One of several short stories I've written. I find it's good to take a break from writing my book every once and a while and hammer out a few shorts. This one got a lot of response from my friends, though mostly because quite a few of us actually have OCD... I have a tendency to write about the extremes of a psychosis though... If this is popular I'll probably post a few of my others.


Point of Order


And now one of them is broken. The man fussed over the bits of glass, sweeping them into a dustpan then dumping them in the trash bin, carefully replacing the lid. Bottles were scattered on the floor, all different sizes, a variety of shapes and colors. The man carefully selected the smallest one and set it to the far left on the shelf. This would be his starting point. From there, he began selecting other bottles, seemingly at random, putting them next to the first, some behind, some spaced apart from the rest.

Slowly, ever so slowly, a pattern began to form. Bottles on a shelf, arranged first by size, then by color, and finally by shape. Some had labels, those fit in a special subcategory of color, and those with different labels but were of the same color were arranged alphabetically. The room is filled with other such displays, food lined neatly in an open pantry, sorted by package size, expiration date, packaging color, then food type, a well arranged silverware drawer, cups stacked neatly in their cupboards, different plates and bowls, all properly arranged through some preset system.

And now one of them is broken. The man finished arranging his bottle, glowering at the empty space left on the shelf. He’d need to find a new bottle soon, and then he’d rearrange the shelf again. Had to fill up that space as soon as possible. He stepped down from the ladder and shuddered. The floor was an absolute mess. He moved to his closet calmly. Order had to be maintained after all. Inside, the cleaners were set neatly by their purpose. He selected a heavy floor cleaner and dragged out a mop and bucket as well.

Casually, he poured some of the cleaner on the floor, wet the mop, and began dragging it around in circular paths, clockwise. Each time he wrung out the mop, the water in the bucket reddened, and he had to go and get a new one. Finally, after wringing out the mop, the water in the bucket stayed clear, for the most part, and the man sighed in relief. Now then… perhaps it would be best to dispose of that clutter in the middle of the floor. As the man reached down and bodily lifted the refuse, he nearly screamed in frustration.

The floor, the clean floor, was dirtied again! It was almost too much for the man, and he railed inwardly about the unfairness of the world. Why couldn’t things just stay clean? As he moved to drop the trash into a dumpster in the back of his house, he cut his hand on something sharp. Ah yes, the broken bottle.

Slowly, he drew the jagged stump out, prompting a fresh stream of blood to flow, further soiling the ground. There wasn’t anything he could do about that though, the ground was the ground, and no amount of cleaning would fix it. Just like people. You could say what you like, he explained to the officer, but some people just wouldn’t listen. He said the same thing to the judge, and to the psychiatrist, but as he said, some people just don’t listen.

As he sat in his room, he began picking pieces of dust up off the floor, lint from the walls, bits and pieces of nothings, and arranging them in order. Size first, then color, then shape. He’d said it, over and over again. He’d warned the boy, said to him “don’t touch my bottles”, but the boy hadn’t listened, and now look where it had gotten him. The man watched, annoyed, as a slight breeze blew the debris he was sorting every which way. With a sigh of resignation, he set about gathering them up again. Order had to be maintained after all.

I'm a little tired, but did he kill a kid?
Pretty good all in all, I can't turn out a short story to save my life it has to be an entire full story for me, I have length issues.

Yep.

Don't fuck with obsessive-compulsive psycopaths.

Thanks. And yeah, he did kill a kid.



Heh, yeah.

I've actually got about 5 more that deal with various psychoses... It seems to be a prevailing theme in most of my writing, including my book...

Oh you silly person, insanity is a prevailing theme in all writing if you look deep enough. Most good writers are slightly insane, case in point: H.P. Lovecraft.
About this book, how far into it are you?

4th chapter...
I had a 5th started, but I honestly can't stand it... unfortunately, the roots for the 5th are set in the 3rd, so if I want to change it, I have to rewrite the previous two chapters...

Since I spent the last two months revising the first 3 chapters, I decided I was going to take a break before I got rid of all that work...

If you look up "writing excerpt" in the general discussion forum, you can see the first part of the first chapter... the revised version is in the final post

Ooh I recently finished a book, after about six or seven failed attempts. I don't want to deter you or anything but most of those failures had their roots in rampant revisionism. You have to be careful, sometimes you'll not like a section and redo it and you'll keep doing that until you pick it apart completely. What I did is that if I found a Chapter I didn't like I kept building from it until I finished the book. Then I read it (to see if it was any good and to correct spelling errors and such) and found that those chapters I didn't like weren't so bad after all. Just don't give up, even if this one's a failure (hopefully it isn't) it's not the end.

Yeah, the problem is, with the set-up I gave, there was way to much exposition going on and it really slowed it down. And then things kind of devolved...
that upset me, so I'm going back to rewrite no matter what pretty much....
the problem is, I'm beginning to think that I'm just not good at writing adventure type things...

I've half a mind to post some of my god-awful early attempts (I won't because it's too terrible) but honestly practice makes... well not perfect but better. If you have too much exposition then perhaps the problem is that your plot is setting-driven rather than character-driven. Setting-driven works can be good (take War of the Worlds and arguably Lord of the Rings) but usually character-driven works read better.

Yeah, I know... but the problem is that I've established the characters pretty strongly, but in order to establish parts of them, I need to establish the world history. Which I haven't done any of... And since one of the characters has pretty much lived in a bubble her whole life, it took a bit too much to explain. So I need to go back and make some changes to the world history. I'm thinking of making it not on Earth... It's far enough in the future that colonization of other planets could have occurred...
that would probably be better

Try explaining it through other means. In my book I establish the setting primarily through a series of diary entries, interviews, and scholarly-type articles at the end of every fifth chapter. It allows you to have some exposition without slowing down the plot in between every line of dialog with an infodump. I'm not telling you to do that but it works for a lot of writers and it worked for me.

I'd do that, I considered it, but it won't work with the kind of story it is... I'm honestly thinking of scavenging it for short story material...
rather than writing one book, maybe writing a connected series of short stories that will tell the history, and the stories of various people living at the same time. Maybe then I'll be able to compile it all into a book...

Why won't it work? When I started to insert the little passages and diary entries I was just padding but as it went on they became an integral part of the story. I'd just give some thought to using alternatives to just raw exposition whether by pure prose or by character exposition. Or at least try to make the exposition interesting. Perhaps the solution is to make it on an Earth that has recovered from an Apocalypse, a clean slate so to speak.

That's basically where it is right now... I'm just going to give it another shot in a month or two, and if it still doesn't work, I'm going to leave it and start on my idea for short story versions... if, in the process of that, I get to the point where I think I can continue the book, I'll do it...

How long does it usually take you to get an idea? Me, I never go more than two weeks without working on something. I'm really good at coming up with plots, its follwing through that I have trouble with. Currently I'm juggling potential plots for about four different stories set in about four different universes. I recommend if you're stuck writing down a synopsis or two for another story (just try not to lose sight of your current work if possible)

Already working on 3 other stand alone short stories, as well as a possible idea for a series of short stories... The idea that I mentioned in the JJ earlier today, regarding intentions.

That was a very good peice. I was not quite shure if it was about a murder or not, as it could have just been about the kid breaking the bottle and it had contained a red wine or something, but the murder make a more powerful statment!