In Darkness

It won’t help.

Another new old story.

This one is from 1997, and its been sitting on various hard drives untouched since then. It’s called Walk.

My original feelings about this tale were that it lacked a “point”… a REASON for it to have been written in the first place. There is no “grand scheme” or “deeper undertones”… no “secret connection” to anything that was written before or since. It was just an idea that came to me, so I wrote it.

I have fiddled a bit with it since I decided to post it. The original text was pretty much an embarrassing, horrible mess, so I changed the beginning a touched up a few descriptions to make them a bit less juvenile. It was also badly in need of a spell check. But the sequence of events remains untouched, even if the words have been rebuilt in places.

Enjoy.

According to Project Wonderful, the advertising service that I use, DarkIcon.com had over 1600 page views yesterday. That’s WELL over twice what I normally get, and over 500 of those views came from StumbleUpon (where I haven’t paid for any advertising in over 2 weeks).

Continuous traffic at that level would be a hell of a start. It won’t pay any bills, but it’s a huge step in the right directly. Sadly, today I seem to be over-compensating, and my traffic is well below normal. Oh well…

From 1998, here’s one of my early attempts at an H.P. Lovecraft-style story.

I failed.

Not only did I fail, but I failed so badly that I KNEW I was failing while I was still in the process of failure. ;-)
So I said “to hell with it” and quit.

Still, there are some interesting concepts in here. This was going to be a part of my “mythos” which was to rival Lovecrafts’s Cthulhu stuff. This “mythos” ties in heavily with October Falls (Shhh!, The Inquisitors, and Heavy) although you can’t really see a connection at this point. If I had continued along with my grand design, you would have seen the Dark Books turn up in October Falls and in several other seemingly non-related tales. Heh… one of them you actually HAVE seen. Sort of. Because, as you know, pretty much EVERYTHING I write is related in some way.

—
(more…)

I forget just what the name of the story was going to be, but the first chapter was “Call to Arms.” So that’s what I’m calling it. This one dates from before 2000. The concept was a simple high-fantasy story told in series of episodes (like pretty much everything I’ve written.) The end result would probably have ended up not being a novel, but SEVERAL novels. The first 11 episodes are all drawn out in my notes. After that I guess I was just going to wing it and let the characters write their own damned story (like pretty much everything I’ve written). I have a LOT of backstory… a history of the known world that goes back several thousand years. Obviously I wanted a firm grasp of the setting. It’s enough information that I’m tempted to post it… maybe.

Anyway, my notes tell me that what follows is the first chapter and a half of the story:

—
(more…)