The sky had frowned thinly for the whole day with a nondescript light-grey mass of clouds from horizon to horizon, and finally broke down - first with a light drizzle, slowly growing to a steady and firm tap on leaves. Multicoloured umbrellas popped up everywhere, suddenly turning the park into a sea-flooded jungle.
Michael deftly manoeuvred through the minefield of bristling spikes and elbows, hurrying on their businesses. Although he didn’t give much attention to an accidental brush or poke - his own business was of penultimate importance.
“Why does this always have to happen to me?” he complained to the heavens, jumping over a filling spring of rainwater across the path, and narrowly dodging a fist going right into his face from some gentleman who didn’t even notice the incident, consumed by juggling his luggage in one hand and his umbrella in the other.
Michael wasn’t very concerned, either, and continued his lament. “What have I done for you (whoever you are) to always make it rain when I have an important date? I didn’t quarrel with anyone today, carried out the garbage, there weren’t any people in need that I could have helped. More importantly, I’m sure she likes me, I like her, no astrological complications. Or are there?”
Michael made his way through a small crowd on the side of the road, and into the front row, to have a clear view of the passing buses. The road was slowly gained fluidity, with two streams on the sides following the flows of cars.
Michael turned his eyes to the sky once again, tracking the muddy cover to its edges somewhere near the roofs of the farther houses. He was brought back by a small chorus of female falsetto, and immediately felt a cool shower from under the wheels of a car racing by on his legs.
“You’re kidding me,” said Michael.
---
At last Angie felt some consolation. The weather, an unlikely friend, let its tears flow in a shower of warm sadness. There was something in the quietness, broken only by a soft beat of rain, something that Angie felt was addressed to her, to her broken heart, something was speaking to her without words. She slowly drew in the smell of the park, leaves, bark and grass, and dusty bricks of a lonely tower, all wet and fresh, forever and always new, like Angie’s soul, torn and aching inside, but eternal and young. And patient. Like the clouds above, thick, grey, taking up all of the sky. They had to start somewhere above a lake, or a sea, just unnoticeable fog rising above the waves, but they were patient, waited, gained, to finally release in an iridescent colourfulness of a rainbow after the rain. So Angie had to wait, collect and keep, strangers and friends, accidental encounters and long-planned meetings, kindness, patience, love.
Angie looked up and silently thanked the heavens for the rain.
---
At the height of ten thousand feet there was no rain. In fact, the sun shone brightly and merrily, setting off white sparkles on the boiling sea of a raincloud beneath. And the rainbow was already here. The great and majestic Zadkiel, an angel, balanced on the rolling puffs of mist, holding onto the light-blossoming arch with his left hand. With his right hand he held the ethereal reins of the cloud.
He once again congratulated himself on getting this job. The concentration it required was a nice change to the slow numbness of office work. The health concerns were another thing that drew him here - every day he was getting a double measure of radiation and fresh air, the doctor had told him that his heart and eyes already showed great improvements. He was kind of counting on another couple thousand years, but the pollution in the city didn’t really make him optimistic. This job was a real breather.
Of course, it had its downsides, but they were rather psychology-related. Rainclouds mostly followed set schedules, and rarely needed to change course. But when they did, the drivers had little influence on the choice, the cloud couldn’t wait, and so most of decision-making was done by computers. The driver only verified the data. When people submitted requests, they were processed by a computer, and either a mean, or a majority choice was returned. So it was rain or draught for everyone.
Zadkiel believed there was some other way, and it involved the Inventions Department. It'd been a long time since someone had made any improvements to the current cloud system, and there was a demand for more precise targeting. Of course, Zakiel knew why it hadn't been fulfilled yet. Other, priority requests came from the Department of Defense, and those guys knew how to handle scientists.
So, no localised response - rain or draught for everyone. That was Zakiel's problem - he didn't really believe in democracy.
---
A large drop springily splashed over the eye of Frog. He intently blinked, opening his mouth a little, and fidgeted, settling on the wet sand.
He found the weather simply admirable. A solid nice rain after a whole two weeks of heat and dryness. Frog finally got out of the pond and had a clear view of the landscape having something solid under his belly.
Everyone rejoiced around him - birds, mice, his fellow frogs - well, everyone he cared about, and birds would be too busy to care for him for some time still.
Frog fidgeted some more, and set to observe the pattern that rain formed on the surface of the pond. He’d forgotten how beautiful it was! The thin, irregular rippling even reminded him of his own bumpy skin. Frog looked at the sky and thought, surely the cloud guy there must be a frog.
This is a good prompt piece--you let me know what each character is thinking right away, and develop their view competently. You do use some dramatic irony in here in a way that could be described as "droll." However, there are a couple of problems with the work:
First, the diction is relatively even throughout. This might work with the first two characters, but with the second two something should really change. Second, there's no break or arc to the flow of this piece, which makes it more of a grind to read through than it should be. Try varying your sentence structure, or use some unexpected metaphors. Finally, and this is more of an irk than a major flaw to a
prompt post, there's no interconnecting story, no driving arc that gives us a setup, climax, and resolution. For me, that makes the piece a lot more difficult to get through.
However, I do find it interesting how you managed to make disparate circumstances and speakers all fit a single mood. All in all, a definitely interesting experiment. I'd be careful switching rapidly between viewpoints on your future projects, though--you seem to need more practice here.
Jonal Naet crouched down, squatting in the usual muddy alley as he looked through his binoculars at the massive structure across the grimy river. He was a soldier, one of the better ones Students For Liberty had, and across the toxic water was a modern day Bastille. Massive tubes connected to a now-silent architecture of death were his target tonight, and this was a crucial step in the war. The artillery he was focusing had fired a nearly unimaginable distance this afternoon, smashing into Zapatista jungle fortresses identified by Bosnian automated satellites. The People's State of America had declared a total war on ‘all those who fight the stable status quo' and Jonal would be damned if he allowed the fascists to win. A chip embedded in his binoculars would send a signal to an illegal satellite operating just above the atmosphere, half a dozen rods crammed with high-density explosive waiting to be launched by his command. The girl he had loved had been in charge of manufacturing the HDE, using chemicals stolen from a Republic of Siberia supply house. She had been cornered on the street, lined up against a wall with a dozen teenagers that had been spraying anti-government graffiti and summarily executed. Jonal smiled bitterly. The snitch who had betrayed them all had screamed for hours and hours.
The guards, a mere hundred feet from him, were looking bored and smoking black-market cigarettes. The detail the binoculars provided was amazing; he could see the brand of crappy French cigarettes they were smoking. Four of the guards were dragging out a battered table and four stools that looked like they had been through the Russian-Chechnya Wars. Two others were standing off to the side, one of them looking at a picture and...crying? Jonal was wary. This was a break in routine. He had been staking out this place for a week and a half, and that one had never taken out a picture. Was it of a Movement member? Unlikely. It probably had nothing to do with the operation. One picture wasn't worth cancelling an assignment that could change the course of the war against injustice and oppression. Jonal's thumb hovered over a crimson button on the side of the binoculars for a moment, checked his firing lines and that the calculations he had laboured on for over a week were correct. They were. His thumb pressed down.
----
A thousand kilometres above the dirty revolutionary, a machine that had been in SLEEP MODE transformed into a humming hive of activity. Bouncing its geo-location signals through half a dozen encrypted proxies on the ground, the machine fixated on its target. Velocity, atmospheric curve, angle of impact and blast radius were double-checked. The target was just a designated area to the circuitry inside the machine, and it performed its task to the highest standard known. All calculations checked out. TARGETING MODE was enabled and activated, the blast area triple-checked. As FIRING MODE engaged, the whirring processors in the satellite’s core reached the limit of their computing power. The weapons rack slid open, the dead cold of the exosphere chilling the fortified components within. Six smooth rods ignited, each blasting out of the deployment bay within a microsecond of the others. The satellite changed its orbit ever so slightly, moving into the path of a fiery destruction in the atmosphere. Its task completed and its existence obsolete, the computer returned to SLEEP MODE and waited for the end.
----
Thaom Cias stared at the picture of his happy family, three tears sliding down his pale cheeks. Three smiling kids, a beaming father, proud of his accomplishments and offspring, and a delighted wife standing in the back yard of a small house. Five short years ago, and now the yard they had been standing on was hard-baked earth, the house was ashes swirling on the wind, and the country had been a state that had a few freedom of speech issues and trouble makers. When had it all gone wrong? His eldest daughter had run off and joined some student movement, his wife and remaining kids were fleeing to the Worker's Republic of California! His life had seemingly fallen apart, and here he was, standing guard to a massive military machine that could accurately strike targets a continent away. He needed any job he could get. It wasn't cheap fleeing a country, and with what little cash he could muster together and the few favours still owed him, he had tried to get his loved ones out of this hellhole. He was going to join them as soon as he could. The decisive moment was six months ago, when the Security and Stability Force showed up at their cheap apartment building. Their elderly, bespectacled neighbour, who babysat the kids when he and Sheila were both working, was dragged out into the hallway. Thaom had watched through the peephole in the door, breath caught in his throat. Some ancient looking book about something called a Communist was waved in the old man's face, and their neighbour had screamed, "It was for historical reading purposes, you dolts! I'm not actually a-!" Four gunshots later, and Thaom was throwing up in the sink, his beloved son bursting into tears, a mere nine years old. Thaom had gone out that night, hands shaking until he had smoked three packs of shitty cigarettes at the local bar. He had started calling people and making subtle payments. Tonight, Thaom knew he couldn't do anything; they were in the hands of a close friend. All he could do was wait to join them. It wouldn't be long now, another month or two, calling them every three days on the disposable cell phone Sheila had taken with her, making a few discreet calls and emails to make sure they crossed the border.
When the first rod slammed through the building and into the armoury six stories below, Thaom hardly had time to blink before a deafening explosion shattered his ear drums and drove him to his knees. Inside the span of three seconds, five more impacts made the whole structure shudder, and then five massive explosions turned the building into mildly radioactive dust, a small mushroom cloud rising out of the sinking rubble, the dirty river now aflame as the sky turned purple and emergency sirens began to blare.
----
Jonal was eight blocks away from the scene of the crime when a smouldering picture of a happy family fluttered down in front of him. He paused and plucked it from the pavement, tucking it into a pocket inside his coat. He thought he might return it to the owner one day, an act which might brighten some poor soul's day and bring back a few happy memories.
This is a good prompt post. You were able to pull off a significant amount of dramatic irony and a good arc through the piece. You definitely had a few interesting moments as well.
However, this piece is not without problems: First, the government is definitely too obviously 'teh evulz'. This would have been ok, but then you switched to the guard's perspective, which gave you the perfect chance to point out the government's side of this equation. However, you just say that the government is bad again. This gives us the impression that the only one satisfied with the government is the government, and even in Nazi Germany at the end of WWII, this was far from true. Second, you use loaded terms where I'm pretty sure you don't mean to: ie, dirty revolutionary. Be very, very careful in political stories that you don't tap into something that you don't want to tap into. I'd recommend a closer reading of this piece to try to pick out these terms. Thirdly, I don't see how Jonal's final actions follow from what he knows, and who his character is. That's obviously a picture from one of the three guards, and he's clearly OK with killing anyone associated with the government, so why should he consider handing off this picture to some government dog's family?
The thing that I can't decide is brilliant or not is the fact that this doesn't feel like the future--more like some sort of 80's military resistance novel. Everyone feels dirty, and the machines are just props for the human drama. On the other hand, it seems like there have been significant changes in the world that we should be picking up on, but it's not there for us to see. I'm not sure, so I'll leave that for you to decide.
The siege had gone on for more than three full cycles. Sarot could almost admire them for holding out so long, the last city he had helped to take had fallen in less than five days. Whatever the evari were doing behind that shield of theirs, it was working. No matter though, nothing could withstand the Huslal, the armored, shielded war machines of the gnomlin, of which Sarot was a pilot. At least, not forever.
He had maneuvered the great arachnid machine back to be rearmed, having spent all of both the solid and energy rounds once again. Then, as he was about to head back to the line, the call came over the comm.
“All Huslal units, break assault and pull back to third station. Break assault and pull back”
He was about to object, but the unit Commander beat him to it, “Command, requesting clarification,” talking on the same open channel, “Why are we pulling back?”
“Galsamingor wants this over with, they're brining out the Eye”
Lumbering on through the night, Sarot suddenly thought the Huslal seemed terribly slow.
--- --- --- --- ---
Kizarith had been standing atop the wall for what felt like a lifetime. It was strange to think that, only a few months ago, he had left his family to go and help the noble Providers in their great struggle. Even stranger was how he had grown to be so accustomed to the roar of the attackers weapons and the flashes of the Providers' shield. So accustomed that he now stood looking out at the gnomlin atrocities feeling almost bored, his tail swishing slowly behind him with near apathy. So accustomed, in fact, that he jumped as if struck from behind when the roaring tumult suddenly stopped.
His eyes pierced the night with ease now that the shield stopped flashing from constant impacts, allowing Kizarith to see the enemy machines moving away.
“They've given up!” he cried, unexpected relief rushing over him.
--- --- --- --- ---
The doors swung wide as the aide rushed in, almost beside himself, “Sejisec! Sejisec Loro! They've stopped! They're leaving!”
Anvetad Loro, Sejisec of Vylena, was quite singular in his unenthusiastic observation. “I can see that, yes, thank you,” his annoyance showing in the forms of his words.
The aide seemed to remember some portion of decorum, bowing before leaving the room once more.
Anvetad looked down from the citadel tower with great skepticism. The gnomlin hadn't given up once, not one single engagement since their rampage of retribution had begun almost a year ago. He didn't quite know what to think about their apparent withdrawal, but one thing he felt certain of, they were not giving up.
As he gazed down at the city, it's victorious joy almost palpable, Anvetad knew the worst was yet to come.
--- --- --- --- ---
“Fire!!”
Ranje Arenth sat up suddenly, woken at his own cry and shaking violently in a cold sweat.
His leran servant rushed in, “Seer Arenth? What's wrong?”
Ranje was nearly incoherent for a moment, “Fire and death. Power, a star, star of death,” regaining his wits as he woke more fully, his terror-filled eyes fixed on the servant “I have to see the Sejisec.”
The leran ran to notify the Sejisec and Ranje threw on a white robe, rushing out into the hall and toward the imperial quarters. The cheers of the joyous below echoed through the black stone archways that overlooked the city and illuminated the white hall by the light of Myrda. But it was too bright. Too bright and... that sound.
Ranje stopped all at once and looked out at the sky. His strength left him and he fell to his knees. It was too late.
--- --- --- --- ---
Dane Atad had been woken by the strange sound, as had most of the city. A sound like a swarming host of angry bees. He and nearly everyone else had wandered out to see what it was, and what it was that was shedding such light in the middle of the night. There were lights, beams of light, piercing brightly across the night and cutting the sky into sections as they met at a single tiny point almost directly above. First one, then another, then another and another until fully seven blazed out from the western Kanes Mountains.
Dane glanced about the crowd for a moment and saw that even the monstrous and hated leran soldiers the evari had left behind were standing among them, staring up in awed wonder. The murmurs of the crowd changed to gasps. He looked back just in time.
The point where the lights met flared bright as the sun, seeming to melt downward for a moment. All at once the night was banished by a raging beam of fire, pouring down from the pinnacle of the sky, twisting tightly and shattering the night silence with a keening sound like a thousand screams. Looking at it felt like staring at a fire too closely and Dane shielded his eyes against it's terrible brightness.
Then there was a blast, an explosion far beyond anything he had ever witnessed or dreamed to imagine. It came from where the beam of fire must have struck ground and billowed into the sky.
It was Vylena, the accursed fortress of the thrice cursed evari. It had to be, he knew, and he knew what it had to mean. The evari were defeated. The city of Etlor-Dras was free. The realization ran through the crowd like water, growing up a cheer as it swept over the city even as the fireball continued to reach higher into the sky.
Dane was free.
This is an ok post. You do use an arc to drive your characters through the story, and you definitely have an interesting bit of history behind your story.
However: The first and biggest problem I have is that I'm thrown into a world where so much is different, then juggled around before I can start getting a comprehensive picture. In general, the more that a world is different from our own, the more time you'll need to get the world across to your audience. I get that there's a war, and it's pseudo-fantasy? Steampunk? I'm not actually sure. I can tell there's stuff behind the world, just not what that stuff is. Secondly, you swing me from one side to the other, and yet don't provide enough clues to tell me where I am. This is a big problem, as I end up confused for a bit into your prose, and you don't want your readers confused. Thirdly, you have a huge context problem--what does it matter to me if some somethings die? You have to first humanize these characters before we start caring about them.
However, I do want to praise the ending. What I got out of it was that the defending side had stolen a city. This is amazing, definitely one of those sensawunder moments that SF literary people bemoan dying. Good job working this in.
Why make something if nothing endures? -
You can lose everything in an instant.
They say “Aren’t the moments of brightness,
And the goodness born by your doing
Worth it?"
They just lie, and may be unknowing.
They just offer a consolation
To have something to keep us from thinking
Of our place on this pointless journey.
But I want no consolation,
No more hide’n’seek playing with Reason.
The truth!
OK, so I still don't like this poem. But you've definitely improved--the meter is consistent, it scans alright, and you have a good arc going... hrm. This will be hard, so let me just go with a line-by-line analysis.
1: An excellent opener. You hit a chord that resonates with a lot of people, and suggest you have some interesting thoughts about it.
2: This squanders all the drama you just built up by being trite. I get the feeling that you felt like you needed another line in there and put this one down without any good reason for it.
3-5: An excellent bit of quotation, thought "born by your doing" is clunky. You could have set it up a bit better with line 2.
6: This has a couple flaws. "Just" doesn't mean anything here, and your scansion would be better without it. "And may be unknowing" is both clunky and covers old ground uninterestingly.
7: "Just" doesn't mean anything again, but this is otherwise a good line.
8-9: This is decent, but I wouldn't leave it untouched. There might be a snappier way to put line 8.
10: A good setup for the rest of the stanza.
11: Excellent building here...
12: Urrk! This is less like a cliff hanger, and more like someone shot the writer! You have a good head of steam built up, so feel free to make some leaps here, and then close it off with a parting thought. As it is now, this end doesn't work.
Since I've lambasted two of your poems, here's one of mine to rip into:
Nothing good comes out of Nazareth,
Just a prophet in his hometown.
Nothing good comes out of England,
Not even a sliver of Newton's renown.
Nothing good comes from America,
The French won World War Two.
Nothing good comes from Raleigh,
That stinking, schizophrenic city,
Heaving with the built up filth of centuries,
Ideological sewage brewed in a racist barrel,
Fermented undisturbed by enlightenment,
Opened to a backwards hallelujah chorus,
Drunk by demented judges,
Pronounced good,
And with it,
Me too.
Nothing good comes out of Raleigh,
Save tobacco for the smoker.
Noone good comes out of Raleigh,
So I'll just be mediocre.
Things Illuminated by Broken Street Lamps
It is dark. Across the parking lot and above the thick stand of pines, the moon gleams behind a mottled cloud cover. It is fat and yellow, and casts an aureole into the night sky. The city lights have rendered most stars invisible. The roar of the freeway has rendered most sounds inaudible, but an airplane can be heard passing overhead. Its lights flash from side to side, red to blue and back again.
In the parking lot, rows of street lamps stand tall. Each lamp has two bulbs, but many are dull gray and lightless. The lot’s white lines are faded. The white arrows still offer direction, but they, too, are disappearing. Most of the lot’s cars are shiny and new—black, white, and silver, all lit in the harsh orange lights of the lamp. They are large and square and American. The chilly wind smells like gasoline.
A sidewalk borders the lot. Small brown and gray stones are embedded into its surface. A thin girl dressed in dark blue sweatclothes strides down the walk. She carries a bright green duffel bag over her shoulder, its bulk bouncing against the lean curve of her back. Her pink mouth is fixed in a broad smile. The smile distorts and stretches her face. It is full of square white teeth.
For a moment, she looks up. She does not pause or stop smiling. She continues walking. Within seconds, she is gone.
This is actually really difficult for me to judge. Usually I come at prompts as a reader first, and a writer second, but this is so clearly a writing drill that reader-me completely shuts down. Should I judge this as a writer or a reader, then?
Here are some things that made reader-me shut down: First, the prose is relatively uniform. You might say that this is part of the prompt, but there are plenty of ways to make the prose less uniform without inserting an opinionated voice. Varying the sentence structure and length, for instance, would be one way. Varying verbs would help a lot too. (You have "has rendered" as the verb in two sentences side-by-side.) And rolling unnecessary sentences into more active sentences would make the prose snap more (Ie, get rid of sentences like "Its lights flash from side to side, red to blue and back again." by inserting text in the previous sentence). Secondly, and relatedly, there is no motion in this piece until the very end. Thing just sit there, for the most part, and the narrative voice describes in splotches instead of, say, panning across the scene, or starting far away and moving in. And thirdly, your prose somehow reads in a slow, lulling development, with few surprises, which may be part of the writing prompt.
Things which make the writer-me get going: You've definitely captured the type of Hemingway here, though in a slowed-down form. Perhaps because of this, I'm suddenly looking for symbolism, treating this as a
text to be analyzed rather than a prompt to read. You capture the feeling of a still night, looking out on the surroundings, if not in a way that punches the reader in the teeth with "READ ME" vibes. This would be an excellent start to, say, a break-scene between action scenes. In short, there's definitely some wordcrafting skillz here.
With that, I finish all the prompts. Hopefully the abbreviated form didn't offend anyone.
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Topic: Bay12 Writers Guild (Read 58910 times)