Hello,
Thank you for the chance to compete! I worked really hard on the novelette and thought this was a great competition. I don't know what I'm going to do with all of the prize money if I win anything, but some will go to the editor of "The Cult."
I have a modest proposal for you all. I've been having a hard time moving out because of health issues, and it's something I want to do very much. I have always wanted to live somewhere that fits my interests and personality better than where I am now. One possibility is to live in the Paseo Arts District in Oklahoma City. However, although I receive a disability check, I don't currently have any contacts there or even any chance of being able to afford renting my own house or apartment there by myself. So here's what I'm asking of this community.
Does anyone have any suggestions for how I can get to the Paseo Arts District? Specifically, I want to stay there for a summer with no computers or television or anything, to absorb the culture of the community and to grow as a person, and also to determine if I'm capable of living on my own. What would help is if anyone lives in Paseo and has suggestions for someone willing to have a paying roommate for the summer.
Thanks for any information regarding this! And thanks to the mods of /r/writingprompts for the competition.
Since living here in the country, I've picked up a few stories to tell. Here's one of them.
Jerry was responsible for my Mom's relocation to rural Oregon. I think they may have had an affair. Jerry wasn't legally married so I can't blame Mom, whose social awareness doesn't go much beyond lists and laws. When Mom came I became afraid she had HIV, and opted to be tested myself.
I passed the test and so did she. We had somehow avoided yet another consequence of our addiction to Chem 1. The psychological dependence was easy to control with debian.
I wanted to go back to Oklahoma City, but new Articles on television had revealed a few things that made it exceptionally difficult to travel. Most humans were clones. There was an uproar across the country. Unbelievably, this had zero effect on my outlook: despite being an archetype myself, I fully believed in the uniqueness of even the clones. The entire population of my town in Oregon had been cold-pressed into Chem 1 dependents; we could only hope the mutations caused by Chem 2 would improve co-morbidity rates.
The organization began research on a kind of cure in which I was especially interested. It was the process of brain imaging. They discovered that one day, through brain imaging, we could understand addiction more completely. I volunteered immediately for tests.
The images came back after two weeks with analysis: schizophrenic, depressed, damage from Chem 1 to frontal lobe, some additional brain trauma, and one very curious patch of activity in the right hemisphere. It seemed that the creative part of my brain was hyperactive because of debian. They said I shouldn't even have any cognitive problems and that my anxiety was simply because I could obviously see the world much, much differently than other people. This revelation was the only encouragement I needed to finish writing the memoir of my transformation into an archetype. Its title was THE CULT.
THE END