Featured, Once upon a time entries
Eli Fang testiculates awesomeness…Once Upon a Time
(Here Elijah Fang celebates having come in second place in our previous writing contest)
OOPS! I meant GESTICULATES!
Fresh off a second-place win in our previous contest, Oceanside, California writer Elijah Fang enters the fray once again in our current contest.
Once Upon a Time requires that you put off procrastinating until sometime tomorrow (or maybe the day after) toss your writer’s block on the fire and WRITE. Give us a prologue and your novel is already started. Fifteen minutes a day and this time next Easter you are signing books at your local bookery. Here is how to get your novel on:
http://www.awordwithyoupress.com/2014/03/20/once-upon-a-time-our-new-contest/
In the meantime, here is the prologue to the novel in progress
Tangle
By Elijah Fang
Marty clicked My Accounts, then Investments. There it was: Vercroft Industries, 750 shares at $80.24 each, where yesterday it had been 750 shares at $2.67 each. Two thousand dollars, now transformed into sixty thousand. He stared at the number taking in the reality of it until he realized, with amused guilt, that his penis had thickened into a semi-chub; evidently because of excitement at his new found wealth. Alas, fallen to yet another cliché of life – getting turned on by money. Oh well, as long as you recognize it, it’s okay, right? Perhaps this could be the next hit ironic tee-shirt for hipsters: “I Chub for Money”. Is this emotion the mental lube of high-class hookers? The cerebral KY-Jelly of aspiring actresses trying to make New York City apartment rents who are flown into Dubai for a lavishly paid 24-hour rendezvous with a sheikh? Of course they actually have to work for it, whereas he’d made sixty thousand dollars (fifty eight if you subtracted the original two grand) and all he had to do was click a few buttons on the screen. Well, that, and be willing to put two thousand dollars of his paltry eight thousand dollars of life savings at risk based on an email that claimed to be from his future self.
Through the window in front of his desk, Marty witnessed the neighbor’s cat float up, as if filled with helium, and alight onto the windowsill. It sat back on its haunches, stuck its hind leg straight up to the sky like a rock star gesticulating awesomeness, and began grooming the matted locks of its ass. Knowing it was oblivious to him sitting inside, because of reflections on the sunlit window, Marty considered stealthily pressing his face to the window pane and waiting for it to notice him. The hesitant pause while it processed what his image was against the reflections, then the panicked scamper would be mildly amusing. No, it was uncalled for, and besides he had other things to attend to today. First on his list: a thorough read of Wikipedia’s entry for Quantum Entanglement.
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(adding to your bank (oh, word play!) of trivia. Our founding father on our banner is Thomas Sully, my great great grandfather and portrait painter. Painted six presidents and even Queen Victoria. The twenty dollar bill is a lithograph taken from his portrait of Andrew Jackson, of the Jackson Twenty, as opposed to Michael Jackson, of the Jackson Five)
“Tangle” by Eli Fang presents the reader with financial intrigue along with inner reactions to the manipulation of stock prices. We meet a character whose sexual references, initial isolation and limited life within his room accomplishes what a prologue should in a modern prologue. That mission is to make the reader as curious as a cat to read on while leaving the author a stem to produce many branches of differing story lines.
First, I read “as if filled with helium” as “as it filled with helium” which gave me a confusing mental image.My mistake, but I thought it was funny enough to share.
Future self, eh? I’m definitely interested in more of this. Though his comparison to sex-work ignores the coercion that’s often involved.
Oh the stories writers will write. Sex drugs and alcohol? Not a chance except maybe a cat’s ass and the thrill of money. This is out there, El, where it should be. I cannot imagine the whole novel; cannot wait to have a peek at chpt one.
will make an interesting novel
This one grabbed me right away. I hope you have more.
So… Donnie Darko meets the Wolf of Wall Street, with some cat (because “there’s always a bit wi’ a dog isn’t there?”). Coming back to real life and having written letters to myself in time capsules, I’ve met a couple people with “chubs” for money… so on a lot of levels this prologue is completely accessible and a guilty pleasure…
Hmmm intriguing.
Floating cats, money, poverty and too much time alone with a bad head and a capricious quantum universe always lurking invisibly, full of dark matter and water running uphill, always makes for a promising readfest of hardship, mind-blowing visuals, conundrums, and creative eye-watering mind benders. Time and quantum anything are always a roller coaster fun ride to me.
Promising:)
Fond regards,
Shawna