MTG Salvation

There seems to be a problem with tabs, I copy + pasted this from Microsoft Word, and I'd REALLY rather not individually indent each paragraph. Help?

This is a novella-like project I sparked up while in a state of writer's block for my priority project (my science-fiction/fantasy hybrid novel).

I want to see if it's worth continuing: simply put, any advice is welcomed. I adjust easily to feedback (negative or positive, life's life).

Regards, Carnifex:

Word count: 2, 384


I remember my wife stepping in the doorway soaking wet with nothing but a sad jacket on. Her eyes drooped and a cataclysmic frown sunk to her chest, which too was shrouded by the inexcusable cold. All of her well being had retracted into the recesses of her lips, which bounced less-than-flamboyantly while she formulated her words. She was careful not to upset me, but what she didn’t know was that I was fully aware of what she wished to say.
I would not be upset, regardless of what spewed forth from her tongue.
“Jack,” she sighed. “I am leaving tomorrow on a plane at seven A.M for South Carolina. I am spending a month there, visiting family and friends further south. You cannot stop me. I will enjoy the last of my independence before this…” She pointed to her stomach, plump like a roast turkey. It was the only bump on her body that shone even when the rain cloaked the sky in blue haze.
I could only smile and watch our baby with my two eyes. She took it the wrong way.
She thought I was ignoring her.
Hardly, she had merely reminded me of our ‘blessing.’
“Jack, I will leave for South Carolina and you won’t stop me. I’m visiting family and friends before the baby pins us down in this house for the next few years. Until this baby is toilet trained, can walk, can talk, and can tie his or her shoes, we are going to be fighting together to maintain composure. Raising a baby is going to be very, very hard Jack. I’m leaving and I will be back in a month,” she exhaled what was left of her shortening breaths.
“Alright,” I said without reluctance. “Remember to eat right. You’re eating for two,” I said for the umpteenth time.
She stared at me wide eyed.
I mimicked her.
She smiled back, a smile I hadn’t seen in some time. I had been expecting its return.
“Oh, Jack, I can’t believe this. I was so worried.”
“Have a good time,” I gave her a kiss and rushed off upstairs to my bubble bath.



She was gone that morning in a flurry of waddling steps; but not before leaving a booklet on our rotting kitchen counter.
The first note within its contents – appropriately so – was a contact number for a hardwood-flooring agency that specialized in floors and counters. There was enough money to cover getting a new counter, and I intended to spend some of my own getting the upstairs spare room decorated for the arrival of a new life. She didn’t know, I hadn’t known.
I knew once I fished my pockets for a wad of cash.
The second number on the list was her brother’s. It made me cringe, but I shook aside my jittery jitters and smelled the bacon. My wife was going to be visiting family and would arrive home four months into her pregnancy. She would ask me all about my chat with her brother, and unless I invited him over, I would not be able to – in all of a man’s power – lie to her.
He would join me for dinner tonight. In the meantime, I skimmed the pages of the booklet for other numbers.
To my surprise, the counter and her brother were all that mattered. She made it clear that I was not to speak with her parents, who were heavily brainwashed Jehovah-Witnesses.
Until the age of eighteen, my wife and her brother (my brother in-law) had followed the faith as well. It was an empty faith, it is an empty faith.
At least she says so.
She says so a lot.
Hmmm…
Her brother and she were kicked out after refusing to rejoin their parents at the church and likewise refusing to walk the streets, candidly pushing their beliefs on others.
They joined the peace core for a while and then settled down with their grandparents who lived just down the road. Her brother was a bitter person then. He was overeager to push thoughts of his parents’ away, while even more eager to reel in a new faith.
Because of – until eighteen – his and her (my now-wife) having their religion pushed on them, they didn’t know the feeling of being boundless in a world where strict systems of faith and good cheer were all too common.
Verily, this was my situation, being boundless to a brink of falling off the edge of an icy cove.
Her brother and her refused to believe nothing, but refused with as much resilience being Jehovah-Witnesses as well. They adopted Christianity and felt it was flawless. This flawlessness was merely a façade that stemmed from their relief in how much easier a faith it was.
I met my now-wife at a restaurant when I was twenty. I served her rice and pork, and she left her number beside the bill. I don’t know what I had done to so easily catch this catchy fish, but I had.
I called.
We dated.
Hoorah, she’s mine.



After seeing the sites in San-Francisco for our honeymoon, and episodes of passion that coaxed my nightly urges, we returned home – very much in love – to our mansion.
Our mansion was an apartment, which quickly became far from ideal. I got a job printing newspapers for a few bucks. Then I got a job writing a small column entitled:



The paper I worked for noted my knack for putting words to paper, but resented placing me in such a blatantly dull column. I wrote weekly about the best shops in town, but secretly the shops I spoke of were not as dandy as they used to be. The public found nothing in my column.
I was dropped.
I was picked up again after printing papers.
My ‘boss’ gave me a shot at writing a column of my own. He gave me these requirements:



I got straight to it, and wrote about the best ways to start a life in a bustling metropolis. Similar to my last column but more general. Spicy.
My first column covered finding houses.
My second column covered filling the house.
My third column covered meeting that special someone to fill the other three quarters of the house. That quirky ‘three-quarters’ part gave me several pats on the back.
My fourth column trailed off into some trivial nonsense. Still, the audience was indulged, and I was raking in enough cash to afford a better place.
A small house outside Toronto. We moved from the sweaty city, into the Greater-Toronto-Area, and got ourselves a place.
I left the newspaper while my girlfriend (now-wife) continued to use her grandparents’ money to make her way through nursing school. Such a brilliant woman.
My new job was short stories for some petty magazines I’ve forgotten the names of. They were science-fiction based. I wrote about political tyrannies that would make little sense in a logically constructed society. I wrote about half-mechanical-half-beast creatures ravaging equally unnatural forests.
It had taken some heartless rejections before acceptance. My stories were alright. The magazine was fine with them; probably because they received nothing else worth reading.
Still, that job flopped. I took one last chance before the magazine went under and added some fornication to the mix. Futuristic baby-making doesn’t appeal to even the nerdiest of underground teenagers.
I got another. My name had circulated gloomily through the small area of my current residence and my last. I got offered a deal, to write a few short novella in the science-fiction genre. Since the deal was already a deal, I had to focus less on keeping it cliché and safe, and more in stretching my noggin’.
Stretch my noggin’ I did, with passion.
I called the story this:



It took place in a square society. When I say square, I mean a precisely square valley placed fixedly in between a mountain range. These mountains swarmed with corrupted humans that had gone mad after scoping for vegetation. The remaining sane of this square society had uncovered that a strange mist lingered higher in the mountains, which would quickly change a man’s thoughts to dismal, deathly things. In short, if a man or woman were to stray too far upwards, they would become cannibalistic freaks.
My story began this way, developing just as quickly as my talent developed.
The dilemma grew. My people in this square society were trapped by their own people whom had gone insane and had turned on a taste for human flesh. They needed water and food, vegetables to keep the air clean, so that this maddening mist would stay clear of their valley.
I stopped.
I had forgotten something vital.
Why were my people here? What had driven them to this obsolete square region? How had they gotten over the mountains without going mad?
Simple. A bomb.
A bomb test had failed, had destroyed a grand city. The survivors had left the smoky region and had gone to find new homes. They had stuck together, but the journey up the mountain was perilous. Many were lost, and so those still alive quickened their pace to avoid further pitfalls.
This bomb had released the maddening gas, which had eventually made it (after being carried through the higher wind currents) to the mountains. What the survivors (the sane ones) didn’t know was that a lot of the ‘lost’ people had merely been trapped by boulders, had been distracted and had lost the group, or had strayed off simply because.
The gas got them, and then they’d shown their faces again.
Some more of my sane survivors had gone to the mountains again after establishing their small town. They didn’t return.
My sane survivors realized the maddening gas for what it was; a maddening gas.
At this point I submitted the first of my science-fiction novella to my new bosses, and they ate it up with whipped cream, berries, and chocolate sauce. They ‘promoted’ me and told me to make a novel out of it.
I agreed.
My wife was happy.
I am now an author in various genres.



That book wound up a cult classic somehow. I am not one to boast. Still, I was proud, and my bosses found room for a sequel.
The first of these books ended with my sane survivors digging tunnels underneath the mountains to escape. They worked day and night; keeping watch for their former friends and family in the mountain range. As they breached the other side, they found that they were not alone. There were other wanderers, wearing sleeves and tattered clothes over their faces.
“It’s just like back in the battle of Ypres!” Yelled one man. This sentence was supposed to give way to the suggestion that my story did in fact take place on Earth. “Pissin’ on a rag to keep this stuff out of our lungs!”
That began a partnership between the two groups of sane survivors.
From there, they searched for a cure to rid the area of the maddening gas.
They found none, and went back into hiding.
My bosses were not content with this solemn ending, and told me to change the perspective of how things wound up. They wanted the good guys to bust lip, shoo the bad guys away.
Unfortunately, I’m not a scientist, and so in order for my sane survivors to win the fight, they would need to find a way around the maddening gas and wage war against the insane survivors in the mountains.
I couldn’t say simply that they toiled day and night for a cure. No, that was too easy, and I would lose my credibility.
So I either had to leave the book as it was and face the consequences at the hands of my employers, or I had to sit up all night thinking of filler for a second book.
I stood my ground and left my book as it was.
My bosses grew angry and insisted that I continued.
I admitted that it was not feasible to do this.
They fired me.
This, ultimately, led to my personal expansion as a writer. I left science-fiction for a few years and dabbled in fantasy, keeping close to home but on a more mystical level. My first novel featured no dragons, no dwarves, no elves; just people and a system of magic that could be logically explained.
I found success in providing boundaries in a genre that spits at them, and found another deal.
The book featured humans and some made-up creatures. They pit battle against one another, fighting for dominion over ‘The Western Glades of Tajerra.’
The book was titled ‘Tajerra.’ I found less success in fantasy than in science-fiction.
I made some money, but fantasy was not for me.



Around this time I was twenty-four, and my wife was the same age. We had discussed marriage on and off, but she concluded (as did I) that we were too young. Secretly she longed to marry, but could not convince me to propose to her.
I loved her, I love her, yes. But I hadn’t a steady job. I was finding myself as a writer still, and marriage is a costly thing.
I told her this. She understood.
I went back to science-fiction and wrote the sequel to my first full-length novel.
It was entitled this:



It began with a golden-haired woman sitting at a throne, watching from the top of her skyscraper my two groups of sane survivors wandering aimlessly. I tried to add mystery, and some romance (inspired by my lack-of-romance-due-to-marriage-on-the-horizon-issue).
The book was published, simply because I had been published before, and this was the awaited sequel.
It flopped.
Science-fiction was not for me.