is no utopia...

Congratulations to my friends William & Christina for their marriage tomorrow and yes that will be on hell of a party!

So I thought of that little quip above last night around 3:00 a.m. when I was about to go to bed. I was listening to "Cry Little Sister" by Aiden (the remix for Lost Boys 2: The Tribe). The reason I went right for the whole opposite is because I was trying to write more of Solstice, unfortunately, to no avail. Thanks to some healthy criticism from =Sunowl, ~midnightsilence08, and ~ejm-written I revised the very first post of Solstice. I like the revision better and so do three friends of mine who read it. I think it's a much more detailed and better base for the story, which is now going into its third version. Luckily, I haven't written much of it so it's a little easier to revise it and doesn't hurt too much to delete pages in Microsoft Word.

If you don't really know what Solstice is, allow me to summarize it briefly. I don't want to give away too much. Solstice is a fictional, post-apocalyptic story set a few years in the future. It takes place in the fictional town of (can you guess?) Solstice. On one particular evening, a series of events, many unexplained, cause the town to become cut off from the rest of the world. The book will be written in journal form from four (lotta F's) journals recovered from the town. I originally wanted to write the book as a lecture from a professor to her students but I couldn't really tie much in so I decided, instead of writing it conventionally, I will just write the journal entries first and then deal with the lecture part, if I so desire. Each of the four journals is written by four individuals within the town who have very different explanations for what happened, further reinforcing the mystery and unexplained happenings of Solstice after that fateful night. One writer will liken the events as the effects of a terrible earthquake, another to the breakdown of law and order after a heavy metal concert (my personal favorite), a third to the release of inmates from a dangerous prison facility housing individuals considering too dangerous and too deadly for conventional prison (think Batman Begins, Arkham Asylum), and a fourth to pagan and satanic rituals that brought on a curse. Solstice will be like a modern Roanoke in the sense that what happened is really unexplained but it will take on the horror of our modern world. It will deal with a number of themes, some complex but others quite simple.

The biggest theme comes actually from an eighteen century French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He wrote a book titled The Social Contract in 1762 that deals with setting up a political system. In the book, he talks about two worlds, effectively the state of man in nature and the state of man in civilization. The former is human nature and the latter, the human condition. Of these two, the state of man in nature, without civilization, is the hardest to prove as human condition has, throughout history dictated the wills of man. Many political philosophers struggled with trying to explain "human nature," whether we are inherently good, bad, or something else. Few, if any, have actually provided something tangible. Hobbes was among the earliest to try but, lacking empirical evidence, his explanations weren't very good, in my opinion. (I'm more of a Machiavelli fan myself). Rousseau states that for any social contract to work, all must accept it voluntarily, much like what John Locke and our Founding Fathers believed. Solstice, in and of itself, is a town that descends from that human condition to a human nature, which I find to be more animalistic than anything else, based simply on instinct and survival, pushing logic and reason aside. However, logic and reason certainly influence the perception of survival, which dictates behavior. This is among the more complex themes.

Minor themes to Solstice border on the more macabre. Among these, the most prevalent will be cannibalism, genocide, and the grotesque (you're only getting those two for now). Solstice's populace will deal with such things as pagan and satanic rituals, religion, the philosophical arguments of God, preservation of culture, and, especially, the apathy of a modern populace to accept whatever it is that befalls them (much like how I see the American people sitting down and accepting a gradual socialization of our country, which has been happening for years now). It will deal with a theme I have proposed in my own political writings of equality versus freedom. To have more of one means less than another. More freedom means less equality and more equality means less freedom. I am more inclined towards freedom than equality but the populace of Solstice will have to deal with that in their own right. So do you like?

Solstice isn't the only literary work I've got in the "current" folder on my computer. However, at the moment, it seems to be the one I'm most focused to, which isn't unusual. I often (and I wonder if other writers do) go through times when I dedicate my thoughts to one particular novel over others and vacillate between them. Here's what I'm working on right now.

Named Works

Fall of the Republic: FOTR is a fictional, political series set around the present time (slightly into the future) that deals with the (as the title states) fall of a republic. If you can guess the republic I'll give you a lollipop. I have already started on and progressed through four chapters of the first book, titled Ghosts in the Wind that is set in a time when the republic remains standing. At the time, the republic is weakening and the book will be the only one in the series, thus far, that isn't post-apocalyptic (sort of a favorite genre of mine). It will follow a single character and his experiences throughout the day (it takes place on a single day). The second book, titled Hunter is set six years after the events of Ghosts in the Wind in the thicket of the republic's collapse. This novel will deal with a state of conflict in the republic, where freedom has been erased, the constitution has been fully trashed, and collapse is inevitable. There will be other books, perhaps I will title the third one Echoes of the Past. This is a title I've been trying to use for the better part of seven years now for something and it has gone through a ton of writes here and there. We'll see...

Infernal: Like Solstice, Infernal is bathed in macabre and horror. It is post-apocalyptic (no surprise right?) and is set after a brutal civil war in an area cordoned off from the rest of the country, where lawlessness reigns free and the most disgusting aspects of humanity are seen. It is set in a purely fictional world and comes from a game that I play called NationStates. The game is cool and it is browser-based that includes a lot of roleplaying. My country is called the Empire of Layarteb and Infernal is set in that world, several years after a brutal civil war changes Layarteb forever. It deals with a number of themes and, of all of these, it is the furthest along. It follows a few characters, all looking for something in this "zone" and uses some themes from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl, a game released in early 2007, particularly the cordoned off zone. At the center of this particular zone is a city that was one a major city in the Empire but had been destroyed during the civil war by a thermonuclear missile. Nobody knows who fired the shot, whether it was the government or pro-republic forces. Within this novel is cannibalism, territorialism, a sort of "king of the hill" theory, and a number of things. Out of all of my works, this is the most macabre and the darkest.

Solstice: See above (duh!)

Tainted Dreams of Misery: This is a novel that I've been trying to write since late 2001/early 2002 and it's in its fourth or fifth rewrite, who knows. It is set in the past, in the late 500s. One particular version got all the way to 112 typed pages before I started another version and now I've started again. This novel means perhaps the most to me over any of the other ones. It's been in the works for so long I want to finish it badly. It deals with a lot of fantasy and endeavors to create a fictional formation of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (because they're just too cool). After reading things like the Aeneid, Illiad, Odyessy, Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and others, I really wanted to make my own epic but instead of poetry form I would do it in novel form. I can't save I've been a big enough fan of poetry to want to write it in poem form so really could it be called an epic? Probably not but the themes are there. The central character is basically a forsaken outlaw (wow where did I see that) who is cast out of the world of the living and banished to a middle world in between life and death, cursed to roam it for eternity because he violated the wills of the gods and found true love. A powerful force that not even the gods can control, love is banned and marriages are arranged, in an effort to never allow anyone to find true love, thus always making them subservient to the gods (who display all of the characteristics of the gods back in the days of Rome and Greece). The head deity is Luna, the moon goddess and she considers herself to be the most beautiful goddess and woman.

Unnamed Works

Dystopian Future Novel: This is a novel I originally started writing 1998 that is in obvious need of a rewrite. It was never completed though. It is set hundreds of years in the future in a dystopian society not unlike those in Brave New World, 1984, and Equilibrium. Originally it was run by a totalitarian, religion (sort of like Inquisition style Catholicism) that mandates every aspect of life. Now with more influences on me since 1998 (duh, I was only 15), I can write it a lot better and I intend to as well.

Unnamed Assassin: This is a work of mine that sort of is more fictional than anything else. Unlike the other novels, it doesn't really tie into any sort of post-apocalyptic end but does have a minor political theme to it. It follows an individual who was a hired assassin but got caught. He worked for a powerful organization who, he believes, betrayed him. After serving a year in jail for felony trespassing (they were unable to pin homicide or conspiracy to commit homicide on him), he gets out and returns to a normal life. Now, years later, he winds up being forced back into service for one last hit against a popular senator who is campaigning against corruption in the American government. It is suggested that the hit is contracted by rivals within the government who face embarrassment and criminal charges for corruption.



That's all I have for now. I intend on seeing through these works but it's slow going. The more projects I work on, the slower each one of them is and I must endeavor to be published, that's my ultimate goal. I want to be a published author more than anything else and have for years upon years upon years now. I've been writing creatively since as far back as I can remember, before college, high school, junior high, back to the days when we measured computer speed by x86. Scary isn't it? Photography may be a hobby that I endeavor to get far better at but writing is the truest of all passions.