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HEART-EATER
WHAT WILL BECOME OF HER?
Have you ever met someone who you had always thought of as being larger than life?
It’s hard to measure up to that in person.
You build them up as a hero, as a nemesis. You prepare yourself. You make plans. You could hardly be blamed for being disappointed when it is all too easy.
One broken lock.
A few messages from the wrong account.
You wait in their apartment, go through their things, and maybe that’s your first sign. It’s one bedroom, small. The most expensive item in the whole place seems to be a TV which is a decent enough size, but several years old. You look through the nightstand and under the bed hoping to find something interesting, maybe something a little dirty. You’ve heard the sorts of things that they’re capable of dreaming up for an audience, but now you want to know what they do in private. Maybe part of you has been looking forward to finding something kinky. Handcuffs. A whip. Porn. Anything, really.
But there’s nothing.
Not even a vibrator, or lube.
No photos of the ex.
No sign that any man has ever been entertained here.
Nothing.
Well, not quite nothing.
There is a very interesting collection of movies. Not adult movies, like you were hoping to find, but a lot of the NC17 kind. The horror stuff you would have needed an ID to see in theater—at least for the ones that made it into theaters. Some of them look too bloody for even that, if you had to guess.
You don’t know. You were never into horror before recently.
And all the rooms are sort of like this. There are no condoms under the bathroom sink, no razors, little enough makeup. The living room, such as it is, has been turned into a gloomy sort of home office. You can’t imagine working here, though, with all the sounds of traffic and sirens and shouting coming from outside. It’s not a great area.
The kitchen is a five-foot square with a fridge and cabinets that are all empty, save for a couple off-brand energy drinks. You crack one open but leave it unfinished because it tastes like shit.
You hear them coming up the stairs and you ready yourself for the fight of your life.
They’re stronger than you, but not as strong as you’ve expected. You have the element of surprise. You have the syringe.
All they have is a pink taser and you happen to know already that it doesn’t work.
By the time you get the body in the car and bound tightly, you’re starting to wonder if it was all too easy. Maybe this is a waste of time. A waste of freedom
You go back upstairs one more time just to lock up and grab a change of clothes. There’s nothing nice. It’s not like you were expecting formalwear, but you aren’t too keen on the ratty jeans and black T-shirts bearing the posters of these disturbing ass horror movies. The wardrobe is as bland and depressing as everything else.
Then you find the envelope.
You know that it’s special because you find it hidden inside a shoe box.
It’s one of the big manila kind, and there’s a print taped to the front of it. It’s black, with a red frame, and an illustration of what appears to be a pair of lips sucking up a human heart like spaghetti.
Your victim is in the trunk already and you don’t know how much you dosed them with or how long it will last. So you don’t have time to go through the interesting find at present—but at least you know you got something interesting, in case this whole revenge thing turns out to be a bust.
So you change as quickly as you can, and then you start driving.
They don’t even scream when they wake up, and you start to feel almost guilty for what you’ve been planning on doing to them.
It’s been one of those days for me.
Anyway, Riley Langdon is here, and I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to kill her or not.
_____
Transcribed from a napkin inside the envelope, the page that started it all
Inspiration/Brainstorming
LolitaMaker
I want to scrap the underage portion of this. Aside from the fact that ages will never explicitly be established, Red herself should look like a young but ADULT woman (early twenties maybe). The terror shouldn’t come from the idea that this could happen to kids, but rather from the idea that it could happen at all.
I do want to draw some inspiration from it though, since it’s one of the most famous deep web legends and even though it’s not technically a red room, there is some crossover.
Financially motivated villain
Bodymodding
Heavy bondage
Sexual component
A Girl I Used to Know
I want to scrap the recurring nature of this one, but I like the personal connection, drawing the viewer in. Topher definitely shouldn’t know Red, as it takes away from her mystique, but perhaps she reminds him of someone else?
Opens up a question of complacency with Topher as well—would he have gotten involved or tried to help if she had looked some other way? (These could be the sorts of things he’s wrestling with already before she kills him).
Also like the “pleasurable” aspect of the streams adding to the discomfort of the audience. Will probably want to work some standard fetish gear into the background of the sets so that the implication can be made without the comic itself ever crossing the line into erotica.
The Game Starts Here
Hate to admit it, but Reddit guy was right. This is a much creepier and more satisfying deep web experience than the real thing.
One Thing About Tor
This is the fictional deep web that I want Red to be featured on.
Bitcoin converters, hackers, trackers, illicit chats, video embedding, livestreams, hitmen, and of course, the classic invitation to the red room.
_____
Amazing, isn’t it?
It starts with these derivative little napkin notes and suddenly there are people willing to kill over this creation.
She didn’t even think of anything new from the looks of it, she just wove all her favorite bits together into a nightmare that actual women were then forced to live. Some hero, huh?
I think if I could do it all over again and be anything, it would probably be a writer.
This woman writes about blood and chains and now look at her.
Well, maybe not where she’s at right now.
But how she’s cherished. How she’s talked about.
The chosen one.
A savior.
The Real Red.
Those were all things that the man said of the Great Riley Langdon when he was torturing me.
The sick thing, well, a sick thing. A really sick thing is that I think he wanted me to be impressed by this fictional character he had me imitating. He didn’t even seem to realize how he spoke about the writer.
Maybe if I hadn’t been a practice run, and he had tried harder to mold me properly, things would have been different.
Maybe then I would have wanted to just kill her, clean and simple like Red does for her creator in the comic.
But that’s too easy, isn’t it?
Now that I have seen for myself how powerful it is to be a storyteller, I need to think about the next part very carefully.
I need to think about which stories get told.
The Creator’s website, for instance, does not deserve the update that he is dead. He failed to bring about a legacy, and deserves to be left to oblivion. Likely he will be viewed as a fraud, or an anonymous shadow, and either is fine with me.
But I do keep coming back to finish this little project of his.
It’s private.
Just mine and his. And he won’t get the benefit of it anymore, which makes it essentially just mine.
I want to see how it ends.
I’m just dying to know what happens to our dear protagonist.
_____
FROM THE FOLDER
Thursday
6/13/13
I did it.
I finally fucking did it.
I got home from work today to find mom burning all my notebooks in the backyard. The journals, it seemed, were already nothing but ash. I tried to salvage what odd pages I could. I screamed and asked her what the fuck she was doing.
The way she tells it, she was cleaning my room when my journal fell open onto a page where I happened to have called her “stupid” for falling into another pyramid scheme.
I believe exactly 0% of that story.
My mother never cleans unless it’s for a presentation, and the house looked like shit except for my room, which she had obviously just trashed. I’m guessing she probably needed another couple hundred bucks to keep her makeup selling status, and since her account is drained, she went poking around in my things for some of my fry money. If I hadn’t been saving, I doubt she’d have cared about me enough to snoop.
I don’t even really believe the part about her being stupid. I wish she were stupid, because that’s something that could be fixed. That would make it less her fault. She could learn. I think she’s stubborn, and that that’s a lot worse. She’s selfish, and she’s so obsessed with finding an easy out of the life dad left her that she hasn’t let herself realize that she’s paying money to do other women’s makeovers, and losing money all along the way the last ten years.
Over half my life, she’s cared more about this absurd string of businesses than about me, her own flesh and blood.
I’ve known that. That doesn’t hurt half so bad as the loss of my stories.
I’m not going to pretend there was any award-winning fiction in there. But they were my words. My escape. I didn’t realize until that moment she had any new ways of hurting me, but she did.
It made the decision a hell of a lot easier when she tried to follow up the bullshit with an ultimatum. She told me I could buy-in to work for her, or I could start paying rent.
I chose firmly to do neither.
I could have yelled at her, or explained how the fast food job had made more money a week than her entire year’s worth of makeup sales. I could have tried to go over the math with her again. Hell, I had enough cash on me at the moment to toss rent in her face just to prove a point.
But I decided that I was done trying to prove anything to her.
She screamed and shouted at me while I was packing up my things. She said I’ll be back, that I’ll never make it in the world without her, that I have nowhere to go. She told me not to come crawling back when I run out of money. It was obvious she never thought I’d go, that she didn’t realize I’ve had arrangements made for this moment for months.
I might well run out of money, but I sure as hell am not stepping foot onto that property again. Not ever. I would sooner die.
Being out is the best thing that has happened to me in a long time.
Some things that don’t feel great?
My car is making a weird sound, and might not get me another 14 hours into the city.
This hotel costs a lot more than I thought it would.
I met Michael online, so, he might well be catfishing me, or he could be a creep or a serial killer, or all of the above.
But those are problems for tomorrow.
Tonight, I just feel so fucking free.
_____
It is much more intimate to be going through these hand-written words than it was to just be following the conversation online.
I wish I hadn’t lost her phone.
Left her laptop.
I imagine there would be treasure troves on there of personal information. Notes to herself. Story ideas?
I am lucky to have found this, though. This envelope has the good things, the private things. Relics of a history far more vulnerable than the one told to me by the woman in the other room.
You know she told me under duress, in pain, under threat of death, that she has no parents? She said she never knew her father and her mother disowned her?
Technically, maybe, but how I’d long to have a fight like the one she described with her mother in those pages? Something so easy to fix. So tangible.
It seems clear to me that Riley, were she not so stubborn, could walk right back into this woman’s life. For the price of what? Pride? A makeover?
It’s amazing what some people will take for granted.
Still, I do wonder what was in those notebooks that were lost.
What horrors lurked with in.
What other torments someone—I—might have suffered had they been birthed into the world instead of burned.
Maybe I understand, just a little, why she’s mad.
_____
Dear Ms. Langdon,
Thank you so much for submitting your manuscript to me. Unfortunately, after careful consideration, I have decided that it is not a great fit for my services at this time.
To be honest, I was surprised by the graphic nature of your piece. One of the reasons it took me so long to send a response is because I truly could not get some of the imagery out of my head. Those are usually the stories that I prefer to represent, but I just don’t know of any markets that are open to something so extreme.
I don’t know how long you have been submitting this to agents, but I hope this rejection does not discourage you too greatly. Your writing is imaginative, and has a certain cinematic flair that I think is going to be a great asset.
I wish you all the best in finding a home for this book, and would like to invite you to submit to me again. If you ever have a piece that is less brutal, I hope that you’ll consider sending it my way.
Sincerely,
Amanda Crowley
_____
Not sure about all of this one, but it seems important
2015 Submission Tracking
1. Heart-Eater:
-Amanda Crowley / REJECTED
-Mary Zenon /REJECTED
-Pickman’s Literary Journal / REJECTED
-Cemetery Dr. Media / REJECTED
-HorrorHouse /PENDING
2. A Mountain in Heels
-Bones by the Dozen /REJECTED
3. Proxy
-Bring Me the Living Zine /REJECTED
-Undead, Zombies, and the Reanimated /REJECTED
4. Just Like Her
-Bathory Review /PENDING
5. Bruises
- Blood and Lace /ACCEPTED
_____
Sunday
2/22/15
I haven’t written anything longhand in a while, but this just doesn’t feel real to me yet, and I don’t think typing it out was doing it for me.
I found a comic artist for Red.
I found the comic artist for Red.
A couple people had sent me some reference sketches, and there was some other, vague, polite interest. No one professional at first, no one with comic experience, or who I thought had a decent chance of sticking with it until the end.
To be honest, I cared more about that than the style.
The other side of that coin was the people who were too professional, people who would expect to be paid per page.
I believe that artists deserve to be paid for their work, and as a writer that has ONLY ever been paid in exposure, I know what bullshit that is. But I really just don’t have the money to pay per page for an entire comic’s worth of content. I know I can be verbose in my storytelling, it may well take a couple years to finish. If we also had to wait for me to save up per page... it would never get done.
Just as I was looking over price lists and preparing myself to abandon the mission, I got a private message from Mila.
Mila.
The Mila.
I’ve been following their work for a couple months on Tumblr, and they’re absolutely amazing. I was surprised at the interest from them, not just because they’re higher profile than me as a creator, but also because their work is far more surreal than what my comic proposes.
That was something they brought up with me, however, during our back and forth. They’ve apparently been looking for a project they believe will challenge them. “A different kind of horror,” they said.
I have never been so proud to have my work described as different.
The best part is that they are looking at this as more of a collaboration. They like that I have the main story beats down from start to finish (neither one of us wants this to last forever) but that I am not attached to all the design elements as of yet.
Working on it together instead of delivering orders to be completed makes me feel a lot better about them putting in the work for essentially nothing but credit. Of course I did offer to pay for the hosting costs for the site.
As to how I’m going to swing that, I don’t know yet. The budget is already pretty tight right now, but I’ll make it work.
I’ve got an artist on board now, a good artist.
And I can’t explain it.
This project feels different than the others.
_____
2016 Submission Tracking
Heart Eater
-HorrorHouse/REJECTED
-Shadow Lit Press /REJECTED
-Yellowstone Media /REJECTED
Proxy
- Haunted and Wandering /REJECTED
Virtual Ghost Town
-Phantasmagraphic /PENDING
Fuzzy Logic
-Viral Attitude Zine /REJECTED
Our Funeral
-Non-standard Scripts/REJECTED
Questionable Erotic Content
-Pulptastic Zine/ACCEPTED
IS THIS ALL THE HARDER SHE TRIED?
WAS SHE SO DISCOURAGED?
_____
When the man was torturing me, it seemed to go on forever. I was barely left alone long enough to catch my breath, let alone try to fall asleep to the ‘clink clink clink’ of those stupid manacles.
It’s different from the other side of it.
It seems like all I do now is wait.
Of course, I don’t have the practice that he got. No trial victims for me. I didn’t have a “volunteer” to let me have any practice swings, or who I could accidentally kill as a freebie.
He told me that was what happened to his last Red. He said he experimented on her, and she’d gotten burned, and that those burns had gotten infected, and they had festered. He said she had suffered a lot at the end. He told me he’d have let her suffer for the cameras if he could have gotten the streams up and running beforehand, just so people could see how long it would have taken.
But he didn’t have that kind of patience, and in this one regard, I can’t say that I blamed him.
That’s why he got me, apparently. Because the first one had died too soon.
The chaining went a lot better for me, he said, and would probably be the very same set that “the real Red” would get to wear once I was out of them.
While he had me anyway, while everything else was set in motion, he said it wouldn’t hurt him to practice.
I would lie there on the table, bleeding, sobbing, and I would wonder how exactly someone would need so much practice with these tools of torture. He’d slice me deeply, every time, and I screamed every time, and I did not ever understand.
It’s a dance. You have to know your partner.
If I cut her too deep, it draws pain from the other locations that I want to hurt, from the bruising around her chains, from the sting of her piercings.
If I push her too hard, I will need to wait for her to recover, or else she won’t feel all of what I mean to do next.
The waiting takes a long time when you’re the one who doesn’t need a break.
Luckily, I suppose, I have this little side project.
And company.
_____
Monday
9/18/17
I am beginning to wonder if I have made it. DOES SHE HAVE TO ASK THIS? DOES SHE FEEL LIKE SHE’S MADE IT NOW?
Obviously I haven’t made it big. I’m not set for life, I’m not a household name, and honestly I don’t even know what other measures of big success are supposed to be for someone in the entertainment industry.
I guess it would be nice to quit the day job. But I’m no longer supplementing the income from the day job with odd data entry hours, and that feels huge.
For me, success as a writer has always meant getting to write what I want. I guess long term, my biggest goal is a modicum of financial stability from getting to write full time. I may still be a long way off from that, but I’m beginning to realize that there are actually some degrees of success worthy of celebration before the final stage.
The comic has taken off.
Again, it’s not bringing in a lot of money, but I’m breaking even on hosting costs and Mila and I are seriously talking about merchandizing. I remember when we put up the first few pages how having merch felt like such a pipe dream, but now it’s feasible—practical, I dare say, with all the attention that it’s gotten lately.
Even when I found out just how long it was going to take to do all 5, full-color arcs, I couldn’t imagine myself taking on any projects but Red until it was done. And now...
Gut Reactions was just me fucking around, killing some time. I didn’t really think of it as a side project, let alone something that would or could even take off as well. But it seems to be doing some numbers.
If I spent the money I had been using to host Red taking a bit of a gamble on my WordPress site, upgrading the plan to support advertisers...
It isn’t entirely impossible that by the end of the year I could be looking at two small, but steady streams of income that are just from my writing. This, without the constant grind and failure of querying my novel and my weird little short stories that no one seems to want to read.
Maybe that failure is why I feel so much like an imposter lately—even with all these small successes coming my way?
In my head, before today, before I started to really think about it, I had always seen success equating to a book deal, to publications, to my name in print.
Maybe that just wasn’t the path for me?
It’s weird to see these other, non-book projects begin to flourish—to the point I don’t even remember the last time I subbed for anything. It’s not that I’m less passionate about these new things, because I’m not. I love doing Red. I love doing Gut Reactions. They’re just not what I always pictured myself doing.
Maybe it’s okay to see where this path leads, though.
_____
Tuesday
5/14/19
Michael left today.
I can’t believe he would actually do this to me.
We had talked about it, and I knew it was coming, but it still feels like a betrayal. He knows that I didn’t want him to go, and he went anyway.
The worst part was how patronizing he was about the whole thing. He said he was doing it for me, because I had gotten to a point in my life where I didn’t need him around anymore. He’s leaving and throwing himself a little pity party on the way out because he apparently knows “what I need.”
Unbelievable.
Maybe he gets to be a little patronizing because he rescued me once, forever ago, when I really needed a place to go. He took a chance on some eighteen-year-old online that he’d only known for a couple months. Is that how he saw us this whole time?
HE WAS STILL CHECKING UP ON HER. TWO BEDROOMS. DOES SHE REALLY NOT SEE IT?
I thought he was my friend.
My close friend.
My only friend.
And he’s apparently just thought of me as someone whose mess he’s been cleaning up for the last six years.
But I helped him too, even if he doesn’t want to admit it.
I know he could have afforded to live here without me, but I paid my share.
I burned through all my high school savings to give him rent in advance so he could trust me, and I worked my ass off so I wasn’t late a single time pitching in.
I wonder how easy it would have been to save for his nicer, two-bedroom if I hadn’t been pulling my damn weight from day one.
For him to have the nerve to tell me that I deserve my own bedroom, that I’m doing “too well” to be sleeping on the pull out still, just because I had one viral movie moment. It’s not like any of that attention has been good. It’s not like producers are lining up to work with me.
I told him. I fucking told him, and do you know what he said to me? He said he’d help me with rent if I needed it.
Like somehow I’m both too big a name for him to be associating with, and also somehow his fucking charity case?
I just can’t wrap my head around it.
I told him that if he was going to go not to even worry about it and just get the hell out. He looked hurt. Like I’m the one who is changing everything? Like I’m the one leaving? Like this is somehow my fault?
Maybe I should be grateful he did this before I quit my shitty day job.
Mostly I’m just pissed.
At Michael, yes, but also at myself for not ever taking the time to make other friends in the city. Maybe for not making other friends at all.
Last month I was just so excited to finally have some savings started and this month somehow I’m a hermit with no furniture, trying to forget that anyone else ever lived here.
I just can’t wait for things to feel easy.
When the hell does that start?
_____
I guess I was wrong, there was a man in her apartment once.
For six years, apparently.
It is interesting to me how these little snippets of her life paint such a different picture of her than the story that the bleeding woman behind me seems to tell about herself.
I’ve learned a lot about her through our conversations that I don’t think anyone else knows.
I’ve learned a lot about her through these pages that I don’t think even she herself knows.
Maybe it’s because I built her up in my head for so long, but reading through the best pieces of her life, the worst pieces, I can see through all the words and nonsense and insecurities into the version of Riley Langdon that never was.
I entertained the notion of trying to create her.
After all, I was powerful enough to be Red for a time, I escaped, I killed him. Why could I not be the next iteration of The Creator?
Why could I not make something truly wonderful out of this mess of a woman who is already so well loved?
I could.
I am of the belief that I could do anything I wanted. As much as the idea interests me on paper, it’s something I don’t really want to follow through on.
Molding her into something new, let alone something better, would take a long time. It would take a lot of training and patience—and for what? For the chance that she still resents me? Kills me? Turns me in?
It’s not worth it.
I’m starting to finally understand the end of her comic, why Red kills quickly at the end of the arc.
As my anger turns to pity for her, I realize that I too, am losing my appetite for vengeance.
For blood.
Whatever I end up doing with her, I think I’m going to want to be wrapping it up soon.
_____
From the envelope
Dear Ms. Langdon,
The studio has decided not to pick up your treatment. While we think the work was very good, we were hoping for something a bit more cutting edge.
We are all fans of your previous film, and the director we have on board hopes that he gets the chance to work with you at some point on a future project. We just felt like you played it too safe with the script that you sent in.
If you have any more ideas, we would be happy to read more from you at any time.
Best Regards,
J.H. Stewart
Acquisitions Manager at Darkline Studios
_____
Dear Ms. Langdon,
On behalf of ComicVerse Conventions, we would just like to sincerely apologize. We understand that you got into an altercation during one of our panels and that our security staff was not able to properly assist you before the point of escalation.
While we take full responsibility for our part in the incident, we cannot condone violence or threats of any kind.
Though you said in your statement with security you felt as though your fellow panelist was being threatened after a guest made certain offensive (aggressive, in your own words) comments regarding gender, we do not feel as though we have the adequate means to make sure that the environments in upcoming panels are more secured. In light of that, we think it would be best if you did not finish your tour with our events this summer.
We thank you sincerely for the work you have already done with us this convention season, but we will be suspending your contract moving forward.
Your co-panelist, Mila, has already voluntarily withdrawn as they were somewhat shaken by the event.
We hope that you understand our position, and that we have the opportunity to host you under different, safer circumstances where you do not feel that yourself or your colleagues are being threatened.
If there is anything else we can do to ease this shift in plans, we hope that you will feel comfortable reaching out.
Cordially,
The ComicVerse Convention Team
I guess this is why she doesn’t do more conventions.
_____
I used to envy her.
Not that she’d be the one to kill him, an honor I eventually claimed for myself, despite all he had told me.
But I envied her for the way he loved her. The way he spoke about her. The way he planned from the very first day that she was worthy of life, and I was worthy of practice, so that she could live. He was even planning to die for her.
No one has ever felt that way about me.
Even when he was inside me, he only saw her, was only thinking about Riley.
Or about Red.
Or about how fucking perfect Riley would be if he could turn her into this more perfect, fictional version of herself.
I don’t even think he really saw me as I was killing him. Not truly. He didn’t register that it wasn’t his Red, that it was me.
And why should he?
I’ve been thinking of myself as Red too, for some time now, if I’m being honest. This better, fictional version of myself that can survive anything. That can get revenge for all the pain.
Pain she caused.
She gets to go out and play champion to the battered women of the world, but I don’t think she gives a damn about us. Not really. How did she think we would feel reading her words? Her sick fucking comic.
It takes the attention away from us and puts it back on her.
The main fucking character, who people must be talking about always. Even when I am being brutalized and nearly murdered, it was her name on his tongue. She is all anyone can ever think about.
And I hate her for it.
I really do.
I think she deserves to go through what I’ve been through. I think if she wants to be free, she can go ahead and earn it like I did.
But there are moments. Just, these little moments, when we talk, and I can see a little bit of what everyone else sees in her. Her cooperation with me, in rare instances, feels like she’s opening up, and not like she’s scared for her life. They feel all the more special because I know she’s a private person.
When I’m reading about her, when I’m working on finishing this document that was dedicated to her, I get so frustrated. She’s been given so many opportunities that she’s been blind to.
She finished a whole damn book! And those short stories! She has a comic and a movie and a website and people paying her because she’s creative, and talented, and she wants to throw it all away. She gave up. She stopped sending stories. I wouldn’t do that if I could write. If I had these ideas. If a movie studio, a fucking movie studio, told me to send in another script? Well fuck, I’d do it.
She’s strong, too.
I know she’s independent and stubborn, but when I poked her with that needle to get her here, she just let me. She didn’t even try to escape.
She’s so bitter and angry and I honestly think maybe she wants this. Maybe she wants to die. And I read her words and how she interprets all these fortunes, and I think maybe this is just another chance that she’s ready to throw away.
And I want to kill her.
Then, like I said, there are these times when I get so mad, and I ask her for clarification.
And sometimes she just says something that will make me understand better why she is so beloved.
Sometimes she tells me things that are too beautiful to be committed to paper.
It feels almost like she’s fighting for me, instead of against me.
I love her.
And I want her dead more than ever.
_____
Dear Miss Langdon,
We are sorry to extend this invitation to you without further advance notice, but we would love to give you a panel room at this year’s AkaCon.
We were so disappointed you weren’t able to make it last year, and we’ve had a few last minute cancellations.
We understand if a week’s notice simply isn’t enough time to prepare, but your stay at the convention center would be comped, and we would love to have you.
There are already a couple of Red fan panels scheduled over the weekend, and we think a lot of fans would be pleased to see you.
We hope that you’ll consider the offer, and that you’ll let us know ASAP
— The Whole Team
(AkaCon Official Members)
_____
Friday
(?)
I haven’t been sleeping right since I started my hiatus.
I lie awake wondering if the whole thing has blown over. If it’s gotten worse. I wonder if I’ll even know when it’s time to come back online. If I should go back at all.
It’s been a few days, at least, since I’ve called it. There was this immense freedom when I turned my computer off, like I might be done with it all forever. Not just the computer itself, but all the rest of it too.
The Patreon. The updates. The communities. The fighting.
Everything.
I have lived for these projects and nothing else for so long that I was starting to forget there was anything else. Did my idea of fulfillment change somewhere along the way? Or am I just burnt the fuck out?
I used to journal.
I remember all my journals got destroyed and I quit. But it was like a smoker quits, you know, and sometimes I used to still write out the important stuff on loose leaf paper when I got really stressed or excited. When I needed a fix. I kept the pages in my folder.
It was one of those cheap, cardboard folders that I’ve been reusing for stuff since about the 8th grade, and I don’t even know how it made the trip out here with me. It was probably in my backpack when I tossed all my stuff in my car.
I remember being oddly sad about it when the side gave out and I finally needed to replace the damn thing. Only it was like my journal, where I never really replaced it properly. I shoved all the papers that I’d been saving inside this big envelope that had contained the one print copy of my piece of shit manuscript.
I feel sort of like that envelope right now.
I’m just a pile of angry thoughts and rejections shoved in around the book no one ever wanted to read.
Red was supposed to be phase one in a plan. It was supposed to be me dipping my toes into the pool of the self-publishing world. I was going to get a reader base and start seeing if I could publish something extreme on my own without anyone’s help.
What happened to all that?
I guess maybe I thought the stories were too similar? Red was too much like the protagonist of my novel, Liv— angry, and the revenge thing, and at the time the setting didn’t seem like a big enough difference.
Not that it would have mattered, I guess. Red was an integral part either way, and that was the part that ended up being the problem.
I don’t even know if I believe that it is a problem.
It seems outlandish to me. Narcissistic even, to believe that I am the sort of creator who would have other people die over their creations.
Just because I live online in an echo chamber where I hear about my work all the time, doesn’t mean that I actually have influence. It doesn’t mean much of anything.
I don’t believe that Elaine Glasgow died because of anything I wrote.
So why the guilt?
Maybe it’s just that anger I’ve lived with all my life—the anger that the problem is bigger than me, out of my control. If some crazy fan actually had done it, I would have the power in that situation, wouldn’t I? I could denounce them, I could protect any future victims, I could bring about some kind of justice. There would be things for me to do, and I’d matter.
Fuck, that’s a sick thing to think about, huh? That I would matter more if the killer had read my comic?
But also, wouldn’t it be true?
I think society would treat me better, if they saw that my words had that kind of impact. I think they’d treat anyone better who had that kind of influence.
I think I feel guilty because a part of me wishes I were responsible.
I really need to buy a new journal. A real one.
There are some thoughts that are just a little too fucked for the internet.
_____
I went ahead and read the last item in the folder, the novel.
I liked it more than Red.
Maybe I’m a little too close to be entirely objective on that count, I confess, but I think this one was a little more personal. Red was the sort of character you could project yourself onto. Liv was the sort of character you had to really try to understand.
The story was a rough around the edges, but that’s life sometimes, isn’t it? Not everything is neat when you want it to be.
If I were waiting for Riley to recover, I may well consider taking the time to transcribe it. But according to the top right corner, it is about 55,000 words and we don’t have that kind of time.
I’m not waiting for Riley to recover again.
Besides, I think a raw novel of that caliber deserves a little more than to be tacked on to the end of a project like this, that already has two authors.
It was fun to work on, though.
I was worried I could never be a writer, because I’m not creative enough. Even talking about myself, my trauma, I didn’t feel like it was interesting. Like I was interesting enough to carry it.
But The Creator, for all his faults, taught me one thing.
It’s a noble effort to finish other people’s stories.
I feel good that I finished this one, even though I didn’t start it.
Now it’s time to finish something else.
Now, it’s time for a decision.
An ending.
That’s one of the scariest things of being a writer; choosing the right final note. How do I want this story to end, for instance?
I didn’t know.
For a long time I haven’t known.
But then I asked it a different way.
When I wrap everything up here, I’m going to get to show the world who I am. I get to reinvent myself.
If I could step out of here as anyone, would I really want it to be as a killer?
Or a hero?
