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WK27
Jul 30, 2021 16:32:24 GMT
Post by rorschalk on Jul 30, 2021 16:32:24 GMT
[Throbbing light clouds over the palantir on Dep's desk and a booming voice issues forth...]
What is the secret of the grail!
[Shocked, no one had ever yet noticed or perhaps they had forgotten Dep's obvious connection to Sauron aka The Rorschalk as direct proof she'd bugalood off into the 4th dimension long ago, their heads turn toward the source of their disaffection, which, being of the genus crystal ball, strikes in them further impressions of oddness when it clears its throat]
Ahem, wrong script... an old, old script. Believe me, I've been around many a year. Voiceover work. Patrick Stewart is light in the buckler. The receiver of many a night's errant joust...
The old tosh, God bless him. But how would I know?
[more rustling as the pregnant question hangs in the air like an unanswered question]
I am the lizard king, I can do anything. Therefore, shall I let the VC Kemmerer know his shiz has been elevated to the terminal.
[The palantir's light fades and the floor recedes into the primordial gloom which is its natural state]
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WK27
Aug 3, 2021 15:32:43 GMT
Post by deplancher on Aug 3, 2021 15:32:43 GMT
[DeP's sitting in the space between the wall and her desk keeping a steady beat on her djembe. It helps, this banging on, to focus on what it is she's employed to do but the practice encourages her mind to wander too, and so there arises a permanent dilemma. Rhythm. Arrhythm. Read. Ignore. Exist. Vaporize. She sets the instrument under the window, checking first for mould, then stretches, awakened from reverie or horror.]
I'm undecided. Is that news? No, I know. The damage done. Still, somewhat into the weavings of each capital I fall, at least for a time. Oui, even the ones I recognize as stinking of mouldy cheese stuck for months deep in the folds of an unused easy chair.
I've a conniving murderous femme fatale at the fountain. A seeker of something an average commoner, even those who purport to be so unusual that they do not, ultimately desires a slice of. What? Love and marriage. Cute babies and security. Money and power. Adoration from someone almost yet not quite as smart as themselves so as to maintain even a covert position of superiority and therefore dominance in the dance of yes and I don't think so.
Some of us just stop eating anything except buttons. Palantir! Listen, let me pace awhile within my own expansive albeit periodically satnam quieted obsessed mind. Where is the centre of this room? I need a replacement bulb for the pale blue lantern.
JohnVC's Pillow Talk swings on the pendulum.
I hear Harrison's For You Blue down low. Influencers try everything.
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WK27
Aug 3, 2021 17:27:03 GMT
Post by rockefeller on Aug 3, 2021 17:27:03 GMT
"Flies all green and buzzing in this dungeon of despair. Prisoners grumble and piss their clothes, and scratch their matted hair..." Jump in anytime, Boligard. Deplancher? Zappa composed some great singalongs.
We each have our own special way of coping down here. It's what makes us... well... special. I like Dep's subtle sensitivities and poetic musings as she guts a cap, and I like Doom's whole distracted judgment without a lot of (or any) deliberation approach. Just the verdict. Wish I could do that, but, maybe because of how I tend to skim and skip, I like to demonstrate that I at least try to read submissions that cross my path. I wonder if our regular VC hopefuls (assuming we have any) ever develop a preference. I, for one, would avoid me like the vaccine.
Frau Rabe has directed her latest offering to "Dear Gabrielle DePlancher." One can hardly blame her. Dep gives great crit. But, unfortunately, this time you got me, babe.
Found the prose precise and engaging, well researched, believable. I like writing that takes me into unfamiliar places. Like Hitler said, "Words build bridges into unexplored regions." Reminded me a little of Findley's Pilgrim, which I just started reading.
The plot's classic "Beware of what you wish for," except the supernatural element's more subtle than typically seen in this type of yarn. No evil genie or magic monkey's paw. Just an old calendar which inscribed prophecies tend to manifest. Not big things like avoiding WW I or managing inflation or stopping the Nazis. Just little things that could easily have been coincidence, like getting undesirable bosses and co-workers to quit, or the death of an old man well past his best-before date. Even the repercussions, the illnesses and injuries suffered in the granting of said wishes could be coincidence. Because the calendar's magic is, if only marginally, ambiguous, for me it works. It's kind of a metaphor for religion: arguable; occasionally demonstrable; but ultimately unprovable.
It read to me as if one jotted one's predictions on specific dates in the calendar. Like how Frank opens the calendar to April 5 to write, "Vicar General Dr. Amadeus Fohr resigns his position." So I had to wonder what date Tauber chose to forestall WW I, or thereafter to control inflation and German politics. Or, finally, portend himself eternal life. If it were me, I'd've written something like, "TQ Rockefeller becomes first ever to break 8 hours in Arizona Ironman" on October 31, 2152. Yeah, I'm probably a cyborg, but still pretty impressive for a bicentenarian.
Different for here. A cut above methinks. And up it goes. I see we have a new Terminali. A bird of some sort. Better spread some newspaper around.
[Rocks scribbles "Clerical Calendars touches Monkey" mid Miss August on the Naked Nurses Charity Calendar stuck (using God knows what) inside the lid of his little lift-top desk. He wonders if it'll work, and, if so, what it'll cost him. He's already losing his mind... so that won't be it. Possibly his dashing good looks.]
Only saw one typo:
Father Tauber polled the calendar out of the pocket...
pulled
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WK27
Aug 17, 2021 18:41:14 GMT
Post by rockefeller on Aug 17, 2021 18:41:14 GMT
Sometimes I wish there was a Basement below this Floor, where ill-tempered denizens could pre-preview cap before allowing it to ascend even to here, with editorial comment perhaps limited to a word or two.
Full Bloom appears to be the first four chapters of a novel written by a young author in a second language. If so, pretty impressive. Despite being riddled with grammatical and punctuation errors, it flowed, waxing, even at times, almost poetic. Still, after pressing on for a thousand or so words and having no idea what it was about, I skimmed to the last sentence: "And so it all ended, leaving countless questions unanswered." Way to stick a fork in it. Kid has instincts. Still, no.
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WK27
Aug 22, 2021 1:37:08 GMT
Post by carol on Aug 22, 2021 1:37:08 GMT
[Carol rests her ass on the pilot's chair, swivels, giggles]
Written by a young author in a second language. Gods, I almost choked. Excellent. The Tit-haunted Man has touched my heart.
[Carol taps out a cigarette, sparks it, sucks in some sweet smoke]
We're going to send this fucker up.
[Carol throws the capital up into the rafters. She waits to see if it falls to the tiles. It doesn't. She sucks sweet smoke into her lungs, holds it, holds it, exhales]
Breckenridge's The Tit-haunted Man has been Terminaled. Bitches.
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WK27
Aug 26, 2021 18:10:51 GMT
Post by rockefeller on Aug 26, 2021 18:10:51 GMT
Lee's recent submission got me wondering whether anywhere in our excellent and unique Guidelines we ask that VCs submit documents in William Shunn's oft insisted upon "Standard Manuscript" format. So I checked. We don't. Didn't think so. It's a pain in the ass not just for writers, but (unless maybe printed out, which I'm pretty sure almost no one does anymore) for readers too. No one (especially ezines) publish in this stupid format. No one wants to see the author's name along with the title atop every fucking page. As a slush reader, I'll probably get arthritis in my middle finger someday from having tapped down through all that double line-spacing, and be unable to extend or retract it as necessary when driving. Also, it doesn't suit certain forms, like this 100 Days piece, which is a journal of one man's quest for sobriety. But OK. I get it. Lee probably had to coerce it into this ridiculous format in order to garner other rejections from other magazines who, for want of imagination and a penchant for conformity, do insist on it. So no points deducted for this decision.
I read the piece last week, and remember it as fairly engaging, with authentic characters. Some of the political discourse, while perhaps cutting edge at the time of writing, struck me as a little tired now, probably because I spend too much time on Facebook (which is really any amount of time at all) and Zerohedge. It also seemed like it incorporated too much verbatim speech, usually italicized, for what were essentially diary entries, epistolary notes to self. I can't recall how the narrator's quitting drinking mattered, except as a ready source of entry headings. I remember the "parler" pronouncement (parlay vs. parlor) motif as feeling overworked.
So, while overall intelligent and articulate, because it lacked forward momentum and struck me as more of a memoir excerpt than a story, I am, albeit with a modicum of uncertainty and guilt, returning it through the Porthole into the deluge from whence it sprang.
Happily, it's already formatted per popular guidelines and will likely find a happier home a decade or two down the road when (in the unlikely event we survive) we're nostalgic for what idiots we were and for yesteryear's littler, simpler problems.
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WK27
Sept 3, 2021 1:21:46 GMT
Post by doomey on Sept 3, 2021 1:21:46 GMT
[doomey snaps the lighter, sparks the pall mall held betwixt his twitching lips]
well.
[he pulls sweet smoke into his lungs, exhales]
Regina Clarke has been Terminaled, friends. her fiction is tight, and it is full circle wilds, can i get an amen. so...
[doomey nods, not a heroin nod, but an affirmative nod, cousin. he snaps open his eye lids, like a Hitchcock movie]
she's uplifted.
[he tosses the capital up into the rafters]
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WK27
Sept 15, 2021 1:17:26 GMT
Post by doomey on Sept 15, 2021 1:17:26 GMT
Wow.
[doomey swivels in the pilots chair. he sucks in some sweet smoke, tilts his noggin. twitches his lips, juts his lower jaw. he shoves his lower lip forward, twists his eyes]
cousins. Basu has been shoved out the Porthole to twirl and twist forevermore. And, totally fuck me, Z.K.Parker has been Portholed. and i know you're standing there or sitting in your cozy movie house/room/attic thinking how can you do this to these aspiring fantastic authors and creators of greatness and... oh, fuck it. Tis fucking done, bitches.
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WK27
Sept 18, 2021 0:33:10 GMT
Post by carol on Sept 18, 2021 0:33:10 GMT
[Carol walks the tiles, a capital in her hand]
I do love true and fit capital. But this capital bored me. I feel horrible saying that, but it bored me. And the only reason I responded thusly, spitting, is because I believe honest vetting makes better artists, right? We kinda got to be honest. And so, fuck me, I feel bad, Parker's The Honeymooner's Seven Lives has been Portholed, bitches.
[She tears the capital in half and tosses it up to the rafters. The pieces of capital erupt into sparkling, twirling, flitting butterflies that meander their way down, swirlingly, slowly, to the disco floor tiles around Carol's boots, and there they fizzle and crackle they die out, in a black mush with an occasional pop of spark. Carol puts her heel to one troublesome blob, and she twists]
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WK27
Sept 22, 2021 0:40:54 GMT
Post by doomey on Sept 22, 2021 0:40:54 GMT
[doomey revolves in his pilot's chair, round and round, reminds him of an old hair-band song. he has an unlit pall mall dangling from his lips, and he's challenging the swan vesta to light the tip of the cigarette, the flaming match-tip wavering as he twirls, the tip of the cigarette ever illusive. Will the two ever meet? doomey slows his twirl. he puts flame to the tip of the pall mall. he sucks in some sweet smoke. he sniffs, twitches his lips. he pulls a bottle of amber from the lower right drawer of the cherrywood and he gently places on the desktop, stage right. the tumbler waits, upstage left]
we're gonna need capital if this ship is gonna sail. good news, a new sopranos show.
[he winks at the camera that no one else can see]
tony's son. right? fuck me. s'gonna be good. is anybody else here in this room with me?
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WK27
Sept 22, 2021 0:49:11 GMT
Post by carol on Sept 22, 2021 0:49:11 GMT
Right here, dick weed.
[Carol taps at Doomey's left elbow with her index fingertip]
Been here the whole time. When you look at me, do you see an empty space?
[She taps a lit joint, sucking and holding it in her lungs, and then she says with the strained voice of a dude hanging out with a full load of weed-smoke in their lungs]
'ere.
[She offers the joint to Doomey]
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WK27
Sept 28, 2021 0:42:07 GMT
Post by doomey on Sept 28, 2021 0:42:07 GMT
oh no, i shouldn't.
[doomey's shoving stuff around in the bottom left side drawer of the cherrywood, looking for something]
you, bestie, know i do not touch the spooky spark, the sparkling green, the twelfth hole, the donkey's teeth. makes me feel opposite of how i prefer to feel, cousin.
[doomey pulls out a big rock with shiny facets and angles and universes slanted this way and that across it's mars landscape. he slams the rock on the cherrywood's desktop]
during this lull, i've begun a rewatch of Uncut Gems while examining Walter Mosely's capital ad infinitum. what have you been examining and bingeing during the great lull?
[doomey is focused on the left left lapel of his sport jacket, and he begins thumb nailing some taco sauce off the fabric]
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WK27
Oct 2, 2021 20:29:55 GMT
Post by rockefeller on Oct 2, 2021 20:29:55 GMT
There's this Recreational Cannabis store across the street from the Southampton laundromat where we washed our clothes. So while Ms. Rocks watched the driers spin, I went over and shot the breeze with its two twenty-something, bored looking proprietors. Had never been in one. Back when I was chronic (before the grow-ops) you had to know a guy who knew a guy who maybe knew a guy who knew how to get into Rochdale College. And you took what you could get, usually Mexican weed full of seeds and lumber, or acetone-smelling hash. I told them I'd quit cannabis about forty years ago, and was a little pissed at how easy it is now. They offered me chocolate covered cherries (2 mg. THC each), an assortment of beverages and gummies and, of course, bud. Lots and lots of bud, the strongest being 30 percent. I told them I was tempted, but that, for me, weed's a mood elevator that eventually takes you down below the floor you got on, and that really I miss growing more than toking now. So they offered me a wide variety of genetically enhanced, female-sexed seeds. Didn't buy anything, but we had a fun chat and they told me to drop in anytime.
Then, back in our Sauble Beach cabin, I read Conner's Egg cap. Like most of what I see here, it's technically fine. If good writing were mainly about coherency, grammatical correctness and reasonable description, I'd send a lot more up. Sure there's always room for another edit. E.g., "... and scratched her back in just the place." seems to want to say, "the right place." "Helen threw a pillow and hit him in the face. 'OK, but I do need coffee,' he said," took me a few rereads to be pretty sure she, not "he" spoke. See, they're having this playful little discussion/debate about whether or not it's okay to leave their baby sleeping in the cabin alone while they go for a short hike, and this is her finally acquiescing. But then the decision's rendered moot when he, her husband, is vaporized by some reptilian alien's high-energy particle beam. Poof! He's gone. Made me think of those joint writing exercises where one writer wants to write relationship drama and the other cheesy sci-fi. Initially, I thought the two instances of the pronoun "You" in the title, You Eggs Will Bring a Belt of Hands to You House, were typos, meant to be in their possessive form: your. But it turns out it's just that these lizard creatures, capable of interstellar travel, haven't mastered English as a second language, and don't have access to things like Google translate. The rest of the piece involves them biting people's heads off, and her breastfeeding and running from them through the woods until, when caught, she manages to bond with one of the nicer, more helpful ones, and upon whom in the end she bestows the titular wish, but with the you/your mixup corrected. I have not forgotten this blessing's meaning; I never understood it. Not quite killer tomatoes bad. But bad. Maybe if I'd eaten a few cherries, I'd have felt differently about it. But, sadly, I did not. Portholesville.
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WK27
Oct 6, 2021 17:54:35 GMT
Post by rockefeller on Oct 6, 2021 17:54:35 GMT
Over twenty years of gatekeeping/slushreading, and this is the first time I've seen a submission with no cover letter. Just an attachment. I like it. Might never try it myself. But I like it.
As to the cap, a boy meets boy tale of neediness and infatuation, not so much. It might've helped if the VC had used time saved not composing a cover letter to better edit the piece.
impossible to squeeze through the door jams
Unless one is planning to spread one's door on crackers or toast, it's jambs.
I fell out of my pocket!
Ouch.
Copious tense problems. Read like it was converted from past to present (probably a good decision) but lots got missed. E.g.,
Merlin had to take a phone call for work. Micah looks out the window...
had=has.
âIs that your boyfriend?â she asked...
asks
And so on, and so on.
I'm not gay. Nor am I homophobic (is anyone anymore?). Still, once it became clear that honest Micah and gorgeous Merlin are going to spend the rest of the story batting eyelashes and brushing locks of hair out of each other's eyes, and possibly more, I started to read faster. Yes, I have my own personal sexual preferences and biases. Like if it'd been two gals, I'd probably have skimmed for the sex scene. But given it's two dudes, I aimed to skip past, which, and mercifully as it happens, is the end. Wisely, I think, their subsequent boinkage is only cleverly alluded to.
I haven't looked at our guidelines here lately, but I'm pretty sure we don't, as do so many others, express any LGBTQ2+ (have I missed any letters?) leanings. So no leg up in that regard. This offering will not rise Terminalward to further punishment. That said, though, I wish long lives and much happiness for M & M as I guide them tenderly to the Porthole.
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WK27
Oct 13, 2021 0:20:52 GMT
Post by carol on Oct 13, 2021 0:20:52 GMT
[Carol sits on the tiles. She working her butterfly knife repeatedly in front of her face, staring at the motions, mesmerized]
Hey Rockefeller. You're wondering if anyone is homophobic "anymore"?
[Carol glances over at Boligard. He's watching a monitor cameraing a girl on 1st Avenue, RV row, Seattle, a hoodie just barely covering her otherwise naked body, and he glances back at her, shakes his head. Carol looks to Rockefeller as she folds the knife shut]
Are you living under a magnificent load of rock?
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WK27
Oct 13, 2021 20:38:56 GMT
Post by bulldust on Oct 13, 2021 20:38:56 GMT
Moo!
The Bulldog is "Homogenizedphobic" due to an accident with a milking machine.
It was a dare. Don't ask.
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WK27
Oct 14, 2021 13:06:52 GMT
Post by rockefeller on Oct 14, 2021 13:06:52 GMT
Hey Bullmastiff, maybe you could win a Darwin in the survivors category like that drunk guy who lowered his sack into a golf ball washing machine, probably also on a dare.
Yeah, Carol. Probably naive or privileged or wishful of me to think gay wasn't a thing anymore. Nine billion people, so even without religion or the rona, there's going to still be a few imbeciles. Speaking of magnificent loads of rock, we drove through Frank, Alberta the other week, home of the famous Frankslide. Even brought home a rock, which I'm sure no one will miss.
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WK27
Oct 15, 2021 15:11:34 GMT
Post by rockefeller on Oct 15, 2021 15:11:34 GMT
So here we have an apocalyptic tale of a father whose wife dies during childbirth delivering their daughter, not breech but "sideways," moments after escaping a run-of-the-mill nuclear Armageddon into an underground bunker. Somehow the baby survives her transverse birth to live for seven years alone with her dad in their bomb shelter. And all in the first paragraph.
The next 8000 words, via toggling points of view, mostly detail their journey from the bunker to the safety of an underground community which he somehow knew was there but had no way of communicating with. It's all a little vague. They have special surface suits (including one for a seven-year-old) they must wear at all times to protect them from radiation, which, because they've neglected to include a Geiger counter in their survival supplies, they have no way of measuring. The suits allow for breathing the contaminated air, but not eating or drinking. So they get pretty hungry without first somehow dying of thirst. (Not sure how they poop or pee... probably doesn't matter... but 30 days on the road with Ms. Rocks last month sort of attuned me to those considerations.) Happily, they do make it to a large underground community. But, unhappily, the daughter's suit has suffered a small tear and she dies of radiation poisoning. The End.
I'm about 78 percent sure that this is an abandoned novel. It has that "Oh fuck it, I give up" feel. Maybe a NaNoWriMo thing that sort of died on the vine after pantsing (vs. plotting) itself into a corner. My advice: write slower; revise copiously. Think NaNoWriDecade if not NaNoWriLife. For sure don't be afraid to bail and start over, just don't shop your abortive attempts around.
Okay, really, it's probably not that bad. I've read way worse, some of it published. (And, again, I like the utter absence of a cover letter. Is this the same VC as last time, or some new trend?) Maybe it just didn't change me. And I want to change. So no.
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