Posts Tagged ‘writing experiment’

Writing Experiment Day #4: usurpation, grey, louche

See rules and word list at this post. If you want to play along, comment with a link to yours below (please don’t paste the entirety of yours; links only).

The man called himself “Mouser.” I read some Leiber when I was a kid and the moniker fit, more or less. He was dashing, handsome, decent with a knife. But he was also a sociopath — would as soon help you as kill you if there was money in it either way.

So no one was surprised when Mouser handed the Duke his assassin’s head in a box and proclaimed that his resume for the newly vacant position.

Mouser, Assassin of Duke Hochmirth

High Concept: Infamous Assassin
Trouble:  Past is catching up to me
Other Aspects: Mind of an Encyclopedia, People are Opportunities, Former Son of the Dragon, Delia

Noteworthy Skills: Stealth (Superb), Weapons (Great), Burglary (Great), Alertness (Good), Poisons (Good), Deceit (Good)

Noteworthy Stunt: Master of the Shadows (+2 to Stealth when hiding in the deep shadows of the dark/night)

Mouser is the sort of character you can throw into a game when the PCs are about to get up in some noble’s business. He’s not without plot hooks, should he or they not just outright kill one another; he used to be in The Dragons, a notorious crime syndicate, elevated high enough to be considered a Son (a trusted lieutenant & advisor). Naturally, he’s marked for death, and they have let slip his identity & whereabouts to those he’s wronged in the past.

He’s hard, but not without heart. He supports his adopted niece, Delia, from afar — hoping that no one discovers her. She is ill, and needs to go to a special and very expensive school in order to cope with her disabilities. (Think Vic Mackey from the Shield doing horrible things to support his autistic kids.)

I didn’t have time to do this before heading in the office today, so here’s an afternoon post. I decided to try making a Fate character rather than a story.

- Ryan

Writing Experiment Day #3: decimate, tractate, litany

See rules and word list at this post. If you want to play along, comment with a link to yours below (please don’t paste the entirety of yours; links only).

They sang. Dear gods, did they sing, their prayers echoing in the heavens.

I didn’t have long to find Hector’s paper. He knew about these beings. He knew about them, and we didn’t listen. And now he’s dead, because we didn’t listen.

“You won’t die in vain, old friend,” I muttered as I ran to his study.

The door was already open. An alabaster man was sitting at the desk, chuckling as he read Hector’s work.

“Hello, brother,” he said as he looked up at me.

“I am no brother of yours!” I pulled my gun and shot him.

As the man fell to the ground, he murmured something. The desk burst into flames. I grabbed what was left of Hector’s work and ran.

“I’ll show you bastards the power of prayer,” he shouted as I fled the house.

This is definitely the weakest of what I’ve written so far, and I was stumped for a good chunk of my allotted time. “Decimate” worked in my head as this character’s motivator, to stop that. And the “tractate” element feels meh, just thrown in. But, that’s what you get sometimes with just fifteen minutres of thinking & writing.

- Ryan

Writing Experiment Day #2: grip, rain, carnal

See rules and word list at this post. If you want to play along, comment with a link to yours below (please don’t paste the entirety of yours; links only).

I watched from inside the church, safe from the rain. I was lucky, as were the three others huddled inside, waiting for the sudden downpour to stop. I almost didn’t make it inside.

The kindly priest was not so lucky. He knelt, the rain assaulting him, unable to move, unable to do anything but feel.

I knew what this rain was. When it started, I kept the others from running out into it with his pistol and his cold, dead eyes. One shot into the rafters was enough to keep the mother, teenaged son, and groundkeeper in place.

The priest moaned outside. The mother begged me to let them go, to help him, the sorts of things I’ve heard again and again. But they didn’t know what I did. This wasn’t ordinary rain.

Ordinary rain doesn’t pin a man down like that. This wasn’t hard rain, rain with strong winds. This was just a little bit of wet, a little more than drizzle. Yet, the poor bastard outside is pinned down. Normal people don’t process incongruous things like that; they focus on the one thing they can see and tackle that. Normal people are blind to the otherworldly.

It’s my job to keep it that way. So I distract them, a big man with a gun.

The priest moaned again, but these aren’t moans of pain. They’re the sort of moans I’ve made after ordering up a couple Taiwanese whores with a side of X, coke, whatever I was in the mood for that night.

He’d be dead in a couple minutes. Once the rain takes what it wants from you, it leaves you an empty shell, incapable of feeling anything, even your own heartbeat. You just lay there, dying–quick but not quick enough. I wanted to shoot him in the head to put him out, but I couldn’t risk opening the window to do that.

It won’t takes one drop.

Another moan. From behind. The woman. I turned around, and saw the small leak in the roof above. The rain had caught another in its grip, which means it won’t just go away once the priest is dead.

I knew Father William. He was a good man; flawed, but good. I hated watching him die, but it was too late by the time it started. But this woman in fromt of me, I don’t know her. But damned if I’m going to have a son watch his mother die from a sorcerous ritual meant to kill me.

I didn’t have long to work the mojo. I flicked open the knife and stabbed my femoral artery through my jeans. This ritual’s going to take a lot of my blood, and I’ve no time to make this clean…

I knew in the middle of writing this that this was crap, more or less. There might be a good idea, but I’m not happy with my writing. Still, that’s what it means to force a first draft so that you can make it to the second one–writing even when you think it’s crap.

I also decided not to explicitly call it “orgasm rain.”

You might see the Twenty Palaces influence in this piece.

-Ryan

Writing Experiment Day #1: crepuscular, night, reciprocity

See rules and word list at this post. If you want to play along, comment with a link to yours below (please don’t paste the entirety of yours; links only).

Carolyn stared at her prey, the soon-to-be victim nodding along to music blaring in his headphones, waiting at the bus stop in the cold drizzle. The streetlamp was busting, thanks to her, but her prey was still light up by passing headlights.

“This isn’t that busy a street,” she thought. “It wasn’t for me.”

She stuck hard at the alley; a single passing light could maim her. Only twenty feet away from this or so very delicious man, whose soul just begged to be reaved, but she could not leap. “Patience,” she whispered to herself.

The man suddenly turned around in mild panic. He didn’t see her, of course, but he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Then he dismissed the feeling and went back to playing with his phone and waiting.

Traffic let up, fewer cars passed. Carolyn took the moment of darkness — lit only by the stars, moon, and ambient city light — and snatched her prey. He screamed, as you’d expect. He flailed, as you’d expect. And she drunk in his terror, as he drunk in hers.

As she started her monologue, telling Rick why he was to die tonight, he pressed a button on his phone. It lit up, shining in her face, melting it from existence. The rest of body turned to smoke and mist, and Rick ran down the street, away, grabbing the first bus that stopped without looking at where it was going.

Carolyn started to form again, the smoke turning into the shape of a woman. She looked down at the fatal gunshot wound in her left breast, the one left by Rick when he mugged her. She gritted her teeth and stalked away. “Just a minor setback. I have all night.”

A Smoke Mistress is yet another ghost ritual, one that allows a female murder victim to come back for one night to exact revenge, putting the killer in the the victim’s position. It must be cast at twilight, and the Mistress has until just before dawn. Sunlight and direct light will dispel the ghostly form into smoke, taking moments to reform once the light is removed or the smoke drifts away.

There is no documented version of this for a male victim, and attempts to use this ritual for a man results in the caster’s slow death over the next few days.

This was awkward because of both crepuscular & night. I wanted to make sure that both were given due, not just collapsed into one idea.

You’ll noticed that I didn’t necessarily use the words in the piece itself. I don’t want this to be “find a way to work in a word” but “be inspired and pay due to a word.”

- Ryan

Words from the call for them:

1. louche
2. penguin
3. decimate
4. reciprocity
5. stupendous
6. pneumatic
7. flask
8. night
9. isolation
10. tractate
11. javelina
12. ciborium
13. rain
14. supple
15. susurrus
16. effigy
17. comfort
18. grey
19. platypus
20. twinkle
21. Appalachian
22. flabbergasted
23. dirigible
24. litany
25. geranium
26. carnal
27. toenail
28. abstract
29. crepuscular
30. banjo
31. anxiety
32. grip
33. sanguine
34. troublesome
35. actinic
36. usurpation
37. boy
38. symphony
39. moist
40. orichalcum

The rules are: I will randomly choose three each day (Monday – Thursday; I’m flying out way early Friday morning for Big Bad Con) and write for 15 minutes on whatever those three words inspire.

I may make up new rules as I go on. You’re invited to do this as well! Comment on my posts with links to your own, but if you decide to, I recommend not reading mine first!

- Ryan