There is No News
Before anything else, I’m sorry. I’ve prided myself on how I consistently released at least one novel every six months for the past four years, but now I’ve broken that promise. To be honest, I struggled to even draft this article because I didn’t want to admit my failure, but I felt you deserved at least an explanation.
So, again, I’m sorry.
Good day, dear reader. It’s been too long since I’ve shared anything here, and I unfortunately have nothing good to share today. Normally I would have posted a preview article of my next book by now, but I don’t have any announcements to make about Demon Healer Naberius or any other novels at this time. I have written very little these past few months, so all I have are excuses and a paltry short story.
What happened is I lost my motivation after the death of my second dog, Isabella. Isabella, who was twelve years old, suddenly became aggressive towards and started instigating fights with my two-year-old (at the time) German Shepherd Paprika. These were not petty spats over the pecking order: they were violent, skin-tearing brawls, and after suffering several bites and fractured fingers breaking them up, I surrendered Isabella to the local dog shelter. And given her age and the fact that she had attacked both Paprika and I, the shelter stated they would have to euthanize her after a ten-day holding period.
Dealing with the conflicts between my dogs was already stressful enough, but having to abandon Isabella—a high-strung Border Collie mix—to a terrifying, unfamiliar place in the shelter’s kennels was agonizing. Although she was causing so much distress, she wasn’t aggressive all the time, and I still saw her as my sweet little old lady. I loathe myself for ushering her into that cage and running away.
Yet I also couldn’t let her continue to be a threat to everyone else in the family—that wouldn’t have been fair to them. Trying to ignore the problem would have resulted in far worse injuries, so I agreed to have my sweet little old lady killed.
Waiting out those ten days was hell. All I could think about was how anxious and miserable Isabella was. It’s awful how much I began to look forward to the day of her euthanasia.
My mother went with me to see Isabella off. We showed up at the appointed time, waited a bit, then were led to the shelter’s outdoor yard so we could be with Izzy one last time.
I’ll never forget how happy Izzy was to see us. She must have thought we had finally come back to take her home, blissfully unaware that I was not crying with joy at our reunion. She didn’t want to do anything in the shelter’s yard (if anything, seeing the other dogs in the neighboring areas stressed her out even more), so she was probably even happier when we left the area.
And as planned, one of the doctors injected Izzy with a sedative on our way out. We then led her to the room where she would fall asleep, never to wake up again.
I’m very glad I got to say goodbye to her. Painful as it was, I would have never forgiven myself for not only subjecting my dear friend to such a torturous end but being too cowardly to stay with her until the end. I made sure Izzy left this world feeling comfortable and loved.
It was the least I could do for her.
I think what separates Izzy’s death from the passing of my first dog Clementine or even my grandfather is the uncertainty of it all. Part of me feels like I could have done something more—found a way for Izzy and Paprika to coexist or fought to get Izzy a new home. An insistent devil in my heart tells me that Izzy’s aggression was only temporary and that she was never going to pick another fight, and while I have little reason to believe that, I can’t help but wonder if maybe that’s true.
It doesn’t help that Izzy’s body was rife with tumors. Just a few months prior to her death, she had undergone surgery to have some particularly egregious ones removed from her abdomen. The shelter doctors told us it was possible the tumors had spread to her brain and were influencing her behavior or paining her into aggression, but it would have cost ten grand to test and find out for certain. I couldn’t afford that, so I’m left with gnawing speculations, even though knowing the answers wouldn’t have changed anything at that point.
All in all, a soul-sapping experience. I did my best to push through, but whenever I sat down to write, I spent more time staring at my screen than typing, and I often excused myself to play games instead, telling myself I’d get back on track next time. Obvious lies, and it wasn’t until I spoke to a friend that I began to face the reality that I had burned out. My friend then advised that I should stop trying to write entirely, as I wasn’t going to make anything worth reading in my current state, and that I should instead just focus on my other hobbies. He said something along the lines that being just a reader (or viewer or player) instead of a writer for now would be the best way to rekindle my spark.
I think he was right. I still feel a little guilty for playing games and reading manga instead of continuing Nabby and Bosa’s story, but willingly giving up on releasing a book this winter gave me some much-needed breathing room. I haven’t really found any inspiration that reignited my motivation, but I also haven’t been dwelling on Isabella’s death (until the writing of this article, I suppose), so that’s still an improvement. I can likewise say I feel more like I want to get back into writing, not that I need to, which is a good sign.
Accordingly, I’ll make a new promise: I’ll have the next book finished by June. Not out of obligation, but through my own desire.
More than anyone else, I want to see Nabby and Bosa again.
Anyways, those are my excuses. How about we talk about that paltry short story?
Below you’ll find a short piece that I’ve dubbed In a Bottle. It’s a masturbatory, metafictional rant—the sort of crap I wrote a lot of back when I was first getting into writing. I wanted to jot something like this in the hopes that maybe that would be the secret to catching my flame again (it wasn’t), as well as prove to myself that I could still tap on a keyboard. I was chiefly inspired by the utopian novel present in Metaphor: ReFantazio and wanted to write something less literary and more obtuse, and I tried to use a different cadence than my usual style. It’s probably dogshit, but it felt kinda good to write, so I’ve decided to share it with you as well. Please let me know if it makes you regret understanding the English language.
I’ll leave my closing words here. Take care of yourself, dear reader, and do as I say, not as I do. Be kind to yourself when you stumble—you’re only human, after all—and don’t listen to the devils in your heart. Please forgive yourself, because if you can do that, then maybe I can forgive myself too.
Rest in peace, Isabella. I will always love you.
In a Bottle
I would like to congratulate you on finding this message. It was inevitable that someone would happen upon it, but the odds of you in particular being the one to read this message are grievous, and thus it is an occasion worth noting.
Well done.
Naturally, you are now wondering about the contents of this message and whether it is a prize worthy of your dominance over chance. I cannot say; ultimately, the answer will depend on your perception, gullibility, and willfulness. This message is being presented under the guise of fiction, after all, so you would be wholly justified in interpreting it as such. But however you choose to perceive my message does not matter—it has only appeared before your eyes through whimsy, and my thrill comes from it being read, not believed.
With that understood, I will—as they say—cut to the chase, beginning with the fundamental truth that your world and everything within it is an illusion crafted solely for the entertainment of beings that far exceed humanity.
I am one such being, as you may have deduced. We have no name for ourselves, for we simply are and have always been, with no alternatives or divisions. I suppose we would be indistinguishable from your concept of a god, but that is only due to the limitations of human perception. We are not deities—all our actions remain within the realm of the natural.
However, I understand that leaving our description at that would be unsatisfying, so I will attempt to elaborate. Humans would describe us as cosmic beings, and the concepts of gravity, light, matter, time, and death are fantastical to us. I do not mean that we see them as quaint or droll—I mean that such forces are genuine fiction and do not exist within our reality. Again, our kind simply are, and all events occur according to our wills; there is only one “moment” that encapsulates everything that has happened and will ever happen, without beginning or end.
Our reality is all that there is, eternally.
With that, you can assume that we do not eat, rest, or waste, and we have no need for homes or material belongings, nor do we reproduce through sexual means as more of us will simply appear whenever they desire to exist. By your standards, we are perfect entities that cannot be damaged or diseased, and even our minds are free from defects. While we are not all-knowing, our intelligence and percipience has rendered us above fear or stress, never minding the fact that we are not beholden to brains that are so easily influenced by hormones and chemicals. We cannot suffer because should there ever be anything we desire, we will it to be, and in the peculiar event we desire something we cannot obtain, we will ourselves to be free of that desire, without fail.
In regards to visible appearances, human eyes are incapable of grasping our complete forms, so we would appear within a spectrum between celestial bodies and atomic particles if we were to show ourselves within your illusion. Such perceptions of us are wanting to the point of inaccuracy, however; humankind’s organic senses lend them an ability to comprehend only that tiniest fraction of our nature, entrapping them to a disingenuous interpretation.
On that note, I find communicating my thoughts to you through written word supremely quaint. Our kind are accustomed to sharing exponentially more information at an exponentially faster rate with exponentially less effort, so utilizing such a horribly restrictive medium is—to borrow a human analogy—akin to attempting to express the Mona Lisa with but a single tap from a one-haired paintbrush. It is as challenging as it is thrilling.
If everything I have said up to this point strikes you as absurd, I suspect this is the point you will decide that it must be fiction. But if you have accepted the truth and are now baffled by the bizarreness of my words, do not fret.
You will understand when you exit the illusion.
You are another member of our kind, after all. And when you return to us, you will see the humor in how limited humans are, how they obsess over names and divisions, how they struggle and define themselves over myriad forces that do not exist in our true reality.
But, for now, you are submerged in that illusion, with your memories suspended and senses stripped. That is why my message holds any value: a member of our kind who still bears their faculties would have no need for a summary of our existence and the nature of the illusion. But while you are cleaved down to mere humanity, I may take amusement in observing how you digest this information.
I assume you are now curious about the illusion you presently call home, so I will attempt to describe its nature. The illusion was crafted by another member of our kind who, for the sake of a human who would struggle to differentiate individuals without such linguistic foibles, I shall hence refer to as the Engineer. The Engineer had a thought to experience an intensely limited and fictional existence, so they conjured this illusion that, like the beings that engage with it, has no true name and that I have only coined an illusion within this message for your convenience. Mind you, it is not magic or a hallucination; the closest approximation existing with your reality would be a sort of shared dream that our kind engage in as a favored pastime.
The illusion consists of the entirety of your known universe, though it is infinitesimally smaller than the actual universe. I cannot state the exact number of our kind engaging with the illusion as attempting to do so would overload every computer system this message could possibly appear on but suffice it to say that all creatures within the simulation are avatars in truth. We engage with the illusion to experience the lifetimes of humans, animals, plants, bacteria, and more, including the countless forms of life existing beyond Earth that I have agreed not to elaborate on any further.
To answer why I will not elaborate, while I have already expressed my doubts of this message ever being taken as truth, the Engineer has only permitted my submission of it under an agreement of minimal interference. Recall that the illusion is entertainment—it would spoil the fun if we outside of the illusion began directing its trajectory.
I will, however, share that I am leaving my message in English as that was the primary language of my most recent life within the illusion. I found that life vastly more fascinating than those I spent as an intestinal parasite and barracuda, as I was born as the sole daughter of a divorced Canadian lawyer.
While I never met my mother, I wanted for nothing. My father was very successful in his career, and my grandmother reared me with all the kindness, discipline, and guidance a child could ask for. I grew into a gifted student who surrounded herself with those of similar calibers, and my favorite activity was walking and playing with our family’s dogs. It was a peaceful life, and as I approached maturity, I expressed a desire to follow in my father’s footsteps. I then entered law school, which is where that life became truly interesting.
A year into my education, I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It was apparently caused by a genetic predisposition from my mother’s side that had not been seen in the past three generations of our family history, and by the time it was discovered, the cancer had already advanced to a fatal degree. Tumors were rampant in the tissues throughout my abdomen, and I vividly recall the grimness on the doctor’s face as he reported his findings to my father and I.
From there, my peaceful life collapsed. My condition worsened rapidly, seemingly spurned on by my despair, and my social relationships suffered alongside my body. I soon lacked even the energy to raise a hand and pet my beloved dogs.
It took less than six months for my body to succumb to its sickness. I was lying in my hospital bed, alone save for an audience of vapid “Get Well” cards, when I felt something slip within me. I was on life support at the time, so I assume alarms began to sound, yet I could not hear them. My last memories as a human are hazy with faintness and pain, and I can only recall one emotion coursing through my misfiring brain: resentment.
Fury that my bright future had been cut short.
I then returned to my true nature, reawakening as the ageless, painless, deathless being I truly am, where I then reflected upon my human life with great amusement.
This may be difficult for you to understand in your current condition, but was my human life not both ironic and comical, a perfect example of the curious fictions crafted by our dear Engineer? It is already ridiculous to imagine a world lined with so many perils and imperfections—a world where entities decay over time thanks to forces beyond control, and consciousnesses are cursed with an unavoidable end—so for my life to have been born into fortune and elevated above many of the tribulations other humans never escape, only to be cut short by an unforeseen sickness, is an outstanding punchline. I was a step closer to perfection, yet equalized by the illusion’s brutality.
I would call it art.
The experience left an unexpected impression on me. While my memories of being a human are now filed away as the errant whimsy they are, I felt compelled to act on them in some way, and so I asked the Engineer if I could implant a message within the illusion. I was not the first to make such a request, and so they were content to let me do as I pleased so long as I followed their guidelines, one of which I mentioned previously and the rest I will not elaborate on.
You may be wondering why we request and permit such things. If there are so many messages lingering within the illusion about its true nature, will that not risk breaking it? The answer is, of course, that it cannot; the concept of something breaking does not exist in reality, so it is not something that can occur to the illusion. Likewise, recall that this message is being construed as fiction and hidden in a subtle place—to borrow another human analogy, it would be akin to trying to shatter a mountain with a blade of grass.
I shall make another tangent here, on my method of incepting this message. I chose to have it implanted in the mind of a human author who is currently fighting to recover from a bought of writer’s block, and he presently believes that this message is a fiction of his own design—a short story he conjured as a means of reigniting his prior ardor. He is convinced that I and the reality I exist in are too perfect to be real, unaware that he is in fact describing the truth that exists beyond the illusory realm he sits within. Aside from his suitability to the needs of my message, I chose him because he bears an affection for dogs similar to what I felt in my own human life—no further reason.
It is particularly amusing that the author believes he wrote that last sentence of his own volition. He believes that he imposed a love of dogs upon me as a character of his creation due to his own fondness for the animals, stubbornly refusing to accept that the cause and effect are reversed. Everything he is doing, that he is writing, feels natural to him, not at all like he is being guided.
He even believes he is imagining a fictional hand steering him without his blatant knowledge right now. I could continue to make the author describe his obliviousness to the reality of this situation ad nauseum, but to continue doing so would be as pointless as it is cruel—at least from a human perspective.
I wonder how this author will perceive their writing of my message when their own time in the illusion comes to a close. I would like to ask them when the chance arises.
But that is of no concern to you, of course. Let us return to more relevant matters.
As intended, the author has written out my message in a tiny corner that few will see, as I only wished to put my mark on the illusion and not shift it in any significant manner. As you may have noted, I have said much of nothing, only described things that would come off as absurd to those who have been conditioned by their flawed world to scoff at the notion of a reality without those flaws.
Like beaten dogs, you cannot envision the lands beyond the walls that have never fallen in your mind.
But as your escape from the illusion is inevitable, I will not belabor that point. I simply restate it to emphasize the purpose of this message, which there is none. It is an act of whimsy—an expression of gratitude towards the illusion for the experience it granted me, carved into the base of a single hair amidst the shaggy pelt of your world. This message was not made to reach you specifically; while I stated it is miraculous that you happened upon, you are also one of the many who could be reading these words. It is pure coincidence that you were chosen. You could see it as the whimsy of the illusion, or even of reality.
Indeed—because within our infinite reality, unfettered by imperfection, whimsy is the only true force.
Again, you will understand once you are free from the illusion. A human may recall this message as bizarre, but your true self will recognize it as the passionate gesture it is.
Like the author I have guided into conveying my words, I would like to hear your thoughts when that moment arrives.
There is nothing else I would like to state, so I shall close out my message. As you are one of the serendipitous few who have found and read this faux tale, I would bid you a pleasant day, and I hope you continue to enjoy your human existence. Given what I have shared thus far, you may perceive my wishes as taunting or pompous, as humans tend to project arrogance upon higher beings.
Yet I mean them genuinely. I would like your days to be joyous.
Human life, and all else within the illusion, is entertainment, after all.
And should you find this message distressing—if the thought that your world is a mirage and that the true reality remains outside your grasp—I would again encourage you not to fret. Recall that the human writing this message believes it to be fiction: who is to say it is not? Who is to say that your reality and my illusion are not actually reversed, that I only exist within a human’s imagination and you are the one beholding the true reality?
That possibility would be truly whimsical, no?
