I emerge from the green summer woods onto a shaded dirt road where a dozen bedraggled refugees are standing in line before a tall barb-wire fence. “You look terrible,” one of them says to me. “I’ve been lost in the woods for eight days,” I answer. All I have in my backpack is my camera, stove, and raingear. For some reason I’m carrying a pillow from my couch under one arm. I had to leave everything else behind.

Some soldiers in jungle camo approach from behind us. The gate opens. “What do you want?” they ask. “We need your help.” They gesture us to go in. We do so, damp and bedraggled and incredibly relieved. We march until we reach another fence. It opens. “Wait here.” They disappear into the camp.

We wait, shuffling and shifting our feet. It starts to get dark.

“What the hell is this?” I ask. “They bring us in and then just leave us here?”

“They must think we’re a threat.”

Bah. “Is anybody out there?” No answer. “Screw this.” I hike up my bag on my shoulders and walk into the dark. Two minutes later I’m hit from behind, dragged to the ground, and sapped in the head.

Next thing I know I’m in a military prison. They keep telling me they’ll let me go as soon as I’m strong enough to fend for myself. I still have my camera and the couch pillow, but they took away everything else. They say they’ll give it back when I’m ready to leave. I’m not buying it.

I have a personal trainer, rather more like a drill sergeant, or even a torturer. I spend most of the day in a dank, moldy gymnasium in a basement somewhere being ground into the dirt. At some point I’m on a kind of wacko back extension machine where I’m expected to hang onto the middle of these long, foam-wrapped metal pipes, lift them back over my head until they touch the floor, and then sit up again. In the midst of these the sergeant is called out of the room, and I jump at my chance. There’s a rusty iron grate in the wall that leads to a storm drain. I pry frantically at the bars until a few of them snap loose, and dive through the opening just as the sergeant walks back in.

I escape into the woods with one other prisoner, who happens to be Erin. The original plan was to hike from Westwood to Blue Hills. We figure we can just walk back.

Down a steep, stone-scattered slope. Dangerous footing, stones slick from the rain. There’s a stairway, with a tall brick archway at the foot, but we’re afraid to take it–we don’t want to be seen.

At the foot of the hill there’s a crowd of norwood baddies playing mud-hockey, surfing on shovels in the mud of an empty baseball field. We go around them.

We stop a moment in that dream-comic store on the north side of Norwood center across from Ground Zero Games. They seem to have gone all high-end, with potted plants and window treatments for sale alongside an unusually poor comic selection. Erin goes on ahead. I tell her I’ll meet her at the department store on the corner by route 1.

And there I am, wandering the aisles aimlessly with my couch pillow,getting weird looks from all the clean and nice-smelling shoppers, trying fruitlessly to find Erin. It occurs to me this is her natural habitat, as mine is the woods. Nobody’s going to find her here if she doesn’t want to be found.

I give up, and head for the door to wait outside. Oh well. This dream was getting boring anyway.

I notice everyone else’s blog has a mysterious, more or less eye-catching title, serving the dual purpose of making it ridiculously difficult to figure out who’s writing it, and making people (in the case of the more eye-catching title as opposed to the less) actually want to read it. I got to wondering: ought I to have a mysterious, eye-catching title?

Partly because I happened to be listening to Ramble On at the time I had this thought, and was filled with that epic sensibility of ancient winds across lost plateaus where wanderers build fires and sing of the verges of dark, and partly because of the lonely, icebound pine in the col between Wildcat and Carter I’m using as the navigation image for this page, I came up with the title of this post as a possibility.

What think you?

This man, Tom Every (aka Dr. Evermor), is my new hero. He has created a tangible, physical, three-dimensional piece of Magic Realism–and not for assimilation into some colossal-budget, contentless movie, but to sit in his backyard and collect time and awe and dust! I don’t even know if I can call this Magic Realism, though the spirit is certainly there. One ought perhaps to coin a still klunkier, more self-contradictory term, like Science Fiction Realism–only I’d rather trade my self-respect for a Jar-Jar Binks costume and a kick in the head than do so.
O, why can’t *I* be retired and sit around in my own personal junkyard fabricating alter-ego supervillains to fling across the earth like shards of meteorite to take root in quiet suburbs and SHAKE them until they turn into Phillip Dick distopias and Jules Verne submersibles? Why?

‘”Look, this isn’t Disneyland,” said Every. “I’m not here to entertain you. If you want to have fun here, you have to participate, you have to add your own thoughts into the mix. Boring people are totally bored here, but interesting people have a great time.”‘

O. Well then. Guess I’ll get back to writing.

Welcome, ye sojourners of the abstract dimension, to Michael J. DeLuca’s Fantasy Writing Forum, a place where Michael will expose to harsh light the mechanics of his creative process, and invite both criticism and participation in hopes that he may better understand that process.

I, Michael J. DeLuca, am a nominally published (quantummuse.com), soon-to-be self-published (joskinandlob.com) writer of fantasy, horror, and mad-crazy unclassifiable (interstitial) fiction. Now that my writing has picked up a few fans and a bit of recognition, I thought it time to start the tiny snowball rolling down the long and gentle slope, such that one day it may turn to the monstrous, catastrophic Mt. St. Helens of ash and ice I so dearly desire it to be.

So, to those few and much-appreciated fans, I dedicate this niche of non-space. I hope they’ll find it, and see their way to helping me make it better.

Erin and I were planning a small party at the Maine house for my parents and sisters, Purpura and the Sheehys.

I was driving Oona up the long dirt road from Maine 4 towards the Mouse House in pitch dark. I was going fast, perhaps 40 miles an hour. Headlights appeared behind me, getting larger fast. I moved over to the right to give him room, and the other car roared past. Its taillights shrank and disappeared ahead, and then once again I was the only one on the road.

Something huge loomed in front of me, and I slammed on the brakes, coming to a dusty and precarious stop barely two feet away from an enormous black bear. It looked me in the eye and grunted, and I thought if it wanted to it could tear this car apart.

But it just turned and ambled past. I followed it with my eyes, feeling very queasy and hollow inside. There was another bear off to my right!

I stepped on the gas and went on down the road.

A minute later I had to slow down again to weave through a small herd of antelope that milled about like cows, only showing any motivation to get out of my way when I started honking at them. Further on I swerved around the body of a dead zebra, and felt the wheels go over its legs. My stomach endeavoured to turn upside down inside me. What the hell was going on?

Finally I came around the side of a hill and saw brake lights up ahead. When I got up close, I saw they belonged to a large trailer truck stalled diagonally across the road, and a smaller car turned on its side in front of it. On the back of the trailer were rows and rows of circus cages, like the ones on the sides of a box of animal crackers. Most of them were open.

A pair of lions padded through the beam of Oona’s headlights, followed by a gray-haired man dressed in khaki utilities, a pair of knee-high leather boots, and a pith helmet. Two huge gray shapes moved in the woods off to the right. Elephants.

I opened the door and stepped out. “Can’t you get them back in their cages?” I asked.

“We’re trying!” he said.

One of the lions, the big male, made an inquisitive sound in its throat, reaching out for me with its paw. I stumbled back against the car, fell to the dirt, and woke.