Progress Report!
I wrote twenty pages this evening, 5600 words. My favorite word in that number is “atrament” which I used in the phrase “black as atrament.” The word means a very dark liquid, but its older and archaic meaning is “ink.”
My favorite exchange of dialog is between Menelaus “Meany Louse” Montrose, a gunslinger from the Free and Armed Republic of Greater Texas, circa AD 2210, and Drosselmeyer, a warlock of the Old Iron Dreams Coven of the haunted ruins of Detroit, circa AD 4400. The gunslinger is carrying the warlock on his back out of a prison camp where archeologists of the year AD 10505 have taken them and other cryo-suspended revenants exiled from former millenniums.
With apologies to my Wicca friends and Christian friends alike, the exchange runs as follows:
“Oho. So you broke into the tombs, and the Knights caught you, beat you, and flung you into a coffin as punishment?”
Drosselmeyer nodded weakly. “I was set to wake only when the Judge of Ages himself should rise, that he alone might judge my case.”
“You were trying to dig up Christians and kill them?”
“Jews also. I took precautions!”
“Yeh?”
“I called my dog, who loved me, for I raised him from a pup, and anointed him with my secret name and slit his throat on a night without a moon within a circle of stones, so that my crimes are with him, away where the shadows of animals run and know no thirst. I am innocent.”
“Um. Technically speaking, killing your mutt don’t write you up no pardon from the Governor. It just makes you a slantindicular balless varmint aching to be hanged by the nearest lamppost for mooking with a critter likelier than you and larger-souled. Technically speaking, that is.”
“My craft was of no avail?”
“Can Jesus spit watermelon seeds through the holes in his hands? Man kills his own dog, he goes to Hell! Any fittin’ God would have made that the First Commandment, not that bosh about making statues or whatnot.”
“Spare me! The White Christ is dead. His powers are conquered and trampled by Rahab, Leviathan, Cthulhu and Karlmarks, and all the dragons of chaos and old night. He is a dead god.”
“Yeah, well my mommy always told me he could pop out of the grave again like a prairie dog, so being dead ain’t much of a great shakes with him, and she done beat me with a strap somewhat awful when I mocked and smirked—so I hold it to be the better part of valor not to shoot off my bazoo when the talk turns to Doxology. Wait—did you say Karl Marx? Ain’t he the dude who invented the Reds?”
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
