symbolic 06: the hook

I used to work at a publishing company that did a speculative fiction magazine (because we weren't just about horror or science fiction or fantasy) and one of the tasks which fell on my plate was reading the mail. The editor wandered by my desk one afternoon and asked me what I was doing. "Reading," I said.

"Why?" he responded.

I indicated the manuscript in front of me. "Because they sent it in?" Figured this was one of those trick questions.

He picked it up, skimmed the first page and handed it back to me. "Ditch it," he said. And, seeing my confusion, laid it out for me. "You are looking for an excuse to toss these. Spelling, a phrase that rings wrong, plot material that you've seen before, even if they misspell my name or don't have the right information at the top of the page. Any reason you can think of not to turn the first page is a good enough reason."

"But how will I know if it is any good?" I asked.

"It won't be." He indicated the pile of eighty or so story manuscripts on the desk. "This is the mail from today. There will be another stack just like it tomorrow. Trust me. You can read them today if you like, but by next week, you'll be looking for excuses. The only stories I want you to bump up to me are the ones that you can't stop reading."

---
Next time you are in the bookstore pick up Stephen King's Bag of Bones. Read the first chapter. Notice what he does. King sucks you into Mike Noonan's pain -- his despair at the loss of his wife. You get hints at the fragility of his current existence as well as the tragic nature of his wife's death. You feel for this guy and you're all wrapped up in his life by the end of those fifteen pages. And then he reaches under the bed...

This is the hook. This is what gets the reader's attention. In short stories you get a line. Novels have a little more breathing space. But not much.

When I'm in line at the grocery store, I check out the rack of paperbacks that are begging for my attention. I go through them one by one, reading the first page, seeing if I can stop at the bottom of the page, seeing if my interest is pulled towards the rest of the chapter. It doesn't matter if the genre is something that I'm interested in; these books are placed to be impulse buys. Of all the books in the supermarket these should be the ones that I glance at and, having done so, find myself wanting more.

They never do. The fat cats have forgotten about the hook. We can't. We don't have the luxury of name recognition. We have to lay a trap for the readers and hook them hard.

Movie Trailer

FADE IN:

A party is gathered at a gravesite, a priest at the head of the hole in the ground. A small group of people are gathered. It is fall, the air is crisp, and the leaves on the trees are gold and red. Mist still clings to the sides of the mountains in the near distance. We're clearly somewhere away from urban civilization, here to bury someone in a small town.

CAMERA tracks in on JACOB MARATRE, early-30's, standing on the left of the priest. Standing alone. His clothing is dark, but not black, assembled hurriedly, though not without some sense of style. It is pretty clear he is an outsider at this gathering, though related in some way to the person being put in the ground. Priest is talking, though the volume on his voice is way down. Young man is staring off into the distance.

JACOB (V.O.):
My mother told me that my father died in a house fire when I was eight. It was our old house up on Wilson Drive. All I remember from that day is the red fire engines and the yellow jackets of the firefighters. I don't remember my father at all.

The local sheriff told me that my mother died in a car accident. On the s-curves of State Highway 203, coming back from Seattle. It had rained earlier in the evening and the temperature had dropped, making the road slick. It was a dangerous curve, they said, and she was going just a little too fast.

We mark our lives by births and deaths -- beginnings and endings. We frame our conception of existence by what we know, by what we've lost. My father has been dead for years. I am burying my mother today. These are the things I know.

CAMERA continues to pan during his voice-over, moving across the graves and the gathered assembly before finally finding a young woman standing back from the rest of the crowd. She is about the same age as JACOB, wrapped in a black cloak, wearing sensible shoes for the soft ground. Unlike the rest of the gathering, she doesn't seem to be terribly upset by the ceremony. At the base of her throat is a clear white stone, like a circular piece of glass. This is LIZ KIMBRELL. CAMERA comes tight to her face as JACOB's V.O. finishes.

JACOB (V.O.):
In two minutes, this woman is going to destroy everything.

FADE TO BLACK:

JUMP CUT: GEORGES MARATRE, JACOB's grandfather, is being chased through the woods. There is blood on his face from a cut on his head. His glasses are small and rectangular -- fairly distinct and unique looking. His clothing clearly indicates to us that this is the past -- 1949 to be exact. There are people in the woods behind him, but we can't see them. He breaks out of the woods onto a dirt track and stops. Stretching beyond him is the flat surface of a smooth lake. A narrow and squat dam sits on his left. His panics. This is the last place he wanted to be.

JUMP CUT: A white wall in an asylum. It is a tiny cell, a single light bulb behind wire in the ceiling. One of the four walls is covered with writing. As high as a man can reach all the way to the floor. Arcane symbols, unreadable symbols, lines of text, mathematical formula -- it's all here. The occupant of the room is working persistently in the corner. This is JEROME MARATRE, Jacob's father.

JUMP CUT: A Nazi book burning rally in the late 1940s. They youth are vigorously throwing books on the fire. CAMERA tracks around the blaze, zeroing in on four men watching the proceeding. Three are dressed in SS dress blacks, the fourth appears to be a civilian, though finely dressed. CAMERA tracks his amusement at the fervent display of destruction.

JUMP CUT: An air traffic control center. FOCUS is on the air traffic controller's screen and the proximity of three tiny shapes near the edge of his screen. He and several other men clustered nearby are listening to the audio traffic. It's a couple of voices, garbled and cut up by static. One is shouting about having been hit. The other is screaming for permission to engage.

JUMP CUT: The cockpit of the aircraft. It's a fighter jet and the instrumentation and markings are historical -- clearly from some era before the present. The pilot is fighting with his instruments, trying to remain in control of the damaged plane. We can hear the voice of his wingman shouting for permission to engage some sort of target. Suddenly, the transmission is interrupted by a wild chattering of noise, a garbled howl of noise and tongue that is more than language and something less than machine code. The pilot's head snaps back and the plane rolls, falling out of control.

JUMP CUT: A farmer on the back porch of his house, staring out across his fields. His livestock is agitated, but that's not what he is watching. In the distance, a star is falling from the sky, a burning trail of something coming down.

JUMP CUT: GEORGES sits in front of an immense panel of dials and gauges. It looks similar to the air traffic controller's station, but much more arcane, much more homemade. He is listening to something on a pair of headphones. Smoke from an endless numbers of cigarettes floats just beyond the weak light from the table lamp. Paper is scattered all over the desk and he has worked his pencil down to a tiny nub. He's been here for hours, listening.

JUMP CUT: Close-up of a pad of paper on the desk. It is filled with lines and lines of number sequences. Groups of five.

JUMP CUT: The asylum walls. Part of the text on the walls is more of these number sequences. Groups of five. JEROME is working feverishly. It might start to become apparent that he doesn't have a writing utensil and the material on the wall isn't ink.

JUMP CUT: The surface of the lake, calm and smooth. It is just before dawn and there is fog clinging to the edges of the trees. CAMERA tracks across the smooth water, finally picking up a fading ripple. CAMERA tracks to the edge of the dam and holds on a trio of men in black leather coats. They are standing on the edge of the dam, looking down at the widening and fading ripple. One of the men bends down and picks up a pair of spectacles. One of the lenses is broken. He examines them for a minute and then flings them out into the lake as well. It's the same unique rectangular shaped pair we saw earlier on GEORGES. This is the same WELL-DRESSED MAN from the Nazi rally though he now sports a jaunty Van Dyke beard. It doesn't seem quite right on him as if it is something that he is trying on in order to blend in.

JUMP CUT: Graveyard exterior again. JACOB is watching LIZ and it is apparent that she has been watching him. The ceremony is breaking up. She is starting to walk towards him.

JUMP CUT: SERENA MARATRE is driving. She is clearly agitated about something. Her driving isn't all that good. The road is slippery and twisting. She is having difficulty keeping control of the car.

JUMP CUT: The car swerves and plows through the crash bar on the side of the road. It is quite a ways down. Car falls slowly.

JUMP CUT: SERENA at the wheel of her car. She is crying.

JUMP CUT: Graveyard. LIZ has nearly reached JACOB.

JUMP CUT: The white asylum walls covered with lettering. CAMERA pans around the room. It is empty. The door is open and several orderlies and a doctor are standing there, mouths agape. They're clearly expecting to find someone in the room.

JUMP CUT: GEORGES has been caught by the men in black coats on the dam. He is struggling, both angry and afraid, he recognizes the WELL-DRESSED MAN who lands a solid punch on GEORGES' cheek. GEORGES falls to the ground, losing his glasses and his hat. His hat sails off the edge of the dam and, myopically, GEORGES watches it go.

JUMP CUT: The farmer on his back porch watching the burning trail fall from the sky.

JUMP CUT: SERENA's car strikes the bottom of the ravine, tumbles dramatically. No one is walking away from this accident. CAMERA holds on vehicle as it finishes tumbling.

JUMP CUT: Graveyard. LIZ reaches JACOB. She looks around to see that no one else in nearby, sparing but a quick glance at the open hole in the ground.

JUMP CUT: The lake in the hills. It is much smaller than it is when GEORGES is thrown off the top of the dam. In fact, the dam looks very rickety and half-assed in this scene.

Something falls out of the sky, hitting the water hard and skipping. It takes a bad bounce and slams into the structure of the dam. There is an explosive moment, but no fire. Everything slowly settles.

JUMP CUT: The integrity of the dam has been breached. It is starting to fall apart, water spurting through developing cracks. It won't be long before the whole thing falls apart.

JUMP CUT: The graveyard scene. LIZ is standing before JACOB. There is a break in the clouds and the stone at the base of her throat picks up the sun.

LIZ:
I am sorry for your loss but there is something you should know. Your mother's death wasn't an accident. She was murdered.

FADE TO BLACK.

JACOB (V.O.):
Who can you trust?

SFX: (soft at first) The wild howl/chatter which ran through the cockpit of the air craft. As the sound grows…

FADE IN:

The air-traffic controller is listening to his headphones. He stares at the other men clustered around him and shakes his head. He can't understand what he's hearing.

SFX: Sound grows in intensity and continues through the following scenes.

JUMP CUT: GEORGES' radio studio. He's listening to the same sound on a reel-to-reel tape. He slows it down and the sound becomes intelligible. It is the number sequences again. He frantically searches his desk for the pad of numbers and starts paging through them. He finds the one he is looking for and begins to follow the intoned numbers across the pad which he has already written.

JUMP CUT: The white room in the asylum. The numbers continue to be read off. A hand follows them exactly along the wall. CAMERA pulls back to a wide shot, revealing that it is JACOB who is matching the numbers to the sound.

JUMP CUT: The CAMERA pans up the cliff-side from SERENA's accident, finally reaching the roadway again, coming up past the twisted metal of the crash guard. There is a man standing there, looking down into the deep ravine. It is JEROME and his expression is inscrutable.

FADE OUT.

SFX: Numbers continue to be read in their groups of five, fading slowly...

Suspicious Deaths

Unfortunate and early deaths of people involved with cryptology:

- Edgar Allan Poe: usually credited with being one of the first writers to mention and use cryptography in a story. He died in a gutter (7 October 1849). After being unexpectedly absent for several days.
- Alan Turing: the attention to his personal life following WW2 led to a revoking of clearance and depression. Ate a poisoned apple, taking his own life, in 1954 (7 June).
- Michael Ventris: English architect whose fascination with Linear B led to the eventual translation of the language. Went public with his knowledge (work done with John Chadwick whose background was in archaic Greek) in 1953. Publication was slated for 1956. Ventris died in a lorry accident a few weeks before publication (6 September).

James Ellis -- Britian's secret guru who spearheaded GCHQ's version of the RSA public/private key techonlogy -- in a docuement from 1987: "...the fullest value of cryptography is realised by minimising the information available to potential adversaries...Revelation of these secrets is normally only sanctioned in the interests of historical accuracy after it has been demonstrated that no further benefit can be obtained from continued secrecy." (Simon Singh, The Code Book, 1999, p. 292)

If one were to be looking for conspiracies...

symbolic 05: to hang a skeleton

If you look at the table of contents of a Hardy Boys book -- or a Nancy Drew mystery, the process is the same -- you'll notice that the story is broken down into a series of succinctly titled chapters. "Frank and Joe Find a Clue." "Chet Falls in a Hole." "The Mystery Man Revealed." Each one is a swift summation of what you'll find in that chapter.

My buddy Tom calls this "The Hardy Boys Outline." Each chapter has its purpose, clearly defined and spelled out on the first page of the section, and, if you read down the list of chapter headings, you will have a basic idea of the course of the story. We don't need a detailed plot. If you've got character sketches and the trailer, then the ideas are percolating in your head. This is just a framework to hang them all on, a roadmap by which to orient yourself. The Hardy Boys Outline helps you see what is next so that you never get lost.

I use a sheet of butcher paper that is three or four feet long -- big enough to be readable from across the room -- and I give myself 25 chapters. If the book is going to be 50,000 words, then each chapter is 2,000 words long. 100,000 word novel means chapters are 4,000 a piece. You can break them up later, but for the time being, give yourself 25 divisions.

Start at the top. Keep it short. Write legibly. Bang them out. If you get stuck, use "SEX" as the contents of a chapter. You don't have to advance the plot during that chapter -- no one ever stops reading because there is sex on the page -- and it keeps you moving. Forward momentum is important.

And, suddenly, you've got a plot. A start, middle, and end in easily digestible segments.

---
The naming of the Hardy Boys Outline falls to Thomas J. Lindell who, while he would qualify himself as a "failed writer," still has a good idea or two in his head. You just have to wait patiently sometimes for them to fall out.

symbolic 04: two minutes

There are a couple of musical pieces that I -- and the rest of the movie industry -- find extremely useful. "O Fortuna" from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana and Peter Gabriel's instrumental version of "The Rhythm of the Heat." You know them, even if you can't place them right now, you'd know them if you heard them. They crop up at least once a season attached to a movie trailer. And they're there because they work.

You've got about two minutes to seduce your audience with the trailer. Modern Hollywood theory seems to cater to the idea that a movie's plot must be completely divulged during these two minutes, and that isn't a seduction as much as it is just a poorly designed info dump. It should be a series of images and ideas which catch your interest. It's a come-on, a hint of what you will find on the screen.

As for the book in progress, we've barely started. You may have a bare bones idea of what you want to accomplish in your novel, maybe even a half page of scribbled notes. But you don't know what happens at every point.

Which is the perfect time to build the movie trailer.

"O Fortuna" and "The Rhythm of the Heat" work because they give you a variety of options with pacing. They start slow, quiet strains which allow you the opportunity to craft setting and establishing shots. They grow in intensity until they are thunderous, filling the theater with their noise. You finish with a montage of images, quick cuts of impressions, split seconds of ideas or thoughts which feel like they belong in your book.

They are best written quickly, listening to music like this if possible. You don't have to use everything that you find in the trailer, but you do have to get something exciting on the page. You do have to throw up an interesting two minutes because if it doesn't thrill the audience then what is going to bring them to your work?

Or, more importantly, how are you going to sustain any enthusiam for writing it?

symbolic 03: first name basis

When I was younger, I wanted to be Steve. Not a specific Steve, just a Steve. It seemed a much cooler name than the one that I have, and, in my dreams, I was Steve. Too many years of pulp novels infected my youth and my heroes were always steely-eyed with unshaven jaws chiseled out of stone. They always managed to have their shirts torn off and were never deterred by pain. You know, "Steve."

"Mark" was always the side-kick, the short guy with glasses who knew how to do bypass complex security systems with eighteen keystrokes and could decipher ancient hieroglyphs in about fifteen minutes. They always had hair that never behaved and perpetually had at least one button that never quite stayed clasped. They moped while Steve got the girl.

Pulp heroes always have monosyllabic names, filled with hard consonants which cause the villains to spray spittle as they chew on their nemesis' name. John Carter. Dirk Pitt. Nick Fury. Doc Savage. John McClane. Clark Kent. Lamont Cranston.

Ah, that last one is an alias. See? No one would suspect that he was The Shadow. Not with a name like that.

This is how a life of pulp novels will leave its mark on a young psyche. I'm okay with my Christian name now, ever since I discovered that Mark is a variation of Mars, God of War, while Steve can be traced back to some poor bastard of a first century martyr who was stoned to death. I've never asked my parents why they chose Mark, figuring that any ulterior motive on their part has passed its expiration date by now and I'm making my own destiny with the name. And I'm not about to have a mid-life crisis and join the armed forces to realize the inherent violence of my namesake.

Our characters, however, can be molded by their names. We don't have to wait twenty years for them to grow into the history of their nomens; we get to build that legacy into them the instant we cull them from the herd. Names are important. You're going to be spending a lot of time with these people running around your head; you may even talk to them in the bathroom when you think no one else is around.

"A" names are red shirts for me. I find myself defaulting to "Arthur" when I'm on the spot for a name. Why I don't go with "Adam" I'm not sure. It may be too obvious. Characters with "A" names don't last long. My wife teaches junior high school and I hear her and her fellow teachers discussing names. There are certain names which they all agree would be horrible to name their children. They have up to a hundred kids that they teach every year, and time and again they've discovered that kids with specific names just never add up to much. Too many bad seeds by the same name can spoil it forever.

You can get about a hundred hits on Google with "baby names" and most of them use the same data. They aren't worth much of your time. This random name generator uses census data as its database. You can adjust the obscurity level of the choices and, with the flip of a button, can get a list of a hundred names. It is certainly easier than paging through the phone book. And more exotic.

Go. Find names for your characters. Find your new pseudonym. I'll be right behind you.

Cabinet Noir

The Cabinet Noir was an office in the French goverment that was given over to the opening of letters of suspected persons. These letters were intercepted by the cabinet du secret des postes (more colloquially known as the cabinet noir), read, and then forwarded on to their destination. Came into being during the reign of Richelieu and Louis XIII (1610-1643) but wasn't given its common name until Louis XV (1715-1774). Used by Napoleon and, officially, still a policy of the French government. Most governments actually. England used this policy during the 18th century and confirmed it with the Post Office Act of 1837.

Richelieu's second-in-command was François Leclerc du Tremblay known as Father Joseph. He was also known as Éminence Grise (grey eminence) for his work in the shadows. He was a Capuchin monk. I'm not really surprised anymore to find a dedicated website for any topic.

When was St. Germaine around? What were the alchemists doing during the 17th century in France? What was Dee (1527-1608) doing in London?

symbolic 02: getting dressed

National Novel Writing Month is the brainchild of Chris Baty. It says something about the explosive nature of this concept that "National" is a misnomer now. Several years ago, Mr. Baty conned several of his friends into attempting to write a novel. Aspiring scribes dream (or have nightmares) about the first book and it is one of those landmarks that writers have to confront. Baty's idea was to quit waiting for it to happen on its own. Get the damn thing on paper, stick it in a drawer, and say, "Fine. Got that out of the way."

Baty and Company decided to give themselves a month to pour everything onto the page. 50,000 words was the goal -- a short novel, but a novel nonetheless. Quality wasn't an issue. Finishing was the only goal. They picked November as the thirty days of doom and got down to business. And when they were done, some had finished, some had flamed out, and some wished they had spent the thirty days waxing their car instead. But most of them came back for more a year later.

Year two saw 128 participants, and last year the number of eager flagellants numbered more than five thousand world-wide. The rules are simple: 50,000 words, thirty days, any word counts, and you can't start before the first of the month.

Fine. But the rules don't say anything about prep time. I'm starting now. Until the first of November, I'm going to be building the framework. I'm going to knock the characters out of the rough blocks; I'm going to build the movie trailer; I'm going to do the Hardy Boys Outline; I'm going to try out several hundred names until I find the right ones; I'm going to read Vogue magazine.

I've got the fall fashion issue on my desk right now. Eight hundred pages of the clothes no one can afford for the fall and winter seasons. I'm going shopping. The characters are going to have to wear something.

Men, let's be honest, wear boots and shoes. Women wear slingbacks, mules, flats, spike heels, boots, slides, mary janes, clogs, ankle boots (yes, I know, but they're not the same), flats, loafers and oxfords. Guys? Women like it when you know the difference.

Altering Sensory Input

"When a primary area is destroyed in man, the sense served by that area is not completely removed. In a few unusual cases, the primary visual cortex has been destroyed without damage to the surrounding visual parts of the cortex. The patient is blind, but he can still point quite accurately to things he is shown. He knows where something is in the visual field, but he cannot say what it is. This produces the amazing situation of the patient being unable to see something but being able to put a finger on it, at the same time insisting that he sees nothing. In a sense, we may conceive of vertebrates as having two visual apparatuses, one to tell what a thing is, and another to tell where it is." (Oxford Companion to the Mind, p. 525.)

All sensory input comes into a primary sensory area in the cortex. These areas are connected to secondary areas by nerve fibers who go nowhere else in the brain. The secondary areas (which are located in close proximity to their respective primary spaces) are connected to the association areas (where, you know, "connections" are made) and finally the motor areas. Each secondary area branches into ALL of the secondary areas and the motor areas. Synaesthesia is the confusion of one sense with another -- hearing colors, for example. It happens in the associative areas and the secondary areas. Data gets misfiled or incorrectly pathed.

Could you make it happen consciously?

symbolic 01: introduction

We assemble every week in the basement of the local church or pub and we sit together in a ragged circle. We're here to make confessions. Hello, my name is Mark. I write.

I'm here because I've got a problem with the writing process. It's not fatal, my problem, but it certainly distracts from the act of creation. Modern psychology likes to reductio ad absurdum with the platitude that "recognizing the problem is halfway to a solution," and I'm all for clearing out the channels. The process and I have become good friends over the years; I did five drafts on my second book, three of which were complete -- and wildly different -- versions of the story. That's not a fact that I'm terribly proud of, and one that certainly lies there and stares at me from time to time, but it has certainly made me much more comfortable with the idea of starting.

It's fall and there are two things I look forward to as the year dies: rain and NaNoWriMo. Rain means you can stop making excuses about the yard work you're not doing and allows you to spend hours squatting next to the water heater with a keyboard on your lap. NaNoWriMo -- National Novel Writing Month -- is a wild excuse to undertake the nearly impossible: write a novel during the month of November. While most people take six months to more than a year to write a book, NaNoWriMo expects you to get off your ass now. For us process-devotees, this is a sweet deal.

This column is a window. I am a monkey and there is a typewriter in the cage with me. I've also got a sharp knife. Gather 'round, we're going to dissect the process. We'll start with this deep-end dive of the novel in a month. And we'll see just how much life this book can have after its accelerated birth. Along the way, we'll stop off at those points which catch our eye and put the knife to them as well.

I'm calling this SYMBOLIC: ADVENTURES IN TEXT. Whether you traffic in film, music, comics, or art at some point you bump into text. You have to deal with symbols on the page or the screen. How does it work? What structure -- artificial or genetically wired -- is in place that allows you to understand me when I say, "There is a purple cow standing next to the red barn." What causes you to argue with me that there is no such thing as a purple cow? How do the symbols work? And, more obsessively, how much of their power have we forgotten?

The Moon

"This path [the Moon] is guarded by Tabu. She is uncleanliness and sorcery. Upon the hills are the black towers of nameless mystery, of horror and of fear. All prejudice, all superstition, dead tradition and ancestral loathing, all combine to darken her face towards the eyes of men. It needs unconquerable courage to begin to tread this path. Here is a weird deceptive life. The fiery sense is balked. The moon has no air. The knight upon this quest has to rely on the three lower senses: touch, taste, and smell. Such light as there may be is deadlier than darkness, and the silence is wounded by the howling of wild beasts...This is the threshold of life; this is the threshold of death. All is doubtful, all is mysterious, all is intoxicating."

(Aleister Crowley The Book of Thoth, pp. 112-113)

Outsider

"What is important is that he leaves the world of common daylight; when he enters the no-man's land between hell and heaven, he is an Outsider. Now the difficulties begin. Unless he is very lucky, he will find his face towards hell; human delusion, corruption, pain, stupidity, ultimate defeat, these are the realities that suddenly occupy his whole field of vision. And behind them, the canvas on which these are merely shadows, the terror of complete emptiness, unbeing, the abyss.

"It is not easy to escape; it is not easy because there seems to be no reason for escaping; this negates even the concept of freedom. The release, if it comes, involves a complete retracing of the steps through the human ground; back to the essential Will to Live that underlies all existence. And this recognition of the world's unreality, this insight that comes between death and morning, brings a certainty in its wake. It is naked insight into the purpose of the force that demands life at all costs. This insight is called mysticism."

(Colin Wilson, The Outsider, p. 187)

BIBLIOGRAPHY
This is a reasonably comprehensive list of my published work, both virtual and physical.

THE MISFIT LIBRARY
I am Nine of Thirteen, one of the members of the Misfit Library, a writing collective which puts out a quarterly journal of our respective work. We are scattered across the globe and determined to change the face of the planet one story at a time. The link above will take you to Misfit Central where you can acquire copies of the journal as well as read exclusive online material.

SYMBOLIC
I wrote a column for OPi8.com's Transmit blogs: journals of the new dark underground. SYMBOLIC tracked the novel I was working on, referencing the process and the research materials which mad up the backbone of the work. In addition, SYMBOLIC busied itself with ruminations and considerations on the nature of language and communication. And a wee bit of mythology. The first 100 entries of SYMBOLIC can be found here on this site as well as at OPi8.com.

LITERARY REPRESENTATION
I am represented by Scribe Agency as my literary agents. Please contact these gentleman if you have any queries about my work.

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