Kiln-Fired Ceramic DM

Indeed, it never worked before or since for any other story I wrote. I was feeling cocky that day. Sometimes that works for me.

Other times, not so much.

barsoomcore said:

Indeed, it never worked before or since for any other story I wrote. I was feeling cocky that day. Sometimes that works for me.

Other times, not so much.

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Man, it certainly worked when you wrote that... I laughed my @ss off reading that, but I'm a bit of a samurai fan, so hearing them get all snarky with each other amused me to no end.

Oh, and Mythago, I loved your story. Very, very unique. My hat is off to the both of you.

Thanks for the kind words. I do have bits and pieces for a Delta Green story hour, but haven't yet posted.

I've considered doing a story hour, and the campaign I'm playing in is certainly worth writing about. Sadly, we've been at it for over a year now and my memory closely resembles swiss cheese. If I can think of a way to write it without having to cover the last year in more than summary I might try it.

Make it up. If nobody else wrote it down, who is to say your recollection is the wrong one?

Heck, orchid blossom, my Barsoom Tales story hour is about sessions that took place nearly three years ago. I don't remember much of anything, so I'm making it ALL up, pretty well.

I won't tell if you won't tell.

Here's a fifteen minute draft for a picture I'd never get a chance to use. I may well edit this later; then again, I may not. Click on the photo first, then read the story.

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Wish upon a star

I should have known.

In retrospect, I should have known. I'm literate, and I read horror novels; Lovecraft and Poe and King. I visit astronomy websites and read news blurbs about odd syzygies. I make jokes to my friends about the srange occurrences which happen to get picked up on the AP news wire: grumbling mountains and odd algae blooms and undersea monsters that go "bloop" on sonar. Everyone hears those rumors about dead celebrities, but it's not like anyone believes them. They never actually happen to anyone you know.

And I was right there.

The eclipse happened right in the middle of the parade, smack in the center of Main Street USA. I'd seen the parade before, of course. This time was different. Mickey and the others slipped out of line and made a beeline for the crowd. I was close enough to see what happened. He paused for a minute, touching childrens' hands as they stared at him adoringly. I grinned myself. The actor in the giant mouse suit paused by a stroller and kneeled down to see the sleeping toddler. I think the little girl's mother almost squealed in delight. Mickey lifted his pristinely white-gloved hands and raised his head almost up to the occluded sun, as if to say "What a miracle is life! Look at this beautiful infant who sleeps before me!" I imagine that thousands of years before, Aztec kings had taken a similar pose before an altar of stone. The shadowy light of the eclipse reflected off of Mickey's plastic features, and I sure knew a Kodak moment when I saw one.

I took a snapshot with my disposable camera. God help me, I took a snapshot. Because that was about five seconds before I noticed the butcher knife he drew with one of those immaculate hands.

That part was over so quickly, before anyone could even move. He hadn't been the only character to have commited the unthinkable. "The blood paves the way," I heard him twitter over the screams. He had an unforgettable sing-song voice that I'd heard on a hundred cartoons. "It opens the way when the stars are right." He lifted a carmine and dripping glove to point, and I looked past running children and panicking marching bands and Donald's blood-stained beak to see what the sacrifices had done.

Walt was back.

He staggered a shuffling jig down the middle of Main Street, and tourists fell like frozen leaves as he passed. His skin still bore the icy stigma of the cryogenic freezing. And he whistled Jiminy Cricket's little song as he danced jerkily along.

"When you wish upon a star. . ."

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Thanks to Kidcthulhu for the appropriation of her own personal nightmares.

PC channels jonrog1.

Pandemonium, obviously, ensues.

That was evil. In every evil meaning of the word.

Pkitty you are a very odd person!

Lets hope the stars are never right!

Piratecat said:

Here's a fifteen minute draft for a picture I'd never get a chance to use. I may well edit this later; then again, I may not. Click on the photo first, then read the story.

Click to expand...

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How much of ENworld's savings account do you want to spend on legal fees?
Amusing as this story is, I am not certain it is worth baiting The Mouse.
There are things in this world scarier than undead. The Mouse's lawyers are among them.

Barsoomcore--that was fantastic. Brilliant voice. Now I have to go catch up on your storyhour.

Orchid Blossom--I'd love to swap story writing mechanics with you, but you have to bear in mind that the tricks I used resulted in impossibly long stories than cannot be completed within the current word limits.

One of my techniques was based on a moment that I fell in love with in one of Mythago's earlier Ceramic competitions. She introdcued what seemed like a decription of the photo, only not quite exactly right--so the reader would pass the shot and forget about it--and then she came around and whammed us with the exact shot later when we weren't expecting it anymore.

It was extremely compelling because it both relieved us of the tedious predictability of working endlessly towards the shots, and also, it established that all of the elements of the photo were present in the world before all the pieces of the photo came into play.

So I always made sure that before I used the things in the photo, I put them into the world.

As far as themes go--I think writers always reveal a bit about what is really going on in their minds, even when writing fantasy. You just can't help writing what you know, even if you are writing about things wholly imaginary. It's the way our minds put dreams together. They're never literally about what they are about, and the images that are meaningful to you are often meaningless to anyone else.

For example, I have recurring dreams about my fish swimming out of my fishtank--they fly around the room, and I keep trying to chase them back into the tank before they suffocate or dry out and die, because they haven't the sense to realize that they can't live in the air, even if they can swim in it.

These dreams always come at times when I feel like my responsibilities are getting to be more than I can handle. That seems obvious when we're awake and I'm explaining it to you, right? But not so clear before I said so, or when I'm asleep, 'cause I fall for this every single time as if I'd never had the dream before.

Good stories are like that--they are obviously about something that is important to the author, even if the author never tells the reader what the literal truth behind them is. We instinctively feel that there is something important going on, and each person reads thier own anxiety or hope into it, drawing signal from the noise. Surreal or fantastical stories are fun because they are blurry, vague, amorphous and leave lots of room for people to recognize their own issues. They also allow the author to write without recognizing what she is putting down, only to look at it later and recognize wehre it came from, what it was all about really.

The set of illustrations for a Ceramic round is like a Rorschach. You just stare at them until you see the signal in the noise. Then you try to find a way to describe what you found well enough for someone else to find it, too.

Of course, as barsoomcore points out, a good snarky narrator and well developed characters is a good place to start, too.