Nicodemus, the Librarian of Riggleman Manor, is determined to save the Queen. Having obtained an Opus, he and his fairy, Vellum, are headed to the police station in the city of Charles Gate, to see if they can help.
D. Michl Lowe
I’m starting to understand what Anne Rice harped on so often in her Vampire Chronicles so much. Eternal life here on Earth would not be as great as some might believe it would be. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think I could make it work, but it wouldn’t be all unicorns and rainbows like you might first believe. In the Vampire Chronicles, the vampire Lestat, the most famous vampire after Dracula I would argue, often laments being “alive” for so long. Vampires often have to go into decades-long hibernation just to be able to deal with living so long.
The loss and pain of losing others tend to catch up to these creatures and cause massive amounts of pain and depression. I have lost more people in my life than I thought I would by this point in my life. Currently, I am 41 years old, and I can think of many friends that I have already lost to death and many more family members. I would like to talk about one of these that has been on my mind here recently and why I miss him. For the sake of anyone who might know these folks and be sad with me, I am going to use a fake name.
When I was a kid, I had a good friend. I know, shocking that I had a friend, but I did. And this friend was a great guy. I will call him Charles. When I was around eight years old, Charles and I’s entire relationship consisted of playing Nintendo and using the Game Genie to try to find ways to make Mario invincible so we could actually beat Super Mario 3. We were terrible at it. He would come to my house and spend the night and we would stay up to all hours of the night playing games together, going on adventures, and discovering new worlds through my little 13-inch TV. Later on, I got a new 25-inch TV and we thought we had died and gone to gaming heaven, it was so big!
When I was around 14 years old, we had upgraded our gaming to the Super Nintendo and one weekend Charles brought over a game on a Friday night that he had borrowed from a friend for the weekend. We started playing Chrono Trigger, a Japanese RPG, at around 6:00 p.m. We saw the credits roll at around 8:00 a.m. the next morning. It was the first time I had ever stayed up all night. It also helped that Chrono Trigger is one of the greatest games of all time. The story sucked us in. Time travel, revenge, and alien invaders who are trying to literally eat the Earth kept us glued to the TV set.
Charles and I grew apart after High School. The next time I heard about him, my mother was telling me that he had died. We never heard what had killed him, he was still really young. I was at the end of my time in college at MVNU and I remember Dad asking if I wanted to go to the funeral. I said yes. We went and I remember seeing his family there, but I don’t think they recognized me. I’m sure they were in shock. It was so sudden after all. It was one of the first times I had lost a childhood friend. To this day, I drive past his old house and always… always think about my friend.
Every year, I play through Chrono Trigger at least once. I play through the adventure I had with my friend and think about the first time I went on this journey. How childhood felt like it had been forgotten, we were adults; staying up late and doing what we wanted. We could save the world from the comfort of my bedroom. We could be heroes and leave the confines of a little holler in Sissonville to roam a new and magical world, if only for a little while. Just one night. For just one night we were more than just little boys, trying to understand the world and our place in it. Charles was a good friend. He was my friend and I will always remember him.
I guess, I just miss my friend.
D. Michl Lowe
If you look at the picture above, you might be remiss to think I stare at the wall all day and to some degree you would be right. However, the pictures haphazardly taped to the wall around me are all important parts of the creative process from my book. You might not be able to fully tell by looking at it, but the maps have minor and major changes made to them. The one on the right has the most.
The black and white pictures on the left are mostly armor, clothing, and weapons from throughout history. I admit, I would rather have a nice bay window behind my desk to glance out of, but I like my little corner. The temperature is cool down in the basement and at times even quiet. So there’s an allure to the basement space that makes it nearly ideal for a writer.
However, I take some umbrage at saying I don’t have a view. I do have a view. In fact, I have a very unique view. My view is a window into a world where I am God. I don’t say that lightly either. Writing is an interesting pastime. Writers spend a large portion of their lives creating story and character. In other words, they make people who live out lives in worlds of the writer’s creation. Whatever happens to them, at them, by them, all of it, is the design of the writer.
We get to play at being God. I was talking to a new friend of mine and we were discussing different books we had read. This new friend and I suddenly realised we had both read the same book and nearly at the same time exclaimed, “man, that character was messed up!” speaking about a particular character who had a rough life growing up. When we read a story, or watch a movie or tv show, we allow our brains to move us into that reality. We become.part of that world, if for only a little while. It’s a truly magical and wonderful ability we have.
So I do have a view. I view the World of Pillar. The Mammon Engine is not just a book, but a place I feel I watch through the window of the computer screen. I am getting to know the characters of Thistlewart, Dasa, Christoph, Meshiah, Nicodemus, and Schalk. I watch them and listen to them. They speak to each other and in turn, they speak to me. I get to spend to each of them and talk to each of them through the mouths of the other characters. At times, these characters are more real to me than people I see on the news or people I pass on the street. I am intimately aware of Meshiah’s doubt. I feel Thistwart’s shame and Christoph’s anger at God. Dasa’s loss and depression are at times my own. Dasa is pictured below.
Maybe someday, when I finally finish this book, you will fall in love with this world and these peoples as I have. Maybe for you, you will begin to understand why staring at the wall has been so fascinating to me. Maybe you too will feel the shame and anger and adventure I feel. I hope you get that chance, and soon.
D. Michl Lowe
So my wife and I recently took the kids to a roller skating rink. First off, these still exist. Secondly. The one we went to could have been mistaken for a crack den. Or at least what I assume a crack den looks like. I nearly passed it for not realizing it was the place. It was built inside what I assume is a condemned school gymnasium from 1973. You might think I am kidding. I am not. See photo below. My middle daughter brought a friend and I apologized that she would need to get a tetanus shot after coming with us to this place.
Anyway, this got me thinking about how much things change. When I was a kid, going to the roller skating rink was a highlight of school trips. Thinking back on it now though, sure there was the fun going going fast, but the thrill of the place was finding a girl to hold hands with during the “couples skate” time. Also, the lead up to that time, there would be a whisper campaign of friends going to ask other friends if they wanted to be your couple skate partner.
As a child, that thrill of holding hands and the build up of who it was going to be was what made that time special. We were too young for real boyfriends or girlfriends, but playing the part was exciting. I walked out on the rink today and realized the thrill of childhood newness was gone. My wife skated by me and I realized I already had my partner to hold hands with. There was no mystery or thrill in wondering who, but that was okay.
That thrill has been replaced with the maturity of a deep and meaningful relationship. One that has led to my children being born and getting to see them experience things in somewhat the same way I did as a child. There was no couple skate today, but my girls come home from middle school talking about their friends who are “dating”. Alicia and I don’t allow boyfriends until they are 16 years old. Which might sound old fashioned, but we find allowing them to focus on childhood has worked out well so far.
I have often said that my current life is my favorite time of my life. I am 40 years old this year. That being said, I said that at 35 and also at 30. At 25 and at 20. I also said it at 15, and while I might not directly remember, I’m sure I said it at 10 and 5 as well. My point is, while I appreciate my past, I am happy with my life now and am looking forward to the future.
D. Michl Lowe
As a writer, I am often split in my attention. While I might be talking to someone or doing a task, my brain is always going over some aspect of my book. Maybe I am considering some part of the world of the book, here recently that’s been the magic system and religions of the people there. How do those things work? Why are they the way they are? Who are the major characters which will interact with those aspects of the world? How will the plot play into these things I am thinking up? All these types of questions are constantly running back and forth in my brain. I even dream about these things. The other night, I woke up and had to grab my phone to write down parts of my dream that would play into the story.
I have been told since I was a kid that I have my head in the clouds. Every single report card I ever got in grade school said that, “Michl is a great student, very smart, but he has his head in the clouds”. I get that I was ADD as a kid (it was undiagnosed), but I think that might continue today, but with very different distractions. Sometimes my wife will talk about how I don’t listen to her sometimes when she is talking. That might be true, but sometimes I think some of those times might be me being in my own head, running through characters, plots, world building, magic, and other things. Now to be clear, this isn’t a huge problem in our marriage, Alicia and I are actually doing pretty well.
However, I wonder if other authors have the same process in their minds. I keep notes on my phone and in my computer, but these things are never ending. There are always more notes, ideas, and characters to dream up and think about. I get inspired by a lot of things and new ideas constantly come into my brain.
I was rewriting a section where one of my characters is teaching a class. I decided to have the character open up to his class about a different part of his personality that I thought would be neat to explore. The issue was, I hadn’t written out that aspect of the character yet, so for the last couple of days my brain has been running through that part of his nature. I finished writing that new section yesterday and feel good about it, but it just makes me realize how much more I need to unpack the characters beliefs.
Am I alone in being borderline obsessed with the book worlds I am creating? I feel like it’s hard to talk to people about my ideas though. Partly because I don’t want to always be talking about my books, but also because there’s a part of me that doesn’t believe my writing is good. I think every author feels that way sometimes, but it’s still something I am acutely aware of. Does anyone else have feelings like this? Let me know in the comments below.
D. Michl Lowe
You would think that the story of this mower would be over, but it’s not. A week or so after that incident, dad had fixed the mower’s breaks and I got a call from him. Again, make sure to read his lines with a heavy southern accent.
“Well hello there son! How are ya do’n?”
“Hey, Dad, what’s up?”
“Well, after fixin’ the mower there, I was thinking about it and decided to go on out and get myself a new mower. So I was a wonder’n if you would like to buy my old mower?”
I thought about it. Yes, this mower had nearly killed me, but it was fixed now and I wouldn’t need to take it down that steep hill again because it would stay at my house. So it should be alright, right? I bought the mower.
Mistakes were made.
That first day that I had the mower I was in the garage and went over to the mower and noticed it was low on gas. So I opened up the hood, twisted off the gas cap, picked up the gas can, filled the tank, and then shut the hood. I started the mower up and got to the mowing process.
If you caught that, you are a step ahead of where I was at the time.
Now, I should mention something about this mower. It was a little old. As such, if the mower was ever shut off without turning the actual key to shut it off (like if you got off the seat the safety switch turned off the engine), it would backfire with a very loud bang. Anyway, I was about halfway through the first lap around the yard, when I found a hole that I didn’t expect. The front tire took a dive into this hole and I took a dive right off the side of the mower and onto the ground. I wasn’t hurt, but of course, the mower shut off using the safety switch under the seat.
As I was getting back up to the mower to make sure it stopped, the engine backfired, and that would be when a pillar of fire went up from the engine ten feet into the air. I would miss that eyebrow on that side. It was my favorite. For that matter, I enjoyed that half of my beard too… and the hair from that side of my head. Smacking my head seemed to put out the flames from that, but then I was faced with a slightly larger issue, the entire mower was not engulfed in flames.
Looking around desperately, I noticed the water hose was on this side of the house. Quickly I ran over to it, it was a good twenty meters from where I was. Upon reaching it, I noticed it wasn’t the kind that cranked, it was one where you had to unloop each loop to get the length of hose you needed, so you couldn’t just pull. I began unlooping the hose! Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip… check distance and amount of hose dispensed… flip, flip… look again, flip. I grabbed the prayer end of the hose and ran towards the mower, which was still burning. I made it three-fourths of the way when I was suddenly jerked to a halt.
Not enough hose!
I ran back to the hose holder again. Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip. Analyzed the distance yet again. Flip, flip. Ran back and grabbed the sprayer end of the hose and made it to the still burning mower. Pointing the nozzle at the mower, I gripped down on the handle to start the flow of the water…
No water!
Again, I ran back to the hose dispenser and turned the little wheel to let the water start to flow. Wonk, wonk, wonk, wonk. Looked out to check the flow of the water, wonk, wonk, wonk. Then I ran back to the mower yet again. Picked up the nozzle and began spraying the water all over the mower. There was a sizzle and hiss as the water doused the flames.
I stood there a moment, soaked, burnt, and exhausted. I felt the side of my head and felt the little balls of burned hair. Luckily, other than the hair, I didn’t seem to be hurt. I called dad and told him what happened, yelling at him that apparently his former mower was possessed and trying to kill me since this was the second time. I was pushing the mower up the hill as I was talking to him, the phone sitting on the wet seat.
After asking me if I was okay, he asked, “Did you put the gas cap back on the gas tank inside the hood? I stopped pushing the mower and cocked my head to the side. Then I opened the hood and looked in. There was the engine and the plastic gas tank just behind it. The cap of the tank sat on top of the engine, not screwed onto the tank. “See!” I yelled, “That proves it! The mower took the gas cap off to attempt to kill me!” I went to screw the cap back onto the gas tank and it didn’t fit anymore. That’s what happens when the threads of the opening look like a painting from Salvador Dali. Placing it on top of the opening I hit it with my fist and it snapped into place. “I wonder if it still runs…” I said to myself. I knew the answer before I even turned the key. A mower doesn’t tend to run with all the wiring for it looks like it came off a taffy puller. Pushing the mower back into the garage, I sighed. Apparently, there were only two realities available to me, either I was foolish enough to leave the cap off, or this mower was possessed and out to get me. Obviously, it was the latter.
D. Michl Lowe
Alicia and I had recently bought a new house. It was bigger than our first home and actually had a yard. Part of the plan was to have a yard so we could get the girls (and us) a dog. As such, we needed a new mower, since our old push mower wasn’t really going to be up to the job of this new yard, but they were expensive, and I was cheap. So-called up my dad who now lived just down the hill from us.
“Hey, dad! You wouldn’t let me borrow your mower would you?” I said.
Just as a side note, while it’s not true of him, I find it very funny to give him a strong southern accent when I read his words in my head, or when I am telling this story out loud to people.
“Well, sure son. Why don’t cha just come on down here and we can take a look at letting ya get a hold of that thing.” Again, use a deep southern accent, it helps.
I drove down to dad’s house and then went through the typical dad lecture about how to use a riding lawn mower without chopping off your own leg and also breaking the mower at the same time. I would recount it here for you, but I am sure you have heard similar lectures from your own dad or dad-type person in your own life. As such, I was soon driving the mower back up the hill to my new house to get busy with mowing the lawn.
It should be noted, that our new house was on top of a fairly large mountain. The road to get to the house is also fairly steep. A solid forty-five-degree angle leads the road to get to our house. Several neighbors’ houses dot the road on the way up to ours. That’s an important note for later, remember that. Anyway, I got the mower to the house and began to mow the lawn. Everything went great, the grass was mowed and the mower did fine. And then it came time to take the mower back to dad’s house.
I got back on the mower and began driving it across the top of the mountain to get to the section of the road where it started to slope down the hill. As I started down the steep slope, the breaks began to do… odd things. They became very touchy. I would barely push on them and they would jerk the whole mower to a complete stop. So I would let off the brake, coast down the hill, and then suddenly slam to a halt. Start, stop. Start, stop. Start, stop. For the first twenty meters or so, this was how it went, and then, suddenly… Snap! The breaks broke.
The mower started speeding up. Faster and faster it began careening down the hill. As it was hitting small imperfections in the blacktop, it felt like I was riding a bucking bull at seventy miles per hour. I kept hitting the breaks, but there was nothing, no response at all. The ride was quickly becoming a dangerous situation. Then an idea sprung into my mind. I noticed my neighbor’s driveway going off to the right and his lawn stretching out flat. At the moment, I thought, “I can just steer the mower over across his driveway and into his yard and the flat grass and friction will slow me down!”
So that was what I attempted to do, I swerved the mower onto his driveway, but there was a problem. What I didn’t see was that the edge of his driveway was sloped up into a ramp. So when I hit the edge of his driveway, it ramped the mower up into a jump! I swear three dogs ran underneath the mower while it was in the air. I landed with a hard crunch in the grass and then another problem became apparent.
I was headed directly for the neighbor’s front door, which was made of etched glass. I remember thinking that the gentle swirling pattern of the glass was going to make for beautiful shards. Trying to turn the wheel was useless, the grass was still wet with dew and I was sliding closer and closer to the door. The mower came to a halt and barely tapped its front bumper on the door. I sat on the mower, my legs upended over the hood, with my arms wrapped tightly over the wheel. I’m sure I looked a sight. Slowly I glanced around, looking to see if any of my neighbors had witnessed me nearly kill myself on the back of a John Deere. No one apparently saw. I quickly put the mower back in gear and coasted the rest of the way down the hill and was able to get the mower back to my dad. His response when hearing the story? “So, what you’re saying is… you broke my mower.”
To be continued…
D. Michl Lowe
One night, I was sitting up in my bed, quietly just waiting to get sleepy. My bed was on the opposite wall from the door to the hallway. As a sat there, I saw a figure of a man walk past my doorway towards the bathroom. It was dark (I didn’t have a night light) and it was only a silhouette that I saw, the color of the back of your eyelids when you close your eyes, a swirling mix of colors that ultimately would be called black. I assumed it was dad going to the restroom, but as I sat there waiting for the light of the bathroom to come on as he used it, that didn’t happen. Instead, the figure came back and stared into my room. It then came into my room and moved silently over to my bed and stood over me.
This was not my father. This was a figure that was made of darkness, the blank face looked down at me and then turned and silently strode from the room. As soon as it passed beyond the threshold of my door, I bolted from the bed, screaming, running towards my parent’s room. When I should have run into the back of that thing, I ran into the front of my dad who had heard me scream, and came running from his room. I was comforted and put back into bed. What did I see that night? I’m not sure. A demon, maybe? This will be a question I get answered when I finally arrive in heaven someday.
D. Michl Lowe
When I would go to my Aunt Sherry’s house to spend time with my cousin Randy, we would often make the trek down the road to the local swimming hole. The Little Kanawha River and Little Spring Creek came together in a “T” about a mile down the road from his house. It was here, just beyond the bridge of Little Spring Creek that we had a small sandy beach that resided below the limbs of several trees. It was shady, cool, and slightly deep compared to much of the river. Water that reached our shoulders wasn’t common in the Little Kanawha River around where we were familiar.
So, we would head down there and wade out into the middle of the water, playing as children often do. However, each time we ventured down to that area, there was always a constant, up in the branches of a beech tree, there was a family of black snakes. The beech tree was very large, larger around than I could reach my arms, even today. It was also hollow. On top of the tree, it had been hit by lightning, so it was sheared off at a completely horizontal angle, creating a flat area at the top of the tree where the snakes curled up with each other.
As we swam below, we could look up and see the coils of the snakes drooping down over the edges of the flat area. One of them in particular was extremely large. As a kid, I remember him being at least ten feet long. However, in talking with Randy recently, he states the largest was more like six feet, but I will swear till the day I die that it was at least ten feet long and ten inches around the waist.
The interesting thing about these snakes is that we didn’t mind they were there at all. For one, they never bothered us at all. They stayed in their tree. For another, we understood that black snakes killed and ate poisonous snakes like Copper Heads and Rattlers. They also ate river rats. We knew we didn’t have to worry about those issues at our swimming hole. You might wonder how we knew how big they were if they were always in the tree.
If we sat on the sandbank long enough and quiet enough, eventually the snakes would get hot up in the tree. So, if we were fishing down there on the bank, or just hanging around, sometimes we would see a snake drop down out of the tree and splash into the water. It would bob to the surface and wind its way through the water to the base of the tree and slither up the hollow to get back to the top where it would curl up again. We could see how long they were as they swept through the water. I remember ten feet; Randy, not so much. He says six or seven.
D. Michl Lowe
Time spent at Aunt Sherry’s house was cathartic in a lot of ways. Thinking back on that time there was a lot of downtimes; time spent just lazing the days away. However, there were also times when Randy and I would come up with some crazy idea and start something that would be special in some way. Ideas that in retrospect were stories from childhood that would stick with my mind and grow into tales of meaning and adventure.
There was an old barn across the road from Randy’s house. It was falling apart. The walls were leaning at an odd angle and walking into it, you always had to watch your feet for fear that there might be a copperhead lurking under each board. Truthfully, there most likely was, but when we entered that place, it was with a purpose. Usually, it was to get boards. The rusty nails didn’t offer much resistance to our yanks as we would cart tons of this stuff over to the river and up into a tree to make our treehouse. One summer I came back to Aunt Sherry’s only to find that Randy had built an elaborate spire of platforms and walls, and even trap doors into the tree.
At one point we were “fishing” for catfish one night and decided that building a fire on the wooden floor of one of the platforms was a great idea. Twenty minutes into the fire and the fire itself suddenly disappeared in a bright flash. Having burned a hole through the floor, the entire campfire fell right through it and landed on the ground twelve feet below in a spectacular explosion of sparks. We howled in laughter.
One time, we were hunting through the old barn and came across a large tractor tire insert. It was the large rubber part that would go inside the hard ribbed rubber outsole of the tire. Upon examining it, it was clear that if we blew air into this tire, it would expand and become a huge innertube. At first, we were thinking about how neat it would be to go down the river with this large innertube, but as we talked about it, an idea wormed its way into my mind. What if we strapped boards to the top of this and made it into a boat?
So that’s what we did. Taking rope we lashed a platform of boards to the top of the innertube and created a fine boat. We went into the woods and cut down some small trees and removed the limbs to make some twelve-foot-long poles to act as quant poles used to push us through the water instead of paddles. My Uncle helped us to load the boat into the back of his truck and then drove several miles up the river. After unloading the boat into the water, we set sail down the river back towards Randy Allen’s house.
Several times during the journey, we got stuck on sand bars or other obstacles, but we managed to get ourselves free and continue on. After what I remember to be a long time, like nearly an hour, we arrived at the section of the river behind Randy’s house. Since things had gone so well, we decided to continue going. We continued sailing down the river until we got to the old swimming hole where the snakes hung from the giant beach tree. We continued on. However, it was just after this point those things got a little hairy. With the addition of the creek water entering the river at the swimming hole, the river itself got much swifter, deeper, and wider.
It was becoming much more difficult and often impossible for us to steer, slow, and especially to stop our boat. In the end, after trying for some time to get the boat over the side of the river so that we might walk home and have Uncle Randy come to retrieve our boat with his truck, we were unable to stop it. We abandoned our boat, which continued to sail down the river without us. I like to think that somewhere down there it made it out to the ocean and saved some shipwrecked sailors.
D. Michl Lowe
D. Michl Lowe - Author 