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NeoGAF Creative Writing Challenge #151 - "Inversion"

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N

Nezumi

Member
Warning: Incoming Bragging

One of my stories has made it into an anthology. Sure, it's e-book only and a very small German publishing house, but still... I can't remember the last time I was this happy :)
 
C

Charade

Member
Nezumi said:
Warning: Incoming Bragging

One of my stories has made it into an anthology. Sure, it's e-book only and a very small German publishing house, but still... I can't remember the last time I was this happy :)
Click to expand...

Oh, wow. That's awesome. Congrats!
 
A

Aaron

Member
Nezumi said:
Warning: Incoming Bragging

One of my stories has made it into an anthology. Sure, it's e-book only and a very small German publishing house, but still... I can't remember the last time I was this happy :)
Click to expand...
Congrats. Sounds like success to me.
 
S

Sober

Member
Not an entry, but I remembered the chat we were having the hangout about heists and I remembered my entry like 2 entries ago. No you still can't really write a heist in 2000 words but I decided to let loose from the word count and build on it a bit more to my liking (2000 words is a prison sometimes). I basically threw another 1000 or so words at it and it seemed to come out better than it was before.

Workplace Romance (revised)
 
C

Chainsawkitten

Member
It's fan-fic-Friday! The highest form of literature.

Kafka.jpg
+
tumblr_ls9so6kDNF1qmrf3bo1_500.png
= The Inversion of Eric Smith

Don't worry, it's not erotic. Unless you're into that kind of stuff. Weirdo.
 
T

Tangent

Member
Nezumi said:
Warning: Incoming Bragging

One of my stories has made it into an anthology. Sure, it's e-book only and a very small German publishing house, but still... I can't remember the last time I was this happy :)
Click to expand...

WOW!!! Congratulations! So worth bragging about! This is brag-rights central, btw. That's awesome! Can you share with us the publishing house and which story made it in? Congratulations!

Ourobolus said:
I'll do the hangout, but I have no ideas for this one yet.
Never mind, I guess the wife would prefer us to not stay in the house all day.
Click to expand...

That's hilarious! Your wife sounds fun though. And man, too bad I missed the write-in too (I don't have a cool wife, or a wife at all! *gasp*). Nevertheless, I think I was actually getting a new car at that time! Weeee! New wheels!
 
C

Cyan

Banned
All right dudes. What the hell. I'm doing this shit on hard mode. For the purposes of this challenge I will be disabling the delete key and doing it typewriter-style: unidirectional, no changes possible.

Fair warning, you should expect a whole lot of typos. And if I end up going over the word count, well, so it goes.
 
N

Nezumi

Member
Tangent said:
WOW!!! Congratulations! So worth bragging about! This is brag-rights central, btw. That's awesome! Can you share with us the publishing house and which story made it in? Congratulations!
Click to expand...

Thank you and everyone else :)

The publishing house is called "Oldigor Verlag". Like I said it's very small. I friend liked a post of them on facebook and when I checked it out I found that that they had a call for fantastical stories. At first I tried writing a story just for that but I failed. Don't know why but I suck when I write in German. So I took this and had my husband help me translate it (I tried doing it alone but got hung up on every sentence because they just wouldn't sound right and where is the good in having married a translator anyway if you don't make use of it :p)


This might actually be the first in a long time where I might have trouble staying under the world limit... I shouldn't have spend the last week with all that outlining and world-building. Now I have to much stuff I want to put in there :(
 
E

exfixate

Member
First draft submissions, the procrastinator's best friend! I'm nowhere close to happy with it
Twerking? Really?
, but what're you gonna do?

Hell Hath No Fury
1320 Words

This is my first time posting for one of these challenges, and I enjoyed it a lot. Thanks for reading.
 
T

Tangent

Member
Cricket Hunt (1580 words)

Well that felt crazy! Which is odd, since I always am so last-second anyway. But to be told that you can't edit...it just felt constraining! It made me want to do the opposite of NaNoWriMo style, and write every word very carefully. I hope that trying to follow my line of thinking isn't a doozy. We'll see! Regardless, it was an interesting experience.
 
F

FlowersisBritish

fleurs n'est pas britannique
Well glad this is done.

Forward (1500ish words)

Hope everyone enjoys.
I'm really happy these exist because they force me to write somewhat consistently. Otherwise i wouldn't be doing it as often and I'm sure my life would just be terrible.
 
C

Cyan

Banned
Climber (2013 words)

I cheated a little in that I went back and fixed any typos in proper nouns, since those might make things too difficult to follow.
 
T

Tangent

Member
Nezumi said:
Thank you and everyone else :)

The publishing house is called "Oldigor Verlag". Like I said it's very small. I friend liked a post of them on facebook and when I checked it out I found that that they had a call for fantastical stories. At first I tried writing a story just for that but I failed. Don't know why but I suck when I write in German. So I took this and had my husband help me translate it (I tried doing it alone but got hung up on every sentence because they just wouldn't sound right and where is the good in having married a translator anyway if you don't make use of it :p)
Click to expand...

Wow that's exciting!!! (Verlag means "publisher," right? What does Oldigor mean?) And how convenient that your husband is a translator! That's funny that you suck at writing in German if that's your native language. I think I remember "Words of Silence" but not quite. And the dropbox link is dead. Can you link it again?

Nezumi said:
This might actually be the first in a long time where I might have trouble staying under the world limit... I shouldn't have spend the last week with all that outlining and world-building. Now I have to much stuff I want to put in there :(
Click to expand...

It just goes to show that procrastination is a good thing. :) I actually had the same problem even though I didn't really start thinking about my story until a few hrs before deadline, and only in my head. But I was thinking of too much and had to scale back my own thoughts.
 
N

Nezumi

Member
Tangent said:
Wow that's exciting!!! (Verlag means "publisher," right? What does Oldigor mean?) And how convenient that your husband is a translator! That's funny that you suck at writing in German if that's your native language. I think I remember "Words of Silence" but not quite. And the dropbox link is dead. Can you link it again?
Click to expand...
I don't think that "Oldigor" really has a meaning. Maybe it is the name of their founder? The link should work now.
 
M

Mike M

Nick N
That secondary objective, man… *sigh*

Timedog: The exactness of the passage of time and the amount of money involved gave me the impression that Carl was perhaps ranking somewhere on the autism spectrum, but then the homeless guy also was going all Rainman and counting the change as Carl threw it on the sidewalk. Then again, the the homeless guy apparently turned out to be Alanis Morissette in disguise, so I guess that would fall under the purview of omnipotence. Though cutting the dollar bills exactly in half isn’t really a problem, since if you have both halves you have 100% of the bill...

Zakalwe: Obviously our heads were in very similar places for this challenge, as it’s difficult to ignore the significant overlap of elements in both of our stories. Maybe it was the fact that we did both go to the same place, but I intuited where this was going more or less straight away, the exception being that I thought Rachel was already dead and was momentarily thrown when she appeared in the doorway. I felt that things kind of unraveled toward the end, though. Doors usually don’t require keys to unlock from the inside, and Rachel being drugged and sluggish seems to contradict what we just saw with her breaking free and getting the gun. The second to the last line utterly confused me, as now I’m wondering if Rachel is the one who’s crazy and that he kid and dog are in fact just fine.

Chainsawkitten: Whole lot of “people being turned inside out” stories this week… While I haven’t actually read much of Kafka outside of The Metamorphosis ages ago (which obviously this is heavily inspired by/borrowing liberally from), you definitely nailed the vibe of being “Kafka-esque” as I understand it to be. Maybe a little too heavily indebted to The Metamorphosis in specific than Kafka in general, however. On a lark, the first result returned for “Eric Smith” is the Wikipedia entry of a murderer. Knowing you and the subject matter you usually work with, I can’t tell if that’s intentional or happenstance.

SquiddyCracker: For some reason I kept getting a Sandkings vibe out of this, but I don’t think there’s really any relation outside of intelligent hive-society creatures. I would have liked to have seen more examples of the unique physiology of the Myrr and what made them such such pests. They mostly came across as intelligent insects instead of the unclassifiable life form they were described as.

Mike M: I feel like this one could have benefited from a slightly elevated word count, but not too much of one. Maybe another couple hundred words. The second scene feels jam packed to the point that I feel like things are being glossed over and rushed by. It’s mostly Markus giving the equivalent of an evil-villain speech, didn’t leave a lot of room for the narrator to be as involved as he was in the first scene. This is a story notion that I’ve had in my head for a while, and it mostly worked out okay, problems with the word count limitations not withstanding. And hey, it’s kind of a heist story?

QuantumBro: Seems like this might be Silent Hill fanfiction with the names and faces changed to protect the innocent? You’ve got a protagonist chased by monsters, trapped in a nightmare version of the mining town that has suffered a mining disaster, and a town cult where someone with a name very similar to Alessa plays a central role… I would have liked to have seen some more of the nightmares. As it is we have a brief glimpse of one, then a flashback comprises most of the rest of the piece. Not sure that the “madness-inducing mist” was a worthwhile inclusion, as it it didn’t seem to amount to much (outside of being an unnamed factor in the single described incident of a miner going mad and murdering a family.).

exifixate: Lenore? Draven?
Squinty-Poe.jpg

I see what you did there.
Stellar premise, and your execution was mostly pretty good. I was originally thinking that to be a reversal of an exorcism that it ought to be some angelic being, but then I get to thinking the opposite of a demon possessing a human would be a human possessing a demon, so I guess on that count you were spot on. Mixing the imagery of cherubic wings and “holy blue” eyes seemed a bit at odds with the notion of the girl being some tattooed devil worshiper girl. Also, not sure what her endgame was? How was she planning on getting back to Earth while possessing a demon/returning with evidence?

Sober: I have a Twitter account myself, but I barely use it. I find the whole service to be anathema to meaningful communication between people and seems to be good for nothing but engendering misunderstandings and watching people make stupid statements that end their career (at least those have the benefit of being entertaining to watch). Plus you have to read from the bottom up, which is the most awful conception ever. The founders of Twitter should be fired into the center of the sun : ( And to further sound like the cantankerous old man I am, if these dates on the tweets are to be taken as granted, their “relationship” lasted a whopping week. In this age of instant communication via a hundred different means, if they were in any way serious about it, it’s not exactly difficult to at least give it a shot and keep in touch.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there are some dang kids on my lawn.

Tangent: You know, they just… sell crickets at most any pet store. If you’re just going to feed them to your pets, that is. I’m just saying. The character dynamics of a Vietnamese family living in a yurt in the woods in the aftermath of the passing of the mother is an interesting premise in its own right. The fantastical elements seemed out of place and nowhere near as well-developed as that core setup. Maybe it would work in a longer piece where it had more time to level itself out, but in this it was more “here’s an unusual and interesting family and their circumstances, and suddenly rabbit girl.”

FlowersisBritish: I actually had to reread this to fully understand it. I thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiink I got the broad strokes of what was happening… The old man has died and is walking backwards through his life rendered in photographs? And he had a gay son that he didn’t approve of? Not quite sure what the ending is supposed to mean. Seems like a pretty shitty afterlife to just have a hallway that just ends...

Cyan: Hard mode indeed, dude. You didn’t need to flagellate yourself for the secondary objective quite that much : ) I think Amadi having the epiphany that something was very wrong with the op almost from the word go was at odds with his behavior and attitude for the rest of the story. If my gut was that something was wrong with the op, and I made it to the rendezvous point to find no one there, I’d certainly view it as much more than a minor surprise. All this stuff about Stream physics, is this the same universe where you had that one about the “crackshot” pilot that I likened to Launchpad McQuack a while back? I recall it had something like that involved.

Ashes: The main character seems on the cultured and eloquent side for much of the internal monologue, but then starts dropping words like “ain’t” during the spoken parts. Nothing beyond the pale of believability or anything, but it threw me for a loop initially. I cracked up at the closing lines, nice follow through : )

Nezumi: This struck me as kind of a mashup of elements from I Am Legend, Daybreakers, and maybe a little bit of Palahniuk’s Rant. You never actually call them vampires, but it’s all but impossible to divorce this one from that idea. I really appreciated the reveal that the main character was something else entirely apart from regular humans and “Nightwalkers,” without resorting to being Blade or Vampire Hunter D or something. An original concept, or at least one that I’ve never come across before. For all the “in theory”ing going on as a preemptive excuse for things not going to plan, it seems like everything went to plan. I would have liked to have seen something *not* go according to plan and have the protagonist try and work his way out of it, but some jerkass set the word count at only 2000 words, which doesn’t leave a lot of room : /

Charade: You could have just claimed to have done the secondary, and everyone would have been impressed with the shape of the draft : P Loved this one, I failed to see either of the back-to-back twists coming (Though really I may have figured out the second one if had stopped reading before the reveal and had time to think about it, but I just plowed ahead). Being king of that land doesn’t seem like a great career choice, what with their history of being deposed by violence like that.

The Votening:
1.) Charade
2.) Chainsawkitten
3.) Cyan

Apparently if your user name doesn’t start with the letter “C,” GTFO.
 
N

Nezumi

Member
Mike M said:
Nezumi: This struck me as kind of a mashup of elements from I Am Legend, Daybreakers, and maybe a little bit of Palahniuk’s Rant. You never actually call them vampires, but it’s all but impossible to divorce this one from that idea. I really appreciated the reveal that the main character was something else entirely apart from regular humans and “Nightwalkers,” without resorting to being Blade or Vampire Hunter D or something. An original concept, or at least one that I’ve never come across before. For all the “in theory”ing going on as a preemptive excuse for things not going to plan, it seems like everything went to plan. I would have liked to have seen something *not* go according to plan and have the protagonist try and work his way out of it, but some jerkass set the word count at only 2000 words, which doesn’t leave a lot of room : /
Click to expand...

First things first. The parents are not vampires. They are more or less normal people. It's a concept I've been having in my head for some time now and probably gonna use in this year's nano. I still needs a lot of work though. This was kind of a test run.
Basically,
the story is set in a really big domed city. Like three or four times Tokyo big. To save energy the government had to pull the plug on all but the most necessary power during the night time, which led to an immense increase in crimes until someone came up with the idea to just put everyone to sleep at sundown by releasing a toxic gas in the air and waking them up in the morning by releasing another. The problem is that these gases have the opposite effect on like 2% of the population, creating a parallel society that has almost no real means of interacting with the other.
I agree with you that I should have put some action in there to give the "in theory" catchphrase more meaning. I originally had something more spectacular planned for the raid scene, but like you said, the word count had me cut it a lot shorter than I liked.
 
M

Mike M

Nick N
Nezumi said:
First things first. The parents are not vampires. They are more or less normal people. It's a concept I've been having in my head for some time now and probably gonna use in this year's nano. I still needs a lot of work though. This was kind of a test run.
Basically,
the story is set in a really big domed city. Like three or four times Tokyo big. To save energy the government had to pull the plug on all but the most necessary power during the night time, which led to an immense increase in crimes until someone came up with the idea to just put everyone to sleep at sundown by releasing a toxic gas in the air and waking them up in the morning by releasing another. The problem is that these gases have the opposite effect on like 2% of the population, creating a parallel society that has almost no real means of interacting with the other.
I agree with you that I should have put some action in there to give the "in theory" catchphrase more meaning. I originally had something more spectacular planned for the raid scene, but like you said, the word count had me cut it a lot shorter than I liked.
Click to expand...

Well, like I said, you never actually called them vampires, it was just impossible for me to not make the connection in my head. Especially with Rabbit remaining unseen all the time and being in service of the "King of the Night." Hard to not draw parallels there : )
 
N

Nezumi

Member
Mike M said:
Well, like I said, you never actually called them vampires, it was just impossible for me to not make the connection in my head. Especially with Rabbit remaining unseen all the time and being in service of the "King of the Night." Hard to not draw parallels there : )
Click to expand...
... Yeah, I really need to come up with some less cliched names and phrases.
 
C

Chainsawkitten

Member
Eric Smith is just me stringing generic names together. Although I'm reading up on it now and man, that's some harsh stuff. As a firm believer in rehabilitation, lifetime in prison for something you did when you were 13, even though you are repentant and have a clean prison record is tough. No matter how bad the crime. I mean, it's one thing if you're not deemed to be safe for society but "he hasn't been punished enough"... If 21 years isn't enough I doubt it will ever be. It seems like he'll never get out.
 
C

Cyan

Banned
Votes:
1. exifixate - "Hell Hath No Fury" - just too goddamn funny not to pick. Execution wasn't perfect, but the premise was so brilliant it didn't matter.
2. Charade - "The Rebel and the King" - wonderfully written and smooth. I didn't totally understand the ending, which docked it some points.
3. Ashes - "Functioning Alcoholic [first draft honest!#-';?]" - very Ashy.
HM: Nezumi
 
M

Mike M

Nick N
Cyan said:
Speaking of relevant, Writing Excuses just did an episode on writing groups and giving critiques. Good stuff! http://www.writingexcuses.com/2014/09/07/writing-excuses-9-37-training-a-critique-group/
Click to expand...
Man, I try so hard not to be prescriptivist, but I feel like there's some sort of idealized standard of etiquette where're you're supposed to simultaneously provide meaningful and specific feedback while at the same time not telling the recipient how to do anything. But it's kind of inextricable for me a lot of the time.
 
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