Didn’t progress past round one in the NYC Midnight short story competition, but the judges’ feedback is so good that I’m considering redrafting it and actually submitting somewhere. It’s been a long while since I had enough enthusiasm for a story to try a second take.
1,400 increasingly unhinged words deep now, including a plot-justified bad haiku. Might as well just ship me that first place hat now.
… and of course despite having a week, I choose to leave myself with a last day sprint.
I have an absurd idea that almost certainly won’t play. So obviously it’s the only thing I’m even considering.
Giving the short story challenge another try. I now have one week to write 2,500 words on:
GENRE: Ghost StorySUBJECT: Always a bridesmaid, never the brideCHARACTER: A developer
Just got some surprisingly positive feedback from a short story competition earlier in the year, despite, on a re-read, now realising how completely unhinged it was.
“They drink their drinks and defecate happily.” « genuinely the final line of the story.
My first prompt: a crime caper in a kindergarten featuring a proud mother…
So just your bog-standard Muppet Babies / Oceans 11 mashup.
“His eyes seemed to root back under all the bulk of that forehead, too thick, too jammy, all full of resistive meats and fluids; exhausting to cut into sections, should such a thing come up.”
I think I may have the turkey sweats.
Something I wasn’t expecting with ChatGPT is its non-trivial use in gamifying ‘the blank page’.
As a non-writer sounding board you can feed it some half-thought-through notion for a story, ask it to produce an outline or where to start, then essentially find ways to do the opposite.
If it produces a standard, formulaic approach to an idea, you can then tear that apart, or invert it. You can much more easily see your story, the one that it wouldn’t tell.
Is there a term like nerdsniping that applies to fiction writers when presented with an endless, winter photography stream of isolated, spooky roads?
“You’ll die. There’s always a chance… but in all honesty, you’ll die.” …
“It’s not an actual written language. He was French. It’s the phonetic spelling of something he overheard.” …