ZiggyStardust

Say what you think of it.

"Order, order!" shouted the worm over the hubbub, banging his bone hammer on the wooden pedestal he stood on. "Order in the court!"
Everyone in the courthouse quieted down.
"Now," said the worm to the secretary to the side of him, "who...er....what..."
"Alan Grassington, sir" snivelled the secretary, fiddling with his black bow tie, He craned his neck towards the cage that held Alan, suspended fifty feet in the air by a great hook.
"Ah, yes," began the judge in his slow, deep, wormy voice. "Alan...what has he been charged of?"
"Er....conspiracy" snivelled the secretarial worm again, this time adjusting his round rimmed spectacles, "playing David Bowie songs on the feast day of St Wormington."
A gasp came from the jury, and soon everyone, worms, crane-necked blobs of jelly and a giant set of buttocks on legs started shouting and whooping and throwing fecal matter across the court. Playing David Bowie songs on a worms' holy day sure did anger them.
"Travesty!" one shouted.
"Kill him!" screeched another.
"Homo Sapian!" bellowed the buttocks.
"ORDER!" the judge commanded.
"Now," began the worm as the crowd quietened, 2Did you, or did you not, play a David Bowie song on the feast day of St Wormington?"
"Yes!" pleaded Alan, arms outstretched. "Of course I did! What's so bad about it?!"
"So bad!?" howled a lawyer, his wormy wrinkles pulsating, "Do you realise the disrespect this caused to St Wormington?!"
"QUIET!" Again the judge silenced them. "First we must get to the bottom of this. Now, Alan, first of all, what song did you play>"
"Suffragette City." came the reply.
The judge let out an audible cry.
"You mean....a song about a settlement full of Emily Pankhurst clones? A city that actively goes against the government?! This song is a rebel war cry! Conspiracy!"
"Conspiracy!" echoed the jury with various taunts and insults, a well aimed fecal projectile from the giant buttocks narrowly missing Alan's long, curly brown hair.
"And!" continued the judge, who was called Grimoir, "the fact that you deliberately disobey the general, standard, short and clean hair cut by having yours like a prehistoric ape!"
"It's meant to look like Eddie van Halen's" protested Alan "and anyway, the song's not about suffragettes, it's about LA, or something...."
"Eddie VAN??!! You mean this man is a vampire?!"
"NO!" shouted Alan "Just shut up, okay? I listened to a song on a stupid worm saint day, now -"
With a sharp crack a hard wooden truncheon snapped down on Alan's head. His vision swam.
"Right lad, you're coming with me." The guard hoisted Alan over his shoulder and walked across the walkway from the cage to the cells.
"Alan Grassington," began Grimoir "under section 4 of rule 27, you are sentenced to hard labour for conspiring against the government, offending St Wormington and playing the worst David Bowie song on Earth."
With a bang of the hammer, the sentence was passed.
"It's okay, lad," the guard said as he splashed some water on Alan, "it's all just figments of your imagination."

* * *

__________________
Welcome to the internet, where opinions are like toilets; everyone thinks theirs are perfect but the public ones stink.

Trollheart

Umm... interesting, but I don't get it. Why worms? Why Bowie? Thought there might be a punchline. Actually, when you said Alan was in a cage I assumed he'd be a bird, and the worms would be trying him for murder. Well written in a sort of Monty Python anything-goes way, but lacking any real cohesion. Which is not to say that I think the writing is the deranged scrawlings of a dribbling madman, cos I would never say that. No. Not that. Exactly....

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

ZiggyStardust

Well the full story kinda goes like this: a guy called Alan has these weird hallucinogenic dreams and can't differentiate between them and reality. Those worms' are actually meant to resemble the judges on The Wall album. There's another segment where Ziggy Stardust arrives in a spaceship and sks him to choose between him or The Wall...so yeah.

__________________
Welcome to the internet, where opinions are like toilets; everyone thinks theirs are perfect but the public ones stink.

CrazyVegn

It needs to make more sense, as Trollheart said, in order to keep my attn. I love this:
"a giant set of buttocks on legs"
and, of course, all the worms

Trollheart

Yeah I got the "Good morning, Worm Your Honour..." bit, but then it started talking about Bowie and I got lost. I don't see how "Suffragette City" fits in really, and I know what you're saying, that it's a guy having hallucinations, but until the very last line you don't know this. Even then, the payoff is very tame. Maybe if he actually WAS in prison, like maybe doing life for killing someone whose name is close to worm, maybe if his name was Bowie... I don't know. I see the germ of an idea there, but kinda like my "Some mother's son" in the songwriting section it hasn't really anywhere to go, so it's really a bit of a letdown. You're expecting a big payoff as I said at the end, something that will either make this all make sense or make you laugh --- "Alan's friends had always thought of him as something of a worm" --- and really, to be totally fair, nothing happens. It's almost like the Bobby-in-the-shower scene in "Dallas", bit of a cop-out just to say "he has hallucinations". WHY are they worms? WHY is Bowie involved? You know, it's important to have things make some sort of sense, even if it's weird sense, otherwise it's just really a stream of consciousness that in the end goes nowhere.

Agree about the buttocks on legs idea though: class!

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

ZiggyStardust

I've going to put the next bit which should add something to it....

1985

At 7:57 AM, on Monday 8th September, the phone next to Alan's bed killed sleep. He grabbed wildly for it with one hand whilst the other rubbed his tired eyes.
"Hello?" he groaned into the receiver.
"Is this Alan?" the voice on the line asked. It was old and hoarse.
"Yeah."
"Just called to say that your appointment has been moved to to 12:30 today."
"Okay. Bye."
Putting the receiver back on the phone with a satisfying click he swung his aching legs over the edge of the bed and shivered as his bare feet touched the cold, hard wooden floorboards. A chair by the bed held he day's clothes; two socks, a shirt and tie, a pair of trousers and a jacket.
After dressing he headed to the bathroom. There he brushed his unruly Eddie van Halen - style hair so it was somewhat presentable, shaved the stubble from his face, dashed a bit of deodorant under his armpit and headed downstairs to breakfast.
Breakfast at Alan Grassington's small town house was a small affair. At most it would be strong coffee, a bowl of cornflakes and a slice of cake.
Today, however, was a grand affair. Today was the meeting.
"Decadence" he said to himself as he took a plate of bacon out of the fridge. It sizzled and spat as it fried in the shallow frying pan. The smell of burning pig filled the small kitchen.
It was wolfed down in seconds along with a bottle of lemonade, and by 8;15 AM he was ready to go.

The next bit goes on about a trip to a therapist and so on and so forth.

Be honest, if I invested in some time and revised it, could it be published?

__________________
Welcome to the internet, where opinions are like toilets; everyone thinks theirs are perfect but the public ones stink.

Trollheart

You'd need to tell us a lot more about Alan before I could answer/guess at the answer to that question. Where is his appointment? What's the hook? What you've written is nice and descriptive (I could smell the bacon sizzling!) but look at it this way: publishers get thousands of submissions a week/month and probably dismiss eighty or ninety percent of them after reading the first few lines. If you haven't hooked them by then, it's over.

Your opening lines have to grab the reader, and though this is well written, it doesn't do that. I have no idea where you're intending to go with it, but I have written novels and stories which I've never finished and I guess never will, and the opening lines have to be good. This is one:
"Well", said the vampire, looking out the window, "that's all very well and good for you to say, but you're alive. You can afford luxuries like that."

Okay it's nothing special, but it does grab you. You think, a vampire? And you sit up. Who's the vampire talking to? What is "all well and good"? Get the reader to ask themselves questions and don't give them the answers right away and you're making a hook. Here's another:

"Yeah yeah, I know him", I groaned into my beer, as my friend pointed the man in the silver coat out. "Did me a favour once. What? Oh, you know: he killed me."

Right away the scene has changed from a simple one to a complicated one. WHAT? He KILLED him? But how can he---? And you've got them. Is this guy a ghost? Is he mad? Does he mean something else when he says the other guy killed him? An editor now wants to read on.

But your piece doesn't do that, and I could see an editor throwing it onto the "rejections" pile. Here's an idea, just something to think about.

On the phone, Alan hears a voice. The voice asks if that's him then sounds annoyed. In the distance another voice on the line says "I thought he was supposed to be dead by now?" angrily and the phone is cut off.

Now you have a mystery, and the reader's interest.

Don't know if that helps, but can you see what I'm getting at? If your piece had ended with something like, I don't know, Alan remembered he had to feed the griffin before leaving and then took his umbrella out so that he could parachute down to the ground from his treetop apartment.... something interesting, something different. You need to stand out. I'm sure anyone who makes a living from writing will tell you the same thing.

Edit: sorry my bad. I see you mentioned he goes to a therapist. Nevertheless my comments stand. You need a hook, and this, so far, hasn't got one that I can see.

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018