Toadfish Monastery

Quote from: Sibling DavidH on July 09, 2010, 08:43:45 AM
@ Robert - I was half joking with the avatar and the name.  If you really like it, be my guest, but if you find something better then I assure you I won't be offended! 

Well, I've got nothing better to put up at the moment, so I'll keep it there for the time being.

Perfectly fine with the name and avatar, good sir.

Feel free to call me anything. I'm never very much concerned with names, so long as I'm aware that it's being addressed to me. I appear to accumulate nicknames like old ladies accumulate cats.

Hello!

There's not much to say about myself, I'm afraid. I do a lot of writing (and seem to get a dozen well-developed ideas in the course of fully writing one, so there's not much hope to ever getting a break), and between that, school, and helping to take care of my siblings, I don't really do all too much.

I was invited here by Scriblerus, and finally managed to get around to registering once she reminded me of the site again after sending me a link to her War of Erin thread on here.

SHEILA THURGOOD— Do you know why you're here, Marie?
MARIE GRAYSON— You think I killed my boyfriend.
ST— You did kill him, Marie. They found you standing over his body with a black knife, crying. Your clothes were soaked with his blood.
(MG sighs)
MG— I liked that coat, too. That wasn't my boyfriend. That was just something which had been wearing his skin.
ST— Nobody blames you, Marie. What he did to those other people... You're not in trouble. But you need to move past these delusions of yours. There was nothing in your boyfriend's body.
MG— You don't understand. The Horror Artist was using him the way you use your body. It was in the place where his soul was, originally.
(pause)
ST— I see. Perhaps we should talk about something else for now.
MG— If you want. How much longer do we have?
ST— Fifty-nine minutes and slight change, Marie. You just got here.
MG— And I'd like to be out of here, too.
ST— It says here that your full name is Marie Blue Grayson.
MG— And my parents call me Rhodes.
ST— Your middle name is—
MG— Odd? Yes. My mother's a fun sort, like that. She really liked the color blue. So of course I'm the only one of her children to get the oddball name. Although I suppose 'Zelia' isn't the greatest name, either, but you can blame my father for that one.
ST— How did you get your nickname?
MG— We lived in Newport, Rhode Island, till just barely after I turned eight years old. I was always getting Rhode Island mixed up with the island of Rhodes. I spent several long summer days looking for Greeks. (pause) I never found any, except for our next-door neighbors. It took me awhile to believe that they were actually Greek, though, since they didn't speak the language.
ST— Did you?
MG— Yes. Well, sort of.
ST— Really?
MG— You can't live on Rhodes without speaking Greek, was always my line of thought. I certainly can't speak it— speaking a language is always harder than understanding it, for some reason— but I could sort my way through a basic conversation, if I had to. I can't do that as much now, anymore. I'm out of practice.
ST— How did you learn?
MG— My grandfather. On my father's side. (MG chuckles) The old man was responsible for a lot that happened to me. He had these old English-to-Greek dictionaries, from back in the day.
ST— Back in the day?
MG— I don't know. He always told a lot of stories, but half of them were obviously too tall for life, so I'm a bit hesitant to put much trust in the other half. Which isn't to say that he was a liar or anything. I was little girl asking for stories, and I wanted them to be entertaining stories, not boring old tales of the time they had skunk for dinner instead of possum. Come to think of it, it may have been the old Greek that I learned. (MG chuckles) At least I might be able to understand Socrates as he calls me a fool, if I ever get my hands on one of Wells' fancy machines.
ST— Could you tell me one of these stories?
MG— Yes, I could.
(long silence)
ST— Marie?
MG— I said that I could, Doctor Thurgood. I don't want to, however. The stories were private things, you see. Between me and my grandfather, and the walls of his house.
ST— I see.
MG— That's good. It'd be awful if you had suddenly gone blind. They might start wondering if I had something to do with that, and I most certainly did not.
ST— So what's your family like, Marie? I see here that you have two siblings, and then your aunt and three cousins are living with you as well.
MG— Do you have my whole life's story on there? Perhaps you could take a look there, and see what stories my grandfather told.
ST— Why are you acting like this, Marie?
MG— Because I'm bored, Doctor Thurgood. This place is dull, and I'm irritated, and there are a hundred things I could be doing right now instead of talking to you, and I am most assuredly not insane, which means that there is no reason for me to be here.
ST— You don't need to be insane to need therapy. Even trauma—
MG— And here I want to laugh, when you talk about trauma. I've had some horrid experiences in my life, but I'm fine. Really.
(ST sighs)
ST— Perhaps this is true. Nevertheless, it was determined that you would have to undergo therapy with me for one hour every week, until either I decided that you no longer needed these sessions, or you came of majority. So since there is no choice for you, except to come, perhaps you should make the best of it.
(pause)
ST— I am not asking to become your friend, Marie. I know that's a stupid thing to ask for even in regular day-to-day situations. It's even more unlikely here, since you're not coming of your own free will. But I would like for you to talk to me, Marie. Please.
(short silence)
MG— Thirty-eight.
ST— Excuse me?
MG— Thirty-eight weeks till I turn eighteen. I'm trying to figure out whether to just sit it out or not.
ST— You're talking now. Why not keep on talking? If you do, maybe we'll be done with this in a few weeks. Wouldn't you rather talk for a few hours, instead of come here and say nothing for an hour, once a week, for thirty-eight weeks?
MG— I'm pretty damn sure I can outlast you. I'm very patient.
ST— Please, Marie? This isn't helping either of us.
(pause)
ST— Thank you. So it says here that your aunt's last name is Grayson, as well. Did she change it back at some point, or was she—
MG— The kids aren't bastards, if that's what you're asking. And you are. I see the look on your face. Her husband is, though. Figuratively speaking. He was my father's brother. He was a beater, too. Broke her nose three years ago, and that's when she finally decided that she'd had enough of him.
ST— So then how did she end up staying with your family? I would have assu—
MG— Because blood isn't always thicker than water, Doctor Thurgood. My father, after he found out what had been happening to his sister-in-law, decided to pay his brother in kind. My uncle didn't get out of the hospital for three weeks. Then he decided that he'd feel much better if Aunt Mandy moved in with us. She had three kids, one of them three years old, and she had to work, just like everybody else.
ST— Of course.
MG— He was also worried that his brother might decide to pay her a visit. Entirely unnecessary, of course, since I'd followed-up on my uncle on my own time.
ST— What do you mean?
MG— If you want to say that I killed my boyfriend, then fine. We've hardly discussed that matter at all and I'm already tired of it. But he certainly wasn't the first person I ever killed. Thankfully, her kids take more after her, except for Fran, who's six, now, not three. She's got blue eyes, like her wife beater of a father. I prefer to think of her as having my grandfather's eyes, though.
ST— Are you— are you saying that you murdered your uncle?
MG— Sure, sure. Well, I was there when he put the gun in his mouth, if that helps. I didn't leave a mark on him, but he didn't even think of shooting me, when he got his gun. He just wanted it all to end, very badly.
ST— Marie, this is very serious. If you're joking, I—
MG— I'm not. But does it really matter? You think I'm insane. Well, then, here's some further proof that I'm utterly mad and never touched the bastard. Look up the records. There wasn't so much as a scratch on him. Except, of the course, the bullet wound. But that's a given, I would think.
ST— Then how did you hurt him?
MG— When I touch people, I can make them scream in pain. Somebody described it as being as bad as getting stabbed in the groin with a red-hot knife with barbs and nasty prongs, and then having someone twist it sharply. (pause) I've improved my technique since then, though.
ST— Perhaps we should talk about something else.
MG— Perhaps.
(pause)
ST— How is school?
MG— Say, is there any point to the twenty questions? Shouldn't you have this information already?
ST— I'm trying to find out how you think, and how you look at things, Marie, and no, I don't have all of this already.
MG— So long as you don't make me look at a bunch of stupid ink blots. (pause) Oh, please. Are you serious?
ST— There is some vagueness with the method, but as yet another tool for me to use in order to understand you, it works very well.

Edit On second thought, now that I see how long this'd look in this forum, I'll just post 2,000 words or so of transcript a day, and a scene a day when it comes to prose, instead of a whole batch once a week.

Hello! maybe i'm just tired has its roots in an attempt to mix together the magical girl and Lovecraftian genres into a horrific, but working, mixture, and while the degree to which it hits on the former of the two is up for debate, I'm not too concerned with that anymore, since the story and universe have spun off into something coherent anyways, and the attempt at a fusion was only a means to get my brain started on a path for worldbuilding.

The story takes place in the late 1950s, in an alternate world which is greatly based off of the world shown in The Repairer of Reputations, a short story in Robert W. Chambers' 1895 anthology The King in Yellow. The anthology is also the basis of a lot more of the novel, and while the universe at large is more based on Lovecraft's works, the plot of the novel draws more elements from Chambers.

I'm not too concerned with matching exact speech patterns as they would have been in the 1950s (at least for the time being), since I'm more concerned with getting the actual content out, and then editing it to match more closely. The same thing applies to slang, since I've found that I write it more realistically when I change things after, because otherwise I tend to use it a bit more than it should be. There are a few exceptions here and there, most notably with the word "fug(ging)," which, according to what I've read, was used commonly in sci-fi stories of the time period in order to get past censors while also getting the point and feel of the word across to the reader. The use of that word, as opposed to its counterpart, seemed to fit Marie.

The novel alternates between transcripts of the taped sessions Marie is taking with her new therapist, Sheila Thurgood,* and then periods of prose, usually around four thousand words long (although the first "interlude" is much shorter).

I'll normally be posting an update every Monday, but I'm putting up something now so that I can't put it off or forget about it any longer.

I'm not going to be doing much wandering around on this site and will primarily be looking over stories based on what's recommended to me, but if you comment here, and you've got a story somewhere on this site (or anywhere else, for that matter), give me a link and I'll make sure to return the favor.

Ask as many questions as pop into your mind about the world, and please tell me whether these are things which you think most readers would want explained now, or if it's just a question which has popped into your mind and which can be be answered later on in the story. I'll still answer it immediately, but I'd like to know if the story should be edited to answer that question earlier on (if, indeed, it's something which had occurred to me as a question which someone would ask in the first place) or if it's fine being answered later on in the story.

Anyways...

*Surprisingly, the last name came out of a random generator based on the US Census, and so there's absolutely no meaning behind the choice of name.