There are nice descriptions, fascinating details, and interesting worldbuilding in your block of run-on text, but a block of run-on text it remains, and that fact kept distracting me all the way through. And all in service of a simple joke telegraphed by the title. I will give you some points for the clever language, Author, but I know you can do better than this.

So let's kick this off. Due to the nature of pony mini rounds (generally less serious and more for fun), their number of entrants, and my limited supply of free time and motivation, I'm going to try and cut back on the Wall of Super Serious Text commentary and do shorter off the cuff reactions for my first pass at most stories.

The eventual finalists, and anything that particularly catches my eye along the way, will get the usual treatment. Exuno (and Not a Hat, though he might be an awkward choice given podcasting and AndrewRogue) have extremely kindly volunteered as a proxy for suggestions in Discord, if anyone wants to go "Hey Ran review my story!" without risking anonymity issues!

That seems like a quite appropriate intro to this submission, too. I ain't readin' all that giant block.

Okay sting at the end. But which way does the joke go? Is the joke that 750 words is supposedly too few to tell a story, or that many participants aren't using the 750 to the best of their ability, or that minis should try to aim lower than 750, or what? Are we angling in favor of an increase to 1000 words here, or no? And what was the purpose of taking the time to make this an entry, and writing that giant block of text? Dunno.

So the skinny: not going to score too highly, but probably wasn't intended to. I chuckled a little. Learning to write concisely is one of the more valuable skills Writeoff mini rounds can teach, IMO, so I guess it's nice to remind people of that. Thanks for writing!

Genre: Raaaaaagh-inducing

Thoughts: Author, you wound me. I became engrossed by the beautiful descriptions and quality world building of the omni-paragraph. I was all ready to score this highly while urging you to inject some newlines.

Then the ending made me groan. It's brash enough that it almost pulls off the to-be-continued that you leave us with. But make no mistake, it utterly denies us any kind of resolution for all the cool descriptiveness that's come before.

Tier: Needs Work

This walks a really dangerous line, hovering right in the territory of good natured ribbing of fellow writeoff folks and being mean-spirited.

>>AndrewRogue I didn't really get "mean spirited" from this... meta, yeah, but not mean. This is a feel we all know too well, right? We need x amount of space to finish y plot line, but we can't fit it in, and we've cut everything else that can be cut as is, so we compromise.

...I mean, it was still a pain in the ass to read, because it's "magitechnobabble magitechnobabble worldbuilding that goes nowhere and dances in the wind," but I at least got a smile out of the ending.

Although that's not really enough, I'm afraid. :/

>>Posh
The reason I say it can read as mean-spirited is because it is such a blatant failure of basic minific construction (and really, short fiction in general) because the massive textblock is almost entirely extraneous information that it ends up reading as "It isn't that hard to not fuck this up, guys" rather than "Oh, I accidentally ran out of room!"

I honestly assume the author's intention is not as such, but it can pretty easily come across that way, IMO.

I think this was a very interesting idea where one of two things happened. Either I missed something overly clever, or you accidentally defeated the intent of your story with the way you approached it.

Initially, I thought this was very clever: I assumed that you were trying to carefully disperse words throughout each sentence so that they would appear as a block of well-justified text in full, and this was tied in to what you were saying in the beginning about how small crystals need to be carefully managed for space. Brilliant. It really seemed like that was the thrust.

I'm not so sure now, though. It seems like the justified text was a coincidence in my browser, and the solid paragraphing was unrelated to anything in the story. I couldn't pull anything useful out of the remainder of the paragraph, but your language choices were so bizarre I was all but certain you were intentionally choosing words to fit a poetic structure. If it wasn't the careful text justification, what could it be? I tried several ciphers with no success (every other word, first word of sentences, even letter by letter). I no longer understand the purpose of macroparagraphing the entire story, and I don't understand the odd language choices throughout. There has to be something hidden here, I just don't know what it is.

My best guess is you planned this in your browser without realizing that different readers would see very different things, but I fear I must give up trying to determine what it was you were doing there.

Let's pretend there is nothing hidden or clever here. In that case, I guess the joke was that, you, as the author, were rambling about unrelated things and couldn't finish the story, so you were meta-complaining a-la horizon about not having enough room in 750 words...?

If this was the intended joke, the problem you face is that you don't need 750 words to tell the joke. It's a joke that could be told in twenty words, by adding "(730 words later...)" somewhere.

There's also a problem in that the sentences don't fit together in a meaningful way. Even if it's a rambling train of thought, the tracks are all broken. This is another datum that tells me there must me something here I've missed.

:ponyshrug:

I think I figured out what to change...

Twilight Sparkle twirled the tiny purple crystal around in her telekinetic glow. It was remarkable how a delicate little prism could contain so much information within it. The magic needed to condense many spells within a small solid object was easy to learn, but difficult to master. Normally larger crystals were used, and the unicorn casting a spell upon it didn't have to worry about maximizing efficiency. With a smaller crystal such as this, there were no luxuries. Every redundant incantation meant wasting magical capacity. Every flaw in the outer facets meant less surface space to spread aura evenly. Every mistake in amplifying the magic meant not a simple chip or crack, easy to repair, but the whole structure shattering. This one had a relatively simple tetragonal symmetry, but the lattices met with strange alterations to the crystal's colors. The lavender clouds bled into the violet swirls, but the closer to the central axis of the crystal they got, the patterns became more distorted. The shapes became more jagged, like twisted pointy teeth springing out in every direction. This was a common side effect of the harmonic crystalline enchantment, but instead of forming impurities they remained clean. Thin gold flakes peppered the calcium caps forming along the top and bottom, which created a positive and negative polarity that directed the flow of magic. Casting a spell through a crystal tended to agitate the mosaic, shifting pixels over by a few spaces, but a unicorn could adjust for this and resynchronize the picture manually depending on the chemical bonds present. Metalic and ionic bonds were a simple calculation, but covalent bonds went in the opposite direction, causing all sorts of headaches for students trying to figure out what they did wrong. As far as Twilight could tell, this one had not been found in centuries. They had discovered it in a dusty case within the Crystal Empire's library storage vault, where the floor was cold to the touch like clear blue ice. It was kept this cold to preserve the finely detailed carvings within the surface of the bricks, forming a written history of the Empire in its early days, before all the same information had been duplicated in the tomes kept on the ground floor. These carvings were all that were preserved after King Sombra's rule, for all the others were deemed unimportant, and the component materials were scavenged to rebuild the palace. Even the knowledge of the tools used for this art had been lost long ago, though scholars had a rough theory of how they were organized, based on the variation in thickness and curves of the surviving carvings. At first it was assumed these were also used to create the magic crystals, but comparing them against the Crystal Heart proved that they were completely unrelated arts. The tools shared an origin with the earth pony styles from elsewhere in Equestria, which meant the Crystal Empire most likely hired unicorn specialists from abroad to deal with those artifacts. Twilight wasn't sure if Starswirl the Bearded was referring to these same crystals in his treatices, but that was only because there were so few of the smaller size remaining in operational condition. In her school studies she had a little experience with crystals, but since moving to Ponyville she had no opportunities to perform experiments on them, as they were all kept within secure Canterlot museums, and it was not safe to transport them because of the stability force fields containing them. The force fields were necessary to prevent residual magic from leaking out and spilling into the soil, upsetting the magical balance like had already happened in the Everfree Forest. When Princess Luna had become Nightmare Moon, her brief eclipse of the sun had caused strange side effects to the nearby land, making the Everfree wild and uncontrollable for over a thousand years. It was different from the eternal snowstorms that ravaged the far north after Princess Celestia and Princess Luna banished King Sombra and his subjects, but the two natural phenomena making each land permanently inhospital did not seem like mere coincidence. Twilight wondered if it wasn't the sun and moon itself, but the Elements of Harmony that had started this chain of events all along. After discovering this new crystal, Equestria might be in grave danger.

this paragraph is too long. I should shorten it.

>>Haze
Close the sluice gates!

retrospective:

this was the most miserable time I've ever had writing, because that huge paragraph is all BS. it's like writing a terrible school essay where you don't know anything about the subject. I don't even remember what I put in there, because nothing's happening. 730 words of purple prose sounds easy, but it's hard to keep that up for long.

I do understand why some people see it as possibly being a mean insult towards writers but that wasn't my intention. I do agree that the minific limits should be 1000 instead. but I can't go with the direct joke, because it wouldn't be interesting at all. 750 words of a normal story, getting cut off before the resolution? that would look like a poor cop-out instead of a punchline. so I had to exaggerate it as much as possible, by having nothing happen at all before the interruption.

I succeeding in making the fic actually painful to read, but nobody found the joke enjoyable at all (not even me). so I got my first wooden spoon! lessons learned.