Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Robby's Beware the ides of March story

Roland's Fortune

I'll be honest. I'm not personally satisfied with this one, and hopefully I'll make liberal use of our agreed-upon one-week grace period to make edits, which I will note here. In the meantime, enjoy. It still has a redeeming feature or two.

EDITS:
5/7/08- Now with an expanded midsection so that hopefully it feels less rushed and more finished (at the advice of J., René, and myself). The dialogue in the final scene has been toned down (at the advice of René).

J.'s story: "Owl-Stretching Time"

UPDATE: I've fixed the link now. So sorry.

And here we are again. That's two in a row. We post one again next time, that's called a winning streak.

For those of you familiar with my work, you might be a little put off -- it's unusual. There's nothing supernatural here. No ghosts, no vampires, no monsters, no telekinesis, no dragons, no clairvoyance. Just a little vignette about regular people having an awful day.

You may take the dedication at the end as you like. I offer gratitude to those who inspire me. In both good ways and bad.

Your geeky bonus points this time: if you understand the title.

"Owl-Stretching Time"

The Rene says, "Beware the ides of March."

Everyone knows where this saying comes from, right? The assassination of Julius Caesar shaped modern existence in probably more ways than you realize. But how many people know the truth behind the matter, the story behind the stories?

This saying is presented in the vein of a Shakespearean play, minus the iambic pentameter, to allow more familiarity with the subject material. I've spent the last two months in rigorous scholarship researching what really happened and I have written it as accurately as I could. I give you, "Kalends."

N.B.: unintended secondary goal for this year, I'm shooting for emulating a different author per saying story. This time it was the Bard, last time Faulkner. Let's see where I'm going with this.\

UPDATE: 5/7/08
Fixed some formatting things from the result of uploading it to Googledocs from Word, added a few lines of dialogue for clarity and humor in the final scene and epilogue.