In which I cast my thoughts into the abyss.

A cultist has second thoughts on the cusp of enlightenment.

This is a short story I wrote about a year or two ago, and is one of the first pieces I finished completely. It went through several rounds of edits and some beta readers before it was done, and I learned a lot in the process. It’s a bit niche, however, and I’ve not had any luck submitting it to competitions and magazines, so here it is in all its melancholic glory. ...

I’m not the sort of person to seek out film trailers, or keep on top of new releases. When I see a trailer, it is almost always when I am sitting in the cinema to see something different, my hand is rummaging around at the bottom of an already empty popcorn bag, and I’m getting bored of the adverts1. In the case of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (henceforth referred to as the far simpler, Marcel, or Marcel the Shell) I was watching a fairly fairly mediocre Jim Broadbent film. The trailer for Marcel blew me away instantly. ...

I have been thinking a lot about dystopias recently, prompted by a precarious visit to my old smuggling work-in-progress. My aim was to flesh out the world building and establish precisely the kind of dystopia the unfortunate main character lived within. Perhaps inevitably, as I waded into what I hoped to be a sea of multidimensional compelling dystopia, I found a shallow imitation of it. The obvious questions is: what makes a compelling dystopia? Is it a political satire, with the big bad government oppressing the people? Is it a social separation of different kinds of people based on class, or thoughts, or where they live? Maybe it is all of those things. ...

Writing is hard. Did I ever mention that?