Pinterest Mood Board I Created For My Wip Short Story, "Bud And Bunny".

Me decaying in bed writing my wip in front of the fan in summer, August.

the painter’s mistress

The oak cottage has grown mushy in the rain, susceptible to mold.

The boggy air - a warm, wet rag, plugs my mouth 

as I sit and snap split peas into a Blue Black bowl, nostrils blaring 

at the stink of rotting leaves.

My hunched figure is molded from swirls of oil, greasy smears 

of Yellow Ocher, Permanent Mauve;

colors you’d so thoughtfully selected, seen in me.

Now, under coats of glaze, spotty like a bride’s moth-eaten veil,

I’m just a mute, colorless oval to you.

It’s needless to hide my bloated, decaying face;

you turned away before I could.

Old books kind of ruined me for that. Cue me staring at my own three paragraph run on sentence while editing and not even understanding it

i love reading old books because they invent such ways to create a long ass sentence

student writeblrs! what are your writing plans/goals for the rest of your break? my plan is to finish drafting/editing a climate change short story and submit it to some literary magazines and hopefully, hopefullyyyy.. draft chapter eight of my lit-fic novel which keeps. not. working. feel free to use this post for accountability! <33

hello world! you’ve severely disappointed me! i’d sound like my mother if i went on about your mistakes, but i’d rather spare you the grief! save room for me in my unlikely return, even if you’re a hard place to call home! ciao!

IT’S GENE MAGIC AND/OR TURPENTINE: A SHORT STORY

the narrator doesn’t know what’s going on and neither do we: surrealist version.

GENRE: surrealism.

POV & TENSE: third-person limited, present tense.

SETTING: an apartment in an unnamed suburb, present-day.

TONE: satirical, resentful, delirious, wistful.

STAGE: completed first draft, 1807 words.

LOGLINE: after being called back from college upon her family’s death, july contemplates her situation by villanizing and blaming her dead family.

LITERAL LOGLINE: life got you down? your entire family dead under mysterious circumstances? don’t worry, your friendly shoulder demon’s got your back, just smoke it out!

CHARACTERS:

july is a college student who was called back in the middle of her course— something that she worked super hard to get into— to go vacate her now-deceased family’s home. she’s angry about this, because she feels robbed of her dream. as time goes on and the story progresses, july continues to detach from her pain over her family’s death and reality itself, subsequently leading to her unravelling.

hale is the shoulder demon. they’re a fun and sarcastic person, and secretly worries for july and her increasing detachedness. nobody knows why they’re here, what they’re doing, or even if they’re real in the first place.

WHAT GOES DOWN:

july is called back from college to attend to her now empty home following the sudden death of her family— mother, sister, grandmother— under mysterious circumstances. this is a source of dual emotions for july. on one hand, she’s grieving for them immensely, and this is signified through the various memories she has of them + her relationships with each member. on the other hand, she’s extremely annoyed by this, because she knew they would die together eventually— it’s implied to be something that runs in the family, and had happened to her father before— and the timing inconvenienced her.

july is,,,, pretty unhinged. a lot of surreal things happen in the story and it’s difficult to distinguish reality from her mind. she also has a friend in hale, the demon on her shoulder. the story chronicles the short period of time she spends in her home, trying to collect her thoughts and prepare for her own inevitable death.

EXCERPTS:

this is a very short story so i don’t want to share much, but here’s one little peek into the tone + style of the prose.

July scoffs again, but now it’s silent and nobody hears. The will features meaningless drabble, small talk and verbiage typical for her mother, and she’s tempted to rip it and swallow the pieces whole. [Why, she can’t say. There’s an odd craving in every object and she’s the only one who makes herself tick.] She concludes that the house is now her’s. How wonderful. Of course July would have traded her college room for a nowhere house any fucking day.

SPARE THOUGHTS:

this is the weirdest thing i’ve written. it’s high-key surrealism and plays with form and character a lot. july is an extremely unreliable narrator. there’s a lot of funky concepts—every speaker’s dialogue is formatted differently, she’s spying on her neighbours, there’s a demon on her shoulder— and while it’s been hard threading them in coherently and fluidly, i’ve never had more fun drafting before. it’s also one of my best short story titles, hands down. feel free to ask anything about this story because there’s so much meta i can get into. [general taglist under the cut]

Keep reading

What's your short story writing process?? I love your works <3!

hello anon + thank you so much!! it mainly happens in three stages. i’ll try and break this up so that it’s easy to read, i’d also recommend checking out this post where i talked about my titling process as that’s something that also plays into the way i write my short story.

NOTE: i’m a pantser and i pants all my work. this process is super intuitive and tends to differ slightly for each story. for me i learn more about the story as i go and i’m just as in the dark as the characters.

1. THE IDEA. this comes from literally anywhere, and can be of any form: the main concept, theme, or aesthetic, maybe an integral image or aesthetic, maybe a specific title or lexicon. i’ll be exampling here to make it make more sense:

for saltwater, the story came first. i’d had this initial idea of a couple drowning in the ocean after one of them drives them both into it.

for it’s gene magic and/or turpentine, it was a vague concept that formed the idea although it has zero impact on the plot since i veered away from said concept.

for geometry of the holy moon (1 am), it was the aesthetic, the setting and the lexicon [specifically the word ”yearning”]. i was inspired by a conversation i had about desi mythology and singing to the moon.

for cranium, i wanted to write something in second-person and wrote the first line, ten followed though with my instinct.

for helium throat [although this doesn't really count considering that this is a revamp of an older story] it was the exploration of a character relationship + dynamic.

getting the idea for me is very intuitive, and it happens at a pace i can't fully keep up with so for most of the time when i get an idea i put it into my ideas’ doc and save it for later. i’ve talked about this before but having an ideas’ doc is a lifesaver because you will have inspiration ready at hand and it can be super organised too! [mine is divided into plot, pov, form, theme, character, titles, verbs, concepts, etc.]

2. THE FIRST LINE / PARAGRAPH. once i get the idea, and i choose to draft the story immediately, i write out the first excerpt / line. this can be a hit or miss. sometimes [like with helium throat and gene magic], the first paragraph lets me understand the voice + tone, and i’m able to draft the rest of the story in it. sometimes, like with gothm, the first line doesn't fully explain it [this may be because it isn't where the story’s meant to start, sometimes because it just feels wrong] and in this case i either scrap the paragraph and start over, or i keep it to add to the story at a later point. this first excerpt is important to me as it helps determine how the rest of the story’s going to go, helps me get a slightly better understanding of the aesthetic and the voice, and at how rich / sparse the prose style will be. [so for gothm, i knew it would be a very thick and dreamy prose style while with gene magic it would end up being short and punchy]

3. THE DRAFTING. this one’s going to get so vague, but basically i then just,,, draft the story! i always keep a notebox kind of thing for each one where i put in anything related to the story [so scene ideas, the wordbank, particular aesthetics, etc]. i refer to this as i go on drafting. when i’m at the beginning, i still don’t fully know what the story will be about but the more i draft the clearer this becomes. most of the time, the ending clicks for me first, and then the rest of the writing process involves me building the gaps between the current scene and the final one. sometimes, i’ll get a scene idea that will completely shift the story from the point it was going. a lot of times, i’d start adding in a specific detail which i’d end up making much more plot relevant later on. i always refer to my general ideas’ list while drafting as sometimes a random, seemingly unrelated concept or word can help me in uncovering the short story. my drafting process is hard to pin down as it’s rather different for each short story but it usually involves me stumbling around a bit and trying to make out more of the story until something clicks or becomes clear and i finish the rest with an exact understanding in mind.

and this is the gist of how i write the first drafts of my short stories! i’ve only just started editing them, and in that department i have no insight [and i’m suffering there too yikes]. but i hope this was able to help!!

tolstoy, vladimir nabokov (trans. dmitri nabokov)

Stuck in an unanticipated editing spiral at the beginning of Draft 2 of Project Istanbul, oh and mourning the plot lines that got chucked for the Greater Good. Goodbye side character whose only purpose was to be aesthetically pleasing, I never knew you.

We're beating flowery prose with razor sharp specificity around here