A Treatise on Infinity

Infinity is not but a word that some such fool of the middle ages whispered into abyss, yet it is an idea, and an idea which can be fleshed out, brought to the light, understood by the laymen who thinketh it is such only a word can be understood by demons and Satan himself, but which can be explained by such a thinker that believes it to be what it truly is, which is not the straight, never ending, always forming line it is thought of today, but an object one must think of as already there, as being a circle-but-not-a-circle, a line which is already there when it is formed, for you see infinite cannot be ever forming for it would not be infinite, it would be almost infinite, and to be infinite it would have to have been formed all at once, so to think of a quark, the smallest of the subatomic particles, three of which comprise a meson, is to think of infinite as compared to the nearly infinite as thought of today, and as such the quark would be represented by infinite, as it is already there and already formed, and the meson, formed by these things which are nearly infinite would be todays variation on infinite, for one cannot travel infinite but can only try and reach it, so to reach it one must only stand still and BE, and thus one can reach infinity and BE infinity by not attempting infinity, and by following that such train of thought we must then say that we are all infinite, but that cannot be, so we must think of all of us as a part of each other and we are all THERE at the same time, as our quarks were THERE forever, so we, each and all of us, are INFINITE.

An army, a thousand strong, camping for the night. The immense floor of the crater crawled with Soldiers, campfires and tents flaring up in the center. The escarpment glittered with dull reflections and echoed the voices of hundreds of men. Mary watched the confusion, wondering why such a force was wandering the wastes. Lost, perhaps? or searching for some front line they may never find? It did not matter. Mary payed them no heed and returned to her Tent and fell into Sleep.



The jurgammersmen whimpered.



Mary awoke to screaming, to blind confusion. The frejn was at the door, beckoning, come quick. "what is it?" she asked. The screeching heightened in pitch, a mad clammering came from the crater. They arrived at the rim. Mary looked out.



Chaos. Soldiers ran screaming, posessed as if madmen held their souls. Above, in the troubled darkness which was Sky, lay a seething mass of Chaos and Nightmare. Half abberant tentacles swept down to carry off running men. The Bell! The Bell which shall Ring at End Time, the seething mass of Chaos which appeareth in the sky above, the RINGING which rends the hearts of Men and drives them wild with fear, the SCREECHING from upon nigh which shall bring an end to sanity. The ringing the ringing! As if from Hell the BELL shall Ring like the thousand
madmen, and, swooping down an omnipresent fist from Satan shall PLUCK the soldiers from the plain and cast them into thew maw of oblivion!
lol. that got carried away. really quickly. yaaaay. but. thats what makes good writing, no? hell yes.

Mary awoke to the frejn standing over her, a bottle of Consciousness in his hand. She blinked once to clear blurry eyes, then stood and thanked it. Outside the wind howled as it always did, the constant rush of dust eternally whipping against the red landscape. Mary heard the mounts whinny, and, noting the absence of a third, wept. The day was young however, and she steeled herself against the loss of her beloved jurgammersman. There was much travelling to be done, and no time to be wasted. Not much to bury anyway.

The tent came down with ease, and once breakfast was had they set off once again into the Red Wastes.

None saw the humanid come snuffling out of the mist. A dead jen hung in its pack. It felt the ground, simple but clear thoughts holding Conjunction.

Followers
one minus
All were here.
missed?
morning.
beans.
shadow.
eateateat
mustmustmust
energy is the soul of all being
go.

The being ate, tearing off large strips of meat and consuming them through its stomache-hole. Then it sifted off into the wastes, following the tracks of Mary and Frejn.

League after league of gray iron dust assailed the travelers, pushing ever onward into the cracks and folds of their beings, lacing their bodies with the rotten remains of long dead civilizations. Great running lights ran every hundred miles, and at these they would stop, cherishing the last vestiges of hope humanity had left on this world. At the second such light they made camp. Frejn dissapeared once more and Mary set up Tent. Throwing the remains of her dinner into the wind, she attempted to sleep. Before she could drink of it, a vibration reached her ears. A dull rumble on the wind, a trembling in the ground. Something large was approaching. Mary stepped out of the tent. Nothing in sight. Of course, that meant nothing in the Maur. Things came and went here with nary a sight, and to see was not to know what was truly there. A clanging joined in, and Mary stepped out of the tent, curious. There. By that crater, that unholy edifice of the old days, therein lay the sound. Ash crumbled beneath her feet as she climbed, the noises growing louder and greater in number. At the rim, She-Who-Searches-For-Her-Husband looked out and beheld the source of the noise.

The Tracker

In the Mor, a Door Opened. Rusty hinges slid back to a weathered iron door. Lights sounded in the Deep, a rumbling welled up. Then only silence, as the wind whistled past and dust rattled against the cold metal. With infinite slowness a head poked up. The Tracker's shelled head faced the wind, thick trunk sniffing the ground. Synapses fired, slow but sharp thought linking the two brains.

Human.
Woman.
something...
Frejn.
shadow
darkness
That Direction
Runner
DANGER
hidehidehide
nonono
runrunrun
eateateat
foodfoodfood
go.

The shuffling semi-human ambled off into the red wind.

Night

Mary looked at the Red Waste, then at the blackened sun slowly descending towards Horizon.
"We'll camp here for Night" she said.
The Frejn dissapeared after dark, which wasn't that surprising. Mary sat alone at the tent opening, watching Poison rise. Sickly green light washed over the landscape, Luna's silvery glow reduced to a pinprick of silver against the obscene form of the mountain in the sky.
When Ring was at half Brightness, Mary drank of Sleep, and as its cool embarce washed over here, her last thoughts were of her Husband and the Frejn.

In the Night, the scent of humanity drifted on the wind. An amorphous blob with moonshine bottled in its insides slid over to the tent, accompanied by a seahorse headed Djarling. Eel formed figures gathered, followed by a glowering abarition. Luna Mor and the Slug Which Shall Be A Mile In Length changed course, and the Million Year Beast began its Thousand Year Blink to catch a sight of the Human curiosity. Drejn tunneled from the Deep, great wyrm-things. Wings sounded in the Night air, causing general uneasyness in the masses below. The night was rent with silent cries and shuffling, as the Creations of Man came to surround the sleeping Mary, standing in silent thought at the sight of She Who Hunts Her Husband.

The Frejn returned at SunUp to find Poison Setting and the luminous population of the Red Wastes slithering back to the Great Deep. It rushed to the shadow of the tent door and found Mary sleeping inside, unharmed.
To a lesser extent had the Jurgammersmen been left alone. Two remained tied to their posts. The third was listing to the side some hundred feet away, a great liquid gash covering the back leg. As the Frejn watched the gash widened and the shrieking animal dissolved. The thirsty ground sucked up the liquid and in seconds nothing remained.
Such were the ways of the Maur.

The Frejn went to administer Consciousness to the sleeping Mary.

The beginning happened on a rainy saturday morning, among the clickings and scratchings of the Hutchins Small Mammal Reasearch Lab. At exactly 7:42 am, an electrode clicked in the spinal column of Test Subject 54-32/G/Hb. Electricity flowed, patterns linked, and a common lab mouse, genially named Marvin by the scientific staff, became the first mammal since Man to gain sentience.

"Who am I?" He thought.
"Whats is my purpose?"
And then;
"Ah fuck this. It's getting too cliche. I'm getting out of here."
Marvin looked at the cage door. A simple drop bolt was all that stood between him and...open space.
Marvin looked down.
"Ah, fuck. They put me on the top shelf."
Marvins nosed twitched as he looked down at the tiled floor, 6 feet below.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Badgers!

The following headline is a clip from the London Times, marked April 17th, 1883.

Essex- Last night an event occured which can only be described as blank and blank. At approximately 7:28 am this morning, the town of Liston recieved a shock as a large mass of Badgers numbering in the thousands descended upon the town.

Acknowledgements

So we have just enough room for an acknowledgements/thank you page. Could we come up with a list of people we would like to thank for their support, etc.?

After we have the acknowledgements taken care of we can get the copies made. Then all we have to do is staple and fold and hand out!

So list away, please!

more ideas

does anyone read this blog anymore? lol. kinda silent...ok so, a woman lives on a hill in some odd place in the middle of nowhere, maybe a large plain. andddddd she goes on adventures, searching for her husband and stuff. lalaslala. humph. and its called like...Mary of the Hill or something really british and old fashioned. cuz you know, steampunk and all that jazz are the future...hmm. my spelling and grammar are really off. there will be mimsies, of course. DAMNIT i had another idea but i forgot...blast. anyway, really old fashioned concepts used in a future millions of years from now. naturally people will look the same as they do now, maybe wearing victorian clothes and laser pistols. nah. meson cannons and quarkium grenades. YAY XD. and yes, they will commune with god at all times and have intimate questions regarding the universe and its wonders. blurgh. ok. the entire story will be written while listening to GRV's Exsomnis, and perhaps more ninja boy. bella bella quite contrair, stars are burning in your hair, gazing out upon abyss, the earth is quiet, Time's amiss. HER NAME IS BELLA. ARGGGHGHHH.

ideas

Imagine that; a seperate universe existed a long time ago and was attacked by a vast creature of nearly unimaginable size. The beings of this universe fought back to no avail, and sought to flee from the universe into another. So, they opened a gateway in the heart of the universe and in a line stretching from the Core some hundred billion lightyears long, they gathered to set through this portal. The creature (who is called the God-Cloud until i come up with a better less cliche name) attacks attempts to attack the core and in a final blow the beings of the universe strike down with a weapon which causes the Universe to fold back, which causes the Abyss to reach up and swallow the God Cloud, essentially trapping it in some Other Plane. The blow starts a chain reaction which slowly destroys the universe, and the 3 surviving members of the War gather at the portal, look back and see nothing but decay, and move on into another universe. which, naturally, is ours. and so they set up civilization, bla bla bla, create the human race, and eventully in the far future we create a religion which is to find this portal to the dying universe and discover our origins. We fly around in planet sized World Ships named Gethsemane and such, looking for the answer. dunno what the story will be calle,d but for the last 4 years ive been working on it and ive only done the intro.
ok second story- its a short story, somewhat based on the one above. Man dies all of a sudden, and asks God or someone of a similar biblical nature what went wrong. The (deity?) then tells man that at the far end of the universe a star exploded at a very precise frequency which caused the entire universe to vibrate in one giant sine wave. The wave comprised of teh energy of teh universe, and when the wave passed over earth the energy was shifted upwars billion lightyears, essentially leaving earth without any energy to support itself. Thus, the entire planet collapsed into dust.
third story- SENTIENT INC.- In the near future, a court case is held deciding on whether or not an animal is self aware enough to be held liable for a crime. The defendent says no, the prosecutor, yes. In some wierd scifi way, the defendant tells the judge it can prove the animal was aware and the judge tells them to come back in a month with the evidence. The two (brothers?) go off and create an implant which they introduce to teh animal and make it sentient. After that theres a blank zone of approx a year in which i have to think of something to occur. After a year, the brothers are getting famous for their discovery aaaaaand there experimenting with other animals. people want it for their pets, and eventually, like in the Rats of NiMH, a sentient animal escapes and starts doing its own thing. It'll prolly actually be a rat, seeing as they can go undetected for long periods of time. Maybe a pigeon. hmm. Thats all I have of the first book. The second book, which is untitled as of yet, has a front cover showing a mouse playing in a wheatfield with a radar dish coming out of its head. This book will go on to describe the problems created when a sentient animal starts creating its own sentient counterparts instead of just humans doing it. The third book will tell of a distant future where all the animals are sentient, most likely including germs and virus'. Mankind will be either challenged or helped by these sentients, depending on my mood. I like it when evil wins, so prolly challenged. There arent any plans for a 4th book, but it would be on a wildy futuristic scale where animals have conquered the galaxy and are moving onward. Imagine a book of stories about mice trading with tigers and the Great Jellyfish Conquest of Aquatia IV. hmm. and the algae has great spaceborn oceans which they keep in orbit around Sirius and constantly have to fight off the beings living in the sun for energy? GREAT. ok. those are my ideas. sorriy for spelling the like teh and the bad grammar. bye now.

The reason Foundation was voted Best Series of All Time and won out LOTR was not because it depicted the decline and fall of a Galactic Empire with its super epic awesome action scenes (for it has none) but is because it enfolds an idea, and that idea is fully realized to the reader. The action is off screen, somewhere else, and the reader is left to imagien it for themselves.

More housekeeping?

1. This is for all, even those who attend the Writing Club regularly:

All submissions must be sent to thechswritingclub@gmail.com ... ALL.

Just do it, okay?

Idea Post

When the last Bell tolls at the end of the world, Man will say "I was"

"He wasn't in the army, or the navy. Nope, Johnny was a member of the freakin' skyfalling space marines. Yessir, 35th division, corporal 2nd class. Won 3 medals his first year, won 3 more for taking out Ceranus. When that planet cracked open, the Generals, they said Johnny was the best they got. Gave him the solid silver cross for that one. Course the Ceranids weren't too happy. Maybe t'was why they hung 'im up on the streetlight like that, organs all tore to pieces..."
Morgan frowned and walked away.

Im trying to not sound like a certain fictionpress message board labeled "what if". So far i'm succeeding.

Bella is God?

What if I took a poem, took each line, spread them out on a page, and made up a story underneath each one that told of my interpretation of the line? damn./ T'would be interesting.

Sooooo you take an everyday event, make it so epic/thoughtful its a story in itself, and BOOM. good scifi. Or you take an everyday idea, such as....feeding a plant, and replace the plantfood with plutonium or something (shit liek that happened everyday back the 40's and 50s ya know) and all of a sudden you have a giant mutant plant on your hands. BOOM. Good scifi.

Little known fact-good scifi stories do not generally make good scifi movies. Case in point, Battlefield Earth and Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life"

Idea Dump?

Hey so I think the Writing Club blog would be a great place to share any ideas we pick up from our experiences for anyone to use. Things you might not be able to think of a use for but that other people would be able to incorporate into a written piece. I don't know how you guys feel about it. Maybe you'd rather be greedy. What do you think? (I'll wait for a response before I let my ideas go)

Setting, Character, and Plot

So I thought about this today: the laws in the world of a realistic story can reflect the laws of the real world. Setting, character, and plot are all present in real life too, and they all influence each other. There's a reason why people don't hold birthday parties in mortuaries, why people get stressed out when they're living in a warzone, and why a warzone doesn't looks ruined after a war. Events, environments, and people are all interconnected. If one is changing, then there's a good chance another one is changing too. This relationship expleins the necessity for art in the video game "The Sims". If you give your person too dull of an environment he will literally break down and cry. I'd never really though of how much that aspect of the game holds true in regars to the real world.
There is also the realtionships between events, between people, and between environments. The ocean is constantly interacting with the pine studded shore. The man in solitary confinement is growing lonely. The war is ruining the birthday party. There are three dimensions to everything and those dimensions interact in all ways possible, and always.
I would even venture to say that there can be no person/place/action without place/person/action and action/place/person. This trinity is perhaps even as fundamental as rock, paper scissors, as Heaven, Hell, and Earth or as Bulbasaur, Squirtle, Charmander. Perhaps there is even an analogy to be made, that every change spawns two more changes. All things fork out. Perhaps this forking is the essence of freewill and the soul of consequence: there is always a good and a bad reaction. But there are actually far more than two reactions, well, there are three since character affects character. But there is certainly more than one character setting and action. But there are three characteristics in which we group the objective world (in literature).

What do you think?

Housekeeping

Blah blah blah this isn't very creative stuffs, but if we want the lit mag to run smoothly...

1. Did we settle a few days for the contributing editors (and is that really the right name?) to meet and review the submissions? I don't think we did. We have, scheduled, for the magazines to be printed and bound from December 9-11. This means that we should have entries picked, edited/uploaded onto a computer, artfully arranged in a pleasing manner and ready to go by Wednesday Dec. 9... The Friday before is Coffeehouse, so the contributing editors couldn't meet on that day (unless they didn't mind not helping out the prep for C-house).
If the editors don't mind meeting on a Saturday, December 5, for the whole day, I would assume, then we could maybe just scrape by in time. Email thechswritingclub@gmail.com if this day works and email thechswritingclub@gmail.com if it doesn't, or just comment, what the Hell.

2. Here's the list of assignments:

• Editor: Cote
• Advertising Director: Zeb
• Art Director: Dan
• Photographer: Felix
• Contributing Editors (I really don't think that's the right term): Cote, Libby, Dan, Aaron, Veronica... (What about Submission Directors?)
• Feature Contributors: Whoever we can get. Suggestions are: Ms. Belair, Mr. Sica and other such teachers.
• Cote holds the post of going on announcements, but what about submitting something to be read, everyday until we stop submissions? We could write something pithy and creative.

Right. This is kindasortareally important and as such we should move with all deliberate speed.

Fundraising Idea . . . See

So we're gonna have a book drive, see. And it's gonna be a smooth one, a real smooth book drive. We're gonna load up our automobiles with used books, see, this is how we're gonna do it. Got that Bugsy? We're gonna get other people to load up their cars with books too. Then we're gonna send everybody over to Concord High School, and we're all gonna dump 'em off, see, we're gonna dump off the books at the school for the Writing Club. Nyah, see, we'll make a fortune off of those used books, and we'll use the money to publish the magazine, see. Nyah, that's the plan, you hear that Bugsy? I'll say it again, now, this is how it's gonna be, see, all you fellas are gonna bring in your books, you hear, bring 'em in in your car, and take 'em to the Writing Club booksale. We'll sell other people's books there at cheap prices, see, at real cheap prices! We'll get the men to buy novels, and the broads to buy childrens books, nyah. And when we're finished, we'll grab the loot, from the sale, see, and take off down the road. The money'll be ours, see, all ours, nyah, nyah. We'll use it to print the 1454. Nyah see, you hear that Bugsy, all ours, nyah, nyah, nyah!

1454

I think we have our title for the Literary Magazine. That title is 1454, as in the year Johannes Gutenberg first mass printed the Bible on his printing press. Here is some history on the man. He was born in Mainz Germany around 1398 of noble blood. He was originally named Johann Gensfleisch zur Laden (his mother's maiden name was Gutenberg). He learned ze trade of ze goldsmith. Around 1428 poor Johannes and his family were exiled from Mainz for cavorting with local craftsworking rebels . . . who also led a revolution . . . which they were in. They moved to Strassburg. He is known best for the Gutenberg Bible! (of which, Zeb, St. Paul's has an original copy) Apparently Gutey couldn't see too well in his last months. That's because he was going blind (too much fine print?). He printed the bible first on his little hand press in 1440. This is technically the date, or so says the internet. We can choose either 1440 or 1454 and possibly even 1450 but I don't like the sound of that. 1454's got a ring to it. I'm glad we thought of it off hand, like not because we tried.

Grammerr?

The only thing I know. Is that I know nothing. Or whatever.

Also, I remember that my password is eight characters because it has to be. So, I may have used two numbers.

Dialogue

Does anyone have any thoughts on how to do a good dialogue? I know its kinda a broad question. but I thought i'd ask anyway.

This could be relevant, if you would want it to be

This is a segment of the lyrics to "Inflammatory Writ", a song by Joanna Newsom. There is a link to it around here somewhere. Listen, or read, or both at once! [The lyrics] will inevitably make best sense when they're heard the way they were intended to be heard.
I like the middle stanza best but that is, of course, just me.

And all at once, it came to me
And I wrote and hunched 'till four-thirty
But that vestal light
It burns out with the night

In spite of all the time that we spend on it
On one bedraggled ghost of a sonnet
While outside, the wild boars root
Without bending a bough underfoot

Oh, it breaks my heart
I don't know how they do it
So don't ask me!

Keep on Keepin on

I hope this club lasts all year. Does anybody else? I think if we are to have it remain (in other words, to keep thing as such) then we must either feed it an excess of Swiss sweets or a feast of fresh fruit. We have to avoid shitting in our club's mouth, which is at present well-brushed. So make sure your airplanes are carrying European passengers, nice ones (not French?) and not fat, quick-to-point-out Americans. Let us give if we are to get. Let us lift if we are to be lifted. Let us finish. . . well maybe that's the wrong word. I'm just saying, I admire this club and its members. Listen! Are you listening? Well............................WRITE! No, really. You administrators are so good at it, yes, even you "Chaste Chancellor". You are just what I was praying would come out of the metalwork and clang into this club. As your silly, silly magistrate I raise a toast, "Long live us!" (or if not, at least "Live us!"

P.S. Zeb, you got me all hanged up on ze grimoir. I ask, once you are over being so smarter than we all. Can you tell us grammar. Like maybe hand out, presentation or! I meaned "?" Really; I means can you asist us in grimoir w/ you're talentz?

Happy Mistakes

Every so often I'll make a mistake in my writing. I'll spell a word wrong or write the wrong word or something. This is more like often than every so often. But sometimes a mistake sounds wonderful. It sounds fresh and out of character.

As a writer I tend to fall into a general way of speaking, a pattern of verb tense, a category of sentence structure. When I screw up it's like I'm falling off of that pattern and onto a new one.

Treasure little mutations like this. Collect your happy mistakes. They appear only when they want to, like good dreams.

As a human you have one life. As a human writer you have a special interest which stokes your artistic talent. You take certain parts of your life and keep them. You live and sleep with one eye open. You are aware of the gems in the river silt, incorporating them (the oustide) and your thoughts (the inside) then putting it all on paper.

This is a substantial part to the art of writing, the process of attention. What's wonderful is that you have more time now than ever again to pay attention. You are lucky every moment because of this.

Be grateful that things are on their way, that when they arrive, you can use your writing to greet them and provide a home for them to stay in. Learn to appreciate happy mistakes and certain moments different from the rest, they are all you have to work with in becoming a better writer.

-Cote

Writing Club 2009-2010

So here's the blog. A good place to put your words, I think. Any ideas for a motto? Anyways, the first meeting we held was incredible. It lasted four and a half hours, not including the after party. We should have an even bigger group this week.

I want us to use this blog. If your like me (a writer) you'll probably know how to say things, and want to say them. By say I mean write. Especially little stories or poems, definitely things you learn that we could benefit from. Or sayings or quotes about writing (or thoughts)! And they don't have to be edited for content or structure, just basic grammar, and spelling if you don't feel you have that already.

Please write.

-Cote