A long awaited post and a little more fiction

So it has been a long time since i posted anything.

I've been incredibly busy with my studies, with the occasional bit of freelance work to keep my free hours occupied. I haven't done much in the way of comic illustration in quite a while now, but i still got a few ideas up my sleeve.

What i have been doing a fair amount of recently is writing. My shorts are coming along well, and the newest plan is to have enough completed to my satisfaction by the end of next year to self-publish a small anthology (designed and laid out by myself, of course).

What is odd is how a number of my stories have begun shifting away from pulp horror to more dramatic intensity. That's not to say that they're becoming poignant or anything - heaven forbid - but more and more they've begun focusing on the characters rather than the action.

Hmmm... hope this doesn't mean i'm growing up.

Never fear though, there's still a decent smattering of gristle and gore, in between the occasional bouts of self-realisation and existential epiphanies.

Here's a bit of flash writing i did as a fun exercise.

It's actually a bit long to be considered flash fiction - around 800 words, i think - but my take out was the same. Trying to successfully condense a story into a single page is trickier than one would imagine. You eventually end up staring at the screen for two hours trying to decide exactly which last two words you should take out and whether you really need that last 'and'.

Anyway, here it is:

(P.S. it would'nt let me cut and paste from the origional doc, so have had to jerry-rig it. if there's a spelling mistake or a bit that should have been italisized and isn't, i'm sorry, but eh...)

(P.P.S. This story has since been edited for a reading at the Bloody Parchment reading - 28/10/2011.)

A Crowd Gathered

The bullet took him just below his left eye. The socket crumbled inwards as his cheek-bone disintegrated under the force of the .45 caliber slug.

His sight doubled. He blinked and his left lid refused to respond.

This isn't what I expected, he thought as he dropped to his knees, This isn't how it's supposed to be.

A spasm ran through his body and he realised he couldn't feel his legs. He felt a tickling in his gut and thought that, very soon, his bowels were going to let go. 

A cop's salary is worth more than this, he thought. The left side of his face was turning warm and a spreading section of his white, collared shirt began to cling to his breast. The stubble on his jaw tickled as thin, delicate waves washed over his cheek and slid affectionately down his neck and he thought of how embarrassing it would be to soil himself in front of all these people.

At least a cop has a pension.

Around him, people were screaming.

Colourful streamers still hung in the air.

He slowly raised his hand to his face. When he brought it away, a slick of red coated his palm. He held it up to his eyes and watched as thick droplets began to roll slowly down the inside of his wrist. His vision blurred then snapped into sharp contrast. Everything flashed white then suddenly went grey. He was struck by a momentary panic at the loss of his sight before realising that he had fallen over - that the left side of his face now lay against the pavement. A sucking sensation tugged at his scalp as something thick and warm slid out of his skull, followed by an even more alien feeling: the cool touch of a breeze on the inside of his head.

It passed through. I can't believe it.

Shadows flicked past the edge of his vision. He tried rolling his eyes in their direction. His right eye twitched only slightly. From his left there was no movement at all. The corresponding ear heard nothing but a high-pitched ringing. The sound filtering through his right was muddy and the hurried thumping of the footsteps around him seemed out of sync with the quickly passing shadows. 

Where are you running? he tried to ask.

He felt hands on his back and was gently rolled over. The sudden, harsh light sent a painful jolt through his head but not even his right eye would blink this time. His left eye was dead. Through his dimming vision he recognised the uniform above him - all red and green with shining yellow - but try as he might he couldn't bring the name to mind. The person's face was a blur. 

Behind his helper, more colourful uniforms flickered past, while darker silhouettes rushed in every direction. From a thousand miles away, walkie-talkies squawked. As his vision dimmed, he could see the last of the confetti as it drifted down from the sky to settle around him. From inside his chest, his lungs began to bubble as they slowly filled with blood.

Where are they running? he asked again, but from the lone figure above him there was no response as he cut open his jacket and shirt. Be careful of my badge, he nearly asked, but then remembered; he didn't have that badge anymore.

His vision was now a collection of white and grey silhouettes, but he felt he was thinking more clearly. 

It won't be that bad. Isn't it better that it passed right through? 

Yes, he was sure. There was less chance of infection.

His vision faded to white, but that was okay. He was a little sleepy and he deserved some rest.

What a stroke of luck that it passed right through, he thought as the lone figure above him worked in vain and, along side them, a far greater crowd had gathered; their attention elsewhere.

-end-

Brett Rex Bruton

26-10-11

Lectcha Sketch 14 - Patience

Lectcha Sketch 13

OK, I've made the font a little bigger in number 12, so should be easier to read now (I just can't get a good save-for-web setting when it comes to fonts). Without further ado, though, here is Lectcha Sketch number 13!!! "Rain Dance..."

Lectcha Sketch 12

The next Lectcha Sketch! Yay. Been a while coming. Oddly enough, I've posted this one now, even though I've been working on another for a while. It just so happened that this one popped up and got finished before the one that raised it's head earlier. Oh, well, them's the breaks... I've decided to become a little more professional about these comix. I've started thinking that maybe, with just a little more effort, I can turn them into something - just what though I'm not yet sure. You may notice that I'm starting to draw some colour inspiration from other comic artists. Otherwise, I'm gonna start refining my style - maybe spend more than five minutes drawing them; little things like that.

This is an earlier post from my other portfolio blog; Poorboy Illustration. I just realised how silly it was that I posted a little history on Lectcha Sketch there and not here, where the majority of the Lectcha Sketch action happens. Nothing too exciting, just relevant: Lectcha Sketch is ancient. It's been going for about seven years, I think - in an unofficial capacity - which is more time that I've put into just about anything besides life. It was born out of boredom; out of sitting for hours through various lectures at Rhodes university, doodling on my writing pad as a way of whittling away the hours before The Rat and Parrot opened it's door (which was usually around eleven/twelve AM, but we won't go into that now). Many an English poetry lecture was spent idly sketching with a ballpoint pen, watching the clock and letting my imagination flop around on the desk like a dying fish. English lectures were the worst. You'd think that a course dedicated to the creative literary expression of our language would hold some element of intrigue, but nay, it was not to be. Rather, historical, creative giants such as Shakespeare and Seamus Heaney were dissected and disseminated with as much emotion as one would a laboratory rat: "Here is the heart, here are the lungs, this is what makes it tick, write a thousand words on the Yeats' central nervous system, wash your hands and don't let the swing door hit you in the arse". It's ironic that those student who were truly interested in the works and literature had to take separate language courses such as Modern Fiction and Afikaans and Nederlandic Studies (pretty sure that's spelt wrong) in order to get a little stimulating discussion. I ended up with the opinion that all English writers are kak and that, for decent, rousing literature, you need to go elsewhere (Italy and South America are my preferred countries). I digress heavily though. Boredom wasn't always the main impetus behind the comics. Every now and then I would find myself inspired by some interesting kernel or theory, for what ever reason, and put pen to paper in a way that wasn't particularly academic but definitely amusing (to me at least). For this reason, some of my comics are terribly specific, and often won't be caught by anyone who doesn't know exactly what I'm talking about. I like to think that the people who do get them feel quite appreciative though - that someone with an Art Theory background will laugh a little bit harder at a certain comic because it feel like an in-joke. I'm all for in-jokes. You other sods can take it as it comes. ;) Oddly enough, it is my other blog - These Creases - that has become the home page for my Lectcha Sketch comics. Maybe it's because of their randomness and offbeat style, but it just felt right to post them there first. I guess it's because they're doodles and don't really speak volumes about my illustrative style. For whatever reason though, if you enjoy them and like a little bit of background on each (when there is some) that's the place to go.

Lectcha Sketch #9

This fellow earned my respect. There's something to be said for a man who, although paralyzed from the neck down, still manages to get it up regularly enough to pleasure his wife. Also, he spun the world backwards and turned back time. That was pretty cool too.

A Chamber of One - a little preview

Okay, so the novel is back on the table - sort of. I realised that, after so much time, there's so much of my own story that I'm no longer sure of myself that jumping straight back into it was impossible without risking leaving some gigantic hole. Now, trying to edit 150 pages off a computers screen is too horrible to think of, and lugging around a ring-binder file everywhere I go so that I can grab a bit of editing here and there is ridiculously impractical (seriously - experience talking. Don't even try it.) I considered my predicament and thought that the best way to get the show on the road was to try and insert it into my routine, a greater portion of which is constantly being on the look-out for opportunities when I can bounce out of work for a little read by myself. I can put away a stranger's novel in a few days in this fashion, surely I can put a dent in my own? The only thing I was lacking was the necessary format... So guess what? I am now in the possession of a printed and bound copy of my own novel (part 1). It was a surprisingly cool sensation. I expected it would be a bit of a gas, but when the printer handed me a fully printed and bound copy of my own work, the strangest thing happened: I felt like a real author. Crazy, I know. It just looked so much like a book - like something you'd pick up off the selves at Exclusive Books or Fogarty's - that it was hard not to feel exceedingly chuffed. I couldn't wait for someone to ask me what I was reading, just so that I could flip them the cover and reply; "Oh, nothing really." Hasn't happened yet, but there's still time... So here's the cover and a little excerpt from the first half of my book; A Chamber of One. The text has been unedited so far, so there are probably a few spelling mistakes, and there's a good chance that some of the text might be changed before it's done (I haven't gotten this far into the editing yet) but hey, enough people have read it so far that I'm not overly concerned. Think of this as similar to when bands release rough, preview tracks online. The final result will be more streamlined and refined. But until then...

(An excerpt from Chapter 2 - Friday: Dreams and Monsters)

Rebecca shifted uncomfortably in her sleep. Back and forth she turned as she tried to escape a troubling dream that would soon be lost from her memory for ever. She was trapped in a world of shifting shadows and darkness where there really were monsters in your closet. It didn’t matter that you knew that the black shapes drifting just beyond the cracked open door were nothing more than hung clothes, strung up jackets and pants, because it wasn’t the clothes that you had to worry about. No, what you really had to worry about were the shapes themselves, the dark silhouettes of your wardrobe, because, in the dark, these shadows grew. They joined and blended, wrapped together and grew tooth and claw. And then, as you slept, the cupboard door would creek open and the dark would step into your room. A thing begot of the darkness of everything normal and safe in your world; monstrous and foreign in its entirety.

Rebecca heard the door creek. Her eyes and mouth sprang open as she sucked in a lungful of predawn darkness. The hair beside her ears and high up on her neck bristled as her skin contracted and her heart pounded in her skull. She nearly panicked when all that met her was a muddled blur of black and gray. Her eyes darted back and forth in search of something recognizable in the sleep addled mess around her, but slowly, as reality began to assert its self, her room began to swim into focus.

She tried to force herself to relax. She lay in her bed and concentrated on slowing her breathing. She hoped that she hadn’t cried out in her sleep and woken anyone.

What a dream, she thought even as the images faded from her memory. She blinked sleep out of her eyes and thought to herself how difficult it was going to be to nod off again after such a humdinger of a nightmare. She groaned silently to herself. Shit, she thought, it’s not even light out yet.

She rolled onto her side to reach for the glass of water beside her bed. Or she tried to. All that shifted towards the bedside table were her eyes. Panic once again began to well up in Rebecca’s breast. What’s happening? she cried inside her own head as she desperately tried to move her paralyzed arms and legs, but the duvet had her trapped. It wrapped around her legs and torso, had managed to slither around her arms, and even its cover had seemed to snake its way between her fingers. And, as she lay there, her body bound and nothing but her head sticking out from beneath the covers, Rebecca was sure that she could feel them pulling tighter.

Ohmygodohmygodohmygod, she whimpered to herself, but not a sound escaped her lips, Something is not right. Oh god, something is going terribly wrong. And as she stared at the room around her – as the covers pulled tighter and as the fabric pulled harder and harder against her throat, her breath beginning to come in short, sharp gasps – she began to see that something was indeed terribly wrong. This wasn’t her room. It looked like it, but it wasn’t. Everything was similar, but certain things just weren’t quite right. Her dresser looked too short, almost stumpy, as if it had been stunted somehow and her chest of drawers seemed constructed at impossible angels; its mere existence as a standing, solid object seeming to buck all natural laws. And everything was too gray. The ceiling, the walls, the stuffed animals on her shelves – all of which seemed turned in her direction, their small, black, plastic eyes staring at her deadly and their fur all matted and dirty as if they’d dug their way out from deep in the earth, paw-full by paw-full out of their graves – everything was tinged with the dull gray of the indescribable; the corpse.

And then something moved.

Rebecca’s eyes shot to the door, her breath short and rasping. What was that? A slight, gray aura of light shone around the door, turning it into a dark silhouette; a pitch-black portal, a door in a door. The light that slanted out struck the toys on her shelf, bringing them to monstrous life. Wicked eyes danced in an evil light and fur writhed over moulding stuffing. As the light moved the shadow grew and with it grew teeth and talons. Small stitched mouths began to widen and split and furry lips squirmed as needle fangs grew from stuffing gums. Rebecca could swear that she heard the soft pop, fwip, pop, fwip of threads breaking and unthreading in the dark and oh god the faces were moving; crawling over newly formed bone and stretching and pulling the eyes wider until she could see pink. Oh god almighty she could see pink around those tiny black orbs and they were moist; wet and gungy and dancing in the moving light and why was the light moving?

Rebecca’s eyes flew back to the door. She couldn’t help it. They were as much under her control by now as the rest of her petrified body. Sweat ran down her face and back, burning her eyes and soaking the creeping blankets so that they clung to her like a second, malformed skin. Her neck felt raw as the fabric rubbed against it and her chest burned from her sharp, desperate breaths. Tears rolled down her cheeks and her nose had begun to run and as the mucus slid down her throat she felt the need to cough, to cough and scream, but she could do neither. She heard the door creak again.

There’s no one there. The door hasn’t moved. It’s still closed. There’s no one here to open it. I know there isn’t. There can’t be! Oh god let it be closed!

But it wasn’t. It stood wide. Oh so very wide. And into its light stepped a figure so immense that it blocked out the dull luminescence of what ever was beyond the frame. For a moment it paused and then it raised one giant foot and stepped into the room. Slowly it moved towards the foot of her bed and with every step a sickening, rasping noise could be heard, like a blade cutting through thick carpet. And as it moved forward, one arm held behind it, the darkness behind it grew thicker. A skittering sound could be heard from inside of it. Shapes moved, and Rebecca knew that the creatures were climbing off their shelves and skittering down the walls – her toys, her presents, her tormentors – and hiding just beyond the light.

This can’t be happening, she thought as the monstrous silhouette came to a stand by her feet. This is not real and I am dreaming. I’m dreaming and I have to wake up! The thing’s arm came around from behind it and gripped in its hand was a shape long and flat and with an edge at its end that glistened sharply in the light. You have to wake up. You have to wake up now. Please let me open my eyes. Please let this all vanish. Sweat covered her face and ran into her mouth, its salty taste sitting like blood on a tongue that had gone dry. Every muscle in her body was pulled taught. Her neck was as stiff as a tree trunk. Her jaws were clenched with her lips pulled back in a sneer and she knew that she was going to die. The figure lifted its other hand to grip the handle of its weapon. She had stopped breathing entirely. Wake up! she said, Wake up, wake up, wake up! Her eyes bulged as they desperately tried to open. Everything told them that they already were but still they tried. They burned as Rebecca frantically pushed to see through the horror that was happening before her.

“Rebecca,” said the monster. And then she woke up.

It wasn’t as though anything changed, really. Everything still seemed to be in the same place. But everything seemed back to normal. And she could breathe again. Her toys were back on the self and her furniture looked the way that it always did. Even the light seemed better – more real and vital, with a volume that had been missing in that dark place, even though it shone in from the passage, dulled by the half open door. She didn’t even think that she had opened her eyes, but rather that they had been open the whole time with her unable to see through them. When the change had come, it was as though reality had simply drifted into the dream, erasing everything that shouldn’t have been there – everything but one, and for that she was no less terrified.

The figure still loomed above her, both arms still twisted and taught up above its right shoulder.

“Rebecca,” it said again, and this time she recognised what was held in its hands high up above its head, its sharpened edge almost touching the ceiling. It was the garden spade; the great, black Lasher spade that hung in the shed out back in the garden and that her dad had sharpened weekly until he had hired someone else to do it for him.

“Coleman?” she replied with her first breath. Her lips quivered out of her control, making his name bounce with staccatoed hiccups. She sucked in with her nose and whimpered, confused and terrified. But I woke up…

“You’ve been dreaming, little Rebecca,” said the giant gardener, “You’ve been dreaming for a very long time.” Rebecca heard the squeaking sound of skin on wood as Coleman tightened his grip on the handle. “But you’ve dreamed enough now and you need to wake up. You thought you were, but you weren’t. And now you must. You must wake up.” The giant flat of the spade inched higher until the point of its edge touched the ceiling.

“This isn’t real,” said Rebecca.

“Wake up, Rebecca,” said the giant.

The blade fell. Rebecca screamed. And the window beside her bed exploded inwards as a part of the night leapt into her room.

( © All work is the exclusive work of the author and subject to copywrite laws.)

Lectcha Sketch #8

A good long time has passed since my last post; lots of time to think, observe and consider the things that are going on around us and to try and come up with intelligent, communicable opinions and suggestions that I can impart, served up with some prime-cut cynicism and a ladle full of bias and belligerency. Yeah, I got nothing. I've been living in a hole for the last ten days (almost a joke - my room is only about 2.5 x 3 metres). If I mentioned how busy I was earlier then multiply it ten-fold and put a gun to my head. So instead of a glowing nugget of perception, I'll just leave you with the next Lectha Sketch. Maybe I'll offend someone - at least then I'll have accomplished something today. P.S. Trivium - good band. Just putting it out there...

Even MORE fun at Brett's funeral!!!

Lectcha Sketch #3

Lectcha Sketch

I'm going to be posting one of these comics a day, unless something else comes up that I'd rather write on. Basically they are space fillers. Think no less of them though; I've been meaning to post them for ages now and this gives me an excuse to (I didn't want to just randomly drop them onto the site.) So if you like them, keep on stopping by.

Lectcha Sketch

During my time at Rhodes, I developed a habit of doodling during lectures, often drawing inspiration from whatever topic we were discussing. This was either Fine Arts or English - but hell, where Barthes is concerned, does it matter?