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I have never been an adherent to “New Year’s Resolutions”. Rather, in keeping with my usual frenetic pace, I believe one should always be improving. Right now, I am aiming to improve the rate at which I process ideas, both as input and output. No idea can be properly understood without first understanding its placement within the corpus of human knowledge and experience.

Over the years, I’ve collected a fair number of books. I say a fair number because I’ve not allowed every combination of cover and title to accompany me in my travels. That being said, however, I do have a certain weakness that has allowed me to acquire more than is strictly necessary. It is a grand pity that every man will die with a collection of tomes on his to-be-read list; I imagine I speak for many of us when I say that I add to this queue with great optimism, an optimism that far exceeds the actual time I have to devote to reading.

I do not adopt every orphan that comes knocking on my door. And though the recommendations I received twenty years ago or more still burn unresolved in my heart, its surface now presents with a crust of patina. A preliminary sampling suggests I will look upon Terry Pratchett’s Discworld with the same quiet frustration with which I greeted Monty Python in my thirties; perhaps there was a time and a place in which I might have been receptive to the vision, but I cannot say. I recently saw some people on Substack discussing Still Life with Woodpecker, a book I did happen upon as a teenager, and wondered if it fell into the same category. If you have to ask, you’ll never know.

While I’ve mostly come to terms with the fact that I cannot fathom the irreverent fancy that pervades a youth’s attempt to understand a chaotic universe, there are other instances in which I am completely overwhelmed by sentimentality. I cannot bring myself to abandon a collection of novels placed in my hands by my late husband, often with little more preface than, “Here; read this.” Many bear bookmarks placed some fifty pages in, re-shelved many years ago in the shuffle of ever-shifting priorities. Kiln People seems increasingly prescient, now sitting quietly downwind of The Lathe of Heaven, Gardens of the Moon, and numerous works by Samuel R. Delany. I chew on a cliché repackaged by Lana Del Rey: “Later’s better than never.”

Unintentional acquisitions pepper my collection like stolen jewels. I think at this point, to return them might be more insult than favor, and I hope their lenders would agree. Death of an Amiable Child and Poetic Justice, the latter penned by Amanda Cross, were passed to me in a life I can now hardly recognize as my own. I have not historically consumed mysteries, but perhaps that fact, combined with their particular local settings, entices me all the more.

Trying to organize the books into groups exposes some of the difficulties of genre. Poetry, short stories, drama: these matters of particular presentation lend themselves to differentiation. History, analysis, and other didactic texts are also easy to separate from the others. But for fiction, where is the line drawn between literature and fantasy? Forgive me if I believe quibbling about whether Cervantes, Tolkien, and Woolf belong on the same shelf is truly tilting at windmills.

The bottom of the central shelf is still more free-form. Next to Flatland and several outdated biology textbooks sits my collection of foundational Icelandic literature, most of which were free gifts from the Scandinavia House on Park Avenue. One of the few for which money was exchanged is an unwieldy omnibus of the Sagas; the time and place where that sum of krónur was surrendered now floating in my memories like a distant dream. I had the finest nap of my life in that country, on a bed more akin to cloud than cotton, while the summer Sun refused to be banished from a blue sky.

A bookshelf is a chronology of where we’ve been and places we still aim to explore. When I was growing up, I went to the library every week and sometimes finished a book in mere hours. Looking back on it, my comprehension was poor and I mistook speed for retention. Required reading in college meant that for many years I did not often read for pleasure, but the lessons served me well; I learned how to digest rather than devour.

Adopting writing as a personal commitment has reawakened my love of reading. I will continue to pen my novel, but I will also dust off the books I’ve been carrying around, in some cases, for two decades or more. As I look forward and develop TCE, I realize it’s all another side of the same die: I want to get lost in a good book.

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In my reckoning, this year started sometime in November 2024 when I broke through stagnancy and published a strange piece from Friday Perkins. With little actual plot, it stood out from the other skits around it, forming a disjointed journey through Friday’s mind, wherein she recovers the memories that had been stolen from her by Vladislaus Straud. Though her convictions are not always sound in reason, they are her own, and when she recovers what was once hers, it is again something to which she can lay claim and say that it belongs to her and her alone.

I tend to work the most feverishly through the long winter nights. Still, in late 2024, I was largely crafting my pieces on pen and paper, filling page upon page with my scrawlings, often striking out and removing entire passages before digitizing the material for publication. I tried my hand at humor when Mandarc failed to understand the concerns of his very human girlfriend, Yuki Behr. AVAEL finally followed her heart, bionic and caged as it had become. And Cedric found release in the darkness.

Straud Mansion would ring in 2025 and celebrate its last new year, but not until the old grievances were brought to the forefront. Between Davian’s disappearance, the threat of the Reveal, and amidst an ever growing rank of enemies, it became apparent that I had written myself into a corner. There were too many voices, all desperate to be heard. But Straud is one who is silent and patient, and when he’s had enough, he can, and will, summon the power necessary to obliterate a demon.

On February 14, I uploaded the last chapter of FPMC. These read-alouds followed in step with a disorganized dream I’d once had to create my own audio books. But with Cedric bidding goodnight to Kevin, now on the cusp of making the change in the world of which he’d always dreamt, I knew there was nothing more that these two could say to each other. After decades of friendship, brotherhood, and things unsaid, this was what made sense in this world: each of them returning to their own apartments, walking parallel paths forward, but never touching.

I had more to carve, but I had run out of marble.

Back in Black

I had, for a long time, been quite dissatisfied with many of my storylines. Many, dare I say most, lingered bitterly incomplete, and even the few seen to fruition stunk of a novice’s clumsy hand. Avaelle’s unhappy childhood brought a melancholy sense of longing to the beginning of the series, only to be abandoned for well over a century. Vincent’s saga was one of the few completed storylines, and yet the climax was rushed and concluded without a real sense of the stakes involved; I had built to an epic fight, and, at the last minute, slumped out with a whimper. There were certainly types of content with which I struggled, but I kept going, knowing I needed more practice.

But one question came back to me time and time again.

How did Cedric become a vampire? What was he like before he died? What of his humanity did he retain, clinging to his bones like perfume, and what did he lose irretrievably?

A vampire story without a sense of loss is just a gloomy power fantasy with a side of O-negative. Fine if that’s what you’re into, but that wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. For the vast majority of FPMC, none of my characters felt like vampires. The part where they were monstrous blood-drinkers conveniently happened during their off-hours, and while in the narrator’s spotlight they were shining beacons of impeccable morality. Was it true, in their bloodlust, that they’d never drained a creature and played at the skeletal hand of Death? Where was the Consent that I had been questioning since Cedric first rose unbidden to an endless vigil?

It didn’t add up. I had to start from the beginning.

The Convergent Eigenspace

The series, with an intentional nod to zero-indexing, begins with Book 0: What Time Cannot Touch. This installment details a beginning-before-the-beginning: the life of Cedric as a teenager before his descent into vampirism. In themes I had previously shied away from exploring, an intense, and sometimes uncomfortable, attention is paid to a young person’s initial conditions, and the inescapable fact that all subsequent events must evolve forward from the starting line.

As a man on the cusp of childhood’s end, Cedric is disaffected and aimless. He cannot put name to the persistent state of want that plagues his waking moments. Reeling from a boyhood wasted in the shadow of an impassionate, drug-addled mother, he enters adulthood in dire need of connection, but without the maturity to yet know what he lacks. In his deficiency, he remains estranged from those who could help him heal, while experiencing a subconscious magnetism toward the danger and neglect that feels as a familiar set of chains. When a supposed one-time drug run lands him behind bars, he trades the prospect of a life of crime for a night in jail.

But even safe from would-be exploitation, Cedric cannot rest. The closer he has drawn to New York City, the more he has understood the meaning of the City That Never Sleeps. His night terrors have become ever more frequent and distressing, and their remnants haunt his waking hours. Ever more persistent is the irrepressible suspicion that these images are more than just symbols and allegories; they may very well be as real as they seem.

Crashing Hard

If Cedric had been anyone else, in another story, maybe he wouldn’t have made the choices he did. Maybe he wouldn’t have followed a strange woman he’d never heard of back to Queens after she volunteered a thousand bucks to open his cell and set him free. Maybe he would have faced his shame and called the people he knew deep down in his heart already loved him, good people who would do anything to keep him safe and warm.

But maybe that would have required a strength he didn’t yet possess. For him to earn that strength, he would have to continue to grow.

From the Ashes

For five years, I wrote hundreds of FPMC skits from the perspective of an ever-increasing cast of characters. Everyone had a story to tell, and I thought what better way to explore that than to see things through their eyes. I thought Cedric was to be found in his world, and that was where I turned my focus. But in mid-2025, looking back at over 400,000 words, I found I had told many small stories, but I had never succeeded in telling the big story. With twenty-one FPMC ‘books’, each told from a different perspective, character growth progressed glacially, while plot advanced at breakneck speed, unfolding before all factions had time to react.

Those first few months stumbling at the keyboard with What Time Cannot Touch were achingly slow. Transitioning from free-flowing ink to the utilitarian precision of a keyboard was a tough sell, but where I lost the analog romance, I gained the ability to take my words wherever my phone or laptop could travel. Teasing ideas out of my mind was akin to fly fishing, and in the early days, I caught little, but I improved over the summer haze. Maintaining a single character’s point-of-view required attention I had not oft practiced. I could not simply switch to someone else when the weight became heavy; rather, like Cedric, I had to endure.

To add to the difficulty, I had left behind the style I had adopted for FPMC, a style that I had come to wear as a threadbare t-shirt. Adhering to a convention that was probably more fever dream than intention from its first incarnation, I had used a screenplay-inspired format for FPMC, setting dialogue apart from descriptive text as a way to avoid repetitive dialogue tags. But what had originally seemed like liberation had revealed itself as another kind of restraint, and the end result was sometimes fragmented and unnatural, reading neither like a television production nor a traditional work of literature. And of course there was the very real concern that my unusual formatting would drive readers away before they could even glean the ideas with which I wanted them to grapple.

Winter’s Bite

Finally, the format has begun to feel more comfortable and I have settled into some conventions to organize and structure the chaos. Each chapter is a set of digestible scenes, running 3,000 to 4,000 words in total. I’ve passed 43,000 words in my debut novel’s draft, with additional scattered sketches of pivotal scenes in the latter books. Emerging on the other side of FPMC, I can’t imagine returning to the old way; I’ve discovered I thrive in the planning. Knowing where I need to end up helps me find the pieces that propel me in the right direction. And once I know the reason why a scene needs to transpire, I can select just the right word to hold the others in their coherent melody.

Once you include specialized, technical, and archaic words, the English language is said to possess nearly a million words in its entirety.

And yet, as I pick apart the shades of their meanings and muse about their lyrical qualities, trying to place each one in its proper place and give every sound a space to shine, I can’t help but feel as if it’s still not enough.

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I have been writing TCE --

Cedric could not ignore the categories Davian kept using to shape his rhetoric: they and them, we and you, Mortals and --

Who, exactly?

“I think you know it too, don’t you, Cedric?”

Davian could hardly contain himself, and he spoke with increasing confidence, a ball released to race down an incline. “Have you ever felt things just happen to work out as you want them to? Lights turn green when you’re running late? Dealt a full house and the rest of the table’s got nothing to match? Never draw the short straw in a game of --”

“Not everyone’s Talent manifests in such a manner.”

Again, the old woman with that word.

“Of course, of course,” Davian chattered dismissively. “It could be nothing like that. Everyone’s gift is unique, but there are certain similarities. Patterns.”

His eyes seemed to glimmer, completely focused on Cedric.

“The truth is that some people endure reality,” Davian spoke, seeming to look over his shoulders before he continued. “And others --”

“Make it.”

(excerpt from working draft of Chapter 10: Soaked)

Some of my enduring difficulties have been with writing Davian. I was not his original creator, rather, I inherited him.

”I want more --”

And I felt so discouraged, when Davian --

“Hard to come by --” they said. “and harder to hold.”

I recently was released to winter break, from my travails. And I aim to write. I hope to complete Act 2 of the four I have planned.

And yet, I’ve thrown myself into organizing, tabulating, stipulating, which documents should be preserved into perpetuity, and which should disappear into obscurity. And sometimes it is so difficult to look back at FPMC. So I have taken to trying to do what I could not do then.

Once, some two years ago, I thought I should preserve the voice with help. Help from the spirits from beyond.

Once, some two years ago, I thought I would revive the man who had gone. The man who had spoken, but had since been silenced. The one who would speak no more. Once, he had spoken to Mandarc as a newcomer to the coterie.

I left that behind, thinking I could not keep looking backward. And I sent Davian to the stars, thinking I could not give voice to something that was never mine.

It was Straud who would be forced to confront the absence of his old friend.

It is true that Book 0 primarily concerns Cedric’s apprenticeship under the man Davian Winchester. (Yes, I renamed him.) And I have been struggling underneath this weight, this veritable burden, because, in part--

This is not how it originally happened.

No, in fact, this was not, in the original conception of FPMC, how Cedric came to learn of the magic he possessed.

In truth it was quite different!

But maybe; maybe it was not so different.

I have chosen to modify the retelling, to tell it how it happened, how it didn’t happen, and how it should have happened.

Or how it made the most sense of happening.

43,236 words -- that’s what Novelcrafter claims I’ve penned. Barfed. Vomited upon the page.

Yes, Book 0: What Time Cannot Touch.

How you haunt me! How I despise that I feel I must get through this telling, this re-telling, this re-re-telling before I can get to the things that really happened!

Oh, but--it all really happened.

The truth is that some people endure reality--

and some make it.

(I’m not gonna crack.)

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Systems have rules. Systems are rules. Rules are systems.

OK, enough of the dullest of tautologies. I swear I’m getting somewhere. Eventually.

The Necessity of No

Earth’s reality has several concrete rules: Nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Time flows in one direction. Mass warps spacetime. They may seem arbitrary, but without them, reality breaks down. Suddenly events can have multiple outcomes and all hell breaks loose: the individuals in the universe cannot exist within it, a fate far worse than being one’s own grandpa.

Once the laws of the physical universe are established, much as we may bristle against them, individual characters have rules laid on top of this scaffolding. The great-and-powerful Genie who helps Aladdin establishes three such guidelines: he will not bring the dead back to life, he will not change the course of true love, and he will not grant more than the three allotted wishes. These rules may be consequences of the physical reality (i.e. I cannot bench-press a thousand pounds) or a statement of personal creed (e.g. I choose not to eat beef), but nevertheless, within a story, they provide a similar end result. Without the rules, what transpires has no context, meaning, or significance.

Escaping the Algorithm

I was not introduced to the world of magic and improbability in any organized fashion. I suppose, like many, I had no words for these feats of fantasy. Martin spoke to Matthias through the threads of the tapestry because the story required it. Merlin could transform into a squirrel because that was how the boy destined to be king would best learn his lessons. I didn’t think much of it and didn’t question what these characters could do because I saw how it wove a path toward what needed to happen.

Enter D&D. All at once, these feats had names, parameters, descriptions, components. Mages were casting Polymorph Self, Fireball, Sleep. Across the table we now had titles and references and words began to shape our understanding as we bickered over interpretation. Even more opaque was an attempt to quantify this world. If you don’t have initiative, you cannot act. Roll 3d6 and hope you get above 14 to kill the lich. But the very facts and figures that facilitated the social activity reduced the mystery and majesty of magic into a couple matrices and some applications of randomly generated numbers. Sometimes a spell felt akin to a chain of if-then statements, and I felt tethered to a legalism from which I yearned to escape.

States that Matter

Mage: the Ascension, the World of Darkness splat that concerns itself with all things relating to magic and those capable of wielding it, takes an entirely different approach to the realm of the unknowable outcome. Without spell lists, slots, or points, the common theme of Mage is, “reality is what you make it”. A worker of feats did not need a framework in which to work or a spell description to which to adhere, and the possibilities were endless, if held together by a tenuous belief in the Consensus.

And yet, I resisted feeling as if I had finally come home. A mage was still limited by their dots, tabulated one through five, and manifesting abilities required grasping the divide between spheres, some of which eluded my intuition. Forces, fine, Life, okay, but what is Prime?

I realized I was looking to a game system to guide me in creating something that wasn’t a game. It was a world, a story, an adventure. But I still needed rules. A system without rules is chaos by another name.

Dissolving the Dissonance

Traditionally magic is treated with a roughly Aristotelian understanding of the natural world. Heat and cold are opposing qualities, and a mage with mastery over the elements may apply them like paint upon a canvas. The mage may disturb an object otherwise lingering in patient inertia at the flick of a finger, but he still works within a science increasingly becoming obsolete.

Other types of magic had even less of a pretense of adhering to physical laws. Suggestions, illusions, divinations, these were born from the simplest desires of humanity, the basest desire for the power to remake the world into something that grants the wishes of our imagination. But trying to explain these lapses in reality as rerouted neural impulses was something few dared attempt, much less felt necessary.

But what if magic were something that kept the inexplicable mystery, but could stand tall above a modern mathematical framework? The probability functions of quantum mechanics provide the necessary backdrop for magic’s infinite range, while reinforcing the mundane reality of our day to day lives. Anything is possible, but you might have to wait a while.

Upgrading the Infrastructure

Living in a world in which a Newtonian approximation is sufficient for the vast majority of common problems, modern physics embodies a very special sort of wizardry. We found in the twentieth century that electrons never sat in any one spot, and light, too, embodied puzzling behavior, being two things while at once being neither of them entirely. And, violating the peace of an impartial universe, some other things were said to behave differently according to whether they were being observed. What did it mean, to be ‘observed’?

As our science expanded, so too did the mathematics that attempted to explain it. All possible outcomes existed as timelines radiating from a single vertex we called the present, the past and future mere constructions of our psychology. We simply couldn’t see the possibilities that didn’t intersect with our own. But that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

The magic system I wanted to develop stood right in front of me, and it very well would occupy the rest of my days to distill it into chunks comprehensible to my tiny human mind.

Fudging the Rolls

Magic at its very core concerns the fantastical ability of a human to move something from imagination into reality. In a very real sense, the things we see before us are simply a subset of the larger corpus of all things ever dreamt by Man. Where one may wish quietly upon a star for love’s true companionship, another may equally create a blight intended to exact devastating revenge, in both cases giving shape to the shadows of their imagination.

But what if someone’s gift manifested quite a different capability? Instead of changing the shape of a single possibility, their ability could pull at a thread, however faint and remote, collapsing the ones that fell between? Instead of bending the rules of reality, they would reduce the infinite paths into a single dark line, rendering certainty from uncertainty. Instead of a gardener sowing seeds, he would find himself a culling blade, destined to lop the heads of some daisies in order to favor the ones that remained.

Maybe chance is simply an illusion in a game in which I refuse to accept any roll but the one I need.

It takes wisdom, courage, and a lot of luck to realize that may look nothing like a natural 20.

( EVERY DAY IS HALLOWEEN. )

( “BLACK NO. 1” - TYPE O NEGATIVE )

Yes, I went in costume today, but who would have known?

I would like to spend some time discussing a very important figure in Cedric’s life.

For those that are familiar with my work on FPMC, you are certainly familiar with the mysterious Vincent Marscapone. Vincent is introduced in the prologue of the work, making an appearance as the reserved and self-assured husband of Myrtle Marscapone. In this piece, he discusses a New York tradition that has since fallen to the annals of time. The version of Vincent that appears here is quite different from the Vincent that appears in Act I, which details an event from which the Marscapones never fully recover. In this chronicle, I write from Vincent’s perspective as he must rise from complacency, and, arguably, the very real affliction of depression. In the most focused of the nine acts, Vincent acts the protagonist who rescues his teenaged son from the laboratory of the wicked Doctor Trelaine. Though he is successful, the entire course of the Marscapone family is irrevocably changed.

Vincent was created not truly as Vincent at all. In that ancient Sims 4 save, now all-but abandoned on the PlayStation, I created his image in 2020, without any grand idea in mind, and certainly without foresight of how deeply these characters would affect me. In two subsequent play sessions, I created two families, having freshly downloaded the Vampires and Realm of Magic DLCs. In Newcrest I created them, first Cedric, a vampire, flanked by his classmates from a wizard’s academy. I took that which was familiar and gave it my own twist. But it was their neighbors that I would say were my first real creation, given life from my own blood.

Myrtle Marscapone was an old woman, “older than sin.” Thin, tall, joy evaporated from her form, she had lines worn deep into her face, creases carved from years of looking down upon her students: some promising, most middling, and none of them living up to their full potential. She wore her grey hair in a tight bun high over her skull, always careful not to let loose a single strand.

In those days, in some kind of prophetic trance, I imagined Myrtle as a widow. Her school had since become her life, and what was left of her days as a young woman was a strange man with pale skin and wide shoulders. Kevin Marscapone, with the brown hair and narrowed eyes, was her son: a Vampire in a witch’s school. He did not leave the house often in those days, and between the digital sketchpad and the entry-level deskblock computer, he brought in the funds needed to maintain anonymity in the world of the commonplace. But his status as the primary breadwinner was never enough for him to earn esteem from his mother. What little time they spent together (Kevin rose when his mother retired) was often punctuated with bickering and disagreements. Kevin’s apparently lackadaisical, whimsical approach to life stood in stark contrast to his mother’s: serious to a fault. Myrtle, for her part, found family in the young Tzu Prano, a teenage girl who represented the old hag’s last hope in the fading years of her life. But, in Myrtle’s blindness, she could not realize how much her family was bonded, with or without her presence. Tzu, a “goofball” by nature, shared Kevin’s zeal for life and fanciful approach to the supernatural, and the two were fast friends. As the household struggled to keep up with leaky pipes and kitchen fires, Tzu got a job as a barista to supplement the house in ways her magical studies could not. And, of course, there was a fourth member of the household, but, well -- we don’t talk about Bruno.

Kevin would eventually leave his childhood home and move east. Free from the scaffolding of his upbringing, benign or malignant, he eventually pursued a career as a scientist and created a number of inventions the likes of which no Sim had ever before seen. I cannot in truth remember so clearly anymore, but I believe Vincent was a creation of my own in Dream long before he ever made it into the Sim-world. Kevin had, at this point, shed much of the affectations under which he had been created. He now had auburn hair creeping toward his temples, colorful clothing, and blood ran underneath his pinkish skin -- yes, Kevin had been cured of Vampirism. But in Vincent, his un-Earthly father, I found a home for the dark and unholy man I had long ago seen in the shadow. In this bizarre and disordered recollection, it was Vincent who was cloned from Kevin, but the truth had been obscured: it was the son who had been given the dark gift from his progenitor.

I have placed a number of elements in FPMC that draw homage to the otherworldly link between father and son. Shortly after Vincent’s departure from the corporeal world, Kevin found himself victim to disturbing visions of his deceased father, visions he initially rejected and attributed to schizophrenia. It was Cedric, ever the linchpin between the world of the ordinary and extra-natural, who urged him to trust his gut and not be so hasty to dismiss an uncomfortable revelation as mere fever dream.

As I begin to bring my ideas to fruition in TCE, I have pondered over what concepts to keep and which to prune. Make no doubt about it -- Vincent will prove an even more key character than he was in FPMC. I think for a while I was quite afraid to put voice to Vincent, anxious that I could not portray him with accuracy. Looking back on the pieces in which he plays a major role, selecting with apprehension the part he plays with introducing Cedric to his life as a vampire, I am not always so satisfied with the aura he projects. The situation became infinitely more complicated when Davian unexpectedly rebound Vincent’s soul to its flesh in the mortal realm. Knowing how, given a second chance, he would not fade again into mist, I tried to integrate him into the coterie, letting him provide fatherly advice and prepare plasma janes in the final scenes of FPMC. And yet, I knew in my heart of hearts that something here was not as it should be. I was trying to tell a story that was not of my own making. I needed to go back to the beginning, to share things as they actually, really, happened.

Kevin and Vincent do not appear in the first book of TCE, and yet their quiet presence in the dusty corners of the Magicademy casts an irrepressible haze over all that transpires during Cedric’s induction into the world of the unknown. Each and every action taken by the elderly headmistress of the foundling home is done within the shackles of her secrets. What the reader will realize upon Cedric’s resurrection is that they were always there: Myrtle was bringing food to Kevin’s room in his imprisonment, and Vincent was walking the hallways in silence, educating his son as his eventual protégé. And Cedric is incensed when he realizes what he did not know -- furious -- when he realizes he cannot have faith in what he thinks he knows. Yes, he, like the reader, must begrudgingly admit that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

There are many aspects of Vincent that will remain unchanged in the new retelling. He is still the adoptive mentor to Cedric, and he, contrasted against his son, Kevin, introduces Cedric to the world of the Vampire. Vincent is headstrong and confident, inspiring those around him to live full lives, to make each moment count, knowing even the immortal die someday. He is a bit of a puzzle, each word uttered seeming to have several more meanings underneath the first. Sometimes, after a while, one realizes that there may be more to find in what is not said, an eye for the negative space, each piece of English just a distraction from the weight of the interstellar medium.

I believe each of my characters is fully realized as I see them -- it is I, the artist, that sometimes fails with my brushstroke. There are some details I have hinted at in various skits that I will highlight and give new voice to in TCE. One of these is that Vincent walks with a cane. In the cosmos of FPMC, it is a detail included in his first appearance in the 1920s that disappears by the time he does battle with Trelaine in the 90s. I will bring it forward and incorporate this detail of his being when he trains Cedric shortly before the turn of the millennium. I do not want to make light of his disability, and it is a particular detail that his difficulty in getting around in the world of the mundane does not affect him in shape-shift -- certainly true disability is not something we can shed by pure and simple volition -- but it is important for me to make the statement that the man titled by some the “Prince of Elysion” is more than just the odd man out. He does not belong here, and yet, perhaps none are so human as he. In spite of a subtle mournfulness, he is a beacon to those around him. Dutifully, for years enduring isolation, he instilled in his son the importance of the hidden lore, knowing that there is no greater possession than knowledge. Just his mere presence inspires his followers to question and think and wonder why the man who is never in want of a joke so rarely breaks into laughter.

Of course, like all aspects of the universe, Vincent is more than he seems. He too has his flaws, and his love of the law keeps him in the dark about the chaos he cannot control. Myrtle is not alone in her suspicions of his aspirations, knowing him too well to be placated by the image of him contented with anything less than absolute majesty. She married him for love, long before she had any idea of his Vampiric nature. And yet, the more time she has spent with him, the clearer the picture has become -- Vincent never settles for anything less than the best.

Cedric’s time training as a new Vampire under Vincent is abbreviated but intense. Perhaps, still wounded from an uncertain youth, Cedric bonds in dangerous haste to the Marscapones, each of them fitting like a keystone into the chasms left by what has been taken from him. When Vincent invariably becomes yet another thing estranged, both Kevin and Cedric must cope with life in the shadow of the deceased. It will be up to them to decide how to shield their eyes and step into the light.

Cedric begins

At the end of the prologue, as Cedric is preparing to leave his hometown, he visits Diana to say his final goodbye. As she sits on a tree swing outside her house, he hands her two library books and asks if she could return them. As Cedric had aged into high school, he had begun to find it more and more difficult to slip into the world of whimsy found inside the pages of a good story. But as he looked for inspiration for his new identity, he found himself returning to where he had begun.

The name “Cedric” first appears in Walter Scott’s 1819 novel Ivanhoe. The name, having never before appeared in literature, is thought to be a misspelling of the name “Cerdic”, most famously referring to an Anglo-Saxon king who ruled over Wessex from 519-534 A.D., perhaps even founding this kingdom of a people known as the Gewisse. Although the native origin of the man is disputed, “Cerdic” is a name of Old English origin, and its most famous bearer instilled upon it connotations of bravery and leadership. There is little doubt Scott intended a comparison to be drawn between Cerdic and his character Cedric; the Saxon nobleman possesses a deep-seated pride in his heritage. His patriotism is somewhat of a liability, however, as he struggles to maintain a relationship with his son, the titular Wilfred of Ivanhoe, when the latter displays a sympathy for the Norman crown. For Scott, his character is not simply a king from the distant past, indeed, he inherits this throne, but is nevertheless something new. What is important to note about Cedric in Scott’s novel is that he is capable of character growth, and where he had once disowned his son, he is able to change his mind in the face of new information, becoming open to Norman ideals and allowing his son to marry the woman of his choosing.

Cedric hits it big

Cover of Little Lord Fauntleroy, 1886, Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett, Artist: Reginald B. Birch

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, digitized from Sp1nd01. Public domain.

It is not until Frances Hodgson Burnett publishes Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1886 that the name becomes familiar to a wider audience. In the first of Burnett’s bestsellers, we are introduced to Cedric Errol, a seven-year-old American who finds he is the only remaining heir of the Earl of Dorincourt. The young boy travels to England to meet his grandfather and eventually wins the heart of the surly old man by virtue of his generosity and beautiful heart. This classic rags-to-riches story appealed to audiences on both sides of the pond with kindness triumphing over cruelty, wisdom worth more than wealth.

Although the modern reader might be somewhat more familiar with The Secret Garden and The Little Princess, it was Little Lord Fauntleroy that skyrocketed Burnett to fame at the end of the nineteenth century. While English by birth, she later emigrated to the United States and used her knowledge of the two countries to provide commentary on the virtues of both cultures. Despite being marketed as children’s literature, little Ceddie appealed to a wide audience and inspired a number of plays based on the novel, some of which Burnett helped bring to fruition.

Tommy Russell and Elsie Leslie alternated as the title character in a New York production of ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’ in 1888-1889.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, digitized from Boston Public Library. Public domain.

Adults were taken in by the gentle strength of the young boy and his popularity spurred a viral trend in children’s fashion. The book sold over 43,000 copies in its first year, making it one of the best-selling English novels of its time. Velvet suits with lace collars, directly imitating the dress of the character, were marketed as “Fauntleroy suits” and remained popular well after the release of the book.

Three children wearing velvet suits inspired by Little Lord Fauntleroy style, between 1909 and 1932

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, digitized from Library of Congress. Public domain.

The long delicate curls worn by Cedric also peaked in popularity, and were often worn by people portraying him on stage, especially in the early decades of the twentieth century. While the broad appeal of the novel and its characters was not the first such trend in popular literature, it remains a key example of early marketing before the invention of the Internet, television, or radio.

Childhood and the Ideal Boy

Cedric Errol, despite being played by women in a number of stage productions, was never intended to be a weak portrayal of manhood. To the contrary, Cedric participates in activities to be expected of a young boy: he wins a footrace against his friends and demonstrates humility in the face of victory.

Little Lord Fauntleroy on horseback, illustration by Reginald B. Birch

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, digitized from Sp1nd01. Public domain.

He displays an interest and talent in horsemanship, far from being a woman’s domain, especially in England. Despite his rudimentary grammar, he makes a habit of keeping correspondence with his friends and associates. And perhaps most importantly of all, he displays immense respect and affection for others, be they people in positions of power over him, like his mother and grandfather, or people from whom he stands nothing to gain. When he arrives at Dorincourt, Cedric stands in stark contrast to his grandfather, a rather miserly man beset with violent fits of gout that betray his inner greed and resentment. It is little Cedric, with his bright outlook and optimism, that endures as the best personification of what a young person can be, and his crowning achievement is convincing the Earl of Dorincourt to change his ways.

Changing Perceptions of Manhood

The hardships faced by the world in the wake of the Great Depression and World Wars led to a steep decline in the popularity of stories that dealt both with the nobility and ultra-rich. This period also saw a vast pivot toward a very different view of masculinity. Utilitarian styles of fashion became preferred, and a militaristic inspiration for men’s dress reflected their thoughts and aspirations. The people had gone through significant trauma, and their changing sensibilities reflected an ideal man that did rather than felt.

Cedric gives some of his newfound wealth to an elderly apple-seller, illustration by Reginald B. Birch

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, digitized from scanned book (archive.org). Public domain.

Rejecting one who might refuse to take up the gun, “Little Lord Fauntleroy” became an insult, a slur to damn its target as pampered, priggish, and, perhaps even more directly, feminized. The boy’s admirable qualities of generosity, idealism, and wisdom were ignored in light of the greater shame: that he was somehow in violation of the precepts of masculinity. But perhaps what we need is a little more Fauntleroy.

photo by author

The first decision that must be made before a single word can be put to paper is from what perspective to tell the story. While doing my comprehensive review of FPMC, I toyed with a few possibilities, but one stood out with little contest.

Early Impressions

I pushed my first commit to FPMC on April 22, 2020. The skit was called “Consent”, and though later reorganizations of the chronology would place it as Cedric 000: Consent and mark the beginning of Act II, this was the first work I created for FPMC. Although I focus on the events as observed by Cedric, I made a clumsy attempt at a third-person external point-of-view, somewhat like one might read in a screenplay. My insistence on capitalizing the names of the characters and starkly stating the setting reinforces my attempt to create a vision that might be viewed on a television.

I was not yet ready to commit to a single point-of-view. My subsequent skits toyed with different narrators, each titled with the point-of-view character. I wrote a number of strange, exploratory pieces as I explored emotion and experience. The events transcribed in late 2020 show some refinement of the third-person perspective and motion away from the screenplay style, but the hallmarks are still present. Cedric 008: Where’s My Car maintains a third-person point-of-view, but incorporates more emotional content to detail Cedric’s desperation and confusion. I tried to apply this approach to explore the viewpoints of other characters through a singular event, as in Kevin 017: Pulse, but my application is inconsistent; Perkins 004: Liar does indeed focus on Friday’s actions, but the end of the skit reveals events that Friday could not possibly have observed.

Formative Consolidations

In 2021, I formalized the division into books by character, and began to number each skit chronologically within their book, starting with Mandarc 001: Stoop Kid. I still maintained a style reminiscent of a screenplay, but continued to add detail on inner thoughts and feelings that deviated from the usual limitations of a strict third-person point-of-view.

The first character for which first-person felt a natural consequence was Straud. At this point in my development, I simply wrote in the way I felt most comfortable, and it was his voice that arose from my own. I found myself wanting to express these characters in the most accurate way I could, and I think Straud says it best in Straud 020: Under Her Nose, where he seems to address the reader with a simple, “Why not?”

“I” Spy

When I went back in time to write the events of Kevin’s abduction, I had become more comfortable writing in the first-person. I began Act I with Kevin 001: Trick, where I willfully and without shame began writing the young boy as he might have written himself. It was thrilling to slip into their shoes and truly live as them through their words.

But there were issues with my attempt. I struggled to find a voice for my female characters, and Myrtle 004: Unsupervised notably deviates from the pattern I had established with the other three characters that narrate this chronicle. The other problem I had with writing in the first-person was that it became very jarring to read the story in sequence because of the huge cast of characters. The perspective established on one page would suddenly be quite different on the next, and the singular letter to which I had become so attached had entirely lost its meaning.

By the time I wrote the last hurrah of FPMC, starting with Perkins 010: A Stitch In Time, I had begun to come full circle. While Friday would never be granted use of the first-person pronoun, the final eight skits afterward are all written from the perspective of their titular character, including AVAEL and Roxanne, a decision I made in an effort to fight against my previous difficulties with female voices.

Love and Letting Go

When I first started writing FPMC, I had no idea where I was going. I soon had a hundred characters and I felt everyone had something important to say. My cast kept expanding and I was adding more and more pairs of eyes to the world. Wearing a lot of hats helped me grow as a writer and learn how to think like my characters, but it was not an approachable creation. Bouncing around to different viewpoints made a complex universe that felt very real to me, but it was not always clear who was talking and why. Characters grew in leaps and bounds rather than in digestible increments and I realized my format and habits were actually preventing me from accomplishing the goal I had set out to do from the very beginning.

Who, and How?

I am not sure I struggled at all with the first question. This was always Cedric’s story. Everything I dreamt up, whether character, location, lore -- no matter how estranged, it all came back to him. I wanted to capture within his struggle the elements that echo across the human experience and unite us all. Now I had a wealth of my words to look over and determine what worked, and what didn’t.

It’s no mystery why novels are rarely composed in the first-person. The use of “I” naturally beseeches the reader to compare themselves to the other. It forces one to create barriers to protect their own self-hood from the identity of someone else. When Cedric states, “I wouldn’t say I remember every one of my victims,” does it not compel you to wonder whether you, in his moccasins, would recount the same statement? I realized I could not hope to make Cedric relatable if his words were so constantly at war with my audience.

I chose to return to the place I had begun. I would craft Cedric’s story in the third-person. That is not to say, however, that I will not include his inner voice and his personal convictions. They are very real, and an essential part of the tale I spin. At this point, I don’t think I could silence the man if I tried.