Entry tags:

fanworks: silent hill, poetry, school stuff, zombietown

Portfolio - Short Works
In Writer's Craft last semester, instead of an exam we had to compile a portfolio of our best works in the class. This post contains some of the shorter pieces - I'll post the longer ones in a little while once I have a chance to look them over again.



Quite Interesting - Concrete/Found Poetry

All quotes and phrases are taken from the British panel show QI, hosted by Stephen Fry. Seeing as I only have a crappy old version of Photoshop that doesn't include paths, I was forced to compose this whole thing using only the Warped Text tool. Most fun I have ever had with Photoshop that didn't involve macros of some kind.

Fog - Tanka

This holds the prestige of being the only honest-to-god poem I have ever written that doesn't make me want to stab my eyes out. It should be fairly obvious what it's about.

The coal fires still burn
Beneath this desolate town.
Listen, in the depths:
The faintest sound of footsteps,
The scrape of rusted metal.





Club 23 - Descriptive Exercise

Club 23 is where two of the main characters in Zombietown, my 2006 NaNo, work as dancers. I got a little ridiculous with the stylization here, which is why this ended up containing the longest coherent sentence I have ever, to my knowledge, written.

The place is not particularly impressive when seen from outside: simply a squat rectangular structure with "Club 23" written above the door in plain white letters, surrounded by dingy shops selling beer and cigarettes and other things to entice the passing clubgoers. In front of it are the benches where Micky and Brian and I would sit during the daytime, eating chips and catcalling any available pedestrians.

Just inside is the doorman's stool, where he sits and scowls and stamps hands all night long. Beyond is the main staircase, which leads directly down to the main dance floor, big and square and black. The walls are black, the floor is black, what bits of the ceiling are still visible behind the lighting rigs are black—in some places old black paint peels away to reveal further layers of black, black paint job over black paint job over black paint job in a seemingly infinite recursion. In one corner, the DJ booth (black, down to the black MacBook Peter brings in for his more complex mixes), a tangled mess of wires and turntables and samplers and mixers; scattered across the room, the various poles and cages and platforms for the paid dancers (also black but with areas of silver metal where it was absolutely unavoidable).

Set into one wall is a small door (black except for the yellow "biohazard" sign put up by one of the past dancers as a joke that no one had ever gotten around to taking down), through which one might find, if one had the proper clearance or didn't mind being summarily tossed out by the bouncer, a narrow flight of stairs (not so black after the first couple of feet, although a general aura of dimness still remains) leading up to the dressing room, with its haphazard rows of racks and hangars and cabinets all filled with corsets and miniskirts and boots and gloves and jeans and fishnets and halter tops and the rare hat or two (overall black, with bits of red and blue and green and the occasional dash of fluorescence to liven things up), and the rickety old chairs where we would sit and talk and laugh until it was time for our shift. (There are still old donut boxes and styrofoam coffee cups scattered around beneath the mess of clothes, remnants of past late-night reunions.)

Hidden behind one rack is a small alcove with a window looking out onto the sidewalk in front of the door. Usually it is covered by thick drapes for privacy (black, of course), but on occasion Micky would throw it open and we would join her in soliciting passers-by to enter the club. She would flirt and spin tales of various mythical goings-on inside, Brian and I would flutter our eyelashes and purr, and sometimes we did manage to attract a patron or two, although more often they would only stop long enough for a chat with the ever-gregarious Micky.