Face your fear - Issue #4
I'm simultaneously writing another project called The Dawn Chorus, which I hinted at in the last newsletter. I have been experimenting (I do this a lot) with shorter sentence structures, incomplete sentences, reducing speech tags to verbs (that's going to upset a lot of people mwah haha) to convey urgency - all stuff that stamps action onto the page.
Does it work?
Well, that's a tough one to call - so I'm going to give you a peek behind the scenes with the first part of the first chapter. This comes with all the disclaimers I can give it- this is first draft material blagh blagh blagh, but it's an experiment I'm enjoying, and it's informing an action sequence in The Masocheist, where Death is facing down Rot and simultaneously battling his own personalities, all of which are trying to take control of his vessel's body, and who are all gunning for each other as well. So let me know what you think of the unusual sentence structure, did I get your breathing quicker, your heartbeat quicker?
So yeah, there you go, you also get a sneak peek into what's coming in the Masocheist by me just spouting out stuff! Doh!
Before the sneak peek, a little more news - My mum is still hanging in there, as some of you will know, she's been deteriorating from Alzheimer's for years, and we are in the last stages. She has been moved into a home and is bedridden, and yeah, it's a matter of time. I'm emotionally removed after all this time, she's been slowly degenerating for about 7 years now, after two years she couldn't remember who we were (the Austrian Spencers), but now the home has had to go into quarantine, due to an outbreak of covid there. Before you worry, She is basically quarantined anyway, has almost no "traffic" other than a nurse and my dad, who see her, so the chances of her contracting Covid are slim, but obviously, it is a concern, here in Austria, far removed with no possibility to see her outside of face-timing when my dad visits.
Reviews of The Sadeiest are still coming in, we are coming up to its first birthday (27th October) and only yesterday I got a lovely review from Anthony, a Frenchman, who had this to say:
Death as you never imagined it
This novel by Austrian Spencer is incredible and simply unclassifiable. It takes "death" as the main character, but takes it out of the caricature we know it to give it a story, depth, and above all a mission. What if death had a purpose? Now that's an incredible premise for a novel!!! Bravo Mr. Spencer. And where authors who come up with original concepts fail to turn them into exciting novels, crushed by the concept, Mr. Spencer does it with a disconcerting ease. His writing style, the structure of the story, the depth of the characters, everything is sublime. I highly recommend this book.
Which was pretty kick-ass :D
Ok folks. Stay safe, remember to be amazed by the small things, take joy in small victories, there's not enough time in our lives to just save it up for the big events. We're alive. You're beautiful, and you are doing exactly what you need to be doing at the moment in your life. Believe me, I know Death personally, and he told me to remind you all.
Austrian
The Dawn Chorus Chapter 1 - Part 1 - Fodder.
The Chorus resounded.
Instinctively I rolled, my right shoulder heavy from where I had slept, yet my hand found and grasped the rifle lying ready at my side as I rose into position. One foot, firm on the floor, the other supporting my weight on my weaker knee as I brought the weapon to shoulder height and locked my trigger arm. I could sense the others, snapped awake at the moment, imagine their heartbeats pounding, adrenaline frantically pushing blood through sleepy brains as they scrambled for their weapons and hastened to be still. The cacophony of the Chorus grew.
“Boon?” Slant remained still, my name whispered against the wind, his lips already closed, breathing silently through his nose.
“On it.” Hissed through teeth, lips barely apart.
My right eye pressed into the scope, ready, but closed, as I focused on the night, my breath held, ears straining to adapt, mentally cursing the others as they finally quietened.
“Daggert.” I spat his name with enough venom that he brought his nasal whine under control.
The Chorus rose triumphant. Avian voices crying rebeliously into the still air, their challenge filling the void of the night.
The pressure built from behind.
I swung, silently, knees and legs reversing positions, till I faced the opposite direction. As one, the others turned to face the danger, eyes scouring the ground of the perimeter, the flickering light from our maintained campfire pushing the darkness back, illuminating the slowly swaying grass of the rolling hills bordering the forest.
Guns raised. Fists clenched around machetes, teeth ground together. The snap of something collapsing in the campfire distracted only for a second.
The pressure shifted to my frontal lobe, then split, two splinters of pain traced lines toward my ears. Perspiration beaded on my head - my scalp shaved smooth - no tremor of hair to distract me.
My left fist rose, two fingers raised, before I pointed in the directions they would attack from. We were on the wrong side of the sleeping children. Unlucky. They had vagued in the worst possible place.
The others crept forward, their eyes scanned the grass for the appearance of sudden weight, my crew’s soft footfalls barely registering in my ears as I strained to let the Chorus in. Allow it to shape the world around me.
Help me find the fuckers.
Our spotters - Jones and Harrison – would ignore the ground. Their eyes darting from soldier to soldier, checking and rechecking constantly. Looking for the freeze. The cold, icy, heart-clenching sign that told us they had drifted through one of us. Gotten a taste.
A stab of pain shot through my right temple lobe, the sound from the Chorus channeled through my ears, directly into my mind. My eyes screwed tight, the darkness behind my eyelids vibrated to their cry. Coalesced around a form. Bent around a shape that emerged from nothing inside my brain as a representation of the world around me. Something was crossing over, to my left.
My eye snapped open as I turned, my gun pointing to the direction the chorus had led me, and saw Slant's twelve-year-old daughter, Carly, in my sights, rising from her place by the campfire, spear in hand, as my finger pulled the trigger.
An explosion of flesh and blood ruptured the space between us. A roar of rage and disbelief filled the air as the grass beneath the thing that I had hit fell flat with its weight. I heard the brief intake of breath from Carly, as she stifled her own reaction, stood shaking in shock, fighting her own impulse to scream.
I saw the first machete land in the thing, suspended at an impossible angle in the air, before I registered the sound of the thrown weapon passing me. Slant, quick as a snake, his aim perfect, never once questioning my lead - despite the fact he had thrown toward his own child. A good soldier, despite his full spectrum, which made the sound of the severing of his windpipe all the harder to hear.
The rush of noise, like an intaken breath, a vacuum of air, directly behind me, close to where he stood, told me the second creature had vagued right beside him, only to enter the rupture once more.
I rolled instinctively. Panic biting at my brain, breath sharp and cold. My only thought was to get away, desperate to escape the drag. I scrambled, frantic on all fours before I twisted again to face the direction I had fled.
Slant stood suspended in the last seconds of his life. Eyes wide in shock, his arm stretched out toward his daughter, his mouth open in a silent scream, his throat torn wide open, his Trachea pulled apart, purple against bone white, the blood splatter droplets sprayed out in a fountain, still, suspended in the air like some fucking medieval nobilities ruff. Immobile, his pocket of time frozen in a ghastly mimic of a photo, burning guilt into my retinas for all time.
And then he imploded. The entirety of him sucked within a flicker of a moment into that hole between our realities. The creature taking its bounty to feast upon.
The Chorus fell shockingly silent. All of their cries and warnings and cacophony at once gone.
And in the stillness of that moment, Carly finally began to scream.
# # #