What are you working on currently? Elaborate epic poem? Heart wrenching love story? Insightful essay? Various and sundry miscellany?

At the moment I'm devoting myself to two different pieces of writing, though I'm struggling on one of them.
The piece of writing I am having difficulty is a novella of sorts. I've given it to a few people to read so far and they all say that I should keep on writing, but I can't seem to get my ideas out. I have the whole plot and whatnot, but it just won't flow.
My other piece of writing is more of a collection of short stories -insert shameless plug-. The characters are reflections of people in my life as well as of myself, and they are all linked by the two main characters who appear in each story. I've so far written three stories, and I'm aiming to fill up a small journal with them all.

I'm working on a story that... I can't put into a genre, it could be a mystery, a thriller and it does have some romance in it (as a prelude more than anything lovey-dovey) and involves people who for various reasons break moral codes (they deceive, manipulate, commit fraud, lie to one another etc), but the reasons surrounding their actions are supposed to make it difficult to judge them as good or bad guys. As in, is it right to commit a crime for the sake of someone else? Are you a bad person for committing the crime or are you a bad person for sticking to your morals at the cost of someone else's wellbeing, perhaps even life?

Sounds like the ideal dark pyschological thriller, Alissa. I'd love to read it! I'm working on two pieces...

Flowers Die In Summer: This is what I consider to be my masterpiece, even though it's not done. It's intended to be a heartrending drama about family, faith, certitude, and unconditional love. The story revolves around Eric Bradshaw, whose older brother Liam takes a blow to the head in a fateful construction accident and, as a result, is mentally reduced to someone childlike and sensitive. Eric must learn to be the caretaker, and throughout the story, he struggles with warring feelings of injustice, grief, role reversal, protection, and abandonment in that he'll never get back the Liam he once knew. I want it to be novel length, but stretching it out is proving to be a Herculean task.

Heaven and Earth: Something of a companion to Echoes, though I wouldn't call it a sequel- merely a piece that touches upon similar ideas. The story begins when a bereaved man's wife calls him from her grave of eighteen years, and it regresses into his lifelong quest to recover her killer and enact revenge. The man recollects how his quest clouded his duty as a father to an impressionable six-year-old boy, and struggles with feelings of guilt, weariness, and a deep-seated insecurity that his search for revenge may not be righteous due to its effect on his son. The son grows up throughout the story, but ultimately, it exposes that pain is vulnerable to love and time. It also features one of my classic indefinite ends .

Ohh, Rabid. I would absolutely adore to read Flowers Die in Summer. It sounds amazing...

Thank you! I'm glad that you're interested- having a vote of confidence is quite encouraging. I've been mulling the story over for about six months and have the entire plot outlined, but it's just a matter of committing it to paper . As soon as I have more than my present tally of five pages, I'll be sure it post it in the creative corner.

I know exactly what you mean. With my novella (of sorts :P) Bleed Me Dry I'm having such a large amount of difficulty getting it down. People keep pushing me to continue, but then again, none of these people ever do creative writing and aren't really grasping the difficulty I'm having with it

I tend to write more escapist style fiction, since I've had the great fortune to live a charmed life and can't get into a really messed up charachter's head.

I have two major current projects, along with various and sundry short stories and poems.
Time Again: In 2038 the world is ruled by a totalitarian dictatorship that took power in the first social world war from 2019 to 2022. James Emry is a physics student during the war, and due to the fact that he is useful, his life does not change much and he lives fairly happily for decades. Then, in 2036 his life is ruined when it turns out that his wife is one of the leaders of the rebel movement. He is not punished, but he can no longer support the dictatorship. In two years he finishes a pet project he's been working on since college: the Phase, a time machine. He goes back in time to attempt to stop the social war, and in the process creates dozens of new universes. Unbeknownst to him, there is only so much space for new universes, and if too many form, then time itself will equalize itself, so as to make the problem never happen.

I'm working on the second project with someone else, and as such it is private.

Rabid - yup, that description fits, lol.

And would love to read Heaven and Earth (*wink, wink, nudge*)! (I SO loved Echoes) and also Flowers Die In Summer, too - it sounds beautiful!

PixCii - I loved it, and I thought it was great the way you didn't name them, it made it feel like they were the only people in existence and yet they could be anyone

Furry - That sounds really interesting, sort of like The Butterfly Effect, but self-repairing?

Aww shucks. Thank you very much. I actually got that idea from one of Rabid's stories, 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'. I just really loved how mysterious it seemed and decided to try it out Thank you Rabid :D

I've actually never seen the butterfly effect, but I got the idea from a lecture on biology as art, and it was talking about how if you want to draw a tree if the trunk forks then one branch will fork, and the other one has to fork before the first one can. I was reading about paradoxes then, and it occured to me time could fork. And much doodling and brief WW2 obsession later, i got the above idea.

FurryPanda, I'm loving the futuristic setting! ^_^ And Rabid, I'm already amazed at how heartfelt you make Flowers Die In Summer sound for an outline. You're obviously an emotive blurb writer Don't worry too much about stretching it out. I've had big ideas that shrink on paper and they can actually be more poignant as short stories.

At the moment I'm working on world building, and having a great time! All my characters that I've created over the years are coming together in one, coherent setting and it's really exciting imagining how they all react to one another.

The project that will stem from the map is a mixmatch of characters, stories, myths and suchlike, a la Chronicles of Narnia. I find that I have too many notable characters spread over the world's history, so will probably jump back and forth in time to cover the interesting bits. XD

Because I'm self-employed and primarily working on building my storytelling business, I don't have much time to write these days. I'm currently just working on a Sims story, partly because I've always loved graphic novels yet never felt my drawing skills were quite up to snuff to make one, myself. The Sims story lets me play with the juxtaposition of visual image and text. I have to say it's much harder than I thought it would be, and I'm not yet satisfied that I have a good balance of picture quality versus text. I don't mean just technically, but also in framing the best, most dramatic shots with the most emotional punch.

However, it has been a tremendous learning experience so far. It is also making me think about story and writing in a different way, sort of opening up that intuitive side of the brain that responds so well to imagery. I doubt I will ever be totally satisfied with the results, and I'm not sure that's such a bad thing. A complacent writer usually isn't a very good writer. To me it's important to push the envelope and force myself out of my comfort zones.

Right now, I'm working on a stupidly-fluffy piece of Transformers fanfic. Go me.

I'm also contemplating a very cracky AU Transformers thing, plopping them into medieval Europe instead of modern-day USA. It needs research in order to find the most interesting place/time in which to plop them. And speaking of research...

I'm researching my Richard I novel, but that's been kind of backburnered since December, due to the pounding of snow we got that month that made me not-enthusiastic about the concept of driving the 20 miles to the "local" college library. I'm sure my enthusiasm for it will fire up again soon. I'm still sort of working with online sources for it, as well, but I just like the feel and the ambiance of a library for researching, is all. I like to be able to hold sources in my hand.

Gee, can you tell my favorite part of writing tends to be researching?

iCad, you're not the only one who hates to get out in snow or cold. I hibernate every chance I get. When the weather gets better, I'll get back to the historical society for research on local history. Until then I'm quite happy to stick to fiction. :D

I'm writing something new called Faith. It's a short story about a religious skeptic who meets a dying woman at a support group for the terminally ill. They navigate a relationship in which she teaches him about the comfort of belief, but when he is healed after she convinces him to attend a faith healing, his newfound religious prosperity falls through in that he can't believe in a God who doesn't heal the deserving. Although religious quandaries linger about while the story unfolds, it's essentially a narrative about love, loss, and (surprise, surprise) faith.

A little story about the Phantom of the Opera which is turning about to be quite epic.
I planned it to be one or two chapters, but, I've been bored as of late, and have worked on it more.

Three things:

1. A story i am writing writing with my friend that at the moment goes by the name 'Kernishia'. It's about 80 pages with a map draw and all. It takes place in an imaginary world in the middle of a war. About two orphaned children who's mothers have been murdered and who's father are in Kernishia. They decide to find their way there and in the end do, after trekking through a country wrecked by war. The girl finds her dad, the boy doesnt. The second part is 10 years later where they come back into a dictatorship and again have to hide and act as slaves for a while. The third part is where they realsie their parents were part of an organisation to save children from the war through underground tunnels. The join in and try to save children but many die. Both the boy and the girl die at the end. The fourth part is about the surviving children and the life of one of them (Maeve) who ran away thinking she shot the boy (she didnt). She goes into a world of magic and pretty much gets betrayed all the way through. At the end she dies along with many others, but her child survives. In part 5 her child is raised to be evil and told to kill all the people who still know about the other country.

2. 'Ataska'. A story about a young girl who is a blind artist. She spend her whole life not seeing and its about how she discovers the world and how she sees it.

3. A story about a white man who finds a black girl in a racist world. He takes her in and tries to intergrate her into a white society. The girl doesn't understand why she is different. One night her dad comes home after being beaten by some peopel who dont agree on him rasing a black child. The girl runs away and manages to get adopted into a black society. She lives her life in poverty but makes something out of herself. After a revolution she goes back to find her father, finding out that he is dead and being told it was her fault she throws herself into a river.

Well, I have a rough idea for a new short story, though I'm not too sure how I'm going to put it to paper.
After watching the latest episode of Supernatural, I was thinking about writing a story on Sirens. I've been told that I make mythical stories work when I focus on them, so I'm quite tempted to do this one. I have the whole idea planned out in my head, now all I have to do is put pen to paper.

That sounds like a great story, PixCii! I'm fascinated by Greek mythology and would be quite interested in reading it, even more so if a Dean-esque character made an appearance .

Currently (as in, right now) I'm working on an Omerta screenplay. Derange and I are testing out this format because it seems to lend itself better to our story/plot. It's actually some what easier to get everything down because you don't have to worry about poet, elaborate sentance structure or flow. Opens with a nice little death scene. Oh, mobster movies, ILU.

Also, I'm working on a screenplay for my film class. It's called Fight the Cravings.

Description/Pitch:

Cheryl has been overweight and unhappy nearly all her life, and she will no longer live with it! She’s tried everything to get her weight done to no avail until a new solution prevents itself: HypnoHelp – a hypnotherapy clinic dedicated to eliminating the addictions of their clients.

The hypnotherapy session Cheryl attended seems to have worked. She’s beginning to eat healthy, with a salad in her hand as she walks downtown past restaurants she normally would’ve been eating in. And then, the scent of a nearby bakery catches her attention. It entices her, and she struggles with herself. “Fight the cravings. Fight the cravings. Fight the cravings.” And she does. She seems to go into a trance, stuffs the remainder of her salad into her mouth and enters the bakery to verbally assault the proprietor. Eventually she is thrown to the curb and shaken from her trance. But this trend continues throughout a montage of her week. Destruction of property enters the picture. Near fist fights, too. Her fights elevate in seriousness until her final battle… with a little girl running a side-walk bake sale. Flashing light and sirens.

Dissolve to the waiting room (specifically the sign) of HypnoHelp. The camera pans over and down a poster that reads: “Believe it! HypnoHelp really works! I used to be 355 pounds and NOW…I wear…” Cheryl’s face and body is slowly revealed, skinnier and clothed in “a size five jumpsuit!”. A size five ORANGE jumpsuit - to be specific.

I wouldn't say I'm working on anything, but I do have many ideas which I hope to eventually follow through with. One of these would be a novel in the perspective of a female teenager or young adult who has a neuropathic disorder or something along those lines. I would need to do a lot of research for that one, since I despise science-fiction and alike, so it has remained untouched for quite some time now.

Another dusty idea that has been sitting around for a while would be again a novel, this time about a woman in her thirties or early forties who has a disordered lifestyle making a living from painting and anything else to make cash. She suffers from depression and goes through a period of perplexity, forlorn and dispair whilst somehow developing an intimate relationship.

Great ideas everyone!

Those sound like interesting pieces, burnziiy. As far as a neuropathic disorder, I've always wanted to read a novel from the perspective of someone with synaesthesia.

I've seen the Watchmen preview a few too many times, and it led me to a question. So often in the comics we see superheroes who die a human death, but what would a superhero death entail? I'm writing a short story called Not With A Bang, But A Whimper about the possibility of their special abilities causing their deaths- the invisible girl slowly disintegrates, the kid who walks through walls disappears, etc. It's not fangirly in the least, and I'm not writing it with any specific superheroes in mind- it's actually a rather serious piece about how lost and forsaken the narrator feels as his contemporaries slowly die away.

^ I really love that outlook, Rabid. It's an interesting idea, I've never really thought about it before.

At the mo I'm still working on my big map and weaving some character's stories into it. It's mostly finishing off details in the world now, but I've got some gorgeous characters that I can't wait to write about! I just have to form a solid story.

I'm trying to make it less magical or fantastical and focus on emotions and such - it's the main feedback that I usually get... my writing gets very fsr-fetched if I don't watch out!

At the moment I'm working on a story with some religious belief in it, where there is a man who doesn't believe in the idea of religion until he meets his God. It explores the idea of soul mates, except your soul mate would be like your God. Admittedly, I did get the idea from 'You Found Me', by The Fray.

I also have been researching Norse folklore, and I've found a few myths and lore that interest me (what can I say? I'm addicted to the supernatural), so I'm thinking about writing a longer story about some of these. Of course, I always have trouble starting mythical stories, but I'm quite interested in writing this one.

Everyone has such great ideas! Plus, everyone has such a great writing style. I hope to read them all.