Reaching, grasping, fumbling
Never quite making it
We strive and yearn
to connect and bond
to somehow go beyond
our mortal boundaries
to have our souls
touch beyond the flesh
yet in the end
each and every time
in even a crowded room
we are inevitably,
always, alone
The waves upon my shores
unceasing to the end
wash away my sand
with nothing left but stone
Never again shall I have
innocent squiggly toes
running across my beaches
Where I to swim the seas
each and every day
a hun’red years
Ne’er I’d recover
each and every grain
What shall next I be?
A rugged mountain top,
A shallow wooded vale?
Immobile earth I stand
and contemplate
as the tide brings in again
the unceasing waves upon my shores
Post upgrade test. Not much new on the writing front, though I am GMing again.
The setting is future earth. Blasts of gamma rays have begun striking the earth’s surface randomly. When they do, everything living in their path dies. Unable to ascertain where these are coming from, or more importantly, when and where they’ll strike next, the governments build hardened shelters and move everyone into them. The heroine is a young adult woman. She’s a loner and a bit aloof. She journeys with a family outside the bunkers. The heroine is a bit of a law-breaker, a smuggler of sorts willing to take people or things outside the approved government travel zones and times. Society has become very locked down in response to the threat of the gamma rays. The family has to travel somewhere for some reason, TBD.
If you can’t tell yet, the gamma rays are a stand in for terrorism. The story is about how government oversteps its bounds to protect citizens in response to a threat and we lose privacy and freedom in the name of security.
At some point in the story, they nearly are hit by a blast. The son of the family, a young adult man almost the age of the heroine (and who obviously has a crush on her) helps save his sister and everyone else by throwing them into a cave but is hit by the blast. This act of selfless heroism brings our heroine out of her shell and helps her realize the value of sacrifices to help others.
Basically the story goes that her vehicle crashes and they are picked up by the government near NORAD. By chance they learn about a project called Zeus which is a complex satellite system. At first they suspect it creates the blasts, but they learn it actually tracks and predicts them. The government doesn’t let people back out, even though they could vacate areas with enough warning, because they feel it would be too risky. That, and the government is used to the total control it has now over where people are, what they’re doing. It seems beneficial: more of the earth’s surface has returned to nature, crime and terrorism are down, and people are united in fear of the rays. The government confiscates any devices she or the family has and lets them go. The little girl in the family though has a pendant from her brother that recorded the conversations in NORAD which can be used to overthrow the government’s secret.
Story idea set in a fantasy world. Humanoid race of magic-users creates a large, strong race (troll or ogre like perhaps) for some purpose in ancient times. The created race becomes a problem and are banished. A new militaristic race tries to control the humans. The protagonist decides to seek help from the banished ones. To get to their distant new home, she/he must enlist help from a sylvan race who has access to great winged creatures who can fly quickly over great distances. These elf-like creatures remove themselves from the daily struggles of the other races, considering themselves above it all. The theme of this is that different black and white views of the world don’t work, it’s something in the middle. The militaristic race tries to hard to control all, the sylvan race represents isolationism, and the human race has to suck it up and ask for forgiveness from their creation as they realize they can’t always play god with others.
A female character is blessed/cursed with the uncontrollable ability to perceive time differently than those around her. At times, she slows down relative to the world around her. Everyone else seems to blur past her, and she seems frozen in time to others. And at yet other times, she speeds up. To others, she seemingly disappears as she moves too fast for them to see, and to her everyone freezes in place. Sometimes these last for seconds, sometimes centuries (if it’s her time frame sped up, centuries would mean she has an extended lifespan as well?).
The central theme of the story would be trying to control life, which is in essence out of our control. Also, the passing of time and the inevitability of death and losing those you love. The overall tone would be very bittersweet, but need to mix in some humor and romance. Once she realizes what her abilities are she shuns love, though some lovers insist upon trying and leave her sweet messages in parting when she freezes in place.
Not sure how to end it. I’m thinking perhaps she finally gains control of it, and decides to either rush through the remainder of her life, or wait it out to watch humanity’s story unfold.
Just upgraded to WordPress 2.3.2 and making sure everything is good after the upgrade.
This one was a long time being born. My creativity fell out from under me during the middle but I forced myself to pick it back up and finish it. It needs serious editing, but here it is. It’s a light hearted story about a chance encounter between two thieves set in a medieval town and what ensues after their encounter. I wanted to write something that reminded me of all the fun fantasy worlds I’ve enjoyed reading about.
This story idea is about a futuristic P.I. or police detective. A prominent AI scientist has been murdered. The killer is actually his latest attempt at an AI. The computer/robot was trying to prove it had achieved sentience, but the deceased didn’t believe it, thought it was still just the sum of its parts, nothing greater. The machine decided the only way to prevent being shutdown like its predecessors was to prove to the world that it was capable of a very human action, murder.
Something swung by and sucked away all my creativity for the last few months. I didn’t write, work on a GURPS adventure, or anything. Basically I worked, ate, slept, read, and watched TV. Exciting. I’d sit down to do something creative, and just have zilch. I made myself write on my current story a couple of times and tonight I worked on my latest adventure. I think by forcing myself I’m kickstarting my creativity. It’s weird to not feel that urge pushing you on like it used to…I start to fear it’s gone! But I think it’s just taken a break. Perhaps changed a little, diminished. But not gone, not yet. I just need to immerse myself in good fantasy or sci-fi a bit more to get it going again 