Megaupload and Autumn Ghosts

I realized the other day that Megaupload might be completely impenetrable to the uninitiated, so I figured I would explain the process of downloading stuff from there. First, go to the URL I provide. Then, enter the captcha (the string of letters) in the box. Next, wait for the timer to run out, and then click free download. Once you've got the file, extract it. It should prompt you for a password, and it's safe to assume that the password will always be interface. Sorry about this rigamarole, but I don't have any hosting of my own.

With that tediousness out of the way, I'd like to comment a bit on Autumn Earth. Autumn Earth is essentially a personal narrative and a reflection on isolation and depression. For many years, I had a tremendous deal of difficulty envisioning myself as a human being, in human settings. I always felt somewhat estranged and out of place in many situations, and it caused me a fair amount of trouble. I used to feel like a ghost.

Eventually these feelings became so oppressive and intolerable that I decided to give voice to them through writing. A story about a lonely ghost is incredibly trite at this point, so I reversed the situation, and made my protagonist the only human in a city of ghosts. The inaccessible nature of his environment enforces feelings of isolation and loneliness, and most of the story is his coming to terms with those emotions.

But there is another side to this story that is played out in the protagonist's attempts to rejoin society. He uses art, in his case poetry and music, to reach out, not only to the ghosts, but also within himself. At the same time, this is the same goal of the author. Both are united in their desire to interface with society through their work, at the same time recognizing the flawed nature of that reasoning and the imperfect nature of their work. The ghosts are not redeemed, but the protagonist is satisfied because he at least attempted to communicated with them, and in doing so realized the power of artistic work to redeem the self. The title of this blog is a reference to that idea.

As for future stories, I'm working on another that I call Corona Radiata. It is the story of a heliophysicist that gains the ability to understand all of causality and his struggles with that knowledge. Hopefully it will be finished in a timely manner.

Thanks for reading, and be prepared for more here at the Interface.