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[maniacal-writer]

Winds howled around him as he climbed higher, tearing at his hair and clothes. He squinted against the rain blowing at him from every direction, dripping from his dark hair into his eyes. Gritting his teeth, he pushed onward. And pointedly ignored the man climbing after him, yards below.

He stalked through the hallways, fists clenched, glaring at everyone that saw him. Outside, the wind screamed, matching his mood. Rain lashed at the windows, and thunder rumbled in the distance. The few people he passed hurried out of his way, their shoes clicking sharply on the smooth white tiles. Hours. It had been hours before they’d thought to tell him. To tell him that that man had escaped again. What had they been thinking?! They should have told him immediately.

“Jarrek! Stop!! You don’t know what you’re doing!” The old man’s scratchy voice was nearly blown away by the wind, and, faint with distance as it already was, he barely heard it. He was wrong, more wrong than he knew. He knew exactly what he was doing. He paid the main no heed, jaw set. Determined. He was nearly there now.

He slammed the door to her office open and stalked in, ignoring the protests of the woman’s reedy secretary. “What happened?” he demanded. His eye twitched. “Surely you were watching him?”

She looked up, startled, as soon as the door banged against the wall. She was short, neat red hair pulled back in a bun, her bangs framing a sharp face. “S-Sir,” she stammered. “Um. Yes. Yes of course we were. I had men everywhere you ordered, sir, and more as well.”

    He stood for a moment, on the peak of the mountain, and watched the swirl of wind, rain, and clouds beneath him. He could feel them, could feel everything. Like it was a part of him. It was confusing, maddening, but he had grown used to that by now. The man was catching up below him, and he stepped up to the edge, looking down at him. “I’m going to fix it,” he said softly, too soft to be heard. “I’m going to fix everything!!” This time his voice echoed off the sides of the mountain, the word ‘everything’ coming back to him. Over and over and over. “Why can’t you see?!” he continued, “It will be better!! The world is dying, is that what you want? IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?”

“Then what. Happened?” His voice rasped harshly in the back of his throat, and he turned away from her, reaching for a glass of water from the dispenser in the corner. He could hear her shifting the papers on her desk. She must be nervous, he thought. Her desk was arranged rigidly, as if aligned on a grid. Everything in its place. She shouldn’t need to move anything.

“If this world is dying,” the man rasped, pulling himself up onto the ledge. His white streaked hair and beard whipped around his head erratically. “Then you will kill it.”

He crumpled the paper cup in a ball and tossed it in the trash can. “Well?”

    She swallowed, “Well, sir….. We’re not exactly sure what happened. Most of the guards that were watching him are incapacitated. We. We have camera footage of the whole thing, of course, but it’s still not really……” She trailed off at the expression on his face, leaning back in her chair. When she spoke again, her voice came out in a shaky whisper, “We-I’m. I’m sorry. Sir.”

    He froze, watching as the man climbed the rest of the way onto the ledge. His eyes burned, held open too wide, too long. “You’re wrong,” he said hoarsely. “I’m going to make it better. You. You’ll see, when I’m done. This world will be alive again.”

[maniacal-writer]

Sometimes the good guy messes up. Sometimes the good guy doesn't win. Sometimes they eff up so bad.... there isn't any redemption.

.

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And then sometimes I get to write happy stories where the good guys win and nobody dies and it's GREAT.

[maniacal-writer]

Okay so. I don't know what this blog is actually about anymore. I've changed the description like three times.

Please bear with me :')

[maniacal-writer]

So at night I'm good at writing sad, depressing, angry, or just upsetting stuff. In the day, I'm better at writing happy, fluffy, silly stuff. And then just. In mornings and afternoons it's.... everything else????

[maniacal-writer]

READER/WRITER PROBLEMS:

having to choose between reading and writing

being inspired by every single book you read

ending up with 50 WIPs

being jealous of all your fave’s writing styles 

spend money on books or notebooks?? 

not enough shelf space either way

not knowing if it’s a sentence you thought of at 2am or one you read somewhere

[maniacal-writer]

So I've been thinking about writing lately, and I decided to post what I'm thinking because maybe someone will be interested and want to read, or maybe it will help someone, or I dunno. But I thought I'd share. I guess.

I'm a writer, technically, but nothing I've written has ever been published. Most of what I've finished is short stories, although I almost finished a novel before I realized it was about the wrong people. Right story. Wrong characters, POVs, whatever.

A lot of my friends and family have read at least a little bit of what I've written, and I'm extremely grateful to them for it, especially my best friend, who reads at least a little of everything I write (so far as I know, she hasn't finished any of the longer stuff), even though she normally doesn't read a lot. She is amazing and I love her and she seems to like everything I've written so far even if I haven't, and I'm glad she enjoys it and gives me feedback and everything. Okay enough being sappy. There are other people who seemed to really enjoy the dystopian stories, or the dark ones, but have kind of just gone.... It's cute? To the fluffier happy stuff. Maybe that's not it, and I'm wrong. Idk. But that's how I perceived it. There are some other people who kind of. Freaked out about some of the things I wrote, and asked if I was okay, and some people have liked the happier stuff and been a little uncomfortable with dystopian stories. Etc etc.

But what bothered me most was the reactions to the short, sweet, happy stuff compared to the rest. I don't know how they made people feel, I don't if I'm doing a good job of getting those emotions across, and that worries me because I know negative emotions are easiest to convey. I once wrote a short story about two characters that hated each other, and my friend said she could feel the tension in her shoulders while reading it. I mean, yes, a lot of the main stories are dystopian. Yeah. But not all of them are, even when they involve the same characters. Someone I talked to this summer pointed something out to me that I guess I always knew, but couldn't put into words.

A year or two or something like that back, in 2016, maybe early 2017, I'm not actually sure because for once I didn't write the date, I made and finished one short comic for my portfolio in an art class, and later started but have yet to finish a second one. I originally started them to practice my Japanese, because even before I began learning, comics were something I was already interested in drawing, and I couldn't think of how to express those same scenes in words without images. They're short, one page, cute little stories with no relevance or bearing on overall plot as far as these particular characters are concerned. But they're canon. They happened in-world, to these characters, even if they aren't in the main storyline.The first was about Dan, waking up at his best friend, Luke's house, and seeing snow for the first time. The second is about Luke making him a birthday cake, something he's never had before. He doesn't even know what a birthday is. These scenes aren't in the main storyline, they never were, probably they aren't even mentioned. But even so I felt, and still do, that they were important. Just as important as the big ones, for these characters, for that world at that time.

These boys grew up in a dystopian world. That's the setting of the story and huge plot point, both in individual and overarching plots. Luke's story is relatively normal. He grew up in foster care, after the age of about 5 or 6. Some, most maybe, were nice. Some weren't. He moved out when he was sixteen. Dan grew up in a hospital. He was part of a group of children brought there for human experimentation, he only had one friend among them. By the time he was old enough to have a best friend, most of the rest had disappeared, or were quiet and subdued. When he was, roughly, four or five or maybe six or seven, his friend disappeared too. They never learned much, beyond what they could figure out on their own, and only a minimal amount of actual teaching. Once his friend was gone, he didn't interact with people much. He was quiet. There wasn't much for him to do, either, and, sometimes, when he was older, he snuck out and talked to other people who were staying in the hospital. When he finally got away, though physically he was maybe around 17, he was developmentally a lot younger. He'd never had a family, a name, parents or even a parental figure. He'd never been outside.

I thought the short comics, about him discovering snow, getting a birthday cake, were amazing. They were cute, I loved them, but they also. I feel like they are as much a part of the narrative as the rest, even though they aren't necessary.

One man told me this summer, without knowing much more than what I told you about Dan here, and having never read a single word I wrote, or seen either comic, was that he thought they were amazing. A great idea. He thought it was really cool that despite the fact that it was a dystopian story, and not one with a necessarily happy ending, that there were still these light hearted, hopeful moments.

Little happy moments of discovery where nothing else in the world seems to matter, like a child, because, at heart, Dan still is one. That's why they were important to me. Because even though life sucks, things don't always have a happy ending, not. Everything. Is. Awful. There are always, always happy moments. Watching someone's face light up.

Someone told me I made their day today, and honestly, that meant the world to me. I'm so so so happy I made their day better, even if all I did was make a thank you note.

[maniacal-writer]

"May it be that I come before you with a heart of Glass, but an iron Will so you cannot shatter me, nor break me into a thousand pieces."

[maniacal-writer]

"It's all about energy. Everything. All of it. It's all connected, everything is connected. We're all the same, two sides of the same coin. The metal in between. In between. There's something important about that, something that we're missing. We're so close to understanding, but without this one piece, we can't see the whole picture. So close."

-- Excerpt from Talia Variant's journal, shortly before her death.

[maniacal-writer]

I can't believe I'm only just now getting around to reblogging this. It's important.

Don't Drink and Slide

Reasons why drunk sliding is a bad idea:

- directions in interdimensional space don’t correspond to directions in 3D space, you have to instinctively feel which direction is which. Great way to get lost.

- delayed reaction time. Imagine walking through a gateway, and suddenly you’re not walking anymore. You’re falling.

- lowered inhibitions, and not the best critical thinking skills. You decide to go to another dimension. You’ve been there before, it’ll be fiiiine. You don’t pay any attention to //where// you’re going in that dimension, and end up in the worst possible place/time.

- think you’re going to one dimension, end up in a different one. Try to go back, only to end up in YET ANOTHER dimension you weren’t trying to get to.

- can’t correctly remember which dimensions are a. at war with each other, b. at war with themselves/war between countries/planets/etc. End up getting killed because you thought you were going somewhere peaceful and ended up on a battlefield instead.

Don’t drink and slide guys. I know what you’re thinking, Josh. Just don’t.

[maniacal-writer]

That, and he's unpredictable af. Every time I think I know what he'll do next, I end up writing something completely different instead.

Delarin is interesting. A lot of the reason he does things the way he does is because he likes to be in control, he wants to have more control over his surroundings. This makes him sound kind of like lawful evil, right? He wants control, so you think organization, order, rules–lawful evil. But he’s not. He actually //prefers// chaos. He tries to leave everyone as unnerved and off-balance as possible. Because so long as //he’s// creating chaos, as long as //he’s// behind it, //he// knows what’s going on, while everyone else is left bewildered and confused. And as long as that happens, he has more control over things than anyone else in the room.

[maniacal-writer]

Interdimensional Physics/Theory

Definitions:

Interdimensional Physics: Inter-Dimensional Physics is the physics of travelling, or creating gateways between different dimensions, and the effects it may or may not have on the traveler, or travelers depending on the dimensions traveled to.

Dimensional Theory: The theories and ideas of how dimensional space, time disparity, and other things work. More recently, this is focused on how the dimensions were thought to have worked before The War, and what changes have occurred, or have been caused by the Rift.

Gateway: A portal between two connecting dimensions. In theory, it is opened at the membrane between two dimensions. In practice, it’s much more complicated than that.

Sliding: Slang for making a gateway or gateways and travelling between dimensions.

Dimensional Theory

It is believed that the dimensions are arranged like cubes, stacked infinitely in every direction. The inside of the cube is the part of the dimension we interact with, the six sides are the “membranes” between us and other dimensions. Every dimension is always connected to six other dimensions that are close by. As you start counting connections, they get exponentially bigger as you connect to more and more dimensions. DImensions that are nearby have more related physics, races, composition, etc. For example, dimensions next to the human dimension mentioned most often in this series, are very similar to each other, with few differences. In all of them, humanity is the only intelligent race on earth, and they have yet to find other intelligent life in their dimension. This rule applies to all dimensions, as you travel further and further from your home dimension, you encounter stranger and stranger races, places, and laws of physics.

There is also a time gap or disparity between dimensions. The same theory as before applies here, the nearer dimensions are to each other, the closer their time stream is. As you get farther away, the time gap gets larger. Time either flows faster than where you came from, or slower, in comparison. Sometimes, although not often, it varies. Alternating between slower and faster, or the same speed.

When the dimensions are said to be arranged like cubes, that does not mean that they are cubes. You won’t go to the edges of the universe to find that we are trapped inside a box. The cube theory is largely an analogy to help us visualize and understand the way interdimensional space works. Interdimensional space is not the same as 3-dimensional space, so the cube analogy isn’t perfect. So while in theory, a gateway is placed on ‘one of the six sides of the cube’ it does not really work like that. It doesn’t matter where you create a gateway in 3-dimensional space, only in interdimensional space. It does matter which direction you create it in, but this does not mean that it will necessarily be a direction that makes sense in 3-dimensional space compared to interdimensional space.

Interdimensional Physics

Since every dimension is connected to six other dimensions, when traveling between them you can only travel to one of those six dimensions. You could travel in one of six different directions.

You could choose to think of them in terms of cardinal directions, North, East, West, South, up and down, but it wouldn't work out in your favor. Sometimes these six dimensional directions correspond with the six cardinal directions, but most of the time they do not. You have to instinctively feel where each direction is, and where you want to go. This said, it's obviously much easier to travel between, or to and from, dimensions you’ve been to before than ones you haven't.

[maniacal-writer]

Archie, also known (officialy) as Professor John K. Archibald, looks to be an older man, but not as old as he is in seraphim terms. Pretty much everyone except his guards or his superiors calls him either Archie, or Professor Archie, though, not Archibald.

He tends to be more than a little bit eccentric, and gets really, really excited about his research. So much so that he has ignored the rules on multiple occasions, either on purpose, or without realizing it at the time. Most of his students will tell you that his moods can change dramatically and quickly, especially if anyone calls him by his first name, or by Archibald instead of Archie. No one is quite sure why, except Archie himself, who refuses to say a word of it.

He is under guard because of an "expedition" he made several years ago, which culminated in, after breaking numerous other rules, him bringing a human into the seraphic dimension. Doing this was already highly forbidden, but he was in even more trouble when he was discovered later to not only have brought a human there, but someone who had already trespassed there before and had escaped being caught.

Since that time, he has not been allowed to leave the university's grounds, much less their home dimension, hence the guards and superiors mentioned in the first paragraph. His punishment is somewhat more lenient than it could've been, however, because in doing what he did, he collected and published the most accurate and up-to-date records on seraphim, other races and dimensions, as well seraphic magic and other types of magic. He is still allowed to continue his research, after a fashion, but only so long as it doesn't involve bringing in more humans, or bringing the other one back, and it doesn't involve him leaving university property.

As I said before, he looks older, perhaps about in his middle years. He is pale as most seraphim are, with short-ish hair and a short-ish beard. Neither are very well kept, scruffy and badly in need of a trim. His eyes are a pale grey that is not quite silver, and he wears a pair of square-framed, red-rimmed glasses. He is well known among the university and it's surrounding area not just for his research, but also because of his remarkable hair color. While most seraphim who are still normal have pale hair, most often white or a pale silver, Archie's hair is a white blonde color, with streaks of black in it.

He has a deep voice, and perpetually sounds just a little bit hoarse, as if he is losing his voice, despite that the fact that he isn't.

Copies of Archie's research and his collections can be found in the university records, and the official Seraphic Records kept by the Council. As of yet, the newer updated records have not been released to the general public, or to the Order, a group of human ministers, government officials, and magic users who attempt to keep tabs on magical and other dimensional beings in humanity's dimensions.