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Week 3 Summary (Plus Some Title Flair)
This week was writing week, and writing is my jam. This week was also a hard week for me with my other classes, work, and trying to get my anxiety under control, so this was a good week to be something I’m already familiar with. My writing wasn’t anything groundbreaking this week, I don’t think. It wasn’t some masterpiece, it wasn’t dripping with creativity. Still, I think I did fairly well given the circumstances. “Stressed Out” was definitely a good release, more for me than for any audience. “Captain Never-Itchy” was a parody poking fun at some of my favorite tropes of one of my favorite ways to tell stories,…
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Writing Up My Writing Assignments
I did four writing assignments this week from the assignment bank. None of the prompts were chosen for any particular reason, they just caught my eye. The first one, “Stressed Out,” is an acrostic poem about how I was feeling as I was writing it. I felt like I had too many things to do and I had no way to get it all done, so I wrote an acrostic (one of the easier poem styles to write) just to get it checked off the list. In the poem I also mentioned my perfectionism, because I worried that it, or anything I wrote, wouldn’t be good enough. Everything in the…
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Long-Form Outline: Red River Valley
I’ve had the idea for an apocalypse story for about two and a half years now, but I’ve been struggling to do anything with it. I know in its final form it’s going to be a storytelling video game in which every interaction you have with the other characters affects the outcome. Because it’s such a vast web of plots, characters, etc., I’ve been having a hard time even knowing where to start. Maybe if I make one plot for this class, it will be a good starting point to get the rest of it made. I swear I came up with this before COVID was a thing, but the…
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The Mariner’s Revenge Song: An Analysis
“The Mariner’s Revenge Song” is a sea shanty by the Decemberists that tells the story of a young man who spends his whole life hunting down the man who cheated and destroyed his recently-widowed mother. The story is told achronologically, with the beginning of the song taking place in the present (the hunter and the hunted both trapped in the belly of a whale). For most of the rest of the song, the hunter explains to the hunted (and the audience) how the hunted ruined his life and the life of his mother by wooing her after the death of her husband and then abandoning her to take the blame…
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I’m Just So Tired
The prompt I feel so dirty. I don’t remember the last time I was washed. I’m probably the thing she uses more than any other possession, but I never get to be clean. I don’t ever feel useful, only used, like some castaway from society. Like that homeless man that I see on the corner on those days she doesn’t cover me, smother me with he who is so beautiful. If you ever used him, and not me, if you ever washed me, he wouldn’t be so much prettier than me! We could both be beautiful! But no, I am to be covered like an unwanted stain, only he is…
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Captain Never-Itchy
The prompt Jessica Booker was normal teenager. She spent her life going to high school, learning math and science like a nerd, and getting picked on by her bullies, the notorious Pink Squad. Those three girls, Dolly, Molly, and the ringleader Holly, were the most popular girls in school. Jessica was jealous of them, but since her name didn’t rhyme, she could never join the clique and was therefore hideous and unlovable. One day, the notorious villain Poison Oak attacked Jessica’s school. (This was the female Poison Oak that debuted in Yellow Fox issue #17, not the male Poison Oak that has been a popular, well-known nemesis to Phantom Macaw…
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Love, Hook
The prompt Dear diary, Pan found three new children to bring back with him to Neverland. One of these days, one of them is going to get hurt, and they’re all going to come crying to me as the only sane adult in this place. I have to get these kids out before some stunt he tries to pull kills one of them. But one of the kids he brought back this time was a girl. Maybe Peter’s finally growing up. Looking for a, uh… partner, rather than a stooge. Tinkerbell isn’t taking the new addition well. Predictably, she came to me to kill Peter in her jealousy. Which seems…
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Stressed Out
The prompt Struggling to get through everything. Trying to finish it all by the deadline. Everything is overwhelming. Should I eat before everything is done? Should I sleep before everything is done? Everything is fine. I have to make them believe everything is fine. Drowning, drowning, going down. Oh right, my theater homework. I forgot. Put it on the list. Undo that, it’s not good enough. This will never be good enough.
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Week 2 Summary (And Here’s Some Flair For The Title)
The biggest things I did this week were the daily creates and the assignments from the assignment bank. The daily creates threw me at first, but as I started doing them and getting into the swing of it I got more comfortable with them. The queen one with the eels was hard because I had this whole fairy tale I wanted to tell but got cut short. I feel like the one with the really big book didn’t make a lot of sense, but I committed to it anyway (the joke was the author wrote down every accomplishment that has ever been attributed to “Anonymous” but I feel like it…
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Writing Up The Assignments
I’m putting the write-ups of all the assignments in one post rather than put it with the posts themselves because two out of the three assignments involved writing and I didn’t want it to be confusing with random chunks of meta-cognition at the end of the story. I wanted those to just be what they were. I hope that’s okay. Assignment one was the fanfiction assignment. I wrote a piece called “The Waitress” about a waitress in The Avengers. The prompt was to tell the story of the background people in a movie or TV show, so I chose her since the camera focuses on her for an extra long…
