Jiro Jones [EMIL IS MY EDITOR VERSION]

Story Excerpt - the post Edit version

Intro

I posted this short story - part 1 of 3 sections from a novel a started to write a long time back. I still love the idea for this story, but all it is is chunks of meat. Since starting my substack almost a year ago, I’ve had the privilege to meet some great writers who share and nuture the culture of fiction we have here.

Emil Ottoman

is one such fine writer who has given me more ZERO BULLSHIT guidance in his inimitable fashion than anyone else so who else would I go to but him for a full on professional editorial review of my work - what did he think?

The Edit is below - and you can see he had a lot to say!

EMIL IS MY EDITOR: NICK WINNEY

The Lessons I Have Learned

I wont lie it has taken me a long time to do my homework. SO what are the lessons

Some basic stuff that as a 56 year old man, I just shoulda known, but…

Stop using passive structures -

The sound of the gunfire was loud

NO - THE GUNFIRE WAS DEAFENING.

Stop using adverbs and strings of adjectives to describe every single thing. You get to use ONE per chapter, if you’re a good boy. Yes, you might know all the words, but you don’t have to use all of them at once.

NEVER start a sentence with SUDDENLY - or your work will suddenly sound like the next line is going to be “he woke up and it was all a dream.”

Starting with a gerund - I realised that I often slip into a construct where I start the sentence with a gerund - an ING form of a verb - it made me sound German. It has a stultifying effect on the flow. I’m not saying dont ever use it, jsut don’t use it all the time sentence after sentence.

Know the space you’re in

The scene has to work in space or you will lose your reader in a void - draw the situation out - make a diagram if you need to. Where is everything in relation to everything else? Where are the people, how many steps are there from A to B?

REMEMBER HOW DOORS ACTUALLY OPEN (FFS) and how STAIR WELLS ACTUALLY ARE.

This was a huge thing for me, and I had to completely deconstruct and reconstruct the first half of the piece because none of the basics actually worked. I will always do this in future and I’m literally crying at how much work I am going to have to do to fix parts 2 and 3. I stepped through my scenery and walked with my character into his charnel pit.

Action

Another huge learn is how to make action flow - to get the action to flow, don’t use short sentences one after another. I think I got this down a lot better now. For a masterclass check this out - it is pure class.

The King of Killers

Dialogue

It has to flow - say it out loud - put on the accents, speak both parts. What would the character say out loud and what would they think to themselves? Does it sound real or is it exposition? Emil pointed out so many extra words that would never ever come from Jiro’s mouth - and he’s my character - I have to know him but Emil knew that he was chattin shit.

SO here it is - it actually edited out longer by maybe 150 words, but they’re all for the good. If you want to know what you could do better, Emil will help you - His autopsies are a lesson you can have for free, but hook him up for a paid edit, it’s the best money I spent on my writing without a dout and worth double. He loves the work and he will not spare your blushes or his own time to help you.

and he can be yours too

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Jiro Jones - Part 1

This is an excerpt from a chapter where the hero - Jiro Jones - 19-20, asian fusion chef and part time delivery boy - is searching for his sister, Kimiko, who mysteriously vanished and whom he thinks he saw being bundled into an apartment block, in a crate from th eback of a black van by suspicious suited goons. This scene is where Jiro stumbles into a world of horror he was not expecting. Parts 2 and 3 are on my stack, minus the emil ottoman treatment, and there are other snippets of this story cropping up as I prepare myself to smash them into a best selling novel, of course.

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Jiro climbed the stairs to the top floor but nerves stopped him on the stairwell before the final flight. He slumped into the wall, balancing the tray of buns in one hand and gripping the steel handrail with the other. Teeth clenched, eyes closed he pressed the side of his face to the cool concrete.

What the fucking fuck am I doing?

From around the corner muffled thuds opened his eyes, then low voices, urgent, maybe Italian? He couldn't make it out. He stepped up and leaned across to steal a quick one-eyed glance up the next flight. All he could see was a door. The stairs carried on up. Probably to the roof. He sank to his haunches, screwing his eyes shut hoping to find some courage in the dark but seeing only the face of the girl staring at him through the bars of the crate.

Fuck sake! Are we doing this or what? Kimi could be in that room. You gotta know. Just knock on the door, tell ‘em you got take-out, you got the wrong address. Then shout her name. That’s it.

Deep breaths calmed him: In for five. Hold for eight.

He started round the corner and up the stairs, one slow step at a time. Silence from above; the emergency exit light hummed, a green glow picked out pocks and holes in the concrete in sharp shadow and sweat trickled to the small of his back.

Go home. COME ON. Go home. COME THE FUCK ON!

He was half way up when an explosion and a laser-bright flash of light from under the door shocked him like wet hands on a live wire and he smacked himself in the face with the tray as his hands shot up in defence. Buns flew everywhere.

Fuck!

Purple lines crazed his retinas and he blinked hard to clear his vision. From behind the door, sounds erupted: a man screaming orders; freakish animal squeals; bursts of automatic gunfire. The door opened and one of the black-suited men stepped backwards into the hallway, kicking the door back open to slam against the wall as it tried to close. He fired short bursts of gunfire from the hip into the apartment with a semi automatic weapon, shouting to someone within.

Resolve gnawed to the bone, Jiro scrabbled like a cartoon cat, trying to flee and the Suit turned side on, drawing a hand gun and a bead on him in one fluid second, still firing the semi automatic into the apartment. Jiro cowered and the Suit spun back to face the door, dismissing him as a threat. He holstered the pistol and pulled a fresh magazine from his belt to reload the semi. Side on, narrow profile, he leaned into the door frame for cover, shouldering the weapon, taking aim at a huge black creature with spines, claws, tentacles and jaws jagged with crystalline teeth, advancing at him.

Jiro couldn't move. Time slowed. Adrenalin surged. Senses tightened. Sounds distorted then his heart got the nitrox hit and everything warped into fast forward.

The beast rived at the Suit as he gunned round after round into it, knocking it backwards, blasting off bits of claw. Its red eyes glowed like fuckin’ Terminator! Each dull exhalation of the weapon was a heartbeat in flame. Monstrous shadows and silhouettes strobed on the walls.

It renewed its attack with another scream, focussing on the man’s neck and arms, shredding his flesh in a snickering blur of black razors. The man staggered and fell backwards into the hall with a spray of gore but his final shots blew off half the beast’s head, slamming it into the wall. It crunched as it hit the ground.

Shell cases spun to a stop. Smoke drifted out of the apartment door and curled up to the ceiling. The creature’s twitching limbs scratched the floor. The man’s rasping wet breaths stopped. Jiro held his breath, heart beat drumming 160 a minute, jaw clamping teeth to a grind so hard it whistled in his ears. It could have been five seconds, it could have been fifty five before he took his next breath. His heart was beginning to slow when he heard a girl’s voice.

“Help.”

“Help me,” again it came.

A sob of pain.

“Stone?” she called out. The Suit’s head twitched, one bloody hand raised then flapped back down.

Still alive!

The hairs on Jiro’s neck rose in a standing ovation to fear.

Do something.

Jiro unlocked his legs and took a step up. At the sound, the head of the man jerked up from the floor. He groaned and rolled onto his side. Jiro climbed the last few steps and the man slumped over onto his face, gargling blood. His head jerked as Jiro approached and knelt beside him on the landing.

Jiro’s hands hovered above the savaged body; he was afraid to touch it. The skin of the left side of his face was torn off down to skull bone and the eyeball hung from its socket on a glistening stalk. Blood oozed from deep gristly lacerations across his neck. His mouth was just a hole full of blood lined teeth.

“Come here,” the gaze of his one good eye said. His ruined mouth flapped. Jiro leaned in.

The man pushed the gun towards him, exhaling pain with the effort of moving his lacerated arm. Red mist came from his mouth as he tried to speak but he could only gag blood from the back of his throat.

Jiro ignored the gun and pulled out his phone. “I’ll…I’ll call for help, an ambulance.”

“GGnnnnnnNOOooo!”

The man pushed the gun at him again, and tried to look behind into the apartment, jerking his head, straining with the effort. Something tore in his throat. Lung-fresh blood bubbled pink then pooled red. Jiro backed away from it.

The man’s head shook with the effort, tendons webbing in his neck

“K-I-I-LLL,” he gargled “HER!”

His one eye squinted then bulged in its socket, focussing intently, beseeching him, holding his gaze until his last breath rattled put and he slumped into death.

Jiro reached for the gun, then thought better of it. Don’t leave prints!

“Stone?” The girl started sobbing again

Gotta help her.

Jiro stepped round the corpse of the man and entered the hallway. To his left a closed door; at the end of the hall on the right, a half-open door. The sobbing put the girl in there. On the opposite side of the hall an open door looked into the kitchen.

Jiro tip-toed round the thing on the floor that had killed the man. In death, it did not look so perfectly black. A trick of the light? It was a mass of different parts: insect jaws and compound eyes in a mutant dog head; lizard body, ape limbs. Tentacles.

At least it dies when you blow its head off. Fucking tentacles?

It was all fused parts, melted together; a nightmare of fur and scales. A stink rose off it like it had always been dead.

He leaned into the kitchen. Empty. A window in the far wall was open, it looked out at the building behind. Bullets had blown holes in the frame and plasterwork. Broken glass covered the floor and countertops. Something had died in here, recently; blood dripped like syrup from the ceiling. The crying girl took him back into the hall. Trying not to step in the bloodbath on the floor, but failing, he stretched an arm out and pushed the door open to look inside.

The room’s white walls were sprayed with blood. Brain matter clung to white vertical blinds across the window to his left. The room was brightly lit from above, the flat disc of an oversized white lamp shade glowed orange where blood soaked it.

On the floor in front of him, the bottom half of a man lay in a lake of blood, black as treacle on the wooden floor. Except for the stump of spine, it could have been the legs of a tailor’s dummy. He stepped into the room. For a second he caught his reflection in the mirror on wall opposite, tendrils of blood obscured his face then the table of horrors in the middle of the room took centre stage.

It was huge; a square slab of slate and upon it were two naked children: a boy and the girl who was still sobbing. They were stretched across it and chained hand and foot to dull metal hoops at the corners. Hanging from the nearest edge of the table was another mutated beast, different from the first only in the unnatural selection of its animal parts. Its torso was ripped almost in two by gunfire, entrails and vertebrae showed.

The boy’s body was slashed and clawed where the beast’s pincers had gripped and torn long rents into his almost unnaturally white skin. He looked about ten or twelve and he was dead. The eyes were lifeless and one arm was buried elbow-deep in the beast’s mouth. Blood coated it’s thick catfish lips. The top of the beast’s head was missing, sliced open; a huge egg full of brains.

The girl…

Another step into the room and to the right, the top half of the dead Suit lay on the floor, coils of guts and a purple lobe of liver protruded from beneath his suit jacket. One of his arms was missing but he hadn’t lost his shades. There was yet another beast at the far corner of the table where the girl was chained. A giant black feathery satanic mantis, it was slumped on top of her, hanging off the table. A katana protruded from its back and seeping bullet wounds tracked up one side. The Suit had killed it just as it had got to her. Just in time. But it had taken his arm off first.

Jiro circled the table to get to the girl. She was pinned beneath the body of the beast. Her sobbing was faint, the weight of the it must be crushing her, making every breath harder. He brushed her hair from her eyes and held her face with both hands, confused with relief and despair. She was Asian, for sure; pale skin, jet black hair, her eyes were Japanese, like his. But she wasn’t Kimiko.

“Don’t worry. I’m gonna get you out of here.”

He stood back and wrapped both arms around the creature to lift it up, hugging it despite the stench and the dregs of death coating it. It was heavy, but not heavy enough for it’s size. It felt empty, unreal, like a fibreglass model but the death it dealt was real. He pulled it up and over as far as he could but the sword had gone right through and the blade caught on something. He tried to drag it to the edge of the table but its spines rasped the girl’s naked body making her squeal.

“I gotta get this thing off you,” he grunted “One more heave. I promise. It’s gonna be ok…you ready?” he didn't wait for an answer and she screamed as he hoisted the carcasse free and dragged it to the floor.

She was a mess of wounds and pitiful in her nakedness. How was she still alive? Her limbs were chained like the boys, but the beast had chewed off her left foot, like it was trying to get her loose. From the way the creature lay, t looked like her left hand would have been next.

Everything but this poor, ravaged naked girl was dead around him but despite the sensory overload, the utter insanity of it, an inner clarity took hold in him. He tore off his hoodie and laid it over her then pulled out his mobile phone. As he dialled for the emergency services, he saw he had no signal. Zero bars. None. The phone told him the same No service. What the fuck? Then he saw it across the wall with the door in: some kind of antenna and a fine copper mesh, wired up to something.

What were those things again? Faraday cages? FUUUuuuCK!”

He stared at his phone screen, thumbing it uselessly, willing it to work. He looked about the room for a landline, for anything and then to the corpse of the Suit, rifling the pockets but finding nothing. Strapped to its belt were ammunition clips, a grenade, a double edged dagger, fuller groove down the flat fixed blade. A knife made for killing. There was an aerosol - mace? - but no phone.

He scrambled over to the man’s severed legs and rooting in his pockets found a pager, three buttons: red, yellow and blue. He pressed them all. Nothing. Nothing. He tossed it aside and went back to the girl.

“Is there a phone? Does anyone have a phone?”

Her eyes were blank, glazing over. She was losing consciousness. He looked down at the brutally savaged stump. Every slow beat of her heart pushed another pulse of life out. She was going to die. Running to the kitchen, leaping over the beast in the corridor, skidding on blood and scattering glass he scanned for a cloth or a towel as he turned on the tap, but there were none.

“FUCK!” he cursed out loud and pulled off his t-shirt, soaked it then dragged his belt with a whip crack from his jeans. He grabbed the single wooden spoon from a green utensil jar, “Home Sweet Home” and yellow daisies painted on the side, then ran back to the girl.

“This is gonna hurt a little bit, ok? But we gotta stop the bleeding,” he said, then forced the spoon handle between her teeth. “Bite on it. BITE!”

She nodded and bit. He wrapped the t-shirt around the meat of her stump, swallowed bile, then looped his belt around it. The girl groaned and blood bloomed through the cotton.

“Ok, count of three, one…two…” he pulled the belt as tight as he could. Her eyes screamed open, jaw locking with a yelp as she bit harder then passed out.

OK What now…Think! Think!

Jiro paced round the table, kicked a candle spinning through blood, pulled out his phone. Still no signal.

Think! The other body!

Back in the hall, he heaved the first Suit onto his back. He had the same kit on him, but Jiro also saw a thin wire snaking from the hem of the shirt into a device on his belt. There was an earphone secreted in the man’s right ear.

Where’s the mouthpiece?

He tried to open the man’s shirt to get at the wire but the buttons beat his shaking hands. With the knife from the Suit’s belt he slit the shirt open to the throat like it was paper. Another wire led down the sleeve of his left arm to a black wrist band with a foam disc mic.

He held up the dead limb and whispered “Hello?” into the mic. Silence.

Again, louder “Hello?” Nothing.

“SHIT!”

He pulled the earphone out of the Suit’s ear, pushing his face close enough to the dripping bloody mess that he could slip it into his own. Then holding the dead weight of the wrist up to his mouth with his other hand, he said Hello again

“Stone?”A voice came back.

“No. That guy’s dead.”

“Who is this? Where are the others?”

“My name’s Jiro,” he stuttered then he couldn’t stop “Stone is dead. They’re all dead. Like, fucking dead and there’s a dead kid and a girl… a little girl her foot’s like CHEWED OFF by some…some…THING. And the kids are chained up and there’s these creatures, these fuckin’ CREATURES like you’ve never seen! I don’t know what shit has gone down here but it’s next level and I just came delivering take out…and the girl. The girl, she’s gunna die, I gotta get help you gotta…”

“STOP! Listen.”

….