Many thanks, Sapphire!. It was written at an odd emotional time for me. I wasn’t even sure what to call it when I posted it here….
Short Story / A Scholarly Essay Upon the Craft of Writing
Scrambled brains with ketchup; moiling thoughts and that queasy/anxious/enervated-yet-energized feeling that I cannot seem to shake lately. Restless. It’s like a pale ghost of the old dark slit-my-wrists despair that I used to know so well. But yet not the same, not at all.
I feel like if I could open the top of my head, my brain would be there, but not a brain. A gray, greasy cauldron of all that I am and am not but wish I was, bubbling now, the good and the bad roiling around, bobbing to the surface and then sinking out of sight. Bright trinkets and star sapphires glinting in the unaccustomed light of my opened skull, clattering and colliding with the Other things, the piranhas and krakens ceaselessly hunting, the floating corpses with grinning lich-faces and beckoning bony fingers.
Bubbles burst at the surface and each one is a sound. A scrap of Mozart or the soft rumble of a purring cat. The sweet, aching song of arousal and submission and surrender and release, and the dismayed and unavailing cries for mercy from my Enemies learning the power of the new me who is not as nice as I wish I was. Not nearly.
Like magma, like wind-blown dust and ashes, like a fog-bell sounding in the deep marches of the night, the voices and the speakers are all over me, inside me, irresistible and insatiable, demanding to be heard.
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VoidSucker reviewed Version 1 -
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This is good as far as it goes – only, it doesn’t go that far!
It’s all description so needs more of everything if you want to turn it into something longer.
If you don’t, then, that’s fine. This works as it stands.
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MuttersomeTaxi reviewed Version 1 -
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You’re right in your notes, there. I’m not sure where I’d slot this one, either.
At most, I’d say it slides more into the prose-poetry setting than a short narrative or anything other than that. I like the alliterative language, the imagery, too.
Not so sure about the title and how it fits in with the images laid out here, though. ”A Scholarly Essay Upon the Craft of Writing” rings vaguely false (often because scholarly essays aren’t often so reflexive that they need to refer to themselves as scholarly.) If this were essay-styled or a scholarly analysis, the inclusion of “scholarly” in the title would offer a bit of satirical bite. Here, it seems awkward.
I’d say more that the non-genre or post-genre nature of the writing here makes it more of an exercise in the craft of writing. That, of course, is getting a little too “literary” for my tastes. (Which is saying a fair bit coming from someone who reads critical theory for kicks.)
But aside from that, the writing here is sound, in terms of imagery and pairing of sounds as well as sentence structure.
I imagine this would be great fun to read aloud, too. So maybe slide this into the poetry category and see what they say there?
Anyrate, all the best of luck
Casey reviewed Version 1 -
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sapphiretragedy reviewed Version 1 -
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This made me smile. I loved the images of all things magical. It is so hard to describe the act of doing something so fundamental yet so personal and involved and yet you’ve done a great job. – 10
mfrizz reviewed Version 1 -
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This is great. This could be a poem or the beginning of a short story.
I like “The sweet, aching song of arousal and submission and surrender and release”
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