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chamged his mind - excerpt...
There hasn't always been the danger. During my years beneath the Businessman, my brain sat in my head like a slug, a wet gray lump that moved so slow it was imperceptible. He doled out paper after paper, until my desk creaked beneath their weight. I moved them around, from box to box, and from folder to folder, trying to make sense of them. Then I lanced their imperfections and extraneous tissues. Mailboy took them to the executives, who rumbled great coughing laughs of approval and begged for more papers. The Businessman piled more papers on my desk. I moved them from box to box, and from folder to folder, etc. As long as I knew he took six sugars in his tar-thick coffee, my brain wasn't needed, and I wasn't about to volunteer it.
After time, the Businessman began getting complaints -- executives drooling and shaking mad because they got papers with spelling errors that marked his work like giant boils. He pounded his desk and howled that he wanted to see me. Reluctantly, I slid into his office, which glowed red with his anger.
sean logan speaks...
When I think about the places that disturb me, the first thing that comes to mind is not a creaky old mansion surrounded by swampland and trees dripping with Spanish moss. And I don't think about filthy, piss-stained alleyways littered with syringes and rats in the bowels of the inner-city.
I think about office buildings. Maybe it's because, like the grave, I always knew I'd end up in one, spending the majority of my life in an uncomfortable shirt under soul-sucking florescent lights, under constant surveillance and under control.
And when I think about the people that disturb me, I don't immediately think about child murdering clowns with twisted faces hidden behind grease paint or wild-eyed doctors giggling behind their surgical masks.
I think about the people that love to be in those office buildings.
When I came into work this morning, I had two emails from a colleague-one sent at 1:27AM and one sent at 2:55AM. That is the type of person that disturbs me. That is the type of person that makes me wonder what is going on in their brain.
"Changed His Mind" takes a look inside one such brain-and it's not a pretty place. The idea was to tell a story through the eyes of a lowly office slug who rises the ranks to corporate dominance. But his mind is so warped that his vision of the world is barely recognizable, and it's hard to tell what's real and what's a product of the narrator's fevered mind.
The first draft of the story was written very fast. Normally, I write excruciatingly slowly, revising as I go. It can take me months to finish a short story. I came up with the idea for "Changed His Mind" late at night. I wanted to jot down a few ideas before I went to bed, but after a few minutes I was hooked, hovering over the keyboard, typing furiously. By the next morning it was done.
Of course, after I made the final revisions, I wondered who the hell would publish something this weird. It's hardly your traditional, mainstream horror story. Then I saw Mike's off-the-wall guidelines for Chimeraworld and thought, "Now here's a guy who's going to get it!"
sean logan bio...
Sean Logan's stories have been published in a number of anthologies and magazines, including New Traditions in Terror, Dark Whispers, Deadbolt, Maelstrom Speculative Fiction, Dread, Altered Perceptions and others. He has also received honorable mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Sean currently lives with his wife, cat and man-eating Rottweiler in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a marketing writer for a software company.
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back to Chimeraworld #3 editorial page
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Hellbound Books, Spring 2006
Plus six other short novels (approx 40,000 words each) that I'm looking to publish in a special 6-pack.
