Splarks is a short story project. Irreverent. Absurd. Amusing. Intelligent. Plucky. Optimistic. Underdog power. Underwombat power. Sometimes even undermonotreme power.
As spoken by my beloved Welcome to Nightvale: “for the weirdo in your life, even if that weirdo is you.”
[catlist name=splarks]
Otherworldly Music is a flash fiction project inspired by music that blurs the line between the mundane and the magical. It’s otherworldly music: the kind of music that suggests dreams, the interdimensional, altered states, and the in-between.
I listen, I write, and then pair with evocative art (my own or using a Creative Commons license). Got some otherworldly music or art suggestions? Contact me.
THE COLLECTION
[catlist name=otherworldly-music]
I help frustrated creatives and disheartened geniuses put words to their great work in the world.
Creatives and geniuses have to decide daily whether to sacrifice their awe-inspiring talent to the practical aspects of business, like writing. Should a band spend their time making music, or should they instead skip their song-writing sessions to draft website copy or fan newsletters? Should scientists devote their days to experiments and lifesaving inventions, or should they slog through writing yet another grant application to keep the money rolling in? How about the dance instructor who’s dreaming of opening her own studio–should she focus on creating outstanding dance classes, or on social media posts to draw in students?
To let their creativity shine, they need help with writing. This is my zone of genius. I work with photographers, coaches, writers, academics, yoga instructors, artists, chefs, musicians, entrepreneurs, jewelry makers, writers, art-based small businesses, fashion designers, nonprofit leaders, scientists, spiritual teachers and others who are firmly ensconced in their zone of creative genius, whether they are seasoned pros or just starting out.
Over the past 17 years, I have spent thousands of hours writing: hundreds of papers for healthcare and leadership development, proposals and research papers, dozens of software tutorials, years worth of monthly newsletters, training manuals, reports (annual, quarterly, monthly, etc). I’ve also written for the arts: magazine articles, web copy, social media posts, marketing materials, and bios.
I have personal interests in spirituality (and where it intersects with science), alternative health, futurism, the social sciences, indie music, yoga, travel, cultivating empathy, and sustainable living. If your project involves any of those topics, tell me more! I’ll be especially interested.
I typically collaborate with clients who want:
| Articles and White Papers | Bios | Book content |
| Educational materials or tutorials | Email templates | Literature review summaries |
| Marketing materials and press releases | Newsletters | Online courses |
| Product descriptions | Proofreading | Proposals and grant applications |
| Reports | Social media content | Website content |
Praise
“When I first hired you to ghostwrite the content for my new course Make It With The Moon I had a general idea around how I wanted it to feel and sound and I wondered if that same feeling could be created by someone else, as I had never worked with a ghostwriter before. Not only did you listen to my outline and ideas carefully, but the language, intention, and feeling you created through your words spellbound me. You went above and beyond my expectations and not only did you save me an entire week of working on this myself, you delivered and executed it with absolute grace and ease. I couldn’t be more pleased. Thank you, Kate.” — Vienda Maria (writer and mentor)
“As an experimental artist with weird music, it’s sometimes hard to find people who ‘get’ my music and how I want it presented. Kate understood where I was coming from and was open-minded about my ideas for written content. Thank Flying Spaghetti Monster, Kate understands weirdos like me.” –DRBIOR (musician)
On Sunday he comes to your door with a dead bat and marigolds in an old violin case. You groan inwardly (hasn’t he found a place to haunt yet?), but you can’t just leave him on the steps, can you? Smiling tightly, you invite him in, arrange the flowers, and pour the tea. He sits in your most uncomfortable chair, legs primly crossed and hands fiddling with the bat.
You wait for him to speak. His creepy ringed eyes stare silently instead, his fluttering hands releasing tiny otherworldly vortices into your living room. God, you hope they don’t get into your hair.
The marigolds wilt.
“How’s your mother?” you ask dispassionately while thinking nice flowers, asshole.
“Dead,” he whispers, empty tones lying hollow in his words.
You know he’ll devour any platitudes of sympathy, so you don’t bother. He keeps staring, flicking his invisible cigarette ash into your ficus tree until he finally asks for a little ectoplasm. “Just enough for my left ear,” he murmurs “I’ll pay you back, I promise.”
Right. You drain your elbow and he snatches what was once your ectoplasm. Then he bows and glides away, leaving the bat moldering on your coffee table.
Advice: when next he knocks, hide between dimensions until he goes away.
***
Musical Inspiration: The Cure – Other Voices. The Cure was the morbid “look how gloomy I am” soundtrack to my horrible high school existence. But for every dirge, the Cure also had some goofy song about cats dancing and kissing random things until your head falls off. I appreciate the Cure, even now.
On a windy autumn night of my childhood, I dreamed that a tall young man opened a door in a tree for me. A dim blue light enveloped the stairs that led down the tree trunk. Uncertain but unwilling to turn away, I stepped inside. The cool air smelled of earth and rain, and my feet balanced on steps of thick roots. I held my hands over my eyes and peeked through my fingers, counting the steps as I descended.
One step
“He loves me.”
Two steps
“He loves me not.”
Three steps
“God’s Heaven.”
Four steps
“The Devil’s Grave.”
Five steps
“I’m awake.”
Six steps
“I’m a dream.”
And below was a wide tiled room with a rumpled bed and a window. Outside, the afternoon sun fell on the deserted highway, grass thrusting through cracked concrete. A red fox paused to cock its head at me before padding away, momentarily interested and summarily disappointed at the swirl of nonsense consciousness in the window: me.
The young man watched from the bed as I climbed out the window to my Yellow Brick Road, gray concrete under cartoon shoes.
When I was seventeen, I found a book by Harlan Ellison and Jacek Yerka in a used bookstore. Inside, I saw the tree, the blue light, and the stairs, and then I knew that I had dreamed someone else’s dream again.
***
Musical Inspiration: “Daniel” by Bat for Lashes. The Jacek Yerka painting I’m referring to is called “Amok Harvest”, albeit with the stairs leading up, not down. It’s available at his online gallery.
Photo: installation art called “The Raven and the Wolf” by artist Sharon Loper.
The jungle leaves its noise under layers of grimy stones and dead vines. Thick air muffles the insect wings, bird calls, and my footsteps. The parrots watch as I pick through the silent ruins. Occasionally I speak in desperation to hear a noise, but it sounds like the movement of fish underwater. I step carefully, terrified I may fall into one of the iridescent puddles and wake up in a world 10,000 years from this place. These portals sprinkle the ground like child’s glitter. History books claim that the conquistadores had never made it here, but they are wrong.
The portals reflect the past, like a faded film projected on glass. I watch.
Their machetes sliced through the jungle vines and they marched ahead to find their fictitious cities of gold. The natives did not bother to issue warnings about the shining temples on the horizon. Once inside, the Goddess drank the men’s screams and tears like nectar shaken from a flower. The men She passed over staggered into these watery portals. Like bees and caterpillars, men were only minuscule creatures to be forgotten, swords and helmets clattering to the stone floors and rusting into fragments soon buried by centuries of creeping vines and lemur bones.
I am so grateful to have seen this holy place. But please, don’t let it devour me. I promise I was just leaving.
***
Musical Inspiration: Loop Guru — “The Third Chamber, Part IV.” This is a perfect meditation song, and also very danceable. The prolific Loop Guru and their strange tribal experimental stuff! I don’t like everything they did, but this song grabbed me the instant I heard it.
The Road to Haleakala
The dream highway ran the narrow strip between the surf and the forest, and we drove alongside a ditch with its invasion of elephantine, doe-eyed marine creatures. I forget the species’ name, but I saw the flicker of their forked trunks under the low-hanging willows and pointed them out to Andy, who whipped his head around to watch them as we passed. The car roof had partially faded away, and we drove with the breeze twisting our hair in the sun. The road to Mt. Kamea was still half-formed, a product of an ancient tribe slaughtered or plagued out of existence. Occasionally the broken tree trunks would slice ghost-like through the car and I’d shiver. The baby in the backseat squealed in glee, drops of laughter flying into the air and disappearing behind us in a smear of glitter. I chuckled. Babies always find disruption novel.
“What’s under the mountain, Mama?” asked Andy, shaking the baby’s liquid off in distaste.
“The ocean under the earth,” I replied, rounding a curve of glass bricks, the snowy mountain peaks gleaming. I imagined sinking knee deep into the soft, mild snow, and touching the permafrost covering Kamea forest’s green leaves.
“Can we swim in it?” he asked.
“We can. But we’d probably dissolve after a few minutes.”
Andy was silent for a while, toying with the baby’s rattle. In the rearview mirror, I watched his face transform from infant to old man. His tiger-stripes were starting to show, darkened by the constant sun exposure. He finally wormed his way between the bucket seats and turned to face me. “That’s what we want, isn’t it?”
I nodded, listening to his words weave into the mountain peak’s hum. “It’s what we always want, son.”
***
Musical Inspiration: The Verve’s “Beautiful Mind.” Seriously one of the most beautiful, chill songs I know that still has vocals.
The storied “Cement Ship” in Aptos, California, a few months before it took its final plunge into the Pacific.
When you’re shipwrecked and cannot die, the page of your book never turns. You live one endless day of saltwater, wind, and the veiny red behind closed eyelids. The water will not burn your tongue nor your guts, but neither will it stop the hollowing thirst. Breathe deeply and watch the flashes of fish under your wet fingers, because this is all you have.
And eventually, you realize that you can tear away the sea and sky. You see the grey void beneath the searing blue, and wisely let the sky curl back into place, the sea slapping at your feet once more. “I will not remember that,” you say to the sea, and the words echo for a long time, maybe years, but maybe only seconds. It’s ok. You’ll remember again when the shadowy figures dart under your dangling feet. You’ll clutch your tattered raft and whisper, “It’s just a dream, wake up! Wake up!”
And you will. You’ll wake up to the void, the last churning of your stomach fading into incoherent particles, and you’ll turn right back to the open sea.
The sea is full of many dead things. You notice them when you cannot die.
***
Musical Inspiration: Sting‘s “Something the Boy Said.” Sting was brilliant when he was with The Police (and in David Lynch’s Dune) but I don’t like his solo stuff and the bland electric piano vibe of this song drives me nuts. But I can’t help liking this song anyway. It’s so creepy. Why did the people in the song die? I imagine that Roman soldiers were going into Scotland in their initial invasions, and they were eaten by a moor monster, or maybe just some woad-covered, half-naked Scots. But no, a guy on SongMeanings.com has a fascinating historical explanation about how crows can give away an army’s position.
One flower in my hand for a genie, and another in my hair for an angel. I’ve woken up in the wrong world again, this time in the place where the residents float, shine and beam. But my feet touch the ground here, so I am unnoticed and fading fast under the glass skyscrapers and cirrus clouds. Fading! Let me write a primer: When fading, be sure to place all objects safely on the ground. This includes your little embroidered lipstick case, the mirrored one where you thought you lived. That was just your reflection, honey. Your flowers will fade with you.
Unseen, I stretch out on the virgin green grass and look up the elegant robes of the angelic cosmopolitans who move above me. I blow dandelion spores into the heavens and into their luminescent underpants. This is the grace of a fool, and it’s all mine.
***
Musical Inspiration: Untitled by Interpol. Saw these guys in concert when their first album came out. They reminded me so much of a modern Joy Division, though this comparison isn’t as apt for their later releases. The end of this song, with the strong bass notes and the ringing guitar, puts me in a natural altered state.
The professor stood at the water’s edge and gave his lecture to the seals. They watched suspiciously, squirming to better assess the haggard old man who stepped closer to the water with each word. They chose to keep their distance.
“There are rooms in this water, and all water, connected by corridors of an alternate reality. Each bubble of air contains a world of living entities that our science has never captured. Such buoyant happy creatures, always interested in human awareness, touching the hair, the lips, desiring stories of mundane matters! As our primitive cultures speak of elementals or devas, so do these entities speak of us. We occupy only one slice of their reality, but we are intimately familiar with this slice, more than they will ever be. We have the advantage here, knowing the ins and outs of how to exist in the body. They wish to know what we know, and vice versa. One can strike bargains for mutual benefit.”
The professor’s knees were wet, but he hardly noticed the sloshing of his expensive Italian shoes. He next addressed the kelp tangling his legs.
“To establish a connection, one must submerse one’s feet in a natural body of water, adopt a state of zen-like concentration and open oneself to the fluid qualities of water. Surroundings fade and give way to the watery walls of their dwellings. They share the dimensional secrets if one allows them to view the physical realm through one’s eyes. It can be frightening, of course, but in my twenty years of exploration, I’ve never experienced difficulties with them overstepping boundaries. They are respectful.”
The professor grew too close to a school of fish, and they scattered around his waist. He glanced at their wake and called after them.
“Some say that a madness can occur. I concur that it’s possible; those with inferior genetic makeup may have less ability to cope with expanded awareness. My colleagues and I are currently experimenting with this, and we seek to discover the problematic genes to avoid any future mishaps.” He paused as the water lapped his chin, and turned his face to the sky, now addressing the circling pelicans. “Ahmed was assessing the data I’d brought back from the water rooms but I haven’t heard from him in weeks.” He coughed, expelling water from his nose. “But he’s busy, and aren’t we all? I am late for my appointment in the corridors. Today they promise to teach me the language of crystalline geometry. I had a taste last week … amazing stuff …so much potential for science…”
The pelicans turned away when they heard the high-pitched chattering and saw the bubble swarms appear. They had learned that such beings offered tasty fish, but ruined the belly.
***
Music Inspiration: Hallucinogen – Gamma Goblins [It’s Turtles All the Way Down mix]. This is very different from the bouncy, scratchy original version. The sample is from an Alan Watts lecture: “Now the dreaming period is subdivided into four stages. The first stage is the longest… and it’s the best… During that stage, the dream is beautiful. The second stage… is not quite so long… and it’s a little unsettling… and there’s an element of instability in it… a certain touch of insecurity… In the third stage which is not… again so long… the forces of light and the forces of darkness of good and of evil are equally balanced..and things are beginning to look rather dangerous. And in the fourth stage, which is the shortest of them all, the negative, dark, or evil side triumphs and the whole thing blows up. And, so, then, there is a waking period before the whole thing starts again.”
Photo: Snooks in Florida, resting in the shade. A bit eerie since they weren’t really moving.
Each raindrop shudders as crystalline structures burst out, the air permeated by the wet hiss of their data transfer. I close my eyes and see these alien creatures catalog the inhabitants of their temporary world: microbes, humans, animals, and ghosts. The ghosts see these new lifeforms as a pervasive metallic sheen, and the squirrels instinctively avoid the tiny filaments. Human bodies react imperceptibly, bellies subtly churning at this biomechanical intrusion, but sometimes the children will wrinkle their noses and say, “It smells weird out here.”
When the final drop falls, these delicate bodies rust away before the last puddle dries, their data evaporating back to the alien atmosphere. An ethereal intelligence pulls it effortlessly out of our world, where it will never exist again.
Music Inspiration: Coil’s “Dark River.” “Dark River” is one of those tunes that pleases me for its unexpected sensitivity. Coil’s something of an experimental industrial band, so their music is usually harsh and screechy. I included this song on a mix for a friend’s new baby. The parents were really into industrial and EBM music, so finding songs by industrial artists that could lull a baby to sleep was … fun?
Photo by Roksolana Zasiadko on Unsplash
Many Splarks stories exhibit extreme optimism and uplifting stories about plucky, weird animals overcoming the odds and achieving their dreams. Well, here’s one for you pessimists out there who are tired of goodness and determination. Revel in some doom and gloom! No slogging through optimism for you today!
Mortimer the Porcupine was a very bad-tempered porcupine. Although the world had never done anything reprehensible to him, he often used his quills to jab random animals and people passing by. His favorite pastime was pursuing strangers and mercilessly poking them.
He was kind of a dick, really.
Are you hoping for a story in which Mortimer discovers that being a dick can’t rival the joy of love and compassion, stumbling upon this truth in some capricious way? Yes, that would be satisfying, wouldn’t it? Very Splarks. But that would merely be conjecture based on your desperate need for an orderly, mammalian-centered universe. Animals like Mortimer preferred to face their truth: we live in a cold, harsh universe that cares as much about you as it does your local landfill. Perhaps the universe cherishes you and the dump equally, taking satisfaction in the marvelous plans it has for you both.
[Marvelous plan for you: enter life as an exceptionally gifted and oft-misunderstood child, meet your soulmate, marry in an extravagant wedding paid for by your hefty salary, produce gifted children, become CEO of a prestigious company, retire in the Caribbean, die surrounded by loved ones, and re-emerge as an esteemed disincarnate being in a mystical realm.]
[Marvelous plan for the dump: lives on virgin land with excellent decomposition prospects, is tended by enthusiastic sanitation workers, smells of roses and sandalwood, births a magical carpet of daisies above the refuse, and hosts a prairie dog colony that frolics in the aforementioned daisies.]
But creatures like Mortimer believe the universe just doesn’t give a crap, and in fact has no consciousness to even be aware of its apathy and lack of marvelous plans.
Do you now understand why Mortimer was constantly out of sorts? Admit it: if you had quills and were mired in Mortimer’s Swamp of the Uncaring Universe, you’d be stabbing people within a 50-mile radius of your house. But since assault is illegal in the human world, you’d choke down your sorrows and brightly quip, “The world is fundamentally good!” You’d wake up in the morning pretending you didn’t cry yourself to sleep as you pondered your insignificance. You’d be alone with cherished dreams that were nothing but random neurons firing. Love would be merely a chemical process to compel you to breed children that are likely as exceptional as your average cabbage moth. The universe did not even see fit to give you quills.
Nevertheless, you might one day strip naked, roll in a vat of paste and then carefully apply handmade quills to your body, perhaps straws you swiped from a fast food restaurant and carefully cut to pointy ends. (Tip: grab some boba straws, which are already pointy) You might then burst into the conference room of your workplace, screech incoherent profanities, and chase your boss and co-workers out into the busy street while hurling quill-like things at them such as twigs, ballpoint pens, and straightened paper clips. But be careful in all your glorious quill-hurling rage–running around in an existential rage is dangerous! Inevitably, you would be struck by a senior citizen transport van and you’d gasp your last breath while gazing into the eyes of an unimpressed octogenarian who long ago began whapping whippersnappers with canes, exploiting everyone who was ever admonished to “respect your elders.”
You see what you did there? If you’d have just waited it out your miserable life, you wouldn’t have had to go to the effort of creating make-believe quills. You could have had your own cane. You could have had multiple canes, one for each hand, and whapped all the whippersnappers you could ever dream of whapping. But you, in your impetuousness, had to shake up the natural order of things and reach blindly, madly for quill-hood. Now the cane whaps you in your last moments.
Perhaps you will be reincarnated as a porcupine like Mortimer. If so, rest assured that the universe does not give one flying fuck about how this transformation will affect your personal development. It is merely coincidence that reincarnated-you has quills, not a consolation prize. So get cracking, Porky. There are some prairie dogs over there that need some dickiness in their lives, and Mortimer can’t do it all.
(Image from Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” central panel)
