#frictionlit#writing#contest#writingcontest#shortstory#sciencefiction#scifi
Below is a story that I submitted to the “friction” literary magazine earlier this year. It's a beautiful magazine that is put out three times per year. Personally, I'm subscribed to it myself, otherwise I wouldn't have tried submitting a piece for their consideration. They hold a Spring and a Winter contest... The Winter deadline is still over a month away. We'll see how prolific I am in the next four weeks, maybe I'll have something that I think might fit the readership.
Getting back to this story though. This is one of the longer short stories that I've written, coming in around ~6k words. It's still considerably much smaller than a novella, but I've written it with the possibly expanding the story and the chapters more with additional prose in mind. So it is broken into ten “chapters” and an Epilogue.
The Pitch?
It's sort of like if Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind had a baby with Total Recall. It's not quite as Philip K. Dick as I would like it to be, but I didn't think f®iction would want to publish hard pyschadelic sci-fi... Maybe I was wrong.
The story was rejected, but honestly, I would rather just post it as-is for people to read while I work on other stories. I would love to know your comments. What do you like? What do you hate? Any feedback is welcome.
Not too long ago, my friends and I sat down and were toying with the idea of making a shared universe with the potential end goal of creating a game. I've been drawn to the idea of doing an interactive fiction RPG hybrid for a while... Something that is kind of crunchy, but a system that lets you do a multitude of things as a player. Text is the easiest way for that to happen, the most powerful graphics processor is going to be your mind and imagination. MUDs and MOOs are sort of the cornerstone of what that can look like in practice, but that requires the player to understand a specific set of syntax to play the game. While not too difficult to learn, it is a barrier to entry.
I began by playing around with Godot and the Ink scripting language. My thought was that it would be easier to start from scratch with Godot and effectively build a framework/UI for Ink and then maybe a separate combat system that shares some state with the Ink-based story scripting... BUT, I've also been playing around with how to run and train LLMs locally. I even bought an M2 Macbook just so that I could run a local AI setup. So far I've been successful in getting Llama 3.2 configured to act as a DM/GM within the 3.5e rules. Last night we tested it out.
The nice thing about LLMs is that you get the text parsing without the need for a uniform syntax that players need to use. They can just talk to it the way they would interact with a DM. And, I imagine this is probably what WotC is working on for D&D proper, but are layering GUI components on top of it to make it even more user friendly.
The AI does have trouble with ending the story/quest. And it seems like no matter how you try to resolve the story, it wants you to keep going. So these are some of things that I need to work on before trying to keep state.
Well, I didn't even get an honorable mention, but I'm grateful for the feedback they gave me!
However, I believe my friends and I re-worked the story to be far more compelling, and we did so before I got any official feedback. So, I'll break it down and talk about what I've learned through this experience. Also, below will be the revised story. I'm curious and eager to hear from all of you whether you think we were able to come up with a story that would have addressed the judges' criticisms before even knowing what those criticisms were?
Not sure exactly when it was that I found out about the NYC Midnight writing competitions, must have been at least a few years ago now though. Probably around COVID, which would make sense because it's the type of thing that people were doing while they were locked in their homes... I'm also not sure what it is that brought me back to it this year. But I made the decision to finally pony up the entry fee and actually get serious about it.
Below is a story that I submitted to the “friction” literary magazine earlier this year. It's a beautiful magazine that is put out three times per year. Personally, I'm subscribed to it myself, otherwise I wouldn't have tried submitting a piece for their consideration. They hold a Spring and a Winter contest... The Winter deadline is still over a month away. We'll see how prolific I am in the next four weeks, maybe I'll have something that I think might fit the readership.
