Case in point: I should've been doing more research for my American Labor History essay. Or sleeping. Something normal and healthy. Instead, I'm here. Doing more short writing nonsense. In a room. With a dog in my lap who keeps licking my elbow for no apparent reason.
Five 100-word drabbles. Prompts are from Set #5, same place as before. I fully realize that most of these will make sense only to me, but right now I am going to go to sleep, then wake up and finish this stupid paper before 11:55 PM if it kills me.
Okay, so this is part-something new I've started, part-terrible attempt at mimicking ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
nombrehetomado in her brilliance at short fiction/being incredibly direct in her writing and also, excellent. These probably won't ever go anywhere, like, actual story-wise, but here we are all the same: five drabbles, each 100 words long, and basically an attempt at keeping myself sane in the midst of all the end-of-semester madness I've got going on. Prompts are from Set #12 over on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif){kind=small}
infinite_muses. I will be working through some of the other sets they have posted over the next few months, after I finish up papers and before/between starting my summer classes. Probably after all that, too.
Title: Into the Woods
Summary: “They won’t bite unless they’re provoked.” A different look at Little Red Riding Hood, written for a prompt in my Creative Writing class.
Word Count: 2,682
Warning(s): Death, violence, werewolves – read at your own risk.
Disclaimer: Mine, mine, they’re all mine.
A/N: Not necessarily my best, but after finding this picture and listening to “Howl” one too many times, this happened.
Title: Special
Summary: He is not their normal fare.
Word Count: 1,044
Warning(s): Death, potentially disturbing content.
Disclaimer: Mine, mine, all mine.
A/N: The goal was to include five different things in one cohesive story: a deaf boy, a carnival, an alarm, a backpack, a murder. Everybody else wrote about broken hearts and attempts at mysteries and junk. I wrote this.
Thank God, LJ's Alive Again
Title: Circus Folk
Summary: It’s always an adventure when Petra’s family comes to town.
Word Count: 1,392
Warning(s): None!
Disclaimer: For once, all these people are mine.
A/N: Written for a prompt in my creative writing class, to take a picture and put words to it. I've added the one I used at the very end.
( "Henry, why are you on my roof?" )
Up until last October, I had never been to an actual funeral before. I had known people who had died – my great-grandmother when I was seven, my grandfather when I was eleven, a boy I’d kissed (and maybe loved a little, in that childish, first-crush kind of way) when I was fourteen – but I had never been to a funeral until my uncle passed away from cancer last year. It was a weird experience, not just because it was a Catholic service and I’m, well, not, but it was one of about three times that my mother’s side of my family was forced to interact with my father’s and like both times before it, it was about five shades of uncomfortable for everyone involved.
Because I wrote about my family, the only real changes I’ve made are just adjusting people’s names. In case you haven’t noticed, most of the people I know and love in real life get fun fake names when I mention them here, just to be on the safe side, and I’m continuing this tradition in this post. Aside from the name-changes I am posting the essay as-is, minor grammatical mistakes and all - no matter how much they hurt me inside. ;-)
Because I know I do. It's such a fascinating subject to me, figuring out how to get by when everything and everyone you've ever known is gone -- and of course by "fascinating", I mean "keeps me up at night and has me planning how to survive in the empty (and possibly zombie-infested) wasteland that was once human culture." This....fascination....isn't helped in any way by all those documentaries and specials the History Channel and Discovery Channel run really late at night. You know, the ones where all they talk about is the inevitable destruction of the planet by asteroids or aliens or floods or earthquakes or zombies a terrible and highly contagious virus that wipes out almost 98% of humanity? Yeah, those are really going to help me get to sleep tonight, Discovery Channel. Thank you for letting me know that there is no hope for preventing the total and complete decimation of the entire fucking galaxy. Seriously, for as informative as they can be -- I mean, thanks to the After the Apocalypse special on the History Channel, I now know how to start a fire with some steel wool and a car battery and how to properly scavenge supplies from a dead body, which are both incredibly important life skills that I was lacking -- I still find them to be pretty terrifying.
But hopefully this terror has proven to be a good thing, because from my ridiculous fears have come something actually resembling creativity. The original version of this story was written a little over a year ago, and I've been playing around with this idea since then and never really going anywhere with it until the past few days. The ever-lovely Harper "remixed" this idea in her own story a while ago and while we've been working on a collaborative "redux" of that on and off for the past few months, this is something a bit different.
( Enjoy? )
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