>>Pascoite
>>Heavy_Mole

Thanks again, folks:

I added a third act, redid the little robot characters as versions of Spike, Rarity, and Twilight, and posted it to Fimfiction. In case anyone's interested... :)

Mike

>>Pascoite

Thanks, Pasco:

Your comment has made me realize that the story is currently lacking a third act. When the three go to see Olive, she should yell at them some more and demand that they leave. Fishbone should then actually leave the apartment--and get picked up almost immediately by Simon who's waiting outside. That would let me expound a bit on the Simon/Olive relationship and let Fishbone put everything on the line to show Olive that he just wants to help her.

It'll also likely push the story past 5,000 words which'll put it over the limit for Zooscape, the magazine I wanted to try selling the story to, but oh well...

And yes, that's a Pee Wee's Playhouse reference. I don't remember there being a Carl in the cast, though--Laurence Fishburne played Cowboy Curtis, of course, and there were some cat and dog puppets who had a little beatnik band, it seems to me. But I only made the stuffed animal in the photo into a dog so I could have a cat/dog relationship. That's something that Simon needs to talk about in the third act when he rants in a calmly unhinged manner about "proper" male and female roles in the world.

But I've got today off from work, so I know what I'll be doing. Act Three awaits!

Mike

OK!

For the first time in way too long, I've got a rough draft in! And still half a day to make revisions!

Mike

>>Pascoite
>>GroaningGreyAgony

Thanks, folks!

The prompt struck me immediately as the perfect first line to a parody Emily Dickinson poem--our first person narrator would throw the rose away, but the rose would refuse to go. But I couldn't decide on what sort of tone to use: make it a humorous "The Cat Came Back" sort of thing or go for more of a horror thing, the rose's stem digging its thorny stem into the narrator's arm and like that.

So I went a completely different way and came up with this. Some rewriting, and there might be something here...

Mike

>>GroaningGreyAgony
>>Griseus

I seem to be, too.

Mike

>>Pascoite

Thanks, Pasco:

And everyone who voted, too. Yeah, I think another stanza ot two shoehorned into the middle will help set the scene better, then it's off to Silver Blade magazine to see if they're interested in renting it from me. :)

Mike

>>Light_Striker
>>Pascoite
>>GroaningGreyAgony

Thanks, folks:

And congrats to the other medalists. This is a form I might've made up, or maybe Kipling does something like it--I don't recall. It's a variation on what's called either "common meter" or "fourteeners" with a couple extra lines stuck in to make those couplets in the middle.and at the end. I was going to call this "No Means No" originally, but all the bloody imagery made me change the title. :)

Mike

Me, too!

It's a veritable plethora!

Mike

My problem:

With this story is that it doesn't seem to be about anything. A lot of stuff happens, but when I asked myself, "What's this story about?" I couldn't come up with an answer. I'm hoping to figure something out before I post it at Fimfiction. :)

Mike

Yeah:

I've been there... :)

Thanks!
Mike

Depending on how things go:

This afternoon, I might have one to submit, too.

Mike

Alas:

It's looking less and less likely that I'll have enough words finished by the deadline.

Mike

>>Bad Horse

I might have something by Tuesday:

But then again, I might not...

Mike

>>GroaningGreyAgony

But:

There was only foive pictures from you, not aught...

Moike

The major problem:

I had with the story is that I can't see any connection between the characters here and the character I know as Sunset Shimmer. You have the perfect opportunity, too, since Equestria Girls has forever left unanswered the question of what happened to the human version of Sunset Shimmer. Maybe she's just gotten her apartment as described at the beginning of the story, then, unable to sleep that night, she walks over to check out the Canterlot High campus only to witness her doppelganger falling out of the Wondercolt statue. She takes this shaky, uncertain version of herself home, and the rest of the story progresses as we see it here, the still-villainous Sunset literally taking over the human Sunset's life.

Mike

>>KwirkyJ

Looks like:

There'll be at least two of us, then. :)

Mike

>>thebandbrony
>>PinoyPony

And if folks:

Would like to see the story I started for this round but didn't finish till right now, it's up on FimFiction as "Creation's Echo Softly Sounds."

Mike

I really like this:

I've got some little things, like Death saying "You" at the beginning. I'd much rather Death just point to stuff instead of speaking. I'd also vote for giving Death a capital letter when you're talking about the character throughout.

Maybe save the "if you do it right, you’ll break a few ribs" thing till after everything's over and Bloom's busy recriminating herself. That way, Balsam can bring it up as she's refuting all Bloom's points. I'd also like a little more in the section after Bloom's death. What was Death expecting Bloom's life after the incident to be like? Was the colt supposed to die that day? And if Bloom was supposed to learn how to let go but didn't in fact learn that, why doesn't Death send the soul into another life that will teach her that? We're told that the soul failed, but Death moves on to the next test—handling power on her own—as if the failure doesn't matter.

And I'm not quite sure what happens at the end of Charm's section: she's about to teleport away from the monsters, but then she sees Cosmo unconscious. We then switch to Twilight POV to watch the portal close, but Twilight says she didn't do it. The implication is that Charm did it by sacrificing her life somehow, but I'd like to get a better idea in the last "after action report" section of what exactly Charm did. I'm guessing that, by sacrificing herself, she learned the "letting go" lesson in a way Death wasn't expecting, but if that's the case, I'd like the story to say it.

But like I said, these are little things. A fine story overall.

Mike

Lots of good stuff here:

I love the world-building aspect of the story, how the underworld is set up and all that, but, as for the story itself, I find myself with a lot of questions.

The story keeps giving us the impression that this is a rare and dangerous thing that Lyra is doing, and yet I don't understand why she's doing it. I assume that her overwhelming love for Bon-Bon is driving her to transcend death itself just to see her again, but the way she's presented, I don't see much emotion from her at all. I want to feel her desperation, feel the iron-clad determination that has led her to do whatever she has to do to make this trip. Right now, I'm not seeing anything like that.

Also, we keep hearing about how dangerous this trip is, but Applejack and the ticket agent seem to imply that living ponies come through fairly often: AJ says, "We get that a lot" when Lyra's asking questions, and the ticket agent says,"Enjoy your stay," not something I think she'd say to somepony who'd died and was coming to live there permanently. Along those same lines, I had assumed the pack holds supplies for Lyra, but after AJ gives her a sandwich from the pack, we get another line about AJ getting Lyra food from Generosity Island.

And the warning not to look back is like a Chekov's gun that never fires. Having ponies talk about it so many times and then not having anything happen with it builds up suspense that goes nowhere. So I'd recommend making Lyra much more emotional throughout: the love of her life has died, but she refuses to let anything on earth or in the underworld stop her from seeing Bon-Bon again. And then at the end, when it turns out that Bon-Bon literally can't love her anymore, she turns away, looks back, and either blows the whole place up or has todealwitht he consequences of her actions in a way that finally allows her to let Bon-Bon go. Something, at any rate, to give the story the ending that it doesn't quite have now.

Like I said, the ideas here are great. Just let yourself explore them and the characters more deeply—underworld humor!—and see where they take you.

Mike

>>thebandbrony
>>Baal Bunny

Alas:

I don't see myself finishing this in the next 16 hours. It's possible, but not probable, as they say. Maybe by next weekend, I can get it posted to Fimfiction...

Mike

>>Crafty

Maybe:

There's a story I've been wanting to do for a while that would fit this prompt quite nicely. It'll all depend on how much time I can carve out for writing over the next few days...

Mike

I'll agree with >>Pascoite:

That more could done with the third stanza if, author, you're trying to say that the "philosophy" of the previous stanzas doesn't stand a chance when confronted by the real world, then maybe in the envoi at the end, you could tell us whether you'll stick to your guns or give in to the pressure.

By the way, Pasco, this is a ballade with the interlocking rhyme scheme and the stanzas all ending with the same line and such... :)

Mike

Lovely imagery:

But I'm not sure what it's in service to. There's unhappiness here, but that's about all I'm getting...

Mike

>>georg
>>Xepher
>>Rao

I finished up:

"The Long Game," the story I was going to enter this round if anyone's interested in reading it now... :)

Mike

I like the rhyme scheme here:

But the rhythm's kind of lumpy. I'll suggest focusing more on arranging the stressed and unstressed syllables into a nice pattern than on simply counting the number of syllables per line.

As for the poem's content, I'm not quite sure what's happening, and there seems to be a lot of people involved for such a short poem: we have a "he" and a "her" as well as a "your", a direct address that to me also implies a narrator who's telling this poem to whoever the "you" is. Four characters, and I can't figure out what their relationships are to each other...

Mike