No prompt has been set for the 24th so that writers in the group can work unfettered on their submissions for MaLa. All MaLa submissions are due by December 1st at 23:59.
The prompt for December 1st is – write about love in a novel way.
This wasn’t exactly the great literary career he’d imagined for himself. Not because it was a desk job – after all, there were certain benefits to a desk job, like subsidized health insurance and a dependable two weeks’ vacation – but because he’d imagined himself the next Hemingway, or at the very least, the man who wrote the headlines. Not the crowded back-corner obituary writer. Was there any position more lacking in glory?
But he had been surprised to find that there were stories here. Happy stories, even. The grandmothers who’d died at home surrounded by the comfort of large families. The couples who’d grown old together and passed away within hours of each other, asleep in the same bed.
And stories that broke the heart. The young man who died in a car accident on the way to his wedding. Three months later, his bride-to-be walked into the ocean. He wrote the obituaries for both. The little ones who burned with their house, whose parents came home to see flames licking the sky, who buried all three of their children the same day.
But most of all, he wrote the average, ordinary stories. Lives, played out in 10-point font on the inside back page of the paper. He wrote them all, and always took care to submit a copy to the family to ask if he’d gotten it right, if he’d captured their loved one with ink and paper. They were adrift in grief, but clung to this simple gesture. This mattered. Not to the world at large – the world at large hadn’t known Aunt Beatrice, hadn’t cared about Grandpa Joseph, wouldn’t notice if the details were wrong or omitted altogether. But these were lives he was recording. This had to be done right.
He took comfort in the ordinariness of their lives, took comfort in his own ordinariness, in becoming a kind of historian. Never was his work nominated for a Pulitzer, never did he get reprinted and held up as a master of his craft. He was merely the medium, the one who told the stories, but instead of feeling passed over, he felt honored. Years later, he still remembered the stories. He kept track of them, he bore witness. The files grew fat.
Well, getting into the spirit of Halloween a bit late we decided that this week’s prompt would be – obituary.
In preparation for the next issue of MaLa, the prompt for the 27th is fault-lines. Hopefully it generates some inspiration for some submissions!
Boogieman Growth Output Slows to 12-Month Low Despite Strong Profits for Killer Robot Firm
San Diego, California based industrial death firm General Atomics has reported strong profits and raised its revenue forecast, despite expressing fears over Chinese currency manipulation.
Profits for the three months to September beat expectations, at $374b (£233b), up from $317b a year ago.
The company also raised its revenue growth forecast to 21%-24%.
“The continued global economic uncertainty, coupled with Middle East volatility, is a concern for the industry,” said the chief financial officer.
Nonetheless, General Atomics plans to outsource much of it remote control drone operators to a Bangalore-based company in order to increase its hiring of teen-aged video gamers. “We can take on more than 1,500 employees during the next three months, a 7% increase in our workforce and the fastest recruitment rate since 2007,” said the chief human resources officer, adding, “By March 15 of next year, the sun will never set on the MQ-9 Reaper, nor will night ever fall for that matter.”
The strong profit numbers for the three months to September follow a lackluster performance in the previous quarter, when profits – measured using a complex formula involving confirmed body counts versus collateral damage – fell 2.4% on a year earlier.
General Atomics is the largest global supplier of killer robots with its three most popular models the MQ-1 Predator, MQ-9 Reaper, and its soon to be unveiled MQ-12 Death’s Head.
The overall growth figure for enemies of the state, terrorists, and other boogiemen was much lower than expected despite a 10-1 civilian-Jihadist ratio in Pakistan alone. Analysts had forecast growth of 9.9%.
For the 4 weeks of November: 3, 10, 17 and 24 we will review pieces that people are submitting to the next issue of Mala. So if you have something ready to go, or a piece you would like to run by the group before you submit it, let us know in the next few weeks and we will schedule you in for November.
Due to the popularity of last week’s prompt with its assigned genres, we decided to do the same thing again this week. Popular vote settled on enforcing a genre on our neighbours at the table. If you weren’t there last night but want to join in, you can pick from the ones below or choose one from last week’s selection.
The prompt line is: “And how long would they take to grow?”
The assigned genres are:
Bill E – chick lit
Bill S – straight phychological realism
Cat – grotesque horror Obi – stream of consciousness
John M – humour
Scott – children’s literature
Elias – satire
Jessie – nostalgic reflection
John J – self-help
Jess – technical manual
Matt – business/finance
Zach – detective noir
Aaron – rape of mother earth
Julia – masculine competition
1,000 words is the limit.
May the muse be with you
Even if she wasn’t wearing white nail polish, I still wouldn’t have been able to understand what she was saying. See, Chinese people have the unique habit of using the forefinger as a stylus to write characters in the air or on the palm when someone doesn’t understand the word in question. Anyways—maybe it was the alcohol or the smoke of the bar—the motions she made with her finger left behind the strokes of a character which burned into my retinas. In fact, that’s the only clear memory of the night. I woke the next day at five in the evening to find myself cleaned out.
Laptop, watch, wallet, phone; It was all gone. I went to the mirror in hopes that in conversing with myself, I might be able wrap my aching head around the night before. I was bedraggled: my hairs stood on end in every direction like I was electrically conducive, the jagged red lines in eyes said the same thing. I put my hands down on the sides of the sink and leaned in close to the mirror and looked myself in the eye.
Think, I thought, think. All I could remember was the graceful movements of the girl’s finger casting a spell which shut down my ability to think. Leaning back I began to whisk my finger in the air, mimicking her finger’s movement. And then I remembered her white fingernail.
An image popped into my head. At the she was a tractor beam. It wasn’t just her nails that were white, her whole get-up was. From wig to white leather; the bitch was a walking spotlight. The memory made my eyes hurt.
After a good scrubbing, I headed out to the local expat pub. While I didn’t have any money, I reckoned that there, I might run into somebody who knew something about that thieving Chinese spotlight whore who robbed me blind.
I found Roy sitting up at the bar on a wooden stool drinking a whisky and complaining to waiter about the taste of his food.
“Hey Roy,” I said taking a seat next to him.
“Oh hey there Buttermilk, can you believe these guys? Look at this, would you call this a pork chop?”
“It looks like a pork chop, Roy.” Roy was full on expatriate exaggeration, he hated the place, the food, the culture, the government, but boy did he love the women. He had all the stories a man could buy because he couldn’t get a lick for free. See, Roy was a slimer, a 60 year old kindergarden English teacher with fake teeth, a pony-tail and a hard Australian accent. He kept his origins a mystery, but on got the idea he shouldn’t be allowed near children. Lucky for me, he was the perfect guy to talk to.
“I got robbed last night, man.” I said.
“You look more like a pork chop than what’s on my plate.”
“Shut up Roy, I can’t remember a thing. I took a girl home last night and woke up looted.”
“Can’t remember a thing eh?” He lit up a smoke and sucked on it through his brown dentures.
“You know, they’ve been known to rub chloroform on their tits?”
“What?”
“Thieving whores.”
“What, why?”
“You lick their tits and get knocked the fuck out, that’s what. You’re sound asleep and they could take your kidneys and you wouldn’t wake up. Got a head ache?”
“You think that’s what happened?”
“How the fuck should I know, Buttermilk. What else do you know about this woman?”
“She was all white, even wore a wig.”
”Well, where did you meet this white mystery woman?”
“Matter of fact, I do have a headache. Gimme a sec, I’ll be back.” I got up and walked to the bathroom.
I went to the sink and splashed water on my face. Where was I? Who else was there? In the mirror, water trickled down between my whiskers, my hair was still trying to escape.
Think. Think. Think. All that came to mind was this glowing woman’s finger nail. And then boom! I never knew epiphanies caused headaches but this one felt like someone hit the back of my eyeballs with a baseball bat: Black Lights. I went back out to the bar.
“Hey Roy, do you have Xiao Pang’s phone number?”
“What do you want to call that little turd for?”
“Never mind, just let me use your phone.”
Xiao Pang really was a little turd, his name mean “Fatty,” in English, which he was. He looked like a Chinese Tweedle-Dee, complete with bowl style hair cut. He met me on the street near a Hongqi Super Market.
“Hey there, Buttermilk,” he said with a giggle. When Xiao Pang laughed his whole body laughed; that, plus him being in one of those silly blue and white tracksuit students are forced to wear made him look a lot more like Tweedle-Dum.
This week’s prompt, selected by Jessie at random from the bookshelf, is “I don’t think this killer is a woman, so who is it?”
Everyone was assigned a genre to write their prompt in, as follows:
Matt: Sci-fi
Sophia: Western
Barry: Chick-lit
Julia: Espionage
Elias: Crime
Catherine: Fantasy
John K: Gothic
Obi: Teen Romance
John J: Erotica
Jessie: Gonzo Journalism
For those who were not there last night but want to participate, select from these other genres:
Food Writing, Steampunk, Victorian Poetry, Adventure, Harlequin Romance, Pirates, Postmodernism/ Stream of Consciousness, Mystery, Self-Help, New Age/Inspirational.
1,000 words is the rough limit for prompts, unless otherwise specified.
Like most kids, when I was little I dreamed of growing up to be Spiderman. But unlike most kids, I actually had the chance to achieve my dream.
During my junior year in college, I was bitten by a radioactive spider. I soon found myself in possession of amazing superhuman powers, including an armour-like back and a stiff, slick abdomen that punches would just slide off of. “Wowee,” I thought, “This is my big chance to be like my hero Spiderman! I’ve been reading about him for years, but now I can actually be like him. Little kids will read stories about me and dream of having super powers like I have and beating up bad guys like I do.”
You can’t imagine the liberation, the elation of having super powers. It made my head swim. Picking up cars with my bare hands, listening through solid walls to secret conversations beyond, standing erect on the edges of rooftops and staring out at the city before me. Who else in the world could do that but me and an elite group of powerful beings? And what awesome responsibility came with this power: responsibility to help those in need, responsibility to fight injustice. Responsibility to benefit mankind.
So I did the obvious thing when you find you have super powers, I changed my major from economics to super heroing.
The super heroing program at Humboldt State University wasn’t famous, but it had a few good teachers who were pretty inspirational. They hadn’t exactly been super heroes themselves, per se, but they really got the super hero mentality and they were good educators. The super hero / super villian scene in Humboldt wasn’t much like what I read about in Spiderman comics; we didn’t have a Kingpin of crime, no Dr. Octopus, barely even any muggers. Mostly me and my classmates workshopped our heroing skills with each other, critiquing each others’ round-houses and super jumps. Every now and then we’d get a touring super hero in for a lecture. Some of them really were world-class heroes, like the Blue Beetle who gave a good talk in 1995. If you haven’t heard of him, the Blue Beetle had previously been a member of the Justice League of America and was a contemporary of superheoes like Batman and Superman. I felt like we had a lot in common, both having bug things going, and I got to ask him a few questions after the lecture. He was a really down to earth guy, and it was cool to see that super heroes are just people too.
After graduation I lived up to that saying, “Nobody ever does what they studied in college.” I kept doing roofing with my friend’s dad in Eureka for two years after college to get a jump on paying off my college loans (and, honestly, to enjoy that Humboldt Green for a little while longer). After that I looked into getting my teaching credentials, took the classes, and did a year and a half of classroom work under one of the emergency creditials that California was giving out then. It was a lot of fun, and I still keep in touch with a few of the 8th graders that I taught. But it wasn’t really for me, and by that time I was feeling like I needed to settle down on a career. But what do you do with a splotchy work record and a degree in super heroing?
So I decided to take a year off and do an English teaching stint in China. A high school friend introduced me to the school in Guangzhou where he’d worked after graduation, you just needed to be a native speaker and to have a degree in anything. While in Guangzhou, I also got lots of other gigs in addition to my teaching. These were some of my favorite things that I did during that year; it was stuff that you would need genuine super powers for back home in the States. But there in Guangzhou, you didn’t actually need any super powers, you just needed to be white. They’d put the cape on you, airbrush your abs, put some dramatic wind effect behind you and *poof*, it’s like you’re really a super hero. Of course, I was in actuality a genuine super hero, with a degree to prove it, so they had lucked out getting someone with real qualifications instead of the regular stream of Joe Shmoes who usually roll into China looking for the chance to be a super hero without having any of the actual powers.
But after I moved to Chengdu, I did find that there were some other real super heroes here too. Real super powers and everything. One guy could make the most amazing electrical blasts out of these antennae on his head. There were a couple good super-speeders too.
It was really heady meeting a bunch of other people like me, and we figured that we’d been given a unique chance here in China to make a real go of the whole super power thing that we’d been gifted with. So we did the obvious thing and started meeting weekly to workshop each others’ super powers.
And that’s the story of how I joined the Chengdu Bookworm Writing Group.
This week’s prompt is your own selection from, or an inspired amalgamation of, the following random thoughts:
Spiderman – Future Professions – What I wanted to be when I Grew Up – Love in the Ruins – Obedience to Authority – The Sweaty-Toothed Man from Qinghai