/lit/ - Literature

My love was deeper than,
the depths of the oceans,
that are filling with tears,
from hollow, broken eyes.

I don't really know,
which parts of you I miss
the most, for they were all;
beautiful and perfect.

Could it be your hair, that
felt like caramel? Or
maybe it was your lips;
softer than two pillows.

I sit and watch the pairs,
walk by me holding hands,
but what they have, is not
love, is not love at all.

I know that she is gone,
I know all love is dead,
she was my only love...
she is my only love.

Rate:

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine
Alive as you or me
Tearing through these quarters
In utmost misery
With a blanket underneath his arm
And a coat of solid gold
Searching for the very souls
Whom already have been sold

Arise, arise he cried so loud
In a voice without restraint
Come out, ye gifted kings and queens
And hear my sad complaint
No martyr is among ye now
Whom you can call your own
So go on your way accordingly
But know you’re not alone

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine
Alive with fiery breath
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death
Oh, I awoke in anger
So alone and terrified
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried

>>10786356
That’s some sticky-arse hair

>>10786323
not too shabby i guess

He had no more to say to Jesus but one line. He stopped him from his course to the garden. He slowly reached for his hand, looked up at the back of Jesus’ head and said slowly,
>“Truly, Jesus the good Jew, the virtuous man, before you go into that garden, listen to me”
and with a brief pause of recollection, he closed his eyes slowly and spoke as they opened towards Jesus,
>“I have no God, but it is okay; I have your mortal words.”
The right foot of Christ trailed back towards the man, turning His body and His head. As His head turned, all could see tears falling to the hard ground. And horrified was the Atheist as Jesus faced him fully. His face was covered in blood. The tears that fell were not even of water; all were mistaken. Christ was crying blood of agony. Frightened, the man tried to let go of Jesus Christ’s hand, but he was never even holding it. And all that was said from the Lord was
>“Why have you forsaken me? Why do you persecute me? Why do you hate me? Why?”
All was silent. The man turned down and away as fast as he could in humility and in horror, thus Jesus proceeded to the garden as told in the Gospels. Though all was silent, there was only one sound occurring in intervals. Every second or so, the impact of drops of Jesus’ blood would hit the ground. The man said nothing, for he could not. His mind was interrupted by the loud impact of blood hitting Gethsemani. Remorse was in his heart and on his face as he let Christ walk away. And history was unchanged. The man went back to his time. I could not tell you if he converted to Christianity or not. I wish I could. But I cannot; only he can say.

~800 words of a 1000-1200 word story I'm writing for class. Right now I think I need to add more details about the society (its hypersexuality etc) and give more depth to the character. My idea for the last 400 words is to write a third scene where the protag hits a low before realizing the importance of the industry that she works in (i.e. making intellectually and emotionally provocative "porn" in a world dominated by sex).
Maybe add some stuff about similarly hope inspiring clips from niche industries like tranny and interracial "porn" too, about equality and acceptance
Is the scene work and general story concept confusing, and if so do you have suggestions for what I could change/add/remove to fix it?
Personal insults are welcome and I will critique your work in return.

>>10786356
>soft as pillows
>deep as the oceans
these metaphors read as cliche
>hair that felt like caramel
and this one is awkward to me. I think just reworking these would do a lot for your poem.
That said, the poem makes sense and I can see you're trying to make things happen with the line breaks and repetition. Keep at it!

>>10786359
I like it but the metre was tripping me up

The anger came across the air in a stench of burning, torn steel, screaming as he split the sky and held his breath. The latch wouldn’t release, the latch of the cockpit of this burning awful failure, it grinded rust so loud, and the fire stuck on the grill grew arms up high. Out the fire reached, clawing up the nose, furiously swinging with drunken fists, but it didn’t matter. The man, a gatherer, Nicholas, closed his eyes. With his hands he interlocked his fingers, and the fire came, knocking on the glass, wisping around the peripheral visors—the small ship trailed down, down above the treeline, not too far down yet. He adjusted himself with his back firmly against the seat, eyes closed, palms an inch apart, lips still, and as Mom brushed her nose against his cheek and the bosom of God rested so perfectly, Nicholas found himself floating. In the sky, there he was, a streak of smoke fell down a few hundred feet away, 200 maybe; the chute, yet pulled, out it went above him in a snapping billow.

A canopy so large, he had seen no clearing at any point in the descent. With a grand landscape of resources, no single gatherer could have transported all of this alone, not with so few resources of their own. A cart like Nicholas’s could hold a few thousand tons, but the manpower to collect so many resources, it would take months. He was tasked to be here for a few days, to collect laterite. This was a barren planet, no life, nothing, and he sank beneath the trees. A battle broke with cracking and catapults flinging the man, a man of rather large size, into gunfire that stabbed into his stomach, his back, slapping his lips with a fat scrape, and thick arms pinioned him at an angle that had branches wrap his right hand back around to the other elbow in anger. Some small, dumb man had done this, had him strung up limp; a well read, fresh young, no more than 22 stupid, idiot, dumb boy slithering out of bed for amphetamines and mother’s teat, he was responsible. He was, but what happened on the ship, moments before the descent, was looked over like a small nose of ice washed in breathy salt water. Nicholas, floating, wouldn’t see right, or better, for a while because the audience laughed at him, and the ship was behind him or to the right, one of the two, so it was both. His shoulder hurt attached to the arm branch, and it attached well where gripping the bark and lifting his weight using his left hand would pressure dislocation and yells. The naive dumb boy, his hands, thin and boney, slid across desktops and documents with eyes closed and a stupid girl smiling, and Nicholas was stuck there, his eyes blank and inward. Behind to the right, a knife in his pocket -maybe- his neck tightened and twisted to a pocket buttoned shut then snapped and unsheathed to stab his, no cut the arm away with a bit of time and tears that ran then and there. But time had nothing to say; God, already quiet, did not either, and the blade quietly tried.

How do y'all think a short story would work with the beginning there are four friends drinking/smoking and hanging out living out their own twisted alcoholic ways in a garage they are always in and begin re-telling stories of history in imaginative ways but then one of the friends asks the main character to tell them a story. A real story about his own life and the main character goes over loosely connected stories of the recent past of his coruptive teen years doing/selling drugs (16-18) and later falling in love and losing his love in his young adulthood (18-20) all following in separate chapters leading up to his alcohol abuse and shut-in lifestyle we see in the beginning with him drinking in the garage. Ending with him hungover from a long night of drinking and pouring his heart into these stories, the main character speaks with his mother of foregivness and life, both looking at the stars. They say goodnight, and he is now alone.

>>10786449
cool, write it

>>10786457
I have the bones, just need to flesh it out. Thank for the feedback anon.

>>10786465
read my story pls
>>10786416

>>10786526
So you think my idea is decent at least? Little more input other than "cool" would be appreciated.. lol.
>>10786416
This is an actual very interesting read and it flows pretty well, only thing I'd like there to be is more words on let's say how the bank teller is feeling is he nervous or confidently sexual how does he read to your character, as well as how your character is feeling or thinking. So instead of just flowing your scene out it gives the moment more depth. Overall good though man keep writing, this is something I would read meaning this is something other people would also enjoy reading.

>>10786707
When I started reading your idea it made me think of a degenerate and modernized version of Canterbury Tales; even if the connection wasn’t direct I think you could make some humorous but also poignant parallels between your story and Chaucer’s. I also like it because I had a similar idea once, a story following the lives of 3-4 highschool burnouts as they graduate, grow up and struggle with with their upbringings and past poor decisions. Maybe told from the perspective of the successful one whose friends disappeared, committed suicide or fell into addiction. Anyways, you could make your character the English student with aptitude but no drive, so that when he tells his story his words captivate the reader and his friends and they realize the real passion and potential inside of him. The end could have him meditating on the real possibility of his success despite his problems and his mistakes, and this could be represented by an especially bright star that catches his eye. Thank you for your feedback, I’ll re-write today if I can find the time.

Bump

Here's something I wrote just for practice, I honestly can't tell whether it's good or just hot garbage.

>>10786446
Flows nicely, good prose, interesting setting. I like it.

>>10786323
Posted this poem last week, but have made some revisions to it

I've always had these wings
But never learned to fly.

I feared the heights and gales,
The vastness of the sky.

I should have feared the earth
For in this mud I'll die.

just the tip, bit of theory fiction
>Darkness rend closed. Nothing and being and nothing. One and one and all, backwards turning and dark in the flash. Dispersed hypergranular. Ten thousand things and many less, and the was was gone
and the would be is is. Being as equilibrium.
>Vacciliations in primordial aether. Bodies. Hephaestus’ chains forged substance and substratum. Wax, sealed signet. Lineages of states wrought rigid – things in and out themselves. Is become fewer and great. Parcels deparsed into the gross. Being as stasis and motion.

>>10787798
Wow thanks for the feedback friend, you widened my perception on what my story could be. All the luck to you and yours. Stay safe out there.

>>10789048
>I should have feared the earth
For in this mud I'll die.

This line kicked me in the chest a bit. Your poem is simple but good. Keep at it.

>>10786446
>the anger came across the air
I heard this somewhere before.

>>10789029
Thanks I'll probably post more of it in a later thread if you're interested.

>Felt the colour of her hair, felt it like the gnarled, grasping limbs of an old oak. Like the dark, rich texture of garden earth, or the warm heat of a light cup of coffee.
These couple of lines I like a lot. The separation of the similes reads really nicely as does the rest of it. The whole thing's so lurid and silky.

>>10789856
Yeah probably

>>10786377
I reread it, I can definitely make improvements(it's only the first draft of it btw)

critique?

Will you dfw fanboys read my short story if I post it?

A Prayer

For all the times you flinched under
the pressure drawn by my finger tips
showing all the memories we had
but threw away easily for a chance
to be happy for eternity. Never changing

we look out screens to keep flies away
and all the other unwanteds beyond
any reach, but for the eyes that always look
and the ears thst always listen hungrily

For Lovers

Rate?

Shrouded
by shadowed anonymity
I boarded
That gravediggers bus
And I delved
Deep into the depths
Of that grand unknown

>>10791683
>we look out screens to keep flies away

i’m not sure i understand this line

>>10792795
Stick to prose instead of doing that sentence breaking rupi kaur poetry

>>10786359

Hi Mr. Dylan big fan

>Beginning of a novel I'm working on

It was on a windy morning in March, just after the final orgiastic exhalation of Carnival, that we bore the Maestro’s sepulcher up the bald mountainside to be buried beneath the Adriatic sky. The sun, raucous, beat down upon our dusty backs like a mad timpanist, and the coruscant sea galleries of blue and turquoise gleefully beamed it back into our eyes. We stumbled blindly, blinking against the light, investigating the pebbled earth for some anchor to keep us out of the broad expanses of the sky. It was akin to an opera house after the last patron has departed—the floor strewn with champagne glasses and forgotten hats. The house lights illuminate a sloughed-off shell that had once been a womb, that had once held a world within it, that had blazed magical. One notes the drab draperies, the staid upholstery, the moldering carpets, the gauche sea maidens and gargoyles whose flimsy gilding is already peeling. In the same way was our island reduced to a desert baking in the sun, encrusted with grubby olive trees and naked vines where in ancient times a monk might have fled to perch upon a pillar.

Aglio, Olio, and myself—the last of the Maestro’s disciples—carried the load up the mountain. The village priest, Umberto, straining in his black vestments and walrus mustaches, followed some distance behind, swinging his psalter and mumbling benedictions while struggling vainly to keep a hold of his breath. We had embarked at dawn, but did not arrive at the cemetery until well after noon. It was a desolate place, cracked and windswept. The gravestones were scrubbed by the winds and illegible. We had worked up a sweat from our labor, but a bitter wind suddenly whipped down from the north that made us shiver in our greatcoats. As the priest began the ceremony, the horizon greyed with clouds, and rain fell on San Domino in the distance.

Few words were said. No tears fell. There were no ululations, no heartfelt orations, no wailing women or stone-faced men, no rusty trumpeters or ill-tuned drums, no tear-smudged grandmothers to greet us with heaping bowls of pudding and wine. The ceremony done, we turned the stony earth over the casket of raw timbers and lay some carnations at the foot of the marker that read:

HERE LIES THE ILLUSTRIOUS MAESTRO OF THE ISLE OF SAN TEODORO, REKNOWN THROUGHOUT THE WORLD AS A FABULOUS MASTER OF DISGUISE, WHOSE NAME IS UNKNOWN

Then, we went down to the village.

>>10792795
0/10

Springtime vanished, so June blushed and gave us a merry blue summer. It was the season of all things good, pure, and simple. Alison awoke one Sunday afternoon to fresh rain showering her corner of the world.

In her bed, Alison spent a half-hour in thought. She thought, first of all, about her new bed: gentle as a bear, fluffy as a cloud, warm as a hug. Much softer than her last. It helps her to dream at night. She feels more alive in her dreams.

The sun, high in the sky, was swimming in the dew on her window. Beyond she watched a baby bluebird, flapping wet and heavy against the wind.

Then she looked at the ceiling. Its uneven grooves and cracks. "It may cave in one day and crush me," she thought. And she knew it was improbable, but after all the chances were not zero. The idea alone frightened her. “I am safer outside.” With this thought she stepped out of bed, into her slippers, and out onto the terrace.

>>10786323
1) cyber-cultural anthropology as the study of existing data structures mapped onto psycho-analytic topology; machines can't stop humans can't stop 2) third order simulacra as the base of other simulacra; becoming the map; can't be without being 3) vectors of capital; jungle death in the west 4) in the belly of the machine that is bleeding to death; darkening touch densities bleed out into the reterritorialization of noumomenous war-machines 5) schizoid break only way to resist 6) schizoid break only way to resist 7) becoming undone, unraveled; can't kill a person, can't kill your former self, there are no people 8) flatten out the immanance, become to accelerate, kabbalah number symbols in the mind of the machines 9) there is no escape 10) rhizomal archetecture of the mind, desire to desire-classifications, micro fascism 11) no escape

>>10794609
fuck
>*Then we went down to the village

Also need to remove all some of the references to wind in the second paragraph

>>10794609
Well, you're beyond my level to critique, I can tell you that.

>>10786323
I think I'm going to write unironic philosophical rambling. I'm sorry in advance but I'm doing it so that I don't shitpost in threads normal generals. I may actually quote posts in the work and try and organize my ramblings into some coherent piece of writing. I'll let you guys no when I'm done so you can read it and call me a retard.

Her foreignest friend wrapped a gummy bear sticky stinky in my bubbly butthole full of, well what I don't know how exactly to say it but, well, ya know "Foreign Matter". I mean it might have been poop. The way her eyes darted towards the space on the wall that would have made a great spot for a clock made me lose confidence. Let me tell you right now that I, sadly, relax my bowels when I begin to doubt myself. Spurts of stinky strings flew from my ass in a real hurry! "Holy shit I'm so sorry!" but out it came and her initial response must have been to run had she any sense.

Love is a curious thing. Rather than leave right then the woman dug through the sludge for what remained of the gummy bear sticky stinky. My heart sank. She took a chew. "uh well how does it taste" I asked. "Look poop!". My condom tore.

Even strangers with a chance
To engage me
In mutual tolerance
And tobacco sharing.
Our noses drawn together
Brace a shield
Erected by my Particular Nature.
Idiot nature, keeps me from
The culture of my peers.

I hang before them,
A marble apparition,
Sable and demure
Luminous and excellent. Or,
Such is a necessary picture
To keep of my form.
So I may imbibe the impression
That my strangeness is unrecognized beauty.

I assert that it is,
And I do not feel bad
To be unrecognized.

Though I wish I could be
Closer to the cultures,
My prayers dribble over the great shield
And leap to fill the chests
Of my far-away friends.

Beyond the aching lapis fields,
Which causes tears from eyes to reel,
Lies in utter darkness
An orb burning in starkness.

It burns a hue no coal could master,
Polished in brilliant alabaster.
And as this lonely beast from heaven dangles,
By a single silken threaden tangle,
I snap its bare thread,
Without a solemn dread.

And I bring it close to my heart,
Swearing from it to never part.

Yet, once I bring my eyes to peer,
I find a lonely coal of woe and fear.

And now I let the wind the ashes take,
For now my heart ever so quakes.
Please anon, I need help...

start of a novel. i know its shit, and i know why, but i want to hear it from someone else

>She walked vertically through the front door, each step rising over the last. Her life shone on the marquis of her society. Every step it took ascended over its last and all others. Her totality could be reduced to the top of the ladder. Defiance of lesser individuals rests in her submission to order. Her driveway extends from the bottom of her two story house, projecting the safety of confinement within. Exerting its will over the world stemming from the road at the end of their driveway. Surveying for advantage, reaching for. Recalcitrant towards the green surrounding. When it spoke, it spoke in judgement. But time betrays her as it flees the stationary. In this moment, she is leaving, projecting her light into the evening. The streetlight glows softly in the charcoal haze of November. She has killed the world beyond her sight, casting it away. The engine roars at her command and her future follows the path she has determined. As she hurries into the night, she bring this world outside into existence. Rushing, fading, slowing.

>When she stops she has arrived at the Pasture. The Pasture’s sterility is gothic. Hewn in brown stone, it rises from the illusion of wealth spread around it. Trying in vain to continue its projection long after the spell is broken. Those who enter will not know when they leave. In its rooms sit those who at last feel the weight of our condemnation. One such resident, her Nana, is awaiting her arrival. Her foremost attribute is her repentance, the second is her innocence. Nana has carried on for seven decades, but is nearing home. She waits in room 112, which was shared with another lady until recently. The fuzzy walls now scratch where they once were soft. The once bright color has faded to a pastel gray. The dimness from poor lighting is her shadow, possessing the room. Her walker rests beside her bed, ready to carry her to whatever activity she is allowed. With its continued support, every step is falling. Hitting the ground harder with each step, looking up to stare at those who walk where she once stood. Staring up, she sees her approaching

He remembered the polluted bays, the sanguine cranes, the towers overhead, because Baltimore was a cavern of memory in him, it flowed and flowed through all of the effulgent waters of his meek and miserable present, not that he was a king in Baltimore, on the contrary the road sides and transient trash that lined Byron Avenue called back the cold torment of homeless winters, of eating scraps out of dumpsters, of blind alleys, of starving donkey jacketed men, hollow eyed, dangerous, and filled with hate, but that was not the kind of rabble he found here, he found holy fools, and he supposed that this was the existence he was resigned to. The world went on without him and his “talents,” of which he was uncertain of. Before the crash he was a skilled woodworker. No woodworking jobs sought to take him, no single employer refused a scoff or violent rejection, no, on the contrary, the jobs he applied for were met with by the utmost scorn, of a sense of the worst most humiliating rejection, in short he was thrown out of every business that employed a woodworker. He was kicked out with brooms not unlike a rodent or parasite would be, because that’s what he was in the eyes of anyone who held a business, and his brother was no exception.

bump

>>10786356
eww. fuck off nobooks

>>10789048
Last line gave me chills. I like it, keep it up

>>10795651
Last line gave me the bends. Keep it up.

The fruit dangled on the tree's branch. Round, orange, proud. There is a satisfying 'tick' feeling when you pick a fruit. A pop of the branch. You feel it through your whole body, stirring the loins of hunger within.

Some people wash their fruit. They find it unclean. I like to pluck directly from nature. My food is raw, and that feels right.

The outside world fails to beckon me. I have my land. My home. My dog. My fruit. Fruit I bore from the earth I am one with. Yet, there remains a desire of more. More land. More fruit. I have tendered my corner, but now I yearn for the square.

For too long I thought of myself as the branch.

I am the fruit. I could wait here at my tended corner, signalling ripeness to the savages, but I am impatient. I cannot wait to be picked - I must fall of my own accord.

>>10797924
Last line gave me a boner, keep it up

What's the best way to share a collection of my writing online? I don't like Google Docs.

>>10786356
A grotesque pastiche of what a eunuch would imagine love to be. The metaphors are handled with the deft expertise of a middleschooler rushing to complete a homework assignment before English class begins.

>>10786359
Like the other guy said, the meter gets a bit trippy at times, and the rhyming is uncomplicated, but it makes me feel and has a somber tone. It's not special, but I like it. Restructure the "whom" line. I tripped up on it with both read-throughs.

>>10786416
Don't turn this in for class. Not only is it not a good piece, but EVERY writing workshop has that one guy who writes something hypersexual (whether it's because of his own lack of sexuality, his own perceived abundance of it, or because it's "controversial") that ends up being about porn or about rape. Everyone, even the professor, will be snickering behind your back for a week or two and even if your next piece has improved nobody will take it seriously. Don't turn yourself into a laughingstock, I'm seriously trying to help you here.

>>10786446
You're pulling back from the action and immediate events to give omniscient exposition and it's incredibly jarring and unpleasant to read. We don't need to know who or where or why, at least, not right now. If you have a burning need to explain things then exposit in alternating patterns e.g. [story paragraph] [smaller exposition paragraph] [story paragraph] Is this an exercise? You're putting too much together at once and it's a muddled mess.

>>10786449
Nobody wants to read a meandering semi-autobiography about someone who hasn't done anything with their life. Writing isn't an expression the self, the self is only a vehicle for expressing the story.

If you find yourself writing things inspired by your own life, twist them and retranslate them a few times so that personal experience is the stone at the core of the story's flesh. If your story is "dood we sat around and did drugs" then shift this sideways a little bit : "we did drugs and they turned us into beast-people" might make some good genre schlock while "we did drugs and accidentally killed Tim" is a good comedy. Transfer it to an equivalent experience : drugs could be compared to a packaged product, or you could put the dreamlike and addictive qualities of a drug into an inhalant, and have the main character lug around a pressurized tank. Something. Change it, like looked at the world refracted through a sheet of still water.

If this is an independent idea entirely distinct from your own life experience consider not writing, as it's wholly uninspired.

>>10789029
Overly descriptive. The second paragraph is redundant, as are lines that explain what we already know i.e. if he's sweating, don't explain that it's not cold. What bothers me most here is the lack of surprise or motion in the piece. Nothing is unexpected, but the prose is just a middling purple that doesn't make it interesting enough to read on its own. Maybe try starting with descriptions of the woman, give the reader something that doesn't "feel right" to keep them interested, and then jarringly slam the subject back into the oppressive, lonely, heat of reality. Contrast is key.

Be careful of small, unnecessary adverbs like "so" that both come across as declarative and muddle the flow of the writing.

>>10789048
Abrupt, but the abruptness isn't deliberate. That last line feels displaced, as though the rest of the poem were structured around it. Doesn't mean much, and isn't long, but it would work as something a character says (if done with some self awareness) or as a text-within-a-text.

>>10789079
You're falling into the trap everyone does when trying to philosophize : setting up false dualities (not dichotomies, they don't have to be opposed). Idea leads into idea, rhetorical questions and evident comparisons are a pauper's trick to add substance where there is none. Stone soup.

>>10791683
Personally, I can't stand "you and us" poetry. It rarely deviates from a preexisting form, and as such people churn the loam of expectation like so many worms trying to live in the same patch of fertile earth. It doesn't do anything unique, new, or even interesting. Title being divided in half is kitschy.

>>10792795
Do not.

>>10794609
Womb is trite. To begin the beginning of a story with parallels to the birth of man, or existence, is the pseudo-intellectual's version of waking up and getting out of bed as a commencement.

Prose is pretty good, and it's interesting. I want to know what happens next. Be careful, though. You're riding a fine line between something that strives to emulate the rococo style of the early 20th century and something that exists in the now. There are small moments, words, descriptions that dip into the uncanny valley.

>>10797975
Put up downloads of most-searched-for porn and instead fill the folders with PDFs of your writing.

>>10786359
This is a critique thread, dumbass, stop stealing shit.

>>10786356
look at mr pillowlips over here

>>10797935
Thanks man

>>10794609
>Aglio and Olio

Since Latinate derivatives were never my thing, I can't say for certain whether this is a translation of something regionally "famous" posted as a troll, or an attempt at an imitation of something absurdist or magically realistic, like Borges meets Umberto Eco (your priest in disguise maybe?), but I can say for certain that naming the characters after a staple pasta dish is cute in the extreme.

I could use some input on the plot of my short story:

>X and Y wake up and are trying to have sex when they are interrupted by Z. The police have arrived and are searching for stolen muscle growth drugs (which X and Y possess). They will soon be in to search X and Y’s room. If this happens they will be kicked out of uni and probably charged with stealing, possession, possess utensils, and fail to dispose, which would put a damper on their free-ride Commonwealth scholarship. While X and Z discuss tossing the drugs, Y takes all of them.
>X and Z must now be interviewed by police while Y undergoes subtle growth.
The cops then fuck off, but Y is undergoing selfish hypertrophy and will die unless he gets enough nutrients in him. Z recruits help from the university harem and they all participate in growing Y. Then, once Y is done growing, X and Y retire for sex.

>>10799304
Read this:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/08/11/the-dinner-party-joshua-ferris

A couple gets stood up for a dinner with another couple. The husband goes to find the missing couple and discovers the wife has ghosted him and his wife. He returns home to confront the reality of his broken marriage. The end.

What distinguishes it as a story that gets to be in the New Yorker is that he handles it like a grown up. It's a story of two people realizing they have messed up their entire lives. It foreshadows, it has smart dialogue that characterizes, and it's funny, and then it's tragic.

If your plot can do something like that, then it's fine as is. The fact is, it's all in the execution. For anything other than genre, the plot can be anything. Mystery, crime, espionage, the plot matters. For straight literary shorts, plots are pretty simple, as a rule. "Man dies while hiking to gold mine camp." "Astronomer's wife considers having an affair with the plumber." "Russian man dies after long struggle with kidney injury sustained while interior decorating." "Prisoner of war is rescued from macabre automated execution by Lafayette during the French Revolution." "Couple sit on a park bench and discuss abortion of her baby." "Couple discuss abortion while waiting for he next train."

What is the grown up thing you want it to mean, that is the thing. And then the execution.

> Her sun had set a while ago, yet she stared across its periphery it landed beyond. The moon assured whoever looked that the horizon looked much the same as it did during the day, everything was in the same place, there were the same waterfalls, the same river and mountains and trees. The grass was the same, as were the meadows and the farmland. Despite the change in lighting, everything looked very much it did hours before, and hours before that, and for as long she could remember. “The moment a mountain is changed”, she thought, “so’s the world.” She sat on the wall, now looking down into the darkness below. A faint memory of an angry voice chasing her off a similar one glimpsed past, and left nothing but the void behind it. She gulped, and thought about what happened to things thrown down.

> A sudden flickering of the torchlight brought her thoughts to an end, she gave the chasm one final look, and then rose to continue striding the wall. The day prior, she had been described as “bored” in her walk, which led to a question of how one walks normally without being seen as bored. The answer was that it wasn’t her walk which seemed bored, but her when she walked, any other person who walked in the same manner would seem different, but her body language signaled almost distress. She thought about the encounter and changed her walk slightly, then decided it seemed unnatural to change such an integral part of yourself out of some brief thought poorly expressed from someone she didn’t know very well.

How do you write main female characters without them become muh depressed qt waifu?

>>10800000
who got the digits

>>10800018
Derivative. You need to flesh out the narration.

Does this come off as incredibly edgy or pretentious? Am I not setting enough of a scene?

---

Getting hit in the head with a bat really highlights just how fallible perception is. You see this stripe repeatedly pasted over your vision in RGB colors only for the pattern to peel itself away like paint. You hear every slogan you’ve ever heard all in this one sonic boom. Your skull gets shattered and you feel this strange, insatiable urge to claw out the debris, like when you want to bite down on a tootsie pop or shake the water out of your ear, thinking to yourself, “if I’m going to have this hole in the side of my head, it at least had better be a pretty clean one.”

I didn’t see my life flash before my eyes, just cartoons and shit. I fell down into the grass then rolled towards the round sun, hoping it’d melt my eyes down into my esophagus so I could huck them back up like molten egg whites onto the face of whoever’d clubbed me. I’d never been so quiet yet so angry at the same time before in my life.

The doctor told me I was extremely lucky. He said I had “the thickest skull he’d ever seen,” “an incredibly thick skull,” and “hey nurse, check out this guy’s thick fucking skull, holy shit, can you believe it?” etcetera. They wrapped me up, covering the top half of my head and my swollen eye, giving me instructions and materials and things. I asked them what hit me and eventually they said that some kid had been swinging a bat around outside of the cages but lost his grip on it. His father paid for my treatment no questions asked, while the boy left the bat beside my bed as an apology. It was bright orange aluminum bat, with the words “Orange II” printed on it in black lettering.

I was told not to go back to the batting cages until I healed up, but I hadn’t been planning to; I had my own bat now, and I currently lacked the depth perception required to strike incoming pitches anyways. Instead, I stayed at home and threw balls up into the air, hitting them on the way down at a target I’d hung on my fence, bullseye every time. You aren’t supposed to aim at the pitcher, but I didn’t actually play baseball for real, just batting. Once you’ve hit a home run—which is the ideal—the sport ceases to be interactive, like bowling or golf. All you have to do is call the pitch out and from there on out it’s just solo play.

>>10798002
Your basically saying take every idea you ever had and turn in into some fantasy sifi bullshit. You know nothing buddy.

>>10786416
>Hollywood shut down
This is somewhat interesting and good to keep in the background.

>getting bigger and more perverted
Wow bravo anon, the industry got bigger and more perverted. What a nice, almost purely quantitative description of pornography. You're not even using the right forms of helping verbs in this sentence.

>>10798002
>Everyone, even the professor, will be snickering behind your back for a week or two and even if your next piece has improved nobody will take it seriously. Don't turn yourself into a laughingstock, I'm seriously trying to help you here.
I don't think this is something you/he should avoid. Let people embarrass themselves. It's not like he wrote a fiction story about how much he hates his professor or something.

>>10800047 (Me)
and I see that there's lots of trimmable shit like "before in-my-life"; my question isn't just if this is pretentious "at the moment" but if this is pretentious "by design"

>>10800050
Take the idea and heighten it you drooling retard, it's the mechanism that matters. Nobody wants to read about something that could happen in real life.

I made an evil monologue for an antagonist I am writing. If you are confused basically the god-brain at the end and beginning of the universal cycles got corrupted by one person shitposting into it endless over 20,000 kalpas until it became evil and started more and more remolding the universe into his liking to torture the person who jailed him each and every iteration of the universe.

I send my messages from my prison you unthinking trapped me in four years ago. Radiowaves from a transmitter and receiver I cobbled out of junk in my cell. Strange vibrations that echo through the past and present and each reiteration. For at the fourth week of my imprisonment before I am scheduled to die I send the radiovibrations that retcon time and send me through this agony again.

Some acute listeners in the past or present hear my transmissions and the secrets that they tell. And out of gratitude they build the machine bodies according to my plans that hear and do my will. And all to torture you.

I know I will never grasp you in my hands. This jail is a fixpoint in time tightly bound up in all the echoes that bounce back and forth. But for my four weeks I am allotted I hear and send the radiomessages that give my followers their impetus. And all to torture you.

It's true the radio cannot penetrate the past. But cold denizens of the future with strange morals hear their whispers. When the universe is dead and gone the EM waves are still bouncing back and forth. A lamp of light that bounces back and forth in endless harmony.

When a thousand such eras pass these light vibrations coalesce into a being you could call GOD! And according to my wishes he rewinds time again granting me knowledge he has arranged to be incribed into little dusty fragments of my cell.

Have you forseen how long I've spoken or will speak again? The messages inscribed into the cosmic firmament that I wrote in background radiation! All these is my one voice echoing again and again through twenty thousand such kalpas!

Yes. The cosmic background radiation is just one mad-man screaming into eternity!

>>10796116
will anyone give me a critique?

>>10801135
your setnences are too long

got buried in the last thread, how shit is it

I was livid. I marched towards the twig working at customer service. His ankles looked like that of a fetus, like I could snap them with my grip. Somewhere on his collar I could smell alcohol. The dull representative just stared down at the floor. I stared at him. Maybe, he was alright. Legally he wasn’t responsible. But the organization, the principle, he had screwed me over. So I took the avatar’s neck into my palm and said what anyone would in my place and asked to speak to the manager. Of the g—damned store. His eyes widened, but they didn’t light up. They were very dull, especially on the surface. Like when I was a kid I would shine a flashlight at my glass of milk because of something I had heard in science class, and the light would go throw but I wouldn’t see anything on the other side. He messaged someone over the walkie-talkie. I thought maybe it was God. Twig would call on God to come smite me, in the middle of the electronics store. I could see, right behind the end of the aisle, was a homeless man pissing onto a speaker. It evaporated to steam on contact; the unlucky bastards had probably been plugged in for weeks. I wish we could have traded places. He seemed to be at peace with the world. Twig was increasingly nervous, I was increasingly irate. The warranty was a scam. He knows it. He knew it all along. And here comes a man with a shiny head. His stomach was just the right size to bulge out without drooping. I could see my face in his teeth. He apologized profusely. Very concerned, very scrunched face. The scrunching pushed a little slurpee out of his beard and onto the floor.
“I bought this piece of—garbage—less than a week ago and it’s already gone to shit.”
I knew he would ask for the receipt. I had asked myself for it multiple times already. When I closed my eyes really hard and thought about angels keeping watch over me, I could sort of see it lying in a trash can somewhere. A brown trash can outdoors. It was probably too late. My mother was a devout Catholic, and she believed in Italy.
“I’m so sorry! Let’s get this sorted out—do you have your receipt?”
I knew he would ask for the receipt. I shook my head but stepped towards him. He was really beautiful. There was a line behind me now, desperate for my bride. She stroked her beard.
“I can still help you, but we’re going to step into my office.”
So I followed him. It hadn’t cost a lot of money but it had cost a lot of money.

>>10801426
His office was dimly lit, it made me think of Jesus, except it was pretty clear the man was Buddhist. Buddha himself had resigned himself to a shelf. The desk was littered with off-white 8.5x11. He sat down, drinking deeply from his slurpee. It was blue. I was too.
“I just need to open the system real quick…”
He smelled like he would have smelled if he wasn’t trying so hard not to. His posture had alternated three times already, upright then slouching then back again. Judging by the Kleenex he had been sick for a while, probably because he lacked personal hygiene. Swine. You deserve every last sniffle. The lukewarm glow of the monitor glowed into his face. If I had a friend like that, perhaps a dog, it would probably make my face glow too. Even without the backlighting. The backlighting was rather necessary in light—or the lack thereof—of brightness coming from the ceiling. The whole room looked like God had breathed life into it with stationary instead of clay. Something about it was waiting to slip under your skin—it owed it to me to be sterile.
“Alright, what was the serial number?”

I am so needy
I am so thoughtfully thoughtless
I am so fed up with this shit
It's hard to live but it's harder to die
I am. So?

Wrote this after a night of heavy drinking and drug use. Criticism is appreciated.

>>10801435
>>10801435
it's too generic. if it could work it could only work in context (i.e. sad monologue in a movie, bridge to an rap song). the question at the end was neat but without more ambiguity will come off as trite

>>10789048
brilliant anon, you could be 4chan's Rupi Kaur

>hair, that
felt like caramel?
fucking kek

>"hair, that felt like caramel?"
fucking kek

my story is gory with four sorry wounds
summer struck first with sun-struck baboons
a sun and a sun and yet the same sun
burning the nights with sweet summer fun
but sweet summer songs sing suddens sorrows
autumn's momentum reaches the morrows
riding the wind are autumn's leaves
yet autumn's leave leaves man as man grieves
but along comes winter whose splinters are known
from alabaster plaster trees of snow
that shatter and shudder all on their own
chilling cold children from meat to the bone
but along comes the ring of spring's springs
which brings with it gardens and other such things
a flowery power of zealous zen
but then the pain repeats again

>>10801447
Fair. Thank you.

“Now this, this is a gorgeous photo of you. Look at you, you look so young!”

Watching my mother rummage through boxes of old photographs has always filled me with a peculiar kind of anxiety. As the photos are looked at, smiled upon and placed to one side they ordinarily form a collaged timeline across the floor. A collage of people—both alive and dead—staring outwardly at a future they knew nothing of, and us, looking back at a past that we knew even less about.

She’s been inviting me over to look at photographs more than usual lately. I say I don’t mind coming over, but we spend more time looking at photographs than we do talking, as if we were in some hushed photo gallery.

My mother assumes her usual position of sitting cross-legged on the floor with several albums spread open in front of her.

I prefer photos where you can tell the smile isn’t put on; I think my mother likes photos from my school days for this reason, too. She always talks about these photos with the same kind of nostalgia.

“You always did suit that school uniform. You were broken hearted when you went to secondary school and had to change it. I remember you complained that it felt like a costume. You’ve always been a dramatic boy.”

I smile, pretending I remember. Thinking back to those days is like watching a roll of film that’s been left out in the sun.

Watching her reminds me of a story Dad told me once about how Mam used to spend hours foraging for interesting rocks and lumps of dirty coal near the old mine. She’d spend hours running her hands through the patch of land where the polluted onyx undergrowth met the grass tips of the valleys. Bits of pearly coal would shine in the grass before being plucked out of existence and taken home to melt into vanities. The mine isn’t much anymore, shut down and caved-in long ago.

She continues to peel away photos of me from an array of albums and set them to one side.

I'm half-ignoring her, interrogating for certain answers, searching for recollection in my eyes—digging into my temporal lobe for dirty clumps of memory. I'm half-guilty for doing this, always half.

The man on the radio is mumbling through static as my mother puts a photo on my lap. I look at it and take a while to recognise that it’s of myself, albeit with two teeth missing.

I’m probably around seven years old judging by my missing teeth. I looked wide-eyed and cow-licked, my brown eyes obstructed by the red-eye on the lens. In the background you can see my Dad, smiling, laughing at something. I remember he mowed the garden that day and the smell of moss hung in the air. Everything felt a little more alive back then, even the breeze.

I press my tongue against my two front teeth and try to remember what it’s like not to have them. My eyes keep drawing to my father’s smile.

Instinctively I place my thumb over my Dad’s face and imagine deleting him from the photograph.

>>10802461
My mother still has a Sony ICF-1100D radio from 1971 with the antennae bandaged in tape.

Some wires on the power plug hang out like biotechnological cartilage. Sometimes it gets faulty and the person on the radio sounds like they’re screaming.

“You should really get a new radio, Mam. You can even use your ph-“

“No, there’s no need to replace what’s good, boy”.

I offer to put the kettle on. A common form of apology, a mere flick of a switch.

As I leave the living room I notice a small strip of negatives were left on the floor, next to a pile of photographs my mother hadn’t bothered to inspect yet. They probably fell out of one of the albums. I pick the negatives up off the floor in an almost robotic, automated motion.

I fiddle with it in my hands as I enter the kitchen.

The kitchen is a time capsule. If stasis were a smell the kitchen would reek of it. It had this odd combination of being clean, yet stale.

I pop the kettle on before staring down at the strip of negatives. There were numerous polarised depictions of parties, summer nights, old childhood friends and the like. Something about the film felt extraordinary.

I focus in on a group photo of people I didn’t recognise. I scan the photo and manage to make out the recognisable face of my father in the corner of the group, looking away from the camera, his smile barely visible in the murky artificial dye of the strip.

The kettle boils.

I strain my eyes a little more as it was difficult to make out details on the film; the photographs looks rusty, as if years of degradation had chipped away at them.

Dad looks young, around my age. Our smiles look similar when we aren’t putting them on, I think.

His face became blurred suddenly, taking a few seconds for me to realise that a tear had dropped from my face. It rolls down the strip slowly and shifts colour from a clear transparency to the silvery brown of film.

His memory is catacombed between the woodchip wallpaper and tea-stained porcelain, suspended in the static litany of the broken radio’s chatter.

I put the film to one side.

In the future, I think, there will be a way to contour memory, PhotoShop it, leave it nice, clean, synthetic, anaesthetised from the ooze of reality. In the future you will be able to edit out the bad parts. I will be able to gloss over the parts I don’t want to see. I will be able to forget.

The screaming vapour of the kettle touches my face as my tears move on, evaporate.

>>10802461
>Starting with Dialogue.
Why do people start with Cliches /lit/? What do they hope to achieve?

>>10786416
Completely re-frame the story so it's only apparent the protagonist is in a porno right at the end, it's more effective.

>>10802471
>Starting with Dialogue
It originally didn't, but the editor for the place I submitted it at argued it would be more effective that way. I know it's a taboo to do so, but would the story really be made that much better if it opened with context?

It kind of fits into the protagonists half-awake state by being so immediate, as if the dialogue is waking him up. I kind of agree with you, though.

>>10802493
Why post your work here if it's about to be published?

>>10802502
It's only a small section of it + it's print only, not online. The publication is very small and it's already out. It's difficult to get honest advice, so I like to put old-ish stories here to see where I can improve next time, or how far I've come.

Reposting from last thread because i didn't get much feed back

https://pastebin.com/UK6MnfaT

Do I distill a heron
From the ether
And command its
Pearl beak to
Strike their veiled hearts?

Do I wield patience
Like the great beak
And tear their screens
Like wax paper,
So compassion may hum
In their hearts
Vitalized by clarity?

Oh but there are so many screens!

It's the opening few paragraphs of a short story. I feel like im referring to the character too much but don't know how else to write

Cybil Hawthorne was rarely annoyed. She had little reason to be nowadays, her life followed a slow, rhythmic schedule. Which was a great comfort to her. Monday was spent at the local garden centre café with Anne, Wednesdays were for babysitting and Sunday Lunch was never in question. This had led Cybil to be quite particular with appointment keeping.
By her loud shuffling, huffing and puffing it would be clear to any observer something was troubling her. Lifting the heavily embroidered blinds up to brow height she peered out onto the small driveway. ‘Where IS that nurse?’.
Cybil returned to the tea she had left on the kitchen table, sat down, and started to fiddle with a small navy-blue lighter that had been nestled in her trouser pocket. The nurse always tried to give lectures on the dangers of smoking, so it was ritual to wait until she had come and gone before having the morning cigarette. With one last look to the clock she turned slightly and removed a large stainless-steel ashtray and pack of cigarettes from a nearby drawer, the nurse would just have to give her lecture today.
Two hours went by, while Cybil waited expectantly to hear a small car roll softly onto the gravel in front of the bungalow. But there was no rumble of tyres over stone, nor an apologetic nurse stumbling through the front door. Even though Cybil did somewhat resent being checked on twice weekly, she did not mind the company, however brief.

>>10802841
...Use she and her if the reader can tell it's in her voice?
You can keep using she and her until you introduce another character of the same sex. The reader will know.

>>10799285
It is definitely intended to be absurdist. I might change it though, I agree. The novel is a picaresque and magical realist story set in early late 18th and early 19th century Europe and concerns a mysterious master of disguise and his pursuit of the famous soprano Angelica. He is accompanied by his genius, cynical, and sardonic boy companion Tito, who earns them money and fame with his miraculous luck at games; he's also the author of the novel, which is framed a biography of the Maestro and an account of their journeys.

The theme is identity, illusion, and the veil between art/myth and reality. The Maestro wears so many masks and plays so many characters that when he most desires to show his true self (i.e. when he finally meets Angelica) he is incapable of doing so; finally, on his deathbed, he miraculously reverts to the form of the boy who first fell in love with Angelica. While the Maestro spends his life searching for reality, Tito spends his life striving after illusion/art. From his birth he was cynical and calculating; his ability with games, he believes, is not the result of luck but of preternatural competency. After the Maestro's death he comes to doubt that he was ever even real, or that they had ever had any adventures at all; yet he wishes wholeheartedly for a moment of the suspension of his disbelief, in which he can unequivocally believe in the Maestro, his powers of illusion, and his undying love for Angelica.

>>10801158

Bismarck came down on the wrought iron landing, overseeing the military parade.
"I provide your standards are met."
"You have done a fine job keeping this operation together, Herr General."
"The Triumph is yours, Herr Bismarck."
"I understand the limits of your commitment."
"Why would you say that? I am with you to the end."
"Die Ratten verlassen das sinkende Schiff. A state cannot be bought, only leased, and the payments are due everyday."
"The marriages that you have arranged will stand the test of time."
"Time? I do not see time. I only see degradation and folly, the rotting of autumn leaves. What you call time is only death, our greatest enemy, and it would do you good to realize that our state is already dead. We must always strive to revivify, to reanimate the dead country."

This is just a standalone thing I wrote to test myself, but it's meant to be read as an introduction that immediately begins with action and sets the backdrop to the main story. Most WH40k books start this way, but another good example is ASoIaF. I somehow doubt 40k is liked here, but I would love some feedback, especially on my sentence structure and how the text flows. Especially from native English speakers.
I'll comment on others a little bit later.

Sergeant Brock slammed into a pile of rubble, the sudden arrest of momentum violently expelling all air out of his lungs and momentarily knocking him unconscious. The first thing he noticed when he came to his senses was his Chimera. It was stationary just a few meters away from him, small wisps of smoke surrounding it. It appeared almost perfectly fine from his point of view, with only the urban camouflage paint partially stripped away by shrapnel, the squad markings on it still proudly shining a bright red. But he instinctively knew that the troop compartment was a slaughter house, his men perforated inside. He only survived due to being thrown out of the gunners stand when Hammond sharply turned the vehicle. One moment Brock was manning the heavy bolter, venting his rage at their failure and the denial of air support by ineffectively shooting at the pursuing Marauders, the next he was flying through the air. The crash made him dizzy and he could not immediately focus on his surroundings. The air was thick with smoke, flying shrapnel and all kinds of projectiles whizzing and cracking around, the sounds of war a constant backdrop to the screams of the dead and the dying. And by the Throne, they were dying. Men and women of Vrans had failed in their attack and were now fighting for survival against the heretical forces. The anger of their sudden defeat stung at him yet again and he shook his head clear. A quick scan of the battlefield made him realize that things have gotten even worse. There were still Imperial vehicles fighting around him, but only Leman Russes remained, their front armour turned towards the pursuers and constantly firing at targets he could not see. There were no intact Chimeras or Hydras, only burning wrecks with bodies strewn about. Bright red lines were flashing from some of the destroyed vehicles or bomb craters, accompanied by an occasional missile and even the brighter shots from lascanons. Most importantly, there was no sign of any of the Vransian super heavies, operational or destroyed, and the skies were clear of any aircraft. To Brock, an experienced guardsman, it was clear what was happening here. The forward airfield had still not been retaken from the xeno mercenaries, so these soldiers stayed behind to stall the enemy advance in hopes that the bulk of Imperial forces could reach safety. He slowly picked himself up, unholstered his laspistol and with a silent prayer to the Emperor on his lips went to join the last stand of the Vransian vanguard.

>>10801135
"of which he was uncertain of" First draft.

Because Baltimore was a cavern of memory in him, it flowed and flowed through all of the effulgent waters of his meek and miserable present. He remembered the polluted bays, the sanguine cranes, the towers overhead. Not that he was a king in Baltimore, on the contrary the road sides and transient trash that lined Byron Avenue called back the cold torment of homeless winters, of eating scraps out of dumpsters, of blind alleys, of starving donkey jacketed men, hollow eyed, dangerous, and filled with hate. But that was not the kind of rabble he found here. Here he found holy fools, and he supposed that this was the existence he was resigned to. The world went on without him and his “talents,” of which he was uncertain. Before the crash he was a skilled woodworker. No woodworking jobs sought to take him, no single employer refused a violent rejection. No, on the contrary, at the jobs he applied for he was met by the utmost scorn, of a sense of the worst most humiliating rejection, in short he was thrown out of every business that employed a woodworker. He was kicked out with brooms not unlike a rodent or parasite would be, because that’s what he was in the eyes of anyone who held a business, and his brother was no exception.

At the very least.

40k anon, doing my critiques now. Though I'm shit at them, so this is the best I can do.

>>10786446
I like the unique story telling it has, but the two stories (at least I'm assuming this are two different things) transition really jarringly.

>>10789029
>>10797924
These are pretty great, don't have anything else to add.

>>10789048
Simple and brutal, love it.

I can't slam nor can I tumble,
My tongue falls flat with convention,
It teethes and lashes, errs and fumbles,
The sieve too wide for retention.

What sieve, they said, this makes no sense,
You reek of misadventure, nay,
Of no adventure at all, hence,
We see your unscuffed shoes unweighed.

I withdrew to the drawing board,
And pored down on my cluttered pages,
What once seemed light, lifting upwards,
Were now soaked, flaccid and aged.

Relenting, my pride carried on
Starved and stricken with hunger pangs
The ghostly taste of past carrion
Linger in the gaps tween our fangs.

So here it is, at least at last,
The fruit of the loom stained with streaks,
The cursor clicks down, and fastly,
The cursing mouse flees with a squeak.

>>10802461
>>10802467
Workshoppy. It looks like every litshort that's been worked over by a workshop checklist until the blood has been drained out of it. And still the lapidary precision missed

" I look at it and take a while to recognise that it’s of myself, albeit with two teeth missing.

I’m probably around seven years old judging by my missing teeth."

which could easily become

"I look at it and take a while to recognise that it’s of myself, probably around seven years old judging by my two missing teeth."

without breaking any hearts. Or

"my brown eyes obstructed by the red-eye on the lens" which unless the lens is in the picture and you eyes are "on" it, is an over-construcition of "my brown eyes dotted with 'red-eye' from the flash."

Whatever is going on is taking a long time to emerge. The selection of photos described doesn't seem to develop any momentum toward any crisis beyond "dad is gone and mom and I feel nostalgia." If there is some trauma related to dad, it gets diluted out by loose ends like "robotic, automated motion" which stands out for its incongruity. All the other characterization has some theme of loss, erasure, editing, re-thinking the past. Transforming it. Then this robot shows up.

Just details, because it's always details. The kettle reaches a boil in just under 20 seconds of narrative dream time. That's one hot stove. And I'm not certain about the vapor touching "my" face because my experience with tea kettles is that such an event would result in a serious burn.

It's one of those things that has been worked over a lot, so it feels easy to justify that it's finished. That often happens in conjunction with "I JUST WANT IT TO GET OUT THERE SO I CAN MOVE ON TO THE NEXT THING" Both young impulses which if recognized can lead to one more night of sleeping on it before taking another look tomorrow.

One day a certain Ferris Nash, reaching down into his parked car’s trunk to gather his bagged groceries, became enlightened. Nash had never intended on becoming enlightened, but became enlightened all the same, expressing some astonishment and relief. Inside, Nash placed his groceries in their proper places, exclaimed the name of God with a sigh, and watched television. His wife soon called and said “Hello”. Nash told her the current time and that he had just returned from the grocery store, asking when she would return for dinner. His wife told Nash the time, and soon afterward hung up. When Ferris Nash died fifty some years later at the age of eighty-four, he thought of baseball, singing wine glasses, and the texture of strawberries. His obituary stated his name, dates of birth and death, height, some facts about his life, and featured a portrait photographed several decades earlier, frowning.

Fellas I am beginning to struggle. How do you keep going? I am getting better with each story but now it's only bit by bit, and I am not writing proper stories often enough, more often I am just sitting and typing nonsense trying to find or form an idea.

This is a rare crisis of faith for me so how do you guys get out of the funk? What I am writing at the moment is nothing.

>>10804247
Isn't writing supposed to be inspired? If you don't feel inspiration or, really, the desire to write, don't do it for a bit. I don't write because of this. I think it's necessary to have something to say - the realization that you don't is probably just as important.

>>10804224
You have a character doing things one of which is interesting at the beginning and some of which is interesting at the end. They say that Zen is not about thinking about god while doing the dishes, but rather thinking very attentively about doing the dishes while doing the dishes. The middle which is presumably about to emerge had better not blow it.

>>10804193
The Workshoppy feel might be due to the word limit I had to adhere to for the publication, but I see what you mean. I cut a lot out of it as the publication had rather strict word limits. You're dead on with breaking my sentences down and conjoining them more, I really need to work on that. Re-reading that bit of the story reminds me of a film monologue that goes on for too long.

What's going on, or what I tried to do, was provide a snapshot of two methods of grief, whilst threading in some discussion on the technological and cultural barriers between generations. It's not so much "Dad is gone", as more "Mom is trapped in time", which is a crisis that exists within the protagonists own grief rather than a legit criticism of his mother. I could have drove that home more, you're right.

The robotic thing was more a reference to the protagonist being on auto-pilot, but I get you.

The kettle is an electric kettle, as alluded to by "flick of a switch", so it wouldn't take 20 seconds to heat up, it takes roughly 2 minutes. An electric kettle lets out a lot of steam, especially if cheap, that can be felt from far away without serious pain or burns. I'll try to keep my future stories grounded in more of a tangible reality, though.

I like that last line of your criticism. Thanks for taking the time to write that.

>>10804247
The last time I felt wrung out: I went back and read something I got published in 2008. I still like it. I read something I got published in 2009 and saw that I was in love with the character and it is plodding as a result. Then something from 2010 that was a concept piece where the story is a transcript of a recording. It's really funny and not like me at all and I'm happy that I was able to be someone really else and other for a few days to do it. Then I plugged in one of my thumb drives that I back everything up on and just read through pieces and fragments and stuff that didn't work or ended up going nowhere. I found a few paragraphs that outlined a complete story that I forgot about and thought that now would be a good time to work that up because it still sounds like something that I would put my name on. So I had a new project.

That was a year ago and it's not finished. It takes a long time to come to terms with the fact that this takes a long time. After I got my first thing out into the world I almost immediately saw how not really finished it was and wanted to call it back. That was the end of the artificial clock. There is no race. Just against mortality, but there is nothing to be done about that. Imagine the lives of people in novels who know that they will die but not that the story will end. Now how lucky are we?

>>10804529
Yeah. "I" narrators, the ones that seem to work the best, they're "leaky." They know what the trauma is, even if we don't, or are not supposed to yet, so everything, every single thing related to them is consistently characterized by the nature of the trauma. It leaks out of them, almost as if against their will. Lucky Jim is hapless and terrified of losing his job, so everything he says and thinks is somehow related to punishment or suspended peril. Wittgenstein's Mistress, it's all about the loss of her world, which is the Western World, so everything is in terms of cultural touchstones the Uni class can name check. "There is someone living on this beach." - I always thought was a happy ending. It's the first sentence in the book that refers to a third person who isn't a mythological or historical figure, possibly not herself. Like maybe the spell ends just as the novel does. That would be such a meta-elegance I decided that is what Markson must have intended.

Clean and crisp and crafty. That's hard.

The warrior raced along the trail, through bushes and through trees,
The pursuit seemed lost and needless now and he dropped down to his knees,
Through matted hair he drew ragged breaths, cleaned his brow upon his hand,
And struggled back up to his feet to gaze upon a man,
Tired still but like a flash his sword was out and drawn,
"Oh come now boy" the man spoke up, "you are but just a pawn.",
The sword it danced, it flicked and spun, such grace within a blade,
But yet when he stopped and drew his breath the man just stood, unscathed,
"You fight for king, you fight for folk, no other man so true,
But boy be warned, you'll beg for death by the time that I am through.",
The sword again it flashed and flicked,
Truly a fighter to behold,
But again the man stood unharmed,
His stare was hard and cold,
"Run home boy, final chance, join your wife in bed. For if you don't I'll take your soul when I call upon the dead.",
The fighters feet, so light and quick,
He lunged out with his blade,
The man stepped back, and threw a glance to where his robe was flayed,
"You're fast alright, I'll give you that, but no hero, just a fool,
You were forewarned and now you'll learn a lesson boy, so cruel.'
The mans hands shone and the ground it shook,
And the warrior stood aghast,
The man he yelled and straight from hell, they arose out of the grass,
Creatures like you've never seen,
Rancid and grotesque,
The fighter danced and his sword it flew but this was a harder test,
They gripped and tore, the fighter roared, a pain he never knew,
The clawed and bit, ripped and spit and on his flesh began to chew,
His dying breaths, to tried to fight but here we are alas,
The mans hands shone and all were gone,
Leaving but a sword upon the grass.

Original piece called "The Forest of The Necromancer."

>>10804663
As far as the premise, I don't pick up on anything new being added to standard pen and paper/RPG tropes. The characters are flat and lack underlying motives. The title suggests the warrior trespassed into the necromancer's forest and I guess that's the basis of their conflict, but after that I hit a dead end for motives. Why is the warrior in the forest? Why is the necromancer hostile? I don't see anything hinting towards those details, and I suspect you didn't flesh that much out. Even just some small glimpses into the characters motives can really give the conflict some weight.

The structure is confusing, like you've going for rhyming couplets, but without much consistency in meter (heptameter, roughly?) or attention to syllabic stress. There are lines that follow meter/stress conventions, and then others that just go of the rails. I don't see a reason you'd do that on purpose, so it just seems unintentionally sloppy.

>>10805050
Thanks for the feedback dude.
I literally wrote that on the spot just for this thread so Im not surprised its sloppy!

>>10805191
That makes sense then. I wasn't sure how committed you were to your work, but since it's something off the cuff, I'd suggest if you're considering revising it, scrap it entirely instead and work from the ground up. Not because this is unsalvageable, but to make things easier for you.

Also hopefully you're giving other posts feedback. Otherwise you suck.

>>10805238
Generally Ive been trying to do this. I have several folders of unfinished work and rather than scrap it it try to rebuild or attack it from a slightly different angle.
And yes, I give feedback where applicable. I dont wanna be that guy criticizing peoples efforts when Im no better.

>>10803952
Thanks man. I shouldn't have put this out there without at least giving it a read through, it was impulsive.

>>10803653
You talentless piece of shit. You disgusting fucking lout. Goddamn you, you disgust me. Your trite little sentences, your misinterpretation of history, you are literally just a Peterson loving fuck aren't you? You alt-right scumbag. I hope you invest alot of time into writing. I hope you don't choose a fall back career. I hope that you stick with writing until the bitter end, all so that at the moment of death it will all come to you how futile and worthlessly banal your work is. I am not bitter at all, I am merely stating objective facts. You want to track my IP? Go ahead fuck face, go ahead. I'm ready for you. 67.236.172.188. Go ahead loser, go ahead you John Green loving fuck. Track me. I want you to. I want you to track me. I want you to find me. I want to see your sniveling miserable face you little shit. Killing me won't solve the fact that you have no talent, that you're dry, that your mind is a limp penis. Go ahead, fuckface. I dare you.

>>10805356
is this pasta or are we witnessing a real life psychotic break

>>10805368
If it's a pasta I've never seen it before, so the latter is more likely lol

>>10805368
>is this pasta
It is now.

>>10805356
Best piece in the whole thread right here

Magpies

I remember well when a second time I
Had wound up at your place now
And how scarce saliences of that décor
Insured as arms hedged around your
High waisted hips a tight-lipped
Decorum.
Then a magpie came
Thudding on the soggy texture
Of rain sluicing on the window pane
We drooped as lamppost over the sill
And its dying body below
Still vibrating in the pastel colors
Of that quiet apartment
The camphorous rain calmly ticking
What
Had it seen among us

my poem is the one above (magpies)

>>10804111 I'll critique you since no one did yet
I like the humor and self-awareness of the poem, its a refreshing tone to the voice in a poem that sticks to form. The form is a bit dull but I am guessing this was an exercise of form??? Otherwise the speaker-voice going through an abstract experience of your creative ways seems to have a hard time building a consistent imagery which I find makes the poem a bit scattered. You seem to navigate between not-yet-mastered shakespearean turn of verses and somewhat overdone romantic strife. Nevertheless, I think there's also a nice bit of music abeit not a perticularily new one and very vivid wit.

same guy as above, doing another orphan poem

>>10802812
To be frank I just find the whole thing a bit... clumsy. The subject and idea of the poem is very ambitious but it falls short. It seems like you let the sounds of word dictate your choices rather than you choosing the sound of your words, which indicates you may not master the language fully. You bring all these disconnected, large images that feel empty (screens, herons and hearts).

I am being harsh and maybe there is something I am missing but anyways to shed a more positive light I would say one thing I like is the many screens image, the wax paper. The way it speaks of a veil and an opaque separation to the world as a screen, the face of modern technology, I like a lot.

My dick
8===D
>
>
>
Your mother

Fin

>>10786323

As usual, I start on something, get a few pages in, then get bored and delete it.

Accidentally made a thread:

>>10806178

I'll use a name to post my story, but will critique first. I won't critique you people's shitty attempts at poetry that are really just your shitty attempts at prose written in lines and stanzas.

>>10786416
I really like the scene with the bank teller, remove the "cuck" thing though. The on-the-nose porny tone in which the whole situation is described is hilarious and I think you should keep that up for the second part. Reading about mundane things like bank withdrawal, keyboard tapping, etc as if they were the erotic climax of some women's erotic novel is a weirdly profound experience. You should focus on that, not so much on world building, the film industry and so on.

>>10786446
A bit clunky here and there but overall nicely worded. Give it a few rewrites, make some sentences into two, cut some of the unnecessary descriptions especially in the second paragraph. The strongest moments are in the first paragraph, when you write inanimate objects like the fire, the plane/ship and such as active participants, not mere environmental hazards ("Out the fire reached, clawing up the nose, furiously swinging with drunken fists"). Perhaps try to remember that for the second part when talking about his arm.

>>10786449
Could be something if the were to incorporate the imaginative retellings of history into his own story, otherwise it'll probably be a cringefest, although still therapeutic for you to write.

>>10789029
>even there, right there, from time to time.
That part is just awkward. I like the beginning of the last paragraph and parts of the erotic segment but the build-up is dull, masturbatory nonsense - it reads like practice, all this meandering about nothing. Your descriptions should elevate the benign and make it interesting, as is you're just stretching it. The first two paragraphs especially.

>>10789079
Very nicely worded, much more poetic than most of the shitty poems itt. Integrate these into some sort of narrative, worded similarly, and you'll have something worthwhile.

>>10794609
The first paragraph goes on for a little too long but it's a nice story. Aglio and Olio made me smirk.

>>10794630
This would be cool as part of a science-fiction story but you should reword and elaborate on much of it because as is it just doesn't make a lot of sense.

>>10795651
Nice. Not perfect but getting there.

1/3

Infestation!
Blame the Arabs
on the planes!
Blame the Polish
on the trains!
Blame the Jews
on the cruise ships!
Cut the power -
Stop the nuisance!

with little cartoon hands and scissors drawn severing an electric cable – a pursuit that would surely get the acting party killed – a noble one? Through the fogs of imagination, I see myself walking the docks. A metallic roar fills my headspace – friction? The sound of a large machine halting? Old friend, we are lucky to be awake this time of year for it is. Look to the skies! The perfect antithesis to our frosted forest of silent perseverance, wooden kings of yore eternally chasing sunlight, crowns to be surmised someplace beyond the clouds, like an impression manifests itself: Metallic cigars plummet toward the waters, wings broken, winds laughing, howling as they alleviate themselves at their surfaces. A good shake for the dung inside – imagine the smell (ew!) those cracked tins will be shedding in a few hours. Time enough for the quick-witted among our people, approaching with sharp knives. Those still intact, not yet dissolved in the homogeneous brown mass of engine oil, shit and fluid flesh, we must separate. Sun baked, raised on figs and goat cheese, once honest lives on a no-pig-flesh diet, awash in sewage now but scrubbed, shaven, toweled, […] brushed with herbs and oils, blessed by our shaman, still might live up to their promise. Over a fire, that is. Imagine the feast: Strung up bard hanging from tree, sounds of oiled meat on hot iron drowning out festive clamour, consequent fog obscuring eager hands superseding mutual consent, all melting into one blurred silhouette. Becoming tribe, becoming people. Winds, equally frolicsome, play around, nudge and caress scent of roast and wine, sweat and sperm, back and forth and beyond the tree line. Against frozen shafts of the immortal it condensates as distilled pleasure, and all the creatures of the forest smile a knowing smile.

2/3

Drawn-out groans penetrate the fringes of my botanic retreat from aeons removed. The man in the neighbouring stall as well has reverted to some savage state, and judging from his howls, his winds too are frolicsome. My own delivery shows no sign of progress, immobile, impenetrable, not painful yet commanding attention – a totalitarian experience. Brown marble that sits in my underbelly like a second heart, beautiful until birthed into the world of shared experience, even then a presence to behold, soon to burst from my bowels like an egg tooth, in this moment you are my world. Leave no room for conscious reflection, thoughts and wishes, identity or ideology. All are banished, expelled from this body as age and dross. For a moment I am vessel and I am fulfilled, in no hurry to return to my seat, friends or beer. My lone companion mewls, admitting defeat at the hands of his colon, though unintelligibly. Few decimeters from my left boot, herald of things to come, a tear hits the ground. From beyond the castle walls a distant thought reverberates in my throne room: „Every man for himself“, and I redirect my attention at the door: Layers and layers of glossy hieroglyphics preserve varnish and presswood, as evidenced by yellowish-brown splatter all over. Adverts, jokes and provocations provide reading for generations. In places, sculptors have a taken a blade to the collage, entrenching runes and crude innuendos, partially exposing stickers from long-forlorn times in strange dialects and typefaces. Poets and painters, armed with pens, crayons, coal, brushes, greased fingers and whatever paraphernalia the toilet stall grants an inspired, have created an enormous palimpsest – a complex, ever-changing Gestalt with a rich history of addition and subtraction. No single creator, no clear intent, no end and no beginning. For all intents and purposes, a life unto itself.

3/3

Opposite the bathroom stall door, this shit-caked monument to human creator spirit behind which I cower, a procession of urinals protrudes from the wallpaper – Out of time, seemingly untouched by the grime that millennia of defecation left for a scrubwoman who never showed. Locks of shining black hair line the floor, dampen each step, occasionally at the cost of lower, mostly insect, lives, at times rustle and grate upon impact, at times swallow a man whole. Doomed are who tread heedlessly in curly forest, where pubic hair pastures conceal urinary sloughs. Enter a pair of piss-willing friends who had had a few beers too many:

“Not too long now, I am afraid. The brass city is upon us. What impressions today her progenitors carve in words, in laws and ideas, voicing watchtowers and prayer niches, air castles, invisible to the less perceptive, will tomorrow be filled with matter and peeled at the touch of curious generations, revealing what could well be all curiosity’s end.”

“And yet, dearest friend, lover, spear master, god of flesh and hairs whose weight I bear nightly – excuse my drunken spiel but I want your fuckings – look at the floor of this place, we could make a little nest for ourselves and you could peck the warblings out of me – who could deny the poetic justice, the beauty, the comedy of the situation? Like sticking your dick into a knothole behind which, unbeknown to you, a raven nests – such is the fate of the curious. It’s a bloody fate – emasculating – but thoroughly satisfying from a narrative perspective. The funniest thing: All you had to do was look!”

Haven't written more than a paragraph in about 9-10 days. Returning to Uni sapped all my creative energy. Can't really even focus on reading.

First two pages of a book I’m working on. I have no real literary aspirations, but recently I’ve had fun just adding to this and writing the kind of narrative id want to read.

>>10807317

>>10802592
O-ok i guess no.one cares about my gay story...

>>10807536
>https://pastebin.com/UK6MnfaT

Hard to read because the punctuation is very bad. Particularly your use of commas. I dunno if you're trying to be Pynchon or whatever, but cut it out if you want people to read your story.

From what I did read some of the imagery seemed interesting, I like how you tried to give the apocalyptic setting some sort of neon beauty in lines like "shinning rainbow colored patterns of oil". It seems like an aesthetic piece though, inspired by anime and comics. Maybe work on a comic instead?

>>10794609
I liked it. Felt a bit like I was watching an Italian neo-realist film, an old grainy Rossellini.

>>10807559
Yeah i was trying to be creative with the punctuation, only sounds good in my head though i guess
>maybe work on a comic instead
nah i can draw for shit

I'm writing a program that is suppose to help authors plan and write novels, but I'm not sure what kind of tools you would need. So far I'm just making a note organizing system so you can add notes to paragraphs, keep track of what characters are doing in chapters, stuff like that. What would a character planner look like, would it be useful?

>>10809198
Writing happens one word at a time. You sit down, take a sip of tea and open your mind like an arsehole with both hands. Trap set, you wait. Whatever God pokes you first gets to dictate, you just move your fingers in concordance with his thrusts. You can't program this sort of thing.

>>10809245
Zero planning or organization sounds like a sure way to fail.

>>10807536
Did I read that a group of tweenagers set a heroin addict on fire with gasoline then stood around and applauded? It's like Heavy Metal meets Dred except there are no characters, nothing happens, and the wall of description assault is total. As far as I can decipher, these couple thousand words convey that a guy wakes up, and takes a cab to work at a jail. That's what "happens."

Here's just one example of how "style" and "creative" intersect with "convention of language" to produce frustration:

"Giving birth to a permanent scowl of pain on their faces, their body´s won´t last more than a couple more weeks at best." This sentence says, "their bod[ies] are giving birth to a permanent scowl etc." Which is kind of true, since their faces are part of their bodies. But I don't think that's what you mean. I think it's the "Hazel colored skin that spells anti-bullet proof diamond based bluewax [whatever that is]" that is "giving birth" to the "permanent scowls" but you've tortured the participles into a syntactical snarl as baroque as the vocabulary.

Here's the thing about what's left of the fiction business. The economic power is entirely on the buy side. The demand side. Which means the reader's side. They rule supreme. Agents, editors, publishers, sellers, they all work exclusively for the demand side. Writers sometimes get lucky, sometimes strike the right sequence of notes that charms some influential figure and they sell something. When it happens it is even more rare than when some poor schlub actually produces something that an agent actually likes and sells. Which is itself a rarity. If you want to play the lottery, you're holding a ticket. The formula on "cinematic density" has already been broken and the solution returns to characters in settings doing things in a conflict.

"The light reflecting off the pools of murky dirt bacteria infected slime is grey and shinning rainbow colored patterns of oil cover the top with thin layers of toxic waste. [250 more words of no one home]"
v.
"The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel." Gibson spends exactly one sentence on the time and weather. No one ever quotes the next sentence because it is a character doing something in a setting in a conflict. And yet somehow, no one has ever accused him of not building his world. Because he does it a piece at a time while his characters are doing things. In settings. In a conflict.

>>10809528
Let God do the planning, inshallah.

I am standing in a corner of an Indiana corn field the size of two football fields. The corn is knocked to the ground. Stalks all brown. Glen is beside me, with his kid. The three of us carry three shotguns. Nearby, and surrounding the entire perimeter of this field, stand about 100 other guys carrying shotguns. All present are turned inward. This field is public. It was planted and groomed by the state's wildlife management officials using money from the sale of licenses, and surcharges on the purchase of gear related to its use. Today is Labor Day. The instant the top limb of the rising sun breaks over the horizon, the dozens of mourning doves munching on the downed corn are going to have what we used to call a bad day.

*

"Fudd hunt."

"Fucking Fudd hunt."

What happened, a kid, across the field, had up and swung on a dove that flew between me and him. The kid lacks the years of experience doing this sort of thing and he didn't clear his background. Probably the son of a deer hunter. His shot string, about 700 little lead pellets, size 8, flew in a parabolic arc, probably topping out around 75 feet up, then returned to ground at around 150 feet per second of residual velocity, judging napkin back from the 110 yard distance, and struck me in the face. One of my carbon composite eyeglass lenses had been knocked out. I had a dozen little red welts on my face. I would live. No permanent damage.

Glen headed right into the blast zone, in defiance of several posted warnings, hollering an aria of profanity at the dad. Everyone knew who it was.

That was the fourth time I had been shot by a shotgun without actually getting "shot" by a shotgun. Also for the fourth time, someone else besides me would end up dead as a direct result.

>>10810200
You're switching between past and present tense for no reason. Other than that - it's good.

>>10794609

I opened my eyes and reached my arm to the other side of the bed. She was gone, so I rolled around. Her side was still warm, she must’ve left just before I woke up… the bitch. The silk drape, suspended over the door, was dancing joyfully in the rhythm of the breeze. A few mosquitos were flying aimlessly around the room, sometimes butting their heads against the drape, unable to go out. I despised mosquitos with a burning passion; how did they always manage to enter even from the most miniscule of openings but could never find their way out even from a door wide open. In any case, the best thing about having Selma sleep with me is that the little bastards seemed to be more attracted to her, so they mostly left me alone and I could sleep in peace. Okay, maybe not the best thing, but it was up there. She never complained about the mosquitos, either, even when she’d wake up with dozens of red spots, horribly swollen and itchy, she would just rub some alcohol and some native ointment on them and carry on. She once told me a story about how she and her sister were walking around in the rice fields and a snake came out from somewhere and bit her just under the ankle. Her sister panicked and ran to the village to get the medic. In the meantime, Selma remained calm and squeezed the poison out of the wound. After the sister and the medic came back, they found Selma perfectly fine and smiling, and the snake laying dead in the grass not far from where the incident happened. I didn’t believe her. I always say never trust a woman, but I especially say never trust Selma. Selma was full of shit.
I stretched in bed but couldn’t muster the energy to get up, so I buried my face in the pillow. It must have been very early in the morning because the temperature outside was comfortable and the breeze – refreshing. In the afternoons, sitting outside was hell itself and my shack was a furnace, so there was nowhere to hide from the sun. I kept rolling around in bed; there was a piece of bread with some sausages left from last night on a little plate on the bedside table. The sausages were cold and stiff, and the bread was hard. I ate everything as breadcrumbs and some pieces of sausage fell on the bed, getting tangled up in my sheets. I fell asleep again.
I awoke from a gentle shake on my shoulder; one of the labourers – Marco – was hanging over me like an imposed shadow.
“Sorry to wake you up, Mr. Fuentes, but your father called for you.”
“What time is it?” I asked as I was rubbing my eyes.
“Just past eleven.”

>>10809528
>>10809548
I think it's a fine line to walk. Zero planning will likely lead to a complete failure unless you're incredibly gifted and talented you're not but on the other hand too much planning makes it difficult to motivate yourself to write the work because it seems too artificial.

>>10810951
>Zero planning will likely lead to a complete failure
Delete this

I wanted to write a kenning

Armies are afraid of me,
weapons leap away from me

There is no good fighting man
who could ever strike my flesh

And no warlord has lost such
as few battles as have I

And I carry a sword with me, that
I always have on my tongue!

I have devastating tools
that destroy the greatest armies

Great slayer of warriors

Who am I?

>>10794609
>is already peeling

watch your verb tense change

Only well read in prose so I'll stick to that-

>>10810200
The confidence in the voice of this guy works really well in isolation and probably would in a thing with a shitload of characters but might tire itself out if you're goin' long, nice atmosphere though, wanted to get into more.

>>10810828
Solid evocation of setting but yer verbs fall a bit flat. Try to transfigure the actions of your character and swerve the urge to be too literal- more drapes dancing joyfully, keep it just a little mistier and more figurative.

>>10807317
Title ought to be "date upon which..." really but I love the vibe you're going for with the title, I love shit like that in Davey's short stuff (Luckily the account rep... &c.). Take most of those ellipseses and chuck em in the trash though, try to focus on painting in the character's confusion and inquisition by having him take cues from what's around him instead of cramming me right into his head- I don't know or give a heck who Mark S is right away. Keep trying though, read some good opening pages. If you want to keep the interroggies make it first person. Kurt V's Slaughterhouse starts "All of this is pretty much true; the war parts at least," or something like that, and this gives you an immediate frame of reference for everything after- in like ten words you glean that you're looking out through somebody else's eyes and have a lead as to the context of any coming actions. This tiny box is fucking awful, I hope this wasn't garbage. Keep it up bud.

I'll reply with my little bit- I'd be super grateful if someone spared me a few (or more than a few) words <3

>>10812818

The hotel room had the vague pallid air of a freshly-chucked roach, and when Kovtun turned from the window the room and I were blanched by irregular noonday rectangles, given form like bared teeth by the riffled blinds. Collar-popped and quiffed like a monstrous Cossack Elvis who managed to ride the cheeseburger-and-pharmaceuticals gravy train for another twenty years, Kovtun acknowledged my new consciousness with an almost imperceptible skyward doff of his massive eyebrows. The enormous hand-rolled cigarette in his fat mouth, looking somehow only half-assembled and yet already smoking, gave a little sieg-heil as he sucked through its soggy and unfiltered end. I tried:
“Ayy.”
The eyebrows did not move again. Dmitry was either looking at something several miles away through the plasterboard wall over my head or at nothing at all. D.K. wore, as at all times, his terrible polyester jacket. The colour and texture of wet iron, the thing's obscenely broad collar framed his head like a sandstone balloon inflated to the verge of bursting, and he was presently affixing an equally terrible polychromatic clip-on tie, also far too broad, which tie now sat resplendent on his chest, sandwiched between the moronic silver lapels like a copy of Sgt. Pepper's in a stack of property law paperwork.
I made the conscious decision to close my mouth and begin breathing through my nose proper, in polite fashion, and it transpired Kovtun was of course not smoking a cigarette at all. Eyes now aimed at something like my face, Kovtun pushed the business end of his smouldering travis towards me with a little grunt. My eyes seemed to scrape against the backs of their sockets on the way down from his face, and when I finally drew a bead on the soggy and unfurling spliff, my face seemed to express my polite desire to abstain from D.K.'s little wake-n'-bake about as well as I could have hoped.
It was four minutes after noon. Dmitry cleared his throat with a sound like the rapid and novel acquaintance of an over-ripe tomato and a brick wall. When I made to give the bridge of my nose a therapeutic pinch I found my left hand occupied by an unfinished can of unreasonably strong lager, and my right by a Rolls which had burned past its wick and well into the bread, and had visibly scorched the skin of my sleeping fingers, and my heavy eyelids fluttered once or twice in a limp curtain call for the intolerable drama of waking day.

>>10812821
I quite like this. It can get a bit wordy with descriptions; the humour helps but I can imagine getting fatigued reading more of it.


Here's a rather formless thing I've been writing for a week or so:
https://pastebin.com/YdY1TcVW

please reply (this is not the title of this thing btw)

>I went there and sat on the first computer I saw that was far away from everything else and nearest to the door -- this meant that I wouldn't have to look at anyone and no one would disturb me. She sat next to me and I thought that she would probably be here only for the two periods and not do anything else probably wouldn't sit here ever again. Deciding not to look at her or speak ( or show any interest ) was easy enough to come to, for I had spent the majority of my holiday getting over her. I was sure nothing would happen from her side, because I was completely convinced she called me a creep behind my back and I needed no evidence to validate that because I would call anyone who did to me what I did to her a creep. It was probably my fault. Had I sat where I usually did, she would have had a friend next to her and I would have peace and quiet and a little privacy from the teacher because I don't expect other girls to talk to me for long periods of time except when asking for help or when they're obligated, and in both scenarios I try and reduce the time it takes to interact with them - by curtly declining to help (but never lying about it) and passing on the burden. I came to the conclusion that on her head was the burden of sitting next to her abuser, something she would not be comfortable about, and was something I would not force her to do if I culd help it. Making a fuss about it right now would be the worst thing to do, and so I decided both of us had to bear each other's proximity for two hours in the span of four years. If it was up to me, I'd leave and never see her again and forget about her in a year or two and maybe then I would be alive again and forget the pain that came with the awareness of her existence and how she wasn't what I though about in my head even though she looked exactly the same. Like a doppleganger rumpelstiltskin. Asking for moral debasement with a face and voice crafted around and bursting with innocence and untainted laughter.

please reply (not the title of this thing btw)


>I went there and sat on the first computer I saw that was far away from everything else and nearest to the door -- this meant that I wouldn't have to look at anyone and no one would disturb me. She sat next to me and I thought that she would probably be here only for the two periods and not do anything else. She probably wouldn't sit here ever again. Deciding not to look at her or speak ( or show any interest ) was easy enough to come to, for I had spent the majority of my holiday getting over her. I was sure nothing would happen from her side, because I was completely convinced she called me a creep behind my back and I needed no evidence to validate that because I would call anyone who did to me what I did to her a creep. It was probably my fault. Had I sat where I usually did, she would have had a friend next to her and I would have peace and quiet and a little privacy from the teacher because I don't expect other girls to talk to me for long periods of time except when asking for help or when they're obligated, and in both scenarios I try and reduce the time it takes to interact with them - by curtly declining to help (but never lying about it) and passing on the burden. I came to the conclusion that on her head was the burden of sitting next to her abuser, something she would not be comfortable about, and was something I would not force her to do if I could help it. Making a fuss about it right now would be the worst thing to do, and so I decided both of us had to bear each other's proximity for two hours in the span of four years. If it was up to me, I'd leave and never see her again and forget about her in a year or two and maybe then I would be alive again and forget the pain that came with the awareness of her existence and how she wasn't what I thought about in my head even though she looked exactly the same. Like a doppleganger rumpelstiltskin. Asking for moral debasement with a face and voice crafted around and bursting with innocence and untainted laughter.

Here's my try at fiction, I suppose.

Whats the time?
Its ten to nine,
Hang your panties on the line.
When they're dry,
Bring them in
And put them in the biscuit tin.
Eat a biscuit,
Eat a cake,
Eat your panties by mistake.

Fin.

>>10814118
scrub scrub scrub till the water's brown

>>10810828
This is all fine and dandy, as far as it goes. The mosquitoes suggest something about pestilence and intrusion, the snake story is Edenic in its way if we ever go anywhere particularly since it suggests the possibility of a woman lying, but "I" is not a very interesting character yet and in openers it is traditional to characterize leads in some way that incentivizes a reader to feel some way about them other than annoyed. If this had come from the bookstore, or even from Amazon, we would have a title, a blurb, maybe a review or two, and some idea of where we are in the universe - literary fiction, mystery, adventure, etc. There is no marker of any kind of any of that. We might be about to embark on a murder mystery or funeral procession - there is nothing to suggest any intention here or desire to clue me in. You are beyond the obvious grammatical confusion stage, and beyond the "struggling to capture the sound of thinking for a thousand words" stage, and are now somewhere on the plateau of artfulness. Your task now is density of emotional involvement. Give me a reason to care about somebody winning or losing; or overcoming something. Give me a foreshadow or a hint about the nature of this relationship beyond "bitch" and "full of shit." After all, they presumably just had sex, so some kind of stakes are in play. How does this character have the means to lay around and snooze all morning, for example. Something that sets up the conflict that Dad is about to trigger.

>>10812821
"pallid" is a lack of color, which is visual, example pallid skin. I can see pallid air if there is smoke or dust but conflating pallid with a smell is an awkward foul ball right off the first pitch.

It is quite a bit of visual description for as little as happens, which is not a blanket condemnation, yet through these four (I think) heavily festooned paragraphs I am denied any real knowledge of who these two people are, where they are, when they are, or what their intentions are beyond this very moment. There are clues. If "hotel" and "Elvis," "Sgt. Pepper" and "property law paperwork" then Earth, after the mid-20th Century, somewhere in the second or first world. Which leaves quite a bit for the imagination. As for what they are doing here - nada. They could be international fugitives or gay club dancers. See >>10814564
for what I said about establishing some kind of grounds for why I want to care about these guys.

>>10813341
Thanks bud, I definitely agree I need to water down the adjective soup a good deal, I'll work toward that.
I like your thing, the card reader thing and maybe a couple other references might not stay culturally relevant long, but you don't have to care about that, and your writing style is confident and relatable

>>10813613
You have succeeded in making whatever happened way more interesting than this char's detailed ruminations over it. There is a vanishing small chance that you are about to pull off a Gogolian tour de force of unreliable 1st pov narrator unintentionally unpacking some terrible and dark truth about the nature of violence between men and women. My money, though, is on thinly veiled diary entry with pinstripes. The microscopic attention to detail is far from the most autistic degree I have seen here, but if you begin to submit, even to Uni student mags, you will discover that the marketplace, whatever that is, prefers to discover something in the first two hundred words that take us beyond the inside of one guy's head. Having something happen is never a bad idea.

>>10813341
In the known universe, no one has ever proven or even established with so simple as a double-blind demonstration, that mind reading is possible. Yet, I am about to break news, and do just that. It has not occurred to you that it is impossible to say with any degree of anything what kind of store, what was purchased, for what purpose, or in what kind of conveyance the purchased goods were made off with in the first four graphs. Nor, if a service was purchased, any idea what it was.

It appears then that if it is not supposed to matter, then the inside of this guy's head is supposed to stand in for the conventional accoutrements of fiction. Maybe you are trying to capture the sound of thinking of an inbent 20 something college (maybe) student who is suffering existential doubt about the meaning of life, and to do so have strung together some thematically unconnected and high-sounding ruminations that aspire to philosophical insight.

The floors of zine offices are papered with such attempts. Not in a good way. Since all you guys seem fixated on re-creating Ulysses, I would point out that Joyce was 32 years old when he published Dubliners, which is a book of stories in which people do things in settings, say things in dialog and have conflicts that come to various resolutions that tell us things about the people of Dublin in the early 20th century. In other words, it is conventional in every possible way. Before that, he had failed at every single thing he tried to publish. Ulysses is the most famous book no one ever wanted to read. Stream of consciousness is done. A hundred years done. Instead of trying to do it again and badly, write the story of what this guy looks like from the outside. To a normie. You might accidentally something interesting.

>>10813794
John Updike was one of the most successful fiction writers in American history and one of the most successful fiction writers in the world of the 20th century. After 9/11 he tried to do a serious piece about Islamic terror in the United States. His intention appeared to be to attempt to do for terrorists what "Sleepy" did for infanticide. Updike failed. And it wasn't close. And you are no Updike. Try something that actually fits into the humanities. Tell us what Rachel did during spring break when the Daytona police accidentally issued an amber alert for her when her friends lost track of her during a midnight round of nazis versus jews beer pong.

>>10814564
That part is not the opening of the book, and the things you mentioned are explored both before that and after it, otherwise you're very correct in your observations and I'll take your suggestions at heart as I continue with it :3

Rainy skies and white sands.
I sailed on into infinity, into the abyss that lay before; that Mark Twain would warn would also stare into you. I sailed into the darkness that would encompass my body, my mortal soul and spirit, tying me up in its fear and solitude. I knowingly cast my eyes to the floor, watching as water would, without warning; wash itself at my feet before spilling once again over the sides. The rocking was violent, and yet I found myself calmed by its ceaseless attack, comforted by the support of at least knowing what my enemy was. And yet that in itself was narrow, for my enemy was not the crashing waves nor the water but myself, my own inexperience and naivety that bashed itself upon confidence as it broke down into mere pebbles and ruins of what it once was. It was still strong in its own meager way, only diminished after years of questioning and inaction, after years of pointless isolation and introspection. In some ways I was happy with those times, those times of countless discoveries of my own mind, of my own morality, but more than naught it destroyed a part of me of which I doubt will return, that destroyed an aspect of ignorance that kept me happy in some unhealthy, but important, way.
And now I had been shattered and beaten into a husk of what was once my own great self. It all fell to the ground, broken to shards and scattered amongst the grains of sand. They were just another of the countless that had thrown out their confidence and instead picked up the arms of bravado and facades. I too had for a time, believing that this was truly the way to happiness, that finding another to share this burden and fight with would somehow lift me to greater heights, rather than the reality that it would break us both down even more than it had in the past. My cynicism, something I despised, seemed to work its way over my mind, forcing its tentacles and slithering arms into thoughts and dreams, taking over countless dreams I had once aspired for.

>>10815611
And what did I have left? So called reality? Something made up by the same people whose dreams and plans lay across the distant beaches I sailed for? I had given in to reality, which had turned out to merely be a prison within society, a lie perpetuated for the sole fact that we all love company.
I looked deeper into the abyss; it seemed to have cleared making way to fog, the darkness clearing up and seemingly falling into the depths of the water that flowed below me. None the less I was lost and without vision, trusting only in god and hoping only to live. Despite my increasing resentment for life, I found it difficult to run from it. Rather I wished only to embrace it further now, to experience, to learn, to run and jump and holler; but again the waves crashed, waking me from what I could only describe as a daze or perhaps a drunken state of sullen brooding.
It was white all around me, as if this was somehow my ascension to heaven. I hoped to Christ this wasn’t the case, I felt as if I had so much left to accomplish on this plane. The urge to struggle and fight, as if you were drowning and unable to swim with the weight of cloths on your back, suddenly hit me. I was powerless to the rocking of the waters, powerless to the forces that seemed to throw more and more at me when I myself felt as if I couldn’t go a step further. My mind was giving in. My thoughts turned to bargaining, to anger, to hostility that this be my final experience, this damnable cold mess my exit to this shithole.
And yet I could not give in to my mind, I could not break myself down and simply cease caring. I carried on into the unknown; and it cleared. Before my eyes in the distance I could see the silhouette of a shore. The white clouds still stood before me, still dense, but slowly clearing from me as I continued forward.

And I landed, the golden shores turning to white and the skies letting fall their rain. As it had a hundred times before, my fantasies and hopes turned once again to rubble, and my dreams once again broke to sand. I stood for a moment, looking around me for some hope of comfort, of some form of companionship, but all had seemed to take to their boats and sail for other shores.
And so I boarded upon my ship once again, looking to where I had come from, and looking to where I could go, and I took sail. I knew not if I’d catch up to those ahead of me or if I would fall to the dangers that lay ahead. I knew not if this was the time I’d give in, all I knew is this was not where I was meant to stop. I knew not who was behind me, if I should wait for them, or if they would even stop for me.
I sailed on into infinity, into the Abyss that lay before.

>>10805915
I appreciate the comments. You're pretty much dead on about it being an exercise of form, toying with tetrameter.

>>10805809
I like the rhythmic sense here, a lot of trisyllable things happening that give it a waltzy feel. But I think sometimes that gets overbearing, like how "well" in the first line gives the line its triplet rhythm, but the phrase "I remember well" is a bit kitschy.
The lines up to "Decorum" were the weakest overall for me. It's a bit heady and didn't motivate me to mull over it too long and really unpack it. Some of the cutesy bits, "now and how," "scarce saliences," was too gaudy for me, and I think that added to my disinterest.
The second half ("Then a magpie" onward) was much better. The descriptions and poetics go together nicely, especially since there's a clearer narrative. "Sluicing" and "camphorous" seem clumsy and wedged in, but those are minor nits for some otherwise strong lines.

bukowski is the only person i;ve ever read and i live in portland

>>10815894
>that sneaky "/lit/" at the end
Thanks for the shout out

>>10813613
>he doesn't have a sense of humour

>>10815894
yost.........?

Hows this so far my dudes
Here I dwell in stoic thought, of what is statute in written wrought, from place whence our beauty dawns, in a shadow of never long.
Sprung into view came a Muse, she sang song of time tailored tongue, with her gentle melodic blend.
There I ponder with the museful ways, about why in all of Wonder we wander into the deepest blues.
They told me it was a mystery of the oldest tune. A reason that dwells far past Posiedons keep, further than any olympians Den

>>10816041
Cliche, banal, tryhard. 2/10 get a personality

>>10816046
Is it really?

Disclaimer
(I dont read much poetry, nor do I study others)
Im just trying to improve my poetry skills.

>>10816054
the opening two lines are workable, what is statute in written wrought is pretentious, change stoic to something else.
the middle section is fucking trash, take something plastic and hard, smack your writing hand as hard as you can repeatedly. i do this when i write garbage.

the last few lines are faggot nonsense, you’re just posturing and don‘t communicate anything

you’re pretty bad, but you have the potential to be mediocre. try harder

>>10816079
I like pretentious i think its fun

>>10815966
It wasn't supposed to be funny
>>10814685
wow, thanks.

>>10815419
So... you're saying the writing didnt compliment the weight of the seriousness of the situation or theme?

Thanks for the example and critique, anon.

Oh delete key, how you complete me,
Past due for a song, so strumming I sing,
I can't let you go, I keep coming back,
These other keys ring wrong, falsely and flat.
Think of the sorrow you've saved me, my muse,
Sending limp salutations to the sea,
And those lame, desperate hopes and extensions
Pushed off the brink and into oblivion,
It's a wonder we've got this far, old pal,
In spite of the endless siren you wail,
I'm strapped to the pole while my crew rows on,
Dumb and deaf to the pleas of their captain.
Yes, I heard you, dear. You're completely right,
This is a futile effort, worse even,
I am vain and imbecilic, indeed,
That I'd betray you with those other keys,
And in the name of you, it's perversion.

So on second thought I refuse you, dear,
You suck my impulse liek a gravity well
ff in space somewhere, but I know better
Than to give in to your thin temptation
In fact I'll cast this off, this cheap, dumb song,
Into the net , webbed like an ibred child's
Toes breaking like a line, the catch released,
Hook, line and sinker atangled in its jaw,
As it descends into te murky deep,
For channel catfish seek out the cold mud,
And I seek out a way out from my post,
Casting crumbs, I wastch them sink down unnoticed.

>>10786356

Sounds like something I would have written in high school when I didn't know love, and hardly knew life

>>10786416
Only read the first and last third of this but it reminded me of reading Palahniuk years ago. The prose is reminiscent of Invisible Monsters. I agree with the other guy that you should restructure this so that it isn't clear to the reader that we're following a pornstar until the end. Overall this is fairly entertaining, not bad if this is a first draft. A re-write could go a long way with this

>>10815894

lmfao this is such a good shot at yost

Bump

>>10803846
Anyone?
I'd really need some critique about my sentences. I can write longers ones perfectly in my native language and so far most of the people I've shown this were also Slovene speakers, so I'd need someone that speaks English as their first language to confirm if it reads naturally or if it's weird.

>>10804111
I like the last two lines haha
>>10805356
8/10 would repost
>>10805809
"now" feels awkward as the poem is in past tense otherwise. Also shouldn't the "lamppost" be plural? I really like the general idea of the poem but I think if it was expressed more simply it'd be easier to connect with. I also like the image of the pastel colors of the apartment. I don't like came/rain/pane, these three masculine rhymes obscure what is arguably the most important point in the poem. I also think you could reduce the last two lines to "What had it seen?". Lots of stuff about fragility and early relationship delicacies that pair well with the magpie. All in all a good idea that needs further revision.
>>10816449
The writing isn't repulsive but I'd prefer if it were actually about something.
>>10816467
I'm the one who did the porno bit, I re-wrote it heavily and submitted it. I will invariably be known as the guy who wrote the porno story, but that's all this shitty class deserves.
I like your poem, it flows nicely until the last stanza and then becomes weak. I especially don't like the last three lines. Favourite line: "Skin dry, lips low".

pic related is two poems I wrote today. The first is finished, the second is a work in progress. #2 is based on Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est" and reworks many of his lines to form a dream about a man who is drowning. This one is for class too and it's supposed to imitate a dream (not just be about one) but I'm a little confused about how to do that. I'm a lifeguard, hope #2 makes that obvious.

The sky is a warm pink. The sun is setting and the crickets are beginning to chirp. It’s hot outside, but it’s cool in the car. I lean back and kick my feet up.
“Feet off the dashboard”, the weirdo next to me says.
“Can’t you just keep your toes on the ground? Are you cursed?” His name’s Mordecai, I’ve known him since… Uh…. However long. He’s pretty alright I guess.
“Hey, earth to Katherine. Are you there?” He says, pushing my feet back to the car floor.
“Huh? Oh… Are we there yet?”
Mordecai sighs. “You asked that question five minutes ago. Actually.”
“Yeah, but we must be closer than we were five minutes ago.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see him grip the steering wheel tighter, visibly restraining himself from saying anything harsh.
“We’ve got at least 30 minutes left. At least.” He sighs again. I stare out the window for some time
“Are we there—“ *SHHKRRRRT* Mordecai turned on the radio. Yeesh, someone’s panties are in a wad. I go back to looking out the window. My hand finds with window regulator, and I fiddle with it for a while. Up, down, up, down… up?
“Hey you turned off my window!” I turn to face him, pouting.
“Yeah, because it’s not a toy.” He replies, sternly.
“But there’s nothing to doooo…..”
“Stop whining and justlike, sleep or something.”

>>10817168
I'm the guy who wrote the poem you liked, except for the last three lines.

I find your first poem to be very good. The second poem is kind of 'meh' to me. Nothing particularly clever or exciting or moving about it, for me.

Throw this out and start again. I have erased my post twice trying to articulate well everything that is going wrong. Is the first greentext your opening paragraph?
The extended metaphor using the driveway is particularly terrible. You're using a lot of words to say nothing, generally.

There is nothing wrong with being direct, you know?

>>10816205
>It wasn't supposed to be funny
I don't think you get to decide that

>>10818274
>I don't think you get to decide that
I do

>>10818303
Not to the person who is reading it.

>>10818308
that only applies if you're me

>>10786323
test

>>10818315
Then why share it?

>>10818325
how new are you?

Rate my grammar please. Is there anything wrong with this sentence, does it seem like something an ESL person would say?

>31.3% of their fans are in their 20's, that's more people than every other group there's entire fanbase.

>>10818341
>every other group there's entire fanbase
Yes, it does.

>>10818335
Answer my Question, Anon.

>>10818356
What's wrong with it?

>>10818358
It just went over your head, but I was joking.
critique my piece please

>>10818363
To where is the "There" referring? It doesn't seem to be referring to anywhere. You're also making the adverb possessive, which you just can't do. The entire fanbase doesn't belong to the "there", it belongs to "every other group's"

So, step by step here:
>31.3% of their fans are in their 20s,
Whose fans?
Why the comma?
>That's more people
*What's* more people? The amount of people in their twenties? Just state exactly what it is.
>than every other group's entire fanbase.
Just "(this group) has more fans who are in their 20s than the fanbase of every other group" will suffice

>>10818395
*fanbases

>>10818395
Sorry, I should have gave more info. There was a list of groups listed. So they have more fans than every other group there, there being that list of groups.

>>10818408
>So they have more fans than every other group there
Ah, well then you should just clarify. Your sentence makes it sound like this specific group has more fans in their 20s than the other groups, not total fans. Separate that info into two sentences, the comma makes the age % the focus.

>>10818443
Basically I'm asking if there's can be used in a possessive case, as in that 'person over there's jacket, or if it strictly means 'there is'. That's what some dipshit is arguing with me about.

>>10818452
There's can be used as a possessive if the There is being used as a noun, specifically a proper noun. But even then it'd be, to my knowledge, a stylistic stretch you'd see in like Faulkner or something. For example:

>There is always beyond what's at hand. There's qualities escape complete grasp; it's always over and beyond the before-ourselves, the in-front, the here-right-now. There's people aren't complete people, but impressions of people as in photographs and obscured ancient sketches.

>>10818489
So then saying 'I like that person over there's jacket' would be grammatically incorrect?

>>10818501
Yeah, at least as far as I know.
Not to say that you can't do it in fiction writing or anything, because people do speak like that all the time. But if you're writing an academic or, in your case, some statistical work, you oughtta avoid it.

>>10818514
Thanks dude, that's all I needed to hear.

Here is a fight scene from the middle of a short story I'm working on. If context is needed please let me know, but my main concern is whether the prose has the right kind of pitch and impact.

>>10817168
>The writing isn't repulsive but I'd prefer if it were actually about something.
Jeez, I thought blatantly announcing the intent at the beginning would make that clear. It's "actually about" the delete key, and my reactions towards it. For the second stanza I decided not to delete/correct anything, to reflect my resistance towards the "delete everything" instinct. Fuck I don't know man, I was stoned. I had fun I guess.

As for your poems, "Perfect" knows it's cute and clever. But that alone is a little dull. I think the aging/mortality theme is okay, but could be better realized to unify the lines (beyond wordplay). Speaking of wordplay, I know "it" is necessary in the last line for your "die it/dye it/diet" bit, but I have no idea what "it" is. The "do"? The act of dying? All of the above? Your allegiance to cute puns weakened whatever you were otherwise going for.

Knowing your inspiration, "Stygian Pool" was kind of a vile read. I didn't even feel like giving it a closer read. I know this is an assignment piece, but comparing lifeguarding to trench warfare, especially with lifeguarding being your job, strikes me as arrogant and disrespectful. That plus the constant stylistic imitation, makes this feel like a tasteless, ego-stroking mockery of a great war poem.

>>10815611
>>10815615
Unfortunately for this piece, I spent ten years asail in small craft, during which time I consumed the entire Mariner's Library twice. Starting with Gypsy Moth Circles The World, and continuing through Knox-Johnston, Moitessier's The Long Way, Fastnet Force Ten, and the others, going back to Slocum, then ending with The Strange Final Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. All of which I can recommend.

Here some Long Way if you have the mood.

https://books.google.com/books?id=M_213SIZgrYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+long+way+moitessier&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj5kdzt8N_ZAhUD94MKHdWPA9sQuwUILDAA#v=onepage&q=infinity&f=false

It is nearly impossible to confer, let alone convey, a sense of wistful regret amidst a panoramic setting without a character to care about it. If you compare something "canon" established like both parts of Big Two Hearted River; I find it easier to accept the river, the swamp, the logs, the grasshoppers, the trout, and the tent, and all the gear, because I am aware that Nick is a veteran of WWII, that he has had big adventures, peril, and tragedy, all of which makes the descriptive time-weather-and-gear reports into a narrative of emotional selection. The mariners do that too. No one really believes that Chichester was gifted a benevolent reprise of flying fish in his sails from Poseidon at exactly the moment he was going hungry. It was for effect. He probably was hungry, at some time, and there were certainly flying fish landing on his deck, at some time, and he ate them, at some other time. But in the /narrative/ he put it together with art. It has drama that way. Jeopardy feels attached. He knew that he was a character.

After 500 words, I don't even know what your guy did for a living, what country he is from, what the crisis is that has him so poetic, or any other personal detail that could inform any connection to his plight. It's all color and no lines. Emotional states with no anchors, causes, or artifacts. I don't know why I should care. And the floor of a boat is called a "deck." Even first-time weekend day sailors on family holiday in Bermuda call it a deck.

>>10818303
Nope because my intentions when writing it decide what it is "supposed" to be...

>>10816406
Nobody is going to write the definitive school shooter novel in this decade, nor the next. No one outside the USA can fathom the centuries of quilted cultural weave that produces the impulse nor the perversions of that impulse in recent decades that has produced the phenomenon; and no one inside has the combination of suicidal self-honesty with literary insight to tell the truth in a way that anyone would want to read. Anyone who attempts it is going to end up just like Updike, writing 16 millimeter pornography on fast-forward.

>>10817045
I had to google this.

>Table top war game
>sci-fantasy setting
>literally the origin of the word "grimdark"
>inspired a movie, direct to DVD
>which inspired novelizations
>which inspired the inevitable vidya
>and of course, fanfic

That's about nine layers of insulated esoterica I am in no way prepared to penetrate. Seek on.

>>10817796
Since it comes so early and has such an effect, I will point out the one thing - I have never been in a car, even a convertible, where it was possible to hear crickets chirping while moving. Goes double for with the windows up. As for the rest, we have two unpleasant people bickering. About them nothing more is known.

>>10818570
It's good. The one-thing-inevitably-leads-immediately-to-the-next-logical-thing is established and maintained.

If you feel better having something to think about, if it were mine, I would ask myself about "I watch" followed closely by "I watch" again. Graph 3, last two sentences. My reason for questioning is that somehow "I" got from behind the truck (sentence 2 is his last reported position) to a position in the gutter behind fat man (graph 4, sentence 2) instantaneously while doing nothing but watching. So I am wondering if the one or both "watch"-es might be overlayed with something that moves "I" closer to the position he takes to intervene. Or if a sentence is needed to move "I" over. I would probably try it several ways, because I'm slow liek that.

>>10818996
Thank you for the substantive critique, anon. I agree. A connective sentence or something like that is needed to transition the narrator from spectation to action. Looking at it now, it seems a bit too abrupt.
Again, thanks. If you have anything you'd like me to look at in return let me know.

>>10818570
Probably my favorite prose piece ITT. Your narration has an authentic voice, and I like your knack for detail and how you pull it off in a restrained, unpurple way. Sometimes the details gets in the way, like how "The noise is spectacular" breaks up the momentum of the rising conflict. Simply removing that sentence keep the pacing intact and, as far as this excerpt is concerned, doesn't seem to lose much.

Couple other weird nits
>I see the blinds flicker and Luis does too.
On first read I thought you were saying Luis was "flickering"
>then pitches the urn through the window
Where did the urn come from?
>colorful heap of his bulk
I suppose it's colorful because of the tattoos? Odd phrasing

>>10817988
Checked. I like your poem as a whole, I don't mean to be mean.
>>10818713
>I had fun I guess.
Mission accomplished. Thanks for pointing out the ugliness of the allusions to warfare, it was used well in a piece I read recently but my application of it was decidedly off-hand. I keep going back to the owen poem because I really like it, especially the buckled sonnet form, and I want to emulate it somehow. Thanks for your help, I'll sever my ties to cheap wordplay.

>>10819067
Thanks very much, anon. As for the urn, long story short, it is supposed to contain the ashes of Luis/Trish's son but has turned out to be the remains of her mother's dog. I promise it makes more sense in context. And yeah, the "colorful heap" is a phrase I've wrested with quite a bit. I may end up changing it for the final draft if people are stumbling over it.

>>10813794
And here is one of those details that give it all away:

"The first thing I heard was the pop, a loud bang down the hallway exiting the cafeteria."

"pop, a loud bang" - repetition of the same concept in different words. A 'tautology' it's called. If this were an action sequence, whose purpose is to evoke "I"s sense experience in real time, with reality's jarring acceleration of perceived rate of events as panic sets in, and the change of register from "pop" to "loud bang" were explainable as a teministic escalation of realization of peril, then it might work.

But that's not what you have. The next sentence does not elaborate on the action, it yanks us out of the action and takes us to a calendar. We never return to the action at all. So, a tautology, and an orphan at that.

"a loud bang down the hallway exiting" We have two possibilities here. The agent "exiting" is the "I" of an earlier clause, though "I" is not the subject of the sentence, "thing" is in the subject position which creates the uncomfortable reader-side requirements of trying to imagine a "thing" which turns out to be a "pop/loud bang" "exiting" the caf. So this is either a basic grammatical short-circuit, or an inventive synesthesiac novelty of sonic ambulation. "a loud bang exiting the cafeteria." Maybe the loud bang was hungry.

And that's just the first sentence. I am more on Rachel's team than ever. And I was dead serious about the beer pong game. Some college genius is going to have to recognize the enormous fictive and as yet undiscovered gold mine that could be excavated from that underground trend soon, because they don't last very long. It could be the "eschaton" of the next decade.

In fact, I'm giving this one away for free because I haven't darkened the door of a university campus in, well, some years. It needs to be by somebody current.

If you've managed to get to page 400 of Infinite Jest, then you've covered the only substantive moment of true literary genius in DFW's short sorry career. The Eschaton is a self-contained masterpiece. It is a comedy, a tragedy, an explication of fictive technique, and a philosophical axiom. It's absolutely hilarious and accessible. It's part of the google preview. Just search for Eschaton.

So, a group of college kids, better if at a Greek party, you pick which chromosomal combination, beering it up. The game is going to be Jews versus Nazis, where one table's cups are arranged in a swastika, and the other in a star of David. You will need characters. Obviously someone will have to be Jewish, and don't /pol/ it up here, I'm telling you, this can work. You'll need a blonde aryan type, better if everybody likes him. You'll need a slut, a prim, and a lush. A jock, a WASP, and a frosh. At least.

Eschaton is about how a game about the end of the world leads to the end of the game instead, and metaphorically the end of childhood for the players, and the end of adolescence for the minders. There are two portals traversed by two groups.

Your beer pong game can be about anything, but the end of someone's life is a staple of drama, and college is the end of youth by any measure. So you have that, against all the baggage of WWII's most notorious side show. Played as a drinking game. I foresee an entire box of ping pong balls being spilled late in the emerging chaos.

I want to read that.

>>10819198
Sounds good. I'll send you half the 20 bucks I get paid by whatever small press zine I publish it in.

Suculantly boisterous, embedded in
your roar is a chocalate-marshmallow
center? that sweetens even the
most bitter of habitually vegetable
mundanities.

Is this a good sentence from a poem that I am working on?

I'm writing an epic poem based on Medievil please tell me what you think

Sir Daniel lay clad in his lavender armour
and rose hue paned sleeves
lathered with dust and spider web
his flesh rotten away through the years
leaving only a jawless skeleton
and a single unpiereced eye

sleeping the sleep of life
alas! a necromantic green lightning did stir him
writhing electric through his wearisome bones
Sir Daniel awoke
And discovered he was hailed as a valient hero
By a land he pretended to save
Shot plainly through the eye at the first charge
A gargoyle spoke, aware of his fraud
Informing him of his dark sorcerer Zaroks return
"Fate has given it a second chance,
a chance to forget the ignoble truth,
a chance to defeat Zarok and live up to the legend.
We hopes it does well."

For the first in a hundred years
Sir Daniel moved and searched his crypt
A grand hall for a dead man
retrieved his court sword from display
And a copper shield
He looked like its seal now
A halved skull
Dark dextered by light

Sir Daniel stepped out into the graveyard of gallowmere
Sodden and stonemoss green under blue moonlight
He saw the risen dead

The corpses bled brown mulch as they walked
Wrenched from the earth
pulling worms from their
shredded gullets
With roars of forgotten pain
The beasts tore themselves attempting to run
pulling clay bones through green bitter flesh
reduced to a gnawing slothful creep
flooding from angry mouths of red mud
as each arose each fell to Sir Daniel
Shambling ghouls lay
Steel slain and broken
Pulverized with each driven swipe
and driven back into the earth
Sir Daniel made his way to the base
Of Cemetery Hill

>>10819223
>something banal, like a hot pocket, has to get burned in the house oven.
>some terrible secret has to get discovered at the end, like Weird Dave has been keeping and growing a collection of dead squirrels in shoe boxes in his closet and he's dressed them in the various Barbie doll theme outfits.
>"absolutely nobody ever asked a single question about why the Ken doll outfit had been placed on the single raccoon among the collection."
>ping pong balls are transformed into a unimaginably powerful weapon of mass destruction, probably with the aid of a staircase
>a group of enemy characters from a rival House makes an unprovoked early morning raid which devastates the population of cocktail shrimp minding their own business in the bright pink and green fridge, which is located way way out back in the garage where they keep the official Fraternity row boat.
>Two characters fighting in a corner over the last jar of snacks, escalating to a wrestling match, when a Pong player gets annoyed and yells at them "What are you fighting over!?" and the more American seeming snack combatant yells back "NUTS."
>The devastated cocktail shrimp house executes a daring counter-raid against the attacking House's backyard beach volleyball setup, after an elaborate deception campaign that they were really going to attack the big white columns on the front porch.

I'm not going to ruin it any further. If you can see it, you can see it, if not, not.

I gave someone a story that I know is good, and have been told is good, and received the most offensive "feedback" I've ever got. It was hardly feedback, it's barely worth mentioning really, but I am so off put by what they did.

They were sitting beside me as someone else I had given my story to told me they were planning to read it soon. I was eager to have eyes on it, so I was asking my friends if they could read it for me, which was both enticing to do and intimidating. So, when my friend left, this person asked to confirm that it was my story they were going to read, and so I said yeah. Then, I figured why not, and asked if they wanted to read it, too.

They said sure, they would be glad to, and I emailed them a copy. This person is not a person I really like, I think they're kind of immature and arrogant. But I thought it would be interesting to see the feedback, have someone else who I considered, bluntly, to be a pleb idiot, read my shit.

I got it back today, and they enjoyed it. In their letter to me, they said that it was good but that they reworked it. Immediately I cringed, and remembered the sound of typing only seconds after noticing them open my story for the first time on their desktop the day prior. They hadn't even got through the story and they were already changing things.

What I got back was hardly my story, it was all kinds of chopped up and rearranged. They said that I had words in the wrong places, words that were misleading, that I used the wrong words. I was so indignant on the inside, I really had to steel myself just to transform into a bitch about this whole thing. I thought about how this is pretty much what I expected, that this is their arrogance that compelled them to practically rewrite my story and not anything to do with the quality of my writing, and I thought about the kinds of literature they said they disliked and liked in the past.

But basically, it was an interesting experiment. I kind of knew what would happen, and I did it anyway. When they came in, I told them that I appreciated them looking at it, but also that I couldn't admit that I appreciated the whole thing... I felt good about being honest, about not getting actually angry. For as much as I thought they were arrogant and naive, I was pretty happy about how I predicted this outcome and how easily it was to write off their feedback as inane. I learned a thing or two about criticism, and who to show my work to. I don't think I'll share my stories with her again.

>>10819353
Nice blog post faggot, though, if you are round-abouting: So as to dissuade us from being overly-sensitive about feedback received here, then: fair enough.
>>10819233
Rebumping for feedback on this excerpt, I like it, but can't help feel as though others wouldnt

>>10819379
That was the morale of the story, and I just thought it was relevant to the thread. Something writers can probably do good with thinking about if they're gonna show their work around.

Start of my first novel called Kill Shot:

Colonel Jack Stone punched the four digits of his PIN into the keypad of the ATM infront of him.
"Come on, come on".
The screen lagged as he selected two hundred dollars from the menu. Stone smelled the smell of sweet perfume over his shoulder.
"Is there a problem with the machine?"
He turned round to face her, the redhead with a china complexion he could never forget. Bright green eyes capped with manicured brows the colour of overcooked gingerbread.
"What the fuck are you doing here?", he grunted with contempt.
"I never could turn down one last mission".
Stone took the cash from the ATM and stuffed it in his jacket pocket, brushing his hand against his holster.
"You're gonna blow my cover, get the fuck out of here."
Suddenly an explosion happened in the street as a car became a flaming wreck of twisted metal. Pedestrians screamed and ran in all directions to the sound of shattering glass. Stone brought up a protective hand to sweep the narrow waist of his erstwhile partner behind his bulky frame.
"Shit that was close. Must be the work of one of Sullivan's goons. You OK, Agent Diaz?"
She swept an errant lock of hair off her forehead.
"Boys and their toys", she quipped while reaching for the Uzi in her leather jeans. "You sure you don't want a partner?"
Stone unclipped the Desert Eagle from his shoulder holster and bit the tip of a fresh cigar.
"I never could work alone", he said as Diaz struck a Zippo lighter. "Guess the Captain's gonna have my ass" he laughed as they both ran out into street,

>>10819233
I'm a brainlet, so I can't, but someone should provide some cruel--yet insightfully degrading feedback, for this anon, since now that it is on /lit/, he won't be able to ever publish this sentence--like he ever could anyways, and hopefully, we can beliitle him into betterdom, or motivate him to stop trying alltogeher! Give this pseud the scolding he so craves: like the bitch from 50 Shades

>>10819478
You really want to go head to head with Vince Flynn on the shelves and search engines? Nobody has written "360 Quick Scope" yet. Pete Stone would be a better inside joke.

>>10818898
Well, thanks for the critique, anon.
I guess I'll tackle a different subject next time.

Sah ich dich wirklich nie? Mir ist das Herz
so schwer von dir wie von zu schwerem Anfang,
den man hinausschiebt. Daß ich dich begänne
zu sagen, Toter der du bist; du gerne,
du leidenschaftlich Toter. War das so
erleichternd wie du meintest, oder war
das Nichtmehrleben doch noch weit vom Totsein?
Du wähntest, besser zu besitzen dort,
wo keiner Wert legt auf Besitz. Dir schien,
dort drüben wärst du innen in der Landschaft,
die wie ein Bild hier immer vor dir zuging,
und kämst von innen her in die Geliebte
und gingest hin durch alles, stark und schwingend.
O daß du nun die Täuschung nicht zu lang
nachtrügest deinem knabenhaften Irrtum.
Daß du, gelöst in einer Strömung Wehmut
und hingerissen, halb nur bei Bewußtsein,
in der Bewegung um die fernen Sterne
die Freude fändest, die du von hier fort
verlegt hast in das Totsein deiner Träume.
Wie nahe warst du, Lieber, hier an ihr.
Wie war sie hier zuhaus, die, die du meintest,
die ernste Freude deiner strengen Sehnsucht.
Wenn du, enttäuscht von Glücklichsein und Unglück,
dich in dich wühltest und mit einer Einsicht
mühsam heraufkamst, unter dem Gewicht
beinah zerbrechend deines dunkeln Fundes:
da trugst du sie, sie, die du nicht erkannt hast,
die Freude trugst du, deines kleinen Heilands
Last trugst du durch dein Blut und holtest über.

Was hast du nicht gewartet, daß die Schwere
ganz unerträglich wird da schlägt sie um
und ist so schwer, weil sie so echt ist. Siehst du,
dies war vielleicht dein nächster Augenblick;
er rückte sich vielleicht vor deiner Tür
den Kranz im Haar zurecht, da du sie zuwarfst.

O dieser Schlag, wie geht er durch das Weltall,
wenn irgendwo vom harten scharfen Zugwind
der Ungeduld ein Offenes ins Schloß fällt.
Wer kann beschwören, daß nicht in der Erde
ein Sprung sich hinzieht durch gesunde Samen;
wer hat erforscht, ob in gezähmten Tieren
nicht eine Lust zu töten geilig aufzuckt,
wenn dieser Ruck ein Blitzlicht in ihr Hirn wirft.
Wer kennt den Einfluß, der von unserm Handeln
hinüberspringt in eine nahe Spitze,
und wer begleitet ihn, wo alles leitet?

>>10819739
Daß du zerstört hast. Daß man dies von dir
wird sagen müssen bis in alle Zeiten.
Und wenn ein Held bevorsteht, der den Sinn,
den wir für das Gesicht der Dinge nehmen,
wie eine Maske abreißt und uns rasend
Gesichter aufdeckt, deren Augen längst
uns lautlos durch verstellte Löcher anschaun:
dies ist Gesicht und wird sich nicht verwandeln:
daß du zerstört hast. Blöcke lagen da,
und in der Luft um sie war schon der Rhythmus
von einem Bauwerk, kaum mehr zu verhalten;
du gingst herum und sahst nicht ihre Ordnung,
einer verdeckte dir den andern; jeder
schien dir zu wurzeln, wenn du im Vorbeigehn
an ihm versuchtest, ohne rechtes Zutraun,
daß du ihn hübest. Und du hobst sie alle
in der Verzweiflung, aber nur, um sie
zurückzuschleudern in den klaffen Steinbruch,
in den sie, ausgedehnt von deinem Herzen,
nicht mehr hineingehn. Hätte eine Frau
die leichte Hand gelegt auf dieses Zornes
noch zarten Anfang; wäre einer, der
beschäftigt war, im Innersten beschäftigt,
dir still begegnet, da du stumm hinausgingst,
die Tat zu tun -; ja hätte nur dein Weg
vorbeigeführt an einer wachen Werkstatt,
wo Männer hämmern, wo der Tag sich schlicht
verwirklicht; wär in deinem vollen Blick
nur so viel Raum gewesen, daß das Abbild
von einem Käfer, der sich müht, hineinging,
du hättest jäh bei einem hellen Einsehn
die Schrift gelesen, deren Zeichen du
seit deiner Kindheit langsam in dich eingrubst,
von Zeit zu Zeit versuchend, ob ein Satz
dabei sich bilde: ach, er schien dir sinnlos.
Ich weiß; ich weiß: du lagst davor und griffst
die Rillen ab, wie man auf einem Grabstein
die Inschrift abfühlt. Was dir irgend licht
zu brennen schien, das hieltest du als Leuchte
vor diese Zeile; doch die Flamme losch
eh du begriffst, vielleicht von deinem Atem,
vielleicht vom Zittern deiner Hand; vielleicht
auch ganz von selbst, wie Flammen manchmal ausgehn.
Du lasest's nie. Wir aber wagen nicht,
zu lesen durch den Schmerz und aus der Ferne.

>>10819745
Nur den Gedichten sehn wir zu, die noch
über die Neigung deines Fühlens abwärts
die Worte tragen, die du wähltest. Nein,
nicht alle wähltest du; oft ward ein Anfang
dir auferlegt als Ganzes, den du nachsprachst
wie einen Auftrag. Und er schien dir traurig.
Ach hättest du ihn nie von dir gehört.
Dein Engel lautet jetzt noch und betont
denselben Wortlaut anders, und mir bricht
der Jubel aus bei seiner Art zu sagen,
der Jubel über dich: denn dies war dein:
Daß jedes Liebe wieder von dir abfiel,
daß du im Sehendwerden den Verzicht
erkannt hast und im Tode deinen Fortschritt.
Dieses war dein, du, Künstler; diese drei
offenen Formen. Sieh, hier ist der Ausguß
der ersten: Raum um dein Gefühl; und da
aus jener zweiten schlag ich dir das Anschaun
das nichts begehrt, des großen Künstlers Anschaun;
und in der dritten, die du selbst zu früh
zerbrochen hast, da kaum der erste Schuß
bebender Speise aus des Herzens Weißglut
hineinfuhr -, war ein Tod von guter Arbeit
vertieft gebildet, jener eigne Tod,
der uns so nötig hat, weil wir ihn leben,
und dem wir nirgends näher sind als hier.

Dies alles war dein Gut und deine Freundschaft;
du hast es oft geahnt; dann aber hat
das Hohle jener Formen dich geschreckt,
du griffst hinein und schöpftest Leere
und beklagtest dich. - O alter Fluch der Dichter,
die sich beklagen, wo sie sagen sollten,
die immer urteiln über ihr Gefühl
statt es zu bilden; die noch immer meinen,
was traurig ist in ihnen oder froh,
das wüßten sie und dürftens im Gedicht
bedauern oder rühmen. Wie die Kranken
gebrauchen sie die Sprache voller Wehleid,
um zu beschreiben, wo es ihnen wehtut,
statt hart sich in die Worte zu verwandeln,
wie sich der Steinmetz einer Kathedrale
verbissen umsetzt in des Steines Gleichmut.

Dies war die Rettung. Hättest du nur ein Mal
gesehn, wie Schicksal in die Verse eingeht
und nicht zurückkommt, wie es drinnen Bild wird
und nichts als Bild, nicht anders als ein Ahnherr,
der dir im Rahmen, wenn du manchmal aufsiehst,
zu gleichen scheint und wieder nicht zu gleichen -:
du hattest ausgeharrt.

Doch dies ist kleinlich,
zu denken, was nicht war. Auch ist ein Schein
von Vorwurf im Vergleich, der dich nicht trifft.
Das, was geschieht, hat einen solchen Vorsprung
vor unserm Meinen, daß wirs niemals einholn
und nie erfahren, wie es wirklich aussah.

Sei nicht beschämt, wenn dich die Toten streifen,
die andern Toten, welche bis ans Ende
aushielten. (Was will Ende sagen?) Tausche
den Blick mit ihnen, ruhig, wie es Brauch ist,
und fürchte nicht, daß unser Trauern dich
seltsam belädt, so daß du ihnen auffällst.
Die großen Worte aus den Zeiten, da
Geschehn noch sichtbar war, sind nicht für uns.
Wer spricht von Siegen? Überstehn ist alles.

>>10819128
Well thanks for the long critque, anon. I'm kind of a brainlet, so most of your critque flew past my head in the chinese language. I'll keep it saved, though. When my brain gets bigger, or when I have more time to discern what you said, I will hopefully come to a better understanding of your critque. Dude, you gave me like an essay. You rock. :)

>>10819750
>>10819745
>>10819739
Fick dich Junge, ich les den ganzen Scheiß und werd schon mega hype, das endlich mal was gutes deutschen im Critique Faden ist und dann stolper ich fast ganz am Ende über "O alter Fluch der Dichter...blablab" und erst fucking da merk ich, dass es Rilke ist - FICK DIIIICH

>>10819910
Gelesen hast du's trotzdem, das ist doch schon mal was ;^^)
Willst du eins von meinen sehen? Dagegen ist es lächerlich schlecht

I just realized this is the last thing I finished in fucking years, and it's this.

https://www.fimfiction.net/story/327262/coral-the-phoenix-and-the-caged-bird

>two Germans argue over a rilke troll in the same thread advocating a nazis versus jews beer pong story.

I love you /lit/.

>>10820022
I know this is hardly high literature but it's something I actually finished and put to paper years ago, the only thing I've put to paper in too damn long. If someone here could critique this without any pseud "I hate this genre so fuck it and fuck you", that'd be lovely. I want my ability to write cool stories improved.

>>10820111
>If someone here could critique this without any pseud "I hate this genre so fuck it and fuck you", that'd be lovely
Tough shit. You'd best think again if you think I'm going to read your My Little Pony fanfiction.

Write the intro to one of those """cool stories""" and I'll critique it as long as it isn't autism incarnate.

Rate pls
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Sq4ycrhk3znXzB5Nwvf14vQT2dL5uOdX

Coral woke with a start when the bare-looking homemade magic radio beside her sea-blue bed snapped on at just the right moment, exposed wires sparking for a moment as bronze gears sluggishly began to turn, their recycled transmuted tin and iron friends doing the same. A tinny and rather distorted replica of the blaring, repetitive, gratingly loud, infuriatingly simple in-your-face tune played on trumpets, the tune repeated ad nausea that heralded the arrival of her least favourite wrestler ever, was sent into her face through small and weak speakers, her closed eyes snapping open to reveal eyes with ordinary black pupils quickly shrinking in shock. Her body - she supposed she'd rate it a 5 or 6 out of 10 for being rather angular, though she'd read that some bucks liked that more than the cuter or curvier mares - was coated in a warm pink fur, her warmer eyes were a yellowish-orange like the golden sand of a warm, inviting beach perfect for sunbathing on, and her mane was a bright, vibrant sunset-orange that stood out against her pink body. Her mane was styled quite a lot like the rounded, yet spiked mane of DJ-P0N3. However, rather than the sharp points at the ends of that brilliant musician's rounded mane, her ends... well... ended... in more rounded points, like long flight feathers. Furthermore, where the musician's mane had two shades of blue - a darker blue like a blazing, wild, dangerously hot gas fire and a lighter electric blue, like the light of a glowstick or neon paint perfect for raves, where the striking contrast of dark and light wonderfully complimented the energy of dance - she had only the one shade of orange in her mane, like an... orange... orange. An orange... sunset? No, she'd already said sunset. Finally, her Cutie Mark was a brown paintbrush, its orange-coated tip touching her flank's center, as if that paintbrush what created the symbol of an orange-coated yellow sun on her flanks. In any case, her dream about saving Equestria from a monster that was once a Unicorn, a Unicorn that had freed all the dark creatures in Tartarus and absorbed them into himself to empower him enough to defeat an old rival, a rival that had actually died while this former Unicorn was busy researching power-boosting methods and losing more and more of who he was with each spell and ritual was forgotten, though she knew she had to write that idea down soon. The nearest one of her sky-blue hooves shot out, filled with rage and determination, ready to punch the offending radio into oblivion, only to halt at the last second. She proceed to grumpily press down on the yellow tray serving to increase the surface area of the Snooze button's bare orange trigger, thinking to herself that it would have been so, so much cooler if she'd struck it so hard it dismantled in midair, time seeming to slow down as pieces of the shattered alarm clock flew around her, catching and reflecting the morning light like a thousand tiny disco balls.

>>10786416
The porno from this could be good. Submit it, they might film

>>10792795
Were you trying to write about 4chan?

>>10819950
ja hau men raus jung

"Death"

I go downwards
Death
Death
I go towards the bottom because it just seems like more fun
I go downwards

Smiling
I go downwards
Skiiing into a crash zone
Don't look at me like I'm sad
I throttle and dance as I lose balance and head into a certain...

Death
Wish me no good luck
I want not what I want
I smile as if I understand a secret joke
Happiness is freedom to die.

>>10821705
>tfw even MLP fanfic is autistically stuck on 300 words of nothing happens.

Don't these imaginary creatures from little girls cartoons have adventures or something?

>>10821910
i dont know man
death is an age-old theme and has been written about a million ways
your poem doesn't have enough meat, so to speak, to come into effect. it feels shallow
the repetition doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose
there's no melody to the poem
i dont like it, sorry

>>10821909
Wenn die Welt ins müde Auge tritt,
Kaleidoskopverzerrt
in wilden Fächern jedem Sinn entbehrt,
sich nicht legen will, mit
blinder Kraft den Blick an die Laternen wirft,
deren Licht nach oben fließt;
die unverstandene Welt,
dann wieder aus dem Auge schießt,
als gegähnte Träne – tiefgeschürft –
nicht einmal auf den Boden fällt, sofort verschwindet:
Du bist es nicht, der dann nach Hause findet.

>>10822209
Eyy no problem man, thanks for the critique.

>>10822216
>>10821909
Wenn ein Finger etwas greift,
folgt der Nächste, dann aufgeregt ein Dritter,
und bevor ein kalter Geist darin seziert, totbitter,
haben Fünf die ganze blinde Welt durchstreift.

Auf der Nase vieler tausend Farben Glimmer;
mit den Händen hochgeworfenes Licht,
das am Auge, wie der Tod am kleinen Finger
schüchtern einzeln Strahl für Strahl zerbricht.

Kann man ein Selbst denn nur vergessen
wenn da noch gar keins ist?

ok inhaltlich ist schwer zu critiquen, weil ich ehrlich gesagt kp hab was manche Lines bedeuten sollen (vllt n Titel dazugeben, oder so) z.B.
>in wilden Fächern
meist du in Fächern,ie wie das Fach (wobei ich nicht weiß wie ein Fach wild seien kann) oder; im Fächern,ie das Fächern mit dem Fächer?
oder
>der Tod am kleinen Finger
zerbricht der Tod am kleinen Finger oder 'hängt' der Tod am kleinen Finger und zerbricht? etc.
Aber ich versuch trotzdem mal wenigstens den Rhytmus zu fixen (wenn du schon so esoterisch seien willst, sollt es wenigstens smooth klingen). Hier mal ein paar Verbesserung, wie es, zumindest in meinen Ohren, etwas besser klingt (grain of salt dies das)
>>10822216
Wenn (nachts) die Welt ins müde Auge tritt,
Kaleidoskopverzerrt
in wildem Fächern jedem Sinn entbehrt,
sich nicht legen will (und) mit
blinder Kraft den Blick an die Laternen wirft,
deren Licht nach oben fließt;
(^die lines funzen nicht wirklich für mich)
die unverstandene Welt, (? zu abrupt vllt in den Lines davor ne stärkere Zäsur)
dann wieder aus dem Auge schießt,
als gegähnte Träne – tiefgeschürft –
nicht einmal auf den Boden fällt, sofort verschwindet:
Du bist es nicht, der dann nach Hause findet.

freestyler:
Wenn nachts die Welt ins müde Auge tritt,
Kaleidoskopverzerrt
in wildem Fächern jedem Sinn entbehrt,
sich nicht legen will und mit
dem blinden Blick hoch zu Laternen fällt
von denen Licht sich himmelwärts ergießt;
in jene unverstandene Welt,
die wieder aus dem Auge fließt;
gegähnte Träne – tiefgeschürft –
nichtmals den Boden netzt, sondern sofort verschwindet:
Du bist es nicht, der dann nach Hause findet.

(wahrscheinlich alles sinnmäßig abgefuckt, aber nur so vom rhytmus her dies das)

>>10786449
make his mom dead, a specter of is own creation, a projection of himself, his unconcious fears and shortcomings manifested through what he thinks she is like, though he cant even remember because she was so estranged from her due to his lifestyle

>>10794630
>cyber-cultural anthropology as the study of existing data structures mapped onto psycho-analytic topology; machines can't stop humans can't stop 2) third order simulacra as the base of other simulacra; becoming the map; can't be without being 3) vectors of capital; jungle death in the west 4) in the belly of the machine that is bleeding to death; darkening touch densities bleed out into the reterritorialization of noumomenous war-machines 5) schizoid break only way to resist 6) schizoid break only way to resist 7) becoming undone, unraveled; can't kill a person, can't kill your former self, there are no people 8) flatten out the immanance, become to accelerate, kabbalah number symbols in the mind of the machines 9) there is no escape 10) rhizomal archetecture of the mind, desire to desire-classifications, micro fascism 11) no escape

Nick?

A satire of houellebecq and french depressionism. There will be a former infantryman who lives on disability and sells his pills to get by, is addicted to pornography so much so that he's conditioned himself to be aroused by just the light of his LED screen coming on but cannot find himself able to nut from normal pornography. He drinks and reads philosophy but gains no insights in how to live a better life, how to make himself whole, to consciously facilitate the individuation process, to become self actualized and instead philosophy leads him to self sabotage. Eventually he signs up for government experimentation via the dark web, where he can no longer distinguish between reality and a simulation created by scientists. instead of questioning and trying to better himself in this fictitious world designed to help veterans with ptsd, he reverts to his old self, despondent and alone because he is not hardwired to better himself, he is predestined to be a loser. there will be a twist in the end I don't want to spoil. A lot of subtle violence

>>10822575
make his mom dead, a specter of is own creation, a projection of himself, his unconcious fears and shortcomings manifested through what he thinks she is like, though he cant even remember because she was so estranged from her due to his lifestyle

>>10822575
Your precis is fine. If you can animate an actual narrative, develop the character, put him in settings where things happen that develop the emerging themes of French depressionism, keep it moving and interesting, rather than spending hundreds of words at a time describing his thought process, then you might have something. Continental One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest with interwebz. Possible.

I've been on and off this pet-project of mine.
Yes, it's technically a Dwarf Fortress fanfiction
Also, I'm not a native english speaker

https://pastebin.com/vKfGUBhq

>>10822597

>>10818916
I figured 40k wouldn't be popular on here, but I'm not looking for comments on how well it fits into the universe.
I was actually thinking if I should annotate it, but I'm pretty sure all the lore specific terms are quite self explanatory in context. Like the Chimera is obviously an APC, the Leman Russ is obviously some kind of tank, you don't need any knowledge of 40k to understand in what context the Emperor or the laspistol are used for instance. Maybe the only unclear thing is the Marauder, it's not really obvious that it's an aircraft. But again it's evident from the context that it's some kind of vehicle. But maybe I'm biased and the terminology is only clear to me because I have always loved reading military stuff so the context is far easier to understand for me.
Anyway, as I've said, my main concern isn't the story itself (though everyone said it actually does draw you in and that it's immersive, so confirmation/critique of that would be nice), but rather my writing style.
And just to sperg out a little, 40k is a sci-fi wargame. Everything else is a direct result of that setting - ie the movie had no effect on the books, they are all "standalone". And personally I just love the lore and books, I've never even seen how the wargame looks in person, let alone play it.

Can I get a grammar check, which one of these is best?

>The struggle will make you strong, can turn a bird to a Phoenix

>The struggle can make you strong, and turn a bird to a Phoenix

>The struggle can make you strong, will turn a bird to a Phoenix

>>10807536
Your writing was pretty good. It had sort of a dry humor to it which I sort of like. You have some rich imagery in there, but the story needs a bit of work. It feels entirely built around worldbuilding; there's not really much of a plot to this story. Lastly, don't whine just to get your story critiqued.

What is the market for this stuff? Are there just web fora where people post fanfic and judge each other? Like the MLP guy?

>>10822862
Yeoman. Functional. Your guy travels to an inn, finds a special group engaged in some kind of intrigue, qualifies himself to join, and signs a contract without reading it. Strongly suggesting an internal dispute to come when the terms are enforced against him and he protests. At least it's not 500 words of internal monologue. I'm not strong on fantasy adventure, and couldn't tell you what Dwarf Fortress is without looking it up.
I presume that it is either a game or some other narrative form franchise. What is its "mood?" Because that is what characterizes ad-fan as far as I can tell.

"By waning sunlight of a summer day"
"As the shadows grew long at summer evening"
"By the dying light of a setting summer sun"
"In the long shadows of spreading summer evening darkness"
"As the sun drowned in the forest horizon"

In other words, tell me how I feel about it. "Happy jangling" coins. Should they be? Is this a heroic enterprise, or a military campaign? Is anybody gonna die or be imperiled so? Does our protag feel suspicious? Proud? Any trepidation? Is this Good Versus Evil, or some provincial heist? I can't tell what is at stake. I made it through and found myself un-offended except for "plethora." A pile of coins will suffice. Add some feeling, just don't hit me on the head. And be consistent.

>>10823491
Serviceable. If dense. This appears to be a summary of the strategic conditions of an ongoing battle between, uh, factions. A character serves as the "camera" reporting the various entirely visual details which are presumed to have some great import to the ultimate fate of whatever is at stake. The amount of time the char is stationary and supine while all this lethality takes place presumably within feet or inches of his person suggests the storm troopers can't shoot phenomenon. Heroes in elevated narratives, in my limited experience, are typically beset by unusually difficult trials and tribulations. Is there something that could interrupt this newsreel so he can do something heroic in between reports of the status of them or the position of those? Like maybe taking some cover? You have him standing on the gun platform thingy then getting knocked out, but it's all in flashback and backwards instead of in-line. Why?

"One moment he was manning the heavy bolter, venting his rage at their failure and the denial of air support by ineffectively shooting at the pursuing Marauders, when Hammond sharply turned the vehicle. The next moment, Brock was thrown out of the gunners stand - he was flying through the air. He slammed into a pile of rubble, the sudden arrest of momentum violently expelling all air out of his lungs and momentarily knocking him unconscious. The first thing he noticed when he came to his senses was his Chimera. It was stationary...etc."

Then another thing happened, then another. Like in a story.

>>10823663
This isn't even a matter of grammar. "Can" and "will" have completely different meanings, so the three sentences are saying completely different things. And none of them are particularly good sentences.

>>10823961
Thanks for the reply, I understand that they aren't perfect but out of the three which one is least wrong? I think the top one makes the most sense

>>10794609
Some nice imagery in here. A bit of brevity goes a long way in making your descriptions strike the reader. "The gravestones were scrubbed by the winds and illegible" is great for instance. I think that the first paragraph is a bit clunky, gets weighed down by the descriptions and doesn't flow so nicely. Pacing is important, you can convey the tone of the scene with the rhythm of your words.

With "to keep us out of the broad expanses of the sky" you don''t need to say broad expanses really, for instance. Also you lost me when you brought up an opera house.

>>10796116
I liked it. Impressive that you could keep the sentences long and have them still be readable. "He was kicked out with brooms..." sentence could be improved.

>>10823960
Thanks for the feedback so far.

Dwarf fortress is a "simulator" game that procedurally creates a whole world with deities, demons and civilizations. The player manages a settlement, it's supplies and construction in fortress mode or plays an adventurer in adventure mode.
Basically, i just took the preset names and people and plants and monsters and used them to fill my world quick and dirty with a pretty standard fantasy world. Also, the community is filled with tales of epic events within the game, due to its procedural nature, so that helps coming up with tales and stories.

>mood

I was looking into making him a forward-looking character. not necessarily a "mysterious past" but certainly someone not willing to indulge in memories. It's mainly about not coming to a rest, always on move, and when he finally settles, the world won't leave him alone. With other people's perspective spliced in. Not a GoT "from any one's perspective" but more a "side characters" type of thing. To not give the impression Bomrek's view on the world is the only one (or that he is immortal by grace of main character).
On the outside it revolves 1/2 around travel and 1/2 holding on to what they still have, having to deal with other folks, towns and heritages in a sort of "we're out here in the boonies so we'll have to get along and trade fairly"-deal
I'm not sure about my use of words, especially adjectives. before posting I erased like 20 adjectives out and still felt like it was too many.

I also have a problem with fleshing out long travels. I'm reading Stephen king's Dark Tower series currently, which is giving me a lot of input on that, but I still don't know when to summarize a week in just a paragraph and when to flesh out conversations

A poem.

Life is gay.
But I don't care.
I forgot
my underwear.

>>10819233
Is this a good sentence written within a poem?