Going to echo BB on some of the POV shifts. I've softened my tone on POV switching (I used to be against it in almost all circumstances), but even so you have switches within paragraphs, which make it seem as if Caleb has suddenly become the POV character.

A few things stood out to me that seemed odd, and I wasn't sure if there was some deeper meaning behind them. Most notable was the constant mention of plastic with the guns -- not many guns have plastic parts, and the 1911 certainly doesn't, except possibly the grip panel. But even then it would be a stretch to use the term plastic to describe any gun except (disparagingly) a Glock.

It had me waiting for some kind of twist or reveal toward the end, but it never came. Minor point, but there you go.

First one in the chute, and this round is starting out strong. Commendable job, author, on setting the stakes up early and getting us invested in them. This wasn't a story I felt like I had to drag myself through -- at all points the story was pulling me forward to the resolution.

On the more critical side, the opening scene was a bit heavy on the expository-dump aspect. I appreciate what you did to soften those edges, but even so the conversation seemed a bit forced. I did like the little touches you put in about sterilizing the planet and the intergalactic response, which added a feeling of depth to the piece. I could easily see the deeper world the story was set in.

The climax was a little... I'm not sure how to describe it, but 'expected' comes to mind. We get a hunter who wanders into a situation over his head, thinks everything is going well, but it's actually not. I'd have honestly been more surprised if he was actually successful at the hunt. Either the build-up was a bit off, or the hunter just didn't act as sophisticated as I expected, given that he was warned plenty of times that these rabbits had vanished with prey just as capable as him.

The final scene, with the POV switch, was a bit expository as well. I'm not sure what it added except for an explanation -- not a reveal that forced us to revisit our previous read of the story and come away from it with a new understanding, but rather more like "oh yeah they weren't rabbits, they were four-dimensional devouring horrors." I appreciate that it added a new dimension to the piece, and the final line especially seemed like an attempt to bring this personal story about one man's quest into a galactic scale, but... the piece isn't really about the rabbit-beings, is it? The story was about Hadjeran, until suddenly it wasn't.

I'm stretching to come up with those criticisms, though. Overall I was very impressed with this piece. Great work, author.

>>horizon

Always good to have a back-up plan.

I'm not in this round. Need a few weeks to finish up other projects. Can't wait to see what people have cooked up, though!

OKAY SO I THOUGHT THERE WAS LIKE ANOTHER DAY LEFT IN THIS CONTEST BUT NO IT CLOSES IN THREE HOURS AND I STILL HAVEN'T DONE ANYTHING I NEED TO DO TODAY SO HERE GOES YES REVIEW THE SHORT ONE!

Ahem.

I liked it.

Lemme start by saying that of the four entries, (Don't) Let Go is easily the most... fluid. Yeah, let's go with that. It's fluid in the sense that it jumps around a lot, transitions are abrupt, some 'scenes' are so short that they lack anything approaching context, and in general it feels avant garde, to use >>No_Raisin's term. It's not experimental, but it's definitely got style.

Straight from the opening this story has energy. Momentum. Things start fast and it's not until the first scene break that they calm down. And for the record, I knew what 'bough' was without having to look it up (flex).

There's not much space in 2,000 words to fit a full story, action scenes and character development, so it's understandable that we don't learn much about Catra Kiera in the course of this fic. Mara, however, we learn a great deal about, and even though she's a canon character, the show never reveals much about her. So I appreciate the thought that went into developing her here, and I have to say I like the idea. We know, from the show, that she undergoes an Anakin-like failure at some point, but we're not given much indication of what drove her to that point. And this fic wisely doesn't try to show us, thereby avoiding Lucas's prequel-pitfall. Instead it shows us something that Mara cares about, the inner conflict her desire for Kiera produces, and invites us to decide how that may or may not have led to her ultimate fate.

Okay, that's characters. Let's talk about the narrative arc and plot.

We have a conflict concisely presented: Mara's love for Kiera is interfering with her duties to Etheria. Apparently. Aside from an interrupted training session or two, though, it's not clear how. Perhaps She-Ra is expected to be an ascetic monk, and forswear all physical comforts? Queen Angella notes that she's never met a She-Ra who couldn't put Etheria's needs ahead of her own. Perhaps the world is asking too much of poor Mara.

But... let's tug on that thread a bit. What is the world asking, exactly? Be a warrior, defend the planet... practice with the sword sometimes. Don't make-out with Kiera until you've done your homework. These seem like reasonable expectations. The guards in Angella's castle certainly aren't allowed to go kissy-kissy with each other whenever they want -- why does Mara feel like it's such an imposition that she can't? Unless I'm misreading something, no one in this story is telling Mara that she must not have any relations, just that she needs to do her duties first. That's something a lot of people have to live with.

In other words, being She-Ra doesn't seem like a terrible burden. In fact, it seems pretty awesome. You get an awesome sword, free hair, and big ole' muscles. And a sense of purpose! That's worth more than the rest put together. So why does Mara feel so... confined?

The story hints at her reasons. It never quite spells them out. It tosses out little suggestions and leaves it to the reader to decide. And that's all awesome. But we reach the end rather shortly and we're left with... not much? A scene with Razz, going out to pick berries with Mara?

The scene with Razz is pivotal, and gives us an allegorical tale to compare with Mara's current troubles, but it doesn't seem to end Mara's conflict. It suggests that she should not let go of herself to become She-Ra, but that doesn't resolve Mara's conflict -- if anything, it perpetuates it. She is still She-Ra and she still feels the tug of these warring desires. She ends the story in the same place she started.

And that's fine! You have a character struggling with a conflict, and in the end they fail to resolve it. Failure is an option. But we never see the consequences of that failure, or any consequences whatsoever. There's no epiphany at the end. The story just takes us in a big lap around the block, and for that matter the first scene could pretty easily follow the last scene and take place the very next day. That's how little has changed.

All this may make it sound like I didn't like this fic -- but I did. I thought it was one of the strongest in the round, that the story it tells is interesting and engaging even as it comes across as a bit jumbled. But I'm willing to accept a bit of confusion if it's fun to read, and this was.

>>Baal Bunny

We actually suspected that might be the case in the chat. It’s one reason I don’t think anyone is actively planning to penalize this story for the choice — it’s just odd enough (and never before seen on this site) that I thought it merited mention.

Okay, second up at bat, The Castle Courtyard!

Compared with the other three stories in this round, Courtyard proceeds at a much slower pace. It covers years of character development, whereas the others focus on shorter periods of time (from a few days for Her Way and (Don’t) Let Go to apparently just an hour-or-so for The Master’s Tools). This lends itself to a more languid sort of story and fits the cold setting very well.

But before we talk about anything else, though, we have to shoot the elephant in the room -- the dialogue tags.

Let me start by saying that they’re not a huge problem. They’re not disqualifying. They’re odd and they’re apparently arbitrary, but when you think about it all linguistic conventions are arbitrary. The Japanese use 「 and 」 to denote quotations, and that works fine. There’s no reason a preparatory em-dash can’t work as well.

But we might as well ask the question: why? Quotation marks may be arbitrary but they’re an accepted convention. Changing them up for no particular reason (or, at least, any reason I can understand) seems to serve no purpose. It only confuses the reader (or me, at least) and sets them off in search of a reason, and in the end I think it’s just a red herring.

I felt like it was a bit of meta-textuality at first, especially coming as it did with this line:

Kindergarten came along, and with it just a bit of maturity for her. She grew a couple inches, and she could now use things like commas and apostrophes in her sentences with consistency.

And I thought at first that the narration itself would develop in complexity and detail, mirroring Sophia’s education and maturity. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. The narration at the beginning feels just as sophisticated as the narration at the end. So in the end I think I just wasted a bunch of effort looking for something that wasn’t there.

Okay, that elephant’s dead. Let’s move onto the story.

I don’t think I’m being offensive if I say that the story here is fairly simple and familiar to us. We knew where it was going almost from the second scene (or, at least, I guessed where it was going). It can be summarized like this: Two girls become friends. Over the years, life draws them apart. One develops strong feelings for the other and is sad when that love is not reciprocated. The end.

This is a familiar story to most of us. We’ve all lost track of close friends, and all but the very luckiest of us have experienced unrequited love. It is, in fact, a part of growing up to experience these feelings and these losses; one who doesn’t experience them has missed out on a fundamental formative experience of most of humankind.

This is a problem in the sense that the story isn’t really presenting us with anything we haven’t already experienced ourselves. It’s a familiar story, told with an original character in a setting that I’m glad to see explored, but the story doesn’t offer me much of anything new. And I think that’s holding it back.

Entire libraries have been written about what makes a story ‘good,’ and I don’t think I’m going to break any new ground here by trying to explain myself. But I think for a story to really engage its readers, it has to present them with something to care about. It can do this many ways -- show them characters who they come to feel for, and then challenge those characters in some way. It can tell the story of characters facing a dilemma that in some way reflects a dilemma faced by the reader in their personal life. It can ask the reader a question and demand they provide an answer. It can present the protagonist with a difficult choice and implicitly ask the reader if they made the correct one.

Or it can do something else. There are a million ways to tell a good story, and I’m certainly not qualified to say what’s good or what’s bad. But I think this particular story has a lot of things we want to see -- sympathetic characters, an interesting and novel setting -- but the story it puts them through is so familiar to us that we come away feeling not much more than a bit of sympathy of Sophia (and, for me at least, Frosta). But that’s all I feel.

I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful, author. A lot of this probably comes across as “Cold didn’t like it because Cold has very traditional and staid ideas about what a story is and this doesn’t fit in his mental square hole,” and that’s mostly correct (except that I do like it - just not as much as some of the other entries in this uniformly strong round). You may decide that you don’t want to change anything about it, but you’ll have to accept that some readers will ding you for your decisions.

After the judging is over and anonymity is broken, I’ll be happy to chat about specifics and answer your questions or hear your rebuttal.

(Typed late at night while still suffering from jet lag. Please forgive any typos.)

So, my reviews are neither as long nor as insightful as Raisin’s. Fortunately, all four of these stories are excellent in their own way, and excellent stories are much less stressful to review.

I’ll be going in opposite order from Raisin, starting with the longest: Her Way.

---

Let’s start by talking about characters and characterization.

We discussed this story at some length in the chat last night, and for the most part everyone seemed to be in agreement in their view that the characterization in this story is nigh flawless. The three main voices - Catra, Scorpia and Entrapta - were pretty much perfect with the show, and the inner thoughts and dialogue of Catra we’re exposed to reflect her pretty perfectly as well.

From the other characters, we don’t get as much. The cadets are painted in pretty broad and, it must be said, shallow strokes. Even in the second-to-last scene, which is presented from Screech’s perspective, we don’t learn all that much about Screech herself. From the other cadets we get even less. I’m not even sure we get their names.

In a story that is so centrally about Catra and her inner conflict, the lack of characterization in the supporting characters isn’t a serious a serious problem for me. However, compared with the exceptional characterization we saw in Entrapta and especially Scorpia, Screech’s relative blandness stuck out to me. My suggestion, author, would be to spend a bit more time filling Screech out for us - specifically, give us a real reason why she was sneaking around inside Catra’s quarters. Not just “I saw a picture and I was curious,” but something that really explains to us why she was so interested in what she saw that she was willing to take the exceptionally fraught step of invading her superior’s bedroom.

(Also, who doesn’t lock their door in the Fright Zone?)

Alternately, if you don’t like the idea of shifting the narrative focus away from Catra because this is, after all, supposed to be a story about her, then maybe go the other way and de-personalize Screech a bit. The perspective shift to Screech in the second-to-last scene makes us want to know more about her as a person, but at the cost of shifting the story’s focus away from Catra.

I think either route you go will work, but right now you’re just kinda going down the middle, giving Screech a whole perspective scene (in fact, the most critical one, with the climax), but not giving us much Screech-the-person. Either give us the whole cake, or don’t present it in the first place.

That was a lot more than I expected to write about the characters! Let’s turn to the plot and story arc next.

I really like the central conceit here - that Catra, having been put in Shadow Weaver’s place, now gets some of Shadow Weaver’s less thrilling duties, including the training of the cadets. Although the Catra in the show is turning into a good leader, she’s still obviously working on some of the finer points of teamwork, so the tension you’ve identified is absolutely fertile ground for storytelling. I could even see this story being the germ of an entire She-Ra fanfic genre, if the fandom ever develops that much.

I saw two lines of conflict in this story. The first, immediately apparent one, was Catra’s difficulty executing her duties and her internal frustration with herself for that failure. The second was Catra’s continuing rage at Adora for her betrayal. This second line got quite a bit of play, and it was where I had some trouble. Not because it wasn’t well portrayed or implausible, but that it was too plausible - we’ve seen it before. It was very similar to some of the conflict Catra went through in the show, to the point that it felt like a replay of the show in a few places.

Now, there’s a solid argument to be made that one shouldn’t make assumptions about how much knowledge the reader has of the source material, and to write broadly for all audiences one should include enough background and context for us to understand why Catra is so furious with Adora. But I don’t think it’s necessary or the best use of space to so faithfully reprise Catra’s evolving feelings for Adora and decision to let go of her.

I’m absolutely happy to see Catra still wrestling with her feelings for Adora. The punching-bag with her picture on it is a great touch, but I don’t know that it needs to be so central to the story. Likewise her monologue with Adora’s picture, which could have been written as a dialogue with any of the other characters. Perhaps even a confrontation with Shadow Weaver (presumably in the Fright Zone dungeons, though it’s not really clear from the show) over Catra’s perceived inability to fulfil Shadow Weaver’s duties. Just tossing out alternatives.

Anyway, back to the first line of conflict. It’s solved, I think, when Catra comes to the realization during her monologue with Adora’s picture that she needs to do things her way. The next scene, from Screech’s perspective, is a realization of this ‘new way,’ via a demonstration of her own kick-ass potential. And that’s pretty cool. But I wish those two moments could’ve been closer together - the epiphany and the moment of realization, the discovery that she must do things her way and the putting it into practice. Instead she essentially completes her mini-quest in the monologue with Adora, and then it takes the entire next scene to… demonstrate it, I guess? But that demonstration seemed effortless and entirely for the benefit of the cadets, whose perspective we see it through. (Though I definitely appreciated the second demonstration of ‘her way,’ the decision to go easy on Screech. Even if it felt predictable by that point).

There’s a reason the climax in most stories comes when the hero is forced to take some dramatic action or make a fraught decision while at the moment of greatest peril, when the stakes are highest. To abuse an overused example, in the original Star Wars, Luke has his epiphany that he must trust the force mere moments before turning off his targeting computer and blowing up the Death Star. It would be a very different climax if Luke had realized he needed to trust the force hours before during a quiet bit of self-reflection in the Rebel base, then went up and blew up the Death Star without much exertion.

I’m probably not explaining that very well, and I’m always hesitant to say that stories must be this way or should be that way. Let’s just leave it by saying that I feel like the climax and resolution could have had more impact if they occurred together, in the same scene, and led into each other more directly.

In summary:

Of the four entries, I felt like Her Way had the best characterization. Some of that can be chalked up to more space, but even leaving the word-count aside, these were perfect realizations of Catra and the others. I had absolutely no trouble reading this in Catra’s voice, and nothing about it caused me any dissonance.

I think you need to pick a direction for Screech. Either pull back from her perspective and give us all-Catra, all-the-time, or give Screech more meat. I think either way could work.

Plot- and narrative-wise, I felt like there was more overlap than necessary with material already presented in the show, particularly with Catra’s conflicted emotions over Adora. Things also felt a bit predictable in places, particularly the resolution with Screech. If I had one, final bit of advice, it would be to find some way to confound our expectations in some way. Raise the stakes for everyone. You’ve written Catra so perfectly that we’re guaranteed to care what happens to her - now use that to challenge the reader in some way.

Thank you for writing.

I don't normally comment on the art rounds, but this is outstanding. Excellent use of multi-point perspective, especially in the first image.

In before a dozen stories about Luna/Celestia/Twilight alone at the end of the world because immortality sad.

>>No_Raisin

For the record, I ranked your story fourth. It came in sixth. So I found it considerably better than the average judge.

Take that for what you will.

>>Cassius

I still can't get over the whole burning dead bodies for fuel thing. Also, while I agree that the use of the book as a tool to learn to read is a clear interpretation, the final line does nothing to advance it. The italics just make it worse, IMO. Italics are signposts for the reader's attention. I much more got the feeling that this story was longer in the original draft, had to be cut to make the 750 word limit, and the author pulled that final line out as an attempt to slap-dash his intent into a single, short sentence. If he didn't want people to interpret it as the bluntest twist ever, it shouldn't have been written like one.

But seriously, why would you burn a body for fuel? I want to like this story, and I hate it when critics sharp-shoot my stories for logical fallacies, but so much of this story is predicated on that rather morbid fact that I can't get over it.

While i concur with Cassius that this is one of the better entries so far, I'm not so sold on the ending. We're told earlier that he can't understand the words on the cover, which I took as an outright statement that the boy was illiterate. As such, the final line had almost no impact for me. I would even say it had negative impact -- it cheapened the boy's dilemma by acting like it was supposed to surprise me.

I also don't get the fuel thing, as there seemed to be plenty in this world still left to burn. But I'll chalk that up to author's prerogative.

One of the few stories I've read so far that shows a story, rather than telling it. I guess for that reason I appreciated it more than the other reviewers who have left comments. An interesting, genre-defying piece. I imagine it will rank highly on my prelim ballot.

Well, I wasn't expecting a Nightmare Night prompt in November, but I'll see if I can make it work.

I thought it was the 'wendigo' option as well. To me that's just too well established as a monster linked with cannibalism.

Nice story though, as always, Skywriter. A little darker than I'm used to from you!

>>Miller Minus

Hey, it's almost that time of year again, isn't it? Already seeing Halloween decorations in the stores.

>>MrExtra

Finally: The Arrow.
A Bit of Realism: I know it's often ignored in fantasy and media, but yanking old-timey arrows out is usually a really bad idea. Those arrowheads were usually secured with a bit of gut or string, and had a tenancy to loosen when whetted by something like blood. This could leave the arrowhead behind to cut the person up from the inside every time they moved. Much more dangerous than leaving a bullet inside someone.

To be fair, the monster might not have that knowledge.

Well, this definitely takes the image it's dedicated to and runs with it. I don't think I've ever read a story that so tightly adhered to the prompt (art or otherwise).

The dueling perspectives, between the kreen and the boy, are interesting, but I'm not sure they work in a story this short. There's simply not enough time dedicated to each character for me to empathize much with them or their plights. The flashbacks (there are two separate flashbacks in a story of less than 3,000 words) give us some backstory but, again, I feel like their placement breaks up the story just when it starts to get rolling.

The moral, if you will, also feels a bit heavy-handed. You have the Kreen, who greet the newly arriving humans with open arms and understanding. And the humans mercilessly wipe them out. Now, that's certainly realistic, and god knows it's happened before, but what's the point of retelling it in this form? The Kreen main character seems to have an extremely sophisticated and academic perspective on his people's slaughter, mentioning history books and human rights, when it seems to me that one of the last survivors of a small band being driven to extinction would be more concerned with hatred (his or ours), a desperate will to survive, and failing that, a lust for revenge.

But perhaps that's what separates us from the Kreen.

Okay, but seriously, a review.

Pinkie and Cheese show up uninvited in Fluttershy's house, then proceed to do Pinkie and Cheese things. For 2800 words.

Like.

Man. I was ready to shoot those two after 1000 words. But it just kept going.

Obviously the Pinkie and Cheese thing isn't my jam. You'll notice I never write either of those characters if I can avoid it.

So yeah, as far as Pinkie and Cheese things go, this was a well-written example. The author has a good grasp on how to translate their wacky visual humor into the written word, which is extremely difficult. It's one of the things that makes Pinkie so difficult to write as a character.

But then we get to the duck, and... well, yeah. That happened. Why a duck indeed.

I try to provide useful feedback with my reviews, author, but I'm having trouble coming up with a critique that doesn't boil down to "This kind of Pinkie Pie annoys the hell out of me, and somehow you wrote two of her." That's not really valid or useful. Instead I'll focus on the duck part, and just say that I never felt the absurd premise had the justification or payoff it needed to work.

Sorry. Sometimes you just get a reader who isn't into what you're putting out. If this goes to finals I'll probably abstain rather than voting on it.

There's a lot of good worldbuilding and hypothesizing here. I love stories that focus on the nitty-gritty details of Earth-Equestria relations, and I don't think I've come across one that deals with the Customs inspections that each nation must have in place. It's neat to think about.

So, that's fantastic. However, I have to say that at a certain point it begins to weigh on the story. Let's consider how that plays out:

This story is ~5,900 words long. The first ~4,100 words are spent explaining the setup. It's not until that point that the actual conflict takes place -- the smuggling effort and Jerry's role in stopping it. That conflict takes up exactly 1,079 words.

Think about that. Only 18 percent of this story deals with the actual conflict. The rest is establishing the world, developing the characters, and the conclusion.

I feel like this is a composition problem. Yeah, there is other conflict present – Jerry feels awkward on his first day on the job! – but that's not a real conflict. Not a real literary conflict, anyway. It's just life. A considerable rebalance of effort might be useful here, and reading some of the other comments, I think the other readers agree.

I wrote a blog post about paragraphs once. It was ten pages long. Suffice to say, paragraphs are important to me.

Now, I'm not the paragraph police. I even say in the blog post that there are essentially no rules when it comes to using paragraphs. Go wild! Just remember that people have to actually read these things.

The... style... this story takes, with its endless repetition of paragraphs so short they barely even qualify as sentences, has the effect of driving the reader forward, never giving them a chance to rest. I also found it incredibly annoying. Let's look at one section:

She became the undying and the undying became her.

Princess Cadance felt her self slip out from under her.

She felt her muscles die.

She felt her family die.

She felt her subjects and her home die.

Something inside of her laughed.

Princess Cadance thought about the ponies of Canterlot.

I will now write the rest of this review in the same style as the story.

What

the

fuck.

When I was in college.

I was on the Speech and Debate team.

It was a good team.

I had fun.

Fun.

For many years I was on the team.

And for many years the team had me (on it).

We had a saying –

technically it was our coach's saying –

but I liked it so much that I stole it.

Whenever someone put style over substance, and talked simply to hear themselves speak.

We called it rhetorical masturbation.

For reasons that I think should be obvious.

Author, I apologize for using that comparison here.

But I look at this story, and I try to imagine where lines like this come from:

The Daughter, pretending that they had already impressed importance upon existence without understanding what ‘importance’ or ‘existence’ meant.

And.

Yeah.

I dunno.

"Kill your darlings," they say.

You can take that two ways:

1. Find the parts of your writing that you absolutely love, the sentences that sing to you, the ones that make you feel like you're Kerouac or Morrison or Mieville, and strike them out. They aren't as good as you think and just come across as pretentious. Someday, when you really are a Kerouac or Morrison or Mieville, you can get away with those things. You'll know when that day comes.

2. I kind of prefer a second reading: it means kill the characters you love. God that's metal.

But most people go with the first definition.

I think it works here.

I would consider it.

And maybe consolidate some of those paragraphs.

It'll be easier to read.

Currently the top story on my prelim slate. An ambitious attempt at an original story. I'll skip discussing a lot of the high points – suffice to say there were many.

Writing a story from the point of view of a non-verbal character is a difficult task, and there's a few times where this story gets tangled up trying to resolve that difficulty. The pantomime scene with Owlicious in the marketplace is the most obvious – I couldn't follow it at all, and just kind skipped to the end of the scene to get the gist. The charades and words-on-cards that Angel Bunny used to blackmail the grocer worked a bit better, but it was still unnecessarily drawn-out, and considering how close you were to the word-cap on this story that space could've been better used, I think, on other scenes. I'm not sure you even needed the whole scene with Angel blackmailing the grocer for groceries. What point did it serve? I guess it demonstrated that Angel can draw well, but there didn't seem to be any narrative purpose beyond that.

The defining conflict of the story, Fluttershy and Twilight's star-crossed romance, comes into the story extremely late. That sort of head-fake can work, and I think it works well here – we know from the start that something has upset Fluttershy, but the explanation we get from the rest of the mane six is clearly lacking and suggests there's something more going on (which of course there is). I think dropping another hint or two along the way would help the story gel a bit more.

Right now there are essentially two conflicts: Fluttershy's attempts to become more mentally healthy, and Angel Bunny's role in that struggle; and Fluttershy's conundrum regarding Twilight. As it stands, the two plots have almost nothing to do with each other except that the second one precipitated the first. You could eliminate either plot from this story and the remaining plot would work just fine. My suggestion, author, would be to find a way to inextricably link them together, even if those linkages don't become clear until the end.

But those are just my thoughts. As I said, this is currently topping my slate, and I expect it to do extremely well in the finals.

(Loved Angel Bunny's names for the other mares.)

>>HiTime

I also don't see Fluttershy cooking snails. Sorry, that's too OOC for me.

We've seen her feeding fish to ferrets in the show. She seems comfortable with predators and their diets.

Special bonus review! Though I’ll be coming back to review all the non-finalists in my own blog.

Try-Again gripped me more than any story but The Fixer. The first-person perspective with the second-person element of you throughout made for difficult reading, but as a literary exercise I could appreciate it. The frequent element of guns was interesting, not because I love guns but because a certain level of knowledge was clearly evident here -- we all know how frustrating it is to read an author expounding on some subject they have little expertise in, filling in the details with generic sketches rather than actual facts. But this struck me as authentic.

Then we get to the end, and… it ends. That final scene raises so many questions in my mind, but I’m left with no resolution. Why the sudden shift from ‘you’ to ‘him’? Is there a fourth character being introduced in that picture above the mantle, or is the fourth family member Armistice? Armistice doesn’t have boots, so that can’t be it, but why the pronoun change? Why? What’s going on?

This is the danger with close-in first- and second-person perspective -- it’s so easy to confuse the reader, especially if they’re not very insightful (like me). In the woodshop, Tom clearly alludes to four family members with the King, Queen and two Knights, but again I don’t know if Armistice is that other knight, or if there’s some hidden fourth character I’m just not seeing.

Frustrated. That’s how I feel, now. Like I should be smart enough to grasp this without having so many questions. Fortunately, we found had other rewards than just the top three finalists, and we agreed that the characterization here deserved its own set of laurels.

As I said to the other judges, The Longest Possible Now is a great idea for a story, and I hope the author writes it someday.

But right now it’s not that story. It’s like a 4,000 word summary of an outstanding science fiction novel. Some of the concepts outlined here really engaged me. Like, I wanted to hear more about these alien races and the Hiator and the philosophical debate the warring parties engaged in to finally solve the problem of Earth.

As an homage to some of the great science fiction of the 1950s, The Longest Possible Now succeeds. But an homage is not a story (though a story can be an homage). Take this idea and run with it, author, and you’ll have something that can win a contest