Three Hundred Words

Write a story he said. Three hundred words he said. Should be easy I said. Yeah right.

What sort of a story can you write in three hundred words? Well, fascinations that open questions the reader must answer. Hints that promise what three hundred words can't deliver but cause the dreams that do. Enticements to indulgence in hidden pleasures of fancy, the kind that nobody else sees...

Try a four-hundred and thirty something word narrative leading nowhere. I didn't believe it could be so difficult. It's easy to say nothing in three hundred words, it's even easy to say something, but telling a story?...

Yeah OK. Davo got maggoty drunk and got picked up by the cops... Yeah that sort of story can be told in about three hundred words. A man walks into a bar… Yeah that can dragged out to three hundred words. But something with more substance?

Then it occurred to me. First person. The day after saying to somebody I don’t write first person, first person. You can get all chummy with first person, so I gave it a go.

The page titled Northern Certainty is that story.

And this is exactly two hundred words now.

Theolmympus

Well I thought I'd let you know the purpose of this Blog. It's so I can upload short stories from this strange place that I've started gathering stories from.

The Darklands however isn't really a fantasy world in the more traditional sense. It's a series of musings that I've been developing for a while now that begins with "What if some people from a technologically advanced culture suddenly found themselves in the situation where all their technology no longer works?"

The short answer is "They'd be screwed." The much longer and easier answer is "They'd found a new empire." This is what the first story that I've been developing has been about, but in the meantime, I've been exploring this strange place. It's a planet, slightly larger than Earth, tilted a bit more than Earth and has two moons unlike Earth. It also has something strange about it that doesn't allow what we think of as technology to work. Nobody knows what it is, but it has something to do with the intense magnetic field about the planet and the strange shape of that field.

And then there are the inhabitants...

Another time.

Welcome

Welcome to the Dark Lands. Well, not the Dark Lands really. More like the countries to the south of the Dark Lands, the Empires of Theolympus and the Lands north of the Great Rivers. Here you will meet with the Dark Landers, Other Landers and perhaps some of the mysterious Lingen.

No, there is no magic here, although some things seem like it. Instead it’s just a reality. Not anything mystical; a technology, not a ritual. This is a place of perpetual strangeness, but that’s anywhere until the strange becomes mundane. Old earthers would have called the inhabitants “Iron Age”, but as you will see, it really can’t be because Iron behaves differently here.

You may want to be careful though. Are they birds up there on the right, or are they mustringen? You really won’t know until it's too late, unless of course you're a Dark Land Inhabitant too.

Enjoy these tales then...


[Constructive Feed Back is always welcome, and no, I haven't given up my day job.]