Fiction

A mixture of short stories and exercises, sometimes first drafts and sometimes more polished. The pieces listed here are a lot more likely to be first drafts and/or change every so often than those in "rants" and "how does it work?". Some of them I may even submit for publishing at some point.

Chapter 1 of my novel

The nameless novel has been in the works since 1996, when I was in grade 12. (I didn't work on it much when I was in university, so between 1996 and 2002 I ignored it completely for about 3 years, equivalent, and only worked on it during the summer or the work terms.) The first version of chapter 1 (not this version; there have been some major changes) was published in the Young Author's Conference anthology. Yay, my first publication! Anyhow, the novel is about half done, I think, and enough has changed since I started it that many parts badly need a rewrite. Therefore, it's currently being rewritten to make it self-consistent and hopefully make it easier for me to write new scenes that are consistent with the existing scenes. Blah, blah, blah. I'm using a wiki to sort out my background information - they're insanely useful for that kind of stuff.

NaNoWriMo 2003

NaNoWriMo 2005

NaNoWriMo 2006

I decided to do NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) this year, and post the novel I came up with. The goal of NaNo is to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. Every day, I posted that day's writing. This is first draft quality writing, so be warned. :-)

Writing within limits 60*80 challenge

This was an exercise posted to Write On! in December 2001. The idea was to write a story in no more than 60 lines no more than 80 characters long - ie, one standard printed page. I decided to go one step farther, and created a brick: all lines start on column 1 and end on column 80, no tricks with spacing allowed, no hyphenating words to split them over a line, no spaces allowed at the end of the line. I did allow a two space indent to mark off paragraphs, in the interests of readability. This is a first draft, and it took a while for me to decide what was going on, so the beginning is kind of weak and the ending is kind of abrupt.

Random exercises

Writing prompts, exercises I've found here and there, and other random short first draft stuff I have floating around my hard drive. The titles given them are not the prompts, they sort of describe the result. (A lot of the writing prompt ones were written in a live prompted chat, Sundays at 10AM PST/1PM EST, if you'd like to try it out yourself. Point your favourite IRC client at irc.write-on.org and join #writing, or go to the java IRC client and use that.)

I have been known to use these as "seeds" for longer stories. If one of them happens to give you an idea for a story, by all means write it and don't worry about "stealing" one of my ideas. Even if we started with the same seed, we'd come up with different stories... (Don't use the text of the exercise in your story, though, because that is mine.)

The Paradox

Fiction