Oolite Bulletins

No, not the lottery...

I was this year's winner of the Wordwatchers Short Story Competition, and while that doesn't sound like much when you realise that Wordwatchers is just a small group of writer's trying to get published here in little Newbury, but previous winners include my friends Katherine and Charlotte (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Legacy-Katherin ... 409117162/ and http://www.amazon.co.uk/Apothecarys-Dau ... 749954442/) who are now full blown proper published authors. OK, it helps that they actually had finished novels too - but I feel re-inspired to get moving with mine again.

Anyway, if anybody is curious (the theme - we always have a theme - was simply the word "Stranded"), the winning story is here: http://www.box.net/shared/mnz0vgq4n9

Man, I am so pleased for you - that is truely AWESOME! Well done!

I shall be reading that this evening. Get out there for a beer and blow your trumpet!

Congratulations, I bet you are bouncing off the roof!

Cheers,

Drew.

Just read the story on Box.net. Really enjoyed it, I can see why you won!

Congrats!

DaddyHoggy, this is a really beautiful story. Looking forward to your first novel.

another_commander wrote:

DaddyHoggy, this is a really beautiful story. Looking forward to your first novel.

Thank-you for the kind words - I too am looking forward to my first novel (it's in my head - but it doesn't always make it to the end of my fingers as intended)

Just read this, DH, and I must say - It's wonderful! Thank you!

Cmd. Cheyd wrote:

Just read this, DH, and I must say - It's wonderful! Thank you!

<shuffles feet> Gee, thanks guys...

Marvellous!

And congratulations, for sure!!

Yeah… very good tale, DH… I like it.

(And not an indent in sight).

Finally got round to reading this on the train last night. Very impressed. It would make a great short story. I was reading thinking 'more background, more detail, more, more, more!'



Seriously good. Well done.

Cheers,

Drew.

drew wrote:

Finally got round to reading this on the train last night. Very impressed. It would make a great short story. I was reading thinking 'more background, more detail, more, more, more!'



Seriously good. Well done.

Cheers,

Drew.

Cheer Drew.

This is a huge story - I had enough bullet points before I started writing for an estimated 5-10K words. One of my favourite scenes which I had to drop in its entirety was how Colin learns via books from a hospital and libraries and from pig carcasses in a butchers how to be a heart surgeon so that he can save the life of a woman who is trapped in her car post-RTA and is pierced through the chest by a part of the car...

Some of my fellow Wordwatchers even suggested its a good premise for a TV series - each episode reveals a little bit more about Colin's experiences - and people he's helped - which in our time line Doug then tracks down to see what impact Colin's intervention has actually made...

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Some of my fellow Wordwatchers even suggested its a good premise for a TV series - each episode reveals a little bit more about Colin's experiences - and people he's helped - which in our time line Doug then tracks down to see what impact Colin's intervention has actually made...

A problem I can see with that is the ever-growing distance between Doug and Colin. If I have understood correctly Colin has completed his work and filled the entire British Library right in the beginning of the story. So his descendants are already gone for good before Doug ever gets to read the first book. Which means (1) that we never will get any interaction between the two heroes (unless it turns out that Colin did something to Doug as well) and (2) that, as more time passes, it becomes more unlikely for Doug to track down new "fixes", because somebody else would've found them already. So he would learn of the "fixes" long before he would ever get the chance to read them up in the diaries. On top of that, how long would that take? Diaries filling the whole friggin' British Library would not only require a lifetime for him to read, without ever going outdoors and tracking down anything, but would require dozens (or hundreds) of people dozens (or hundreds) of lifetimes to read, without ever going outdoors and tracking down anything. The task is just too overwhelmingly huge. While reading I had the feeling of a gap, widening at an exponentially increasing rate, and I was worried it would swallow the story.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing the story. I liked the premise very much, but I think the implications of what happened in the story are just too big to handle.

Oh, and I think I found some typos. Interested? Or have you already proofread this version (v2) all over again?

Commander McLane wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Some of my fellow Wordwatchers even suggested its a good premise for a TV series - each episode reveals a little bit more about Colin's experiences - and people he's helped - which in our time line Doug then tracks down to see what impact Colin's intervention has actually made...

A problem I can see with that is the ever-growing distance between Doug and Colin. If I have understood correctly Colin has completed his work and filled the entire British Library right in the beginning of the story. So his descendants are already gone for good before Doug ever gets to read the first book. Which means (1) that we never will get any interaction between the two heroes (unless it turns out that Colin did something to Doug as well) and (2) that, as more time passes, it becomes more unlikely for Doug to track down new "fixes", because somebody else would've found them already. So he would learn of the "fixes" long before he would ever get the chance to read them up in the diaries. On top of that, how long would that take? Diaries filling the whole friggin' British Library would not only require a lifetime for him to read, without ever going outdoors and tracking down anything, but would require dozens (or hundreds) of people dozens (or hundreds) of lifetimes to read, without ever going outdoors and tracking down anything. The task is just too overwhelmingly huge. While reading I had the feeling of a gap, widening at an exponentially increasing rate, and I was worried it would swallow the story.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing the story. I liked the premise very much, but I think the implications of what happened in the story are just too big to handle.

Oh, and I think I found some typos. Interested? Or have you already proofread this version (v2) all over again?

I also found two typos - but they might not be your typos - so yes please.

And yes, you're right, there is supposed to be an ever widening gap between Doug and Colin. Doug's auto-translating cybernetic eye is a direct result of what Colin and his descendents worked on in that blinking of an eye.

There's a much bigger back-story, involving the LHC, the fact that there's a genetic reason Colin could only pull some other people out of time, why there were only ever 174 "Stranded", how these "Stranded" (who live and die, breath, eat, and procreate) deplete the world of almost all its food stock, but leave behind working examples of energy/matter converters to act as the templates to build food replicators and the fusion reactors to power them.

What possibly (obviously) didn't come out in this short 2000 word version was the fact that Doug has the head of an institution by the time he retired, the whole institution (although I think I underwhelmingly called it a "team in the story) dedicated to cross matching events from the diaries. The final idea was that, the diaries would confirm or deny all the events that were "claimed" to be because of Colin... eventually....

(One of my Writer's circle pointed something out too - "It was lucky Colin was a "good guy" - otherwise this story could have been a much more murky affair" - I hadn't thought of that!)

Before I forget it, here is an idea I had, completely unrelated to what we discussed above:

There is a mention early in the story that everybody else seems to move faster than Doug. He puts it on the lack of caffeine in his system. But what about he would experience the opposite of what happened to Colin? (Whatever caused the time anomaly for Colin & Co could produce the adverse effect for another group of people.)

So Doug would also fall out of the "normal" time frame. While he reads through the diaries, a huge amount of time would pass, everybody he knows would die, and he would see the long-term effects of Colins fixes evolve while aging only very slowly himself. In the end one of Colin's discoveries could cure him, or not.

Don't know whether it would be worthwhile to explore a little more down this road...