The Campaign Builder's Guild

I'm going to find all the short stories, poems, and prose that I began writing but gave up on, and put as many as I can in here. They will often be frustrating, always incomplete, and often very bad. I'm putting them here as a reference tool for later, and as a public reminder to myself that a lot of what I do sucks. More forthcoming.

Opening lines to poems that never came to be:

QuoteSam McMahon was a sad little man with a sad little plan for the world

The cramped and sweaty night box
With[/quote]Smoking skulls and salvation salves[/quote]Euripides is crossdressing to look like the Pharaoh[/quote]the girl is secretly a quasar[/quote]Erstwhile apple-trees and the Nature of Mrs. Quailmonger
 
 Don't look for love,
[/quote]den mother youthful rake friar Einstein disguised as Bob Dylan disguised as Robin Hood crossbred with a tumbleweed[/quote]Robert Stanley Birgens wasn't a tall man[/quote]In the desert night cowl
Where the wolves do howl
Sitting on the side of the road
[/quote]Is Gunsmoke Kelly
The outlaw felon
Who Annabelle's heart stole
[/quote]The ballroom pianist threw me out the back door
Of the friendly local neighborhood knickknack store
The ballroom pianist threw me out the back door
Of the friendly local neighborhood knickknack store
[/quote]The wraith of the rock star haunts the folksy bluesman
He plugs his guitar into the
[/quote]If I were a platypus
 Would you call me Dave?
 If my name was Atticus
 Would I be your slave?
 Could you speak in rhythms
 That beat in Harlem grates?
 Could you beat cynicisms
 That
[/quote]Blood bank refund
 Dark chocolate bitter
 Half a mind lobotomize
[/quote]You track your life by events
 You mark your calendar with resentment
 You hold me to your clockwork morals
[/quote]Let me tell you the tale of Morton Demure
 The digger of graves in the town of Allure
 His daughter, he claimed, was a delicate sight
 He hid her from suitors to prevent her flight
 In summer and spring, Morty's work had been slim
 He  would wander the grounds, the grass he would trim
 But those mundane tasks held no fame or grandeur
 And both such were wanted by Morton Demure
 
 One spring, so it's said, there had been many dead
 A strange turn of events that put Morty ahead
 Seeking to capitalize on this fortune
 He sought a dowry of decent proportion
 Only old Olman, an old man for sure
 Would do for the daughter of Morton Demure
 
 Old Olman, it's told, was quite hard to goad
 For he had both a wife and mine of coal
  eh fuck this
[/quote]You hear that sound?
 The drums of war--
 Haunting fields with
 Thunder, thunder
 
 I hear the sound
 The lyres of war
 The strings played by
 Liars, liars. [/quote]

Short fiction:

Quote from: HeartbreakVance and Christina sat on separate park benches, both staring into the pond, the forest, the sky'"looking anywhere but at one another. Dead oak leaves scraped along the sidewalk, their hollow shuffling echoing, echoing, echoing into the cold night's breeze, crawling further and further from one another in the sharp autumn wind. wait a second I'm not Bob Dylan

: To become anything in life, to make something of yourself, you have to realize that you are already dead. That is to say, at this very moment, for every conceivable purpose, you exist in a state that will irrevocably lend to your demise, your removal from said state, and the passage of physical reality into the absence of reality. For the moment, by the grace of forces beyond the scope of the average human mind, you continue to consume the resources of the universe around you, but the causal chain that permits your continued existence will snap against the tidal forces of mankind's well-known master: death. For even the greatest men, the humblest men, and indeed the most righteous of men cannot escape their inevitable demise, when old age robs them of their health, when killed by the actions of others, or when the universe itself swallows them whole. Accepting that you are already dead is the only way you can begin to live. [/quote]i see the reaper, looking rather grim, as he stumps through the headlock harvest known to us cityfolk as a revolution, hoping that the man with a manifesto and the fancy french names can hold a flame to the slicing winds of economic distraught, but last week I had to[/quote]

Quote from: First chapter to a novel I got bored of quicklyChapter One
The Anatomy of Mr. Body

   Simon Body was a profoundly unhappy human being.  He preferred it that way, really, since nothing made Simon happier than talking about his unhappiness. Working as a proofreader at the Halvington Tribune, Simon spent just as much time correcting dangling participles and improper comma usage as he did complaining, to no one in particular, about his mortgage payments, his car payments, his student loan payments, and just about every other thing requiring a payment. Although he wasn't liked by most of his colleagues, who Simon suspected would snicker and mock him when his back was turned, there was a professional air of politeness about the man, who prided himself on his inoffensive and agreeable friendliness.

Others found this virtue to be a flaw, and would occasionally chide him for his ineffectual slump and mild voice. At his previous job at the Tribune's rival, The Halvington Daily Times, Simon had acquired the nickname 'Mr. Nobody,' an unfortunate soubriquet that had managed to follow him well after his departure from the Times. Simon had no real desire to move from the Times to the Tribune, but was forced by necessity when the Times fired most of its senior staff in favor of entry-level, fresh-out-of-college youths, the type of young people who would work long hours for little pay. At the age of twenty-seven, Simon was an unemployed old man, and thus turned to the Tribune for his weekly check and benefits.

Simon was ill-suited for proofreading, but found the work easy and the paychecks soothing. Although he had once held aspirations of writing novels and fiction, that dream had been buried beneath mountains of debt. The idealist Simon thus succumbed to menial work, staring at pages of uninteresting text for hours on end, eventually reconciling his newfound profession with his original ambitions. 'I am helping communicate,' he would tell an uninterested journalist, 'I'm the bridge between you and the reader.' A polite nod and an expedited escape by the journalist signaled to Simon that not everyone shared his newfound zeal for minutiae.
Life at home was equally unimpressive, though Simon and his wife of five years Vivian had found a modest home in one of Halvington's nicer neighborhoods. The two had met in college, and although Simon could not recall where they had met, it had probably been love at first sight, if such a thing existed. As Simon and Vivian watched their friends get married and have children, they settled for one another, finding a mutual interest in something that blossomed into long-lasting marital bliss. They had even decided to have a child, a passably beautiful two-year-old girl, who had single-handedly put an end to Vivian's burgeoning career as an interior designer. Simon often told his co-workers in a hushed voice that he hadn't expected Vivian's career to last long anyway, and often wondered if she was colorblind.

The long, inflexible hours that Tribune boss Mark Words imposed on Simon seemed reasonable at their inception, though Vivian would loudly protest that she felt Simon was a non-entity in their child's life. Although an understandable complaint, Simon wondered if she recognized the magnitude of their monetary situation or his professional responsibility to appease Mr. Words, but he found himself working even later than before, despite her continued complaints. Or perhaps because of them.

Rumors of an economic slowdown worried the Tribune staff, as Mr. Words was known for 'competitive down-sizing,' his euphemism for 'opportunistic firings.' This is known as a "novel," which is apparently a euphemism for "really bad writing."

I really like how you formatted the poetry post, with the small lines coming first and the stanzas coming later.  "the girl is secretly a quasar," is my favorite beginning by far, reminds me a lot of a Neil Gaiman story.

Except for the tailing-off ending I like the apocalyptic dream.  In fact, that the fragment trails off, denying us the final stages of the eschatology, actually reinforces the dream-like quality.  Feels like Kubla Khan.