Fiction
The Novel That Bit Me. Honorable Mention in Not Quite There Yet Challenge.
Fir the Next Great (American) Novel challenge (which, despite the title, didnae actually huv tae be American), Ah hud two ideas an' two entries. Baith included Glasgow as almost a central character. One wis heavily inspired by Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh an' a real-life experience that happened many years afore Ah started writing.
By Paul Stewart4 months ago in Critique
Rosamunde or "Write What You Know". Runner-Up in Not Quite There Yet Challenge.
Rosamunde was a boring girl. She was the kind of girl that people would look past when scanning through the crowd. The kind they would describe as a "nice girl" because they could find nothing specific to say.
By Sasha Desideri4 months ago in Critique
Zero Plain
Zero Plain originally started as a short story submission for a Vocal+ challenge. However, as I was writing, I quickly realized that the story would fall well over the three-thousand character limit. So, I hit save, and moved on to another project. I honestly can’t even recall quite which prompt it was for, ironically.
By R.C. McLeod4 months ago in Critique
The Struggle of a Couple New to Recovery
Not Quite There challenge - The Prompt: Share a story that never fully came together, along with what’s holding it back. Not every piece reaches a finished form. This challenge makes space for work that is still unresolved. Share a story that never quite came together, along with what’s holding it back. The gap might come from structure, clarity, scope, or something harder to define. Be specific about where it falters. What feels incomplete, and why has it stayed that way. The focus is as much on the friction as the draft itself.
By Denise E Lindquist4 months ago in Critique
The Ethics of Emptiness
Introduction In the works of Søren Kierkegaard and Ludwig Wittgenstein, inwardness appears at first as the final refuge of ethical seriousness: a space where the individual confronts truth not as doctrine, system or public slogan, but as something lived inwardly, suffered privately and reaffirmed through personal existence. Yet a critical genealogy of modern ethical thought complicates this hope. Once the moral traditions of Kantian duty, Kierkegaardian inwardness and Wittgensteinian silence are examined together, a more unsettling conclusion emerges. Much of moral philosophy turns out to be a vast labour of redescription, a perpetual rearrangement of terms such as duty, truth, will, inwardness, faith and authenticity, all of them moved across intellectual systems like counters in a language game. The promise that one might escape the emptiness of external convention by turning inward proves equally unstable. The inward self is not a treasury of moral law waiting to be discovered but an uncertain and often hollow space, one that offers no final guarantee of ethical truth. If morality survives this collapse, it survives not as objective necessity but as decision, direction and self-imposed purpose. To be moral is not to discover an eternal code hidden either in reason or in the soul. It is to choose, without metaphysical insurance, a way of existing toward others and toward oneself.
By Peter Ayolov4 months ago in Critique
Time and tide
They’re children the first time they meet. At least he thinks so later. It’s hard to be sure because what it means to be a child keeps changing, now a dreamy golden idyll of toys and nurseries and lessons, now a fast-moving, sharp-edged world full of bright screens and blue light.
By Vanessa Gonzales4 months ago in Critique
Unfinished
One story has been sitting in my drafts folder for almost six years. I kept opening and closing it, but nothing was really coming to me. It began with a character I couldn't shake or forget about: a man returning to his hometown after receiving a voicemail from his estranged sister, only to discover the sister disappeared the same day the message was sent. All his relationships are strained in someway or another.
By Adrianna M. Braun4 months ago in Critique
Hiding in Plain Sight . Content Warning.
Heather lifted the heart-shaped, white head covering out of the wooden drawer and held it up to the morning light pouring in through the window. The fabric was thin, but well-crafted, each stitch intricately sewn. Although the covering was light in her hands, it felt heavy. Heather knew its importance, the hundreds of years of Amish culture and heritage it carried; a culture not her own.
By Jenna Tomovich4 months ago in Critique
