This is a story that Jolene and I started collaborating on a while back. Then life got in the way for me and we didn’t see the story to completion at the time. Part I is here.
She also got to see the hidden dark side of my editing processes and probably wanted to run away screaming. I once shared a strikethrough version of such a process on this site or the earlier iteration and the lasting comment from readers was, “Wow, that is lot of red text.”
Add side comments in the margin along with those redlines and my process quickly appears more madness than method.
No one would blame a collaborator if they scooted. Quickly.
A few months back, Jolene mentioned off hand that I should run with it and, once again, I had too much on my plate. I said something to the effect of “that goes both ways, feel free to resurrect it.”
So she did.
So far, we’re in familiar territory for me.
While we blocked things out with some rough notes, I’m sure she’s soon going to go less familiar territories.
A cautionary tale with a modern twist? Written by: Jolene Rice Michael Raven Judy sat in her car looking at the address her GPS sent her to with disgust. Not only at the appearance of the rundown structure; at herself. Now she knew how Sarai or Elizabeth felt in the Bible. That feeling of crying […]
Jolene decided to finish something we started together and I had to bail on when I got busy with life. Three kids and seven cats apparently have that effect at times. And a job where emergencies crop up without warning…
Anyways… While we never got around to collaborating on it after the first couple of brainstorms and paired writing sessions over Google Docs, Jolene went back and finished what we’d started a couple of years back.
Most of the credit should go to her. My writing DNA might be in it but she took ownership of the tale and saw it through. It really is her story, although she’s been kind enough to credit me for my meagre contributions.
She asked if I wanted to read the final story before it went live and I declined. I want to see where she decided to go with it and be surprised as much as her readers are. It’s more fun that way.
If you’ve not visited Jolene’s site before, I encourage you to give it a gander. Maybe stay for a while.
I toed off my shoes all mouse quiet to avoid the verbal hiding I was about to receive, but that weren’t gonna fool him. The man was like one of those psychic kids from the Stephen King books. The early ones. Those good ones left all beat to hell in the library cos so many hands have held them they are permanently fanned out with especial gaps where the good parts are. The scary parts. Sometimes the sexy parts.
It weren’t the well-oiled hinges that betrayed me, but the gust of autumn wind come raging through the open I had slipped through on my way in tattled by way the flickering of the candle light dancing shadows as it rush on past.
“Where you been.” It weren’t a question.
“Out.”
“Out?”
“Out.”
I didn’t bother hiding my footsteps no more as I walked down the hallway, didn’t skip that creaky part right by the picture of my ma when she weren’t much older than me.
“Mal,” said Man Rivers once time, gnawing on a tobac leaf like he always was as he wound up wire and pulled stake. “There come a time you have to accept you’re bein’ snookered.”
“Howdat?” I asked watching how he coiled the snare for used elsewhere.
Man shot an glance sidewise up to the steading. You could see that fatboy Lawson up the guardtower looking real hard like his attention was on something, anything, other than Man and me.
My eyes narrowed.
“I’m just sayin’ you need know when time’s come to find a new place to snare a bit of game. ‘Times there’s a fox waiting in the underbrush waiting for your snare to catch.”
I should have been more on top of this, but recently my fellow writer Ted Wallenius (aka shredbobted) pulled together about a dozen writers to do some short story workshopping and cross-promotion. Six of them made it through the gauntlet (the other six, including myself, started but then a little then a little thing called “Life” got in the way for us). Those brave and creative souls were:
If you are ever on the lookout for some talented writers and don’t have two pennies to rub together, you can probably find something worth reading from at least one of these six talented individuals. There’s a little romantic fantasy, a little body horror, a bit of absurdity crossed with action flick, several literature played straight pieces, and something I would call speculative fiction.
The last few prompts that have intrigued me enough to write about have a wee bit of a problem when it comes to the stated goals of including more prose fiction to this site.
As I work on the barebones outlines and start making headway into the actual writing of the stories based on the prompts, I discover that they are regularly exceeding the length of what folks normally consider to be flash fiction (<1000-1500 words by most standards; my personal limit being <2000 words).
With only the beginning scene for the occult noir story the prompt handed me last week, I am already at 1000 words, which makes it hard to have a middle and end in the next 1000 words. To complicate matters I only have the vaguest notion of where the story might end up, so it could easily be quite a bit longer by the time I’m finished.
But I’m enjoying this world that’s coming into shape and I don’t want to rush the story just to fit in with an arbitrary limit that no one but myself is imposing on me.
So, first-off, I will stop calling those prompts “flash-fiction prompts” and just call them “fiction prompts”.
Secondly, due to the added length, I’m going to post fiction offerings longer than flash-fiction lengths in episodic format to keep the posts within the average attention span. Plus, this particular story will benefit from the technique of employing mild cliff-hangers. I probably won’t post an episode daily when I do this, but I will try not to let it go longer than a week between episodes (I’m also taking additional editing steps that are not common to my posted fiction).
I also have a rough outline of a story that I may pursue for Jolene’s prompts, and that will likely also exceed my original limits (if I share it at all, it depends on if my take on the humorous tale feels right when it is done).
Just letting everyone know where my head it at and explaining my thought processes. The first episode from the files of Vivian Locke will post later today. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.
Below is my short fiction response to prompts proposed by Jolene on her post at Poetry & More. Check out the link to see the criteria she gave her readers either before or after reading to support another online author. Follow her, if you want to be really cool.
I didn’t do a ton of research before writing this (and it is very much improvisational), so read it as a pulp tale, one not intended to leverage realism to any extent.
