>>Not_A_Hat
Seconded. I started doing some wonky comment voting after a couple days, just because I could see that this was going to be a problem.

>>TitaniumDragon
It's... what you might expect from a Hugo winner that doesn't win the Nebula? 2012 had a very pretentious Nebula winner (Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312) and a very pulpy Hugo winner. It's an entertaining read, but nothing terribly special in my opinion. I sort of have the impression that's pretty typical for Scalzi.

There's a lot of shared premise between Redshirts and "Extra", but it doesn't go much beyond that. Redshirts unfolds in a very different way, with characters who never really become important to the show—and the plot goes somewhere completely different from where "Extra" goes. Sort of. They end up arriving at sort of similar places, and both deal with the idea of the show being really badly written, but in different ways.

I feel like "Extra" is derivative enough that it'd have a hard time finding a publishing home, but not so derivative that I really feel bad about it, for what that's worth. I'd probably say it's right on the edge of something I'd consider Redshirts fanfiction (but I wouldn't argue hard against calling it straight-up original fiction). But, I mean, we're pretty familiar with fanfiction, right? I wouldn't call most fanfiction that similar to the original material. Derivative, sure, but nothing remotely approaching the p-word.

Okay, last story I'm going to read this round. What do I know going in? Cold in Gardez says he doesn't think this is Sci-Fi, and a lot of people seem to disagree. Also, I have some reason to think this is going to play a bit like Lucifer's Hammer. Which was nominated for the Hugo in 1978. Last story was a Hugo-derivative, could this one be too? Probably not, but I kinda feel like maybe you guys need to read some more classic spec-fic... (-.-)

5 – Doubt Not the Stars Are Fire

Pretty naturalistic opening. Doesn't do much to catch me, but doesn't do much to lose me either. Given that I've seen the trailer for this movie, I'm wondering how Hollywood we're going to go—and I'm hoping that phosphorous isn't going to be a key reason why everyone's about to die, because that's literally as Hollywood as it's possible to go. Then again, foreshadowing. Anyway, we'll see.

For a minute, when Ms. Muriel told Matthew to look up, I thought this was going to go full-on Lucifer's Hammer... but I was wrong! I guess everyone's just a computer simulation, and somebody's going to shut down the program. I guess that rules out phosphorous, so good job there!

Nice use of description throughout here. I don't find it obtrusive, and it's varied enough to still be rich while staying brief.

The premise here is starting to feel slightly nonsensical (though it may not help that I've read a few end-of-the-world-is-coming stories like LH and Seveneves). I find myself questioning why anyone would give a notification that a bunch of simulated intelligences are going to be terminated. In what sense is that better than just terminating them, if it seems like basic psychology would suggest you're going to wind up with a lot of stress, pain, and panic. I'm wondering if this isn't the whole point of simulating said intelligences, actually—to see how they'd react in a situation like this. (Then again, I can't deny that we occasionally get a little socially weird trying to protect people and things.)

I'm curious about the jumping perspective and I'm kind of hoping we don't do it the whole time, that we cycle back around to these people. Brianna makes a good amount of sense as a perspective character. Matthew makes essentially no sense, given what little we saw of him in that first scene—he has no capacity for anything other than trying to hook the reader and seeing the Notification, neither of which he was particularly good at doing. Cesar seems fine. And we're back to Matthew! Okay, cool. (I guess this paragraph has now become defunct as a source of important criticism. Oh well.)

I like the word choices here, in general. The dean's use of "cognizant". "Irrefutable evidence of this hypothesis." Brianna's casual use of cruiser and . I'm not sure how much I like "blue nitrile surgical gloves", though. Rich's video game example, similarly, is good—but I don't know how much I buy into video games being so socially common these days that I'm going to assume Joe Police is a gamer. The metaphor feels like it'd be more natural coming from Cesar to me. There are a few other places where I feel like the word and focus choice in the narration may be slipping away from tight character perspective, too. A lot is good, but I do think you could still improve this in editing.

The end of the second Cesar section is a real punch in the gut, especially after telling us what Maria's parents believe. Thanks, C.S. Lewis.

Nitpick, but the bridge between Brianna 3 and Cesar 3 has a near-identical sentence structure on both sides, very close together.

I like Spotlight and the plan to try to communicate—and incidentally, CiG, to me this story officially becomes science fiction when the characters try to affect the premise, since the premise is I think pretty well classified as sci-fi; when the premise is just a McGuffin, this could credibly be called a drama, but when the story jumps to interacting with the premise, this becomes definitively sci-fi to me—to try to communicate, but it does overlook the worry that the simulation isn't running in real time and that it's entirely possible no one will have time to stop it from terminating. This in no way impacts the plot point, because I think it still makes sense in the context of the characters, but as an outside observer it's a thing I find myself thinking.

I definitely like the quiet ending here. I was expecting a more sudden ending, but I like this better. At the end, this is a type of story I've seen done a few times before, but that doesn't really take away from the fact that it's done well here. The choice of characters and scene selection feels pretty solid to me, now at the end. Not all of the scenes feel deeply purposeful, but there's a lot you're capturing with those choices. (ETA: looking back on it, I do feel like the scenes begin to repeat themselves a little. You're really kind of hammering the same bits on many of Brianna's scenes and the same bits on many of Cesar's scenes. I enjoy them, but I think you may have started hitting diminishing returns on some of the ideas you're putting into them. On the other hand, it's probably fair to say that I can be a decently subtle reader, and what I might consider 'hammering' when I sit down and think about a story could very well be a perfectly reasonable level of thematic repetition.) I think Matthew is definitely the weakest element of this story, since he seems to be pretty much a passenger in his own sections. At the same time, that doesn't really bother me—and maybe I'm wrong to call it out. Brianna and Cesar are both much more active; it may make sense to have a more contemplative third voice that isn't really on the hook to do anything narratively.

I think I have little doubt as to who wrote this. It's another total package story, and I don't think I can honestly deny it a well-earned top spot on my ballot. It could be more original, but it couldn't be a whole lot more well done without rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up.

HORSE: Decline to rate.
TIER: Top Contender

>>Orbiting_kettle
I agree, I did see you mention it once. But I'd already been pretty well primed by hearing people mention Star Trek and the fact that the thing is titled "Extra".

On the other hand, I read the novel a couple years ago and I have a pretty good memory. I don't think there's any significant priming effect here, because I would have gotten to that point within the first 300 words anyway.

...what. the. fuuuuuuuuu...?

I was literally the first person to mention Redshirts in connection with this story? Half the readers missed the "Initiate Kinetic Drive" thing, even after it got dropped?

I am deeply confused by what happened here.

14 – Extra

I like the hook (which I'm counting as everything down to the hard break), and by the end of it I have a good sense of what I'm reading. I'm interested in the IN KIN DRI button, and I really like how the protagonist almost became a real character, and then the episode ended. That got a smile. I think it's worth mentioning, though, that I don't think I'd have understood what I was reading for the first two paragraphs or so, without having heard some talk about Redshirts around the edges during this writeoff. My natural inclination in the first paragraph is that I'm reading a present-day story about someone who's obsessed with a TV show. In the second paragraph, that'd morph into me thinking I was reading a story about an actor. This may not bother you, author—like I said, I'm enjoying it by the end of that first hard break—but I'm always a little nervous about readers coming into a story with the wrong mental priming and having to waste attention to reevaluate their expectations early on.

There's a lot of needless adverbiage running around in here that you should be culling, even if the story reads okay as is. "I very definitively remember." "I didn't really know what [stuff] really meant."

I want to point out that, amusingly, the Proper Noun Trick actually works well here. It's an important part of world-building, because it's so classically Star Trek / pulp sci-fi. The Proper Noun Trick here isn't creating the illusion of depth, it's acknowledging that a lot of the depth in this type of thing is illusory. Hurray for meta-writing-technique-use!

Well, this looks like it's going somewhere different from Redshirts, but this is just so phenomenally Redshirty that I am having a bit of a hard time wrapping my head around calling this original fiction. I don't particularly have a problem with that myself and in a writing competition like this, but I imagine that it might be well-nigh impossible to professionally publish something like this. (I'd probably be curious to know whether I'm off-base on that from some more knowledgable hands.)

I came to about three and a half minutes later, lying flat on my back on a metal table in the ship’s infirmary. I was dead. I knew that, because Dr. Reeves had just said, “She’s dead, Jack,” to Captain Harkton.

Two things here. First, I really hate "came to" there, because "came to" is also a verb phrase (e.g. "It came to pass that", "I came to understand that"), so it always throws me a lot when I read it. Second, I'm going to be incredibly sexist here, but I default to assuming that main characters are male and I always find it kind of weird to learn otherwise this deep into a story. Based on my reaction to "Homebound", I feel similarly about learning that characters are British. I'd love to be aware of this stuff earlier, though I get that it can be hard to do without something like a mirror scene in a first-person narrative. I suspect there are other people who also tend to not assume Male or American, so it probably cuts both ways and would be good in general for everyone to do stuff like this. On the other hand, you may want to just ignore me here because I'm hopelessly atavistic. But it does tend to throw me, yes, when I learn the way I've pictured the character for so much of the story was wrong.

“I’m a robot, beep boop,” I said.

Oh God, Author, this may be the best line anyone has ever written in a Writeoff.

This story has gotten amazing. It's also gotten pretty telly, unfortunately: "This happened. Then this happened. Then this happened." But the idea of a power-mad fictional character trying to subvert the narrative flow is pretty awesome, especially when she goes completely overboard into "there is no way you're still sympathetic at this point" territory. I particularly like the masterful way she's trying to get the show cancelled in Season 4. Though, again, I think we could probably benefit from some more direct storytelling and less abstract narration, at least from time to time. That was one of the reasons the beginning of the story was fun to read, and it's really gone away in the latter half here.

When I called out to initiate our kinetic drive, I saw a cadet push a big red button and I burst out laughing.

You know, I honestly don't know how to feel about this. I was trying to come up with what IN KIN DRI could mean early on, and this is exactly what I came up with. So... I don't know. I guess it makes good sense? But at the same time I find it fundamentally unsurprising, which is a small disappointment.

Yay! This has gotten back to a real scene for s5e26! Also:

“No, no, it’s okay. I wasn’t trying to be rude. It’s something that I’ve realized, though it’s taken a long time. Just because something’s not real, doesn’t mean it’s not important.”

Way to go, moral drop!

Hmm. How do I feel about that ending? It's... subtle. On first glance, I actually find it very unfulfilling. I think this is, without question, the most meta story I've read since "A Basilisk for One". The story is, once you finally figure out that line, openly and directly recursive—its whole point is to give Inkindri a chance to tell her story, which is exactly what she's been doing the whole time. In a way, I think the "We put Redshirts inside your Redshirts" thing may become a feature rather than a bug at that point (though I'm still somewhat pessimistic on how publishable this could be, given how derivative it is on first glance).

This is really good, and easily the most I've laughed reading a Writeoff story in... oh, I can convincingly say "six months", anyway.

HORSE: Decline to rate—this is another story where the big strengths (execution in a lot of the humor, originality in the deeply deranged protagonist) is counterbalanced on the same scales (going extremely telly through the midsection, being a Redshirts knockoff).
TIER: Top Contender... ish. Now that we're in the finals I'd probably call this Solid, but I think it's at least at the level of some of the other things I've called Top Contenders this round.

Well, I told bats I'd do this one for him even though the story's no longer in competition. I've only got two finalists left to read, and a few days before voting ends, so I'll get to them a little later. Here goes! Same HORSE system, same HORSE channel.

19 – Almost Anything Can Be Repaired

First up, that is a freaking awesome hook. The thing that really makes it for me is the hard break that follows the first sentence. That takes balls, man, and I love it.

A couple points on the start of the next section. One, "She fought against it" is unclear to me. I had to think for a while to figure this out, because contextually it seems like she's fighting to wake but there's nothing that makes me feel like she has an urge to go back to sleep (i.e. the stupor thing doesn't communicate that to me). Two, you unfortunately spoiled me on what's going on here, so I don't have a totally unbiased view, but there's nothing before the face and the phrase "medical equipment" that makes me think she's reanimating. I would have initially read this as an afterlife thing, morphing into a Matrix thing as the biological description comes to the fore.

The use of the name "Gertie", coupled with 1992 and stroke, make me assume Jessica is quite old. The use of the word "rejuvenation" is strongly loaded for me, then; I was actually thinking aging was going to be one of the unrepairable things here.

I don't like the 1940 infodrop. I'm pretty invested in the horror of the reanimation process, which I'm quite liking. The pain memory idea makes sense to me, and I don't think you're completely off base to attempt something like this. But it just seems really, really, really weird to me that Jessica's mind would take a vacation from what's happening for long enough to spend three lines remembering what her life was like five decades before she died. Contrast with the "Young people always assumed the elderly must be frightened" and the "Gertie always told her she ate too many eggs." Those are both some great pieces of characterization, but they fit with the overall scene and add to it, rather than pulling me out of it for a few lines.

"Far off year" and its paragraph I get, though I don't really like it. It does sound weird, but it doesn't sound unreasonably weird. I think what I don't like about it is that it definitely gives me a vibe that the doctor is condescending. If that's what you're shooting for, great; but if not, I'd say maybe don't try to pitch his dialogue to the helpless rejuvie so much. (Everything following the frown helps considerably, but I do still feel like I'm losing a good amount of sympathy for him before that point, with his blanket assumptions about what Jessica is going to care about.)

Paragraph where Brian introduces himself, again he feels kind of weird to me. He's grinning and laughing, which is distinctly at odds with the professionalism I'd tend to expect from somebody doing his job. If this is intentional, I'd make Jessica think about it to lampshade it. Really, with any of his weird behavior you're intending, I think it'd make sense to lampshade it through her perspective and expectations. (Also, I really dislike the 'and' in the sentence where he introduces himself. It doesn't feel conversationally natural to me; it feels like he's mugging for the reader instead of talking to Jessica.)

Everything from 'vitrification' on down for a while feels a bit infodumpy (though I get that that's probably okay for a lot of published sci-fi). The word 'cryonicist' feels a little weird to me here, because I'd tend to read that as "someone who studies or practices cryonics" more than "someone who was frozen". And there's a really big question mark that's been hanging over this story for a while, but especially after the 'vitrification' line: Jessica didn't know she was getting frozen, did she? She's not acting all that surprised, but she's also not acting like she knew or expected this. The fact that it hasn't come up in the text yet, one way or the other, is starting to feel a little weird to me.

Nevermind, it looks like she did know. Or at least she's totally not surprised by any of this. I dunno, given the fact that cryonics seems like such a leap of faith at the present (and I think substantially moreso in the late 1980s and early 1990s), I feel like she could really do with an "It actually worked!" reaction at some point early on.

The mirror thing... I dunno, I guess it kind of goes to what I think of Brian again? It's hard for me to interpret it any way other than, "Damn, this Brian guy is completely incompetent at his job." Was he actually not aware of the possibility of a reaction like this? Is Jessica so weird that she's the only person it's happened to? Because otherwise, it seems like he should be trying to prepare her for the possibility that there will be a shock (and there will almost certainly be some shock anyway, since she's going to be young again). We know this guy tries to do okay by the employee handbook, even if he's bad at it (c.f. the "Welcome to the future!" paragraph). So he's either worse than we thought, or the employee handbook is just shit.

I'm expecting some twist at the end from Brian's perspective on the new face thing, because from his explanation it seems far more likely that her own memory of her face is what got screwed up than the face itself, for which they've presumably got a lot of information with bone structure and genetic detail that ought to be able to tell them what she really looked like.

And I got it. I think generally I like that last section, though it's probably a good dumping ground for a bit more technical information like a name-check or small explanation of the information decay problem. I think, in terms of Brian's character, it might also be nice to get some suggestion in the Jessica section that he wants to be more honest than the company wants him to be (which is not a thing I really picked up on).

The resolution is a little flat, but I think I'm pretty much okay with that. This belongs to a long tradition of sci-fi idea stories that don't really wrap up a plot so much as they end with a thought-provoking idea about the subject being discussed. Your "Gotta be a lot of 'em, if big mistakes do happen" paragraph is filling that role perfectly well.

All in all, I really enjoyed this story. There are bits I'd mess with, as discussed above, and this never really wows me the way "The Name Upon His Forehead" did, but I would be perfectly happy to read this (or a somewhat revised version of this, anyway) in a collection of professionally published speculative fiction.

HORSE: ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉
TIER: Solid

...well, this has turned into kind of a weird conversation.

Okay, y'all, this story is not all that good. I'm totally cool with it not making the cut. For once, I think I'm going to post a recap blog on this guy, now that my anonymity is gone. (Some of that is because I'm starting to think maybe this is worth trying to salvage into something, given the reaction; last night I was just thinking of tossing this on the junk heap.) So if I'm going to be perfectly honest, here are what I see as the strengths and weaknesses of this story.

Strengths:
- Nice prose
- Nice tone

Weaknesses:
- Lack of character building (all told, nothing shown)
- Weak world-building (Sec.4 explanation feels unmoored to the rest of the story)
- Lack of conflict and plot
- Loose theme (I have an emotion I was shooting for, but I couldn't put clear theme into words here)

That's just on the top level. I'd also quibble with the balance of foreshadowing—I didn't really start in on the "humanity in retreat" thing until Sec.3, largely because I didn't settle on it until at least Sec.2. I agree with >>Ferd Threstle's two major points about the use of Pripyat and the choice to describe the final photo as compositionally perfect. There are a few other issues readers have brought up as well, though I think I'll break a couple of these out for a longer discussion.

>>TitaniumDragon mentions that the first scene with the (not directly named) Moeraki boulders doesn't tie into the overall story very well, which I consider an excellent catch. I know it's kind of lame, but this is the first serious writing I've accomplished in about six months, and that first scene was me trying to ease myself into something. I took the old "write what you know" dictum and minimally modified an actual event from my life. You can see the photo I took here—I think it's probably about the best shot I've ever managed. (I dropped or changed a few surface details, like the fact that it was actually a fairly lame digital camera that I used, and that I sat in the car for about half an hour playing PSP games, waiting for sunrise to get closer—hey, what is artistic license for?) Anyway, point here being that I strongly agree with TD's call about Sec.1 not really tying into the other sections except tonally. That's a thing that needs fixing. I should be foreshadowing a lot more stuff in this section, and I'll need to think about how to do so.

I also thought >>Southpaw caught a couple good points, but the ones that hit home for me largely made it into my self-review above. (I actually disagree with the Nikon thing; I like having the proper noun to change up the wordspace a little and provide a bit of extra concretization.) I definitely agree that Sec.1 and Sec.3 aren't really pulling their weight narratively—but then again, the overall absence of narrative is one of the larger problems in this story, to me, when you compare it to one of this round's really excellent entries like "The Precession of the (Goddamn) Equinoxes" or "The Name Upon his Forehead". It also seems like a few readers thought the photographer was using the same roll of film the whole time. I think I need to do more to make sure I don't accidentally leave that impression. He talks about having many rolls of film in Sec.1, but it's a throwaway comment with a lot less narrative importance than the Sec.3 stuff that sticks in people's heads.

>>Baal Bunny's comment was one of those, "Dammit, Mike, I hate you but I love you" things. I'd decided on the overall structure for the story fairly early: three photographic sections, broken up with two introspective ones. I got into the middle of writing the second introspective one, didn't particularly like how it was going, and in particular found that I really didn't like the mixing between the two ideas there. But I'd already basically written the section, and I didn't have a lot of good ideas for what else to do with the space or how to make the story there work better, so I wrote a couple extra sentences in the section to try to paper over some of the problems and left it as is. I'm glad I got called on it, though; it's easy to assume your quick-fixes work when you've already looked at a spot and messed with it. It's good to hear you still didn't really fix the larger issue underneath.

And of course I agree with everything >>horizon says, because horizon is a frickin' genius. I tried to drop some timing information in the Kolmanskuppe section, about how many years it had been since Namibian diamond mining was a major industry with German settlers. Why on earth I thought this would be sufficient information for anybody to infer a timeline is completely beyond me—it's not like I wasn't on Wikipedia when I wrote it, trying to pin that stuff down. Who here is going to know enough about diamond mining in southern Africa to pin down a timeframe based on that? The choice to make the Nikon a hand-me-down from the photographer's father was supposed to get at the first timing issue raised, though I obviously could have made that more textual. Given that it's got some good characterization value in it, not making it more textual was kind of dumb. The Pripyat thing, too, if you've *cough* watched a few documentaries on it *cough* you might know that there are already some families living out in the exclusion zone. It's a lot of free land, and a lot of it isn't actually that bad. So, at least to me, there's really no suggestion with Pripyat that we'd be moving thousands of years into the future until parts of the radiation really started dying down. I was also trying for this subtle idea that the photographer was going there to view the more radioactive parts of the plant, knowing he'd die but wanting to experience this sort of holy grail of human places without humanity. I'd wanted to tie in thoughts about the film being useless because he knew that it'd be ruined as soon as he went inside the plant, too. But things really didn't come together here, because I also wanted to confront him with people and make him change his mind, and it just didn't seem to make a lot of sense to have him expositing about all the bad things that'll happen and then completely changing what does happen.

Anyway, the Pripyat section is just a mess in a lot of ways. There are elements of it I like, but those are mostly the character, plot, and theme elements that I finally started using a bit there after skipping over them in the first four sections. I'll probably pick a new setting and redo that entirely. Given that this is supposed to be a future setting, I think it's really kind of dumb to not be walking the photographer through one or more places that tell stories about that unknown future we haven't seen.

This guy's probably going to take a lot of work, but at least I think y'all have convinced me that it's not a complete lost cause.

I'm using horizon's HORSE rating system, which you can learn more about here.

11 – The Last Burdens of Childhood, Cut Loose

Hook is passable. I'm not bored, but I'm only a little engaged. I guess there's going to be a ghost in this story. I'm not a fan of the doubled-up timing sentences, though—it feels unnecessarily confusing to be discussing two different timeframes back-to-back in the story's hook, the most important place to make sure your reader's attention is totally committed to your story.

I like the quick pace on the prose, not wasting a whole lot of time to get through descriptive details. The scene-setting in the house carries a bit of nice character like the cigarette burns (though I could do with a bit more, and maybe some multisensory work, which should be pretty easy in a smoker's home).

The "last connection to my youth severed" thing mentally registers to me as a direct contradiction with the bit about Alex in the hook. Maybe it'll turn out to not be contradictory, but it sure feels that way on a first read.

Okay, this is getting entertaining in a hurry now. You've got your fable setup—"whatever you do, don't do X"—so it's pretty obvious where this is going. That never stops these stories from building some good tension, though. This is what half of the horror genre is founded on, at least for films. I'm in. Let's see where this goes.

About halfway through, I'm finding some missing-word and doubled-phrase errors. Worth being aware of, but a good editing pass should pick these up. Also, as much as I enjoy the protagonist's characterization, I feel like her voice goes a little wonky every once in a while. "I have nothing against you," isn't a thing I think I'd ever say to someone in real life. The protagonist's narration occasionally gets a bit technical (e.g. gibbous moon), and that feels a little off for what I want her voice to be based on the rest of the piece, though this may just be me—there are good reasons you're establishing why technical language can fit her. Still, perhaps worth knowing that it occasionally feels a little off to me.

Seeing a bunch more of that voicing stuff with simple word choices. I think the disconnect may be coming from how literary she sounds, even while she's narrating being a pretty impulsive (if smart) teenager. It may also be a product of the transition from the short, choppy lists of the introductory section into the longer prose of the later section, which really does feel different.

The protagonist's mother's use of "We" in the scene where Tom's death is announced is a little strange. Who does that "We" refer to? It doesn't seem to get explained, but it really feels like it needs to be, since the mother specifically talks about how "We" know about the ghost, and the lore, and everything else. If it's completely not a secret, why does it have that aura of mystery when the protagonist first learns about it. If it some kind of closely held information, the mother is making a fairly major statement about who holds that information that remains unresolved.

Hmm. Well, it seems making "I have nothing against you" stand out a bit is intentional.

Well, that went where I was expecting from pretty early on. I don't really get why, though. It seems like the implications point at either Alex being responsible for the protagonist's brother's death (which seems pretty damn sketchy, unless I missed something major) or the protagonist just kind of being a murderous psychopath. Obviously something happened that the protagonist blamed Alex for, but I really don't feel like I've got a clear handle on what.

The sad thing is that I don't think the story has done enough work to make me really care, either. There's definitely some good stuff here, and I expect this story is going to look a lot better once it's been spruced up a bit. Plenty of foreshadowing, a bit of tension in a few spots, and it tries to weave everything together into a nice concerted whole. It mostly does a good job with that, though I'm not sure that it really has enough words for so many characters to breathe. I get the impression that you're expecting us to care about the protagonist, her brother, Tom, Ella, and Alex—but all the characters except the protagonist have very limited roles in the story, and hardly extend outside those roles. There's a sense in which this serves the story's tone: this story always feels spare and empty, like the mother's house, like the beach at night, like the protagonist's solitary-seeming life. But it also nerfs some of the tension, since we never have a whole lot of reason to care about anyone here.

Feel like I'm rambling a bit at this point. This was generally a fun read, with a lot of nice bits of tone and setting. Unfortunately, there's nothing especially new or unexpected, and the prose and construction generally feel loose. Normally I'd probably advise just tightening this up until you've got your core story without any distractions, but the distractions are giving you some of the tone, which is one of the highlights here. So (I know this is kind of nebulous advice) instead I'd probably advise fleshing out some of the details and characters here while trying to retain the spare tone, and then going through and trying to prune back everything that's not directly giving you tone, theme, character, setting, or plot.

HORSE: ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉ (Yes, I left them balanced.)
TIER: Almost There

7 – The Precession of the Goddamn Equinoxes

I absolutely adore this opening. Okay, Author, you have my attention.

I know I've seen some incidental commenting on the use of "Goddamn" in this story, and my initial reaction was to disagree on its overuse because that first barrage did a huge amount to establish Mauli's character and it had me laughing. Moving on, though, I do think you're running into diminishing returns with this—and it doesn't help that some of the later "Goddamn"s really don't feel as natural to the flow of the dialogue or narrative. To wit, "Goddamn" can be a very effective adjective, but it usually sucks as an adverb a verb modifier (it actually looks like it can work okay as an adjective modifier, c.f. "Goddamn sticky").

I'm not finding much to talk about on the character, plot, or setting fronts because I'm just thoroughly enjoying this story. The insect blocking in particular is just kind of wonderful. Teb's four-armed sanctimonious pose is so easy to visualize.

"Mummy! Daddy! There's butterflies! May I please go in a little ways and look for more?"

This may just be me, but I feel like this line is a little off. That last sentence makes it sound like Alice is mature enough to be very good with rules and action planning (e.g. she's going to have to wander into the woods to look for more butterflies); but to me, that feels at odds with the wonder she seems to be feeling towards the butterflies themselves. Maybe I just had a depressingly rational childhood, but I don't usually find that passion couples well with good planning in kids.

Through to the end, and I really don't know what to say on this one. It's easily one of the best stories in the competition, almost certainly going in my top three, and I'm going to have to think hard about where to put it. The characters are rich and interesting, there's a whole range of conflicts going on in the background, the story is very goal-directed, it's funny, the world it creates is fun to live in... No, screw it, this is my new Number One. Lose or move a couple of Mauli's signature words (especially the ones modifying verbs), and this'll be all but Goddamn perfect.

HORSE: Decline to rate
TIER: Top Contender

I'm using horizon's HORSE rating system, which you can learn more about here.

24 – Landscape Photography

There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of plot hook here, but the prose is really catching me. Author, you're doing a very good job painting a scene with words. Which, I suppose, is maybe appropriate here, given the title. Some nice use of simile and multisensory imagery, and a lot of little concrete details.

Despite what you may have heard, I'm not a misanthrope.

Not a fan of this line. The sudden second-person inclusion really throws me out of the text, probably for the first time. I know there's this whole thing about first-person perspective meaning the perspective character is actually narrating to the reader, but this just feels jarring to me. Otherwise, though, I'm kind of digging the protagonist's voice. He might be a little full of himself, but I feel like he (or she, I guess) is delivering a pretty clear perspective. Word choice is a bit... do I want to call it purple? I'm not sure. It's detailed, but in a way that seems to kind of be carrying that voicing. The Willem Kalf thing I especially like. I had to look him up, but the line is delivered in a way that feels natural to the narrator.

Aaagh! Some of this language, I have to admit, I'm just loving. "The summer sun is a blazing ingot laid across the anvil of the sky"? Come on. I want to write metaphors like that. I like the Calvino reference, too; though I think the overall imagery is starting to drop off. That first section had some serious multi-sensory depth. This third section has a lot of visual detail and some auditory detail, but there's a lot more you could be doing here, author. The photographer is in the African desert, in the daytime, during summer. I'm guessing it's probably hot there? I feel like you're missing some easy lay-ups here.

Humanity was in retreat long before the fertility collapse.

Well, that's a change of pace. This line doesn't take me completely by surprise. All of the last three sections have been about places without people. Still, this is so abrupt that it takes me aback, when juxtaposed with the style this story is employing elsewhere. Really, this whole section is a little weird. I hate using show vs. tell language, but this is very telly. The other introspective section had a clearer character voice behind it. There are some nice details here, but it still feels very expository without doing a whole lot of multitasking with the text. Get some character building in here, to go along with the world-building. Or... well, this story doesn't really seem to be going in for plot. I'm not sure how to feel about that. I'm not feeling like there's a great lack here in not having a major plot focus. It's a bit like "To Make a Choice"—this story isn't going for a traditional narrative; it just wants to take an idea and put it up on the screen.

I'm getting the sense I must have missed a subtle time-skip in here. I'm guessing the author intended to use the word "old" to convey that in the last section, but it's too sparse for me to really buy what it's selling, especially since we didn't know the photographer's age in the earlier scenes. The photographer is pretty clear about being out of film now, despite thinking he/she had a lot more available in that first scene, so clearly there's been a lot going on between those points.

I like the change-up at the end, with other people finally in the mix. I also like the photographer's re-evaluation at the end. I think there are some points in here, though, where you're probably being overly subtle to the story's detriment. The prose is really nice throughout, and this is another breezy read, but I want some more depth to the photographer's character—especially if the plot (such as it is) turns on the photographer finally having a late-in-life change of heart to stop being so avoidant where other people are concerned. That's an attitude that's stated pretty clearly, but then never really challenged until it's directly overthrown by the story.

The prose is a strong point here and I don't think you need to worry about that (other than the aforementioned suggestion that you might be able to get some more bang out of adding a bit more mult-sensory work after the first section). The plot... there's really not much of one, and I think I'm okay with that. This is more theme-focused, and although the theme is sort of open-ended, I think you're doing a good job resolving that toward the end. The places I'd work on this, then, are in that section on the fertility collapse which just kind of sticks out relative to the rest of this story, in building more solid characterization for the photographer (you were doing a really good job with this early on, I thought), and in maybe easing back on the subtlety in a few places to make the timeline you're looking at clearer, and possibly foreshadow the whole "humanity in retreat" thing earlier. It barely touches that first section at all, and even by the time you hit it full-on in the fourth section, it comes as a bit of a surprise, at least for me.

All that said, though, I definitely enjoyed this and I'm inclined to give it a Solid on the strength of what you've got going right. This could definitely be improved, but even though it's not my usual thing, I enjoyed it quite a bit the way it is right now.

HORSE: ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉
TIER: Solid

A couple points for >>Monokeras:

"Wrought iron" isn't the author using fancy language, it's an actual thing. You might recognize it from, ohh, the Eiffel Tower.


"Pinkie promise" actually predates My Little Pony, and is traditionally a promise made between two people while linking their hands by their pinkie fingers (the last finger on the hand). Traditionally, it doesn't involve any cupcakes.

---

On the fight scene, I'd sort of decided where my problems with this story were before that point, but I'll echo what a lot of other readers seem to be saying. My problem is less that it was janky, as >>Icenrose described it (though I think there's some fair criticism there). It's more that the fight is always a fait accompli without a whole lot of back and forth.

I could give some detailed discussion on this, but I think I'm just going to take the easy way out and link to one of my old Fimfiction blog posts where I talked about writing fight scenes. I know, it's lazy and a little lame to go posting links to my Fimfic account on someone else's story, but I'm not going to be able to do a better job talking about them here than I did there, so I feel like this is really the optimal way to go.

I'm using horizon's HORSE rating system, which you can learn more about here.

23 – The Necromancer's Wife

Somewhat nitpicky, but I'd smosh the first and second paragraphs together. That first sentence is hanging out there like it's supposed to be important, but it's really not very attention-catching. Peter has a dead wife, and he's visiting her at the graveyard. Yay, mundanity! "Maybe it was a necromancer thing." is an awesome hook, and everything you write before that point should be working toward making that line pop as much as possible, because that's where you're going to catch your reader. It already pops plenty, but the fact that it looks like you've got a dynamic line at the start detracts a bit, especially since that first line is in no way dynamic.

That "Brains" line is fantastic.

The writing here is just consistently excellent. I'm... I don't know how far in, I just got to "the old stew-and-chew". Only one real editorial comment thus far: it feels like there's a lot of disconnect between Peter and Sabriel's romance, and the zombifier story. You've made a point of connecting them up through the argument between Peter and Sabriel, and that's good—but I think this would work better if there were a more natural connection than Peter thinking the authorities are unprepared, and so he should probably go help. There's really no tie-in to motivate his need to do this thing, so the stakes are pretty low. The zombie plague is threatening a lot of characters we don't care about, but the two we do care about seem like they can pretty much resolve the plot to our satisfaction by just walking away.

That's continuing to be the big problem I see in this story. The dialogue scene with Peter, Sabriel, and Cynthia is all fun, but it also feels pretty undirected. It's three enjoyable characters standing around talking, but they don't seem to be doing enough plot advancement, character development, or world-building to really justify the scene they're in. I know that's a high bar to set for a Writeoff story, but when you're up against the sheer, calculated density of something like "The Name Upon His Forehead", it's important.

"Haha!" Peter laughed.

This feels like a really weird bit of unnecessary double-use. Aside from the fact that it gives me pretty bad Shy Ronnie flashbacks.

"…hmm." Cynthia frowned, considering. Peter maintained his smile. He had sworn on his power, which wasn't an oath for a mage to take lightly; if broken, his power would shatter, and the backlash would destroy his body.

This is awfully intrusive, explaining the dialogue through narration. I'm not a huge fan of this.

"Aleister Crowley." Peter's smile grew. "The evilest man in the world. Granddaddy of necromancy. You didn't seriously think he was dead, did you?"

This is getting a laugh from me. I'm not sure how intentional that is. I just find it farcical, a bit like watching a fairly serious Las Vegas heist movie and having Elvis be the revealed as the villain at the end.

Through to the end now. It's a fun read, with nice prose and some cool details. I was a bit weirded out by the poetry, but then seeing that Crowley used much more character-appropriate incantations made me enjoy the worldbuilding you were doing there quite a bit. I think I might actually push that reveal back a bit and make it less subtextual: Cynthia could show some surprise at necromancers using poetic incantations and give Peter a chance to exposit a bit. (I mention this largely because I think some readers might completely miss the juxtaposition you're doing with Crowley; I don't know how obvious the difference is unless you have a little background in the history of magic.) My problems here haven't changed—and if anything have probably gotten a little worse with the Crowley thing. But there's no denying that I really enjoyed reading this story, and even though it's not going to get that close to the top of my slate, that's less a comment on this story's quality and more a comment on the quality of the field as a whole. This is absolutely a piece of work you should feel good about, Author, even if it could use some revision.

HORSE: ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉
TIER: Solid

>>horizon
Oh. Um. Yes. Horizon raises a good point. That whole thing at the end with the king makes a lot less sense if you don't already know the story of Joan of Arc. (Bax, the idea is that there was a fake king in the room and she ignores him and goes for the real king hanging out on the side, looking like any old courtier. This gets screwed up a little by the fact that in the story, it's John who orders her brought in and she hears his voice, though, so the "king" she's supposed to be tricked by is never really mentioned or clearly alluded to here.)

Also I actually think the magnet thing is fine. The author makes a point of mentioning that the compass is period-appropriate technology, but when Joan doesn't know what it is, he has to come up with an explanation that doesn't out him too far. John totally understands magnetics, and I had no difficulty reading his response to Joan as a way of trying to not blow his cover.

Otherwise, unsurprisingly, general agreement.

16 – Hollow Man

I don't feel like the first paragraph is carrying a whole lot of information content, and I'm worried that the biggest piece of content ("raise morale", implying Mattello is a military man) may be unintentional. It's not clear to me how much the weak first paragraph matters, though, because you're doing a pretty good job dropping information slowly across the first few. I usually like a faster hook, just to get me immersed in the story, but this is probably one of the better slow hooks I've read in a writeoff. It's like a persistent pull rather than a yank.

And then there's that fourth paragraph. Hoo-boy, does that change things up. Okay, now I'm finally a bit curious.

He asked him what it was, and after an awkward hesitation, his caretaker had left without telling him.

Want to flag this because it's particularly bad. You just introduced a character on a pronoun that matches your perspective character's gender. I literally cannot imagine a good reason for this.

The description of the visitor is... distinctly unhelpful to me. It starts out by comparing him to a class of animals that's sufficiently broad to not give much information on appearance, and then proceeds through metaphor to hint at morphological changes and limb additions. Based on the description given, this seems like it could be anything from a six-legged centaur with a bull head to a humanized pony with a weird skirt of legs, to a goat-spider with a human-looking thorax. (After spending far too much time looking at this paragraph, I'm thinking that this is supposed to be like a centaur but with the animal's original head—though I still have no clue whether the original animal was a horse, an ox, a water buffalo, or one of the weirder draft animals like a goat, an elephant, or a reindeer.)

There are a few cliches floating around in here, and a few pieces of what feel like odd written construction to me. I don't know how much to bother talking about these things, because it seems like some of it can be written off as an authorial voice that I don't particularly like at times. I guess my advice would be to sit down with this at some point and read it out loud to yourself, and see if there are any places where you feel like the language sounds a bit unnatural. Those places definitely exist for me, but if they genuinely don't bother you on a close read, author, then it's probably fair to just ignore my discomfort.

I will say, though, that there are definitely some spots where you keep your language loose and unconcretized. These are places where I think you'd uniformly improve the story by doing some further concretization. Let me give an example:

"Very well." Frøy took a deep breath. "You've been dead for a long time, and so has the Dragonbond Empire. Something called the Descension killed the First Race and warped the face of the world. I wish we knew how long it ago that was, but it was long enough for some new species to take over. Some of them, like mine, think pretty much the same as you, or close enough. Others don't. They're dangerous, and they're in the majority.

This looks awfully concrete, with a lot of proper nouns thrown in—but there's no detail on the proper nouns, and "some new species", "think pretty much the same as you", and "[t]hey" are very nebulous things for Frøy to be talking about. This passage winds up feeling like an infodump, except without much info. One of the big reasons for that is that it doesn't feel like it's carrying much information about who Frøy is. He probably doesn't think in terms of "some new species", he thinks in terms of his race and the major races his race interacts with for good or ill. He might well mention the Dragonbond Empire since that's contextually expected to be a shared point of information for him and Mattello here, but "there was this thing we call the Descension" is unhelpful from both his perspective and Mattello's, since the name is going to mean nothing to Mattello and it dodges giving any real details on what happened. You want to be working inside the framework of "What is Frøy thinking about, and how will he try to communicate it to this outsider who lacks much of his cultural context?" Even though it looks like you've got some solid concretization here with "Dragonbond Empire", "Descension", and "First Race", one of those terms isn't really carrying any in-character information. (The first is carrying some about Mattello and the third is carrying some about Frøy, though. Not as much as I'd like, but some.)

The switch from Frøy to Rhos really bothers me, because it's so fourth-wall-breaking. It's not the only place you're making some odd intrusive choices—another example is when Mattello almost seems to act as author-hope-for-audience-surrogate and thinks that the conversation is interesting now that proper nouns are getting name-dropped—but it's the one that bothers me most. It raises a major question to me of where the perspective is sitting. It can't be sitting with Mattello, because we're explicitly seeing Frøy's internal reaction to the change in name choice. But it also can't be siting with Frøy, because he's not going to change how he thinks of himself based on how a third party is naming him (not unless Frøy is considerably more alien and interesting than he appears, which you're not doing any groundwork to suggest). So is this an omniscient perspective? But then, as with Frøy, why is a character suddenly changing his name in response to another character's attitude. It's all very irregular.

Frøy's reactions once Mattello starts telling his story seem pretty bizarre. The "Oh no" paragraph in particular makes me expect that Frøy has just realized some critical piece of information about Mattello. I mean, it doesn't seem like he can really be shocked that Mattello was suicidal, because it would be stupid if he didn't know Mattello is currently suicidal—so the implication is that he's shocked about some heretofore unknown fact about the eggs that I'm desperate to hear about. Except I don't, and it doesn't seem like Frøy really figured anything out. His "fall on his ass" bit seems similarly over-dramatic. Mattello seems to have a right to some strong reactions as this scene moves forward, but Frøy not so much.

Done now. In the end, there's a lot I like here. The setting and backstory are both fun, and much of the prose is smooth and engaging (with the caveats above). I genuinely find both Frøy and Mattello interesting, and I wouldn't mind knowing more about them. There's a bit of resolution by the end, though I think there's never quite enough conflict here to make the payoff all that worthwhile—this is mostly a setting story. The perspective and prose issues that exist, though, bother me a fair amount, and I feel like you're papering over a lot of actual backstory with the Proper Noun Trick. And while I enjoy Frøy and Mattello, I feel like they could both use some more serious characterization. They're interesting frames to build off of, but as with the backstory I want more actual substance and fewer shadows and ghosts. The overall effect is oddly on-point with the title: I like this story, but what's here seems uncannily hollow.

HORSE: Decline to rate (primarily because the Proper Noun Trick sort of breaks the meaning of the Originality scale—originality is both the strong point and the weak point in much of this story).
TIER: Flawed but Fun

I'm using horizon's HORSE rating system, which you can learn more about here.

17 – Encounter at dusk

There's a lot of good stuff going on in the opening here, but it could use a heavy tightening pass. You hook my interest in where the story is headed, but I'm actually going to do something a little weird here and really dig into the first paragraph, because based on content, I suspect the best advice I can give you here is going to be some precise prose targetting. So here's that paragraph:

I try to bury the metal splinters strewn all over the ground around me under a layer of dead leaves. This might be superfluous, though, as I run no great risk: even if a hunter or a stray farmer found them, they wouldn’t catch their attention for more than a few seconds. To the naked eye, they are just polished shards of some grey metal. Only the microscope could reveal them for what they really are.

First sentence: you're adding a lot of extra words, mostly in prepositional phrases, that don't add any meaning. Generally clunky, though the real flag for me here is that you don't fully concretize your hypothetical, which mostly wastes space (a small case could be made that having both hunter and farmer in ther adds setting info, but I think you can do better adding more novel setting info elsewhere). Second sentence also has a they/their pair where those two pronouns refer to different things. General tightening in sentences three and four. Also, drop the low-information cliche in the end of sentence four. If I were going to pare this down without making major changes, it'd probably look something like:

I try to bury the metal splinters strewn over the ground beneath a layer of dead leaves. This might be unnecessary, though, as I run no great risk: even if a hunter found them, they wouldn't catch his attention for more than a few seconds. To the naked eye, they are just polished shards of grey metal. Only a microscope could reveal their true nature.

If this were me, I'd go even farther and do some rewording, and I might end up with:

I bury the metal splinters under a layer of dead leaves. Perhaps I am being too cautious. Even if a hunter found them, to the naked eye they are no more than polished shards of grey metal. Only a microscope could reveal their true nature.

That's a 40% reduction in word count, and the only pieces of information you've lost are that there were many splinters scattered around the perspective character, and that farmers are a common part of this setting. I think it's likely that both of these are acceptable casualties. Anyway, let's drop the workshopping and get back to the story.

There's some occasional usage oddity here (which makes me wonder if I might have hit Monokeras's story finally, after all his exhuberant protestations). Author, if the issues here are stemming from EFL, I'd get a native speaker's eyes on this for some proofreading. If the issues are simply a lack of editing time, I'd go with the read-aloud trick to try catching them. Either way, they seem pretty minor—but consistent enough to be worth a quick mention.

It's a story about Joan of Arc? Okay, thinking Monokeras even more strongly now...

I hope I'm not being led astray by my authorial suspicions, but really a lot of the problems I'm flagging with this story are very small things like word choices that carry weird information, like using "giggle" for the perspective character, which sounds very strange in the context of the way this character has been acting in the story. A laugh would be perfectly reasonable, a giggle carries some very different character information for me. Anyway, I'm going to skip out of text-edit mode now, read some more, and move on to larger issues.

I'm enjoying the pace and the scene selection here. The story moves at a pretty good clip, and there's usually something fun to read ever couple hundred words. I think the area I'm seeing the most trouble is in the characterization, primarily through the dialogue. You've got two very different characters here, but both speak in a way that feels modern and colloquial, and belies their fundamental differences. I feel like you've definitely begun working on giving the characters' dialogue content that makes sense for their situation and personalities (e.g. the way they both approach theological matters), but it's important to get the tone of their dialogue to match as well. Is one more serious than the other? Is one able to make better logical arguments than the other? Is one more prone to angry outbursts, or to trying for humor? Thinking about the tone adopted by your characters in dialogue will help make them more real and better separated to the reader. (Also, you've got a lot of colloquial phrases running around, both in and out of dialogue. Clichés are usually best avoided in writing, and I personally feel like your writing would be improved pretty much every time you're using one if you'd avoided the cliché and gone for something more direct.)

I was wondering exactly where this was heading. I do think I like that as a stopping point.

Okay, upsides here: The pacing of the story keeps me moving along well, and I never felt like it really dragged. There are a number of sections where I actually quite enjoyed the prose. I'm pretty happy with the scene selection inasmuch as there's usually something interesting happening, even if it's just a boar fight.

Downsides: I definitely would have liked better foreshadowing of the reveal in the second-to-last section. I know there was a little, about what would happen if England won this war, but it turns out that this is as much of a key thread in the story as all the Joan of Arc stuff, and so it definitely feels a little undercooked. Word choice issues, as mentioned. Characterization issues, as mentioned. We get to spend a good amount of time with John and Joan, but I don't feel like they ever have to confront issues that really make us come to understand them well as characters. Joan has a crisis of faith at one point, which is probably the right type of thing to do, but which felt a little overblown to me since it seemed to mostly come out of the blue. And finally, overall plot structure. There's really never a clear conflict that needs resolving here. John is trying to get Joan to Chinon, and they interact along the way, but there's never a clear indication that Joan's destiny at Chinon might be threatened in any way, through her inability to get there, or through the wrong events unfolding once she did. The only real spot where it seems like there might be conflict around preventing this is when John kills his counterpart, and this happens suddenly and without much foreshadowing, so there isn't really any tension or release tied to this since it's all so sudden.

My advice for future stories would be to work on building a stronger framework in terms of plot and character. Do some hard-core outlining before you get into the writing—even if it's for the write-off. A shorter story with a strong outline on the plot/character front is going to serve you better in the long run. The English issues are troublesome, but they're also the sorts of things you should be able to iron out through your own editing, or with the help of some editors/friends who have an easier time with some of that stuff than you may. At this point I'd say the larger, structural issues are where you should be concentrating most of your attention.

HORSE: ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉
TIER: Flawed but Fun

>>Monokeras
Sorry, I did. I figured it'd be a long review. I didn't want to waste too much of my review space on chat logs...

22 – Don't You Cry For Me

Author, I want you to be aware that this is what went down on Writeoff Chat just prior to me reading your story:

BRADEL – Well, let's see what happens if I add another to my slate. Somebody may be about to get happy.
BRADEL – "Don't You Cry for Me". I guess you're off the hook, Mono.
DUBS REWATCHER – @Brad Let's see if you think it's as good as everyone else is saying
OBLOMOV – inb4 Bradel destroys the story

With that in mind, let's see what happens when Bradel Tries to Take Down Everyone's Favorite Story. (No, really, I'll try to enjoy it just like I try to enjoy everything else, I promise.)

So, the hook. Missing word at the end of sentence two. I laughed at the idea of fresh air and less crime constituting an adventure. I feel like your intro could be a little smoother prose-wise, but I'm honestly pretty happy with it. It's giving me a lot of information and it's getting me curious enough about the characters to want to move forward. You can't ask for a whole lot more than that.

Yeah, this is a very solid start. Paragraph three is especially excellent. There's another missing word in paragraph four, though.

From the hiding-in-her-room bit, I was assuming May was the younger of the two, but based on the arrival dynamic, she's starting to look like the older. No real suggestions on this, but I think it's worth noting.

I may be a little neurotic, but I'm really disturbed that nobody cleaned up May's stir fry that was leaking on the floor.

The characterization on Claire is generally good, but every once in a while it goes a little wonky for me. For example, the backpack of stuffed animals and the stuffed animals on the bed are great to me, and I feel like the overall characterization here is of a little adult that's not fully equipped to deal with the world (which is generally a characterization I like on kids). Why do I mention the stuffed animals? Because when you move somewhere, you bring your life necessities, whatever those may be. Books, a television, a computer, cooking tools, etc. The two stuffed animals bits make me feel like Claire's stuffed animals are serving as something of her critical life tools, which is an attitude I can see a kid unconsciously having in her situation. (The situation itself is great, in that it creates a lot of conflict and tension immediately, and leaves me wanting to see what develops. I don't think you're necessarily doing a lot of heavy lifting to motivate my attention, but I'm frankly fine with that. If you've got a nice trick like a story premise that can do that heavy lifting for you, take advantage of it.)

Anyway, I was saying the characterization occasionally gets wonky for me. When Claire needs to explain to May that they live next to a graveyard, she definitely comes off as the more intellectually mature of the two (especially given my lack of clarity on ages through that section). Claire takes ripping her skirt very calmly, like it's just another thing to be taken in stride—which is in keeping with her characterization, but still feels kind of weird for a nine-year-old under considerable stress, to me. And she pays enough attention to the grunge friends' conversations to report back to the reader on Kurt Cobain, which just doesn't seem like the sort of thing a nine-year-old would care about enough to report—it feels like a clear fourth-wall break. Certain metaphors also feel strange coming from a nine-year-old. Metaphor is a hard tool to lose as a writer, but I just don't know how much I can buy a nine-year-old being able to consistently think with that level of abstraction.

This is another really minor thing, but every time you use the verb flew/fly to describe Claire's motions, it throws me a little. Obviously it's supposed to feel abrupt, but it's so at odds with the discursive narrative around it that it just feels off to me. (If I were in the business of suggesting, which I totally am, I'd suggest playing around with sentence lengths so the piece has more variable pacing based on the emotions you're trying to evoke in specific scenes and passages. If it's reflective, sure, use long and slow sentences. But when something's caught Claire's attention or gotten her stress level up (or is about to), maybe try moving to shorter and more direct sentences.)

Timing: I got really thrown off by the timeline of all this for a moment. I think the culprit is "It had been four months" (do a search on it), which in hindsight is supposed to refer to how long it's been since the fire, but I read as how long it's been since the move. When there's a later comment on Valentine's Day, I'd felt like the calendar had gone all screwy.

Well guys, that's the best I can do—some nitpicking on fairly limited or advanced stuff. This is just a plain old good, solid story. It's got an actual arc to it, including a climax where it pays off emotional tension it really does earn. I teared up for a fraction of a second at the end—even my cold, scarred, editorially excessive heart can be touched. It's just good.

This is recapitulating, but there are only two real weaknesses I see here: Claire coming off as a little too adult with no clear rationale (like a frame story where she's older and recounting this), and the generally monotone sentence pacing that leaves some of the more urgent moments a little flat. But those are some pretty high-level issues to me. This probably won't go to the top of my ballot, simply because I'm not that enamored with it as a story, for all its good execution. I think I'd like to see it shooting for a higher bar, like my current ballot leader. But this sort of solidity and execution definitely deserves some reward in my opinion. Good job, Author.

HORSE: Decline to rate
TIER: Top Contender (which I'm apparently giving out like candy this round)

>>Solitair
Well, that's why it's getting that "Misaimed" from me. I can tell that there's some solid quality here, but this is really not my style. I'm still going back and forth about whether to abstain on it or not. Part of me feels like I ought to (and I'm frankly not going to feel bad if it makes the finals), but another part of me feels like it's unfair to the stories I genuinely like better and appreciate more to move them down-ballot just so I can not penalize a story I didn't like a whole lot.

It's tough. I know it sucks getting a reader/voter who's just not interested in what you were going for, and knowing that's likely to weigh down your scores. But boring me is one of the cardinal sins a story can commit in my mind, and this one definitely bored me. It's... ugh. I definitely feel bad for the author, because it seems pretty obvious he/she has got some very good skills and just got unlucky getting me as a voter.

Reading through the responses of other commenters, I find myself disagreeing a little bit with many of them—though honestly I think I'm wrong and they're right. The bits of repetition (like the constant appearance of her mother) didn't bother me a whole lot, though I think that's because the writing was doing so much work pulling me through the story. I liked a lot of the family expectations background, but I think >>Baal Bunny is right that you could probably pull back from it a bit as the story goes on and use different context to flesh out the world and story better, instead of going to the same well so often.

Similarly, >>Ferd Threstle's comments on over the top reactions didn't really hit me, but again I suspect this may be a product of the writing pulling me through so well. I think you managed to write a story that's pretty awesomely targeted at my weak spot (clean, transparent prose), to the point where you really got me to skip past things I mightn't have liked. That's pretty awesome, honestly—to be able to do that for part of your audience. But I think it's probably worth listening to folks who don't seem to have gotten quite so engaged so you can see where you're missing them as well, and try to turn this into a thing that's going to give everyone the sort of ride it gave me.

I'm using horizon's HORSE rating system, which you can learn more about here.

12 – Tiny Planets

I like the start. As of the exclamation point, though, I have to say I'm really hoping for some Terry Pratchett type fun here.

This moves at a really good clip through the first couple pages. Breezy text, wonderful to read.

Sorry, Author, but I'm not going to have a whole lot of comments on this one. That's what you get for being entertaining. That said, I feel like the bit about fire as advanced magic could use a little foreshadowing. You're having an event happen and then you're telling us after the fact why it's important instead of building that in on the front end so that we can recognize when Sophie creates fire that this is a really big deal. The moment should have a lot of emotional impact, the way you've got it set up—but you're having to backfill that impact with a post-hoc explanation, which bleeds the feeling dry.

Thoroughly enjoyable throughout—though part of me feels like the quality of the writing is almost a crutch here, because I'm really not sure what to think about the conflict in this story. Sophie feels beaten down by the weight of expectations, so she abandons her exam and... discovers that she's always had the power to make her dreams come true? I remember people mentioning in the comments on "Just Do It" that the conflict seemed to resolve without any real struggle or learning of lessons. I feel like that's perhaps even truer here than there. Honestly, this is a wonderful read and I really enjoyed it. But I can't get over feeling like it's sort of thematically hollow once you scratch past the surface.

HORSE: ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉▉
TIER: Almost There

1 – The Name Upon His Forehead

I like almost everything about this first section, with two exceptions: "Yaron lies" and "Adam". "Lies" is a sore thumb saidism to me, especially in the first line of this piece. I don't normally have that big a problem with saidisms, but this one feels awkward to me. Personally, I think the whole thing would read smoother with one additional sentence added very early in. Yes, I know, I'm being super nitpicky—but I've read the intro here twice, and that bit at the end of the first line throws me each time. With "Adam", on the other hand, I'm not sure what to say. It's fairly clear that Adam and Inspector Loewe are the same person, but this is the fifth name you've given in three lines of text, and figuring out that this is a redirect can take a bit of work. On the other hand, I think Emmett's choice to think of him that way carries some good characterization, so I can't just write this off as a bad choice. It's a good choice, that I think is working poorly. Anyway, enough on the hook; let's read this thing.

...okay, this is going downhill for similar reasons to what I mentioned above. I think you've got too much information density here, much of it coded in the form of names. You've just added proper nouns Aaliyah, Chadash Haifa, Ophek, and Zohar, and it turns out Adam is female. "Hilla Loewe" has serious potential to be the straw that broke the camel's back for me here—in no small part because Emmett's choice to refer to Adam / the Inspector / Hilla Loewe as "Adam" over the other options is already starting to work against the strong characterization bent on honesty-to-the-point-of-avoiding-any-imperfect-phrasing. If Emmett accepts calling her Adam over the others, it suggests that "the Inspector" and "Hilla Loewe" are both substantially less critical markers of who this person is—and given that you're already confusing the issue kind of tremendously, it's a big deal that we've got no information at all on the most critical piece of this puzzle (i.e. how Adam is the best name).

That said, except for the "lies" saidism and the naming issue, at the first hard break this is nearly pitch-perfect to me. I'm all the more disappointed about feeling like the name thing is needlessly overcomplicated, given that the characterization and setting feel so wonderful going in. I think my best suggestion would be to actually go back and slow down the opening with a few more sentences to establish the pieces you're talking about, especially prior to the soft break. It's not often I want more sentences in a story, but this is one case where I think they'd help.

Second section, again, I just feel like you're setting the learning curve too high. I have a hard time breaking down what's going on in these transcripts until the very end. Maybe this story / writing style just isn't to my taste. I know Iain M. Banks used to throw out stuff that was basically garbled nonsense you'd have to come back to later, after he gave you the pieces to decypher the text—and I do love Iain M. Banks. Keeping this tight a character focus is worthy of a lot of praise, and I'm enjoying it. But at the same time, because of how alien Emet is (or is it Emmett?), a lot of this comes off as frustratingly unclear on the first read. I want to say "frustratingly and unnecessarily unclear"—but that's the real crux, isn't it? I'm not entirely sure that it's unnecessary. But it damn well is frustrating.

Her belly is heavy, and the airlanes of Chadash Haifa are full with Adam's evening pilgrimage from temple to house.

That sentence is carrying a chunk of information I really wish you'd hinted at before now. I get it now. I'm still kind of annoyed it took this long for you to make it clear.

Adam's brownstone homes — filled with the crackling hum of Barak's Word

Eeyup, this story would be freaking beautiful if I understood more Hebrew. This I got, and it's wonderful. It's pretty easy to infer much of the rest now.

Dammit, my objection to using "lie" as a saidism just got quashed. Nope. That needs to stay at the beginning.

Welp, whoever wrote this one—Gardez, I'm looking at you—I think you've probably earned my vote for best story in this Writeoff. It's going to take a lot to knock this off the top. I stand by my earlier frustrations, but this is just bloody fantastic.

HORSE: Decline to rate
TIER: Top Contender

>>The_Letter_J
Didn't >>TitaniumDragon do that once? Or possibly more than once? :duck:

(I figure it's pretty fair for TD, though, 'cause I think he usually does think it's the best thing he's ever read and everybody else is just wrong—so it's not like he's actually trying to be manipulative.)

>>The_Letter_J

Or if you really have no morals, you could give your own story a glowing review to try to influence other people's opinions of it. But in addition to their questionable ethicality, a review like these could easily backfire, and will probably only work once anyway.

Oh really? I pretty much do this every writeoff. :derpytongue:

More seriously, though, I find reviewing your own story to be... an interesting experience. It definitely does let you highlight things you thought were important that other people were missing, or push back against what you think are basic misunderstandings. At the same time, I'm mostly in the Death of the Author camp, so I tend to feel like if you want/need to do either of these things, your story is failing on a fundamental level anyway (though of course it's perfectly reasonable to have one or two readers who completely miss the point—but if everyone's missing the point, that's probably not an issue with your readers).

There are also a lot of little considerations you have to worry about on doing a self-review well, I think. I know there are some very specific differences between my self-reviews and my normal reviews, and I'm not going to mention what they are because I think y'all might well be able to identify me based on the tells I've noticed, even though I've been working to cover them up. And like J said, I live between I and K being too positive on your own story can work out badly sometimes. I think one of the more common tells is when someone nitpicks a minor point that doesn't really speak much to the overall quality of the story—though this happens in conventional reviews quite a bit as well.

And there's the question of when you do it. I've wanted to drop the first review on one of my stories for a while, but that can be particularly dangerous since I often don't have a good sense for what the reaction to my story is going to be. Jumping in and joining the consensus later is much easier, because you can blend in with the crowd and share insights from other reviewers as if they were your own. On the other hand, for someone like me who makes a point of avoiding reviews on stories he hasn't read until after he's gone through the story[1], one easy tell to develop is to respond to other people's comments in your review of your own story while not doing it in your reviews of anything else.

tl;dr reviewing your own story is an art.

-----------------------

[1] Speaking of, Roger, I just want to say that I adore the story-linked comment setup. It's really nice to be able to finish a story, add my review, and then immediately read what other people thought and respond to their comments if I feel like it. This is one of my favorite features of the new site structure you've got going on. Thank you!

On second thought, after listening to smart people—like... well... >>Not_A_Hat, >>Baal Bunny, >>Cold in Gardez, >>Southpaw, and >>Scramblers and Shadows—it seems I've kind of overlooked the fact that the only serious conflict in this story is very manufactured and artificial.

It's still going to place decently on my ballot, I think, just based on me enjoying most of the writing. But I can't help thinking these guys have a pretty important point. (And feeling like I need to be a better reader, that I had such an easy time missing it when I read the story myself. I really need to get back into my writing game...)