Writing
This is pretty old, and could do with an update. Except, I don’t write anymore.
More than most people I know, I live in my head. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been thinking up stories, characters and worlds to distract myself from mundane affairs. As I grew older, I found an excuse for indulging in my creative interests: I am a Writer.
The problem with this is that one finds oneself constantly having to justify that title. This is a bit tricky to do when you don’t actually write that much. Or at all. My latest take on this is that creativity is a useful survival mechanism, and if indulging in creative pretensions is what it takes to foster it, it’s easier on the ego to be a writer who doesn’t write than to not be a writer.
Whatever.
Anyway, once on a blue moon, I write and finish something. Here’s some Science Fiction:
Red Rain - A cyberpunk Novella. You can read it in either a text version (223 KB) (may contain inconsistent line breaks) or an HTML Version (228 KB) (no paragraph indention, but looks better), then come back to look at my self-defensive Commentary.
Requiem(20 KB) - an SF story I wrote based on an idea by Etgar Kerrett, the famous Israeli short story writer. Etgar also had a lot of input into the editing and revisions, but any failings in the story rest ultimately with myself.
If you have any comments, don’t be shy and send me (dotan@corky.net) some email.
Or, if you’d care to read some fiction in Hebrew, why not go to my page of the New Stage (stage.co.il)?
Red Rain -Foreword/Afterword
“Red Rain” is a CyberPunk novella I wrote at the turn of the decade (both the calendar’s and mine - I was loitering around 20 at the time). I must have spent more than a year on it, deriving great fun out of writing it, and later a lot of agony out of trying to “fix” it in different ways. I hope I’ve finally given up on it, and I’ve decided to post it online, in its original form, spelling errors and all, figuring there’s not much else to do with it.
I think this can still be kinda entertaining if you don’t mind nonexistent characters, pornographic violence, prudish sex scenes, angst and shocking thesaurus abuse.
This story showcases some of my worst writing faults at the time, including my tendency for gratuitous description. It also demonstrates the obviously devastating effects of exposure to William Gibson at an impressionable age, and the dangers of going overboard with the cyberspace metaphor. Strangely, I think most of the fun in the story comes out of experiencing it like a sort of virtual reality love/sex/violence/death fantasy trip, which does put the crap characters and really impossible “dialogue” into a context that actually makes sense.
It’s also painfully obvious that I had no firsthand experience with sex at the time. At least that’s my excuse.
