The results were pretty weird.
_
A couple of years ago, inspired by a random YouTube video about learning the creative discipline required to finish things and a quote from Gene Wolf where he said that the best advice for a new writer he had was to write a story every day, I decided to embark on a wild writing Odyssey:
I was going to take a single writing prompt and write a response every single day for 100 days.
The writing prompt that I chose was simply the word, "Moonman."
The dream was to do a different story each day.
That quickly altered on collision with the unyielding surface of cold, hard reality.
On the other hand, I got so into it that I ended up overshooting the hundred day mark by approximately 110%.
It was, for most of that time, the reason that I thought I was alive.
Naturally, I didn't finish. (I had, by this time, decided that all of the stories I wrote were actually connected in a grand short story cycle, because I am a sane human being with realistic ambitions.)
Anyways, I took a quick break to write a ninja story for my ninja-obsessed goddaughter's birthday present never came back to it.
For two and a half years now, the three ring binders stuffed with hand scrawled drafts have sat on their dusty shelf, radiating silent guilt waves as the silverfish nibble their edges.
In the mean time, I did what I do best: start a bajillion other projects.
Sometimes, I would walk into the closet on whose shelf the half-dozen binders of this insane writing project sat and gaze at them, like Gilgamesh looking over the mighty city of Ur, and say to myself,
"Lo, have I not laid the groundwork for grand things? Yes, grand things which I can come back to and accomplish any time I want, but, you know, not right now."
"Right now, I've got to write a story about a talking swordfish."
"Right now, I've got to sculpt a bunch of dagger cats for a wargame of my own devising."
"Right now, I've got to make up melancholy Renaissance dances on my stick dulcimer."
"Right now, I've got to watch some inane garbage on a streaming service both written and run by coked-up monkeys hammering the 'auto fill' button."
"Right now, I've got to see what happens if I shake up this offbrand Fanta, duct tape a thousand pop rocks to it, and then shoot it with a BB gun."
"Right now, I've got less important things to do."
This may have gone on for all of eternity (or at least my tiny slice of it), except for a personal disaster which served as a a shocking and terrible reminder of the impermanence of all things in this temporary life.
I lost a manuscript.
A manuscript that I had been very, very excited to work on for many months.
Somehow, a three ring binder full of hand scrawled first draft – exactly like the ones which I had been neglecting for lo these several years – simply vanished from the face of the earth.
Fortunately for me, this project was Vim Is the Color of Rust and Sun, and I had been uploading completed chapters of it to this here website.
Shocked, chastened – nay, chastised! – I began the arduous process of printing out what had been… and rewriting the in-progress chapter from scratch (which, admittedly, had been pretty messy, and was actually much improved by the exercise.)
Having salvaged the story from the disaster of all story disasters, I dusted my hands off and patted myself on the back.
Boy, good thing that I had decided to put that up on a website where it was recoverable!
Glad that I'll never, ever, ever in the history of the universe have that happen to me again.
I mean, what are the chances of 2 manuscripts being misplaced by a person with my completely perfect memory who definitely doesn't walk into a room and go, "Wait, why am I here again?" approximately 7 times a day?
Absolutely nil.
And yet… I could not shake the lingering existential dread. All those writing projects sitting on my closet shelf – hundreds of handwritten pages which had meant the world to me as I wrote them but had failed to motivate me to return and finish them anytime sooner than "someday" – were no longer safe and secure in my mind.
At any moment, 200 days of feverishly passionate effort could vanish from the face of the earth, never to be procrastinated again.
I was under no delusions that I could re-create them from scratch.
So, I am going to be slowly typing out and uploading this particularly lengthy and bizarre exercise.
Initially, I thought that I would redraft in perfect all of them before writing the final stretch that would complete the insane, shambling behemoth, but such perfectionism is a big part of what has kept them on that dusty closet shelf all this time.
Instead, I'm just gonna throw them up there as is: a rough draft of a really crazy writing exercise that I thought, for the better part of a year, was the reason that I woke up every morning.
Here goes:
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Moonman the Acquirer spat and rubbed his scarred, green hands. It was exactly as the thief in Red Knives said: the crater’s wall had crumbled inwards, revealing the side of a thin, needlelike spire, still half entombed by the remainder of the wall, like a splinter seeking the surface of the skin.
He grinned and hugged himself beside the fire. It was all, as yet, untouched.
The only other ears that would now hear the thief's report where the darting, silver fish at the bottom of the Lethe, but the Acquirer still comported himself with the professional paranoia of his trade.
Once more, he checked the crater’s room for the smoke of rival fires, or the telltale dust of the riders of the waste. His eyes shifted to the sky above, but all was stagnant-water-still. From its winding sheet of stars, the barren husk of all that was cast down its amber light, as quiet as the corpse it was. Nothing stirred.
Satisfied that he was safe from the devils above and the savages below, Moonman the Acquirer kicked dust onto his campfire, already well hidden by the cup of a smaller crater, and clambered up the scree.
At the top of the landslide, an ancient door awaited his crowbar's kiss.
With a pop and a hiss, the alabaster portal yielded to his craft. He stood, for a long breath, on the threshold, sipping air which had not felt the touch of human lungs in ages past recall.
Slowly, he reached inside and ran his tool's metal beak along the doorway's ancient lentils. His diligence was rewarded with a tinkling of silver needles. The points still glistened green despite their age.
A quarter hour's careful toil unveiled another 16 needles, two cunning lines for poison gas, and a golden asp, fixed above the jam with titanium thread. Its flanks still rose and fell long after he had crushed its head.
The Acquirer rubbed his hands again and made his preparations.
With tar-soaked rags stuffed in the gas pipes' hidden mouths, and probing the floor in front of him with the prybar's metal beak, Moonman the Acquirer cast a final, lingering glance at the star-framed husk that haunted his sky, struck his flare, and stepped into the antique darkness beyond the bested door.
His flare went out at once.
He turned, not daring to step blindly, and found the door already far behind him. Carefully, his left hand reached for his second flare.
There was no need.
The darkness beside him was split with a spear of blue.
A window stretched from the floor into the heights above, laced like a lady’s gown, bathing the scene, not with the amber corpse-light of the waste outside, but with a brilliant, green-tinged blue. The Acquirer gasped.
His was not a mind built for confoundation, but there he stood, struggling in vain to reconcile what he saw with what he knew.
The shape in the star-spattered sky was no dead husk, but a blazing sapphire, chased in green, wreathed in radiant white beyond the purity of snow.
Tears welled at the corners of his eyes.
"Life," he whispered.
From the dry and ancient shadows at his back, another whisper answered his:
"Beautiful it was."
Moonman the Acquirer nodded. An enervating cold had begun to spread across the members of his body. His hands seemed as distant as the door.
"A man could go mad staring at it," continued the sibilant hiss, "Staring at the lost, staring at what was and what could have been, staring with the hunger of grief."
Moonman the Acquirer nodded again. The prybar slipped from his fingers. He did not hear the sound as it hit the dust-strewn floor.
"But it is dead," whispered the voice, "And we are old and mad."
The windowed jewel became once more a brown and barren corpse.
The Acquirer’s lean and scar-crossed face wept for the first time since he was a shivering child.
The voice came again, so close that the hairs of the Moonman's neck danced.
"But what a bright and savage life," it whispered, "Burns within your breast."
Outside, the ash-choked embers sputtered and went dark.
_
Boy, that was pretty weird, huh? I was supposed to write it all in one day, but I immediately fell short of that.
My initial plan was to write a kind of Conan the Barbarian style story of weird pulp horror-adventure, wherein a plucky scoundrel had a brush with the unnatural and barely escaped.
On day two, I realized that I had already gone far beyond my "story a day" goalpost, and this spooky-story-around-the-campfire ending (the severed hand of his unseen attacker still squirming after him as he ran) was still out of sight.
"My goodness," I thought, "I might have to write this over the course of 3 days."
Then, a strange, raspy voice in the back of my head went, "Or you could just, you know, kill him."
"Yeah," I thought, "Why not?"
So I did.
Then, that strange, raspy voice in the back of my head went, "Or he could do something even worse than die, and it could become the basis for a sprawling story cycle of unknown length that will consume the next 198 days of your life."
...But that's a story for next time.
___
Oh, and – after all that – Vim finally turned up. It was in the bottom of a moldy cabinet that I usually keep rechargable batteries in. Metaphoric karma, or something, I guess.
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