Dragonfliet - Writer

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Dragonfliet - Writer

Postby dragonfliet on Mon Jul 21, 2008 3:19 pm

Jason "Dragonfliet" Daniels
Writer
Age: 26
Location USA
Contact: dragonfliet@gmail.com
Modding Experience: Insurrection (Defunct) Eden

About Me: I have been writing seriously for the last five years, mostly in the short story format. I am interested in working with talented teams to create memorable games with compelling narratives. Although I am heavily involved in my current mod, I'm always interested in new ideas and new games.

Work:

A picture (a collaborative piece, mind you, I can't draw to save my life) from my current mod:
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Excerpts from short stories, download attachment for full story.

"Something Like Zen"

    "When are we leaving?" Lisa looked up at her father; she had been avoiding eye contact nearly the entire time. It had never occurred to her that there was anywhere else to look but at the table, at her fingers, the lime drowned at the bottom of her glass. He looked tired, but steady. The same man he always seemed to have been.

    "I got an offer on the house, so a few weeks. I'm going to sell most everything, so if there's anything you want to keep, pick it out. Your brother should be coming down this weekend to give me a hand."

    She nodded her head. "I'll give my notice. I don't need to go back to work. Is it the blackberries?"

    The National Guard had been sent in and the news had been escalating. The blackberries were the darlings of the media terror spotlight: botanical hydras—if one severed a thorny limb, it seemed that two would grow in its place.

    "It's somewhere not here," he said, "and I could use a change of pace. Maybe I'll think of something to do."

    "Like what?"

    "I don't know yet."

    "Okay," Lisa said, glad that there was a direction to head, even though she didn't know what she would be doing, or what it would be like, or even if they would be safe. Simple direction was enough for the time.

    He sold the house, Lisa quit her job. They put an ad in The News and Record, listing an estate sale, and people came with cash in hand to load furniture into the back of their pickup trucks. "Did anyone die on that chair?" A curious child, about twelve, asked and Lisa shook her head no, tears sprung from her eyes. "I'm sorry," his mother said, quickly extending her hand with the bundle of cash. Lisa took it silently and the two picked up each end and hauled it away. Another part of her life went where she couldn't follow. Nobody asked if her mother had died on the bed, but she had; she had gotten up in the middle of the night, gone to the restroom, come back to bed, had told her husband she loved him and that he was taking over her side of the bed and when he woke up in the morning, she was dead. Lisa's father had told her the story the morning of the estate sale, tears down his cheeks as they waited for the first people to show up, and it was the only time outside of a funeral home she had seen her father cry. Then he had simply gone to the bathroom, cleaned himself up and they'd finished up their preparations for the sale. A few people offered their condolences for the loss, but it was hard to accept a stranger's sympathy when they haggled over the price of a mahogany coffee table.

"Searching for Supernovas and Proof of Alien Intelligence"

    It's almost ten thirty when Eddie finally arrives. John has told himself that he's going to leave for the third time, the last time for real in the few minutes proceeding. As Eddie runs through the woods, his shadow flickers like a strobe light against the trees, jumping up their trunks and then down to the dark grass and back up again. John watches the shadow dance along until Eddie finally makes it to the clearing that they chose because the trees block out almost all of the light from their houses and from the street and from their lives. The better to see the stars, that had agreed when choosing the spot, the better to talk, the better to hitch a ride off the planet should the opportunity arrive. "Man," John says, "where have you been? What if my mom checks in on me? If I'm not there—you don't even understand." John's anger deflates as he hears the whiny tone of his small voice.

    "My dad drove me out to Port Columbus," Eddie says, "he said I should be there with him. We didn't leave until almost nine."

    John can't help but think that he's always the last to know about everything. "What for?"

    "Justin's unit came back home," Eddie says. "Dad says it's only right for us to be there to welcome them back." Eddie acts nonchalant in a way still impressive and unique to John.

    "Oh," is all John can say. He doesn't have the words. Eddie's brother was killed when his HMMWV tripped a bomb in Afghanistan, a country John couldn't have even located on a map before the accident and he is still embarrassed by his ignorance. "Um,v he says, "did anyone know you were,v he searches to fill the void because he can't bring himself to say Justin's name, "his family?"

    Eddie shakes his head. "Not really. We mostly just shook hands with guys as they got off the plane, if their families didn't show up. There were a few guys that recognized me from pictures Justin had shown them and they were nice about it. They said how great they thought Justin was. I don't know, it was lame, man."

    "Oh," Eddie says again.

    "Yeah."

    Eddie's words hang in the clearing like a balloon low on helium, unable to rise up or fall flat. John fidgets, sticks his hands in his pockets. He grabs a quarter from the lint and twirls it around his fingers. Around and around—what the hell is he supposed to say?

"Mitosis"

    "I'm sorry I've been transient," Ellen says, closing the magazine she spent all of twelve seconds rifling through. She shakes a few pills out and swallows, chasing them with water.

    "How many is that?" Margaret asks.

    "One," Ellen lies. She wishes she had the I.V. at home so she could feel it immediately, like in the hospital, not having to wait for the pill to dissolve. She doesn't have any heroin, she's been trying to stop, but she wants it right now. Not just the two little pills.

    Margaret sets aside the dishes, shakes the water off of her hands and dries them on her robe. "What's going on?" she says as she takes a seat. It almost feels like old times.

    "I died," Ellen says and the memory is instantly on her. It wasn't raining yet. The cumulonimbus clouds were so beautiful; tumultuous towers in the sky, harmless looking when they weren't directly overhead. But then, lightning didn't need to be directly overhead. She remembers seeing the bolt coming her way exactly as it hit her, the image burned into her retina, the pain in her shoulder, like being stabbed with fire, the pain in her foot, the smell of burning hair and burning cloth and melting rubber as the lightning found it's way out through her foot, through her sock, through her shoe, to the ground. She remembers the sound reverberating in her chest and the sight of the tree, also struck, splitting in two, the trunk peeling apart from itself, the chunks of bark that hit her as she was falling. She remembers waking up in the hospital, the words V-fib, asystole, residual deficits, Lichtenberg figures. Pain. "And I came back."

    "I know," Margaret says. She was there; she heard the explosion, the crack of the tree and the groaning of the wood and the cry of pain. She gave her twin sister C.P.R. through her tears, she ran into the house through the sudden rain, she called the ambulance through sobs, she waited in the E.D. for years and years that were really hours, and she remembers the doctors telling her the words quivering of the heart and flatline and residual deficits and scarring and pain.

"The Reality of Speed"

    A semi with an LG Electronics logo looms in the distance ahead of Thomas. The distance quickly closes. "This should be fun," Eric says and Thomas smiles. The truck is in the right lane, Thomas moves to the left. The music slowly fades as the song ends.

    Cindy leans up from behind Thomas and he can feel the heat of her face near his shoulder.

    "We should probably slow down," Mindy says from the far right corner seat. The next song kicks in on the CD player, "Revolution 909" by Daft Punk: there is a slow fade in of police sirens and bullhorn directions.

    "Go faster," Cindy says and Thomas can feel her hot breath on his neck. The song slides into a staccato bassline with a smooth harmony that builds.

    The speedometer is at one fifth the speed of sound. Thomas moves the car as far left as he can, his wheels riding the paint of the two lane highway. He can hear Mindy in the back repeating herself. He can feel Cindy behind him squeezing the top of his seat, he can feel her breath, he can feel his own breath he can feel the paint underneath his tires, he can feel the vibrations of the semi's diesel engine only a hundred yards ahead of him, he can feel the capillaries in his fingers constrict as he squeezes the steering wheel. He can feel—


"How to Feel"

    Ten rifles not tasked with maintaining the prisoners ran into the next stairwell and onto the top floor of the short warehouse. In wait were two defenders, crouched behind solid cement supports, unworried about the rising cost of fragmentary grenades. The slightly depleted group of operatives sprinted out of the flushed stairwell and dove headlong to the concrete floor wherever cover existed. The small explosions sent out shards of irregularly shaped shrapnel with twenty-four-hundred-feet-per-second's worth of kinetic energy into the unpainted drywall. Two well-practiced shots: two well trained soldiers rising from behind a steel crate containing stinger missiles, aiming along the length of their carbines through red dot reflex scopes. The operatives filled the building with the familiar bangs and grunts of successful shots and the familiar rush of rubber on concrete that secured the last of the building's threats.

    With few words, all handcuffed prisoners were dragged, bleeding, to their feet and pushed and pulled as gently as speed would allow down the flight of stairs to be rejoined with their like-situated comrades; then all were dragged down the remaining steps into the evening air. The prisoners were shuffled and hurried behind familiar buildings, dragged and picked up and shuffled when they fell until they reached the extraction point that would lead the prisoners to medics and treatment for their wounds and empty rooms and the man who would ask them questions. The wop wop wop of wings moving faster than fuselage was the sound of a military-issue angel.

    "Poetic, no?" Allison says.

    "You wouldn't understand," says John.

    Joe says, "Did you shoot anyone?"
Last edited by dragonfliet on Mon Jan 19, 2009 12:24 am, edited 5 times in total.
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Re: Dragonfliet - Writer

Postby Kodox on Mon Jul 21, 2008 6:12 pm

Cool, so are you going to college for something in the literature department? Or maybe you have finished college. Oh, and I downloaded the full version of Mitosis, looks like an interesting read.
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Re: Dragonfliet - Writer

Postby mat_de_b on Mon Jul 21, 2008 6:27 pm

I only read the first one, and i would say you use to many words and to precise descriptions...

Arguably to each their own, but i would say

The car is going a hundred and five miles an hour down the nowhere Arizona highway just after midnight with Thomas’ drum and bass at eighty decibels and the light system in full glow.


Sentences like that need breaking up, use of rhythm to create tenstion and mood etc...

Also things like eighty decibels is too scientific stick to more general descriptions, not generic like really loud, but those that give the reader a chance to formulate his own ideas as maybe im just a noob but i dont have a strong concept of 80 decibels...

Sorry to put this on your portfolio... Its nice to see a writer here and if you want im more than happy to delete this...
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Re: Dragonfliet - Writer

Postby zombie@computer on Mon Jul 21, 2008 6:54 pm

mat_de_b wrote:I only read the first one, and i would say you use to many words and to precise descriptions...

Arguably to each their own, but i would say

The car is going a hundred and five miles an hour down the nowhere Arizona highway just after midnight with Thomas’ drum and bass at eighty decibels and the light system in full glow.


Sentences like that need breaking up, use of rhythm to create tenstion and mood etc...

Also things like eighty decibels is too scientific stick to more general descriptions, not generic like really loud, but those that give the reader a chance to formulate his own ideas as maybe im just a noob but i dont have a strong concept of 80 decibels...

Sorry to put this on your portfolio... Its nice to see a writer here and if you want im more than happy to delete this...
dont. comments like yours are what these portfolios are for. If you only want appraisal of everything you do, go replace kim yong il. If you cant take the critisism, dont get on the net.
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Re: Dragonfliet - Writer

Postby KILLA-COW on Mon Jul 21, 2008 7:12 pm

Overall I think it's very good but at times it feels a bit contrived and disingenuous, for example in the reality of speed excerpt, it's just a bit too descriptive it almost feels like I am reading something that's been written with the standardly accepted way people expect stories to be. Sometimes it's better to break the mould a bit - which I think you did do in the others such as mitosis, I felt that was quite original and a more satisfying read.

This is my 2 cents on t'matter.
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Re: Dragonfliet - Writer

Postby Sorrow on Mon Jul 21, 2008 7:37 pm

The wheels, black and spinning, are practically invisible against the light display and so the car looks like it is hovering on a cushion of music and light.


This is something you wouldn't normally say.. it sounds a bit awkward.
One of your older writings?

anyhow, would put that more along the lines of "the car appeared to hover on etc." or just leave it out completely.

this seems like nitpicking perhaps, but you were going for that masters thing were you not?
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Re: Dragonfliet - Writer

Postby dragonfliet on Tue Jul 22, 2008 2:02 am

Thanks for the feedback. Nit picking is always good and I take everything into consideration. Feel free to criticize as much as you want.

I've chosen these stories because 1) I like them and 2) they are heavier on dialogue that some of my other stories (which is the more important thing in videogame writing).

~Jason
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Re: Dragonfliet - Writer

Postby dragonfliet on Thu Jul 31, 2008 12:07 am

Updated with a new story, "How to Feel," as well as slightly changed in format. There are now longer excerpts so that a better idea can be gathered without downloading the whole file.

~Jason
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Re: Dragonfliet - Writer

Postby jister on Sun Aug 17, 2008 12:43 pm

I didn't read all of them yet, (hope i will) but some sentences seem awkward to me... no English is not my native language so i could be totally wrong. parts like "...couldn’t have even located..." sound like the got a word to much or dislocated? wouldn't it be "...couldn't even locate..." or maybe something different like" ... didn't have a clue..."...

anyway it's tops that you have them up here as a portfolio. it's bitchin hard to write a good story or find a good writer for a mod.
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Re: Dragonfliet - Writer

Postby dragonfliet on Mon Jan 19, 2009 12:25 am

Update in the slightest with new mod link and a pretty picture.
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