Darkly Dreaming Demographic.

Bonjour,

Not much up, still doing the second draft of Diana in the dark, Diana the Daydreamer, Diana After Dark, Diana by day. Still messing with that. I should have it done soon, get TOTCB editing out of the way and oh all the rejection.

I mean people wonder why there are so few female writers historically, it’s because men are more used to rejection. Men have no choice but face rejection everyday otherwise the species couldn’t continue, it’s always men that have to compete for the right to breed and it’s just women that have to accept or decline. They’ve never had to go looking for a mate and face the possibility of rejection, so dealing with rejection is an evolutionary traite for men in particular, I’m not saying I like rejection any more than anyone else, it still sucks but I’ve usually forgotten about it by lunch.

But now the game has changed, because now all the agents and publishers are women so in group preference works in a way that means they actively discriminate against men. That’s why you see so many female authors at the top of the charts these days with books that are frankly fucking garbage, I mean twilight, fifty shades of grey, these books are borderline retarded. I mean I like Harry Potter but it’s sort of spergy too with it’s fanbase.

The films were fun, I like watching them christmas, I had wanted to forge a nice tradition with my ex where we’d watch them every year but she’s now my ex so that went out the window. But it’s hardly the fucking holy grail of literary perfection.

I’m not saying men don’t write utter garbage that is nevertheless popular a la Darren Brown, that’s the guy that does the Davinci code or whatever, I’m just ranting.

I knew TOTCB wouldn’t do well, too many male main characters, not enough ‘strong empowered women’. I tried to do a female centric zombie story with Green Sunday but obviously it could never reach mainstream appeal purely because of the subject matter. So I’m hoping Diana will do a lot better because it’s a more mainstream subject matter and it’s pretty damn female centric, I mean you’re in a woman’s head the whole time, well it’s my head with a woman’s voice haha.
Not saying I intended it to be this way. I didn’t write it to pander to women it was just a happy coincidence really. Originally I wanted to centre it around the male child Cody but I realised after a while that wouldn’t really work and I’d have way more fun putting it from the perspective of the youngest child and actual blood relation to Dexter. And I had way more fun with what I actually did with Cody, no spoilers haha. I mean I could have based it on his male child from the tv show but that would have sucked, it would have been too generic.

I wrote it because I knew I could have fun with the set up, I never ever write anything with anyone in mind, particularly, I’m just thinking what would be the most interesting thing for me to explore. It just so happens that it might be appealing to these nutty feminist new yorker type literary agents haha. But that’s yet to be seen, scheduling it for editing some time later this month. I’ll see what Nat (The editor) says, always like to hear her take on it, even if it is a little ‘too nice’ at times.

Aurevoir

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It was late, Johnny was taking a shower. He just let the water run over his head, his eyes closed, trying not to think.

It was just him in the house, Peggy was out at a bar, some kind of girls night with her and friends from work. The kids and his mother were tucked away in bed and Brandon was working the night shift.

He got out the shower and dried his head with a crisp white towel. It was a simple bathroom with a bath shower combo with a round tub. That bathroom was all white tile with a touch of light blue. The sink was littered with kids toothpastes and brushes and shampoos. All those bright colours and cartoon characters in between those standard brands.

He went to his room which was the guest room at the end of the hall. The top floor was carpreted in this white almost shag and it made his footsteps quiet and soft, if a little itchy.

He put on a shirt and a pair of boxer shorts ready for bed. Sitting on the end of the made double bed in his bare room with only the bedside lamp on. The windows in this room had no shades, just venetian blinds which he’d taken all the way up. Now he was just staring into space quite literally. The sky was black and seemed to ooze into his room with the occasional dot of light.

After a while of sitting and staring the thought of sleep seemed a waste. His mind was tearing at the seams trying to make sense of all this. A lot of time seemed to pass of him just staring out into the night sky and not thinking. Just letting the empty blackness enter him and clear his mind of itchy thoughts.

He’d soaked up enough darkness. He turned the bedside lamp off and then noticed the light coming from the crack in his door. He’d left the hall light on. He got up and went to his door and walked into the hallway to turn off the light.

The switch was at the top of the stairs next to Peggy and Brandon’s room. The door of which was tightly shut but as he probed, not locked.

He turned the handle and the door opened with a jerk. Something light and small fluttered in the corner of his eye and as he slowly entered. He could smell her perfume and almost hear her voice. He switched the light on and the room lit up. He stepped inside and noticed there was a small piece of tissue paper under his feet. He picked it up and it was blank so he thought nothing of it.

The room was fairly nice but there was something odd about it. It looked almost like you’d expect a little girl’s room to look, cuddly toys, lots of pink and lace. A dressing table like her mothers but smaller and more modern and less cluttered. The bed was big with too many pillows and looked like it had never been slept in ever with more plush toys on top. This was the room Brandon shared with her but there was almost nothing of him in here. Shy maybe a few sets of the same kinds of shirts in the dresser near the bed.

The room was layed out almost indentically to her mother’s room without the ensuite. The dresser on the left as you came in, the bed across the wall on the right and the dresser against the wall opposite.

The room was neat. It almost made his room seem less like a hotel room seeing that her room was almost as bare. Besides the little touches and the stuffed animals.

He walked around barefoot on the soft carpet. She had long pink and white drapes that touched the floor tightly pulled together. He walked over to them and looked out onto the street. It was empty, lit only by the street lamps and the neighbour flood lamps.

He closed them and went over to sit on her bed, the covers of which were tightly pulled over. He didn’t know why he was there or what he was looking for but he felt different in this room. There was a cold static energy to it that he could feel running up his back. Touching the tips of the tiny hairs on the back of his neck, touching each of his finger tips.

He looked over to the bedside table, the one closest the window, the drawer of which was open about a half an inch. He slowly slid it open, it was almost empty but for a worn looking purple address book.

He opened it, careful that nothing would fall out but something did. Something small and cold and metallic fell into his lap and onto the floor. Upon closer inspection it was something of crude journal. Used to jot down her thoughts in short hand that was barely legible. Things like groceries and things she did. It didn’t seem to go back too far or have too many of her inner most thoughts such as you might expect. But it was stuffed with pieces of folded paper which looked to be a few years older than the book itself.

He unfolded the first one as carefully as possible. Trying to remember the exact way it was folded so he could fold it back again. It was a child’s drawing, but a fairly detailed one drawn by an older child. At first it just looked like something a bored teen would draw. Just mindless gore of a battlefield, stickmen killing eachother. As he looked closer he saw specifics and recurring themes.

In them a child sleeps with tears running down, his dreams in a bubble above his head. In the bubble a man with a bullshead turns the boy on a spit over a raging fire, laughing as he does it.

The next picture was of a man with a beard sitting in a chair. The man being bludgeoned to death with a hammer by someone marked as ‘J’. A woman in red watched in the background. There was lots of blood.

The last picture was a boy running away from a mass of darkness made up of garbled words. The only one of which he could make out was ‘Nobody’ repeated over and over.

After he folded the pictures away he remembered the thing that fell out. It must have hit the carpet and made no sound. He closed the book with the drawings folded up in it and placed it on the bed. He looked down at this feet and couldn’t see anything, it must have bounced under the bed.

“Shit”

Johnny got on his hands and knees on the carpet and started padding the floor. Under the bed where he assumed the thing had bounced. After a few moments of padding nothing he felt some hard and small and metallic and he pulled it out. It was a chain, some kind of necklace. He pulled on the chain and the necklace came into view and he cradled it in his hand to get a better look at it in the light. It was some kind of bird, an owl most likely, atop a five pointed star in a circle.

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