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SuperBiasedMan

Idle Fiction Jam - Rumours and Hearsay

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Coincidentally! Due to my incredible obsession with Fictional Podcasts, I was briefly fantasizing about the idea of doing recorded readings for submissions earlier today.

 

Dunno if it's a good idea, but maybe it'd be fun if enough people are up for it. Audioshortstoryandorpoetrycollections.

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Yeah a couple people have thought about that (me included) and it's a fun idea! If I had a better mic I'd definitely be interested in doing my own for funsies.

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I also have a submission now!

Space Boss: The Lord of Space

 

I am very doubtful of what I turned out. :/ I should probably try something much simpler next time round. I had a lot of ideas but I didn't just pick one to run with. And despite all the ideas I had no clue how to end it so the last section is pretty flat. Oh well. I'm going to tackle next week's theme differently and hope I can get into more of a groove.

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a sprinkler spontaneously burst in my house and this month has been a nightmare because I've been sleeping over at my folks place and commuting back here to let the workmen in and to work (my home office was unaffected), but i work nights until ~10:30 to 11:00 and these workmen all want in around 8:30 in the morning so my sleep situation has been...not ideal

and yeah that's my "my dog ate my homework" excuse and I'm sticking to it.

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Here's my entry: Stapler. This was really fun! I'm not 100% satisfied with how I realised the idea I had at the start, but it was great to get back into the habit of writing. Thanks SBM! Looking forward to the next one.

 

I've linked it because the formatting options on Medium weren't comprehensive enough to make this one legible.

 

Anyway, spoilers for talking about it:

 

I tried to hit as many diversifiers as I possibly could, which ended up being the following:

  • Write in any form that’s not just straight fiction. Tell your story through verse, rhyming couplets or facebook statuses.
  • Write from the perspective of multiple different characters
  • Use formatting to inform your narrative/communicate something to the reader.
  • Write in a genre you don’t normally read/write.
  • Write a protagonist that you disagree with. Maybe you dislike their ethics, politics or taste in music.

The mood I was going for was kind of comedic horror. I tried to catch as much personality in each different character's emailing styles as possible. Some were obvious like the admin girl being overly exclamation-mark-y. While others I tried to be more subtle like the new guy always having his email signature on with 'kind regards', even when he's being an asshole. Which hopefully indicates the superficiality of his nice guy routine.

 

The formatting is a bit blunt, but I didn't have the time to do more interesting things with it. Some other ideas that the chaotic force in the office might have made happen were splitting emails between recipients, cyphering the messages, or writing vertically/strangely. Regardless, it was fun typing like a drunken idiot to try and get the effect that is in there already.

 

Would love to hear what people think about this silly experiment. :D

 

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Submit discreetly my lords, the end of month one is upon us. The deadline's not quite hit, but you don't have much time left. Everyone can then start reading up on entries, talking about them here and gearing up for our new theme on Monday. Get hyped cause I'm hoping for a good follow up.

 

Looking forward to reading/rereading them all tonight. :)

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I think there were only four entries, so here they are in case people want a convenient place to see them all. Also if I missed one let me know.

Er, looking at that, is there a rule that each piece needs to be titled the same as the podcast prompt? I feel bad for being the odd one out. :S

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I haven't read these yet, I wanted to wait for the final versions, but I took a quick look to see if anyone went with the idea I would have used if my late wizjam entry weren't sucking up all my creative time - the itinerary of the new Lord Of Space - and was glad to see Phill had a similar idea! Looking forward to reading all these.

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Thanks for gathering those links, I nicked them to put back in the first post. :P I also added ratamero's entry in there.

 

Also no! Your title doesn't need to follow the theme. Naturally a lot of people will use it as it gives immediate context for where the idea started (or if someone didn't have a specific title in mind they would just use it), but deviation is encouraged.  (and Stapler is a good title :tup:)

 

Yours was a lot of fun to read phill. I liked reading the goofier tone. And it seems so obvious now to lean into the Boss part and make it a series of office emails.

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I think there were only four entries, so here they are in case people want a convenient place to see them all. Also if I missed one let me know.

Er, looking at that, is there a rule that each piece needs to be titled the same as the podcast prompt? I feel bad for being the odd one out. :S

 

Ouch dude, ouch:

 

Space Boss by twmac

 

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Thanks for gathering those links, I nicked them to put back in the first post. :P I also added ratamero's entry in there.

 

Also no! Your title doesn't need to follow the theme. Naturally a lot of people will use it as it gives immediate context for where the idea started (or if someone didn't have a specific title in mind they would just use it), but deviation is encouraged.  (and Stapler is a good title :tup:)

 

Yours was a lot of fun to read phill. I liked reading the goofier tone. And it seems so obvious now to lean into the Boss part and make it a series of office emails.

 

Jesus, I didn't realise my entry was that bad/bland that everyone forgot it

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New month, new theme! The theme for July is A Person-Shaped Thing is a Person. This one seems a bit more vague, so I have no idea what to do with it yet but I do have fun ideas on how to come up with a story concept. I'm also gonna try approach it differently to last time, and I encourage others to do the same!

 

PS I don't remember at all why this was a title.

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Jesus, I didn't realise my entry was that bad/bland that everyone forgot it

 

Sorry! I didn't mean to miss it, I'm bad at forums. ):

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Thanks for the apologies - the omission stung for a bit.

 

Edit:

 

To make this post a bit more constructive - Phill I just read your piece and it is my favourite of the lot. The form of emails makes the whole thing hilarious and very familiar to my previous work environments.

 

That said there are some mistakes in there that broke the flow a little:

 

In the first email there are some spelling mistakes:

My last palce didn’t even have a cleaner (!) so this makes a wonderful change

Apologies in advance for any stupid questions I might have, and if you ened anything from me just let me know!

Kind regards,

 

I know that spelling and errors become a part of the theme later but these seemed incongruant with the ones later.

 

Also this part:

 

Hey Pete,

I think what Amy means is that it’s pretty important you find that stapler. We’ll have a look today but if we can’t find it, you should really start wracking your brains.

 

Is this not meant to be 'Todd' written here and not 'Amy'?

 

There is a missing word in the final email from Jess but I took that as being part of her personality.

 

Anyway, the format worked really well, it was a dark comedy and then it veered into 'Raw Shark Texts' territory. Very fun read.

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Hey I'be been really enjoying these!

I actually really enjoyed yours twmac it felt really touching and reminded me a little of my own experiences travelling and growing up.

It was neat seeing how yours grew SBM. I had a lot more sense of place in the final work which ended up supporting the tone more.

Wooden's thing was a nice perspective flip and it did feel like a properly Sci Fi short story.

Stapler was certainly the most fun for me out of all of ours. I was thinking that Todd was the secret boss for a short while but then you went into deals with eldritch space powers territory which was nice. Actually your story and Wooben's are kinda similar. Not in a bad way. Just in a way that my head canon has the new guy from Stapler crossing dimensions into one of Wooben's salt monsters.

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About a thousand words into my first draft.

 

Trying to figure out how to stop this one being utterly depressing.

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Alright, I'm back, with 100% more feedback. But firstly thanks to twmac for the detailed feedback: you were right on the Amy/Todd thing, but the spelling mistakes in the initial email were kind of there to show as an early indicator that he wasn't that competent, but that wasn't obvious so I'd probably remove them in a future draft. Also thanks heaps everyone for reading. This is the first piece of fiction I've written for almost a year, so it was really lovely to read everyone's thoughts.

 

I'll spoiler my feedback for all the different stories. As I always say with any critique I give, it's my opinion only and if you can imagine it in as helpful a voice as possible because that's how I'm trying to deliver it. Not that I think anyone would take offense, just in the past people sometimes have taken things the wrong way. Anyway, here we go!

 

Space Boss by twmac:

This was really good! I think the best part of it was that I don't think there's any way to tell whether the narrator is male or female, until right near the end, so it questions our assumptions as readers. You really captured that first crush feeling, in fact it reminds me of the first make-out session I ever had, listening to music and finally going in for it. (; 

 

My only comment would be that there are couple of places that you can opt for brevity to make it a bit tighter. For example, I think that the 'He exclaimed in Portuguese when he saw...' could be eliminated entirely, as in the previous sentence you've told us what he's reacting to ('...and pulled out my prize.'). Also some formatting choices like the full-stop rather than an ellipsis in 'The story will be interesting for at least a couple of months and after that.' means it didn't quite read right the first time through. 

 

But really other than those small things, great story!

 

Space Boss: The Lord of Space (draft) by ratamero

I’m bummed that you didn’t get enough time to finish this off, as I think it’d be really fun as a concept. Like, a series of ads for a show where we learn the contents of the show and the drama involved. Maybe continue working on it in the future because I think it could be really neat!

 

SPACE BOSS THE LORD OF SPACE by Wooben

I love the dual points of view of this one. As Jerem(y) we barely know what’s going on, but you reveal just enough in the female character’s POV to give us some answers but still leave some important questions for us to ponder. Why are they beholden to the mouth? Where are they? How long has this been going on?

 

As I read through it I thought I had seen more instances of repeated words, but the only one I can see now is ‘long since numbed’ at the start of the female section. ‘My ears have long since numbed…’ and ‘Couples have long since numbed…’. I’ve found that those can be really easily picked up if you read through your story out loud, as you notice them straight away. But yeah, you left me wanting more which is great, well done!

 

Space Boss, Ze Lord of Space by Mawd

This is a lovely slice of a life. I think this reads the most like literary fiction to me, giving us impressions of this mind that is, very sadly, on its way out. The change from third- to first-person perspective really does something interesting to the text, though I’d be curious to read it through in the third-person as well. I don’t really have any suggestions in terms of critique or edits, so well done on the piece! Looking forward to your take on the next prompt.

 

Space Boss: The Lord of Space by sbm

This has a lot more to it than when I last read it, a lot of which answered the questions I had on the first draft read. I like the image of this curmudgeonly guy being in charge of something as important as habitable planets. It seems comedic at first, but then you realise that someone like this is literally the only kind of person that could keep going at it, even with disappointment after disappointment. I don’t have that much to say in terms of critique on the structure of it, except that some of the stuff is being told to us (‘…lately it’s been just dragging on him’) when you’ve already shown it. The temptation not to trust the reader is real, but I think it would pay off more and add to that sense of isolation of the character. Anyway, again I think this story has a great mood, it’d be interesting to see where you would go from here but as a self-contained story it’s really good.

 

Also, kudos for including the soul crushing feeling of getting a progress report from work which tells you absolutely nothing about your performance.

 

Looking forward to everyone's efforts for the new prompt!

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Thank you that's really sweet. I haven't seriously written, or felt sure in my writing for years.

Currently I'm tied between a song, a type of user manual, a children's book, or something of all three.

Whatever this ends up as it needs to be warm.

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A response to the response

 

That was actually put in after two people had no idea what was going on in terms of the phonetic translation of the swearing because it hasn't been properly established. It was clumsy but I couldn't think of a better way.

The other thing I will fix, makes absolute sense.

 

Thank you for the feedback!

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Thanks for the feedback phill! Glad that the Changes really made it work better, and that you liked the ending. I wasn't sure how to stop it for a long time but that just came up as a fitting capper eventually. I agree about repeating things in a more direct way, it is a confidence issue of not being sure that a meaning has carried. It's hard to know how clear and obvious this stuff is to somebody else.
 
For the new theme! I have done another word map, but more helpfully I listened to the episode it was from. The phrase cropped up when the thumbs were wondering whether or not a Kinect would read a cardboard cut out as a human. That seemed like a really good thought to me, the idea of high tech computers being fallible in ways that are incredibly foolish to humans.
 
So my idea was born from that, a story about a bumbling robot detective that makes faulty assertions, with hilarious consequences. I want to make it more silly and farcical. I don't have a plotline or details laid out, but I like the idea and what I'm thinking of as the world this is happening in. For fleshing stuff out, I got a fun new toy. Basically these narrative dice things, you can see a pic in the spoilers at the end of the post (the forums don't like me using Internet Explorer).

They're just normal six sided die, covered with pictures instead of numbers. The idea is to roll them and take the result as narrative inspiration for your story/characters/whatever. I'm hoping that this will help me do some different things, alongside the diversifiers.
 
On that note, I am going to update the first post with a couple new diversifiers if anyone wants to check back (and you should!). How're you folks getting on? Anyone fleshing out ideas?

post-34425-0-73721500-1468272085_thumb.jpg

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