The Architect

"An aperture to the world of natural connection."

There is something so wondrous about the creative process of drawing up the perfect plans to a structure. I feel that only a few have ever experienced such a joy. My creations are a reflection of the type of beauty that I wish to see in the world. A beauty so simple, yet so dynamic, that it causes those that see it to open their minds to new possibilities.

Such as the possibility of nature and mankind coming together to create beautiful spaces that not only feed the progression of science, but the soul of our humanity.

"A reminder that nature is not meant to be conquered, but to be lived in"

A perfect blend of worlds that compliment each other. That is what I wish my works would invoke. But the reality is that very few who view my works feel anything at all. They're so obsessed with the idea that grandeur is better, that they don't see the beauty or perfection that is simplicity.
I have seen this world that they marvel at. I have seen their creations that tower over nature and push the boundaries of architectural design. They stand in awe at the sights of these monolithic structures, dumbstruck by the sheer size and intensity these godless shrines radiate.

"A blending of nature and science..."

I pity those that come after me. Gone will be the days of that warm feeling of natural connection. Instead only the cold shadows of  a steel monolith will remain. And the people will neither notice, nor care that any other feeling has ever existed.

Dream Machine

Dreams, we all have them. They're the images that dance in our heads that remind our bodies that we're still alive while we slumber. Dreams range from the monotonous, to the insane and incomprehensible. To me, dreams unlock our deepest desires and fears. They access parts of the mind that we block out during our waking hours either due to social implications or because they're simply impossible in reality. Have you ever had a rather gratuitous dream about a friend, or some random stranger you happened to admire from afar a day or so ago, even though you're in a committed relationship? Waking up you actually feel guilty and sometimes you feel as if the event actually happened, even though you've physically done nothing. That is the power of dreams.

I've had a number of dreams that I never wanted to awake from. I've also had nightmares where I thought I was going to die. The amazing dreams though... they might be the closest to heaven that we ever get, or if our greatest dreams give an indication of what heaven is like, then we're in for great things. Imagine though, what if scientists could create a machine that allows you to dream forever? (I've actually never seen the movie Inception, so forgive me if this is the plot to that movie.)

Imagine that they place you in a machine filled with nourishing liquids, breathing apparatus, and other medical equipment to keep your body alive. Imagine a contraption strapped to your head that runs all the way down your spine and branches off to sensors covering your extremities, so that you could feel everything inside the dream. With the cranial contraption you could create your ideal dream and live in it for as long as you like, even forever if you wanted to. Would you? To some its an easy yes. It's not so simple though. You would effectively be giving up reality and essentially your life to live in a make believe land filled with illusions. Everything would feel real though to you and you wouldn't be the wiser that it is all a dream. With that in mind, does that mean we can make our own reality and that reality is relative? Some would say that reality is already relative. Your idea of reality is probably different than the person that has dementia. Lets face it though, reality is painful for most of us. I would probably elect to be hooked up to a Dream Machine, for the simple fact that reality is boring.

You could literally design your own heaven. You could populate it with whomever you wanted and make it appear anyway you wanted to. It would be yours to create and do with it as you please. You could do whatever you wanted to in the dream and it would have absolutely no impact on reality.

So, if a Dream Machine existed, would you decide to substitute your own reality? 

The Dying of the Light

Every day or so there are moments when my mind wanders into deep waters of depression. These usually occur right before I go to bed, when the room is dark. The scariest thought that I think any mind can create is the thought of being motionless/unconscious for eternity. These are one of the thoughts I try not to linger on, because they make me feel that no matter what I do with my life, that in the end, it was all without purpose. My mind just can't fathom no longer existing. That... is probably the darkest thought my mind can conjure. If there is no light at the end of the tunnel, then why do we go on? Why not just slip into darkness now, get it over with? Well, this could be one reason:

The movie Interstellar gave me inspiration on how to cope with this possible realization. Throughout the movie Michael Caine's character, kept reciting this poem that was written by Dylan Thomas. Here is the whole poem:

It's the human condition to fight. When we're facing certain death or trauma, we fight. We simply don't just succumb to the end. This movie taught me that even though death is guaranteed, and possibly permanent, that as long as we're alive we should live like we'll be dead tomorrow. It still is not very comforting, but its the best we can do. Life is a struggle, and death is the only guaranteed outcome, we might as well do what we do best, and fight back as hard as we can. Live the life that you want to live, or do the best that you can to live as well as you can. You may have a crappy job you can't leave because of the pay, or for one reason or another. You may be alone, you may be in a terrible relationship, you might be questioning whether or not your life is worth living. But the next time you're staring into oblivion, and darkness is closing in around you, rage, rage against the dying of the light. As long as you wake up each morning, its far better than what could possibly be in the darkness.

Playing D&D: AKA My New Writing Process

One of my new favorite things to do is design D&D adventures in my free time. I had never played the game, or even thought about playing the game until about two months ago. One of my friend's friend actually got our group into it. I played a character one time and then became the group's GM. Since then I've created all of our adventures.

I quickly found out that creating the games actually helped my creative writing process. Creating a D&D adventure is a lot like creating a story, only at a faster level. You create the place, plot, and people that the characters will interact with, but also create the challenges that they will face. Creating the challenges is where the game helps my creative writing skills.

Designing challenges or "encounters," as they're called in D&D, requires balance, timing, and creativity. If you design an encounter that is too hard, the characters will die, and your story will end. If you design an encounter that is too easy, the characters breeze thru it and the story loses a bit of luster. Even though I'm a new GM I have been lucky enough to find good balance with the encounters I create. My encounters are hard enough where the group almost doesn't make it out alive, and it usually comes down to a last ditch effort to defeat the encounter.

My group of friends are probably pretty close to the worst D&D players ever. They literally will attack any NPC (non-playable character) they come across, to the point I have to put in things to protect certain NPCs from being attacked. My group can't grasp the term subtlety even if a door with the word "subtlety" scrawled across it, slammed into them repeatedly saying, "the door is trying to kill you." This means that if I tell them for example, "You sense this creature is immune to most magic, and it's power level is far beyond anything you've ever faced," they would still try to attack it. And when their attacks had no impact, and the creature then roared back and killed one of them in one shot, they'd look at me and go, "what the hell?" (This has happened.)

So, when I create encounters, I have to design them with all of this in mind. This really stimulates my creative process and I can come up with some great ideas. This helps unlock story ideas for my creative works as it allows me to look at situations and ideas differently. I might as well tell you about one of the games I ran last week where I used this technique. I created a one shot mission, entitled, "The Fearmonger." In the mission the players were tasked with finding and killing an evil illusionist that lived in a tainted forest. I skipped over letting them talk to anyone in the town. (The game would never have gotten started because they would have burned it down...) I plopped them right in the middle of the forest at night and threw an encounter at them right away.

In the encounter, a deer, happens to wander into their path. Except, this was no deer. I describe the deer as being as black as night, having blank pupils, and that wisps of smoke seem to be coming from it. Now, most players would realize that this was no ordinary deer and would likely try to find out if some kind of magic was responsible for it. Not, my party. They just go ahead and attack it. (See what I mean?) The deer, since its not really a deer, explodes into a bunch of black masses that take on the shape of a murder of crows. The crows fly thru the party and I make the party take a wisdom check. The one's that fail receive an insanity counter. This is how I dealt with their hack and slash tendencies.

As the game went on, each player accumulated insanity counters, and with each insanity encounter there was an effect. Players either had their wisdom attribute lowered, gained disadvantage on wisdom saves, or worse. So, about half way thru the game, someone of course had to do something stupid. Since he was craziest at the time, my friend decided to burn some bodies of kidnapped townspeople who the group believed to be zombies and had butchered, thanks to a powerful illusion that was put on them. Well, one of the players felt that it was too much and decided to try to restrain him. All hell broke loose.  However, it fit the story perfectly. He ended up being naked, knocked out, and tied to a sled for most of the game. In the end they completed the mission and "killed" the Fearmonger.

Now did the game go perfectly? No. My friends will never play the game the way it is supposed to be played. This gives me a rather hard challenge to bring the game to their level and at the same time make it fun for me to run. This is probably the first adventure where I actually had fun as the GM. While the players never put two and two together that they were living in an illusion created by the Fearmonger, I still had fun messing with them and I believe most of them had fun participating in it.

I don't really have a process when I think of story ideas, but I tend to find inspiration in a lot of weird places. This is just one of the new ones.

The Other Side of Stars

Artwork by Abuzeedo Design

Something has always captivated me about space. As far as we know it is an endless ocean of black filled with all manners of colorful heavenly objects, and that is only what we've seen so far. The possibilities of the universe are endless, literally and figuratively, and there is no telling what else lies just beyond our peripherals. As awe inspiring space is, it also brings the word lonely to mind. Looking out into the infinite gulf is enough to make you feel quite insignificant and alone. Despite it's silence I can almost hear sad soft classical music being played against it's celestial background.

I had a thought this evening about a story idea. The phrase, "The Other Side of Stars," came to mind as I wondered about the possibilities that lie across our known and unknown universe. My mind drifted light years away and millennia away to a remote, inoperable space station, floating in the gulf, with a star twenty million miles away, bathing the desolate station in an orange glow, causing shadows to dance among the dark walls as the light slides its way down a long row of bay windows.

Pretty descriptive, I know, but that is the image that was etched into my imagination. I then thought, who or what else might be near this old space station. The idea of an explorer, wearing a special exo-skeleton like space suit, with the glowing orb of an AI floating from a contraption on his wrist, sprung into view.

While I have no idea where the story is going, I went ahead and wrote out a simple paragraph describing this scene with just a little dialogue.

The corridor is silent and still. Shifting shadows dance along the smooth metal walls that line the hallway, as the light from a star twenty million miles away, cascades through the row of bay windows, mimicking shadow puppetry as it slides its way toward the end of the corridor, stopping only at the darkness. A single line of green light shoots past the windows and is swallowed up by the abyss.

“Lantern readouts show only residual radiation activity sir,” says an autonomous sultry female voice.

A human figure steps out from the shadows towards the light that pierces the bay windows.

“Zana, no matter how much I fear the dark, this reminds me that it can be pushed back.”

“You’re correct. Darkness can be pushed back, but light can be extinguished Aleph,” replies Zana.

Through his black visor Aleph closes his eyes, trying to feel the warmth of the star as light envelopes around him, bathing him in an orange glow. He presses one gloved hand against the window and sighs.

“Always the optimist Zana.”

I know it isn't much, but to me, this scene conveys a lot of emotion. You can feel a slight tension as the scene unfolds around you. A paragraph before this might bring in a bigger picture of the desolate space station to set the mood. You also learn a little bit from this passage. You learn that this male character's name is Aleph, he has an AI named Zana, and that something called a Lantern is able to analyze the environment. You also learn that Aleph is hopeful, which possibly makes him the protagonist of the story, but you also learn that there might be another reason he is here at this forgotten space station, something darker.

Did I necessarily mean to convey all of that in one passage? No. It is just what came to my mind when I started to put all of those pieces together. Will I continue to work with this concept? Maybe. Does it have a cool title? Hell yeah it does. Who knows. If anything I was able to escape for just a moment into the depths of space.

My Obsession and Failure

Writing has been both an obsession and an absolute failure for me. I truly enjoy creating stories, depicting exciting and intriguing plots with characters that contain true emotional depth. The problem is, no one is interested in reading them. I know, writers shouldn't care about who reads their work, if anyone at all, but it would be nice to get the occasional feedback from a story I worked hard on. For example, I worked on a short story for months, edited it well over a hundred times, developed out two characters that were interesting and down to earth, when it was posted to an online forum where people comment on original works, it received no comments. That's a little heartbreaking to me.

I think it boils down to the fact that I possess a much different imagination than most people, which in turn affects my personality. What I find interesting or inspiring, others find boring or terrible. I won't say that there isn't anyone out there that shares the same imagination as me, but in all my years on this earth I have never found anyone I can truly connect with on that level. Growing up I never had a best friend. I've always had friends, but I was always just another option. I blame this on my personality for the most part. There is a part of me that wants to be accepted by the people who I'm close with, and I think in someway that shows through and it makes me push those people away a little bit. Sure they're my friends, but if I left their life it wouldn't diminish theirs. Over the years I've gotten use to this fact that all my friendships will terminate sooner or later and there has even been months or even years at a time when I didn't have any actual friends. I think that is part of the reason why I've developed such a dark imagination. When your world is dark, what else do you expect to find inside your head other than the abyss?

I believe the darkness and the creatures that live within it comfort me in someway. The fact that I'm able to thrive in such an imagination makes me feel different from everyone else who may not respond too well to the images and thoughts that grow in my mind. When I do write, my stories all seem to take a darker tone. They contain such themes as: loneliness, depression, the futility of mankind and of existence, and death. I tend to focus on the antagonist or the evil figure more so than the main character. For example, I toyed with the notion of working on a story where it is strictly from the view of the villain. The villain in this story was a wizard who, by accident, destroyed his entire continent, killing everyone he loves and erasing his homeland from existence, because the ones he loved failed to acknowledge his existence. He finds himself in a type of Purgatory, where he is tortured by an entity who convinces him that he is powerful enough to reshape the universe with his bare hands and can finally make everything work out for him if he just gives in to evil.

In a way I can see myself in that character. To be spurned and misunderstood in reality only makes me want to dive into my imagination where I have complete control. It's the only thing that makes my life bearable. One day I hope to at least be able to make a few fans with my writing, or even just an acknowledgment that someone enjoyed reading one of my short stories for five minutes. Until then I will struggle on to make the best of my reality and my writing.

Escape into Imagination

Imagination has always been something that I possessed. From childhood to adult, I've never had trouble creating make believe worlds, adventures, and monsters. When I was young it was simply used as a way to make play more enjoyable. As an adult, it provides a much needed escape from reality.

Reality for me has always looked rather bleak and dark. Life in general for me is quite boring. I work a management job that offers no creative ideals and boils down to nothing but stress and unrealistic expectations. Combine that with having to see how a majority of people live their life on this planet everyday, and you have a bleak, constantly questioned existence.

It is no coincidence that my imagine, which is rather dark, and sometimes epic, mirrors my overall attitude to reality. It's dark because I'm at the point where I'm struggling to see any reason for existence, not mine, just humanities existence overall. It's epic because life is boring. I personally believe that there is no grand plan for our existence, we as individuals, define our existence, and I choose to exist in reality, but live in my imagination.

Reading and writing are my primary escapes, and gaming is my secondary. I read a lot of supernatural horror, weird fiction, and science fiction. My favorite author is, yep you guessed it, H.P. Lovecraft. I discovered H.P. Lovecraft a few years after college while looking through the horror section in my local bookstore while my girlfriend was looking for a book she had been wanting. "Call of Cthulhu" for some reason caught my eye. Now I had heard of Cthulhu before, as any young person who wanders the internet for more than a day, but I never knew much about the monster or the story that features his name. It was only nine bucks, so I bought it. I never looked back after that.

I felt myself fall into a universe where humanity was an accident that just happened to be left alone as some kind of cosmic joke, by beings beyond our meager scope of understanding. Suddenly, my life made sense. It was a cold truth, but it was the truth. Now do I think there are some interdimensional beings that exist out there in the cold depths of space? No. What I got from Lovecraft, was that there is no pre-determined destiny. There is no purpose to our existence other than to exist. In the end, that is our true freedom. We can be anything we want to be in this world. Why worry about what hides in the darkness, when it is our final journey anyway? Enjoy the ride. I personally hope something exists beyond death, I also hope there is a merciful God. I live my life the best way I can, and I try to help people everyday. At times I even pray. After all, I am human, and I'm afraid of death. Until then though, I'm going to be who I want to be. I refuse to live in reality, and instead choose to escape into imagination.