Stepping into the Midst of a Story
This collection offers a unique experience, presenting incomplete narrative fragments. Each piece is a moment captured mid-scene, a few pages torn from a larger, unseen book. These unfinished tales invite a sense of mystery, prompting readers to imagine what came before and to envision the story’s trajectory beyond its final sentence.
This project represents an experiment at the intersection of human creativity and artificial intelligence. It explores how digital tools can function as a partner in the writing process, shaping new forms of storytelling and enhancing digital literacy through collaborative creation.
Today’s selection delves into genres such as psychological drama, sharp satire, crime, historical fiction, and unsettling horror. This post features intriguing pieces from authors Jamie F. Bell and Tony Eetak.
We invite you to engage with these short stories not just as a reader, but as a co-creator. Allow your own imagination to complete the narrative, bringing these intriguing fragments to their full, envisioned potential in your mind.
Today’s Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
Delve into thought-provoking short stories across Psychological Drama, Satire, Crime, Historical Fiction, and Horror, crafted with elements of Swashbuckling Romance, Poetic / Lyrical, Gritty Realism, and Dystopian themes. This initiative champions digital literacy by exploring AI-assisted narrative and the future of digital publishing, harnessing creative technology to innovate the storytelling experience.
The White Silence
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Psychological Drama | Genre: Psychological Drama
A remote cabin, buried deep in a snow-choked forest, becomes the stage for a solitary arrival. The air is thick with a preternatural quiet, hinting at forgotten events and the unsettling persistence of memory as winter’s chill begins to seep into the very walls.
Rust and Resin
Author: Tony Eetak | Category: Swashbuckling Romance | Genre: Satire
The air, thick with the scent of decaying leaves and two-stroke exhaust, hung heavy over the autumn forest. Golden light struggled through a canopy already shedding its summer finery, illuminating motes of dust dancing in the chill. A rhythmic thud echoed, a testament to the unromantic, ceaseless labour of August, whose thoughts drifted through a fog of mild resentment and burgeoning absurdity as another Tuesday bled into the relentless, unyielding sameness of his early adulthood.
The Weight of Glazed Clay
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Poetic / Lyrical | Genre: Crime
The air in the Manitoba Museum was a carefully curated blend of controlled humidity and the faint, papery scent of things long dead. It was the kind of quiet that felt heavy, a silence built from the reverence of schoolchildren and the shuffling feet of tourists. Dawson felt the counterfeit potshard in his jacket pocket, its smooth, fake glaze a small, cold point of reality against his hip in the otherwise historical dreamscape.
The Glass Shiver
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Gritty Realism | Genre: Historical Fiction
The city held its breath, a vast, frozen beast exhaling plumes of exhaust and woodsmoke. Winter had clenched Winnipeg in its iron fist, and the air itself seemed to crackle, thin and sharp, carrying the distant wail of a siren like a prophecy. Streetlights cast sickly yellow pools onto packed snow, and every shadow stretched long, distorted, like a silent scream against the canvas of the long night.
Beneath the Still Canopy
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Dystopian | Genre: Horror
The dense summer woods, usually alive with the hum of insects and the chatter of unseen birds, falls into an eerie hush. Sunlight, once a warm, dappled presence, now struggles to pierce the thick canopy, casting the forest floor in a deepening, unnatural grey. A subtle but undeniable change in the air, a metallic tang, speaks of something profoundly amiss.
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.
