Pencil Scratches: A Short Story Writing Blog

   When I first started this project was realistic and I believe it was. However, I hadn't planned on starting to write another novel until the summer. Dedicatedly writing a novel, writing a short story every week, and working a full time job is just a bit to much work for me. The point of this wasn't to stress myself out. It was to learn and the last few short stories I have written it felt like I was just cranking them out to hit a deadline rather than giving them the time that they really needed.     Because I of this, I am modifying this project a bit. I am going to change the framework. Instead of mass production I am going to focus a on a lesson learned or an idea achieved. Honestly, after writing stories with an idea in mind and missing the mark because of a deadline I think this is a better way of going about it.     This means less stories, but it also means that the stories will hopefully be a better quality. I am going to aim for a story every mo...

  The hallways dulled the sound. She didn’t know if it was by design or by accident, but she hated it. The first few times she went running through the halls of the space ship all she could hear was her own breath and her heartbeat in her ears like she was pressing her hands over them. She managed the quiet for two days then she made sure that music was playing through all the speakers when she ran. It wasn’t just the hallways that were quiet. It was her bedroom. It was the dining hall. It was the rec room. Deafening quiet that made her ears ring. That made her wonder if she even existed at all.  It was the fifth day when she decided she had to have noise all the time. It was the sixth day that she decided that cafe noises were too creepy. Those songs with lyrics were too heart wrenching. That classical music managed to make her feel a little more human. The eighth day was the day she started talking to the robots as if they could talk back. Nearly everything was aut...

       The ground was cracked mud. It baked in the sun drawing out the last bit of water until any softness was gone. The man stood staring at the mud with intent focus trying to understand why it did not look the way it should. He had no memory of it looking any other way, but there was a wrongness to it that he could not understand. He had been staring at the cracked mud for hours or days or weeks. He did not know nor did he care. The only thought in his head was to understand why he knew that something was wrong. “They changed the river’s course. To be forgotten is to forget.” A voice said, a woman. The man looked up slowly and found the woman staring at the cracked mud with him.  She looked up at him, her eyes melancholy. Her hair was long, cascading down her back and rippling in the sun. A cloth of great length surrounded her. It gathered like a cloud made of floating swaths of green and gray fabric that changed color in the light. The sight of her fill...

 Vivaldi floated from the record player in the corner of the room. A fire crackled in the hearth and settled in the leather chair that rested beside it was a man who called himself a scholar. Gerald surrounded himself with books and thought of their knowledge to be the most important in the universe. He held a glass of wine to his nose wafting the flavor his way. This was his oldest and finest vintage. There was nothing better than relaxing with a fine glass of wine. “Nothing but fine company,” he said with a laugh that didn’t meet his eyes. It was a joke that he had with himself. Gerald had yet to find someone that matched his intellectual prowess, but soon that would change. He had ordered it a month ago, an android downloaded with every piece of information in existence about Shakespeare. That was why he had cracked open his finest vintage to celebrate. Then the doorbell rang. When he answered the messenger carted in the box and left with a signature. He opened the box and was d...