:: The Legend of Zelda—Shadows Saga, Episode 1 ~ Dreamers NOW AVAILABLE! ::

The wait for the first episode of The Legend of Zelda—Shadows Saga is over! It looks like Santa visited the site last night and brought a little Christmas gift for everyone. Those of you who would like to have your very own copy of Episode One ~ Dreamers on PDF can find it here.

Like much of the creative writing on this site, this media is made available at no cost. However, if you like what you read, your donations are always welcome. Just click the donate button on the upper right to donate the amount of your choice via PayPal.

Thank you for your readership and patronage!

Download Episode 1 ~ Dreamers from GoogleDocs now!

:: Drink and Be Merry...Christmas ::

I don't drink, but for some reason I'm really amused by drunkenness. Well, at least, the Hollywood kind that you can experience at a safe distance without the really bad breath and actual danger to self and others.

And so, as a tribute to the holiday season (which for others will likely include more than a little merrymaking with alcoholic beverages) I submit this little ditty that popped into my head this morning. To the tune of the Chipmunks' greatest hit: Christmas Time is Here. Everyone all together, now:

Christmas Time is Beer

(to the tune of Alvin and the Chipmunks'—Christmas Time is Here)

by Jay Carter III

Christmas, Christmas time is here,

Time for Wine and time for Beer,

We’ve been good but we can’t last,

Drink your Vodka, drink it fast.

Egg Nog makes me loop the loop,

The room feels like a hula-hoop!

We can’t harly enunshiate,

Pleash Cri-mas don’ beeeeaaaaa—*hiccup*

:: The Jabbergluck is Coming ::

For you RPG geeks out there (you know who you are) who happen to be in the Kansas City area July 8–10 of 2012, you really need to look into KantCon, the foremost summer gaming convention in the midwest.

What is KantCon?
From the main site:
KantCon is a new gaming convention for tabletop hobby gamers in the Kansas City area, created by tabletop hobby gamers in the Kansas City area. The only available gaming conventions and large gatherings of gamers in the Kansas City area are limited to the beginning of the year, and the end of the year, in March and November, respectively. As most gamers are increasingly busy, in school, or have children in school, there is a void of a centralized gaming convention in the summer months in Kansas City. KantCon will fill that void with three days of tabletop fun in the form of tabletop role-playing games, card games, board games, and miniatures games.

With options for recreational role-playing of all varieties, and a staff of geeks just like yourself, how can you go wrong? Pre-pre-registration begins in January (with a special incentive, I hear). Check out the KantCon main site for more details.

Oh, yeah, and Fleurish Design ~ Spilt Ink's sister business ~ designed the logo and came up with KantCon's friendly (yet voraciously hungry) troll mascot, the Jabbergluck!

:: Spilt Ink Acquisition # 298 ~ Underwood #5 Typewriter ~ 1923-1931 ::

I bought this Underwood typewriter from an antique store in Lawrence, KS right as the guy was bringing it in. I think I paid $35 or something like it. He said he had brought it from his father's farm, where it had been used to keep track of the farm finances for about ten years.

Here you can see all the major workings: note the absence of a "floor" ~ the keys run on levers under the machine where they manually swing the letters to the surface of the platen. This is referred to as a "Grasshopper" mechanism. If you look closely at the right end of the keyboard, there is even a key for 1/2 and 1/4.


More pics and description after the jump!

:: Butterfly Grounded ::

I submit the following with more than a little trepidation, for this poem was meant for a once-love, and not the woman I married. Still, it embodies something universal enough that I still regard it as relevant for those in the same situation as I had been.

She was in Belgium for a year and a half. Still, the tensile strength of love was never tested by leaving Cupid's bow unstrung. I took a semester of French while she was away. I wrote her weekly, sometimes twice. We had only been on two dates before she left, but I felt like her being away did more to strengthen what I felt for her than diminish it. Alas, it did not last. Belgium was so far away, and my eyes and arms forgot her, and all my heart remembered was a fable; a love story to tell myself at night. Several months before she returned I met another girl and soon I stopped writing altogether.

Then one day Belgium showed up at my door. It took only until the end of a longish walk to see that we would not have made it even if this other girl were not in the picture. Our priorities were too different by then; our experiences ~ and therefore our beliefs ~ were too different...too nostalgic, as it were.

The irony of all of this is that the girl I met lived in Minnesota. I traded writing-letters-half-way-across-the-world for driving-halfway-across-the-country. But I guess I thought this butterfly, who had braved half a world, could make it eight hours in a Honda. And it did. When I felt the time was right, I asked Minnesota to marry me and come to Kansas.

But as it turned out, I underestimated the cost of the trip. I was starting to see the same thing that happened with Belgium happen with Minnesota; the things we wanted were too different. I became tired and at last I had to resign myself to the seat at that old cottage in Tuscany. After that, it wasn't long before the moisture gathered, the wetness beaded, and finally, the boulder dropped. Minnesota moved to Hawaii for school. And I could not follow. "Marvelous captive/Trade me places/For my love is far from me/And my heart cannot fly."

Which is why I'm so lucky to have married Kansas. Where she flies, I am circling somewhere nearby, admiring the colors of the woman my eyes can see and my arms can hold. And at night, I tell my heart the story of the woman sleeping beside me.

Full text of the poem after the jump.

:: Encyclopædia Fantastica ::

It seems my entire life I have been imagining what fantastic creatures might be like if they were real. How does mermaid anatomy work when it combines both mammal and fish structures? Is a dragon's fire breath actually flammable gas that it somehow ignites, or is it purely magical? Is a griffin the literal half-eagle/half-lion, or is it an entirely unique creature that simply resembles these two halves? Answering these questions has become somewhat of a lifetime obsession of mine, and one that I have begun to exorcise from my brain by writing a reference book about it: The Encylcopædia Fantastica.

I have already compiled a list of roughly 150 entries that should cover most of the creatures known to the human imagination. I exclude most deities (unless they are universal enough so as to be ubiquitous thematically, if not in name—such as the Sacrificing God, or the God of Thunder, or the God of the Underworld, etc.) as well as unique beings (such as Scylla and Charybdis from Homer's Odyssey) unless they have survived in modern fiction as their own race (such as the Pegasus, the Phoenix, or the Minotaur, all of which were originally cast as single entities). I also gloss many cultural variations of a single creature together as one being (such as the Hob, Hobgoblin, Boggart, Boggane, and Brownie, just to name a few). What results then, is the list below.

As I intend to explain the fantastic world exhaustively, this will mean covering every major (and perhaps minor) topic that exists. Hopefully, when I am done, I will have a method for explaining any known mythological concept in universal terms ~ including the unique ones ~ from Amphisbæna to Zephyrus. But to do this, I need your help.

In order for the list to be complete, I must consider creatures that perhaps have never occurred to me. If you see any gaps on my list, or can think of a variation I might not have considered, PLEASE comment and add it. They should be races or classes of beings (such as fairies or deities) rather than named beings (such as Queen Mab or Zeus). Any suggestion is appreciated; future generations of nerds will thank you!

List of Fantastic Creatures (after the jump)

:: He's Not Heavy ::

I listen to Pandora habitually these days, mainly because of what many know as the spice of life: Variety. More than once I come across a song that speaks to me on levels so deep I can't put it into words. Only but rarely do I hear a song that manages to get the words into my ears. It was just such an occasion, recently, when I heard "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" as sung by the Choirboys.

The Choirboys - He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother

The following (non-factual) story found its way into my mind (after the jump):

:: Go Quietly ::

It's strange how things come into your life, and then you blink and forget about them as they go 'round and 'round in little whirlpools of time, bobbing up again and reminding you they exist...

I first encountered Max Ehrmann's prose poem Desiderata (Latin: Desired Things) on the front of a greeting card while I was on a mission for my church in California. The card only quoted the first sentence: "Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there may be in silence." At that time in my life, it was a reminder that while the negative powers of the universe may try to grind away at you with its clamor and "get it done yesterday" attitude, the eye of peace at the center of that storm is simply being quiet and purposeful.

I tucked the card away in my things when I moved back to Kansas and quickly forgot about it. Some time later when I moved into my own apartment the greeting card bobbed up out of the whirlpool and asked me to remember what I felt those years ago. By then I had a degree in Graphic Design, and I was looking for a job in my field, among other things, and I found that the one sentence still had meaning for me. As I thought about them, the words said they wanted to become something new, so I looked up the full poem and designed a little something to hang on my wall.

Another year or two went by. I still didn't have a job in my field; at least, not one that got me a steady paycheck. But other things happened in my life to make it fulfilling; I got married, my wife and I bought a house, I got a job with the school district that paid the bills ~ and on top of that I still took freelance design gigs where I could. But by then things were too crowded. I never quite had enough time for everything. The storm was starting to overwhelm me.

Then, as my wife and I were digging through boxes, I found the Desiderata again. Both the card and the framed picture reminded me of that time back in the day when I knew that the answer to clamor and haste was stillness and silence. So I trimmed my life like the groundskeeper does the overgrown bush and stood back to observe the beauty of it as it was, not as I wanted it to be.

For, as Ehrmann says, "Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time."

The framed picture now hangs in our living room, silently reminding me that within quiet purposefulness, there is peace.

Max Ehrmann's full Desiderata (after the jump):

:: Baz Luhrmann ~ "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)" ::

I first came across this song as part of a mix CD a friend made for me. I thought it was a joke, or that some random person had recorded their Class of '99 valedictorian speech and put it to music. But the longer I thought about it (and the more people I talked to) the more I realized it was more widespread than that.

Not only was it originally an article published in the Chicago Tribune, it wasn't even written by Baz Lurmann at all. It was written by Tribune columnist Mary Schmich. Schmich's original article, entitled Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young wasn't published in 1999 (as the lyrics to the song suggest) but on June 1, 1997 as a hypothetical commencement address Schmich said would give if she were ever asked. This didn't stop the spread of a viral rumor that it had been written by author Kurt Vonnegut and delivered at the commencement of MIT that year.

Just one more reason you should NEVER believe things at face value ~ there should always be some internal reason you think what you do, and ultimately you are the only one responsible for that reason. If advice can be thought of as a generalized modus operandi based on our own personal experiences and beliefs, then ~ to paraphrase Schmich ~ belief is a form of nostalgia as well.

For your brain-crunching pleasure, the lyrics of the Baz Luhrmann song are posted after the jump.

:: New Look ~ Well, Old Look ::

Those of you four individuals who saw the blog before I added the new duds, the site looked a bit bland. After putting out feelers in various places for notoriety, I realized that people might actually come to the site and browse. That meant two things:

1) I might actually have to get some content on here, and
2) I needed to dig around in the pile of long-forgotten designs sitting in the corner of my study and pull the actual Spilt Ink brand identity out of obscurity, wipe it off, paint over the ugly parts and recycle it for more than it’s worth.*

And with that, I hope you like the New (Old) Digs.

* For those of you who don't recognize the reference, please refer to Baz Luhrmann's "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)", or just look above.

:: COMING SOON! The Legend of Zelda—Shadow Saga ::

Have you ever been to ZeldaUniverse.net?
Have you ever read the amazing fan-fiction in the Writing Showcase?
Have you ever wanted to see one of those stories crafted into the book it deserved to be?
Well, coming soon, you can download one for your very own in a publish-worthy PDF: The Legend of Zelda—Shadow Saga!

Re-designed as an e-book and featuring a never-before-posted Epilogue, The Legend of Zelda—Shadow Saga is a fan-fiction written by Wm Jay Carter III in 6 episodes which follows the exploits of your favorite green-capped, left-handed hero as he navigates Hyrule and the Golden Land to stop the Shadow Gods from plunging Hyrule into endless twilight! Describing the events that occur before and after four of your favorite Zelda games, The Legend of Zelda—Shadow Saga is the perfect companion to any fan's replay of Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Four Sword Adventures, and Twilight Princess. Discover the histories of many popular Zelda characters, items and places, and delve deeper into Link's life, family, and destiny as the Hero of Hyrule. Guaranteed to keep any timeline theorist guessing, and play out the fantasies of those who always wanted to see which love interest finally won over the hero's heart.

Look for Episode 1—Dreamers coming Christmas Eve 2010!

:: Story Starters: Episode 1 ::

This game is called Story Starters. The way we play is I will post a series of story starters and you can pick up any of them you want and finish the story. Post your finished story as a reply to the post so others can see where you took the tale!

Read the story starters The Alice of Nearmarsh and Help by the Frowning Lane after the jump:

:: Spilt Ink Imaginarium arrives ::

For those of you who are visiting for the first time, Spilt Ink Imaginarium will shortly be an ideal place to get creative writing ideas, short story starters, and witness the brain smatterings of one Jay Carter III—a hapless soul of rambling taste who thinks aloud and speaks aquiet.

For now, however, the place looks a little deserted, don't you think?