DISCUSSION THREAD -- October 2023 -- 75 Word Writing Challenge

Parson said:
I still haven't written a story. I have an idea or two floating around but even with reading all of these stories and looking up Cosmic Horror I still don't understand it at all. Horror and a godlike entity where humans have very little agency is as close as I can come. Does anyone else have a concise definition of it?
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The entities are only godlike due to the perception of the humans in the tales. They are to us like we are to ants.

In these tales, we may think we are masters of this world, yet other things exist that pay us no heed. We are insignificant to them.

For me, cosmic horror is about the gulf between and the occasions where they meet, whether by design or accident.
 
I'm a fan of cosmic horror, but I found defining it to myself well enough to hit the genre and theme surprisingly tough - I think that @M. Robert Gibson 's list kind of sums up my problem, as it needs considerably more than 75 words to define what makes Lovecraftian horror!
 
@Daysman .... Noodle .... Sometimes you've just got to use whatever noodle you have.

@Pyan .... Shreve, Lamb and Harmon were aliens... .... Eventually everybody understands when you're in trouble.

@ColGray .... Pendulum .... Victory can be a slippery truth.
 
Luiglin said:
The entities are only godlike due to the perception of the humans in the tales. They are to us like we are to ants.

In these tales, we may think we are masters of this world, yet other things exist that pay us no heed. We are insignificant to them.

For me, cosmic horror is about the gulf between and the occasions where they meet, whether by design or accident.
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I think the best way I'd convey the feeling of it is being in the path of an unexpected big wave, or witnessing a tornado. To paraphrase Terry Pratchett: "It would smash them flat without even offering the dignity of hating them". Or the famous quote from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
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For me it's that feeling of being in the path of something vast, impersonal, and perhaps more basic to the forces of nature than a human. Something that doesn't even really know you're there, and is so powerful that neither your strength nor your cunning will do anything to stop, slow, or sway it. It's outcome is inevitable - at best you may be witness to it, more likely you will be crushed in its path, but either way you and your actions have little or no meaning in the balance of things.
 
Sorry to have we say we've had to remove two entries for being over word-count. Please be careful with counting, and if in any doubt, contact me or another moderator. In particular, don't combine or hyphenate standard words/phrases and then count as one word unless that usage is common (or it's a proper noun in your story), and don't rely on software to count until you know its quirks (for example, MS Word will count two words joined by an ellipsis as one; but we won't).
 
It's going to be difficult to choose a winner: some of these stories are very good. It seems a worrying number of our writers are personally familiar with the realms of the Elder Gods.
 
My sister told me that becoming pregnant is like being taken over by a different lifeform over which you have no control, but now it’s too late to suggest that ordinary human biology might be a deep mine for cosmic horror - does it qualify, do you think?
 
Hugh said:
It's going to be difficult to choose a winner: some of these stories are very good. It seems a worrying number of our writers are personally familiar with the realms of the Elder Gods.
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Only at the weekend, when the barriers between realities are weak and only if there was nothing to watch on Netflix.
 
It was really difficult to choose just one because, cliché though it is, these were really classy entries in my opinion.

I went for @genelewis with their fable of mosquitos and unintended consequences.
 
@Hugh .... Starbucks 0958am Monday 23rd .... Ecstasy on the cheap. (Or at least relatively cheap.)

@Perky .... The Earthworm .... Sometimes the real strength is found in the littlest and simplest.

@Bren G .... Dancing Among the Stars .... Power and insight can be displayed in very different ways.

@Christine Wheelwright ..... The Limitations of AI When Applied to Religious Rituals .... This is a tale about the failure to communicate and why A.I. is heavy on the A and light on the I.

@The Big Peat .... Blood Curse .... And this is the way the world ends. A tiny accident and .....

@Ursa major ..... A Cosmic Horror Story .... The truth of something is hard to understand from many angles.
 
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