Reileen van Kaile

Eidolon
by Reileen van Kaile

these are my puppet strings that bind you here
what is it in my eyes you fear?
I'm the faded photo you burned long ago
reborn from the ashes a million scissor lashes
resurrected by the heat of my hate

here we stand at the threshold to black
take my hand, go now to these lands
savor the salvation that came much too late

how far will my chains let me run?
how long can I believe in your grief?
how could you be so naive?
well, try to save this, just try to hide
from these feelings that you thought long died
you'll never escape these tangled threads that Fate has spun

these are the ghosts that have stayed the course
what need have they of remorse?
I see that still I clasp your tongue
mine to twist, so cease to resist
you'll never find your lady in the sky

I'm your demon angel, your seraphic plague
no disguise, you're wise to finally realize
I'll never return the self that you gave

how far will my chains let me run?
how long can I believe in your grief?
how could you be so naive?
well, try to save this, just try to hide
from these feelings that you thought long died
you'll never escape these tangled threads that Fate has spun

(can you hear me out there
the voice of your little toy?
can you feel my memory
bleeding you into the void?)

well, I've torn away your hellish night
ripped through all your silly lies
yet you deny what any fool can see
you no longer have any power over me

how far will your chains let you run?
how long will you wander your grief
searching for what's left of me?
well, I burned it all, but trust that I cried
for these feelings that have long since died
and now I stand, alone and proud...the battle won

vyctori

Were you able to hear my voice as I spoke?
The Heart Station broadcasting at one o’clock in the dead of night
Requires no tuning on the dial as it lies
On a secret frequency.*

Were the radio waves of my heart able to reach you?
It’s broadcasting from the Heart Station of sinners
And only God knows
How much I miss you.

Everyday my life's in shambles
since you took your love away
I got nothing left to gamble
I've thrown it all away

Now and then I'm suicidal
Flirting with a new temptation
Happiness inside a bottle
is what I need today

Oh my lover's gone away, gone to Istanbul
Light as a feather
I lie in my bed and flip through tv channels
Eating Godiva
I'm smoking my days away reading old emails
In my old pajamas
What a day, me muero, muero, muero

Death comes in many guises, but one way or another it is usually a lack of oxygen to the brain that delivers the coup de grâce. Whether as a result of a heart attack, drowning or suffocation, for example, people ultimately die because their neurons are deprived of oxygen, leading to cessation of electrical activity in the brain - the modern definition of biological death.

If the flow of freshly oxygenated blood to the brain is stopped, through whatever mechanism, people tend to have about 10 seconds before losing consciousness. They may take many more minutes to die, though, with the exact mode of death affecting the subtleties of the final experience. If you can take the grisly details, read on for a brief guide to the many and varied ways death can suddenly strike.

wyld_dandelyon

posts about
preserving the balance between development and wilderness in today's world. In a similar vein, ysabetwordsmith

dantaron

We readers come to this novel with certain expectations. We expect that it will tell us a story -- a coherent narrative that makes sense. Those expectations are so habitual and fundamental to our experience of reading novels that it can take us a long time to accept that such expectations are really being thoroughly frustrated. That's why it took me a very long time -- hundreds of pages -- before I finally conceded that the constant, flagrant contradictions between our narrators' perceptions and their reality weren't some kind of deliberate, meaningful narrative device.

[. . . ]

This chapter might have been more interesting if Buck had turned out to be only partly immune to Nicolae's enchantment and he had emerged from this room less than certain of what he'd really seen -- as though he really were having to fight to keep his sanity. He is, after all, a brand-new RTC, a mere infant in the faith, so the divine counter-enchantment might not have been fully operational just yet.

But that wouldn't work because that's not how the authors' notion of RTC magic works. It's a binary system. You're either 100-percent saved or you're 100-percent damned to Hell. There is no half-way, no partial, no blurring of categories. Truth is wholly true and lies are wholly lies. Good is wholly good and evil is wholly evil.

And that, ultimately, is why readers don't have to worry about things like unreliable narrators in this book. The authors can't have intended such a device because the authors don't believe in it.

dark_christian

The thing is, if your story is intended to be a piece of straightforward porn, you can pick a style and go with it. The usual objections to blunt writing are removed; graphic words for body-parts tend to leap off the page in a rather glaring way if your characters spend most of their time dressed. The reader gets to know the characters in, basically, a social context, like you'd get to know a friend, and if your friend suddenly whips out his genitals, it's a bit startling. Overly graphic sex scenes in otherwise fully-clothed books can feel like too much information, like the characters suddenly changing style and going from Regency elegance or lyrical melancholia to porn-speak, which is as disconcerting as if the vicar poured a cup of tea and then started talking dirty. All of which gives a sense of 'whoa!', which is not exactly the mood for sexual bliss. If, on the other hand, the story you're writing actually is porn, there's no reason at all not to use pornographic language. Direct language can be used all over the place without the style taking a lurch.

But if you're not writing porn, you need to match the sex scenes with the rest of the book.

A disagreeable variant of Mary Sue, often found in action films, cop shows and the more battly kind of science fiction. While Mary Sue is a fictional character who bends the universe around herself with her amazing specialness, Macho Sue bends the universe around his manhood. He has a particular ability to get away with behaviour that would be considered bad in a woman - to the point of behaviour that would be considered typically female by a misogynist if displayed by a woman.

Phantonym
The feeling you get when you're searching for the perfect word: that there is a word for this concept that's not in the thesaurus, but you can't quite remember it. Usually this is not the case, and you're forced to go with a word that's slightly wrong, or else rewrite the whole bloody sentence. (Reileen sez: "I get this one all the time.")

[. . .]

Naglet
A concept or action that you have the nagging sense really should have a single word to describe it-the action of a dog putting its head between its paws on the ground to invite you to play is one that always bugs me - but most unfairly, it doesn't. (Reileen sez: "This is often a jumping-off point whenever I'm doing in-novel conlanging for SF/F. What concepts exist in such-and-such culture to the point of ubiquity, and thus would probably require a word or a short phrase describing it?")

[. . .]

Subconscious-Packing
Reading and absorbing as much as you can in the way of good stylists and general information, on the understanding that it'll mesh together in your subconscious and make your writing richer. Not to be confused with procrastination. (Reileen sez: "It's probably the equivalent of eating past being full, but I follow this philosophy for my art, my writing, and my music. Needless to say, it drives me nuts, but it drives me nuts if I don't at least attempt to do it, so I'm pretty fucked either way.")

It strikes me that a key element of English insults is the idea of self-awareness: a great many of the insults denote someone who, were he aware how he was coming across, wouldn't be acting so stupidly.

The kind of insults a nation creates are an unusual insight into its general character: you wouldn't bother to invent an insult for something that nobody does or nobody minds. Whether this means that, say, England has more wankers and America has more jerks, or that England notices wankers more and America notices jerks more, I couldn't really say. (As an interesting side-note, many English people feel that 'arsehole' is a stronger insult than 'asshole', even though the only real difference is in pronunciation. Curious, huh?)