/crit/ - Writing Critique General

>>9820775
Sample first paragraph: With the immediacy of a shut off faucet, the street din mellowed out as he closed and locked the heavy door behind him. He entered into the dimly lit foyer, the stench of yeast on his lips. Solemnly and slowly he hung his dreary coat, and having it secured, grazed his hand across it. Rough, dry, bumpy with lint. This was no way to present himself. He had been lucky enough to be invited to such a distinguished event and yet he still disappointed. Appearance is everything; that is the law of business and even life itself. The old mantra of the company. What does it matter to feel, mortally? He looked about the wide display of lined coats, possessed by full figures of men and women elsewhere, and lamented the fact that he was neither professional nor as suave as his peers. He envisioned them now, underneath the strung levitating lanterns’ urine leer, brows shaded and giving way gleaming perfect teeth, grinning at some obscure joke told in such elegant accents, their forms intermingling until they became indistinguishable and eternal. No, he was neither professional nor suave and he could not fake it. A woman should've dressed him, but he had no wife and he could not live with his mother at such an age.

Full story here
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Bq-fN2Zuhq7XguK3MnniD0IgYwAcG6s5lQ_yo5TGu8A/edit

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I leased the apartment about a month ago.
It wasn't perfect, but a place to call home.
The worst parts about it: there were claw marks
etched into the bathroom door, and piss stains all over the carpet.

I never asked the landlord about it,
but she had a sad look about her
when we got to the scratches..

I had another breakdown tonight.

Loneliness driving loved one's to my sight--
My mother. Lost friendships; visions of I--
I cried, and promised with hope, not a lie.

Forcing myself to try and sleep, a soft
pup's nose brushes my hand, then hops
between my open legs to find what it had lost.

The bathroom door will soon be replaced.
Tomorrow my mother will visit the place
for the first time since I refaced.

>>9820775
why do we need 2 of these?

Distant Isles was an American shoegaze band formed in 1996, at the peak of Britpop, and a time when both its descriptors had already become terribly unfashionable. The band, formed in Hanover NH, consisted of [A] on vocals, [B] on glide guitar, and a carousel of drummers over its two year lifespan.

They released just one album, [albumname,] in 1997, which was hailed as “some cool new tunes by some friends of mine” by its sole published review ([G,] writing in the Dartmouth.) But despite their sparsely attended critical reception, Distant Isles attracted a small, obsessive following, first among diffident students around campus, then eventually younger siblings across the Northeast. In fall of 1997, rumours swirled that the band’s core, [A] and [B] were dating, until [D], at [H]’s 22nd birthday party confirmed to attendees that they had been married since ’95. The band eventually split up (musically and romantically) in May 1998, citing creative disagreement, particularly regarding heroin use.

Soon after the band’s dissolution, [B] suffered an overdose and was hospitalized. He survived narrowly, and vowing to quit heroin for good he entered a rehabilitation facility in Maine. Rejuvenated after his release, he decided to use his miraculously extended lease on life to drink to death in Hawaii. He died in 2002.

Last time anyone at Dartmouth knew, which was a while ago, [A] worked as an ad executive in Atlanta. Her last known commercial, The Magic of Discover for Discover Card (2002) is a turgid 90 second piece which traces a 40-year period in the lives of a family of Bangladeshi immigrants as they experience love, loss, random searches, and 15% cash back on select purchases. The spot contains no discernible musical or thematic resemblance to her time in Distant Isles.

Today, our diligent executor of the metaphysical would render the band’s estate roughly as follows: (1) Some hundreds of CDs of [albumname], distributed among back shelves in dozens of record stores which share an expected lifespan of no more than 4 years before bankruptcy. Among the dusty record collections of college graduates and dropouts ages 37-44, experiencing midlife crises. And in even more neglected shrines, in attics and storage lockers, in boxes with forgotten memorabilia. (2) A thriving legacy of mediocrity currently residing in every band willfully obscure enough to cite Distant Isles as an influence. (3) A few dozen bootleg cassettes of their best remembered shows. Most commonly Manchester 02/11/97, although the most fans generally agree that while the recording quality of the 02/11 tape is excellent, the much rarer 04/14/98 is the ideal, featuring a frankly incredible setlist and some crazy emotional vocal performances. (4) More than a thousand used heroin needles, resting in various landfills. Shortly after burial, the needles dating after August 1997 could have been identified by the presence of HIV in the tiny specks of dried blood around the hub.

>>9821063

Abandoned story opening, wondering whether it's worth trying to resuscitate

As the sand beckoned to the waves, so did Elle her lover. The water lapped at the shore, unsure, rising and receding. Gently splash-splashing. Each nubile surge coated the surface and dissipated, both returning to the vast distant ocean and soaking in a little bit. Strange how the stationary remained in command.

At his store's grand opening in Newark last night, one of many stops to come across country, eco conscious magnate Philip Petite exited the festivities after making a bizarre closing statement. He said, “I have had conflict in the fashion industry for as long as I can remember. It comes with the territory. However, never in my life has a rival company caused me such anguish. Animal rights are ALWAYS priority. Animal rights are OUR rights. Those who breach these laws of conduct are guilty of high treason. To be able to do such things with no remorse, to me is the sign of complete apathy, equivalent to demonic possession.”

Rumors are surfacing that the enigmatic prose is directed towards their main competitor, Lucy Fur. Lucy Fur has been in contention with Petite's company since both of their Genesis.

>>9821066
It's not bad, but the dryness really inhibits the impacts of the jokes IMO. I'd cut down on the verbiage so that it reads less like a report and more like a story.

>>9821063
>>9821066
The information dump was annoying as I read through it, but I really liked the last paragraph and it probably justifies the previous rougher sentences(because honestly, even annoying, it takes no time to read).
If this is the opening, where does the story go from here?
Not sure the letters instead of names is working, I've seen Bolano pull it off though.

>>9821022
Niqqa u tryin to fuck a dog?

So my name is pronounced like pee-noose. What do you think?

>>9821080
And so the tide rose, bringing in foamy tracks, embracing the sand further up its top, and by nightfall it had gone back out, washing away its marks and taking something extra, as if to compensate for the evidence of its presence that was no longer there.

Of course, the beach was still a beach, and there were still a few grains too many for for the liking of Elle's feet, which paced towards the horizon in the day's early hours. The sand chipped away at the blue paint on her nails, and the brisk wind sent her thin cover a-flutter, wanting to get a look at the tight stomach and appropriately blue bikini underneath. She thought of the warmth waiting for her, the coffee and donut, balcony and sunrise, baby face and muscles, and single blanket for all. She walked on.

>>9821329
>>9821359

Fair points, the dryness was originally supposed to be a little fun stylistic quirk for the intro that gets less bad as the story goes on, but it doesn't really seem like it's working.

Letter names are just placeholder.

If you're curious, here's one of the attempts at continuation:

[F] (Dartmouth, class of ’01) was an adjunct lecturer at one of the many interchangeable liberal arts colleges in the Northeast. He taught the history of Renaissance Italy. This was not a subject that he loved; although it was the subject of his doctoral thesis he chose it only in a misguided attempt to ransack the glory of his college days. He had spent all his life since graduation stumbling through dimly lit recollections, trying to resuscitate them by obsessing over the trinkets he brought back to the present. A major in history was transfigured into a non-tenure track teaching position. Various romantic flings with shining, immaterial young women were brought back as a marriage to a now excessively corporeal ex-classmate. Thus most of his life since graduation was spent five hundred years in the past, vainly searching the spires and domes of Florence for a much younger memory, resting on the other side of a wide ocean.

Its first scene opens with a zoom through heavy snowfall in a dark sky and then a casement window into the fourth floor bedroom of a brown duplex. A seventeen year old boy sits cross-legged on the floor, picking fibres out of a carpet. Immediately after her cue (dishes crashing), the boy’s sister, [A, recall A is bandmember from earlier], says the opening lines:

“Don’t you have college apps to do?

“...”

“Fine, you can chill here and listen.”

“Thanks so much sis, I love you.” (At this point in the script of the daydream, a thirty seven year old adjunct lecturer has scratched out the single typeset word “sweet” several times, and has added the current line as a correction above it in blue pen.)

She gets up from her bed and moves to the CD player. Her costume is a pair of jeans and a leather jacket. He will find them today, maybe, sitting in some undisturbed cardboard box, moth-chewed and lifeless. When she turns, her face is an empty white space, left unfilled by the artist. The music plays and the image stays static. The ponderous chords drown out the distant roar of a car engine against the road beneath him. The boy’s thumb traces circles on the smooth black leather of the plush carpet. Look at me.The girl’s face is still a blank blue white, a vitreous clump on the bright horizon. The chords trapped him here, staring at that unfinished sketch of his sister, unable to complete or dispel the image. The boy sits there, in a cheap blue sweater and jeans, relentlessly picking out carpet fibers and listening to his future for about fifty miles of bright open highway. The volume cuts out, wrenching [F] from his oneiric cinema and dropping him into a swerving car on an open expressway.

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>>9820775
We just sent a weeb shit illustrated novel for publication and I could use some criticisms about it before we get a reply from the publication house.
>https://sigilworks.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/violas-chapter-1/

This is our first time taking our hobbies seriously. Hope the world will be kind to us this time

>>9821388
Benny crawled out of bed and traipsed towards a pot boiling water. Boxer clad and yawning, his stubble and abs belied (betrayed?) his innocence. The magazine cover, salivating at the roasted scent filling the kitchen, was in fact unemployed, much less an object of any teenage obsession. To say he'd had no chances would be unfair, but, simply, nothing much pulled Benny in one direction or the other. So he was here, slicing open a grapefruit, attentively severing the fruit from its skin in each section, and lightly dusting each half with sugar.

>>9821372
Nice spotting anon

I'm writing something just using sounds.

Pffuhhh eugh huh wha- huh um hmph errrr ah ehhhh mmmmph uhuh hmmmm uhm ohhhh tsk eh

>>9821471
gay

spot brushed his nose on my face, his lips parted and saliva dripped, slipped, down my chin, seeped into my shirt. his tongue followed and touched my buttons. undid them, took it off, my pants unbuckled and his canine musk swept over. He was on top of me. He was inside me. Pulsating pink member curled inside my cavity, it wasn't rough but i begged for more. He pants faster and my anus heaves to the rhythm, to the beat of my flapping forskin because im rubbing my cock down and up with two fingers, his paws on my hips, lubricating mouth on my belly, tongue in my navel.

with The other hand i rub his ears: furry, supple, dog-like, edible. his thrusting hips start speeding up, and i feel his cock is widening. I let out a yelp, he replies with a bark, then another. My cock throbs and the motions of my manus jitter with pleasure -- im trying to keep up but his humps are fast, honed by daily walks and nightly fucks.

he's climaxing, I can hear it. A wolfish howl escapes his mouth, his head arcs up and leaves my slobbered chest -- I cry out, cum flies from out my cock, his fills my violated anus. Spot howls again, thrusts out and in: ululating all the way.

he stops, swells down, leaves me wide and gaping. A weight is off my torso and his paws depart my sides. I'm covered in cum, and Spot has fucked me doggystyle.

>>9821471
>just using souds

How is that different to language, friendo?

>>9821410
do any siblings actually call each other 'bro'/'sis' etc? I've only ever called my sister by her name

It began when I found the calcified remnant of a late casearian viaduct behind the bushes in the park. I was slowly rolling my tongue over it just to be sure when Mary arrived. She said she had heard I was here on the dispatch radio - I had been reported earlier today after I mistook an orphan playing on the swings for a diminutive Visigoth.

I had been there a day and a half. "I'm on the verge of a big breakthrough," I told her, "proving the Romans came to England." "Hasn't that already been proven?," she said. "If you say so." I gave her one of my less robust smiles, where I raise my eyebrows like little brown clouds up my forehead at the same time. She looked as though she was going to say something, but the words had gotten tangled around her tonsil in a vernacular cats cradle. Instead she spat out a little cough onto the ground, where it withered and died in the afternoon sun.

"You should come by sometime." Mary said. "Ronnie is sorry about what he said and he'd like to make it up to you." She dragged a little circle on the ground with her shoe as she went on. "Ronnie has a new exhibit coming up soon, and he'll be able to get you in." Ronnie was a pale little bohemian, with his hair dyed black like burnt sausage and little pedo eyes that constantly quiver in his eyesockets -
a result of his ketamine habit, Mary tells me. I acted disinterested and made a show of carefully considering the nearby shubbery as Mary explained that Ronnie had assembled the worlds largest collection of human appendixes (three hundred and eighty one) ever, all arranged in little glass jars with notes on their former owner. After the exhibition was over, he would gather them all up and grind them into a fine meaty paste to be fed the local poor, to make a point about society's detritus or something equally heart-wrenching. Apparently Brian May had funded the whole thing.

>>9820775
It had not dawned on him until it was far too late that Barry Baker lived in a crater for the damned. His memories made the case for notions like this, all passing like the blurred trees, houses, and streets of his upbringing which he would not see for a very long time. All that made him now comes back as he sits in this gilded and insular vehicle to remember his gilded and insular life. The car rolls forward without patience towards a certain solid future—only the past can explain his present.

>>9820814
Can't login to google, so only have the first par. First blush: Gogol likely did it better.

["The Overcoat," Akaky Akakeivich"]

>>9821949
Hahaha yeah, I've read that.

>>9821530
As a relative youngfag, my brothers and I call each other bro constantly. Not as often as we use our names, but close.

>>9821278
Rate this someone

My mother's final words to me were simple enough.

"Agiapimou." She muttered, her hand brushing my cheek. "You are not special."

Fourteen-year-old Eric blinked a few times, tears spilling with every flutter of his eyelids. "M-mama?"

"You have no magic in our family lines. No legacies to live up to. No prophecies to fulfill. You will inherit what very little we have, and likely be forced to live elsewhere." She didn't look like a sickly woman. She looked like the strong, confident soccer mom she'd always been. I swear she could still have lifted me from the ground, even in a hospital bed, with disease spreading through her blood like ink in water.

"Whatever you do. Whatever you achieve with your life... It will be yours and yours alone. You do not need me. You do not need your father. You need no one but yourself," She smiled softly as she saw the stars in my eyes. "And perhaps a few close friends. Be someone. Make people remember the name Eric Anderson." Anderson was her last name, not my dad's. I was always proud of that, for some reason.

"Mama, I don't know... I don't want you to..." I steeled myself and hugged her around the neck, feeling her arms, wrap around my back, soft but firm. "I love you." I whispered, shaking in my own skin.

"I love you too, agiapimou. More than you can ever know. I will see you again. But my story is over. And yours begins here."

>>9821471
I understood the joke. Very funny.

>>9822930
The plural of genesis and is geneses.

>>9823160
Thanks my bad wrote it rushed. Do you like the joke

>>9821063
it's good, you write good

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I wrote the entire last chapter of Wuthering Heights in a series of sonnets. This is the last of the series. Enjoy, lads.

>>9824308

I actually enjoyed this more than Wuthering Heights itself. Good stuff.

>>9824308

This is cool, but like, what made you want to do this?

You're gonna carry that weight.
There's no one, nobody's gotta ask why,
because you're not made for happiness.
All the skies' beds'll drop your dream
since you're not made for happiness, Saturn.
Where off to, sunless, you've that jungle rain soul,
ain't no one who'll house a kink-in-a'-ring.
And you'll make be and move out forever.
You'll slingshoot the dark film, you'll be alone again.
Again and again.
And each second you'll be alone reminding yourself,
it'll be a cold month. Then?
There is no then.
You've got that load none's gonna ask you what for,
let the act yap tills it dries, do again do again.

And you're gonna carry that weight,
until there's no he or she left in the world to love.
Then you'll still carry on, loneliness ain't no less a vengeance.
And you'll die in sixteen languages,
but what does it matter, you'll sing till you're song,
even when you've no one to break the new day with in the morning,
even when you've no one to gaze at clouds with in the evening.
even when you've no one to warm the bed with in the night.
I'd rather be dead than do many things alone.

And you're gonna carry that weight alone,
until the black that bleeds through your white kills you slower.
That's because you aren't made for happiness,
otherwise I wouldn't send you so far away from here.
Day'll rain, does it. Day'll I come and drown it. Wrestle the canopy close and end it.
The sky'll press the dome in, malachite mad, and remedy this fault with open faucet.
With the calm dying, with the clothesline left drying, with snow and brazen thunder-glad
and the welterchildren whose syllables are now incomprehensibly sad, day'll thud on until
water and water can't fill me trying. Then, in ascending elan, drop the clouds name by name.
Adieu, butterflies. And adieu caterpillars, small in the consequence you are, I will not forget,
not the song of mice and bird, no little thing quits.

Is dark.
Is low.
The worst of it is it is.
I don't so much know what the feeling of her is.
And so much of her, so much good, that she deserves better than me.
I am content long as I make her happy.
World's between wonder, you say, and wander.
World between wonder and wander, I am alone.
Whirl on, though I'm alone to the World surround.
Wild, sophisticated, troubled, loud.
I can't hear out of the noise my self's music,
for, with every step, I lose it passo a passo, piu piano.
But if you'll add a little luster.
If you'll poke'round this cancer-addled body,
find a little spot for little you and me,

maybe.

You're gonna go, gonna carry that weight.
Time better hurry, best time not be late.
Time must not betray me.

And it'll be the end of you, Saturn.
No coffin can bear the weight of your ring.

>>9821619
>>9821619
These feel a little too rushed, and could use a slower development.

>>9824308
This is nice and self-contained, comfy.

>Here's a tiny little snipet of what I've written. I am a complete noob when it comes to writing, so if you find it to be complete drivel, do not be surprised, as I still have much to learn.

I hate you.

What a simple phrase. If I were to say it, the words would fall smoothly off of my tongue, and the resulting sting that would flash in your eyes would surely feed my vindictive pride for a few moments. Yet, as sweet as it would be, hatred is too kind a word for what I feel for you. The utter loathing that festers inside of me whenever you are near cannot be described with mere words. It is an eternal, black hatred, but all the same, I do not voice it.

I am a coward, for to admit my hatred of you... would mean that I hate myself.

Why would this be, you ask? Am I not clearly insane? After all, you are clearly not ME, and I am most definitely not YOU.

However, appearances can be... deceptive.

I can see that you are clearly confused. Even now, the cogs in your insipid little mind are struggling to creak along, aren't they?

Well now, boy, I would suggest that you sit and listen. I have much to tell, and not a lot of time to tell it.

Let us go back to the beginning, shall we?

stuff in the beginning of the book i'm writing

The ruins stood amongst the trees.

They weren’t a palimpsest of times gone by, or a destructive reminder of what hubris can achieve. Rather, it was a hollow corpse of what it once was. Dull gray slabs or rock half-immersed into the crusty soil underneath a canopy of trees. A few marble slabs that looked like staircases rising up only to be cut, and crumble back down.

>>9821278
Can someone rate this please

>>9824679
This speaks to me. Strange.

>>9824710
Interesting. Let me guess, the setting is either an ancient ruin or post-apocalyptic.

>>9821063
Love it

Care to post the complete story?

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Caleb squeezed himself onto the carriage, pressing himself against the glass doors and squeezed between about five people, one of whom was a short middle eastern looking man with a trimmed black beard and no hair on the top of his head and fleshy and raw pink scars beneath his eyes and on his cheeks. Now and then the man would jerk unnaturally, his head twitching to the side, jerking forward, his shoulder lifting itself up to his ear, his hand raising itself to his nose, his body contorting like a glitch in a video game, alien and unnatural and disgusting to Caleb, who watched the man, feeling then as though every feeling and thought he had ever felt or thought was welling up inside him. Welling up behind this dam wall he’d built in his mind and realising then on that train that that damn dam wall was not made of stone or concrete or whatever but crepe paper and watching now the middle eastern man twitch that ungodly twitch and jerking his head back and forth like a simulation, like artificial intelligence teaching itself to walk, and watching now, helpless as all those feelings and thoughts burst through that damn crepe paper dam wall and flooded the train carriage in one single deadly torrential outpouring. Screaming and rabid, Caleb grabbed the malfunctioning middle eastern man by the lapels of his winter coat and shook him and shook him as much as he could and nobody stopped him but just allowed him to keep shaking the man until he was grabbed from behind by a tall man with strong white hands like bricks.

With a yawp he flung Caleb across the carriage knocking himself and Caleb into the bystanders who scrambled away like woodlice. The middle eastern man had collapsed into the corner of the train, cowering, the pink scars on his face covered by his fleshy brown hands.

Oi,” said the tall man, “what the fuck are you doing?”

“I’m not fucking doing anything,” Caleb mumbled from the floor of the carriage, and when the doors opened at North Strathfield he took himself off and ran for the stairs at the end of the platform, the tall man with the hands like bricks yelling something he couldn’t hear, Caleb not looking back, just continuing to run.

>>9821278
Rate this please someone

>>9824971

Glad you liked it. As mentioned, it was a story opening I had abandoned because it never got much further, but >>9821410 is one of the attempts at the next section.

>>9820814
>With the immediacy of a shut off faucet, the street din mellowed out as he closed and locked the heavy door behind him.

The street din - choose either shut off faucet or mellowed out. And a shut off faucet has no immediacy. Turning one off can be done immediately, but has no inherent immediacy in the act. And mellowed is to slowly move from one state to another, which is not how he is closing the door. Din's are usually muffled and not mellowed. And heavy door? Why is heavy here? Is this important? How about he closed and locked the door?

>>9821422
>https://sigilworks.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/violas-chapter-1/

"They were unknown to the words of peace and deny the concern of those whom they deemed as inferior."

That's not a coherent sentence, sorry. And your opener is bad, sorry again. The overuse of telling coupled with the under use of explaining who the fuck you're talking about is upsetting to me almost as much as your lack of proper punctuation. If you get paid for the writing, I'm going to be sad.

>>9821278
>>9825047
you need to break up the first sentence. honestly, some of your word choice is incorrect. "enigmatic" for instance. there's nothing enigmatic about his closing words--they're very straightforward. "eco conscious" is redundant because you're showing this next. you don't need to "tell" it.
"animals rights are always priority" is missing an article: always a priority or always the priority. "treason" is a crime against a government. apathy and demonic possession are very opposite things: lack of emotion or extreme behaviour. you should choose one or the other. genesis doesn't need to be capitalized and should be pluralized as "geneses" since it refers to the starts of both companies.

and so on

>>9825038
100 ands when describing one dude,, hmmm

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>>9825115
I showed it multiple times now and the prologue always get a lot of our readers lol.

It was just your cliche "Humans got rekted by plot-device" that we re-wrote in the vaguest way possible. Was it that awful?

>>9825198
*rewrote

>>9825118
Not OP here. The spiritual realm is mysterious by nature and eludes reason therefore making it enigmatic. Depending on the delivery of the speech, if delivered metaphorically it can be understood, emphatically delivered it could lead to wondering if he believes that to be true. Demonic possession is one of many possible causes of extreme behavior and lack of empathy. In this case, it results in the implied animal cruelty. Also, treason is not exclusively pertinent to government. It can also refer to any treacherous or disloyal action.

>>9825118
Thanks for the criticism. Grammar definitely can improve. The demonic possession, Petite believes, is the reason his competition engages in animal cruelty. It is enigmatic if you are in a public setting and you yourself are not a clergymen and refer to demonic forces. It's a bewildering accusation. No one knows if he believes that to be true, so it can confuse people. Did you enjoy it however?
>>9825328
Did you enjoy it as well?

And Death rode on, spearing the men who stood in his way. Breaking through a rank of spearmen with the flick of his rapier, Death stopped, got off his horse, and floated above the clamour with his bony limbs outstretched.

‘I am here. Killer of all, they call me. Which of you wishes a release to the pain of life?’

Men recoiled, some bolted. But one raised his voice over the confusion.

Lips twitching, he said, ‘If you’re really Death, then prove it’.

They looked at him, an expression of awe on their faces. Although nobody would laugh, they wondered if a brain existed within his thick skull. Who in their right mind would question a floating skeleton?

Death didn’t even throw a glance. Curling his fingers, he could imagine the man’s pulsating fragile neck being crushed.

Spasming on the floor, the man gasped, ‘who are you?’.

‘My name’s Death’, he said. ‘And I’m here to help’.

>>9825750
Is this copypasta? it would make good copypasta

>>9825080
"With the abruptness of a disengaged faucet, the street din died down as he closed and locked the door behind him."

How about this?

>>9825784
T-thanks, y-you too.

"Aight, peace." The door would've closed behind him if there had been a frame. The now unaccompanied soul barely acknowledged the departure beyond a crossing of his legs, metal meeting metal with a slight clink. He watched the doorway for a moment before reclining fully. Minutes passed, not many but enough for the inhabitant to take note of the stillness. Music. Music would fix this. The base of his built-in antenna had long since become clotted with jury-rigged straps and adhesive. He shifted slowly into a suitable position, legs uncrossed and arms practically anchored to the table in front of him, he concentrated. More minutes passed. No reception, typical. Clearly the only solution to this problem was a verbal assault, lucky for the neighbourhood he was preempted before a single word left his speaker."Ain't no amount of reverb riddled cursing's gonna' get that shit working, T."

His cracked optics darted back to the doorway. "You could still make the cut ya'know, it ain't two strides down west, just a couple blocks, got a jack set up there myself and no filtered shit eith-" The dealer leaning in the doorway would not be allowed to finish his proposal.

"Aight, peace." The now upright 'bot relayed.

"The fuck is that. Yo, what did I tell you about recording our conv-"

"Aight, peace." This time with the pitch amplified. The dealer stepped into the room with surprisingly little presence for an individual with a personal power jack. "You better cut that shit now, I'm tryin' to help your punk ass." The 'bot stared for a second, optics flicking between the door and the dealer. Another playback of the words followed. The dealer got close enough to feel what should've been the hum of his associate's chest. There was no hum, just a slight spluttering.

"You know I can tell you're running on empty right?" This time the 'bot stayed silent. The dealer took note of this, giving him a few seconds of downtime in case the tinman wanted to make another joke. "Oh that's right, see. When I stepped up in here not 20 minutes ago you were pulling that old shit about your 'hybrid core'." He attempted to tap the 'bot's chest, but was countered with a push, light enough to stay standing with little recuperation but a push nonetheless.

The dealer backed away, admiring his sorroundings for a second, savouring the moment. "I looked into your little core soon as I left, and you know what I found?" He parroted the spluttering of the steel drum in front of him as he reached into his pocket, the imitation falling to laughter as he retrieved a small vial. "I found that you can't keep running on electricity alone forever." The 'bot did not take this kindly.

>>9825831
r u legit

are you from /lit/ ?

>>9825849
Yes, why was it bad?

>>9825852
It reads like that "CRASH" copypasta
It's just so cheesy man... reads like it was written by a ten year old
legit I'm picturing you dressed in one of those shirts with the flames guy fieri wears

>>9825899
Yes, it's satire, but what was wrong with the prose?

>nothing happens here but i hope it's ok

The summer had made it beautiful. In the process of parching but not yet dry, the earth was sometimes thick, muddy ooze, and sometimes little pools of sparkling water that caught and reflected a delicate shimmering sunlight. Among the water there lay twisted hunks of metal, car parts rusted and worn, piles of ancient bricks, machinery, plastic boxes deeply sunken into the ground. The years had leeched the colour out of it all, turned it into bog, sedated the tumultuous mess of once-vibrant, manufactured garbage, and now it rested amongst the earth with an easy peace. A small wind still worked at the world, and vastly overshadowing the deathly stillness of those rusted artefacts, a slow-moving blanket of marsh-grasses, creeping weeds and flowers held careful dominion over the scene. Amongst it all were the delicate, clockwork movements of Summer's beginning slowly bursting into motion. Far out a flock of long-legged migratory birds, picking their way minute by minute through their own nomad lives. They stood out, tiny, sharp pieces of black and humming gray, against the muted green. We walked into the water, leaving our boots, the plastic sack, all on dry earth. The wet was up to our ankles, and everywhere alive. Tiny mites, winged insects, made strange, erratic patterns through the air, their courses purposeful and unclear. Others skimmed across the surface of the water, snapped away from us lazily as we brushed across their paths – or else they clung to us, sticking to the skin, wet and glistening like tiny, dark beads of ash. The mud upturned by our movements rose in waves throughout the water, unsettling the tiny lives, swirling grey and marked by little silver flashes. There were some kind of fish here, disrupted by our arrival. We reached into the water and tried to grab them, always missing, our hands coming to air full of rotten plant life and grey-brown mud, and tiny, depthless flowers.

>>9821278
HOLY FUCKIN SHIT SOMEONE RATE THIS ALREADY, FUCK ME

>>9825980
you need to break up the first sentence. honestly, some of your word choice is incorrect. "enigmatic" for instance. there's nothing enigmatic about his closing words--they're very straightforward. "eco conscious" is redundant because you're showing this next. you don't need to "tell" it.
"animals rights are always priority" is missing an article: always a priority or always the priority. "treason" is a crime against a government. apathy and demonic possession are very opposite things: lack of emotion or extreme behaviour. you should choose one or the other. genesis doesn't need to be capitalized and should be pluralized as "geneses" since it refers to the starts of both companies.

It had been a sorry night followed by a crappy morning where he woke with pains all over his damn decaying seventy-four-year-old body. For weeks he had anticipated this morning and now that it had actually come he didn’t feel like getting up, felt more like dying right here on his piss-stained mattress. When the eternal radio in the kitchen announced that the clock struck eleven, however, he resigned to the fact that he wasn’t going to die, or not at any foreseeable point in time, so he rose and shambled off into the kitchen. He was hungry, which was a rarity these days, but when he opened the old breadbox and peered inside he found that the bread had gone moldy overnight. Which wasn’t that much of a surprise, what with the dampness in the walls that no one ever seemed to care about and least of all his landlord. Grunting, he stalked across the kitchen to see what groceries were left for breakfast. The fridge was like a defiled cemetery. Two shelves empty altogether and on the third one a chunk of Emmental that was about as hairy as a hippie’s wife. No drinks. He opened the cupboard and tapped himself a glass of lukewarm UHT milk but dropped it when his hands got shaky and when he looked down at the mess on the crumb-strewn filth of the floor and saw that there was no rag hanging over the single defective chair or on the littered table either, he decided to not give a shit. Who was there to get worked up over some spilled milk, anyway? Not him. Not anymore. The times in which he had to worry about this shithole would be gone soon enough.

>>9825988
I already retorted to that, did you like the fiction scumbag?

>>9820775
Sometimes life takes stabs at you then you die

>>9825915

I feel like you spend way too much time describing the environment. It's good to get a picture of it, but I don't need to know to such an exhausting extent.

>Tiny mites, winged insects, made strange, erratic patterns through the air, their courses purposeful and unclear. Others skimmed across the surface of the water, snapped away from us lazily as we brushed across their paths – or else they clung to us, sticking to the skin, wet and glistening like tiny, dark beads of ash.

Just say "Our presence perturbed the mites and some of them clung to our skin"

>>9825991

I want to know more. Not many stories are about a 74 year old deadbeat.

>>9825915
>>9826004
Don't listen to that philistine. Your descriptions are good and I think they are heart-felt. I can not imagine a fucking mite to follow a purposeful course, because all I see is erratic shitheadedness when those motherfuckers fly, but still, you got some fine prose there. Work on it rather than dropping it.

>>9826028

He shuffled over into the living room and slumped down into one of the two armchairs — the one with the broken armrest but intact springs — and there he sat sullenly contemplating the mess around him. His stomach gave a splenetic grumble. How was it possible that he had allowed himself to become so utterly disarranged? Two years ago he couldn’t even munch down a sandwich in the living room without his wife Ann reproaching him for it. “Gerald,“ she’d say with a big accusatory sigh, looking down on him in his armchair, shaking her head in housewives’ agony before she would shuffle off into the kitchen to fetch broom and dustpan and sweep up a handful of breadcrumbs from before his feet with exaggerated exertion, wheezing and moaning like a slave laborer in the Vorkuta Gulag. And now the place looked like caveman’s trashsite.
For the next hour he sat in the chair and let his eyes wander about the living room, over the cupboards accommodating books and records and a bazillion trinkets whose sole raison d’être was to be bought and catch the dust of all those tiresome decades. Ann’s stuff on the shelves that clung pointlessly to the wall, next to the bright, virginal spots where the gold-framed excerpts of two lives spent together had hung. The wedding. Faded looking beaches, the background of some vacation of which nothing else was left but this picture. He took everything in, planning what to pack. You would better get up and actually pack a goddamn thing, you old waster, he told himself. But he didn’t.

>>9826034

His prose is alright, it's just that there's a name for it. He's telling a story, not proving how good his literary talent is.

There's always plenty of time to show off how good you are, it's just that you shouldn't waste it on mites and insects, you shouldn't draw attention to that, but rather focus on the story, the characters, what they are doing there.

>>9826052

>you shouldn't waste it on mites and insects

Had I known that you are one of those guys who see stories not as an art form but as a product, I wouldn't even have bothered to mention you in my post.

>>9826042

This has potential. It's pretty comfy to read too.

>>9826065

It's both, but you gotta balance it out.

>>9826066
Well fuck me, that's good news. It is actually the beginning of the second chapter of something that ended up being thefirst draft of my first major work. Thing is, when I finsihed it, I fucking hated it suddenly.

I like the voice petty much, but I wasn't able to apply it evenly. The plot line is, to put it mildly, badly planned.

Someone liking the prose actually yields a little motivation.

>>9826069
Alright, I'm willing t take this out?

Why do "you gotta balance it out"? How can you be so sure that the way you see it is the correct way? Can't you see tha someone else might actually enjoy a verbose description of mites, even when the story is not about them?

>>9826034
Thanks a lot friend. With the 'purposeful and unclear' line what I was going for was that the direction was unclear to the viewer, but had some purpose to the insect. I guess that was difficult to convey without lingering over and I sorta lost the meaning.

>>9826052

Ok I'm definitely not trying to be an overly-wordy cunt but prose is fun as fuck to write and plot is definitely secondary for me. Also, most of my novel is set in very grimy, oppressive locations, and this is one of two moments of 'release' from that, so I really wanted to linger on nature. I do appreciate this criticism though and finding a balance between prose and action is definitely something I need to work on.

>>9826089

I'm just one reader of your work. You should take what I say with a grain of salt, and just consider it. Get 10 people of some merit to tell you their honest thoughts and you get a pretty clear picture about what you can improve.

>>9826104
Okay noted, thanks. I'm mostly too anxious to share any of my writing so I'm way behind on criticism, I'll try getting around to doing what you said sometime in the near future.

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>>9820775
Been working over this scene for a while. Have the plot of the short story worked out, but have been in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan -- I thought it would help, but began to feel further away from what I wanted to write. What is highlighted in red is a paragraph I think is terrible but also redeemable, like a evangelical might see a gay kid. I'd appreciate advice there, I think it's deplorable to have two introductory paragraphs for what should be a short story, but I'm on the fence on how to cannibalize it and segway into the awkward meal. Reading the dialogue, I realize it might sound a little to weird, unfortunately, it was that weird for me. Is it alien though?

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>>9827223

>>9826042
This is good. Confident voice and a focus on empathetic direct experiences. I'd like to see more and I'd like to see how you'd deal with abstractions, themes, more characterization etc. I have this feeling with a lot of competent American writing is that they become deadpan rather than risk failure, but I've seen too little of yours to say that.

>>9825991
Similar to above. Liked it bu there's not enough to go on to say more.

>>9825915
As the other anon said, this is good descriptive prose. The problem with descriptive prose, is that it has to be genius to really be worth the space. We're an ADHD generation and books are dialogue, dialogue, action -- keep practicing, but focus on other areas too. Just keep that honesty, you have it down.

>>9825833
>but was countered with a push, light enough to stay standing with little recuperation but a push nonetheless.

Clusmy, otherwise fine.

>>9825038
I really dislike modern metaphors like "video game". I think it takes time and experience, like age against wine, for a symbol to become pertinent.

>>9827223
This is me, more for proof that I'm not a leech. I'd comment more, but this bar limits my internet to fourty five minute stretches. Why is that Americans write so differently? I feel like I can spot it, perhaps I'm wrong, I know not all of you are.

>>9827288

> Why is that Americans write so differently? I feel like I can spot it, perhaps I'm wrong, I know not all of you are.

I'm the guy with the story featuring the old man and I'm not American. I'm not even a native speaker of english. Which makes me double happy that you liked my writing.

Here is another excerpt, featuring the other main character of the piece, and I'd like to know if my narrative can compete here:
He’d spent a restorative night, suspended between two red firs on his tarp after he’d fashioned it into a makeshift hammock, and he was relaxed, he was feeling tranquil and high-spirited, and the first thing he thought after he opened his eyes and sucked in the resinous scent of the trees was that this was the morning of mornings, the morning against which all other mornings ought to be pitted. Originally, the night had started worse. A lot worse. The idea to turn his tarp into a hammock had occurred to him only after he’d spent nearly an hour looking around in the blackness for a spot where he could lay down that wasn’t crawling with an army of insects or so interspersed with sharp rocks that you couldn’t ever hope to wake up with an intact spine. When he had spanned the tarp and slumped down in it, it had taken him perhaps two minutes to accustom himself to the swinging and bobbing and then he wondered why the fuck he hadn’t come up earlier with the idea. No hard rocks poking in your back. No grass leaves tickling your face whenever you turned around the slightest bit. No insects — except for the occasional wayward fly.
So his night had been great, best night in weeks, and his morning managed to compete, too. After he’d woken he had emptied his canteen in three large, satisfying swigs – his throat was parched and there was the faintest headache rebuking him for the booze – and then he’d sat down and treated himself to a can of surprisingly savory beef ravioli along with the rest of the french bread from the night before.

>>9827353
There's nothing wrong in what you write, un-American. I only think sometimes that you are redudant. I think often, of what a reader imagines that the writer does not even have to print. There's a kind of telepathy. I think truly good writers get this, and they know give enough to give the reader there own picture. Your fine writing seems almost nervous.

Tell me, could you rewrite this, in half the words, with the same effect?

>>9827413

>Tell me, could you rewrite this, in half the words, with the same effect?

No way.

I see your point though, and while I'm not much for circumcising my writing, you got me thinking with that mention of nervosity. Thanks man, I'll consider that.

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>>9827223

>>9827288

It's pretty hilarious to see what other pseud sub-par writers thing of each other's work.

>>9827568
Then post your own.

>>9827562
Thanks anon.

>>9827568
I enjoy insultings way more if they are not typed by imbecile twats who can not tell thing from think

>>9821278
Hey can anyone tell me if they liked this joke or not

>>9820775
he sat in
front
of a
glowing
display
of
filth
and
masturbated
to thoughts of
himself
exhibiting
greatness

No one on here is qualified to critique the writing of others kek. All you idiots who want to write:

LEAVE THIS PLACE NOW!

>>9825118
>discredits himself and his thread mid critique

trea·son
ˈtrēzən/Submit
noun
the crime of betraying one's country, especially by attempting to kill the sovereign or overthrow the government.
"they were convicted of treason"
synonyms: treachery, disloyalty, betrayal, faithlessness; More
the action of betraying someone or something.
plural noun: treasons
"doubt is the ultimate treason against faith"
synonyms: treachery, disloyalty, betrayal, faithlessness; More
historical
the crime of murdering someone to whom the murderer owed allegiance, such as a master or husband.
noun: petty treason; plural noun: petty treasons

>>9825118
trea·son
ˈtrēzən/Submit
noun
the crime of betraying one's country, especially by attempting to kill the sovereign or overthrow the government.
"they were convicted of treason"
synonyms: treachery, disloyalty, betrayal, faithlessness; More
the action of betraying someone or something.
plural noun: treasons
"doubt is the ultimate treason against faith"
synonyms: treachery, disloyalty, betrayal, faithlessness; More
historical
the crime of murdering someone to whom the murderer owed allegiance, such as a master or husband.
noun: petty treason; plural noun: petty treasons

>>9825118
trea·son
ˈtrēzən/Submit
noun
the crime of betraying one's country, especially by attempting to kill the sovereign or overthrow the government.
"they were convicted of treason"
synonyms: treachery, disloyalty, betrayal, faithlessness; More
the action of betraying someone or something.
plural noun: treasons
"doubt is the ultimate treason against faith"
synonyms: treachery, disloyalty, betrayal, faithlessness; More
historical
the crime of murdering someone to whom the murderer owed allegiance, such as a master or husband.
noun: petty treason; plural noun: petty treasons
ur a goof bud

>>9827765
Rupi kaur gracing us with her presence I see.

Two NSA agents walk in to a bar. The bartender greets them, "Hello Gentleman have you been here before?". "No", they reply. "Great!" the bartender says, "Would you like to hear our specials?". The pair reply, "No thanks, we heard them earlier."

>>9824624
Wow. Thanks.
>>9824678
I don't know. I love the book. I like trying new things with my poetry.
>>9824679
Thanks! I do admit that it's a comfy aesthetic. Bronte's prose is poetic enough, but this was a fun poem to write.

>>9826042
I think the first paragraph there is unnecessary. The detail you gave in the previous post is sufficient to make me wonder why his place looks like a caveman's trashsite. Possibly you could just put in a memory of his wife when he spills the milk? - she interjects with "Gerald!" etc and he shakes it off; make it clear that she's not there any more. Might work as a more stream-of-consciousness thing, as that seems to be what you achieve anyway (generally speaking). As in, your narrator isn't detached from the old man, but seems to be part of him, or at least sympathetic.

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i'm a woman
gotta take pictures of my
face constantly have to
keep taking pictures with my face in
them i have
three different websites just to
post pictures of me looking cute for
my family friends and total
strangers did you see me wearing
this new clothing did
you see me
standing
in front of this building

one time i went to the library and
just so you know that i went there i took
fifteen pictures
of myself
standing next to it and looking cute haha
look at this one it's of a burger i
ate that
i wanted to show everyone and also 80% of the frame is
my face
can you believe the cutesy affected
expression i'm
making don't i look cute when
i'm doing absolutely
everything that i
ever do on a daily basis that i
photograph myself doing have you
seen these 214 pictures of me visiting madrid for
one day have you
seen how i stood next to
all the things and my
face was there and i was cute

hang on

don't take a picture of me let me make sure i'm posing my
facial muscles in a way that perfectly makes me
look youthful
and girlish and attractive in a series of gestures and expressions that are
half-conscious because i'm a narcissist but also
half-unconscious because i've simply
introjected a constant need to be
posing and preening and
peacocking in every moment of my fucking life and everything i do
is just a
vehicle for appending my
face to it because i’m
a woman

WOW excuse me are you misogynistic or
something it's not like i do this for
you are you kidding me you
actually think that i spend all day
every day every hour of
my entire waking life
specifically accentuating all the
secondary sex characteristics
you find attractive and
posing my face
to look cute and young for YOU
are you delusional I do this for me and
nobody else i
just like to feel attractive nevermind the fact that
attractive presupposes the question to
whom i do it for me and
nobody else now
excuse me
while
i take a picture of
myself fictitiously soullessly smirking in a
way that i've
unconsciously learned makes me look dorky-cute variant #81 while i
try on sunglasses
in a fucking
walmart

>>9827722
no one likes you

>>9821278
This is shit.

>>9828427
And how many like you kek
>>9828549
Expound teeny deek

>>9828594
it's forced and unfunny

>>9821063

this was incredibly dry and boing. The last sentence was the only one that even remotely interested me, and I think it's just because of the shock value of the letters "HIV"

>>9828600
why is it forced? expound minimind

>>9824732
Mind if I ask how?

The graying and dusted men sat on their porches across from one another with their gazes broken by the occasional car, truck, and freight that might pass incidentally, having taken a wrong turn searching for fuel or the motor hotels that survive off their traffic. Their children had married or left for schooling or had accidentally died, leaving their fathers and mothers to idle or, if they had kept their health, to work for the motor hotels that served commuters and mistaken travelers; awake for long hours, waiting for intermittent calls from customers about room service they can't provide, relaying the ingrained and routine words, "We're sorry, Sir, Ma'am, there is no food here. There's coffee in the morning after sunrise. If you're hungry there's the 24-Hour Diner five miles away down route 29, take the fourth exit on the right . . ." Taking no effort to speak as though they were the words of another person speaking for someone else, to someone else, about a matter that doesn't concern them. Some don't even pick up the phone, or when answering don't, maybe can't, respond.

There was nothing to be talked about anymore between these men, knowing each other from need and from their previous work. Everyone knew what everyone else was doing, had done, was going to do; it could all be learned from a glance at the other men from across the highway, on their porches with wives in the kitchens and faded living rooms cleaning what could be cleaned.

>>9825997
Not him but no. You revealed the conflict in the first lines and now it will probably be tensionless. It's not enough to get me to read the rest.
Also if people ignore, there is probably a reason and you don't need to be so childish

>>9825820
NO! Fuck! Just drop the faucet bit, it's a terrible hook and a poor metaphor

>>9829012
This text has nothing to do with tension. It's more of a visual text anyway. It's a news report. A business man accusses another business man of demonic possession. Turns out the name of the business he despises is called Lucy Furs (Lucifer's). They have been fighting since the beginning. That's the joke you deluded queef. It's called Allegory and double entendre. Literary devices ya gobsmacked goof.

>>9829075
That was obvious I just too on the nose. Look, anon, this is the reason no one replied. You're not wanting critique, you're wanting praise and will be an obnoxious cunt until you get it. Just grow up.

>>9825820
Haha. "Disengaged faucet." "Abruptness." Haha. Oh man, the range of these actors, from comedy to tragedy. And you can never tell which is which.

>>9820775
A short excerpt:

Richard didn’t know where he was. He didn't want to know, either. The moon, glistening like a raindrop on a leaf, watched him from the dark, violet sky. Richard looked to the side. A pale, pink body laid across from him. Bandages were wrapped around the body's head, hands, and one eye. Richard stood up and walked towards it. He stared. They'd talked a few hours ago. Or she’d talked, saying two grim words before they’d both fallen asleep. His hands had been around her neck; he didn't know why. Richard opened his mouth. No words came out. His hands twitched.

“Don’t say anything,” Mary said, opening one inflamed eye.

>>9829087
Speak for your own taste. Now that you know its a script. It would pass for a Simpsons gag right?

>>9825198
Is this a translation? Cause that would explain for some of it, but maybe not for the vague story content.

If you're serious that you're "getting" to your readers, than I want in on this get. But only if you're getting paid. Otherwise this is badly written and badly told. Sorry.

Setting forth 'gainst cracking wood-flesh
Swift of leg and sure of grip
A single insect keeps its mission
Aided not by horse nor ship.

Six deft limbs propel its passage
Light hides from thoracic gleam
Antennae twitch and twirl with languor
As though in longing, or in dream.

What catalyst sends soul akindle?
Though at Queen's behest, this ant
Betrays no lesser inspiration
Than divine to Man may grant.

>>9829129
Not bad. Overwrought in parts

https://pastebin.com/d6We4yem

Last fall was the start of my first semester of music school. I hated it. Can't stand the sight of my instrument now or even the thought of music.

Since I couldn't bring myself to practice at all this summer I began reading and writing some to fill my time.

I honestly just want to know if I'm wasting my time or if I have some potential. All comments welcome

>>9829171
Why are you having a bad time, anon?

>>9829129
Fake and gay. Update yourself to at least the 20c

>>9829171
This is full of cliches, purple passages, and exposition (as opposed to action). Honestly it reads like YA trash. But im gonna be real with you. Everyone has written trash. You can grow out of it. Keep reading.

>>9829087
Also to tie in the demonic with animal cruelty and fashion is not easy faggot, Lucy Fur is a brilliant name.

>>9829175
Ever since music became essentially my job it has lost its allure.

Music used to be my escape from school, responsibilities, life, what have you.

I'd spend hours afterschool everyday, just creating and enjoying music.

And now I've got a new project due every week, having to crank out song after song with this chord structure and that harmonic rhythm, yada yada.

My passion has turned into my job and I don't seem to be enjoying it anymore. As soon as I'm done cranking out another 2 minute phoned-in track the last thing I want to do is sit down and play for another hour.

But I'm at the school now, and if I transferred I feel like I'd be letting down my parents who supported me through this and agreed to cover half the tuition.

I don't have any other skills, or interests.

If I left I wouldn't have any other prospects and I'd probably end up wanting to get into music again when all my other exploits end up running dry in 3 years or so.

This wasn't meant to be a rant but it turned into one.

>>9829188
What, is it unhip to use meter and rhyme scheme these days?

>>9829212
Ty.

Any author recommendations? I just finished vonnegut's entire catalogue and I'm sort of treading water.

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>>9829129
Do you have a reason for the archaic language, because I'm not seeing it really.

>>9829228
Why not view compositions and exercises you might not necessarily like as a means by which you can improve your skills? Isn't that the point of going to school?
As a musician with a decent amount of gigging experience I can tell you that it's never not going to be hard work. But that's no reason to give up. If you have a passion for your craft, hone it to the fullest.

>>9829250
I like the way it sounds? It doesn't really seem archaic to me besides the 'gainst and that was just for metric purposes

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>>9821372
My eyebrow also rose.

Dogs famously look for their lost bone; Hawks made a movie about this (Bringing Up Baby). And the bone (an intercostal clavicle, to be precise) was not just a bone.

That said, lines 8-11 touch on something that touches me.

The sudden appearance of a rhyme scheme in the last verse was odd, although those last three lines were rather nice, and that last word sticks the landing.

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>>9829271
>the not-nor syntax
>the [blank-of-blank] construction paralled
>though at Queen's behest

these are all p archaic, but I am not sure that some don't come from a struggling with meter, otherwise I think this narrative could be more directly (and powerfully) in a more contemporary voice.

>>9828788
Some strange comma placements. Also needs a conclusion, some sort of jolt.

This thread is shit lol No one here can help you write.

>>9829382
Scoffers are worthless.

>>9829383
Yes (You) are.

>>9820775
My therapist killed himself today
He put a gun in his mouth, scraping the barrel against the missed goals and lost loves that he couldn’t swallow
The bullet splattered against the wall the dreams destroyed by time
His clock ticked, counting the seconds he spent trying to get himself together and the hours he donated to the wretched whose dreams, he said, sat on the tips of their tongues
My therapist killed himself today
As a result my throat itches as i try to tie times stitches and turn back that hand just an inch to stop his finger from making that fateful twitch (quickly into “I wish”)
I wish i could reach into that throat and unforce feed him that thick ounce of so called “reality”
I wish that i could smash that clock so that the seconds became moments and the moments stretched over the horizon into a world where time only hurts you if you let it
A land where hope sprawls across the open grass and our dreams flow like molasses being flung into the air through the gaps in the teeth of our smiling mouths, dancing in the sky, lucid hallucinations of beauty
My therapist killed himself today, but he didn’t die
His words still echo in my skull, telling me that you can’t defeat the passing days you can only conquer them
That sometimes if something is too hard to swallow it doesn’t belong inside you
That to tear open your heart is to take back the time lost to terror
To reclaim your title
To be able to call yourself human

My throat is getting better
But it’ll itch a while longer
Until i find that land where beauty flows out of us like stories from our drunken selves
A part of me killed itself today, so i'm afraid that now i'll have no one to speak to

feel like it gets to quickly into the intensity and needs a little more foreplay to tease someone into reading it.
>>9821506
hot
>>9823021
really nice, that last line seems a bit too cartoonish for me.
>>9829129
little bit heavy in terms of vocabulary but really enjoyable.

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The human traffic was halted. Johnny could not see very well, but on his tippy toes, he could make out the sign of the Phillips® MagLevator 5™, designed to fit around 400 people. There, he had to wait. Thanks to the speed of the Magnetism LevitasIon™ by Phillips® technology, not so long. During the wait, at his height, he could notice many boy students pushing other girl students in the butt with their pelvis, and he did not know what to think of it. Some turned around and muttered things like "consent not granted" or "fuck off", others did not react, and let themselves get touched up. How strange, Johnny thought to himself. The black-skinned, black-haired Nubiomericans had no trouble doing what they wanted with the girls, especially if they played footkicker or ball. After taking the MagLevator 5™, Johnny ran to the screengaming lab, and joined a bunch of his friends, who were already connected to GreatGamesOnline.rosaparks, playing their favorite screen games. Rosa Parks' name now replaced the ancient ".com" URL suffix to honour her great doings. In 1945, she was the first black presidentess, after all, and immediately defeated The One Who Shall Not Be Named™. The poor, boring white man precedenting her black Majesty didn't do anything, like all boring white men usually do. Of course she had to swoop in and save the day. Little Johnny sat down in between his friends Karin and Rosa, two chinese asexual twins. "阴茎" Johnny said to salute xer both.

Nothing special. Comedy Dystopia inspired by MillionDollarExtreme's Jaihoo's Trip To The Future and Billy and The Clown.

>>9829690
precedenitng is not a word, *preceding. My french background is showing.

The night it happened, Alis could barely sleep. Though it was only still July, the nights had been growing colder and colder for weeks. The harvest would suffer, she knew. Alis was born many miles away in a bright and busy city. It was there she met her husband and was whisked away to this gloomy little village. Of course, with the lustre of fresh love, it didn't seem so gloomy to her back then.

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blowing out vape to cover up weed smoke
at ur low income part time job/joke
below the poverty line what it means to be broke
but reading nietzsche on your breaks? now that's woke
suckin on his words, gazing past the fakes,
buying lotsa herb, having what it takes
u called me a nerd, now I rhyme like blake
u cant find the verb but i give girls the shakes
listen what I say, this'll be the day
rollin in the hay, fuckin like we gay (they do it better)
say now
cree-ay-tivity gets u all the pussy
be a freak for me dont start with the mushy
facebook messages, ladies getting pushy
u wont see my bed again unless u got some tushy
nawnaw im just kidding
cuz girl I am so sensitive I promise I know how to live
ive read so many dead men they power lurkin in my pen
not dolce and gabbana but deleuze and guattari
if knowledge is wealth im rich like a qatari
if sickness is health im ill like bad inari
if u my taylor swift ill take u on safari
like in her video
now this is degenerate, inveterate
but would you have me writing letters? lovey dovey earnestness
spirit bound in fetters, papa with the sternness
im more of a mama's boy, a make your girl a-cumma boy
take her in the bathroom teach her about leo bloom
do you know what's thats from? now im in up to my thumb
its easier on molly, her eyes all big and dolly
oh shit you know this vulgar but I really did indulge her
dont post this on instagram, keep it gay on 4chan
shout out to my faggots, all you beta boys from /lit/
one day we gon make it, even those of us with clits
but now im out of stamina, cant hear to my anima
so here I call it quits, post your own shit if its lit

>>9821506
This is fucked up

A long one coming!

My Kind of Porn

I've noticed that there don't seem to be any porno movies
that are made for guys like me.

All the porn I've come across
was targeted at beer-swilling sports bar dwelling alpha-males
Men who like their women stupid and submissive
Men who can only get it up for monosyllabic cock-hungry nymphos
with gargantuan breasts and a three-word vocabulary

Adult films are populated with these collagen-injected
liposuctioned women
Many of whom have resorted to surgery and self-mutilation
in an attempt to look the way they have been told to look.

These aren't real women. They're objects.
And these movies aren't erotic. They're pathetic.
These vacuum-headed fuck bunnies don't turn me on.
They disgust me.
And it's not that I'm against pornography.
I mean, I'm a guy. And guys need porn.
Fact.
"Like a preacher needs pain, like a needle needs a vein,"
Guys need porn.

But I don't wanna watch this misogynist he-man woman-hater porn.
I want porno movies that are made with guys like me in mind:
Guys who know that the sexiest thing in the world
is a woman who is smarter than you are.

You can have the whole cheerleading squad,
I want the girl in the tweed skirt and the horn-rimmed glasses:
Betty Finnebowski, the valedictorian.
Oh yes.
First I want to copy her Trig homework,
and then I want to make mad, passionate love to her
for hours and hours
until she reluctantly asks if we can stop
because she doesn't want to miss Battlestar Galactica.
Summa cum laude, baby!
That is what I call erotic.

But do you ever see that kind of a woman in a contemporary adult film?
No.
Which is why I'm going to start writing and directing Geek Porno.
I shall be the quintessential Nerd Porn Auteur.
And the women in my porno movies will be the kind
that drive nerds like me mad with desire.

I'm talking about the girls that used to fuck up the grading curve.
The girls in the Latin Club and the National Honor Society.
Chicks with weird clothes, braces, four eyes, and 4.0 GPAs.
Brainy articulate bookworms, with MENSA cards in their purses
and chips on their shoulders.

My porn starlets will come in all shapes and sizes.
My porn starlets will be too busy working on their PhD to go to the gym.

In my kind of porno movies the girls wouldn't even have to get naked.
They'd just take the guys down to the rec room and
beat them repeatedly at chess
and then talk to them for hours about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle
or the underlying social metaphors in the Aliens movies.

Buy stock in some hand cream companies
because there is about to be a major shortage.

And I'm not just talking about straight porn. Oh no.
There should be fuck films for my nerd brethren
of all sexual orientations.
Gay nerd porn flicks with titles like "Dungeons and Drag-queens."

It doesn't matter if you think you're overweight or unattractive.
It doesn't matter if you don't think you're beautiful.
You are beautiful. . .
And I will make you a star.

>>9830142
holy shit, just buy a hooker or something; you need to get laid, man

>>9825820
>With the brevity of a cancer-riddled infant, the street din died down as he closed and locked the door behind him
ftfy

>>9829228
What school do you go to? Also just realized it looks like you're a composition major, so I don't actually have much advice

>>9829030
I did.

>>9830261 >>9829097
lol, sometimes you get attached to a metaphor I guess. Deleted it yesterday though.

>>9829880
unironically one of the best in this thread. i'd replace "colder and colder" with just "colder" though

>>9830142
yikes!

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>>9829030
"The street din died down as he closed the door behind him, deserting him to weighty silence of the foyer."

This?

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"No missing calls, no incoming calls, two wards placed and that's because I spammed VQN for 5 minutes, why are you in ranked?"
After scolding his team, Jeane felt relieved, slumping into his GGEZ ergonomic seat with only a pang of worry. Thanks to a blunder made by their opponents, team Loves2Spooge would move on to the semi-finals. Behind the stern, yet child like voice raging through the voice chat, was a hurt and gentle person. His team knew better than to react emotionally, instead teasing Jeane to calm him down.
"GGEZ, my back hurts" said Richard Blackmountain, pocket sand at the ready in the event Jeane would attack. Goading the team captain was in of itself a form of stress relief for everyone.
"Your back hurts with that whopping 1:1/2 K:D ratio, remind me to get you some steel rods to put in your fucking brain".

Jeane was never quite the same after losing the finals. He returned to living in the basement of a family friend, working security part time, subsisting in neither complete discomfort or contentedness. Instead, Jeane would remain in a limbo of angst until his own little Rocky Balboa came to be. With the help of his schizophrenic hallucinations, Jeane starts again on the path to the world championship.

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https://pastebin.com/MryJKbFh

I know I can do better. Fucking destroy this for me, please.

I spake a shriek! The little hound bit at my shins as if they were bone without flesh. As my siren sounded, both ears of the foul nipper sprouted with attention. "Stop this immediately, fiend!" I ordered. Yet what I was served was a mere equivalency of shredded paper. My wounds, my wounds! Oh, my wounds bled like the tears of a mothered spirit whom just discovered infertility within her blouse.

The mutt prevailed in damnation of my demands, until a swift kick lunged the beast into a street lantern, eclipsing its light with contortion. Upon explaining this dire circumstance in court, I was left without sympathy and as a result I must now reimburse the precinct the total value of post repairs. Bastards!

>>9829316
Wjat the fuck is going on with that typography it looks terribad

>>9830328
Try to write complete sentences. Right now your rapid fire verbless clauses just seem too messy.

>>9830396
Are we talking about the motel scene? I wanted to reflect a more instinctual, at-the-moment style as opposed to the rest of the work. I'm no expert at action sequences, but I felt the shorter it was, the more it would convey to the reader. But thank you for actually bothering to look at it, I'll give that area another go-around, see if I can't work out something smoother.

Since this is a QTDDIOT, I'm posting it here:
Does reading more make you a better writer?

that there are patterns among us who are ready to be defeated by those of greater intensity, and in their sublimation, come to see that which is worth seeing

why should I feel the necessity to accept all things?

to accept all things would be to stagnate imperpetuity

Tell me now. I am my own man, I desire what I desire, I envision the world I wish to partake of, and you,
you eternal principles, how shall you judge me? By what standard? Through what esoteric doctrine shall the
things I say now be undermined? Wherein is the beauty of the absence of firey will? Only the cold chasms of
Brahman can know the tranquility of the world as seen from the highest tower. We are not there, and nor did
we nor god feel it right and proper to now be there. We are where we are for reasons unknown to us and known
to the god we scorn, and rightfully scorn, and god himself accepts our condemnation with shy malaise.

Take the reigns of your inner world, scorn what you find deplorable, and praise what you find righteous and
beautiful. This is the proper way to be alive. Don't fall into the metaphysical traps of the cunning orator.
Of the deceitful philosopher who got lost in the labyrinth, seeking the golden fleece with his ironic turns of phrase.

it seems I am providing myself with "relevance" as to the ongoing narrative of the world, the globe, with my participation in this rather ephemeral way of the internet, digital and harsh. A part of me knows the irrelevance, but the other engages all the same.

I feel the center of all things. I mean, I feel like the center of all things. I exist, and what is it to exist, but to be the center of that which exists? Am I somehow existing and yet peripheral? How would that make sense? I am that which is, to me, and to what other standard should I hold myself up to, other than my own life, as it engages with that which is supposedly other than me? That whole wealth of past literature, fiction and non-fiction, mathematics, archeology, metaphysics, philosophy, folk stories, mythologies, ... Who am I in relation to all this? In relation to "my" ancestors? And how to I claim "my" in relation to ancestors? Simply the line of race and nation? Am I chinese or irish or german? These seem to not matter. I can't hold to these things as important. They are rather stylistic curiosities, that one may find delightful or not, according to one's soul's proclivities. Soul's proclivities thereby being the more important thing to know.
What you dig, and what you don't.

I wish to find the essence of things.

Paradoxes assault me, of which I've learned through studying Zen literature, if it can be called that, and indian and chinese mystical thought patterns.

The warrior or the laughing vagrant? Penniless, without a home, wandering hungry, raising his hands above his head for alms, ...who is more prosperous? In all the flaming fury of war, who gains the treasures of life in the life beyond life?

>>9830439
(cont)

the logos is probably like a glass object that surrounds a source, or rather the source, of light

it is the prism through which sheer energy is given form and substance, those two ideas being actually the same, and shapes the sheer radiation into complex specifics

the word is the concet is the archetypal shape, and it is a unity, a duality, and then a trinity

take all your occult reasoning and fashion it into geometrical images surrounding the total absence of geometry, that is to say sheer sheer-ness, light, radiating, the anticipating energy which wants to manifest that only waits with anticipation for god to command its formative patterning, ...

the planets in their orbits, the distances between them as they trace their paths, are always, when considered as a totality, unique in each moment, they do not repeat

the ratios they form when given numerical significance are always unique at any moment, there seems to be a desire for progressive novelty even in the progress of the heavens, of the celestial bodies which define our fates (and don't think those dots in the sky don't matter), in fact all the dots matter, but the nearer matter more.

That which is near matters more, to be sure.

What we call Jupiter is a kind of Jungian archetype, which has its place in the unfolding human drama, though probably unknown to nearly all, besides perhaps some obscure theosophist.

Life is part of a proper, larger pattern. That we cannot condense that pattern into the human brain seems like a defeat to many humans, but why should we want the totality of things to be so easily understood? Do we not want an adventure that far supersedes the lives we already inhabit? If so, our lack of understanding should be felt as a welcome incapacity. Until we unite with God in the capitol G sense, we have many more millennia to the power of millennia to go. Does that sound tiresome, too much? Suppose you were God, you'd create the grandest adventure possible for yourself, would you not? Thus is the state of things. The time is immense. The way that any given individual character figures into the whole mandala is beyond the individual character's capacity to know. Know only that you figure into it. Because you exist. You, conscious, body-inhabiting, avatar of the divine, exist and are performing EXQUISITELY the task set out for you to do, because the action of existence is only ever exquisite. That is to say, in a larger pattern of beauty that we as of necessity have yet to comprehend.

Limitation is one of the primary functions of beauty.

To experience something as a totally new thing, that is incredibly beautiful. That is you being born into this place, not knowing where or what you were in the infinitude before.

>>9830458

Sounds like someone's been eating a certain type of mushrooms

---RESTAURANT---

Outside stood my Chevrolet Impala 2017 model that I recently purchased. It was beginning to look rather dirty, but it’s only a Chevrolet so I didn’t care.
I hadn’t enjoyed a lone meal at a restaurant for years, so I got inside and drove off, having decided on a whim to get lunch somewhere downtown.
The traffic was negligent and nothing interesting happened on the way—just the same old things. Cars, sidewalks, traffic lights, people dressed in black or tan, school-children crossing sidewalks, gaunt faces, and then I arrived at one of the main streets downtown where I could pick a restaurant to walk in on without a reservation.
I drove by a few until I saw one that appeared like it wasn’t too cheap or too expensive, then drove into the parking lot. It was practically empty.
As I entered the restaurant, I was immediately put off by the lighting—it was too bright. The waitress spotted me and I approached the counter.
“Please have a seat, and I’ll be with you in a minute.” She sounded like she was having sex regularly. People that have sex regularly don’t sound like they want to die, and so I was relieved.
I sat by one of the windows and opened the menu. I just wanted fish and white wine. She came to my table.
“Have you decided what you want to get?”
“Menu item number 27 and the Voucher Chablis chardonnay.” She wrote it down, then smiled at me and I smirked back at her to be polite. She then walked off with my order.
“Wait,” I said and she deftly spun on her foot.
“Yes?”
“Drop the wine, and just give me some carbonated water with lemon instead.”
“Sure.”
I looked around and appreciated the cleanliness of the place. The tables all had white coverings with candles lid on them. I like when candles are lid in restaurants—it adds a layer of class and hospitality.
Close to my table were a guy and a girl in their early twenties, engaged in a lively conversation, and I wondered if they were together, or if the guy was a gay friend of hers. The volume of their conversation was modest enough to blur out the details, but I decided he was a gay friend of hers.
The waitress came back with my water but she forgot the lemon. I didn’t care.
I sipped on the water for 15. Minutes, until she came back with my order. It looked delicious, and I wanted cold white wine to compliment it. I don’t drink.

I saw him on the windowsill.

And he saw me back. White whiskers, greying fur, eyes suffused with ink and lust, the mirror of a bestial passion that flared upon my face. His tail twirled behind him, fingering the frame he sat upon. His lips he licked. My cock was hard.

He leapt up off the sill and strolled (seductive casanova!) towards my tautened pants. His scapulae he raised with every forward pace he took, and dragged his member on the cold and furry floor. My breath was still, his paws on my feet, trousers, belt, boxers -- his tongue took my buckle and my hands gripped the armchair, tight, rigged, illicit passion. Sweet slobber graced my underpants and traced a thickened outline; his furry face pointed at my crotch. He looked up. Our eyes met. I thought he smiled? His nose dipped and teeth tore at my loose modesty: he was ravenous, thirsty, lusting for cock. I obliged and hoisted his feline form into the air, tearing my boxers away too. My cock flipped up, free from its cloth cage, his arms were spread and his asshole cleared for impact -- no lubricant today, my friends; he wants it raw and I oblige.

I thrust him down, no time to pause, and a purr of pleasure escapes. I pick him up and plunge him down, a ring upon my finger (cock), and he cries out with every stroke, pink willy waving in penile synchrony.


Pitter patter rain drops clapped atop the roof, a snarling, sneering, satyric applause that cheered our bestial love.

I count the shoves of my cock in his cavity: forty. On the forty-first I stop, scream, release my gooey seed. He whimpers in pain, licks my sapient hand in sexual submission.

He pounced on me a lion but I, a man, and master of the earth, hath dealt my dominating blow.

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>>9830519

>>9830519
fuck thats my old draft

i mean to change: hath dealt my dominating blow to 'hath made him my pussy.'

>>9830388
I'm trying to play with a technique I saw in a Robert Duncan poem called the Fire.

‘Faster’, the Priest thought. ‘I need to go faster’.

His robe was leaden with sweat. But the ribbon continued to dance, soaring higher and higher. It was working. Wind whipped the earth around him, sending rocks into his orbit. Roaring, the dragon clawed at him, sending fiery blasts at him to no effect. It was too strong.

The dragon couldn’t get him; but he couldn’t get the dragon. Slashing his wrists, he let the blood drain around him in a circle. He jumped back, feeling the earth tremble as a pillar, the size of a mountain, thrust into the sky. It grew features: first a snout, eyes and then formed its body to mirror its opponent. It darted out, ripping its jaws into the flesh dragon’s neck. The Priest fell, a smile creeping on his face.

‘They’re safe’.

It was early Autumn, but the air in the classroom of was still hot and moist like the nose of a dog suffering of a nasty cold. The white walls had big gashes that showed the armoured cement behind the plaster, and said gashes were barely covered by maps of the entire globe, plus a diagram about the inner works of a radio.
The desks and the chairs clearly weren't put with regards about order. Complete silence reigned, to the point it was possible hear the sound of a falling pin. All of these things combined created a sensation of desertion and disarray not uncommon to an High School classroom that had been just abandoned by both the students and the teachers for the Summer Break.
However, the class was not abandoned that day. In there, two girls and one boy sat down on the desks, waiting for a teacher to come and start their recovery tests.
The boy, his name Rodrigo Moya, student of St. Catherine High School, was sitting on one of the desk nearest to the window exposed on the empty and dried-out courtyard of the school.
After a few minutes, there was the clicking sound of shoes on concrete and, shortly afterward the teacher, a short man with hoary beard and silvery gray hair wearing light brown fine clothes, entered in the classroom with his usual bag made of black leather. Rodrigo remained concentrated on munching the pen, however.
“Mr. Rodrigo, I suggest you to raise yourself from your seat.”
Rodrigo immediately took the pen out of his mouth immediately and looked up, and saw the two girls standing up and the teacher sternly glaring at him. Rodrigo, at the cue, got up and said “Good day.”
The teacher let out a grunt, as he gestured to sit down, and wait for him to give out the test sheets, thing he did only when all the three students had seated back in their places.

“Alright,” Rodrigo said to himself as the teacher handed him the paper “let's get this done. I've studied history all Summer, there's no way I can fail this!”

>>9830574
Once he had said do, he took the pen, as he read the sheet of questions, idly making pen tricks as he read.

“The start of the Gothic-byzantine War was in 535 AD,” he whispered to himself, as he crossed out the date in the list, not even looking at the other ones. He scanned down his eyes to the next question.

“What was the outcome of the Gothic-byzantine War?”

He saw five empty lines to fill out. He sighed, as he thought up a coherent answer to the question, trying to remember as much as possible about what he had studied, and trying his best to not mix the reality with the fantasy described in a series of books Rodrigo's brother had suggested him.

He thought, thinking to the various locations he could recall, dates and, of course, outcomes. After excluding some of the absurd combinations, like Ostrogoths losing the final battle but winning the war and viceversa, Rodrigo finally thought up a decently-written and plausible answer, and he started to write down his answer.

Once he thought he had found an answer that sounded satisfying, Rodrigo started to write it down.

“The Gothic-byzantine War, after more than a decade of fights on he territory of the Italian Peninsula, ended with the defeat of the Ostrogoths at Mons Lactarius and subjugation of all territories previously owned by the Ostrogoths under the rule of the Emperor of Byzantium. The victory of the Byzantines was brief, however, as the Langobards, disgruntled about their pay as mercenaries, and the Franks, who had interests in the territory of the current-day Provence, invaded the newly conquered territories of the Byzantines, uniting them to their kingdoms.”

Rodrigo finished to write this, re-read it, and then gave himself a thumbs up, just before going to the question below, which, once again, had boxes to sign.


“The Holy Roman Empire was founded by...”

Rodrigo looked next to the slots to fill, reading the list of available names.

“Karlommann. Charles. Adolphus II. Valamirus I. Atta III.” He read out loud to himself, slowly dawning him he could not remember the name of the founder. Rodrigo shook his feet around like a couple of rattles, like he always used to when under stress.

“Think, who was the founder? Can't be Adolphus because he was Emperor at the start of the millennium, Karlomann was the one killed in the attempt to make the Trinitarist Pope escape from the isle of Elba, I don't remember any Valamirus or Atta beyond the first living during in those times.. “

He started to tap his left foot on the ground and shake the other one, as if he was playing drums in a rock band. Of course, since he wasn't there for practice his drumming skills, he was going to need to cut that and concentrate on the question at hand.

“Let's say it was this Charles guy.” He crossed the box next to the aforementioned name, crossing the fingers of his left hand and signing the box with his right one.

>>9830578
Done so, he passed to the next question, which was an open question, but with three blank lines instead of five.

“What was the name of the treaty that declared that Popes had to be elected by the Holy Roman Emperor?”

Rodrigo, once again, rattled his legs around again, unsure about what to answer to it, passing several minutes in thinking about a solution. As time passed, he rose his head away from the sheet of paper and up to the wristwatch of the teacher nearby.

Ten to eleven.

He had just twenty minutes, before he had to give his test to the teacher. Somewhat panicking, Rodrigo answered.

“The treaty, signed in Rome, that declared that the election of popes was to be approved by the Holy Roman Emperor, was called the Privilegium Othonis, from the name of then-Empereor Otto I.”

He sighed, crossing his fingers again, before looking down at the next questions.

The following questions were all concerning the year 1000 and why it was an important year. He quickly wrote what he knew best about the time period in question and its economics. Rodrigo answered to them very quickly and without any effort. He then flipped the paper around, and saw the last three question, which he read aloud to himself.

“Explain, in five lines, the phases of the Gratis Städer and freien Städte.” “Who signed the Magna Charta, when and why?” “What was the casus belli of the Hundreds Years' war?”

Underneath, there were only blank lines to fill with then answers. Rodrigo felt his hearth speed up like a joyrider begin chased by the police, as he panicked at the realization that he didn't have much time to answer either. He skipped the first question and started to take guesses at the other two questions, writing the first things he could come up with.

“John Landless signed the Magna Charta in 1215 to give barons certain legal rights in exchange of money for the wars he was involved into.” Rodrigo quickly wrote in the lines under the second question, before he passed to write the answer to the second.

“The official reason for the start of the Hundreds Years' War was a succession dispute over some territories in Northern and Western France between England and France.”

As soon as he signed the full stop in the sentence, the old teacher said "It's to give your tests.”

>>9830579
The two girls, almost in synchrony, got up and gave out their sheets, then signed their disclosure, before giving a little bow and saying “Goodbye and good day, professor.” The teacher answered back, nodding and raising his right hand with the palm open outwards.

Rodrigo sighed, as he moved himself away from the desk by pushing it away with his legs, before getting up and shambling towards the teacher's desk, before giving his sheet in the teacher's right hand and grabbing the red pen from the teacher’s left one. He teacher was not amused.

“Be little more polite, Mr. Rodrigo, this is a state exam.” He said monotonously, as he put the sheet atop the other two sheets given by the girls. Rodrigo resisted the temptation to shrug at the teacher's phrase, as he quickly scrabbleda doodle that was his alleged signature.

“Goodbye.” Rodrigo said, as he hastily went back to his desk to pick up his pen at his desk, before rushing out the classroom towards the dusty courtyard, where he was going to pick up his motorbike.

>>9830583
The next day, Rodrigo was at school once again, but, this time, he was waiting while sitting on a chair outside the teacher's lounge, waiting to hear the results of his test. Compared to the day before, the muggy weather had waned, which made the most air more bearable, but not by a logn stretch.
Rodrigo shuffled on his chair's padded seat, his arms crossed and smirking, as if he was completely sure he had nailed it and that he was going to proceed with the year without any further hassle. However, deep down he knew that his fate was hanging by a thread. A very, very thing thread made of wet paper...
The wooden door creaked open, as it opened, revealing the figure of a burly morbidly obese woman wearing a light blue dress with white pois, which made her look less like a secretary and more like a retired professional eater.
“Moya Rodrigo.”
“Oh God, let this one be good,” he said, getting up with a loud groan from his seat, before walking inside the very bare and gray teacher's lounge where, at the end of the metal and glass table, the same teacher of the day before sat, his hands intertwined together as if he was a movie villain hatching up a plan for blow up a country off the face of Earth. Rodrigo pulled his shirt's neck away in nervoussnes, before going back to apparent smugness, walkign next to his teacher.
He handed the sheet, saying “Everything is on it.”
Rodrigo snatched it out of the teacher's hands, before reading his teacher's notes. The first question had a check mark in green, but, from the second question onward.
“You will be allowed to re-take the exam when the people in Campania will speak Greek and most of the North will speak French.”
“To answer incorrectly with a known name is forgivable. To answer with the obvious distractor is insanity.”
“Get the treaty's conditions right but not the dates or the names isn't enough to mark the question as correctly answered.”
“Barely correct.”
“No answer, no points.”
“Who is this 'John Landless'?”
“You got that it was fought over and for France. That's it.”
Rodrigo hissed, then slammed the test on the table and stomped out of the teacher's lounge, going straight to the exit, while accusing the teacher to be a great consumer of the services of sex workers, over to be one of them. Outside, Rodrigo took his motorbike, turned it on, and rushed away, the city around him bustling with the sound of music from all around the world, from Scandinavia to Navarra, from the Manatthan Commune to Japan.
“Sometimes I wish I had been born in the world with the history I detailed in my history test” Rodrigo mused, once he had calmed down and thus also slowed down his vehicle.

>>9830587
> his arms crossed and smirking
how are his arms smirking?

What most ill conceived of emotions
What most useless speck of feeling
What good has ever brought aversion
Hate for naked flesh, for recorded defeat
Is it not better
to face it all
And shame's eyes meet?

I hold myself to a very high moral standard. One that I, at times, admittedly struggle to keep up with but I've found that it helps to define some strict rules. For one, talking about myself is prohibited, god forbid I commit the sin of self indulgence and egotistical gluttony. This eases us into the absolute and inflexible abstinence from magical thinking and the likes; after a lengthy period of introspection I've determined that such whimsical, self inflating garbage is only damaging to my mental health. Yes, I do consider myself to be a robust moral fiber, so you really must imagine my shock when I woke up one morning on the cold kitchen tiles in a rather demeaning pool of sweat with gore up to my elbows.. Oh yes, and upon discovering the dead child in the closet under the stairs.

>>9831030
could be jared leto

Dead nature

A girl of a white dress is holding a jittery basket
And on the table
Two tangerines.
And on the street a passerby.

>>9831302
lmao is this bait

>>9831302
sounds like my diary desu

>>9831302
no

>>9832719
you keep a diary, anon? t-that's gay

I have to write a 10 000 word paper. My deadline is next Monday.

Am I going to make it?

The sun was setting behind the vast field in a warm summer evening. If it weren't for the piles of corpses, the scene could could have been called even idyllic. What was once a hundred man company was now nothing but worm food. Two men were still fighting against the enemy that had ambushed them.

One of the men, Elenua, clenched his hands around his sword as the last man fighting alongside him fell in a loud slump. Elenua sighed. He wasn't expecting this to happen on the first assignment his newfound company was deployed to. As he was completely surrounded, he struck his sword in the ground. The enemy knew to be cautious around the infamous captain when he was armed, but now that he was completely alone and without a weapon, they charged him from every direction.

"It has been a while since I was in this kind of a situation", Elenua thought to himself, "I guess I have no choice but to go all out. Just this once."

>>9833098
maybe it is...

we could read it together if you like

>>9832619
>>9833059
can you guys at least be specific with what's wrong with it? I spend 95% of my time writing essays and don't know how to write creatively

>>9833193
s-stop it i'm not a stinky homosexual

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>>9830425
does watching football make you a better footballer?

of course not

>>9833131
how much have you done so far? in my experience, a research paper of that length takes a month from start to finish. that's just the writing. the reading behind it would be another 3 months at least

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>>9833182
O W T H E E D G E

>>9833275
Please post constructive critique

The dark leaded man sits glass eyed as his pale lover dances around him spinning like a dervish under god - Whirling faster, faster - spun on into destruction by mad fanatical ecstasy
the faster she - the slower he

[I wrote this short prose poem in a flurry but I'm not sure I even like it myself]

>>9829316

I'm guessing with the split verse/caesura and alliteration you were inspired by medieval english poetry(probably Heaney's Beowulf)? It isn't a bad poem but I do think the modern english lacks the harshness needed for good alliterative verse(like Sir Gawain)

>Here's a short story I wrote recently. I don't have too much experience in writing an actually coherent story, so if it's just pretentious bullshit be sure to tell me. Don't take it too seriously.


As the world walks by, the television flashes to power. One by one, the endless rows of silver screens light up, a showcase of city skylines for all to see. The pedestrians stand side by side, their frozen limbs barely touching. Their cloaks and fluffy hats are not enough to protect them from the dreadful winter weather. They did this to themselves, with black pupils and frothing mouths spitting empty words, pale and painless. Dull men and the dreary children with their eyes lit up hopefully- they should be miserable, but the sound of militant marching in the distance causes cheers in the crowd. The ritual has begun.

The faces of countless idols take a quick glance out to the thousands of men under their total control, and what they see appalls them. Their grins are shallow and superficial, blank, blunt. They paste personalities onto their skull, smiling and waving out to the cruel, impetuous followers. As the world behind the screen screams, a small boy with a black cap stands upright and watches it all unfold in utmost fascination. At the TV, he stares blankly, colorless eyes reflecting the hordes, so enormous in number that they appear as a monstrous mass with only a single mind. It wanders back and forth around the ancient church, the sore thumb of the urban kingdom- the city of the future. Nobody pays it much attention, however- nobody bothers to pay anything much attention. These simple pedestrians see only themselves, the street, the snow, and think nothing of the world they have built.

(1/2)

>>9833605

The black-hatted boy remains alone by the television screen, but he takes no notice to the innocent people and their gods, protectors of the public draped in fake grins to bear the rabid admirers. He watches the flashing images, but disconnects from them completely. He takes sanctuary in their suffering. The bubble the boy has created is narrow, yet expansive. It consists only of the TV and his void eyes, but that alone is so much to him. He begs to have this one moment to himself, without any interference. He begs to be let alone. Meanwhile, the television displays the crowd once again- though a select few are just as upbeat and cheery as they were before, many have since become restless. They could have been sitting in the comfort of their home, but instead they must endure. Yellow-jacketed men traverse through the mob, setting up barricades and shoving anybody who dares get in their way. Though this alone is their job, regret fills their empty stomachs as they too must endure the treacherous snowstorm.

“Hey!” a fragile, elderly voice screeches. “Where are you supposed to be right now?” An ill-intended utterance begins to drill into the bubble, words belonging to an old woman, with hair short but completely grey, bags beneath her eyes and dissatisfaction in the young boy’s bliss. He pretends he doesn’t hear, he prays not to hear. The woman’s voice raises even higher, a pained squeal begging the child to return. She is outraged by his constant disobedience, assuming all he wants is to upset her. She believes she has done no wrong her entire life. Suddenly, the boy’s eyes regain color as echoes of outrage scratch the surface of his home. He is petrified in fright, failing to believe that nothing can burst his bubble. As the TV illuminates his parched lips, he firmly believes it is the only being without judgement- the television is his closest friend. Loneliness and loss of self-control lie outside, and the terrifying screams relay all throughout the only place he has ever belonged. There are tears in his eyes.

In an instant, the bubble pops. The boys stands in the clutches of an old, cranky woman who wants power and nothing else, tugged by his sleeve as brutality brightens the silver screen. The world walks by once more.

(2/2)

>>9833611
pretentious garbage unfortunately
channel that metaphorical descriptive power into scenes where it's pertinent
seriously explain what's going on first before diving headfirst into that sort of stuff

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>>9833627
Thanks for the critique! I'll make sure to keep that in mind next time I write. I guess I went overboard with the metaphors.

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>>9833671
you got it my buddy pal friend partner

Diary of Regis Harker 7/23/1923

I’m writing this entry to capture my deteriorating mental state. For the first sixteen years of my life, I could have been considered normal, save for my extreme distaste of the sea. Born and raised in the port town of Gentle Maw, Maine, I spent most of my days in the town library. Pages soaked and dried from years of sticky, salty air offered little olfactory escape, but managed to whisk my mind to distant lands. For years the towering mountains and endless plains contained in the leatherbound tomes became my refuge. I worked my way through the shelves until I had exhausted their reserves. It was a few months after my sixteenth birthday that I found the chamber. I had observed the ancient door in my prior years, but my attempts to open it had been futile. I assumed the ages of humid air had warped the wood and rusted the black-iron fittings. I know now the door had been deliberately sealed.

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https://pastebin.com/j7ytLnSw

Here's mine, the opening scene of a 500-page piece I have been working on. It's unpublishable, autistic shit, but I still want to improve it if I can. Also is this thread for broader advice (such as what plot elements I should keep / remove), or just for prose?

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1/2

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>>9833982
2/2
thoughts?

>>9828086
high treason is a crime against the state. if you can't deal with criticism, you shouldn't be writing
>>9829226
"lucy fur": About 83,300 results (0.48 seconds)

>>9833982
>>9833985
there are times when telling instead of showing is fine but this is too much exposition/explanation. i'd recommend writing this as it happens instead of at a remove in the courtroom.

>>9833981
this is ok. the spiderweb image isn't very original but otherwise i didn't have any serious complaints

>>9833605
>>9833611
it's overwritten. simplify. also, having characters go through extreme feelings isn't the same as evoking emotion in the reader.

>>9833182
it's possible to write in the heroic mode without getting into implausibility. unless you're going for something completely over the top, this is too much.

>>9830328
good for what it is but yes you could probably write something more complex and nuanced. have you read "the last good kiss"? excellent hard boiled fiction.

>>9831302
i'm so tired of reading this voice over and over again. it's like a disease that targets new writers.

>>9830142
yes we all know cline is terrible. i hope the movie fails but it's just as likely to do well because fuck this world.

>>9830028
i chuckled

>>9834218
>i'm so tired of reading this voice over and over again. it's like a disease that targets new writers.
i'm intrigued, i've never read any books with that tone, so what's pushing me to write like that?

>just scribbles about people from my place of living.
Out here in this dry distopian stretch of land highways lead the average crawler to a lonesome state of human condition. The kind of condition that headways ones conciseness down the path of nowhere, where you'll find only miles of gravel, dust, and pockets of the great old american west in all its decay. Here will lie only the eeriest, most dragging and strange of creatures. The old dirty bastard whose only life care was his country. A sullen man, vision blurred with a consistent shade of red white and blue. He fought in this war, his father in the last, and his fathers father in the before that. The snake eyed man diseased with addiction. Slithering and pulsating up one street and down another, hunting and tracking for the only holy thing in his life. A fix. A fix comes in all sorts of varieties ranging from shooting tar, smoking crystal, to gambling hard earned money and fucking anything with a pulse. Without it he would most surely be incomplete. The long gone drawn out lonesome hobos. Old women pushing every trinkit and every little forgettable in a shopping cart. You could tell by her eyes the world has never done a damned good thing for her and she knows it. A thirty something man who lost his wife, job, house, just about everything he had besides a torn up duffel and a rock of a pitbull whose seen more meals then him. Their only desire was to get by. The thick wristed farm hand whose never dared leave home. NOt out of fear but out of sheer ember love the porcelain breeze would never let smolder. He knew every orifice, every speck worthy of naming in the state and each one gave him a feeling every man can only hope to touch before he parts ways with the world. The poor and poor in many different meanings kid, whose little life was squeezed and juiced into a sweet thick pulp only angels could wine and dine. Soft words arose from his stomach, he only cared to know if his family and old friends were alright. To make sure his motel life family had green money slips for bread and butter for dinner. He did so make a living and in return a death in the the sale of narcotics. Poor kid. The cotton pail woman who was happily greeted into the world by other cotton white folks who welcome her too the long lineage of paper blood and privileged eyes. She knew basic math.science.history. But she was never taught pain. And for that it made her ignorant. The guy with rotten teeth, hair curled with slime, four crater eyes some looking northeast some looking southwest. He's been abused, beaten, burnt, stripped of everything but a coat of despair and hate, the only thing keeping his body from failing. All he ever did was laugh and shrug. And under the polka dotted tar black night the common denomination was poured unto me, It didn't matter where you went, what you do, or who you think you are, out in the land of dust, we are all on in the same... a desert rat

>>9834496
i dont really bother too much with punctuation and all that i just want to know if it is at the least something interesting to read. thanks for your time /lit/.

>>9832546
Please critique this guys, I'm very eager to hear an honest opinion from a stranger

>>9832546
too short, what's your point. I like the feel of it, although the first line is long for some reason. And how can a basket be jittery? Is the girl shaking? Why add a detail like that when everything else is added plainly, for ex "two tangerines" or just a "passerby."

all in all you're getting longer, shorter, shorter, than long again, weird, unless its free verse.

>>9832546
>>9834822
The flow feels right.
I have no idea what the message is, however.

I laced my fingers behind my head and leaned back in my chair and stared at the clock and waited for the ceiling to collapse on top of me.
He chewed the end of his ballpoint and scribbled a few sentences and looked up for a moment to steal a glance at the girl a few seats away from him.
She wore too much lipstick and eyeliner and uncomplicated satisfaction on her face to be beautiful. I wished I could push her into a dirty lake and wash it all off. He wished he could fuck her.
I sympathized. We both wanted to see her disappointed.

>>9834909
>>9834914
The idea of it was for it to be of dead and stale composition as dead nature as a mode of art generally is, and the jitteriness of the basket is supposed to dehumanize the living and mistify the object and bring a little uneasiness into it.
Sort of.
And the passerby is here to shatter the subjective perception of dead nature even more.
It does sound a bit dumb explained though, especially when it is not in my native language

>>9834968
And I don't really get the critique of shortness

>>9834970
spotted the manlet lmao

>>9829667
Some people are cartoonish.

I had gone too far, and Richard Doherty, Sr. was not about it, and I was certain at the time that he aimed to kill me. There was little that could stop him, a man who's enormous body seemed little more than a container for liquid fury and the short fuse that ignited it daily. My parents could not protect me; in this small town, it was a fluke of proportions as immense as Doherty's breadth that, of all of the indiscretions that were routinely, quietly covered up, the rape perpetrated by the deputy sheriff's son was not one. Thanks to me, /he/ was certain to think.
We made our break, slipping out of school without notice in the middle of the day and onto the interstate, when we would most likely not be seen, but he was waiting, and Uncle dared not speed away. My terror was tinged with humiliation as Doherty, Sr. tapped on the glass and ordered us out. "The boy's coming with me," he said, a terse, mundane statement of fact, the same as what surely accompanied many an ancient beckoning to strange lives. My uncle did his best in the moment: "Don't hurt him." Doherty, Sr. grunted like a bull. The cop's handcuffs clinked on his belt as his vice grip led me to his squad car.

There were only two Dohertys in my hometown, and one was now in prison. The other was known for his meanness and for the broken bones he'd provided local hospitals at least a dozen times per year since he was 14; and also for the kind of bully's intelligence that tells a man to personally stake out the 3rd most used road out of town; a kind that honed in on negative feelings, cruelty. But what he was not known for was guile, and so as we rode, he quickly explained why we were not going to the police station. I had not been arrested, you see. This was not a kidnapping either, as I had come of my own volition. "I am doing," he rumbled, "both of us a hu~ge favor here. Because of the way my son was done, lord help him, my line no longer has a future. Because of the ill-treatment you received from those good for nothings who reared you, you almost didn't have one either. But I've come up with a way to solve both of our problems."
Squirrels don't attack bears, no matter how breathlessly livid they might feel.
"I will provide a home for you while you figure out what you're going to do with your life. You're the perfect age for that, right? 18?" I could barely get enough air to stay conscious, let alone speak.
"That was a question, boy." Something - I don't know what - was on the crest of my lips when I saw stars. His roaring was unintelligible at first, and I was sure again that he was going to kill me. "-EN I ASK YOU A QUESTION. NOW, I SAID, YOU'RE THE PERFECT FUCKING AGE TO FIGURE THE FUCK OUT WHAT YOU SHOULD FUCKING BE DOING WITH YOUR SHITHEAP OF A LIFE, RIGHT?" I moaned, confused and in pain, but it must have been enough, because he huffed in approval; we two were already speaking on the same bestial level.

>>9835204
This is pretty good. Some of it is borderline "genius" which is always just common sense anyway, but I don't understand the undertaking itself, or the moral tone for that matter? Like there's just nothing subversive that can come from this. It'd be more interesting to see people good at writing using complex, overly-knowledgeable characters to reverse their convictions rather than simplistic ones in learning theirs, like who cares? It's good writing though.

>>9835342
Well, it's actually supposed to be the opening passage to a piece of uniquely fucked-up muscle growth erotica. Suffice it to say that Doherty won't be redeemed, but he'll at least be understood. The protagonist will suffer and emerge from his ordeal "better off", in a highly conflicted fashion. Also, did some more:

He motioned for me to sit, and then busied himself moving dishes between the fridge and oven and table, balding redhead disappearing and reappearing from behind his wide cop rear as he bent and stood. I just watched. It was not surprising to me that a man of his size - he eclipsed the fridge - had so much food ready at arm's length. In theory. Actually watching bowl after bowl, plate after plate appear in front of me was another matter. I couldn't believe he was going to eat all of that. But that was the sleight. He wasn't.

----

My insides felt beyond bloated. Beyond engorged. It was more they were trying to escape out of my throat. ____ly was the worst kind of nausea I'd ever experienced. My head swam from the pain, from the overload of water hitting my system - "To top things off". I knew I was going to collapse any second. I tried to stand up, slipped, landed hard on the floor, and immediately loosed the entire contents of my stomach in wretched heaves that bled into one another. And when I was done, face wet from tears and vomit, I lay in the mess, barely registering Doherty's movement around me. There was the sound of a blender. Eventually he pulled me up by the back of my shirt, which caused me to hurl again; this time, there was a bucket held by his hamhock mitts to catch it. He sat me down once more, wiped me off. He was holding some kind of plastic tubing in his hand; was wiping down the end of it with something. He finally spoke.
"Now, we both know I'll kill ya without a thought if you struggle. So just relax."
Gingerly, he tilted my head back and inserted the tube into my nose. I chocked back a sputter as it worked its way down my throat, the length seeming to disappear into me. I knew what was happening. I knew what was going to be on he other end of that tube. But I didn't do anything. It was not a conscious decision. The part of me that wanted to survive and the part of me that had given up simply found themselves strangely in agreement. When Doherty was satisfied that the direct line from the bag of my sick to my stomach was secure, he released the valve and let the flow start. I felt the bloat coming again, as I listened to Doherty blend up the last bit of my vomit. Not a bite was going to be wasted. I was going to benefit as completely as possible from Doherty, Sr's hospitality.

Short story written from a dream. I like some parts, dislike others.

Please critique, what is good, what is bad, what is neither.

Thanks for your time.

https://pastebin.com/d4saB9GD

>>9833182
my first response to my approaching demise after fighting for what could be hours is to sigh too.

>>9834924
ilikeilike

Once upon a time when i was 5 (BUT I AM 6 mommy kiss my head and sed it's time to sleep for ever and then she hugged me with my pilow and I cryed and cryed but everythin was dark and when i waked up mommy wasint there and i talked to a please man.

When there is room in a bowline for the eye to tighten, it has been tied wrong and should be re-tied, though not before you check the line first and lubricate it with spit or the grease from your hair. Too many people tie bowlines like they'd tie a fishing knot. Slack is death for rope, double that for whatever it's meant to haul. When Dad tied them he'd ask Mom to spit on the rope, and I'd pull the tag end while he pulled harder on the leader and the whole thing slipped into position. Wind blows the spit away in the Bay, though, so I usually run my fingers through my hair and grease it that way. The synthetic ropes take the grease easier than the hemp ones.

Sunday bobbed on the froth of each wave and the ropes she wore bounced and fluttered like a cheap wig.

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>>9835678
>chocked back
>chocked

Here's a poem. It's called -ing -be- I.

Spry distractions loaf on lithe intent,
men waking, wishing, trying,
b’lieving, doing, buying -inging time rather than be-,
results in salt-work, sprawling like the C
in coldness: callous spray
that dampens your New Canvas Day.

Pixels splat and reek of pure demise,
wine trauma met with whys
fires livid earth from foil-pressed crumbs
from which your towers rise. You miss
the point of -ing;
the shape you’re in’s an -e-d thing
writ past because of practice;
timed it slow, fixed solemn bets
all rife with catty pugil,
ribbons placed on “I-got-tīme-in” breasts
that gleam too brightly
for the lover’s open eye. Youriyese
in grace, ingratiated by devices
(rueful caries)
shelter you from toil’s ten-thousand days.
You see them, they see you whilst print-ing,
comb-ing over, feel-ing joy anew: such sugar lines
the bottom
of a borrowed cup of time.

White hues direct-ing -ingots in a line
totally gold
and pin “pathetic” on your chest,
their best not forged in -ing or be-
(like they would want you to be) -lieve,
but rather hey! and halt!
The hollow points of discord,
blood of victims be- -in’ salt.

>>9824679
>>9824732
Me too

>>9834323
I think you're trying to expand your range by writing in a voice that's different from your natural one.

Usually I think it's because people are trying to sound educated and be impressive. The third scenario is that people who write like this are writing in their natural voice. In that case, they should be stay in academia and give up writing fiction.

‘Understand’, said the self-sown heteroclite
(Who was always so desperate to have it known
That what they lacked
In orthodoxy they made
Up in sheer fucking
Arrogance)
‘That I am unlike ye Many,
Instead I am
Amongst the hoi oligoi.
Watch me dance!
Watch me!
Watch me laugh!
Watch me!
Aren’t I such a delight
To behold?
Folk in all spectrals do come
And write of me for
All the generations!
(Til judgement day!)
‘REMEMBER THEM?’
‘NO.’
‘THEY WERE SPECIAL AND
DIFFERENT?’
‘YES.’

Yet this here slight-saoshyant
Holds no words
On the deeper
Pools of truth
That ebb
In fathomless and secret
Coves and hollows
Far beneath
And ballast this frigate Earth

I believe I
Remember
A place where
A time when
I was a green
Skinned child
Crawled up from St. Martin’s Land I
Only ate
Broad beans and
Blackberries,
And speaking other words
From other tongues that
None knew
Cept I who
Ran through copses and brambles
(Legs all scratched) dashing over
Streams (that had flowed
From before all ages)
Catching the last guttering
Shreds of sunlight and
Letting them
Crackle cross my necks and arms
(For I had
Not known it
In St. Martin’s Land)

Chasing stoat and starling
To bring to you my darling

1/2

>>9838388

2/2

Therein lay the
Old gods of my soul
(Gods that are best left unsung)
Yet they sometimes creep
Through the kirks that
I am bidden to now
Roe deer
Eye on altar
Shifted from within

Chasing stoat and starling
To bring to you my darling

Once there was a man
(Walking in the desert)
And he found a dragon
(Walking in the desert)
The dragon slithered under his skin
And ate and ate and ate
It hollowed him out
And sat in his heart
Til he was a pelt
A suit of faded green
Worn by a dragon
(Walking in the desert)

And when the mountains
At the end of the world turn
Red and my heart makes
Passage to the Sunless Country
To the Great Below
It will be the broad beans
And the blackberries
That are remembered
And to be again
In St Martin’s Land

For I am there
All nights
(As I sleep)
I am there

Chasing stoat and starling
To bring to you my darling

>>9821063
>Rejuvenated after his release, he decided to use his miraculously extended lease on life to drink to death in Hawaii. He died in 2002.
nice

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Looking in the mirror this morning I realized that I had finally become old. I used to look at my body as if it were a bad haircut or a short and annoying cold. It'll be gone tomorrow. It'll change by next month. Subconsciously, I always expect to see how I was in my twenties: sleek and curled brown hair, a modest frame, an intelligent gaze, morning wood. But looking at myself in the mirror, I knew with certainty that nothing could be done to fix my sagging chest and that my stomach was only going to enlarge from here on out. My back problems are getting worse, food doesn't taste as good as it used to, and I have a pill bottle for every ailment I've experienced over the past twenty years in a small cabinet above the toilet that I hit my head on every time I try to sit down and shit. What a mess. Who is this man in the glass in front of me? When did I start wearing contacts? When was the last time I cleaned this mirror?

My birthday was celebrated by a call from my co-worker Garrett and a knee-jerk decision to go out and buy a new table that I didn't need. I have been living in the same apartment for nearly thirty years, having immediately gotten a local job after passing my Bar exam, and I realized that I haven't bought a substantial piece of furniture since I moved in with my grad roommates. I am fifty four years old as of ten days ago and my only plans for today are to return the table after I shave and take my morning aspirin.

Thinking about of this made part of me want to go outside and smoke a cigarette even though I had quit smoking nearly three decades ago at the request of my long ex-girlfriend. I had always heard it was hell, but I had quit without any noticeable problems and soon forgot I ever smoked at all.

>>9821506
this is genius >>9823021
you didn't write this

Wrote a poem:


and who would find my corpse?

bloated and rotten on the carpet

who woud clean it up?

the melted fat and flesh

glues me to the floor

you'll need to replace that carpet

it's done-zo, kaput, bye-bye!

now I'm happy I never vacuumed

>>9838740
gave me a giggle

>>9833605
>>9833611

Not bad

I think what would help is to present it in a less editorial voice - take out phrases like "they should be miserable" and let us decide for ourselves.

>>9835733
>Liked
The setting.
Sameer's eagerness to start a job I personally hate.
>Dislike
The elderly bald man and the girl. Everything after that didn't grab my attention on it's own. The shock factor didn't kept me interested.

Very new at writing, id like to get good at describing stuff before writing about "meaningful" things.

> The tall figure suddenly stopped in its tracks and turned around to face me. It's whole body had already stiffened up once our eyes met, as if the rythmic and tender flesh i was observing just a minute ago had turned into rigid wood. The open brown eyes and large ears stood out on the otherwise blank face. I could hear it's troath swallow itself and drops of sweat began to appear on parts of the long face where the sun shined at its brightest.

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>second section of my short story

https://pastebin.com/evCLLcWG

>>9840906

The narrator showing off and the crammed in "style" overshadow the actual story.

Cut out "I digress"es , they add nothing and only serve to cut my focus away from your actual subject

>>9841042
Ok thanks, I'm working on paring down my writing style (but not to the skeletal simplicity of Hemingway). I used to write very verbosely. I guess it still shows too much

Feeding the Monkey
The path, worn marrow deep
leads me again to stagnation.
The space choked with growth
too solidly fibrous to civilize,
pitted by the bites of countless mouths,
too small to kill but not to change.
It hurts me just as much,
the both of us poised here at the top
intimate as two strangers could get.
And just when I think my shell can’t take the pressure,
her lungs empty and I breathe her in,
watch her eyes go from windows to mirrors.

Took a break from writing after hitting a rough time in my life.

https://pastebin.com/EAjkEFvs

The basic premise is a slasher movie, plays straight many of the archetypes and story elements but further down the line im planning on giving it a little twist.

Note this is a very rough draft that i've written in the past two hours and is subject to change/underwritten in general. I've got the general plot of the chapter sorted it's just the atmosphere and description i feel needs tightening up.

>>9841507
Worth mentioning I'm writing for a younger audience and trying to keep the teens personal lives as important as the horror without it seeming too "typical high school drama".

I realise that's a little bit of an oxymoron but would like to have something with a bit of edge that kids could read and relate too, with the horror aspect serving as a disguise to social anxiety/expectations of 16-18 year old life.

>>9841540
>>9841507
Lastly if that's no good i could do with some opinions on this piece.

https://pastebin.com/f0R8MebX

Going for a disoriented surreal atmosphere where the reader should feel confused but in a curious way rather than disinterested. Again you might have to be kind with punctuation and so on, i rarely redo chapters until i've finished the entire plot of whatever i'm writing.

>>9841507
“After the depression in the 20’s the guy living in this house Old Jack Horrens found his stocks and shit going down the toilet”
I kinda feel like this could be worded better, if he's meant to be making a facetious statement then adding 'his' before shit might better imply a tonal emphasis on 'and', it just sounds better in my head like that.

>>9821063
Note that HIV breaks down quickly when exposed to air or light. There wouldn't be any in decades-old dried blood.

First two paragraphs lifted from my new short story:

It was, as far as I can ascertain, in September of the year 1811 that a post-chaise drew up before the door of Aswarby Hall, in the heart of Lincolnshire. The little boy who was the only passenger in the chaise, and who jumped out as soon as it had stopped, looked about him with the keenest curiosity during the short interval that elapsed between the ringing of the bell and the opening of the hall door. He saw a tall, square, red-brick house, built in the reign of Anne; a stone-pillared porch had been added in the purer classical style of 1790; the windows of the house were many, tall and narrow, with small panes and thick white woodwork. A pediment, pierced with a round window, crowned the front. There were wings to right and left, connected by curious glazed galleries, supported by colonnades, with the central block. These wings plainly contained the stables and offices of the house. Each was surmounted by an ornamental cupola with a gilded vane.

An evening light shone on the building, making the window-panes glow like so many fires. Away from the Hall in front stretched a flat park studded with oaks and fringed with firs, which stood out against the sky. The clock in the church-tower, buried in trees on the edge of the park, only its golden weather-cock catching the light, was striking six, and the sound came gently beating down the wind. It was altogether a pleasant impression, though tinged with the sort of melancholy appropriate to an evening in early autumn, that was conveyed to the mind of the boy who was standing in the porch waiting for the door to open to him.

>>9842553
he is still waiting for door to be opened at end of second para but its a short interval in the first para apparentyl? clearly this invalidates the whole shitty thing

Despair Forever
Our wicked Obsessions, Objections
Immortal, Dawn to Dusk
Reborn is the Ghost of Me
Lost in my Dreams, the Waves
Nightmare Eternal
Unstable Petals
Falling Desire
to Find a Reality
Where I am, me?

They gazed upon its being in wonder and horror. It carried an air of absolute intimidation. A majestic presence, to which All bore witness. In that instant All became One. One became Nothing. The Rich and Poor, Strong and weak, Good and Evil. Nothing mattered for Everything was finally truly equal in Nothingness.

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We are the young people of this age.
The teens of the Second Millennium.
An age were boys can be girls,
and girls can be boys.
Where virtual can be reality,
and reality can be virtual.
An age of hyper modernity,
hyper corporations,
and hyper technology,
Of social media, that turns out not so social.
A society on the brink of environmental disaster.
We have the entire history of humanity before us.
Philosophy, religion, science, and art.
But we would rather watch a cute cat in a cart.
Every day my wealth increases with a new facebook like.
I got the newest shoes after watching a commercial by Nike.
The old society is crumbling into itself.
My selfies are not on the shelf, but in the cloud.
A cloud that causes acid rain, melting my brain.
do you know what I am talking about?
Oil, metals, and genetic vegetables.
The earth is not my home, but my sex slave.
I rape her like, the media rapes the minds of the young.
My body is not a temple, but a container for xtc at the rave.
I have a special safe zone, its place of concrete stone.
With 4 wheeled metal boxes that fart poisonos gas.
I have 500 friends online, but feel so alone.
Outside of the city is totally unknown.
Aren't there wild animals that eat me to the bone?
Luckily I can see tigers from the comfort of home.
I have a chair in virtual space that I call my throne.
But in real life my life is a disgrace.
Drinking starbucks and shoving hamburgers down my face.
Look at me, I am so happy! look at me!
After I made another visit to the psychiatrists place.
And watching celebrity gossip on TV.

>>9842031
I agree with you, most of the chapter was written to get the plot down.

That said i'm trying to keep speech somewhat realistic having filler words and trying to make it sound authentic that some high school kid would say that.

The Sorcerer raised a fist to his eyes and wiped away the rivers. Weakly smiling, he wrapped his feeble arms around half the Dragon’s abdomen.

‘Why?’, he said. ‘Why did you stick with me all these years?’

‘At first I wanted to kill you. But you treated me so nicely over the years and when the magic wore off; I couldn’t leave you. Besides, you’d die without me, you can’t do this by yourself anymore. You need me to help you’.

The Sorcerer spat a glob of blood on the floor and exploded into a fit of coughing.

‘You need some rest’, the Dragon said. ‘I’ll be right back’. He lowered him into a chair with his scalpel-like claws. ‘Don’t move, okay?’.

The Dragon came back with a bowl of warm soup. He took care in his work, careful to cut and remove bones in the meat for the old man’s digestion. Placing the bowl by the Sorcerer’s side, he continued his work around the tower: sweeping its many floors, repairing its derelict walls and cooking for his master.

‘Thank-you’, the Sorcerer said. 'Thank-you for everything you've done all these years'.

>>9843287
Sounds interesting. What's the premise of the story? Is it a short story or something bigger?

>>9820775

''Codswallop'' rasped the old hag, staring intently into her brew of caffeinated cider. ''Nobody can tell me what's to do with mine''. The stitches on the dress clung for dear life, working in unison to keep the unaware wearer in comfort from the drafts that seeped into her shack from every direction. Where had all the good men gone? ZOOM
That was not relevant now as she tilt her head backwards, falling quite graciously onto the threadbare carpeted floor. A cat clambered atop the shapely mound, ready to prize an eyeball from its adoptive caregiver. With one final whimper stacey screamed. ''I am beautiful''

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Well @GNNNUUUULLLFFF, at least I will go down as a president!

Ooga booga if if if uhh uhh ahh ahh if if if

Okie doke!

>>9843131
boring. boring boring boring. nothing you've said is interesting, or new. lrn 2 think.

>>9843131
I don't want to be as harsh as >>9844124

If you want to make a profound statement about society find a specific area that you dislike and right something with more substance on that area.

At the moment you're angstymillenial/10.

They littered his mind, each a pylon that stood higher inside his remembrance than they had outside it. Each better in memory than they had been in the time. He would hear of them in passing, from his family back home or a letter or call. It was funny how hard it hit him when the status quo changed. He remembered once of hearing of a dear friend moving states; he nearly drowned in an inexplicable feeling of loss. Once his mother had told him of a neighbor, someone who had been near to an Aunt when he was young, passing. Dread engulfed him at that moment, and he had nearly broken to tears. The longing for stagnation, for everything to remain as pristine as it seemed in his youth remained inside him. It was a cancer he couldn't cure, and it brought him closer to something he could only identify as death of the soul.

It always amazing him how quickly disconnect grew in these times. It started early now days, children as young as 5 or 6 picking up phones and losing themselves in games; They would ignore their surroundings, the other people around them, the fund and joy of simply running and rough housing. He was born in the young era, he though. Too late to explore the world, to enjoy the raw, untainted beauty of the land, or to fight for a just cause, and yet all the same to early to venture to new lands. He was stuck in the middle like some mediocre awkward cog. It ate at him most days, slowly turning him bitter as all the games, stories, and enjoyments of his life were lost only generations later.

There's a brief moment when you fall where your stomach stays in position. It's a bizarre feeling, and a relatively common one all the same. When he was young, he'd feel it as his father drove a little too fast over the train tracks; As he grew older, in the sudden loss of lift as his plane momentarily dropped in the sky. Now, as he fell, he felt it again. It stayed with him momentarily as he built up that initial acceleration before leaving him as he grew accustomed to the speed. He wanted to laugh as he had always done in the past. Laugh as his father looked back at him a smile one his face. Laugh as his wings once again found their lift and he was once again entranced by the vastness of the world around him.
He wanted to laugh; Laugh as he realized if he had only gripped a few inches over he would've been fine, laugh as he realized the serenity that would continue after he had been buried, laugh as he hoped and prayed against all reason something would catch hold of his hand and save him.
He wanted to laugh at it all, but he was too far gone and no sound would escape his lips. Instead he closed his eyes and waited, and as he did memories embraced him. He remembered his brother and how they'd run, squabble, and enjoy every moment of it. He remembered his mom and dad and how in love they had seen, and the inevitable pain of their moving on. He remembered Jessie and how in love with her he had been; Perhaps he still was. Nights filled his mind, the both of them sprawled on the grass taking in the stars. They felt the warm summer winds caressing them. She threw her arms over him and would smile with an Ecstasy he would rarely see in her.
And all the people, the ones he hid from, returned to surround him. They came one by one through his mind showing the joy and pain and contentedness they had given. He wished there had been more. The wind embraced his face and pine invaded his senses. He smiled and opened his eyes, taking in the mountains.
She stood horrified. He was face down on the rocks below her, blood spilling from under him. He had taken a misstep as he climbed, it seemed, and fell some 50 feet. She scrambled down the rocks and had shook him violently. She felt nothing, and was too terrified to turn him over. She stood there awhile until another group cam along. They escorted he away leaving two behind to watch his body.
'Poor son of a bitch,' said the one in flannel, he had his head leaning against one of the trees, 'He nearly made it too."
The other, rounder one simply shrugged and put on a sad smile "At least it was a beautiful day."
The one in the flannel kicked off the tree "Hell, maybe it still is."

>>9844507 6.5/10
>>9844540 what/10
>>9844598 4.5/10

>>9844665
Thanks for the ratings bro. Any other feedback?

Falling down rhythmically each drop resounds with glee
At harsh thunder’s entry, stopped
Knights made of ivory danced ‘neath black Calvary
War shouts end revelry, abrupt

(Scrambling fate’s hands seek to reshape the strings)

Ships tossing endlessly, the helmsman slumped
Hale thumped NO Glaciers rose from the deep and bumped into the boats

(The hands of fate grow still, their master humming slowly, slumming in oblivion, summing nothings together, becoming slave to empty, empty, silence)


Over smooth waters the knights, through their visors, see,
Straits, where rain falls gently, through the sea

Yet the following tide smashes their ship and pride:
On rocks no lookout spied, crushed.

(Son of a bitch. I swear this piano’s broken.)

>>9844598

I read it again and I guess this deserves at least a 6.

THE LAMENT OF A MIDDLE AGED MAN AT THE BAR

I fucked her in her pussy,
my dick went in and out
I fucked her in the pussy,
she didn't scream or shout.

We'd met on fifth and vine street,
the dusk was pink and thick.
We'd met on fifth and vine street,
I grabbed and pulled her quick.

I fucked her in her pussy,
her skirt around her head.
I fucked her in the pussy.
Who wants a boy instead?

She seemed so young and simple
compared to whores in rouge.
She seemed so plain and simple
compared to beatitude.

I fucked her in her pussy,
my dick went in and in.
I fucked her in the pussy,
This is where it begins.

She didn't turn to scowl at me,
She didn't turn to smile.
She didn't tell me yes, but oh,
she said "You'll work awhile."

Because I fucked her in her pussy,
I've got a pair of girls.
Because I fucked her in the pussy,
I'm scared for them. The world!

Oh tell me brother, tell me
what can I ever do?
Oh tell me brother, tell me
what can I ever do?

We've got a house on seventh
with pretty little bays.
We've got a house on seventh.
Soon she'll send me away.

I fuck her in the pussy.
She smokes a cigarette.
I fuck her in the pussy.
She reads the new gazette.

Oh tell me brother, tell me
what can I ever do?
Oh tell me brother, tell me,
do I stick it where she poos?

She seemed so young and simple
compared to whores in rouge.
She seemed so plain and simple
compared to beatitude.

Oh tell me brother, tell me
what can I ever do?
Oh tell me brother, tell me
what can I ever do?

>>9844708
Phrases and images just not thrilling and musical enough to justify how opaque this is. Go back to Yeats and Auden.


>>9844598
>It's a bizarre feeling, and a relatively common one all the same.

Remove this and all sentences like this from your writing. Your writing is also too vague, full of too many vague words, and it feels like it's set inside a book instead of somewhere. Go outside more and write about that.
>>9844540
>>9844507

If it's not interesting enough for you to even write a small story around , it's not interesting enough for me to examine.

>>9843468
Jerkoff and you know it.

>>9843463
Too cute by half.

>>9843287
Dialogue sounds too much like both parties speaking to a third person rather than to each other. Write speech that assumes what both already know.

>>9843131
whoa dude, so deep

>>9842655


Jerkoff and you don't know it.

>>9842645
Actually meaningless because it is so abstract.

>>9842553
Insert more simple sentences. This is too tiring for the level of reward. It's also off. You need to read more Victorian fiction or dial it back.

>>9841581
You sound like you're trying to write really hard. Use plainer words. The words you're choosing distract from what you're trying to get across. This is probably deep down because you dont give a shit about your story, you care about being a person who can write a kind of mood. Allow the mood to come from the story.

>>9841284
Dully complicated.

>>9840906
>>9841042
Agreed.

>>9840850
This is a mistake. Find what is meaningful to you and you will find a way to write about it that is true and good.

>>9838740
The situation of this poem is thin but the voice is charming. Good ending. Cut the line "glues me to the floor."

>>9838485
Rework all the descriptions. Expand the second and third paragraphs into an actual story, with scenes.

>>9838388
The language is dull.

>>9837528
You're a decent writer. Now write a story.

>>9835733
>Short story written from a dream.
Why would I care about your dreams? Dull as shit.

>>9835204
Needs more scenes less summary.

>>9834968
You are writing poems that court interpretation rather than writing poems in response to things. You should be trying to limit meaning more.

The poem itself has good flow but its a fragment.

>>9834496
Read 100 more books.

>>9844977
What's so complicated about it?

>>9844977

> This is a mistake. Find what is meaningful to you and you will find a way to write about it that is true

Hmm, i think youre right. I guess i am just so used to skills having important fundamentals: Drawing, music and you name it, but i guess that in writing basic grammar and vocabulary will already suffice. The rest will develop on the way.
Style will adapt to your message and it should be that way since i do value the meaning more in literature, its quite a freeing thought that i can already start with the juicy part.

Thanks for your feedback. Ill try to implement some personal thoughts next time.

For just a moment, he turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the world around him. No amount of thunderous noise could penetrate the blanket of peace he felt just by looking at the face of the woman he loved. There was nothing more important than to truly believe the reality he was in was real. To believe in the realness of his rose on a battlefield that kept him from falling through the gates of oblivion.
Like a drunkard in delirium, he raised his hand and gently reached for her face, afraid she might flicker out of existence as if she was just an illusion of a perfection, a perfect illusion. He leaned into her and placed his nose next to the nape.
With his fingertips, he felt her warmth.
With his nose, he felt her scent.
Emotion he didn’t recognize welled within his chest and hurt him softly, a thin ribbon squeezing his heart. He welcomed the pain, greeted it with open arms. It made him feel alive. Alive and real. Releasing a short breath, a small smile settled on his mouth.
‘I really am back.’

>>9845325
If you're drawing, you draw from life. And generally speaking, you draw things you want to be able to draw or things you find visually interesting.

If you play music, you don't practice with genres you hate. Even fucking around you're doing it towards the kind of music you like best.

>>9845303
It's oblique, the grammar is complicated relative to the length, there's a lot of word modification going on, the non-literal phrases don't conform to a unifying conceit.

>>9843463
>generic MRA fantasy #2,998,457

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To Ma Own beloved Lassie. A poem on her 17th Birthday. Lend us a couple of bob till Thursday. I'm absolutely skint. But I'm expecting a postal order and I can pay you back as soon as it comes. Love Ewan.

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>>9844977
>Rework all the descriptions. Expand the second and third paragraphs into an actual story, with scenes.
I can dig. I usually just try to write a paragraph or two in 30 mins whenever I see these threads.

judge sex scene

She approached and stood on her toes to kiss him. He picked up her body, and faltering for a bit, laid her down on the bed. The flashes of kisses between them, the pulling of the hair, the scratching of skin under passion. He felt the fluidity of her body likes waves underneath him and her heart going like tattoo as her feet caught onto the sheet and ripped it loose. Her nails struck the skin on his back and she bit down on his trapezius muscle. He felt none of this, he was pounding the immensity of her anvil-flesh, his hands dipped into the folds of her waist. Again and again. He was going like a wrathful pendulum, falling into her and out of her, she gasping and moaning in delirium lust with each fusillade. He locked his lips unto her vampiric damp mouth for one epiphanous moment, and with one final thrust and an execration he collapsed next to her.

The Sun Never Fades

The sun never fades,
Never wanes,
Never not to see another day.
Beneath his regal splendor,
In the forests and the seas
Life riots in the throes of death,
Condemned to live,
And die again.
Decrying their fate,
the chirping birds light the forest aloud with noise,
The wolves howl,
And the trees join in silent commiseration.
By dawn the object of their jealousy has returned,
The everburning, happy sun.
What unfairness is his timeless condition
To his subjects below who languish in their mortality.
Man looks in envy at that kingly star,
Fixed in the sky for the perishing to see;
the sun, forever young.

Of estival graves of camberly trees
I have been so graced by sights of the sun;
So harsh to mine eye of bronze drapes o’er seas
Of reefly paths keeled by the charged bosun.
Of seines cast to seas and followed by leaves,
Of those moans uttered by willows in pain,
I wish them buried neath their own umbrage.

[ Just got back into the groove of writing, tried to get out about a page of work. Be brutal. ]

Charlotte has been watching the sky for years, and as long as it’s snowed, she’s never seen a woman float to the ground, light as a snowflake.

December in Ellsfalls was as quiet as the townfolk could make it. Unluckily for the gentle, peaceful people, tourists rolled through the village as often as they could, eager to see even a fraction of the mysterious beauty that captivated anyone who passed by. But, as the year grew late, not even the splendor of the frozen Shivala Falls could convince the general populace to abandon their homes for Christmas. Those who appeared on the street were either locals out to search the wares of some firelit store or a lonely, wandering soul, hoping that fate decides its time for them to finally be free of their worries and woes.

Charlotte never thought of herself as someone desperate for something else. Her life was just as gentle as the town liked, never straying too far from her hometown, inheriting her mother’s dress shop at the first hint of Abagail Feliana’s desire for retirement. Three years had past since then, three years of sleepy snowfall, bright-eyed travelers buying her dresses at an even rate, and the world spinning in blissful peace.

In the deep winter, Charlotte tended to live her days with an air of luxury, the bulk of her business for the season finished up weeks ago. Stepping out onto the cobblestone stairs leading to her store, Charlotte fitted her mittens onto her hands, locked the old wooden door shut, and turned to stroll down the snow-sprinkled sidewalk with the lights left on. The locals appreciated lights left to brighten anyone’s night, enough so that it was tradition to leave the lights on when one was out, at least until midnight. By that point, only the streetlamps were left to light the sidewalks as deeper darkness covered the town, allowing the world to take a moment to themselves.

It wasn’t difficult to get away from Ellsfalls. There were plenty of sidewalks that lead to old, winding trails deep into the surrounding forests. It wasn’t uncommon for a home or two to lead this far back, worn cottages filled with firelight and love lining the cliffs and mountains. Charlotte slowly halted at a railing blocking her path from one particular gorge, leading down to a crystalline creek, silent in the moonlight. Snow danced in the air as it drifted below, glimmering in the light glowing from a line of frost-white streetlamps trailing along another secret, cozy path. Looking into the swirling night sky, Charlotte can barely see a single star, bright, twinkling through the endless overcast.

Staring longer, Charlotte concludes that, if that were a star, there’s no way it’d be getting bigger that fast.

>>9846031
Get rid of the following:
>Unluckily
>hoping that fate decides its time for them to finally be free of their worries and woes.
>as gentle as the town liked
>tended
>fitted
>filled with firelight and love
>slowly halted
>it’d

You pulled a Thomas Harris and changed tenses in the middle of the passage.

Also: show, don't tell.

>>9846135

Thank you. I'll do my best to improve it.

>>9844977
>>9842655
jerkoff?

>>9821063
*browses /mu/*
*reads DFW once*

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>>9820775
"Absolute chaos surrounded him. People cried out, looking for friends and family, but those who had found their loved ones were _________"
what do i say? "rarely satisfied"?

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Here's my try, guys.

Warning: Dark Fantasy, there might be edge.

Please request if you want more.

>>9843370
It's just a short writing exercise; the end of itself.

Look, my worms, here.
There's lukewarm deer.
Blood red floods, dead.
Squirmed in its deathbed.
No longer shed a tear.

it's about rape of little girls

>>9846708

harsh, but not far off.

>>9846746
>First line is weather/scenery description
Dropped.

Seriously though it's so overdone. I'd caution against it. The rest isn't terrible. It's not great but it isn't terrible.

>>9847326

Thanks for the critique, anon. I'll do what I can to not be too hammy next time.

>>9847326
Same anon here from above comment, or did you mean the weather description was a trope overdone?

>>9847356
Yeah I guess you could call it a trope. Have something else as your opening line.

A poem I wrote a while ago.
Not sure how I feel about it so open to any opinions.


Pinkly golden
Shafts of divinity
If undappled
By the grandly oak tree
Then yawning terror;
Quell modernity

My attempt at a third person nonfiction I have the whole story done, so reply if you want more or just criticisms.

Frostbite
“I’m going with or without you.” A simple wave from the other runaways seems to say “we’re coming,” but after a while Anon was positive he would be alone on this mission. It seemed easy enough, just follow the road, that’s all he had to do, so he starts on his journey. He’s about a mile along the way when a car pulls up beside him. Instinctively, he pulls up his hood. He doesn’t have time for this. The driver, a cleaning woman from the facility, rolls down her window,
“Are you sure you want to do this? Just go back Anon.”
He chuckles. The mission was the result of a week of thinking if he should go or not. There was no way he was turning back now. The hard part was over. He was already free. He keeps walking. The car follows and this agitates him so he walks faster, the car always on his heels. Annoyed, he turns and cuts into the forest. He knows the road. If he goes through the forest he should be back on the road in no time without any further annoyances.

>>9847369

I don't like chewing on the "kly," the "dappled," and the "grandly," but I also don't think you should change them.

I don't like the semi-colon there, and I would remove it.

I like the poem and the images and sounds it brings me to consider.

>>9847369
I personally don't like it, doesn't really flow well.

>>9847402
The pinkly's bothered me for a while. First two lines remind me of a dick tbqh. The grandly just makes it worse.

>>9847404
Yeah that's how I feel about it. Some of the lines I like but as a whole it feels really... angular. I don't understand metre well at all and haven't read near enough poetry.

q to anyone else in this thread: who should I read to get better with the fundamentals of poetry? i get imagery and wordplay but there's technical aspects I unfortunately lack instincts regarding. perhaps studying my betters could provide some aid.

>>9847433
Just read a book on alliteration. I know it sounds stupid but trust.

>>9847369
"yawning terror" has no context and is meaningless. not really fond of the conclusion either since it also comes out of nowhere.

>>9847433

pinkly and grandly bother me too.

I said leave them in because I think they're necessary for the last line to work. What better way to get us on the side of quelling modernity than to have us endure a disjointed, "pinkly, dappled, and grandly"?

As for getting better with "the fundamentals," start with basic structures/schemes. Try writing a bit in them. At the same time, try and find poetry you enjoy and figure out why you enjoy it, then figure out how it relates to the rest of poetic tradition.

>>9847450

not the guy who wrote it, but the context is there. It's the oak tree yawning...

>>9847455
the tree is terrifying? who's scared of a tree? this is a poem about dendrophobia?

>>9820775
A thin long road which trails through the field and up to the forest. Who first stepped this into being? A deer or rabbit who’s feet clear a wisp through the ground, followed then by others following wearing it deeper. A young shepherd who catches the trail and uses it to cross from grass to grass. Thus cutting the tract through the hills without an owner, pure land.
A man come, he comes from the North sacked with tools. A broad man almost hidden in the wires of iron red hair. What is seen on his skin is a story written in scars of a coarse man.
Here where the marsh gives way to the gentle forest he hears the voice of running water where he rests his pack and looks around, all creatures silent around while he mutters to himself. “This may do” his rasping voice groans as his picks up his axe.

He begins clearing, stopping to drink from the stream, eat, and sleep. Not more not less. He rises with the sun and falls with the timber he has cleared in the evening.
The afternoon of the third day he leans against a freshly downed trunk and looks out upon his work. “This may do”. Now begins the scrapping and splitting of many rough knotted boards, and from the ground up a rough shelter is cobbled out of the land.

>>9847462

>the tree is terrifying?
no.

>who's scared of a tree?
"they" (the pinkly golden shafts of divinity) are not scared of the tree. the terror lies either in:

1. the possibility of their ceasing to exist (as a result of the tree's yawn).

2. not being able to quell modernity (because the tree's 'yawn' prevented them from doing so).

>>9847455
>>9847462
>>9847450
It's the sky that's yawning

this might make it better or worse but essentially I was on a bus looking at all the wretched people on said bus and feeling generally angsty and withered and full of ennui and weighed down by the anxiety of urban life yadayada abloobloo :'(

And then i looked to my right and saw this absolutely awe inspiring pink sunset coming through these tall oak trees we got down in Texas Anna's just felt lifted from the moment and kinda stupid for being so cynical and the whole thing just felt really primordially inspirational and put me in a great mood for the rest of the day despite being in a stupid lonely city

And the sky's yawning because it just seemed very stretched out and like a gaping maw and the sun was going down so I thought the whole thing just seemed a bit sleepy, preparing for rest.

so it's just about the transcendence of nature as a cure for modern urban alienation, I guess.

>>9847493
that's a good moment to capture but the poem's too short to explain any of that. poetry should not be a puzzle to figure out.