I am both amused and bemused by the fact that one of the submitted prompts is literally just [Memes].

There's a lot of interesting ideas here though. :O Can't wait to see what I'll be panicking over in less than twenty hours, haha

And it's time for a retrospective!

>>GroaningGreyAgony
>>Jordanis
>>Moosetasm
>>SPark
>>Fenton
>>HorseVoice
>>Xepher
>>AndrewRogue
>>FanOfMostEverything
>>scifipony
>>Posh

To start with, thank you all for the comments and critiques! I'll do my best to keep them in mind going forwards. Overall I'm pleasantly surprised that I was able to get as far as I did in my first Writeoff, but I'm also a little disappointed that I allowed myself to make some rather large missteps. Onwards and upwards, I suppose!

For starters, I didn't notice exactly how many -ly adjectives I was using while I was writing, but boy are there a lot. I've never really considered how that can bog down a reading, so thanks to everybody who pointed that out. The prompt relation in my idea was that "the twilight zone" was literally an "area of twilight," and I wanted to make this "area" to be something worth remembering for the characters. The points about the perspective change and pronoun confusion are greatly appreciated too, since I didn't even realize how off those were.

My biggest issue, and I think this was the most damaging of my mistakes, was that I really messed up the tone and meaning of Celestia's speech. The tone seems to have been interpreted as cute and fluffy, which was definitely part of what I wanted, but I had intended the last few paragraphs to slide into melancholy. I had actually wanted Celestia's speech to feel a bit off for Twilight's situation because I wanted the speech to read like it was being spoken not fully as an encouragement to Twilight, but also as a promise for Celestia to right her failures to Luna through Twilight(especially the last line of the speech). I think I didn't emphasize this enough for it to actually be understandable though. My only hints ended up being how Celestia initially reacts to Twilight's description of how she felt in her nightmare, Celestia staring only at the moon while she spoke, and Celestia's trembling at the end. I also initially had Twilight actually start questioning the logic of Celestia's speech, but I cut that out at some point when trimming down. The purpose of the last few lines was originally to have Twilight realize that Celestia seemed upset about something too, and Twilight's hugging Celestia tighter was Twilight's way of trying to comfort Celestia despite the situation being intended as the reverse. I don't know what I was thinking in trimming this part out because I think it would have helped a lot with getting to the meaning I intended.

Overall I think this ended up being a decent story, it just wasn't the story I thought it was in my head. I'll have to work more on what to trim and what not to trim since I think that was a big part of my problem. It seems like it'll be a while before the minific rounds come back again, so hopefully next time I'll have a bit of a better eye for it.

This weekend is actually pretty free for me in the first time in a while. I've been thinking of trying to write a basic story idea for every prompt both as a challenge and because I'm rather bored, so I'll be hoping to post those in here after all the voting is done. I'm seeing a lot of prompts that could be neat to write about, so here's hoping we don't get Ot! I'm excited for the result!

So I am viewing these on mobile, and I usually keep my phone on the lowest brightness to save battery. When I first looked at this image, I literally only saw a black square. I thought it was a joke until TD posted about seeing a corpse in the image. Even at max brightness I don't see the corpse very well at all. I understand the idea of utilizing darkness in the image to relay the feeling of the deep ocean, but you also gotta make sure your viewers can see your piece.

>>Posh
I always knew Applejack was secretly a unicorn. :pinkiegasp:

I'm with most of the other comments here, in that I think this is a great idea that doesn't have enough room to shine. I feel bad saying that since I've said that on a few stories now and it should probably be expected since this is the minific round, but it's true. It feels like the start to a bigger idea instead of a story in itself. That said, I really hope you continue this, because this does feel like a pretty good start.

>>billymorph
Ohh, that could be really interesting. Knowing the prompt could definitely bias meaning for those who are just writing off of the drawings. I don't know if a customisable block to the prompt is feasible, but it seems like a cool idea to me.

>>Fenton
>>wYvern
>>CoffeeMinion
>>Kritten
>>Monokeras
>>Posh
>>Novel_Idea
>>Rao
>>horizon

So I was the author to this... Thing. To get the elephant in the room out of the way, no the fuck-ups were not deliberate, unfortunately. I have not really used multiple text commands at once before, and wasn't aware that the order had to be specific or else it would break. On top of that, I'm going to get a stupid question out of the way and ask how you can view your story as another person would see it before submitting. I didn't know that was a thing you could do. :facehoof:

The next big problem with this is the "epilogue," which I just completely deleted in the currently ongoing rewrite. The first one and a half thousand words of this story were written about eight hours before the cutoff at 8pm while I was on a plane, after I had spent the rest of the writing time really trying to write a serious idea and utterly failing. At about 3am I saw horizon's post about submitting anyways, and it inspired me to finish the last bit of what I could and get it out there anyways. For some reason, my brain linked nonsense in Ponyville to Discord and thought "oh I should explain that." Unfortunately it was 3am and I was not fully awake enough to not be stupid, so I wrote it in. I wasn't able to finish the idea and that hurts this story a lot, but I'll go into that a little later.

Lastly, my complete overuse of adverbs. Is it sad that I trimmed them down a lot while editing and still left enough to be a problem? In my speech I have the same problem of inserting adverbs or qualifiers where they are not quite needed. I developed that habit originally as a way to soften my speech and make declarative statements less confrontational. Over time, it's seeped into me just adding -ly words willy-nilly to my speech and writing. I'm working on fixing that, and I think next time I write I'll do so without any such adverbs at all. When I edit it, if it feels like an adverb is actually needed, I can add it there. Hopefully that'll help me fix this.

I think I am going to continue writing this story to the original ending I had thought of. This story started off with enough planned plot points that I probably would've hit 5~6k words with it. Due to the fact that I got this idea so late, I wasn't able to write everything I wanted to. horizon got it right, I had planned for there to be three confrontations and for the second one to have gone very differently. The second confrontation was supposed to introduce the idea that DarkStorm was not actually a creature of Nightmare, but of another force called Nonsense. The third scene would have been Bon-Bon, uh, I mean Doughnut Steel and Heart Harp, venturing into the heart of Nonsense and putting a stop to it once and for all. Now that I have the time, I'm going to finish it like I meant to in the beginning.

Thank you to everybody who pointed out things to fix, or who said what they liked. While it was flawed pretty badly, I'm glad this story could provide some fun! I'll try to get Doughnut Steel up on fimfic as soon as I stop re-writing and nitpicking it. So in about three years.

>>Ranmilia
>>TitaniumDragon
>>Fenton
>>Monokeras
>>MrExtra
>>Cold in Gardez
>>georg
>>AndrewRogue
>>Not_A_Hat

Me, as this round began: I really hope people like this idea, it took me a while to think up and it's not the best executed but hopefully the idea will carry enough to... wait, what the heck is a "mist ending?"

So after executing a vigorous googling maneuver I discovered that the idea that I had thought up had not only already been done, but it had already been done by Steven King. Oy. :facehoof: Somehow I've actually gotten to this point in my life without having heard of The Mist, and legitimately wrote this thinking it was a semi-original twist on the idea of mercy-shooting. I suppose it's true what they say about nothing being original. :applejackunsure:

In the end, though, I was pleasantly surprised that this made it to finals. I hadn't really expected it to get far, mostly because I as an author wasn't satisfied with it. This story felt both lacking and wanting to me, and even after multiple editing passes I wasn't at all sure what needed to be added or taken away for it to work. After a lot of deliberation, I submitted this story anyways with the hope that people more experienced than I would review it and help me to learn what this story needed for it to actually work. And that's exactly what happened! So I'd like to thank everybody who commented talking about things I should change or things that they liked or anything at all, you've helped me out a lot. :twilightsmile:

I've always felt that my strength was in comedy, mostly dealing with more absurd situations, but I can't just coast in that safe zone forever. ...Well, I suppose I can, but I don't want to. I joined this website so that I could challenge myself and grow as an author, and while it's painful to submit something I'm not happy with, I'm not yet good enough to know the best strategies for writing different genres. But maybe one day I can be as good as horizon in Gardez and explosions Voice Hopefully next time I'll be able to submit a story that is more deserving of a finalist spot.

Looks like the prompts have finally been invaded by the Sneeple (snail people). Every man/woman/thing for themselves! :raritydespair:

This was a fun, odd little dialogue. Outside of that though, it isn't very clearly explained. I think a story expanding further on this idea would be interesting, like an alternate universe where the sirens were actually active predators instead of secretive. I also think it would be nice to know exactly how she pulled off taking over a city, and why, and all that. Given the word limit though, you couldn't exactly have expanded on all that. For what it is, it's an enjoyable little read.