Four high school students encounter an evil spirit. Thoroughly cliched and hopelessly derivative.
Growing up, nothing Mikhail did was ever right. Not according to his father, anyway. A career army man, he was disgusted by the quiet, passive nature of his son.
One of Mikhail’s most vivid memories was when his father made him play on the town’s Little League team. Mikhail had no abilities whatsoever, nor did he care. But his father, having wished for a red-blooded, athletic son who could play sports and shoot guns, was furious at the sight of the pale, thin boy staring dumbly at the pitcher with his dark-circled eyes. Mikhail’s only skill seemed to be avoiding the ball.
So his father took matters into his own hands. One evening, they lost the game because some of the players were on vacation with their families and the coach was forced to have Mikhail play. They would have lost anyway, but Mikhail was an easy scapegoat. His father drove them home in silence. Mikhail stared out the window at the houses, mailboxes, hedges, and white picket fences streaking past them. It was the first time in his life that he noticed the boring sameness in everything.
His father rudely swung into the driveway and slammed on the brakes. “Go stand by the garage!” he barked. Mikhail complied. Yet even his obedience angered his father.
He grabbed one of the baseballs he had bought for practice and threw it at Mikhail, who curled up and flinched as the baseball hit him. “Maybe if you know what it’s like to get hit by one, you won’t be so damn afraid of it!” The lesson in corporal punishment didn’t end outside the garage that night.
Mikhail’s father achieved his purpose—Mikhail wasn’t scared anymore.
Who the Hell Knows? 
The 2nd & 3rd from last paragraphs, read how strong and vibrant they are. Action, action, action. Passive has its place, setting mostly, and often saying something just /was/ sets up the next sentence full of thrashing and gnashing. See inline comments in the gdoc.
The scene seeps with intent — quickly explain the boy’s hatred. Someone primed for manipulation, perhaps.
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I will check it outs. Thanks 🙂
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I guess I read it a bit differently. I saw motivation, motivation to destroy, motivation to survive. It was well written as father and son were dynamic and opposing opposites.
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You’re on the right track.
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This is O/T. Sorta.
I have been musing a little over whether I should be less misogynistic. Even before you brought up the topic, Hetty, I had been dwelling on it.
Some day I’m going to be a professional writer, and my success will hinge almost entirely on whether I can please the female audience. If I can’t submerge my — dislike? hate? Is it so raw? — now, then I never can. But it’s also an aesthetic question here. How should I approach the female sex? Are women to be cherished like the classic painters do? I don’t think I can go that far, and I know women and they don’t want to be cherished anyway.
As I talk this out, I think there IS a sweet spot here. I’m going to quote from my topscreen permanent page:
The key phrase is “ALMOST AS IF.” That modifies and turns the whole meaning of the thing. Women DON’T want to be abused. They want to know you CAN and WILL kick their ass if they cross that invisible line. And they want a towel snapped on their butt occasionally. They want to be denied sometimes as well.
That settles it. I’m going to go through my blog and delete all anti-female sheeit. I owe you one, Hetty. One for sticking with me. Two for seeing something in me where maybe another individual wouldn’t see anything at all.
*raise a can of soda pop to you*
To the girl who mocked me in Real Life for saying I prefer pop to wine, wherever you are.
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I can’t tell if you’re sincere in your intention to be less misogynistic. Certainly, it will be a trial for you. What’s interesting to me is that for all your–highly generalized–talk about women, you still regard them as some alien species. I can’t tell how old you are–I figure somewhere between fourteen and thirty. Either way, you seem to spend too much time with a worthless subgroup of women who are willing to put up with shit like negging and whatever else you’ve learned from your…. “mysterious” tutor, we’ll call him. No, the proper relationship is one in which know I can cross the invisible line all day long and still be taken out to dinner. Anyways, it’s telling that you speak of “submerging” your hatred for women, as opposed to reducing or removing it altogether. You’ll only become worse. If you truly wish to be a good writer and appeal to a broad audience, male or female, you need to be able to tell them something about *themselves*. And to do that, you must study people on the individual level. Therefore, I’d suggest, cut the arrogance and study yourself and these hangups, and study other people, male or female, as individuals, without canned preconceptions.
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This is an excellent response. I don’t think I could have said it better.
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Thanks. But actually, I deleted the rest of our convo because it got weird and was frankly more interesting than my story.
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Wow, you captured my father quite well. He was raised in the thirties in the after effects of the Depression and had that old school method of making men out of his two boys. He taught me there were two breaks a day; day break and back break. Consequently, I worked like a rented mule and pain never distracted me. Glad to see we’ve improved a little.
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Fathers walk a bit more of a tightrope than moms do. Call it the umbilical advantage.
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I like that. My mother and I were very close even on a psychic level. She was able to balance the harsh lessons with genuine love and compassion and never interfered with my dreams. She was still a teenager when I was born so we grew up together.
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That sounds like something you could write a whole book about. I hope you’ve written these things somewhere, even if just for yourself.
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Indeed, I have flooded the internet with snippets of my unusual life and nuclear age family dynamics. Most of it is just too hilarious to put in one place. It might disturb the Void. Even our greatest tragedies were filtered through a family sense of humor that made just barely surviving a real hoot.
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