A long time ago, when you were deciding who you wanted to be, you drew lines in the ground; in the wet concrete of your childhood haunts; and you vowed never to cross them.

Well, you were young and full of ideals.

Then, as you walked further from your childhood beliefs and idealism, you start to wonder; what's so great about the other side of that line? What did it feel like, is the air sweeter? The world brighter? More exciting?

See, you were young and brimming with curiosity.

So you stepped across to the other side, you grew with the perspective you gained from stepping across, you've learnt from the experiences, you learned about yourself, some of the lessons were enlightening, some were painful, but you learned. When you look back to the boundaries of your childhood ideals, you find that the line you drew had been corroded away by the neat and ever efficient hands of Time. It's nowhere to be seen.

But you remember the shape of it and so you draw another line. This time in the dirt of experience, matriculated by insights that was beyond the naive idealism of your childhood.

You were still young, and you thought you'd gained some wisdom in your travels.

From the other side of this line you can see all the world on the other side. This time, you know exactly what's on the other side. It's not brighter, nor is it wiser, but still something of that world, that world from which you're estranged from, is tugging at your desire. Remember the tastes? Remember the contentment you felt? The pain of hard lessons, they were ephemeral. They can be washed away.

This time, keeping your eye firmly on the line you've drawn in the dirt, you cross with the intention of stepping back over quickly. You don't intend to stay long.

When you look back, the line is washed away by tears. By the waters of regret. Again there's no going back.

So you draw the next line in the mud. And each time you cross that line, the earth beneath you is washed away, little by little, until finally you're drawing lines in the water.

You look around and you're no longer young, and you no longer recognise your surroundings. You're stranded far from home, lost in the ocean of time. Fearing the edge of the world.

...


ahem...
gee. that was cheerful.
I'm ok. really.
I just need ice cream, an ocean of ice cream.

mmm...ice cream.

I am Otaku Liteâ„¢

[This message was edited by wraith on July 22, 2003 at 03:56 AM.]

Glory!

Praise ice cream!

Praise it!

Hey. I'm thinking of doing The Black Haired Girl as a short film and entering it one place or another. It's not all that great as a written piece, but I think I can get it to work pretty good as a short film.

I'll have the main character narrate all but the few short chunks of dialog and maybe even them... with the voices of BHG and the shoe repair shop guy quieted in the background. I'm thinking quasi-camera-verde for the moving around the city scenes. I'll have to pick a different city besides Dallas, because I live nowhere near there and a young man to play the main character because I'm an old guy who might have gotten lucky writing like a young guy.

Did that make any sense whatsoever?

yes
do it

[This message was edited by razorgirl on July 22, 2003 at 03:10 PM.]

I'd say the casting problem isn't going to be the young man.

I beseech you, if you must have narration, only use it at the very beginning and the very end. But I'm telling you straight, this film (hell, most any film) will be better without narration. Don't tell us, show us.

Yeah! I have to find an amazing looking Black Haired Girl, right? I didn't think of that. And one without pierced ears? Maybe I can raid some Quaker community or something. It's a problem.

I'll think about the narration. In the way I'm envisioning it, I still think it might work... pretty much the guy just saying what I wrote (with notable exceptions) with action going on visually to support that. Sorta like when Ray Liotta is narrating parts of the action toward the end of GOODFELLAS. Like he's sitting on the stone bench explaining to someone why he's there... telling the story.

Finding the right voice and phrasing to where it doesn't turn out like crap? Odds are that makes your comment 100% correct. I ain't no Scorsese. I've actually thought of how to do it either way. But, I might as well not plan anything unless I find that girl first.

And I wondered why good short films are so rare.

I did something bad.

I detoured from the noble and glorious concept of spontaneous writing, to the dark, scummy, devious and unoriginal area of short films. Shame on me. I mean that.

Never again on this thread. I'm going to do some storyboards and scout a few locations in Salt Lake City, (maybe Denver too) and keep my eyes open for that Black Haired Girl, but if there's any progress worth talking about... I'll start another thread. This one is sacred. I'm sorry I befouled it.

It was like Mother Nature was PMSing. Her emotional instability reflected in moments of meditative calmness, to salty winds that kicked your eyeballs back in their sockets if you looked at the shore the wrong way. Spanish explorers named it, "Pacific" - Peaceful. Another trusted first impression.

Sporting a slate gray Lost brand hoodie, Sam crept through the washed up seaweed that by noontime would smell like fish piss and swarm with fleas, with 'Cosmo' her metal detector. A few months back she would share this sort of a morning with him, and listen to him attack the surf as much as he did the seagulls swarming the edge for their breakfast. He was 13 years young when she had to put him down. Over a gin and tonic, she likes to think he had a happy life.

"Miss You", the previously unreleased track from Aaliyah, velvetly sings through her mind from the minidisk player tucked within her pouch. She barely hears someone call her from a disembodied place somewhere outside of her headphones. Turning, Sam flashes her smile while tucking a few bleached strands of hair behind a hood covered ear.

"Sammy-cat. I thought I'd find you here." Eric tromps up, giving a blinking acknowledgement to a picked at, bodyless, salmon skull buried between kelp. He's wearing that flanel jacket she hasn't figured out if she likes or not.

"It's my vacation." She reminds him, smile fading, while carefully noting the office-badge still pinned to his colar. It's against policy to wear it outside of the facility. It makes you a target. "And it's 7am."

"6:47am, actually, and I know. That's why I'm out here. I need you to take a look at something."

"What?"

"TCP headers."

Sam turns, adjusting Cosmo across a patch of oceanic mucous, "I do HCI." Human Computer Interfaces, "I don't do low level, Eric."

"Oh, first-name. I must have hit a nerve. But, I wouldn't be out here if I didn't think it was important. Especially since it is your vacation. Breakfast is on me."

She hears him walk off, back towards the her property, the beach front house she bought after making three real-estate turns, painfully aware of the fact he still had the keys. The locksmith is coming tomorrow. As she follows the man-sized footprints he leaves in the sand, Sam wonders, idly, if she should remind him just how 'broke up' they are.

~Fehu, pauses

I'm stunned.

That's good writing!

Glory!

more. more. maaaoowww!!

I am Otaku Liteâ„¢

ps i like yr sf idea trogdor. do it. do it.

I've been a fool. A drunk, of course. But I'm not always a fool. I think I've finally made the one mistake that can't be undone.

Amontillado. The bastard. Offer me a drink, does he?

Irons. If I weren't fastened down, I could scrape away the mortar between the bricks. I can smell it. It would ooze under my fingers like soft cheese, and I would be free.

The wine in my veins is turning back into blood, and pounding in my head. If only I could let it out. I'd spare myself the indiginity.

He added one last item of humiliation. The cap. The bells.

"Ring the bells softly," he whispered, as the trowel scraped over the rough face of the brick.

This is the worst hangover ever.

***
Poe fan-fic. Now you've seen everything.

Well, maybe not. Slash fic from Paradise Lost, anyone? (I know I'm not going to write it.)

-------------------
There is no sig.

Great stuff!

hey,
this makes my first post here.
i'm new at the board, though ive been a silent witness for quite some time.
my interest in w.gibson's works has brought me here.

She was our driver.

“Take over if you have to”, she said while she leaned across the front seat and leafed through her magazine.

The curve came.

“Turn turn”, I shouted from the back seat.

She looked surprised as she raised her head slightly before returning her focus to what she was reading.

Bill stood up, leaned over and steered us back into our lane. As he jumped into the driver’s seat and pushed her aside, she collapsed and started snoring.

He awoke from his dream of him and Nikki embracing each other, naked, to the white glow of his comp-glasses. "Motherfuck" he said. “Left the goddamn thing on all night” he said to himself. He checked the battery display meter on the lower right-hand corner of the lens; he had about five more minutes until it completely ran out of power. He decided that it would be enough time to check his e-mail. He moved his eyes up to the e-mail icon on the lens and it opened up to him. He had received four messages while he was sleeping, one from Nikki, and the other three were e-mail advertisements for various commercial products. He opened Nikki's e-mail first.

*URGENT*
You must meet me at Jules Verne Cafe immediately. I need your help. Love, Nikki

After he read this he swiftly rose from his chair, that he had fallen asleep in last night, put on his black leather coat he had put over the back of the chair last night, and went out his door at a half run.

He ran through the empty three o'clock streets of New York. He was a handsome man, but not incredibly, he hadn't shaven yet so there was a shadow of a beard on his face, his hair was stuck together in clumps with the grime of not having showered, his eyes had dark rings under them showing that he had not slept for a long time.

Muscles in his legs tightening, he pressed on as fast as he could move. Wind whispering her name in his ears over and over again, Nikki, Nikki, Nikki. Two men he could hardly make out in the darkness came out of an alley to mug him. 'No' he thought. 'No, I can't let them stop me. Have to get to Nikki'. Suddenly his run of desperation changed immediately into what looked like a starving Lion spotting two meaty Gazelles.
Anger and fear mixed together to produce a man about to kill.

He screamed as he approached them. He dreaded what was about to happen, but he knew the outcome couldn't be any other way. He pulled out the 9mm he bought in a dark and wet alley last night.

Five seconds later he woke up from the white light that had engulfed his brain. He looked down. There they were, the two muggers turned out to be simple tourists lost in the wrong part of New York. "Fucking tourists...fucking tourists...” he said. They were a man and woman, Japanese, they looked completely harmless, especially now.

He knew he shouldn't have done it, but he used a payphone to call an ambulance anyway. He knew he shouldn't make her wait any longer.

And he was running again, running for Nikki's life.

Six minutes later he arrived at the Jules Verne Cafe. Nikki was there, waiting for him. She was a Caucasian Russian girl with short, unnaturally red hair, and about 5' 5" tall.
She was beautiful.

Later, the next day they were on an intercity bus to Chicago. That was their strategy. Move through the cities with the countless masses and they wouldn't be able to find them. For a while.

[This message was edited by NCGuy on July 25, 2003 at 11:32 PM.]

"So, anyway, I took it to mean he was pretty into me, y'know? The sort of, 'Hey, let's you and me, like, experience comitment together.' That sort of into. And, um, I guess I thought that because he's always checking me out? That's a sign of attraction, right?"

The grass is green here. But it's sharp, jagged. Shards of broken glass shooting out of the earth's root-rotted soil. Freshly mowed. The stench of allergies heavy, causing the bees to swarm around from pursed petal to petal in some hightened orgasmic glee. Ringged butts pirkily shot into the air. Amanda looks up and around the iSight cam pinching the lip of her laptop, squinting at the local gangers low-riding their bicycles through the park, jeering at eachother with prepubecent taunts.

Flicking back, she gazes back into the screen, to where approximatly-digital-Sam's relaxing into a cup of hoji-cha tea, bare feet propped onto a quilted pillow she got from a guy she met over the 'net who worked in Singapore. ~Sam looks up, chapped lips mouthing above the taught surface of tea settled in the ceramic, "Sure. He seems interested."

"That's what I thought. So I kept, ah, talking to him. Y'know. A call here. And invite to go there. That sort of stuff. Problem was, I got to realize that I was the one instigating all this stuff. But, when we would meet up, he'd do all the talking. Do you know how many times I've had to listen to him bitch about how his roomate's Buddhist and how he believes the 'Right' religion by being Catholic? Not that I'm into religious war or anything, but I think he's got to get off his high horse. I mean, he also rants about the Baptists shoving their religion down his throat, but he goes and does it to his roomate. Saying his is the 'first' and 'true' one. Not to get into details, or anything, but it was Catholism that split from the Orthodox church thousand some-odd years ago. Turn the other cheek, right? Anyway...I'm just wondering when he'll understand my needs in this relationship. Do you know how many times he's asked me how my day was? How I was feeling? Never. I've always volunteered it. I swear, men. They're so confusing. If he's interested in me, he should just say it. If he's not, he should say that, too. Not, 'Oh, I think you're really interesting. I'm just not sure if you're my type yet. I think we're going too fast.' What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Ugh."

Eric's still asleep, Sam notices, as she glances to the futon halfhazardly unfolded two steps outside of camera shot. She can partly see the leaf-shape ear of the Elf he's got tatooed on his right arm. A trophy from a game of D&D they were in a few years back. Apparently his fighter was possessed by the soul of some necromancer once he dispatched her. Sam'll agree, it was some intense role-play. But, Eric, always being almost too into his characters took it far, and got the picture. A tribute to the perversion his character must endure.

Dork, Sam thinks to herself, head sliding into fingertips holding her skull up by the eyesockets. Dully aware of Amanda's whimpering 2,000 miles east of here, she murmurs a advice, "Don't talk to him for a few weeks. See if he calls. If not, date his best friend."

Imagine that "Run Lola Run" girl, except her hair is a bit shorter and not as poofy in my imagination. Also she's dressed more like a New Yorker. Also, also she's Russian. or Russian/American. Or Russo/American. Or whatever you like to call it.

Glory!

Praise the fruit of such a beautiful tree!

Praise it!

Nowhere but on Mr. Gibson's board will you find such wonders! A cult of writers!

Praise it!

An office, 17 macs on a shelf loop around the observer. The sound of the more than 17 mac-fans is giving the observer a tempo to think on. Two young adults, a boldy-wise-wannabe and a good-boy-turned-lucky are discussing instead of finishing the work that is going take them long into the night. The boldy was planning his trip to a remote beautifull place this morning. The lad has resigned to his no-more vacations fate. The lad is surprisingly lucky with women these past weeks, had several encounters turn intimate... Boldy is now saying how inadmissible the lad's behaviour is (going from flower to flower even though he states his intentions) because he is missing out on the most important experiences of love and sharing regardless of the fact that boldy would visit many more flowers given the opportunity. And he calls to names meaningfull to none but the two of them, uses big words in the worse possible way, and still his jelousy is the only speaker and obvious to all but him...
What is his reaction going to be when his beatifull plans for romantic moments will become dreams of things that could have been? Because boldy is the only one that can do the observer's tasks and the observer is going to be history by next week.

The observer smiles and thinks "How can a calm and nice guy like me be so nasty?...what you reap, grows and bites you back in the..."

[This message was edited by Bluhomie on July 26, 2003 at 08:21 AM.]

I am a black cat. I know how to type. I speak three human and two animal languages. Now that you are reading my story you know that I can write. Actually, I hate technology yet it gives me fun. I prefer face to face and non-verbal communication. I devoted my existence to the asthetics of communication. I suffer from human egoism. Nothing surprises me.

I am an 666 years old black cat. I cursed the humanity. I installed black holes in the spirits of human beings.They live in 'de ja vu'. They are amused by the Matrix.Their faces are white as corpses. They like blood.

I am a sleepy black cat. I will have a nap and dream of bloodred surprises.