This is a fascinating bit of writing with a strong, sharp meta-edge. Its loose structure and surreal presentation give it a dreamy quality, which suits the subject matter and the content very, very well. And on closer examination, the way it opens and closes... it's cyclical, see. It raises, to me, the question of how much of the story is the dream, and how much of the story is the minutia of Octavia's everyday life.

The choice of characters and setting, too, are interesting; I don't think anybody else would have thought to tell this story using Octy, Vinyl, and Lyra, and not, say, Twilight, Rainbow, and maybe Rarity -- who I could easily see fitting their various niches and voices in a more traditionally structured and written piece.

This story takes risks, experiments with structure, and sacrifices a sense of prescriptive meaning and coherence for a dreamy, surreal quality, enhanced by the structure and presentation (I love how the cast of dream-characters never actually say who they are, or what they are, or provide any sense of accounting for themselves. As a reader, it's frustrating, because I want to know what's going on, but as an author, like... dreams be like that, you know? It's a good illustration of how people react to what's presented to them in dreams). I love all of that.

I worry about how this will fare against other stories on my slate, though -- the more traditionally written and structured fare. Because the downside to all this organizational doohickery and experimental bedafflement is that there's a lack of a meaty narrative for me to sink my teeth into -- just the wispy ghost of one.

I wonder if that sounds backhanded or self-contradictory. I don't mean for it to. To me, the story's greatest strength could also weaken it against other stories on my slate. I won't know until I get to them.

But for now: I'm really impressed with this. :)

I don't think this story is finished?

I mean, the ending isn't clear in the least, there are characters being introduced with only dialogue (and no indication of what their roles are) and the final 9 scenes seem to me like notes jotted down by the author to be filled out later. One of those scenes is literally blank.

I understand where Posh is coming from, but even if this is meant to be as difficult to follow as a dream, I have to take a harder line on that approach regardless. I have no idea what happened in this story or what the message or feeling was that I was supposed to take away. That's not good.

And sure, it's just like a dream that way. But if your angle of approach with this story was that "dreams are unclear and confusing," then congrats, you nailed it, but I'm still going to complain that your story was unclear and confusing. I mean, there's an unreliable narrator, and then there's an unreliable story.

But let's move on and talk about the first 3/4ths of your story because they feel actually closer to being finished. Can we talk about your opening? You introduce characters who talk about whose job it is to take out the trash, and all the minutiae and steps involved in that process. It's not incredibly interesting, and none of this gets mentioned again.

Your story isn't a hipstery-bullshit litfic where two roommates complain about their roles and responsibilities in order to portray some hackneyed commentary about the futility of co-operation. No! you were writing a mind-bending exploration of dreams. In short story land, that has to come earlier. And those few paragraphs at the beginning don't count, because they aren't really mind-bendy yet, and all I can see them doing is setting up the less interesting scene that we're about to witness. Octavia practically complains about how mundane the following scene is about to be.

Here's another mind-bendy dream story from the writeoff. Check out that opening scene, and how mind-bendy and dreamlike it is. That's what I'm getting at—the opening scene is making promises to your reader, whether you like it or not, so it's important to grab it by the reins and introduce whatever tone and/or theme you're going for early, or else some other pesky thing will take its place.

Now I'm about to give a compliment that devolves immediately into a critique. Sorry in advance.
See, I found your dialogue to be very good, and you lent excellent voices to the characters, but I thought it was veering awfully close to "talking heads" at points. I would have liked more of the surrounding environment. There's also a lot of internal monologue-ing by Octavia, too, which felt like it was being used as a crutch to keep the story going.

In terms of ranking, whether or not you meant for this to be as "unfinished" as a dream, I'm afraid I have to interpret it as an unfinished entry. But that said, I don't see any reason why it couldn't be expanded (and indeed I want to know more about those final 9 scenes!), but I can't grab hold of this as is.

But still! Thanks for writing and for submitting; you're miles ahead of everyone who didn't submit anything, so well done.

Best of luck!

After reading this story, I thought of Philip K. Dick for a moment. My opinion on him is that he could write a solid set-up, but somewhere near the end he either did too much drugs or didn't do enough and thus his books often lapse into some non-sequiturs rather than a satisfying ending. So, I gotta agree with >>Miller Minus that this appears unfinished.

Bottom of the slate for making Octavia straight.

This one is a bit harder to talk about because without knowing how it actually ends it is hard to draw conclusions about the material prior. What little we have of the later scenes is fairly strange and honestly I'm not sure I like the direction you appeared to be taking? The story was working for me as a somewhat fantastical bit of melancholy mundanity, while the end seems to go full bore into magical forces opposing her? But that is me making guesses based off random snippets so.

The internal responses from Octavia at the beginning are odd in that they don't really come up again. If you are going to make that sort of interaction so prominent right at the beginning (like she basically does it in response to every Lyra line), then it ends up feeling forgotten when you don't actually continue. You establish Octavia as a fairly reserved person with a strong internal dialogue, then no more. She is much more externally communicative! If that is how it is to be, you should probably reign it in a bit so it isn't such a sudden jump.

On the other hoof, it was a fun place to meet cute boys who didn't know what they were doing.

This line was clearly added to spite me, personally, so I recommend removing it. More seriously though, it and the other boy related line later down that scene actually feel really out of place. For reals, no shipping jealousy here. It just seems very at odds with the character as presented. Nothing about her or the situation she's in (given the tenor of the previous scene or the scene this is in) gives any indication she'd be looking to score, so calling it out here feels a lot more like you going "I'm not shipping the music pones, fuckers" than an actual narrative thought.

Actually, you have a few really weird lines in general that just super jump out at me like that. For example, referring to Vinyl factually as a friend from orchestral class while... not actually identifying anything about Lyra or Bon Bon. Cigarettes are really weird. When she finally snaps at Lyra, having a line that tells us she loses her temper before she loses her temper. Etc. Your choice on soft and hard break points also feels a little erratic. I don't really have quick, fix all solutions for these, just thought it'd help to bring them to attention.

You do manage the banal mode of life and the sort of dreamless quality of drifting through that existence quite well, and the blend of the two is obviously a solid thing. Like, the tone is there, the mood is well delivered and I was definitely invested by about the mid-point, but as >>Miller Minus points out you take a little while to get there. I think the initial banality is important, but I also think it wouldn't hurt to speed things up by reducing the time Vinyl and her chat about the minutae of transcripts maybe? I dunno, the trash worked for me, but you lost me with the weird course issues she was having.

Unfortunately, that's... kinda where I have to end the review. I would definitely like to see how this ends and I very much like the mood this is set in, but without actually hitting the true meat of the story I'm not really able to comment on much else. Still, hopefully that provides some insight that helps you finish it later.

Thanks for writing!

>>AndrewRogue

Bottom of the slate for making Octavia straight.

Don't pretend you didn't write the only story on the ballot with Vinyl and Octavia.

>>Posh You don't think I'd still bottom slate myself for it?

>>AndrewRogue Nice try, but we all know you can't vote on your own stories. And Octy's heterosexuality could just as easily be a tactic to disarm people who'd guess your authorship. Further, there is no evidence in the text to suggest that Octavia isn't bisexual; this could be at a point in time before she developed feelings for Vinyl.

*mic drop*

All of what I am about to write is likely the result of not having time to revise a hastily written story and hitting a deadline.

There is a writing truism. If you don't know where to start a story, start writing anyway. By the time you finish, you'll know where the story actually began—and know where to cut.

Your story begins in the segment where lucid dreaming comes up. (I was a lucid dreamer once so I like what you did there.) Everything before it is loosely written and feels like padding.

Little things like using the word altitude made me think the protagonist was a flying pegasus; my best guess afterwards was they were on a second floor. You make assertions about curriculum and changing requirements that don't jibe with my experience at university (albeit not at a conservatory) and feels unresearched or made up. The sequence with spitting out the pen is something even a unicorn would know and an earth pony wouldn't mention. All of it and more destroys verisimilitude. It almost seems like the thread of Lyra, despite the stir-fried rice scene that I adored, was completely superfluous to the story as a whole, ie, about lucid dreaming.

There is a huge story to be mined there, but in the end it feels glossed over, or as others mentioned, unfinished.

I got kind of lost when Wisteria and Rose showed up, to be honest. Taking their words at face value is well enough and they make sense in that regard, but the question is why are they showing up here, and why do they suddenly give Tavi the boot? They feel like a reference back to some grander thing, but without that prior knowledge I can't help but feel like I'm reading the mid-section of a wider anthology.

Which isn't to say the rest wasn't interesting. I was pulled along nicely start to finish, despite the confusion toward the end.

There's a lot of:

Good stuff here, Author, but it never quite congealed into a story for me. I always have trouble anyway with dreams in fiction--I so rarely remember my own, I don't really have much personal experience with how they're supposed to work--and since there isn't much to this except the dreaming, I'm left all at sea.

I'll also mention that, other than the line about spitting out the pen, there isn't a lot here to make me think of Pony. I kept having to concentrate not to see them as humans...

Mike

I really dig the provocative tone that the first couple of scenes sets. It's not often you see an MLP fanfic take such an abrasive angle with its characters, so that's definitely a breath of fresh air. The stress of Octavia's breakdown comes through strongly and is well-permeated into each scene.

Unfortunately, though, I do have trouble with how the story carves out and delivers on its stakes. As an dumb exercise, try Ctrl+F'ing the word, "dream". Other than the first sentence (which did felt a little odd and jarring in my first read-through), the word only begins appearing at the end of the second scene, at the end of a conversation that started out being about something very different. And then "dream" appears with surprising frequency in almost every single scene until the end, which is amplified by the fact that the last several scenes have a very short word count.

I think this kind of illustrates the issue I had, with that we had a very slow burn start before introducing the primary conflict, and then we get twelve (12!) scenes that only take up about the same amount of wordcount as the first two. It starts becoming very hard to understand, and I didn't think the questions and conflicts raised in the first half were addressed.

I can't help but to think you must have ran out of time, which is a shame because it's abundantly clear that you have a very specific vision coming into this one. For me, as the story is right now, there's just not enough to really pay off in the way I suspect you intended.

Yeah, this was unfinished, and I felt guilty for that all week. I'm sorry.