DISCUSSION THREAD -- October 2022 -- 300 Word Writing Challenge #47

[THX1138]

Congratulations @Victoria Silverwolf on the victory

Thanks to @Luiglin, @JS Wiig, @Christine Wheelwright, and @chuckroc73 for the votes, and thanks also for mentions/listings/whatnot from @BT Jones, @johnnyjet, @Starbeast, @Cat's Cradle, @Phyrebrat, and @The Judge (I think that's everybody). Considering I looked at my story a day or two after posting and immediately saw a few spots I could have improved it, I'm pretty glad with that response.

A few notes about my story. Been thinking a lot about loss lately. Went to two funerals this summer, one for a friend from university who passed suddenly and unexpectedly in his mid-thirties (I was told brain aneurysm), and another for my aunt who finally succumbed to cancer after 7 years. There was also a trilogy of music videos put out about a month ago really focusing on the dark side of loss (aptly titled Pain Remains) that have been making metalheads cry, and the songs and videos are really well done and have been rattling around in my head (the videos come with a trigger warning, I'll add them under a spoiler tag here). These are deathcore songs (think extreme metal), so I'd wager few of you might enjoy the music (and likely none of you will enjoy the vocals!) and it comes with a big trigger warning for self-harm and suicide; I find parts of it pretty hard to watch. But if you're interested, somebody stitched together all three official videos, and added subtitles, here:

On the flip side, one of the people who spoke at my aunt's funeral spoke at length about the great love that she had for her family and those she cared about, and how he could feel that love was still there so she wasn't really gone. At some point while trying to think of a story for this challenge it clicked for me that the love and pain that remain after a loss like that are two sides of the same coin, and I decided I wanted to write something focusing on the love, rather than the pain. It was harder than I thought; I had several pretty good ideas focusing on the darkness before what eventually became my story came to me. I've been seeing my uncle a fair bit since the funeral (they'd moved to be closer to family shortly before her health took a sharp turn for the worse) and though he doesn't always show it, I think he's been struggling a bit; who wouldn't after losing their spouse of 50 years. I think part of me wanted it to end on a hopeful note because I want to be hopeful for him. In any case, this one was more for me than anybody else.

Stories always take on a new meaning when you read them from the authors view and experience.
May a steady breeze fill your and yours sail.

 

[Christine Wheelwright]

Congratulations @Victoria Silverwolf on the victory

Thanks to @Luiglin, @JS Wiig, @Christine Wheelwright, and @chuckroc73 for the votes, and thanks also for mentions/listings/whatnot from @BT Jones, @johnnyjet, @Starbeast, @Cat's Cradle, @Phyrebrat, and @The Judge (I think that's everybody). Considering I looked at my story a day or two after posting and immediately saw a few spots I could have improved it, I'm pretty glad with that response.

A few notes about my story. Been thinking a lot about loss lately. Went to two funerals this summer, one for a friend from university who passed suddenly and unexpectedly in his mid-thirties (I was told brain aneurysm), and another for my aunt who finally succumbed to cancer after 7 years. There was also a trilogy of music videos put out about a month ago really focusing on the dark side of loss (aptly titled Pain Remains) that have been making metalheads cry, and the songs and videos are really well done and have been rattling around in my head (the videos come with a trigger warning, I'll add them under a spoiler tag here). These are deathcore songs (think extreme metal), so I'd wager few of you might enjoy the music (and likely none of you will enjoy the vocals!) and it comes with a big trigger warning for self-harm and suicide; I find parts of it pretty hard to watch. But if you're interested, somebody stitched together all three official videos, and added subtitles, here:

On the flip side, one of the people who spoke at my aunt's funeral spoke at length about the great love that she had for her family and those she cared about, and how he could feel that love was still there so she wasn't really gone. At some point while trying to think of a story for this challenge it clicked for me that the love and pain that remain after a loss like that are two sides of the same coin, and I decided I wanted to write something focusing on the love, rather than the pain. It was harder than I thought; I had several pretty good ideas focusing on the darkness before what eventually became my story came to me. I've been seeing my uncle a fair bit since the funeral (they'd moved to be closer to family shortly before her health took a sharp turn for the worse) and though he doesn't always show it, I think he's been struggling a bit; who wouldn't after losing their spouse of 50 years. I think part of me wanted it to end on a hopeful note because I want to be hopeful for him. In any case, this one was more for me than anybody else.

Good story BigJ. Happy to have voted for it.

 

[Ursa major]

Homer Simpson...

This is why @Mouse is to blame for my entry.... (Bad Mouse!!!!)


I have to admit to being less familiar with The Odyssey and The Iliad than I ought to be (having very read short versions of them when I was young, and read/seen stories/books/films/memes that riffed off them, but not the originals), and was originally going to "retell" the story of Jason and the Argonauts (from which my mute sailors and their collective name arose), but that got nowhere.

So, almost in desperation, I turned to The Odyssey and, to refresh my memory, the Wikipedia article on it (which provided a brief precis of the well-known episodes). It still wasn't working -- and was all a bit too obvious to make the puns and wordplay work -- when my subconscious, on seeing the name of Odysseus' wife, simultaneously dropped the name of the Spanish film star into my conscious mind and suggested a pun on it would make a good title (and, because the reader might wonder why it was a pun on a film star's name, might allow the source for the story to emerge during the reading of it).

Of course, this also suggested swapping the roles of Odysseus and Penelope. And from there, the puns and word-playing became obvious and made it possible to suggest each of my chosen episodes from the original story in a few words -- far fewer than relating them would have taken and not much more than just saying the names of the antagonists (which would have been more than boring and would have contained no story, original or derived).

After that, the story almost wrote itself.

Anyway, I hope everyone (at least those who know The Odyssey**) got the various references.


** Or, in one case, has watched Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End....

 

[Astro Pen]

I really like having everyone explain their stories and motivations here. It adds insight and a range of approaches, some very personal, others methodical, or channelling writers they like. We should do this after every challenge, it is interesting.

 

[Elckerlyc]

In that case, sorry everyone! There isn't much to explain about my story. It's just a silly tale that surfaced while writing.
Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever written something that's based on a memory or a dream. It's not how my creative mind works, I suppose.

 

[The Judge]

I really like having everyone explain their stories and motivations here. It adds insight and a range of approaches, some very personal, others methodical, or channelling writers they like. We should do this after every challenge, it is interesting.

Hear, hear!


I forgot to add for mine that although it didn't provide inspiration as such, I did deliberately echo Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse, first by pinching the title, and then by using some of the plot ie the squabbles and argument over going there, the house party, the son's death in the war. Definitely not channelling a writer I like, however, as I can't get on with Woolf at all and while I could appreciate the imagery and prose of the central section of the book, the rest of it exhausted my patience. (I've limited tolerance for navel-gazing, upper middle class aesthetes!)

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I picked up the Virginia Woolf link.

As to mine, which bombed (thanks @nixie for the vote) it was a story I was playing around with for a possible novel, of a lighthouse in space linked to one of this world. But it's making my head hurt, frankly. Therefore, having it bomb makes a decision easier.

 

[Swank]

Congrats @Victoria Silverwolf! It's a rare month when you don't get one of my votes!

Explanations:
My story is about an advanced group of researchers that are stuck on a less advanced planet because of the locals and the security protocols of their own ship. Having failed to solve the problem, they ask a non-technical member for "interdisciplinary" help. The story is her out of the box solution to get a person in orbit with a fairly small device.

For many years, I've been kicking around the idea that the amount of G force a human could sustain is proportional to the kind of support their body received. Soft couch good, water bath better, etc. My idea is that the human body is so close to salt water in density, that if you remove all the air spaces (like in The Abyss), and then massively pressurize the water they are floating in, even massive G forces would proportionally have little effect. In other words, if your body is being compressed from all sides by 10,000 lbs of force, what difference does another 2000 lbs in a particular direction have? Of course, enough force over time and you have the centrifuge effect of separating tissue my molecular weight, but the story exists in the sweet spot between that and incredible acceleration - where her capsule goes from zero to escape velocity in a few hundred meters.

I didn't do any of the math - the pressures used in the story are fictitious. Assumably the crew members have knowledge of medical techniques to avoid oxygen toxicity at great depths.

 

[JS Wiig]

Yes it is wonderful and interesting to see personal commentaries on the stories!

While I lost track of the calendar for this one, I posted it in the 300 Improvement Thread, and will go ahead and drop it here as part of my continuous marketing campaign:

When the Water Comes

:the sea is one of the most powerful forces of nature:

Salvage bot ED416 moved slowly through the rubble. Its task was to collect broken glass using a series of complex scanners, a grabber arm, and a precision vacuum nozzle. Many other salvage bots traveled back and forth over the once thriving ocean front community of retirees, vacationers and beach bums, reduced to piles of splintered wood, scattered personal belongings and bare concrete foundations.

:but they will rebuild here again:

The central database was full of these historical cycles. The storm would come, leaving death and destruction in its wake. Then the sun would return and the work would begin. After the salvage crews completed their cleanup, the survey crews would lay out the new developments. Construction crews would follow, rebuilding the destroyed structures. Then the humans would return. And in time so would the sea.

:stubbornness is an inherent human trait:

ED’s programming didn’t include understanding or empathy. Its algorithms accessed the Central Database to acquire basic information on human behavior for task performance enhancement. Sensors interrupted and the machine stopped. It lowered a vacuum arm through tangled two-by-fours, past a stuffed animal and a sock, to a small pile of glass covering a photograph: a man, woman, and child posed before a fire burst sunset reflected across a serene, flat ocean.

:retrieving scrap…:

ED416 sucked the glass into its storage bin and processed the image of the family into its memory banks for upload to the Central Database. ED’s programming didn’t include assessing their outcome, whether they evacuated or drowned in the storm surge and had been — or would be — found by the cadaver bots. The salvage bot ED416 just reactivated its scanners and motor tracks, then moved slowly on through the sea of rubble.

We’re about as landlocked as it gets up here in the high deserts of Southwest Wyoming, so the sea is a bit of an enigma and I really enjoy writing about it. We do have a large reservoir we really like boating on. One of our bucket list items, if you will, is to drive a boat from the east coast of Florida and cruise the Bahamas. We made the first of hopefully many trips to Florida last spring in pursuit of this goal. One of the places we visited, Ft Meyers Beach, was nearly annihilated a couple months ago by hurricane Ian. I couldn’t stop thinking about that with the picture.

In short. the story is about a robot cleaning up after a devastating storm. But it’s about the timeless love hate relationship we have with the sea.

So if you like my story, please let me know how many votes I missed out on so I can kick myself even harder for missing the deadline!

And if you think it stinks, well it’s in the Improvement thread so let me hear about that too. And you don’t even have to be gentle; I grew up and work in an Industrial Oilfield Wasteland and have alligator thick skin (but a sweet gooey caramel center). I’m also an early blue belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu, so used to getting beat up in the name of “learning” and “personal growth”.

Thanks for reading!

 

[AnRoinnUltra]

please let me know how many votes

Can't say if you'd have made the podium but I like it -the style is cool and the :subheading bits worked well for me (saw it over on the improving thread, but I don't have any advice).
Thanks for the story

 

[paranoid marvin]

This is why @Mouse is to blame for my entry.... (Bad Mouse!!!!)


I have to admit to being less familiar with The Odyssey and The Iliad than I ought to be (having very read short versions of them when I was young, and read/seen stories/books/films/memes that riffed off them, but not the originals), and was originally going to "retell" the story of Jason and the Argonauts (from which my mute sailors and their collective name arose), but that got nowhere.

So, almost in desperation, I turned to The Odyssey and, to refresh my memory, the Wikipedia article on it (which provided a brief precis of the well-known episodes). It still wasn't working -- and was all a bit too obvious to make the puns and wordplay work -- when my subconscious, on seeing the name of Odysseus' wife, simultaneously dropped the name of the Spanish film star into my conscious mind and suggested a pun on it would make a good title (and, because the reader might wonder why it was a pun on a film star's name, might allow the source for the story to emerge during the reading of it).

Of course, this also suggested swapping the roles of Odysseus and Penelope. And from there, the puns and word-playing became obvious and made it possible to suggest each of my chosen episodes from the original story in a few words -- far fewer than relating them would have taken and not much more than just saying the names of the antagonists (which would have been more than boring and would have contained no story, original or derived).

After that, the story almost wrote itself.

Anyway, I hope everyone (at least those who know The Odyssey**) got the various references.


** Or, in one case, has watched Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End....

Well, I thought it was a marvellous story; a complex weaving of puns, allusions and classical and contemporary references.

 

[paranoid marvin]

JS Wiig, when I started reading your post above, I thought that this:

We’re about as landlocked as it gets up here in the high deserts of Southwest Wyoming, so the sea is a bit of an enigma and I really enjoy writing about it. We do have a large reservoir we really like boating on. One of our bucket list items, if you will, is to drive a boat from the east coast of Florida and cruise the Bahamas. We made the first of hopefully many trips to Florida last spring in pursuit of this goal. One of the places we visited, Ft Meyers Beach, was nearly annihilated a couple months ago by hurricane Ian. I couldn’t stop thinking about that with the picture.

was the opening paragraph of your story, and only realised my mistake in the last few words. I thought what a wonderfully written piece of narrative to start your story, and I was becoming intrigued as to what lay ahead.

 

[AnRoinnUltra]

Well, I thought it was a marvellous story

Speaking of which, the no word audio drama you penned last month was listed as a runner up in that competition. I lost the mail so didn't get to posting it on that thread ...plus there was no prize so you'll have to leave off a life of endless wealth/ jet setting shenanigans and keep the day job (unless that's what you already do). Will try find the link and post it, anyway -well done, thought it was class at the time

 

[AnRoinnUltra]

For what it's worth I gunthered The Blather of Ailnasearcagh into audio (below) -the idea is from a big surfing wave off the coast of Co.Clare, Ireland, that has a sea stack on it's run. The lighthouse reminded me of it, and I thought of a spoofing lighthouse keeper out there. I worked with the son of a lighthouse keeper who was given to tall tales so that was it ...not exactly Wuthering Heights

 

[paranoid marvin]

Speaking of which, the no word audio drama you penned last month was listed as a runner up in that competition. I lost the mail so didn't get to posting it on that thread ...plus there was no prize so you'll have to leave off a life of endless wealth/ jet setting shenanigans and keep the day job (unless that's what you already do). Will try find the link and post it, anyway -well done, thought it was class at the time

Hey it wouldn't have been possible if it hadn't been for you prompting it and then making it happen. I'm quite happy to share the 'nothing' between us!

 

[JS Wiig]

JS Wiig, when I started reading your post above, I thought that this:

…

was the opening paragraph of your story, and only realised my mistake in the last few words. I thought what a wonderfully written piece of narrative to start your story, and I was becoming intrigued as to what lay ahead.

Thanks! Maybe I should get started on my autobiography lol…

 

[paranoid marvin]

Thanks! Maybe I should get started on my autobiography lol…

Or maybe try a first person entry for a Challenge?

 

[AnRoinnUltra]

Hey it wouldn't have been possible if it hadn't been for you prompting it and then making it happen. I'm quite happy to share the 'nothing' between us!

Nice one, we'll be back for the win next time around

 

[JS Wiig]

Or maybe try a first person entry for a Challenge?

I actually did one a while back and had a good response, maybe I should try it some more.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

@JS Wiig fir me it was the lack of character to engage with - but I am hugely influenced by character so please don’t let that be the guide to whether it works for others