Principal's Office

Hello! Here is a kind of random quick story I drafted today. I feel like it's still in its early stages, but on the other hand I don't think I want to put a whole lot of editing into it, because for me I would say it was more just writing practice. But it was a fun one to write!

Principal's Office

“So what happened this time?”

Jesse watched the toes of his running shoes kick the bottom edge of Mr. Burke’s desk and shrugged.  He didn’t know what happened.  He didn’t understand any of it at all.

“Do you want me to tell you what Mrs. Pelletier said?”

Jesse shook his head.  He needed new shoes – he could see his sock. He wiggled his toes.

“You tell me what happened then.”

Long Story Short

The title for this blog post is thanks to my friend Mike, who thought it might be a fitting name for my blog (before knowing its actual title), after I explained to him the trouble I had keeping my prose fiction short.  My Creative Writing professor, Seymour Mayne, said that a short story, according to the acceptable length for magazine submissions, is 3000 words.  For our first submission he had wanted 5 pages or less - oops! Remembering Sophie spilled over onto the sixth page, just a little bit.  On a normal basis, my (incomplete) stories are heading into something more like the novella.  So, for my class, I have challenged myself to write shorter short stories.  So far so good, I think, and so here I would like to post a whole bunch of stories all in one shot.  Two are ones I wrote within the past couple of days, and are, for me, pretty short - and, better yet, complete!  Unless I write something else in the next two days, one of them will be my second submission for class.  Another story I'm posting here is a kind of random one I wrote a few weeks ago when I was brainstorming to get myself started on my first submission, before I landed into Remembering Sophie. The fourth one is an old one I wrote years ago, which is particularly noteworthy for its extreme shortness.  All four of them are fitting for this post, "Long Story Short."  One thing I've noticed, by the way, is that the best way to make a story short is to make it kind of horrible (of course, there are exceptions).  Novellas are happy stories, but the short snappy pieces are dark.  (I guess if the story is leaking onto the sixth page all you have to do is kill off your protagonist and voila, problem solved!) The stories are, in order: Birdsong (2000 approx words/5 pages), In The Waiting Room (926 words, yes!! 3 pages and a bit.), The Grapes of Fate (1000 words, a little spin-off of the Grapes of Wrath), and Aedan the Spy (369 words for real! 1 page!!)

Birdsong

I woke to the sound of birds singing.

“How odd,” I said out loud. My voice was thick and raspy, not so much from sleep as from  lack of use.  I sat up and leaned over so I could see out the window.  As soon as I moved the curtain, I was blinded with a ray of sunlight. I leaned my forehead against the pane and whispered,

“The sun is shining. Birds are singing. Is this still real life?”

I drew a smiley face on the pane where my breath had fogged it up.  I had almost forgotten how to draw a smiley face.  If the sun could shine and the birds could sing, then little Darika Umar, the girl who survived the Silverwood Valley explosion, could walk again.

An old short story of mine

Hello! For those of you receiving emails from me already, I promise I won't clog up your inbox with overly-frequent posts.  I am just trying to give my baby blog a strong kick-off.  This story is one I wrote a number of years ago, sadly I do not have the date but it was when I was around seventeen. I do not have many complete short stories as what I mostly did was novels, but for the few I do have I would like to post some of my preferred ones from back in the day.  I did a lot of writing in high school but went through a lot of ups and downs - mostly downs - with writer's block since I started university.  Now that I'm getting back into the swing of things, most of my stuff will be new creations, but I would like to get some of my old stuff up too.  The story is titleless, and since it's from a time gone by I don't think I want to add one on now, so much later. If you think you can suggest a good title though, by all means feel free! Enjoy :)

            I opened my eyes.  What was the point of keeping them closed, if I couldn’t sleep?  Mom always said that if I pretended to sleep, soon I’d really fall asleep, but it never worked.  I looked across the room at the wall to see what time it was.  The wall grinned back at me like a sheet of ice, clean and blank.  No clock. 

That’s right, I reminded myself, we haven’t unpacked it yet.

We’d just moved in to the new house the other day, and nothing was unpacked yet.  Just the bed I was lying in and the dresser, empty and bare, along the equally-empty-and-bare wall.

The dresser had been my grandfather’s, and his initials were carved into it: B.W., for Bradley Walters.  Those were my initials too, but they didn’t stand for Brad Walters, they stood for Brandon Wolf.  The B.W. took a little away from the loneliness of the dresser, and the dresser took a little away from the loneliness of the room.  I knew I should have unpacked something to put on that dresser.  It looked like it needed something to cover its nakedness.

After a while, I felt my eyelids beginning to droop.  I was being pulled into the deep abyss of sweet sleep.  I vaguely wondered what time it was.  I could feel my heartbeat, softly thumping, sounding like the ticking of a clock.  Tick, tick, tick…

Ding-dong, ding-dong...

I opened my eyes again.  The grandfather clock downstairs was chiming…it could tell me what time it was.  I closed my eyes and strained my ears, listening…

One.  two.  three.  four.  five.  six.  seven.  eight.  nine.  ten.  eleven.   twelve.  thirteen. 

My eyes snapped alert.  Thirteen!  Thirteen?  Had I counted right?  Maybe I was just tired…I swung my legs around and stood up.  The air was chill, despite the furnace which I could hear banging in the radiator, and I shivered in my striped pyjamas.  I tiptoed out of my room, my bare feet like ice on the floor.

Remembering Sophie

This is the first short story I'm going to post.  It's my most recent complete one and I brought it in as my first submission in my Creative Writing class at school, which means there will likely be further drafts to come. Which would be the case on a normal basis anyway, that I will post primary drafts and then repost later ones. But I have a confession - I don't actually particularly like this story. But that's going to happen a lot too, I'm sure.  I will probably often post stuff that I absolutely hate.

Remembering Sophie

Looking through old photographs in a shoebox from a closet, which I was doing one night instead of studying for the biggest exam of my university degree, I came across a picture of me and my sister Sophie at the cottage when I was 17 and she 15, and it struck me as strange and vaguely horrible that I could barely remember her.  It was when I picked up a second picture, this time of Sophie with our old dog Lula, who I could remember easily, that I decided it was time to stop running.  I had been running for over a year.  Not physically running (though I had been doing that too, as a regular hobby), but running away from, and hiding from, awful things I didn’t want to see in my memory.  Now, I needed to stop.  I had to promise myself that I was going to stop running.  I stared at the two pictures – Sophie’s long blonde hair, her pretty smile, her eyes.  I could almost remember how close we had been, how much I had loved her, and how good of friends we had been.  But it was a just a shadow of a memory, and no matter how hard I reached for her in my mind, she just wasn’t there.  Now, she would be almost twenty.  She should be here with me, in university, getting good grades, playing on the women’s soccer team, being the President of the Catholic club on campus, making lots of friends.

Well, if I knew that much about her, I must remember her, somehow.  I knew, in my heart, that she was smart, athletic, popular, and religious; but I just couldn’t remember her, in the flesh, being a part of my life, as she was for almost 19 years.  But things were going to be different from now on.  I wasn’t going to run anymore, and maybe Sophie… maybe I could get her back.

Salutations!

It is my great honour to welcome you to my blog. This is my first post and as you can see by the time on it (currently it is 12:20 am), I am acting like the typical writer - but killing myself in the process! (I recently discovered by experience that, as a general rule, writers don't sleep. Students typically don't either, but typically THIS student and writer does... so don't ask me what I'm doing still up.) What should I be doing instead? Homework? Sleeping?? Praying. Yes, indeed.

As you have figured out by now, unless you are as dense as a London fog, I am a creative writer! Woohoo. This blog therefore is supposed to be a form of self-publishing, so to speak.  I hope you enjoy reading and exploring my blog! It will progressively become more and more exciting as life goes on. This I guarantee. Thank you very much in advance to all my future fans and followers! (Great expectations, guys.)