Short Story (v1) - teh hungerrrr

It was one of those dreary, wintry days where the sky was that kind of light gray that evenly spread the buttery sunshine over everything, that kind of light gray that made everything that kind of light gray. Jonathan trudged through the snow that had built up on the sidewalk overnight, dragging one foot after the other, as he did every day. He left behind him two evenly-spaced channels as if he were laying down a new branch for the railroad that ran through the town, one that would take people straight to the town store.

Mix 7 - the colored ice cream [choice dreamer colet]

Daisy Colet never asked for anything.

Ingredients 5 - "Dust"

As I'm sure you picked up when you (hopefully) read Remnants 12 before "Dust," one of the main goals I had in mind when writing "Dust" was keeping it short. I even went through the painstakingly painstaking trouble of typing it up in Word so I could keep a word count. As I'd hoped, I was able to write it in exactly one hundred words.

Remnants 12 - A Shocking Revelation & "Dust"

So I thought about it for a while and realized that the main reason I don't have too many MIXes out is probably the fact that I tend to write freaking long stories for them. 'Twas quite the realization, I must say. I do know I have at least three MIXes with over a thousand words, and one more that isn't done yet, but all of those had to be that long because I had to fit each complete story in them. Therefore, I came to the conclusion that I've been thinking too big for my stories and that I need to practice writing more basic things that are made long through meaningful description.

So I'll start practicing with this short, titled "Dust."

Ingredients 4 - More Short Story Drafting

q|o O|p
\D/

**WARNING**

What I have here will be disturbing. Please note that the fact that I know it is disturbing is a clear indication that I am not disturbing.

In case you want to spare yourself from having to read disturbing things now, I've put all the disturbing things after the break. I will, however, write this post with some level of effort to make you want to read it, just so I can laugh internally at your disturbance.

Anyway, last time I wrote about my short story, I introduced Jonathan. I'll tell you now that Jonathan is not the kind of person you think he is, unless I've already told you in person what kind of person he is. When you read the excerpt later in this post, you will clearly see what I mean. Even if you do read the excerpt, though, you will still be mistaken.

See, my reason for writing this story (besides it being required) is not to subtly share some kind of deep, emotional, soppy experience in my life. I'm not trying to let you in on issues with my family or my love life. Even if I had one of those kinds of stories to tell, frankly, I'd think it's somewhat silly to have to use the mask of a "fiction" piece to pour my heart out. You know why fact is stranger than fiction? It's because people are too weak to write fact as it is, so instead they think they can get by by writing some "fiction" thing that dumbs it down enough so that others can experience the "same" feelings that the authors did. In the world of fact, there is no feeling that can be expressed exactly through words, so don't even try. Different people feel different about different things, and the more you try to cater to those differences, the more unclear your story becomes, and then it loses its original intent.

...Sorry, that was me just ranting about how I feel like what I've been reading is so generic. Somewhere, deep down, I do enjoy reading stories like that, so keep writing them, people.

I digress. For some reason or another, I've decided to build my story upon a premise that no one has any true experience with, something unreal. Try as you might to understand Jonathan by imposing your realities on his actions and descriptions, you will not understand fully until I tell you. Maybe I wanted to feel somehow superior to all of you by keeping you in the dark. Maybe I was just tired of reading the same thing over and over, so I thought I'd be the one to MIX it up. Maybe I actually am trying to share my true, inner feelings with the world (although I certainly hope not). Maybe...

Read it, criticize it, analyze it, do whatever you want to it. Just keep in mind that even I am not completely sure what my intents are in writing this story.

Remnants 11 - You have the power to believe

This post is in part a response to Lich Arr's post on states of existence.

Remnants 10 - [ untitled ]

Weeks of taking pictures of my hair from when I wake up all comes down to this:

Remnants 9 - I have issues

So a couple minutes ago I read this post on Wesley's blog and it made me reflect a little on something I've reflected on increasingly in recent times.

That aforementioned something is my ability to set my priorities straight, or lack thereof. Or maybe it's my general laziness. Or my selective dedication/determination/willingness to exert myself. Or m...

Whatever that something is, I'll be describing it in this post, so allow me to introduce you to one of its little quirks that I think really helps define it.

Ingredients 3 - in the name of love

Alright! A new MIX!!!

Again, multiple exclamation points were necessary.

Mix 5 - in the name of love [flame on the vine o']

Damn. Damn it.

I need to make a decision. Now. Continuing to stand here would be dangerous. Think. If I drop down to the left, I can make a quick enough getaway to keep myself relatively intact. But that means I'd have to start over again. I've come all this way; there's no way I'm going to back down now. It's taken relatively little energy to lay low and avoid capture, so I should have no problems fighting. But I didn't plan on ever getting caught. I didn't plan on fighting, so I didn't even consider how many of them I would be up against.

Damn it.

Ingredients 2 - Short Story Drafting

! ! !

A second INGREDIENTS post, and it's on something that isn't a post!

Assigned Blog Post 06 - YOU SO CRAZY!!!

(yes, caps and multiple exclamation points were necessary)

So, over the course of this course, I feel like I've gotten to know a lot of my fellow classmates much better, and a lot of that can be attributed to what I read on their blogs. Not only do these blogs give me an opportunity to steal delicious infos about the people with whom I spend about 1/4 of each day, they provide me great pieces of writing to simply enjoy as a normal person, someone who lives life and goes through all of its joys and pains and whatever else gets thrown in the mix.

Remnants 8 - Late-night Limbo: Part 4 (Living Dream)

Remnants 7 - Halloween Funsies

Carved this on Monday/Tuesday from 10:30 PM to 1:30 AM. As a not-so-random sidenote, I didn't go into limbo that night (morning?), probably because I had to keep my mind focused on getting this all to work out right.

I like pumpkins.

Remnants 6 - Late-night Limbo: Part 3 (Life Balance)

Life Balance by Nagisa Cosmetic. Listen to it here AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Life Balance. IT'S DANGEROUS. When I mentioned seeing how high you and a friend can get yourselves in Late-night Limbo: Part 1 and self-induced limbo in Part 2, I was talking about Life Balance.

Life Balance is a special song (to say the least) that brings about a special type of limbo. Wesley said that this song keeps him up at night. Unlike all other forms of limbo that I've discussed, this kind actually allows retention of consciousness and maybe even promotes body activity. This, however, says nothing about the exact level of mental processing that goes on while the mind is suspended in Life Balance. I'll tell you this upfront - it's low. Please don't expect much from this post, because I'm writing it while listening to Life Balance on repeat.

Remnants 5 - Late-night Limbo: Part 2 (Piecewise Fail)

Today is one of those days where I surprisingly don't end up in late-night limbo by 11 o'clock (incidentally, I employed a combination of fruit juice and timed explosion of Hatsukoi Limited to keep me afloat). Therefore, I will detail my findings on a second form of limbo that I have encountered.

This form of limbo is similar to my 11 o'clock Fail in that a total loss of consciousness is reached. What differentiates the two, however, is that Piecewise Fail is just that - a version of late-night limbo that comes in defined waves of high and low strength, leading to periodic moments of relative awareness that cause even more confusion than 11 o'clock Fail.

Remnants 4 - Late-night Limbo: Part 1 (11 o'clock Fail)

I've always been pretty good at doing the limbo, not just because I'm short. I have good enough knee and back strength to bend into a bridge from standing. I think at some point in middle school we for some reason were doing a limbo competition thing and I won.

But late-night limbo is something else entirely. It's still focused on the concept of "how low can you go," but more in a mental sense, rather than physical. See, late-night limbo is all about having a competition with yourself to see just how low-level your mental processes become before you just lose and fall asleep from exhaustion. It's generally a single-player thing, but sometimes you can bring a friend along and see who loses first, or see how high you can get yourselves before falling back down to normal thought patterns.

Late-night limbo is not just an activity, but also a state of being and possibly an alternate dimension. Within the coming weeks I will seek to chronicle my trips into late-night limbo and its various forms.

Creative Assignment - Intruder

The house alarm's little "bing-bong" sounded in its usual, cheery manner, as it did each time one of the doors opened to welcome somebody home or each time one of the windows opened to welcome a breeze. The chime broke through the music I was blasting, the music that halted midway through the song as I immediately pressed the pause button.

Why did that chime just go off.

It wasn't even a question because I knew it could only mean one thing: someone or something had just entered my family's home. My thoughts quickened with my heartbeat as adrenaline inundated my veins.

Was it my parents? No. They left over three minutes ago. Even two minutes was too long for them to turn around if they had forgotten something. My parents were gone.

Was it my sister? No. She was at her friend's birthday party. The party was a few towns over, and it was supposed to end at 8. It wasn't my sister.

Oh jeez, this really sucks. Because no one else has the keys to our home. And that means someone just breached the walls of our shelter. Oh jeez. Someone just broke into my house.

Assigned Blog Post 05 - Jerk

Move with a brisk pace; walk with your arms folded; stand with your arms folded; put a little more of your weight on one leg, so as to make it look like you expect something from them; stare down the people who look into your eyes, so as to make sure they know you're completely serious; look past the people you bump into, so as to make sure they know you don't give a crap about them; ignore the people tapping on your shoulder - if they wanna say something, they should say it; don't do menial tasks for others, only things that will boost your reputation; don't delegate the work, because if you want something done right, you should do it yourself; make them do the work, because if they want it done right, they should do it themselves; here's how you greet someone you could care less about; here's how to greet someone you hate; here's how you (don't) greet someone you somewhat like, because that way your underlying nature's gonna bleed through and scare them away; someone you actually like should know you well enough that they don't care how you greet them; wait until they've already started the assignment before telling them it's not actually due, because that way you can laugh at how stupid they are but they'll still think you're nice enough to trust next time around; but deep down, my underlying nature is one that needs love and care; let your eyes be shifty, because that way they'll pick up more things for you to sneer and jeer at; don't ever wipe that smirk off your face until you're sure there's no one there to see that it's not there; don't ever turn around and look at the messes you've left behind; but what if I feel bad about leaving people in those messes?

Remnants 3 - ay, where's mah creativity at?

So lately I've been working on a really long mix, but beyond that I feel like I'm not having any ideas of my own.

Assigned Blog Post 04 - Bindleton? Milderweicht? Luza Bay City?

So...names for our version of Winesburg, Ohio. Bindleton sounded like a good name for a kind of mellow town with a humdrum sort of life. I guess by having an underlying mundane nature for the town I figured we could have fun unmundane-ifying it. Milderweicht just sounded cool, and apparently it means "mild softened" in German.

Assigned Blog Post 03 - Quinn Marksley

Quinn Marksley was a bit odd, or at least his fading mother definitely thought he was. She was in her mid-90's, and although she sometimes took a while to figure out who Quinn was, who she was, and how they were related, she would always remember he was messed up when she did get that all worked out.

It was a complete mystery how she could possibly survive so long with a son like Quinn. As far as she could remember (about 4 days if she concentrated really hard), he was essentially some strange man with the soul of a six year-old who lived in the basement of her home reenacting scenes from the Pokémon TV shows using his infinite collection of Pokémon cards. No, really, he lived there. He feared all people, even his mother at times, and thus he never left that basement (he shut her up in some tiny room; it wasn't hard because she couldn't move at all beyond random twitching). He had no job but the one he made for himself, and those reenactments didn't exactly pay . . . at all, but the family had enough food in the basement to last through a nuclear holocaust followed by an ice age (and that wasn't counting whatever sustenance may have been upstairs).

Sometimes people would ring the doorbell for who-knows-what, then after a few seconds without reply, they would leave. One time, however, someone was able to pull off a whole 17 minutes and 3 seconds, at which point Quinn Marksley had become so distracted that he couldn't even emulate Rattata's battle cry. So Quinn actually went up the stairs and opened the door.

In front of him was an upright mop. A mop dressed in a gargantuan sport coat with a fake-looking golden nametag. On the tag lived an impressive collection of grime that probably would have taken a normal person a lifetime to gather, but through the smudges Quinn thought he could see the outline of a few words. From what he could tell after staring at the tag for a little over a minute at point-blank range, they said: Oswin St. George, CEO. He looked up and noticed that what he had been staring at was not, in fact, a mop. It was a person whose hair could have passed as the long-lost brother of the tattered stick that Quinn's mother used to use to wash down what she could reach of Quinn's room (when he still lived in his own room). Quinn staggered back in fear as the mop's face revealed an otherworldly void which, given a larger body on the other end, probably could have consumed Quinn in under five minutes. From the void came a sound that Quinn instinctively interpreted as a battle cry.

Assigned Blog Post 02 - Me, Myself, and not I [m' style and me - info]

As I'm sure you're now well aware, I'm not everyone else. In fact, if I had to say, I'm probably everyone. My personality, I think, is fairly dependent on who's around me. Sometimes I'm that kid in the corner just staring at the crowd, listening to whatever seemingly important chatter comes out of the others' mouths, analyzing and evaluating everything. I'm a part of the crowd, laughing at all the little things that (don't) count in life. I'm the one that waits until it's almost time, just so I can have the thrill of having something I'm supposed to do, even if only for one moment. I'm too good, the jerk who would rather ignore the inferiority of the crowd than fix it. I cry for the happy-ending love stories, then scoff as others do the same.

Yeah, I'm a mixed bag, and when I write, I'm never sure which one of me is the one that's writing. Whatever gets written reflects that, in plot, concept, and character. My writing is abstract, because I don't totally know what it is I'm writing about. I make it up as I go. I come up with things to write based on how I feel about what I just wrote. Sometimes I'll know how I want a story to end, but I've yet to start it, then I struggle in filling the gaps to reach that end. Other times it's the opposite way around. I see my inspiration in one facet of my soul, and I follow it deep inside to nothingness, then end up popping out of some other facet. In my mind, life is twisted. I have to twist myself and my writing to fit it.

Remnants 2 - Why "Remnants from the Blender Lid"

Short answer: Because it sounds random.

Mix 3 - through life and death [he found that head girl]

He sat in the food court of the mall, not to eat, but to work. That's the kind of person he was. Once he started something, he had to finish it. He didn't care about sleep, he didn't care about sustenance, he didn't care about people or what they had to say about him.

Assigned Blog Post 01 -The Convergent Realities Collectively Known as Truth

When we write fiction, we present to the world our own personal reality. Whether this reality is a representation of the truth or an almost completely implausible figment, it is always undeniably influenced by the truth. While as individuals we each hold our own views and emotions, we inevitably interact with each other, even if only on the level of simply perceiving others, and these interactions taint our individual realities until we formulate what we decide to call the truth.

New Challenger Approaching: INGREDIENTS 1 - SAGASHIMONO

Made a joint decision with inx to create a new kind of post.

• Ingredients - Small explanations on what kinds of things went into the making of a MIX. They will be sort of similar to REMNANTS, only they'll be focused solely on what inspired a certain MIX. There may be spoilers, but hopefully I can make those available upon button-click.

Anyway, as I said in REMNANTS 1, MIX 2 was originally written to go with the prompt "looking for something lost." The first thing I thought of when I heard that prompt was a very short girl wearing a large coat and a backpack with tiny wings, running around a city in the afternoon, holding a paper bag filled with red-bean-paste-filled pastries that she accidentally didn't pay for, and attacking hugging childhood friends that she hasn't seen in seven years.

Mix 2 - SAGASHIMONO [oh, i am a s-song?]

She understood there was something she was supposed to look for, but that was as far as her knowledge stretched. For a while now, she had been sitting in that dark, metallic box, trying to think of what she could possibly need to search for. Was it something worth money? Did it hold some kind of priceless sentimental value? Was it even tangible? She knew not the answers to these questions. She could not know the answers to these questions; she simply did not have any means to find them from within that box. Thus she was forced to leave the box.

Remnants 1 - Looking for Something Lost

I wrote this short with only a vague idea in mind at the start. Really the only thing I visualized at first was the image of a child digging for worms. From there I pulled the classic saying, "Leave no stone unturned." After that I just let my heart write through my hands. As I wrote, I filled in the rest of the idea, and (clearly) changed it multiple times before reaching the end. I feel like this was a great exercise in writing fiction. Not only was it fun, it also taught me a ton of things about myself and my good and bad points when it comes to writing.

In my next post I'll publish the story I wrote for another idea I had for the prompt "looking for something lost." If you'd like to read the story behind this post, just send me an email.

[ thus concludes this collection of remnants from the blender lid. the first collection of many to come. ]

Introduction & Mix 1 - 4635 [rove the fires u fix]

So I'm not totally sure how this blog is going to turn out, since 1) I've never kept a blog before, 2) I hardly ever read blogs because I absolutely HATE reading stuff from those people who try to have perfect spelling and grammar, then end up with ONE little mistake that completely ruins it (ask people who know me, they know), and 3) I generally don't write much, especially fiction. Hopefully the things that end up on this blog are worth reading. And with that, a little explanation of what will end up on this blog.

• MIX - Basically if I find something interesting about life, I'll make a statement about it, and then scramble the letters into a different statement upon which I write a story. As you'll see later in this post, these are almost certain to end up really weird, but that's okay (probably).
• REMNANTS - These posts will contain reflections and revelations about my writing and my life. They'll probably hold a little more meaning and relevance than the Mixes.

I look forward to mixing up life in the blender, and hopefully you'll stick around to pick up the remnants. And now for the first Mix - 4635 [rove the fires you fix] . . .