Early on, I figured the protagonist's muse was either dead or meant to represent some unattainable abstract concept of a significant other. This didn't make the road to the end unbearable, though. Accompanying the main character through his/her life and inner workings of their mind and how everything in their life is secondary to "her" was truly enjoyable, and I was eager to see how that would resolve.

...and then it didn't.

Yeah, main character accepts that Sarah is dead and will never reply to the poems, but it all happens so fast I feel it's a tad anticlimatic. One moment we're reading about how the memories of Sarah are coming back, and two paragraphs later, the story is over.

Eh...

She assured me that whoever I was writing for

Yeah... The protagonist's mom never told the therapist about Sarah? Because her death must have happened very closely to the moment the writing started, someone must have noticed.

I liked the protagonist, and the way his/hers view of life is portrayed, but overall, the story didn't hit me as hard as it could have.

I appreciate the stylistically minimalist scene structure combined with quick, brief scene cuts in order to briskly pace the narrative while keeping things just vague enough to warrant further interest. It is certainly an interesting way to present a story, and sans some repetition of certain effects throughout the narrative, the story itself kept me engage. Unfortunately, I think this story's strength in its narration came back around and became a weakness when it came time for the story to resolve.

The ending scene takes the style of the rest of the narrative, but is unable to transform it into from what it is ultimately a rather maudlin scene into something more substantial. The subtlety and implied depth of the story largely fail to pay off in what I would consider to be a largely "Hollywood" esque ending, and the style of the story as a whole seems to clash with the ending content as a whole. This story has a very removed, almost clinical narration style and tone that does not befit this sort of unabashed display of emotion. Perhaps dialing back the scene, leaving it more to small character interactions and implications, which would leave the reasoning behind the main character's angst in the dark until the last couple lines, would be more fitting. Just some light tinkering with the scene to omit some rather ham-fisted phrases and dialogue from the narration would be enough to elevate this scene (ex. "It was... just so normal... or the dialogue about being a robot and seeing love).

I thought a lot of Avatar the Last Airbender's "Tales of Bah Sing Sae" episode when considering this story, and that's a good thing to be compared to, but I feel the emotional heart of your story needs to be more developed for the ending reveal.

Verdict: interesting style, content decent, tone and resolution a bit too inconsistent for my take.

So. The World I Once Called Home. What's going on here that made me stop and write the whole digression of >>horizon out?

It's this: virtually all of my frustrations with this story can be summed up in that mistake of mixing up Idea and Story.

We have here two perfectly cromulent ideas. A space miner strikes a jackpot and uses it to cash out in hopes of returning to a home that no longer exists. A man with a dark past mentally confronts the mistakes that haunt him. But it feels to me like this is treating idea as story, and plowing through to its ideas as directly as possible rather than route-finding.

The line that keeps itching at the back of my brain every time I think about this is:

Depending on the amount of Grig, even split three ways, it would still mean more wealth than most independent miners such as themselves usually gained in a year’s work.

These folks have just hit the jackpot — a few minutes' worth of work for over a year's salary. If I'm reading the story right, it looks like they all quit their jobs and cashed out. And yet the only dialogue we ever get about the magnitude of their discovery is a cynical joke about how they'll fly by it and hit the next one, and a "Well, it was nice knowing you" as they part ways?

I'm not sure what my exact reaction would be if I stumbled across a winning $100,000 lottery ticket in the street, but my reaction certainly wouldn't be nothing. Even if I didn't laugh or weep or dance around in glee, I'd certainly call my friends, post a photo to Twitter with a string of "OMG"s, and spend the next day or two obsessed with planning my windfall. Point is, for such a personally and professionally momentous event, the entire crew just shrugging the find off is deeply weird. The more so since the second scene apparently establishes that they know Ray's plans, and yet none of them congratulates him or tries to talk him out of his decision, or talks about how they're going to spend their share, or anything that turns them into characters. To me, this reads as a giant failure of that idea->story crafting process, a huge missed opportunity. The idea was to hit the core idea of Ray's trip home, so that's what got put to the page.

(And I totally get that, in a Writeoff context! I know there's a number of stories this round that were written in a single frenzied pass late at night, and given those limitations, this is nothing to be ashamed of. It's got an actual character arc (Ray makes the decision to follow through on his trip home despite Earth being destroyed by nuclear war), and clearly the first lines were written with the last lines in mind so this isn't a total seat-of-pants thing. Grammar and spelling are clean. This isn't a bad-writer thing, it's a failure-of-time thing. But the solution to structural problems is to examine your approach.)

I'm not sure how much detail I should go into here — because it's definitely not just the reaction to the discovery, I'm just using that as a prominent example — and I don't know how useful vs. demoralizing it would be to list the misses here. I'm trying to help, not pile on. But I'll point out the other big thing in hopes it gets your brain primed about what sort of questions to ask when plotting:

• What conflict did you want this story to be about? What is the biggest conflict that the story resolves? Because you've got two different ideas here that got merged into a single story — the miners' jackpot, and Ray's coping with his past — and right now those have separate conflicts that don't meaningfully connect. As soon as Ray corrects his mistake and gets to the asteroid, the miners and the discovery are just sort of there, and vanish once Ray gets his money; as far as your A plot is concerned, you might as well have just had him cash in an inheritance or something. If this is about Ray's past, then every scene you write should drive that conflict or raise the stakes on that conflict. And you've got a very good way to do so — after all, you've established that his crewmates saved his life, took him in, and know and care about his trip home! Don't they have opinions of their own about it? The tragedy here is that Ray's chasing a doomed dream of a dead lover … what would make that conflict hurt more? What if, for example, Ursula (or Herbert) are in love with him, and Ray has to choose between that and going back to Earth?

So, basically … I spent a lot of words here not because this story is a trainwreck, but because I want to offer some food for thought on what sort of tools can take technically proficient but narratively shallow writing like this to the next level. And talking about how to write is a LOT more complex than talking about how it could have been done differently. I'm not sure how well this does the former, and I'm definitely not trying to pick on you (sorry if it comes across that way), but I wanted to make the effort.

Thanks for writing. You've got good stories ahead.

Tier: Needs Work

Strong story, although I feel I disagree with Scramblers and Shadows on one main point: the relative weight of the original Marina Abramović performance relative to the story. I do not mean any insult to the author by saying this, but I feel that The Performance itself is overshadowed by the material that it takes its inspiration from and offers a less poignant commentary on human empathy, cruelty, and the corrupting influence of authority by comparison.

For those who are not in the know, Rhythm 0, the Abramović performance that this story takes its premise from, involved the performer standing in the middle of the art patrons with a table of 72 items which stated that the patrons could do whatever they want to her.

The exact text used was:

Instructions.
There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.
Performance.
I am the object.
During this period I take full responsibility.
Duration: 6 hours (8 pm – 2 am)

Ultimately, as the performance progressed, the audience became progressively more deplorable in their actions. They cut the clothes from her body using razor blades, cut her body, cut at her throat so one audience member could drink her blood, and a loaded gun was pressed against her forehead. Luckily, there was a protective element of the audience that prevented the trigger from being pulled. What is interesting about this performance is not only was there morbid acts done to the performer when denied her humanity, but also that there was a line drawn when considering what was appropriate. It provides interesting and fresh ideas into what defines mob mentality and what a modicum of power can do to a person.

What I suppose what I am getting at is that beyond the transparent subtext and metaphors relating the performance itself to being a refugee trapped under the authority of outside, specifically immature and petty western influences, this story doesn't have as much bite too it. The author, for our sake and his own, I think, strayed from getting too dark with this story, and because it is done in third person limited with the two boys being the focal point, this is probably for the best, as it is, it is already fairly unbelievable that they would on their own would engage in such depravity. The interesting thing about mob mentality is that when someone is not reprimanded for doing something that would otherwise be considered inappropriate, another person again tests the boundaries of what they can get away with. As such, it is hard to make that sort of progressive dehumanization and cruelty seem natural from a story mainly centered around two people, and the idea that the Michael and Jeff would be so delusional as to not understand the reality of the situation and the harmfulness of their actions without that sort of force egging them on is a level of delusional beyond believably.

The ending falls very flat for me as a result.

The other issue I find is the two lead characters themselves. I understand their purpose in the overall metaphor, and their characterization as rather ignorant, frat-boy types makes sense from that standpoint, but they are severely lacking in personal humanity. Their stripping of Amira is fairly understandable within this context, but beyond that they have no motivation or factors pressuring them to further denigrate Amira—causing them to seem more like monsters than human. This would be fine, if the narrative lens wasn't so tightly on their perspective and instead was oriented around the entire room, but in the current format, they seem more like strawman, tools to make a polemic argument for the purposes of the narrative, rather than legitimate characters. Same goes for the one-line moment with Rachel. I think perhaps what you may be losing is that by making these characters ignorant, boorish, and in Rachel's case, unabashedly prejudiced, is the important message is that we, as westerners and as people, have the same capacity to be like them.

That was the power of the original Abramović performance.

Nonetheless, your command over the written word and method of detailing description is very impressive, and this read was very smooth. From a prose stand-point, this is easily one of the more solid entries.

Verdict: Powerful argument and construction, strong ideas, character execution could use some work, and the shadow of its inspiration lingers large over the product as a whole.

>>ShortNSweet


This wasn't ShortNSweet at all. I feel like a liar.

Hm, a story of a lost blond girl lost in life being picked up by a more authoritative figure that helps her figure out her place in life. I feel I have read this story before...

At the price of having this comment thread be echo-chamber of the same opinion, I found that the relatively contained conflict and resolution of this story was more a hindrance, not because of the plot itself, but because of how it is executed. A small scale story like this doesn't have to overtly dramatic—it's very obviously a slice of life in sort of more optimistic interpretation of realism—but there does have to be a bit more stakes involved in the narrative and there does need to be a bit more room for these characters to emote if this primarily aimed at being a character piece. As Bachiavellian rightly puts, Rudy and Scarlet are more archetypes of the person they are supposed to represent in the narrative rather than legitimate characters in their own right.

Rudy's got a bit more going than Scarlet with his sort of salt-of-the-earth persona, but never Rudy or Scarlet are really challenged by each other or given reason to expose anything more than surface level details to one another. Both are in a relatively challenging position, or at least Scarlet is, but there is really no suspense in the narrative suggesting that whatever Rudy has in mind won't work out. When Zaid said that this feels like an 80s feelgood movie, I think he was right, and that comes with the negatives and problems associated with that kind of genre as well.

A minor critique I feel the need to levy is that Rudy, although certainly experienced and wise in his rustic ways, occasionally feels far too reaching in his ability to accurately discern other people's situations to a pinpoint accuracy that makes it seem he read ahead in the story rather than ascertaining this information organically.

Overall scene construction is good, prose while not standout, reads easy and doesn't intrude on the reader, and narrative voice is strong. Obviously you're experienced.

Verdict: Slice of life that is perhaps a bit too fluffy and predestined towards being a feelgood story, solid overall construction, one or two tension-adding scenes would highly elevate this.

Reviewing this story is being handed a puzzle of an essay on fatalism and being prompted to assemble it, then being tasked to write a paper on the author's intentions. Which is to say that, while it is easy enough to understand that it is a puzzle, it is much more difficult to unpack.

There seems to be three main themes: how terrible fatalism/predestination is, what is the limit of true love, and moving on. Because of the way this story is told, there are at lot of scattered syllogisms and small moments across the entire story that ultimately build the backbone of its conclusion. The interconnected nature of the scenes and second read-through bonus are very strong on this story, but it might lean on these factors too heavily in order to provide a coherent thesis by the end.

That being said, I do find the ending strong and interesting, but it needed perhaps a scene more to prepare the reader for Jo's ultimate transition from the person willing to let horrific things happen in order to save her lover to someone who has let that love transform into malice and resentment. Jo's unwillingness to accept things the way there are and efforts to change them result in the conflict, and the story seems not be endorsing her for it, but not condemning her either. Even her last moment is just a refusal to fix things, rather than an active sabotage. . It is the logical extension of the dinner conversation they had, which is: "How many people would you be willing to sacrifice for one person, if you really loved them?" It's a sick hypothetical, and I don't believe there is necessarily a right answer, but how each character goes about addressing it is interesting and understandable. Jo is an absolutist, where she reasons that the act of killing ten or a million is essentially irrelevant, as these things don't have a price, where Matt is a relativist that stresses the importance of that sort of "magic number."

The weird style helps and hinders, the hardest sell being the strange take on perspective the story uses. The author is breaking a lot of rules knowingly, so I'm willing to give him/her some benefit of the doubt, but nonetheless, I find myself questioning some of the techniques utilized.

That being said, this was a strong entry. Some of the dialogue in certain scenes was a little off, particularly in the "confrontation" scene, but otherwise the character voices were strong and consistent throughout. Some great scene construction, decent prose, and very intriguing subtext makes it high on my list.

Verdict: A strange tale with some questionable moments, but very rewarding and fun the more you invest in it.

Well, this story made me cringe really hard, so it's succeeded on some level. :/

I dunno, author. I'm not really sure this sort of thing works in written form. For Rhythm 0, or something like the Milgram experiment, we're moved and shocked and impressed because it actually happened. Seeing people's dark side in real life reminds us that it's... real. But fiction... the whole point of fiction, on some level, is that it's insulating and safe. It's not that it isn't powerful, but even for people who aren't broken out of their willing suspension of disbelief by the awfulness of what of your characters are doing, they still won't be able to move past the fact that this invented. It's not what your characters are doing that I'll look to in the end, but what that means. Still... I don't think it's drawing any spectacular conclusions. Some people are selfish, unthinking jerks, and some do crazy things in the name of Art.

Moreover, you, as the author, were asking me to put myself in the place of someone doing selfish, awful things, and I didn't like that at all. It took me two or three tries to finish reading this, because I was simply repulsed by what was happening.

Honestly, for me, the most interesting character here is Amira. Unfortunately, we don't get to learn much about her, because she is literally a device to reveal the other characters; that is the very intent of the performance, isn't it? Still, what I'm left wondering about most is what's going on in her head. What motivated her to go to such an extent for her art? Was it for the sake of herself or her audience? What was she thinking, and why was it that important to her?

I dunno if I'd like a story from her viewpoint more or not. Still, I think her position would be better served by the qualities of fiction than that of an onlooker.

You're a talented author, and this story is undoubtedly visceral, even if I don't enjoy cringing. However, I can't help but feel it's aiming for a target it's just not going to easily match.

Perhaps I'm simply not in your audience.

...oh, and this feels like it's skirting pretty close to the edge of the T rating. I guess it is 'Art' though... :P

Your flashbacks were unnecessarily confusing, I think.

Overall, this struck me as very... form over function, aesthetic before effect, diffuse and lacking in direction somewhat.

Like many dystopic-ish stories, I feel like this world has twisted reality a bit too far in service of its plot. I'd be shocked if the costs of shipping stuff to space didn't outweigh whatever benefits running this operation in space is supposed to bring. They're still using rockets! It would seem like return shipping would be cheap, but... don't forget you've got to pony the shipping containers up there in the first place. Not to mention they're apparently capable of regrowing organs anyways, and keeping people in cold-sleep indefinitely, and the risk of having however much money you've sunk into an operation like this ruined on the off chance someone goes crazy might not be worth whatever benefits you gain from recruiting people with nothing to lose? Especially since there are people who really wouldn't mind spending six months alone. It probably wouldn't even be hard to find them.

Suffice to say, you really didn't sell me on this. It came off more as a chamber of horrors or something, and I'm really not a fan of grotesquery for its own sake.

Um...

Did she just blow up some random neckbeard?

This story came across mostly as jumbled and a bit unfocused to me. There are some neat ideas here, although nothing I haven't seen before I don't think.

I think this could benefit most from a bit more clarity in why the MC is doing things, and a bit more foreshadowing and rationalization for what she does. As it is, I'm not sure I followed her thought process for most of what goes on here.

Author: My feeling here is that in addition to the very-non-trivial challenge of writing verse in the limited time constraints of a writeoff, and the scansion and grammar issues that >>Not_A_Hat mentioned, you also tumbled unwittingly into a cruel problem - I think this piece should be shortened substantially (by perhaps a third or a half) for it to become most effective. But you not only had to hit the minimum word count, you also lacked the time to write it more compactly. As it stands, I have trouble reading the piece in detail because the subject matter is not engaging enough to me to overcome the distraction of the technical issues.

My recommendation, which authors rarely want to hear but often does them good, is that you pare out the base concepts, let them percolate for a while and think of fresh perspectives, then start with a blank document and go for a rewrite. Fairies can do more than dance, and I think you can do better by giving your talent more time to work.

So...

What was his answer in the end?

I liked the world-building and character work you've done here. It kinda edges up on solipsism, which I'm not really partial to, but it dodges just to the side. Unfortunately, while it starts well, the ending just kinda peters out, without giving me much in the way of resolution or satisfaction.

This is good, but I can't shake the feeling that it could have been a lot better.



Oh, unrelated story.

I knew a guy, an aircraft mechanic, who's fuel pump broke down once somewhere in the boonies. He didn't have a phone on him, and hiking seemed like too much trouble, so he unhooked the pump that sprays the windshield with wiper fluid, drained the water out of it, and filled it with gas before hooking it up to his gas line. Whenever his engine started sputtering, he just hit the button on the end of his wiper lever for a bit...

Got him to the next town at least. :P

Oh, and this came up on my playlist a bit ago, and I thought you might enjoy it.

Youtube link because we don't have proper video/image tags yet ROGER

Did she just blow up some random neckbeard?

This story is on my slate and I haven't yet read it, but this gives me high hopes.

A study in contrasts, huh?

Overall, I found this evocative. However, I was left a bit... I dunno. I wish I had a better idea of what remembering means to the psychopomp. He uses words like 'heroic' and what in the end there, but he then applies them universally, and that... leaves me wondering if it really means anything at all.

I think I would have preferred drilling down into the contrasts, instead of smoothing them over. The two travelers are intensely different, and I think I'd have rather seen what that meant.

Still, I guess death is the great leveler. Perhaps the point is that when everyone's special, no-one is. Is courage as pointless as cowardice, if they both die forgotten and unnoticed?

Eh, character sketches character sketches.

I mean, I don't dislike them, you know? But it's not exactly what I'd call compelling.

You've done a great job of layering some of your subtexts here. The bit with her family and what that means to her; good stuff with that.

Solid prose and decent storytelling. Wish it had more weight to me.

I have no idea what your title means.

>>Not_A_Hat

I have no idea what your title means.

My guess is that the story takes place in the near future and half of the characters are robots but they don't know who is who, so they all take care of each other.

Boy, you feel you know someone and then they turn out to be barely constrained blood-thirsty sociopath who flips at the first signal of perceived power.

Go fall down a well, Mike.

"If I can't be happy, no-one can," huh? Jo comes off as megalomaniacal and more than a little selfish to me in the end. Matt comes off as pretty one-dimensional, honestly, not deviating much at all from the one or two character traits he's given pretty early on.

What was up with the birds nest? That didn't make any sense to me. Even less sense then the Perfect 10, which in itself was a pretty big 'just because', driven by whatever strange machinations of 'fate' you've got going on here. When I read the bit about the car crash, I thought that perhaps his continued presence in the world would create disruptions in what was planned that would slowly spiral out of control, but I have no idea how that would end in an earthquake. :/

Anyways, this is a pretty strong narrative. It doesn't seem to nail down a theme, and... I'm mostly okay with that, except that I think it feels like it wants to have a theme, since the simplistic characters make it feel kinda archetypal.

>>ZaidValRoa I did consider it being robotics. It would fit with the 'healthy family programming' bit, since the first law is 'can't harm a human or allow them to come to harm'. I didn't really feel there was much evidence to support that, though. It's... more than a bit of a stretch, honestly.

I kinda like your interpretation better. :P

This felt pretty repetitive in the middle.

And can you actually make money publishing poetry? I mean, I don't think there's really that much of a market for it.

Um, is the laser-guided-amnesia even useful for your story? It seems like he's done an excellent job of forgetting this girl without even getting hit by a car.

I feel like there's potential here for commentary about the self-destructive nature of obsession, and how the most crippling mental problems are the ones that come with benefits. I mean, sure, it's kinda destroying this guy's psyche, but he's a successful author, right?

Apparently, if Stella was suddenly attacked by werebeasts in her home, she could chase them away by using the blade of her family's coffee grinder.

I'm going to be sad if this isn't foreshadowing.

...and I'm sad.

Well, I did like what you were doing with the setting, I think, although I was pretty sold on the 'humans are mythical' before it was 'lol no I'm dating one'. I'm not entirely sure what the climax of this story was; I guess when they got caught in the storm? The whole thing seems a bit diffuse to me. I don't think you got enough mileage out of the jargon for the amount you've put in there.

Intriguing, but not amazing.

Intro left me a bit cold; I frowned when his motor 'hummed', and was a bit nonplussed at the solar panels before I caught what was going on. I have a very solid image of what that sort of truck should look like, in my head, and his wasn't fitting it at all, which was a bit jarring.

I laughed when he ran over the painting 'bot. :)

Got a bit of mood whiplash at the end there. I think it was the fact that not too long ago he'd ended on the 'maybe today would be brighter', and how he just kinda snapped at the robot with no real reason to? It was alright as a climax for the story, but doesn't really make sense to me from a character standpoint.

The world-building here was interesting, but also left me with rather more questions than answers. I mean, what is 'home'? Is going there even an option for him? What does going there entail, and what does that mean to him?

Well-written, but not as satisfying as I'd like.

I also am skeptical about the use of small-caps in this story, although I have a predisposition to believe that the story wouldn't have changed much without it.

I'm getting very Mass Effect vibes from this story. Perhaps it is just the Commander Jacobs bit.

I think if this story was tacked on to a longer story without using the in media res, the overall poignancy of the Commander's sacrifice would be felt more. As such it reads more along the lines of an ending scene to a longer story than an independent product, and the story itself strains itself to explain complicated areas of the sci-fi backstory by inorganically creating exposition and inserting a somewhat farcical reason for why the Commander can't get into the cryo-stasis area.

The bits with the AI and Commander interaction that deconstructs his hopes for some bit of humanity in "Sarah" or more likely, his attempts to project humanity onto her/it are interesting on their own, but practically scream to be developed further and more gradually. Brevity is probably this story's biggest weak spot, which causes the overall introduction of these relatively complex ideas to be introduced at a rather breakneck pace and without a lot of leeway to really dive deep into these thoughts and feelings.

Verdict: a good part of hopefully a bigger story with some minor plot factors detracting from the overall experience

Oh hey, I feel like you must have seen Spirited Away. The Lady is very much Haku from Spirited Away and utilizes some of the same archetypes, but this tells a slightly different story.

With that out of the way, this was a pleasant read. I felt that it resembled a bit of a pastiche of the aforementioned spoiler, The Giving Tree, and perhaps a tinge of C.S Lewis. I find myself unable to lobby much critique at it only because the critique I would give would be against the spirit of the piece itself, which is to say, personally I would have enjoyed something a bit more substantial in the subtext, but ultimately that wasn't the intention of this story. Additionally, I do feel it may be a bit too derivative from the above if my suspicions in the aforementioned spoiler are correct.

This is very much in the vein of a traditional Disney adaptation of a fairy tale: a pleasant, inoffensive, and high quality production, but does not have much of an edge to it. In a slightly more reduced state, I could easily see this being a lovely children's book. I have no issues with this story's conclusion as presented in that sort of tone.

Verdict: strong, whimsical writing for a classic fairy tale, but may leave you wanting more underneath

So... What happens if I promise to leave the woods? Do the faes just take me out of spite?

I like the story, even if the heavy lore was a bit daunting early on, it slowly grew on me. Nicely done. I still wish we could have gotten to know the characters a bit more. Specially the girls, Khulan and Sarnai didn't get enough development, and their deaths did little more than move the plot forward, they didn't resonate with me as much as they could have if we had, say, spent a scene with the group of girls.

Nonetheless, I still very much enjoyed the story presented.

I'm going off-slate to read this one and spread the review love around.

In terms of constructive criticism, I generally try to read stories with an eye toward larger, structural issues, and this one's doing fine on the structure front. (That's no small thing! It's the first of the five stories I've read so far to have all of its elements come together into a coherent larger journey. So, well done.) Chief among the problems here is that old devil show-don't-tell. There are entire scenes which are given to us at a distance:

He wanted to pass his exams. He wanted to be a success. He wanted to leave this life of his behind.

But he didn't ask for any of that. He asked if he could talk to her.

She assented.

It was difficult at first. What experiences could one possibly share with a magickal creature living in – but not really in – the canal? What questions could one ask that wouldn't sound like an interrogation from the Ministry of Thaumo-Cryptid Intrusions? But, somehow, they muddled through.

What was she? A lamia. What was her name? She didn't have one. Would Lamia work? No – it was a description; lower-case only. Were there others? Not here. Not anymore.

He learned she came from somewhere far off, but she's been stuck here for so long that she'd forgotten how to get back there. For all she knew, the lamiak from her home might all be dead too.

This is edging up to the 8k limit, so it's possible these scenes were abbreviated for space; if so, I hope this gets edited to actually show us the conversations. But if this was an intentional stylistic choice, I'd urge you to reconsider. Think of it in terms of what showing and telling's relative strengths are: showing brings us into the scene, gives us an emotional connection to the characters, offers detail and focus. Telling imparts information quickly and unobtrusively, when you want to establish something and then move on from there to something more important. Telling is good, for example, for exposition -- but when you've got a pivotal scene between the two most important characters in the story, then this is the 'more important' you should be saving your space and focus for! If this drifts down my rankings -- and I expect that it will as I continue my reading -- it will be mostly due to that tell-heavy writing style.

Agreed with !Hat that the lamia's turnaround is rather startling. I mean, there are ways it makes sense in hindsight -- your narration up front establishes lamiak as dangerous monsters humanity made an effort to eradicate, and straight-up calls them parasites (in a way that's reminiscent of how a lot of people see MLP's changelings) -- so the idea that she was playing him from the beginning isn't coming out of nowhere [1], but the more I think about it the more questions I have. What is the lamia's actual motivation? If she's evil and feeds off of people's needs, then it makes no sense to use her as a karmic agent and punish him for ignoring the woman looking for her son: she either wouldn't care, or would encourage him to be uncaring and incompetent in order to drive more people to her in desperation. But if she's not evil and trying to make a difference, then why didn't she bring the city's problems up with him? Betraying and exiling her most solid ally in the city seems like an objectively shitty way to work for justice when she could, y'know, just ask. Given what we see him do on her behalf, he's wrapped completely around her finger.

And then there's the eggs. It's clearly important to her to get a nest of lamiak started in the new location, and yet she sends them off with the dude she just betrayed. Did the thought that he'd just destroy the eggs out of vengeance occur to neither of them?

Moving a little more into the details ... I love a lot of the geography here, but I just can't assemble a proper mental picture of your setting in my head. The second scene establishes that the city's basically built on the margins of seven bridges with a tiny bit off spillover onto land at the edges (which is super cool), and that "the castle" is spread out throughout the city because there's no room for a big building (even cooler), but then you've got canals throughout the city which are large enough for boats? So they make canals on the bridges? And there are several references to named streets, which makes no sense if the city's all on bridges; the bridge itself would be the street and there would be no need for separate street names. If the bridges are a major part of the city but most of the city is on land, you really need to revise your descriptions.

So, yeah. Definitely things to work on here on a bigger and smaller level, but it's not a scrap-and-redo-whole-scenes rough. This is a solid foundation for a second pass.

[1] On second thought, that needs significant touch-up too. What exactly does Caskarule know about lamiak when he first meets her? He certainly reacts as if the idea of a woman rising up out of the canal water isn't a freak-out level event, and goes along with the gift thing without question, both of which suggest that there's a body of common knowledge about them. But then he goes off to do basic research in super-restricted archives, and what basic knowledge exists paints them as evil, so either he should have been as bewildered as the audience or his non-negative reaction needed to be heavily lampshaded.

Tier: Almost There

It started very good. Felt a small kinship as we all have at one point had an idea or a purpose overtake us to such a degree it makes everything else fade away, and the feeling that the end result of our work in not good enough. There's a connection there.

It kept going and going about his obsession but it didn't get boring. It dragged on, but it pulled me with it. I was interested, and I gladly read each line.

The amnesia shook me. It felt tacked on, like a pre-requisite that had to be put on for the sake of completing an arbitrary list of tropes that must be in a work. It also felt like there was nothing coming out of it, apart from losing his job. He had already made himself forget the girl, and he could have lost or quit his job in hundreds of better ways that this. You know that thing you do, when your lips twist in distaste and your eyebrows furl like so, your whole expression saying "really?" I did that.

The end was... lackluster. There wasn't an impact. I would have waited a revelation, the character being taken aback, his core screaming. Instead I got, "Oh, fyi she's gone, kktnxbb." There wasn't an escalation of emotion or anything, the pace remained the sedate one it was before. At least a feeling of giving up or despair, nothing. Life goes, and the obsession continues even while the character had such an insight. Perhaps that is how humans work, but... yeah.

Your first two sentences:

I met her at a time in my life when meeting people was something you did as you might grasp at rose thorns to pull yourself from a raging river. And she herself was going through motions like a cracked china doll, insulating herself with a bubble of reserve, unable to leave the surfaces of herself open to any impacts at all.

Take it from someone who abuses mixed metaphors like a fish riding a donkey: this is a horrible collision of imagery, and not a good first impression. I suppose that abstractly "grasping at rose thorns to pull yourself from a raging river" works, in the sense that if you're drowning you'll flail around even for things that hurt you, but there are better ways to express that. And there's nothing about china dolls (now your third unrelated metaphor element) that relates to "bubble of reserve" (four), unless the doll is being packed away by its owner for shipping/storage, and you can't exactly pack yourself in a box.

As we did not strongly chafe when we met, we fell across each other’s path for a time.

So you have a narrator who is madly flailing about like they're drowning and don't care what gets damaged, and a person so damaged that they are retreating to self-made safety ... and they DIDN'T strongly chafe??!?

Kill that first paragraph with fire. D:

whether this happened in a room with physical walls and windows, or in an energy cloud in which beings of thought intersect with each other through traces like mathematical formulas scribed in light, may be left to your preference.

I am definitely not a fan of the narrator's continual emphasis on breaking the scene-setting here -- deliberately foiling any attempt to ground this, and denying the reader any chance to establish a mental image -- but I do like this. It reinforces that ambiguity in a way that offers some actual detail (and pretty, besides).

I also rolled my eyes a bit at the dialogue between the mother and child establishing that they're aliens/gods/something that are incarnating as humans on earth, but largely forgave it when this sank its teeth into the core theme of suicide. That was a pretty cool place to take the idea, and a solid yet unusual take on the prompt.

The framing story here needs a lot of work, but it's surrounding an interesting core. Other than that, I don't have a lot to say. This seems like it has about a 2000-word idea, which is a good quality for a 2000-word story.

Tier: Almost There

(And that makes every story reviewed at least twice!)

>>horizon
Gotta say that I agree with a lot of it. All in all I think that taking one of the two stories and running with it would work a lot better.

The beginning, I kinda rolled my eyes at. I'm sorry, but it felt like a space movie I've seen a hundred times before with a hundred different titles.

It didn't pique at any point, and it didn't give me the slightest sense of how much time had passed. How long has passed between the two narratives? A decade? Centuries?

All in all, it is a loss to speed it had to be written with, and a story too large in scope to be sufficiently told in so few words.

I'm not qualified to comment on the grammar, other than some minor inconsistencies that Hat pointed out.

It was an odd juxtaposition between modern and magi-tech. I did like the story, though it felt like it was oddly fast paced.

My main impression of this story here is that it's simply incomplete. It feels like everything wants to fit together, but there are are some crucial missing pieces right in the middle where everything should link.

For example, that ending twist upends everything the story seems to be establishing, but without leaving anything in its place. There are two heroes or "heroes" investigating the crime scene in a way that seems fishy to our narrator, one or both of whom might be linked to the bombing that killed Cooper, but in response the narrator apparently "blows up the neckbeard" as !Hat put it -- giving one of them what can only be a bomb. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, straight-up villain material, all the more so since she's GUESSING which one is involved! But if she's a villain, why is she trying to find and stop the League, as the narration all along suggests? Is she an unreliable narrator and actually was responsible for the bombing? That might be interesting, but seems to be ruled out by her confusion over the hair (she wouldn't need to test it to find out whose it was!) ... and if she's NOT the bomber, I'd think she would be perfectly placed to have informed opinions on the act based on her work continuing her father's legacy (tracing via materials used or shaking down her suppliers), rather than grasping at the straws of finding hairs at the crime scene.

Speaking of which ... is she really Madame Merrow, using her divination powers to find a hair the police overlooked, and concerned for her personal safety? But that seems to be ruled out by the narration too, unless she's repeatedly straight-up lying to us, and that only partially resolves the ending's ethical problems (since her powers would at least give her knowledge of who's the target, but that doesn't change her actions).

Seriously, I'm grasping for straws here trying to make sense of her actions. Like, to the point of wondering if the fishy kid with the obviously fake hero backstory is her son in disguise, except that is *SO* ruled out by the ending. Is the League competition? Is she actually her father, time-travelled to the future with a sex change operation? What's her motive here? D:

Since [Madame Morrow] was one of the few heroes who adamantly pretended that superpowers were real ...

Uhh ... if their powers aren't real, then why are heroes such a big deal as to be allowed to stampede into police investigations, and how have they virtually stamped out crime?

There's a really intriguing premise here, but it doesn't work without the full reveal this was building toward, or at least the motive half of the reveal you provided.

Tier: Needs Work

This is another one in the "needs more pieces" bin. Apparently tonight is the night for the Writeoff to hurt my brain as I try to piece everything together.

It's pretty clear from the beginning that Marcus is ... well, non-physical and sharing the narrator's brain, however you want to label that (imaginary voices, multiple personalities, the Clippy of their brainware implants, etc). The big problem with framing the scene as the narrator alone talking with a head-voice is that there is an extra special burden to establish who is inside their head and who is NOT inside their head. It took me far too long to figure out that Bobby physically existed -- my default assumption given your introduction was that Bobby was like Marcus, and took over the narrator's brain to make them walk out into the desert or something (or drove them out, locked the car, and buried the keys in a sand dune).

[1] It also didn't help that she's got a boy's name, because when I hit her pronouns, it took me extra time to try to sort out whether there were other unnamed individuals also being talked about ... that wouldn't have been a problem in isolation, but when I'm already so confused, it's one more thing on the pile.

She kicked your butt. And don’t curse. You know Charlotte doesn’t like it.

Okay, so Marcus is concerned about Charlotte overhearing, that makes her another head-voice --

“Well, Charlotte should have been there! Her and Lily could have handled things if you hadn’t insisted they have a spa day in freaking Tucson!”

-- okay, so Charlotte isn't a head-voice. I think. Or is there some sort of mental holodeck where head-voices can "go places"? Even assuming that Charlotte exists, is Lily real or a head-voice of Charlotte's?

Hey, they’ve worked hard these past couple weeks. And you got Lily’s arm broken when your fat mouth got us in trouble with Edgar from Accounting.

... okay, so Lily's presumably real, assuming Edgar is real too. (Or maybe these voices are radio chatter of people locked in an office somewhere? At this point I'm beginning to question my own existence.)

They earned a day off from your rampant idiocy and I’m sorry for having faith that you could last more than three hours without a gimped mother and her little girl here to hold your hand.

ASDFJKL;ASDFKL;J;AKF;SLDJ;BBQ IF THEY'RE REAL THEN WHY IS MARCUS THE HEADVOICE IMPLYING THAT THEY CAN BE "HERE" CODDLING THE NARRATOR

Seriously, I cannot overstate the impact of Marcus being the second character introduced without any context as to why he and the narrator share brains, or how common that is. It's like starting out a story by showing us that some people are secretly lizard-people in human skins, and then introducing a huge cast of apparently human characters without ever mentioning lizard-people again.

Once the story settles down and stops introducing characters, it gets less confusing, if no less bizarre. I mean, I guess after everything we've learned, the idea of professional assassin-bombers kung-fu fighting with the president's bodyguards is just sort of whatevs. I'm not sure if it's the sleight of hand of the early story making me desperate for something concrete to latch onto, or whether I'm taking it in stride because this just doesn't reach the high-water mark of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, or what, but that's an amusing sort of over-the-top insanity and I really wish it and all of the head-voice stuff had switched places to get everything properly framed first.

And then there's a bunch of character development stuff, and an abrupt ending which is more or less a punch line calling back to the opening bookend. So my experience of the story was a long time struggling to figure things out, some whimsical insanity once I did, and an anticlimax/lack of resolution. Color me frustrated.

So, #1:
This desperately needs to fix the framing stuff I mentioned, but if it had established everything properly, this would certainly have had my interest. It seems to be running mostly off of Rule of Cool, and while the headvoice thing ended up backfiring, I definitely admire the effort there -- providing context in medias res rather than resorting to lengthy exposition dumps. That's a big strength of this story, and I don't want to discourage it -- but the danger of in medias res is that the reader is trying to figure it out as they go along, and if you get them building up images in their head which you later kick out from underneath them, they feel a little betrayed by their engagement. (Take heart; I made much the same mistake in Harmony Needs Heroes, which was my first-ever Writeoff non-finalist after several years competing, so this is certainly not a novice problem.)

#2:
Totally separate from that, I can't say the ending landed for me. You're asking for a lot of reader engagement, introducing a really dynamic cast of characters and drawing us in with a tight and gripping storytelling technique, and then this sort of becomes a shaggy dog story. It's hard not to feel disappointed because the writing promised so much more. This could certainly be the basis for a more ambitious story.

Tier: Flawed but Fun

(... by which I mean: I didn't actually have fun reading this, but the potential is all there, and modulo the failed experiment of the headvoice, I think this would have drawn me in. The command of narrative is certainly evident here, it just made some choices that didn't pay off.)

The concept of this story is an interesting study on the perspective we take towards death, but I think fails to fully come into its own in exploring that perspective. The idea of a long road conjoining the afterlife (or in this case, the infinite) to the real world (or the finite) is ripe grounds for making visceral imagery and extended metaphors, but The Psychopomp doesn't explore much beyond its premise. The contrasts of the hero "going towards the infinite" (i.e. death, and the glory associated with it) and the father trying to return for one last moment with his daughter are understood, but the weight of their struggles is somewhat subdued by the manner of presentation and tone of the story via the main character, who henceforth I will refer to as "Psychopomp."

The enigmatic and mostly deadpan Psychopomp provides more questions than answers with how to regard the events that are unfolding in the story, and the ambiguity in his narration typically results in a mixed message. We are not really given the information to sufficiently understand when he "feels" something or why he feels a certain way, and it's difficult to understand the Psychopomp's overall place in this story other than as a device to connect the two separate plot threads of the hero and the father together. Essentially what I am saying is that it's difficult to get a read on what appears to be some sort of ancient, stone-faced deity's perspective and why he feels the way he does. By extension, it is difficult to get a read on the significance of the two men's actions (i.e. what are the stakes, the personal costs of "going to infinity to soon" or refusing the call outside of the purely physical torture, their personal emotions and motivations) when it seen through a character that clearly doesn't understand them well. Perhaps if there more hints within the narrative or dialogue indicating to these emotions would make the piece feel less cold.

Which is why the ending doesn't quite work for me. The subdued emotional tone of the entire story can't support something as blatantly storybook emotional as a "last words goodbye" and unfortunately comes across as unnecessarily maudlin. I think perhaps adding some more humanizing elements to the story as a whole would be helpful even if this ending were not be retained on a redraft, but were it to remain the same, the addition of more humanizing elements for both the men and The Psychopomp would be a necessity to avoid tonal whiplash.

At the end of the day, this story had a lot of interesting internal mechanics to it that kept me interested, but ultimately I wish that the statements it tried to make were a bit more substantial, or in lieu of that, a more humanistic, and detailed exploration of its two human characters.

Can only really echo what's already been said. Lots of names, a confusing situation, not enough context and it quicky disengages me as a reader. Theres nothing to latch on to that makes me care about the charecters or what happens.

Even weird realities should be grounded in something relatable.

The desert is well described, and there are certainly some very colorful metaphors bandied about.

As the people sitting in the Discord chat can testify, I had a long laugh once it was said in the narrative that the tunnelers physically dug into hell, punctuated by a single "Oh no."

I think this is a comedy, but sort of the special kind of comedy that is just so outrageously silly in how it transitions between thoughts that your brain gets wrapped up in a mess trying to comprehend the decisions being made behind the story and why they're being made. Starting with the aforementioned "tunneling into hell", a narm of a premise if there could ever be one, there's a lot of baffling, strange things going on in this story that seems to be pointed towards just trying to shock the reader with how against expectations everything is. But of course, I'm not certain on whether this is intended to be humorous or taken seriously, and that forms sort of the crux of the problem with this story.

That is to say that the tone of this story is pretty ambiguous. Characters act as if things are supposed to be taken seriously, and there are moments in the narrative that communicates the seriousness of the situation, but strange and silly moments undermine the seriousness, and the seriousness undermines the silliness. I thought for a moment that the story might have been transitioning to a strange sort of "what hell is really like" idea where the main character is trapped in this weird purgatory where his friends go missing and a weird demon just annoys him for the rest of his days, but obviously that wasn't the intention, and I'm left even more confused.

Additionally, this isn't really much of story that goes anywhere. The characters accidentally dig into hell, Meet Satan , tell some jokes, and the story just kind of ends. I'm not sure what I'm really supposed to draw from this, so I'm tempted to label it as a comedy that just didn't hit very comedic heights and didn't communicate its tone clearly enough to make it understood what the story was going for.

So. Whatever you're trying to do, do more of that. Do less of what you're not trying to do. Probably the best advice I've ever given in my entire career.

Hmm. Once more, I don't have much to add, other than to agree with what's already been said. I found the intro to be a good hook and interesting - - worry about the kid growing up to emulate a villainous grandfather is fairly solid, though the prose needs work.

But then the story seems to drop that plot point entirely, and I quickly lost track of who was doing what and why.

By reading the first couple of pages of this story, I was thinking that it was going to be some sort of whimsical fairy tale-esque anecdote of the 2016 elections, particularly with the iconography of a donkey that everyone claims to be great. The extended allegory still kept my interest when it became apparent that this wasn't going to be the story that was told, but sadly it did not amount to much. A lot of my expectations that I set forth when approaching this story searching for a universal sort of theme tying everything together (which transitioned from undeserving people gaining power, to religious exploitation, to profiteering off a fad) and nothing ever struck me as particularly cogent. In other words, there are a lot of things that are established that never really pay off in a meaningful way.

I think that the author had an idea to tell the farmer's story of a smart donkey and tie it together in a neat bow with the concluding pun, but wasn't exactly sure of what sort of story he wanted to tell in between those two points. As a result, we have a hodgepodge of different scenarios that don't exactly gel together with one another to come away with an overall thesis or point of the story. Our characters don't really learn any lessons, despite the ending's claim to the contrary, and we as readers also don't really learn anything about this phenomena of putting things on a pedestal just because someone vaguely hinted that it might be a good idea. The various scenes of this story aren't exactly connected together and they more seem like constructs meant to get the main character in the physical place and situation of the story's conclusion rather than organically making these sorts of decisions and realizations himself.

I wouldn't say that any of these scenes are bad ideas: the insincere father, the four sons, the goofy and flamboyant apostle, and strange monks, but they lack a thread tying them together and as a result seem like plethora of scattered ideas that don't have any relation to one another. My main advice for this story would to be concretely sketch out what you're trying to say and have each scene be an extension of that message, or don't have it at all. This is a fable format kind of story, and if there's no clear lesson, or the lesson seems false, then it completely falls on its face when it hits the conclusion regardless of the story that came before it.

I enjoyed the goofiness and some of the underlying subtext, but without anything more substantive, I'm left thinking that there's not a lot cohesion to the piece as a whole.

Like those before me, I find myself wishing we'd had more time to digest the little nuances that made Solana and Ismerelda compelling characters.

I honestly have to congratulate you on that front. While they didn't veer too far from the traditional clichés of fantasy, the characters had depth, and that youcould pull that off in a little under four thousand words is a sign of your skill.

Still, the story is marred by the infodump-heavy dialogue and the rush of character development. Giving an abridged version of events that would span entire stories of their own is bad per se, but maybe spending a bit more time with the characters instead of telling us of all those adventures they had off-camera would have done wonders to help the reader connect more with Solana's plight of having lost a partner and Ismerelda's inability to be what her hero needed of her.

I have no doubt that if you'd had a few extra days to beat this into shape, this could be a surefire winner, but as it stands it's juuust a bit short of getting there.

Oh, and if you ever expand upon this little universe, let me know. ^ ^

This is a long involved buildup to the letdown of the predictable final pun, which probably should have been made earlier in the story if used at all. Edited for clarity and simplicity, and given a punchier ending, it might make a workable children’s book, but to an adult reader this seems like an Aesop’s fable that has been drawn out much further than it needed to be taken. We already know that people en masse may be foolish enough to select a donkey to lead them; children must have that sad truth delivered to them via short comfortable fables.

It wasn’t until my second reading that I noticed that the Goddess sacrifices her memories to send Izzy more time and power. I think this event needs more foreshadowing / emphasis if it is to add to the drama of the ending.

I have no other objections that haven’t been raised by others. Good job, author!

The visceral nature of this story really benefits from a second read-through, potential readers. Don't let the obtuse presentation put you off from considering this story fairly, because the surrealism really is in service of the message that the author is trying to present.

That being said, I do think that as horizon has pointed out before me, the level to which this surrealism has been taken, from the non-conventional descriptions, obtuse artisan metaphors, and the general presentation of the "dream" or allegory, whatever you'd like to call it, all coalesce together in a fever dream of confusion if you're reading it for the first time. This is mainly because we as an audience are thrown face first into an exceedingly dense first paragraph of descriptive prose that doesn't quite establish what the grounding of this story is, and as a result, it is difficult to understand until the concept is basically explicitly defined half-way of the way through the story. Not helping matters is the once again very dense dialogue between the child and mother characters that form the basis of the allegory.

Look, I know this is not intended as a light read; it is a story you have to sit down and think about why the author is making all these strange choices, and largely, these choices pay off, but the manner of presentation doesn't really inure the reader to read deeper. I remember reading the first three paragraphs of this story, somewhat agitated at the over-the-top artistry of the metaphors plus the exceedingly removed narration, and then hit the point where a dream would be introduced, to which I rolled my eyes. To be fair, what I got from the dream sequence was much greater than I anticipated, but nonetheless, the introduction of this story does nothing but dissuade me from continue reading.

That being said, once I got over the hump, the story became a rather pleasant interpretation of depression / suicidality that I can appreciate and respect. It's sweet and understanding, and removed aspect of the narration and sketchbook quality of the characters and their circumstances let the reader immediately understand that these people could easily be them as well, and perhaps even more impressive, gives reason for the readers to feel empathetic even though they barely know these characters. It's a mature and soft-spoken message that I don't see many stories trying to tackle this topic attempting.

The title "No Shortcuts" is accurate, both as a means to understanding this story and as a means of reading it, which is its main problem. Grounding it a bit more early on or changing how the overall story is framed could do wonders for it, I think.

Top five of Georg’s second Round Micro Reviews for the new stories on my slate The Long Road Home: Scores are letter grades for Plot, Technical Work, and Characterization mushed together, with an E for stories I find particularly Enjoyable. Ranked by how I like them, not necessarily how perfect they are on the score. (and posted all at once, from top to bottom so they line up on the chat.) Late *again* for this. If I ever get wings and a horn, I’ll be the Princess of Procrastination. And from what I’ve read, I won’t be in the finals this time. Darnit, guys!

Enjoyed - Oaths — A+ — Ah, a Russian Lifeboat story. Let’s see how this plays out. Ah, and a nice twist at the end. Broke expectations.

Enjoyed - Lamiak — A+ — Entrancing view of a dystopian future woven with magic. Really sucks you into the story. Only a few minor autocorrect catches. The weakest part seems to be right at the last meeting up until the end. It seems to get a little vague, where the rest of the story was rich with descriptions and scenery (but being wounded will do that, I suppose.)

The River Lady — A- — The kid falls into a river in London and survives. Seems improbable. (snerk) Ok, getting more serious. The story involves pollution without going all Captain Planet, which is good. Happy ending, striving as a thread through the story, also good. Good, solid pattern and characterization. Held my interest through the whole thing, also good. And better than mine, darnit.

Enjoyed - Roll D120 To Get Home — A- — Elves role-playing. (snerk) Evil auto-correct strikes thither and yon. A pleasant mix of mythical and high-tech, much like a Traveler game at times. It’s nice to know even the elves forget to plug in their spellphones occasionally (sorry). The little brothers are annoying, but that’s ok as they are *supposed* to be annoying little bothers… I mean brothers. Really a fun read, particularly for RPG geeks such as I. And also better than mine, darn.

The Farmers Tale — A- — A fairy tale, by the looks of it. And has nice rhythm. But it drags it’s a— after a while. Some serious snipping in the last half would pick up the pace. Still, better than mine, and with a lesson at the end.

Proverbs 22:6 — B — Man on moonbase story. Ah, with a twist. And a time-jump. And another. Ok, I got lost. A couple of times back and forth and I’m still lost about some spots in the middle. Wonderful concept and terrific writing inside the sections, though.

One Truck — B — Emotionally touching, and has a good ‘last human being on the planet’ touch to it, a little like Bradbury-eske. The character’s emotions are there, but they don’t seem to jump out as much as I expected, and the ending scene is fragmented and jerky. It has promise.

This very well might be the longest Shaggy Dog Story I've ever read. I'm trying to figure out how much to ding it in my scoring for that. :trixieshiftleft:

For the most part, though, this kept me reading. The various escalations felt natural, even if in hindsight I'm left agreeing with previous reviewers that a lot of the plot threads ultimately went nowhere. The prose is smooth enough that there were only a few elements which broke my immersion -- oddly enough, the names Danthony, Tedward and Bilfred were the worst offenders, possibly because this is otherwise earnest enough to carry its own weight, and those names are where the story came closest to revealing its core lack of seriousness.

Ultimately, though, while I did feel cheated by the ending, there was enough else to appreciate here to keep me feeling broadly favorable about it. I'm possibly an outlier in that, though, and I do second all of the above advice.

Tier: Strong

I'm likewise fairly confused. There's some nice turns of phrase in here, but also quite a bit of apparently deliberate obfuscation, or 'noddle incident' references that don't apparently add anything to the story. They feel like they're inserted purely to make us feel like there's more depth to this story than there really is.

I like the reveal at the end, but getting there was rough.

I thought this was beautiful throughout, but I think I feel the same as Mr. A_Hat about the end -- the Lamia undergoes a rather rapid transition from grateful co-conspirator to self-righteous bitch. Certainly I understand her position, but it comes across as rather untelegraphed and jarring.

I'm not a fan of the word choice, in places. I'm all for evocative phrasing, but words like "illuming" and "ginnel" just seem unnecessarily obscure.

Those quibbles aside, though, this is at the top of my slate at the moment. Flawed, yes, but ambitious, and I like ambition.

I had ice cream sometimes and all that, though that was only a treat reserved for the special occasion when someone dropped it on the ground at the local boardwalk down by the beach. No matter the color of the ice cream, it always tasted like rocky road.

This made me laugh.

Other than that, I enjoyed reading this. Satan seems like a pretty chill dude. I think the story could definitely use a stronger commitment to comedy. The other characters could use some stronger personalities, especially to bounce of the MCs relatively nonplussed attitude. Maybe some character conflict beyond banter?

Not a lot of actual plot here, but the character stuff is really strong. It's a great look into that particular phase of adolescences in college, on the cusp of adulthood but not really there yet, still figuring out the path and purpose and how to make these decisions on your own.

It all feels very familiar, the kind of struggles and conversations I've had with my own friends and family in years past.

Lots of good descriptions and visceral imagery in here. It paints an interesting picture of an afterlife, or something like it.

A very nice parable. While a bit slow at points, the story held my interest the whole way through. I saw the ending pun coming from a mile away, but it was still worth it.

Dark, introspective sci fi. The pacing is a bit wonky, especially with jumping in and out of flashbacks, but I was able to follow what was what without too much difficulty. A strong look at the bottom of the barrel, rising a little above it, only to fall back down.

I personally thought the small-caps were appropriate; I appreciate when the formatting reflects the action or characters, and the small-caps served as a visual reminder that Cmdr. Jacobs was speaking to an AI--a reminder that was particularly useful after he attached the very human name "Sarah" to it.

The plot itself felt somewhat familiar while I was reading it (very little in the universe is original), but I still found myself curious as to what was in the Medical Bay, and the story did keep it dangling long enough that I found the reveal satisfying. There certainly isn't much action occurring within the story's parameters (we don't see the asteroid, nor the crew going into the chambers, nor the Commander's final moments/the rescue team's arrival), and maybe that's what >>ShortNSweet would like to see (I certainly wouldn't say no to an expansion), but this story seems to accomplish what it sets out to do within its word limit. It paints a lonely picture of a moment where home is simply too far to reach, but the protagonist heads for it anyway, and that sort of persistence in the face of crushing futility leaves me with a bittersweet taste in my mouth.


In all, strong thematic use of the prompt, excellent composition, and an engaging read that pulled me along to a quietly melancholic finish.

>>Cold in Gardez It's fairly simple, and obvious from this year's election cycle at least. The lamia was lying to not only him, but most likely a great number of others. The narrator is reliable. The subjects, not so much.

The writing here is ethereal and evocative (the snowflakes lashing against the ward being one particularly strong example), and I found myself quickly lost in the prose. I didn't quite know who was whom some of the time (as I was lost), but it certainly made the time differences between the ward and the hero feel inconsequential, so kudos if that was an intended effect. Whimsical isn't quite how I would describe the overall feeling of this (the tone is far too somber), but it's certainly... dreamy? Otherworldly?

Regardless, this was an interesting take on the prompt, and the imagery is certainly inspired in places. I liked the mood of the piece.

I'm afraid I don't have much to say, since everyone else seems to have it covered. It's an interesting idea, or rather, two independent interesting ideas smooshed together... But we don't really get to see much of it. We don't get much feel for the characters, or their personalities, or anything.

Also, a minor quibble... But a mere 'nuclear war' would not destroy the biosphere, let alone reduce the Earth to a 'spherical volcano.' You'd need something a lot more energetic than a few nukes to manage that. I'd have just said something like "It was destroyed during The War" and avoid specifics.

Okay, I'm going to be honest here. I got about halfway through this, and then devolved to merely skimming the other half. Because very little about this makes one whit of sense.

A moonbase full of cryogenically cooled corpses/people... Who need to be kept cold to be fresh.. As they somehow regrow organs.. which are being shipped back to Earth... And all of this is a big government secret.. which is being overseen by a whacked out druggie because, of course those make the best astronauts!

Oh, and despite the incredible complexity and expense of those whole asinine operation... We're only sending enough food for the exactly six months.. and if we're a wee late, the poor bastard left alone up there starts to starve to death.

There is no set of circumstances whereupon this makes any sense. At all.

Given that I am unmotivated to give the rest a proper read through, I'm simply going to abstain on this one.

Very tense, tight story. Excellent example of how to keep the stakes high.

I like the device of the fae and the woods. You don't go overboard with the backstory -- too often I see authors trying to drop far too many hints in, to convince the reader that there's more depth than really exists. This story doesn't fall into that trap, and doesn't pretend to offer us a whole world. It offers us characters and a conflict, which is enough.

I agree with Mr. A_Hat's issue with the line, "That was her voice." Whose voice? There's been a bunch of voices so far, and as much as I tried going back to parse it, I couldn't figure out what the soldier meant. For such a critical reveal, that's a big whoops.

The ending was a little pat. I personally feel that if you're going to set up such high stakes for your characters, you need to deliver on them at the end. As written, this felt like it was a bit of a weasel-ly way out.

But those are minor quibbles. This was outstanding work -- with a few tweaks I could easily see this in a fiction anthology.

Not a Hat keeps beating me to these reviews.

This was a good sketch, as he notes, though I'm not sure it's a good character sketch. What character? The commander's the only one we meet, and not much about him comes across but sad acceptance of his fate. SOVOS doesn't give us much to work with either.

Frankly, there's just not much here to judge. There's no story, at least as traditionally defined -- with a conflict, climax and resolution. Now, a story doesn't need to be traditional, not at all -- some of the best stories do away with tradition altogether. But they replace it with something else.

This doesn't really do that. It's just a window on a man slowly dying in space. He does nothing of consequence in the time we know him -- the only item that approaches meaning is his refusal to divert air reserves from medical to the command section -- which he admits wouldn't prolong his survival by any meaningful amount.

You know, I really liked the brief aside about the orphanage and hoping that someone would steal him and he'd become their kid. Nice, oblique way of describing despair.

The comedy elements feel out of place. They're not unfunny, but they don't jive with the tone of the story -- crocs being a mortal sin? The arson store line was nice -- that sort of sardonic, gallows humor is appropriate when one is in hell. Dooming someone to hell because they laughed at a down syndrome meme is just silly, though, and I think it detracted from the rest of the story.

I think you'd have been better served to have Satan explicitly suggest that they all died in a cave in when he first meets them. Then they get to worry about existential matters, doubt themselves, wonder which of their friends may have led them to their deaths. More weight, there.

I can't upvote !Hat's post hard enough. But since this is the only story left with only two reviews, I should say a little more about it.

First of all, this gets major points from me for simply being poetry in a short-story round. I'm sure this took all three writing days -- and judging by the ending, wasn't even complete when the deadline hit.

The core rhyme scheme here is ... let's just say a daring choice. Your stanzas go AAAB CCCD EEEF etc, meaning that you're constraining yourself hard for most of the stanza before all of a sudden you careen outward with a terminal line that doesn't match with anything else anywhere. Oddly enough, I think there are ways in which it structurally works for you, in the sense that each set of lines ends in the poetic equivalent of a deceptive cadence, that lack of resolution driving the reader to push onward for resolution and lending the piece a sort of restless momentum that fits with the prompt. That said, it's also subliminally uncomfortable for the same reason, though over the course of the piece I sort of adapted to it.

My favorite couplet:

Pinned by the briny, shifting weight
Of sea-held distaste, dislike, hate--

I also really liked the section about the mermaids where the poem split in two with some right-justified lines.

My least favorite stanza:

Alone she found herself once more,
Still thinking of yon distant shore.
Deciding to protests ignore,
She for the ocean headed.

s/protests/grammar/ # ;-p

Seriously, I can understand why you felt like you had to twist that third line into a pretzel for the rhyme, but the fourth line doesn't rhyme with anything, and has literally the same cadence if you say "She headed for the ocean".

Now, there's something to be said for consistency. The AAAB rhyme scheme felt super weird to me as I settled into the poem, but by sticking with it, you owned it and made it feel like this poem's thing. Similarly, there's an argument that, even if your noun-verb inversions are a grammatical trainwreck, by doing so consistently that makes it feel more like a stylistic conceit. But I don't think that doubling down on that second thing helped you nearly as much as the first. There's nothing wrong with an odd rhyme scheme, other than it drawing attention to itself, whereas grammatical inversions force textual reparsing and make your rhymes look forced.

One place where consistency isn't so much a thing is the structure. Seemingly on a whim, this breaks its AAAB structure to go ABBA or AABB or whatever; it's fond of splitting up its four-beat lines into two two-beat lines (and setting those lines off with line breaks); there's a few stanzas where it slips into common meter (1 line of 4 iambic feet followed by 1 line of 3, repeat); and other such variations that are too common to make this feel like this adheres to its chosen style well and not common enough to give this a Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock anything-goes metrical feel. That variation does keep the form from getting stale -- crucial in poetry this long -- but does cost you a lot of style points. On the other hand, extra credit for using some of those breaks to challenge yourself a little more: e.g. emphasizing tight internal rhymes when you break a 4-4 couplet into 2-2-4 lines.

Ultimately, though, despite this story's problems outlined here and above, I'm left with a positive overall impression. With the luxury of time, this needs to work on using natural grammar and vocabulary rather than contorting words into place. That's going to be a lot of extra work, and slow and thankless work at that. But if I spot this poem its linguistic contortions (and its running out of time at the end), this is super ambitious -- a swing and a hit. Please turn this into a polished final form, but even as-is it goes near the top of my slate.

Tier: Strong

Edit: Aw, damn, this really should have made finals IMHO. Small short-story rounds and their tiny finalist pools are a cruel tyrant. :( Still, this gets an honorable mention from me, and a round of applause for tackling the short-story writeoffs in I Wanna Be The Guy difficulty level.

No Shortcuts


I think there's a lot to be said for a “literary style” – heavy with vivid metaphors, interesting phrasing and baroque sentence structures. But here, while I applaud the attempt, I can't say it's working for me.

Let's look at the first paragraph. The first sentence is good – it's information-heavy and comes with a vivid metaphor. As a point of nitpicking, I suppose you could say you'd grasp at rose-bushes despite the thorns. And it might help to extend the metaphor a bit – “to try and stop yourself being carried away” or something like that.

The second sentence overdoes it though. It's a Jackson Pollock of mixed metaphors, leaving no raly impression save a sort of generalised archness. Stick to one vivid image if you can. Better yet, extend the previous metaphor.

Next up, another nitpick: “I was growing white hairs” – why not just say “I was getting old”? If you want to be subtle, you work that information – the signs of old age – into your existing sentence structures.

Later, we get: “Here there appeared a construction of a shining light with small spheres that surrounded it.” From later reading, I suppose this must be the Solar System. But this is evident from the description – and the description itself seems rather limp in comparison to the beginning.

That's all for style. What of substance?

I'm not sure I see much of it.

Once you pull back the gauze of Shikasta the stricken, what's left? Life is painful. Please don't kill yourself, because light. It's not demonstrated, dramatically or otherwise. It doesn't come by metaphor. It doesn't even come by allegory. It's a lecture given by one character to the other – a platitude, unexamined and unchallenged.

And, worse, the conceit itself undermines the message. When we die – that's final. That's it. Game over. No do-overs. When these creatures die, or commit suicide, they have to wait about for a bit and then get a lecture about light. It's not really the same thing.

I don't know if I can get behind this. Maybe there's some deeper level of meaning here that I'm not astute enough to see. But, since I can't see it, I guess I'll have to settle for this …

Seconding >>horizon 's edit so freaking hard.

I work in one of those hotels that strives for posh restaurant service, where they present the food all artistic-y, and you end up with a lot of ugly-duckling food being put aside for the staff to pick at. So sometimes I'll come in and there's just, like, an entire plate of cheesecake there for me to steal. And it'll be made up of the bits where the cream collapsed, or the biscuit crumbled, or the strawberries fell off, or they're wrong-shaped edge-pieces or what-have-you, and I will not care a single whit because it's an entire plate of cheesecake.

Reading this was like finding one of those. There's bits where the rhythm stumbles into off-beats, and bits where the rhyme scheme does what it feels like, and bits where the sentences sound like Yoda with Tourette's, and I just do not flipping care, because none of its lumpiness detracts from the creamy delicious fable that is its essential core. Bits like

No songs of war,
Nor angry shore,
Disturbed her well-earned rest.
No swelling crests
That tried their best
To pull her to sea-floor

But from the depths did manifest
A softer song’s encore.

- were just lovely; however much your rhythm or rhymes stumble, when you get it right you get it right. The concept and the world are just adorable, the tale was sweet and gripping, and even if the ending was anticlimactic, it was the right kind of anticlimax; not bad-writing, but intentional, carefully-built, and leaving a hollow sorrow in its passing. Top contender, sir or ma'am.

================================

(Hmm.)

(>Fairy wants make poetry cool among her friends.)
(>Fairy makes poem.)
(>Fairy presents poem to her friends.)
(>Fairies go 'eh'. )

(> Fairy is a Writeoff-er.)

:V

This story was based on the album Moon Colony Bloodbath which you can listen to in its entirety here.

The character, his past and his history? Those are all biographical accounts of the life of the singer, John Darnielle. This story references the songs -- honestly, just look at the Sunset Tree, Life of the World to Come and All Eternals Deck albums for a good place to start. Then throw in Transcendental Youth because why not, eh?

This story was written in the style of Darnielle's book, Wolf In White Van, possibly my favourite book of all time. Easily a contender. So to those saying it's a confusing style; Bug report noted, fic working as intended. Could tweak a lot of it, but since it didn't even make finals, I'm just going to hack it up into my favourite segments and never come back this way again.

This is gonna medal, and it's gonna deserve it.

Slice of Life stories, as we call 'em around FIMFic, live or die on their character portrayals, and on whether or not they can draw us into the conflicts despite the low stakes. This grounds itself in a lot of well-chosen details -- most notably the gynecological experiences, and the constellation of worries accompanying medication, and the way that ties into the family history -- that really bring the characters to life. Another factor, I think, is that the characters are dealing with problems that (while ultimately small) are messy in the way that real life is. A third thing I appreciated here was the small and subtle things this reinforces through repetition, like the narrator's asides about their role in the relationship talks.

I would have liked to see a more concrete focus to the story, and a less hanging ending, but those are really preferences rather than problems. I just can't think of anything this does wrong. Well done.

Tier: Top Contender

>>ZaidValRoa >>Not_A_Hat
It's not Asimov's first law, it's Newton's first law: An object in motion will stay in motion, and an object at rest will stay at rest, unless acted upon by an external force. That ties very neatly in with the themes throughout, of the ways that we intervene in each other's lives and the ways we react when forces act upon us from outside.

>>horizon I dunno. I mean, you may very well be right, but... I bet I could make just as strong of a case that it's the first law of thermodynamics or something. :/

"Subtlety is dangerous" I guess, but... it's not like the title is super important in the writeoffs.

>>Not_A_Hat

I keep telling people, "Don't be subtle in the WriteOffs, it just leads to heartbreak."

>>Cold in Gardez

eh

>>Cold in Gardez
I guess that depends if one would rather win, or get useful feedback on how the subtlety worked.

>>Not_A_Hat
>>Cold in Gardez
>>Cassius
>>Haze

I guess I should further explain my disdain for this sort of "Don't Be Subtle" comment. The write-off is an opportunity to be creative and try out new things that you are personally interested in with the added benefit of having some high-powered feedback given by people who are also passionate about writing. Discouraging that sort of creativity and risk by loosely implying that those ideas are unable to succeed I think is not only against the spirit of the Write Off itself, but also encouraging writers to think less of the audience's intellect and disregard the feedback they give.

I understand that none of us are story-telling experts or professional critics, but as far as the pony community / general population is concerned, a lot of us are leagues ahead in terms of experience. When we as a whole have trouble understanding the principle and basic ideas that construct a story, it is not often because we were just too dense to pick up on the message. The Hemingway's Iceberg is only useful if it manages to crack the surface. Just because sometimes it never becomes visible to the reader in a certain instance or story and fails to score well with readers, it doesn't mean that the principle can simply be thrown out or that subtlety is a component of stories needing to be excised in order to succeed.

Writing a subtle story is definitely more difficult and being able to inform the audience of the significance or meaning of events without being overtly direct is a writing talent. I think recognizing that difficulty and being unfazed when confronted with a lukewarm reception is more important than how it will score. Additionally, I think that a well-executed, subtle story is perfectly capable of being competitive. Don't be afraid to be ambitious.

I have some time to kill this morning so I ended up reading that. Don’t ask me why, I’ll pretend I don’t know.

Oh, of course I apologise. All that I’m able to report on is nitpicking. I bail out as non-native for the rest.
---

absently fiddling twice in the first scene. You like that turn of phrase, don’t you? :P

Of course it's Newton first law, the law of inertia. But pay attention: something's wrong with the physics you hint at. Gravity times height? That's speed. Mass time acceleration, that's force. Not homogeneous.

Some garbage here: “It’ll be close to both our parents, too,” she says, and I can almost see the future she’s imaginin, hanging in the shadows us.

Wow Is it really too much to ask to want to spend time with him? So many tos :P

far to little and insignificant to warrant – you lack a 'o' here ;)

Okay – let's get to the brass tacks:

• Fiancée is for a girl (final e). The masculine, what you want here, is simply fiancé ;
• Sasha, as Nikita, is a boy name in Russian (it's actually Alexander). Yeah, it ends up in -a, and Elton John had it wrong as well, but it is, nonetheless.

Otherwise, great work. Thanks for adding a lot of words to my notebook, on which I don't draw sketches, but I keep trace of new words I can later rote memorise. My only way to improve my English :(

NO REPLY


“I think it’s time.” an empty sigh escaped my lips. It had come down to something I feared and had been avoiding since it happened. My dear childhood friend. If only you could see me now. As sure as I was that my appearance and constant success would surprise her. Yet all I see in the mirror is a man pondering how Sarah would have grown up if we were never separated.


So here I stood in front of her grave. Words failing to say anymore with a sealed envelope in hand. It took everything to hold back my grip from crushing the sealed note held inside. Instead my body settled for a rather tight pinch between fingertips. It was so hard to let that letter go, let alone talk to her. It had been years and I’m sure her spirit would haunt me for avoiding it for so long. I wouldn’t blame her, she was rather energetic and craved my attention always.


Reading the words on the gravestone I could feel my eyes trying to pump out tears that had long since dried. It didn’t stop my whole being from aching and wanting to flee. To hide behind my desk and act like it never happened. This, was reality. This was her fate and I couldn’t handle it before. It took me to forget her to remember what was so good about her in life. So for the final time I wrote one last piece. It didn’t matter if she read it or not and I knew I was never going to get the reply I had worked so hard for. It didn’t matter to me anymore. For that will come when I welcome my own end with open arm. No rush to meet it, even though my heart pounded to speak with her. For now my last poem laid there upon the stone that sat right atop of Sarah’s body. A simple poem.


“Fame and fortune don’t mean a thing if there’s nothing to love.

Every ache and pain couldn’t match the loss I’ve received.

For every memory we spent I will never deny ever again.

For it’s you who I love, and life canl never be the same.

So it’s with great sorrow that I finally bid her farewell,

Waiting for that fateful day when we cross paths

Until then, I understand there will be no reply.”


The world had gone dark. Unfamiliar territory rose in place of the graveyard I had been standing in. Could it be that it was just my whole heart uncomfortable with leaving her side? Or that the world was now opened in front of my eyes? Just when I thought it couldn’t get harder than to see her, leaving her for the final time stung the most. Knowing that her absence will haunt me, I could only move forward. For life continues. For some people unspoken words is what we live for.

---

Woo-hoo! Hey not bad with only ⅓ of a story written! Truth be told this story was suppose to be much much larger! Unfortunately I had started writing very late and had less than a day to complete this. It was a rather large script and I had been craving to get this done, so I did. In the end I wrote what I wrote with half of this story shaping up to be how I wanted to be while the other half suffered as I feared the upcoming deadline. So for now I’m happy it had an effect while perplexed at the reactions for this story. So thanks for the following people for taking the time to read my piece. I do hoped you enjoyed it and I look forward to more of your critics in the future.


Scramblers And Shadows - I’m just gonna guess this isn’t your cup of tea? You hit the nail with the intro but seemed to ignore the details of being in an individual’s personal life. I tried making it more intimate with the character in question but if the events of his life bored you I can understand. This type of drama isn’t my favorite and thusly I failed to really create any passion in writing it. It really did get tiring of the same effect over and over again, which is why it’s suppose to be shortened to lessen that blow to the reader. Trust me we both read stories that would drag on a lot longer for these types of scenarios. Was the added ending here good enough for you? It was suppose to be the end to the story.


ZavidValRosa - Wow! You’re very passionate about things aren’t you? Ooooh! Come and see me sometime, big boy! Now! Don’t mind the flirting pretty pony. I’m happy to see you truly enjoyed this tale. I agree with you that it could have been more and some points were vague. Though that’s how the story was built to be, to be vague until the unveiling of the problem that had been hiding under everyone’s nose. Minor details I thought should be obvious but I guess more detail was needed to get certain things across. A therapist encourages growth and adaptation to situations in a person’s life that affect the way they live. That phrase is meant to hint that the good doctor was trying to get our main character into moving on with his life, which his mother most likely explained already that it’s a traumatic event that’s causing the obsession. Same goes for you this should have been the ending but alas! I never did put it in.


Not_A_Hat - Yes it did! Yes, you can. It’s much harder than other profession, but you can indeed make money off of writing poems. Also he never forgot about her. Keep in mind he writes for her and looks for a single woman’s approval, not thousands of others. The unspoken words we sometimes crave in life is not dependent on how many people or how they praise us, sometimes it’s just one person whom we look up to. Actually the memory loss was suppose to trigger an epiphany. Something to enlighten him that he was mourning for too long in denial rather than dealing with the reality of the harsh cold truth. Also one more thing, money can give you everything. If you read back he took the job to continue his writing for that one girl, which was suppose to trigger more insight on how much he loved her. I guess these points didn’t come out well enough and that they needed to be looked over. For now I need to stop assuming and make things clear! Roger that!


Crimmar - Yay! This one is my favorite comment! Crimmar! Love you! Yes it’s unfortunate that he lost his job via untold and unofficial means with probably a letter of termination saying “that’s that folks!”. He kinda got the job in the same way. Just out of the blue. I figured the story hinted that his work ethics were rather abnormal and that he was being taken advantage of because he was purely a writing machine. Another thing is he really didn't care for the job and it wasn't a important factor to him so why would it be in his journal? The purpose of the company was to portray the world in how things continue to revolve around a single person and how humanity itself cannot fathom one person’s troubling life. All in all it’s that fact that I wanted to point out. For no one is special. I agree on the ending. It was suppose to be a much bigger project, but oh well! Life goes on right? Why cry for me when you can just read my stuff?

So this was a fun round. I’m so glad I got this out of my system. This one idea has been screaming in my head for over a month now. I got what I deserved and expected no less. Excellent analyzing guys! Glad we could share this experience together! For now I hope you four look forward to more of my work, cause trust me! I’m starting to get the flow of things here and my style is changing to suit your tastes. So here’s to brighter days good-reads and heart-filled writing!

>>Cassius
>>Haze
>>Cold in Gardez

I basically agree with Cassius. I mean, I say 'subtlety is dangerous', instead of advising against it, because I think it's is a high-risk high-reward proposition. Done right, it's very rewarding. Lean on it too much, or don't calibrate it correctly against your audience, and all that work is lost energy.

I also think it's a step that every writer needs to take at some point. One of the principles that I base my 'theory of writing' on is: "The more indirectly something can be communicated, the more strongly it will be felt." Of course, this is dependent on the communication actually making it through in the first place, which is where the danger comes in.

And hey, say what you will of show/tell, but the idea behind it is about subtlety. So... I think these risks need to be taken in order to push a 'good' or 'decent' story into 'great' territory.

I'm a bit of a bad reader in this respect, I think, because I want stories to be subtle, but I'm actually not a very insightful in many ways. I hope I'm not too frustrating to people in my reviews. :P

Was it being particularly subtle? I mean, it mentions the wording of Newton's First Law, like, five times:

It will remain motionless unless acted upon by an outside force. So long as the force of my hand balances out the force of gravitational acceleration, it will exist in equilibrium.

I don’t stop. I can’t stop. I have to keep moving, keep running, and maybe if I run long enough today I’ll stay running. I’ll stay in motion, and then Klarissa won’t have killed my equilibrium but shifted it.

The force of their equilibrium is too strong, and Carmen won’t allow any outside doubts to tarnish the dream of home she’s chasing.

She beams at me, then, and maybe it’s a silly presumption, but I can’t help but feel like her motion has changed, like she’s finally realized she can't follow the road to her dreams if she’s surrounded herself with a wall of her parents’ expectations.

Maybe all she needed was an outside force.

I shake my head as equilibrium reasserts itself.

- although, yes, you have to know Newton's First Law before you can pick it up, and it's not exactly common knowledge ^^ I guess it's just one of those niggling semi-unsolvable things: if you don't bald-facedly mention the First Law in the text, then anyone who doesn't know it can't appreciate the references; if you do, it feels like you're shoving up a big flashing sign going "Look! Look! Look how clever I am! Look at it!"

I dunno.

In any case, a lovely low-key read. I really can't say anything else.

>>MonarchDodora

I am of the opinion that this subtlety in that you don't have to know anything about Newton's First Law to understand the contents of what is being overtly said, but there is a subtext connecting those descriptions together.

The River Lady

Even after thinking about it for some time, I'm not sure if I like this story or not. It certain has its fair share of faults:

The faux-fairytale style of prose doesn't quite ring true, and often comes off as plodding. The dialogue has the same affliction.

The characters and their relationship felt shallow. This could charitably be interpreted as an attempt to give them a sort of universal, ethereal quality – but that doesn't quite fly, so rather than silhouettes glimmering in the mist, we're left a pair of laminated cardboard cutouts. Something else that feels like a symptom of this: The narrative insists on referring to the characters as “the boy/man” and “the Lady” even in circumstances where a simple pronoun would suffice – and yet we're given both their names. The effect is at once arch and mundane. Pick one and stick with it, unless you've got a point to make by mixing the two.

The themes also lack depth. We get an explicit chat about violence and war – but neither party has anything really significant to say about the matter, and the matter is eventually dropped without going anywhere. The matter of pollution fares slightly better. It governs the whole story, and for the most part avoids lecturing, but there still wasn't much there. From the intersection of the two, I suppose you could dig out a theme of nature versus civilisation, a trope which was beaten into the ground a long time ago.

Finally, zooming out a little bit more, I can't help but feel the entire thing is cloyingly sentimental. Everything's fine in the end. Isn't life hopeful? But the story never does any hard thinking, so the happiness and affirmation feels undeserved.

And yet …

For all the dissection above, I didn't dislike this. I can't hold my instinctive aversion to sentimentality against it too much. And there are a few gems in there – the lady playing tag stood out to me, as did the weak hug near the end.

Long Haul

That's an interesting intro. One the one hand, it packs a lot of good information into a small space, and does a lot with implication. On the other, the prose itself is painfully slapdash. We jump from “the moment he spotted her” to “He'd noticed her the moment” In the space of a single sentence. We get a sore thumb cliché soon after, coupled with a jarring repetition from “stodd out” to “standing”.

I'm honestly not sure whether to have high expectations or not. Well, let's see.

Okay, finished.

Well, the prose issue never really lets up. A lot of the phrasing is awkward to downright jarring, and redundancies pop up often.

But once we look past to the scene portrayed, things get a lot better. The first three quarters are a masterclass in how to effectively dial up the tension. The story relies on the opacity of Rudy's and his passenger's motives, which is a difficult trick to pull off. Here it's done without ever feeling forced. Power, danger and sex loom over the scene without ever ruining it by revealing themselves.

But the ending, while not bad, dampens my enthusiasm somewhat. It's a little too twee and cutesy for my taste. Still, I can get behind the main theme here – appearances can be deceptive – even if it a well-worn one.

Wow. This wallops you as hard as a hooch draught.

Sometimes you wonder: is the beast really inside the cage, or outside? In this case, you deliberately unleashed the beasts outside – setting off the dignity of the woman inside – calling up a collection of epitomes: the ruthless boy, the black guy recording the whole incident without taking any action, and the edgy cop that will fire even though he's not threatened.

There's prolly a lot of symbolism behind this — Refugees being virtually caged in the country they land in because they don't speak the language? Refugees accepting to debase themselves because they would do anything to flee their country? Other people, especially young, barely regarding refugees as humans? There's probably a mix of all that.

As I pointed out on the chat, it's not the first time I read a story about someone locking themselves up in a cage to draw attention to a cause, but this one escalated far beyond what I was familiar with.

Well done.

There seems to be an interesting split here, of people praising this story for its impact and people uneasy about whether it's making any point separate from the context of its nonfictional source. Apologies, author, but I'm going to have to fall on the latter side of the division. Before I do, let me make clear: one, I commend you for being up front about the real-life inspiration, and nothing I say should be construed as an attack on your originality; and two, like the source, this does carry an undeniable emotional impact, so if I were evaluating it strictly based on effectiveness this would be very strong.

My reservation is … well, it comes down to what in my head I call "crossover scoring". As >>ShortNSweet notes, the plot here treads along very similar lines to Abramović's performance art. When you're drawing from a source that already has a powerful emotional impact, I don't feel like I can credit you for any impact arising from references or retellings of that story/event, because what's powerful about that comes from someone else's work. What I have to evaluate this story on is in the ways in which it distinguishes itself from the source, and the ways in which those differences impact my emotional engagement.

I'm going to skip over a bunch of stuff best summarized as "I agree with ShortNSweet" about the nature of that divergence and its effect on the story's impact. (tl;dr: the refugee angle here is new, but feels underplayed; and grounding the actions in two characters instead of an anonymous mob just makes this a moral about a single psychopath instead of the capabilities of humans in general.) Crucially, though, what makes this story as a Writeoff entry stumble for me is: the conflict (the game of chicken: will the artist follow lethal directions? will the audience escalate?) and the theme (when given power over another individual's life, people are scary) are basically identical to Abramović. Using slightly different events to make the same point … well, pales next to the original, because it doesn't take the courage of the original to strike out into the unknown. Plus what >>Not_A_Hat said about the safety of fiction.

(Well, wait, you might say: doesn't this tell its own story by killing the performer? That gets into issues of sacrificing life for art, police violence, etc. But that's more or less a detail of the plot, when the big takeaway of the piece is conflict and theme — it's like saying that Gamera destroyed a Japanese naval base rather than Godzilla destroying Tokyo, and while there may be some smaller unique issues that raises, the core message is still for science not to play god with nature, and the core theme a warning about mankind's hubris. Yes, you get credit for those smaller things, but they're just individual spices in the same recipe.)

What this needs in order to be a strong piece on its own merits is to break that mold. Here's one modest suggestion: make the core of this piece about the audience reaction to the performance rather than the tragedy of the performer. What do I mean? Well, what if … when the gun is pulled out … instead of a policeman arriving, Jeff looks on in horror as Mike continues to gleefully escalate, and then in a moment of decisiveness/curiosity/vindictiveness/etc, says "Amira, shoot Mike in the leg." Suddenly, the story is VERY decisively not about her decision to relinquish agency — but about Jeff's decision to take control of the escalation. With a little bit of effort you could construct a similar scenario which turns this into a question of what Amira chooses when she is handed agency back. Actually, this could tackle a very big question without major changes simply by not having the cop show up and having Jeff tell her to kill someone else rather than herself — though you couldn't end the story there! Whose fault would that death be? The legal/ethical implications of voluntarily ceded agency is a question Abramović's performance never answered, and this would be a hell of a way to tackle it. Any of those changes would very decisively make this its own thing.

Tier: I don't think I can tier this. "Misaimed" means it's fundamentally unable to be edited into something I would like, which is false. But any other rating faces that weird gap between its overall quality and the quality of its purely original aspects. I'm going to score it low as a contest entry, but that doesn't reflect my opinion of its quality in the abstract.

An interesting concept though I can't help but think that I've seen this idea before, maybe more than once, though for the life of me I can't remember where. It's infuriating.

Personally, although there is some nice worldbuilding here, what with the hint that there is magic behind a more mundane world in a Harry Potter kind of way, it is so vague that it annoyed me. I wasn't sure how things were supposed to be or how out of the normal the interaction with the kid was or if that's how it often went, simply meeting each other and going their own way or a more organized system somewhere else or... Very, very vague with no hints to entice me to wonder what else is there getting me, as I said, annoyed.

Also, I'm not sure what the MC is supposed to be doing. Is following that thread going to get him somewhere where he can make a change, is he only supposed to see his own moments and what got him to his situation, is it simply a random occurence that he ends up at places he knows as he goes through... well, everything? We don't know, and I get the feeling that he doesn't know either. There's no plan, at least as I understood it, and he feels like a "leaf in the wind" protagonist that has been stripped of all possible action. I think this story would fit better a whole other different kind of story or prompt, perhaps one of powerlessness, rather than the current one.

Well, after a few days I come back to Oaths for my final slate. Unfortunately, time has given me opportunities to consider this story's flaws.

I stand by my earlier praise -- this is a tense story, and tension is good. It has high stakes, which is good. It has characters we come to care about, which is good.

But what does it do with any of those things? In the end, nothing. This story does an excellent job of establishing a setting and mood, and then it fails to capitalize on them.

We have a main character who is both a slaver and a murderer. His death is threatened throughout the story, and seems to be inevitable. Either he will die, or he will do something extraordinary to avoid death. But in the last few paragraphs he suddenly has an 'oh!' moment and realizes that he can just have other people die on his behalf. Nothing we were led to care about in the previous six thousand words ends up mattering.

The stakes were wonderfully high. This story had potential, but the author inexplicably discarded it, deciding instead to spare a main character who doesn't deserve to be spared.

But, as we so often say in the Writeoffs, this story was well-written. Exceptionally well written. Of all the stories in this round that tried to say nothing, this one did it the best, and I think it may win for that reason.

Thank you all very much for your feedback. I may have failed hard with this story, but your comments gave me some specific things to look into and work on. So that's a win in my book.

Why did this go wrong then?

Basically Scramblers and Shadows summed it up perfectly: I was trying to write a novel-sized tale in the space of a short story, and started without knowing exactly where I was going. Not having a grasp on story structure, grammar, and formatting didn't help either.

I mostly just went with what seemed like the obvious thing for my characters to do, then changed and added parts in an effort to make it make sense, but in the end I failed to communicate central points like what I had imagined the setting to be like, or that Emily was masking as both the League and Madame Morrow, for the excitement, the fame, and the money that'd come with the boost to her husband's career.

Still, what surprised me most about all this, was discovering that I don't have an idea what a short story is. I can't say in what way other than length one would differ from a regular book - so that's another thing I'll look into before I chime in on a short story round again.

There are a lot of people in the world who suffer as much for noble purposes as any hero ever did, and no one notices. It’s nice to think that someone, somewhere, sees and remembers. Thank you for this story, Author.

Back when I was on my college's speech and debate team, we had a criticism we sometimes lobbed at particular speakers: "rhetorical masturbation."

Was the word-smithing here interesting? Yes, I guess it was. But reading a paragraph like this:

All I usually recall of my dreams are sensations and moods, so I do not want you to assume too much about the scene of my story. Some may want to imagine a place of air and light, perhaps with shining clouds and golden tracery. But these are things of our own experience, and they are not universal. As beings born under a star’s light, we cherish warmth and blue skies, and fear the cold and dark. I do not know if colors or dimensions had any meaning in the scene of my dream. There may have been other senses I could not conceive a way to perceive, something my brain was not built to interpret. I could only take what was given me and assume it was right.

Is like drinking a tablespoon of maple sugar. What precisely is this paragraph trying to say? What's with all the digressions? If you chopped out all the deadwood, how many words would this story really be?

This story bubbles with conceit. Why is the dialogue entirely in italics? Are quotation marks out of style? Were they not hip enough? What is with this line?

My child, look at me. I do request it of you.

I'm sorry, author. I see from the reviews that other readers appreciate this style of writing. The actual story, when one sifts through the dross and gilt enough to find it, shows promise. But, in this form, it is unrealized.

>>Cold in Gardez

Is like drinking a tablespoon of maple sugar.

Sounds delicious.

Huh. I like the slow reveal on the paradox and causality. I might be slow, but it took me until the fuel pump before I realized who Toby was chatting with.

In terms of critique, this story took a little longer than necessary to get started. The whole first 500 words or so seemed unneeded, just jabbering about roads and how they have two ends. Perhaps its my biases showing, but I always feel an author should start as close as possible to the story's essential action.

But that's nit-picking. I liked the idea here, and the way it slowly developed. The vehicle repair reminded me of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," which actually had a scene with a small metal part dropped into the deep recesses of an engine block. Before I read that, it had never occurred to me that mechanics had these sorts of problems.

Magic probably helps, I guess.

It's pretty clear early on that Rudy isn't just a random John. He's too morally self-aware of what's going on:

She shrugged noncommittally. “Anyplace but here I suppose.” She kept her voice even and unconcerned, but Rudy doubted that the slight shivering he saw was from the cold.

and

It was clearly a struggle for her to not back away, but she stood her ground. But even with his light grip, Rudy could feel her trembling under his fingers. Feel how tense, how tightly wound she was.

But what else could he be? The two answers that leap to mind are "psychopath" or "do-gooder in disguise." Secretly, I'm hoping for the former. That's a lot more interesting.

The story's development is nice. Some elements seem rather pat -- what if the girl actually had a drug problem? But these are avoided by the deft step of simply not giving the girl a drug problem.

The climax is long. Really long. Like, a third of the story is Rudy dropping the poor little broken bird off at her new home and rhapsodizing about what a nice person he is. I think this could be a lot shorter and still be effective.

Also, called it: do-gooder. Kinda wish he'd been a psychopath, though.

10:48 AM


When I got a few paragraphs into this, I was worried it was going to steal the concept of those Final Destination films. A while later, I was relieved to be proven wrong – it's not about warmed-over fatalism, it's about time-travel and utilitarian morality!

Then I got to the halfway point.

How disappointing. How cruel, even. I thought I'd managed to avoid such a fate, only for it to sneak in through he window and get me when I wasn't looking…

Yes, I do have an issue with this FD-fatalism conceit. It's just so silly. It's always struck me as a sort of wimpy anthropomorphism, where some human values are imputed to the universe, but then things stop short, terrified of going the whole way to petulant and jealous gods. Because it's more mysterious this way? Except it isn't. It's bathetic. It's as effective as some guy in a lace curtain making ghost noises.

Maybe I'm being unfair. So I don't like the conceit. What about the story itself?

Well, the thing about the story is that it doesn't make sense. The ideas it lays down for us contradict themselves over and over again.

So, for example, in one of the pasts, Jo talks about the problem of evil and how the deity must be apathetic. All well and good, but given the events of the story, it's very clearly not apathetic. It obviously cares a great deal. I don't know why, but it does.

It's not just the big stuff either. Take this quote: “Matt had honed his ability to read Jo’s face to a knife’s point over the years. There would be no deceiving him.” At which point I have to wonder how she manages to spend close to every other moment of the story deceiving him.

“Matt, I didn’t do anything!” A lie by omission. The narration, meanwhile, lies by commission.

Again:

Matt was a man of reason. He believed in empiricism and logic—but logic didn’t apply to “The Perfect 10.” It sat there, smacking him right in the face, challenging everything he ever believed about the Earth and its rules. When rational thought failed, irrational thought replaced it: fringe theories, conspiracies, government cover-ups. Matt and the rest of the world, when faced with no other answers, ate it up.

Once you get past all the contortions, what this paragraph says is that Matt is a man of reason who, the moment things get tough, abandons any pretence of rationality.

Even more condensed – what this paragraph says is that Matt is a bit of a knob.

Which, at least, is a trait he shares with the other main characters. If there's one thing that unifies Matt, Jo and the universe here, it's a sense of overblown self-importance coupled with relentless immaturity. And that's the other big thing that irritates me about this.

So, I guess this has been another one of my special S&S-is-being-a-dickhead reviews. For the sake of housekeeping, though, there are a couple more things I want to note.

On the bad side, a lot of your dialogue feels worn and clichéd, especially during the arguments.

On the good side, your actual hook is excellent, up to and including the point where Matt misses his death. It's effectively dramatic, interesting, and it serves to effectively demonstrate the first part of your conceit. Similarly, the technique of prefacing the scenes with times is a cool way of weaving the theme into the structure. So well done with that.

AHA, IT WAS ME ALL ALONG!

And now my retrospective. I'm writing this before the results go down simply because I just want to pass the time before the results are announced.

>>ZaidValRoa
>>Bachiavellian
>>Not_A_Hat
>>Scramblers and Shadows

So most of the sticking point from everyone seems to revolve around the story's conclusion, of which I had hoped would come across as more ambiguous than it had, but I think that is simply hard to look past the utilitarianism of the situation or see it as anything other than petty selfishness, which was not my intention. Ultimately this story was intended to be a deconstruction of the idea of fatalism as a whole and the meaning of fate in as a general idea, to which the ultimate thesis is that fate is a stupid, broken system, and whatever greater good that is used to justify its continued existence is not worth the means.

In short, fate is not a comforting concept. Putting meaning on things as "destiny" is dangerous, because it implies that those were never given a chance to live and be happy were "destined" to be that way. I find the idea of fate and fatalism's existence to be repugnant, personally.

I think perhaps that the problem is that the idea of fate is too tied to the real-life and it can be easily misunderstood that when I talk about fate in this fictional sense, I am talking about the reality of our real-life world, instead of the concept, which is why the conclusion ultimately comes across as more self-serving than necessary.

Nonetheless.

>>Bachiavellian

As for complaints, the mid-story perspective shift was a little jarring for me, but I'm not sure how to tell the story without it, so I'm not gonna dock any points for that.

Honestly, I felt that this was going to be the biggest sticking point for people, and I was pleasantly surprised nobody called me out on my bullshit for POV-shifting like I was writing in third person omniscient.

But the leap from "I'll do anything to save my boyfriend." to "This unjust universe and everyone in it deserves to die!" is pretty massive, and we only get a handful of paragraphs to bridge those two character points.

I regret not establishing this transition in the scene prior. I overestimated the building I had done in the last two scenes to establish that Jo was spitefully going out to basically break the universe, and her entire diatribe is too far a jump from simply being dispassionately resentful about fate. One thing I regret the most is not more directly supplementing the narrative with more bits illustrating the inherent cruelty of a universe driven by fate.

It's hard to get the reader to get behind telling the universe to go fuck itself.

>>ZaidValRoa

If you're unable to let go to the degree Jo is, then use your time travelling powers to re-live all the time you've had together.

Okay, it is only one sentence in the dialogue, but this actually did happen in the story.

Seriously, are you so self-centered that you don't think you can't ever love anyone ever again?

I wish I made this story about a cute little girl and her father instead of two lovers, because I think I couldn't communicate the idea of "true love" or "unconditional love" through the narration hard enough to make it understood that isn't an option. I might rewrite it under that framework later, to be honest.

But yeah, the ultimate point here I was trying to make is that some people are simply irreplaceable to others beyond any sort of utilitarianism. I think if I rewrote the character of Jo to be a father and Matt to be a cute daughter, this sort of connection would be more apparent. What do you think? I think it would be a lot harder for people to make the argument that a father's unwillingness to see his daughter die by being shot in the face as being selfish, and a lot less inclined to tell him to "get another one." I think, also, the ending would have been much well-received. Also the pre-existing scenes would largely still work.

At this point Cassius realizes that he should have wrote the story with that framework instead . Oh well.

>>Scramblers and Shadows

So essentially, I'm not sure how you did it, but you've sort of read completely opposite to my intentions, and the mechanism of the conceit that I tried to establish. I think it stems from this:

anthropomorphism

All well and good, but given the events of the story, it's very clearly not apathetic. It obviously cares a great deal. I don't know why, but it does.

"The universe had been skewed, thrown off its axis. This was only the first groan, the first buckling of the cosmos under the strain caused by an interloper mussing with its gears. It was only a matter of time before more and more cogs fell out of place. Finally, the grand machine of the universe would break."

The idea that I went with is that fate and the universe are essentially one in the same. They're not personified beings, simply forces that exist. I think perhaps because of your experience with Final Destination, you are projecting the essence of a character onto the universe, where sans some admitted ambiguous lines, I did not create. The universe / fate are pretty much interchangeable in the story because they are simply just very complex machines. Jo and Matt aren't any more important than anyone as individuals living and dying on schedule in the story, but nobody besides Jo has the ability to casually undermine the universe's mechanics.

If there is a God in this universe, it would be a Spinoza's God, or a watchmaker God. A being that created the universe that was self-sufficient and left. As far as I'm concerned, As far as I'm concerned, God wouldn't be present in this story, which is why I find the charge of a Final Destination-esque fatalism to be all the more baffling.

I was relieved to be proven wrong – it's not about warmed-over fatalism, it's about time-travel and utilitarian morality!

WhyNotBoth.TacoGirl.

It really is about both though.

I don't really accuse this of people often, but I actually feel you are misreading the text in most of the cases you've quoted.

Matt had honed his ability to read Jo’s face to a knife’s point over the years. There would be no deceiving him.” At which point I have to wonder how she manages to spend close to every other moment of the story deceiving him.

This is demonstrated at least twice in previous scenes and another time afterwards that Jo has difficulties lying directly, and she often answers with a technical truth rather than lie. But most of the time she isn't lying or deceiving him, and is being perfectly genial, again which is established in the following dialogue. But even moreso, ignoring all of that, the circumstance in which this scene occurs is important, which is when Matt is directly attentive and confronting to Jo, which essentially happens no where else in the entire story. I find it confusing that you'd site this particular point.

“Matt, I didn’t do anything!” A lie by omission. The narration, meanwhile, lies by commission.

Well, this is more a matter of perspective of what Jo is talking about here contextually. Does failing to let Matt die as scheduled count as "doing something" or not? Probably not my best phrasing, but nonetheless, seems to be an odd semantic point to pick out.

Matt was a man of reason. He believed in empiricism and logic—but logic didn’t apply to “The Perfect 10.” It sat there, smacking him right in the face, challenging everything he ever believed about the Earth and its rules. When rational thought failed, irrational thought replaced it: fringe theories, conspiracies, government cover-ups. Matt and the rest of the world, when faced with no other answers, ate it up.

Once you get past all the contortions, what this paragraph says is that Matt is a man of reason who, the moment things get tough, abandons any pretence of rationality.

Even more condensed – what this paragraph says is that Matt is a bit of a knob.

Well no. When confronted with something completely supernatural, Matt finds refuge in far-fetched and unlikely rationalizations rather than simply admit the event is supernatural. I can't really speak to how people in real-life would react to a legitimately supernatural event beyond all known science, but I assume most people who couldn't believe that it had occurred would attach themselves to some sort of theory that sounds more plausible than "shit is magic."

I guess what I am saying, S&S, is that I find your read on my story to be fairly unsettling, because it is certainly not the story I thought I wrote.

So, I guess this has been another one of my special S&S-is-being-a-dickhead reviews.

I'm not sure what you really mean by this comment.

Anyways, thank you all for the feedback. If you think that the story would be better with the framing changes I described in response to Zaid, please comment and tell me so. I rewrite the entire thing, saving some of the core elements, then polish that version of the story up and submit it to a fiction anthology or something. Otherwise, I'll just try to add to what I already have.

The Psychopomp

This one here was my first foray into writing something original. Unfortunately, I was horribly hampered by lack of time. I had no more than three hours to come up with and write the story, and it resulted in going to work sleep-deprived that day.

Coming up with the story was... easy. More than that, I came up with a lot more that I had time for or even words if I did have the time. The Psychopomp, as a character, was indeed supposed to be distant. He is, for all intents and purposes, death, though his role is limited to guiding souls that pass on. He is an amalgamation of the Grim Reaper, Hermes, and Charon, a character who doesn't judge but is more similar to a tombstone. He is the eternal tombstone of everything that has died, never forgetting a single soul or what they say to him as they walk the road to infinity. He doesn't have a certain form, taking the shape that his wards are going to be more comfortable with, although he does show a preference. There were supposed to be a few more humanizing elements to him, a small desire for him to understand and experience further, but there simply wasn't enough time to portray this enough. I managed to insert a few, his tasting of the hero's feast for example or the sense of pride he feels for the father that keeps going.

The father and the hero were two of the three characters I wanted to insert. There was supposed to be a third one but I had to cut him out of the whole process. Again, time. There was a mirroring an opposite between the father and the hero, the hero marching through the roads challenges almost unhampered, while the father struggled and was mutilated. The hero did it for his own personal gain, the father only to say one last goodbye and hopefully somehow make his daughter know he was there. The hero doubted and turned back before claiming his prize, but the father went on. The last one, that was SUPPOSED to be there but I simply forgot to type down the defining line, was that the hero was the only one who managed this feat. The father was only the most recent of a multitude of souls who dared that journey and succeeded. Every tale of someone thinking he heard one last whisper, a dream after a loss, a feather touch while alone, they were all supposed to be the result of a lost loved one who went through all that for that brief, fading moment.

The ending was indeed an over-emotional mess. I had another one in mind, perhaps as over-emotional as that, but one that kind of merged the concept of infinity with the finite through the father's words to his child. He was supposed to say his goodbyes and become ready to depart, but the guide would always point him towards his child. There was going to be some interaction with the Psychopomp and at the end the father would simply reiterate his goodbyes, adding that he will always love his child. Then the road to the infinite would open and take him back, instantly taking him to the door.

I really wish I had the time to give everything its proper attention, or at least edit the damn thing. I didn't even manage a read over, and the experience has left me with the taste that I failed a good idea in the worst way possible.

I have an entire story about the time I learned my special talent was procrastination, but it's fairly irrelevant and I only have ten minutes before class starts so I'd just like to instead thank you all for your thoughts on Confines.

This thing is rife with tense changes, spelling errors, word garbage (sorry, Mono)--and just generally looks like it was written in the span of, like, six hours. Because it was.

I was kind of really busy during the writing period: in addition to the poem and Confines, I had six academic articles to read/annotate, four psychology essays to write, a book report to submit, and the final finishing touches to put on an academic article of mine that was recently accepted to a conference. (Plus my roommate had her 21st birthday party that Saturday).

Congrats to the medalists for their lovely stories, and a good job all around. As usual, y'alls prowess with the written word is simultaneously awe-inspiring and intimidating.

To our medal winners, Horizon, Oroboro & Fahrenheit: Congratulations and well done!


So --

Lamiak

Yeah, I wrote this. And I think the diagnosis is pretty clear. I got carried away with myself and tried to cram a novella-sized story into ~7k words. So while all the essential plot beats made it in, the important character groundwork got squeezed out.

Oops.

Anyway, if anyone's still concerned about the lamia's motivations: She's not evil. She just has a broader perspective than Caskarule.


>>Not_A_Hat
Oh, hey, you guessed my story. I was wondering how long it would be before that started to happen. And you also twigged the Gormenghast influence (that book is still bouncing around in my head months after I finished it). Anyway, cheers!

>>horizon
Thanks for going off-slate to look at this. I don't have much to say since, y'know, I agree with most of what you say.

>>georg
Yep, Caskarule stops paying attention as much once he gets shot. I'm glad this got noticed, but perhaps I could shore it up a little. Thanks!

>>Cold in Gardez
Looking back, "ginnel" is definitely going overboard. Anyway, think you -- especially for the comments about ambition. I appreciate that.

>>Fahrenheit

six academic articles to read/annotate

four psychology essays to write

book report to submit

finishing touches to put on an academic article

(Plus my roommate had her 21st birthday party that Saturday)

Medal-winning story

Epic poem in addition

I have an entire story about the time I learned my special talent was procrastination

PTHTHTBHBTHTHBTBBBB.