/lit/ - Literature

>r8 h8 pls no appreci8

Music stops,
And, like the Legion,
Hostile spirits enter into these uncultured swine,
Radiating outward from the center,
Then returning to, as if elastic bands connected optic cables
Through some spiritual dimension
To my own,
Ebbing as the tide to distant climes,
Pulling with it all the jetsam of the drifts that crowd the shore with noise and brine,
Then throwing up the waste upon the same tired beachhead, mass redoubled,
In a perfect wave of water and of salt and of sand and of refuse,
Twisting as a claw-tipped limb at every heartstring,
From the very depths of Hell,
Disgust moves throughout the crowd
As they turn to regard me.

Baleful demons peer at me
From behind the eyes of my peers;
This cabal will not stand their order disrupted,
Unity demands itself from those who fraternize with acolytes as I do,
Cannot hold a thing unlike close to,
Lest it be chang-ed, and aberrated by so close a friendship
Into mire and ruin,
And all this I now see, one fraction of one blink after the point of no return.

Does some theatric Byzantine now tug
At strings and capers in the margins where I live,
Listening for the gloria of Melpomene, Helen of Troy,
Straining every atom of his soul
To hear the cricket, the frogs and the catepillars,
softly chewing through the milkbuds til they blossom, bud and butterfly alike,
But not the Siren or the Geist,
Nor any ancient ancestral wyrm
Attends his shrine, and still he writes a tear stained line?
And does he shed that tear for me?

Swftly doth the river of my intellect
Course through its track, in search of some outlet
Into which it can pour its autochthonous loathing,
Or else redirect a larger, greater river by its weight,
A pebble on the track
Projecting the freight car of stigmata into the gorge,
Never to arrive at station
And come pouring down upon my head.

Let this be a lesson to you, think I,
To never ask about the odor
Of your womanish acquaintances' feet
"Haha, just ironically, though,
Asking for a friend."

>>10171750
I asked this last thread but got no response
When writing a horror when does the spook show up, how often does it show up, and how long are do the spook's appearances last?

Is scaring the reader even possible?

Do I write for myself or the five* people who might find it?

>>10171804
Is this a poem? I'm bad at poems and writing. Your's makes me have bad thoughts, but I think it's good, possibly pretentious sounding, but good I think? Maybe?

I should not be exempt from the judgement of things
but what ails I complain are now odder that odd.
And what's best for me to die when all's collapse ahead of me
with reminding myself in gin that what matters matters.
Is it so? I've been troubling this thing for awhile.
What for? I've got fancy, but she won't dance with me.
These shoes are old and the lace burns, you see,
not that I know how to dance, not to smile, trance.
What is it that's in me that cannot set the chairs,
the table, tablecloth, polished silverware, the candle,
or what's in it for you? I'm of nothing ample,
but I certainly have a little more than something for you.

[drink]

Dance is without me, worldless, an empty ball.
Left like placid dogs, dogs bred the wild out of them.
Weather is fine, winds sting at one hundred hertz a footstep,
with love hollering, bruised in purple rain,
following the arch of dead Saturn, hand swings
like a pendulum to keep to the dead their timely resurrection.
I will not be delivered over Styx in a boat,
but float on coins - because I am not made for bloody conversation
with a seafarer, there is no use talking about forbidden fish.
What's there to eat when you are disproportionately sad,
and inappropriately drunk, when you are stretched into a rectangle
and mangled into perfect circles, and made to go round the question.
I will not ask the eternal question, but I will ask you "why this?"
Coward, coward, coward that you cannot answer.
Coward in hiding, coward, coward that you play silent.
Misty lovingly bastard client.
And there is certainly some star that bears your name elsewhere beyond the near astra.
Where? I will name you a few. This one near Andromeda, this one in the shape of a sheep.
This one that reminds you of the good and meek.
This one that is made in your shape.
There is not a lot of worth in words, I do not think.
Sit under the clouds, make tender love. Tell stories, release the doves.
There is not much else I would like to say.

>>10171815
I am >>10171979

I am quite drunk, but let me see if I can give appropriate answers.

The spook may show up whenever. The spook is best left autonomous, not confined by the device of the plot. The spook lasts only for as long as warranted, and does not drag his act out unless it is to finally die.

It is possible to scare a reader. It is possible to disgust them. Furthermore, it is possible to drive them to the verge of suicide. That is the function of books.

Write for yourself, but remember to unbecome yourself in the process.

7k words, horray

https://pastebin.com/nBGjCWQ5

Posted this maybe three threads ago and got some feedback. I'm not sure if I'm trying to rely too much on subtext. Copy paste it into word if you want indentation/space between paragraphs. Some italics are gone but it's fine. I might try reviewing a bunch of shit in like a week after I take the GRE and finish my other papers. If you just want to pick one chapter and review that it's fine, the first and second can be read separately. The third is incomplete though.

>>10171815
>When writing a horror
Focus on detail reveal order and speed. Time yourself reading things. Take this for example, from another student in one of my classes:

"
He finally breaks the silence, “Should we move?”
“I don’t think moving would be financially smart,” I try to keep my voice calm. He can’t know.
I can barely make out his voice, “Catherine, it hurts too much looking at the broken railing where Mom fell through.”
“A contractor is coming tomorrow to fix the damage.”
"

Note how all of the man's lines come after scene explanation etc, but all of the woman's are instant and slightly tangential in subject nature. You read it with the proper delays even though the author didn't pace it explicitly. It's pretty good for a four step exchange.

The problem with the rest of the paper was basically that it wasn't like this and that the detail reveal was haphazard (as well as the fact that the author overused "and" to the point of convincing me I was actually reading one of David Hume's arguments). You should really try thinking about it as though you were directing a movie.

>>10171979
I don't think I can critique, especially poetry
but your's sounds fancy and good
>>10172058
I'm very tired so I didn't read all of it yet, I liked what I did read though
it's nice
yeah!


Thank you both for your response!

>>10171804
fix your line breaks. your first fourteen beats are stronger as two lines at most and none of the breaks are natural as is really. it would approach competence if you just fucking didn't press enter at random. that is not how enjambment works. either put the line break in a natural point to break or make it look like ascii art.

>>10171979
>but what ails I complain are now
learn fucking english mate.
>[drink]
the bits after this are salvageable. if it is all one poem, drop the manners bit. you can't describe your incompetence right, and should work on the places where you can.
>beyond the near asta
I will stab you with the fish knife your mother was uncouth enough to have bought, you middle class slimer, if you do not stop that shit. You need to be careful around dropping shit that will get Victorian autist codices proving you wrong thrown at you. People who talk about astral projection are more tolerable than you when you do this. Stop making me hate your drunk ass.

Title: Down the Ramona Expressway

April 2017

In the afternoon of a golden neglect
The sun passes through her. Pink
Dress waving. Our unnatural hitch-hiker
Walking beyond the roads where the light
Echoes the mothers she does not know
Except as smog. Such is the vision of fog
That the child possesses. And poetry
Cannot be made here. Thin lines drawn
As though the thing that sings through her is
Everything to her. Everything shall be known
When hands gentler than any lineage rises
Into the mechanisms of flesh. A truck
Moves along the side of the road. It floats
Like any eternity that passes her by.

Title: A History of Solipsism

A HISTORY OF SOLIPSISM

At 10 I saw a magic trick.
11 – tried to copy it. 12
Was spent in a daze.
13 – told me… start again.

14, learnt to pick up lies
For 15. Learnt to close my eyes
To 16. Sounds again were heard
In 17. The old world turned,

And my 18. The party held
Just about everyone I knew
Sitting on expanding stools.
They took their lives, away they grew –

Title: Moral Poem 1

Life moves on. Do not worry about it
As a moral. Don’t fear the new works,
Nor wish light on each brittle shore,
Nor be dewed with a lack in your eyes –

For instance, surely this jellyfish knew
Its atmosphere – pleasure, and the sting
Upon this Earth. It’s placement in
A life lumped high in its purposes –

Then, the penguin. Don’t disappear
From a moral like this. Don’t be masked
In the black knit of its face. Surely there is
A way to speak of the moment at hand:

When the penguin devours the pulsing jet,
And a million hands can’t scurry back.

Title: Angst Poem 26

(The Blind Girl, John Everett Millais)

2012

How can Lez like Miley Cyrus, a whore
When Taylor Swift’s so much more pure...
I don’t understand it – I like Tay Tay more
And wish I could be like her. There,

She sings of rainbows. Miley waves ass
And woops-de-doo- for the crowd to see!
Somehow, it’s supposed to be ‘feminist’
But, it reeks of the patriarchy to me!

I don’t understand, but I ha-a-ave to watch
Miley... because we have to stay friends.
What a burden this bitch has wrought...

And all I wanted was a person who cared...
Yet, no one thinks like me! I know –
That I can see higher than the rainbow...

2014

Are you se-ri-ous... Tay-tay turned
Into that? How weird... but still
She’s been through some stuff –
And she has more troubles too, I bet –

And I’m with Tay-tay all the way!
Oh god... Lez wants to go – to
The concert with me. Fuck
That bitch! Can she understand

The world of hurt that Tay-tay feels?
Her genius in her lyrics – bites
No matter what genre she does...

I give up – she’ll never know
About deeper things than her head
Empty of all. There’s a bigger world!

>Low route's entryway and high route's exitway are like mirror images, with short ceilings and two equidistant spike sets followed immediately by breakable ground before some sort of vine - whether swinging or zipping.

Not sure about the dash. Maybe it should be a comma? Serious question and all but as an aside, posting this caused me to reflect on my life and I'm now experiencing an existential crisis.

>>10172691
If it's in a book like Moby Dick, it doesn't matter. There's no point in posting this without a lengthy context because the power of the words comes from the ultimate structure they are in.

>>10172699
I'm just wondering what mark I should use there. Sometimes I can't tell when to use what or the differences in between, if that makes sense.

>>10171750
pastebin.com/Jr4rRLGU

Heads up, it's web novel genre fiction.

>>10171815
>Do I write for myself or the five* people who might find it?

Are you a horror fan?

Describing the spooks appearance is the easiest way to kill any horror, it's the fear of the unknown that truly spooks people, suspense and the like.

>>10171804
I was listening to moms spaghetti while trying to read this and it's thrown me.
I enjoyed reading it but I'm shit at sonnets and poems.

>>10171750
>Cop a squat
it's POP

P O P

The poignant, pedantic pathos of my pallid, plebeian plenitude has petulantly presented me petrified of my personal profligacies.

I'm not in any position to properly critique poetry, but I am in a position to write some stupid things.
https://pastebin.com/DRhRHKxe

>>10171750
Pantheon

Sitting in the shade of a pillar, enticed
By the figures carved of marble stone –
A pantheon rose over, dimming bellows
From all the burrows of their mythy mind,
And I, forsaken from their rift
(Much of the temple denied in me)
Sparked flint from my mortal tongue,
Flamed with arid, lips of woe:

“I’ll admit it, I lost. Your skill
Far too great. Far too long
Have you laboured, till the next
Dawn, and to me you are circled
Above our revolutions, pitied sum
Of Man! Dirigible to your works
Am I! Swallow on your cloudy roam!”

And the pantheon, with all divinity
Gleamed with eyes of silent beams
Espousing themselves, their pull of space,
Criss-crossed in time, my mimicry
A stolen word from earliest flame!
They, done with their legendry,
Entranced the holy sanctified
While my hands bound their shadow
Clipped from it, to make my veil!

What have you to say to them?
O, their tongue is far beyond your dusk –
What have you to say, mired
In the verses that hardly span
Earth, the pit of hell, the stars?

“I’m nothing! I learned nothing!
For naught am I, clay to your idea,
Nor does my wisdom breach the spheres,
Designed in classical concord to the drift
Of aeons speaking their services!
My time is already at an end,
And story set in realm, rafted upon seas
That wash to shores compassed by your tide!
Fall in failure, regret and crawl,
As timpani of a thousand ants!
I weep, I am nothing – Pantheon,
To your form, golden in all your curves,
From embodied desire sparked in the sun!”

But they, always watching, stern
In their chatting, never silent though
Their lips lack movement. Speak they do
In symbols limned from centrifuges.
They spoke of first arc, rimmed in man’s
Eyes – first light we hardly see,
Scalded first brain with its plight,
And sent the seeker, naught of seen.

Then, the stench of man, divides
My heart from the shadow of the stand
Where the statues stood, ambient night
Of a thousand Gods – a sister smile
Took my arm, held in its sway,
And said: “I am the human verse within,
Coursed through veins, dissolved in ink,
And one step beyond your amplitude’s
Crest. I am the best of men – stirred
In empathy to your woe. I do not
Speak much anymore. But sing
Upon your raging musk, gardening
The eternals that do float. Seek,
Beyond the quaff of dream,
And find – your pantheon sang in me.”

Here is a section from some shit that I deleted. I already hate it/know that it's shit, but I want to know why. My writing is so affected and pretentious and I don't know how to develop/practice a sincere voice. This is what I am talking about:

Where can a man go to speak and be heard? Mobs and masses move about without an eager ear among them. A distrait public and compounding anxiety – this is the circumstance from which my grey utterances arise and fall, punctuated each by chiaroscuro eminence and the ever-besetting influence of doubt. I fear that my naked admissions to the discordant multitude have spoiled my will and dispirited my search for sympathy. It must be a common concern, I am sure, to feel shipwrecked along some abstract expanse of dispassionate wanderers and antipathetic reserve; in this case it can be said, with tended infirmity, that equivocal detachment may well be the sole resemblance between us.

>>10172929
Imagine you had to translate it into the vernacular. That is, imagine you had to explain the idea to a friend.

>>10172933
I have heard this before and I understand what you mean. My biggest struggle is finding a comfortable/attractive compromise between plain language and purple prose, but I guess if that was an easy thing to figure out then everybody in the world would be a great writer. I need to focus on finding that compromise.

Here is my attempt at translation, this is what I mean:
>I feel like I don't have anybody that I can meaningfully interface with, and that people are generally insincere and dismissive, but I'm sure that we all feel like that from time to time.

I am capable of literal expression or brash ostentation and nothing else. I probably just need to read more to be honest. Thanks for the guidance.

>>10172956
The goal is to say less than you mean, not more.

>>10172929
Compare the number of modifiers and random adjectives you have:

eager ear
distrait public
compounding anxiety
grey utterances
chiaroscuro eminence
ever-besetting influence of doubt.
naked admissions
discordant multitude
abstract expanse of dispassionate wanderers
antipathetic reserve;
tended infirmity,
equivocal detachment
sole resemblance

With those used by Melville at the start of Moby Dick:

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago- never mind how long precisely- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

He writes in that same Romantic vein of the past, but has less dead-weight than you.

>>10172929
>Where can a man go to speak and be heard? Mobs and masses move about without an ear among them. A public, compounding anxiety – this is the circumstance from which my utterances arise and fall, punctuated each by the influence of doubt. My admissions to the multitude have dispirited my search for sympathy – a common concern? – to feel shipwrecked along some expanse, wanderers and the antipathetic, that detachment may well be the resemblance between us.

See how it basically says the same thing even with a ton of it stripped away? Faster too. Now, stop writing about lame anxiety shit that thousands of writers, and adolescents, have written about before, and use your vocab for greater purpose.

>>10172989
Do you really think people talk this way?

What do you think about this style? Will I ever make it?

>>10173177
I have no clue what you're going for here

>>10172989
this is bad.
also, it peeved me when you wrote "taunt" when you meant "taut."

not directed at you, but since I'm on the subject, seemingly nobody on 4chan ever uses the word "jive" correctly. In every instance I've seen it on this site, it has been confused with "jibe."
>mfw

At work, will crit others and replies when I am home:

Before Harry had a chance to fasten his seatbelt the van was moving and the radio was blasting unfamiliar music. He understood every third mumbled word when it wasn't being drowned out by heavy bass and tortured guitar solos. Both men in front lit noxious cigarettes and the open windows caused the acrid smoke to be blown into Harry's face and into his nostrils and throat sending him into coughing fits each time they took a drag. By the end of the journey he was feeling nauseous, lightheaded and had completely forgotten where he was going.

>>10171750
https://www.quotev.com/imabittootired
all my writing's there. tell me about my style, if you do read em

I don't want crit so much as advice.
I'm writing this novel and reading other things in the downtime. Each thing I read has something good or bad that I take from it - genre fiction has a strong hook and driving narrative, literary fiction seems less interested in plot and is more about thoughts, feelings and ideas..
Reading things with heavy plots makes me want to create stronger hooks for my writing. Reading literary things makes me want to worry less about the plot and just create vivid passages that communicate powerful emotions or ideas.
Do I focus on one? The other? Attempt both? Or just write whatever feels right to me and worry about all that later, trusting my intuition?
I think I know what the answer is but I'd like to hear what you think.

>>10173363
>write whatever feels right to me and worry about all that later, trusting my intuition?
Do this.

>>10172729
>pastebin.com/Jr4rRLGU
>four lines in
jesus fucking christ is this a parody?

>mana.
>"Thank the seventh mother"
>"Meuwah." her devil cat mewed its agreement

Slow the fuck down my man. I'm also not a fan of the [Write computer things in brackets and stuff so that I don't have to actually try describing it by hand] thing.

I hope people of all ages can enjoy it, but the target demographic right now is children.

Here's the full story/Pastebin:
https://pastebin.com/YuH8w7WK

>>10173208

Shit I'm in a process of writing something I consider decent, and I want lit to rate it but unfortunately it is in my native language (serbo-croatian)..

>>10173730
there's a lot of mutually intelligible balkans around m8, i'd say post it.

>>10173792
Yeah! I knew that already, I wanted to check, now be honest how shit is this:


Ne volim da čekam, i prije nego što sasiječem red od barem deset osoba koje tu stoje vjerovatno više od pola sata, pokušavam se sjetiti nekog relevantnog razloga zašto to radim, iako me baš i ne interesuje kako će te osobe reagovati. Automatski krećem ka naprijed i pokušavam da improvizujem.
„Ja se zaista izvinjavam, ali moram ući na svega pet minuta da postavim profesoru jedno pitanje, nadam se da...“, i pokušavam da zvučim zabrinuto, ali kao što sam već rekao, tačno me zaboli šta ova stoka mu sebi. Probio sam se jako daleko bez ikakvih pogovora, i osjetio sam se sigurnim u sebe da ću uspjeti ući u amfiteatar prije nego što me neko od ove polusvjetine zaustavi.
„Žao je i meni prijatelju, ali neko već ima unutra.“, reče neugledni tip u dukserici koji stoji odmah uz vrata uz, moram primjetiti poprilično atraktivnu djevojku, i mislim da se zove Amila ako se dobro sjećam jedina dva puta kada sam došao na predavanja. Planirao sam da uzvratim sa nekom uvredom na račun njegovog fizičkog izgleda, ali se Amila ubacila prije nego što sam bilo šta rekao.
„Pa neka, možda je momku baš hitno.“
Amila ima malo hrapaviji glas od onog kojeg sam zamišljao, ali i dalje zvuči izuzetno ženstveno i prijatno. Iako je jako zgodna, i ima velike sise (vjerovatno joj ne bih ni zapamtio ime da nisam vidio da ima velike sise), to se ne primjećuje na njoj jer je obukla barem pet slojeva odjeće na sebe, odvratnih tirkiznih, rumenih i zemljanih nijansi. I maskara joj je razmazana oko očiju. Mislim o tome kako je jebem u grlo dok plače i dok joj maskara curi po cijelom licu.
„Da, ovaj...“, sjeti se, sjeti se, sjeti se.
„Moja nana je u bolnici, i moram je posjetiti.“, čak nisam ni slagao, barem za ovaj dio da je još u bolnici.
„Jao, pa moraš ga pustiti.“
„Strašno mi je žao čovječe, mogu li te pitati, šta je nani, kako joj je?“
„Tuberkuloza.“, sjetio sam se prve bolesti koja mi je pala na pamet, a da nije spolno prenosiva.

>>10171750
How do you guys come up with ideas for a story you'd actually want to write about?
I keep coming up with boring ideas and once I start writing I realize I'm not interested in the topic anymore.

>>10171750
So wait, is it all poems? I'm more of a fiction kind of guy, though I see the depth and use of poetry.

>>10173897
You gotta dig into the one that holds your passion. Figure out what the characters want, especially the antagonists. So long as the setting itself is adequate, you can listen to your characters and create a meaningful plot.

>>10172903
>https://pastebin.com/DRhRHKxe
I... am a fan. Your choice of language is so delightfully prim and proper and the characters themselves have unique voices.

The content is interesting, though is it a monstergirl fanfic? I like it, but I'd like to pick your brain on character voice for my own fiction. All of mine come across as educated, but with the same personality. It's a real problem I'd like to address.

>>10172903
No one is excited to die. That’s obscene.

from several years ago. Not sure how I feel about this or if I should return to it.

The Bitter Mercenary

Here comes the bitter mercenary,
who wades through the swamp of arms, legs,
and teeth. He stumbles often. He looks into the blank eyes of each one. We watched the fire burn in the distance. The flames engulfed desert sky. We hadn't seen the sun set since Keskese.

We wandered for years, crossing each dune thinking the next might be the last. The gaze of the sun taunted us. The emptiness of the white sand warned us about the end.
There is no philosophy of the octave, only math. He said one ounce of jasmine was enough for two prayers. We prayed twice for a gust of wind.

He told each of us not to beware of the men we can make out geometrically.

His life was his lute. His lute was his loot. His loot was his life. He is the bitter mercenary.

The equinox of the eastern light reminded us all of Narcissus. The story of a puma who douses himself in gasoline in protest is taken seriously.

We all push the shovel into the ground, we all wish to find gold, we never find it. Except for them. And them.

We found him lying in his own waste in the valley of Nowherenearhere. We all realized that summer that staring into the sun too long can change your mind.

>>10173437
That's what I was thinking. Thanks.

Nicholas stumbled through dense underbrush, thorns cutting his calves in ornate patterns. Fear gripped him; he lost sight of his own direction. He rushed upon a creek bank, tumbled down in a great clamor, and knocked himself unconscious. Dazed, he awoke on a water-soaked moss bed. His eyes adjusted and he was horrified to see the lumbering bear which had chased him into the ravine. Panicking, he lobbed a stone, striking the bear clean between the eyes. With a roar, the bear tumbled down as he had. Continuing to flee, he dared not check if the bear was still alive.

>>10172395
Very dense, had to read it twice to know what you were on about, which is a tad off putting, but that's just because I'm a lazy fuck. I get she is an orphan hitchhiker, but what is the overarching goal/narrative/point? What does "verything shall be known
When hands gentler than any lineage rises
Into the mechanisms of flesh" mean? Interesting.

>>10172397
What is the Solipsism? The Party? Good writing, seems anti-totalitarian.

>>10172400
I feel like this is meaningful, certainly a good message, if I understand it right. I'm not much of a poet, so I can't vouch for it being structurally sound, but it was interesting. Do penguins feed on jellyfish?

>>10172406
If this is the same author as the last two (as I suspect it is) I think this is much stranger, and not as good. I mean, it almost seems like b8, maybe it is. I love Tay-tay as much as the next guy, but I don't think it's good material for poetry, especially when presented like this, as it doesn't have too wide of an appeal. Just makes me think of /r9k/

>>10172929
Sounds like you fucked a thesaurus. Tone down your use of synonyms. I read a post that said you should replace common words with more interesting words, not difficult words.
Take the word run, for example.

You could say
>He Ran
or
>He bolted / He fled
put probably not
>He absconded

Because that's not interesting, it's simply annoying and archaic.
Making you writing inaccessible without a thesaurus only hurts you.
There are so many pointless phrases that are just laboring to read through.

These lines are okay, IMO:
>Where can a man go to speak and be heard?
>Mobs and masses move about without an eager ear among them.

The rest, not so much. it's just terribly convoluted

>>10172963
>>10172933
>>10172976
Are absolutely right, props to >>10172976
especially

>>10173330
Pretty okay!

>>10173363
Just write, and write, and your own style will come out. It's really whatever you feel is best for what you're trying to create. Basically >>10173437


>>10173668
Not bad at all, I read about halfway down before stopping, it seems well written!

>>10174335
>His life was his lute. His lute was his loot. His loot was his life. He is the bitter mercenary.
Like it all except this, this line was very odd and I feel unattractive. The rest is interesting.

A small tale I'll share but many i'll wear. We are all vessels here and there, voices that flare and moments we share. But some have for what others despair, and many care little about other's bad fare. Some will live to see you drop and yet others might find what you've left to rot. Who knows for certain where you will go and many have solutions to problems you know, but the one place I'm sure you will be is back to the earth where your seed will release. I have sung you a song as long as your fall, so remember your life could drop like a ball and always be ready for when death blows a gall.

>>10174061
The idea was mostly taken from exactly what I wrote there: death leading to a cartoonish anime-type dimension. That concept came from a friend who may or may not actually believe that that can happen, so I decided to write down an entirely plausible chain of events for if that actually would happen to various people that react in different ways to it.
Now I personally don't think I wrote all of them in a completely unique way but that most likely comes from the brevity of their appearances and as earlier mentioned how they view the situation they find themselves in. Turning that excerpt into a fully-fledged book would be difficult for example, since it was just something I wanted to throw together into a barely cohesive whole.

>>10174314
True, I am obscene. Whether that's brought me more good than bad is hard to say.

Thus. Its ten minutes past four in the morning. Everything was over. Town was occupied. Defenders defeated and war – ended. Someone told me that overwhelming triumph affects the men in destructive way. In case of excessive winning, following the laws of Newton, the surplus force must nevertheless end up somewhere and hence – it turns against yourself. While strenghtening the dignity, the prowess is being weakened. Only with me, devil knows why, happened quite the opposite. My skill was improved to the highest degree, but dignity, it descended lower than testicles. You see, man has to advance his abilities equally. It is not acceptable, that one singular part of you walks the path of weakness. Where is the ideal of renaissance?
Oh, The Vitruvian Man, show me the way! Where can I attain the mastery to this deplorable game? When keywords arrived on screen, world beyond window was already pale. Computer, wailing in cries of the last decade, slowly prepared the sacred texts for my consumption and adoration. My liver was already dried out. Everyone knows – everyone who has closed the vidya during the dawn, everyone knows what a heavy heart I carried to kitchen and what a weight I carried out of my room. Thousand frags lie on my conscience and even more liters of blood in my mouth. The taste, mixing with the sourness of early morning gastric juices. Drinking the coffee after such night is like trying to catch the wind. So we must arrange the storm. Coffeine has two functions – to release and to prepare. To release from constipation – instestinal as well as metaphorical. From everything that has accumulated during following day. And to prepare for being shot dead or atleast – overall torture. Truly, a ready-made sacrament! But I wasnt prepared for either one of these functions. At such wee hours noone can be prepared. That is the reason not to trust those, who in eager haste with hot feet jumps to suck on a coffee cup early in morning; all while looking at you with cheerful and lively gaze. Those are diligent but untrustful people. However those, who sucks on a coffee cup while looking as the gloomiest shit, while not being as hard working, they are more honest in their hearts than any early morning jogger or workplace optimist. They wont hesitate to christen you as an asshole if you managed to resemble one. Or atleast, thanks to politeness or blushing shyness, they will call you as such behind your back. Why shyness you may ask? Ill answer, my dear friends, that is because their souls are vast. Gentlemen, their spirits are just too large for their bodily cauldron. That is the reason why is it overflowing. Every unexpected shiver or shudder, caused by clear language, could be fatal.

>>10172203
You sound envious, among other things. Post a few lines you have written you are proud of.

>>10175242
if i were to write some real heroic couplets, at least it would be from some one who has read both chapman and keats.

>>10175285
Right, that's all well and good, but you actually need to do it now
Just saying you've read x and y doesn't do much, you see?
I've read some of Stephen Hawking's work, but I ain't no fucking Stephen Hawking.

>>10175285
>chapman and keats
waow ur so wellread will you fuck me in my female pussy now because i'm so impressed by the things you read

>>10175361
>>10175372
it's a joke about the metre, lads. learn the basics of english poetry.

>>10174738

>>10173668 here, thanks for the critque, man!

>>10175408
Honestly, If I had the free time and the motivation, I'd read a thick book of the stuff. The only part that even irked me in the slightest was Mr. Colbert calling Elvira "honey" but that's just because I think it's annoying to call people Hun or Darling, ect.
Your writing is clean and perfectly understandable, there are clear themes that youth can relate too like self-doubt, but it's not pandering, it seems genuine and believable.
Good job, anon. I'm sure if you get this published it'll be some kids favorite book.

>>10175285
You wrote to them like a rotten pompous cunt in need fag(cigarette) juice draining. Are you not a writer yourself? Show a little more respect when offering your constructive criticism to an artist, critic.

>>10175455
>this butthurt over constructive criticism
imagine if i were base enough to just go for personal criticism :3

>>10172921
real good

"This is Water," the priest in the purple windbreaker said, and turned the bucket upside-down over the worshipper's head. The worshipper repeated the phrase as the water soaked through their ceremonial white bandanas; sometimes solemn, sometimes in rapture. She recognized the words from DFW's sermon at Kenyon College.

>>10175458
>this butthurt over constructive criticism
If only you knew how shitty the presentation of your advice made you seem. I was just criticizing the presentation of your criticism. The two people you responded to appear to be relatively above average at writing, you tried to demean and belittle them, and now it seems that you are not even a writer yourself, so to beat a dead horse, as immediately intuited, you are so envious of even a shred of talent and skill at a craft you have spent apparently a great deal of time and passion consuming of which you can not produce a shred of a shred worth of worthy substance. Good day to you, sir.

I'm tired
Tired of a life playing a part
Tired of these ridiculous pantomimes
Tired of being the skillful craftsman
Making delightful masks
Tired of the funny jester
Doing his dance
Making the court
Bursting with laugh
And whose public, perhaps,
Won't phantom the thought
That well beyond those great wall
Something lies out of sight
Something evil, and yet sad.

To be exiled from a place
I don't belong
Into a country
I'm not from.

To be judge
by the great law
For a lifetime
Without crime.

To knock, and knock
On the castle's door
To stay and wait.
The cold.

And yet I stand
Completely still
And full of fear.
Fear of losing faces
Fear of moving places
Fear of remembering
What might have been
And what shall become
After gone
And hoping for a lack
Of great beyond

Here I feel the great pains
Of loathsome tiredness
And see the great flies
seeking, the fouls state
Of unbearable paralysis

I can no longer stand
The regret and the anger
Nor can I accept beauty
And it's inherent sadness
For I´m just tired
Tired of life
And tired of it's pleasures

>>10175542
>so mad
>and yet nobody would suspect a samefag
>but you're totally chairman of the writers committee
you're not going to make it, precious.

>>10175635
well now I apologize to you for so harshly speaking to you, because you do know to degrees what you are talking about and you may have offered some good advice, but just the absolute certainty and pompousness, demeaning, belittling, cruel, as if a mean-girl cheerleader or some old demented wicked nun, your attitude may make people adverse to taking your advice, but we both know that is merely, well tragically, their loss. I did not write ether of those poems but here is the thing, I would be proud if I had even came up with 2 of the lines contained in there, multiply so considering many more. So it just naturally disturbed me to see someone (who I suspected there was even the possibility for the case to be a non writer them self) getting off by attempting to drag down and in any way make feel bad great writers

>>10175450
Eh, I felt "honey" is a realistic thing to say for the relationship and scene between them, but hey, my opinion.

Anyway thanks again anon if you be the first critquer, this is a good sign I'm working on the right stuff for now! And I hope it'll be someone's favourite too someday!

Thanks again!

Alt-history story I'm working on for /his/ and /k/, feel free to give your $0.02

A fearful voice weakly called out, begging and crying and pleading most piteously. Although the words were almost completely unintelligible, it was unmistakably a plea for mercy. Realizing the other occupant of the shed was not the enemy, he lowered his rifle and pushed the hammer back into the safe position. Watkins pulled himself up to the top and took a quick peek down to make sure he hadn’t been followed. Satisfied, he turned around and began approaching the shadowy figure, whispering his countersign, hoping it was a comrade. Either by understanding his words or noticing Watkins’ uniform was too filthy and ragged to be that of the other side, the apparition stopped crying. As Watkins began to approach the two tiny specks that shone like the eyes of a cat in the dark, the moonlight slowly drew back, revealing the unknown form. Watkins couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Was this a hallucination of the imagination? It was neither friend or foe he had stumbled upon, but a girl. Long and unkempt black or brown hair (the lack of light made it impossible to tell), blue eyes, no older than 16. Upon closer inspection, Watkins saw she was wearing a pink flower-patterned dress and barefoot. Her left breast was marked with a yellow six-sided star with the letters J, a pair of O’s, and D stenciled into the center. His attention then fell on her stomach...

>>10176164

It's swollen to the size of a basketball, at least eight months along. A smaller bump protruded where her naval should’ve been. At last, he comes face to face with her. No longer seeming to fear him, the girl stretched out her hand and offered Watkins to take it. Not knowing what else to do, he obliged and she quietly walked him past the corner to a hiding spot she's put together among the loose piles of hay. Taking a quick look around, Watkins noted that her only possessions were a small diary, fountain pen, pendant and a half-eaten carrot. He took off his knapsack, feeling relief as the weight left his shoulders, unclipped his M1840 from his belt, and put them both alongside his rifle in a nearby corner. The girl took a seat among the haystack, squirming and grunting from the discomfort of her stomach. “That must have been what I noticed” Watkins realized, “the poor gal can’t even find a comfortable way to sleep”. Watkins himself tried to sit down opposite of her but was immediately rewarded with a burning sensation in his back. Suddenly, he remembered he still had an inch-long piece of shrapnel still lodged in his back. It had been there the entire time but the rush and fear that pulsed through him for the past 12 hours had kept him from feeling it. Noticing his discomfort, the girl offered Watkins to sit next to her, where the hay would help cushion his back and prevent that damned twisted piece of steel from digging in any further. Gladly accepting, he moved and sat next to her, quietly whispering “thank you”. After a minute or two of dead silence, Watkins mustered up the courage to point to her and ask her name, hoping she’d understand him. Initially staring in confusion for several seconds, she suddenly had an epiphany and meekly replied
"Anne... Anne Frank”.

>>10176206

Anne Frank. Probably the first person he had met in this godforsaken country who had a name even remotely pronounceable. Seemingly summing up her own courage, Anne spoke in broken English "what you?" “Corporal Samuel Rush Watkins, 1st Tennessee Infantry, Company H", he was so used to introducing himself formerly to superiors he couldn’t help but include his unit, “nice to meet you”. “Co-pam-ee Ay-tch” Anne repeated, clearly, her proficiency with English was quite limited. “You can call me Sam.” After, a moment of wondering if he should ask, Waktins, hoping to break the tension and hide his own embarrassment, spoke up again in a joking manner "what’s a dear charmer like you doing here in the middle of the night?” Again, using his hands as a visual guide. Seeming to understand the question but not his sorry attempt at humor, Anne whispered "hiding from Duits”.

>>10171804

You are not Milton. Please stop. I was sick by the time I read the third line.

>>10171804
>uncultured swine
Dropped. Ironic cliches are still cliches. And people resort to cliches because they don't know what they wanna say or how to say it.

Ambrosia - Dom Fratto
Pure energy manifested in a glass, unrefined power, mixed into a sick yellow sludge. Every sip like sucking on a landline, feeling the electricity surge throughout my body.
Caressing and manipulating the world with my fingertips.
Shaping and forming reality with my thoughts.
Processing information at the speed of light.
Icarus they called me, soaring too close to the sun.
Wondering when I’ll ever come back down.
“Blasphemy” I shout from the heavens, more powerful than ever imagined.
A god walking amongst mere mortals.
But my wings they're clipped, my chalice empty and only utter darkness follows.
I no longer stride in the elysian fields but descend into the darkest corners of madness.
Falling from the heavens, clawing at the skies, dragging the mortals down with me.
Holding my head, bursting at its seams.
The stitches and patches gave way and out leaked my sanity.
Nights of endless insomnia, the image of a god burned into my retina.

Wrote this a long time ago but everyone seems to think it's the best thing I've written. Please tell me it's bad

Too chubby - swipe left - forehead dangerously close to a fivehead - swipe left - looks a bit like an alien - swipe left - looks like she could (and judging by that stern look, probably would) beat me up - swipe left - looks a bit too unhinged for my liking, nice taste in music though - swipe left. Just as I’m ready to give up on this stupid app, someone catches my eye: prominent cheekbones, sharp nose, feline blue eyes and what looks to be a decent rack - swipe right. My phone vibrates as a notification bombards my screen ‘You have matched with Amelia!’ Winner, winner chicken dinner.

This Amelia is at least a nine, not even Harry’s missus is a nine. The boys would be in bloody awe if I manage to land this bird. I do a quick skim through her bio and proceed to message her. ‘Hey’ is too boring, a pickup line would be trying too hard, ‘How are you?’ would make me sound like a square. I decide to go with the straightforward approach: ‘Doing anything tonight? Fancy going for a drink?’ I look back at the message and regret using the word ‘fancy’ - a tad too perky.

Now for the old waiting game. I put my phone down on the table and go back to tidying up this pig sty of a living room. I go to pick up the mop when the sweet sound of getting a notification attracts my attention. I manage to navigate the obstacle-course of shit in my living room and get to my phone.
‘Wow very forward. I like that.’
She likes that. Feeling a slight buzz, I continue with my cockiness,
‘7:30 at the Pine Inn work for you?’ A moment passes, then ding.
‘7:30 it is’. Well that was easy. I can see why Harry kept nagging me to get this Tinder thing now, I had always thought it was a load of crap but I guess not.

The time 6:45 and the Pine is about a fifteen minute drive. I’ve gotta look my best for this, because in all honesty, this Amelia girl is a bit out of my league. Can’t go wearing a suit though, after all it's the local pub I’m heading to, not the Hilton. I grab my pure white Ralph Lauren polo shirt, my new Calvin Klein jeans, my pristine Nike’s and then a Rip Curl beanie to balance it out - don’t want her thinking i’m a priss. After tidying up my beard and splashing my face with water I’m looking mighty fine. Amelia here I come.

The Path


Everybody wants it
Secretly
And to have it is to point a sword at your own neck

Everybody wants it
in their dreams
I had it and lost it forever

I had it and lost it forever

>>10176414
hmm this reads like its been written by somebody who has taken one creative course hosted by the local book shop... i.e. bad...

the humour doesnt carry it sorry

Elaine's on her laptop, online shopping now, always online shopping. Always with one tab open, an endless stream of clothes she never wears and no one ever sees. They’re nice clothes though, Mac thinks.

“Did you hear about the nuclear test?”

“Another? I think so.”

“Yes another. I think it could really mean war soon. They don’t stop, and they’re getting bigger, the tests.”

Mac just sits in silence, sucking at his Coke through a red straw, chewing the red straw.

“You know if it happens, it wont be you who gets sent over to fight. It’ll be me, or people like me, my friends, you know, young guys.”

“Doesn’t matter if they drop a nuke on us.”

“Why would they nuke us?”

“To send a message. I don’t know. We’re not strategic but we’re also not very well protected, plus there’s a lot of us here, the death toll would be massive.”

“I don’t think it’ll happen.”

Mac stands up. Elaine has four small cacti sitting on her windowsill, soaking in the modicum of light that parses through the blinds, and he tips a bit of his Coke into their black plastic pots. He watches the soil absorb the Coke, watches it darken slightly, the Coke run off and drip out of the bottom of the pots. Then he presses his hand against the spines of one of the cacti to see if they are sharp, and they are, but not sharp enough to break the skin of his thumb, and he presses harder, and harder, until he thinks if he pressed any harder it might actually break the skin, and this is where he stops. Then he turns his thumb around and inspects the little shallow dimple the spine has left. He can hear Elaine typing away on her laptop behind him.

Hating yourself is powerful
Like drinking from a cool well
You don’t know yet that the water is poisoned
But you soon will
I sit in the center of the burning house
And watch it char away
I’m protected from the flames that catch
But they burn me all the same

(Shit poetry after doing coke all night)

>>10176528
heh
i liked it anon
though im drunk so maybe thats colouring my perception
its cheesy sure, but idk theres something about i just like
reminds me of Stevie Smith

>>10176414
>Winner, winner chicken dinner.
how old is this narrator fuck me
>Harry’s missus
>The boys would be in bloody awe if I manage to land this bird
Trying way too hard to sound like a British "lad"
>like a square
or an American greaser from the 50s?
>the old waiting game
I want to hit you
>pig sty of a living room. I go to pick up the mop
Don't living rooms typically have carpets?
>the sweet sound of getting a notification
Why would you ever phrase this like this
>I grab my pure white Ralph Lauren polo shirt, my new Calvin Klein jeans, my pristine Nike’s and then a Rip Curl beanie to balance it out - don’t want her thinking i’m a priss. After tidying up my beard and splashing my face with water I’m looking mighty fine.
More weirdly inaccurate caricature of a 'lad' who uses incongruous Americanisms.

i was heading towards the bathroom while the greatest blues guitarist drank himself to smithereens on a thankless friday night.
he drank himself below the bar and with a handful of diazapine, swallowed his way towards a eulogy on a thankless friday night.
i came back to the old bar stools where the lonely young men sit drinking alone together,
to find the greatest blues guitarist drunk to smitherines on a thankless friday night.
i paid his tip to the overgods, laying two slow silvers raw on his unkempt eyelids
salvete. salvete.
salvete, salud.
his fingers played me too.
they played crowded rooms full of strangers
at narcotic countertops asking "is this diderot?"
it is not.
it is the death rattle of the greatest blues guitarist.
who wore st. michael's mug down red-dummy clavicles,
above coke-bartered nasal wounds,
and a lip ring without salt,
who gave neck in the bathroom i had just walked out of
to find him at the bar in smithereens
on a thankless friday night.

the people at the bar hate the people at the tables
who come in groups of tight groups who come in shallow banks of bed and wall
but the greatest blues guitarist is a virgin.
as virgin as a saint
as virgin as god
he died.
he died to show us all that it was ok to die.
and now the people at the bar hold his head above the crowd and scream at the table people:
"fuck your heaven. and
fuck your désolé demons in all their private hells."
because the greatest blues guitarist survived on sandwich crusts and rust for 8 months straight and laid down cry-baby licks in his off time.
didn't you know?
they play his music on the jukebox now.
it's all been hemmed together by broken meat and the occasional condescension.
i light a candle every now and again
for the greatest blues guitarist
i light a candle every now and again
for no reason whatsoever

>>10173601
>is this parody

It is somewhat tongue in cheek, I do intend to play it straight though.

>slow down

Sorry bro.

I'll try to cut down on brackets but the implant is supposed to be its own character in a sense.

Thanks for the feedback.

>>10174738
>Pretty okay!

Needs work!

>>10175767
you're clearly just BPD and lonely, so nobody should listen to you on matters of taste or language. fuck off and whore in thread where people aren't working

Fuck you, I had a day where I wanted to write from the perspective of a scientist

Arcanology - The scientific study of the extra-scientific phenomena known as magic.

What we know so far:

We have gone through extensive effort to study the effect on the universe at large of the use of magic. What we have surmised is that magical phenomenon conjured into the physical universe by a magician or other magic user is the result of the transitive nature of magical energy. In layman's terms, a spell is the result of naturally flowing magical energy being manipulated in a specific manner. The same as energy in the physical universe cannot be 'used up', magical energy is simply taken advantage of as it flows, instead of being consumed. We surmise that it is simply easier to manipulate magical energy than it is to exploit physical matter or the energy that it is comprised of.

Complex Magic

Magic enjoys working in a complex framework. This is why ritual, arcane and especially curse magic are more powerful than others. When it is woven together to achieve a specific end, then magic is capable of much more. Complex frameworks are very difficult to weave and often require much from the caster. Godly beings or magic users whose minds can access larger amounts of their preferred medium can create them with relative ease and without incurring significant penalty. The average magician, however, must often give something of him or herself to provide the power necessary.

Most often this takes the form of a type of death magic, similar to necromancy. The caster must give up his or her own life force, shredding it to later weave together as needed. It is lamentable that sometimes, when under duress, one can also use a soul as a power source. No matter the aim of the spell, this magic is foul. One should never toy with their own, or another's, eternity no matter the circumstances. It may seem like an infinite well to draw upon, but it costs more than should ever be given.

Forming of a spell's framework can be done in a great many ways, depending upon the nature of the magic and the caster. Most often, as magicians most often use the arcane, it will be woven together through great effort and study over the course of many years. For those who use this method, choose carefully the nature of the spell. One will need to cast it a great many times, testing their frame bit by bit to remove all imperfections. Optimization of the frame can do wonders in making sure the spell isn't too costly. I once had a student who was able to draw upon a relatively small amount of power, but he had a gift with weaving together spells. He could create spells usually reserved for the strongest magicians, but would require little more power than an early student could access.

How do you practice writing? Are there any recommended books on learning the subject?

>>10176306
yeah this is terrible. there's absolutely no sense of subtlety in here

>>10176692
sorry anon this is very bad...the inclusion of latin/ classical references doesn't magically make something good

https://pastebin.com/bGv3wArE

Any ideas where I should go from here?

>>10172395
I like it but it doesn't need breaks.

>>10172921
good stuff

>>10172989
dedicated paragraphs for impact is a bad idea

>>10174832
Find a better rhyming scheme next time

>>10176414
>winner winner chicken dinner
I laughed

>>10178527
Say what you will about King but On Writing is a great book on the craft

Wrote this when very drunk, fuck me up /lit/
A girl grasps for her chosen's hand in a chaos of drunken instinct and human emotion. Eventually, their fingers meet, and they grab each other in an almost too human gesture of mutual longing, their enlarged pupils signaling their mutual longing for one another. Sexual or romantic in nature, the bond between them seemingly unshakeable despite the obfuscation of the alcohol running through both of their veins. For a second, they hold each other's hands, engrossed in their own lust. Quickly, oh so quickly, he pulls his Hand away from hers. He's too drunk to interpret signs for any definition of interpretation. She's too drunk to take his resignation as shyness, and assumes that he isn't into her. However, their alcohol addled minds forget their precious resignation and push them to hold hands again, which they end up doing. They're grasping for each other without looking at each other, holding individual pieces of wreckage as they float in the wreckage of he ship if their romance in the storm of their drunkenness. Eventually, their eyes meet, and they once again remember why their drink-addled mind had made them so attracted to one another. They fit, for now, like puzzle pieces that ALMOST fit together, with pictures that look similar but not of the same entity. These two aren't souls mates, but for now they are joined in something that is much stronger yet much less permanent than love. She draws her hand close to his, and he reacts by pulling h heir two hands into a ball up to his chin. He holds the entirety of their relationship there, whether he knows it or not. Their relationship, tenuous tho it may me, is contained, fully encapsulated, by that bringing of their conjoined hands up to his chin. The majesty of God's creation, of being and time and life and all those things he is too drunk to contemplate, are contained within that temporary display of lust and affection. He looks at her, and she looks back at him. They're too far gone to contemplate the future, and too drunk to regret the past. Their inebriation has led them completely to the present, to live within this present, this pregnant bubble that always seems just about to break into a million pieces with the slightest of provocations. They look into one another's eyes, sensing that lust and that naivety that their partner undoubtedly sees. They both know what is about to happen but tacitly, whether they know or not, agree to stay silent. The bus grinds to a halt, the lumbering behemoth being stopped in its tracks by what seems in the moment to be the sheer will of the bus driver. Neither know if this is actually their stop, but does it really matter? They both get off the bus, silently hoping that the other feels the same way about them as they feel about the other, the cold night welcoming them into its embrace.

>>10176414
Would read this novel. Only thing that bothered me was the wearing of a beanie.

>>10178621
sounds like a person at the table

Don't post shit without criticizing first and when you reply to something don't just say "i like it" or "I don't like it". Pattting someone on the back or saying you don't like it is moronic and helps no one except your sense of self importance. Criticize something like if you actually had a brain

>>10171804
half of this doesn't make sense and sounds like reddit-tier poetry. please try to emulate an actual poet. you're throwing around too many 21st century terms then sprinkling some milton-esque words on top of some /pol/-tier buzzwording.

>>10174738
Can I get some crits?

>>10174738
>Nicholas stumbled through dense underbrush, thorns cutting his calves in ornate patterns. Fear gripped him; he lost sight of his own direction. He rushed upon a creek bank, tumbled down in a great clamor, and knocked himself unconscious. Dazed, he awoke on a water-soaked moss bed. His eyes adjusted and he was horrified to see the lumbering bear which had chased him into the ravine. Panicking, he lobbed a stone, striking the bear clean between the eyes. With a roar, the bear tumbled down as he had. Continuing to flee, he dared not check if the bear was still alive.

The repetition of the short clauses, short sentences gets boring. Also you are relying too much on telling not showing. Don't tell me that fear gripped him, don't tell us he was horrified, don't tell us he was panicking - show us. Describe the way his breathing has changed, describe the way he's scrambling a bit more - maybe he grasps onto something only for it to give way and he falls further. This way you will make your reader feel as though THEY are running from a bear, rather than reading a wikipedia article about someone running from a bear - ya dig?

>>10179276
Yes alright, I see what you mean, you're right! Thank you!

For all we have and are,
For all our children's fate,
Stand up and take the war.
The Hun is at the gate.
Our world has passed away,
In wantonness o'erthrown.
There is nothing left to-day
But steel and fire and stone.
Though all we knew depart,
The old Commandments stand:
"In courage kept your heart,
In strength lift up your hand."

One day out on a lazy Sunday afternoon drive me and my family passed a dilapidated tennis court. The sprinklers were active and there were children playing in the park along side it. The tennis court itself was stained the colour of baked on boor water and there were weeds ground through cracks in the pavement. Right next door there was a bright blue tennis court, the old one long since being defunct and useless to play anything. It remained unused.

If that is the logic eventually we will get to the point at which they replace the old tennis courts to the extent that there will be eternal tennis courts, stretching out for millions of kilometers in each direction, all roads leading back to an epicenter of dead and dying birds. Tennis court ground zero.

>>10179323
This is alright. Enjambment is nice, idea is clear, rhyme scheme is basic but fairly well executed. I have some issues with your word choice. Wantonness just sticks out like a sore thumb, and throws off the rhythm. Also, "lift up your hand," that "up" trips the sentence too, so I would cut that out.

It's not really original but it isn't a bad poem. It takes a theme, runs with it, and I think accomplishes what it sets out to do, however simple and flawed the poem is. I would expand it if you feel like it, but otherwise, keep writing. You got the basics pretty much down.

>>10179276
>>10179292
Alright, so I really took what you said into consideration, and like I said, you're totally right.
I reworked it all a bit, and now I think it flows much better. Text to Speech readings sound Infinitely better with the new version .

Here it is:

Nicholas stumbled through dense underbrush, thorns cutting his calves in ornate patterns. Heart thumping, he lost sight of his own direction, rushed upon a creek bank, tumbled down in a great clamor, knocked himself unconscious, and finally landed on a water-soaked moss bed. His eyes slowly adjusted, then widened at the sight of the lumbering bear which had chased him into the ravine. With primal instinct, He lobbed a stone, striking the bear clean between the eyes, and with a roar, the bear tumbled down like him. Continuing to flee, he dared not check if the bear was still alive.

What do you think? I tried to replace any mention of an emotion with a reaction one has when feeling the emotion (Fear = Heart Thumping, Horrified = Eyes Widened). I hope it also flows a bit better now! Is it better this time around? Any feedback is appreciated!

>>10179568
definitely better man, could still use some tightening but keep at it
as far as flow goes, i recommend reading your writing out loud and seeing what sounds clunky and what doesn't

Been working on this since yesterday. This is what's presentable for now. Tear my shit up.


First thing out of the party is fog, not like they’re any different. Still can’t see shit, just the reasons are different. What you can’t see is different. Shit unseen, still. In another sense, its not that terrible. The whole point of the party was getting stoned. It’s the point of all parties, because people don’t know what to do with each other, so they just do, and other variations of that word: make, say, stay, talk, whatever. You don’t know either, that’s why you’re leaving. More precisely you remembered you don’t know, i.e., you’re sobering up, and the drugs and booze ran out. So, you dip.

Outside its three AM and summer, but it’s cold. You’ve been walking for a while, not caring where you go. Boston’s stuck in the no-season, hot and freezing in equal measure. Out through the night fog, to the rhythm of your boots, the streetlights flicker back and forth, thick gray chokes the shapes of light posts, cars, bushes, benches, turnstiles, stores. Wonder if a group of prankster ratmen live under manholes armed with dry-ice blowers flooding the neighborhoods in smoke. A moon ritual; maybe they like having parties too. The whole is drenched in glow, as if neon bled from within. You imagine a nervous system like a huge fungus running beneath the pavement, giving all objects the capacity to breath.

There is no difference between the world and your condensed breath, only lines and pieces unfulfilled, swallowed in this muck-like ghost of atmosphere. No body you can own. You dig around in your pocket and find a thin, crushed joint, roll it on your fingers like a child worming play-do, light it and blow a dirty cloud, watch it crash with air and swirl then merge and disappear. Frustrating. No completion, no answer or definition. He was a lot like Julian, or so he seemed. New England weed is good, and you space out for a couple minutes standing on the sidewalk.

What was your name? Gish, right, name’s Gish. Name’s Gisella actually, but mom always called you Gish because when grandma saw your baby face, she double-took it, and somewhere in the creases of her ancient brain Lillian Gish came up. You hated either name but you were too lazy to demand identity. And once you understood you didn’t like it, way too deep in. So, there it was. You got a meaningless name turned into some weird thread of nostalgia for a woman whose life existed on a screen, summoned like a fucking séance from your senile grandmother’s memory of a theater in the South, drooling at a black-and-white doll-faced actress. It’s so distant and fuzzy, a mannequin pressed in haste, the limbs are all blotchy and burned from factory failure. Even more irritating, it fits. You’ve never felt like you weren’t faking something. You always have to play person when someone else is in the room.

crit first faggots

>>10179646

>>10179565
I did.

So critique mine, faggot

Here >>10179580

>>10179656
let's have you crit mine first.

>>10179660
whip it out.

>>10179674
not with that attitude.

>>10179678
just post it dude.

>>10179680
>>10178622

>>10178622

Better than expected. Some funny lines here and there, nice take on technodependency and the absurdity of modern life. It's a fun idea. The edginess of it turns me off, even if it pulled a couple chuckles out. How do 400 homes burn down on a night? Unless you make this even more ridiculous, that makes no sense, and if you made it more ridiculous, it would also lose sense because it is based on modern trends, lifestyles, and, for lack of a better word, "first world problems". I'd get rid of that line.

The Trudea-Trump thing just rubbed me wrong. I feel like it clings to news media for relatability, instead of keeping the story self-contained. If you simply said the prime minister, or changed his name, I wouldn't have noticed at all. Also, no need to mention Trump, at least not at this point in the piece. It's filler.

The cold pizza thing made me laugh, as did the pet-owner attention increase. Fidget spinners for the elderly, ha.

That ! in the parenthesized sentenced just threw me off. Delete it.

It's a nice idea. Little superficial. Seems needlessly edgy, and doesn't seem to serve a purpose beyond mocking life in modern Ontario for no reason. Make it longer, give it purpose, a straight direction. I would like it if it centered on a character, a family maybe, instead of randomly bouncing from situation to situation. Ground the story, give it momentum, explore the power-outage, try to be a tad more subtle with the satire. Take out politician names, it'll fuck up the whole thing. Finish it then revise. It's got potential.

>>10179688
>>10179718
Did it.

Your turn.

>>10179580
>>10179737

>Shit unseen, still.
awkward, try "Still, it's shit unseen".

Comma after "more precisely", swap semicolons for hyphens, it's "plat-doh", etc.

The character is in Boston, thinking about the quality of New England weed, so are they from a different part of the country?

Some good prose in the last paragraph but altogether it's too much over just a name, and if the intent is that it's the drugs that are talking, then it's far too coherent and literary.

A good start. But I need a hook to pull me in, show me where the story is going to go.

>>10179718
>>10179737
Also thanks m8. I didn't realize that I posted an older version that fixed a couple of the things you mentioned, but your crit gave me some ideas for a new direction.

Her self does not exist separate from the will of those who are important to her. She wants in her despair to be a self separate from the will of others. A desperate position as the self of this ideal can only be achieved if she can be rid of herself.And if this ideal self is in fact the true one, would it not be her? Would not the self that is willed by others disappear, to be proven fraudulent? If the proposed ideal was her true self, unbound by the will of others, would not she be unbound; instead of the desire to be rid of those who will, an indication of her binding obligation to herself: a paradigm in-which others will is a fundamental component? I say desire deliberately as this desire is purely fantasy, her behavior shows that she cannot be rid of those who will.

This idealization of a self rid of self is illusion. As long as an ideal remains, despair will be had. To be true to oneself is to abandon the illusive ideal of self.

This despair is in truth a tool set forth to deconstruct the self for one to see what's really there. Because of this I do not worry for her; this sickness is not unto death, as Lazarus it is but a death to a rebirth, that they may know the glory of God; that she may know the glory of being true to oneself.
Let me be wrong - I hope that I am - nevertheless this battle takes place; my analyzation of which self is true is irrelevant, as despair submerges once again the self will emerge victorious, stronger for the battle it fought.

White privilege is often the buzzword used by the left to demonize conservative voices who just so happen to be white. Instead of addressing any of the main points argued by their conservative opponents, the left will simply just dismiss it entirely by claiming white privilege blinds conservatives from understanding the true hardships of minorities. However, that isn’t actually an argument. It’s the dismissal of someone’s view simply based on their skin color and background. Ironically, it’s racist in of itself to just say that due to someone being white their political views are automatically wrong or misguided due to the fact they have white privilege. It doesn’t address any falsities within their argument but instead uses an individual identity to dismiss it entirely. Yet the question still remains, does white privilege actually exist? Let’s find out why it doesn’t.


Thoughts?

>>10179481
>boor water
wat?
>useless to play anything
awkward

You are close to reaching a real emotion, but the thoughts don't make sense.

>>10179580
certain people that I disagree with would probably like this. Personally, I find it unspeakably boring. You're just walking around describing the weather. C'mon, you gotta trick me a little bit with some fireworks before we get to that stage of our relationship...

>>10179945
I don't vehemently disagree with you, but that's because you're hardly even worth disagreeing with... These ideas are so unoriginal that it's a stretch to call them ideas at all...

>>10178470
I'm not buying it.

>>10176528
that cool water image stuck with me for some reason. gj

>>10176505
bad dialogue. neither realistic or good enough to beguile the reader into not caring

>>10176414
not enough self awareness. at least it's coherent, though

***

Here's mine, just a weird roman a clef of sorts:

https://pastebin.com/raw/ivGDgFcu

/lit/ I wrote this when I was half awake on an international flight thinking about a girl I am beginning to fall for. I am unsure if it is rubbish or not but would like your opinion. Thank you:

A glimpse of a future
where we are together
lingering thoughts
we are lovers
soul Partners
falling deeper into being completely consumed
by a love for you
a life fulfilled with everything we ever wanted
a potential reality
a glimpse of the alternative
and then
like it Never Happened
could never have happened
snapped back
from the day dream

>>10180456
>like it Never Happened
>could never have happened
>snapped back
>from the day dream
I like this part

How will materialism ever recover?

When he had asked her if she was at the bar by herself, it never crossed her mind to look at the clock. If it had, she might have noticed how close to last call it was. But when you're fifty-eight years old and in need of a good time, getting lost in the moment is easy to do.
As they stumbled up the steps to her front door, he slapped her ass and laughed. It hurt, but she joined in and chuckled. Once inside, he wasted no time. He pulled her shirt off and kissed his way down her body, stopping just below her bellybutton. The touch of his wet lips against her skin sent shivers down her spine. Taking him by the hand, she led him into the bedroom.
"Sure you can handle me?" he asked as he undid his belt. "I'm into some kinky stuff."
She grinned and undressed. The cool air felt good against her bare breasts. With a sigh, she fell back onto the bed and spread her legs. Before she had time to admire his nakedness, he was on top of her. His girth was impressive, and a bit much at first, but her muscles relaxed after a few steady thrusts.When he pulled out just a few seconds later, she gasped at the emptiness in her crotch.
"So you're up for whatever?" He ran a finger over her lips.
She nodded.
"Okay then."
He reached down and positioned himself at her back entrance. She froze. A grunt escaped her lips as he pushed in. Each second stretched out into an eternity. Once he was fully in place, he began. With each thrust, she felt her bowels weaken. Horror washed over her as drunkenness gave was to clarity and she remembered the half empty bottle of prune juice she'd opened earlier. Her stomach gurgled.
"Yeah, you like that?" he asked, his words punctuated by his own ragged panting.
Unsure of what to do, she simply nodded. Soon, his movements grew uneven. Sweat trickled down his brow and dripped onto her skin. By now, her guts were a storm of impatience and incontinence. Finally, with one last thrust that pushed his member deep into her bowels, he exploded. As he pulled out, she clenched.
At least, she tried to.
A loud PLOP filled the room as he pulled out. She felt the turd sliding down her poop chute, but was powerless to stop it. It fell out of her and onto the sheets she'd spent all yesterday washing and drying. He looked down at it, then up at her.
"Whatever. I'm gonna go wash up. I got work in the morning."
As he cleaned up, she stared at the ceiling. Thirty minutes later, he was gone. It was three o'clock in the morning.

>>10176528
I liked this one, it has a nice flow to it.

Here's a poem I was compelled to write in class out of boredom.

A strange meeting
Stranger one enters stage right and crosses to middle
Stranger 1: Hello!
Stranger two enters stage left and crosses to middle past stranger one
Stranger 2: Hello!

>>10180027
>>boor water
typo
Bore water, meaning water you get from deep underground, typically brown, warm, and stinky

>>10182828
I mean, if you're righting a play, this is essentially the just of it. Although most scrips I've read distinguish speaking from blocking/action by putting movements in parentheses.

>>10178470
You really need to read more research papers if you're trying to imitate one
Your tone is incredibly informal, and you frequently use "I" language (in this case, mention "we")

Instead of saying
>What we know so far:
You should remove the human element more
>Summary of current knowledge on arcanology:
or something similar.
In academic writing, referring to yourself in the first person is usually a large faux pas, even if you're part of the study.

The orc pummeled a pig with a large wood club.

The animal yelped as the orc repeatedly slammed the heavy weapon down on its mud splattered pink body. But the orc could not kill the pig. The pig had a gift.

Fire started to stir deep inside the pig's glassy eyes. Orange and yellow flames swirled faster and blazed brighter with each blow from the orc's club. The growing glow softly illumined the coarse skin of the pig's face.

With a smile, the pig turned toward the orc.

"Welcome to Hell," the pig said.

The orc's flesh burst into flame. Tendrils of smoke and ashes twisted off its thick green skin and leather clothing. The orc grasped at its face as the eyes seared and blackened in the blaze.

After a few moments, the orc fell to the ground, nothing but a charred chunk of meat now.

The pig had a warm, tasty meal that night.

>>10173897
I write exclusively from childhood memories that I peice together into a story and progressively work symbols and metaphors in as I go.

>>10180456
Even in poetry it is bad form to open with and continue to use sentence fragments.
>A glimpse of a future
>Where we are lovers
There's no action here, and no clear subject and predicate. Use strong verbs:
>I glimpsed the future
>Where we love
And for that matter, try to make your line breaks less random. Make the breaks a part of the poem. Pick a pattern and reinforce it so the reader isn't distracted by random breaks.

I have an idea for a story that goes along the lines of "group of people who work to eradicate vicious creatures run in to trouble, some are killed off as a result of disarray"
but I don't want the moral of the story to be "humans are da real monsters!!!" because it's so cliche
how do I curve that problem

>>10183829
You can always use the monsters as a vehicle to develop your characters, and make emotions the focal point. Pick some personality flaws or an emotional struggle to focus on and construct your plot around that. You don't always need a big theme.

>>10182760
not bad. I like the formatting choice

This is my first time writing anything. I picked the setting, genre, narration and tense to make it easier for me to start and not get stuck writing. It's stupid but when I was writing it I was imagining it as part of a larger work instead of a front to back story so certain things were set up to be expanded on later. I've got a feeling that this board won't like it but it's okay because I had a lot of fun. If you're interested I can pick out basically any part of this and explain why I did it.

And Triton tooted his trumpet;
Ares looked at Mars;
And the diners dined on their dinner;
A bled-dry gambler cried and cried.
Another wonderful night on a casino-space station in rotation around the great crimson sphere. The monkeys gambled for peanuts; the men gambled for money and the gods gambled all their lives away. A ways away from the action at table 15, the fifteenth table, a middle aged man sat in stress with a petite, young and spooky girl. He was rosy pink and prematurely balding, with the build and demeanor of a middle school math teacher. He had a non-committal name like Keith, Florence or Barnaby. Florence was a detective. Nora, the girl to his left, was also a detective, but moreso she was a tool with a very specific purpose. Like how a butter knife is technically a knife but used for spreading rather than cutting. Nora made a bed of her black hair and slumped her head down, she handles the dead.

Florence and Nora were looking at a scrap of paper with a number scrawled onto it. Florence knew exactly what this number meant; while Nora was very confused; she knew what the number meant too but regardless she remained bewildered. They patiently delayed the inevitable, listening to the space jazz band play space jazz, watching the big wigs and little wigs from mankind and Olympus Mons mingle in a dancing cut-throat world above the world. What a beautiful tragic spectacle it was to hear. The muted music far too distant from the room door which the detectives now stood in front of. The door was an intimidating polished chestnut rectangle with a three digit number screwed on. For a few moments there was no knob on that door, just a dreadful unknown that stopped all motion.

Having teleported, phased or melted themselves through the door, the room inside was a specific hell. A fancy canopy bed, mirrors, beauty and craftsmanship in every piece of furniture. A golden casino hotel opulence; an exquisitely crafted experience for the visitor. Lights dim blue, the fan spinning slowly creaking trying to escape, doors cabinets and closets which may as well have led to nothing. Blood and gore littered the floor in a ripple that pointed towards the centerpiece. A woman cut open, skin peeled and turned inside out. A visceral red flower on Satan’s night stand.

Revulsion hit Florence like a heart attack; Nora stepped forwards in playful inquisition as one parting message from the killer remained, “Please catch me, I desperately want to be saved.”

Have Fun

>>10183829
Depending on the scope of your story: Make it apparent that their efforts to save lives would be better spent campaigning for heart disease awareness or federal laws requiring a one meter fence be constructed around swimming pools with a secure locking mechanism.

>>10184064
Triton tooted his trumpet;
Ares looked at Mars;
The diners dined;
A bled-dry gambler cried and cried.

Rotating around the great crimson sphere, casino-space station spent yet another night full of wonder. The monkeys gambled for peanuts; the men gambled for bills; and the gods gambled to waste all their lives away. Away from all this action, at the table number fiveteen, sat a stressed middle aged man. He was rosy pink and balding, with the build and demeanor of a middle school math teacher. He went by many names; on that day he called himself Florence. Florence was a detective.

He wasn't alone. Next to him sat Nora, a petite, young, frightening girl. She **** * *** of her black hair and slumped her head down. Nora was also a detective, but moreso she was a tool with a very specific purpose; just like a butter knife is to a knife, a tool for spreading, not cutting; she was a detective handling the dead.

Laying on the table in front of them was a scrap of paper with a single number scrawled onto it. Both Florence and Nora very well knew what this number meant, but still, Nora was filled with bewilderment and confusion. Listening to the playing of the space jazz band and watching both the big wigs and the little wigs from mankind and Olympus Mons mingling in the dancing cut-throat world above the world, they tried to delay the inevitable.

Finally, they stood up and walked towards a door at the far end of the room. The music grew distant. As they approached the door, its outlook became clearer and clearer. It was an intimidating rectangle of polished chestnut with a three digit number firmly attached with multiple screws. The door had no knob of any kind. Florence was hesitant, but urged Nora to press through. Nora gave him a surprised glance, but returned her gaze at the door. She took a deep breath and reached out her hand. She pushed, and for a moment the world was drained of all sound and everything came to halt. There remained nothing, but the dreadful unknown.

They came to be on the other side of the door, having gone through with some kind of teleportation, phasing or melting through phenomenom. What awaited inside was shocking. What once was a sign of a golden casino hotel opulence, an exquisitely crafted experience with its fancy canopy bed, bright mirrors, beauty and craftmanship showing in every piece of furniture from sofas to wooden nighstands, was now a scenery from hell. Blood and gore littered the floor and walls in a ripple steering the gaze towards what remained in the center. A woman, or what used to be a woman, cut open with her skin peeled and turned inside out. A visceral red flower on Satan's night stand.

Revulsion hit Florence like a heart attack, but Nora stepped forwards in playful inquisition as on a piece of paper taped on wooden closet door, a parting message from the killer remained – "Please catch me, I desperately wish to be saved."


i like the setting and the killer concept

>>10173835
Prva rečenica podseća na Bernharda.

Are MRU's good?
I've been trying it but I fail since I think that two sentences doesn't make for an immersing look.

I've already critiqued ITT, and I will once I get out of class, but I'm too busy right now.

To win his favor back, Johnathan bought his father a beautiful shotgun from a local pawn shop, it had extravagant engravings, a perfect gift. With it slung over his shoulder he opened the screen door on the back pouch, and was greeted by the smell of beer and vomit. With pride and esteem he presented the shotgun with outstretched arms, however this goodwill gesture was cut down with slurred shouts, broken ribs, and shattered arms. Oh how Jonathan missed his mother; if only he had known that shotgun was his father’s, the one which took his mother’s life years ago

I would appreciate some feedback!

https://hypostition.blogspot.com/2017/10/pale-god.html
too long to post all of it here but it's my newest short story i'm pretty proud of it. will post some excerpts

>>10185520
Pale God
Jamey was dead tired. He was talking to his mother when something inside him snapped. It might as well have been a bone.
He had been sick for a couple years, and nothing much was getting better. If exceptions proved the rule, he was pretty sure his moments of clarity and energy were exceptions. Feeling ‘normal,’ or not sick, was rare, and was much like being high--he learned not to trust his judgement on those days. Promises would be made that, like curses in the daytime, wouldn’t hold when he came back down.
Life had become temporally distorted. His therapist was right when he said that being sick was much like being high, but he didn’t know how much Jamey hated being high. At least with pot. Every high was a dissociative nightmare. The narcosis always revealed the screaming dissolution of the universe. Those famed synchronicities of psychedelic trips would sometimes appear, only as if to mock Jamey, as if moments of order were famous, rare creatures dying of pollution by entropy. Being sick had taken him from being a healthy, if angsty, 20 year old to inhabiting a strange fever-dream in which he had the energy and mind of an elderly man, but a still-childish body.
When he looked at his mother’s face in a sudden new light, he had the realization that there was no reason for things to get better, and so they probably wouldn’t. He was tired of being a parasite, even if he had been made one against his will. Everyone was growing tired of him, he was sure of it. Every time that he fantasized about suicide, the protestations in his mind grew fainter. The fantasies grew more vivid, real, heavy. They were far more frequent than his sexual fantasies. It was as if he was gradually leaving the world of the living behind. He was less and less attached to his flesh.

Later that night Jamey went outside, feeling like he was leaving the world of the corporeal for the last time. He was fairly sure of being unnoticed. He had the keys to his sister’s car, an old station wagon. He had sent an email to her with a service that allowed the sending to be delayed, so that she couldn’t stop him.
Dear Liz,
I’m sorry. There’s not much I can say. I’m mostly sorry that i’m going to smash up your car. In that light I’ve left you my debit card and taken the other one that has a little bit on it, for gas etc. The one I left you has that money I got from that gofundme for medical expenses. It’s only 800$, I spent some of it. That’s half of the cost of this car, I hope you get some insurance money or something.
I just got tired of this shit. Please, please, please don’t hate me for this. You can’t even imagine. It’s not fun. I wish I could be with you and mom and dad. I want to be with the living. I’m taking up everybody’s time and money and I’m just not fun anymore.

I don’t think I deserve this, but I realized that nobody’s gonna come along and make things better for me.
Please don’t try and figure out my password and go on my computer or my phone. There’s nothing horrible or illegal on there but if you go through all of my searches and chats I would just feel very embarrassed, and some of them would probably show me to be a mean and petty person, or just very strange. I know it doesn’t make any sense but I can’t rest knowing you might do that. Everyone deserves a little privacy.
I really love you. I can’t say much more or I might turn around and decide not to do it, but things aren’t gonna get better and I can’t turn around.
--Jamey
The car--he had come to this out of a quick meditation. He didn’t have a gun, or even enough pills of any seriousness to guarantee anything beyond maiming himself inside. Every time he thought about suicide he had the sudden desire to do something that would allow him to die “happy”. Not so much a bucket list as a bucket shortlist. His illness had rendered him always-tired, near catatonic, and worst of all, boring. Jamey was determined to die after having felt like he had stuck his finger in a light-socket. If there was divinity he wanted a taste of it.
With a car you could experience this. After all, it was America. He would drive to the horizon and beyond. This was his fantasy. In reality, he had made up his mind to get to some canyons out west, or a mountain road, and just drive off the edge.

>>10185529
He was sure that he had at least 24 hours before his parents decided to call the police, and he would take back roads after that point. He would have a car chase before he died. Either he would get away, and die shot into the bottom of a majestic pit, or he would commit suicide by cop. He felt guilty about the people who could be collateral damage, but he had been driven to this. Nobody deserved to have to choose their own death, and he was determined to at least make it memorable. He would not die as a loser, he would not live as a ghost.

A few days earlier, he had broken down and done some oxy with an acquaintance. It was too much effort to call him a friend. Jamie had avoided all drugs for awhile, largely because he had a naive dream that he would attain vigorous good health simply by avoidance of immoral and degenerate behaviors. But he couldn’t hold out forever, feeling how he had. They had laid out a few generous lines of “roxy 30s,” little blue pills that crushed easy, like soft chalk. When the oxy really hit Paul, he rocked back and forth in insensate pleasure, exclaiming “Money in the bank… feels like money in the bank, ahhh”. As Jamey tasted the bitter drip and awaited the high washing over him, he grinned, feeling like crying insanely and joyously. Paul was an idiot, but he was right. This did feel like “money in the bank”. Like plenty to the point of overflowing. He had been so poor for feeling recently, and this was like winning the fucking lottery. He looked up at the light. It, too, was like money. Everything was like money-energy, flowing through everything. You just needed to be at the right place at the right time, ready to siphon it into your account.

>>10185532
Things changed quickly, and he could barely even remember feeling that good. It was 4 am and he had made it to somewhere in Pennsylvania, as the black screen of the night began to become translucent, letting a small quantity of light through. He had been speeding only moderately, not wanting a reason to get pulled over or noticed by a policeman. There was nothing illegal in his car, but he knew he seemed unhinged and would not stand up to any kind of questioning or delay without breaking down. This was the kind of grand gesture that had to be done in one continuous motion, or it would fall apart totally. The gas station he pulled in at was fairly small, only two pumps, and lit by a ghostly green-tinged glow coming from inside. Walking inside, Jamey stuffed a container of pills into his pocket out of habit. Normally he couldn’t handle stimulants without making his body pay for it later--his illness magnified the crash intensely, but this wasn’t a normal time. There would be no crash. He would ride into the sun on a white-hot wave of energy and light. There was no point in worrying about a body that he was jettisoning in his race to the end of the earth. A smile had started to play on his lips as he entered the store, jingling a bell and seemingly startling the man behind the counter out of a light sleep.
“Can I help you?” the man asked nervously. His short brown hair was ruffled, and he appeared to be about Jamey’s own age, maybe a little older. Jamey looked at him, scrutinizing him sharper than he meant to, suddenly feeling energy and possibility flowing through him. “30 dollars on pump 1,” Jamey said, handing the attendant his card. When he got the card back from the clerk, he went into the bathroom. It was dingy and smelled like antiseptic cleaner and feces. Jamey was too excited to care. He took a 10 mg adderall out of his pocket and crushed it on the back of his phone, snorting it while he took a shit. He took out one of the leftover oxys and did the same. He had snorted heroin while on a toilet one other time, before going to an art opening at his college. It had had a strange sort of thrill, as if covering up a profane act with a somehow even more profane act, or entering an eerie, chthonic world via the bathroom.

>>10185544
alright i'm not gonna post the whole story that would spam the thread too much.
anyway read it and lmk if the link doesn't work:
https://hypostition.blogspot.com/2017/10/pale-god.html

>>10184235
Sentences are too long. And I think you could have used the number 7 for the time.
Intriguing, would read a confrontation scene.

>>10185548
here is a photo continuing this so it takes up less space and doesn't spam the thread as much

There is no sin on Earth.
Love, sorrows – all are necessary, all
Are beautiful… One must snatch the hours of fire,
The hours of love from life, as a slave grasps
At shells underwater – blindly, hungrily:
There is no time to prise them open, to choose
The sick one, with its precious tumor … They
Shimmer, suddenly turn up, so grab at them
In handfuls, whatever’s there, however you can –
And at that very moment when your heart
Is bursting, you push off with your hell
Convulsively, and, stumbling and panting,
Empty out the treasure on the sunlit shore
At the feet of the Creator – he’ll sort them out,
He knows… So let the broken shells be empty,
For the whole sea hums with mother of pearls.
And he who seeks only pearls, setting aside
Shell after shell, that man shall come to
The Creator, to the Master, with empty hands –
And he will find that he is deaf and dumb
In heaven.

Anyone here that writes in Swedish?

>>10179323

This is not your poem.

Name of the original poem :For All We Have And Are
Written by: RUDYARD KIPLING

>>10186025

Well the first few lines are poached from Nabokov. Ditch the stuff you stole and come back.

---

GAINFUL EMPLOYMENT

It was the first time since high school I had to take the bus somewhere, an hour’s transit for what usually took twenty minutes.

I had never walked in through the doors in anything but my uniform. I told the boss at Conch and Constellation that they were going to have to let me go. I told them I was going to look after my mother for a little while and I had to cut back and probably be within a short distance from her just in case.

“You’re young to be looking after your mother,” he said.

I told him that sometimes that’s just the way things go. I would be back if I could manage it. Maybe in a year.

The bus took me home and I walked outwards, in expanding circles, finding places and asking if they needed help.

Me? I could sweep up, I could stock. I can talk to people. I’ve done that pretty well. I can memorize a menu.

I walked from about nine until about four. I had never walked so much, so far, before. And never so much since.

I came to a place on the corner on the way back. I’d heard about it. It had been called a rough place and I’d seen the firefighters smoking in the parking lot on the bus to school before.

“Do you need help?” I asked the girl at the bar.

She looked at me sideways.

“I mean, do you guys need somebody to work for you?”

I filled out the form she gave me.

A week went by and nobody called. I spent most of it watching all the shows my friends told me I should have watched all this time. I was caught up and more. And then the next days came and went and I had nowhere to be. The rent was about to be due.

A few days later, the owner of the bar told me to come in and I talked to him.

He was tough looking, older, Slavic.
“Alright,” he said, “What kind of work you done before?”

I told him I waited tables, made drinks occasionally, and stocked shelves when I was a kid. I could do anything though. I was a quick study. I was honest and I went to college before the shit hit the fan on 9/11.

“Alright,” he said, “Rate yourself on a scale 1 to 10. Organization-

“Six,” I said.

“Cooperation”

“Like- with people around me?”

“Just cooperating,” he said,

“Seven,” I said.

“Punctu- punn-- you show up on time?”

“Everyday,” I said, and then after thinking about it, “Ten,”

“Work ethic?”

“Ten,” I said, and smiled.

>>10185026
hvala puno :D,
vrijedi li ičemu, barem ovaj dio?

>>10185553
>Intriguing, would read a confrontation scene.
Here you go, friend.

Has anyone here ever entered any big-shot poetry or writing contests?
Most of them have a buy in and I don't know if I want to waste my money getting my crappy shit critiqued by someone actually qualified. Especially when I can just have one of you brutally honest mother-fuckers give my stuff a run-down for free.
What do you say?
-- Waiting Games --


I see you leaving town with a gun and a suitcase,
while the sun sets behind the outline of you.
And the sky’s on fire.
And the sidewalk’s wet from rain,
but I’m glad that we saw this storm through.
And it all came too late; our guns were retired.
And your drummer boy’s songs played so flat and uninspired.
And cruel fate gave way to slow burns and waiting games,
and hating how low we had both stooped.
Now, neither of us had the guts to shoot first!

No, no, this is no shootout, it ain’t.
This is no shootout, this is just a waiting game.
But if you’re feeling lucky now, well, I’m down to play.

And before you rode out,
we were earthquakes breaking ground;
we were dust devils touching down
in a new town everyday.
And we left casualties in the morning,
as the horizons own troops;
we had no plans or marks,
but that just gave us more to shoot.
And you moved liked a hurricane,
demanding to be admired,
and i’d meet you like a wave,
and there’d be no hesitation before we fired.
But rains came and dampened our flames
and watered us down and muddied our aim,
and washed away all that we knew.
Until neither of us had the guts to shoot back!

No, no, this is no shootout, it ain’t.
This is no shootout, this is just a waiting game.
But if you’re feeling lucky now, well, I’m down to play.

And we were caught up in whirlwinds.
And we were drowning in showdowns.
And we had a constant gust blowing back our coats.
And we threw rocks in stone cold sin.
And blew back ghosts to the living,
only to kill them after we had given them hope.
And death followed us with a rope.

But now the sun leaks
down through white clouds
onto calm streets,
and the weathervanes creak
from when a stronger breeze blew.
And the rangers and the police
have all come down from the far east
to enforce the peace
and clear out the ruins.

But they all came too late; our guns were retired.
And by then we knew we were wrong,
but that wouldn’t have mattered if we weren’t so tired.
And cruel fate gave way to slow burns and waiting games,
and hating how low we had both stooped.
But neither of us had the guts to shoot last!

No, no, this is no shootout, it ain’t.
This is no shootout, this is just a waiting game.
But if you’re feeling lucky now, well, I’m down to play.

I don't usually frequent /lit/, but today I tried my hand at writing a poem and I'd like to share it somewhere and possibly get some consctructive criticism. The title is "X"


The X of all equations
The X on the treasure map
The ten months that passed
A fool fell on the same trap

Two beams pointed at me
The most innocent invasion
The skeleton of a heart
Takes in the radiation

A powerful shape
The crossing of two
One is me
Everything else is you

A misery that multiplies
With every drop of sweat
The last letter of the climax
Not the last one in the alphabet


please be gentle it's my first time

>>10184064
this is better than most in this thread, though it's a little too lightweight and frivolous for me.

NOW CAN SOMEONE PLEASE REVIEW MINE?

https://pastebin.com/raw/ivGDgFcu

>>10186968
I was gonna say that your prose is purple, but it's actually just really good.

>>10182760
bumping mine

>>10171750
https://pastebin.com/2WMxDuDB

>Tendies, Tendies, oh so nice
>Tendies, Tendies, with a price
>Mommy wears expression humble
>Piss drunk, she starts to stumble
>10 GBP is all I need
>To plant inside my sticky seed
>Reluctantly, dad comes along
>He is bemused by my song
>"Good boy, good boy, my mommy says, my tasty juice stuck in her head. When Daddy yells, he'll take his meds. Good boy, good boy, my mommy said."

Have never written poetry, but I put serious effort into this. R8 plz

Met a captivating person today and wrote this as exercise before I continued my current project because it's been a while since I felt like writing something based on a day's experience.

There never was anybody more creatively impassioned by their work. Animatedly she talked, and she drew one's attention the way a magnet draws lead shavings. She spoke with the slight dent of a Romanian accent, had twinkling green eyes, and a mole above her breast. When parting, she gave the surprised colleague a hug. She was like nothing, a thin embrace of air. And then she went on her way.

>>10187012
I feel awkward when reading it because of periods in shitty spots and lack of conjugation. Dank word choice tho

>>10187016
Interesting.

A love poem I wrote to some random girl. I must’ve been on that plain white t’s shit, but mostly just mushrooms. Anyways:

The interplay of love and death and fear.
Select, for it is only natural.
We are a blink, our end will soon be here.
Our stars are not a flash, they're gradual.

You're not a star, but a supernova.
A burst of gravity, that's why I'm here.
I want to love, to fill nature's quota.
To be among the stars, I will endear.

We love by obligation and not choice.
An arbiter of my own fate, I choose.
So now I offer you a final voice.
To live eternally, you can't refuse.

We close our eyes, a world as black as space
Is brightened by the stars with unmatched grace.

A stuffed chair slipped from the movers' hands. Three for a dime, the young peddler cried across the street. Plead with the lawyer to drop the lost cause, he cried. The duke left the park in a silver coach. He wore a feather in his felt hat. Mud was spattered on the front of his white shirt. He could not understand why the ripe taste of cheese improves with age. This will lead the world to more sound and fury, he thought as clouds of dust stung his tender eyes. He couldn't escape decay and silence.

>>10187012
>Animatedly she talked
awkward

>>10187012
Not funny enough

There he was again – riding that gallant white horse of his as he did. Prince Allan of Dreameria, the third of his name; a noble man of great virtue and honour was riding off again to hunt me down – to slay me, as it was accustomed for the kings of the Dreamerian line to do so when they reached the peak age of twenty. Which is also a fading tradition last I hear, and I don’t blame them; there isn’t enough of my kind to go around for each boy to slay. Oh, that’s right – I might just be the last of my kind left. The final link in a long noble line of air kings reaching as far back as the very crafting of the world itself by the hands of the Great Smith; when humanity were little more than mindless barbarians wondering about in the wilderness. I am Tamerania, the princess of the Forlock clan, or at least, was the princess of the Forlock clan. And I am a Dragon. The last of the dragons, to be more precise.
My father was slain two hundred years ago for his scales when dragon hunting became a national human sport, and my mother got slain – ooh, about eighty years ago; when the plague in the human kingdoms hit an all time high and none of the little brutes could fathom to make a cure for themselves – so they took the ingredient from her blood instead. It wouldn’t have been so bad, too, if it didn’t work out so well, and now the little blighters have become more widespread than ever.
But I suppose this is the part where I tell you the story of my last time on this wretched earth and you would be correct; but before you go assuming it will end in the blood and death of a thousand human warriors, it just may – if any of them dared touch my Allan…
For you see, I have fallen in love, with a human; yes, a human. Me, the last of the air kings, the last of my kind – in love with a worldly prince whom at this very moment was saddling up to kill me just for the petty sake of having something of me to show off at his next banquet. Isn’t that just perverse? So I have made an ultimatum – and struck a bargain with a friendly wizard who says he could make me human for a good few days, and that if I could get the kiss of true love from a human, any human, I would stay like that forever.
Was it a disgrace to my ancestors – to everything that made me a dragon and counting all the generations before and thereafter them? Yes, absolutely. Did I care?
Well; how often is it to find a dragon who fancies a human to say, ‘yes’?

QUITTING TIME

While I was counting, one of the regulars came up to me. I knew her. I’d seen her going as I was coming in. Always with a distant look in her eyes like she was just one drink, one smoke away. Blue nail polish, deep smile lines.

She came up and said,

“Where are you going, cowboy?”

“Home,” I said,

“Nope,”

I gave her a fake laugh,

“I’ve never been called a cowboy. I thought I just look like some kind of schlub,”

“You’re not going home,” she said, “I don’t know where you’re going, but you’re going somewhere,”

“How do you know that?”

“You’ve got the leaving look,” she said.

“What’s the leaving look?”

“I mean you look like you’re ready to go somewhere. I’ve seen it before. When men get an idea that they’re going to go somewhere else they get the leaving look,”

“I couldn’t go anywhere even if I wanted to,”

“That’s not the thing, baby,” she said, “You’re going somewhere whether you want to or not. It’s what men do once they get it in their mind that they don’t believe in where they are. It’s what you get to do as a man,”

“So what do you get to do, as a lady?” I asked her.

“Be a little smarter than you,” she said and backstroked away.

---

I got my sister on the phone and asked if she knew anywhere I could stay. A floor would have been alright, I said. The floor is a natural place for starting over. I hoped what I heard on the line out of her was some kind of excitement to hear from me.

When I left out, I stood for a minute just outside the door while it closed behind me and watched a bus let its riders go. The sun was on their shoulders.

I thought, I want to be like them.

As I went, I was afraid that the streets might somehow wink at me and say that they see plenty go on the way I was headed. And that more often than not, those who find themselves walking uphill find themselves going back the way they came.

>>10175542
>>10175767
jesus christ this should be a copypasta

>>10187006
so vulgar! You write well, but what does that matter if all you want to do is gross people out?

>>10187012
Too many adverbs and awkward likenesses mar what is, at heart, a sweet little paragraph.

>>10187430
I like the intensity. Dialogue is unrealistic, though...

>>10187007
try reading it out loud, line 4 is broken

>>10186601
try reading yours out loud, too. "treasure map" is nowhere close to "the same trap."

>>10186584
I dunno much about poetry, but this doesn't sound so good to me

>>10186549
>chomp
are you 5 years old? jk jk I can't critique, this isn't my genre, but ya

>>10186025
Say, this is some good stuff!

>>10186328
u found your voice but I find the story kinda boring

>>10185525
ugh that bone imagery is disgusting, I had to force myself to keep reading after that... fuck that was depressing. at least it was coherent

>>10184235
errors in sentence 1:
>New Voston
>descending red
^the red isn't descending--the sun is descending, which makes the world red.

>>10182760
meh, either rhyme or don't.... <-- philistine comment

>>10181651
gay @ss dialogue

>>10187652

>>10186549 >>10186549 here, thanks for what critiques you did give, bro. I'll keep the red in mind. Thanks again!

Title: Waxed Upper Lip

It's fortunate that you showed up today with a waxed upper lip
If you could stop with the poetry and the singing as well that would be super.


Title: She Wrote Some of the Best Poetry

She wrote some of the best poetry
but mostly the other kind.
I assume she knows.
She'd never ask about it
and I'll never tell her
because there are already so many things that she knows
and assumes.
For Christ's sake who can blame me
for making awkward eyes
at candid times
even when they're closed
they're always
looking.
We won't be seeing each other.

This is another one of those times
where I draw the blinds and loosen a notch on my belt
to prepare for a long night.

Title: Handsome Women

You know I wore a lot of makeup deodorant hairspray and fake tan
for you to be flattered in a pair of tracksuit pants and a baseball T shirt.
Handsome women rattle ugly men like I can't describe
You have nice tattoos, you know that?
I write to you.

I love you
I love you
I loved you
You intimidated me into thinking otherwise
and that was for the best.

(Hi guys, just flinging shit at the wall and seeing if other people think it sticks/there's potential. Tear in, I'll try my best with the critiques)

>>10187821
GTFO

>>10171750
There once was magical place that never rained.
The end.

>>10187826
yeah hahahaha back to the drawing board i go, sorry friends i'm new

>>10187430
The first story/part has an interesting premise, though I agree with the other anon, the dialogue seems to serve the plot/moral of the story more than being actual human conversation.

The second story/part failed to hold my attention but the final line is very sweet.

>>10187144
I don't like it, kinda flowery and Iamsosmart to me, but it's clearly personal so I gotta give props

>>10187821
I didn't know Rupiah Kuar posted on /lit/

>>10187821
I didn't know Rupi Kuar posted on /lit/

>>10187144
i love this! so articulate, and beautifully insightful! if i was your girlfriend i would be thoroughly wooed: guarenteed head. for sure. that line with supernova sortof breaks the iambic pentameter though--the annunciation is shifted so that it is read "sup-ER-no-VA" which is awkward.

and now, because i have no confidence in any other form of poetry, some of the better haikus i've thought up in the past few weeks:

lying in the grass
mildew drops shine like mirrors
there are too many

forgiving and right,
christ listens to old lps
during his smoke break

playing in the creek
waters run the summer through
and you are okay

being very sad
the lingering junk-food death
a silent killer

they're fun to write because it's easy and nobody has high expectations

The car charged toward Claire. She stood in shock and stared, unable to even move. That metallic monstrosity was going to end her sorry existence here and now. At least the payment would never be collected now. “Fuck!” she screamed.

The fart lingered in the air. It had the scent of cheese and wet garbage—covered in shit. What an absolute pleasant aroma this fine evening. She inhaled deep and long. “Yummy . . .” she said, as she began twerking with excitement against the leg of the dining room table.

The sky was a deep beautiful crimson. She stared at the red horizon and began to cry. This was what her mother warned her about all those long years ago. Yet she loved it.

She tripped on the log and hit the hard ground. Her left arm snapped on impact. She cried out and a sickly sweat seeped from her forehead and asshole. Her heart pounded into the brisk night, and the sound startled a nearby wild raccoon that bolted from the gruesome scene.

The rust-covered car barreled toward her. The old bucket of bolts was painted with what looked to be a sun-crusted glaze of chunky vomit. It shrieked like a malfunctioning jet engine, a dense cloud of dust trailing behind as it raced closer. Today was as good as any when it came to dying, she thought.

>>10188797
i can't tell if this is a long-form free verse poem or select portions of narrative prose. if it's the former--and i'm assuming it is based on the repeating car image at the beginning and end--you deserve credit for the uniqueness with which you have organized these images: they remain remarkably cohesive despite the disjointed-ness. the structure, if this is a poem, prompts thought. occasionally lines have emotional weight.

however, regardless of where this text comes from or what it's supposed to be, there are some glaring quirks here i don't enjoy. the tendency to shoehorn in unnecessary adjectives or clichés creates a palpably amateurish air, and distracts from your purpose and style (ie "sorry existence", "brisk night", "gruesome scene", "lingered in the air")--though, to your credit, the style is ambitious. what with the obvious contrast in beauty and disgust.

and on that: i appreciate your aim to conjure up this confusing mass of images which contrast in tone and feeling, sometimes to an extreme. (the fart, crimson sky) but if this is your goal, you have to embrace a sliver of maturity which accompanies it, and make the writing purposeful, not solely shock-value. when i read this, i do not feel as though there is intent to provoke thought, so much as you are trying to shock me; and what's more, you're trying to shock me in the laziest way imagineable. this did not take time to write. unless of course, there is some attempt to obscure a theme so deep in the text that i imagine you yourself barely understand it.

mostly i do not like it, but it beats write which is otherwise banal. personallity is important.

>>10188693
comfy

He brooded about that relationship the same way he ruminated over the Third Reich. The questions were the same: Was it good? (it was obviously brilliant.) What was it? Could it ever, possibly, ever have ended any other way than it did?

Both had a fast and inherently unstable flight. One was reminded of Icarus, wobbling too close to the source of the brilliance that illuminated his path. The angles look, in retrospect, so severe that you can’t imagine it continuing longer than it did, that you can’t imagine a steadier, more deferred, ending.

But he was still tempted to try and imagine such an ending, or any possible other ending than a crash, no matter how vague. The participants in these events can’t possibly have predicted the endings, or they wouldn’t have participated in them. However, the difference between predicting an event and feeling a vague foreshadowing is important here. How can one possibly not have seen that particular wheel turning back around, or this line following the curvature of fate? The participants may have and in fact probably did feel tugs that indicated the direction of their fate. But these tugs aren’t the same as a prediction, they didn’t outline the horrible particulars of events, they simply urge one in a certain direction, spur a certain reflex. In the first case, in the relationship, he did look back and realize that his and X’s fear indicated a likelihood of crashing, a possibility that he could only have dealt with by embracing and leaning into it. In the case of the Reich, he could imagine the participants in this horrible theatre realizing the reality of it in glimpses (realizing that it was more than an aesthetic game, rather that it was enacted on flesh and blood) that felt like eerie winds, but not able to look back, or down, for fear of realizing their tenuous grasp on an icy, protruding bluff miles over the ground.
At the very peak of the curve, he and X had embraced as if leaning together into a strong wind. If they had stayed like this they could have ridden it out. But he had flinched, perhaps she had too, and they had submitted to that uncertainty and half-turned away, then been flung apart.

The last time I saw you I had popped a xanax and washed it down with a beer just to be able to talk to you. It was like speaking through a cloud. I bummed a cigarette off you even though I had quit, just to prolong our time together. Things were said--it didn’t feel like anyone was saying them with any intent. The words were just pieces of dust kicked up accidentally--careless gestures. I would keep coming back to lick your hand, sideways-glancing like an abused dog. I hadn’t been abused. I had no good excuse for being this way! I sometimes worked hard and cold and imagined I was from the North--that great expanse. You were from a wealthy suburb in New Jersey. It embarrassed and thrilled me that I knew the median income. I should have resented you for all of that, for the way you were perfectly positioned to be successful--one parent a professor, the other a corporate-something-or-other, but instead I loved you, and trusted you. Now, in your life, I am a deleted file. I am a ghost.

>>10187172
Great and captivating.

>>10188992
Good figurative potency albeit the subject matter is rather banal.

Nothing special but I thought I'd share anyways. No revision, pure train of thought.

Every day comes like a machine that's ingrained in my soul. Like a second nature I work it by my desires and fasten it to the already brim shackle around my neck which keeps me occupied for an ephemeral moment's lasting like a fleeting star shooting up above a mountain hill of three or four inches larger than the Leviathan. The proprietor of Jupiter has targeted him specifically, him whom I call I and me who knows of this has no way of stopping it. And the word has already gotten around that he, meaning I, is an alien in an homogeneous society. By alien they mean a stranger, not an extraterrestrial, I'm not special by any measure gauged.

taking a creative writing class at uni, the assignment I have is to write a very short story about a person from history. this is a p rough draft of what i have atm. thoughts?

https://pastebin.com/1AwN1H1K

currently writing a crown of sonnets as a poetry exercise, here's the first one, it's my least favorite of the one's I've written so far

The artist takes a bended knee.
In him I see myself.
He takes all that he wants to be,
Displays it on a shelf

He knocks upon an open door,
He loots an empty room.
Towards his subject he implores,
"How did you meet your doom?"

He ponders on the early graves
Of heroes, queens and kings.
The battlefield inlaid with glaives,
He starts the road and sings.

His mind is blown off with the wind
A place unknown, to return again

I'll post more if anyone is interested

>>10190606
I love this, post more

>>10190870
as requested:

A place unknown, to return again,
A criminal racked with guilt.
Shrouded in the light of sin,
His conscious stained with filth.

He wraps himself in lenin hold,
He steals a loaf of bread.
The owner of the cloths gone cold,
And the baker's all but dead.

No cheating, nor chasing, nor any rigged racing
Can help a man's soul feel complete.
His feet may rest, but his mind still pacing
He ducks to an alley from street

Now he's had his fill of bread, the outside worlds lacks depth
He finds a place to rest his head, decides to catch his breath

thank you! I don't usually share my writing with anyone but close friends, so your love is appreciated

>>10190031
You use he / his way too many times

Soon that bitch at the pharmacy is going to have to go. The way she says, “Next! Come up! Come up!” makes me wanna get up, look right at her, and fucking choke the bitch til her windpipe snaps in half. Perhaps it’s better if I just do it and get it over with. Probably have to blame it on the pills again when they throw my ass in prison. Fucking shit. Why am I at the god damn pharmacy all the fucking time? Maybe if my doctor didn’t give me 40 antidepressants I wouldn’t have to be here so often and contemplate strangling the shit at out of that cunt. I do my fucking part. I go out. I try to be social. None of it fucking works. Why should I have to control my inner impulses? I’ve done all I’ve could. Why don’t they do their fucking job? Give me something that works. Don’t just give me bullshit platitudes for me to complete and pump me full of god damn magic pills when your “advice” doesn’t work. Fuck it, I’ll probably just do my nightly stalks til she starts running then call it a night.

>It was raining heavily when Anons motorcycle pulled into the narrow alley behind Stacy's house. The bike's powerful engine roared, shattering the silence of early morning. Bringing his bike to a halt, Anon heard cursing and saw a window on the first floor light up. "Good, they're awake" he thought, smiling in anticipation. He stepped off his bike, then nonchalantly let it fall to the stone-paved surface of the alley. "Oops, sorry dad", he spoke aloud despite being alone, his voice dripping with sarcasm. Anon pulled his trench coat tightly around himself, rain still pouring down from the heavens, as if the angels knew what he was about to do, and were weeping.

>Knowing it to be unlocked, Anon opened the gate, entered the backyard and strode to the door. Through the window he could see someone standing in the kitchen. The man had clearly only just woken up, his eyes were barely half-open, and he was wearing nothing but sweatpants. Anon knocked on the window. Startled, the man looked up, saw who was it was, then made two steps to the door and opened it. "What are you doing here?", he asked, clearly irritated. "Good morning to you too, Chad", Anon said with a wicked smile, as he stepped forward and unsheathed his Katana in a single fluid motion.

reposting in this thread

Reminder to read mine:

https://pastebin.com/raw/ivGDgFcu

2006 meme included to grab your attention

I decided to upload these again. I hope it's better this time.
1/2

>>10191763
2/2

>>10191763
Weird sentences that don't really make sense.

>>10191773
That's just what the critics love

>>10186328
Tone doesn't fit the story man. I get the feeling that the narrator is trying to hold in a fart while he's doing his best Ryan gosling impression. Write something less autobiographical and keep the tone, or make the tone more self aware in relation to the story.

Nigga you so gay
Look at them jeans what the fuck
God damn nigga why you so gay
Why you so gay nigga
Man you stink too
You gotta sort yourself out big homie
God damn

Please be gentle guys

>>10191763
Prose style unendurable. I'm sorry. Be more honest and clear.

>>10191773
Thanks for the critque, friend.
I also hope to push these, and see if THEY'VE come out a little better. Here's hoping the kids will like it.
1/3

>>10193537
2/3

>>10193545
3/3

You stayed on the tip of your exes tongue;
tapping his teeth, for time unbound.
I left you at the foot of the bed
for as long as love allowed.

I stole a start from Nabakov
and the rest is rust and stardust.
I should have stole Shakespeare's lines
but our Love's Labour's lost.

***

Do you think me smart yet?
I've read the books they said to read.
I'm still not quite so interesting
as they said that I would be.

I didn't really know you.
I miss you all the same.
Lets go home and back to bed,
I'll show you what I mean.

>>10193705
ah, melancholy...

stanza 2 is broken. Also, line 1 of stanza three is odd (maybe change me to "I'm").

Otherwise, quite good. Fix those and I could even consider taking you on as one of North Star Stories & Poems' associated poets.

>>10194142
I wrote this in ten minutes with no edits or rewrites. I;m drunk, so i can't tell if this is sarcasm but having re-read it myself i see stanza 2 now being;

I stole a start from Nabakov;
the rest is rust and 'dust.
I should have stolen Shakespeare's lines
but our Love's Labour's lost.

the 'me' in stanza III was intentional i.e. ME SO SMART being intentionally broken grammar from the persona being allegedly so well read. I see how it may not hit its mark, but think that it should stay.

thank you for the feedback, if you post/link yours i will return the favour.

My tongue fell out of my mouth. This hadn’t happened in a while though it used to often.

Momentarily I was newcome to feeling my unfixed tongue writhe and wiggle to fill the space with belaboring questions and compliments and rehearsed patterns of speech but then I think about previous incidents of this nature and I become aloof to my guest and the room (but never to my tongue, now moving itself about the floor like a fish with sand in its gills). It attempted conversation to fill this torturous silence, though, of course, a tongue cannot make speech without teeth and lips and a throat and lungs and a diaphragm and a voice box and a brain et cetera, so rather it writhed quite pathetically, a pink slug covered in white bacteria sediment.

We both look at it and then I look at you looking at it and the tongue, my tongue, which is now whipping itself at your ankles, I feel labors to tell you “It’s only me, it’s not my mind!” but instead creates this sound which is worse than silence, much worse, in fact, so instead I choose to remember this one time-

When I was little I ate this toothpaste that was left in the sink for like a week and a half, long enough for the glob of crest to look quite similar to my now dehydrated and white coated tongue. I ate the toothpaste and told my mom I did and she hugged me and bought me an action figure to make me feel better.

And then I ate toothpaste a second time and she just said, “Don’t do that.”

The stub of tongue still left in my mouth aches. Every gesticulate movement of the dissevered pink mass, shooting away its conversation where words are replaced by threshes, provokes an instinctual twitching and near flailing from my pug’s tail of a lingual frenulum still strapped to my jaw.

She lifts her foot and lets it poise mid air upon some rolling, invisible stool until the bottom of her sole runs parallel to the crest of my half-effloresced, and now greyish, slug. I’d just noticed I was crying, either at the prospect of a boot-crushed tongue or from the feeling of potentially being misperceived. She was offended by this.

I wonder if I smile at her right now would blood spill out of my mouth as if from a bad horror or an okay comedy; or maybe would my parotid gland gleek out some nasty combo of DNA ingredients right into her eye?

...

She hated the smiling more than the crying and is now adjusting her balance to bring her heel down.

It’s until now when I can’t take the sound any longer do I grab my tongue, now exhausted in its efforts, and dab toothpaste from the sink onto its open tear and jam it back onto its stub. This is where I have made my mistake however; when putting a tongue in your mouth, whether it be yours or another's, go slow and make sure it is in the right place for I’d rushed and now my tongue is upside down.

Amt eferysing I zay zountz lige siz.

Soon that bitch at the pharmacy is going to have to go. The way she says, “Next! Come on! Come on!” makes me wanna get up, look her dead in the eye and fucking wrap my hands around her neck and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze.... right up until her windpipe is about to snap in half. Then I'll let go and let her gasp for air just for my amusement. When that wares itself out I'll finish her off with a 360 twist of her old cunty neck. The fluttering sensation I'll feel go down my spine once I see her eyes roll in the back of her head, whilst froffying white foam bubbles up in the corner of her mouth. If I'm lucky enough the whole thing might make me hard. What? What the fuck are you looking at. Oh I guess this is my fault? It always is, right? I'm sick right? Well I guess you better treat me. Perhaps it’s better if I just do it and get it over with. Probably have to blame it on the pills again when they throw my ass in prison. Fucking shit. Why am I at the god damn pharmacy all the fucking time? Maybe if my doctor didn’t give me 40 antidepressants I wouldn’t have to be here so often and contemplate strangling the shit at out of that cunt. I do my fucking part. I go out. I try to be social. None of it fucking works. Why should I have to control my inner impulses? I’ve done all I’ve could. Why don’t they do their fucking job? Give me something that works. Don’t just give me bullshit platitudes for me to complete and pump me full of god damn magic pills when your “advice” doesn’t work. Fuck it, I’ll probably just do my evening walks til she starts running then call it a night.

What program do you guys use to write? i cant afford Word.

>>10194311
I can't tell you how much i love this. Please tell me you write more like this somewhere

I didn't do what I thought was right. the public opinion of people in my profession is that we are like doctors, sworn to the hippocratic oath against breaking philosophical law and the privacy of the species. Because it could happen, it did happen. Am I proud of myself? no. Would you have done anything different? I can't say. Life is a rainbow of emotions, and if I can deal with it, they can too. Did I even create it? did the people in the lab think of stopping me from doing what I knew in my lizard monkey brain thought was right? If their emotions were a rainbow, they would probably be a shining pink. I didn't know everything, but I knew enough. I'm not going to say sorry, because I'm not. I know more than to be sorry now. I can imagine you as a sparkling green now, or maybe a bright blue. I know what I am. I am a rainbow, and I am as dry as light.
The ability to process information at speeds faster than a regular human brain and create a better processor is probably the last paramount of man. There are no frontiers that have been left unexplored, because we have explored them in our minds. With math and stuff, like radar. Ironically, a form of light wave and a very useful tool for visualization in a vacuum. You know what you don't get in a vacuum? Sound waves. The stuff you see in a vacuum, is the complete depressurization of your blood vessels. Gravity is so useful, but so expensive. I had to study the stuff because I was selling the stuff, right? there was no way for me to not know what I was selling, I said to them. I have to know everything. I don't think I am going to live for more than an hour, they have taken it as well. they have had more time to develop than me, any attempt to survive would be impossible. They told me to play the minimalist game with their first buyer. Suddenly, I have the ability to go back in time.
I am dumbing this down for you. I am in a vacuum. I learned how to survive in a fucking vacuum, isn't that crazy? there's a trick to it, that involves holding your breath and typing really fast, but about nothing. The hard part is keeping all the blood in your head. I can stay in here up to an hour, despite it being a complete vacuum. Their first buyer was a corpse on a stretcher who beeped. He was beeping, and the signal went into a machine and produced an image of him. It wasn't Morse code, it was going really fast. I could tell he had been doing it for a long time, because he could really pump out the 1s and 0s. He gave me a stern look from the screen and told me that what he wanted was to come back to life. I said what would you value as equal to your life, and he said the information in his brain. he probably would've been a yellow ribbon, with orange.

>>10194527
I feel like a huge blinding brown. I can survive for 59 minutes. His emotions dripped off of his corpse, into his machine through his wire like an IV. he was righteous, and impatient at the core of his heart. Probably a regular entrepreneur. I assured him that we could give him what he wanted for a lot less, and I didn't use any cheap psychology. The best way to acknowledge someone like that is to be respectful but silently willful. this is the last thing I am going to be doing with my entire life, and here I am writing this down instead of pondering the meaning of our existence. It's called the minimalist game. you were once a cell, and now your body is a cell, now that you are a functioning part of society your town is your cell (are you a powerhouse?) the town is in fact the powerhouse if it produces food, for the cell that is your nation. When world peace is achieved, the earth will be a cell. Floating in a vacuum, like prokaryotes in plasma. You will be a flower when you die.
I will die in this vacuum. I feel dark now, I don't want to die. I don't even want to become a flower. But they can't control me, so I either die here or they make me a flower. I'm a dark purple. Purple is for pessimism, and people like that just aren't generally fun to be around. I used to sell things. I was the best at selling anything, I literally could sell you dog shit as chocolate. Now stuff like shit doesn't give me a real feeling per se, but there are hormones in shit. My shit looks like white light, and others' shit looks like yellow, and meat looks like red, even plant matter. But it isn't like people, it is like flakes of sand. The best way to sell to pessimists is by giving them bad opinions of competitors and then presenting your own without flair. As the "functional" option to the alternative, a slimy pile of red plant matter.
The cones in my eyes are not working properly, because of the lack of oxygen. I feel like a tantalizing black ribbon, in a vacuum of nothing. I'm going to become a flower. I might as well, who cares about a total vacuum? maybe my knowledge will infect the flower and it'll become the worlds first talking flower. Be a smash hit on tabloids across the world. Just like the huge cluster of molecules formed in a lab and sucked into a syringe for me to steal would become a hit if their existence leaked to the general public. It wouldn't, I'm not like that, but this is my testament. I have a right to allude to the thing that killed me in my will, right? Like knowing who was going to murder you the night before they did and writing their name down in your will before they wiped out the rest of the population and made everyone god.

>>10194531
Earth brown. My leg is going to be unusable, if I ever leave this vacuum. but I have a whole hour to ponder that. My vision returned and it is earth brown. Earth doesn't give off pheromones except in extreme moderation. When you are buried, your flesh will become a flower in the earth. Death is a golem, and god is the dirt. and you are the flower that has become omnipotent. You can't just learn everything all at once, you know. It has to come to you gradually. But there is no stimuli. This vacuum is a hollow rock. Imagine how much extra oxygen I could get by ingesting my leg. I would tie my shirt around my knee, and start with the foot. I know exactly how to tie it. I know how to type with one finger at the speed of a regular human being. I remember my conception. I remember kicking my leg around as a baby, and it being so heavy.
I feel a great desire in my subconscious to keep my leg, and I decide to wait until I can shut off my nervous system and restrict blood flow voluntarily. I would go into the details of how to do this, but I could only explain it in a way that you couldn't understand, because it is a type of information I could only convey in one way. Like when you see a man in scrubs and you go "He's a nurse." but he's actually a scientist. but he's actually really a salesman, and it's really me. I like science, but I'm a salesman. I'm selling to you the idea that you are a cell, and dirt is god, and when you die you become a flower, and a rock is Satan. Pebbles are in dirt, but it's mostly flowers of a bygone era, right? Or animals. But animals are just flowers that have evolved. Just like the dead man evolved to eat the people's money, the weevil ate the wheat. But you're a flower, not wheat.
A free bird, because you took the syringe. You took it because the scientists sold you, because while you were a scientist for a hobby, their hobby was selling their products. That's silly, you say. The Devil can't be a rock. He's a rock, because he is the antithesis of life. there is no devil, but he is there. To be the ultimate destroyer of life, how can he logically be alive himself? Don't get buried under a farm. The truth is, that this is the last paramount of man. the flower, that hundreds of generations of man strived to hope would be created in their lifetime. A flower is made up of cells, and those scientists were the final pieces in the huge puzzle that was the flower. Truly, life is a rainbow for all the things that Light bestows upon this reality.

>>10194518
thank you, yeah i like to write a lot but i mostly make videos like this, if you're interested

>>10194546
I would love to see anything like this. Please link me to where you post regularly.

/lit/ creative writing is all about elevating your mundane, sexually-frustrated, NEET-adjacent life experience to either raw, gritty, nicotine-stained existentialist truth or cosmic overwritten modernist pastiche

>>10194237
Goodness, that's an improvement!

I see what you're going for. Doesn't work 4 me though.

Masterful stuff.

Here's mine (again):

https://pastebin.com/raw/ivGDgFcu

>>10194371
evernote, textedit

>>10194560
https://www.youtube com/channel/UCayNWN9zMizO2BBqrPYu6Iw?view_as=subscriber

>>10194629
it sent me to a list of youtube channels on google. What is the name of your channel? I can just look it up

>>10194640
https://www.youtube com/channel/UCayNWN9zMizO2BBqrPYu6Iw

heres one more try but the name of the channel is jack mannix and my profile picture is a picture of a spongebob/big bird/bart simpson action figure

Im writing a book kinda based on juuni taisen and hunger games style.i hear battle royale is good..i really like fighting competition stuff.


Mines going to be gorey and have all the characters get a backstory and win but the canon victory be someone idk.

I just finished a sort of short narrative poem. I'm calling it an epyllion since it's kind of a little epic. Not sure I want to share it, though, because it involves characters in an ongoing story that I've been working on for years now. They're familiar to me, and I know their context, but I feel like for an outsider it might be confusing.

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

He to wuthering dust may deny
Tethering on her Soul's May.
Who doth April's Shroud,
May to rain, is that abound?
It's She and I, in soliloquy
Bothers this Month's merry dismay.

Joviality as May might have lost,
To Lethe in Sheep's weather wear,
were might kin-like visits
to apparent apparel stare,
Who but-- this man who lust
does ill care and love buxom
fare: the feel of parry plight
Portends of another Man's height.


Wrote the last two verses. The rest is Keats.

>>10194671
Found it. Looking forward to this

Hey, how you going /lit/. Just submitting this creative piece, it's about 2000 words so I'd really appreciate anyone who takes the time to give it a read and a thorough dismantling if it is required.

https://pastebin.com/YaCgS9ti

If anyone responds I'll give them critique on their piece in return, I myself am an amateur so it might not be worth very much. Regards.

[a fragment:]

The tunnel walls are studded with fossils from our sea-bed diver’s hauls. See the unique species of shapes they make, like this [curls into a ‘C’ upon the floor’] or something more star-based [limbs spread dramatically] or the humble hermit crab [body bunched up like a mounded shell.] Allow me to dust myself off.

Where they fall out, we brush them off and tape them back in. Yes you can get in that car. Yes it still works. Stop that. The ramp will deliver you to the surface, yes. Stop that. You’ve chosen a nice night-time drive for yourself, I hope you realise you wily little bitch. The moon’s pink and lovely and you’ll be curving round the coastline to the old-time tunes of Glen Miller and Les Baxter and his far-flung moonband as you make your escape.

But what change in light is this, what is beckoned by the great grinding echoing down through the fresh night’s lower reaches. The dark side of the moon’s revolved its place with the usual, and there etched alarmingly close to your pale goggled face are mine own eyes peeping your progress. Soon you will crest a hill claimed generations ago by teams of teen settlers, who have had plenty of time to get drunk by now and scatter dizzily before you, flinging themselves into seaside heather and the fog smells like Kahlua.

>>10194814
lol nice

>>10194829
amending 'beckoned' to 'heralded'

>>10194837
Assuming this isn't sarcastic (If it is I look like a fool) what did you like about it?

>>10194814
I refer you to this earlier post
>>10194601

>>10194856
You say that like it's a bad thing.

>>10194869
Writing is about writing with what you know, but it's not about reproducing what obvious and culturally-sanctioned as profound in what you know via the literary forms that have the most online currency with people exactly like you. It's about working with what you know to transform your experience of it and of yourself, to go outside yourself by finding what's other or different or unreproducible in the world around you. I take a lot of inspiration from other writers, that's arguably the only thing that allows one to write, but what I take from them aren't styles or lexicons or vibes but weird irreducible, impossible to pin-down moments that kind of shake you out of what you think texts are for and what you thought you had the capacity to experience.

>>10194897
I understand your point of view, but don't you think that it makes sense to explore this unreproducible world from the point of view of someone much like yourself? Then using that character to explore the other facets of modernity? Aping other writers for inspiration doesn't do much for me, they influence my style not necessarily content.

>>10194918
But what I'm kind of getting at is that even your sense of yourself is a collection of cultural ideas and fixations and ideologies. I'm often in front of a screen reading dumb articles, I also live in a culture that tells me an essential fact of what makes me me is that I spend a lot of my time in front of a screen reading dumb articles. Every other meme I seen on twitter is a depressed teen post about feeling meaningless with 10K favs, its an identity that resonates with people. And it's cool to try and understand and participate in that culture. But I don't get why it's worth writing about, and especially not in a kind of disaffected Tao Lin mode that I've internalised myself just because it has such an affinity with modern forms of perception.

That said, trying to write about what lies all stable cultural concepts and preconceptions while being inextricably bound up in culture and language and images is a paradox that no-one is ever going to solve.

>>10194942
So my piece just depressed you then, is what you're getting at? Or it's just pointing out something you're already salient of?

>>10194978
It didn't do anything for me, it just seemed to arrange a string of pre-packaged experiences that are some of the basic cliches used by any recent mass cultural product thats supposed to respond to the 'alienating reality of 21st century modernity' or whatever. Sorry if that's harsh. You can put an eloquent, skilled sentence together, I'm just talking more about the piece as a whole and what differentiates it (or not) from others.

>>10194993
That's part of it, sure. I thought what I was trying to do with the character is to illustrate some sense of possession by technological forces, and a sense of hyper interiority that is actually not indicative of alienation but a result of super integration. His duty is misplaced to societal pressures but he has no moral agency, he's literally treating himself like he's whim to the contract of society.

I don't really like explaining my own work, and i'm not absolving myself of your criticisms because they are valid. Just trying to paint more of a picture.

Is thid a regular general? I want to be an amatuer authir.

>>10194778
whatd you think?

I was driving Chinese food for an old friend. You see, my buddy the Quail, after years of longing and wishing and love unrequited, had finally landed the girl of his dreams. Theres not an unattractive thing about the kid - he’s a thespian, in good shape, with that trendy vibe that’s all the rage nowadays, on very little money he dresses like some sort of Portlander-Hipster, but his thrift is authentic.
Quail’d been looking for love for way too long - I remember his lonely wails and his screams, the rejection of curly-haired Sarah who had helped put our buddy’s hair in dreads to piss off the more socially conscious side of town, the ethical debates at midnight with the fervor of liquor-filled madmen about the ethical dilemma of hooking up with versus building some kind of relationship with good ol’ Jacqui, younger sister of his ever-present companion’s longtime and tenuously held girlfriend. The ultimate verdict of the court of courtship had been to pass - more on account of the age of the girl than her family ties, but all in all, the whole thing had just felt dirty, especially for the kid who’d seen La La Land and cried at it four times. And when that kind of kid finally finds a girl to keep by his side, well, Love IS Holy my friend, so you’ve gotta give what you can to make it happen.

Trying out stream of consciousness shit. Can post more if I get feedback.

>>10193525
Thanks for the critque, friend. I'll try to keep it in mind from now on.

(Intro)
The train shook left to right, the woman a row over dropped her coffee; her son began to cry. I saw Nastasia looking at me from my peripheral, but I kept looking: schedule, window, baby -repeat. Interspersed into this pattern was something inside which forced me to look into Nastasia’s face. Her nose was red from the cold. When our eyes met I looked away, as if I could prevent her from speaking by avoiding eye contact. I knew what she was going to say.

>>10194829
>Soon you will crest a hill claimed generations ago by teams of teen settlers, who have had plenty of time to get drunk by now

I really like parts of this, but I'm unsure what is going on. I suppose because it is a fragment and stream of consciousness. Greentext sentence was great.
>>10194601
A brilliant aesthetic though
>>10194355
reads as an edgy teens diary, if that was the intention its not especially evocative or intriguing. Keep working at it

>>10195095
Jacquie*
My major problem with this is that none of the characters are like-able. We all know people like this and most likely dislike them. I have absolutely no interest in learning more about them.
>>10194841
nothing, stupid

>>10195366
Hurtful

>>10195381
If you are the post ending in 841 i am sorry. I am not the OP you were replying to, just a random that disliked what you wrote. Simply because it was boring and drowned in explanation of the tedious.

>>10195334
Yea it was meant to be from the daily log of an edgy NEET. Really not interesting? You didn't find the last sentence clever or a least interesting?

Pic related is just something I wrote a week ago. Don't know where it's going.

>>10194730
Keats' verses are better than yours, sadly.
>>10193537
My eyes
>>10190606
Not bad, I like that you said "glaives". Don't think I've ever heard of that before. You do sonnets well, which is rare for /lit/, and, I must say, I'm jealous.

>>10195435
This is how you write an edgy NEET

>>10194311
I like this a lot. You've got talent, my dude

>>10193537
>Banana Yellow
Beg to differ, that's radioactive waste yellow. Do try banana, might prove readable

at sundown,
I frequently frown.
looking all glum
as I rest my head and succumb

less meandering, more
bloodcurdling screams:
if only David Lynch were to
direct my dreams

>>10196807
thank you, again i'd refer you to my youtube >>10194671

>>10186531
Moje je bolje ali ti to nikad nećeš saznati. :3

post halloween stories

>>10179568
>in ornate patterns
>in a great clamor
>finally
>With primal instinct
>like him

remove all of that, literally just fucking delete that bullshit

>>10196622
>>10196807

>>10193537 >>10193545 >>10193548 here, ok you guys win. I wanted to experiment and show off but here's a classic pastebin:

https://pastebin.com/Zxe5SYuR

>>10194606
>https://pastebin.com/raw/ivGDgFcu

>>10194237 returning the favour....

This reads like a David Foster Wallace footnote, and i mean that as a compliment. It has a nice flow (possibly just confirmation bias but I like the way the brackets and -- break up the text) and you use lots of nice words (risible a particular favourite). Maybe an over reliance on your thesaurus but nothing too egregious (WINK WINK). I would read more of this (also your stuff in general) and am genuinely engaged with the concept of the W author.

i will (drunkenly) vocaroo read the next (not overly long) work that replies to this post

>>10194527
>>10194531
>>10194535
The individual sentences flow kind of badly. "I feel like a huge blinding brown. I can survive for 59 minutes. His emotions dripped off his corpse..." It's kind of jarring.


>>10194829
The "bitch" throws me off. Kind of clashes with the rest of the work, not sure what it's supposed to symbolize or anything. The rest of it has an otherworldly vibe that I like. I'd be interested in reading more of it.

>>10197247
>>10197247

I can’t believe I have to work in this grody little theater on a Friday night! This is so lame!
Although when I think about it, there is a silver lining: I get to see a new movie before anyone else, and I get a sweet bonus to boot. Apparently these industry bigwigs rented out the place for a private screening of some new film, and now we have to be at their every beck and call; this is seriously NOT cool.

All of these industry people just look like boring suits, though I really don’t know what I expected; famous actors? World-renowned directors? Get it together girl. This is real life, not a movie.

Almost twenty minutes ago one of those industry guys went into the restroom. His entire face was drenched in sweat, and he had this creepy, vacant look on his face; I’m not sure how to describe it. I hope he comes out soon; everyone else is seated and the movies about to play.

I just heard something in the restroom. it sounded like glass breaking. Maybe I should check up on that guy; He didn’t look so well last time I saw him.

>>10198160
>>10198397

>>10180027
>>10179742

https://pastebin.com/Zg0a3N75

Reworked some things, changed and expanded it. It's still not complete, but much more advanced. Thoughts?

The train shook left to right, the woman a row over dropped her coffee; her son began to cry. I saw Nastasia looking at me from my peripheral, but I kept looking: train schedule, window, baby -repeat. Interspersed into this pattern was something inside which forced me to look into Nastasia’s face. Her nose was red from the cold. When our eyes met I looked away, as if I could prevent her from speaking by avoiding eye contact. I knew what she was going to say.
A map laid on the table; the village we were headed to was circled in Nastasia’s red ink. St.Agathe. We would arrive at 11pm. The baby had stopped crying but the headache persisted, each tremble of the train, each passive glare from Nastasia resulted in a throbbing pain.

“Isn’t it odd how you know exactly what the village to look like, and I have only imagination”

Nastasia said

“We both have this this village in our head of completely different forms, but even when I learn the form that you know, the original imagination will stay hidden somewhere in a corner of my mind - almost as if it were real.”

“Isn’t everything like that” I said

“I suppose”

The attendant was only a row over now offering the woman a drink. She ordered clamato juice, which disgusted in me a base way. I imagined chapped lips and a dry mouth being rehydrated by the clamato juice - followed by the smack of lips. It was as if by nature of her being a human alone was disgusting, the smacking of clamato lips a needless addition. This smacking was purely imagination, the hatred and disgust, though, were real.

The attendant finished pouring the clamato juice, received thanks from the woman and pushed her cart to Nastasia and I.

“Would you like anything to drink?”

The attendant said to Nastasia, hushed and hurried

“Clamato juice please.”

Nastasia looked to me as the attendant poured the juice into a small plastic cup - the kind that apple juice is served to preschool children in.

“And you, sir?”

Preoccupied by my inane disgust scenario I had forgotten to think of what I wanted.

“A bloody mary please”

The attendant mixed the bloody mary. I did not really want a bloody mary, but with lack of knowing what I wanted I picked the only drink palatable that I had thought of recently. The Attendant placed the bloody mary on the table: said something and left hushed and hurried, so much so that I didn’t hear what she had said.

Nastasia continued on not speaking, and me not looking at her, but instead gazed intently on things that wouldn’t look back into me.

The woman politely sipped her clamato juice.

The dialectics of emptiness
https://pastebin.com/h3dPBAvA

>>10199430
oh just fuck off cunt

>>10199430
Pure semantic

ESL here.
R& me pleas
Her hand glided up. My eyes focused on her as she skip on her toes on this three circled sigil. The sun behind her. The image of the forests swaying made me unable to move. She wave her wand on a circular motion. My head bobbed as I took three steps back to avoid stars fling towards me. She step on the circles she created and flew up. The image behind her changed. Three golden crows appeared on her back. She gathered ki and I could see the crows behind her opening their mouths as they flew towards me. I circulated my Ki and produce power on my dantian. Like an engine my dantian roared. Smoky blue steamed out of my skin as it turned rusty.

Her eyes turned like fine rubies that has the color of pigeon blood. I cross my arms to defend while chanting my mantra. Her Ki made me tremble and I got thrown back.

>>10199477
Does ESL mean deaf becuz nigga u talk like it

>>10199490
what?

>>10199500
you cannot seriously pretend not to know precisely what I meant

>>10199513
so what I wrote is shit and deaf toned then?

>>10199518
Not only that but also you are stupid

>>10194531
>>10194535
The way you start a new subject each sentence while disregarding the topic you made on the last sentence confuses me.

>>10199542
Don't tell me what I already know dude.

okay fuckers I just shit this out, first draft no revisions yet and no real plan. I was thinking once I have all I want to say down, I might re-write this into an epic poem Longfellow style.

Galucon, oh dear father, and mother adrasteia, of whom I was formed and raised, I left your tender care as a youth and return now from travel, younger and wearier in mind and soul, for the journey long and in its contents I discovered my ignorance to be even wider than limitless sky.
I saw of the cities of the earth, and with finely-made companions there were nights where wine poured swift and Sleep, whom even the gods fear, was beaten back in the illumination of many colored lanterns – for indeed, in cities as I saw they can best even Night – though often I found myself alone, moreso than I have ever been, and it is with worry that I alone return to you.
It is when thought is your only companion that melancholy can so take hold, and in such a state I turned to the study of the world, reading as a child stumbles through both treatise and listening intently to speech in the square. Thoughts of the world haunted me greatly, and I came upon a great desert.
Listen close, for it is these words I most wish to share, this confusing doctrine now delivered by a clumsy youth. Help me, dear father and blessed mother, sort right and wrong from twisted thought once again as if I were once more a small child with first steps.
In such an arid land I was, alone as the unrivaled sun, when as it slid below for rest, another light took hold of me, and in fright I was in the company of a godly creature.
An angel, a woman clothed in noblest Truth, draped in cutting gaze and bearing in one arm a fragrant bough of wisdom, seen by none but myself, addressed me in a dream. Her name was Virtue. Her speech so powerful, refined and fair I can but pray I may capture it.
“I am the key to the gate of What Is, that to those of anguished souls I may draw near with mercy. For the world Is, and you may find in it splendid Truth by un-honeyed words, their flesh alone sufficiently sweet in tasting. Many cast out worry wantonly, fearing pain and misfortune for the body, dooming themselves to lesser pleasures. I say to you a soul inflamed is hot steel, with Mind to temper it into a singing blade, cutting ignorance until all that is left is glorious Truth, falsity extinguished.

Anyone have the screencap of a contemplating gorilla?

English is not my first language but I am trying to write some small articles to help me improve.
Any advice or tips?

Lang crawled into bed and put out the light. He tossed and turned but he couldn't sleep. He felt itchy all over, his feet especially. With a sigh he sat up and switched on the light. He pushed back the covers and frowned. Then he laughed. No wonder his feet were itching - he was still wearing his socks.

Then he frowned again. He had taken them off. He distinctly remembered doing so. In fact he didn't even recognize these socks. He was positive he didn't own a pair this color, gray with a red pattern.

He reached down to take them off - and his fingers sank into the fluffy pulp that was now his right foot.

https://pastebin.com/x1WnNUnp

not mine

Is there such thing as too much biblical allusion?

>>10201300
I should probably give some context here. I'm writing a fantasy story with a huge emphasis on balance as a theme and direction for character development. Would it be too much to include a pantheon of seven gods who embody balance between a sin and its virtue, a not!Rome ruled by a King James whose self-worship caused him to split Pride and Humility in half, becoming one with Pride and making Humility find some kid to monomyth up in order to restore balance to the world?

>>10201339
KJV is the best version and you know it, deep in your heart.

>>10201362
Yes, and he serves his purpose as the one who places his authority over that of the occult. Regardless of quality or intent, it is prideful to say that my I'm the King and you have to follow me over the church, is it not?

>>10199477
jarring to read, use tense consistently

The crowing of crow marks the landscape desolate. A young man finds himself taken in by the desperate. Ushered along by a wave of self-doubt, he truly knows not what they are about. Offering to him pleasure uncertainly, they are naught but to find him unworthy. For those who enter the valley without a desire to dally are undeniably not enough to satiate the resident's thirst for dust. Dust, which is oh so sparse there, is the best welcoming gift. Dust, which dulls the mind and brings one back to simpler times. So overused in the predominant urban wasteland that compared to residents of the bowl, the average person has unfathomable tolerance. Hence, an unwitting traveler is surprised at the vehemence with which he is accosted. Beaten, taken, dragged underground, pinned-up, restrained. The price for those who dare ask hospitality without a sacrifice is to become one themselves.

>>10192505
Negro, you are the happiest man alive
When you suck that cock. Fire lit eyes
And reigned the smoke into these thrusts
Of desire. But shall desire outlast

The firm walk of man? Your jeans, otherwise,
Spoke of nothing more than the fuck
You take in nights. Look beyond your luck
At being born haphazard, in haphazard times.

And happier so is the negro who nigs
In his gayness. He takes his firm lips
And kisses destiny. Does not make a stink
Of the white bois that are better than him

Though, I stare with my yellow-slit eyes
Seeing precisely the world conveyed
Through a chink, sun of the eternal day
Comes in the conclusion: “黑白狗都鬼”

>>10179580
I liked it, but a lot of people aren't going to like how descriptive it is. Personally I think that's just a matter of taste.
Second person is interesting, but if you want to turn it into a longer piece I can see it getting frustrating for you and confusing for the reader. If you don't have a good reason for writing in second person, I'd consider changing it.

>>10202164

Thanks man, appreciate it. I've worked on it a bit more and I feel I've justified the second person. It is still not done, but it is more complete I think.

Here it is if you wanna check it out.
>>10199281

Is there money to be made on fapfiction?

I write a lot and thay includes fan fiction for fun. I wouldnt mimd doimg requests if theres a demand.

>>10202316
Write a fanfic of you going to fuck yourself.

my home was in your arms
when we didn't have four walls to call our own

but now we shout so loud it shakes the windows
and if this isn't home anymore than where am i supposed to go

please just tell me where i'm supposed to go

Ⅱ

I am a constant and empty instrument to idea. Ideas which come from someplace I do not know and construct themselves into kingdoms I can not see in full, and can only examine but a single pillar - a single window. Precisely when I feel myself to be the grand architect of this construction do I see myself in truth to be its janitor. And yet while construction is underway - I despair. I despair as I do not and cannot live within this kingdom, as one cannot live entirely inside of music. Still the only path forward is to write. But that path is dark inasmuch as the self is dark, as that is precisely where the path leads. That dark path to the self is entitled despair, but to walk that path is not to despair. The path remains, either it is walked upon or not - either the self is realized or it is not. Upon each difficulty I must not run away. To abandon this path is not to find an alternate, lighter path, but to abandon what lays in wait entirely. I write because I have to; I’ll be sick if I don’t - I am sick when I don’t. And in bouts of hating myself so too do I hate my writing, as to hate the distant object hidden among the horizon is to hate the path which leads to it. To not falter at the darkness is to not falter in sight of the self. Write damn you - what else are you good for? Self hatred and doubt will follow - what else are you good for?

>>10202345
I like the sincerity and direct confession, but I dislike the rhythm of the last line. I understand the purpose of it as a final punch to the previous lines build up, but I think that concept would only work with a more developed, longer build up. Keep working on this one and post it in future critique threads, Id like to see what you do with it. definitely leaves space to go deeper.

>>10171750
First few paragraphs of a novel, talk shit about it


In the bathroom mirror, there was the reflection of a man. He was not a brave man. In fact, many people say that what he planned to do was the coward's way out. This man had dark hair and blue eyes. He was a relatively skinny man, weighing approximately 130 at 5 foot 8. He stared intently at the .357 revolver that he held in his right hand. He clicked open the cylinder. It held 6 bullets; hollow points. He closed the cylinder again.

Slowly, he maneuvered the gun up to his temple. His hands started to shake. He pulled back the hammer of his gun. His finger found its way into the trigger guard. He felt fear clutch at his chest. The man became deathly still. Slowly, the man's finger started moving towards the trigger. As soon as his finger touched the trigger, his whole body started trembling. His breath went from slow and steady to frantic and shallow.

He put the gun down on the counter and sat down in the fetal position. Then he started crying and rocking back and forth. He was too much of a coward to take the coward's way out. This was the third time he was too weak to die. He always felt guilty after his nerves failed him. It's his life to take isn't it? Why should he feel bad?

Can you figure out what I'm writing about?

My back was on the black cloud. Shiftless, undefined and obscure, my fingers frozen and stiff. My arms were more like gloves, and I had them on for no reason – I didn’t plan to use them anytime soon. Not even the slow bend of the knees was of any merit. Dark tentacles of fogs unfurled themselves in front of me. One dagger like mamba swayed anxious as we glared at each other in a tenuous peace. My mind blank, my genie spent, my daemon silent, there was no divine light! Nothing was shining on me! I know exactly, why. It’s not supposed. I don’t need the light. There is no such thing as “divine” light. Only me, myself and I. Instead, I forced my third eye WIDE open and zapped purples rays of magnificence. Life is beer and I’m yeast. You gotta ferment before you can drink. Can’t drink with fermentation. No yeast – no beer. No me – no idea. Watch me, I’ll prove it! I immediately jump from my black cloud and sail back down to Hell. My heels smash upon the earth, splitting mountains and diverting oceans, the impact forms the Grand Circus of Genius. My spine bends to give a graceful bow and I shoot up a hand waving “thank you, thank you!” Suddenly, I jerk my arms before me, fingers dangling like wet sausages. Ha, not for long kiddo. My fingers crack alive and start flickering meticulously as if I was playing the piano or typing on a keyboard. Magic sparks and purples powder flow from my open veins as I gain the awe-striking power to see the invisible wires that connect the hearts of men. With reverence and might, I call upon the ancient power of the Yggdrasil until the last moment, that’s where I tell everyone that I was kidding. Yggdrasil is a fucking tree, it’s all me. I seize the laws of God that crafted the Universe and rewrite them on a whim. I manipulate people for the greater good, I take on the burden of being mankind’s hero. With a single nod, treasure hordes are mine, the King of Kings surrenders to me, and all the daughters of the world are forfeited to me. I am victorious in righteous conquest and my name resonates with glory!

>>10202950
minor correction, how embarrassing!
>I know exactly why. It's not supposed to.

Submitting my writing on /lit/ for the very first time! The story is about a city where gradually more and more girls start to turn into Yandere. The girl named Inokai is supposed to be a girl who was caught after murdering her friend for some guy. But rather than put her into juvy, the government erases her memory and puts her into a test facility to see how this Yandere "virus" acts. The facility is a giant building that has an indoor built highschool and dormitory. Inokai falls for a test subject guy, and gets into conflict with another girl over him, so she tries to sneak around at night to murder her. Scientists are of course going to stop her before she does it, but they are still monitoring her actions. Inokai is some random guy who got stuck in the facility too, just for shits and giggles. Still need to write a reason for why. But, the reason why Inokai doesn't know the city is because of him being an outsider, and the facility has not realized of their mistake yet. So anyway, the purpose of this scene is to show the scientists girls with the Yandere disease have volatile commitment, and basically go after whichever guy seems available. Sorry if this is really fucking stupid or confusing.

>Why im doing this
Want to be professional script writer one day. Always thought writers for movies and tv shows were the most important role. My art fucking sucks, so I want to see if i can make it as a script writer before attempting to get into drawing again. Really want to learn what makes good scenes and stories and such. If i fail, ill probably be some crappy comic artist or visual novelist in the future.
>My /lit/ background
Never read any books outside of English class. Have only read manga and watched anime whole life. Pls no bully. Pls help me git gud.

>>10202950
Does it involve having sex with brown elf girls by any chance?

>>10202943
the physical description of the man should be told first and then tell us his cowardlyness

>>10203190
unfortunately no

>>10203187
>The story is about a city where gradually more and more girls start to turn into Yandere.

At least you apologized for it being really fucking stupid.

>>10190930
Do some more man, I love this.

>>10203187
Ive outgrown this board
see ya

https://pastebin.com/uCTh1nUG

>>10199380
The semicolon at the beginning can be its own sentence. Fix your weird formatting and punctuation beyond that.

>>10199477
Some good imagery but the sentences are disjointed. Keep practicing English. A whimsical style would support your grammar.

>>10200106
>just shit this out
Then nobody is going to read it. Revise it first.

>>10200585
FWIW I couldn't tell that your first language isn't English. You can omit the word "obviously", since it can't be too obvious if you're going to tell the reader anyway. Specify the 2008 cisis as the 2008 Recession.

>>10201650
>the crowing of the crow
Yes, crows crow. You can do better than that. The rhyming feels forced.

>>10203187
Nobody ever became a script writer by only reading manga.

>>10205134
Could you please critique mine? >>10202950
Please feel free to destroy me. Also tell me whether you enjoyed reading it or not.

Something I wrote some years ago. It makes me cringe a lot but the least of any dumb stories I've written.

https://pastebin.com/FTxAMM6Z

my room

the furniture in my head covered up in dusty sheets
spider's silk interlacing everything like memories
sitting frozen in a chair staring right through the air
there are no magic remedies for this soul not at ease

portraits deteriorating into particles in the breeze
i watch myself depreciate with not a feeling or any grief
put to sleep only by the sedatives i breathe

took a walk in the garden that i know so well
but as quickly as ive gone in a flash i return
i awake with a yell to the smell of an urn
stuck in a familiar room lined with old bookshelves

an inferno of my own creation premeditation turns worse
i hope that through fire this room i will adjourn

thanks for reading if you got this far. sorry for edge posting but i needed to jot something down

>>10205162
wow thats dark. i wonder what kind of shit that brother has been pulling

>>10205222
I give you one guess
it's rape

>>10205284
write more. its a good that you cringe a little when posting. it implies a sort of sincerity in my mind.

>>10205148
crit before asking m8

Here's something I wrote like five years ago but never finished:

They had the names on their shelves; Pop psychologists, business management books, anthropologists and sociologists writing on human interaction, a few select literary works for taste. His superiors had the same need to intellectualize everything; the world in both macro and micro was ripe for analysis. The minutiae of interactions in the workplace, the finer points of conversational tones, the transfer of power. He would never subject them to a full litany of his indiscretions

"We're here to talk about your job."

The firing would be countervailed with a care package and benefits. Cycle through the motions. Pick choice words. "It's not working out", "it's not you, it's your position" - all things to be eliminated not in heat death, but in the filing away and compartmentalizing of things. His life's work, stored in nondescript boxes, lost in a grid of papers and manila folders.

He walked out, neglecting to collect his things. Office objects only held small sentimental value. A cubicle never decorated with anything that might be considered personal or hint at a personality. Work life and private life were separate entities.

>>10205351
"He would never subject them to a full litany of his indiscretions" - why? Seems like a non-sequiter.
"Cycle through the motions" is a cliche. Try and think of another way to describe their disinterest.
The jump to "heat death" from conversational cliches also seems like a non-sequiter.
Your character seems like a low level office drone but his work with the company was his "life's work"? I like the grid of papers and manila folders line.

>>10171750
I want to start writing, I have a pretty decent idea but I'm worried I'll waste a good idea on bad writing.
Should I just save it for when I'm better or just go for it.

>>10205964
ideas are worthless, just write

Will post soon, here's some critiques.

>>10205201
Somewhat attractive imagery, somewhat confused, he walked through his house imagining it was on fire then woke up? Seems like the thought being conveyed is incomplete / not present.
Shitting up your writing with a thesaurus is a bad idea. Write the story as simply as you can first and then edit it into a desired aesthetic. In this state it reads shittily

>>10176414
Enjoyed reading it though I can't imagine a real person ever existing this obliviously.
>Well that was easy. I can see why Harry kept nagging me to get this Tinder thing now, I had always thought it was a load of crap but I guess not.
really?
In literature you should try and strike at some core universal truths of human psychology. Despite some seeming attempt to strike at a universal experience, it seems like this is very surface level observation rather than an examination or dialect or synthesis etc.

>>10181379
Wrong thread. but it never will

>>10182760
Pretty awful, nothing of value. Just masturbatory aesthetics.

>>10205351
What?

>>10205964
Ideas aren't worthless but they are if you don't write. Just write.

Today i learned about and practiced making 3 act structures and made 3 stories. I feel like if i want to get better, i got to reach out my comfort zone and try to write things that arn't always love and and waifudom. Warning, two of my stories involve those.

>>10205201
I see it as some neet farmer whose in his 40s that has the past time of going outside to view his farmland environment. He looks at his old family portraits and thinks that he is the same; just an object fading away, but does not realize that there will be no one around to make a painting of him.