He’s Brian Scalabrine, AKA the White Mamba, and I’ve been thinking about that fan psychology a good deal lately. On the courts of Substack, we talk a lot of smack, but our game might not live up to our claims.

Last year I wrote a series on advanced writing techniques and had begun the work on turning that into book form. That work stopped when I needed to step away, but I’m once again pressing forward. Over the next several months, I’ll post updated articles to help transform those ideas into something more book ready, but I believe there’s more to be done.

Fan psychology can lull us into contentment. It makes us believe the only thing holding us back is an inept industry. Writers get lazy. One reader came to me after he’d read an article mocking “the try-hards.” It claimed talent poured out of you like piss from a cow or it didn’t.1 There’s was no point in trying to be better.

Whoever wrote that nonsense had succumbed to fan psychology. He thought he could beat Scalabrine, maybe even LeBron himself. An honest industry would have recognized his talents by now.

Don’t get me wrong. The industry is broken, but that’s something we can’t fix. What we can do is become better writers.

Allow me to strip away any false modesty and be real. I consider my breakout story, The Sphinx and Ernest Hemingway, to be art. It was published under my real name in 2006 in the second issue of Fantasy Magazine, and it would haunt me for the next decade as I struggled to repeat what I’d captured in that magical moment.

The story came within a hair’s breadth of being accepting by my dream publication, but in the years that followed, I realized that if the story I couldn’t live up to didn’t make it… what chance did I have? Frustrated and disgusted, I pulled my crime novel from a friend’s publishing house and walked away.

Only, walking away didn’t work. I kept writing, even if I’d told myself I’d given up on publication. Truth was, I was lying to myself. There were real reasons I’d walked away. First of all, the book wasn’t good enough. That’s why I pulled it. Second, I was seeing less stories published because I insisted on pursuing my own weird ideas instead of satisfying an audience, and finally, I could write well but not consistently well.

God bless who helped with my attempts a decade ago and who read some of the worst lines I’ve ever penned to paper. Mind you, this was a decade after I’d published Sphinx, and I still couldn’t find my footing.

Check out her Substack. Read her books. She’s the real deal. She’s done it all, including publishing with the big houses.

Credit in inspiring my second life as a writer also goes to who first worked with me about the same time. His literary work showed me what flow really is. His lines are like a river, taking me along wherever they may lead.

Eventually I came here and started the series on advanced writing techniques, and the experience has taken me to a new level. Still, there’s more to be done.

The danger in comparing ourselves against ourselves, boosting our egos (or bruising them) against this narrow selection, is that the real barrier we must break is somewhere beyond.

The best ballplayers in the neighborhood can’t stand toe-to-toe with Brian Scalabrine. Yet, for me, the only acceptable goal is to out-write the professionals. If that’s your goal, too, I’ll share what I gather along the way, and together, we’ll kick literary ass.

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The Biggest Improvement in my Consistency Came from this:

After mentioning the importance of subjective and objective writing in my last essay, I’ve felt compelled to write about the subject, but anything I say here will be raw and fresh. These are ongoing lessons shared in the heat of the writer’s battle, not pondered upon from the safety of years passed.

I’ve often quoted a paragraph Hemingway wrote about a downhill skier,2 and it’s largely objective writing and yet has a lovely flow to it. That counter example will stand in sharp contrast to this claim: subjective writing is the key to achieving flow in your writing. Through the various sentence structures and techniques I’ve discussed in my essays, we can achieve rhythm and flow anywhere, but it’s true that subjective writing makes it easier as it more readily opens itself up to sentence-extending techniques.

Many writers trip themselves up by limiting themselves to objective reporting of the story (a camera’s view of what’s happening), interspersed with the characters direct thoughts. The resulting reading experience can be jarring.

I’m a fan of objective writing and believe many writers use too little of it. It helps ground us in place and action. Interiority can be hinted at in ways that become profound when the reader is able to connect the dots and draw their own conclusions. That being said, one of my stumbling blocks was the ill-conceived idea that objective writing was better writing.

Then, as I realized the error of that thinking, I over-complicated my approach to a character’s interior life and shattered the flow of my writing. I promise you. It doesn’t have to be that complicated.

Let me stop here and introduce you to a Youtube video because it contains some points I want to address:3

The key points:

• Don’t use emotion words (angry, sad, happy) to tell us what your POV character is feeling. They’re fine when your POV character is considering the emotional state of another character

• Don’t us bodily sensations to tell us what a character is feeling. This one is huge. It goes against so much of the advice we get, and she’s absolutely right.

• Avoid writing as if body parts have a will of their own unless that’s your actual point.

That second point was screaming in the back of my mind and demanding to be shared. Of course, this is a list of what not to do, but while sweaty palms aren’t a great way to write about fear, there are other options. One writing-advice Youtuber who recommends the sweaty-palms technique likes to tell us to get up inside our body. Instead, get up inside your character’s mind. Use subjective writing to show us what she’s feeling.

Objective, camera-view writing and a character’s direct thoughts are extreme ends of a spectrum of possibilities in what’s known as narrative distance, and your writing is free to move along that spectrum. We will each have areas where we feel more comfortable, from which our writing will reach out into strange territories and return to safety. That point of comfort and the dance outward will help give our style a flavor that is uniquely our own, but the entire spectrum remains available to each of us.

The jarring sensation we feel from having direct thoughts dropped inside an objective paragraph comes from a lack of transition through degrees of narrative distance. The writer’s camera isn’t locked in place nor is the mind beyond its reach. We’re free to roam, and if done well, we have no need to explain ourselves when that distance shifts.

The spectrum is all about the degree to which the character’s perceptions and emotions flavor the writing. The stronger the flavor, the more we can readily use the various techniques available to us.

For more on narrative distance, I suggest this article by .

Falden's Forge

The Most Important Narrative Tool No One Told You About

There’s one important part of narrative that is almost completely overlooked, a tool for crafting a story that seemingly no one has heard about…

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2 years ago · 355 likes · 78 comments · Eric Falden

To explore my work on prose line theory, begin here:

Together, let’s move beyond fan psychology and grow as writers.

— Thaddeus Thomas

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In the beginning, new writers rebel against this process. They fear that stripping away amateurish habits will make their writing sound like everyone else’s. Their writing feels unique because they don’t see anything else like it on the store shelves. Unfortunately, those habits make their work read like all the others in the slush pile. Ripping away bad habits is a necessary process of tearing down our writing to this shared language and then finding ourselves anew within it.

That finding ourselves is largely the process of learning the various tools available to us, but today, I want to address something different. I want to talk about the idiosyncratic nature of your style.

When William Faulkner lambasted the idea of pursuing a style, I think this is what he meant. He wasn’t belittling writers for learning how to write better, he was mocking them for trying to figure out what would be their unique signature. I first began to appreciate how correct he was as I heard Cormac McCarthy and Charlie Kaufman talk about their own writing. It’s less obvious with David Lynch, but through them, I understood Lynch better as well.

I mention these three because they’re all favorites of mine and I longed to be more like them. In the early 90’s, it seemed every TV show and movie was aping the style of either David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino. None captured the magic and were quickly forgotten, but even with all that evidence before us, many of us longed to be like our favorite novelists or screenwriters. Only the original writers could convince me I needed to find my own path.

Kaufman has spoken on the subject, but it was Cormac McCarthy’s history in developing his minimal use of punctuation that really struck home.

The first time I ever checked out a book by McCarthy, the librarian commented that she had tried to read his stuff but couldn’t get past his lack of punctuation, and it does take some getting used to. For McCarthy, however, he thought it made the prose clearer. It began when someone charged him with rewriting something to make it easier for them to read. McCarthy stripped away much of what he considered to be the unnecessary punctuation, and it worked. That experience birthed it all.

McCarthy wasn’t trying to distinguish himself from other writers. He was pursuing the path he thought led to greater clarity. Kaufman isn’t trying to be avant-garde. He has a particular type of story to tell, and he’s looking for the best way to tell it. Lynch isn’t trying to give homespun Americana a weird twist; down to his soul, that’s simply who Lynch is.

Each of these storytellers is a unique voice, but they were simply being true to themselves and telling a story as clearly as they could. That holding true to themselves wasn’t about clinging to amateurish habits. They learned the language of their medium but held to their convictions about how each story should be told.

I walked away from this with my mantra: clarity with conviction.

As I work on my fourth short story for 2026, I see the choices I make that aren’t grammatically required but feel right and necessary to me. If the patterns of my writing were different, I might have made other choices, but I have emerged with two new rules, strictly for myself, that I believe conform to this idea of clarity with conviction.

The choices are similar in nature. First, I write “and” instead of “but” unless the context absolutely demands I do otherwise. Second, my character tags use “said” instead of “asked” unless context demands otherwise. My characters say most questions. In both cases, the words fade into the unseen parts of the sentences, whereas the change to a but or an asked demands too much attention for itself. My choices allow the focus to be elsewhere while sustaining the rhythms of repetition that are important to my work.

Whether I’m right or wrong is irrelevant. You don’t have to agree with me. That librarian certainly didn’t think McCarthy’s use of punctuation increased clarity. In addition, if I didn’t point these choices out, I suspect most readers wouldn’t notice. It’s not a stylistic signature in the sense of some expert noting how Thomas does this or that. It’s a personal conviction about what brings clarity to the flow and meaning of my writing.

The intent is clarity with conviction.

Is it a big deal? No. Probably the most important improvement in my writing in recent years has been a better intuitive understanding of subjective writing, writing tinted with the opinions and judgments of the POV character, as opposed to objective writing that presents events without opinion. I believe objective writing has an important role to play, but as I unlearned some bad teachings about subjective writing, the consistency of my writing improved. Maybe I should write about that soon, but my point in this context is that clarity with conviction isn’t a back door to being more like our favorite authors.

These can be small choices, but the goal is to tell a story clearly without chaining ourselves a committee’s approval about what clarity means.

— Thaddeus Thomas

Suggested Reading: Never Let Roald Dahl Keep You from Understanding How Stories Build Meaning

Required Reading: One Star Review by Nick Winney

Spoilers: As Good As It Gets and Toy Story

This is part 2 of my exploration of meaning, but part 1 (Never Let Roald Dahl…) isn’t necessary to understand today’s essay. However, Nick Winney has agreed to our using “One Star Review” as an editorial case study for how we can put meat on beautiful bones. Reading his story first is highly recommended.

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Meaning has Four Rs

• Repetition

• Reflection

• Recontextualization

• Resolution

In the first essay, I discussed a story’s “punch line” (recontexualization) and mentioned themes and motifs (both of which are aspects of repetition and reflection). Today, we’ll add resolution, by which I usually mean the denouement.

Denouement has at least two meanings, the modern and the classical. Here, I mean the modern meaning, the post-climax story wrap-up. In the classical sense, the denouement is the entire last act.

If you’ve finished a story and just want it to have more weight, begin by reviewing the resolution.

As Good As It Gets

Let’s look at the final moments of As Good As It Gets (screenplay by Mark Andrus and James L. Brooks).

Carol is on the verge of walking away from her strange, budding relationship with Melvin, when he stops her by saying: “Hey, I’ve got a compliment for you.”

She’s still hesitant, but he breaks into his speech about how he’s the one who sees how wonderful she is. They kiss. It’s a failure, but Melvin says, “I know I can do better.” They kiss again, and this time, it shows promise.

They walk off together and discover a bakery is open. Melvin backs up for the man sweeping the entrance and in doing so, steps on a sidewalk crack, something he’s spent the entire movie avoiding. Melvin notices the moment, and walks into the bakery with Carol.

That’s the resolution. So, how does it help create meaning?

The most obvious part is the speech which keys into Carol’s need to be appreciated, but it’s one, less-subtle part of the whole. Negotiation and persuasion gurus tells us that the most powerful persuasion technique is to make the other person think the idea is their own. You present two pieces of information and allow them to make the connection.

The movie begins doing this when Melvin says, “I have a compliment for you.” This reflects an earlier scene where Melvin has to rescue his dinner with Carol after accidentally insulting her. She demands a compliment, and if it’s not good enough, she’s leaving. He goes into to a long monologue about how he hates medication but because of her, he started taking his pills.

At first, she doesn’t understand, but he explains: “You make me want to be a better man.”

This is echoed again after the first attempt at a kiss, when he says: “I know I can do better.” It comes up for a final time when he realizes he’s stepped on a crack, and he’s okay.

She needs someone who appreciates her. He needs someone who inspires him to be better. That is the core of the story’s meaning, and exactly how we phrase that meaning will depend on which of the story’s themes resonate the most with us.

• Improvement is a series of small steps, not an instant transformation.

• We need relationships that bring out the best in us.

• We can overcome selfishness and learn to put other people first.

For another quick example, the end of Toy Story has Woody say, “Buzz! You’re flying!” And Buzz replies, “This isn’t flying; this is falling with style.” It’s a repetition of Woody’s line from the beginning of the movie, and it shows how Woody now believes in (respects and loves) Buzz and how Buzz now embraces his role as a toy. It’s not just a random call back but a repetition central to the story’s meaning.

This aspect of storytelling is so crucial that if you change the resolution, you change the meaning. Carol and Melvin’s actions at the final uncertain moment in their relationship tell us how to view all that’s come before. If Buzz replied to Woody that he could fly all along, that they can all be more than a child’s play thing—the entire movie changes.

If we’re editing to put meat on a story’s bones, it only makes sense to start at the end. We do that by asking ourselves the right questions:

• Does the story mean anything in its present state?

• If it has meaning, is it a meaning we want and could it be made stronger?

• Is there a better meaning we’d like to build from what we’ve written?

Out answers will inspire our work: reflecting meaningful moments. Meaning is made through repetition.

Many times, we’ll only now fully understand our story and what we hope to say, and that probably means rewriting earlier material.

One Star Review

Nick Winney’s story One Star Review is a delight. It’s well written, moves fast, and it’s fun. That’s enough. The end.

I had the nerve to reach out to him because I found the story through a Note where he’d claimed it had been turned down for not having enough story, and I thought that was nonsense. It has plenty of story. It sounds like what they needed was a little more meat on those beautiful bones—some meaning to give the tale coherence and weight.

That never happened, however. The “not enough story” line was Nick’s own, but if I wanted to dissect the story, he was all for it.

I’ve done this a few times before, but this one is different. I’ve recently decided that our writing needs clarity with conviction. The conviction is about being true to ourselves and writing our story in the style we think serves the story best. Given that context, our next job is to tell the story as clearly as we can. Nick does that.

I’m not giving a line editorial today. I only want to consider how we might approach the story if we wanted to build more weight… depth… meaning.

The Story’s Current Meaning

For me, these lines are important to understanding the character:

Henderson, with his wanky Audi. Such a dickhead. Barely able to string a sentence together, let alone argue a point. These people can vote. These people get to run franchises and people like me, who can make them look like the clueless twats that they are, even after a dozen shots? We get to work in their shit sandwich shops for minimum rate on zero hours contracts. Something is going wrong with the world.

Along with Debs placating words meant to ease the pain of the termination:

“Don’t take it out on me; I’ve let you off loads of times. You’ll get a job somewhere else easy. You’re too smart for sandwich prep anyway, you can do better than…than… this.”

Is Nick really as smart as he thinks he is? Probably not, but he thinks he’s better than others and the world is cheating his greatness and rewarding mediocrity. In his mind, he’s absolutely justified.

The Current Resolution

It was glorious chaos. I took a photo.

When I got home, I went online and left a review: “One Star - Not enough pigeons.” And posted my photo.

Fresha social media replied. It was probably Debs. “The person that left this review is a former employee who maliciously attracted pigeons into our shop on market street. We would like to apologise for any inconvenience to our wonderful customers while we cleaned the shop.”

I had another idea.

After week of it, they called the police. “It’s a free country,” I said, dropping the whole sack of grain at the door and retreating to a safe distance.

A week? These people are saints.

Building Meaning

As we look for connections to build upon, the segments I highlighted under Current Meaning are important, but there may be others we want to consider. Personally, I’m fond of:

“They say its good luck, getting shit on by a bird,” I said “but the birds will tell you it takes years of practice.”

That line’s humor hides its thematic resonance. Nick believes Henderson arrived at his position by unmerited luck, but I’m sure Henderson would tell us it took years of hard work. There’s a great deal in common between people and pigeons.

We could focus on echoing the idea that some people get all the luck, and Nick is just giving them more—enough more to potentially drive them out business. By proxy, it’s Nick who’s shitting all over them.

I hope you can see I’m not trying to change the story, only highlight aspects to emphasize their importance. Maybe Nick’s story doesn’t need it, but this is the same process I just went through with my own.

Rewriting Earlier Material

Do we not change anything? I don’t want to because Nick’s story reads so well, but let’s assume we haven’t a choice. There’s pigeon being held to our heads. We have to make a change. In that case, I’d look here:

I rolled my eyes and sighed. Looking up to the exposed pipework of the ceiling, dusty spider webs hung down, the aircon wafting them gently in the direction of the door.

These are perfectly fine lines, except our space is limited. I know they’re in the prep room, but I want a view of salad bar before it’s introduced in the climax. If we’re talking about the exposed pipework, I want there to have been a time when a bird flew into the restaurant and used those pipes to roost. It would foreshadow events to come and build a greater cohesion.

What we need, though, is to use one of our reflected passages to hide a kernel of the true meaning, at least what the story means to us.

For that, I’m looking to this passage:

“Was it the Christmas lunch thing? Was it that?” Debs looked even more uncomfortable.

“It’s that isn’t it.” Debs looked away and shifted on her feet. I rolled my eyes and sighed. Looking up to the exposed pipework of the ceiling, dusty spider webs hung down, the aircon wafting them gently in the direction of the door.

“That’s what you were talking about the other day when he came in, isn’t it. He told you to sack me, first chance you got, and this is it isn’t it.”

I know what I want Debs to say, but she’s not going to tell Nick that he can’t shit on people and get away with it. She’s not even going to admit the Christmas party had anything to do with Nick getting fired, but we can put all that in Nick’s mind. He’s heard it before. People get embarrassed when they’re bettered and talk like you’ve shit all over them, a bunch of mindless fools self-deceived into believing they’ve earned what luck has thrust upon them. In the end, Nick’s always the one getting crapped on.

In his mind, anyway.

What this accomplishes is tying the pigeon poop to a line about self-deception, which has been Nick’s problem all along.

The meaning becomes something like: people can look like lucky fools, that we’re the smart ones working hard for no reward, but judging others is a self deception that makes us the fool.

A Note on Recontextualization

In One Star Review, the punch line is Nick’s use of the pigeons to get revenge. It’s the engine of meaning for the story because it takes all of his pain and turns it into violence against those who don’t deserve it. It cements Nick as the villain, not the hero, of the tale.

With the story written and that climax in place, we look to the resolution to interpret what just happened. Nick doesn’t learn. In fact, he escalates his behavior while the story’s points of reflection highlight thematic elements, reminding us how it all ties together.

This Essay’s Resolution

Roald Dahl often didn’t do this kind of work in his adult stories, and he’s a beloved author. It’s not required. However, if you want to create more meaning in your work, try building on the work of your climax* by connecting thematic points through reflection and repetition and then pulling it all together in the resolution.

— Thaddeus Thomas

*That’s assuming your climax is your recontextualization point. It doesn’t have to be.

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My problem wasn’t the joke structure but rather my judgment of his stories as ending with a gotcha and little more. I needed an example that would teach me what was really happening and show me the potential for creating meaning in our stories. I found that example in “Man from the South.”

For years, I remembered the story as being by Stephen King, most likely confusing it with “Quitter’s Inc.” (from both the book Night Shift and the film Cat’s Eye). In the Roald Dahl story (first published as “Collector’s Item”), a man from South Africa bets his Cadillac against a stranger’s pinky that his lighter won’t light ten times in a row. That story was an episode in both the original Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the 1980’s revival. In 1979, it was an episode of Tales of the Unexpected, and in 1995, it was Quentin Tarantino’s segment for the movie, Four Rooms (with the title changed to A Man from Hollywood). Chances are, you’re familiar with it in some form.

If not, consider this a spoiler warning for both that story and Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace”.

“Man from the South” doesn’t have a moral; it’s not teaching you a lesson. Even so, you come away from the story with the understanding that people will wager something that isn’t even theirs against your deep and true loss.

Time after time, the lighter refuses to fail, but on the last attempt, our hero nearly loses his pinky. The man, however, never had anything to wager. Seeing his addiction, his wife had gambled against him, time and time again, until she owned everything he ever possessed. That car is hers, not his to gamble away against some unsuspecting fool.

She reveals the cost: most of her fingers are gone.

As the main character is tricked, so is the reader, and this provides for both the surprise revelation and the feeling of weight that I don’t get from most of his stories.

I don’t believe a reader needs to understand what the meaning is, although it’s wonderful if they do. They should, however, feel like the story has substance. I want the reader to believe that if they spent time ruminating over what they’d read, they’d find the meat. That’s important, even if they never make the effort. It makes the reader’s investment of time feel worthwhile.

Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” reminds me of Dahl’s stories. In it, a woman borrows a diamond necklace but loses it. For the next decade, she and her husband work in poverty until they can repay the loss, only to learn the original was a fake. It may be de Maupassant’s most famous work. Like Dahl or O.Henry, it obviously fits that story-as-joke format.

My personal favorite of his stories isn’t so obvious, but even so, the punch line is there.

Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif“ (or “Ball of Fat”) follows the Edgar Alan Poe tradition of starting slowly and ending strong, and while I now see its ending as a punch line, at the time, it felt like a gut punch. The emotional impact is unforgettable and its theme of hypocritical righteousness has stuck with me and challenged me throughout my life. That’s all I’ll say about the story’s content, because I hope you’ll read it, but I dream of having that kind of impact with my own writing.

That resonance happens not despite the way a story works like a joke but because of it.

I was a pastor for twenty years and was often forced to watch Christian movies. I hated it. With all the hours I spent studying scripture, I didn’t need someone’s story to force feed meaning to me. Fiction isn’t about lectures but themes, motifs and, for lack of a better term, punch lines.

I hesitate to use the word “twist” because we have certain ideas of what a twist ending is, but there are subtle ways a story can recontextualize itself. However bold or subtle it may be, the punch line creates meaning. In “The Necklace,” the story was about personal sacrifice to make right a wrong, but the ending refocused the meaning on the vanity that keeps us from openly addressing our failures.

And if the reader misunderstands your meaning? Let them. Your story isn’t a sermon. They don’t have to get the “right” meaning or even be able to put it into words. If they feel it, that’s enough. For some, it might be a life-changing moment, but we have no control over that. We absolutely shouldn’t force it. Let meaning be there for the reader to experience on their terms, to whatever degree.

The punch line itself isn’t enough. The story that leads up to it builds both the context and the capacity for recontextualization, and the study of literary techniques is more than just the beauty of a sentence. Those choices increase our capacity to create meaning without resorting to sermons and lectures. The examination of those choices is what the Literary Salon is all about.

— Thaddeus Thomas

The trouble was that I was “eavesdropping” on people who had already done that foundation work. Their focus was on what they needed, not what I needed, and I was too ignorant to know the difference.

We need to find that advice that applies to us where we are.

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Two: I’m a fan of the one-panel comic, and a key to their success is the artwork tells a story that is then reinterpreted by the writing underneath. If the comic is just a talking head saying something funny, it surrenders much of its power.

If we squint hard enough to apply this to fiction writing, it could be interpreted different ways. It could be action within the mise-en-scène that reinterprets and is reinterpreted by the dialogue. It could be the narrative voice set against the voices of the characters. However we apply it, a contrast in narrative elements can reveal things to the reader that need never be directly addressed.

Three: I’m a tall, fat, middle-aged man, but I’m trying to get back in shape. As I wade into the proverbial shallow-end of working with weights, I feel my muscles wanting to lift. If I have a quiet moment, my body is eager for the next dumbbell.

I’m experiencing my body differently, but none of that is visible. I look the same, and while pondering that phenomenon, something struck me.

I didn’t get fat by focusing on the end result. I got fat because I enjoyed the process of getting fat. If I want to get back into shape, I need to focus on enjoying the process. Do that, and the results will take care of themselves.

The greatest advice we can give ourselves:

Enjoy.

—Thaddeus Thomas

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Day of the Comeback Writer

I don’t write anymore, or at least, I didn’t, not for a few months. Didn’t read either. Depression decided I needed a sabbatical.

My comeback stories are Old Truths for a Best Day and The Gosling, and when it came time to post The Gosling, none of my history as a writer mattered anymore. I couldn’t tell you if it was good or awful, if I’d be welcomed back or laughed out of Substack. The community, however, was supportive, and that helped me write another story.

That I’m writing at all feels like a miracle, and I certainly don’t worry about writing every day. I don’t have a routine, but I am finding my joy again.

What are my days like? I go to bed trying to remember why we can’t travel faster than the speed of light. We can’t because the experienced speed for light is instantaneous, and you can’t travel faster than that without going back in time. As witnessed from the outside, the faster an object travels through space, the slower it travels through time. The witnessed speed of light is C.

It’s vital that I understand these things because I manage a group home for adults with developmental disabilities. The relevance is obvious.

Today is Saturday, and on Saturdays, we visit our daughter. She’s a lawyer in the city. We home-schooled her since before she left Kindergarten because that’s the kind of people we were. I was an evangelical pastor; now I’m a progressive pain-in-the-ass.

Today we visited the museum for the Art in Bloom exhibit that pairs art with flower arrangements. In one small room, the only exhibit is a series of panels that reflect everything in monochrome, and it inspired this piece:

While viewing the remains of ancient sculptures, I was inspired with the title for my next story. With Old Truths, the inspiration was the opening. For Gosling, the story came to me whole, and I just needed to figure out how to make it work.

Intellectually, I believe in writing a bad first draft, but in practice, I usually have to believe where we are and where we’re going, and if I don’t, that’s a problem that can’t be fixed in post. That means I don’t end up with an ugly first draft, and it creates a problem when beta reader feedback suggests you need to fill-out the story more. How do you add to mostly polished piece with a working rhythm without destroying everything?

This time, I solved the dilemma by going through the story and identifying natural pauses in the rhythm. At each of point I placed a marker, allowing me to go back later and consider what (if anything) I wanted to add. It worked remarkably well.

I write at my late father’s desk, in the basement, on a Qwerkywriter keyboard that mimics the look and feel of a typewriter. It’s a first-generation model that I bought used off of Ebay and which was shipped unprotected. It lost a key en route, but I bought a replacement for $5. A few years later, the damage from that rough transit is showing in misbehaving keys. When I replace it, I’ll be buying another, but new this time.

I’m sharing this older picture of the setup so that I don’t have to clean. After lunch, my daughter took us to Subterranean books where I picked up If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin, but if it avoids more chores, a picture of All the Pretty Horses works just as well.

Some of you might notice that the 30-day view count was 15k. At one point, I reached double that. After being gone a few months and publishing two stories and one short essay, I’m currently running close to 2k views a month. To my surprise, the world didn’t end. My subscribers numbers and my paid subscribers have increased. I don’t have to push myself to constantly produce and can, instead, focus on writing the best stories I can.

Take care of yourself. Build a site that will help new readers find what you have to offer, and focus on quality. For me, that means The Literary Salon leads with a hero page that helps direct readers to my essays on prose, but you do what works for you.

Write the way that serves you best.

—Thaddeus Thomas

About the author: Now politically progressive but once an evangelical pastor, I lost my tribe for speaking out against Donald Trump. Lately, my stories have turned apocalyptic. Surely, one thing has nothing to do with the other.

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Old Truths for a Best Day

You’re not in trouble, but I need you to listen. Remember my words. Treat them like your potassium pills, and they’ll ward off the sickness to come. Can you do that?

Sarah said she’d remember everything. She promised.

Randall ruffled her hair and lost himself in innocence that radiated like a nuclear blast, but the half-life of a child’s trust could be measured in months. The teaching had to be done while her core still burned.

“You’re at an age,” he said, “where you understand the difference between who you are and who you pretend to be. You’ll lose that as you grow older.”

The Geiger counter waved a red finger. Chittering softly. Silencing him.

Sarah’s brow knitted, but her only worries would be whether she could go out to run and dance or if this was another indoor day. With the winds building in the east, indoor days could become basement days–could become bunker days–and he felt a blistering of guilt. Let her play while she still could.

But he didn’t want this to be a tomorrow talk, turning it into a lecture to be associated with cinder-block walls and second-rate beds. Best-day talks came with bright skies and bird song, and that’s where the truths of the old world belonged. Old truths for a best day.

“As you become a teenager–”

The counter hushed, and a new chittering rose in its place, the shuffling of shoes on snow-sheeted paving stones.

Sarah’s face double brightened. She knew the signature of that sound as well as he. Better. Her lips mouthed the word: Tommy.

Randall nodded, and Sarah sprung from the white sofa, sprinted past the grand piano they would never hear properly played, and skidded to a stop between the staircase and the windowed door where glass sparkled like jewels, cascading rainbows across her ill-fitted white dress. Beneath Tommy’s twisted shadow, those sparkles died like the memory of stars.

She opened the door and squealed as Tommy stepped into the foyer, slouched and hidden beneath a frayed hoodie. She spun in circles and talked about all the fun they would have in the snow. Dizzy and joy-drunk, she wrapped her arms around him. Her eyes closed and her smile widened, but Tommy shrugged her away.

Randall stood without thinking to stand; no one came into his house and disrespected his daughter. No one.

Tommy’s hands never left his pockets. He stood without purpose, a creature of resentment, indifference, and ego, and when he raised his head, when Randall could see his eyes beneath that raggedy hood, he spoke with all the eloquence of a paralyzed dog, two mumbled thoughts dropping from his mouth like rotten teeth: “Mom’s dead.”

Caitlyn. Tommy’s mother. Their neighbor. Dead.

Shit.

Tommy’s resentment became grief; Sarah’s pain became compassion; and bluster fizzled away, a great litany of damnable curses transformed into softly spoken words.

And Randall said, “I’m sorry.”

Caitlyn had embraced Sarah. She’d insisted the kids have “play dates” and, in this time of distrust and isolation, had become a true neighbor. Randall never wanted the intrusion, but he knew they’d been made richer by it.

Her death was the end of a future that no longer existed, a future that ended months before they met. Before Sarah found the manor. Before Randall found Sarah.

In truth, they’d all died with the world. There could be no tomorrow, and every today was the death spasm of a lost humanity. Caitlyn had dreamed of more, but like everything else, dreams die.

“I can’t bury her on my own,” Tommy said.

Sarah reached her hand for his. “I remember when my momma died.”

Tommy didn’t reach back, and Randall’s heart ached. Like so many others, Sarah had lost everything and pieced back together a life from what she could find. She’d adopted Randall as her stand-in father. Given the chance, she’d adopt Tommy as her best and only friend. Did she imagine more? At her age, Randall thought it possible, but his heart told him no.

Natural ringlets bobbed before Sarah’s eyes as her hand remained outstretched and unmet. Randall expected her to cry, to run back to him and bury her face in his side. Instead, she looked at Tommy with disapproving curiosity and said, “You’ve got no gun.”

Tommy shrugged.

“You don’t never leave the house without a gun,” she said.

“Didn’t much think about it,” Tommy said. “Didn’t much care.”

“You’d care if they found you.”

“Not really.”

Sarah’s mouth made a scandalized circle.

Randall put an end to the quarrel with a hand on Sarah’s shoulder. Tommy wouldn’t have welcomed his touch.

“We’ll help with the burial,” Randall said.

“Do you mind if we don’t go back right away?” Tommy said.

“We’ll take it in your time. There’s no rush and no needs to serve but our own. If you’re tired, it’s a good day. You can sleep in a good bed.”

“It’s a best day,” Sarah said, but nobody answered, no one at all, even when death was an old truth, and old truths were best shared on a best day.

“But even on a best day, you need a gun,” Sarah said.

Randall hushed her, but her comment caught in the recesses of his imagination. Taking up arms had become instinctual. Tommy would no sooner forget his weapon than walk out in the snow without shoes.

“I had to wait until it was safe to go outside,” Tommy said.

Randall said he understood, but danger grew in layers. Some came and went with the winds. Others hardened into the foundation of the world.

“She’s been in there a week,” Tommy said.

Randall said he understood, but what he understood was dark and dangerous. He’d seen women and children, exposed and unarmed, and had feared them more than any militia. Vulnerability only risked itself under a protective eye and only exposed itself to draw in the unwary.

Tommy wanted to appear harmless and knew he was protected. Caitlyn wasn’t dead. She was coming for Randall’s girl.

Clearly, they didn’t know Sarah as well as they thought. She didn’t need a father’s protection. She’d pointed a Glock 9mm at Randall’s head on the day they met. It’s why he’d believed her when she said she was alone but that he could eat something as long as he behaved. She’d kill him if he didn’t. It’s why he’d felt safe and slept like a child.

He’d eaten very little that first day. He’d been so emaciated, giving in to hunger would have killed him, but day by day, Sarah had strengthened him. He grew muscles again. Even a little fat.

Together, they felt like a family, but he’d always known this day would come. Kill the man. Take the girl. That’s how the new world worked.

But not Tommy. Not Caitlyn. They’d been different, at least Caitlyn had, full of hope and clinging to dreams.

Maybe that was who she pretended to be. Maybe, underneath, she was like everyone else. Maybe. His heart said no, but no one listened to their heart at the end of days. Hunger and lust spoke too loudly.

But Tommy didn’t want to go back, not right away.

If this were a ruse, right away was exactly what he’d need. Move quickly under the confusion of emotion. Rush Randall outside and into the sights of Caitlyn’s gun. Spring the trap before the quarry gets wise.

Kill the man. Take the girl.

Randall put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and felt him flinch. “I was just telling Sarah that she’s at an age where she understands the difference between who she is and who she pretends to be. When you’re a teenager, that goes away. We get this idea that the life we imagine can be the life we make real. The people who love us most can look like obstacles, good for nothing but holding us back. We resent what we have because of what we imagine.”

Tommy looked up at him.

“What matters is life as it is,” Randall said, “not life as we wish it to be.”

“I wish it were anything but this,” Tommy said.

Randall had rebuffed Caitlyn’s intrusion into their lives. Sarah, he could keep safe, but Caitlyn came and went as she pleased. He’d told her she was risking all their lives, that when they came for her they’d kill her son.

To sweep up Sarah in her fantasies would be selfish and cruel.

“Tell me about your mother.”

Tommy stared at his own feet.

“Tell me what she wished for,” Randall said.

But it was Sarah who answered.

“My momma used to tell me that some dreams never go away, no matter what happens.”

Randall hadn’t believed in dreams and certainly not in family, not before Sarah. What she’d given, he wouldn’t easily surrender to another, especially not this whisper of a boy.

Sarah would understand. She’d have to.

“What did your mother tell you, Tommy?” Randall said, and he heard anger in the cutting edge of his voice. “Did she have dreams for you and Sarah?”

Beneath his touch, Tommy’s shoulders hunched forward, as if he would curl into a ball.

“Tell me.”

“It was stupid.”

Randall softened his tone. “Tell me.”

Again, Sarah answered. “My momma said that some dreams are built into us. Countries fight, but we all still need to be human. It can’t be helped.”

Tommy’s voice barely raised beyond his lips. “Mine was kind of the same way.”

Sarah looked up into Randall’s face, her eyes wide with fresh understanding. “Tommy will live with us now, right?”

Randall wanted that Glock pressed to the side of his head. He wanted to feel safe again. He wanted to sleep and know nothing would hurt him in the night. It’s what he should have given Sarah but what she had given him. Peace. Security. Belonging.

Now this scarecrow of a child had come to take it all away.

Randall’s grip tightened. “How’d your mother die?”

Tommy didn’t answer.

“My momma got stabbed over a bucket of drinking water,” Sarah said.

Tommy didn’t answer.

Randall lifted Tommy’s chin until they could see each other. Tommy cried, but men cried over killing other men. Tears never meant safety.

“She told me the future belongs to the young,” Tommy said, “and then she put a pistol in her mouth.”

Randall let go, and Tommy’s face disappeared beneath his hood.

“Shot herself,” Sarah said.

Randall looked through the jewel-like glass to a splintered view of the front lawn. No one waited, but he felt the presence of the gun. He felt the pressure of it in his mouth, the taste of metal on his tongue.

Sarah wrapped her arms around Tommy’s waist. He didn’t push her away.

“Damn fool,” Randall muttered, but as he watched the kids hold each other, he knew Caitlyn had been half right. The kind of future she wanted couldn’t be stolen. All she could do was offer it as a gift, and with all their walls and all their division, perhaps this seemed the only way through.

Tommy looked up, and in his eyes, Randall saw the boy’s pain and need for answers.

“The future belongs to the young,” Randall said, “but today belongs to us all.”

Outside, the wind howled, and the counter chittered its warning.

— Thaddeus Thomas

Gripping a reader’s attention focuses on the fundamentals of storytelling over the mechanics of writing. Sentence structure be damned. But when we get our writing out of the way, the story’s hook has a chance to sink, and now we have a reader. The writing matters.

In the opening paragraph, require as little as possible of the reader. Don’t interrupt the flow of your sentences or overload your reader with descriptions or minutiae. Make the paragraph impossible not to read and leave them with a fundamental understanding of the story they’re about to encounter.

We begin by removing interruptions.

Sally, whose eyes twinkled in the moonlight, swung astride her horse…

While it’s perfectly fine sentence construction, by interrupting our subject and verb, we make our reader work. That’s wonderful when the reader is committed to the task, but in the beginning of a story, a thousand distractions vie for her attention. Every mental stumble is an opportunity for her to choose something else.

Sally swung astride her horse and listened for any errant noise. The prairie lay dark and silent, as if listening back…

Challenge every prepositional phrase, not only for its necessity but for its rhythm within the sentence. Every redundancy and every break of rhythm is another opportunity to move on to something else.

Sally swung astride her horse and listened. The prairie lay dark and silent, as if listening back.

Focus now swings into…well…focus.

Before I continue, I can step back and say what I couldn’t earlier. This is one theory. There are many ways to capture your reader, and even if you choose this method, the techniques employed don’t have to be used throughout the entire story. Remember, this is about getting out of your reader’s way until she’s committed to the story.

I saved that statement until now because I wanted to grab your attention and make you interested in what I had to say. Once that was achieved, then I could interrupt myself, slow things down, and offer a little backstory. In the name of fairness, we front-load our articles with caveats, each one of them a reason not to read. We front-load our stories with interruptions and minutiae. To achieve relevance, we require delayed satisfaction from our readers.

But with this present theory, relevance is the focus of the opening. The reader thematically connects with the story and is now eager to read.

Sally swung astride her horse and listened. The prairie lay dark and silent, as if listening back. Time’s face turned away, and a thousand chains let loose their shackles. She could do anything, be anyone. Her father would have no say.

The reader finishes the opening paragraph, and she understands the story. We haven’t yet described Sally, but we know the central dilemma. We reinforce that dilemma when her father calls out and this spiritual reprieve is interrupted.

An alternative opening would begin with father crying out. In such a case, relevance is treated as a mystery for the reader to solve. I once thought it the only way to write.

But with our focus on thematic conflict, the mysteries come later, and the hook is linked to the story’s stakes. The example works if the story continues by introducing her controlling father and perhaps her real-life hope of escape. It doesn’t work the same way if the paragraph is followed by her riding off into the sunrise, leaving her old life behind and ready for adventure. Juxtaposed to such a tale, the opening paragraph becomes backstory.

Our suggested method reveals current conflict, not the origins of present actions. It’s important, because it quickly helps the reader answer the opening’s key question: why am I reading this? An engaged reader knows what she’s reading and why.

The longer it takes a reader to answer that question, the more likely she is to slip away.

— Thaddeus Thomas

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The Gosling

They came like your naked grandmother, bald and four-footed, hunched upon stilt-like legs. That’s what the newsies heard. It’s what they repeated. It’s what Daryl believed. No one ever said anything different.

With the calcium ammonium nitrate in the coffee grinder, Daryl pulled a fifty-pound bag of icing sugar from the pantry. Beth and the girls watched from beyond the bakery’s shattered glass. Behind them, dawn broke over red-brick buildings, and the little strip they called downtown changed, becoming what it was when Daryl was a boy, probably what it was when the first stores opened in ‘46. For a few, sun-glorious seconds, he saw the memory of a world, young and healthy.

He looked to the boy with the backpack and the mouth full of news.

“As a child, I’d ride my bike through downtown on the way to school,” he said. “I’d leave too early and arrive too early so that when I passed by, that fresh-baked aroma was still strong and clung to me like hope. No better smell on that pre-forsaken earth.”

“They’ve passed as far south as Grover, but that was three days ago,” said the boy. “They eat what they take, so that’ll slow them down some, but a town the size of Grover won’t last no three days.”

Death worked like a hive, snagging its victims and keeping them in a communal feeding area where hundreds of naked grandmothers ate and shat until the food ran out and the shit ran high. Then death moved on.

Daryl dragged another bag of icing sugar from the pantry and then a third. He looked to the boy with some faint notion of finding help, but the boy had come with news and nothing more. Daryl went back to the pallet. The bags wouldn’t be going far. He could handle it on his own. There’d be plenty of rest when he was done.

Beth called out to him from the sidewalk, saying she was strong enough to help.

They’d talked about this. For at least a month, they’d discussed how today should go, and together, they’d decided that he’d do the work. The girls wouldn’t be alone.

“There may be a doll left in the store,” Daryl said.

Beth stood her ground, and the girls didn’t even glance in the direction of possible toys. Such promises had lost their meaning.

“Okay then,” he said.

“You wait here,” Beth said to the girls, and she stepped through the glass.

“Ma’am,” said the boy.

“We haven’t had a newsie pass through in weeks,” Beth said. Then she took hold of a bag by its corners and dragged it out through the opening and into the road, and when she was done, she sat on the bag and made a whooping sound full of dignity and the pride of effort.

Daryl looked up at the sound and smiled.

“We used to think they wanted their meat fresh,” the boy said.

Beth pushed herself up from the road, ruffled the hair of her youngest, passed through the glass, and took hold of another bag.

“Ma’am,” said the boy.

“What do we think now?” she asked.

“Ma’am?”

“What do we think now that we didn’t think before?”

“They’ve been seen eating carcasses off the road, roadkill, bloated, and reeking of rot,” said the boy.

“Roadkill,” she said.

“People. Those killed in the riots.”

“They eat carrion. That sounds adaptable to me. That sound adaptable to you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“They were never said to adapt.”

“We didn’t think them capable, no.”

“But now we know better.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She dragged away another bag.

Daryl returned to the grinder, covered his mouth, and worked by hand what was intended to run by motor, cranking a handle he doubted had ever been connected before today. It moved easier this time, the grains being finer now and putting up less resistance.

“I’ve reports of how they digest their food,” said the boy.

Daryl glanced at the girls. Four, six, and eight. His first memories were of being four, most of his first memories, anyway. The world was full of discovery then, and every new thought felt profound.

It was strange how, on that journey from gosling to gander, the ignorant wisdom of new eyes became the foolish knowledge of youth.

Beth returned for more sugar. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”

“Eye witnesses out of Boston and Tullahoma,” said the boy.

“It’s the eye-witness part I don’t understand.”

“Boston was still heavily populated. A few made it out. At Tullahoma, the witnesses were hunters, camouflaged, with scopes at a distance.”

Daryl wanted to say they’d hit plenty of populated areas and plenty heavy with hunters, instead he asked the boy what any of that had to do with how the creatures’ digestion worked.

“They don’t digest their food internally,” said the boy. “They vomit fluids while the catch is still living.”

Daryl grabbed a bag of sugar, pulled it to his shoulder, and walked out, passing Beth along the way. Her voice drifted back to him.

“They do the same with a carcass?” she asked.

Down the fall of the road and up the rise, thin crowds gathered, moving Daryl’s way. He couldn’t hear the boy’s answer.

He raised a hand in greeting. A dozen hands raised in return. The world went quiet. He could almost hear his own wind chimes play their strange song from the wraparound porch of their two-story, clapboard house, white as bone among well-tended flowerbeds, spotless and pure but for the occasional flurries of ash.

He pondered that ash and remembered its taste. Other towns. Other families anointing their homes one last time, transforming themselves into the soil which had supported their generations.

Bits of ash had lodged themselves in his daughters’ lungs, flavored their breath, and punished them with coughing fits. One more click of the clock. Time was running out. Death would come by fire or cloaked in baggy flesh and perched on lanky limbs. It’s what the stories said, each echoing the same inescapable horror.

Their meager farms failed. The food stores wouldn’t last. Months ago, they’d worked in teams to search root cellars and inventory what provisions remained, but—

—A tiny hand grabbed his trouser leg and tugged.

Even before he turned, before he understood the trouble, his hand whipped to the pistol tucked in his waistband. Before he could pull it free, he saw Beth holding hers and pointing it in the boy’s drained-white face. Her own flushed red.

Beth’s words broke clean and clear in all that silence. “You’re no witness.”

Daryl motioned for the girls to stay behind and then stepped through the glass. “If he’d seen, he wouldn’t have survived to spread the news.”

Her voice became something feral. “Not even those piles of manure left behind? Shouldn’t somebody somewhere have seen something?”

“Apparently, they have,” Daryl said.

“Boston and Tullahoma. Where the hell is Tullahoma?”

The boy said nothing.

Daryl answered for him. “Tennessee, I believe.”

“Well, it ain’t here,” Beth said. “Neither are they.”

“You rather we leave?”

“I don’t rather nothing.” Her grip on the pistol loosened.

Daryl walked past her and checked the grinder. The fertilizer looked like sand. He funneled the powder into a paper sleeve.

Beth’s voice settled. “I’d like to have heard something, anything, from someone who’s seen.”

Daryl dropped the last chunks of the ammonium nitrate through the grinder’s top. “I can’t fathom what difference that would make.”

“It’d make a difference.”

He pulled on the handle, and for a long second it barely budged. “How so?”

“It’d make a difference to me.”

The handle turned, and the room filled with the noise of gears turning and teeth gnashing.

“We chose to keep living our lives in this place and with these people,” he said. “I can’t imagine having done it any other way. Does that change now?”

“Did you hear what they do with the rotted ones?”

Daryl stopped grinding. Beth looked away from the boy. Looked right into him. Daryl saw a familiar emotion in those eyes, strength buckling beneath an inescapable weight. He pulled his own pistol and aimed it at the boy. As if released, Beth came to him. He took her in his arms, and she tensed against his chest, her fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt, clinging to him like a climber clings to the mountain.

“It never mattered before,” he whispered. “It doesn’t change anything now.”

But it did matter. Whether it changed anything or not, every detail mattered.

“I don’t regret a single day,” she said.

“Until now.”

“Not even now,” she said.

Now had come the time of second guesses, as clear as any mark on the clock. Click. The news. Click. The doubt. Click. Peace with that which could not be appeased.

Click. The news. Always the same and always believed. Click. And now? If they proved it all lies, the clock still clicked. If they proved it all dreams, the ash still fell. If it be nothing but ghost stories, even stories had an end.

“They don’t vomit on the dead and bloated,” Daryl said. “They suck up the rot.”

“You were listening.”

“That’s just what it has to be.”

She drew her mouth close to his ear. “When they come, they’ll suck us up, too, whatever’s left. We were meant to be escaping that.”

Outside, the first of the others gathered behind the girls, each couple carrying their own heavy load.

“From some things, there is no escape,” Daryl said.

She took one long breath, pulled herself out of his embrace, and with a touch of her fingers, lowered his pistol arm.

“I still wish you’d seen them with your own eyes,” she said to the boy. “It’s the one thing today needed.”

Daryl walked the boy out through the glass and the gathering crowd. He pointed to the valley, to the white farmhouse where sunlight reflected off wind chimes. “Some provisions. Even now. You’re welcome to what you can carry.”

The boy shook his hand.

“Where you off to?” Daryl asked.

“Heading south until I run out of road.”

“Just as likely to meet them there.”

“I know.”

Daryl put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “If it weren’t for men like you, we’d have no notion of what’s going on in the world. I don’t have much news to offer in return, but you can say that Gosser’s Gap was a place where generations were born and raised. A good many of us decided a change in the world needn’t mean a change in us.”

Beth stood with the girls. The youngest buried her face into the back of Beth’s thigh.

The boy walked on.

The crowd grew thicker and, one-by-one, set their explosives in the street. Children glanced at one another without smiling. Adults spoke of the quality of the sky and the lingering scent of rain.

Daryl held Beth’s hand, and the girls pressed in close. They’d gathered in these same streets for the town’s bicentennial, the same couples, the same friends, but there’d been babies that day. No babies now. His four-year-old and those few her age were the last to experience the depth of first-discovered thoughts. He wondered what she’d tell him if he asked her about today, but he knew he’d never ask, not even if seconds stretched into eternity.

Down the road, the boy stopped and watched. Perhaps he felt it necessary, and Daryl supposed they’d goaded him into bearing witness. The boy. The gosling. The fool. Mouth full of news. Mouth full of lies. No idea which was which. No notion whether he spread life or death and not enough sense to ask.

Daryl had been such a boy on mornings when the air carried bread like ash and the chatter of fools carried no more consequence than the passing of time.

-end-

Thaddeus Thomas

For the full journey, you’ll read the original version of Cherry Soda, come back and read my editor notes, read the first rewrite of the story, come back and read my final notes, and finally read read the final version. You can also do whatever combination makes sense to you.

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One: The original version of Cherry Soda

Two: My first editorial notes:

Dear Haley,

It’s rare that I’ve offered to do this, but something struck me about your story, and in it, I see a path for you to make some quick advancements as a writer. The critique process can be painful, but that’s not my intent. I chose your story because I see potential.

The Quick Fixes:

First, there’s the issue of “the diner table” which is an awkward construction. For far too long, I wasn’t sure if you meant dinner table. That’s some confusion we can avoid by removing “at the diner table” entirely.

When talking about Jenny’s boyfriend, you write: “She’d had a crush on him…” You mean Becky had a crush, but the structure of the sentence suggests that the “she” in question is Jenny. We can solve that by replacing the pronoun with the correct name.

Describing the stranger as looking like a beatnik is jarring. It’s an uncommon reference and suggests the story takes places sixty years ago. It’s also unnecessary, as you then show us what that means. We can solve that by removing the beatnik reference.

You need to make it clear from the beginning that it’s night, but there’s more that needs to be established early on.

Some More Difficult Issues:

The tone of the story isn’t horror, and that’s okay if that’s your intent. However, the reveal should be foreshadowed. It needs to feel right for the story, and to do that we need to establish certain themes earlier. Five paragraphs in, you tell us she’s hungry, but that hunger is the key theme. Consider tying a rumbling tummy to the slurping of her cherry soda in the first paragraph, thereby tying the hunger to your metaphor for drinking blood. Don’t just tell us she’s hungry. It’s a key point. Make us feel it.

Then you can remove the hunger reference later, as the reader will be keenly aware. It’s a paragraph of contradictory statements, anyway. She didn’t eat all day in anticipation of eating lots of junk food but then ordered the smallest burger and fries. It’s more likely that she didn’t eat because she’s self-conscious around her “friends”, but you don’t have to tell us that. As we feel her hunger and then see her discomfort around her thin, childhood friends, we’ll understand.

More Work-Intensive Issues:

Becky is too unguarded and trusting. You felt this and tried to adjust for it by having her question herself after the fact, and that’s a tactic we’ve all tried at some point. I’d like to see you go back and rework the dialog to justify them walking together. If it’s a case of hypnotic suggestion, give hints without saying outright. Perhaps she thinks she’s dizzy from hunger.

Watch for phrases which add no meaning. I’ll illustrate using the first paragraph. (I’ll also remove the “diner table” reference as that’s a different problem.)

Becky froze as everyone turned around and stared at her. She’d just made a loud slurping noise finishing the last of her cherry soda. She hadn’t meant to; it was a force of habit with her.

That they stare at her is implied. She’s sitting next to them, so they don’t turn around. They just turn and look, and we can assume her slurping her drink wasn’t someone else’s habit.

In the silence of that moment, before she’s able to apologize and when everyone’s attention is on her, that would be the most impactful moment to add the tummy rumble, adding to her embarrassment.

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Three: The first rewrite of the story

Four: My notes after the rewrite:

I’ve just begun, but I’m really liking what you’ve done with it. I’ll point out some trifles as they come to mind, and we’ll see what’s to be addressed after.

I would recommend removing this line:

Sally, Jenny and Mary-sue. They were all thin and pretty and looked great in the latest fashions. She was too fat to look good in anything. Each of them had a boy seated next to them. She was sitting alone in the corner of the booth.

You set up her weight issue well enough without it, and it doesn’t quite land the way you want.

Capitalize both names in Mary Sue.

Some minor points and suggestions:

She broke into a run, not wanting to hear anymore [any more]. Cool, night air brushed her wet face as she burst through the doors. Tears ran freely now. Her shoulders shook as she sobbed [period needed]

She heard [H]her stomach growl[ed] again, there was [like] a hole sucking on her insides. She didn’t even get to eat anything and she wanted food so bad.

I’m making these recommendations because, if we’re making the same point twice, we want to keep the stronger one. We want to remove the filter of her hearing her stomach. Now we hear it instead, and the intimacy between us and the character grows. We change the comma splice into a simile, easing the flow of the sentence, and finally we remove what we know and what can be inferred and get right to the the point.

The elements the story needed are falling into place. This is very promising.

She startled at the voice coming from behind. It sounded like an 80 year old man who’d smoked twenty packs a day from birth.

I want to suggest simplifying this into one long sentence or two fragments. Remove the direction. Make the thought flow.

To her surprise, the speaker was a young man.

This line doesn’t work. It destroys so much of what you’re building up by removing the intimacy and distancing the reader from the characters and the story. The culprits are “to her surprise” and “the speaker”.

He was dressed in a leather jacket and had a goatee [I corrected the spelling]. His thick curls sprang wildly from underneath a poor boy cap, reminding her of a lion. He smelled of tobacco [spelling again—maybe these are regional differences?] and motor oil.

If you want, you can cut the line that doesn’t work and have this one begin: He was a young man dressed in…

Only I don’t recommend keeping the word dressed. I want something that will work with both the leather jacket and the goatee. Styled is a choice. He was a young man, styled in a leather jacket and goatee. If he were a different type of character he could be hiding behind them, but that doesn’t feel right. Sporting instead of styled in would work, as would boasting.

I want to suggest Thick curls instead of His thick curls, and mostly that doesn’t matter, except that you’re running a series of sentences that begin with He and this one begins with His. Remove the word and you improve the variation.

Not the kind of man she should be talking to. She glanced around; [T]the street was empty except for the two of them. Her heart beat a little faster.

Nice. I know it’s strange to say I like it when I’m suggesting cuts, but the removals are meant to reveal what’s already there.

“Sure, I’m fine,” she muttered and wiped her tears.

“Oh sorry, I should have known you were crying tears of joy.”

She didn’t have anything to say to that. He took out a pack of cigarettes from his jean pocket.

“I saw what happened. Great friends you’ve got there.”

“Well, I guess they aren’t really my friends. What’s it to you?”

“Oh nothing. I just don’t think anyone deserves to be treated that way.”

The dialog was something I wanted to address more after the initial rewrite, but this is so much better. It feels much more natural. I’m going to make suggestions anyway, but with everything I suggest, remember that it’s just my opinion.

My suggestion is the last line. This is the climax of this micro-segment of dialog, Cut the fluff.

“Oh nothing. I just don’t think anyone [No one] deserves to be treated that way.”

His words caused [Her] tears to well up again. She blinked and looked away. Her head was swimming [swam] and the ground felt unsteady beneath her.

Again, I’m cutting to reveal what’s there (and to keep verb tenses consistent). The last line of the paragraph is different, though.

She really needed something to eat.

There’s a missed opportunity here to tie this into the segue you’re attempting with the dialog. You need to give her a reason to walk with this stranger and also reveal the impact her hunger is having. Right now, you’ve shown us and then told us with that closing line.

I suggest you cut that line and replace it with new dialog. He says she doesn’t look well. She says she’s just hungry. Low blood sugar. He says they’ve got to get something in her, and until they do, she’s in no shape to walk alone.

She wants to decline but can’t. Instead, she accepts his protection.

That’s how I think you can best use the details you’ve built up to move her into the situation the story needs.

Now these lines go:

“Thanks. I should be getting home.”

“Okay. How you getting there?”

“Oh, I’ll walk, my neighborhood is just a few blocks away.”

But work this in as part of his offer to help get her home:

“I could give you a lift.” He inclined his head towards a Harley Davidson parked a few feet away.

She struggled to come up with the right thing to say to get him to leave her alone without making him mad. Her head felt like it was stuffed with cotton wool and she couldn’t think properly.

Her response changes, though. Focus on the details of her dizziness from hunger. She tells him she’s afraid she’d fall off.

“No thank you, I can’t get on a bike. My father would kill me.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

She took two steps and stumbled.

“Woah, you okay there.[?]”

“Yeah, I’m just feeling a little woozy.”

Keep it focused and tight.

“I don’t like letting you go off into the street like this. Let me walk with you a bit.”

Maybe he was dangerous, maybe she would collapse in the road on the way home, she didn’t know anymore. She was too hungry and tired and faint to argue.

“All right,” she agreed.

The long sentence is a comma splice. Twice. Keep it if you want. Change it into abrupt, short sentences if you prefer.

They walked in silence for a bit. The dizziness had faded, but her thoughts were covered in a thick blanket. She couldn’t concentrate on anything with her stomach gnawing at her.

You repeat the phrase “a bit” in close proximity. Cut this one. Keep the tense intimate. Don’t explain your metaphor. You’ve set it up. We’re with you.

“I never got your name,” she said, trying to regain focus. “I’m Becky, by the way.”

“You can call me Steve.”

“All right, Steve. So, are you a part of a biker gang or something?”

“A gang? No way. I ride solo. I’m a lone wolf.”

“So what do you do for a living?”

“I don’t do anything for a living, I just live. Each morning, I get on my bike and go wherever the road takes me. I sleep under the stars. I do whatever I want.”

“So you’re a bum.”

“That’s what most people would call me, I suppose.”

“I think I might envy you. It sounds so free. Still, it must be a hard life, on the streets.”

“Not for me.”

When she calls him a bum, it’s too direct. She’s not that impolite. The reference to her father didn’t work for me before, and I think I’m going to suggest removing the idea that she still lives with her parents. We’ll see when we get that far, but this is where a reference would work: “My dad would say you’re a bum.”

I almost wrote “father” because that’s the word you used. Is Becky the kind of person who call him father or would she call him dad?

The moon ducked in and out behind the oak trees as they reached the suburbs. Closer to food. There was leftover chicken, and ice cream in the freezer, and Cheez Whiz…

“Don’t you ever get lonely though?” she asked.

He took a drag from his cigarette.

“Sure, course I do. But it’s better this way. Safer for people to stay away from me.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’ve never been cut out for civilized society. My appetites are just too strong. I’ve tried to fight them, truly I have. But I always lose.”

I love that section.

She supposed he was talking about alcohol or drugs. Or women? Who was she to judge, when all she could think about was getting home so she could stuff her face.[?]

“I see,” she said. “You know, I think I might become a lone wolf too. People are just too mean and fake. Who needs ‘em’.”

“Good for you. With enemies like those, who needs friends, right.[?]”

She glanced away, smiling. Then stopped walking.

“Well, here we are.”

“Your parents. They home?” he asked.

“No, they went to a party.”

I’m going to suggest something more subtle from him and less reckless from her. He’ll ask something like: anyone home to make sure you’re okay?

“Yeah,” she lied. “I’ll be fine.”

The second part of that suggestion is whatever, but I really want her response to be instinctual. She doesn’t know why she’s lying. We don’t know. But we know she is lying and there’s no one waiting for her. She’s in danger.

“I just want to say, those boys are fools. I think you’re just swell. I like a girl with some meat on her bones.”

I think swell is interesting. It’s anachronistic. That character shouldn’t say it. No one in 2025 should say it, but least of all him. It reveals something about his character. He’s not who he appears to be, and part of that, is he’s much older and carrying slang from another time.

The just is overdoing it, however.

She forced a smile. She [and] felt exposed, like she was standing there naked, even with all her clothes on.

I’m addressing these sentences separately because their needs are different. The part above just needs tightening up.

The second part:

What had she been thinking, walking around at night with a strange man.

I want you to give this sentence style. You can ask the first part of your question (and remember your question mark) and then follow it by fragments. One or two words each. That’s one option. You choose, but it needs some stylistic punch. It’s an important thought and needs to drive home its point with panache.

“Well… Good night then. Thanks for walking me home.”

He flicked his half[-]finished cigarette to the pavement and stomped on it.

“Good night Becky. It was real nice talking to you.”

“Nice talking to you too. Good night.”

She took several steps backward, turned around towards the house. Picked up her pace. Then b[B]roke into a run.

Turned around is unnecessary and too much, other than that, the other cuts are a matter of taste. Entirely optional.

Arms like steel bars locked around her waist, pulled her to the ground. Fangs glinted in the moonlight. Then the sting, just above her collarbone.

She tried to fight him, but it was like trying to lift a truck. Tried to scream, but had no breath.

Hot blood trickled down her chest and pooled on the lawn. The last thing she saw before she closed her eyes was the safety of her house a few feet away.

The important cut here is “pooled on the lawn.” When in her POV, and I don’t think she sees that.

“You’re a vampire.”

“And now, so are you.”

I think it works better if you don’t state the obvious. Also, no comma needed here:

I didn’t realize how lonely I was, until I saw you sitting there in that diner, fighting a hunger you could never satisfy.

When he says, It does feel great, don’t it? That turn of phrase turns the statement into a question. I think it needs a question mark, but if you intentionally want it the other way, that’s cool.

Her hunger was worse than ever. Her body [shook] was shaking with [an] overwhelming urge to bite into flesh.

If you keep the ending a little less direct, I think it really works.

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Five: My Notes Upon Reading the Third Draft

(I’ll share the link to the final / third (or is it fourth?) draft at the end.)

You’ve come so far, and you’re almost ready.

She’d been so desperate to not [to] stay home on a Saturday night, she’d accepted an invitation to eat out that was offered out of pity. She’d drifted away from her childhood friends over the years, yet kept hanging on, begging for their scraps, hoping something would change, somehow.

Here, we have a repeated use of she’d which we need to tone down. Using it to start two sentences and an additional phrase within that first sentence is too much.

The second note is a split infinitive, but split infinitives are acceptable now. It’s not the crime our English teacher’s made us believe, and while I’ve taught myself to be comfortable with the phrasing “not to stay home,” you might not be. If you want to keep the split infinitive, keep it.

Sally, Jenny and Mary-Sue. They were all thin and pretty and looked great in the latest fashions. Each of them had a boy seated next to them. Becky She was sitting alone in the corner of the booth.

Becky is not the subject of the rest of the paragraph, so you can’t reference her with a pronoun without causing confusion over who you mean.

“You need to get some food in you. You need a lift?.” He inclined his head towards a Harley Davidson parked a few feet away.

We can avoid the repetition of starting both sentences in the dialog with you because the you can be left understood, without being written.

Only it’s not just the you. The need is also a problem. Change one.

Some possibilities:

You’ve got to get some food in you. / You gotta get some food in you.

-or-

Want a lift? / Wanna lift? (Depending on how he should speak)

(Also remember to remove the extra period.)

She struggled to come up with the right thing to say to get him to leave her alone without making him mad. Her head felt like it was stuffed with cotton wool and she couldn’t think properly.

Here the repetition is the string of prepositional phrases all beginning with to.

Instead of “the right thing to say” she can struggle to come up with the right words, so he’d leave her alone…

But now we’ve changed the sentence so the ending “without making him mad” don’t have the logical link you’d created. You can choose to change the phrasing, but the phrase can also be assumed. I’d cut the phrase and end with leave her alone.

“Woah, you okay there.”

That’s a question. Give it a question mark.

“All right,” she agreed.

Style choice: you do what seems right for you. I’d leave off the speech tag. It feels redundant.

She felt something else. Hunger hit her senseless. Her whole body ached with it. It was no longer burgers and chips she was craving.

Did you mean hunger hit her senses or that hunger hit her and left her senseless? Either way, I’d cut the word. It’s confusing.

You have two uses of the word it back to back. You can cut the first usage with losing any meaning. That’s also why I recommended cutting “her senseless” instead of just “senseless,” because otherwise, you have the same word, back to back.

Those are my final recommendations. When you’re ready to publish, send me the links to the various versions! Well done.

Six: The Final Story

I’ve offered notes on a few stories before but never in stages. This approach allowed me to address the necessary points without overwhelming the author, and I hope that, in the end, both she and you are pleased with the results.

I love what she did with the story, and I’m honored to have played a role.

Read the final version here.

— Thaddeus Thomas

Short not Sweet

Short Story: Cherry Soda

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8 months ago · 2 likes · Hayley Stone

On Sunday, she’ll make the next two drafts available, and Monday morning, I’ll publish my notes.

This editing pass is a little different than the ones I’ve done before. Haley is a genre writer from South Africa, and the original story had already been published on her Substack. I reached out to her and asked if she’d be interested in my editing notes, guiding her through a couple more drafts of the story, and that’s where this is different. In the past, I’ve offered my feedback, and that was it. This time, that feedback came in stages with Haley going back to work on the story each time.

God bless her. That took a lot of patience for a story that was supposed to be finished. It also took bravery, both because such a process can be painful but also because there’s no guarantee that my opinions would help improve the story. For me, that’s the bonus of this approach of offering feedback only in cases where I feel so inspired and believe that I have something to add. I come into this already certain I could help.

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I’ve shared my opinion on editorial and writing advice in the past. Some people are gifted and skilled editorial artists, and the man I’ve called “Substack’s Editor” is one of them. He and I may no longer be friends, but talent is talent.

The problem I have with most editorial feedback probably doesn’t apply to any of you, but you know people it does apply to. Some writers give bad writing advice, and they love telling everyone what to do. It’s one of the reasons I don’t support the idea of publicly giving advice on people’s fiction without consent.

Substack authors see the efforts being made to support other writers and think its masturbatory; the better use of our efforts, they say, would be to tell writers where their work could improve.

No matter what ideas we get from Notes, Substack isn’t just writers writing for writers. If we flood stories with unsolicited advice, that writer’s readers will see that, and they don’t know enough to understand when advice is warranted and good and when it’s not. I don’t see that being helpful.

Even if the advice is wonderful, it’s not always appropriate in that space.

So, do I think I’m an exception to the rule? No. I’m not offering unsolicited advice in a writer’s comments. Nor do I come to this believing I’m the answer to Substack’s problem.

I see a story with issues I believe I can address, and I offer to do so, if the author is interested. I ask to do it publicly (in my Substack not theirs) to make my time spent worthwhile, and that’s an option for anyone who’d like to do this. Offering thoughts privately is also a good option.

Check out Short not Sweet, and if editing notes interest you, watch for Monday’s post.

—Thaddeus Thomas

Short not Sweet

Not so sweet short fiction.

By Hayley Stone

If you haven’t already read the article, I’d love for you to click over and have a look. I was thrilled when they reached out and asked me to write on the subject, and since then, it’s stirred up a lively conversation. You’ll find links to additional Substack articles at the bottom.

To introduce the topic, I began with a brief overview of the time periods that led up to metamodernism, for it isn’t a movement or a manifesto but an attempt to define the time in which we currently find ourselves.

In my overview of our modern time periods, I focused on meaning and grand narratives, which was a dangerous choice as the potential was ripe to carry over old prejudices from the church. Postmodernism’s supposed abandonment of grand narratives was a threat to our beliefs which hinged on grand narratives. I’ve little doubt that some of that old condescension and mischaracterization carried over.

My article serves as an introduction and has been praised for it brevity and clarity, so if metamodernism is new to you, it’s not a bad place to start. There’s much to explore from here, and I don’t come to this pretending to be the expert. The folks at The Republic saw where I’d enthusiastically talked about the subject and, being unfamiliar with the term themselves, asked me to write about it.

As part of the ongoing discussion, questions have been raised about my focus on meaning and grand narratives. For one, does metamodernism have anything to say about grand narratives, as my article suggests? In an interview with Tank, Vermeulen, one of the authors of the defining article on the subject (Notes on Metamodernism) said this:

There are many ways one could approach a review of the time periods from modernism to metamodernism, but the search for meaning both in life and in literature is the approach that interests me the most. We’ll get more into that in a moment, but let me first quote a line from the article that seems to has caused some confusion:

It’s the last half of that line that’s caused some stumbling, and I’m not surprised. Most of the article is me reporting on the ideas of others. I don’t recall a direct source for this particular notion, but when I recognized the pattern, it struck hard because we focus on the rebellion of the modernist against Romanticism to the point where we talk like one had nothing in common with the other. That’s proved to be an oversimplification, for the shared thread is the failure of rationalism. Yes, modernism is a reaction to and against Romanticism, set against the world-shifting backdrop of industrialization and WWI, as I say in the article, but modernism was also a reaction to and against the whole of the Age of Reason.

Perhaps it was unfair of me to toss this nuance into an article that’s meant to be an introduction, but the primary failure that modern man must grapple with is that a rise out of superstition and ignorance and into rational thought didn’t lead to our salvation. Instead, it created a world war, twice, and with that second conflict came the threat of nuclear annihilation. Romanticism may not have seen that coming, but it was still a reaction against man’s faith in his rational nature. Romanticism went in the opposite direction to that which modernism would eventually take, in part because Romanticism was a moment born in the agrarian world that had always been, and its solution (in part) was a renewed focus on nature and emotion.

Modernism, on the other hand, came to be as humanity was stripped from that old life and thrust into the life of the city.

It can be much easier to say what something is than what it isn’t, for if I say that modernism placed meaning on the everyman in his new city-centered existence, that doesn’t preclude it from being many other things as well. If, however, my focus is elsewhere, and I attempt to say that modernism wasn’t about meaning, that’s a claim that attempts to carry the weight of an unknown universe. In this case, it fails. Meaning absolutely was an aspect of modernist literature.

In the article, I say that eventually we could find no meaning because postmodernism said there was no meaning to find. Some of that old church taint seeped into the way I discussed it, but the broader meaning of that particular thought was how these time-focused descriptions become prescriptive burdens that time eventually shakes loose. Still, my brief overview of how that happened within postmodernism was less than fair.

After all:

I also said that deconstruction and irony were tools meant to reveal a total lack of meaning. Even if we replace skepticism for a total lack of meaning, deconstruction is still a delicate subject to raise. However, in contemplating this, something has occurred to me; I’d accepted the idea that our contemporary use of deconstruction was at odds with Derrida’s meaning, and I’m sure this may still be true in ways I’m not considering here. Even so, the argument I remember depended on defining our use of deconstruction as separating a concept into its pieces, but even a cursory glance at the pop-culture love affair with deconstructing superheroes reveals the failure of that definition.

The “evil Superman” trope is a deconstruction of the myth in which a binary concept is taken so that the privilege is moved to the marginalized counterpoint. The myth of Superman focuses on his goodness, and so in deconstructing Superman, privilege is placed on a self-centered or dictatorial nature within the Superman figure. It’s a simplified version of the concept but very much in line with Derrida’s intent.

Getting back to a postmodernism defined by skepticism instead of a total rejection of meaning, where does our time fall on that path, now that we’ve moved past postmodernism?

Tracing our approach to meaning is a legitimate and understandable way to note the history of modern thought through these three eras. The impact and influence of capitalism has also been suggested as an approach. I touched upon that when I said:

However, I’ve taken issue with this sentence of mine in the weeks since publication. The claim that metamodernism has hobbled consumer identity is based less on fact than hope. I believe it can and should lead us away from a dependence on consumerism as a replacement for meaning, but I don’t know that it has. I can’t even promise that it will.

The skepticism of postmodernism toward grand narratives had us defining ourselves by what we bought and owned, and I’d very much like to see a reduction in our dependence upon consumerism for a sense of self. Metamodernism won’t destroy it entirely, but it can allow us to move between consumerism and grander narratives of meaning.

Speaking of which…

One of the more difficult sentences in my article—and this time, I mean for me as a writer, not necessarily for the reader—was that metamodernism finds meaning in grand narratives while recognizing their constructed nature. I’m not sure what it means for a person of faith to believe in a religion that they think is a construct of man. It’s a meaning I’m attempting to explore, however.

Perhaps the answer is a belief in God which recognizes that much of what we use to approach Him is a creation of humanity. One of the errors of the church, in this approach, would be putting too much faith in the construct instead of in God.

I could attempt to discuss the ways that familiar focus has caused psychological harm, but that’s not the point of this article and probably beyond my current capabilities. These are questions I’ve asked, not answers to which I’ve arrived.

Let’s close this off with links to the ongoing discussion on metamodernism, and until next time…

—I’m Thaddeus Thomas

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The Republic of Letters

How Metamodernism Can Save Us All

Dear Republic…

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8 months ago · 108 likes · 32 comments · The Republic of Letters and Thaddeus Thomas

The Republic of Letters

Meta-Modernism In Action

Dear Republic…

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8 months ago · 64 likes · 22 comments · The Republic of Letters and A. A. Kostas

Chic-critique

A Vibe-Based Critique of the Substack Scene

I first encountered the word metamodernism while reading Thaddeus Thomas’ essay How Metamodernism Can Save Us All. Until then, I had never come across the term, but its promise caught my attention. It struck me as a potential alternative to two dominant forces shaping contemporary literature: the still-looming shadow of the traditional publishing world…

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8 months ago · 16 likes · 4 comments · Alexander Rivera

Burnt Tongue

Craft Pathology Report: Metamisframed

(Meme, me, Cult of the Rainbow Rat, FB, 2020something, fuck who cares…

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8 months ago · 31 likes · 11 comments · Emil Ottoman

Passion drives us to learn, and when your passion is writing, good lessons are both hard to come by and overwhelmed by a sea of misinformation. Eager to grow, we’re always learning, even when we what we learn is harmful. The wrong lessons can knock us back, undermine our better sensibilities, and rob our writing of power. When we’re desperate to learn, we’ll take any comment as gospel, even if it wasn’t offered as writing advice, even if it was offered as criticism of a summer popcorn flick.

One critic of Superman (2025) complained he couldn’t feel the tension when our hero fights the kaiju. Bystanders are unafraid and taking pictures. The action focuses on cute rescue scenes instead of the immediate threat. The critic seems to teach us that when the hero is fighting a monster, nothing must undercut the dramatic tension and rob us of the fear that the hero could die at any moment. He says bystanders should always run in terror, and a good writer would cut the nonsense with the dog and the squirrel. Let us feel real jeopardy.

It’s the wrong lesson.

One would certainly expect the lesson to apply in any fight with a giant monster in the heart of the city, but it fails to take into account the story being told. It assumes that there are cookie-cutter purposes that always apply to anything with matching surface vibes.

It would be easy to argue that the scene is world building. After all, the scene reminds us that heroes and monsters are commonplace in Metropolis. The complacency of the bystanders puts them at greater risk, but only because the fully expect Superman to protect them. They’ve been through this before.

That answer isn’t wrong, but it doesn’t explain the necessity of the scene nor the key role it plays in setting up the story’s central conflict.

What’s important here are two story beats juxtaposed against each other. Superman is about to learn, with the rest of the planet, that his intended mission isn’t to help mankind but to rule over it. To make this work, writer/director James Gunn sets up this key story point against the kaiju scene, which emphasizes Superman’s goodness. Superman’s objective is to protect the city and its inhabitants while capturing the monster for an intergalactic zoo or (if absolutely necessary) to euthanize the beast in the most humane way possible. This is set against the other heroes who don’t share this objective, who dispose of the monster cruelly, and who leave it up to Superman to make sure bystanders aren’t killed in the process.

The battle isn’t a story about strength but heart, and that’s important for the story’s central conflict.

If you received the critic’s feedback on the script and rewrote the kaiju scene to emphasize the danger Superman and the city face, you’d undermine the core conflict of your story. Instead of going into the dilemma having demonstrated the goodness of Superman’s heart, you would have emphasized his power, lining up your character with his newly revealed (and evil) mission—not against it.

It’s important that Superman saves the girl, the dog, and the squirrel. Set that within a kaiju fight, and you have something unexpected and fun to watch. Magnify that goal by having Superman want to save the monster, contrast it against heroes who lack that same compassion, and now you’ve helped us understand the character before the central dilemma reveals itself. His unwillingness to be a tyrant isn’t merely something said in a line of dialog. We’ve seen it played out in extreme circumstances.

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Interestingly, Man of Steel has a similar scene. This time, Superman (or Clark Kent, rather) finds a Kryptonian scout ship and through a holographic meeting with his father, discovers he’s meant to be a symbol of hope. This revelation is set against a series of non-linear scenes capturing both Clark’s wanderings as an adult, morally confused and uncertain, and his childhood with the Kents who taught him to protect himself by hiding who he truly is. We see Clark struggle against their teaching that he doesn’t owe anyone anything. We see him save people, despite all his earth father taught him, and this reveals his inner sense of hope, set against the conflicting morality of self-preservation.

One gave us an establishing dilemma before the clarity of who his birth parents intended him to be. The other gave us an establishing clarity before the dilemma of his birth parents’ intention. The former rose out of its conflict into a certainty that would drive its version of the man of steel, and the latter dropped its Superman out of certainty and into its central conflict of identity and purpose.

Fans of the character will argue over which represented him best, but that’s not the point here. We have examples of movies that mirror one another in many ways. One man of steel allows himself to be taken prisoner from a newly discovered place of clarity, and his incarceration reveals that he’s no man’s prisoner. The other Superman allows himself to be taken prisoner from a place of newly created internal conflict, and his imprisonment reveals that he’s more at man’s mercy than he ever imagined. Both of these come from contrasting story points with specific purposes, set against contrasting scenes to create the story’s sense of change and movement.

In the case of the kaiju, the purpose was to reveal character so that character could be juxtaposed against his calling. No scene, no matter what its aesthetics, has only one possible purpose. Stories are not cookie cutters.

I’ve used this quote before, but…

I’m a fan of story structure because I needed it. As a tool, it helped me deal with my weaknesses as a storyteller, but these days, I’m concerned that structure has become another cookie cutter, limiting the way we tell stories.

I don’t know that I’m right in my concern. My need to follow Kaufman’s advice may be another of my weaknesses. Maybe I’d do better with the cookie-cutter approach, and that doubt doesn’t surprise me. Kaufman himself obviously wrestled with it. The entire movie of Adaptation is based on that struggle.

But I came across an article addressing the strengths and weaknesses of Gunn’s Superman, and all the concerns centered on how the story strayed from what approved story structure was supposed to be. Look, however you approach story, whichever of Adaptation’s Kaufman brothers you identify with, I hope we can all agree that we don’t judge the cookie by the cutter.

Judge a story on its own merits, and that holds true for stories within stories. I don’t expect the kaiju scene in Superman to have the same purpose as any from Godzilla Minus One. We shouldn’t compare our stories’ scenes to vaguely similar scenes in other stories. Instead, we need to understand each scene’s place and purpose within the story and how it contrasts with the scenes juxtaposed against it.

That’s the lesson we should learn.

—Thaddeus Thomas

Cycle One: Pluto’s Allegory of the Grave

Book One: The Hell Jar

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I grow tired both of feigning faith and of this Council. Leave me to my studies in Mystra, and I will be well. Had I not laid murder and sorcery at their feet, maybe we would now be on our way. Every representative is homesick and frustrated with these debates over minutiae in which neither side will bend.

Instead, I gave the Council proof of a hell beyond any Christian theology, and I could curse myself for it. Their arguments run in circles with more concern over ecclesiastical law than truth, and meanwhile, the public is kept ignorant both of the proof and the danger. The Council has forbidden me from saying anything beyond its walls. Something unholy walks these streets, and the people of Florence are left to go about their lives in ignorance.

The Council left Ferrara to avoid the plague. May the gods save us from what faces us here.

Alessandra mourned the horrid, little man. She mourned the city and all its mothers, but if the goddess appeared to her now—in this tiny, foul cell—and offered her the opportunity for repentance, she’d find no room to turn. The gods had promised the return of her son.

For that, the world could burn.

As she hoped for sleep, the cell reminded her of another place and time, far away from present impossibilities. She was a child again, lying on her cot in a tiny room and could almost hear the breathing of her nurse nearby. Her brother had outgrown the sopraletti with its screened window into her mother’s room below, and so she was both surrounded and alone.

But those who surrounded her were not her nurse. They were not her mother.

From where she lay, she could not see out the high, courtyard-facing window, only the night glow that breathed space into her confined darkness. It spoke to her of broad horizons and great heights, a mockery of these close walls, the latest of many unfair fortunes.

If she had played a hand in an unfairness upon others, thousands, a city—the city first played its hand against her. Its politics had crushed her father’s fortunes. Its laws had stripped away her child.

From down the hall (perhaps) and through the door came a sound like her nurse’s breaths, soft and steady.

“I did what you commanded,” Alessandra whispered. “I accepted the pact and kept my side.”

The soft sound whispered back in words too distant to comprehend.

“Our scriptures say God is a debtor to no one,” she continued, but inwardly she understood. No verses she’d ever read applied to the gods she now served.

She breathed and the cell breathed with her.

“If you delay, they’ll hurt me.”

The gods had made no promises against her suffering. She squeezed her eyes tight and felt her heart beating. To have her son again, she’d endure anything. Let the torturer come.

A tear ran along the edge of her nose.

She thought of the creature’s head in Daphnis’s hand. Had he killed the beast? No, not Daphnis. He was only a coward who ate at her father’s table, pretending an interest in her hand. Men such as that took advantage of the trust and goodness in others. They took for themselves and gave nothing back and claimed glory in the reflection of greater men—men like Plethon.

Plethon was older than her father, but he had a vigor she wouldn’t have expected. In him, there was no pretense of interest, nor any offered by her, but she had seen in him the kindness and respect that rarely came from others. When his countenance toward her changed in the infirmary, when all she saw saw was contempt and fear, she knew how far she had fallen. His face was a mirror, true and pure.

The hall breathed with the murmurings of unheard threats.

The Council sent the old man to collect their prisoner, and a part of Firat resented the philosopher’s presence in his inquisition. When he saw him approaching, some of that resentment faded. Plethon didn’t want to be here. Firat could see it in the shoulders weighed forward with guilt and the face that showed its many years. Firat threw wide his arms and welcomed him as would an old friend.

Plethon roused himself and embraced him. “Has she said anything?”

“Nothing that makes sense.”

They stood outside the windowless walls of le Stinche and its moat. The great box-like building had only one door, above which were carved the words: it requires charity. Firat unlocked the door and ushered Plethon inside.

“She’s unharmed?” Plethon asked.

“As the Council requested.”

Plethon offered a heavy smile that seemed to apologize for the need to ask the question. “I’m still uncertain how to carry the reality of what we’ve seen. I laid the creature’s corpse before them, and they act like it’s an invention of my imagination. Whatever they might think, and as much as the city will never know...”

When Plethon’s thought trailed off into a choked silence, Firat completed it for him. “We fought the beast, witnessed the deaths, and shared in the loss. That truth belongs to us.”

Even as Firat spoke, his thoughts tripped over the idea of truth. He’d grown up with tales of the demonic ifrit, trapped in a jar marked by the Seal of Solomon, but these were only bedside stories told by his father—ones he thought he’d soon get to tell his own children. Their attraction relied on the deep divide between their horrors and this life. When that divide no longer existed and the stories became real, what was truth?

He escorted Plethon to the largest of the prison’s courtyards and had officers bring Alessandra to them. She walked down the stairs with a composure better expected of a bride at her wedding than a prisoner at her inquisition. She wore the same clothes from the night of horrors, stained brown with blood; her hair clung lifelessly to her scalp and neck, but she held her chin high, her shoulders square, her hands clasped together lightly beneath her bosom.

“The surviving monks are cooperating,” Plethon said. “When you answer the Council, you’ll find no benefit in lying.”

“Daphnis was jealous of you, but his respect for you wasn’t feigned,” she said. “Whatever judgment the monks unleashed upon this city, I hope you’ll survive it.”

“You talk like you played no part,” he said. “That won’t work with the Council.”

“The truth is that after you left my father’s house, the monster was there to take me. From there, I did what I had to.”

Firat could not stay silent. “You consorted with demons.”

“Demons?”

“We saw the creature you released from the jar,” Plethon said.

“Have you tried speaking to the urn?” she asked. “Touched it, even? The Council can make their guesses and accusations, or they can ask. It’s their choice.”

“No one with respect for his soul would touch that object,” Plethon said.

Firat nodded to the officers, and they held back, allowing Alessandra to approach, almost like a free woman.

“You know I’ve touched it. Use me. Let it speak through me.”

“How could they know anything it said was true?” Firat asked.

She smiled. “Plethon’s the smart one. He’ll think of something.”

Firat saw nothing sinister in her smile, nor did she betray any fear. It would have been easier, either way, whether she’d stood against them as some personification of evil or cowered before them and the methods at their disposal. Instead, they entered the carriage and rode together through the streets of Florence, as if setting out for an afternoon in the countryside.

“We’re not meeting the Council at Santa Maria Nuvella,” Plethon said. “The patriarch of Constantinople grows weak from his illness. The council waits for us in the palace given to him and his retinue. They won’t have the jar with them.”

“They can get it,” she said. “They will, if they want answers.”

“You’re entertaining a few false ideas, and I think it’s best to dispel them before we arrive,” Firat said. “The Council’s orders protected you at le Stinche because they intend to witness your inquisition firsthand.”

A solemn recognition revealed itself in Alessandra’s face. “They intend to torture me. So be it. Just secure the urn. I can’t tell them what I don’t know.”

“You’re brave; I’ll give you that,” Plethon said, “but bravery often becomes foolishness. For Daphnis’s sake, I’ll give you this warning. Be careful. Be humble, and speak nothing but what is true. Either way, you’ll suffer, but he wouldn’t want that prolonged. I saw his love for you. Had he lived, I imagine, even now, some of that affection would have remained. Perhaps, his death was the greater mercy.”

Alessandra’s solemnity became something else, something darker with edges of pain and hatred. Firat knew this moment, this breaking of the facade, had been unavoidable, but he regretted the change. For a moment, he’d allowed himself to believe this time would be different, that Alessandra represented a deeper, more virtuous truth which he could not yet understand, a truth that might have offered some meaning to the crime and his final inquisition.

As with the other regents, the podesta only served for six months and brought with him his own judges and officers. Firat and the rest of the podesta’s men had begun their service in January, arriving in the city only days before the Council straggled in from their journeys from Ferrara. Some had taken circuitous routes to avoid threats from their enemies. Some arrived in obscurity and others in pomp and glory. Now, six months later, it was Firat’s turn to leave in obscurity and either return to Venice or continue on to wherever his newfound wealth would take him.

None of the city-states on the peninsula felt particularly welcoming. The greater their fear of the Ottomans grew, the more precarious his life became. He needed direction, and somehow, when Alessandra had stood before them, unbothered by the threat she faced, he imagined she possessed an answer to life’s mysteries. Her bravery had seemed a compass.

If only it had been so.

The carriage stopped, and Plethon and the prison officer escorted Alessandra out of the carriage. Strangely familiar walls loomed over her, immediate to the street and running from one corner to the next. Her childhood memories were filled by such scope and grandeur in their lost palace in Montevarchi, and the similarity interrupted her fears. She had withstood the threats of torture, only so thoughts of her mother could make her cry.

The men allowed her a moment as she stared up the height of the building, past the small ground floor windows to the narrow and high ones of the first and second floors. Her eyes lingered on the windows of rooms similar to those where her mother had died. Her lips pulled into a delicate smile, and that smile surprised her.

She breathed deep and stepped into a hall so tall and wide, her present house could have fit within its empty space and still left room for the grand, sweeping staircase. The marble beneath her was hard and unforgiving, but the art on the walls spoke of the Christian principles of redemption from judgment. These were not images one might find in church paintings, but she recognized them all the same. Any child in Italy would. The paintings illustrated scenes from Paradisio by Dante, culminating in three women before the white rose of heaven: Mary, Lucia, and Beatrice.

The officer urged her forward by she resisted.

“Wait,” she said. “Allow me to prepare my soul.”

He removed his hand. Alessandra focused on the painting. If there remained any hope of salvation, she would find its promise there.

Beatrice was Dante’s idealized woman, love personified, whom he had first met when they were both nine years old, and here she had been captured in the innocence of youth. It was Beatrice who led Dante through paradise.

Next was Saint Lucia who was martyred at twenty-one for her prophesies against the Roman Emperor. In the painting, she appeared as she might have in those final days.

Mary had been in her late forties when her son was crucified, and though no one knew how long she lived upon the earth, here she was depicted in old age. The white rose of paradise behind them, which had been said to represent so many things—including the very meaning of the universe—seemed to Alessandra symbolic, too, of Mary’s assumption into heaven.

Artistic understanding came in the memory of her vision of hell. The very air had opened like a black rose.

With that understanding, she prayed. Remember, most gracious Virgin Mary, never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession, was left unaided.

Plethon placed his hand upon her shoulder. “It’s time.”

The silent prayer became vocal. “I fly to you, my Mother. To you I come, before you I stand, sinful and sorrowful. Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in your mercy, hear and answer me.”

Plethon’s hand held still and patient, and she felt in his touch the gift of this moment of prayer. She closed her eyes.

Men of faith sought judgment. I seek only my son.

No other words came. She stood with silent head bowed and heard her own plea. She’d asked for mercy but made no offer of repentance.

Plethon drew her closer against him and, whispering, continued her prayed. “Protect us. Lead us, as in everything, by thine illustrious children. You entrusted them with our destinies, fulfilled as just they ought to be.”

For too brief a moment, no one moved, and then Plethon escorted her out of the hall.

A crowd had gathered in the loggia off the main courtyard. Here she would stand and be judged. One of two possibilities awaited her. She would lose her life, or—if the voice of the urn proved true—she would have the meaning of life restored. She wiped her face and reconciled herself to either future. If the urn had lied and the Council condemned her, she would regret adding to her father’s sorrow, but better this than becoming a stranger to her child.

The men turned to watch her entrance, and Plethon positioned her in the center of the courtyard, beneath the open sky. She looked up into a still, blue pool. If she were to allow herself, she’d fall upward into its waters.

Plethon cleared his throat, and the Council fell silent. He introduced certain members, and she thought he meant to introduce them all until he skipped an elderly man, thin and frail. She realized this had to be Joseph II, the patriarch of Constantinople, to whom the Ferrantini family had surrendered their home. She recognized something in him, something she had experienced the night Daphnis and the others died but could not then appreciate. She had no word for it, perhaps a disassociation of the body from the spirit, something anyone who had visited the dead would understand. She saw it in Daphnis’s fall and confirmed it in his death, and now she saw it here, in Joseph and in the space he inhabited. It spoke something to her, not a secret, no; it was not the message that startled her but the messenger. Joseph would not leave this house alive.

“On behalf of the Greek church,” Plethon said, “I give you Mark Eugenicus, Metropolitan of Ephesus, and Cardinal Bessarion of Nicaea. Representing the Latin church, I give you Cardinal Cessianus and John of Montenero. Others may question you as well, but these are your lead inquisitors.”

The formality served as a mask, a humane facade hiding the terror beneath. She who had called down damnation stood to be judged by men who had dedicated their lives to God, but none of those gathered and none left behind at Maria Nuvella had ever met the God they worshiped and in whose name they governed and taught.

Blessed are those who have not seen, yet believe.

They served blind, but she had seen. She’d peered into the heart of hell and pulled forth a goddess.

At Plethon’s command, men dragged the corpse of the half-decapitated empusa out of the garden and into the courtyard. They laid both body and severed head before the gathered crowd.

“This creature is the killer you enlisted us to find,” Plethon said over the roar of startled murmurs. “The monks who died in San Marco had called this creature out of hell with the intent of bringing judgment upon the city. They did so using the jar I brought to you at Maria Nuvella.”

The Council fell silent.

“One of our number was lost in this inquisition,” Plethon continued. “Daphnis Lamonidis, a secretary to the emperor, was assigned to work by my side, and I first met Alessandra through him. She warned us of what she’d seen, but we would not believe a woman’s word. We left her to face this creature alone, and that fault falls on my shoulders. What then should we require of her? I adjure the Council to tread carefully and not make my sin your own.”

Voices rose again, in anger rather than fear, but Mark of Ephesus, a thin man with a narrow, graying beard, silenced them and stepped forward to begin the questioning. He walked her through the events at the house, on the road, and at the monastery.

“And you attest to the veracity of your statements, in their whole and without reservation?” he asked.

“I do,” Alessandra said.

The men whispered among themselves and pulled first Plethon aside and then the prison officer, until it seemed they had forgotten her.

Then Cardinal Cessianus turned his full and shaven face toward her, his eyes dark and hooded beneath a red cap. He wore a short cape that buttoned in the front, also in the Pope’s color. The cardinals wore red as a signifier; they were bound to the papal body and acted as an extension of his authority. Cessianus’s repressive posture declared the meaning of his clothing better than most. No mere pomp, his was a blood-red expression of power.

“How do you explain your reaction upon meeting the devil?” Cessianus asked.

“I—”

“A Christian soul would have cried out to God and man for salvation,” Cessianus said.

“My father—”

“You received the devil like a friend.”

“I—”

“Have you consorted with demons in the past?”

“Never.”

“Don’t lie to me. No woman could have withstood such a presence unless she’d already deadened her virtue at the damnable altar.”

“I have withstood much in life, more grief and sorrow than I thought my soul could bear, but when the creature first presented herself to me, I saw only a woman, silent and strange. When I realized she was something other, the shock had passed, and I thought of my father. I considered myself dead and sought to see him spared.”

“And with that same nobility of spirit, you participated in the murder of a half-dozen men of God,” Cessianus said.

“They sought only to participate in the will of the Lord and the advancement of His kingdom,” she said. “By their self sacrifice they sought to usher in the wrath of God. Perhaps, they have. Perhaps what they unleashed that night was His angel of death.”

“Angels are not women,” Cessianus said.

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I would,” Cessianus said.

Above, gathering clouds burned red against the lapis sky.

Mark stepped forward. “Tell us about the jar.”

She tried to tell what little she knew, what little she had experienced, but it proved more than they were willing to hear.

“The God of glory doesn’t ask for human sacrifice,” Cessianus said. “Nor will He forgive a suicide.”

“According to the urn,” she said, “sacrifice is not destruction but the foundation stone of what is to come.”

“Why would we care what that infernal thing says?” Cessianus asked.

“Because,” Alessandra said, “you asked.”

The officer whispered, “Be careful.”

“Lies and the father of lies,” Cessianus said. “Every minute her words are not tested is a minute wasted. Take her to the garden.”

Mark held up a hand. “Not yet.”

No one moved.

“The voice called both itself and you the tools of a god, used for her own purposes,” Mark said.

Alessandra nodded.

“What god?” he asked.

“She never said. A goddess. The creature guarded me; I could not run, but the jar made me a promise. If I did as the goddess required, my life would be spared and my son returned to me.”

Cessianus smiled. “Did you believe her?”

“I wanted to,” she said. “I begged her to promise that such might be true.”

“And how did she answer?” Mark asked.

“She said she’d spoken, and that meant more than any man’s promise.”

The assembly murmured among themselves. Here and there men of the Council cried out, denouncing her in the name of God.

Cessianus shouted, “Enough!”

A sudden silence focused on Cessianus , but then Joseph, patriarch of Constantinople, lifted a frail hand.

“If you mean to harm this woman, I will play no part in it,” Joseph said. “Take me to my rooms.”

Attendants led him out, and when he was gone, Mark spoke. “Nor can I condone what your hearts intend. My role in this matter is ended.”

Mark followed Joseph, and others followed after, Latin and Greek, alike. When they were gone, she remained before her accusers. Although half their number had left in protest, none had moved to save her.

Until now.

Plethon stepped into the center of the courtyard. “I first must have my turn. If you would ply the rope to her arms after I’ve spoken, that is upon your heads, but you will listen.”

Again, the Council murmured, but no one spoke against him.

“We have been called by God to this city for other purposes, not this. Leave her to the city’s judgment, as the ecclesiastical crime was instigated not by Alessandra but by those who died.”

“And how do you suppose the city would handle the matter?” Cessianus asked.

“I will testify before them as I testify here, she is a survivor of and witness to a tragedy. I saw the woman the monks unleashed upon this world, and with Alessandra’s help, we might yet avert the promised destruction of Florence.”

“Her words must be tested,” Cessianus said.

“Must mine?” Plethon asked. “Must yours? You condemn her because her testimony was not foretold in scripture, but that same scripture speaks less about what is found beyond than what is expected of us here. Not even a Cardinal should be surprised if eternity offers more than his finite theology. As for what is clear and what is known, the Lord has spoken; be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

Cessianus spoke into the ensuing silence. “Maleficos non patieris vivere.”

The remaining members of the Council rose, their cries of outrage united and strong. Men in Florence were tutored in Latin; Alessandra was not. Whatever the pronouncement that sealed her fate, she could not answer, not even if they’d been ready to listen.

They marched her into the garden. Over the grass, trees, and flowers, a tall monstrosity of wood loomed, supporting a rope suspended over a pulley.

Brilliant clouds turned gray, like ashes left by a dying flame.

The prison officer pushed away the men who held her. “Where are the operators we sent you? There are laws, and as men of the book you’re bound to abide by those laws. Blood may not be shed, and no permanent harm may come to her. If you try to operate the strappado on your own, you’re likely to kill her. This is an inquisition, not an execution.”

Cessianus circled him like an animal hungry for blood. “Then you’ll operate it. Torturing women is in your nature.”

Alessandra saw a bristling anger in the officer’s eyes, but he held his tongue. Despite his claims, these were the most powerful people in the Christian world. Whatever they did here, the city would excuse it all.

“As for the men you sent, what we deal with today is not for the world to see,” Cessianus continued. “You’re the only outside witness the Council has approved, and even so, no righteous ear would accept your testimony over ours.”

Plethon broke free of the settling crowd. “I fought alongside Firat, your eminence. His hand slayed the creature and saved my life. He deserves respect.”

Cessianus stood still. “He is here before us. What greater honor is there?” His gaze settled on the officer. “Bind her.”

The officer secured Alessandra’s arms behind her back and the rope around her arms. “You’ll be lifted off the ground and dropped. The device will seize the rope before you hit the ground and dislocate your shoulders.”

Alessandra breathed in rapid, shallow bursts. She looked from one face to another, seeking a savior but finding none.

In her soul, she felt the dark clouds above grow heavy.

The crowd parted and gave a wide berth to men carrying the empusa. Its wings dragged across paths and grass and over hedge rows, until body and head lay at her feet. She stared at the torn flesh of what remained of its mouth, the tongueless floor, and the cascading rows of devil’s teeth.

“What is this beast?” Cessianus asked, and at his words, the officer drew the rope taught.

Alessandra’s arms pulled back, away from her body. She gulped for air and fought to form words. “The urn. Bring me the urn. I’ve told you all I know, but she knows this creature. She knows its world. Ask and she’ll speak through me, but the urn must be in my hands.”

“What is this creature?” Cessianus repeated.

The rope pulled her arms again. Bent forward, she danced upon the tips of her toes. “The urn called her an empusa. Her empusa. It served the woman.”

“Who was the woman?”

Her arms pulled higher. The muscles in her shoulders stretched taught. Her toes tickled the grass but not the ground beneath it. “I saw her at the edge of a marsh lit by fire. I heard a name. Persephone.”

“What else?”

Alessandra’s feet kicked helplessly at the air. “Another name. I heard another name.” She rose higher. “Please, in the confusion of her coming, I heard another name. Herophile of Cumae.”

Murmuring rose from the crowd like the sound of distant thunder.

“What of Herophile?” Cessianus asked.

With a jerk, she rose higher, and pain wracked her shoulders, back, and chest. “Just the name. Only the name.” She stared down into Cessianus’s uplifted face. “I’ve never heard it before. It means nothing to me.”

Cessianus turned to the crowd. “Fetch the jar.”

“Please,” she begged, her voice strangled. “Mercy.”

Cessianus signaled, but the officer refused to move.

“If you won’t do it,” Cessianus howled, “I’ll drop her myself.”

Plethon stepped between them. “If the jar is coming from Santa Maria, then give the woman rest. Let it speak through her as you intend. This isn’t necessary.”

Cessianus pushed past Plethon and held the officer by the collar. “When her lies are stripped away, then we’ll have no need of pain. We have not yet reached the truth.”

Alessandra cried out.

The officer spoke. “Of what lie do you suspect her?”

Cessianus drew the officer’s sword. “Herophile.”

Wet winds blew with the threat of a coming storm.

“It is only a name,” the officer said.

Cessianus traced the blade from Alessandra’s bosom to her chin, as gentle as a husband’s touch. It stirred her at the edge of consciousness. Thoughts twinkled like fireflies at the borders of her vision and were gone, forgotten, lost, with only vacant space to remind her something had once existed there. She was no more indelible than those lost thoughts. She waited, and only that one idea remained, burning cold and blue in the gathering night of her mind.

“There is but one pagan oracle the church has received as its own,” Cessianus said. “To the sibyl of Cumae, God gave prophecies of the coming Christ. Of the names attributed to her, first and foremost is Herophile.”

Alessandra muttered, “Only a name.” The storm pressed into her chest and closed her throat. The darkness grew behind her eyes.

Below, Plethon spoke. “The sibyl aged but could not die, and according to a line by Petronius, she shriveled away until her acolytes left her hanging in a bottle.”

Cessianus pulled back the sword, eager for the killing blow. “If you don’t drop her, I will.”

Lighting ran white through black clouds, and Alessandra felt its crackle within her heart.

“Hold!” the officer cried and let loose the rope.

Thunder echoed along the streets, and rain and Alessandra fell.

—Thaddeus Thomas

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Recently, I’ve come to understand that doing so was the absolute right path, and more importantly, I now understand why.

As I considered the issue again, it occurred to me that I’ve been chasing the wrong rabbit. If we take the Jungian approach at face value, the unconscious is about archetypes. This brings to mind the famous quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, The Rich Boy:

The first sentence is the actual famous bit, but I wanted to share the greater context because it speaks to my error. It’s time for me to let go of this literary mysticism I held onto, seeing the unconscious as some wellspring of creativity. To the extent that the unconscious and conscious differ in that one focuses on types and the other on what makes us unique as individuals, if we focus on the former the latter will take care of itself.

The power of story comes first through what distinguishes us, and then the romance of the unconscious is that we find commonality on the most foundational level in the types buried there. If we write the individual, the connections between character and reader will forge themselves.

— Thaddeus Thomas

Cycle One: Pluto’s Allegory of the Grave

Book One: The Hell Jar

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The ride outlasted their attempts at a conversation, and Daphnis let himself follow every stream of thought until those, too, ran dry.

The woman on fire meant nothing. It meant everything. Plethon was a genius. Plethon was a fool. And Alessandra? Was she a fool? No, not Alessandra. She was a woman but not a fool. She’d shared her logic, the cunning with which she’d face her predicament, and it was sound. He could not answer the many questions such an admission posed about the nature of her vision, but nor could he question the soundness of her mind.

The carriage jostled, and the cushion felt flatter now, having succumbed to the rigors of the journey. His posterior ached. It buzzed and bit, as if he were perched upon an anthill.

Plethon stared resolutely forward, his brow furrowed, and the droop of his great beard suggested a frown.

Daphnis wanted to say something, to challenge Plethon and see him rise to the occasion, but if he were as great as his reputation, then his thoughts were already chasing their own lines of inquiry. Daphnis’s attempts would only distract him. If he were not the man Daphnis believed him to be, then his thoughts were of no greater value than his own. Any other time, he would have considered that idea welcome. Not now.

One of the equi, Marco, came into view, and Daphnis was thankful for him, especially as the last light of evening faded into night.

Without turning to look his way, Marco spoke. “We should be there soon, sir.”

“Be on alert,” Plethon said. “I fear we’re in greater danger than we realized.”

Marco flashed a genuine smile. “Have no worries. We’re ready for whatever comes.”

Plethon’s answer came in a whisper. “None of us are ready, not in the least.”

Marco prodded his mount and rode forward, out of earshot.

“You have concerns?” Daphnis asked.

“I’m a fool, a greater fool than you, for I knew better and still failed to turn this carriage around and question your Miss Lodovico. The very angel of death could be unleashed upon us, and we’d have no idea.”

“The angel of death?”

“Figuratively speaking,” Plethon said. “Whatever awaits us, I don’t expect it’s come from our scriptures.”

“Then God is still with us.”

“Pray if it suits you, but do it quickly,” Plethon said. “The moment is at hand, my friend, and we’re ill prepared.”

Daphnis bowed his head.

“Pray for a hundred men,” Plethon said. “A thousand. Or maybe that one of us would develop wisdom enough to see us through the night. So far, we’ve shown ourselves simple and bloated with pride. An absolute evil stalks our streets, and my intellect fails me. If I die, tonight, I do so deservingly. May God be merciful upon my soul if I’ve taken you with me.”

Daphnis realized he wasn’t praying, only listening.

Firat’s voice reached them, sounding through tension’s mental fog. They had come to a crossroads.

“We’re here,” Plethon said.

Firat called out, again. The monastery lay just beyond. The horses whinnied, and the carriage shook.

Tomasso backed his mount in unwieldy bursts. “They’re spooked. We’ll have to go on foot from here.”

Daphnis exited into a darkness punctuated with hoof beats. He ran for the open gatehouse, and Plethon and their driver followed close behind. Firat, Tomasso, and Marco fought to secure the horses, failed, and fell back into the gatehouse, like men under attack. At the other end of the gatehouse tunnel, the scene changed little. Horses ran wild upon the monastery grounds.

“Stay together,” Firat said. “Horses so frightened won’t want anything to do with us.”

“Are we running for the church?” Marco asked.

“The dormitory,” Plethon said. “There’s no flicker of light in the church windows.”

“What’s got the horses in such a state?” Daphnis asked.

“They’re worked up on both sides of the wall,” Tomasso said. “It has to be something they smell.”

“I smell it, too,” said the driver.

“You’re imagining things,” Firat said and led the way out into the open.

Daphnis followed. The odor hit him like a dagger between the eyes. “It’s rotten and burns my sinuses.”

They ran, and the horses snorted but kept their distance, running in circles.

“Brimstone,” Plethon said.

Above them, beating wings sounded low and loud. A large bird, seen only in silhouette against the lesser black of the sky, roosted atop the narthex.

Firat beat against the dormitory door, but no light shone. No voice responded to their call.

The winged shadow took flight and disappeared, obscured by the high walls of the monastery buildings.

Tomasso spoke for the others. “Where are the monks?”

“I was naive to assume the monk escaped the slaughter unscathed,” Plethon said. “They may have him in the infirmary. It will be farther back, separate from the other buildings.”

A horse approached within fifty paces and struck the ground as if killing a snake. The men watched, unwilling to move until it turned and sprinted away into the darkness.

Firat drew his blade, and the officers followed his example. “Same as before. Move together. Move fast.”

The buildings grew around them, stretching out farther with every step they took. The dormitory became the cloister which became other buildings, the nature of which Daphnis couldn’t identify in the dark, and behind them the horses persisted in their protest until one unsettling idea settled upon him. The horses were warning them off. Go no farther. Turn around. Evil lies ahead.

Memories of skeletons plucked clean overcame every coherent thought. His legs kept moving only because his fear of shame still overshadowed the growing fear of the unknown, and then the walls stopped. Only empty space lay between them and a lonely, long building in the distance, a tiny chapel tucked against its side.

Everyone stopped, lingering on the edge as if watching for an invading army, and Daphnis knew then that his imaginings were not his alone. Everyone sensed the unknowable, unnameable something. The pause continued a heartbeat--two--and when he could take it no longer, Daphnis spoke.

“What’s out there?”

His voice broke whatever spell held them. Firat rose from his frozen crouch and stepped out into the open grass.

“Nothing but gloom and gloam,” he said.

No one else moved, but as Firat continued and the night itself to didn’t reach out to grab him, the others stirred and followed, first Plethon and then the officers. The driver and Daphnis moved last of all.

The absence of stone beside him felt like the loss of a mother, leaving him to wander though vulnerable space, a physical lack-of-presence where the air itself reminded him that nothing stood at his back, nothing held him, and nothing cared.

When the buildings ahead stood as far away as the buildings behind, death moved.

A brushing blow struck Daphnis across the chest. Heat singed his face. A sudden burst of light blinded him and then was gone, and in their stumbling and confusion and swinging of blades, Daphnis saw a horrible, empty space where Marco had stood.

The men shouted into the night and at each other. The driver turned and ran back the way they had come. Plethon grabbed Daphnis’s sleeve, as if Daphnis would have run, too, and maybe he would have. Tomasso slashed at the darkness as if upon a manifested legion; three times Firat shouted his orders before Tomasso heard and obeyed, reigning in both his sword and fear.

With Firat at the head, and Tomaso behind, they hurried forward. The infirmary beckoned to them with the promise of safety and respite. They had halved again the distance when something solid dropped out of the heavens and bounced once upon the grassy soil with splayed limps and gangling, flesh-torn neck. Marco’s half-severed head stared out at them; his shriveled, bloodless lips drawn into an endless grimace; his clothes and hair burned; his entrails spilling out of his tunic.

Daphnis held a shriek at the back of his throat, unable to give it voice. Tomaso screamed, and it felt like Daphnis’s own release, until he saw the shadow of wings and the black eyes within a head on fire. The creature struck. Tomaso’s sword spun loose from his grip--his feet, from the ground. The beast swept through them, a shadow peaked by a point of fire at Tomaso’s throat.

The three stood alone again in the quiet and the dark.

Plethon sounded far away. “She spoke the truth, and we wouldn’t receive her witness.”

Firat’s voice rumbled. “What damnable truth is this?”

Tomaso’s sword lay in the grass. Daphnis searched the skies for a sign of the creature and then ran for the weapon. An inhuman screech pierced his ears. Fire fell. Daphnis stumbled, his fingers mere inches from the blade. Grass burst from the shadows as light flared around him. He rolled onto his back, screaming, his eyes wide to behold his doom.

Firat slid along beside him, his sword cutting the air, as if slicing through Daphnis’s scream and into the wing-born beast. Head, torso, and wings tumbled through the grass. The creature rolled to a stop, and the body of a black-winged woman lay crumpled on the ground, her head severed at the jaw.

Daphnis pulled himself to his knees. Firat stood blood-splattered, half-singed, and bathed in the stench of brimstone. The whole world narrowed to the stretch of earth between them and the body.

Oddly jointed wings, leathery and black grew from pale, unblemished skin. From the severed jaws rose multiple rows of serrated teeth, folding forward from a tongueless floor.

Firat mumbled a prayer. Plethon cursed, and Daphnis vomited. The fullness of its contents emptied, his stomach continued its contractions, suffocating him, drowning him in an airless void.

Plethon grabbed him. “Move, while we still can.”

But Daphnis didn’t move. He couldn’t. Plethon pulled harder. Daphnis half rose and stumbled back to his knees.

“Leave him!” Firat yelled.

Plethon hesitated a moment more, pleading, but something broken within Daphnis would not be so quickly put together again. He stared up at Plethon, unthinking, seeing as if through a fog.

Plethon turned away and, together with Firat, stumbled out of the open field, through the embrace of the infirmary doors, and into the dimly lit space beyond. The doors closed, and Daphnis was alone.

He looked again to the creature’s body. Its limbs twitched.

The abbot, the prior, and the monks listened with respect as Alessandra explained what little she understood. The hearts of men were beyond her control. The goddess couldn’t hold her responsible for anything more.

“What crosses now is not like what crossed before,” she said. “When the courage of the others failed, one monk gave his life to create the opening, but the judgment you seek requires more. With that one life given, only her empusa could enter.”

“Her empusa?” asked the prior, and his question seemed to stress the gender of the goddess rather than the nature of the beast.

Candles dimly lit the long hall against the night. One monk, Conrad da Osimo, lay on his death bed, and she sat at his side, the urn clutched in her lap. The others gathered in rapt attention.

“I helped him hold the jar,” Conrad said, and they strained to hear his weak voice. “Our brother plunged the knife into his own throat, setting the example we should follow, and I was holding the jar when he died. I was obedient, but we were afraid and full of doubt. For that disbelief, our lives were forfeit as were our rewards. Arm me now, for I’m ready and won’t hesitate. I will not fail.”

When Conrad drifted into silence, the abbot turned to Alessandra. “We have pledged ourselves to God’s mercy while it lasts and His judgment when it comes. If the end of the age is upon us, we are ready to a man to rise up in obedience—or to fall as the case may be. We are men of faith but also of sound theology, right and true. What I hear now is heterodox at best and blasphemous at worst. The Lord is God, and there is no other.”

Two phrases stuck in Alessandra’s ear, delaying her response. To a man. We are men. An unintended reminder that she was something else and a revelation, perhaps, of his insecurity surrendering leadership to a woman, especially at such a moment. She had come to demand they slice their own throats. Presumably, they understood as much, but his fear was not for his throat but for his balls.

The prior answered for her and waved off the idea, as if a lesser man than the abbot had spoken. “We cannot expect orthodoxy from devils, even when they’re used according to God’s purpose.”

Instead of rebuking the prior, the abbot nodded and looked again to Alessandra for explanation.

She gripped the urn tight and her own fragile composure tighter, and she wished the voice of the urn would speak again, that the winged woman would burst through the door, showing herself solid and true. If these things were real, so were the promises and the hope. Her soul ached for hope.

“With a monster like the empusa, either she’s here or she’s not,” Alessandra said. “The goddess is different. She is both here already and requires the greater sacrifice if she is to physically cross the divide. The empusa may bring death to some, but the goddess will rain down vengeance upon Florence, and her judgment will begin in the house of God.”

“Judgment will begin in the house of God,” echoed the abbot.

The other men murmured in approval.

Alessandra breathed and felt the spark of that breath surge through her. Something she’d said, something she’d been given to say, spoke truth to these men. Though she spoke of the realities of hell, they heard from her some hint of heaven, and maybe she could still believe God was in this. Maybe, she spoke according to His will and not against it. Either way, whatever her sin or righteousness, this tiny piece of the church was ready to listen. They could just as easily have condemned and strangled her and burned her body, rendering it unusable by God and alienated from the hope of resurrection.

“To whom much is given, much is expected,” said the prior. “God forgive us all.”

She watched him, uncertain of his meaning. Part of her silently screamed for them all to run. Death had come to their door.

The distant hand of her son held shut her mouth. Marsilio was growing up without her; soon he would be seven. He still smiled, certainly, but he no longer smiled for her. He ran, but he longer ran to her. He would grow into someone she didn’t know, forever a child in her memories—his memories of her, thin and ghostly.

“He who stayed the hand of Abraham does not call His children to human sacrifice,” said the abbot.

“He who stayed Abraham’s heart first called him to ascend the mountain,” Alessandra said, even as she questioned the judgment she meant to bring upon the world. How many mothers would lose how many sons? How many sons, their mothers?

“He called Abraham to build the altar and bind his son,” the abbot said, continuing the thought.

“And only as he brought down the raised knife did God hold back his hand,” said the prior. “This was the son of promise, and in faith, Abraham counted God able to raise him, even from the dead.”

Again, the monks murmured in agreement.

“The manuscript sent eight men to San Marco,” the abbot said. “No more than that should be required now. Bernardo, take those uncertain in this calling and lock yourselves in the chapel to pray, that the rest of us should be resolute in our duty.”

“I let others go in my place once before, I won’t do it again,” said the prior. “We raise the knife in faith or we live to see God’s judgment. If those are our choices, I know my duty and will not shun it.”

Again, the murmurs rose.

“Do we have weapons to arm us all?” asked the abbot.

The rector gave a nod, and the men behind him distributed the weapons among the monks, including Conrad in his bed. “It is enough.”

“And the coins?” Alessandra asked.

Another monk held up a jingling sack and disbursed its contents among the brethren.

Their focus returned to Alessandra, their dying brother, and the urn. Alessandra hid her trembling with a redoubled grip. The men had set firm their will. Whether she doubted or believed no longer mattered. Death had come.

The hall’s distant door burst open and a soldier stumbled in, sword drawn, followed by Plethon, Daphnis’s friend from the Council. Plethon stood at the door. He held it half-closed and tight to him like a shield and peered out into the night, his free hand moving in anxious circles.

“Get up,” he called. “Please, get up!”

Alessandra rose to her feet. “Plethon?”

Plethon didn’t turn to face her, and the soldier returned to his side, ready to fight whatever waited for them in the night.

The abbot stepped forward. “Who are you? What is this?”

Still holding the urn, Alessandra stood alongside the abbot and the rector. “They’re representatives from the Council in Florence.”

“They know,” the rector whispered. “We must act now, before it’s too late.”

“But the Council…” the abbot began.

The rector reached for the urn. “They’d defy God and hide behind a dozen inquisitions.”

Alessandra pulled back. In the rector’s other hand, the knife glinted in the candlelight. Alessandra screamed.

“Plethon!”

The rector grabbed at the urn, and in that moment, the voice of the urn broke her silence. “Enough!”

The rector pulled back. The abbot approached Plethon and the soldier, and several of the monks moved with him. The rector, his eyes wide, remained focused on Alessandra and the urn. He reached out again, but hesitated, watching Alessandra as if for permission, the knife still in hand, but forgotten, unimportant.

In this moment, she saw finality. She might turn back now but never again. If she repented, the city could be spared. Her son would grow up without her, but he’d have a chance at a good and normal life.

Normal. Why should a life stripped from the one who loved him most ever be considered normal? She’d be a fool to sacrifice herself for a society designed to crush and discard her.

Alessandra nodded to the rector, and he lay his fingers upon the urn’s surface.

“You’ve chosen your path?” asked the voice.

Inwardly, Alessandra answered. I have.

The rector nodded. “We will obey.”

“How many remain with us?” asked the voice.

Alessandra looked, but before she could count them out, the voice answered.

“Five. Seven including Conrad and yourself. It is enough. Alessandra will hold the jar but is to be unharmed, and this time, none can falter in their duty.”

At the far end of the hall, the soldier reached past Plethon and closed the door. The abbot had halved the distance between them.

“We will not fail,” said the rector.

“Alessandra,” the voice said, “take your place beside the bed. Every man’s hand must be upon me.”

Trembling, Alessandra stepped back. Conrad’s pale wrist rest against her arm. His hand gripped the urn. At the rector’s orders, the monks did the same. Each man’s arm raised, each knife’s blade pointed at its owner.

Alessandra wanted to cling to the memory of her son’s face, but the image wouldn’t come. She saw only the streets of Florence stained with blood, its buildings burning.

The dry heaves stopped, and Daphnis knelt in the grass, cold and drenched in sweat. The wind swept over the hill and brushed against stone walls and summer-thick trees. No cricket chirped, and no bird called in the night. The whole world waited, asking if it was safe to challenge the dark.

He’d come close to death, had felt it upon his flesh, and he wondered who’d mourn at the news of his passing. Perhaps someone would hear that a secretary of the emperor had died and would assume him to be an important sort of secretary, a secretary of this or of that, and think to themselves, What as shame.

Nannoccio would think himself bereft of a suitor. Perhaps, Alessandra would mourn, truly mourn. For all her plans, she might still hold some hope that he’d propose and take her awake to Constantinople, as if anything or anyone awaited them there. The city itself was doomed, it’s empire long ago cut off and consumed. Nothing remained but what its walls could hold.

He should have told her. Her family’s ruin mirrored Constantinople’s and his own, where the loss of empire meant the loss of family and lands. Only a lucky few reached refuge within the golden horn. Her sorrow was akin to his. She’d have felt herself knitted to his grief, knowing too well the loss of spouse and child.

He could have been honest with her.

He lifted his face, and the creature stared back at him, eyes fixed and dull, strands of hair blurring with congealed flows of blood. Somehow, in looking into those eyes, he found his strength to stand. He snatched up the head by the hair and studied the fringe of pointed teeth. The killer was dead. Whatever horror birthed the monster, they had killed her. The morning’s impossible crime had become the night’s impossible culprit. Head in hand, he marched to the infirmary and threw open the door.

Plethon and Firat stood in animated discussion with a group of monks and one who, by his dress, appeared to be their abbot. At the back of the room, another crowd gathered around the bed, tending to their injured friend.

He lifted high the head. “This is the demon! This is your killer!”

All talk stopped. Everyone turned to see. At the back of the room, the cluster broke, and at its center, a woman sat, bedside, clutching a pot.

Alessandra.

Her lips moved, and though he could not hear her, he knew their form: No.

Even in such a moment as this, she feared more for him than for herself, and he knew that of all his sins, failing her had been his most egregious. On that alone, he deserved the bowels of hell, kindled hot in anticipation of his flesh, but God had delivered him in this moment to be her savior. He’d rescue her, redeem himself, and return to the city to claim both her and it as his own. The emperor would release him to the people who clamored for him as their hero and not condemn him for abandoning Constantinople to its fate. In gratitude, Nannoccio would give him the inheritance once reserved for his son, and he and Alessandra would retire to the garden to drink wine in its shade, a paradise bursting with the growth of spring ripened into these first days of June.

The monks moved, closing in around Alessandra, their hands raised; in each, a knife.

Daphnis ran, pushing through the nearest cluster of monks who grabbed at him and held him back. He fought with the only weapon he had, the monster’s head. Her dreadful teeth shredded robes, and men shrieked and tumbled out of his way.

His eyes met Alessandra’s, full of muddied emotion. He felt in his gut what he saw in her eyes and surged forward as if driven by the wings of the murdered beast.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the knife drawn from the monk’s cloak. He saw the arc it cut as it drove down into his side and sliced between his ribs. He took another step before the pain ripped through him, another before his legs buckled, and one more before he fell.

From the floor, he could no longer see Alessandra, only the monks and the face of the monster staring back. A red stream pooled, ran out to where the monster’s teeth pierced the floor, and trickled between the gaps.

Daphnis fell.

The monks drove their blades through their own throats. Their blood traced red arches through the air. It ran down Alessandra’s face and dripped from her arms as if it were her own. She turned away and met Conrad’s glazed, lifeless eyes. A knife lay in his open palm. His throat remained intact. He had tried to hold on for the others, to live long enough to die for their shared cause, but his wounds had won.

The monks’ hands slipped away from the urn, leaving only hers and Conrad’s.

Daphnis lay in a pool of his own blood. Plethon knelt beside him, screaming. The foreign soldier held back the others, but all that was needful was done, the sacrifice, complete.

But Conrad? Natural death opened the path one way; violent death, another. The urn remained silent.

Plethon pulled Daphnis into his lap, held his head to his chest.

The room spun and blurred. Its edges smeared and the space around her opened like the blossoming of a black rose. For an instant, she thought she’d faint. Instead, she floated over a dark land cut through by rivers as if they described a whirlpool, and one of those rivers ran with flame.

She was falling, and as she fell, a dark swamp rose up below her, a ghost forest sprinkled with the memory of trees. On the bank of the swamp, a woman stood, pale and regal. The woman looked up, revealing impossible beauty, her eyes and hair as dark as night and skin as white as bone.

The woman spoke, her voice, a chorus.

A rush, a wind, a name lost within the roar.

Alessandra sat again upon the bed in the long, dim hall of the infirmary, her arms wrapped around the urn. The woman stood beside her; the faintest smile crossed her perfect lips, and her gaze moved to the fallen monks. Her beauty shifted with the movement of the muscles of her smile. It became something less human, more than human, and the room shrank away in its presence.

The others—the living—fell still and silent. They watched as the woman glided toward them and plucked the empusa’s head from the floor. She gazed into its eyes and then walked through the crowd of men and out the door; the moment the night embraced her, she vanished, as if she’d never been.

The empusa’s head rolled lazily in the grass. The infirmary walls drew up straight and near.

Still carrying the urn, Alessandra knelt beside Daphnis, but Plethon pulled him away from her. His eyes fixed on the crumpled and bloodied bodies of the monks.

Daphnis blinked. His eyes focused on her, and his mouth wrought itself into a wretched smile. “I should have believed you.”

Light and focus left his eyes, and he slumped in Plethon’s arms. Outside the open door, a new wind howled. Alessandra looked to the abbot. “Place your coin in his mouth.”

Plethon hissed. “You’ll do no such thing.”

“It’s the only favor I’ll ask of you,” she said. “His journey into death must be paid.”

She didn’t expect him to understand. She hardly understood, herself, but with a nod, he allowed the abbot to place a coin upon Daphnis’s tongue.

“What was that woman?” Plethon asked.

“A minister,” she said, and it was all she knew to say. Any greater truth was locked within the urn, and the urn was silent.

—Thaddeus Thomas

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I suppose this telling of history’s-troubled-dream serves as a double mythology, but whatever truth it appears to obscure, may it also illuminate.

Plethon came to Florence as part of the ecumenical council attempting to unite Rome with the Roman Empire (the Latin church with the Greek) prior to the fall of Constantinople. Plethon, whose birth name was Georgios Gemistos, was at least seventy-nine, and he had come at the request of the emperor to be his advisor. He was a respected philosopher, but after his death, writings were discovered that were interpreted as a rejection of Christianity and an embrace of a pagan spirituality inspired by classical Greek mythology. It seems accurate to say his writing interpreted the facets of the Divine and categorized those facets using the names of the classical Hellenistic gods. The truth is elusive, though, as the bulk of that writing was deemed heretical and destroyed.

The Latin church of the time was very much beholden to Aristotle, but Plethon helped re-introduce the west to Plato (after whom he’d styled his own name). It is said that his profound effect upon Cosimo de’ Medici inspired the creation of the Platonic Academy which Marsilio Ficino led, but that is history, which isn’t the same as saying it’s true. Plethon’s influence on Medici has been questioned as has the role and nature of the Platonic Academy.

We too easily think ourselves above believing in mythology, which we pretend is limited to pagan gods and magical creatures, but modern mythology is a re-imagined past told to hide unpleasant truths. We create mythologies about our nations, our institutions, and our past, like children who tell themselves bedtime stories so they can sleep at night.

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The Sibyliad

Cycle One: Pluto’s Allegory of the Grave

Book One: The Hell Jar

Eliot was not one to give translations of his foreign language quotes. Instead, he championed a view of literature which was obscure and exclusionary; he wrote for academia. I don’t mean this as a criticism, simply as a context for why he is beloved by academia while others are not. Their brilliance does not require a lecture hall. Eliot’s does. It’s hard to imagine, but once there was no long tradition of studying a canon of English literature. The classics were by the Greeks and Romans, and those who sought to legitimize English departments in universities needed theories of literary criticism that would require their existence. They needed poetry and fiction that were not accessible to the masses but, rather, obscure and heavily referential. Eliot provided everything academia required.

Alessandra’s father retired to bed, but she lingered in the garden. In the faint moonlight, she saw hints of the city, a wall beyond her own and rooftops in the distance. In the night, the flowers and vines of the garden were muted, almost gray, the house dark and drenched with shadow.

She sat alone at the little table and let her heart’s wounds bleed. When she had the strength, she ate berries from the vine and stood in the doorway of the house peering inside at furniture formed in silhouette, a kitchen on one side, a table on the other. The bedrooms were hidden behind a closed door or up the simple staircase.

She imagined her son beside her. This place was so very close to being everything she needed, and yet her heart could find no joy and no contentment. Without her son, it was a shadow of the world she’d wanted and nothing she’d wanted at all.

Weary and forlorn, she climbed the stairs and crawled into bed. She tried to sleep but only stared into utter darkness. This was hell.

In fitful moments of sleep, the opening of blossoms in the supple light of dawn filled her dreams. Her son’s laughter drifted across the garden; hints of musk, sandalwood, and myrrh lingered in the air. She sat up, awake in a space defined by the lack of all these things, a molted shell of discarded promise.

In the night, a shadow moved. Alessandra rose from her bed and peered out the high window to the city and its gate, a memory of a shriek lingering in her mind, perhaps a fragment remembered from a nightmare.

A figure stood in firelight, and when it moved, she screamed.

#

She tried to tell her father what she’d seen, but the feeble languages of man couldn’t carrying the weight. She felt the dishonesty of her words despite their truth. When neighbors stole her father’s attention with rumors of gruesome killings, she gave up trying.

She was washing the dishes when she heard the horrid little man’s voice at the gate.

“I need to ask a few questions about last night.”

“You’re investigating the deaths at San Marco?” her father asked.

“Under orders from the emperor.”

That piqued her interest. She gathered the wine and met them in the garden.

“I’m working with Plethon,” Daphnis was saying.

Alessandra looked at him from beneath her brow. She had known better than to trust his first boast, but this she believed.

“He’ll be here soon,” he continued. “We’re heading into the country. To the north. There’s a chance a survivor passed this way.”

“Last night, you say? Maybe so. Maybe there was something.” Nannoccio looked up at her. “You saw a light at the gate, didn’t you? A fire?”

Alessandra didn’t move.

“Tell me?” Daphnis asked.

Alessandra wanted to be heard, but this was not the man to hear. “I don’t know what I saw, really.”

“Please,” he said.

Alessandra straightened her shoulders. “I saw a woman on fire, and then...”

Daphnis waited.

“The fire flew away.”

“Maybe your survivor was carrying a torch.” Her father said, and she saw the apology in his eyes, not to her but to Daphnis Lamonidis.

Daphnis kept his focus on Alessandra. “Thank you.”

Plethon arrived with the carriage, escorted by a unit of soldiers with a foreigner at their lead. Daphnis thanked the family for their hospitality and promised to return when he could.

“Perhaps the two of you would eat before you go?” Nannoccio suggested, his attention on Plethon.

Alessandra instinctively looked to Daphnis, wondering if he sensed the change in her father’s demeanor. Plethon must have been in his eighties, too old to be considered a suitor, but he held her father’s respect in a way Daphnis never could. Alessandra savored the difference.

If Daphnis noticed, he hid it well, or maybe it didn’t matter. Anyone’s attention would be pulled to the celebrated philosopher, and Daphnis was the sort to bathe in the overflow of glory, congratulating himself on being the reason the great Plethon had come to their home.

Plethon offered his regrets at being unable to accept the invitation, and her father watched the carriage go. Alessandra watched something else, something ethereal that weighed heavy upon her. An angel had appeared in the night, and that had to mean something beyond the strange deaths of a few monks. It had to mean something for her.

“Too bad he’s foreign,” her father said. “He could have made something for himself in Florence.”

She pulled away. “Do you want to eat in the garden?”

“I’ll be inside momentarily.”

Against all the grief and loss that welled up within her, Alessandra told herself it would have been no different if her mother still lived. The world moved according to the dictates of men, and God bless those unfortunate enough to be born a woman. All she wanted was her son and a place to raise him, but no one asked. No one cared.

She entered the gloom of the tiny house, and she’d shut the door behind her before she realized she wasn’t alone.

A woman stood at her table. Alessandra recognized her; she’d seen her the night before, at the gate. The woman smiled at her. The hair that fell to her shoulders was auburn, so red as to be mistaken for fire. One bare leg shone, reflecting the light as if forged from brass.

The woman stretched. Great, black wings, like those of a bat, spread from one end of the room to the other. Alessandra froze except for the trembling of her hand upon the door. She wanted to scream and perhaps to find both refuge in that release from its dreadful attention. The vision before her could be nothing more than that, a vision, a trick played by a mind no stronger than men believed. A release of her bottled terror might break the spell, but a scream would draw her father’s attention. It would introduce him to the danger that was now only hers to bear. That she would not do. If this creature was to be her end, it would be her end alone.

“I saw you,” she said at last.

The creature nodded.

Behind Alessandra, the door opened, and the harsh glare of the day swept across the room.

“Papa, wait,” she said. “I’m washing up.”

The door closed slightly. “Let’s eat in the garden, after all.”

“Very good, Papa.”

Her father’s footsteps retreated, and the creature closed the distance between them. She smelled like ash. A warm hand touched Alessandra’s shoulder. The door opened wide, and the light of the day enveloped them. On great, black wings, the creature flew, and Alessandra dangled in her grasp. Tree tops tickled the bottom of her feet. The air whipped at her like a winter’s gale, and they left the house behind them and Daphnis’s carriage below.

The creature’s grip was careful and secure. Almost gentle.

Daphnis tried to assure himself that no blame could be placed for failing to solve such ungodly crimes in the span of a day, that neither the outcome of the Council nor the fate of Constantinople rested upon their shoulders. In this, he didn’t succeed.

If all else failed, when they returned to their normal lives in the morning, Daphnis needed to have done at least one true act. So, he spoke.

“I haven’t told you the truth.”

“No?” Plethon asked.

“The woman, Alessandra, saw something last night, but the nature of it seems incredible; I couldn’t bear it if you were to belittle her word in this matter.”

“I understand,” Plethon said.

“She saw a woman on fire, and the fire...”

“Go on.”

“It flew away.”

“Did the fire, itself, fly, or was it the burning woman?”

“I asked you not to ridicule.”

“I’m not,” Plethon said. “These are serious questions.”

“It was the fire. I think.”

“Is she certain on this point?”

“I don’t know,” Daphnis said. “I didn’t ask.”

“What did you ask?”

“Well, nothing.”

“Our one witness, and you posed no questions?”

Daphnis began to defend himself but realized that in so doing, he’d commit the very act he’d begged Plethon to avoid.

Plethon peered out the carriage window, past the soldiers on horseback, apparently considering making the trek back to pose his questions.

“Does the burning woman mean something to you?” Daphnis asked.

“Not now, no, but this world often poses its answer before the question. Although this could be the fascination of an intellect without reason, it’s no lie, of that I’m certain. Has she been accused of bedevilment?”

“No, never.”

“You’ve found her respectable and reasonable in other matters, to the limits of her education?”

“Thoroughly.”

“Until given reason to do otherwise, I’ll take her at her word,” Plethon said. “I cannot surmise what she saw, but perhaps before long, the question will present itself.”

Daphnis had known Plethon’s reputation and witnessed his powers of reason and debate, but for the first time, he felt inspired by him. Beyond anything else, he was grateful. Plethon knew nothing of Alessandra, and yet he had shown her the respect he’d failed to give.

Their time might be limited, but perhaps there was hope.

He said none of this but only, “It’s getting late.”

“I expect we’ll arrive after nightfall.”

Daphnis peered out at the dark blue sky and thought of Alessandra. This small confession had done little to assuage his greater guilt, a guilt that wine could never again wash away. Plethon’s respect had unveiled his own selfishness, cowardice, and cruelty.

He prayed for forgiveness and what came to mind was scripture, a fragment from the proverbs: Men don’t despise a thief who steals bread when he is starving; but if he be found, he shall restore sevenfold; he shall give all the substance of his house.

Daphnis had stolen Alessandra’s trust, coming to their garden in the guise of a suitor, knowing she would never leave her son and he would never stay in Florence. How could a theft like this be restored even once, let alone seven times over?

Some things could never be restored.

She’ll not rest content, though you give many gifts, the scriptures whispered. Neither will she regard any ransom.

Daphnis’s head remained bowed, but neither prayer nor answer came, only silence.

The creature dropped Alessandra at a bend in the road and pointed to the woods. In the underbrush, just beyond the grassy shoulder, lay a ceramic urn, two feet tall, not including the lid, and a skilled artist had long ago molded intricate figures into its sides.

Alessandra crept forward, dropped to her knees, and pulled the urn to her.

“Careful,” said a woman’s voice.

Alessandra held still, waiting, the sound of her own heartbeat amplified.

“The creature is still hungry from her journey,” continued the voice within her head. “It’s too late to run. It was too late from the moment she chose you. The men who came to visit you, did you find the courage to tell them what you saw? Be careful to tell the truth.”

“He didn’t believe me,” Alessandra said, and she heard the plea in her voice.

“What is a woman’s word? What is her life, in a world run by men? I understand this better than you know.”

“Who are you?” Alessandra asked.

“I’m not the one who should concern you,” said the voice. “You and I are merely tools, used by a god for her own purposes.”

Alessandra glanced back at the creature. “A god?”

“It’s all the same, one side of the grave or the other. That is, unless you have the power to stand up for yourself and take what’s yours.”

Keeping one hand upon the urn, Alessandra clutched the fabric at her bosom.

“Do you know what manner of creature it is that brought you here?”

Alessandra shook her head.

“She’s a herald of power. The goddess she serves will restore to you everything men have taken. Has your god made any such claim?”

“No,” Alessandra whispered.

“My mistress does,” said the voice, “but she needs something from you. She requires entrance into this world, and few means remain. I am one of those mechanisms, but the creature can do nothing with me. That takes the living.”

Alessandra’s hands trembled, and she felt the creature’s presence, behind her, watching, waiting. Refusal would mean her death. She could feel it. Still, perhaps she could welcome death, if it meant not giving in to this damnable beast.

The creature stepped into view.

“You have a child,” said the voice.

The creature transformed, shrinking and folding away its wings until what stood before her was not a monster but her son. Beneath curly locks, elegant eyes pleaded with her. Pouting lips strained against unheard humor, threatening to plump already cherubic cheeks into a smile.

Alessandra’s breath caught in wet, ugly sobs. She’d wither away. She felt it, the rot that grew inside, without hope or direction.

“Don’t,” she pleaded.

The creature took pity on her and became itself once more.

“Men underestimate what a mother will do for her child,” the voice said. “They always have; they always will. You’ve been thrown away, your very soul stolen from you. What you’ve lacked and what you need is power. The goddess will restore your son.”

The presence of the demon faded from Alessandra’s mind. She felt only her son and the distance between them. “What must I do?”

“We’ll do anything the goddess says, and you’ll have your son.”

Alessandra pressed her forehead to the urn’s cool surface. “You promise?”

“I’ve spoken,” said the voice, “and that means more than any man’s promise.”

Alessandra sat upright squared her shoulders. “Tell me what to do.”

After hundreds of years, poverty had hit as hard as neglect. The monastery once depended upon the generosity of local villages, but long ago, the growth of Florence had lured people out of the countryside with the promise of wealth and protection. They abandoned God’s work for the promise of man’s leisure.

So be it, thought Bernardo, Prior of the monastery.

They’d never escape the end, nor would their walls hold back the overflow of God’s wrath. When the sky rolled up like a scroll, all mankind would see and understand. They might shake their fists at heaven and pray from the mountains to fall upon them, but they’d know the truth. Generation upon generation, Bernardo’s order had dedicated their lives to that truth: the world’s end had come.

The side door creaked and a face in a brown hood squinted out into the evening light, blinding as midday against the gloom of the infirmary’s interior. When the monk’s eyes focused, he didn’t look at Bernardo nor at the remnants of the village below, but the graveyard. The prior could almost see him question whether they’d bury another brother in the morning.

“How is he?” Bernardo asked.

“The abbot’s with him,” the monk said. “He’s asking for his jar.”

“Then give it to him, whatever he wants. He’s done all God asked of him and given all he had to give. It’s the least we can do.”

“There is no jar. He didn’t have it with him when he was found.”

Bernardo studied the cold, dark wall of the infirmary and then the woods to the south. “Faithfulness must be rewarded. Have the search party meet me at the stables. If our brother dies tonight, he’ll have what he needs to strengthen his faith in the blessings to come.”

The monk retreated back inside, but Bernardo skirted the building and crossed the open field that separated the dead and dying from Christ’s living church, the dormitory, the cloister, and last of all, the stables. He mounted a horse and, with two of his brethren, followed the road in the direction of Florence.

Silently, he thanked God that neither man asked why he placed so much importance on retrieving the dying man’s jar. They had committed themselves to a life without possessions. Clinging to one now would be foolish.

The last time he’d journeyed this far, patches of snow still clung to the shadowed earth between the trees. Now, the vitality of spring was giving way to a heat that lingered, even after sunset.

“We saw nothing with him,” said one. “Our only concern was in getting him home.”

“I don’t know how he made it as far as he did,” said the other. “You’ve seen his wounds.”

Bernardo had.

The man continued his thought, but over the rhythm of hoof beats on the hard-packed dirt, the words were barely audible. “...like the devil himself had a hold of him.”

The powers of hell had enjoyed their time on earth, but the horrors the coming months would bring, they were straight from the throne of God. Even so, he didn’t rebuke the young monk. No matter how correct one’s theology, the heart always assigned such things to Satan, as if nothing unpleasant, inconvenient, or uncomfortable could ever be the Lord’s good purpose. The world would learn soon enough. Judgment hurt.

He knew the men had other questions. Among them, they’d want to know why God’s wrath had struck against the very men who acted in faith and obedience.

“The death of His people is precious in the eyes of the Lord,” Bernardo said. He intended to say more, but his voice choked; his vision blurred, and he fell silent. Some questions could not be answered with truth. What they needed was peace.

“We’re almost where we found him,” said the elder monk. “He’d fallen from his horse and lay in the road, just around the bend. It was by God’s hand alone we didn’t trample him.”

They pulled back on the reigns, as if still expecting to find him there, and when they rounded the bend a woman stood in the road, her brown hair disheveled but her dress, worn and frayed, suggested the memory of wealth. She stood as if waiting for them, one hand behind her back, the other, trembling, clutched at her bosom. At her feet sat an earthen jar.

Bernardo pulled his horse to a stop, and the others brought up their mounts behind him. “Are you hurt?”

She shook her head.

“You’re traveling to the village?” Bernardo asked. “Alone?”

“Anywhere there’s shelter.”

All three dismounted. Bernardo stepped closer. “You’ve been crying.”

“I was alone.”

“A woman shouldn’t travel unaccompanied. It isn’t safe. It isn’t decent.”

She lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Again, he stepped closer.

“You came for the urn,” she whispered. “Take it.”

She shook harder now, and he averted his eyes, shamed by her fear and pain. “I’m the prior of San Giovanni. Our hospitium has not had a visitor for nearly a year. You can shelter there, and I’ll have food brought to you.”

She thanked him, but his focus was on the jar. It waited for him at her feet. Larger than he had imagined, it looked old, ancient even, and the figures were not Christian.

He knelt beside it. “You can take my horse. I’ll ride with the others.”

He reached for the jar. Her hand swung out from behind her back, and in it, she held a broad strip of cloth, as if torn from a tunic.

“You wouldn’t want to damage it,” she said.

In the moment before he realized what she had offered, and just as his fingers grazed the surface of the jar, he had the feeling someone was calling out to him. There had been no sound, only a voice, as if crying from within his own soul.

He wrapped the jar and signaled for the others to help.

He’d have to talk to the abbot about the voice. After years spent praying into the silence, the silence had spoken back.

The sky burned at its edge and died in a trail of sparks and ash. At the crossroads, a dog barked at the riders, and then the monastery wall and gate rose up to bar their way. Outside the gatehouse, the hospitium sat quiet and dark. The prior called out for the absent gatekeeper. Alessandra peered around the monk in front of her and then craned to see past the prior who rode at her side. She saw no one. They waited for some reply. None came.

The forward-most monk dismounted and approached a gatehouse perched upon stone legs, between which stood wooden doors. He called out a questioning greeting, his voice pitched and strained. The stone wall swallowed his voice without echo.

By the size and state of the gatehouse, Alessandra assumed the grounds of the monetary to be magnificent and to have fallen into disrepair, with too much work for too few men. She wondered if, with those who died in San Marco, the complex would fall into utter ruin unless Rome chose to save it.

The monk called out again and put his hand to the broad, wooden door. It creaked and shifted under his weight. He pushed harder, revealing a featureless dark that stretched back into immeasurable space, perhaps a foot, perhaps forever.

“Open the other side,” the prior called. To Alessandra, he said. “This is irregular. It may be some time before we get you settled.”

The monk pushed the outer doors to their limits and paused, as if the night were waiting to be invited inside. Alessandra saw the outlines of walls, but nothing more. The monk probed forward with his hands and feet until he reached the far doors. They, too, moved at his touch, and he pulled them open, revealing the sweep of the monastery grounds.

They rode through, and horses stomped and snorted uneasily in unseen stables. The prior carried the urn, wrapped in a piece of her own tunic. They crossed the forbury and dismounted outside the westernmost edge of the church.

“Stay on your horse,” the prior said. “The others will get you situated in the hospitium.”

Alessandra dismounted and stood facing him. “I watched over the urn until your return.”

The prior’s face was a prelude to rebuke, but she was first to speak, cutting him off. Her words were simple and honest, but she heard the emotion that welled up within them. For all her candor, she hid a deep well of fear and swelling need. She could not be sent back. The man she was meant to see lay upon his death bed, and though his death meant nothing, the monks were gathering to him--the same monks who sent their ill-fated brethren to Florence. They shared the same desire to see the judgment of God poured forth upon a world that had forgotten them, but without her, they’d fail. The voice of the urn had promised her this. They lacked her determination, and where they’d fallen short before, they’d fall short again, unless she spoke to them on behalf of the urn and the voice they feared to hear.

“I pulled it out of its hiding place,” she said.

“You weren’t protecting the jar for us,” he said, “and if you want to make some claim of ownership--”

“I want to pay my respects and visit your dying friend.”

He turned away from her. “That’s impossible. We’re providing you shelter and food, as is our Christian duty. No one owes you this.”

“Touch the urn.”

He stopped. The other monks moved their horses closer.

“Put your hand upon the urn,” she said.

He hesitated, and even in the darkness, she saw him tremble.

“You’ve touched it already, haven’t you?” she asked.

“What was that I heard? Have you heard it, too?”

“Take me to your friend,” she said.

He looked at her differently now, with desperation and respect, and she knew these were symptoms of a newly kindled hope. He nodded, and she followed as he left the church and continued on to another set of buildings farther back, at the moonlit edge of darkness.

—Thaddeus Thomas

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I began this work in 2020. It predates my study of prose, but most everything I’ve shared here does. The primary exception is Such Was the Epiphany of Theodore Beasley.

The titles of this series are based on the assumption that I have a sense of humor. I’ve kept the “pseudologue,” which I probably would have cut if I were publishing this outside of Substack. The greater sin is that I didn’t understand the need to start a book with a focus on the main character, which I get to after an introduction by Plethon and a short prelude focusing on a monk.

The chapters are grouped thematically in small clusters. There are four in The Hell Jar, and I’ll finish that “incanto” and pause a bit before beginning the next.

I remember almost giving up calling them incantos when Disney announced they were making the movie Encanto, which I ended up loving, by the way. The sections of Dante’s Divine Comedy were divided into songs or cantos. An incanto (Italian) is a spell or enchantment. It seemed clever at the time.

The story is Renaissance Europe discovers the Greek(ish) underworld.

—Thaddeus Thomas

P.S.: I missed publishing this week’s chapter of The Last Temptation of Winnie-the-Pooh because of a difficult week at work. It will pick up again next week.

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The Sibyliad

Cycle One: Pluto’s Allegory of the Grave

Book One: The Hell Jar

My dear Daphnis, you think yourself ready to die. Most do, secure in the one belief that’s meant to ease their passage from this world to the next. I could teach them all to fear, if they were ready for anything but comfort and grace.

Stand in the grass outside the Basilica of the Holy Cross or idle curiously along the road; hear me teach; see the thinkers of Florence discover greater illumination outside the church than in. Too bold a claim? Before today, you’d have thought that idea a grave danger, but now, we present Florence the skeletons of freshly dead monks, stripped of skin and muscle, immaculate in their bloodless display.

My words are not the threat.

He secreted himself through the night’s narrow streets and between cramped buildings. The open squares offered breathing room and bedless refuge, each watched over by a church, the hallowed home of every fair soul’s hope, but the monk found little relief. It would’ve been easier to approach San Marco from the north. Once he’d passed through Porta San Gallo at the north-most corner, there would’ve been little between him and the ruins of the church Cosimo de’ Medici was rebuilding to his own glory.

Within those unfinished wall, the city’s judgment waited.

Instead, he’d started as far south as he could without ferrying across the Arno. The parchment had instructed them to cross the city from every direction, bearing witness to the damned. As he drew closer to the piazza, the other monks fell in behind him.

He stopped at the center of the square outside San Marco, a low building bolstered by a false front, a high façade presenting itself as a place of holy refuge but enriched not by God but the power and money of the Florentine elite. The faces that gathered round him were pale and red eyed, heartbroken over the task for which God had called them, and he blessed them for their sorrow and mercy.

“Hidden inside that church is the bowl of God’s wrath, prepared for this moment.” He spoke softly for fear the city would wake. “We are God’s instruments, chosen for this hour.”

They responded with bowed heads and whispered prayers, and the monk turned to face the half-built facade. The light of the moon reflected dimly off its stone, deepening the shadows within.

“Have faith,” he continued, as if speaking to his men and not himself.

New construction and demolished ruin blended into one another amid the shadows and long fingers of moonlight. Beside the church, a monastery boarded the courtyard on three sides. Broad arches opened to a walkway that attached to the cells where Sylverstrine monks once lived.

He ran to the last cell, and the others followed. He felt them standing at the door, watching as he pried out the loose stone. From the cavity beneath, he pulled forth an ancient jar decorated with figures, a frieze depicting mythical tales from long ago.

“What do we do now?” they asked.

“We wait for a visitation.” He carried the vase into the ruined garden. The others followed, watching, waiting for proof. If no angel came, they’d followed the writing of a false prophet, and he’d led them in their folly. If the angel came, if the angel spoke, then the age of man was at an end, and every earthly thing they’d ever known would burn.

He sat with the jar in his lap, his palms pressed against the figures formed on the ceramic surface. He felt the gaze of the men and heard their growing whispers.

“In 1231, Sylvester Gozzolini built his first convent on Montefano near Fabriano.” Again, he kept his voice low but, this time, to silence his men and quieten their doubt. “Gozzolini first destroyed the remains of the pagan temple, a holy act committed without hesitation, but, as Achan coveted the treasures of Jericho, so one of Gozzolini’s followers coveted an old Roman jar--this jar--found among the ruins.”

Their whispering rose and fell again, each man entranced, certainly, not only by the story but by the promise of what was to come.

“Thirty-six years later, Gozzolini’s followers took over the church where we now gather, and that same, disobedient monk took the jar with him. In moving the vessel, his flesh touched its surface for the first time, and an angel spoke. She revealed the purpose of the jar, a passageway into hell. If while holding it, he were to die in peace, it would open the way for him to enter.”

The men stirred, and the monk understood their unrest. No dying man needed passage into hell. Without God’s saving grace, he was guaranteed it.

“If while holding it, he died violently, then the passage would open the other way, out of hell’s depths and into the earth. It was then he understood what the angel was telling him. He held in his hands the bowl of God’s wrath.”

In the cold of the night, a bead of sweat ran down the monk’s nose.

“Where’s the angel?” they asked.

The monk turned upon his challengers. “As you lack faith, so did the men of his order. It was not enough for him to die alone. One death would open a passage through which a man might pass, but to unleash God upon this place, eight would have to make that sacrifice.”

“Why would God need to be unleashed from hell?” they asked.

The monk removed his gloves and touched the relief, tracing the curves with his fingertip. “We’ll know better when it speaks.”

“I hope so. I’ll not act on your word alone.”

The monk beckoned them forward. “Come. Touch. Hear.”

They hesitated. Some backed away. He saw fear in their eyes and knew their faith would fail. He would have to show them, to lead the way for others to follow. God had called them to this moment. Judgment would come.

Dark-haired and clean-shaven, Daphnis Lamonidis inched through the crowd. Outside the Basilica of the Holy Cross, Plethon taught a knowledge lost to the west, but that day several of his most prominent attendees had not come. Gossip swelled in the voids left behind. Tragedy had fallen upon San Marco, something dark and godless.

Daphnis had run the distance from the palace of Rudolfo Peruzzi, and his face was pink from the effort. He sensed the mood of the audience had turned. They looked to Plethon for answers, even though he would know only rumors, same as they. The people of Florence saw Plethon as a foreign font of wisdom, come from the east as counsel to the emperor; and though Plethon was laity, he addressed the Council often, where he focused on logic, knowing his arguments of theology would not be heard. With that gray hair and beard and a robust figure that belied his many years, Daphnis understood why the people, beset by an unknown evil, turned to him for hope.

Daphnis had heard his lectures before, both here and in Constantinople. Early in Plato’s career, he had said evil was a lack of information, a cogent thought for the present. Plethon’s audience, however, would want more.

As if he’d read Daphnis’s thoughts, Plethon spoke. “Plato said that evil was to be out of alignment with the moral order and thus with God. Both politically and personally, evil is a tyrant, and that tyranny strikes first against the tyrant, himself. He is a man out of order with his own creation.”

At last Daphnis stood before the man, leaving a wake of murmurs behind him. He whispered the emperor's command, and Plethon made his apologies to the crowd. As they walked to the palace, many joined them, still eager to hear Plethon’s wisdom.

“Why does God allow evil to exist?” asked one.

“It is society that allows evil, not god,” Plethon said. “If a society is not in revolt against its own nature, neither will be its people.”

Daphnis joined in. “But surely God could make it all go away, if He so chose.”

“As for what the Lord can and cannot do, I will leave that for theologians, but if man can solve the problem of evil, yet chooses not to, why should we expect God to intervene?”

As they approached the palace’s grand roadside entrance, the crowd fell away. Daphnis and Plethon passed alone into the ornate entrance hall and up the stairs into the annex outside the rooms where the emperor held his audiences.

They waited in the annex until attendants bade them enter. They then stood alone in the lusciously colored sitting room, not daring to seat before their emperor had entered through the ornate double doors, received his due honors, and then, having first taken a chair for himself, asked them to join him. If he were to make such an offer at all. With a matter so urgent and time so dire, he would make their audience short and keep them standing. Daphnis was sure of it.

The doors opened, and Emperor John VIII Palaiologos entered, briefly accompanied by two pages who were only there long enough to close the doors behind him. He hurried to Plethon like he were an old friend or, perhaps, even a grandfather of sorts. He was Plethon’s junior by nearly forty years, still a handsome man and made to look rugged and sharp in his portraits.

“Your excellency,” Plethon said, his eyes and smile kind.

In his presence, the nervous emperor viably relaxed. “We were close to reconciliation. You’ve seen it; I’ve heard you comment as much at Maria Nuvella. Then Joseph’s illness took a worrying turn, and now this.”

“And now this,” Plethon said.

“If it’s as horrible as I’ve heard, people will see in it the hand of God or the devil, and either one will dissuade them from their course. I wanted you with me to protect us from the mad reasoning of the clergy, and you’ll never have a better moment than this.”

“And what could be so horrible to impersonate both God and the devil?”

“Monks were murdered at San Marco,” the emperor said.

“I see.”

“I can’t leave this to the Podesta. There’s too much at stake. The Signoria knows of my interest, and the Podesta has agreed for his chief man to meet you at San Marco.” The emperor’s brooding darkened.

“What is it?”

“This man, this soldier in charge of the inquisition, he’s a foreigner. A Muslim, they say. The Latins here aren’t as close to the threat as we. They won’t see it, but he may jeopardize our cause.”

“Whoever the inquisitor, it’s likely the Florentines will keep their discoveries to themselves. When we arrive, whatever evidence they discovered will be gone, but I doubt it will be for the reasons you fear.”

For a moment, Daphnis forgot his place and spoke. “If that’s so, you’ll have no hope of helping, unless the Latin investigators are blindfolded and drunk.”

“Such things are possible, but never probable,” Plethon said.

The emperor waved away the notion. “Perhaps they’ll cooperate, when you remind them how much Medici likes you.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Plethon said.

For a brief moment, the emperor turned his attention to Daphnis. “You’ve heard the bishops argue. One would think the only thing at stake is the wording of our creeds. In the end, it’s come to one word over which we squabble to save or condemn Constantinople.”

Plethon bowed his head, seemingly aware of a closure Daphnis could not see. Daphnis followed his example, and the emperor left the room, unseen pages opening the doors without command.

“The empire needs a better relationship with the west,” Plethon said. “Let’s see if we can keep this murder from getting in the way.”

A carriage awaited them outside, and they endured the ride to San Marco in an uneasy silence. When the carriage lurched to a stop, soldiers escorted them through the church to the courtyard beyond. There, in grass stained black with blood, a monk lay dead, a knife buried in his throat. Skeletons lay nearby, scattered about the courtyard, their bones wet and stringy with connective tissue and tiny clumps of torn flesh, hardly a drop of blood in sight.

Nearby, intestines, livers, and kidneys were gathered in a single pile, along with eyes, fingers, toes, and the occasional penis.

Daphnis turned back to the church, and his stomach regurgitated its contents. “Animals?” he asked, when he regained himself. “They picked the bones clean?”

Plethon looked from one end of the cloister to the other. “A proposal with more problems than solutions.”

Daphnis followed his gaze and attempted to follow his thoughts. He considered his position in the cloister, bordered by the church on one side and the cells on three, all in various stages of destruction and rebirth. In the northern corridor, two doors allowed access to the monastery without passing through the church.

Three of the equi stood nearby, watching and nearly succeeding in holding back their laughter. “You ever see animals clean a body like this, Tommaso?” asked one of the others.

“My dog back home does the same thing. Stacks the leftover bits in a tidy little pile.”

“These are the big brains they sent from the Council,” said the third. “Listen up and learn from their genius.”

“We’re listening,” said Tommaso. “What particular beast do you think is guilty of these murders?”

“The animals came after,” Daphnis said. ‘The killer is human.”

Plethon walked to the exterior doors, which he studied for several moments before opening first one and then the other and peering out to the road, which led directly to Porta San Gallo and the countryside beyond. “They’re right. Your theory doesn’t account for the pyramid of rejected body parts.”

“Maybe it’s like you said,” Daphnis said. “Someone’s destroyed the evidence.”

“Should I bring in my horse for questioning?” asked Tommaso.

Plethon stepped into the road, his gaze focused at his feet. He called back. “Do we know to which monastery the victims belonged?”

Dhanis looked back at the equi.

Tommaso had just opened his grinning mouth to speak when the self-satisfied smile vanished. He and the others stood upright and squared their shoulders.

Out of the church walked Firat, the Black captain of the court assigned over the San Marco inquisition, who stood a little shorter than some but whose arms and shoulders looked like he was carved from stone.

“It’s a small order to the north,” Firat said. “This massacre must have cut their numbers by a third.”

It took Daphnis an uncertain moment to understand what his eyes were seeing. Firat was foreign, which was the way of justice in Florence. The highest offices of the court were all hired from outside the Republic and kept for too short a period to allow for corruption, but Firat was something more. His being Black was unusual in itself, but Daphnis recognized aspects of his speech.

Then he remembered what the emperor had said. This was the man.

“Judging by the robe fragments, they’re not Dominican or Sylverstrian,” Plethon said. “How are they connected to San Marco?”

“They’re not,” Firat said.

Daphnis drew closer, forgetting to hide his critical investigation of the inquisitor. Firat’s statuesque features fit well among the Florentines but was still clearly beyond, not just beyond Florence but beyond the peninsula. He was Ottoman Turk or maybe Egyptian. The war for Constantinople had followed them here.

If Plethon had noticed, he seemed not to care. “We need last night’s records of people coming and going from the city. Pay close attention to San Gallo. The survivor left in that direction.”

“Survivor?” Firat asked.

Daphnis tagged along as Plethon led Firat back into the courtyard and the one body still in possession of its flesh. “The survivor was kneeling here, by the victim’s head, and his robes will have the blood stains to show it. You can see traces of it left behind at the door.”

“Could just as well be our killer,” Firat said.

“Perhaps,” Plethon said. “The killing raises many questions. To find answers, we need to talk to the one man who lived through it.”

“I still say animals got to the bodies,” Daphnis said. “It’s the only logical explanation.”

“Wouldn’t explain the lack of blood,” Firat said.

Daphnis wondered if perhaps Firat had ordered the area cleaned before their arrival. He couldn’t make so bold an accusation, not yet. Instead, he asked, “What would explain it?”

Firat bent down beside one of the skeletons. “I’ve no idea, unless the six were murdered elsewhere and carried here, but that’s too absurd for consideration.”

“If it explains the facts before us,” Daphnis said, “any seeming absurdity shouldn’t matter.”

Plethon looked away from the bodies to the repairs and construction begun on the church and cloister. “If our explanations for the facts lack logic, then we don’t have all the facts.”

The ground where they stood was once, and would soon be again, a formal garden, and Medici had hired his personal architect to design the buildings. It seemed an odd contrast, the wealth of the building and the monks’ vow of poverty.

As Daphnis considered these things, an officer approached and whispered to Firat. Unable to make out their conversation, Daphnis turned back to Plethon. “In the end, it’ll be animals. Wait and see.”

“There are more bodies,” said Plethon.

Daphnis fell silent and looked back to Firat. Plethon’s aged ears couldn’t have heard their conversation. It was impossible.

“You suggested we check the gates,” Firat said. “It was one of the first things I ordered, and the night watch at San Gallo was missing.”

“And what of the bodies?” whispered Daphnis.

“Apparently,” whispered Plethon, “the night watch is no longer missing.”

“Eight monks entered the city; one left,” Firat said. “His departure is the last recorded entry at San Gallo. You still think our missing monk was merely a survivor?”

Plethon looked as if he might laugh. “More so now.”

“More so?” Firat asked.

“Do you have the monk’s name?” Plethon asked.

“Conrad da Osimo.”

“If Conrad killed your men, it was not to cover his departure. Have you sent someone to fetch him?”

“I was just now set to do so.”

“Let’s see the new-found bodies before you proceed,” Plethon said. “Some light might yet be shed that will illuminate your path.”

Firat gave orders to secure the church. “After you’ve seen the bodies, you can make your report to the Council, leaving me to my duty. Assure the emperor and the Medici, both, I’ll soon have the man responsible for these crimes.”

Instead of turning toward the gate, as Daphnis expected, they headed south, into the city. Mk

Daphnis walked close to Plethon, and his mind sought refuge in thoughts of home. Florence grew along both banks of the river Arno, but Constantinople occupied the coasts of three land masses where the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus flowed into the Sea of Mormora. Once home to a million people, its numbers had dwindled in recent centuries, more so as fear of the Ottomans grew, until now its people were little greater in size than Florence. At times, Florence felt bigger, all those people squeezed into a city a fifth the size of Constantinople.

There was less green space within Florence’s walls, and at times it felt like nothing but narrow streets lined by buildings and their red-tiled roofs. They walked down one such street and entered a white-faced building much like so many others. They climbed the stairs, not to the first floor or even the third, but all the way to the roof.

“Residents found the bodies,” Firat said. “The story will be all over the city by now.”

The bright sun of an early afternoon stood in contrast to the dark scene. High atop the vaulted red roof, two bodies hanged, impaled, one of them missing large chunks of flesh.

Plethon broke the silence. “You were more right than I would have imagined, Daphnis.”

“I was?”

“It’s animal-like behavior, or, at least, reminiscent of animals stashing a kill for later.”

Firat looked skeptical. “You think someone is eating these men?”

Plethon examined the roof tiles, as if considering a climb up for a better look. “I think it’s worth keeping men here overnight, armed and watchful. It seems rational to say this alters how you’ll approach Conrad, the monk.”

“How so?”

“He fled through San Gallo. Two bodies were hanged from rooftops deep within the city. One would seem to have little to do with the other.”

“He must be questioned,” Firat said.

“Leave him to us for today,” Plethon said. “Daphnis and I will make the journey, accompanied by a unit of your men, and if our results aren’t satisfactory, we’ll bring him to you in the morning.”

Daphnis hated to take Firat’s side in the matter, but he had no choice. “Surely, he’ll run.”

“He’s in the only place in the world where he feels safe, and that’s where we need to talk to him. It may be our only hope of getting any real insight.”

Firat considered them a moment and then nodded. “You may question him, but I’ll lead the unit.”

Daphnis looked again to the bodies, limp and pale. The tiled roof spread about around them like a river of blood, and he wondered if these bodies, too, had been drained.

#

In the short time Daphnis had lived in Florence, he’d witnessed change, an ebb and flow between a focus on the desires of man and the dictates of the church. Just that year, they had passed a law limiting embroidery and lace to sleeves alone. Among the Council, it was seen as a victory for propriety. Daphnis never said aloud that those same men would be the last to be accused of modesty.

The monks were different, as were nuns--women who became cloistered for God when being cloistered for their family took an undesirable turn. Maybe that wasn’t always the motivations for a woman’s vows, but it would soon be for one he knew. While Plethon reported to the emperor, Daphnis visited the woman and her father in their villa just beyond Porta San Gallo. An elegant little home, it would have spoken of wealth and power, if it were not their only remaining property.

The old man, Nannoccio di Lodovico, was the last scion of a failed banking family; his fortunes had fallen as Medici’s rose, but he welcomed Daphnis’s interest. For a man down on his luck, a visit from the emperor’s secretary was as good as a visit from royalty.

They sat in the garden, and Nannoccio’s daughter, Alessandra, brought the wine. Her eyes were intelligent and fierce. Her dark hair and sun-kissed skin had some time ago been robbed of their radiance, but he saw in her a beauty that had lost the softness of childhood only to find the harsh grief of a stolen motherhood.

She stayed at her father’s side.

The pair lived closer to the northernmost gate than anyone, and while the chances of them having seen anything were slim, Daphnis needed no answers, only a pretext. Women weren’t allowed to live on their own, and when Alessandra’s husband died, her in-laws took her son and sent her away to her father, who now sought to marry her off one last time.

If Alessandra’s threats of becoming a nun were to be taken literally, Daphnis thought it a shame, an awful waste of a fair countenance.

Until that moment came, he intended to spend as much time in her company--and in her father’s garden--as he could. Now more than ever, haunted by the memory of those bloodless bodies, Daphnis needed a little wine and a little beauty, and Alessandra seemed wise enough to understand what her father did not. Daphnis had no intention of marrying a Florentine.

Whatever pang of guilt that truth pricked within his conscience, the wine soon washed away.

We deserve no such god such as Christ represents, and for over a thousand years our actions and inactions have proven it so. There was a time in Greece when we knew better and worshiped gods whose temperaments and failures reflected our own. They possessed every human emotion and insecurity, the power to act on any whim, and the arrogance to believe themselves forever justified. There are few noble stories among the gods, and those that begin well become twisted parodies of their promise.

So it is with us.

The horrid little man had returned. Alessandra barely tolerated his presence most days, but now she had no patience at all, not after what she’d seen.

She’d been witness to an angel.

On fire.

—Thaddeus Thomas

The question is: what?

Before I propose one such weakness, allow me to toss this hand grenade: The Judge from Blood Meridian was a moral creature, and I’ll explain why at the end.

An Emptiness in Contemporary Fiction

I enjoy a little study of philosophy, but moral philosophy bores me to tears.

I have an extremely religious background, but I’ve always been repulsed by Christian movies, to the point of a knee-jerk anger response when, as an adult, I continuously found myself compelled to sit through these films. It was so bad that I attempted a self-directed form of exposure therapy and spent a month watching them as my only entertainment, and in the end, found a few I actually appreciated.

This is my background, so when I say we’re addressing a fictional character’s standard of morality, understand that I mean none of this.

You might point out how something I discuss here relates to moral philosophy or religious storytelling, but that’s not where we’re coming from, what we’re aiming for, nor what we need to study to get where we need to be.

Morality in the real world isn’t the point, and the issues of the day have nothing to do with a fictional character’s morality unless that’s relevant to the story. This isn’t a self-insert. It isn’t preaching. It isn’t even philosophizing.

And I’m beginning to understand how underutilized but vital morality is in fiction. It’s that thing we sense is missing from contemporary fiction but cannot name.

What is Your Character’s Moral Standard?
What is Their Moral Dilemma?

Morality in fiction is a reasoned and consistent choice in response to a challenging circumstance. It might be the reason to do that hard thing, but it also might be the reason why doing something is hard—because it breaks a moral standard.

We might never see a character’s reasoning, but we see the actions. We see the choices, and we see that pattern of choices challenged at a key point in the story.

In Boule de Suif (Ball of Fat) by Guy de Maupassant, the main character is a prostitute in wartime, and she draws a moral line at (ahem) aiding and abetting the enemy. The point of the story isn’t whether it’s wrong to sleep with the enemy, but her moral dilemma is the climax of the story and highlights the hypocrisy that is the point of de Maupassant’s tale.

People talk a great deal about a character’s want and need, and in some cases, that discussion has mutated into a focus on the character’s dilemma. It’s a choice between sacrifices. You can only make the one choice, and something has to give.

That change might be an acknowledgement of what’s missing from our stories and characters: a non-emotional, reasoned conviction that is part of the story’s conflict and climax, whether that climactic solution is holding to the conviction or finding reason enough to break it.

However, I should treat the want / need / dilemma issue as something separate, although related. The need is likely to touch upon a character’s reason for breaking a moral code—or her want impacts her reason for holding to the cold, even though it costs her what she wants.

It’s not an emotionally based choice, either. The moral standard holds true no matter how she feels, but it’s challenged, for example, when holding to it creates a greater evil. Think of Huckleberry Finn struggling with the society-indoctrinated idea that assisting a runaway slave is a sin. He decides that helping Jim is the right thing, even if it sends him to hell.

Huck breaks that standard fairly early in the story, and that’s fitting for an outwardly imposed moral code, his rebellious nature, and the needs of the story.

We have moved away from characters having moral standards because of postmodernism’s stance on the grand narrative, but not only are we beyond the postmodern age, the moral stance need not have anything to do with our grandest of narratives like religion or country.

Think of how you grew up and your family’s stance on punctuality. It taught you a moral code, whether that being on time was a virtue or that people who worried about such things were uptight and repressed. Whichever way you were raised, that arbitrary point became a standard of morality, and then you married someone who was raised in that other kind of family.

The horror.

It would be a challenge to make a story where the moral dilemma was punctuality, but you get the idea. A moral certainty is an absolute in the character’s eyes, but that absolute need not be absolute to anyone else. Based on their history and influences, this is their reasoned stance and before it’s challenged within the story, it’s unflappable.

Unless, the character’s moral uncertainty is the point, and he fails to live up to a standard he believes in but can’t hold until the ultimate choice must be made and he lives up to the standard at the moment it costs him the most.

Maybe you’ll even find another approach.

And maybe there is no moral dilemma in your story. The character can still be driven by moral certainties, and that’s true of your main character and obstacle characters. If your character’s want is in conflict with his father’s moral certainty, there’s little room to argue out of that conflict.

Your character might be heroic, and her virtues are based on reasoned absolutes. Your character might be a villain, and her vices are based on reasoned absolutes.

Old-school morality has caused problems in the real world. Driven by errant “absolutes”, moral people do wicked things. The distaste for morality is near…absolute?…in our society, but that repulsion is a mirage. We all still have a sense of morality and absolutes whether we acknowledge them or not, but because we refuse to acknowledge them, we don’t acknowledge morality in our fiction either.

If you find yourself thinking there’s something missing in contemporary fiction, if there’s a weakness to a story’s central conflict compared to your favorite tales from days of yore—it may very well be that there’s something watered-down in a story whose sense of right and wrong is purely based on how it makes the character feel.

If there’s a chance this might be true, then its worth exploring as part of our push toward quality beyond that exemplified in traditional publishing. It’s a remnant of postmodernism that contemporary fiction needs to move past to reclaim its strength.

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The Morality of the Judge

Judge Holden is evil. Some think he’s the devil walking the earth, and to say that the Judge is a moral creature is to suggest that the devil himself is too. The very idea is repulsive.

But morality is about standards by which a person lives and by which they judge themselves justified. The Judge kills the boy because the boy offended his sense of morality, and as evil a man as he was, the Judge had a catalog of speeches explaining that morality.

That quote is a moral standard by which certain acts are not only justified by required. He doesn’t kill because of how he feels about you in the moment, at least, not usually. He kills because in his view of himself and the world, it wouldn’t be right to let you live—much as society would gladly see him hanged.

Morality is our attempt to live rightly in this world, but to be moral only means to be guided by a reasoned and absolute standard. It’s doesn’t mean you’re right. It’s doesn’t mean your good.

It doesn’t mean you’re not the devil incarnate.

—Thaddeus Thomas

For the rebels, here’s your chance to see it for yourself.

The focus of her video essay is fantasy, but don’t let that worry you if your neither read nor write fantasy. Taking our focus off of the genre concerns of the publishing industry is very likely one of the steps we’ll need to take if we are to…

Revolutionize Literature and use Substack to Do It

Hilary Layne gets one bit of publishing history wrong and tries to correct herself with subtitles added in the editing, but that didn’t quite get us there. The mistake was that she conflated the 1954 hardcover publishing of Lord of the Rings with the 1965 paperback publishing, and that difference is crucial in understanding the books’ success.

Publisher or author, I’m not sure which, but someone decided that The Lord of the Rings was above a paperback edition. Without that paperback, there would never have been the student obsession with the novels that then spawned the cultural obsession and after that the intellectual obsession.

When someone released a bootleg paperback, that created the urgency needed, and a genuine paperback release quickly materialized. The history of fantasy and publishing in general would have been significantly different without it.

The relatable point here is that there existed an accessible publishing form that seemed beneath legitimate publishing but was the key to birthing a phenomenon. The role that paperbacks filled in the 1960’s, might be played by Substack, today.

Beyond that slip-up, I trust that the rest of Hilary Layne’s history is correct because none of it just happens to hit some tidbit of publishing history of which I’m keenly aware.

The History of the Modern Fantasy Genre is the History of Modern Publishing

In the 1990’s Michael Moorcock and George R. R. Martin were central in a movement in fantasy publishing that positioned itself as the anti-Tolkien. There are attempts today to react against that reaction. The heart of Layne’s video essay points out that these are formulaic responses to a formulaic problem, one that wasn’t caused by Tolkien but Lester Del Rey.

Del Rey wanted to ride the coat-tails of culture’s obsession with Tolkien and created a formula for derivative material of various qualities that became the publishing model of Del Rey from The Sword of Shanarra through to The Wheel of Time. It’s success became the standard.

Side Note:

Please understand, that I’m not engaged in a take down of these books. I don’t know their quality because that was never my interest. I’ve read The Lord of the Rings but none of Del Rey books. It’s okay to love these books. That’s not the point. For me personally, I see myself as a fantasy writer, but I feel out of place standing in the fantasy isle of a bookstore. That’s just me being me.

On the other hand, I’ve read The Master and Margarita three times since discovering it in 1989. It’s my favorite novel.

The formula that Del Rey insisted upon was this:

Original novels. Invented worlds where magic works. A male central character who, with his innate virtue, triumphs over the forces of evil who were generally associated with technology.

Del Rey came at a time when the publishing houses had been purchased from the founding families by big conglomerates. Publishing had gone from focusing on the art to focusing on the business, and that’s what his formula was meant to capture. It worked.

Those who rebelled against the trend in the nineties inverted the formula to the same purpose.

Layne says the answer won’t be found in those trying to write the anti-Game of Thrones. It won’t be a response to the formulas but will rather ignore them.

It’s Not About Me

I’ll confess to the fantasies that darted through my mind as I watched the video. I wanted to be the publishing magnate that turned Substack into something profitable for fiction, but that’s already holding to the same problematic formula. It’s about me, and it’s about the buck.

Of course, writers need to earn from their work, but I’m not thinking of myself as the writer in that scenario. So let’s back up and start again.

It’s About the Work

We’re looking for a story to capture the imagination of Substack, and it has to be genuine. Suggestions are often made for catapulting a writer or a story into the Substack’s collective consciousness, but these ideas are usually artificial, planned out like any other industry push where the quality of the story is of secondary importance.

If there’s a formula or a response to formula here, it should be this. The dictates of the old publishing world are meaningless here. It’s not about associating ourselves with a genre but creating the best work possible. We aren’t creating the inverse of an old formula but seeking to create stories based on the needs and demands of that story.

Perhaps we’re doing that now. So… why have none of us taken Substack by storm? The answer’s obvious, but you’re not going to like it: our work has to be better.

Traditional publishing is its own worst enemy. We’re not going to get anywhere by comparing ourselves to that. We have to be better than traditional publishing. That’s a given. Ignore it. We have to be better than self publishing. That’s a given; ignore it.

By comparing ourselves to outdated, formulaic business models, we will only hinder our growth.

Substack becomes relevant when we focus on writing better than we’ve ever written before. That’s when Substack ceases to be an alternative means of consumption and starts being the new home of creative freedom. We’re so used to being artificially manipulated into buying whatever someone wants us to buy, we believe that’s the model we need to imitate. It’s not.

We must be authentic. We must be focused on the quality of the art. Fiction will be recognized on Substack when it deserves to be.

To be of comparable quality is to consign ourselves to anonymity.

How can we hope to achieve this when they have all the resources and full-time, world-class editors and entire teams dedicated to the production of a single book? Those systems will only ever produce a book of the quality it allows. We’ve been brainwashed into believing they’re better by virtue of being chosen.

We don’t have their resources, but we don’t have their limitations either.

At least, we shouldn’t have their limitations, but we’ve adopted their constraints as our own. We write within their prison walls because that’s the only freedom we’ve ever been allowed. Until that changes, nothing else will.

If we’re writing the equivalent of knock-off purses, we’ll never be better than the original. If we’re doing our own thing, we can go places and accomplish miracles the traditional published author never dreamed of.

But that’s a choice. One we each have to choose for ourselves.

And here’s where I depart from Layne. It’s not enough to ignore formula because it’s baked into us now. To ignore is to recreate it.

She’s right though, doing the opposite is to do the same. That puts us in a place where it can seem there is no escape.

If there’s interest, I can try to follow up with a few essays exploring how we challenge the narrative limits baked within us, but this isn’t about me. It’s about us as a community. We have to challenge this together and help each other recognize the old limitations and push past them.

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— Thaddeus Thomas