Well I have good news, but there's a catch. You're really good at describing scenes, people, and clothing. But you're doing far too much of it. Your scenes are getting bogged down by long, winding sentences filled with excellent descriptions, but when you describe absolutely everything in a scene, and especially when it's interspersed with a lot of jargon, eyes will glaze over, like mine did at times. I would recommend reading your scenes carefully and asking yourself if they add anything to the story, or if the story would be exactly the same without them.

Here's a part in particular:

As the sound of footsteps on the catwalk receded, Rennie stood up and winced before stumbling over to the window. She leaned against the glass and looked to the west, easily spotting the lazy curves of the Mississippi river, though she was on the wrong side of the ship to see the city of Saint Louis.

With a grunt, she pulled the gauze wrap off of her right hand and made a fist several times. After one more glance at the river, she turned around and began digging through a chest of clothes, eventually pulling out a pair of cargo pants. They were at least three sizes too big, and required a belt to hold them against her hips, but they weren’t frayed or patched.

Her arm was too sore to pull a tee shirt over her head, so she picked the only button-down shirt she had; a white, lacy blouse with puffy shoulders. She stopped to look at herself in a mirror and frowned. Her hair was tangled and oily, and there was grease and dried blood on her face to match her hands. She’d already managed to get greasy black-brown finger stains on her blouse, too.

She picked up a bar of lye soap and turned toward the door, but stopped when she saw an unfinished wooden carving laying next to a few scones on her little table. Ber’s knife lay, still open, with a tiny chip of wood hanging on to the edge of the blade. Rennie picked up the carving and turned it over in her fingers.

It had the form of a horse’s neck, arcing up and forward in a graceful curve of powerful muscle that ended in an unrefined head-shaped block. The surface was uncomfortable to touch; every edge was rough and covered in splinters that threatened to embed in her skin.

The block of soap in her left hand was smooth. It was comfortable. Her fingers slid over its surface easily and painlessly. It promised clean skin, clean hair, a clean smell, and a civilized appearance.

Rennie placed them both on the checkered table, leaving a finger on each one as she looked over the positions of the soap, the knight, and the stale scones. Two teacups and one teapot. After a deep breath, she tilted the bar of soap until it fell over, then picked up the knight and squeezed it against her palm.

With one last glance at the abandoned bar of soap, she stuffed the unfinished knight in her pants pocket and shuffled toward the door, picking up a pair of boots as she left.

This came up right after Rye told Rennie that we're about to have a meeting on what to do next. I'm down to hear this plot-advancing meeting, but I have to get through all the above first. This could all be said in two, maybe three sentences, and then we could be at that meeting. With this strategy, the story above could be maybe half as long as it is now, while still saying the same things and having the same impact.

This gets increasingly hard to read when the action kicks in, like during the dogfight. It's hard to be enthralled when every single detail of the scene is being painstakingly described, and I feel more like I'm hearing a history lecture (or a lecture on engines) than a great story.

But enough harping on structure... let's talk about the plot itself. I love the idea; our civilization has been fractured into the poor and starving against the lucky ones who got together and decided to try and reinstate civilization. It's obviously a tricky sell to the poor, and it's an even trickier job keeping your hands clean while doing it, as Rennie is discovering. And seeing the politics play out with real, visceral consequences is quite engaging. I also found Rennie to be a pretty solid character, although her cruelty was taken a little far during the interrogation scene.

Now that I'm thinking more, her character arc felt like a bit of a paradox. It seems, at first, that the easy route is being taken: that she is upset that she's lost her brother and is taking it out on her enemies. But if that were the case, she might have tried to use the pilot to save him instead of going nuclear on him. Her not doing that is an interesting direction, as it shows she's actually more blinded by rage than she is broken up about her brother. Her initial reaction to the news (which was rather flat) supports this notion.

But here's the thing: if Bernoulli wasn't the reason she was so upset, then what is? What is it that the savages have really done to piss her off so much, that she would react to Bernoulli's death so coldly, and deny a chance to save him when he turns out to be alive? What else happened to her? She hasn't even truly experienced them, if Nancy's claim that she spent her whole life on the ship is to be believed. There are of course a lot of reasons you could use, and maybe I'm just thick and totally whiffed on it, but there should be something driving her other than Bernoulli if she's really going to abandon him and descend into CIVILIZATION.

Those are my thoughts, Author. Thanks for submitting this story; it was an interesting read. My only concern is that, as GapJaxie once said to me: "This story had no real payoff -- it doesn't conclude so much as just end". People like endings, and this story has yet to conclude.

Good luck!

This does an excellent job painting a picture of grief—step-by-miserable-step through the whole process. There's nothing in the voice, or the pacing, or the narrator's feelings that I can criticize. It's all solid.

If this is coming from a very real place for the author, then I hope it has helped somewhat. But suffice it to say, for me, it was not fun to read. It should be obvious as to why—it's a story about hopelessness, and I wonder if you got the feeling you were leaning too heavy on the sadness when you were writing this, hence the positive note about seeing family members again, and the final line at the end. But it isn't really earned, based on everything that came before it.

This hit home for me. I was there last year—I did many of the things described above for my grandfather. It did not hit me as hard as a mother would, of course, and I was kept away from the waiting rooms and the hospitals until the very end. But from the visitation onwards, I experienced all of this. Yet many memories of that weekend are fond. It was great to see everyone, and the stories we all told of my grandfather made us feel okay again. I wish that feeling was stronger in this story, because without it I just feel like I've been told to be sad in a neat and tidy way. But I remember what this is like. It doesn't have to be as bleak as it's described.

Thanks for writing this story, Author. I'm glad I had a chance to read it.

I wanted to like this more than I do. Crimson Skies is, after all, one of Great Games I hit in my formative years; it will always have a soft spot in my heart. You must have stumbled across the Acron and Macron; you've even gone with the five fighters complement they had.

...Unfortunately, I kinda generally dislike post-apocalypse stories. So... I'll try and keep that side of myself in check as I review and rate this, but yeah. Not really a fan of this genre.

There's some good stuff here, although I'm not really sure about the details. Can you really build an engine on a lathe that'll be more powerful and lighter than one you could scavenge from a car? I guess air-cooling is a thing, but there are old VW bugs around in most cities, and I've been told those actually had a plane conversion kit, which I assume was mostly force-bearings. Well, there's a lot more to 'building a plane' than the engine; is everyone assumed to have the woodworking, aerodynamics, and materials knowledge to build a plane, but just lacking the engine? Furthermore, I'm no expert on GMO's, but aren't a lot of the modifications they make to them nowadays for pesticide/herbicide resistance? Unless Monsanto is also stockpiling a million gallons of glycophosphate, I'm not sure their seeds are going to do a whole lot for post-apocalyptic America.

Well, I may be totally wrong about any of that, but yeah. Those were my thoughts as I went through this.

I do think your main arc is well chosen, and it mostly works for me; right up to the very end. The civilized girl vs. the uncivilized boy; boy gets shot down, girl's world falls apart, the girl puts her world back together later, but it looks different.

The thing is, I'm not sure I buy the 'doesn't go rescue her brother' thing. I don't honestly know why she wouldn't do it. Sure, her worldview has changed, but... changed enough that she's willing to let her brother die? Why? What could possibly motivate that? Sure, she doesn't want the SIC to have sole access to it, but surely she can just, I dunno, bomb them from her zeppelin or something later? Burn their fields? Give all their neighbors machine-gun tech? I guess what it comes down to is that I'm willing to buy that her character has changed, but not by that much in that way. it just seems totally disproportionate and in the wrong direction to what she's gone through.

Anyways, this is rambly and probably not very helpful, sorry. Hopefully you find something useful in this, or at least find it entertaining.

TLDR: got some good stuff in it, but the MC goes a bit wacko at the end.

>>Miller Minus
As much as I'm not a fan of this story, I thought it was pretty clear that the main character is an AI who inhabits a human body, but designed from the ground up to be the brain of a spaceship, who "wears" a few hundred (thousand?) pounds of nanites (microscopic robots) that take the shape of the hull around her body. The sparring with her father took place across thousands of cubic kilometers of space while she was wearing a hull that let her maneuver in space. She left the nanites in the airlock when she came back in.

Well, this was delightful!

I don't really have a lot to say here, except... I do think the meeting between Taymer and Chayli is a bit too smooth and fast; they meet, and bang, their friends. It's fairly believable, but later on, he's very, very convinced that animals and humans should be singing together, and it doesn't feel as weighty as I think it should, because he seems to have just kinda fallen ass-backwards into it by sheer luck. If that was tested a bit more, if one or the other had to make a serious effort to bridge the gap, he'd be more convincing when he talks about it. Adding more weight there would also help add weight to when he actually puts it to the test with resurrecting the animals.

Honestly, though, there's a lot to like here, and it's all very well put together. Jaxie wanted professional-level stories, and I think he got one. Well, if this is written by who I think (- talking animals + poetry? Yeah -) that's not really a surprise, but still. :P

Good work, thanks for writing!

What can I say? I'd like a resolution, please.

This is very well done for what it is. The characters are fairly crisp, and the setting and tone come across clearly. Some of the details are excellent; the 'can't aide in breaking the law' thing is a clever touch.

But, uh, prologue is right. Because there's not really a whole lot of arc here. There's three confrontations; Clients with lawyer, lawyer with family, and lawyer with corp rep, and each of them reads very nicely. The stakes are laid out, they all maneuver around, and each one ends well. They even kinda build on each other. But overall, they never actually give closure to the plot that's brought up in the opening. As such, you're absolutely right to label this a prologue, and I hope you understand when I mark you down a bit for presenting what looks like not a whole story.

I mean, I liked it, buuuuut... yeah. I like conclusions. Sorry.

I can't really sink my teeth into this one.

I think part of what's going on is that I want there to be some sort of theme; the Off the Cuff thing reoccurs enough that I feel like it should be meaningful and thematic, but it doesn't really tie into the ending, and even analyzing the ending, I'm not sure I can grab a theme for this story.

The 'condition' of our generation is that we fail at being spontaneous?

...that's all I got. It doesn't feel right, though.

Anyways, as long as I'm missing the point of this story completely, I might as well go all-in. I'm pretty sure that 'The Human Condition' is about being a human being, not about humans being in specific places or times or whatnot. Like, the reason he can connect with his father's story is because they both have The Human Condition; they're both human despite their vastly changed circumstances. The Human Condition doesn't really change, unless the point of the story is that we're not human anymore or something.

Well, I might be wrong about that. That's just how I've understood it sometimes.

Um, I'm also not sure what you're doing with all the family history. I found the middle of the story a bit of a slog to read because of that.

The mood and tone here are pretty good, though. It was a pretty nice read? I'm just not connecting with it at all on a plot or theme level, for some reason.

I don't think I'm grasping the significance of the stinger.

So, the earth itself is sapient now. It's telling people hello. But, uh, they were alone, right? It wasn't alive before, plus none of the aliens were around. So... yeah.

The setup here is pretty cool. Freezing the whole earth + moon while aliens argue over it's fate? Excellent scope, lots of potential for all sorts of drama. I remember reading a scene in a Heinlein book (Have Spacesuit Will Travel...?) where they put the Earth on trial, and it's stuck with me since I first read it.

The trial itself... not super riveting. I didn't feel like there was actually a possibility for any real damage, and so I didn't feel like it had a lot of tension. Sure, not everything needs tension, but still.

In the end, I found a lot of this fun and easy to read. It had some of that sensawunda that I enjoy in sci-fi. The opening descriptions of all the people on Earth might have felt a bit padded, and the ending seemed entirely too abrupt, but it was fun.

I just wish I had a better idea what you're going for thematically. That stinger feels like it should be really important, but I'm just not grasping it, I guess.

Ey, this was pretty decent.

I liked your characters, the worldbuilding was fun and unfolded nicely, there was some plot; yeah, it's pretty good.

I think, though, that you could go a lot deeper with it. If you bring in the emotional conflict stuff that Pyria's dealing with earlier, you could deepen them a bit; she feels useless because she's old, and she takes that out on her daughter, etc; this comes through in the end, but bringing it up earlier would give you more time to work on what it means, and show how her daughter deals with it more effectively. As-is, it's all there, but it's not as strong as I think it could be.

Anyways, I rather enjoyed this. I think it could be stronger, but it's pretty fun. Thanks for writing!

So this was pretty fun.

I'm not really convinced that you've concluded both the conflicts you seem to raise; the one with the Epiphanizer is pretty well shut, but the secondary one, between Suzanne and Beatrix, seemed like it was predicated on them both vying for the Professor's attention. As-is, that doesn't actually seem to be resolved. Sure. Susie got a hug from Calvin, but I somehow doubt Beatrix will be willing to give up with just that.

And speaking of those names... I really didn't like how you kept switching from one to the other in the middle of the story. I have enough trouble tracking who's doing what in stories as-is, without the characters nomenclature changing scene-by-scene. It's probably not a big deal for people who are good at paying attention to details, but yeah.

Also, I think this story could stand to start a bit faster. It could not only use a better hook, but it could also stand to be more up-front about setting the stage for the steampunk stuff. I'd suggest starting with a failed experiment or something; you could start with a literal bang, and then move into explaining at least a bit of how the steampunk stuff works.

Overall, though, I did enjoy this. Some of the details were really good; 'carpedium' is a nice pun. "Magic science has a flair for the dramatic" is cute and fun. It has a complete story arc, with beginning, middle and end.

Good work, thanks for writing!

Can grief make someone actually think the walls are closing in on them? Like, literally go psychotic? Because that seemed a bit over-the-top for me.

And what actually happened to the mom? You tease and skirt around the idea, but you never actually answer it. I'm assuming she died, but... how? Was it suicide? Something else? What could have happened that would traumatize these characters to this extent?

It took me a bit to get a grasp on how old Penny was supposed to be. She seems fairly sophisticated at first, but more childish later on. I think the seriousness of her psychosis with 'the walls are closing in' makes her seems older, maybe?

These huge whitespaces are a bit annoying.

I mean, on the whole, this is quite good. I do think the amount of trauma the characters are facing is a bit inordinate for what's presented. It also maybe trends a bit much in the puzzle-box story direction for my tastes, and a lot of the tension is based on a blatant mis-understanding... well, it doesn't quite verge into idiot-ball, though, because the reaction, although silly, is believable in a traumatized child. There's some real emotion here, and even a laugh or two, and that's pretty great.

Good work, thanks for writing.

Very nice, moody character piece:

I love how the story advances day by day through the week even though the days are actually separated from each other by months and maybe even years. That's such a terrific way of structuring a story, I may have to steal it. :)

But I need a few more markers set up in the text to direct me One of the problems with being subtle like this, author, is that oafs like me will latch onto things that we decide are hints and will use them to fill in blanks spots in ways that you maybe didn't intend. For instance, in that first Sunday section, when I read the paragraph that stars, "Mother would always close the curtains in winter" and then see that neither Tom nor his father is concerned about maybe waking her up as they stomp around in the middle of the night, I assume that she's dead.

So when she wakes Tom up at the beginning of the Monday section, I assume it's a flashback and that the school they talk about in the first section means that Tom is a teacher in the present day of that Sunday. I'm already filling in all kinds of details, not knowing if you want me to or not. If I'm making the right guesses, then all is well. But if I'm not, then things got confusing. Which is where Armistice the dog comes in.

See, in my reading, that first section says Mother is dead and Armistice is alive. And yet at the end of story, Mother is alive and "Armistice takes a break under one of the apple trees and doesn’t wake up." So I need a bit more guidance throughout as to what's actually happening and when it's happening. The same with the big brother I assume Tom's telling us about in the final paragraphs. I'd like more of this brother sprinkled in earlier so he doesn't appear so suddenly. Who's dead and when, I guess, is the question I'm left with at the end of the story...

Mike

I'll have to side:

With >>Not_A_Hat here and mark this one down a bit for not being a short story. It's a nice prologue, yes, but, well, this isn't a prologue-writing contest...

A couple things occurred to me while I was reading, though, author, so I'll pass them along in case they might help if you decide to keep going with this. First, the detail about Anderson's research paper comes completely out of left field when it should be very much front and center. As soon as Akari says she wants to be emancipated, Anderson's mind should flash onto that paper--we're in his POV, after all. And I have to wonder why Akari went to the other law firms first if Anderson has this paper in his background. He would seem to be the logical first choice since he's already done some thinking on the subject.

Second, I don't know how court ordered non-disclosure agreements work, but since they've got the word "non-disclosure" right there in the name, I have to wonder if Knox could legally tell Anderson anything at all about the other cases involving robots gaining sapience. If there are any public records of these cases, Anderson would likely have found them by the time he meets with Knox, but would Knox be able to tell him any more since he's also bound by the order? It's something you'll need to research, I reckon...

And lastly--as well as being the tiniest of nitpicks--is the line "“Akari, I can’t believe you would do this!” she hissed." In order to hiss a sentence, it needs to have a lot of 's' sounds in it. This sentence only has one 's' at the every end. So I'd recommend either changed "hissed" to "snapped" or some other verb, or changing the line to something more hissable like "Akari, how could you possibly do this to us?"

Mike

The only question I had:

About this story is how the title fits in. Everything else--the character voices, the flow of events, the things we're told and the things we're not told--it's all really nicely done.

Mike

Interesting. The story I was writing (and chose not to publish) had similar themes, though the setting was much farther in the future.

This story had a bit of a rough start, as it was hard to do much more than watch from the outside as things slowly unfolded, rather than be drawn into the characters and setting. Some passages were a bit long, some explained a bit too much where they could have been shortened for effect. Once I got in further, it became more interesting.

It doesn't strike me as being as simple as Rennie's descent into savagery, though clearly that's a lesson here. In the end she looks at the photograph of a family - of the 'enemy' - who are clearly on the edge of starvation. Those people would benefit from her efforts to obtain wheat and share it, but power is clearly the SIC's primary goal, not it's people—something which would inevitably be at the root of a holocaust that placed humanity where it is in this future. As savage as her actions are in the end, ultimately her purpose appears to be to save the wheat so it can be used to save others. The ending wasn't a good sign for her, though, or by extension for the goals of the people of the Meek. You'd end up thinking she would use some mercy with the SIC political officer (being civilized, or choosing to rise above savagery), but she chose to torture and (presumably) kill him when she truly didn't have to.

Anyway... In the end, I'm honestly not sure yet what to think about this story, though I did like it for the most part. The message here wasn't strong enough to affect me as much as I'd like. Rennie was an angry-ish person from the start, and we didn't really know why (a general anger at the world really doesn't count for much, because it's not compelling), so her fall from 'civilized' to 'savage' in this seemed more like tripping down a step, than a fall from a great height which would have had greater impact.

Side note: I found it interesting how you used Monsanto's GMO wheat as a saving grace, here, considering the savage way they do business to advance their domination of the wheat market. Talk about corporations being psychotic by nature...

This story reads very much like a first draft. The narration is a stream of consciousness, and there are a fair share of typos, but I honestly feel it shows a lot of potential for a much longer and more refined story. I have my own fair share of qualms, so let's get into it:

I have to say I found Sarah a little annoying and hard to relate to. The situations she's put through in this story call for much stronger reactions from her, yet she talks like Spider-Man—always ready with a quip. Hell, maybe that's why you named her Parker!

But the thing with Spider-Man is that he saves most of his quips for situations of low danger (bank robbers) or for high-danger situations (Doc Oc) when he thinks he can piss his opponent off and force them to make a mistake. And he's a lot stronger than Sarah. AND Spider-Man got to stay in New York! He wasn't whisked away to a fantastical LoTR universe, having his entire world-view turned upside down and destroyed in the span of a few minutes. The puking probably should have come earlier. Or at least some sort of fetal-position episode? Think about how anybody, honestly, would react to a situation like this. It's probably not with wit, or at least not right away.

The present tense is also a strange choice here. I'm having trouble putting it into words, but all I can say is that I think past tense would have worked a lot better. Sorry I can't articulate why I feel that way.

Now for the actual plot of the story: I think it would be pertinent to lose the apple-cart scene. I was wondering why she didn't ask Ally where her son was, which would have helped get things moving a lot quicker, and when the twist came I found out how contrived it all was. And yeah, it would have spoiled the twist if they spoke about him sooner, but I found the twist to be entirely out of left field anyways. Partly because it was a hell of a coincidence that she immediately met her relatives in the first place (what were they doing out there anyways?), and partly because the connection Sarah made was barely there when she made it. Plus, how is it that a hero slayed the demon king and ended a horrible war and the apple-cart guy didn't know his name? That's usually the first thing that gets passed around, isn't it?

I also found that your timeline has a flaw here. Sarah says that Daniel would be nineteen during the events of the story, while also stating she was a mother at that age as well. But that wouldn't quite put her in her forties when Daniel is nineteen. Something to work out.

One last note: This is sort of just a pet peeve of mine, but with the plethora of other works involving portals to other worlds (the other reviewers are right to call it cliche'd), I've always found it annoying when the portal has zero explanation. I don't know why it always gets a pass when it comes to fantasy stories, despite any other plot element that only exists because the story needs it getting lambasted and labelled a Deus Ex Machina by critics left, right, and center. But that means there's a precedent for what you've done so it's up to you if you want to listen to my ranting or stick to what you've got. Or maybe you still have a plan for explaining it, considering this story hasn't wrapped up.

But that's all I have to say. Great work, thanks for entering, and good luck!

P.S. Change the title for heaven's sake!

It is very rare that an original fiction story in the Writeoff (or any story, for that matter) grips me hard enough that I have to keep reading. This is one.

Good show, author. A few rough edges, near the beginning in particular, but soon the story had enough momentum to ride over those bumps without pause.

Edit: Knowing as little as I do about organized crime and Italian-Americans, I have only a vague sense that this story was inspired by television, detective stories, and the like. Aside from a few details like gnocchi and the stereotypically Italian names, there aren't many details to really paint this story as authentically as I think it deserves. If you come back to this, author, try to fill in those little details. They can do so much to capture the reader and engross them in your work.

I enjoyed this! If it was weird as some others have said, then I suppose I connect with the weird ones, somehow, but I 'got' this story almost from the start. I was thrown off a bit at first with an "Oh no, a unicorn..." but you quickly turned this into something much more unique. This was by far the shortest long story I've read so far in this contest, meaning that I was engaged all the way through to the point where it flew by.

The sharp turn the story (and Clémence) took when Marcus showed up at 2am that first time threw me off, but eventually I realized that Clémence – at least in my interpretation – is a disaffected and ambivalent youth, and that informs everything that came before and after. Her mother is in the spotlight, becoming more and more successful, while Clémence remains in New York: bored, watching the rain fall, watching people sitting in restaurants, feeling empty especially at the end, and only really coming alive when she's doing something dangerous or rebellious. And for me, part of what played into that was the mythical dynamic hinted at many times between unicorns and humans. She showed affection to the men she was with when performing her magic trick for them, even the man she'd felt initially threatened by. Her psychology seemed to be shaped by that of the men she connected with.

Clémence could have been human in this story, but that would have made her magic 'special' and almost cliché. Instead, her being a unicorn gave her a talent that no one cared about except that it could be used as a tool for them.

In the end "she was hollow inside" is a good description of her condition. I could almost feel sorry for her if she had felt any measure of remorse at the end...

This was sad and maybe a little strange, but it works. Excellent story.

Edit: Can't help thinking that Clémence is a little white lie, meaning merciful. You might even stretch that to mean generous. Even if the name doesn't suit her actions. Just a thought.

Well this was fun. I felt that the origin of the winding was a little bit of a fizzle, but it was also a tad funny and oddly appropriate.

This is a story I'd place in my library called Very Little Gravitas Indeed because while there was a bit of tension here and there, I knew from the tone of the story's beginning that it would all work out well, and that there'd be little that was heavy. Which made this pleasing to sit back and just enjoy.

Anyway, nice show.

Hey, since it costs James a roll of quarters every time he calls on Four-Lane, can we nick-name Four-Lane 'Ten Bucks'? :P

One more:

Before the finals round, and all I can say here is that it needs more fiction in it. It's very heartfelt, but, well, whether what we're reading here is true or completely made up, I'd like it better if it was put together more as a story than as a report. Keep the sequence of events, but give us some dialogue so we can come to know the characters in their words and actions rather than just in what the narrator tells us about them.

Mike

At least it wasn't a 10mm socket that Rennie lost. :P

I love this story so much. It reminds me of Alistair MacLean's style, if he had ever written steampunky dystopian future stories (and it's a shame he didn't). Maybe steampunky is the wrong term, I don't know, but that's kind of the feel I get from it (probably because of the airship).

I also love the attention to detail. Every scene was like I was there, and the subtle little bits--the duralumin and the Oerlikon cannons were details I really appreciated (and that's when I started thinking of Alistair MacLean, to be honest). Also, "a song of propellers."

The choices of mixed tech were interesting. I didn't figure out right away the time period; I don't think it was until you mentioned LED lights that I was clued in that it was modern but with lots of old tech stuff going on (there might well have been clues earlier that I was dumb and missed).

There's a bit of a slow build to introduce us to the characters, and I'll be honest the story didn't grab me right away like a couple of the other contenders did--maybe that's just because there's no story description to give the promise of what's to come. But once it grabbed my attention, it didn't let go for a moment, and this is a story I'd dearly love to read more of.

I can't say that I'm entirely happy with Rennie's choice in the end, but that's not something I'd consider a downside to the story at all. I didn't foresee it turning out quite that way, but that's okay. It felt like it was in character for her, at least by the end of the story.

Wow. I don't even know how to organize my thoughts on this. On the one hand it was a bit confusing--not the author's fault, but rather the baggage I brought to the table. I kept thinking it was something else, and then it would shift and change right before my eyes, and I don't think I ever quite got the author's view of the world, but I feel like I was damned close.

Oddly, that didn't detract from it at all. All throughout, I felt like I was in some world that was familiar, but not quite the same as the one I knew, and I guess that given the protagonist's journey to a strange new place that she thinks she knows about but doesn't really, that worked. That worked really well for me. It looks like it was the longest story entered, but it sure didn't feel like it. In fact, it needs to be longer! I only got a tantalizing taste of the world, and then it was over.

This was an interesting story. A little bit normal high fantasy, and then you introduce the color commentary on the magic mirror . . . the revolution may not be televised, but clockwork dragon fights are.

There were a couple of spots where I noticed minor technical mistakes: "Maybe the monster would flatten her house, but if it didn’t there wouldn’t be fractured plates and glass all over the floor." for example. I had to read that twice and I'm still not sure if it shouldn't be "...if it didn't there would be fractured plates..." I also think that there was some comma abuse, but since I pepper the damn things like buckshot over everything I write, I'm hardly an authority on how commas ought to be used.

That aside, I really liked it. It's an interesting world you came up with with sort of a fusion of traditional high fantasy and also some modern technology and ideas (for lack of a better word).

Man, this one is a toughie. On the one hand, it's very well written and absolutely feeds into the aspects of Sci-Fi I love the most. It's sort of I, Robot. Plus, I've also been on a legal kick recently, watching Leonard French on YouTube (everyone's favorite copyright attorney), and I always liked Grisham as well, which makes this totally awesome in my book.

On the other hand, it's not a complete story. Well, it could be, I suppose, but I hope that there's going to be more of it. I want to see how the case goes. I'm invested in the characters now, dammit!

>>Baal Bunny

Second, I don't know how court ordered non-disclosure agreements work, but since they've got the word "non-disclosure" right there in the name, I have to wonder if Knox could legally tell Anderson anything at all about the other cases involving robots gaining sapience.

Not a legal expert, but I think it varies on the specifics of the NDA. I think that Knox could say that there had been previous cases and possibly what the resolution was, but he couldn't give any other details (I base this on the fact that I occasionally hear on the news things like "Ford settled three lawsuits for an undisclosed amount").

This is an interesting story. The whole thing, from beginning to end, felt familiar. It reminded me of a story I'd read once, or several stories, or conversations at bars and parties. The narrator's voice was a little odd, but completely believable, I guess in the way that sometimes you can't be sure if someone is consciously trying to strike a particular tone or if that's just the way that they naturally talk.

Some of the details in the story hit close to home, as well--my grandfather was a foreman at a factory making airplanes for the war (Baltimore Assembly, building TBM Avengers for Grumman). He got to keep a toolbox full of drill bits after the war ended and the plant went back to building Chevrolets.

When my father was thirteen, Clyde decided he didn't like looking at that face anymore. He decided it would look better with a nice round hole through the middle of it. He did the remodeling himself.

I had to read this line twice before I got it. I read it, and then I said, 'wait, what?'

Well, this was delightfully odd. I had an idea what was happening, and then when that was wrong I had another idea, and so on. By the end I think I figured it out, but I'm not entirely sure that I actually did.

Telling it in two distinct voices was an interesting decision, and it really worked. Sometimes that gets confusing to read, but not here.

I agree that the whitespaces were annoying, but I imagined that they were different pages in a book. Like if you were actually publishing it on paper, you'd read a little snippet and then have to turn to the next page and you can't really do that on a computer so you had to settle for the next best thing. And that helped give it the sort of disconnected, snapshot look and feel of her diary.

I think that there was also a good balance of humor to seriousness, and I loved the line "he'd probably smell like fish that also haven't showered in a few days."

I didn't really get this one. It reminded me of some of the weird Sci-Fi from the sixties and seventies--like in Dangerous Visions--and I'm just not smart enough to figure it out. Like, why have the offspring of two spaceships be a human? Is it supposed to make her feel empathy towards her human cargo later on when she becomes a ship's AI? If there was a reason for it, it should have been explained in the text, preferably rather early on, so I didn't keep wondering and hoping for an explanation that never came.

I have so many questions about this universe, and I didn't feel like the story gave me any answers.

>>Admiral_Biscuit

There were a couple of spots where I noticed minor technical mistakes: "Maybe the monster would flatten her house, but if it didn’t there wouldn’t be fractured plates and glass all over the floor." for example. I had to read that twice and I'm still not sure if it shouldn't be "...if it didn't there would be fractured plates..."

But isn't she putting them away so they won't break? Maybe that should have been made clearer.

Well done to all of our finalists! With nine days to go, final reviews will be up soon, and then we'll have our top-3 winners.

And to everyone else, grats on getting out an original story! It's a big and scary step for many fanfic writers, and a challenge you have overcome. Remember that stories that didn't make the finals are still eligible for the secondary prizes, like Best Worldbuilding.

I thought this story was good enough to make the finals round. My condolences that it didn't really pan out for you. But that could have just happened because this story is a lot different than what mlp fanfic readers are used to...

I had originally ranked this kind of mid-range on my slate, as it was well-written and evocative, and it avoided the melodramatic pitfalls like a pro, but it didn't really stick with me. And it wasn't until >>Baal Bunny's comment that I realized I had been totally daft and missed out on the entire point of the story. The missing older brother.

And when I read that comment I decided I wanted to read the story again. And I felt like a fool for not clueing in at the first line of dialogue:

"Our youngest is a night owl"

The story is shown in a whole new light when you actually pay attention to that line. But then, if I can defend myself, you didnt really draw attention to it. Or at least, not to the more important part of it. You focused in the night owl part instead. And as far as I can tell the reference to the older brother only comes back at the end, and it's even more subtle here.

In the end, the abundance of subtlety probably hurt this story the most, but it's not such a bad problem to have, especially considering the story ticks a lot more boxes otherwise.

Subtlety is a dangerous game, but I happen to think it's worth it. It's all about putting yourself in the reader's shoes and picking out what they're gonna latch on to and steering them in the right direction at the right time. And even if it doesnt totally work, it still makes for great second read, like this one did.

Thanks for the read, Author. This was a very pulling stiry among a lot of stories that struggled to engage. And it would be cool to see some more of your stuff on this website sometime in the future because I think it would fit right in.

It's a shame this story didnt get more comments, because it's decently written and tells its story adequately well. But I feel like there may be an explanation for the lack of commentary. It's not an incredibly relatable tale.

It's about an alien who can't talk like us, whose body and offspring are different from us, and who lives in a world that's technically supposed to be like ours but is defined by the ways that it's different from ours. And even then, the setting itself is rather barren--it's a boring warehouse far removed from the political landscape you've described.

So while the story is written just fine, it doesn't create much of an impact for the reader. Everything on display here is clearly very important to Chowzee, but not to me. So for many people the tale likely entered their brain and left it without really saying much, and so they didn't feel like saying much either.

I would point to a lot of great stories about alien life and how they might react to humanity. Stories like E.T., or Matt Haig's The Humans. These stories aren't really good because the alien life is weird and different, but because that ugly meshing between alien and human brings about some deeper meaning or message. Something that we might have in common, or something about humanity that we like to pretend isn't a problem but the aliens expose. And in some cases the human perspective is used, to help bridge the connection between reader and alien.

So I would simply ask, what is the message in this story? What are you trying to get us to feel? And how better could that come across than solely through someone we've never met before that clearly hates us?

Either way, thanks for the read, Author. I hope this comment was helpful.

I think this story could have had a lot more impact if the main character had actually had any agency or the ability to make choices. The fact that, at the end, we find out that she was biologically coerced - willing or not - to do everything in the story really removed the gut punch of her act of sacrifice. She just didn't have a choice, so... was she a hero? Or just a meat shield? Was she even sentient, after the event that removed her memories and gave her a biological imperative?

>>Kai_Creech
That's what I assume it means, but it could have been clearer.

I assume if the house gets flattened, she's not worried about the dishes.

I haven't used:

The adjective "Stapledonian" in maybe a decade or two, but this definitely qualifies. The word comes from Olaf Stapledon, a British SF author of the 1930s, who wrote these books with no real characters in them that spanned millions of years of galactic history. It's not a style I tend to enjoy, but this is pretty fun and short enough that the lack of detailed individuals didn't bother me too much.

Still, I think it might strengthen the story to put some actual characters into it. Maybe tell the first section from the POV of some human scientist trying to figure out what's happening during Earth's last days, then pull back to the POV of the person among the Arkyz who first picks up the Hiator's beacon and figures out what's happened. This Arkyz character can then become the advocate for reviving Earth in the big assembly, and the story can end with that Arkys introducing the unfrozen Earth scientist to the newly sapient planet. Or something like that. It'd make the story longer, but it'd also make it more concrete and draw readers into the world more firmly. If we've gotten to know someone who's been frozen on the Earth, it'll give us more of a stake in the outcome.

Mike

Sorry for my silence thus far in the contest; I've actually written comments about all of the stories (even the non-finalists) and will be posting them after we post our Official Prize Post. I just didn't want to tip my hand early. Cold in Gardez, GAPJaxie, and I all had a lovely discussion about the stories today, so you all can expect the final awards post to go up shortly after the contest ends.

For those of you who haven't read through the finalists yet, I hope you enjoy them.

The opening is reasonable enough. The opening line is decent, the second paragraph does a good job of following up on it, and it is nice to see the whole “running hands over axe” thing to imply a history of Pyria being a warrior.

The clockwork dragon section is awkward. It says that it towers over everything, but the details are hard to make out. In fact, it repeats the fact that the details are hard to make out several times. I think giving a description of the upper part of it sticking up beyond the smoke would be more effective.

I’m also confused by the “meatbag” part – is the main reporter a magitek robot thing? If so, that could be made clearer, as it seems like an extraneous detail.

My thought on this story on the whole was that it was competent, but kind of underwhelming. I didn’t really invest in the story, and it seemed a bit rote. We don’t really end up getting a good grasp on anyone, don’t have a strong investment in anything, and the story’s overall message seems to be “Well, parent, you did good,” seeing as the actual warrior in the story isn’t even really a person to us, just something we see on magic TV.

This is a nice little character piece, the sort of thing I’d expect to see in a magazine as an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical piece. A piece about what I think is a girl and her father, this is overall a pretty decent little piece. It is very much a piece about evoking a mood rather than delivering a message, but I think it does so rather nicely, with the setting, the writing, the protagonist feeling weak in the face of their father, worrying about not living up to their standards, and yet simultaneously the dad still clearly loves them and accepts them, even if it feels at time to the little girl that maybe he loves her a little bit less for her unwillingness to hunt.

While this doesn’t paint a complete picture of either character, we get little hints at what sort of person each of them is, as well as their feelings for each other, and the care and love.

My biggest problem with this piece was that it didn’t really stick with me. It isn’t bad in any way, but it simply felt kind of disposable – again, like something I’d read in a magazine, to pass the time, and then forget about on down the line. I think a big part of why is that it ends rather abruptly, without a really strong conclusion to tie it all together and give it a strong sense of purpose.

That being said, I liked this story on the whole; it didn’t end up making the finals, but the vivid writing did a good job of carrying me through this story.

The descriptions – particularly of David Anderson – are kind of plopped in at the start, rather awkwardly.

The core idea of the story is decent enough.

I have two real gripes:

1) This is a prologue – the story isn’t complete.
2) I’m not sure why this is being told from the point of view of the lawyer, and not Akari.

The former is… well, I suspect you started this, and ran out of time.

The latter, however, is more of an issue. The story, as it is right now, is mostly a presentation of the problem. However, the problem seems to be for Akari rather than the lawyer. That’s not to say that the lawyer is the wrong point of view – the problem is that the lawyer feels only peripherally involved, rather than feeling like the central character, and while having your point of view character not be the protagonist isn’t a bad thing necessarily, I’m not sure what the purpose of them being the protagonist is. They seem to already accept the idea that the robot is a person, so where are you going with all this? Is Akari the protagonist, or is the lawyer going to end up undergoing some character development here?

Another issue is that it seems to vary in closeness of point of view – sometimes, we get in close enough to feel the character’s gut clench up, but other times, we feel more distant.

A vampires vs werewolves story, it took until the second scene for me to understand what was actually going on. That being said, I actually did enjoy the contrast of some of Gregor’s first words being a lie about his own name; it was amusing.

Gregor was a decent main character; a mess of a man living on the fringes of society but still trying to do right in his own way – and yet having no real idea of how to do so. Him being a new leader made sense in that regard – he was still trying to figure things out, despite being a grown man and a father.

The biggest problem with this story is that the arc isn’t strong enough. It is actually a good arc – the idea of Gregor believing that werewolves are on the edge of society, have to be, or else they’ll lose control and hurt people, is an interesting one, as is the idea of the younger generation rejecting it and living like, you know, normal people – but I think the story suffers somewhat for lack of establishment of the situation. This is a short story, of course, which makes it hard to do, but we don’t really get much grounding in the “you need to live on the fringe of society” thing before we’re shown that, no, you don’t. Indeed, the first werewolf we learn much about the life of – the nurse – is the one who is the “deviant”. As such, we don’t really have much grounding in Gregor’s position, which weakens the arc of the story.

Incidentally, Ten Scars is a really nice title.

This is a rather eccentric and rambly story, but it actually manages to capture the sort of rambling quality I hear sometimes when someone is telling a story out loud about someone – it is just a kind of random mish-mash of things, all sort of tangentially related to each other, one flowing into the next.

This story doesn’t really feel like it has much of a point, instead trying to evoke a certain feeling, that feeling of being rambled at, of various things happening that don’t quite touch you but don’t quite not, that you don’t really care about but you still kind of do.

But I also have to admit that this story never really grabbed my attention – I kept drifting away from it as I was reading it.

The paragraph spacing in this was inconsistent, and that bothered me; it also made it kind of harder to read for no good reason. I think this was probably a result of copy-pasting out of another program, but still, it ended up putting me off.

Overall, this was rough, but it did manage to transmit the feeling it was going for, I think. But on the other hand, that feeling was the sort of thing that makes me stop caring about a conversation and want to go drift away to do something else.

This is a story that loves its expensive words, likely to excess. Some of these are remotely okay, but others (peregrinated) are really just obtuse; wandered would be much more natural in the context of the piece, most people aren’t even familiar with the word “peregrinated”, and unless you’re trying to do some sort of allusion to a falcon, I don’t know why you’d even want to use the word. The sheer density of all this is kind of offputting; it feels like it is trying a bit too hard at times.

The story on the whole felt rather drawn-out, and while the idea of Gaslamp technology is cute enough (and you needed space to explain it), I’m not sure that it really ever reached the point where I was actually enthusiastic about reading it (though I did get a chuckle out of Beatrix’s shirts, and I appreciated the terrible puns. Clearly Gaslamp tech is a dad).

Also, in the end, I’m not quite sure what the point was. It seems like it was Susanne coming to accept the Gaslamp technology would be the central conflict, but I didn’t really feel much there.

On the whole, this was something that I wanted to like more than I actually liked it; the whole thing is silly, but the pacing strangled the humor out of it. I’m pretty sure it was supposed to be funny, but only a few of the little jokes actually made me chuckle, and for most of it, I was just making my way through the story.

This story suffers from one major problem, but it is a very large one – it is rather boring.

The problem is that the protagonist is, frankly, extremely generic. And this is ironic, seeing as the protagonist is an android who is also a ship.

Except this isn’t exactly ironic, as I’ve seen this in many, many stories, and many other places besides. D&D is perhaps the place where I’ve seen this problem the most – someone makes a character of an odd race/class, and… that’s the character.

The thing is, making your character something weird doesn’t actually make them interesting. This is a common mistake people make – they think that a character being weird somehow makes them interesting. But you can make your character a dragon, a hobbit, a decker, or anything else, but that, in and of itself, doesn’t actually make them an interesting character.

That’s not to say that unusual characters are bad in any way; however, if you want to make your character interesting, there aren’t really any shortcuts. This is especially true in a textual medium, where their unusual appearance can’t carry a story, because the reader can’t see it – and even if you make them weird looking, it is hard to make a bland character remain as even their chosen shape in every scene in the reader’s mind’s eye.

The story takes all of the sci-fi set dressing and then makes for a totally standard story about someone growing up and moving away from home. The only really interesting idea is the whole “a ship needs a pilot” thing – everything else, for all its set dressing, is pretty dull when you drill down into it. I don’t get a strong sense of anyone’s personality in this story – not a single person. And I don’t really have any reason to care about any of it. I’m not sure if I can list a single personality trait of a single person that wasn’t an informed trait (something that the story told me they had) rather than a trait that they clearly exhibited.

I got some serious Redwall vibes at the start of this story. Whiskers, animal people, elderberry, and of course, the mention of food. I’m hungry, now. :raritydespair:

And after Snow dropped to all fours to approach the protagonist, I definitely got into the sense of a mouse world. Who told you my secret weakness?

One of the commenters noted that this hit them “right in the childhood”, and that’s exactly what this felt like – a children’s story (albeit with some aspects, like spending the night with Snow, which I wouldn’t expect in such a story, Lady and the Tramp notwithstanding, so maybe a YA story with the veneer of a children’s story). And a reasonably enjoyable one at that. This story was memorable, and while it had its imperfections and sudden leaps of story logic, on the whole, it hung together pretty nicely.

There are some stories which attempt to invoke a certain sense of wonder at a different world in them, and I think this story did that pretty well – we get the start, with the mouse folk, and then we see them in the real world. But what I really liked was that this subverted the usual tropes of “magic versus humans” stories, as well as the common presentation of Humans as Cthulu in certain sorts of mouse world stories. We get the whole “science is bad” and “humans are bad” and “if we don’t keep the real world out we will die” sort of thing from the mice – and then that’s subverted, with the humans being presented as people, with the focus on the child protagonist particularly exemplifying the idea that humans aren’t actually bad. The child protagonist also really helped to reinforce the idea of this being a children’s story. And this all worked well for me.

My biggest issue with this story is that there isn’t much of a sense of narrative tension here – the resolution (humans and mice working together) felt too neat, like it just sort of resolved itself, rather than actually having any sort of build up, as Taymer immediately jumps to the conclusion that humans and mice can do magic together. I think it would have been more dramatic if that particular revelation had been held off – basically, Taymer at first thinks that making the harp must have been his own magic, and that he alone has magic in the world, but he can’t bring the mice back to life with his song, but then the girl recognizes the tune, and she joins in, leading to the fusion. That would have made the ending more effective, I think.

Overall, this was one of my favorite stories in the competition, but it definitely had problems. I really liked that this averted the whole “Science/humans = bad” thing that is so prevalent in stories like this, but at the same time, the conflict and resolution is really weak here. I actually felt bad for our hero when his mousey love was separated from him and possibly killed by the poison gas, which is a strength, but the story didn’t really have a strong pay-off.

I liked this story on the whole – we get an alien who doesn’t really fit in on earth, as well as some sort of war. We see the perspective of that alien, then see another alien, showing that the first alien’s perspective was clearly incomplete – that some of what she believed was untrue.

My biggest issue with this story is that I’m not sure how to feel about what Chowzee did. Is the Queen a baddie? Do they mind control their own kind? There seem to be implications of mind control here, and reasons why the humans (and indeed, the other Formicans) might not like the idea of a queen rising up again. By the end of the story, I’m not sure if Chowzee won, or if she lost, given that I’m not sure whether or not her task was even a good one.

That being said, I thought this was okay otherwise – the ideas here were decent, and it was nice seeing that the aliens weren’t just one-dimensionally good or bad. But I’m left uncertain of whether Chowzee’s loyalty to the queen was earned, or if Chowzee was a victim of something bad.

The premise of this story reminds me very strongly of a movie that involved people using time as currency – time in the form of lifespan. As such, while the idea was neat enough, it was also something I’d already encountered – and I’m not sure how much sense this would have made if I wasn’t already familiar with that premise.

The biggest problem with this story is how empty the protagonist is – I’m not really given much reason to care one way or another about them, and I’m not given much of a sense about how empty their society is on the whole, as the only other two people we actually see much of seem to be much less empty than the protagonist is. As such, while the system is clearly dehumanizing, I’m not given a clear idea of whether the protagonist is normal, or abnormal, within the context of the system – both her boss and coworker appeared to show much more care than Samantha does, which makes me question whether Samantha is normal or abnormal, and whether or not our view of society through her eyes is normal or abnormal.

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this story at first; it at first seemed to be about a crazy person having a psychotic break in an empty house after their parents died, then I found out their dad was still alive and they were much younger than I thought they were at first. I feel like the initial portion misled me to how old the daughter was.

That said, as the story kept going, I got my feet under me, and got a better understanding of what was really going on, and a better idea of the characters’ voices.

Once this story picked up, it felt pretty solid overall, if a little melodramatic. The father-daughter tension was kind of one-sided, though, because I knew both sides as a reader, and thus this rather defused the daughter’s side of things because I knew what was up. And while I could tell that the dad was scared for his daughter, I couldn’t ultimately feel the adult fear there, because I knew what was wrong and knew that it would be alright.

But as noted, I did think it was solid on the whole, and I thought that the characters’ concerns, both big and small, as well as the car letter game, worked out alright (and I liked the ARKN resulting in darkness and hearken, both solidly relevant words, which was quite clever).

I nod. “Three. My twin sister Paulette is a baker’s apprentice. She lives in Freeburg. She introduced me to the Royal Astrologer just a few days ago. Freeburg was the first place I went. Besides Paulette, there’s my eldest sister Mildred, who studies geology, and Gertrude, who works with Mother and Father back on our farm.”

Oh, Marble Pie, growing up and seeing the world.

Er, I mean Mabel Stone. Can’t imagine how I made that mistake. >>;

Mm-hmm.

Okay, more seriously, this story felt like a decent sort of coming-of-age story in parts, but it also felt kind of lacking. There isn’t much conflict in the story, and what conflict there is comes in late and then is quickly resolved. As a result, I’m left feeling somewhat dissatisfied, as ultimately, everything feels rather too straightforward, with our country girl’s problems being quickly resolved one after the next. It just feels kind of ephemeral in the end. You managed to go somewhere on the order of 10,000 words into this story without even introducing any sort of real conflict, and then quickly had the whole thing resolved in a dream.

I don’t usually see the parent of an adult child chasing their child into a fantasy world. The conceit was actually pretty solid, and honestly, I was pretty on board with the start of this story – up until the fantasy world bit.

Where this story falls down is the whole fantasy world. The major plot twist – that Daniel was the hero of the war and that the kid was his – was kind of obvious (and is also an implausible stretch of coincidence – seriously, why was Daniel’s lover even wandering around near the portal?). This sort of story tends to be predictable, and this ultimately made it into an Untwist simply because I’m familiar with story tropes and conservation of detail.

Apart from the unusual protagonist, the story was otherwise extremely straightforward and predictable-feeling, and frankly kind of generic as far as the “stumble into another world” story genre goes, despite the start seeming interesting.

The writing style here reminds me of some old sci-fi stories I remember reading from the 1950s and 1960s. Unfortunately, the story itself also reminded me of them, and not in a very good way.

Ultimately, the story seems to be more concerned with itself and its own weirdness than being interesting for an audience. I felt disengaged from the conflict and the arguments did not really convey a whole lot of emotional tenor. Moreover, a lot of the argument was about alien politics to which were were freshly introduced and which we have no real interest in. The ultimate solution is a bit too perfect and also just kind of feels random, with the whole “Earth given a mind” thing being more or less a deus ex machina.

I could tell from the beginning of this story that it was not going to end well for the narrator’s mother, and it didn’t. But I suppose that was the point.

This story manages a lot of emotion via its description of events, and how obvious it is that things aren’t going to go well, even as the narrator tries to convince themselves otherwise – tries, and fails. Tries to build up hope, but knows this is probably the end.

This story’s strength is in its emotional content, and it feels very personal. The weakness is, ironically, that it feels generic. I’ve heard this story before, in many forms, and it always hurts for people. But the problem is that I have heard this story before, and this didn’t really do anything to set itself apart from similar stories. It is strange for something to be both personal and generic at the same time, but that was how it felt to me. The best part – the part which stood out the most to me – was the start, the Lifeline bit, because that DID feel different – most stories don’t start with someone talking about such folks, and it is a little bit of personal humanity in here, the Lifeline bit, as we’ve all seen the commercials, but I’ve never actually encountered a story that tied into “the button” outside of their commercials, and so it was nice to see.

But other than that, there wasn’t a whole lot here to set things apart for me from other such stories I’ve read. So while the emotional tenor of the piece was very effective, with the vivid descriptions, it ultimately didn’t stick with me as a discrete entity, instead blurring into the other stories I’ve read and heard about similar events.

Post-apocalyptic stories often include ideas like this, of people abandoning civilization, of people being civilized or uncivilized. I like the idea of part of the reason for the apocalypse being, you know, people being jerks to each other rather than the intrinsic downfall of civilization.

While I liked the idea of the flying airship fortress place, and it made for a good setting, I still didn’t get a clear visual of what I was really seeing here. I really liked the MacGuffin being genetically modified plants, which are a sensible thing for people to really want in a post-apocalyptic situation (much more efficient food production is a really big deal for civilization).

I think that the ending of the story was strong, though. We get to see the whole civilization thing, and we also see that their opponents are not only awful people, but awful people who are making the world worse *because it will hurt them less*. And we see the protagonist, faced between the pragmatic decision and the “save your lost man no matter what”, choose to make the pragmatic decision (and take that decision away from the captain, who they fear would make the less practical choice). The only real weakness is that the final line, while a *great* pre-mortem one-liner, feels kind of… I dunno. The choice she’s making fundamentally boils down to “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” which is one of the major parts of civilization.

This sounds really negative, but I did enjoy the overall aesthetic of the piece, and I appreciated a number of the components. It had an arc, and we get to see the protagonist progress over the course of the story, as well as see more of their personality, and the horribleness of the people below sort of consolidating her view of them as awful.

I really liked the intro here. Having him put on his Hat of Transformations and pick up his Wand of Power and shrug on the Mantle of Shadows, I was simultaneously put off (oh god, is this going to be a cheesy fantasy story?) and hooked (because I wanted to stick around long enough to see if it was), and then was quickly rewarded with him actually being a stage magician, which you then subvert in the next scene). While a kind of dicey introduction, I think it actually did its job of pulling me through long enough for the story to get its hooks into me.

This story had a reasonable enough urban fantasy vibe to it, and I liked the idea of the cost of True Magic. The story definitely had some solid urban fantasy vibes, and it threw the audience in pretty well. On the other hand, the dialogue sometimes felt a little… samey, at times, without enough variation in it, so the wit sort of wore a bit thin by the end.

This told a short little story, invoked some decent mental images, and while some of the exposition felt a bit forced, it still fit into the story well enough.

I was, however, left with the question of why he couldn’t just make new memories with people to sustain his magic, especially given the way the story ended.

My biggest problem with this story was that I didn’t actually really care about any of the characters; the story itself was decent enough, but I didn’t feel major stakes because none of the outcomes really mattered to me. The worldbuilding pulled me through it, but it was the big selling point here; the rest could have used some sprucing up.

New York City was not a good place for a unicorn to live.

This was a great opening line which immediately put me on board with the story. This is one of those opening lines which is simple but hooks the reader, because we have gotten a statement and want to see where it is going. Why is New York City bad for unicorns? Why does this matter?

Also, given I once wrote a story about the Plight of the Unicorn American, this hits me in all the right places.

No bias though. Clearly. :trixieshiftright:

This story made me care about Clémence, our unicorn protagonist who, despite her nature as a magical forest creature, feels very real and relatable. We learn a lot of little things about her that build her up into a real person, and see her boredom, her likes and dislikes, and her insecurities and self-consciousness. I really wanted things to turn out well for her – and as the story went on, I felt increasingly bad for her, as I could see that she was walking down one of life’s dark alleyways. I wanted to tell her to turn back, but I was powerless to stop her, and had to keep reading to find out how things turned out. The juxtaposition of what Clémence should be and what the world she was inhabiting in New York City was very powerful, and it was interesting to see just how much trouble she caused by stepping outside of what she was “supposed to be”.

The idea of someone who is stereotyped as symbol of purity using their talents for ill, and getting sucked into it for the excitement, because it makes her feel useful, and because she liked someone (or at least, liked the idea of them)… this story really pulled me. I felt bad for Clémence, as it was obvious that she really, really shouldn’t have been doing what she was doing, and was ultimately doing it for the thrill and for someone she cared about more than she should have. Her motivations weren’t good, but they were all understandable. I cared about her, even as she stopped caring about the things that matter most.

This was a great story, and I wanted to keep reading all the way through to the end. I really got into this, and above all of the other stories in the competition, I both felt compelled to read this through to the end, and I really cared about what happened to our protagonist.

If I had a complaint, it would be that the ending was a bit abrupt; it could have used a little more breathing space in showing the connection between the two main characters fraying, as well as Clemente’s feelings seeming to drift towards Vincent. The “six months later” time skip also felt rough. I think there were other ways of communicating that which would have felt better.

I loved this story. Well done.

As we're just an hour or so away from the final reveal of who wrote what, I thought I'd post my thoughts on all the stories. I've been hoarding them in a word document for a while to avoid influencing CiG and GAPJaxie before they'd read them, but as everyone has come to their decisions already, I figured I'd post them.

Thanks to everyone who entered the competition!

The rankings are out now, so everyone knows the rankings.

The algorithm messed up though, because two were in a statistical tie, but in discussion, the judges agreed on the rank ordering. :| So BIT OF CLARIFICATION HERE

#1 was indeed The Fixer by Admiral Biscuit. It was a unanimous decision; we really loved this story.

#2 should have been There Is No God by Miller Minus

#3 should have been To Drive the Cold Winter Away by Baal Bunny

The rest of the rankings are correct.

Congratulations to our winners!

GAPJaxie has a blog post prepared, so that will be going up sometime later today, including with the three runner up awards.

The Fixer was our consensus choice for #1. There wasn’t even much debate involved, aside from a few minutes to suggest a few critiques and things that could’ve been done better. For me, I felt the rapid change in attitude Clemence underwent in the story’s final, pivotal scene occurred too rapidly. So too did Marcus’s turn away from her -- after many thousands of words spent showing them growing closer together, and Clemence’s growth from quiet shut-in to an experienced mob fixer, barely any time was spent explaining how they fell apart. I’ve been in this situation before with my stories, when I realize I’m suddenly reaching the word limit but I still have lots of story left to tell. Invariably, the plot gets rushed, and the narrative arc gets compressed. I also had some qualms about how authentically the New York Italian-American scene was being presented, but with no particular knowledge of it myself, I can only assume all these stereotypes are accurate.

But those are minor complaints. The world envisioned by The Fixer was imaginative and enthralling. As I said in my short comment, this is one of the only stories in the WriteOff that I’ve been driven to keep reading, not out of obligation but because I need to know how it ends. For that alone, not to mention the great characterization and creativity on display, The Fixer was my easy winner.

The judges started to quarrel starting with our second entry. All of us rated There Is No God highly, but how to rank it with some of the others? In the end we agreed that Penny’s portion of the story was so well written, so imaginative, that it outweighed the story’s other flaws and managed to clinch the second spot.

There Is No God had one of the best conflicts in the contest, between Penny and Adrian and their inability to come to terms with each other or the loss of Penny’s mother. It also had one of the most satisfying resolutions, though we all agreed the author added an unnecessary twist after the revelation about the photograph, Penny’s understanding of what Adrian meant by “her smile,” and Penny’s subsequent catharsis -- followed abruptly by another bout of anger. It turned the resolution into a bit of a muddle.

We also all agreed that the additional whitespace was an unnecessary annoyance. The whole subplot with Uncle Shane was needless -- if you’re going to leave that in, author, make it matter more to the outcome of the story.

But despite those criticisms, There Is No God did more things right than wrong, and it took us along for a thoughtful ride on the way. We agreed it was the (close) second place.

This is where things got contentious.

Author, I’m sorry. I ranked this story as my #3, but under duress. It rubbed me wrong from the beginning (anthropomorphic animal stories are not my thing), and it never grabbed me at any point. The conflict was minimal and the resolution/victory unearned. It boiled down, in my reading, to Oh we can do magic together, let's sing and bring our dead friend back to life, yay.

That sounds harsh. But this was an actual line from the story: "How he was doing it, he had no idea. But he couldn't deny the shiver he felt simply from putting his claws to these strings."

Get that? It just happened. The magic was inside them all along.

And yet… It’s a good story. As much as I didn’t like it personally, I can’t deny that it’s a good story. It’s just not a good story for me, and I have to be honest that in every other respect it’s an excellent product. I felt like the plot and resolution were lazy, but the descriptions were excellent throughout. Even now, after reading and judging all the stories in this contest, only The Fixer’s two main characters stick in my mind more than Snow or Taymer.

So, I’m sorry, author. I didn’t like this one much, but I recognize quality when I see it. If you want me to rank this higher next time, be more ambitious with your plot or your themes. Just making the characters fuzzy animals and the solution to life’s problems “magic” won’t cut it for me.

We had a lot of interesting debate about Ninety-Five Years.

Is it a complete story? No; 95 isn't really a story so much as a logical progression of sorrow. (Jaxie said we should put that on the book jacket). It’s an intricately drawn portrait of the grief we will all go through one day ourselves, but… well, that’s it. It’s a portrait more than a story.

I’m something of a purist on stories, in that I believe they should follow traditional rules -- they have characters, the characters develop, there is a narrative arc, the story’s climax involves some significant choice or sacrifice that leads to a subsequent victory (or defeat). These are basic things and they’re present in almost all the stories we know.

But… well, they’re not, really. Plenty of excellent stories don’t have some of these things. One of my favorite novels of all time, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities has virtually none of these things. Yet I love it all the same and have tried to emulate his style. So why should I be a hypocrite and demand other authors hold to narrow conventions, when I don’t?

And the answer is I can’t. I have to accept that unconventional story styles are valid and entertaining. But I am allow to insist that when authors try for something new and daring, something that breaks convention, they excel. If you’re going to break the rules, wow me.

The other judges agreed with this, and when we looked at 95, we found a lot of great writing, but nothing that knocked us off our feet. The author took a daring chance with this piece, and he did some great things, but not quite great enough to dethrone any of the top three. And it hurt when we cast our final votes, because I think we all agreed that 95 was in that top tier of stories.

Crimson Skies? I’d never seen/heard/played it, so I went into this blind. I loved the thrilling world, the sharp descriptions of life in the air, and Rennie’s prim manners.

All that changed, though. Like, really fast. Rennie’s ‘prim and proper’ thing died in the space of like, a paragraph. And from there the story turned into a fairly conventional adventure, with a few holes that never quite surmounted the suspension of disbelief. Where did this enormous flying airship come from? How did barbarians without tractors just a few years ago manage to field an air force capable of attacking said airship?

Oh, then there’s the ending, which I will summarize thusly: “Torture is okay if you’re the good guys.”

To his/her credit, the author recognizes the moral difficulties with this conclusion. Rennie even states it clearly, that she’s not ready to be civilized yet, right before she blows her captive’s head off. And, you know, that’s a thing people do. But it’s disconnected from the actual resolution of the story, which we never learn. It’s literally just the climax -- the moral decision made by the protagonist that determines how they’ve developed and whether or not they deserve to win -- without the actual consequence.

As one of the commenters put it, this story didn’t so much conclude as simply end. And I’d have loved to see the ending. Still, for its imaginative setting and gripping action, this story came in a solid fifth place among our finalists.

Oh, author. This was the hard one.

Most of our top finishers were consensus picks, with a bit of variation. Same for the bottom of the finalist pack. But not Deosil. We didn’t agree.

I was rough on this story. Great setting, interesting characters, and a fascinating little sub-plot throughout -- the sacrifice of memories, which is a great device. But too many other things weighed this one down for me, including the fundamental question of whether it was a comedy, a parody, or something serious.

Jaxie said it was a self-aware comedy. I didn’t think so. I pointed at lines like this:

“Very." I felt the magic swirl in my chest, and took another gulp of my drink. The burn of the rum couldn't cut the chill in my lungs, but it did take the edge off. "You may have heard of Incursions before."

"Fuck."

Could you see Nicholas Cage delivering that line? I could. Is his work comedy, parody, or something serious? I’m not sure either. You tell me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVCrmXW6-Pk

Certainly, there’s a lot of over-the-top action here, with wands flashing and enemies exploding. And the creativity was probably unmatched among our finalists, with the robo-steed impressing each of the judges.

But I couldn’t get over how the plot developed. The resolution largely developed on the main character being friends with a vampire they called to bail them out of a jam. That’s a nice tool to have, but… well, it’s not very fulfilling. “We’ve been captured! What do we do?” “Just call your vampire friend.” “Oh yeah.”

In the end, we couldn’t really agree on where to rank this one. But we did agree it deserved the honorable mention. Author, I hope you read TD and Jaxie’s reviews of this one as well, because I think they’ll have some different things to say about it.

Not the best title. Let’s get that out of the way.

We all agreed that the first half of this story, with Daniel and Sarah (later just Sarah) in the real world, was outstanding. If the rest of the story had been so good, it would’ve been one of the top finalists. But unfortunately it went from a tightly drawn cop story to an… well, isekai would be the Japanese term. A story about a person from a real world, lost in another world (Sword Art Online is the preeminent isekai anime most people are familiar with). It can be a great genre. It can be a silly genre. Depends how well it’s done.

In this case? The isekai half simply wasn’t done as well as the real half, which I found amazing. Usually writing fantasy is much easier than writing real-world, gritty fiction (at least, it is for me). But somehow this turned into a generic fantasy adventure that failed to keep me engaged.

It also relied on a great deal of contrivance and convenience. I mean, we’re made to assume that Sarah found this fairy ring and went through it at the exact same time her son’s lover and infant child were being molested by demons, at the exact same location Sarah appeared in the fantasy world. Like, what if Sarah had stopped for some Burger King before investigating the fairy ring? What if she’d hit a red stop light instead of speeding through a green?

In all, we agreed the answers were just too pat. We liked the subversion that Sarah’s special power (her gun) was useless against the final demon. But the rest of the resolution -- Ally did magic and they ran away -- seemed rather lackluster.

Bottom line: outstanding setup and first half, but the generic fantasy world and incredulous coincidences in the second half couldn’t keep this story going.

As I put it in our judging, “Mabel's author can clearly write, we just need to talk with them about priorities.”

More succinctly: in a 12,000 word story, the defining conflict didn’t come until the final 655 words. That’s 94.6 percent of the story, building up to the final conflict.

The first 11,300+ words were spent describing how out-of-place Mabel felt and how she slowly came to terms with the big city, which is great. That’s important for us to know. But when you only have 12,000 words to tell a story, you need to prioritize a bit.

Like, the part about the jade jewelry? Unnecessary. Mabel suddenly goes from poor and needy to moderately wealth and… well, still needy. It would’ve been shorter and less credulous for her to just find a bag with thousands of credits on the streets.

This will sound harsh, but here’s how I summarized the resolution: "Then Mabel, who was raised as a conservative evangelical Christian and disliked lesbians based off of an obscure bible verse despite never apparently encountering or conceiving of lesbians in real life, suddenly realized that she was in love with the lesbian who she had just realized she hated."

I’m exaggerating a bit there for effect. But that’s how the ending felt. Rushed and reliant on easy stereotypes.

And, uh… yeah. I’ve had this problem with my own stories, and I think The Fixer’s author had the same issue with theirs -- ran out of space. You get to the final 500 words of your word limit and realize you have half the story left to tell.

So, author, go back and look at the first 11,300 words of the story, and decide what really needs to be in there. Subplots like the jade selling add little or nothing to the resolution. Now that you don’t need to care about the word limit, expand the portion after the conflict is introduced to fill as much space as all the action before it. Remember, the conflict in a story should generally be introduced as early as possible, not as late as possible. If you want to break that rule, you better excel (see my comments on Ninety-Five Years above).

As I said to the other judges, The Longest Possible Now is a great idea for a story, and I hope the author writes it someday.

But right now it’s not that story. It’s like a 4,000 word summary of an outstanding science fiction novel. Some of the concepts outlined here really engaged me. Like, I wanted to hear more about these alien races and the Hiator and the philosophical debate the warring parties engaged in to finally solve the problem of Earth.

As an homage to some of the great science fiction of the 1950s, The Longest Possible Now succeeds. But an homage is not a story (though a story can be an homage). Take this idea and run with it, author, and you’ll have something that can win a contest

Special bonus review! Though I’ll be coming back to review all the non-finalists in my own blog.

Try-Again gripped me more than any story but The Fixer. The first-person perspective with the second-person element of you throughout made for difficult reading, but as a literary exercise I could appreciate it. The frequent element of guns was interesting, not because I love guns but because a certain level of knowledge was clearly evident here -- we all know how frustrating it is to read an author expounding on some subject they have little expertise in, filling in the details with generic sketches rather than actual facts. But this struck me as authentic.

Then we get to the end, and… it ends. That final scene raises so many questions in my mind, but I’m left with no resolution. Why the sudden shift from ‘you’ to ‘him’? Is there a fourth character being introduced in that picture above the mantle, or is the fourth family member Armistice? Armistice doesn’t have boots, so that can’t be it, but why the pronoun change? Why? What’s going on?

This is the danger with close-in first- and second-person perspective -- it’s so easy to confuse the reader, especially if they’re not very insightful (like me). In the woodshop, Tom clearly alludes to four family members with the King, Queen and two Knights, but again I don’t know if Armistice is that other knight, or if there’s some hidden fourth character I’m just not seeing.

Frustrated. That’s how I feel, now. Like I should be smart enough to grasp this without having so many questions. Fortunately, we found had other rewards than just the top three finalists, and we agreed that the characterization here deserved its own set of laurels.

Third place?

I can live with that. The first writing contest I ever entered more than a quarter century ago, I got a third place for a talking animal story, so it does seem to be my lot in life :)

Still, I've been working on a few points that I hope will address some of the issues folks have raised, then I'll be submitting the thing to the Exploring New Places anthology Fred Patten is editing for FurPlanet books.

Thanks to the judges for putting this together!

Mike

First things first: Thank you all so much for commenting!

>>Baal Bunny
I'm glad you enjoyed it! I thought it would be a neat way to introduce a little extra continuity, and by all means feel free to borrow it. I expect someone else has done it before me, and I lay no claim to it.

In hindsight, I should have named this fic "Read Me Twice." Mind you, I don't mean to offend or poke fun; in fact, I agree with you. I've previously been told that I have the Bad Habit of holding my readers' hands, so I made this an exercise in subtlety. Even then, I felt that the four or five hints that I dropped were pretty blatant. :P

It would seem, however, that I needed to make things clearer. Thanks for the feedback! I'd encourage you to go back and read it again slowly, because there were a few hints dropped about the older brother. Alternatively, read Miller's comment.

Again, thank you so much for the response!

>>Miller Minus
I would be lying if I said that I felt it measured up to the competition; The Fixer had my jaw dropped, and I adored To Drive The Cold Night Away. There were so many strong entries, and I recognize this was a bit of an oddity among its peers.

Great catch on the first line hint! That was the one I expected everyone to miss, which is why I added the other... four? Five? I think there's 4.5 hints at the older brother before we hit the final day.

As I said to Baal, I had a particular goal in writing this fic: be subtle, and leave it up to the reader to catch the words scribbled in the margins. There were a few extra hints tossed in between beginning and end, but they were on the order of a word or two. Some you'd have to pause a moment and think about. Well, that was the goal, anyway.

The narrator sleeps in a bunkbed. The father took out an identical rifle to the one the narrator killed that chipmunk with. There were two knights in his castle of dust. The trigger-drift problem runs in the family, and the mother was hemming old clothes to fit the narrator. I'll admit a couple of those were pretty vague, but I was more paranoid about people picking up on it too easily.

As you say, subtlety is a dangerous game, and I erred too far on the side of caution. "I'm being too blatant! Quick, make it more vague!" I succeeded in some ways, failed spectacularly in others.

But given that you enjoyed it and found that beautiful, sweet, delicious A-HA! moment, I'd say it was worth it.

As for further submissions... well, if I get a couple of days to write, I will. But one day mini-fics are impossible for me to do, given the nature of my work. Thank you so very much for the encouragement, and even more-so for the feedback!

>>TitaniumDragon
Thanks for the response! The narrator is a boy, but now that I go back and read through it, I didn't place much emphasis on that. It doesn't matter if the narrator is a boy or a girl, from my perspective. It might change how readers look at the relationship between father and child, but this could easily have been left gender neutral and I don't think it would have had too much impact on things.

You're right about this being more evocative than simply granting some lesson or moral. I was going for sadness, some grief, and that hole that opens up when you lose someone dearly loved and demand of yourself to fill in their shoes for others' sake. I'm not certain how well it worked, given I was mixing all that in with an unhealthy dose of subtlety.

That said, you hit most of the benchmarks! It's a combination of being unwilling to hunt, and being a daydreamer with their head off in the clouds. They're the scrawny young thing of Today, following in the footsteps of an older sibling who took more after their father's nature, of When Men Were Men.

I'm sorry to hear it didn't grab you, but I can't say I'm surprised to hear it. There was an incredible diversity and strength of character in the submissions in this contest; I found it rather humbling! The ending was meant to be abrupt, and to tie in the loose hints I'd dropped regarding the older brother throughout the narrative. I'll have to go back and think of ways to draw readers in deeper, I suppose.

Again, thank you for the review!

>>Cold in Gardez
*gasp* A Special Bonus Review?! For ME? :D Thank you!

I was aware that mucking around with the narration would be a risk, but it gave the prose the intimate, familiar tone I wanted. In comparison, the third-person version of this story just felt so... flat? I didn't like it at all, so you got to read this version instead.

Yeah... The ending fell flat for a couple of people, sounds like. >>Baal Bunny and >>Miller Minus (and now you!) really hit the nail on the head with the main problem I created for my readers in this story: Everyone Is Drowning In Subtlety. The shift to 'him' is in reference to the absent brother that's been hinted at throughout (As Miller noticed, from the very first line of dialogue!). The shift works only if you've cottoned on to there being a brother, which is definitely the main failing of this piece. I wasn't able to put forth his existence in a strong enough form to catch readers' attention. Granted, I was TRYING to be subtle, but it turned out to be the subtle where, at a wine tasting, someone comments on the gentle hints of vanilla flavor while I'm busy squinting my eyes and trying to figure out if this grape water is a red or a white.

Armistice is just an old dog who can't learn any new tricks. To be honest, I was never quite happy with how his symbolism turned out. He's meant to be a relic, proof of the Great Things the boy's father lived through, that the boy only knows secondhand in tales. Yet, that past is also something that keeps the boy and his father separate, and draws them together. The father's rough upbringing and his down-to-earth nature is at odds with the boy's head-in-the-clouds tendencies. Yet, it is through the boy's love of stories that the two bond over the father's tales of his time in Alaska. The same thing that splits them is what draws them together, and Armistice's passing was meant to symbolize that the past was no longer barring the two from a future. The shadow of the older brother no longer holds them back, kind of thing.

Like I said, I was never happy with how the Old Pooch's symbolism turned out. :P

The royalty in the sawdust was actually meant to be one of the hints at Tom's older brother. Armistice is a whole different level of symbolism, but I can understand where you're coming from, here. Like I said, one of the failings of this piece was that if you didn't catch on to what was going on early in the story, the ending and other hints would leave you lost. :P Anyways, I think I may have just gone overboard with the symbolism, subtlety, and shenanigans in this piece.

I'm sorry that it left you so frustrated, but I'm not sorry that you became invested enough in this story to BE frustrated by it. It's gratifying, in a way. Hopefully this sorted some things out, gave you a few answers. Thank you for taking to time to respond, really! I appreciate it. :)

>>TitaniumDragon


Thanks. I hope to write a real book about this place, and this was very helpful.

I’m also confused by the “meatbag” part – is the main reporter a magitek robot thing? If so, that could be made clearer, as it seems like an extraneous detail.

It's how I remembered the talking mirror from Snow White

>>Miller Minus >>Not_A_Hat
Immediately after you wrote this, I was all, "of course that was it!" Ugh. At least it was an easy fix.

>>This is a game I lost

I have more comments for you, but first! What's the best way to get in contact with you, Re: Prize stuff? Can you PM me on FiMFiction?

>>This is a game I lost
>>Kai_Creech
>>Not_A_Hat
>>Baal Bunny
>>Admiral_Biscuit
>>TitaniumDragon
>>Cold in Gardez

Wow! I'm blown away that I placed as well as I did. The quality on display this contest was really top-notch, so this means a lot to me. Thanks everyone for reading, and for your insightful comments!

I'm shocked nobody guessed this was me. I was really, really close to writing a fake review that started with: "Hey! They drove right by my house! What a coincidence!" but I realized that would give it away more than hide it. If Pascoite had been guessing he'd've nailed me in an instant. That guy has me pegged. I even used the word 'colour'. And 'neighbour'!

Shoutout to my friend who, the day before Christmas Eve, invited me to visit her in Caledon while she house-sat for her friend. She may not have known it at the time, but the tour she gave me of the family photos in the living room were the starting point for this story. That, as well as my love of nurses and everything that they do.

Caledon is such a quaint and nice little stretch of farmlands and tiny suburbs. Though I'll admit the only reason to go there is to visit relatives. It's not exactly overflowing with theme parks and nightclubs.

Thanks again, everyone, for all of your comments. I'm going to revisit this story and improve it, and everything said above will be super helpful. The main change will be the opening. I've just recently been introduced the the concept of "killing your darlings", and that opening is absolutely my darling. I liked it so much that I bumped up Penny's age just to make the language more believable. Naughty, naughty Miller. No more darlings for me, which apparently includes all the whitespaces too.

Now, I have to ask. Did anyone solve the last license plate? No, it isn't Agrobiodiversity. You can't use words I don't know. It's really, really sneaky, but there is an answer. I'll admit, there's a typo up there that makes it the slightest bit tougher, and telling you what the typo is would give it away, so I won't. But it's there somewhere and it was kind of the point of the story. Perhaps I'll simply take it to my grave.

Ciao for now!

Man, the thing I hate the most about anonymous contests is that I can't reply to comments until the very end. :P

>>This is a game I lost

It's fun, and requires you to NOT think and NOT question things, which is neato. Why is there a unicorn, why is no one curious about this. You've taken the magical and wonderful and made its biggest concern whether or not the landlord will be mad about the scuffed floors. And I like that. It's fun, to NOT question things and just accept a little weirdness.

This is something that I really worked on way back when, trying to drill down and explain all the logic of every little thing in first contact stories and whatnot. It was only after realizing that I'd used nearly every reasonable explanation that I came to understand that sometimes it's better when stories leave some of that stuff behind. Why is there a unicorn in New York City? Why not. Why does nobody care? Because it's New York City. That's enough of a reason, I thought.

The interactions between characters were lovely, and certainly there's the strength in this story. Hell hath no wrath like a woman uniscorned. Or an associated bad pun. It was a bit... I don't know, I found myself thinking Rozencrantz and Guildenstern, but with a little bit of Pulp Fiction stooges. It was cute, and silly, and I'll confess that I forgot entirely about the body stashed behind the couch. In a good way!

Uniscorned, man I like that.

If I have one strength in writing, I like to think it's characters and dialogue.

I guess that's two strengths.

(...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope)

>>Hap

I think I figured it out. This needs to be a Netflix Original Series.

I'm strongly considering expanding this. There's a lot that would have happened inside that 'Six Months Later' marker, which unfortunately the word count of the contest didn't really permit.

That said, I don't see what it has to do with the prompt. Any story, ever, will be about characters who probably had parents, and thus could ostensibly fall under the broadest interpretation of "the next generation."

Now I have a sudden urge to write a story with characters who literally have no parents in any sense of the word. But I'll be damned if I can think of anything workable; even the first single-cell organism had 'parents' in the form of amino acids floating in the primordial goop or somesuch.

>>Cold in Gardez

It is very rare that an original fiction story in the Writeoff (or any story, for that matter) grips me hard enough that I have to keep reading. This is one.

:heart:

Edit: Knowing as little as I do about organized crime and Italian-Americans, I have only a vague sense that this story was inspired by television, detective stories, and the like. Aside from a few details like gnocchi and the stereotypically Italian names, there aren't many details to really paint this story as authentically as I think it deserves. If you come back to this, author, try to fill in those little details. They can do so much to capture the reader and engross them in your work.

I'm no expert in organized crime; most of what I know about it comes from movies and books. I wanted to try and avoid any obvious stereotypes while also hinting at them . . . I can't remember if I explicitly stated it in the story, but she's living in Little Italy and Umberto's is a famous Mob hangout. If/when I do expand this, I'll do a lot more research to fill in those blanks, though, and get the right balance.

>>Southpaw

I enjoyed this! If it was weird as some others have said, then I suppose I connect with the weird ones, somehow, but I 'got' this story almost from the start. I was thrown off a bit at first with an "Oh no, a unicorn..." but you quickly turned this into something much more unique. This was by far the shortest long story I've read so far in this contest, meaning that I was engaged all the way through to the point where it flew by.

Thanks!

The sharp turn the story (and Clémence) took when Marcus showed up at 2am that first time threw me off, but eventually I realized that Clémence – at least in my interpretation – is a disaffected and ambivalent youth, and that informs everything that came before and after. Her mother is in the spotlight, becoming more and more successful, while Clémence remains in New York: bored, watching the rain fall, watching people sitting in restaurants, feeling empty especially at the end, and only really coming alive when she's doing something dangerous or rebellious. And for me, part of what played into that was the mythical dynamic hinted at many times between unicorns and humans. She showed affection to the men she was with when performing her magic trick for them, even the man she'd felt initially threatened by. Her psychology seemed to be shaped by that of the men she connected with.

That's a pretty accurate interpretation, actually. She's bored; things like looking at America's oldest cheese shop don't fill all the time, and she wants to do something useful that plays to her skillset. I don't think she realizes right at the beginning what the implications of her actions will ultimately be, but once she starts going down one path it's easier to keep going down that path--especially since everything seems to be working out on that path--rather than step back and examine where she was going.

While I don't have any ties to anything like this, there was one point when I was younger and had some relationship issues (which is probably the most delicate way to put it) that one of my friends straight up asked me something like this: "At what point if any did you stop to think how deep the hole you were digging was?" The answer was obviously that I never stopped to think at any of the points where I clearly should have.

This was sad and maybe a little strange, but it works. Excellent story.

:heart: (damn this site for not having the familiar pony emoticons)

Edit: Can't help thinking that Clémence is a little white lie, meaning merciful. You might even stretch that to mean generous. Even if the name doesn't suit her actions. Just a thought.

I used that name with full knowledge.

>>Miller Minus

Now, I have to ask. Did anyone solve the last license plate?

"A great big voice" is probably too obvious to be the answer. Isn't it?

>>Admiral_Biscuit This is a great story, biscuit, and I agree with everything >>TitaniumDragon and >>Cold in Gardez said.

>>GaPJaxie
Wait, I won a thing? .__.

OH, runners-up stuff! Sure thing. I'll poke you on the Fimfiction once I have a moment longer than this one!

Alright, with the results out and most or all of the likely comments in, time to respond! General stuff first, then individual replies. (And apologies for the length – this ended up being a bit longer than I'd expected or planned.)

To start, I'd like to thank everyone for the feedback, and particularly the parts that get into specifics and details. I knew going in that that was the only prize I had any remotely realistic hope of winning, and while it was perhaps not exactly pleasant to be proven right, I nevertheless appreciate it. Hopefully it'll help me get to the point that I can at least make the competition work for the prizes at some point down the line.

On that note, does anyone have a suggestion as to what tack I should take next? On one side, a natural choice would be to start with trying to fix this story up some – after all, it's not even to the point that I'd have felt comfortable sending it off to prereaders yet, but the deadline had a way of forcing the issue. On another, I could see it being more educational to jump into a new story instead, and save this one to maybe revisit at some point in the future.

---

The near-unanimous consensus that the pacing is too slow is definitely the issue I most expected to see brought up; as one might imagine, the repeated rereads I had to do to double-check various things quickly became something of a slog. I'm pretty sure that at least three or four full pages could stand to be cut, and quite a bit of material would probably benefit from being shifted around. Unfortunately, even if I'd had the time to do any significant trimming – let alone a second draft – I'm not sure it would have helped all that much, since I'm not confident I can actually tell the parts that need work from the parts that currently do work. If anything stood out enough either way that it immediately springs to mind, I'd be quite grateful to have it pointed out.

The need to explain things better is also not a surprise, considering that the solid majority of stuff I wanted to detail ended up only very vaguely hinted at or not making it in at all. In this specific case, the critical aspects of the feedback actually ended up being somewhat encouraging emotionally as well as intellectually, since pretty much every specific thing people have pointed out to me as needing elaboration is one I already wanted to include.

The big thing I didn't expect was people thinking this was supposed to be a comedy. After all, comedy is hard and I'm not going to be up to the challenge anytime soon, else there's a decent chance my first story would've been an attempt at the Comedy Is Serious Business contest instead. I simply figured it wouldn't hurt to at least try for a modicum of levity to keep the edge off the darker aspects of the story, and once the pacing problems became evident, I had to hope it'd also be enough to keep the story from being too much of a drag to read.

>>Kai_Creech
Glad to hear you enjoyed it!

>>Baal Bunny
First off, I have a horrible confession to make: I have not actually read Girl Genius. I've heard enough about it to know that I certainly want to, and if I'd come up with this story idea at the start of the contest rather than three weeks in I'd probably have used Research! as a transparent excuse to finally do so, but as-is I simply haven't been able to justify taking the chance to yet. The name Foglio Hall is actually just because they're who coined the genre term gaslamp fantasy, and everything else is simply drawing on general memories and stereotype rather than directly pulled from a specific source.

I agree the mixed-metaphor discussion (along with basically the whole of scene two) ought to be more like half the current length, but I honestly didn't plan for or expect it to be read as funny at all – it was merely intended to give a bit of initial characterization. But you're not the only one who's commented to that effect, so I suppose there may be something to it....

On chronology in general: that was basically an instinctive attempt to try and keep the timeline from being too ridiculously implausible. Naturally, it was only after the deadline had passed and I'd had the chance to recuperate for a couple of days that it occurred to me that hold on, given the way the magic works a ludicrously compressed timeline would actually be more appropriate. Oh well. At least it'd be an easy change to make, since there're only a handful of in-text references to specific days and weeks to line up with a new chronology.

Regarding how Calvin survived the month (and also part of why Susanne and Beatrix didn't catch him on a grocery run): that's one of the things I actually tried writing out but ultimately cut, since I felt that with just the limited number of Calvin sections I had the time to fit in it weakened the overall effect. Since that effect is one of the things I've been told worked well, I'm reasonably confident that while it might not have been the right choice, it at least wasn't a wrong one. But of course, that's no reason I can't copy over an example attempt here so you can decide for yourself:

[date] [~CB emergency food larder]

Calvin placed a last pair of cans from the nearly empty shelf into the bag he carried, then retrieved the pot of water with a shaky hand. Though the lost time pressed against him in a burning ache, failure to maintain his body would result in far greater losses as his strength flagged and his mind fogged.

He hurried his way back to his laboratory. A flick of the switch set the fabrication torch to blazing life, and as the water began to heat, a quick examination verified that the ventilation was still performing admirably. It would hardly do to lose time poisoning himself into insensibility.

A stray fragment of thought niggled at him, cautioning that depleting his supplies with such abandon was not the grandest of ideas, but he quieted it with a shake of his head. He would simply make sure to go purchase replacements once he’d watched his latest ideas to their completions.

Regarding the 14 September scenes: the intention was that the second one starts a short bit after the first, with the theory having been that the combination of Calvin and Susanne suddenly being a little way into food preparation and Susanne's comment about being really thrown for a loop would establish that it started a few minutes later, once she'd had a chance to get herself unstunned a bit. Obviously, that's something a prereader would probably flag as not sufficiently clear. It doesn't help that while all three characters get in a comment or question about someone coming back to earth, the speech patterns Calvin's affecting means his takes a completely different form from Susanne's and Beatrix's instances, so the repetition is of limited use in realizing his intended meaning.

On Beatrix's introduction: whoops.

The box is another thing I wanted to include more detail about, but given the already-slow pacing I figured it'd be better to hold off until after I'd had the chance to cut some stuff first, since I assumed people wouldn't care too much (and it's good to see that's not true!). Basically, Susanne wouldn't have any more reason to open the door for Absolutely No One than for Beatrix, so Beatrix needed something else to get her to actually do so. In theory she could've tried asking someone she ran into on the way to stand there until Susanne answered, but bringing a prop herself was both easier and more reliable. It's not ideal to only bring up the box once and then leave that thread hanging, but at least it's better than leaving people wondering why Susanne didn't just go back to her food once she saw an empty porch (and it also serves as a convenient way to establish the weather before it becomes relevant). I didn't write out the end of the scene, but it would probably look something like this:

[SK propose a time to meet]

[BF agree + head out]

[SK notice BF grab box and object to her stealing]

[BF ~eyeroll/equiv, explain box hers and ask if SK would've opened the door if she'd seen empty porch]

[SK ~"Ugh, right, duh" reaction, BF response?]

[BF depart, SK watch for a bit? + return to dinner (+ nar note SK thought regarding now-inevitably-cold food?), SCENE END]

[NOTE: try to set up/include BF "It's just water." bit to contrast BF actual reasoning with SK biased narration]

Finally, the "and that's why it wasn't discovered a century and a half ago" is intended to mean "and that's why it wasn't discovered in the middle of the 1800s (ie during the time period whose aesthetic the magic favors most)". Unfortunately, the timing of the magic's manifestation is another thing that I didn't figure out how to elaborate on without resorting to an out-of-character As You Know infodump (which would probably be tonally appropriate given certain genre stereotypes, but I've got to draw the line somewhere); the best I figured out how to manage was Beatrix's line about chronium being "discovered a few years back, when people still didn’t know much about Gaslamp tech". While a setting that diverged in the mid-1800s would be really interesting, it'd also take a ton of work to worldbuild properly, and since I had an all-too-vindicated suspicion that I was going to be running up hard against the contest deadline, I was basically forced to take the least-time-intensive option of a familiar modern setting, which required the magic to have been around long enough to have been studied a bit but not long enough to provide sufficient proof of its outlandish properties to go mainstream and start causing radical changes.

>>Not_A_Hat
For what it's worth, I certainly don't think the story properly concludes the Susanne/Beatrix aspect. To some extent that's because the relatively one-sided nature of Susanne's conflict with Beatrix that I'd intended is absolutely not readily gleanable from the story as it stands, so even if the planned denouement had been executed better it wouldn't have been sufficient to address what readers actually take away from their sections. In large part it's because I ended up scrapping quite a bit of Susanne/Beatrix interaction and Susanne/Calvin discussion, so there's a lot less on-screen development than is probably called for. But I think the biggest issue is that I wrote the ending before the bulk of Beatrix's scenes, so I essentially had to guess at what would still need to be dealt with in detail, and obviously didn't manage to cover everything that ultimately needed it. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what I could have done to improve things, because that turned out to be an extremely good decision: the earlier parts might be important, but having an ending is vital, and if the deadline hadn't been extended the fact that I wrote the ending when I did would've made the difference between submitting a weak-but-functional narrative and submitting a collection of events that sort of look like a story but crash to a halt without wrapping anything up.

Do you have any suggestions for how to make characters calling each other by different names less potentially confusing? It's not something I'd expect to use all the time (or necessarily to such an extent – I figure I might as well go all-out with any experimental stuff early on, since if it doesn't work it's not like it's going to ruin a particularly good story anyway), but it's also too useful for characterization to just let fall by the wayside. I do suspect that a lot of my early story attempts will end up being not very forgiving to the less-attentive reader, but I'd prefer to minimize the extent to which that happens, at least as long as it's not intentional.

Of course, it would've been rather more appropriate to have the story in third-person omniscient instead anyway, but I haven't read anywhere near enough 3PO stories to have a good idea how to use it, and while scrambling to dash down a contest entry in a week is not the time to try figuring it out.

Definitely agreed on the need to get essentially any significant exposition into the first half of the story (or the second half, but that's a different issue). That's probably the area where a stylistic aspect ended up hurting the story the most – if the story had been in 3PO, it would have been dramatically easier to fit in lots of background information without the delivery coming across as unnatural. However, I know it's certainly possible to do in the particular third-person limited variant this story actually ended up using, so I suspect this may be a case where the solution may well be just to practice.

And I'm glad you ended up enjoying the story anyway despite the issues. Particularly the pun(s?) – I know they're pretty throwaway compared to everything else, but I find them disproportionately appealing relative to a lot of the more actually important stuff, and it's nice to see them well-received even though I didn't manage to make as good a use of them as I had hoped.

>>TitaniumDragon
About too many big words: yeah, I was afraid that might end up being the case, since an aspect of Calvin's character that only got inadequately hinted at is that he's intentionally trying to affect a particular "professory" image to help with how the magic works for him. I did try to ensure things didn't go too overboard by restricting myself to just words I'm already familiar with from seeing them used in media multiple times (which, yes, includes "peregrinated"), but the consensus seems to be that it doesn't appear to have worked particularly well. However, it feeling like the story's trying too hard at times might actually be appropriate if all those times are in Calvin's narration or dialogue, so I'm not really sure yet to what extent that should be considered a bug versus a feature.

I've covered most of the second paragraph's stuff in previous comments, so onto the most important aspect: I'm glad to see you liked the shirts and the puns. Those were pretty much the only "real" jokes I intentionally included (at least that I remember as of the time of writing this comment), and I was somewhat worried that this would be a case where everyone else's sense of humor differed from mine, so it's good to see that everyone who's brought them up so far has appreciated them.

What I had originally envisioned as the core narrative was Calvin's arcs, including some cut stuff for the gap between 27 August and 14 September about the aftereffects on him. The increased focus on Susanne and Beatrix was in some ways kind of a throw-it-in aspect that emerged as it became apparent that my early fears of struggling to meet the word floor were perhaps not entirely warranted, and their sections ended up being significantly more discovery-writing than Calvin's. Ideally, reconciling the two a bit better would've been something to do during a second draft of the story, but given my time troubles I was essentially forced to just muddle through and hope it'd work alrightish anyway.

Also, are you sure you meant to say "Beatrix" there instead of "Susanne"? Beatrix is the one who already knows how to use Gaslamp tech, and who ends up helping Susanne not-sufficiently-onscreen to get it to work, so I can certainly imagine that Beatrix coming to accept Gaslamp technology would seem a bit vacuous as a central conflict.

And to finish off, while I've covered this paragraph's material earlier too, it does lead me to wonder: would going in knowing the story wasn't actually intended to be properly comedic have affected its interpretation/rating, and if so, how?

"Do you have any suggestions for how to make characters calling each other by different names less potentially confusing?"

Yes, actually; give at least one of them a them more distinctive voice, such as a spelled-out accent or catchphrase or verbal tic. It won't entirely remove the problem, but if you make them recognizable without the names, then you can call them whatever you like.

Another thing that might help (and you might have done this, somewhat; I don't remember ever being totally confused by who was who) is associating one of them with a distinctive descriptive characteristic, like Beatrix's shirts. When you change the name, associating the new name with that characteristic can help cement who you're talking about in the audience's mind.

As for the 'revise or start again' question, I've always been a 'do it better the first time' kinda guy; I'm really not a fan of revising. My view is basically: why do something I don't enjoy? As long as the problems have been identified, I don't think I learn that much from re-writing.

>>Not_A_Hat
Ah, good. I mean, it's not good that the voicing is too samey, but it's always nice when the solution to a new problem turns out to be "start by fixing a known problem and then work from there".

I did want and try to associate them with individual characteristics, but I'm not sure any made it into the story enough for people to pick up on; at the very least, if anyone did they haven't brought it up yet. Pretty much the only character/voicing thing whose implementation I was really satisfied with is Susanne's tendency to (over)address people while talking to them in proportion to how respectful she's feeling toward them at the time, and that basically just distinguishes Susanne from herself (between different situations) rather than helping to make her voicing distinctive where it really matters.

And thanks for the input.

>>MSPiper

Also, are you sure you meant to say "Beatrix" there instead of "Susanne"? Beatrix is the one who already knows how to use Gaslamp tech, and who ends up helping Susanne not-sufficiently-onscreen to get it to work, so I can certainly imagine that Beatrix coming to accept Gaslamp technology would seem a bit vacuous as a central conflict.

Yes, I meant Susanne.

>>Kai_Creech >>This is a game I lost >>Miller Minus >>Baal Bunny >>TitaniumDragon >>Cold in Gardez


I don’t want to write this. I’m going to anyway. If I don’t write this now, I never will.

I didn’t want to write this story either. I had to.

My mother passed away in January. Our family is not much for tears and wailing. We’re a lot like Applejack in that regard. Still, I had this in me and I had to get it out (and psychologists charge a *lot* more than a writeoff).

So there I was with pent-up emotions, and there you were, asking for emotions to be dumped on you like a steam-shovel.

The whole story came out in three writing sessions, with short choppy sentences and brutal grammar. I decided to leave it that way, but clean up as much of the errors as I could find. Certain sections of the story have been abridged for clarity, while others added to a little for flow, but other than a few changes, it is just as I originally wrote it. Smoothing it out, adding dialogue, wandering into fictional territory or such would only cut into the emotional impact.

My father passed away in ‘95. I didn’t spend enough time with him before he passed. My mother moved here the next year, and we moved across the street from her a year later after our girls were born. We waited because we didn’t want to be twenty miles of orange cones away from the hospital when the girls were due. My mother gave birth to my brother in the car on the way to the hospital the *second* time that day, because the first time, the doctor told her to go home. When it was my turn, she didn’t believe him and had dad drive around town a little before going back. That hospital is now a two-floor apartment building about six blocks away from where I live now. But I digress.

So for the last twenty years, I’ve lived across the street from my mother. Yeah, laugh it up. I was able to check on her daily and she was able to babysit our twins, so nyyaahh.

Over ninety-five years, my mother has been… everything. Store clerk, insurance office secretary, mother, teacher, dairy farmer, LWML members, Red Cross blood drive organizer, volunteer, et al… She’s seen more funerals than an undertaker, more weddings than a pastor, more kids than a schoolyard, and more to me than my own breath. When I was writing kid-safe stories, I used to read them to her at night when Wheel of Fortune wasn’t on, and she’d comment. She’s the reason why The Lazy Dragon of Dragonvale got a reading. (Thank you to jake the Army Guy!) I tell people that she got more done in her lifetime than most of us could do in twice the time on cappuccino.

So thank you all. And particularly, thank you to my mother, without whom I would not be here.