The Mind of Bryan Lee Peterson

I have entered a short story into Indiehorror.org’s Cannibal Cookoff short story contest. My entry is called “Control Group.” I’d incourage you to visit the forums here to read all of the entries. You have to join to vote, and you can vote for three. I’m not a big rah-rah kind of guy when it comes to this, vote for the best ones. That’s how it works.

That being said, this is a synchronicities post, and two of them happened in writing this post. I got a direct tweet which probably a few hundred people got asking for a submission to this, and the rules said the story had to be written after Jan. 22nd (I think, mine was actually written this week after grinding on the initial idea for a week). So I came up with this idea about lab-grown meat, and the next day, on one of my regular news sites, there was an article about how one man was working on lab-grown meat as a food alternative, and how he went about it. I thought great, the universe is helping me out again.

Let me explain what I mean by that. This isn’t like when I wrote about the University of Illinois Chicago linguistics professor who transplanted a group of Guatemalan abuelitas to Chicago to learn their Mayan dialect, and then a month later found out about a real life University of Illinois Chicago linguistics professor who transplanted a group of Guatemalan abuelitas to Chicago to learn their Mayan dialect. This was more like when I was in college, writing my senior thesis novel about a group of men made immortal by Anunnaki in ancient times, and during the break before I began writing it, a copy of Archeology Magazine arrived at my house, addressed to me, with a relief carving of an Anunnaki photographed on the cover. I didn’t have a subscription, never asked for a free trial, and another issue never arrived. That’s what I mean. The world provided me with research material, poked the story on.

During the writing, I used a number of articles I’d read in the past to guide the conversation in the story, and mentioned the creation of skin in the lab. I didn’t have anything to go by. The day after I wrote that, an article on making skin in that lab came up on Fark.

I know. Strange. Go visit the contest. Vote. Maybe for me if you like it.

I’ve told some of you about how everything I write comes true. Sometimes it’s just coincidental, like when I wrote about a scientist who broke a liquid helium machine at Fermi to kill a demon in The Hidden, and a day or so later, a liquid helium machine had a problem at CERN. Ok, so that’s just a coincidance (sic, c.f. Robert Anton Wilson). So was when I wanted to create a backstory for a Rosetta Stone type of journal and remembered a Romantic poet who died in a fire trying to save his books, screaming “By the immortal gods I will not move!” who also happened in real life to be a translator.

But then there was, in the same story, a character I created who was a University of Chicago linguistics prof who transplanted a village of Guatemalen Abuelitas to Chicago to learn their nearly extinct Mayan dialect and then a month or so later found out about a University of Chicago linguistics prof who transplanted a village of Guatemalan abuelitas to Chicago to learn their nearly extinct Mayan dialect. Don’t worry, so far as I can tell, none of them have ben murdered by the professor in a ritualistic manner. Yet.

And that’s just the beginning of all of these synchronicities. When you start lining up the coincidences, and there are so many, you’re tempted to stop defining them as coincidence and start narrowing down the conspiracy, or begin to apply the hipcrime vocab definition of coincidence, “You weren’t paying attention to the other half of what was going on.”

So this has struck again. I’ve just finished my warm up to Inside, and I’ve edited Inside up to where I had written before, so now it’s time to strike out and put new words at the end of the manuscript. My next scenes? An attention seeking pastor at a conservative church burning Michael’s painting because he found it offensive, and both sides of the argument try to manipulate the media for gain. Well, substitute “Koran” for “Michael’s painting” and you’ve got today’s news cycle.

Either the world is reading my mind, or it is handing me research material again. Any way, this is going to get interesting.