The NCDC Club

Several years ago, I started this mysterious little Secret Society called the NCDC Club over on America Online. The club was intended for those who were serious writers, those who remained In-Character and viciously plotted some amazing stories in journals and in the chat rooms. For those who were not part of the NCDC, there was quite the ruckus in trying to crack the acronym and figure it all out, along with a dose of desperation in being part of the IN crowd.

Well, there was nothing really IN about the NCDC club, the gist of which was taken from a line of the antagonist character Annie Wilkes in Stephen King's "Misery" novel.

If you're at all familiar with the novel, the line was delivered in a fit of delusional rage when Annie Wilkes was reciting a childhood memory of going to the weekend matinees at the movie theater, where prior to the main feature the audiences were treated to a weekly serial that ended each week with the hero in dire straits. The following week, the hero would manage to get out of the impossible situation.. only by way of cheating via the script writer's loss of realism and continuity. As an avid fan of stories, this naturally angered the young Annie Wilkes -- enough that she carried her rage well into adulthood.


"No caca doodie cheaters!" On pain of death and dismemberment, we swear to never cheat (god-mode), lest we infuriate our Number One Fan!

So in honor of the crazed Ms. Annie Wilkes, I salute all the writers of the secret NCDC Club society. You know who you are!

The NPC

This was a great little Wiki article that sums up NPCs very nicely. I've italicized a few points in the article below that I wanted to touch upon:

* NPCs vary greatly in importance - It's rather obvious in the article that there's a general consensus that NPCs are necessary and integral to the telling of the story in the game. Yet in many role play venues, this is not the case at all, where the majority of NPCs are pulled out of someone's ass at convenient times to avoid certain predicaments within a story. More often than not, these NPCs have no persona whatsoever, and are completely emasculated.. like wooden dummies on a stick. They are not a viable part of any story at all, but are frequently used either to deter god-moders, or to aid and abet god-moders.

* Doing (NPCs) well is.. one of the hallmarks of a good GM - This just goes without saying, and not merely the hallmark of a good GM, but a good Writer as well, who can understand and appreciate the dynamics of well-rounded characters in general, whether PC or NPC. I'm touchy about my NPCs. Ask anyone who knows me. If someone tries to take over an NPC of mine without permission, they get a smack on the hand for bad form. Many of my NPCs upstage my own main PCs! So yeah, they're important.

* The more "real" the NPCs feel, the more fun players will have interacting with them in character - Again this goes without saying. But I'm going to say it anyway. Flesh out your NPCs. Make your role play partners hallucinate and forget the person working the puppet strings. If they're seeing the mun behind the scenes and not the character, PC or NPC makes no difference, then you're not doing it right.

* A player who is without a player character of his or her own can temporarily take control of an NPC - Player beware. For many, finding someone to fill the shoes of an NPC temporarily is a boon. But for some, a poorly played NPC could be the ruination of a great character. Sadly, I have given over a few cherished NPCs of mine to players who swore they could do the character justice, only to find myself banging my head on my desk three posts away. It makes me very reluctant now to offer out my NPCs for other people to play.


How do you feel about NPCs? If you've got any input to add on the subject.. please share!



Role-playing games
A non-player character, often shortened to NPC, is a character that is controlled by the game master in role-playing games. When this definition extends to video games, an NPC in a video game is usually part of the program, and not controlled by a human.

NPCs vary greatly in importance, from the NPC innkeeper seen once by the player characters, to the NPC arch-nemesis who comes back time-after-time again for an entire campaign. While every inhabitant of the game's world except the PC's are NPC's, very few are given any detail by the game master (GM). In fact, most of the minor ones are invented on the spot as needed—doing this well is in fact one of the hallmarks of a good GM. There is some debate about how much work a game master should put into an important NPC's statistics; some players prefer to have every NPC completely defined with stats, skills, and gear, while others define only what is immediately necessary and fill in the rest as the game proceeds. There is also some discussion as to just how important fully fleshed-out NPCs are in any given RPG, but it is general consensus that the more "real" the NPCs feel, the more fun players will have interacting with them in character.

Playability
In some games and in some circumstances, a player who is without a player character of his or her own can temporarily take control of an NPC. Reasons for this vary, but often arise from the player not maintaining a PC within the group and playing the NPC for a session or from the player's PC being unable to act for some time (for example, because they are injured or in another location). Although these characters are still designed and normally controlled by the game master, when players are given the opportunity to temporarily control these non-player characters it gives them another perspective on the plot of the game. Some systems, such as Nobilis, encourage this in their rules. ~Wikipedia

That Thing You Write - Bildungsroman

6. Bildungsroman - "A bildungsroman is a novel that traces the development of a character from childhood to adulthood, through a quest for identity that leads him or her to maturity. The term bildungsroman comes from the German for formation novel, or education novel." (Ginny Wiehardt)

Within the gist of a story and its many plots, the peeling away of a character's many onion layers to get to his or her soul is the most tantalizing part of all. And often the most difficult thing for many writers to grasp hold of. Without the glimpses into history, without the circumstantial molding and shaping into specific flaws or graces, it is almost impossible for an audience to connect to the character's humanity. We're just nosy creatures by nature. And in storytelling, it is essential for the writer to sate the nosy needs of an audience.

I think perhaps the most compelling example for a bildungsroman is "Sybil," the 1973 book by Flora Rheta Schreiber. And while it doesn't exactly follow the chronology of passing from childhood into adulthood, it does indeed paint a vivid, circumstantial portrait detailing all the reasons behind the main character's bizarre behavior. I was eleven when I read that book, and to this day I distinctly remember a choking sensation over this woman's harrowing childhood experiences. It has stayed with me and left enough of a lasting impression that I don't think I could read the book again.

What else is the bildungsroman for, if not to draw an audience into the heart and soul of a character, and leave a lasting impression?

In a Flash - Gone

So after a couple of days wondering how in the hell someone just presses the delete button without any warning or provocation, and shoves several thousand posted submissions into the irretrievable waste basket of electronic purging, I've finally just taken a deep breath and let it go. I thought it impossible to rationalize such a thing, that someone could possibly have that little respect for the work of others.. or that little respect for the medium, period. It baffled me two days ago.. to the point that I lost sleep over it. (Eh, but I lose sleep over just about everything. Welcome to the world of a chronic insomniac). And it still baffles me.

But it isn't like I've never lost precious pieces of myself to the electronic void over the last thirteen years. I have. I've even lost countless works of mine in hard copy format over the years during my many cross country moves. I was born with a wander lust. I have always traveled lightly, picking up at the drop of a hat, and leaving anything behind that I could not carry. I have also been guilty of pushing that delete button on numerous of my own manuscripts, flushing things away into ozone of cyber space. Things that, sadly, I can never reclaim.

It hurts. I'm attached at the hip to my own writing, and in a very personal and intimate way. It is almost narcissistic.

I'm wondering if I even want to sign on to the internet anymore; if there are not countless better things to do with my time. There's a chair over there in the corner with my name on it, collecting dust. It's a chair that faces an archived stack of scattered notes, big and small, written on anything and everything from sticky post-its to matchbook covers, to cash register receipts. It's a composite of the past when a package of disposable pens, (Papermate Write Bros. medium point, because Bic pens with their faceted edges sucked), a bookshelf filled with dictionaries and reference volumes, and a library that stayed open late were all you needed.

That chair over there in the corner is looking better and better to me with each passing day. And believe me when I say this: If I go over there and dust it off, I will get lost.. just like I did in the good old days. And I won't be coming back again.

That Thing You Write - Avant-garde

5. Avant-garde - from a French term originally referring to the vanguard of the army.

The term was extended beginning in the late 19th century to describe movements in art and literature that call for experimentation and revolt against tradition.

"Avant-garde represents a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The notion of the existence of the avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism. Many artists have aligned themselves with the avant-garde movement and still continue to do so, tracing a history from Dada through the Situationists, to postmodern artists such as the Language poets." Wikipedia

While I don't often think of literature in terms of avant-garde, I will say this in deference to one extraordinary beat poet: His poem Howl left me breathless, and for very personal reasons that struck a deep chord inside of me when a college literary professor of mine had noted on the margin of one of my essays that it was "written in the spirit of Ginsberg's Howl."

Certainly I am no Allen Ginsberg. But when I finally read this poem many, many years after leaving college, I was spellbound. Spellbound that anyone would compare my work to his.


So, here is my one shining example of literary avant-garde, courtesy of Allen Ginsberg's Howl:



I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and thingy and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills of Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be f*u*c*ked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom.
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate thingy and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, thingysman and Adonis of Denver--joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to the each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts
who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy, and
who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 a.m. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time--
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

That Thing You Write - Antagonist

3. Antagonist - sometimes referred to as the villain, the bad guy, or nemesis, this is the character who opposes the protagonist or hero. The antagonist is the necessary element which provides a story's conflict.

The Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert for example, in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, is an evil nemesis from beginning to end, while Cedric the Saxon's character plays only minor antagonism to the hero, Wilfred of Ivanhoe.

Sometimes the antagonist is not always so clear cut, such as when the perceived villain turns out to be other than what the writer originally made you believe about him. The Harry Potter novels are filled with delightful, shady flip flops between character tendencies toward hero and villain, designed to keep an audience guessing and always surprised.

Also, the antagonist does not always have to be an actual character, but is sometimes just a force which works against the hero in the tale, such as a rash of bad luck, a severe storm, etc.

That Thing You Write - Allusion

2. Allusion - Within one literary work, it is the practice of making reference to another work, such as a film, a work of art, a book or novel, or even a real event. While allusions may be used to draw upon the collective understanding between writer and audience, they do occasionally run the risk of alienating those in an audience who have no familiarity with what has been alluded to.


One of my favorite allusions is a reference from To Kill A Mockingbird, which comes from the movie Benny & Joon. After Benny discloses to Sam that Joon suffers from chronic schizophrenia, Sam sneaks down to the kitchen, staring at Joon from the stairwell. After spying him from the corner of her eye, Joon asks him: "Having a Boo Radley moment, are we?"

Of course, for someone who has never seen or read To Kill A Mockingbird, this line would not be obvious in drawing reference between Sam's blank stares and Boo Radley's blank stares.

That Thing You Write - Alliteration

Coming up:
A list of fifty-three commonly used terms used by writers of fiction.


1. Alliteration - the use of repetitious consonant sounds in a verse or sentence, more commonly used in poetry, but many fiction writers sometimes make use of it (sometimes without even realizing it) to convey rhythmic styles in narrative or dialogue, place emphasis on certain mental imagery -- or for humorous effects.

Most often the use of alliteration will strike a chord in the flow of speech and literature, giving it a comforting sound or rhythm. Such as in Shakespeare's Sonnet XXX:
"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought...."

Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream:
"Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade,
He bravely breach'd his boiling bloody breast."

Robert Browning's A Grammarian's Funeral:
"No! yonder sparkle is the citadel's
Circling its summit.
Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights:
Wait ye the warning?"


And of course some extreme and rather humorous examples of repetitive consonants for example:
A big black bug bit a big black bear and made the big black bear bleed blood.
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
She sells seashells by the seashore.

Sleeping With Eddie

(Selection from Ugly Vegas)

Eddie's voice cut to the quick and with a hushed gasp, the Baroness looks to its source. The doorway.. So he'd either been watching all along or he came moseying by at the end to show good 'ole Rudy the door. Like the delivery man, Lara feels guilty, kneeling there, her lips shiny with another man's ejaculate. Guilty that she'd crumbled so easily to the will of not the lesser man but of Eddie. She licks slowly at the sore spots on her mouth but doesn't get up from her kneel.

"Is it because I've been with so many men.. that you don't want me?" No blow jobs because her mouth is a dumping ground. No sex for the same reason. Maybe that's why Quist is as stand-offish as he is.. and why he prefers to merely watch her take on man after man.

Gone in Sixty Seconds. Rudy dashed from the penthouse suite without ever looking back, leaving the blonde foreign bitch and the Vegas Snowman to their lonesome once again. Eddie remained there in the doorway, crossing his arms over his chest as he stared down at Lara on the bedroom floor as she seemed once again to beg something from him. The girl wanted.. to be wanted. Wanted by him, no less. And yet he remained there, staring down at her with the same stony, passionless expression all the while. Gone were the shits and grins from his previous egging of Rudy the clothing delivery guy. And what seemed a fun game, was now quite over.

It was amusing the way a broad concluded her worthlessness if she got rejected the least little bit. And here this bitch, Lara Mortonmere could have any dick she wanted. Any dick at all. Eddie didn't answer her. His mood seemed to have changed a bit in the past half hour or so.

Lara doesn't do well to be stared at. Her hopeful expression falters as her eyes seek solace in a stare to the carpet, down and away from Eddie. She's a vision. Honey skin, long blonde hair, features that make a man's mouth water but he makes her feel like soap scum ringing a neglected bath tub. He wasn't going to answer. Or maybe he didn't need to but with a clipped nod, she at last rises from her subservient kneel to look about for something to where. None of her clothes await her in the bed room.. she'd shed them prior to her arrival here so with a barely audible sigh, she tries to edge past Eddie, trying to hug the wall opposite from him so she wouldn't be the added spark to his powder keg. His silences frightened her.

Eddie stuck his leg out there inside the door's frame, refusing to grant her passage to the other side, still garbed in a filthy pair of Levis that he'd never bothered to zip up.. ever since Rudy had entered their suite to deliver clothes. His tip far more generous than the twenty bill Lara had originally intended to give him -- two sips off a spilled beer and a blow job.

"Go to bed, Baby Doll," he finally broke his silence at last.

Blocked from passing, her dark eyes fly to his face.. but seeing no fury edged there in sharp relief, Lara allows herself a shaky breath. All that was in her wanted to slide her hand down the exposed patch of flesh between the flaps of his jeans, to make him happy.. and liking her better but touching Eddie could spell disaster. With a bite to her bottom lip, she brushes her fingertips over denim alone, one of those flaps batted away from his stomach to better the view. She's in love with Quist.. in her own way. In their own way.

"Yes, Eddie.." she whispers, retreating from him to pad back over to one side of the bed. Obediently she slides beneath the covers, turning down his side.. in case he wished to follow.

Eddie kind of liked the broad. Funny that. For the man didn't much like anyone at all. That is not to say he disliked anyone. e was simply indifferent.. to the whole human race. A social pariah who could easily enough turn on the charm and pretense, in order to get what he wanted. Until the scene was over. He'd not endure a close relationship for any other reason, than to gain something for himself. He'd tolerated Rudy just long enough.. not so much to sate his penchant for voyeurism, but perhaps to sate the hungry whore, Lara. Who seemed.. insatiable. Look at her! Still wanting something more.

Eddie remained there, standing in the doorway with both arms folded over his chest for several minutes after the broad turned back and crawled into the big, king-sized bed. It seemed he might have been contemplating leaving.. the way his jaw twitched once or twice.

"Don't go.. stay.." She whispers. No longer reclining with her head on the pillow, Lara lifted up to gently pat the spot beside her, straightening the pillow slightly. He hadn't followed and the Baroness can sense she is about to lose him to beer and the boob tube.

"I could rub your back, Eddie. Or .. we can just sleep. When was the last time we slept?"

Together they'd been awake for more than one day, possibly two. The past hours bled together and she wasn't sure what day it was. And she should be more worried about the American police and that lech, Carlo whatever, but right now, she only wants Eddie Quist to like her. Just a little. Especially after Rudy.. because for some reason or another, Lara is sure that whole episode is all her fault. She'd failed some test. She should have said no.

She ought to be crashing soon enough after her last hit of coke -- especially after the three-day no-sleep marathon. And whether the insatiable little crack whore realized it or not, Edward Quist meant to take care of her needs. Food, sleep, sexual gratification in one way or another, and permission to use the crapper any damn time she needed. The bare essentials for survival. What was odd.. was that he cared at all. Eddie could just as easily crash out on the couch in front of the tv, and seemed to have every intention of doing so. That is until she rose up and gave a pat to the fluffy king-sized pillow in its crisp white linen case.

His arms unfolded and at last he pushed himself from the door frame and right into the bedroom. Near the bed he turned his back to her and tugged his filthy Levis right off. They were stiff enough almost to stand there on their own -- and even walk away. And right afterward, Eddie sat down on the edge of the bed with his back to Lara, and stared out at the glittering neon Vegas panorama out the large bay window. He hadn't slept.. since he met the bitch.

"Been days," he said quietly.

In her own right, Lara plays a little hard ball. The sheet does lovely things to her beautifully full breasts, sliding down their firm, tawny slopes to catch for a breathless moment at her nipples before falling away to her lap. She crosses her long legs when he approaches, turning towards him to ever-so gently run her hand down his back. It is soothing, not sexual for his words bring it home how bloody weather-worn they are. She doesn't say anything more, worried she might topple the precariously balanced apple cart and screw herself out of this tiny concession. She gets to rub his back. First only one handed and tentatively at that.. but finally Lara gathers her legs beneath her to kneel naked behind him. She feels something.. a connection. It stands out from the pleasant buzz in her head. Eddie needs her. He wouldn't hit her.. or get angry if he didn't feel something. She runs her hands over him slowly sometimes going as high as the back of his neck, sometimes as far as the ends of his shoulders.

Eddie didn't writhe or twist the way most would do under such a slow caress of hands. Instead he sat there motionless.. lost in some kind of daze in his own world where none were privy to enter. And for several minutes he simply tolerated the woman's closeness; didn't shove her away. Then after a particular long and silent spell, he asked very quietly:

"Why'd you suck him?"

One would think that question would be a shocker but Lara is either too tired to feel that emotion or she saw it coming. So how to answer it? She stares at his shoulder in thought, making tiny figure eights on his warm warm skin.

"At first.. because you wanted me to, Eddie." His shared wink.. his offering her up like his own little complimentary gift. It had made her feel good to be considered his property, even if that later waned.

Cock sucking seemed such a selfless act; nothing at all in it for the one who knelt and sucked. It was the purest act of giving from bitch to alpha.. and one he'd seen plenty of in all his years behind bars in the Leavenworth federal penitentiary. So why had she chosen the subservient cock-sucking when she could have had herself a nice fuck between the legs, replete with kisses and hugs and shit? When it seemed Lara hadn't gotten the gist of his question, he turned his head aside and glanced back at her with a stretch from the corners of his eyes.

"Why didn't you just let him fuck you, instead?" He laid his hand down right atop the broad's knee.

Lara frowns slightly and when the pretty lady frowns, her lips pooch out in a lovely pout.

"Because.. I wanted someone else."

Women were finicky like that. Even whores could go strange and prefer the man who got them hot and bothered in the first place to sate them. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered and she might've richly enjoyed riding Rudy's thick prong but not when Eddie wasn't her lover too. The fact he hadn't taken the plunge -- but wasn't adverse to doing so with other women, aka that despot bitch, Rebecca -- made Lara feel like she wasn't good enough. And it also made him three thousand times more alluring. Lara wanted what she cannot have.

"Did I do bad by not fucking him? I thought you wanted me to make him happy, Eddie.. I'm sorry.."

Lara was given a glimpse inside. Just a mere glimpse where she was no longer the outsider, but the third wheel Rudy was instead. Rudy had been the set-up, afterall. The one meant to put on a show and perform; the one meant to be useful and butter up a hungry whore's cunt.

"Don't be suckin' dicks no more, Baby Doll." Eddie squeezed her knee, deciding right then and there that he didn't like the broad suckin' the dicks of johns.

"I don't want you doin' that." And that was that. Though interestingly enough, he'd tolerated her sucking his own flaccid cock right before Rudy had arrived with his delivery of clothes. But.. that was different. Lara was his bitch.

Eddie pushed her knee aside and finally laid himself down on the bed, stretching out flat while staring up at the ceiling.

But. .but.. he'd insisted she suck the cabbie's dick! He was going to beat her black and blue if she did not and by his own admission Eddie had richly enjoyed playing voyeur to her oral skills. Lara doesn't argue with him though, she only nods while trying her best to use her tongue as a squee-gee and get rid all the remnants of Rudy's cum out of her mouth. Eddie didn't like what she did, even if the delivery man sure did.

"I promise.. I won't any more," she whispers, moving aside when it appears he wants to stretch down on the soft coverlet. She runs her nails up and down his nearest arm, studying the many tattoos that cover it as well as his shoulder.

The felon could change his mind on a dime, and very often did without a hint of warning, either. Whatever went through his head, his own logic, his own warped perceptions.. he wasn't much for sharing. Though it was a fairly safe assumption that much of his psyche had been shaped from not only the decades of imprisonment.. but being reared at the hands of a non-functioning alcoholic mother and her myriad of abusive, live-in lovers. And for as much as he hated the white-trash cunt.. here he was tangled up with a woman who was probably just like her! Odd that. But then again, people did tend to live out their existence in tail-chasing cycles of repetition.

Eddie reached up with that same arm Lara was fingering, only to curl it around her and drag her right down to lay against him, opening his door just another hair.

She wants desperately to be a good bitch. To please him until he passes out, but Lara's body betrays her once snuggled against his side. She lays her head down beside Quist's shoulder and her hand which had been lightly stroking up and down his arm, makes its passes instead to his chest, yet slower and slower. He was holding her. It made her feel so good she forgot all about her foibles with Rudy and about hunter Blair and the American police. With a happy sigh, Lara closes her eyes to what seems like the first time in centuries since she's allowed her lashes to fully decend.

"You smell so good.." she mumbles and passes out completely.

Sleep doesn't come so easily to Edward Quist. He's been somewhat of an insomniac.. or perhaps just a very light sleeper, for most of his life. It was part and parcel with survival. And he was the quintessential survivor in the kind of a life that would have left most a victimized casualty. Eddie's instincts are damn near bestial in a dog-eat-dog, cut throat world.

And for as many hours as it took while the bitch slept soundly and wrapped in his arm, Eddie drifted in and out of sleep.. blinking his eyes wide awake at least twenty times or more all throughout.. in a good fourteen hour pass.

Affecting An Effect, In Fact

Affect and Effect are two English words with fairly similar meanings, and fairly similar pronunciations as well. Yet although they are not true homophones (words which sound alike), there is enough similarity in them to cause a lot of people a bit of confusion. Even folks who use them frequently will very often find themselves stumped over which word is the correct one to use.

The word affect is almost always used as a verb in English. It means to change or alter something. Her death affected the survivors in a profound way. How will my vote affect the outcome of an election?

But the word effect is most often used as a noun in English, and is characterized by something that is produced by an agent or cause. The result or consequence directly related to a sort of catalyst. The effects of her death left the survivors in a daze of disbelief. Cause and effect are necessary to formulate a scientific theory.

Affect may rarely be used as a noun, but its usage is nearly obsolete and a bit pointless to dredge up out of archaic retirement.

Effect also, may occasionally be used as a verb, and is a wee bit more common than the noun uses of affect, but probably best to simply steer clear of adding more yarn to an already tangled web.

Easiest to remember: A for action word -- A for affect. It makes a good effect, overall.

Who, Whom, and Who'd-a-Thunk

While a spell checker can easily cover a multitude of sins, grammar flubs are a little trickier to cover up. So for those of you who are interested in knowing how to solve some of the most common grammar riddles, I will give you some simple, easy-to-use rules for the English Language.

To Whom Or Not To Whom?

It's a very simple rule in this one: Who is a subject. Whom is an object. Who does something. Whom has something done to it.

For example: Who does it to whom.
If you're still befuddled, try substituting he for who and him for whom.

Unlike some of the other similar sounding words in the English language, such as Your and You're, Then and Than, etc., Who and Whom mix-ups, for some reason, tend to fall out from under much scrutiny.

However, when in doubt, the Rule is to always default to Who.

A misused Whom will most assuredly ruffle up the Queen of England as well as your junior high school language arts teacher, and a small handful of people like me who have a chronic urge to correct a grammar faux pas with an imaginary red pencil.

Writing should be fun! Never a drudgery. So we at The TriQuetra dot Net offer this and a multitude of other self-help tools for whomever may be interested in improving their craft -- whether writing or graphic design.

Purple Prose Parody

The term "purple prose" is derived from a reference by the Roman poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 BCE) who wrote in his Ars Poetica (lines 14-21):

Inceptis grauibus plerumque et magna professis
purpureus, late qui splendeat, unus et alter
adsuitur pannus, cum lucus et ara Dianae
et properantis aquae per amoenos ambitus agros
aut flumen Rhenum aut pluuius describitur arcus;
sed nunc non erat his locus. Et fortasse cupressum
scis simulare; quid hoc, si fractis enatat exspes
nauibus, aere dato qui pingitur

( "Your opening shows great promise, and yet flashy purple patches; as when describing a sacred grove, or the altar of Diana, or a stream meandering through fields, or the river Rhine, or a rainbow; but this was not the place for them. If you can realistically render a cypress tree, would you include one when commissioned to paint a sailor in the midst of a shipwreck?" )


Purpureus meant lustrous or dazzling in Horace's Latin. Purple dye was rare in the Ancient World, with only the wealthiest able to afford it (this is why purple robes and trim came to be associated with the Emperor and, later, European royalty). During the Roman Republic, social climbers would sew purple cloth onto cheaper clothing to give an appearance of wealth. This was regarded as pretentious and gaudy.


It should now be abundantly clear what Purple Prose is all about.. the overuse of flashy little archaic words and phrases which force a reader to become tangled up in them and easily lose sight of what it is the writer is trying to say. Some of them have been so overused that all of us might even be guilty of a little purple now and then. And while this exercise is meant to be humorous and entertaining -- in the end, I hope it sheds a wee bit of light on the engaging art of Creative Writing. Afterall, it is the goal of a writer make the reader lose himself in the story so completely.. that he forgets he is reading mere words. Rather than make our reader stumble over bizarre words and phrase choices so much that the entire gist of the story seems a blur, at best.


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Challenge

Rewrite the following passage taken from Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage in your best Purple Prose.

"The youth fell back in the procession until the tattered soldier was not in sight. Then he started to walk on with the others. But he was amid wounds. The mob of men was bleeding. Because of the tattered soldier's question he now felt that his shame could be viewed. He was continually casting sidelong glances to see if the men were contemplating the letters of guilt he felt burned into his brow. At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage."

Once completed, submit your entries to this forum by hitting the Reply button.. so we can all admire it and Vote for the best!

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