I’ve been brainstorming for my blog for a long time now, trying to decide what sort of thing to write. Flash fiction, I know, but something semi-continuous, yet, at the same time, something that really doesn’t make me commit. The blog is mostly for fun and the writing isn’t all that serious. I barely proofread it—I’m sure there’s many mistakes I overlook, as I tend to blog late at night read most things over only once.
Regardless, I’d still like to present something worthwhile both for myself and those who read, something to post other than the Letters and my own rants about life and whatnot.
I started the blog for a reason, so I suppose I should continue it for a reason.
So, brainstorming, I started thinking about a Neil Gaiman short story. If you haven’t read him, you should; everything he writes is fantastic. Anyway, I forget the short story’s name, and I don’t feel like searching through my books for it. In essence, a bunch of people—Months of the year, actually. You know, June…July…November…those guys—come together for an annual meeting of sorts to share stories. It’s a contest, if I remember correctly.
And so my idea was born. I think it’s hard for me to write short stories because I can never write from my own mind or thoughts, if that makes sense. I have to get extremely deep into the character, become the character(s), and I think that’s harder in short stories than it is in longer pieces of fiction. You have less room, less time, and it’s a different sort of skills that I’m still trying to hone. But if someone else tells the stories for me, a group of characters I create before their stories, then it somehow feels easier. I’m aware that that may sound insane, but that’s okay. I understand insanity very well.
Also, writing this sort of thing is good practice, since I should be writing more short stories in hopes to publish them, as publishing is very much a snowball effect. Once you’re in, it’s easy to get deeper.
I suppose writing and publishing is a lot like having sex.
They both make me cry.
Wait, what?
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The Nightfall Game
Prologue
They gathered as they always did, beginning so many years ago. It was an ancient game they played, and at the same time, not a game at all. Played, lived, obsessed over—it depended on which one of them you asked and how well they spun the lie.
They gathered as they always did, near the shore where you could watch the sea roll in and out through the salted windows of the tavern, where you could hear the waves crash against the stones as black as night, where you could feel the wind gust through the cracks in the walls. Lanterns burnt inside, their flames always flickering and always yellow more than white, creating more shadows than light. But they, those who gathered here, never fretted over the lack of light and excess of shadows. Their stories belonged to the shadows, were better off told in darkness than light, better off whispered.
They gathered as they always did, eleven in all but only ten who told their stories. The eleventh, a grizzled man behind the bar, poured their drinks and filled their flasks, but mostly he just listened to their stories.
That’s needed, even here. Someone to hear the stories, an evenhanded listener crouching on the outskirts, his one good eye watching the speakers one by one, one by one.
He was the only one of the eleven who ever gave his real name, and although he was as ancient as the rest of them, from a time nearly before times, when the stories, their stories, led to the creation of all other stories—although he was similar to the others, he wasn’t one of them. His name was Gallan, his true name, and he was the tavernkeep, and he was a simple man surrounded by some of the most complex men and women to ever live.
He wasn’t one of them—and after all these centuries he knew he would never be—but he was close enough to be a judge, to have a voice, to change the world again and again, and to always share their regret when they stood from their seats and emptied their tables and slid on their cloaks and coats and left the tavern for the night, and for the year, until the next year, and the next and next and so on.
Stories like this, they go on and on.
No, Gallan wasn’t one of them. He resembled them closely enough, as any man resembles any other man. His long white beard was a beard—hard to argue that. And his one eye—cloudy blue now—could see well enough. Almost as well as two eyes. Curse fishhooks. He wore a gray cloak that anyone else could wear, and black boots and a thick woolen shirt to fight off the chills.
Even so, he wasn’t one of them, but he belonged with them on one single night, every year, for so many past years that no one bothered to count anymore.
And so he readied the beer and wine and whiskey. The casks in place, the barrels full and tapped, the bottlenecked glasses filled with their burning, murky contents. He readied the tavern—although it had been readying itself since they last departed a year ago—because they would be gathering soon. And voices would fill the tavern, and words would be spoken, yarns spun and tales told, stories, and at the end of it all, a decision, a judging, a verdict, and they, those would played this Nightfall Game, would accept fate and leave again.
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