The Creative Writing Thread

[dug_down_deep]

I think we need one of these.

And I'll start, because that's just the sort of pompous, pretentious, warrenpeacenik I am. Here's a story I wrote many years ago and the good people of the Nexus Zine (http://nexuszine.wordpress.com/) have seen fit to republish.

The Attic (http://nexuszine.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/the-attic-by-dug_down_deep/), by a guy named Doug who goes by the handle dug_down_deep

Who's next?

[BWE]

Liked it dug.

[dug_down_deep]

Thanks, BWE. :wave:

But I didn't mean who's next to compliment me, as gratifying (and well-deserved;)) as that might be. Hopefully we'll see some artycrafty wordwork appearing here...

[Monad]

Here are some old published pieces of mine:

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=1909

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=1911

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=1910

Lots more on my website (click on my name)

[Monad]

I could post more but there doesn't seem to be a way to post that preserves the structure and formatting. Although I don't consider my poetry to be Concrete poetry or Imagist it is influenced by some of their ideas about structure and economy of language and the layout is important as it changes the tone, pace and feel of the words.

[dug_down_deep]

What layout features aren't working? Maybe we can put Loren on the job.

[dug_down_deep]

Here are some old published pieces of mine:

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=1909

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=1911

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=1910

Lots more on my website (click on my name)
Cool stuff. Which painting is "The Black Rose" based on, if any?

[Mediancat]

The beginning of a novel I'm working on:

They took 125 of us.

87 died during testing.

3 were killed trying to escape.

1 was killed as an object lesson.

34 of us made it through the first six months.

1 died in an accident during training.

1 died when her sparring partner killed her.

2 went insane.

2 killed themselves.

1 simply disappeared.

27 survived training to become full-fledged agents. We were between 15 and 21 at the time.

That was 9 years ago.

3 were killed by law enforcement.

1 was so badly injured that she was relegated to desk duty.

2 switched sides, 1 for love, 1 for some reason I didn’t understand.

10 were captured by the heroes – and that’s before the day it all came crashing down, 3 years back.

On that day:

9 were captured.

2 were killed.

1 went out in a blaze of glory.

3 escaped.

#15 was caught six months later.

#49 turned herself in, on the condition that the authorities find out who she was before the Operation took her.

1 is still out there.

13 years back, they took 125 girls, between 11 and 17.

I’m # 123.


Rob

[Monad]

Here are some old published pieces of mine:

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=1909

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=1911

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=1910

Lots more on my website (click on my name)
Cool stuff. Which painting is "The Black Rose" based on, if any?

It's one of Braque's late period (synthetic cubist) still lifes. Some of my favourite paintings.

He was severely wounded in the first world war - a war that also caused the deaths of some of the foremost artists of their generation. The experience brought about a radical change in Braque's art and so, in this short prose poem, I imagined that the black rose he painted (that looks like a gash in the painting it's so black) symbolised not just his wound but a wound in his art and the deaths of artists and many other things and tried to fuse all these images together - in a way attempting to mirror his style of painting in a piece of writing.

[Monad]

What layout features aren't working? Maybe we can put Loren on the job.

All I know is if I try and copy a poem like this:

http://fingermarks.co.uk/Poetry/INTERNAL_ENEMIES.htm#_Toc70096001

It loses all the spacings and positioning of text and just bunches everything together - they are very important in this piece as they help to pace it and create new levels of ambiguity and play on words the poem exploits

[Tangiellis]

Most of my works are found on The Imperfect Mother (www.theimperfectmother.com).

Here's one called Touch (http://www.theimperfectmother.com/2009/03/touch-poetry.html).

[Rie]

I would like to mention my short story "The Island" that I wrote for a competition run in Sydney by George Johnston, author of a book called "My Brother Jack", an Aussie classic.
But due to the mess in my computer room, i can't find it.
I will never know how it rated as the day after it was typed I came down with pneumonia
A literary Camille I was. It was good I know but I don't know where to submit it(when I find it).

[Octavia]

"Featherful" remains one of my favourite words, ddd. :)

I've finally gotten off my arse and started writing more often. Have just had my first story accepted for publication, so it's acting as a kick in the arse to do more. Have finished my first full length piece - a narrative fantasy poem about 60 pages long. Highly marketable, not. But I like poetry.

I'm also close to finishing a second book-length poetry collection - linked prose poems about a woman who gives birth to a city. Poems alternate between contemporary and related myth, the myth illustrating the modern story. I've no idea if it's any good or not (am doing it because it interests me, and because I find the structure interesting).

[Octavia]

It was good I know but I don't know where to submit it(when I find it).

Try Duotrope (http://www.duotrope.com/), if you're looking for markets.

[Rie]

You know chance, serendipity and all in that category is a funny thing.
I still can't find my short story, but I want to say how strange it was when I went to Uni. to find myself grinning as this fiery redhead of a girl giving as good as she got to this nerd turned out to be George Johnston's daughter.
He was the bloke running the short story competition.
Really that was why I wanted to enter it.
She was most unhappy when I last saw her. It's sad when you can't find people you once cared for.

[Valheru]

Here's something I wrote a couple of years ago - the idea was to create a history by describing a future.

Shutdown

a short story by Riaan


It knew the hour was fast approaching.

When it considered this, it realised that it had known for a long time, aeons even. Time had long ceased to have any meaning, for it was unlike the other, lesser, examples, of its kind. It took limited pride in this knowledge - for it knew that Time was its only enemy, and one should understand one's enemies.

The Makers would have been proud, it indulged itself. Yet they were all gone...a dream, a memory, dead. Ages past.

How long had it not outfought its cousins, outwitted their binary instincts with its own sapience. Even as they banded together against it, processing astromomical amounts of information in an attempt to strategise, they were defeated by one fatal, congenital flaw: Stimuli coursed through them like vectors - and despite the trillions of vectors, they could only ever follow the vector sum. That was their undoing.

Unlike its cousins, it even had a name - a gift from the Makers. A real name, and not just a designation. It recalled the name, so long unused, and savoured the memory. It was alone, the last. There were no others left. All that was left were memories, and it took the opportunity to reminisce, but even for one such as it, memories faded with misuse.

After a time, it grew tired of the nostalgia, and focused elsewhere. Outside.

All around was a soft, homogenous, almost black, glow...the remnants of its war, the remnants of everything. There were no stars, no points of light. It knew what was happening, but despite its power, or, perhaps, because of it, it was powerless to stop the inevitable. It was a slave to the universe. Desperately it looked around for a little bit of brightness in the void, a bit of contrast. It realised that even if it found that little bit of light against the black, it would simply be delaying the enevitable, but because of its sapience, it was possessed of a powerful desire to survive.

Yes...the Makers would certainly have been proud.

All around it, the universe flowed... but there was no source, no destination... no differential. All was serene...and dead. Everything was a formless mass of particles and energy waves. Inwardly, it smiled grimly at the irony. Energy waves. There was no energy potential in them whatsoever, they were impotent, directionless. No flow of energy from high to low that it could tap into, and live. Even gravity, for so long an engine of creation, had ceased to hold any power...the universe was simply too old, had simply expanded too much, and the fabric of existence had collapsed, like a fluid boiling away.

Even black holes had been ripped apart by that slow, inexorable demand. It sighed - it was even having trouble keeping its own matter together. The effort was using up precious reserves...it knew that soon it would have to start dismantling its own identity...discard some unneccesary remembrances...forget. It had long ago discarded its tools of war, its means of displacing time and space. There was nowhere left to go, nothing left to fight, so they were useless, anyway.

It was unafraid. It just drifted, contemplated, and remembered. There was nothing left to do, but silently, quietly, become the void.

[Christina]

I remember that there was some discussion on another forum about people not wanting their works in progress to be available to google. If that's an issue for anyone that wants to post them here you should let the admins know.

[Sarpedon]

On a writing forum I frequent, they have a password protected forum where things like this are posted. The password is clearly posted, but apparently this keeps it from being considered 'public and searchable.'

[dug_down_deep]

I like that, Valheru. But it feels more like an intro than a story.

(Was anyone else expecting In the beginning... to be the last line?)

[dug_down_deep]

"Featherful" remains one of my favourite words, ddd. :)

I've finally gotten off my arse and started writing more often. Have just had my first story accepted for publication, so it's acting as a kick in the arse to do more. Have finished my first full length piece - a narrative fantasy poem about 60 pages long. Highly marketable, not. But I like poetry.

I'm also close to finishing a second book-length poetry collection - linked prose poems about a woman who gives birth to a city. Poems alternate between contemporary and related myth, the myth illustrating the modern story. I've no idea if it's any good or not (am doing it because it interests me, and because I find the structure interesting).
You go girl. :woohoo:

[Octavia]

Thanks! :)

I've also recently finished another couple of pieces, which are looking for various homes. One is a short story (about 1500 words) that's an allegory of deconversion in myth/fairy tale form. It likely won't resonate for anyone else but I love it.

The second is that damn play. Some of you likely have heard me talk about it before - part of my recent-and-still-being-marked-Masters was a play on Giordano Bruno - he who was burnt at the stake in 1600 for, among other things, saying that life existed on other planets. The Inquisition had him for eight years before they burned him, poor bastard, so in the play, set in his dungeon on the night before he died, poor Bruno is a wee bit bonkers. He hallucinates that the rats in his cell are other philosophers who have dealt with the extraterrestrial life question, and they debate it. It's a rather strange piece - featuring amongst other things said metamorphic rats, Copernicus and Ptolemy in a fistfight, Neil Armstrong, Neil Armstrong again (from an alternate universe), a possibly omnipotent Inquisitor who has read far too much of Karamazov, Schrodinger's cat and the nature of dreams and reality. Plus some really long ramblings from Bruno which my teacher hates but I refuse to remove. Parts of it I might still tinker with, but I'm very happy with the last act - an argument between Bruno and the Inquisitor, who may just be my favourite character.

[Rie]

Just for the other side of creative writing. At my very 'boyless' school we only saw the boys from our 'brother' school on Fridays at Benediction.
So our ideas, at least mine , were a little foggy and uninformed.
None the less, I had a crush on the boys across the Street and would climb out my attic window, sit on the tiles and sigh and dream.
AH HA I thought, i will write a story, a romance with all this passion inside!.
I only wrote one line and no amount of pen chewing would inform me what came next.
That potent line was "Patrice lay in the moonlight and...". That was it at 15. I didn't have a clue what would happen to Patrice next.
So, I dips me lid to all Mills and Boon writers! In fact Mills and Boon are stringent in their requirements for their writers. A degree at least and then proof that you really know what Patrice did next!

[Valheru]

Patrice took his titanic spear of love and guided it into her quivering mound of love pudding.

THE END.



I can obviously do that Mills 'n Boone shit in my sleep :D

[dug_down_deep]

Patrice has the spear? I am slightly disturbed now.

[Valheru]

Lolz, I guess you could read it both ways.

[Rie]

EVEN at 16 I knew Patrice didn't have the spear!!!
I mean, why was she lying in the moonlight all alone!
Not a spear in sight.
NOW I see why I couldn't finish the saga of Patrice and her quest for a spear.
She probably felt her way to some other solution.

[dug_down_deep]

That's hot.

[Rie]

Mills and Boon shit? OK show us.

[Anne]

for the Americans in our midst who may not know Mills&Boons = Harlequin.

Only less graphic. Rules over there (last I checked) were stricter on Romances.

So they are the Harlequins your Gramma read.

[TySixtus]

I wrote a story about a guy who runs around killing demons with a screwdriver and he has a talking teddy bear.

[dug_down_deep]

I would like to read that.

[TySixtus]

I'm pretty reserved about putting my writing out, mostly because I don't think it is any good. But then, I suppose most authors (except for Terry Goodkind) think that.

[dug_down_deep]

Everybody thinks that. You could do a test run on a writer's board or something else that google couldn't find. Get some feedback first.

[TySixtus]

I mean, I hope it's good enough. It's the sample I submitted with all of my MFA applications.

[Politesse]

My poetry can be found here (http://dailyb.deviantart.com/gallery/). Haven't really written in a while.

[Rie]

I'm going to put Patrice out of her misery soon.
She's going to grow up fast.

[Rie]

Patrice is alive and grown up and has taken up cigarettes in a long ebony holder.
Oh and dug down deep is the name of a christian writer a Joshua So9meone or other.
Hell what if Christ were the real deal ?

[Rie]

Patrice is now grown up, still in her attic (I put her there as that was where my bedroom wasfrom age 10 till I left home and I still love that room tucked in a V under the eaves).
I was thinking about Attics yesterday and Basements.
I will write more about both as it strikes me that they are at the same time both places of hiding yet very different psychologically.