Exercise 20: History undone

[Creole Ned]

Exercise 20: History undone

Take a famous event (good or bad) and alter history by changing it. This can be done via time travel, presenting it as an alternate history or using whatever approach works best for you.

Alternate exercise: Take an unfinished short story of yours and complete it.

Due Monday June 15th.

[Kinglupid]

I am here, and ready to party! I will submit a story for the alternate exercise part of this one over the weekend. Glad to be here!

[Creole Ned]

Here is KingLupid's entry, a day ahead of deadline even!

The Sick Ones (http://creolened.com/fiction/the_sick_ones.pdf)

[Creole Ned]

I figured more people would have liked making a botch of history. :P

I will have some thoughts on Lupid's story soon. I likely won't have an entry (again) because I am pushing to get my novel done by the end of the month. I'll crack the whip at the rest of you, though.

<image of whip being cracked here>

[Creole Ned]

Hey, glad to see so much feedback on Lupid's story. :P By the way, it is all of two pages long, you lazy sods. Take five minutes and offer a little feedback or I will turn this forum around and go straight back home!

That said, I liked the flow of the writing in this piece. I re-read the story several times and once out loud (my cat always gives me The Look when I do that) and the narrator's voice comes across as very natural. I am not always the sharpest at catching metaphor and things that aren't explicitly spelled out in stories but this appears to be, possibly...a zombie story?

The days threw me at first. The call is on Wednesday but the burial is on a Monday, which immediately seems backward but I interpreted it as the burial happened five days after the father's death, since that's a reasonable time between death and funeral. I suspect most won't have the same problem with this that I did.

You've done a good job of teasing out hints of a greater story unfolding here and the brevity of the piece definitely left me wanting more, to fill in the gaps and reveal in detail exactly what was unfolding. Overall, I enjoyed this story and would definitely look forward to a longer piece of fiction. Nicely done, Lupid!

[russellmz]

hey Kinglupid, i'm a little confused about what events unfolded. i thought the guy somehow went back in time and brought his dad back and triggered some sort of apocalypse as a result of that. creole ned's interpretation fits much better when i went back and re-read it.

i liked his internal thoughts about how getting a call perturbed him instead of glad to hear from him.

[Paladin]

Heh. More zombies. Nice work keeping them off stage, though. I thought the piece felt rushed. I guess that was what you were going for, and if it was, you succeeded very well. I'm just not sure it fit as well with what you actually wrote as a well as a slower, more anguished pace might have pulled off.

There are two ways (at least) you can go with something like this. You have the author who is obviously griefstricken and depressed, struggling to survive in a world where he is now prey. You can go with the frantic, adrenaline fueled pacing like you did, but then I think the focus should be on surviving. Maybe in that case, the letter would have been him asking his lost father for advice on how to survive, even knowing his father is now one of the mindless mob trying to kill him. You can have the author dealing with grief even as he's using the letter to plumb his memory of his father for insight into how to go on. With what you have written, though, I think it maybe a slower voice for your writer would have been better.

Still, quite an amazing job at wringing so much emotion and such fast pacing in such as short story, and one largely devoid of any on page action.