Rick Cook Jr.'s Blog, page 24

ShortStories: The Last Ride [1700 words]

This is another writing prompt response, this time for Chuck Wendig’s Psychic Powers.

The Last Ride

by Rick Cook

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Nicholas rode the bus twice a day. Twice a day Nicholas feared for his life. The morning sunshine beamed over him through sparse clouds; Nicholas had yet to fear this day. Oh, there had been a moment, on his morning walk, when a crowd of people emerging from the subway had nearly overwhelmed him with their cloud of shapes and colors. He had bypassed them with only a flutteri...

Brain2Page: Taming the Senses – The Three-of-Five Rule

There are few things in the world of writing and revision that drive me truly crazy. The first of these is simply that You Are Never Done. Which I will no doubt explore at some future point. But I’m not here to talk about that quite yet.

The second thing that drives me absolutely bats is description. Writing it, rewriting it, reading it. Anything that has to do with description really gets me into a bad frame of mind, because there are so many ways to approach description, and almost every way...

ShortStories: The Price of Fortune [3,500 words]

This short story was written for a writing prompt, Chuck Wendig’s weekly writing prompt, to be precise.

So anyway, on with the show.

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The Price of Fortune

by Rick Cook

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Spectacular Spells was due to start any minute now. Tomas and his friends had finally saved up enough to go, but now they were in danger of getting kicked out. Tomas peered through the peephole his friend had cut in the curtain, looking for the women of the show in states of undress. If he saw even one scantily clad gi...

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Brain2Page: A Muse Approaches; What Do You Do?

Sometimes writing floods the page, and your fingers can’t keep up with the deluge of content bursting forth. You’re so excited, you’re typing a page every ten minutes, you know it’s not perfect, but it’s something, and probably something good. You tell yourself this is the way it should always be. You finish another page. You finish another paragraph.

Then suddenly all that momentum, all that excitement, all that content just dries up. If a gremlin exists inside your head, he just rigged th...

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Brain2Page: Where Do I Even Begin?

To start off my Writing Advice series, what better place than “Getting Started”? This blog post endeavors to help you in deciding just how to begin writing a piece of fiction, whether it’s a short story 500 words long, a sweeping epic series with fifteen planned entries, or anything in-between.

This is such a common problem that no specific method will always be the best way to approach it, but I often find that some level of structuring at least puts me in the right frame of mind to put some...

ShortStories: Penny for your Thoughts

This is a short story I wrote that ties into the universe of Something More, but only in the sense that it is technically a flashback for one of the characters who will feature prominently in the sequel.

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Penny for your Thoughts

by Rick Cook

Marcy’s 8th birthday was unremarkable, as far as birthdays go, which is to say that she would remark it as the best day. Amid the many festivities of the day were pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, killing a piñata, a rousing if confused and chaotic game o...