Follow the escapades of The Mad Earl Fazgood in this rollicking tale based on the should-be-true adventures of a delightfully bizarre nobleman run rampant.
All seems straight-forward enough when Fazgood and his compatriots sail in search of his much beloved but ever-elusive moosecrab stew, despite everyone, everywhere wanting him dead for no good reason at all. Sailing from port to port doesn’t seem to evade his executioners so Fazgood goes to the capital of the Kingdom, despite being an exile, hoping for at least one bowl of moosecrab stew before he must surely face his doom.
Instead of moosecrab, however, Fazgood and his outrageous companions find corruption, deception, and an ancient talisman that could easily dissolve the very Kingdom he hates to love.
Fazgood finds himself conniving the highest ranks of society into helping him solve the problem of his imminent demise or, for that matter, the Kingdom’s. And he does what any good hero would do: he crafts a plan so cunning, so secret, even he cannot fathom it.
Join the Mad Earl and his compatriots as they traverse a Kingdom filled with peaceful, god-ruled citizenry ranging from carnivorous plants to sorcerous gas bubbles.
Will he save the Kingdom that set him on his felonious life or will he let the Kingdom be digested?
Would you mutilate mankind for love? That is the question of “The Flesh Sutra.” In Fin de siècle Boston, the mystic healer Alecsi Keresh lays in the passionate embrace of his lover Mrs. Olivia Spalding, when he is shot dead. Enraged, he forces his way back to life through ghastly means. He becomes an abomination. All for love. Olivia is terrified of death. Alecsandri dreads abandonment. Seeing one another as soul mates, they resolve to atone for their sins by helping humanity. But their jealousies mar their works, often with hideous results. And a spirit stalks them. One that grows more powerful at every turn. Will the lovers succeed and transform mankind? Or will their weaknesses twist humanity into abominations? Therein lies the answer to “The Flesh Sutra.”
Said it before and I’ll say it again: all the elements of the story should be presented to the reader within the first 20% of the story. Setting, genre, characters, goals, and the first complication.
Language is a laboratory. You can get away with invented words within a context, sure, but narrative voice can allow all sorts of grammatical variance. Partial sentences. Interjections! Pfffff — even sounds are used to express!
Do not write down to an imagined reader. Do you use the word “phosphorescent” in spoken conversation? Then use it in your writing. If your reader needs a dictionary, that’s on them. The goal to writing is for you to have fun and express yourself, first and foremost.
How does the dog smell? Is its fur bristly or silky? Does your sore elbow ache as you stroke the dog’s back? Smells, textures, and proprioception are required in evocative writing.
If your ending doesn’t work, figure out what it needs to work, then put those elements in the beginning of your story.
Each story will teach you how to write it. Some need the fun scenes written down first, then the motivations figured out. Others need an outline. Others need to be written backwards from the cool ending. Whatever gets you into writing the story is valid.
Theme cannot be imposed. Theme will emerge over multiple rewrites. Sometimes you will be uncomfortable with the theme that emerges, but that’s how art teaches you about yourself.
Listen to the conversations around you. People interrupt. They have, like, verbal tics, like. They go off-topic, for someone else to get annoyed and get them back on track.
Go to emails and text messages for character voices. People generally write the way they speak.
Is there anything wrong with an interrobang?! No, there is not.
If it fits the character, use gestures and sounds instead of words. Use a word instead of a sentence.
Animals are great foils, because animals know what’s really going on and what’s important. A character reveals important values around animals.
You can describe a character in pieces. Mention a “crease in her large, smooth brow” in paragraph one. Later, have a graying curl drape across her eye. Then her broad shoulders later, etc. Again, have all those elements in the first 20%.
Think cinematically. Cinema swiped its language in part from literature. For example, read the first two pages of “The Three Musketeers.” Wide shot of Paris, then zoom into a neighborhood, then we hear a character.
For unreliable narrators, have them reveal themselves in the first sentence: “Momma says I’s awful fanciful, but that’s because my family’s so boring.”
If your world or premise is truly outrageous, drop that oddity in the first sentence, then blow past it by introducing a mundane, relatable conflict. “Ridi, Bobo” by Robert Deveraux has a world of miming clowns, but the main character-clown suspects his wife of adultery. The world now serves to express the character’s heartache.
Much like something insidious waiting just outside space and time, and as close as your shoulder. This idea says that maybe:
Consciousness itself is a separate entity. You are part of a sleeping, protean force waiting to be awakened. Civilization would call it psychosis, but a heart cell would seem psychotic to a ligament.
A smaller-in-scope hive-minded creature is waiting just past the edge of rational thought.
