Exercise #11: Genre writing

[Creole Ned]

jackrabbit has indicated that he'll be too busy to take part in #11 so I'm taking the liberty of going ahead with my own idea for it.

After laying out specific requirements for #10 I thought it'd be nice to loosen things up a bit for #11 and so here it is:

Exercise #11: Write a short story based on one of the following three genres: horror, fantasy or science fiction.

Deadline will be Friday, February 20th.

Submissions:

The Spinner's Tale (http://creolened.com/fiction/spinners_tale.pdf) (Arioch)
Send in the Clones (http://creolened/fiction/clones.pdf) (Russell)
Hello? (http://creolened.com/fiction/hello.pdf) (Creole Ned)

[Paladin]

Can we extend the deadline through the weekend?

[Creole Ned]

There are no penalties for being late, so sure*.



* unless you're like a year late or something, then we release the hounds**

** zombie hounds

[russellmz]

There are no penalties for being late, so sure*.



* unless you're like a year late or something, then we release the hounds**

** zombie hounds

do they shoot bees out of their mouths?

[Creole Ned]

Undead bees, yes.

[Creole Ned]

Arioch is in first with his short short story, The Spinner's Tale (http://creolened.com/fiction/spinners_tale.pdf).

[Creole Ned]

Mine is running a bit long but I should have it done by tomorrow.

[Creole Ned]

By tomorrow, I meant Sunday, of course. I'm beginning to think Arioch had the right approach here. :P

The next exercise will be announced Monday.

[russellmz]

i sent my long rambling story with an ending i don't like over.

[Creole Ned]

And here it is!

Send in the Clones (http://creolened/fiction/clones.pdf)

Mine is still moving along. I am going to try to wrap it up tonight but it has been slow-going and it's getting rather long. Thanks for yours!

[russellmz]

hehe, awesome ending arioch. short and sweet. not to give it away but the creature does have a very realistic appearance and over time they have evolved to become larger percentage-wise compared to the host. :D


russellmz
man, i hated my story. i finished off the ending in a rush to try and get it in before the weekend was over. messed everything up by failing to do the ending first. so i wrote myself into a corner and had like 20 ideas that interfered with each other and each one i didn't like. 47 shoots walls. walls shoots tooms. no shootout. rocks fall, everyone dies. 47 sabotages tooms' rifle. walls dies. there's a bit where i imply walls had a plan but it never came to fruition.

the ending i should have put in was with 47 saying she's not a murderer then later walls steals a component of tooms' rifle to cause his death but then she's the one that gets killed when it misfires. then 47 finds the component and realizes her clone did try to murder someone. i didn't think of it too way too late, so i might go back and try and shovel that in.

tooms, i tried not to make a 100% villain but i think i pushed it too hard and made it so he's not actually that villainous, then overcompensated in the last part.

plus, i really should have nailed down who the main character should be. oh, well, back to the drawing board later.

[Creole Ned]

Gah, I blame Qt3 for not having my story done by tonight. I was playing my hobbit in LOTRO with the Knights of Qt3. :P I did work on it a bunch today and it's getting quite long -- over 8200 words at this point. I should be able to wrap it up by tomorrow (no, really!) and I'll get to the feedback on the others as well.

[Creole Ned]

Yeah, so my story has really gotten away from me here. I'm now going to just finish it as soon as possible, whenever that might be. I'll have feedback on the others before week's end, though.

[Creole Ned]

I feel like I was living in the world of my story it took so long to write. :P I have no idea if it's good, bad or ugly at this point but I give you: Hello? (http://creolened.com/fiction/hello.pdf)

[Creole Ned]

Feedback!

Arioch:
Minor nitpick: You switch randomly between "grey" and "gray". Or at least I think it's random. Maybe there's subtext I'm missing...

This is a very short but enjoyable read that left me scratching my head -- nervously, not out of confusion. ;) The bright tone of the narrator worked well and the "twist" at the end is well-played, if not exactly surprising.

russell:
I think you're being a bit too hard on yourself. I do agree on a couple of points you made, chiefly that there is no clear protagonist in the story. Is it 47? Walls? Hugh? The answer seems to be "yes -- all of them".

Things I liked: As with the first slice of this future-war universe, I think you handle the basic setting well, of soldiers moving through battle lines, dealing with the crap that soldiers have to deal with, and the added dynamic of the clones and their place is still an interesting concept (I have not read may SF war stories, so to me this is not territory that feels worn out). I love the name Walls and the explanation for it is nicely amusing. I like 47's minor thievery. It strikes me not so much as theft so much as taking shiny things, the way a raven might grab objects to drop in its nest.

Rimbo is going to call you out on the cussing but soldiers probably don't have the most polite vocabulary, so it worked for me. I kept thinking of the Qt3 Koontz so the name was a bit distracting but that's hardly a problem most readers would have.

Tooms is pretty much a straight-up bad guy here. That's not necessarily a negative but if you were trying to create a more shaded character, there probably isn't enough to show that. His shooting of Walls at the end would work better if he had motivation to get rid of her, since he knows she's on track to be shipped out after getting wounded again. Instead, he just comes across as more of an unstable jerk. I'd be interested in seeing you play around with some of the other endings you've suggested.

The ending between Cushing and Tooms left me confused. Cushing is the one who left behind 47 and Hugh at the start of the story, so he seemed to be of a similar mind to Tooms regarding clones as fodder. That made his threats against Tooms feel a bit off. Is there something I'm missing here?

A few minor nitpicks: there's probably a few too many descriptors used for dialogue that gets into "telling, not showing" territory. One or two is fine but it's probably better to let the dialogue or body language convey tone than to spell it out explicitly.

Walls shut him down. "Yes. But I'm not a murderer or plan to be." might read better as:

Walls shut him down. "Yes. But I'm not a murderer nor do I plan to be."

Overall, I still found this an interesting slice of war in the future and it can certainly be cleaned up. Don't worry about deadlines too much. As long as a submission isn't weeks behind (where we might be several exercises ahead) it's not a big deal being a bit late (or more than a bit, like me :P).

[Arioch]

No, the gray/grey thing wasn't on purpose. So, can you tell from which point on you though of the twist? Was I not ambiguous enough, for a change? Or did you read Russell's spoiler ;) beforehand?

Russell:
I like the gruffness of the military jargon (and the apparent influence of RPGs), and I dig your stories as parts of one overarching narrative. I didn't get the "Walls" joke either, care to explain (I know, explained jokes always suck). The "afterwards. Afterwards" in the last line should probably be changed, and the ending was a little anticlimactic, especially the dramatic hostage situation was solved too fast for my tastes. Koontz and Tooms were phonetically a little too close for my tastes, but now I'm nitpicking, and I really don't want to appear as if I did not like the story, because I did. It's a promising setting, I think. Do you have more stories set there?

Ned:
You really make characterisation look easy, Benny and Mike were sympathetic characters. And again a swimming race to a float.
I wonder why his first reaction wasn't to get back to Benny and Mike.
The losing of the knife read a little awkward. Why let him take one with him at all? All in all, the tone of the story - which, to me, was quite scary and dark - clashed sometimes with the almost splapstickian falls Aaron routinely suffers, and of course I wished for a solution, but with stories like these, with such a bizarre premise, a solution amlost always feels flat (see King, Stephen). I really, really liked the story, and though it was the longest story since I joined in the exercises, it never felt longwinded. Great job.

[russellmz]

thanks for the feedback guys. man, this week was killer for me: health records processing for the 4th quarter along with the semi-annuals all due on the same week. (this is about as exciting as it sounds, but really long)

i'll respond a bit more after i visit the folks this weekend but to explain one thing:


Russell:
I didn't get the "Walls" joke either, care to explain (I know, explained jokes always suck).



867-5309
867-5309
867-5309
867-5309

I got it, I got, I got it
I got your number on the wall
I got it, I got, I got it
For a good time, For a good time call....


it's actually a more polite song than the quote suggests...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axLRUszuu9I
lyrics and vid (http://www.tsrocks.com/t/tommy_tutone_texts/867-5309.html) (turn off sound for work, an embedded youtube autostarts)

[Creole Ned]

My story went through a *lot* of permutations before I finished it. A lot of the last day I spent with it was just ironing out inconsistencies that came up as the story evolved.

Arioch, on the question of why Aaron doesn't return to Benny and Mike, I tried to convey that the campsite is tucked away fairly high up in the mountains. When his car loses power, it's after driving for over 30 minutes along a highway, so walking back to the camp would just seem too far, especially since he has no idea how widespread the situation is and wants to get downtown to find out.

And I was conscious of using the race to the float again even as I wrote it. I went for it, anyway :) (and I need to finish that other "race to the float" story, too).

A hunting knife is essential camping gear (and he uses it to carve the roasting sticks), which is why Aaron has one. Losing it on the bridge may have been awkward like you say. I wanted to underline that things were not going to go well for him in the days ahead. At the time that he loses it, it's the only thing like an actual weapon he has to defend himself with.

As for the various falls, my weak defense is he's a bit of a klutz. Note he pulls off any number of moves without falling down, though!

Thanks for the feedback!

[Arioch]

Russell: Man, I'm slow. I still don't get Walls answer.

Ned: I totally got why he went further on to his workplace, even though the chances of anyone being there were slim to none. But when he got the bike and went home, his decision to stay in and read really confused me, especially because he made long rides afterwards. But it's essential for the narrative, and it's not like human beings always behave logically in stress situations - and even if he had returned, they probably would have already left while he was still freaking out, and then all of this could have been deleted as padding, since it didn't further the story, so you probably did the right thing in not including it in the first way :D.
Oh yeah, one more: Had you your ending planned beforehand, or was there at any point supposed to be a source for the sounds Aaron hears except his nervous imagination?

[Creole Ned]

For each day in the story I basically asked myself, "Where is Aaron's state of mind?" The first few days I imagined him getting into the mindset that this thing was temporary and the best way to handle it was to just stay put and wait it out. Cabin fever is probably the main motivation that drives him away from the house. That might have been stated more clearly.

I didn't have an ending in mind when I started the story (that's usually the case) and thought over a couple before settling on the one I went with. Once I did I went through the story and made sure all the details lined up with it. The groaning on the bridge is just what he figures -- the bridge settling. With traffic noise you'd never hear it but it's dead silent up there when he's walking along. The rest -- up to your imagination. :)

It was an interesting exercise to put myself in the mind of the protagonist and sort out how he feels each day and decide what he does, having him flashing between hope and despair, between feeling aimless and having focus.

[russellmz]

Russell: Man, I'm slow. I still don't get Walls answer.

walls' number is 867(like in the name of the song). in the past before my story, the first time she introduced herself someone asked her if she got her number off a wall*, like in the song. walls never heard the song before and didn't get the reference but she played along and made her own joke that it was on two walls.


* i'm not sure if this happens frequently outside the u.s., but a crude teen or adolescent prank involves writing a girl's name on a school bathroom wall with her phone number and sometimes a description of her sexual prowess (crude graphic optional).

[Rimbo]

Arioch:

Hahahahahaha! I've read enough short SF stories that I knew this was going to go somewhere familiar. But I still completely didn't expect that ending. By "Greys" was this a reference to these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greys ?

russelmz00:

Every time I saw "Koontz" I kept thinking of ... you know, the other Koontz. Story really gripped me and didn't let me go. I was a little confused by the clones' names at first, but not so much that I couldn't figure out where the story was going eventually. Except... which side was fighting which? Or did it matter? :)

Creole Ned:

tl;dr. Or rather, I'll read it after I finish this post. :)

[Arioch]

Yeah, the "greys" bit is intended as a red herring.

[russellmz]

russelmz00:

Every time I saw "Koontz" I kept thinking of ... you know, the other Koontz. Story really gripped me and didn't let me go. I was a little confused by the clones' names at first, but not so much that I couldn't figure out where the story was going eventually. Except... which side was fighting which? Or did it matter? :)


thanks!

when i'm stuck for a character name i toss in a qt3 handle.

it's usa versus...i haven't figured that out yet. i can't think of a bad enough country to bump up against the us within 30 years (barring global depression or disaster).

this story is part of a universe where the us uses a large number of clones in the army to avoid the problems of having a small highly trained military that's too precious to use. the first part is here:

http://www.martiancartel.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2671


Do you have more stories set there?

i started a novel from the november novel writing thing that i've kept working on for fun. this story was actually something from there that started as a one paragraph idea with someone saying the "it's sick" line.

[Creole Ned]

I had a couple of random things I wanted to mention about my story, so I'll just toss them in here.

I made a conscious decision to write the whole thing without any spoken dialogue. It was fairly easy since most of the story is a single character alone but it's an interesting challenge to convey dialogue without actually using any (at the beginning and end of the story, in this case). The other thing was writing the whole thing in an active voice: "I go to the door to see what is there" instead of "I went to the door to see what was there" and that tripped me up a few times, forcing me to go back and rejigger scenes that didn't match. I thought the immediacy worked well for this particular story (in my humble opinion).

I may actually revisit this particular "world" someday. I find I think about it off and on, something I rarely do once a story is done.

[russellmz]

creole ned
pretty good. i really felt the guy's isolation, though i also wondered why he didn't make a try back for his friends while i was reading it. even if it was a long trip as you explained up above.

it felt like the first couple chapters of a novel than a story by itself and i wanted to see what happened after and why everyone disappeared.