/lit/ - Literature

https://pastebin.com/B9gS1cc6

>>10946725
Memories lose detail every time you think of them
Intelligent sobriques expand the scope of understanding while diminishing returns
Fail to capture
And enrapture
The majesty that a picture brings

We stare at books like jigsaw pieces
Whose picture dies more and more
A faded reminder of self immolation
Whose sparks are dying no re-lighting
called for in lonesome designs plead

I remember you
Your voice has no sound
Your face no features
The barest of gestures create the most robust of meanings
Extrapolation from an incomplete list
Every part of you fades from my mind

Grief is liquid, it flows into moments where cracks apear
Seeping slowly
A gray ink which bleeds through covers and bindings
As threads and adhesives melt and tear
A cold burn provides the motive
Skin red and raw but for the lack of blood

A rash left alone will heal
A rash scratched laughs at your pathetic attempts
And spreads
So as I contemplate this grief
Kept alive for study
An autopsy of emotion
Single minded simulations singing set symphonies soullessly

It spreads.
It burns
And but for the lack of blood
I would feel it
_______________
New to /lit/ and poetry so be postwarned.

>>10946776
>Intelligent sobriques expand the scope of understanding while diminishing returns
I don't like this line but I can't explain why. It's like I've been attacked.

>>10946776
First of all, subject matter-wise, I really liked it. I loved the metaphors and smilies you used. As for flow, I thought it was pretty good as well, but don't take my word for it. (there's always room for improvement somewhere, somehow)

All and all, I really enjoyed it. Keep up the good work man

How did things get so out of hand? I honestly have no idea, so now I’m here, writing all of this out, trying to make sense of thirty dead parakeets in the back seat of a totaled 1993 Dodge Grand Caravan and a sock half full of cocaine. If I’m being honest, I have full recollection of the events that had transpired, but I don’t entirely understand why they went the way they went, or why I chose to make the choices I made. It’s as if I had been entirely intoxicated throughout the entire course of this part of my life. Or maybe I was under the control of some sort of Cartesian demon that wanted to see me suffer. Nonetheless, for the sake of simplicity, we’ll just say I don’t remember a goddamn thing, and I’m here writing everything down, so that I can retrace my steps. So then where did all of this begin?
I.
Insanity is an interesting thing. I’m an authority on this, not because my credentials have anything to do with the academic field of psychology, but rather because I myself am a functional insane person. So I guess my credentials somewhat relate to the actual field of psychology, but, you see, there’s theory and then there’s practice. If anything, my credentials have to do with the practice of psychology, but rather than being in practice, I just happen to be in a professional match against Sugar Ray Robinson. Beyond all digressions, all of this started with my insanity. You see, insanity isn’t something that just hits you in the face one day, but rather it is a series of products, a cascade of effects, if you will, that happen to fall on your shoulder, as a feather does on a windy day. As the feathers continue to pile up, you keep telling yourself that there’s nothing there. In fact, you keep trying to brush it off, while at the same time telling yourself that there’s nothing to brush off! It’s absolutely incredible! Still, as the feathers pile up, you eventually become weighed down to such an extent, that you succumb to crawling. Then one day you look to your left and you see nothing more than an impermeable wall of white. Then you panic and look to your right, only to see the same thing. It’s at that very moment in time, you realize that you’re only able to see what’s in front of you and at that very same moment in time you realize that you’re not insane, but rather different. Then one day you fuck up so colossally, that you realize you’re not only insane, but also retarded.onetheless, I would have to say that everything started in August, when the feathers started to noticeably weigh me down. Coming back from summer, even my friends noticed that I wasn’t the same person. Even they began to notice the feathers starting to pile up, but because either they weren’t used to seeing feathers, they didn’t say a thing, or they themselves were just like me and didn’t say anything because they were in the same state of denial.

>>10946835
Thanks man, I appreciate it.

plz i need someone to tell me if i should burn my keyboard

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 clerk 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 any prune would do 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?”

>>10946839
I typically don’t care for this type of writing. Though the cocaine, birds, and van seem a bit wacky, if not cliche, I really enjoyed this piece. Your character is believable - I want to hear his story.

>>10947035

https://pastebin.com/B9gS1cc6


here's the pastebin to the rest of it. ofc it's not finished yet, but everythinng I have is up there

https://pastebin.com/k01gtjNv

>>10947033
Don't burn your keyboard anon. I enjoyed it, but I'd like it to be a bit snappier. I'd suggest dropping some of your monologue to move the story along, as this feels like action oriented writing.

>>10947117
thx.

i enjoyed yours as well, although i felt it was a bit overwrought, especially the final sentence. it was still good and made me feel like i was there. is that it or is it part of something larger?

>>10947142
Thanks for the feedback. It was just a one off thing. Regardless, the most important thing is to just keep writing!

Let's not be the ones outside
Looking at the world go by saw you standing all alone
Wasted time has gone for good
Play no more, it's understood
Come to the twilight zone, let me feel your secret hand
Like a feather on the sand. Only made of gold
You can make me feel a king
And surrender everything. A fire can't control
Hold me in your arms again
Strangers down a lonely lane
We can still survive, driftwood on the stream of life
Hold me in your arms again
Let me touch your velvet skin
No more lonely nights on the way of no return
Play me the bolero
See your mystery in your eyes
And the emotion in your lies
I feel the magic in your touch
'Cause the voiting is too much

>>10947501
I love the way you're using rhyming to disrupt the rhythm. It made me think a little harder on my first read. Your imagry however could use some work. Add one or two more adjectives and you've got gold.

https://pastebin.com/bsyAsEwG
I'm the guy who did the poem about memory BTW.

>>10946725

eat me, seat me, hit me with a spoon
cry me chunks of yogurt
spin around the moon
if you see that cow there
milk it mighty soon
you never know you might need
billions of microscopic bacteria to aid in digestion

The backyard sank beneath the long weeds of the wet season. A dark grey sky settled right down low. The pool was murky; someone left the gate open. I ran across the corrugated roof and leapt sinking into the water. An old bike sat out under the rain along the quiet side of the house. Grass grew from the dirt beneath the bricks and came up through its spokes. And rain ran down the length of thick hanging branches and fell in different broken streams that disturbed the flooded soil. I stood under the water and let the chlorine rinse out of my hair, pulled back and drank all the bits of bark and freshness and the ants running with it.

I’m coughing up blood on the floorboards;
like it’s my very own canvas.
A collection of violent memories and childhood antics.
As my intestines spill my secrets unveil;
a troubled past and a rotting will.


Is this decent or just emo be honest.

I like writing poetry, I have no intend to sell it or distribute it besides just here. If someone found my poetry book I'd probably anonhero. Here's one, it's writen as a ABA CDC then a couplet GG.
Girl of my dreams, wishing to see tomorrow
We are running thin on encounters
Wanting to steal past lives in order to borrow
And make up for small passing-by
Quick "hi"'s like doves
Scared by hawks ever circling skies
Wishing we could be together as one
Is a lie told by the heart
As it leads you toward the sun
For every hour spent in thought
Helps locate, desires that need be sought

>>10946734
I've seen this three times now and the praise of the afflicted has lulled you into laziness. Here is a before and after of what you should do to it:

This girl, in fact, only had a decent looking face going for her, yet, for some reason, since the begging of that jagged year, I had stared at her. As to why my eyes were drawn to her, and not a better looking girl, I think it was because she was the best looking girl in a class full of ugly strangers. Yet beyond her looks, she, for some odd reason, had mystified me that year; she had mystified me to such heights, that she had even begun to enter my dreams. One night, I saw her round, delicate face turn towards me, so that she could glaze my heart with her almond eyed stare. After doing such, she let out a smile saturated with crooked teeth and at that instant her body dropped and began to squirm. She had just been lynched. Looking back at it, I should’ve taken this dream as an augury for trouble, but the foolishness of my youth, allowed my heart to be taken over by her looks, forcing me to take this dream as a good omen. Yet, although I saw it as such, for the remained of that year, I never actually tried acting upon this dream.

This girl only had a decent looking face yet, since the beg/in/ing of that jagged year, I had stared at her. I think it was because she was the best looking girl in a class full of ugly strangers. She, for some odd reason, had mystified me to such heights that she had even begun to enter my dreams. One night, I saw her round, delicate face turn towards me, so that she could glaze my heart with her almond eyed stare. She let out a smile saturated with crooked teeth and at that instant her body dropped and began to squirm. She had just been lynched. Looking back at it, I should’ve taken this dream as an augury for trouble, but the foolishness of my youth allowed my heart to be taken over by her looks, forcing me to take this dream as a good omen. Yet for the remaind/er/ of that year, I never actually tried acting upon this dream.

Because: the repetitions are accretive, but not the way you think. They add up to a viscous resistance that a willing and un-afflicted reader, a market reader, has to struggle through to get forward to the little bits of insane-in-an-interesting-way stuff that is peppered among the viscous resistance. Look again - what you are trying to say is "this girl offered a strange compulsion and I dreamed her violent death." So let the forward momentum carry the crazy. Let the snowball accrete down the hill getting bigger as it goes. There is no style-murdering sin attached to filtering the gunk out of drafty prose. Gogol, Nabokov, and Kesey would all agree with me.

>>10946725
https://pastebin.com/2gd2STUd

>>10947033
Imagine I'm an agent reading this as a submission I am to represent for sale to, somewhere. I have to rep this. Is what you hypothetically want.

What the hypothetical me wants to know is: what distinguishes this as a work of fiction, from what might otherwise be construed as a miscathected re-telling of a personal frustration suffered by its author? Because within the words given, what we have offers no glimpse of the "humane" or "belletristic" reason for its existence. Now, maybe there is more that has that. Maybe the petty frustration of the narrator leads him to commit some life-altering act of violence which takes him on a journey of contrition and redemption. Maybe the hapless clerk learns something about basic empathy and they become an unexpected Odd Couple who team up to invent to the new Co-op retail experience of the 21st century. But whatever that fictive something is that raises it above customer service complaint, it ain't in there. Yet.

>>10946725
A ditty I made based on a painting by some artist over on /tg/:

>What shall we do with the queasy dragonborn
>He burned our camp, all 'cause of bad corn
>Then sat with himself, and his lie was born
>Early in the mornin'

>He woke us up, said "'twas the forsworn"
>Our mundane selves, with pure rage were torn
>While our higher selves threw him looks of scorn
>Early in the mornin'

>Oy vey, our torches enkindled
>Oy vey, our blades whistled
>Oy vey, the rogue shambled

>Those pesky pyros, we hunted down
>Their camp we reduced to a ghost town
>While the dragonborn's pants slowly turned brown
>Early in the mornin'

>Eventually he couldn't keep the truth no more
>He ran away, left a note that bore
>The full story, and a roasted boar
>Early in the mornin'

>Hoo-ray, we feasted in silence
>Hoo-ray, we felt ambivalence
>Hoo-ray, it looked like a seance
>Early in the mornin'

>What he didn't count on was our persistence
>We tracked him down through massive distance
>Until we found him, and here's the piece de resistance:
>Earlier this mornin'!

>He joined a pirate crew, put on a disguise
>Dressed up like Davy Jones, thought he's so wise
>But he couldn't fool our honed eyes
>Earlier this mornin'

>Yippee ki-yay, how he tried to run
>Yippee ki-yay, 'twas so much fun
>Yippee ki-yay, guess who's a monk son!
>Earlier this mornin'

>So now, we're forcing him to play a bandoneon
>Sing his tale to all, and as a warnin'
>Stuck a bottle in his cheeks for no reason
>Earlier this mornin'

Be kind, I'm just a guy who enjoys rhymes. I barely understand syllables

>>10950217
>>Oy vey, our torches enkindled
>>Oy vey, our blades whistled
>>Oy vey, the rogue shambled
>Early in the mornin'

Forgot that part

>>10950101
Try this on:

As it got closer, its face acquired features, a cruel face with a flat, squashed nose, tusked mouth, and eyes that were alight with cruelty and cunning; a dangerous combination.

As it got closer, its face acquired features, a flat, squashed nose, tusked mouth, and eyes that were alight with cruelty and cunning.

"Cruelty" is not erased. It's right there. And the "dangerous combination" is still there too. It just doesn't pop through the page's fourth wall and bonk you on the nose.

It was flanked by more figures, all standing still, content to spectate.

It was flanked by more figures, all content to spectate.

"Turning around, he saw one of his compatriots on the ground, dead, with an arrow sticking out of their neck."

Multiple overlapping stuff in this one. "Turning around" is a hung participle - "he" turning around or "compatriot" turning around. Also "he" and "his" are confused between victim and perp because the pronouns have to reach back to the previous sentence for referents, and that sentence also double-taps "he" between the two chars, so the confusion is compounding as we go.

>He turned and saw one of the bandit's compatriots on the ground, dead, with an arrow sticking out of [his or its] neck.

It's like this the whole way through. Cluttered.

>>10950259
Okay, thanks. I'll try to work on those referents

>>10949113
I think this has a lot of potential. I would bust out a thesaurus, and replace a few of the more common words to make it sound a little more artful. The emotion and imagery is there

Most of what I write is some kind of free form poetry I guess. Jibberish. I feel like this wants to be lyrics, though

Forever and never. Never and forever. Love turns away, as disdain cradles, and spite fills in every empty space, between me and you, between me and this, in the absence if bliss, in the absence of a kiss. Fleeing in the fog of dawn, under the weight of a bourbon blanket, which you spread across us both.
You fled in the darkness as you fled in the dawn. You fled in the darkness as you fled in the dawn.
The indigo sky is so much bigger than the lavender of daybreak. Morning brings into sharp focus what night, and dreams bleed into gorgeous chaos.
My chest, split open, sits quietly among bland and uninteresting sundries.
Gods ultimate punishment isn't casting one below, it's returning the sacrifice. It's being spit back into the world of the living, heaving and spitting, gulping breath greedily into a body you surrendered, and are now burdened with.
It's all on the table now.

>>10946725

>>10950111
sorry i shouldve explained. its the start of a short story called a conversation with the manager, because people are always asking to talk to a manager. he just talks with the manager, it gets more deviant as their conversation goes on, tension builds, the store closes and they go home

>>10946725
His legs by the pond stood and rotted
while his heart punched it, and the clock, somewhere far|
in a room, with it's hands beat death into silence

>>10951125
Something some MFA prof said was good enough for wherever. You disregarded his or her advice to put the opening graph in the 2:2 position, and that remains a bad call on your part. Otherwise, fine, we start in the middle (except for the misplaced paean to Saab), we have a character who thinks things, there is a topical hook, and something strange starts to happen which develops a mystery: what is really happening to Calvin.

Put a question mark next to "visceral," and "ephemerally," to reconsider during a moment of reflection about who the narrator is; and think about the 3-dimensional capability of a "pool" on a "forehead."

Better than undergrad workshop. Proceed.

>>10951125
Except for the misplaced “was,” this is very good. Very very good. Get off lit good.

For weeks now we had been texting each other on a fairly regular basis, and though I had been enjoying the clear air, dejection soon crept into the atmosphere and resumed choking me. Although the frequency of our texting was something I was content with, our messages were very shallow; with messages like those, I knew that finding an opportunity to introduce the grand illusion to her would be rare. If I wanted to ensure my success, I knew that I needed to change that. Sadly, I hadn’t the faintest idea of how I could do such a thing, and to make matters worse, there weren’t many people which I could go to for help. Now some of you may be asking why the case was such. Well the thing is, I wasn’t entirely truthful when I told you why I didn’t want anyone to know about me and her. The real reason why I didn’t want anyone to know was because I didn’t want to jeopardize my image.
You see, to the people who were useful to me in that school, I was perceived as an almost incorruptible being, who was fearsomely incorrigible in his ways. I was never known to hunt, and because of that, I was somewhat respected. Yet above that, I was never known to be helpless. If I were to have made it known how desolate I felt at that point in time, I would have most certainly tarnished my reputation, and thus lost any leverage I had held over those people. Yet when I begin to think logically about it, it was most likely my hubris that brought people to respect me, and it was because of my hubris that I didn’t want to show any signs of weakness.
Nonetheless, at that point of the hunt I had become so helpless that I knew I needed to ask someone for advice, and so for hours I thought of who to ask. After these odd hours of deliberation, I decided that it would be best if I sought the counsel of one of my most trusted friends: Darren. Darren would have never seen my problem as a point of weakness, for he was not only my friend, but was also someone whose pure-heartedness reached such heights, that it never ceased to move my heart to tears. Yet, I didn’t seek his counsel solely based upon his good intentions, but also because of his wisdom. You see, Darren was someone whose wisdom far surpassed that of anyone else I knew and because of that, he would never look down upon me for desiring help, for as a father sentimentalizes his son, so would he his pupil.
Nonetheless, after those odd hours of deliberation, I approached Darren as he was sitting in the back of the biology lab, with his trademark red hoodie. He’d had that hoodie for years, yet whenever he wore it, he wore it as if it was the first time, and because of that, his noble hoodie had always radiated a brilliant red hue. As I was timidly approaching him, he pulled out a stool, and gave me a smile. “Hey what’s going on dude?” he spoke with the warm eloquence of a man who cherished his children. ‘Nothing much man,” I said having felt quite at ease with his welcoming words...

>>10946725
BUMp

>>10950111
This is a prose thread

Everything was fine, he thought. It was all still, serene, and eternal. It was all such a perfect, beautiful balance. People always seem to realize that fact too late in their lives. Often times it's on their deathbeds or it's forgotten in some stupor of drunkedness or tiredness that hits you at two in the morning. As his car careened across the barrier at 80 mph he was trying to figure it out. His car momentarily flew into the air before landing and meeting one of it's metallic bretheren. The collision instantly caved in the other car, sending Rich's rolling along the free way before it stopped. Rich was still trying to figure it all out. He felt the warmth draining from his fingers, his toes slowly tingling and becoming numb. Each second started to slow down, turning into lifetimes before it froze completely. It would be only minutes before the cops arrived to the monstrosity of metal that looked increasingly artistic in it's display. People had gathered around it at that point, looking to it as some sort of grand attraction; a couple tried to help, but soon gave up the endeavor. A woman stood there, momentarily forgetting completely the existance of her two young kids. They in turn simply stared, unable to comprehend what they saw. Sirens blared in the distance, their sound echoing down the streets, three distinct patterns of sound makings its way to the site.
'Jesus christ, what happened here?' A man came from out of a nearby building 50 feet away.
'Christ if I know. Probably some kid on his phone,'
'Any survivors?'
'Supposedely the car that flipped the barrier is had a survivor.'
'Jesus Christ...'
They would all forget this later tonight. They would go home, maybe a few would feel some sort of pain for a few days, but it would fade and it would be as good as it always had.
Life continued.

Maybe life was like a pun, lost in the translation of some long forgotten language or misunderstood under cultural significance beyond his knowledge. Maybe it had no real meaning at all or maybe the joke was just never that funny. Whatever it was or could be, it went over his head

>>10946725
And fifty men started to masturbate. You could hear the squelching as the ones with foreskins smothered the glands of the peni. Abigail acted her best, moaning and looking at the men with the passion of a Christ. One man had already came, squirting all his semen down the back of her throat. It tasted smooth as it slid down her tonsils. Two more men, aroused at the idea of their white liquid swirling in her mouth, came at the exact same time. They sighed with the relief of a thousand suns. Abigail smiled and touched two men, stroking their shafts like she was skiing. Abigail knew that she had power over these men and it aroused her. Her vagina was flowing with the power of Niagra falls.

>>10953049
>relief of a thousand suns
Change your metaphors. Suns have nothing to do with relief

>>10953049
>>10953058
How about
>relief of a thousand sons

Jessie entered the room with an aura of panic surrounding him. Questions were flung at Franz, completely ignoring the dwarf in the room. Franz couldn’t understand anything Jessie was saying. The man was in a blur of panic and every word that stumbled out of his mouth was like the digestive tract of a thesaurus. Unnerved, man. Discombobulated. Unhinged. Synthetic. Research. Chems. Enzymatic. Perplexion. Affinity. Infinity. Trynd looked completely unnerved himself and quietly tapped away at his keyboard while the drugged loonacy played out in front of him. Franz was fascinated though, his entire mind taken aback by this verbal pukage. He kept asking what? What? Jessie, what? But the words kept flowing...partiality. Plurality. Masculinity. Anarchism. Molecular synthesis. A common theme was emerging and while Franz was attempting to make sense of Jessie his own mind was swirling in circles down into his legs like a toilet bowl flushing away shit. His mind was becoming discombobulated, fried, was this the first floor? Second? Third? Fourth? Who am I? What is this? The room became dizzying and the previously relaxed mood in the room was replaced by a frightened paranoia. Franz took Jessie by the arm and fled into his dorm room. They were greeted by a poster of Johnny Depp in his pirate regalia toasting to the viewer a jar of rum. A shriek from Jessie followed and a punch into poor Jack Sparrow’s face, through the poster, into the drywall. The anxiety was enveloping all train of thought through poor Franz’s mind. Jess with his arm through the wall, crying out towards Franz who couldn’t grasp any sense of the situation. Flooded with bygone guilt from every and all corners of his past. Shaking and tremors. Outbursts of energy uncontrollable. He ran from the room. He ran from the dorm. He ran from it all. Out into the campus lands, of moorish red and yellow dotting all concrete surfaces. Paths guided by the streetlight bulbs, students and passerbys seemingly staring into Franz’s soul even without a glance his way. The tremors moving his arms and hands around like Lou Gehrig, his every move an impulse of anxiety. His drug-dosed eyes open with anguish and nervousness. Bad trip. Bad trip. Bad trip. Though not too unfamiliar, a psychedelic twist on the all-too-familiar primordial panic. Lucy? Where are you? This isn’t love! Trapped in an organic body, the overwhelming dread consumes Franz -- a feeling that no mentally-healthy man ever could comprehend, a dread trapped, no way out. No substance. Where is Mary Jane? I need her. Why do I need? God-damn research chemical!

>>10953061
Much better

Buddhism is gay,
That's what the smarter goys
would always say to me.

The rabbis of yesteryear still glare at Shelia
"she has a shmeckel.. it's only for boys"
they enrage me like a bull over this.
The joys of her half hairy toy- phallusphilia,
I snuck in late last night
to give Schlomo Gould his second Bris.

I was the big nosed Bobbit
I wrangled and ran
The Master of the Torahs sea Urchin in hand.
Like a gelato in heat,
Holy his bled.

I finally understand now lessons from before.
That trap porn causes cocklust galore.

Note: Picture seemed oddly relevant.

>>10953061
Uhhhhhhhhhhh, sure man

>>10953049
Good use of metaphors,
How does cum taste smooth?
Wouldn't she be gripping their shafts?
,buuuut it gave an erection so nice job.

>>10953254
>Was pacing
Would sound better "paced" considering you started the sentence with "as"
>Slowly the cigarette (...)
I think slowly sounds superfluous here, it's more punchy without it. Also consider swapping "The" with "His" but either one works
>After the em dash.
I'm not feeling it there. Consider making it a new sentence. It'll make the end of that sentence sound better too since you won't be shoehorned into the "comma followed by present perfect progressive tense" rigmarole.
>Popped
This is just preference, but I don't like that work. I think "slipped" would sound better.
>Sentence starting with "Behind"
This one's structure is off. Consider describing the woman's position in the room /after/ you've established the woman. That sort of impersonal order feels odd applied on a human, and the focus of the sentence should be her, not her position in the room.
>She held in her mouth (...)
I'd start the sentence with either an action that ends up implying the cigarette holder, or if you're set on describing the object before the action, something like "pressed between her lips" Which gives an added bonus of being able to describe the maiden's lips. Slender, supple? Also
>"Shiny"
Consider, "lacquered." It paints a more vivid image.
>She sat patiently (...)
You've done a good job of implying her demeanor here.
>As he bounced nervously (...)
Too wordy considering you've already described his movement beforehand. Shorten it to simply "paced nervously" or "paced back and forth nervously" if you must.
>Gunter began, pausing (...)
You could replace that whole sentence with just, "Pausing to drag his cigarette."
>Once more focused on the ground
When was it established he had been focused on the ground for the first time?
>He turned again towards (...)
Maybe "Again, he turned towards"? Again this one is mostly preference.
>The smoke that hung
I'd just make that "lingering smoke" readers will be able to assume it's inside the room.
>At a last
Is this a typo?
>Who stared at his wife
Consider replacing with, who was staring. Again, readers will be able to assume what he's staring at.
>Suddenly
I hate this word in general, especially at the start of the sentence. Honestly, prefacing the words with "suddenly" ends up making the action feel anything but sudden. Consider just "Then came a knock" or any other alternative.
>smushed its fiercely burning head
Touching on purple prose. It's not something important enough to warrant personification in my opinion. Consider simply "And smushed it into the ashes (...)"

All in all, it was pretty good. You sound like the detail-oriented type, very cut and dry, which fits this type of theme, but you might benefit from some flighty similes here and there to break it once in a while. Scene is vivid, easy to imagine the personalities and affluence of the characters. Your prose wasn't abhorrent, and is good enough to carry any ideas you might have without ruining them.
>>10953258
Too lazy to crit this too.

the force of natures, wind, air, eartth, dirt, and me.
Thats right, com e on hyea!
what s that?
aha, ahava, no
See ya bingo! fool! goobye! Sa!
All for me, offer me what? whata ya some kinda
Im goin home apter this, oh no, im gon home
AGHhhhhh this is bullsit what im gonna do?
aass, hate you
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII hAaaatE YOOOOOOO
bich
deadd bich dead yor dead shut up bich
no GOd motherfuck
wrong guy bich it?
AhHH god godda thing k
God.
ahhhh
stupit please, hate
please fuckin

ha, imma force a nature

I saw them dancing all together in that room downstairs, over the carpet spinning silly, laughing. I remember that the children were with them at their knees, pulling on fingers and getting spun and lifted and adored. The camera flashed at the perfect second when they were hung in motion for capture. I saw that she was young and smiling, her blonde hair brightly against her vivid skin, and she was holding his curls in the corners of her mouth and eating at his ear, trapping him against her chest where he was laughing, pushing, caught in ticklish agony. There was life about. A birthday party. It breathed through screen and sliding doors. All the sounds went resoundly along the walls that kept them there together, of deep brown laminate, a fake wooden texture to say that this was home. And the moment bled slowly through the windows where outside it was night; bleeding all the yellow light that was warm inside house. Faces danced for the span of seconds past the glass panes hung on the darkness. Outside the air conditioner hummed in the empty echo space of the carport, long rhythmic whines came down to a tick and blared up again with a start when the temperature evaporated in the panting, shouting talk of them. It was moving, moving, time was moving along; and life began to saunter. So that she had a second to duck upstairs and the house exhaled when she opened the sliding door. I saw that the women were sitting behind the old bar they had, letting her carefully crawl along it as long she agreed to finally sit still. And outside it was hard not to follow, so he went out to take a piss in the garden with a cigarette in his mouth, and the boy was next to him doing the same. His father’s penis was much bigger, the moon flowed in their streams. Over the fence the cane seemed ready for harvest, the long strands of grass came so close to the yard that they nearly hung over. I said that night that I was never sure of where I was. I could not find the back of my skull. The cane was so tall, and the fence and the palms trees too, casting long shadows in the garden. I asked him to tell me that when we died we could all be together. He said Mate, we are all here right now. But Dad what if I’m just dreaming that we’re alive? You’ll see mate, we all have to die, but not for a long time yet.

>>10946839
>How did things get so out of hand? I honestly have no idea, so now I’m here, writing all of this out, trying to make sense of thirty dead parakeets in the back seat of a totaled 1993 Dodge Grand Caravan and a sock half full of cocaine.

Stopped there. It's too tryhard

>>10946725

>A mirror for the twentieth century

A coffin that wears the face of a child,
A book
Written inside the guts of a crow,
A beast trudging forward holding a flower,
A stone
Breathing inside the lungs of a madman.
This is it.
This is the twentieth century.

I was sitting in the toilet when it struck me. At first I thought it was a heart attack,
seeing my own hand grasping at my heart from the precordial pain, but my mind
was still clear and it had only one thought in it: the dream was over. Devastated, I
stumbled out of the bathroom, haunted by an endless cascade of evidence
that everything I hoped of the future was nothing more than a charade, a ruse. I was
deceived by my own optimism, but now it had enough. I ran, tripping on my trousers,
falling and crawling desperately enough to stab the wooden floor with my nails.
It's over, it always was. How could I tell her the truth? that trip, that job, that house,
all that I could never get and never give her. How could I show her that the real me
is the one crawling on the floor, trousers down, nails bleeding?. "This is the person
you shared your dreams with. You deserve better, and I deserve worse. Run while
you still can."

https://pastebin.com/a11GmKLX will give feedback after received

>>10954577
I don't know much about poems. Your's is a bit gay, especially the bit about the beast with a flower. BUT it seems like a real poem. Wouldn't think twice if it was in some gay anthology of real poets.

The ceiling is moving like waves, I got dizzy so I stopped looking. A fly moved in to vanish, and I can't tilt my head. The woman beside me doesn't any clothes on, aside from her socks. She's passed out, I know that without looking. The ceilings waves stopped moving now, but I can still hear water, from the bathroom perhaps. Probably just a ghost, they'll leave me alone eventually. The woman too, but I'll ask her to stay longer this time.

I don't want to leave the room yet, I don't want to leave the moment.

>>10952952
That's why I posted my pizza order.

>>10952061
Its school aged self-absorption makes me want to shred the flesh of my legs with a cheese grater and go swimming with a school of tiger sharks. The tonal contrast between his contrivance for the girl and his warmth for Darren makes him sound closeted homosexual. They blowsy style is repetitive and makes the act of reading it a trudge. "Now some of you may be asking." Holden used this up fifty years ago. Try a third person narrator who can observe all this confessional exposition, or an omni who can cut through it with something actually happening.

>>10952972
Good Old Neon already did it, and better.

>>10953071
Young Mark Leyner without the meta-fictional programme, the narrative through line, or the humor.

>>10953254
>>10953258
I still would like to know how the sales energy of the gallery #7 relates to the potential for sales in gallery #13, beyond my neophyte inference that the two rooms are connected.

>>10954256
Kind of like a Straya Mark Strand, but less lapidary, more literal.

>>10956385
I don't know Good Old Neon, but everything has already been done and better since writing became a thing. My intent is not to compare myself to other authors, simply write what I feel like writing and hope it appeals to someone.
Writing isn't a competition.

Entirely s p r a w l e d out beside some
busted old ragpile of shirts and
other things, foreign contents,

you lay.

And maybe it was, like rainbows, like
magic, a trick of the lights
but there was some
radiance, measured, that poured out- soapy
dishwater, steel
wool,
well kept and maintained, a sort of enchanting mirror

and the oil of you caught my eye
not for lack of things
to see
but for lack of you
and me.

I can’t begin again under
this aromatic smog, gone and spent
like a paycheck made for rent, divorced
from so many tithes and tiny
responsibilities.

A lone smile shadows valleys
behind which a river ran
at some point. But
now there is no trace. But
now there is no trace.

You can’t remember quite when it all came
crashing down around about your name
but you and I would never be the same

Gone and spent, not for lack of
depth of character. I once gave myself
to the whirlpool to find a matching sock
for the one hanging limply (that makes
two of us) on the shelf of the room
not quite abandoned
but getting there.
Give it time. This is triage.
Time is ether you said as you gazed
into a firmament of plaster

There are mosquitos in my breath
who buzz incessantly
and I have mostly given myself to them

There are spiders in my gut lately
who have run out all the butterflies
but I will have words with them later

You see, my dear, there is nothing
quite like the feeling of drowning in air
of being pressed down
flat against gravity, halfway between
Autoeroticism and the Cretaceous Period,
intoxicating,
don’t you think?

The spiders are protesting- gone
are the days long
past when my spiders listened to reason.
Now all they listen to are
other spiders

Imperceptibly, you moved,
It must have been my imagination
getting the better of me but I
swear I saw you move
as if to motion to the world you still drew breath.
Perhaps it was involuntary,
but I moved in tandem,
similarly, involuntarily
to run parallel to you again

Could I bring you back again?

Exit stage left we raced
our hearts- our hearts our own
pacemakers leapt us from stagnation
led us deep into temptation
and found us swirling down and back
again.

But it was like hanging there, a horizontal drop,
a chasm as wide as winter
and twice as long, gone out for a drag but always
back again
before you knew it, back again
and I kissed your back again,
a desert of moonbeams that dared
and arched in little ways
to maybe feel a sense of thirst, I closed my eyes,
and you moved, imperceptibly
against me.

>>10946839
This is dishonest writing. Cliched writing. Start stories where they begin not where they seem interesting. If you have to set up your story with a promise "trust me guys it gets wacky and wild!!!" its not worth being told.

1st person is advanced. Try this in 3rd: capture the same tone and character. Show. Don't tell.

>>10954629
Paced for the Victorians. I doubt even Proust would get away with 534 words of Sunday school and internal monologue in between her question and his answer without so much as a bowl of chicken soup. Maybe in some remote village in Kyrgyzstan where television, radio, the internet, and the newspaper have not yet penetrated, someone might imagine this reverie of mediocrity going nowhere to be an absorbing read. But I hear they go in more for decapitating goats and playing blood polo with the heads.

Eclipsed by distant mountain
where Heaven’s storms are torn,
beneath black plume and fountain
the Son of Man was born.

Voiceless song and palmless psalm,
triumphant, blaring horn
decree the end of earthly calm:
“The Son of man is born!”

Then with a single, benthic groan
the Son of Man was gone
to sit upon his ersatz throne
in graveyard Babylon

What withered father,
of sallow skin and marrow strands
(that wretched Ancient of Days)
issues loathsome, bleak commands
that the Son of Man obeys?

>>10956521
lmao so just cut it all in effect? feelsbad but ty for critique

>>10956469
I'm sure whoever left you made the right choice

>>10946725
Looking around all that I saw was the epitome of happiness: dancing, talking, laughing, and all I could do was stand and watch. Even when someone came up to me to start a conversation I would look straight through them and answer in one-word phrases that would immediately deter them. I thought of my lady drink, and how I longed for her tender embrace that would rid me of my existential and pessimistic outside, releasing the free-spirited soul trapped within. I also thought about [Her], and how my plan to get off with her at what was the first party we would both be drunk at together was completely ruined by her staggering up to the entrance drunk with her whorish friends. Two drunk people fucking is fine, but as soon as one of them is even slightly sober the whole instance turns nasty. As she noticed me on my own she walked over and hugged me, before offhandedly walking away after completing the required social interaction for a close, albeit estranged, friend.
As she strutted off in her tight, revealing cheerleader costume I thought about what I wanted out of her. In my mind [She] was only ever a sexual object (however misogynist that sounds) and I never really imagined her to be the type that I could settle down with. She was also really starting to infuriate me.

(Names redacted because my diary desu)

>>10954629
Really liked this, good job. Keep on writing.

Nonexistence. The state of nothing permeating nowhere. Space: Nowhere to be found. Time: Unmoving, unexisting. Nothing to be seen, nothing to be heard, nothing to see or hear, seeing and hearing not being possible. No awareness, no consciousness, no light, no dark. No space: no infinitely dense point from which Something will erupt, no location for any point to exist in, no existence for any abstract concept like a point to be attributed to. No physical realm, no divine realm, no possibility, no past present or future, no cause, no effect. No reason for anything to ever change. No such thing as reason, anything, ever, or change existing in the first place. Nothing permeating nowhere. No point, no line, no area, no cause, no effect. No light. No dark. An unchanging, unexisting nonstate of nothing. Cannot ever not not exist. Nothing facilitating anything, facilitation not being possible as nothing can ever not not exist.

>tfw my novel is in 2 moleskines that I haven't transcribed yet
>mfw these threads just make me stressed cos I haven't done it

Ernesto reached his head out of the mosaic tile, blue and yellow and sun like as it was, and he was born into this guy’s eyes. This guy, Jennifer, he walked in a sun above his hair blonded brown, and for when he didn’t see Ernesto’s mouth move out of the way for Jennifer in hellos and sorrys, he found the car in the parking lot where he’d left it to buy some boots. Ernesto lurched sideways to the lot with all white eyebrows convexed and wet, his hairy fat smooshing space. Looked at him go, thick assed thing, fuck he’d fucking tear into that fucking ass god damn. Face was whatever but whatever man that ass. Jennifer did seen him though, that guy stuck in the ground with a face full of awful eyes; Jennifer seen him walk into the store one time a time ago too, told Man he look like a creep. Man got into some conversation about testicular cancer with the guy, trapped himself in a tongue game of friendly, neighborhood advice about his balls, and the guy all the while’s gesturing how to grab himself and probing pictures of a penis out of Man. Jennifer could tell, Man could too, but Man’s alright--doesn’t want to start anything. Ernesto didn’t see Jennifer though, just an asschest of a sky man, and he didn’t see him before either, the guy was just some gas station nobody hippy idiot who counted change on his fingers.

The train was trembling the way trains tremble when they are old and travel through rough terrain and harsh weather. We had travelled for hours now and we had not said a single word to each other or otherwise. We were the only passengers, at least in our car. The outside was now completely black and had been so ever since about 15 minutes after our departure. The only thing I could see outside in the space the train was moving through was a row of faint white lights far away from us, but I couldn’t make out if they were moving or not. In the cart I sat with my back facing the direction the train was not moving in, and in the back of the cart above the door a clock hung. It showed a different time every time I looked at it, completely arbitrary. 19:26. 14:02. 03:21. 23:57. 22:39. 07:18.
“We will be arriving at approximately half past three.”
“In the morning?”
“Don’t ask questions! Luckily we are on the train now so I’m not forced to leave you, but do not ask any more!”
“Sorry. You mean in the morning.”
“No. half past 15.”
The train moved on. The clock showed 15:15. I stared outside the window. The lights were far far away, and would resemble stars had it not been for the colour. Completely white, when stars usually have a slight blue hue. The clock showed 8:54. I heard the door behind me being slid open and closed with a click. I turned and saw a conductor, also in a three-piece suit.
“Tickets please!”
Although I was the closest to him he started with the therapist. He produced a ticket from his inner pocket and handed it to him nonchalantly while looking at me with a tilted head. The conductor walked over to me.
“Now, young man, let me see your ticket.”
“Do not give him the ticket.”
I didn’t believe I even had a ticket, and I was about to ask the therapist why, but remembered I was supposed to go with the flow.
“Well? Do you have a ticket? If so please show it or else I will be forced to throw you off the train.”
“I won’t give you the ticket.”
“Very well. Follow me.”
“If he is to be thrown of the train, please throw me off as well. He is my companion.”
“Very well. Follow me both of you.”
We followed the conductor to the door. The train stopped trembling, slowed to a halt, the conductor opened the door, made a gesture – open palm – towards the opening and we stepped outside. The train horn sounded and off the train went. We were alone.
“Why didn’t you give him the ticket?”
“Because you told me to.”
“Do not question what has transpired. Reach into my right pocket.”
I did not question anything and reached into his pocket where I found a letter. On the front of the letter it said in big bold letters “OPEN ME”. I opened the letter. Inside was a photograph of an impossible spiral.
“Try to make sense of the photograph as hard as you can.”

It was in the stairwell where I forgot his name.
He, who remembered me to the tiniest grain of detail
And I, too self absorbed and detached, to know anyone else.

>>10956469
>s p r a w l e d
Stop.
>Exit stage left
Stop.
>You see, my dear
Stop.

>>10956655
You're a very boring person, and it reflects in your writing.

>>10956824
This subject never looks good to me in text, like as if it's too ironic for its own good to be written down. I don't think I've ever seen someone get it right.

>nothing permeating nowhere
I hate this

https://pastebin.com/qJrjE75s

Ramen thing. Haven't posted this in forever. Cut a bunch, tried something new. Went a little further down the sperg route.

I wonder how fast rain is.
The damn stuff falls from the sky,
at least a hundred feet high—
maybe more.
The drizzling rain falls slow,
the heavy rain falls fast,
hail falls even faster,
and snow the slowest.
What about during a typhoon?
Sideways rain seems pretty quick.
Or geyser rain,
that falls upside down, fast and proud.
Is spit rain?
Or a tear falling from a pilots face,
30,000 feet up in the air.
Is an astronaut's urine rain?
Fluorescent green streams.
A flock of ducks shot with buck
falling down from the firmament
is definitely part rain, red and pain.

>>10957036
If I were your ideal reader, what would I say about it? Seriously. Let it rip. What do you imagine your perfect reader's reaction to be?

>>10956468
I feel the same way about my piano. I just push keys down and hope that the noise appeals to someone. It's not a competition because it's not like people have anything else in their lives. Duh.

>>10957114
Why do you have to be such a fucking cunt? Does it turn you off to put people down? If you had a point in your response I would have been glad to take it, but instead it's just salty, amateur bullshit put up with an air of bravado.
People have wrote most topics at this point, my only goal is to enjoy what I'm doing and try to improve. If you see an issue with that, and are unable to be constructive you can go fuck yourself.

>>10957254
>i do life MY way and its ok that i rely on goverment funding cause i dont know how to try harder

>>10957264
Government funding?

>>10957254
I'm here to help the serious, enrage the dilettantes, and chew bubble gum. And I'm all out of bubble gum.

>>10946725
Corrida de toros

It’s nowhere to be seen or heard,
All quiet on the southern front,
But it comes-like a rising tidal wave and soon, all that is visible is red,
And all I can see is the matador.
Now craving,
Flesh, nothing but the outermost layer:
An exosphere,
Where morals, personality, ethics
And anything else of remote value,
Begin and end,
An incestuously fused slurry of non-existence.

It begins enticingly with a rub and tap of chest,
Like crows feet on an empty oil drum,
Listen to the echo bounce back at you.

Situation arousing....
I’m static,
Unfinished, a painting of the Madonna.
"Let us tear our stitches so that scars may be laid bare",
Accoutrements, logic and cape now tossed aside,
I am medused, and bowing my head-
We begin the bull fight.

It’s car-crash limbs,
Rough-and-tumble-toil-and-trouble,
And deflowering and blossoming…
Getting faster now-
Carnivorous and cavernous everywhere
An entire forest
Everywhere red
Everything black
Losing vision
Losing control
Losing anything that’s left
Now it comes
NO
NOw
NOW!!
.
.
.
.
.

Now here’s an epilogue of youth:

I retreat to my stable in defeat,
In my bed lies the body of a man I met earlier,
Nothing else has changed
Except for my lamp, which seems dimmer than it was not five minutes ago.
And yet somehow I understand;
I could change the bulb, buy a new lamp or lasso the sun itself to illuminate me,
But it will never be as bright as it was before.

>>10957317
Is it actually about bull fighting?

>>10957254
>Does it turn you off to put people down?

You can't even write a rage post without fucking it up.

>>10957409
this actually made me crease. lmfao

The subway wilts, spewing iron
onto passersby draped in tinder
ground from the forest of stone.
The belltower crumbles in sun-
light bent into the pools of black
connecting like nodes bands of meek,
poor and hopeful, lost and found.
The pastor peels a tangerine blindly,
and the conglomeration hisses in tempo—
the metronome for high-octane grinding—
waiting to eat the old virgin's flesh
and sup the fermented blood to commune
with the immaterial shadows of yesteryear.
We march on to the city hall of polystyrene
fortified by faith that gravity's given up
after a battle long fought in arms, heaving.
At the grand door, a fog rolls in on skates
whistling Mozart's Requiem in reverse—
a beam pierces the heart of the leader
and extinguishes his sense of self
as a finger deletes a letter misplaced.
"Heed my warning, man of subtle successes!
For if you don't, you will die peacefully
and loved dearly, by friends and family."
And so he tilted his head, and stepped once more,
silently declaring an honest denial, for
a death of peace costs a life of mean.
He took the crowd by the ear
and led them to their deaths,
glorious and triumphant, reserving for them
a seething table at the ball of the greats
where remembrance glides with the weight of eons,
spreading as life does so sporadically.

>>10954577
I don't understand what you're trying to get at but I like the rhythm

>>10952983
Rework this into a poem and it could be good

>>10949167
I like the subject matter and some of your imagery. The meter is a mess though. Read it out loud, you'll see what I mean.

>>10956571
I like it, do you have more?

>>10956934
I'd read more.

>>10957052
Good, but I don't like this part
>Is an astronaut's urine rain?
>Fluorescent green streams.
It breaks the romanticism of the previous lines, so the final ones with the duck don't have as much impact.

1/3

With such iridescence, the springs hover and bounce and glide, evaporating tearful meadows upon gentle eyes
What unknowing sounds, wavering with the wow and flutter of simple vibrations from which lips and eyes even speak with such calm curious sounds so careful—complex
Wandering ‘round the avenue, subjugating the miraculous skies, rearranging all the twinkling stars and constellations into magnificent glossolalia that spews high into swaying heaven, dropping down into the cavernous depths below, beneath the farthest reaches of the soul.
Walk into reverie, O bright one, O chosen child, and let us witness the shining beacon that you hold, yet timid, as if to project upon the wasteless afternoon with warring ultraviolet light.
Wonder--frozen, entombed in awe, what striking wonder I feel for the kindling kerosene that burns within me like an inferno, igniting the cosmic passion into clouds of flaring, flickering fantastica that envelop my simple and only consciousness.
Withdrawn now, oh what travels I have seen in subliminal passages that translate her warmth, hidden in deep canyons of incandescent splendor. Valleys upon valleys upon valleys upon valleys of hazel summer, a labyrinth of green and brown (and blue) and sometimes gray, displaying harmless autumn, above a smoldering winter, and into the spiraling springtime that leaps up with its fists full of flowers and the crying Colorado river.
Where did these dreams eventually go, so shocking and hesitant with whys and hows and whos and snooze until it begets a deathlike sleep tucked somewhere in a daydream as if under a spell, a wisdom, a curse? A cure!

>>10958097

2/3

Watch as the everything blossoms, defending the frightened feeling, though scared, when the evergreen explodes, then entering the beginning of an emerald serenity. Are those eyes or are you illuminators of my doubt, and want, and fear, and happiness, and pain, and love, and hate, and loveliness, and holiness—divinity.
Well, I’d guess the color of your hair was like October, bleeding into the evening-bloom indigo night’s kindness; like September when the evaporated auburn mists into the humid tornados of air, screaming above the pavement, wild and free and yelling its own name out into the sunset, wavering and dancing and shakings its hands high above its head like a serpent slithering its way to victory.
Why is it that this exists but only for a moment, as if a vision, conjured and appearing as a Victorian angel, an apparition like dust, wisping out into trails of tiny particles, vanishing into the distance, with only a faint after-image of a path to follow. Beauty in scope, beyond the known and unknown stretches of the Buffalo Bayou, so vast and biblical. With grace, grandiose and wise; yet innocent, pure in her effect; harmless yet with unparalleled might. Go beyond infinity, I’ll see you there. Endless, a perfect well of heavenly healing. Captured, I’m viewing, a celluloid hallucination: 2 places and growing. Here, there, everywhere the air will carry, beneath concrete earth, out in the satellite sprawl, ever present, ever calling. Signaled by its vision, a lighthouse siren beckoning your thoughtless attention, not frozen into marble or stone but defenseless tranquility.
Waltzing along the perimeter of dusk, transmuting the twilight into her gleaming spectacle, with languid lampposts that wilt with sorrow remaining not their lame selves but becoming animated with their tendrils reaching far into the night-sky competing for brilliance with the ever waxing and waning moon that reflects her ethereal glory down upon mere mortals, a gift that remains available to all whom may come out and celebrate in the nocturnal symphony: the blessing of the lunar tide
Whatever her thoughts, her feelings, her accent, her poetry, each and every part comes together forming something transcendental, emitting a white-weather light from within, and within that yet more light.
White shining, the illumination of dreams, into the black midnight, recovering a flowing gown of stars that adorn a goddess. Levitating, magic, mystical, with such earthly gardens bestowed upon her femininity. Her starlight filled expression a wordless treatise with beautiful, ornate script stamped upon two irises like hieroglyphic camouflage accented with bleeding blotted blue ink pupils arranged in a formless Rorschach.

>>10958100

3/3

Walk through the black garden of her soul, the forever expanding and contracting mouths of the volcanos, entombed in glass like liquid marbles, refracting limitless light and reflecting your own image as if sent through telepathic gestures, arriving in an instant. Breaking the momentary gestation of thought. With stillness, electrifying!
Welcoming within, something wizened and horrifying. An ancient silence, static, and still, forever forged with the day and week and hour and this moment, that strange moment, arranged as if an infinitesimal pluck of a tempered string, shrouded in a ringing sopranic flash of light and sound, with fugues of sorrow and ribboned harrowing, projecting itself through the white crystal singularity.
Wake up, reach for her heavenbound heart, as if to grasp at something you cannot see nor hear nor feel, wish as you might for it to be tangible, for you to be present, for the birds to be not cartoon characters but birds genuine in sight and sound, to feel and touch, with heart and soul, just as her heart or her soul, and so to follow her into the dying dawn.
Whir of the spinning blades of vegetable knives, synchronous armies of erect strands of the earth’s hair, whipping and flowing violently with the exhaling sky, waves in the veritable ocean of grassland, field of soft, sequined furs, embracing the energy of her love, her life, her silent thinking narration as the technicolor fields of flora surround her, birthed with daisies and mushrooms and dandelions that sweep her feet with kisses of gentle familiarity.
Warble of those shaking happy feet, separating the leafy fingers twiddling in the deep horizon from the mother soil that breathes joy into her moves, vibrating in tectonic singing hues shooting arrows of living thunder from beneath the swirling clouds into soft pink pearlescent beards of God before raining down like the fiery sun, containing mercy and the laughter of millions.
Whimsical, fanciful, the era of unconditional euphoria settles as her movement releases treasure into my eyes, realizing hot burning is flushing throughout my feeling as if a venom with no defense, I flurry within the rays of extraterrestrial longing imprisoned in her headlights with precipitating droplets of cushioning delight sequestering signals of affirmation and acceptance that say simply: yes.

When I was a boy
I’d play for hours
With the toys my dad had given me
But they could only do so much supplement his absence

For many hours he would work
Solving problems, helping people
“My dad’s a hero” I would say
My face felting with joy

I would look up call to him as he spoke with mom
But he would never turn
Always still he would never look down
Though I loved him all I could see from the back was stone

Walking out the door now
He calls for me
ariose and sweet his voice is
Reminding me of the gifts i’ve been given
But do not deserve

Deep and far it reaches
From the blue of the window it bellows down
But I do not turn
My neck like stone will bend no longer

With each step his voice grows softer
I know he still calls for me
I am his son and always will be
I wonder If he has the heart to forgive me

>>10946725

The unfettered Wilds that have sprung
And shall always in the Spring's passing
Doth creep through the fractures —
Pierce everywhere the sturdiest structures,
And cast their infant hue upon the olden gray.
For what road does not harken to Time's barbaric yawp? —
Does not sink like the evening sun back into the Earth?
What brutal edifice have ye beasts created
That shall not revert to soil and sediment,
And in that renewing season — into which
God exhales his being as the arid winds
And presses the tides to ebb —
Sprout as a great oak or pine,
A cherry blossom or redbud,
Into the vaulted sky, stretching its wooden tendrils
Like the wondering fingers of a newborn,
Reaching towards its great Creator?

>>10956468
>My intent is not to compare myself to other authors, simply write what I feel like writing and hope it appeals to someone.
>Writing isn't a competition.

That's a great mindset but if someone has done what you're trying to do but better it's important to read it. You will learn a lot.

>>10946725
tiddly tee
tiddly toe
my names alfred
your moms a ho

/lit/ I want to here your opinion on some prose from the book i'm currently reading. Here are the first few paragraphs of chapter 1 of Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans:

More than two months elapsed before Des Esseintes was able to immerse himself in the silent tranquillity of his house at Fontneay; purchases of every kind still kept him roaming the paris streets and scouring the city from end to end.

And yet how thorough had been the researches he had undertaken, how deeply had he reflected, before entrusting his home to the decorators!

He had long been expert at distinguishing between genuine and deceptive shades of colour. In the past, in the days when he received women in his apartments, he had designed a bedroom where, amid the small pieces of furniture carved in pale Japanese camphor wood, beneath a sort of canopy of pink Indian satin, women's bodies took on a soft blush under the artfully prepared lighting that filtered through the fabric.

This bedroom, where mirrors mirrored one another and reflected an infinite series of pink boudoirs on the walls, had been celebrated among the prostitutes, who loved to soak their nakedness in this bath of rosy warmth, perfumed by the minty aroma from the wood of the furniture.

But, even aside from the benefits of that artificial atmosphere, which seemed to transfuse fresh blood into complexions faded and worn from constant use of makeup and from misspent nights, he felt, in that languorous environment, special pleasures on his own account, pleasure made keener and in a sense energized by memories of past afflictions, of vanished troubles.

....

>>10959513
>Against Nature
judging from the title alone you picked up a shit translation

>>10957091
I dunno. I wanted it to be bridging in the end. There's a kind of exclusion between "the four-chan elite" and people who're on the more bazinga-ey end of the spectrum. This is largely because bazingas write shit like RPO and make good jokes cliche just by touching them, but it isn't as though obscure internet memers are extraordinary either. He's sticking his inner child in the closet, he makes fun of two year olds for pooping their pants, etc.

The older version of it I had was much more coded if you're curious, not that I need more crit on it:

https://pastebin.com/nJunPme1

An excerpt from a horror story I'm working on:

I made my way to a hedge standing on a small hill above a lake. The clicking noise was coming from beneath it. I stood behind the hedge and looked over in the direction of the noise. There was a girl in a bright yellow dress with black pigtails stapling the body of a small man to a tree. The man was naked and had great antlers protruding from his forehead like a stag. The girl would stretch his skin and press a staple gun against his flesh. She would then press the trigger and the clicking noise would commence. Though I was unable to hear it from afar, the man let out a yell which sounded like a groaning bull as he was stapled to the bark. He was stretched out like a deflated balloon against the tree, but there was no blood. I stood in terror watching the girl. I knew it was Sammy.

She did not turn around. But all of a sudden she pulled a large hammer from out of a duffle bag. She licked her thumb and placed it in the middle of the man's forehead. She then swung the hammer into his skull, and did so repeatedly, causing shattering noises that were each more gruesome than the last, like wacking a very tough grapefruit. The man was not very tough however, his face was inverted and pummeled. His scalp was busted open and the tree became a bloodied sponge. Sammy began to tear the mangled pieces of skull from the man’s neck with her bare hands. She was like an animal.

The storm of woes that affects a man when he is down are relentless. A
man, this man, is one of strong mentality. He has weathered many
storms like this before, but none like this.

Asking himself, why he continue to live, "if life is all storms,
what is the point of life", Not one to extrapolate his thoughts he adds
"for me, atleast". He wonders if his tireless fortitude can only be used for
wading though storms.
and more storms...

For a transitory moment men with faces shrouded by darkened, twirling smoke from engraved birch pipes of Turkish tobacco gave a quizzical glance toward the direction of the sound, only to avert their gaze back to whatever preoccupation they had engaged themselves in. From the doors emerged a young lad. His stern hands were adorned with lineaments of hardship, which also seemed to appear in droves on his brow and cheeks, illustrating a unique brand of depth beyond his years, incongruous to his youthful nature. Dark brown hair sat in curls on his scalp, the gas lamp exalting his noble composure, presenting a virtuous microcosm of God to the degenerates in the tavern. The lads most stirring feature, however, was his sunken, penetrative gaze. His demeanour indicated he was either in a state of perpetual boyish giddiness or vexation and his glance roused neither this nor that.

Effortlessly he glided through the polluted atmosphere to the bar amidst the whoops and hollers of Crimean Tatars and drunken soldiers. He exchanged brief pleasantries with the landlord and after lapping up a refreshing sup of draught, he placed his bulk on his elbow and presented a pipe from his raggedy soldiers jacket, lit a match and took a long winded pull before exhaling coolly. He assumed a most impressive stance and underneath his wrinkled brow he shot a predatory glance around the room to which nothing seemed to impress upon the lad, until his eyes met that of a small statured dragoon with neat epaulettes and a tidy unscathed uniform. 'Probably one of those Petersburg dandies' he pondered to himself in clandestine. The small statured man hastily averted the young lads predatory gaze and continued playing drafts with his companion. 'He shall make for a fine target tonight', thought the young lad once more, cracking a wry smile before taking another long-winded drag of his pipe, relishing in the thought of emasculating the young aristocrat.

Number 743819 woke up by the sound of the wooden bridge struggling to hold the weight of the warden, as it made its way to 743819, stopping a bit to his left to make way for someone else at the bridge.

The gentle and confident steps of the person suggested someone from nobility, and as they got closer, 743819 could see the glow of a Divine shine through his closed eyes.

They started talking, but it was muffled as if underwater. As they strolled on the stone platform, the god would occasionally turn to him and ask a question, but would laugh and speak back to the warden.

His sense of touch came back as seconds passed, and he could feel the weight of the planets chained to his arms dangling on the side of the floating mountain, threatening to tear his arms if he became too weak.

The smell of grass overcame him. Images of his daughter and the farm flashed in his mind.

He had to get out of here.

Up there, a couple billion light years away, was the exit.

He hd to get out.

>>10953186
First half, meh, second half is pretty funny

>>10956468
You should read it! It's good!

“ Oh fuck, jesus that thing,
That thing is a mammoth,
It's the rain curtain coming in HOT
for my garden of azaleas!”

It’s large and obtunded like a bankers belly
hankering for more, it really never stops.

I see it’s open mouth, teeth gnashing me
I am a lime,
a scuffed shoe hide exterior
with a sour-face squenched interior
I have been zested clean for this.

Not unlike the boring pamphlet
You find on an airplane,
In economy class
Behind the crying infant,
In front of the glassy eyed minorities,
I exist.

I am relatable, I am colorless,
I am defined by my surroundings
I do not fight this…

I get less nervous each time,
It can be an application for the “dream” job,
It becomes the interview, it becomes the acceptance
and eventually the mundane.

I accept i’ll be ok with the consequence,
Sometimes it’s the invite upstairs after our first date.
It’s the first arm I put on your waist
When the butterflies become moths
We can be undone.

It's the subpoena that never comes,
I'll wait and constrain over the arrival
The letter thats lost in the mail.

After all, it’s elephant fossils
dug up behind the Mcdonalds parking lot.
The wind will turn the rain
The plane will taxi
The anxious thirst will be quenched once again.

>>10959937
It's confusing where the clicking is coming from (The lake, the hill, the hedge?). I would go straight into describing the stapling, the sentence "There was a girl in a bright yellow dress with black pigtails stapling the body of a small man to a tree." feels expository.

I like the imagery of this antlered man being stapled alive, gives a very grusome image ;).

>>10960265
>immediately copied " 743819" and pressed ctrl+f to see if it was a post number

Generally speaking I'm not going to read that whole number each time, I just read it as 347. I guess it's the first three backwards, and the first two add up to the last one. If you want to show that there are a bunch of prisoners you can add an apostrophe somewhere to show that he's only going by his last three digits. I don't know what the best solution would be though, my intent is just to get the experience of reading it across.

>Number 743819 woke up by the sound of the wooden bridge struggling to hold the weight of the warden, as it
"it" sounds like it refers to the bridge and "he" would probably sound like it refers to our numberphile man. I would end the line on "the warden." You can say "the warden" a second time if you have to.

>as it made its way to 743819, stopping a bit to his left to make way for someone else at the bridge.
Cut "the bridge." Also, "making his way towards" keeps me in the moment of the warden moving towards there, so on my first read through I assumed he was stepping to the left so someone could pass him, but it sounds like he actually "made his way to" the cell and then stepped to the side to someone else could talk to the prisoner. Consider/examine:

>Number 347 woke up by the sound of boots on the wooden bridge. The warden made his way to the cell, stepping aside to make way for someone else.
Even that could be improved but I'm just trying to provide a trajectory for you. I also wouldn't break into a new paragraph there. Read your work aloud to yourself if you aren't already.

Asked the sea to not leave me
Tides went away
Ships slide by
Smokes and drinks
Hot gusts to the face
Sun arcs
Waves return light goes

What is productivity
It's not today back home
Maybe in the time lag something will happen
Salt water baths for now
Bought showers and rice
Silhouettes of limestone mountains
Fades into horizon
Watching the strates
Artery of the globe
World lungs breathing on you

Mind finally free
Not the set and setting
Not the drugs
Could be the beers
Or the discipline to sit still
Your legs don't shake
Just don't shit yourself

So much must happen
Make your money
Ignore bugs on the legs
Write your words

Been saying the same for years
Looking back it's been all the same
The promises and commentary
Little change from self examination
Fuck these bugs better off in the apartment
Cramped space like blinders
Staying stationary will do that

Is it productivity
The heat is not
Move around the cold places
Worries of survival
Accelerating change
Your joking suggestion for the world
Could be for you
Practice what you preach
The auto suggest suggests
It is easy to click into the groove
Press the buttons
Do it once
But to sustain
This is what you want
That is what managers want
The percent improve
Accrued like snowballs
Thrilling when it rolls
It's the dream, it is a lie
Lie with Thailand

>>10960478
Thanks.

>>10959469
Thats a really good point. I apologize for the outburst.
>>10960411
I'll check it out. I've always found Wallace to be fascinating, if not incredibly depressing. It's not a bad thing either way, but it is what it is.

What are you thinking about?' said the woman walking beside him, her head slightly cocked.
He shook his head, as though suddenly awakened from a dream, 'Nothing.'
'It can't be nothing,' she stated smile creeping across her face.
He returned the smile, and once again wondered if he loved or hated this woman. It seemed to him that the two where fare closer than people liked to admit, but she had known him since he was young and she understood the art of silence and he felt comfortable with her. She too found herself comfortable with him.
She remembered the quirky smile he would always carry in his youth, the light that seemed to radiate from him. He used to be naive, yes, but the naivety had brought out such an untainted level of pureness she couldn't help but adore. Now he had fallen sullen. His eyes no longer shined with the fire of the young despite his age. She had experienced the fall of the child, and she had grown to enjoy the brooding man who grew from it.
There where moments when his melancholy became unbridled in it's wrath and released itself upon her, but more often than not he was gentle and empathetic to a flaw. No, she understood his dilemma more than most, and often times could not distinguish her adoration from her disgust.

askew askance
change your spirit stance
call the culled
herd of dizzy dogs
and pray to odin
who's scrotum is swollen
beckon the courtyard
jester named chester
kill in the name of
allah the great and powerful
and make this last
till it tips of tower full
of loving lovers loved not
and go fuck your own fuck bot

Ernest Cline makes good jokes bad just by writing them, he
deserves to be beaten with a fake tit for writing Nerd Porn and
shot for writing Ready Player One. James Eagan Holmes wasted
himself on The Dark Knight Rises, and
he wasted a lot of other people too, which is bad, but
they were normies.

Just kidding.

I'm not the kind of murderphile who'd make a joke about a

mass shooting.

But sometimes these nerds deserve to get thrown into a locker and
tossed to the bottom of the ocean.

>>10946776
>sobriques
Don't start with that shit if you want people to keep reading beyond the second line. I don't know what that means; I don't care enough to look it up. At the very least you should put in some context clues for what you mean by that. The rest is really good, 8/10. Could've been a 9 but your diction pissed me off.

>>10946776
>>10961037
This kinda. I would call it misleading; pairing it with the word "intelligent" made me think the line was ironic at first.

>>10959513
Nineteenth century decadent French Symbolis/me/. Three out of four not my things. Before electricity, patience and time were budgeted on a very different ledger. And spending an entire volume meditating on a rejection of the "bourgeoisie" isn't really much of a newsmaker, these hundred and thirty years later, and two world wars since. The prose, like the theme, is an artifact. Like a harpsichord in some historically preserved house with a national marker out front. "Giovanni Keats," says the one in Italy.

Longing

My boots leave two footprints on the muddy path.
The sun shines in the sky, but my eyes take no notice.
The birds sing on the trees, but my ears are not listening.
My heart is heavy with a thousand unspoken words.
Hours and hours, days and days, years and years,
The clouds go on rolling over my head,
My heart still longing for its companion.

>>10959937
I got stuck on the Hannibal television character immediately. This is another example of market awareness. I am not confused by the clicking noise. It proceeds about its business, but I remain stuck on the nearly identical figure from the previously hit TV show. I didn't even watch it, the images of the character leaked out into the culture and became memeified. Pic related.

Blossoming

The morning light plays in your messy yellow hair,
Dreams of last night shimmer in your sad blue eyes,
Your soft limbs shuffle about shyly from place to place,
Your small pink lips speak words dreamy and detached,
By chance, your beautiful white face turns towards me:
These images settle in my heart like a morning dew,
Love’s flower blossoms in petals of so many colours.

>>10960101
Yet another archaic style stuck in the epoch of Fin de Siecle languor. If you insist on doing it this way, all "lineaments of hardship" and "dark curls" and "noble composure" then why not go all the way and just make it "Bram Stoker does gay Jack the Ripper" and /over/ - do it to make it clear that we are in the presence of a historical revision?

>>10960265
So very genre that I don't get it at all.

Cannes. Yeah. The whole shebang. Red carpets, the Croisette. Camera flashes. Cleavage, booze, he other stuff.

Edgisson, Edge to his friends, was not of these people, this scene. He taught his dog parlor tricks. Hadn't slept with anyone but his wife since the last millennium. Very wrong shoes for anywhere in France.

But he wrote "The Filet Knife" and won an Oscar for best screenplay, so here he was, and like most Hollywood contractual obligations, the options of compliance or litigation held about equal appeal. The fourth young, fizzy, half-nude actress of the evening button holed him next to an arras - an honest to God arras, Shakespeare defend him - and opened up.

"You absolutely must," she somehow managed to evoke air-emojis around 'must,'"must write me on of those spectacular hair on fire monologues," she said. "It's a Hollywood joke about the blonde that fucks the writer, but Jeanie owes her new options in life all to you honey-pie."

Edge actually has thoughts like, "in all my time on Earth I have never seen such a thing as a pie filled with honey and outside of some Martha Stewart fakelore, I don't think such a thing exists," at such moments. Along with, "for all the trappings of glamor, they sure revert to native hick when they get a couple in them."

"I want to die on screen too. The most memorable death scene ever. Better than Spacey in Confidential. I CON ICK."

She meant "iconic" in the second take he projected on the inside of his forehead. He sipped gold-flecked Champagne that must have cost his advance per bottle from a glass he remembered to hold by the stem and nodded. "Anything else?"

"I don't fuck." She stuffed a calling card, because can it be a business card if it is from someone who neither does nor knows anything about business, into his right front pants pocket. "On screen." Her face registered mystery when she failed to detect arousal. Edge's jaw flexed. She caught the eye of some other frenetically substanced movie type and strode off, brushing his cheek with one finger, as if her director had given her a note to do so. "Now she thinks I'm gay," he said to the arras.

He set his glass down on an empty stand up with the same contempt with which it had been served to him when the first European sirens blared outside and gendarmes appeared at every entrance and exit, with more visible through the windows. Not just the restaurant, the entire hotel was surrounded. Either a terrorist incident was underway, or someone way more important than a one-credit writer was dead.

"One big hit and everybody wants to drain the next one out of you for themselves," said the arras.

"You don't have a sword back there by any chance," Edge asked.

"No. Nor gun neither. But I could use some help."

The very right shoes had probably been visible the whole time, if Edge had followed the script and looked down earlier.

>>10946839
The beginning is so cliche I thought you were shitposting at first
>trying to make sense of thirty dead parakeets in the back seat of a totaled 1993 Dodge Grand Caravan and a sock half full of cocaine
>*record scratch*
>*freeze frame*
>So yeah, right about now I bet you’re wondering how I got here, let me start from the beginning
>*footage rewinds*
Just seems like you’re copying writers you like and writing a screenplay.

>>10947033
Your similes and metaphors need some work. Lots of purple prose that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense or probably not the best word choices.
Just one example:
>his ankles looked like that of a fetus, like I could snap them
I can’t say i know what a fetus’ ankles look like and I’m not sure fetuses “snap”. It just gives me the mental image of a guy with fetuses for ankles. Also it’s somewhat redundant because you already said that he is a “twig”

>>10961198
Hahahhahaha fair enough I’ve been reading too much romanticist lit

at last
we see
what fast
trochee
will do
to thee
in mon-
ome
tre po-
etry

>>10961533
carlton is such a fucking faggot

The C 3 network for a CAP defense system can be very complex. Its
duties normally include long-range target detection, target identification
assistance, assignment of individual CAPs to each raid, long-range inter-
cept control, obtaining from higher authority the clearance to fire on a
given target (if clearance is required), and keeping all participants apprised
of the current overall defensive situation. When CAPs are committed to
various targets, the C 3 system has the responsibility of shifting CAPs from
one place to another, committing GAIs, etc., to maintain the integrity of
the system and to ensure coverage of the most critical CAP stations. More
mundane C 3 tasks include tracking fighter fuel states, allocating airborne
tanker assets, and even assisting CAPs in maintaining their assigned
stations. When stations are over open ocean or large expanses of trackless
desert, etc., the fighters may not have the navigational capability to main-
tain the prescribed stations, as electronic aids to navigation may be beyond
useful range, or they may be jammed, destroyed, or silenced to deny their
use to the enemy. A self-contained, jam-resistant navigation capability for
each fighter, such as that provided by inertial navigation systems (INS), is
invaluable under these circumstances for reduction of C 3 workload. Data-
link capability between fighters and controllers provides further workload
reduction and increased resistance to enemy jamming. Multiple fighter
radios can also aid in reducing frequency congestion.

The best control techniques vary greatly with the defensive situation,
but quite often a combination of broadcast and close control provides good results. Broadcast control can be issued on a continuous basis to keep all
CAPs updated on the big picture. This information aids the pilots in
obtaining their own target contacts, maintaining their defensive posture,
and planning for necessary gaps in coverage, such as for refueling. Control-
lers usually have a better picture of the overall defensive situation than do
individual pilots; therefore, under ideal circumstances, pilots should not
initiate their own intercepts on contacts which will cause them to leave
their assigned station unguarded. When the defense coordinator decides to
assign a CAP to a particular target, he should, when it is practical, pass the
CAP to another controller and control frequency for close control. It is the
coordinator's responsibility to allocate his defensive assets (i.e., CAP, GAI,
SAMs, etc.) most efficiently to counter each target track. Individual initia-
tive on the part of the pilots can make this task much more difficult or
impossible. Pilots should, however, retain the authority to attack any
hostile aircraft penetrating their assigned airspace and to report any sightings or contacts which are apparently unknown to the C 3 system, as determined from monitoring the broadcast-control transmissions.

The C-3 network for a CAP defense system can be very complex. Its duties normally include long-range target detection, target identification assistance, assignment of individual CAPs to each raid, long-range intercept control, obtaining from higher authority the clearance to fire on a given target (if clearance is required), and keeping all participants apprised of the current overall defensive situation. When CAPs are committed to various targets, the C-3 system has the responsibility of shifting CAPs from one place to another, committing GAIs, etc., to maintain the integrity of the system and to ensure coverage of the most critical CAP stations. More mundane C-3 tasks include tracking fighter fuel states, allocating airborne tanker assets, and even assisting CAPs in maintaining their assigned stations. When stations are over open ocean or large expanses of trackless desert, etc., the fighters may not have the navigational capability to maintain the prescribed stations, as electronic aids to navigation may be beyond useful range, or they may be jammed, destroyed, or silenced to deny their use to the enemy. A self-contained, jam-resistant navigation capability for each fighter, such as that provided by inertial navigation systems (INS), is invaluable under these circumstances for reduction of C-3 workload. Data- link capability between fighters and controllers provides further workload reduction and increased resistance to enemy jamming. Multiple fighter radios can also aid in reducing frequency congestion.

The best control techniques vary greatly with the defensive situation, but quite often a combination of broadcast and close control provides good results. Broadcast control can be issued on a continuous basis to keep all CAPs updated on the big picture. This information aids the pilots in obtaining their own target contacts, maintaining their defensive posture, and planning for necessary gaps in coverage, such as for refueling. Controllers usually have a better picture of the overall defensive situation than do individual pilots; therefore, under ideal circumstances, pilots should not initiate their own intercepts on contacts which will cause them to leave their assigned station unguarded. When the defense coordinator decides to assign a CAP to a particular target, he should, when it is practical, pass the CAP to another controller and control frequency for close control. It is the coordinator's responsibility to allocate his defensive assets (i.e., CAP, GAI, SAMs, etc.) most efficiently to counter each target track. Individual initiative on the part of the pilots can make this task much more difficult or impossible. Pilots should, however, retain the authority to attack any hostile aircraft penetrating their assigned airspace and to report any sightings or contacts which are apparently unknown to the C-3 system, as determined from monitoring the broadcast-control transmissions.

>>10961858
On the next page do we get a Power Point presentation too?

John I’m sorry but you know, someone has to be the barer of a deeply uncomfortable truth. And I won´t tell you I don´t mean to offend because, to be completely honest with you that´s kind of what I’m trying to do here. You know... I think maybe we all need to be offended every once in a while. And you can go ahead and feel that way, you can call me an asshole for saying this… But look. Nobody really cares. Do you realize that? Nobody cares if you sit alone every day, if you spend weeks without talking to anybody. They really don´t care. The truth is… we are made by the people we surround ourselves by and you´re becoming a ghost because you don´t surround yourself by anybody. Maybe your isolation is an act of self-righteousness. A gesture of defiance against a world that doesn´t deserve you, at least that´s what you tell yourself. But you´re just a scared man. A man who lives attached to his narcissism that is his only weapon against a reality that you can escape from no longer, the truth that you´ve known all along, that you thought you could pretend wasn´t real. You are nobody. You never where anybody. I´m not saying this in an insulting kind of way. There´s an emptiness to you john that comes from someone who´s tried to erase everything they didn´t like about themselves and found they had nothing to fill in with afterwards. And all of this it matters more to you than it matters to other people because that´s the truth you´ve been trying to run away from your entire life. Do you even understand how little you matter to other people John?. Do you realize there is no reason whatsoever to even care?. People need a reason to care. You could die tomorrow.. I feel sorry John. I honestly do. To tell the truth that´s the worst thing I could say to you, but to you that idea that someone could take you into consideration enough to actually feel sorry for you… The truth is John, you´re not a remarkable man, you´re not a good man. Or a even a bad person for that matter. There´s nothing really deeply broken inside of you. No childhood trauma or any of that crap. Your harmless. You always where. And there´s nothing more insignificant in this world than a harmless man.

>>10961680
This is a fun poem, good job anon.

>>10961921
I see this working more as something epistolary than as dialog. For this to be spoken, it would need to be broken up with character actions. Like an email, or a paper note found long after it's too late in the wreckage of the house, or saved from the shipwreck because she taped it to her body, along with her passport so she could be identified after she decomposed.

I dedicate this to the girl of my dreams:


I dream of you every night
i see your face pretty and bright
and i hear your voice, sweet and light

but what i most fondly remember
is your boobies, sexy and tender

how can i keep on living without your tits?!
oh please! let me see them tits!

>>10961921
OK
1-You write well but I think that this is too poetic and detailed to be ever considered a realistic representation of a modern conversation

also where is john and why is he silent?

2- this sort of truthfulness(which is also a form of self-criticism; you are john this maybe why john us just silent, you speak to yourself?) sometimes strikes me as a form of pessimistic attempt, maybe born out of desperation, to feel better for once and it never goes anywhere beyond nihilistic negations of the world: it doesn't matter...while a true realism will assume that everything matters...

>>10961484
Okay man I think this has some nice elements but first and foremost this is a really cringey self-insert fan fiction.

I'm not going to give you advice on the piece itself because, in all kindness mate, there's nothing worth salvaging.

Read more. Write more.

Babylon

and the brooding of the subject
is the object of the verb

and the twisting of the sense
the method of the frog

the scansion of the verse
the creaking of the hearse

the song of gleeful toad
a yonder jumping thing

and joyful song
from lion's loins stir

the kingdom of Satan
the proverbs of prophets

all confused and misunderstood
words on poet graves

a babbling of digits and voices
and above the great god Kek

laughing over all
senseless sense of myth

>>10962168
How did you know I'm a Hollywood actress?

>>10961921
s-stop talking to me like that

Salt pour from wound inflicted pus-ridden gangrene; miasma festering soiled undershirt by which all but flies abandoned. Bitch, don’t fucking talk to me. I have this dick placed delicate rimmed by dung and dumb slit cockhead to baseboard where maggots roam. What, you looking for a commendation? White-heat then to knuckle paled putrid flesh and fractured cheekbone; fucking whore. Be that you wench fucking flab, sad and sassy; drop on bended knee as though to pray and worship my filth. God—I am god! The fuck you pray towards? Lame these hands to lick weak and whimpering fade by light and fire behind that facade.

>>10962239
So you’re one of the 25-50 active serial killers in the USA right now?

How do I write for longer? As in, I write every day but it's rarely not for more than an hour or two each session. I seem to just lose my focus and call it a day and I've only been writing like a page each time.

I have ample time, as I only work part time and don't have any other responsibilities. Just not sure how to motivate myself to write for longer durations.

>>10962322
I also have this problem, and I'm not entirely sure how to fix it. My brain just kinda... fizzles out until the next day, and forcing myself to continue only produces shit.

>>10962358
>had 3 days off from work
>tell myself "wonderful, you can finish that chapter!"
>only wrote about 6 pages

Lol dont quit your day jobs guys

>>10962394
Insightful.

>>10962394
Nigger

>>10962394
fuck off i´m going to be the next hemingway and there´s nothing you can do about it

>>10962394

>>10961974
thank you

>>10962417
>I'm going to be an alcoholic cuckold who will kill myself

>>10962429
Go back to Pr*ebbit plz

>>10962322
Since you're in this thread asking this question, I'm going to assume you're either fairly green, or an off and on hobbyist. I could give you tons upon tons of advice for honing your focus that are probably too individualized or annoying for you to deal with, so I'll just tell you this.

Write every single day. Under no circumstances should you ever fail to write at least a paragraph if you had access to your writing station and even ten minutes of free time. The goal is to force writing into a habit, and something your brain just expects to do. Like when you step in front of a toilet and your body is immediately overwhelmed with the urge to piss, you want to sit in front of a computer and feel compelled to write. You'd be surprised how much you can train your brain if you understand how it work.
Alternatively, make sure what you're writing is actually interesting and something you're passionate about, block access to the Internet, or smash your dick with a hammer whenever you look away from your document.

somewhat unrelated, but didn't want to make a new thread: is "masturbatory" acceptable to use in non-literary formal writing?

>>10962480
Hey just followed your advice and smashed my cock with a hammer, I’m infertile now

I want reparations

>>10962480
But anon, I don't have internet in my house. Posting this from Barnes & Noble public wifi. I've done exactly what you said. I wake up at 4:50AM and write until 7AM. The problem is, I just can't force myself to write for much longer than that. Yes I am green so maybe I just suck. Shoot, man, I'm even doing the Seinfeld method of marking each day on a calendar.

>Friday night quality turn from autistic Con to Manistee troll jam.

Death!
Plop.
The barges down in the river flop.
Flop, plop.
Above, beneath.
From the slimy branches the grey drips drop,
As they scraggle black on the thin grey sky,
Where the black cloud rack-hackles drizzle and fly
To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop
On the black scrag piles, where the loose cords plop,
As the raw wind whines in the thin tree-top.
Plop, plop.
And scudding by
The boatmen call out hoy! and hey!

All is running water and sky,
And my head shrieks -- "Stop,"
And my heart shrieks -- "Die."

Some guy on lebbit claimed this was literally the worst poem ever composed. I use literally in the correct sense, as in there is not a poem worse than it. I can't tell if that guy is a total moron or I'm being memed or I'm a complete brainlet. Like I don't like the poem by any means but it's not _that_ bad.

>>10962579
It’s fucjing horrible

Terrible use of onomatopoeia, it just feels wrong and basic. The imagery is repetitive. It’s unstructured and not in the good sense. How many fucking times are you going to say ‘plop’? Is there any message to this poem? The ending is abrupt and unsatisfactory and a tad cliche. It just runs like shit. I’m sorry, I didn’t enjoy reading this. I didn’t enjoy one thing about this.

>>10962588
I agree anon, but "the worst poem ever written"? I can probably find a counterexample in this very thread.

>>10962593
It's not mine by the way, if that was unclear.

>>10962593
Yeah, worst poem in the world is pretty melodramatic. I imagine he meant one of the worst he’s read.

>>10962510
Alright, I'm going to assume that the issue you're having is slowly drifting away from the document as you're working on it, which is probably you running at the end of your attention span, which is perfectly normal. Not everyone can write non-stop. Assuming you've removed all distractions, perhaps you simply haven't come to enjoy writing enough yet, so it's wearing on your attention span as effort rather than enjoyment and takes some refractory period before you can dive in again. If that's the case, just stick with it until you either develop enough confidence and skill to enjoy writing to its fullest, or enough to know it's not interesting enough to you to hold you after your hypothetical "effort-o-meter" runs dry. But again, writing every day will make writing easier and easier. You should add your word count for that day to your calendar. It will motivate you.

Another possibility is that you're frequently running into roadblocks in your writing, such as not knowing how to phrase something, not knowing how to write a character's dialogue, or where to take the story. It can become frustrating if you don't feel like the words are flowing onto the page, much like stop-and-go traffic is more annoying than simply slow traffic. To help this, you again, just need more experience and confidence, but also enough imagination and creativity to help you through. Work on your outlines and have a good idea of what needs to be established and generally how you're going to do it before writing. Read more books and keep track of all your little ideas you might have, no matter how small.

If your problem is that you're just a fundamentally lazy person, well, good luck. It takes years to undo that.

>>10962593
>I can probably find a counterexample in this very thread.
go on then.
share the abuse

WHAT'S THE BEST POEM IN THIS THREAD?

>>10962604
Dammit, anon. You figured me right on all three of your points there. Thankfully I've been undoing my laziness for about 3 years now (that "former gifted kid bingo" in the catalog used to be me) but as far as the others I know the only thing I can do is to keep pushing. Besides "muh feelings make it hard" I don't have any kind of excuse.

Seriously though thank you for this. I will screencap your post and add it to my "/lit/'s writing advice" folder.

>>10962659
none

I will always remember my father as a hulking silhouette. Casting sparks against the shoji papers walls as he struck the sword iron. As I would sit on the grass outside, listening to his precise strikes in the warm twilight. Despite what become of him, that's the memory I choose to preserve.

>>10946795
My only in this thread but maybe because it feels like it goes on forever? Its like syllable vomit? Sorry poet-anon. I don't know but when I wanna autistically shitpost as a pseud I like throwing on syllable after syllable to create as much aural autism as possible. That line reminded me of that, it feels like when someone overexplains something.

>>10964889
In fact im gonna temper my critique here, you do have good flow anon and i just kinda picked out that first sentence and stopped to analyse. Sorry about that.
>>10946776
Its decent but I find the metaphors a little dull although used fairly.

>Grief
>Seeping
>Cracks
>Inks

Youre new, and so am I really so I'll forgive
But these pairings feel lifeless and it'll-just-about-do to me. I know I haven't but I feel I've read this before, it feels weakly gothic somehow. I liked your poem, and for a first one well done but work on and improve.

>>10961484
Formula. Hollywood hasn't made a straight, original locked room murder mystery since Deathtrap. Crooked House was adapted, and so was the train one that everyone knows. That California thing was about cults, and the Frazier's brother thing was not a mystery. So maybe, since Hollywood is stupid and corrupt enough to give Tom Stoppard Best Picture the same year that Private Ryan was out, maybe they might be stupid enough to make "Agatha Christie does Hamlet" but I doubt you are Tom Stoppard. Maybe you can sell it to PBS and get the little bald mustachioed Hercule Poirot guy to play your lead and call it "Murder at the Elsinore Hotel."

Dare to dream, anon. Dare to dream.


First draft clutter---
Line 1: "he" the
4:1 - "on" one
8:6 sequence violation. "brushing." find a gerund, find a bad judgement call. - "She caught the eye of some other frenetically substanced movie type, brush/ed/ his cheek with one finger, as if her director had given her a note to do so, and strode off."

Sloppy.

Translated from Spanish, so it will never be anywhere as decent as the original. However:

A train wagon, around noon, halfway between Madrid and Valencia; and then I spread myself as wide as I possibly could on my seat, so uncomfortable, so gray, as economy class as we were, so illusioned, playing mental table tennis about something, something we did not know, and still we do not, but we played (perhaps we did know and merely we tried to deny it, as someone who gazes into the absurdity of life and then pretends he can live as if nothing had happened at all, as all us poor, wretched children born after Camus), we played with a soft melody running in the background because it was the thirteenth of July, and the thirteenths of July have always been particular dates, something happens in the thirteenth day of the seventh month (sounds like a prophecy, like a prayer straight out of a New Age Tiresias disenchanted with his city). And then you looked at me, with this face that was perhaps a half smile but no, it didn't thoroughly get there, it never became complete, ever, the entire situation was as such, half decent and there was a certain rush in the air but I did not know why, you did because you kept the check, you had everything planned, you bought the tickets for this train that's taking us back, even though the idea of leaving was never your idea still you were responsible, yes, you were, you would be the person responsible when there was a difference between fault and responsibility (responsibility always belongs to someone; it is not as such with guilt), you were.
Your parents, they were a bit foolish calling you Nausica. Perhaps if it had been written in Greek, in the Original Greek, in Ancient Greek, or simply well, well written, Ναυσιkάα, or Nausicáa, to say something, anything beside that is bland and not worth anyone's time; although it's already something, to be called that and not a normal name, a typical name for someone born in the nineties, I don't quite remember where in the nineties; I never remember dates, I've never been good at dates. Perhaps you could have been a perfect and beautiful Laura, or born the same name as Cristina or Alba, I believe Cristina fits you more than it fits Cristina, really, you always have this aura of martyrdom that's different to hers, you resemble so much more a redeemer or a figure appearing like it, an archetype that approaches it. Yet you remain a little boat and you never sail, it's a bit sad but it's not so important as to become tragic, but even only being sad it still bursts out one tear or two if you intensely think about it, sometimes I intensely think about it, there are nights, there are nights.

>>10951342
Who do you think you are

>>10951491
Thanks

>>10965067
Anonymous in a critique thread. Don't you know who you think you are?

>>10956652
That was mean.

>>10961680
Best poem in this thread.

"Why?" She asked as he walked through a narrow hallway filled with doors. "Why?" she echoed back from the corners of the room. His breathing deepened, he shied away from yet another door and quickened his forward pace as the floor grew long in front of him. "Why?" She whispered gently in his ear. "Why?" she caressed the small of his neck and sent a shiver down his spine. "Why?" She bit his lip and made him cry. "Because," he breached the silence with a shout "I'm weak!" He signed the admission with his tears.

Then he walked, and walked, and never heard her voice again.

>>10962263
Yeah, but do you have any criticism of the prose?

>>10961146

Thats crazy I've never seen that show before in my life.

>>10966117
I know. I believe you. The firehose overload of narrative product out there makes starting anything like the first year of a PhD dissertation - I can't even write the first sentence until I spend 6 months trying to figure out what I am going to be accused of ripping off. Scott Adams, before he became a political commentator, once, astutely, pointed out that we have reached peak television - that our televisions are training us to not watch television because the much-predicted "500 channels" moment has arrived, and it's too complicated to search through it all.

And that is on top of the several hundred novels and thousands of stories that make it to audiences every year that have to be at least kept nominal track of, because nobody can actually read it all.

Don't even know what to make of it since I get disappointed with everything I write.

I woke up today wishing I was someone else,
Took my consciousness away to escape myself,
In this body now, I am a prisoner
Mirages in the desert when I'm missing her,
Love was a mirage, but it's over now,
Two stops into the town on the overground,
Getting sober now, had a heart attack,
I just lost my life, but you brought it back,
Love was a mirage, but it's over now.


Don't hate.

>>10946725
Just wrote this, am I a faggot?

Les larmes du cœur, elles me bercent d'un beau souvenir...

Se rappeler d'un beau rêve,
dormir la mer au ventre,
les vagues aux yeux,
mes cils battus attirent les étoiles, éclairent le sommeil.
Et puis je vois le phare, l'espoir ; il guide mes sentiments, les réveil.
À quoi bon chavirer dans une eau salée ? Elle me dégoute et déshydrate d'émotions.
Non, je rame dans le souvenir de l'eau douce, celle qui m'a fait boire ses baisers, et de la soif comme du bonheur, elle te quitte pour mieux revenir.

>>10965464
thank you thank you

The sculptor ever so with ardor sculpts,
Enduring every monstrous tool's insults.
For over his woes, throes, and listless soughs,
Is a thing which exceeds a mind's repose.

Above such is his lustrous marble bust,
Which shimmers as it was with stardust buffed;
Forever to stand while he to death bows.
And right before the scythe through his neck plows,
He shall remember that though his soul leaves,
And his kith and kin shall so ever seethe,
They shall remember he is always near,
For they'll find the bust which he held so dear,
And as the bust like alabaster gleams
They shall remember all that he esteemed.
Please help guys...

tolstoy tolls toys

>>10961680
>trochee
>a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one

>>10965965
I'm guessing it's about a woman prying into a man's psyche and it ultimately causing a rift between them?

The poem/prose isn't to my personal taste, if I had to critique it the only thing I could say was not liking the formatting.

>>10966874

I like what I read, I'm getting the "author who created but never finishes" vibe from it. I would remove the last sentence myself, or end it on the refugee line

>>10967196
Too many half rhymes, and if that was intentional then you shouldn't have a full rhyme in it.


>>10967966

I genuinely like this one, I'm guessing it's about a sculptor nearing death and wants to be immortalized through his work

Child of Teeth

Hello there new one,
Born with your only treasure.
A beautiful gift,
Priceless beyond measure.

A world of thieves,
They seek to take it from you.
And all that you are,
To shape you as they knew knew.

A child of teeth,
Of bone, wisdom, and sinew.
They brought you this far,
To take what's within you.

Do not be of them,
Find where your treasure's needed.
Seek others as you,
Who's teeth shan't be heeded.

Do not think as them,
Too their words seek your treasure.
Their kindness a guise,
Loss guides them to pleasure.

Do not judge of them,
Too their treasures were taken.
These children of teeth,
They too were forsaken.

By children of Hate,
Of fear, mistrust, and power.
They too were once young,
And too were devoured.

Do not fall as them,
Don't let them blacken your soul.
Lest children of teeth,
Come to swallow you whole.

>>10968351
>To shape you as they knew knew
Fuck, you'd think I was new new at this.

And who is fairer - and who is more dread?
The tiger - or Athens sprung from Zeus's head.
the fires of Athens craft the weapons of war
no Roman spear could slay so many souls
as baleful fires - craft by her most pious men
and God bless that men might not live to see
her wisdom overthrows the throne; become death of all

would that all men be good and honorable soldiers
such that I should mourn even my hated enemies defeat

>>10968667
>Posts work
>Doesn't critique others

https://pastebin.com/YwwT8iLy

River

It's always a curve devoid of a line
But it's blue and linear
You can watch it babble for hours

Sometimes something floats around
It always looks like that special something you want it to be
Those objects never find a shore, they just drown in distance
Your eyes have to focus on the passing currents, they are bright like fire

This time, 2 girls in a boat are paddling onward
They're nearing a drop
But the sun is out, and there's no reason to stop
So you slosh in abandoned mud

Ticks are breathing in the grass, smelling the fat of passed gas
But your legs are in your stockings
You're as safe as boats docking
You're as ape as ape can be
Two dandelions stare at a tree, as brothers

There's a blackness in the woods
As sun goes down, you stare at it as anyone would
And you think it's a beast on hind legs
But it's truly the distance, stirring the day
The moon's sitar comes out to play

Your fishing pole is next to a rock of nothing
There you find it's best it sleeps
Better to leave the fish alone
Better to let the stars weep

You're resting by a ghostly mill
It has no guts
It has no sills
The river flows through like gills
You wonder 'bout those girls you failed

They drowned in a sudden way
They fell 5 stories towards the bay
They went where the fish are deep and lay
Without a current
Without a name

As morning came you couldn't sleep
With eyes open you tried not to weep
The moon's sitar pointed at lakes
Oceans, tributaries, and bodies of late

The girls were gone from the depth of things
They floated as objects into their ring
A ring of fire too feared to sing
A place of absence that we all shall see

You set your hat down and talked to cops
You reported what you saw and hadn't saw
It felt empty
It felt raw
This is the truth of how life goes on
This is the day you fish for logs

The emptiness of your pole
Could pull anything from this world
Whether breathing or still
It'd be a catch
And until you pass
You think "This is just as best"
"This is something I caught"

https://pastebin.com/y81X1yUe

River

It's always a curve devoid of a line
But it's blue and linear
You can watch it babble for hours

Sometimes something floats around
It always looks like that special something you want it to be
Those objects never find a shore, they just drown in distance
Your eyes have to focus on the passing currents, they are bright like fire

This time, 2 girls in a boat are paddling onward
They're nearing a drop
But the sun is out, and there's no reason to stop
So you slosh in abandoned mud

Ticks are breathing in the grass, smelling the fat of passed gas
But your legs are in your stockings
You're as safe as boats docking
You're as ape as ape can be
Two dandelions stare at a tree, as brothers

There's a blackness in the woods
As sun goes down, you stare at it as anyone would
And you think it's a beast on hind legs
But it's truly the distance, stirring the day
The moon's sitar comes out to play

Your fishing pole is next to a rock of nothing
There you find it's best it sleeps
Better to leave the fish alone
Better to let the stars weep

You're resting by a ghostly mill
It has no guts
It has no sills
The river flows through like gills
You wonder 'bout those girls you failed

They drowned in a sudden way
They fell 5 stories towards the bay
They went where the fish are deep and lay
Without a current
Without a name

As morning came you couldn't sleep
With eyes open you tried not to weep
The moon's sitar pointed at lakes
Oceans, tributaries, and bodies of late

The girls were gone from the depth of things
They floated as objects into their ring
A ring of fire too feared to sing
A place of absence that we all shall see

You set your hat down and talked to cops
You reported what you saw and hadn't saw
It felt empty
It felt raw
This is the truth of how life goes on
This is the day you fish for logs

The emptiness of your pole
Could pull anything from this world
Whether breathing or still
It'd be a catch
And until you pass
You think "This is just as best"
"This is something I caught"

>>10969378
>>10968667

I'm not reading these until you two read someone else's

>>10969454
I read quite a few
Some were good
Most were bad

Honestly I could give a fuck about critique and BJ 4 BJ. I'm just posting some shit. That's what it is.

Fuck me!

You hear the clacking of a thousand weathered fingers…they cleave through the opulent silence And mourn the night through the bare glorious trees…the cry of the hawk, owl, sparrow
Smell deeply of the musty paper…held like a flower aloft by purveyors of knowledge as it is pulped by the woodman’s gnarled hands
Licking the sweet and cold summer air… crying out for motherly sustenance And breathing the wafting air of youth spread as it is from the stark green meadow I smacks my lips and wonder at its sublime taste of you and others Drawing the wind deeply into me… the pale yellow sky’s earthy scent
We all feel the crunching on our shoes…the gemstones of the movements and eruptions of our earth digging into the underside of mankind Of the gardeners who tend the soil drawn low on the ground Of the swarthy workmen and workwomen who pave and stack Of both our droplets of sweat left on the morning dew
I am the sun and moon….trees and lakes…. everything will flee and return to me Even God? Even you? Even the newborn waling in dirt and the old women breathing through a tube?

>>10956907
A few days later, up a hill, outside the gas station, Ernesto came to of a sight down on rail runner tracks: two red hawks taloned together and drifting in dirt with fervent opposed ideas of where the stars were, and they did not peck or yell or cease in the cooked up dirt winds they dug out. Benched to the left of his sun beaten gaze were two old mexican women pressing noses and speaking about boys; they were waiting for one of their husbands to pick them up after their afternoon walk. They looked at Ernesto when he asked how long this had been happening, those birds there, how long had it been like this with those birds doing that, how long, and the women did not know, probably forever as another one tilted her nose up a bit, the sun giving it a lurid beating with spoons. Ernesto opened up his jaw and jowls and tongue and let out the laugh he had been preparing to make in his throat for that past half minute of jowl wrinkles smirking. The women learned quickly that Ernesto was just smiling and staring and so they went back to aligning their noses in conversation which then had Ernesto look back to the hawks who’d now been tired and were tired and tied to each other in stabbing grips even when tired. The gas station looked across the street, across the bench, Ernesto, dirt slopes to tracks, and tracks of birds trying; it looked across to Jennifer’s car pulling across the bridge at that time of day when the sun destroys hope that it’ll be there when Jennifer’s tired body wants to feel sunlight’s warm red love for skin. Across all this were Jennifer’s eyes, tired and unphased by the familiar orange busyness of it all familiarly blackened and unfamiliar, and he parked his car there where there were desert men doing desert things like walking around and sitting.

>>10969523
I won't but I like your poem. Try some pepto bismol

>>10969557
>they cleave through the opulent silence And mourn the night through the bare glorious trees
I hate the way I say And in my head
Also why are the trees glorious. I'd kill them
I like it

>>10968351
Still waiting on some critique.

>>10968351
I like it. Maybe a bit too familiar, but I like the message sort of, if for its naive irony. It's very agreeable and not very bold, the message, but the rhythm of it is all nice and pretty. It feels like something I'd read in some women's publication. I don't really like that its kind of addressing the reader, especially the "Hello there new one" which almost lost me

Woke up. Fell out of bed. Dragged a comb across. Found my way downstairs and drank a cup and looking up I noticed I was late.

>>10946725
The smoothness of my balls after a hot shower
The razor full of pubes
I drag my finger in between my cheeks
I have shaved there too
I touch my asshole and I shiver
So smooooth
I grab my balls with one hand
and my shaft with the other
and browse exhentai with the third

>>10946725
>"We've arrived at the Merry Taxidermy lads. Dismount!"
>The passengers exit the cart, and find themselves face to face with a Bronze Dragons about to breathe lightning at them.
>"Barbarian! I can't be surprised! I roll initiative!"
>As the barbarian charges the dragon's maw to gift it some new dentures, a kindly elf emerges from the dragon's cavernous mouth.

Come one, come all
To the Merry Taxidermy
Fear not, the dragon's head
For 'tis been dead near a century

Walk through the dragon's throat
See the portraits of performers long gone
Ernest, Flamingo, Brunt, and Kurst
Sal, Myriil, even Worthag the brawn

Next comes the main hall, shield your eyes lest
You be blinded by the caged phoenix's flame
Snatched from the rift by our lady Vivno
Former queen of the skies and still in her prime

Make your way to the bar
Don't come betwixt us and the stage
Seat yourself, pour a glass
And Vivno, your fortune will gauge

Or have a seat, watch the show
We get folks from every race and guise
Exhilarating, awing, breath-taking gigs
Or if a sketch's drawn, we watch as the paint dries

Or perform yourself, we enjoy a good show
Dances, Ballads, Tricks new and trite
(That last one'll getcha thrown out, beware)
Stories short and long, we once even had a bullfight


It's basically a cross between an inn and a theater. How do I fix/improve upon this?

>>10956655
jesus you sound like a gay cunt

>>10954629
>>10956521
I agree. And not only that, I can tell what it's going to be right away.

>if she had seen him again, for mothers often cry at almost anything when their children are young and sweet and then turn harsh as their progeny grow old.

I cringe straight away. And then we move on:

>and yet he may

eeessshh

Just boring stuff straight away. The rhythm and vocabulary are very try hard. This feels like you sat down to "Do Literature". This is a new world mate, try reading something modern to see how you can use language. You don't have to affect such a heavy handed tone to write in a literary voice.

>>10969523
So relatable because I’m a nervous fuck that’s always staying up late, tapping my leg and biting the skin off my lips. Unironically. I liked it.

The river which stops for none, sculpting earth,
And drowning men all for its very mirth,
Is brought to its knees; to a screeching halt
Yet, who could lead this barbaric assault?
None but the winter which we much exalt.
The utter being who to death gives birth,
And pilfers man of all that he is worth.
She who our very happiness appalls;
The one who creates in our hearts a fault,
A rift that none could ever hope to vault.
Yet, now she comes and binds us to our hearths.
Again now we must watch her steal our firth.

As the cars carve out aquatic sounds
I look to the wet grass below the lamppost,
bright green in the middle of the night;
these shadows stretch out like a barcode lines over wide green space
oblivion
but I'm holding a plastic bottle of coke, somewhere else, with a grey sky and so many
brick buildings.

>>10970069
Ty for the criticism pal! Actually helps a lot. Those changes were actually made due to previous critiques on my work but its good to know that they may not have been well executed so tyvm :)

>>10970069
I at least think the greentexted line rolls well, though "progeny" screams "thesaurus" and the content in general is still deserving of immediate cringe.

>>10972267
The character is meant to be a member of the upper middle class set roughly around the 1920s. Idk if that comes across or actually makes it more cringe. The character is supposed to display a dissatisfaction with society. I'm probably a really terrible writer etc

>>10972286
I'm not the anon I replied to, for the record, and I only read that green line out of context. It sounds written and not spoken. As dialogue it would be terrible, as writing it still looks bad largely because "progeny" looks like it's only there because you used the word "children" already, which just screams "thesaurus" and reminds me that I'm looking at a page.

>>10969523
Damn.
Maybe "lying, supine, awake."
vs "supinely" - I think it might rhythymically ift better

also
picking
at the skin
of my lips
raw
at 1:09 AM

feels weird as it enjambs. Not sure how to fix for sure, but maybe:

of my lips,
raw
at 1:09 AM

so the flow can match the content better. Unironic like though.

>>10972304
ah ok. It was used more so to show pretentiousness but i probably just try to emulate the people i read rather badly

Wonder if its a bit too bogged down with descriptions. Does it read well? Brackets for Italics.

My god I had fucked up bad. I was poised to walk home uphill, knowing the journey was a taxing uphill journey, the two boerewors rolls squeaking in my hand. It wasn’t the distance that bothered me, more distance meant more coals, more of the same coals scalding. (I had asked her if I could message her. She told me yes. Why did I beg for confirmation? Why did I insist on making a Kendrick Lamar joke? God it was a bad joke. The second time a “bitch be humble” joke had fallen flat. They still didn’t get it after I explained it in faux-Hugh Grant, all of the bumbling, none of the charm. Left in stinging yellow overthought.)

God! The night sky an open space accommodated the moans. Then trees were overhead and I waddled on the grey curb, the tar sidewalk fractured by roots. A butch girl teetered on hardy boot heels, the drunk walk of a spinning top losing centrifugal force, lumbering, toppling with the head first then the legs follow stamping balance, lumbering forward, a smaller girl wrangling the beast. My teetering walk still resembled a strut.

White lights went in a soft procession to the peak and beyond, stenciling the trees beside them, gaping darkness in the intervals. A pair of green lights were among them, still irritatingly far away. The houses felt familiar and the lights were softer and more forgiving like salve on the road and the green of the trees. They cooled the shame of my parting comments, dulled it to a matter-of-fact burden I would carry to bed and feel duller tomorrow. But God it still burned.

>>10971949
Not an expert here. I like the first three lines.
The fourth could be split:
these shadows stretch out like barcode lines
over wide green space oblivion

I don't follow the break in the narrative with the "But I'm holding a bottle of coke...". The but doesn't work, and the plastic bottle of coke means nothing as it is. I like "somewhere else, with a grey sky and so many brick buildings.

I think this isn't complete. The images of the shadows like barcodes and many brick buildings create a sense of alienation in an urban sprawl. Think about the emotion you're creating with your images, feel it, and write accordingly. Build on it.

>>10947033
Pointless sentence fragments everywhere- "Of the g--damned store" for example. think of the periods, splitting off that fragment from the rest, as emphasis. why the fuck is this particular phrase being emphasized? it's unimportant and implicit anyways. there are lots more examples of this throughout. sentence fragmenting can be a valuable device, but only when it has a real purpose.
as for subject matter, reads like wish fulfillment of a wimpy introvert who hates customer service. projecting much? the first person adds to the effect. first person perspective is truly difficult to make effective- i'd suggest trying this is in third person. you can still do some lovely things with unreliable narrators despite using third person, don't worry.
>>10961561
i also second all of this guy's critique. the similes are very odd, and there are lots of em. again, every sentence, every decision you make, needs a purpose.
>his ankles looked like that of a fetus, like I could snap them
what does this sentence convey? that the twig is skinny and weak, frail. that the narrator is stronger or feels stronger, and is envisioning himself harming the twig physically.
the weakness and skinniness of the twig has already been conveyed by 'twig'. the narrator being pissed was already conveyed and will be reiterated many times. the narrator being a threatening presence is conveyed later, when he grabs the twig and the twig is afraid. so, this whole sentence is redundant and should be removed- unless there is some other point to it, ie. the snapping of the man's bones being chekhov's gun, or fetal imagery being a reoccurring motif. but assuming neither of those are true, CUT THAT SHIT OUT.

>>10959937
>a hedge
>on a hill
>above a lake
find a better way to introduce the environment than this litany of repetitive modifiers.
>the clicking noise was coming from beneath it
>it
the hedge? the hill? the lake? cmon bud clarify.
>like a stag
>like a bull
>like a balloon
damn, what isn't he like. maybe just alter phrasing, maybe drop some of these, idk lots of easy ways to fix it.

>there was a girl
kind of nitpicky/personal opinion, but i hate this. why say 'there was a girl'. if you just start describing the girl, (A girl in yellow was stapling...) it becomes obvious that she exists, you don't need to say it explicitly.

she "would" stretch his skin, she "would" press the trigger- maybe im missing something but why is it 'would' and not 'she stretches his skin'? doesn't make sense, sounds odd and distracting.

>though i was unable to hear it from afar
if you want to include information from beyond the protagonist's perception, why use a limited first person perspective? it's awkward asf, and slightly inexplicable- why and how is protag telling us something he can't possibly know. just use a third person omniscient pov, or drop this, or have the protag speculate or be able to hear it.

>all of a sudden
there are better ways to say this

>and did so repeatedly
EW. what. this is almost clinical in its impassive description but 1. i don't believe that's your intent? the narrator is 'standing in terror', and previously the scene was described grotesquely ('like a deflated balloon') so why switch to this awkward, impersonal phrasing now?
>very
nope
>...not very tough however, his face was inverted and pummeled.
when you say 'however', the next part of the sentence MUST explain why he is 'not very tough'; they must provide a direct contradiction. something being inverted and pummeled is not mutually exclusive with being very tough. a simple change such as 'He was not very tough however, his face had easily collapsed and inverted under the girl's pummeling.' see? something being inverted does not necessarily imply that it is not tough. something collapsing due to the strength of a mere little girl DOES imply that it is not tough.
similar thing with 'he was stretched out like a balloon against the tree, but there was no blood.' which implies that because the guy is stretched like a balloon, the narrator expects the scene to be bloody. personally, i don't see the connection between the two- maybe use a different simile than a balloon, or drop the mention of blood there.

i hesitate to tell people to get a thesaurus, because it can easily be overused and create some utter crap writing, but you really only used very generic, plain wording at all times, and in conjunction with your invariably simple and short sentence structure, it's just a tad monotonous.

I sat in class today
and ran chessboards to find
the best girl for me
to rape

I chose the
one in front of me

Her name is Margeaux
and her voice is smooth
and deep

Like the cooked soil
of an impact crater

Blue bored eyes
Black short hair
cold-bitten
purple lips

I follow Margeaux's steps
to the train station
careful
and quiet
and boiling

I find her home
I find her room

I appear atop her
and empty out my anger in her
while the body is slowly leaking
every human pretense
to a grimey slick of hatred

>>10974773
Really good. Great description of her voice.

https://pastebin.com/rJQF9Fhm

This is the first draft of the introduction to the novel I am writing.
To give you some insight, the book is a psychological thriller about a ghostwriter who gets involved into writing a murder mistery novel, and becomes suspicious of the author as the novel progresses, as his ability to determine truth from fiction becomes sparse.
If you really wish to know the ending, read first the introduction, then read the following sentences.
During his writing, the ghost writer is so suspicious he investigates with the help of a private detective, finding out that the author has given him a pen name. Eventually, as he learns more about the novel's story, he finds a similar story in the archives of the newspaper he works where he finds out about the feud between two writers about a novel idea that led to the murder of one of them. He is convinced that the author is the murderer, but keeps writing in order to get increasingly incriminating evidence. Meanwhile, the private detective investigates further and comes to the conclusion that the ghostwriter, who has become ever so aloof and estranged, suffers from a dissociative identity disorder and that an alternate personality which seems to be writing the book, is actually the murderer. The writer eventually receives a final letter which finally reveals the murderer. It is the other writer, and the account of the murder is given by none other than the ghost of the writer who died. Nobody believes the ghostwriter, which eventually loses his last remnant of sanity, as he is sent to an asylum and his book becomes a celebrity under the alias of a split personality with a pen name.

I'd like to know if such a story would be worth the read. thanks for any advice.

>>10975575
>I'd like to know if such a story would be worth the read.
Definitely worth the Read anon. In fact I was planning on writing something similar though ultimately different story.

Though I think omitting the private detective will help with the suspense, though that just me. Nevertheless I wish you good fortune on your novel to be.

>>10950665
The subject matter is very elegantly presented and it has very striking imagery. This is my favorite world on this thread. The first time I read it though I didn't know exactly what you we're talking about, but I felt the emotions. I like this quite a bit anon.

I walk over to the window and open my curtains. The fields are a sort of sickly green, the hills in the distance brown from deforestation, with pockets of snow on the tops, like a sprinkling of sugar on a Christmas pudding. There is a perverse sort of beauty in the degenerative post-agricultural countryside.

On the other side of the road, there is an old, large elm tree. In mid-spring, the leaves still aren't budding, because of the late snows this year. Several birds nests are scattered throughout it, although there is only one bird in the tree currently. It's black, looking like a fairly normal bird. Knowing very little about birds, all I can say about it is that it's not a pigeon.
It's head keeps twitching from side to side, it looks like it's searching for something. As I start to move away from the window, I hesitate. Despite living in the edge of the countryside all my life, I cannot recall ever actually just stopping to observe the natural world. I've walked a lot of trails, climbed a few hills, but they were always done with the purpose of finishing them, rather than taking in my surroundings.
I stay at the window, endeavouring to watch the bird in the tree. It continues to stay perched at the end of a very long branch, looking around. After a minute or so, it spots me, and looks directly at me. I stare back at it. It soon looks away, spreads its wings and flutters away. I move away from the window, back over to my desk.
For me, there didn't seem to be much that I could take from the encounter, I didn't learn anything, no profound thoughts popped into my head, yet I have is a definite yearning for more.
The bird and I have lived completely different lives, and while we are presumably both aware of each other's existence, we rarely interact in any meaningful way. I decide then that I want to try and change that.

>>10965025
Bumping this, please and thank you.

>>10967321
Somehow it feels as if the water metaphors are not enough to carry the weight of the poem so it just doesn't work towards the end. I also think you should play more with French, disregard common writing rules. Mieux revenir is technically the correct way to put it but revenir mieux sounds way better.

>>10968667
There's something about writing poetry about Greek gods in 2018 that just doesn't quite come together.

>>10969523
I've never understood the random enjambments
when they
feel
unnatural
and at the
same time
do not carry
any
meaning to them,
you could
give them meaning
yet in this poem you don't.
But I like it better than most of thread.

>>10976410
There is no need for so many meaningless epithets. The sugar on a Christmas pudding metaphor throws me out. Too descriptive, lacks meaning or depth. It could be way more interesting with less surface-level description and more thought. I like the concept.

“What am I doing?” came to mind as soon as I came to consciousness. Skin like Ice, I got up from the ground and gathered myself. Where were my clothes? In nothing but my briefs, I searched for a landmark. Rolling fields as far as I could see. I could hear a buzzing in my ears. The moon was dimmed by the overcast night and I had no idea where I was or why I was there. I quickly found a logical explanation. I was an avid sleepwalker when younger. My half-sister Gwen would always rant about it creeping her out. Perhaps with all the stress lately I have rekindled my night-time habit. Just then, a memory came to mind and gave me the feeling of somebody’s hair in my food. “These are not the briefs I wore to bed”. I remembered because I specifically chose my worn-out Calvin’s because the waist band is loose. Of course, I could have just changed while I sleepwalked. I convinced myself of this, calmed down, and decided to set off in a direction.

Next thing I knew I was face down in the dirt and my big toe was throbbing. I felt around, and my hand touched something hot and jagged – I yanked my searing hand away. Hot? No, Ice cold. On contact, the ringing in my ears grew louder. It wasn’t buzzing. It was voices. They grew louder again, but I couldn’t understand. Too many at once. My heart started pounding. Am I dreaming still? The voices were thundering now. My ears were going to bleed. I curled into a ball – wait I understood it amongst the interference – Its saying to grab the rock. I did, and the noise stopped. The voice spoke, alone, clear as day.
“Good, can you hear me properly?”
Too stunned to speak, I nodded. Then everything faded to black again.

>>10975575
>This is the first draft of the introduction to the novel I am writing.
>To give you some insight, the book is a psychological thriller about a ghostwriter who gets involved into writing a murder mistery novel, and becomes suspicious of the author as the novel progresses, as his ability to determine truth from fiction becomes sparse.
You had me at this. Write it all and get it out, then post it here after for less than $10

>>10946725
You tore my heart out
Bloody stains on your clothing
I apologize

>>10977057
I sit
Watching and waiting
Hoping and crying
He returns
But only for a moment
Lost to me again
I sit
Watching and waiting
Hope fading

Gunshot buck to break back and shoulder, a lively essence spilling out fresh upon the Kentucky soil. Screams, then, scratching out eyes like those plucked in the beaks of crows, plumage and coagulate dark dread nightmare-fuel underneath savagery. A whisper withering watched them fall in row, as though tilled by the hands of Good Christian Men to sprout with hymn and psalm spoken in reverent tones; songs carry upon the willows and winds; cold corpses, an empty promise. What man can speak with the voice of God?

>>10977119
Good good good

>>10972745
Bump c'mon playaz

just shat this out. tear it a new one.

The hands of women
look softly pressed
upon each other

Skin melding
like cloudbanks

making space
for rounded cells
bricks of wind

god's mortar
binding them together

As though to stay put
or disintegrate
would mean the same

the hands of women
with black and red
and brown and grey polish

like tiny eyes set upon
everlasting necks, reaching
out for water, for pencils,
for each other

the hands of women
tender stalks with
sweet-smelling branches
acid fruit lingers on the leaves
and I sit beneath them
waiting for the juices
to dissolve me completely

Dancing clouds beneath our sun, pack your
bags and maybe stay
another day

Slow the morning as she comes
passing cars and trains of thought
youthful blues you listened to,
in plastic film that wrinkle to mindful slurs on strangers' friends
let the day commence.

Baby dance again again, feel it in your jaw and chest
closing in you take a breath
to place a thumb on all this fun would only leave a smoking gun.

R8 me plbes

>>10977882
Fuck off my thread, Liam Gallagher

>>10977882
It has all the stilted flow of a cheesy B-tier ninties love song, with none of the ironic appeal.

To read this, should be taken as a heed
Choosing love, that isn't sure
Over one, that will last fourscore
Is a decision, done purely of greed
And for me, to stand, and sow what I seed
None should be hidden, nor obscure
And agreeing yes, I am quite immature
But to be happy, with thynself, I decreed

The next time I see her in splendid sight
Shall be the time to call
waiting for her heavenly voice to reply
Is something wished upon all -
Hopeless romantics, who can't do right
So this shall dedicated to their sigh

I wrote this today, its absolute shit.

>>10972745
Three graphs, each of which could be the first of three completely independent things. Does this all boil down to "anon struck out with a girl?" Because I want you to think about how much (You) are dying to read that story in all its Leopold Bloomy sprawling detail, ending with a promise of even more "duller" tomorrow. Literally. As in non-ironically literally right there promising me to "feel duller tomorrow" than where we are right now. Maybe the scene where the spaghetti falls out his pocket can save it.

The spinning top thing was good. Use that in a story about something whose stakes are a little bit higher than nogf green text.

>>10975575
4. is your opener. Greek choruses and nested intros went out with the Victorians. Unless it is framed as belonging to a character. Which it is not. Think of how many times voice-overs in movies actually serve a filmic purpose other than filling in the dimmest portion of the audience who needs it spelled out to them. A River Runs Through It - maybe. Typically its more like Blade Runner and it's cheesy and insulting. I've seen this done very often recently by finding a famous quotation or passage which says more or less the same thing and putting it, with attribution, at the top.

5. Again, many readers find priming up expectation to be the best way to kill expectation. I want the narrative to do that, not the fourth-wall peeker who can't resist.

To the end. OK. It's pretty self-aware, anon. Maybe you are aware of Deathtrap and all the imitations from back in the 80s. "Murder by Death," etc. The big Christie revival. The tone of things like this is ultimately important in pulling it off. The idea is fine, novels sell the execution. I sense such an eagerness to get to the big reveal, you've jumped over some of the architectural necessities and gone straight to painting the teetering, un-moored walls. Murder mysteries always serve up more than one big surprise, and the best ones are nothing but big surprises all the way through. "Mood" and "style" are completely married in something like this one is the other, and indistinguishable. The best exemplar of recent etc I can think of is Presumed Innocent, a breakout from an unknown and extremely crafty at mood, style, and misdirection. Google books has a preview that has more than enough to glean what I am talking about. Also Since We Fell, as LeHane is a practiced master at this. Slow down and think through how you want me to feel at each page and chapter. Use perspective and foreshadow and word choice and timing to execute that emotional manipulation. Become an expert at murder mystery. Agents love to rep stuff like this, but the writing has to soar high above the average.

>>10976410
Elm trees occur across the entire Northern hemisphere.Curtains and deforestation place us anywhen between 1700 and today. So, it's adrift in time and place. Which also puts adrift why this anxiety between character and nature matters at this early juncture. "all my life" is invoked (twice), so something has changed. What that something is must be important, since it is launching this narrative reverie, yet it remains also, adrift, a mystery.

>>10976732
It's first person weird, so if that's what you are going for, yeah, ok. The Bourne books do something like this to set up that he is going to come to amnesiac, but then they take a sharp turn into the whole where-when-why stuff, along with a dawning revelation of the prior events. It doesn't spit at me or vandalize my swimming pool, so let's get on to something that does make sense and ground all this "I" experience in something we can follow.

>>10978120
Thanks.

Workshop tip:

Write all the dialog first. Not one single word unless it's spoken by a character. Not one descriptive, expository word. If it's not in quotes and attributed, don't write it. When you get to the end, THEN add in only as much as is needed to ground the action in the setting and nothing more. Give that to somebody to read. Now you are ready to stylize. Gently and consistently to the piece's intentions.

>>10978308
To clarify:
Awkward prose, good for effect in some cases but definitely needs clarification and should be used sparingly?

>>10978494
effect, sparingly, needs resolution into a narrative, yes. The prose isn't wound salt, it's just drafty. "moon was dimmed" passive in the middle of a holophrastic action sequence. "overcast dimmed the moon." Also there is almost no end of trouble connected to gerunds, and this is almost always true. "big toe was throbbing." versus "big toe throbbed." "heart started to pound." etc. just on the first-level nervous system processing of it, isn't "ing" kind of an ugly sounding syllable? It's phlegmy and back of the throat. I ctrl-f for them as a proof step and interrogate with extreme prejudice.

>>10946725

Anuses. Dale's mouth, vagina, nipples, and navel had all become anuses.

>>10978494
>>10978690
Here is another gerund example,
>>10964999
The sentence says she does three things, but one of them happens in a gerund which time warps the narrative sequence and ruins the effect. First draft- he thought of the director simile on the fly and didn't proof it. Happens all the time.

Behind the diner counter, a greasy woman moves to the kitchen window, to the sink, to the window, and back to the counter again in an endless delivery of plates. Some are full of hot eggs and toast, others not. Others hold only crumbs and a thin film of what yolk could not be mopped up with bread. Carlisle orders a large, sturdy platter bursting with meat and dark, seedy bread. I resign myself to a plate of hash browns, then order a cup of piping hot, bitter coffee. I sip it slowly. Carlisle talks on, and I smile and nod, my eyes darting about. A woman at the counter spoon feeds a sad looking baby. Some of the woodsmen gorge themselves on great, heaping quantities of omelette and dicings of garnished potato. The coffee slowly vanishes, giving way to the mug’s blue texture. The diner grows louder with each chime of the bell above the door. I have never seen the village gathered in such number. All about are smiles, intermingled with those tired grimaces of windy mornings. A symphony of forks and conversation.

>>10978699
The Great Anus Wars: A Critique of Postmoderism

My first time writing. Should I just give up?

The mud splashed under Grim’s shoes as he walked back to his father’s farmstead. His arms, shoulders and legs aching in an unpleasant but familiar manner. The day’s work had been hard, but it would pay well. Not in a few chickens, a sick dog, or a weanling cow, but in pure silver straight from the Jarl Tostygg’s purse. After all, today had not been an ordinary day. For today, Grim, with the help of his friends Garth and Ulf had chopped down a great oak for one of the Jarl’s new ships. Everybody in Stenvik was talking about the new fleet that the Jarl was building and how soon he would have more ships than all other Jarls and petty kings in Norway.

>>10978919
No. I mean, don't get me wrong, this reads like first-grade scribbles on the back of an autistic downie's math textbook, but lots of people start out that way. Read more; write more. You'll get better with time.

>>10978919
You know what setpieces are important and need to come into play, but it suffers from the very common fantasy cliche of cramming as many names, locations, and detail into each sentence as possible.

Don't be discouraged, anon. My first writing was fantasy and it was similarly very heavy on detail and unfocused in language. The key is to read as much as you can. Read fantasy, read nonfiction, read anything really, but do it at a lot. Write a little bit less than you read. Balance it. That is where improvement comes from, simply put. Critique is useful but it rarely makes you a better writer. Only reading does.

>>10978937
>>10978947
Thank's. I'm wondering whether or not to make my book historical fiction or just fantasy rooted in history. It's about a guy that goes from the far north to Constantinople to join the Varangian guard.

A Foregone Conclusion


Grown-ups kidding: the wait,
a motherlode of devilish details,
entrails of steel tales,
a maelstrom of quiet.
The passages of time
and time again:
a potamologist's wet dream,
a snake length taxicab stream.
Gridlocked in the gridiron,
wee ours is, Scotty's broken beam.
The self itself: a scale-scale,
not for fish but cushiness,
a T9 haystack, a needle and whale,
Big Blue in the big blue,
a pea-brained green giant
whose anger'll lead you to rue,
turning rosy to bulk-sold glue:
a constituency of errors renewed.

— — —

(Y'all force me to play fancy,
like a Broadway broad dancing
down the alley towards jubilee
where wares birth earthen epiphany
at the syrup-blooded sycophancy.)

— — —

Ain't it fortunate to be so down?
When up they look at your crown,
a syndrome spinning infinite frowns,
neon flames, out of frame, a pyre
for celebrity the life of a clown.
Ain't it fortunate to be so down?

>>10948229
Good detail but you need more words that connect actions. The movement feels incredibly jerky, i.e. when the person jumps into the pool
Additionally:
> drank all the bits of bark and freshness and the ants running with it.
what, slow down and think about it more

patchwork spin-cycle


Heist shite:
porcupines fucking
divining profanity through shades
the elementary elementals,
a cat catapult to die for
killing the engine softly,
the target moves to Nebraska
with a fictional John Denver
and Judy Garland's childhood ghost:
an age-old incipience ex nihilo
schooled by the fishes,
a penny for your wishes.

You-now you must betray,
so too tomorrow as today
if you want to enjoy your stay
here in this thoroughbred place.
Spacetime is money, baby,
let's hurry up and fall in love.
We're already fashionably late, baby,
let's hurry up and make more love
and more and more and more
never no more.

>>10946725
The distended nebula of star-scraped sky wove its web of astrology, as the boy swirled his toe on the silken-smooth tablet of sand. His mother called from the house, her voice barely broken by the screen that ensconced the porch, and the sound of his dog bobbing in the salt-spume reef pulled the boy towards the shore for a moment's further rest. He capped off his sand-drawn figurine, a family with a missing little boy, or missing to him, as the latter portion of stars revealed their light-drenched scars in the flesh of the cosmos. The dog's paw dashed the sand's imprints. He heard the voice of his mother again, shriller this time, with the timber of annoyance. He looked at the moon-swept waves and planted his heel on the stick-figure drawing of his mother.
"Why did they have to give me a brother in the first place?"

>>10946776
>>10956469
Did you even read this out loud you fucking faggot.

>>10947501
>>10949167
>>10953506
>>10953186
>>10954577
>>10957317
Be clearer about what you mean.

>>10947940
How silly.

>>10949113
It can really just be condensed down into: my past is painful to talk about.

>>10949167
The rhythm seems off.

>>10953186
How Jewish

>>10956571
Need to go into more detail. Maybe add a middle part.

>>10957052
This could really be shortened to almost a haiku:
rain rain rain stuff
how fast it falls
ducks shot with buck

>>10968667
did some crit

>>10976466
You know if I did a quizz on the streets I bet more people would know that Athena has wisdom under her purview then remember that Uriel is the angel of wisdom. I suppose I could also identify Uriel as beautiful and female but I think that could be religiously controversial and also a bit stretched. I would have to completely rework the poem to get across the symbolism.

>The tiger - or Athens sprung from Zeus's head.

This is a reference to William Blake's The Tyger. It also refers to a prophecy where Athena is destined to replace and overthrow Zeus. Athens is identified with Athena and Athena is identified with civilization, democracy and philosophy.

>the fires of Athens craft the weapons of war

One of Athena's purview is handicrafts as well as wisdom.

>no Roman spear could slay so many souls

These is a subtle reference to Mars/Ares who the Romans loved much more. Mars was an aniconic god identified with the shield and spear.

>as baleful fires - craft by her most pious men

This is a reference to Greek fire but also a reference to the nuclear bomb. Its saying that Athena's most pious men or people who search after wisdom craft the most terrible weapons.

>her wisdom overthrows the throne; become death of all

This is a reference to the prophecy that Athena would replace Zeus. And also the quote from the Bhagavad Gita thought of by Oppenheimer where Krishna becomes Time destroyer of all.

>would that all men be good and honorable soldiers

This is a play on Numbers 11;29: I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!” and also on the phrase from Horace: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

In summary, the poem references the ancient myth of the prophecy of Athena overthrowing Zeus, Rome and Ares as personifying brute war and contrasts these actors to the development of fearsome technology like the atomic bomb, Ultimately, the poem concludes that Athena or wisdom is indeed more terrible and fierce than a tiger or even brutal Roman war and wishes that war was simpler.

This is not to say that brutal war isn't horrible in its own right. But I think that wise war is overhyped as being meek and mild like a lamb when it is not.

It’s something most people don’t know of. They get the picture of the Oval Office alright: there’s the Desk, where supposedly underneath or inside some secret compartment there’s a giant red button ready to blow us up: but that’s nonsense, because it leaves too much to chance. The Crypto-Lizardmen, to tell the Truth, are totally calculating, and are therefore (to use a real word) averse to chance, or gambling, as many such President before Miami found. So there’s no Big Red Guy like people imagine. There is though an Escape Hatch, but that can wait till later. Beside the Desk hangs the Artwork: portraits of guys who either got it right or fatally wrong. People don’t often know heads or tails about the artist though, the painter I mean. What I do is pat them on the shoulder while saying it happens. Model sailboats or cowboys need dusting before camera crew’s allowed past the Door. Before that the florist comes in, clips, removes any appearance of Death, pinching stems, replacing a Blossoming Life. Hidden also, and well enough they’ve never become a point of criticism, are the Products of the Pet. A cocker spaniel, its story an old custodian wanted passed to his successor then amongst the youngster’s pool, would in some time have earned from the shallowest possible grave a rounded tradition concerning one of its weightiest sits. At the Seal-Eagle’s talons, and he was of the mind like it was carried away. Nobody’s laughed like he did. Not in there. Not since the Old Days; but even then the people’s conscience itched, like the upholstery always has. Kids’ Pop-Guns have laid left under cushions; TV remotes for secret sets have planted themselves; impure magazines have rushed into a darkness at the Knock. It’s boyish in some ways. Others wouldn’t understand, because they’ve never really worn a suit & tie; they’ve never sought their own eyes in the mirror to meet such a power, then tightened the knot around their necks, then straightened everything else, then given themselves a smirk that blows us up. The faintest proud blush: that’s The Big Red Guy. The camera flash. Thou-sands. Allover the earth. Over time it loses effect. Loses firepower.
Ashes ain’t Fond ‘o Flame: that’s the first dirty song wrote in the Office, when it was late outdoors but warmer than Hell. Writer took his pen & notes from the Desk the following morning then burned it by striking a match. I’m only allowed to read part.

https://pastebin.com/N2mPunDQ

>>10979874
you've entirely missed the point

>>10946725
This is part of a story about an orphaned young man. I'm very new to this so any critique would be very helpful, thanks a lot
-------------

Mark hopped the fence of the playground after it closed for the night. Mark examined the playground for a place to sleep for the night. He was distracted from this task by a swing swinging in the cold wind and feeling the sand beneath his soles. He was instantly transported back to a memory he previously never recalled of his birth father pushing him on a swing.
Another punishing cold wind brought him back to the sobering present. Mark begrudgingly walked passed the sanded playground area and continued to the dry soccer field with dying brush at the end. There he would be completely unseen.
Mark set up his camp behind the brush. His hunting camo sleeping bag, and his backpack as a pillow. He stared up at the sky. Clouds blocked the stars. He saw the moon’s fading behind a black cloud slowly moving in front of it. Another cold wind made him turn on his side so his back faced the wind.
Wind echoed through the tube slide and brought Mark’s attention to the playground swings. The sound of his grumbling stomach was drowned out by rustling brush in the wind.
Mark looked at the swings trying to bring back that old memory that had just slipped his mind. He tried hard to remember his father’s face. The more he tried, the foggier the memory seemed, as inevitably as the black cloud moving over the moon.

>>10980080
I also wrote the below fragment, let me know what I can improve
----------

Mom’s screams filled every square inch of the house. It’s happening again, I hope she’s not mad at *me* this time, Peter thought. Peter quickly hid his homework in case Mom found it and tried to rip up his books again while telling him he’ll never amount to anything. He quickly took two Ibuprofen in anticipation of a stress headache and assumed a position that was now instinctual from Mom’s countless tantrums: curled up on his bed, gripping his teddybear, facing the wall. Every time Peter assumed this position, like a dog conditioned to drool at a whistle, Peter's eyes began watering. As the screaming and smashing got closer and closer to Peter’s door he began crying harder and harder into the teddybear, imagining the teddy bears stubby arms embracing him.
Mom opened Peter’s door, screamed for a few seconds, looked for something to smash - a toy or something - but there were no toys left to smash. She looked at Peter’s trembling back, stormed out and slammed the door. Vibrations of smashing objects and loud foot steps shook Peter like bombs. He stifled his own whimpers into the teddybear's head. He missed Daddy. Like always in these situations, Peter thought of Daddy’s death in the war, slipping into sweet unconsciousness around bombs and bangs. Peter closed his eyes hard as if trying to wake up from a nightmare. His eyelids slowly gave out and he fell asleep.
He awoke moments later, alarmed by the foreign white noise of complete silence. He clutched and felt nothing, as the teddybear rolled out of his arms. The dark house was unusually quiet, the walls and floors unusually still. Is Mom finished? It’s never this quick, he thought. He heard light and hollow plastic gently bounce on the floor in Mom’s room. Peter picked his head up and noticed his 250-count Ibuprofen container was missing.

>>10980080
>mark x.
>mark y.
>mark z.

stop writing sentences like that

>>10980116
Thanks, anything else? Did you like anything about it?

Ανδρα μοι εννιπε μουσα,
Πολυτροπον ´ος μαλα πολλα

>>10980153
cyka

Rape is a myth
it is the mother of our people
those humans calling themselves wise
denying the wisdom of their ignorance.
We the people.
More like: Wee: the people.
Big in body, small in mind,
I know, for I am but one,
modified by the knowledge of two
seconds thought on emptied hearts
bagging platelets between poles:
the essentialists die in vein.

>>10946725
X felt the anesthesia go into his mainline and was hooked for life. He was eight when his appendix had to be pulled. As the masked man with porthole spectacles pushed the plunger all that was once stable began to be infused with some lively vibration. The air shimmered and X stammered "this feels good." He never forgot that feeling. Even when he was banging heroin he yearned for that energy. Elective surgeries, self injuries, and experimental dental work were all means to a very different end then the medical professionals had in mind. Heroin came and wasn't that sweet, sweet anesthesia. By this point X had wasted away and was more rust than man, corroding the underside of a docile girlchild who hanged like a lynch victim on every word he said. His parents had to be called to scrape him off her side and gather up the dust into a neat little backpack. Professionals recommended electricity to deoxidize the rust so that is what came. First unilateral, then bilateral. The first treatment was accompanied by methohexitol. And there it was, 14 years after that first glimpse at true release. Week after week, X went to that electric clinic for his fix and week after week some cultish nurse with freakishly hairy forearms treated him right.

>>10980383
>infused with some luvely vibration
awkward. cut this sort of wasteful phrase out
>he nevrr forgot that feeling
imagine ways to express yourself we havent read over and over before

>>10980080
>Mark hopped the fence of the playground after it closed for the night.
You should probably reword the setnece and not start it with "mark did x".
Something like
>"Hopping the fence of the playground, Mark..."
Having every sentence start with Mark said, or did just takes the reader out of the story and annoys them killing any emersion and distracting from the overall experience.
Good luck too you anon, keep at it

>Prose Critique
>Posts Poetry

>>10979714
bamp, fuck me up losers

>>10980410
Thanks, anon. Any parts about it you liked?

The Husk of Ones Home

Dust dancing in the rays, sneaking inbetween the cracks of the rotting curtains. They've hung like this for quite some time now.

Inside this place were notes scrambled all over the place with illustrations, limericks, unprocessed dialogues, accompanied by stacks of books out of their shelfs. More formal paper had mixed together, letting dreams hide the expenses.
The damp smell of half empty bottles combined with dirty dishes, the scent of cigarettes and perfumes of women long since abandoned the torn couches, made of a strong blend of longing and loathing.

On the walls, the mauve Fleur-de-lis motived wallpaper on one side of the room had fallen off due to the dried glue. The wooden panel on the other carried off-kilter frames which content no longer visible, or markings of frames long since gone.

It was a misery. I've seen age take people to happier places than this. I wonder at what it'd gone wrong.

>>10980080
>>10980098
bumping for these. aside from not writing sentences like "Mark did x" and "Mark did y", what else can be improved? Was there anything good worth salvaging about these?

Okay /lit/, here's something I've written a while ago, English isn't my main language so I'll translate it.
----------------------
I was a day in the middle of April, just like every other day; the sole distinction being the terrible heat, which felt like living in Hell, but nevertheless, it did not affect or bother me one bit. With every passing year, my ability to feel warmth and cold faltered a little, as if part of my body was dying. I was seventeen years old and three hundred and fourteen days, and I had never felt deader in my entire life.
It was the sixth lecture for that day and it felt like it was going on forever; the chemistry teacher was explaining, almost mechanically, something about the reduction-oxidation reactions, but every student was too busy to care; my eyes jumped from face to face and all I could see was boredom and apathy. A fly entered the classroom through the open window and landed on my desk, soon another fly followed it and they started fucking there, on my desk, in the middle of the class, a strange, lustful show invisible to everyone but me.
Now I was horny, the flies kept fucking, the students were waiting for the bell, the teacher was sitting in her desk browsing the register. I saw a drop of sweat on her neck that started sliding down, the female fly was rubbing her hands, the sweat drop kept going lower and lower, the male fly came and flew away, the sweat drop disappeared between the teacher's tits, the female fly flew onto another student's desk, he raised the chemistry book and smashed her.

>>10946839
*record scratch* yup,that's me. You're probably wondering how i i got into this situation

posted this before but made a couple of edits since then to make it more fluid

DAY BY DAY I SINK DEEPER INTO DARKNESS

Day by day i sink deeper into darkness
With a relentless giveaway to the creeping somber
At night I feel the call of sleeping madness
Whispering sigh a song
Of joy that lives no longer
From the yearning light came the call of a bleeding heart
With a burning might step nearer to the leering dark
In the black that swallows whole the strength of gladness
To the grave that holds the path to eternal darkness
The night that speaks in tongues of sleeping somber
Through dark that grows in strength with age of yearning bleakness
Bring, along the call of burning weakness
Blow the flame, which glows with burning need
the call of weeping hands in plains of yearning joy that bleed
and hold the void of light, by day
And day I sink deeper into darkness
With a relentless giveaway to the creeping somber
At night I feel the call of sleeping madness
Whispering sigh a song of joy that lives no longer

These hedges might be quite accessible but they can also hide anything. The difference between a body in a room, a body in the ocean, and a body that has fallen next to the sea makes recovery ridiculously tedious to the point where spite replaces pity. I wish for you to carry on, and do much better than I did. Forget the body - it's only wrapping paper.

>>10978894
I know what you mean, but "kitchen window" sounds like a residential glass pane. You are talking about the cook's service counter, through which food is placed for service. In US back house lingo, it's called the "pass." See also, "running the pass" and "dying on the pass." Something.

It's a moment. Presumably we will find out soon what has the village in all the hubbub.

Not a native speaker of the language but have been trying to write in it. Aiming for a simple prose.

https://pastebin.com/YMnBm1w7

>>10979714
Astrology is a superstitious ancient practice of divination, astronomy is the science of cosmological phenomena. That's a pretty loaded distinction, so make it clear you know what you are doing. Is he going to be a detective and find his missing sibling (astronomy) or are fate and providence going to conspire to intervene in his fate (astrology)?

It's a lot of figurative imagery that evokes an attempt to be pretty, but assess the consistency of nebula, star-scraped, astrology, tablet, light-drenched, scars, moon-swept - typically this kind of thing adds up to a technique of foreshadowing the tale, and would have some kind of commonality. Some thematic intent.

By the way, a nebula is visible from Earth as a tiny dot of light, dimmer and optically as small as a star, because it is a gas cloud remnant of a nova or supernova. If this is trying to paint the Milky Way, some less precise term would improve it. "Cascade." Or thematically, "veil" or "curtain." maybe. On to the mystery of the missing brother.

>>10979914
Something of a shame, really. You had a kind of an Irving-y Garp/Meany freak accident setup with ripped-from-the-headlines hooky potential that could have gone anywhere then you graffiti-ed over it at the end.

>>10979887
I'm thinking.

>>10980080
You ever read Big Two Hearted River? It's the ultimate "Nick did thing after thing" story. It could help. Also "for the night," "for the night." Head bumping repetition. Drafty.

It is much less difficult to move a character's perspective than it is to move one across a room. You can do the redline:

Mark examined the playground for a place to sleep for the night. He was distracted from this task by a swing swinging in the cold wind and feeling the sand beneath his soles. He was instantly transported back to a memory he previously never recalled of his birth father pushing him on a swing.

"He searched the playground for a place to sleep. A swing hung on chains clinking in the cold wind distracted him. He thought he remembered his birth father pushing him on a swing like that one."

It's a matter of confidence and what editors call "tight" versus "loose." Tight writing trusts me to get it as it goes along. "and brought Mark's attention." Look what happens: "Wind echoed through the tube slide to the playground swings." Almost like magic, right?

>>10980098
This is much better, I fear because of personal familiarity. At any rate, whatever works. This one has propulsion. It has action and perspectival implication of imminent tragedy. It's like from two different people.

>>10980410
>Hopping the fence of the playground, Mark..."
>>10981241
For several very good reasons pointed out elsewhere in this very thread, please do not do this. Hanging participles with additional gerunds is two waypoints on the road to hell.

>>10980383
I'm not sure what part about addiction has not already been said. Nor can I imagine where this is going next, and I can normally imagine quite a bit. All that comes to mind is Lighting Man, because it is a tale of personal tragedy and it handles a decent into woe like this in an episodic way whose lyricism elevates the otherwise relentless dread.

>>10979887
It has a "Think hard about how much work Faulkner and Wallace had to put in before they were allowed to get away with sentences like this then ask yourself" problem, which I would think is already known to you. The cocker spaniel one is off the rails by a significant amount. There is something here maybe, but it currently resides at the benthic layer, crushed by the pressure of the trench above.

For example, I am with it until "as many such President before Miami found." The city? A fictional president named "Miami?" Are we really talking about actual Lizardmen, or was that some whimsical reference to popular whatever? There is no Big Red Guy, then later there is a Big Red Guy. It could use some window cleaner. To un-muck it up a bit.

>>10981798
Reminds me of the Fight Club house on Paper Street. I can smell the decrepitude. Now we pass Go and collect 200 words of what it's going to be about?

>>10983135
I see what you mean and I like your version of that sentence better, I'll be more mindful of this, thanks a lot. Sentence structure, as others have mentioned, will also be a big focal point for my research. Thank you for your feedback.

>>10983160
Yeah I wrote this one over the course of 4 hours whereas the first fragment took 30 minutes. So the first fragment was from a writing exercise about using the landscape, objects, and external things for a character sketch. The second fragment was a writing exercise specifically to "write the moments just before the discovery of a dead body", with the purpose of building suspense.

>>10947611
A life changing event, occurring out of nowhere, right out of the blue, and other cliches
Laziest sentence of the year

>>10955350
Well, I liked it.

>>10983206
a trench?

>>10983500
I make a simple metaphor about crushing ocean pressure and get "?" but you expect this hairball of elliptical allusion to make perfect sense?

>>10983049
Thank you for catching that and providing some better word choice. You're right, it's definitely a moment, one that in the larger story doesn't really have the payoff I think it should.. But by itself, what do you think of the prose? Readable, decent, good, poor?

>>10983599
It doesn't bite or bark at strangers. For the big majority of editors and agents, they are going to care way more about a story that knots their socks than about discovering the next great prose stylist. It made a whole bunch of sense when someone smarter than me told me to think of style as an emergent property, and what it emerges from are the needs of the piece itself. The "Canon" prefers "stylists" because writers used to have the equivalent of box office appeal. People bought a name. Now it's the chameleons market. Especially at the beginning. Think of Dubliners versus the novels. David Means versus Alice Munro. I prefer artists to strivers. Means is on a journey and it's always interesting and surprising. Munro was a brand masquerading as mastery. If verse weren't dead, I'd say the same about Ashbery. Another favorite of the bespectacled class no one can name three favorites of.

>>10983526
where's your passage m80? ill share my thoughts on it then post the leading paragraphs to that oval office mania (President Miami is The Rock)

A man in a tall dress with no sleeves like a lighthouse with anchor arms swivels his gaze towards me and says
Blue boxing gloves pop, but who wears them? Even tragedies turn into eyerollers as saltwater washes my paint away.
I want to hear the obscurity fizzle out like water draining from my ears with a single clear pop, eternally.

My mouth is an eyelid, filled with whipped cream, and I'm blinking and breathing and my teeth are chattering,
I wonder what people mean when they tell me my eyes are smiling. Do I look hungry? Lip smacking? Finger licking?
Maybe I'm nailbiting, ingrown and curled up with my heart beating out the back.

As the cars carve out aquatic sounds I look to the wet grass below the lamppost, bright green in the middle of the night;
these black shadows stretch out like a barcode lines over the wide green space in a single flash of oblivion,
but I'm holding a plastic bottle of coke, somewhere else, with a grey sky and so many brick buildings.

>>10972866
I agree but I build from behind because despite coming off as insufficient it sounded final/like an ending. I wrote the thing above before reading your comment, so if it looks like your criticism hasn't been incorporated it's just because I'm only now reading it.

The coke bottle to a degree was me exercising, so I can see why you'd want it either trimmed or worked into more well. I just saw the back of one and realized how much less commercial it looks with the logo gone and how much more obvious the crinkles are. It comes off as a little pointless with how it's thrown in though, but a friend of mine keeps calling it "the coke bottle poem" so I might just try building a new stanza for it.

>>10983915
man I fucking butchered the second line of that last stanza

>>10983915
>build
built, I don't mean to say I generally build from behind

>>10967966
I like this a lot good job. I have an issue with you using "insults" here though
>Enduring every monstrous tool's insults.
I don't think thats a good word to describe what the tools which create this immortal work of art do. If i were you i'd replace it with something more suiting the tone of the rest. Why would the tools be insulting the piece? They should be admiring it, even they're violently breaking the stone i think this should be seen in a way in which they are aware of the purpose and beauty of the piece.

>>10968351
This isnt bad. I'm not a fan of the sort of tone that it carries but thats just me. I like the line
>And too were devoured.
because it continues the imagery of teeth.

>>10968667
Damn i like this its got a grittiness to its rhythm that really delivers that "become death of all" line. Good stuff.

>>10972745
I like this you got some good lines here.
>Left in stinging yellow overthought.
For instance. I really like the middle paragraph. Its good stuff I can say I've felt like this before. Got any more?


Be brutal with me. I know I'm good at knowing what themes and plots and metaphors I want to develop, but prose is something which I have less faith in.

"I didn't know exactly how I would get in, but I had suspected that the back of the house was less secure than the front so I jumped the fence when no one was looking and there I found my open window. I entered into a bedroom which I surmised belonged to an adolescent; one bed, various posters on the wall, some video games and other things which belonged solely to youth. It was very messy, surely whoever stayed here was just as disorganized in mind and manner. Disagreeable as it was what a peculiar charm it had! What representations of youth had this room come to embody! I stepped through the mess until i was standing in front of the door; this view, I thought,is its most personal. Under what different moods and circumstances had this view been had by this youth; a welcoming release from the drudgery and ceaseless boredom of school, or maybe the feeling was communal, shared with friends after wandering the city bus line to bus line drunk, its bed and TV a domestic comfort. But it was not just these particular objects that had represented this feeling, it was the room itself. Beyond all these objects it was personal, before anything else it was his"

>>10983980
>so I jumped the fence when no one was looking and there I found my
I would cut "and there I"

>I entered into a bedroom
who the fuck says "entered into"?

>which I surmised belonged
the ed-ed sounds really gross in this context. You could try "surmised must belong." Just as a random sonic example, think of how this rolls off the tongue:

>I entered an apartment which I surmised must belong to an adolescent; one bed, various posters on the wall, some video games and other things which belonged solely to youth. It was very messy, surely whoever stayed here was just as disorganized in mind and manner.

Obviously my example is just saying something downright different, but you need clean licks to write sentences that long. For the most part they work well though, to me this looks like one of those injection mold model kits with a bunch of nubs on it that need to be filed down.

>Disagreeable as it was what a peculiar charm it had!
Consider putting a comma after "was," it feels like the exclamation point should only apply to the text coming after that point.

Thanks for not doing the "What a !, what a !" more than twice. If you were considering going further, don't.

>I stepped through the mess
I don't normally say this but you could put an adjective before mess.

>; this view, I thought,is its most personal.
this is word salad and it isn't even clear to me what "its" refers to, it sounds like you're going to say "its most personal [noun here]" with how you work into it and it's incredibly choppy compared to everything that came beforehand for no good reason.

>by this youth;
Honestly I just don't like how you're employing these semicolons. End this on a question mark. It's fine if this makes the next thing a fragment, you aren't even supposed to have fragments on either side of a semicolon anyway so whatever.

>a welcoming release from the drudgery and ceaseless boredom of school, or maybe the feeling was communal
The comma after "school" feels too weak; an em dash might express the track-changing better. Just ending on a period could work as well if you really want to.

>its bed and TV a domestic comfort. But it was
the second "it" here sounds like it's referring to the room itself when it gets turned into one of those "it's a darn shame" "it's" when I get to the middle of the sentence.

>Beyond all these objects it was personal, before anything else it was his
I'd throw a comma in after "these." My biggest "ugh" was probably the thing with the semicolon sentences, followed by "entered into" I think.

Reposted from the other thread

>>10983912
In the late 80s, the Oakland school district decided that the ghetto kids were showing up with what amounted to foreign language literacy, black English having gone so far from standard English. So the black teachers and black administration studied the problem and came to the conclusion that foreign language immersion offered the best outcomes. The foreign language was English, and they called the native language"Ebonics." The goal was to teach ghetto kids standard English, but by the time the idea got raped through California politics, Ebonics became a rally cry and saving kids from functional illiteracy became a symptom of white supremacy. Phonics was lynched and replaced with "whole Language" which is designed to foster linguistic ignorance of novel utterances and every generation since has come down progressively more shallow and limited. Google "flamenco" and wheel of fortune. Imagine Chaucer meeting Shakespeare.

hey fellas

>>10985065
>anew one

sounds like it's talking about something real but in a still very written sort of way, the structure and the goddammit sound cliche to me despite the fact that I like the events in the plot themselves

>>10946839
Trying to hard to sound insane and using way to overused cliches for your descriptions. Just polish that a bit with more honesty and less purple prose and you could be the next Hemingway

>>10985239
good advice, this is marginally better.

Can you tell me more about the structure being cliche? I wanted to frame it as if I were telling a joke, or in conversation

It was fun to write, I like
>I was laughing, he was laughing, and the whole place roared with laughter.

I've been working on this piece of shit for way too long. Please help me to make the next thing better.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AiX8XiQY8sHY6OPDR5_iz0uEnmNkA4HUU7LXf1nNd7s/edit?usp=sharing

>>10984178
Overembellished. A lot of what you're trying to say is hidden behind awkward phrasing.

We know that James dreaded class because he was a 'normal' teenager and he 'trudged' there. Lampshading it afterward doesn't add anything.

You're also using passive voice.
>it hasn't been stated because it isn't true
Don't do this.

Nyx pulls her dark robes over the earth,
Night, the interval between two breaths.
As souls float in the ether to charge
I sit by candlelight, in this uterine meditation
Brooding over the blank papers of the future.
The endless possibilities
Of composing harmonies from the stars
With the grand lute that rises heavenwards,
Pass before my eyes in tapestry dreams
That shall vanish in morning with the mist,
To make clear the way
To the mind, waking fresh to give birth
To the embryos crystallized in the dew.