Tag: fiction

Story: “It was a really bad day.”

This was the first story I wrote for my 11th grade creative writing elective; I was reminded of this by the play, it’s mostly Hunter-ish slice of life with a bit of odd imaginative departure from reality.

Martin Berger had a remarkably annoying Thursday. In the morning, he did poorly on a test in AP Chem. At lunch, Jennifer canceled their date, and informed him that she never wanted to see him again. He therefore had a very good excuse when he responded to his English teacher’s question about the Illiad with “The root is two-plus-five-i.” Of course, Mr. Travidia had no knowledge of Martin’s bad day, and assumed that Martin was just slacking.

Full story after the break. No warnings needed, but the Gulf War references (which were already pretty dated in the fall of 1992) are quite outdated may seem inappropriate of place to folks unfamiliar with the early 1990s.

Continue reading “Story: “It was a really bad day.””

Another fragment of fiction – I started writing a play?

One of the weird things about getting to my age and having been a digital pack rat before such things were common, is that I occasionally find things I wrote in the distant past that I have almost no memory of.

To wit, at the start of ninth grade (Sept. 1990), I started writing a play, some sort of vaguely Walter Mitty-ish thing about a self-insert main character with an invisible friend. I definitely reused a lot of character names in later things, and it would not surprise me if this was the first appearance of several of them.

Here’s a sample above the break.

[Derek] Stands up, wearing dirty sweatpants and t-shirt. Goes towards bathroom.

George: Ahem… Aren’t you forgetting SOMETHING…

Derek: No.

George: Your CLOTHES, numbskull. You can’t go to school like THAT.

Derek: And why can’t I?

George:
[Aside] Why? He asks me why!
[To Derek] Because you’d be the object of public ridicule, that’s why!

Derek [Taking Clothes from drawer]: So? There’s nothing unusual about that.

Full text below the break. At some point I may put in some thoughts on repeated characters I used back then, and where this may have been going

Content warning: casual/gratuitous use of profanity

(Yes, I could edit out the f-bombs, but I’d like to remain true to my 14-year-old self no matter how idiotic I was back then.)

Continue reading “Another fragment of fiction – I started writing a play?”