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A Christmas Carl
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So first of all, kudos for having the longest sentence I've ever seen in the Writeoff and possibly my entire life? I haven't been keeping track until now.
Short-term-memory strain aside, this sentence also has a crazy amount of plot development in it. More words and more periods would go a long way.
Now I have to admit, the headfake at the midway point completely took me out of the story. And it's too bad because the first half really had me going there. The little details about this boy and his family fleshed them out so well – especially the father's skill at turning every inconvenience into a secret plot by the 1%'ers to keep him down. I liked these people a lot; they felt very authentic.
But then the shapeshifting. There are definitely ways to sneak in a genre-twist in a story, but there was nothing sneaky about it here. And the fact that the first half was written so well leaves me confused why the tone and genre took a 90° turn when going a hundred. I'm going to chalk it up to a talented author that just wanted to have a little fun. At the end of the day, there's nothing wrong with that.
Thanks for writing! Best of luck to you.
Even after his father drove the Renault off the Balboa Island ferry the week after Carl graduated from high school—the car was empty when the Harbor Patrol fished it out, and a summer-long search of Newport Bay by both amateurs and professionals never turned up a body—and even after his mother sold their former beach bungalow that fall—she gave Carl half the million dollars she got for the place and took off the next day with nothing but a suitcase full of two-inch-tall bottles of vodka in a ten-year-old red Toyota pickup truck for Taos, New Mexico—Carl kept the tradition alive.
Short-term-memory strain aside, this sentence also has a crazy amount of plot development in it. More words and more periods would go a long way.
Now I have to admit, the headfake at the midway point completely took me out of the story. And it's too bad because the first half really had me going there. The little details about this boy and his family fleshed them out so well – especially the father's skill at turning every inconvenience into a secret plot by the 1%'ers to keep him down. I liked these people a lot; they felt very authentic.
But then the shapeshifting. There are definitely ways to sneak in a genre-twist in a story, but there was nothing sneaky about it here. And the fact that the first half was written so well leaves me confused why the tone and genre took a 90° turn when going a hundred. I'm going to chalk it up to a talented author that just wanted to have a little fun. At the end of the day, there's nothing wrong with that.
Thanks for writing! Best of luck to you.
The word I'd use here, author:
Is "goofy," I guess. I like goofy stories, but I'd also like to know that it's a screwball fantasy from the beginning. Maybe Carl's mother's reaction to Carl's father's conspiracy theories can be that it's elves keeping them down, not the wealthy? A little something to prepare us more for the big turn the story takes. And I almost want Santa to bring Carl's father back into it at the end by saying that he chose Carl because his father, still roaming around the multiverse somewhere, recommended him. Because the more loose ends you can tie up in a story like this, the better.
Mike
Is "goofy," I guess. I like goofy stories, but I'd also like to know that it's a screwball fantasy from the beginning. Maybe Carl's mother's reaction to Carl's father's conspiracy theories can be that it's elves keeping them down, not the wealthy? A little something to prepare us more for the big turn the story takes. And I almost want Santa to bring Carl's father back into it at the end by saying that he chose Carl because his father, still roaming around the multiverse somewhere, recommended him. Because the more loose ends you can tie up in a story like this, the better.
Mike
So I don’t forget later: this story is actually definitively two paragraphs too long. The burrito line was a significantly better ending with the flow you had.
You know, for all that various authors here keep pestering Roger for the ability to post images, the sort of use I would be tempted to put them to here is simply the Ron Burgundy "That escalated quickly" meme.
Count me among those thrown off the ride by the screaming left turn, author. To be clear, that step too far wasn't the Santa reveal; you were doing a good enough job of building up Carl's life in the front half that the story's slide into absurdity felt slightly disappointing by comparison, but I was willing to follow the old science-fiction adage of "spot the author one large break from reality and see what they do with it". Santa Claus being Doohan was that one, and then the whole war with the Ice Queen thing that came out of nowhere was a second. It didn't have the benefit of being foreshadowed from the beginning that the Doohan thing did, either. It just left me feeling unmoored.
Congratulations -- as >>Miller Minus notes -- on breaking the 100-word sentence barrier, though! (My own record is 188 plus nine footnotes, in the first section of This Is Not An Adventure Clyde Adventure. This should not be taken as a challenge -- although if you do, let's compare notes.) That sentence didn't particularly bug me, but if it's distracting some readers it still might be worth massaging.
... honestly, even the Ice Princess thing wouldn't have been a bridge too far, except that it crowded out all of the other things you could have been developing there. Vixen's introduction was set up to start settling the reader into the idea fairly gently; the Ice Princess could have been an excellent twist once we reoriented ourselves. It was just the pile-on effect of too many twists at once. Even if it's only a few sentences, let us ask a question or two along with Carl, and give us some signals that you're not done escalating -- make the Ice Princess a known problem that they warn him about just in time for her to show up.
Re the ending, I don't entirely agree with >>AndrewRogue. The burrito line is a punchier ending, but it feels like it's laying the footwork for a second chapter or a sequel. What you've got now feels like it has a little more closure, but not enough to feel satisfying -- it calls back to your earlier themes to tie a bow around the story, but it doesn't feel to me like it resolves any of the questions the second half of the story introduces. (It closes those arcs, kind of? But I reached it still feeling off balance, and the story ended before I ever recovered. I think that's why the ending feels insufficient.)
You know, I just had a thought: a simple way to frame the Ice Princess thing so that it's not swinging in so hard from left field is to simply have it be one of Carl's father's conspiracy theories. Maybe not even related to Santa Claus! Just something that's been at least name-dropped so that we have context for it when she shows up. I can picture the dialogue in my head now as Carl tries to argue with her about the Rosicrucians, or something, making her angrier and angrier as he renders her moment of triumph more and more embarrassingly anticlimactic.
Thanks for writing!
Tier: Keep Developing
Count me among those thrown off the ride by the screaming left turn, author. To be clear, that step too far wasn't the Santa reveal; you were doing a good enough job of building up Carl's life in the front half that the story's slide into absurdity felt slightly disappointing by comparison, but I was willing to follow the old science-fiction adage of "spot the author one large break from reality and see what they do with it". Santa Claus being Doohan was that one, and then the whole war with the Ice Queen thing that came out of nowhere was a second. It didn't have the benefit of being foreshadowed from the beginning that the Doohan thing did, either. It just left me feeling unmoored.
Congratulations -- as >>Miller Minus notes -- on breaking the 100-word sentence barrier, though! (My own record is 188 plus nine footnotes, in the first section of This Is Not An Adventure Clyde Adventure. This should not be taken as a challenge -- although if you do, let's compare notes.) That sentence didn't particularly bug me, but if it's distracting some readers it still might be worth massaging.
... honestly, even the Ice Princess thing wouldn't have been a bridge too far, except that it crowded out all of the other things you could have been developing there. Vixen's introduction was set up to start settling the reader into the idea fairly gently; the Ice Princess could have been an excellent twist once we reoriented ourselves. It was just the pile-on effect of too many twists at once. Even if it's only a few sentences, let us ask a question or two along with Carl, and give us some signals that you're not done escalating -- make the Ice Princess a known problem that they warn him about just in time for her to show up.
Re the ending, I don't entirely agree with >>AndrewRogue. The burrito line is a punchier ending, but it feels like it's laying the footwork for a second chapter or a sequel. What you've got now feels like it has a little more closure, but not enough to feel satisfying -- it calls back to your earlier themes to tie a bow around the story, but it doesn't feel to me like it resolves any of the questions the second half of the story introduces. (It closes those arcs, kind of? But I reached it still feeling off balance, and the story ended before I ever recovered. I think that's why the ending feels insufficient.)
You know, I just had a thought: a simple way to frame the Ice Princess thing so that it's not swinging in so hard from left field is to simply have it be one of Carl's father's conspiracy theories. Maybe not even related to Santa Claus! Just something that's been at least name-dropped so that we have context for it when she shows up. I can picture the dialogue in my head now as Carl tries to argue with her about the Rosicrucians, or something, making her angrier and angrier as he renders her moment of triumph more and more embarrassingly anticlimactic.
Thanks for writing!
Tier: Keep Developing
In the Game of Poles, you either win or your minions melt and you have to go crash at some rando's house until you can rethink your plot to destroy Father Christmas.
I was expecting a more melancholy tale based on how the first chunk went, but then we 180'd, did a hop, and spun around all over again and you know I'm mostly okay with how I felt through the entire ordeal. The Ice Princess bit brought me into an almost Equestria Girls-type headspace (spontaneous magic villain vs vaguely equine heroes, plus 1), which was unexpected given the front half but not at all unpleasant. I was smiling and laughing along to the absurdity of it all all the while, though Doohan doing the Chessmaster routine caught me a little off guard.
I was expecting a more melancholy tale based on how the first chunk went, but then we 180'd, did a hop, and spun around all over again and you know I'm mostly okay with how I felt through the entire ordeal. The Ice Princess bit brought me into an almost Equestria Girls-type headspace (spontaneous magic villain vs vaguely equine heroes, plus 1), which was unexpected given the front half but not at all unpleasant. I was smiling and laughing along to the absurdity of it all all the while, though Doohan doing the Chessmaster routine caught me a little off guard.
Okay. I'm back. I stand by my opinion that >>horizon is wrong. The burrito line fundamentally conveys the same message that the final paragraph does: that Carl is a carpet that doesn't want to raise a fuss and is just going to roll with it.
Anyhow. The big issue here, in my opinion, is that very nearly 50% of this story is "wasted" space. It is interestingly written and evocative wasted space, but, by and large, the first 1553 words really don't serve a purpose besides faking you out for the actual story. And yes, I do realize there are technically things in there that matter, but there's really no reason for it to be 1553 words long.
The problem with a long fake is that you are really pleasing nobody. Anyone who was engaged in the first half is having the rug pulled out from under them and the people who are game for the second half... probably didn't want to read the first half and quit already. In general, these sort of swerves are better served by happening earlier. Like, take Zombie Land Saga (yes I'm using anime, fite me). Your main character goes from cute girl doing cute things to a head-on encounter with Truck-kun in 1 minute, 14 seconds. (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfLkkUahRIE ). And realistically you've seen the show's title and maybe a description, so even that 1:14 isn't really a swerve.
But wait Andrew, you like Doki Doki Literature Club and doesn't that take forever to swerve? And you'd be right! If you weren't so wrong. DDLC swerves immediately with the content warning and associated marketing. It isn't really trying to hide what it is. The interest curve there stems from "how is this going to get to where it promised me at the beginning." And it still runs that too long anyway. And, functionally, the swerve STILL isn't as hard as what you do here, because the story is still, in a lot of ways, about the same thing it started as. Just the nature of the relationship to that thing has changed.
Anyhow, that really is the problem. You have two very different ideas bolted onto each other here. If you are interested in telling the second story, you really need to condense the front half of this. Especially since because the way you end up pacing the second half and jamming it all together into one brief ball of action and exposition it ends up as just a punchline with no real setup besides "Hey, so that thing you were reading... is not actually what you were reading!"
This sounds more critical then I really want it to, I think. I mean, fundamentally the idea can work. Plenty of stuff does it. But I just think in practice the way you've set it up here is going to just bounce off most people because you spend so long establishing another story entirely.
I do think the first half stuff is pretty solidly written. I think the second half, even as a joke, just comes too hard and too fast. It's just a relatively madcap sequence of events. They are amusing (though the lampshade hanging with The Santa Claus initially had me rolling my eyes really hard --- Actually, I guess that's another point. This story doesn't actually swerve once. It swerves twice. Which just kinda amplifies the problem in that there really isn't ever anything to grab onto and no real arc. It is just two extended gotchas in which Carl just kinda floats on through and ends up... basically where he started.
I'm really unsure how the fake Santa death worked on that note. Like, it seems like a shelf fell on him, but I'm not sure how that event keys to Carl opening the door, which really kinda impacts the punchline there. This should definitely be a joke you really lean into and it should be very clear how Carl is responsible (or otherwise very clear that Carl is in no way responsible).
I think that's all I've really got here. The writing quality is definitely solid but you can also count me in the people who bounced off it category.
Anyhow. The big issue here, in my opinion, is that very nearly 50% of this story is "wasted" space. It is interestingly written and evocative wasted space, but, by and large, the first 1553 words really don't serve a purpose besides faking you out for the actual story. And yes, I do realize there are technically things in there that matter, but there's really no reason for it to be 1553 words long.
The problem with a long fake is that you are really pleasing nobody. Anyone who was engaged in the first half is having the rug pulled out from under them and the people who are game for the second half... probably didn't want to read the first half and quit already. In general, these sort of swerves are better served by happening earlier. Like, take Zombie Land Saga (yes I'm using anime, fite me). Your main character goes from cute girl doing cute things to a head-on encounter with Truck-kun in 1 minute, 14 seconds. (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfLkkUahRIE ). And realistically you've seen the show's title and maybe a description, so even that 1:14 isn't really a swerve.
But wait Andrew, you like Doki Doki Literature Club and doesn't that take forever to swerve? And you'd be right! If you weren't so wrong. DDLC swerves immediately with the content warning and associated marketing. It isn't really trying to hide what it is. The interest curve there stems from "how is this going to get to where it promised me at the beginning." And it still runs that too long anyway. And, functionally, the swerve STILL isn't as hard as what you do here, because the story is still, in a lot of ways, about the same thing it started as. Just the nature of the relationship to that thing has changed.
Anyhow, that really is the problem. You have two very different ideas bolted onto each other here. If you are interested in telling the second story, you really need to condense the front half of this. Especially since because the way you end up pacing the second half and jamming it all together into one brief ball of action and exposition it ends up as just a punchline with no real setup besides "Hey, so that thing you were reading... is not actually what you were reading!"
This sounds more critical then I really want it to, I think. I mean, fundamentally the idea can work. Plenty of stuff does it. But I just think in practice the way you've set it up here is going to just bounce off most people because you spend so long establishing another story entirely.
I do think the first half stuff is pretty solidly written. I think the second half, even as a joke, just comes too hard and too fast. It's just a relatively madcap sequence of events. They are amusing (though the lampshade hanging with The Santa Claus initially had me rolling my eyes really hard --- Actually, I guess that's another point. This story doesn't actually swerve once. It swerves twice. Which just kinda amplifies the problem in that there really isn't ever anything to grab onto and no real arc. It is just two extended gotchas in which Carl just kinda floats on through and ends up... basically where he started.
I'm really unsure how the fake Santa death worked on that note. Like, it seems like a shelf fell on him, but I'm not sure how that event keys to Carl opening the door, which really kinda impacts the punchline there. This should definitely be a joke you really lean into and it should be very clear how Carl is responsible (or otherwise very clear that Carl is in no way responsible).
I think that's all I've really got here. The writing quality is definitely solid but you can also count me in the people who bounced off it category.
The fist half of this story engaged me intensely. Then the steel cabinet fell over and the story lost all coherence.
I think I get where you were headed with the story, but I'd be willing to bet you'd be more satisfied if you had had a chance to revise the second part before the writing deadline came. With a folkloric name like Doohan, and other designations you used, I sense that you are trying to force the Santa Claus legend into folk stories of the Fae. I think it could have worked, but the passing on of the Santa torch even if not actually happening, and the what-felt-like an unrealistic fight with fire, which actually succeeded, just broke all verisimilitude. The ending scene intrigued, but like what had happened before, I could not understand it.
Still, I liked the story enough to see potential. I don't know if my ramblings from my understanding of the words you wrote will make sense to you. I hope they do. I think the story idea is good enough that you ought give it another try, probably starting from a blank sheet of paper, or at the very least when he looks for the Christmas tree lot late.
I think I get where you were headed with the story, but I'd be willing to bet you'd be more satisfied if you had had a chance to revise the second part before the writing deadline came. With a folkloric name like Doohan, and other designations you used, I sense that you are trying to force the Santa Claus legend into folk stories of the Fae. I think it could have worked, but the passing on of the Santa torch even if not actually happening, and the what-felt-like an unrealistic fight with fire, which actually succeeded, just broke all verisimilitude. The ending scene intrigued, but like what had happened before, I could not understand it.
Still, I liked the story enough to see potential. I don't know if my ramblings from my understanding of the words you wrote will make sense to you. I hope they do. I think the story idea is good enough that you ought give it another try, probably starting from a blank sheet of paper, or at the very least when he looks for the Christmas tree lot late.
>>Miller Minus
>>horizon
>>Rao
>>AndrewRogue
>>scifipony
Thanks for the comments, folks:
And congrats to our medalists!
The "double swerve" problem here should be pretty easy to fix, I think, especially since the markets I'll be sending the story to after running it through the revision process will be science fiction/fantasy oriented to begin with. So they'll be expecting any story submitted to them to have some sort of SF element. I just need to bring up the Santa/Snow Queen conflict at the top of the story--Carl could mention his theory about Mr. Doohan to his father, and his father could go off about the Fae Elite who have opposed Santa from the beginning or something like that.
The biggest problem for me is one I didn't bring up in my own comment 'cause I didn't even think of it till Haze put up a non-Writeoff-related blog post over on Fimfiction yesterday that crystallized what I'd been finding lacking in the story since hammering it together: Carl doesn't want anything. Even just making it more definite that he wants to be unnoticed and unremarkable might help his character, seems to me...
At least I've got some time to get it cleaned up. Editors aren't interested in seeing Christmas stories till August.
Thanks again!
Mike
>>horizon
>>Rao
>>AndrewRogue
>>scifipony
Thanks for the comments, folks:
And congrats to our medalists!
The "double swerve" problem here should be pretty easy to fix, I think, especially since the markets I'll be sending the story to after running it through the revision process will be science fiction/fantasy oriented to begin with. So they'll be expecting any story submitted to them to have some sort of SF element. I just need to bring up the Santa/Snow Queen conflict at the top of the story--Carl could mention his theory about Mr. Doohan to his father, and his father could go off about the Fae Elite who have opposed Santa from the beginning or something like that.
The biggest problem for me is one I didn't bring up in my own comment 'cause I didn't even think of it till Haze put up a non-Writeoff-related blog post over on Fimfiction yesterday that crystallized what I'd been finding lacking in the story since hammering it together: Carl doesn't want anything. Even just making it more definite that he wants to be unnoticed and unremarkable might help his character, seems to me...
At least I've got some time to get it cleaned up. Editors aren't interested in seeing Christmas stories till August.
Thanks again!
Mike