So We've Established That Everyone Can Write Wrestling Matches.

[Chuck Woolery 0]

but, as someone who just declared as a contemporary writing major, i'm curious as to how many of you write something substantial beyond the swf. i seem to remember clark having a novella/novel about walt disney as god that i didn't think was a horrible idea, and edwin's a writer and i think supes is too, but there's a lot of guys here now who i'm not all that familiar with and i'm curious about them.

 

feel free to post snippets or entire stories here, as i'm sure i'm not the only one who'd be interested in reading them.

[Ace309 0]

The most recent thing I wrote was a heavily-footnoted 35-page scholarly article about Indian (ie, Native American) law as it pertains to child custody in the six states which fall under Public Law 280.

 

Other than that, I do write fiction, but it's been a long time. I keep meaning to start something new.

[The Amazing Rando 0]

As some of you might know, I'm currently 201 pages into a novel that sort of is about IDrinkRatsMilk. It's not about posting on messageboards or anything, but he is pretty much the main character/inspiration for the whole idea.

 

 

To post a snippet, this is the end to chapter nine. There is a larger chunk of monologue before the first line, spoken by the narrator(named Anthony, or Ant) to David (IDRM), but in the context of this section it doesn't really work.

 

"...You really are coming off as, and pardon me for saying it, a stunt junkie.”

 

“A what?” his reply was noticeably riddled with intrigue.

 

“A stunt junkie. You might not be an addict in the most normal of terms, but you still have a need to always be trying things that few others would. You might know a hundred people just like yourself, but compared to the rest of the world, you are in quite the minority. You said it yourself that you were always trying to be the crazy one. You find a line, you cross it, and then you hunt for the next line, and so on and so forth until you hit your wall.”

 

“You’re talking like I’m a part of a Yosemite Sam cartoon. Except that I am playing both characters of the story, drawing lines for myself to cross and not noticing the giant cliff behind me.”

 

“But, and correct me if I am wrong, your wall seems to be quite a distance from your cliff, but even your wall is closer to that cliff than my wall, which is more a prison cell than a shield from oblivion.

 

“Nobody is shielded from oblivion, Ant. Not me, not you, not anyone. You really want yourself to be….”

 

“…I don’t think…”

 

“…you want yourself to be indestructible,” he continued, barging through my interruption, “you really do. But with every close call on the highway or every news story of a plane crash or a mass murder in a shopping mall, your shield breaks down. None of us has a shield, Ant. You can tell yourself that you do all you want, but the only thing stopping me from lunging across this table and choking you to death is the fact that I like you enough to not do that, the fear of going to a real prison, and the fact that murder is one of the few things one can do that can cause them to go straight through their wall and flying over their cliff and into the oblivion they are trying to quote shield themselves from.”

 

Well, I did not have anything I could really say to that. I was trying to write down as much of it as I could, but even after I finished I sat and stared at it, reading it over and over and wondering if anyone knew that a prophet might be walking the Earth. A mysterious chain of thoughts that had kept me awake at night for years had just been demystified in the matter of about a minute. He sat in silence, sipping at his coffee and giving me time to let everything sink in. If I was ten years younger, I would not have truly understood a single word he had just said. Even now, I only really understood three-quarters of it. The idea that there is nothing keeping me from self-destruction was not a concept I wanted to accept, like the idea of the planets revolving around the Sun in the days of Copernicus and Galileo. I wanted to revolt. I wanted to jump out of my chair, point right in his face and scream “NO!”…

 

…but he was right.

 

Damn it.

 

He was right.

[Thoth 0]

I do technical writing for these guys:

DataNET Solutions

Believe it or not, my SWF writing experience was a factor in getting the job; I was able to show that my first drafts were of higher quality because I had years of experience being under time pressure to get it right the first time.

 

But shit, that paragraph above me is really good. I need to write fiction more.

[Toxxic 0]

I have a sort of futuristic (I wouldn't go as far as to say sci-fi) thing that I've been hammering at for a while, but as for whether it'll go anywhere is another matter. These days I find it very hard to switch from the past participle tense of the SWF to the past tense of my other writing - I've tried writing this thing in SWF tense, but it doesn't feel right.

 

This is the beginning of the story - it's told from the point of view of (so far) two protagonists; Kev, a young gang member in the habitation tunnels beneath the surface of the unnamed world (I haven't decided if this is some futuristic Earth or some some colony planet in the future), and Angel, a thrill-seeking girl from the marginally better-off surface.

 

Kev jerked awake and started up from his bed, hands groping under the blanket. Within a second two heavy, snub-nosed pistols were aimed at the chest of the figure standing silhouetted by the light from the open door. The figure flicked a switch and bathed the room in a harsh acidic glow.

‘Shit kid, what’s up with you? S’only me.’

 

‘Spider?’ Kev stuttered, squinting through the light. His eyes started to adjust and Spider swam into focus; greasy black hair hanging down to shoulder level, one of the many web tattoos that gave him his name visible on his neck and, most recognisable of all, the expression of surprise and faint fear shifting back into his default look of irritation.

 

‘No, it’s your guardian fucking angel,’ Spider snapped, ‘now do you want to point those things somewhere else?’ Kev blinked, realising he was breathing heavily and aware for the first time of the sweat trickling down his chest and back, then gave a start and lowered the guns.

 

‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘Must’ve had a bad dream.’ Something of it still gnawed at the edge of his mind, a vague memory of screams and half-recalled pain. Shaking his head to clear it he swung his legs out of the plastic bunk with blankets wadded into it that served as a bed. ‘What’s going on?’

 

‘Remind me to turn the light on before I come in next time,’ Spider growled in response, shooting Kev a suspicious glance. He picked up Kev’s armavest from the floor and tossed it to him. ‘Trouble. The girls say someone’s torched the still and thiefed a bunch of cells. You, me and Surge get the job of checking it out. Doubt there’ll be anything there but the boss ain’t taking chances.’ He turned to leave, then paused. ‘Bring your guns. Not that you’ll need telling...’ he added, half under his breath but loud enough to be audible.

 

Kev watched the older man leave and settled his pistols in their hip holsters, the safeties off. He caught sight of himself in the small mirror on the wall and paused as he started to pull on the tough armavest; dark-eyed, dark-haired, upper body looking like it had been chiselled out of some sort of deep-brown wood like furniture from off-world, the young man in the mirror didn’t look much like the one that joined the Vypers. Of course, down here that much wood would be worth considerably more than he was, even with his guns thrown in. He idly traced the scar that ran down one side of his torso, his finger running over the hard planes of his muscles. He’d joined the gang to get a bigger share of... well, whatever he could find. And he’d got it, but only along with hard living; hard dying too, nearly. The gangs took soft kids, but only those who could become hard survived.

 

He rubbed his eyes. They look kind of wild, in the mirror. No wonder Spider had been a bit shaken; he would have been too, if he’d seen the owner of those eyes pointing two guns at him. Shaking his head, he pulled the armavest on, double-checked his pistols and strode out of the room, slapping the light off on his way. Sleep, that was the answer. He couldn’t remember the last time he slept well.

 

* * *

 

Surge slammed the heel of his hand into the glowbulb on the wall that provided fitful light. It flickered for a second then steadied, brighter than before, illuminating what looked like a bombsite; pieces of glass and twisted metal were littered across the floor of the warehouse in stark contrast to the usual neat precision of the still.

 

‘Magic touch,’ Spider murmured approvingly, scratching his tattoo and looking at the glowbulb.

 

‘Always,’ Surge agreed. He squatted down, fingering through the shards of metal. The acrid smell of raw alcohol was all around them, the still’s contents making their boots stick to the floor.

 

‘Bunch of fucking kids,’ Spider grunted. ‘I told Max he shouldn’t keep the still out here. Yeah, it’s out the way, but as soon as someone finds it,’ his gesture took in the mess around them, ‘we’ve lost it, and a bunch of cells too.’ He sat down on a nearby crate that until recently had contained bottles of thick, flawed glass and shifted his shotgun across his knees. ‘We should’ve kept it at the Den.’

 

‘Yeah, and you wouldn’t be drinking it always?’ Surge asked absently, his slightly odd speech patterns still noticeable despite his time in the Conurbs. Shattered glass crunched under the Craterman’s boots as he straightened up, dark eyes darting around and filing information. Spider snorted but didn’t answer, legs crossed in front of him and watching Surge impatiently. He had passed his verdict on events and was now waiting, Kev felt sure, for Surge’s careful, meticulous habits to come to the same conclusion. Surge chewed his lip, looking at a piece of metal that had previously formed part of the still, roughly the size of his open hand.

 

‘What?’ Spider asked. ‘Just a piece of metal, Surge.’

 

Surge turned to Kev. ‘If I throw this up, you hit it?’ he asked. Kev pulled out a gun and nodded. ‘Good.’ The Slag Heap Vyper’s second-in-command flung the shard high towards the dark warehouse ceiling. Kev didn’t even have to think about the process; before he was really aware of it he’d aimed and fired in fluid motion as the two older men turned away and shielded their faces. The shot caught the piece of metal dead centre and sent it spinning away into a dark corner. Surge walked over and retrieved it, then threw it to Spider.

 

‘It’s still a piece of metal, Surge,’ Spider said with a certain amount of scorn, ‘it’s just got a dent in it now.’

 

‘Kev fired his gun real close, it got a dent in,’ Surge replied, his Crater Town accent growing more pronounced, ‘so what the fuck destroyed the still? Blown to shreds, Spider. Kids don’t got guns like that. You could shoot that piece of yours for five minutes before you’d take it out. We’ve been hit, and by someone with some heavy shit.’

 

‘Great.’ Spider was on his feet now, shotgun in both hands, and the bigger man was looking around. ‘What do we do?’

 

‘We get out of here,’ Surge answered, pushing past him, ‘we tell Max what happened, we warn the girls who run this to keep their heads down, we find out who did it and we pay ’em back. That good with you?’ he finished sarcastically.

 

‘I can live with that,’ Spider responded. ‘Specially the getting out of here part. You think Max will want us to bring anything back?’

 

Surge shook his head, looking at the room. ‘It’s all trashed. Even the bottles been broke. I say leave it.’ He ran a hand over his long white hair, as great a sign of nerves as he ever displayed. Kev and Spider followed him outside the old warehouse to where huge, ancient fans whirred far above in the dim reaches of the hab-dom, circulating the stale air. The slight breeze felt cool on Kev’s cheek.

 

‘Who’s done this Surge?’ Spider asked as they climbed onto the methane-powered buggy. ‘All the locals know not to mess with us, and no-one’s stepped onto our turf for ages.’ He gestured with his shotgun for emphasis. ‘The other gangs know we’d turn ’em into ratbait if they shove their noses into our stuff. So who is it?’

 

‘I don’t know!’ Surge snapped, pushing the starter harder than strictly required. The engine roared into life and Surge wrenched it into gear, almost dislodging Spider as he reversed sharply. ‘Maybe if you keep your mouth shut and think more you work it out? Not holding my breath.’

 

The ride back on the buggy was, if anything, more worrying to Kev than seeing the still destroyed, due entirely to the reactions of his companions. Spider had always been a bluff, overbearing individual with a loud, raucous laugh who loved to humiliate others but lacked anything resembling a sense of humour when the tables were turned; Kev didn’t like him much, but respected him as one of the four survivors from the original gang line-up. However, for all his bullying ways and vicious streak, Spider was never short of confidence. Seeing him fearful in the aftermath of Surge’s revelations about the nature of the hit was as shocking as if the big man had got up and started dancing on tables in the bar one evening; theoretically possible, but you’d never thought you’d see it happen.

 

Surge, on the other hand, was a completely different personality. The laconic Craterman had drifted into the Conurbs at some point in the last ten years and at some time after his arrival had sought out employment with the Vypers. The details were vague on his history because Surge didn’t talk about it much; to hear him speak, the however-many years before he’d come to the Conurbs might as well have not existed. What was clear was that Surge was a highly-intelligent and thoroughly competent individual, and Wulf and Rocco still occasionally talked with wide grins about how he had earned his place in the gang; Spider hadn’t believed that the ‘old man’ with the white hair could be worth anything and, being under the influence of alcohol, had swung a punch. He’d ended up on his back with his wrist being twisted to within an inch of being broken and Surge’s knee pressed into his carotid artery. After Surge had let him up and the process had been repeated a further three times (with the rest of the Vypers politely applauding) even Spider had conceded that perhaps the newcomer might have his uses.

 

All of which made things even more worrying. While lacking the natural and inspiring charisma of Max, the Vyper’s leader and himself not a dumb man, Surge was probably the brains of the gang; his leaps of intuition, attention to detail and immense background knowledge of (seemingly) virtually anything meant that there was very little he could not work out. If Surge didn’t know who had destroyed the still, or with what, or what they intended by it, then as far as Kev was concerned no-one in the in the gang would.

 

All in all, it was a development that meant he kept one hand on a pistol as the buggy jolted across the uneven street surface back towards the Vyper’s Den.

 

* * *

[The Amazing Rando 0]

that's some damn good grimy sci-fi shit right there. love it.

 

And I'm willing to throw up some more of my piece if people really want to see it.

[The Amazing Rando 0]

Eh, fuck people...here's some more... (from earlier in the story... about 60 pages earlier) ...David speaks first.

 

 

“I spent at least two hours on a self-portrait. It took me three tries to get it the way I wanted it. I messed up my left ear on the first try, so when I started over I tried to change the viewpoint, then I screwed up the right ear.” He laughed a bit. “For the third one, I just drew myself with long hair.”

 

“Did you have long hair?”

 

“Never in my life.”

 

“That’s not quite a self-portrait, David.”

 

“I drew what I felt,” he paused, “…and ears are a pain in the ass to draw, anyway. But yes, I drew what I felt. It was very somber, my eyes turned down at the viewer and my hands clenched into fists. There was some rage there, though I didn’t feel it at the time. I wanted to scream at the world for listening to a liar and sending me down that path. I wanted to destroy something or someone. Not myself, not suicide, just break something. I knew it would never solve my problems, but for one split second my entire being was screaming to just explode.”

 

“What did you do?” I nearly interrupted him, but I noticed he had begun to breathe deeper, the way Lon Chaney would before becoming the Wolf man. His head was down, allowing me more a look at the top of his head than at his face. When he finally raised his head back up, I saw a very large and mood swinging smile on his face. He giggled again.

 

“I ripped the picture in half.” He finally said, and started laughing louder and louder. I looked around in a panic only to notice we were the only two people left in the café. I breathed a sigh of relief. “Don’t worry. It wasn’t that good anyway.”

 

“So because you wanted to destroy something, you ripped up a picture you had been working on for two hours?”

 

“Better than masturbating” he said, then shook his head “no, I take that back.” I almost gagged.

 

“Did you?” my head titled, and without a further word, he shook his head.

 

“No, I didn’t really feel the need to risk being seen by a police officer while playing with myself and that goes especially for an officer I had just met. You don’t need those kinds of awkward stares coming from someone with a gun.”

 

“That’s a good point, so after you ripped up the picture…” I trailed off, hopping he would know to fill in the blanks.

 

“I ate it.”

 

“You what?”

 

“I ate it. I was going to flush it, but then I decided that ingestion would be much more fulfilling, like the way a hunter eats his prey after a successful kill. It was work getting there. It was work to find it, to kill it, to make it ready for consumption. Outside of the few exceptions, our bodies do not enjoy partaking in the raw. Not as food, not as life.”

 

“As life?” David was getting deep on me, and I tried my best to hold on to my pen and paper as a floatation device as he pulled me along. I did not, and could not, ask where we were going, but I thought I might like the journey. I was right.

 

“Think about the way people react to raw violence, raw speech, raw life. Gangs, at their core, are raw - people who run in a tribe for the benefit of themselves and no one else. Our society tells us, screams at us, that those people are raw and ‘uncooked’ individuals, for lack of a better term. They are not ready for social consumption. We shun them and push them away. The same goes for those that speak out against our way of life. They have always existed, and again, the majority have been pushed away and shunned, even killed. Sometimes society listens, and comes an uprising, a disease to the current social world, the same way uncooked food may cause sickness to our bodies. On that night, I took something that came from my soul – something raw – and I ate it. And at the moment I swallowed I felt the uprising. It may not have been a disease, but there was a revolution deep within me. It might have been the best feeling I had ever felt in my then seventeen, close to eighteen years, on this planet, but as I stared at the ceiling and cleansed my throat with a bit of water, I still felt those same horrible sensations that I had been feeling since I left the jail hours before.”

 

“I would think that getting out of jail would be a wonderful experience.”

 

“I guess maybe it would be something special, if you had something waiting. I didn’t.”

 

“Yes you did. You had a second chance.” As I said those words, David looked up at me, his face bent in a puzzling stare. After a pause he smiled.

 

“You know, Ant, maybe you are right.” He paused again. “Maybe.”

[Toxxic 0]

I was going for a Blade Runner-esque feel - you know, "the future is old". Anyone who's played Necromunda will know what I'm getting at here.

[The Amazing Rando 0]

That's pretty much exactly why I like it. It has an old west feel, but with "heavy shit".

[Toxxic 0]

Who the hell is IDrinkRatsMilk anyway? I mean, I know he's a poster on here (or was at one point, or something) - what makes him worth writing a novella about? And does he know?

[The Amazing Rando 0]

Of course he knows. He's my biggest supporter of the project. It's hard to explain exactly why the entire idea came about, but let's just say the conversations between me and him and the conversations between the two characters in the story are fairly similar.

 

It's pretty much that IDRM likes to talk, and I like to listen. The actual plot...I really can't explain. When people ask, I jut say it's about a guy that drinks rat's milk. If you want a copy of what I have so far, I can PM it around.

[Smartly Pretty 0]

I'm on the newspaper at school. That's where most of my writing goes.

[Golgo 13 0]

I used to back when I had drive and determination.

[muzz 0]

I don`t write anything, and if I tried, it would most likely be terrible.

[the.weej 0]

In the words of Douglas Adams, I start on a lot of projects that are almost incredibly successful but in fact just fail to see the light of day.

 

-Z

[Red Baron 0]

I did Journalism for two years.

[The Amazing Rando 0]

So, 316 or so pages in (not much from when I last threw anything in here), but I have a piece I want to put up for readingz.

 

“Don’t worry about tomorrow, okay. I am scared, too, but I am not going to let an opportunity like this pass me by. Everything you have told me makes me think that the guy that left me so long ago was not the same guy that you have talked to. I want to see that for myself.” There were some tears forming in her eyes. “I was afraid for my life, Anthony, and now I have a chance to confront all of that. It hurts, though, to know that all of those sleepless nights might have been for nothing. Don’t you ever have that feeling?”

 

“I don’t know.” My response came after a hard swallow. I felt like I had been slapped in the face. My nights staring at the ceiling had nothing to do with the possibility of stalking or murder. “I wasn’t exactly thinking about my own death.” Not the truest statement, as I know I had those sorts of dialogues with myself in the darkness. As much as I feared the thought it was still something that skipped through my mind at times. “Everything has a reason, Amy.”

 

“I don’t think any of that fate stuff is going to help me tonight. Just because I might believe that something larger than the both of us or the three of us has put us all together does not mean I’m going to get a good night’s sleep.” She rubbed the water from her eyes and slid herself between the sheets of the bed. “Set the alarm okay?”

 

“Way ahead of you” I pointed toward the bedside table, but she knew as well as I did that it had been set before. It was, I believe, just her way of reassuring me that tomorrow was going to happen and not just be a pipe dream. “Try to get some sleep. I’ll be in bed shortly.”

 

I left her in bed and walked out to the kitchen, then back into the living room, repeating a small circle from refrigerator to television and back in the darkness. I had my own mental picture as to how it was all going to play out, but if I knew David as well as I thought I did then I was really only kidding myself. There was very little I could do to prepare myself other than try to sleep, and none of this pacing was going to change that. I made one last slow circle through the living room and retired back to bed, inching my way underneath the covers and close to Amy.

 

“You awake?” I whispered, barely audible even to myself as my arm slipped over her side and across her chest. I felt her breathe on my wrist and could sense her eyelashes flickering. “I love you.” The words slipped from my mouth almost to my own surprise, and somehow Amy did not seem to hear. I was unsure at that moment where they had come from or why I chose that very moment to let that emotion out, but I had. Did I even believe it? I had to ask myself that question many times in the minute or so between when I actually said it and when I felt Amy’s hands reach up and squeeze into my arm.

 

I stayed there for a few minutes, pressed up against her back until I felt her grip loosen. As I pulled my arm away we both rolled into more comfortable positions, our bodies spread about the mattress as though the other was not there – but we both were there. She was with me and I was with her and somehow David was with both of us, more so now than ever before. The last thing I remember hearing before the alarm buzz awoke me a few hours later was a very soft voice in my ear.

 

“Ditto.”

[muzz 0]

A character saying the name of the other character in the middle of a sentence always irks me because hardly anyone is that formal.

 

I'm neither a good or experienced writer at all though, but as a reader I'd feel more comfortable if it wasn't so stilted.

[The Amazing Rando 0]

Well sometimes I use that as a crutch, for sure, but for at least the Anthony character I do it on purpose. I think it's just a way to keep my head on straight, who knows. I know damn sure that the proofing stage is gonna tear me apart.

[Mad Scientist 0]

The most recent thing I wrote was a heavily-footnoted 35-page scholarly article about Indian (ie, Native American) law as it pertains to child custody in the six states which fall under Public Law 280.

 

Other than that, I do write fiction, but it's been a long time. I keep meaning to start something new.

 

Dude, that is weird. My law school thesis was on Native American sovereignty in the wake of a case that allowed state police to pursue investigations and conduct arrests inside tribal lands. And, scarily enough, it was about 35 pages.

 

I've done some (bad) poetry that was published in the college literary zine, and I dabble in fiction and pretend to be writing several different novels in modern urban fantasy, sword & sorcery, and high fantasy. I keep meaning to start pretending to be writing something SF-ish, but haven't been able to get going.

[Retard Girl 0]

yes, i write; and no, you may not read it

[HollywoodSpikeJenkins 0]

I'm a failed sitcom writer.

[The Amazing Rando 0]

So, I finished the beast. A scant 361 pages and so-very-nearly 110,000 words. I'm mentally exhausted.

[This is Bo 0]

Whats funny is that I use to write bad love poetry that was published and a few of them was going to be in a book if I gave permission (Dont know why I didnt).

 

I've always wanted to write novellas (Novels) but it seems that I never had the time for it. I had thoughts about this one novel that I've been itchin to write for some time but never had the time to start and frankly, dont know where to start from.

 

Since I'm from New York, the streets, I've experienced and seen a lot of shit happen in the hood. One thing that I wanted to write about is a fiction novel (expire by true events) about these 3 brothers (Blood brothers same mother and father, although father died in the street game) These 3 brothers were all in rival gangs. As they go their oppisite ways in the gang life, and alot of hatred brewing amongst them, the one common denominator is that they are all brothers.

 

What happens when one of the brothers get brutally murdered by a police officer? Do the brothers finally unite as one for the sake of their fallen brother, or will their hatred between gangs get the best of them? This is the street tale of gangs, money, power, respect, and FAMILY.

 

Shit, that sounds good to me, I got to start writing.

 

SIN

[JST 0]

I also dabble into some "kinda" sci-fi, but I don't think I could take the criticism if it's bad. (cuz, y'know, it might not be... )

[The Ill One 0]

Recently I really got back into writing (I always have written but I mean with some motivation) and that actually became the spark that led me to showing again. I've enjoyed writing the last six matches or so and I mostly contribute it to picking back up older stories. I've got a couple things goin', mostly for my own amusement, but recently for a class I wrote a twenty-something page story that I liked so much that I'm using the general premise to try my first actual novel. It's currently the only thing I have written with complete confidence about it being a solid piece of work, which is really, really refreshing.

 

So here's another question, does your writing greatly differ from matches (general style, obviously not content)? It's sort of a dumb question since most stories vary but you get the jist of it. Personally, I've actually written matches more like I may with a story. Once upon a time I found in-jokes (as in, within the description of the action itself) or anything not straight-forward description to be useless but that's far from the truth. Lettin' that style seep in actually has made it match writing more enjoyable, which is always a plus.

[Toxxic 0]

The biggest stretch for me in moving from a long period of match-writing to going back to non-match writing was moving away from the present tense. it suddenly felt much less vibrant to me writing 'so-and-so moved' compared to 'so-and-so moves'.

[The Amazing Rando 0]

http://www.lulu.com/content/2589083

 

Here ya go, ladies. Buy my book.

[Toxxic 0]

£11 for a paperback? Boy, that's some crack you're smoking.

[The Amazing Rando 0]

It's retail markup. I didn't have a choice. It's also close to 400 pages. That took the manufacturing cost up.