/lit/ - Literature

>>4123489
I had a migraine yesterday and came up with some weird stuff, half because I couldn't process language correctly for a while and had to stumble around in the dark to find words. Some of the words I wrote made complete sense at the time, but now it's like some Kubla Khan shit. I'm not going to type it out here until I can make some sense and rhythm of it, but yeah... it was an interesting experiment. I hope it becomes something worthwhile.

>>4123506
I'm not sure if this is creative prose or just you commenting.

Wrote this a year or two ago. Anyone think it's worth salvaging?
http://pastebin.com/atfQEEmF

>>4123506
>>4123521
It's pretty good, isn't it? A scene and conflict and everything: like flash fiction, but not burdened with ambiguities, and somewhat soothing.

Let's coin it with something.

I am lying in my bathtub, fifteen minutes gone at least, the water cooled down, but still providing a pleasant warmth. I take a long bath once in a while, to think, to let my mind drift in all directions as it sees fit. A routine I’ve been doing since my early teens, when I discovered the joys of the warm bath, best taken in wintertime. The contrast of slipping into hot water surrounded by cold air. A cozy, relaxed feeling taking over the body, as my mind wanders off. Vague plans made, possibilities explored. Problems, big and small, like dark clouds over distant mountains. They look meager and nonthreatening, barely a blip on the horizon. Everything seems possible, everything will work out. The water whispers its comforting words embracing me like an old friend, with its warm, gentle arms.

>too pleb?

A man was sitting on a bench, waiting to be called into a room where he would be violently interrogated at length. It was not a torture most would elect themselves to, but a set of ongoing circumstances forced the man to do just that.
The man, a professor of linguistics, had fallen on hard times in recent years, harder even than most would presume for someone who taught what was by most accounts a dying area of academic investigation.
There was a buzz at the receptionist's desk and a click made in return.
"They'll see you now."
The shuffling of papers in folders as he gathered himself. This was an important meeting and he wanted to have as much of his being present as possible to show for it.
Walking into the hall he noticed a couple of things right off the bat. First, not all of the members of the board were present at the long table from which they conducted their joint affairs. Strictly speaking, this was not a good sign since it signaled a perceived lack of importance on the board's part with regards to the professor's grant proposal. Although it was possible that a few of the faculty were experiencing health problems, it seemed more likely that they simply intended to cast his request in the bin like so many who had come before him.
Second was that the sunlight filtering in through the window brought out the deep reds of Dr. McCoy's hair.

>>4123545
This has a nice flow to it, I like it.

Russ consulted the map on the bridge, with Tai and Elif looking on. "Yes: the first available gap in the Exclusion zone is closed. Also, there is a Spree scout following us."

Sarcastically, Elif said, "It's a good thing we're nothing. Less than nothing."

Russ dismissed this. "They were following us from the station, along with three Xist destroyers. Two from Corporate Compliance, and one from Due Diligence, from the signatures."

Tai frowned. "So some of them are trying to stop us, and the other is making sure that what we're doing is being done according to, what - corporate regulations?"

"Sounds a little schizophrenic to me," Elif put in over her shoulder.

"You know what large corporations are like," Russ countered. "It's probably just some greedy middle management taking the ships out for an unauthorised spin around the cluster. They won't shoot at us." She paused. "At least, not in any serious way." Another pause. "As long as we don't give them reason to."

"What you mean 'we', white man?" Elif asked, slowly, cautiously, knowing he wouldn't like the answer.

"Well, that was your pirated media on the public channel at the market." His jaw dropped at the effrontery of this. Russ grinned. "Don't worry. I wouldn't throw you to Corporate Compliance. I like you, Elif." Tai matched Russ' grin with her own impish variety.

He came close to turning pale at this. "I would much rather you didn't," he said quietly.

Appearing genuinely curious, Russ asked "Why not?"

"It's not consistent with our relationship. I have a hard time trusting anyone in a position of authority. True communication is only possible between... equals.." His voice trailed off as Russ gave him the works: staring into his eyes, her pupils dilated, head tilted forward to focus her attention on him. She inhaled, cleavage swelling, and slowly smiled, giving him That Look. She didn't use any Aetherics; she didn't have to.

"You understood that, didn't you?" she purred.

He swallowed. "I understand how; I just don't understand why."

Russ tilted her head slightly to one side while keeping her eyes on his. Dear god, is this leading to a kiss? No. No way in hell. He shook his head once, a matter of a fraction of an inch's movement each way. Russ blinked slowly to indicate she understood and even managed to look disappointed; Elif felt apprehensive at how quickly she'd developed her puppetry skills.

She'd probably had a lot of practice with Sybrandis.

>>4123538
I like it but I don't think you should associate water with warm gentle hands as water is rarely warm outside a bath or shower and therefore it doesn't allow for good sensation. I'm thinking that you should portray a feeling similar to wrapping a cool blanket around you or sleeping on the cold side of the pillow

>>4123665
Yeah I agree, couple of things bother me in there. The arms part and the whispering part. But I wanted to keep the old friend in there somewhere as it seems like something that I've been doing forever.

Tai explained the western custom of a New Year's resolution to his gathered workmates while they were all for once together outside of the office, sat on the bank of the Pearl River and watching the fireworks. “In America,” he said with authority, “at the start of a New Year you decide upon a specific goal for that year and then resolve to complete it. It's a form of self-improvement.” No one said anything because they were watching the fireworks. Affronted, Tai sat down. The grass was wet and he felt it through his trousers.
Galaxies obliterated themselves in the air, rainbows detonating in big starburst patterns. He sat with his arms resting upon his knees and his back a little hunched, like a small child. Lanterns outside every house, flickering lights like pinpricks in a big black sheet of paper. That was what the city looked like from here: he wasn't sure if it existed at all. He held a hand out and clenched it, extinguishing the lights. Putting out society for a bit. Firecrackers argued somewhere further along the bank. If you were only half-listening it sounded like an argument in fierce Mandarin, that is to say, regular Mandarin.

His tie was loose and his hair was a little bit disheveled and he had drank a single beer. A particular grand firework went off, showering the world in emerald. Crystals falling from the sky, jagged shards of make-believe glass. There was singing too. Tai didn't sing. He fingered the neck of his one lonely beer bottle and thought to himself that his speech about a New Year's resolution had been a good idea.

My writing has been shit for a very long time and I can't figure out why, so this is just the sort of thread for me. Here's my last several paragraphs:

“s’been two hours. We’re nearly there.” Ambrose seemed paralyzed by this realization, and Elyse remarked, not for the first time, on the paradox of the man’s engine – that nothing galvanized him like the possibility of imminent action, yet fear of failures already committed damped his fire. Could it be that in these moments, he didn’t even admit the possibility of defeat before it happened? The kind of reserve of spirit one must have to act that way – it fairly put a fire in her own soul.

Elyse pulled herself into a crouch and went to Ambrose’s knife on her hands and knees. Retrieving it, she handed it up to him.

“The ceiling, remember?”

Ambrose took the knife and pulled her up, but there was a gloomy cast about his face. “The pirate’s probably already alerted SDO Group to the ship’s presence by now. Even if we take him down, that infernal microwave gun will fry us like two eggs in an omelet before we ever reach the Station.”

They should have a radio station
where you can listen to a man
curse at weather and automobiles
in a nagging voice so familiar
you forget it is not your own,
saving precious energy otherwise expended
by moving lips and wandering mind.
Oh how effective we can be!
Rest your vocal chords for now
so that the day after tomorrow
you can strain them with such vigor
that the man on the T.V. almost hears
vehement screams of passion
suburban wives once knew
behind closed doors.

>>4123686
I wouldn't say this is 'shit'. It seems you're going for a more archaic sort of style, old-fashioned and stuff, and it works in that respect. It's just a little light on actual prose as opposed to dialogue, but that could just be the extract you've shared.

>>4123703

I think this is really very good up until like line 12.

>>4123489

Smog filled skies, overcast
I don't hate them but I should
Maybe if I was born into cleaner vapors I would

I've seen blue skies
With mountain trim
I've breathed clean air
In places where
Very few have been

I will return to living near
Empty lots and parking spots
I don't hate them but I should
Maybe if I was born into cleaner vapors I would

>>4123705

Well, it's supposed to be hard SF, so maybe an archaic style isn't very appropriate. Let me try to rewrite it in a less archaic style:

“s’been two hours. We’re nearly there.” Ambrose seemed paralyzed by this realization, and Elyse remarked again on the paradox of his motivation – that nothing galvanized him like the possibility of imminent action, yet fear of failures already committed damped his fire. Could it be that in these moments, he didn’t even admit the possibility of defeat before it happened? The kind of reserve one must have to act that way – it made anything less seem criminal in its presence.

Elyse pulled herself into a crouch and went to Ambrose’s knife on her hands and knees. Retrieving it, she handed it up to him.

“The ceiling, remember?”

Ambrose took the knife and pulled her up, but his face was unmoved. “The pirate’s probably already alerted SDO Group to the ship’s presence by now. Even if we take him down, that infernal microwave gun will fry us like two eggs in an omelet before we ever reach the Station.”

Have you ever wondered how it's like to actually die? Like the moment you're finally taking your last breath, thinking about your family or whatever it may be in your last moments, in a blurred confusion... Then finally, you're up in the clouds. Heaven, as many people call it. You're finally free, away from all of the little things that grabbed you from Earth. If only it was that simple. I used to think that maybe when I died, I'd live a good life, and although a bit short lived I'd go up to Heaven and maybe see my parents again, and even that dog I remember my mom getting me after school back in the third grade. No, death is not something that just ends at a nice, warm place that people no longer have any troubles. This... This may all seemed extremely far fetched, and being raised in a Christian home, I'd think I was full of shit too, but I've seen first hand that death, and really.. It's all a lie what people tell you on how nice and sunshiney things are after life.


Would really like a critique on it, I plan on using this later on.

>>4123734
That works better already. Again, a little wordy, but that's no bad thing. Keep it up anon!

>>4123489
>>4123489
Dwarf fortress fanfiction

Amxu Cruelnourishes split my hand in two. He and the Scourges of Slapping. I crossed his path and took his life.

Pools of water atop the hills that were murky rancid red for we chopped each other to pieces while we drowned within. Even at the moment of final destruction they hacked and bled into the dumb water. I stabbed them through their guts and cut their hands from their bodies and watched them vomit the hearts of those they'd eaten and scramble from amidst bronze and copper gang rapes, their blood running down the grassy hillsides slick from rain and full of fingers and masks and arrows.
As I saw the anguish of the taking of limbs I ran to relieve the sundering but could only watch as beautiful pale youth yielded entrails and crimped bone. The sounds of the aftermath were always the pitter pattering of blood dripping from trees like water does in a rainforest, and the vacuum void of men suffocating on their blood and bile, just like the screams of a hero who's fallen from a cliff.
I licked the blood from swords and sold the clothes of mutilated corpses for spiked pink earrings and bracelets made of glass. I left acres of treasure to rot and sink into the ground, to nestle ribcages and old breastplates. I am not an elf, I am a blood angel whose agon is to witness the blunder of the demiurge.

>>4123717
any advice on what to do with it?

>>4123489
Gut full of brown food squeezing out making me pregnant with nothing- I am dirt for shit to grow in, and maybe when it's done squatting on me I'll reclaim my right like a regent creeping back into the decision making quarters. My insane lust and desperate desire seems like fiction as I sit with every kind of crop and meat curling up inside me, weighing me down so subtly.

Pushing pelves deluging piss, oily cascades and broiling rivers of nasty amber excrement. My macbook pressures you, awakening you like a fat snorlax where before you sat listless, pushing gentler and gentler against my muscle walls that contain you, so I forget and lull into my writing until you burble up in force and I must run to the toilet and unite you with your crisp cool cousin where you'll inbreed until his purity is indistinguishable from your salty power.

*smack!*

You reel, awash in iron starlight as the blow cracks the marrow from your upper cheekbone. You feel your muscles yawn open to air and the elements, and as you fall to the shimmering dust an icy wind sweeps your shattered dimple. Chest hot, hair hot for fresh blood given its final freedom. Naked nerves dance like flagellum to the tune of your blood squirts.

>>4123744
1. This paragraph says it's about the moment of death, but then you go and talk about stuff that happens after, like heaven.

2. Remove "finally" from second sentence.

3. 3rd sentence, replace "from" with "on"

4. short lived should be "short-lived"

5. "maybe see my parents again, even that dog I remember" (omit conjunction)

6. "death is not something which ends in a nice, warm place where people no longer have any troubles"

7. "This may seem extremely far-fetched, especially for someone Christian like me, but I've seen death first hand and it's all a lie what people tell you about how nice and sunshiney things are after life."

Work on making sure your grammar is right, and that you are using words correctly.

>>4123779
Literally end it at line 12, or else replace the next few lines with something that continues the theme and mood of the first part.

>>4123489

Dreams run out of gasoline
refueling themselves.
The champagne fountain
retires, bubbles on the cusp.

Strung-out hands find
another glass empty.
The moon is too dim.
The gramophone's too loud,

No one wants their heart
pushed out by bass and treble,
which doctors say happens if
and when you snort too much cocaine:

Freud's bad habit, he plucks organ from
chest cavity (the still playing Wagner makes it
unbearable) for an aortic mano y mano:

"I should have
give you
to another."

Ghosts find his body
less than bone.

>>4123771
This shit is, miraculously, both terrifying and hilarious at the same time. Reminds me quite a bit of the "death hilarious" monologue in Blood Meridian.

I say you finish writing this as you have begun it, then omit all mention of it being a dwarf fortress fanfic. Let it stand on its own merit.

>>4123727
I really like this. I love the topic of conservation anyway, but THIS is from a whole other angle, and I love it. Here is mine, from the opposite side:

"Conservation at Midnight"

Strange, troubled sleeper hooing tonight
What do you see from your perch?
Prophetic bird releasing discernment,
Who's who?
There is a heathen ready to clear your home.
Anxious for pews for its' wheeled idol.
Four wheels for the will of glory,
but what of beauty?
What is a scarred land for a legacy?
You claim your changing territory
And take walking, crawling, and swimming prey.
Who's who?
Monsters in contrasting shapes,
Your talons versus their machines.
Both ruthless in devouring.

>>4123758
Ok, here's the next part, archaic language can't be all it is because it just doesn't look like good SF to me, and no publisher will take it:

Elyse knew what she had to say to that, but was afraid of what it might mean to Ambrose. Yet now was no time for withholding.

“Ambrose, if we conceal ourselves aboard this ship and wait, it will almost certainly take us right to the station.”

“But that would allow –”

“I know,” she interrupted, gripping him. “It would allow this traitor a chance at escape. But we took an oath, and your heart is made from the same fabric as ours, however rent the seam that binds you. When you took that oath you meant it for life. And we must uphold it.”

Ambrose scowled, but began unfastening the ceiling tile with his knife. Behind the mask of his face debate seemed to be replaced by decision. “Never mind the blasted oath I made to protect a people that forgot us, a station used against us, or a fraternity whose justice is a bitter pill for me, bathed in the blood of my friends in fighting for it. Not just my life, but yours also would end if I revealed us to the enemy now, and that’s a satisfaction I will not grant him.”

The tile fell, and Elyse caught it before it could clatter to the floor.

>>4123795
k :DD

I posted this in the poetry thread but no one commented on it.

A man shouts cries to ev'ry crowd he sees,
He speaks of things that we must all defend;
Declares he honor, duty, loyalty;
Or else, he says, the world will surely end.

The people hear and cry out in support,
These values true all eager to fight for,
Their children parents send and men deport,
They cheer in the streets and cry war, war, war!

Across the globe, another stories told;
Men, broken, lie; they can't be told apart,
The dreams of glory fade away; behold!
The glorious war that all wished to start;

No voice can be heard but the soldiers cries,
On these vast fields where hundreds of men lie.

Delicate freakshow alert the frame
Bash all flags were the mag spin park
Corroded by the volts that jolt the cold vein
Boogie-down kits to slip past the guard
Def for the mascot of radical mass
Megaphone fuzz and a woofer on fritz
We are not trained to divert the crash
So lets march face-first with a prayer for the blitz

>>4123850
reminds me of flander's fields.. I think you could develop your specific ideas more.. flow is good. word choice is okay.. also
>stories ; story's

“I like to think I get a sense for when someone’s fucking or not. Call it a pimp’s intuition, but I knew when one of my gals was getting it and when she wasn’t. I just felt it. Sort of a sleazy spider sense; and that spider sense was tingling hard right then. Annie was fucking, and I had to get in there and break the little dick’s prick to teach both of them who was really fucking who.
“Now I ain’t got no problem with devoted relationships father, and I ain’t got any problem with my gals getting it on with other guys for their own pleasure. That’s on them, and they’re free to do what they do. But what I do got a problem with is love; love is bad for the business, you see? When a guy starts porking a gal its fine, but when he falls in love with her, then the thought of another guy porking her just don’t sit right with him. He gets emotional, he gets possessive, and he gets to thinking that maybe that gal shouldn’t be porking any other guys meat but his. Now in all things considered, he’s right, but that there is where the problem lies. I couldn’t have my gals up and quitting on me cause some little shit out their thinks he loves her; I had to make bank and roll the dosh, let the green flow, you know? Hard to do that when my gals are running around swearing their done cause ‘Jack really loves me.’ Worst part is most of these girls come running back the second Jack finds a new flab to bust in, their heart broken and still out looking for money. If anything, I was saving them future emotional turmoil by prohibiting long term relationships with other hustlers.

>>4123850

Given your excellent technical and poetic ability(except for that odd "stories" on line 1 stanza 3 which should be spelled "story's" because it is a contraction), I am afraid I have some bad criticism for you:

The war poets of WWI did this stuff already, and their words still ring very true and modern for us now. I don't see a reason to repeat what they say. I want to see talent like yours applied to war as it greets us in the misty dawn of this new millenium.

War is a reflection of human cunning, because human cunning finds a grim apotheosis in it. For this reason war is infinite, and though it is as old as man it is always being reborn. Focus on what has changed, what we don't yet understand about our murderous child

Some minor grammatical issue here btw.

>>4123862
Some minor grammatical issue here btw.

>>4123860
Stand up for the cinema fire
Simian ire
Cold shimmy for the cinnamon sky
Intimate eyes
Loop all known alleys
Scoop the bounty like daddy hires Bazooka to murder Ralphy
I curdle with burnt milk
Pariah sigh
Honor piranha money
Count it with the knuckle that hustle bread out of copper's tummy
One of these rebels could level the marked city
But the NY uber alles government's pick me up

>>4123861
>>4123865
I know it's story's but for some reason it just didn't look right on the paper. But damn that, proper grammar takes precedence.
>>4123861
Thanks.
>>4123865
>Given your excellent technical and poetic ability
You really think so? I'm flattered.
>The war poets of WWI did this stuff already,
True. I just had the idea for the last stanza come into my head, and I found the rest of it really easy to right, like most of the syllables stresses worked on the first draft and such.
>war as it greets us in the misty dawn of this new millennium. War is a reflection of human cunning, because human cunning finds a grim apotheosis in it. For this reason war is infinite, and though it is as old as man it is always being reborn. Focus on what has changed, what we don't yet understand about our murderous child
That sounds interesting. I'll have to try to do something with that.

I'll be the jenky Jesus for the species you bleed with.
Ultra.
Soldier poach the folklore.
Jump guns through the 9th gate.
Jump guns like a noon 6 burner lit up on the 9th pace.
Even set among a portion conformed to the blind stage,
Never lured by the formal watching imported wines age.
We bow to the gusto mustered by the mecha-bot.
Plowed by the public, ushered out the letterbox.
Wowed by the subject punctured by the helicop.
Boy meets vermin: the widescreen version. Headaches, nausea, vomiting, facial paralysis.
These area a few of my favorite venomous side effects.
Mamba, Water Moc, Pit Viper, Diamond Back, Anaconda, Boom Slang, Cobra,
Bite 'em back.
Spinal tap crabs to the clapper.
Aesop Rock is the Cadillac of natural disaster.
Push that button.
Everybody gotta push something.
That's why the envelope is where it wasn't.
I work with the builders, widdle my gorilla military and fizzle 'em through the vigilante filters.
Who lamps left of the toggle?
How'd they fit that ninja ina bottle?
A hundred million motherfuckers with they hands out vs. a walking zipper bomb trying to keep the man down.

I stood up. I remember I was so angry. It was his nonchalance, I think. I was so angry at him for saying what he did. He yelled at me but I ignored him and went up to where you guys were and I slammed the door open and saw you two there; you were on top of her and you were both naked, both looking at me, mortified, and then you stood up, condom still fitted snugly around your penis, and you came to me, and without a word you swung your fist around to the side of my head, right in the ear, one solid hit. I remember the ringing. I remember it, like church bells in the dim half-light. Like the misty and divine rows of pews where that fake man of God had delivered his sermons. Then you grabbed the front of my shirt, lifted me up, higher, so I could look you in the eyes. They were dead, I remember, little dark beads of nothing. Black holes. I remember you said, “Why are you here?” and you were so calm and you said it with such cold and robotic venom in your voice, and then you leaned in close to me and your eyes burst into flame and your breath, smoky and with the scent of ash, circled around my head. I remember floating, wreathed in dragon smoke. I remember that your voice thundered in my ears forever. It was so loud. I was so scared, then. I am still scared. That was the first time I’d seen you like that. I didn’t say one thing. After a while you grew bored, I suppose, so you threw me to the ground, kicked me, over and over again, picked me up again, smashed me in the face, yelled again. I could smell my own blood, I remember. I can still smell it.

Arcadia was drunk in celebration; every street was filled with laughter and quarrels echoing off the cold, smooth pavement. Bliss had been oozing from the manors uptown, and trickling into the surrounding shanties since dusk. Word the city had finally defeated their rivals was regurgitated throughout the day. It was as good an excuse as any to rejoice. The soldiers were on their way home, and patrons were preparing to greet them with warm spirits and open arms.

Fireworks silhouetted the skyline, their sizzling bursts all twinkling in the dilated pupils of teary eyed citizens below. Some had brought their children to the festivities, others their consorts. Some seemed to dangle loosely from the arms of their caregivers, while others struggled to wriggle free from their grasp. Drunkards were spilling onto the sidewalk at every corner, but the crowd’s glances were swiftly captured by men juggling torches. It was too easy to lose one’s mind in the sensuous music enveloping the atmosphere. Many felt the vibrations caress their spines, jolting their bodies into passionate displays that glimmered in sweat. Every dance was fueled by the belief that tomorrow had no meaning. They were alive, and that’s all that mattered to them.

Yet up in the towers overlooking this debauchery, the revelry was shrewd, calculated, and encased by a thick veneer of courteousness. Boisterous titans of industry encircled a bountiful feast, each clad in funeral finery. When their mechanical eyes weren’t fixated on another’s wife, like suave falcons ready to dive, they were teasing their tongues with the luxuries sprawled before them. Silver dishes stacked with glazed ham, soft, succulent lamb, charred salmon, fresh fruit and perfectly aged wine, all basking in the buttery light. Pungent cigar smoke choked the air, mixing with the bourbon-stained breath exhaled by the sophisticated guests, their snouts numb to the stench.

>>4123680
Tai is a girl's name.

>>4123489
So silicon microbes encased in suits the size of suns versus creatures of pure vacuum and impulse leaves us billions of years behind, and only our guile or cosmic chance will preserve us. No naked human will stand against a machine gun before our spaceships reach distant suns, and these nude beetles and centipedes and androids and forgotten gods will not either, but their asteroid missiles and erasers of matter make flesh irrelevant- expediency and competition demand that we become nothing but consciousness that infuses empty space, shedding our penises and uteri so as not to be perforated or burned or blemished physically.
While I crave the life of a bonobo we threaten each other with bizarre weapons. Supernova suns, plagues that make your bones primordial soup, space monsters and black holes to devour you without even the will to do so. While I would rather rub my ball sack against the procreative organ of a metal squid to defuse our mutual wrath, for some god forsaken blasted evil unyielding reason it is easier to scorch and splatter one another, to crush each other with moons than to lay together in wonder at our bodies and minds.
I do not love these creatures but I could because I am a simple man as far as the stars and cosmic phenomena are concerned, and my wonder for alien squids and sands made of flesh is boundless, as it is for any human raised among dirt, grass, wood and paint. I know that because I out of untold googolplexes of individuals feel this way, at least some of those googolplexes feel that way too and I want to communicate with them, we don't have to shatter the galaxy and stain each other with our common gore as we humans have done- maybe we need all that holocaust to know right from wrong, but I don't want to bring war against you- there are so many stars for us all. Please do not crush us, I would rather gasp in wonder every second until I suck the air without end at our civilizations than stare at the fabric of space disintegrating around us.

>>4123489
Honesty is terribly difficult, even with oneself and one's best friends. Sometimes you have nothing to say, sometimes you have horrors to make the stars cry ready in your fingertips. Sometimes I am filled with joy, but not lately. One way or another, putting on the page the absolute first thing at the edge of your train of thought takes practice but yields plentiful truths.
Truths or insight. I want a gigantic swimming pool made of warm cheeseburgers with Dick's special sauce. Pools of lettuce and hot tubs of warm seltzer water. That's the kind of good stuff that's lurking at the edge of my mind.
Cows with two heads pull themselves in two and the black and red spider that sits in my brain bites fluorescent green poison into the woody fibers of the page, 1/1000s of an inch deep but glowing like deadly neon. A black spider that reaches around the inside of my skull, darkening the creative output of my brain, swimming through hot black ink to emerge at each morsel, piles of flesh upon islands of charcoal, inseminating them with the starving guilty torturer eggs that contain the little bits of our common humanity that have brought us to our current position of platinum glowing majesty, diamond-coated dominance, reaching into the perplexing fathoms of space to fuck every inch of vacuum between the stars.
I want to bundle every piece of existence outside myself into a wad the size of my fist and fuck it endlessly, seeing it shred itself apart against the skin of my cock, squeezing ever tighter until I've rubbed every fiber in the universe into the skin of my dick.
I'm tired of this dark wildness. I feel that I am evil.

I palm your cheek
and connect my lips and your lips
together
My hands feel your sides
rise
and fall
I press my chest
into
you
within you my warmth
meets your warmth
A touch, a flood,
heart hard-pumping, blood
moving smoothly, skin
on skin
against skin --
the warm reminder that within us all is a flash that lasts.

My words are meaningless.
I describe nothing when I write.
I am a man with no future.
Doomed to obscurity.
Feigning interest in a life he did not choose to live.

>>4123984
I like it.
>No naked human will stand against a machine gun before our spaceships reach distant suns
I had to abandon common sense at that, and, having done so, I felt comforting eros. Would have philosophical crisis with/10

The field stretched for as far as he could see, foothills on the west marched their way to true mountains. East was a dense forest, the trees giving up the land as they soldiered toward to the shore. Mangul picked up a pile of leather shifting it this way and that. He eventually untangled a massive travel pack, and began stuffing dwarf bodies into it. He snapped the limbs and crushed their ribs before stuffing them into his pack.
“What in the name of the gods are you doing?” but Vordain already knew. Mangul stuffed the final dwarf into his pack, shouldered it and looked at the human.
The ogre was average height, just under ten feet. His massive shoulders were armored with piecemeal armor, most much too small. Enough chain mail for a full set for the average human covered his slab like arms. His chest was exposed to the elements, but his giant gut plate made up for the lack of armor across the chest. Bones and teeth of saber cats, mammoths, and rhinoxes made the sigil of the Great Maw on the plate. A giant pair of patched and sewn leather pants covered his tree trunk legs, boots of iron covered his feet, the toe of the boots a cruel curved spike. In two steps he covered the twenty feet between them, leaned close to the human, and said one word.
“Snacks.”

This thread reaffirms my belief that everyone on /lit/ is a pretentious hack.

>>4124016
Were you ever in doubt?

>>4124017
I had hoped for the contrary when I first arrived.

>>4124016
Why?

>>4124029
Have you been reading?

>>4124033
Not really.

>>4124042
Lucky you. I still see the atrocities behind my eyes.

http://pastebin.com/mLsnNGyg

>>4124058
feedbag pls

>>4124058
well done

>>4124072
TY

If I post more will you talk to me?

>>4124012
that's the idea :)

>>4124074
are you a girl

>>4124076
Are you asking about my vagina?

>>4124033
>>4124042
>>4124045
>>4124058
>>4124065
>>4124072
>>4124074
>>4124075
>>4124076
>>4124077


For the love of God, someone just delete this fucking thread already.

>>4124077
if you are a girl i want to talk to you

sum dialogue

"Of course, it's one of the best. It's just a painful reminded that this, the internet, is your main form of communication.
And that hurts, because it's so sterile and inhuman.
Like all you have is yourself and your imagination, and both are fucking depressing.
You want to be happy, but nothing satisfies you.
The slightest thing makes you want to cry, but you can't bring yourself to do so"

>>4124086
Sorry I was getting something to eat.

I'd talk to you but it seems this thread is going to be deleted any second now.

bye

>>4124094
shit

why does this always happen?

>>4123489
Telomeres
On the tips of our chromosomes, there are these little hooks of genetic material that kind of look like paper clips. These little paper clips are the things that keep our DNA from deteriorating or fusing improperly, and they play a hugely important role in the aging process. See, over time, they get shorter, and they eventually become too short to protect our chromosomes, and so our DNA is destroyed, and cells can’t survive. Telomeres set our lifespan to a finite number of cell division iterations and the fact that our cells are programmed to stop working and die helps to prevent cancer. Scientists think that we might extend the human lifespan through recent developments in our knowledge of telomeres.
The science of aging is tricky. We’re probably not going to become entirely immortal – at least not anytime soon, but the relevant goal for lifespan lengthening is much easier to grasp. New technological developments are constantly increasing the potential lifespan of human beings. Once we reach a certain point, hundreds of years may be added to our lifespans within the lives of a single generation and, the longer we live, the more we will see technology advance to extend our lives, which will extend our lives even more. Eventually, we can find a simulacrum of immortality if we can just start to advance technology and increase the potential lifespan faster than people can age. Some scientists call this an “escape velocity”. Eventually, dying might be cured altogether from the healthy population.
My favorite TV show is called Telomeres and I watch it religiously so that I never miss any significant parts of the plot. I have all of the merchandise that the creators of the show sell, and several fan-made things from the show. I’m a senior in high school, and I am so ready to get out of town.
My family isn’t terribly wealthy, but I like to dress nicely and keep my room clean anyway. My mom and Dad split up after my dad abused us. My brother and I don’t see him much anymore, but he seems to be pretty sorry. I kind of miss him sometimes.

>>4124124
That’s not to say that mom’s been perfect. In the years since the divorce, she kind of lost touch with reality a bit. She divorced her children’s father for abuse, but when her boyfriends hit my little brother, she’s usually too drunk to notice. I’m too big for them to hit anymore. She drinks a lot. I try my best to keep her from driving afterward, but that doesn’t always work, either. She usually just gets defensive and throws the same accusation back at me again and again,
“how do you expect me to get home from the bar, huh?”
When I bring up designated drivers and taxis she just brushes the ideas aside, saying that taxis are expensive and that only losers go hang out with drunks and don’t drink. I wish she would act a little more intelligently about drinking and driving. Not for herself, anymore, I wish she would have sense enough to do it for us. She doesn’t really care.
Aside from Telomeres, I don’t really watch that much television. I read books a lot, partly, I think, because people don’t much interrupt you when you’re reading a book. There’s no commercial break. That’s why I read. It’s not just escapism; I almost become invisible when I’m reading something, and I like that. Schoolwork is another thing that gives you breathing room in my house. I focus on my grades because there’s nothing else that will keep me from living like this forever.
After eighteen years of this house, I feel almost like a deflated, wrinkled balloon, trying to keep afloat on the old helium in me. I’m ready to change. I packed my bags a few months ago, and I’m only waiting for graduation to come around. I’m ready to escape from here.

>>4123489
1/?
The fires rose around them infernal stygian smoke swallowed them as the building collapsed, slowly building their tomb. Yamala freed herself from the pinning rocks a snap of her bones and her ankle detached. Her leg was crushed all that remained was a pureed paste of human meat. Crawling over to Yama she rose up, her arms shaking straining under her weight, looking her over, Yama, you are dying, she said dryly. “Oh…” Yama, can you still hear, you shouldn’t be losing all organ functions yet. “I can hear you, I feel a bit uncomfortable.” That’s okay, that’s… okay.” “Whats wrong with you?” I… I lost my leg. “Rough.” Do you want to die…die…Yama? “It wouldn’t be bad…. Im just so tired.” I can put us to sleep again? “No… that only worked…. Once, and not well, we…woke up.” Im sure it will work this time. “No, can we…. Make it Yam? Can we?” I can…. You cant. “Oh… I don’t want to sleep then Yam, i… want to see this world a bit. I had fun traveling with Isumant and his friend. They are nice people….why do we have to do this… its not like it will make it better for us….or them, just them.” They made us this way. “Yes but…I don’t want to….be their image…do you understand?” I do. Can… you… do it, do it? “S-s-sure, I-i-I did it before, before the execution. I’d sneak out… there was a little boy…b-b-oy… we’d spend time together… I m-miss h-.” Its okay….

>>4124132
2/2
You wont have this body Yama… but I can break your Samsara. “That’s nice…” she stopped the words exiting and echoing softly, Yama closed her eyes and sharply exhaled. Yamala crawled away in a corner, face covered with little slits to see her sisters body eaten by the fires. The shin burned and exploded in conflagration as the oils set off the flames, the skin melted and puddled around her body, flesh charred and fell as clumps of ash in to the puddle of skin as streams of boiling evaporating blood rushed to coalesce. The bones were clear against the back drop of black flesh, ashy, and rigid unyielding to the glutinous fire. The fire died down, some scorched flesh desperately clung to its former owner, the husk that was Yama was a disgrace to her magnificence, she was nothing now, an empty vessel in the middle of nowhere.

>I was sincere: I do not know exactly what is love, but although I do not know him, I must say that it seems a primordial error of our philosophers to recognize only the soul as its mother; only the spirit as his father, denying to the body and any slice and piece of his paternity, as if he was at best a distant uncle, shy and sterile. It’s our body just a mountain range of muscles, with occasional showers of sweat, with a loud echo cave called stomach, swamps of tubular fungi called intestines and burning boilers in the private parts below? Is the brain a simple spongy cloud of tempests, the skin a blanket of grass, the heart a nucleus of bubbling lava? Is our body a mere mountain of meat in which lies hidden the immaculate and bright jewel of the soul? After all, what is the soul? Does she have smell? No. Does she have taste? No. Maybe she has texture? Why, in the same way that the fog has texture. What about the voice: is thought the voice of the soul? Is she a kind of small crystal gnat trapped in the colossus of mud and dust of our gross human body, within which it lies, whispering its will? Unlikely... So, gentlemen , why this ghost, this specter, gets all the credit for all that is beautiful in us humans, whereas our bodies, that are always with us (yes , our bodies abandon us only once) are called servants of addiction, unclean dolls, meat cooked in dirt, pigs sinners? Must the glory of nature be called a muddy rag marionette, a sewage incarnated? That would be an injustice: if we celebrate the cold mosque of the soul, why not also celebrate the carnival of body heat? When something is good for us, and we wish this something to be seen with the paints of superiority, we say we love it, but never use the name of pleasure, being this name something, something bodily, something dirty. And yet, it’s not love the child of pleasure? When, still newborns, we suck the motherly breast, do we not so because it’s good, because it’s pleasurable? And, on the deathbed, when we cover our dying bodies that feel cold with blankets, do we not so because heat is good and pleasurable? Why we live with the people we love? Why, because it’s good. Pleasure, gentlemen, is the one who pulls us through our nose with his sugary finger through the road of life. But how do we feel that something is pleasurable? Well, thorough this walking radar: our body. How then can we know that we really love something? Why, by reading the language of our bodies. So, gentlemen, long life to our bodies, because we can only love while still having them.

"So," the girl asked, "what do you do?"
"I paint." The Artist replied.
"Really? What do you paint?"
"Anything I want."
"Don't you specialize on a genre? Say, portrait?"
"Portrait." The Artist crossed his arms. "Ha. Might as well just take out your phone and let the little shit do the magic."

The girl received a cup of tea and paid it with a smile.

"What do you have against camera phones?"
"They've killed us and now we’re dead. Even photography is considered art now. God."
"Thank God I don't paint for a living," a smile curved on her lips as they touched the warm chamomile tea.
"No shit.” A cup of black coffee slid onto the table. The stench was sharp and nauseating. “What do you do, then?"
"Guess."

The Artist reached for a tea spoon and began forming a small whirlpool in his cup. It was almost hypnotic to him.

"Anything you want?"
"Yes," a sugar cube dived into her tea, "but no. I write."
"You write. Wow. Let me guess, [poetry]?" The whirlpool spun more vigorously as the spoon moved spontaneously. “I never get those; they’re meaningless.”
“Abstract art share similar traits, you know.”
“I don’t do abstract.”
“Nor I [poetry].”

The spoon stood motionless as drops of black coffee slowly dribbled off the edges of the cup. Some splashed onto the Artist’s finger, and they were cold.

“Okay. What do you write, then?” The Artist reached for a napkin.
“That’s a good question.” She smiled as she handed him a stick of sugar. “What do you paint?”

>>4123703
I liked this. Unlike >>4123717 I don't think there is anything wrong with it
don't expect that the opinions of other people are the truth to how you should present your work
because opinions are countless

>>4124495
>The girl received a cup of tea and paid it with a smile.
wat.
Also you forgot the cocktail glass with the red flags.

>>4124568
hey
had to cut down 30 letters
>The girl received a cup of tea and paid it with a smile. Her eyes closed as she inhaled the peaceful scent of chamomile.
what's wrong there?

>>4124495
I gues this is the same guy who did the artist and lyricist in the other thread.

please stop with these and do something else. they are terrible.

your opinions are ridiculous, your characters are smug, your intended sexual chemistry is completely absent, and your coffee shop needs to be firebombed

>>4124605
how constructive

>sexual chemistry

>>4123489

Gentle cotton swabbed dust-plagued eyes from the tracks as the evening broke through the day's heat; a mother opening her vast and light blue arms before them, stepping over the grasslands with a cool skirt to receive her children. Alpha and Omega squinted and hid their tiredness under her dome. Their backs were now relaxed against the train roof. Naked but strong, the arms of the trees were reaching, widening for her, too, and there was the String, a white ribbon glistening with purity on the welcoming bosom of the sky. Beyond was the compact dark universe.

>>4124495
Dialogue feels kind of stilted. My guess is that you don't have a lot of experience in human interaction. Also, it reads sort of read when random bits of object just do things seemingly on their own. What sort of effect are you hoping to achieve?

Also, 6/10. If you're going to post something, at least post something exciting.

>>4124617
>reads sort of read
reads sort of weird. I don't know how that got passed by me. It's early in the morning.

"From the bleak grey sky of England fell torrents of rain. It would have been a silent night but for the weather, each raindrop plashing in the rippling puddles and the low yet heavy rumbling of distant thunder. It rolled over the hills like a string of racing warhorses, their powerful hooves drumming across the earth. The thunderous marching of the horses continued through the night, until they came to a river. The river Severn snaked across the greens of England and Wales, rising, in the rain, to swallow the banks on either side. Petrichor filled the air."

“Just one cup of coffee,” the customer said.
“We don’t serve plain coffee anymore,” said Alfredo, “what would you like to put in it?”
“I do not want anything to be placed in my coffee, but I would appreciate the coffee being placed in the cup.”
Alfredo expanded his arm beyond the counter and grabbed the gentleman’s tie with pure contempt. The counter was wide, high and of firm concrete, but he managed to get his head in touch of the man’s. The man’s 40 year-old face had a river of sweat escaping the edges of his face. Alferdo kept staring into the man’s eyes for a few seconds just to realize a young boy, who resembled the gentleman in a weird way, was standing in the dark background staring. He left the tie and checked to the 7 year-old’s situation with his eyes; the pants were wet and face red. The stains grew darker and wider and Alfredo merely stared. As the kid’s face started to wet and flourish in red, Alfredo jumped over the counter, almost hurting the startled man, and ran away. Alfredo ran as if he were chased by the nation’s men. His face had a pathetic stare and his eyes were getting wetter as the time passed, and as it passed, he only fastened.

I was in high school in Arizona when the Red Menace heaved its mirror surfaced beachball into the Autumn night to fall forever. I was thinking of cars and beer and the sweet smelling fuzzy secrets girls hid under their lacy white underthings. These were secrets they kept easily in those days, and smiles and winks always seemed to inply so much. It was a good time, October, '57. Hot in the fall, as I rolled out with the Sun Devils on my silver Indian. Down through the canyons and the backroads at a breath-shaking sixty two miles per. In town you had to stay below 25. Not enough to raise up a breeze. I worked unloading cases of soda pop and hucking green melons into the backs of trucks driven by smiling Mexicans who knew what heat was. I was a man, but did not think about wars, space, russians or death. Anymore than any of us did in those days at least.
We worked and fucked and fried in the heat while up above us Sputnik rolled endlessly in the stupefying darkness.

>>4124596
Why is she paying the cup of tea?

>>4124668

This genuine piece made me laugh. For real. Keep up the unpretentious humour, whatever you write. Intended or unintended.

They bought some take-away coffee from the cafeteria in the lobby of the building and headed out into the scorching dry air. After spending hours in the comfortable climate-controlled coolness of the administrative building, the scorching air outside hit them like an overzealous girlfriend: it was all over them in a matter of seconds. The analogy could be extended to their escorts, too, who had been waiting for them in the lobby and proceeded to follow them around wherever they went. Darwin appreciated them, though, as the pro-war Baghdad (and indeed, pretty much the whole of Iraq) was as unsafe as it could get. Walking on the streets without armed guard would get you killed or kidnapped before the passing of the hour.

my mind sterilizes experience and reduces it to 26 harshly scribbled characters. all the pain and all the joy becoming cardboard cutouts of themselves. in my clumsy hands, words remove feeling and sense from memories. in this way i distance myself from what is inside me. things become distorted and disappear. when glimpsed from any direction but head on, they are only tacky advertisements for a life some stranger must have lived or pretended to live.

I often wondered what happened to Frankie Fischer, the handicapped boy that lived down the street from the house I grew up in. You see Frankie had an unfortunate amalgam of physical, mental and emotional difficulties. You could see it in his dog-like face and his permanently paradoxically docile yet angry expression. Frankie did not go to the same school as I did, he attended the special needs school situated on the same field as my comprehensive but separated from us by a rather large yellow fence. It was terribly gaudy and in the early morning sunlight, it was offensive to the eyes, the way the sun rays were deflected from that steel contraption of a cage. I would see Frankie on our commute on those drab mornings as mist carpeted the grassy field and wind rustled the trees of the offset woods. He, with his ragtag group of misfits, set apart from the rest of society, content to trade Japanese playing cards whilst sipping orange cordial from a sports bottle. I like a tree, would stand tall at the centre of my equally socially awkward clique of which were the scourge of our mainstream school. Oh Frankie, we did laugh on that January morning when you danced comically upon the iced field, trying desperately to maintain balance before falling flat on your ridiculous face, grazing it, bleeding and crying like an injured child.

>>4124697
Do you even feel remorse for laughing at a retard because you were socially awkward?

>>4124701
I would if it had actually happened.

>>4124706
well done then. it felt like a page out of my own life had been read back to me

although the word gaudy felt misplaced, and i assume from the weather and other oddities like "my comprehensive" that you're some sort of european (which i am not)

>>4124710
Thanks, and yes, I am guilty of being European. I feel I should also add that that was an excerpt from a stream of consciousness piece that I have yet to properly review, so I know it reads awkwardly.

>>4124687
There are some mistakes, but that's because I didn't proofread it. Sorry about that.
I hope you weren't implying that it's actually pretentious, and I hope you actually enjoyed it.

>>4124719

I enjoyed it, for real. Nevermind me getting off as sarcastic; smiling while I replied and snickered at (among other good things) the name of Alfredo. It's a hilarious name and you use it very well. I missed your mistakes. Job well done.

>>4123489
>some of the first chapter of a sci-fi novel I'm working on. I'll post more if anyone is interested.

Fisher started up the system. While he waited for the dig equipment to initialise, he punched a button on the outer surface of the Holocon field controller console, sending a wake-up call to the rest of the crew. Fisher and his surveying team had recently been transferred to a small outpost in the Pyrenees in order to scout for minerals in the extensive cave systems in the area. The sedimentary limestone within the caves was often susceptible to collapse, sometimes revealing sizeable deposits of precious minerals. They had to be careful though; if they were careless, falling debris could damage or destroy the expensive drilling equipment. The door opened. Callan, the team's technician, entered the room, holding a small tablet computer and scanning it intensely.

“Morning, Callan,” Fisher called back without looking. Lawrence and Maya were never up this early, but Callan's cybernetic enhancements meant he never needed more than a few short hours of rest. Fisher didn't sleep much either, but only because he'd never really been able to on sites. For some reason, the faint sounds of the station's automated processes disturbed him. Even when he closed all the vents and covered the windows, he couldn't help but imagine the ticking of the hydro-sprinklers, the low rumble of the rock-sampler, and the rest of the machinery all racketing away in their eerie, disjointed rhythms.

“Good morning,” Callan replied. “How's the weather?”

“Quite alright today, actually." He looked up at Callan with a wink. "You might be able to breathe outside. I think I even saw a bird fly past before.”

Callan gave a small smile. Their little joke was an exaggeration of the state of the environment, but it wasn't too far off. Looking out the window of the dig station, they could see that the expansive hills and valleys that were once covered in lush forests had fallen victim to the near-perpetual cloud cover and increasing levels of salinity in the soil. All that was left now were small clusters of hardy shrubs and a few scattered beech trees. Even so, by their standards, today was positively terrific.

>>4124668
>dat cliffhanger ending

but what was Alfredo fastening?

>>4124738

LOL! I love Alfredo

>>4123489
Something, somewhere, had gone catastrophically wrong. It was a point Hank kept circling back to, looped around in careful deliberations with his subconscious, contemplating how he ended up here and not where he originally intended to be. It was a chain (and it really was the greyest, most religiously consecutive chain imaginable) of events that stretched the most banal route toward his current point, and he would’ve been happier, or at least more content, had he warped even one rung of it into some profane new shape rather than simply following it, in all its repetitive torture, until he lay here defeated.

Tonight those deliberations were thrown, in what was surely an act of police brutality, into a drastically altered context that smelled faintly of piss. And still his thoughts continued to echo around in his skull, brain a numb lump, sometimes stumbling from his mouth to echo around the dank walls of the prison cell that enveloped him on every side. He lay parallel to the grey slab of the floor, rather than the grey slab of the bed, vertebrae crying and nostrils twitching with lingering smell of past occupants, and he was thankful at least that he only had their smell for company.

>>4124757
Chains have links, not rungs.

And I have no idea what Hank is dealing with, but it sounds like he deserves it. Anyone whose inner monologue is that purple deserves anything that comes to them.

"I know you ain't thinkin' what I think you're thinkin'", Lovell snapped,"now dammit, Cap'n, you said it yourself! Jamison was your friend, not just some piece of meat! Eatin' him now would make you a hypocrite, you bastard!"

I replied, "I guess I've said a lot of things today that I didn't mean."

PLS PLS tell me what you think, can post more if you want


Dearest reader, allow me now, to paint you a picture of my home. I will warn you that this picture will not fetch a grand price like those of many famous artists in years to come, neither will it look as appealing fifty or sixty years from now, so I urge you to look at it while the paint is still fresh and discard it when your fancy has been sated. The world changes as fast as the way you care to see it, and if you ever stumbled upon the place which I am about to paint before you, you probably would not recognize it from the words written here. It is a frozen snapshot of a moment, carefully excavated, thawed and cleaned from the vault where I keep my fondest memories for your viewing pleasure.

The scene, dearest reader, a house. Time - some two decades ago. This house would probably be referred to by today's man as a "hovel", a home where poor people lived in the past. Red brick walls, covered by white lime plaster, turned grey from the defecation of birds which perched on the wooden beams which held the roof made of wavy asbestos cobbled together to protect from rain and sun. And most assuredly, if you gave the large metal door a generous tug and they squeaked their way out of the frame you'd smell a scent which I remember quite vividly. Actually, you'd do good to notice that it is more of a combination of smells than a single smell, it's notes vary - old people, poppy seeds, burnt wood, linden tea and rancid fat. Each of these olfactory notes sharp, piercing and unforgettable. Even just writing this down makes my nose twitch involuntarily.

>>4124917
You are a hack. You will never make it in the industry. Your parents should be ashamed of you. You probably have no friends. The keyboard on which you typed this is probably coated with Cheeto dust. You look like shit. The whole world hates you. Kill yourself. Game over.

>>4124955

Wow I wanna read this book.

>>4124456

Nobody analyzed the excerpt from my play ;_;

>>4124917
>Dearest reader
Jesus fucking christ. Don't do this. I haven't read past this sentence.

>>4124970
That's because light green hurts the eyes.

>>4124974
he did it again at the beginning of the second paragraph too

>>4124984

I knew it! The colors corroded my career.

>>4124988
No, just green.

>>4124992
I laughed.

>>4124988

Fixed for you anon

I was sincere: I do not know exactly what is love, but although I do not know him, I must say that it seems a primordial error of our philosophers to recognize only the soul as its mother; only the spirit as his father, denying to the body and any slice and piece of his paternity, as if he was at best a distant uncle, shy and sterile. It’s our body just a mountain range of muscles, with occasional showers of sweat, with a loud echo cave called stomach, swamps of tubular fungi called intestines and burning boilers in the private parts below? Is the brain a simple spongy cloud of tempests, the skin a blanket of grass, the heart a nucleus of bubbling lava? Is our body a mere mountain of meat in which lies hidden the immaculate and bright jewel of the soul? After all, what is the soul? Does she have smell? No. Does she have taste? No. Maybe she has texture? Why, in the same way that the fog has texture. What about the voice: is thought the voice of the soul? Is she a kind of small crystal gnat trapped in the colossus of mud and dust of our gross human body, within which it lies, whispering its will? Unlikely... So, gentlemen , why this ghost, this specter, gets all the credit for all that is beautiful in us humans, whereas our bodies, that are always with us (yes , our bodies abandon us only once) are called servants of addiction, unclean dolls, meat cooked in dirt, pigs sinners? Must the glory of nature be called a muddy rag marionette, a sewage incarnated? That would be an injustice: if we celebrate the cold mosque of the soul, why not also celebrate the carnival of body heat? When something is good for us, and we wish this something to be seen with the paints of superiority, we say we love it, but never use the name of pleasure, being this name something, something bodily, something dirty. And yet, it’s not love the child of pleasure? When, still newborns, we suck the motherly breast, do we not so because it’s good, because it’s pleasurable? And, on the deathbed, when we cover our dying bodies that feel cold with blankets, do we not so because heat is good and pleasurable? Why we live with the people we love? Why, because it’s good. Pleasure, gentlemen, is the one who pulls us through our nose with his sugary finger through the road of life. But how do we feel that something is pleasurable? Well, thorough this walking radar: our body. How then can we know that we really love something? Why, by reading the language of our bodies. So, gentlemen, long life to our bodies, because we can only love while still having them.

It is my third year here, on my own. Three years of living. I run the memories in my head, flashbacks of past, I have a certain distance to the them, as if they were not my own, as if they never happened to me. I don’t make any judgements, they all seem neutral and distant, just the way things are and were. I came here to attend university, I came here to study economics. I’m an economics major. And finally, I’m taking a year off. I didn’t do well up to this point. I’ve grown to hate the experience of formal education. I don’t mind economics, but I despise being told how and what to study. That’s what I tell myself. Maybe it’s all smoke and mirrors for my conscience. And if it is, is that a bad thing? Is it not just a defense mechanism? Is it not better for one’s own sanity to delude himself, to adjust the lens until it shows something else other than a lack of work ethic, and ultimately adjust it further until it shows a lack of failure of any kind? I can feel a subtle grin forming on my face as the words ‘any kind’ echo in my head, it’s the staunch realization of the fact that this was anything but a failure of ‘any kind’, it was something that went profusely against what I thought were my morals, my values. I was not worried about the lack of academic success, no this was much more subtle. It planted its roots from many angles, deep beneath the dirt of my mind, ultimately producing a nagging feeling that defined me for what seems like an eternity. I had to wait, wait for some kind of cataclysm before I finally acknowledged it.

>>4123800
I like it a lot. Yeah, my poetry seems to always be dominated by ideas rather than structure and style, which I think makes it pretty average honestly.

>>4124968
It's autobiographical.

Here's a short story I wrote
1/2
As King Jan slowly led his men out of the forest and into full view of the battle, he was greeted with the deafening sound of cheering - the men had been waiting all day to see the sight they did now: over twenty-thousand cavalry arriving on the flanks to crush the Ottomans. Jan looked down at the bottom of the hill he stood on – three-hundred-thousand Ottomans on the battlefield, every single one of them set upon the singular goal of capturing Vienna and ensuring St. Peter's Basilica would become a mosque.
They would not accomplish that so easily - Vienna itself fought tooth and nail against the invaders. For two months the city had been under siege, surrounded by trenches, and starved from food. Tunnels had been dug under the city walls in an attempt to sabotage them. They had held out for as long as they could, but the city would not be able to hold out much longer.
But they would not stand alone either; the various squabbling European powers were now sending aid to the city, and did battle with the Turks below. Jan led his troops to the top of the hills and surveyed the field one more time. That morning, a mass was held for the army and Jan himself personally placed it under the protection of the Virgin Mary. He was certain they would not fail.
He turned around and faced his army. He saw troops from both Poland and Germany, united against a common foe. At the front of the lines stood his proud Hussars. Their wings, made of a wood frame and feathers, attached to the back of their armor, rose several feet in the air, and their long lances rose far above the rest of the lines.
He addressed his troops, "We face here today the full might of the Ottoman Turks - for too long they have spread unchecked, intent on conquering all of Europe. But this shall be no longer, for today they face the full might of the united kingdoms of Christendom! They have once before tried to take this city, in times long past. They shall fail at that task again! For we are under the protection of the Virgin Mary, and I have no doubt that God will fight with us this day - fight with us to save Christendom itself!" The men let out a cheer even louder than the one before, and their horses eagerly stomped their feet, clearly ready to run down the hill.
Jan raised his lance high into the air, "We fight today as one! We fight today to defend this blessed city of God! And as long as God fights with us, we shall not fail! We shall not falter! We shall prevail!" It then sounded as if every man on the field, including the Turks, was cheering at the top of his lungs. One would not even be able to hear their own voice in this flurry.

>>4125913
2/2
Jan reared his horse around, gave out his loudest cry and pointed his lance down the hill. He spurred his horse forward, and twenty-thousand men followed behind him. The Hussars rode at the very front, with Jan leading them. Above the cries of the cries of the troops, and above the sound of the horses racing down the hill, rose the piercing whistling of the Hussars’ wings passing through the air. They crashed into the Ottomans with a force only seen before in cannons, and almost immediately broke their lines.
The tired Ottomans could not withstand the charge for very long. Vienna’s garrison sallied forth from the city to join in the assault, and the cavalry made it to the Ottoman camps. As Turk after Turk was slain, the ones still alive came ever closer to breaking.
Finally, less than three hours later, their spirits were crushed once and for all, and the remaining Ottomans fled to the south and east. Vienna had been saved from the clutches of the Ottomans a second time.
When the smoke cleared, and dead bodies littered the field, Jan remarked to himself, "Venimus, Vidimus, Deus vincit" – "We came, we saw, God conquered".

>>4124970
>Nobody analyzed the excerpt from my play ;_;

I am still waiting ;_;

You may think not, but I really value your opinions. You have two important things: a) true love for literature and a certain literary knowledge and b) no emotional bond with me, which is why you can be honest about the material.

Man, I'm home alone today. I kind of wanted the company of some of you anons to have a beer and maybe meet some girls.

>>4123489
1/1
I poured another glass. Six months had passed since I had received my diagnosis. My coughing fits became debilitating and I would almost pass out each time that I exerted too much energy. Now, I mostly sat in my one bedroom apartment. I read and wrote and drank. Glass after glass went down and matched each page that I could slide onto the lined paper. Vodka and lemonade, half and half with a side of whisky when needed. The pain pills had nothing on my liquid cure and sometimes I would listen to music too and become so absorbed in what lay at my hands and swirled around my head that I forgot that I was actually sitting here dying. Sometimes I would look off into the distance or straight up at the sky and mistakenly feel full of life again. Often in that moment, the pages would be damp with spilled alcohol and the occasional tear that my tired eyes could spit out. I knew I was dying but still I sat and waited. One afternoon, I indulged and filled my stomach to the brim with burning liquor. The shot glass lay broken now on my counter from smashing it down either one too many times or much too hard after the last, forced swallow. I had received money from my last paycheck from work and spent half of it at the store with my friend. We bought all sorts of wine and whisky and I had rushed home like a kid with a bag full of candy. A big, brown paper sack of delectable, gut-rotting candy. I was eager to try the whisky because I had recalled that it was what the alcoholics in my family drank. Both sides of my family had more than a handful of habitual drinkers. Some were dead and some were still in the process of being dead but I knew each of them and I feel like they were the only ones in my family that I could know. They were the ones that were uninhibited, even in momentary sobriety, and that shared the most of themselves with you regardless of who you were or what you did or if you were doomed to death or set to live another 50 years. All of them somehow identified unspokenly with the same whisky even beyond generation gaps and so now it was my turn at the age of 20 to partake. Johnnie Walker Black Label sat on my counter and in my stomach. I reveled for quite a while around my own room with the new taste and then left and invited several friends over after the sun had set. My neighbor knew of my habits and sensed that tonight would be the same when he knocked on my door to check on my senseless yelling and was unsurprised to find me quite naked as I answered the door. No one could stop me when I had been drinking like that and I most definitely had no intention of stopping myself. Or put on clothes. No apparent intention for that either. It felt as if I had lost the walls that were holding me in so tightly bound to society and, in turn, sobriety. There was no line any longer and I trampled all over the boundaries that I had set for myself in the past.

>>4125966
2/2
Friends came and went that night and we relocated our drinking to another friends house where a party was happening. I piled in 3 friends into my little, silver Nissan and another car followed us, hardly matching the swerving of my own vehicle. We arrived after some time of speeding through the darkness of the residential side of the outskirts of town and crept up to the door. The door was open so we walked in and I immediately looked downward and vomited as I crossed the threshold. The poor girl in the white shorts never saw it coming and I looked up from my puddle that I had fallen into and gave her the first genuine smile that had crossed my face since the summer before I learned of my diagnosis. Never mind that my teeth were blotted out with chunks of stomach acid and dotted with specks of blood that my heaves had unhinged. I smiled the most shit-eating grin that a man could muster. She didn't smile back.
The next feeling that I registered was freezing water and I felt momentarily lost in the ocean of bathtub until I realized that it was only my friends pushing me toward the current of water that was getting increasingly hotter surprisingly fast. I fell into it, by their direction, and the water found my face and shirt. I tugged my shirt off and heaved another wave of vomit as soon as the shirt had reached above my forehead. The rise of disgust from my audience made me laugh until I felt the burning bile sear through my nose and I was contented by this to sit there in my bathtub for a while. All but one friend left me there and he was kind enough to hand me my drink that I had so valiantly carried through all of these mishaps until I was dragged into this tub of, now burning, water. The still cold liquid in the plastic cup met my tongue faster than I had anticipated and slipped around my mouth and down across my chest but I did my best to drink it all down. It washed away every single sensation and I thoroughly tossed it back. When I finished the last drop, an enormous belch that rivaled any sound and smell that I had ever encountered in my 20 years erupted from the depths of my intestines and echoed across the medium-sized bathroom. Evidently, it had affected my tub-side friend more than myself and the difference was noticeable when we both followed my belch with yells. Mine, a joyous yelp of victory over self and substance and his a more guttural yell that didn't subside until his face smashed into the toilet bowl on the way down to evacuate his own toxic stomachful in response to my flawless performance. I waited and then when he looked up after a moment from his toilet my eyes met his and I noticed the long string of eruption that seemed to spider-web between his nose, chin, bottom lip, and the toilet seat.

>>4125932
I'm not even remotely up to /lit/'s standards and though I disagree (if such a thing is even possible) with your "body is this and that" theme, it is well written and...logical I guess. The prose is good, though not my style. So I recognize your work as good, despite pretty much disagreeing (as much as one can disagree with art) with its content.

>>4125981

Thank you for your criticism. Actually I do not agree with this view. In the final scene of the play I made a kind of Plato's Symposium, where several characters make each of them a speech about love, about its nature. Most speeches are humorous, some are philosophical cliches, and one of them contains my true vision of the love.

My view on love is that of science: an electrochemical reaction in the brain. I've read studies that show the differences between the initial passion and the late greater empathy and bonding that occurs with time (that we usually call love).

Actually, I do not even know if I believe in that. Topics as broad as love, hate, death, etc.. never seem to be able to be fully understood.

But thank you humbly and wholeheartedly for the time you devoted read the excerpt.

>>4126019
Well now that I think of it, it was really stupid of me to assume those were your own convictions, especially since you mentioned it's a play but nonetheless even if it weren't it would still be stupid. I guess at least I got immersed into it to the point where that seemed a possibility.

Pain and Hoss approached the scorched land. The men in the car were dead. Shot to shreds, Engulfed in flames. The snow melted around the area.

"Do you smell that fresh smell of dead niggas?" Said Hoss.

Pain wiped his brow. Uneasy and uncomfortable.

"Now that you put it that way... i don't have much to say." Said Pain.

"Don't mind me, my mother grew me this way. " Said Hoss.

Pain inspected the burning car.

"Let's just calculate the body count and get the fuck outta here. It's cold as fuck and I want to go home." Said Pain.

"Shit nigga you don't think I don't? I've got a fine piece of pussy waiting for me at the pad. All I have to do , is get my black ass over there and pounce that pussy. Know what I'm saying?" Said Hoss.

Pain sighed under his breath.

"I have no idea Hoss." Said Pain.

Pain reached into his coat and pulled out a small red notebook. With a pen he wrote: Alabama Springs. December 23rd. Death Count: 5.

Hoss peered over at the dead corpses.

"Got some ugly mother fuckers over here." Said Hoss.

"Well that explains their actions now don't it?" Said Pain.

He stuffed the notebook back into his coat. He walked away from the burning car and headed to his own. Hoss followed behind.

"What the hell are you talking about?" Said Hoss.

"Niggas as ugly as these can only get their fuck on, if they kidnap a bitch. These pieces of shit kidnapped three of Casper's girls. Raped, Killed, Raped again, then dumped into a fucking river. " Said Pain.

"Well I guess they all deserved it. Whores and junkies. They're all gunna burn."

Pain and Hoss entered Pain's car and drew out of the crime scene.

>>4126024

Thank you again for your time and education. I really wanted some friends like you now to have a beer and chat.

I'd really appreciate anyone taking a look at my prose.

The evening sinks into the West like a blade, splashing crimson across dark thunderheads, mountains of vapor hanging blunted from the heavens like trembling stalactites. Cornfields sit on either side of the blacktop. On the road a boy pushes through the first drops of a storm. Yellow rectangles blur together under the wheels of his bicycle. He is standing, pumping the pedals, trying to see over the next hill.

A small sports-car passes by. Shining in the sunset and set against the dramatic sky it looks like the subject of a TV commercial. The car shrinks and disappears in seconds but the glossy image hangs in Peter's mind and mocks the emotion driving his feet down on the pedals. He has not decreased in speed but the corn passes him slower and the road inches along. He has too far to ride, so his eyes narrow and his lips tighten into a grimace and he continues riding.


The cornfields turn to low hills with lines of trees and bushes, smaller properties of unworked land divided by barb wire and chain link, mobile homes sitting on hills in the center of them, some polished white with garden pots and some the centerpiece of accumulated garbage and scrap. When Peter comes over the next hill he turns left down a dirt road and passes by several of these smaller properties before coming to the gate of Camelot. He splashes through a large puddle that has accumulated at the base of the entrance sign with the knight smoking meth graffitied on it. The rain now comes down in a steady sheet, but the clouds overhead still roil and billow, a loud and obvious harbinger of a storm that will do more then flood the trailer park.

>>4123489

“I remember seeing you on the trail, how about that?”, replied Tommy unblinkingly. Richard felt his hackles rise ever so slightly at the calmness Tommy portrayed whilst revealing such an uncanny lack or at the very least disregard of a disturbing memory. That nauseating atmospheric anxiety assaulted Richard's consciousness in waves of undulating regularity. Similar to long forgotten panic attacks, a thing of the past thanks to a monthly prescription and therapy sessions. “What exactly do you recall of seeing me on the trail?” replied Richard. He deliberately avoided mentioning that terrible blankness of his eyes the previous evening, and the now profuse bleeding of his nose. “Everything”, Tommy said. Richard took a moment to compose himself. “Something's happening to you guys, I don't understand it! Are you doing some sort of weird drugs?” said Richard. “No way man, this is so much bigger than that, you'll see. Come with me and I'll show you.” answered Tommy. Tommy motioned for him to follow, and started in the direction of the library. Richard was hesitant to so willingly concede to Tommy's will, in light of such disturbing circumstances, and yet he saw no choice in the matter if he were to uncover whatever strange phenomenon was visiting itself upon his two closest companions. And so he decided to follow Tommy out of pure desperation and curiousity.

I know it's not good, hence the need for critique. I appreciate it.

>>4126268
you are abusing adverbs, and it is bad

it makes no sense to say "replied Tommy unblinkingly" because you cant reply blinkingly
in the first place.

>>4126049
Anyone interested in critiquing my story? I's a work in progress

>>4126370
I have a sense that English isn't your first language. That or you haven't read a book before.

>>4126049
>>4126370
I agree with >>4126371, your dialogue is unbelievable and forced. You have to give your characters a voice that fits and without any other details I can already tell you that neither of them fit

>>4126268
You're being overly descriptive in places where you don't need it, using too many adverbs, adding too much to where there should be little.
>The nauseating atmospheric anxiety assaulted
Too much too much.
>>4126104
A few minor grammatical errors like
>Do more then flood
should be than
And you have no voice in your writing, it's too cut and dry without any real flavor. Sounds like you're writing an analytic description for a report instead of a story.
>>4125966
>>4125972
Too many run on sentences but at the same time you use commas in places where they don't belong, along with too much 'and'. Along with some minor syntax errors ie
>There was no line any longer and
should be arranged as
>There was no longer any line, I
or
>I piled in 3 friends into
can simply be read as
>I piled in three friends
also a word of advice, if it's a number under ten write it out. Personally I write out anything under a hundred but people don't like that.
What do I know though, I'm just a cat. Y'all do what you want.

my silver spoon,
gives my only reflection.

a bulging nose,
and pinpricked eyes dotted,
crossed and etched.

I am no man,
who questions his features,
but his cold senility,
and graceless teeth,
have bitten better things,
reflected on silver before.

I am but a grain of sand in an eternal hourglass, and I won't live to see the passing of a second.

>>4126399
cliche

>>4126398
I like it.

>>4126404
many thanks.
just typed what I felt at the moment.
consider it a gift to you.

>>4126049
Grammatical errors out the ass.

>"Do you smell that fresh smell of dead niggas?" Said Hoss.
Said needs to be lower case. It's one sentence.
>"Do you smell that fresh smell of dead niggas?" said Hoss.

>"Now that you put it that way... i don't have much to say." Said Pain.
Don't use ellipsis. Reword it as this,
>"Now that you put it that way," Pain said. "I don't have much to say."
The dialogue tag act like a pause, eliminating the use of the ellipsis, making for a cleaner looking dialogue.

>"Don't mind me, my mother grew me this way. " Said Hoss.
Once again, it's one fucking sentence. Replace the period within the quote with a comma, and said needs to be lower case.
>"Don't mind me, my mother grew me this way," said Hoss.

The whole thing feels stilted because you overuse "said" when you don't need to. You only ever need to use it if it might cause confusion with the reader.

Examples:
>Hoss peered over at the dead corpses.
>"Got some ugly mother fuckers over here." Said Hoss.
Could be this:
>Hoss peered over at the dead corpses. "Got some ugly mother fuckers over here."

And when there are only two characters speaking, once you identify which character is speaking, the other doesn't need to be identified.

Take some English classes, son, before you start writing.

>>4125913
>>4125919
Your first sentence doesn't jump out and make me want to keep reading. Quite the opposite, I've never enjoyed a story that started with 'as'. You use repetitive wording.
Also, you use too much 'and' in place of another sentence that could stand alone. 'And' does not follow a comma either, that's a very poor thing to do.
>Jan reared his horse around, gave out his loudest cry and pointed his lance down the hill. He spurred his horse forward, and twenty-thousand men followed behind him.
>Jan's own battle cry was lost in the sea of cheering behind him. He reigned his horse around and lowered his lance to face the enemy. With a flick of his heels he launched forward, twenty thousand men followed his lead.

Idk my bff jill

“What do you mean, you’re not coming?” David asked incredulously. For perhaps the first time this year, he was genuinely surprised. “Everyone’s here and waiting – all drinks are on Valentine, Lance is wasted out of his mind after only twenty minutes, and even the boss himself dragged his old sack of flesh down here. You’d be welcome here, Remy!” He had to practically yell over the sounds of carousing and merriment in the pub.

“Didn’t they tell you about me?” Remilia replied in her soft voice.

“Lance mentioned you didn’t really like social situations, but come on! This night was months in the making, and we couldn’t have done it without you.” David motioned to Jack that he was stepping out back. Jack gave him the slightest of nods before turning his attention back to his plate of ribs.

A sigh came from the other end. David could also hear the faint buzzing of Remilia’s “battlestation” now that he was out in the frigid November air. “Lance has no talent for words. He might as well call the sun big, or the ocean wide.” Remilia’s own words were spoken slowly, as though she had to piece them together in her head perfectly before being delivered.

“Simply put, I haven’t left my apartment in seven years.” Remilia continued. “Ridiculously, obscenely antisocial would fit me better than what Lance told you.”

>>4126417
This is a troll post right?

>>4126422
No, why?

>>4126422
>
>>4126424
Okay, in retrospect, I could see why you would think it was a troll post. But no, I've just got some odd characters.

>>4126417
It's not bad m8, though your dialogue in the first sentence could use some work ie
>after only twenty minutes, and even the boss
>after only twenty minutes! Hell, even the boss
Also adverbs m8, nobody likes adverbs like >incredulously except in extreme situations. Plus, David having to shout over the sound in the pub but Remilia replying in her soft voice and David understanding her doesn't exactly follow. If you've ever been in a bar that's not even partying hardy and you've had to answer the phone, it's near impossible to hear without sticking a finger into your other ear, even then it's pretty difficult.
Remove also from
>david could also hear

But from a grammatical and syntax standpoint is bretty good, compared to some of the other stuff in the thread. Just remember that you can remove commas from places like
>spoken slowly, as though she
>social situations, but come on!
>first time this year, he was genuinely
and the sentence will work perfectly fine.

>>4126390
whoopsie, I messed up myself, pls I am a cat
When I said
>I piled in 3 friends into
to
>i piled in three friends
I meant that you should say
>I piled three friends into

don't mind me

>>4126435
Thanks for the advice. Why are people adverse to adverbs, though?

>>4126413
>dead corpses
redundant

>>4126456
Not him but adverbs tell, they don't show. Dialogue should be strong enough to stand on their own. If they're not then adding adverbs isn't really going to help. Really, the only time when you should use them is when you can't express it through dialog, like sarcasm maybe, and even then you can express sarcasm through actions.

>>4126456
Not the guy you're responding to, but from my experience it's very easy for writers to latch on to adverbs as a means of providing description. I think the issue is that it is incredibly easy to overuse and to use improperly.

>>4126467
For instance, I just used two without even thinking about it.

>>4126466
>>4126467
So are dialogue adverbs the only ones I should watch for, or do I try to eliminate adverbs entirely?
i.e. should
"He slammed his foe into the wall forcefully"
be changed into
"He slammed his foe into wall with such force that the lights overhead shook"?

>>4126484
Notice how much better the second sentence is over the first

>>4126484
The second sentence is more descriptive, but that doesn't automatically make it superior. Adverbs aren't bad and it's really sort of a preference whether you want to use them or not. Hemingway (afaik) never uses adverbs, or very few. James Joyce does.

Amy was standing by a unique and fashionable coffee shop. She wasn’t there solely because it was fashionable, (although she did pass easily by a nearer Starbucks) but because she needed coffee. College work had blessed were with the gift of late nights, and the previous night she had entered bed at 3 am, angry and almost crying as she lay there because she knew she would feel horrible the next day. So she did. She trudged down to the shop feeling mild annoyance at everyone she saw walk by her. And, to be blunt, she had been sick with bowel problems lately. Her stomach ached and she needed a restroom quick. She snapped at the lady at the counter of the coffee shop when her coffee was taking, and for a long while did not feel any remorse. Coffee houses should be quick to serve when you need coffee. Now she stood outside the shop in the fenced area with chairs and tables. She didn’t bother to sit nor did she feel like sitting.

>I'm not a girl

In a world where speaking more than one language is becoming not an asset, but a necessity, it is important to instil the knowledge and practice from a young age. This polyglot phenomenon is not limited to those that work internationally, it is also a major factor to those who work domestically.
The United States is turning more and more into a multilingual nation as those who were once small minorities emerge, their presence in the business and political climate is felt more each day. El Pasoans have the advantage of being exposed to several languages more than most within the nation, and as a major international trade center, multilingualism is an even greater advantage. As this is such a huge aspect of life in El Paso, we must examine the economic advantages multilingualism has in international business, the neurological effect, and the cost of providing a proper multilingual education.
First draft is due at 8:00 and this is all I have written.

>>4126417
I really like this. I'm writing a story about hikikomori too.

I'd love to read more if you're down with swapping emails.

>>4126548
not the guy, but the word hikikomori inspired me


john and his soda cans are one. he sits on a fuzzy chair close to them. day after day he can see his soda cans. they are blue and red and blurry, and he looks at them often for a long time, until they begin to morph and the red becomes a person and the blue becomes a person dancing around on the surface of his soda cans cans. “it’s beautiful” he whispers, he isn’t scared because no one is around. he says it louder: “it’s beautiful.” the people are always there on the cans, and how he likes to watch them. a very bright light shines on his face with which a very advanced technological click can control the intensity, if need be. it’s fine here.

>>4126566
That was interesting

Tick-tock, goes the clock, I can feel it up my cock
Ting-tong, I feel feeble, I can feel that fucking needle.

This is what I'm saying to myself in Dr. Ramey's office. This is what I had imagined Samander saying going into Dr. Ramey's office, after Dr. Ramey told me about--in metallic detail--the single patient who had to come back for a second visit. Oh yes, normally I just write the prescription--yes--but poor Samander, yes, he came back in his fifth hour, the poor man, little prick little prick little prick oh please just be a little prick, and he didn't even ask for a refill!

I imagine old Sam, sticking it in some hot young thing, while Ramey is sticking it in my hot young thing.

You know, this hurts really bad, right Doc?

Oh, yes.

I'm not very good at description but my Professor gave a weird surprise theme write. Where we describe a moment where we watch the moon.

The rotting shingles crunch beneath my sneakers as I climb to my vantage point at the crest of the roof, they aren't quite as stable as they used to be but I manage the climb as well as I always have. Once I reach my seat I can see the dingy orange light that spills onto the street from a light post two houses down in the otherwise dark suburban neighborhood. It casts my pale lengthened shadow across the neighbors window. In the dark the light has weight, it occupies the cough syrup section of the visible light spectrum coating the pastel colored houses with a dirty bronze plating, if I close my eyes I can feel it on my skin like a film of grime.

>>4126572
thanks haha

>>4126572
thanks I suppose haha

>>4126587
You're welcome.

>>4126591
You're..... welcome?

I'm composing a personal opinion piece. Could I get a little feedback? This is my rough draft.

From now until the explosion of the sun, I will promote cigars over cigarettes. When I see someone standing by a curb, in the death of winter, puffing away at a cigarette I wonder to myself how on Earth they could enjoy that. The answer, of course, is they don't. In a sense, cigarette smokers are like energy drink guzzlers. They both want to get as much caffeine, or in this case nicotine, into their bodies in as short amount of time as possible. Poise and grace be damned, they need a quick fix! Just as a gent drinking tea is more refined then a teenager slurping Monster, a man unwinding with a cigar is more refined than a wench puffing on a Camel.

Is it elitist of me to think this? Perhaps, but I shall still proponent that cigars offer a higher degree of satisfaction than that filtered trash tobacco. Enjoying a cigar is to sit down to a vigorous, smoky and herbal sensation. On the off days, when I do try to choke down a Marlboro, the flavor is that of poisoned preservatives and additives. The only decent cigarettes I've ever had where made from specialty tobacco and wrapped by myself. These where okay, I suppose, but nothing like an old fashioned stogie.

>>4126603
I like this, it was clear and conveyed your idea well, so nothing wrong with your prose

it's a few weeks later now and we still haven't talked about it. i think we both know it's a common fixture to our rhythm: sundays we eat pastries and some day in the future you swallow not enough pills again while i exist too many miles not near enough. i'll keep you talking- what am i to do when i can feel your heart leaking potassium into my mouth back up the phone line if i speak?- until a clinic of your choice opens, maybe after the weekend, maybe after lunch. then i'll talk you into going, and then we'll not talk about it again. everything tastes of burnt out liver if we talk about it in the weeks afterwards. i never tell you why i do this, why i fixed it to our mutual constellation. it's not that i worry, it's that you'll never take enough and i want to taste pastries.

>>4126625
i really like this, but the 'leaking potassium' section fell flat for me. also, i feel like the last sentence needs more stoppage in the rhythm, the delivery is too fluid to have a strong impact. consider parsing that into proper formatting and submitting it somewhere, it's pretty rad

>>4126637
>tfw dating her makes me a better writer

>>4123489
I feel tired, and my chest hurts. Now, I just painfully remembered why I can not leave and last long: I have to take my pills for the heart; without them, I would cease to be in a matter of days. I'm not the self-sufficient man I thought I was. As I throw away my shattered pride, I pick up a white flask from my pocket and then I extract from it a white pill which looks like a plain candy. I hold it tight in my hand, as a foolish act of defiance, but I know I can not deny this pill to my body, this instrument that saves me and binds me at the same time. As I swallow it I think of how ridiculous I suddenly feel, and I find myself smiling as if I had just discovered a simple but decisive fact: I will never be able to escape from this place, for I am bound to it physically, culturally and emotionally. Caged birds are not meant to fly by themselves.

>>4126390
The grammatical errors are something easily fixed, this was literally from what i was just working on. As for having no voice, thanks for your input but I'd need more opinions to actually think theres a problem with my voice

We rode across the Great Pan, leading dawn by about an hour. The air was cool and the horses well watered, and we hurried.

The hooves left craters an inch deep in the soil. Two weeks before, a storm in the mountains had rivered itself down throough the cuts and gulleys and arroyos to die here. The water had seeped into the pan and wicked up through the moist and pregnant soil the spectre of what lay beneath this place. All around us sage and mesquite and thistle stood dead and frozen and sere. Strangled at the root by that blasting ghost.
The raiding tribes and the cattle drivers avoid this place. The beasts are stunted and ragged and picket-ribbed as razorbacks. The soil is not good for men or weeds or coyotes. It sparkles in the dew when it falls, and it tastes of blood.

The great pan is the grave of an ocean.

Sometime way back, after the great winter headed up north to sleep in Greenland for awhile, and rolled it's ice blankets back into the scooped out river valleys that hang above Athabasca and Hudson and the Great fish River, the loss of that weight and thre natural rise of the ground had suspended a gulf of water here, in this dry, dry place, and the ocean had died. It's corpse was a twisted vein of rocksalt eighty miles long and forty wide. Big as three counties. Its shroud was about fifteen feet of sand and silt and leaf-rot loam.
But the ocean is restless, and water wakes it.
It rains shallow and seldom here, and the soil is thick and gets renewed every spring by snowmelt, burying the ocean deeper every year. The water that runs from the springs in the high rocks is sweet and cold and tastes of the life of the high slopes. seeds blow in and tumbleweed slides out and birds fly and things grow in the pan sometimes for a dozen years. Even creosote and bramblebush and shallow rooted trees.

Then the floods rise in the hills, and then the snow melts too heavy, and the water flashes down the cuts and gulleys and spreads out across the pan, washing away the shallow layers of life, and then it finds cracks in the roof of the tomb.

Cold fresh water seeps down and wakes the ocean in its million year sleep, and the poisoned fingers of its ghost creep skyward. Then a morning like this comes, when the soil sparkles whith cubes of mild azure halite and the wind has a bitter and cracked flavor.

>>4126830

We rode through a blasted plain. leaves hung like tinsel on branch willow and white poplar and birch. Saplings as high as sixteen feet over our heads, all dead a week. the bugs had made holes in every leaf that was more than four feet above the ground, but they had had their turn too, and their husks blew in dense drifts around our horses feet. No birds sang. When we made camp that night in a circle of swamp rose the deadfall wood we burned had strange colors of lavender and violet and green at the roots of the flames. The ghost was hungry.

I dreamed strange dreams that night and woke troubled. The indians smoked around the fire and said nothing. In the morning they were gone.


By noon i crested a crumbling dune hill and could see Lusk in the distance. There were no buzzards circling, no blackened ribs of burned out buildings. The telegraph wire still snaked from tree to pole to fencepost along the low-banked road from the railroad spur ten miles outside town. Lusk was a mining town: loading borax and salt and potash in the small tipples at the mine head, and trucking them out to the smaller tipples on the hill above the railroad spur. Six times a year the Durango Central backed a bell boiler engine and a line of cars twenty miles down the spur to load. The train would come in three weeks.

>>4126830
>>4126831
Pretty nice, but Blood Meridian's already been written.

>>4126840
I was going for Gordon Shirreff's "Manhunter" books, since I think he's the only western writer to capture the true horror and desolation of the west, but thanks anyway.

Suddenly, he sits up and tugs my panties off and throws them on the floor. Pulling off his boxer briefs, his erection springs free. Holy cow… he reaches over to his bedside table and grabs a foil packet, and then he moves between my legs, spreading them further apart. He kneels up and pulls a condom onto his considerable length. Oh no…Will it? How?

“Don’t worry,” he breathes, his eyes on mine. “You expand too.” He leans down, his hands on either side of my head, so he’s hovering over me, staring down into my eyes, his jaw clenched, eyes burning. It’s only now that I register he’s still wearing his shirt.”

“You really want to do this?” he asks softly.

“Please,” I beg.

“Pull your knees up,” he orders softly, and I’m quick to obey. “I’m going to fuck you now, Miss Steele,” he murmurs as he positions the head of his erection at the entrance of my sex. “Hard,” he whispers, and he slams into me.

What do you think, /lit/?

>>4126847
Isn't this from that other thread on women's literature?

>>4124738
I didn't mean to be subtle, I meant that he was fastening his pace. I hope I used the word right.
>>4124734
I'm very glad you enjoyed it.

>>4126390
>>4126316

I knew that unblinkingly part was shitty, thanks for the affirmation. Been reading up on conversation tags and it was obvious. Good to know about the adverbs though, thanks. How should I fix that? Just remove them entirely or try to replace them with more substance action-wise?

There was a man in the orange water; glittering fireflies gave a glow to the surface. Together they reflected a moment of importance that had not come and never would. Long ago, perhaps, nature was also people and the fluidity of species and behavior gave rise to beautiful scenes of serenity and transcendent connectedness. In an alternative course of human development this was not a juxtaposition but an alignment. There could be an era locked away in our universe's endless chest of memories where light, water and skin perform in the theater of the senses, exhibiting a kinship and a oneness that transgress the avenues of perception like a loud and wet and red and lush and opaque and offensive and pungent and permanent brushstroke. Instead they are just bugs and a dirty man.

>>4126857
the word you want is "quickening" "fastening" means to make fast, that is to latch or lock down. Like fastening a door or cabinet,

>>4126688
Sorta depressive.

>>4126865
Would 'hastened ' fit better, or should I settle down with 'quickened'?

A bookshelf, filled to bursting, lined one wall of the wooded room, lit by a single fluorescent lamp in the ceiling and one incandescent on the desk. The desk itself faced the door and was of a wood deep brown, a laptop computer occupying one side with neat stacks of paper claiming the other. Pens and pencils were arranged in a manner bordering compulsive. A chair of standard office fare took its position behind the desk, plastic wheels on hardwood floor. Jay found his loafers straddling the edge of a carpet of the intricately patterned variety. Behind the desk hung a map, its title reading “MAP OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA”. A wooden globe portraying an unfamiliar planet rested in its stand. The window, slightly ajar, looked out at an empty parking lot under the harsh glow of streetlights. A barbed wire fence secured the perimeter.

The buzzing of the lamp was briefly interrupted by the creaking of floorboards as Jay stepped into the room. He could hear a dulled conversation somewhere else in the warehouse. The window brought word of crickets outside and the sound of a light breeze.
Washington was in the room, studying the map. He turned when Jay entered.
Jay spoke, after a moment of silence.

“Who the hell are you?”

The way water on the surface of Helen moves you’d think it was slow. No one’s sure if anything lies beneath so we’re all passing around a stick to prod under the boat for some sleepless critter. The water, warm and dumb, slowly blackens and does not much else of note. Stinks too. Conversation only when someone recognizes the silence. It’s as if there’s a job at hand; to anyone else we’d look like we’re fishing for bones.
Everybody’s read it. Stark white pages are placed neatly on everyone’s lap, but we’re all struggling to find the right words to get into it. Carly passes me the bent branch and I submerge it underwater, trying to get a feel for Helen’s slush. Four pairs of pupils stick to me as if to avert their gaze would dislocate their eyes from their sockets but I can only fixate on the water. The silence sets muck from the tip of my tongue down to the pit of my stomach. I anticipate interrogation and remind myself that I don’t need help.

>>4126871
if you use hastened, drop the word pace, you could also use "increased" his pace, lengthened his strides, stepped up his pace, fell into a jog, hurried, or moved faster. depending on the flavor of mood you want.

>>4126907
The final sentence didn't have 'pace' in it.
Thanks for help; my English isn't the best.
"His face had a pathetic stare and his eyes were getting wetter as the time passed, and as it passed, he only fastened."

>>4126917
try "pathetic look" and "he closed up" instead of fasrened. or even "he withdrew".

>>4126929
would 'fastened toward nowhere' fit, or is it too pretentious?

>>4126933
well, the problem is that "fastened" doesn't mean "went faster". It means "locked" or "closed with a latch" "sped toward nowhere" "moved rapidly in no particular dorection" seems to be what you want. "hell-bent for oblivion" if you want a colorful phrase. Just discard "fastened".

There's a long and winding trail where urbanity convenes with rurality, a sensuous path placed along a twisting river, rushing away from the city. A bicycle glides down it, deftly maneuvering around cracks and potholes, across mud and puddles. The rider is straddling a line between two worlds. On one side, separated only by a thin hedge, machines roar past, clattering down asphalt, squealing on brakes, occasionally letting loose a loud horn blast, triumphant in their artificiality, proud to be automobiles. Proud to be not of this earth. On the other side, separated by a short embankment gurgles the river Delaware, flowing ever south, ever onward to the sea. There is something more subtle here, more layered. She is not loud out of pride, she is loud out of necessity. She is lost. The Delaware flees the city, flees the dirt and filth, crying out for the ocean, crying out for absolution, for forgiveness, begging to be allowed to flow once more into the whole and not be alone. To not find herself stranded in a strange land with no sense of completeness. Beside her tall arbors crowned with fire bear silent witness to her struggle, guarding her journey south, standing by her side until she triumphantly climbs out of samsāra. Which is more human? Which side is more symbolic of the human condition? The urban turns us into machines, beings proud in our separateness from the earth. Only by straddling the line between the two can we see that we too are alone, trying to reach the ocean.

>>4126943
>discard "fastened".
I will. Thanks for making it clear for me.

>>4126906
Would love some pointers if anyone is willing to criticize.

>>4126906
No idea what the hell this is about. I'm guessing Helen is a body of water? The narrator has some sort of problem. Unsure what else is happening though.

Thoughts on >>4126944 ?

Another nonsense thing:

Umbertsnad high horse hip hopping hugmunch were mêde maîque to eaten coats travaille and alwaits, with a smigliones hear and a yuhumgagrahar (straist gagaher for pripoor unmuncular ripotenza) there, led on by lanky laments to port of most import wheremst, at the grainy house Ungt (like in olter leeds 'Ungt wunah, Uignt wuin gaghagahaga! Wingt wallabere, byens miegup!') buaig the seay of Olruus and looking on to whereles warts, it was time to work a walky way out to the djabube and sleep well buggins! Here at Ungt it was a more obvious inconspicuscene than elsewheren'ts, even Propelsior Chompsky had used it when on the run from that walking menage Mer Menub, error from the eep, as a result of being askanced of the Anorak Syntheticalist literatunes, and it seared Umbert's brêgn summunck fiats for to think of the thought such as it was was to be caught indulging as he was in something one nights mistake for a bagatelle and cheeves as they were and, as it might have been, he was not.

Bidding stairwells to the chorses would have been a kindness, for they do not crumble well at sea, but it seamed unseamly for, allowing safe paysage, they would in fact requite their fastly legs whunts moored. For such a simple man as Umbert, horsing was nexusoire and indeed envimental to his wellbearing hips, but, he surmised, for the glory of Zing Webinar (a matter of some unguence for decanting later on, fallows) would it be dispondibule and inceinture, in such time as to be falked urumiously and without esitompte. But frold Omer Goggins thee wat waits, and which wuay this is is not noopsed, the hitosteres of the MagClaggins remaakse unnoawak and without an unsurmentionable aggeragains of speedy clives it should be knowed well and without muss, that, in the wats oaf oold, ther could be no generarologia in the discitation of phneeph, the transdishannals of tim and the works of Wov. Such ingomareon I dotot not passons to theet witaints reason, surs et modules, I assuage you, but rather that in times of struge and tyoom, arowig fur ambrains, itns sns leisky ist, and not unst!

A skeecret secreted waltz accrued, but onsly for Onslo (nagt fæge Osloeška) whu wizzled awain the nacht by the waibes and droned in that monotone blue goat.

>>4127079
This is actually pretty funny. the puns seem to work right into the flow of it. It makes me think of those irish writers and liverpudlian poets of the merseybeat that used to write poetry books. Not sure if it's literature, but it's a lot of fun.

"bagatelle and cheeves" indeed.

>>4127079
>propelsior chompsky
>anorak syntheticalist

10/10

I'm back for a few minutes
>>4126535
Something about the word placement doesn't quite flow smoothly. A few grammatical errors
>college work had blessed were
>when her coffee was taking
Like so many others in the thread you use 'and' after a comma, which is usually wrong. Plus you've even used it to start a sentence, 9.99/10 times you can word a sentence better instead of starting it with 'and'. Try using a semicolon, people always underestimate the power of semicolons. Don't overuse them, but use them.
You insert your own dialogue and opinion into the story but don't attribute it to your character, you just wrote it. Don't do that.
>Coffee houses should be quick to serve when you need coffee

>>4126539
A few word arrangement problems
>The united states is turning more and more
could be
>More and more the united states is

Also you use too many commas instead of separating and fleshing out your sentences. I find myself doing this when I'm working against the clock, so I don't hold it against you.

>>4126585
Your first sentence needs work. Like I told some guy before, I've never liked a story that starts with 'as'. Yours doesn't quite start with 'as' but it's basically the same thing. Your word arrangement and word choice could use work ie
You use two descriptions whenever you use any description; pale lengthened, dingy orange, dirty bronze
Your shadow can't exactly be pale, nor can you see a shadow very well in on a window.
blah blah etc etc
>>4126603
Good content for the most part, a few minor things I would change like
>The answer, of course, is they don't
to something like
>The answer, of course, is simple; they don't.

>The both want to get as much caffeine, or in this case nicotine
to
>The both want to stuff as much poison into

The word 'proponent' doesn't work where you put it. It means what you want it to mean, but it doesn't work grammatically.

Like so many others, you overuse commas. Try taking them out and see if your sentences work without them, or if you can reword the sentence to work without a comma.


I can't stress using less commas enough. While you may know what voice you wrote it in and how it's supposed to sound when read inside your head, other's won't necessarily make the same pauses you do. Often they're not needed.

I'm going to do catstuffs all day, will critique n stuff when I get back. Anything above my previous post and anything after this one.

>>4127079
I find this shit genious! The flow! I love it.

>>4127207
You're doing God's work on this land.

>>4126316
>>4126390
>>4126268

Okay I tried changing it all up, and making it less cluttered with adverbs. Let me know if it's any better. Are there still too many or have I used them more intelligently here? Once again, very much appreciated.

“I remember seeing you on the trail, how about that?”, replied Tommy. Richard's hackles rose in response. He felt familiar pulses of anxiety beginning to invade his mind, product of forgotten panic attacks. “What exactly do you recall of seeing me on the trail?” replied Richard. He avoided mentioning that blankness of his eyes the previous evening, and the now profuse bleeding of his nose. “Everything”, Tommy said. “What's happening to you guys? Are you doing some sort of weird drugs?” said Richard. “No way man, this is so much bigger than that, you'll see. Come with me and I'll show you.” answered Tommy. Tommy motioned for him to follow, and started in the direction of the library. Richard was hesitant to concede to Tommy's will; in light of disturbing circumstances, and yet he saw no choice in the matter if he were to uncover whatever strange phenomenon was visiting itself upon his two closest companions.

The cottages are newer than they pretend to be.
Hedgerows turn the countryside angular, digital,
they just repainted the lines on the sandstone bridge over the brook.
The hills are defeated gladiators held down by copper nets
and the roar of the motorway is as hard to escape
as the maze of buzzcut gardens in which we,
though we don't belong,
though we let the grass grow and wear our hair long,
are trapped.

>>4127106
>>4127124
>>4127210
Much appreciated, guys. If you like, here's the first "episode" I wrote in this style, although the style itself has changed considerably since then.

Ah, the colloq and winsome vagueries done one collected in the fire there. Whence and what horm might be influctuated gravously and storthwit. Vaqu, vaqum; the vacuum in situe was not best pleasantised nor hospit did come, for the English are a strangled people of small means and wit smaller still. But be known that wherest arrangements for vacancy is sparse, that sparsity may be usulated and usurped for the good of mankind. And yet, I babble beyond my precipitude, for the protagon and firent do approach the view of this halpstated narratide and time it is for us to mean them, and well.

"Heron! Heron!" The voice ran thick and deep in the brush and Cantwell surround, such that it weren't not heard for mines besound. Indeed, heron there was but for brief momints, 't did fline and flow 'way over brush and Cantwell insurmount, for mount don't doubt what it hone and hurt when it did. The voice belongated to Harp Swittleswidt, a man of malabooth and stupor, or merely torpor. Friend Frund Dibds did resplend: "'Eron gone, so 't has, eh want 'Arp?" Switt did nit respring, for 't was not his court, him being of zetetic persuancite and thus not gib'd to unobus phenoms and such.

But there continued putter pint footward motionings in a genericised easterly maniére, at appropus tree mines an whole, where it stooped and bloomed like tur and ton in flagrant oburescence. Making way to when crow'ther and su'et, protagon and firent did recite and make good for night and when mourning came Switt was sharp and delibranitic. Dibds 'ad 'ad twun and tweeberry too many, Switt did dedunk, and set eastwarts whence more.

Eastbert Rigor and Ridden were rife and ransacked ruminously in rank ruborence. Umbert gallant and funt, but not twent mons lint was the raisin detract known and shouted forth from rooftips and wonders. "The Devil herself were him and home, so breget and borst yon sides and rend forth, lesser demise be sharper and stuck!" The cacophonitude was all permetrating and ran bunk to brush and Cantwell betrunken o'er it spitsnot. Yeigh, Eastbert bunt and bent to the wyrm o' the Devil hirself and hem and horn and rote and ring and sprunlike, for 't was that the Devil - him high, her hope - had sent fir and fur crumb on the board, rock and cobule. The feetward ascinate began again but mostly qu'unker, for Switt o' the Harp and Le Swîdt owned none time for frivolution!

>>4126944
i'm sorry but this is really pretentious and ugly
you should just imply all this stuff, not spell it out

I remember when fishing was not so lonely. It used to be a quiet contentedness broken every few minutes by someone pulling a fish out of the water. We would all crowd around for a moment and compare it to ones already caught; anything smaller than dad’s hand had to be thrown back. The affair used to equate to drawn out summer afternoons watching the multi-colored clouds in the water. It used to be tackle and bait stretched across the rocky shore of the pond for a hundred feet in between our seats, but now it is just me, alone, fishing in a pond that desperately needs to be restocked.
This afternoon is as good as any other. The huge, fluffy clouds drift over the water with their bellies colored purple, gold, and orange by the setting sun. They always looked like buttered mashed potatoes to me the way they were stacked up with crevices of darker and lighter yellow shadows on their mountainsides. Only a slight breeze ruffles the surrounding pasture’s grass. Tall Matura grass with fat heads on the end of the stalks sway out of time as the breeze rocks them back and forth. Along the edge of the fields the deep green oaks and maple sentinels mark the boundaries of the property as if guarding it from the rest of the forest that they stand in front of. Or perhaps they are the front line of the army of trees guarding the forest against the encroachment of the fields. The rusty barbed wire fence standing in the shadow of the trees must be the mediator. A few posts really ought to be fixed at some point. Only the cores of the cedar posts remain and the cavity around the bases make them susceptible to breaking or being pushed over by cows.
My father used to own these pastures. He used to be the one out here with me, using minnows and struggling grasshoppers to catch fish to grill for supper. My brother used to sit on the other side of him talking more than anyone else. Emilee won’t come out and fish with me. She says it is boring to just sit and wait for fish to bite; so I end up dressing and cooking all the fish I catch.
That is probably her yelling for me from the house, but I choose to hear the frogs starting to croak instead. At night the spring peepers and the bull frogs fill two parts of an arrangement that drifts into the windows of the house. In the field adjacent to the hay field that the lake is a part of the cows are all starting to lie down. They chew the cud with the same expression I have as I mull over the thoughts vacillating in my head. It takes weeks for a thought to begin to germinate; the roots have got to have time to prod and grope and test every impeding rock and intertwining root in its vicinity before it begins to sprout. After the new roots have found their place then the idea can really develop untroubled. That’s really the only reason I come out to fish anymore. But what good is all this thinking of there is no doing?

It's the start of a short story —

On Sundays, my children and I took a drive to the beach. My wife would career into the kitchen, in an animated state of artificial panic, vague inattentiveness legitimized by the rush. An hour later, after funny papers and cereal, our little troupe of three stomped and sang our way to my car. The performance continued as the engine huffed into activity, as the oaken homeliness of Victory Ave. slid into recent memory, as town hall's leaden cupola loomed, as 'Frère Jacques, frère Jacques, Dormez-vou'd, Dormez-vou'd', and until something vehicular caught the bass section's booming attention, demanding taciturn concentration.

The promenade, often grey and empty in the afternoon smog, came into view and buckets, spades and nets rattled. A dizzy serenity overcame me; kids running ahead a little - a little ahead -, gulls swooping leisurely above, brogues clopping satisfyingly on the boardwalk. The jangle of change in my pocket reminds me of confectionery, Arthur and Susie called back, and a frantic delight explodes on their little faces as I smile an offer of ice-cream. We walk up to the counter, agog above a range of pastel flavors - my momentary lapse back to childhood, half forced, and too regular but really sincere really real, I want to fit in - and there's strawberry, pistachio, chocolate, vanill-ofcourse, and mouthwatering. There's one I hate, 'tutti fruity' and I tried it once and it's, I mean, it's terrible; not fruity, just a tart miasma that tastes like nothing, and - miasma - the sort of thing my brother, my bro, a professor of geography at a community college in Ohio, the prick, might call - with that toothy, hairy grin - 'non-omatopoeia' "BAHA, jugetit?", "Tooty sounds fun, like a trombone, right? But it ain't, and nor is it fruity, so it works, BAHA!" And a hand through his graying beard, and those eyes so earnestly expectant.

I order three chocolate cones, we normally vote in unison.

>>4127263
The first couple of stars have popped up in the sky and dusk is starting to settle in earnest. For some reason the imminent darkness does not seem like a valid reason to go back to the house tonight. Emilee will probably fuss at me for not giving her enough attention or for wasting time out here catching nothing. The woman is a childhood dream that has grown up into a nightmare. Once the thought of her swelled my heart with excitement and joy, but, like too much sugar, she has turned into a very bitter, pervading after-taste. I realize that I do not love her, as much as I wish that I did. No, rather, I do love her, even though I wish that I did not.
The fish are too small for the hook on my line and they have nibbled the worm off without drawing the cork under. A very reluctant grasshopper has the point of the hook forced through his exoskeleton. This is the last cast of the night, I tell myself. But as I wait I see that the tacklebox is still open and the shiny new 1,000 pound fishing line is still in its plastic bag; it was supposed to be used when dad and I went to the beach for his birthday, but that never happened. Still, it would be a shame not to put the line to use.
The line is smooth and waxy. The sun is behind the tree-line now and the pastures are all in a quickly deepening shadow. I go over to the old oak tree in the middle of the field that used to serve as shade for farmers in generations gone by, leaving all the tackle on the shore. Can I still climb? Oh yeah. This tree has not been trimmed in decades and plenty of big branches are low enough to grab onto. Knots that my dad taught me come back slowly as the shadow begins to grow deeper. Emilee is definitely hollering out at me from the house, but she can keep yelling for ever for all I care. I can see the yellow of the windows marking the house from surrounding darkness in the rural landscape that it is the headquarters to.
Surely that will do, I think as the second knot is tied around one of the bigger lower limbs. I remember shooting a coon off of this same branch as a kid and bragging about it to anyone who would listen at school. But no one listened at school. No one listened at church. No one listened at college. And Emilee does not listen. Will the string cut through my neck or will it hold and snap like I want? Ha, who cares? I can see the cows in the field over from this branch, but they don’t look back at me. They’ll be the only ones to know where I am for the next few days.

>>4126390
Thank you for the feedback, I did a bit to lose the "ands" because I knew that was a problem and tried to solve the syntax errors and commas but I'm a bit drunk now so no doubt I've made new errors.. Also added in what I've been meaning to put into this story so far. I'd be glad to hear any more feedback from you, helpful cat, or any anon.

1/?
I poured another glass. Six months had passed since I had received my diagnosis. My coughing fits became debilitating and I would almost pass out each time that I exerted too much energy. Now, I mostly sat on the balcony of my one bedroom apartment. I read, wrote, and drank to pass the long hours of the daytime no matter how hot or cold it was outside. Glass after glass went down and matched each page that I could slide onto the lined paper. Vodka and lemonade, half and half with a side of whisky when needed. The pain pills that they had given me had nothing on my liquid diet. I would listen to music too and become so absorbed in what lay at my hands and swirled around my head that I forgot that I was actually sitting here dying. Sometimes I would look off into the distance or straight up at the clouds in the sky and mistakenly feel full of life again. Often in that moment, the pages would be damp with spilled alcohol and the occasional tear that my tired eyes could spit out. I knew I was dying and so I sat and waited. One afternoon, I endulged and filled my stomach to the brim with burning liquor. The shot glass lay broken now on my counter from smashing it down either one too many times or much too hard after the last, forced swallow. I had received money from my last paycheck from work and spent a little more than half of it at the store with my older friend. We bought all sorts of wine and whisky and I had rushed home like a kid with a bag full of candy. A big, brown paper sack of delectable, gut-rotting candy. I was eager to try the whisky because I had recalled that it was what the alcoholics in my family drank.

>>4127329
2/?
These times felt as if I had lost the walls that were holding me in so tightly bound to society and, in turn, sobriety. There was no line any longer. I trampled proudly all over the boundaries that I had set for myself when I was younger. There was a time when I would have been proud to announce that I didn't partake in drinking. I used to prefer to smoke marijuana. Due to my constant buzz, I hardly feel the high anymore though and it only adds to the drunken dizziness. It haunted me sometimes too. The man from only a year ago would be ashamed of me now. Speechless at what he saw even. My father would be ashamed also. He hasn't indulged in anything alcoholic since his father's death before I was even born. Heart failure due to alcoholism at age 55. Now my father spends his days watching his only remaining brother follow the same path. He drives 30 minutes away to the small town of Andale. There lies the graves of his younger brother, father, and mother. His mother was the only one to reach the age of 60 with his brother dying a couple of years ago of liver failure after having years of dialysis. I used to go with him and now he visits them alone every Saturday just as he has for as long as my mom and I can remember. Then he turns his attention to his remaining sibling. The memories of these days stick plainly in my head and I'm sure that it's still the same. My now 67 year old father returns, trying desperately to pry his youngest brother from the poker table and slot machine in the only casino near Andale. Sometimes, my uncle would come with us and other times he'd stubbornly refuse. When he did give in, we'd drive him back to his house right off of the dirt road near where my father and him grew up. I'd sit alone in the back seat while he rambled about his losses from the casino or brag proudly of how his new system is paying off. On the good days, he'd wave his wad of cash around with one hand and sip the last of his beer with the other. On the bad days however, none of us spoke after the first minute of driving. My father would pull up to into the long drive way and walk him into his small shack of a house. I never knew what happened when they got inside and my father never let me follow.

>>4127330
3/?
Sometimes, I waited a couple of minutes. One time though, my father returned after 20 minutes and would not acknowledge the tears that I could still see from my seat in the back of his red truck. I know that now is still the same. I still smelled the alcohol on my uncle's breath at his daughter's wedding last week.
I snapped out of these thoughts when I heard the knock at my door and the commotion that my dog made in response. Friends came and went that night and we relocated our drinking to another friends house where a party was happening. I piled three friends into my little, silver Nissan and my best friend's car followed us. It hardly matching the swerving of my own vehicle though. We arrived after some time of speeding through the darkness of the residential side of the outskirts of town and crept up to the door. The door was open so we walked in and I immediately looked downward and vomited as I crossed the threshold. The poor girl in the white shorts never saw it coming and I looked up from my puddle that I had fallen into and gave her the first genuine smile that had crossed my face since the summer before I learned of my diagnosis. Never mind that my teeth were blotted out with chunks of stomach acid and dotted with specks of blood that my heaves had unhinged. I smiled the most shit-eating grin that a man could muster. She didn't smile back.

>>4127332
4/4
The next feeling that I registered was freezing water and I felt momentarily lost in the ocean of bathtub until I realized that it was only my friends pushing me toward the current of water that was getting increasingly hotter surprisingly fast. I fell into it, by their direction, and the water found my face and shirt. I tugged my shirt off and heaved another wave of vomit as soon as the shirt had cleared my forehead. The rise of disgust from my audience made me laugh until I felt the burning bile sear through my nose and I was contented by this to sit there in my bathtub for a while. All but one friend left me there and he was kind enough to hand me my drink that I had so valiantly carried through all of these mishaps until I was dragged into this tub of, now burning, water. The still cold liquid in the plastic cup met my tongue faster than I had anticipated. It slipped smoothly around my mouth and down across my chest but I did my best to drink it all down. It washed away every single sensation and I thoroughly tossed it back. When I finished the last drop, an enormous belch that rivaled any sound and smell that I had ever encountered in my 20 years erupted from the depths of my intestines and echoed across the medium-sized bathroom. Evidently, it had affected my tub-side friend more than myself and the difference was noticeable when we both followed my belch with yells. Mine, a joyous yelp of victory over self and substance and his a more guttural yell that didn't subside until his face smashed into the toilet bowl on the way down to evacuate his own toxic stomachful in response to me. I waited and then when he looked up after a moment from his toilet my eyes met his and I noticed the long string of eruption that seemed to spider web between his nose, chin, bottom lip, and the toilet seat.

>>4127233
Better, now you just need to work on flow and syntax, along with word placement.
>He avoided mentioning that blankness of his eyes the previous evening, and the now profuse bleeding of his nose
Your possession of "he" needs to follow da rules. As of right now the 'his eyes' is applied to Richard when you meant to apply the trait to Tommy.
>He felt familiar pulses of anxiety beginning to invade his mind, product of forgotten panic attacks
This doesn't flow well at all, it seems to change the tense of your story to me, maybe I'm just imagining it.
>He felt the familiar pulse of anxiety in his forehead, the product of long forgotten panic attacks.
Maybe? I don't know. Let's see. The dialogue here;
>"No way man, this is so much bigger than that, you'll see. Come with me and I'll show you."
Unbelievable and forced to me. Nobody really talks like that. It would be better like..
>"Nah man, shit, you'll see. Come on, I'll show you."

As I've told many others, using 'and' following a comma is wrong and can usually be solved in a much better sentence. I know I said use semicolons to someone else but you can't just toss them in if you don't understand them properly. They should be an afterthought, a sentence within a sentence that directly explains something in the previous part before the semicolon. Keep working on it m8, don't get discouraged. I suggest reading more fiction to get a better grasp.

>>4127263
Your tense is confusing, I don't like it one bit to be honest, it's in the present as if the person writing is writing it right that second, but that's impossible because he's fishing. It feels as though you're just thinking onto your story. You can take what you have as an image and apply it to a story, but what you have doesn't exactly work in my opinion. Try rewriting it in third person.
You don't use enough commas as it were, or when you do they're in the wrong place. Your semicolons are overused and generally used wrong. You've also got descriptions inserted into the center of a sentence that ruin the flow ie
> In the field adjacent to the hay field that the lake is a part of the cows are all starting to lie down
Know what I'm sayin?
The potential is there, it's just in improper tense.
>>4127265
I like where you're trying to go but like so many others you use far too many commas, the barrage of 'as' in the first paragraph ruins the flow. You've got some errors in sentence structure;
>The jangle of change in my pocket reminds me of confectionery, Arthur and Suisie
This sentence should be divided into two parts.
You have the vocabulary but not the structure to use it properly.

>>4127329
No problem Anon, I'm here to do catstuffs and some of my best catwriting was done on catnip. You should see the one I did on catlsd about killing some guy. It's non fiction.
Let's see. Again as I've told others, you don't use and following a comma. Also you've now got sentences that are chopped up and could be combined. Your overall structure could use some work, but it's coming together better.
>Now, I mostly sat on the balcony of my one bedroom apartment. I read, wrote, and drank to pass the long hours of the daytime no matter how hot or cold it was outside.
to
>Now, my time was spent reading, writing and drinking on the Balcony of my one bedroom apartment exposed to the elements.

>Often in that moment, the pages would be damp...
to
>Often in that moment the pages would be damp; from spilled alcohol or my own tears, I didn't know. I was dying.
Your bit about
>eager to try the whisky
should be removed, doesn't fit well with the image of a poor dying fellow who's been drinking his sorrows away for a while now.

Blah, I have to go back to do more catstuffs, I can't catch any breaks around here. I'll try to critique you a bit more on your other three parts when I get back later. Don't ever get a catjob.

>>4124668

He would’ve kept running if it weren’t for his tired heart. He wondered if it’s been more than a few hours since his last jump; he ran his hand across his cheek while thinking of Forrest Gump, but he dismissed the idea as ‘stupid’ as he felt his clean-shaven face. While searching for a place to rest his legs, he heard an ungodly voice of 70 years—strong, though cracked—giving him the name ‘young boy’.
She was only few meters above him, sitting on the balcony exposing her melted thighs to the world.
“W-What is it, ma’am?”
“Get me a pack of cigarettes, I’ll throw the money.”
He was sweating in a manner most unnatural and his heart was pounding.
“What brand would like?”
“Marlboro red, soft pack,” the old lady said while throwing a few dollars at him.
Alfredo gathered the money though little light was there.
“She managed to see me through the darkness and she yelled like a soldier,” he thought, “old woman extraordinaire.”
There was a small shop a few minutes away. Alfredo walked his tired limbs across the street wondering why he even replied to the old lady who was almost her tights. As he went in, a dark cat ran in front of him. The idea came instinctively, but he thought that it’s ridiculous to think that a mere jumping car might bring him bad luck.
He went in nervously into the silent shop. Its walls were cracked and the floor unclean. Only one person was there, but he didn’t manage to see her face. She was sitting behind a small counter abusing her mobile with her fingers. He coughed as he moved nearer hoping for the young blonde to notice his existence. She stood erect, but with a plain face almost dead. Her eyes had a smooth red line which would be unidentifiable if he weren’t standing so close. Alfredo was confounded by her breasts’ size as the rest of her was slim and small. His eyes kept jumping up and down perplexed by the question ‘where to aim?’
“I’d like a softly packed Marlboro black, please.”
“What?”
“Red Marlboro, soft pack, please,” he said as he remembered the damned cat and cursed his luck.
“Maybe if you straighten your gaze, she replied with a crack between her eyebrows.
“It’s been rough day, I’m sorry.”
The girl turned around to get him the pack, modeling the rest of her body against a confused Alfredo who only wished that she was the one sitting on the balcony.
“I’ve never seen you before, are you new here?” she asked as she handed him what he asked for.
“I just came here because an old lady told me to; I don’t live here”
“Ah,” she replied.
“Yes.”
Alfredo left disappointed as he hoped for more, but he could settle, and indeed did, settle for a lonely ‘ah’.

"Wieder und wieder blickte Sigrun über die Schulter auf den Brunnenplatz, der seinen prächtigsten Mantel aus Schnee und gefallenem Laub angelegt hatte. Schon seit Jahren war sie der Stadt der Lichter ferngeblieben, hatte die Götzenburg und Cyrenne Riot von Rossbergs Anwesen schon beinahe vergessen, als eines Tages ihr direkter Vorgesetzter und Lehrer, Orvell, sie zu sich in sein Arbeitszimmer zitiert hatte. Abermals betätigte sie die Türglocke, von einem Fuß auf den anderen tretend. Natürlich war es ihr seltsam vorgekommen, gleich von Anfang an, denn ein „privates“ Gespräch bedeutete für einen Agenten des Custodium, der Schwarzen Wacht, oftmals Schlimmes. Herabstufung. Auslöschung. Sigrun schnaubte bei dem Gedanken, nicht mit dem Rest ihrer Zelle –in schwarzem Panzer und tintige Flamme zur Hand- an der Grenze zu den Sharac-Landen ein geheimst geheimes Handelsabkommen zu sichern. „Ich habe mit mir gerungen, aber ich kann diese heikle Aufgabe nur dir übertragen“, hatte Orvell gesagt, und Sigrun waren sogleich tausend und ein Grund eingefallen, warum sie dafür äußerst ungeeignet war. „Infiltration, Beobachtung eines Subjekts und Beschaffung von subjektrelevanten Informationen“, was sollte denn das überhaupt heißen? Dort draußen im Südosten fiel wahrscheinlich gerade ein Freund einem Attentäter zum Opfer, weil er sein Negrum nicht im Griff hatte und damit ebenjenem Zutritt zu den unwissenden Handelspartnern gewährte- und sie fror hier auf der marmornen Schwelle des drittprächtigsten Anwesens der Götzenburg trotz ihres perfekten, lückenlosen Negrums unter ihrem dünnen Mantel wie eine Schneiderin im Turmzimmer. Die teerschwarze zweite Haut schirmte so gut wie gar nicht gegen die nebelfeuchte Kälte des Finnburger Winters ab und durch dir Löcher in ihrem Mantel pfiff der Wind. Die wenigen Leute, die vorbeikamen, starrten sie an; entweder hielten sie sie für fahrendes Volk wegen ihrer feuerroten Haare, oder sie hielten sie für eine Bettlerin. Wenn ihr nicht bald jemand öffnete, würde noch ein braver Bürger die Hüter herbeirufen, um sie vom Platz zu schaffen, wie man es mit Bettlern und fahrendem Volk nun einmal tat –und eine... unschöne Situation wollte sie nicht provozieren. Mit dem Finger fuhr sie einen Strang des Negrum entlang, nach 13 Jahren des Unterrichts in der schwarzen Kunst noch immer fasziniert von der sehnig-ledrigen Oberfläche. Die Kälte, das wusste sie nur zu gut, kroch aus dem Fluss Merten durch die Stadt und in die Knochen, um an ihnen zu nagen. Murrend schlug sie mit der Faust gegen die Ebenholztür, dass die Kette der Türglocke erzitterte. Warum um alles in der Welt hatte Orvell, der weltmännische, klarsichtige, nie zweifelnde Orvell, es für sinnvoll empfunden, sie hierher zu schicken, wo doch nur ein einziger Grund –ein einziger!- dafürsprach? Wieso wog dieser eine Einwand mehr als die zahllosen, die dagegensprachen?"

>>4127686
I want to send you a second draft.
My email is k407dgp@gmail.com. Send me an email.

>>4127686
Thanks. I want to send you a second draft. My email is k407dgp@gmail.com. Send me a message.

>>4127686

Thanks dude that was from my first story in a long time, it's about 3k words. I'll just keep at it and try to take away what I can from the fiction I read.

>>4127200
>>4126535

thank you! you're right, it needs editing, although I would like to say the opinions in the paragraph are not mine but the character's. I suppose I should change that so it is more clear

>>4127766
Sehr guy mein deutsch freund. Das Verstehe ich nicht.

Senior Communications Officer Warren Menoff drove his car like a madman, swerving from lane to lane and breaking near-every law under the New Pallas Transcontinental Highway Traffic Act. Beside him sat Senior Sensors Officer George Slovens, gripping his armrests with white knuckles. In the backseat were Petty Officers Ai-Lun Lu, a young stone-faced Asiatic, and Ellie Lunet, a nervous, bespectacled woman coming up on her thirty-fifth birthday.
“Slow down!” She yelled over the noise of the highway. “Why are you driving so fast?”
Warren didn’t answer. Sweat poured down his forehead, matting his long black hair to his face. He was the only one in the car in uniform.
“At least tell us what’s going on!” Ellie yelled after receiving no answer. Warren ignored her. Ai-Lun crossed his arms. George continued holding onto the armrests, whispering something to himself.
Ellie's pleas persisted until the happy quartet came upon a traffic jam – all four westbound lanes of the TCH-1 slowed to a crawl.
“Fucking shit!” Shouted Warren. “Bullshit!”
“What’s going on!?” Ellie shrieked. “You grabbed me from my room in the middle of the night, dragged me into this car, and now you’re flying down the highway at the speed of light! Tell me what’s happened!”
Ellie looked at the rest of the crew. George was slowly rocking in his seat while Ai-Lun sat still as ever.

Something I wrote up just now

It’s autumn, nights can be pretty cold. The sun is still up, I figure it has another hour or so, it’s still warm enough to enjoy a walk through the park. The sunlight is almost bronze as the sun slowly but surely sets, the leaves on the trees producing a beautiful palette of colors – gold, bronze, yellow and brown and orange. There is a slight breeze moving the smaller, fragile branches and the leaves on them, creating an elegant, gentle dance of autumn. As the sun falls it gets colder, the breeze bringing the news of the upcoming winter and there is a smell of a distant snow in the air, it had to snow somewhere, maybe further up north.

I write in spanish which sucks because I wish I could share my shit with you guys

>>4127830
No problem bruv, I'll shoot you an email and hopefully I can help you some. Be warned I have a full time job doing catstuffs.
>>4127834
>>4127857
No problem y'alls, just doing my cat duty. The only thing I can suggest to help is to keep reading more and more, eventually structure and flow will come. You don't even have to read some srs business shit like what /lit/ likes to suggest, just a bunch of YA lit or easy 3-4 hundred page fiction will do the trick.
>>4127330
Okay, let's see. You need to pick out a bunch of sentences from your story and rearrange them to see it wouldn't work better, along with rewording them.
>There was no line..I trampled...There was a time...I used to prefer...Due to my...It haunted...The man from

>Twelve months ago I would be ashamed of what I've become, speechless even. Back then I only smoked weed and scoffed at the alcoholics, proudly proclaiming my sobriety. Long gone was any resemblance to my previous values, these days I was drunk so often that I could hardly tell the difference in my buzz when I smoked pot. Any and all lines I'd drawn were no longer visible, nothing held me back from complete degeneracy.

I don't know. I'm not saying what I've written is better, I'm just saying you can reword and rewrite a lot of what you've got to make it flow better. The following bit about your father needs a lot of work, both structurally and grammatically.

You're trying to fit too much into too little in certain spots. Split them up, allow yourself to describe things, especially when you're talking in the moment and not about the past.
>I snapped out of these thoughts when I heard the knock at my door and the commotion that my dog made in response.
to
>A knock at the door startled and brought me away from my thoughts. My dog jumped from his spot on the floor and began barking his warnings at the visitor.

There's just too much to go through to analyze it bit by bit, you know? But you've got the substance, just work on it more.
Don't take anything I say too hard or seriously, I'm not super serious English major or anything, I'm just a cat.

>>4128037
A lot of us can read in Spanish, and we have Spanish speaking threads every week.

>>4128015
Something I rewrote just now;

The sun is still up, I figure it has another hour or so before it's gone. The window of opportunity for an enjoyable walk through the park is slowly closing. The low sun casts long shadows over everything it touches while simultaneously bringing out the brilliant beautiful colors of the trees. A cool breeze rustles the thin branches and loose leaves creating an elegant dance of Autumn, a magnificent show without any actors. The quickly setting sun slowly turns the breeze colder, bringing news of the approaching winter. Somewhere, further north perhaps, it has snowed.

but from a critique standpoint..
Your final sentence is flawed grammatically. You use repetitive wording. When trying to be as descriptive as you are and using the structure that you use, don't bloat sentences with adjectives when you've already got two or three commas in it and an 'and' to boot ie
>There is a slight breeze moving the smaller, fragile branches and the leaves on them, creating an elegant, gentle dance of autumn.

>A slight breeze moves the smaller branches along with their leaves, creating an elegant, gentle dance of Autumn.


Please don't be offended by my kitty cat rewrite.
>implying anyone enjoys assonance or consonance half as much as I do

I've been working on my social skills. I actually talked to a stranger today and it went well. I was a little stiff but it was a nice conversation. I also attended a meeting of sorts with multiple people. I was quiet the whole time but I take it as a little step in getting to know them, getting them to be used to seeing my face and building courage.

>>4124456

You are very good. Congrats.

"One time Leo ate a blue snowcone, and I swear to God his turd was blue when he pooped."

>>4128154
pretty clumsy, remove simultaneous.

>>4126830
very good. As much like Barand as Shirreffs though, and a little more descriptive than maybe necessary

>>4126548
I'm the guy who you replied to. Sadly, this small excerpt is really not what you're expecting. It is not about a hikikomori. It is a half sci-fi about a 500 year old immortal and his associates working to subvert a mad quantum physicist who wants to throw the world into ruin for his equations.

Albrecht is the immortal billionaire. Everyone else there works for him. They're celebrating because they recently shut down a human trafficking ring that provided much of the bad guys' income.

And I know, there is literally no way to not make the aforementioned two paragraphs sound retarded.

>>4127731
Would anyone read this?
I feel like I really found my style, but I'm not sure if it's good enough.

>>4129053
>half sci-fi
what

J'étais étendu sur mon lit, regardant le mur devant moi, presque sans pensées, et elle était tournée vers moi, nue, promenant ses doigts sur mon torse. Elle avait des cheveux blonds, naturels ou non, et ils coulaient sur les draps. J'aurais pu lui faire l'amour, l'embrasser, lui dire que je l'aimais, mais sans cesse ses amants passés me revenaient à l'esprit: je ne sais qui ils sont mais qu'une femme puisse se donner à quelqu'un de médiocre me lève le coeur. Je les imagine toutes, ouvrant leurs cuisses à des imbéciles et j'en suis absolument dégoûté; j'imagine le taré, penché avec son sourire niais sur elle qui sourit également, croyant qu'elle affirme sa liberté sexuelle, ce génial mensonge élaboré par une société de justification, et n'est pas en train de s'humilier.


Eût-elle été vierge, lui aurais-je fait l'amour? Alors je me vois me penchant sur elle et je frissonne.


-Es-tu bisexuel?

-Pourquoi?

-J'ai un ami, un ami à Christophe, qui l'est.

-Ah.

-Alors?

-Non.


À chaque fois que je dois être avec une fille, je ne puis que penser aux terribles minutes perdues, perdues entre des cuisses, des hanches de jeune fille. Demain elle prend un café avec un ami. Il a dit qu'il voulait parler de communisme, de Marx avec elle. Que peut bien lui évoquer Marx, à elle? Sûrement un personnage inconnu, étrange, nimbé d'une aura effervescente d'altérité? Elle doit s'y intéresser quelque peu. Et lui, quand fut-il naïf ou cynique, j'aurais toujours autant de difficulté à excuser un pareil comportement. Ah! quand même je le vois lui, le communiste qui collectionne les citations du Che et des maximes rimant à propos de la vie, oui je le vois bien, lui, qui n'a lu de Marx que le Manifeste (la quatrième de couverture, en fait), et elle, elle, elle, parler de Marx autour d'un café.


-Oh non, je crois que je vais ronfler.


Qu'elle dorme; je lui jette un gentil rire qui ne veut rien dire. Je crois connaître l'ennui, le vrai: c'est la femme, c'est de ne pas l'aimer, de ne rien éprouver pour elle sinon cette vague colère alors qu'elle part ou voit un autre; c'est de ne pas arriver à se dire autre chose face à une fille belle, intéressante, que tout chez elle se retrouvera souillé par la servilité, l'honteuse soumission qu'est l'acte sexuel. Eh! que de beaux mots ne peut-on dire avec la queue de Sartre (qui dut tenir du lombric) d'enfoncée dans le cul, Simone?

1/3

>>4129550
Et pourtant toujours ce sentiment douloureux alors qu'elle part. Et que n'avais-je espéré ce départ, alors qu'elle était là à me serrer, m'asséner ses inepties sans relâche, me crever de compliments, se noyer dans mes paroles melliflues de cynique qu'ivre je fus assez intéressé pour cracher: paroles simples, intelligentes et convaincantes, comme celles, plus pathétiques, de qui souhaite parler de Marx autour d'un café. Que faut-il être mélancolique, cynique, naïf ou simplement vide pour se permettre pareille infamie. Je me verrais, moi, sobre, résumant Marx à une fille de seize ans, des étoiles dans les yeux comme si j'en avais quelque chose à foutre (et il en a quelque chose à foutre, lui!), comme si ce n'était pas là une grande blague bien grasse, bien ironique et déplacée, qui ne vous arrache qu'un rire jaune d'amertume, et je la vois se déshabiller devant moi; elle retire ses vêtements en me souriant et lorsqu'il ne lui reste que ses dessous, s'avance vers moi, doucement, en me souriant d'un si joli sourire et ses cheveux bruns et ses yeux bleus: elle est mince, a ses hanches de seize ans et les joues rouges, non creusées par la vingtaine débilitante: elle s'avance vers moi et se met sur la pointe des pieds, alors d'un geste digne d'un comédie romantique de 2008, j'écarte ses cheveux de son visage de ma main gauche avant de descendre lentement la courbe de son visage avec ma main droite; je frissonne de dégoût à l'idée qu'elle se tient là, nue, parce que je lui ai parlé de Marx comme si je voulais la convaincre, comme si je m'intéressais à sa personne. Ce ne sont pas ses yeux que vous aimez, mais bien en eux le reflet de votre visage malsain et intéressé! Alors je ne puis que m'imaginer fuyant, fuyant devant ce visage que je vois dans le bleu jouvençal de ses yeux: les yeux ne sont pas miroirs de l'âme mais bien miroirs de notre propre immondice. Et je ne puis me débarrasser de l'idée dérangeante que lui se prend au sérieux et adore en ces yeux le reflet de son visage couvert de sueur, de ses lèvres suceuses s'ouvrant sur des dents blanches, de ses joues rougeaudes d'attente, d'attente malsaine de foutre sa gueule sur un vagin et de bien s'y complaire; et qu'il ne ressent aucune douleur, aucune honte à débiter des âneries pour une heure ou deux la gueule bien enfoncée entre deux cuisses et le visage encore rouge de vaisseaux sanguins dilatés et oh! ne me sentirais-je coupable? Ne connais-je que trop bien ces lourds instants malaisés, étendus aux côtés de cette fille haletante, et ce profond dégoût pour vous-même, et le regard fixé au plafond, presque catatonique? Il n'y a qu'ivre que l'on peut s'abimer en ces promesses de profondeur que sont les yeux des jeunes filles, qui au fond n'auront été que cils et couleur.

2/3

French people ITT?

>>4129553
Qu'y a-t-il de plus beau chez la femme sinon la candeur, la douce naïveté aux joues érubescentes et pâles, aux yeux qui voudraient rire mais ne comprennent, vous dévisageant éclater de rire? Celle qui empathique vous regarde délirer sur De Musset (eh, que faites vous du mal du millénaire, ma chère?) et qui est si belle? Il n'est pas chose plus triste: la jeune fille vous glisse à l'oreille en quelque parole soyeuse que tantôt sonne le glas: il n'y est plus déprimant que ce papillon qu'enfant l'on eut attrapé et qui l'aile brisée, aux pavés brûlants du soleil d'un midi de juillet s'en fut mourir. Eh, qui oserait, en ces jeunes filles aux sourires dolents et timides, ces palais de cristal parcourus de courants d'air, qui s'y oserait promener pour y faire tinter le sol de ses pas trop gauches?


-Est-ce que tu dors?


3/3

>>4129550
>une aura effervescente d'altérité
non

vite fait aussi la fin du premier post quand ça devient pornographique, très peu pour moi surtout la pornographie téléphonée qui manque la sensualité
(c'est long la suite, je repasserai sans doute. désolé)

Le Palmier
Entre le grand palmier à l’extérieur de la chambre à coucher au seul matelas sans sommier, ce cube gris de moquette et le mur blanc lait (bleuté le soir quand ce moment précis arrive) sur lequel se balancent des formes noires et gigantesques, juste au dessus de son oreiller et de ses yeux aveugles dans la nuit, au dessus comme un nuage au dessus comme un baiser de bonsoir, l’ombre fantastique. Entre le palmier au dehors qui n’existe pas, qui se contracte et se rétracte au gré du vent qu’il n’entend pas, et ces gribouillis sibyllins qui dansent et dansent et dansent au dessus de son visage prêt à céder, une fenêtre. De la taille d’une cage d’oiseau. Suffisamment grande pour laisser minuit filer le feu, treillis et débris, réverbères oranges, gazouillis inquiets, milliers de milliers d’impressions du jour finissant dans le vide présent, sur ce mur blanc lait qu’il déteste, maintenant tout est sur ce mur, confusément, la nuit, la fenêtre, le mur, le palmier.

La première pensée va à ce palmier au dehors. Rien ne lui dit que ce palmier existe ; et si ces figements tout juste moins sombres que la chambre noyée dans l’ombre étaient les traces d’une autre chose ? Certes ces bras longs et fins y ressemblent, mais ils peuvent très bien être tout autre. Les installations électriques qui jonchent sa rue, les rues parallèles, les rues perpendiculaires, toutes les rues depuis qu’il est ici ; deux crucifix et quelques fils entre les deux pour le confort des oiseaux, leurs taches auraient cette forme également, des palmiers du futur. On a les arbres qu’on mérite, se dit-il. Mais non, ce ne peut pas être eux. De toute façon, ça ne fait rien, rien n’existe au dehors : et ça ne sera pas les antennes électriques. Il pense à autre chose : je pense à autre chose. Plus près d’eux, de leur tendresse au monde, il voit dans ces noirceurs la forme élongée et souple une tige longue, si grande qu’Icare sur son épaule l’atteignait à peine, une plante majestueuse portant un fruit rond et parasol. L’exotisme de Paris. S’il lui restait encore le toucher de ses êtres sur sa peau il se sentirait à cet instant ému. Mais c’est la nuit et c’est la Californie. On y brûle le jour et on se panse le soir. Plus rien n’y reste. Aujourd’hui, rien n’est plus réel que ces ombres fantasques sur son mur blanc lait. Rien n’y reste et tout se recycle. Il y avait quelque chose là bas, avant, maintenant je le sais, dans cette vie que je ne connais plus, dans ces horreurs tachetées, chantant de vérité.
(...)

>>4129555
C'est plus prétentieux que du Marien Defalvard.

>>4129568
>vite fait aussi la fin du premier post quand ça devient pornographique, très peu pour moi surtout la pornographie téléphonée qui manque la sensualité

C'est justement la critique de la sexualité que fait ce passage...

>>4129570
Et assumé.

t'es mauvais Tallis - et je dis ça pour que tu le saches, pas pour essayer de te faire bisquer.

>>4129577
la critique qui se fait sans sensualité est rébarbative -on a déjà vu du beigbeder ou du houellebecque

>>4129578
Bah, c'était la première fois que je faisais dans la prose, et je n'aime pas particulièrement.

>>4129581
Alors quoi, illustrer le manque de sensualité avec la sensualité?

>>4123524
I liked this quite a lot. You've got a lot of really great humor in your writing.

Il y a quelq'un qui ne parle pas anglais ici? J'ai rien contre les histoires ecrit en francais - en fait, j'adore votre langue - mais c'etait meilleur d'essayer maintenir la discussion en anglais si possible.

vas chiez, les Francais(e)!

>>4129590
Oui. Pour provoquer une gêne chez le lecteur connue en anglais sous le nom de whyboner.

>>4129590
j'sais pas, mais l'air blasé "où est l'amour" c'est un peu frustrant

>>4129698
>c'etait meilleur
I wanted to say "ce serait mieux". How did I screw that up?

>>4129724
Mmh. Je ne voulais pas dégager cet air, mais plutôt un dégoût pour les mondanités liées aux relations hommes-femmes, mais jamais de l'amour.

>>4129698
Qu'on jette un regard sur les règles de 4chan, et si on devait en trouver une encourageant ses utilisateurs à se limiter à l'Anglais, je la suivrais.

what's happening

"I still don't understand why I have to be put in an asylum."
"It's not an asylum, honey, it's a hospital."
"Really? So I'm sick?"
"That's right, you're not well so they're going to make you better."
"Well I guess that's okay then."

I don't remember what came before this conversation, but I remember that it was the last we spoke. I remember staring vacantly out of the passenger window for the remainder of the ride. It was early September, but the leaves had already begun to change colors. Soon the whole of New England would be host to the thousands of tourists that flocked each year to witness the splendor of the autumn foliage. I'm sure I sneered as I thought of that. I always sneer at ‘foliage.' The only part of the word that I understand is "age." With age comes death, and with foliage comes death as well. Autumn is just a prettier term for "fall." And when something falls, it either breaks or gets hurt. Autumn; fall. It's just a downward spiral leading to another end. I'm pessimistic, and I'm morbid. I have been. I was that day, and I'm more so now.

So here I am, en route to a mental institution at age 12, watching the leaves enjoy their last days before they turn brown and fall. Here I am, en route to a mental institution at age 12, contemplating how very much like a leaf I am, and enjoying my last hour or so before my fall. Soon, these leaves will be blanketed by the white of the snow that November will undoubtedly bring as it does every year. Soon, I will be entombed by the white of the walls and garments that the ward will undoubtedly have, as does every ward. Here I am, contemplating how very much like a leaf I am.

And I fall.

The change from forest to pasture went unnoticed and I somehow missed that we'd crossed the Connecticut River and entered Vermont. I must have missed the rolling hills and the sleepy little towns. I noticed that we were pulling in to the parking lot for a large complex, and realized that what I really missed was home. I stepped out of the Honda Civic and gingerly shut the door. I ran my fingers across it and looked at my reflection in the peeling maroon paint. I was stalling. Nudged by the thin hand of my mother, I turned and squinted into the morning sunlight.
There were people milling around all over the grounds. Some played chess on outdoor tables. You know, that sort of thing that you'd find in parks in big cities. Some were reading in the shade. Some walked around. Some people just sat there. What I did not notice then I can not impress upon my reader enough. In retrospect, I realized what they did not do. No one laughed. No one spoke. No one smiled.

>>4129776
French invasion.

>>4124737
I'm interested, would love to read if you post more.

the flow of the prose is really good, my only complaints are small: the scene is a bit visually vauge (I'm guessing it's partly because this is a chunk out of context). That makes some sense, especially if you want to go for a 'big reveal' that the environment outside is bad by letting the characters/described inside area allude to it indirectly.
You don't need much more though. Even the scarce bits of descriptive talk about the sounds of the station, the 'controller console', et cetera really draw up the atmosphere of the environment well (at least for me) just add a few no-frills visual descriptions and all that great atmosphere will have something to lock it down into a concrete mental image for the reader

>>4129796
Frenchies have always been here; what's the matter, are you so plebby that you don't even know French?

>>4129845
French sounds like vomit and is the worst (and most pretentious) language to waste time learning.

>>4129853
>Plebbus maximus
I bet you don't even know any Latin either, right?

>>4129845
I know only little French now as i have forgotten it with age.
If you took my comment too seriously to the extent that you criticize my plebbiness, I am extremely offended and emotionally hurt.

>>4124917
>grand price
grand prize

Also, there's no reason to start the first paragraph with:
>Dearest reader, allow me now, to paint you a picture of my home.
And the second with:
>The scene, dearest reader, a house
You also have quite a few run-on sentences and it feels like the narrator is trying to hard to sound intelligent.

>>4129854
>>4129853

So yeah, anon can't read French. Argue about your preferred language on /int/ or in another thread. Freund Quentin despises shitposting.

>>4129874
Fortunately no one cares what some namefag despises.

>>4129874
Using another language isn't against the rules and I can't see why /lit/ would be bothered, especially when said language is known to be patrician.

>>4129879
every language that isn't a conlang or a recent creole dialect has the marks of a patrician one.

>>4129924
lulz neapolitan and romani are not patrician. english is even romance based. i can't fully comprehend the level of childhood confusion which would need to be present to believe this were you not deprived of basic socio-linguistic tutelage

>>4129979
>lectures anon on language
>disregards grammar, capitalization, and punctuation
>begins remark with an internet neologism

>>4130000
sick quads, lrn2vernacular if you can't in2greek tho

>>4130015
>>4129979

would you mind clearing that up, I can't for the life of me fathom what you want to tell me.

>>4130034
χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά

>>4130065
wie überaus reif.

>>4130078
>wie patrizich.
fix'd. now learn what the word means before you use it.

>>4130000
>implying everyone here isn't using google translate

>>4130088
>implying everyone here doesn't know French, Latin and Greek
I heard some people don't. I understand people who don't know any Russian or Arabic because shit's hard, but the base three should be a given for any self-respecting typical /lit/izen.

>>4130087
>correcting a native speaker's German with incorrect German
>implying I had any clue what you were saying

Why don't you get your English up to a comprehensible standard and come back whenever that may be?

>>4130108
Your use (and, therefore, implied comprehension) of the concept and term "patrician" is poor, grammatically incorrect, and historically inaccurate. Your understanding of languages' social prestige also seems limited, especially for a European. Naples dialect is known for its criminal association; Romani's social status should be quite apparent to you; Greek is the patrician language; 4chan using anything above Engrish is not to be expected; you are so lost because you need to lurk moar both here and IRL.

>>4130138
The Greek you love so dearly rests comfortably in its dusty coffin, only having been re-animated for a short time in the 18th century by, you guessed it, Germans. If on /lit/ "patrician" equals "making intelligent and meaningful statements while also remaining aesthetically pleasing", then every language can be patrician, though mostly and predominantly (sp?) to its native speakers. Another such "clever" assumption, like yours, would be to call Greek the language of a corrupt, retarded and economically incapable people. But that would be wrong.

>>4130163
modern Greek that is

>>4130163
so you want to argue for your idiolect of the 4chan dialect when it suits you. stay pleb

>>4130182
if the importance of context eludes you, fine. You also casually call other people "faggots" in real life? Also, it's spellt "more" not "moar", while where sperging here.

>>4130091
This is why /lit/ has the reputation it does.

>>4129979
>english is even romance based
English is a germanic language. I admit that it was heavily influenced by French, which is a romance language, but to say that it is "romance based" is fallacious.

>>4123489
Three short burst, CLANG CLANG CLANG. Knocking, and it didn’t ask; it announced. He winced with the first, eyes screwed for the second and braced for the third. Surely they could budget for quieter locks. They managed it for the camera that sat high in the corner, a blinking spider that watched and waited for him to break, lens black and firing his ordeal up and through wires onto the monitors of some fat supervisor looking for some laughs of a Saturday night. But of course, there was no message in quiet locks. Churches were built big for the small children under God, and prisons were built small for the big men under justice, and they were all trapped just the same, men and children alike, but justice had learned to laugh.

>>4123524
There is a lot of "this happened because this" in there, but overall the story is fun. Freshen it up. Perhaps try rewriting the whole thing from memory with how you write now, two years later.

>>4123659
I don't know what to say. A lot of pointless he said she said/frowned/cried/laughed. The 2nd to last paragraph held a bit of amusement, however.

>>4123680
Tai is a man's name. Anyway, he doesn't sound drunk enough to be so self important. I liked the bit where the grass was wet through his trousers. That's always a lame feel irl.

>>4123779
Maybe not start the line with the word "that"

>>4123862
Fun topic, but you took longer than I imagine a man with street cred like this would take to explain it. The paragraph could have 1/3 of it taken out, and that 1/3 will be up to you. But a cool topic if you can keep tone for a longer piece of work.

>>4123489

A song from my play (in english and in the portuguese original):

We will ascend to the heavens, to infinity,
The immense summit of the very immensity;
Our bodies will be the bread of dust,
For we no longer will live the conflict:
The sad rite of being.
Already in the tongue of mud dissolved
From the raw shells of flesh freed,
We will ascend together.

Yes, we will ascend, with wings of dew,
Pure as the sweat of light and light
As the tears of the moon; as the snows
And the clouds: we will ascend without toil.
Our bodies will sleep
In the stomach of death; to the bright
Flower Fields of stars we will fly:
Two curious birds.

The clouds will kiss our nakedness
With their lips of adamantine clay,
Snow in which God shapes whatever he imagines,
Landscape of endless pregnancy
Always transforming;
From these lips, however, beyond we will go,
Searching for the core of the heavens:
The bed where we will sleep on.

This is the portuguese original (with metrification and rhyme):

Subiremos aos céus, ao infinito,
Cimo imenso da própria imensidão;
Nossos corpos serão do pó o pão,
Pois não mais viveremos o conflito:
Triste rito de ser.
Já na língua da lama dissolvidos,
Das cruas conchas da carne libertos,
Subiremos unidos.

Sim, subiremos, com asas de orvalho,
Puros como o suor da luz e leves
Como o pranto da lua; como as neves
E as nuvens: subiremos sem trabalho.
Dormirão nossos corpos
No estômago da morte; aos luminosos
Campos floridos de astros voaremos:
Pássaros curiosos.

As nuvens beijarão nossa nudez
Com seus lábios de argila diamantina,
Neve em que Deus modela o que imagina,
Paisagem de infinita gravidez,
Sempre a se transformar;
Desses lábios, porém, além iremos,
Pelo núcleo dos céus a procurar:
Leito em que dormiremos.

>>4124456
>Is our body a mere mountain of meat in which lies hidden the immaculate and bright jewel of the soul?

LMAO i loved this line. Unfortunately, i felt like all the questions of the soul could be deleted and you could have only 1 question of the soul, then 1 of the voice.

So many questions in this big blob of green paragraph. So much. However, I hope that you can cut some stuff out and make this 2 paragraphs.

>>4124495
Practice dialogue. These two are so white, smug, elitist, and undeserving that I would not have read past the opening page.

>>4124917
Dear writer, please don't talk to me. I want to witness as though a fly on the wall.

>>4126049
You say niggas, but I don't believe you are one, because it all would have sounded so much more natural. As it is, you don't know how to write with correct punctuation, and you also don't know how to write as though people are really talking.

Stick to non-offensive language until your prose stands by itself.

He was one shrouded in cold, uncaring darkness.
Consciousness, awareness gone, he could not think to loose himself from the tendrils of those with senses lost—yet his freedom was come. Liberation brought him from the blackness and returned him to the world of the living, first beholding, his tired eyes, a deep and piercing brightness. A soft ringing proved strong enough to deafen him, but when the ringing subsided, his beating eardrums perceived a light melody: a charming and frantic voice that his attention drew from the abyss of ennui:

“Oh good, you’re awake!”

Gentro is the kind of place where dreams go to die and whores go to turn their last tricks. Villains, criminals, self-styled hackers, heist men and retired politicians call Gentro home. It wasn’t always like this, but a steady descent had been taking place almost as long as I can remember. At first it was the small things, the random violence of youth that would occasionally roar out in the streets. Reasonable, realistic violence that local police could easily handle. But there were more and more fights, the murder rate increased, slowly but steadily it climbed to record highs. And no one quite knew how or why this madness was going uncontested. The local police had no answers, or at least none they would give us. The newspapers long ago stopped reporting the news with the ferocious hunger and tenacity they once had. This was a dying city, perhaps already past the point of no return.
Park Street was the main avenue that ran through the entire city, in most places the corner lamps had been silenced, their bulbs smashed with rocks or even entire lamp posts torn down for no other reason than the joy of destruction. This was the work of mere children, whom had been born too soon or too late but not in time to actually have a childhood. They roamed the streets, some with eyes hollowed by drugs, others shouting out challenges to passerby, rival gangs, or the unfortunate who became lost in their territory. Some would say that these young ones ran the city but this was because they didn’t bother to look long enough. The average citizen did his best to ignore the jungle like rituals that took place on the street. If they were only to look longer, deeper, they would observe a hierarchy of power that ran much deeper than a few street kids warring with other street kids, more than drugs and stolen goods making their way through the streets as a ship makes its way down river. But I get ahead of myself….
On Park Street the filth ran freely. Pimps and prostitutes plied their wares; needles were shared and dealers provided the citizens and each other with any drug of choice. Down dark alleys murders and rapes took place with the majority remaining silent for fear of retribution. In other alleys, groups of homeless met to pool their money so that they could bring a sip of wine to their lips. Gathered around trash can fires, some told stories of the old days, when they didn’t have to be as careful and one wrong turn wouldn’t take them to their graves.

In your own home, in a place like this, nobody knows anything. No one says anything. I guess those are the side-effects of life in suburbia. The walls surrounding your neighborhood tend to slowly migrate inwards, slowly moving into your eyes, your nose, your ears, your mind. You become numb, distorted; boredom starts biting the tips of your fingers.

>from the point of view of a drugged teenager

>>4130414
how do i improve?

>>4124495
lin/10

>>4123489
Procrastination is the worst thing we can do to ourselves.

"I can do it later" lead to poor grades, unfinished work, unborn children and even death.
You leave the housework for a day or two, no harm no foul, right?

>Writers block leads to stupid ideas.

The nights would feel like a damp cloth, tied tightly over his head. He would look up and see only tar, endlessly engulfing the forever fossilized prehistoric universe. It would take only that glance to know that the tar had spread, and that he was caught in it with everyone else. Looking down, he saw how the tar had adhered itself to everything. His breath was slow, the tar was stuck to his lungs now. He could feel it filling in all the holes, where things could escape and often did. His pace had become sluggish, and the black road swallowed his legs. He knew this was it, as he had known a thousand times before, in his Promethian deaths. The moment is not instant, but arrives afire, with the manic anxiety of knowing.

>>4130292
I would say it is a very old creole. A fascinating case, really.

>>4131019
No that anon, but:

Listen to real dialogue from real people. Catch the bus downtown. Catch a train. Write down (discretely!) everything you hear. Remember when putting it into a story that fiction demands dialogue which has verisimilitude - verbatim transcribed dialogue invariably sounds fake.

Kind of like that Simpsons episode where they're filming the Radioactiveman movie and thet explain to Bart that they have to use horses since horses don't look like horses on film.

>>4131128
>horses since COWS don't look like COWS on film

fuck.

>>4131128
>they have to use horses since horses don't look like horses on film.

What?

I had this as a separate thread, but, I feel it belongs more here.

http://pastebin.com/KyM3nLgC

It's about me falling asleep in English class and this guy I like in there. Any comments?

>>4131143
>http://pastebin.com/KyM3nLgC

Don't fall asleep during class. Your teacher probably puts a lot of time into creating a lesson plan and sleeping through it is extremely rude.

If you absolutely must, then zone out and don't pay attention. But don't show up if you're going to be actively disrespectful.

>>4131152
I've gotta show up, else I get a tardy, the school phones home about my parents, and that's one whole mess I don't want to deal with.

Besides, I already know the stuff we're talking about; we're reading "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" in there, and I read it myself years ago. Good book, but I read it. Just gotta show up and take the tests so I can go to college next year.

>>4131160
Shit. Just realized this post could imply I'm not 18. I am. Highschool Senior. 18.

>>4131152
>>4131143
How can you sleep in a class, where your personal space is invaded, someone is speaking, and a ton of people you probably don't know well enough, and even if you do, you're putting complete trust in them

I went to the store. I saw that they had freetrade coffee. I purchased said freetrade coffee and brewed a tasty beverage.


Now, we Hemingway