Theme - "Obscure"

Word Limit: 2000

Submission Deadline: Wednesday, 7/14 by 11:59 PM Pacific

Voting begins Thursday, 7/15, and goes until Saturday, 7/17 at 11:59 PM Pacific.

Optional Secondary Objective: Summer: Set your story during summer, or incorporate something that feels summery to you.

Submission Guidelines:

- One entry per poster.
- All submissions must be written during the time of the challenge.
- Using the topic as the title of your piece is discouraged.
- Keep to the word count!

Voting Guidelines:

- Three votes per voter. Please denote in your voting your 1st (3 pts), 2nd (2 pts), and 3rd (1 pt) place votes.
- Please read all submissions before voting.
- YOU MUST VOTE in order to be eligible to win the challenge.
- When voting ends, the winner gets a collective pat on the back, and starts the new challenge.

Writing Challenge FAQ

FUCK YEAH SUMMER

FUCK YEAH AMERICA

I'm not sure I understand the topic. Seems unclear.

Seems a bit obscure you might say.

Well I'm not going to do Faery Story 2 at least.

Clear as mud!

Well, I think I might as well try my hand at fantasy this time around. I've been trying to think of something, but I can't quite grasp what exactly I need to do. Theme personified...

Anyway, this should be pretty fun. I hope I'll be able to pressure myself into finishing before the deadline so I can actually edit the damned thing for once in my life.

Irish said:

Well, I think I might as well try my hand at fantasy this time around.

Click to expand...

You ain't fooling me this time. Fool me once, shame on me... fool me twice, shame on me... not wait... fool me once shame on you... arghhhhhhhh.

I'm going to do fanfiction.

I shall collect no shame.

Seriously though, I really like reading fantasy stories, but I hate writing them for some reason. I don't get it. I mean, even back when I was RPing (shame collector back on) I tried to make my characters as realistic as possible within the confines of the (oh noes) Naruto universe. I couldn't even do justu properly. Shameful.

Don't be too ashamed. When I was in middle school, I wrote Evangelion fanfiction.

fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, won't get fooled again.

Dresden said:

Don't be too ashamed. When I was in middle school, I wrote Evangelion fanfiction.

Click to expand...

When I was in middle school I wrote stories about tarzan having a tree that grew money and him going around killing people for no reason. Also he could run 60 miles per hour.

Timedog said:

fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, won't get fooled again.



When I was in middle school I wrote stories about tarzan having a tree that grew money and him going around killing people for no reason. Also he could run 60 miles per hour.

Click to expand...

Mini-Timedog was adorable.

hey_monkey said:

I'm not sure I understand the topic. Seems unclear.

Click to expand...

I've never heard of such a thing.

Fourth of July

Word Count: LOL

It's that time again. I wonder what I'm going to do today?

Fifth of July
Word Count: ROFL

Oh fuck, I still have a fuckload of time to write a story for this challenge, what am I gonna go? Then he got killed with a weapon.

Hello writing-gaf. I hope to be a regular. I'm finally starting to take my writing seriously again, and scanned this thread. I thought why wait for the deadline, thought of something quickly and knew that if I didn't just write something write away it would never get done, and this is the outcome. Feel free to criticize the shit out of it. It's the only way we grow.




Intergalactic Eggs and...Ham? (1994)



12:43

I ignored it.

12:43

I pulled the pillow over my head and desperately attempted to drown out the wail of the alarm clock by grinding my ear against the mattress.

12:44

I whimpered a little, suddenly aware of both the drool that had gathered on the side of my face and the complete depth of my coherency. That was the thing about alarm clocks. Alarm clocks always go off at the wrong times. If you expect them, then somehow you wake before they strike, and you wait for what seems like hours for it to actually go off. Like tonight however, in the midst of a dream that just so happened to host a copious amount of charming and beautiful women it would suddenly blast it all to pieces with a sudden, annoying announcement as if to say, “Don't you regret setting me?”.

12:44

Unable to withstand the alarm clocks incessant cacophony, as well as its deep red swell of neon light, I slapped my palm against the clock surface and put an immediate end to the abuse. I tried to fall back into sleep, wishing that I could somehow push the play button in my mind that would summon my dream, but it was out of reach. Unable to fall back into sleep, I noticed all of the little things. How things in my room looked in the dark, how uncomfortable I was wearing only my underwear, and how the temperature seemed to have risen a dozen or so degrees since I took my nap. Thinking back on the alarm I had to have had a good reason for setting it, but nothing came to mind at the time, so I decided the calendar on my desktop computer in the kitchen would be as good a place as any to solve a late night mystery.

When I made it to the kitchen I was already starting to remember the reason for setting the alarm without even looking at the computers calendar. You see, every evening at noon I marched myself right on up those small stairs at Daisies Diner. Chowing down on one of Jimmy the cooks bacon cheddar sliders and a large malt smoothy wasn't just a tradition, it was nearly a goddamn religious experience. I opened the fridge and my eyes took a moment to readjust to the sudden explosion of light before grabbing the cool milk carton and pouring myself a tall glass of milk. The bubbles formed a foam at the top of the glass, just the way I liked it. Suddenly relieved of my thirst, I sat down and thought back to that moment at Daisies.

A small community like Peaks Crest doesn't really have any secrets. I'm only twenty four, an aspiring writer who works part time at Sams grocery store, but I'd gotten some good stories talking to people over the years, and good folk were sometimes just worth listenin to regardless. That hot day was something else though, there was a stranger there who I hadn't seen before, someone who stood out and struck me as odd. He was pale as milk, thin as a whip and was chowing down on enough grub to feed a third world country.

“ He sure do like to eat.” Jimmy the cook loved to state the obvious.

“Yeah, must be the first time he's eaten. Look at em.” For some reason, I couldn't keep my eyes off of him. “ Ever seen him around Jim?”

He shook his head and picked up my finished glass of malt, “Kinda sorta. He been here since a few days ago. Comes back same time and sits in the same chair. Orders the same thing.” Jimmy took off.

You know how sometimes you're so caught up in a thought that you stare at someone without even realizing it? I didn't even realize what I was doing until he was staring at me and waving me over. Not one to turn down good conversation, I got up and took my first steps towards meeting Egg, the most interesting person I would ever again meet in my life.

Long story short, we spoke on and off for the next few weeks. To be fair, he was exceedingly nice, nicer than anyone I'd ever met. When I brought my station wagon over that I had mentioned was probably on the way out he somehow managed to fix it right there at Daisies, and when I mentioned my moms failing health he even offered to take a look at her. Egg always seemed to have a slight screw loose, referring to himself as “we” here and there on occasion but I always blew it off.

“That's nice of you Egg, but what could you do? You aren't a doctor.” I said.

Egg smiled warmly as he always did, “We are not a doctor. But I know about sickness.” His tone was flat, without emotion.

When I asked him just how he could help her, things took a turn for the worst. He got quiet, his eyes went narrow and he glanced around the room evasively.

And quite simply, he proclaimed himself to be an alien.

Now I am not a close minded man. I have listened to a number of theories on things both natural and unnatural, from the beyond and unreal, and have grown to accept the fact that probably one myth of astounding improbability is likely to be true. In that instant though, I could feel nothing more than disbelief. I joked with him at first, tried to call his bluff but he remained adamant. I left Daisies that day wondering if I should ever bother coming back, wondering if I wasn't inviting myself into the lap of a madman, a raving lunatic of a serial killer that had somehow taken a liking to young men who had an infatuation with the mysterious and unknown. I couldn't help myself though, and over the weeks we had discussions about dozens of things. My lunch time every weekday was filled with an interview with an alien, and I was drinking it up. I began bringing notepads and voice recorders. According to Egg, I was the first human he'd ever spoken with, the face of mankind that would live in the memories of the Num Dum race for an eternity.

...Yes, I said Num Dum.

“ We Nums are not so unlike you, even physically we share a similar physiology as humans. I could not describe it to you exactly. It is something to be experienced.” Eggs eyes never left mine. He was constantly reading me. The intensity of his stare was starting to become startling. “ Humanity itself has acknowledged momentous occasions via national, even global broadcast at various stages of its lifetime. Presidential elections, super bowl, a-and lunar landing one.” Egg always was excited when discussing humanity and its breakthroughs. “ John, we have told you this before, but we are not here. We are a husk, a recon enabled tool not unlike humanities mars rover used simply to scout and collect data. We are simply more advanced. To you, our discussions here have been odd, and perhaps you doubt us. But to us, you couldn't be more real, and billions of Nums watch this husks recordings daily.”

Over the last few weeks of the budding friendship with Egg, things had gone from entertaining and pleasant to odd. I covered all the questions you'd ask an alien. If they were peaceful, what level of technology they had, if there were others out there, and Egg never failed to respond. One thing was for sure, Egg was either a master at deceit or truly believed every word he was saying. After that conversation ended and I excused myself, Egg said something that I thought I'd never forget.

“ We are leaving John.” Egg looked distressed. “ We are required to deliver our samples of Earth back to our home ship. We do not know when we will be back.” He turned his head at an angle. “ We at home have so enjoyed your company though John.” He stood and offered his hand. “I offer you a unique opportunity. You will be the first visitor of our homeworld.” He blinked, then smiled.

I humored Egg as always. “ Tell me where and I'll be there buddy.” I pushed my chair in and let my money fall on the table. Jimmy and Daisy deserved the tip. I cracked a smile and shook his hand. “ I'm a proud representative of earth. I should be honored to serve as ambassador.” There was an awkward silence, I cleared my throat and made my way out.

“John!”

I turned.

“ 1:20 a.m, on August the 23rd, there will be a comet that marks our arrival by the constellation you refer to as the little dipper. Should you ever seek to learn the truth, or aspire to learn of great things or the way of my people, then let us have dinner for once.”

He walked out of my life, and that was that. A couple of months went by, and it was almost the end of August. That much time goes by you chock the whole thing up as the ravings of a lunatic. Somewhere deep inside though, a part of me always wondered. The writer in me, the adventurer in me begged for the opportunity, not one to explore an alien race, but to achieve some form of closure. I wanted to walk out onto my porch one arid, sickeningly hot summer night and stare at nothing for a few minutes and then laugh about the whole thing the next morning while bagging groceries for bingo winners at Sams grocery story.

So I set the alarm.

1:10

I threw something on as fast as I could.

I sat on my porch with a beer and a cigarette, sitting in my boxers and sandals with a bath robe draped over my shoulders.

1:19

I was slightly aware that I was nervous. My hands were suddenly sweaty, my heart jumped out of my chest and within my stomach someone had clearly opened a jar full of fluttering new born butterflies. I scanned the darkness towards the little dipper, noting the boxy outline of stars that seemed to merge together.

1:20

I looked at my watch and could scarcely draw breath. I wouldn't allow myself to blink, my eyes grew itchy and began to water as I refused to miss a single second of the revelation. If I allowed myself to blink, if I didn't remain focused for the entirety of that minute then I would always guess that the second that I blinked might have been the moment that comet would have streaked right out of sight, always leaving me wondering.

And there it was. Like Egg said, a single streaking white comet that left as quickly as it came.

Holy.
Fucking.
Shit.

After what seemed like a life time I reached the diner, which was empty at this time of night. It was basically at desert out there without the traveling populace to cause a stir. I briefly began to wonder if the comet had simply been a coincidence when the loudest sound I ever heard erupted all around me. The earth seemed to shake as if in an earthquake and I suddenly felt queasy. I struggled to make my way back to my car, but I felt like I was walking through molasses. Suddenly, a blinding light surrounded me, and I felt my feet leave the ground. Up, up, up I went, Peaks Crest becoming nothing more than a small dot, and then earth was a marble, and then I traveled through black holes, dead stars and the infinite depth of the galaxy before I came to a sudden and magnificent stop.

And Egg was there.

hmm....

What's on your mind, my good man?

All right, I've basically got mine sketched out. Hopefully will finish tomorrow or Thursday. (will be mostly away from internets starting Friday)

Bah, fantasy is hard to write or come up with an idea for. I've got several ideas for my regular style, but nothing that meets my goal of finally writing something different. Maybe I'll just make my character a little more supernatural than usual.

Ugh, nothing coming to me this time. Hopefully I'll be able to pump out something more than a half baked random splurge of text that people, with the goodness of their hearts, try to make something out of. :Lol

State of the Field: an Open Letter (630)

To my colleagues in the science of obscurity:

The field of obscurity is in desperate straits; it stands on the brink of irrelevance. Indeed, obscurity science is on the verge of falling completely into unimportance, invisibility, and universal disregard.

Last year, I was commissioned to undertake a “state of the field” study by the United Research Council. That the study was undertaken at all might itself be viewed as a failure, but the URC quickly forgot about my work, and I lost my funding on the verge of completing the study. With some difficulty, I brought the study to completion without funding. (see Appendix A for detailed disinformation on my methodology)

The results were disheartening, even given the inherent difficulty of conducting research in this field. Grants have dropped by fifty percent in the last decade alone (see Appendix F), and are less than a tenth of what they were in the field’s heyday, when Hermann Unbekannt conducted his little-known foundational research. Faculty appointments in obscurity have fallen off a cliff; few new professors have been appointed in the last decade, and obscurity departments are becoming increasingly hard to find. But even beyond those unsubtle signs, the field is losing visibility. Mentions of the science itself and of the posteminent figures in the field in newspapers and in mainstream scientific journals dropped substantially in the last decade. Obscurity Quarterly seems to have gone out of print; or at any rate there are no extant issues from the last decade in any of the research libraries I looked through. Internet searches relating to obscurity turn up either nothing at all, or results that are wholly unrelated.

Some would have it that these problems are inevitable and cannot be answered. They could not be more wrong! The problem of creeping disregard is not insoluble, and I will propose three potential approaches to solving it.

The first solution is for the field to bring in new blood. The key here is for obscurity to be presented to youths as a useful and interesting alternative to the other social sciences. Low-cost informational programs could be launched at various high schools, aimed at those studying related subjects. Art history students could be briefed on Bassano and Masriera, music students could look at Sutcliffe or Jansch, while shy students could learn about the root causes and methods of obscurity. Altogether, these efforts would give us a solid base of young people with an interest in obscurity.

The second potential solution is for the field to construct a foundation upon which future research can be built. This would require the foundational texts in obscurity to be assembled; a task fraught with difficulties. The earliest researchers in obscurity were not well-known, and their works are difficult to find--double-digit printing runs were the norm, and few libraries were interested in collecting them. In order to attempt this solution, an obscurity commission would have to be formed, which would attempt to track down all the early and most basic works in obscurity. This done, survey works could be undertaken to make it easier for future obscurists to study the roots of the field. Firmly establishing the roots of obscurity in this way would help to combat the decrease in academic profile and university backing.

The final solution is to use marketing techniques to to increase the field’s visibility, on the internet and in print, and especially at major institutions of higher education. To be perfectly frank, I have no idea how to do this.

And so, esteemed colleagues, if any of you are reading this, this concludes my summary of the state of the field. If I might be so bold as to summarize the summary in a single word: success!

Irish said:

Bah, fantasy is hard to write or come up with an idea for. I've got several ideas for my regular style, but nothing that meets my goal of finally writing something different. Maybe I'll just make my character a little more supernatural than usual.

Click to expand...

Your character should lose a limb about two sentence into your story. Then the entire rest of your story is about the SEARING PAIN that is blinding them to anything else around them
Did I get your mind going? You're welcome. *smug face*

Peace out cool cats. Hopefully I'll duck in for votes, but not sure how much internet access I'll have. Later!

Got an idea spark. We'll see where it leads.

Deconstruct
Word Count: 1737

I am the house built from sweat equity; I am the over-hanging branches that hold back the rain.

Plot swung back and forth on the swingset, while the rain forgot how to cease overhead. It dripped down his face and soiled all his clothes, but he continued to swing. If he stopped, then everything would fall back into place, and he couldn't let that happen... not until Conclusion got home, at least. He said it'd be a few hours, but there's a traffic jam holding him up.

He stared upwards at the slate grey and felt the droplets of water sting his cheek and eyes, but he stayed vigilant. The clouds were too light – there had to be a sun waiting behind them, fighting to burst through. There was a pull and tug from far away, but he couldn't tell from where or what... something fighting its way towards him. A short bolt of lightning struck not far away from Plot, forcing him off the swing violently; he crash-landed on his shoulder, a sickening crack echoing around his small playground. Crying out in agony, he rolled over, clutching at the broken bone. The storm was not a friend today.

After struggling to get up, he found his footing in the soggy mud, even though it seeped and squelched and slid around. His playground was surrounded by trees, except for the singular path that had been carved by the Writer a long time ago. Plot's right arm hung uselessly next to his body, unable to move from the pain. The rain hid his tears, and even though he stumbled through the wet slosh, he was glad that no one would see his pain. I have to keep going.

The path wove around a lake of trees, and the branches began to stretch out over the path, cutting the downpour in half, keeping most of it at bay. A pillar of fire burst upwards far away, shooting up into the heavens. Plot could almost feel the heat from where he was, and yet... he was not afraid. Something in him screamed, The Point! The path suddenly became familiar, all the smells of damp grass and wet tree trunks swirled around him. He could almost visualize them; as if on cue the sight-smells began to point in a single direction, an arrow straight towards the fire.

A divining rod – is this fate? Was I meant to go this way? There have to be other Points, right? Erased by God's invisible pencil, this errant epiphany ceased to be. Plot felt his mind being cleared of all these other directions; the arrow kept its shape and direction and now he was being pulled along by a leash. The trees began to shrink back, then, and the rain began to make its presence known once more, battering and stampeding the well-worn trail. The pain in his shoulder had become nothing more than a dull throb, but at the same time, a reminder...

Things can fall apart at any time. Plot felt his feet moving faster and faster, as if adrenalin had been jammed into his legs by a thousand million needles. Time had begun to blur, and everything around him slowed down. Liquid became solid, cracking and exploding like glass, sending shards of itself to and fro. There was no time to dawdle in the here and now. Conclusion will have to wait at home for a while. The trail began to split numerous times, trailing off to the left and right, forking repeatedly, and he ignored all of them. None of these paths would lead him straight and true. Yet his mind couldn't help but wonder... where do they lead? Where do they go?

But before he knew it, he was staring into the crimson inferno, his eyes dancing with the flames; the blaze welcomed him with open arms.

----

I am at the beck and call of rules and code; without me, there is... chaos?

The snow flurried and blitzkrieged the cabin she lived in. Sentence stared longingly outside the window, wanting to make snow angels or throw snowballs. She had no one to do so with, but... something compelled Sentence to want to do any number of these things. Same thing with labels – she always wanted to be called this or that, but in truth it was many things... whatever Words were jammed into it that day molded and shaped what she was to be. Content with ambiguity, Sentence lay on her bed, her arms behind her head, imagining herself out in the blizzard.

Plot had told her to stay inside all day; he reasoned that if the snow didn't stop, Sentence might get lost... or better yet, buried. Plot told her the worst thing to happen was to become fragmented – this happened all too often with Sentences; Plot then told her that he was proud of Sentence for not being a run-on. Those were even worse, he reasoned.

“But I just want to join you outside...” Sentence whispered into the unresponsive air. She bolted upright, then, feeling the tug of more Words. The Words were working her feet and hands, shoving clothes on her body, dragging her up from the bed and to the window once more.

Far away, barely visible through the alabaster symphony, a funnel of flame cut upwards through icy sky, scissor-cutting frozen clouds.

“It's... intense.” Sentence mumbled, eyes wide, mouth agape. The door of her cabin slammed open then, but not of its own accord. Sentence's head flashed towards it, suddenly compelled to go outside, even though the bitter cold cut like a sword swipe through the warmth of her abode.

She hugged her attire close to her, as if it would do any good in this arctic blizzard. The snow seemed to shift in its direction, obscuring where she was travelling. The weather seemed to trying to keep her from reaching the flame. I've never seen such a thing before. What is it?

Two Words appeared in her mind, then, and just in front of her the snow seemed to be forming them for her: The Point. The Words had meant nothing to her before, as she had been so secluded. Plot told her that she was one of many; he had effectively squashed all of her hopes of being unique. But now, the two small pieces of language were starting to make sense. If she was one of many, that would mean that many Sentences just like her were striving, battling these inclement white devils to make it to the same Point.

“Gotta... keep... going...” She said to herself, fighting to hold steady through the snowpack. As she said this, though, the snow began to stop all around her. She could see it falling next to her, above her, but not on her. A barrier had been erected to keep the snow away, and it lead directly to the inferno. She ran, then, not caring if her shoes flew off, or that her scarf had loosened and ran away from her. The Words were following her, imbuing her with ways to describe and explain what was going on around her. Fate... destiny... one. And then she began to see others like her, running along similar paths parallel to hers.

We're all running towards the same goal. The tundra lead onwards to a cliff edge, just before the tower of crimson orange. She watched as others of her kind failed to see the edge coming, tumbling downwards, forever lost in a white prison down below.

I've made it.

-----

I can mean one thing and everything; I am an infinite rung-upon-rung chain of meanings.

The summer sun baked all that was exposed to its indomitable severity. Lizards and other small animals scrambled to find small bits of shelter... something, anything to escape the heat. None of it would mollify what was going on Word's mind, a constant, shifting, dynamic consciousness that would never be held down. To call him 'he' would do injustice to what he was – an ever-changing image. The heat pierced through his shapeshifting, though, and all of his infinite forms felt the unbearable pressure.

“Make it... STOP...” Word croaked, his throat and mouth dry to the point of cracking both his voice and his lips. He longed for just a subtle taste of water, or a gushing waterfall, or the depths of a wide azure ocean. Plot left him here to die, he thought. Plot didn't care for a Word, because a Word could be taken and thrown out, easily scrapped, crumpled up and tossed into the wastebasket.

He remembered when Plot and Sentence were here, when they had given him company, promised him a better life. But then they left while he was asleep. It had been days since they had disappeared... and still Word didn't die. He was on the breaking point of delirium, but something in him willed him to stay alive. Some ever-present force, some inner drive.

Word pulled himself to his feet, then, and he looked towards the horizon. The desert was endless, but he often imagined Eden was there, off in the distance. There was a paradise calling out to him. And as he closed his eyes to once again dwell in the fantastical, a loud roar tore loose from something far away. He opened his eyes to see Babel in flames.

The Point.

But his feet wouldn't move. His mind and his soul screamed at him to move, but he couldn't. No matter how much the shape of his feet changed, or how much the shifting image of his legs struggled to pull free, he was stuck.

But then he realized something.

No matter how many different meaning-possibilities he had, he was being thrown out. His worst fears had come true. Plot and Sentence had not just merely abandoned him, they had discarded him. He was a Word that no longer fit into their paradigm; no matter how many truths he upheld he was inevitably useless.

He reached out with futility towards the heavenly torch, and he imagined himself becoming one with it. He would soar along its currents of heat, up into the cosmos, melding himself with the Plot in union.

But he was thrown away. And so he sat down again, eventually falling backwards to kiss the ground.

The world doesn't need me anyway.

for the first time in ages, i'm in. will post when i get home and type it up.

feels good to write again.

here's mine. 1061 words.
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Prunus Persica

When the rain came back to my green plains, my body was still asunder in at least three places, and I fought with it every day to struggle back to equilibrium I once took for granted in an unbroken sequence of seconds that stretched into years and then decades. Now it seemed I couldn’t remember how long this had gone on—how long the first steps out of bed had hurt my feet, my knee, when turning doorknobs started being something to dread—only that though I could objectively remember being capable, I lived in emotional perpetuity as someone who was not.
Each day I go through these comfortable motions: coffee, two cups, oatmeal, wash bowl, shower, dress, news, door. I’ve heard people view these actions, with their familiarity and consistency, with contempt, but to me this is like growing antipathy for the foundation of a house. I start solidly, structurally, and build up.
I packed a book in a leather bag I carried once I realized you liked it that I did. It was the bag I bought for the graduate school I never attended. I live this way often: appearance first, reality second.
It doesn’t always work.
I wonder if you do this. I wonder if you know this.
I wonder.

Hot water freezes faster than cold water.
Did you know that?
The world is full of so many things that don’t make sense, at least in any practical way. Could rain dry my clothes? Cutting down plants often makes them get bigger.
I have learned not to trust common sense. I live in a world of joyful opposites, and each time I find one I feel everything wrapping around me, swaddled by unlikelihood.
Are you sure? I’m not so sure.
We are unsure. We’re sure of it.

You cradle a ladybug on your fingers. “I saved it!” I watched you reach into your glass and airlift it to safety, saw your lips assuring it and cooing from across the room.
“It owes you,” I say.
“I owe her,” you say. I note pronouns. “If it weren’t for me, she’d be a goner. That’s a responsibility now.”
“Ask her to put in a good word with the aphids eating our plants. They don’t have to stop, but they could at least slow down, or move next door.”
“We have to name her.” You let the little red dot walk finger to finger atop your hand, underneath, and flipped palm side up so she wouldn’t walk upside down.
I question the logic of naming something that lives less than a week.
You don’t.

Belinda.
Belinda ladybug.
A year later, you still mention her as if she were out in the garden, living peacefully.
I know this isn’t likely. But I still draw images in my mind of her reasoning in calm tones, or tied to a tomato like a marked tree, aphids in flannel and hard hats waiting to cut it to pieces.

We weren’t close.
You had left.
But years later there was something you liked: words, hobbies, face (I find this last hard to believe). A letter in my box one morning, breaking that beautiful waking machine, skipped work, busy pens.
A simple life, but a full one. You knew that. I liked rain and favorite jackets and sweatshirts and buttered popcorn. My body slightly broken, but my heart thawed, beating healthfully. My family was close. My friends were close. Any solitude was a solitude I chose, and not some byproduct of loneliness.
But I looked at you, at these pictures you sent, and saw smiles and stoic faces and casual glances, noted the careful omission of frowns, and felt myself wanting to see them so I could change them. I wasn’t rational. I see that. I wanted to transmutate your leaden seconds of sadness with the grape suckers I buy you from the drug store by our apartment.
You lie on the couch and rub your feet together, tasting it, and I’d finish puzzles and lament missing pieces with a smirk.

I like lying around on weekends watching movies. I like going to flea markets and new grocery stores. I get excited when we see an old man selling peaches roadside from a dirty wooden crate, and nudge you when he asks me why I’m buying peaches when I’m already carting one around in my passenger seat.
Do you see how reality segues so easily to fiction?
It’s dangerous.
This is my life. Dog walks, parks, sunshine, gardening, cooking, shopping.
Talking. Lots of talking. Pink lemonade.
Do you like it?

Our tomatoes grow undisturbed. We make sandwiches with bacon and tomato and mayonnaise and black pepper on bread you kneaded.
We toast Belinda while we eat.

Expectations are a funny thing.
I’m not sure what you expect or expected, or what anyone does. There’s a tendency to reduce the people we know only by their component parts to simplifications. I tell you of a car: these are the wheels; this is the seat; it is black and has a nice stereo. But does that tell you what it feels like to drive the car?
I am books and food and cartoons and some place you left behind long ago.
You are progress and music and poetry and pictures with your tongue wagging out and a wailing, laughing nephew cradled in your arm.
But what are these things?
What is reality?
Everything backward is forward. Hot water freezes more quickly. How can this be so?
I see many realities running parallel. There is the one in which it is not we that progresses but you and I—me pleasantly back in my motions, you thousands of miles away making music and being beautiful, separate but still thriving. There is another filled with the hands we hold and diplomatic elderly ladybugs, where I have your coffee ready when you have to wake up late and rush out to work in the rain that so inevitably always comes back to all the green of spring.
And there is the one in which I live, that could be as like or unlike either of these.

My papers sit, a notebook open with these words.
You walk by, glancing, and pause; your coffee cup leaves a round brown kiss when you rest it here, taking up my pen to underline something you like.

Alfarif said:

What's on your mind, my good man?

Click to expand...

Internet memes.

I know this is somewhat unrelated, but do any of you want to critique a short story I wrote for an assignment? <3

If you're thinking to submit something feel free to do so here. But if you're looking to have it critiqued but don't want to submit something here, you can pm me I guess. You'll get a lot more variety of crits here though, if its only a writing assignment piece.

Unfortunately, I started this a few weeks ago (it's thus not eligible for the challenge). I sent you a PM. Thanks in advance! <3

two/TWENTY/2 (1949)

At four thirty in the afternoon, my shift is over and I collect my things and nod to the fresh faces taking mine and Sams places at the counter for the remainder of today. The days are getting longer, but the sun is still setting early, I pull my jacket on and head towards the tube station at Golders Green. The real rush hasn’t started yet but it won’t be long, you get a pre-rush rush on the tubes in London, people like me, striving to get to where they’re going before the workers finish up for the day and head home, full speed ahead. You feel a sense of togetherness with the pre-rush rushers, a sense that we’re all secretly pleased we don’t have to contend with the real peak traffic. We’ve all managed to pull one over on life. Not enough of a togetherness to give anyone the green light to talk to anyone though. The adverts above the windows will still seem abnormally interesting now or in thirty minutes. The long tiled corridors always remind me of the toilets in my old junior school, except there weren’t any washed up hippies strumming out various Bob Dylan songs in the toilets. I wish there had have been. It would have given my school a touch more character. Perversely, the toilets in my old school didn’t ever smell like piss, whereas these long corridors do. The platform is all middle age women and lost foreign students, all wearing identical “I heart London” t-shirts and bright orange backpacks, looking left and right with huge eyes. A light breeze whips my fringe and a faint smell of soot lets me know that a train is due and seconds later the hallway is filled with sound, a doorway appears in front of us. The foreign students look at the train as though it’s a monster, unsure if it is entirely wise to step into its belly or not. They’ve been bitten by this trick before. With trepidation they step on, looking around sheepishly with a vein hope that someone might reassure them they are not travelling towards hell itself.

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Ten minutes too late and I’ve hit the peak. I don’t so much step out of the train as I levitate out, carried by the tidal wave of home goers. We spill out onto the platform, minding the gap as we go and slosh onto the escalator. A few unlucky suits are caught in a vicious undercurrent and can’t stop; they clamber past on the right hand side, flowing up and up, faster and faster, through the barriers and kasplash onto the streets here and there, bodies everywhere. Washing into shops, restaurants, flooding down the streets. The carnage is unstoppable. The flood warnings sound as a panicked voice from an all reaching Tannoy tells people to head for higher ground. Overhead I can hear the news helicopters and the reporter screaming to the viewers at home that London has never seen a flood as destructive or terrible as this since biblical times. Pay per view.


I stop into the newsagents on Haverstock Hill to pick up some cigarettes, light one up outside and pull out my address book from my bag. The local area map tells me I need to walk for about five minutes, crisscrossing through a maze of streets in unfamiliar territory. I’ve been here what now, two months? It’s taken me this long to build up the strength to come this far, but now I’m here it’s not as intimidating as I thought it would be. The streets are lined with trees on one side and a large industrial building on the other. It’s not quite the exotic paradise I envisaged, the drunk on the corner drinking something from inside a Morrisons bag in place of the sophisticated, finely dressed Italian men of my imagination. The address I’m looking for is easier to find than expected and I sit down on a low planter opposite to regain my thoughts and smoke a cigarette. The building is unremarkable, a small, square four flat affair. With a pathway along one side and a driveway leading to grubby looking garages the other, sectioning it off from the terrace. There is a light in the upper left window and I wonder who lives there. A young family of three, husband, wife and baby perhaps. The husband works in the city all day and comes home to a warm living room, a family dinner of some French origin. After dinner the husband and wife will bathe the baby, put it to bed and sit down together, the husband reading the paper whilst the wife reads a novel, they listen to radio 4 and drink red wine. Or perhaps it’s her. It could well be, I know the number, it’s number four. But I have no idea which flat corresponds to which number until I go in. The doorbell is grey metal; parts of it have a white crust where the oxidisation has chalked up the years. There are four bells, each with a white name plaque underneath. D.COBERLY, F.OSKINS & J.FISHER, MR & MRS. SWANN and finally S.TILBURY.

Sophie.

The flow has caught up with me. I’m washed out into the suburbs heading for the south. Military personnel and air-sea rescue are trying to save lives but the force of the water is too much, when we reach the coast a huge tidal surge will wash us all back to London, levelling the whole place. A flash of green. I sink down into the depths and hear a slow jazz number playing in the faint, garbled distance. A wisp of dark brown hair, dancing on the nape of her neck. Olive skin as soft as the haze of the moonlight, glowing on the surface of the calm seas above. The taste of salt water.


The old drunk from earlier blurts something at me from across the street and reminds me that I’m still in a solid state. He has ditched the morrisons bag in favour of a large blue tarpaulin. “The end of the world has been and gone son, we smashed right through it and now we’re not stopping for anyone. We all done too much too soon”. He starts singing a bob Dylan song and when he is almost out of earshot I remember I have to move fast to catch the last tube home. I look up at the top left window, the light is off.


As I drift off to sleep I realise that the crazy old drunk is the only stranger to acknowledge me since I came to London. Reassuring to know I am still a physical form.



I slept so badly last night I gave up in the end. It’s only six thirty; the sun has started its steady climb. The Heath has a pale white haze hovering a foot above the ground. The air is still with only occasional birdsong to break the silence. I managed to catch the tube before the rush hour, so the one station ride between Goddards green and Hampstead was surprisingly pleasant. I must be getting lazy. In Bridport I would walk for 2 miles just to buy cigarettes from the petrol station. There are two joggers running by the pond, one of them looks like he could die at any minute. The years have been cruel to him and he isn’t the figure he once was. The other looks like he could be a personal trainer; he has more muscle in one of his legs than I have in my whole body. He is a well oiled machine. Perhaps literally, just like the robots they make in Japan. Identical in every way to a human, without the added weight of conversation. I’ve seen it on YouTube.


My mind drifts back to last night. What happened to me? Why, after two months couldn’t I bring myself to talk to Sophie? After I went all the way to her flat. After I came all the way to London. It never used to be like this at home. I would go over to her place and we would spend time together in the garden, listen to some classical music she liked on the portable CD player. We talked for hours on all sorts of topics. Quite often I would just nod, trying to cover the fact that what she was saying was flying straight over my head. I think she always knew when this happened, but she would never have stopped talking. She knew I would feel embarrassed. She knew me so well. The joggers have taken a break and are sitting on the grass bank. PT is talking to meaty, but meaty doesn’t look like he is concentrating too much, he looks more like he is one, short breath away from collapsing. I can feel his heart beating through the floor from fifty yards away. I wonder if I’ll be like him in twenty years, running around in a city park in an effort to reverse all those years living underground, feeding on soot and fragmented conversation.


I stand up and brush the dewy grass from my jeans. I think I can sleep now, if only for a few hours.


Sitting on the pebbles with the sun beating down on my face; Blue sky, hazy horizons. Sophie is playing in the surf, the shallow sea water placidly resting above her knees. She is wearing a red bikini. Her olive skin exposed to the warm breeze. It’s a quiet, deserted stretch of beach, if I turn around now I would see concrete parking barriers that I would later sit on for hours and hours talking desperately to Sophie, wishing her not to go to London. Beyond that and across the road is Sophie’s bedroom window up on the grassy bank. We often came here in the summer. She plays with me, gesturing for me to come into the water. I don’t much like swimming in the sea; I could never swim that well even in a pool and Sophie knows this completely. She turns and the sparkle of the sun on the surface of the ocean forms a silhouette of her perfect body, smoothed over a thousand years by the tides themselves. A strand of her messily tied back hair breaks loose and plays gently on her back. The glint of emerald disappears as she turns her head to look out to the ocean. Sophie once told me about a French philosopher who said that within beauty, a person can find the meaning of life. I never really thought much about it, but as I watch her, graceful, playful, I feel a wave of understanding wash over me. She knows me far better than I could ever know myself. I wade into the warm sea, she embraces me and for a few seconds I know what it means. She breaks free and splashes the water over me. I can feel the warm droplets on my face. My chest feels as though someone pulled a plug somewhere in the bottom of my stomach and the contents are being sucked into a vacuum. It’s difficult to breath and I wake up and wipe the tears from my cheeks. Always the same dream.

END
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I don't write that much these days and this is my first post in a creative writing thread but I hope to get back into writing bit by bit, I'm not really a good writer, but I enjoy it a lot. I used to have a buddy who was into writing and we'd back and forth a lot with bits we'd write, but he's moved across the world and got married so I lost motivation somewhat, hopefully this thread can stir it up again!

i know he's not around right now, but a big thanks to cyan who, in my long long absence, would often pm me and ask me to come back. i probably wouldn't have even thought about writing anything if he hadn't.

one very cool guy.

ProudClod said:

I know this is somewhat unrelated, but do any of you want to critique a short story I wrote for an assignment? <3

Click to expand...

Sure

So I've written my idea up for this week. I'm going to have a think about it before I post it. Strangely I feel pulled by another writing idea that I feel I have to write. I won't though till I get it fully worked into a workable story.
From the brink of creative bankruptcy I am juggling about four different ideas for stories. One of which is I wrote this week for the challlenge.

Dark FaZe said:

Sure

Click to expand...

PM sent

Having a bit of trouble coming up with an idea. Life's been distracting me lately what with my best pal moving ten hours away and having to start working on grad school apps again. But hey, I'm sure that if I can come up with an idea, it'll knock all of your socks off.

I had an idea that seemed to provide material for a longer story, but I wrote it down and it's only ~700 words. I often have this problem. I think I really found something to write about, but then I run out of stuff almost as soon as I start. I always envy reading people saying they needed to trim their stories, because I have such short stories I'm more inclined to fluff it up with anything that comes to mind, no matter how superfluous.

700 words is a good story length. a great many stories would benefit from a good deal of trimming and a few lessons in economy. don't wish padding and bloat upon yourself.

For my brotha-from-anotha-motha Timedog:

An Anomaly
Word Count: 1,194

Silver metallic lines with 2 different and exactly opposite orientations divide out equal squares of area far off into the motherfuck. The entire world is covered by a flat, perfectly 2-dimensional grid. Inside of each square an earthy color, maybe a brown? Definitely brownish. I can’t distinctly see the letters in any of the words that I might use to describe the color, so I can only guess at what color I’m looking at. Silver metal lines and a brownish something.

The silvery lines comprising the grid may have been as wide as a planet, a galaxy, the universe, as large as god, as large as god’s love, as large as an infinite number of universes, gods, and planets rolled up into a ball and sent skipping across the vast motherfuck that stretched forever and out of sight in every lateral direction.

The only way to gain a relative judgment of size was to compare the metal lines that etched out the grid with the vastly larger creamy milk chocolate rectangular centers. I’m telling you, there were lines and the lines made a grid and in each square there was brown shit. The brown squares may have been as small as a cat, an ant, a cell, a string of DNA, a molecule, an atom, and quantum bubble, a string. The only frame of reference I had for the size of these squares of burnt ochre earth was the craft I was piloting.

This thing is so huge. I can tell it’s huge, I’m not sure why. You know how sometimes you can just tell that you’re next to something massive like a skyscraper, as if you actually feel its gravity pulling at your mass? That’s what I feel from this thing, except it’s much, much larger than any skyscraper. Or maybe I am just really small. I’m not sure, all I know is that it feels like the gravity from this object is pulling at and warping not only the fabric of my body, but my very thoughts. Like every idea, observation, inspiration that is running through my&#133;wherever ideas run through…is being twisted and reshaped by this thing before concluding inside of me.

Am I inside the object? Am I outside? I don’t know. My thoughts are a trainwreck, warped all to hell. The object is spherical. Perfectly so, in fact, down to the atom. This type of observation makes it seem as if I’m outside of the object. Maybe I am inside of the object, and I’m being pulled equally in every direction. Maybe I am in the exact center of the craft. No, impossible, the sphere is solid gear metal. No inner compartments. I am outside the craft, I am ethereal, or I am the sphere itself.

How long have I been flying at these ungodly speeds? As long as time itself, perhaps? There is no top or bottom to time here. No left or right, up or down. Time is a sphere and I may have been here forever indefinitely. I can’t remember anything different. Just hovering over this grid and flying at perhaps a million billion kilometers per hour. It was quite like skipping over a glassy lake in a speedboat, but with all the interesting parts removed. I was traveling so fast that the curvature of the planet I was on became noticeable. Then I went even faster, and that curvature seemed to almost fold in on itself, turning the landscape into a visual sine wave, the fast I went, the high the frequency, and into infinity.

This sphere I am moving inside of, the same size as me, the same size as time, both bigger and smaller than anything you could ever imagine, this sphere is where thoughts and memories and feelings get put through the paper shredder. Trash compacted into a perfect cube whizzing around at trillions of miles per hour.

A metallic cube roughly my size appears as a glint of light a hundred billion miles to my left on the horizon. And then it is in front of me. Directly in front of me and time slows down. The two massive objects, Myself the sphere, and Itself the cube, in such close proximity are causing some sort of time dilation as our gravities interact. My sphere just misses his rear edge as we cross paths. You could not have fit a piece of paper between our two crafts at the point of near-impact. And then the universe hits the fast forward button and he is gone in the other perpendicular direction. Another casualty to the expanses in a race of shapes appearing and suddenly dematerializing from sight at the speed of light like radiation at the event horizon edge of a black hole.

These near collisions with other crafts are happening at a regular interval. It’s hard to tell at what interval, because time is slowing down and speeding up like god is tapping on a reel of magnetic tape, slowing it down periodically as it spools out. The other crafts are perfectly smooth, perfect shapes. Cubes, Spheres, Pyramids, Cylinders. Bubbling in and out of my life like imperfections on the surface of boiling water. One moment of glory and then they’re ancient history, perhaps literally.

And then, an anomaly.

A triangle. Not a pyramid, not a 3-dimensional shape, but a triangle appears in front of me, having precisely no depth. Time slows as the triangle approaches, despite the fact that this shape cannot have any mass with which to slow time down. The dilation is different though, if only by some almost immeasurable amount, the triangle is going to crash into me. There is an error in the system. Time is at a near standstill and I’m watching as the very edge of the triangle barely nicks the edge of my sphere. In ultra slow-motion, I see tremendous force waves rippling across the surface of my sphere like tsunamis on…on…on Earth. The usurped metal behind the force waves is glowing orange and the waves are traveling toward the point on the sphere polar opposite to the point of impact.

The wave coalesces into itself at the negative pole and that end of the sphere explodes perfectly. Another ripple echoes out from this opposite pole, this one a wave of mutilation, violently tearing apart my fabric. I am being blown apart and space around me feels stable, but it is a liquid—chaotic and fluid and moving in every which direction. As eventuality would have it, god presses play and whatever vaporized fragments are left of the triangle go careening toward the horizon in real time. There is a planet shattering boom as pieces of me fly in every direction into the motherfuck at a million billion trillion kilometers per hour. And everything turns to black. And there is nothing more, because I am dead. Or at least…I think I am dead? No, no I can’t be. In order to be dead I’d have to be ali…

I wake up lying in a hospital bed hooked up to a life support machine. I am 23 years older than the last time I was conscious.

I guess alfarif was right. People lose their heads when they leave the the writing threads.

Well, it looks as if Zephyr has beaten me to my sworn duty.

And, because the deadline is finally approaching, it looks as though I'm going to be starting my story soon. Shit be supernatural, my good fellas.

Irish said:

Well, it looks as if Zephyr has beaten me to my sworn duty.

And, because the deadline is finally approaching, it looks as though I'm going to be starting my story soon. Shit be supernatural, my good fellas.

Click to expand...

Why write something that gives you displeasure? Just write whatever man...

I actually like my idea this time around. Normally, I create a character based on the theme and then toss him into a random situation. This time, I had to think about it a little more and I actually think it's a pretty nifty idea. I just need to tap out the details.

Wait... you're actually 'positive' about a story? enough said.

aw man he's positive about a story that means it's gonna suck aaaaaaaaaaaaah


jk

Ashes1396 said:

I guess alfarif was right. People lose their heads when they leave the the writing threads.

Click to expand...

I wish we could see people's post history like we used to. I bet you would be very surprised to see how people act once they're not focused on banging out some bad ass stories or poems. :lol Or maybe their stuff is a reflection of what they do beyond these threads? Hm.

So, I have about 15 hours to write my story for this challenge? Great. I knew I shouldn't have got that kitten for my wife a couple days back, nor that new camera. I haven't even written in my daily short story notebook like I usually do in the morning. Good god. Thankfully, I have an idea, but I guarantee that it will get a lot of "could have been so much better, Alfarif" crits this time around. Ah, the lack of time is killing me in these challenges. Someone tell my life to slow the fuck down for a minute.

Like the guys on PSN always like to say, "You see that name right there on the left side of the screen? Does it still say Irish (BrokenOath in that case)? Right, that tells me that you're gonna suck next round. It's all good though. We've come to expect it."

You see, it all works out in the end.

I definitely see myself writing this differently than usual though. The words aren't flowing in the same pattern.

Huh, I didn't even realize that the deadline was drawing near. I was thinking to myself, people sure are posting early. Will probably write something.

On another note, the anticipation of waiting for replies to some of my story submissions is killing me. >_> It's way past the usual rejection time (as listed on Duotrope), so I have some hopes, but with my ill-luck they probably lost it or something. Just a few more days until I can query and ask them what happened.