First Official Facepunch Writing Competition! Fabulous Prizes! - General

Big Dumb Americans story was very impressive.

[QUOTE=Pandemix;23913239]Big Dumb Americans story was very impressive.[/QUOTE] Come on, stop rubbing it in.

[QUOTE=TheDiddler;23913282]Come on, stop rubbing it in.[/QUOTE] You just know that's the only one that's gonna get read.

[QUOTE=Turnips5;23913503]You just know that's the only one that's gonna get read.[/QUOTE] His story [B]was[/B] very good though.

[QUOTE=:smug:;23913812]His story [B]was[/B] very good though.[/QUOTE] He deserved to win.

Bangin' I won something! Boomslang came into my place of employment today and told me. BDA I really enjoyed both of yours. I'll give the rest a read through later.

Hey judges, I didn't see my story in the winners, either of the honorable mentions, or the shitlist. It was titled The Ephemeral Love, and I was wondering what you thought of it.

[QUOTE=SKuM;23919174]Hey judges, I didn't see my story in the winners, either of the honorable mentions, or the shitlist. It was titled The Ephemeral Love, and I was wondering what you thought of it.[/QUOTE] I don't remember receiving a story with that title. What was it about? Are you sure you submitted it correctly?

[QUOTE=SKuM;23919174]Hey judges, I didn't see my story in the winners, either of the honorable mentions, or the shitlist. It was titled The Ephemeral Love, and I was wondering what you thought of it.[/QUOTE] Do to the way you submitted I had to dl it separately. I read it, but I forgot to post it because I didn't dl it to the same location. My overall problem with it is that you were trying too hard to go for that style of writing that I found it far too hard to read through. Also, when you go through writing "I'm" like "im" it's almost impossible to call it anything but an AIM chat log. Not to say that your story read anything like that. So that people understand what I mean when I say that, and don't think that someone seriously was just ignoring grammar, I'll post the story. I thought it was entertaining, but it lost too much substance in it's artsy-ness. [quote=Ephemeral Love]The Ephemeral Love I am a worthless shitheap of fetid fuck me. I'm on the precipice of death and being a pissant excuse for a swine of a man. I am lying, facedown, hugging a rickety wooden beam bridging the crevasse in my skull where my brain cells used to live. I'm cold; I'm wet; I'm fucking tired. My head is throbbing with an unending series of cranial paresthesia zaps to the rhythm of hell’s metronome, ; : Diablo’s Heartbeat. Enough of my brain still functions well enough to tell my autonomic nervous system to flood my muscles with lactic acid and relax my anal sphincter. I shit myself and I can't find the willpower to care. My arms are clenched around the board like a vice and my toes are outstretched like I'm mid-orgasm. My fingers are interwoven with each other gripped so tightly that my knuckles hurt and my nails are bleached white. I’m shivering uncontrollably. Every time I shake a splinter in the board slices deeper into my left external oblique. It hurts. .. I don't want to die. I made a mistake, I mean more than one, more than several, but everybody does and it's not my fault it's not my fucking fault. I'll right every wrong I’ve ever made I promise I just need another chance. I know I've said that before but I mean it this time. Really. I'm sorry. Did you hear me? God? Did you hear me you cocksucking motherfucking fucking fuck FUCK. FUC!K YOU !TOO look im sorry ok please i didnt mean it im just scared and im lonely i dont know what to do. i dont even know where i am. i dont know how i got here. im naked. in more ways than one. im alone. im scared. please help me im sorry im sorry sorry sorry sorry. .. A wave of nausea washes over me and I vomit into the BlacK below. The floodgates break open. New memories surge throughout the axons of my neurons. Hiding in the deepest corner of my drug-addled brain, repressed and locked away by layer after layer of mind figment two by fours and tenpenny nails. ::::: I was twenty years old. Broken bottles of cheap lite beers laid at my feet, next to a ripped t-shirt and jeans caked in dried vomit. The carpet was stained with semen and hard liquor. A ripped poster of softcore pornography was hanging on the wall opposite from me. She lay on an old, broken pool table in the center of the room, beneath a plastic bar chandelier with the words Beta Zeta Omega scribbled in the Formica margins in black and green Sharpie. She had a busted lip, a broken nose, and was missing three teeth. Black and blue welts the size of quarters covered the entire left side of her torso. Blood stained her green polka-dot panties and dribbled in a stream down her thigh, pooling on the floor. She was fifteen. I stood up. I was naked. I dropped my hammer. <^> I dry heave. I bawl my eyes out until I can no longer breathe. I black out. I regain consciousness. My arms are still glued to the board, cramped shut by muscles starved of adenosine triphosphate for weeks on end. How long have I been here? Two weeks? A month? A year? Time moves slowly without sight or sound. Nobody to talk to. Nothing to do. But explore. My collective conscious. The collective conscience of the mind. Self Ex --ploration I never returned to that room. I never returned to that town. I never returned to that state. I woke up that morning; I was twenty three. I didn’t dry heave. I didn’t cry. I didn’t even feel guilty. I just put my clothes on, got in my car, and drove away. Away. Far away. I lived my life. I was going to be a fucking doctor. ::::: .. i was drunk. i was thirty three years old. i had a son and his name was jack and he was eleven. he was in the other room in the house and he was arguing with his mom and he said ‘you cant tell me what to do you fucking bitch’ and she began to cry and yelled ‘GET OUT OF MY HOUSE GET OUT YOU FUCKING SHIT GET THE FUCK OUT’ and my son said ‘fuCK YOU’ so i grabbed my bottle of jack daniels and i walked into the kitchen and my son had a kitchen knife it was serrated about six inches long mostly used for cutting breads so i took the bottle and i said HEY JACK and i smashed the fucking bottle against his fucking face and he was bleeding and he screamed and i kicked him in the fucking ribs and he cried he said NO DAD STOP PLEASE NO and i said SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU RUINED MY LIFE YOu UNGRATEFUL SHIT and he cried and cried and cried and he pleaded and he begged and he said mommy please make him stop but i didn’t stop and i didnt feel bad and i didnt feel sad i was just angry ;angry at him angry at my wife angry at my bottle and angry at myself and i didnt stop kicking him until he stopped crying and so i left. i dropped the bottle and i left. i never saw my wife again. i never saw my son again. i never visited that kitchen again and i didnt even say goodbye i just left. I lived my life. The ultimate problem solver. Cease to make the problem exist, remove the situation from your life, and somebody else will inherit the problems you leave behind in your wake. .. <^> Time. Stretches. On. Years. Pass. Nothing exists but the infinite below me, the infinite above, and the wooden beam. Floating. Existing. I don’t sleep. I don’t eat. I don’t drink. I simply exist. For decade after decade; century after century; mil l e n i a a f t e r m i l l e n i a S E L F E X P L O R A T I O N . ::::: I was driving down a road in a 1996 Ford Ranger. There was a needle sticking out of the main artery of my my biceps brachii and a cloudy mirror on the dash. Half a point of black tar was slowly coursing through my circulatory system like tumbleweeds on a grassy plain, and my sinuses were clogged with a gram of Columbia’s finest. My central nervous system held a gun to the roof of its mouth and pulled the trigger. My vision blurred, my arms seized, and I lost all sense of proprioception. I wrapped the car around a stop light at over 90 miles per hour, shortly before plowing into a Farmer’s Market Fruits and Vegetables stand and killing three pedestrians and an unborn child. <^> I am no longer in the planes of my mind. I am sitting in my 1996 Chevy. My face is resting against the steering wheel of the car. My left leg is severed from the knee down and my right arm is nowhere to be found. Blood is spewing down the back of my throat, down my trachea and into the pharynx and the bronchi and the bronchioles of my lungs. I can’t breathe. Suffocation. Vision blurring. Chest churning. My liver and my spleen and my small intestine and my gall bladder and my heart and my lungs and my large intestine sitting in a neat little pile on my lap, dripping down my calf onto the floor mat below. ::::: I’m standing on a wooden beam. It’s bridging the crevasse in my life where happiness used to be. My life. A pinpoint of light shines through the sky. It lands on the board in front of me. The mold evaporates. It sheds its splinters revealing a sanded redwood plank, glossed and finished. The beam widens. My cracked and bloody fingernails heal, the crusted dirt beneath them vanish. The frostbitten and bruised and scarred patches of my arm peel away, leaving my arms tanned and healthy. Patches of cloth grow around me, forming a brilliant violent and foam green suit, with a red rose in the pocket of the double breasted jacket. The light expands, revealing the walls of the depths of the pit, scraggly cliffs of shale and granite. On either side of me the light grows, purging the world of the dark and revealing endless landscapes of forestry and jungle. My plank bridges a gap of maybe a half mile, separating nothing but nature beyond the infinite. The beam focuses on me, and I rise. I am a surveyor of all lands as I climb, miles upward, without sight of any visible end to my new world. Rocky buttes, sand swept deserts, lakes miles wide and icy mountains pepper the trees, which peter off into an icy tundra clawing at the horizon. My board is too small now to see, as I’m rising further, faster, gaining speed to break through my stratosphere. The crevasse disappears in a fury of loud noises, just a crack, a thin black line, and erasure of everything benevolent and lovely in my world and suddenly it is out of sight gone gone gone. The bright light sucks me into itself in a bright flash of oblivion and suddenly my world implodes. No trees, no soil, no rolling hills, no gorges and valleys. No winding rivers, no flora and fauna. No board. No Black. Nothing. <^> In reality, none of it ever existed. It was a figment of my imagination, a self-imposed penitentiary of the mind to force me to face myself. It was a fancy mental card trick, existing solely in the few bits of brain I had left that weren’t splattered along a concrete sidewalk along with a few dozen strawberries and eggplant. My brain’s reaction to a confronted death; the dumping of every last drop of dimethyltryptamine it had left and the creation of my world. I woke up from my blackness six months and eighteen days later, crouched in the fetal position listening to the soothing thump-thump of heaven’s metronome, ; : God’s Heartbeat. I was reborn. I was spared. Thank You ::::: please STOP reading ////?//// if you would like to retain ANY of the good vibes you just had from reading my story then exit your browser take a nice long walk in the park nearest to you think of your friends and your family and how happy your life is and please enjoy life to the fullest extent possible “{[]}” curiosity killed the cat STOP S S T T O O P S P S T T P O O O P T S ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- <^> In reality, none of it ever existed. It was a figment of my imagination, a self-imposed penitentiary of the mind to force me to face myself. It was a fancy mental card trick, existing solely in the few bits of brain I had left that weren’t splattered along a concrete sidewalk along with a few dozen strawberries and eggplant. My brain’s reaction to a confronted death; the dumping of every last drop of dimethyltryptamine it had left and the creation of my world. I woke up from my blackness six months and eighteen days later, crouched in the fetal position listening to the soothing thump-thump of heaven’s metronome, ; : God’s Heartbeat. As I peered with inquisitive eyes outside my belly button window, I saw bustles of people, walking and hurrying. Living their lives. Unbeknownst to them, a tiny fetus held all the answers to all their questions of life and death; religion and morals; heaven and hell. There is no heaven. There is no hell. There is no God and there is no Devil. There is no inherent evil, no inherent good. Life, the Earth, morals; they only exist in the eyes and minds of those who observe and judge them. Then I saw a fruit stand. ?was it worth it [/quote] FP ruins some of the formatting, as everyone knows.

[QUOTE=-Dazed-;23919838]Do to the way you submitted I had to dl it separately. I read it, but I forgot to post it because I didn't dl it to the same location. My overall problem with it is that you were trying too hard to go for that style of writing that I found it far too hard to read through. Also, when you go through writing "I'm" like "im" it's almost impossible to call it anything but an AIM chat log. Not to say that your story read anything like that. So that people understand what I mean when I say that, and don't think that someone seriously was just ignoring grammar, I'll post the story. I thought it was entertaining, but it lost too much substance in it's artsy-ness. FP ruins some of the formatting, as everyone knows.[/QUOTE] I quite like experimental writing like that, but it shouldn't get in the way of flow. On a side note: I went rooting around under my bed and found this old alt account so fuck you man I can get gold after all. :razz: [editline]08:02PM[/editline] only 1954 posts to go :ohdear:

Got Bad Company 2 with my winnings! Can't wait to check it out before work tonight. Thanks Nigel, judges, other participants. Ya'll been awesome.

Two weeks passed and it happened again. Chairs, cabinets and small tables were recklessly tipped over like the trees, they were once carved from. The elderly man, frustrated with what he thought was long since had its final croak crawled its way back to life from mere non-existence. More precious commodities tumbled over into shards of their broken selves or slithered their way into wooden crevasses. His mind began to mix itself to shreds using anger as the blender to do so. He yoinked a chair down on its luck since it was in the horrible lump’s warpath. With all the withered strength a man far beyond his youth could muster. He slammed the chair onto the lump which responded with scarred yelp, it began to retract its feet to disappear into oblivion. The man wheezed painfully into yet another false victory. He placed the chair thoughtfully behind himself for which to sit on. He groaned exhaustedly as his joints made cracking sounds that would confuse a small child of popcorn being prepared. He heard footsteps come rushing down the steps with due haste, his daughter emerging from the doorway to see the whole living room in chaos and disarray like a police raid for drugs just occurred. Her face’s muscles contoured through several emotions from the sight of the room. The first face was that of antagonism, her scorn pierced the frail shell of a once caring authority figure who was then just trying to help Humanity get back on its feet. The daughter’s face soon distorted to worry seeing her father tired and pale as if a ghost just played a joke on him. The daughter spoke in a tone that her father knew all too well, “Dad? Are you alright?” The father looked at his daughter coming to him in a comforting way and responded wearily, “I’m okay Dakota, just tired…” He slowly sank onto the sofa next to him, trying to rest the body that was running low on fuel. Dakota sat next to father on the other side of the sofa, so not to get him flustered or annoyed. She nodded and knew he wasn’t telling her something, “What the hell happened here dad?” Her father looked up with a face of innocence; he knew all too well she would most likely believe him. In a soft tone he confessed his sins to his daughter, “For the past month, a lump has been scouring across the rug…I’ve thought I killed it two weeks ago, but it came back and started knocking over the tables.” Dakota looked at her father, trying to make what little sense her father was making. She thought in her head he was lying and was just going through an episode of dementia. But her father was weary and tired, and the work on making the XEN relay point safer to use for teleportation. It was also getting harder to keep transmissions with Dr.Issac Kleiner and Dr.Eli Vance to report updates of information and progress on his research. “C’mon dad…Let me get you some water and then we’ll go do something else.” Her caring tone that only sounded like a daughter talking to her father lifted his up his spirits as he followed his daughter to the kitchen. In a questioningly curious tone, the father asked Dakota, “When is William coming back?” They continued talking into the night.

"Terminus" was mine. I did it in just a couple of hours, and is probably one of my worse stories.

So is there going to be a second round for this or what?

[QUOTE=LCBADs;23936298]So is there going to be a second round for this or what?[/QUOTE] I'd be up for a second round. I don't fancy judging again though, since I'd like to enter. If one of the existing judges would like to host the next competition, I'd be all for it. Dazed?

professor -snip-

I think we need a general writing thread. You know, for discussing books, poetry and whatnot, and for posting creative writing for critique. I figure if science gets a thread, we should at least have one. I'd make it myself but I'm awful at making an eye catching OP

[QUOTE=strayebyrd;23944531]I think we need a general writing thread. You know, for discussing books, poetry and whatnot, and for posting creative writing for critique. I figure if science gets a thread, we should at least have one. I'd make it myself but I'm awful at making an eye catching OP[/QUOTE] Agreed, it's a constant battle to keep this thing on page one.

So are you going to make a new thread or update this one?

[QUOTE=strayebyrd;23944531]I think we need a general writing thread. You know, for discussing books, poetry and whatnot, and for posting creative writing for critique. I figure if science gets a thread, we should at least have one. I'd make it myself but I'm awful at making an eye catching OP[/QUOTE]We had a thread for books a while ago (I think it was called "Facepunch Book Club").

[QUOTE=SPESSMEHREN;23949415]We had a thread for books a while ago (I think it was called "Facepunch Book Club").[/QUOTE] really? damnit I missed that one

[QUOTE=LCBADs;23949314]So are you going to make a new thread or update this one?[/QUOTE] It'd probably be best to make a new one, to call the attention of everyone who flew away once the results were in.

[QUOTE=Nigey Nige;23940800]I'd be up for a second round. I don't fancy judging again though, since I'd like to enter. If one of the existing judges would like to host the next competition, I'd be all for it. Dazed?[/QUOTE] How about a system where the winner goes on the panel of judges for the next round? Just seems like a certain person might dominate the competition, sperming all over the inferior literal skills of everyone else. :3:

[QUOTE=:smug:;23960446]How about a system where the winner goes on the panel of judges for the next round? Just seems like a certain person might dominate the competition, sperming all over the inferior literal skills of everyone else. :3:[/QUOTE] Good idea. I'll hook up BDA and the other judges tomorrow.

[QUOTE=Nigey Nige;23973240]Good idea. I'll hook up BDA and the other judges tomorrow.[/QUOTE] Definitely up for it.

I hate writing. Being forced to pick a particular subject pisses me off and I don't want to do it (or more often; I can't really write something I wouldn't want to read) or have no ideas. Other than that, hopefully some good works come out of this.

Hmm, I have to say I am looking forward to round 2 if it uses the broad genre and single sentence meathod, as my biggest problem is finding a root idea. Hopefully next time I won't forget to do it. Congratulations to all the winners, and BDA, your story was great. Also, is there any chance that one of the later competitions has a higher word count and time-frame? I'm all for short stories but I'm sure many will agree that 2000 words restricts writing, especially if you like to make elaborate metaphors and somewhat irrelivent backstories.

[QUOTE=cercerd;23977309]Hmm, I have to say I am looking forward to round 2 if it uses the broad genre and single sentence meathod, as my biggest problem is finding a root idea. Hopefully next time I won't forget to do it. Congratulations to all the winners, and BDA, your story was great. Also, is there any chance that one of the later competitions has a higher word count and time-frame? I'm all for short stories but I'm sure many will agree that 2000 words restricts writing, especially if you like to make elaborate metaphors and somewhat irrelivent backstories.[/QUOTE] while that might work, having stories of increased length would mean it would take quite a long time for judges to review all of them. Also for a "general writing and literature" thread, what do people think would go in an OP?

So uh, is the second round happening soon?