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>>GroaningGreyAgony
See, if I could actually draw I could think of all sorts of things to draw that a "a sheep". Could be a mass of puffballs that look like a sheep, a wolf in a sheep skin, a mass of people blindly following another's doctrine. The restriction of "a sheep" is very board.
But sadly I can't draw. I have a tablet and intended to learn but like so many of my other endeavors I'm too lazy to see it through... .
See, if I could actually draw I could think of all sorts of things to draw that a "a sheep". Could be a mass of puffballs that look like a sheep, a wolf in a sheep skin, a mass of people blindly following another's doctrine. The restriction of "a sheep" is very board.
But sadly I can't draw. I have a tablet and intended to learn but like so many of my other endeavors I'm too lazy to see it through... .
>>GroaningGreyAgony
As Mister Rosewater is fond of saying "restrictions breed creativity". All you need for this one is a hurricane of some sort but just how does the eye of one "blink"?
As Mister Rosewater is fond of saying "restrictions breed creativity". All you need for this one is a hurricane of some sort but just how does the eye of one "blink"?
Neat little piece. Love the rain effects on the blades and the puddle on the ground.
Once again I forgot to come back and check on feedback. I loose track of the days far too easily.
>>Griseus
I wrote this whole thing in one sitting and once I hit 700 words (which I thought was the cut off point, not 750) I found that I had started all but two of the paragraphs with first-person I so I rewrote things a bit to have them all start that way for consistency sake and not having two paragraphs just stick out for being different when they were not overly important. If this was expended out into a full story I'd avoid this sort of thing.
>>Pascoite
Not going to lie, the ending is a joke on "forest fire fighters" in that this guy is a "forest water fighter" and both jobs hate "bucket duty".
As for his "goal" he needs to fill the revivor under the stone he was fighting on with water, to a level where the stone would activate and "call" the rest of the water into it. The rain becomes what are basically water elementals that if not contained would go out and flood the world. Because the storm was so short he didn't get enough "kills" and now has to go out an hunt the escaped elementals and use lots of buckets to bring the water back to the ritual stone and get the rest because he can't hunt them all. (And yes they do have water set aside for cases like this but there are problems with that because magic.)
As for tense shifts, well, I like to say that my brain isn't moored in traditional linear time so I have trouble keeping my tenses straight. I've yet to find a good tool to help with that part of writing. On the upside I tend to understand temporal mechanics very well and the majority of time travel stories are very easy for me to understand.
>>Heavy_Mole
I'm not really sure how to respond here because I'm not sure what your problem is.
You talk about the opposition, which as I said above are water elementals formed by the rain, but then talk about the main character?
Also as I said above I thought the word count was 700 and not 750. I sort of forgot about the Write Off until six or seven hours before it closed while I was trying to go to sleep so I wasn't firing on all brain power at the time. Had I realized I had another fifty words I'd have padded out the end a bit more to give some more context on a "bucket hunt" but it was always supposed to end on the "joke" of being a "forest water fighter" as opposed to a "forest fire fighter".
This was also my prompt so I felt I had to make something for it but my original idea for the prompt felt like it needed to be longer form so I just ran through various "blot out lights" ides, hit upon "storm and rain" and went from there.
>>Griseus
I wrote this whole thing in one sitting and once I hit 700 words (which I thought was the cut off point, not 750) I found that I had started all but two of the paragraphs with first-person I so I rewrote things a bit to have them all start that way for consistency sake and not having two paragraphs just stick out for being different when they were not overly important. If this was expended out into a full story I'd avoid this sort of thing.
>>Pascoite
Not going to lie, the ending is a joke on "forest fire fighters" in that this guy is a "forest water fighter" and both jobs hate "bucket duty".
As for his "goal" he needs to fill the revivor under the stone he was fighting on with water, to a level where the stone would activate and "call" the rest of the water into it. The rain becomes what are basically water elementals that if not contained would go out and flood the world. Because the storm was so short he didn't get enough "kills" and now has to go out an hunt the escaped elementals and use lots of buckets to bring the water back to the ritual stone and get the rest because he can't hunt them all. (And yes they do have water set aside for cases like this but there are problems with that because magic.)
As for tense shifts, well, I like to say that my brain isn't moored in traditional linear time so I have trouble keeping my tenses straight. I've yet to find a good tool to help with that part of writing. On the upside I tend to understand temporal mechanics very well and the majority of time travel stories are very easy for me to understand.
>>Heavy_Mole
I'm not really sure how to respond here because I'm not sure what your problem is.
I don't quite get a sense of his/her opposition. They seem calm, virtuosic, and self-assured in their defeat of evil.
You talk about the opposition, which as I said above are water elementals formed by the rain, but then talk about the main character?
Also as I said above I thought the word count was 700 and not 750. I sort of forgot about the Write Off until six or seven hours before it closed while I was trying to go to sleep so I wasn't firing on all brain power at the time. Had I realized I had another fifty words I'd have padded out the end a bit more to give some more context on a "bucket hunt" but it was always supposed to end on the "joke" of being a "forest water fighter" as opposed to a "forest fire fighter".
This was also my prompt so I felt I had to make something for it but my original idea for the prompt felt like it needed to be longer form so I just ran through various "blot out lights" ides, hit upon "storm and rain" and went from there.
Damn, missed prompt submission again. I just forgot to check when I got home from work and did other things and didn't think of it until now.
At least I didn't miss voting this time.
At least I didn't miss voting this time.
>>Crafty
If it had gone through I was going to do either one about an A.I. going through their learning loops and becoming self aware or a hang gliding competition.
If it had gone through I was going to do either one about an A.I. going through their learning loops and becoming self aware or a hang gliding competition.
I was just thinking last night while laying in bed trying to go to sleep if this one was this weekend or next, so I'm once again one day short of submitting a prompt.
>>GaPJaxie
>>Pascoite
>>No_Raisin
>>Griseus
So now that the authors have been revealed I can reply to comments made.
First though; thank you all for reading and commenting on my story.
Some backstory to the story; I lose track of when prompts are going up, I've often missed prompt submission by a few hours or a day. This time I missed it by nearly the whole writing time! I checked on "when are prompt submissions due" and found that there was a little more than three hours left to submit the story and not the prompt!
At first I wasn't going to do anything, the prompt itself hadn't initially caught my attention. So I went off to go do some other things but them I had An Idea (tm). Said Idea was the title I picked, which is a somewhat common phrase for use in tabletop RPG circles. From there my first idea was to go "the character of a person", as in a sort of "weighing of the feather" type of scene, where a recently dead man had to tell an Anubis like figure about why they deserved to go to the good afterlife and not the bad one. I didn't really go anywhere with that and instead just latched onto the "talk with the Reaper" bit of it and from there settled on doing a "pure dialogue" fic. It wasn't until I started writing that I decided on doing just one half of the conversation. Oh, and I only had a bit less than two hours to write it all.
On my phone.
So, yeah.
I actually finished the "first draft" with about forty-five minutes left to spare and then did a few read throughs for major flaws and autocorrect errors, which of course I didn't get them all (again, on my phone). Then I started to trim down my word count and changed some phrases as I got a handle on the Reaper's voice (not sure why it uses the contractions it does and not others but it 'felt right'). My first daft had been 520 words, and I really wanted to cut it down to 400 but this was a case of "If I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter" and when there was less than ten minutes left I said "Good enough", submitted it and went to bed. So, sorry Griseus, the word count being a number associated with closure was completely happenstance.
Now, for replies to comments.
GaPJaxie:
One of the "points" of the story was that the readers don't get to hear any of it, and that to this Reaper it is just another life story it has been told by a soul not willing to pass on just yet. The curt reply was meant to imply a certain level of apathy on the Reaper's part while also not being overly blunt. The departed is too caught up in their own thoughts, now being ready to move on, to really notice just how apathetic the Reaper was top hearing their life story.
I also felt a needed something of a direct tie in with the title so this part was put in. It also gave me a way of having the departed 'resolve' their death and be ready to move on.
Pascoite, No_Raisin: I did not intend for this to be a second person story, more third person limited. The Reaper is not talking to the reader, there is an actual in-story person they are talking with that gives actually in-story responses it is just that the readers do not get to 'hear' what this other character is saying. I'm not sure how I could have made that clearer without detracting from the story though, as I tend to work in either first person limited or third person omniscient and never in second person anything.
One idea I had after reading your two comments was having a "partial transcript" line at the start but that would imply all sorts of things I hadn't wanted to imply in the first place, mainly there being some sort of oversight bureaucracy on Death.
I'm not sure how to really take into account Pascoite's advice since it was all hinged on the fact the story was intended to be second person narrative when it was not.
But Death of the Author and all... .
No_Raisin:
The "Sadly you currently have no proper words in your language for what I am." line is referring to species not occupation. I was saying here that, as of this person's death, the human language can't describe what a Reaper is. They are literally Indescribable because the language lacks the words needed. This implies a lot of things about what the Reaper looks like.
>>Pascoite
>>No_Raisin
>>Griseus
So now that the authors have been revealed I can reply to comments made.
First though; thank you all for reading and commenting on my story.
Some backstory to the story; I lose track of when prompts are going up, I've often missed prompt submission by a few hours or a day. This time I missed it by nearly the whole writing time! I checked on "when are prompt submissions due" and found that there was a little more than three hours left to submit the story and not the prompt!
At first I wasn't going to do anything, the prompt itself hadn't initially caught my attention. So I went off to go do some other things but them I had An Idea (tm). Said Idea was the title I picked, which is a somewhat common phrase for use in tabletop RPG circles. From there my first idea was to go "the character of a person", as in a sort of "weighing of the feather" type of scene, where a recently dead man had to tell an Anubis like figure about why they deserved to go to the good afterlife and not the bad one. I didn't really go anywhere with that and instead just latched onto the "talk with the Reaper" bit of it and from there settled on doing a "pure dialogue" fic. It wasn't until I started writing that I decided on doing just one half of the conversation. Oh, and I only had a bit less than two hours to write it all.
On my phone.
So, yeah.
I actually finished the "first draft" with about forty-five minutes left to spare and then did a few read throughs for major flaws and autocorrect errors, which of course I didn't get them all (again, on my phone). Then I started to trim down my word count and changed some phrases as I got a handle on the Reaper's voice (not sure why it uses the contractions it does and not others but it 'felt right'). My first daft had been 520 words, and I really wanted to cut it down to 400 but this was a case of "If I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter" and when there was less than ten minutes left I said "Good enough", submitted it and went to bed. So, sorry Griseus, the word count being a number associated with closure was completely happenstance.
Now, for replies to comments.
GaPJaxie:
That's such a curt reply for someone telling the story of their life. What happens in-between these two lines could have been an entire fic inof itself.
One of the "points" of the story was that the readers don't get to hear any of it, and that to this Reaper it is just another life story it has been told by a soul not willing to pass on just yet. The curt reply was meant to imply a certain level of apathy on the Reaper's part while also not being overly blunt. The departed is too caught up in their own thoughts, now being ready to move on, to really notice just how apathetic the Reaper was top hearing their life story.
I also felt a needed something of a direct tie in with the title so this part was put in. It also gave me a way of having the departed 'resolve' their death and be ready to move on.
Pascoite, No_Raisin: I did not intend for this to be a second person story, more third person limited. The Reaper is not talking to the reader, there is an actual in-story person they are talking with that gives actually in-story responses it is just that the readers do not get to 'hear' what this other character is saying. I'm not sure how I could have made that clearer without detracting from the story though, as I tend to work in either first person limited or third person omniscient and never in second person anything.
One idea I had after reading your two comments was having a "partial transcript" line at the start but that would imply all sorts of things I hadn't wanted to imply in the first place, mainly there being some sort of oversight bureaucracy on Death.
I'm not sure how to really take into account Pascoite's advice since it was all hinged on the fact the story was intended to be second person narrative when it was not.
But Death of the Author and all... .
No_Raisin:
Something I find strange but also curious is that the speaker claims that the word to describe its occupation has yet to be created, but it's clearly meant to be like an angel or the Grim Reaper.
The "Sadly you currently have no proper words in your language for what I am." line is referring to species not occupation. I was saying here that, as of this person's death, the human language can't describe what a Reaper is. They are literally Indescribable because the language lacks the words needed. This implies a lot of things about what the Reaper looks like.
*Sighs* Missed prompt submission again darn it. I'm always just a little bit off... .
Geeze, prompts closed fast. I really wanted to put in a specific prompt for this one too... .
>>devas
At least since the one that become "Moving Targets", as that was the one that made me notice the change.
At least since the one that become "Moving Targets", as that was the one that made me notice the change.
I actually kinda hope a prompt not my own wins now that I've seen it and it has given me a terrible, horrible, wonderful idea...
And once again I'm a day late for prompt submissions and only barely in time to vote...
Let's see what promt wins, I have some vague ideas for a lot of these this time.
Let's see what promt wins, I have some vague ideas for a lot of these this time.
Thought I'd try my hand at someone else's gimmick now that prompts are closed...
Through Fire, My City Was Gone, An Isolated Incident
Awkward..., We Don't Talk Anymore, It Will Claim Us All, That Feeling You Get When You've Forgotten Something Important
An Idle Stroll, Beating Dead Horses at What They Have Done, A Paper Crown
Two Ways Out, A Way Out, No Way Out, A Long Pause, Running on Fumes
Third Side of the Coin, Cyberbully, Not Even a Little Bit
Through Fire, My City Was Gone, An Isolated Incident
Awkward..., We Don't Talk Anymore, It Will Claim Us All, That Feeling You Get When You've Forgotten Something Important
An Idle Stroll, Beating Dead Horses at What They Have Done, A Paper Crown
Two Ways Out, A Way Out, No Way Out, A Long Pause, Running on Fumes
Third Side of the Coin, Cyberbully, Not Even a Little Bit
I like how not even the person who submitted it voted for "A Bird in the Kush"...
And i'm seeing "We Come in Peace" and "In Name Only" as tied. How was the tie breaker chosen?
Now I need my brain to come up with something to use this prompt for.
And i'm seeing "We Come in Peace" and "In Name Only" as tied. How was the tie breaker chosen?
Now I need my brain to come up with something to use this prompt for.
Ooooooh, I get it. Couldn't really tell what was going on from the small thumb nail but seeing the full size image makes it obvious. Very nicely done.
But what does it mean? Is something going to be thrown up into the air?
But what does it mean? Is something going to be thrown up into the air?
>>Baal Bunny
That prompt was mine. I don't tend to re-submit prompts so I've not problem coming forward on it. I thought of the normal "circus" variant but that's overdone and then because of the way my mind works the word "circus" matched to "citrus" when I thought of ways to re-use an old phrase.
I was planing on doing a story about main-land doctors looking into a new "wounder food" coming from "the island people" that was proving to be viable prevention/cure of a deadly illness they hadn't been able to treat before.
The reveal at the end was going to be that they were treating scurvy with lemons.
----
Sadly I'm going to have pass this round, some things have come up that is going to suck away all of my time in the next few weeks.
That prompt was mine. I don't tend to re-submit prompts so I've not problem coming forward on it. I thought of the normal "circus" variant but that's overdone and then because of the way my mind works the word "circus" matched to "citrus" when I thought of ways to re-use an old phrase.
I was planing on doing a story about main-land doctors looking into a new "wounder food" coming from "the island people" that was proving to be viable prevention/cure of a deadly illness they hadn't been able to treat before.
The reveal at the end was going to be that they were treating scurvy with lemons.
----
Sadly I'm going to have pass this round, some things have come up that is going to suck away all of my time in the next few weeks.
So I really should get around to making full reviews of all of these stories but I just wanted to pass along my reading of the end of this one to >>Pascoite.
The boy is the person that Tiff stole the fishing rod from early in the story to try and catch herself some food and he is the real Hero of Light of prophesy. He Missed The Call because he was being all cuddly and cute with a girl. Had he not skipped out on fishing that day to go and help this other girl with something he would have been the one to find the sword instead of Tiff.
The bones are the real Necromancer Queen that Magpie got her extra finger from. "Happy" to be burred and forgotten and just left alone.
The boy is the person that Tiff stole the fishing rod from early in the story to try and catch herself some food and he is the real Hero of Light of prophesy. He Missed The Call because he was being all cuddly and cute with a girl. Had he not skipped out on fishing that day to go and help this other girl with something he would have been the one to find the sword instead of Tiff.
The bones are the real Necromancer Queen that Magpie got her extra finger from. "Happy" to be burred and forgotten and just left alone.
Paging WIP