/lit/ - Literature

>>4822790
Life Is something that happens to other people,
Because we are not profound.
We have no monument and no great war.
We are the middle child.
We are un-bloomed flowers.
Possessing underused powers.


A slot machine of golden pennies.
Form an institution to defeat institutions.
To banish sobriety and pervert order.
Ancient machinery constructs and writes,
Palendromes and ouroboros.

They say we are lucky,
Because we have information,
But information isn't knowledge,
No, it's a glitter.
Which once applied makes the proud ugly.
Great works don't possess us,
And we don't excite the world.
The wheel doesn't turn anymore.

We are the unexcited generation.
We are the desensitised generation.
In plain truth, we are the boring generation.
Because we blame our generation.
We ascribe attributes to our generation
Like our music is bad and our population is ignorant.
But when we say that we never mean ourselves.
Because we are enlightened right?
We are the aristocracy of underdogs.
The vox populi is a shrill whine.
The first thing communication taught us,
Was that we hate everyone else.

Because we are better.
We are better.
We are bitter.

Pg.1

The trees on the street are rich with green leaves. Leaves have fallen to the ground, and the fresh foliage is moist, wet and of recent spring growth. Bunches of bush, grass, and tree matter make up the appearance of the road. Brown, gray-ish branches from trees, bushes, and flowers are mixed in with the rain drenched plant life. Trees’ brown stems are thick and lined and slightly carved; the trees have marks, are thick, and slashed.
As I walk down this road, the lighting created by the fog rain clouds’ filtering the sunlight changes in a spectrum from white to gray. The light gets in my eyes sometimes and I have to squint to see where I’m going. The clouds of rain seem fluffy, full with rain, almost ready to soak the streets. In other parts of the sky, from the viewpoint I gain as I walk further, are partly blue. Sometimes the skylight is covered by the overarching trees on the street - tall and leafy.
Metal signs on poles, marking parking spaces and non-parking spaces, are wet. Cars go by, emitting trace amounts of smoke, smog. These too are wet, droplets of rain water on them. The drivers have their windshield wipers on, though it has ceased to rain - briefly. A city bus drives by, rumbling, the parts of its metal compositions shaking. It is colored green, and it has advertisements on it - this one, Burger King sandwiches.
The road I’m on is in a residential area that leads to a big and foliage rich, forested park. Houses are lined by the street. The houses have lawns on the front and I think I can see gardens in the back. The houses are big, some brown, some gray, some blue. No one really goes up this road, so it’s quiet. The area I’m walking inside of is hilly and I sweat slightly as I travel.
I’m wearing black jeans, into which a plaid short-sleeve shirt is tucked into; Nike running shoes, and a gray puffy bomber jacket I got from JC Penney. My hair, black, is parted at a side, glossy from having combed it with grease, and shaved on the lower sides. I continue walking from where I was coming, in the direction of the park.
I hear the wind blowing about. A plane roars over. The acceleration of cars is audible on this street, though decreases in frequence with time. I hear my foot-steps. The tiny rocks from the street asphalt over the sidewalk making slight scraping noises as I tread. Earlier, when I was inside my parents’ apartment, I could hear the rain fall on buildings, cars, and streets. Now it is quiet out.

Pg. 2

Feeling the cold wind on my hands, as I walk, I place my hands inside my coat. My feet begin to slightly ache; I have been walking for about 15 minutes. Almost there. I am full, I had a tuna sandwich at Subway at noon. The wind hits my hair a bit. I feel my breathing, my lungs taking in and taking out air. The air is fresh. I can feel the fuzziness inside my coat’s pockets - they are keeping them warm. The atmosphere is moist, leafy, winded, and slightly quiet.
I feel good. I’m slightly excited, and slightly cautious - eager to not be caught by the following. The majority of people are at work and I doubt there will be people at the park, its size making a dozen people feel like none to me. The beauty of a drenched, fresh spring is on my mind. The textures almost naturally pleasing to me. Air and rain like this seems cleansing to me.
I arrive. I quickly move to where I was yesterday. Taken out of my backpack is an electronic device. I created it after my studies of advanced physics at UCLA. The gadget is a small, dark crystal rectangular box. It is two inches by two, in dimensions. The crystal cube is colored black with purple streaks in it.
On the cube is a single circular, silver button. I go to a very leafy area of the park, and I set the cube on the dirt ground. I press the silver button. Sparks of electricity are emitted from the cube. They are about 3 feet long. The sparks stop. I pick up the crystal and I instantly turn half-invisible and half white-gray electric sparks. No sound is made.
I manifested as probabilistic static. I thought of the ocean, blue and beautiful. Then, I was in outer-space. I could see the earth, its sky - covered by streams of white cloud matter.

>>4822792
This is probably the only free-verse I've read on /lit/ that wasn't total crap. It's got a message that anyone can relate to and despite it being a subject that's well-worn these days, you still do it well. Having said that, here's some things you can do to improve:

>"we have no monument and no great war/we are the middle child"

those lines are dangerously close to ripping off Fight Club, so if I were you I'd write something else in their place or tweak the wording so it stands out on its own

>Because we blame our generation...like our music is bad and our population is ignorant

I don't know why, but the wording here just sorta kills the flow for me. I'd change it to something like: "Because we blame our generation/for making shitty music and the shoddy education of this ignorant population"

overall I give it a 7/10

Here's an excerpt from the first chapter of this novel I'm working on about a mob enforcer who can't accept the fact he's a borderline psycho. If you guys like it, I'll be happy to post more

I prop him on the john and pull out the razor, flipping it open and running my finger lightly across the blade. It’s sharp, even barely touching it gives me a paper cut. I pull on a pair of latex gloves and wash the blade in the sink, then wipe it off with a towel. Spalding’s still asleep, but I gotta act fast before he wakes up.
Grabbing his wrist, I press the razor to his skin and run it down his arm, opening the veins and watching his redness flow. Spalding’s eyes flicker open just then and he almost struggles, but I hold him in place with a firm hand and a firm choice of words:
“Listen, it’s too late. You’re gonna die. Ain’t no stopping that. Look, look at your arm. Your ulnar artery’s opened up, even if you could escape and call an ambulance, with all the excitement you’d bleed out before they could save you. And even then, the people who sent me would find you again and they’d finish the job. And s’posing you escape death altogether you’ll be on the run your whole life. Trust me, this is the best way. Just let it bleed.”
Spalding doesn’t quite accept those words at first. He struggles some more, weakly.
“Let it bleed.”
And funny thing, even though he had some fight in him, he starts listening to me. He stops fighting and sits still. We look into each other’s eyes and I watch the life go from his. It’s a horrifying and, somehow, kind of an amazing thing to witness if you get the chance. This is only the second time I’ve watched a man’s soul go, and the only time by my hand, but there’s something in it that you just can’t ever forget.
For one long and short moment, Spalding’s eyes are blinking, contracting, you can see the life in him at work. Then something happens on the inside. His gears stop turning and it’s like something leaves him. His pupils dilate, relax, he stops blinking, his eyes stop making those tiny movements and he just stares ahead like a statue. Gone.

>>4822899

Meh.

Mob hitmen, and people robbing a casino are like the number 1 thing amateurs like to write about for some reason. It would have to be over the top good to go anywhere

I don't know what this is.

I owned five of the gnomes before he took the pig-fucking things. gone everywhere ‘round town before I broke down and I cried. That was out in the field by the McD’s, sideways to the Denny’s across from the ‘lot. I was there for five to big ones, just crying in the drygrass. I was just changing my trowsers when I saw him, when I saw Zeke Pycantre. Caught me with my piccolo out too.
So I say to Zeke that I’ve seen him with my gnomes, that I’ve seen his car and I’ve seen them in his car. We’re out in the field, my piccolos shrinking and he just smiles. I tell that Zeke you and your family’ve been nothing but trouble since you rolled up, and that everyone, even Aunty Shpekelmeyer, knew this was par for course with someone like you, and that nothing, no amount of debatin’ or gerrymanderin’ or just flat out blockadin’ could ever hope to stop one such as you, you degenerate scum. I tell him that he’d walked right over the line, and that there was a way to this town, a nice deep precedent. And in none of this towns four hundred and forty six years has anyone gone up to someone’s lawn and taken his pig-fucking garden gnomes.
He looks at me like a kid on Christmas. Then he smiles more like a fag getting colonoscopied. I see that smile and I see those rows and roles of pearly whites, stretching deep throat down. Never knew how he talks with that condition he has, but shit, he says he loves my gnomes and he loves the taking of them. And he loves my shriveled piccolo and he loves to see me cry. And the whole time I didn’t see one car on the intersate.
I was done with the sobbing, so I looked at him and I said I’d have him and my gnomes. Yes I would take him forever for what he’d done with me and he’d never quite be as he was before, and for the worse. Zeke Pycantres face gets all scrunched. He tells me the gnomes, my gnomes are stashed up in his basement in a nice tidy circle, and he goes down there what with the candles and the incense and the aphrodisiacs. And has hisself a time.
Then he high tails it like a nigger from common authority, too fast even for me. A full sprint from the wheat field. Zeke never veers nor stumbles, he makes a beeline from his one chance at decency. A straightaway away from me. I take a hard peep at him running. watch him leg it ‘cross the empty highway to the flat plain on the other side. watch him in his full sprint across the valley, his small business t-shirt back getting smaller and smaller and finally tiny, before he blips into the horizon of the piss yellow flatland.
I threw myself on the ground and thrashed about, squealing like a pig. Clawed at my chest, my legs, the piccolo. Carved out a piece of the land around me too. Pulled up moist handfuls of dirt and slapped them on my chest. Got in my fingernails. I had a go at it. Zeke wouldn’t get away with what he’d done on me. I beat the ground and squealed his name just like a little piggy.

>>4822899
>the BLADE. It’s sharp, even barely touching it gives me a PAPER cut

No. That's just called a cut or a laceration. You get paper cuts from paper.

>>4822944
Yeah I've noticed that too, that's why I want to make it less about the actual crimes and talk about how doing the wrong thing can sometimes turn into an addiction - hence the whole "borderline psycho" struggle

>>4822999
Ever hear of figure of speech? Although now that you mention it, that sentence could probably use a little editing

>>4822844
Please review.

>>4823037
there's figure of speech and then there's tedious verbiage.

>>4822999

It worked. Wasnt the best i've ever seen, but it does ok in conjuring up an image.

>>4822996
any critique would be appreciated

>>4822844
>>4822848
Pretentious and boring. Your writing skills aren't strong enough to carry you through a series of descriptions from the protagonist's point of view in an engaging fashion. 2/10, apply yourself.

>>4823115
Too descriptive. Description is good if it's new, fun, interesting. You're not being all that creative with your descriptions, and yet you drone on and on with them.

I'm kind of screaming "Ok, i get it, it's fucking wet out we're in a park or something. WHERE IN THE FUCK IS THIS GOING?"

Less is more in a lot of cases. I dont know what your story is, but it's got to be way more interesting than your descriptions. Stick to that.

I tend to think you're padding though.

>>4823152

Too umm...."Look mom, i'm being creative, but i dont really understand what i'm doing!"

>>4823175
agreed.

you can be self-indulgent maybe once every four or five pages.

I'm just wondering if this passage is boring or tense or immersive or anything at all. Sneaking around in the dark has always been something I find thrilling.

--

Richard's tradeshop was on one of the few torch lit roads. To come anywhere near it would require coming out into the light. He maneuvered quietly behind a stone and spent a while listening to the sleeping town. Not every shop or home was as sturdily built as Richard's. Many had walls made of sticks, or hadn't proper doors, and when the wind died at just the right time he could hear a gentle snoring in the silence.

Jean once told him a scary story about being ambushed as a child in the woods, by a forest warden who ended up taking his baby finger off for poaching. "Only a sneak can catch a sneak, Thomas." Thomas knew none of the guards to be sneaky, but was terrified at the possibility of one day finding out the hard way.

Satisfied with how everything sounded, the mousey Thomas emerged from his hiding spot and snuck up upon one of the torches with a stick in his hand. He scraped away enough wax and rope to diminish the thing's flame. Earlier he decided that an extinguished torch was suspicious, while a dim one was not.

He hopped up on a barrel behind the tradehouse, and climbed atop the structure. The perfectly flat roof was a mess of straw and rotten lumber, decayed enough that he wouldn't feel comfortable walking on it, even with his meager weight. There were no obvious entryways in the weathered surface, no patchwork repairs easily undone by bare hands, no loose boards. The chimney was well interfaced with the roof, the hole around it packed with cob and straw that he didn't want to risk chipping off to fall down inside the house and wake everyone up with its noise. The chimney itself was a curious thing, seemingly made from a single stone six or seven feet long, tunnelled through top to bottom with a long chisel. The hole was too small for anyone but a malnourished twelve-year-old peasant boy to enter.

This was far and away the bravest thing Thomas had ever done in his life, even being up on the roof like he was. He stopped with one leg down the chimney and imagined all the bad things that could happen if he were caught. He remembered the boy who stole an apple and had his hand cut off in the town square, and how the blushing hand's fingers curled as it lay on the cobblestone. Stealing during the day, he thought to himself before climbing into the chimney. He deserved it.

>>4822792
>un-bloomed
Why?

>>4822844
>The trees on the street are rich with green leaves. Leaves have fallen to the ground, and the fresh foliage is moist, wet and of recent spring growth. Bunches of bush, grass, and tree matter make up the appearance of the road. Brown, gray-ish branches from trees, bushes, and flowers are mixed in with the rain drenched plant life. Trees’ brown stems are thick and lined and slightly carved; the trees have marks, are thick, and slashed.
Boring.

Wrote this about an hour ago. Feels cliche and trite to me, but is it particularly bad /lit/?

What kind of broom could sweep away
The light of star and bright of day?
What kind of soul would have the gall
To halt the march of funeral pall?

To stand and face the laws inviolate
Attempt to fell their ancient pilot

What Icarus can stand and say
Their wings survived the end of day?

>>4823193
>To come anywhere near it would require coming out into the light.
You can think of a better way to put that.

> He maneuvered quietly
Avoid adverbs. He sneaked. He maneuvered, etc.

>and spent a while
Dont write like you speak, and dont speak like you write. "and waited" or something. "A while" is unnecessary, it goes without saying.

>sturdily
Ugly word dude, come on. Even has "Turd" right in the middle.

>scary story
Why not just 'Story"? You explain what made it scary, let the reader decide.

>Satisfied with how everything sounded
Once again, dont write like you speak.

>diminish the thing's flame
"Diminish it's flame". Isnt that cleaner? So on and so forth.

Well it's interesting at least. Definitely first draft material, needs cleaned up. But i'd read more.

>>4823184
Could you get a bit more in depth? I'm new to writing, so specificity would b helpful.

>>4823221
sounds way too much like The Tyger

>>4823279
You're trying to be weird, ok cool fine. But i dont see much direction. Seems more like a mad lib.

Being weird in writting is hard to do, because you need to know why you're being weird.

>>4822790

http://scobarblog.wordpress.com/2014/04/19/%EF%BB%BFparty-like-im/#respond

>>4823221
>poem solidly in iambic pentameter, little to no variation
>most of the poem is one or two syllable words, probably because you are clumsy with meter still.
>all the rhymes are hard rhymes, many single-syllable, often used ones (away/day, say/day, gall/pall)
>archaic words, "gall, pall, involate"
>Greek allusion
>Stock symbols of English lit, the day, stars, light, wings
>actually just one long question, offers very little to the reader besides the picture of somebody trying to stop a funeral, no various aspects of character, appearance, etc, explored, as in >>4823287 , which explores the entirety of the tiger, and also works with stock assumptions of design
>Metaphors have no relation to each other (laws, pilot, broom.)

>>4823319
Right, so I need to make things more cohesive, expansive and get a better grasp of meter and language, thanks.

I've been writing poetry in earnest for less than a month, so thanks for being constructive without being derisive.

>>4823362
Just why it seems cliche. None of the things I'm mentioning, by themselves, are necessarily bad, nor are in-cohesion, or non-(strictly-)metered poetry. You can write great unvaried poems, great poems using stock symbols and greek allusions, great poems that offer very little to the reader, but the poem can't be doing all of that at once and nothing else.
It's clear you're imitating the surface qualities of canon poems, or just a vague impression of what's 'poetic,' because they are esteemed, or because you enjoyed their 'feeling,' without an understanding of the deeper functioning of those qualities.
As a new poet, I suggest you pick up the anthology and guidebook Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren.

The soft brush of waves
Settle the beach floor.
A rock shove a crab from progress.
He faces himself and smashes
his mind on the rock
Ceasing his limit,
becoming the rock
And continuing his journey.

---
Please critique specifically. And point out what's good as well please. Thanks

In the American Southwest, amid the mesas breaking free from scalloped sands, live the squat Utes. Sangrial inheritors of the lost rock palce people, the Anasazi. Who, when they commit themselves to their usular dance, atop the man shaped Ute mountain, a mount that will someday rise to pulp beneath its boulder feet the alien children of far eastern ice gods, do cut themselves with obsidian and flense their red flesh with sandstone blades giving in sacrifice the last drops of mother earth's gift. With hair so blue black and flesh prone to pox, they tell the story of the skin walkers. Great champions, sons of the mischievous Kokepelli, who ate the flesh of horse and Anglais rather than sit upon the former and be sat upon by the latter. They were chosen and eternally damned by the gods of sky that watch over the elevated funerary pyres of human beings. Never would they hunt mule deer in the clouds with their people. Always would they hunt Anglais that walked upon their broken potsherds without cognizance. Given unto them was shapelessness. As the coyote, as a desert fog, as the magpie would the make war on the sanity and dreamlands of the one godded Anglais. As a toll, taken from them was their coups, their high feathers, and their great names. But when old mother, queen of terra firma, favored them these red menaces were granted the coporeal dominion of father owl; for every man knows that when the owl calls your name thrice the boatman Chiron must answer and set sail in firm posession of your phantasmagoric identity, underway upon the River Styx. He who possesses the stygian bone cock that haunts you will say as he seduces you, "Don't worry about your reputation bro, it isn't gay if you're underway, Navy rules totally apply."

>>4823530
>soft brush of waves
The "s" sounds are good, but you aren't doing anything with the dead metaphor of "brushing" here, which is bad.
>a rock shove a crab from progress
You might be trying to jar with grammar, but it just sounds like you're a second grader writing a story.
Progress is a pretty big word for this poem. Especially if it's directly from progress. His progress would fit, and would have the double, allegorical meaning there.
>he faces himself and smashes
It'd be better to compare shell to rock.
>smashes/his mind on the rock/ceasing his limit
crabs have minds?
>becoming the rock
how?
>continuing his journey
what journey? he's a crab.

The shape of the poem, mirroring waves, is good. The s sounds are good, but that's largely a given effect in poems about the sea. You don't really do much with the language and kind of train off into some sort of philosophical framework that's not in the poem at all.

>>4823530
It was alright. I liked it, Not the best ever but probably would get an "A" in creative writing class, at least.

>>4823754
Thanks so much dude. You don't know how much you're helping me. I can clearly see how a reader would have trouble understanding and I see the points I need to elaborate and what not.

>>4823754
I fixed the poem and made it clear the crab wants a bath. But the whole point I wanted to get at in the poem is that a lot of times our own mind is the only thing stopping us from progressing as individuals or completing a goal. Would calling the rock his mind be stupid? Should I use some other metaphor?

Cold determination inhabited the pale spheres of his eyes. A sheen was scattered across slicked back hair and pointed features pulled across an expanse of pale, unblemished skin. He could almost talk with this man. He thought he could see the characteristic twitch of his left eyelid.
He was drowning, the water was in his mouth, rattling down his oesophagus like a tin watering can. His lungs weren't working and his vision was slowly blurring into an obscene mess of serenity as his brain capitulated under a lack of oxygen.
A gun was on the can. Questions. But time. Time is power and that never changes. Time. Time. Time was repetition and power was repetition and Time.
And to tremble from start to stop, only to start again. Withhold emotion and keep it at arms length. Let the nature of our human constructs provide us with a false grounding for our ‘progression’ and ‘development’. Feel the sickness in the pit of your stomach, feel it grow, let it become what you always have been, moral morality, fatal mortality.
Feel the cliff’s breeze suck at you, let it crumble, falling tall. Let words, only words be what we are, for what are we apart from meaning? And meaning without worth for meaning is without substance, effectively meaningless.
Like those bent down on dirtied knees in stock down mud houses under hot suns and foreign tongues. Arms bound like meat, eyes folded to shut knowing light from piercing naïve tranquility. But the trumpets play and it is the national anthem. Stand up, hand on heart, and don’t let the enemy win. So with their knees in the blood of brothers, ready yourself. Because you are yourself and you are only. No one else is real and this paraphrased existence is yours, but it dominates you and there isn’t anything you can do.
Yet they are still there in the choking desert dust and blindfolded with blinding death, but you are here. With me. Because there are children there too. They are being killed and yet you sit here and waste in transient mental suspension. Everything is a countdown, don't you see?
The gun is there. It is in his and my hands. Cool metal barrel of determination, subconscious submission in total entirety.
I check the clip, only a single bullet. I put the gun into my mouth, that thick saliva you get after a deep sleep stringing and thickening my breath. I can taste the sharp metallic tang of gunpowder, a peppery burning that nibbles at my gums. This pistol had been used before. The sleek barrel is ice in my clammy mouth. I haven't cocked the damned thing.
Tung-tung, tung-tung
I can't go through the drama of taking the damned thing out of my mouth and doing that. I try to pull the hammer back with the gun in my mouth. It is very difficult. It is stiff. I manage.
Tung-tung, tung-tung
I feel a little exhilarating rush of cold air expelled from the gun as the bullet moves from the clip to the chamber.
Tung-tung, tung-tung
What are we waiting for? Resistance from the trigger, but it gives, after time.

>>4824057
complete fucking shit

Guy Danger Boyd was back underneath the homestead investigating a pipe exposed in the crawlspace. Marcus Walther was the man who’d disappeared thirteen years ago, fled out West after he found himself in a dire situation involving, per the Burk Tribune, 'complicity with an international mail fraud operation.' He packed everything, nearly nothing, and departed from Mt. Vernon, landing in Cimarron, Oklahoma with a beard and a suitcase full of cash. He’d bought 300 acres of land over the phone from a catalog under the name Guy Boyd and had a clean false ID for this character produced and initialized GDB by some confidants back East and bid all farewell. The heavy accent was developed mainly through film study, Westerns, but it was clear on arrival given the locals’ reaction that he’d overcompensated and was promptly granted the nickname “Hollywood” by a dusky Texaco attendant. A single man back then and a bachelor at heart, the situation with the wife was unexpected, and the children more so. He’d only recently begun getting used to ‘Pa’ coming from his daughters. The wife, hitching from Santa Fe, NY-bound, gave up on her thespian dreams to settle with a curious densely bearded man who owned 300 acres of flax and lived an hour north of the nearest good hospital. He loved her more than anything. His fugitive status and their relationship despite the damn feds was more romantic than pretending for the movies, she’d said, and their life would get biographed someday if everything went south and she was okay with that as long as her part was played by Judy Garland and his was played by Gregory Peck a la 56's Cpt. Ahab.

About to abandon this project, so might as well throw it in here just for the heck of it.
-
He was sitting in the seat opposite her, with His dry, flaky, ash-grey skin, and His stiff, dusty, white hair, calmly twiddling a small old-fashioned watch in his left hand, but nobody else could see Him. His cold, dead eyes were like black holes, and they were staring into her, straight through her otherwise impenetrable visage, and directly into her mind, scanning her thoughts, emotions, experiences, memories; everything. He slowly and leisurely let His gaze wander up and down her; He looked at whatever and whoever He pleased, because He knew nobody would stop Him.
He spoke with a wheezy, raspy voice, and the skin on His lips cracked as His mouth opened. “Hello again... My darling,” He said, but nobody else could hear Him. The corners of His mouth slowly curved upwards, revealing His sharpened yellow teeth, in what she assumed was supposed to be a smile. “Judging from your current facial expression, and perhaps also your growing consideration of jumping off the train, you don’t seem to be too happy about my return, but… I suppose that it’s... Understandable. After all, we are both aware of what it entails.”
He exhaled deeply as He leaned in closer, His face now right in front of hers, and suddenly a putrid smell of death and decay filled her nostrils, a smell that she recognised immediately. She didn’t know if this was simply His natural body odour, or if He deliberately attempted to smell like a mass-grave, but nobody else smelled Him.

http://mastbc.tumblr.com/post/81467544617/allonelinesscompendium

and for the tumblr-averse (though the sites a wordpress stand-in @ this pt.):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6pcjwvqq03boooz/alloneliness%20compendium.pdf

im going to go through and read some ppls thangs n try

In Christ hanging above the medicine cabinet
I see the watercolors of my home's walls
shutters made by thick glasses
with crumpled newspapers that hide
things I stole
I don't even know why.
with open hands I remember goats
that may well be my blankets
that lickingthe salt from the stones of Pagkrati
are the mornings
afternoons and evenings of my childhood.
I was the one that fell into the well,
but I survived.
Goats were coffing and mumbling
and I do the same things now.
The blankets stitched one with the other
are the sarcophagus of sleep
and asphyxiation.
Stacked the nuances of the onion skin plaster
that cracks if you tickle it with your fingers
drawing eyes
of various size and colour depending on the depth.
The old ladies of my church
break the fence that keeps out
the sin of blacks:
for a bad face they put their knife in bellies.
But the ladies are not black
some of them are xanthiès,
is this comforting?
As well as the greek chirping chicks
that follows their entrance.
the council of priests and waving sheets
are like the incense of morning;
everything is in its place,
even Yaya's consumed cutlery from the 50s;
they show me where to lay or not to lay
my head from the side of the pillow
they make noises as pots
when I get up at night
and this is the night
I wake up as the sound of open locks.
Only her clothes can make me cry.
Poor, poor little sparrow,
a sparrow in the picture
that shares the same frame with my
grandchildren's pictures, along with
new things, hunting magazines from 3 winters ago
and cats that jumped on the tin roof:
this before that thei told me to get rid of them.
The plants in old fuel tanks
filled with soil
there are no more,
they burned because I'm old
and my legs burn:
they burned the plants,
that looked like the palm of the Lord.
I have a three-meter high gate
dapper with barbed wire,
impenetrable,
for my fortress of memories;
the dust and my eldest son's drawer
with nails and knives
teeth keychains and street's shards
you get hurt if you put your hand inside.
Games under cellophane envelopes
kept read for occurrence of new childhoods.

>>4822996

this is a p. damn good excerpt of something larger i think but idk exactly what that larger thing is

its a very cool n natural read though. colloquial emphasis in a way that ain't trite or hoary in the slightest lorrie way

keep up w/ things like this in w/e framework you need to put it in n u'll be doin good imo

This was bad. If I was on a computer I would give you better critique. I don't know what you're getting at, it sounds like you're just trying to sound deep or some shit. The beginning was alright until you went to drowning. I wanted to hear more about the dude.

“Ha!” Satan laughed. “Less lenient than hell? Listen to your own words, dear Uriel. You’ve never been to the pit have you? You’ve never seen it with your own eyes! You speak through your ass and I can smell your breath from where I stand. Away from me. You speak of lenience while standing next to our disfigured sister. How many times did you ask your master for lenience when he stole her golden strands? Did your flatulent tongue whisper a fart of mercy in your creator’s ear then or did you cower and hide in the safe numbers of the other archangels?” In the face of such a blasphemy, Uriel was at a loss for words. No good would come of this visit.

>>4824124 This
was for
>>4824057 this

>>4824103

honestly u couldn't particularly call me a fan of this shit but its p. classically solid from the standpoint of what ppl enjoying see evoked from poems

you've got a forlorn geriatric gargling in the glaze of what she remembers and what she really can't access prolly in part b/c of her confinement to a place that doesn't care about her n isn't built to care about everything around her as well, only to ensure that her tie to the this world remains n doesn't remain all too invested in what worldliness pertains to human existence

good job on stuff in that regard, my other gripes would b biased on aesthetic perspective so i dont think i gotta warrant those a forum

Just the first part of something I'm working on. I have absolutely no idea where I'm going with it.
---
[Untitled]

It was a lonely house. The house was lonely and so was the man and he saw that the fox scrounging around in front of it was lonely too, so he decided to go up to these lonely things. As the man walked to the front, the sound of his boots on the house's wooden porch caused the fox to dart away into the the thicket. The man only knocked once before a woman opened the door and appeared to him. The woman was lonely too, but neither knew it.

"What do you want?" She said.

The man opened his mouth to answer her, but found that her frankness and made him silent. "I-"

"You what?", she cut him off "come on, speak."

The man continued from this interruption hastily "Hello ma'am, my name is Todd Alger and I'd like to do your landscaping."

The woman of what Todd guessed to be thirty years frowned, and her forehead wrinkled with this gesture. She looked out at her front yard, and Todd followed her gaze. The yard, which sat like a jungle between the house and the cracked-asphalt street, was a salad of tall weeds and dandelions. The sidewalk that led up to the house from the street had become impregnated by weeds that grew up in the cracks along the concrete. The only sign of life between the two of them was a distant crow's soft lament for the state of this house.

Todd turned his head back from the yard to the woman, who was now giving him an incredulous stare. The wrinkles in her forehead had become thicker along with her gaze.

>>4824041
>would calling the rock his mind be stupid

Depends on how you do it. Also, if your point can be gotten across that simply, why not just write a short essay with some allegorical passages in it? Or maybe a fable?

Chapter 1
A man in a hat entered the room. He took off the hat. “It's you!” They all said. At the same time like a class speaking to a teacher. “Hahaha Hello gentleman”, the man in the hat said, putting the hat on the table. “And hello ladies he said. Turning to the ladies and lifting his hat politely. “Leave us alone Trent!” The women said. Perhaps it was because the were angry at him for something he had done in the past, a long, long time ago. Or perhaps it was because he was holding a gun at them!

The gun came from nowhere. He had got it out of his pocket and now both bullets were aimed at the people.”Say your prayers!” The man said but one of the men grabbed the gun, knocking the table with the hat on it and some other things on the floor. A vase got broken. Now the gun was in the other hands and we would have to wait and see if it was the right hands.


-----------------


got this far, now got to work out what happens next!

>>4824118
thanks m8

>>4824182
because I'm practicing my poetry. Honestly all my poems could be explained quite simply in normal language, I'm just doing it for the artistic quality.

>>4824292
Poetry's all about nuance of thought and emotion constructed through nuance of technique. Think on your theme for longer. Come up with counter arguments to your thesis, include them, refute them, refute the counter-arguments, refute the refutations.
Try to work the feelings, in minute detail, of frustration and the relief at overcoming and obstacle into a poem, into the meter, into apt phrases. The feelings in the opposing view.

You wake up in your tiny little room in the inn on the edge of the harbor. You wager it's about ten in the morning, judging by the hustle and bustle of the busy harbor outside your window. It's been thirty six years since humanity had to more or less start over after the plague and the breakdown of social order took out most of the world's population. 'Course, you weren't around back then, and most people who were are in their twilight years now. You sit up in your bed, adjusting to the sunlight beaming through your windows. You better find some work today, your dad always used to say that idle hands are the devil's playthings, or something like that anyhow. For the past decade or so, you've been taking up odd jobs for people around the city. You'd be a lot safer being a dockworker, but you were never one to be confined to the restraints of the safe New York Harbor. Besides, you're damn good at what you do, whatever it is that you find yourself doing'. It's dangerous out there, but years of experience have made you a grizzled adventurer, and you've carved out a nice little name for yourself in the community. There's lots of adventurers out there for people who need shit done, but when people need shit done well, they come to you.

You slip on some clothes, grab your spring steel crossbow, your pack, and get movin'.

Don't let the window open too long,
You'll invite too much
Of the breeze and bird song,
You'll ruin our lunch
With that incessant throng.

Please close that window son
The air is causing such a racket,
And until the pudding's done
I can't afford to don my jacket.

Just shut it please
So I can have a moment to myself,
Without that steadfast breeze
Bringing chaos to my shelf.

>>4823723
No critique or feedback?

>>4822790
Just finished this the other day. I posted it in the other thread, too. I would really love some criticism and will help whoever critiques me.

>Manic Man
I met my Prince Charming in a mental hospital.
Tall, dark, and manic-depressive.
Sweet and suicidal.
An angel cycling through Hellish dreams,
Heavenly nightmares,
No Purgatory insomnia to save him.
Somnambulist by day,
Daydreamer by night,
Floating through waves of mood and mind,
A victim to extremes of each kind.

He was a paradise of paradoxes:
A perfect confection,
A lemonlike lemon;
He was syrupy citrus and saccharine acid:
The immaculate blend of sugar and sin.
His own pro- and antagonist,
Rival of his reflection
like a self-sick narcissist.
Melancholic martyr in morning,
Manic egomaniac in eve.
Equal parts devil and daredevil,
Victor and villain, friend and fiend.

Never faint, always fierce.
Never mild, always wild.
Never subtle, always severe.
He was my paradoxical paradise,
My heroic villain,
Caressing me like meth,
Holding me like heroin,
He was twice the roses
with thrice the thorns.
More woo with more woe.
More rush with more ruin.
More high with more hangover.

We were a duet of delirium,
A bittersweet, bipolar tragedy.
Spiritless soulmates and frantic heartbeats,
Circling madness, sadness, insanity.
We were Adam and Eve
and Eros and Thanatos
and God and the Devil
and Juliet and Romeo.
An endless repetition of
crash and climax,
crash, climax,
crash climax,
Crash.
He broke through the mirror
and murdered his rival.

No manic depression,
no Hells and no Heavens,
no heroes or villains,
no rush and no ruin.
Purgatory insomnia—no leave either way.
Trapped in grey prison,
no black, white, night, day.

Sometimes I see him,
The few times I sleep,
I'll have Hellish nightmares
or Heavenly dreams,
Momentarily rescued from
grey apathy,
Then wake to the world
of Purgatory.

He was Hell who gave Heaven,
Death who gave life,
Rest and resurrection,
Dark in day, light in night.
Satan made God,
And he was my blood.
Even one rose is worth all the world's thorns,
And it's better to live than to never be born.
There's no sweet without sour,
No "end" without "began,"
And no world to me
without my magical, manic man.

>>4823276

Thank you, excellent advice.

---

Jean the Hunter was a solitary man, and only one person knew where he stayed through the night. It was a fair walk away from Taunton, in a crescent of rock croppings. Thomas hated walking around in the woods at night, and moved much more loudly through them. He was afraid of being ambushed by wild animals, despite Jean's assurances as a woodsman: boars, wolves, foxes, stags. He had seen them all during the day, and wouldn't want to meet them after dark.

The terrain became broken, the canopy of treetops ended, and he knew he had arrived. With the utmost care not to snap any more branches or trample and more shrubs, he skirted around the rocks to find Jean's camping site. He turned a corner and found a flickering fire, enclosed on almost all sides by jutting brown fingers of the earth's crust. A tunic was hung across a shrub, and someone had dragged a big, fluffy pine branch right next to the flame.

Yet, nobody attended nearby. Thomas had seen all he could from his distance, and drew nearer, eventually having to abandon the cover of trees. He came into the light, and he saw a wineskin nestled against a rock.

"Je vais déchirer vos orphelins off et vous les mangez!" A disembodied voice growled.

Thomas gave a weak cry of anguished surprise. The voice became warm laughter, and he recognized it's owner right away.

"Scélérat!" Thomas hissed.

"Ah ha ha!" Jean emerged from behind a skinny tree trunk that stood right behind the fire. It had cast a shadow wide enough for the man to hide in. "You should have seen your face! You must have thought I was the devil."

"How did you do that?"

Jean was wearing a burlap poncho and his long hair and shaggy beard was wet. He took up his wineskin and began- or maybe just resumed- drinking it. "I was hiding behind the light. I could hear you coming from a mile away."

"What do you mean 'hiding behind the light'?" Thomas furrowed in thought, wondering if perhaps he was misunderstanding Jean's Francaise.

Jean pointed at the fire. "Look into the light."

Thomas did. His pupils narrowed.

"Now look into the dark."

Thomas did. He squinted, and the light had left a faint orange ghost that floated before him on a field of black. "I can't see anything."

Jean smiled. "Neat trick, huh?"

Thomas smiled too.

"Is this what you do all night long?"

>>4824361
>You'll invite too much
Try "invite in too much", the syllables work better.

>bird song
*Birdsong

>incessant
Use a 2-syllable word to keep the rhythm flowing.

>Please close that window son
Use punctuation here (eg. "Please close that window, son,").

>The air is causing such a racket
Say "air's". The dad is speaking colloquially throughout the rest of poem, you should be consistent with your contractions.

>I can't afford to don my jacket
Maybe change "don" to "get" or something, to stress that the reason why he can't afford to wear it is because he'd have to leave his station.

Other than that, I like it.

>>4824348
Anyone?

>>4824601
>2nd person
Put that in the trash where it belongs, or at least make it a choose your own adventure.

>>4824606
>CYOA

But that's the idea, anon. I always second guess my introduction.

>>4824348

>You better find some work today, your dad always used to say that idle hands are the devil's playthings, or something like that anyhow.

Don't resort to recognizable idioms. Give the characters some originality by coming up with your own phrases. You should never use common idioms unless you're intentionally writing for common idiots who will say, "Hur dur muh daddy used to say that too, I like you!"

>Besides, you're There's lots of adventurers out there for people who need shit done, but when people need shit done well, they come to you.

This sentence literally makes no sense. Unless you're some sort of genius savant that's improvising new and exciting ways to reformat the English language (pro tip: you're not) then you need to fix this shit. Try:

"There's lots of adventures out there for people who can get shit done, and when people need shit done they come to me."


That second person shit absolutely has to go.

Having said all that, a story about a second generation post apocalyptic adventurer for hire sounds like cool story.

>>4824684
>the idiom thing.
Noted. I'll change that.
>adventurer sentence.
Why doesn't it make sense? There's lots of second-rate mercenaries, but you're pretty much the best on the market.
>second person
For what I'm writing, it's necessary.

>>4824178
The flow in the first paragraph is kind of stunted. I know what you're trying to do with the repetition, but you should rework it. Apart from everything looks alright.

>>4824709
Are you writing a "chose your own adventure story for the 9-12 year old market? Because that's the only place this is necessary. And, if you are writing that maybe a mercenary in a plague ravaged landsxape isn't your best option. For those novels you're gonna want to keep your conflict to escaped circus herbivores and getting seperated from your parents at the mall ( maybe a magical time travel mall)

>>4824731
It's for a /tg/ quest.

>>4824178

I think you're trying to disguise a boring story with prose.

"A guy asks a girl if he can get work landscaping her house" I wouldn't read that.

Also you over describe the acting. The opening of the man's mouth and the frankness of the woman making him silent doesn't interest me. Just say he 'hesitated'.

>>4824178
>The man opened his mouth to answer her, but found that her frankness and made him silent. "I-"

For some reason, I really don't like reading this. It might be better written as:

Her frankness caused a stutter in his response.

Or something like that. It just reads... wrong, to me.

>>4824741
Did I just respond with literary criticism for a fucking D&D wizard's story? Holy shit. In the words of Cormac McCarthy there are some "things which could not be put back. Not be made right again."

I'm gonna go take a shame shower

>>4824785
No, not a wizard story. It's exactly like an anon before said.
>Having said all that, a story about a second generation post apocalyptic adventurer for hire sounds like cool story.

No magic, orcs, elves...etc. I just enjoy writing and tabletop games. This is a good medium to kind of combine the two.

>>4824795
I'm the anon that said that. It is a good idea for a story, I stick by that, but you're not writing a story, you're creating the setting for a role playing game. Do you even sociology?

>>4824847
Well, it is a story. Quests on /tg/ are kind of a weird mix between CYOAs and tabletop games. Lots of player interaction.

>>4822790
The stairs lead down, the shadows stretch and warp. Loud machines spit hot exhaust through the chain link that makes up the stairwell's cage-like walls.The red indicator panels all glow, showing the diesel smoke as a sanguine haze interspersed with the rhombic silhouette of the fence (occasionally a facade of total darkness would loom like a wall in the middle of the stairs, marking where stacks of boxes or the machines themselves obscured their own light), cutting the miasma into a 3-D checkerboard lattice.

>>4822996
this picture always makes me sad

Everything here is boring and written matter of factly like a news article. I don't suspect any of you have written at length. You think you can just string some words together and you'll be a novelist? Write until your eyes bleed and then you might make something of yourself. To be decent at it, you have to be just on the verge of insanity. Writing things that make sense, but no one would ever think to explain in that specific way. Develop a proper style by practicing. The same way anyone masters anything else. When you're finally ready for publishing, the reader should feel like they just ate a piece of buttered toast with a glass of piping hot chocolate after your first chapter. Not too rich, not too dry. Just right. Make them think and allow them satisfaction.

-hunter s. Thompson peacing out

>>4824239
is this YA

>>4824921
Most everyone here does suck at writing, yeah. I see no evidence of you being different.

Hunter S Thompson isnt the best example of "making sense" either. He wrote two good books, that werent really well known for their coherence. Then he became a stuttering incoherent mess for 30 years.

Personally, i'm about 200 pages into my first novel, got enough ideas for 5 more, so i'm not really sweating it. One huge tip i would give any aspiring writer: If you have a good idea DONT POST IT ON THE INTERENET!

Hopefully, most everyone in this thread is already aware of that, and just posts some of their throwaway stuff.

>>4824239
this seems really good! want more! was the gun in the right hands now?!

>>4824947
im going to guess you write sci fi or fantasy

im not judging im just seeing how testing my radar is

please confirm or deny

>>4824975
Nope, just regular fiction. No interest in sci fi or fantasy.

>>4824921
I'm a professional writer, have been for awhile. Nothing in here reads like an AP style news story. I know this because I write both AP and features stories for a living. The former which is what you're talking about is the "who, what, where, when" model. The latter is more of a personal narritive meant to resonate with a particular audience. Some of the lit herein is tenuously like that, but that's by definition a type of literature. It's one step away from editorialized work or the gonzo style founded by your man H.S. Thompson. Who, by the way, was and self-identified first and foremost as a journalist. If you have actual criticism, that's assuming you know how to perform a literary analysis, go for it. If all you can do is say weird shit out of context about food as compared to dozens of distinct pieces, then go to /b/ and have fun with the rest of the underage trolls.

To You, In The Kitchen

It’s a fucked up thing
how the air stings
when you’re near me

And a billion suns
rest inside my ribcage
and it burns

Just like the house
in which we spent days
endless, hazeful days
When we were stoned
and marooned
and broken
and happy

>>4824947

And read stuff like the Hunger Games and Harry potter to get an idea of what good writing sounds like. No one wants to read your pseudo philosophical bullshit that has a .9% chance of becoming relevant in 50 years. If you're good, you should be able to write about a piece of shit making it's way to the water treatment facility and have it be interesting. Everyone thinks they can write because they can use adjectives. I know I suck, but I've just started. It will be about 200 hours of pure writing time and twice as much reading before I make anything decent.

The music and laughter found its way through the trees to him on a bank of mud. He gave it form: the people he was camped with, enjoying each other around a camp fire, who he had known for a long time but still didn't, really, at least not that well, and who were very in their element here, ready to dance whenever it felt right — always, it seemed. It was an opportunity that did not so much present itself as be discovered by them in every moment of time. They were always cheerful and he had retreated from them to sit still and smoke on the riverside, the furthest he could go.

>>4824987

good job. You can use words that are slightly less used than most people's vocabulary. I hope you're not trying very hard because you suck too so far.

>>4824981
damn

>>4825001

Do you even have a coherent point....?

Because you're not doing a good job of explaining it if you do. You know, using your writing talent and all.

No, i dont read hunger games or harry potter. I also seriously doubt even a good writer can make a piece of shit making it's way to a treatment interesting. I'd love to see you try.

>>4824855
I'll give you this, you're a good enough writer to convincingly sell "pretend make-believe time" as "interactive. "

>>4825017
I'm not sure how to take that, but thanks.

>>4825015
While I agree with you about the jackass, a writer should be able to make anything interesting. Read Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain, a fascinating story about the incredibly banal funerary profession. Or Housekeeping an award winning novel about women who live in a cluttered house and never leave for the most part, or the highly anthologized On Dumpster Diving which is a great short story about trash.

>>4825032
Hell, try 4chan greentexts. Really funny lasting stories that are widely shared and contain such subjects as spagetti in pockets and dating a jar of Prego brand tomato sauce.

>>4825032
Well a writer HAS to make anything interesting, it's not a matter of "should".

Still, none of those you mentioned are talking about a piece of shit floating to a waste treatment plant. If i were to tackle that as a writer, i would find the best way to avoid it.

There's all kinds of tricks in writing. Many of the things we consider to be great works of art are actually failures on the writers part. Like in sound and the fury, the reason caddy is never given her own chapter is because faulkner couldnt figure out how to do it. But that turned out to be one of the great things about the book.

You need to to learn to to cheat sometimes.

>>4824967
this is the saddest samefagging attempt i've ever seen.

>>4825032

Banal is such a banal word. Don't use it unless you're being ironic like me.

>>4825038

You're just not creative enough. A proper writer would jump at the chance to do something like that.

>>4825059
Really.....?

A proper writer would jump at the chance of making a piece of shit floating to a plant interesting? You really think Faulkner or Hemingway would just die for that opportunity?

I dont see any of you trying it...

>>4825066
I already have a preliminary narrative in my head. Maybe I'll write it up later for practice so you can all tell me how much it sucks.

Wrote this yesterday for my first novel. Opinions?
"Jasmine, the new cleaning lady, is telling me about her son, whose name is Reginald but who is known to his mates as Bizz. For his just-passed sixteenth birthday, her husband bought Reginald a motorcycle. A big mistake, in Jasmine's opinion. Now Reginald stays out every evening, neglecting his homework, missing meals. He and his friends hang out on the back roads, racing each other, practising skids and God knows what else. She is afraid he is going to break a limb, or worse.
'Your son is a young man,' I tell Jasmine. 'He is testing himself. You cannot stop young men from exploring their limits. They want to be the fastest. They want to be the strongest. They want to be admired.'
I have never met Reginald, probably never will. But I enjoy Jasmine's performance, enjoy its transparency: too well-mannered to boast about her boy, she complains instead about his unruliness, his recklessness, his joie de vivre, about how he will be her ruin."

>>4825059
All writers have a very narrow spectrum of what they find interesting. You dont see Hunter S. Thompson writing a lot about women's lib. Or Virginia Woolf talking about southern american life during the 1800s. Or Faulkner writing about the effects of ww1 on the aristocracy of Europe.

Writers arent magic. Even a good writer cant make anything out of anything, they all have their particular interests, and tend to stick mainly to that.

>>4825015

sage for not knowing pynchon just like i don't *le dubs faecsimile*

>>4825073

Kurt Vonnegut would do it. You know he would. Because he's the best writer of all time.

>>4825038
Fuck it,

My people, who the Wabanaki called maize, rose each passing season in the fields, ear by ear, row by golden-green row. The red children would play their games at our stalks, the red women would tell their hushed stories as they planted fish in the soil to feed our roots, and the red men would offer us to the wapiti deer for the hunt. That was before the new age, before the grand arrangement. Rubbed out were our friends the wabanaki and the Algonquin too, who took us for sustenance when they rode their birch canoes on the war path. The new men brought with them their metal, and their terrible industry. I am glad I lived in the time of our friends the Wabanaki and the Algonquin. I have seen a vision, it shows my children, eaten by the new men, refusing to be changed by them and refusing to accept the lifeless brown of other voyagers through their alien viscera. Expunged from there into the great copper labyrinth, making headway down waters, like the erased Algonquin in their birch canoes. Until they reach their terminus. There to be returned sterile and souless, forever losing their place in the great circle. It is good I will not live in those times. I will welcome the winter.

>>4825090

Nice. Now we're firing on all cylinders finally.

>>4825090
I'm not this guy btw >>4825015 I just believe a writer can make a story about anything.

Am 25, go to a BBQ with old friends of similar age, I'm drinking a Pepsi:

Loud sex is funny!!!!
"is X coming today?" "maybe X will come later." OMG COME later hurrdurrr
black dildos omg!!!

"h.hey, do any of you read short stories? I just read this Lorrie Moore thing....and...no? oh harry potter is great? ok..."

Elizabeth smiled out at the world and the world turned away from her.

>>4825104

Well then give it a shot, make stories about everything, and let me know how it works out.

>>4825110
I just wrote a story about corn in fucking shit off the top of my head. What the fuck do you want me to write about now? I don't know how I made out, that's why I'm in a peer review thread. You tell me how I made out. Some fucking people never get the point.

>>4825118
you did...?

Thats the story? I seriously thought that that was just the introduction. Thats a short paragraph duder.

I like your use of language, but it's no story.

>>4825126
Like I said, some people never get the point.

>>4825118
Do you also grasp, that you seem to only write about things from a native american perspective?

Try writing about it from a female amish girl's perspective.

>>4825104

Thats kind of like saying that every football player should be able to play every position well.

Doesnt really work that way.

All writers have strengths and weaknesses, the whole point is finding where yours are.

>>4824911
I didn't even see the picture you were talking about and I knew which one you meant. I wonder where that guy is now. >>4824947

>>4825159
right here.

>>4824947
If it's a good idea it's probably already been done in some way at some point in time.

And so you're afraid that someone might take your idea for a story and make a better version of what you'd do? I don't understand the worry

>>4825126

Now you're just contesting what "story" means, not what he actually wrote. Semantics. Leave, your IQ is too low to participate.

>>4825167
>And so you're afraid that someone might take your idea for a story and make a better version of what you'd do?

huh?

If i understand you right, your basic point is that plagiarism never happens and is nothing to worry about?

>>4825172
>Leave, your IQ is too low to participate.

Ok.

>>4825176
Has it happened to you?

I'm saying, what exactly are you afraid of? You said you don't want to post an Idea for a story. If you said you didn't want to post a passage or specifics I could understand, but an idea?

>>4825134
Rachel, before you leave I want to tell you an old story, even a parable. When I was young, and going on my Rumspringa. I was so scared, just like you are now. The world is so different for them, so much bigger, too much faster. But we go anyway, all of us in our turn, in our season of free youth; for as the Proverbs tell us, "Folly is bound up in the heart of a child." And so folly led me away from the hearth and my father's hay to that great city in New England. Automobiles, talking picture shows, the lighted signs, all were wonders to behold. As beautiful and magnificent in their existence as they were godless and devoid of simple heavenly grace. But of all the wicked and wonderful things I beheld, none were so tempting like as the German boy I met. Tall and exotic he spoke to me and sang a song in my ear. A song that had not been sung on erath since that terrible snake sang it to mother Eve. Like her I fell under the spell. Off we made to his quarters, I was not myself that day, and to be truthful I have never been myself after that day. It was worse than that he stole my innocence, my marital gift, if you can call it stealing, for under that spell I was as meek and willing as a ewe lamb upon the block. It was worse because he was German and because with that came perversions unimsginable. Truly the devil is the lord of the flies for upon my naked person he smeared his excrement and I moaned all the louder for it.
But the following day, as the sun rose, I knew that somewhere in the world my father, your grandfather was looking at that same sunrise and like them in Eden's garden I felt such shame. I would have spilled my own blood that day and committed myself into the Lord's fold, but the new world held one last miracle for me. A miracle as redeeming as the precious blood of the lamb of God. It was powered water. I entered their hot shower, like the Isrealite enters the mikvah, dirty in sin and excrement. But as it ran invvermiculate rivues off my body it traveled to a place of new beginings, a place where even the filtiest is rendered anew. So like the Hebrew in his mikvah, I left the shower cleaned and whole again. With all that German serpent's waste forever removed from earth.
So enjoy your Rumspringa, and be wary of boys with scales.

[Hoping] to write a little less angsty version of 'The Catcher in the Rye' if that makes any sense. I actually just read it after someone who asked what I was thinking about writing about said that it sounded like Saligner. Sheeeeeiiiiit, should I just scrap the whole thing? It'll be the first thing I've ever written (so it's certainly not great), but be harsh /lit/, I need a legitimate evaluation. Here's the opening paragraph

____________________________

“I write to know what I think,” or something like that. To be completely honest here, I don’t really remember if that was the quote or not. It’s something that my high school literature teacher had hanging up in his room a couple years ago. I believe the quote is by Joan Didion, but I could be wrong on that. Anyway, when the first though of writing came into my mind, this is what had really compelled me. Probably the best way to really figure out what I think of things (or life at all, for that matter) is to write about it in order to see a concrete version of my thoughts, and so I decided to start this journal (?), record (?), diary (?) to really help me nail down a lot of thoughts that have been going on lately. I suppose you probably want a little context here, considering you really don’t know what’s going on: allow me to fill you in.

>>4825231
*vermiculate rivules

sorry I'm typing on a tablet.

As he lept off the edge of the towering oil rig, he heard the yells behind him. Gunfire spattered in what felt like the distance, though only feet behind him. Why are they even shooting? he wondered. He knew he would hit the water like a ton of bricks, and it would be over with. Surely they knew this too. Sure, they were angry, but shooting at him now? How idiotic. A waste of bullets, if anything. Wasteful. Typical of these brutes.

He felt the crisp air crash against his skin as he fell. He fell faster. 20 feet away, maybe. He considered that he would be colder still when he hit the water. Bummer.

He never quite felt the pain upon impact, never felt the cold of the water after all. All he felt was a jolt, much like a sharp knock to the skull, except on his every inch from heel to hip to head. That, and the tear of his back. But no pain. He sunk, unknowingly, and deeper by the minute, towards the drill beneath the rig. He half-floated, half-whipped against its base. The drill was in no way exposed; he never would have wasted time building a drill with design flaws that would allow for something to be caught inside its gnawing teeth and fantastic steel. What a waste that would have been, a waste of time, a waste of money, a waste of steel. As the life left his limp, shattered body, more bullets were wasted above him in victory, fired into the air with pride. A single shell found its way through the water and half-floated, half-whipped against his cheek. What a waste.

>>4825252
typical first roman a clef novel about a young male who is basically the author

knock this out if you like working on it but unless you're a damn good writer, it won't amount to much

>>4825110
>>4825149

Writers chose to write about subjects that resonate with them. That doesn't change the fact that a good writer is, above all else, a storyteller. They should be able to articulate any story in a poignant way. If they can't then they're not writers so much as chroniclers of their own intrests. Read almost any correspondance interview by a good writer, even when they're just writing answers about anything to questions from a journalist or a fan, they do so in meaningful ways. McCarthy has an interview where someone asked him what he does at his friends barbecues? Why, I don't know, apparently someone out there cares. Anyway his answer was as eloquent and as powerful as any passage from his novels.

>>4825073
Since you mentioned Thompson it's important to realize that he was a journalist and the most important talent a journalist can have is the ability to take any story your editor puts on your desk and make it interesting no matter how shitty or boring. Thompson was one of the best at it.

>>4825231
Seriously? No one has anything for the on demand story about shit going to a treatment plant from the perspective of an Amish girl? Where's the guy that asked me to write it? If you're gonnacask a person to do that at least take the time to provide some fucking feedback.

>>4825312
Link to the McCarthy interview?

>>4825420
http://www.theparisreview.org/the-art-of-fiction-no-223-cormac-mccarthy

Paris Review, interviewer was Bunny Truman

>implying that Bunny is a name you would admit to outdide of a furry convention

>>4822844

Are you trolling?

Please tell me you're trolling.

>>4825445
Fanx!

>>4825454
Welcum

>>4825445
I am laughing my ass off at this interview

MCCARTHY

No, it’s not that. I entertain most nights. In the afternoon you wear the mud mask of your being. And then the guests arrive and you are a new thing. It is the unspoken promise of nightfall. It takes time. Time that hunts you, time that is calamity.

INTERVIEWER

These are dinner parties.

MCCARTHY

Barbecues, mainly. And this is part of it. Calling the dogs in, all limbs and sinew, the vermicular homebound patterns they weave in the scorch of the grass. The glint of the grill in the sun’s fire ellipse, its entirety as it bends toward hyphenate unyielding horizon. I like to soak the mesquite chips for at least half an hour. Then there’s the marinade for the brisket, or the dry rub, the laying on of hands. A replication of primeval violence. In your fingertips the harm of generations, the wish to make right, the failure to cleanse and absturge. Raw matter. Chile ancho, dried chipotles, paprika and salt, pulverized plant and rock, the sad spice and crumble of the earth’s red crust. I put the beef in a plastic bag for two hours before my guests come.

>>4825472
I thought you guys would like it, it's classic Cormac, as enigmatic and pretentious as he is talented and verbose.

>>4825472
it goes back and forth, one minute it's like reading the greatest disciple of Faulkner the next it's Martha Stewart on Better Homes & Gardens.

Hello. If you’re reading this, hoping for fancy words and grandiose ideas and all that, then don’t. (Except for “grandiose.” I’m proud of that one.) Frankly, I don’t even know what this story is about yet, only that I told Ellie that I am going write one and now she’s holding me to it. I suppose I’ll write about me, since that’s the only thing I really know well enough to write about. Thing is, you really need to know something to write about it. I read books sometimes and these authors are all high and mighty and writing ideas so abstract that they don’t even understand them, and it sets my teeth on edge. I’ll try not to do that, though no promises. I don’t make too many promises. I found lately that the best way to keep promises is to make them sparingly, and that’s what I’ve decided to do.

sdfoih aerf khjaerr Oh sorry, Ellie just walked by and I had to look like I was working. Otherwise I’d have to tell her that I’ve just been staring at a screen for fifteen minutes and then she’d be disappointed in me. I’ll edit it out later. Maybe if I pretend to work long enough she’ll just forget about it? Yeah, right. No, she’s gonna pester me about it till the day I die if I don’t write this. Might as well get started then. Well, really get started, not that start on top of the page, cause even though that was technically the start, it’s not the start of the story yet, whatever that will be. You know what? I think I’ll edit that out too. Who wants to read about *why* I am writing the story anyway? Plus, in all the books, the authors all have a story that they really need to tell, and tell now and tell well and it’s all lies. I think. Maybe it’s different when they really do have a story to tell? What do you think? And why am I asking you? You’ll never even see this. Heck, chances are the book won’t even get published. Well, you know what? Too bad. I ain’t writing this to publish it anyway. And maybe it’s going to be a great book? A real milestone of modern literature and you won’t ever read it because it won’t ever get published. So, ha! Joke’s on you.

>>4825486
So, if I am writing about me, I should probably introduce myself. Hi, my name is Paul. Paul McGuire. My name has a long, rich history that I never bothered to research, so you don’t get to find out about it.

Should I? Research it, that is. I am pretty sure writers do research before writing a story. Oh whatever, I will research something else. Maybe I’ll watch one of those videos that teach people how not to ramble. I ramble sometimes, you might’ve noticed. Yes, I tend to go on and on and on and on and on and … ok, now I just look pathetic. No more filler. Promise. Oh wait, scratch that. No promises. Just … probably.

So, I was born in June. The most boring of all months. Really though, it’s smack dab in the middle of the year. There’s nothing exciting about it, nothing mysterious. No ... dammit. What was that French phrase people use? Something che qua? Quis? One second, let me look it up. “Je ne sais quoi.” There, I did research. Although, I’m kind of ashamed that I didn’t remember it myself. See, I bet people born on a more interesting month remember these things. Like December for example. It’s the end of the year. The days are shorter and the nights are long and spooky and interesting. Or say, February. Shortest month of the year. Plus, they have leap years. We don’t even have any holidays in June for Gods sake! I think. It’s not as bad as August, though. That’s the worst. Nothing happens in August. There’s no two ways about it, August is a boring month.

At least the date is good. June 13. It’s my favourite number, and not because it’s my birthday. There’s just something about that number, sort of like December. It has a certain taboo charm. Pinazz if you will. Always makes me think of Alice in Wonderland, where the Cheshire Cat is grinning, and it starts to disappear but the grin stays, and that final moment when it’s just the grin and nothing else. That’s the number 13. That right there.


Unedited and pretentious. Just the way you faggots like it.

>>4825486
Not sure why but I like it. Feels conversational. Ever meet one of those people that are really full of life and you just find yourself watching them wondering where it all comes from? The narrator reminds me of those people, even if they're a little silly they're just so damn infectious.

rating: 7.5/9 verdict: would read more.

He stopped his car about one hundred feet past the house, a couple homes down. Turning off the engine, he listened to the clinking of the dead engine for a minute. Sitting there, apart from that one sound from the motor, he was in complete silence. There was virtually no movement to be seen in the neighborhood – everything stood still. A small gray cat meandered along a pathway of a house across the street, disappearing around its corner. A single seagull squawked out far in the distance – a faint sound. He knew the ocean was less than a mile away. The imitation leather steering wheel was quite warm in the sun, he squeezed it one last time with both hands before he got out.
He walked slowly up to the house, making sure to not drag his feet or make any other sounds. The ominous dwelling sat in view like a bad omen, dizzying. The sun was baking; that morning he checked the weather forecast; highs of up to 112 degrees Fahrenheit in central Florida. 689. That was the address, just as listed in the phone book. It barked at him in the muted silence of the neighborhood.

(plz be gentle)

Whenever I jump,
I think I won't hit the ground.
I think I'll get picked up by North winds
and carried into lands unseen and full of treasures.
I'm convinced gravity will spare me,
and release me from its mortal coil,
springing me into these new pastures,
unheard and full of treasures.
But then a gust of wind does come
as I'm still airborne,
and the burst of air flows around me,
before I land on the ground,
in surprise.

>>4825507

Thanks. I was trying to make it lively, without making it childish.

>>4825539

A little amateurish, but there's definitely potential there. Keep writing (and reading).

3/5

To You, In The Kitchen

It’s a fucked up thing
how the air stings
when you’re near me

And a billion suns
rest inside my ribcage
and it burns

Just like the house
in which we spent days
endless, hazeful days

When we were stoned
and marooned
and broken
and happy

Stupid, imbecilic, moronic, idiotic,
and absolutely pea-brained!
How could I have done such a thing?
As avoidable as a train, or massive iceberg.
Such a titanic lack of foresight,
such incredible ignorance,
such a resounding ding in a chest!
If it had been anyone else,
if only it hadn't been then and there,
if only it hadn't been.

Disgrace and shame,
these are my mother and father now.
They are Adam and Eve, and I am the world.
I sit beside the tree of knowledge
and eat its forbidden fruits of regret,
such addictive and bitter delights they are
with Seeds that sprout effortlessly
and nectar that tastes of opium.
If only I had found shade elsewhere
or simply let myself go,
holding on for dear life,
then maybe it would've been different,
maybe I would've triumphed.

>>4825134

>Try writing about it from a female amish girl's perspective.

>from a female amish girl's perspective.

>female amish girl

Do the Amish have female boys?

>>4825607
The language is solid, especially the bit about the tree of knowledge, but what the hell was your mistake?

Mike and Steph had the oddest dynamic. Watching them interact was like watching a public school Chemistry teacher giving a poor demonstration. I mean, there was chemistry, it just seemed a bit unconventional. For instance, Steph one day came over to my place to see Mike, and she had brought us over some honey for a reason unknown to me then, and still now as I write this. That's just the type of eccentricity she brought, thick and sweet. Anyway, Mike came out of his room, ignored Steph, got a teaspoon and filled it with honey. As he did this, he kept unbroken eye contact with Steph and then grabbed her hand and walked into his room, presumably to fuck. Me and two other friends were in the room, and well we didn't really have anything more to say than, "that was weird." Because really that was all there was to it, absolute peculiarity. At least that's what my other friends believed. I knew behind every person's actions lies a set of habits and principles that's based on what makes sense to them. And granted most people aren't smart enough to make sense in the first place, this puts everything on circumstance. And the circumstance was, Mike and Steph were intelligent. They had values, convictions, beliefs that weren't contingent on popular opinion. They were weird, but they were interesting. I guess that's why when they asked me to go to Peru with them, I did.

forty five minutes west of wichita:
the cave of a thousand whispers
the first one; heavy with regret
Icarus.

I am Icarus

Father.

five faces
five fucking faces
now brimming with sullen innocence, now mirthfully putrid in their complicity
I am Icarus.

a chair

no

yes

no, no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no

I wanted a father
he wanted a catamite
clearwater, harrington, saturday night live, ecclesiastes

“Loose.”
“Yeah?”
“You gonna bring that everywhere now?”
“Yeah. That’s what Pa said so I gotta.”
A long gust blew the stalks of wheat above them. Lucy helped the hair away from her face.
“That’s dumb.”
“How’s that dumb?”
“Well… it’s gonna scare off them Souza boys for one, sprayin the nhaler in your mouth n makin them faces n such.”
“What faces?!”
“Y’know!” Mary sat up, thumb-in-lips, and sucked in her cheeks and rolled back her eyes, twisting her head side-to-side.
“It don’t look like that, Mare!”
“It do too! I seen you do it just today!”
“When’d you see?”
“Heard the Souza boys was callin you an alien too, suckin your alien food from it or somethin.”
“They aint say that. They aint so rude.”
“I swear on my soul, Loose! Glenda heard em with her own two ears. They was at the gas station and she heard em clear's day.”
“That lil girl ain’t told the truth since she learned to speak.”
A flock of birds sprawled out from the woodline.
"If you say so."

>>4825635

It isn't about one person's mistake as much as anybody's mistake. I've made millions of mistakes in my life, and so I just tried to extract the general feeling after each, at least the bigger ones. Not knowing what the error is is a big part of the poem, because it isn't always about the mistake as much as it is how it makes you feel, and more importantly what you do about it.

>>4825641
Lazy b8 m8, troll harder

LSD Trip/10

>>4825579

Seems pretty solid. A bit simple if anything. Also what the fuck does hazeful mean anyway?

>>4825651
Fair enough, but in that case you might try to rework it into third person. See if you like it. It really is well written though.

>>4825653
Fuck you i put my fucking soul into that poem man. You won't understand. all the trauma. The fear. the self-loathing.

Hell, at least give me a somewhat more detailed critique.

>>4825641

How high are you?

The Morlock

You are like the Morlock
You could leave your dark tunnel
Yes, you could do that.

Even then,
Your eyes would strain
At the vegetable splendor
Of the Eloi's fertile world.

Your eyes would look
For narrow bridges,
Crags and barnacles,
More warm flesh to eat.

Not even that
They would focus
On the waves beneath the bridges,
The incarnadine dorsel fins
That shave the crystal sea
Into bits of radiated foam.

Even worse
You would just stare at your feet,
Through strands of white hair,
One step after another,
In search of more work.

Perhaps,
It's best for everyone
That you just stay put.

Blinding cowardice creates survivors of war:
Yet surviving soldiers are not all heroes,
for in avoiding death
one also avoids life,
neglecting it like British teeth
or parents taken for granted.
No, as I was born to die,
I was also born to live,
I shall exalt death as I do life
and fear life as I do death.
I shall wait for time's execution in media res,
never foreclosing my house of dreams,
always waiting for the paper.

>>4825660

Coolio, thanks a lot mate

It was right after my shift that I met the piece of shit

whom I had murdered. I murdered him very horribly. I

was wearing my typical uniform at work and for my

undershirt I wore a white longsleeve shirt that with

hinduistic images on both sides of the shirt, although I

am not religious. I picked the shirt up at a Goodwill

amongst it were several clones of the same shirt all the

same size. I pass by him as I walked to the

supermarket to meet my mother who was grocery

shopping and would drive me home. He told me he

needed money and SYRINGES because his brother has

diabetes and needs the syringes for his insulin. Like a

fool I believed him. I got 40 dollars for him and let him

in my mother's OWN CAR to come to my house so I

could use my car to drive him to various pharmacies to

find syringes.

>>4825685
I can't believe I fell for this rat's game.

We first went to a Wal-Mart and we conversed on the

ride there. He told me he went to

community college but I doubt that if the motherfucker

can't afford syringes. The Pharmacy at Wal-Mart was

closed so we tried a CVS. The pharmacy there was not

closed. When I asked for the exact syringes he asked

me to get I was told you need a prescription to buy

syringes and I of course did not have one and neither

did the fucker. When we left the CVS he asked why

you need a prescription and that "his brother" needed

them. She replied with "You need a prescription

because people buy them for drugs". It was at this point

that it clicked for me, but it should have clicked outside

of the supermarket before I dare converse with the

fucker.

>>4825687
In a final attempt to get him what he needed I

went to a childhood friends house who lived very close

to me to get the syringes he wanted. I talked to my

friend's parents and explained the situation and got two

syringes in return. It was at this point that I knew I was

going to do what needed to be done. The piece of shit

wanted a ride to a McDonalds not to far from here. On

the ride to the McDonalds I reached with my left hand

to a hammer that was in a small compartment in the

door. I clutched the hammer in hand and stopped at a

three way stop. I looked left and there was noone.

Then I looked right and there was noone. I pointed and

feigned a chuckle and pointed with my right hand and

said "Haha look at that guy's dog" As the fucker turned

his head to the right to view the dog that was not there I

quickly thrust the hammer sideways and smashed it into

the fucker's left temple. It makes a satisfying noise. A

cross between a crack and a thud.

>>4825688
This makes the

fucker slump over quickly with the seatbelt snapping his

body securely and his head bowed over his lap as he

drones on "ughhhhhhhhh... ughhhhhhhhhhhhh" I relish

the final moments of his miserable life and bring the

hammer down on the back of his head making the same

fusion noise that I enjoyed. He stops making noise. I

unfasten his seatbelt and let his lifeless body tumble

forward with his head hitting the ground of my car first

and his entire body being obscured by the car door for

anyone to see. My heart is racing in these moments. I

am ecstatic. I take the body to an abandoned

department store. I go behind the store where there is

noone obiously and take out the body as fast as I can. I

prop it up against a dumpster and undress it. I was not about to leave

without letting the entirety of my rage spill over.

>>4825641

>heavy with regret

/thread

>>4825691
This

trash had seen where I lived, allowed the pleasure of

my mother's car, and lied to a kind person. He also

wasted my time, and I hate wasting time. I took the

hammer and begin pummeling his head. I lost count of

how many times I did but it was at least a dozen times.

I smashed his head and face until he was completely

unrecognizable. I smashed him good; real good. I had

never seen so much blood in my life before. Amongst it

were bits of brain matter, tissue, shattered bone, and his

eye balls. I kept the hammer as a trophy. My only

regret is not having the time or resources to have hurt

him in agonizing ways. That would have been time well

spent.

Rickety rickshaws aren't the best mode of transporting kilos of cocaine. No, the best would be a fleet of Mexicans on forklifts, but we were out of Mexicans. Either way, the score went well, Jimmy didn't fuck us like I thought he would, and Mildred still thinks I'm at some Marketing seminar. It's brilliant. Once the truck's full, Bill and I are going to meet with our buyer tomorrow, sell the shit, then get the hell out of Tucson; this arizonan sun is beating me up more than I thought. I really hope I don't have to kill somebody this trip, I can't keep telling my priest about the shit I do because some day I might have to take care of him.

>>4825629

no, but they have male girls.

>>4825008

someone say something about this

The only thing I can sing
is the blues.
With a spotted liver and baggy face,
my soul can't seem to invest in any other music
but the blues.
I can't play the guitar, I can't whistle like the wind,
I can't even keep beat to save my life,
but I can sing the blues.
Pain, sorrow, and sadness,
a little dash of humor,
and a teaspoon of sugared honesty:
the blues taste so sweet.
I chuckle when I realize on my porch
in my rocking chair
that to sing the blues,
you have to rock back and forth,
with the monsoon in your stomach
like a dingy in the ocean.

>>4825703
Needs some context.

Where are you that your transportation options a rickshaws and Mexicans with forklifts?

Do you moonlight as a nun in a convent in China town, Tijuana? Why else you you take care of a priest? Or do you mean kill him?

Context pleeze

>>4825710
something about this

Hope is so hopeless
replete with empty wishes
like a busy dad

>>4825718

Eh, you're right, I leave a little too much to the imagination. Did you like it otherwise?

>>4825708
>implying you know what the fuck you're talking about.

you're on lit, pick up a book and learn something. It's established that the Mennonites have male girls, not the Amish

Do you even weird Al Yankovitch?

>>4825703
Jumps too much
The individual bits are good, but they don't flow properly into each other.

>>4825560
>>4825679
>>4825717
>>4825727
>>4825639

Would love some thoughts on these.

>>4825727
That was funny and hearbreaking. Awesome anon

>>4825733
Actually yes, except the "it's brilliant" part it's not really brilliant, it's your standard issue alibi for the wife. Pay attention to things like that call a spade a spade and a garden varitey cover story a garden varity cover story.

America

Devil worshippers enact their ghoulish rites on every remote forest clearing and every cobweb-ridden church abandoned by the once faithful. Degenerates prowl your dark alleyways, inflicting their depravity upon children and the unwary, leaving behind but a trail of glitter, scintillating sinisterly in the august moonlight. The devil rides in plain view, and even your rural townships, once standards of community now lie infected by the plague. Not a plague of boils and fevers. No, one of decadence, immorality and unbridled egotism.

>>4825741
Yeah good luck with that. Seems like everyone's just here to get some validation. No one takes the time to offer real insights. Earlier these assholes made me write 2 stories about shit traveling to a treatment facility on the spot. Just to prove a point about writers being versatile. Then no one had a fucking thing to say about any of my posts.

>>4825753

And yet, you could've helped to change the status quo by just reading one and sharing a thought or two, even if just a quick opinion. Instead you complain about a problem that you verily just acted in favor for. Please, if you point out which post is yours, I would be happy to share my thoughts on it. But complain? No, complaining is a fool's errand.

>>4825676

I quite like it. Definitely sad.

>>4825751
How are you the same guy that wrote that retarded shit earlier? I was gonna dox you and call the oaramedics because I was sure your brain was in the final stages of a dengue fever induced rant. Now you pist this and it's really fucking good. Descriptive, eerie, articulate. Keep writing except poetry, right now I am drafting a letter to the U.N. asking that they classify your poetry as crime against humanity. But keep up the solid prose.

>>4825719

thank you

>>4825560
It's good. I enjoy the up and down, he's lost in his fantasy and "surprise" there's reality. I would change the mortal coil phrase, it's overused in lit and your clearly talented enough to come up with an original phrase.

I posted this a few weeks and I worked it since then.
Fishing in Idaho.

I could hear my motor
above everything else
on that lake.
It purred as it spun
through the water.
My wake was my mark,
here and then gone.
The days searing light
hadn’t caught up with me,
or the rest of the lake
for that matter.
The gray lay softly In the sky
exhales its cold and thin breathe
over me.
Oh captain,
I’m the captain
of this dingy.
It’s me and no one else,
I set the course
but
also row the boat.
In the middle of a lake
the reflection of the mountain
in the distance forms symmetry.
It looms and leers
over me; the great head of a
crocodile too somber to snap.

What If
the earth was just
a series of cosmic crocodiles.
Latched onto each other
in a great mound, so
they don’t float through space
alone forever.

But over time
they grew to hate each other
and the people like louses and mites
crawling on their backs?
So they want to break off.
No one’s got the courage to
be the first to swim into space
alone.
And I’m just swimming
in a pool of silver crocodile tears,
a louse grasping at smaller louses
to fry and eat.
If I’m a louse,
a louse still has to eat.
So now the captain waits.
And he does, he waits
and waits until gray air
fills with gold and the mountains
reflection fades away on the water.
The sun grows to cook at the back
of his neck, my neck. Surely it’s red.
So is the flame that I will cradle
and harbor as bedding for my fish.
My fish,
no longer the lake’s.
I’m waiting to raise him
from the watery perdition.
And he’ll thank me
by filling my belly.
I couldn’t see them
they were there though.
Darting around my bait,
one will make a wrong move
and then it’s on.
Speaking of which
there he is on the hook
Not fighting. He gets it.
This is what he wants.
Open mouth,
soulless eyes,
and translucent stomach.
What a disgusting creature.
I bet he thinks the same of me.
He didn’t accept the fate
that lay before him on the boat.
It was me and my rock.
I’d say I was sorry
as I raised the stone high.
But I read somewhere that
fish don’t feel pain.
And then down it came
on his head, once , twice.
I may be a louse, but
I’m not that louse with his brains
at the captains feet.
The stupid open mouthed look
still on his face,
what a horrible way to die.

How do I learn to write creatively?

I read stuff I write and it makes me depressed.

>>4825754
Oh sorry, I was busy responding to your work >>4825768 while you were complaining about me not responding to your work. I am on a tablet I can't type so fast.

The screen door slammed shut with a rattling thwack that told her that it was indeed on it’s last hinges and her mother had went outside to smoke. It was moving day for Adrianna, her mother had finally landed a rich husband, the third one, and they were making their way out of the dingy trailer they had been renting near Los Angeles and into a mansion in the hills. It was another blistering summer day in California, so she was laying on her cot-like bed in her messy bedroom, “JUICY” emblazoned on her extra short shorts that left nothing to imagination, and a tank top that had ridden up slightly to reveal her pale skin. Adrianna, or Addy, was the only daughter of a serial gold digger.

“Addy, get your ass out here and help the movers!” her mother’s voice screeched through the screen door and the eighteen year old shut Vogue and rolled out of bed, her body sweaty. They didn’t have air conditioning, and the fans just pushed hot air around the trailer, she was hot, she was sweaty, and she was tired.

“Mama, why did we hire these men if I’m taking their job?” she yelled back at her and padded barefoot through the messy trailer that was a mixture of chaos from moving and her mother always being too busy to clean. Sometimes Addy tried to pick up, but like mother like daughter.

“I didn’t raise any child of mine to sass back at me!” her mother shouted for the whole trailer park to hear. She was beet red with embarrassment, it was hard living with her. She stepped outside to see her mother tapping the ashes off the end of her Virginia Slims into the dirt next to the trailer.

“Mama don’t be so loud, people are going to talk.”

“Let them talk then, we’ll be gone for good this afternoon!” she took a drag of her cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke towards Addy, making her daughter turn and cough.

“Mama you said that the last time…”

“Don’t sass at me little girl, this man is the one!” a smile spread across her face as she looked up at the clear blue sky, blowing a stream of grey smoke upwards as another man dragged out a garbage bag full of clothing.

“Careful, Careful, I have all my Gucci in there” she chastised the mover.

“I don’t know how you got a man like him this time mama, he doesn’t seem like your type.”

“A man with money is my type, and William definitely has money.”

>>4825775
Depressed because it sucks or because you write in a morose way?

>>4825777

Gracias amigo, and i think you're right. Mortal coil is a bit cliche. I'll find something better

>>4825754
Also I've been constructively commenting on this thread since yesterday.

>>4825761
Thanks dude

First Chapter of the novel im working on

Light filled the alley as Captain Lennart Steiger of the Schutzstaffel stuck the match and lit his cigarette. His hands were trembling. The nicotine would help. He took a deep breath, savoring the warmth in his chest. It steadied his breath, the rhythmic in and out of smoke. Like a heartbeat. He needed to be calm. Focused. A few more drags.
Every time, he could see the man kneeling in the snow in front of him by the light of the embers. He could see fear in his face. Absolute terror. He was sobbing meekly, pathetically, like a lamb before the slaughter. Steiger could barely stand to look at him. It probably would have been worse if he could see his eyes.
He took another drag. From the light he could also make out the dark figures that circled them in that alley. Men with guns. Men with orders. If he had any doubts, he had to hide it from them. He was a Nazi. He knew what he had to do, what was expected of him to prove himself. Still, he felt uneasy about them. From their faces he felt an air of anticipation... eagerness... sadism. They were going to enjoy what was about to happen. To them, the thing kneeling before them wasn't even human.
It wasn’t going to get any easier dragging this out. He pulled out his revolver and pointed it at the man’s head. The cigarette had helped his nerves but the cold wasn’t doing him any favors. Even through his gloves his hands were shaking. The barrel traveled across the blindfold, to his nose, his ear and back again. He gripped the handle tighter, trying to will some courage into those hands. He gripped it so hard he couldn't feel anything at all.
Captain Lennart Steiger of the Schutzstaffel took one last drag of his of his favorite German cigarette, and on December 10th, 1946, Captain Lennart Steiger of the Schutzstaffel shot First Lieutenant Christof Bauer of the Schutzstaffel as he knelt blind in the snow. He never saw it coming.

>>4825784
it sucks which I can deal with, but mostly because I have clinical depression and reading about my days when I was worse make me feel worse.

I guess what I mean is how do I write better?
How do I write creatively?
And the first answer I'm use to hearing is "Write more" or "Write what you know".
I've gotten better at technical writing this way, but creative writing I write becomes technical in a hurry.

Burning through the icy waters are my hopes and dreams.
My obsession with melancholy leaves me yearning for the end of thought,
of time,
of my despair.
Wallowing in desolation.
Beautiful, yet evil in the moonlight.
Isolation pulls me under.
I'm sinking in a sea of tears.

>>4825008
>5/10
>>4825070
4/10
>>4825090
7/10
>>4825106
2/10
>>4825231
6.5/10
>>4825304
3/10
>>4825486
5/10
>>4825539
5.5/10
>>4825639
5/10

>>4825834
Elaborate? Numbers do absolutely nothing to improve the writing.

>>4825855
Who are you?

>>4825863
I'm shit going to the treatment facility guy I'd appreciate some feedback

>>4825855

>>>4825486 <- Me

Set the suns to one side; the inevitable descent from the sky, the seance of memories and rhythms take charge of the house, the head, and the life of the mind.
- A horse bolts on the suburban racecourse, out past the fields and forests, stricken with carbonic plague. A miserable woman straight from some play, somewhere in the world, yearns for unlikely sexual abandon. Desperadoes languish after storms, drunkenness and wounds. Along the rivers the little children stifle curses. -
Back to our studies and the thrum of the consuming project as it gathers and rises among the masses.

>>4825903
Really strong use of language, you have an impressive vocabulary. Even though it's tersecI can get into the characters like the hopelessly horny woman. Don't know if it's what you're going for but reads like American prose poetry. Would read more. Watch the break between the opening and the racing horces it might benefit from a softer segue.

>>4825912
*horses

*terse

Sry I'm typing on a tablet

>>4825912
its just random stuff i write

heres a bit more


Pool, let your waters rise. Foam, roll over the bridge, over the woods - black palls and organs - lightnings, thunder - rise and roll - tides and sorrows, reinstate the Floods.
Since they've scattered - the precious stones digging their graves, the opened flowers! - life is dreary. And the Queen, the Witch who lights her fire in an earthen pot, will never consent to tell us what she knows - and we do not.

>>4825560
Line 4 is disappointing mostly because 'unseen and full of treasures' is so bland. You use 'full of treasures' again later on and it is equally bland. Last 4 lines are ok. Narratively, it needs more developing than 13 lines just to flesh out the themes you're trying to convey.
>>4825679
Subject of war heroism vs. cowardice is played out. Scrap.
>>4825717
This has rhythmic problems, see line 4 which has too many syllables, unless you're referencing the 'not keeping the beat' thing, in which case you're expecting too much from the reader and compromising too much of the work. I like the premise of this one, though, and it has potential. Line 3 is good. Food lines are good. 'Pain, sorrow, and sadness' is too forward, you need to portray those emotions instead of stating them. Just needs more rhythm and it will survive.
>>4825727
I do like this but I can't shake the feeling that the last line needs to have more syllables than the first two. 4 is too quick; the reader needs to get roped in then executed.
>>4825639
Uncomfortable mix of technical and conversational wording. Scrap the 'anyway'/'I guess' stuff. Too straightforward with your ideas at points: 'I knew behind every person's actions lies a set of habits and principles that's based on what makes sense to them.' First line: your text will convey the type of dynamic if you're effective enough. Keep the idea of an 'odd' dynamic to yourself then show the reader oddness through examples. Same thing for explaining that they were intelligent. Basically this requires a page or two to do well. And it needs to be more odd an absurd than that lame honey shit. Think more about it.

>>4825945
And I know the 4th one is a haiku but it would work better otherwise. And with the third's 'Pain, sorrow, and sadness' you can leave it as three words but just use more interesting ones.

>>4825941
Your talented. Did you major in English or Lit? Only thing I've got is trade froth for spume. It's in keeping with your strong vocab and it carries all the weight of the sea and the tides with it.

>>4825974
im not at university

thanks for the tip

>>4825945
These are teally impressive analysis' would you mind doing mine? I could use some smart criticism

>>4825979
High School or autodidact?

>>4825982
self taught

My Good! My Beauty! Atrocious fanfare - but I do not falter! Enchanted rack! Salute the undreamed of work and the marvellous body, for the first time! It began with children laughing and so it will end. This poison will remain in all our veins even when the fanfare goes blowsy and we're back with the old dissonance. Let us now - we who deserve these tortures - passionately reaffirm the superhuman promise we made to our bodies and souls, as created: that promise, that madness! Elegance, knowledge, violence! We've been promised that the tree of good and evil will be buried in darkness, that tyrannical proprieties shall be banished, to make way for our love of the highest purity. It began with aversions and it ended - unable as we are to seize this eternity here and now - it ended in a riot of perfumes

>>4825486
This annoyed me mostly because of the childish aspect that you were concerned about. But I don't know the character age you were trying to convey. This person seems to me to be 12-13 and effeminate. Stuff like 'fancy words', the 'high and mighty' sentence, 'it's all lies' sentence, 'Heck', and 'So, ha! Joke's on you' lead me to that conclusion. So, as a children's story it is converging on alright. There's no fixes to be made if it is anything more serious because the mere premise is too immature.

>>4825981
Who are you?

i need legit help with this. i wrote it last night at 3am and rewrote it now at 3am and it's got some phrases but doesn't amount to much. i don't want to toss it, but don't offer help if you know it's beyond fixing. thanks.

we're in ceremony.

slaps and cries might
do the trick if the rust&phony
stay out of our slinking waters.
drink me up in this daze of spent silt
sounds
of downy widow dust. stone learns
asides and eats up pomes,
leaving me shirking
deities and false speaking pretty
tipsy; i'm shaking: rinsing out
below you, unable to wait for the
revel+fall to shards.
please, don't let my moans
create space in the cards.

>>4826003
Well, I was going for 15-16 and spineless, so I guess there's still some work to do. Thanks anyway.

>>4826009
Dude, I don't like to be critical but I literally have no idea what the hell is going on here? Can you provide some context? What are you trying to get across to the reader? Maybe it's just over my head.

>>4826012
I got the impression it was from a high school aged guy who talks a little too much because he's uncomfortable with silence and feels a need to constantly reassure himself and the reader. I critiqued it earlier and still thinks it's a solid piece. Holden Caulfield without all the confidence of a rich preppy and all the anger of a victim.

>>4825805
Can you explain this: 'They were going to enjoy what was about to happen. To them, the thing kneeling before them wasn't even human.'

Deep within the deceptively small limits of the pasta aisle at Joe's, George Decanter was lost in a self-contained argument as to whether one could actually get drunk off the vodka cream sauce. It had been nearly 6, maybe 7, years since he had even thought about picking up a bottle, cream or your basic marinara, but the prospect of getting drunk whilst eating pasta intrigued him in a way pasta had not since his coworker had directed his attention to TED Talk about Moskowitz– in that moment he couldn't remember the exact details, but he did feel a sudden craving for extra-chunky, also something about a bliss point; though that could have been that thing about three scotches for creativity, four for sleep .

Over in aisle 6 (Mexican vegetables, proudly not grown in Mexico) Jane Smith pushed her cart with the passive aggressive fury unique to sexually repressed suburban women with a taste for jumpsuits only matched by fictional Russian immigrants. Her hair was done up in an unintentional tribute to the worst of 80's mullets, while her knuckles were white with grip onto her cart full non-gmo grains, and 16 gallons of apple cider vinegar– homeopathic intestinal lubricant. She was turning onto 5 when she noticed a rather heavyset man gazing intently at a bottle of Prego vodka cream sauce. His hunched stance, coupled with his long suit jacket, took up around 2 feet of three and a half foot aisle. Jane was in a hurry, so she recalled her basic math, and figured she could fit her cart through with a politely enunciated excuse, and still get by only grazing the back of the man's suit jacket.

Still deep in thought, but now over the suspicious origins of vodka cream sauce– drunk Russian, or adventurous drunk Italian, and don't even get him started over the Polish variable, let alone those wily Ukrainians. George failed to notice the blonde train wreck of a mother hurtling towards him with the blind intent a CN train slams into drunks. He did, however notice her when the cart's bow sent him in him in a tumble into the tile. His head bounce off the tile, and sent him into dark for a few seconds. Waking him up he felt a gooey mess under his head, fearing the worst, and believing this women was going to get away with this fucking excuse of a manslaughter, George removed his newly polished Glock forty five, and ensured her lungs were as perforated as her brain surely was. Turning his head to look at his success, his own blood seeped over his tongue,hmm, he thought, vodka.

>>4826086
Just wrote this, not looking for grammar, just impressions.

>>4826024
it's a mix of religion and sex, as most of my poems are.

baptism (slaps and cries rhyme)/going into holy waters.

idk it's about fucking on a more spiritual level than fucking generally suggests

>>4826086
fell asleep reading - i'll try again tomorrow: a first impression.

>>4826091
Very funny

cuntlines

the ships are restless
i’m breastless, hips lean against
us. they stare at me starving,
carve without caring.
now i’m full of stained nicks
while seas laud me.
boys saw my arms off lest
i wave the coast into
their city. they think
i’m pretty (they’re proud
of their work; what a
pity).

fuck this town, let’s ride off this port
drink it down and catch some ladies,
fuck our labor; it can come later.
we’ll forget about babies
as we slick into
gin-soaked decks. the sins stay
on land, as the fins cut our hand.
fuck those flounders.
we’ve found her, and we don’t
eat flukes!

the fathers urge us into houses
where sisters serve feasts
for men in love with figures
that sigh their songs to beasts.

they whimper when they see
they’ve been out-tricked by
sticks and paint.
forget our sways to simpers and
saint us now. aren’t we holy?
we’ve ended Your crusade.
or was that all toll-free?
at least we got laid
up. home we go, to the missus.
i sure do hope they
miss us.

>>4826128
Holy shit. I think this might be the best thing I've ever read on /lit/

>>4826128
>>4826144
Little awkward in the last stanza, but shit above poster is right.

>>4826144
i feel maybe that's not even sarcasm!!
thanks man, i appreciate it. i wrote it a few nights ago p much fully formed and can't seem to top it

>>4825993
bump
any thoughts to this?

>>4826128
>>4826144
>>4826151
samefag

>>4826156
>>4826156
dude seriously not i am impressed.

on being a heroine:

one time demand crushed me,
i’m a lush, see?
i poured myself in the middle of
the lane
god, i’m wrecked
& i could write about rain
but fuck it, i don’t wanna
ruin the view and spew all over.

end me and i’ll sign my will to you.
last time i forgot
the world wasn’t
bending and now i’m at the
wrong altitude to parade onto.
i’ll glisten when you see me,
wash your feet
in silken waters.

need’ll open them rusted gates
and bring us home,
after we finish feeling
hope towards another day.
the holy mountain is
too much father
so i’ll turn round,
trek back down and
swim with some others.

just one more line.

Not samefaging, I wrote these >>4825231 >>4825090 and I wrote this >>4826144 but I did not write this >>4826128

I can't speak for this guy, >>4826151 might be samefag but I doubt it.

>>4826156
This >>4826284 was supposed to be in response to you.

>>4822848
"I created it after my studies of advanced physics at UCLA"

Okay anything before that, CUT

remeber every words only job is to make you read the next word.

Shut up in an attic at the age of twelve, I came to know the world; I illustrated the human comedy. I learned my history in a store room. At some night-time festival in a Northern city, I met all the wives and women of the old painters. In a crumbling backstreet, I was taught the classical sciences. In a magnificent dwelling surrounded by the entire Orient I completed my vast opus and sat out my illustrious retirement. I stirred my blood up. I have been relieved of my responsibilities. No point even thinking about them. I really am beyond the grave; no debts outstanding.

Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, horror of the faces and objects in this place, may you be hallowed by the memory of this vigil. It began in utter boorishness; see how it ends, in angels of fire and ice.
Little drunken vigil, holy! if only for the mask you've granted us. Method, we endorse you! We have not forgotten how you glorified our every age. We have faith in the poison. We know how to offer up our life, day after day, entire.
This is the time of the Assassins.

>>4824057
Cold determination inhabited the pale spheres of his eyes.

How exactly is determination cold? how do you measure the temperature of an intangible thing like that.

Pale spheres of his eyes? eyes are white spheres, everyone knows eyes are white spheres, to tell us that an eye is a pale sphere is redundant.

how do you think you see a facial twitch?

capitulated- Never use a complex word when a simple one will do,"his mind surrendered"

what can? youve told us about this guy and his hair and maybe having a twitch, but i dont know where we are

after that it just sounds like something a SNL parody of Chloe from TD would say so i stopped.

Something I've just started working on:

I knew that she knew that I wanted her. I would glance at her guiltily to refresh the fantasies that I harbored in my pornographic mind. She was no dumb gal, she knew very well that I lusted after her cunt, knew that I was being driven mad by my fiery desire, knew that cum would burst volcanically from my cock upon contact with her cunt.

It was the guessing that exhilarated me, guessing what her puffy fat vadge would look like. Maybe hairy, maybe shorn - I'd take it in any way, shape or form (rudiments for a poem here).

One blessed day, she bade me come in and then said, with her sable eyebrows foxily upturned: ''Wanna see it?'' She ripped her skirt off and stood there in her underwear - a hellish roadblock to heaven. Bent over, she began to slide off her black thong, and there it was, all adrip. More meaty and hairy than I had ever envisioned, I wanted to crawl up her pussy and snugly slumber there for thousands of wet and dark years. I felt lust-hunger, I salivated, I...

It occurs to me that you get options as to what you want them to do with your body once you're dead. Cremation and a new home in an urn or smotheration by dirt. I want, and you can take this as my last wish, that a large tombal cunt be constructed; and therein shall I be interred.

>>4826493
please be trolling

>>4826498
What? Why? How?

>>4826493
lazy b8

puffy fat vadge/10

>>4826493
>smotheration by dirt

/thread

>>4826493

>>4826511
It isn't bait. It's a sort of absurd story told from the perspective of a vaginophile. He especially likes cunts that, from behind, look like wet raisins bunched together.

>>4826518
What?

>>4826493
Look at the fucking reCAPTCHA challenge for this post

lel

>exces Theybate

excessively they bate indeed

well played Moot

>>4826493
>Maybe hairy, maybe shorn - I'd take it in any way, shape or form (rudiments for a poem here).


bottom kek

sage

>>4826493
>>4826530

>Wet raisins bunched together

What the fuck is wrong with you?

>>4826493
You creepy fucker

>>4826550
'Bunched together' is the key phrase there. There are many ways to describe that kind of pussy. Pat Cooper described it as dark rubber bands smushed together. Jim Norton described it as ''the kind of pussy that looks like it just smoked an exploding cartoon cigar.''

>>4826493

Solve for x

X + ammonia + bleach = a better world

X= you

>>4826583
Now that's just mean.

This is what CQ must feel like whenever he tweets.

>>4826493
lit·er·a·ture
ˈlit(ə)rəCHər,-ˌCHo͝or,-ˌt(y)o͝or/Submit
noun
1.) written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit.
"a great work of literature"

>mfw

>>4826565
>>4826597

>Norton
>Cooper
>CQ

"Have you met all my friends?

>>4826603
It seems my great work of literature has stirred up a lot of controversy. Well, Flaubert had to deal with haterz too... Sticks and stones, right guys?

>>4826395
not writer, but you seem like the kind of person who would enjoy non-fiction more than creative writing. There's nothing wrong with writing "pale spheres of his eyes." While unoriginal, it's not redundant, per se, just unexciting

>>4822790
http://pastebin.com/8esPUF9C

r8 h8 & masterb8

>>4826688
It's no Speak, Memory, but I did like the train part.

>>4826692
>It's no Speak, Memory
huh?

>but I did like the train part.
thanks

This is shit, and i need help making it better,ill completely revise it if needed
And as im on the bus this bubbly girl sits next to me, at first we dont say anything, as strangers normally do but after 3 hours, she begins to start a conversation, "so where ya heading?" "toronto" " thats quite a trip, im hannah by the way, but you can call me hope". At this point i didnt know i would be spending quite some time with this bubbly , awkwardly named stranger.
We start chatting about everything from the weather to the current whereabouts of MH-370 (she tells me it was abducted by aliens, I laugh at first but then i see her face and then part of me becomes scared), and then she asks why I'm alone and going to Toronto, why I'm not accompanied by my parents or even any friends, which is weird considering she looks younger then me, around 16. At first I'm hesitant to tell her about my plan, so I tell her I'm looking for someone , fortunately enough she doesn't ask who, I ask her where is she heading, to which she replies " same place as you.". At this point I really feel like asking her why is a 16 year old girl like her going all the way to Canada alone, without parents or even any friends, which would be a weird question considering I'm 16 myself. So I ask her, to which she replies "I'm looking for someone."
And then I realize the redundancy of what just happened so I change topic, a few more hours into the trip and I'm looking out the window and hope says, " hey stranger, I'm going to Toronto and you're going to Toronto , why don't we accompany each other until we get there, I know the way but the CBSA will probably give me a hard time if I'm alone.." I look at her and realize, that while my mission is completely personal, the chances of me making it all the way to Toronto alone are rather slim, and I could use someone who knows the way, and I think to myself that no way this 5.4 , Awkward looking 16 year old girl in a beanie could kidnap me and sell me to the Canadian-American syrup cartels. I say to her " ok, I guess". Not long after the bus comes to a stop.

>>4826788
I need help making this better

>>4826086
I edited it
Deep within the deceptively small limits of the pasta aisle at Joe's, George Decanter was lost in a self-contained argument as to whether one could actually get drunk off the vodka cream sauce. It had been nearly 6, maybe 7, years since he had even thought about picking up a bottle, cream or your basic marinara, but the prospect of getting drunk whilst eating pasta intrigued him in a way pasta had not since his coworker had directed his attention to the TED Talk about Moskowitz– in that moment he couldn't remember the exact details, but he did feel a sudden craving for extra-chunky, also something about a bliss point; though that could have been that thing about three scotches for creativity, four for sleep .
Over in aisle 6 (Mexican vegetables, proudly not grown in Mexico) Jane Smith pushed her cart with the passive aggressive fury unique to sexually repressed suburban women with a taste for jumpsuits only matched by fictional Russian immigrants. Her hair was done up in an unintentional tribute to the worst of 80's mullets, while her knuckles were white with grip onto her cart full of non-gmo grains, and 16 gallons of apple cider vinegar– homeopathic intestinal lubricant. She was turning onto 5 when she noticed a rather heavyset man gazing intently at a bottle of Prego vodka cream sauce. His hunched stance, coupled with his long suit jacket, took up around 2 feet of the 3 and a half foot aisle. Jane was in a hurry, so she recalled her basic math, and figured she could fit her cart through with a politely enunciated excuse, and still get by only grazing the back of the man's suit jacket.

Still deep in thought, but now over the suspicious origins of vodka cream sauce– drunk Russian, or adventurous drunk Italian, and don't even get him started over the Polish variable, let alone those wily Ukrainians. George failed to notice the blonde train wreck of a mother hurtling towards him with the blind intent of a CN train slamming into drunks. He did, however notice her when the cart's bow sent him in a tumble to the tile. His head bounced, and he faded into dark.
Waking up, he felt a gooey mess under his head, fearing the worst, and believing the women was going to get away with this fucking excuse of a manslaughter, George removed his newly polished Glock forty five, and ensured her lungs were as perforated as her brain surely was. Turning his head to look at his success, his own blood seeped over his tongue,hmm, he thought, vodka.

>>4826788
>(she tells me it was abducted by aliens, I laugh at first but then i see her face and then part of me becomes scared), and then she asks why

you use then a lot here which is weird to read. try to simplify sentences more and try not to repeat words so much

I'm still trying to figure out my voice. Criticism welcome:

A white blast of sparks, then the flame, growing, eating up butane as it rises from the bowels of the lighter. The tongue flits across transparent edges of an old plastic film, torn away some time ago from a box of cigarettes and dropped into a desk drawer, saved for just this purpose.
The plastic edges soften and disappear into each other under the flame. I pull it away and now there’s only one edge, rough and bulging unevenly across its length but whole, save for a few breaks in the gelatinous seal. I close these between my thumb and forefinger, and though the plastic boils I feel no pain. The nerve endings in my fingertips, deafened by this repeated action over the years, ignore screams from some hundred-thousand dermal cells as they incinerate, their walls splitting open, spilling organelles into the molten plastic on my fingers to rupture in the heat, turning inside-out like popcorn kernels in cooking oil.
An excited cloud of molecules released by the burning plastic drains in through my nose. The impression echoes through the vaulted ceilings and half-closed crawl spaces of my mind until it dislodges the closest analogues. This smell is like open pits of burning garbage this smell is like dollar store candles on a birthday cake.
Above, the ceiling fan has little effect on a cloud of smoke casting its shadow over the room. Seems like it’s been condensing up there for awhile, maybe an hour or so before I arrived. The fan blades beat plumes of smoke into a roiling foam as they rise up from the glass pipe passed among the six men and women who live here. Only the singular vent in their common room does anything to diminish the still building mass. There are two windows here, neither opens.

Never posted my writing anywhere online before. Formatting is going to go to shit though.
No proper ending to this one.

The Holy Text details that one who is pure and believes in Jesus Christ, the lord and savior, will be permitted entrance to the eternal paradise in the sky, known as Heaven.
It's 99% accurate. Upon death, a good Christian soul is permitted into "Heven". Heaven was just a translation error.
Beck was exactly that. A strong, upstanding man who had done everything as the good book told him to do. He didn't swear, he hardly drank, he never fought and always turned the other cheek. Even to the bitch in accounting, Susan.
So when he got to Heven you can only imagine his disappointment.
There was no one was at the gate when he arrived. No one greeted him as he just casually strolled into the afterlife. He had always pictured a city of gleaming perfection, where every soul could live a life of leisure. Instead he found ruins. The golden city had fallen apart, the buildings had collapsed inwards, the streets were cracked, the street signs were all uprooted and every traffic light but one was stuck on yellow.
He called out. "Hello?" No response. "Is anyone there?"
He didn't understand. This wasn't right, this wasn't fair! This wasn't what Heven was supposed to be like!
He wandered the destoryed streets of paradise for hours. He had to know what happened. What had become of heaven?
The hours turned into days, and those days turned into weeks before he sat down on the remains of a bench in what had once been either a beautiful park or a minimall. There he sat for more hours and then more days, unable to wrap his mind around the true afterlife until he finally heard a voice.
"Oh my.. Someones here." Beck launched to his feet and spun to see a woman facing him. "I can't remember the last time someone was here.."
"You.." He didn't know what to say. "What is this? Where am I?"
The lady smiled, "You're in Heven, dear."
"Heaven?" He still couldn't believe it, "But.. what happened to it? This isn't what it's supposed to be!"
"It's simple really." The woman sat down on the bench and placed her hands on her lap, "We lost. Lucifer marched his army against the gates of heaven and we lost."
There was a silence. How was he supposed to take this? How could anyone accept it? Beck stumbled forward and sat besides her. "But.. where are they? Everyone? The angels? The demons? The people? Why is it so empty?"
"Oh honey.." She placed a hand on his shoulder, "The war was hundreds of years ago.. Everyone's left."
"They left?"
"I don't quite know where to, but everyone left. Those who stayed just sort of.. disapeared. I had been alone for decades before you showed up, sweetie."
Silence. What was he supposed to say to that? How could he possibly respond. He couldn't. They sat in silence. He placed his face in his hands and exhaled.
"What's going to happen to me?"

>>4827194
I hand the improvised plastic bindle containing the last of my pills to Bentley, the kid on my left. I palm his money and slide it into my back pocket while I reach for the pipe being passed from the girl to my right. Kristy, I think. It becomes one fluid motion, so that none of the people sitting on the floor in front of me will see which pocket Bentley’s money goes into.
The hit I take from the pipe is really more of a formality than anything. I had a taste for ganja growing up, when it was still illegal. But then the federales stopped calling the sale of cannabis traffic and called it trade. And then the storefronts sprang up, and they were many, all pushing their crop with neon leaves glowing behind tinted windows and dry ice vapor spilling out onto sidewalks. And then the corporations came and gobbled them all up, and then you could only buy your greens as powdery plant matter in plasticware tins from behind high glass shelves in superstores. And now MART, the one true super source reigns, and there’s no such thing as a cannabrand sold without additives, preservatives, or freebase THC included. So I don’t care for the stuff, but I hit it anyway. People these days, especially the kind of people willing to buy what I’m pushing, won’t trust you otherwise.
“Excited?” I ask Bentley, and pass the pipe his way.
“Yeah,” he says. It comes out strained, a grunt, as he leans over his gut to grab the pipe. Like the other people living in this apartment, Bentley holds the glass with stubby fingers and his knuckles disappear within dimples on the fleshy backs of his hands. “But I'm tryin to get somethin real, y'know? Like, is Nay…”
“Naomi,” I tell him.
“Naomi, yeah. It’s like Dreampatch, right?” His speech comes slowly. His bloodshot eyes are half open.
“It’s nothing like a Dreampatch.”
“Nah, Carri told me. It’s like a Dreampatch. Like that Enchanted Jungle shit everybody was stickin last year.”
Carri is a stupid fucking bitch who has no idea what she’s talking about and if she wasn’t bringing my business to other stupid fucks like you I’d have snuffed her a long time ago and made her walk into traffic. I’m thinking this, verbalizing it in my mind and pausing long enough to complete the thought.
“Carri is way off.”

>>4827212
“But it's got wunna the same compounds they put in Enchanted Forest,” says a pig-faced girl on the other side of the room. When you're on trial for selling an illegal substance, the prosecuting attorney calls it a drug. When MART is trying to sell you a Dreampatch variety pack on TV, the narrator says compound.
I don’t know this girl's name and I don’t care. One look tells that she’s not the type to buy anything the rest of this group isn’t already getting.
“Who told you that?”
“Carri.”
“Enchanted Jungle has an analogue of 5-MeO-DMT in a couple of its layers, yeah,” I say. I stand up and look down at the six of them. “But Naomi is pure DMT. The first pill, the pink one, primes your system so that your liver will metabolize the white pill. So take them thirty minutes apart, on an empty stomach. It’s going to come on slow, so be patient, but after an hour you’ll feel it and the trip lasts for a good six hours. This ain’t Dreampatch. No break in awareness and no subliminal memetic bullshit. You won’t wake up tomorrow craving McDonalds.” Not from the Naomi, anyway.
They stare at me, the same glazed look on all of them. High susceptibility to suggestion is something I’ve always liked about MARTers. Their minds are baked halfway into the center from all of the MART value-brand hashish, and even when they’re sober they believe almost anything.
No one speaks. There’s only the sound of pig-face flapping at the lighter with one of her great thumbs until she manages to conjure up the flame and light the pipe, which I can tell from here is mostly filled with ashes. She sucks at the glass stem, holds her breath for a moment, and lets loose the smoke. She begins to pass the pipe over to her neighbor when I see a larval idea wriggle its way forward and her eyes focus on the space surrounding my head.
“Carri says it ain't good as Dreampatch. Says you don’t remember the trip too good the next day. So what’s the point.”
She still holds the piece out toward the girl next to her, who hasn’t noticed yet. I decide that I will dose Carri with some snuff after all, maybe sometime early next week.
“Look,” I say, and with some effort the words come out without enough malice to betray how I really feel, “if you really think so four hours into the trip, your money back. My word. Bentley, you’ve got my number.”
Bentley gives me a nod that I return to the group and then I’ve got my bag and I’m out of there, into what’s left of the day’s light. Thinning sunbeams scatter in through the hive of upright cinder blocks that is the West Columbia MART Employee Housing Complex.
Big, fat concrete buildings leaning in over me, pitted concrete walkways underfoot.

>>4827248
>>4827212
>>4827194
Dude come on.
You expect someone to read all that shit?

>>4827260
Well yeah, that's why I posted it. Is that your way of saying it's boring, or too long, or what?

>>4827274
not that anon, but yes, it is too long. It's three posts that all go to the character limit. We don't need all this, just post a snippet

>>4827281
I'm saying literally everyone else posted one page. Two pages max.
We got other shit to do bro.

>>4827281
Sorry, well how about just this section? I make no apologies for the length of this last sentence:

Every bit of my available thought process adheres to the internal combustion engine two feet in front of me, its burning metal heft separated from my body by what seems to me now like an insanely insufficient amount of protection. I realize that a collision at moderate speeds would be enough to collapse the front end of my tiny car and catapult the engine into my seat.
This visualization over and over: a huge, blackened block of metal coming at me, tearing through the dashboard and pushing aside the steering wheel like it’s nothing, all four cylinders still pumping, flattening my thighs, genitals, intestines in an instant, and then I’m just sitting there in the quiet seconds after a crash when everything becomes very still and the engine cooks me -- what’s left of me -- immovably heavy in my ruined lap and still halfway attached to the belts, hoses, and struts that it pulled with it into the cabin.

>>4825945

Appreciate it.

>>4827295
Put down the thesaurus bro.
Otherwise good. I'd change genitals to waist, or something comparable also.

>>4827295
>Every bit of my available thought process adheres to the internal combustion engine two feet in front of me, its burning metal heft separated from my body by what seems to me now like an insanely insufficient amount of protection.

Stopped right here.

underbellies.
a capital marriage
family fun day out
pushing the inbred
veiled mother made.
wrapped in contraptions
special design
have ramps and colourful signs
construction to carry
your brother's buckled brain
my father's fractured face
in a smile
cackle gibberish at a brand
don't fright the white skipping,
jesus christ.
the future is foaming
behind my broken window
demand in england building

>>4827615
Care to explain why? Care to give some small amount of helpful advice? I really shouldn't be responding to you at all, should I?

>>4827604
And thanks. Honestly, I don't write with a thesaurus. I guess I'm being too verbose? If it's distracting, I definitely want to reel it in. Would you be a bit more specific?

>>4826128
>>4826158

The best stuff I've read all month. Post more.

>>4825445
w-w-what the fuck

INTERVIEWER

What advice would you give, then, to aspiring writers, especially those—and there are many, by now—who don’t wear your influence lightly?

MCCARTHY

Towelettes. Moist towelettes.

>>4825090
>>4825231

Would really appreciate some criticism/advice/feedback on these.

>>4826059
Its a story about a Nazi who joins the resistance and this is him proving himself by killing another Nazi. Im trying to make it seem like he is going to kill a jew or something and the people around him are Nazi's, which makes the reveal that they aren't more dramatic

“Not quite.” The door slams.
The question was, “Am I dead?” and I only asked because I felt different than I had ever felt before. Emotionally, physically, spiritually… Drained and gray.
Two weeks ago I met a man who claimed to be the devil. He was the one that answered me. And now I’m alone.
The back of the van I’m lying in has smooth reflective sides; audibly, visually, reflective. My hands are bound and my breath is shallow. My palms feel wet.
I met him on a park bench, a week ago. I was reading and he sat down next to me. I looked up, not expecting a response; but I got one.
“You’ve been busy.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing. I’ll be seeing you around, Ben.”
He stood up and began to leave, I stood up too, “Wait! What the fuck is this? Who are you?”
He pointed at my book. The next word I read was, “devil”.
He wasn’t the devil, though. Just another hired hit man. How terrifically boring. So boring that I feel I might just fall asleep... I have no idea what he gave me but if it doesn’t wear off soon, I might be in some real trouble. The van hits a bump. Have we been moving this whole time?
My hands aren’t even bound all that tightly, I’m just so weak. There is a red light coming in through the front window and drenching the back; where I am. Shadows dance on the walls; shifting into claws and monsters’ bodies. Am I hallucinating?
I get one hand out, but it doesn’t do me much good. Still, I flail it around like a fish out of water. Wait. Use your head. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Do you remember if he searched you?
Turns out he didn’t. Maybe he just didn’t know... I always keep an Epi-pen in my shoe, hidden in the soul. I don’t have an allergy, but it buys me an extra minute or two when dealing with respiratory suppressing poisons. I figure it might help now.
It’s difficult to generate enough force to pierce the skin, but I finally get it. As soon I breath in deep and feel the pen’s venom, I get to work. I know that I only have a minute or so’s worth of energy.
I’m fairly certain the van is moving too fast for me to jump out. Looks like it’s just me and the driver. I quickly unstring my shoelace and sneak up behind him.
I trust the string around his neck and pull back; I can hear choking now. My body is feeling heavy again. I knew this was coming, that’s why I used the shoelace. I let myself fall back, holding tightly onto the shoelace, letting my weight do the work. The van speeds up and begins swerving erratically. All I can do is hope that I survive this crash.
The driver slams on his breaks to try and break my girl. He doesn’t brace it right but I do. His neck snaps against shoelace.
As I’m leaving the car, I can swear I hear laughter. Hallucinations again. I just need to find a safe place to lay down until this shit wears off.
But where am I?

>>4825231
The Amish consider themselves German. They call the outside world English.

>>4825486
I guess you do a decent job characterizing this Ellie character through her actions. My main problem with this is that it just goes on way too long. Also, having the narrator say "my name is" is shit. Absolute shit.
And I don't like the narrator much. He isn't sure enough of himself to be this narcissistic, so it reads funny; like the thoughts of an autistic kid.

Sorry for the harsh critique, it's just pretty far from saving. You need to re-evaluate this narrator. If he's really only writing this book to appease this Ellie character, why is he so full of himself? Wouldn't he talk more about her? Or at least why he's doing it?

>>4826086
I kind of liked this, although it does kind of drone on. and the action sequence could be a lot clearer. Still it's a good start.

In the year 4021, the cyborg reptiles had arrived in their planetship. On the rim of earth's solar system. Humanity knew they were coming. Earth was the last outpost. The cyborg reptiles had ravaged every colony that was connected to the hyperspace internet. They knew this because of their offline status on spacebook. If any rogue settlements existed, the people of earth were unaware if they had perished.

The cyborg reptiles' planetship was a marvel of the universe. Two moons that had once orbited the strange purple planet were now linked to it with a great wiry object of planetary proportions. They speared up from the surface of the purple ball, one on each side of the north pole, halfway reaching the zenith and pointing 90 degrees into space. A blue aura emenated from the wires that stopped as the ends penetrated the wretched things. The two moons showed signs of additional molestation by the green bursts of energy that occasionally erupted from their ends. These were the engines that set the planetship in motion. It had driven the cyborg reptiles across the galaxy in a spree of conquest and genocide. The absence of oxygen, sunlight and "normal" gravity was of no concern to the cyborg reptiles.

Humanity knew not how far this campaign was in the making, only that they had come upon human civilization six years ago. If weapons capable of obliterating entire planets were in their possession, they were yet to be displayed. Humanity had taken no chances, however, employing an extraordinary mode of defense; an idea that had come to mankinds greatest minds upon learning of the cyborgs' planetship. They had turned earth into a planetrobot resembling a sort of cosmic feline. This incredible champion of mankind had been constructed over the course of these six years, meanwhile humanity had fought a desperate, futile battle against the enemy. Several billion lives had been lost to buy time for the completion of the planetrobot.

>>4822792
tyler durden pls

>Ancient machinery contructs and writes
>palendromes and ouroboros
Dont know what you're trying to say here m8

Liked the last two stanzas

>>4828125
10/10 would read full manuscript

An endless swarm of police vehicles, news vans, and civilians litter the scene, as the tranquil New York summer night is suddenly not so tranquil anymore. The Museum of Natural History is awfully lively for 2 AM, despite closing it's doors at 6 PM. Meanwhile, the pair of would be thieves sit handcuffed in the back of an NYPD squad car. The juxtaposition between them is jarring. An older, rough-around-the-edges type gentleman with of about 45 bickers incessantly with a much younger, product-of-social-media type woman of about 23.

"Jesus FUCKING Christ, maybe if you weren't so worried about your goddamn nails, we wouldn't be in this situation, would we?" the man asks, angrily.

"I told you before. I just got them done," the younger woman rolls her eyes, clearly not as incensed as her fellow convict.

"And maybe if you weren't fucking twattering all the goddamn time, just maybe, we would have made off with it," says the man. The woman's nonchalant attitude only serves to anger him further.

"Ugh. It's TWITTER, you old fart. God, you're so fucking old," she replies, almost disgustedly.

"You know what? Fuck you. I should have Paul to do this. At least he wouldn't have been glued to his fucking phone screen," the man let's out a deep sigh.

"What, you mean Paul the pothead? Give me a break. He's too stoned to do anything half the time," the younger woman shoots back.

"You know what? Fuck you."

"Fuck you too, dad."

>>4828316
I'll be frank and say this isn't very well written. It would, however, certainly sell well. You rely far too heavily on cliches "Swarm of police vehicles"; "Goddamn nails"; "Rolls her eyes", etc. You tell without doing a lot of exact showing, the dialogue is inane, and a good deal of it could be cut (e.g. "...despite closing it's doors at 6PM". The whole Dad scenario is interesting, though I'm warning you, a similar plot line just reached its conclusion in Hollyoaks, which, even if you don't know what I'm talking about, isn't an indicator of a good plot. If you're going to make this work, you'll certainly need to polish your language.

***
On those inter-provincial occasions where nothing much of anything happened, my mother would gently wake me and walk me, one plump limb after another, down to the little stream by which we’d parked and from which the horses drank. There, in the morning light, we’d find Piotr, looking every bit insane. He was purple around the eyes, his hair messed, filthy down his back from where he’d fallen in the night. He habitually woke at three and practiced ‘til dawn. Teetering, he took up his sword, faucibus ensis benedictus, and stuck it down into him, and we all thought we’d come to the river one day to find him blue and punctured. I did not cry, as other children might have cried. He bled from the corners of his mouth where the blade had grazed his lips, but I did not cry; I watched. My mother sang “Ai-Lyuletchki”, or “A, my Sorrow”, or sometimes even:

“Oh! Precious is the flow
That makes me white as snow;
No other fount I know,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus”

She would kiss my forehead and wash me head to toe, and Piotr would stand and waver, and swallow the sword again. In that short time many of the performers would wake and come from their tents and beds to practice down by the riverside. The old equestrians smoked and spoke deeply of their next stopping point, and of their wives somewhere out in Surgut, who they said were forever grateful that, thanks to the small penance sent home, they were the only women in their village who needn’t resort cannibalism come winter. Laughter and chuckling and spitting resounded, and then, quieter, growling and hushed they spoke of Akim and Piotr, of rumours they’d heard of the brothers in distant provinces, where they’d been known for abduction and cannibalism and sacrificing any man named Dmitri to a pagan god they believed would deliver them wealth. They kept, it was said, their victim’s teeth in a box, and on nights of the full moon would wear a necklace along which each was tooth was strung, where the brothers would pray dark and sordid things. But here mother would sing louder, closer, and the birds would sing, too, and she’d bend with lips on forehead pressed and skin so clean and in this scene stood Piotr and bodily asked: “Who’s to say I didn’t eat a few pieces of my older brother’s flesh?”

>>4825572
wow thanks man (seriously)

>>4828316
>awfully lively
Avoid adverbs, does "awfully" add anything to this?

>45
dont use numbers, use the words. Forty-five.

> the man asks, angrily.
The best reason to avoid adverbs is they're they're almost always redundant. A reader can tell just by the man's foul mouthed speech that he's angry.

>almost disgustedly.
Once again, redundant based on the already established dialog.

Pretty good otherwise. Just typical minor first draft mistakes.

>>4827185
Okay, any otjer way to revise this?

Reggie really walked into the room fast, he had walked so fast into the room that he got a head rush.

"Ouch," he said, "Ouch I gotta head rush from entering the room so fast like that, wow."

Reggie felt compelled to leave and re-enter the room in a more calmer manner in the case that anyone might have seen him enter at that brazen velocity...then they would also subsequently observe him re-entering the room at a much more calm and better pace.

"Fuck, I hope no one saw that," he said to himself, "that would have been bad for my prestine image and everything."

Reggie knew today was his wife's birthday but he did not give a shit because she had one of those every year and they were getting to be boring.

"My wife? She thinks she's the best and she's all that but she doesn't even know how fucking lame and stupid she is," Reggie thought directly at himself.

Oh no! A man in the hallway saw Reggie entering the room for a second time and gave him a very bad stinky look. Reggie darted back at the bystander,

"What the fuck man!? You've never seen a man re-enter a room since he wasn't proud of his initial entry? What are you some kind of fucking asshole or what?"

The man looked at Reggie and replied,

"You think I even give a shit? I got my own stuff to worry about fuckface!"

Reggie and the man knew that they just developed a deep mutual respect for each other's in your face image and neither had to use words to let the other know that they knew what the other knew what they knew.

From that moment on, Reggie and the Bystander were best friends.

(excerpt from "Reggie and the Bystander: The Journey They Never Knew About")

I have reserved for the conclusion of my phase the account of our unsuccessful first tryst. One night, she managed to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family. In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards--presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.

I liked being taken to church even though I don’t like church

I liked being there because it felt like being haunted

Or maybe just what it would feel like to sit inside a ghost

Petal pink ectoplasm holding our eyes shut

So we couldn’t tell that these were dreams

God’s face is on a rain drop that falls beside me at the train platform

Someone whistles the happy birthday song

We fasten our coats and our fingers

Our eyes shake us onto the train

We leave the part of town with the stained glass colored like dark bruises

The 7:40 train moves into town on fog instead of rails

We are the loneliest riders

Our cell phones freshly charged and quiet

The 5:30 train is when we all growl out the window and press into one another

It doesn’t matter which train we’re on

When we come to the bridge

Our bones are missiles pointing to a wet grave.

>>4828316
this fucking sucks lol

>>4829211
>dont use numbers, use the words.

What's the reasoning behind this? Just curious

>>4829672
Excerpt 2 of Reggie and The Bystander....


This bystander was a mysterious guy, there was simply no doubt about it. Reggie had been traveling with him for many weeks now yet the mystery which clouded this enigmatic man rarely de-shrouded itself.

"Hey bro, you think we can pull this caper off?" Reggie asked the Bystander.

"Yeah, I do." The Bystander replied suddenly.

"Okay, Cool." Said Reggie.

Reggie didn't know why the Bystander wanted to rob these Mexican guys. He didn't know if the Mexican guys stole something from the Bystander and this was a revenge-robbery or if the Bystander maybe just hated Mexicans or something.

Reggie did not like prejediced people so he asks the Bystander straight up.

"Hey B, why are we robbing these Mexican guys?"

The Bystander replied brisquely,

"Well, this one time...I met this lady online on OKCupid and I went to meet her at the subway station because she looked fucking hot in her photos...but then when i got to the agreed upon location...she was not even there! Before I knew it a bunch of Mexicans jumped out of nowhere and threw salt into my eyes and stole my WALLET!"

Reggie was flabbergasted! He responded thus,

"Holy shit! No way! They threw salt into your eyes and stole your wallet! Fuck these guys! Come on B, let's go rob and break everything they own!"

The Bystander's respect and friendship for Reggie grew ten fold at that very moment. Wow.

"Those Mexicans won't know what hit them. With our forces combined...our friendship represents the most dangerous fighting force known to man," stated the Bystander.

It doesn't really matter. That was his mantra, every time it got a little hard or difficult or he had just failed himself in some way. 'In the big picture this doesn't really matter.', give or take 1 million years of modern or near enough human ancestors, historical fact only existing for the last 6000 of those years. All in all what did the actions of one unremarkable human living a solitary life among 7 billion others truly matter. The complex web of invisible laws both written and biological that govern his desires, emotions and actions are re-examined over and over. The surface deep turning cogs and drilled-in programming of everyday life, its causes, are all revealed through learnt methods of deduction. He fancies himself smarter than his peers because he thinks he holds a basic understanding of the triggers and reasons why we do what we do. However he wonders is he really alone in that self-assured knowledge or do so many of them ignore it as he does and continue with the great act out of instinct and convenience. Moments of reflection remind him, his existence is only real to him though aeons of evolution filtering down to the body into recognising itself and to a lesser degree others. A prediction machine taken to the latest extreme, a constant experiment in competition and escalation. Despair when he can't articulate any of this, it becomes like a gag in his throat, too many ideas piled on top of one another like a mental pyramid to the latest question or answer. He's terrified he's right, he's convinced to his core he is. Anything else now is just wishful thinking, there's always a corner of his mind that holds the smallest quiet hope of a special metamorphosis in death. But hope is another device of survival, just an emotion, the most minimal offering of effort in reality. In the end if he is right and we don't find a way around this horrible knowledge or can no longer deny it, then by his own programmed standards none of it is worth the effort. Doesn't even seem like a joke any more, it's too bizarre to be real. He still doesn't understand, but it's fine because it doesn't matter anyway.

Excerpt 3 of Reggie and the Bystander

Reggie may have hated his boring wife but he knew how to respect and care for boring people as much as he could respect and care for cool people.

The Bystander may have been Reggie's best friend but he could not make babies with him...so he vowed to return home to his lonely suffering boring wife after all these years on the road. He instructed the Bystander of his intention,

"Shit. I gotta go home, man."

But just then a shaodwy figure burst violently from outta the shadows! Oh no! The figure pulled off his mask and Reggie and the Bystander were super startled by the face that lay underneath it!

"Haha! It is I....an I have come for even more revenge than the LAST TIME! You ready?" asked the recently un-masked man.

"Fuck, not you again!" Said Reggie.

The assassin threw a knife at Reggie's heart but at the last second the Bystander jumped in front of the knife! The knife hit him in his heart and he was very badly injured.

"I must flee for I only brought one knife this time you guys!" yelled the assassin as he vamoosed into the shadow of night once again.

Reggie held the Bystander in his arms...they were covered with so much of the Bystander's heroic manly blood.

"Don't die, bro...you were always my one and only best friend....," murmured Reggie who was really really sad.

"It's okay...when you and your boring wife make the baby....just name it after me, ok?" responded the dying and bleeding Bystander.

"I will, B, I promise. My first son will be named The Bystander!" Yelled Reggie to the heavens and skies.

"Thank you....," said The Bystander.

>>4829734
Die please

>>4829734
How badly injured?
Like on a scale from my wife is boring to knife in the chest?

He was an old man
From a very far land
Way down yonder in Vietnam
Got his orders from Uncle Sam
Well he lost his legs, lost his eyes
He lost everything he ever did prize
But when he talked to me-
oh golly gee-
Boy was his voice so heavenly!

Singing, oh-oh-oh-la-dee-doe
Old men, dead men,
What's the difference? Man, nobody knows!
Singing, oh-oh-oh-la-dee-dee
I wake up every morning, singing "What's wrong with me?"

She was a foolish girl
From an old man's world
She could lock a heart with her curls,
He gave her a necklace made of pearls,
Well she lost her looks, gained some thighs
Now she's looking like something you can't recognize
But when I see her-
Boy golly gee-
I think of our nights and how they used to be.

Singing, oh-oh-oh-la-dee-doe
Where is she getting her salvation now? Nobody knows!
Singing, oh-oh-oh-la-dee-dee
I go to sleep every night screaming "What's wrong with me?"

>>4829711
The old salty lift eh. No bueno

I wrote Reggie and the Bystander when i was 15 in my most best and yet darkest of hours.

it was the truest tale of friendship ever wroted. if anyone wants ill make up more stuff one day and release it as a .txt file for MS DOS.

the actual manuscript of Reggie and The Bystander is like 900 pages tho.....

>>4828025
I have trouble limiting myself, I tent to write in long intense bursts. The writing, thus, feels manically exhausting, any advice?

excerpt 4 of "Reggie and the Bystander: The Journey They Never Even Knew About"


Not in Reggie's wildest of dreams did he imagine that he, The Bystander, and the Mexicans would become the wickedest of friends. Not after all the rumbles and crazy bullshit that happened between them.

Sometimes you make friends that you least expect....and other times you make enemies that you didn't even want to make.

One of the biggest and most tattooed of the Mexicans ventured a gesture of goodwill towards the general direction of Reggie and The Bystander and said,

"Reggie, Bystander...you essays are ok by me. Here take these mexican spicy lollipops as a sign of our eternal blood truce to end this unneccessary and costly war between us and you...Reggie and the Bystander."

Reggie and the Bystander held out their hands and graciously accepted the spicy mexican lollipops from the biggest of the Mexicans.

"Thanks."

"Yeah, No problem."

The Bystander had his own piece to make and went about it in his own unique personal way in the form of a very touching monologue or soliloquy that went as so...

"Mexicans...that one time you whipped salt directly into my eyes at the subway in my moment of vulnerability and deception....and when you proceeded to rob me of my wallet...I seriously and honestly felt that I would never ever in a million years fucking forgive you stupid assholes.

But, there comes a time in every man's life where he has to bite the bullet and give credit where credit is friggin' due.....and I gotta say this, Mexicans....the way you guys covered are backs in lagoon was one of the baddest assed things I ever fucking saw. I couldn't even believe it almost...but I know it happened because I saw it with my own eyes. You fucking fucked those crocodiles the fuck up!" sollilolquied the Bystander to the Mexicans.

The Mexicans replied,

"Yeah, we know...come on, enough talk now...let's high five!"

Reggie, The Bystander, and The Mexicans all high fived and for once in Reggie's life he felt a moment of true peace and relaxed awesomeness.

>>4826788
Is there anyway i can revise or edit this
And make it better?

>>4829935
Writing is exhausting, thats just the nature of it. Stephen king based his book misery based on the fact of how exhausting, and self punishing it is. In his mind, the Annie Wilkes character was the part of his own mind that forced him to write. It is kind of a slave driver type thing.

The only thing i can say is keep writing. Maybe you wont be able to run a mile the first time you go jogging, but you can train yourself up to it. That said, most everyone has a set limit of the amount of writing they can do. Stephen king says he has to write 10 pages a day to be satisfied. Personally, i can only write a good 2-4 pages a day, and i'm toast.

It also comes down to what your goals are. King has published 50 books so far. If you want to do that, then i guess writing 10 pages a day is a must. I'd be happy to publish 5 books by the time i die, so i have nowhere near as much ambition. I'd also rather write 1 good page of material a day, rather than 10 mediocre or bad pages. If you read king's work, there's quite a bit of shit he wrote that was pretty sub-par.

>>4831275

stephen king kinda sucks though.

>>4829830

pretty bad.

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