Early experiments in short fiction
There is no such thing as an original work. Do what you will with these, but know that someone, somewhere, might accuse you of theft. And I will deny everything.
Plays
I got heavily involved in the live-theatre/dramatics scene during my undergraduate years. Besides acting and directing, I also managed to write a couple.
- Lilium Cruentus
I know. Rediculous name. In the document, it’s titled “Passive,” which was a working title. I can’t find the final draft for this. A collaborative effort with Rishi “8pm” Kar, we kept arguing over what the title should be, and compromised on the worst one to spite each other. We co-directed and performed this at an inter-hostel competition on campus. It’s essentially a project to expand the final scene from the American adaptation of Constantine into an entire play. Comes with a mad man in a straitjacket. I played the mad man.
- Valhalla
This one I am more proud of. I stole the plotline and presentation heavily from the movie Das Boot and the anime series Black Lagoon. The entire play takes place on a submarine, and switches backwards and forwards in time. In the past timeline, the sub is manned by a full compliment of a Nazi crew, and in the future, all the crew members play dead and a couple of treasure-hunting divers take stage in a sunken sub. We changed the lighting from bright to dark blue to switch between scenes. This one won first place! I graduated on a high note.
Weird “Creative Writing” thingies from College
My undergradute institution’s student-run creative writing group had a hard time eliciting individual entries from students for a yearly contest. They “solved” the problem by changing the format. Now, every hostel (think dorm) had to collectively submit a masterpiece in A2 size that folds like a newspaper. We cranked out two in successive years while I was still involved. These are, by nature, large collaborations. But I did take lead design. All art assets stolen from the internet without permission.
- Triage
This one received high praise. It is one of those pieces that wrote itself. I think we figured out how to exploit the new format to its fullest before anyone else did. I made use of multiple authors to create genuinely differentiable pieces of prose, that were meant to come from different sources (in fiction). We wrote too much, and then partially covered up some of the text to leave the reader to fill in the blanks. Its lazy but effective.
- Vespertillo
This was us trying to repeat the magic of Triage from the year before. I set a vampiric tale in the fictional setting of the Thief series. I swear that I hadn’t heard of Hellsing back then!