Modern Lives, Deep Thoughts, and Shifting Horizons
Within this collection lie short stories that exist as isolated moments, presenting scenes and character interactions without their full narrative context. They are brief glimpses, like excerpts from a novel or diary, designed to stimulate the reader’s curiosity and encourage imaginative speculation about the larger story from which they originate.
This project is dedicated to exploring the evolving landscape of creative collaboration, specifically at the intersection of human ideation and artificial intelligence. It examines how digital tools can augment the writing process, enabling new narrative structures and enhancing accessibility to sophisticated forms of digital literacy.
Today’s selection brings together distinct genres, spanning from reflective Contemporary Fiction and speculative Philosophical Sci-Fi to atmospheric Rural Noir and poignant Coming-of-Age narratives. Jamie F. Bell is the author behind these thought-provoking unfinished tales, offering a range of experiences.
We invite you to immerse yourself in these narratives. Consider them points of departure for your own creative interpretations, completing the arcs and resolutions that remain unwritten within their frames.
Today’s Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
Delve into thought-provoking short stories in Contemporary Fiction, Philosophical Sci-Fi, Rural Noir, and Coming-of-Age genres, alongside Stream of Consciousness, Superhero, Science Fiction, and Western Style BL categories. Our commitment to digital literacy involves pioneering AI-assisted narrative and creative technology to reshape the landscape of modern publishing and the future of digital publishing.
Where the Pavement Gives Up
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Stream of Consciousness | Genre: Contemporary Fiction
The car was parked where the gravel road dissolved into coarse sand and smooth, grey stones. The air was thick with the smell of low tide: salt, brine, and the faint, organic scent of decaying seaweed. The sky was a uniform, heavy grey, indistinguishable from the surface of the Atlantic, which rolled in with a slow, percussive rhythm, each wave collapsing on the shore with a heavy sigh.
A Theory of Dissolving Spoons
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Superhero | Genre: Philosophical Sci-Fi
All John wanted was a quiet Americano and the Saturday crossword. What he got was a lesson in spontaneous entropy reversal. It started, as it often did, with the sugar. He didn’t even take sugar in his coffee, but he liked the neat, ordered geometry of the cubes in the bowl on the table. Today, however, that geometry was refusing to remain static. One cube, then another, was sliding from the pile with no discernible propulsion, arranging itself on the dark wood of the table. He was sure of it. This coffee shop was a localised anomaly, a tiny, baffling pocket of defiance against the laws of the universe.
What the River Forgets
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Science Fiction | Genre: Rural Noir
The body had come in with the morning tide, tangled in a mess of fishing nets and dark green seaweed. Constable Philip trudged along the shingle beach, the air thick with the smell of low tide and diesel from the trawlers in the harbour. The victim wasn’t local. That was the first problem. In a town like Port Blossom, where every family tree had roots deep in the rocky soil, a stranger was an anomaly. A dead stranger was a catalyst.
Direction Measured in Poplar Bark
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Western Style BL | Genre: Coming-of-Age
The compass was a joke. Noah knew it before they even left the trailhead. The cheap plastic housing and the bubbly, sluggish needle felt wrong in his palm. But Mr. Davies, the gym-teacher-turned-outdoorsman for the week, had clapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Same model the army uses, son!’ which Noah knew for a fact was a lie. Now, with the autumn sun bleeding out behind the dense wall of spruce and birch, the cheap plastic felt like a death sentence.
A Geometry of Folded Napkins
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Western Style BL | Genre: Contemporary Fiction
The air in the kitchen of ‘Gino’s Slice of Heaven’ was a tangible thing—a mix of garlic, scorching cheese, yeast, and the metallic sweat of teenage boys working too hard for too little. The ticket printer chattered relentlessly, a mechanical insect spitting out orders. It was Friday, it was August, and the entire neighbourhood seemed to want pizza at the exact same moment.
About the Project
By design, these stories have no beginning and no end. Many stories are fictional, but many others are not. They are snapshots from worlds that never fully exist, inviting you to imagine what comes before and what happens next. We had fun exploring this project, and hope you will too.
The Unfinished Tales and Short Stories collection is an experimental, creative research project by The Arts Incubator Winnipeg and the Art Borups Corners Storytelling clubs. Each chapter is a unique interdisciplinary arts and narrative storytelling experiment, born from a collaboration between artists and applied AI researchers, designed to explore the boundaries of creative writing, automation, and storytelling. The project was made possible with funding and support from the Ontario Arts Council Multi and Inter-Arts Projects program and the Government of Ontario.
