Author:
Taxonomy upgrade extras:
I'd recently been trying to create a new blog while looking at an old blog, and I'd accidently deleted the old blog. I really liked the old blog and the responses I'd gotten to it, so I decided to create a new blog entry with the contents of the old blog. Wish me luck!
Below are bits and pieces of stories and story ideas I've had simmering on the back burner of my imagination for a while. It's just little peeks into the stories, so nothing is complete. I've just been wanting to share a bit of something with everyone after having been in a writing slump for a while. If anyone has any thought or suggestions on anything, I'd love to hear it. :) All the story fragments and story ideas below are copyright 2008 by Heather Rose Brown.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Breakdown
The light tapping on the stall door almost sounded aplogetic. "Paula?"
I wiped at my cheek with the back of my hand, then stared at my knuckles, wondering where the dark smears had come from.
"Paula, is that you in there?"
It took me a few seconds before I realized the voice on the other side of the door was talking to me. I tried thinking of some sort of intelligent response, but all I could think of saying was, "Who?"
"Honey, could you please come out of there so we can talk?"
I was starting to get annoyed. "Please, whoever you are, just go away. I'm trying to have a nervous breakdown in private here."
"The ladies room isn't the best place to go for privacy, Paula."
=-=-=
Chance and Hope
Chanceroy Livingston, known as Chance to almost everyone, was only vaguely aware of the way his sneakers were filling with stagnant water. He barely noticed how the raspberry bushes lining the ditch snagged at his jeans and scratched his bare arms. After headlights passed overhead and the rumble of the lone pickup truck was a distant memory, the scrawny teenager pulled himself back up to the narrow strip of cracked and pitted asphalt that passed for a road this deep in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.
A stiff breeze hissed across a field of tall, dried weeds. The bright harvest moon made it look like an ocean of silver waves. In the middle of that ocean was an island of shadows in the shape of an abandonded two story house. The goosebumps Chance felt rising under his soaked clothes wasn't just because of the chill of the night. It wasn't the cool breeze that made him shiver.
It was the house ... the house where his best friend, Hope, had died.
=-=-=
Daddy's Little Girl - Christmas Day
Sipping my fourth cup of coffee for the night (or was it the first cup for the morning?), I studied the scruffy face of the man I used to call my husband. He set his cup on the ancient kitchen table separating us, missing the saucer I'd put in front of him for just that purpose by several inches. "Are you sure you don't want to call Jack and tell him it's okay to be here?"
I imitated Mark's action, but waited for the clink of stoneware against stoneware before shaking my head. "I don't think he'd come today, or at least not this morning, no matter what I said. We discussed it for quite a while yesterday, and he seems convinced things would work out better if, at least initially, it was just you, me, and our son."
Mark's bushy eyebrows popped up. "Our son?"
I closed my eyes and sighed. "I mean our ... child."
I opened my eyes back up when I felt his hand on mine and was taken by surprise when I saw the deep concern in his golden brown eyes. "Theresa," he whispered, "are you thinking of backing out?"
"No," I answered just as quietly. "I've tried doing things my way and wound up with a miserable, withdrawn child. It's been breaking my heart seeing hi--her like that."
My former husband nodded, and stared at his half-empty cup before asking, "How does Jack feel about this?"
I shifted my hand under his, took hold of his fingers and squeezed them gently. "Actually, he was the one who initially suggested maybe what I was doing wasn't helping."
Mark looked back up at me, the pain in his eyes replaced by impish mirth. "He had the nerve to suggest you might be mistaken? He's a much braver man than I."
I could feel my cheeks growing warm. "I'm not really that bad, am I?"
=-=-=
Dolly Daddy - Part 2
"Substance, void, time, information," I muttered under my breath as a scrawled those words in capital letters across the dusty chalkboard. I turned my back on those four words and faced a lecture hall full of peers and colleagues, both friends and rivals. I was too caught up in the glorious thrall of lecture mode to ask them why they were all so small or why both the men and women were wearing very infintile looking dresses.
Without breaking my stride, I walked up to the podium, then gestured to the what I had just written. "Those are the four basic elements apon which *everything*, including the elements, are based. Each of them can be defined by the relationship of the other three. Also, each element can be," I paused as I searched for a word my audience would be able to grasp, "folded, or perhaps rolled into one of the other elements. It is apon this last realizition upon which my mass displacement device is based."
"Daddy, what are you talking about?"
I opened my eyes and was confronted by an inexplicably enlarged version of my daughters face. I blinked a few times, wondering if I was still wearing my micro-magnification contacts. "I'm sorry, sweetheart. I must have dozed off again."
"Actually, you fainted."
=-=-=
MARS - Male Adult Regression Syndrome
This is a story about how society changes when male adults all over the United States (and maybe the Contiguous Sovereign States, Canada, and Mexico as well) begin regressing both mentally and emotionally to early childhood.
Eventually, it will be discovered that a popular nutritional supplement that had been introduced into the regular diets of the majority of people in the United States triggered the regression when the FDA had banned it's use.
Symptoms only showed up in men, and were mostly undetectable in anyone under twenty. Initially, they would find new growth where they had lost hair due to male pattern baldness, but they would also lose all other hair gained during puberty.
=-=-=
Persona Death
In a world where there were too many people and not enough food, a solution was found: sharing bodies. This is the story of one individual, known as a persona, who's accused of killing another persona sharing the same body. The most damning evidence is his own memory of the murder.
The body of the story tells of his incarceration in the State Mind, which is an artifical mind created by the government for housing potentially dangerous personas who are awaiting trial. While being held there, he is met by another persona who believes he is innocent and eventually convinces him to escape...into her body.
While adjusting to a new body shared by his new friend, he gathers up evidence related to the murder, and discovers personas presumed to be deleted (executed by the State) are actually still, in thier own ways, alive. While they've lost everything one might identify as personality, they still have will and memory.
In the end, he discovers his personality had been hijacked by this collective mind, then after it commited the murder, left behind what they did in his own memory. At first, the State believes he is just making up a wild tale to avoid being deleted, but eventually convinces them of the truth when he is forced back into the State Mind and faces off the real murderer, who's been lurking in the persona deletion grid.
=-=-=
The Magic Swingset - Part 2
I lay in bed thinking about the long 'chat' I'd had with my mom when she'd gotten home from work. Once she seemed to have gotten over me falling from the swing, she went from being worried to ... well, not exactly angry, but frustrated. Mostly the chat had been about the way I'd been acting lately and how I couldn't be a tomboy forever.
I sat up slowly, still aching a bit from the fall, and looked down at myself. My clothes still looked pretty much the same. My jeans seemed to be made of a lighter material, but the were still jeans. My grey sweatshirt wasn't different at all. Of course, when I'd had to go to the bathroom before my mom had gotten home, I discovered some things had changed.
Just as I was going over the shock of finding myself wearing girls briefs (and what I found under them), I noticed something beeping under my bed. I reached under my bed and found my Nintendo DS exactly where I'd left it this morning. Once I got the built in chat program running, it took me a minute to figure out why Marcie97 was paging me until I remembered my friend had used Mark97 when she had been a he.
=-=-=
What the Hey?
Submitted by Sephrena Lynn Miller on Fri, 2008/12/26 - 7:57am.
Those are excellent stories right there Heather! Why aren't they expanded upon? Geez! You made me want to read everyone of them!!!!!!! Write, write, write1 You have the Write stuff! Just do it! :)
Love You (and those stories ideas!)
Sephrena Lynn Miller
BigCloset TopShelf
Wow! more ideas than you can shake a stick at!
Submitted by Pleione on Fri, 2008/12/26 - 8:13am.
Just need a bit of stirring, add some seasoning, turn up the heat and server to an appreciative audience.
Please don't leave them on the back burner and let them get all dried out ;-)
Pleione
Goodies!
Submitted by Karen J on Fri, 2008/12/26 - 4:34pm.
I really like the snippet of the scene titled "Breakdown"; and the bit titled "Daddy's Little Girl - Christmas Day" has the makings of a good melodrama from the looks of it. My only suggestion for now would be to concentrate on those two. :-)
KJT
Moving a story from the back burner
Submitted by Heather Rose Brown on Sat, 2008/12/27 - 9:33am.
Hi everyone! Thank you so much for all your comments. It actually got me going again on Daddy's Little Girl - Christmas Day. I had hoped to finish it in time to be posted by Christmas day, but I'd been caught up taking care of some other things. I was originally planning on waiting until next Christmas to post it, but I decided it really isn't that far away from this Christmas, so I put it up now. :)
