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Thursday, July 23, 2009

In the interests of collaboration, I am posting the first paragraph of a story for others to build on. Each person gets a paragraph to do with what they will.
Keen?

I figure the way to do it is leave your paragraph as a comment on this post, and number the paragraph. If you feel like being alternative you can make your paragraph no.267 or the like, and write the end of the story, or the middle etc. If the story ever reaches a conclusion, I'll compile all the paragraphs as one big post.

1.

In an attempt to gather some dignity, he went back to the party. There, he laughed at all the wrong moments.
No one took much notice.
His friends hovered at the horizon of his haze, occasionally breaking in to ply him with a drink or take a cigarette. He danced for a while, and then slammed down some tequila with the host. He left by midnight. He walked fast, only vaguely keeping an eye out for the supposed shadowed monsters of the City night. Though his pace was determined, his thoughts were aimless. He was avoiding it. He rounded the corner to his house, and retreated from the amber glow to a sleepless bed.

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6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

(2)When, eventually, unwillingly, sleep grabbed him, his dreams did not wander like his gait. Instead, he fell through sky and water and earth, towards a not un-pretty girl. He fell until he almost touched her, but she moved slightly away, reaching out, smiling. He felt like he might fall forever. He felt afraid.

On waking he took a bath and noticed a ring of red glitter around his tub, matching the bloodied edge of his left nostril.

And she was gone.

July 23, 2009 at 8:59 AM  
Anonymous polok said...

3) On the telly something about crack addicts and the usual as he bent over his laptop and started writing out his letter of resignation.
...bloody bob pops up with that annoying 'bloop' from msn saying hi as one of those cape winds runs uninvited into the room and chases all the glitter out the bathroom and into his living room.

July 23, 2009 at 11:01 AM  
Blogger Simon Tamblyn said...

4)which made him think. Icicles.

July 27, 2009 at 3:07 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

5.)Edward needed air, a walk would do the trick, to clear his mind of the previous evening. Pausing on his way down the path he retrieved a crumpled and damp letter from the post box… when he wondered, was the last time he received mail… as in hand written mail, delivered by the post man and not Google? Months, perhaps. He fingered the envelope… foreign postage stamps. Not sure where from but definitely foreign. So much for the walk, he dumped his coat at the front door and sat on the edge of his bed, feeling its weight and size with eyes closed. A couple of pages at least. He removed the sheets from the envelope, and started creasing them along the original folds. One he folded into a heart, the next a dragon with wings that flap, an aeroplane, which he tossed across the room. Reworking the pages with his hands, twisting the paper, some turned to gunk which stuck under his nails. Some fell to the floor. Heaps of confetti which looked like snow, discarded and disintegrated. Edward concentrated on the pieces, looking through one eye, turning them into patterns and pictures. Days later the broken up bits of yellowing paper, still lay strewn across the floor, markers of minutes, hours, days, years.

August 11, 2009 at 4:28 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

He woke with an almost inhuman yelp. He felt as a convict would after going to sleep in his cell and awaking in a Woolworths next to the well presented quick dinners: disorientated.

He had dreamt of Edward, he knew that much. Some hint of a party and paper planes still clung to him in the fog, like the fog, hazy and incomplete. Coffee, cigarette, e-mail, an apology from an ex-lover, coffee. The pristine melancholy of the dream picked at him, pouring Edward all over his morning.

August 15, 2009 at 12:18 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

just a suggestion... maybe you should combine the stories in your own way and then repost a new "thread" so that it doesn't disappear into nothingness. then it will be fresh in peoples minds and it will be reworked.

August 19, 2009 at 12:09 PM  

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