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.

Autumn Earth

Envision an empty city, but one that thrums with activity. Envision a society of the dead, where the ghosts of this earth roam freely, accomplishing their petty tasks. Envision the hollowness of an August cold front, and the impending collapse of fall. Now imagine you are the only one left alive. This is the central aesthetic of Autumn Earth, the first short story I wrote when I began writing last year. I hope you enjoy it.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=PGTS4VC5

You'll need an archiving program like WinRAR to open this file, and the password is "interface". Comments and criticisms are always appreciated.


Autumn Earth by Michael Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Vessel Commentary

I'm about to post another story that I wrote almost a year and a half ago, but first, I'd like to comment on Vessel.

A few years ago, I was thinking a lot about romance, especially as it pertains to the young. I saw love as a rush to uncover as much about another person as possible--to dig into the strata of another human being in part out of curiosity, but also to fulfill perceived emptinesses within oneself. I wondered if such digging might uncover not the desired feeling of fullness, but might uncover a deeper emptiness.

Recently, I was mulling over those same thoughts, when I envisioned two people meeting each other on a crowded street. They are strangers, but within moments of seeing each other, they feel a deep connection. They rush through a crowd to meet one another, but, as they embrace, they recoil from one another, sensing something wrong. This is the central image of Vessel. When we fall in love, we not only expose or strengths to each other, but also our weaknesses. Perhaps beyond the inevitable posturing of being some two will find nothing.

But this is also a story about the flaws in our perceptions of others. It has been theorized that the human brain has a limited capacity to recognize other humans as people--that beyond a certain number of close friends and relatives, all others will be perceived as an indistinguishable rabble. This is an inevitable vanity of humanity, and it is one that has been often discussed in fiction (For an excellent treatment of the subject, read Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions). My intention in Vessel was to create a dichotomy between human and non-human, but also to betray that dichotomy in order to expose the foolishness of the whole thing. We are all human. To attempt to separate the sheep from the shepherds, the unaware from the awakened, is vanity. We all suffer.

Vessel

I finally finished Vessel. I don't consider this a final draft, but it's as close to done as it is getting for the foreseeable future. That being said, here it is! Sorry about using megaupload, but I couldn't figure out a better way to do this this time around.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=2J33BBNP

You'll need a rar extractor like WinRAR to download this, and the password on the file is "interface" sans quotation marks. Let me know what you think. Also, I've decided that this story and anything else I publish here will be under a Creative Commons license.


Vessel by Michael Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.