Rael Marak's Collection of Horror Stories for the Sleepless
Ah, you found me! I’ve been waiting… just stirring and fumbling around here with some ink and paper. Horrible things have been born since you’ve been away, dripping from dream-filled chasms and pooling around the nearest door to this world: your wonderful brain. I’m so glad you’ve made it!
Why am I reading a Halloween book in the middle of summer? Because I couldn't help it. 80's neighborhood supernatural horror is magnetic.
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That headline will show up in a Google search and stir some feelings, no doubt. It’s the least I can do this Halloween– which has been an utter pain. Halloween on a Thursday, days before an election, is simply hurtful. We should all just have a wake instead, an unholy wake where we put our hands to the threshold until the other side acknowledges us, of course.
This is my time of year and it’s more than the “Spooky Season”. What draws the most intense feelings from myself is that very human sense of change, loss even. It’s a beautiful season and it makes us feel: cold returns to the air, damp seeps right through our suddenly tender skin, and our eyes begin to question the edge of every shadow. Leaves escape the branches and we have no choice but to watch the earth shut up shop. She locks the cupboards and pulls the grey veil over herself until the sun returns in an unfathomable number of months.
I held an idea in my head: the colossal necrotic lord of a wasteland empire lumbering through the ruins of his kingdom. I imagined a towering creature formed of bones, millions of repurposed femurs and fibulas piled and fused to shape a god-like behemoth that’s inhuman gaze stared down from a cold sky. I didn’t surface this idea for any noble reason, nope– there will be no tale of cyclopean elder-gods or any eerie vision to post to Instagram. I wanted to feed my idea to an AI and see what came out.
This is not a rant about what used to be Twitter. This is simply a modest announcement that I’ve spun up an Instagram (and Threads) account for this holiday season (the Orange Season). The current data suggests that I’ll be visiting my “X” account rarely– but that’s not an indictment, it’s just capitalism. I’m moving my “attention currency” to a different market.
Fiction writers often find themselves confronted with a question: are you a pantser or a plotter? This essentially means: do you sit down to write a plot before you tear into the details– sometimes taking months to tune and sequence every layer of events– or do you dive right in, putting one word after another without any outline in place.
ChatGPT has been swirling at the top of every creative conversation in the last couple of months, especially for indie writers. A new cottage industry of folks pumping books from their browser with the tool and pasting them right into Amazon has emerged, flooding the market with… with, what? I can’t really say, but I did give the tool a spin myself and it’s, in the least, very entertaining.
I gave ChatGPT the chance to approach a premise I started exploring on this site. The Twilight Rambler is a bit of a pantsy project, and it’s lost a lot of steam as I’ve been immersed in my true passion lately: plotting without ever finishing. ChatGPT, however, is the ultimate pantser. Unlike the humans who write the stories we read, it has no idea what it’s going to do between words. The tool puts down one word at a time, what it deems to be the best fit, with some randomization for realism’s sake, and then runs the logic again for the next word, always bouncing its progress off of the prompt and the wealth of human generated data that informs its decisions.
This is a bit of a fallacy, at least for most, since a pantser probably has a good idea of where they want their story to go and what beats they need to hit. They just don’t write them down… or count the syllables between them. Stephen King is undoubtedly the most famous pantser, and as prolific as he is, technology has given him a rival!