And here's the one with my original WIPs, because there were too many for one post.
1. My main project, which is currently entitled "Cult of the Lesser Apostles" because I suck at naming. It's basically just about people. This is from the early college years.
“I think…maybe we just don’t have compatible personalities.” He feels ashamed now, and angry at himself for it; it isn’t his fault that he dislikes her.
She laughs, loud and hard and true, and Simon jumps a little in his chair at the shock. “You just said…” she laughs some more and shakes her head, one hand in her messy hair. “You just gave me the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ speech!”
He blinks, partly because he would not have thought her able to glean the meaning from that statement at all, let alone in a split second, and partly because it is true and now he wants to smack himself in the forehead. “I…didn’t mean–”
“I know! That’s what makes it funny!” And she is nearly doubled over now, giggling, and Simon wants to smack her in the forehead.
2. Something I'll probably never finish, in which a dysfunctional family of sorts "adopts" a homeless girl.
“Uh-huh,” Diego said. He was trying to be patient, but the doctors had said that if the hallucinations got any closer together than three or four months, she would have to be taken in for “testing”. Diego did not want his sister to go through “testing”. He was worried, and not in the mood for this. “Blanca, why would a girl be standing out on the street at 1:50 in the morning, in the middle of the rain, staring at a streetlight?”
3. A day in the life of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Also will likely never be finished.“Who does this guy think he is?!” Destruction shouted, waving his cereal spoon at the television as Pestilence flopped onto the sofa next to him. “What kind of a moron steals a car and doesn’t even try to wrap it around a telephone pole? People today got no common sense, I’m tellin’ ya.” He crammed another spoonful of Lucky Charms into his mouth and glared contemptuously at the high-speed chase happening in front of him.
4. Left In Cinders: What Really Happened After "Happily Ever After". The story of the events following Cinderella's rise to queendom. Essentially, she screwed everything up and Prince Charming's father the king, along with Cinderella's stepfamily, plot to capture the Faerie Godmother and have her fix everything. This is the Faerie Godmother's reaction to their collective accusation that this is all her fault:
"Don’t you think I know that? Of course it’s all my fault! I was being stupid…I should have thought more clearly. It’s not easy being a faerie godmother, you know! This job is full of whiny brats who want a hot rich guy and want him now, and I have to make all these snap judgments on the character of the girls and the urgency of the situation– it’s hard, it takes a lot out of you, and by the end of the day I don’t even know who I’m granting wishes for. She wants a prince, she gets a prince, I get to go home and watch Oprah. That’s how it works. So yeah, it’s my fault, but I did the best I could!"
5. This is basically something I started writing about how life is boring, and then I stopped, because it was boring.
For breakfast, I tried to pick the meat off of a piece of meat lover’s pizza, but they put the ham slices under the cheese like always so I gave up and had some peppermint tea and an apple. I’ve been using the same mug for three days because everyone is too lazy to load the dishwasher. It’s getting kind of sad.
6. A story about two best friends who ran away from their weddings, and how their jilted fiances and their families are tracking them down to drag them away from a life of crime and back to civilized living.
“He left me at the altar!” Madeline screeches, throwing her bouquet to the church floor. She threads her fingers through her pale curls and pulls, tearing some of the baby’s breath free from its carefully woven arrangement. “That bloody bastard left me at the bloody altar!”
“Now, Maddy, don’t curse,” said her mother, bustling along behind Madeline as she tears an angry path across the church. “It’s not ladylike.”
“Ladylike!” Madeline snaps. She whirls on her mother and rips off her veil, pitching it to the floor in a rage. “Ladylike! What does it matter, Mother? Mogie doesn’t care about ladylike! He ran off with a childish brat who wears her skirts above her ankles and climbs trees and never wears shoes!” She is furious, her chest heaving and high cheekbones flushed an unsightly red. She clenches her fists and spits like venom, “He left me for a tomboy.”
7. Something about a guy whose short-term memory is so fucked he has to write everything down so he doesn't immediately forget it.
Sam leaned against the counter in his T-shirt and striped boxers and stared at the notebook as he sipped his coffee. The stare was careful and intent, as though the rings of the notebook might snap open and sprout into little legs that would carry it scuttling away into the vents the second he dared to look away. He stared so that he wouldn’t forget it was there.
8. This is actually based on a song called The Gypsy Lover. It's a folk song, so it already tells a story by itself, but I thought it was a setup for something more involved. (FYI, it's meant to be kind of a parody of silly dime store romance novels.)
He sat proudly on the back of his horse, a large and well-tended beast the color of chestnuts that went by the name of “horse”, simply because the only use the gypsy had for a name was to roll it on his tongue until it took the shape of a sweet nothing and murmur it seductively into the ear of whichever poor creature it belonged to, and he certainly did not see his horse in that light, much as he did care for it as a companion and trustworthy steed.
9. A crazy-long, ongoing saga about the Seven Deadly Sins. It has like 25 chapters, but I'm using a quote from Sloth, because A) it sums up the general purpose of their collective being well enough, and B) Sloth is my favorite. Snarky, lazy bastard.
“Yeah, we’ve accomplished quite a bit. The Kennedy assassination, obesity epidemic, five-second celebrity weddings, the Republican Party. All that and more. The Seven Deadly Sins: Screwing the world over since the dawn of man.”