Tag Archives: imagination

Unseen [1,800 words]

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This story is posted in Fiction, Horror, and Short Stories.

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Unseen

by Rick Cook Jr

“I hate him I hate him I hate him!” Wanda shouted, punctuating each stomp up the steps with another “I hate him!”

Laughter echoed up, clanging around inside her skull until she shook her head and leaned over the banister at the top of the stairs to cry, “I hope you find a snake and it bites your face!” She stalked off down the hall.

Her mother called from downstairs, “Wanda! You don’t ever-” Wanda slammed her bedroom door, cutting off the remark.

The sound pleased her and she grabbed hold of the knob to yank it open and slam it again. The door wouldn’t budge from its frame.

She screamed her frustration out while pulling on the knob. “Stupid door! Stupid house! Nothing ever works like it’s supposed to in this stupid old dump.” Wanda kicked the doorframe for good measure and heard a soft thump in the adjacent wall. Continue reading →

Dreams Should Stay In Your Crazy Head

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This article is posted in Brain2Page.

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Being one who is inclined to creativity, even in the less visual form that writing takes, I often have very vivid dreams that tap into whatever the hell is going on inside my weirdo head. I have an entire document – a dream journal if you insist – that chronicles the silliest, the scariest, the downright most awesome, and even the ones that make me question my psychotic profile.

The compulsion to turn these dreams into a story is strong. I have several unfinished manuscripts and even more short stories that started out as dreams. Yet I have never finished one. At some point there’s always this illogical transition that completely interrupts the entire sequence of events, and coincidentally enough it is that illogical transition that makes me want to make it into a story. But how the hell am I supposed to fit a serial killer murder mystery into a slice of life story? How should I make this ridiculous horror monster make logical sense in my court-room drama about getting divorced (when I’m not even married)? Continue reading →

The World Ended and I Still Need Condoms [1153 words]

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This story is posted in Fiction, Short Stories, and Writing Prompts.

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This is another short story prompted from Chuck Wendig’s weekly challenges, this time it was called “ABC meets XYZ“. It was fun but incredibly difficult!

Content warning: There are some graphic descriptions of violence, PG-13 language, and sexual discussion if not description. You’ve been warned.

The World Ended and I Still Need Condoms

by Rick Cook Jr
 

The first time I felt truly alive was the moment after I was almost meat, for the first time. I’ve been almost meat more times than I’ve had sex, and I’ve done both a lot. That’s not bragging, it’s just simple truth.

And the sex after the apocalypse is some of the best I’ve ever had. You don’t know release like “Oh my God we escaped the zombies today” sexual release. I’m sorry, but you just don’t. Continue reading →

My Brain is a Genie that Grants Everyone Wishes!

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This article is posted in Brain2Page.

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I was once an insufferable little prat a teenager, discovering a lot about myself and the world around me in that clumsy way all teens have. I found out that women made me feel funny inside; that I didn’t really like slapstick comedy very much; that there was more than a surface level in books, movies, television, video games, and in people. I found that what I loved as a little boy (reading) wasn’t something a lot of people did (at least a lot of people I would come to know).

I also discovered that it takes a writer to make something a reader can read.

The very first time I can remember having written something that I genuinely enjoyed the process of writing it as opposed to reading the outcome was when I was in sixth grade, before 12-year-olds were considered junior high schoolers. My teacher was Mrs. Gardner, and we were given the assignment to write a short story about our lives thirty years in the future. Specifically we were told to imagine some technologies that might exist thirty years in the future, and to describe who we were as people in this crazy future world. Continue reading →

Brain2Page: Taming the Senses – The Three-of-Five Rule

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There are few things in the world of writing and revision that drive me truly crazy.  The first of these is simply that You Are Never Done. Which I will no doubt explore at some future point. But I’m not here to talk about that quite yet.

The second thing that drives me absolutely bats is description. Writing it, rewriting it, reading it. Anything that has to do with description really gets me into a bad frame of mind, because there are so many ways to approach description, and almost every way has merit to somebody. Continue reading →

Brain2Page: A Muse Approaches; What Do You Do?

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Sometimes writing floods the page, and your fingers can’t keep up with the deluge of content bursting forth. You’re so excited, you’re typing a page every ten minutes, you know it’s not perfect, but it’s something, and probably something good. You tell yourself this is the way it should always be. You finish another page. You finish another paragraph.

Then suddenly all that momentum, all that excitement, all that content just dries up. If a gremlin exists inside your head, he just rigged the floodgates. The last dribble splashes onto the page. You sit there staring at words you hardly remember thinking. You try to trick yourself back into the flood.

But it’s too late. That moment has fled. The page sucked up the words like parched ground drinks the rain after a split-second break from the drought.

You try to force it. You keep going. Nothing is the same. Everything you put down now is polluted compared to the wondrous torrent of just one minute ago.

What happened? What changed? How did you have the Biblical Flood come pouring out of your head one minute, and only bring up dust in the pail the next? Continue reading →

Brain2Page: Where Do I Even Begin?

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To start off my Writing Advice series, what better place than “Getting Started”? This blog post endeavors to help you in deciding just how to begin writing a piece of fiction, whether it’s a short story 500 words long, a sweeping epic series with fifteen planned entries, or anything in-between.

This is such a common problem that no specific method will always be the best way to approach it, but I often find that some level of structuring at least puts me in the right frame of mind to put some words together in something approaching coherency.

Continue reading →