Exercise 26: And the rest

[Creole Ned]

Exercise 26: And the rest

Take one of the 10 sentences you wrote for Exercise 25 and use it as the beginning to a full short story.

Deadline: Wednesday, September 30th.

Two notes:

1. There will be one or two other quickie exercises during the rest of the month.
2. If you didn't participate in Exercise 25, choose from one of the previous exercises you have not done yet.

Entries:

Lunch Meeting (http://creolened.com/fiction/lunch_meeting.pdf) (UpOn2Wheels)
Unfallen (http://rimbosity.com/writings/Unfallen.pdf) (Rimbo)

[UpOn2Wheels]

Question - are leftovers OK? Any limit to the length?

I've got a short story already written, but it's about 15k words. Is this too long for an exercise?

I've been looking for an excuse to re-write part of it, so it wouldn't truly be leftovers. Think yesterday's pizza with fresh onions and more pepperoni.

[Creole Ned]

15k is a lot but it's still short story length by contemporary standards, at least (I've submitted 10k+ efforts myself), so it's not a problem for me. You'll have other opportunities to submit your own material for review if you still want to pick up from Exercise 25, though.

[Creole Ned]

UpOn2Wheels is in early with his entry, Lunch Meeting (http://creolened.com/fiction/lunch_meeting.pdf).

[kerzain]

Show off!

I've started and restarted a couple different stories for this one. Unlike my previous entries this one will arrive closer to the deadline.

[UpOn2Wheels]

Show off!

LOL - it's called having too much time on my hands. I've been unemployed since April, and there is absolutely nothing on the horizon. If only I could figure out how to make money at writing...

[kerzain]

This might turn you off the whole idea, but if you are serious consider talking to instructors at local community colleges and such (most colleges have them all listed with their email addresses on the school website if you don't want to walk down and knock on their office doors). It's common for these guys to get offers throughout the year for them and their students. Most of these offers don't pay well at all, and are typically one-off gigs (which is why you never see them listed on job boards) but it's a better way to build a portfolio than doing something like blogging (which is still recommended now days, but doesn't stand as well on its own).

It is unlikely any of this will help you build a fiction portfolio, but it will keep you practiced, build a portfolio, help you network, and give you some writing credits that will help interest an agent/publisher when they read your experience on the cover letter to any stories you submit, giving you some validity and making it less likely they'll drop you on the slush pile before at least taking a small look.

You won't find any fiction gigs this way at all (if you do I'd be surprised), but if you can stomach technical writing, ghost writing, non-fiction and stuff like articles from unheard of newsletters and the like, and you don't mind doing a lot of work for (almost) free... this could be a great way to network (which could help you find someone who "knows-a-guy" that might want to read the short story you have printed up and waiting to be read in the front seat of your car at all times... etc....)

If you try talking to an instructor and they have nothing, don't forget to ask them if it's cool if you email them again in a couple weeks etc. Let them know you're open to hearing about anything they've got. Obviously some instructors keep stuff like this to themselves (because they could be out-of-work writers who are stuck teaching for the time being) but many of these people are too busy teaching, reading and grading to pursue a lot of this stuff.

They won't all welcome your solicitation, but teachers have a tendency to want to help people.

[kerzain]

Well I've managed to piss away all my free time during this assignment. I've started and stopped writing about four different stories with a couple of my openers, but none of them really worked for me. Now I am heading out of town for a couple days, and then I start college on Tuesday the 29th.

This one will be late for me.

[Creole Ned]

Note: I may be a bit late on this one, as well. And I obviously fibbed about the quickie exercises for this month.

For October I am planning to include at least one quickie exercise, one themed for Halloween and another that will be posted tomorrow.

There will be only one exercise for November -- write a short novel (http://www.nanowrimo.org/). I will open up a private area of this forum for anyone who participates in that and doesn't want his work exposed to the hoi polloi.

[Acid]

I'm going to be late too. I haven't slept for days and my writring ability is getting questionable.

[Creole Ned]

Sometimes (speaking only for myself) a longer deadline just increases the chance I'll miss it. "I have more time to finish, I still have more time to finish, I still...dammit, I'm late."

[Rimbo]

And I'm in with 15 minutes left in the day!

Unfallen (http://rimbosity.com/writings/Unfallen.pdf)

As I mentioned earlier, this is pretty clearly the beginning to a larger story, but it at least seems to have answered enough questions and kinda sorta come to a stopping point. I don't know if it's worth finding out the rest of the story or not, though...

I'm guessing there'll be a lot of work to be done on this one, more than on other entries.

[Rimbo]

Acid, CN & kerzain -- Sometimes you just have to suck it up and release the damn thing. I mean, this is peer review; I expect what's submitted to be draft quality and not release quality, y'know?

I certainly don't expect my story to light a fire under anyone, other than maybe the protagonist. :)

[Acid]

I'm shopping a novel Rimbo...I know. :)

[Creole Ned]

Oh, it's not a matter of quality, since the work I've submitted to these exercises has varied a fair bit depending on inspiration/mood/alignment of the stars, it's just being so caught up in other things, including my own novel, which I'm trying to get done before November when I'll be jumping into National Novel Writing month. And that was an impressively bad run-on sentence!

That said, I'm still going to try to only be a few days late on this one. If I block off time today I may get the first draft done.

[russellmz]

hey UpOn2Wheels, did you drastically shorten your work? it was only 4 pages and some change, nowhere near 15k.

spoilers
i was interested in the setup, about why the private eye's client wanted the pictures showed to the husband. but i never really found out, and then the story was over. it felt incomplete. the husband is left angry and alone but what's he going to do about it? i couldn't quite tell if he as really pissed that she implied he couldn't afford her lawyer or if he was taking out his anger at her.

[russellmz]

rimbo


spoilers

i liked the story overall. had a first issue comic book feel.


that opening sentence still seems long to me.

do her scars seem fresh or old after she transforms back? the intervention guys seemed to buy her story about the slip and slide. the reveal of her back to everyone seemed unrealistic though.

so maria was doing it with some guy before jenny's shower and afterwards the church group and everyone else was there (fully dressed)? the timing seems off.

i kind of wanted to see how the intervention ended. scenes where a superbeing tries to not reveal their powers under questioning always amuse me.

would her dad agree to share the story with her roommates so readily? i liked the roommate's comment that the dead guys deserved it. shows her trust in her roommate. but the fact the roommates take the truth in stride seems unrealistic to me.


possible typo:
methodists do or don't learn everything catholics do? at the end of page 4.

[Rimbo]

rimbo


spoilers

i liked the story overall. had a first issue comic book feel.

Kinda went there, didn't it?

that opening sentence still seems long to me.

Me, too, but I felt it would rob the exercise of its... i dunno, somethingoranother, if I changed it.

do her scars seem fresh or old after she transforms back? the intervention guys seemed to buy her story about the slip and slide. the reveal of her back to everyone seemed unrealistic though.

One of many bits which should've been explained better, largely as a result of me not really writing first and figuring out what's going on later.

I tried to describe Jennifer going back into her room, away from the intervention group in the living room, with just her 2 roommates following her; the reveal is too short for the roommates to figure out if the scars are fresh or not, but one assumes the roommates have seen her back before.

so maria was doing it with some guy before jenny's shower and afterwards the church group and everyone else was there (fully dressed)? the timing seems off.

Another one of those where I should've made it clearer.

Jennifer was in the shower a looooooooooooong time. Maria is not one afraid to leave a guy with blue balls; as soon as she heard the shower start, she rallied the troops. Sucks to be Maria's boyfriend. She'll make it up to him later, possibly inviting the cute marxist girl she met in the El Salvador Students' Club. Shortly thereafter, she dumps him for her, and they fuck like bunnies for about 18 months. Maria goes back to Jesus, finds herself a good Catholic man from San Antonio and has him by the balls for the rest of their lives. She cheats on him twice -- each one lasting 3 months -- and he never finds out. She raises her four kids very strictly, which of course leads them to rebel; not one of them remains a virgin by his/her fourteenth birthday, and one of the two girls ends up having an abortion at age 15 without Maria's knowledge.

The other one really is a lesbian, but doesn't admit to it to herself until dumping her fiancee at age 26, and comes out a couple of years later, after being with the woman she'll spend the rest of her life with, whom she forever refers to as "my husband Darlene."

Anyway, that subtext was all in there... implied, you know.

i kind of wanted to see how the intervention ended. scenes where a superbeing tries to not reveal their powers under questioning always amuse me.

Nothing interesting happened; they gave it their best, let her know they were there for her, yadda yadda yadda.... Basically wanted to keep the story to the interesting parts. Unfortunately, I'm not all that interested in the story. I have to admit that I don't really like how Jennifer turned out.

would her dad agree to share the story with her roommates so readily? i liked the roommate's comment that the dead guys deserved it. shows her trust in her roommate. but the fact the roommates take the truth in stride seems unrealistic to me.

They didn't at first, but I didn't want to go through the whole, "You're shitting me, oh you're not, well that's hard to believe, ..." Maria's somehow just more likely to buy it. The other one (can't even remember her name) takes overnight.

possible typo:
methodists do or don't learn everything catholics do? at the end of page 4.

They do not. Catholicism has an awful lot more mythology attached to it than most of the Protestant faiths -- e.g. I'd never even heard of Lilith before I got to college.

As an aside...
:spank:
^--- the guy on the left really looks like he's enjoying himself, doesn't he?

[Rimbo]

UpOn2Wheels --

Like Russell, I was expecting something longer. :)

I really like how a lot of the details are portrayed about the diner, and how the scene reveals itself.

I had to look up "reverse cowgirl."

A lot of the details about the diner are dumped just as the guy is leaving. Seems to me almost like they were thrown in because you'd had 'em stored up and didn't want 'em to go to waste, but it doesn't seem like a time when he'd notice such things.

The guy drives a Mustang? No wonder she cheated on him. I KEED I KEED

Not a fan of the phrase "voices raging inside my head."

Seems to me there's too much contrast in the calm descriptions of his rage and anger. It works well when it hints at the fury built up (Amber Bock #5), but the reveals (when Amber Bock #6 meets its untimely end) are too jarring; they don't feel like they fit for some reason.

Though I like how, in the end scene, the detachment works well so that it's clear that the guy's interpretation of her actions are way out of bounds.

[UpOn2Wheels]

hey UpOn2Wheels, did you drastically shorten your work? it was only 4 pages and some change, nowhere near 15k.

spoilers
i was interested in the setup, about why the private eye's client wanted the pictures showed to the husband. but i never really found out, and then the story was over. it felt incomplete. the husband is left angry and alone but what's he going to do about it? i couldn't quite tell if he as really pissed that she implied he couldn't afford her lawyer or if he was taking out his anger at her.

Hey russell - thanks for the feedback!

No, I changed it up. Originally, I was going to post a 15k word story that I'd completed a few years back. It seemed like cheating, so I posted a new one instead.

Ah, so the story worked, then! I was going for confusion on the part of the protagonist; his world's been turned upside down, and even he doesn't know whether it's sorrow, rage or rabid ennui. OK, it's probably not ennui but clearly, he's not in his right mind. Even he doesn't know what comes next, so it's understandable that he's not sure of his actions.

[UpOn2Wheels]

UpOn2Wheels --

Like Russell, I was expecting something longer. :)

I really like how a lot of the details are portrayed about the diner, and how the scene reveals itself.

I had to look up "reverse cowgirl."

A lot of the details about the diner are dumped just as the guy is leaving. Seems to me almost like they were thrown in because you'd had 'em stored up and didn't want 'em to go to waste, but it doesn't seem like a time when he'd notice such things.

The guy drives a Mustang? No wonder she cheated on him. I KEED I KEED

Not a fan of the phrase "voices raging inside my head."

Seems to me there's too much contrast in the calm descriptions of his rage and anger. It works well when it hints at the fury built up (Amber Bock #5), but the reveals (when Amber Bock #6 meets its untimely end) are too jarring; they don't feel like they fit for some reason.

Though I like how, in the end scene, the detachment works well so that it's clear that the guy's interpretation of her actions are way out of bounds.

Thanks Rimbo - I appreciate the feedback!

Here was my mindset on noticing things in the diner - have you ever been in an extreme, potential life-or-death situation? I've been in a few, and it's the absurd details that come back to haunt me. For example:

- I crashed a motorcycle on a country road some years back. I remember downshifting for a corner and then WHAM, I'm skipping across the pavement at about 60 MPH. I remember thinking, "Wow, this pavement is really bumpy from this perspective. It seems a lot smoother when you're riding on it."

- I once has a bad spin (at about 100 MPH) back in my car racing days. I was hot into a corner, missed my braking marker and wound up in the marbles at the edge of the track. Next thing I know, I'm sliding through the dirt of the infield and the car goes up on two wheels (one reason for my moniker). I probably slid 30 feet like this before the car settled and landed, but it would have been very unpleasant if the car had dug in a bit more and rolled. Or flipped end over end.

The whole incident couldn't have lasted more than five seconds, but it was the longest ten minutes of my life. There wasn't any panic, just absolute clarity from which I remember the smallest detail. The exact moment when I realized I wasn't going to save it and put in the clutch while flooring the brake. Clutching my hands to my chest to keep them away from the steering wheel (broken thumbs aren't much fun). Shutting down the fuel pump, shutting off the oil supply, covering the fire suppression system and covering my harness release for a quick exit when the horizon stopped spinning. To this day, it remains the most vivid and realistic experience of my life.

I have other examples, but here's my point - in an extreme situation, I notice the most absurd details. Perhaps even at the expense of details I SHOULD be observing. I never claimed to be wired correctly... :bg:

No worries about the Mustang - I like them, but never owned one. It just seemed like the kind of car the protagonist should drive.