Addendum to the Social Satire of Batman: Arkham City

    Hey guys,

    It's been a long time since I wrote The Social Satire of Batman: Arkham City (available to read here) and it occurs to me that it I should revisit the essay in light of new information. The recent release of the DLC Harley's Revenge means now's a good enough time as any. As a warning, this article will contain SPOILERS for the game so don't proceed if you haven't completed the game.

    In The Social Satire of Batman: Arkham City, I focused exclusively on the relationship between RL life authoritarianism and the prison itself. I drew parallels with the War on Terror, Guantanamo Bay, Blackwater, and real-life prisoner abuses. I attributed the plot entirely to Hugo Strange, even though I'd already played the game and knew it was actually the result of Ra's Al Ghul's manipulations. Likewise, I acted like Mayor Quincy Sharp was a party to the atrocities when the game revealed he was nothing more than Hugo Strange's dupe.

    In retrospect, I think most of my essay still stands. The game does use the trappings of the War on Terror very effectively to lure the player in to thinking it's going to be a straight rebuttal of totalitarianism. It shows how many of the problems in Arkham City are inherent to the citizenry's willingness to abjure responsibility for its prisoners and ignore the truth in favor of what they want to believe.

    Nevertheless, there's a bit of subtext which I glossed over and is important to deal with. Specifically, that Arkham City highlights the role of terrorism and how it feeds off of oppression. While Hugo Strange is an effective villain in the story, he takes a secondary role to Ra's Al Ghul and the Joker. Christopher Nolan's Batman movies underscored the terrorist elements to both Ra's and the Joker so using them as a metaphor for the subject is hardly new. However, Batman: Arkham City takes it one step further.

    Ra's Al Ghul represents the ideological terrorist who hits a surprising number of notes for what many in the West still fear from Al-Qaeda-esque organizations. He's a man who wants worldwide revolution, is a quasi-religious leader, and is of Middle Eastern descent. Ra's Al Ghul supports the creation of Arkham City not to overthrow the West, however, but to turn it into something more akin to his liking.

    Hugo Strange in the game has created Arkham City as, essentially, one gigantic roach motel for the undesirables of Gotham City. It's never really been intended as a prison, a place where criminals are held until their sentences are up, but a place he would eventually create conditions bad enough to justify executing the entirety of the population. In short, it's a death camp only the victims are criminals as opposed to members of a particular ethnicity.

    Ra's Al Ghul supports this action because in addition to environmentalism, he is also a figure who considers the majority of the human race to be parasites. Like Batman, he considers himself to be making the world a better place. The elimination of tens of thousands of criminals from Gotham City's population is something he can only figure will benefit everyone.

     Given so many video games consist of player characters effectively doing that, it's an interesting parallel to be drawn. The players, as Batman, are thus forced to save the lives of people they'd normally gun down in games like Max Payne. In short, the game says that it's people like Ra's Al Ghul who consider prisoners to have no humanity whatsoever.

    Then there's the Joker who almost manages to justify every single atrocity against criminals by his very presence. Over the course of the game he not only kills numerous people but organizes a widespread biological terrorist attack on Gotham City, all from the safe confines of Arkham City. If there has ever been a non-supernatural character in comics thought of as irredeemably evil, the Joker will usually be first in line.

    The thing is, the Joker is a character who is largely unimpeded by Arkham City. It's no more a prison to him than Arkham Asylum and his activities actually get worse in the second game, utterly indifferent to the larger plots of Hugo Strange and Ra's Al Ghul. Indeed, the Joker is ignored by the authorities and able to carry out his plans unhindered. The attempt to focus on all criminals leaves the nastiest one alone. Of course, really, it has to be that way since it wouldn't be a Batman game without his archnemesis.

    Still, the Joker is an interesting idea about the dangers of one individual. He doesn't need a massive network of assassins like Ra's Al Ghul to wreck havoc. While he has a small gang of individuals under his control, it's really a core of followers who allow him to do all the nasty things we expect him to. Gotham City should be watching out for the monsters as opposed to the little fish since a single monster can kill literally hundreds of people. I'll leave that for you to draw your own conclusions regarding.

I just don't see motherhood in her future.

    I will say I'm pleased the game world chose not to have Harley Quinn pregnant with the Joker's child. Never mind nature vs. nurture, the simple fact is that I prefer Harley as a sexy character who menaces Batman directly rather than one who hides behind the legacy of the Joker. Besides, what is the Joker's child going to do? Drool at Batman?

    My .02.

Sleeping Dogs review

    Sleeping Dogs is a Grand Theft Auto clone which manages to transcend the formula, becoming arguably better than both the recent Grand Theft Auto IV and Saints Row: The Third by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, being 'better than both' is high praise but the game could have been even better than semi-legendary Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas if it had taken a few more risks and not truncated so many of its plots to the level it did.

    Part of this is due to the fact the video game had a rather infamously spotty development cycle. It was originally supposed to be an original game series called Black Lotus and was eventually bought out, getting retitled True Crime: Hong Kong. Then people noticed the True Crime series wasn’t really doing so well and cancelled the game despite it being more or less complete. Square Enix and United Front Games rescued the game from oblivion and released it under a new IP.
 

    What a smart decision that was.

    The gameplay is pretty much you’d expect from a Grand Theft Auto game in many respects. You can steal any car and drive like mad in an open-world sandbox version of Hong Kong. It has the Saints Row-style side-missions of fight clubs, cock fighting, street races, and oddball favors you can do for your character’s various associates.
 

    The game further enhances itself by cribbing Arkham Asylum's melee fighting style, Just Cause 2's vehicular combat, Assassin Creed 2's free-running system, and a gun-fighting system straight out of Max Payne. It doesn't do any of these things as well as the games centered around them but it manages to copy an eclectic mix of play styles in a way that's both humorous and original.
 

    I also am deeply fond of the Hong Kong setting. While not a direct copy of the real life location, there’s enough similarities you can be persuaded you’re on at least one part of the island. The lead can travel from back alley markets to beautiful skyscrapers with everything in-between. The meeting of East and West culture which embodies the region is something spectacular to behold.
 

    What separates Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row from Sleeping Dogs, however, is a simple but effective element. Specifically, the protagonist is not a horrible douchebag. I don't mind playing a sociopathic criminal every now and then but sometimes it becomes difficult to care about their personal narratives. Carl Johnson was the last Grand Theft Auto character I cared about and even then it was only due to the fact I ignored the construction worker mission.

Everybody was kung-fu fighting. Those kicks were fast as lightning.

    The main character of Wei Shen is an undercover police officer who has the somewhat flimsy excuse of maintaining his gangster appearance to justify all the wacky GTA-esque hijinks he gets up to. Still, alongside the criminal activities are missions to stop White Slaving rings and taking down serial killers. Wei Shen has a character arc based around balancing his undercover identity as a Triad foot soldier with his true loyalties as a police officer. I imagine a lot of players will be torn themselves with the police being morally upright but cold while the Triads are psychotic but fun.
 

    The idea of an undercover police officer getting too deep is an overused story device but works surprisingly well here. The cast of characters is varied and entertaining with excellent voice acting all around. Some of my favorite actors make a guest appearance here with Kelly Hu, Emma Stone, Will Yun Lee, Robin Shou, and others. Sadly, some of them are distinctly underused and the underdeveloped storylines of several NPCs lacking a proper denouement.
 

    Sadly the lack of development in certain areas is the one thing that keeps Sleeping Dogs from greatness. After an exceptionally strong lead-in during the first Act, introducing an excellent mix of low-level Triad gangsters and suspicious cops, the second Act is muddled with numerous characters introduced who seem like they should have plot lines but don't, and the Third Act bounces back only to have the ending feel unsatisfying. Yeah, there are no loose ends to wrap but I expected something a little more spectacular.

    For an example of the storytelling flaws in action, let's take the 'dating' mechanic. I don't have a big "thing" about dating simulation in video games. Still, it's part of the storytelling that romances can and do happen. It's no different from tragedies or comedies. In Sleeping Dogs, Wei Shen can go on dates with half-a-dozen women but each date ends with a 'fade-to-black' scene with no further encounters with the characters. For me, this seems wasteful. If you're going to introduce a love interest, have them do something. Even San Andreas offered some fun options like drive-bys for characters to enjoy.

    Still, the game manages to capture a lot of the feeling of Hong Kong cinema in action. There's numerous homages to Bruce Lee movies (including three of his outfits), John Woo's Heroic Bloodshed films (particularly Hardboiled), and the entire premise is not that far removed from Internal Affairs (remade in America as The Departed). I particularly liked how dynamic and fluid the combat system became once I unlocked all of the special moves at Wei Shen's dojo.

    In conclusion, Sleeping Dogs is the best purchase I've made since Skyrim or Fallout: New Vegas. I encourage people to buy this game or rent it. I don't think it's quite as good as those two but it's damn close and it's a pity it could have been even better but didn't quite reach those heights. Whatever the case, I'm eagerly awaiting Sleeping Dogs 2: Even more Kicking.

9/10

Pavlov's Dogs review

    Werewolves vs. Zombies.

    If those three words intrigue you, then this is the book for you. In the spirit of Universal's The Wolfman vs. Dracula and similar titles, Pavlov's Dogs takes the kind of question that fanboys muse about and wrote a fun little story about it. Surprisingly, the book isn't wall-to-wall werewolf versus zombie action but frequently interrupted with the kind of survival horror common to zombie stories. The book also possesses a surprising amount of black humor, almost pushing it from horror to Urban Fantasy like The Dresden Files.

    It doesn't, though.

    Pavlov's Dogs manages to stay on the side of horror-action primarily because the humor is actually only a dim cover for a surprisingly dark story. Despite the ostensible good guys of the story having access to werewolves, the fact is humanity is getting overrun as it always seems to in these stories. Worse, the danger from within isn't just incompetent short-sighted humans like in most George Romero movies but genuinely evil ones. Also, as befits a story about two monsters fighting, either way humanity loses.

    The premise of the book goes a bit deeper than "zombies appear, werewolves fight them" and does something interesting with it. It reverses the usual treatment of werewolves as a purely mystical phenomenon and the recent trend of zombies being the product of mad science. In Pavlov's Dogs, it is the werewolves who are the creation of a mad government project while the zombies inexplicably appear with no warning or explanation.

    Honestly, I think I prefer this. While one might argue mindless cannibal humans is slightly more "realistic" than werewolves, I can more readily believe the military wants to create super-fast healing shapechangers over a plague which transforms the majority of mankind into feral monsters. Sorry Umbrella Corporation, I'm going to have to go with the mad scientists of Pavlov's Dogs here.

    Curiously, the book doesn't necessarily center around the werewolves or the zombies but people's reactions to them. The majority of the book is done from the perspectives of humans Ken Bishop and the treacherous Doctor Donovan. I'm not spoiling anything by saying Donovan is the bad guy, since the guy pretty much radiates scumbag from the moment he's introduced. Ken Bishop, by contrast, is an unlucky everyman thrust into an insane situation.

    Honestly, while Ken isn't my favorite character in the novel, he win props for being a head smarter than the vast majority of zombie story protagonists. Having noticed one of the group of survivors was bit by a highly infectious cannibal plague, he neither overreacts or ignores the problem but nonviolently isolates the infected survivor from the rest of the group. Nobody dies as a result of his decision. I don't think that's ever happened before.

    Really, my favorite character in the book is undoubtedly the villainous Kaiser. The "evil werewolf" for a basic summation of his character role, Kaiser is an intriguing figure with a more developed personality than he really had to possess. Effectively, he's a human being who has  adopted the morality of a wolf only supplemented with a man's intellect. Rather than simply parrot ideals about the "law of the jungle" or other tired old phrases, the book shows his thought processes and how dangerous he truly is to those around him.

    In a post-apocalyptic situation, there's usually a change up in the rules of society. I think it's interesting to speculate on how wrong Kaiser is that humanity might have to revert to primitivism in order to survive. Certainly, if they were able to transform the majority of humans in the novel into werewolves, it might have gone a long way to establishing mankind as having a fighting chance against the zombie menace.

     Ultimately, the book isn't really interested in developing Kaiser beyond his role as a foe for Ken Bishop and the other survivors but I found myself rooting for him until the very end. Kaiser is a monster but just how bad is he when compared to the looming threat of extinction? Can we really blame him for wanting to be Alpha when his ostensibly nicer commander isn't the strongest wolf? The book lets us make our own decisions about these things.

    If there's one complaint I do have about the book it's the handling of female characters. It's not that there's not a bunch of intriguing females in the book, there are. Shanya and Summer Chan both emerge as interesting characters in the later half of the book, arguably proving more effective than the protagonists in many ways. It's just they don't really play much of a role in the narrative. I hope, in future novels, we get to see these characters expanded upon and added to.

    Pavlov's Dogs is a dark, moving, funny, action-filled story at various parts. I heartily recommend it to anyone who wants to enjoy a good night of seeing werewolves do battle with zombies and humans do battle with both.

9/10

Keyboard busted

    No updates for awhile sadly, I made the classic mistake of removing a loose key and ended up being unable to put it back together. My attempt to remove another key to figure out how to put it back together only made the problem worse. Even the laptop repair guy couldn't fix it and I had to get a new computer keyboard ordered.

    Oh well.

    It's given me the chance to play Sleeping Dogs.

Tension in horror

    Michael Grimm, a favorite commentator of mine, mentioned that one of the key elements of horror I forgot to mention in my immersion thread was building tension. You know, he was absolutely correct. Immersion is one of the best ways to build up horror, making it so nothing snaps you out of your suspension of disbelief. However, arguably more important, is the ability to build up things to a crescendo.

    Then take your audience well past the point they're ready for a climax and make it so much worse!

    Bwahahahah.

    Ahem.

    No, seriously, tension is the process of building suspense and getting the audience invested in waiting for something to happen. This could be our heroine heading downstairs into the basement we know a serial killer is waiting for or noticing the fact her child is possessed.

    Whatever.

    One of the reasons I really like the Marble Hornets series is that it's very good at building suspense. It's why the otherwise silly premise of looking for the appearance of the Slenderman in split second frames of the movies or for him to show up at the end is so terrifying. Nine tens out of ten, the Slenderman doesn't even do anything but we're invested in his appearance to the point we're on the edge our seats waiting for his arrival.

    Which is, oddly, why I hate jump scares. Jump scares are those moments where the tension has built to a crescendo and then out of nowhere something happens. Either that or, worse, there's no tension and something happens! Aren't you scared? Well, honestly, no, no I'm not. In the first case, breaking the tension is a bad thing unless you really want to sell it. The second feels legitimately lazy. The "cat scare" is my most hated example of this, you know where the tension becomes really thick only for a noise and oh it's a cat (usually before the monster attacks).

    I hate this. Don't ask me why.

     One of the greatest of all sources of tension in movies was, of course, the build-up to the events of Psycho. Alfred Hitchcock, it's not a surprise to say, was a master of tension even when he wasn't doing horror. The heart of the movie is the audience building up sympathy for its main character, who is not Norman Bates, coming to like her and then becoming increasingly aware of how much danger she's in. When the movie killed their "lead" halfway through the film, the audience had no idea what was going to happen from that point on and everything continued like a roller-coaster despite its most likable character being dead.

    Jaws and Alien are two "monster movies" which benefit also from the sparing use of their monster. They appear just often enough that their presence looms over everything. Too much of a monster and there's no real fear from it as you have the rest of the story to fill up with him so too much damage is impossible. Just enough, however, and they can lurk over everything. The terror is in the waiting for their arrival. Of course, you do need some appearances to remind audiences why they should be afraid. I've seen a few books who don't give enough of the monster to make the audience afraid for our heroes.

    In general, tension is like a secret the audience has been let in on. They're aware of the danger and so is the storyteller but the protagonist is not. Even when the protagonist is made aware that Jason Voorhees or whoever is in the woods, they should never know where exactly. Sometimes, it's a good idea to have the audience have some breathing room. That way they can be scared all over again.

    What is the perfect mixture of appearances versus not for creating tension? Difficult to say because I think everyone has a different threshold for it. For me, I like tension that almost never breaks. The build-up where the audience knows the villain, knows something is going to happen, and the movie strings it along even when it should be giving you time to breathe. For me, the resolution is almost an afterthought.

    Just my .02.

Marble Hornets Season 1 review

    I was actually intending to review this before the previous post but I started talking about immersion in horror and it branched off to become an essay. Suffice to say, immersion is extremely important to the Marble Hornets series and its ability to sustain it throughout the first season is a major factor in making it great.

    Marble Hornets is, for those unfamiliar with the work, a series of video-blog entries by a college student named Jay who is investigating the mysterious mental breakdown of his friend, Alex. As revealed in the first video, it somehow relates to the internet meme monster known as the Slenderman.

    The Slenderman is a faceless man in a suit who is unnaturally tall, capable of making himself unseen (but not invisible), and who is utterly inscrutible. He was created for a photo-manipulation contest on the Something Awful forums and has since branched off to become an urban legend with numerous series based around him.

    Interestingly, the Slenderman actually taps into a bunch of real-life legends that give the character plausibility. The Slenderman is not that far removed from legends of the Fair Folk, Men in Black, modern-day demon sightings, and malevolent ghosts. The Slenderman doesn't have an origin like other monsters and is all the more terrifying for the fact we don't know what sort of rules he operates by.

    He is also terrifying.

    No, seriously, not since I've been a child have I had the kind of clammy frightened 'hairs standing on the back of my neck' feeling I've had while watching this series. The last time I remember being this scared was an irrational moment while walking down my own street at night only for suddenly the entire place to seem unnaturally menacing.

    Unsafe.

    This entire series is like this.

    The videos are usually quite short, often not more than a few minutes long, but work well for their easily digestible nature. The level of tension in the videos is incredible, building up through the entirety of the series with no pause. By the time the series ends, you'll be shaken to the core but eager to begin the second season.

    It's hard to put into words why the series is so effective. The shaky camera-work would normally annoy me but it's supposed to be crappy given it's taken by amateurs. Also, it's hard to keep good camerawork when you're terrified out of your mind. The visual storytelling is wonderful too, often saying a lot with a single short image that other movies would take an hour to build up to. There's also the fact Slenderman is the best monster since the creature fromAlien, IMHO.

Yep, he's just stolen your soul.

    If I have any complaints about the series, it would be the TotheArk messages. Explaining them would ruin part of the fun of the main series but I can't stand the guy. While necessary to the story, the actual mechanism chosen for his communication annoys the hell out of me. 

    Whatever the case, I'm definitely going to buy these episodes on DVD.

9/10

Immersion and Horror

    Immersion.

    This is the greatest thing that any horror story can achieve, it is also one of the most mind-numbingly difficult things to do. Of the horror movies which have achieved this coveted state, I will state only a handful have truly done so. For whatever reason, possibly because people need to use their imagination more, I'd argue horror literature has an easier time of achieving immersion. I'll still list my top three immersion examples from movies, though, because they're references people can immediately get an idea of what I mean from.

    Jaws, of all things, is the probably greatest movie success for building immersion. No, people didn't believe the events depicted on-screen actually happened but they believed Great White Sharks were capable of killing people. The tourism industry as a whole suffered that summer and the author of the book devoted rest of his life to preserving sharks due to the hysteria he inadvertently helped create.

    Prior to Jaws was Orson Welles 1938 radio drama broadcast of the H.G. Wells classic, The War of the Worlds. Even before the internet was invented, Orson Welles managed to successfully troll a substantial portion of America. However many were actually fooled is anyone's guess, probably not as many as would be cinematic, but enough that it obviously had an affect.

    Finally, more recently, there was The Blair Witch Project where a lot of gullible Americans were fooled by the idea of found footage. Less gullible Americans still appreciated the attention to detail that went into making the story plausible if not believed.

    Most modern-day horror films, I tend to think aren't actually horror per se. They're action or fantasy features which just happen to have a higher gore count than what is expected by audiences. Routinely, after seeing a bunch of his buddies slaughtered, the hero rallies back and defeats the monster in the end.

    Evil is punished. Yay.

     Horror novels have been known to follow this standard as well, perhaps because a downer ending is something audiences are disinclined to accept after a lengthy period of bonding with a main character. No one would doubt The Shining is a horror story but, spoilers, it ends with at least two of the characters getting away at the end. Short-stories, by contrast, tend to have a much higher body count as the pressure to have it end on a high note is less.

    Really, I think true horror is something that's surprisingly difficult to achieve. It requires the audience member to be a willing participate in putting on their suspension of disbelief. They must accept that not only is a guy in a painted Captain Kirk mask wielding a knife but said individual is going to kill someone the audience cares about. Psycho by Alfred Hitchock predates Halloween and managed to turn people off showers for years thereafter.

    How does one achieve this, though?

    Honestly, I have no idea. Still, I'm going to make a couple of guesses. The first is establishing people in your work are human beings. Stephen King made his living creating quirky New England towns filled with people who were, more often than not, strange but believable. In fact, I'd argue their quirks were what helped sell them to the audience. No person in real life is completely normal. Bob might be the most average American male of all time but his obsessive love of Woody Woodpecker well into adulthood makes him more like someone we might know.

    Once you're able to establish the people involved in the story are human beings, making them act like them is a difficult task. One of the chief flaws of zombie films nowadays is the fact that everyone in the world should be familiar with how zombies work yet it's not like they were ever a folklore monster. Zombies, as they exist in Hollywood, are solely the product of movies. Plus, if you have people lamp-shading the zombie-threat, you run the risk of making the story tongue-in-cheek.

    A good rule is to think about how you would react in a given situation and build from there. If there's a serial killer in my house, I am getting the [censored] out of there. If there's aliens, it's going to take a little longer for me to wrap my head around the situation since I don't believe in them.

    Blind panic is possible but should happen after a very specific set of circumstances. Gory deaths might work but, really, I imagine most of us would be numbed by just sudden death around us period. Assuming we're not trauma surgeons, EMTs, or battle-hardened soldiers.
   
    Next is to take the audience out of their comfort zone completely. One of the most effective ways of doing this is, ironically, starting in it. The shower scene in Psycho is so effective because we're at an extremely vulnerable state when we're bathing, especially if the curtain is closed.

    One of the most effective elements from the Marble Hornets series is the fact Slenderman routinely appears in cameras unnoticed by the main characters. The lurking dread something is right behind you, which you don't see, is a very primordial fear. If you can convince your audience a threat is coming into their house with impunity while they're asleep - you've got them.

    Finally, taking the audience out of their comfort zone leads me to think there's two really effective ways of achieving horror with monsters. The first is using very believable monsters and the second is using ones which are utterly incomprehensible. Monsters which split the difference by being fantastical but well-known manage neither.

     The problems with vampires is, as  H.P. Lovecraft observed so very long ago, they're rather well-known. People know what to expect from a vampire and the horror is diminished. It's part of the reason we rarely see ghost stories nowadays, because people have gotten it into their heads they're nonthreatening. There's too much Casper and not enough Poltergeist going round.

    Believable monsters are monsters which can exist in the so-called real world. Cujo the rapid dog is a terrifying construction because he's something which could happen in real life. Norman Bates the schizophrenic/dis-associative identity disorder serial killer is unusual but not impossible. Misery is insanely effective because the villain is just a person with absolute power over our protagonist.

    Unbelievable monsters are the opposite in they are completely incomprehensible. One of the most effective short-story ideas I ever got but couldn't turn into something concrete was a man found himself completely unable to leave his hometown, nothing supernatural at first, he simply became overwhelmed with panic attacks at the border of the town.

    Then he discovered everyone else was in town and no one could enter without becoming effective. What's causing it? Hell if I know, I didn't finish the story but the tension for the mystery and powerlessness makes it good. Likewise, a monster which never communicates and simply does things can be quite effective. Ditto beings with abilities we don't understand unlike the vampire.

    I'd hesitate on describing special effects, however, because horror and awe are enemies. If I found out my front door suddenly lead to a vast Stygian abyss, there's potential for horror there, but there's also a certain level of cool that might work against you. To achieve the desired effect, you have to use the wrongness of a door opening to nowhere against the reader. This is achieved in Peter Cline's 14, almost word-for-word.

    These are just my thoughts, hope you enjoyed them.

Just finished a couple of short stories

    I've been in a rather horror-filled mood lately so I decided to write a short-story to get it out of my system. Cookies for the Gentleman despite its innocuous title is probably the scariest thing I've ever written. How bad was it?

    I had nightmares after writing it!

    I've also written another short story for a contest being hosted by Chaosium where you Cthulhu-ize or Zombie-ize a fairy tale. In my case, I wrote a Lovecraftian version of the Cinderella story.

    Oooo.
   
    Short-stories are something I recommend for people who are trying to break into writing. They're not going to make you any real money but they are going to make you money in the immediate sense. Plus, when you receive your first check for $50 like I did for Horror, Humor, and Heroes Volume 3, you can say, "I am a professional author."

    (Technically I was a professional author years before due to the Machine Goddess books but that experience is one I tend to erase from my memory - maybe I'll explain that one some day)

    Odd fact: I actually find writing short stories harder than writing a novel. It requires an entirely different mindset.