A Reading School Creative Writing Club Bulletin with a welcome to new readers, and apologies to our fans
Junior club: Tuesday, junior lunch, A1
Senior club: Friday senior lunch, A2
A club caption contest:
Stop stepping on my feet.
Nice mooves.
We want our money back.
It gets worse and worse every week.
Aren’t you meant to try ride me?
Aren’t you meant to try kill me?
I think you dropped something
Mooooooo
Eyes up here human
What am I doing?
What is he doing?
Do you think anyone is watching?
I think my skirt fell off…
A club caption contest:
Rico ate another bomb
General Pengrevious, you’re taller then expected
Prescription for the artic monkeys
I’m afraid you can’t come in without shoes, Sir
Pingu, is it really you?
I am afraid your condition is incurable
It’s challenge 25, I’m afraid
Neep Noop
We meet again, Q.
A club prompt: Truly Pathetic Fallacy
Pathetic fallacy is the projection of human emotions onto inanimate objects, more often than not, weather. We invited the club to deliberately misuse pathetic fallacy in a piece for dramatic (or funny) effect.
Warm light glowed on my face, as the clouds parted to reveal a beautiful, golden, radiant nuclear war head.
, Y10
The clouds were really cloudy. And grey. I think it might rain. Did I mention that it was cloudy? That is to say, I am mildly depressed. I lost my job, my house, even my left pinkie toe. As I walk through the dark alleyway, the rain thundering down around me, I can only ask: why me?
, Y10
Luke
Joel
It took us a while to figure it out, probably after three or four deaths, but once we knew, we realised how easily actions had spiralled.
Of course, when we had arrived, we must have felt remorse on some level, or at least understood that it was a crime, but honestly, I don’t think anyone saw it that way – for us, it was just a way of life, moving from home to home, hounded by problems both of our own doing, and those outside of our control. Settling in here had been no different at first, and we had quickly made our small area as comfortable as we could. That peace was broken a lot faster than we’d expected, and it ruined the experience entirely.
Normally, it takes the owners at least a few months to notice we’ve been living here, but this time it was a matter of days. It was Ricky who was spotted first, out for a stroll. Apparently, they’d locked eyes briefly, before he sprinted away to tell us. After the initial panic, we’d come to the conclusion that nothing serious would be done. It had only been Ricky they’d seen, and we hoped he’d looked more like a passer-by than a long-term residence. Besides, it was a nice house, and it seemed a shame to leave over such a small matter.
That was why it was such a shock the next day when we awoke to the sounds of heavy footsteps and deep muttering. We hid ourselves pretty well, but looking back, they must have still carried suspicions afterwards. Anyway, when Mark was found dead a few days later, we were sad, of course, but it was a risk he took, and it happens. So it was even more of a shock to find Lucy dead just a few days after that, and then Charlie bare hours after that.
Now they try to lure those left of us out. We all say we won’t fall for it, but I can see we are scared of what they will try next. We once met others on our travels who told of poisoned food, and men with horrific masks, and strange sprays. At night, to scare the children, we talk about cats. We call them myths, but even the oldest and wisest among us will question this on dark, cold winter evenings. I have tried to warn the children about the traps just outside the gap in the south wall, but my words will certainly ring hollow when they see the bait: for almost every mouse, cheese is worth the risk.
By LM
A foray into Flash Fiction...
Flash fiction is “a concise form of fictional storytelling that aims to deliver a complete narrative with a strong impact in a very short space. ”
Here is a smattering of what we came up with during a club meeting...
Keenly, they decided to eat their best friend
Burt, a skull fell out of your closet, what do I do?
The wave rose and crashed into water
For sale: 803,762 watermelons
It was a normal summer for me. Actually no. It wasn’t raining half the time, so it was mildly abnormal. But apart from that... It was a somewhat regular summer, when I met him.
‘I think you dropped something’
I span around towards the unexpected voice. A 6”4 man in a crisp white shirt holding a copy of ‘Feminist literature for beginners’ stood there behind me, offering out my lip-gloss.
I could scarcely look into his radiant eyes. Mostly because of the blaring sun behind him in its normal summer fashion. ‘Thanks’ I replied, the knot in my throat barely letting the words out, as I took back the lipgloss.
As I stood there, I felt a shock pulse through my body. Our eyes locked together, his slight stubble sticking out on his cheek, tracing an emasculate jawline.
‘Do you want to get a coffee?’ The words jump out my mouth before I can even register them being thought.
‘Sure’ he casually replied.
And that was how the best summer of my life started...
A club CHALLENGE
Want to get in on the fun, but too busy and/or anti-social and/or frightened of us to come to club meetings?
You can still share your work with us!
Even better, we’ll consider it for publication in our annual magazine, the Wordsmiths’ Gazette.
To submit, you MUST:
Be a Reading School student
Have your work neatly formatted in a Word document
Submit it to Ms Ellis (PEllis@reading-school.co.uk)
You CAN:
Submit work in any format (poem, novel excerpt, script, recipe...) and any genre, as long as it’s appropriate for school. Request that your work be treated anonymously, if you so choose
Lastly... our current challenge to inspire submissions:
Write a piece in which you narrate a dramatic event from a really unexpected perspective.