Help wanted draft

Here's a little piece I wrote some year or so ago, it was the first piece of creative writing I attempted as an adult, before "Nome". It depicts Joel and Faye on an average day (well the start of one) it's unfinished obviously but acts as a stepping stone between help wanted and bedlam.

Anyway, enjoy. In many ways I prefer this over my attempts at writing bedlam, it was a bit more murky and depressing, which is great.


Joel rolled onto his stomach, coughing loudly without restraint. The previous night was a blur of wretched sights and disgusting odours but then again, he thought the same of work and his apartment so business as usual there. Lifting his head to peer out of the window across the room, he glimpsed the bomb, Bedlam’s largest structure and monument to the isolation of the town, through the haphazard slats of the blinds. Grasping wildly with the hand not pinned beneath his torso he found his cell phone, squinting painfully at its face, feeling annoyed that it showed so much life so early in the morning.

The new girl had started at the coffee shop a few days previous and had wasted no time in making him feel unwelcome there, not through hostility or distance, but by turning his shift into a half-decent experience which made him shiver. Working was the bane of his existence and the thought of looking forward to it turned him to the drink he was desperately trying to keep down. Tumbling from his single mattress he slid into the adjoining bathroom, knocking miscellaneous objects aside with his bloody feet. Aside from the familiar cracks and crunches a desperate squeak filled the air about his shuffling gait, signalling that the mice had come back. Joel didn’t mind the mice, they were company after all and anything they ate was something less to bundle into trash bags come the end of the week.

He wondered what day it was, but couldn’t bring himself to check his mobile. Its cheerful obedience reminded him too much of her so he fell into the shower and lit one of the many cigarettes he kept littered about the space he occupied. Leaning heavily against the cold tiles he closed his eyes, trying to remember what he had said to the new girl that sparked the drinking binge he was trying to desperately ignore. It was no use, he had become accustomed to shutting things out whenever things became too much, and besides, his head was making a spirited attempt at punishing him for his addictions. Slapping the walls with bandaged palms he found the faucet and turned it. It didn’t make much difference which he used as hot water was a luxury he didn’t have.

With a pathetic hiss his cigarette went limp. Allowing it to drop, he set about the arduous job of washing himself, noticing he hadn’t removed his clothes at any point. Pulling the drenched contents of his pockets out and placing them on the nearby cistern he proceeded to clumsily unbuttoning his shirt, hurling it at the pile of clothes lined up nervously in the corner of the bathroom. They smelled of mildew and Joel was sure something was living in them but evicting them seemed hypocritical to someone who didn’t belong in this god-forsaken town to begin with.
The walk to work was hell, not only did he feel like shit, he hated himself for walking faster when he thought of her waiting, panic-stricken at the door for him to let her in. She was always on time and insisted that they would get in trouble with the manager if they didn’t work hard. He remembered snorting at this remark as, knowing the manager, the place could burn down and attract more customers. Either way, she had set about “organizing” the place which meant he had nowhere to sleep as the stock room was now filled with boxes and chemicals instead of the trash bags of clothes he would prop himself up against.

He rounded the corner to the store, shielding his eyes from the sun now cresting over the bomb, a fake sunrise that was so brilliant as to overshadow its first attempt four hours previous. Painfully peering through outstretched fingers he saw her in front of the store, pacing and furiously mashing her phone. After a few steps the shrill sound of his own device filled the empty street, causing her to look up from her fervour and exclaim, half excited, half anxious that he was over half an hour late and that she wasn’t sure he was coming.

That sparked something in Joel’s mind but before he could chase it up she had closed on him and was grasping at his bandaged hands in a mothering way, muttering about the state he was in. His jaw half-opened he said nothing, staring blankly at her purple hair partially covering her face. Shaking himself mentally he was about to tell her to ignore it when they met eyes, causing his voice to shrivel and his stomach to drop. Swallowing, he brushed her aside and thrust both hands into his pockets, busying himself with finding the keys to the grille covering the service window of Bucks Coffee shop. She coyly pulled at his sleeve but he determinedly told her to get the machines ready, tossing her the keys and pulling a bent cigarette from a sadly squashed packet.

The story of Bedlam part one

Bedlam?

People who know me well (so hardly anyone) know that I've been toying with an idea for a story for some years now. I've written half of the story, scrapped it, rewritten the first chapter in a better style, abandoned it again, so that I might first hone my writing skills, and here we are.

Bedlam wasn't just an idea that I came up with off the top of my head, it was an idea that started small and evolved to what it is now. In a nushell it's a city secluded from the rest of the world. A town built in a wasteland around a humongous bomb. The inhabitants have no idea why they are there and have no contact with the outside world due to humongous walls surrounding the town on all sides. Make of it what you will, a study in seclusion, a pastiche of society, the fragility of peace and the first world or just the crazy imaginings of a twenty-something year old hermit (that's me, by the way).

One day I'll write that book, it's depressing, shocking and an unhappy tale of two young people trapped in a town that hates them (metaphorically speaking) but what may be more entertaining in the short term is just how this town came about so I decided to chronicle it here. It spans a few years, a mental breakdown or two and a few failed relationships. So let's get started;

Secret of The Ancients, my magnum opus, will be chronicled at a later date.

When it all started

It all began when I was working in SPAR, the crappy convenience store. I had to smile and pretend like I gave a flying fuck about customer's needs and wait for ages whilst they fished around in their pockets for loose change to buy cigarettes or bottles of cheap brandy to fuel their addictions, and I found myself wishing that I could just tell them that I thought they were scum and that if they were hit by a bus on the way home it would be a net gain for the world.

Joel - he says what we're all thinking/ Faye - she's sweet, sensible and a bad influence.

Okay, perhaps not so harsh as that, but I wanted to tell them to hurry the fuck up and that I couldn't care less about how the price of a tin of soup was different to the sticker price by two pence. I imagined a world in which people could act how they wanted, if you were having a bad day it would be okay not to smile and if you were pissed off you wouldn't have to smile because your contract says you have to. And thus the town was born.

It was a place with all pretence stripped away and people said it like it was. There was truth in advertising and people acted stupidly because of their own stupidity, like not being able to sue a company for not putting a warning label on their product. It's silica gel, used to keep packaged goods dry, you don't need a warning to know not to eat it but there is one because some dumb shit did.

"Help Wanted" episode one. It was ugly and wooden but introduced Joel and Faye.

Help Wanted

The first iteration was to be made whilst I was dabbling in flash animation from 2008-200. I made a short animation (it took fucking ages and was tedious and arduous) called "Help Wanted". It was about two people, a man named Joel and a woman named Faye, who were to work in various roles and inevitably get fired over and over for speaking their minds and treating the annoying general public in the manner they deserve. I made the first episode, set in an unnamed department store and had the pair cause an old man to have a heart attack and a five-year old to be tackled by a security guard because they were interrupting their conversation. (Trust me, it was funny on paper but the execution was wooden and involved awkward pauses and only one camera angle)

He probably deserved it.

The series was to evolve, I had drafted more episodes that were sleeker and harder-hitting, involving recurring characters, improved visuals and jokes but they never got past the design stage. (I learned that I am NOT an animator. I am a writer) so the series kinda died on its feet and the first episode was never published due to horrific errors in the programming stage that made the file far too big to be usable. After some time, I sketched a coffee shop, called "bucks coffee" that would feature in a later episode (and become Joel's coffee stand in the Bedlam novel) and made an animatic (a rough storyboard with sound) in the hopes of working with an animator in order to make the series go further.

Someone liked the idea and put me in contact with a man named Jordan Duchynz... something like that, under the screenname of Duchednier. He was an excellent artist and agreed to make something with me. We decided to make a shorter animation to test the water and it was here that Bedlam, the town, was born.

Warning labels was pithy, funny and had a message.

Warning Labels

A short minute-or-so long piece about warning labels (entitled "warning labels") which was set in this as yet unnamed town was created and won an award for best daily submission on the website "newgrounds.com", pretty much the only place online that caters to amateur animators who use adobe flash (commonly called flash animations). The piece was written and visuals designed by myself, with Jordan putting in the "leg work" and animating it. I felt throughout that he was expecting to share the animating with me, but I simply didn't have the talent or knowhow to be of any use.

Watch Warning Labels here!

Sadly, shortly after I had designed an episode linking "warning labels" to the "help wanted" series, Jordan contacted me with a very odd link to a video. The video was about this meta-faith thing called "the secret" which in a nutshell is the belief that all successful people know something that makes them successful and other people don't know this "secret". It seeks to educate people and promises to make them successful too. I told him exactly what I thought of this (bullshit, incase you hadn't guessed) and shortly afterwards Jordan told me that we wouldn't be working together any further. The thing was, I thought that he was trying to make a joke or simply asking my opinion, I had no idea that a grown adult could believe in something so ridiculous and not be institutionalised. Turns out he thought it was true and the reason for his being a good animator and was upset that I didn't feel the same way. Sometimes I wish I had gone along with it as we made quite the team but then again, I don't like lying to people or to myself so maybe it was for the best.

Warning Labels was unwittingly set in Bedlam. It was here that the visual style of Bedlam was born, as well as the bleakness, cynicism and some of the town's main locations and characters.

What happened next

Shortly after publication of "Warning Labels" I wrote this on my Newgrounds account. nothing came of it but it helps highlight  what was going on at the time:

Info time!
The town warning labels is set in is "Bedlam", a city of restraint and freedom, a contradiction i know but read on:
Bedlam is a growing town being constructed around a gigantic bomb, whether the bomb is active or not is unknown and the residents seem not to care. the knowledge that death can come at any time gives people an uncaring attitude and they act however they want all the time. people's true feelings are released and whether they are crushed by depression or elated with vindication is up to them.
The main corporation running the town is the Rappy corporation, an uncaring faceless company determined to keep the townspeople blissfully ignorant as it sucks their money and privileges out of them, forbidding travel out of the town but keeping crime levels low through constant surveillance.
I'm hoping to introduce the town and it's inhabitants in more depth with future projects, and for people interested in seeing more - the next project is titled "Bedlam: Help wanted" and is in production now, watch this space!
Dil

I ditched the Rappy corporation idea once I realised how it wasn't corporations, but people and their own idiocy that made people miserable. It's not a corporation's fault that you're broke and feel insignificant and unattractive, it's your fault because you spent all of your money, aspire to something you can't be and think you need to look a certain way to feel good about yourself. Live the way you want to, not how the media says you should.

To be continued...

So that's what I have on the origin of Bedlam so far, there is more to come and I'll post the next part soon. Watch this space.