Portfolio
Idol Wheel Of Chaos | Week 17, #1

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We're down to just five writers for Idol: Wheel Of Chaos now. This week, we're writing a portfolio that centers on five key components: our favorite story we've written, our favorite story by another author, a letter to an author from earlier this season, and stories for the prompts 6 7 and Banner year.

Choosing favorites is always hard! For my own stories, I wrote a lot of humor this season, but also some drabbles, two poems, a couple of entries with pathos, and a horror story. I considered choosing the acronym fun-fest (Going BATty), the caustic self-help guide (A New Man), the baking witch (Cursecraft), The Three Trolls from last week (Piplet!), or the souful Little Metal Hearts. But I think my best story was unlike all the others. It was a classic, timeless sort of tale with a tinge of bittersweetness. It was hardly read, because I was poisoned that week and it wasn't included in the poll, but it's the one I'm proudest of.

My favorite of my stories: Here Be Dragons

Weighing other authors' stories was just as hard. There were so many I really liked this season. From week 1, the Quality entries by bleodswean and static_abyss really stood out. rayaso's week 2 War Of The Words (the evils of ChatGPT) was a riot, as was flipflop_diva's Week 11 beleagured aliens story. serpentinejacaranda's Week 6 dreamlike political satire (Affliction In The Form Of A Question) really stuck with me, as did xeena's Blair Witch Idol Meta and l0lita's hard-hitting zombie apocalypse story. But the one I finally picked used a difficult prompt and featured a great child's voice and very real drama disguised as fiction. It was both beautifully written and painfully true.

My favorite other-author's story: inkstainedfingertip's Week 5 Toi, Toi, Toi

Next, we were to write a letter to a former contestant from the Wheel of Chaos season. There were so many to choose from: static_abyss (never here as long as I would like), bleodswean (such talent, and such a great Idol supporter), rayaso (so funny, week after week), alycewilson (talent and soulfulness all in one). I couldn't choose inkstainedfingertips because I'd picked him for my favorite other-author entry, plus he's still in the competition. So, I chose one of my overall favorites from this season AND last season (Idol Mini). She was the author whose season this was to lose, I thought, and apparently so did others because she was taken out by a targeted elimination vote after Week 10:

My letter to xeena

And finally, there were two entries to write for specific prompts:

6 7

Banner year

I hope you've enjoyed my portfolio, and the range of offerings it provided! If so, please vote for it here.

All Anticipation
Idol Wheel of Chaos | Week 17, #4 | 2227 words
Banner Year

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"These are the best years of your life," Lanie's mother always said. With her senior year of high school just a few months along, it seemed as if her mother was right.

Lanie was kneeling on the floor of the art room, working on the Homecoming banner for the game this weekend. She was dating the quarterback, and was every bit as invested in Homecoming as he was. Her best friend Chloe was there with her, helping out and keeping her company. Chloe's boyfriend was on the basketball team, so she was more interested in painting neat letters than what the banner represented.

"How do you think you did on the SATs this time?" Chloe said.

"I feel like the math went better?" Lanie said, "And I'm hoping that will be enough."

"I can't believe you took it twice. I mean, your original score was better than mine!"

"I just want to have the best options for where to go to college," Lanie said. "Could you hand me the yellow?"

Chloe passed the can of paint. "Well, there's always Podunk U."

"Don't remind me. My dad went there–it's why my mom keeps reminding me not to settle."

"She chose him, though," Chloe said.

Lanie moved around to the other side of the mural. "Yeah, but we all thought he was a better person than he actually turned out to be…"

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If you enjoyed this story, please vote for my Portfolio here!

Childhood Treasures
Idol Wheel of Chaos | Week 17, #3 | 1424 words
6 7

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It was never a time capsule, no matter what Bobby Lockerby said. It was a memory-box, where Jake kept souvenirs and other special things.

Jake was 6, almost 7, when he started collecting those things. It all started with a pretty little red rock he found down by the creek one day.
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There was a four-leaf clover, dried and flattened, and the ticket stubs from the first ballgame Jake ever went to with his Dad. There was a trilobite fossil, a squashed souvenir penny from a trip to Disney World when Jake was eight, and a Kingfisher feather as blue as the sky.

Jake kept all of them in a metal Superman lunchbox in his closet, with Jake's–Keep Out! written on the top. The note was mainly for Jake's younger brother Eddie, who had no respect for privacy. Mom said it was because Eddie was only five, but all Jake knew was that he didn't want some little pipsqueak pawing through his stuff.

It was a miracle Jake ever had time to find any of the cool stuff he did. It seemed like Eddie was always there, following him everywhere he went: "Whatcha doing?"

Sometimes, Jake just wanted to explore quietly on his own. You saw more of what went on that way– animals weren't so afraid of you, and nobody was there to distract you. A little brother with non-stop talking was just about the biggest distraction there was.

And when he wasn't out exploring, Jake would rather be playing with Bobby Lockerby or one of his other friends.

"Mommmmm," Jake would moan. "Why can't Eddie go bother someone else?"( Read more...Collapse )

If you enjoyed this story, please vote for my Portfolio here!

Idol Wheel of Chaos | Week 17, #2
Letter to a past participant

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Dearest xeena,

I've always enjoyed your writing, starting with when you were in Idol at Live Journal through being xeena now at Dreamwidth. You brought quality storytelling to Idol every single week, and not many can say that!

But these last two seasons have been stellar.

I love your quiet, often ethereal style, so effective for the spooky tales you love so much and just as evocative for dramatic and non-fiction entries. The language is gorgeous, the flow is smooth, and the content always makes me think.

This season featured the dark, stark Week 9 story about a suicidal woman who has lived a violent, hopeless life and who decides to burn the world down with her. Her fatigue and recklessness are palpable, and her behavior shockingly nihilistic. I think this is an immensely strong piece, and a risky one, and you pushed through and did it.

There was also the soulful Week 4 entry about the sentient house. The things it has seen, the memories it keeps, and the renewed life it yearns to hold within it once more! This was poetic and unexpected. Just lovely.

But my favorite—one of my favorite entries of yours of all time—was the Week 5 Blair Witch Style Idol Meta. The script format was ingenious and fresh. The dialogue sounded so much like what I and other Idol contestants would say that I went back to check the Wheelhouse comments to see if I actually HAD said exactly that. But best of all, it was humor, which is a flavor we don't often see from you—AND satire, AND meta.

You showed us you could truly do it all.

I'm just sorry that one of the twists this season took you out early. This felt like your season to win, but there were people determined to keep that from happening. When week after week of being poisoned (but also earning the antidote) couldn't take you out, the directed Elimination vote created the circumstances they sought.

It still seems unfair, even though we all signed up for a season with built-in chaos.

But I hope you know that, to me, you will always be a winner!

The Three Trolls
LJ Idol Wheel Of Chaos | Week 16, #2 | 1812 words
There was only one bed

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Once, there were three trolls who lived in a cave deep in the heart of the Winsome Woods. The trolls wore rough tunics and carried large clubs, and they terrorized many of the other inhabitants of the forest. When they were not bothering other wood-folk, they squabbled with each other over almost everything.

The cave had only one bed, which the three trolls shared. Some weeks, they argued about which of them had to sleep in the middle and get poked by pointy knees and elbows from both sides. In other weeks, they fought over which of them had to sleep at the edges and risk being pushed out of the bed.

They had arguments about whose turn it was to make dinner, and then the two who had not cooked complained about the menu. The tidiest of the trolls lamented the mess in the cave, while the other two fussed about the sterility and the lack of homeyness whenever the cave was clean.

The heart of it was that trolls were contrarians, and frequently that included being contrary with themselves as well as everyone else.

Trog was a great, hulking beast who longed to be delicate and dainty. He stomped up and down the countryside, scattering squirrels and bunny rabbits with the pounding of his footsteps. His voice was like thunder, its power stripping the leaves from the nearby trees.

Fernwick was smaller, and utterly envious of Trog's size. He was the most forgettable of the trolls, and he was all too aware of it. Piplet was the tiniest, with a screechy little voice that made dogs howl and birds lose their feathers. Piplet resented the world and everything in it with a fury exceeding that of the other two trolls put together.

They were a disagreeable bunch, and when they roved as a pack none dared to approach them.

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If you enjoyed this entry, please vote for it in the poll here.

This Lonely Highway
Idol Wheel of Chaos | Week 16, #1
Kako no ashoito (memories/events/influences from the past)

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Wheeling through the dark,
light lost to the stars
and the city far behind us,
we travel the barren highway
toward a distant promise.
The moon gleams cold as ice.

On a looming hilltop,
a lone steer stands, starkly
black against the dimness behind it.
The unfenced land crowds close,
the highway an inky ribbon
stretching into the night.

Nothing thrives in this desert,
in this unforgiving land
along the road to somewhere else.
Time waits frozen, as unyielding
as the desolation
of this lonely, forgotten place.

Wakeful, I watch the hills unfold,
mark a field light's deathly glow.
Ghost songs on the radio
float up through the static
in this in-between nowhere
caught so very far from home.


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If you enjoyed this entry, please vote for it in the poll here.

Rare Treasure
LJ Idol Wheel of Chaos | Week 15A Writeoff | 1825 words
Open topic

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There once was a dragon who loved a maiden, the brightest jewel in his or any other kingdom.

The dragon's name was Firesong, and he first glimpsed the maiden while traveling over the tips of the Fangold Forest on his way to the Western Wastes. The girl's long, long hair shone like burnished gold—like a river of sunlight—and her blue gown was like a piece of summer sky.

In all of his four-hundred years, the dragon had never seen anything so stunning.

He circled back around again for another look at her, for Firesong's vision was piercingly fine, able to spot a single diamond or ruby from hundreds of yards away. She was indeed beautiful, this girl whose name he did not know.

But now she was wary, there at the base of a large tree that she hoped could somehow hide her.

"What is thy name, fair maiden?" the dragon boomed.

The branches on the nearby trees trembled from the force of his words, and the girl quaked in terror.

The dragon was quite embarrassed. "Forgive me," he said more softly. "What, dear maiden, is thy name?"

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If you enjoyed this story, please vote for it in the poll here.

Becoming Multitudes
Idol Wheel of Chaos | Week 15 | 2091 words
Head to Head: Use another author's two entries from last week as a springboard. Mine were drippedonpaper's Ambuscade and A Nail Driven Out By Another Nail.

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I was five years old the first time I changed.

One minute, I was looking at a bluebird and wondering what it would be like to fly. Suddenly, the grass was up to my chest and the rest of the world seemed far away.

I was so startled that I changed right back again.

I wasn't sure it had actually happened. How was it even possible? I decided that I must have imagined it. I kept on believing that until six months later, when it happened all over again.

It was such an innocent thought: do puppies know their tails are wagging? And then I was nose to nose with our puppy, a happy little brown dachshund who'd never met another dog she didn't like. We chased each other around the yard for a long time, running circles in the grass and racing in and out of the flowerbeds. When I stopped to catch my breath, I remembered who I was and just like that, I was Annie again. Coco jumped back and yipped, but was just as happy to see the Annie version of me as puppy me.

After that, I started to wonder if changing was something everyone could do.

"Mommy, do you ever change into other things?" I asked her.

"Like what?" she said.

"Like a bird, or a doggy?"

She just laughed and hugged me. "What an imagination you have!"

I guessed that meant No.

I asked my friend Sophie whether she had ever been something else. "A cat once, maybe?" she said. "In a dream?"

As I got older, I learned to stop asking. Nobody else could do what I did. That either made me special or weird. Maybe both.

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If you enjoyed this story, please vote for it here.

Gone
Idol Wheel of Chaos | Week 14, Story 2 | 1834 words
Ambuscade

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It's been four months since Jenny disappeared.

I honestly thought she'd be back by now. She had a job waiting for her, and she was never the flaky type. But she went to the Allegheny Horror Con in June, and apart from Instagram updates the first two days, no one had heard from her since.

Jenny and I weren't super-close, but if I'd been a better friend, I'd have gone looking for her months ago. Now, at least, I was able to take some vacation time to fly to Pennsylvania. I hoped I would find some answers.

I got in late Friday night, and drove to the same Airbnb where Jenny had stayed. Jenny had gushed over its quaintness in her posts, but it didn't look terribly interesting in the dark. The inside was old-school gothic, with spooky candelabras and a color scheme built on deep red and black. I would have called it murky— we were in the LED age, but the lighting was all low-watt incandescents.

Maybe it just fit better with Jenny's Addams Family aesthetic than my mid-century modernism.

It was a medium-sized three-bedroom house, and yet there was an actual parlor filled with wingback chairs, a fireplace, and dusty portraits. Different eras, different priorities, I supposed. The bathroom had a claw foot tub with a shower head and a curtain. The main bedroom had scrollwork furniture and an honest-to-god four-poster bed.

I put down my suitcase and took in my surroundings. Gloomy, I thought, and kind of creepy. But for Jenny, it was probably perfect.

Jenny had been a horror fan for as long as I could remember. She read it, watched it, and breathed it, in perpetual contrast to her sunny personality. She'd been looking forward to Horror Fest since buying her ticket in February, thrilled with the chance to meet some of her favorite authors. Beneath her wholesome blond exterior beat the heart of a woman who hoped to someday write like Catriona Ward.

Was Catriona there at the conference, I wondered. Did you get a chance to speak to her? I knew Jenny had gone to a couple of movie panels and met a lot of other fans, but most of the writers' events were on the last day and she'd stopped posting by then.( Read more...Collapse )

No poll this week, but all the entries are here.

Second Chances
Idol Wheel of Chaos | Week 14, Story 1 | 1253 words
A nail is driven out by another nail

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Lee woke up into excruciating brightness—white lights, white walls, white sheets. The room was hostile and glaring.

He couldn't remember exactly what had happened. One minute he’d been sitting at his desk holding a pen, and now he was here, wherever here was. And my god, he ached! He couldn't remember ever feeling pain like this before.

He’d never been so groggy, either. This wasn't like getting up in the morning—he was slow and stupid, and he could hardly move. Why wouldn't it go away? And why was he so tired? The room seemed to be fading away at the edges…

It was still bright the next time he woke up, and he still didn't know where he was. He could hardly think, and the pain was unbelievable. What the hell?

A bunch of people came in and out of the room, and from listening, Lee gathered that he was in the hospital and he'd had some sort of major reattachment surgery. No wonder things hurt!

It would be a long road back, they said, and moving would be hard at first. Lee soon discovered that was a huge understatement.

This thing called rehab sucked. It was so hard. Everything was kind of numb and tingly, and it didn't feel quite right. Mismatched nerve endings, the people said. Foreign material. He would adapt to it, but he had to give it time.

Well, it wasn't like he had a choice.

Lee worked and worked, day after day, slowly building strength. He still felt clumsy, but it was getting a little better. Everyone seemed pleased with how far he'd come, so he guessed he was doing pretty well? But it still didn't feel like his own body. He wondered if that would ever go away.

What if it was always like this? Like part of him didn't belong? ( Read more...Collapse )

No poll this week, but all the entries are here.