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The Thing From Beyond Time

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19:46 / 16.05.02

but with all these people writing, it can be coordinated... i think the trick would be to outline the plot in advance month by month here, and then set the various writers out to fill in the blanks.

if it's contradictory, we write into the concept things about madness / misperception / alternate realities and it all fits

Less searchable M0rd4nt

21:02 / 16.05.02

I'm all over the two journals idea, but if you make it a love interest I swear I'm going to puke. How about his mum, or his sister, or just a mate?

21:09 / 16.05.02

The girlfriend deal was just a suggestion. But, how about a female friend? You know, that way everybody's happy. You got a male protagonist and what basically amounts to a female protagonist.

21:23 / 16.05.02

This is just sounding better and better.

Okay, so we've got 2 journals, a girl and a guy. The main bulk of the story, for the beginning at least, will be played out in the guy's journal, with some (word has escaped me! Explanation? Elucidation?) in the friend's journal and once he's disappeared, or whatever we decide happens to him, her journal can take over as the main story. Perhaps the odd, strange rambling entry in his from parts unknown. That can be worked out later I guess.

I think the technical question has to be answered too. Now, we can do the same thing here if you want. I have a preference for Livejournal, but we could always link it to a blog that the female protagonist has. This also opens up a larger community, exposing both the journals to both the lj community and the blogger community. I'm not sure if we're beginning to complicate things here, but you know what, a good story is always quite complex, so so be it.

Once that's done, we need to sort out personal details. I think with all of us writing it, it will really lend to the increasing dementia this character will hopefully suffer, different writing styles and such. But we ought to have some concrete details, both of the he and the she, so that regardless of how the posting styles differ, it'll still come across as the same person.

And then we'll need names.

So, a couple of other random thoughts. I think that with whatever happens to the male, the "main character" of the first part, it should only take a month, real time. Let's not drag this out too long. We want a concise and well-written story, not something that's going to ramble for a few months until everyone loses interest, right? So, a month for him to go mad, or disappear, or whatever. Perhaps the follow-up investigation could take a little longer. I really think an inheritance of some sort to start it off, but that's mainly 'cause I'm such a Lovecraft purist, and it'd be a bit of an homage to the old gentleman.

Those're my thoughts right now. I say we try to nail these things down before tomorrow when everyone vacates the 'lith so that we can actually put some thought to the story of our two heroes over the weekend.

Zoom.

21:29 / 16.05.02

Something else that occurs. Once we get into the real meat of it, I'd like to try to avoid any mentions of Lovecraftian deities and creatures. It's just such a sign of it being a fiction, or just someone taking the piss. If we need names for things or old tomes and such, let's see if we can't find actual names of various ancient gods, and I've got a fairly good list of actual "occult tomes" that we could use.

Just a thought.

Zoom.

09:39 / 17.05.02

a network of journals? regular polt briefings?

'kin hell, this is gonna be like writing some big, mad soap opera! um, in a good way.

I don't know about limiting the first guy's demise to a month .. shouldn't be spend some time establishing our characters as vaguely believable people with a life of their own before we launch into the horror plotline?

A couple of male names which sound slightly Lovecraftian, but hopefully not obviously so:

Curtis Jerome
Arthur Blake

Regarding ancient gods and tomes, I think it would be especially good if we DID use the Necronomicon, Cthulhu etc. Chances are most of the readers (assuming there are any) won't have heard of them, and I like the idea of encouraging the slightly post-modern aspect of the Cthulhu Mythos .. 'most people say that Lovecraft made up all this stuff, but what if maybe he was basing it on actual sources, or communicating with real scary entities in his dreams? WHAT IF IT'S ALL REAL?? AAAGGGH!!!'.
It would be so cool if someone read the blog, saw the mysterious disappearence, and started typing 'necronomicon' etc. into search engines..

Less searchable M0rd4nt

10:03 / 17.05.02

"Exposition", dude.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

10:24 / 17.05.02

Have a look at this site. It's not quite the same thing but it's in a similar vien. Might be useful, might not.

12:38 / 17.05.02

1) I must admit that I stole this idea and already started writing entries in a "travel blog" that will soon be filled with horrors. Even if you don't know squat of Portuguese, you can look at it.
2) I really think it makes it more believable if the person estates h/she is using a pseudonym from the beginning of the "story" already.
3)Let's count who's up to the thing already and stablish turns, shall we?

13:16 / 17.05.02

Arthur Blake.

He's, what, 23?

Just graduated college - Where?

I think he majored in Communications, with a minor in History.

He started writing a blog because he's got a boring data entry job, and his college girlfriend just broke up with him - she's in grad school somewhere far away, and he just moved to another city. (Boston for him? San Francisco for her?)

How's that sound?

13:18 / 17.05.02

It'd be cool if the girl was someone he knew from before college, hometown, who never lost touch.
They only see each other on holidays, when he comes back to visit family.

13:24 / 17.05.02

Ok so Arthur Blake (how about Arthur Blakesly, just to make his a little less cool sounding) is kind of shy and bookish, right?

So maybe the female journal writer should be more extroverted and cool. Maybe he has a crush on her, but he's not really in her league (at least not until he unleashes dark, buried magics). Her early journal entries could be filled with different Barbelithers experiences going out to clubs and doing drugs. Maybe they live in the apartments next to each other and find out that they both do journals so they link to each other's stuff. Maybe he gets her a job through one of his friends or something, or maybe he feeds her cats while she's away. Maybe she always kills plants, and he's helping her bring some rare plants she clipped from the Botanical garden back to life....

just some ideas...

15:15 / 17.05.02

Thank you, Mordant. That was driving me absolutely crazy.

Zoom.

15:34 / 17.05.02

Grant and Gridley's ideas all sound good to me.

19:08 / 17.05.02

All of this is so damn cool.
I'm going to try and come up with some interesting plot points this weekend and hopefully next week we can come up with a plot for at least the beginning bit. Point well taken about the month time limit I proposed. Maybe a little longer is necessary to really develop the characters.

Zoom.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

10:49 / 18.05.02

I think making sure he does a fair amount of mundane stuff is important... both for realism, and to make the weird shit (when it happens) much more effective. But mundane stuff that'll be interesting for people to read even before they realise there's an alement of bizarre cosmic shenanigans.

14:23 / 18.05.02

What about making him a student of parapsychology, or cryptozoology? Or an employee at a rare books library or something? Or both of those things. Something that'll make him kind of stand out, but still look like an ordinary guy.

Zoom.

19:58 / 18.05.02

What about a wage slave - some slacker working in the fast food industry, video store clerk (!!!), janitor , whatever -- who just has an odd hobby like a butterfly collecting (pinning insects to boards, dreams of being cacooned, the meta-morphus motif???) or is an ametuer parapsychologist, you know, always trying to drag his cool girlfrind into dark abandoned houses ... I don't think his job should lead him into the hands of the Dark Things Beyond Time -- that should be instigated by his own personal interest, his obsessions -- whatever that thing is that he uses to forget about flipping burgers, number chrunching or whatever pays his bills.

If you guys are going to modernize Lovecraft -- why not make the evil express itself through computers, or the TV ... maybe that snuff video Arthur has always been trying to get his hands on???

20:37 / 18.05.02

Actually I read a cool little snippet in a magazine for the Call of Cthulhu RPG that had a mythos-related computer virus that just over-ran the computer, putting little spells and sigils into the most mundane programs until it drove someone insane. That might be a cool angle to go from.

Zoom.

07:08 / 19.05.02

as an aside to the captive audience here, Resume With Monsters by William Browning Spencer is an amazing novel about a wage slave at a kinkos beset horribly by lovecraftian creatures. it's smart, funny, terrifying, and one of the best modernizations of lovecraft i've ever seen -- anyone who's interested in this stuff with love it love it love it.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

10:34 / 19.05.02

YOu could give him something like my old job- working for the British Library, in a great big ex-military base where they outhoused loads of weird ol' texts that people didn't request very much. I spent about nine months there, shelving really cheap Hindi novels, Japanese fasion mags, and brick-thick grimoires bound in suspicious leather. (And no, the last part isn't a joke.)

11:01 / 19.05.02

I looked at http://danieloliff.blogspot.com/ and, although I don't read the language, it gave me this idea.
You see, I have my browser set to display Japanese(Shift-JIS) when it appears.And some of the non-standard alphabet was translated when I viewed the above blog. So what if we could do the same, include some encodings in odd character sets in some of the fictional postings, that would be seen only by readers with the encoding on. They would be kind of atmospheric keywords, an accident of the terminal used to connect by the protagonist perhaps? But of course, when the context of the posts gradually becomes revealed they are shown to represent some form of the headmessing and reality changes being discovered in the story.

14:13 / 20.05.02

Nightguard: I really like the idea of the butterfly collector.

It's kind of, well, antique.

And I used to work in a butterfly museum, preparing specimens. I can talk the talk.

- g

21:54 / 20.05.02

that library depository Mordant was talking about sound really cool. almost too cool, but I like it. butterfly collecting, I like as well, but maybe that should just be a hobby/obsession? on a sidenote, this weekend my girlfriend said, "you remind me of a butterfly I used to have. I stuck a pin through it."

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

22:49 / 20.05.02

Grant- you may have to brief the rest of us on how to write convincing "butterfly collector-ese".

14:50 / 21.05.02

It wouldn't take much.

Butterflies are usually known by family names: swallowtails are papilionids, sulfurs are pierids, blues are lycenids - there are also danaeids and nymphalids and a few other things. Morphos are big, dramatic, reflective butterflies.

There are a *lot* of butterfly hobbyists, and it wouldn't be unusual for one to be working for a museum, even if he's just filing old texts. Or a library, even. Collector mentality.

Here's a page of links for lepidopterists, and here's a hobbyist supply & specimen selling page with a nice picture of a case of Morphos up front.
And here's a pretty good FAQ about collecting, from another page.

The hardware for preparing specimens is pretty basic: pins, threads, wooden blocks (sometimes called "spreaders"), a big lens, glassine envelopes (that's the same wax-paper stuff lickable stamps come in).
Maybe a humidifier for old, dry specimens - to soften their wings before spreading them on the block. Actually, this how-to page just recommends a large jar with a wet paper towel in the bottom. A "relaxing chamber".

I suppose if he's a hobbyist, we'd have to decide if he primarily kills & prepares his own, or if he buys specimens from places like that hobbyist supply store up there.
If he kills his own, he could go on butterfly hunting vacations to remote locations, with his killing jar, a net, and a box of envelopes.

If he works in the library, he could find maybe an old book on lepidoptery, and "borrow" it.

There's a specimen described in there that has only been found near one temple in South Asia, with an odd, face-like marking on its wings....

15:41 / 21.05.02

Hey, I'm finally back. Anyways I'm glad that I inspired all fo you to do this but I'd like to mention a few things first.

Each livejournal entry automatically has the date and time of the entry written right above it. My idea was to have the story written in real time. That is if the character says "I found out the strangest thing last week" then we should be able to see, by the dates, that more than a week had passed since the narrator's last post.

Also, the narrator should not use a pseudonym. Why? Well, because the narrator has no reason to use a pseudonym. Why would anybody use a pseudonym in their journal?

Also, the beggining posts should be "normal". That is no hint of any upcoming Lovecraftian activity.

And we can't have a cdrom instead of a book or a letter because cdroms did not exist in the narrator's grandfather's or thrice-great-grandfather's time.

I also think that maybe we should have other livejournals branching off. Like, for example, if the narrator mentions meeting up with a friend that friend might have a livejournal and might be writing about his normal life until the main character dies or something and then the friend starts to investigate while posting stuff on his or hers livejournal.

And here's the livejournal post that started it all:

Current Mood: Eldritch
Current Music: Moebius Trip by H.P. Lovecraft

Here's a Lovecraftian Idea

Somebody should get a livejournal and use it as a Lovecraftian story. Use the journal to carry on the narration.

For example:

November 23nd, 1983

I have been reading the withered tome which I had found in the attic yesterday. It seems to have once belonged to my great, great grandfather, one Joseph Curwen of Salem, Massachussets. The book details the most intriguing and dreadful of stories about visible creatures who "can't be seen by no man sane" and multiple-tentacled beings who hover just above our visible dimensions. The tome also provides formulas for the calling of some of these beings.
Strangely enough some of these formulas look quite terribly familiar.

16:48 / 21.05.02

right now my guy is heading towards Pru, taking a wooden box that the post office delivered to him by mistake (it should have been mailed to his elder uncle) inside the box, unbeknownst to him, is a small tentacle-headed idol carved in stone, which is about to be stolen...

17:53 / 21.05.02

Can Arthur have been waiting for this box? Is your story in present time or past?

Well, we need a plot lads and lassies. What's going to happen to this dear boy? And would anyone like to volunteer for the first post?

Here's my thoughts:

Arthur, who lives in Boston, works in a library (we'll have to get the name of one). He is a butterfly collector, but let's make him trap and mount his own, as that's way creepier. While working one day, he breaks the wooden backing on a shelf and sees that it leads through to a closed up section of the library.

Why's it closed up?

Zoom.

17:56 / 21.05.02

Also, grant has suggested that the female character start posting stuff first. Anyone want to set up a blog for her? I have no experience with it, so anyone who does would be a wonderful human being for volunteering.

Her story: Also a butterfly collector, though not as fanatical about it as Arthur. In Boston area, the two meeting in the library he works at while she's perusing books on lepidoptory (sp?).

???

Zoom.

18:20 / 21.05.02

Zoom: My story is in real-time, present time. Is about this guy who is going on vacation to Peru, to sort some problems out in his head. Before he leaves, his uncle from USA, an old paleonthologist, calls and asks if by any chance he didn1t receive a box by mistake that was supposed to be sent to this uncle.
The next day he receives the thing, and the uncle asks him to deliver it personally to him. The uncle looks nervous, high-strung. From there on, everything gets grimmer and grimmer; I even have the final post sorted out. I hope this thing can be a four-month or so adventure.

21:00 / 21.05.02

I set up a blog for her at http://minty4resh.blogspot.com/
PM me for details.

13:28 / 22.05.02

I've given gridley the keys. Anyone else want in?

I have yet to give her a real name, so anyone can do that if they like. She definitely leads a more interesting life than Art, I think, except he occasionally travels to catch bugs.

14:47 / 22.05.02

A couple of thoughts:

-minty meets art at some point after the start of the two blogs, so we can have the "up" of the budding relationship play against the eventual "down" when the crap starts to hit.

-rather than having Art break through a wall in the library, why not have him do a lot of Urban Exploration-type things. He might just find a box of weird stuff (papers, little glass/metal/plastic items, a jar of gungy green liquid) on a nasty shelf in the basement, while wandering the building, off-duty. Poppy Z. Brite and Caitlin R. Kiernan did a nice Lovecraftian update in a story called "the Wrong Thing" based on a piece of an industrial capacitor one of them found in an abandoned factory, for example.

-You can also use this idea to insert totally innocuous, misleading entries, in which Art goes to a variety of abandoned whatevers, storerooms, and theater catwalks.

-link to lots of popular sites, offering banal commentary. This is going to need a fair amount of camouflage to come off just right.

16:25 / 22.05.02

Yeah, what with the interlocking blogs, it would be easy to get into a situation where there was a massive continuity error of some kind that would totally discredit the whole thing.. people claiming to be in two places at once or something (although maybe that would be a good thing?)

But anyway, love the urban exploration idea, Logos!

THOUGHT: for the primary blog, can we make sure that every entry is wrtten a day or two in advance and screened here before it's uploaded?
Say, only one person (Zoom I assume, since he started the thread) actually has the password, and everyone's entries have to be approved by, say, half of the people who are taking part..

..which sounds a little dictartorial I suppose, but it would prevent any fuck-ups..

whatdoyouthink?

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