Fiction Every Bit as Appealing as Protose
Early in my fictional career as a literary writer, I established milestones that would build my confidence on my way to publishing success.
The first milestone: profoundly impact at least one person with my fiction. I achieved this milestone quickly. A short story that I had written for a creative writing workshop had profoundly affected one of my classmates. The short story, “Pendanticia, the Uncensored Adventures of a …
Dear Unpublished Guy:
I usually don’t respond to the pathetic pleas of a person who has made the misplaced presumption that they are a writer. As I indicated in my initial communication, your submission exceeded our gazette’s word count by a magnitude of 100. Perhaps more to the point, you submitted the novel, Moby Dick, copied verbatim.
I’m afraid that I am not moved by your fair use argument. Your postmodern tom foolery would have …
Schlafen Ahab and Other Fiction Characters
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Continued from Writing on Deck – The Metafiction Myth – Pt1.
After taking her pills, she went to the coffee tap (nothing beats real coffee), but when she pushed the graphical button labeled POUR, the lovely, lovely java that came out was decaf. What would she do now? It was early in the day to start with the whiskey-straight pills …
Utnapishtim on Life Support
I sent out a dove on the …
A room full of writers writing
Gerald entered the writing deck where many of the other guests were already busy developing his myth. Schlafen Ahab was not visible to the naked eye, but Holger Meins walked up and down and around the tables.
As he searched for an empty seat, Gerald looked over the guests’ shoulders and read fragments of what they were writing:
Pip walked down the alley. He had the feeling …
Gerald, a cloned German terrorist, and a duck walked into a bar.
The Zombie that Lives within Us
The clone raised his hand. “Barmann, zwei bourbons, ‘neat’.”
The German and Gerald walked briskly side by side, circling the barroom and weaving around guests.
“What brings you into town?” the clone asked.
After circling a moving waitress several times, Gerald paused in front of the TV. “I’ve been hired by a wealthy client to investigate a …
A change of pace from catastrophic fiction to catastrophic Halloween costumes.
Yog-Sothoth Costume and other Costumes Heralding My Doom
http://dominique.signoret.perso.sfr.fr/
I’ve often undertaken an ambitious fiction project with multiple themes and layers of meaning, the next Moby Dick, that instead ends up being the next unfinished, unpublished Atlas Shrugged. Likewise, I had several costume misadventures this year.
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After the fiasco with the stampeding herd of chevrotains, Ishmael returned to his room at the Pequod.
Motel Run Like a Whaling Ship
The light flickered the way bad motel room lighting stereotypically does. Ishmael Barz pulled a slab of hippopotamus meat out of the mini fridge and crammed it in the microwave. While waiting for the meat to cook, he ate some oranges. The breakfast nook in the lobby had crateloads of oranges, …
Fiction writing style that features repetition and more repetition.
Tale of a Whale
The Chopsticks style was pioneered by Fred Schonell and popularized by William S. Gray and Zerna Sharpin of Dick and Jane fame. Its popularity peaked during the 50s. The following beginning-to-end reimagining of Moby Dick provides an example of this writing style:
Call me Ishmael.
Ishmael stays in Inn. Inn is full. Ismael shares room. He shares with QueeQueg. Ishmael sleeps with
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The Writing Style of Moby Dick
Characterized by obsessively detailed descriptions on minutia that seem beside the point. The longest sustained work of fiction in this writing style is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.
Violet got into her car, a baby blue ’97 Toyota Corolla. It had four tires. The rear passenger tire, a Goodyear, was slightly less deflated than the others. The rear brake light on that same side, the passenger side, had been broken,
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Some novels are rumored to be too dense, arcane, or pretentious to be read in their entirety. Those sorts of novels are my specialty, and I have been emboldened to complete five such novels from beginning to end.
100 Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
Over on listverse, list contributor Shane Dayton describes this novel as both overrated and unreadable. I’m afraid I have to strongly disagree. Much like Italo Calvino’s If on …
