World Record Attempt Fatality Laughter Extract IV

This is precisely as far as I have progressed with this project, to date. Sample three has not yet been published. Doubt the disordered nature of releases will damage its continuity at all tho!

    The storm may be upon you before you even notice it gather. Composition, merely a reflection of the society that had caused it to take form as such an inane and incomprehensible manifestation. What I could not countenance was the way he used the ghostly voices as samples in later musical pieces released for everyone in the world to access. Having ignored all the stern warnings, this was the equivalent to burning a mountain of tires on a secluded, south pacific island, white-sanded beach. Even as the tip of his fountain pen made contact with the page upon his clipboard its ink bladder ruptured, soiling the entirety of his notes recorded thus far, relegating all he'd seen to the obscurity of only his memory. Windswept was the most fitting description of the house as it stood, lonely in the deep shadowed valley. Little did they know, something was most certainly going to attempt, (most determinately), to kill them.

    An example was given during a lecture just after world war two where many people had reported nightmares before the advent of that conflict heavily featuring barbed wire, terrible killing machines and great suffering. Chunks had already long ago been ripped out of him by the darkness. Insert stock photo of standard cosmopolitan city street with trams. Only one problem existed with substitute water, and if only they could keep that quiet everyone who bought it would be dead before anyone else found out. They were the kind of people who drove past one another without acknowledging the other, remembering only when it was too late. Truly mad scientists who conducted experiments such as stitching a living tarantula onto the lining of a human child's heart, (without anesthetic) in order to see 'what might happen', who had been given free reign in Nazi death camps to do as such and very much more, when later apprehended by the allies were not prosecuted and instead, upon rescinding ownership of their research files to them, were granted not just immunity but a laboratory, a home, a salary and a position of esteem within the secret research facilities run by the victorious governments.

    Stories of humans working right alongside aliens in secret compounds were concocted and served well as subterfuge. Everyone treated us as though invisible except for a select few. This is the generation they invented the atom bomb for. Those who noticed us as we wandered the streets of our village spoke only to my girlfriend as if they were people that she knew well even though none of them were people I think she had ever met. Even more disconcerting was how she seemed to know exactly what it was that they spoke about. She would not even acknowledge the presence of these characters to me. We were still sleeping in our car. Implanted character flaws caused android personality programming to exhibit those aspects of character which humans often use to differentiate preference for one over another.

    Sleeping in his car next to us was some kind of rock star or musician or something who had run away from it all. Not long after his car battery went flat and he could no longer listen to the radio he just vanished. When the voices stopped coming from inside his head they instead started to project from round the back of the curtains, and after this everything escalated. Almost incapable of successfully taking off her sunglasses and talking after a three day ecstasy binge. Finding an airline to move the entire family to Antarctica was proving difficult. A door opening upon a door, opening upon a door, opening upon a door...

Reviews

[alanwgraham]

Hi Brett. This is the kind of imaginative and challenging writing that I like to try myself. I agree with your own review that it needs quite a bit of work. I will be honest with you, as most on WC don't seem to be when giving reviews, that my own preference is to work hard to iron out any problems and make it readable. One thing that I did notice that there is some confusion about who is talking, you seem to jump from I to us, from he to she. I agree with breaking up sentences as longer ones give more opportunity for confusion.
This is well worth developing but it shouldn't be for the reader to do the work.
Cheers.
Alan

[Brett Hernan]

Thanks for your review and comments, Alan. i really appreciate them.

It's a 'disembodied narrative' that I am deliberately trying to make work here, designed in some ways to evoke varying responses from each of its readers.

The reader is meant to be an observer of a fluid reality where time and space are spontaneously entered into at random multiple places and left again at intermittent points where rationality and sense aren't important and just don't matter.

In that respect, continuity of a personal narrative perspective is not as all important as it might be to someone writing a straight narrative work.

It is intended to be evocative and suggestive of both tangible and intangible abstract imagery, concepts and sensations rather than representative of reality, the written equivalent of the completely visual experience of observing a still scene, a sculpture or other visually based artwork, and it is the 'summoning' of a narrative from the reader's own subconscious that I am aspiring to.

This is a goal which I am not always successful in achieving nor, with these ideals in mind, can I ever hope to be. I may not be at all.

I take some of my inspiration from dada and surrealist writers who were more interested in nonsense and the dream state than in telling any kind of literal story. This does make it harder for the reader to access, most assuredly.

I also wrote this with an intention of it being read aloud (by me) and recorded, and so when doing,the tone, pause and intonations I apply to it during that process may make it slightly more accessible.

These are only small segments of a much larger work and in its entirety the style it utilises might be more accessible to the reader through its constant length, (if they are the kind of reader who has a taste for this type of writing, that is!)

It has been written for people who don't like reading. Those of a short attention span afflicted with concentration problems and, (also quite pretentiously), for a group of people who may not yet have been born, (and who may never yet be born!)

I accept that only a tiny percentage of people will ever find what I've written resonates with them. I don't expect to have a mass audience, I don't expect to have an audience at all, and that pretty much sums up my target audience-no one!

I am resigned to the fact that this particular work under the rules of conventional writing will be inevitably deemed as flawed and the work of an unsound mind. It is as I am-disjointed, and in this context it very much serves as my autobiography!

I could explain more about why and what I'm writing but I'd prefer to just 'let the text speak for itself'!

[alanwgraham]

That's great Brett. A audience of one may be enough. From what you've said I don't feel too bad that I didn't follow the drift entirely. My mind also works in a singular way and there are times when the writing becomes disconnected but 'exciting' to me. Personally when I post on here I feel that the function of my writing is to communicate some idea or story to the reader and so I have to make it comprehensible. Please dont take that as any comment on your writing which is equally valid.
All the best,
Alan

[Brett Hernan]

Thanks Alan. No offense taken and I knew none was intended at all from you. Any criticism is rightly valid as all readers approach the written word with their own set of expectations, many of which are logically universal. It's a big ask of anyone to expect them to mold their comprehension to my will... but that's probably what they'll need to do to get any type of pleasure from what I'm doing!

Replying to you very much helped me to further crystallise some of my ideas and intentions. I appreciate that you read it, am pleased you enjoyed aspects of it and that you took the time to stop and comment as well.

Who knows? It might end up a best seller (in 3150)!

[Brett Hernan]

Still a bit clumsy and in need of revision. Long and complex sentences need to be shortened into a few or to be made more explicitly clear in what they are (or are not) stating, especially in the context of the disjointed narrative employed in this style of writing. Terminal confusion is unproductive within an attempt to intentionally baffle.

I have edited it a bit more now, removed some repetitive terms, fixed a typographical error or two, thrown in a comma here and there, a full stop or two and split some sentences up, but it still is only a rough draft. (That's my excuse, anyway!)