This week (today, actually) I’ve written a Halloween dialogue: Demon Zone.

Mark the doors with the sigils of the moon, of the red red river, of the biting chains. Empty dawn of its fire. Let dusk sink eternally into crepuscular paralyzation—hypnagogic, terrifying.

Thus begins the shouting match of the demons. Blood, horrible sights, and terrifying beings culminate in a conversation of violence where any talk of beauty or peace is muted.

“Three Demons” © 2021 — Randal Elon Greene

Yeah, I’ll be sending this piece out pronto. Though it might end up getting published as a poem. I say this because for a dialogue it’s awful unconversational. I just couldn’t imagine a bunch of demons who sit around and shoot the shit (well, actually I can imagine that; it’s just not how I was inspired to write this particular dialogue). “Demon Zone” does resemble a prose poem. It’s perhaps more prose than a dialogue like “Insults Two by Two,” but it’s certainly poem-like enough to get published as one. Which is fine. A poetic dialogue. A dialogical poem. Tomato, tomato.

I have enough dialogues (and drafts and drafts of dialogues) that next week I’m breaking out a file box for it all. I don’t need the old drafts, really, as everything is saved in digital form. But I like to keep these as backups and for posterity or whatever.

The only other file box I have like this is full of Descriptions of Heaven stuff. Lots and lots of DoH stuff. Seriously, every draft was like a whole little book. I can’t imagine what my WIP, a novel, will fill. Two? Three file boxes? Yikes! I better invest should I ever see any on sale.

Notable life news: As some of you know, for a while my best friend, Mike, lived with my wife and I. We had a huge combined library and liked to chat about books, physics, and life. Well, we still like to chat, but nowadays we do a lot of that chatting here at the hotel (where I typically do my blog posts). He lives at the hotel now where both he and I work. It’s pretty awesome. For me anyway. Mike doesn’t seem to mind it much either.

One of the reasons he moved in with us was so we could work on a video project together. The project is Mike’s baby. I wrote for it, completing two scripts. While I never expected the same level of output (I write constantly; he writes sparingly), when no scripts were forthcoming from him, the project was pretty much red lighted.

Well, after revisiting the idea and steering our thoughts in a new direction (one which he and I both feel is a better direction) we may be starting the project again. Maybe. We’ll see. I do feel confident enough to actually write about it here because Mike is working on a script. I am in a state of squee about this, since I really think this collaboration could be fun and educational for both of us.

For me, this is a yellow light. I want to see Mike actually complete something for this project before I dive back in. Luckily, I was able to repurpose one of my scripts for a creative nonfiction piece (edited and sent out to potential publishers last week). If Mike manages to stay focused on our project, then come the new year when this dialogue challenge is done, I’ll green light my script writing again.