9 months after its inception, my new short story, Hypnotica, is out for submission to fantasy magazines!
If you want to learn more about the inspiration behind it and how I fleshed out the magic system in the story, you should check out the posts DREAMWAVE: FANTASY WRITING, QUANTUM THEORY, AND DAFT PUNK and NARCOMANCY: MORPHINE, LUCID DREAMING, AND BINAURAL BEATS.
If you want a taste of the story, I’ve included a short excerpt below, along with sketches from my friend Joel Clapp. Hypnotica is the story of dreamwrights, mages who use music to shape dreams into surreal raves, and the Yoshiwara, a ghost-city that exists at the boundaries of waking and sleeping. The sketches depict the setting of the story, a ruined city carved into the side of the mountain, named Ibiza. In the story, the protagonists, two narcomancers named GRIN and NO-FOOT, travel between Ibiza and its mirror reflection in the dream world, the Yoshiwara.
“The Yoshiwara is a dream city, and there are breeds of magicians here that only exist between sunset and sunrise. The most famous ones, the ones only the Yoshiwara can make, are the dreamwrights, who play their music for the ghosts and the dreamers, carrying their songs in their bones.
Each night, the flesh-and-blood bodies of dreamwrights fill the coma houses in Ibiza like stacks of wood, and their sleep-selves find their way to the other Ibiza, the one that exists in dreams. That mirror-city is the Yoshiwara, whose streets and buildings match the waking Ibiza only loosely. The Yoshiwara is where they make names for themselves.
These days in Ibiza, shrines and cults spring up around the celebrities, the dancers and the artists, and for a while their autographs are exchanged like gold for anything and everything. Invitations from the courts of the drug lords and architects flood in, and gold flows as freely as the liquor when they go out.
But standing over all the petty celebrities, towering like the ruined buildings of Ibiza, are the dreamwrights and their names. DEKAY. OZO. ENAF. Their fans paint buildings with their names in the middle of the night, writing love notes in twenty-foot-tall letters. Their fans carve their names onto tables, wooden joists, scaffolding, tattoo them across the skin, weave them into robes and scrawl them onto the margins of menus in tea houses. The popularity of dreamwrights is measured by the ubiquity of their name. But for every one that makes a name, a hundred wither away into addiction, and no one remembers them.”
