I’ve been meaning to edit the first chapter and re-upload it to the Inkshares page. “The fox’s eyes WERE dazzled as he passed from the darkness beneath the arch and stepped into the daylight. Maxan HAD BEEN following his mark…” Argh! Those passive verbs are killing me! One of my weaknesses as a writer that I’m trying to work through is the fact I obsess about the quality of every line, every arrangement of words, practically every letter that I produce. Which wouldn’t be so bad if it all happened AFTER I committed the sentence to the page, you know - like normal editing.
But no. No. Oh no. Unfortunately it happens to me DURING the writing. I’ll type something that’s maybe not perfect but not so bad, and then I’ll instantly convince myself there’s a better way to say it… *backspace*backspace… “Aaah, there you go, Joe. Now we can move o… Hold on, what was I going to write next?” By the time I get ready to move on, I’ve lost the rhythm. Anyway, as I said, I’m getting better at ignoring the perfectionist riding on my back. I need to be a bit more Blaster, a lot less Master and just get the g*d**n first draft done!
Besides the superficial edits that need to be done… There are some sweeping changes that need to be made to all of The Animal in Man’s earlier chapters. You see, one day, I got tired of worldbuilding and just said “Hell with it! Let’s write!” And I did. Only while I was writing it, I was discovering things about the world that I hadn’t prepared for. Like this plague called “The Strayn” that grips the Herbridian population.
When a Herbridian develops a case of Strayn, they have quite literally ‘gone astray’ or become ‘stray.’ It’s not a physical affliction. It’s a complete breakdown of their mental faculties. It’s a complete reversion to a wild, feral nature. They lose anything and everything that makes them more than an animal, starting with coherent speech. They growl. They stop using utensils to eat their food, opting instead for the more natural claw and fang to scratch and rend and tear into their sustenance. And they develop an ‘unnatural’ taste for meat. Live meat. They hunch, they stoop, they start to move on all fours as opposed to upright. Their entire bio-mechanics change. The most advanced cases of stray Herbridians are relatively indistinguishable from the animals you or I might see behind a cage at a zoo in this world. Only a Herbridian is roughly the size of a human. So imagine that Lion-man, standing upright, 6’6” tall, powerful, proud, the sunlight of Yinna glinting off his golden armor, his hand gripping a Gladius hilt buckled at its side, and then some hunger sets in, some beast whispers within the veil of this Lion-man’s dreams, reminding it how much it enjoys the flesh of the gazelle, the thrill of the chase, and soon the Lion starts slouching, just a little, over time, inch by inch, and soon the Lion starts staring down the cobbled street toward a block of Crosswall it knows many gazelles call home. More and more, it catches itself there on that corner, week to week, day to day, every minute, and soon the lion doesn’t bother to wear its armor any more. Wearing clothes has no point, nor standing tall, when one moves so much faster, when one hides so much better, beneath just the fur that covers its skin. And one day the hunger overcomes the lion, the whisper has grown to a scream that can only be silenced if the beast slakes itself on the blood of that gazelle.
And thus the once-proud Lion-man has fallen astray.
So when I edit The Animal in Man, I will need to remind readers of the danger that surrounds Maxan when he skulks through the Western district. He doesn’t just shadow from the rooftops because it keeps him hidden. Oh no. It keeps him safe. The Western District of Crosswall is an enormous cage. The Leoran King has ordered all Stray to be quarantined within the high stone walls that run the length of its miles-long perimeter.
But are all those Leorans locked in this district Stray? No. Many are falsely accused of going stray and exiled. Neighborly disputes in the other areas of the city can be solved by whoever bribes corrupt city guards to believe that their rival’s fangs might be showing a little more involuntarily these days… “Right? Maybe his shoulders are stopping a little more than they used to. Maybe he doesn’t feel so right in the head?” And after a coinpurse changes hands, that perfectly healthy rival might find himself flung into the Western District, surrounded by Stray, separated from his family and from his claim to property in the city. His life completely destroyed.
Such is the nature of greed, or of revenge. Of opportunity and betrayal. Besides our tendency for violence, there are many ugly parts of ourselves we try to hide. There’s just not enough room in this update to list them all. Stay tuned for the next weekly update, due this Friday Dec. 11th, wherein I’ll tell you about Maxan the fox, The Animal in Man’s reluctant hero.
