Bullets From the Heart – Part 2
Ideas are wonderful. They can keep you warm on cold days, give you hope when things look bleak, and they can occupy wonderful minutes as you build and structure ideas with even more ideas.
At the end of the day, however, ideas are essentially meaningless.
That’s right. Worthless nothingburgers of the highest order. ‘Why Justin, you wound us so! The Palace of the mind is sacrosanct!”
Ah, but you’re wrong. Ideas, as most of them stand, will never do anything for anyone. Stuck in your mind, looping about your daydreams and regular dreams, an idea is simply mental masturbation. There’s a payoff, but only for the one participating.
With writing, even the most atrocious idea ever birthed that is placed on paper is worth more than the best story never told. Ideas are simple, easy. Writing prompts are a dime a dozen. A ton of sites, blogs, twitter, instagram, tumblr, and other media avenues give them out for free.
The real work of an author, regardless of their medium of choice, is to pound an idea out into actual writing. You have to take the shiny thing in your mind, and transfer it to paper.
Most of the time, while an idea might be Avalon in your mind, when it is exposed to reality, it curdles into something more akin to a derelict building. There are hints and aspects of the building which show that it might have once been mighty and majestic, but for the most part it is a hollowed out, rotting mess.
When you have an idea, the real work hasn’t even started yet. When you write the first draft, the work is only a quarter of the way finished. That’s what trips up so many, that’s what causes such a raft of men and women and those in-between to quit on their goals and ideals. It’s work, hard, laborious, and unrewarding. There’s no ‘Eureka!’ moments in the real world. For every ‘aha!’ you’ll ever have, there are at least a hundred thousand other writing moments where you’re just hammering away at a brick wall with a spoon. You’ll get the job done, but you’ll hate yourself, the wall, and the villainous spoon most especially.
We (I) have the romanticized dream of a writer gazing into a sunset bay, drinking a cocktail as they lounge at their small cafe table. Ideas waft to them on the salty breeze, and settle like gentle rain on a field of sown seeds, sprouting bestselling books everywhere.
In reality, ideas are a lot like roaches; THEY ARE EVERYWHERE, AND THEY ARE LEGION. I have a thousand and one ideas a day. My dreams are a constant source of inspiration and neat world building opportunities. Not all ideas are worth writing about however, and even those that you believe are, will look almost nothing like what you had pictured in your mind.
It’s back to that whole abandoned building. If the bones are good, then you can do something with it. You have to strip away all the bad parts, leaving nothing but the solid foundation. Then, simple tedious labor is your ally, your steward, your spirit guide. You simply work hard at building around the framework your idea has provided you, and hope that you mange to get everything done in the right order. You’ll make a lot of mistakes; you’ll build the wrong thing first, focus on the wrong project to do things smoothly. You’ll curse the heavens and your very birth as you work.
In the end though, you’ll have made something. Truly and completely, you’ve made something. You’ve given back instead of mindless consuming what is offered to you. That’s worth doing, no matter how high the cost. No matter how boring the process.
We are gods, all of us. We just never realized how tedious and boring it is to actually make something.
Bullets From the Heart – Part 2
I was exhausted, running out of steam as I dashed from ruined building to ruined building. The blue bullets chased me, an endless supply of poorly aimed death. I had time to flash a smile: if this necromancer had spent even a tenth as much time at the shooting range as they had in the library, I’d be dead long ago.
It still wasn’t going to save me though. Piss-poor aim or not, I wasn’t going to last much longer. I still hadn’t figured out what was wrong with my energy canister. The runes were all correct, meticulous and precise as they always were. It wasn’t my first canister either. I’d used dying miscreants before, and it’d never been an issue. So why now, of all times?!
I slid down the rain-slicked wall, squelching softly into the lightly irradiated mud. I didn’t care; doing a ritual to cleanse myself of exposure was the last of my concerns. It takes weeks to trap and enslave a soul, and I didn’t have that kind of time. I took the time to use both eyes to study the cylinder, and it was only then, with the addition of depth perception, that I noticed what had happened.
I had left a hole in the cage spells. A small nick on the engraved spell-weaving. Not a large one, not enough for the soul to have escaped after the first shot or two. Yet it was big enough that each time I had fired at my attacker, the hole had widened a little further. I laughed, exhausted and frustrated and amused at the same time. Thirty six years of practice and patience, thirty-six years of rituals and frantic research so my soul would not be subject to endless torture upon my death, and a simple scuff mark was about to kill me.
I stared at the cylinder, and while I did, a wild and desperate thought hit me with the force of a spirit shell: It’s a hole. Holes go both ways. All the runes and spells etched into a cylinder were basically restraints and prison bars. Spirits wanted to flee. Necromancers faced eternal punishment in the afterlife because spirits kind of held a grudge at seeing their fellows trapped and tortured into non-existence.
The power provided by the cylinders were almost an after-effect. The spell-work which externalized the energy generated by a soul was still intact. What if…. what if I used part of my own soul to power the weapon? Not the whole thing, obviously. I didn’t want to die just now, thank you very much. If I ripped a tiny piece of it off, and shoved it into the cylinder though…
I would only get one shot, realistically. A partial soul in a damaged cylinder. Plus I had absolutely no idea how it would feel or what would happen to the rest of me while I did all this. Better than just sitting here waiting to be slaughtered like some ignorant farm animal.
I wrote a quick ritual in the mud, and bit into my right index finger so I could empower it with my blood. After a few seconds, the fingers of my right hand glowed a deep and brilliant azure. I sucked in breaths as I frantically tried to gather my courage. ‘Oh nuke me why am I doing this?!” The shouted curse did nothing, and with mounting panic I swiped at my midriff with the glowing hand.
My fingers passed through my mid-section like it wasn’t there. I screamed again, this time a rising wail of agony, as my fingers came away cradling a globule of softly glowing orange light. I moaned, retching into the dirt at my feet. My hands shook abominably, and I almost dropped the cylinder twice as I tried to bring it up to meet the snippet of my soul I had just ripped free.
I tipped my right hand, and my soul rolled and sloshed its way into the cylinder. At last, the lines of power returned, the orange glow causing a triumphant gasp of laughter to escape my lips. I kissed the tiny cylinder, the taste of sweat and bile and mud tasted of ambrosia in that moment.
Hands still shaking, I reached for my korin, opening the rear hatch with practiced ease, and slid a part of myself into the waiting chamber.
To be continued….
Soulfully,
Justin
