching him now.

He laughed.

They were afraid of him. But then, he was afraid of himself, wasn’t he? He always had been,

They had something in common.

There was a bright light and he stood in the midst of an open plain.

The sun baked the cracked alkaline surface and seared the back of his neck. The silence was profound.

They stood in a ring around him, a stone’s throw away. The plain stretched off into the haze and the horizon no longer existed. It was a blue glass bowl overhead. Two dots floating above the far edge of the distant sky resolved themselves into big black birds, but they didn’t frighten him either. He should have been scared. He felt nothing but contempt for their mystery.

He knew their names now, and a wave of despondence washed over him. Each and every one of them, he had once thought his friend. He had loved them, liked them, looked up to them and respected them. They were all good people. It was why he sought them out in the first place, always knowing that he was unworthy of their confidence…his heart sank. He had wanted so much…

Why were they doing this to him?

“What do you want?”

The words rang out and mocked him in the emptiness.

No one spoke.

They were trying to tell him something.

They stood there in their everyday clothes, with their everyday faces, in their everyday postures, looking at Butch with a tolerant amusement.

They pointed now, and twisting, Butch craned his neck and looked behind.

His jaw dropped.

It was the most beautiful city he had ever seen, looming up over the shimmering waves of naked heat and towering right up into the base of the billowing white clouds that emanated from the city itself. Under its soap bubble dome, the oasis of green verdure and shining blocks of ennobled humanity beckoned in promise of welcome, a tall, soothing drink and a place to stay for the night. He turned, momentarily blinded by the mist across his eyes, but they were gone, as mysteriously as they had come, and he was still there. Whatever had just happened was over.

“Thank you.”

A promise had been made, one that must be kept on both sides.

His stomach felt very strange and he was sure he would wake up in a minute. It would have been better if all of this wasn’t so real, and so pregnant with obscure meanings.



End


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The thousand-yard stare.

I need to go for a bike ride or something.

I’ve got that thousand-yard stare. Maybe even a thousand-year stare, for I have been working far off into the future.


Having just completed a novel of 62,650 words in about forty-nine or fifty days, I can finally sit back and figure out what to do next.

It’s a nice, quiet little science fiction novel. Insofar as submitting it goes, I owe it to myself to try. An advance would be useful and a traditionally-published book would bring some glamour to the operation and get space in bookstores, with all the cachet of whatever imprint.

My next project is the third in the Maintenon Mystery Series. I have all kinds of ideas, and if I can just stick to my present routine I could probably have another novel/manuscript by about October 1.

So I’m preparing the SF book for submission. That gets it out my hair immediately, with no thought of self-publishing that one for a year or more. Generally speaking, response times vary from four months, to eight months, and one rejection came in two years later.

The mystery novel will be self-published. That still leaves me time in 2013 to write a bunch of short stories. If I could do twenty stories in a week I would be happy to have them. I probably have at least a dozen or more short stories under submission right now. They get rejected, I submit them somewhere else. Every so often I stick one up on my blog.

On my desktop or in folders are a number of unfinished projects, including ‘Whack ‘Em and Stack ‘Em,’ a parody thriller novel. That sits at about 13,000 words, so it’s already got a good start. I could just peck away at that one. There are one or two other stories as well, of varying lengths.

The trouble with writing a novel in such a short time is maintaining that focus. It requires producing a good two thousand words a day for about five or six weeks, although at the end the pace slows a bit and then the rereading and editing process is slower still. Life sits still for no one and leaving out personal details, everyone around here faces all kinds of challenges on all kinds of levels.

Life is like that sometimes.

You may have had a similar experience.

Escaping to another world, one completely under my control, has its uses when the stress levels begin to build. Any pressure to perform stems completely from within. No one puts a gun to our temple and makes us do this. Focusing on what’s inside the book helps me to forget about everything else, if only for a couple of hours.

It takes a kind of persistent focus, working day in and day out according to some semblance of a routine. I don’t claim any great work ethic. This is what I like doing, and without it I might be bored out of my skull.

My first two books took ten months to edit. Now I’m doing it in less than a week. That is the value of writing your brains out and studying the craft, not just of writing, but editing, proof-reading, fact-checking, research and even publishing.

This is my eleventh novel and I start number twelve in a week or so.

In the meantime, I need to go off bike riding or something. I really do.