I'm gonna be quick, the reasons for the lack of updates are as follow.
-My grandma was diagnosticated of cancer, i'm currently working and centering myself in helping her.
-Because of that, i'm working 2 jobs and studying at night, which leaves me with very little time to write (that's why y'all can see i'm still reading some fics but never wrote another chapter, my free time is used up)
-Not only that, but while i have a the entire fic somewhat planned, because of time constraints things like lore checking and making sure i don't make a plot hole takes a lot more time than just writing.
Maybe i'll upload the paper where it says my grandma has a malignant tumor as proof if y'all don't believe me(btw because my grandma and me are from a technically 3rd world country the health system is trash, which means to have a decent chance of her living we need to spend a lot of money, which is why i have 2 jobs)
Idk what to do with this fic, as it doesn't generate me any income and it would take a lot of time to write, that and having to make a fic paywalled is not something i'm comfortable in doing (I'm seeing you, scammer GhostyZ) and i need money for my grandmas treatment so idk.
Maybe i'll go with the fic going from daily to weekly, create a p*treon where everytime someone joins, i'll post 2 to 3 chapters as bonus? here btw, not on p***treon, if someone joins everyone gets the price, and a K***ofi where every time someone donates i'll post 2 to 3 chapters as bonus too? idk, i need y'all opinions in this.
Basically, if i want to continue this fic (i want) is not going to be the same as before, with a chapter per day, but a weekly chapter and me making a p*treon and a K-ofi (even if i'm not comfortable with making money from ip's that are not mine).
Or i just drop it and we all go with our lives
Which means it's time to choose:
Continue? (i will need y'all to help me, if not joing p*treon or K-ofi then sharing the fic so that people are aware why i'm doing this)
Drop it (and we all go with our lives like this fic never existed)
Choose in those 2 paragraphs or in the chapters comments
Meanwhile, i'm going to word fill to bump chapter and get fic recomended.
Communion of brothers
A long time ago I wanted to write a western. Well, sort of a western. I was looking for something with the thin, stretched feel of a spaghetti or revisionist western but set in a dying world. So, a spaghetti dystopia, I suppose.
The idea was pretty simple. The women and children of our world have been killed by a disease called Lifeboats Disease, as in women and children first. The men don't seem to be contracting it but society has fallen to ruins. With no hope of a future and no guarantee they won't all fall ill, the world has become a very different place.
I wanted the main story to tell the story of a young man who is forced to become something worse than the murderous monster he was. I wanted him to learn the dangers of hope and faith in a world where neither exactly fit. But, before we got to him, I wanted the introduction to be almost a scene setter. A separate little vignette set in the same world. A way of setting up the atmosphere before we moved into the story itself.
What you have here, is the beginning of that vignette.
A cold wind blew hard over the brittle surface of the faltering world that morning. The arthritic sun rose slowly to claim its rightful place in the pale, stretched sky. Its thin, sallow light bled meekly through the grey and impotent clouds.....
pony street murder club
I was happy writing fantasy until Fight Club came along. I saw the movie at the cinema the night it came out and the damn thing broke my mind. It changed how I thought about stories and characters. I changed what I understood about twists and it also did something to me when it came to the idea of rhythm. So, what I did, was to start trying to write a fantasy that fit with that model.
The Pony Street Murder Club was the result. The first novel length story I ever finished. It's as rough as hell and pretty cheesy, but I thought I'd share the prologue with you here. The main story concerned itself with a young man who thinks he's become a faith healer until he learns that he has actually become Death. It's a long and complicated (and pretty juvenile) story. Still, I'm a glutton for punishment. I thought I'd let you read a bit of it.
The Angel of the Lord sits by my side in our stolen car and tells me to watch. He tells me not to look away, not to miss a thing.
"Don't miss that old woman getting mugged and beaten across the street," he says, whilst he tries to retune the radio. "See how they're kicking her fragile, old skull in? I can guarantee you those men are going to spend all their ill-gotten gains on drugs and end up giving their cheap, whore girlfriends some terrible disease one day in the not too distant future."....
The costume party
Halloween 2017 was the first time I ever stood in front of an audience and told them a horror story. I went with something dark, grisly and a little funny. I thought it would be the best way to keep them interested, especially seeing as there was a well stocked bar nearby.
The people organising the event told me the story needed to be no longer than ten minutes. The final draft I came up with turned out to be considerably longer than ten minutes, so the delete key really got a chance to stretch its legs before we headed to the venue.
As a special treat for you kind people, I've decided to put the full version of the story here. Let's call it a director's cut, if only to keep my ego happy.
As I slipped on the jacket and struggled with the tie, I realised I'd never been a fan of Halloween parties. I didn't even go in for trick or treating as a kid. The whole season had always seemed a little tacky to me. It was never a religious statement or anything to do with hating being scared. Ask anyone who knows me and they'll tell you I've always enjoyed a decent horror movie.
Halloween is simply a little too touristy. All those plastic pitchforks and crumpled, cardboard witch hats. The face paint that rinses off with a little party sweat and the fangs that fall out mid-sentence. It all cheapens a good scare.....
Blindsight Saifullah Usmani
I wish I never got my sight back.That thought crossed my mind sitting outside the hospital, in the green Chevrolet Camaro my father left me. The sun rose, bathing the city in its warm glow, but my body still felt cold. The smell of old leather and the hard steering wheel under my hand take me back to just a few months ago when I drove it for the first time. Right after I had my surgery for Retinitis Pigmentosa.To be clear, I hadn't lost my sight completely, I was just in the process of losing it. I've had the condition ever since I got glass...
Windows to the Soul Helen Tynan
I ring the doorbell, my suitcase hunkered beside me on the footpath, a black, sullen thing. After a few moments, the door swings open. Jane, my eldest, looks surprised to see me. "Mam," she says. "What are you doing here?" No how lovely to see you or I've missed you. She hasn't come to see me once since she left, years ago. She eyes my suitcase on the pavement. "I've come to stay," I say simply. "Stay?" she says, not understanding. "With me?" I nod. "For the weekend?" she says. I shake my head. "For as long as you'll have me." We look
NE dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.
In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name "Mr. James Dillingham Young."
The "Dillingham" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, though, they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called "Jim" and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.
Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling—something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.
There was a pier glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art.
Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. Her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.
Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim's gold watch that had been his father's and his grandfather's. The other was Della's hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.
So now Della's beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.
On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.
Where she stopped the sign read: "Mme. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds." One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the "Sofronie."
"Will you buy my hair?" asked Della.
"I buy hair," said Madame. "Take yer hat off and let's have a sight at the looks of it."
Down rippled the brown cascade.
"Twenty dollars," said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.
"Give it to me quick," said Della.
Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's present.
She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation—as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim's. It was like him. Quietness and value—the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.
When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends—a mammoth task.
Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
"If Jim doesn't kill me," she said to herself, "before he takes a second look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do—oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?"
At 7 o'clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.
Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit of saying a little silent prayer about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: "Please God, make him think I am still pretty."
The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two—and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.
Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.
Della wriggled off the table and went for him.
"Jim, darling," she cried, "don't look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn't have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It'll grow out again—you won't mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say 'Merry Christmas!' Jim, and let's be happy. You don't know what a nice—what a beautiful, nice gift I've got for you."
"You've cut off your hair?" asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.
"Cut it off and sold it," said Della. "Don't you like me just as well, anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?"
Jim looked about the room curiously.
"You say your hair is gone?" he said, with an air almost of idiocy.
"You needn't look for it," said Della. "It's sold, I tell you—sold and gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered," she went on with sudden serious sweetness, "but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?"
Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year—what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.
Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.
"Don't make any mistake, Dell," he said, "about me. I don't think there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first."
White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.
For there lay The Combs—the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims—just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.
But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: "My hair grows so fast, Jim!"
And then Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, "Oh, oh!"
Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.
"Isn't it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it."
Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.
"Dell," said he, "let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em a while. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on."
The magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men—who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
Remember, Choose.