The Unseen Depths: Imagining Beyond the Words
Within this collection, readers will find incomplete narrative fragments, brief moments captured mid-scene. These are not full narratives, but rather glimpses, pages torn from larger, unseen books, inviting personal reflection on their origins and futures.
This project explores the interplay between human creativity and artificial intelligence. It aims to demonstrate how digital tools can support the writing process, fostering new methods of storytelling and improving digital literacy.
Today’s selection features Contemporary Fiction, Coming-of-Age, Military Fiction, Dark Comedy, and Historical Fiction. Jamie F. Bell, Jamie Bell, and Leaf Richards are among the authors shaping these stories.
Engage with these unfinished tales and allow your imagination to extend beyond the presented words, completing the narratives within your own thoughts.
Today’s Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
Discover unique short stories spanning Contemporary Fiction, Coming-of-Age, Military Fiction, Dark Comedy, and Historical Fiction, enhanced by Slice of Life, Western Style BL, Comedic Misadventure, Expository, and Journalistic approaches. Our initiative advances digital literacy in publishing, demonstrating creative technology’s role in pioneering AI-assisted narrative and the future of digital publishing.
The Unspooling Drift
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Slice of Life | Genre: Contemporary Fiction
The first snowfall of winter descends upon the town, muffling sounds and softening edges. A single figure, Johannes, stands by a frost-kissed window, the quiet hum of an old refrigerator the only other sound. The world outside transforms, but the world within remains stubbornly, painfully clear.
Ash and Embers
Author: Jamie Bell | Category: Western Style BL | Genre: Coming-of-Age
The night had swallowed the last blush of sunset hours ago, leaving the forest a study in deep charcoal and sharper shadows. A small campfire, built precariously close to the edge of an old logging road, fought against the chill, its orange glow painting the faces of two figures in fleeting, dancing colours. The air, crisp and tasting of woodsmoke and damp earth, pressed in, a silent witness to the quiet unraveling and tentative re-knitting of teenage hearts.
The Mud-Spattered Blueprint
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Comedic Misadventure | Genre: Military Fiction
A biting spring wind, still carrying the lingering memory of winter’s bite, whipped around the makeshift command centre. Canvas flaps, stiff with dried mud, strained against their fastenings, rattling a persistent, urgent rhythm. Outside, the world was a study in grey and brown, interrupted by sporadic patches of tenacious, pale green struggling to push through the thawing earth. The air, thick with the damp scent of wet soil and exhaust fumes, clung to everything, a constant, gritty reminder of their provisional existence. Inside, the single bare bulb hummed a lonely tune, casting a weak, jaundiced light over a cluster of young faces etched with a peculiar mix of fatigue and an almost desperate optimism.
The Sky’s Last Joke
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Expository | Genre: Dark Comedy
The kitchen window, usually just a frame for grey spring skies and slush, now glows with an impossible, sickly orange. A child, Abraham, watches the distorted light consume the familiar Winnipeg street, his small world shrinking under an indifferent, colourful apocalypse.
Asphalt’s Fevered Pulse
Author: Leaf Richards | Category: Journalistic | Genre: Historical Fiction
The Chevrolet Bel Air, a tank of rust and ambition, chewed up the kilometres, its exhaust pipe rattling a rhythm against the endless prairie. Heat shimmered off the asphalt in waves, distorting the horizon into a watery mirage. Inside, the stale air conditioner groaned, barely winning against the August sun beating down on the cracked vinyl seats. The radio crackled, half-tuned to a distant rock station, the tinny guitar solos barely audible over the wind noise. Every surface felt sticky. This was freedom, or at least the sweaty, slightly uncomfortable prelude to it, and it was stretching out, flat and boundless, towards something they couldn’t quite see.
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.
