Invitation to the Autopsy: Specimen No. 9

A developmental and line editorial pass on a short story by Emil Ottoman

(I think this is from a Jodorowsky flick that I turned into a meme in like, 2018? I don’t know.)

Welcome to the Autopsy

I hope you all find a seat. I’m sorry that I missed most of an entire month. Things have been insane, but like they say, the show has burnt down. Enjoy this with your Sunday whenever SUNDAY morning coming down.

The archives and instructions for how to submit your work for a weekly autopsy are linked below. Feel free to consume them one by one starting with the first.

And before we move onto the delightful story of how I came to be autopsying myself, if you want, feel free to tip the old sawbones

AUTOPSY SUBMISSIONS ARE OPEN ALL WEEK!

Be brave. Submit something. You’ve always got a shot. I’m sorry there’s been a lack of free autopsies during the last MONTH or so. The move to the new spot was brutal, we’re still unpacking boxes, and I let my passion project falter for the paid Emil is My Editor work while barely keeping up with contracted editing work.

This week, don’t do it a comeback, but I’m doing MYSELF to get back in the game, and I want to rewrite this piece as it’s showing its age. This week aside from my contract work and everything else I’m behind on, I’d like to resume the FREE Invitation to the Autopsy series.

The next entry in Emil is My Editor will be From

Zivah Avraham

, whether she wants it published or not however, will be up to her.

Thanks for continuing to support the experiment. If you’ve taken anything worthwhile from these, subscribe, maybe pay, or spare a coin. Fiction is culture. There is only the work. And the work is never finished.

I WILL NEVER PAYWALL THESE POSTS! I AM DOING THIS FOR SUBSTACK’S FICTION COMMUNITY, FOR THE WRITERS SENDING ME THEIR WORK IN GOOD FAITH, FOR THE LOVE OF OUR CRAFT, & TO HELP WRITERS GROW.

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I AM TAKING EDITORIAL CLIENTS/LIMITED BASIS

My calendar is pretty full. Boilerplate about my services below. Right now I’m taking novella length manuscripts, short stories, or I have room for ONE full length manuscript on the books right now.

“Flash, short, novella, novel; I specialize in line and developmental editing for clients serious about working on manuscripts for pub (self, trad, doesn’t matter) that are non-traditional, experimental, or cross genre, with an emphasis on literary style, story at the systems and sentence level, and your voice as an author. If you feel like you’re on the brink, have hit a stall, or are interested in a consult and chat do not hesitate. Talk is free, $125 reading fee for potential clients (up to 1200 words) is mandatory. I’m serious, I want my clients to be serious and have as much skin in the game as I do.”

INQUIRY BY EMAIL: PLEASE PUT “EDITORIAL INQUIRY” ALL CAPS IN THE SUBJECT LINE, AND YOUR NAME.

SEND TO: EMILOTTOMAN@GMAIL.COM

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HOT RIGHT NOW

To the Moon, Darkly

Pablo Báez

showed up on my radar a couple weeks ago (I read Substack to stay sane and it’s cheaper than Vicodin, OK?) and dropped a few stories with his whole chest, shit hits like drone strikes right to my dome. This reads like you’ve put drama on benzos and let it breathe into the cold air above a coffin. Out-fucking-standing.

heavy body...skin

alex b.

has been dropping a series of poems that will rock your dome. The cycle is called Heavy Body, and I’ll let her own words explain it.

“In this series, I’ll be deconstructing the human body into five parts: skin, nerves, muscles, organs and bones, illustrating the body’s response related to mental and physical health. Basically - giving our bodies a voice to our battles + bullshit. If each part of our body could tell their story, what would they say?”

Every one so far has been a banger. Go check them out. And buy some of her art too. I did, and soon it’s going up on my wall.

Open-World Fiction: a writer's introduction

Thaddeus Thomas

is up to it again with a participatory group writing experiment, and aside from reading all his other hot ass word nerd shit, you should check this out too.

A Man Became Boyish (Audio Lyric Poem, Rap Bars)

and now Miguel

dropped a track, and he dropped a track at the end of March with

ARC

, both of which you shouldn’t sleep on.

Charcoal Teeth

When we say Fiction is Culture, we mean THIS.

Brock Eldon

is one of the most slept on faces on Substack that you already know if you read

SUM FLUX

. This piece is tight, minimalist, brutally surreal, tense, and reminds me of a Cronenberg short. but another amazing story he dropped a few days ago is horribly overlooked from what the metrics say! Check it here: The Last Lecture of Professor Benjamin Krall. You will not be disappointed.

OK, this is an autopsy, not a news post, but check these out if you haven’t.

I can’t help it, I’m an excitable boy.

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EMIL IS MY EDITOR

Emil is My Editor CONTINUES (backed up several spots.)

THE ANTE: You buy a professional editorial pass on 2500 words for my reading fee of $125.00USD. You get in line. You get what you need done up. You get it returned. If you want, it doesn’t get posted. If you do, I post it. You rework what you wanted done up, you post it, I post it, we all boost it, your work gets a signal bump, you get a professional editor and an in for any future work with me by default.

THE STAKES: We create an ad hoc community and support network. You get your work gone over professionally for relatively cheap. So far this initiative has helped me move, saved my family’s ass, and seems to have brought together a lot of fun people doing a lot of very interesting stuff. I have bills to pay, yeah, but if you want to support me and guarantee you get your work done over professionally and not for show. There’s an element of showmanship to the autopsy series by design. There almost has to be. But we keep building community. Every autopsy I do keeps me sharp and every story I work on I go at it like you’re going to get published in Guernica. And then the next time some shit goes down with someone associated, we’re all there to help, and instead of being the person who gets all the help, I can organize the work of helping others with the free cognitive bandwidth.

THE FUTURE: Once a network is in place, we can do things with it. The community coalesced around me out of thin air in a time of great need. That garners my support of everyone who helped my family until I get my brains blown out (only a semi-likely scenario) I’m BIG on community building and self organizing support networks. I’ve built a few. I’ve started a few. A rising tide lifts all ships. And maybe we can help get the fiction tab out of the swamp Substack has put us in.

FICTION CREATES CULTURE

therefore

FICTION IS CULTURE

and so

WRITERS CREATE CULTURE

And what are we, but writers of fiction?

(I’m gonna make this its own page soon, I swear. Goddamn, shit gettin’ long.)

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ON WITH THE SHOW. I PRESENT FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT, ENJOYMENT, AND PRAY YOU TAKE SOMETHING FROM IT:

The Autopsy

This started out when I was going to do some writing last night. I have this story I like, but it’s getting a little dated, probably from 2018? 2019? I can’t remember. But I posted a teaser for it late last year and people liked it. Then I read it again and said to myself “oh, oh I can’t put this out there like this.”

So I made a note before breakfast today (it was a very late breakfast.)

I don’t check Substack for most of the afternoon, then come back to two restacks, 14 likes, and

Adam Hunter

,

Pablo Báez

,

Simpulacra

,

Zachary Dillon

, along with the infamous Muppet Pendleton Fitzgerald The Third, saying I gotta do it.

So let’s see if

M.P. Fitzgerald

is right in his assertion:

“I think that’s a dope idea, you should do it!

Right now you’re like the McRib, when you come back people are gonna lose their shit.”

So please, if you lose your shit over this, I’m back, and we doin’ it. But I’m not a ground molded pork product dipped in barbecue sauce that only goes on sale when pork is cheap, OK? I’m the editor, and today, I’m going to disembowel myself and weigh my own organs.

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BUT FIRST. (I’m a carny barker, you thought I’d just jump right in? Bless your heart.)

I turn 40 on Tuesday. It’s an honor. I have scores of friends, more than I can count, including my sister, The Saint, my closest friend ever, frozen in the last moments of their lives who will never see this age. Until Tuesday you can get 40% off a year of my Substack by subscribing at the button below.

And in honor of Sarah, since she’s stuck at 36 forever, even if she was talking about the “37 club”, and she couldn’t wait two more months to leave. Until the 29th if you subscribe at the link below, you get 37% off my Substack FOREVER.

Why the 29th? Take a guess, and the only right answer is 701.

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The Format

I’m not going to do the Google Docs or footnote thing. I edit myself all the time. That old saw is that part of becoming a great writer is becoming your best editor. So I’m going to go paragraph by paragraph, and you’ll get a look into how the gears in my head turn. Fuck, maybe you’ll even laugh, I don’t know. Main text is normal, editorial commentary is parenthetical and italicized.

The Text

99 Luftballoons.2 (this has always been a working title, I sort of like it, but I haven’t given it a lot of thought in a long time. I do like how incongruous it is compared to the way the story starts. When I posted the first page to Substack last October I renamed it with a subtitle on a whim, and I may like that better. IMG464195387 - The Man Who Sold The World: A Prelude, as it is long enough for me to turn into at least a three part serial if I want to expand it.)

“Astronaut starts when you press GO,” is what it says at the bottom of the landing page. (I’ve got no idea what I was thinking when I wrote this but as a hook sentence it almost works. I may tinker with it. It does immediately present at least one issue to drag you on to the next text)

There's a site you can click onto and watch random Youtube videos that have no views, or almost no views. It’s a real thing. There's copycat sites but the original one, or the slickest looking one anyway, was Astronaut.io. And sometimes you would click on a link and you'd see someone's video of a streetcar lit up at night somewhere, or a kid blowing out candles on a cake, or someone admitting they murdered someone 20 years ago. I mean, 300 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every minute. In the time it's taken you to read this, how much does that equal? (And then I dump some shit exposition as setup. In the first version of this story, it starts with the man in the car, then backtracks to the exposition. Astronaut.io is a real website, for the record. It was the framework I built the premise for the story around. And it works, or worked, just like described. I’ve twiddled with what to say about the found footage before and I’ll probably do it again. I’m using big voice to speak directly to the reader. All the facts as of the time of the writing were true, establishing that good old authority. But I’m not entirely sure it works how I’d like.)

The landing page for the website says "today, you are an astronaut. You are floating in inner space 100 miles above the surface of Earth. You peer through your window and this is what you see. You are people watching. These are fleeting moments." This is not bullshit, every video only plays five or six seconds unless you click to keep it from skipping to the next video. (Yes, the landing page for the website said/says that. I’m big on that sort of verisimilitude. I don’t know if I like the tone, but the narrator of these sections, the raconteur, at least has a little bit of voice. I see some fat that I would probably cut. Maybe rearrange these first two paras entirely.)

IMG464195387 started normal as a video of someone driving through the desert close to sundown like from a shaky dash cam mount listening to Johnny Cash soft and wounded by ethereal static would. Something no one would ever search for or bother to watch, it's just more 300 minute per minute shit, signal interference. But the voiceover to the scene starts talking, and he says some nutty shit like, so this is possibly my last living will and testament. My last gift to the world I helped to build from the ground up, even if nobody ever fucking sees it. His voice is frozen smoke grinding against a granite canyon wall. You stop the video from switching to a recorded physics lecture or outtakes from the local news in Belgium. The things kids do when they're burnt out studying, like you doing this; it's pure voyeurism for no reason, low risk, public and private at the same time, he says. I'm taking this video with fancy ass smart glasses, for the record, he says. Never gonna be able to sleep, ripped inside out on Adderall and last second academic anxiety, telling yourself just a minute ago all you needed was five minutes to chill out, turn the brain off, check a bullshit site instead of doomscrolling for once. (pulled the filename out of a hat, I believe from an actual video on my laptop at the time. Switch to past tense. After the opening this piece switches from past tense for any time the viewer is the only person en scene. And stays with the protagonist in first present the rest of the story. I’ll probably keep that. It works. There’s some things I may cut. I like the intro to the video, but I’d probably rewrite it. I’m working from a version that was worked on before posting the first bit to Substack, so it may have already been worked over once, and in comparison to the rest of the story, I think it might have been. The protagonist doesn’t get quotes. Free indirect, I’ll keep that. Some of this is just signal noise. And there’s been a lot of change in the way we consume media even since I wrote this. I’ve considered switching it from one lone college student, to fourth person, they, to imply more than one person is watching at once. Adderall? Academic anxiety? In the age of Chat GPT, yeah, cut and rewrite a good bit of this, fuck me. Points for an earlier use of doomscrolling though. I like some of the metaphor in here. Good job me.)

He looks out at the sunset’s gold rim clouds against a pastel sundowning darkness above a vast expanse of scrub and rock. You wanna say this is him driving in the hellscape middle of the Mojave on 40. The desert opens so wide, fading to blue shifted mountains and mesas in the extreme 4k video distance where it’s already dusked itself dark. So he’s gotta be driving north, right? Rock tumbler voice on the narrator says, it's pretty out there isn't it? Turns and he looks down at the seat next to him in this old beater car as big as god’s dick with some ancient rumbling V8 he's driving and the revolver comes into frame. A hand, his skin weathered, pale, dry, rock hard lookings, reaches down and pats a shining black void the pistol looks like on a ripped up red leather bench seat in streaming 1080HQ high def. I just have to do this one thing he says. They can't have my goddamn kid. (Who looks out, Emil? Jesus? The protagonist. I mean, it’s obvious it’s the guy in the video, but that transition has always bugged me. Consider keeping some of the big voice reader directed first person, other places fourth person would play. I’m going to have to think about this. It IS the hellscape middle of the desert on 40, but the Mojave doesn’t run through New Mexico, the Chihuahuan mountains between the Sierra Madre do. HOWEVER, you can get the two mixed up because trust me, driving that stretch of 40, it all looks the same. I may keep that. It’s literally burnt tongue. But there’s still something there that bothers me. Cut extreme 4k video distance. ugh. I like the bit about directionality of travel. It’s a bench seat. This is all different than it used to be. I don’t like the literal introduction of the gun, it doesn’t have any tension to it. I like the dissonance between him saying it’s pretty out here and then introducing the gun, but I don’t like how I did it. The hand thing has always been an issue, don’t like that whole line of description. Burnt tongue on accident with lookings, I’d probably keep that for voice. I do not like shining black void. Rewrite. I’d allow the passive verb construct at the end of the para because it leads into he reveal, someone cannot have his kid. Note: I like writing this character.)

The man talked, he said that linear time was a hoax that was being played on the public for their betterment because if they knew the truth it would unravel everything about humanity. You can trust me, I have half the alphabet behind my name, you know? I'm sixty-two. I work in a cross-disciplinary field that you've never heard of and probably never will but then this shit happened. And I know I still have some of that corn fed ass accent at the back end of my speech but that doesn't mean that I didn't do theoretical work down in Santa Fe and put in my time before I got picked up for a big project that you'll also never hear of, alright? Hotel California comes on the radio in the background and the man driving keeps talking for the next hour and forty-five minutes. He's saying how I was a theoretician but then I moved over into application and that's where it went off the rails. He says, you know this is my second career actually, I didn't even go back to school until I was about 30, but do you know any other motherfucker could finish their first Ph.D. in six years? Imagine, being a goddamn middle-aged prodigy. But he also said things like, did you know that you can buy a whole new identity in Miami for about twenty thousand dollars? Do you know that the cartels have infiltrated the government and you can actually buy yourself a new you if you know the right people? This shit for two hours, and the kid watching it can't even tell if he's just been up too long and this is an elaborate hallucination, if it's an experimental film, or what. (This para is shaky and I don’t know if it’s producing the effect that I want. It’s quick cuts in a music video and an excuse for the narrator to give you more information about himself that’s important for the story, yeah, but is it important to MOVE the story. The bit after Hotel California is a cop out and shortcut. “And the man keeps talking for the next… yeah, rewrite that. Yeah, the bits about buying a new identity for about 20 bands, those are true. Move to fourth person, more people are watching this shit in the middle of the night. Opportunities to cut other people in. You can really tell this was written before Chat GPT came out…)

You don't believe me, but this is all really happening to me, the man would cue the viewer every once in a while. I'm reminding you that this is real. (If I’m going to commit to the cue, I have to commit to the bit, but in this piece I don’t. I also don’t think there’s enough doubt on behalf of the disembodied and addressed reader, the fact that this is just streaming video uploaded to Youtube is taken way, way too much for granted.)

I'm six feet one inch tall, 170 pounds, and I have grey goddamn hair. I started smoking again six months ago from stress. The sun went down in the video. The man had a voice to match that hand, craggy, gnarled; it was the baritone of gravel tumbling in a drum full of smoke, punctured by coughs and drags from cigarettes that he chain smoked the entire time. It's not that I think I'm god but I basically gave birth to the kid and I'm not going to let them carry out some ritual that they think is going to save the world, these Moonie Heaven's Gate wannabe motherfuckers. I don't care IF you're my boss, you don't get to do that. (Some references are getting to be real fuckin’ dated here. Cut and rewrite “the sun went down in the video” ugh. Like the voice but we’re doubling up on how he sounds and I just noticed it and now I’m pissed at myself. I like his voice, at 62 some of his references WOULD be a bit dated, like referencing Moonies, so that may stay, but he’s foreshadowing something that happens way, way sooner than it should for this sort of narration. Failure on economy of words Emil. -10 points.)

He said, you ever wonder about those stories about fish falling out of the sky over some field in bumfuck Ohio? And it wouldn't lead anywhere, he'd just say, yeah, me too. Weird shit. Elon Musk is full of shit, you're not living in a simulation. That would be too convenient. (Fish falls are a relic of the 90s mostly, but at the time I remember there was one I’d been reading about on BoingBoing. Might as well have referenced Cow mutilations. Jesus. I will never not take an excuse to take a shot at Elon Musk, that will stay, but the pacing is incongruous through the first third or so of the story, it wanders, even for free indirect discourse. I don’t like that. I want to tighten it up a little next go round. Like, compare this para to the ones above. We have a pacing problem.)

At an hour and 45 minutes, he pulls off the highway onto a gravel road heading up into the hills past scrub like he's been there before more times than he would care to count. The pistol I have is a Smith & Wesson 629 in .44 magnum, and I only have the six bullets in it but they never take security to this shit because they say that it would desecrate the sanctity of the ritual. Okay, he says, so I've been complicit before, but those times it wasn't MY kid, alright. I grew her from cells, no one is sending my baby flying off on no damn spaceship. In the video he shuts the headlights off on the car and pulls off the side of the gravel road that's gone to two worn tracks heading high up into the middle of nowhere. I'm in New Mexico, he says, but you'll never in your life be able to find out where. He shuts off the car and pulls down the car's visor and there he is, gaunt, wrinkled, severe bone structure, dry cracked lips, grey eyes to go along with the grey hair. A widow's peak and thick rimmed Google Glass glasses on his face, he says, and there I am. I'm wearing a black suit because this is a formal occasion but it might also be a funeral. I'm not wearing a tie because I never do. He flips the visor back up and looks over, grabs the revolver. (So he continues talking for 1:45:00 and we have it just come to pass, off the road he goes. Middle of fucking nowhere, poor descriptions. No real feel to the goddamn scene. No atmosphere. This is lacking some atmosphere is what I feel like. He’s still foreshadowing. I like how he doles those bits out, but a lot of the rest of it needs work. From “in the video” I could build atmosphere, but I DON’T. Fuck me. For the record the car he’s driving, unstated in the actual work, is a 1969 Cadillac Eldorado. Issue, I don’t even know if they HAD vanity mirrors. But it was an easy way to get a quick description of his face in that I wanted. Smart Glasses were on their second or third generation when I read this. Just to the point where they looked like Wayfairers or horn rims. Too blase on grabbing the revolver. Note, having no interiority on this character because he is both narrator and POV was a choice I’ll probably stick with.)

You know, he says, David Bowie was a fucking alien. And now he's been reincarnated as a dog. I'm not expecting you to believe that one but you know, it's the goddamn truth. He's an alien and we got him trapped here. There's something out there demanding tribute in return for all this sort of shit. He says, you ever hear of the Bohemian Grove? Yeah, me neither, right? (Give him some business in here, he’s going somewhere, doing something, looking up at the stars, whatever, but there’s no atmosphere. He’s tense. He should be wound tight. But he’s also insane and cocky. Fun character to write, but easy to go off the rails. David Bowie reincarnated as a dog is in a short story I wrote before this and I will DIE on that hill.)

In the video he opens the door to the car and heads off into an ink black landscape with a star dappled sky above, struggling over rocks and past scrub that tangles his arms, his view pointed up the hill he climbs. By this point the student would have kept watching just to hear the next shit to come out of the guy's mouth. He'd started taking notes at the half-hour mark. This couldn't be real was what he was thinking, and then every time that he would think it wasn't real like a reminder the man would say something like, you know I'm a real living breathing person as of this recording right? I'm batshit out of my mind but someone has to see this shit or else my life's work will have been for nothing. Or he'd say something strange like, do you think that they would let a convicted drug felon, a chemist no less, switch tracks and decide that he wanted to be a geneticist? (In the video, are we doubling up again when we don’t need to, of course if it’s referencing him its in the video. Jesus fuck. Rework that whole sentence. “star dappled”? fucking kill me now. Sequence of action isn’t bad but isn’t great, work on that. If using the cues, use them in fourth person. If speaking in big voice from narrator of video or narrator of story, first person. The note taking bit is underdeveloped throughout. Didn’t put much into it. That’s part of why multiple perspectives from multiple people would be more appropriate, no one on the planet would be this kid up studying on amphetamines in 2025. Incongruity in this bit between sentence ending in “nothing” and next starting in “or” Why not just have the narrator own it. This shit does nothing for the pace or timing of the story, the sequence being written, or the actual man speaking. )

Lord almighty, I hope you've been taking notes because the show is about to start. At the top of the page the student has scrawled "Linear time is a lie," and underlined it three times. On the screen the man comes over the hill finally and looks down onto a glowing congregation of seven black vehicles, all of them SUVs but one, set in a half circle around an object covered with red tarp standing up like an erect dick fifty feet high and illuminated by generator run pole lights humming in the middle distance, shining sterile white on the tarp-covered thing at the center of attention. The car right in front of the lipstick red erection is a limousine and the man says, fuck I'm late. Then he starts to whisper, have you ever heard all those stupid conspiracy theories about the goddamn lizard people? He checks the pistol, opens it and spins the cylinder, says to whoever would ever be watching, let's go crash this fucked up party. (This could be expanded and I have ideas but I’m not going to share them because this is my goddamn autopsy. Again with the notes. This is why I want multiple viewers. More reactions. More options. More interest on my part. Rewrite the intro of the rocket. It would definitely not be a tarp, I’m seeing a curtain. A tarp is not culty or ceremonial. I must have been scrounging for words. Some good lines in here though. I don’t like “says to whoever would ever be watching.” Well, actually I’m torn on it. It’s almost a snag, but not quite. I’ll have to play with that bit.)

From there he heads down the steep slope slow, creeping, two steps at a time, whispering, I'm sixty-two goddamn years old. My bones ache. Then the kid watching was thinking it had really good production values if it was an amateur film someone had uploaded by mistake, but if they had, what was the goddamn point of the whole thing. See, the man says, soon they're going to start the goddamn music. And on cue: (The kid watching was thinking, broke my own rule, not only did I reference the viewer viewing the events poorly, but I gave them interiority I didn’t mean to, but the concept of it being an amateur film I liked, and still do.)

"Hast du etwas Zeit für mich?

Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich

Von neunundneunzig Luftballons

Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont

Denkst du vielleicht grad an mich?

Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich

Von neunundneunzig Luftballons

Und dass sowas von sowas kommt" (Singles in German from the titular. This went through a great workshop and I’m still waxing and waning on the lyrical aside. Needless to say, Pynchon I am not. Even if music IS a large part of my writing.)

That's the German version of Nena's 99 Red Balloons, if you don't know the song because you were probably born after the Berlin Wall fell and we thought nuclear annihilation was a thing of the goddamn past. The music echoes off the rocks and sounds tinny in the video, tinny and so loud it almost drowns out his hoarse whisper when he says, this song is about a guy mistaking balloons for incoming nuclear missiles and almost triggering the goddamn apocalypse. They play it to ward off the apocalypse though. He grunts going over a rock, I hate that it has to be in goddamn German though. You ever hear of Operation Paperclip? You hear all sorts of weird conspiracy theories and rumors in goddamn prison, you know that? (tinny and tinny, I actually have a repeat that fucking close? Oh my god, shoot me. He’s still foreshadowing. Everyone knows about operation Paperclip, rework all of this.)

Underlined, halfway down the page, the college student watching had written "Anunaki" under that "Unified theory?" (Why? Just, why? Yes, Anunaki is a prison reference.)

neunundneunzig Luftballons booms, neunundneunzig Luftballons, blares as he heads down the slope. From behind the tarp covered, he says it's a spaceship, or he implied earlier anyway, come seven men in scarlet robes out of the shadows carrying 14 red balloons each, tied to six foot long strings, hanging over them, grapes filled with blood floating in the night air. The man whispers fuck, fuck, fuck to himself. That's 98 balloons, he says. The doors to all the SUVs open at once and people in robes step out of them, twenty, thirty, he's glancing around the scene and it's hard to tell. The man goes down the hill tripping and stumbling, slipping and sliding. Someone's going to see this shit, the man says. I mean, they're going to see me, or they're going to see this video, either way, it don't matter at this point. (I want to stage this scene better. I just do not like it how it’s written in this version of the story. I’d probably nuke and rewrite this whole fucking para.)

Come sliding down to the sandy rock floor of the bowl half on his ass, this is a crater, he says, this is a crater left by some meteor millions of years ago. You'll still never find it on Google Earth. His breathing rings hard in the microphone picked up by his glasses and he stands up, looking down and brushing himself off, straightening his jacket and wiping dirt off of his pants. He's standing just far enough outside the lights to still be in shadows, but no one in the gathering is paying attention to him, and those stadium lights and hoods would have them half blind. When he looks up the door to the limousine is opening twenty yards in front of him. (I see fat to cut. picked up by his glasses. Ugh, passive verb constructs. Mind you this was written a while ago. Some of this is good, but I want more texture. I was rushing and excited by the concept when I wrote this originally, and in some places, it shows.)

My name, the man says, is Nick Tesla —no relation before you have the gall to ask yourself— and you're about to witness an unprecedented event in the history of mankind, my John Wayne moment. As he says this a burly robed figure steps out of the back door of the limo pulling a small figure out after it, a girl wearing a red hoodie with the hood up, pulling behind her a red balloon on a string. Before I do this I just want to tell you something, Nick says to his audience of one watching astronaut, The Devil was just a stupid fuckin' alien, and I had to learn the hard way that all power demands sacrifice. Creators forgive me for what I'm about to perpetrate. (yes, All Power Demands Sacrifice. I’d forgotten that was in there. I’d rewrite half of this, keep that line. I’ve always liked the idea of the devil being an alien though. In case you haven’t gotten it yet, there’s a little bit of cosmic horror in this piece. And yes, Nick shows up in a lot of stories. He may even be Lucifer or some force of nature. He is in fact the same nick from the Faust story.)

neunundneunzig Luftballons, he walks past the perimeter into the glow of the light and the glasses refocus and recalibrate to the new conditions, everything goes blurry for a second and then clears, then there's digital artifacts at the bottom left of the screen. In the light, for the first time the student noticed that the man walked with a limp. He looks down at the gun in his right hand and shakes out his arms, taking deep breaths. The fat man in the robe leads the child with the red balloon towards the red tarp, and the tarp is pulled down from behind, revealed to the camera from the bottom up, standing there in a crater in the desert is something that looks like a German V2 rocket but at least twice the size and fuck me lips, fast car red. A hatch is open with stairs leading up to what looks less like an opening into the rocket — the student wondered, that has to be a rocket — and more a chamber you'd lock something into. I hate this song, Nick says. I really hate this song. The seven men all release their fourteen balloons at once when the fat man and the little girl are close to the steps up to the rocket. (The sequence of action at the start of this para makes me want to gut myself. What the fuck Emil? Just what the fuck? Tighten that shit up. Nix singular student. Nick does always have a limp. Maybe frontload that earlier so it doesn’t seem like he got hurt coming down the scree of the bowl of the crater. Fuck me lips red, cut fast car. The cutaway to the student fucks the pace. Nick hates the song. I was trying for something with the men, but I think I wasn’t hitting on the cylinders I wanted. I had an idea in my head and I expected the reader to read my mind. I don’t give them enough information to complete what I want them to know, and I don’t like that.

The man raises his right arm, points the pistol at one of the men who held the balloons and fires. There's a puff of blood or dirt when that sprays the night air from the man's chest and then he falls down. No movement, no drama, just real life voyeurism of the worst kind. Any college student who has been on the internet since highschool with a morbid streak can tell you a person getting shot in real life on video looks the complete opposite of a person getting shot in a movie. Holy shit I just watched someone get shot on Youtube the college student said out loud. (This is where I should have switched to Nick raises his arm, but that sequence of action is a clunker. Second sentence makes no real sense, rewrite. The big voice afterwards works, but it’s more a millennial experience I feel like? Or was watching execution videos back in like, 03-07 just a ME thing. Cut that college student shit. That all has to go. Fuck me it stands out so bad.)

Motherfuckers you turn off that goddamn music or I'm going to kill every single one of you, Nick bellows and sounds like Tom Waits screaming in a deeper voice. That's my daughter and you're not feeding her to no goddamn space overlords, I don't care, I grew her up from cells, she's a thinking, feeling, real human being. She's more real than any of you goddamn captains of industry, you politicians, you mad scientists that think you control the world, Nick yells. (Trash everything past Nick bellows for descriptor and write it better. The rest is alright. I may expand on it. I have ideas.)

The music stops. (Damn right it does.)

The fat man in his robe bends over and whispers something to the girl with the red balloon and she nods, then turns to look at Nick and asks why are you doing this? You know we have to do this, this is what you signed up for. (Totally making this someone very specific. Everyone at the cult meeting is very vague aside from Nick’s descriptions of them. I don’t think I like it, and it doesn’t jive with how my writing has grown in the interim. Rework the cult dude’s dialogue, Jesus, that’s… Just no.)

No, I signed up so that I could make her, and so that I could pull the curtain back on you people, and because you sold me a pack of goddamn lies when you snagged me up from the Santa Fe Institute and put me on some secret Rosicrucian mailing list and locked me in a lab with a very vague set of instructions on what to do with all the fancy tech you had given me. (Ahhh, Nick’s agenda laid bare. Yes, this is the reveal. I don’t know if it works. Even in the early version here. Comment below and tell me if it does! I’d love to know. I do like some of Nick’s pitter patter here, not exactly Ahab, but obviously has an agenda.)

Nick, we are only trying to do what is right for the country; the fat man has a shrill voice, nasal, but his delivery is solemn and he means what he says. If he was ordering a beer it would come out a whine, but here he carries some sort of authority. You grew her to feed them. (REWORK AND REWORD, FUCK)

Nick raises his arm and shoots another man standing closer to him in the head, blowing the back of the hood out of his robe and sending him slumping to the ground next to the open door of an SUV. And you've brought a weapon of destruction onto holy ground, Nick this is unacceptable. (Decent, but needs more power.)

You people order drone strikes on weddings and poison water supplies for profit, Nick yells, and you're worried about me and my pistol fucking up your cult meeting? (Nick yells sticks out here, cut. The rest is still relevant. But there could be some in between this action.)

We have to give in order to receive Nick, the man yells. We have to give in order to receive! (This will stay)

Vivienne, don't you worry, papa is here to make sure that the lizard apocalypse cult doesn't feed you to gigantic, horny space aliens, Nick yells at the girl. She doesn't move. Vivienne just hold onto that balloon and we'll get out of here and vanish. (Gonna keep the girl’s name Vivienne. May rework this. Don’t know if I dig Nick’s references to lizard people. I want to bring a little bit more realism to it. They’re humans, they’re oligarchs and politicians and billionaires, they’re not lizard people, don’t abstract them like that)

You can't run from us Nick, the fat man says, we're the goddamn government. (Make it bigger than JUST the government)

Then how the fuck did you end up hiring me? I'm a criminal. You have never known shit about me. As far as you're concerned I have zero history, none, it's all lies. You stand on top of your goddamn mountain and you can see the valley, right? You can see the valley below you but you're all so old, your eyes are so bad that you have no idea what's going on down there. You know there's a village, but you don't know the name of the village priest or the hangman, and right now I'm both; Nick's voice, angry and tired, scratchy and hoarse, breaks a time or two when he says this. And he yells, do you think you see everything just because you know things other people don't? Your privilege won't help you here, that's my daughter. Now you walk up those stairs and get in that pod and feed yourself to those goddamn aliens or I'm going to blow your brains out, but she's not your tribute. She was never going to be your tribute. She's my goddamn daughter. (Probably keep a good portion of this. Was going for Ahab vibes, almost caught them. But this is the second reveal. Does it work? For the love of god, tell me.)

Nick, you know that's not how it works, the fat man yells, and Nick cocks the hammer back on the pistol and levels it at the man and shouts, well this time we're trying something new then. The fat man turns to another cloaked figure and asks, can it be Lola? Lola is at least a female. The camera shakes in a nod and Nick says yeah, send her up then. (Nick nods, glimpse of the top of the rocket, says yeah, send her up then. There are a lot of places where just the actual PROSE here needs some help, from long action sequences to everything else. Still stand by the fact that it’s a good story, just needs some work.)

You really shouldn't have Nick, the fat man says, and Lola, this other cloaked figure that might have breasts under there, shakes her head and walks up the steps into the chamber, then pulls it closed. As soon as the chamber closes there is an audible series of loud clacking sounds, a seal setting itself with a hiss, and then gas starts to come out of vents at the bottom of the rocket. Nick shoots the fat man in the chest as soon as this series of staged events has started. (This paragraph is loaded with trash and glue, fix yourself Emil. Also, have Lola, like, make Lola a person. Jesus.)

It's over, Nick yells, I'm taking my daughter and leaving. Everything from here on out runs automatically, he says, to the astronaut watching the film. All I had to do was get someone in there that wasn't Vivienne. He snorts, and spits, and says, you know it's sort of weird doing this and narrating it all at the same time, and now we have seven minutes before that thing takes off so there's no rush. He walks to Vivienne, she's frozen standing holding that balloon close to the dead fat man, and when he gets to her he sweeps the crowd and says, I'd tell y'all not to do anything stupid but violence isn't allowed on hallowed ground and you're all dumb enough to believe that matters. Anyway, don't anyone go being stupid just because I suddenly broke all your rules, right? Some of the figures nod their heads under their cloaks. (The double narration works, but I think there should be some line delineating him speaking low to the audience and him addressing the cultists that I totally whiffed on this draft. Rework last 2/3ds of para.)

Vivienne, he says and bends down, grabs her by the shoulder, and turns her around. Papa, she whispers, but her mouth is a vertical slit that looks too Georgia O'Keefe for it to be less than deep gut turning disturbing, along with the six red eyes and the white feathers where hair should be. When he turns her around its also obvious that her arms aren't in the arms of the red hoodie she's wearing, it's draped across her shoulders and her arms are something like a cross between wings and conventional human appendages, but with little girlish hands at the ends. If you were to say anything about it, you would say that her arms unfold when she hugs him then, still gripping the balloon, and the hug comes with the rustling of feathers and a coo. Papa, she says, they told me that I had to go meet God. (This is where for the impact of it I would now give Vivienne quotation marks. She’s the epicenter of the story, she’s not indirect, she’s direct, she’s a child. Maybe also tone down some of the grotesque description in first sentences of paragraph. Could leave it at Georgia O’Keefe and it would have the same effect. Yes, this is a genetically modified pigeon child with a vulva for a mouth. What of it? I’ve written worse things.)

Yeah, Nick says, well they were full of shit, and she says that they said that the warrior is not afraid of space, and that bravery invokes magic. Nick says that they're right on both those counts, but they were twisted Nazis about to feed you to some Eldrich horror controls parts of reality that was going to violently mate with your mouth and then you were going to have something in you would eat your guts for Gerber's while it grew and you were awake in a fluid suspension in a vacuum, freezing cold, and this goes on for the next ten years because you're only eight. (The warrior is not afraid of space and bravery invokes magic are both quotes from a small Buddhist book I bought in Santa Cruz that is deeply weird but fun reading. Keep most of this, maybe switch some of it around, cut the fat and tighten it up. But yeah, I wrote an 8 year old genetic mutant with a pussy for a mouth. I’m a horrible person.)

Papa, she says, that's not what they told me. (Keeping this. Kids be like that.)

All the government will ever do baby girl, is lie to you, Nick says, now let's go home. And she asks him where home is and he says shut up. He takes her free hand in his left hand and turns her away, one last glance at the rocket and Lola now hoodless and screaming inside the casket, and leads Vivienne away to one of the SUVs. He shoots the man standing by the driver side door and says, I'm taking this car out if you don't mind. They get in and he drives around the rocket and down a paved road out the other side of the crater. The thing about secret societies and bullshit like that, he says to the lone astronaut watching, is that they do some stupid shit like this because it's secret. Vivienne asks him who he's talking to and Nick says he's talking to whoever is watching because he recorded the whole thing. He looks down and she covers herself and groans, no, I don't want anyone to see me. (Seems a little too tidy? But it does make sense that he would be coming up the back side and they would definitely have a paved entrance to their secret spot. But would there be a security cordon? Things to think about.)

Baby girl just because you're part Rock Dove doesn't mean you aren't pretty. (I just like calling pigeons rock doves, because that’s what they are.)

My mouth, my mouth looks like a vagina, Vivienne says and Nick asks her how the hell she even figured that bit of information out. Vivienne groans again and slumps in her seat. Behind them a hiss and the rising sound of something taking flight. And Vivienne asks, Lola went up in the spaceship didn't she? Is she a warrior, is she not afraid of space? Nick laughs until he coughs and says, no, she wasn't a warrior, and she was fucking terrified of space. Concern rising in Vivienne's voice she asks — her voice sings like birdsong synthesized and coming out of a precocious eight year old — will Lola be okay? (Right vibe, but take it out of exposition. This is a scene and they are talking. It’s still free indirect discourse, but it’s gone a way I don’t want it to. I’ve always liked the description of Viv’s voice. I’ll keep that or something like it, but maybe load it earlier, like when she first talks… Jesus.)

Lola will be fine, Nick says. Ok Google, stop recording. (Fin on Action.)

Then the video stopped. The college student astronaut had pages of notes written. The next video that came up was Gorillas behind glass in some foreign zoo looking very bored. Underlined at the bottom of the last page of notes he'd written, "the warrior is not afraid of space," and "bravery invokes magic." At three in the morning, nothing else was getting done. He would start Googling about this video after tests were over, and as he fell into bed he was annoyed he'd watched that whole thing, but adrenally exhausted and his skin was tingly because the video had seemed super real. (MEH, cut rewrite, and fix it.)

The college astronaut didn't dream and woke up with his second alarm to two text messages on his phone and a cluster of missed calls that he'd slept through. All the missed calls came from two numbers. The text messages, one apiece, were from the two opposing numbers. One was a DC area code, but he didn't know that, and one was a 707 area code, that's Northern California, but he didn't know that either. The DC text message read, "we are very interested in meeting with you to talk about upcoming recruitment possibilities as per our previous contacts." The Student astronaut went to Brown University, and he didn't know that it was an NSA and CIA recruitment factory bigger than you'd ever think it was. They'd started courting him a few years ago, but now that text in the morning from a phone number that had been calling him over and over again in the middle of the night read like a threat on his radar. The second text from the 707 area code read: (This is true, they do recruit from Brown, no cap. Everything else about this story from the end of the recording I sort of want to shred completely. It’s just so gauche.)

"You watched my whole video before they got it yanked by the skin of your ass. You have a hotrod university connection of some kind because if that video hadn't loaded or you'd paused it, it would have disappeared. By now they're bothering you, am I right? Well, any dreams you had, give them up. All power demands sacrifice. Call me though, I can tell you how to get out of this bind you've put yourself in. You can come meet Vivienne." He was even long-winded and didn't shut up in text messages. "But you have to do everything that I say, you have to follow my instructions exactly. This is where you pick a side, right? You can go work for those people in the video, or you can be the warrior who isn't afraid of space. Either way, hear from ya soon kid, it's a no-brainer. Give Uncle Nick a call." (I will find a way to end on “All Power Demands Sacrifice though, on god. And the first allusion to the fact that Nick might actually be the Devil, Uncle Nick being an anachronism for Satan. But whatever. I don’t like this ending and it’s getting shredded and reworked anyway. I may go macro with it if I do 4th person and multiple people watching. Already thinking. Someone late night at the gym, etc. And that would leave me other perspectives to work with to end on, and hang it differently instead of this conventional ass ending that I don’t even fucking like.)

FIN

And that’s how I go through my own work.

I don’t know if you got anything out of it, but you got new fiction, an autopsy, self analysis, and me getting mad at my own writing. Which means after a week or two, you’ll probably get this in finished and newly written form.

At the base level the story achieved what I wanted, at the time. This is not that time. And I have many more tricks and ideas to work with. I can tell where I sped through the meat to get to the candy, and I don’t like it. The cult scene is underwritten and vague in a way that I would excoriate a client for, so I expect better of myself.

I’ll probably pop a Dex put a song on repeat, and hit it until I quit it. Just, rip the fucking thing to shreds. We’ll see. Maybe pull a Blake Butler and just write it again completely.

Either way, I hope you’re entertained, because is this not what you came here to see?

I’m still unpacking and catching up on paid work from the emergency move. I’d like to thank everyone for their patience. For my birthday I’m going to drop something hot…

Thank you for reading, thank you for your support, and thank you for being you!

Good luck and Godspeed,

Fiction is Culture

Fade-

Emil Ottoman

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Early registration starts on Monday. Me and

🫀body fluids🦷 - a lit mag

will have more instructions and information then. Get your best ready and strap on a flak vest.

This one isn’t going to be for the weak.

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DROPS APRIL 15

“April is the cruelest month.” - T.S. Eliot