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Decision made in the “To Kill or Not To Kill” zone. It was “To Kill”.

This was actually not an easy decision. To be honest, from the start we wanted to write the blood. We wanted to write the scene… to show the blood, in words.

But we felt challenged. The circumstances… an accidental confrontation in a bathroom in an extremely public museum. This isn’t your “stop and have a bath” kind of a situation… uh-uh, not time to dilly-dally, not time to really enjoy the moment.

And our Luca, Soup Pot Killer extraordinaire, has also been an enforcer and assassin in his life. He knows and understands these kinds of situations. It would be swift and clean, even with a knife.

But we wanted abject horror. We wanted to skew the circumstances. It seemed that if we were going to go through with the kill, it would have to be big, unexpected, and horrific. And, most importantly, (at least to me) believable.

So we thought about it. If you were skilled and drove a small thin long blade under the sternum, upwards and a bit to the left, you could substantially pierce the right and even left ventricles of the heart, causing nearly instantaneous death from massive internal blood loss. Remember, we said “if you were skilled.”

So we thought about that kind of kill. We thought about our strong-skilled Luca and decided that he would kill the guard that way. Then we thought about what might go wrong. I touched my sternum and got out my human anatomy books. I read and researched.

In my journey I found out that the Xiphoid Process is usually fused to the body of the sternum in the human adult by age 29 and that it can be naturally bifurcated, sometimes perforated. It occurred to me that these non-threatening morphological differences could catch the tip of a sharp blade and drastically change the circumstances of the situation.

A much bigger hole and a lot more blood. More drama.

So, what do you think about the solution? Did we meet our burden? Please leave us a comment… we would really love to hear from you!

He looked up at the sky. It was steel blue. The falling rain made the sky seem more alive, more dangerous. “If I could fly,” he thought to himself.

He closed his eyes against the pelt of the rain. His lids were so tight that he saw white shapes in the blackness.

“It smells like old damp clothes. I can taste the retch.” He held his right hand out and turned his palm upward. The heavy drops of rain danced and dove off his fingers. “It feels like music. Or the myth about lemmings.”

His eyes still closed, he took a step forward. He slid his foot on the concrete to the edge of the curb. He listened, straining his neck and head into the lane. “I can hear the whisper of emptiness.”

A line of water streaked across his forehead. Sweat and rain. “I could just open my eyes. If I just opened my eyes…I would see. If I could see, then why would I be afraid?” He kept them tight.

He willed his leg to move. His left foot stepped fully onto the road. He heard the scrape of gravel. “I don’t know,” he thought. “It just feels unknown, like when I was a child and the lights were off and the house was silent.”

There was a sound. He craned his neck. “Wait. Is that near or far? Is that an engine?” It sounded like a motorcycle. Not a motorcycle, a car engine. Standing in the street, hands at his side, he began shaking.

“Just open your eyes! That’s all you have to do!” His face was now drenched. “OPEN!” he thought.

His thought trailed off. “Why won’t you open? I can hear the engine, it’s getting closer.”

It came to him like a buoy surfacing in the water. “I’m dreaming.” And then, “I wonder … if I die in my dream, will I die for real?”

He heard the sound of screeching breaks and shrieking tires. “It feels like death.”
END

Let me start by saying that I’ve been fascinated with the idea of writing about dreams and how they might intersect with reality. I remember someone telling me when I was a boy that if you died in you’re your dream, you really died. It’s been one of the little myths I’ve carried with me. You have those, I know you do. I’ve also always been fascinated with the conscious/subconscious thingy and how they intersect and collide. More on all of this in the future.

So, what about you? What’s your thing about conscious vs subconscious? What did you think about this piece? Please leave us a comment… we would really love to hear from you!

Everything you FEAR is real.

That monster under your bed… in your closet. Real. The thought that the creaky noises’ houses make late at night are really monsters slinking around. True. That aliens can gestate in your stomach, then burst through your chest. True. That if you are bitten by a werewolf you will become one yourself and in the light of a full moon, crash across the countryside ripping innocents from limb to limb.

Yeah, definitely true. The feeling you get that makes the hairs on your neck thrust out that someone who should not be… is watching you. That wrong kind of person who exists to harm, to maim, to murder. The man missing teeth and an eye, unshowered and unkempt. His smell. He is real. The certainty that the food, the air, the drink, the touch is laden with killer bugs and germs too small to see yet to lethal to ignore. Bacteria that can make you melt. Bacteria that can transmogrify you into a vampire, a zombie, a drone, a flying piranha, or Homer Simpson. Yeah… those little suckers are most definitely real.

You fear many things… you fear things that have not happened, you fear things that won’t ever happen. You fear things that aren’t even real. You make up stories in your head all the time about things you imagine that have no basis in reality at all. If the definition of insanity is extreme foolishness or irrationality, then you are insane. (We are all insane).

So how is this all real?

• First, the mere statement made here that what’s said is reality gives it a form or reality: it is real above.
• Second, one might believe that man cannot think of anything that cannot exist, so it could all be real.
• Third, how can one really challenge perception/projection? You might say my fears aren’t real. I would respond, “Prove it.” But I might also challenge you to prove the color Blue is blue.

And I don’t know about you, but for me, that little bit of uncertainty that my fears might be real is what keeps me interested and engaged. That place where I seem to teeter on the brink of destruction based in the realization of my fears drives me to write the way I do and think the way I do.

How about you? How do you live in the place where you are afraid? Do you relish it or do you go out of your way to miss it? Please leave us a comment… we would really love to hear from you!

That said, we took the wimpy way out and just left it unresolved. This week’s Part 6 of Number 38, the Blank spin off short story about the Soup Pot Killer, breezed right past any requirement to answer the kill or not kill question. Now we truly get only a temporary stay of execution… we will have to answer it next week in Part 7. So we continue our examination.

According to the website Movie Death By Off Screen Killing (Yeah, we get that it’s a bit hard to believe this site exists, but it does — just click!) there are 49 movies that include an off screen murder.

Chris Eggertsen thinks that David Fincher should have shown John Doe (Kevin Spacey) cut off the head of Tracy Mills (Gwyneth Paltrow) in Se7en. He tells us to “Forget what the media tells you; watching senseless, gory murder after senseless, gory murder is a relatively healthy way to get out your frustrations.” This I agree with. I don’t however agree with his thoughts about Se7en. I remember anxious doubt whirling in my soul in the moments before the head was revealed. I wasn’t that surprised… but I would have liked it less if I’d known… better to experience it with David and William.”

And we get that there really is no “great” answer to this question… only small ones related to specific instances.

Like with the Soup Pot Killer, facing the urinal, eyes glued to the mirror, knife open, poised to act… there are a number of choices:

1. Cut away and never answer the question. Not another word about it.
2. Luca presents a fake but believable badge and ends the situation without bloodshed.
3. Luca brutally murders Brenner.
4. Luca incapacitates Brenner so he can get away but does not kill him.
5. We enter the scene again with Luca exiting the bathroom cleaning blood off of the knife.

And we all know there are a million other ways this could go. SO. If you had to pick one (we do), which would you, pick? Or even better… what’s your idea? Please leave us a comment… we would really love to hear from you!

Will the short story of one of Blank’s victims (The Soup Pot Killer) be best served if the conclusion to a tense scene climaxes in a kill or a simple brush with death?

It’s important to note that this kill — the one we are currently fretting about — is a found kill. What I mean to say is that this opportunity to kill was never part of the original story. We found it along the way.

And in fact, whichever way it ends up going, the truth of it won’t change the outcome of the story one bit. The only value we can see for using it is to add heightened drama to the tale and broaden the relationship with the affected characters. And that’s all of great value… but we think we still get a certain amount of that value, whichever way it goes.

Like John Blank, we can kill. We can deliver a visceral scene of murder replete with buckets of blood and reasonably consistent gore. Or we can take you to the last moment of the kill, the second before it happens and stop there. You know there was a kill, at least you’re really sure, but there is a small seed of doubt that can heighten the moment. Or we can create a moment where a kill seems most likely and then, again at the last moment, offer an entirely different “no kill” solution.

In No Country for Old Men two important characters were killed off-screen. Both Josh Brolin’s Llewelyn Moss and Kelly Macdonald’s Carla Jean Moss (husband and wife in the movie) meet an invisible demise. We know it happened because Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh is the fourth horseman of the apocalypse. But the Cohen brothers never show it.

Writer, Michael Joshua Rowin said, “…No Country could serve as a textbook in how to handle action off-screen—the film’s most effective intimations of evil occur from across the bridge of what the brothers allow the viewer to see.”

And, my friend and writer Julie Andrijeski reminded me that it’s all about context, which is so true.

What are your thoughts? Which do you prefer? Does the empty feeling of knowing but not knowing drive you crazy? Please leave us a comment… we would really love to hear from you!

The first words in Chapter Five are now completed. As I mentioned last week I wrote a smidge more then a thousand new words into the chapter. I added two new sections and evolved an existing one. You could say that both of the sections revolve around living things: the first, a specific group of tsetse flies, the other, a specific human being.

We’ve had butterflies and a cat that talks and now we have flies. And we may have flies again, possibly.

You’ve got to love the fly… what else that we know of can carry up to as many as 6 million bacteria on their feet alone? And the tsetse fly, our fly of choice, is the Boris Karloff of flies. That’s right… it’s a “Blood-only diet” for our little pets and as well as spreading all kind of disease wherever they go, they are the primary biological vectors of trypanosomes, which cause human sleeping sickness and animal trypanosomosis.

In the world today the tsetse fly kills between 250,000 and 300,000 people a year and they have existed in their current modern morphological form for at least 34 million years. Not even Angel has been around that long!

So I’ve turned the new words over to Don and he will take them and mangle them and twist them into the beauty that he makes. You’ll see all of it soon. And next week I’ll write about the new character you are about to meet and what we’ve learned about what she does. ALSO: “To Kill or Not to Kill”.

So I’ve been reading on the subjects of virology and epidemiology for over two years. For me this stuff is fun and interesting, as I was at one time on an academic path to medicine, which gave me some background. (Maybe someday I’ll write about my experience with cadaveric dissection.)

Also, in addition to the research on all things small and deadly, we’ve also been plotting and outlining our story.

Which brings me to this week.

We sat down on Monday and made several decisions about revisions to Chapter 5 that we’ve been talking about for a while now. Those decisions in hand, it was time to do some Blank writing.

As I said, this new and important character was going to be introduced in Chapter 6. But one of the decisions we made was to introduce her at the end of Chapter 5 instead.

Which was what turned out to make this week so amazing, I was able to write a bit more than a thousand words of Blank Death. And it’s probably been more than a year since I’ve done that. More on that next week.

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We also recorded our radio interview with Kim and Julian on their wonderful show “Life with Twist” and it was a blast. If you haven’t heard it and need something to listen to the next time you’re having root canal…but seriously folks… these are cool humans, so go to their link, listen to their show and give them some love! Hell, they might even have us back.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/twistradio/2010/05/16/life-with-a-twist

MyeBook
In another cool note, Blank Death has had over 50,000 views at My eBook and is still the Number 1 “Most Favorites” Comic/Graphic Novel. This makes us very happy.

BIG BLANK
The LARGER Blank community, as of Friday May 21st:

Followers of Blank on Twitter: 58,798
Fans on the Facebook Fan Page: 517
Members on the Blank-thegraphicnovel.com website: 445
Page Requests on the Blank-thegraphicnovel.com website: 69,019
Views of Blank the Blog: 2,426
Views of Blank on MyeBook: 50,713
Subscribers to Blank on YouTube: 29

“I don’t get this fucking story at all. It just goes on and on.” The curly-headed teenager spoke into his smoky basement bedroom. As he glanced at the top of his desk, his eyes paused on a blue “Neytiri” action figure standing tall, bow drawn and ready to fire.

The young boy thought about how the “Navi” warrior-goddess had used her body as a shield to defend the lifeless body of her lover, Jake Scully. He closed his eyes and imagined Tepes flying through the air and plunging all the way through the lion. The images of “Avatar” gave new life and understanding to the words he’d just finished reading and the images they were evoking in his head.

He imagined Lapetus flinging the massive spear and the dead lifeless body of the great beast sliding off, flying through the air and landing with a hollow thud. “Mmmmm, that’s so cool,” he thought.

Later that evening at the dinner table, Tommy spoke to his mom. “Have you read Castration-House?

“Not since I was in high school,” she said.

“I love the intense imagery and the way the story keeps winding inward… but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.”

His mom looked at him and smiled. “How far along are you on the journey?”

“Lapetus and Tepes are fighting a group of male lions and one of them is imploring Tepes not to kill him.”

Chuckling softly, “Well, my son, looks like you are on the brink of a great discovery. Sometimes you just need to have blind faith.” (to be continued).

Lapetus continued to scream and thrash and fight the lions. He swung and kicked and gouged at their eyes. They raked his body with their claws and tore at him with their fangs.

Then, a blur of metal. The first lion let out a roar of pain as Tepes, wielded by the unseen, cut deeply into his shoulder and cut across his chest, splitting the beast in two.

The blade then passed through another lion, cleaving his heart and ending his life instantly. Tepes then danced through the air at the third animal, jamming into it’s chest and slicing through it’s body until sticking out the back of its thigh. While the lion struggled, Tepes lifted him off of Lapetus and flung the quivering body into the distance.
As Tepes was severing the heart of the second Lion, the last of the attacking lions let go of Lapetus and backed away a small distance. It trembled as the sword approached.

“Stop!” the lion begged. “Has there not been enough bloodshed here? How many members of my family must you kill before you’ve satisfied your taste for murder?” (to be continued).