Pages from the Incomplete Archives
This collection presents unfinished tales, fragments of short stories that pause at critical junctures. They offer fleeting peeks into developing worlds, like moments captured mid-scene or singular pages pulled from a larger, unfolding narrative. Readers are encouraged to lean into the mystery, imagining the story’s past and future.
This project serves as an experimental program where human creativity, interdisciplinary arts, and applied artificial intelligence research converge. It examines how digital tools can support the writing process, fostering new forms of storytelling, scriptwriting, and improving digital literacy skills and workflows.
This post features stories ranging from the reflective depths of Literary Fiction and the transformative paths of Coming-of-Age, to the intricate conflicts of Young Adult Contemporary and the high stakes of a Legal Thriller. Contributing authors include Leaf Richards, Jamie F. Bell, Tony Eetak, and Eva Suluk.
Read these tales not just for what is present, but for what is suggested, and allow your own insights to complete the story arcs within your imagination.
Today’s Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
A Slackening Current
Author: Leaf Richards | Category: Domestic Thriller | Genre: Literary Fiction
A biting spring wind whips off the churning river, tugging at Rory’s worn jacket. Beneath a sky the colour of bruised plums, she picks her way along the muddy bank, the damp chill seeping through her trainers. The air carries the faint, metallic scent of damp soil and something indefinably industrial from upstream. It is a walk she takes to clear her head, but today, the landscape feels less like a refuge and more like a stark, gritted mirror.
The Unfastened Hours
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Boys Love (BL) | Genre: Coming-of-Age
The Winnipeg summer dawn bled a pale, insipid blue through the gap in the curtains, a colour Fred despised. It was the precise shade of disappointment, a thin, weak wash over the lingering vibrancy of the night just vanished. His bed sheets, damp with sweat from the oppressive heat, felt like a shroud, clinging to him, anchoring him to a world he desperately wished to escape, a world that offered none of the profound, gentle solace of his dream.
A Garden of Tarnished Silver
Author: Tony Eetak | Category: Gritty Realism | Genre: Young Adult Contemporary
The first weak breath of spring carried little promise, only the smell of damp earth and the lingering chill of winter’s forgotten touch. Phillippe, a boy on the precarious cusp of twelve, watched the world unfold through the smeared pane of his bedroom window. Below, the garden belonging to Mrs. Morden, usually a bastion of meticulous order even in its dormant state, was now home to a curious, almost desperate struggle, played out under a sky the colour of unwashed tin.
The Memo
Author: Eva Suluk | Category: Gritty Realism | Genre: Coming-of-Age
The control room hummed, a low, persistent thrum against the backdrop of an impossibly bright spring day outside. Dust motes danced in the anemic shafts of light that pierced the gloom, illuminating a space crammed with ancient technology and the stale odour of lukewarm coffee. This was not the glamorous world of broadcast media, but the gritty, overlooked reality of community television, a place where dreams went to slowly pixelate and fade. Maggie, barely past her twentieth year, found herself tethered to a swivel chair, her gaze fixed on a screen that had just delivered an unwelcome jolt to the fragile ecosystem of their humble operations.
A Nickel for a Parallel
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Fantasy | Genre: Legal Thriller
The oppressive weight of a Winnipeg summer noon pressed down like a hand, the air thick with the scent of hot asphalt and something faintly metallic. Marvin Jessop, a man whose tailored suits had seen more courtrooms than dive bars, adjusted his spectacles, the humid sheen on the glass a minor irritant. He pushed through the glass door of ‘Tommy’s Sundries and Curios’, the jingle of the bell above his head a thin, reedy sound swallowed by the heat. Inside, the cool air promised by the humming, struggling air conditioner was a lie. It was merely less hot, heavy with the cloying sweetness of stale sugar, old newspapers, and something else – something indefinable, like damp dust and the ghost of forgotten ambition.
Storytelling and the Arts, Skills Development and Digital Transformation
AI-Assisted Storytelling and Scriptwriting: As part of our research, we actively explore AI’s role in creative development, focusing on how it aids in crafting diverse narratives. In genres such as Legal Thriller, Coming-of-Age, Young Adult Contemporary, and Literary Fiction, we investigate AI’s capacity to generate intricate plots, develop relatable characters, and refine narrative structures. Our studies analyze how AI can assist in constructing believable courtroom dramas, capturing the unique voice and perspective essential for young adult stories, and contributing to the thematic depth and stylistic nuance characteristic of literary fiction, thus supporting storytelling and scriptwriting.
Talent Development and Training: Our project also examines the evolving skill sets necessary for creative professionals in the age of AI. The experience of developing stories across genres like Legal Thriller, Coming-of-Age, Young Adult Contemporary, and Literary Fiction using AI tools offers valuable insights into future digital publishing and film production workflows. This research underscores the growing importance of digital literacy and the ability to effectively manage and integrate AI tools into the creative process, empowering artists to innovate and adapt within a transformed industry landscape.
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.
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