Author: Caleb Jacobo
I Just Wanted to Help
It was shortly before one o’clock on Sunday afternoon. I was sipping a cold cup of coffee while reading the news on Facebook, a habit I find pleasurable despite the incessant reports of violence and corruption. The daily phantasmagoria reminds me that, while the world might be losing its way, at least my moral compass still points north. I’ve also become rather addicted to iced coffee.
August 15, 2016
My Robert is Dead!
A bus stop somewhere in Northern Utah. It’s nearly eight o’clock in the evening and the summer sun is just now realizing that it has overstayed its welcome. A woman, about fifty years old, sits on the bench, scratching her newly styled hair. It’s short, curly, and dyed the color of old blood. A man, who can’t be younger than seventy, shuffles breathlessly to the bench and lowers himself beside the woman. His knees pop audibly. In one arm, he cradles a small gift.
July 1, 2016
Mother
When my bedroom door is securely locked, I rush to my desk, push my MacBook Air aside, and lift the heavy Olympia onto the desktop. It was considered a “portable” typewriter in 1957, but hulking next to my laptop, it looks about as portable as my desk. That’s okay. I don’t need it to be portable; I just need it to work.
April 4, 2016
I Didn’t Ask for This
This can’t, like, really be happening to me. What have I done to deserve this? It’s been hard enough just trying to get through middle-school with nobody liking me, but at least there was always the hope that high school and college might help people forget how much they enjoyed looking down on me and calling me names. If they find out about this, about me, they’ll have an actual reason for hating my guts, and I’ll never be able to get away from it.
February 12, 2016
The Walking Dead
The following is my response to today’s Daily Writing Prompt: “A bobblehead collector is talked out of suicide by a member of his collection.”
January 7, 2016
What is Conflict?
In a previous investigation I talked about what a story is and I defined thirteen potentially essential elements of a story; that is, thirteen things that every story must have. But there was something missing, a driving force that may not exist in the most mundane story, but should be present in any good story. That force is conflict.
January 3, 2016
Character Development Web — Part II
I’ve been toying around with my character development web, or character chart, a sort of visual character sheet to help me quickly identify the key attributes of a fictional character.
December 31, 2015
Life-Changing Technology
The following is my response to a writing prompt from the book 642 Things to Write About: “Describe something you wanted badly and, once you got it, never used.”
December 29, 2015
Adam and the Storm
The following is a story sketch I wrote up in response to a writing prompt I got out of the book 642 Things to Write About. I wrote the whole first draft in two hours and spent only enough time editing and cleaning up to make it readable. I don’t want to present these sketches as finished pieces, but as they are: rough sketches done for practice. I hope you enjoy the sketch. If you like this public writing journal, please follow me on Facebook and Twitter and recommend it for your writing friends. Thank you!
December 27, 2015