yup,--haven't officially dropped the story on 406ness.com quite yet. special preview for y'all.

ooh,--a horror short. finish it and post it, i could offer feedback.

hella cool.

My favorite words occupy more thought-space than I'm readily willing to admit. Sometimes I worry that the words mean more to me than the things I associate them with... But hey--I'm drunk as fuck and it's a fresh day of the new year! This is no time for dialectic crises!

I say the word yikes a lot, that's an all-time classic. Just the way it feels, and the shape my face makes when I say it tells you everything about how I'm feeling. The 'y' at the beginning is fun, that 'yuh' sound is underrated. The hard 'k' at the end, it's just explosive and sounds nice and punchy. It's just an expression, it barely means anything. But the sound is just as important.

Rambunctious. I never use this word, but often I'll catch myself saying it so much in my head that it loses all meaning. Truthfully, most of my favorite words are chosen not because of their meaning, but because of the way it sounds, the twists my tongue gets to make and the shapes my mouth is allowed to form.

Anyone but those fucking Red Sux.

Your instructor is right, that sentence is dope. And you're right too, adding clauses isn't always a bad thing. The semicolon thing is right, too, but I think it's easy to overdo it with those. I guess I come from the minimalist school of thought. But I think the important lesson here (as we've seen with all the different viewpoints and what kleinbl00 said about 'correctness' in our language) is that it's important to switch it up, as you said. Damn, I'm just reading through all these replies. Punctuation and grammar just set this place off.

Yeah, in the Translator's Note in my edition the guy talks about how Camus acknowledged employing this 'American method' in writing the book. "the short, precise sentences; the depiction of a character ostensibly without consciousness; and, in places, the 'tough guy' tone." Kind of interesting, but I wonder why.

Extremely interesting. Thanks for sharing this insom. That whole thing about Münchausen syndrome got me all inspired and shit for a story... Twenty-five Wikipedia pages later...

I'm super-duper late on this. But here are a few books I can read over and over again...

Lolita, Vladmir Nabokov.

So lyrical, funny as hell, and masterfully written. This man influenced me heavily. (The writing part, not the pedophile part.)

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy.

Another master at work, and (in my opinion) this is his masterpiece. Some of the most on-point dialogue you'll ever read comes from this man's head. Jarringly violent and told with this sort of neo-biblical voice that only few can pull off. An impressive work that I come back to every now and again.

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner.

Another massive influence on me. Honestly, it's hard to pick just one of his novels. I had never read anything like it before. Faulkner's plotting and pacing has always impressed me. I love how he jumps into the mind's of all of these different characters, and each one feels fresh and different. A book packed with meaning and dark humor, one of my all-time favorites.

That's a good question, lil. I'd say it's a mixed bag--certain authors and books influenced me at different points in my life, for a bunch of different reasons. So I guess my list bedside books would be different depending on when you asked me. For example, when I was in high school I read this book called The Last Domino by little-known author Adam Meyer. It's one of my favorite books and I remember at the time how great of a story I thought it was. I read it three times, I e-mailed the author and asked him for writing tips. I haven't picked it up in a few years now but it inspired me a lot. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger is another favorite book of mine that (again) I read in high school. Now, I have a much broader view of literature as a whole--I read (a lot) more than I did in high school and other books have had time to impact me.

Yeah, I'll often creep on somebody's profile like a pre-teen girl hooked on Facebook just to see what they're into, what their bio says, and what they've been sharing/posting. It's kind of like looking at someone's online dating profile or something, to see if our interests might be compatible.

Hey guys, I have to pass my turn for now--kind of busy getting things ready for a move. AshShields, take the reins my dude.

I've read and re-read these essays and if you're interested in improving your writing, I highly recommend them. One thing though, is that a lot of Chuck's advice is mainly useful if you want to write like Chuck does. Not that there is anything wrong with that--that's just how it is. I mainly use the first person, so a lot of Chuck's style and writing advice applies to me. It just depends on your style. That being said, a lot can be learned from these essays regardless of how you write.

I hate Walter. He's pretty much gone full antagonist for me at this point. Dude is a despicable human being--how could anyone even argue otherwise? He's consistently shown that he will commit any atrocity to save his own ass. He lets his own pride and ego get in the way constantly. I think the major turning point from 'relatable character in a desperate situation' to 'total villain' was when he made the choice to poison Brock with the Lilly of the Valley. After that he went from Walt the dying high school chemistry teacher turned meth cook into Heisenberg, straight up.

To me, Jesse is 'the protagonist' of the show--he's the one I'm rooting for. Walt can eat a dick.

All of those locations are good. I've lived in Belltown, which has a ton of nightlife, but is very expensive. Right now I'm on Capitol Hill, which also has a ton of nightlife. It's the gay district, but if you don't mind getting hit on every now and then it's a lot of fun. I had a girlfriend who had a place in Queen Anne and it's nice there, and not as expensive as it is in the heart of the city. Quieter, too. The U District can be sketchy but yeah, it's cheap and fun. Tons of UW students up there. I head up there whenever I wanna get white boy wasted.

Tin-Can is a phone-to-phone text messaging app, that is, it doesn't require the internet or cellular network to transmit messages. It was successfully backed on Kickstarter (as I've linked).

Thanks for your contribution. This is thenewgreen's thing, but I think in the future it would be best to have one thread, let's say named 'Caribou Story', and the original poster would include the beginning of the story in the first post. Then, everyone else could continue to jump in and add their own parts of the story in the comments section. I think the way the layered comments work, any one story could branch off a million different ways and everyone could continue the different timelines as they saw fit. Just my two cents.

I like it... #storyclub in the hizzouse. This is a good idea, one that could work perfectly with Hubski's format.

This is an interesting subject. There's a very nice National Geographic special called 'Stress: Portrait of a Killer' ( full shit here via YouTube ) that delves further into the whole animal study aspect of this. Baboons are nasty little fuckers.

What the fuck is this crazy shit. I gotta stop coming here after a bowl. How is this even possible? On the sidebar it recommended to me a few more articles. Gold on Earth came from colliding stars? Snow detected in young planetary system TW Hydrae? We can detect snow in this shit now? ALMA may help solve mystery of missing massive galaxies? We're losing track of galaxies? Where they at?

Serious question, it seems like I'm always hearing about all of this new information being learned about space. Like, a ton of new information being learned all the time. How can I tell what's going to really be important? Or what's even legit? I hate the idea of being one of those people falling prey to sensationalist headlines and scientific jargon but you throw a couple nonsense solar system names in there, a math equation and a few quotes from some professor and I'm convinced. Not saying that's the deal with this particular article.

Also, that artist's concept picture is fricken' sweet and scary as fuck.

I haven't linked to my blog on here yet. Mainly because it... blows. Yeah. As I said, I very rarely update it. It was my New Year's Resolution to regularly update my shit and (surprise, surprise) I have failed miserably. I'm hoping my lack of attention to my blog will pay off in the future with a book deal.

That comment thing is sweet for sure, though. I saw it used on lil's site as well. Will it work for Tumblr?

Let's not forget that Phil Fish isn't exactly a saint. Dude has been known to regularly fly off the handle and sling mud at people and tell others to kill themselves. He's just as guilty as everyone else.

Yo pimpalicious. Kind of late, but I just read through this. Here is my feedback:

So we sit looking out over the barebones St. Augustine grass, and we talk. He gets to talking about the war. I talk about high school. The bottle of Jack doesn't say much; but it talks through us, I suppose.

Women are a common theme (especially when it comes to lying). From the sound of it you'd think I ran the buffet of my whole damn high school, and my granddad met every prostitute in Vietnam. Course, neither is far from the truth. The best lies are always rooted in hard fact.

Thumbs up right here. These two paragraphs are working.

But anyway, this evidently wasn’t just any shadow.

Cut that first part--it weakens your next statement, which stands much more powerfully on it's own. 'Evidently this wasn't just any shadow.' Much better. Maybe even better: 'wasn't just any OLD shadow'.

See, after a while you start to figure out the movements shadows make, the better to ignore them completely.

Might want to reword this here, kind of confusing as is. Or maybe drop it altogether--we've already been told this at the beginning of the paragraph.

After a mite more squinting and some of the fastest thinking I’ve ever had a reason to do – though there was that time in the desert, I suppose – I said hello back.

So right here our narrator calls back to some moment we haven't heard about in the desert. If you're going to use an 'off-screen' callback like this, try to make it more specific to add effect. Something like 'though there was that time in the deserts of Sonora back in '82 with Gomez,' gives us more to chew on and adds interest to the past event, and in return, to our narrator. Just a small tip.

---

I thought this was a really solid short. Your voice is working here, everything flows naturally, and you had me going the entire way. I thought the exchange with the demon tree shadow was odd (as it was most likely intended), but I wish it had more significance to the story as a whole. What the shadow said, specifically, seems out of theme with the rest of the story. A shadow telling us that it is hell itself? Woah! That puts a dark and strange spin on thoughtful, quiet times at grandpa's beautiful and secluded place. Again, maybe that's what makes it stand out so much, but I would be interested to see how the story would work with that exchange switched up a bit.

Keep writing.

To me, whether someone is a teenager or an adult or a toddler, it doesn't matter. As a grown man, I would never allow somebody else's hateful words to break down my will to create and do what I love. I'm not saying getting hated on would be fun or anything, but I mean--you work so hard to achieve something, put so much of yourself into it, and you're ready to quit because a bunch of people want to hate on you? Take that shit as motivation, that the only reason such hateful words are being thrown at you is because of how popular and successful you are and how jealous and pitiful they are.

I don't want to make light of somebody telling somebody else to kill themselves, but the ugly truth of the matter is that hateful trolls have existed as long as the internet has. I don't have any solutions for that issue and I don't know if there is one. Again, I'm not Phil Fish and I won't pretend to have any knowledge of this level of vitriol he has experienced. That's just my take on it--the ultimate victory would be in surviving and proving to all of the nasty bottom-feeders that you're stronger than they are and have more will than they do.

I can't say that I've experienced the same level of hate that Fish has, but just about everyone on the Internet has dealt with some form of negativity and flaming. Maybe I should have worded it differently--words sent on by a bunch of random teenagers from behind their desktop computers shouldn't mean anything. If you're going to be a creative individual then you need to accept that people are going to criticize and hate on what you are doing almost every step of the way, but you gotta ask yourself what's more important: the words they say or your passion. Again, I haven't experienced thousands of 16-year-old white kids telling me to kill myself like Fish has but I would think my passion for what I do would outweigh whatever hateful tweets anyone could come up with. I'm not him though.

Yikes. Ugly situation all around. Both sides are to blame, the vitriolic and hateful vocal minority in the community and Fish's overemotional reactions to what are ultimately petty issues. Sad that this blatant hatred being tossed around on both sides is just a normal part of our online culture, but it is what it is. Words are just words, and if you're in the public eye (especially online) it would seem wise not to exchange them with antagonists, and to let the hateful comments sent on by middle class white kids just slide off your shoulders. Be bigger than that.

Glad you liked it. I'm not sure who your cable/satellite provider is but I watched it from HBO GO which is pretty handy.

I'll most certainly check that out. Thanks for the badge dude. I appreciate all the love.

If she's into time travel she will love Primer. One of my favorite indie sci-fi flicks of the past few decades. Shane Carruth is wonderful. It's a novelistic film, so you'll have to pay attention closely and multiple viewings are almost required. I recommend watching the film with the subtitles on, as the dialogue is complex and jargon-laden and can be difficult to catch on to. It's a rich and complex film, but there's a ton of material online that can be used to help understand the events.