Experimental

I generally like fiction where a story is told in an unusual, experimental format. And this story has that in spades. The fact that it revolves around football of all things is more than a little surprising.

At the time I’m writing this, it’s only posted a couple of chapters and I’m eagerly waiting the next one. Hopefully by the time you’re reading, more are up. Go read it and tell me what you think! Trippy, right?

It does make me wonder what the future is going to be like. The long future, that is. Tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years away. Will humans still be here? If we are, will we even be recognizable as humans? Will we have found some way to save the planet or will we abandon it for somewhere new?

So many questions. I can’t even fathom an answer.

Short Scares

Several months ago on Tumblr (wait! Don’t leave! It’s good, I swear) I stumbled across a blog called Sixpenceee (the extra E’s are silent) that is absolutely filled with scary goodness. Her posts range from scary stories to weird events to random science facts. Being that this is October, we’re going to stick with the scary stories, but there’s a link to all the different subjects she covers over in her sidebar.

The scary stories she posts are (mostly) written by other people and range from mediocre to downright frightening—she’s actually also holding a short story contest this month and you can take a look at the entries on her forum. Anyway, I’ve tracked down the ones that I think are the best, as well as several others that have been highly recommended:

Three girls came into my ER last night, I have no idea whatthey are

The title is pretty self-explanatory for this one.

The Undying Love

A quick one, definitely amusing in a horrifying way.

Betsy The Doll

Considered one of the best stories on the site.

Dr. Ramsey

Made even more horrifying by the fact that the writer claims these are real events that took place in the late seventies.

Her Lips Taste Like Cigarettes

Really short but really good.

Autopilot

Another that’s considered one of the best, and it’s definitely a punch to the gut.

NoEnd House

A psychological mindscrew.

Minimalist

Another psychological story, this one about the degeneration of the mind.

My Daughter Learned to Count

Another short, creepy and amusing story.

This New, Old House

Short and scary.

The Guardians

This one’s probably going to squick out a few people…

Rocking Horse Creek

More sad than scary, but definitely good.

Both My Parents Were Surgeons and I Used to Talk to Furniture

In my opinion, the best one.

Okay, I guess that’s enough. I actually had to trim this back a bit because I just wanted to link to all of them if you like scary things, I suggest you try them. And definitely check out the Short Stories link because there’s a lot more where that came from. Just clear a few days off your schedule first as you won’t be sleeping.

Short Stories, Apocalypse Version

Because I promised another apocalypse post, right? So I gathered up some apocalyptic short stories for you. All written by dudes, I’m noticing. We need more women writing apocalyptic short stories (luckily we have Margaret Atwood and Susan Beth Pfeffer to deal with long form).

Year of the Jackpot by Robert A. Heinlein. Really more of a long story at ninety five pages. You can buy it for two dollars, kind of a lot really, but I remember it being a good story about the world seeming to reach a peak of insanity. The ending is probably one of my favorites.

Last Contact by Stephen Baxter. It’s a story about dark energy, cool enough, and a sudden “big rip” as the universe is suddenly pulled apart, vanishing before our eyes. Unfortunately, it’s not online anymore, a real shame. I wish I mentioned it when I first read it (of course, I didn’t have a blog then, so it may have been difficult). If you can find it somewhere, I highly recommend it.

The Scarlet Plague by Jack London. I love Jack London, so I just had to include his story of life after a plague wipes out most of the planet and returns the few survivors to a pre-industrial level. It’s a pandemic story from ninety nine years ago. It’s worth reading for that alone.

The Spider by Hans Heinz. Okay, confession, this isn’t an apocalypse story. But it is about impending doom, so I think I can kind of make it work? Well, whatever, it’s my blog. I make the rules. Anyway! It’s about a med student investigating a hotel room where everyone ends up hanging themselves. Not all that different from 1408 by Stephen King, but I liked this one better.

What apocalypse related stories do you like? Or short fiction in general?

Scared Yet?

And in continuing with this month’s theme of things to be scared of, I tracked down a bunch of short stories that are both scary and written by the person you least suspect. Don’t worry. They’re not too scary : P.

                                                                   

The Sandman by E. T. A. Hoffmann. If that name isn’t familiar, he wrote The Nutcracker. He’s not an English writer so it’s a translation, but I think it’s a good one. It’s the longest story I have here, but it’s worth it.

The Birds by Daphne du Maurier. Absolutely nothing like the movie. It takes place in England, the main character is a middle aged man with a family—if you’ve read REBECCA, you know what you’re getting into here.

A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner. The horror of this story isn’t fully realized until the end, but it’s skillfully foreshadowed. Like most of Faulkner’s work, it’s full of bitterness and heartbreak, but in this it’s taken to an extreme conclusion, hence the classification as horror.

The Landlady by Roald Dahl. Yes, that Roald Dahl. Like most of the stories here, it’s not straight up horror, but more subtle, and definitely not like any of his children’s books. The best part is, the scare doesn’t sink in until you’re done with the story and have time to think about it.

Miriam by Truman Capote. I’ve always considered Capote to be a literary writer, but here he flirts with the supernatural. I absolutely love this story, because even if you don’t believe in the supernatural, you can still be afraid of what’s going on here.

So those are the greatest, most unexpected scary stories I’ve found. What about you? What kin dof rare gems have you come across?

Story Time

I always like to do something fun in my Saturday posts. Sometimes it’s just fun for me, like in one of my rants, but you guys have put up with that enough lately, so I decided on something that’s actually fun for everyone: short stories.

I love short stories. I love long stories, too, but this week’s about the short ones, namely those of the sci-fi genre. We’re lucky to live in a time after the explosion of sci-fi shorts left us with thousands of varying quality to choose from.

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov

I actually mentioned this one before, but at the time was unable to find a copy of it online. The prolific Asimov calls it his best work. It’s certainly one of the smartest, most amusing ones.

The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin

If you prefer to be depressed by your sci-fi, look no further. It’s one of the most heart-wrenching, emotionally driven stories I’ve read period.

And He Built a Crooked House by Robert A. Heinlein

And He Built a Crooked House is par for the course time travel-y confusion. Seriously, you might need to write down detailed notes about what’s going on. Still fun though.

The Unreconstructed M by Philip K. Dick

It’s Philip K. Dick, so that right there should tell you it’s going to be cynical.

Ugh, I just realize there are all guys here. Lame. However, I’ve also been reading through MACHINE OF DEATH, a collection of short stories by various authors based on the premise set forth in one of Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics. And lucky for us there are plenty of females in there as well as males. So it’s proof that women can A), write science fiction, and B) be funny. Suck on that, SFWA.

Short Story Appreciation

Even though I can’t write them (every idea I think up is just too “long”), I love short stories. I think it may take more skill to write a coherent short story than it does a long one, where you have time to get to know characters and reveal their personality. And to craft a story with beginning, middle and end in so few words! Talent, that’s what it is.

Well, here are some of the best ones I’ve found. Fair warning: here there be spoilers.

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov

I’m sorry that I only just read this recently. Asimov thinks of it as his best story and considering how prolific he was, that’s saying something. It really is worthy of praise as intriguing, philosophical, and as per usual with him, with a believable glimpse at the distant future. There was once a website that had this story on it for free but it’s shut down now, possibly for legal reasons. I’m afraid your best bet for finding this is in a collection.

The Picture in the House by H.P. Lovecraft

I don’t think I could mention short stories without bringing up Lovecraft. Most of his works are wordy for supposed shorts, with meandering yet vivid sentences that tend to bog down the reader. But if you want one that’s interesting and fairly concise, you could do worse than “The Picture in the House”. It starts out as eerie, builds to unsettling and stays there until the end where it spikes into OMFG!!! If you want a collection, there are several out there and they tend to flush out the weaker ones as well. Since he’s been dead for over seventy years, his work is in the public domain. There are several sites filled with his short stories.

The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe

Hey, Halloween is in just over a month. It’s time to get in the mood, and you probably can’t do better than Poe. Unlike most nineteenth century writers, I find his work engaging, even when the main character isn’t named and his circumstances mostly unknown, as in this story. We learn a man has been imprisoned during the Inquisition (and even that isn’t described accurately)—that’s all, and yet that’s all we need to know. None are better than at putting the reader into the body of the main character, making his stories intense and powerful. As he’s also been dead long enough for copyright to expire, many of his works are available.

Where Are You Going, Where Have YouBeen? by Joyce Carol Oates

See? It’s not all horror and sci-fi. I read it in college and it made a strong impression on me. Oates is absolutely eloquent with her words here. In a few sentences, the reader has a sense of the main character, Connie, her family, and how Connie views her family, something that becomes absolutely painful when you get to the end. In a word: haunting. It’s available for free on Joyce Carol Oates’s webpage at the University of San Francisco.

To Build a Fire by Jack London

And if that last story didn’t depress you, how about one about dying of exposure? You might think that spoils something, but I don’t. It doesn’t convey the desperation, the fear that the short story does. It’s available for free at several sources since, again, copyright has expired. Definitely worth a read.

Short Stories

Back when I was in high school, I took a creative writing class. Or perhaps I should say the creative writing class since it was the only one offered. Anyway, it was pretty broad, covering poetry, character creation, and fiction writing. Even back then I had the dream of being a famous writer so it was a lot of fun to write a short story.

It came out at a grand total of twenty pages. Most of my classmates’ came out at six.

It was then that I realized I would never be a short story writer. I remember having to shorten the ending because the thing was due the next day and I was out of time. Am I verbose? Loquacious? Simply a big-story planner? All three, most likely.

I can’t do short stories. It’s just not in my blood. In recent years, the shortest thing I’ve written, with the exception of flash-fiction pieces for a certain Campaign, was a forty-thousand word novella, something I would probably expand rather than cut back on.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I don’t like short stories. Some of my favorite pieces are shorts. I admire them in the way one admires a great work of art. Obviously I’m never going to paint the Mona Lisa or Starry Night. But I can still understand their greatness.

And that’s my writing story for the week. Your turn. Do you do better with long fiction or short fiction? If you do both, is it easy to switch back and forth?

Third Campaigner Challenge

Welp, here’s my entry for Rach Harrie's Third Campaigner Challenge! I know, I didn’t enter the second one. I planned to but got major writer’s block whenever I sat down to do it : (. Yes, I’m terrible. Personally, I blame editing for sapping my creativity. Because it’s obviously not my fault.  

And here are the rules:

Now for the Challenge (and please note the word count change!):

    Write a blog post in 300 words or less, excluding the title. The post can be in any format, whether flash fiction, non-fiction, humorous blog musings, poem, etc. The blog post should show:

        that it’s morning,

        that a man or a woman (or both) is at the beach

        that the MC is bored

        that something stinks behind where he/she is sitting

        that something surprising happens.

    Just for fun, see if you can involve all five senses AND include these random words: "synbatec," "wastopaneer," and "tacise."   (NB. these words are completely made up and are not intended to have any meaning other than the one you give them).

Got it? So here’s my story. I hope I managed the show-not-tell okay…

Fresh Air

Salt air overruns my nose and I know I’m there before I leave the forest. Even with the nuclear waste bubbling on top, the water is beautiful. It ripples, curls into waves. It’s alive.

I take off my shoes and run, almost not caring that the synbatec is much softer than sand and doesn’t have that gritty feel I miss. But there are no harsh UV lights here. Just the sun’s golden veils. No boring, sterile air either. I inhale deep, gag, kneel down before I puke.

Breathing through my mouth, I can sit down and enjoy the hum of the wastopaneers as they filter the nuclear waste. At first, I like watching the tide flow in and out. It’s so much better than the holographs. But after a few minutes, I can’t tell the difference and the sun is now blinding me like the UV lights in the Tacise.

I flick sybatec beads, roll them between my fingers. They’re not quite blocky enough to balance on top of each other, but I try anyway.

I risked contamination for this?

“Hey! You!”

My head whips around. Shadows move forward in the dark. The Unclean! They live!

I run back into the forest. Sticks jab my feet, blackened branches dig into my face. But I have to return to the safety of the Tacise. I never thought there was a reason for the underground research station other than all their experiments. They were right. I can’t believe they were right.

Oh god. When I check, they’re following me. And then a downed tree appears in front of me. I crash right into it.

                                                      

Branches crunch behind me. I gag again. My tongue feels like it’s ready to rip out of my mouth. Did the sea come to get me?

No…no!

The Long and the Short of It

I’m not very good with short stories. I like to read them of course, but for some reason, I’m unable to churn one out. I didn’t start my writing career with short stories, either. For my twelfth grade creative writing class, my short story was twenty pages long. When I wrote my first non-school assigned piece, it was a 140K novel. The few flash fiction pieces for the Writers’ Platform Building Crusade are probably the shortest things I’ve ever written.

Whenever I have an idea, I immediately start thinking how I can work it into a story. I usually have a few characters, the main conflict, and an idea of what the world is like. Then when I start writing, it gets bigger and bigger. I come up with more ideas, more things that happen, more challenges for the characters to face. And pretty soon, I have a novel.

Part of the reason I’m a long-story writer is because I like to spend time with the characters in their world. I’ve never been able to condense their journeys into only a few pages, again, because I like to explore with them. Unfortunately, this isn’t always a good thing. Having the skill to say something in two words instead of twenty is an admirable trait. You can do more, experience more, show more…or just do it in fewer words.

What do you think? Any short story writers out there? I’m curious. Can you discern when an idea is a short story and when it is a long one? Is your process for writing them similar?

Taking A Break

Not from blogging, of course. I don't think anything could keep me from having people validate my every thought. I mean, entertaining.

I've just reached my editing limit in my WIP. As many people have suggested, it's probably time for a break anyway. I've been working on it for a while. Mostly that darn first chapter. I like how it's turned out, but...well, I thought it was good before.

So! Time to do something else. I still haven't edited the project I did for NaNoWriMo, so I think I'll try doing that. I definitely think it would work better as a short story (okay, a long story) and I'm going to try cutting it back. As for what I'll do with it next...I have no idea. There certainly isn't a market for novellas/short stories. But it will give my brain a chance to do something different for a while.

What about you guys? How's your writing and editing going? Any WIP's losing the IP and just becoming W?

Based on the Short Story By…

Short stories don’t get enough credit.

Back in college, one of the best classes I took (okay, the best class I took) was a short stories class. But not just any short stories. No, this one focused on stories turned into movies. I was surprised how many short stories became movies that were, in many cases, vastly different than their source material. In other cases, I was just surprised that there was source material.

Here, let me show you what I mean. Movies that have been made based on short stories. Warning this list contains spoilers and is full of my own opinions:

The Sentinel -> 2001: A Space Odyssey; Arthur C. Clark also wrote a novel at the same time as the screenplay for 2001 but the original idea came from a short story about astronauts finding a strange artifact of alien origin on the moon. Once they crack the force field, the narrator wonders if whoever placed it there will return to see who broke the device and whether or not they will be benevolent. Both novel and movie expand on this brief scene with monoliths that may or may not spurn advances in humanity.

The Birds -> The Birds; by Daphne Du Maurier. The short story is, on the surface, different from its source. The best you can say is Alfred Hitchcock read the story and took the idea of attacking birds from it, brought it to California and made up his own cast. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a good movie! But the short story has its own charm, one the lovers of the movie might not recognize.

It Had to be Murder -> Rear Window; by Cornell Woolrich. Yes, another adaption by Hitchcock. Unlike the above, this one is very close to the source material. The major difference is the addition of the love story angle, not surprising considering even now Hollywood likes, well, Hollywood endings. In the story, we learn the specifics (okay, Jeffries’ theories) on the why and how of the murder. Things in the movie seem a little glossed over, and there’s a lot more build up.

Memento Mori -> Memento; by Jonathan Nolan. This is interesting because the short story and film were written simultaneously and done by the Nolan brothers. However, Jonathan, not Christopher, came up with the main story idea and so I consider the movie derived from the story. Both contained the same basic premise: a man has anterograde amnesia, the result of an attack where his wife was murdered. In order to function, he has to write notes to himself and the notes convince him to seek out and kill the murderer. Obviously, the movie has more details. But it’s more about the search, whereas the story is about overcoming the no-short-term-memory enough to do it. In both cases, the main character uses it to trick himself into doing something (murder/escape).

The Minority Report -> Minority Report; by Philip K. Dick. Like The Birds, this one is taking the idea of the story and running in another direction with it. Can one really be punished for a crime they haven’t committed yet? The question is part of both movie and story, although the former is based around revenge and justice. I find the movie to be a little trite and a lot preachy (I mean, I get it; he’s been future-framed and that means Precrime is a lie). The story however, ends with the total opposite. Anderton commits the murder in order to save what he worked so hard to build up! He doesn’t really have anything against the man he kills. It’s just what he thinks is the moral thing to do, which makes me wonder about the shift of ethics over time.

And there are many, many more. I’m only going into detail here because I haven’t seen the movie, read the story, or don’t remember it well enough to discuss.

Anyway, my final word is this: short stories are great inspirations. They’re also great on their own.