Weekly Unfinished Tales and Short Stories from our Dataset
Welcome to our daily collection, a curated selection of short stories drawn from our ongoing creative arts and research program, the “Unfinished Tales” project. This initiative began as an interdisciplinary experiment undertaken simply for fun, and to learn what we can do when exploring the intersections of technology and narrative. The stories presented here are foundational narrative experiments from our dataset, each one a unique exploration of character, setting, and genre.
These narrative vignettes are instrumental to the project’s dual research objectives. For our work in AI-Assisted Scriptwriting, they serve as a rich corpus for exploring the generation of novel ideas, alternative plot structures, and dynamic story arcs. Simultaneously, within our focus on Talent Development, these tales provide practical case studies for examining the essential skills and training needs for creative professionals. They help us understand how to better manage emerging AI and immersive technologies, fostering greater digital literacy and interdisciplinary approaches to modern storytelling.
Today’s Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
The Alkali Stain
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Boys Love (BL) | Genre: Young Adult Contemporary
The sun beat down on the parched earth, a relentless, blinding glare that promised nothing but more heat. Dust, fine as flour, coated everything – the weathered wood of the fence posts, the wilting sagebrush, the worn leather of Benji’s boots. The air shimmered, distorting the already vast, empty landscape, making the distant hills ripple like water. A silence, heavy and ancient, pressed in from all sides, broken only by the buzz of insects and the distant, dry creak of the wind pump. It was the kind of quiet that felt less like peace and more like a held breath.
A Catalogue of Grey Buttons
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Coming-of-Age | Genre: Psychological Drama
The sound wasn’t just in their ears; it was in their teeth. The rhythmic slap-slap-slap of their winter boots on the polished linoleum floor of the Portage & Main concourse was a frantic drumbeat against the deep, indifferent hum of the city’s circulation systems. Each gasp for air tasted of pine-scented floor cleaner and the metallic chill that clung to the grates in the walls, a flavour unique to the places built to connect other, better places.
A Bastion of Pressed Tin
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Coming-of-Age | Genre: Western
The air, sharp enough to cut glass, carried the muffled sound of traffic from three streets over. Here, in the narrow canyon between two brick warehouses, the only noise was the squeak of boots on packed snow and the shallow, steaming breaths of children trying to be invisible. A single string of malfunctioning Christmas lights, stapled to a fire escape, flickered a frantic, festive Morse code onto the ice-crusted brickwork.
The Patron Saint of Polyurethane
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Coming-of-Age | Genre: Dark Comedy
The cold was a physical presence, a thing that scraped at the lungs and turned the moisture of your breath into a cloud of tiny, instantly freezing knives. It was the kind of cold that made the city’s festive lights look brittle, like coloured glass about to shatter. Steam plumed from sewer grates along Portage Avenue, ghostly and slow in the windless dark, while the hollow chime of a distant bus announcement echoed off the icy facades of office towers.
An Aberration on a Wednesday
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Coming-of-Age | Genre: Sci-Fi
The cold doesn’t just bite; it holds on. It seeps through the seams of Norman’s worn parka, a persistent ache in his bones that feels older than his sixteen years. Downtown Winnipeg is a monochrome photograph of itself, all grey slush and greyer buildings, but the Christmas lights strung across Portage Avenue try to argue otherwise, their colours bleeding weakly onto the salt-stained pavement.
Design Notes and Applied Research
This collection demonstrates a significant breadth of narrative skill, moving between the distinct conventions of Psychological Drama, Western, and Science Fiction. The selected subject categories, particularly Coming-of-Age and the niche subgenre of Boys Love (BL), highlight how artists are adapting established frameworks to explore personal development. This fusion of classic genres with contemporary, digitally-influenced subjects serves as a clear example of storytelling’s ongoing evolution in the digital space.
The curation of such varied material within a single collection was a valuable exercise in creative juxtaposition. It effectively illustrates how our program’s participants are navigating the intersection of traditional craft and new media to develop their unique voices. This dynamic exploration has provided insightful data for our project’s research and proved to be a highly engaging component of the incubator’s work.
About the Project
The Unfinished Tales and Short Stories collection was an interdisciplinary arts and narrative storytelling experiment in 2025. It was part of a creative arts and participatory research project by The Arts Incubator Winnipeg and the Art Borups Corners collectives. It focuses on two key areas: AI-Assisted Storytelling and Scriptwriting, exploring AI tools for generating ideas, plot structures, and story arcs; and Talent Development and Training, studying digital skills, literacy and training needs for creative professionals by experimenting with AI and immersive technologies to inform future projects. 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.
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