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 twinklemojo blow-by-blowbrawl - judgEment. Cavent: this is my first competitive crit. Salt at the ready, gents. So, a beating then. Neither of you delivered fights per se, but then that was never the point, was it? None of us go into the fight for fighting, we go to inflict pain, and witness pain inflicted. Sometimes, when we’re very lucky, we go to feel it. Consider yourselves lucky. twinkle cave, I respect your audacity at getting the word ‘craft’ seen to within the first ten words, but you’ve let the winds of you nautical metaphor blow you off course. The problem with the sea is that it provides so much imagery that people seem to neglect its symbolic qualities. If we can strip away his language, let’s consider your character; a man who was once strong and sure, but has lost his way in a world of too much possibility. This is a rich idea. There’s all sorts of conflicts and sadnesses inherent in a person falling from their peak, and where better for this to be displayed than in combat? Thing is, the narrative is choked with purple prose. You have a talent for turns of phrase (“the large meat hammers” – amazing and true), and the ones at the point of impact carry lots of weight indeed, but they fall so thick and fast, combined with either some very liberal grammar or outright spelling mistakes, that reading became a challenge. You’re trying to capture an incoherent world, but I’d say that increases the need for coherent language. Finally, unless I’m missing something there is a depressing lack of logic in events. Some guys pick on a weaker guy, because. That may well be possible, but the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune don’t elicit my sympathy, it just makes me think of a crappy world. Call me cruel, but a sailor who takes to Netflix and his couch for no explained reason doesn’t deserve much though. For what it’s worth, I attempted a Confederacy Of Dunces-style reading that paints the protagonist as a delusional but erudite bum who’s never taken to sea and it almost works really well, but there’s no supporting evidence (though there is a great payoff in the ‘truth/truth’ motif). So close. sebmojo, this might have been the point you were making, but who am I supposed to feel sorry for here? I’m pretty sure it’s lonely Ellen, and she makes it clear enough to the reader. All good. But like twinkle cave, there is something powerful that’s not being said – and this might be one of the rare times when those hidden narratives could benefit from being spoken. Simply, the story of how this terrible mess came to be. Ellen doesn’t have much of a chance to do anything other than shout and fight, and so it’s to Kevin to provide subtle clues of his character, and help us decode what’s going on. And he fails to transcend the role of generic knife-wielding manic until we get that reference of ‘his den’. I thought I was about to get a classic ‘character portrait via a space’. Instead, he takes a poo poo. And this is my frustration – the action is great, but inside it you have so many chances to clue us in as to the real character story that this fight is resolving. You have two characters, walking and talking, within a space they’ve both lived in and changed, and you allow Ellen to refer to the past and have her own thoughts. Going into this world more would have given us a sense of tragic agency to both characters. “I went out with a crazy” isn’t enough. Weirdly, if I could see what had happened to push him over the edge (in a way that he regrets, nice touch), there would be more sympathy for her. Otherwise, it’s just a case of poo poo Happens. (language thing – maybe it’s just me, but the sentence construction of “she did a thing, did another thing” without a ‘then’ or an attempt to run the two actions together starts to grate after the fourth use. Personal preference.) In the end, I have to give the victory to twinkle cave. Both stories have a fantastic command of the, ahem, craft of language, but twinkle’s is the one that hints at our loser’s inner world. Sucks to be him.
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Jun 7, 2013 00:02
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twinkle cave posted:Thank you for the judging Coma and for the crit. And thanks to sebmojo for the challenge and whipping me out of not competing. If I sound like a dick (and reading it back, I do), it's because I'm terrified of missing the whole point. Both talkes take what could have been a pretty up and down prompt, and hint at something far greater. Splendid.
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Jun 7, 2013 01:05
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Found myself with less time than I hoped to check it, but I think it's okay.quote:Rahab Hides the Spies Surveyance. The tower was our focal point. How could it not be? The city turned on its spoke, fearful. "If you can see it, He can see you," the little girl told us, "and he always likes to see you." I tried to imagine this crusty old man, surrounded by his radio telescopes, surveying the thousands of kilometres of urban trash spread beneath him. "Why does this king want to see everyone?" asked Mushar, wiping the lens of the camera we'd been given before we left. Getting pretty grimy, now. "Because he can." She scrubbed the rusted cooking pot harder. A proper effort, for a six year old. "Wouldn't you?" I looked up at the thing, clicks away but the biggest thing I could see; the biggest thing I'd ever seen. I'd been trying not to stare since we got here - I didn't like the idea of me and this... King making eye contact - but you couldn't avoid that great shining spike. I wrote it all down in my log on that first night, the way the academy had instructed us. "The tower looms over this wasted land like a monster. Its steel and glass surfaces are faceless and polished... it shines so vibrantly, as though it is sucking vitality from the slums around. "Even the river has lost the will to flow, now just a stagnant pond of metal and slime. As we crested the great ridge, Mushar and I saw children clambering across the waste. I must have audibly gasped - one would think after havng seen so much that I would be difficult to shock. Clara, the little girl, giggled like I'd asked a stupid question and said they were looking for food. "In this landscape of height and waste, steel and ruin, in the furtive glances of the people, in litle Clara's forced maturation, is the reason why nobody dares to enter Old Europa any more. But we have been sent, to look. And so I look." Mushar's reminded me of that mantra whenever I felt squeamish. He'd said the same thing whether I'd recoiled in shock from molten fab-complexes of Ital, the brutal labour camps that carpeted Flaundres, or the ice-crusted hunting grounds of Nethers-land: "This isn't a job, Alia. This is our cause. Or people have to know what they've hidden themselves from. If we don't look, who will?" I believed him, I wanted to, but home felt further away with every step, now we had crossed the Oilsea. And this tour had been two years. Mushar was lining up another shot, bounding about with that wiry energy he got when he was a little too excited. "Up on this piece of rubble please, Clara." "Salvage!," she shouted, and giggled. "Salvage, sure." Mushar crab-walked round until Clara was between him and the tower, and grinned. "Perfect." Mushar was staring at his lenses, Clara was staring at Mushar. My eyes were draw to that unconscionable tower, and I saw a winking red light near its peak. The light pulsed fast and brighter, like an approaching atomic from the stories, and Mushar's camera flashed, sputtered, and died. "Ah!" His mouth formed a curse, choked it down in Clara's presence. Her lip was quivering. "Did I break it? I didn't mean to break it!" I comforted her, as my role always seemed to be in these situations. Alia, the Trustworthy. "You didn't break it, Clara. I'm not sure, but I think your King did." Mushar's excitement ebbed when he looked at me. "We can't take any more shots, the lenses are melted. And we can't return with nothing. What do we do?" This is Mushar's problem, the problem of anyone on their first tour; all energy, no orientation. Always flustered without a plan. I hated knowing what to do; it brings such responsibility. "There's only one place in this land with optics," I said. "Clara, could you take us somewhere?" It was a difficult discussion, but we were carrying strawberries. She'd never seen them before. The tower rent the ground and abutted the sky like a giant's tooth, and shone in the moonlight so brightly that I could easily make out Mushar. I'd expected resistance, guards perhaps, but the ruined city was empty of anything but peasants and children. People ran when they saw us, hiding behind crumbled statues and shattered advertising hoardings for brands we'd never heard of. It was a ghost town. We'd caught the first whiff of decay as we stepped out onto the shifting river, but it became its most foul at the base of the tower. The point that sucked newness from the land had a decay festering at its base, an open wound. I gave Clara the last of the strawberries, and she ran off. Like the poor citizens that flitted through the streets, she disappeared in a heartbeat. Mushar had reclaimed his grin. "Remember," I said, "touch nothing you don't have to. We're here because we observe." He nodded, and slipped the suction pads over his hands and knees. I attached mine, foraged through my memory for my training, and took a first step on the smooth surface. Crosswinds battered us against the glass and kept me fighting to keep place as we climbed, but whenever they abated I saw thing I was trying to avoid. In the reflection, the ruined city spread out below and behind us, buildings which as we climbed became abstract and symbolic, map rather than territory. The darkness became absolute so I lit a flare, and saw through the glass - a room, of a sort I'd never seen before. Ancient terminals in ranks, long expired. This close, they seemed more real than the uncity below us... and in the reflection, there was an outline of my face, my features more weary than I'd seen them in months. The spaces inside the tower looked more industrial as we approached the top, so Mushar cut an entry through a great glass plate and we clambered inside. Darkness, but from a floor above there was an unnatural machine glow. We crept up the stairs. At the top, the narrow stairway opened out into a vast pyramidal chamber, much bigger than it looked from the outside, the walls pocked with treasure. "Scopes," said Mushar. "Alia, look at these. This is everything we need, and more." It was. Lenses and peri and telescopes, binoculars and camera obscura, instruments pointing up and down and sweeping across like a gun emplacement. A cathedral of observation. Devices that had been whispered about during training, which we'd never dreamed we might see. At the thought of training, old reflexes kicked in. "Touch nothing, Mushar." But Mushar was already picking his way along the edge, stopping occasionally to peer through a view. I saw cables trailing from the lenses, all snaking into the centre of the room and there, in the centre, sentry at an ornate desk inlaid with displays and more eyepieces, sat- "Your Highness," I said. The skeleton didn't reply. It kept one bony finger curled around a monocle, as if in defence, and I realised who the tower truly ruled over. "Mushar-" I started. But Mushar wasn't listening; he was glued to a telescope. And then I saw the perfect clarity of the sceen in the desk, found myself sitting down, gazing in. There in the display was Clara, rendered in perfect nightvision. And the streets and river and people, and beyond those, lands uncharted, there for the watching, everywhere forever. For if we don't look, who will? 1257w. BONUS: It is, of course, The Shard, in London Bridge.
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Jun 10, 2013 00:43
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Kaishai posted:Finally, the verb tenses in this are a mess. 'Helios had found that one does not take a wagon and goats out for a galloping jaunt' switches between past perfect and present, yikes. This is a good crit, but I have to defend this point - Jonas is implying an eternal rule of propriety. He's shifting to speak as 'the voice of the rules' for a second ("one does not"), in a Jane Austen-style free indirect discourse. I think.
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Jun 10, 2013 09:26
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Yes, in. Yes.
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Jun 18, 2013 14:21
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Fumblemouse posted:Because you could easily replace that thought experiment with it with, say, an actual experiment. If I want a world where I can shoot a monkey and bullets follow a parabolic arc then I'll go outside. The premise lacks sufficient brainfuckery. Who knew AA Gill did Thunderdome?
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Jun 18, 2013 22:52
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Right then, I'm in. 4th-6th SF Write a story about a sweating shapeshifter who builds the smartest computer in the universe.
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Jul 5, 2013 09:54
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It's getting really late here and I went a bit mental at the end andquote:a sweating shapeshifter who builds the smartest computer in the universe Developers (934w) The blade bent under the weight of the two squabbling insects. It was strong grass, sun-hardened, but these two had nudged and scuffled each other to the very tip, and they still rubbed their legs and barked barbs at each other. A poorly-rendered man-thing leant down over them, beaming. "And you two shall be called grasshoppers!" "gently caress off," said the larger grasshopper. "We're busy," qualified the smaller. The man-thing's grin faltered, then he strode off into the garden, inanely waving at some trees. The grasshoppers squared off against each other. "It's very simple," said the larger. "You stay on your side of the field, and I'll stay on mine!" The blade of grass sagged further in support of this notion. "If you don't, I'll-" "You'll what, you sick-makingly pathetic insect?" As it had done so many times before and after, on so many scales and in so many forms, a red button materialised in front of the larger grasshopper. It rubbed its legs together, sending a menacing sound round the field, the tickticktick of a bomb near its detonation. The smaller grasshopper shook its head sarcastically. "So desperately dramatic. You'll never really do it." The larger one, the male one, had indeed never done it, but he felt sure that this time, some condition had been irreversably broken. The breeze shifted the grass around them, and he decided it had to be last breeze they felt. The fact was now undeniable. He and she - for they'd discovered the terms in an amusing Urth book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, and then spent many fruitful eons as Mars and Venus, perverting their orbits until they collided, killing the nascent bacterial life that continually struggled on the two planets - were bored. Bored of sharing a furtive glance across a crowded party in order to tenderly fall in love again, of her playing the black hole and him playing the dispersed cloud of matter that found wholeness inside her maw, and the reverse; of forming covalent and noncovalent molecular bonds in order to make pathetic puns about "having chemistry" in the afterglow, of leading two warring intergalctic emprires that only found peace through their stolen tryst; of, simply, loving. Bored of rutting and sweating together as dogs, proteins, stars, octopi, jelaphi, machines, phenozoa, soundwaves, apes. They'd both experienced that same turning point, holding hands in the light of an energy-vomiting supernova that they'd caused. Not created - even that no longer held pleasure - just called up from the files. She'd looked at him, looked at the light, looked back to him, said: "Bit pointless, this, isn't it?" He'd thought about the four trillion simulated beings in the path of the star, screaming, clutching each other with claws and fronds and tentacles, then having their ones changed to zeroes, and said: "Hmm." For there was a second undeniable truth; they'd run out of things to say. What bothered him most about the stolid silence of their conversation was that he couldn't be sure if they'd said everything they could think of, or if the computer had some unknown limitation, like a short-term memory that'd they filled with platitudes and tedious questions and, finally, barbs. It worried him deeply that they'd spent so long inside, there was no way for him to know for sure. Even this scene had been played out so many times in different skins that he couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't slot neatly into this doomsday scenario subroutine, and so he stroked the button and tried his favourite thought experiment. "You're doing it again," she said. "You're trying to remember your body." "No," he said, and wished he were some kind of grasshopper-eating predator, though that too would doubtless be some equally contemptable beast. Not like the forms they'd originally plugged into this great system. They'd been... they'd been... "Nobody in this whole world but us, for an uncountable age," she said, "and you still think that you're an impenetrable mystery to me. Like anything you do is so unique." "Oh, go on then," he said, and moved his chitinous leg from the button, still pulsating with the need to be pushed. "What do you remember?" "Well, you were fat for a start." He laughed, or some equivalent, for they both knew that fat was a quaint relativism where they came from. They talked through the binary day-night cycles and gradually assembled a memory. They remembered abundant raw materials but scarce little time and the two of them, whatever form they had originally been, piecing together this system with volcanoes and magnetic fields and singularities as the hardware, and the collected knowledge of the all intelligence as the software, a perfect matryoshka universe that would last for ever, eternally stretching out the last gasp of its parent. He remembered them hauling an asteroid into a certain orbit to start the system, on the eve of the end of everything, and she remembered telling him that the software was missing one last thing. "Us." "Us, yes." And then they both knew they were the x and y of this particular graph, that if they could ever truly get outside the graph there would no longer be anything there, that what they'd built was now all there was and all there is: each other, two loving grasshoppers, scratching each others legs, the tictictic of animal friction falling on nobody's ears but a simulated man whose eyes now rest upon some wiggling line with no correlation to truth and whose mouth says you, you shall be called a serpent.
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Jul 8, 2013 01:11
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Fanky Malloons posted:
I'd like to take you up on you extra (read: "remedial") grading. What would have been an acceptable level of wtf? Did it matter that you didn't know if they were human or alien (in my mind, they didn't know any more). Was planetary sex not sweaty? (I'm not disagreeing with anything you've said, but if there's a gap between what I intended and what came out, I wanna know why and fix it...)
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Jul 10, 2013 08:40
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Fanky Malloons posted:I was mostly kidding about the sweat thing, but if there was implied sex in there somewhere, I absolutely did not catch it. Shiiiit. The entire point of the middle third was to show them getting bored of loving each other across time, space, species, and metaphor. Only I read it back now, and I never actually said it. Thread-clogging whine over, but I'll make my next entry clear if it kills me.
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Jul 10, 2013 23:29
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Kaishai posted:No plat here, but I'd welcome a crit. And me! If you've still got the appetite for it.
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Jul 12, 2013 08:29
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Chairchucker posted:I will be judging, but don't feel that means you need to pander to my capricious whims. Having said that; in honour of the delicious orange cake I just baked last night, FLASH RULE the next person to sign up gets to write us all a story that significantly involves food. in with 
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Jul 16, 2013 08:53
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systran posted:You don't chat in the Thunderdome. You can discuss stuff in the Fiction Advice thread or join IRC. sebmojo posted:Noone cares about context. Post your story, back the gently caress away. Just checking - do we actually believe either of these? I don't see them in the rules. I've also seen plenty of non-story stuff in here, from everyone, and as long as it's in the minority who cares?
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Jul 21, 2013 13:22
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From Chairchucker:quote:a story that significantly involves food. quote:A Love And Beef Story (1097w) It was that Billy Bear ham that started it. That ham where chemicals are used to make the red-pink flesh turn various shades so that a happy bear-face is impressed on each slice. Meat with feelings. They market it to kids, you know, as if kids need any help eating this kind of poo poo. As if potato needs to be shaped like a letter. I'm no censor, but that's asking for trouble; you serve a four year-old those Alphabite things and within five seconds they'll be spelling out 'POO' in processed carbohydrates across their plate. Or, knowing Eloise, 'UNCONSCIONABLE'. - She waved the piece of ham at me, held it so close that I could only hear her and see it. "Daddy, it's un-conshible." "What's unconscionable?" Billy Bear's dumb meat-face grinned at mine. "Eating animals!" Eloise whipped the slice away, threw it at the window, where it stuck like a shameful badge for all the Saturday shoppers to see. "But honey, you never felt that way before." "I DIDN'T KNOOOOOW!" She screamed. She's only mastered two volumes so far. She huffed, tears erupting to flow down her cheeks, and then returned to her inside voice. "I didn't know they were animals," she murmured like a penitent thief, "but then I saw the face..." I glared at the slice. Billy sodding Bear, I thought, you have ruined my weekend visits. "Is that all, honey-bundle?" "Well, mummy said-" Her words merged into a high-pitched whine. Of course mummy said. Mummy and well-meaning, lovely Kevin, vegan Kevin with five days in every week to fill her head with ideas, her stomach with delicious lentils and dahl. None of which I could compete with. When I handed her back to Kevin on Sunday night, she was irritable and starving. He did the only thing worse than blaming me, which was forgiving me. - Each time he forgave me, every week for a month, it cut me deeper. Each time Eloise ran to him, I prayed it was only starvation that quickened her pace. It hurt to watch her each weekend, 48 hours of not eating. I don't know if she'd ever heard of a hunger strike, but she did something I wasn't capable of. Every time she rebuffed my efforts with cheese, with pizza - even, goddammit, when I suggested we buy a pet rabbit - I was torn between hating her stubbornness and loving her principles. I gnawed on cocktail sticks until they broke, as though I could somehow eat for her. I considered my only remaining option, and it terrified me. As Kevin's Prius crunched off up the road one more time, I turned to my bookshelf. My bookshelf is a cardboard box, heavy with John Grisham novels, with the word 'bookshelf' written in black Sharpie, but it has never failed to deliver what I ask of it, like a magic lamp for a mid-thirties new bachelor. I opened my copy of Gordon's Meals In Minutes for the first time, sat down on the couch with a beer, and started to read. - "Uhm, I think it's just a name," said the attendant. She squinted once more at the beef tomato and I reminded myself that the badge on her blouse said 'Cecile: here to help', rather than 'able to help'. "I'm sure it's okay. I'll take two, thanks." A part of me hoped that there was something sustaining, something beefy about them. Their blood-redness made them look vital, like little multi-chambered vegetable hearts. The young woman gave the shining organs the gentlest squeeze and I caught myself thinking, another time, Cecile, another place, and maybe- "So, can you cook?" "I cook." I tried to sound nonchalant. Here to cook, not able to cook. "That's awesome," she beamed. "Not many people do any more, you know?" I told her I did, and wondered when Eloise would let me rejoin the wisdom of the masses. - Mary - not babe, not love, Mary - was carrying a tupperware box and a sheepish expression as she dropped our daughter off. "...just in case?" She smiled, weakly. I looked at the tub of risotto. A ricey trojan horse, about to enter my gates. "I'm sure I won't need it," I said. I took it. Inside, Gordon's instructions merged and mixed on the page; chop this, stir that, mash your dessicated other; a twisting puzzle. Meals in minutes? Verbs for days, more like. Something to my left started spitting, then blackening. I swore, then swore at myself for swearing in presence of The Human Parrot, but she was watching TV. I turned back as a huge column of smoke erupted into the air, making the fire alarm sing. I flapped a scraggy tea-towel at the little white unit and imagined Cecile and I laughing about it all, and deciding to get takeout instead. When the alarm stopped, Eloise was talking at the same volume, and pitch. "-ilding blocks of life, Dad. Kevin says fruit and vegetables are the bricks that your body is built from. Isn't that interesting?" I looked at the pile of rubble that was my kitchen counter; shards and offcuts littered the marble, barely resembling the produce they'd come from. Juices and seeds mingled in the grouting. In the middle of it all, my two beef tomatoes sat, untouched and glistening. I started to gnaw on another cocktail stick, thinking of temper tantrums, another argument, Kevin's pitying smile. The tupperware box of risotto sat on the counter, like a suicide pill. Then the stick fell out of my mouth, as the bricks came together. - "Dinner, hun-bun!" Eloise trooped to the table, expectantly. My heart gave a little tug as I realised that this girl, for precociousness, never gave up on me. She saw what was on each plate, and grinned in imitation of it. "He just needs a name, love." "Brian!" she said immediately. "Brian the, uh, tomato." "Very well," I said, and addressed the plate. "Nice to eat you, Brian." Grinning back at me was a beef tomato, red grape eyes pinned on with cocktail sticks, above a green pepper smile. On a bed of risotto. - After dinner, we watched The Princess And The Frog again. We rode bikes again, my heart crying for relief like it had been chopped and mashed. We sat on the old bench in the park again, tucked between our trees, watching mums pushing prams in the last fingers of orange light, and we guessed what each baby would be when they grew up. Eloise had fairly specific futures plotted for each of them. "And you?" I said. "What will you be?" "A bear." I overestimate her sometimes. //
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Jul 21, 2013 22:36
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Phew. That's my favourite method, too.
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Aug 7, 2013 15:40
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Oct 9, 2013 10:35
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Your Habit Stop that. Stop it. You know what your problem is? Your problem is called Displaced Anxiety. Saunders told me about it at squash. You’re anxious about the school board, and the parents, and that little kid who eats crayons. But don’t you see? You’re no better than him, and it’s killing you. Yes, the Rioja please. The ’07. She’ll have water, thanks. Look, you’re doing it again. I don’t mind if you have some little compulsion, God knows I can’t do without a pint with the boys after work, but here we are and it’s a beautiful night and it’s taken me a month to get this table and every time I turn my back you’re gnawing at your fingertips like you hate them. Do you know, I think that might be it? When I managed to get that week off in the summer and we went to your mother’s house in New England, you just kept saying, “I need some new gloves.” Gloves! In summer. Ahh, thank you. Yes, leave the bottle. His gloves, the white ones? They’re different. They’re about ceremony. That’s the thing about restaurants; everyone’s got a part to play. That’s what Mr. Meadows said in our last session, remember darling? That we both have things to work on. I’ve worked on my things, well I’m working on them, don’t roll your eyes at me like that, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect you, in turn, to be a little more ladylike. You’re not with children here. I wonder what they think of you. Not in a mean way, in the spirit of Open Dialogue you understand, those kids must see you as a role model and you’re up there nibbling away. What if they start to copy you? Marcie - you remember Marcie - was telling me how her kid started biting so much that his finger got infected. His finger, Cathy. drat thing nearly plopped off into the cereal one morning, it was so bad. They painted his whole hand with that solution that makes you vomit when you taste it, great way to break a habit. Hold on, is this the ’09? it’s rot. Let’s have another. But dear, if you don’t bite when you’re at school that doesn’t make sense. Have they got Pate de Foie Gras, Fried Duck Liver in a Loganberry Jus, Dazed Sea Bass with a Raspberry and Angus Terrine? I doubt it. They’ve just got books and those solar-powered calculators. I think it’s the coffee. You know all coffees in this country are double-shot now? We’re all getting more addicted to coffee, and you’re drinking it at home and getting the jitters. I’m throwing the coffee out, if you can’t be trusted with substances. I want to help you go back to the way you were when we met, but I don’t think you want me to help. If I come home a bit late some nights, it’s because I don’t think you’re listening to me. Tony and Sam and Crispin and those other guys at the bar, they say what you need is tough love. I just think you need to- put your hands down. Why are you shaking? Just grab the table cloth, put them in your pockets, I don’t care. It’s not even a proper addiction. You know why I come home late? Because business isn’t some play-school hobby, we’re dealing in millions of dollars a second. That gives people eighty hours a week to hooked on something proper, not their own loving fingers. Waiter! Another bottle please. Have some self-control. (600)
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Oct 13, 2013 12:32
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Wow, I'd never seen this before. Incidentally, it seems that this week has tipped us over the million word mark.  For good or ill, congratulations everyone. That's a lot of poo poo.
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Oct 14, 2013 07:52
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Yeah, I'll go in for this one.
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Oct 22, 2013 14:30
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This is it. EAR ONE THOUSAND Symptomless Coma fucked around with this message at 10:46 on Oct 27, 2013 |
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Oct 24, 2013 13:44
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Sitting Here posted:So go forth and goonrush. loving do it right now go.  Brilliant idea. God bless you.
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Oct 28, 2013 23:20
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Sitting Here posted:
Having looked through a bunch, mine is the only one with absolutely no comments on it from anyone. Did I gently caress up that badly?
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Oct 29, 2013 22:16
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magnificent7 posted:Flash Rule: No characters over the age of ten. In. Why not? Flash Rule: Story must involve a list of arbitrary and slightly unnecessary rules.
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Nov 29, 2013 15:37
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Right then.magnificent7 posted:Flash Rule: No characters over the age of ten. Hide, Harry (842) Ma and Da gave Harry to me when I swam twenty-five meters without floats, and how far is that you ask? Twenty five meters is the distance we have to walk one two three four five SIX seven eight times to where Harry is now when we want to visit him and talk to him through the little hole in his lid. I drag new best friend Tobias Finch out the back door down the brick steps around the stone frog under the climbing vines and round the rosebush that I used to think held fairies though that is a baby thing to think and not the attitude of a SIX year old never mind one who is halfway to seven. Here is the Seeking place. There is a knack (a knack is a trick for grownups) to Hide and Seek and that is to Know The Terrain. I know the Terrain like the back of my hand which we drew in Art and then filled in with paints and since mine is now on the fridge next to other important pieces of paper (e.g. Shopping List and Faulkes Rise Funeral Parlour Invoice) then I know my hand. I know every patch of the garden from the beech tree where we let Harry stay because he always used to watch for birds under there to the bench where Nana would sometimes let me sit when I was being good though now she isn’t here anymore I don’t really want to because the bench is too big for one. I cover my eyes and say okay Tobias ready steady GO and count from one up to twenty, then I keep going to forty because Fair Play and also it is nice to know that I can. Forty is the number of steps from one end of Nana’s I mean our house to the other. When we first got there for living rather than just visiting it seemed too big, with loads of creaking rooms filled with rocking horses and old books and no TV. I sat down on the creaky bed that was supposed to be mine and started to cry like I’d seen Ma do on the telephone the week before when she found out the news. That was when Harry jumped up next to me, and bopped me on the head to say okay Catrin, it en’t the end of all, and slinked out the door flicking his ginger tail which has always meant come and look at this in our language. Tobias may have his own boys’ knacks for Hide and Seek, because he is not behind the shed, he is not under the brick steps, he is not even inside the fairy bush. When Harry played Hide and Seek with me he always went somewhere new and scary, in attics and bedrooms that Da hadn’t yet cleaned out. Once he meowed from under the stairs and I had to go in. I never would have gone but cause it was only a game I sort of could, and that’s how I made Nana’s House into My House, and why I can show new best friend Tobias Finch around and let him hide. But he is clever in a way that makes me have these memories, and so I have to explore further. It is five times twenty five (one hundred and twenty five) metres to get to the tangle of thorns in front of the Secret Garden. The wind is cold, but I don’t have my stockings on because I’m being a boy today, so getting through will be difficult, but I straight away know that is what Tobias realised too: that sacrifices must be made to win. Da had said girl, you have to know when to let go, and he had pushed the box containing Harry into the flames and I had screamed so loud it must have gone twenty-five twenty-fives, then we sat on the bench for a long time watching the rain sink into the ground, and I knew somehow that things had to go back to where they came from when it was time. I have a cut in my leg like a tiny road but it’s worth it because beyond the thorns there beside the beech tree is the defeated Tobias Finch and he is pointing at- “I di’ent mean to-” White dust cakes the toe of his black trainer. It streaks in one line from where he’s sitting, shaking, back to the tree, back into Harry’s upturned jar. The tiniest white sprinkle remains on the lip. Tobias scrambles to put it back in, “I di’ent know, Catrin!” But the cold wind blows through the garden, picking up ash and sprinkling it through all the trees, over the bench, out into the fields and maybe beyond forever, and when Tobias Finch sees my face he smiles, because I’m smiling and maybe he understands what I know, that Harry will be happy in his new home of a thousand hiding places. drat, nearly sign-up and entry in one go
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Nov 30, 2013 00:34
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Oh yeah, this sounds fun. Me, me, in.
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Dec 17, 2013 11:22
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The Battle Of Cathexis & Jean (983w) [snip] Symptomless Coma fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Dec 29, 2013 |
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Dec 21, 2013 14:22
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