Crossposting from the Writing What You Don't Know thread b/c maybe people here might be able to give me a hand:
so hey I had an idea for a story and wrote out the skeleton for that idea (not super fleshed out, as in several main characters don't have names yet) if people want to take a look here's a link for ya (warning: it's quite basic and not super high quality) you can comment directly on it or tag me here. some things might need clarification so if they do you can comment on that thanks :D
Looks pretty good! A slow-release mystery that actually progresses nice and quick. I wasn't too satisfied with the father's original story, and then lo! it was not true all along. Nice. Are the kids supposed to be shared mains, or Sam primary, Charlotte secondary? Because as it is it's all about Sam. Could she be the one who calls home in ch6? (minor: In ch10 I think you mean omniscient (all-knowing) not omnipotent (all-powerful)) Have you got a writing buddy or editor friend? For a story like this you really need someone who isn't you to confirm that your implication and misdirection is working.
Thanks for the feedback! I originally wrote it just from Sam's POV and then decided to split some of it off. Charlotte could use some work, I'll do that. I did mean omniscient, yes; I wrote that bit when I was a bit out of it (the whole chapter is supposed to be a bit weird). And I do not have one of those, which is why I asked you guys. Thanks for the feedback, I will work on it! (Though I do need to go to bed now...)
I have made either a very good decision or a very poor one far as writing goes, and begun attempting to hybridize the Mass Effect and non-SBURB/SGRUB Homestuck settings, because my love of stories about hope and unity in the face of unfathomable, unfeeling horror (and also sloppy interspecies makeouts) is insatiable. I may attempt to actually write a story or ten with said setting, but mostly I want to smoosh it all together and I keep chuckling at the idea of Commanders John (Egbert-)Shepard and Jane (Crocker-)Shepard, who love their Captain mom and weirdly similar civilian dads very much. Also trolls might have Feelings on the subject of Reapers considering how much horrorterror shit is in the background of their society. Also also, I adore the idea of pretty much any given outsider having to deal with the Alternian government on an approximately even playing field instead of as a victim or after its annihilation. I could gush and speculate for days honestly, but nobody I'm friends with is into both things, so it's. Gahhhh.
It may be a size-of-pieces thing there. something covered in fingers is funny, something covered in hands could go either wany, something covered in arms is almost always GOD WHY
anyway I'm considering some sort of urban magic thing based off the idea of risk-and-reward magic as presented in umineko ie that you have to take a really big risk to get a big effect, and little risks can be balanced for smaller effects i'm Considering
Feel free to hit me up if you want to discuss more/have bits you want to run past someone. It looks like a really interesting story and I'd love to see where it goes!
So by pure introspection I have loosely created a concept, but don't have necessarily a story or plot or anything. I had this idea for a narrator who isn't so much unreliable as they are BIAS toward the subject matter. The first problem I have is that I want to create a highly interactive piece. One where the narrator looks at the camera and says "Well wouldn't that be a story for another day, wink wink" and the narrative on that side would complete through other writers picking up on the idea(s) to create a much larger meta-work. The second problem? ...I don't have any characters or story or anything to start it out with. Just the concept and the narrator. What do?
Silly little DnD bit Spoiler The weaponsmith looked at the beat-up old shortsword and tried not to sneer. "All you want is the grip rewrapped? This thing is better off melted down for the metal. It's barely a one dee six!" The halfling scowled at the man. "He's better than that! He was a one dee eight longsword when I took him off a dead bandit that thought she was better off bare hands than using him. He got banged up a lot cause I get into lots of fights, but he was always there for me, and I always got him back when I got beat up. He was up to a one dee eight plus a couple longsword before I broke him against a rock giant (don't hit rock giants with swords, it just tickles them and they don't like being tickled). I got him fixed to be shortsword and I guess he liked me saving him cause he was a one dee six plus five when I got him back. Look at him! He glows! Touch his edge, I dare you." The weaponsmith ran a finger over the edge of the sword lightly, blinking as it came away bloody. "He knows I love him. He's been beaten and broken and I always get him fixed. I don't throw away my friends." The halfling smiled up at the weaponsmith. "He's a one dee six but he's got plus ten cause of love and I ain't gonna let you melt that down. You can't make a plus ten, you gotta earn it."
Ooh, this sounds like a more clever version of something from one of my 'verses - Basically, a "space sci-fi with no aliens(...yet)" with two cheats: FTL/gravity tech and... telepathy. Telepaths are made, not born. Individuals as a whole, primed or not, have different strengths and weakness in each region of their mind and the extent to which they can read/be read/write/be written over. Telepathy is also super dangerous, because if you screw up and touch brains wrong, people die. People make better telepaths if they're better at interacting with people because mirror neurons blah blah somewhat convincing pseudoscience goes here. Once an individual has been primed, until they're properly trained, the world is suddenly full of all kinds of social BS they weren't even aware of before. But autism makes you mostly immune to telepathy. The end results: - all the schools for psychic training are taught and staffed mostly by folks with some degree of autism. - so are most important appointed government positions. (Why would you pick someone who could be jedi-mind-tricked?) - which basically makes being autistic way more useful than your average psychic Spoiler: plot shit It later turns out that the reason allistic people "make better telepaths" is because the original telepath was allistic; it's really more relevant how well two people's brains line up than what exactly those brains are like. Suckily, if the people who prime you aren't enough like you, you don't get the full breadth of your potential ability... unless you have someone else do a patch job later.
Everyone hates the old cliche of the princess/noble girl who Doesn't Want To Be A Lady and runs off to be an adventurer. I've been looking for something to do with an old self-insert of mine, and I was thinking; would it qualify as a deconstruction if she was in that situation because she's on the spectrum in a setting where that isn't diagnosable yet? There are so many things about being a princess in a pseudo-Victorian era which would be horrible for an Aspie who doesn't know why those things are problems; sensory processing fucking with her when she has to dress and have her hair done acceptably and when she has to eat with important people, coming out with awful things which embarrass the royal family because she doesn't get the social conventions, panic attacks during public speaking... I know I'd hate it, and she'd know full well she'd make a terrible queen. So she gets the family to tell everyone she's gone to a foreign finishing school and runs off to be a librarian and join the Dress Reform movement.
Spoiler: rwby stuff i unearthed from my files Cedar Monte has never considered himself a brave man. He keeps his head down. His nose clean. Doesn't draw attention to himself. It's a defense mechanism, he supposes. Faunus who make spectacles of themselves don't live happy lives. Truth be told, he doesn't know how he ended up wrapped up in all this. He's had so many chances to back out. They've been so careful to let them know that. It's been months of no shame, no pressure, tell me if it hurts, no more hurting if we can help it. Putting an end to that kinda stuff is what we're all about, the Doc had said. We're The Cure for cruelty, and we won't force you to do anything. He glances over to his left. He's sitting on the floor in corner of the warehouse cordoned off with a few sheets of plastic strung up between the skeletons of machinery long since picked clean by scavengers. The door is still there, right by his side. Still unlocked. He resists the urge to reach up and test it. Instead he pinches a strip of curling paint on the door frame between his thumb and his forefinger and worries it gently. You can leave any time you want, up to the very last minute. The woman at his right coughs. Cedar jolts and tucks his wandering hands under his armpits, flinching into himself. His cheeks burn. He's never been a brave man. He peaks out from behind his bangs. The woman isn't staring. She knows him better than that now. From the very first day she's been there, by the door with him. He'd gotten there fifteen minutes early and sat on bare concrete after thirty minutes of twitching towards the ramshackle assortment of chairs and faunus clustered in the center of what they had already dubbed the "sick bay". She'd gotten there twenty minutes late and dragged a rusty folding chair towards the door, heedless of the eyes on her and the hideous screeching of metal on concrete. Cedar had felt like such an idiot. He still does, sitting here next to someone like her. Afraid like someone like her. Like someone like him needs an escape route. She's so small next to him. She'd grabbed his hand once after a particularly long meeting, joints popping and muscles creaking as she stood, and her fingers had barely managed to encircle his first two. Her whole hand could fit in his palm, he had thought, awed and ashamed. She's so small, but she stands so tall and so proud and when the meetings get into full swing he watches her bend forward towards the speakers like a flower towards the light, drinking in every word with something urgent and thirsty lurking just behind her gaze. Like she wants so deeply and so true that the world can't help but give it to her. Cedar has never felt anything so deeply in his life. Not even fear. She catches him staring at her out the corner of her eye. She turns towards him, and his gaze trails along the knotted mass of scars that twists her every expression into something out of a horror movie. She grins at him, conspiratorially. Her empty eye socket deforms with the movement. He finds himself smiling back. His teeth feel heavy and awkward in his mouth, and his heart shudders and jolts like it's trying to escape. "Today's the day," she croaks. The brilliant pink line slanting across her throat bobs. The shredded remains of her rabbit ears twitch with excitement and, dare he imagine, nerves. "Yeah." He whispers. He smiles again, making sure to cover his teeth with his lips. "No more hurting," she whispers, almost to herself. She wraps weak and unresponsive hands around her legs tucked up under her chin and shudders, helpless with joy. "Yeah." He says, wishing he had something more to offer. "Yeah," he says again, softly, like the repetition can convey all that he's feeling and all that he wishes he felt. The curtain on the western end of the sick bay parts. The Doc's personal assistants stride out. Seven of them, pristine in sterile white uniforms, pushing carts too sleek and well maintained for the surrounding environment. Cedar looks at his own hands, huge and clumsy, dirt ingrained in the crescents of his nails and the whorls of his palms. He picks at the frayed canvas of his work pants and bites his lip. He's not the one out of place here. The woman rocks forwards, making a soft pained noise in the back of her throat. Cedar shudders and balls his hands against his chest. The assistants break off, two pairs and one trio rolling over towards clusters of faunus. Wait for us to come to you. The Doc had said. We'll take care of everything. They've endured months of testing for this. Nearly a year of putting their lives in the Cure's hands. Month after month of agents monitoring their every move. Of needles pockmarking the insides of their arms, vomit oozing out the crevices of chattering teeth, cold sweats and shaking hands and long quarantines beneath the surface till the thought of sunlight seemed like a child's dream. It's a hard rule to follow when the end is so near. It'll all be worth it, just you wait and see. There're twenty-three of them left. There'd been a lot more than that when he first started. More than someone who kept his head down and his gaze averted could hope to count. But trials and testing and the constant strain of secrecy and the rigorous procedures meant to preserve it ground them down to a scant handful, even before the constant barrage of health crises had worn down all but the most devoted of zealots. It'll be more than enough to get it started. It'll be more than enough even without him, he thinks. He won't change anything by leaving, he thinks. The Cure'll have their way with or without him. A wave of miserable certainty rolls through him at that thought. He's not a brave man. He holds the course. Stays put. Moves along the path of least resistance. And it seems he'll even commit atrocities if you put enough eyes between him and the door. Genocide is such an ugly word. They reach the woman first. An assistant, broad shouldered and tall, approaches her by himself, a pale green tray of supplies resting jauntily against his hip. His face is hidden by his mask, but Cedar has been here long enough to recognize the sway of his hips and the bounce of his stride, a wealth of enthusiasm spilling out his every movement. If he curls up any tighter he'll disappear, Cedar thinks, thought sticking sickly sweet in the back of his throat. His breathing comes out in loud shallow gasps, and he all but shoves his fist in his mouth to muffle them. "Hey." The man says, airy soft, the voice of someone edging delicately around something fragile, unstable, sick. Cedar jolts, antlers clacking painfully against the wall behind him. The woman doesn't stare, and he thinks he might love her for that, but she does watch, subtly, delicately from the corner of her eye. One small hand is wrapped around a slender wrist, rubbing the soreness of a needle prick, and god he hadn't thought it'd go this fast. Somehow he'd thought something this big would take forever to come to pass, that one little injection would hover at the edge of eternity, that the world would stop spinning and time would cease to flow, weighted down with the enormity of their undertaking. God. God, he swears, he hadn't known it'd be like this. "Hey there, big guy. Feeling a bit of the last minute jitters, are we?" The man wraps one slender hand, small but strong and calloused in all the wrong places, around Cedar's, huge and filthy and rough. "It's gonna be okay. You'll be fine. We've gone over this, we've made sure of it." His thumb rubs soothing circles over Cedar's knuckles. Cedar feels his stomach coil tighter and tighter with each pass. He mumbles something through the painful knot in his throat. His eyes burn as the man, still making soothing noises, turns his hand over and brings the needle to the prominent vein on his inner arm. "Just relax, buddy." The needle dips, clean and nearly painless. "It'll be over before you know it." ---- Weiss Schnee is not having a very good day. Flu season is in full swing, and with hundreds of adolescents with varying grasps on the concept of personal hygiene rubbing elbows on a day to day basis, she's had a hell of a time avoiding the various bodily secretions of her fellow students. shs The man, nearly twice her size and made even bigger by the towering three point antlers twisting out from the top of his head, turns to face her, cringing in on himself. He's crying, Weiss thinks, with a thrill of horror. He looks barely older than herself but a million times as shabby, clothing threadbare and hair shaggy, nose running and face flushed with fever, and he's crying. "Uh, look, it's not. I'm okay, I'm fine, everything's. Don't be. Don't be like that, it's fine, okay? Jeeze." He presses back against the brickwork, cowering like he thinks she'll hit him, like he's not seven feet and two hundred plus pounds of solid muscle. "I'm so sorry." He sobs, turning his head like he's expecting a slap or a gun under his chin, and Weiss doesn't want to be annoyed, but she wants to be sympathetic even less. "Don't be. I'm fine. Stop blubbering, you're embarrassing yourself." "No, you don't under-" His head snaps towards her, watery green eyes meeting her own grey. "You don't, you can't know, I didn't mean for it to be this way, I swear!" He staggers, hand curling over his mouth to muffle his sobs. "But it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, I just. I'm so sorry." He turns and runs, barreling through the slow crowd of early morning shoppers. Weiss blinks. "The hell was that all about?" Absentmindedly, she reaches one hand up to dab at a suddenly runny nose. I'd forgotten about this one and I actually kind of really like it, and that sucks because I don't watch RWBY anymore and don't even know where I was planning to go with this beyond "some extremists make a fantasy virus that turns humans into fakey fake not quite faunus in the hopes of ending racism, prompting discussions of prejudice, genocide, and other such topics between color coded cartoon characters".
there's at least one Bogleech Creepypasta Cookoff entry which contradicts this! I don't have it bookmarked, but there's a fields with fingers instead of grass and it is TEN KINDS OF NOPE
crossposting now that ive properly finished this section. Spoiler: tw repeated suicide mentions Spoiler: romison green
Spoiler: hydra has feelings about Ben Solo and is entirely a bad writer He never hurts you more than he needs to. He shows you, once or twice, in the same distant, careless way he allows you to see him, sometimes. How fragile you are. His hands cleaving through the back of your skull like the meat and bone of you is all but air before him, his fingers carding through your thoughts, your nervous system twined through his fingers like thread. He could ruin you, you know. He could hurt you so badly, and nothing you could do would stop him. He doesn’t have to be so gentle with you. And he is only looking. Your revulsion is childish, you think. You wrap your shame and sorrow and determination in a bundle and present it to him, once. An apology, pressed at him with a mockery of his own power and control, indelicate, artless, shameful. He does not have to be as gentle as he is.
A thing I writed while waiting for the 167 updates to win 7 from a new install. Spoiler She saw the shadows again. The ones from her dreams. But she was awake. They were coming for her. Again. In the dreams they were always in a circle around her. That was why she never went out into open spaces at night. As long as they couldn’t make a complete circle they couldn’t get her. But now they were so close. She kicked off her shoes and started to run. High heels were so stupid, she thought, as she watched her white feet against the black asphalt. Her feet were pretty, a stray thought noticed. The shadows were always there. Every night she saw them stalking her. They always seemed closer but never seemed close enough to see clearly. She stopped wearing shoes. It was easier to run from them barefoot. And she liked the way her white skin looked in the dark. It seemed to glow a little. The contrast against the black of the ruined buildings was somehow satisfying. The buildings hadn’t always been ruined. She remembered shopping at many of the stores that were now just shells slowly collapsing on themselves. The clerks had always sneered at her. A poor little girl who had to save for weeks just to buy a pair of jeans, she wasn’t good enough to be shopping there. Now she remained and they didn’t. There was a feeling of satisfaction in that. A new pair of jeans would be nice. It had been a while since she’d found a store that was still open, and none of the shells had anything to salvage. Avoiding open spaces was getting harder. She’d managed to stay away from the shadows for a long time. It felt like it had been a hundred years of running and hiding. She was tempted to just walk out into the dark and let them have her. Then daylight reminded her she wasn’t ready to die just yet. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten, but she didn’t feel hungry. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt hungry. It didn’t really matter, as long as she could run in the dark, her skin glowing and lighting the area around her. There were no buildings. There was nowhere to hide. The shadows came closer, arms stretched out to grab her. She ran. They were always there. Always closer. The cold touch of the shadows on her skin stilled her. She closed her eyes and let them touch. They touched everywhere, even places she didn’t. “Have we pleased you, Mistress?” The voice was as cold as the hands that were molesting her. “Uh. What?” “We have taken them all and given their life to you. Have we pleased you?” Giving in to the feelings the hands were bringing to life, she smiled. “You have.” Understanding didn't matter anymore. Edit: I missed a bit in my first paste.
