Blogtober 13 – Challenge Accepted!
I’m going to ignore that it’s Friday the 13th of October and not write about anything
Halloween or horror-related. Instead, I’m gonna get esoteric and weird…
The last social outing I had before the COVID shutdown was a Sunday brunch with one of my best pals. During that brunch, we talked about writing. Yes, it’s a subject that comes up in my conversations a lot. In that conversation, we talked about how some writers have managed to change the way we look add or use language. At some point, someone decided to take first-person perspective and apply it to a fictionalized narrative. Boom. Language changed fundamentally forever. I could go on, but you either get the point of the example, or you don’t.
At one point, my friend asked me how I might fundamentally change writing. I thought about it for a bit, shrugged, and said something like, “I’ve got nothing today, but I’ve still got a couple of decades to figure it out.” I was being about 50/50 tongue-in-cheek and serious.
Then my friend fires back at me, “Why don’t you make a new verb form?”
I laughed.
The thought was amusing.
Sure… I’ll just go ahead and not just bring a new idea that shifts our perspective of writing, I’ll go ahead and make an addition to one of the two foundational pieces of language required for our basic communication. With minuscule exceptions, we communicate through language and sentences. With minuscule exceptions, sentences require a noun and a verb. Subject and predicate. And now, I have this gauntlet thrown at my feet to bring something new to a process that hasn’t significantly changed in centuries, at the very least.
I laughed.
The conversation went on.
But… in the back of my mind… wheels turned… pistons moved… ideas and thoughts simmered, percolated, and boiled over until… in the middle of a sentence… I interrupted my buddy with something like…
“Fuck you.”
I had an idea for the new verb form. I just needed a project to put it into.
At that time, life and writing couldn’t accommodate this new idea bouncing around in my head. So I put it into the back of my mind to simmer.
Then… along came SPELLPUNK. Well, more like, SPELLPUNK comes sauntering back into my life saying, “Hey, it’s time.”
And suddenly, I have the perfect project for playing around with the new verb form that’s been getting louder and louder inside my head.
When I first started this blog post, I thought I was going to go into my new verb form and how it will work. Now that I’m at the point where it would make sense to do so, I’ve decided not to. I’m just going to include it in SPELLPUNK and let it unfold as it fits within the narrative.
I also considered sneaking it into this post and see if anyone noticed. Again, I decided against it. Instead, I will let it arrive in the story, growing organically after I plant that initial seed.
So… in the tradition of Scheherazade… if you want to find out more about this potential new verb form, you’ve got to start reading The SPELLPUNK Requiems. Or don’t, and continually wonder what you’re missing.
So yeah… a new verb form… because why not?
Scientology started as a bar bet at Worldcon.
The six-word story was supposedly written on a bar napkin.
Frankenstein exists because Mary Shelley didn’t want to participate in a three-way with Lord Byron.
Hollywood legend has it that the cartoon Freakazoid exists because someone told Steven Spielberg he couldn’t possibly get weirder than Animaniacs.
So then, why can’t I make a new verb form because of a brunch challenge?
Stranger things have happened. Challenge accepted.
