THIS IS A POST IN PROGRESS.  I’m going to do edits on it at some point in the evening maybe?  To add to or elaborate on the scenes.

I want to make a scene-focused outline, which emphasized interesting moments over moment-to-moment storytelling, which I usually do.  To this end, I’m going to try to turn my plot into 70 scenes.  To do that I have no choice but to start with a more conventional outline.  Reiterating and doing a few improvements to the one I previously established…

Matthew is working under the table for the mob as an IT guy when his disability benefits are shut off until question marks.  Sees little girl out his window one morning.  The mobsters are complaining about too many cops sniffing around lately.  At some point he meets the full roster of Bacchantes, including the murderer.  Random circumstances, Matthew finds himself in the tunnels, where he witnesses the Princess Lupe getting her pocket picked by lesbian hustler Bonnie.  He ends up the prime suspect but Godfather Freddy gives him 24 hours to make it right.

Matthew goes into the secret halls again, from the entrance in his apartment.  There is some action to suggest the highest ranked mobsters are the ones who know about and use the passages.  He locates Bonnie and gets her to give up the goods, then has convo with Princess Lupe – I’m gay too, but watch out.  Ain’t always fun and games.  She says I owe you and let’s figure out how to get you off the hook.  He goes home for the night and thinks he’s seeing the girl again, but she flies away in some impossible way.  Or was it monkey wearing her dress?

M & B came up with scheme to “ping” her stolen electronics, which “turn out” to have been mislaid in a bookshelf, and boss Freddy is grateful again for his cool nerd powers.  What do you want in reward?  Let me quit.  Too much for my nerves.  The boss sez he might contract him for short gigs but will let him chill.  On his way out the door, Matthew hears that the cops are pestering people in the projects about a missing person.  Was that the girl he witnessed?

He frets about calling the cops or not – the girl could’ve been imagination?  Hyun-woo appears and asks if anyone has seen the girl.  Matthew makes contact, and is instantly infatuated with Hyun-woo.  What now?  Here is your challenge, weird nerd: Find the girl or find out what happened to her.

Matthew takes to the tunnels, always ducking from supernatural menace and visions of chaos?  In spying on the world, he finds out about people with problems.  A weird child is into insects and outrages violent mom-BF.  From Matthew’s PoV, people take on animal characteristics.  The child is a giant humanoid ant, the patriarch is a bug-eyed horse.  Maybe.  Still trying to figure out how literal I should get or not with that stuff.

Matthew tries to ignore villainy and keep head low, but ends up helping ant king Yolanda get rid of the horse Dexter, and garners another favor.  At this point that’s three favors and a quest – Bonnie, Lupe, Yolanda, and find the girl Ha-eun.  He keeps getting glimpses of some kind of truth about the girl.  Or the monkey?  Something something snakey snakes.

He starts getting some hints and false leads about the mobsters, including The Disease.

He sees three ravens getting their ears boxed by the witch Majel.  No food for you.  He helps the kids get access to food, but it turns out they were really trying to get access to weed.  Don’t smoke weed kids.  They ask if he wants some and no, but another favor owed.

Hyun-woo has doubts, so Matthew has to kick it up a notch to keep him around.  He laments to Bonnie, who does some kind of a favor that helps out.  Was it legit, or foolery?

I think Yolanda is a target of the snake, and thus discovers big hints for Matthew.  One favor repaid.Act Three-ish, Matthew and / or Hyun-woo are close to the mystery, and end up at a Monster Party.  If they don’t leave before midnight, they might get made into monsters or eaten.  Princess Lupe repays favor by getting Matthew out.  But what happened to Hyun-woo?

In despair, Matthew gets a clue from the ravens, last favor repaid, the apple of life.  He finds out where to save Hyun-woo.  They find out, as much as is possible, what happened to Ha-eun.  Hyun-woo leaves, unable to deal with the tragedy, but some time later they reconnect and Matthew escapes the Projects.  The end.

General Principles:  When crafting scenes, amp up emotion, mystery, and horror.  I’m going to intentionally post scenes suggested by the outline out of order below, to try to force myself to not think of them sequentially.

SCENES

YOLANDA ON A HOOK
Yolanda barely escapes The Disease and helps Matthew get info.  Obviously has potential to be one of the scarier moments in the book.  It raises the question, to what extent do I want to write in close third person perspective?  Mystery is greatly helped by constraining one’s pov to one given character.  Particularly where there is a question about what is real or not, moving between characters tells you that at least the main pov character is not likely to be imagining those other guys – they have an existence independent of him.  Whether the scenario and everyone within it is imaginary, this is a good thing to be able to hold onto.  Still…  it may be worthwhile for me to not do that.  So many more possibilities for scenes if I allow other people to feel real to the reader.
Sooo Yolanda real.  She does not get along with other children.  Like Hyun-woo, she can be a character with a life outside the building.  We first saw Eun-ha outside, implying The Disease gets them there, possibly.  What does that mean to be able to leave the Box?  Even a child like Yolanda is larger than Matthew, more powerful.  It takes strength to go fight the battles of the mundane world only to turn around and come home to a supernatural prison at night.
How does she get hold of Matthew?  Does she have his cell number?  Does she have her own cell phone?  Did she inherit Dexter’s when he got taken out?
Matthew gets a call, “I’m in the Forest.”  He rushes to a window and looks out.  Yolanda is hiding from something.  Is it real?  Can he get to her in time?  Probably the scariest thing would be seeing something going to attack a child when you could do nothing to intervene.
Maybe this is all his perspective.  Maybe she doesn’t actually escape The Disease at this point in the story and her gift to Matthew is her cellphone getting dropped in the Forest, with footage of The Killer.  But is that’s true, what would Matthew do?  Would make sense for him to call the cops, tell them about the tunnels, see if they could find her by scouring them.  Why wouldn’t he?  He knows the Killer could already have her dead, has her in the building.  He’d have to feel like doing some last resort type of shit.
Maybe he has Hyun-woo with him and this helps get that guy back on the page of believing Matthew after their relationship is strained.  Maybe they go into the tunnels together and split up to cover more ground, see if they can catch the snake before it gets into its hiding place with her – and succeed?  But lose the monster of course.
But that then raises the question – why wouldn’t brave Hyun-woo either go kicking open doors in the tunnels, or call the cops for that search himself?  Doesn’t work.  Ugh.  I need a short break…
I think it’s gotta be Matthew by himself and he has to get her back somehow, by himself.  He catches her in the tunnels.  But will need more consideration about how to make that as scary as possible without ending the story.

I COULD KILL YOU
Lupe lets Matthew know she’s thought about killing him to keep her secret safe.  I think, he’s trying to press her for info about her dad’s friends and she says it in annoyance.  Then he’s upset by it and she has to try to console him / sort him out.

SCRATCH TICKETS
The ravens involved?  Matthew sees Loan Shop dude being sus.  Maybe he has to get a payday loan himself…  Naw.  I dunno.  He pays rent to Freddy, and I imagine would be less fearful of eviction after getting in his good graces.

LUPE FIASCO
Lupe and Matthew carry out scheme to find her stolen goods in front of Freddy.  She stashes the gizmo and he pings it via computer trick, eliciting mobbish gratitude..

BONNIE BEDELIA
Bonnie coerced into giving up the goods, sez thx for not telling.

KILL THESE ROACHES
Matthew witnesses Dexter abusing Yolanda.

HE WENT THATTAWAY
Ravens give Matthew the big clue to get back into The Disease’s place and rescue Hyun-woo.

BAD FAVOR
Bonnie tries to repay Matthew with a favor, but something about this one just sucks.  Is it the invite to the monster party, or something that can lead to it?

KILL YOUR HORSE
Matthew defeats Dexter and wins Yolanda’s favor.  I wonder how… Maybe this can be an angel vs angel thing.  I like all the negative things of the building to be angel-influenced, and maybe the angel of Yolanda’s roaches is angry at Dexter.
I gotta commit to how this supernatural element is going to play out.  I think the main thing, as far as Matthew can tell, is that looking at things through the secret passages reveals something about them, shows them looking different.
Maybe he finds here that coming into an apartment through certain kinds of portals makes that appearance into reality, and uses this to unbind one of Yolanda’s dolls, who is the angel of the roaches.  Unbound she goes to war with Dexter and wins in some way.
Maybe it’s that if you leave by any passage other than the one you cam in by, the “vision” world is real in that environment.  To get back to the real world you have to go out how you came in.  Hang on, making a note on another section…

REAR WINDOW
Matthew’s first instance of spying from walls, sees Lesbian Drama.  What do you do when you see something you’re not supposed to be seeing?  What did Jeffrey do in Blue Velvet?  Not that.  Let’s say he sees that there’s something wrong fast enough he feels obligated to watch it play out – sees the pickpocket happen almost immediately.  Bonnie is evoking fish for him but not yet clear why.

NIGHT MONKEY
First glimpse of the monkey with the dress.

KICKED OUT OF NEST
Majel locks ravens out of her apartment.  Matthew fooled into thinking it’s abuse of some adopted children, sympathizes.  He uses tunnels to open her apartment and let in the ravens, who just go to smoke her weed.  They offer some but also say “we owe you one.”  Maybe has moment of cat jump scare from “David.”

BACCHANAL PROPER
Matthew and Hyun-woo at the worst party, get parted.  Lupe bails out Matthew but Hyun-woo has gone missing.
So, how does this one play out..?  Alarming buildup, some grand invocation, and the Wildness, including a few fake-outs that it’s going to be more tame or much worse than it all superficially is.

ALMOST THE WORST
Hyun-woo confronts Matthew on possibility he is stringing him along to get laid.  Messed up, dude!
Explaining the suspects.  But it’s never enough to go on, always enough to keep me here.  We had sex.  Was that a mistake?  Or was that always what you wanted out of me?  It was!  I can’t believe it.  I need to get out of here.  No way she’s in the building.  I know she is!  I can’t tell you why because you’ll think I’m crazy.  I just know she is!  Bullshit, Matthew.
I think this will get cut off prematurely by the plot revelation that gets them to go to the bad party, preventing awkwardness from culminating.

BORED GAMES
Matthew and Hyun-woo bond as people.  Hyun-woo and him go over what he knows about the building, within the limits of not telling him dangerous secrets about organized crime.  They have to take mental health breaks, during which they talk about who they are, find out they’re both gay?  or later?  Yeah, just hints – cultural things, interests.  Is established that Matthew is hesitant to tell Hyun-woo about tunnels, for reasons unclear to himself.  Shame about the spying incident?  A feeling that he’s going to be using that to look for Eun-ha?  Also doesn’t want to say he saw her flying in the monkey incident.

HAIRCUT
Gets haircut and contact lenses to impress Hyun-woo.  Finds out one of the creeps from the Bacchanal was the barber.

GETTING TO KNOW ALL ABOUT YOU
Matthew and Hyun-woo bond as possible lovers.  Matthew doesn’t have directly relevant things to report but does say how he’s gathering favors, might be able to use them to get closer to more evidence – also that he is getting to know more people in the building, to be able to do the questioning, including a girl of a similar age.
OK, revelation of gay happens here.  “Focusing on this is necessary, but terrifying.  Gotta balance it out with trying to keep an even head.  Beer me?”  They get closer to maybe doing a thing.

GLIMPSE MONKEY
Monkey jump scare in the secret passages.

LOVE SCENE
Token sex scene.  Lynch had something to say about sex scenes, about how movies shying away from them is not allowing themselves access to something powerful and magical?  Something like that.  Fools gotta get it on.
I think Hyun-woo is getting upset, gotta console him.  What could it mean?  Why can’t we just get cops to turn the building upside down?  If they do, they’ll just find her dead, won’t they?  Terrible terribleness lays out before them.

HYUN-WOO INTRO
Love appears.  Would he be going door to door in apartments?  Maybe he would, but at some point he’d get rousted as a trespasser if he did.  Maybe that’s how this scene ends.  So…
Hyun-woo knocks on the door.  Matthew opens up, hoping for a sexy mormon or jehovah’s witness to entertain for a dishonest hour.  Have you seen this girl?  Terminator 2 style.  Maybe I have?  I saw a girl.  I heard about the rumors and it got me thinking, could that have been her?  Points out where in The Forest she was, what was going on generally.  Expresses discomfort with going down there but interest in helping him with investigation.  Goons are going to walk him out but get talked out of it – tho he’s forbidden from bugging neighbors.

HE CAME BACK
Happily ever after.  Calls him on the phone.  “You want to leave with me?  I’m in the Forest.”  Looks out the window, “I can’t see you.”  “Come down.  Come outside.”  Matthew decides he’ll finally be brave enough to leave the building, but as soon as he opens apartment door, Hyun-woo is there.  They kiss, then “I was serious about leaving.”  They go out together.

HALL PASS
Finds out the prime suspects / Bacchantes all use the secret passages.

DISEASE PIMPIN
Sees The Disease with his hoes.  Where?  The courtyard?  The bodega?  The halls?  Old ladies are on the old monster’s jock.  Maybe he gets those kinda kicks with lady angels and just uses kids for food.  Less edgy honestly.

IN DA CLOSET
Finds the tunnel, involves a white snake.  ON MY OWN.  Finds out where they lead, including to his own apartment.

BACCHANAL ONE:  FROM THE OUTSIDE
While working for the mob, Matthew meets all the prime suspects when they attend a party at Freddy’s.  This is a very early scene and a very important one.  Establishing the mansion and its inhabitants and guests – almost all angels, all weird as balls.  They should all be saying things that disturb or provoke bad imagination.

MORNING GIRL
First time Eun-ha is witnessed.

COME BACK TO ME
I can’t.  Hyun-woo leaves because the investigation is over and he needs to get away.  Matthew can’t just drop everything and follow him, can he?  Senses it wouldn’t be welcome, that he would remind Hyun-woo of tragedy.  Plus he has all his stuff to consider, giving notice if he moved out, where he could possibly afford to live elsewhere…  The box is a trap.

HALLS OR WALLS?
Matthew can’t decide if he should investigate inside or outside the secret passages.  How is this a scene?  Let’s say he’s starting to experience to supernatural, and a moment of that has him swear off spending time in there.  The monkey scare?  … Nein.  It’s the thing where he finds out the visions have a reality of your own, and for a bit he’s worried that he’ll get stuck forever in there, because he hasn’t worked out with certainty yet that you can get out by going back the way you came in.

THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM
Matthew’s first glimpse of The Disease’s place.  I don’t know.  Should it not initially come off as being the one?  Are there other places just as spooky, therefore he doesn’t know for sure which is it?  Why doesn’t he wrap things up here?

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST
In The Disease’s place, must rescue Hyun-woo and find out about Eun-ha.  Is he locked out?  How does he get in?  Would he bring something with him?  A weapon?  What could he even use?  Get a roscoe from the ravens?  From somebody else?  Going in unarmed is braver.  More foolish, but that’s how we get our horror story feeling.
Trying to get a handle on the surreal horror thing.  Leonora Carrington’s *The Debutante* is pretty good for that.  Very snappy, vulgar, punchy.  I think the bat near the end was an interesting touch.
Gotta walk through the place with trepidation, weapon at the ready or looking for an improvised weapon as he goes, take in the spooky details.  Chicken coops?  Incubators?  Chicks?  Down twirling in unseen breezes on the floor?  I don’t know.
What’s Hyun-woo suffering?  What’s happening to him?  How litcheral is this snake?  I can’t even decide.  Losing my marbles.  Last couple of days have been comparatively chill but I still don’t feel like I have the sauce for this.  But I can’t fucking admit defeat.  I can’t!  It’d be letting the fascists win.
A conveyor belt with deformed or dead chicks on it, running in and out of chutes on the walls.  Kinda *Existenz* I know.  Eggshells like papier mâché.  That gibbon running up and down the aisles, slapping or ripping at you as it goes by.  Eun-ha, how about you?
Vats covered haphazardly with tarp.  Some are askew, showing bodies in varying states, or piles of dusty or goopy bones.  Are they girls turning into giant chicks or vice versa?  How are they being consumed?  Where are the souls?  Something twisting through it all, a great movement in the ground that can’t be discerned.
I dunno i dunno.  The pink dress falls off a hanger on a door that is ajar.  Inside, Hyun-woo in bondage.  Liberate the boy.  But a snek must be upon thee.
Maybe Matthew gets Hyun-woo unbound but he’s unconscious.  The Disease catches Matthew and is about to kill him when Hyun-woo saves the day.  Baby Eun-ha shows up and goes to hug Hyun-woo, but vanishes in a puff of down around his legs.  She was a ghost.  The end.
I dunno I dunno I dunno.

ALRIGHT, time for another angle.  If this is gonna have 70 scenes, and if it’s gonna be third person, I can come up with scenes specifically for other characters when they are not being observed or interacted with by Matthew.  The private lives of NPCs oh my…  Gotta decide who should be shown and who should not.  If you humanize a character you remove an element of mystery from them.  Would be better not to show much of the more monstrous characters…  Or maybe not!  I’m thinking about *Wild at Heart* when evil mom was siccing Harry Dean Stanton on our main mans, freaking out on the telephone.  That’s a scene showing a monster alone…  but that is cinema and this is prose.  Hm…  Call these ideas, and if they don’t work they don’t work.

Hyun-woo.  What can he do with no Matthew in the scene?  What might he do alone?  Maybe his arrival at the building, like when the cowpoke rolls into town at high noon and a tumbleweed blows past.  That does feel like a sequential scene, an interstitial scene – not a time in the story when anything exciting or interesting is happening.  On the other hand, it does show the building as mysterious in a way it would not be to Matthew, since he lives there.  Getting the outside perspective could be good.  Also could be the first part of the story to switch perspective, and thereby establish the significance of the other guy at the same time as establishing that’s going to be a method to use.
So I’ll go with it.  How can it feel mysterious?  Hyun-woo dodges cops on the way into the building, showing he’s not with them, has his own agenda.  He has some kind of weird encounter in the bodega maybe, leads him to want a closer look at the building and its inhabitants.  He can sneak in by the hall that goes back into the building.
He should have some other scene.  A phone call to one of the relatives that put him up to this task, perhaps.  What else?  Other times of coming into the building, showing the people Matthew knows from a different perspective and state of mind.  Again, this ain’t feeling exciting or worth elevating.  I’ll look at it again later.
Maybe at the party once he’s separated from Matthew, gets snaked?

I feel like Yolanda could be a more significant character, get some writing from her perspective.  It’ll also help offset the way all the black people in this story are turning out to be outrageous weirdos, by humanizing her.  She sees Dexter’s death traps for roaches and tries to carve little ways out for them.  She interacts with her doll that will later turn out to be a shackled angel.  Both in the same scene?  I feel like there should be a scene where she’s showing her alienation from other kids.  Maybe it would be good to try to make scenes with more than one character, like, two birds some.

Lupe is a significant one.  Her combo of fragility and menace is compelling.  After Matthew gets dismissed from the mob, she could be a human’s eye perspective on them.  Scenes of her being weirded out by the weirdos.  Getting victimized by her baby boo feels like it needs a resolution of some kind.  Bust them puppies?  So: Revenge, Mercy, Weird-outs.

Them ravens.  In this story they should always be together.  Three teenage boys take up a lot of physical and social space, but these guys are made to feel small and fly away.  Before the kicked-out scene, some other scene to intro the idea of them.  After that, some more evidence of them doing hijinks.  Then their last favor.

Bonnie’s scenes should all be with Matthew or Lupe, so no more for her.

Prime Suspects should have one apiece – Freddy, Armando, Don, The Disease.  Don makes like he wants to cut Yolanda’s hair.  Armando menaces the ravens.  Freddy weirds out his daughter.  The Disease does something weird with baby chickens, if that ain’t too obvious.

All told, that could be another ten to fifteen, depending on how I slice it.

Matthew I:  Getting ready for work, sees Eun-ha.
Matthew II, Freddy I, Armando I, Don I, Dario I, The Disease I, Lupe I:  Scared by mobsters outside their party.
Matthew III:  Tech support turns into Tunnel Time.
Hyun-Woo I:  Floating World.
Matthew IV, Bonnie I, Lupe II:  Tunnel Time ends with witnessing Bonnie crime.
Freddy II, Dario II:  The Shipment I.  Freddy+Dario discuss the shipment.
Matthew V, Freddy III:  Accused by Freddy.
Yolanda I:  Anything.
Matthew VI, Bonnie II:  Confronts Bonnie.
Matthew VII:  Tunnel Time to find Lupe.
Matthew VIII, Lupe III:  Gets with Lupe.
Matthew IX:  Scared by Monkey Faces.
Freddy IV, Dario III:  The Shipment II.  Freddy convinces Dario to get Armando’s help acquiring it.
Yolanda II:  Some kind of early scene to hint she will matter later.
Lupe IV, Bonnie III:  Lupe schools Bonnie.
Hyun-Woo II:  Hyun-woo arrives, begins to investigate.
Matthew X, Lupe V, Freddy V:  Lupe helps him get out of mob.
Hyun-woo III:  Hyun-woo door-to-door, attracting bad attention.
Matthew XI, Hyun-woo IV:  First meeting with Hyun-Woo.
Ravens I, Bonnie IV:  Hint they will matter.
Freddy VI, Dario IV, Armando II:  The Shipment III.  Freddy+Armando+Dario get the shipment.
Matthew XII, Yolanda III:  Tunnel Time to investigate for Hyun-woo, Yolanda hint.
Matthew XIII:  Crushing, scrapbooking?
Yolanda IV:  Messing with roach traps, yelled on by Dexter, talks to Dolly.
Lupe VI:  Lupe Somethin?
Matthew XIV, Hyun-woo V:  Bored games.  Hyun-woo still temporarily scared to not investigate.
Freddy VII, Dario V, Armando III:  The Shipment IV.  Freddy+Armando+Dario get the stuff put away, but hint of troubled relationship.
Lupe V, Don II, Armando IV, Freddy VIII:  Weirded out by dad and homies.
Matthew XV:  Tunnel Time but decides to stop doing it.
MONKEY RAMPAGE
Matthew XVI, Ravens II, Majel I:  Matthew sees ravens kicked out, helps them.
Hyun-woo VI, the Disease II:  By himself v. The Disease.  Hyun-woo braving the halls again.
Matthew XVII, Don III:  Haircut to impress, realizes Don was at bacchanal.
Lupe VI, The Disease III:  Is weird with hoes.
Freddy IX, Armando V:  The Shipment V.  Freddy+Armando scheme to betray Dario and let Armando sell it with a more generous cut.
Matthew XVIII, Yolanda V:  Tunnel Time ends up seeing Yolanda in trouble, weird idea to unleash angel.
Matthew XIX, Yolanda VI:  Dexter defeated, Yolanda victory stomp and fall into the roaches.
Hyun-woo VII, Armando VI:  By himself v. Armando.
Ravens III, Armando VII, Matthew XX:  Scratch tickets.
Matthew XXI:  Gets a face full of cops.
Freddy X, Hyun-woo VIII:  By self, vs. Freddy.
Lupe VII, Bonnie V:  Have mercy, I forgot to be a lover.
Matthew XVIII, Hyun-woo VIII:  Getting to know you.
Ravens IV, Freddy XI, Armando VIII:  The Shipment VI.  Ravens jack the goods from Freddy+Armando.
Yolanda VII:  Alienation.
The Disease IV:  Is weird with baby chickens.
Hyun-woo IX:  Hyun-woo vs. Cops.
Matthew XIX:  Tunnel Time but getting exhausted and scared.
Matthew XX, Hyun-woo X:  Love scene.
EUN-HA ALIVE?
Yolanda VIII:  Again?
Freddy XII, Dario VI, Armando IX:  The Shipment VII.  Freddy+Dario+Armando have a Mexican standoff over this anime betrayal.
Ravens V:  Some kinda hijinks.
Majel II, The Disease V:  Majel vs. The Disease, he knows she steals from Freddy and don’t care.
Matthew XXI, Lupe VIII, Bonnie VI:  I coulda killed you.  Matthew laments to Bonnie.
Matthew XXII:  Tunnel Time more hints at supernature.  Monkey Scare again?
Freddy XIII, Dario VII:  The Shipment VIII.  Freddy+Dario we’ve lost it all.  Ruined forever.  Who will provide for my mongooses and ocelots?  Then they get a hint about a new shipment of some trivial shit and start scheming again.
Yolanda IX, Don IV:  Don threatens to cut Yolanda’s hair.
EUN HA v. MONKEY
Matthew XXIII, Yolanda VI, The Disease VI:  Yolanda abducted, saved in TUNNEL TIME.
Matthew XXIV, Hyun-woo X, Bonnie VII:  The Worst.  Bonnie interrupts with party invite.
Ravens VI, Majel III: Ravens vs. Majel.
Matthew XXV, Hyun-woo XI, Freddy XIV, Armando X, Don V, The Disease VII, Lupe IX:  The Bacchanal.
Matthew XXVI, Hyun-woo XII, The Disease VIII:  Final fight in Tunnel Time.
Matthew XXVII, Ravens VII:  Give Matthew the Apple of Life in Tunnel Time?
Matthew XXVIII, Hyun-woo XIII:  I just can’t.  Go home.
Matthew XXIX, Ravens VIII:  The Years:  Ravens in trouble.
Matthew XXX, Lupe X:  The Years:  Bonnie dies.
Matthew XXX, Yolanda VII:  The Years:  Yolanda much bigger.
Matthew XXXI, Hyun-woo XIV:  Amelie finale.

Got some ideas for subplots to add foolery and length.  Eun-ha will get a few scenes.  At some point a glimpse of her doing something will imply to the reader she may still be alive.  At some point the monkey will be implied to be her, while it rages out and does some kind of preternatural vandalism.  At last, there will be a scene where it is made clear Eun-ha is not the monkey because she will be in a struggle against it, during which it may be hinted again that she is not alive.  This leads into Yolanda’s biggest scene of getting menaced.

Majel will also get a lil more screen time, showing her power over the ravens, another hint about her cat, and that she is connected with foolery in the building – including The Disease.

But the main thing is “The Delivery.”  I feel like the mobsters should get more time, and some kind of mobbish plot can help with that, plus demonstrate that their crime is kinda unimportant to who they are.  Theirs is a world of metaphor and spirit, not earthly goods.  At first it will seem like the intrigue over a mysterious delivery of presumed contraband is something real, but by the end it will be clear this is not conventional material goods or criminality – these guys are something else…  (edited into outline above)

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Big Spoilers Ahead.  If you thought you were going to read the Best Story in the World without spoilin’, read this not.

David Lynch had an idea that if you can come up with 70 scenes, like on 4 by 5 cards, you have enough to make a movie.  Might explain some things about some of his movies.  When you focus on a sensible plot, you spend a lot of time going moment to moment, and feeling bound to include boring scenes that make sense of the story.  Focus on scenes can result in a less sensible story (tho not necessarily) but one with more indelible images, iconic moments, memorable events.  That will be a good goal for a The Best Story in the World™ so…

As I begin this post I have no scenes and I have barely a grasp of the most important puzzle I was trying to resolve for much of last post.  The things we go through to try to write the best novel in the world™.  Anyway, lemme see if I can rip through that.  The housing project is the heel of god’s hoofprint as he stomped thru his shitty creation.  Angels wiggle in the depression like a pile of maggots.  Seraph snake string ties god to the damage he’s done, communicates his mood to the dirt.  A key link in the chain of wormloops is the dominion, an angel that is occasionally activated to do something grandiose, but mostly lies in wait, eating the souls of children for fun and profit.

A pack of greasy angels cavort like bacchantes in the depths of the depths, toasting to their good fortune.  They know nothing of themselves and what they are, just acting on instinct.  The one among their number with the true knowledge, known to them as an underworld fixer / idea man, is the dominion – a serpent in human-like skin.  He taught the project godfather something of the nature of the world, but only enough to empower him to serve the will of god.  One of these secrets of his success?  A web of secret tunnels that run through the building, used by mobsters to run goods or occasionally do hits.  Why not spy to do blackmail?  Not their preferred pound, as Chuck say.

Hero is a disabled dude who meets a stereotype of computer nerd, so in desperation between random cancellations of his disability benes, he takes work as an IT guy for the Godfather.  Due to random circumstances, he finds out about the tunnels, and when hiding in one, witnesses the Princess getting her pocket picked by lesbian hustler.  Then he ends up the prime suspect in her shit getting lifted.  Still, Godfather gives him 24 hours to make it right.

He locates the hustler and gets her to give up the goods, then has convo with Princess – I’m gay too, but watch out.  Ain’t always fun and games.  She says I owe you and let’s figure out how to get you off the hook.  They come up with scheme to “ping” her stolen electronics, which “turn out” to have been mislaid in a bookshelf, and boss is grateful again for his cool nerd powers.  What do you want in reward?  Let me quit.  Too much for my nerves.  The boss sez he might contract him for short gigs but will let him chill.

During course of this he witnesses little girl on two occasions, the second she seems to fly away.  Was it monkey wearing her dress?  Cops are pestering people in the projects about a missing person.  Hero doesn’t think anything of it, until some bit of conversation on his way out of the mob – was that the girl he witnessed?

Don’t talk to the cops.  But what about the girl?  Don’t talk to the cops.  But what about?  Don’t.  A dude appears and asks if anyone has seen the girl.  Hero makes contact.  Dude is sexy.  What now?  Here is your challenge, weird nerd:  Find the girl or find out what happened to her.

He takes to the tunnels, always ducking from supernatural menace and visions of chaos?  In spying on the world, he finds out about people with problems.  A weird child is into insects and outrages violent mom-BF.  From Hero’s PoV, people take on animal characteristics.  The child is a giant humanoid ant, the patriarch is a bug-eyed horse.

He tries to ignore villainy and keep head low, but ends up helping ant king get rid of the horse, and garners another favor.  At this point that’s three favors and a quest – Lez Hustler, Princess, Ant King, and Find the Girl.  Keeps getting glimpses of some kind of truth about the girl.  Or the monkey?Something something snakey snakes.

Sees three ravens getting their ears boxed by parents.  No food for you.  He helps the kids get access to food, but it turns out they were really trying to get access to weed.  Don’t smoke weed kids.  They ask if he wants some and no, but another favor owed.

Sexy Dude has doubts, so Hero has to kick it up a notch to keep him around.  He laments to the Lez Hustler who does some kind of a favor that helps out.  Was it legit, or foolery?

I think the Ant King is a target of the snake, and thus discovers big hints for Hero.  One favor repaid.

Act Three-ish, Hero and / or Sexy Dude are close to the mystery, and end up and Monster Party.  If they don’t leave before midnight, they might get made into monsters or eaten.  Princess repays favor by getting Hero out.  But what happened to Sexy Dude?In despair, Sexy Dude gets a clue from the ravens, last favor repaid, the apple of life.  He finds out where to save Sexy Dude.  They find out, as much as is possible, what happened to the girl.  Then they get out and live happily ever after?

I think Sexy Dude leaves, can’t deal with the tragedy, but some time later they reconnect and Hero escapes the Projects.  The end.

–

So that problem tho.  You come up with what’s literally happening (all that angel guff), but for David Lynch points, you come up with a metaphorical way it can be understood by the people who are touched by it.  Touched by an angel lol.

Literal serpentine angel turns human enfants into chicks and literally swallows their souls.  This looks like…  This looks like … … man i’m tired.  If this was in the Black Lodge, what would it look like?  Characters might wear masks that abstractly resemble their animal souls.  Or just act weird.  Fishes flop around, ravens flap arms.  I feel like there was an implication that the Man from Another Place was magician Mike’s severed arm.  People multiplied and that was echoed at multiple levels of the story.  I don’t want to reiterate somebody else’s work (don’t @ me bro).  What’s my metaphor?  What would be scary?

It wasn’t originally my goal to specifically try to be like Lynch, tho it is a vibe for the moment, so maybe I can jailbreak my brain a bit by looking at easier goals.  Just remembered the other day I’d considered aiming for Carter instead.  There were a few stories from latter half of The Bloody Chamber that jumble in my imagination, but the main things… She seemed really stuck on the erotic role culturally allowed to women – that of the virgin girl in the power of a depraved monster – and tweaking it to her own pervy ends.  Give that monster a tongue bath, freaky girl.  Some variation on this showed in more than one story.

If my main emotional theme is of the child devoured by evil, how could I echo that in other things?  Maybe a formula.  I make profiles for each significant character, which include a section for talking about the emotional idea of them, and ways to make it more abstract.  I could roll this in with the 70 scenes by having a scene idea attached to each profile.  OK…

Here are some scribbles I did while pondering.  Nothing useful about the snake, really.  A few ideas on character descriptions tho.

Haven’t drawn in months and who should appear on top of my sketchbook and pen?  A guy that doesn’t even like to snuggle.

The world is against me!  My grandiose aim is feeling a lot less attainable from here, but if this ends up being at least entertaining to my dude, that’s worth more than nothing.  Scenes ‘n’ profiles with scenes, or whatever this ends up being…

PROFILES

The Snake, known to his friends as The Disease.  As a dominion angel, he is in charge of all the archangels in the building, who in turn are in charge of the angels.  What would happen if he died?  Angelanarchy haha.  Considering these angels are parasites, lacking a regulating agent they might go berserk, or die, or leave.  I think Ant King’s momBF will be one – the first to go out of control or be defeated.
Anyway, The Disease looks like a white man about sixty with too much sun exposure.  His skin is mottled with any kind of polka dotting that white people can get, his eyes big and pale grey, his remaining hair also speckled in rust and white.  He listens to oldies, particularly Elvis, Neil Diamond, and The Righteous Brothers.  It’s all about the rhythmic noises; he has no soul with which to appreciate the feelings.  He wears big glasses with brown and clear plastic frames, off-white tank tops, and powder blue polyester pants hiked up too high with suspenders.  His socks are dark green, shoes brown patent leather.  His hair is frizzy curls just a bit too long to look nice in the donut around his head, and he has a bit of a pot belly from eating too many children.
Emotional Reality:  The universe is terrible and he is the universe.  The Disease has some kind of thought – practical things, rudimentary strategy, but is incapable of contemplating what and why he is.  He only exists for whatever his instincts and desires tell him to do.  His are the emotions of a predatory animal – that he eats children is the only way he matters to the story…  But I do need a personality for him.  I think he comes off like a low key pimp, relaxing in the corner with salacious expressions, weird old (angel) hoes on each arm.  Obviously a man of some importance, if nobody knows what that importance is.
Metaphysical Reality:  Angelology is real inconsistent about what angels look like, so I have some room to fuck around, assuming I want to make them look angelic at all.  I can’t easily find a source for it now, but when I was researching The Septagram I found some references to seraphim as being serpentine or dragon-like, with at least one source just saying they were a snake with six wings.  Most early sources show them with a human head – sometimes also the faces of an eagle, bull, and / or lion, and six wings to cover their bodies and faces.
I’m gonna say The Disease is a sixty foot snake in speckled red black and white, with orange-white flames flowing from his eye sockets and mouth.  He isn’t outrageously large for a snake except in length – head proportions and thickness are normal for a big snake, his length is the absurd part.
Manifestation:  Iconic man… Gotta come up with something iconic.  This is just a classic Bébé styled mélange of quirky bullshit.  What will it be?  What can it be?
Plot, Generally:  The Disease lives on a higher plane, with a sketchier relationship to linear time than most of the building’s tenants.  He is slowly eating lots of children, as he has since before the MC was born.  Nothing in that will change, unless he dies during the course of the novel.
A Scene:  Gotta be some scene where it’s demonstrated what he does with the stolen kiddies.

The Hero, Matthew Poor, a disabled young dude living on benefits.
Emotional Reality:  I need a personality for this guy, something like a voice.  It’s good to make a cartoon character of a guy in your head because that color washes out on the written page and they just seem like a distinct person, but you do want your MC to be more bland than the side guys so he’s more relatable – can’t be too eccentric.
This is gonna be a guy who needs love and is willing to quest for it; that’s the emotional core, what his plot should reflect.  But the plot as I’ve conceived it thus far requires somebody with more juice for social interaction than the average neurodiverse kiddo.  Lemme see…
I guess depression or bipolar would be fair game; they don’t need to involve social anxiety or disabilities at all, tho they are probably positively correlated to such.  Bipolar would make sense for a guy who is running around in spooky adventure building.
For personality tho, whose voice should I steal?  Some kind of PNW personality.  PZ?  Steve Pool?  Kurt?  Jimi?  Fucken Eddie Vedder lol.  No.  Somebody I went to school with.  Try-Anything-Once Todd?  Bad-Moustache-Having Guy?  My Former Tech Support Guy?  I think my visual may have been inspired by Bad-Moustache-Having Guy, tho I didn’t give him a moustache.  It’s hard for me to imagine that guy in this situation tho.
Me?  I’m a PNW personality.  Every character I write probably has too much “me” stank on them already.  My brother?  I can’t do an impression of him as well as he can do of me.  Not sure what that’s about.
GF.5.  My point-fifth girlfriend.  She was physically very different from this character, but I could imagine a personality like that on him.  Probably she would avoid situations like this, if presented with them, so I’d hafta imagine how she would approach a stranger regarding heavy business.  Remind herself she’s an adult.  Try to make the crossed arms look less defensive than they are by squaring the shoulders.  Open with “You don’t know me but we need to talk.”  Naw, that’s still very me.
My boyfriend?  That would be funny, and also appropriate because the book’s for him.  But we grew together over the last twenty years and probably talk real similarly at this point.  What are the differences?  Other people’s moods do a bigger number on him.  How would he approach a stranger?  Shit, I can just ask him.  Haha, fine…  He said he would write a letter.  No good.
Metaphysical Reality:  Human.  If all humans have an animal soul, his -not appearing in this picture- would be a ?  A dog maybe.  Sure.  Like a belgian shepherd maybe.
Manifestation:  What kind of expression of his emotional reality would he have?  On a quest for love.  Don Quixote.  My dude is not prone to doing outlandish things for love.  The people I’ve known who are most prone to infatuation (an annoying old school chum and myself circa 1991) are insufferable drama queens, and that ain’t him.  Can something move a person who is not normally moved to such lengths?  Being lonely for a long time?  I dunno.  Probably a lot of reminding himself it’s foolish and absurd, chastising himself for doing brave and unreasonable things.
Plot, Generally:  Discovers secret tunnels, accidentallies self into several people owing him favors, falls in love with sexy stranger who is searching for a relative-turned-missing-person, trying to find the missing person to win the man’s heart.
A Scene:  What does one do when they’re crushing?  Travis Bickle montage?  Journaling?

The Sexy Dude, Hyun-woo Lim.
Emotional Reality:  A guy loose in the world, no job at the moment, temporarily living at home.  Get rousted by fam into trying to investigate his missing niece.  Some reason they think he’d be good at it.  Journalism major?  That would explain the unemployment lol.
Metaphysical Reality:  Human.  A fellow dog soul?  Man somebody should do a dark fantasy game with furries in it called Dog Souls.  When you beat a boss it’ll be like YOU YIFFED on the screen, whatever that means.  Maybe for my furry allyship I should write a furry book sometime.  I came up with an idea for one back in art school, never did nothin’ on it ‘cept some doodles.
Manifestation:  The manifestation of his purpose.  He is a man with a mission of compassion, tempered with grim awareness of the possibilities.  He must walk into a place from which he knows he may never return, knowing all he’s going to find is sadness.
Plot, Generally:  Investigates missing relative in the projects, becomes entangled with weird gay dude and supernatural horror.
A Scene:  Should probably have a romantic scene with Matthew.

The Project Godfather, Frederick “Freddy” Paz Principa.
Emotional Reality:  Mob bosses are monsters.  Not in a cool way, like, ooh, look at this badass over here.  They are shitty bullies with a license to kill, and the worshipful attitude around them strokes their ego, makes them feel like saints even while they do terrible things.  This is why they can seem nice, compassionate, good to the people they think of themselves as being good to – but they can harm the ones they “love” because at the end of the day love has fuckall to do with who they are: greedy-ass cocklords who feel entitled to hurt and kill for money.
Metaphysical Reality:  A power, from the second choir of angels, controlling mortal affairs inside the box.  In his angel form, he’s a metallic copper minotaur with bullish legs and a human face on the bottom of his oversized bull head – he lifts his chin to speak, eyes and mouth glowing white.  He has halos of red-rimmed white fire that lick at the ceiling, one on his bull head and one on each of his largest wings.  Another four smaller wings wrap around his torso at weird diagonals.
Manifestation:  Back-slapping, hand-grabbing, big gratitude and magnanimity, but it can turn to ice cold razorblade upside your scrotum if you slip.  See him looking larger than he should be.  See bull horns on his shadow.
Plot, Generally:  Who’s house?  Run’s house.  He is annoyed by his daughter losing important things.  He parties with his fellow creeps.  No real changes in the course of the story.
A Scene:  Weirdo parties.  How do I make them read like I’m not ripping off Blue Velvet?

The Princess, Lupe Paz Dominga.  She has cornrows and gold hoops and a diastema like her father.
Emotional Reality:  Coulda been worse, if she had full respect of her father, but his sexism blunts any sense of entitlement she would otherwise feel for being a mob princess.  Is angry lesbian, but lives with some serious fear of her father and what he can do.  Life of constant tension got her ready to snap.
Metaphysical Reality:  Technically a nephil.  Naphil?  They’re supposed to be giants and warriors.  She’s just a teenage girl.
Manifestation:  I think her divine inheritance will be breathing fire in random uncontrolled ways from time to time.  She can light a cigarette by putting it in her mouth backwards.  Her emotional reality could show as an outburst of violence that doesn’t even make sense.
Plot, Generally:  Loses important thing to pickpocket girl, gets it back through Matthew’s maneuvers, doesn’t like what he knows – not one bit.
A Scene:  Some kind of moment where she reveals she considers killing Matthew to keep her secret safe.

The Girl / The Gibbon, Ha-eun Lim.
Emotional Reality:  Within the story she is an animal, a maguffin, not a real human being but an idea of one.
Metaphysical Reality:  Human, but could be confused with a monkey.  Or a baby chicken.
Manifestation:  She is a glimpsed thing, just out of reach and then out of sight, like the white rabbit.  I’m full of animals today.
Plot, Generally:  Drawn out of time and out of life by a monster, her memory haunts men and pulls them into danger.
A Scene:  It is revealed she is nothing but a ghost.

Lez Hustler, a Fish, aka Bonnie Macek.
Emotional Reality:  Low key antisocial PD.  Fuck all y’all, I get to take whatever I want.  But this is a child, and you can catch the tiger by the toe.
Metaphysical Reality:  Human, fish soul.  Splip splap.  She will try to bounce off the hook.  All she has to offer at the end of the day is slime.
Manifestation:  At her truest when shaking and crying not to tell mommy.
Plot, Generally:  She steals from a gang and nearly gets caught.
A Scene:  When does she help our mans?  Return the favor?

Some Fucken Pigs.  The cops are mostly alluded to or glimpsed at a distance, putting heat on the project residents.
Emotional Reality:  It doesn’t matter if they’re guilty or not, you did your job if you harassed some people.
Metaphysical Reality:  Human.  Pig soul.
Manifestation:  The reality is when they upset you, make your skin burn, make you feel like you could just die, your whole life dusted off for nothing.
Plot, Generally:  They irradiate the first half of the book but fade as things get more surreal.
A Scene:  At some point, Matthew needs to get a face full of them.

The Ant King, Yolanda Biggs.  Isn’t “ant” and obscure racist term for black people?  Maybe not.  I heard it in a blaxploitation movie, but it may have just been a more general kinda insult.  I dunno.  Hope not.  I like this image of an angry tiny black girl with her face scrunched up and stray locks looking like antenna.
Emotional Reality:  Peak autisms.  A keen interest in something natural and right, frustrated by the cruelty of those who enforce conformity.
Metaphysical Reality:  Human, bug soul.
Manifestation:  Freedom for her is seeing the bugs win.  Hopefully the building doesn’t get drowned in the sunsabitches.
Plot, Generally:  She tries to foil pesticide schemes of stepfather, tries to win victory for cockroaches.  He abuses her, but he is defeated.
A Scene:  The victory stomp, and fall into the (del)roses(/del)roaches

The Horse, Dexter Slocum.  Yolanda’s mom’s bf, Dexter is a spiritual parasite making life worse for everybody so he can feed off of the hatred.  He looks like a pot-bellied white guy with lank black hair, weak facial hair, and glasses.  A stereotype of a child molester, but that is not his evil of choice.
Emotional Reality:  You can seem so reasonable when you’re doing things that need to be done, like pest control.  But the motives matter.  He hurts bugs to hurt Yolanda.
Metaphysical Reality:  This is an archangel.  He rules over rushes of inconvenience and power interruptions and worries about money, at least, in his own apartment.  His natural form is of a white and grey horse with extremities that drip black and white fire.
Manifestation:  Memo to self: no idea here, but when I am formalizing my scenes, I should try to make all of them as scary as humanly possible.  Amp the horror; otherwise this is too me-ish.
Plot, Generally:  Just doing his thing, going about his life, until Matthew fucks it up.
A Scene:  His defeat.  Arrested?  Killed?  The angel that gets what they deserve.

Raven One, Jared Henke – the smart one?  The ravens are a group of lighter-skinned late tween boys.  Jared is the leader, with long blond hair, a big nose, glasses, and dark clothes.  His voice is resonant but quiet.
Emotional Reality:  Developing minds shouldn’t be doing the weed.  They feel the need.  The greed for weed.
Metaphysical Reality:  Human, raven soul.
Manifestation:  Always be perched.  Smoak and croke.
Plot, Generally:  The ravens in Whitesnake GOIN DOWN THE ONLY ROAD I’VE EVER KNOWN get kicked out the nest, like y’all suck.  Matthew kills his horse to feed them?  idk.  i decay.
A Scene:  Matthew is the one, who spins the lie that gets Matthew to help them score.

Raven Two, Colin Gordon – a dark-haired boy with the greed.  Not as shaggy as his friends, big dark eyes, hint of future facial hair.  He looks like he could be any latin kid kicking the futbol in the yard, but he’s lost interest in everything except scoring.
Emotional Reality:  In the future he’s the first of the gang to die (resist linking song and making a scumbag money).
Metaphysical Reality:  Human, raven soul.
Manifestation:  Head darting around, looking for something to get into.
Plot, Generally:  They get the weed and smonk it.
A Scene:  Colin almost gets in a fight with Matthew and blows it.

Raven Three, Marlon Graf.  The ravens are lighter skinned guys, tho Marlon is black.  He’s more melanistic around his sleepy little eyes, elbows, and knuckles.  His big sensual lips will be pierced in the future, for now they just tighten out whenever the guys make him nervous with their ambition.  Wears a long olive drab army coat.
Emotional Reality:  In the future, promoted to a main character.
Metaphysical Reality:  Human, raven soul.
Manifestation:  The sorrowful croak of the big bird.
Plot, Generally:  420 is the weed number
A Scene:  Marlon’s sad lil self wins Matthew sympathies.

The Crone, Majel Billy, has a cat named David Coter.  She looks like a middle-aged white woman with peroxide blonde hair styled like 1960s cool, black eyebrows like slash marks over large prematurely ancient eyes, discolored and goopy, mascara in chonks stuck to insect leg lashes.  Her mouth is more full and strong than that of a true geezer, able to properly roar.  Majel dresses a bit like granny from the sylvester and tweety cartoons, but with an affection for fur stoles and jewels – rings on every finger.
Emotional Reality:  Use magic to impress ’em, but also to maintain secrecy.  She is the more subtle end of the criminal spirit, but every bit as nasty and ruthless as Freddy.  Enjoys getting boys to do her crimes for her – a crime in itself.
Metaphysical Reality:  This is a virtue angel, supposed to embody god’s will and make miracles upon the earth.  In practice, she just takes what she wants, and makes people believe in magic while she’s at it.  In a sense, she’s another crime boss to the building – a shadow boss, who likes to remain unknown as such.  Let’s say her angelic form is a powerful young woman seven feet tall with wings that end in giant fingers, and her halo is a fiery glowing eyeball floating above her head that can shoot lasers n shit.
Manifestation:  Not in this story.
Plot, Generally:  She only appears to set raven plot in motion, boxing their ears.
A Scene:  Matthew mistakes Majel for being the mom of the three ravens, like maybe they were adopted, but no.  She’s their ringleader in criminiminal enterprisels.

Bodega Owner.  A boothie, Dario Jefferson.  He’s a tall black guy nearing middle age, bald without bothering to shave it down.  He looks like a TV actor from the late seventies, straight out of a sitcom or cop show, in corduroy pants and a turtleneck with the sleeves pushed up.  Sadly lacking in charisma to match…  Ya know I should probably some up with a more entertaining idea.  Later.
Emotional Reality:  Dario runs game.  Come eat his sandwiches.  Hope you don’t get sick.  He upsells his food just so you know that he truly disrespects your entire life and your intelligence.  Mm mm, get this good stuff, fresh for you today.  Only fresh he knows is getting fresh with old ladies.  Not as successful in love as Don Commodore.
Metaphysical Reality:  There’s probably a catholic canon on the appearance of angels somewhere but I couldn’t find it in a minute of googling and who cares?  Angelology has been all over the place on that, when it’s had any concern about the subject at all.  I’ve got a throne angel looking like a building.  Let’s say my principalities have the legs of golden calves but looking up from those sweet gams, the closer you get to the head the more unique they are.  Angels are usually shown as metallic or jeweled or made out of glowing things like fire or lightning, with parts of mans, cows, eagles, and wheels, less commonly serpentine, very often winged or covered in eyeballs.  Let’s say these ones always have a halo of lightning that arcs to the ceiling, wiggling in place.  Between the halo and the legs, Dario has the body of a handsome man, but with eyes at random, getting denser near the head – itself shaped like a golden gyroscope embedded in his neck flesh, covered in eye-like sapphires.
Manifestation:  Dario shows his supernature and / or emotional theme in moments where he has eyes in the back of his head, and he gives everybody the hard sell.
Plot, Generally:  None, just a freak in the crowd.
A Scene:  Didn’t have one in mind yet.

Loan Shop Owner.  A boothie, Armando Ciniegas.  He looks like Dan Hedaya but with a perverse sense of humor.
Emotional Reality:  The usurer.  Only give five when you can take ten.  Laugh at their pain.
Metaphysical Reality:  Armando has golden calf legs and a lightning halo that is always snaking up to the ceiling.  In between he has a tangled mass of taloned eagle limbs reaching in all directions at once, wings folded around his lower torso like a corset, and a head with four eagle faces staring out, sharing a confused mass of glowing eyes that trails away into his lightning halo.
Manifestation:  He shows his supernature and personality by snatching everything in sight with those talons.
Plot, Generally:   None in mind, just a freak.  All of Freddy’s party people are there, in a sense, to make possible suspects other than The Disease, help keep it mysterious.
A Scene:  Didn’t have one in mind.

The Barber.  A boothie, Don Commodore.  Don Commodore is a middle aged black guy with a tight fade and looks like Steven Williams.  Hot stuff.
Emotional Reality:  You never look good enough.  Keep coming back, keep it tight, or you’re a bum!  It’s about class too.  Even here in the project, if you don’t got gold, you ain’t cool.
Metaphysical Reality:  Don Commodore has golden calf legs and a lightning halo that is always snaking up to the ceiling.  In between he has a lion face, mane, and claws.  His halo originates in his eyes, which increase in number when he gets mad, some floating in the air around his head.
Manifestation:  He expresses his supernature and / or emotional reality through preternatural intimidation and pride.
Plot, Generally:  Didn’t have one in mind.
A Scene:  The barbershop scene aforementioned.  Or aftermentioned.  Not composing this in sequence.

Some Maenads.  Elvira Columbia, Crotchy Carolyn, Lachrima Christy, Zinnia Driver, Rashida Mix, and Felicia Fix.
Some Bacchantes.  Salvage Sirloin, Bobby Yomama, Sam Pham, Seeds Ballinger, Markethands, Gulliver Briscomb, Telly Felony, Wretched Fitzgerald, Policy of Truth, The Definition, Fuckbucket Gallego, Norris Lemonde, Cold Bicep, Salad Tongs, VHS, Hernan Bonanza, Billy Blaster, The Hookup, Graham Torwulf, Laundromatic, Dickvein Jackson, Sir Tossalot, Sizzle, Sotto Voce, Slim Delivery, Ivan Grigoriy, Vladi Hubcaps, or Seymour Panties.
Just bringing forth the name list in case I wanna use it.

Locations:  Foothill Manor, a housing project in the fictional city of Seaport, unspecified state Pacific Northwest USA, is about fifteen stories tall but full of ambiguities.  It’s the largest building (aside from warehouses and factories) for miles, bounded by scrubby abandoned lots and broad roads, overpriced dilapidated single family homes on small plots of dead grass, and factory warehouse and shipping yards that do who knows what.  The cranes that move shipping containers are like abstract brachiosaurs looming over a similarly artificial and corroded region.

The building is shaped like a rectangle, with nothing but a narrow strip of sidewalk outside.  The front and back of the building are both on city streets, the south side being where the garbage is taken out.  It’s across the street from an untenanted beige brick block of low rent office space, a few slightly less ignominious apartment complexes, then miles of shitty little houses.  The north side is across the street from a few blocks of factories and warehouses, many of which are seemingly not in use.

The west side of the building has an alley shared with a smaller ruin of an apartment building, occasionally tenanted by squatters.  The building has a name carved above its barricaded front door:  The Carolingian.  The east side was a vacant lot but decades of abandoned rubbish – the bulk of which is furniture – created a habitat for tangled vines of blackberry and ivy, and all the creatures that such an environment can sustain.  Some call it The Forest.

There’s a strange and extremely dank smell like hot organic garbage that hangs heavy when the wind is too slow, supposedly from a wood mill.  Miraculously, it cannot be smelled indoors unless you open your window to it, and cannot be smelled in the courtyard.

The courtyard is in the middle of the building – just a concrete walking space with a few dangerous and hotly contested items of playground equipment, a few planters surrounded by benches.  Perhaps they were originally meant to hold trees, but not enough daylight reaches the depth of this hole over a hundred feet deep, and they now hold planters and lots of cigarette ash and butts.  The courtyard is the quickest route for people on the north side to get to the garbage on the south, and trash fallen from bags dots the place.  The worst is when petulant children tasked to take out the trash just leave the bag in the courtyard itself, rather than going out back to the dumpsters.

The courtyard has an unusual feature for construction in this part of the world, inspired by European blocks.  There are storefronts all around the interior.  But this feature was never fully used, and most of the storefronts are either converted into apartments or boarded or bricked over completely.  The only business in the courtyard is The Loan Shop.  It has a name that is illegible and forgotten, and is run as a combination convenience store and payday loan store.  They also sell scratch tickets.  Gotta win big if you ever wanna get out.  Maybe next time.

The street level outside has several storefronts as well.  Most of them are papered over from inside the glass but still theoretically available for lease – hope springs eternal.  The only ones in use, both on the north side, are the bodega and the barbershop.

The roof isn’t supposed to be accessed, but people do it all the time.  The least worst are people who want to smoke in the stanky open air, naughty children, poetic souls, or some combination of the three.  There are also criminal activities, gang fights, suicide attempts, etc.

The building’s landlord is not a typical slumlord.  He lives like a king, preferring the bottom floor and a significant chunk of the basement, which has been converted on the inside into an improbably lavish mansion.  His wife passed without leaving a male heir, which is a problem for his little mind, and he shares his home with his daughter and close criminal associates.

The project is diverse but, predictably, has a higher percentage of Black, Latin, Pacific Islander, and Southeast Asian residents than the region at large (Natives are present but not over-represented, preferring tribal resources).  To get this kind of housing, you have to get on a real long list and wait, and meet certain criteria of limited income relative to household size, old age, or disabilities.  Everyone here is a mess.

Foothill Manor:  The housing project
Emotional Reality:  A place of economic and spiritual despair.
Metaphysical Reality:  Actually a trap that erected itself at the boundary between Earth and the spirit world.  The building itself has a spiritual body parallel to the material, comprised of a single machine-like throne angel.  The secret passages are something like its digestive tract.
Manifestation:  Anybody paying a modicum of attention knows the building doesn’t make sense.  The elevator and stairs have fewer floors than the building appears to have from the outside, and there’s seemingly no way to access any floors other than those one can get to by those means.  The layouts of the floors are not the same from one to the next, even though that makes more sense from a construction and design perspective, and the halls and apartments don’t seem to fill the entirety of the available space.  Nobody with this awareness has felt bold enough to really test the limits, to solve the mystery, for various reasons.
A Scene:  In a hall Hero confronts the pickpocket.

The Courtyard:  In the middle of the building, a concrete space, technically open to the air but so submerged at the bottom of over a hundred feet that even the city’s funky pollution can’t reach it.  Instead it’s just the smell of trash that gets lazily strewn about.  The Loan Shop is here, plus some benches and ferns and playground equipment.
Emotional Reality:  It’s like the open-air experience in a prison.  You don’t go there to feel hope.  For that, you stay in your apartment and look out the outer windows – if you’re fortunate enough to have one.
Metaphysical Reality:  There’s a hole in the ground, like a fountain that never flows with water.  Sometimes a snake tail drips down from heaven and slips in there, then withdraws and disappears.  Dropping notes?
Manifestation:  It feels innocent enough when you’re new.  You go there just to smoke or go to the loan shop for snacks.  Maybe to hang out with your gang.  But in time, you realize you’re only coming there when it’s time to lose something vital, for the right to continue your diminishing existence.
A Scene:  Maybe when the hero meets the raven boys.

The Loan Shop:  The single most important business in the project, this is run by a principality angel in human guise, Armando Ciniegas.  The store is so tiny, it seems like a converted studio apartment.  Armando or an employee is always present, hiding within the fogged and scratched bulletproof (?) plexiglass.  The goods are more familiar American fare than in the bodega, but decidedly stolen from the backs of trucks – sporadic availability, roulette expiration dates.
Emotional Reality:  Exploitation, despair, tension, the high cost of being poor.  The farce of “legitimate” business.
Metaphysical Reality:  There is something like a mouth here, and something like a gullet.  Armando’s living in a cheek like chewing gum that’s gone flavorless.
Manifestation:  Did you see his eyes glow red when he handed you the scratch ticket?  Did you feel a fraction of your soul get snatched when he handed you the payday loan?
A Scene:  Didn’t have one in mind.

The Bodega, run by Dario Jefferson, a principality angel in human guise:  While you can technically come and go through the front door, out on the sidewalk, out in the sun, many people come through a narrow passage into the first floor hallways.  Why leave the building?  You could just spend eternity in a box, at least until they require you to go down to the welfare office and sing for your supper.
Emotional Reality:  At the supermarket, the produce is hustled in from foreign lands so fast, it seems like the fruit of paradise.  At the bodega, where exactly does this stuff come from?  The produce might not kill you, assuming there even is any on a given day, but it doesn’t look too appetizing.  Even the twinkies here seem like they’re past the expiration date, or passed through some kind of unknown abuse on the way to the shelf.  The strangest things are the foreign foods without languages spoken by anybody in the building, least of all Dario.  Anyway, the emotional reality is the feeling that you don’t deserve nice things.  A supermarket is for real humans.  Everything you get is freezedried or shrinkwrapped, with stickers telling you not to eat it, and stickers partially occluding those ones that say new prices and “we accept EBT.”
Metaphysical Reality:  One of the bottom corners of the box.  If you could see it from the outside, it would look like the brass lion foot of an old-fashioned bathtub.  Inside the window side extrudes into sloping fluted brass.  The black and white tiles are scales.  Some kind of chitinous combs hold the stores good and sometimes leak slime on them.
Manifestation:  Darker inside than you’d imagine, has odd items you wouldn’t expect to find and don’t understand.
A Scene:  Had none in mind.

The Barbershop, run by a principality angel, Don Commodore:  Don is a domineering presence.  Seems like he’s gladhanding and schmoozing to mack or to make friends of customers, but it’s forced.
Emotional Reality:  It’s where you go to look good, to get the hairy world off your neck.  You chat with the regulars, get to know the people in your building, right?  Big look at yourself in all the mirrors.  Who is that weird person, and why do you have to be them?
Metaphysical Reality:  One of the bottom corners of the box.  If you could see it from the outside, it would look like the brass lion foot of an old-fashioned bathtub.  Inside the window side extrudes into sloping fluted brass.  The black and white tiles are scales.  Cockroaches fear no light, eating the hair that falls on the floor.
Manifestation:  Looks darker inside than you’d expect.  More bugs.  The friendliness is of people who expect to get beaten if they overstay their welcome.
A Scene:  Hero goes to get a haircut to look good for Sexy Dude.

The Secret Passages:  Winding through the building is a whole other building unseen.  Secret passages facilitate criminal activity, but also bridge the physical and spiritual realms.
Emotional Reality:  A sense of wrongness.  At the most simple level, why is the number of floors visible from outside greater than the number of floors you can reach by elevator or stairs?  The building is full of building you are not allowed to experience, and who knows what is going on in there?
Metaphysical Reality:  Almost all mobile organisms are, at core, a worm.  Food goes in one end and out the other.  When your food is pure energy and your physical form is a mockery of functions you don’t actually require, what goes through your worm tube?  It’s a place for weirdos to lurk, going about weird business.  If you see it as it truly is, ????  I dunno.  Ribbed for her pleasure.  I kid, I was thinking, maybe it should have some kind of banding, like an inside out earthworm, to facilitate peristalsis that it isn’t doing.  Ocelli dotting the walls let one spy on regular rooms.  Architecture not quite sensible, has a lot of short staircases and dead ends.  What goes on in its rooms?  Mostly locked?
Manifestation:  Almost every other floor of the building is full of this wriggling form, and it intrudes on the regular floors as well, with passages next to peoples’ walls, from which you could spy on them.  But when you are in the literal belly of the beast, things may appear different from how they do in the regular halls.
A Scene:  Hero finds the place for the first time, sees things he shouldn’t see.
Another Scene:  In desperation to find out about the girl, he starts prowling the halls.
Another Scene:  Has to find the Serpent’s room to rescue Sexy Dude.

The Boiler Room:  The basement of the project is partly taken up with the larger rooms of the Godfather’s “mansion,” but also has some secret passage space of its own, and a few more conventional rooms of machinery or storage.  The boiler room is the nexus for all that kind of thing.
Emotional Reality:  The boiler room is a place of high pressure, janky and seedy business.  You’re not allowed in but you got in there just the same.
Metaphysical Reality:  This is most of the organ meat of the throne angel.  Step off the serpent path, end up in golden gears and black sinews.
Manifestation:  If you go through any one door in basement halls, you will often find this kind of area.  What do all these pipes even do?
A Scene:  I didn’t have one in mind.

The Mansion:  The Project Godfather’s part of the building.  As near any visitor can tell, it achieved grand ceilings by taking out the floor between a basement and the first floor, with short staircases descending to the floor in any taller rooms.  Likewise, walls were taken out between apartments, or restructured.  How can there be a stained glass window there, when there are none visible from the outside?  Don’t think about it too much.  This area really does feel very much like a mansion, with the radically restructured interior, but doesn’t have as many windows as the real deal.
Emotional Reality:  How do the rich even live in the same world as us?  How do they fucking dare?  What unmitigated gall.
Metaphysical Reality:  This is part of the throne angel that comprises the box.  Call it the liver.
Manifestation:  The place is as much a conundrum in physical space as in the spirit.  If one was seeing reality true, it would just look like a more gold-plated version of what you already see – maybe with pulsing veins running over the frescoes.
A Scene:  The Hero has to do something with the internet wiring which leads to discovering the tunnels.
Another Scene:  The Hero gets accused by the Godfather.

The Roof:  The whole building’s layout is a loop around the courtyard, and on the rooftop, people can freely walk all the way around.  It shouldn’t be accessible, but there are two stairwells with broken doors at the top, and a hatch door that can be reached from inside with a ladder.  There is barely a lip in sight, no guard rail, and anyone could easily fall off, by accident or on purpose.
Emotional Reality:  Freedom to breathe the air, with all that entails – risk of cancer, crime, and death.
Metaphysical Reality:  This is the crown of the throne angel.  Other angels live in on and around it, led by more self-disciplined creatures.
Manifestation:  When the roof’s spiritual self is visible, it is the halo of the throne angel, just some fire that doesn’t burn and never dies.  The angel’s crown is brazen metal shapes that can reconfigure, rise and fall with its breath.  Or not.  Hey I said there were cherubs buzzing above the building.  Do they leave huge dookies on the roof?
A Scene:  Wasn’t planning to have one here.  Maybe…

The Forest:  The overgrown vacant lot / rubbish heap / pile of vines to the east of the project.
Emotional Reality:  Plants are nice?  Being the Pacific Northwest, you can see green hills in the great distance if you’re pointed the right direction – maybe even some mountains.  But the immediate neighborhood looks lifeless on the surface, making the pile of green leaves appealing to look at – for about nine months of the year.  You can even see hummingbirds visiting the flowers.  When the vines die back in winter, the garbage beneath is much more apparent.
Metaphysical Reality:  Just outside of the footprint, The Forest is exactly what it looks like – an accidental urban micro-biome, full of rats and bugs.
Manifestation:  From inside the project, appearances of things on the outside can be distorted.  What was the movement there?  Can it be real?  The hero can see The Forest from his window.
A Scene:  Hero sees the Girl out there, aimlessly wandering over the heap in a pink dress.
Another Scene:  Hero sees the girl in the pink dress, but she suddenly moves in an impossible way.  Is that actually a gibbon in a dress?  Is that all she was the first time?

The Carolingian:  The abandoned apartment building to the west of the project.  It will not appear in the story, really.
Emotional Reality:  Fucking sucks to see beautiful brick Victorian buildings go to waste and ruin, but as long as whatever dracula holds the deed doesn’t feel spicy enough to raze the place and install something corporate, at least it can be a place for wild people to dwell – in some amount of risk.
Metaphysical Reality:  It is what it appears to be and nothing more.  Just outside the footprint, angels only rarely travel its dismal halls.
Manifestation:  Not relevant.
A Scene:  No scene.

Woof.  All that and I don’t have my 70 scenes yet.  Coming ASAP!

–

Big Spoilers Ahead.  If you thought you were going to read the Best Story in the World without spoilin’, read this not.

OK.  The post before this I was still trying to work out particulars on the Best Story in the World™ and came to a point where I had to chuck a not insignificant amount of work in the trash.  Maybe to be retrieved in future for a different occasion, but it won’t work for the best story in the world.  I needed something immediately and persistently more mysterious and uncanny.

I could dig through Grimm and try to come up with modern retellings of multiple stories, several of them, and pick the one that works the best for this requirement.  But we’re real close to the wire – this event begins March 1st!  So I’m gonna hafta freestyle more.  My husband is working on a story of his own, themed around the idea of a missing person, and sometimes we like to share a theme, so he suggested I do something with that.

I decided to re-use the setting I’d developed for the Henchpuss story – a big housing project with a strong presence of organized crime – so that someday the Henchpuss story could amuse people with connections to this one.  A child went missing in this area and police sometimes harass or shake people down using that as a pretext.  Nobody thinks it’s justified – but is it?

MCs will be a guy who lives in the building and a private citizen investigating the missing child.  I like the idea of the characters from Henchpuss never leaving the building until certain dramatic points in the story, and this one can be the same.  Guy who lives in the building as PoV character, has housing despite no job, because of a disability.

I think the MC sometimes sees the girl, sometimes sees a monkey, doesn’t know if the girl sightings were hallucinating about a monkey.  Maybe the monkey ends the story with some Murders in the Rue Morgue type of shit, wearing a pretty pink dress lol.  Boy I’m tired.  Lemme see…

You know what?  I’m gonna poke at Grimm for a set amount of time and see if I spot something that could have these ideas stretched over the top of it.

The White Snake:  A servant takes a lil bite of his king’s forbidden snake dish and gains Beastmaster™ powers.  He uses them to get a favor from the king and goes on an adventure where he uses those powers to get the love of a hot princess.  But I know what it means.  To walk along the lonely street of dreams.  HERE I GO AGAIN ON MY OWN.  GOIN’ DOWN THE ONLY ROAD I’VE EVER KNOWN!  LIKE A DRIFTER I WAS BORN TO WALK ALONE…

But seriously, this isn’t too bad.  Guy gains some wisdom he can use to his advantage – secret intel about the mysteries and criminal hijinks in the project.  He uses this to accomplish goal of resolving missing person mystery, and is rewarded with a hot prince.  Actually, totally workable!

The Girl Without Hands:  A lotta divine intervention in this one.  Devil wants a maiden fair and tricks her dad into cutting off her hands because reasons.  She goes out in the world and a king falls in love and gives her silver hands.  King has to travel and Devil messes with the postal service, yadda yadda, girl is out in the wilds.  Angels help again, King finds out about wacky misunderstanding and hunts down his baby boo, angels help him, and they meet up again and live happily ever after.  Also god does exactly the kind of faith healing in this story atheoskeptitypes always complain that he can’t do.

You can really tell the Grimm Bros actually did the work they said they were doing, and documented stories from across the land – not just writing their own and ascribing them to people from such-and-such place – because they often evince very different values or attitudes about men, women, religion, etc.  I don’t like the part of Europe this story came from, wherever it was, because the story is bad religious values – piety to the patriarchy taken to the point of egregious violence, being meek as hell to get impossible rewards from heaven.  Fuck that shit a lot.

But the love in it was easily the most moving.  And the girl was the main character!  Make of that what you will.  Also the main character was disabled, to a point, so relevant..?  Angels grew her hands back tho.  God cannot tolerate cybernetics.  But those kooky kids really loved each other.  I weep.  I cry, but angels deserve to DIIIIIIIE.

The Queen Bee:  Three princes gotta wake up three hot princesses from slumber with magical bullshit.  The youngest prince is nice to animals so they help him wake up the princesses.  All three get a princess but nice boy gets the hottest one.  Too many main characters.  Three brides for three brothers.  I don’t see it.

The Goose Girl:  One of the biggest flaws in Frankenstein is classism, and possibly also racism against the Irish, but very prominently the story has repeated instances of the only worthwhile people being upper class in origin.  If the character is a servant and good and fair, it’s because they descended from “finer stock” and only became a servant through misfortune.  This story has the same trope in spades.  Princess rides far away to marry a cool prince, but her wicked servant is jealous and bullies her into giving up her princessly raiment and treasure, and having to assume the role of servant.  A cool talking horse has to get killed and with his head nailed to a wall is still able to speak, giving the king a clue that the real princess is stuck tending geese.  So he takes what he perceives as the true princess and chucks her in an oven until she confesses the situation?  Get tortured, maiden fair.  The story ends with the nasty brutish lower class girl dragged around town in an iron maiden until dead.

Leaving aside the class angle, this is a changeling story.  Characters reversed their rightful roles but were ultimately given their correct rewards.  Is my disabled boy supposed to have a cooler thing going in life, gets it back?  No.  No, this doesn’t work.  Cool magic in the original story, if terrible values and unlikable characters.

The Golden Bird:  In a kingdom ruled by a greedy asshole with three incompetent ratbag sons, the king finds out about a cool bird he wants, and sends his sons to get it.  They fuck up monumentally, with two sons ending up at the gallows and one going on a misadventure with  cool magic fox.  The fox knows everything and has ungodly superpowers, but as a fox he has bad self-esteem, so he always has a human do shit for him.  He helps the least ratbag prince go on a magic adventure to get the cool bird, but prince’s incompetence repeatedly threatens to ruin the endeavor.  In the end, the least ratbag wins everything, and releases the magic fox from a curse, and they all live happily ever after.  Except the dead incompetent ratbags.

I like this one, aside from some amount of annoyance at how the least worst prince conducted himself.  There was some sorta clever stuff happening, it’s zany, it’s action-packed, and has more detail than some of these stories, which are a bit slight.  But I don’t even think it’s worth the effort to map this one onto the story I’ve come up with.

White Snake?  But I’ve made up my mind.  I ain’t wastin’ no more time.  ‘Cuz here I go again.  Here I go AGAAAIN.

Disabled boy can’t make ends meet because his disability benes keep getting cut off.  To get by he takes work for tha Projects Godfather.  He finds out something he was not meant to know, which helps him solve the case of the missing person, and get the sexy prince.

In the fairy tale, servant boy succumbs to curiosity and eats that white snake.  I feel like the symbolism here could be taken in a sophomoric direction.  Maybe he finds out about gay stuff going on in project?  And the Godfather is like, you’re one of us now.  This would be ironic, given what the Godfather gets up to in Henchpuss.  Maybe not.

What is the equivalent of the animal whisper network, in my version?  Secret tunnels in the apartments, maybe?  Secret chatroom?  Mobchat 2.0?  Little black book of mob activities?

He uses that resource to exonerate himself from a seeming wrongdoing, gets favor of boss.  He uses that favor to just permanently excuse himself from the job.  Then he gets involved with investigator boy, and uses his secret insight to help solve the missing person case.

He finds out about people having problems throughout the project and solves them, in exchange for unspecified future favors.  Three fish, the Ant King, and raven chicks.  He feeds the last ones his own horse.  “One good turn deserves another.”

To get the hot prince, he has to do dangerous tasks.  What risk is there in investigating the missing girl?  Original tasks were:  Get ring from bottom of sea (fish helped), Pick up a bunch of grains (ants helped), Get an apple from the tree of life (ravens got it).  Then he gives Prince some apple and they live happily ever after.

What dangerous thing could he be doing that involves helping people who can pay him back, resulting in mystery solved, and wuv, twue wuv?  Lurking on a bulletin board isn’t risky.  Is it?  Crawling around in secret passages that are used by mobsters would be.

I wanted the mob princess to be gay.  Maybe first thing he does is find out she is, because.. something.  She lost her cellphone and didn’t put a lock screen on it?  No…  In the secret passage he witnesses a girl pick her pocket.  He’s suspected of crime but is able to talk the guilty girl into giving up the thing she stole, in a way that doesn’t implicate her.  He lets Princess know he’s gay and she says she owes him – unspecified promise of future assistance number one.

The whole time police are harassing the tenants.  But somebody else becomes involved:  sexy investigator man.  How do I do this?  Somebody makes MC feel like little girl might be in the building, so he risks going into the tunnels.  While he’s in there he finds out about some people in tough situations and ends up helping them, for unspecified future assistance.

Three fish:  Somebody or group of somebodies that can help him with equivalent of the first task to win the sexy prince.  What is the first task?  Maybe… convince him that answer to girl’s disappearance does have to do with the building, so he’ll keep coming back?

Ant King:  Used legions to pick up grains as second task.  In Whitesnake this was when the princess wasn’t satisfied with first feat, seeing the servant as too lowly, and asked him to do a second impossible thing.  Mmm…  ugh drawing a blank here.

Baby ravens:  Get the apple from the tree of life.  The last task, allows happy-ever-after with love interest.  Solves the mystery?

Maybe I need to decide for myself what the resolution to the mystery would be, and to what extent the supernatural should be involved.  I like the idea of referencing Rue Morgue with a monkey in the mix.  What happened to missing girl?  What happened?  What would feel satisfying as an answer to the mystery?

What happened to Laura Palmer?  Too dark.  Should be dark.  I dunno.  I don’t think Frost or Lynch knew at beginning of series.  I ain’t goin’ out like that, as they say.  Gotta do somethin’ proper.  What do I want to say about anything, if anything?

I like people being compassionate and kind; I hate cruelty and greed.  My highest values.  Anything in that?  I’d like the mob boss to live through this one so he can be killed in Henchpuss.  If girl is missing because somebody did something evil, they draw the big ace, so it can’t be the mob boss.

Something terrible should be going on.  What does it have to do with the monkey?  Who did what to whom?  Who was the girl to them?  Competing theories could happen.  Girl was chasing the monkey or lured by the monkey to some horrible person.  Obvious thing would be rape and murder, which is dire as hell.  What other motives could a freak have to disappear a baby?

Spell components?  Sacrifice to the elder gods?  That could be a competing theory, whatever turned out to be true.  A false one could be that the sexy investigator did it so he could get something out of the victim’s family.  What would be a surreal abstraction of the idea of horrible stuff befalling a child?  I think monsters are the go-to.  She was gobbled up by a monster.  Another alternate theory.

What else could work as a metaphor for that?  Transformed into an object, as being murdered to satisfy a bastard’s perversion is the apotheosis of being objectified.  Transformed into an object and destroyed.  What kind of object?  What kind of destruction?  How would it be discovered and what would come of it?  How might it be turned back upon the killer?

The monkey is a murderer in Rue Morgue.  In Argento’s Phenomena a Rue-inspired monkey kills somebody near the end of the picture.  Maybe the monkey is the killer’s familiar, but rebels and kills the killer.  Killer transformed into something a monkey could kill.  Maybe a snake.

Fairy tail-ish but not surreal enough at the moment.  Ugggggh.  Through the darkness of future past the magician longs to see…  I remember that dream where the chicken lady said she used to shed like a bonfire.  Was girl turned into a chicken?  A lil fuzzy chick?  Does killer turn into a snake when he goes to eat chicks?

This isn’t feeling best ever.  I need the best everness.  Something iconic.  Something that grabs you by the short and curlies and slaps you around.  An indelible image.  What can it be?  Hellraiser had its puzzle box, its hell priest.  Maybe an iconic villain?  Yeah, like the ghosts in Kairo, like the mumblecore hypnodracula in Cure.  If he sees you, you just know that you are going to die.  Don’t let him even know you exist.  He walks like a burning pillar, like a lightning strike that refuses to fade.

Like Frank Booth’s weird friends in Blue Velvet.  I loved that scene.  That could be like… the suspects.  The Project Godfather’s friends.  The snake is in that crew.  Get invited to the party but don’t stay til the end.  I think that’ll be Princess’s contribution – at the mob party, she’ll keep MC from having to stay til the end and get taken up into the company.  The Unseelie Host.  The Bacchantes.

Part one of the book, MC eats the Whitesnake ON HIS OWN / discovers the hidden passages.  He opens up a door into his own apartment so he can come and go through them as he pleases.  Finds out about Princess getting girl-hustled and convinces Godfather to cut him loose – can’t take the fear of working for the mob.  Anxiety disorder?  I dunt know if I should be writing a mental condition far outside of my own.  Many people have kernels of disorders and with a smidge of research can write them effectively; gonna need to give that more thought.

Anyway, in background of this part, glimpses of girl and beginning of police harassment.  Maybe it culminates with, right around time of Princess saying she owes him, connecting the police activity with his memory of seeing a girl, wondering if it’s the same.  Also, should establish the mob suspect weirdos.

Part two of book, MC finds out bout sexydude investigations.  Has to protect him from running afoul of the mob, keep him around with hint girl might be in or near building.  Keeps trying to find out more about girl leading to favors owed.  But sexydude grows frustrated.  Somewhere in here should be more red herrings about the weirdos.

Part three of book, MC &/or sexydude go to big weirdo party and have to be saved by Princess.  MC ends up alone, having to save SexyDude and solve mystery.  This all get back to the need for some kind of interesting way to mystery, to menace, to horror.  Should people be dying?  Disappearing?  Might be necessary to establish stakes for the scariness.

I think back on Killer Bob putting that one character’s soul in a doorknob.  That kinda sucked.  I wanna be surreal but I don’t want that.  It’s killin’ me.  I guess the key thing is making any given piece of nonsense feel profound or emotionally significant, or have it speak to one of the mundane emotions one doesn’t normally experience in art, which thereby acquires a profundity it doesn’t normally possess.  sdijorsiejgijreojehow do they do itwfpijprijgpoirjgi

Leonora Carrington’s writing benefits from literally being dream scenarios, as do older surrealist films.  Maybe I can just think of the whole fucken endeavor as being a dream.  Start it with “last night i dreamt of manderley again” and then delete that when i’m done with the draft.  Maybe that’ll help jailbreak my mind.

Somewhere in the building a serpent moves, made of negative space, worming its way through lives and experiences, watching for vulnerability, or gliding by indifferent, until the day that it isn’t.  Ride the snake.  The ancient snake, baby.  The snake is long.  Seven miles. rjeoijgoijrigrefRip it up and start again.

How can I think when I’m burning the candle at both ends?  Every day is work of one kind or another all day long.  I take my breaks when I can but that ends up feeling like too much, like some responsibility is falling through the cracks.  Gotta go fast like hedged hogge.

Snake eats the chicks.  Snake eats the chicks.  How do you see them.  What do you see of them.  Through the walls.  What’s it all look like.  What does it look like.  What is a snake like?  A scary snake.  Regular snake ain’t great, but they’re just an animal.  What’s a human snake like.

Maybe everybody is an animal, that’s why becoming the Beastmaster is useful.  Animal associations for the whole cast.  When MC figures out what animal you are, he gets an advantage.  Maybe he sees a young Henchpuss and figures out the catness.  Maybe the ravens are the fuckup boyz from Henchpuss story, still children in this part of the timeline.  Teens anyway.

I walk forty-seven miles of barbed wire, got a cobra snake for a necktie, got a brand new house by the roadside, made out of rattlesnake hide.  Got a lil chimney there on the top, made from a human skull, Come on take a little walk with me honey and tell me who do you love?

What is the apple from the tree of life?  It’s the bomb that will bring us together.  It’s something that brings boys together at the end.  It’s a cure for poison?  When SexyDude gets snakebit?  Sounds good.

I think Angela Carter should be my guide.  I need to re-read some of the short stories from The Bloody Chamber.  Yeah, that’s good.  The downside is that those stories are explicitly fantasy, working in well-trod cultural archetypes that are a lil less accessible in a contemporary setting, without going “urban fantasy” – which is decidedly not my aim, whatever this all sounds like.

Alright let’s think, if I was going to take Carter and bend it Lynch of K. Kurosawa, how could that look?  Funny that I cannot help but think in pastiche.  A true child of the post-modern era, like all the fascists who benefited from helping the public view bigoted opinions as being valid truths, but coming from my own liberal schoolmarm / hollywood underdog story -programmed point of view.  I will say, in my defense, that I do this less on projects that are more specifically for following my own stars.  In this one, I’m trying to build to somebody else’s tastes, based on what I know he likes.

Way distracted, as usual.  Back to the point, Angela Carter but more contemporary and dream-like.  That doesn’t seem too inaccessible.  Y’know, it really still comes back to the issue, coming up on being a crisis, of not knowing how I want to depict the surreal elements of the story.

Snake mans.  The Godfather’s frank boothies.  A candy-colored clown they call the Sandman.  I think this godfather is black.  Maybe Dominican?  Just to avoid a ton of research he can be pretty amurricanized.  Villains of color can be cool, as long as that isn’t all the PoC in your story and they aren’t living down to stereotypes too badly.  I like the idea of him having grandiosity, bombast like the horror emcee characters in the Tales From the Hood movies, played by Clarence Williams and Keith David respectively.  Welcome to hell, motherfuckers!

His guys all run criminal enterprises in the project.  There are two stores in the building, let’s say the loan store and the bodega.  The loan store is a combination payday loan / loanshark operation and convenience store.  The bodega is the only place to eat something besides expired snack food stolen from the back of a semi in Chinatown.

I love naming criminals, but I’m overly tempted to call one Sheisty, like Sheisty Pete, Vincent Sheisty, John Forsythe Emanuel Sheistington the IVth.  I resist the urge.  Here are some ideas: Frederick Paz, Elvira Columbia, Don Commodore, The Disease, Salvage Sirloin, Crotchy Carolyn, Bobby Yomama, Sam Pham, Seeds Ballinger, Markethands, Gulliver Briscomb, Telly Felony, Lachrima Christy, Wretched Fitzgerald, Simone Kovacs, Zinnia Driver, Policy of Truth, Armando Ciniegas, Dario Jefferson, Rashida Mix, The Definition, Fuckbucket Gallego, Norris Lemonde, Yolanda Biggs, My Mormon Cousin, Snitchy Britches, Brittany the Witness, Cold Bicep, Salad Tongs, VHS, Hernan Bonanza, Tori Lameness, Felicia Fix, Jolene Roxbury, Sandra Impious, Nerdwad, Billy Blaster, The Hookup, Graham Torwulf, Laundromatic, Laura Suffolk, Dickvein Jackson, Sir Tossalot, Sizzle, Maryjane Datsun, Sotto Voce, Slim Delivery, Skinny Kimmy, Georgette Lewis, Mikki Maclemore, Fallon Frankenstein, Maddie Iberia, Dexter Slocum, Ivan Grigoriy, Vladi Hubcaps, Bumpin Booty, Seymour Panties, or Cristina Salmonella.  Drop more in the comments or tell me if this list has any faves.

On the other hand, Frank’s boothies may have worked better for lacking names.  I think only one of them had a name?  Maybe I just use the name for my own purposes and leave them mostly unsaid in the story.

This is all useful thought but isn’t getting over the crux of the problem.  I’m not sure what to litcherally do to evoke the kind of mystery and surreal horror my husband likes the most…  I broke down and went several rounds with an AI (deepseek) to try and boil down some lessons culled from the greats, and this is what it came up with:

“To create a Lynchian surrealism in writing, focus on immersing the reader through vivid, tactile descriptions that make the surreal feel tangible and immediate.  Let the surreal elements operate as symbols of a deeper truth, but resist explaining that truth, allowing them to function with their own internal logic.  Anchor these elements in the characters’ emotions—their fears, desires, and traumas—so the surreal feels like an extension of their inner worlds.  Finally, leave the metaphysics unresolved, presenting the surreal as glimpses of a larger, incomprehensible reality.  This approach makes the surreal feel more real by being vivid, symbolic, emotionally charged, and ultimately unknowable.”

I could ask it to make that more concise (I’d already asked it to make it more concise, but you can keep going with that stuff), but it’s important for me to understand and contemplate it.  I’m not giving you the whole back conversation, but suffice it to say, this wasn’t just me asking “hey whatcha think about david lynch” and pressing go.  I gradually ratcheted down what I was most bothered by, most trying to find a way past.  Basically, what do I literally do on the page to communicate surrealism, without it coming off trite, lightweight, like some fantasy.

First part – take advantage of medium to include sensations you wouldn’t have in a movie, just vividly felt, immersive writing.  Resist explanation – to do this I need to know what the truth is for myself before i present the illusion.  Focus on emotional realities, intense feelings people can have in the mundane world, as motive for their entry points into the surreal….   … . . .. . .    Yeah, I’ve had a similar thought before, but it was escaping me as I beat my brains against the keyboard.

Alright.  The reality is … The housing project is a spiritual puzzle box, a trap that lets supernatural forces feed on different aspects of human souls.  The supernatural parasites don’t understand themselves any more than they are understood by the hosts – operate like animals on instinct, despite powers of speech etc.  I could come up with classes of spirits like the angelic hosts.

first sphere:  seraphim cherubim thrones.  closest to the greater reality above the puzzle box.second choir:  dominions virtues powers.  enforce the will of higher powers or operate the functions of the box.third sphere:  principalities archangels angels.  i wonder why there’s a lower tier of archangels and the highest of angels are also called archangels.  that’s like there being local priests called cardinals, or infantry squad leaders called generals.  gotta dig up pseudodionysius and bust his chops.

Why is the box there?  Machines naturally emerge from the spirit world like crystals from chemistry like organisms evolving to fill vacant niches in biomes.  A giant stepped on the earth, and from its burning footprint emerged complexity.  A throne made the shape, cherubs buzz above the fire like flies, seraphs connect the giant to every footstep it has made.  Virtues became the machinery of the box, powers prevent anyone from escaping into the spirit world, and dominions interpret the will of the seraph to rule over lesser spirits.  Archangels go between dominions and angels, which are the main run of parasites, principalities rule over mortal institutions, clans, gangs, etc.

What does this have to do with animals?  I remember when I was researching demons for The Septagram I also researched angels.  As the goetian demons in the story were supposed to be fallen angels, and I’d noticed that the descriptions of some of those demons were quite close to the depictions of some angels, I assigned former angelic ranks to the demons that appeared in that novel.  All that’s to say, I know angels as classically depicted sometimes have animals aspects – six wings, three faces where one is a bull and one is an eagle, that kind of shit.

Maybe all humans are animals, like, in their souls.  Henchpuss is really a kind of cat man, the foolish boys are ravens, somebody else is fish, somebody else is the ant king.  I dunno.  Is this something that all people have before they even come into the box, or something that develops once you’re there?  Is the little girl actually becoming the monkey?

The angels are parasites.  Some would just exist invisibly causing problems for people, or have weird manifestations like stickers notifying people of debts owed or repossessions, drugs that replenish themselves just when you were most desperate, light fixtures in weird locations that burn your eyes.  The archangels and principalities would be more human-like – the Godfather, the owner of the loan store, the owner of the bodega.  Is Princess half angel?

So the snake is a snake is a snake.  Maybe he’s actually a dominion – seraphs have a serpentine aspect, their go-betweens could share this.  He makes human babies into their animal forms and gobbles them up.  But this should be the truth underlying some visual metaphor?  It obviously already is a visual metaphor.  Still I think I could work better with an idea of an underlying reality that will never be explained on the page.

I think this is perverse.  Usually authors will not do this kind of thinking in public, leaving a trail where nerds could track down the answers to all questions and leave people going – oh, this is unmagical as hell.  thanks, i hate it.

But fuck it, we ball…

What does it mean for a person to have an animal soul?  What does it mean for a person to have a soul?  The animals pretty much have to be metaphors for people’s souls, which might be glimpsed visually one way or another in the story, but are not true reality themselves.

This dominion angel snake just eats the souls of children for food.  Om nom.  Serving a seraph means he has more access to the world above than other members of his choir.  He’s aware of his insignificance and that of others.  Humans are nothing to him.  When he interacts at the weirdo party, he may be aloof to others present.  He should have the power to control all lesser angels with a word – the mob boss, the princess, the cockroaches in the hall.  He should have power over fire.

Bro collects souls like you do in Dark Souls – sits on em.  Do they ever digest?  Reduce to nothing?  He’s a snake full of eggs but they ain’t his babies; they’re victims having their dreams slowly digested.  God damn I’m tired.  Ugheuhfuhushdhdhgfghghghl.

I got a lot more thinking to do and not a lot of time to do it in; might come in the form of sketches, which i scan and upload later… I dunno.  Tomorrow, scene ideas.  David Lynch said if you have 70 scenes you have a movie.  We’ll see.

–

Big Spoilers Ahead.  If you thought you were going to read the Best Story in the World without spoilin’, read this not.

In the post before (the post before) this, I grabbed a Grimm Bros fairy tale at random, like the Wizard of Oz core of Wild at Heart, Alice in Wonderland-ish aspect of Blue Velvet, and tried to spin it into a contemporary tale.  I turned Puss in Boots into an LGBT crime story.  Now I wanna try to infuse it with all of the things my dude likes, from other posts.  Here I go…

Not yet.  I still don’t feel ready.  OK, a big recurring thing my dude likes is a sense of mystery, but what can be mysterious in this?  In original Puss, how a cat talks could be a mystery, but the story isn’t interested in it, so it isn’t, and in my story he isn’t a cat.  Maybe a combo of little magical elements can add up to that.  I know he generally doesn’t go in for what would be called “magical realism,” more just surrealism proper.  Ugh.

Surrealism is the challenge.  To me what’s great about Lynch is the surrealism, because it carries a sense of profundity.  Something that feels special in a very undefined way.  Maybe undefinable.  Most simply, can I make it feel like a dream?  I’m gonna skim my dreamposting.  Before I do that and before I forget, one element I just came up with and might use:  Boss has a vault with some unknown treasure in it, he sometimes goes in and comes out smoking.  Is it a weird drug stockpile, or a gate to hell?  Daughter is tempted by it at the end but resists and leaves the mystery unanswered, leaves with the boys.

Alright dreamposting…  A few surreal bits.  Main one I thought might work is the boy who accidentally names the antagonist in a video game after himself, and sees that reflected in adult life.  A lot of patchwork environments of grubby weirdness.  Some perv stuff.  Celebs I do not want to include.  Characters with deformities or disabilities.  Messed up animals.  Sense of obligation to menacing paternal figure, shades of The Freshman.

Still not feeling ready.  It occurs to me Puss is kind of a wizard, and he fights a wizard during the story.  Maybe the Wizard and Henchpuss can be actual wizards, Henchpuss being a wayward apprentice that comes to kill his mentor.  “Someday you’ll be killed by an apprentice junior.”  Later on has opportunity to teach some tricks to Princess or Boss and declines to.  What would wizardry be here?  Getting away with absurd things, like our original cat?  I dunno.  Henchpuss should at minimum have prior familiarity with or knowledge of Princess and various key figures in the Underworld.

Maybe the story within a story can feel magical.  Start with Boss as kid playing video game against himself, refer back to it in ways… keep intercutting flashbacks to that, or make him rediscover game as an adult?  So that’s three magic things.  Godfather’s vault, Henchpuss+Wizard being wizards, and Boss’s save game haunting him.

Maybe just plotting things out with more details will suggest to me what the magic should be.

Opens with Marlon Graf age nine playing video game.  Accidentally names enemy with his own name.  His character has the name of his mother.  He goes ahead and plays the game, being a practical kid and unbothered by foolishness.  Some indication of the ghettoness – he lives in the projects.

Marlon’s friends Jared Henke and Colin Gordon get tangled up with a mysterious sorceress.  There’s another kid there that they don’t see the face of.  Sorceress is named Majel Billy.  She gets them tempted on some turkish delights shit.

Grown Marlon gets dragged by Jared and Colin into doing a crime.  They go to a different part of the projects from the corner where they live, and break into a guy’s apartment.  It’s just to steal his supply of Thing X, but they end up killing him.  What about the assistant?  Something in circumstances causes them to split the goods.  Jared takes the treasure, Colin takes the money, and they leave Marlon with the gun – and the understanding he’s to kill the witness.

Marlon says I didn’t even want to do this.  What am I doing here?  Assistant introduces himself, David Coter.  I didn’t want to be a victim of violent crime either.  You know, if you trust me, I could make you very wealthy.  Just don’t get me killed and I’ll let you live.  Are you sure that’s all you want?

Later Marlon gives gun to Jared, saying “you’re gonna need this to watch your ass.”

David tracks Marlon to his home.  Are you sure that’s all you want?  Dude, get out of here!  I’m going to make you rich, because you saved my life.  If being rich is crimes, please don’t.  You won’t have to do a thing.  What can I say to make you go away?  Gimme those cool boots.

Jared comes by Marlon’s pissed, “Somebody got the loot!  The sorceress is going to be big mad.  Watch my six.  This was your fault.”  He goes charging down to a place where he gets ambushed and killed, while trying to roll David.  Echoes of death of David’s old boss.  David sees Marlon and gestures for him to stay out of sight.

The killer congratulates him and he takes him back to Godfather and Princess to keep his head low.  “Thanks for restoring Thing X to me.  You’ve been rewarded with your life, so this is fair.  But I haven’t given anything to your boss.”  “Let him operate in the project, and we’ll make sure you don’t get hit again.”  “Deal, but I simply must meet him.”  “You will.  He’s busy guy.”

David calls Marlon.  “I had to do that, you understand?  I’m so sorry you had to see it.” “Alright but are we goddamn done yet?”  “Please let me make it up to you.  I mean, I took your cool boots.  It isn’t fair.  We aren’t even.”  “Don’t kill my other friend.  No more killing.”  “OK.  Also let me make it up to you.  I got you into the Godfather’s graces so you have a pass for at least one fuckup.”

Comes by with a gift – game cart from a pawn shop.  It has his old save on it!  You mind if I stay and watch?  Bonding.  Colin comes around and David hides in the bathroom.  Bathroom flushes and Marlon says something wrong with toilet, goes to check and Colin startles him barging in, but no David.  Did he flush himself down the toilet?

Colin says “Jared got aced because that weasel got away.  I don’t blame you, not like you’d ever been in that position before, not a bad person…  But we gotta make sure we don’t get caught.  Let’s never go anywhere near there again.  Here, have some cash monies.”

..

NEIN.

This run at the particulars is sucking.  There are some potentially funny bits, it could be reworked to be a lot more interesting.  And the fundamental plot wasn’t bad, I am very likely to use this idea in the future!  But I am realizing this will be less about mystery and horror than about action and crime, which is not going to be the best story in the world for my guy!  And I can’t bend it far enough in that direction!

Last ditch desperate new attempt tomorrow.

–

Big Spoilers Ahead.  If you thought you were going to read the Best Story in the World without spoilin’, read this not.

By the time this post escapes my queue it will be just a few days before I get started on writing the Best Story in the World™ (for my husband).  As I’m composing this like ten days ago, I’m just going through my thoughts on the story in a public way, to get blog content out of the deal as well.  I hope by the time you read this I’ll be a lot closer to having this sorted out than I do as I’m writing it.

The latest scoop is that I should be able to take a fairy tale and heavily rewrite / modernize it.  Downside, one I know he likes a lot is The Seven Ravens, and I feel like if I use the most obvious one it’ll be less thrillening.  So lemme check on some other ones…

A lot of them don’t really have the pathos to turn into a really compelling story for adults.  They’re just “here’s some wacky shit that happened.”  The ones with real stakes are probably all taken…  Well, I’m going to change this a lot anyway.  What could I do to Puss in Boots to make it feel more like compelling narrative, where the ending is earned, instead of being doled out by a magic cat upon some lucky bum?

The boy who inherited the cat should have to suffer a lot more, so his fortune at the end feels like a magical transformation, reward for a bad time.  Taken abstractly, this then becomes a story where there are two characters – one a sad mess, one with cool skills who is always trying to help the other, and is rewarded at the end with that help becoming more permanent.

It starts with the boy saying he’ll kill the cat, and the cat says naw, let me help you out.  Which is weird.  But in terms of a modern scenario, I could see that playing out in a context of war, or organized crime.  Crime is less bitter for me to contemplate, so yeah, some kind of mafia thing?

Puss opens with a business dude bequeathing his possessions to three sons, maybe I have three partners in crime kill a rival and split his possessions.  One gets the business, one gets the money, and the last gets a henchman.  He’s like, what good is a henchman?  I should kill him before he has a chance to stab me in the back.  But Hench says I didn’t like my old boss anyway.  Gimme a chance and I’ll make you phat loot.  Hench asks for some cool boots and uses a zany scheme to make money off that, idk.

Henchpuss’s first scheme was to get catch elusive partridges for a king that loved partridges, and then to lie that his boss was an earl who had bagged them as a gift.  The king gave Henchpuss gold.  This reminds me of the Count of Monte Cristo, where somebody is going to use treasure to pretend to nobility they don’t have.  I think I can come up with modern mafia equivalents.

Henchpuss keeps partridging for the Godfather until he’s ensconced in his inner sanctum.  He overhears that the Godfather and his Princess are going to the lake, and tells his Boss to go bathe in the lake.  He steals his clothes and then cries to the Godfather that Boss’s finery got jacked by banditos and he’ll catch cold in the lake.  Godfather gives Boss finery he never previously possessed, and Boss gets cozy with Princess.  This scheme is a little more outlandish, but I think I can do it.

Literally the same day Henchpuss runs ahead to a fiefdom ruled by a magician, convinces the people in the fields to front like it belongs to Boss, and tricks the magician into making himself into a conveniently edible mouse.  Godfather Princess and Boss are still spazieren gehen and roll up on the fields where the people pretend it all belongs to the boss.  By the time they get to the magician’s castle, it’s no longer the magician’s, an Henchpuss says welcome home, Boss.

Boss and Princess get Godfather’s blessing to marry, Boss inherits the Godfather’s kingdom as well, and he makes Henchpuss into his Underboss.  The end.  This is the problem, as I said earlier.  The Boss’s only moment of suffering was getting Henchpuss instead of grander prizes, and his only virtuous deed, for which he was rewarded with a kingdom, was sparing Henchpuss’s life.  Doesn’t feel earned, not to a modern audience.

I think a natural sideplot, in turning this into a mob story, would be for the Boss’s other brothers from the beginning to recur as characters who mess him up, cause big trouble…  Y’know, Henchpuss is kinda reminding me of Yojimbo, in that he farms out his magical service rather than being a boss himself.  Altho unlike Yojimbo, he has loyalty.  Maybe I could lean slightly more Yojimbo in having him fake service to the other brothers, and betray them in the end to his chosen Boss.

For some reason as I’m running through this all, I find myself thinking of the two lessons of Haitian Creole I took in DuoLingo.  Imma mange some mango ak fwomaj…  Brains are the worst.

Problem is my dude specified he isn’t interested in crime stories, back in the previous post, and that’s where I’ve gone with all this thought.  Can this be tweaked?  I think the key thing is that my husband does not relate to greed as a motivation.  He wants things to make him happy, but does not want an amount of things that would require mobster loot, so mobsterism is unrelatable.  Could I replace the greed motivator?

What does my dude even want, aside from surcease of his various pains?  What’s a relatable goal?  It’s why he likes horror – the only goal is to survive, and this is relatable, I think, to living with chronic illness.  Hm…  Survival as the goal?  Is being gangster that dangerous here?  Is there any other motive he could find relatable?  Lemme think of his fave stories again…

Cure has a cop battling a guy that kills with hypnotism.  Gotta stop bad guy, because it is your responsibility.  Mulholland Drive has wannabe starlet falling in love with amnesiac girl, trying to have a career and love, while a very fucked up secret threatens to flip it all.  Hm… not very usable.  Perfect Blue has a wannabe starlet being stalked by murderous obsessive(s) that make her question herself and reality.  um…  Silent Hill 2 has a guy get a letter from his dead wife, and he goes to meet her in their special place, only to be confronted with his dark secret in surreal survival horror circumstances.  Motive: Investigate an impossible thing of great emotional significance…

My Mafia Puss in Boots is lacking supernatural mystery.  Maybe that can suggest a better motive for the action.  Contemporary setting, mobsters doing dirt, what magic can be happening?  Maybe the gangsterism is imaginary, like PvP in a video game, and there’s some question of what’s real vs. video gameness…  Been done a lot.  Kinda tired.

But a number of stories he likes involve that “through the looking glass” other world aspect.  The one where it’s most metaphorical is Blue Velvet, but that’s also one where it works very well.  Jeffrey’s innocence at the beginning of that story is not compatible with the mobster idea.  Or is it?  Maybe the Boss is just trying to fake it til he makes it, coerced by circumstances and sheisty other brothers into criminal world.

I’m kinda liking that, but I’m still in mobland.  The whole thing is taking shape in my head – kinda baroque, but ultimately can be boiled down to a simple story – just like he prefers.  But it’s in mobland, which is not his preferred milieu.

When I do gangster content in my stories, I prefer to keep it lo-fi, janky and skanky.  Like the furry scene in Centennial Hills.  That opens the door to eccentric freaks like you’d find in Blue Velvet, which feels magical even if the supernatural isn’t invoked.  You know, I may be pondering the mafioso because of my recent experience with JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.  I’m thinking, I like the idea of a mob princess in the vein of Trish Una.  Hm hm hm…

I can’t make this self-indulgent!  This MUST indulge my husband, above all!  Argghgghhgghhhghhg!

Well, it goes without saying then, that Henchpuss and Boss are going to be gay, and get together at the end of the story.  That’ll be big big husband points.  I might as well ride this Grimm Bros rocket to its natural conclusion, and switch gears at the last minute to something easier if I have no choice.

To that end, plot notions:

Henchpuss is a cool gay hustler in the criminal kingdom of Godfather.  Boss is a guy whose best friends are no-good scum that try to do a hot score by jacking Henchpuss’s boss.  What if they’re corrupt cops and Boss is just on a bad ride, like Training Day?  No, that makes Boss a cop, and I’d rather not have a protagonist cop again.

What if his best friends are undercover cops and he isn’t?  Lol.  Um… No…  OK.  No… Maybe… I can fold in the Wizard.  They should be in the Wizard’s crime family, which turns Henchpuss’s mousification of the Wizard into a betrayal of Boss’s original boss.  And maybe that crime family could be tha cops?  I feel like a crime story without cops is lacking…

But it isn’t supposed to be a crime story, not really.  Alright, so.  So let’s see.

The Wizard is a drug dealer who has done real well for himself in some limited market, like… a college campus?  Wait, I already did that in Mitosis.  Could this connect to the Mitosis Cinematic Universe?  Don’t be silly.  The Wizard is a Faginesque mystery man who has monkeyboys do crimes for him.  The brothers are monkeyboys turned onto a hot score – jack Henchpuss’s boss.  Boss didn’t know the only way to do that was to kill him.  Why wouldn’t they also kill Henchpuss?  They ask Boss to do it and he cheeses.

Henchpuss says buy me some boots and I’ll make you a bank full of money.  Boss says I’ll settle for not getting killed by rival gangs, but sure, have some boots.  Henchpuss scores some fat loot for Godfather and says it was Boss’s doing.  But mob bosses don’t usually love somebody doing crime without permission in their territory.  Let’s say.. Hm.. what can the partridges be?  What is Godfather like?

The obvious thing would be if the partridges are a vice.  Drugs, drink, weird porn, um… Guns?  Expensive watches?  Cars?  Is he on some Gone in 60 Seconds nonsense?  No, that’s cars, which my dude also finds boring.  What can Henchpuss get with nothing but boots, and impress a mob boss?  Lab-grown diamonds with fake pedigree as coming from more valuable blood mines?  Cool designer drugs?  Man…

Samurai swords?  Comic books?  Funko pops?  Used underwear?  Candy?  Expensive coffee?  Tobacco?  Fine art?  Maybe Henchcat’s starting boss was the guy who usually supplies the stuff to Godfather – but no, if he said Boss was supplying around the same time the usual supplier went dead or missing, Boss would be number one suspect.

Maybe it could be a switchback where instead of saying it was Boss, he says it was another brother.  Then when…  No, this doesn’t work either.  Unless… He says Boss stole it from other brother, and this is actually Henchcat getting revenge, while boosting his new Boss.

Mob Boss goes after other brother One.  This isn’t in Puss narrative originally.  What did come next?  Puss ensconced himself in King’s household while continuing to enrich his boss by selling this supply.  But that don’t work because Godfather would feel entitled to this supply.  Maybe Henchpuss just gives entire supply to Godfather and gets big brownie points.  He just asks permission to operate in town, promising not to hit any of Godfather’s enterprises, and it’s granted.

Henchcat overhears Princess lamenting Godfather expects her to marry so she can make male heir for family line, realizes she’s gay, and hatches scheme to have Boss do a lavender marriage to her, but doesn’t spring the deal yet.  Back at Brother Two’s place, B2’s manipulating Boss into helping him avoid mob wrath, but plans on making him take the fall for the score getting jacked, when the Wizard inquires.

Boss gets messed up and almost killed by the Wizard, Henchpuss gets Godfather to save him, and while in their graces he gets fresh finery.  Wizard disappears, killing brother Two to cover tracks.  Henchpuss discovers a clue, pretends to be Boss to get into the Wizard’s inner sanctum, and defeats him somehow.

Then he tells Boss to take credit for whacking the Wizard when Godfather asks, and Boss gets Made.  Henchpuss ends up having to do some difficult jail time but keeps advising Boss on lavender marriage scheme.  When he gets out, he gets with Boss romantically.

Godfather is biggest remaining threat to everybody’s happiness.  In Puss the King dies, bequeathing kingdom to cat owner.  How will he get taken out here?

It occurs to me that Boss is still a bozo letting Henchpuss do all the work.  What does he do to deserve it?  In this version, I think what he’s doing is being beautiful and romantically available to Henchpuss, who is the actual main character – if not the PoV character at the beginning of the story.

Godfather should pay for his misogyny and patriarchy.  Actually, let’s have this be the moment when Boss and Henchpuss get together.  Godfather finds out Princess is gay and is about to beat her or something, when Boss does his first brave thing and distracts Godfather – by kissing Henchpuss in front of him.  Godfather freaks out and goes to shoot them, leaving him open to Princess stabbing him in the back.

Boss is now Godfather and Henchpuss a consigliere.  Or are they?  I don’t get the impression they wanted to be criminals in the first place.  Maybe the gays all just take the money and run.

So there’s Puss in Boots as an LGBT crime story.  That’s pretty cool, but hardly what I was expecting.  But I suppose that means it would be unexpected to him as well, and therefore surprising or compelling.  Now to see if I can inject things from his “fave stuff” lists, reduce influence of “most hated stuff” list.

Aha!  Looking at older posts gave me some hot notions.  Commenter Ian King suggested a crumbling old gothic estate as a location, which doesn’t fit too well, but what about… a council estate?  What if the whole story including rival gangs is much more small potatoes / low rent, and the whole thing takes place in one housing project?  That fits me and my husband’s interest, as poor people, in more familiar environs – in avoiding glamorous depiction of wealth and power, of writing the world as we know it.

Then the name can just be the name of the project.

I’ve made lists of my husband’s favorite things before, for various purposes.  These were in sketchbooks, so I’m gonna try to distill and elaborate on them here, for use with my upcoming zany writing schemes…

LIKES

Movies:  Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead, The Thing, Cure, The Shining, Jacob’s Ladder, Gothic, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tetsuo: Iron Man, Akira, Perfect Blue, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Session Nine, Vampyre, Tale of a Vampire, The Cat, Kairo, Night of the Living Dead, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Little Otik, Crimson Peak, Videodrome, Event Horizon

Some take-aways from that:  character-centric horror, indelible imagery, iconic qualities, if it ain’t literally the end of the world it feels like the end of the world.  dreams.  monsters.  beautiful people.  beautiful people who are monsters.  small central casts.

Stories, Books, and Comic Books:  The Metamorphosis, Fall of the House of Usher, Lost Souls, The Strange Tale of Panorama Island (both versions), My Sweet Audrina, The Necrophiliac, Hellstar Remina, The Laughing Vampire

Some take-aways from that:  gothic drama, cold-hearted beauties, violence, style, ultimate corruption.

Visual Art:  Edward Hopper, Francis Bacon, Hieronymus Bosch, Malcolm Liepke, JC Leyendecker, Stephen Gammell, Suehiro Maruo

Some take-aways from that:  That stuff is pretty varied, but a lot of it ranges from spooky to horrific, from stylish and elegant to exploding with lurid detail.

Games:  Silent Hill (best to worst 3 2 1 4), Sanitarium, The Dark Eye, The Secret World, Rule of Rose, Fallen London, Kult

Some take-aways from that:  good storytelling, it’s all horror games, an emphasis on parallel / hidden worlds.

Music: The Cure, Bauhaus, Tr/st, Drab Majesty, Qual, Joy Division, The Pixies, Fad Gadget, Grauzone, Depeche Mode

Some take-aways from that:  dark romance, frenetic agony, convulsive energy, awkward alienation, depression, laughing at one’s own depression, literary references, intellectualism.

Keep it Short:  Short stories, even so short as to be simple vignettes, like Fuan no Tane.  He always likes this better than long form fiction, which is funny, because he wants more of what he likes, right?  The best compromise if I’m shooting for longer length, I think, is to make sure each part holds up well on its own – has internal interest and its own arc.

Fashion:  Description of what characters are wearing, or other things related to their milieu or subculture – the food they eat, the things they drink, the music they listen to.  I don’t think he always needs this – many of his favorite short stories don’t get much into those details – but he likes it when it shows up.  Describing what characters are wearing, or what they look like at all, can throw a brick on your story’s pace.  I think the writers most concerned about that would be people like myself who are heavily influenced by cinema, but it’s a mistake to forget what medium you’re working in.  Sometimes people wanna know what stuff looks like, sometimes they don’t.  Gotta find your audience and play to it.  In this case, easy, it’s just one guy who I know well.

Looking back at the original notes, he specifically said he likes to see “makeovers.”  That’s tremendously gay.  I’m into it.  Not sure how well suited it will be to gothic genre fiction, if that’s what I make.  What the hell am I going to make?

Colorful Color:  My dude may be goth, but at heart he retains some element of that childhood attraction to green pterodactyls and purple dragons.  New Wave fashion, the makeup on New Romantics, the colors of Lisa Frank art.  Black paired with rainbow.  This is more a thing he is drawn to in visual art, but a reference to nifty colors in a book might go over well.

Simple Language:  I don’t think my dude is as much into this as he was when he made the older of the lists I was reading.  Since then, he has read and enjoyed The Turn of the Screw and Blood Meridian.  Though he did not read the latter in a linear fashion; he hopped around in it, reading parts at random until he was done.  He said it was what he imagined xtians get out of reading the bible – open to a random page for inspiration.  That book was a lot less about the overarching plot than the vignette and the character, I think.

Just the same, I think I know what he was getting at when he added “simple language” to the list.  We’ve both read amateur writing that tried to impress by using strange sentence structure or confusing metaphors.  Best to avoid that kind of shit, I’m sure.

Descriptions:  My husband has mixed opinions on how much description to include or not include in a story.  He has a piece of Stephen King advice memorized that he finds useful – that what’s left to a reader’s imagination is something they can make their own, actually immerse them in the story more effectively than telling them what to see.  His example was having a character step into a bar for a short scene, and only mentioning two details – like the bar being sticky or the bartender having hairy arms.  Something like that, I don’t recall specifics and didn’t feel like looking it up.

That is sound advice, but by contrast, sometimes an author wants to cast a spell, pull us more fully into their own world, and my dude has enjoyed that kind of writing a lot as well.  Since he has this flexibility, I think it might behoove me to use another metric for deciding how much and how little description to include.  Here’s a good one:  The more description you include, the more time slows down; the less, the faster it goes by.  I’ll just use description to control pace, or cover important details…

I say that, but I’ll probably just fall back on my evil ways and describe stuff however I please.  It’s a real hard habit to change – maybe those kind of changes are best left to subsequent drafts.  Looking back at the original notes, one says, “vivid description but not too dry.”  I think I tend to hit this mark with no effort.

Writing Actions:  A caution against excessive blocking.  Most of us are thinking visually, or acting out what a character does in our heads, so we feel the need to say “he put his hand on his chin” forty-seven times in a book, when one would probably suffice.  How often does it really matter if something happened on the right or left side?

Environmental Activism:  Not actual environmentalist themes, which would be an intrusion of depressing realities best left to other authors.  When my husband is looking at the work of amateur writers, the number one thing he harps on is that they do not establish what the hell is happening – the first element being where it’s happening.  They’re too eager to get into dialogue between their fun funboys, but are they in a rundown apartment or the Gobi Desert?  That shit kinda matters.

Establishing shots are a thing in cinema; descriptions of where your story opens have been de rigueur for hundreds of years for a reason.  In fair Verona where we lay our scene…  I don’t think I’m going to have a problem with this.  I don’t think like those kids.  RIP to them, but I’m different.

Identifiable, Well-Conceived Characters:  Stephen King does well enough at this most of the time, but his failures are notable.  As a boomer, he can maybe detect the subtle differences between white people with strained marriages and kids they don’t pay adequate attention to, better than we can.

Lovable Characters:  I don’t think he’s as much about this now as he used to be, but he’s still 100% not into unlikable characters, which is something a surprising amount of writers and readers are fond of.  I know he hates anything that feels twee or like it’s for babies, so even the beloved Dale Cooper is pushing it a little, sometimes.  People having likable flaws is good.

Romance Beginning or Being Renewed:  A lot of drama is wrung out of relationships going bad; he is not interested in that.  I’ll avoid it.  He does like to see a romance begin, or be reaffirmed in the course of a story.  Less depressing.

Humor:  My husband doesn’t like a lot of humor writing, but the humor in the writing he likes?  He likes it a lot.  He also tends to include elements of humor in most of his stories, at least a tiny dash here or there.  The kind of humor I’d be reaching for: Kiyoshi Kurosawa (wry, dark, feminist, humanist), David Lynch (people acting like wacky monsters, other people having gentle quirkiness, awkward situations as long as they aren’t too humiliating, parody like Invitation to Love or What did Jack Do?), parody of the banal things of life such as brand names and TV shows, breaks in tension at dramatically appropriate moments, etc.

Horror:  Typically of the surreal, science-fiction, or fantastical origin – a menace you would not encounter in real life.  Feeling disempowered in real life, he cannot relate to the power fantasies of being able to action hero your way out of danger.  He likes the Raid movies some, but not as much as me.  Horror as a genre is incredibly diverse.  On one end, there are action horror stories, where the characters survive and / or defeat the evil because they are so cool.  Not his jam.  Another expression is lurid interest in physical and psychological trauma, as one sees in “torture porn,” or edgelord films like Last House on the Left.  Also not his main interest, though occasionally there’d be some appeal in some amount of that.  Lastly, you have the disempowered character being confronted with a source of mortal fear, and doing their best to escape or survive.  That’s the stuff.  Another use of horror as a theme rather than a genre is to express a powerful feeling, as the surreal elements of a David Lynch film.

Survival Horror:  Of his favorite things, not a lot in this category.  Significantly Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo and the Silent Hill games.  What does he like about it?  I’m guessing it isn’t the “chance to return to zero, and make your way by wits and steel” like the main run of zombie genre fans, or the desire for a faceless mob you can mow down without compunction either.  Maybe there’s some allure in not having as many people around, since he has the shyness.  There’s another way that could interact with social anxiety – the circumstance gives an obvious way to bond with strangers, to overcome shyness.  If you’re a survivor, you have something in common.  But I think, broadly, this is just an extension of what he likes about horror.  It is believable and relatable to be in a circumstance you must react to, exciting when it’s a scary circumstance that is not one you would actually experience in real life.

Ambiguous or Inhuman Enemies:  This can be true in both survival horrors like Kairo and Silent Hill, and in works that include surreal horror like Twin Peaks and Lost Highway.  I haven’t seen all of the new / final season of Twin Peaks yet, but I somehow doubt that within it Lynch and Frost spelled out exactly wtf Bob and the doppelgangers were.  One has to wonder to what extent even the writers themselves left things intentionally undefined.  Spirits?  Aliens?  Alien spirits?  What does it mean to be a “magician” in that world?

While as a writer I tend to spell this shit out pretty specifically, I think I can manage the restraint to make an ambiguity work.  On the other hand, people did express some confusion about Josefina and Blasfemia, so I should tread carefully.

Suspense:  I don’t tend to instinctually think like this, as a writer – gotta force it.  Remember when I said I was going to aim to write a Dan Brown-style thriller?  I very thoroughly planned and outlined it, but didn’t get very far into writing.  Nonetheless, I can’t wait to get back to that project, because the preparation did help a lot.  The writing was very fun.  But making it suspenseful?  For this I had to make a conscious effort in my outline to include all the tips and tricks famous people like Brown and (much more importantly) Hitchcock have given on the subject.  It’s a cool way to make a story compelling.  Even cheap tricks can work well; they exist for a reason.  But I may have to take a very different approach if I want to land on David Lynch instead of John Grisham, you know what I mean?

Mystery:  Silent Hill, Mulholland Drive, Cure, these works all had a significant sense of mystery to them.  Not a whodunit among them, but still, you are led to wonder a lot, which is compelling to a guy like him.  I’m a basic bitch for stories spoonfeeding me.  Perhaps I’m a touch incurious – too assured that I understand everything I need to understand in life, and that anything outside of that domain can stay mysterious if it so desires.  But I think this’ll be a lot easier than suspense to work into any given story idea.  All I gotta do is come up with a bunch of stuff that is never shown on the page – only alluded to – and thereby invite speculation.

Should be important stuff, something you might actually care to know.  I’ve seen amateurs put a mysterious but uninteresting character in front of you, and in asking for feedback say “what do you want to know about this guy?”  Gotta make sure the answer, in my case, isn’t “not much.”

DISLIKES

Story Too Long:  He much prefers short stories to novels.  Contradiction:  He writes novels.  What’s up with that, man?  He also wants to see a lot more of the things he likes – like Silent Hill games, which turned to shit before their time.  You can’t get more of what you love without said thing going long, one way or another.  For my part, I’ll probably keep what I write on the short side for a novel, with room for a sequel.

Description Too Dry:  Too much description, or description that creates a dull, uninteresting tone.  I’m a lazy writer.  Won’t catch me penning anything like the first chapter of Mysteries of Udolfo, so I think this is not a problem.

Unnecessary Information / Overlong Exposition:  When we develop a sci-fi or fantasy setting, or an elaborate web of conspiracy or intergenerational intrigue, we tend to want to lay out all of our work on the page.  Big mistake, for any audience except the ultragork, and my dude has a low tolerance for it.  I don’t expect this’ll be a problem for me.  On the other hand, maybe J & B would’ve made more sense if I spent more than the odd short paragraph on explanation…  Contradiction:  None; he’s pretty consistent about this.

Too Much Relationship Drama:  He probably has Post-raised-by-women-who-watch-Dynasty Stress Disorder.  A lot of stories get their mileage out of ups and downs in a relationship.  Oh no, is he cheating?  Is she jealous?  Is he planning to leave her?  Will absence make these hearts grow cold?  Contradiction:  He’s OK with including one of these things, but generally is true to this principle.  It just doesn’t interest him – or me.

Too Much Conversation:  When word count is tilted toward dialogue, this is a pet peeve for him.  Especially if the dialogue is redundant or adds nothing but mild character development to the story.  Contradiction:  None; even in real life he’s pretty stoic.  Maybe he doesn’t like chatty characters because he doesn’t relate.

Graphic Sex:  A lot of people agree with this, just find it tasteless to see a lot of dirty words in print, feels better when something is left to the imagination.  Contradiction:  How much sexual content is in David Lynch films?  In books he loves?  I suppose that can hinge on how one defines “graphic.”

Judgments / Shaming:  Too easy to relate to a character who is on the spot, beloathed.  As a child he used to identify with the villains in superhero stories, like Wesley Willis assuming Batman would kick his ass.  Contradictions:  If he hates an antagonist enough, they might get some amount of this.  But even then, not for long.  He once wrote a rush limbaugh -inspired character that was mocked by a demon for like two seconds before being sent to hell.  Don’t dwell on it.

Embarrassment Comedy:  You ever notice how much comedy – especially sitcoms and Farrelly brothers movies – revolves around humiliation?  You ever been humiliated?  How you responded to that experience may be the deciding factor in whether or not this humor works for you.  Personally, I fucken despise it.  Nuke it from orbit.  My dude has expressed as much to me, and I can’t see myself writing a scenario like this, even by accident.  Incidentally, the fetish some people have for humiliation is also beyond my comprehension, except insofar as I understand any intense experience could be sexualized.  Not my cup o’ tea.  More broadly, my husband doesn’t like reading about people being embarrassed, on the spot, upset, but… Contradiction:  The sad ending of Mulholland Drive hinges in part on the social horror of humiliation.  At least we’re not expected to laugh at it.

Realistic Characters as Impediment to Story:  It might be realistic for characters to have a slow time adjusting to a fantastic circumstance, but if they’re still getting used to the idea of zombies existing when the credits are about to roll, that shit is annoying.  Real life people tend to not have bold personality traits that line up with tropes, just being a muddle of contradictions and mild feelings about things.  Archetypes and tropes exist because they help storytelling, and shouldn’t be shunned to make your guys more boring.  Contradiction:  My husband, as a writer, does tend toward understated characters that don’t hew closely to existing archetypes, and can have complex motivation.  A sort of realism can work, if it doesn’t impede the story.  I don’t think I’ll have a hard time writing characters for him, in this way at least.

Inscrutable Characters:  Not everybody has to wear their heart on their sleeve or be obvious from go, but if you haven’t made at least a false sense of the character within a few chapters of their introduction, they’re kind of a non-entity, not interesting.  The Man of Mystery can’t be too mysterious.  Contradiction:  He’s down with the antagonist from Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, who seems to have amnesia throughout the picture, and has indecipherable motives.  What’s up with that, man?

References to Attractiveness:  Nobody is universally attractive.  Even if they look remarkable, different people will be struck by that differently.  I’ve only seen people with noteworthy eye color less than ten times out of thousands of people I’ve seen, and I wasn’t “arrested by their limpid pools,” hollering after them or trying to get those digits.  Some readers want a fantasy of everybody being horny for the character they identify with, but it reads like the insecurity of the author to me.  Not compelling, unrealistic in a bad way – a way that limits the narrative.  Contradictions:  My man likes the early works of Billy Martin, which have the sexy-to-everyone specialest boys in them.  I do think we’re mostly simpatico on this one and I’m not likely to transgress, but could I dip into it just a bit, for cheesy charm?

Self-Important and Self-Pitying Characters:  When the author identifies too much with the character, there’s a tendency to treat them even more preciously than we treat ourselves in real life.  At least, I’m hoping that’s the reason characters are sometimes written like this, because if they are reflecting their authors accurately, those authors are not appealing people.  It comes off like more insecurities.  Sometimes it will be a character clinging too tenaciously to the comforts of their cute little status quo.  Sometimes they’ll overreact to perceived slights and disrespect.  Sometimes they will just seem absolutely uninterested in other characters in the story.  Sometimes they’ll react to any suffering imposed by the narrative with too much sniveling and whining.  Not every character has to be stoic manjobs, but this stuff sucks.  Especially when the Universe of the story agrees with their point of view – everybody around them is unreasonable, every inconvenience they experience truly is a cosmic injustice, etc.  Contradictions:  My dude likes gothic writing, which does have a lot of self-pity on display.  But, y’know, when you’re being poisoned by your grandma and your uncle is driving you insane with snakes in the parlor so he can steal your inheritance, self-pity might be in order.  He’s clarified this for me more recently – impotent rage is the least appealing expression to him, reminiscent of incels.

Characters too Edgy:  Stories that expect you to identify with a rapist – why are there so damn many of these?  Ditto other stripes of creep.  This is easy enough to avoid.  Contradiction:  My husband likes some stories with grody MCs, altho the out for that is when the author is not asking the reader to agree with them, like EA Poe with his various murderer-narrators.

Gross-outs:  We personally know a talented new writer who loves to write about sloppy piles of guts and excrement.  My dude has a reasonable amount of respect for her, but is decidedly not on the same page for that stuff.  Contradiction:  The part in Ranpo’s Panorama Island which luridly describes the double’s sorta-fresh corpse gets a thumbs up, as does the writing of Gabrielle Wittkop, such as The Necrophiliac.  Hm.  I suppose, for horror, a good metric would be how it compares to Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive (originally Brain Dead).  That is clearly grody as hell for the sake of being grody, which is a no-go.  One of our writer friend’s short stories was very much like Dead Alive, or Reanimator.

Scary Animals:  It amuses me that this was on one of the lists because he has done extensive work on at least three novels with prominent use of animals for scares.  He has complex feelings on beasties.  I do hope he gets them ready for self-publishing; they are compelling.

Children and Babies:  Something about stories involving children or babies is extremely uninteresting to my dude, which makes sense for a non-breeder, but there’s more to it than that.  He also doesn’t like most literature written for children, no matter how much it works for the masses.  That’s part of why he never had to feel the disappointment of queen terf’s heel turn the way many people close to his age do.  Even if the characters are over eighteen, if they’re “coming of age” or “figuring themselves out,” it feels like kid stuff to him.  Contradiction:  I think he’s cool with scary kids, like Damian Omen and Sadako The Ring.

Boring Settings:  He just finds certain milieus uninteresting and boring – deserts, prisons, courtrooms, corporate / professional settings, extravagance and wealth.  Contradiction:  He has a line from The Trial tattooed on his body, the joaker.  Plus gothic stories are usually set in an environment of extravagance and wealth, if a decaying one.

Overly Detailed Settings:  Can’t have so much detail that it’s hard to remember or understand.  Contemporary setting is by far the best, if sci-fi or fantasy keep jargon constrained, minimize learning required.  For my part on this project, I’m definitely using a contemporary setting.

Crime Stories:  Again, a setting or milieu he finds uninteresting.  For me, it depends on the execution and the focus.  If the characters are all competent and cool criminals executing a hojillion dollar heist, less interesting than grotty fuckups getting into trouble.  But the grotty fuckups can easily become too unlikable.  For me Pulp Fiction really pushed the limit.  I generally can’t get behind those assholes, but the actors helped a lot.  Professional charisma havers.  You do not get this benefit in print!  Of topic.  Lessee… Contradictions:  He liked The Raid movies.  Twin Peaks is a murder mystery -esqe thing.  More than one Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie has police procedural elements.

Cars / Vehicles:  Like a boring setting to him, but also connects to a general lack of interest in action.  No Fast No Furious.

Action:  He doesn’t like action adventures – he does not like scenarios that show a character’s power, because it is unrelatable to somebody with chronic feelings of disempowerment, even as wish fulfillment.  Contradiction:  He is OK with action scenarios that are more about just barely surviving, horror content or scenarios that feel like horror content.  The Raid movies are relentless action, but horrifying.  He especially liked a scene of the dude from Matheson’s I Am Legend arriving late at his fortified home, which was swarming with vampires.

Too Many Enemies:  Not sure what he meant by this one.  May have just been an extension of how he doesn’t like longer form or overly complicated stories.

Heavy Topics:  Environmentalism, war, global strife, politics, homophobia, transphobia, racism, ignorance – even in antagonists.  It’s too real; my husband goes to literature to see problems that are not affecting him IRL.  Contradiction:  I think he can tolerate traces of this, but he’s pretty consistent about it.  The villain should be scheming to steal your kidneys for Satan, not hurting you because you are gay.

From Recent Discussion With Him:  Best stories are simple at their core, which is why he favors short form.  If I do something long, the length must not come from complexity within the story, or too many side plots and characters.  Asked which David Lynch movie involved the least time-wasting foolery, he said Blue Velvet.  I bet he’d say that of Eraserhead as well, if he had thought of it.  Asked for an example of something more like novel length that didn’t waste too much time, The Haunting of Hill House was mentioned, and Frankenstein.  He emphasized that fairy tales are a good model for elemental storytelling.

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This is more notes to myself and I have no special idea on what people should comment, if anybody feels like commenting, but as you please…

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Planning on writing the best story in the world this march, for the audience of one husband.  Call this post “thinking out loud,” as I’ve been known to do on stories in the past.  I don’t know how many times I’ve done that in a blog post and had nothing come of it.  Let this one be different.

The majority of the stories he loves the most are in contemporary settings.  The grounding of recognizable reality makes the deviations from such easier to get with, makes magic feel more magical I suppose.  Gotta go contemporary.  Urban, suburban, rural?  It’s tempting when going contemporary to set it far enough back that cellphones were less universal, but I should really get with the times on this.  No narrative crutches.  People should have cellphones that don’t conveniently lose signal when bad guy is closing in.

Puts me in mind of what I was sayin’ about the soap opera bits in Twin Peaks.  I said the show within the show says something about the show, but it also invites you to become aware of yourself as watching a show.  It could make the proceedings feel false, but alternately, it could be the rope ladder that lets killer Bob climb out of your TV, become more real.  A cellphone in a story could create a bridge between maximal fakery and the mind of a reader.  Get got.

The Satoshi Kon movies and series in the big list tend to involve modern technology and media, as a springboard for shenanigans.  Gotta be careful to not go too creepypasta.  In general, that dude’s output was too gonzo for where I’m aiming to be, but there are some subtle vibes hiding in it.  The use of the real world as a foundation for surreal happenings, with a lot of depiction of the aspects of reality that don’t typically show up in our narratives – awkward insterstitial spaces and moments.

I remember how a critic who was disappointed by the lack of an overtly sensible narrative in Inland Empire said it was a “wagon train into Lynchistan” – something that can be a rewarding trip, but less powerful than your Mulholland Drives or Blue Velvets.  How did its surrealism compare with that of Eraserhead?  I dunno, been a minute since I’ve seen both.  Pretty sure I need to start it out feeling less precisely like a dream than either IE or EH.

I think about how in the things we like the most, there may be things we don’t like.  I asked my man what he liked least about Mulholland Drive and he said the scenes with side characters that had dubious relevance to the story.  Similar quibble on some other Lynch stuff, especially for the sillier stuff in Twin Peaks season 2, which may have been the influence of co-creator Mark Frost.

Just the same, I can’t help but remember how having different characters with their own lives does give you a lot more room to explore variations on your theme, and generally get more material out of your story.  Paranoia Agent, Uzumaki, and yeah, Twin Peaks, all made good use of large casts.

On the other other hand, this story is for my audience of one and the word has been handed down from god’s lips.  I may refrain.

On the other other other hand, maybe I can try to come up with a bunch of concepts for side characters and subplots that I don’t spend my word count on, just use to inform scenes that are only half-understood, and add to the surreal atmosphere.

A suburban environment, a lil PNW Gothique.  Everybody has their own personal demons, not everybody bothers to put on a brave face about it.  Black mold.  Al Columbia.  Thompson’s Teeth.  Some kind of mystery shit is happening, and characters are compelled to walk that path.

This stuff almost always has miserable endings.  Hearts get broke.  Makes sense, but ehhhh  I dunno.  I don’t know.  I do not know.

At the end of Pulse, which is basically a ghostpocalypse, it seems like one character is getting away on a boat.  Surely the ghostpocalypse will catch you, but you have your moment.  Likewise Hellstar Remina – doomed survivors have a bleak moment of peace.  Wan joy.  Maybe that’ll be a fair compromise.

The other night I was realizing that I will always fundamentally be a baby, because I only ever think of baby scenarios.  Superheroes, action, SFF.  Genre fiction.  When David Lynch wrote a story, he was thinking about adult concerns – the kind of feelings you can’t cure by punching Green Goblin.  Even if I include an element of supernatural horror, which I surely will, it can’t be the point.  It’s gotta just be a vehicle for the big surreal expression, whatever that is.

Whose feelings am I expressing?  This may be something I can’t puzzle out in public.  It might be too personal.  And is it my person, or my audience’s?  I write something that reflects what I am aware of in his own feelings and struggles, and he sees something that agrees with him, is personally  moved… or finds it too painful to hang with.  I write to express some way I feel, he probably won’t relate or connect, because at the end of the day we are fundamentally different.  He is goth, I am a dork what falls in love with goths.

There’s a whole other branch of things I haven’t considered.  Almost all of these influential stories are personal or small in scope, but some do get apocalyptically colossal.  Or at least have a more grandiose scope, like Panorama Island.  Maybe I should go big.

Comments from my last article that I’m taking onboard, at least, having some version of in the background of the brain:  If powers appear, they could plausibly not be supernatural in nature.  Vast remote gothic mansion with series of vignettes or short scenarios.  Jazzlet won’t read this one.

The surreal thesis.  The big surreal expression.  What feeling am I trying to convey?  Should be something sad or huge, something we can’t escape…  Ya know, I think I’ve got it.  Again, personal.  Now, what kind of nonsense scenario would really pull that theme out and make it land like some Wile E. Coyote trap lands on Wile E. Coyote?  I continue avec mes pensamientos ahora im privat.

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You ever wanted to write a formulaic thriller, sell it to boomers, and cash out big time?  Look no further!  November is Novel Writing Month ^{_{(nondenominational)}} and in honor of the season of slapdash bullshitting, I converted a certain famous author’s formula into Mad Libs™ so you can easily write one of your own!  Save a copy of my Secret Thrilla Document before I delete the link (EDIT: deleted!) to keep myself out of trouble, and replace all the all-caps text with your own material – then get to writing!

Chop chop!  I wanna see my comment section filling up with Billy O’Nairs!

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