Alright, I'm gonna give this story one more read later on to try and figure out how the two plotlines intersect here, because the writing was top drawer and the characters were vibrant and I don't want to be disappointed just because I didn't understand the ending. If I do get it then this might shoot up to the top of my slate. But for now it's stuck at... the top of my slate.

What I'm saying is I enjoyed it.

There's an interesting throughline carrying this story along--a commentary on how important it is to have a purpose in life. It's not until he has a goal in mind that he is able to finish that letter and make plans for the future.

It suffers, though, because he is so strangely detached from the duel he's about to face. There's no moment of realization that he's just done something incredibly stupid, even after he sobers up. He approaches his impending death the same way someone might react to losing their weekend to overtime at work. For another minor point, I struggled to get too invested in the duel itself because I had no idea of the marksmanship skills of either of these two, so I didn't get a chance to wonder who was going to win. For all I knew, either of them could have been a chump, or a deadeye.

The writing also felt a little slow, though not terribly slow. It felt like certain things were being dwelled on that didn't need to be mentioned, and certain things were given way more attention than they needed. The description of him waking up at the beginning, for instance, felt overlong, and it didn't give me the impression he was being lazy. More like something supernatural was going on with the light or the curtain. The laziness impression came later on through Olga, who was a great addition to the story.

That's all I have to say for criticism, but I did have a suggestion for a different way to end the story. Feel free to disregard it. What if he won the duel? What if he rode the high and the celebration for a while, elating with his new band of friends until they eventually lose interest in him. Then, having still gotten no work done, he goes right back to his lazy lifestyle like nothing's changed, flying in the face of his promise that winning the duel would change his life and start him fresh. Once it's over, so is his purpose, and normal service resumes.

But that's just me. This is a solid and interesting entry, well done!

Hmm. I love everything except for the last single very itty-bitty tiny little line.

I realized halfway through what was going on and I would have been perfectly fine if it ended the way it should have, but the ending has me all in a twist and now I’m so confused.

I’m going to think about this for a while. Edits might be prevalent in the future.

>>Hap, >>CoffeeMinion, >>Roseluck, >>Not_A_Hat, >>No_Raisin, >>Moosetasm

Skye’s the Limit

Congrats to the winners, and thanks for the comments!

This was done at the very last minute, after other good ideas failed to crystallize and I had put most of my time and effort into my other piece, which got almost no attention. Perhaps I am better off procrastinating?

This was sketched with white china marker (essentially crayon) on black paper. I did the terrier, the rats, and the background on separate pages, and combined them in Photoshop.

>>Moosetasm

Expedition’s End

I had a lot of fun planning and executing this one, and placing the little figures. I’m disappointed that it got so little attention.

The patch of differently colored rock is in the original. I see why you might think I did a sloppy job of pasting the prints in. I mainly meant what I hinted at in my fake review, that whatever it was that left those footprints, they were standing against the sky, and the fact that they are now gone I meant to be ominous. I might have gotten more mileage out of suggesting that giants climbed the mesa at the point where the rocks look crumbly, but I’m not sure it would have made a difference.

The main image is from Google Earth, which has a very nicely detailed 3D map of Monument Valley. I picked Eagle Mesa (Google Maps link). The people and footprints were taken from free sources online, and the climbing rope was simply drawn on.

Onward and upward. See you next round!

I don’t think the illness was an actual illness like the others said? I think the author wanted to convey the fact that he is having dread and fear about what’s going to happen. I know my stomach feels that way whenever something reaaaally bad comes my way.

Idk. That’s just my interpretation though.

Early on in the story, when we follow Risatia (excellent name, btw) flitting about an autumn afternoon, your prose has a particular quality to it. It’s as though I’ve been enfolded by the words like a warm, comfortable blanket, settling in for a pleasant afternoon reading with a nice mug of tea.

Then I got to this paragraph:

And right away I knew what else she had meant; this job she had for me was one of those sequence things, where you can’t just let the events be their own in the sweep of the Twixt and Tween, twirling like butterflies in flowers, but you have to polish them to make them turn right, then chain them together in order like a huge puzzle and thread a string of time through them to leave them sparkling like beads. Sometimes all you’re doing is sorting out a silly mess and keeping it from tangling up something else of merit. But once in a while, you get something that sparkles even in the darkest night, and that’s worth keeping.

I don’t think I’ve seen a writer call their shot quite so brazenly before. I have to admit, it knocked me pretty cleanly out of the narrative, as it reminded me that this was, indeed, the story that had tagged each and every art submission in the gallery this round. Still, I couldn’t help but smile as I leaned back in my chair and said to nobody in particular, “Alright, Writer. Impress me.”

I would very much like to say that you have, and at times you did - your prose is tight, and I’m a fan of the way Risatia describes things (particularly the Isle of Grayglass, that’s a neat image just from the name). But there are times when there are only token nods to some of the images you tagged, where others got the benefit of Risatia’s visitations, and in general I would liked to have spent a bit more time in each of the worlds she stumbles upon.

As it stands, this is a whirlwind of a story, one that resolves a bit too abruptly. I’m not entirely certain what, exactly, the terms of the agreement struck at the end were, nor am I certain how or why Risatia and Armano had the authority to broker such a treaty.

The best way I can phrase my feelings here is that the strength of your narrative in the beginning of this story set me up to be underwhelmed by the time it concluded, and I have a feeling that the task you set before yourself wound up being a bit too much for the time frame given.

All the same, this is probably going to place moderately well on my slate on the strength of writing alone. There’s a lot of potential I see in your prose, Writer. I look forward to seeing what you do next.

It did turn out well! I really like the way you draw the rats. Definitely feels like there's a story there.

>>Miller Minus
How do you know that suggestion isn't the bitter cup he mentions?

I, too, felt the beginning was slow, and the end was rushed.

A solid entry, though.

The Dawn

I won’t comment on the Easter eggs I found all along this piece – Easter eggs which seem to be targeted specifically at me, BTW – which point (almost) unequivocally to one only possible author. I might be wrong, but I think the margin of error here is less that ten to power of minus twenty.

Now, to the text itself. I found the setting pretty much generic. Right, you use Russian names throughout (BTW, please avoid things like Mikhail Mikhailovich, it sounds as dumb as Michael Michaelson. You can do better.) and mention Russian typical dishes, but apart from these details nothing really anchors your fic into a specific decor.

Well, barring one thing: I’d say the action is set during the 19th century. Fine, I don’t have any problem with that, but please then refrain using modern terminology. For example, I found the repeated use of “technically” a bit jarring, knowing that this particular acception arose probably some time late in the 20th century. In any case, the use of that word felt anachronistic to me.

After she left downstairs, he stopped to think, staring at the ceiling once more. He had a lot to do today. Things that he was supposed to do a week ago. Don’t tell us a character stops thinking if you plan to tell us in the next sentence what he’s thinking: non-sequituur.

There’s one big grammar gripe I have. Look here:

Maybe it would help if he looked at some old letters. Or maybe even the letter that his father sent him! That was a good idea. He glanced around the desk. He rose and looked at the bookshelf, looking through some old papers he left lying around and lists he left in half-read books as bookmarks. Not there. It wasn't under the desk either, or on the table. He uncrumpled some old sheets in the trash pile and cringed at the discarded drafts. He considered calling Olga in, but he didn't want to bother her too much.

You use simple past either to refer to “contemporary” actions (i.e. “he glanced around the desk“) and past ones (“Or maybe even the letter that his father sent him” / …”he left lying around”…) which creates a sense of confusion. You could use pluperfect instead (“…that his father had sent him.”) which would make the whole passage a lot easier to read.

Occasionally I felt some other awkwardness in the prose, e.g.: How long ago did he eat, exactly? versus “How long has it been since he last ate?”

On to the story. I’ll gloss over the slowness of the beginning, which others have pointed out and which, to me, is one of the Easter eggs I mentioned above. The main problem I have with the plot is the apparent lack of agency the protagonist has. It’s like once he has been challenged, he loses all his volition and everything happens as if it’d been settled down from the start. By the way, we never really get any sort of background about that character. How does he survives, if he’s a layabout? Etc. All in all, I couldn’t really connect with him, and that made me read the whole piece without being really emotionally invested. He’s just a lazy loafer suddenly realizing he’s signed his death warrant and that life is a precious gift after all, especially when you’re about to lose it. But instead of drawing a conclusion and, say, shirk the duel and flee, no, he runs headlong into it.

Takeaway? Guy is a fool and lost his life as a fool.

>>Hap

How do you know that suggestion isn't the bitter cup he mentions?

Via extreme doubt.

Edit: I should clarify, I'm pretty bad at interpretation sometimes, but here I can't see any way the bitter cup to be interpreted that way. If it is meant this way, it's far too abstract.

>>Anon Y Mous
I thought this too at first, but the author specifically mentions that Gene is being killed by consumption.

>>Monokeras

(BTW, please avoid things like Mikhail Mikhailovich, it sounds as dumb as Michael Michaelson. You can do better.)

Prepare to be serenaded by your least favourite artist

Real talk, though—I think the fact that his name is simply a repeat of father's is to show that he has no identity of his own, and that his father is an overbearing rich man who pays for everything for him. This would explain why he is such a layabout, and also how he survives it (Olga mentions that Mikhailovich is receiving a monthly allowance from the estate). I've seen that type of plot before in English stories with characters named "Junior".

Also, thanks for bringing up the fact that the character was lacking agency at the end. That's what I was trying to say in my first comment but the word never came to me.

While not badly written, I found the whole fic lacked a definite purpose. You’re fine in demonstrating how “good” can be relative. One of the most famous French comics once had this quip: “The enemy is mistaken: he thinks the enemy is we, whereas the enemy is he.”

Most reservations I have come from the last part. It’s already a bit cliché to have the final definition of good delivered from a monk in a secluded village in the boondocks. You reproduce the old “wise living in the mountains” trope. But then, you leave us with a mixed feeling: has the monk been manipulating Noct into killing him? We don’t really know. While your conclusion tend to attribute the final blow as a necessary consequence of reaching balance, the opposite conclusion, namely that Noct has been somehow conned once more, is equally valid. That might be a deliberate move, but I wish you’d chosen side more clearly – especially the latter, which would have demonstrated how ironic and vain is any definition of “good” even in those who might be the more able to teach it.

But, overall, we are left without real takeaway. Noct learns progressively what good is and how to achieve good deeds, but at the end there is no real moral lesson. What do you try to hammer through this parable? What is Noct supposed to embody beyond her simple existence as a tool for narration. That will be my main gripe here: the story is fine, but it seems it fails to reach higher. As presented, it is a fantasy story about a monster (whose ultimate fate, by the way, we’re never told about) and well, that’s that. Once you've read the final line, you don’t ask yourself “so, what the author has tried to tell us here?”. No, you just half-smile and get to the next story.

I’m sorry you squandered an wonderful opportunity to deliver a message more profound than the text itself.

>>Miller Minus

Real talk, though—I think the fact that his name is simply a repeat of father's is to show that he has no identity of his own, and that his father is an overbearing rich man who pays for everything for him. This would explain why he is such a layabout, and also how he survives it (Olga mentions that Mikhailovich is receiving a monthly allowance from the estate). I've seen that type of plot before in English stories with characters name "Junior".

Fair enough. To be honest, I always found this “habit” of naming one's son by the same first name with “junior” affixed to it to be highly ridiculous. Thanks God we don’t do that over here.

And also, you’re most welcome!

To me, this story has several points that drags it down.

First of all, I don’t understand why Casey takes interest in his mentor. Alright, he’s his mentor, but that does not tell me why Casey pokes his nose into the private life of his boss. It looks like his appointment as Taylor’s mentee is more than a simple search for a job. This uneasy feeling is emphasized by the fact that we discover Taylor’s best friend is actually conducting a research into the firm/guy. Actually, I get the impression both Casey and Lauren are in cahoots, and that Casey's hiring is just a way for Lauren to have access to material she would be shut out otherwise.

That makes part of the plot a bit contrived. Because, either it’s a sort of conspiration – but we don’t find any evidence of it in the text – either it’s such a fluke that a guy got hired at such a position precisely while his best friend is studying the company for her thesis that the coincidence is hardly believable.

There are a couple of other points, like the way they unearth the evidence about Taylor's past, that feels a bit forced too. Fair enough, sometimes journalists miss important affairs, but in the case of a purportedly highly successful company, it’d seem unlikely that some muckraker did not already dig into this and find the evidence.

Finally, the way Taylor's breaks down and spill his guts in the penultimate scene feels also a bit overacted/hammed up. The dam breaks too easily.

But the major letdown is the final scene. As Samey pointed out, you built up a sort of tension, and we expect something terrible (or at least interesting) to happen. Instead of that, all our expectations fizzle out and we’re left with a confrontation over a handful of hasty, run-of-the-mill words (“I’m going to sue you, goodbye!”), and everything is unraveled. The whole scene feels artificial because it’s very generic. Nothing we've learnt about Driscoll, Taylor or Casey is really brought in here. You put in a lot of efforts to coax the reader into caring about the two main protagonists, and, at the end, they act in a rather cardboard cutout way.

So, yeah, I’m with Miller here. Very lukewarm aftertaste.

This story somewhat continues the trend of both The Dawn and Captive of Industry. I fail to really care for the boy, which seems to be a modern counterpart to Dawn’s hero. Guy is a layabout, lives in a ‘sty and own his survival only to his father's liberalness. More than that, he’s a liar, and that doesn’t make him very sympathetic to the reader. More like a loser.

Most of all, I don’t see any storyline here. Father steps in, they get out, they find out that they feel fondness for each other, and, well, the end, folks. There doesn’t seem to be any evolution. It’s all about description. But that lack of plot or conflict unfortunately means that we don’t have any real reason to care for the characters. It’s like someone showing us a picture of a father and his son, hand in hand, smiling. It’s a cute picture, but if we don’t know the persons, we have no reason to care beyond the fleeting moment we discover it.

If you wanted to say to us “even losers love their parents”, then yeah, you succeeded. But it’s not a very memorable message. And I’m even not convinced that’s what you wanted to convey here.

I'd say the prose is certainly up to snuff, and thank you for teaching me the word “countertop”, but outside this side benefit, I emerged from the story with a “so what?” feeling.

Well, this definitely takes the image it's dedicated to and runs with it. I don't think I've ever read a story that so tightly adhered to the prompt (art or otherwise).

The dueling perspectives, between the kreen and the boy, are interesting, but I'm not sure they work in a story this short. There's simply not enough time dedicated to each character for me to empathize much with them or their plights. The flashbacks (there are two separate flashbacks in a story of less than 3,000 words) give us some backstory but, again, I feel like their placement breaks up the story just when it starts to get rolling.

The moral, if you will, also feels a bit heavy-handed. You have the Kreen, who greet the newly arriving humans with open arms and understanding. And the humans mercilessly wipe them out. Now, that's certainly realistic, and god knows it's happened before, but what's the point of retelling it in this form? The Kreen main character seems to have an extremely sophisticated and academic perspective on his people's slaughter, mentioning history books and human rights, when it seems to me that one of the last survivors of a small band being driven to extinction would be more concerned with hatred (his or ours), a desperate will to survive, and failing that, a lust for revenge.

But perhaps that's what separates us from the Kreen.

So this story falls right into the "Humans are the Real Monsters" Trope. The humans are killing these things because they're there, and apparently because that's 'Just What Humans Do'. In my experience, humans always have a reason for how they react- even if that reason is 'I'm Scared'- and painting them as uncaring kill-bots who also love their children is too simple for something as complex as a human.

The monster in this story doesn't behave like a human- he is a human in every way except for the brief mentions of his physical appearance. Every living thing is a product of the environment from which they evolved. Humans developed hands and brains to survive, so why would an enormous black dog creature evolve in a multicolored jungle? There needs to be more to differentiate these creatures from humans.

Their entire species can also apparently speak and read the human's language perfectly. If the humans just showed up one day and started killing things, as humans apparently do, then how did the creatures get access to the human culture and history?

The boy notes at one point how what he is experiencing is very much different from what a "human from Earth" would experience. This insinuates that 1- these humans came from earth, and 2- they have the ability to move from earth to this planet. This being the case and lacking any apparent magic, why are they using arrows for military action? Especially poisoned ones.

Finally: The Arrow.
A Bit of Realism: I know it's often ignored in fantasy and media, but yanking old-timey arrows out is usually a really bad idea. Those arrowheads were usually secured with a bit of gut or string, and had a tenancy to loosen when whetted by something like blood. This could leave the arrowhead behind to cut the person up from the inside every time they moved. Much more dangerous than leaving a bullet inside someone.

I... have a soft spot for cliches.

I personally think the story melded well together and the ending didn’t feel rushed like I expected.

All in all, well done. ;)

I think my comment is going to be a bit disjointed. Apologies for that.

This is an amusing story. Sure, as Samey pointed out, it would made any historian tear his hair out because of the helter-skelter, topsy-turvy chronology. But I’m not sure we should stick to the reality of history here. In any case, the whole text feels like a big cauldron in which you had thrown various philosophical concepts. You stir, stir, and fish what's coming out with a ladle before incorporating it into your story.

I’m a bit lost with the dragon’s subplot. What’s that?

The plot left me a bit confused too. So, the devilish legions build machines to extend their earthly dominion to recruit people to make more machines, but at the same time they build a rocket to conquer a single space station. I don’t see what's the point of building jets and missiles. What are they used for? Pull wool over their true intent?

Also the way the Greeks in the tavern react left me pondering. It’s not even stoicism, it’s more like fatalism, which I think wasn't much the mode at that time.

So, okay – Lucifer and Beelzebub are hellbent (sorry) to destroying God, which, if I’m not mistaken, happens to be a computer. This makes me thing of an old Star Trek episode called The Return of the Archons. The philosophical stance here is interesting, with God being depicted as static and self-absorbed, and Lucifer being depicted as a dynamical, simmering-with-ideas entity, Change versus stillness. This is, in a way, a heretical, but not unheard of, position.

Unfortunately, that interesting premise you build your story on fails to deliver. Lucifer wins, but finds himself at loose ends and abandoned, so there’s no clear winner. Daedalus has survived. The tavern always exists. Technological progress doesn’t seem to have changed anything in the way those Greeks live. Lucifer doesn’t seem to want to continue building a highly advanced civilization now that his goal has been reached.

In a way, you leave us exactly where we would like the story to begin: “At some point in time, Lucifer gets even with God. Then…” I can’t really buy that Lucifer we spend all the rest of eternity discussing philosophy with barflies, though it’s something you suggest.

It’s a good comedy, but as the set-up is completely crazy, we’re entitled (and enticed) to construe the whole text as a fable, or a parable. But we’re not told what the parable is, except that “once you've defeated your enemy, you’re left twiddling your thumbs”. Or maybe what you tried to tell is that “things never change”. Or, like Voltaire’s Candide, “all that is well, but most important is that we learn gardening.” Or “god or no god, that doesn’t make any difference”. Or whatever.

There is no real solid conclusion, you leave us with a dangling scene. It is a bit underwhelming w/r to the rest of the story.

Sóknardalr means “valley of the Sok”, admitting that Sok is feminine. However calling a village valley is a bit of a misnomer. At the very best, a synecdoche.

Also Hallvarðrsen is wrong. The -r ending is nominative. It is replaced by -s in genitive, that’s what you want here: Hallvarðssen. Admitting Hallvarð is a male name, otherwise you want an -a (Thorbergason).

I have little to add to what the other reviewers already said. The story seems to use a lot of red-herrings (sorry). At the end, the only plausible explanation is that Agmundr suffers from hallucinations and maybe brings about what he sees in his delirium.

Here also I fail to see what is the moral value of the tale. I mean, if you endevor to make us care about such a setup, it’s probably because you want to teach us a lesson, like an aesop. I can be mistaken, but I think your intention is not to make us focus on old Norse names or old folk tales about Walkyries. The problem here is that I fail to see what the takeaway is. As is it’s a nice tale but that’s all it is.

I think what I'm feeling now is called Losing My Religion syndrome. As in, most people don't get R.E.M.'s Losing My Religion, but they like it. So yeah, I don't get the ending, but I like this story.

Like others I felt that all the exposition and long paragraphs sort of held the story down. I didn't understand why we were getting so much exposition while he was focusing on casting a spell?

I also definitely noticed the switch from Zep to Zeb. But, another small thing:

A bucket of snowmelt sat to one side of the plain desk

...snowmelt? You mean water?

It took some pounding to free the last pile of wood from the frozen snowmelt

Frozen snowmelt? You mean... frozen water? Ice? Perhaps even snow?

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Unabomber quotes aside, I have one snippet to add to >>Samey90's historical nitpicking:

Byzantine land claims and legal… thingy

This is probably unfair, but at this time 'Byzantine' would just refer to the city Byzantium. The word 'Byzantine' to refer to complex things only came about hundreds of years after the fall of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, I'm pretty sure. I probably only noticed this because >>Samey90 was talking about all these historical points in Discord and I had that in mind as I read.

...aside from that, I really don't know how to feel about the story yet. I agree with some of >>Monokeras's criticisms, but not as harshly. Even so, I think this will have a solid place on the upper side of my slate.

In the off-chance that this is actually someone's effortful and genuine attempt at an entry, I apologize. But as it stands, I am 90% sure this is either a crackfic with an intentionally ridiculous amount of typos (I have written down all that I found, but it's not worth my effort to organize it here unless the author is genuine) and a non sequitur ending, or it was an attempt at a fic that the author wrote without ever hitting the backspace key or scrolling back up once and gave up on by the end, but for some reason still submitted to the Writeoff.

In either of those two cases, I would really prefer that this kind of story not be submitted in the future. Against my better judgment, I actually put the labor into reading it all the way through, thinking it might just be an amateur writer I could offer constructive criticism for. Now, instead, I feel like I wasted my time for nothing.

An actual review, in case this is a legitimate attempt:

This story reads as one random minor obstacle after another. None of the characters have any depth to them, apart from—possibly—the MC. Even then, we're given a lot of backstory about her that bears no relevance on her future actions in the story, and worse yet, the MC doesn't seem to be much more than a passive observer (and an occasional problem solver for minor obstacles). Lesser loose ends or hints of greater significance, such as Mahalile's vehement disagreement with the central tower plan, never have any hope of being addressed again. The major loose ends, such as King Nimrod's place in this all—why he wants to pierce the heavens, why he suddenly took a stand against God at the end, why he was seemingly placed into the same language group as Ned and Ahnna, why he's coming in through the window through a pulley at the end and then just ending the story right there—are not even tied off. None of the interminable descriptions about central tower-laying, or wind circulation, or three-pointed starring, has anything to do with the story's momentum.

If I can say one good thing, besides the token service done to Ahnna's motivation as a character, it's that the ending scenes where Ahnna and Ned are trying to escape the tower produce some degree of a tense atmosphere.

But yes, let us not forget the typos. Typos typos typos! Here are just a random few I found:

"Ned rolled his eyes, almost as if to catch a glimpse of his thoughts. Just about everyone had been used to Mahalile’s neigh say nature."
"The temperatures were becoming more difficult to bare."
"The tower acted as a log interrupting it’s current."
"The thought bothered her about as much as gnat."
“But Ahnna,” she was hoping she wouldn’t say it, “the interior tower has no such decay.”
"She wasn’t sure what to while shaking in the sight of the LORD."
"In her mind, God’s face seem both foreign and familiar, almost shifting into everyone she’s even known and people she never will."

Honestly, I did like it. I felt like the tension was genuine and certainly unlike anything else I've read so far. I have to dock points for it being rather one-trick, and also ending without even a further hint as to what we're meant to take away. Most of all, I just want to know how Anderson got like that, because it's obviously way, way beyond simple otaku-ism.

It made up a theme and stuck to it, which is more than I can say for many other stories. I only wish the author had put some more effort into critically proofreading his stuff, because a kind of talented carelessness shows itself in some of the punctuation and grammatical constructions.

>>Monokeras
This story isn't at all framed like a traditional story, and this much was at least immediate to me from the start. The protagonist is indeed a lying layabout, and the father is too soft with his kid to the point of delusion. This description of the two is done thoroughly enough that I did legitimately care about them. There is intentionally very little in the way of an evolving plot, and it's not like there's going to be a gold-trimmed moral or resolution by the end of the story. It works well enough as a portrait of two interesting characters in a static moment of their life.

>>Paracompact
I can easily see where you come from, but the characters feel too generic to me. We lack any sort of background that would give them depth. Instead we have pretty much nothing to gnaw on. Some crumbs. And then it’s over. I need more, because I’m unable to relate this text as it is. It needs way more flesh to grab me.

I didn’t have much problems with the language used, and the use of Esperanto (or Volapük) to write the sign placed on the tower made me smile.

There is, however, a good deal to say about your linguistic choice. Mallory’s English is close to early modern English, but very far from what you used, as this snippet quoted by Wikipedia shows:

Doo after the good and leve the evyl, and it shal brynge you to good fame and renomme.

So, either you stick to the original – fine, but you’ll be likely met with ferocious opposition – or you choose the easiest way and go modern. Your choice of using a fac simile of Shakespearian language does you no favor: it impedes comprehension and does not make your writing feel like the original manuscript. So it’s a sort of no-win scenario.

As to the story, I’m on the fence. Was that supposed to be a comedy? Unfortunately I guess not, but at the same time it’s hard to take the text seriously. The way the plot unfolds and some characters’ thoughts are very much comical and make me think of Rabelais, for example. But somehow some passages seem to be very self-absorbed. It’s hard to come out with a definitve answer. I wish you’d taken the full comedy route, and most of all I wished that instead of setting this in an Arthurian background, you had chosen Don Quixote.

>>MrExtra

Finally: The Arrow.
A Bit of Realism: I know it's often ignored in fantasy and media, but yanking old-timey arrows out is usually a really bad idea. Those arrowheads were usually secured with a bit of gut or string, and had a tenancy to loosen when whetted by something like blood. This could leave the arrowhead behind to cut the person up from the inside every time they moved. Much more dangerous than leaving a bullet inside someone.

To be fair, the monster might not have that knowledge.

I agree with >>Hap. I enjoyed most of the story and thought the tension was very well done. But that whole ending does the otherwise-great story a huge injustice.

As far as I am aware, there are only two factions in this war.

The Russian Civil War? More like ten factions: Reds, Whites, Greens, Blacks and Blues... Fun times.


But that fun fact aside, I actually really liked this one. It seems technically competent as far as I see, and sure, a little cliche with the monk and discussion, but it's a solid story all the way through that has a dialogue and a message. I'm sorry that I don't feel confident enough to provide a more detailed review, but know that this will be on the upper slopes of my slate.

wars ended on the spot

Somewhere at this point, I thought that it was all too idealistic. I immediately thought that once the existence of God was proven, a war would break out over which god is that. And then exactly that happened, so I guess it was a well-thought idea.

However, I find it a bit hard to believe (even harder than in the fact that in 2147 newspapers still exist) that humans, who usually have three opinions in a group of two people, suddenly all agreed that the guy's last word was supposed to be "paradise". It could've been "paradoxical domain" for all we know. No conspiracy theorists ever tried to disprove the authenticity of the recording? No government agency tried to deny the existence of the video (how was it broadcast live in the first place?). Lots of question the more I ponder about it.

Hmm, the story seems like it goes somewhere and then ends up in a completely different place. Perhaps an attempt in combining two ideas into one?

Okay, I came back, cue applause. This is a bit of difficult piece to workshop simply because of how the ending really in my opinion really overshadows most other critiques I would have about the story in terms of priority, but I don't want to simply harp on the ending for the entire duration of the review. So let's jump into a series of more minor complaints before getting into "the main issue."

Probably the most minor of minor complaints is that the Professor in the story has no name. I highly suspect, given that the story is exactly the word limit, that the Professor did in fact have name and removed to fit within the word count. The fact that the professor doesn't have a name is not only damaging in the fact that it removes some color and sense of identity from the professor being dictated to, but also undermines the informal voicing of the narrator. It comes across as overly formal for our narrator.

The opening could use some work in regards to the hook. It's serviceable and gets the exposition necessary to understand the scene off in short order, but it's rather dry and lacking flavor. I don't mean to imply that you need to pad down the scene with pointless details or random thoughts that don't contribute anything to the overall narrative, but it could certainly help to tinker with the structure of the scene and really try to get the most character out of what is essentially four to five paragraphs of explanation of the premise.

There are many instances in this story where there the suspension of disbelief is strained. The strain is caused by two main factors: plausibility (i.e. realism) and contrivance (the artificiality of the story-telling medium). The former is the less important, but more frequent than the latter, whereas the latter is a critical issue, especially approaching the ending. But we'll get into the ending later, so for now let's talk about plausibility.

When I say plausibility, what I mean to say is that the events depicted describe a situation that likely wouldn't occur in the manner presented. It's the feeling of "this probably wouldn't happen as described, or if it could, it would happen for reasons other than the reasons presented by the author." The difficulty of writing in the real-world, as opposed to fantasy land, is that real world situations often have a lot of intricacies and specifics that require either personal experience or a lot of research to properly convey true-to-life.

For example, it's pretty apparent that you've never been a psychology student, or if you have, you've only taken a few introductory courses twenty years ago. Luckily for you, the mistakes you make are mostly undetectable to someone who isn't familiar with psychology as a field, and in general, pretty minor. Conversely, it is unfortunate for you that I hold a degree in Psychology. A lot of the situations that happen in this story can reasonably be played off as being part of the narrator's ignorance, or the fact they're a bad student, but then you have lines like such:

Anyways, I start researching right away. I wish I could say I go to the library, but I just fire up Google instead because it’s 2018 for fuck’s sake. One day you old fogeys will come around.

Everything we do is digital. If you're trying to do any research, the vast majority, I mean 99.9% of all your citations will be from scientific journals found in online databases that the University leases. In fact, many of my professors advised not going to the library for research. It is much easier to seek out current peer-reviewed scientific journals by using a database than rooting through a likely outdated and limited set of publications that may or may not contain the information you're looking for.

But maybe this is a shitty university and they don't have access to PsycINFO or PubMed or any of those places for the students. Maybe the narrator is just incredibly ill-informed and doesn't know that when writing any sort of psychology paper, you're going to have to have a ton of citations from peer-reviewed journals, and that you need to do research. But it doesn't really stand to reason why the professor wouldn't use a database. It makes even less sense for them to use a library.

The professor's assignment must have really poorly defined guideline for the narrator to think even from the beginning that this sort of approach would be accepted, or the narrator is just really, really dumb. I could reasonably buy that the narrator's intrigue about the situation got the better of him, but he seems to think he could somehow work this excursion into an actual, usable paper. I mean, psychology isn't an English class where you can just write a colorful anecdote about a personal experience related to a prompt. The narrator calls this a "case study."

This isn't a case study and even it if was an undergraduate can't ethically conduct an actual case study.

Moving on, it's really, really unlikely that the same doctor would be running all of these tests and overseeing them personally, and is especially unlikely that he, in addition to being some sort of neurology wunderkind that runs all his owns tests, he also is an expert surgeon capable of performing on-the-spot skin grafts. Even Doctor Strange wouldn't do all this shit himself.

Speaking of which, the MRI probably wouldn't rip the cochlear implant out, but it'd very likely cause some damage. This isn't a huge complaint because you're basically taking dramatic license here, but I figure I'd point it out anyways.

Also it's pretty unlikely he'd order an EEG. Also you don't "pass" an EEG.

They sue the lab coat, the shirt, and the pants right off of him, and just like that, it’s goodbye Doctor Assumptions. The thing about malpractice insurance is that it gets so expensive after you use it that you wonder if you ever really had it in the first place.

Really, really, really unlikely. Given his status as "best doctor" in an immensely specialized field he's probably at minimum pulling in 200 grand a year, probably closer to 300 grand. If he's also a surgeon on top of that he's likely making at least half a million. But even if we were to throw the issue of salary completely out the window, the amount of punitive damages that Alexandra would receive on a successful malpractice suit probably wouldn't even crack over $500,000. In the world of lawsuits, some pain and suffering plus some scarring isn't really all that much, and I can't imagine it'd be enough of a payout on his insurance to raise his premium so high to run him out of business.

Really, the easier explanation was that the hospital fired him. Which, they probably do, considering he's at a different hospital, but the reader doesn't know that for certain.

There's also a problem of him supposedly being "the best doctor in the field" and making a very serious and obvious oversight in not ordering an X-Ray. There's really no plausible reason why he would think an X-Ray, specifically a CT scan, was a waste of time, especially because an MRI isn't designed to look for possible injury or malformations in the skull itself. So there's really a conflicting characterization of the doctor as the result of this oversight: is he really a good doctor, or is he incompetent?

Signs point to the latter.

But I digress. I could yammer on and pick apart every little bit of minutia, but these details are less important to the understanding the overall story. Remember that I wanted to talk about contrivances?

The issue of there actually being a physical problem with Alexandra doesn't comport with the presentation of the story, and in fact, the story itself highlights how this is an issue early on: Why didn't Alexandra's parents get an x-ray? Or even better, why didn't they get another MRI? Either way, the question of the problem was completely unanswered, and the parents never gave any sort of adequate reason why they simply didn't try again with a different doctor.

The entire ending is predicated on these massive leaps in logic that honestly left me a bit dismayed while reading. She just so happens to run into the doctor who recognizes her after a nearly a decade and decides to go on an action-adventure chase after her and she tries to run her car off a cliff to kill herself, but she won't just jump? The story went a little bit off the rails at that point, and I think the story is actually improved substantially by having a different doctor realize she should have the x-ray instead of relying on a very odd set of contrivances to get them both back in the same place.

Of course, our main character is able to find said doctor just on a vague presumption that she may have been to a hospital to tell the doctors to go fuck themselves, which in that of itself is very suspicious. The entire story the main character has had a rationale that has been explained to the reader in detail about how he was able to track down Alexandra, and in the last stretch of the story he basically just says, "Well I thought it was a good idea to go there because I had a feeling about it."

Again, just to be a smartass, I'd like to point out here that when she provides the list, she puts down "MRI" which indicates to me that she may have gotten a second MRI after the first one. If that's the case, that MRI would have detected it, because despite being non-magnetic, its effects on the brain would be perfectly viewable, and the needle itself would likely have interfered with the imaging.

The story wraps up far too quickly and isn't paced well, so there's not enough room to answer all these middling questions or really give a more plausible explanation for how all these fantastical, Charles Dickens-esque coincidences happened to pile-up in the last act.

And I'm not even halfway through my gripes. What you're (presumably) going for is tonal disaster. In one hand, you're saying, "well all of this terrible shit happened because nobody cared enough to do the right thing and Alex was kind of a bitch" and on the other you're waxing poetic about us finding the source of our pain. These two sentiments do not gel together! In fact, the last line, which is a rant in that of itself, doesn't fit the entire story.

So I'm going to respond and comment on what >>Paracompact said in regards to his opinion on the ending and offer my own perspective.

is a necessary sort of denouement for an email to a professor.

This kind of thinking is what I believe lent the ending to being bungled. It's not necessarily wrong on paper, and I even go as far to would say it's a generally good idea for stories structured like this to adopt this more analytical and tidy approach to a conclusion. Main character says the story itself is an essay, it's likely he should end in his conclusion. But this sort of clean, orderly narrative structure runs right up against the messy, disorganized, and slapdash style the plot and narrator adopt. The down-to-earth realism imbued by the narrative voice is undercut by the hollow artificiality of his summation and flowery sentimentality felt in the final few lines.

So there is, I would argue, a real sense here that the author needed to break form for the ending, keep things disparate and away from an easily described thesis, because ostensibly that's the sentiment the entire story is trying to impart or at the very least, not be so glaringly direct. I wouldn't expect the end of Fight Club to be:

"At the end of the day, we were all just guys just looking to feel alive. I hope one day I feel alive."

namely that it was too sentimental.

albeit slightly cheesy

That is the crux of the issue. This isn't a cheesy story, in any way shape or form. My point of critique isn't that it is too sentimental, it's that it's ham-fistedly so. The area you quoted is not huge issue in that regard, although I think it's guilty of hand-holding the reader a little bit too much, it's the two lines that follow, which in my opinion are absolutely awful.

Really, the story ended with the brilliant line: “Why does the needle change anything?” But it's not like the author could've actually ended it there, given the frame.

Nah man I toats disagree bro the author isn't like beholden to the man brah he can end the story whenever he feels like and isn't like constrained by artificiality of story structure if it's in line with the overall theme of the story broseph. The only thing that prevented him from ending on that line is that he didn't create a resolution that supported ending on that line, not because he couldn't.

I'm going to bring up a positive now. I'm sure the author will be pleased after like 1800+ words of ball-busting I've decided to pay him some sort of compliment.

>>Miller Minus

If you ask me, the strongest message is in the doctor's last piece of dialogue.

OBJECTIVELY WRONG GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL.

The story's best message is related to that, but best exemplified by "the puddle metaphor." It's something that's felt throughout the entire story, but only put in front of the reader's face once: the idea of suffering is something that begets pain and isolation. You said earlier that you had difficulty deciding what the main underpinning of the story was, and for me, "the puddle metaphor" is best answer I have.

To be more specific, I believe the story is an exploration of the social nuances that prevent people from getting help and prevent people from giving it. People come in with the best intentions to help someone they care about, but often they can't relate, lack the resources, or simply the wherewithal to help someone, and a person in need can often be abrasive, distant, or difficult to deal with. A person with depression can often be withdrawn, aggravated, and prone to lashing out; the sort of personality traits that people often actively try to avoid and stigmatize. Same with Alex. Really, the entire story could be broadly applicable to anyone who suffers from some sort of chronic condition, physical or mental.

The important reverse that is missing from the "there are no heroes" sentiment here is that there also are no villains. Everyone tried to help in their own way, but they failed, not because they were bad people, but simply because they lacked the persistence to keep trying in the face of an unconquerable adversity, and Alex herself didn't do herself any favors, as she is both the victim and victimizer.

That's a mature and nuanced theme, delivered compellingly with elements of mystery added in. How fun!

Anyways, expansion is a good idea as >>CantStopWontStop mentioned. I suggest cutting or repositioning the Adele cutaway; it doesn't fit in tone with the surrounding scenes and undercuts the mood. I assume it was meant to be a a comic reprieve from the drama, but the current length of the structure doesn't support that quick series of mood-swings.

Really, I'd like to sing more of this story's praises, but I've already typed so much up and this review might as well be its own entry at this rate, plus people liked this story a good deal, so I think the author doesn't need much more of a self-esteem boost from me. Thanks for writing.

I really liked your interpretation of that particular picture! I was curious to see what kind of stories would come from it, and you didn't disappoint. The flow felt ungainly at times, and there were moments (specifically the final conversation between our hero and the guide) that felt like an example debate from a high school intro to philosophy book.With that said, I'm a sucker for strong vibe, and there's a very strong vibe here indeed.

My head snapped left and right looking for and exit to anything, to anywhere.

Gah!

You're lucky horizon isn't here or he'd be very cross with you for having a typo in your opening sentence. The first impression is important in any story, but it's especially true in the writeoff because we have no idea who you are when we click on your story. All we have to go on is that opening line. Make it count!

Moving right along: This is another story that adds its own ideas to a piece of artwork and fleshes it out with backstory and consequences, and this is a type of story I can really get behind. I agree with >>Cold in Gardez that we don't have enough room for the two perspectives maneuver to yield good results, and I also think that this type of storytelling can sacrifice some of the tension in the story. If we had had just one perspective, regardless of who it was, we could have followed along with that character as they're trying to determine what the other character is going to do. Will they attack? Will they help? Will they even speak to the protagonist?

Again, this could have worked with either of them. And when we have both, there isn't much to guess about, because I'm getting to know both characters so intimately. And while the story is structured in a way to imply a conflict between these two characters, I don't feel it because they're both quite clearly the "good guys", so to speak.

This feels like a story that's borrowing ideas from a lot of different places, in other words, the author is inspired by a lot of different stories that they want to try applying themselves. I won't say that's a bad thing, because we're all just practicing here, and it's not like I paid money to read this. But I will say that the ideas that were used in this story didn't feel earned. The characters don't progress so much as they leap from one end of their arc to another. The kreen leaps from full of hatred for humans to saying he'll never forget Caleb as long as he lives (even though Caleb didn't really do anything for him). And Caleb leaps from having basically no knowledge of the situation to asking his father, “Do you think the stars can forgive?” This is meant to be a powerful line, but what's behind it hasn't built it up. It doesn't sound like this scared little boy.

But that's enough from me. Good luck in the contest and thanks for writing!

Exposition isn't a problem, it just has to be interesting, and what's presented at the beginning of this story isn't interesting. It's the author's job to tell the reader their story using only the most interesting and/or important pieces needed, but a lot of this exposition is uninteresting and only marginally important.

The interesting and important parts of the opening half of this story are: Zep is horseshit at spells but he's trying his best, and there's a kitten outside that is going to die if our poor mage doesn't do anything. But we're constantly cutting away to get details of the cottage, of Zep's backstory, of the particulars of his living arrangement, of his master's personality... Some of these things are obviously important, but they're constantly bringing us away from the interesting stuff. Not to mention, a lot of these things can be told in a much more organic way, without the narrator being so heavy-handed with it.

At the end of the day, the opening half of the story could be told in a lot less words. There's a way to do it in half the words, in a quarter of the words, in one tenth of the words, and neither of these options is better than the other. But as it is, for the amount of information presented, it's too long. At least, in my opinion.

I'm afraid I can't speak more to the story itself because I have the attention span of a goldfish, so when I'm being distracted by unimportant minutia throughout the scene, I end up at the end completely unsure if the conclusion makes any sense.

Lastly, since we're all picking apart some of the sentences, I have one to add to the pile...

Zephirum was a wonderful cook, and with a few hours of work, cleaning, and dried vegetables, ...

...I read this as, cooking the hare will require a few hours of dried vegetables.

But that's all from me. Thanks for writing and gooooooooooood luck!

I'm afraid I couldn't get into this one at all. Sorry, author, for what follows, but I have to disagree with most above me:

There wasn't any point in this story where I thought there was something deeper going on under the surface. It felt like a string of horrifying events placed one in front of the other, but with nothing tying them together. There's a strange man who talks funny, there's a character who doesn't seem to be seeing this shit, there's a dark cave, creepy dolls, sounds of machinery, possessed dog, corrupted protagonist, but why!

Why any of these things!

I think another barrier for me was the narrator, who, when not hitting me with both show-y and tell-y narration at the same time, is acting as a comic relief. The constant jokes kept undermining the tense atmosphere that you were trying to provoke. Instead of a skeleton in an armchair reading me this story, pieces of flesh still stuck to his body, I pictured some teenager with an emo swoop rolling his eyes and flipping his hair every time he successfully diffused any tension the story had going for it. Here are some example lines:

Besides a lot of mud and some scrapes and the fact that she was living in a Twilight Zone-style nightmare, she seemed to be fine.

The whole place was like something out of a serial killer’s arts and crafts project.

Best case scenario, the psycho who’d been living down here might be so busy scooping out Greg’s insides like spaghettios out of a tub that she could slip by unnoticed.

Why am I supposed to take this story seriously if the narrator isn't?

But let's go to a positive: You definitely had an excellent hook. I even voiced it out loud, after having read the title and the first paragraph I said something like, "Oh yeah, here we fuckin' go, creepy horror, I'm all about it." And then what followed was a story with good ideas, but ideas that aren't used with any purpose in mind.

But that's all just me, clearly it's working for some too. Thanks for writing and best of luck to you! I'll leave you with a very stupid thing that popped into my head when reading this story:

My Little Doggy, My Little Doggy... Ahhh-Ahhh-AAAHHHH-AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I think if it's obvious to me as a reader that the dog's the one doing the talking, it should be obvious to the character. A lot of words and a lot of time are dedicated to the narrator not realizing the obvious, and it's frustrating to read. I'd suggest just cutting all reference to an "owner." The narrator never has any good reason for thinking there is an owner, and all the reason to think a dog-like beast is speaking to them.

Otherwise, I'm very intrigued, but not satisfied. That final conversation happens so quickly, and the dog gives in so easily. I'd be really interested in reading a revised version of this in which we get to hang out in that discussion longer.

I'm afraid I didn't finish the story, so take this comment with a grain of salt.

It's World War Sunflower dialed up to 11, and I was already frustrated at that one for its priorities. From the opening, though, I got a similar reaction to A Clowder of Cats in that what's being painstakingly detailed isn't interesting or important to the story. Nothing really grabbed me and pulled me in, so when I realized what you were doing... yeah, I can't, unfortunately.

Don't worry, I'll abstain. Have a nice day!

Alright, every story has 2* reviews!





*I did a crap job on A Fairy's Toil so that one still kinda has only 1. Anyone want to step up? Thanks, Rao

I read this story back near the beginning of the round (it was on my original slate) and I didn't really know what to say. And then all these handsome commenters above swooped in and put my thoughts into words for me.

I agree with all of them. But since I'm trying to hit every story I'd thought I'd leave a little +1. The writing is proficient, if a little bland. The story is filled with a lot of irrelevancies, and it totally feels like two ideas that have been mashed together, though they don't seem to match at this point.

Wait, I do have something to add! I don't understand the title? But I also get the feeling that maybe I'm not supposed to?

EIther way, thanks for writing and good luck!

>>Miller Minus

it totally feels like two ideas that have been mashed together, though they don't seem to match at this point.

It’s called an antibonding orbital.

>>Monokeras

No.

>>Miller Minus
You killjoy.

Despite all the flaws in the construction and the long-winded way in which you expose simple things (but I won’t harp on what others have already pointed out), this will end up mid-slate for me. The ending is cute, although a bit predictable. As soon as the apprentice takes the book, we are led into an open-and-shut scenario: the world comes to an end or the kitten is saved. It was hardly difficult to guess which route you’d go.

But if you meant through this fable that owning a pet can improve how children with various behavioral difficulties interact, you’re definitely right.

>>Paracompact
I suppose the “something” the apprentice has listen to is the meowing of the kitten.

Excellent mystery set up, good creeping dread behind the scenes. Lovely ambiguous ending. Did he really wake up again, or did the man pull a gun? So it's a town of people being haunted by their past mistakes. The driver is haunted by the apparition of a man running on the road because he'd previously killed a jogger. Ed is haunted by an apparition of a runaway he'd shot and killed in cold blood.

It's rare for a mystery to be executed so well, to reveal just enough to let readers figure it out for themselves without revealing so much to be disappointing. Great work.

When you come back to this story for revisions, I'd focus on what characters are actually doing. Because they're not doing much. A lot of sitting around. I don't have specific suggestions for what they should be doing, but I'm certain this could be a stronger story if the detective were more actively involved in the case.

>>CantStopWontStop


Oh, okay, I get it now.

In that case, I feel like the story should have ended one line earlier. Still, maybe it takes a little too much work to figure out what's going on here? Anyhow, it's super well written. It's definitely up there on my slate.

This starts off very well, but quickly gets out of hand, loses focus. The premise is intriguing, the hook is good. I'm interested in reading about a monster begging to be mutilated by strangers, but I'm a lot less interested in reading about tea time, and the meandering wars, and the long-winded moralizing.

I think this may be a case of start again and refocus. A full discussion of the definition of evil is a bit too much for a short story. If good and evil are what you want to portray, don't just spend time having your characters discuss the concepts, show us good and evil, descriptively, succinctly, and specifically.

Okay... Non-sequitur ending aside, I do think this is a genuine entry. The author may have just run out of time. Although >>Paracompact's comment has certainly given me something to think about...I'm gonna stick with my gut and say this is serious business.

This story struck me as one that is trying to have its cake and eat it too. And when I say "cake" what I really mean is "architecture." Coming from someone with a background in architecture and building codes, rest assured that the architects in this story will be losing their licenses. Designing/building one floor at a time is crazy as it is (although I can forgive this for the sake of the story), but re-aligning floor assemblies using a counterweight is insane because that would only cause the floors to bend, rotating some star-shaped storeys won't significantly reduce wind forces at such a height, unless the storeys are so skinny that there's no room for camps, and the load-bearing capacity of the base of your structure is never ever an afterthought. And it certainly can't be fixed with Jenga-style revisions (side note: that reference was on point, though, I loved that).

But whatever, right? It's the Tower of Babel, it's a Legend, I'm supposed to just enjoy it for what it is without bringing architectural principles into it. But in my defense, you started it. If you're going to call your main character an architect and bring actual science into this then I think it should all work.

But that's enough about that. Para also makes good points that the characters don't have much depth as well. The only one I see having much of a personality is Ned, but his doesn't make any sense towards the end. I liked his nonchalant attitude at first—I liked his "chill" comment a lot the first time we saw him, for example. The second time, though, it's so out of place. I'm supposed to be tense, and this guy is pretending there's nothing wrong for the sake of a joke, undermining the situation.

I'm also going to have to dock some points for not being as original as other stories. This is framed mostly inside an existing story, and the things that you've added in don't quite hold up. And pretend I made a pun here about lofty heights, or... a structure that's about to collapse.

But anyways, thank you for writing, and good luck in the shakedown!

Edit: I forgot to mention, you may have noticed I didn't go after the vents idea. There's something in that. I mean, they would have to be huge vents for friction not to cause the exact same issues, but that fits with the larger-than-life attitude that this story is structured around, so I think it works.

This is a very tricky type of story to write because in a hypothetical situation like this, there will be a lot of readers who have different ideas on what would happen. As >>Samey90 mentions about the three opinions in a group of two people, you'll get the same thing from your readers. I fall into the 'disagree' category of how humans would react in this case.

horizon wrote a story similar to this a few rounds ago, of an alien race's clever strategy to get humanity to destroy each other by pretending that they were going to die and that they could only save one of them. In that story, we all kill each other, and I think the reason I sorta believed that one but not this one is that this story's premise is way more complicated, and invites way more nuance because what's actually happening is so uncertain. People disappeared off a ship, and we only have one syllable to go off of? Not exactly time for wars and destruction yet. Why wouldn't we send anybody else up there? "Par—" was enough, case closed? Time to kill each other?

I also think that this story underestimates the number of people who don't really care and would rather just get on with their lives. The religious people who thinks everything that's happening is a lie, the [ragmatics who understand that none of this has anything to do with them. The narrator speaks in absolutes about the ways everybody acted, but it's not like anybody's lives are irreversibly changed from this strange discovery, as opposed to horizon's story where literally everybody is going to die except one person.

Altogether, I'm disagreeing with the premise of this story, so I'm not enjoying it as much as I could be. Sorry about that.

The other thing I think this story lacks is a character to get behind. The narrator is nameless, and they're formless, too, because we never even tighten our scope down to their level. So there's not much investment to be had.

And for a final note, I think the title of the story is a little too adequate. I mean, it's fine, but there are definitely better ones out there.

But whatecer, it's clearly giving people things to think about, so what the H do I know? Thanks for writing and good luck!

I'm with >>Oblomov, I really liked this one. Of the fables we have this round it seemed to most grounded and with the perfect balance of whimsy and message. I'll admit, it is kind of frustrating that what you're trying to say is spoken in plain English by the monk, which is not only lazy writing but a bit of a trope as >>Monokeras pointed out. There are certainly more organic ways to have this discussion of intent vs. result w.r.t. good vs. evil, reach the conclusion you're going for without being so overtly didactic. If you'll allow me to apply a word I learned today when stalking the fic channel on Discord.

But overall I thought it flowed very well, it twisted and turned in ways I appreciated, and I loved how much more is added to the artwork you chose. And I will agree with >>CantStopWontStop that digging really deep into the acts themselves, and even the thought processes of those committing them, could add a whole lot to this story.

Thanks for writing this entry, author, I'm glad I got around to it eventually. I hope to see it in finals.

I agree with both >>Paracompact and >>Monokeras.

Yes, it's not your typical story, and what the feeling it wants to convey comes across very well. There are people who live like this, and that's depressing, and this story made me feel exactly that. I can respect a story that has a goal in mind and achieves it. But is it all that enjoyable?

I'm reminded of a 4chan greentext story, which is not a reference I thought I'd ever use when reviewing a story, but it's out there though and I'm sticking with it.

But this greentext reminds me of Mono's comment, because the story told there, whether or not it's real, has stuff that this story doesn't. In the greentext, this particular loser is making actual sacrifices (his evenings) just to make his father proud, where in this story the character is just trying to get his father off his case. They're both lying to their fathers, but the intent is different.

I like reading about characters, and if the characters themselves are not good people, then I'll settle for liking their relationships with each other instead. I feel there's an 8-ft thick concrete wall between Anderson and his father here, so when Anderson himself is a lying layabout, and he's not even really trying to consolidate the relationship at all, it's hard to get invested in his plight. I'm only depressed because, like I said, people live like this. And that sucks. But the next step is to make me feel actually sorry for them.

One other thing: I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt for the two times a paragraph ends without the final sentence being concluded. It could be that you just wanted to interrupt the narration instead of throwing in a "suddenly,". But if that's the case, I recommend putting in a "—" in there so that everyone is clear that we're being interrupted by something, and that you haven't forgotten to finish your sentences.

Thank you for writing!

>>Miller Minus
>>Anon Y Mous
>>Samey90
>>CantStopWontStop


Observe the glorious confusion, author. This entry is proof that one errant line can completely upend everyone's comprehension of your entire story and toss them out of an airlock into the vacuum of space. Specifically, I'm talking about your ending line, which made me question my entire read of the story where I was thinking the mystery was basically what >>CantStopWontStop describes. We have an A story (mystery of what happened to the kids) and a B story (cop's guilt about becoming a BLM talking point), linked by a common theme (a killing), right? Presumably, these are connected by some town-wide thing brought about by the storm (supernatural stuff only happens when it rains, it seems), as numerous character complain about being unable to sleep and have dreams about things in their past. Wraith? Ghost? Guilt monster? Who knows.


A powerful wizard by the name of Cold in Gardez once said:"I hate the Jews" "Subtlety is for fuckin' chumps; I'ma go out and get my fiftieth gold medal in this competition, suck my dick." He doesn't follow his own advice. Why did he say that?

I don't know, but subtlety isn't precisely the issue here. I think most attentive readers (sorry >>Miller Minus) will be able to easily pick up the parallelism between what's happening to the cop and kids, and that there is clearly something supernatural going on. As early as the introduction of the car crash, it is apparent that this mystery is going to have a supernatural element to it. To me, this wasn't really even a question. A group of five otherwise normal kids don't experience a collective hallucination, and there's no even half-way believable way to explain what they saw.

The "thing" that caused the car crash is some sort of wraith or vengeful spirit. The author was kind enough to even hold the reader's hand with this paragraph towards the end in case the reader was particularly dense:

“Okay.” Ed leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. “What’s your theory? What does the wise and omniscient Senior Detective Dakota Evans think it was?”

“Beats me, man. Ghost?”

The mode of presentation is the issue here, I'm going to diverge from >>CantStopWontStop's opinion here, and say that playing coy with the end reveal is actually hurting you more than it's helping. You're introducing confounding factors at the end of the story when things should be becoming more clear, you pull the rug out from under the reader and make them doubt everything they had read up until that point. Especially with this "This must all be a dream" line.

Aside from the fact that it is a cliche that takes me out of the piece, I want to ask you, and the entire WriteOff as a whole: have you ever had a dream where you spent the day at work, and then went somewhere else? Now, maybe I'm just a crazy person, but when I see some strange things after work, and trust me, I've seen some strange things after work, I've never in my life said aloud, "You know what this must be a dream." Now, I'm not retarded, and I'm aware the author put forth the extra effort in the opening to note that the "dream seemed so real" and such, but really, that only makes sense because Ed is recalling a very specific memory when he's dreaming, and he isn't having a dream about him spending the entire day at work and debating whether or not he should stop at the deli on the way home.

But the introduction of the possibility of the dream concept introduces all sorts of vectors for confusion and also tosses everything we've read up to that point out the window. Now, essentially, at any point, the narrative could be in "dream mode" and not be literally occurring. Hell, the entire story might not have happened. Because of that line, you could read it that way. If the main character's perception is being questioned, it calls into question every single piece of information that's been viewed from that character's perspective, and the characterization of the main character as an insomniac who falls asleep frequently would basically make it impossible to delineate when he's awake or asleep if you're going to accept that his perspective is unreliable.

Basically you're making shit needlessly confusing. I think it's highly likely that the events that happen at the end are meant to occur and are not a dream. Presumably, the line "The gunshot woke him up" is a bookend for the opener line "The gunshot woke Edward from his dream" and the removal of "his dream" and the vagueness of "woke him up" (i.e. alerted him, as opposed to physically awaken) is an intentional device to communicate that this is indeed occurring in the real world, and that the protagonist has been shot and killed by his vengeance ghost. Everything in the story happened as it was described, and we're not dealing with any "dream world" bullshitting about, and for whatever reason, the author has decided to throw a wrench in the works in a last ditch effort to obfuscate what is actually going on.

Wait let's back up a second. Shot by a vengeance ghost?

This detail doesn't make sense. One, because a ghost shooting a gun is just silly. But more importantly, it doesn't fit the events or fall in line with the precedent established by the first encounter. The wraith / ghost / apparition caused by the storm, whatever the hell you want to call it, that first showed up to terrorize the kids was highly implied to be born from a killed jogger.

He chased those kids. Fitting.

The problem with the ghost shooting the gun, is that the young man Ed shot didn't have a gun. Ed had the gun. Ed shot the guy. The jogger ghost didn't hit the kids with a fucking car, so why would the young man shoot Ed?

Just seems wrong.

Anyways, good fundamentals and descriptions, but some scenes are more barebone than others, especially with Ed's partner. There seems to be a want for this story to expand further considering there are a great deal of words dedicated to establishing the relationship dynamics between Ed and his wife that don't really have any bearing on the overall plot, only giving a small amount of detail to the relevance of the storm, and Cidne herself is more a vehicle to make writing the scenes with Ed easier by giving him someone to interact with rather than a necessary component. I call this literary technique "Stephen Kinging"; spending a large amount of your word count on tertiary details that probably should have been edited out or truncated because they're not exactly relevant to the progression of the plot, but are kept in to give a nice splash to the characterization. Stephen King can do this for dozens of pages, though.

Not knowing more about the "monster" so to speak is a bit of a misstep. There's just a few fundamental things missing about how the "rules" work for this thing(s) to really get any significant picture what it can actually do. It seems to haunt the dreams of everyone in the town and show them nightmares of things they feel guilt over, but what causes it to manifest? Obviously, it can be seen by anyone in town, because the girl saw it and she wasn't even aware of the driver's hit and run history. Presumably, there'd be a lot more people having encounters if the storm is affecting the entire town's ability to sleep. So does it only happen to manifest in a homicidal entity in extreme cases where someone was actually killed? What are the conditions for it showing up? Is it conscious entity, or is it made by the emotions of the person feeling guilt? You don't need to directly answer these questions, but give some hints as to what the answer might be, because as it stands, it's a hard for me to understand why the "monster" only showed up in these two specific instances, or why it wouldn't have showed itself to Ed the first night or anywhere else in town.

There really should a be a scene interviewing eyewitnesses or something similar. That could give enough of an answer to satisfy me.

Anyways, I'm gonna take a nap because I'm tired.

>>Samey90
>>Miller Minus
>>Paracompact

Hey, thank you for taking the time to read this and sharing your thoughts and words!

Due to time constraints, this story ended up not taking the shape I had originally hoped. The abrupt ending came from me slapping a few sentences to the tail of what I had and submitting it with the last 20 or so seconds left. The title was even rushed onto it. I was hoping to make the title a linguistic pun of the Hebrew word for 'tall'.

The major part of this story was supposed to be about how the main character escaped the tower she helped create. The major obstacles were supposed to be the fact that she couldn't understand anyone else in the building, and the fact that the oblong revisions were counterproductive in the case of a fire drill. It ended up being 1/4th of the whole story in the end which, uh, makes it fall pretty flat. I also didn't get a chance to flaunt all of the details I wanted to incorporate into it, and the details I did get a chance to flaunt were half baked.

Anyway! I studied my linguistics books and went online (admittedly on Wikipedia, especially for the bible stuff) for all the language and history related details in the story. Each month is part of the Hebrew calendar, which has a theme applied to it that I tried to incorporate. The languages used in the middle portion are romanized translations of languages like Amharic, Egyptian, Sinitic (specifically Mandarin) Hebrew, and for fun I added in Basque and a secret special language. I love languages, and they were supposed to be a large part of the story!
I had to look pretty much everywhere to get an accurate portrayal of Babylon and its size, but an old humanities text provided a pretty decent reference. The architectural knowledge I have is incredibly limited, so I hoped my mechanical drafting and physics knowledge would carry me over while I glanced at maybe like, two google pages about the Burj Khalifa and the Shanghai Tower. I should have studied skyscraper construction a tad more. I wanted to bring science into this legend because it would be cool.

As for the characters' lack of depth, that was either my inexperience as a writer, the fact that my story is pretty much cut in half, or both. I usually try to show character through dialogue, and I don't know if that's a bad practice or not so I cut the dialogue short.
Oh, as for my overabundance of typos: those were just typos. I couldn't get anyone to read over the story with me, and I was out of time. Perhaps it was careless, but I figured it was better to submit something rather than nothing at all. Next time, I'll divvy up my efforts differently!

Again, thank you for reading!

>>Paracompact
>>CantStopWontStop
>>Monokeras
>>Samey90
>>Miller Minus


First, I’d like to thank everybody who left feedback on this story. Its strengths and weaknesses - more latter than former - are made abundantly clear by the consensus I’ve received, and I agree with what everyone says wholeheartedly.

“No sun sought and no sax stone scarred” is the first line of the inscription on the Eggja Stone, a gravestone from around 650-700 CE dug up in Sogndal, Norway. The old Norse version of the name Sogndal is Sóknardalr, which is why I chose it for the name of the village in the story. Should have realized it was probably the old name for the region, not the old name for the town. Oh well, lesson learned. I think I did a reasonably good job of sticking with Old Norse versions of names throughout the rest of the piece, at least (misspelling Hallvarðssen notwithstanding).

My intentions with this story were to walk the line between a classic draugr haunting and a man slowly dying from a progressively worsening infection, but as I was coming up on my final deadline (had plans for that Sunday night) I realized I didn’t have a good way to end the story. In the end I went with a fairly heavy-handed indication that Agmundr was actually being haunted with the frayed, bloodied rope discovery, but I wasn’t at all happy with it. But, given the choice between something and nothing, I chose to submit something.

I should probably have tried harder to make the characters more well rounded than they were, and I freely admit that I found myself lacking the time to tie off the loose ends I wrote into this piece. Finishing a story hastily and punting it out the door has historically never panned out well for me, and the trend continues here. Hopefully I’ll have my head in the game next time around.

Thanks again, everyone!

>>Monokeras
>>Miller Minus
>>Samey90

Thanks everyone for your reviews. Let me just respond to a few things.

I agree with those who had issues with the end. I wrote the final scene with Driscoll in a bit of a rush, hence his Disney villain–esque antics and dialogue, and it's fair to say that it came off as artificial and that, as Monokeras says, things kind of fizzled out. The trouble here is that—and this is my own fault—as far as I was concerned, the previous scene with Casey and Taylor is the "real" climax, and the confrontation with Driscoll secondary to that. Unfortunately, it's not written that way—Casey has too easy a time with Taylor, and then they have too easy a time with Driscoll too, so that both function like an anticlimax. Obviously this is not ideal.

Miller (and Paracompact privately) expressed concern with the character of Lauren. I'd hate to see her go, as I'm a fan of prickly characters, but I have to agree her role in the story is problematic. There is a contrivance in the way she's studying Driscoll at the same time that the position Casey applies for opens; that goes unexplained, and I'm not sure that it can be explained. And as Paracompact complained, Lauren is too much the plot mover here. I'm not sure which of the suggested changes I'd go with, whether cutting her, bringing her to the confrontation with Taylor, or changing her role to that of confidante rather than plot mover, but I'll bear it in mind.

One word about the intention with the story, since I don't think anyone picked up on it. My purpose was to explore some implications of this apprenticeship system I devised. It's why I brought Lauren in early with her very specific thesis about it (that it impairs socialization in the workplace). It's why Casey was so concerned about befriending Taylor, which would have been rather strange in a normal office, and it's why Taylor's past is what it is, because I wanted to explore a potential failure mode. I spent a lot of time with the idea in the story, so I'm disappointed that that didn't come across. Another thing to keep in mind if I ever do revisions.

Thanks again!

Thank you all for reviewing my fic!!

This round of reviews felt... tame? I don't know. I think I just braced myself for the literal worst. I really appreciate that you all took out time of your day to review this and, now, time to read this. :D

I don't think I've ever read a story that so tightly adhered to the prompt (art or otherwise).

If the whole 'star' thing seemed shoehorned in at the end-- that's because it was. I've never done this art to fic thing before, so I didn't know if I was doing it right and I assumed that I had to follow the original prompt to a tee.

You all are right that this feels wayyyy too short to make a story like this work. If I could redo this story I would throw out the flashbacks, since they did seem to hold the story down, and replace it with more dialogue to get an idea where all of them are coming from. And add a lot more words.

>>Cold in Gardez

when it seems to me that one of the last survivors of a small band being driven to extinction would be more concerned with hatred (his or ours), a desperate will to survive, and failing that, a lust for revenge.

In the original prompt he was about to kill Caleb, the boy, and only stopped because he was so hurt and falls over; I felt that it took up too much time/attention in my short story. :/ I probably should have put it back in there rip.

>>MrExtra

humans always have a reason for how they react- even if that reason is 'I'm Scared'- and painting them as uncaring kill-bots who also love their children is too simple for something as complex as a human.

I've read these tropes before and I never expected one of my stories to fit in there. I know that humans always have a reason and the ones in the story were supposed to be too done/lazy with diplomatic relations because they had done so many in the past with 'inferior' people. I know this absolutely did not come across in the story and I'm sorry about it. ':)

A Bit of Realism: I know it's often ignored in fantasy and media, but yanking old-timey arrows out is usually a really bad idea.

If you'll see by my previous comments I thought that I had to follow the prompt exactly as it was. I attempted to ignore the arrow and just give the humans some very poisonous ones. I did, in fact, know that ripping one out was most likely worse for you than leaving it in and, like what Cold mentioned, the beast didn't know. What I didn't know was that old timey arrowheads could just... fall off. I did read the article you gave me and it was pretty interesting lol. It was interesting that some arrowheads could twist when given the right circumstances hmm..

>>Miller Minus

My head snapped left and right looking for and exit to anything, to anywhere.

I SCREAMED when you showed me that sentence. I looked over my story a couple of times for grammar mistakes but, sadly, I didn't get that one. ;-;

The Kreen leaps from full of hatred for humans to saying he'll never forget Caleb as long as he lives (even though Caleb didn't really do anything for him). And Caleb leaps from having basically no knowledge of the situation to asking his father, “Do you think the stars can forgive?” This is meant to be a powerful line, but what's behind it hasn't built it up. It doesn't sound like this scared little boy.

The last few lines of my story still make me cringe. if you have read previously you should now know that I tried to force the sky to be stood against by forcing that last bit in there.

I don't think that the beast was angry at Caleb, more at his kind in general. Caleb, though, has too quick of a character arc for an eight year old, let alone anyone. Thanks for the review, though. <3

>>Roseluck
>>Not_A_Hat
>>Moosetasm
>>Hap
>>GroaningGreyAgony

Thank you all so much for reviewing this!!! <3

I will say, though, that this composition does feel very... safe, to me? You're obviously a talented artist who picked an idea and executed it with a clear scope and clean composition, but I guess... you make it seem so easy, I don't feel like you were challenged at all. Maybe that's unfair to you, as an artist; I don't know how much blood/sweat/tears you poured into this, but it doesn't feel ambitious. I'll try not to let that color my judging, but yeah.

Mr. Hat, you are right my good sir. I wasn't very challenged by this, but I wanted to make the picture as vague as possible to give the competitors as much of an idea as I could.

This was made on paper and with some markers and a white gel pen. The stars, now that I think about it, are, in fact... equal? The stars should be clustered in some places more than others. I'll think about that next time. ;)

Thanks again for the reviews :D

>>Roseluck
>>Not_A_Hat
>>Moosetasm
>>No_Raisin
>>GroaningGreyAgony

I detect some social commentary with this one.

Well, you know, social commentary is best served passive aggressively. ;)

The unbalanced number of signs is bothering me more than it should. :/

I fully agree with you, as I was making this picture I thought to myself, 'does... does this matter? I mean, I'm thinking about it now so-- nah...' and went about my business.

...well, that one sign on the far left looks kinda like a cooked alien to me...

That's pretty funny.

You could have profitably put just a little more effort into showing us that this is a crowd of people. As it was, I had to think about it for a second or two. Just drawing some people at the periphery or showing some arms and hands grasping the banner would have helped.

Drawing people sucks, though... :'(

I don't know about anyone else, but I had a good time. It's a big task to weave all the art together into a single cohesive narrative, and I think you came up with an excellent framing for it. More than that, though, Risatia had her own reasons for faffing about between worlds that kept me invested in her quick adventures. Having her meet her banished lover early in the travels was an inspired way to alter the tension flowing through the rest of the story.

Good work.

I feel our protagonist's pain all too well. Hours slip into days into weeks into years, months be damned. I wait, constantly, for that transformative experience that sets my sails right, but it never comes. Sometimes, for a moment, after brushing up against death, but even that rush loses its luster with repetition.

Good work trapping the essence of ennui and its only likely cure being imminent death.

I really liked the language and diction of this one. The fantasy and magic really felt so wonderful and your fae narrator has such a lively voice.

Parts of this held a good sort of cheesy familiarity, and I'm always glad to see first person. There was a lot of good action and fun in this.

Oh my god, this... fuck, I want more.

Also, curious how the needle would have gotten there.

MORE LIKE HOSPICES OF LOVE AM I RIGHT?!

you get it, because they're waiting to fucking die?

>>Miller Minus
None of those examples seemed, to me, to be attempts at humor. Not even, like, poor attempts that fell flat. Just simple statements of the state of things.

Everything in this story was seen through the eyes of the protagonist. She is scared, and we the readers can't be sure that what she's telling us is what's actually going on, or just her perception of it.

I thought that using the fear of what was behind her, the need to be near someone safe, and the stupidity (real or imagined) of Greg that drew him farther at each step, was a clever way to advance the story and force Esther to advance.

I'm sad this didn't make finals.

>>Hap

None of those examples seemed, to me, to be attempts at humor

Not even the one with the word "spaghettios" in it?

>>Miller Minus
No? Why would it?

>>Hap
Oh, nevermind. To each their own.

>>Miller Minus
Heh. Spaghetti-o's have long been associated with horror movies and their aficionados. "I know that's not real guts - just spaghetti-o's - but it's still a classic!"

I thought it was an obvious nod, but apparently not.

>>Hap
Oh! Well then that could just be my tenuous knowledge of horror films talking. But I still maintain it is a silly word!

Hey, how many notifications do you think we can give the author before he yells at us?

I feel like standing up and applauding all the creativity that's been poured into this story, but at the same time, I don't... think...

Hang on a minute.

Yes, I'm having a similar reaction to World War Sunflower here, albeit for different reasons. But you can be safe in the knowledge that you have my blessing to point and laugh at the author of that story for bothering me more than you have.

But insincere comments aside, I did enjoy this one. The comedic narration worked really well, Rincewind Daedalus was a great character to follow along with, and you had some great lines. The barfly philosophers taking off their sandals to count Daedy's drink intake had me stopping for a moment to giggle, and that's not the only time that happened.

That aside, the entry also felt quite distracted, with different ideas being brought up and then abandoned quickly for the sake of a joke or a quick scene change. A lot of it was hard to follow. The style is very quickfire, and comedy-focused, so when it tried to have a moral while simultaneously being so intent on giving me the giggles, the moral fell flat. I think based on other comments that they have had a similar reaction. You even seem to have broken Cassius!

But here's the main issue I have with a story like this: Your style is funny, but your plot is not. If the witty narration and sharp dialogue is stripped away, and all we're left with is the plotline, we have: In an amalgamated melting pot of historical Greek figures, Lucifer breaks away from God, attempts to advance humanity along its technological development way faster than intended, and confronts God to challenge his beliefs and treatment of his subjects. Is that funny? On its own, no.

Actually, it sounds kind of like a Marvel movie, but one of those ones that get tons of flak for trying to be too funny. In those movies—and in this story—there's none of the emotional impact or character development that the better movies might have. Instead it's all played for laughs. I feel like we're watching Thor: Ragnarok, except instead of following Thor, the entire story is centered around that comic relief character who gets "kidnapped" by Hela. He's funny, sure, but isn't there stuff going on that has more gravity than this?

I don't know if any of that made sense. My point is that there I see two (of many) different directions that I feel could have made this story more enjoyable: If the plot itself were funny so that the narration could support it better, or if the comedy were dialed down and the actual impact you wanted to have in the story was given more focus and more time.

But still, I'm comparing you to a Marvel movie, and those are a lot of fun, so don't take this as admittance that I didn't enjoy it. I did.

So thanks, you.

On my slate but I definitely don’t have the spunk to read 8,000 words about a fairies’ war. Will abstain, unless I muster energy enough to change my mind.

Some line based commentary with a summary included there. Please keep in mind that most of my commentary is done in the moment and may, at times, be a bit cheeky or irreverent. Read at your own risk. Might add some more stuff tomorrow when i'm not half asleep.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xidRPnIJ6xfhBmBjJDc4o4P8MhvVA9PqQsKwntPJd1A/edit?usp=sharing

EDIT: Derp. Comments should now be viewable. Just reopen it.

This read very much like an early Dean Koontz novel: normal detective-type mystery that suddenly jumps into the supernatural pool. I dig that as a genre, and the work done here was pretty great.

I'll agree with >>Cassius here that we don't have enough "rule building" for the phenomena to really get a feel for its what or why. Between the kid and the cop, there's obviously a theme of guilt being punished going on, but when we learn about Cinde's dream, her only guilty feeling seems to be not playing more as a child/ruining too many dresses. There's not even a hint of "oh my best friend got killed by a train when we were girls" or something inline with the other two primary examples. Clearly, the phenomena is widespread, and I'd really like to know if, not necessarily what, the underlying logic is to warrant the town being half shutdown due to sleep deprivation.

Now that said:

so why would the young man shoot Ed?

I'm not convinced the kid did shoot Ed. The "dream" plays out similar to the previous iterations, where the kid goes into his pocket and then there's a gunshot. While there's a theme of "vengeful ghost" going on, it's never clearly established that the running ghost actually did anything to the car or driver, so I'm not 100% convinced Ed's ghost would/could actually do anything to him.

It's not 100% clear.

So it turned out it was me.

 

I'm writing this approximately 13 hours from the big reveal and I'm going to paste this in before I've even looked at the results because I could be anywhere in the finals ranking, and it's not going to change how I feel about this, so here we go.

The night before the fic submission closed, and I had run out of time to try and patch this up any further, a little voice appeared in my head that said, "Don't do this." It said, "Don't you fucking do this. You know this is a bad idea."

There were three reasons for this. Yes, number one, I had a pretty good feeling that the plot wasn't going to hold up under scrutiny. And that parts were rushed and/or shallow. And that once again I had bumped into the word ceiling without finishing the story. But these things tend to happen when you abandon your idea at hour 10, and then come back to it in hour 40 because you maybe found a framing device that's just serviceable enough and maybe a voice that can be used to really sprint through the story and get it in there on time.

I knew I was in for trouble when, not a day into the contest, a good friend of mine who always reads my work (praise her), sent me a message that we needed to talk. We needed to talk about that ending. Her question was simple: Why?

And I already knew what paragraph she was upset about. And I didn't honestly know why, yet.

I'll get to that.

The next thing I know, Cassius is telling people on the discord that he's really digging this The Pain Network story that he's reading, and I just… It was excruciating, watching it play out. I had no way to warn him. It was like watching a train careening towards the flat face of a mountain. Except the train was going to be fine—the mountain was going to be totalled. And after the dust cleared the train was going to have some notes for me.

My number two reason for thinking this was a bad idea is that this story is really, really personal. Big reveal, here we go: The story about the chronic headache was written by the guy with a chronic headache. What can I say? I've spent five years with this thing, it might as well do something useful and be a fucking muse.

I'm not going deep into this. But I will point out that there's very little of my situation that mirror's Alex's … adventure, let's call it. Her situation is far, far worse than mine. And the reason for that is the reason for a lot of things that went wrong: I spent too much mental effort trying to remove my own situation from the story as I wrote it. All I wanted was to break this story down into something that said how I felt about what I've been through without it coming off as whiny, or self-indulgent, or self-serving, or a cry for help. Because I didn't want it to be. I just had something to say.

And I refused to let myself submit this anonymously because then I'd probably go way too far into the whiny deep-end without having any consequences.

Consequences being, having to write this retrospective. The third reason I was telling myself this was a bad idea.

I'll mention two problems with the story that my poor frame of mind explains rather easily: That inadvisable paragraph where I guided the reader right into the message I wanted (for obvious reasons), and the lopsided stakes between the narrator and Alex herself. That second one is an easy fix, really. Give the narrator the same problem. Make that forum post resonate so well that he drops everything to try and find out if her answer is the same as his. Make him dictate, not to a professor, but to his parents, or something sentimental like that. And then all that psychology bullshit is gone and the stakes are suddenly perfectly level. Easy, right? If only it didn't involve more work to rip myself out of the story.

I've learned my lesson here. Next time (if there is a next time) I'm going all in, come what may. I'd rather people think I was a whiner than someone who kneecaps his own story over and over again for no discernible reason.

Oh, I haven't even gotten to my fake review yet! What fun. Zero thumbs up, huh? That's probably fair.

See, after I had my phone call with my friend, and >>Cassius left his first comment, I thought, What do people think I'm trying to say here? That's what I wanted to know more than anything else. My apologies for being a teensy bit manipulative here, but my review was only partly the usual red herring—the rest of it was a strategy to encourage people to put their interpretations into their reviews, by playing the fool who had no idea what the hell I was trying to say in order to get someone to respond with their hot take. I don't really have anything to say except that I wasn't expecting to hook the biggest fish of them all:

I believe the story is an exploration of the social nuances that prevent people from getting help and prevent people from giving it. People come in with the best intentions to help someone they care about, but often they can't relate, lack the resources, or simply the wherewithal to help someone, and a person in need can often be abrasive, distant, or difficult to deal with.

I knew I had put that in there somewhere (everywhere). Thanks, >>Cassius. I don't suppose you can let me out of jail now?

That's really all the big stuff I have to say about this story. I'm happy to have submitted, in the end. It was a good exercise. And weirdly therapeutic? So that's an added bonus.

Thanks to everyone for dissecting and pulling apart every contrivance you found. There's nothing I saw that I really have any response for other than, "Yeah, you're probably right." I'll save all of this in a folder somewhere and maybe pick it up again in a few years to see if I can't turn this into what I really wanted it to be from the beginning.

Thanks again, and congratulations to our medallists and our finalists.

Some other notes:

-I was being insincere when I said “maybe” Chuck Palahniuk was the inspiration here. I had just read his novel Survivor, and I decided that his voicing style was so goddamned annoying and that I wanted to try and do it better. The schizophrenic, A-B-C-A-B-C-A-B-C, style made my face hurt because it pulled my attention in so many different directions at once. I wanted to see what it was like doing a similar thing without being so ADD about it. I think it worked well on the whole, if not for everyone.

-I saw Rao in the Discord ask why the cochlear implant parts were installed separately, but the outer part is just an earpiece, and would be easy for her to lose. Something I can defend! YES!

->>CantStopWontStop, if I do pick this up it certainly won’t be getting any shorter. Thanks!

->>AndrewRogue, thanks for your line-by-line, and especially the summary at the end. But I will point out that that typo you caught near the beginning happened when you pasted the story to Google Docs, so there.

-What the fuck was I even thinking with the Adele gag. Possibly the most boneheaded move of the whole story.

-Thanks a lot to >>Paracompact for the defense there. It's nice to know that someone can enjoy what I've written, and that, in theory, none of their enjoyment would be hampered by fixing what others had qualms with. It's a nice feeling.

->>AllegedlySombraHimself, thanks for reading and welcome to the writeoff!

-This pic2fic round was a lot of fun and I can't wait to do it again. Hap's piece was particularly inspiring, and the other pieces I tagged helped me work it all out too.

Wow. That's just the icing on the cake. Thanks so much for reading everyone.

Man, this one was my favourite while I was working on it. So much stuff just came together that I'm really disappointed it fared so abysmally. It's fair to say I spent the majority of my time on this entry, and since lots of stuff didn't seem to get across, I thought I'd list what went into this fic here.



[*]Daedalus is a mythical figure best-known for creating the Minotaur's labyrinth and for inventing the wax-and-feather wings that allowed him and Icarus to escape. He was a mythical reference first and foremost. Heck, the opening begins with a mythical inventor joke (the reference to said Daedalus's flying device).

[*]The "Athens during Roman occupation" setting, specifically during the reign of Emperor, places this close to modern times without having Jesus around (which would have been awkward, given Lucifer's presence is already stretching it). However, it mainly fed into the broader theme of conquerors, and you rarely get much more recognisable conquerors than the Romans.

[*]Daedalus's salt contribution is lifted directly from the old Roman payment of salt to soldiers, hence the derivation of "salary" and a "man worth his salt". It's unlikely he'd get any from the Emperor, though, but I wanted to suggest a kind of imperial patronage for good behaviour (and to imply Daedalus is quite high-ranking himself).

[*]Trochilus is a gag name. It's a genus of hummingbird. In fact, it's the type genus of Trochilidae. This also plays on the need for the device's operator to flap their arms a hundred times a minute.

[*]Apart from being a world-building note, another important note for the slave Trochilus is that, despite Daedalus later acting as conscience to Lucifer, her presence reminds us that Daedalus himself isn't flawless when it comes to an egalitarian outlook. She doubles (triples?) as a symbolic caged bird, fitting for Daedalus given his mythical roots and themes.

[*]Of course, Lucifer is the mythical rebel angel cast down into Hell for opposing God. If Paradise Lost is to be believed, he also became the serpent that tempted Eve with the Tree of Knowledge, though specifically of Good and Evil rather than Knowledge in general. Both work here, given his moral awakening as the fic progresses. His name, "bearer of light (of the morning star)" is also a reference both to his "enlightenment" through the Industrial Revolution and to the way he enters the scene as a star-like dot in the sky.

[*]The tavern-goers and their philosophizing was loosely inspired by similar scenes/characters in Terry Pratchett's Pyramids and Small Gods. They were parodies of Greek philosophers, whereby supposedly stately matters of philosophy are reduced to pub chat and petty squabbles.

[*]Aerosteon means "air-filled bones". Since I'm a dino aficionado, it's also a genus of (possibly Megaraptorid) dinosaur. Gravitas is also the opposite of this lightweight motif, hence he usually opposes Daedalus.

[*]Enthea is a back-formation of Enthusiasm, or "possessed by a deity". Since Daedalus's wife is not recorded in any sources I consulted, I took the liberty of going for an artistic inspiration for the name.

[*]Euterium doesn't really mean anything. The "eu" stands for "good/well", but "terium" is a nonsense formation I loosely got from "tera-" (trillion, and also a homophone for "terror") and "-ium", a usual ending for elements of the Periodic Table. At the time, I just used it as a placeholder name until I could think of something better, and obviously I lost track. Apologies. <:D

[*]The Temple of Arcas is actually dedicated towards the King Arcas of Arcadia, a mythical son of Zeus whose nymph lover Callisto was turned into a bear by a typically jealous Hera. The reference was chiefly to the pastoral idyll invoked by Arcadia, which is ironic both because the fic mostly focuses on urban positives rather than on rural ones, and because real-life Arcadia is (and was) actually a bit of a barren dump.

[*]Beelzebub being Lucifer's second-in-command is lifted straight out of Paradise Lost. His lightning "crossbow" is based on the concept of the rail gun, which uses magnetism rather than ignition to fire rounds at high speed. Not to forget his "Lord of the Flies" name etymology fits well with the theme of flight and of insects beneath greater beings. (Similar to Daedalus feeling like an ant beneath Lucifer).

[*]Lucifer's ten wings reflect both the tendency for higher-ranking angels in angelology to have a greater number of wings, (though higher than six is unusual) and the ten ranks angels usually get in the Christian and in various Jewish rankings. It's also slightly overkill, reflecting how high his position was pre-fall.

[*]The Roman viceroy is a bit of a cheat. In those days, there was no viceroy or any equivalent, but I needed a nobleman to represent the Emperor without actually dragging the Emperor into Athens from Rome, so the viceroy was used as a stand-in.

[*]The steam reference, and the double reference to Hero of Alexandria and Vitruvius, are all founded on the aeolipile, the first described steam engine. Hero makes the first definite reference to it, though there is an uncertain possibility that Vitruvius came up with something similar much earlier. This is reflected in Daedalus's uncertainty over whether he got the notes from Vitruvius.

[*]In fact, this is what inspired a huge part of this fic: the aeolipile and the possibility for the steam engines of the Industrial Revolution to have been invented sooner. It's an idea that's captured my imagination over and over.

[*]One of the main features of the Industrial Revolution was the creation of the train network, which led to much rapid development and also resulted in the need for the standardization of time. It's also extremely iconic and useful for importing supplies. That's why Lucifer makes it a top priority before embarking on the main project.

[*]The Dragon of Revelation is an obvious allusion to Revelations; it's part of the package for the end of the world, so its use to end the world Lucifer is trying to create fits naturally into that. The Golden Mask is loosely based on the Golden Masks of the Pharaohs in Egypt, just for flavour.

[*]Note that, while there are mountains near Athens, they're unlikely to harbour giant biblical dragons, so this was a stretch in the story.

[*]Lucifer's Rod of Freedom is (ironically) loosely based on the imperial regalia of rulers in many ancient civilizations.

[*]The mention of the viceroy's children playing with the aeolipile is sort of a dig at the fact that so many ancient peoples in Greece failed to capitalize on the new steam technology, seeing it mainly as a curio or toy.

[*]Meglobites and Gigobites are gag names, references to Megabytes and Gigabytes. ("Mega-" in full is usually "Megalo-", and "Gigo" doubles as a reference to "Garbage In Garbage Out"). The land disputes between people whose names end in "-ites" is hardly rare in history, most obviously with the clashes between the Canaanites and the Jews. I didn't really want to reference any specific examples.

[*]No, the Byzantine thing wasn't a reference to Byzantium. Just a coincidence borne from using English for Ancient Greek characters.

[*]Gravitas' Cultural Dichotomy Theory is a reference to Nietzsche's "Apollonian and Dionysian" division of cultures.

[*]Beelzebub using lightning would have been a bit of a Ben Franklin moment, but a recognized sign of hubris to the Ancient Greeks, given they're Zeus's main weapon. Another example of futuristic technology superseding ancient beliefs about the world.

[*]The reference to the "Aristotle thing... arete" refers to Aristotle's concept of excellence and fulfilment of purpose. Daedalus being coopted as a tool of the tyrant would be viewed as him being denied his natural purpose. "You're not where you belong, is his point."

[*]Some people might recognize the flying machine with the "rotating screw thing" as a Wright-brothers-like plane, the first step towards aviation and mechanical flight.

[*]Daedalus' story about the prince noticing the old people is a slight reference to the story of the Buddha, who was prompted on his spiritual quest by the sight of old age, illness, and death, awakening him to the transience and pains of life. Obviously, Daedalus's version is somewhat garbled.

[*]"No one knows anything about it, what it is, how to make it, how it works, or why it does what it does": slight paraphrasing aside, this is a direct quotation from Pearl S. Buck that I liked the sound of. The "Man cannot will what he wills" is likewise directly from Shopenhauer.

[*]"Physician-building" means "hospital". I wasn't sure if "hospital" would sound right even in an advanced Greek setting, so I opted to go with "physician" and tack "-building" onto the end.

[*]The "letting-the-women-vote" stuff is a reference to how primitive the Ancient Greek democracy used to be. Lucifer's not just speeding up industry. Although Ancient Greek civilization actually had quite a lot of "foreigners", I wanted to imply that Lucifer was more inclusive than usual in his conquest, and it was a regrettably tempting shorthand.

[*]Cannons, gunpowder, and oils are preparation for the rocket fuel Lucifer would later employ.

[*]The "facsimiles" are actually "factories", it's just that Ancient Greeks aren't likely to be familiar with "factories", and anyway using a word reserved for an inferior copy had some good implications to it, such as the complaint that mass production is inferior to individual craftsmanship in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.

[*]"Lodestones that made lightning" is a rough reference to the modern electric generator using magnets. Likewise, the omnibuses and horseless chariots are lead-ins to the automobile. Lucifer is thinking ahead to the 20th Century.

[*]The new models of flying machine refer to the development of the aircraft during the two World Wars, culminating in the "jet". By this point, Lucifer's machine-like wings start to resemble the current technology and Daedalus has an early clue as to their scientific rather than magical nature.

[*]This is also why Daedalus complains about things moving too fast. He's not just referring to the Industrial Revolution as a whole, but to the exceptional speed a jet fighter can achieve.

[*]Progressing from cannons to the rocket is a reference to the side-by-side development of rockets and missiles. Missiles originally referred to any kind of projectile and not exclusively to the rocket-propelled ones.

[*]The lighthouse Daedalus mentions is a loose reference to the Pharos of Alexandria. And before you go nuts about the anachronism, this isn't meant to be the actual Pharos. It's just Daedalus getting ambitious.

[*]Daedalus' scepticism towards the world being millions of years old is another world-building note, an Ancient-Modern difference in outlook; before modern geology developed, most ancient estimates of how old the world was were distinctly anthropocentric, only a few thousand or tens of thousands at most.

[*]And voila! The aircraft project thus gives way to the manned space shuttle, as per the technological development of the 20th Century! In fact, making the Tower of Babel a launch pad seemed to me to be the best modern analogue to any kind of heavens-reaching structure made by humanity.

[*]Obviously, by this point I feared the suspension of disbelief was in trouble, so I added some dialogue indicating that Lucifer basically did a lot of cheating to get here, namely that he already knew what followed what.

[*]Beyond this point, it gets sci-fi in the speculative technology sense, so there's not much to note other than the low-gravity effects on Daedalus briefly convincing him he was flying as soon as he unbuckled himself. Making G.O.D. a computer wasn't based on anything specific, though since Monokeras mentioned Star Trek I think a close example would be "Who Weeps for Adonis?" where a seemingly godlike being is actually using a machine to simulate immense power.

[*]That said, I quite like the idea of making the space station resemble a Sephirot. For those interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sefirot

[*]The reference to the "child who disobeys and repents" is loosely inspired by the Parable of the Lost/Prodigal Son. I thought a sideways, heretical interpretation by Daedalus and Lucifer would have given an interesting perspective on the whole "stable, changeless society" aspect, namely that Lucifer thinks G.O.D.'s idea of progress is futile and ultimately hyper-conservative, even backwards. I also toyed with the idea that Lucifer was once the dutiful son who felt hard done by, so he viewed it as "one step back and one step forwards" and rebelled out of a sense of betrayal. That possible reading also puts an interesting spin on his (not-so-secret) desire to replace G.O.D. (desire for new management and fairness).

[*]"I CONTROL THE DRAGON AND THE SERPENT AND THE BEHEMOTH AND THE LEVIATHAN." This is a reference to the speech in the Book of Job.

[*]The back-and-forth between Lucifer, G.O.D., and Daedalus involves a grapes-and-sun comparison. This is based on a similar one from Sri Ramakrishna. "The sun knows how a bunch of grapes is to be ripened." Obviously, Sri Ramakrishna was making a wholly different point to the one Lucifer and Daedalus arrive at.

[*]And I figured the best ending image for this kind of fic would be to make Athens the New York of Lucifer's new world! Skyscrapers were also a concept I considered for the prompt "They Stood Against the Sky", given the name, so they had a nice thematic parallel to them too.

Now for actual responses.

>>Anon Y Mous

The beginning I hedged my bets over, given the outlandish premise needed a good run-up before we got to the main event. I'm glad you liked it, either way!


>>Samey90

For the record: This is a comedy-sci-fi-"pseudo-fantasy"-philosophical fic in which mythical Lucifer teams up with mythical Daedalus to create the Industrial Revolution two millennia ahead of schedule to fight God. True, the historical context and references don't always mesh, but I'm outright puzzled as to who exactly is interpreting that set-up as a faithful historical drama. Daedalus alone is far more recognizable as a mythical figure than as any kind of historical one; even Wikipedia calls him mythical repeatedly.

"To put it in perspective, it's like saying Barack Obama liked to hang out with Charlemagne."

Hey! Now that's my idea for the next fic... :D

hoplites than legionnaires

Ancient Greece actually was occupied by the Romans in the first century BC, though I admit the gaff with the trident was unintentional.

about five Jews

This... To put it politely, this does not sound likely to me. I mean, I haven't researched it, this was a shot in the dark, but five seriously sounds unlikely to me.

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>>Monokeras

I’m a bit lost with the dragon’s subplot. What’s that?

?

I don't want to sound funny, but how exactly could you get lost there? It's not a complicated plot device. The dragon's literally described by Lucifer as an Agent of God that stops and pursues them as soon as the jamming devices fail. Daedalus's comment near the end that "It’s made of metal" plus the general sci-fi turn of the story plus the fact that it's literally flying in space should be a pretty open-and-shut case.

but at the same time they build a rocket to conquer a single space station. I don’t see what's the point of building jets and missiles.

Again, what? The narrative explicitly progresses from technology to technology. It's explicitly a recreation of the Industrial Revolution. They're progressing from steam engines and planes to space rockets. The very narrative structure reflects that progression which explicitly parallels the real-world development of technology, just two thousand years ahead of schedule. Technological progression. He is starting with the Ancient Greeks, after all. You don't just go from there to rockets.

As for your interpretation of the ending, much less the point of the story...

This is the exact opposite of what the scene was designed to do. Far from suggesting loss of progress now Lucifer has no enemy, it shows that humanity has developed to the point at which Lucifer himself is replaced, and unlike G.O.D. he makes no attempt to resist the change. Progress is occurring and it's now out of Lucifer's hands, and since he doesn't resist he completes his character arc set-up from the start, where he just marched in and dominated the humans under the excuse of being a benevolent dictator. Obviously, there are complications - Lucifer did have a benevolent goal and a time limit forcing his hand, for instance, which prevents this being a straight "Lucifer is bad" harangue - but the arc's there.

Quite apart from the obvious technological saltation on display, there definitely have been changes to society as the story progressed. Daedalus's influence gets the angels to stop treating the humans as pure slaves and to actually interact with them. Trochilus is another example, going from a mere slave to a confident worker directing the Tower of Babylon crew. In that same scene, Lucifer describes how ideas are coming from humans as much as from him now, with a developing thread that leads to the humans rebelling against Lucifer post-G.O.D.'s defeat. Lucifer even introduces same-sex equality and openness to foreigners, effectively bringing humanitarian revolutions up early too.

The emphasis is on Lucifer being replaced in turn. The main difference here between him and G.O.D. is that Lucifer learns from his mistakes; whereas, in the story, G.O.D. hasn't changed and is soon outdone by Lucifer's upgrades, Lucifer is said by Daedalus to have not resisted the revolutions of humanity taking technological progress away from him. Daedalus even compliments him for it, even as Lucifer's unhappy about the abandonment. This is Daedalus preventing Lucifer from becoming just another tyrant, an important note given the theme of conquerors and the nature of G.O.D. itself.

It was intended to be an ambivalent or bittersweet ending; humanity's no longer held back by G.O.D. and technological benefits have been accompanied by other social ones. It's the dawn of a new age; Lucifer certainly had no skyscrapers prior to this final scene. And following that real-world analogy to the modern day, it should be obvious that social change has happened. The tavern and the few temples leftover, plus the comment earlier about "scars" as a result of such fast development, weren't there to undermine this point, but just reminders that it wasn't a naively complete transformation.

In short, this is the natural end-point both of Lucifer's character development from "fighting tyrant" to "friend and philosophical bystander", and of technological innovation transferring from him to the humans.

"Dangling scene". Oy vey...

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>>Miller Minus

Haha! First of all, that's a bizarre way to open given that this contest allows for multiple entries. I mean, try pointing and laughing at yourself. It just doesn't work, does it? :D

Second of all, comparing Daedalus to Rincewind makes no sense to me. The obvious fit is surely Leonardo da Quirm?

"That aside, the entry also felt quite distracted, with different ideas being brought up and then abandoned quickly for the sake of a joke or a quick scene change."

I have no idea what you mean here. Every scene had its place in the development and progression both of the technology and of the character arcs (for instance, Daedalus's initial excitement once he figures out what was going on eventually gives way to his resentment and frustration, which leads to him openly having a go at Lucifer - a child that, at the start, unnerved and terrified him). About the only possible things I can think of are references like the "Cultural Dichotomy Theory", and that was so obviously a throwaway gag that I fail to see how it could mar the meat of the fic. I can tell the difference between a garnish and a steak.

"Your style is funny, but your plot is not."

Your recommendation for this suggests you'd have preferred something more monolithic, either all-comedy or all-seriousness. It's not a simplification I'm inclined towards, to be frank. For starters, blending comedy and seriousness together can be done: hell, Pratchett was an exemplar of the form. For another, the comedy and the seriousness stem from the same source(s).

It's particularly disappointing that you seemed to regard Daedalus as incidental or minor compared with the story as a whole. The exact opposite was the case. Daedalus and Lucifer teaming up isn't just an excuse for a gagfest. They bring the rebellious tale of Lucifer-vs-God in collision with the worldly-yet-innovative philosophy of Ancient Greece, united through a sci-fi conceit that requires Lucifer to co-opt an inventor and his ilk.

Daedalus isn't some comic relief thrown in to make fun of Lucifer's rebellion. Throughout the fic, baked into it from the start, are themes of free-will-and-fate, tyrants/conquerors-and-liberation, and progress versus stagnation. The fic is about the way Daedalus and eventually Lucifer navigate those themes. That's why Daedalus is jaded by the philosophical talk in the second scene and feels held-back in the first.

That's why Lucifer, for all his benevolent intentions and exciting new technological marvels, can't end wholly successfully. It's because he starts off as a proud tyrant, and him just winning would strike the wrong note for such a morally complex position. Daedalus responds positively to the technological innovation - as expected, given the theme of flight and freedom he's associated with it in the first scene - but it doesn't escape his notice that Lucifer is just another tyrant. Even when people "volunteer", he notes that it's mainly because "news gets around", especially after the defeat of the Romans at Beelzebub's hands.

So he softens him up, first with the political advice and then by growing frustrated and outright talking back to him. Lucifer, in turn, warms up to the philosophical discussions of Daedalus, which presents him with a less violent way of espousing and challenging his and other people's views. Lucifer, thanks to Daedalus's efforts, stops playing the supreme high-and-mighty boy at the start and starts admitting to his faults in the second half of the fic.

This culminates in him not resisting when humanity starts coming up with its own ideas, taking the project away from him, and having its own revolutions at the end (which Daedalus thanks him for). Daedalus' philosophical background and experience with conquerors and history enables him to contribute his point during the discussion with G.O.D. at the climax, and Lucifer and he are presented as in synch by this point.

The fact that Lucifer ends up living with Daedalus and his wife and going to the tavern like Daedalus originally wanted for "the consolations of philosophy" caps their mutual development and softens Lucifer enough that he escapes just becoming another tyrant. This is a point of emphasis, as a clear indication in the original Lucifer myth is that Lucifer would just muck things up if ever he actually deposed God, a feat which in any case is A) impossible, and B) lost on him because of his sin of pride.

---

Sorry to go on like this, but it profoundly irritates me when it's suggested that comedy can't be meaningful, well-developed, philosophical, even moralistic, and suggested in the same comment that makes a Terry Pratchett reference. It strikes me as narrow. Both the comedy and the seriousness were baked into this fic from the concept up and planned out from first scene to last. They stem from the same incongruities and absurdities as seemed thematically appropriate, and while the comedy's there to have fun with the concepts - because I fail to see why serious subjects are somehow forbidden from having a dose of levity in them to add to the flavour - they coexist with the character interplay and the foibles of the protagonists, feeding off the same source.

I'll admit the last scene involved some definite word-count-jitters and rushing, fair enough. World War Sunflower had a similar problem. But I'll be damned if my features are accused of being bugs.

Before I stopped procrastinating and wrote this story, I thought of what I was going to say in my retrospective—how I was going to justify myself—a hundred times over. And now, I don't fully know what to say.

Firstly, thanks for the comments and reviews. Secondly, I'm certainly surprised I got as far as 4th place, but I'm sure it was super close. I got a 'most controversial' medal, after all.

I'll go with some replies, I guess:

>>Miller Minus

There's an interesting throughline carrying this story along--a commentary on how important it is to have a purpose in life. It's not until he has a goal in mind that he is able to finish that letter and make plans for the future.

Sort-of, but I'm an Absurdist so I don't believe in inventing purposes for life.

It suffers, though, because he is so strangely detached from the duel he's about to face. There's no moment of realization that he's just done something incredibly stupid, even after he sobers up. He approaches his impending death the same way someone might react to losing their weekend to overtime at work.

You're pretty much right. While there were a few lines near the end where he reflected on how stupid the entire matter was—the risk of death in a duel initiated by such a petty dispute—it did bug me that he did not put up much resistance to the duel itself, and I never gave a real reason that he didn't consider apologizing. My official excuse is that I rushed the ending because I procrastinated and the deadline loomed.

For another minor point, I struggled to get too invested in the duel itself because I had no idea of the marksmanship skills of either of these two, so I didn't get a chance to wonder who was going to win. For all I knew, either of them could have been a chump, or a deadeye.

That's a good point as well. In War and Peace, which I am reading right now and greatly inspired this story, the marksmanship of two characters is known and briefly mentioned before their duel, which heightened the stakes and made the result more surprising. I should have taken a note from that!

The writing also felt a little slow, though not terribly slow. It felt like certain things were being dwelled on that didn't need to be mentioned, and certain things were given way more attention than they needed. The description of him waking up at the beginning, for instance, felt overlong, and it didn't give me the impression he was being lazy. More like something supernatural was going on with the light or the curtain. The laziness impression came later on through Olga, who was a great addition to the story.

I'm going to use the 'stylistic choice' card here. I wanted to give the impression that Mikhailovich spent so much time idle and consumed by thought and rumination instead of actual action. This wears off later because I sort-of rushed the ending, and also because I felt like he would be less observant while drunk and more mindful after his 'awakening'. I am glad you think Olga had a good role, though. I was a little concerned about that.

That's all I have to say for criticism, but I did have a suggestion for a different way to end the story. Feel free to disregard it. What if he won the duel? What if he rode the high and the celebration for a while, elating with his new band of friends until they eventually lose interest in him. Then, having still gotten no work done, he goes right back to his lazy lifestyle like nothing's changed, flying in the face of his promise that winning the duel would change his life and start him fresh. Once it's over, so is his purpose, and normal service resumes.

One of the works that inspired my story besides War and Peace is another work of Russian literature—Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov. Yep, it's where my name comes from!

There are no duels in that book, but the idea you are describing is similar to what happens in Oblomov, when he is 'awakened' and coaxed out of his idleness by the efforts of his friend Stolz and falling in love with a girl. Ultimately, he is too flawed to know how to love, and falls back into his squalor. I saw my story as a more short-fused exploration of similar ideas, and while the suggestion you have isn't bad, but it's the inverse of what I was shooting for and very similar to Oblomov.

>>Hap

How do you know that suggestion isn't the bitter cup he mentions?

I hope this is nothing more than a joke. I was a little scared someone would criticize me for making the death not-explicit!

I, too, felt the beginning was slow, and the end was rushed.

Yep, see reply to Miller.

>>Monokeras

I won’t comment on the Easter eggs I found all along this piece – Easter eggs which seem to be targeted specifically at me, BTW – which point (almost) unequivocally to one only possible author. I might be wrong, but I think the margin of error here is less that ten to power of minus twenty.

Anyone who knows me can easily single this one out as me. They're not exactly easter eggs; it's just that you know me too well.

Well, barring one thing: I’d say the action is set during the 19th century. Fine, I don’t have any problem with that, but please then refrain using modern terminology. For example, I found the repeated use of “technically” a bit jarring, knowing that this particular acception arose probably some time late in the 20th century. In any case, the use of that word felt anachronistic to me.

I am really bad at committing to settings because I am terrified that I don't know enough—that someone will call me out and say, "Hey! That's not how X works!" or "That's not what that city looks like!" Since the story was inspired primarily by two works of 19th century Russian literature, the setting was very vaguely similar, but I never named anywhere explicit to avoid the problem mentioned above. Also, I also was a little bothered by my use of 'technically' as well, but I kept it in.


>>Miller Minus

Real talk, though—I think the fact that his name is simply a repeat of father's is to show that he has no identity of his own, and that his father is an overbearing rich man who pays for everything for him. This would explain why he is such a layabout, and also how he survives it (Olga mentions that Mikhailovich is receiving a monthly allowance from the estate). I've seen that type of plot before in English stories with characters named "Junior".

This is pretty much it, yeah. Note the line: "'And don't call me Mikhail—that's my father's name.'" It would be pretty weird for a Russian person to go by their middle exclusively, I'm pretty sure, and his decision to do so reflects something about how he views himself, I'd say.

But I had some fun with the names here. A very common complaint in Russian literature is English readers being confused about why everyone has "nine different names", which I find kinda funny.

>>Rao

Thanks. I think I targeted the right demographic here!


Final note:

Some may noticed I was concerned about someone deriding me for not having much connection to the art I linked. I'm very happy this was not the case. (I even wrote an explanation for myself beforehand!). In short, GGA suggested taking a shared element of multiple pictures and writing a story based off of that, and both pictures I tagged had some sort of fight or duel happening. This got me thinking about the duel in War and Peace, and then I thought of Oblomov, and so on.


For my first entry under my real alias, I'm quite happy. I frequently checked for reviews to assuage my fears, and I did not see much discussion in the Discord for my story. But Cassius told me not to get demotivated, and Monokeras told me that Cass and him were discussing my story privately, so that 'endorsement' really lifted my spirits.

Thanks again, all. I hope to participate more in the future!

>>BlueChameleonVI
Look man, I can't help how I reacted to your story. It didn't work for me as well as I thought it could, and since I thought this kind of story was my thing, I tried to put my concerns into words. I thought the comedy and the seriousness clashed, and at no point did I suggest that it was impossible for them to work together. For me, in this story, they didn't work together. One person, one story, one opinion.

Maybe my thoughts weren't helpful. Maybe this isn't as much my thing as I thought it was. Maybe I was piss-drunk when I wrote my review. Maybe I'm a mouthbreather.

Maybe a lot of things.

Next time you think my comment is narrow, or makes no sense, or is "profoundly irritating", feel free to ignore me. You have every right as the author, and I resent being ranted at when I was just trying to help.

>>BlueChameleonVI
I mean I could probably dig into your story and unearth more bones to pick. That would be unwise. Just one thing. When you say:

So much stuff just came together that I'm really disappointed it fared so abysmally.

it’s your right to think that the sixth spot is “abysmal” but it makes me wonder what you think of the stories that finished lower — personally, I don’t care, since I am convinced my talents as author are definitely way worse than abysmal, but I suppose that’s not the case for all the other contestants.

>>BlueChameleonVI

Ancient Greece actually was occupied by the Romans in the first century BC, though I admit the gaff with the trident was unintentional.

Well, except Daedalus was thought to be a grandson of an Athenian king who lived in the fourteenth century BC, long before Rome (founded 753 BC) or the inception of Judaism (around 9th century BC; five Jews from my comment would probably be followers of the polytheistic Semitic religion Judaism originates from). The story would indeed make more sense placed closer to the birth of Jesus, but then, Daedalus would have to be a time traveller. Babel actually found a way around it, mentioning that people before the flood could live for centuries (which is a reference to the Bible, where Methuselah lived for 969 years and Adam for 930).

>>Samey90
To me, the choice of Daedalus was weird. If I had to pick a Greek figure who is a philosopher, an engineer and an inventor, the name that comes immediately to my mind is Archimedes.

>>Miller Minus
>>Monokeras

it’s your right to think that the sixth spot is “abysmal” but it makes me wonder what you think of the stories that finished lower

No no, I didn't mean it like that, I swear! It's just me. "Abysmally" was too strong a word. I needed some time to cool off before I realized that. I had no intention of offending anyone or of belittling their work. That would be ignorant, rude, and self-absorbed of me.

and I resent being ranted at when I was just trying to help.

I know you were. That's what these rounds are for, after all. I appreciate that now.

And I know I was acting like a snot. You see, I had really, really high hopes for this one. Too high, as it turned out. I thought I'd figured out how to make an entry that satisfied a lot of criteria, criteria I thought would make it strong enough for a medal: comedic, engaging, meaningful, creative, and with a solid beginning-middle-end, stuff like that. It felt absolutely right in the moment of writing, I loved the thing, so when it placed lower down than I'd hoped, I got frustrated. Overambitious to the point of delusion, I admit, but frustrated all the same. So I took it out in the comments.

Sorry for my taking it so immaturely. It was a heat-of-the-moment response. I'll leave the posts up so I'm not hiding my mistakes, but after thinking about it since posting them, I regret how I acted.

I apologize to everyone I had a go at. I made a mistake. It won't happen again.

No worries man, it's good to be passionate about your work. And props to you for sprinting out 24000 words in three days--that's some bitchin' workrate you have.

Hope to see you next round.

>>BlueChameleonVI
It’s okay. We’re all in good faith. Criticism can be hard to bear, especially since some of us (including me) have a tendency to deliver strong blows. So it’s your right to respond in kind.

But yeah, sometimes putting off a few hours just to let the pressure ease up ‘s a good idea! ;)

See you in a month or so!

>>CantStopWontStop
>>Paracompact
>>Oblomov
>>Miller Minus
>>Monokeras

Story notes for A Clowder of Cats in the Writeoff.me site:

Taking the criticism of front-loaded exposition in stride, I think more than a small part of that is pacing, i.e. the readers are reading a lot of fast-paced stories in the writeoff, so this slice of life story slows their previous pace down. I blame Twitter. I’m going to have to start doing my stories in 140 characters or less.

Anyway, I fixed the Zep/Zeb issue (darned changing character names midstream) and a number of Verb doesn’t point to the right Noun issues. Not bad, but I didn’t hit that perfect sweet spot I wanted.

As background, this is taken from a Christian story I heard I don’t know how many years ago where a priest is angsting over why Jesus was sent to die for our sins, since we are such generally worthless creatures. In the middle of his self-pity, he hears a kitten crying out in the cold, and he can’t convince the little thing to come inside. In his misery he calls out, “Oh, Lord, if only I was born a cat so I could lead this creature out of darkness.”

And he understands.

>>georg
A nice parable!