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Hi!

I've started writing for the video game website: The Gamer's Challenge and just wrote my first piece titled "Drug Addled Video Games: The Importance of Narcotics" which is about the use of drugs in video games. I talk about Max Payne, Heavy Rain amonst other things, if you're interested check it out here: http://www.thegamerschallenge.com/tgc/drug-addled-video-game s-the-importance-of-narcotics/

Leave a comment there or here if it intrigued you. Also any criticism about the writing or the content would be really appreciated.

Thanks for your time,
Daze36

Sounds quite interesting, I guess the only thing I should have mentioned before is that I'm located in Sweden, not sure if that matters or not though...

At 10/1/12 06:00 PM, Unveiling2012 wrote: Extended Synopsis:

A 19 year old is just your ordinary teenager until discovering he is not so ordinary during an epic struggle between the powers of good and evil. As our hero overcomes his fears with the help of family and friends he nears a choice that may effect the entire world as we know it.

I could be interested, depending on whether or not the premise appeals to me, so I would need a little more information. I am quite interested in apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic plots as long as they are handled well. What's the target audience for this? What age groups?

At 11/9/11 06:13 PM, Fro wrote:

At 11/9/11 04:44 PM, Travis wrote: I guess it wouldn't be wrong for me to ask for pms of critiques from the judges?

I only took notes, but you'll have to wait until after the results are given by Tom before they can be shown. I'd expect him to post them at any time now.

Where are the results going to be shown? In this thread or?

At 11/8/11 06:09 PM, Fro wrote: I'm done judging. I hope I'm not the only judge because some of these stories were just so close in terms of quality. The top three that I picked would all tie for 1st place if that was possible. (That's why we usually have more than one judge.) They scored 9.91, 9.9, and 9.8 out of 10.

The three that won my votes were followed by a few good stories, but after that the quality fell sharply.

So do we get to find out who the 3 you picked were? :) Do you know who else/ how many other people are judging these or are you the only judge (emphasizing the word usually here)?

At 11/6/11 12:17 AM, Ship wrote: The suspense is killing me!! I could use 100 dollars....

I know exactly how you feel

At 11/1/11 10:51 PM, DeftAndEvil wrote:

At 11/1/11 07:58 AM, Daze36 wrote: Thanks for including me in the finalist list! Good luck to all of you!
Also, when do we usually find out who the winner is?

The last two have taken about 10 days. So, about 2 weeks? There are many more submissions this time 'round, after all.

Oh damn :P Alright, that means I can stop religiously checking now haha.

Thanks for including me in the finalist list! Good luck to all of you!
Also, when do we usually find out who the winner is?

Having safely acquired the piece of broken glass, I had held my arm up against my back, hiding her imminent death from her. To further elevate my sense of self-importance I had viewed her carefully, listened to her soft voice, overjoyed at the notion that I would be the last person to ever witness the experience of Katherine. I contemplated whether I would have sex with her one last time, but I could no longer withstand my temptation to watch her blood flow like a rough, frighteningly beautiful, waterfall onto the hardwood floor.

That's when in one seemingly swift motion of my arm I allowed the shard to slice into her throat with almost a surgeon's precision. She had then collapsed to the floor in involuntary jerks and muffled, choking cries, the front of her dress already turning a shade of crimson. I had leaned over her convulsing body and passionately stabbed into her chest, all the while attempting to gather all the small details of her death into my memory. When she finally released her last struggling breath I sighed deeply and felt a certain type of satisfaction, which I had never encountered before. A feeling which validated my reality, made me the only real person in the world. Her death validated my existence, and from there the body count grew.

Now I am not one for confessions, and I certainly do not feel guilty about my previous actions, but my life up until the moment I began my murders had been at a stand still. It was as if I was waiting for a purpose, a necessary means to a seemingly meaningless system of thoughts, actions and emotions. While I may be more empty on the inside, devoid of true humanity according to you, I deem myself more human than the rest of the individuals that share my space. I am not attempting to say I am better, rather that I am real, this idea gives me the right to take away the false ideas of reality that the rest of you have obtained, and instead instil the only truth you can ever signify, the truth of death. And I cannot be stopped.

The Crimson

I lead a pretty natural lifestyle. Usually I join the inhabitants of Earth in our desensitized conditions forcing us to live in a state of constant apathy. Maybe my apathy is stronger than theirs, that could explain my actions, or maybe others find more productive ways to stave off the persistent effects of consistently feeling nothing at all. Some sort of environmentally friendly material that fills the abyss that is life. Unless others have never realized how apathetic they really are hence they walk around with their feelings of self-importance in their meaningless jobs, materialistic tendencies and attempts at reaching new more desirable social stigmas. Fuck, how did I end up preaching some sort of libertarian mantra about the suppression of freedom in our all too modern lifestyles? Next I'll end up telling my non-existent children that if they masturbate an angel will shit a brick the size of a small caravan, which will then with the miraculous aim of the divine land on top of their mother's head, killing her instantly. In all honesty I have no idea why I am the way I am, but I'm starting to believe in that timeless idiom that goes, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks".

You know, life, it's just a seemingly never-ending cock tease for all of the people experiencing it. A whore that almost brings you to fruition but stops right before you actually reach the climax, over and over again. We're stuck in a circle of forcibly having to keep our true enjoyments at bay due to these highly enforced rules created to keep our survival bleak enough so that we remain close to depressed. To top it off nature stuck in this little fail-safe in our brains that makes sure we always have the idea in the back of our minds, the gnawing hope if you will, that things are going to get better. The hope that one day we'll all be sitting around naked, with no rules and no restrictions. Doing whatever we want, whenever we want. Until then though, if we eat too much we get fat. If we drink too much we turn into alcoholics. If we don't work hard enough we can't provide for ourselves or our families. We're fighting a never-ending battle, trying to do things that are pleasurable but never being allowed to do them in excess, and yet we're made to always want more luxuries. That's why life is dull, that's why all the colors of the world take on a shade of gray. That's probably why I am the way I am. Sooner or later everyone gets tired of paying a whore that doesn't finish her job.

While the intoxicating appeal of philosophy is enough to keep my mind circulating around different theories for hours on end, I'm afraid I have already digressed too far. Let me tell you about the only thing that brings me any sort of relief in this life. It all began merely three years ago, when I was with a girl who had managed to convert me to the ridiculous theocracy of true love. It was a brisk fall morning, the sky was gray much like the rest of the world. The auburn leaves had begun to turn into a shit colored shade of brown, and most of them lay in a heap (almost fittingly) by the sewer grates on the street Katherine and I had been on. We had been walking down that very shit stained road, hand in hand. Until I had found Katherine, nothing in my life was real other than me. After I met her, however, it seemed like I had begun to meld into the background; I was no longer convinced of my reality. In fact, she was so much more real than me, that she had taken on an omnipotent role in my life.

That morning she had seemed taken aback and tentative. She radiated a sullen, unpleasant mood. Her eyes lacked their usual sparkling vigor, they seemed cold to me, almost dead. This had shed a new light on her existence, as if she had been starting to fade away along with the rest of the world. I began to compare her to a succubus, leeching off my life in an attempt to achieve entity. This thought was fleeting that cold autumn morning, but it had festered in my mind over the days to come. I attempted to get a direct answer from her concerning the state she was in, but she had successfully evaded all my questions up until we reached our old hang out spot: an abandoned house in the middle of an abandoned street. The same house where we first had sex, the act that had temporarily allowed her to triumphantly steal my actuality from me.

As we entered the house, still hand in hand, we went up the old rickety stairs into the room where we had consummated our love. Where we had made a statement to the world that for the duration of our sex acts we had merged into one solidified (albeit horny) human being. As we walked up the stairs I noticed that tears had shown up in her eyes. I had observed that, for whatever inexplicable reason, seeing those tears had made me feel absolutely nothing. They left me completely devoid of emotion, much like the rest of the world does. So I had walked up the stairs, hand in hand with Katherine who had begun to solemnly cry, in complete silence.

Once we had entered the room I was utterly confused, but sure that one way or another I was going to get laid. We sat down, face to face, on the hard wooden floors and I peered into her eyes for the last time. They had already lost an amount of their depth, but I had still managed to find beauty in them. At that point a number of mascara laden tears had been streaming down her cheeks. Still, there had been no room for compassion inside of me. The words that had come out of her mouth passed by me in an unsettling haze. Sure, I had caught the more important ones, but some of the true nuances in her depressed sentences were lost upon my idle ears. She had called me disconnected, unaffectionate, and even a misogynist who was only interested in his phallic tendencies. Without much thought about it I had slowly leaned back towards the corner of the room where a glass shard sharpened to near perfection lay. I winced as my hand had wrapped around it's sharp edges and droplets of my own blood began to form a crimson puddle on the floor.

Our only private place on earth was not an ideal place to be. Rusty nails protruded from the walls ready to inject tetanus into an unaware passerby. Broken bottles littered the floors, partly from squatters that were attempting to evade the freezing winds of winter, partly from us. Floorboards creaked and threatened to give way under our footsteps and on a windy day it sometimes felt like the roof would come down on us. Electricity was out of the question, so our only source of light had been candles, which cast looming shadows that sharpened their fingertips on our raw flesh. Of course none of that mattered at the time, we were content with being together, regardless of how dilapidated our surroundings were. Ironically, our environment was not responsible for the death of Katherine, safety is an illusion shrouded in more mystery than we can fathom. The idea of safety, in other words, is a real bitch.

Continues in next post!