Filed under: fiction | Tags: creative writing, flash fiction, short story, spirituality, story, writing
On Atheists and Atheism
Only an utterly neurotic and insecure deity will find a moments disquiet in the emergence of some number amongst their sentient creations that actively disbelieve and deny that they were, in fact, created. We expect that only very few of our readers will need to be warned in advance that self-determination will inevitably produce such a wide variety of modes of thought that some small percentage will hit upon the idea that chance and physics alone are the sole cause for their existence.
A well adjusted god will realize instinctively that such persons are harmless and there is no need for violent over reactions such as floods, plagues, mass burnings, torture chambers or the creation of a fashion industry as punishment. Indeed, a deity that is confident in his position will regard such aberrations as both natural and harmless and leave anybody foolish enough to entertain such notions to their folly.
Filed under: fiction, science fiction, short story | Tags: creative writing, fiction, flash fiction, science fiction, short story, writing
a flock of multicolored insect mechanicals are throwing themselves one at a time against my kitchen window. they must be robots. i know this because real insects make a dull tapping sound on glass and not a sharp metallic ping like these ones. also true insects rarely form up in an oblong swarm and dispatch their members one by one into a window pane. and even if they did, and i’m prepared to admit it’s possible, they wouldn’t hit in perfectly timed increments like a metronome and they wouldn’t hit the same spot every single time. no, these are definitely mechanicals.
i’ve done my best to ignore the sound which reminds me of a persistent boyish lover throwing pebbles except i’m four floors up which would mean he’d have to have a strong arm and highly developed accuracy. in fact it might be physically impossible i’ll have to check but i think pebbles are light enough to be diverted by the wind if someone on the ground were throwing them.
i suspect the window being hit like that so many times in the same spot it won’t hold up forever. i suspect this not because i have done any calculations proving it but rather because otherwise why would they bother to keep doing it? it has to be intended to eventually cause a shattering of the glass to gain them entrance.
it did occur to me to run into the hall, but what if that’s their aim, to scre me out? so far my fear of what might be beyond my door prevents me from having opened it. i also had a mind to call for help except there’s no one i can think of who would take this particular difficulty i’m having seriously. i suppose i’d rather face the robots than the task of asking anybody for help with them.
perhaps they don’t mean any harm. perhaps its something vitally important that they need from me. perhaps i should fling open my window, let them in! just face the music and be done with it.
this must be dread. i find it to be a feeling as unlike fear as jubilation is to happiness. something is bound to happen and i can neither stop it nor bear to face it so instead i sit and write and wait for it to come for me.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: creative writing, Uncategorized, writing
Vonnegut thinks I’m wasting my time. He laughs at me. Calls me ridiculous! Ridiculous! Just like that, with an exclamation point. Vonnegut knows I’ve got no clue at all to what I’m doing and besides he doubts that women ever make good writers. Come to think of it, I don’t think he thinks women are really people, really. Same with Roth (but we all know why that is).
I don’t care what Updike thinks. He’s completely over rated. I know this for a fact, even though I haven’t read a single thing he’s written. See, he’s my father’s favorite author and he writes about Suburban Living. These facts disqualify him from having an opinion. There. That’s Updike sorted. Sorted!
Asimov says go for it. He says we’ll all be having books downloaded directly onto our positronic nets instead of reading soon enough but in the meantime why not do what makes me happy? Lem looks on in disapproval at Asimov’s approval. He refrains from commenting.
Vonnegut says mind you don’t set the bar too high, girlie. You’re bound to fail before you’ve started if you go around comparing yourself to the likes of Us. He says anyway it’s a dead giveaway that all the female writers you can think of have first names attached to them like kite strings. Jane Austen. Edith Wharton. Zora Neale Hurston. Evelyn Waugh.
Idiot! Evelyn is a man’s name. Don’t you know anything? Still, the point’s been made. Nobody ever calls down the authority of Woolf without adding a Virginia in front of her. No one will ever, ever talk about Vitiello. Nobody even knows how to pronounce it! Have you considered finding yourself a decent pen name? Preferably a short one that can be written in big letters on a cover, with your first name, longer, positioned over it in smaller letters.
Much better, says the ghost of Vonnegut. Decent thoughts of modestly successful novels with stylishly designed book covers are far more appropriate to a young lady of your talent and ability.
Well, my creative writing class is coming to an end, and I’m very glad to have taken it. The grades and feedback I’ve gotten so far, all As and all very encouraging, have been a confidence boost and the aim of the class to help those taking it finish a story suitable to be submitted for publication has really helped me move to the next step with my writing.
I’ve passed in my final draft, after getting a perfect score on my first draft (yay!) and I’ve also sent it out for consideration to be published in a literary magazine I found in some of the resources the professor provided for the class. Although I know that it’s about as likely to get immediately recognized and published as it is to be hit by lightening of course there are always the fantasies of fame and fortune coming easily and quickly as my genius and insight are immediately recognized. There’s no help for this. I just have to hope that my disappointment won’t be too crushing when this fails to happen, and that I’ll be able to settle into some sort of routine of sending things out and waiting patiently for someday one of my stories to win publication.
To that end I’m working on a new story, one that I hope to finish and send out somewhere within a month or so. It’s about a culture that has been traumatized by endless wars between rival ethnic groups that has in desperation tried to bring an end to the conflict by abolishing any mention of these ethnic groups or of the society’s history or the period of conflict. I’m trying to imagine what it would be like to grow up in a world where there was no history class, and where it was denied that such a thing as history was even knowable and all the books were science fiction, looking forward, with the past as dangerous and forbidden territory.
It’s an interesting thought. If you never had a history class would you realize there was something missing?
A week or so ago I figured I’d give twitter a try. I skipped facebook out of moral reasons (ie, didn’t feel like joining facebook) and I figured I’m too young to reflexively hate all new internet phenomena.
So, if you’re interested, I’m on twitter under the name vive42, and so far I’ve mostly dabbled in fictional and semi-nonsensical status updates. I’m not sure I have anything to say in 140 characters or less, but you won’t know until you try I suppose.
For the record, I beat Oprah Winfrey by several days. Also for the record, I have a theory that twitter is going to jump the shark and fade quickly into total irrelevancy, a la myspace. We’ll see, though.
Don’t get me wrong, I haaaate being ill. I’m generally very healthy, at most catching maybe one cold per year and sometimes not even that. I think it’s because I’m usually so healthy that I’m such a complete baby when I do catch something. I want to just shut myself away from everyone or everything and feel miserable and sorry for myself until its over, and the more hours spent unconscious while this is going on the better.
But, you know, every cloud has a silver lining! I managed three days without any deliberate vomitting (the first day had a little of the other kind, very unpleasant) and was really and truly unable to eat anything for all of Wednesday and most of yesterday. Which means that my weight, which I’d been fearing had begun an inevitable and unhalting climb into the stratosphere, has made some progress in the right direction, ie, downwards.
I’m really pleased and relieved. It’s still in or near the statosphere, but any movement down makes it feel less like there’s nothing I can do to stop it climbing ever higher. There’s a lot of mentality to my mental illness, you see, and when I get it in my head that my binging is out of control and my weight is bound to go up no matter how hard I try there’s a lot of self-fulfilling prophecy in that. This way at least I’ve got a little bit of evidence that I’m not doomed to repeat each day the way the last one went, even if it did take being near death’s door to prove it to me.
Death’s door is a slight exageration of course, but I do think I may have blamed the graham crackers prematurely. I was definitely ill and probably coming down with whatever it was regardless of the grahams. No idea as to the real culprit, but thank goodness I’m recovering at last.
Note to self: If you think you may have food poisoning of any sort do not eat ANY more of ANYthing you had been previously consuming.
I just passed one of the worst nights I can ever remember having, and I still feel pretty awful. Yesterday I ate a few things, mostly canned soup and graham crackers, and I started feeling ill sometime in the evening, but not too badly. I was actually quite pleased because I wasn’t feeling terrible, but just bad enough that there was no chance of my binging and/or purging.
I was feeling a bit better a couple hours before bed, and my overall caloric intake had been very low, so I figured I’d have a few more grahams, they seeming to me to be the least likely candidate for having made me ill and the most likely to settle my stomach which was feeling better, but not all better.
I’m going to have to assume the grahams were the problem all along, though, based on the evidence of my beginning to feel far worse a couple hours later and spending a very long night of laying in bed feeling ill for an hour, spending 5-10 minutes in the bathroom, and repeating this from midnight to 7am, at which point I got a couple hours sleep and then began repeating the cycle when I awoke around 945, still feeling awful.
pooooooor me! anyway, I haven’t updated my personal life for a while, or my fiction for a less long while, but apart from feeling as if my stomach is mounting an amphibious assault on the rest of my body I’m doing well. A nyone interested in reading a finished short story about a boy that discovers a dead fairy body email me 
Filed under: fiction, religion, serial fiction, short story, spirituality | Tags: fiction, flash fiction, religion, serial fiction, short story, spirituality
Withdrawing
It is likely inevitable that at some point the previous two strategies will fail to contain a burgoning spiritual movement and you will find zealotry and wild ideas spreading like wildfire throughout your previously orderly and well behaved civilization. Some combination of chance and free will will conspire against common sense and you will find that a previously well quarantined group of pious people with a few odd ideas will manage to violently overthrow the existing order rather than violently getting themselves martyred. Or perhaps some poor overloaded little lunatic will manage at last to string a few coherent sentences together on the nature of divinity and find themselves at the head of some brand new religion.
For the purposes of our discussion we have assumed that this unruly movement arose by chance, despite your best efforts to adhere to our suggested strategies. However, we concede that it may also be the case that you yourself will have ignored some of the warnings about the dangers of overly enthusiastic types. You may have given some divine encouragement to some small faction only to find yourself saddled with a strong and growing faith that all of a sudden goes haywire and begins telling everyone that wood is unholy and that in order to get to heaven they must learn to build their campfires of stones and milk, or that god commands everyone give all their money to the priesthood, or that while killing is still wrong it doesn’t count if you do it because your religious leaders told you to. In any case, the strategy of withdrawing divine favor is applicable to previously favored religious movements and breakout cults as well.
Withdrawing divine attention means exactly what it implies, which makes it simple enough in its implimentation. Simply cease to communicate with, inspire, answer the prayers of, or intervene for any of the followers of this religion. We suggest you use this as a last resort as previous examples show that nobody much notices when this happens and it is unlikely to stifle the growth of a robust spiritual movement significantly. However in the course of a few centuries it will help to gradually reduce the number of wild eyed people killing innocents in Your Holy Name or setting themselves on fire.
Filed under: fiction, religion, serial fiction, short story, spirituality | Tags: fiction, flash fiction, religion, serial fiction, short story, spirituality
Overload
One simple way to deal with those individuals who become irritating in their persistant search for spiritual enlightenment is to give them everything they ask for. Whatever material you’ve used to make their minds will be inherently unable to contain the knowledge of a god, which means that the more enlightenment you give the more suseptible it will become to breakdown. Bliss will become confusion and the more they try to share their newfound insights the less they will be able to communicate.
Most individuals will realize this and after a failed attempt or two will fall in line and return to a less mystical and more practical existance as soon as their overloaded thinking organs cool off and stop bubbling. You may even find side benefits, as artists or musicians having had this sort of brush with over stimulation can sometimes translate this into mighty feats of composition. A few unfortunates may refuse to do the sensible thing and quit while they’re ahead, but this sort of mortal is generally harmless as they are unable to share the truths they are discovering with other people and will likely be locked away for their own safety and/or stoned to death. You’ll find that either way the problem will have sorted itself out neatly without further need of almighty attention.
Filed under: fiction, religion, serial fiction, short story, spirituality | Tags: fiction, flash fiction, religion, serial fiction, short story, spirituality
Quarantine
The kindest approach to the sort of overly sincere worshippers that can wreak havoc on a smoothly functioning society is to stick as many of them as possible together in small groups of similarly intense personalities. It should then be simple enough to encourage them to go off and renounce the corrupting influence of the physical world in retreats where they can be as weird as they like without it interfering too much with what everybody else is doing.These small quarantined societies may be stable enough to eventually contribute something positive to the cultural life of your people, which makes for a win-win situation. Alternatively they may fade in influence over time as followers grow tired of living secluded lives high in spirituality and low in comfort. These are the most common results when people form these sorts of communities, but we would be remiss if we failed to warn you of the third and final possibility, which is that the group will become increasingly unstable.
Instability is a unfortunate consequence that can occur when too many intensely devout people congregate with too little input coming in from the outside world. A particularly intense and unstable grouping may destroy itself, either in a mass suicide or through violent conflict with the world outside. In most cases this can be avoided by the prudent use of godly intervention. Naturally this will be left to your judgment and there may be cases where you prefer to encourage this sort of violent end, should you judge there to be a particularly high risk of societal contagion. While this may seem a bit callous, the individuals concerned will likely believe that they will gain some sort of post-death reward or sexy afterlife and if you are so inclined it is obviously within your power to go ahead and grant them one.
