/lit/ - Literature

I hate myself and I'm worthless.

>>18170467
Instagram storys

>>18170485
No you're not Anon.
>>18170494
How are they coming along?

A creepy middle aged guy stalks a handsome young man for 10 pages and at the end it turns out he’s a CIA agent vetting up a potential recruit

>>18170467
Not a story per se, but I’ve been preparing for a few slam poetry competitions

>>18170467
A conspiracy theorist podcaster predicts the imminent apocalypse at the hands of Brood X: a trillion strong horde of carnivorous cicadas.
https://pastebin.com/raw/ZeJpEgr1

>>18170624
Oh? I hope you'll do well.
>>18170618
Kind of sounds like it could be a funny time if that is your intention.

>>18170614
not that bad actually, yesterday I discovered 2 dead pigeons in 2 different locations and I posted them black&white pics in my story...

>>18170647
Yeah like he watches him exit the gym and makes speculative observations about what he hit that day

>>18170655
Oh "The Man in the Patagonia Fleece Half-Zip", I like that one

>>18170467
I was thinking before about making a cute story about a guy who lives in a victorian era house that’s haunted by a maid
Kinda gay but i could make it work

>>18170614
>>18170654

>>18170654
>>18170696

Spooky stuff mate. I wonder what could have killed those pigeons. Maybe they collided in the air and fell in? A story is there.
>>18170655
Creepy indeed. But maybe something will come of his hard work.
>>18170689
Not at all. I'd like to see that.

>>18170689
I'd read it if it didn't take itself seriously.

I'm thinking about writing about a guy becoming jobless with no one to turn to, roaming around and discovering a magic society portrayed by homeless people in the streets of New York. There he'd learn how to do magic to get a better life. The only trick is that it's hard and not at all how he imagined magic would work, the whole thing forcing him to change how he saw life in order to learn, confronting the people he ran away from, etc.

The magic would be at the heart of the story, at first established like some silly jokes or smart tricks by the hobos until the story really starts. The true enticing stuff is that it manifests differently for every magician, so there would be an evolution, sometimes predictable and sometimes not after and during every plot point. I'd really like to write it like a mystery serial with episodic clicks and imaginative scenarios, each chapter being used as a foundation for something greater in the background and make smart readers speculate about what would happen next, while more leisury ones would just enjoy the ride. I don't have the time to write it yet, but it stays in a corner of my mind.

>>18170846
>The Homeless are magic.
I like that premise already, and it seems that you have a rough idea on how the magic system works as well as where you'd want to go with it. My only advice would be to pick a city besides New York. That place always gets up in stories. Try a city no one expects - no one expects the Homeless to be in on a magic society, so why not the city be somewhere like, Pierre South Dakota?

>>18170872
not him but I like that idea

>>18170467
I'm working on a post-post-collapse story about global domination and transhumanism. Cyborgs, mutants, pirates, rogue AI, Robots, the Irish, etc. I have at least 110,000 words so far, now I'm just fleshing things out over what has been written.

>>18170902
the idea of a different city, cause homeless people in New York are kinda well known to me, u can see them in many skate clips

>>18170467
i'm trying to put together this dumbass allegorical mockumentary but i'm stuck in a loop of self doubt due to how unoriginal it's been so far

>>18170911
>Howitfeelstochew5gum
That made me chuckle, and I like that story. 110k words? That things almost done mate. Will you publish it?
>>18170927
Ah, you are a New Yorker. Alright, that makes sense. Do what you know.
>>18170942
Lets hear out your mockumentary. I wrote up a little story about Steve Irwin investigating magical creatures, can't be dumber than that.

>>18170951
nah I'm not him, just saw some hobos in some skate vids lol, I'm not from New York

>>18170951
Thanks, it's one of my favorites.
I plan to get it published in one form or another, I might just make it a series or an expanded universe. The setting I've worked out covers the whole planet so there's tons of stuff to write about.

>>18170467
An office space-esqe story of corporate espionage ruminating on boredom and loneliness in the 21st century
It's gonna be ass

>>18171010
>Thai Cuisine
HA!

Hmm, you could have one story on each world. Have each one cover a new topic, or the same topic from a different perspective and outcome. You got a name for this?

How do I get my novel published when I’m done

>>18171012
It sounds like ass Anon.
I would like a copy.

>>18170951
well it's basically the story this delusional guy who tries to shoot a real serious documentary concerning this fake civil war that happened between people who understood sarcasm and those who didn't, and he believes himself to be the savior of the nation who will carry out the light of truth for the whole world to see. the thing is, he does eventually find himself accidentally getting deeper and deeper into an actual group of schemers who are trying to hijack this ultimate machine that's supposed to endlessly generate comedy, and they keep feeding him red herrings all along in order to pamper his ego and subvert the initial goal of the doc. as the production value keeps increasing with him going from shooting with a cheap phone to shooting with a dslr, he becomes a bit too cocky. in the end his work is not taken as a face value and is considered ironic, and he has to figure what really would be the most authentic path to take.
there's many more elements to this retarded story but it's 5 am and i'm too tired to keep going.

>>18171022
I'm sort of shit with names, so not really. The title I work with for the universe is just 'Dominion', after the main protagonist faction.

>>18171047
Huh. That actually sounds up my alley anon. I'd give it a read.

>>18171088
An interesting name though I'd check to see if its taken already. You'll come up with a name. It'll hit you out of nowhere.

>>18171103
really ? i think it's drivel so far but i'm glad you feel this way about it. maybe it ain't so hopeless after all.

>>18170467
I have been working on the same story for the last 12 years. Every day I write, when I'm not working or sleeping I research, when I drive or eat I think about it. I'm not even halfway through but I won't stop; several hundreds pages of prose, thousands of verses, a lifetime's work: I shall succeed.

>>18171023
These days you don’t get published, you self-publish. Unless of course you already have a massive following in social media, are jewish, rich, or well-connected to someone in the publishing industry.

>>18171698
What’s it about?

>>18171969
A lot of characters committed a lot of sins; how to atone? What does it mean, to atone for a sin? Why?
That's the basic question; however, to understand penitence one must first ask: what is Sin? Thus one must explore sin and, of course, what is not sin; this goes down a rabbit hole of mostly theology and ontological debate, explicit or not, and the plot is very thin. To be honest I envisioned it as a cathedral, a summa of all that is human; I go about every possibile subject of knowledge, from architecture to music to material conditions etc, really everything I have ever studied.
It's a unsellable product and I have never thought for a second to make a penny out of it; I'm gonna put my soul into it. I will die childless, but not without a son.

>>18170467
I haven't written a long piece in about 2 years but I've recently been looking into Antarctica. There's seven churches there. One of them burnt down twice. Might make for an interesting alt history fiction story.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Antarctic_churches#:~:text=Churches%20%20%20%20Name%20%20%20,%20%20%20%204%20more%20rows%20
(on a side note I have bought so many scratch cards the past week then when I was filling out the capcha there and there were 3 bikes in a row for half a second I thought I'd won something >÷[

>>18170618
What if the guy he was following was also cia and it was a training op to see if he was worth recruiting?

>>18170911
I would read that.

>>18170467
God help me I am going to get into the hack web novel game and write xianxia

A screenplay for a red western set during the end of the Russian civil war with Ungern-Sternberg. It’s going to be sick, bros.

>>18171964
Don't listen to this utter faggot, my brother is traditionally published and is none of the above. The most cursory glance at debut novels published in the last 12 months would prove this notion to be false. Now, as ever, it's a narrative peddled by mediocre writers to justify their own mediocrity and failure to qualify for traditional publishing.

>>18170467
I'm going through edits of a story I wrote about guilt back in March with a friend who has a publishing internship. I have two more I want to write soon; one about an ex-monastic and a mechanized intelligence, and a hardboiled story about loss of love. I also remembered the first fiction piece I wrote way back in my sophomore Intro to Creative Writing class in college. Found a workshop copy that I kept and it's pretty bad, but I think it's solid enough for a rewrite.

>>18170467
Here's something I wrote in 5 minutes

A Metaphor

He was an elephant. He's not an elephant I hope you understand. He's just large. Not large like a large building, or even a small building. Buildings, on the whole, are comparatively large to what he was. He was a large man. No, he's not large. Elephants are large but when you call someone an elephant you're really saying they're fat. So, what I'm saying is that he was fat. Well, that's not entirely right. He obviously wasn't always fat. Babies aren't fat even when they're big babies. It would be wrong, entirely wrong, to call a recently born baby fat. In truth, he was born a twig or at least some sort of spindly branch. No matter what size he was, his mother always towered over than him despite the fact she was 4'9. This is not because he ended up equally small. It's because she dominated his life. It's like an image in another image's clothes or a simile that didn't have self-esteem problems. She's irrelevant to this. All I wanted to say is that this man is fat.

Anyway, he was a fat man. I apologise. I haven't told you why you should care about this fat man. You know nothing about him besides the fact he is fat. That isn't fair. You think of a fat man in isolation and you don't get a good image of someone. Fatness as a single attribute is not attractive. If I said he was a funny fat man then I'm sure a couple of you would go "Oh yes, I love funny fat men". There's something in there. Sadly, he is not a funny fat man. I'm sorry again. I haven't told you his name yet either. If I gave you a name I'm sure you'd become more attached to him. You'd care about him. He'll cease to become a fat man then. He'll become something entirely new. He'll become a James. He'll become a James of a man. A man who is pure Jamesiness. Actually no, once again. I am very sorry. I wish I could make up for mistakes here. He'd be a fat man named James; Elephant James. There's an interesting difference, I find, between James, a fat man and a fat man named James. James who is described as a fat man is primarily James. A fat man who is called James remains fundamentally a fat man. His fatness supersedes his Jamesiness.

I may as well just call him Elephant from here on out. Everything from then on is just a filler from the fact I said he's an elephant. It's what everything here is based on.

I'll start again.

Elephant was a fat man named James.

>>18170467
I've been writing and then editing a novel for a coupla years now. It'll be done in a few months. I'm pretty chuffed.

I’m going to do for Erotica what Goosebumps did for Horror

>>18171698
>>18172250

You will complete this, for this is your Great Work, and when it is completed it shall be wonderous. I'm rooting for you Anon. May I one day hold it in my hands.
>>18172444
Huh?
>>18172604
Tell me more.
>>18172773
Do you feel that Self-Publishing might be an easier way for someone to get their stories out to the greater public, Anon?
>>18173467
What is your story about?
>>18174423
oh no.