A Thousand Words, or, Those Wicked Games We Play

[Amake]

I saw this little gamesocialization exercise on another forum, and thought we could think it was fun. It's a little like the General Discussion thread, but with illustrations. The rules are pretty simple:

One poster tells a story. Probably something that's happened to you or whatever's on your mind. It might be a lot less than 1000 words, and that's fine.

Then another poster finds or makes a picture in response to this story. Be frank, funny, frightening, predictable or creative. There's no wrong answers except if you screw up nobody will love you anymore.

If anyone still doesn't know how to put pictures on the Internet, PM me and I'll host it for you. No questions asked unless, I guess, if I have questions.

For every picture you post, you may share a story. The game ends when no one has anything more to say.

To begin, a story. Let me see. I've struggled with writer's block since about three weeks after I first sat down in my own home free to do nothing but write all day, in 2002. The less distractions are forced on me, the more confident I grow in my gifts, the more I figure out ways to motivate myself, the closer my book gets to being done, the easier the work becomes, the worse my block seems to become. I seem to need stuff to be really, really hard to do in order to do said stuff; if it's easy enough that I could just sit down and get it done there doesn't seem to be any point in doing it.

I got a lot done while I was suffering after my mom died last year, and now it seems I work best when I'm putting my characters through the most savagely painful traumas where I have to lie down and cry for them every other sentence. If only there was no such thing as joy in their world, I might be finished in a week. That wouldn't work with the story I have to tell, though.

So I think I might be some sort of masochist. The end.

---------- Post added 07-28-2013 at 11:09 AM ---------- Previous post was 07-27-2013 at 07:02 PM ----------

Okay, we've got a slow start, so I'll give an example of how to join the game. Note that you won't usually need to post an answer to yourself, but.

I've struggled with writer's block since about three weeks after I first sat down in my own home free to do nothing but write all day, in 2002. The less distractions are forced on me, the more confident I grow in my gifts, the more I figure out ways to motivate myself, the closer my book gets to being done, the easier the work becomes, the worse my block seems to become. I seem to need stuff to be really, really hard to do in order to do said stuff; if it's easy enough that I could just sit down and get it done there doesn't seem to be any point in doing it.

Done! Of course this doesn't stop anyone who would want to from posting another answer to that story, although if you don't want to be repetitive or derivative it's slightly limiting your possibilities.

And now, a funnier story. I'm reading this book I really loved as a kid and haven't read in like twenty years, and realizing it's amazingly, wonderfully bad. On paper it should work abou as well as [i]Twilight[i]. In fact, it's called Twilight Eyes, by "The master of menace" Dean Koontz. It's about a teenage boy who joins a travelling circus and fights a war against a conspiracy of evil goblins disguises as people. Slim, our hero, narrates in the first person and seems to go out of his way to make everything he does sound cool and dramatic, mostly by abusing overwrought sentences involving the word "for" and talking about God a lot. He has purple eyes the color of twilight, special eyes that lets him see goblins and all sorts of convenient psychic emanations that always lead him the right way through the plot and also makes him an extraordinary sex machine. Well, that and his prodigious natural athleticism. And he meets a girl who's seriously so hot that guys get erections left and right around her, with a cold exterior hiding a uniquely sensitive, wounded, lonely blah blah blah and they kill trolls together and have spectacular sex. All set to the background of life on the road in America in the 1960s. It's so cheesy it could give someone a heart attack.