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I will not be able to write for this one as I am in the middle of moving, but I will undertake to draw something in the art phase for everyone who submits a story.
You may very well wind up with some decent cover art!
(Hasty doodles are somewhat more likely.)
You may very well wind up with some decent cover art!
(Hasty doodles are somewhat more likely.)
This was neat. I liked how the problem with the "getting into a conflict with somebody else who's mining" was not what I thought it would be. Clever. Thanks for writing.
Yes, let's get this out of the way: an 8th grader could write a more technical fit story. I be lucky to get a C, if this was school assignment. D minus all around instead.
This whole story had too much padding of worthless points and not enough character development or world building. The Sunsets seem different enough. Soft Mist is just kinda there, not even coming across as a bimbo or anything. Confused Pegasus? Background garbage. World building? It's an alternate Equestria in which how would a newbie understand? Didn't go much into details. That would have been better to add, instead of some of the dialog banter that didn't add to much to who these characters were.
Lack of conflict with the plot hurts this. Could have passed this off as a weird Slice of Life, but I can't even claim that as a crutch because of how boring this is. Resolution and the "joke" at the end was the worst part. Could rewrite this with 1000 less words I bet and drop the mirror backstory to have something leaner and to the point. Maybe next time I won't use life experiences from an MMO about bot miners?
This whole story had too much padding of worthless points and not enough character development or world building. The Sunsets seem different enough. Soft Mist is just kinda there, not even coming across as a bimbo or anything. Confused Pegasus? Background garbage. World building? It's an alternate Equestria in which how would a newbie understand? Didn't go much into details. That would have been better to add, instead of some of the dialog banter that didn't add to much to who these characters were.
Lack of conflict with the plot hurts this. Could have passed this off as a weird Slice of Life, but I can't even claim that as a crutch because of how boring this is. Resolution and the "joke" at the end was the worst part. Could rewrite this with 1000 less words I bet and drop the mirror backstory to have something leaner and to the point. Maybe next time I won't use life experiences from an MMO about bot miners?
Maybe next time I won't use life experiences from an MMO about bot miners?
Well, or at flesh out the mechanics a bit with a view to a more realist feeling. A game can get away with treating "to mine" as a single, uniform action that's just something you do, but with a story one expects some more details of what is actually happening. Is digging involved? Or are the crystals simply sticking out of the ground and it's a matter of picking them, like carrots? The latter seems to match better with how it can apparently be seen plainly from at least some distance away whether there are crystals to "mine" or not. The way it's described here, I suspect that "gather" would have been a better verb than "mine".
I don't think Confused Pegasus is a garbage as you say -- he's important to the resolution of the scene, and the way he suddenly backs down nervously helps set up the twist. However, he could easily be given a real name if he had simply replied "No, my name is not Soft Mist, it's So-And-So".
The real problem here seems to be that there were too many ideas to develop within the time you had. It shouldn't be 1000 words shorter, it should be longer. E.g., take some time to either allow Pony Sunset to be appropriately surprised at the interdimensional visitor, or alternatively establish more firmly that this is a world where running into one's dimensional alternates is something that tends to happen on Tuesdays.
Technical advice: I feel that each time we hit a stretch of dialogue -- especially the ones early in the piece -- you forget to tell the story and instead just produce an audio transcript of who said what in which order. If there's a viewpoint character, they must be thinking something throughout the conversation; tell us what that is. Or when that doesn't work, give the characters some stage directions, expressions to wear, directions to look in, little things to do while they're talking. Even if those actions don't openly move the story forward, it can make the scene flow a lot smoother if just every two or three changes of speaker there's a sentence with a description of something that isn't words. (Bonus points if you can pick actions that somehow illuminate the scene, but that's not strictly necessary, so long as it stops it being talking heads).
The last line confuses me. Suddenly there's an in-universe narrator? Is that supposed to be a character from the story telling it? The only obvious candidate would be Confused Pegasus, but that doesn't make a lot of sense.
>>Troposphere
I'll make a note to have them or future characters "animate more" around the dialog parts.
I'll make a note to have them or future characters "animate more" around the dialog parts.