Ladies and Gentleman! We’ve done the first month! (explosion of confetti and marshmallow everywhere). You guys have the next month to read the entries and vote for your favourite pieces! (See the Voting page)
And whilst you lot are busy doing that, our incredible writers will be working on the OCTOBER CHALLENGE! This month I’m asking the gang to write about FEAR. This can be a personal phobia, someone else’s fear or even a made up phobia; it can even be a discussion of fear itself but we want up to 1500 scared, shaking words!
With that I give you the example piece for this month. I have given myself my own personal challenge of writing the example pieces within the submission weekend. I have based my piece, entitled Rushed, on the fear of music’s evolution into something that lacks soul or even human interaction! Inspired by the song 2112 by Rush.
Enjoy the pieces and I’ll be back this time next month. May the pages be forever in your favour…
Rushed
And so I sit in this here rocking chair.
I have lived a most fulfilling life, experienced many joys and waned with many disasters. I have taken every punch that this fastidious heavyweight can throw and I draw none when an opening becomes clear in his defence. Though this final punch has took the breath right from me…
I was merely a boy when I found the instrument. It sat at the bottom of a large ravine we used as a shortcut between the realms. It looked like a gourd that had been squeezed by the very rock itself, and in doing so a large shaft in the middle had shot out of the top. Along this slender strip were hair like vines that were as taut as to the point of breaking, yet they did not yield. I took this contraption to my hideaway in the mountains – a shallow cave behind the waterfall that fed our village – and experimented for hours. I found that the device could produce sound when the vines were strummed or plucked, the sounds could also be manipulated by pressing my fingers at intervals on the shaft.
I had a moment of paralysis when I went to return with the device to my village, afraid that it would be stolen or condemned. Instead I continued through the ravine, on to the other realm, where both the soundbox and I turned ethereal and wandered out of a closet in a young man’s bedroom as he slept. I cannot explain why the ravine always leads to bedroom closets but it is a portal that is very rarely used. I placed the substance of an object of very similar quality that resided in the bedroom, sure it would be safe for when I next returned…
And so today, nearly 2 millenia after that fateful day, the instrument returned to me. It was left on my porch with a note that read:
Dear Lifeson,
I have spent many years in that other realm, and I have transferred my spirit between many homes. You left me in the control of a young man with different coloured eyes and a lightning bolt shaped scar across one. I shook with joy when I lived under the supervision of a man with a large afro and vibrantly coloured clothes. When he burned his instrument I transcended into that of a man who I presumed was questioning the foundation of education, the mortar of society, and having pudding if meat was never digested. I worked with people condemned to die at 27, I worked with men at work themselves!
All these things and more happened before my demise and return to your side. In the past years an overriding government has monitored and limited the creative industries of Man. They have ostracised my sound to that produced by computer and thus, mankind slipped into a downward spiral.
Whatever you do, Lifeson, keep me from digitalisation.
I could not believe my eyes, yet here it was and I had been following the news of recently deceased humans from the other realm in the paper. Bowie, Hendrix, Cobain and many others had died and been loved for centuries after; that was, until the Red Starred government had started. The year was 2112, and music had just died. I flung the paper down, I could not stomach all this information at once, I had caused the birth of this music, only to see it die before my eyes. I exiled myself from the village, I could not bear the idea of speaking of my crime of interfering with the other realm, let alone the judgment as I mourned something I had not known until it’s ruin.
And so I await my end, in whichever way it may come, whilst I sit here in this rocking chair…
Novel Dreamers 