RE: The Spark + Unbewusstes - Finish The Story Contest - Week #66 @bananafish
Thank you! I thought I was going crazy looking for a hidden meaning.
You know it is very interesting. My mother also wrote. She was very good at noticing acute details of human behavior and her narrative was very dense with interesting details and humor, but she had difficulties finishing her stories, or rather having a direction toward some final point.
I wonder if this is the key difference in a person's mind oh how they perceive reality: as one unending even string or events or events that have some relative difference: one being more important than another.
Let's say we take the story by @sarez. I wouldn't say this was one of his best stories. However, one can summarize in one sentence what it was about. It was about how trolling and disrespectful behavior negatively affects people and how one kind person can make a whole lot of difference in the alleviation of these detrimental effects.
Your story actually has a point, but this point is not intrinsic to a plot and characters but is going through the fourth wall, speaking directly to the reader.
Your point is that the prompt contains some hints that could be developed in two different directions: one being the humanity of machines and the other being adulterous adventures. Those observations or evaluations are written in a humorous style (a kind of mockery) and make it a pleasant and entertaining read.
What your novel is about?
Your comments are so much fun!
My idea was that the AI was becoming more human even as the humans were becoming mechanistic (the future of human realtionships being less intimate as machines become more available to serve the needs of humans). I had just read a book review on “Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships" by David Levy the same week as the writing contest, so that was on my mind. Not that Jennifer was on the prowl. The colonel came across (to me) as an Old School guy, with that cigar, and I imagined Jennifer found herself drawn to his organic (not metallic) man vs the stuff I read about Levy's forecasts. With only 500 words, I didn't delve deep.
My novels: first one, a woman pilot who races a custom-built at Reno against a stock P-51 Mustang piloted by a man who turns out to be... (major spoiler). Second, a teenage girl abducted by sex traffickers. Third, an English woman on her way to an arranged marriage in Germany is beaten and left for dead by her scheming maid, who assumes her employer's identity to go marry the German prince, but the real Lady Evelyn wasn't dead, and a dog finds her in time for an exiled doctor (accused of being a Bonapartist because he was a battlefield medic who'd treat Frenchmen as well as Prussians, enemy or ally, and it dawned on me that "Germany" as such didn't exist in Napoleon's day, and I made a mess of that novella). Fourth, unfinished, a girl fresh out of high school goes missing, and her sister goes looking for her, and of course she is not dead! But I couldn't finish it because I can't write three novels in a row in which the missing girl is not dead and will escape captivity. JUST KILL JENNY, I told myself during March Madness, but I couldn't, and just didn't finish the story.
In real life, my sister went missing in November 1975 and was found dead a few months later, and we were never allowed to see her body, and I liked to believe she was in Witness Protection and was alive somewhere. And somehow I'd find her again someday. Her killer(s) walk free to this day. For the past four years I sought to get the truth out, whether or not an arrest was made. It's been demoralizing and frustrating with police corruption and cover-ups and now you are REALLY sorry you asked you asked about my novels... :)
Yeah, Interesting. I see why you don't want to kill Jenny and you shouldn't. As apparently your motivation in writing these novels is to create a proxy story where your sister is alive and is found. Who cares that you have the same story in all of your novels as long as it is therapeutic for you. Dostoevsky has a murder almost in all his novels and it's fine. No one is protesting. )))
Incidentally, Prussia did exist in the time of Napoleon. In fact, the Prussian king Frederich the Great lived half a century earlier those wars.
I have a rather interesting story as my dad was a prisoner of war during WWII and spent 5 years in German camps and then 8 years in the Russian Gulag. The interesting part of this story is that my dad was purchased by a german woman at the market and he worked for her doing different typical male jobs, including the job of a sex slave. As a testimonial of that, I have a brother somewhere in Germany who is 13 years my senior. He apparently lives somewhere in Germany, but I have no clue who he is. So for all intents and purposes, he is as good (or as bad) as dead. )))
WOW you have quite a story there - phenomenal! The truth is stranger than fiction. This would make an epic movie (your dad's horror story) - I hope it has a happy ending (hence, you were born), but apparently you will never know. And that too is the kind of ending that made me stop reading The New Yorker short stories: all the fiction ended with the Not Knowing. Wow again, wow, thank you for sharing!
And yes, I wrote about Prussia in that ill-fated NaNoWriMo novel, but I kept wondering if it was ok to refer to the doctor as a German. I decided to play it safe and make him Bavarian. Germany as such didn't exist until the late 1800s. Now I'm wondering if Russian is your native language? You probably know @mariannewest's is German (and I might hazard a guess you could have grown up in Germany). I would love to hear what became of your father. By now, he'd be a hundred years old, wouldn't he? If he's alive...the way you wrote that final line is spectacular, and I hope you'll work this into fiction one day soon.
More! More! More! (I know, I know, it's deeply personal, hence that disclaimer that it's "only fiction.") :) I blogged about that a few months ago...
Bavarian is fine, and Prussin was fine also and since both principalities were essentially German I think you could have called the doctor German. )))
I somehow was never pressed him enough for details. But of what I know... He was an artillery soldier in Brest - a city by the Soviet border between Belarus and Poland. On June 22nd, 1941 German troops advance so deep into Russian territory that my dad deep in German-occupied territory. For three days he was hiding in the forest. But hunger made him come out and surrender. He was taken to the camp and was transferred to different camps. Ended up in Germany. Not sure exactly how all this went on but to his words there were many times when he could be killed, but somehow he was lucky (if spending 5 years in Nazi camp could be called lucky). In 1944 he and other prisoners were sent to Balcans to clear of mines from fields. Germans didn't get close as it was dangerous when mines blew up. My dad and many other prisoners ran away and my dad became a guerilla fighter in Greece. In May 1945 he returned to Russia. But the Soviet secret service considered all people who were captured as traders. He was sent to Gulag and spent there another 8 years until the death of Stalin. In 1953 he was released by amnesty. He wasn't much of a catch as he was forbidden to live in large cities. But at that time there was a big lack of men as many of them died. That's how he married my mother.
Personally, I like German people. I was in Berlin and liked it more than all other European cities. I find that the Russian and German mentality is very close. Maybe that's because since 17 century many Germans lived and worked in Russia. occupying important government positions, including the fact that the Russian emperors were mostly Germans. Tzar Nicolas II had only 1/128th of Russian blood. The fact that Germans had Hitler - well that is very sad, but ultimately this could have happened with every nation. And modern Germans have nothing to do with it. )
Another keeper of a reply - so many things to respond to!
I love it that you see good in Germans as well as Russians, and traits they share.
And your poor father! How could one man suffer so much bad luck - or as he saw it, not getting killed was good luck, even it meant more time in POW camp.
Oh, the lack of men! I first read of it here at Steemit: little girls growing up without fathers and grandfathers. The men died in the war. It took a generation or two for children to have fathers on the scene once more....
So much sadness!
And yet there is still goodness, and you seem to know how to find it.
Yeah. He lived a long life though. Died in 2012 at the age of 90. But yeah, his best years he spent in pow camps. Compared to him, I was very lucky.
And true. So many children grew up without fathers. That's a shame. Hopefully, this will never happen again.
He lived to age 90 - that's something!
Fatherless children - in some parts of America, it's all too common, but not due to casualties of war.
"Lucky" is a state of mind, according to the mystics. Have you seen @owasco's posts about visiting two prisoners who light up their dreary world with optimism, hope, and good cheer? Look for the blue flower to find those posts...
No. I was kind of busy writing a story draft for a writer's club. Can you drop me a link, please?