Freak Thoughts

For our 407 collab story, I want to write the story of the girl whose fiance dies. I’m considering making her pregnant. Is that too much?
I think I will use the mines as the catalyst for this tragedy. I’m planning on having them communicate through dreams and strange occurances. He is trying to tell her something. What point of view would work best?
I want to be in her head, but I don’t if it would be easiest to stay there, or if it would be better to be omniscent. I kind of wanted her family to be rich, and disapproving of her choice of mate; Kind of a “Pretty in Pink” scenario but backwards, with some twists, death, and a much more bizarre ending.
Any suggestions?

I’m currently working on a story about a little girl who is molested and abused at the hands of the babysitters. I’m at the point of the molestation, and am unsure where to go. I don’t know if I should give details, or skim over the event. Similarly, I don’t know if I should just stop it at the point just before the molestation, or continue on and let the girl tell and the molester recieve his punnishment. Here’s  the paragraph I can’t seem to get past:

I asked him if the other girls were going to play, and he said, “No, of course not! They’ll never play with you. You’re naughty. This isn’t a fun game. This is punishment”. And he undid his robe. Usually, he would pull the thing our through his pants hole, but this time he was totally naked. His old wrinkly body still makes me cringe. I can see his body, but no face. Perhaps it was too scary to look at.

Any suggestions???

I read and have noticed that some students are having issues with grammar and punctuation. I also have difficulty remembering all of teh little rules, so I have compiled a list of sites that may be helpful.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/607/02/

www.grammarbook.com/english_rules.asp

www.yourdictionary.com/grammar-rules/index.html

www.grammarbook.com/english_rules.asp

I have found more resources for our 407 collabrative story. Here’s a link to a site with a bunch of stories from Appalachian people who worked in coal mines. I found it very helpful

http://www.appalachianfolk.com/category/coal-mining-stories/

I am having such a hard time looking at my paper being up, seeing typos that I have missed in my rough draft, and thinking about the critique. It really does bother me when I see such things in my work. All I can say is that I’m hoping to deal with that issue and quickly correct the typos.

Well, here’s to tomorrow and to hoping that the reviews are good and I get a lot of good suggestions.

Reading James Fenimore Cooper has made me want to write an alternate history of the United States. Yes, I am proud to be an American. No, I am not proud of some of this country’s past and present. I want to write an alternate history piece in which the Native Americans won the initial strings of battles for the conquest of their land. They were the rightful owners and did not view it that way. I also want to give them extraordinary medical capabilities so they can become immune to the diseases that are spread both intentionally and unintentionally. I want their children to live, and never for them to be hanged in the number of thirteen. This will happen once and only once. The great spirit will show its dark side. The natives will use their immense knowledge of their own terrain to outsmart the assailants and steal their weapons. This is the story that would have been written as history if someone could have warned them. No, they befriended the whites and helped them survive. The same goes for the Spaniards who read them a proclamation in Spanish which they “had no hope of understanding” (Source: Corporate Avenger.)
and in effect meant this. There are several translations and this is the one in the Corporate Avenger song.
“We ask and require you to acknowledge the church as the ruler and
superior of the whole world and the high priest called pope and in his
name the king of Spain as lords of this land. If you submit we shall
receive you in all love and charity and shall leave you, your wives and
children and your lands free without servitude, but if you do not submit
we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall make war against
you, we shall take you and your wives and your children and shall make
slaves of them and we shall take away your goods and shall do you all
the harm and damage we can.”
I want the Natives to win. I think our society would have been more peaceful and moral had this land never been stolen. The great civilaization that already existed in North America.

This is 100% true and so are the gruesome details (which I will post here) in the song (which I won’t post here. Instead I’ll give you a different song so no one gets offended. Here’s the gruesome details.

“The Spaniards made bets as to who would slit a man in two or cut of
his head with one blow. They tore babies from their mother’s breast by
their feet and dashed their head against the rocks. They hanged Indians
by thirteen in honor and reverence for their redeemer and their twelve
apostles. They put wood underneath and with fire burned the Indians
alive.”

This time around the natives would be able to defend themselves because there will be a Paul Revere type in the natives who discovers the plan for conquest initially. This causes the tribes of America to unite in battle as one tribe.
Another Corporate Avenger song (Evolved) states
(I would indent but this is a post)

“Indians are not chinamen, some books contain lies.
If man had evolved from apes, there would be no more apes.
It has been said and written over and over again that the first north
Americans crossed on a land bridge from asia into the north America due to
exposed land which occured during the low sea levels of the last ice age.
It has been said that there is no historic record of these early pioneers the
last of which crossed supposedly at 10,000 years ago, even though great
civilizations, with great structures already existed in north and South America.

If man had evolved from apes, there would be no more apes.
Oh, the truth feels good.
All this is quoted as fact with absolutely no consideration to the common
sense notion that as an ice age recedes it does so from the warmest parts of
the earth around the equator, to the north and to the south towards poles.
This grear land bridge theory subliminally suggest that the people who were
native to this land were not native at all but mere descendants of immigrants.
If man had evolved from apes, there would be no more apes.
Oh, the truth feels good. ”

I would like to take this interpretation of the history so I can emphasize the strength of all of the tribes conjoined. It is their great civilization. North America will help South America and vice versa to eradicate the genocidal, parasitic and destructive evil from the face of their great union that requires no laws, boundaries, or borders. This land does not rely on treaties that become broken but on mutual respect and symbiotic relationships. This inner strength will assure the ultimate victory of the natives. They are no longer cornered or isolated. Sure they lose some battles but they have enough immunized men to fight forever! The battle is on!

I do not think war is right but I do believe that self- defense is a God given right to every organism on this planet.
(My main focus is making my story as realistic as possible this time around. The sole basis is not morality or absurdity. It is an alternate reality.) The link below where the text is underlined and talks about the RATM video is a link to the Gutenberg text detailing the initial destruction inflicted upon the natives.

I have kept journals all my life. Laying down in bed, recapping my day, speaking to this book that I wanted no one to read, yet thought so hard about. I can reread these old books and laugh, but back then it was my life, it was my biggest secret. I journaled like this up until I was 18. It drove me nuts, but I had already committed so much to journaling that I had to press on.

When I turned 19, I had had my computer for a semester. I was ready to fill it with my journal entries of the future, but something stirred in me. Something that made me HAVE to make journaling fun again. Or simply stop it all together.

I eventually came up with the idea to write journals as a narrative. Something that I am saying, in actual dialogue, something meant to be read out loud. I had also realized that no one cares what I had for breakfast, not even me, and what is important is perceived, felt, and thought.

Since then, my journal is complete, and I have started a new one. Below is an excerpt from that journal.

“…it’s that feeling you get just before you jump over the cliff’s edge. That tremendous and eruptious lurching in your heart, your ribs ache and the beats of your heart slam against your sternum. Your knees grow weak and the mind is consumed to a soft pudding of emotion behind which are only rose tinted thoughts, dreams and a skewed vision of reality, wrong in almost every way, but right because you made it so in your blinded eyes. Some would call it love, I call it a complete loss of yourself, everything you are, everything you want to be is now potentially compromised and it might all be for nothing, after all, nothing is pure, nothing is JUST out of innocence, every punch is meant to hurt and every comment is meant to earn a reaction, even if the reaction is nothing, for even nothing can be perceived and used. This love, this all consuming, disastrous being, this monster, this zombie creator that is love…is simply horrifying.
I am tired of the abusers of love, for love is abusive enough, it forces you to fall, for you do not rise up into love, you do not climb to that level with someone, you dig your grave with them, for only by death do you part. I loathe the men who dream of cheating, I hate the comments about how they love their significants and yet, complain and wonder about other options. I despise the women who enthrall themselves to the men made of lies. I mock the girl who walks from the one who matters, not for someone else, but for herself, one should never cave to love as if it necessary for survival, but nor shall you stumble away from it out of selfishness. And when she realizes that she is alone…that will be simply horrifying.
The deeper you dig your trench, trying to leave a mark on the impervious world, it becomes clearer, you cannot change anything in the grand scheme of things. For many, it is bothersome, it hurts them that they are insignificant, that they, the great ones, who are the worlds future, are not cared for because no one gives a damn, especially the world. For me? For me it is only comforting that I can effect people on a personal basis, I can kill, resurrect, punish, or save, the world doesn’t mind, it might convict me, but it doesn’t care. At least I know that by not being able to change the world, I can’t screw it up too bad either. The leaders have no power and the blood spills only because we want tears to fall, nothing is all there is, and for what is, is not known, and what is known, is a lie, for under every fact, lies another, under those rests even more, eventually, we run out of knowledge and are left with nothing, everything we know, is based upon nothing, for even our own existence, our gods, and our hope for purpose, while believed in, is still unknown, and that… is simply horrifying…”

~Excerpt From “The Life of Alone: An Oral History of my Nineteenth Year” a completed biography by Garrett Radant

Notice that this quite literally is an ongoing rant of my own. This can lead to grammatical errors, especially run-on sentences. When I finished writing for the day, I just stopped. I would the pick up the same idea, or a totally different when I sat down to write the next day. I never dated entries. It was and is very different to normal journaling, what do you think about my revision to classic journaling?

Thanks for reading.

I would like to use free energy in more detail than in the story I have posted. This may include refining this story in order to make it more believable. The miraculous elevator was said to be run through free energy but I did not do a thorough enough job of explaining how this technology is possible. Obviously the technology is more advanced than the admitted technology today because any device that might provide cheap energy would probably weigh down an elevator in these times. I need to explain how it was that technology had gotten this far or what characteristics of this other planet that exists in relation to potentials rather than actualities. I may choose to write a whole other story pertaining to free energy that might provide more detail. I want to write something that emphasizes the madness and genius of an inventor that has followed the path of Nikola Tesla and has translated it into their own modern energy science. This alarms the ‘global elite’ because it threatens their energy monopoly. This would be along the lines of a biography of a modern day Tesla. This time the people will win as I splice in my cheesy moral message that will detract ever so slightly (or largely depending on how I feel) from my piece. Yes, deal with it.
I really want to write about fantastic concepts, but my last two attempts have shown that I must go back and practice the basics of simplistic stories and examine the reasons for which they are sensical and believable. I have a tendency just to jump into the extraordinary and I sometimes leave readers in the dust. I will try to further develop my skills to make my works believable, but I also want to write about fantastic things as well.
Hopefully with this tale of a mad electrical experimentor/ inventor I can bring my stories back down to the earth and start with that point.
(My fiction writing is rusty. I haven’t completely finished a short story since high school I think – before these last two attempts)
I will try to make the piece more believable than my last two, but I still want to use technology that is more advanced than what is admitted currently. I will explain this man’s process of inventing and his inventions. His intention is to free mankind from the slavery of energy dependence and to provide free energy to every person on the planet.
The last piece I did was believable until the point that the free energy elevator just shot out of the guy’s house and went into outer space. I may choose to work with this piece to develop some alternate endings or to piece the fantastic events together to make them sensical and believable.
The story with the inventor will be helpful in bringing back my sense of the illusory cause and effect process.




I am using this guy for inspiration. I would like to progressively map his psychological processes while at the same time focusing on the vastness of the relevance of his (my character’s) realtion to the outside world.

Today I borrowed Dean the first portion of a comic named Transmetropolitan, written by Warren Ellis in 1997. I think it’s a cyberpunk story. I’m not quite sure, and I don’t want to stick my foot in my mouth again. :p

This story features a gonzo journalist named Spider Jerusalem, who goes through a nasty, gritty future and reports the news with a gun and an attitude, basically. I was thinking about that, the fact that it is in a visual medium, and I also thought about the discussion on horror in class. We found that the scariest monster a writer can put onto paper is one that the writer doesn’t describe, because then the reader will fill in that blank with whatever fits the best to them. It’s a very effective strategy, but this doesn’t only apply to monsters. This applies to technology as well. You’ll see instances of this in steampunk books, books like The Difference Engine or Boneshaker where machinery is described in function, but not necessarily in form. As a writer, we do this when there’s a specific effect we’re going for and don’t want to lose the reader in details they won’t connect with. We have the advantage over the visual medium in that respect, don’t we? (Note: It’s worth a mention that the difference engine was an already-existing machine and had a distinct form, but if you didn’t know that when you read the book, you’d have filled in that gap anyway. It’s just an example.)

Warren Ellis in Transmetropolitan had his vision and he executed it fairly well, but he does depend upon an artist. This artist makes a physical depiction of the events, characters, and setting for the reader to see. Around this time, laptops were not very common. They were pretty new technology. In the comic, Spider uses a laptop to transmit a story that he was writing live, and this feed was given out to the city for everyone to read. It scrolled across electronic billboards, but it still looked like a typewriter in a way. In 1997, that laptop was sleek and badass technology. Today? It’s common. Tomorrow? Not so much in the impressive category. Not exactly what you would envision for a futuristic story. So they lose longevity in that respect. It’s going to age, and it’s going to age quickly.

The writer of the novel or short story or whatever, we don’t have that deficiency. That drawback, disadvantage. We don’t need to spell out what a laptop looks like. We can just say it was a high-tech interface and describe how the character interacts with it, and we alone are responsible for the delivery of the image. We shape it to our needs, and let the audience do the rest of the work. It ages well because it’s malleable.

The point: I always write from a cinematic stance, as I’m sure many of us do. I write my stories like a script. I write like my story is being filmed, not told. I try to keep in mind what things would look like in motion, how they would age, how redundant and future-proof it is or could become. I’m fully cognizant of that every time I introduce some bit of technology or pop culture into a piece (which is why I cringed a little bit when Spider asked for a 2gig camera device. Never mention specific measurements of memory or computer speed!). But if it was made into a movie or a comic or a cartoon, I lose that power. I can no longer control my great vision.

I had a grand thought about converting one of my favorite stories to a screenplay a long time ago and that drive is still within me, but after today I have doubts because of this. I mean, I’m sure it wouldn’t get greenlit and sent to 20th Century Fox post-haste or anything, but it was a great idea, and I have a lot of vision for it. Then I lose the power. I lose the suspension and I lose that connection to my darling, lovely reader in this common space that they enable and help me to create. But I look at the movies that were already made, based upon this great story, and it makes me want to cry because they’re just so damn awful and miss the mark by a wide margin that I find it insulting. I want a glorious tribute to a story written by a great writer, but there seems to be a cost that is perhaps not worth it. And that is the story of how I learned to respect Alan Moore, the things he did, and the decisions he made along the way.

Yes, I’m posting this at midnight with all of my homework done. These are things that actually keep me awake at night.

I just wanted to thank everyone for taking the time to read and comment on our stories for today. I can tell that a lot of thought went into the feedback that we were given and I really do appreciate it. The class brought up a lot of things that I know I was having trouble with and gave me a lot of different options as far as how to tie things together. I was at sort of an impasse with my story, but now I have a lot of different things to consider when I pick it up again to revise. Again, thank you for your constructive honesty and I look forward to reading all of your stories!