Most of what I create does not see the light of day.

That's right. Most of my drawings ends up crumbled up in the trash, or burned, or deleted. Most of my screenplays I will never be stupid enough to try to make into movies or cartoons. A majority of the things I type will never be posted in the Scooposphere.

But today I'd like to share some samples of failure with you.


It is always a difficult decision, when I come to the point of discontinuing work on a story. I no longer delete them, because sometimes I come back to them months or years later and see some glimmer of promise I couldn't see before. But there is no use lending infinite massage to something that seems for the present too sick to survive. And so I hereby stop typing the story a few weeks ago I threatened to release, entitled Killing Marigold Twice.

In the interest of preserving whatever bits may have not been totally without merit, I shall pepper this diary entry with a handful of passages that seem half-decent to me, despite the overall abject shitastrophe of the unfinished piece. For instance:

Let me tell you a little bit about myself. My name is Errol. I'm a man and I was born on Earth. I'm twenty-six years old. I am not attractive. I am essentially shaped like a pineapple, except that I keep my hair cut short.

Intriguing? Vaguely funny? You tell me. But this was the passage that got me out of bed in the middle of the night a few weeks ago, driven to type my thoughts out before they all escaped. I wanted to write a simple story of a basically normal but bashful man living in the not-too-distant future, with a problem rooted in his own very relatable emotional world that finds a solution in the otherworldly technologies of his day (high verisimilitude immersive simulations, a popular art and science among citizens of the Joviat who lack the open and unhostile spaces of Earth or Mars in which to revel).

My favourite part of the day is commuting on the train to the city, leaning my head against the glass and watching the fields stream by. I never talk to anyone, unless I bump into them or step on their foot. It is a public hour we spend in private: the twilit world, my reflection, the cool glass.

A bit pretentious, I reckon, but I think it speaks to many people's commuting experience. I wanted to give very little information about the world Errol lived in at first, in order that the reader feel it was a primarily a people-driven story, with the science-fiction backdrop standing only to enhance the character action. At this point the reader should not wonder too deeply about what kinds of fields Errol might be seeing out the train window -- it would've been an awkward time to launch into a big to-do about yeast farming. Still, the passage is very stilted, lacking the easy give and take flow of Errol and Marigold's first meeting -- which I find bumbling and cute. Others may disagree, finding it affected and trite.

Marigold met me at the company picnic. She didn't mean to. Nobody that pretty would mean to meet me. But when she bumped into me and spilled white wine on my shirt she felt obliged to help me find a napkin. "I'll find you a napkin!" she promised seriously, grabbing my hand and towing me through the crowd.

(She grabbed my real hand, of course, because I keep my fake one in my pocket.)

"I'm sure it won't stain," I told the back of her head. Some people looked at us as we passed, and I thought stupid things about what they might think. Maybe they think we're together, I thought. Stupid!

She stopped short and I ran into her. "Omigosh," she cried. "I'm sorry again!"

"I'm sorry," I said.

We were standing by the sad remains of a pillaged buffet -- twin rows of steam-trays containing single noodles, puddles of sauce and crusts of pies. A lone napkin rested by the cutlery, holding a wet emsemble of olive pits. "Shit," she said. And then, "Listen, you wait here and I'm going to run to the washroom and get some paper towel, okay?"

"It's fine, really -- really, just nevermind," I said.

"Oh shit, it isn't. I'm sorry. Look, I'll be right back, okay?"

"Okay," I conceded.

Then, when she started off toward the washroom, I ran away.

The Fake Michael Moore was critical of the last sci-fi story I posted into the Scooposphere, Two Moments of Invention, on the grounds that the protagonist was boring and insipid on account of his being nothing more than a fantasy-analogue of the author himself. This is difficult to deny, especially in light of where this newer story was starting to head. Consider Errol's profession:

Basically, I counterfeit the real world to populate worlds of dreams. It isn't glamorous. I spend a lot of time making running shoes and potted ferns. Sometimes I design the water stains on ceiling tiles. My claim to fame in the industry is that my implementation of a dog turd generator is still used in lower-tier commercial simulations around the world. (If you've got your street licence you've probably stepped in my work.)

...Which could be straight out of any CBB narrative, give or take a tweak. I know Errol isn't me, but he is based on me. My question is: how could he avoid being based on me? I'm no actor -- I'm just trying to write what I know, gussied up with some sci-fi props and gratuitous nudity (which, on second thought, is much like my life anyway). I want a feeling of authenticity, yet I am obsessed with outer space and robots. How can I synthesize these goals?

If I just write what I know, won't all of my stories end up being the same story told over and over again? I mean, I only lived the one life.

A braver man would venture out into third person narrative, telling stories about strangers. But I don't like the third person. I'm always asking myself, "Who wrote book? Who typed it out? How did he know?" But this preference is self-defeating, I know, because in order to remain consistent I could never tell a story about a protagonist who dies (otherwise who would be relating the account?). I know, I know -- stupid, literal, irrelevant.

Which broaches another troubling issue: should I write from my preferences, or write only what I believe to be sound storytelling devices? That is, do I listen to my gut or listen to reason? My preference for first-person understated sci-fi may be my typing undoing, if I too stubbornly cling to my 'druthers. But my founding philosphy of creative typing is this: type only what you yourself would like to read...and I have the unsophisticated palette of a pulp-hungry cinema-raised tit-brained man-child.

That's why this story died. I decided I wouldn't want to read it. If I came across it in an anthology, I'd have skipped to the next story.

And, is this pretty or just fucking gay? I don't claim to know.

I was on the train. My head against the window, I was lost in non-thought.

The sun caught me by surprise. It crested the horizon without warning and released a piercing light, blinding me. I was forced to turn away. Several of my fellow commuters slotted down the shades where they sat, and so the car became striped with bands of light. The train swayed on the rail and the stripes swam.

My vision cleared of the sun's drifting pinprick afterimage and the faces of the people opposite me became defined. I saw that Marigold was seated there. (She hadn't told me her name when she spilled the wine, but I knew it anyway.) She gave me a little smile and waved hello with her fingertips. She was pinned in a ray of dazzle from the window, so she had one eye squinched shut.

"Hi," I said. (I'm shy but I'm not a barbarian.)

"Why did you run away from me?" she asked me point blank.

I busied myself slotting down the shade. "I'm sorry," I said. "Would you prefer the shade down?"

"No," she said.

"Oh," I said, looking at the closed shaded shade dumbly. "I didn't mean to."

I heard her ask, "Didn't mean to pull the shade or run away?"

"Probably both," I ventured.

"Why don't you ever look at me, Errol? Is it because of the scar?"

I turned away from the shade. The two matrons in black seated next to us were watching me with barely restrained interest. Marigold was looking at me frankly, a small smile on her interrupted lips. Her beauty made my breath catch, and my abdomen quiver. My eyes dropped.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Nothing's wrong," I told her. I suddenly felt that I smelled like meat.

So I'm telling elements of the same story over again, rehashed themes from Two Momments of Invention -- the schism between actual and virtual, the border between creator and monster, the violence we can do to others in order to heal ourselves.

I have a top of the line immersion set at home, and in my professional capacity I have access to industrial-grade simulation creation tools, including petabyte object scanners and a back catalogue representing thirty years of simulated environments.

So it was easy for me to decide how to channel my feelings for Marigold, without risk. I simulated her...

I would take the unfinished versions home and plug them into the immersion set, to spend a quiet hour at the foot of the mute, mindless statue in progress. I dressed her in a sweater and skirt, as in life. Her hair was down and her hands hung loosely at her sides. Her face was impassive, but her brown eyes followed me. She was only a shell at that point -- an apparition with a limited set of behaviours up to and including remaining standing under simulated gravity -- but I found myself talking to her anyway. I found I had a lot to say.

An untallied personality engine did eventually find its way into my possession, but it was based on a standard spear-carrier profile and it only had five basic sets of behaviours: milling, cheering, disgruntled, panicked and riotous. Seeing as most of these modes would bring me no comfort to see in Marigold, I usually left her to mill. If I ran into her in the simulation she'd excuse herself, and if I knocked her down she'd become indignant. "Goodness!" she'd say, in a freeware female voice.

Okay, that is kinda funny if you're not too put off by the frufrooey alliteration pattern (s, s, f, f, v). The transcendence of what he worships is tainted by absurdity -- another classic CBB theme. And then, again echoing the voyeuristic creepiness of the Slimfast Metamucil:

"Is lunch somehow safer than dinner?"

I nodded, chewing. I wagged my roll meaningfully until I could swallow. "Yes, it is. Isn't it? I mean, it's less overtly romantic."

Marigold leaned back in her seat and arched one eyebrow. "So lunch is only covertly romantic."

"I'm on to your trick," I said, smiling. "You're trying to shock me by being blunt." I felt very brave for having said such a blunt thing, but I took a breather by sipping ice-water. I looked at Marigold through the bottom of the glass but I couldn't make out her expression, her features swimming in the bevelled translucence.

"Are you having lunch with me to prove something to yourself?" she asked as I lowered my glass. "Are you trying to prove you're not afraid of me?"

I took a moment to rearrange the items on my placemat. Her candour took my breath away, but there was only one way to meet it: in kind. I looked up and saw her framed against the windows of the galleria eatery, the sky filled from rail to rim by the bands and whorls of the grand face of Jupiter. I put my right hand on the table. "This hand is artificial," I said.

She furrowed her brow, leaned in closer.

I went on, "I am afraid of you. I'm afraid of you because I have a crush on you. Like a kid in school." I nodded at my fake hand. "But my last relationship ended...badly."

"Violently?"

I nodded. "I didn't bring it up to talk about it, I just brought it up so you'd know it was there. To help explain why I act the way I do, around you."

"I would listen," she said in a quieter tone, her brown eyes pointing into mine. "Have you ever thought about how it might help to...just talk to someone nice about it?"

"...Yes," I admitted.

Marigold pushed her sweatered arms across the table and seized my fake hand before I could withdraw it. She drew it closer and turned it over, her index finger tracing a spiral out of my palm and across my wrist to the transition line. "Where does the real you start, Errol?" she asked.

"Right where your finger is," I whispered.

"Can't even tell," she said, shaking her head. "Really beautiful work."

She continued to touch the fake hand but I drew it back. She thought it was because of my discomfort with the hand itself, but in truth the reflex sprang from my unwillingness to have her discover my true mission: along my forearm inside my shirt lay the antenna that was drinking in the signals of the recording beads I had planted all around the booth prior to my highly specific reservation. The beads listened and watched and mapped Marigold, and their co-ordinated efforts were being written to a strip of memory taped inside my armpit.

Over soup she said, "You still haven't told me what you're proving to yourself if it isn't courage."

"Maybe I just like your company," I suggested. "Maybe I don't have anything to prove."

"Men always have something to prove," she assured me.

"Okay," I agreed noncomittally, shifting in my chair and trying to think of a casual way to steer the conversation toward the next personality mapping question. "Can I ask you something weird?"

"How weird?"

"Hypothetical weird. I want to ask you what five things you'd take with you if you were stranded on a deserted island."

"A what?"

"An uninhabited island, in the middle of the sea."

"Here?"

"No, on Earth."

"That's pretty hypothetical."

Hot lunches arrived, and we sat back in calm silence as the waitress put down our plates and collected our soup bowls. When she was gone I said, "Please humour me. It's just my little way of getting to know people."

Marigold smirked, the scar across her lips tucking into a crescent as she did. "And that's the best question you could think of?"

I shrugged. "No, I have others."

It's shortly after this point in the story that I injected the character of Omar, a personality antithetical to Errol and every way and yet (cryptically inexplicably) they're pals...I hint that they have a history together, which may be another story for another time. The thing is, it wasn't long into Omar's introductory scene that I realized that nearly everything that happened plot-wise would be at his instigation -- I had introduced him to solve certain technical problems, but he ended up upstaging my protagonist with an even less credible, broadly-drawn nemesis magically responsible for driving the engine of the story.

"Hello Omar," I said darkly.

"You're not happy to see me, or what?" he said, snapping off the immersion set and tossing it carelessly onto a table. "Come give me a hug, you stupid man!" he grinned, gleaming white teeth splitting his dark face. He grabbed me and pulled me into a tight embrace, smothering me.

I stumbled back, gasping. "You smell terrible," I informed him.

That's when I re-read the story and realized, "Aw, crap. This sucks." Fucking fiction! (It's so much easier to type stories when you already know who everybody is, and what they're going to do.) Who will I ever write a novel if I suffer from these kinds of crises of confidence? I don't believe in the story, so how could I expect a reader to?

For posterity, here's the hook. Would you be intrigued enough to read on?

I killed Marigold twice. The first time was easy, the second time was hard.

I'm not a violent fellow at heart, but I was just coming out of a relationship in which I'd lost my right hand. When the person you love amputates parts of you, it can put you in a really weird space, emotionally speaking. I was confused.

I wasn't ready to fall in love with Marigold, and that's why I started the simulation in the first place. I didn't want anyone to get hurt. I was just getting used to having no real right hand, and I needed a place to be alone with my thoughts. You know, to sort out my shit. And Marigold was always so sympathetic. So I wanted her to be there, too.

And then things got out of hand.

Would you feel betrayed later when the story turned out to be sci-fi? Is it disconcerting when you're thinking people live in contemporary times for a few paragraphs, and then you pick up the hint that their sky is filled by the eye of Jupiter? I drop the hints like breadcrumbs: the sky is black, the sun is a hard pin-point blaze, dropped objects fall slowly...

Myself, I prefer the subtle reveal. But my tastes are not universal.

What my taste is telling me now is that I'm a pretty hopeless hack when it comes to writing fiction. I'm not sure when I'll try again after this dismal failure. When I do, though, I suspect I'll try to tell the same or a similar story yet again -- I'm a one-trick pony when it comes to short stories, it seems. What's on my mind is on my mind, and even a handful of years doesn't dislodge it.

I had been writing this story for Admiral Rusty's latest web experiment, but that seems to have been indefinitely delayed due to human reproduction (there is no website at the domain he registered, and the January 1st start date has come and gone). So, the pressure to complete this piece of shit has been removed.

I have other flawed projects to struggle with that take priority, anyway.

Yours in hackery,
MFDH