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Huh. Interesting way of interpreting the prompt; the analogy with racing does a good job of framing the plot. Seemed mechanically and grammatically sound, and while 800 words isn't much time to really develop a character, I could follow their motivations. The only real issue I had with the piece is the ending. Even with the analogy and thematic foreshadowing, the actual act seems to come out of left field.
I'm gonna be honest here, I really don't get what this one is going for. Like, I'm still not really sure what the actual meaning of the punchline is. I get that this is a parallel vs perpendicular thing, but I don't understand why.
EDIT: That said, also made me think of Futurama. Dimensional Drifting indeed.
EDIT: That said, also made me think of Futurama. Dimensional Drifting indeed.
Well yeah, there are two points I want to address here. One is general, the other specific.
• General point: I'm ticked off by how many stories this round based their premise on a fully-informed, sapient dopplegänger. I mean, dopplegängers are fine, but why should they be more informed, more up to speed w/r to the parallel universes, etc. than the main protagonist? I wish we had a story where two doubles meet, and each one is equally scared of the other. That would be much more symmetric than those stories were the "foreign" double has the lead.
• Specific point: I don’t get it. Which Ingrid is disintegrated? Who or what have collided with her worldline? How was she even supposed to be aware? Why was she at a crossroad, and which crossroads exactly? Seems like a catch-22 situation.
All in all, the fic takes too long to explain a lot of concepts, just to let the reader befuddled at the end of it. Many words for no payoff.
• General point: I'm ticked off by how many stories this round based their premise on a fully-informed, sapient dopplegänger. I mean, dopplegängers are fine, but why should they be more informed, more up to speed w/r to the parallel universes, etc. than the main protagonist? I wish we had a story where two doubles meet, and each one is equally scared of the other. That would be much more symmetric than those stories were the "foreign" double has the lead.
• Specific point: I don’t get it. Which Ingrid is disintegrated? Who or what have collided with her worldline? How was she even supposed to be aware? Why was she at a crossroad, and which crossroads exactly? Seems like a catch-22 situation.
All in all, the fic takes too long to explain a lot of concepts, just to let the reader befuddled at the end of it. Many words for no payoff.
>>Monokeras >>AndrewRogue >>Ratlab
It took me two re-reads, but I think I understand this now:
** GIANT SPOILERS AHEAD**
It all comes back to the street racing metaphor. By shaking up her actions, Protagonist-Ingrid is doing some sort of metaphysical drifting through possibility space (although that's not the source of the title: "drifting" is a street racing term [and also a meme]) — and consequently Protagonist-Ingrid is wandering into the middle of two other Ingrids, Racer #1 and Racer #2, actively having some multi-dimensional race. The "alternate Ingrid" that the protagonist talks to is Racer #1. We never actually see Racer #2, only the effects of her existence.
This context explains the weird punch thing at the beginning. Racer #1 had to metaphysically "swerve" to avoid some other hazard (presumably a fourth Ingrid).
This context also explains the sudden explosion at the end. Protagonist-Ingrid gets plowed into by Racer #2 and they both die in a spectacular crash. Racer #1 provides an epitaph.
That said, this needs some editing because there is some actively misleading dialogue that contradicts itself and/or the scenario above:
#4 is the most directly problematic — because it directly contradicts #3, and wrecks the metaphor that alternate-Ingrid is setting up. If #4 is true, then alternate-Ingrid should know that she's in no danger — protag-Ingrid will collide with the other racer, not her.
#1 contradicts with #3, #4, and the twist ending in different ways. "One of us will die" implies that they are both equally in danger — but if that were the case, then a metaphysical "crash" would kill both "racer" and "bystander", which means they're both in danger, not exclusively one. Per #4, they're not both in danger. Per #3, everyone's in danger. Only one of these things can be true.
#2 may just be unfortunate wording, because you're talking about them being in danger already, but this refers to a different sort of danger (the physical contact between the two), and when alternate-Ingrid says there's no danger it sounds an awful lot like she's dismissing everything she just worked up to in #1. I would clarify and narrow this point significantly, e.g. "You don't get it, do you? There's no danger from touching."
But that 1-3-4 triad is really gonna cause problems for your premise. The story needs to decide exactly what the mechanism for multidimensional "crashing" is, who's in danger, and why. Author, I think once you make a firm decision on that, you'll realize that alternate-Ingrid's behavior isn't entirely consistent with your premise, either, since she's the one who knows the exact scope of the danger and should be reacting appropriately. If protagonist-Ingrid is a danger to them both, she should be a lot more urgent about getting her "off the track" as it were. If the crash is inevitable as of the time they're physically meeting, what's the point of warning her to back away? If it isn't, you need to decide whether she wants her competitor to die or not; I don't have a good sense of that from story-as-written.
Get your premise pinned down, however, and I think this will clean up considerably. A lot of the reader confusion is likely caused by the fact that there's no single narrative that all of the foreshadowing points toward, so when the twist occurs, there's no coherent context to make it make sense.
Tier: Almost There
It took me two re-reads, but I think I understand this now:
** GIANT SPOILERS AHEAD**
It all comes back to the street racing metaphor. By shaking up her actions, Protagonist-Ingrid is doing some sort of metaphysical drifting through possibility space (although that's not the source of the title: "drifting" is a street racing term [and also a meme]) — and consequently Protagonist-Ingrid is wandering into the middle of two other Ingrids, Racer #1 and Racer #2, actively having some multi-dimensional race. The "alternate Ingrid" that the protagonist talks to is Racer #1. We never actually see Racer #2, only the effects of her existence.
This context explains the weird punch thing at the beginning. Racer #1 had to metaphysically "swerve" to avoid some other hazard (presumably a fourth Ingrid).
This context also explains the sudden explosion at the end. Protagonist-Ingrid gets plowed into by Racer #2 and they both die in a spectacular crash. Racer #1 provides an epitaph.
That said, this needs some editing because there is some actively misleading dialogue that contradicts itself and/or the scenario above:
1) "Yaknow, it's really fucking dangerous, you shouldn't be meeting me. One of us will die. And don't assume you're so important that it's not you. You should go home right now. But I've met too many of me. We're always too damn curious to learn more. I aint surprised.
2) "See? Nothing dangerous, unless stabbing's involved."
3) "One of them might slam into your side, maybe both."
4) "... It's not the parallel ones you gotta watch out for."
#4 is the most directly problematic — because it directly contradicts #3, and wrecks the metaphor that alternate-Ingrid is setting up. If #4 is true, then alternate-Ingrid should know that she's in no danger — protag-Ingrid will collide with the other racer, not her.
#1 contradicts with #3, #4, and the twist ending in different ways. "One of us will die" implies that they are both equally in danger — but if that were the case, then a metaphysical "crash" would kill both "racer" and "bystander", which means they're both in danger, not exclusively one. Per #4, they're not both in danger. Per #3, everyone's in danger. Only one of these things can be true.
#2 may just be unfortunate wording, because you're talking about them being in danger already, but this refers to a different sort of danger (the physical contact between the two), and when alternate-Ingrid says there's no danger it sounds an awful lot like she's dismissing everything she just worked up to in #1. I would clarify and narrow this point significantly, e.g. "You don't get it, do you? There's no danger from touching."
But that 1-3-4 triad is really gonna cause problems for your premise. The story needs to decide exactly what the mechanism for multidimensional "crashing" is, who's in danger, and why. Author, I think once you make a firm decision on that, you'll realize that alternate-Ingrid's behavior isn't entirely consistent with your premise, either, since she's the one who knows the exact scope of the danger and should be reacting appropriately. If protagonist-Ingrid is a danger to them both, she should be a lot more urgent about getting her "off the track" as it were. If the crash is inevitable as of the time they're physically meeting, what's the point of warning her to back away? If it isn't, you need to decide whether she wants her competitor to die or not; I don't have a good sense of that from story-as-written.
Get your premise pinned down, however, and I think this will clean up considerably. A lot of the reader confusion is likely caused by the fact that there's no single narrative that all of the foreshadowing points toward, so when the twist occurs, there's no coherent context to make it make sense.
Tier: Almost There
>>horizon
I didn't catch the entire scope of the self-contradiction you did. I understood it as P-ingred racing against alt-ingred without realizing that she's doing so.
I agree that the knocking over a beer thing was a dodge by alt-Ingred - she seems to have some way of seeing hazards that P-ingred seems to lack.
Or at least that was my read.
I didn't catch the entire scope of the self-contradiction you did. I understood it as P-ingred racing against alt-ingred without realizing that she's doing so.
I agree that the knocking over a beer thing was a dodge by alt-Ingred - she seems to have some way of seeing hazards that P-ingred seems to lack.
Or at least that was my read.
Tagging >>horizon to increase his red notification counter, because that's a mighty fine post up there. I agree almost completely.
The "almost" comes in because, to some extent, I'm not sure the details of the explanation matter. Many design processes can be broken down into two main approaches: top-down (start with an overarching idea to meet, then design or choose the pieces, concepts and media that will allow you to produce that concept) and bottom-up (start design by focusing on mechanics, media capabilities, subsystems or small concepts that are interesting by themselves, then use them together to build upward into whatever your final product is.)
I wish I had a single amazing writeup about these concepts to link, since they're so common across so many fields, but Google isn't being very helpful. I also wish I learned about them in formal education somewhere, but I didn't. The first time I heard of these concepts was in Mark Rosewater's articles about designing Magic: The Gathering, and those, I can link a couple of:
A classic from 2003
And a 2015 article discussing their application to player/consumer psychographics (scroll down a bit to the Vorthos section)
If my incessant geekery hasn't given it away, I work in/around the games industry, so I make a lot of use of these concepts, and I think they're applicable to design of written fiction just like design of any other creative media! I haven't seen much in the way of articles applying them specifically to storytelling (If anyone else knows of any, I'd love to see them!) but sometimes they're very useful frameworks to think in.
Here, specifically, this story is a clear example of top-down design. Everything is a setup for the core idea, the climax and final punchline, and the details of how and why it happened are less important to the way it was constructed. You still have to have both a good big-picture idea and coherent building blocks, and doing that is the hard part no matter which design framework an author chooses to use, but sometimes one can see that there's a clear slant in one direction.
Top-down is very accessible for minis in general, since a 750 word maximum simply doesn't allow very much room to develop good bottom-up pieces and have them mash together into something organic. So that's the overly lengthy explanation for why I don't mind the details being fudged a little here - it's clearly all in the service of delivering the payload, so if the payload is strong, much can be excused.
Unfortunately, the payload in this one doesn't land well for me. The punchline is violence: Naive Ingrid gets splattered across the solar system, the end. So then I have to look at why it happened, and the answer is: because of arbitrary cosmological rules she had no chance of understanding or avoiding (regardless of what the exact rules and forces in play were.) When viewed as a communication between the author and the reader, I have no idea what message I'm supposed to take away from this, or what tone I'm supposed to read in, or even if it's supposed to be comedic or dramatic (it IS a meme, after all...).
So overall, this is probably destined for mid to low mid for me. It's not bad, though, far from it, it's a very solid effort. The imagery is evocative, the prose reads fairly well, it's just a bit disjointed on the big picture. Again, see horizon's review for some touches on how to tie up the narrative, and everything else here is fine. Thanks for writing!
The "almost" comes in because, to some extent, I'm not sure the details of the explanation matter. Many design processes can be broken down into two main approaches: top-down (start with an overarching idea to meet, then design or choose the pieces, concepts and media that will allow you to produce that concept) and bottom-up (start design by focusing on mechanics, media capabilities, subsystems or small concepts that are interesting by themselves, then use them together to build upward into whatever your final product is.)
I wish I had a single amazing writeup about these concepts to link, since they're so common across so many fields, but Google isn't being very helpful. I also wish I learned about them in formal education somewhere, but I didn't. The first time I heard of these concepts was in Mark Rosewater's articles about designing Magic: The Gathering, and those, I can link a couple of:
A classic from 2003
And a 2015 article discussing their application to player/consumer psychographics (scroll down a bit to the Vorthos section)
If my incessant geekery hasn't given it away, I work in/around the games industry, so I make a lot of use of these concepts, and I think they're applicable to design of written fiction just like design of any other creative media! I haven't seen much in the way of articles applying them specifically to storytelling (If anyone else knows of any, I'd love to see them!) but sometimes they're very useful frameworks to think in.
Here, specifically, this story is a clear example of top-down design. Everything is a setup for the core idea, the climax and final punchline, and the details of how and why it happened are less important to the way it was constructed. You still have to have both a good big-picture idea and coherent building blocks, and doing that is the hard part no matter which design framework an author chooses to use, but sometimes one can see that there's a clear slant in one direction.
Top-down is very accessible for minis in general, since a 750 word maximum simply doesn't allow very much room to develop good bottom-up pieces and have them mash together into something organic. So that's the overly lengthy explanation for why I don't mind the details being fudged a little here - it's clearly all in the service of delivering the payload, so if the payload is strong, much can be excused.
Unfortunately, the payload in this one doesn't land well for me. The punchline is violence: Naive Ingrid gets splattered across the solar system, the end. So then I have to look at why it happened, and the answer is: because of arbitrary cosmological rules she had no chance of understanding or avoiding (regardless of what the exact rules and forces in play were.) When viewed as a communication between the author and the reader, I have no idea what message I'm supposed to take away from this, or what tone I'm supposed to read in, or even if it's supposed to be comedic or dramatic (it IS a meme, after all...).
So overall, this is probably destined for mid to low mid for me. It's not bad, though, far from it, it's a very solid effort. The imagery is evocative, the prose reads fairly well, it's just a bit disjointed on the big picture. Again, see horizon's review for some touches on how to tie up the narrative, and everything else here is fine. Thanks for writing!
I think I finally realized the meaning of the last line (the one I tagged as #4 in >>horizon). Alt-Ingrid is making a distinction between parallel universes, and perpendicular universes — back to the racing analogy, where two racers are headed in the same direction (parallel to each other) they're not a danger to each other, but people who wander in from a different direction ("crossing the intersection against us") cause collisions. It's not a reference to any particular Ingrid, but about the relative orientations of the Ingrids that are meeting.
That's more clever than I gave it credit for, but it doesn't really change my complaint about alt-Ingrid's behavior not being consistent; and given how long it took me to pick up on it, could really use some stronger lampshading. The idea of non-"parallel" universes isn't an intuitive one to drag in as outside context, because you're talking about dimensions that are very nearly metaphorical. Especially since the very first meeting of the two Ingrids describes them as remarkably similar — reinforcing the idea that this is a parallel, when it actually isn't.
(I briefly considered the idea that protagonist-Ingrid is the second racer, but she's lampshaded in the text as not having raced before, and she doesn't know what she's doing. Alt-Ingrid specifically talks about the close races being the fun ones, which strongly implies equal skills and/or knowledge. As a total newcomer, protagonist-Ingrid logically has to be the obstacle.)
That's more clever than I gave it credit for, but it doesn't really change my complaint about alt-Ingrid's behavior not being consistent; and given how long it took me to pick up on it, could really use some stronger lampshading. The idea of non-"parallel" universes isn't an intuitive one to drag in as outside context, because you're talking about dimensions that are very nearly metaphorical. Especially since the very first meeting of the two Ingrids describes them as remarkably similar — reinforcing the idea that this is a parallel, when it actually isn't.
(I briefly considered the idea that protagonist-Ingrid is the second racer, but she's lampshaded in the text as not having raced before, and she doesn't know what she's doing. Alt-Ingrid specifically talks about the close races being the fun ones, which strongly implies equal skills and/or knowledge. As a total newcomer, protagonist-Ingrid logically has to be the obstacle.)
Part of the problem of late reviews is that it's difficult to speak without repeating others. I'm in agreement with >>Ranmilia here; I thought the concept was interesting, the execution was good, and the analogy was clever; nonetheless, the ending fell flat for me, as I wasn't sure what exactly I was meant to be taking away from this. The story started as mildly absurdist; veered into comedy; and finished with the out-of-the-blue death of the narrative persona. Which was funny, in the sense that it's dead-pan delivery successfully shocked me the first time, and tied up a clever story conceit; nonetheless, it didn't do particularly much for me, which leaves me conflicted; in a purely narrative sense, it's a strong ending. In terms of emotional engagement, it's not.
Nonetheless, the story was a good read. Thanks for the entry, author.
Nonetheless, the story was a good read. Thanks for the entry, author.
With all the explanations of the analogy above, I feel a little sheepish about saying I didn't really care for this one. But I'm sorry, I don't really think it works. While I admire making the story focus on drag racing in a unique way, I feel like this story does a lot more telling than showing. I know, I know, limited word prompt and all the details won't be able to be fully fleshed out, but if the double's going to tell me a story right in the middle of this story, it better be one that holds my attention. That's the problem with stories-within-stories: they need to try even harder to keep the narrative focused. The drag racing tale was almost there, but it got a bit too longwinded for my taste. Call me a pleb, but I just didn't care for this one.
4/10, gotta go fast
4/10, gotta go fast
RETROSPECTIVE:
I should've focused more on establishing a horror tone, and taken out the boring parts.
I should've focused more on establishing a horror tone, and taken out the boring parts.
>>Haze
I love you Mayor Mare! :heart:
I would say I were sorry for what I did to you two chapters ago but I'm not :twilightblush:
I love you Mayor Mare! :heart:
I would say I were sorry for what I did to you two chapters ago but I'm not :twilightblush: