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Short Story Updates: “The Crownless King” and “Old No-Eyes”

Despite working my full-time job at Outer Places (which included an interview with P. Craig Russell, who’s scripting the new American Gods comic), I’ve been doing a lot of writing. I’ve got two stories on deck this month, one out for submission and one in the late stages of revision. At this point, I’m offering copies for people to read and let me know what they think. Here are the descriptions:

The Crownless King

When I took the draft of “The Crownless King” to a monthly Brooklyn Sci-Fi Writers workshop back in November, I was blown away by the feedback: people said it was “strange, eclectic”, “original,” “gruesome”, “fantastic,” and “fucking spectacular.” It was super encouraging, especially considering that I’d been working on the story for about seven months and eight drafts. You can read an excerpt and check out some of the sketches from the early draft, back in January 2016, here.

“The Crownless King” revolves around a wizard and his student holed up in a frozen tower buried under snow in the aftermath of the end of the world. While they’re preparing to head up to the surface, the wizard (named Samal) decides to teach his student (named Iz) a very old, dangerous piece of magic, which is ‘the crownless king’: the ability to remove one’s head.

People loved the lore and history woven into the story, as well as the parts dealing with self-surgery and magical flesh-work. It’s one of the first stories where I get to showcase my world’s take on wizards, magic, and ghosts. Here’s are some notes/sketches I did around the magic of ‘the crownless king’:

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Old No-Eyes

This is another one I brought to the BSFW writing group, this time in December. “Old No-Eyes” came from a much bigger and more complicated story involving Yute, the subject of my post on psychopaths and madness, and the Nokizi, the book of necromancy and mathematics that I ended up writing especially for that story. I wanted to focus on those two elements, so I cut it all down and wrote a new story, which is “Old No-Eyes.”

“Old No-Eyes” deals with Yute, an eccentric, ruthless necromancer with a talent for mathematics, and his former, backstabbing colleague named Tenza, who needs Yute’s help decoding a bizarre occult book written by an anonymous madman who calls himself “Old No-Eyes,” who claims that the text will teach the road to immortality to anyone who can decode it.

I’ve been passing around this one since December, and again, the response has been overwhelmingly positive: despite being a psychopath, people love Yute and his twisted sense of humor. People also liked the way mathematics was worked into the story and the depth of the worldbuilding. It’s the first of my stories to dive into the world of necromancy and introduce Yute, who’s one of my favorite characters. Here’s a sketch my friend Joel Clapp made of him:

One of Joel Clapp's initial sketches of Yute, based on Charles Manson
One of Joel Clapp’s initial sketches of Yute, based on Charles Manson

Want to read A COPY?

If you’re interested in receiving a copy of these stories, I can send you a link to the private postings on Medium or a PDF via email. Shoot me a message at christophmahon [at] gmail [dot] com or hit me up on Twitter @DeadmanMu.

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New Essay in Clarkesworld Magazine: “Frodo is Dead: Worldbuilding and The Science of Magic”

I’ve said this before: magic should not be science. Magic can be systematic and internally consistent, but it shouldn’t be reduced to a human tool, like astronomy or chemistry. A lot of writers and worldbuilders don’t seem to understand the difference–didn’t Arthur C. Clarke famously say that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?”

But there is a difference. That’s what my new essay is about.

In this essay, titled “Frodo is Dead” I wanted to show how basing magic off of science, ration, and the Enlightenment philosophies that informed them inevitably leads to a breakdown of its fantasy world by turning it into a mirror of our world.

You can read the essay here on Clarkesworld!

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I’m Going to Be a Speaker at Glasgow International Fantasy Convention!

Last month I saw a post on the SFWA website calling for papers and presentations for GIFCON, the Glasgow International Fantasy Convention, and decided to submit a presentation on my Rats in the Walls project. Now, I found out I’ve been accepted–I’m going to Scotland to be a speaker at the con (March 29th-30th)!

“The Rats in the Walls,” inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft, was something I put together for the Twitter Fiction Festival, but it quickly became something bigger. It received some coverage by folks like The Dusty Rebel and ANIMAL New York, and it kept me sane while I was unemployed. Otherwise, I might have been up in a clock tower with a rifle rather than drawing chalk summoning circles.

kilroy union square rats walls

Here’s the abstract for the presentation:

The Rats in the Walls: Storytelling That Blurs History, Reality, and Fantasy

Two years ago, an anonymous figure in a white mask began appearing in Lower Manhattan, handing out cryptic messages and drawing occult diagrams in chalk. ‘Kilroy’, as the figure called himself, claimed to be the spokesperson for an enigmatic group called ‘THE RATS IN THE WALLS’, which was planning an apocalyptic event that would shake all of NYC. In reality, this was the beginning of a carefully planned, city-wide fictional narrative played out over two months and multiple mediums, including scavenger hunts, original video, and live performances.

“The Rats in the Walls” project incorporated elements of New York history, graffiti culture, and the work of H.P. Lovecraft to create an innovative, meta-textual storytelling experience that turned Lovecraft’s signature obsession with cosmic horror and local history into a narrative that blurred the boundaries between fantasy, reality, and urban legend. My presentation would take the form of a faux-journalistic account of the history of the Rats in the Walls, beginning with Lovecraft’s “Horror at Red Hook” (which will be treated as history) and ending with the fictional apocalyptic event Kilroy and the Rats brought about in 2015.

Along the way, the presentation will illustrate how the project incorporated elements of alternate reality games (ARGs), alternate history, worldbuilding, and metatextuality. The importance of live storytelling, the use of technology to create dynamic narratives, and the practical challenges and methods that come with allowing wide-scale audience participation will also be addressed.

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Five Years Worth of Sketches: Ritual Magic, Death Masks, and Helmets

This weekend I finally started digging into about 5 years worth of sketches and thumbnails doodled in the margins of my school notes. The majority of the sketches are for helmets, masks, and faces, but there are some symbols and ritual magic designs.

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Most of the helmets on the left are meant for Redcaps, which are elves that have warped their bodies into killing machines. Their helmets usually have a grinning skull motif, like death masks. On the right are robes, designs, and a mask for a necromancer. The almond-shaped mask design is one of the oldest masks I made.

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Most of the designs on the left are ritual hook designs, surrounded by symbols. I’m not sure what I’ll use them for yet. The other symbols scattered around the page are for necromancy. On the far bottom-right corner is a sketch of the god of death, Erroth.

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I’ve been experimenting with creating a language of symbols for magic based on Chinese or Japanese pictograms. The two blocks in the center and left are some automatic drawing examples. On the right is a design based around the mask of the god of death.

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More helmets on the left, and death masks on the right. The mace in the middle is a take on the Gae Bolga, the famous weapon of Cuchulain, the Irish hero.

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These are some assorted drawings of faces, including the skull-like face of a necromantic character and the alien-like neck and head of Absurdity, which is an embodiment of chaos.

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Outer Places, GIFCON, and Clarkesworld Magazine!

Three big pieces of news!

First, I’m taking on the temporary title of Interim Managing Editor for Outer Places, the sci-fi/science site where I work! My official title is Staff Editor, but until a new managing editor is found, I’ll be taking on that role and managing OP’s output and marketing. I’ll probably be heading out to SDCC, WonderCon, and NYCC this coming year to help cover events and speak on new panels too, which is amazing!

Second, Clarkesworld Magazine accepted my new pitch for an essay on magic and worldbuilding! For the past several years I’ve been bugged by magic in different books and games, especially The Elder Scrolls, because it’s often treated like a science where mages can ‘experiment’ and harness ‘magical energy.’ The way I see it, treating magic like science will inevitably create a domino effect within the fantasy world that leads it to turn into a world like ours, one where magic is harnessed like any other natural phenomenon. Magic will stop being magic, and Middle-Earth will become just ‘Earth’.

Third, I submitted a presentation proposal to GIFCON, the Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations convention, outlining a lecture I want to give on ARGs and The Rats in The Walls, my April 2015 project. I got an email last week that my proposal is under consideration, and that I should hear back around mid-January. We’ll see!

Finally, two of my friends got me a new poster:

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Looking forward to 2017!

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I Just Published a New Piece on Multiverse, TSR’s Blog!

Back in college, I used to keep a sticky note attached to my laptop titled “Things Chris Mahon Believes In”. In order, they were:

  1. Ursula LeGuin’s “Wizard of Earthsea”
  2. Princess Mononoke
  3. Neon Genesis Evangelion
  4. Milk

The sticky note was there to anchor me, and remind me why I do what I do. I used to read and write a lot about moral philosophy, and a lot of my writing is still informed by that, but day-to-day, I always found myself returning to stories for inspiration and a reason to get out of bed.

Thanks to Outer Places (the sci-fi website where I work), I got to write a piece on my seven favorite sci-fi/fantasy movies and books for TSR’s blog, Multiverse! You can read the article here, but here’s the list:

  1. Wizard of Earthsea
  2. Dune by Frank Herbert
  3. Neuromancer by William Gibson
  4. Princess Mononoke
  5. Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard
  6. Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
  7. End of Evangelion

This list isn’t definitive, but it’s a good chunk of what I love. There’s no H.P. Lovecraft on there (because most of his work is short stories and novellas) or Paranoia Agent or Serial Experiments: Lain (both TV shows), nor is there any manga/graphic novels (Vagabond or Uzumaki or V For Vendetta or Prophecy), and I couldn’t include things like The Seventh Seal or Man of LaMancha because those films aren’t technically fantasy.

Still, it’s a good shortlist and amazingly cool that it’s been published. It’s now “ON THE RECORD.” Woop woop!

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I Just Published a New Piece in The Portalist!

After sending in a pitch to Open Road Media’s new sci-fi/fantasy site The Portalist back in November, I wrote up a listicle on the 5 Most Elaborate Sci-fi Alternate History Books, including H.P. Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness, PKD’s Man in the High Castle, and William Gibson’s Difference Engine. Now it’s live on the Portalist site! Huzzah!

Today I also sent in my third non-fiction pitch to Clarkesworld Magazine on the topic of magic and worldbuilding in fantasy–we’ll see what they say. My last two essays with Clarkesworld were on “The Candlelit World,” about mythology’s influence on fantasy, then “Paradise Lost,” about the history of the genre. They’re a fantastic publication.

In the meantime, I’m still working on my new short story with Yute, incorporating some of the ideas I picked up from my new book on wabi-sabi and the Japanese tea ceremony.

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New Books! Wabi-Sabi and Tibetan Buddhism

So I swung by the Spoonbill & Sugartown Bookstore in Brooklyn today while running errands and some cool books. The bookstore itself was fascinating and had a lot of cool, eclectic titles, including the Atlas Obscura and the new Non-Stop Metropolitan. There was a surprising amount of stuff on magic and mysticism, which caught my eye. In the end, though, I picked out these two to help me with my Buddhist-inspired fantasy worldbuilding.

Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, and Philosophers

“An updated version of the seminal 1994 classic volume on the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.”

Wabi-sabi is something I’ve always wanted to read more about, but all I could ever find was the Wikipedia page. I’m really interested in its connection to Zen Buddhism.

Wabi-sabi, as I understand it right now, is an aesthetic and life philosophy that centers on incompleteness, flaws, and authenticity. It has a lot in common with Daoism and Buddhism, and can be extrapolated to everything from dishware to clothing and architecture. I’ve always thought it was cool how people found ways to turn living into an art, especially when the that ‘art’ is tied up with the inevitability of death and decay.

 

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

“A newly revised and updated edition of the internationally bestselling spiritual classic, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, written by Sogyal Rinpoche, is the ultimate introduction to Tibetan Buddhist wisdom. An enlightening, inspiring, and comforting manual for life and death that the New York Times calls, “The Tibetan equivalent of The Divine Comedy.”

I’m kind of wary of bestselling books written by self-identified Buddhist monks (especially the Dalai Lama), but I thought this would be a good reference point for creating a philosophy about life and death for my world. One of the things I’ve realized is that I don’t have much in mind for burial procedures or rituals, let along day-to-day philosophy.

Tibetan Buddhism also produced the Bardo Thodol, which I still haven’t read, but want to.

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The Nokizi: A Fictional Necromantic Manifesto, Part 1

I was playing through TES III: Morrowind recently, and I came across three books in a necromancer dungeon: Darkest Darkness, Arkay the Enemy, and N’Gasta, Kvata, Kvakis. I remembered these from years ago, and was excited to see them again: these are necromantic books you can actually read in-game–they’re short, and they give you a bit of insight into the beliefs and ideologies of the black mages you’re going up against. My favorite was A Game at Dinner, which was a sort of epistolary novel from a spy to their dark lord.

I’m writing a new story about the necromancer Yute, who I spoke about in my last post about the psychopathic mind, and one of the main plot points of the story is his own manifesto, The Nokizi. The Nokizi is meant to be a book similar to Arkay the Enemy: something to be passed around and read by the initiated members of the necromancer community.

But ever since I first conceived Yute, I wanted his necromancy to be at odds with the popular ideas of the day–I imagined him as an unorthodox figure, a radical other necromancers would be wary of, like Malcolm X or Timothy Leary. As soon as I imagined him, he needed an establishment to rebel against.

The Nokizi is Yute’s critique on the current state of necromancy and the major figures whose work has influenced it. These figures include Amassad, Togorun, and Banasail, all three of whom have achieved a different kind of immortality and huge followings of acolytes. These three are sort of like Hindu gurus who promise their followers eternal life and enlightenment if they follow their teachings. Yute, meanwhile, is based off the Bodhidharma, the iconoclastic founder of Zen in China.

I imagined that Yute brought all of his new ideas before the gurus first, expecting to gain praise and recognition from the masters and cement his position as a new master. It would be a sort of “look at me, I found a new path that is undeniably better than all of yours, and now you must admit it.” Instead, he was laughed and jeered out of their temples and abodes and derided by all their students, one after another. Yute, not one to take humiliation well, devised his Nokizi as a critique of the establishment that rejected him, and a manifesto for his new method and philosophy.

The actual critique is a blend of mathematics, paradoxes, parables, German philosophy, and Rinzai Zen, with the goal of showing that 1) Amassad, Togorun, and Banasail are all going about immortality in the wrong way, 2) the current conception of time and the self are wrong, and 3) that immortality seekers should employ mathematics, not body-modification or other techniques, to achieve immortality.

At the very end of the Nokizi is an encrypted portion, along with the promise that anyone who solves the cipher will gain the secret to his new method. The idea is that, though the necromantic community rejected him before, he is willing to allow converts into his new method if they are clever enough. But it’s all a trick–the insanely complicated cipher encrypts only a bunch of gibberish and nursery rhymes, as a giant, spiteful fuck-you. “You had your chance to be my acolytes, and you laughed me down,” is Yute’s internal reasoning. “So I’ll show you what you’re missing, offer you my secrets, then laugh at you.”

Yute’s a twisted kind of character.

You can read the first part of the Nokizi here.