Writing corner

Rolanbek's Writing Corner.

Well, I tried

Thanks for the submissions but this was clearly not meant to be

R

Sounds awesome.

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Post #3: You changed tenses a few times, and you should put periods or commas at the end of speech (“You must remember this," looks a lot better than “You must remember this”). Other than that, it's an interesting idea. It's hard to judge a work which closes so quickly though.

What I entered in the Helios writing competition:

If a butterfly in Africa were to flutter its wings, absolutely nothing would happen. Its muscles would get just a little bit weaker; its life would be a just little less mysterious; eventually it would stop its fluttering and drop dead.

Butterflies are far too unimportant for the movement of their little wings to cause a great tornado in a distant land. Butterflies are the sort of thing that God came up with on a Sunday morning when he had nothing better to do.

Butterflies are comparable to “Revolution 9” of Lennon fame – they might have a meaning, but no one knows what it is and no one really cares. The only interesting thing that will happen to a butterfly is that it might amuse a human child, a prince of the universe, for a few fleeting moments. The death of a butterfly affects nothing; a butterfly’s actions, fears, hopes and dreams are just drips of water in the river of life. The butterfly will be crushed in the gears of the universe and be forgotten. The butterfly lives a life of simple placidity and fades away, without leaving an impression or harming anyone.

If only humans were like butterflies, wasting away the moments flitting from one moment to the next without leaving behind our hate and hope to pollute the river of life. We are the wrench in the gears of the universe which destroys the entire machine. But even in the height of our self-importance, even if we are convinced the circle of life revolves around us, one day we will fade away. Only one question remains.

Will we take the universe down with us?

*

America, land of coke and money, pocked with glittering metropolises and miniature apocalypses from sea to shining sea. Land of the free, home of the slaves to money and power.

Thomas took one whiff of the stale air and knew what sort of air it was. It was American air. It was the best air on planet Earth, but that wasn’t saying much. Thomas was acutely aware of what was in this Earth air; the ashes of a million genocides, the stench of human hunger and greed. Perfume mixed with rotting fish, the façade humans wear over their lies which makes their hypocrisy almost bearable. Thomas looked upon the human race from above and sneered. He sneered at the hustling and bustling in the streets while children were murdered in side-alleys; he sneered at the sparking cleanliness of the rich as the poor wasted away in the dirt; he sneered at the citizens of hell and those still struggling to gain the right to enter.

The particular circle of hell Thomas was visiting was called New York City, a city of hypocrisy like all other cities. To be more specific, he was on the subway, speeding along in a rotten car beneath the rotten earth of a rotting city. He examined each specimen aboard the subway carefully. There was a woman sitting alone with herself, peering at her face in a mirror and dabbing powder and cream upon her countenance. She wanted to look perfect. Thomas considered examining her closer, but decided against it. He was mildly allergic to fakeness.

His eyes fell on a man, huddled in a corner with a newspaper. He wore dirty clothes, ragged holes at the knees and elbows, and had not had the time or leisure for a shave in several days. Or, apparently, a bath.

The man’s smell was so rancid and real that Thomas felt himself inexorably drawn to the seat next to him. Thomas sat down and smiled. “Nice day, isn’t it,” he said, with the crisp pronunciation of someone who had decided to bear with English for the sake of communication.

The man looked up from his newspaper, somewhat suspiciously, as if thinking: Nice day? Doesn’t this man know he is in New York? “I suppose,” he grumbled. “It’ll be nice when my employer drops dead and I don’t have to ride the subway every day.”

“He wouldn’t pay you if he was dead,” Thomas pointed out.

“There’s life insurance.”

“For his wife.”

Dreams temporarily shattered, the man looked down at his newspaper again. Determined to garner more information, Thomas tried to look over his shoulder. “What’s in the news?”

“Um,” the man said. “Sucker got hisself shot in Brooklyn. ‘N his wife is expecting a baby, too.”

“That’s terrible,” Thomas said without feeling.

“Yeah,” the man said equally flaccidly.

“Well, out with one bad idea, in with another.”

“Eh?”

“Never mind.” Thomas expected he never would mind. No one really does.

Thomas stood and walked further down the subway. He spotted another likely candidate; a teenager sat, quietly deafening himself with a sleek iPod. He lip-synced to the words, staring out the window. Thomas plopped himself down next to him, smiling sunnily. The teenager looked over at him uncertainly; after a moment he popped out one white earbleeder and mumbled, “Yea?”

Obviously not from New York. “What are you listening to?” Thomas asked cheerfully. “Is it good?”

“I guess.”

Thomas waited for a more elaborate response. It was not forthcoming, so he continued. “Are you visiting New York?”

“I guess.”

“Brilliant conversationalist, aren’t you,” Thomas muttered, sunny disposition momentarily blackened. He had wished to extract some mediocre meaning from the teenager’s mutterings, but had only received the ubiquitous “I guess”. “I guess” is an extremely hard pair of words to decode; it can mean anything from “You’re completely right” to “I don’t know” to “I wish this child molester would go away”. Angered, Thomas simply sat himself down in the first empty seat he saw. He found himself next to an old woman who smelled of beans and bygone days. She clutched the armrest with both hands, knuckles white, stiff as a board.

“I think you ought to relax,” Thomas said. “Subways are very safe.”

She looked up. “It’s not that they aren’t safe,” she mumbled. “They’re simply so ... so crass. Back in my day, trains ... trains had class. Trains were stylish and smooth, and didn’t smell like someone did his business on the ceiling.”

Thomas looked up. “That’s probably paint,” he said comfortingly.

“Yellow paint?”

“Colorblind painter.”

She laughed quietly at that, a pathetic laugh that suggested it would be hilarious if she could muster up the courage to care. “What’s your name?” She asked after a moment.

“Dakdak groboMalog the Seventeenth,” Thomas stated.

“Gesundheit,” she said.

“Thomas.”

“Oh, Thomas!” Her eyes lit up. “Thomas is such a lovely name. And so classy! Back in my day, all the boys were named Thomas.”

“Really? I’m sure you had a veritable horde of Thomases swarming about you then,” Thomas said. He doubted it.

“Oh, no . . .” she said, waving dismissively. In Woman, it meant “please continue flattering me.”

“Why not, a beautiful lady like you?”

“Oh stop,” she said, blushing bright red. The only difference he saw was that she looked like a red raisin instead of a white one.

*

Childhood.

That delicate stage of human existence where everything has a meaning, which is so often marred and mutilated by older, more enlightened humans. In the human, it lasts a few years, years of bliss and simple contemplation. The child accepts without needing an explanation, yet is always curious. The sky is blue, but he would like to know why. Whatever he learns, the sky will still be blue. The sky was blue, is blue, and will forever be blue.

The cynical product of the smashing of childhood by the boots of Reality dismisses the blissful years as ignorance. The grown up human learns everything but knows nothing. The grown up human forever asks how things work like they do, but never why. They seek to know how the universe functions so that they can control it, limit it, force it to do what they want it to do.

The child asks why things are as they are. He knows nothing, but he learns everything from it. They seek to know why the universe is so that they can be part of it, learn from it, and teach it.

Children attempt to make a difference. Children try to be involved and to improve their world; but their ideas are influenced and perverted by the adults.

In the twelve hundredth and twelfth year after a man died on two overlapping pieces of wood, children in Europe united under a common goal fed to them by adults: marching to Jerusalem, incidentally to take it in the name of that same man (the one on the two overlapping pieces of wood). The children marched to a great port, were loaded onto merchant ships, and vanished from the face of the earth. They were sold into slavery.

It is, of course, the adult, not the child, which holds all power on this planet. In a child’s world, the crusaders would not have been sold into slavery. They would not have been crusading in the first place.

The basic idea is that it could be expanded pretty much endlessly ... a dispassionate protagonist's views of humanity in any stage, birth, death, war, peace, and a little snippet about humanity.

Good? Bad? Ugly?

Post #3 SPaG'ed for your viewing pleasure

You changed tenses a few times,

Yup, I forgot to repost the caveats on the original post , Anyhoo that's the sort of thing I had in mind.

Post #4:

I like the choppy style, it reminds me a bit of a 'slice of life' screen play. For some reason the butterflies section, in my mind has pictures in the style of Peter Chung follow the narrative. Suits your dark simile.

The middle sectoin is Gaimen -esque you seem to enjoy this style the most of the three. I though you played with it more, and would certain like to see more 'Thomas' interludes. :original:

the Third I like as comment and it makes the overall shape cry for a 4th section, a dialogue response, if you like.

Definately, the good

R

To #the post above mine: Thanks. Just letting out the misanthropist inside, I guess. There will be a 4th piece, when I get around to it.

I would like to see more of yours. Have you written any more? What do you plan on doing with it?

I think a little more for now.

This is to follow the previous piece.

What do you plan on doing with it?

no clue...


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R

more. a little rougher this time but trying to get some shape.

Edit: 20:43 word change to clear swear filter. ....R
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Any comments?

R

#8: It's really getting interesting now, and is feeling more original than the previous snippets. Keep it up, it held me.

More, unfortunately even choppier than #8


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R

Plenty of views, but no comments....apart from Justinian.

Oh well, i'll carry on a bit longer....

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R

I shall bump this fine piece of writing, and direct Rolanbek to the PM I just sent him about it. :original:

It's a re-write from memory of something I did in my GCSE exams - got me an A* and all. The supreme individualism is a trifle over emphised, and in hindsight I shouldn't have tried to show off so much, as it was at the expense of readability. Certain people *hint hint Garbuncle* ought to know the influences, especially after a conversation we one had.

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I sat with my back to the wall, my shivering arms clinging as though for protection against my legs, although against what I cannot fathom. The steady beat of my trembling heart drumming inside my chest. The foggy light from the nightmare world outside illuminated my skin, painting my flesh in grey, lifeless tones. The hazy miasma rolled up against the window of my refuge, trying to press its way in through the fragile pane of glass.

Not that is was a place of safety, this miniature world of mine. The rank sense permeated through the wall, dripping and oozing though a thousand cracks and fissures, slowly and inexorably seeping its way towards me. I let out a groan of irrepressible despair. I realised that I could not take flight, it like some relentless and inevitable fate from which I could not escape. This feeling, this certain lot which I had in no way, shape or form agreed to be entered into. I would try and express what it was like, however there are certain sensations which are fortunately indescribable with mere words alone. I say fortunate for I would not desire what I felt on anyone indeed I am writing this as a warning rather than a mere description of events.

I heard a noise, a mere whispering from the door, from behind that feeble barrier. A rustling of leaves maybe, or perhaps otherwise a creak like that of the clambering of an antediluvian flight of stairs. Whatever it was it was gone swiftly, a fact for which I am all the more grateful.

I beseech you to understand, it was more than the mere rasping of boughs in a winter gale, or an owl screeching, which caused me to enter this deplorable state, shivering and lamenting like a newborn. No, rather it was the realisation that on some fundamental, primordial level I am no better than a wailing child I fear that which I do not understand but yet ignorance is my one defence. I am of no significance for there is not even a fantastical plot in which I might be a player. In those few fleeting moments I become conscious of something which generations before me had been senselessly eager to suppress - that since there was no grand scheme in which I could serve, attend and grovel and genuflect, I could be my own playwright. The future did not belong to some incomprehensible being or some inexplicable and enigmatic force, rather it was my own to seize and forge. As the latin Horace said, the day is yours to commandeer, to steer wherever you wish.

Grinning, like some insane capering god of primeval capering god, I rose, no longer concerned by my state of mind or body. I moved towards the door, my feet leaden on the dusty boards of the floor. I noticed with amusement that my hand was twitching as it reached for the handle, almost relieved as it grasped it.

Slowly and resolutely I stepped outside.

On post #13

Tostig, thanks for posting that piece.

I thought I had a great, leaden quality and it reminded me a lot of some of Poe's work. With Is that a style you like of use a lot? (obviously with note to your own comment regarding readability) Would you consider posting another piece for us?

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R

awesome guys, Maybe I can find some of my older stuff and revise it.

Hicks, the more the merrier


more blurb

has i am editing on the fly some text has been brought froward from #14 so i can work on it here there are about zero words in this post

again edits will be marked in this colour

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Finaly a revised version of my story.

Special thanks to Octavian and Grimsta for giving me suggestions on editing it!







Suddenly, all went silent in the forest. Faringoth’s mount continued down the road slowly, followed by the rest of his companions. The sound of hoof beats slowly came into earshot. Dwyrldelf the scout returned and emerged from the blackness of the night.
"The Path is blocked ahead," the scout uttered quietly, “I saw at least twenty men guarding a barricade, I know not who they are or why they are there, but I recommend we take another path.”
Faringoth sat silently for a moment considering his options. Dwyrldelf did the same, silently stroking his beard as if some type of wisdom would result.
“Bandits?” asked Faringoth.
“Most likely, but the thieves no longer frequent these woods, its marauder’s I’m worried about.” replied Dwyrldelf in a tone that suggested a hint of fear.
The rest of the company watched silently on as the debate continued. Both horse and rider could sense the tension in the air. Faringoth was about to ask another question when he heard the sound of a twig snap. Dwyrldelf heard the noise also and turned towards the edge of the path.
The unmistakable twang of a bowstring was heard, quickly fallowed by a thud. Faringoth turned to see his scout fall slowly from his saddle. A large arrow was embedded deep in his throat. Dwyrldelf struggled on the ground gurgling on his own blood for an instant then lay still. Faringoth quickly surveyed the broken man’s body, his eyes transfixed on the arrow. The mere size of the arrow told him one thing.
“Northmen!” he screamed as he drew his sword and quickly swung his shield off his back.
There was a sudden roar of battle cries as a hail of arrows came darting from the darkness followed by the fierce raiders of the north.
Faringoth and his companions struggled against the small horde that assailed them. These were no bandits; they were heavily armed and armored. Each warrior carried a sword, an axe, and a round shield. They wore coats of mail and terrifying helmets wreathed in mail.
Faringoth slew three of the invaders before his horse was brought down by a swift axeman. He lay on the ground at the mercy of the barbarian’s blade, but no death blow came. He opened his eyes to see one of his comrades gutting the vicious attacker.
His rescuer glanced over Faringoth’s shoulder and uttered a quick note of warning.
Faringoth turned and jabbed his blade deep into the stomach of the attacker who had attempted to slip in for a quick kill. He watched the dying villain slide slowly off his blade and looked up in time to see a club smash hard into his helm. Faringoth fell hard upon the ground; he felt several corpses land atop his body, friend or foe he could not tell. The last thing he heard was the sound of clashing swords and screaming men, then he passed quickly into unconsciousness.

Faringoth slowly cam back into consciousness. He struggled for a moment, and then finally found the strength to move the heavily armored bodies that lay atop him.
The world gradually came into view again; he could see the tree limbs overhead swaying gently in the breeze, the full moon illuminating the branches.
Faringoth set up, rubbing his bruised head tenderly. The Mail Coif had done its job and saved his life, but he still had a splitting headache. As his memory returned, Faringoth began to look about him. There were perhaps thirty dead bodies strewn about the ground. Many a noble knight from Faringoth’s court lay slain next to the brave yet savage Northmen who had assailed them on their journey.
From what he could see, Faringoth could tell his comrades had made the enemy pay dearly for their ambush. For every companion that had been killed, at least two of the Northmen had been sent into darkness.
For a moment all was still, and then Faringoth’s blurry eyes picked up some movement. There lay, not ten feet away, the body of a severely injured soldier of less than twenty years of age. The young knight lay, slowly rolling back and forth, penned to the ground with a long spear of the Northmen. His dark blue surcoat was covered in fresh and crusted blood. From his mouth dripped a small trail of blood that disappeared into his short undeveloped beard.
Faringoth crawled close to his dying comrade and kneeled beside him. Silently, he shook the boys arm. The young knight’s eyes opened, quickly, as if he was expecting some sort of wild creature to attack.
“Faringoth, my lord!” he managed to half whisper before a rush of blood silenced him.
“What’s your name, boy?” asked Faringoth in a concerned tone.
“Fritzel”
“Well Fritzel, you’ve fought well. I see at least three dead Northmen at your feet.”
“Sire, I’ve little time to live, so I must speak in haste.” Began the wounded soldier.
“We fought till there were but four of us left, I was wounded, but the other three, they were taken alive!”
“Alive?” asked Faringoth.
“Yes m’ Lord, taken by force to certain torture and death!”
“Which direction did they go?”
“Towards the east,” Fritzel managed to point, “please sir, hand me my sword and dislodge this spear from my stomach, I will die like a man, not a skewered boar.”
Faringoth paused. A mere boy, dying like a lion, it seemed wrong for a man this young to be killed in such a way.
Fritzel saw the hesitation in Faringoth’s eyes, “My lord I beg you, let me die like the man I would…should have been.”
Faringoth was touched by his bravery, and slowly reached down and handed Fritzel his sword.
The boy gripped it and closed his eyes tightly. Faringoth then grabbed the spear tightly and put his foot on Fritzel’s shoulder. With a sharp tug, the spear came out, followed by a moan from Fritzel, but the moan was low and short.
Kneeling down again, Faringoth looked upon the boys face, now white with death.
“You fought as a soldier, you died as a hero. I shall find you’re friends and my comrades. All will know the story of Fritzel the Brave ere this year is done.”
With that, he took off down the eastern trail the Northmen had left, a lord with no subjects. It wasn’t a hard trail to follow, but it was getting dark, and even skilled trackers have trouble at night.

Discontinued due to lack of response

Justinian, Tostig, Corporal Hicks I am sure that your stuff will make the new fiction section they are dicussing in CP.

Thank you for your comments

(and like that, it was gone)

R

Originally Posted by Rolanbek

Discontinued due to lack of response

Justinian, Tostig, Corporal Hicks I am sure that your stuff will make the new fiction section they are dicussing in CP.

Thank you for your comments

(and like that, it was gone)

R