📝 Search for the given words in your story. If your story doesn't have a word, you can use a variation on it or a word with a similar meaning.
Thanks again to my tag game bestie @winterandwords appreciate you loads <3
Once again, from Metanoia:
There are 24/7 convenience stores on seemingly every corner, xerox shops and little magazine sheds Mal hasn't seen since they ripped the sole one away from Plain River's main (and only) boulevard.
"You feel it, you're feeling all of your injuries. You're in pain because you're alive. Because you're awake."
Mal bets he stops to move snails out of the way after it rains, so they wouldn’t be stepped on.
“People drain me. I need my space away from it all.”
Tagging @catchingbigfish @rainbowpitofdoom @enchanted-lightning-aes and OPEN TAG for anyone who wants to do this :D
📝 Share a sentence from your WIP that starts with each letter in the word given to you by the person who tagged you
Thank you, @winterandwords for letting me share some more of Metanoia <3 Hopefully I can share some Holy Heresy soon too, but until then...
As soon as his body relaxes against his mother, all desire to pursue his chase for the truth seeps out of him.
Liquid lightning, all through Mal's aching limbs. He opens his eyes slowly, terrified the voice is just in his head.
“Nononono, those things– Those things were–” He rubs his face roughly, an attempt to excuse the tears bubbling in his eyes. “They meant something, okay? Rags, bloody, they were important to me.”
Or did he just take a familiar feeling and pulled it apart, twisted it into his own daydreams and scenarios that would make sense to him, would give him a shred of control back?
Everyone else has glow-in-the-dark bracelets and glitter and sparkly, colorful pants and mesh tops and go-go boots, this guy looks like he’s at a funeral afterparty.
Tagging: @writingamongther0ses @aalinaaaaaa @catchingbigfish and OPEN TAG for anyone who wants to give this a try.
Got tagged in several games by the lovely @winterandwords so I'm just gonna do a big scene from Metanoia, since I still haven't started actually writing anything but dialogue for Holy Heresy yet lol
He really shouldn’t feel so comfortable with someone other than Contessina chilling in the bathroom with him while he’s buck naked. Gabe doesn’t seem to care about his privacy, putting the lid down on the toilet and settling with Contessina on his lap like they’re moving in.
Mal’s eyes drift to Gabe’s hands, slender, ringed fingers scratching under Contessina’s chin, behind her ears, between her eyes. She is swept away in bliss.
“You can tell a lot about a person by the state of their hands.”
He sees those attentive, gentle fingers wrap tightly around red fabric, pulling forcefully, cutting off air.
Feels them against his cheek, brushing softly.
Sees them stained with blood.
Feels them thread through his, cold and pale.
Sees them twist muscles and break bone.
The urge to taste them sits uncomfortably in Mal’s throat.
“How’d you get here, Malachi?”
Mal sinks back into the water, now tinted pink with what he pretends is the bath oil and not gunk from his wounds. He lets it embrace him almost up to the ears, a protective shell that pumps life back into him. Contessina’s content purrs lull him into a sleepy buzz.
“You know what it’s like to live the exact same day every day?” he asks the shower head. “I wake up. If my mom’s in her nice personality, she leaves me alone. If she’s got the annoying one, she rips my head off for not saying good morning. I make breakfast. I clean up after her. We do crosswords. I walk my dog, 8AM and 8PM sharp, every single day. The one choice I have, the one thing that depends on me? What kind of soup we’re eating for the week. We watch TV. Sometimes she visits her fake friends so I can–”
He catches himself, a hand going over the shitty gum tattoo on his wrist. It’s only nondescript dots now, traces he rubs easily away as if they’ve never even been there.
What’s Tommy doing now?
“–I can go out, walk around. I don’t remember anything, not really, I just know that I should. Everywhere I go, it taunts me that I can’t remember. I don’t have goals because there’s nowhere to go, I don’t work cause my fucking mom won’t let me, I’m stuck in the routine.”
“The routine’ll kill you.”
A familiar poke into Mal’s brain. He’s heard this before.
He sits up fully, turns to Gabe, ignores all the open wounds yelling at him to give them attention. Just for a second. Just a glimpse, so he can pass out and maybe bang his head even worse and maybe this time it’ll stick. Go on, just drift your eyes dow–
“The other day… I changed up the routine. I walked around places I hadn’t seen yet. I found a house.”
Gabe’s eyes leave Contessina and fall on Mal. There’s something behind them, but Mal can’t read it.
“Red roof. Abandoned. I think I almost died there.”
It’s so easy to see the shift in Gabe’s breathing, the way his pets get a little more heavy, how his teeth chew the inside of his lip, how his foot jerks before stilling again. Everything that makes up Gabe jumps out to Mal involuntarily, like it’s a part of Mal’s own self he’s intimately aware of and only he can untangle.
“You almost died here.”
“Yeah, I think death has a lil’ crush on me, but I don’t really swing that way.”
“It’s not funny, Malachi.”
You keep saying my name like that. Like it means something.
Tagging @catchingbigfish @calicohyde @aalinaaaaaa No rules here, just share whatever you want and however much you want <3
Premise: List the first lines of your last 20 or so stories. See if there are any patterns. Choose your favorite opening line. Then tag 10 authors!
Thank you so much for the tag, @aalinaaaaaa ❤ I have nowhere near 20 stories that are actually written because I'm slow as hell and love to float in the worldbuilding phase a bit too much, so apologies for ignoring that bit of the rules oopsie
In no particular order:
Flat 27 (short film)
Darkness, save for a faint glow from an ancient laptop
screen, stuck on a screensaver that makes it look like the entire room is underwater.
In the dim light one can make out a cramped, suffocating combo of kitchen and living area, made even tinier by the amount of nondescript clutter and neglected objects strewn around.
RYAN (V.O.): Silence kills.
What It Is To Live (radio play)
FIRE CRACKLING SOFTLY. OUTSIDE, THERE
ARE DISTANT SOUNDS OF SWORDS BEING
HAMMERED OVER AND OVER. INSIDE,
SOMEONE IS CARVING WOOD WITH
RHYTHMIC SCRATCHES.
MINHO: (V.O) I don’t really know how I came to be. I know where, I know when, I know why, for the most part. But how… that’s always been a mystery.
Forget-Me-Not (feature film)
A small, bare room.
Moonlight slices through all-encompassing darkness.
Specks of dust dance hauntingly in the air.
Smothered under sheets and heavy blankets lies an OLD WOMAN.
Her head lolls to the side, eyes barely slit open.
A bony hand reaches for a MAN, sat at her bedside, and grasps his wrist softly.
Using the last of her energy, she nods at him.
The man trembles. With slow, hesitant movements, he places a pillow over her face.
Metanoia (novel)
“There’s a myth that a person can bite into a finger as easily as biting a carrot.”
Mal’s knife stills.
He sneaks a glance over his shoulder.
Holy Heresy (idek yet)
If he wanted quiet, the bar is the last place he should’ve gone - the slurred voice in his head whining for alcohol is one thing, but the loud music and the brash patrons yelling and laughing and clapping and roughhousing in the background of his existential dread is all a bit much.
A small disclaimer that the Holy Heresy line is not actually the first line in the thing, but the first line I've ever written for it. I also took the liberty of choosing as many lines as needed to give the excerpts the tiniest bit of context
Starting on imagery and sensory things is a given, considering most of these are scripts.
4 out of 5 also take place at night, which is a surprise to no one because I do quite enjoy how freeing the dark is when it comes to storytelling
Also interesting is how 4 out of 5 are set in the main characters' homes and most of them have some sort of dark element involved (Ryan's line, Mal with the knife, the man with the pillow)
Tagging my eternal writing friends @catchingbigfish @calicohyde @winterandwords and an open tag to anyone else who wants to do this! (yes i cheated the rules again im sorry im not around here enough to have 10 friends and i regret that every day)
Happy STS, Laura. ~~ For any story, have you ever spontaneously added something to your story that you wouldn't have added normally? If so, what made you do it? Sending grand creative energy and ☆☆ vibes ☆☆ your way. 🌈🌈🌈 - ✨ Enc (@enchanted-lightning-aes)
Hiii Enchant! Thanks so much for the question <3
I think Holy Heresy keeps surprising me with the kind of weird-ass stuff I keep adding to it, but given its context, that's what it thrives on :)) I need to push the boundaries of my thinking even further to do the story justice tbh, and for this one in particular, I'm entertaining even the most nonsensical ideas and trying to figure out how to make them work
BUT to actually name a thing I did when I wasn't planning on it: A huge plot point of Metanoia is when Mal recognizes Gabe. Most of the story hinges on it and so I needed to figure out exactly when he does it and what kind of domino effect that'll have. Except the second these two came face to face Mal refused to NOT recognize him instantly, so I had to re-think every interaction between them from that moment onward 😅
💕💕💕 Have a little romance, courtesy of my boy Gabe:
"I pictured you... to calm down. My first thought, in a panic, was you. I let myself... feel you. Next to me. Touching me. Calming me down. And it worked. And it kept working, so I kept you with me. At work, at home, with Bunny at all her weird parties. I brushed my teeth with you, ate with you, slept with you, set broken bones with you, walked home with you, watched people die with you, watched babies come into the world with you. I don't really know... how to be without you. And even after trying, I don't really like it. I don't like me... when you're not here."
For every 💬 I get in my inbox, I’ll post a quote from my own writing that I’m proud of!
@calicohyde tagged me (last year, sorry) to find the given words in my WIP! His words for me are blue, waste, hour, power, and strange, and as always, I'll do Metanoia:
blue
Tommy pounces faster than Mal can blink, shoving him back into the door handle hard enough that Mal can already picture the vessels burst beneath his skin, purple and red and blue bleeding into a nice, big bruise.
They’ve done this countless times. Still, Tommy stares at Mal like he’s too afraid to breach the gap and take what he’s already been given, a weakness and hesitation Mal struggles to swallow down.
waste
They paved the dirt road snaking through his neighborhood, so he can’t recall all the scrapes and bruises he’d gotten falling down and playing. The puddles he’d splash into. The dirt and pebbles getting into his shoes. They took the green gazebo; strays used to hide out there during bad weather, but it was also where Mal knows he had a birthday party when he was in high school. He’d been shown photos. They’d had tiramisu instead of a birthday cake, people got wasted, Carmen made them pizza, they even had a fully functioning barbecue; now it’s just a sad pit of dirt.
hour (hella spoilers but out of context, tw blood, death)
"I sat here for hours. Stared at him. The blood was seeping through the floor, bubbling like acid. He had this empty, innocent look plastered on his face, like he’d been wronged. Like he’d been a saint. And it just came out of me, all this pent up... Sobs, tears, snot, my voice cracked, my throat was raw, and I was laughing too because I finally felt free. Free of him, free to be."
power
It's different when the violence doesn't come from Tommy. With him, Mal could trust, somewhat, that no real harm would come to him. That he had enough power and sway to get himself out. Now it's cold and dark and hopeless and the emptiness in the pit of his stomach is scary enough that all Mal can do is try to laugh it off and hope it goes away.
strange
From the moment he asked “who am I?” to the two strange women claiming to be his mother and sister, Mal was plugged into a state of itching panic, confusion, and helplessness. The heartbreak in Lu’s eyes, a devastated sibling love he couldn’t connect to, dunked him in the cold realization that he didn’t belong there. He was wrong, a stranger, and he robbed this family of a son and brother.
Tagging @catchingbigfish @zeenimf @macabremoons @winterandwords and OPEN TAG for anyone who wants to share~ This is your sign to put some of your writing out there!
Your words are: type, swallow, purple, hand(s), shadow
