Spectral Trails and Unconventional Bonds: A Genre Expedition
These stories are not complete works but rather incomplete narrative fragments of short stories, moments captured mid-scene, or pages torn from a larger, unseen book. They offer glimpses into worlds just beginning to unfold or abruptly ending, inviting readers to imagine what came before and what happens next. This unique format encourages a participatory reading experience, where the absence of a definitive conclusion becomes an invitation for personal interpretation and creativity.
This collection is an experimental program at the intersection of human creativity, interdisciplinary arts and applied artificial intelligence research. It explores how digital tools can act as a partner in the writing process, shaping new forms of storytelling, scriptwriting and enhancing digital literacy skills and workflows. The project aims to understand the evolving relationship between human imagination and computational assistance in literary creation.
This post features an unexpected fusion of Boys Love (BL), Contemporary Fiction, Supernatural Mystery, Psychological Drama, and Western genres. Authors Jamie F. Bell and Eva Suluk delve into narratives that combine the rugged aesthetic of the frontier with elements of the mysterious and the otherworldly, alongside complex emotional landscapes. Their stories defy easy categorization.
We invite you to engage with these unfinished tales, not just as a reader absorbing words on a page, but as a co-creator. Allow your imagination to extend beyond the presented text, filling in the silences and envisioning the continuations that only you can write in your mind. Discover the narrative potential within these intriguing beginnings.
Today’s Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
The Improbable Departure of the Rusty Valiant
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Surreal / Absurdist | Genre: Boys Love (BL)
The air in Benji’s study hung thick and still, scented with old paper and lemon polish. A lone sunbeam, impossibly precise, cut through the gloom, illuminating a million motes of dust that spun like miniature galaxies. The only sound was the languid hum of a forgotten refrigerator in the kitchen and the distant, almost musical chirping of cicadas, a relentless, shimmering backdrop to a particularly uninspired Tuesday afternoon.
The Coiling Serpent of Portage
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Literary Fiction | Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Perched in a borrowed studio above Portage Avenue, a young artist named Leo observes the relentless pulse of rush hour. The late autumn sun bleeds across the cityscape, mirroring the internal turmoil of a mind grappling with a world that feels increasingly fragmented.
The Warped Track
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Supernatural Mystery | Genre: Supernatural Mystery
A teenage runner experiences a terrifying, surreal distortion of time and space during his sprint, leading him to seek answers from an enigmatic professor whose office is as chaotic as his theories.
On the Quantifiable Soul
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Grimdark Fantasy | Genre: Psychological Drama
The only sounds in the room were the hum of the old refrigerator from the kitchen, the soft ticking of a clock that seemed to be mocking him, and the frantic, almost silent, tap of his own fingers on the keyboard. It was three in the morning. The city outside was asleep, but in the small pool of light cast by his desk lamp, Samuel was locked in a desperate, losing battle with Section 4b of the National Arts Endowment Fund application.
Wet Socks and Cold Beans
Author: Eva Suluk | Category: Comedic Misadventure | Genre: Western
Deep in a damp aspen grove, Shawn finds himself unable to continue the pursuit, trapped by the crushing weight of his own indifference while his companion tries to salvage the mission.
Storytelling and the Arts, Skills Development and Digital Transformation
AI-Assisted Storytelling and Scriptwriting: Within our
We’re excited to learn about these new technologies and how they can be applied to expand the boundaries of human storytelling. We encourage you to keep reading, keep imagining, and keep exploring the incredible potential that opens up when creativity meets technology.
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 interdisciplinary arts and narrative storytelling experiment. It is part of a creative arts and research program by The Arts Incubator Winnipeg and the Art Borups Corners collectives. This project focuses on two key areas: AI-Assisted Storytelling and Scriptwriting, exploring AI for generating ideas, plot structures, and alternative story arcs; and Talent Development and Training, studying the skills and training needs for creative professionals managing AI and immersive technologies to inform future training curricula. Funding and support were generously provided by the Ontario Arts Council Multi and Inter-Arts Projects program and the Government of Ontario. We thank them for supporting the arts, digital transformation, and applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) research for northern innovation in Ontario.
About the Author
