Authorial Undeath: A Pilfer! Excerpt

Hi, all! Here’s a quick excerpt from my newest book, Pilfer!

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Thanks to a quirk of an apocalyptic epiphifaerial* event some hundred years prior, humans found themselves unable to write without adding spectral to their personal adjectives. Most missives in Yvise were a few words long, and those words were chosen from a pool of vague concepts, lowering the chance of murder by grammar.

Kitchens were rife with arguments over which dish spiced small animal was. Newspapers fit onto tiny ribbons of material, headlined with MAN UPSET BODY with a subtitle of Others have happy. This lead to journalistic integrity being declared permanently eradicated with the headline of THING NOT DONE. Wars were thrown into disarray as orders consisted of variations on maybe fight, where army, and do war.

The desire to write required a disregard for one’s personal livelihood, and the act of
writing required a kind of death. As soon as a human put ink to paper with the intent to write more than a few sentences in a day, they perished, quietly, quickly, and painlessly. The pain would surface a few minutes later when they’d resurrect with their bodies and minds contorted to fulfill their newfound addiction to ink. Newborn writers would consume entire inkpots before editing their death scrawls, declaring them awful and restarting from scratch. The specific professions of journaliches, authomancers, cadaveditors, and ghost writers emerged over time, focusing on whatever they hated the most about the written word and bringing it to heel.

Most ghost writers knew this and willingly took up the cost, throwing themselves into the
ethereal world of putting one sentence in front of another. Some had no idea and simply got caught up in writing a strongly-worded note to a co-worker. That co-worker would find them a few hours later finishing a 30-page essay on whose responsibility it was to dump the rubbish and clean the communal mugs, their authorial undeath coming as a complete surprise.

No human in their right mind became a writer. It was a madness the living could not
suffer.

Once the ruins of Old Reflect were fully evacuated and the city of Quartz became the defacto capital of Yvise, these semi-living writers became the backbone of the vocational world, providing communications, cleric work, and, worst of all, love letters. Granted, their change in appearance meant they were generally sequestered to dark areas to keep the public from becoming unsettled. Ghost writers were sewer systems: it was all well and good that it worked, but no one wanted to watch it in action.

(*[EH-pi-feh-FAIR-ee-el], related to epiphaery, the magic in Pilfer!)