There will be a story. Soon. It is not yet written. I don’t yet know who the characters are. There will be a world. There will be people. Something will happen: an internal thing as much as an external thing. One, I suspect will be larger than the other, and both, I suspect, will follow an unexpected pattern. I find that the stories that grab me are all stories that deviate from the norm in one respect or another. I suppose it’s because I write the stories that I ultimately want to read. Few modern writers seem willing (or able) to tackle the stories that I enjoy, and so the task of writing such tales falls to me. Ah, there are plenty of writers…plenty of good ones, China Miéville and M. John Harrison come to mind, as to Samuel R. Delany and Ursula K. LeGuin. The problem is that Miéville and Delany and LeGuin are singular people. They don’t have time to continually write the stories that I want to read. LeGuin and Delany have slowed down, somewhat. Ah, but Delany has never been what the French would call Un pisser de copies. A hack. Literally, one who pisses copies. Hack. The concept works so much better in French. Delany is not a hack, and the other writers I’ve named are not hacks. This explains why they haven’t written as much as many so-called prolific modern day writers. This explains why I don’t have as many of their books as I’d like. This explains, ultimately, why I write some of the stories that I write. All of this is to say that Honesty/Judas’ Coin has come to figure prominently in a new fictional universe. I like this because such stories are inspired by images. Such images bear something in common with the series of onion-husks I posted a while back. There are connections, thus, between the onion-realm stories (of which there will be more) and the honesty stories (of which there will also be a few.) And so in honor of onions and honesty, here is a slightly altered take on… …honesty. I find it interesting that this single, heavily-manipulated image seems to bear links with three distinct worlds: the world a particular plant has inspired…the world inspired by the husk of an onion…and a world governed by strange and complex mathematics. There will be more stories in the universe of the onion-worshippers, and there will be stories set in an as-yet-unrevealed universe, involving Judas’ Coin…Honesty…or whatever else you’d want to call such a plant. And there is a third universe, only hinted at so far…the multi-planar world of Escherelm. I thought of Escerelm as I made this image, because in some small way, this may actually represent one of the art forms popular in that strange, algebra-riddled place. As each thing that exists has its own algebraic equation, I suspect that such equations may (in some small way) look like this image. Algebra looks this way, after all, once you translate all of those algebra-things into more overt art-things. Perhaps this isn’t a manipulated photograph at all. Perhaps it’s something linguistic. The way in which you spell “honesty” in the dominant, mathematical language of Escherelm. One never knows, but I suspect there’s a story in that too. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.