What a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts

The Sister is going to hate me for this one: “Helen Fields Goes First.” Found under the stories tab or by clicking here:

Helen Fields Goes First

An old writing exercise from college, which I’ve always kind of liked for no good reason. I can’t remember the exact instructions, but it fell along the lines of “write a character doing something unexpected” – but possibly with other limitations, though what those might have been aren’t likely to ever come back to me. Please bear in the mind that the only way I can write short stories is to cut out all the interesting bits, or to end them in poetically terrible places. And that’s all the warning you’ll get from me. Enjoy.

(Or don’t. Yes, I see you over there, frowning at me. Both of you, quite possibly; none of us were raised to like open-ended possi-tragedy.)

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12 Responses to What a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts

  1. Your Local Friendly IT Guy says:

    Nothing like school assignments to get you to do things you wouldn’t do normally. And then posting them years later to annoy your brother and sister.

    • A.L. Schultz says:

      I know, I know. Though it’s a good thing I have these sitting on a very old backburner. I wasn’t in the mood to post anything on The Story Folder yesterday, so it was a relief to have a fallback. Especially one I could count on my two watchers to hate.

      (That was a very odd sentence. I’d edit it, but I don’t feel like spending the time to do that either. See Andrea. See Andrea get around work.)

  2. The Sister says:

    I considered not reading it to avoid becoming annoyed, but figured I should know what you were talking about. And the ending is quite annoying. The real question is, do you know how the story ends?

    • A.L. Schultz says:

      Do you remember that story about the Tiger and the Lady? The one where you never knew whether his lover sent him to his certain death or to another woman?

      Yeah. I hated that one too.

      • Your Local Friendly IT Guy says:

        Can’t you answer that one easily? A woman scorned…

        I don’t actually know the source material, that’s just what popped into my head on reading your comment. 😉

          • Your Local Friendly IT Guy says:

            Hahaha.

            I can’t decide if he made it worse by talking about the non-telling at length, or not. Hooray for literature. I guess. 😛

          • A.L. Schultz says:

            I know, I’d forgotten how old the writing style was until I re-read it. The last time I read it was in middle school – or possibly early high school. My memory did not retain all the “the semi-barbaric princess wrestled with her thoughts for ten grueling paragraphs” before finishing on a choose-your-adventure style “YOU decide.”

          • The Sister says:

            What a stupid story. Am I allowed to at that. I don’t remember it. Anyways, YOU did not answer my question.

          • A.L. Schultz says:

            I didn’t? Well. My mistake.

            >:)

          • Your Local Friendly IT Guy says:

            See, how she’s just trolling us for days. I’ll repeat my previous statement: hooray for literature. English Majors

          • Your Local Friendly IT Guy says:

            Well, that was supposed to have some “mumble mumble” around the English Major thing, but apparently the formatting I used was eaten by the comment system. Oh well.

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