The call (course version)
I woke to thoughts of ink black tentacles sliding against each other and a throbbing pain in my right foot. (Action) Peeling sticky blankets off my body, a bloody red scab and a dark blue ring surrounding it bore into me, that had certainly not been on my leg yesterday when I felt, what I thought at the time, was a bug bite there. (Background). I stumbled to the bathroom, and finding my first aid kit, squeezed anti onto the wound, and finished my treatment by slapping a bandaid on it. Immediately my vision began to shrink as the edges were consumed by an inky black, and my mind once once again taken hold of by an impression of an immense malicious tentacle, so large that it seemed to have its own crushing gravity. In this state, I rushed to my phone and dialed the nearest hospital, hoping to speak to a doctor, to find assurance that this was just a bug bite, that this nightmare would be better in the morning. (Development) But when the finally a doctor came on the line, if one ever did, I had already succumbed to the darkness and had fallen helpless to the ground. (Climax). When I woke again and on the living room floor, late afternoon sun was pushing its way through my curtains. In its light I saw the ring was now a deep inky black and grown in tentacle-like blotches to cover my ankle. In that moment I knew if I was to save myself, the solution would not be found in a doctors office, but in the sea where this evil came from. (Ending)
Hello world
What is my idea? And just where did it come from? And why am I writing about this just now? Let me try to answer that. My idea was to make a Lovecraftian short story. I had the vague idea that the story should have three elements 1) Be set in and incorporate the often strange world of Onjuku, Japan, which I have been visiting for at least 8 years now and which has become a second home, away from the big Tokyo city 2) The main character should die or suffer some horrible fate 3) The main character should be a alternative version of myself, as some way to exorcise my own existential demons, or at least make them “real”. Where did the idea come from? Well, a few times I have been searching for my next fix of cosmic horror and thought “I think I could something like this or maybe better, I should just do that”. Just one day I did something about it. Why now? Who knows, some extra time (not really), better mental place (maybe), random photons hitting me in the head (probably).
From there I thought I would try to make the story into bit size chunks, perhaps because of my previous experience in writing a big book that was a lot of work to edit and play with as one big document. As Lovecraftian works are frequently found journals of some kind it seemed to make sense, and since I already had a website on this page from my previous book, I thought I would just jump in and make some blog posts that would flesh out the book. The first post was a police report, the premise being the main character has died, someone has come looking for him, and found these journal entries.
Over the course of about 10 days I vomited ideas, mostly for events, people, places in Onjuku that if taken in a different context could be quite eerie or fit well in the genre. I had two revelations during this process 1) I quite enjoyed the wring, far more than I was expecting. I think its something to do with having a creative outlet and building worlds, and being able to express my ideas through a medium I can control (as opposed to just blurting things out that I cant re-edit!) 2) I have perhaps no experience with creative writing and what I was writing was pretty gosh darn terrible. Embarrassingly so. I also had, and still have an idea that this could be some kind of video game, perhaps something very lightweight like a choose your own adventure book or such, maybe make a few bucks at some point in my life. So with those ideas and still being rather excited about all this, I enrolled in a creative writing course (I was “on” Coursera anyway for professional skill building) and am giving this thing a try. Wish me luck!