On Writing: General structure – Crises & Disasters & Consequences

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, EscrituraLeave a comment

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

Once you’ve come up with a list of meaningful plot points that should happen in your story, the Acts structure (generally three, but could be strengthened by turning it into five) is a proven method to organize those plot points in a way that makes the story more cohesive, and usually building up in tension.

The following list of questions should help you craft compelling and impactful crises and disasters for your story, ensuring that the plot points have consequences.

  • What’s the worst thing that could happen in your story?
  • Is there a point in this story, just prior to the resolution, in which the hero endures some deeply significant test?
  • How does the story bring the protagonist face to face with their darkest fear, or weakest link, and at the crisis point, forces them to confront it?
  • Can you set up the story so that at one point, it leaves the protagonist with no options, no detours, and no help, making them well and truly lost?
  • Do the characters consistently have to choose between goods or between evils instead of choosing between good and evil?
  • Can you apply pressure and time constraints so that the protagonist is forced to make a decision fast?
  • For every significant event in the story, brainstorm a list of consequences.
  • Try to ensure that all major decisions in the story have real consequences. Our heroes make painful choices and must live with the grave consequences of the risks they take.
  • Could you weave into the story an example of what would happen were the protagonist fail to accomplish the overall goal?
  • What are the death elements of the story (in which the protagonist could face an ultimate physical, psychological, social, and/or professional death), and when does the protagonist experience those realizations?

Neural Pulse, Pt. 4 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

I brandished the stun spear, then pressed its twin prongs against the figure and thumbed the trigger on the grip. With a muffled crackle dampened by my helmet, the figure crumpled, inertia dragging its limp form across the ground to carve a furrow in the earth.

We slunk closer, like wary cats, to the overturned machine. Its six metallic legs—narrow, jointed, eerily reminiscent of flesh-stripped limbs—splayed rigidly to one side. As Jing crouched, the oval beam of his flashlight skated over the reflective metal.

“Did you see it make a move to attack us?”

“If you wanted me to waste time weighing pros and cons before stunning anything that approaches,” I snapped, my voice edged, “you should’ve let Dr. Halperin carry the spear. But if someone does come at us with ill intent, she’ll try to reason with them.”

I handed the stun spear to my friend. After she wedged it under one arm, her gloved hands reclaimed the multimeter.

“If you’re going to mention me, use my title.”

Jing traced a gloved finger along the machine’s bronzy carapace.

“A robot.”

Its compound eye—a clustered dome of hundreds of bulbous diodes protruding from the chassis—glowed with amber light. Metal groaned inside the machine, the casing shuddering. We lurched backward. A sound like a steel ball grinding through clockwork innards erupted from its core. The robot righted itself. Its six spindled legs flexed, hoisting it upright before it marched between us, the amber light swaying as its gait stabilized. The container trailing us calculated a collision course with the machine, and pivoted sharply aside.

The robot led us to the sarcophagus mounted on the wall. It halted in front. We encircled the machine, dousing it in the beams of our flashlights. A flexible appendage—an antenna resembling that of some insect—emerged from the robot’s compound eye, probing the air until it brushed the sarcophagus’s casing. The robot froze.

Mara aimed her multimeter at it. Behind her helmet’s visor, an eyebrow arched. We waited as if standing before a melting block of ice, anticipating the trapped creature within to stir.

The robot retracted its antenna back into its chassis. It maneuvered its six legs in a choreographed pivot, spinning 180 degrees before trudging toward the rear of the dome, imprinting circular tracks into the sandy earth. We hurried after it.

“You plan to introduce us?” I asked.

“Would you chat with one of our robots?” Jing replied. “They likely programmed it with just enough intelligence for maintenance tasks.”

“Kirochka, stop it,” Mara said.

I stepped ahead to block the robot’s path. Stretching out a leg, I planted my boot like a barrier over its compound eye. The machine shoved against my limb, its legs thrashing. When Mara gripped the robot’s base and lifted it, its own limbs scrambled for purchase in the air.

“Heavy?” I asked.

“Like a materializer.”

She hobbled, cradling the machine, to the cargo container trailing us. Jing opened it. Mara placed the robot upside-down inside. She straightened and puffed audibly while she lighted the interior of the container as though expecting defiance. Five seconds later, she secured the lid. Behind her visor, she narrowed her eyes and exhaled sharply.

“Why bother?” I asked.

“It’s alien tech, dimwit. Who knows if they stumbled on some revolutionary method while building a maintenance bot.”

The muscles of Mara’s mouth, which I’d assumed were atrophied, curved upward. But if any hangar employee discovered the burner was missing, it would erase that smile and the ones to follow.

We were advancing toward the ramp when a muffled series of thuds distracted us. The container trailing behind us shuddered as if someone inside were thrashing against its walls. After a few seconds, it grew still.

“Poor thing,” I said.

“They programmed it to maintain this facility,” Mara replied. “We didn’t kidnap a child.”

We gathered at the summit of the ramp and lit the descent. They’d polished the curved slope of rock but left the walls raw, as excavated: overlapping sheets of smoke-gray stone, streaked with clay-colored veins like rusting metal. The angles of some outcrops neared ninety degrees, threatening to snag and tear our suits. Under my flashlight’s beam, the rock looked powdery, like the walls of an apartment abandoned for decades.

Jing and Mara stared at me as if awaiting permission to proceed. I took a few steps down the ramp to prove it would hold under our soles. Caterpillar tracks had littered the floor with crusts of dirt. When I turned, the beams of their flashlights whitened my vision.

“Stay close.”

Jing and I descended shoulder-to-shoulder, though our opposite shoulders grazed the rock walls, while Mara lagged behind. The Geiger counter shattered the silence with its crackling.

A different kind of excitement thrummed through me, distinct from the tension that had gripped me when nailing a difficult landing or overtaking another racer on a curve. What awaited us underground? How would I react to what I’d see? During missions where I’d had to land in clearings amid alien vegetation, the scientists and soldiers had infected me with their enthusiasm, but their expedition ventured forth without me. I kept the ship running in case we needed to flee, and to stave off boredom, I’d invent dangers.

“They bury their living spaces,” Jing said, and I couldn’t tell if he’d been speaking for a while. “To shield them from explorers, weather, and meteorite impacts.”

My flashlight traced with inky curves the fissures between slate-gray rock layers. In some veins, bronze-like flecks sparkled like sequins. Our beams painted shadow-drawings across the curved wall and central pillar, while five meters down the ramp, a wall of blackness loomed. How many intelligent creatures could tolerate living in this darkness?

“Mara, what kind of rock did they excavate here?”

“What’d you say?”

I glanced back, but my friend was gone. I hurried up the ramp until I collided with the woman’s outstretched fist—she’d been mapping the route as if planning a documentary.

“You vanished,” I said.

“Surprised?”

I ran my fingers over the streaked protrusions on the wall.

“I was asking about the rock.”

Mara studied me with her feline eyes, as if deciphering a joke.

“Do I look like a geologist to you?”

A couple of minutes later, as we descended, a roar of machinery assaulted us. A work shift starting at some factory. We froze mid-step, staring at each other, dazzled by the intersecting beams of our flashlights. The ramp and walls vibrated. My helmet filled with a thunderous noise, like a rock crusher grinding stones.

My ears rang, and I wanted to jam my index fingers straight into my eardrums. I hurried down the ramp, determined to stop whatever was happening.

I reached a landing that opened into a rectangular basement carved from raw rock. Four metal pillars braced the ceiling, and to the left of the entrance gaped an abyss. About twenty meters below, my beam illuminated a quivering mound of bronze-colored crushed stone.

Jing wandered dazedly. I stepped ahead, gripped the shoulder of his suit, and yanked him back. When the xenobiologist noticed the chasm, he rubbed my helmet like it was a dog’s head.

We edged cautiously toward the precipice—the source of the roar. From the ceiling of the cavity hung a fluted metal column, greasy and gleaming, terminating at the bottom in a massive drill bit. It spun relentlessly, pulverizing rock and spewing debris.

My eardrums throbbed. The floor trembled, threatening to hurl one of us into the abyss with the next violent shake.

A few meters from the edge stood a pedestal topped with a control panel. A hexagonal button jutted prominently. Crowded into the corner was a wardrobe-sized machine, forged from the same bronzy metal as the sarcophagus. A feeder tube snaked from its side. I leaned in: rubble had piled up at its base. At the machine’s front, I found a door, and when I opened it, the lattice of guides and tubes inside reminded me of a materializer.

I swept my flashlight beam across the rest of the basement, searching for hypersleep chambers, but the room was barren.

Mara, her face contorted from the noise, aimed a multimeter at the pedestal’s panel. Jing hunched nearby, staring at me through eyes narrowed to slits, his mouth twisted as if he’d bitten into a rancid almond. Someone’s voice crackled over the radio—drowned by static.

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

I feel like I need to apologize for the quality of this story’s beginning. The translation improves upon the original prose, but I can’t do much regarding the rest of the awkwardness. I’ve even had to remove a few sentences whose meaning was lost to my current self. I considered removing Mara’s cryptic “If you’re going to mention me, use my title,” which I’m not sure what it refers to, and felt like an odd thing to say regardless. These days I wouldn’t write such a story, as I’m no longer in the same headspace.

Anyway, I hope that at least one person out there is getting anything out of these first few parts. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the worst first act of the six novellas I wrote back-to-back all those years ago.

The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 18 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

Elena held out the excerpt, and I took it. I perched on the coarse, waist-high wall, legs outstretched. I would surrender to her woven spell, a meticulously crafted incantation designed to bottle up a experience that would revive its magic upon consumption.

The narrator wondered how long they had spent in the clearing as if the outer world had gone dark. From dawn to dusk, a granite sky peered through the canopy, and night blackened to tar in minutes. The narrator forgot which weekday dawned, but they wanted to forget such concepts existed.

The narrator sat on the pebbled shore of a lagoon when hunger twisted their guts. Their belly was sunken. They needed to leave the clearing for provisions. The narrator waited for a woman to surface from the stagnant water, but fifteen minutes passed without any ripple stirring the green scum and mud. That woman submerged in the lagoon as casually as if retreating to the bathroom, and whenever she returned, soaked and dripping cold water, she curled against the narrator as they peeled lichen patches from her skin.

I looked up and found Elena’s pale blues fixed on me, as if scrutinizing every subtle twitch of my expression while I absorbed her writing. She lounged on the lawn chair, her hands folded over the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie.

“May I rely on your external input to learn the gender of the narrator?” I asked.

“Sure. I’m cheating you out of the full experience; a regular reader would already know. As you might imagine, I can’t start any random scene reminding them that the narrator has a penis. So does the protagonist of today’s other excerpt.”

“That makes three out of four male narrators so far. Does it mean anything?”

“That’s how the stories came out. As the conduit, I don’t question these things. If the story demands a male narrator, who am I to argue? Besides, I have no issues with my narrators’ gender. I only care if they interest me. Now, read on.”

The narrator left the clearing in darkness. Distant streetlights invaded through the passageway’s rectangle. Emerging onto the deserted street, he hurried to the opposite sidewalk’s vending machines like a thief stealing food from sleepers’ homes. Next time hunger speared him, he was kissing that woman, her legs entwined with his. The narrator’s dizziness spiked, and he rolled onto his back, gasping. He imagined himself leaving the forest again, but against the nakedness of skulking amidst cement, metal and glass, that ache for food didn’t matter.

Memories of the outside world faded like yellowing photographs. Minutes after twilight yielded to a granite dawn and birdsong, hunger cramps woke the narrator. His guts clung like an old balloon. He pictured the effort to dress, go down the trail through the trees, and hurry to the vending machines hunched and disheveled. He resolved to stay in the clearing. Sheltering there had stripped society’s makeup. He refused to breathe in its stink again even if his starved stomach devoured its own lining and spilled the acid into his core.

The woman looped her arms around the narrator’s neck and urged him to eat. He claimed he would last until hunger stopped his thoughts. She insisted he needn’t endure it. The narrator refused to leave the clearing again, and considered hunting for critters. But she brought up a better option: to feed from her. Then, she leaned back in the grass, tilting sideways. She clenched her side at kidney level and yanked until she tore a handful of white flesh out. In the gash, grooves scarred where her fingers had dug in. Blood pooled. The narrator froze as she folded his fingers around the proffered chunk of meat.

Saliva drowned his tongue. He yearned to savor that flesh as much as he longed to hold the woman against him, joining their warmth like two coals in a bonfire. As he brought the piece to his mouth, he could tell apart the white threads of fiber in the meat. Its surface had grown slick with juice from the pressure of his fingers. His teeth grazed the soft flesh. Saliva spilled from the corners of his mouth, trickling down his chin. He clenched his jaw millimeter by millimeter, the fibers taut against the tip of his tongue. Before he could refuse to feast on the woman, a hot, sap-like juice flooded his mouth. He tore off a morsel and swallowed. It left an aftertaste of turkey. The rest, he devoured, then he licked the juice off his fingers.

A crisp rip startled me from the fictive dream. Elena had torn open the pack of Príncipe chocolate cookies. She plucked one, bit into it, then chewed as crumbs clung to her lips. I imagined myself as that cookie: crushed by her teeth, then ground to fine particles that mingled with hot saliva, coalescing into a doughy pulp. It would slide down the tight, pulsing cylinder of her esophagus and into her stomach, where the pulp would dissolve in gastric acid and become her flesh and blood. A warm vibration welled within my loins.

Her white throat contracted as she swallowed. She leaned forward to pick up the carton of Don Simón from the grass, lifted it, and sipped. A droplet of orange juice escaped her mouth, but she caught it with her thumb.

“Sorry for the noise. You’ve yet to touch your peanuts. Want me to toss them?”

“Don’t worry,” I said, my voice dry. “I can survive for weeks on my fat reserves. And I’d rather not distract myself from your writing.”

Elena shrugged, then set the carton back on the ground.

“Alright. I’ll just keep munching on my cookies.”

She stuffed the remainder of the cookie into her mouth. Crumbs sprinkled her hoodie.

I returned to the excerpt. When the narrator looked up, shame flooded him. The gash in the woman’s side dripped blood down her hip, splattering the grass and pooling on the dirt. He rushed to cover the hole with his hands, but warm blood seeped between his fingers like soup. The woman calmed him, assuring him that her flesh would regrow. He wanted to laugh, but a whimper escaped. He couldn’t live off eating her. She doubted he would eat so much that he’d swallow her whole. Besides, he argued, he needed to ingest proper liquids. The woman lay on her back, then cupped one breast and squeezed the nipple. Thick milk oozed like honey.

From then on, the narrator avoided glancing at the clearing’s exit. He felt that a monstrous hunter stalked that pine-guarded trail, and if he wandered its bends and hollows, the creature would ambush him, tear his limbs from his torso, slurp the marrow off his splintered bones. He wondered how he had dared to enter and leave this clearing without realizing it. Beyond the forest, the machinery of society would grind on, its gears, lubricated with the sweat of nine-to-five drones, screeching as they pulverized bones caught in their teeth. Whenever such images and memories assailed him, patches of his brain crackled with electricity. He wanted to pinpoint those patches and scour them with bleach.

They rolled in the grass, rubbing sweat and soil onto each other’s skin as her tongue probed his mouth, and the part of his brain that believed itself in charge checked out. Sometimes his consciousness resurfaced and found him biting and tearing at her breasts, digging deeper until he should have chewed through her ribs and burst a lung, but instead, just a handspan beneath her skin lay white meat free of veins, arteries, tendons, organs, cartilage, or bones. Kissing along her nape and spine, he sank his teeth into her back and gnawed off a chunk. His mouth flooded with blood that flowed hot and coppery down his throat.

Lying beside her, his belly full, the narrator traced the contours of her ribs and pelvis with his fingertips. Her skeleton held. But whenever he bit, he found white flesh. Even so, a moment after tearing off a piece, the wound oozed blood, and minutes later, when he looked back, her body had stiched itself together. The missing bite was outlined in sticky, half-clotted threads of blood.

Once, the narrator devoured her neck to the extent that he nearly decapitated her. Another time, prying apart her labia with his tongue, as she bucked her hips to his mouth, he chewed into her womb and beyond, splitting her abdomen open to the ribs. He ate an entire thigh and ended up clutching her detached calf, foot dangling from the end. He shoved himself backward on his ass, driving his heels into the earth, and screamed. But when the narrator dared to glance back at the woman, she stood on both legs, and his hand gripped air.

Author’s note: Today’s song is “Velvet Waltz” by Built to Spill.

And why not, here’s a 90s anime version of that concept:

Life update (03/29/2025)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

This afternoon, on a Saturday, I wanted to leave the house and get some fresh air. Whenever I consider going out, I usually need to have a purpose; walking around town mainly depresses me with how much it has gone to hell, and sitting at a coffee shop means dealing with human beings. Suddenly I thought, “Why don’t I just grab my guitar and head to the woods, like old times?” I hadn’t played the guitar since 2021, around the time I started my currently unfinished novel We’re Fucked.

I’m not entirely sure why I stopped playing, given that I loved doing so. Of course, I’ve had bad experiences: a neighbor complained (although I used to play my electric Gibson at the time), one time a bunch of punks mocked me because I was playing (as in, “Haha, he’s playing the guitar, what a dork.” It made me wonder what was wrong with their generation), another time some guy interrupted me because he thought I had stolen his phone, another guy interrupted me because he wanted to talk at length about his own journey with the guitar…

I don’t play the guitar because I want to be listened to. I do it because if feels great. It’s another way of communing with my subconscious, which is mainly why I do things unrelated to keeping my body alive or amassing money. That said, I did have one unexpectedly positive interaction when playing the guitar: a young mother with her daughter, who may have been six or so, stood there smiling at me as I played the entirety of Godspeed! You Black Emperor’s “East Hastings,” a perfectly reasonable song to smile at. At one point of the performance, the mother brought to both our attention that a squirrel had stopped to listen to my song as well. When the song ended, both clapped (the young mother and her daughter), and they went away pleased. I usually feel that most people around me are annoyed or disturbed by my presence, and wish I wasn’t there, but in that case those two seemed genuinely grateful.

Anyway, I have taken the guitar and headed to the nearby woods. I also brought a camping stool that I had only used once before and that came away diminished because they had the bright idea to attach removable end caps to each leg, and I lost one of them; the moment you sit in mud, it gets pressed down hard, and the mud closes over it. Anyway, I sat down as comfortably as I could, which wasn’t much, and played through some songs, mainly Iron & Wine’s “Passing Afternoon,” Eagles’ “Hotel California,” Waxahatchee’s “Swan Dive,” and Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.” Over and over. Van Morrison’s song always reminds me of my Izar, motocross legend, love of my life. I found myself belting out the lyrics while playing those simple chords, and it felt so good, man. Freeing. Like connecting with something meaningful.

As far as I’m concerned, everyone should learn how to play an instrument and then some of their favorite songs on it. Creative people in particular should do so, even if they’re not musically-inclined in general, because it facilitates communication with your subconcious, which every artistic endeavor relies on.

Now I’m back home. My right hip hurts from the sitting posture, the fingertips of my left hand regret that I allowed them to lose their callus, and I feel chilly from having stayed in the shade of those woods for a couple of hours. But I guess I enjoyed the experience enough to write this post about it.

Neural Pulse, Pt. 3 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

I ordered the helmet’s AI to enlarge the complex’s map and keep it suspended five meters ahead. The three-dimensional map skimmed the folds of sandy earth like a piece of fabric floating on the sea. We circled the hill while Jing and Mara flanked me as though trying to bolster their own courage.

At the base of the crater, the dome emerged. Starlight bathed its crystalline shell, but failed to banish the cavernous darkness of the dome’s three-meter-high mouth.

Mara aimed her camera at the tracks etched into the esplanade before the complex. These crisscrossing, overlapping patterns had been imprinted by the parallel treads of some vehicle, one that had worked around the smaller crater centered in the clearing. We approached. Jing knelt and traced the outline of one track with a gloved finger.

Mara and I continued toward the hole, which had depressed the earth in a five-meter circumference, exposing a rocky base. She focused on the crater with the camera mounted on her arm while pressing buttons along its side. The camera took photos, emitting a succession of flashes. Mara unclipped her Geiger counter from her belt and pointed it at the hole.

I listened, trying to distinguish the crackles.

“Should we be hearing it through the helmet?”

“I’m sending the signal to my suit.”

“What’s it telling you?”

The woman commanded her helmet to display the options. Mara’s gaze drifted up and down as she blinked to make selections. The Geiger counter’s staccato crackling broke into the radio frequency like an uninvited speaker.

“Does that mean it’s radioactive?” I asked.

“Slightly above the ambient radioactivity.”

“Enough to worry about?”

She shook her head.

“Not unless you’re planning to build a house on top of it.”

Jing overtook us while brandishing his thermal camera. He headed straight for the black mouth of the dome waiting about a hundred meters away. When we caught up to the man, his nerves were tugging at his smile.

“How do you think we should approach the unknown?” said the xenobiologist.

“You’re asking me?”

“I’ve studied every previous encounter, reviewed the reports, devoured the documentaries. I’ve read the novelizations for pleasure. But you’ve transported scientists to virgin planets.”

“I used to land as close as safety regulations allowed. I kept the ship running hot in case a stampede of scientists and soldiers pursued by some beast came charging out of the jungle. But it never happened. I just transported tired scientists and soldiers back.”

Jing raised his gaze to the black mouth of the dome, that loomed larger as we approached, and he furrowed his brow as if organizing his assumptions at a forced march. He swept the frontal space in an arc with the thermal camera. I stole glances at the blue-toned figures that materialized on its screen. The black mouth of the dome opened into a void. Orange hues painted the vault, which the starlight was heating. To the left of the dome, a rectangular, sarcophagus-like box mounted horizontally on the wall swayed yellow.

“Entrance twice as tall as those in our equivalent buildings,” Jing said. “Bipeds.”

“Or they just prefer to build them tall,” Mara said.

I commanded my helmet to shut off the projection of the complex’s map. About fifteen meters from the mouth of the dome, its darkness lightened to dark grays. Parallel caterpillar tracks extended inward until merging with the shadows.

Mara advanced diagonally ahead of us toward the right flank of the dome, and aimed her camera at the piece protruding from the hexagonal panels. An antenna oriented toward the skies, constructed of crystalline material.

“They communicate with their civilization, assuming they power the antenna.”

We drew close to the mouth of the dome. The angle from which the star poured its arctic-blue light eclipsed the interior.

My chest tingled as if I were venturing to explore a cavern whose ceiling hung with thousands of sleeping creatures. The evolutionary adaptations their isolated development had afforded them for survival would bewilder me, just like those videos broadcast on news programs whenever explorers uncovered another ecosystem.

I commanded my helmet to activate its flashlight. Its white beam illuminated the sandy ground and the layers of tread tracks. When Jing and Mara mimicked my action, their ovals of light danced across the earth and climbed upward through the emptiness toward the vaulted ceiling.

We ventured into a cavity, as if those who had constructed the dome had abandoned it before furnishing the interior. Jing studied the surroundings while frowning. Mara moved away toward the left flank, where the sarcophagus had gleamed in the thermal camera, and I followed the xenobiologist, who swept the oval of light from his flashlight along the curved wall. The light skimmed over the inner face of the hexagonal panels like it would over tarnished metal.

“No signs or engravings,” said Jing. “No evidence of language. Nothing that denotes the intelligence they employed to construct the building.”

As I twirled the electroshock lance like a baton, during one glance at the ground I noticed circular impressions distributed between the caterpillar tracks—the kind that a staff would make. I tapped Jing on the shoulder and pointed to the circular hollows. The xenobiologist crouched. With his index finger, he traced a pattern in the air.

“Six legs.”

We followed the hollows toward the left flank of the dome. The beams from our flashlights illuminated the golden back of Mara’s suit as she studied with an instrument the mounted sarcophagus. It had been molded from a single piece of bronzy metal. She turned, then narrowed her eyelids against the brightness of our beams.

“They built the dome with solar panels made of some photovoltaic material,” she said, “and the flow of electricity converges here. Batteries, I imagine. They siphon from the star all the energy they need. A fraction will drain into the antenna and the machine that manages communication.”

“And the rest for the habitation pods,” said Jing. “The hypersleep chambers.”

“Which we haven’t seen yet.” She pointed with her measuring device at the furthest end of the sarcophagus. “The electricity flows inside the panels toward the back of the building.”

We followed Mara as she tracked the wiring like an arrow marking the path. Our beams swept across the sandy earth, their white ovals distorting with the depressions and ridges of the caterpillar tracks.

“What will you call the aliens?” I asked, my voice electrified.

“I hadn’t thought of a specific name,” Jing said. “It would depend on their physiognomy, their culture. Though I had considered slipping in a reference to my young son, if the teams that review the nomenclature accept it.”

“Whoever discovers the aliens names them, I suppose.”

“You’re assuming your superiors will refrain from stealing your credit,” Mara said to Jing.

“I should be able to name them. But I will have co-discovered them with you ladies.”

Our beams revealed the curve at the bottom of the dome, and when lowered, the beams converged on a hole excavated in the rock beneath the layer of sandy earth. A polished stone ramp descended like a spiral staircase. I had stepped forward and opened my mouth to ask Jing’s opinion when a honey-colored glow emerged from the ramp, followed by a meter-tall figure gleaming bronze, that headed straight toward us.

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 17 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

At the end of César Figuerido Street, we turned right and ascended a stretch of pavement winding along a towering wall of trees and wild undergrowth. Ferns draped their fronds over moss-covered gutters. Elena trailed close behind, gripping her backpack’s strap as she shifted the load. Her nostrils flared, her lips tightened, and sweat glimmered at her hairline. Her pale blues were fixed ahead with the determination of someone resigned to enduring torture with dignity.

“You doing alright, Elena?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“The path will level out soon.”

We crossed the road to the side closest to civilization. A middle-aged couple, the man sporting a yellow-and-white knitted earflap beanie, talked loudly in a Slavic language as they exited a parking lot and strode past us. A distant whistle blew, accompanied by a burst of cheering. Between the trunks of the trees, I glimpsed a deep-green field of artificial turf marked for football and flanked by two silvery lightning towers. Color-coded middle-schoolers pursued a ball, intending to kick it toward the opposite goal, while their relatives watched from concrete stands.

The hill flattened. Across a roundabout, dozens of headstones topped by crosses jutted out over a three-meter-tall stone wall.

“Oh, is that the cemetery?” Elena asked, her voice strained.

“It better be.”

“Are you taking me there?”

I shook my head.

“You sure? I could lie down on a slab of marble and catch my breath.”

“You’ll recover soon enough.”

“Or we could find a nice grave for you to bury me in. Save you the trouble of digging a pit in the forest. You could toss some dirt in my face and then just pretend that you never met me.”

“I’m not letting you die yet. We have a lot to talk about.”

“I guess we could bring up some topics.”

“Should I have taken you to another coffee shop instead?”

“No, I’m glad you’re showing me around. It’s a good kind of pain. I’d rather suffer than feel nothing. Besides, I think my heart rate’s approaching normal human levels. Tell me, Jon. Are any of your relatives buried there?”

“Yeah, my grandparents. Never bothered to locate their graves, though. They’re a bunch of bones now.”

We followed the path as it veered left, away from the cemetery. To our right, beyond a fenced garden, the landscape unfurled: Mount San Marcial, carpeted in rolling waves of pine and rising to a pitiful 220 meters. A titanic cloudbank, billowing over the mountain’s crest, eclipsed the chapel at its peak, that struggled to emerge from the treeline. The bluish-gray core of the cloudbank promised rain.

“The mountain looks different from here,” Elena said. “More alive.”

“We’re drawn to higher ground, where the world appears richer in meaning, where we feel safer. From a defensive standpoint, at least.”

“Is that so? Must be the Basque genes. But I get it. I wouldn’t want to be caught at the bottom of a valley when the floods come.”

Further along the sidewalk stood a three-story rectangular building composed of pale-cream bricks, its windows shuttered. Mortar lines across the facade formed a tight grid. Toki-Alai School. Rust had ravaged its fence; you could snag your clothes or scrape off your skin on the jagged edge of a post.

I looked back for Elena. She had crossed the road and stepped onto a grassy patch overgrown with weeds and tiny blossoms of yellow. Crisp white stripes ran down the side of her black joggers. Her pale neck curved elegantly, her almond-blonde ponytail dangling from the back of her head. Elena’s gaze had caught on the panorama: a sprawling array of trucks, some bright blue or red, lined in rows at a transportation yard as large as a stadium, in a stark contrast to the undulating green hills beyond.

When I approached Elena, I wished I had brought a camera, or could stop time. Sunlight cascaded down her face, sculpting her forehead, the bridge of her nose, her high cheekbones, her slightly-parted lips. From beneath the skin of her eyelids, those glacial blues glowed with an ethereal intensity. She evoked a wanderer from some bygone epic, standing before a war-torn vista. She could have been a bardic song, a lament, an ode to a fallen kingdom.

“I guess it isn’t a complete hellscape,” Elena murmured. “I have no idea where I am. This place, the fact that you exist and also have a weird mind… The more I interact with reality, the less familiar it becomes.”

A cool breeze wafted the scent of hillside grass and earth and pine, mingling with the tang of truck exhaust.

“In the spirit of sharing awkward stuff,” I said, “I regret that I will never drive a truck for a living.”

Elena whipped her head toward me, a mischievous smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, drawing dimples on her cheeks.

“What? Why?”

“Well, think of the solitude. All those hours to yourself on the open road, discovering new sights. They say the brain mainly reacts to novelty, so it can fend off predators. If you head away from home regularly, you’ll always feel alive. And imagine the conversations you could have with yourself in the driver’s seat. You could write, too, between naps, in motels or rest areas.”

“That’s a romantic and likely inaccurate portrayal of a trucker’s life. You’d have to deal with the hassle of loading and unloading cargo, navigating roundabouts in a hulk, driving at night. I picture them snagging their trailers on posts, falling asleep behind the wheel, slamming into cars, flattening old people. You’d have to sleep in rest areas, where any shithead could try to break into your cab.”

“You’d also command a multi-ton killing machine that can obliterate anything in its path, up to and including the laws of physics.”

Elena chuckled.

“Figures. You’re aching for some truckmageddon. Maybe with a side of strangling prostitutes.”

“Only a small percentage of truckers are serial killers, you know.”

“Oh, but I see it now: a trucker poet, crushed in the cab of his rig, his unpublished masterpiece scattered across the highway, pages soaked in blood. A crow would land on the rim of the shattered windshield and peck out his eyes.”

“Damn it, woman. Let’s just get to our destination.”

Past the school, a lawn caught the sunlight, forming a shimmering carpet of green. Across, set against the blue sky, loomed a pockmarked ruin, its rugged stones darkened by centuries of moss and grime. Small plants burst like wild hair from fractures and shadowed crevices.

“The hell’s this?” Elena asked. “A ruin out of nowhere?”

“Gazteluzar. Built in the sixteenth century, I believe.”

“So it was here. Gazteluzar, meaning ‘old castle.’ Quite the hyperbolic name, don’t you think? Barely qualified as a fortress.”

We crossed the lawn, our shoes treading over soft grass, and slipped under a rough archway into a courtyard. The sunlit walls rose in a jumble of irregular stones and smaller filler pieces, as if built hurriedly from nearby rocks. Bushes hugged the crumbling corners. I guided Elena toward a circular clearing enclosed by low, lichen-encrusted walls hinting at the foundations of a turret. At the circle’s center, decades of foot traffic had stripped away the grass, exposing bare stone.

Standing against a curved section of wall, a folding lawn chair faced us, its seat and backrest composed of red and navy interwoven strips of plastic webbing. In this dilapidated fortress, the chair looked like it had materialized from another dimension.

“You’ve brought a lawn chair up here?” Elena asked, amusement creeping into her voice. “Just for me to rest? What a gentleman.”

“I’ll gladly take the credit for the work of some anonymous benefactor.”

“It doesn’t even smell of stale beer or piss. The kind of neighborhood where nobody steals an abandoned chair, huh? I better take advantage of it before the owner comes along and shoos me away.”

Elena unslung her backpack and dropped it onto the ground. With a groan of relief, she sank into the creaking chair, its plastic strips sagging under her weight. Reclining with her eyes closed, she draped her arms over the armrests and stretched out her legs. After a couple of deep breaths, she turned her head and threw me a languid, heavy-lidded glance.

“You took one hell of a gamble, Johnny boy.”

“How so?”

“Bringing a woman you barely know to a secluded ruin. Most would think, ‘Does this big, bearded fellow believe I aspire to become an archaeologist?’ Nevermind that reaching this place requires an Olympic fitness level.”

“No gamble at all. You’re not most women. I brought you here because this is what you’re like.”

Elena lifted her head from the backrest. Her ivory skin accentuated those pale blues as they locked with my eyes, granting me passage through the darkness of her pupils into her abyssal void, a space preceding language, filled with black stars and white blood. Her lips curved faintly into a placid smile.

“You do understand me, don’t you? Better than anyone ever has. I should run away while I can.” She sighed, then lifted her backpack onto her lap. “But I’m fairly easy. I appreciate most places as long as they aren’t packed with people. Better than staying at home with my parents and their endless disappointment.”

Elena unzipped her backpack. Amid a crinkling of plastic, she pulled out the carton of Don Simón orange juice, unscrewed the cap, tilted her head back, and chugged. She then rested the carton on the ground between her canvas shoes. As she licked her lips, she reached into her backpack again and brought out her blue folder. She opened it and retrieved a stapled stack of papers.

“You may enjoy this one. Also takes place in a secluded clearing.”

Author’s note: today’s song is “Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts” by Wolf Parade.

Did the Ghibli thing

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Inteligencia artificialLeave a comment

In case you haven’t been around for the past couple of days, OpenAI (creators of ChatGPT, the company that has the infamous record of charging the most for one of its AI models) released a revolutionary image generation model that’s leagues above what was possible before. People have gone nuts asking ChatGPT to generate images of themselves and their families (and memes) in Studio Ghibli’s lovely style. Here is the result with a couple of old photos of mine, from around the time the events of The Scrap Colossus take place.

Credit where credit is due: Studio Ghibli is the legendary Japanese crew responsible for unforgettable films like Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Grave of the Fireflies, My Neighbor Totoro, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and more.

I wondered what would happened if I drew a shitty manga portrait with my mouse on Paint and told ChatGPT to make it into something professional looking in Ghibli’s style. The shocking results are below.

That mouth was supposed to be open, but other than that… Jeez.

Neural Pulse, Pt. 2 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

Jing’s voice, which belonged to the type of neighbor who would occasionally show up offering a tub of food, invaded my helmet as if the xenobiologist had hunched over my ear.

“Can you help me?”

He had climbed the steps to the cargo compartment and was gripping the handle like the lid of a stubborn jar refusing to open. When I approached, Jing descended the steps and moved aside.

“I’ve never worked with one of these vessels before.”

I released the safety mechanism on the handle and slid the door open with a single pull. In the circular hollow, like the inside of a can, the containers waited stacked and secured with taut netting.

“Don’t worry. Nobody is born knowing.”

Jing laughed politely. I gave him space while the xenobiologist removed the containers one by one and gathered them several paces from the ship. When he crouched beside a container, I stood up next to him.

“Have you done this before?”

“I’ve been transported to many planets.”

“To an uncivilized one?”

He lifted his face to smile at me.

“That’s new.”

He sank one knee into the sandy earth and opened the container’s lid. Inside he had organized smaller containers and measuring instruments. I recognized a thermal camera.

At the top of the ladder to the cabin, the hatch to the depressurization chamber had closed. I surveyed the ship’s surroundings. Dozens of meters up the slope, the previous landing had carved descending tracks in the hillside, like the drag marks of some deep-sea monster across the abyssal floor.

“Have you seen Halperin leave?”

Jing, who was emptying the container and arranging the instruments on the sandy ground, looked up in surprise, glanced around, and shook his head.

“I’m in the cabin,” Mara said over the radio.

I bit my lower lip and took a deep breath. I climbed the ladder. Turned the hatch handle, yanked the hatch open, and entered. As hissing sounds enveloped me, I waited for the chamber to pressurize, then I opened the door to the command cabin.

Mara, seated at the control panel with her helmet and gloves on, was refreshing on a monitor the frequencies used by the station. I approached until I could distinguish the profile of her face through her helmet lens. The curvature magnified my friend’s features in a way I had never seen before, a face from which strangers expected to receive the same candor with which they treated her, but it belonged to a nervous creature.

I leaned on the upper section of the control panel.

“I suppose you’re checking to reassure yourself.”

“For now, we remain invisible.”

“With luck, we’ll return to the hangar stuffed with artifacts, long before anyone notices the ship is missing. Some days they don’t even bother to inventory the old burners. They think nobody would pilot them.”

“After that first landing, I understand.” When Mara stood up, her features twisted as if seized by a gut-wrenching cramp. “I hope we’re lucky as you say. I thought I would acclimate when we reached the planet, but my nerves are getting worse.”

We passed through the decompression chamber and descended the ladder. Jing was emptying the second container. We advanced toward him, but Mara lagged behind, contemplating the vast stretches of walnut-brown earth as if she had awakened in the middle of the night in some unknown bedroom. The landscape was crisscrossed by layers of hills and mountains that faded into purplish hues with distance. The mountain peaks jutted out bone-white like splinters.

Clustered around the xenobiologist were containers and gauges. I nudged a metal box with the toe of my boot; on its top surface, a display showed rows of numbers and codes.

“I can’t imagine what half of this stuff is for.”

“Routine equipment,” Jing said.

“But you haven’t come to explore a cave bordering on a colony, Jing. Time is pressing. By now we should be heading down toward the dome.”

Mara hurried to the closed container and opened it. She pulled out a Geiger counter. Crouching, both scientists focused on readying the equipment. Each piece of gear they set down on the sandy ground kicked up a cloud of dust that the limited gravity was slow to settle.

If only I could rub my face. I paced about ten meters away from them, longing to scout the crater alone before the two scientists appeared at the crest of the slope lugging their gear. The waiting chained me, and I pictured a hangar employee stopping before the burner’s vacant spot and reporting its absence to his superior.

“Got a moment?” Jing asked.

I approached. The xenobiologist had gotten to his feet, and from that angle, the star’s light highlighted the gray strands at the side of his head, where his black hair was still thick. With his right hand, Jing brandished an electroshock spear. Extending fifty centimeters up from the handle was an iron-gray shaft terminating in two prongs like a snake’s fangs.

Jing handed me the spear. I hefted it, turning it over as light glinted along its polished shaft.

“Planning to wake them from hypersleep?”

“It looks abandoned from the outside, but maybe someone keeps watch in shifts. Security measure. Even if we just came to say hello, no one invited us.”

I raised the spear and pressed the button. A crackling arc of sky-blue flame leaped between the prongs at the tip. When I released the button, the arc vanished, leaving a wisp of smoke that dissipated in the breeze.

“The charge will run out,” Jing said.

Mara appeared at his side. She had clipped an array of meters to her suit’s belt, among which I recognized a multimeter and a Geiger counter. She had mounted a camera on the thick, reinforced fabric of her left sleeve. It would record whatever she pointed at. The woman hid her nervousness behind an expression carved from milky quartz.

Jing programmed an empty container to follow him. He slid a pry bar through a loop on his belt and clipped on an electric screwdriver. He walked closer, each footstep kicking up a plume of dust. The container trailed the xenobiologist like a dog.

“Ready?” I asked.

As they nodded, arctic blue reflections slid up and down their helmet visors.

I marched towards the edge of the hill, tapping my suit’s shoulder with the electroshock spear.

“Let’s go say hello to those aliens and dismantle their house.”

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

In case you’re thinking, ‘This is shit,’ I must admit that the beginning of the story is my least favorite part of the six novellas I wrote about ten years ago, and this scene in particular may be the most boring. It makes me cringe to think that the judges of a couple of contests read it. So if you have gotten anything of value out of this scene, the story only improves from now on, as far as I remember.

This story is something of a homage to two stories: first, Michael Crichton’s Sphere, my favorite novel as a teen. Second, the first novel I ever attempted to write: a disastrous, almost-incoherent tale about space marines doing dodgy shit, which I started when I was fifteen or so and eventually abandoned when I was twenty. I dreaded to read any excerpt of those manuscripts (I rewrote the story several times, as I had no fucking clue what I was doing), because they mainly displayed my psychotic state in that miserable period of my life.

A few years ago, as I cleaning out stuff from my youth, I threw away all my remaining copies of that manuscript. A stark contrast with an instance when I was nineteen in which I forgot a corrected manuscript in a neighboring city and I nearly had a mental breakdown until I managed to get it back. Discarding stories that don’t work, and that may even poison your current writing if you let them in again, is a way of growing as a writer. I think so, at least.

Although I thankfully remember little of those years, I recall I used to be a bit of a pantser (writing without a clear map), which I have abhorred since. Every scene in a story functions effectively only in relation to the broader constellation of planned scenes. You won’t fix it in post, trust me; by then, the words will feel carved in stone. These days not only I keep chronologically organized notes and Excel files with scene lists, but I have also adopted the “manga series” style of nailing a scene in one shot, which forces you to make all individual parts compelling in some way.

On Writing: General structure – Revision

On By Jon UreñaIn advice, EscrituraLeave a comment

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

Once you’ve come up with a list of meaningful plot points that should happen in your story, the Acts structure (generally three, but could be strengthened by turning it into five) is a proven method to organize those plot points in a way that makes the story more cohesive, and usually building up in tension.

Once you’ve settled on an ordered list of scenes, the following questions should allow you to revise it carefully, to ensure that all the scenes have earned their stay.

  • Does the story start at the last possible moment?
  • Imagine your first couple of scenes being the first ten minutes of a movie. Do you think you’d sit there bored and wondering who these people are and when the hell the story is going to kick in? How would those first couple of scenes suck the reader in?
  • Look at the juxtaposition between individual scenes and consider reordering.
  • Can you cut any scene? If you can remove it without risking the collapse of the whole story, throw it out.
  • Does everything in your story’s cause-and-effect trajectory revolve around the protagonist’s quest (the story question)? If not, try to get rid of those scenes.
  • Try to combine scenes so each one is packed, but make sure each scene accomplishes essentially one action.
  • Go through every plot point other than the first, and ensure that each of them escalates from at least one previous plot point.
  • Go through every plot point and ensure that they have real consequences, that they make at least one other scene that follows inevitable.
  • Go through every plot point and ensure that they respect the context of the act they belong to. If the plot point belongs to the traditional second act (second, third, and fourth in a five-act structure), how does the plot point belong to a series of actions in which the character confronts and resists some type of death (physical, psychological, social), against some opposing force?
  • Go through every significant disaster or plot point, and consider how you’ve set things up so that something else could have happened.
  • If three crises hit close together, try to merge them into a single scene of supreme crisis. That would multiply the danger those characters face.
  • Is there at least one “Holy crap!” scene?
  • Put a check by every one of your scenes you consider to be “good.” Don’t lie either. Be honest with yourself. Don’t consider your structure done until at least half of those scenes are top notch.
  • Pinpoint all the moments that challenged your protagonist and caused him to take action.
  • Can every scene challenge the protagonist’s flaw? The action should somehow serve to pose them that fundamental dramatic question, ‘who am I?’ Are they going to be the old, flawed version of themselves, or are they going to become someone new?
  • How does the plot constantly force your increasingly-reluctant protagonist to change?
  • Do your scenes provide enough surprises to keep things unpredictable?
  • How do you make the likelihood of a negative outcome for the story believable?
  • Do the crises build from meaningful but not irreversible to life changing and irreversible?
  • Consider whether the ending is premature. Does the hero have his big insight early, ending his development then, and making everything else anticlimatic?
  • Does the hero achieve his desire too quickly?