Her

This week we had to write a piece about someone we knew, using the contrast of poetic and realistic. I came up with the following

Her
By Samuel M. Curd


She was the late-night phonecalls
And the days spent wondering
She was the endless waiting
The self-doubt and the feeling of skin on skin
She was the swollen heart and the endless tears
The inspiration and the lurking shadow
She was the bedtime companion, the reassurance
And the grey clouds on the horizon

And now she's shacked up with some prick in Baisingstoke

So it's a new year.

Technically, not for me, it won't be a new year for me until march fourteenth but hey, semantics.

And what's going to happen this year? Well, I'm going to be taking another creative writing course and I'd like to have another shot at learning Japanese and maybe taking guitar lessons. Either way, being an author, translator or songwriter isn't a proper way to earn a living but fuck it. I just don't care. I guess that makes me more of a punk than all those hardcore punks with a family, kids, an SUV and a full-time job in an office and I'm not even trying.

So, ways to turn my apathy into art... I'd very much like to do something creative. Animate something, design something, get something published. What I'd really like is to collaborate, to have people to work with on a project and have my input accepted. I could design characters, write a scenario, draw some concept art or critique a work or something, I just want something to focus on, you know? The reason I want to collaborate rather than solo it is that I ALWAYS procrastinate or lose faith in myself. I need someone else there to keep me motivated and to bounce ideas off of.

So essentially I need a valet... Hmm I guess they don't work for IOUs.

So my first creative writing class of the new year is coming up soon, and I suppose I can check around newgrounds to see if any animators are in need of a writer or something.

Ideally I'd have a creative girlfriend that can be there for me and keep me going.

And maybe pigs will fly

Oh, and soph said I should write songs after reading my poems. Maybe. Id like to but you cant really form a band by yourself.

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.

The butcher

Here's a short something I wrote in my creative writing classes.

We were told to describe a person, a butcher to be specific. Whilst everyone was writing about balding middle-aged men in an apron, handing out pork chops or sweating over a pig carcass in a walk-in freezer, I was going the other way and describing a man called "the butcher".

Just goes to show how against the grain I like to think. I always stretch the definition of the task and it's made me quite popular in my course.

..............

They called him the butcher, but you wouldn't think it to look at him. He was a thoroughly well-to-do man in his late thirties, dressed smartly and to all was affable and adept. He had a wonderful penchant for the violin and spent his weekends volunteering at the local homeless shelter washing blankets and collecting money in a tin by the railway station. The problem was that he had a character fault, minor though it was, in that whenever the sun went down he just couldn't stop killing. The voices in his head bargained for him to stop saying "now, pete, you know these people don't deserve it, go have a mug of lemon tea and watch that nice movie about the holocaust again" but he would block them out by whistling jingles from television adverts. No, you wouldn't think it to look at him that this selfless civil servant had over a score of dismembered body parts hidden about his home, but after all, don't we all have a few skeletons in our closet?