Boundaries of Words

I haven't written in a little while. It's a busy season. Though the failure isn't entirely due to a lack of writing material as I've actually been doing a good deal of writing (or at least editing). I'm writing a story for the Writers of the Future seasonal competition, and editing my story into something worth reading has been a nightmare. I constantly get stuck in a state of being over-pretentious in my writing, elitist without the prerequisite technique to back up that sort of egotistical behavior.

I have several major problems with my writing, and one of my gravest is that I like writing in a pretentious manner sometimes. One of my recent stories began thus:

There is something sinister in infinity, and magnificent. The stars cease their winking charade and stare: cold, incessant, pitiless in eternal surround.  Space is not a sea in which we float amongst the heavens, but a hole, an absence, crushing ever inwards.  The fragile veil between us and without: beautiful; the journey into the void: fraught.

            Lost stared vacantly behind as his home, all their homes, receded into a glowing point in space.  He didn’t know why, but watching the vods of their departure made him feel… something.  Maudlin? Solemn?  It was getting more difficult to do that these days: feel.  The echoing thrum and whirr of magical machinery whined behind Lost as a counterpoint to the numbing silence of the stars.  The control room faintly glowed with nurturing light, a laughable counterfeit sun, while overhead, a glass dome glimpsed into forever as the vessel glided through space.  

Of course it is pretentious. Of course it doesn't flow well. And this is still an early draft (the NaNo I worked on this recent November past), but that is often a disclaimer for those who dislike the style (most people) even though I have a secret fascination with it. And my recent story is no different. I can't get it to flow; I can't get it to read like a story because I struggle with wanting it to read like a story. I adore puns and elitist easter eggs, and filled my mythical tale with them, but I eschew simplicity too often. We live in an age where the most read books are young-adult books, and the demographic that is reading them is 35-55. But I find those books shallow. Not out of necessity, and they are not all shallow reads, but because the target requires an easy, limited diction and imagery.

I like rules, but I also like to press the boundaries of words and find out just how far I can stretch meanings and interpretations. So I'm editing, and fighting mostly against myself and my innate tendency to be obtuse.