Promptness

I've browsed a few other writing blogs, and there seems to be a trend in writing from prompts. I think I may start doing this, and I'll make it a series if you readers are interested. I'm going to draw my prompts from the Forward Motion Writers generator, or maybe a few from the example sentences in my Mac dictionary when I find them (they're quite curious sometimes) and then write an unedited drabble that may or may not have anything to do with the actual story of a character.

So, my first shot, the prompt being "Crowds are funny things. They can be chaotic, unpredictable, unma[n]ageable. And they can be dangerous, [especially] when rumors and complaints are running like water through them.

Today, your character finds themselves smack in the middle of just such a crowd, the threat of a riot all but certain. What they do about it is up to you."

and my randomly-chosen character being Michelle:

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Michelle had some basic riot training, of course. With the streets eternally clogged with crowds, and few of the citizens made any happier by this fact, general discontentment could spark into destructive anger within a few words. It was something that happened and something that forced her to sort damage reports. A common nuisance, nothing more.

At least, that was how it looked when she was behind police office doors or sturdy, clear shields. When she found herself standing unprotected in the middle of the crowd, the idea of a riot was a bit more worrisome. The lack of zap in her system—and, judging by the trembling arms across the throng, in the others'—did not help the situation, either.

A man with a shaved head a bit darker than her skin pounded at the front door, which looked more like an overgrown wooden shutter than a proper barrier. It would probably buckle quickly once those in the front decided to bust it down. But no—there was a secure metal door just behind it. Wasn't there, the last time she was inside? That was right, yeah...

Dangerously close to losing her balance, Michelle tried to keep up as her part of the group approached the knocking man in the front. What were they going to do when they found the door wouldn't come down? How was she going to get out of here before things escalated? How was she going to get out of here at all if she didn't get her fix?

The crowd had just come to a stop when she heard the shouting. Rising above the grumbles and cries of the rest, a man's voice called for them to unite. To strike. They all deserved another helping of zap no matter what the organization was trying to do, and together they could secure it. Even if the addicts had to claw every brick from the walls, they would get inside. 

It took little more convincing before the horde was crushing itself to get closer to the building. Everyone was eager to do his part in the distribution of just rewards, even if to do so he had to send his fellows sprawling and ready to be trampled. 

The sweating bodies pressing in on her, the feeling of air going thin in her lungs, and the roar of excitement finally sent Michelle forcing her way past those in front of her. As if these grungy, reeking zapheads deserved to get their fix more than her! They were leaving others to die so they could get a little closer, while she was a perfectly good policewoman who saved people. She would put the energy to much better use than any of them.

She never faltered in that thinking as she fought past anyone in her way.

If only her coworkers could see her now.

New Fan Fiction Idea #17

Came up with this one after reading that, on average, women can tolerate more alcohol than men.

Working Title: "The Drinking Contest"

Fandom: Hetalia: Axis Powers

Length: Oneshot

Genre Tags: Humour/General

Protagonist: Germany.

Other Main Characters: None in particular. Maybe Denmark, Belgium, and/or Prussia.

Antagonist: Nyotalia Germany.

Plot: Germany and his female counterpart have a drinking contest. (Surprise, surprise.)

Setting: Present-day, probably at some public place that serves alcohol.

Point of View: Third person, omniscient.

New Fiction Idea #33

I still don't know what's going on in this story. I just want to play with the characters. Do let me know if you like the plot, though. It's hard to think of anything that hasn't been done a million times in the superhero-type genre.

Working Title: Suture

Genre: Fantasy

Protagonist: Sven, a 17-year-old young man with very yellowish blonde hair kept chin-length. He's tall with hands a bit too large, and he's more enduring than strong physically. He has a dark sense of humour, is a bit irresponsible, and has rather low moral standards towards those who aren't his friends. He has the ability to seal up any wound, tear, fissure, etc.

Other Main Characters: Anna and Anya, 15-year-old identical twins with short, brown hair styled in the same single forward swoop. They're of average height but very slender. Both wear headbands—Anna's pink, and Anya's yellow—but will take them off or switch them to fool people. They're very much tricksters, although on a petty level, and they love cute things, fawning over boys, and swimming. Both are telepaths, with Anna able to control sugar crystals and Anya salt crystals.
Midas, Sven's 19-year-old brother. He has dark blonde hair kept reasonably short and about the same physique as his brother, although a bit more muscular. The quiet type, he prefers to be alone, usually listening to classical music or sketching architectural designs. He's intelligent but can be incensed quite easily and usually lashes out in such situations. He has the ability to control others' circulatory systems by taking a baton and conducting.
Jethro, a 30-year-old man with dull red hair and a fairly heavy build. He's infuriatingly patient and determined. He tries to be an agreeable father figure. He has the ability to touch an object and temporarily give it an extreme temperature, either hot or cold depending on the object.

Antagonist: Harrison, Jethro's brother-in-law and a very physically strong man with dark hair. He is influential in a prosthetics manufacturing company, and normals are entirely unaware of his self-termed "osteophagy." While he is able to consume food without ill effects, he must eat human bones for energy—a simple task when he can pluck any bone straight out of its owner and let it melt in his mouth.

Setting: 1980s California.

Plot: One year after a handful of people fall ill with a stomach bug and also happen to gain powers, Jethro starts putting out advertisements for those affected and rounding them up. As Sven and the others try to get along, Harrison starts his own forceful recruitment, and the protagonists soon discover that Harrison is preparing to start a wide-scale dispersion of a lethal pathogen. Having been accidentally exposed to its predecessor, Sven and the others are the only ones who can enter the pathogen creation/storage complex to shut it down.

Point of View: Third-person, omniscient.

Art!

Because true creative minds cannot be tied to one medium alone!

...That doesn't necessarily mean we're good at all of them, but still.

Some of you may be aware I have a deviantArt page, although I don't post much. I'm always more inspired to put things into words than pictures. Occasionally, though, a single moment or idea presents itself, and it cannot be hacked out on a computer keyboard. That, or it's something that really doesn't interest me that much, such as fluffy romantic pictures for certain Hetalia characters, so I'd rather sketch it out than try to construct a whole story of any length. And then sometimes I just feel more like drawing than writing.

I've already done a few posts on how connected music is to writing, but it is, of course, its own art form. I've humoured the idea of becoming a classical composer (or rock star, let's not lie), but I'm never really inspired to make music. I'll sing along to Fleetwood Mac or play "Crazy Train" on oboe, sure, and I'll often find myself humming a random, classical-style tune that I find catchy (usually this happens when I start adjusting a tune to something annoying that's stuck in my head and go way off on a tangent), but it's not the same as creating a story. It sounds pretty, and it can tell stories in some sense, but there are less specifics, more hinting, and less time to get through it all. It's kind of hard to describe my view on music because it's so many things to me—a background to writing, an inspiration to writing, a way to shift my focus away from a stressful situation, a means of worship, and sometimes just a means of amusement.

All I can say is, these mediums are different, as they should be, and can't serve quite the same purpose for the same person. Of course, they can be mixed, but that's another story altogether.

To conclude, here are a few random ideas that I want to draw but haven't yet. I may start posting these like I do Fragments, although they have little to do with writing and might not belong here.

• A collage of anatomical sketches (e.g., nephrons, neurons, stratified squamous epithelial cells) overlaid with the text "I AM FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY MADE"
• [fan art] A shipping picture featuring Russia and (OC) Antarctica with the title "To the Ends of the Earth"
• Personifications of Mississippi and Alabama standing back-to-back
• [fan art] A shot of a really, really battered WWII England with an almost crazed look of tenacity, the background being a particularly bad bombing of London
• An American flag made by snippets of red, white, and blue portions of other nations' flags (with a few other colors so the other flags can still be identified)
• Pairs of characters from The Long and Winding Road, including Emile brushing Monique's hair, Charlotte and Arthur back to back shooting down monsters, Jordan trying to teach Silas violin, and Martin joshing around with Manfred
• Not exactly a drawing, but I'd love to make some chaotic war/battle scene with no sound but "Scarborough Fair"

New Short Story Idea #4

I considered doing this for the Writer's Digest genre short story competition, but I don't think I'll have a decent version out in time for the due date. At any rate, it doesn't feel like it has enough to it to be a whole novel.

Working Title: "Communications Breakdown"

Genre: Sci-Fi

Main Characters: Tommus Richards, a 24-year-old black man who is appropriately full of himself. He is a world-famous runner (anyone could guess from his physique alone) and loves it. He can be rather greedy, and he'll look down on others often, but he's not always offensive. He abandoned the long-running family business for his current career and, as a result, has been estranged from the rest of the family.
Phil, the antagonist. More greedy than Tommus, he's rather slippery and unafraid to take risks, whether they involve him or someone else.

Setting: Future Earth's largest hospital. The size of a city, it demands a large workforce and a multilayered communication system. It consists of several futuristic buildings as well as some outdoor space.

Plot: Tommus is lounging in his summer mansion waiting for the next competition in a month or so when there's a knock at his door. The man there informs him that somehow the entire hospital communication system has crashed, and they're in desperate need of some people to help get information from one place to another fast. Figuring it could be a decent training opportunity, Tommus agrees to volunteer a bit, and it's all fun and games until he starts to stumble upon clues that the shutdown wasn't an accident and just how much money Phil could get if a few delayed messages lead to deaths.

Point of View: First person (Tommus).

Fragments III

After Fragments I & II comes Fragments III, more incompleteness for you and me.

• A character named Martha Bell who outlives her husband significantly (after seeing a couple's gravestone with the husband dying at about 40 in the 1930s and the wife with no end year inscribed)
• A fighting gnome with an ice pick (how my mother described her earache)
• A crack dictionary with fake definitions of the chemical elements (i.e. Manganese, n., the language spoken by otaku, or Boron, n., an idiot who can't even be interesting about it.)
• Someone with a painfully Greek last name (I may end up giving a character in the original fiction version of The Long and Winding Road the last name Papadopoulos, so check.)
• "They can turn off my feelings like they're turning off the light" (line from a Phil Collins song)
• A story based on example sentences in the dictionary on my computer
• Characters who fly planes over tornadoes/hurricanes and drop bombs down the middle of them to disperse the circulation (my father's idea for a real-life thing)
• Action girls that are personifications of thunder and lightning
• Someone who brings optical illusions to life/reality
• Personality traits as currency
• A Hetalia SpaIre fic insisting that the Black Irish origin myth does have at least one grain (or one couple) of truth to it

And By Flip-Flops, I Mean Freedom

Symbolism is supposedly a big part of literature. I'm not really in on the bandwagon.

When I was little, my school had a Young Authors and Poets club. I joined, figuring I was pretty good at poetry (although at the time I didn't think it was anything more than writing in verse). The first time we did a group critique—or at least swapped each other's pieces and talked about them—a boy named Seth informed me it wasn't a really good poem because it didn't have enough symbolism.

I've since dropped out of the poetry sphere, but that doesn't mean I'm out of hot water yet. Symbols are still important to prose, or so I hear, and, well, I write prose. It's a way to incorporate deeper meaning into things without hitting the reader over the head with it.

Symbolism also seems to tie in with theme, which may be why it gives me trouble. It's all about getting a point across, which just isn't why I write. Sure, there are things that I argue, but most modern people are just going to be offended by what I have to say, and I've never once written a story for the theme. I just want to play with characters I like in a world I like, and pushing a theme into the mix may still allow that, but it hogs some of the focus.

So, I'll probably try to work in some symbolism, although the way I write it would have to wait until editing.

What kind of symbols do you use in your stories? Like to see in other stories?

(For anyone curious about the title: In my "nerd prison" school, flip-flops weren't allowed, which made me unhappy because I quite like wearing flip-flops. Additionally, Dad won't let [trans: make] me drive if I'm wearing flip-flops. Thus the freedom part.)