New writer you ask? Maybe. What I lack in experience I make up for in TIME.
Imagine a time, before Christ was born. Alexander the Great was but a whelp who smelt of milk as he talked. I tutored him up until his father Philip was assassinated. My old friend Darius still ruled much of the world then.
I was lacking in coin at the time, so I think I can be forgiven for his eventual downfall at the hands of my overachieving, and rather annoying, student.
Aristotle, you ask? NAY. That man always did love to steal my achievements.
He was a bit of a stalker, you see. He envied my intellect and super natural wisdom. I mean,
I was already finely aged, by a thousand years, around the time we first generated sparks in Mytilene. Fool didn’t know I was the mentor for his mentor, Plato.
The dunce was preaching about the “Four elements”.
I argued there had to be much smaller building blocks of various matter to account for the variations of minerals and even stressed that air had to be made up of different types of vapors due to how a candle becomes smothered when covered by glass.
The moron called me a loon!
The audacity! So I shut his trap by asking him “What is streaming down upon us from the sky?” The insufferable man said, “Heat, of course!”
I retorted, “How is that heat transmitted? Why do clouds weaken the heat yet we are able to still burn? Why is shade from physical obstructions cooler than being directly in [light]? Why does the [light] change colors when striking polished crystals?”
I SAVORED that the tongue, of that buffoon, was tied.
After a few years is when he made this silly theory of dry and wetness levels of the five elements.
The man even included Aether to use as a Deus Ex Machina! Pompous ass!
Writing wasn’t a huge thing, yet, so luckily some of his more idiotic ideas were not carried to modern times.
I will not repeat them, because I genuinely think those ideas lower general intelligence by large percentages, per line spoken or read.
Funny enough, I never thought to write about my life. My memory is fairly good. Encyclopedic knowledge is stored within the fleshy vault called my head.
Art, science, and math? Those were what I spent a vast investment of time on.
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was a proud student of mine. I need not teach him much before his brilliant mind exploded with his own, unique thoughts that rivaled my own.
We were both a part of Andrea’s studio and became fast friends.
The man was quiet, but intense. Even in his youth. He seemed to only smile when finishing a painting or when Lionardo de Tornabuoni was around.
I was not so foolish as to not see the infatuation in both their eyes. Unlike the fools of that time, I believed love to be pure, no matter the sex.
I was seeing a woman at the time. Lisa. Normally I shy away from married women…but she had a unique power to draw others to herself. Even that of Leonardo.
The painting of her was a work he slaved over and simultaneously loved and hated.
It was a wonderful painting, but he hated he couldn’t capture her “Essence” perfectly. I told him that even in paintings…the life is an illusion, so to even catch a fraction of her spirit was akin to working against the gods.
Wonderful man. Wonderful woman. I miss them both even to this day.
My first attempt at creative writing came in 1935 when I ran into a young man, Isaac. He was a brilliant man and quite eccentric in the best ways. He loved to write.
We would talk science and chemistry in between classes. (I was a teacher at the time. History. Notice a pattern?) He was deeply curious about what the future held. Often wrote science fiction short stories.
I had encouraged him to submit them to a publisher to share with the world the incredible worlds he built based on the physics of this world.
To encourage him, I wrote my own stories…but they tended to be a retelling of history, not new endeavors of imagination.
I soon became frustrated when I realized I lacked a certain perspective due to the long years of observing the world as it was.
I was missing imagination.
Isaac opened my eyes to this weakness and I dedicated all my time to reading all the fiction I could get my hands on, especially short stories and novels he finally had published!
Out of all his works, the Last Question had me the most enthralled. The eventual heat death of the universe that couldn’t be avoided even with the knowledge and power of a supreme god at the hands of trillions upon trillions of humans. My immortality finally felt…finite.
I always took for granted my immortality. I grew bored a majority of times and seeing the human race at it’s most savage often desensitized me to death.
I now thought, “Even if I am immortal for now, the visible universe will end. After that, the material universe will finally reach equilibrium and that will be the end of entropy, which is the reason we [live].”
I will one day be stretched out, at an atomic level, that my essence will be either frozen atoms, or further be obliterated into a what that idiot once postulated. Aether.
The universe infinitesimally close to being at absolute zero in a soup of leptons, and photons? Not even that?
I mean, this is in exponentially far-future, referenced time…but to an immortal, a future none-the-less.
This “AH HA!” moment spurred on something long buried in my ancient heart.
I began to write. Feverishly. Science fiction to fantasy to horror and beyond my normal niche of ancient history. I yearned for other universes to exist where the impossible happened. Infinite places to escape to once all the fun could be had in a dying universe.
Maybe have my own “Let there be light!” moment with a sentient computer infinitely more advanced than what we could imagine, tucked away in subspace pondering “How can I undo entropy?”
I failed. Miserably.
Eventually I shared my thoughts and frustrations with Isaac when I saw him last, in the 80’s. His mutton chops looked ridiculous, yet at the same time breathtaking.
He was at a book signing for his latest short story release, I think. After inappropriately hugging a female fan and her flustered get away, I smiled offering up the book for his signature as he leered in her direction.
He looked at me as he had realized I was familiar, then that thought turned into a “Holy crap! How can you look exactly the way you were in the 40's??”
I explained what I knew and he excused himself after the signing to sit with me.
We talked and laughed for hours. He asked if I published any of the many thoughts I had. I nodded, no, telling him I was still enthralled with reading and not succeeding creatively.
He laughed and said,
“I was also an avid reader. The worlds others create are wonderful distractions…but what can be greater than being a god of your own universe?”
At a primal level, I understood. It took me until 2 days ago to finally act on it. I was done being the visitor in worlds of others. Now I looked forward to being a creative entity in the worlds of my own.
A loving, yet vengeful god.
“Experience is exactly what I have the time for to gain.”
