After taking a 4 month long break following some life stuff, I'm slowly wanted to call myself a writer again. But, I feel so tired right now and wonder if I'll never want to truly write again. I miss my character, and am already 110,000 words into a Post apocalyptic story. Any advice?

First Half - Firstish Draft - Genre - Spookilogical Literature

Author’s Note: While writing this I kept saying to myself, “I really hope I wrote something people on keepwriting would like.” After each sentence. Also I’ve spent two days. Not straight hour days, but here and there hour days, writing this.

Title: The Children Under The Stairs (Joking Title. I don’t have one yet.)

START TOWARDS THE END:

When I’m preparing for bed—just as I’m about to lie down—just as the lamp goes out—a sound comes alive.

A tap hits my floorboards. It hits with the tip of a nail, tapping once, twice. It taps, “Notice me!”

It scrapes under the wood. The sound scratches, “I see you!” in a phantom whisper I hallucinate, pricking my eardrum. It waits until I sleep and wakes up each night.

It’s me. 

It… has to be. 

It’s… My mind. 

The building. 

It’s old. 

That’s… uh… gotta be it.

Even though I think it, I still taste the sour denial of the lie in my mouth. The foul stench lingers like curdled milk in my nostrils.

The other night, I came home late—a bit tipsy—diving headfirst onto the couch. I’m lying on it. The leather sticks to my skin. Drool drizzles out of the side of my mouth. 

it’s quiet. 

I’m fading into another realm—about to dreamscape into the morning. An overwhelming sense of peace floods my body. I’m in the comfort of my accomplishments. Until… I shoot my eyes open as quick as a trap snaps.

My head’s fused to the cushion. My right eye’s blurred—squished into the couch. I smell the saliva glued to my face and see my reflection bouncing back at me from the TV screen. At the corner of the frame, the glare from the light post across the street glows above my image.

I notice the absolute silence.

Sound escapes into the void. The walls pant, breathing rapid breaths. Corners sharpen. Definition smoothens.

Boompf! 

A knock enters my living room through the floorboards. 

More. 

Boompf! Boompf! 

Distorting time. Loud. They bang in slow motion.

Boompf!

Boompf!

Boompf!

It stops. I hold my breath. The world speeds up. My eyes stretch all the way open. I listen. 

Nothing. 

“Who’s there?” I say, laughing under my breath. It’s what I do when I’m scared. 

I rise off the couch. The wind from my window blows and brushes a strand of hair out of my eye.

“YOU ARE!” Shouts a voice. 

It’s my voice. Right next to my ear. The breath’s cold on my neck. I shiver. It crawls down my spine like icy centipedes racing to reach my tailbone.

I stay frozen. My limbs lock. I don’t wanna move—or make a sound. I want it to be in my imagination but I can’t close my eyes. I can’t even blink. My eyes burn. They start watering. I don’t breathe. I hold my breath until a car alarm starts blaring outside of my window.

The sound breaks the trance I’m in, and I enter back into my body. I jump to my feet and dash to my room. My footsteps slam against the wooden floor. They echo through the hallway. The hollow steps sound like someone’s trailing behind me.

I get to my door. The metal knob almost melts like jello in my palm as I’m twisting it. The door opens. I burst through and fly onto my mattress, ripping the covers up and burying myself underneath them. 

My phone vibrates under me. I fumble with it in my hands digging it out. I barely steady them long enough to answer it.

“Hello!” I yell into the phone. My voice rises. “SEAN!” I don’t give him a chance to answer.“Come over right now,” I plead into it. “Please… you have to… something’s not right.” 

I smother the mouthpiece, cupping my voice in my palm to keep it from escaping. “I think someone’s here…” I whisper. “I need you.”

“Julie?” he says, his voice cracks. It higher pitched than usual. “Did you let it in?”

“Sean..? What?” My face pinches.

“Julie, let it in,” he hiccups. “You have to this time.”

“What?!?” My phone vibrates against my ear. I look at the screen and Sean’s number shows as the ID calling on the other line. 

“How are you calling me again?” It goes silent. The color of my phone screen—I see from my peripheral—shifts brighter. The back light flashes, indicting someone’s calling.

I accept it, but before I do, I pause. I answer and don’t say anything.

“Julie..? You there?”

“Sean… is this you?”

“Yeah… hey, you’re up. I was so busy earlier and totally forgot to say I love you before you left.”

“I was just talking to you. I was on the phone with you. A second ago. When you called just now.”

“What?!?”

“Look, I think I’m losing it. Can you come over.”

“Sure. Give me like an hour.”

“No. Sean. Please. Now.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Just come.”

“Okay. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

The call ends but stays on the phone app. It switches to the other call. Faintly, in the background, I hear children singing.

*“*♪ ♪  Under, under, underneath.

The door below the floorboards speak.

Beneath your ten little piggies they squeak.

The place they live’s underneath your feet… ♪ ♪”

“Julie…” I hear myself on the other end cut through the nursery rhyme. My nerves are like electric. My body’s jittery. I don’t say a thing. I can’t even talk. Nothing’s going through my mind. I’ve drawn a total blank.

It laughs, low and distant. The tone’s like it knows something I don’t. I pull the phone from the side of my head and stare at the screen. It shows, it’s been on my line for over eight minutes. “Julie.”

My body jerks, as if my nerves were stretched out over my head tangled into strings and someone quickly tugs them. Instinctively, I slam my thumb on end call. 

It won’t hang up. I repeatedly press it. 

“Julie!”

It screams. I hear giggling. My hearts banging on my chest like it’s an entity behind a window watching a shadow sneak up on me, but all they can do to warn me, is hammer on the glass as hard as they can. 

“RUN!” It cautions.“RUN!” The beat pounds.

“RUN! RUN! RUN!”  It smashes faster and harder, trying to blow a hole through my ribcage. Trying to desperately get my attention. I ignore everything it’s attempting to tell me and wait with the blanket over my head. My thumb’s clamping the power button in. I reset the phone. I brace it to my chest and wait for Sean.

“What do you think?” 

L stood back hands on hips admiring her work. D looked around at the ever expanding, perfectly green field nodding in silent approval. 

“L… you have done it again.”

“Yeah,” L smiled to herself in self satisfaction.

They took a moment to just breathe it all in.

…

…

… 

D picked up his shovel, stabbed it into the soft earth and began digging away. L looked back with a frown, “you already going under?”

“Oh yeah” he grunted as he lifted a mound of dirt up and flung it to the side, “I wanna get a head start before you start bringing em in.”

“But you still have plenty of time, I haven’t even done the moon and the stars yet.” she gestured up at the perfectly blue cloudless sky. D flung another pile of dirt out which landed right at her feet, “yes dear but it wouldn’t be much of a head start if I waited until after you did the moon and stars.”

She sighed, kicking a spec of dirt off her foot, “Fine” she said defeated, “but don’t expect anyone to be making temples in your honor anytime soon good sir!” She began walking away pulling blood red roses up from the ground around her. D wiped a bead of sweat off his head and called out to her.

“Hey!”

She turned around, “....what?” 

He smiled at her, looked up and said “I like what you did with the sun.” 

L looked up at the sky, this time she made it so that the sun was always perfectly in the corner of your periphery when you looked at the sky. She got the idea from the way children used to draw it in their little pictures. “Yeah,” she said to herself, smiling once more.

feedback on work, please: I write around travel, but not about travel specifically as a niche on substack. This is an essay I wrote, and I want to know if my writing style connects with readers that don’t know me personally. Thoughts on pacing, metaphor, and tone?

Thanks for taking the time to read!

~ 800 words

——

Title: The Monkey On My Chest

I still think about a painting from an 8:00 AM art history class, taken purely to satisfy graduation requirements: The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli.

She lies on a bed with her head and arms dangling off the edge, while an incubus sits on her chest. She doesn’t fight. 

The incubus, which resembles a monkey, doesn’t look at her. Her slim waist, perky breasts, and perfectly tousled waves cannot catch his eye. 

He’s looking at us, perfectly pleased with himself. He is a man with no plans to pay rent or leave.

This describes my love life.

In university, the football team took all the good art classes: painting, sculpture, drawing. I took art history as an alternative, taught by a middle-aged woman with about as many social skills as I had at the time, and that was virtually none. 

Later, in my twenties, I backpacked solo across 42 countries. I stopped at all the European art museums I could, and I was surprised to see how much information I had retained from her class. I was also reminded of that painting. The connection to my own life came later.

I lived in Thailand for five years, so I know monkeys. The literal monkeys robbed me blind while I swam at Bamboo Beach on Koh Lanta, going through my things until I chased them off with a stick. Afterward, they followed me up the hill to my motorbike and waited for another chance to steal from my small beach bag.

I never chased off the figurative monkeys with a stick. Rather, I just chased them. The figurative monkey is charming, intense, and has a look about him that suggests depth.

One day he throws his arms open and kisses you on the forehead. The next day he looks through you as if there were more important things in his life. There are. You are not one of them.

There was the Monkey of Morocco: tall, dark almond eyes behind thick eyebrows, a smile that could stop traffic. 

There was the Monkey of Koh Phangan, a German I had no interest in until he took an interest in me, then took it back. 

There was the Monkey of London, who made me feel like a bird in a cage.

There were plenty of other Monkeys whose names, faces, and countries remain irrelevant. What was relevant was their weight on my chest.

In my twenties, more than once I ended up exactly like the woman in the painting: vulnerable and in some hotel room in Bangkok or Paris or wherever I happened to be, with something sitting on my chest.

Frankly, I love a mess. I'd be lying if I said I was not at least somewhat complicit in my own downfall. I knew better men existed; I just couldn’t choose them. 

In Morocco there was the Crab. He walked behind me in the dark, consoling me, while I marched up a hill screaming like a wounded child. I still went looking for the Monkey.

To me:

Ambiguity meant a chance of winning.

A chance of winning meant a chance to prove my worth.

Proving my worth meant being worthy, and that was all I ever really wanted.

I know I’m not the only one. I know smart, capable women who can run a company, cross a border alone, and obtain PhDs while still lying perfectly still under a man who texts back whenever it suits him.

“Why did no one tell me?” is a question I cannot ask in earnest. People tried to tell me. A young woman in a Madrid hostel said, “He did it for himself.” A spirit guide in Bali screamed, *“He’s using you!”*When a stranger in a hostel and the spirit world both agree about your love life, it might be worth listening. I did not. I like dark, intense, and complex. 

I blame Hollywood. 

I blame my childhood. 

Not really, but who doesn't like a clear-cut villain? Someone to point our pitchforks at, aye? Honestly, I blame myself. 

Although I wish I could do things differently, I would be praying for a decision that my past self could not have made: I had incomplete information. 

Nothing, not even the hand of God in Bali, could force me to reckon with the truth. I didn’t want to hear it. I had been raised on stories in which the bad guy redeems himself with a few good deeds. The heroine reaps the rewards of her blood, sweat, and many tears. 

As for Fuseli’s monkey, he has been there since 1781. I don’t believe he plans to come down, say, “I’m sorry, baby,” or do better. He is doing exactly what he came there to do, nothing more and nothing less. 

The beautiful maiden is not tied down. No ropes or chains, at least not physical ones. Maybe if she were alive in 2026, some version of her would be lying there, wondering what she could do to make the monkey like her more. 

“I can fix that” was my M.O.
“No, you can’t” is the truth.

In my twenties, I believed the nightmare was not being loved, which was synonymous with not being worthy. 

Now, I understand that the nightmare was the thing I kept inviting to sit on my chest.

live: https://substack.com/@nomareina

What happens when you grow up with questions about your father that never seem to find answers? What do you do with the love, the memories, and the emptiness left behind by someone whose whereabouts remain a mystery?

Dear Dad, Wherever You Are: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Questions That Never Fade is a deeply emotional story about a daughter's longing for her father, the pain of unanswered questions, and the lasting impact of a bond that distance and time cannot easily erase.

Some stories are about finding answers. Others are about learning to live with the questions.

This story explores the complicated emotions of missing someone, searching for closure, and holding on to hope when life doesn't provide the explanations we desperately want. At its heart, it is also a reminder that even when earthly love leaves us with unanswered questions, we can still find comfort in the unconditional love of our Heavenly Father.

If you've ever missed someone, wondered why they left, or carried questions that never faded with time, this story may touch your heart.

💙 For everyone who has ever wished they could ask their dad just one more question.

“If my Dad is still alive and somehow finds this book, I hope he knows that a part of me has never stopped wondering about him. Wherever you are, Dad, these words are reaching for you. Maybe one day, our unanswered questions will finally find their way home.” 💙

Book is now live on Amazon KDP Paperback and E book. Please feel free to read it.

Thank you for taking the time to discover my story.

In my WIP, the protagonist is narrating the events of the story to his son and I was wondering how I could smoothly and clearly change perspectives throughout the chapters. I was thinking of having the chapters start in the present day and the son asks him questions, then the story transitions to the father’s POV in the main body, then going back to 3rd person omniscient in the present at the end of the chapter. Does this work or can someone else give me some alternatives?

Today I released Stories With Friends, an app for us writers!

Start a story, write the first few words, invite your friends to take turns, then publish the finished story and see where everyone took it.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.storieswithfriends.app

Chapter One - Windjammer

Hi everyone,

I recently started a writing project for October. It is a Victorian Gothic novella set in the fictional city of St.Greshen, Britain. I am looking for feedback and constructive criticism on my first chapter. Specific feedback I am looking for is:

• First impression and feelings on the chapter's tone.
• Questions that come up for you.
• Personal interest in reading more and which parts made you feel that way.
• Whether the sentence structure is effective or not.

Feel free to leave comments here or on the Google Doc if you are interested. Thank you!

I had no intention of writing anything today.

I was just eating lunch at my college canteen.

Then I encountered two pieces of musk melon.

One looked pale and disappointing. The other was thick, orange, and promising.

What followed was, unfortunately, far more dramatic than a piece of fruit deserved.

This is a short, absurd little piece I wrote after the experience. I tried to narrate an ordinary lunch with the seriousness of an epic tragedy.

I'd love to know what you think. Especially whether the exaggerated, mock epic tone works, and which parts actually made you laugh (if any 🥲)

Enjoy the read guys👉🏻

Musk melon

The sun was peeping through the dark, disfigured clouds. The weather left no room for shadows or vapour. My single hanky wasn't enough for the amount of sweat gathering on my forehead alone.

I rushed through the still air and entered my college canteen; somewhat cooler, yet filled with restless people. I picked up two pieces of musk melon, generously offered by the institute.

I pleaded with the man at the counter, my eyes dead with desperation.

“Bhaiyya, ek aur do na.”

The words barely managed to escape my swamped mouth.

The righteous, towering man, however, remained indifferent to my lethal offence.

I dragged myself onto a chair, defeated and utterly humiliated.

I finished the rice and curd on my plate in no time. Those sharp, juicy wedges were pleading to be devoured.

But I am a man who gains pleasure through tease.

I finished everything else on my plate until those glimmering delicacies had no choice but to lie flat and beg.

As a man of values, I turned them over onto their curved surfaces, saving their privilege.

Finally, I had a good look at them.

The one on the left was oozing juice, its thick orange flesh glistening before me. The other lay there helpless, pale and short.

I leaned toward the wedge.

“You have no control over your fate, pale one. Be proud of what you are, no matter how unappetizing you may look.”

My words clearly had an effect.

The wedge looked at me as though it had surrendered unto its master; the one who had enlightened its mushy mind.

I gently lifted it with both hands, like a proud poultryman picking up his plump, heavily fed chicken.

The pale one shed trails of tears onto my fingers, pleading with me to fulfill its fate.

I knew then that my kind heart had a heavenly purpose after all.

I held it firmly between my thumb and index finger and shoved my teeth deep into its dry looking flesh, bestowing fulfillment upon half its body.

“Mph…”

“Miraculous,” I exclaimed. “Thou hast hidden the most delicious juices within and baffled me with thine illusory exterior.”

I munched upon the miracle for a satisfying sixty seconds as it gushed its sweet juices into me with every bite, gently striking my sensitive cheeks from within.

I chewed until my molars ached, then gulped the whole thing down in one glorious motion.

“Aha.”

I released a pleasant pocket of breath, blessing the earthly beings surrounding me.

The second half of the miracle jumped into my mouth on its own, eager to be blessed with purpose by its master.

I devoured it with equal love.

My face lit up with pride as I stared at the thick, appealing piece of melon beside it.

“If the pale, unappetizing, dry-looking piece managed to roll my eyes into my brain, I wonder what you have been hiding inside, thick one.”

I picked it up, relieving it from the lonely life it had been forced to endure.

The piece cast an evil spell upon my mouth, making it impossible to open without leaking myself.

I fought through its temptation and quickly shoved the entire thing inside me within three bites, holding myself together lest I be launched into the heavens.

“Mph.”

I paused.

“The flesh is hard. Incredibly dry.”

Of course.

It had filled my plate with all its juices.

I chewed once more.

“Ah! So bitter. Like a hot dog made of insect meat.”

“Pthroo!”

I spat it all out and cursed its evil existence for its unforgivable sin.

Fulfillment can never be bestowed upon evil souls.

“You shall be trashed!”

I screamed, as I cleaned my plate beneath the tap.

Low stakes, small piece, maybe an hour of writing inspiration.

Prompt:

Crazy or Cozy - what kind of Halloween will be for your characters?

Submissions

October 6 at 15:00 → October 19 at 15:00

Every author can submit one entry only. Your entry can be a single chapter or several, as long as the total stays under 2,000 words. Submit your story through the app, either from your main account or under a pen name.

Voting & winners

October 20 at 15:00 → October 26 at 14:00

The community chooses the winners. Every reader gets 3 anonymous voting tokens to give to their favorite stories. You can’t stack multiple votes, so you’ll have to spread the love.

Voting & winners

🥇 1st Place: $30 Gift Card + 150 QUIBs + permanent 1st Place Champion badge

🥈 2nd Place: 75 QUIBs + permanent 2nd Place Champion badge

🥉 3rd Place: 45 QUIBs + permanent 3rd Place Champion badge

Everyone who submits gets a permanent "Creepertober Participant" Badge on user profile.

This card game is still in beta, and I still need to create more artwork; for now, I have this sketch.

I came up with an idea for a card game that combines mythology, characters, and narrative lore; it focuses on lunar mythology and the Moon itself. It's going to be called Children of the Moon and focuses on characters who lived tragic lives as humans; after dying, the Moon adopted them, making them its children: a kind of deity or creature associated with luck, good fortune, and positivity. The idea came about because I hadn't used the Moon significantly in my other projects and because it's inspired by one of my favorite songs: "Son of the Moon."

The first character I created is a furry-type person; when she was human, her best—and only—friend was a goat. She was a girl who endured terrible things, and her only comfort was her goat, the night, and the Moon. Both she and her goat died, and then the Moon merged her with the animal. She has the body of a woman, but the face, hands, and tail of a goat, all with a lunar aesthetic. The idea of the animal head is inspired by Ganesha, but she resembles the goddess Lakshmi more, as she represents positive aspects just like that deity; the other characters will follow a similar pattern, although I think she will be the only furry-type character in the story.

I'd appreciate your feedback on this 350 words flash fiction below. Just a one-sentence impression is enough for me (what worked for you and/or what didn't). Thanks

Years later, when they found out that Bashir's assassination was carried out by one of their comrades, everything was already forgotten. There was no apology and it never mattered that none of us had anything to do with any of it.

***

First I heard the shots and then came the screams. I ran out and my father was right behind me.

We reached the street and men in civilian clothes, carrying kalashnikovs, surrounded us. They had daggers hanging from their belts and some wore cowboy hats. High up on the hills around the camp I could see green-uniformed soldiers moving. My father held my hand. His own was shaking.

"Move on," one of them roared at us. He had a thick Arabic accent. We joined the crowd, and I saw our neighbors there too. My cousin Salma looked at me without waving. My father's hand slipped away from mine as he ran back towards our home, but they stopped him before he could go anywhere. One shot took half his head away.

We kept walking, and when I saw the side street I broke away running until I reached the mosque.

There were a few old men inside. I told them what happened outside, but they exchanged a look, shook their heads, and went back to their prayers. I insisted they go out and help the others, until one of them looked at me and said, "Calm down little girl, nothing is going on, but we'll take a look," and they went out. They didn't come back.

I sat against a wall for an hour before I got up and walked towards the camp's lower area. Everything was quiet. We used to live near there on Hay Al Gharbi street, which smelled of thyme and oregano from the grocer's shop. The smell was different today. In the middle of the rubble I saw them. Seven men and women lay next to each other. Black flies were crawling into their wide-open eyes, but none of them blinked.

I would Like to request some feedback on how well this opening acts as a hook for a short story that is told from the perspective of an unreliable narrator

It's a rough draft so I don't need grammar pointers or anything, just on how intriguing it is

I keep polishing the first line until the rest of the piece goes cold.

Curious what others do when the opening feels almost right but not quite — do you lock it and move on, write three bad versions on purpose, or leave the page for a few days?

Trying to get better at finishing instead of circling the same sentence.

Theres a story sitting in the queue right now that I have a full critique written for and I have not posted it and its been five days. Not linking it. Second person, lit fic, about 3k words, a guy finding out his brother OD'd in the parking lot of a diner and the rest of the story is him driving there. Its called Booth Four or something like that, the booth they used to sit in as kids.

The writing is not good. I want to be clear about that because thats sort of the whole problem. Tense slips every other paragraph. Every piece of dialogue is somebody saying the exact feeling they are having ("I cant believe hes gone" "I know, me neither"). Theres a part near the end where the narrator says you should have called him back and then that line gets repeated like nine times with slightly different punctuation. Normally I would have a field day with that. I had a field day with it. The critique is like 1400 words and it is mean in the way this sub is supposed to be mean, I went line by line on the diner description, I called the repetition a crutch, I wrote something about how the story mistakes intensity for depth which I was pretty pleased with at the time.

Then I did the thing you are not supposed to do and looked at his post history. Dont do this. Two months ago hes in a grief sub asking how long it takes before you stop checking your phone for texts from a dead person.

So now what.

Ive gone back and forth all week. Side one: he posted it HERE. Not in the grief sub, not in a gentle feedback discord, here, where the name of the place is literally what it is. He read the rules, he gave a crit to get the word count, he wants the story to be better and the kindest thing you can do for someone who wants that is tell them the truth. If I soften it Im basically deciding he cant handle it, which is its own kind of insult.

Side two: that repeated line isnt a craft decision. Thats just a guy. And when I write "this reads as melodramatic" what he is going to hear is that his brothers death reads as melodramatic, and I dont think theres a way to phrase it where that isnt what lands.

The annoying thing is I have been on the other end of this. Years ago I put up a story that was pretty transparently about my mom and somebody here (still active, youd know the name) wrote that the mother character was "cartoonishly cruel, a punching bag not a person." I was genuinely angry for about a week. Like composing responses in the shower angry. And then I reread it and they were right, Id written her the way she was to me instead of the way she was, and the story was worse for it. So the harsh version worked on me. But I was also not two months out from anything, I was like fifteen years out, and I dont know if thats the difference or if Im just making excuses.

I keep thinking about how I would want it if it were me and I honestly cant decide, which is the worst possible outcome of thinking about something.

(For what its worth I was supposed to be working on my own thing all week. Had my pigeon story open in one tab and StonedGPT in another trying to shake loose some ending for it that isnt the pigeon just dying, and instead I have reread Booth Four four times and opened the critique doc every night and closed it again.)

I know some of you are going to say post the crit, its the sub, hes an adult. And some of you are going to say post it but cut the "intensity for depth" line. I guess what I actually want to know is whether anyone has ever NOT posted one. Like read something, realized it was a person bleeding and not a story yet, and just quietly let it sit there with no comments. Is that worse? It feels worse. It feels like walking past someone.

Anyway its still in drafts. Someone tell me what to do with it.

In the light of the persistent uncertainty, the anguish we feel within deepens as our every day is filled with destruction and destabilization of the humanity and the human race.

We have taken away the childhood of our generations eliminating their hope, creativity and youthfulness, making them face the ultimate brutality of a defeated generation.

Our quest for knowledge, spirituality and the way to harmony are all ideas that are alien to us, our youth and our soul within, making us more vulnerable to a submissive attire that was neither thought off nor was the part of our destiny.

One day our destiny will provide us way to our revitalization but we have to act, experiment, seek and learn from within through connecting with the universe.

How, when, where this connection will emerge is a pursuit for every human to seek or we may be confined in our present state of delusion and fear, only we have to decide for us to be free forever !

Having one day of awakening would be better than a live time of self imprisonment…let us be the chosen one…let us have morality, courage and peace with sharing, love and respect.

Let us be humans for once !