>>MrNumbers
That's a very eloquent analogy. And it's exactly how I felt about the last story I entered in the writeoffs. So I know that feel.

Still, people read and review for their own pleasure, so don't feel too bad about what you've wrote; you're not actually coercing anyone into anything here, (which is something I had to keep reminding myself of) and if people voted your stories into finals, they genuinely enjoyed them! So that's a good thing, even if it's hard to accept. Believe me, I get it.

>>MrNumbers
What Hat and Kettle said. Though I'm still curious where "A Long" came from. <.<

Well, time to get off my ass and discuss this story with all the kind people that happened to review it. Still got one story in the running, so go find that

I think, if I may be inclined to disagree with you folks, is that what is threatening suspension of disbelief in this particular scenario is not the realism of the situation, but rather in which it is conveyed. I discussed this briefly with Not_A_Hat in the Write-Off chat: basically, the lack of a set up, foreshadowing, or even implication for Cathy being off forces the reader completely out of the story when the reveal comes. The narrative abruptly forces the reader to drastically reconsider Cathy's mental state to be drastically outside of the norm when there is no implication earlier in the piece of that being the case, nor any subtlety conveying a more "uneasy" atmosphere to the reader. It's the same sort of reaction you'd likely get if I told you the first half of the story was entirely a dream and Cathy woke up to her kid still being dead: you'd hit me with rocks and tell me I'm a hack (which I am), because that's a cop out, and the story didn't build to that idea. Same principle, at least to me, here: the first half doesn't build to the second half, and that's what's throwing you out of the story.

>>The_Letter_J

But you explicitly say that this was the first time she had made breakfast for him, so that idea is out.

This is right on the money, and I think illustrates the overall problem with the piece. A lot of the writing I did in the first half was for maximum "wham" on the second halve, and I overlooked such opportunities as this in favor of strangling the reader by the heartstrings.


>>Leo
>>Trick_Question
>>Not_A_Hat
>>The_Letter_J

On the other hand, I really quite object to the idea that the situation itself being "unbelievable" or "unrealistic" because certainly people can and do act in the way Cathy does in response to extreme trauma such as the loss of a child. Flaunts his Psychology Degree Dissociative amnesia certainly is a real condition that affects episodic memory (retrograde amnesia) typically close to the time of trauma. Obviously, this sort of response is not normative, and my failure to communicate that idea effectively cost me my reader's immersion, but nonetheless, I feel the need to ask least defend the framework of the story on that merit, if only to illustrate that people can and do respond to trauma like this.

Minor notes:

>>Trick_Question

I cannot imagine a dissociative fugue coming and going this quickly.

Well, unless you are using an outdated nomenclature for the condition, this is clearly not a dissociative fugue, and I feel somewhat perplexed you would describe it as such. Cathy is clearly aware of who she is and where she is; she has her identity intact. She lacks the features of a fugue state except for the loss of some episodic memory, but that is more easily defined in other conditions.

A chorus of screams suggests multiple children dying, which is clearly not what the story is about; that ambiguity muddies the picture you're trying to send.

The intention was describe a play-time scenario outside with kids that gone wrong. The screams come from his friends around him, not the boy himself. This confusion probably could be rectified by placing some sort of "giggle of children" in the prior sentence, but I wasn't sure how to do that without distracting from the more painful side of that memory.

other forces at work psychologically, like medication

This is an option I considered, but ultimately chose to exclude due to word-count, and also, I find it a bit ethically dubious and a bit extreme to imply that things she'd likely be taking like Xanax that can cause such short term memory loss would cause her to forget her child died, and might unintentionally seem like I'm advocating not taking your medication.

I wasn't certain if you were trying to connect the racecar with the way the child died—I think that should be clearer one way or the other.

Nope! Sorry, it was just a plate. I should have made it a different image to avoid confusion.

>>Not_A_Hat

This woman spends her time reminiscing, but can't even remember this tragic event?

coughs. Yeah, once again, this sort of thing can happen, but I'm certainly not doing my reader any favors by using this framework, am I? Whoops. I believe I oversold my inner monologue a bit too much because I wasn't exactly sure how to prep the reader for the twist.

>>Not_A_Hat
>>Leo
>>The_Letter_J

Still, this was an excellent effort, and some solid craftsmanship in many ways.

The revelation is certainly unexpected, and Cathy's everyday pondering about her son in the beginnign sets the reader up for an emotional impact, so from a technical standpoint this is well-done.

Like I said, there aren't any other major problems that I noticed

Aww. Thanks guys.

>>The_Letter_J

And this story is very similar to "Six Candles," though not done as well.

Yeah pretty much. I'm fairly certain I said the same thing to you in the chat when it was brought up.

>>horizon
France

Hay all! Shameless self-promotion: my uber-geeky novella which was originally intended for the "Out of Time" contest is finally complete!

Broken Symmetry

Now I am going to lie down because I broke my arm today! :facehoof: (Yes, really. Ow ow ow stop typing wolf.)

This is a nice story. The way the character of Gregory unfolds is good, and his emotions actually progress over the course of the scene, which makes for a well-working structure.

I agree with >>MonarchDodora on that you could prune a bit, but that's not a major complaint from my side.

What I do want to criticize, however, is that the relationship between Sasha and Gregory is never introduced. In the beginning, I felt as if they were just collegues (and MonarchDodora mentioned this as well), but then it becomes obvious that they have some sort of closer relationship. Only in the very last paragraph she kisses him on the cheek, which the majority of readers will probably interpret as a romantical gesture (even though it's not unambiguous either). I think it should be made clear from the start how they stand towards each other.

Another thing that is not introduced is in what sort of place and situation the characters are. The scene is never set, resulting in a case of the infamous talking heads syndrome. It seems that Sasha is showing Gregory some prototype things that relate to her game idea, or at least I think that that's the case, but it really comes down to guessing.

This strikes me as particularly well-written, and does a good job of evoking emotions. I really like this feeling of childhood nostalgia, and then of course there is the twist. I would personally disagree with >>Trick_Question on the ending - to me it was all clear.

The only thing I can think of that might make the story stronger - and this is just a random thought - is actually ditching the part in which the protagonist explains what happened, instead cutting back to the present. Imagine that after

Leigh probably wanted one last hurrah before school started.

it went on with

Marie and I reach the slope.

(with maybe an additional sentence to make the transition clearer in this case). I can't say that I know for certain how others would perceive this, but it would get at least me even more.

My time is a little tight, which I apologize for, but I still want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who reviewed this.

I won't argue with the criticizm, but there's one thing that I realized and wanted to discuss real quick. The idea for this story was showing how the wounds that humankind inflicts on earth (urbanization, in this case) will heal, because life in general will probably persist way longer on earth than humans. However, >>Trick_Question makes a very good point about how foxes (and they are only one example) actually benefit from human culture in many cases. Life in the wild is not some sort of paradise that's ultimately better than the alternatives. And that wasn't my point to begin with, which is why a different approach of the theme might have been a smarter choice for me to make.

Also, just to clarify, I use an omniscient narrator and, in this particular case, went for the very telly style with full intention. Might be I didn't do a good job with it since I don't have any experience with the perspective, but at least that's the reason why you don't see a fox POV or anything.

Sorry, everyone. Minifics are just killing my desire to review, so I'm probably going to stay silent and limp through my slate silently this round. I will, however, review this because it's the only finalist with less than five reviews (there's four people speaking up above, and Quill didn't review it, so it only has three actual reviews).

Starting off with a fairytale format and I can already tell this is aiming high; that's one of the few formats that has regularly proven strong in a minific format, because it works really well with the word limit. The fairytale genre primes us not to need the deep characterization we don't have the space for, and to accept a certain telliness in the narration which is very economical word-wise. That telliness only gets you so far, though, because "He marveled at these things and thought deep thoughts about them" is a lackluster start. At least tell us specific, intriguing details, not bland generalities.

My take on the above discussion of Twu Birb Wuv (tm) is more on >>QuillScratch's side: love at first sight is very fairy-tale-tropey, and you're clearly setting up a fairy tale here, so that should pass on its own merits. The fact that it's established indirectly is a problem, though, and I think the solution in a piece this short is actually to double down on the fairy-tale tropes: just spend a sentence or two nakedly lampshading that they fell in love at first sight, and move on to your plot.

You do do this, halfway:

"Hello," Albatross said. "I have flown far over this land, and never have I seen someone as beautiful or majestic as you. Might I have your name?"

She smiled bashfully. "You are too kind, good sir! If I be beautiful, then you must be handsome. My name is Swan. And what might your name be?"

But I suspect it would have been more effective if you'd made love an explicit element of your narration rather than beating around the bush with all their flirting. I know the love is central to your story here, but it's also essentially a background element: they have to be deeply in love for your story to work, so you want to just bake that into your setting and move on to the actual conflict.

There, too, this feels like this goes into the weeds: once the two of them start flirting, all that small talk goes into building up the relationship which you could have established with a single-sentence "Their eyes met and they fell in love." And normally that's great! It makes logical sense to focus your story on its central plot element (the romance and the betrayal). But here, you're trying to cram so much plot into the wordcount that other central elements like the fact she's heaidng north for the winter and he can't go with her get crammed in as afterthoughts to the scene. Your characters are sucking the oxygen out of your conflict.

This soft of word-count spending probably contributed to the suddenness of the swan's husband's appearance at the end, too. I really felt like that needed some more foreshadowing, even if it was just some thematic "I will love you forever!" irony; as written, everything's fine for the two birds until suddenly it's not, and that didn't feel satisfying as a twist. Don't get me wrong, I see what you were going for, and you aren't too wide of that mark, but the pacing and focus here are working against you.

If you edit this one, author, I would do something unusual: try keeping it at exactly the same length. It would be easy enough to expand this to add in the context that the word limit forced you to abbreviate, but I think you'll learn more if you try cutting in different places to make this work. By leaning on the assumed tropes of fairy tales and bringing your conflict to the foreground, this could very easily work as a minific, and what you learn will help you hone your future Writeoff entries all the more.

Tier: Almost There

Not really a review, just noting one thing I didn't see any reviewers mention:

"Look, I didn't mean it. You've helped me a lot and I'm just being mean and..." She paused. By the looks of things stalling was only making matters worse. Gregory wanted an answer. "You used to enjoy new ideas once. Now you get more and more bitter with each year."

Gregory felt as if he had been turned inside out. His first reaction was to refuse to believe it. All those years he had gained knowledge, excellence, experience... not bitterness. He still enjoyed lots of stuff!

Mind your perspective. Third-person omniscient is rare and somewhat distracting, and if you're in third-person limited, you're jumping from Sasha's perspective in the first paragraph to Gregory's in the second.

... well, I definitely wasn't expecting that.

>>Cassius
cant type well, braken arm.

I misspoke when I said fugue state, I have psych degree too. All I meant is that it doesn't seem realstic, which is more of an opinion than fact; but if severyl users share it that might indicate you're not getting the point across properly

I could blab with you a lot about natere of dissociative disorders, but again, broken arm :facehoof: I'll save it for when the cast is on.

Also whoever wrote Six Candles: dick move for stealing the same idea and running with it! :V I actulaly thought the imagery in Sunny Side Up was more evocative (I rated it 80% in prelims), it just wasn't quite as believable. The messages were very different as well, since SSU was about denial and psychological trauma while SC was about being able to let go of the past. But still, dick move story thief :V

>>Cassius
I replied here (below link), but it didn't show up in the story's forum. Here's the link for completeness.

>>Trick_Question

Alright, gonna try to get back on the review horse while I'm between calls at work and procrastinating on tech support.

For all that the pseudo-second-person all-dialogue format leads to some of the awkwardness described in above reviews, and for all the clumsy edges of the expositional narration ("No, this isn't- look, are meth labs this chrome? Chrome everywhere. Flashing lights. Tangled wires. Foggy air from all the evaporating liquid nitrogen."), and for all that both family-based emotional wounds and time travel are big recurring themes this round … I still like this one. The narrative voice here counts for an awful lot, and (as >>FrontSevens notes) the humor is both on point and a welcome leavener to the snarky cynical dough. Not without its flaws, but engaged me the whole way through.

Tier: Strong

I have not much to add to what the others said, except maybe a little bit of a different interpretation.

Copious spoilers ahead, even if maybe at this point it isn't important anymore.

This was not a story about finding God, this was a story about being incapable to cope with a failure. Everyone has a different tolerance to failures, some manage them better than others, and some are haunted by something that may seem minor to everybody else. In this case we have what is for many a relative minor failure (failing the project and losing the Cum Laude, it is hard but for most not life-ruining) which hits the MC so hard that he can't cope with it. Enter his vision of God in a Cardbox, not a metaphor for religion but for his incapability to achieve a deep comprehension of Quantum Mechanics, made solid in a form resembling the most known Gedankenexperiment of that specific subject.

And the failure haunts the MC for the rest of his life, mirrored in his incapability to find a job at the level of his degree or to keep a certain stability, in his piles of never read books or in his apartments. And each time he fails again the box talks, bringing him back to what he feels, not sure if he is conscious about it, the root of all his failings, and the wound time doesn't heal.

Or I have completely misread it.

Edit: I loved the story.

Huh!

I seem to have read all the finalists before the deadline. How did that happen?

This is the one currently at the top of my list. It could use a little scene setting--for some reason, I saw the gentleman sitting at an outdoor cafe with the young girl on the sidewalk beside him--but that's just 'cause I always hafta picture something when I'm reading a story. Other than that and the oddness of a scar being only a week old, quite a nice piece.

Mike

Those last two paragraphs feel like this story hitting a wordcount wall at full speed, but up until then, this was solid reading. This does something right that's tough to do with minific rounds: it picked an idea that is appropriately sized for the space, and then spent its words focusing on a vivid scene description that leaves this a memorable read rather than trying to cram in a lot of plot that leaves the story reading like a Cliff's Notes version of itself. I'm too often guilty of that myself.

I'm wondering if this might not have been better if it had left the broader narrative arc more vague, actually. The strength of the piece is in its scene-setting and mood and tone; the plot twist that drives the ending is pretty cliché even if you had had the extra words to build up the emotional resonance for it. Soft-selling that more would keep the focus on the memories while still hinting at the wider tragedy.

Tier: Strong

So the impression I'm getting from this one is that this is some sort of urban fantasy universe in which monsters and magic and angels literally exist, and that the girl's mother was a literal angel (who might or might not also be dead). That's probably not what you intended, but the reason for that is that that's the only way I can make sense of the first two scenes.

You're invoking the Rule of Three here, which is a powerful and immediately recognizable structure: windup, windup, punch. (Goldilocks eats three bowls of porridge: too hot, too cold, just right. Ebenglimmer Scroogelight meets the three Horses of Hearth's Warming: Past, present, and future.) The problem is that your first and second iterations are focusing on the boundaries between reality and metaphysics (monsters and magic), and the third iteration introduces a new element (the mother) that because of the story structure I want to interpret within the context of the first two. If I try to read this as just a parable about a father's beliefs with the twist of a dead mom, it feels like you're interrupting your actual story with the twist, because you've spent so much time and structure winding up for a blow that never landed. And even if I do go with the mom's-a-literal-angel interpretation, this feels awfully thin, because the emotions it tries to harvest are from the implication of death, which still isn't part of your windup.

With most stories this round, I can see what the story was going for even if the story fell short of its goals, but I'm having trouble with this one because there's so much deliberate effort put into a structure that the ending disrupts. How do monsters fit into this? Is it a really oblique clue that the mother wasn't just killed but murdered? But if so, how can the father discuss it lightly and positively while the angel talk sends him into a stuttering mess?

In editing, figure out your core message here, and start lampshading it from the beginning. The more solidly you can make that windup-windup-punch structure land, the stronger this will get.

Tier: Needs Work

What >>Leo said about the POV switch: this needs some editing on that bridge showing how the fantasy and mundane worlds connect. You may also want to aggressively reread with an eye toward which role each brother plays in each scene — it looks like you're going for a sort of initial older-brother role for William and having James grow scene by scene into being the one who is finally able to carry him, but James is also leading the wasp mission and keeps William from throwing the rock prematurely, which disrupts the arc of his growth by starting him out as fully responsible.

That said, this is probably the first story I've read this round that feels like it was firing on all cylinders. I don't know if any of that is carryover effect from me having recently played Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons, which did this same storyline pretty devastatingly, but regardless, this makes good use of minific space, knows where it wants to go, and spends its words right.

Tier: Top Contender

>>Trick_Question
My point was more "the story is trying to have its cake and eat it too on whether Tony has previously met modern intelligences". The entire setup, and especially the last line, only seem to make sense to me if this is being presented to him as a preparatory step before his first exposure to modern society. And yet the fact that he knows the safeword to stop the simulation (and knows it's a simulation to begin with), and Zae's comments on him "having trouble", all rely on this being a consensual regression step, which invalidates the ending.

I think if I had to choose between the two, consensual regression would be a better story (and it leads to some of the strongest moments here), but if the story is going that route then Zae is being awfully patronizing and ignorant in a way that the story doesn't quite play up enough to feel intentional to me, and which make me doubt his sincerity/effectiveness if he's meant to be presented as a sympathetic and helpful character. I don't know how much more I can say here without knowing the author's intentions.

Unrelatedly, if you're interested in this sort of scenario, Transmetropolitan's "Another Cold Morning" is a fucking amazing look at the future-shock of cryogenic revivals. Transmetropolitan is fucking amazing in general, but that issue and the Transient storyline (the first few issues, about a genetic body-modification movement becoming political scapegoats) and the issue where Channon's boyfriend uploads into a cloud of nanomachines are just art.

Separate from my review and rating:

I'm a little bit secretly disappointed that, given the setup of the first scene, it didn't end there, with the "father" closing the door and taking off his dad costume to reveal a grinning bed-monster underneath.

("Yeah, we're totally scared by little girls who aren't afraid …")

>>horizon
In retrospect I think the biggest problem with this story is we don't really get any indication of why he doesn't fit in (or isn't prepared to fit in, or is "being quarantined" until they know he's safe, or whatever the interp).

I'm apparently in the minority here, but this story's got too many fridge-logic problems for me to get into it like everyone else did, sorry. My engagement issues started right in the first paragraph when it was described as before dawn and yet "little Billiam" was already outside. Points for foreshadowing, yes, but implying that a mother is allowing her child to play outside in the pre-dawn dark is such an exceptional statement that I kept looking for what the heck was happening and figured out the story well before the twist.

I do like the care and detail that goes into the prose about the cake (and the reuse of the candles, which is significant for an entirely different reason than the one that makes surface sense, and which is a nice touch).

It was one of those rare Spring mornings so warm that a child could play outside without his overprotective mother worrying about dressing him properly. Maddie watched Billy carefully from the window, and fell deeply into her thoughts.

No she didn't. D: That's physically impossible, unless she has X-ray vision. Concealing the twist with clever implication like that first sentence is one thing, but the second half just feels like lying to the readers.

… it was at least nice to have Billiam home for his birthday.

This is part of a larger problem where the characters' thoughts don't actually make sense once you know the twist and reread the story (or on first read, if you got alerted by that first paragraph and are trying to piece things together). >>Baal Bunny points out another.

Sam rested his hand on his wife's shoulder, and spoke softly. "It's been eleven years, Maddie."

This is where my stretching suspension of disbelief finally snapped. I simply can't simultaneously accept that: A) she is still ten years later in such denial that she's watching him play like he's still alive, B) yet she only pampers Billy once a year on his birthday, C) she knows he's been dead for eleven years, D) she'd nevertheless make a point of the forty miles to the hospital; E) Sam is the voice of reason here who knows Billy's dead, F) Sam talks about Billy in present tense.

Clearly you've been effective at tugging heartstrings, and based on the responses above you're probably gonna medal, but I can't give a high rating to a story that's flat-out lying to me to set up its twist, and which leaves me struggling to figure out exactly what Maddie knows and doesn't know, robbing her final outburst of its impact.

There are some nice prose touches, like the cake and the consistently strong descriptions, keeping this from the bottom of my rankings, though. And I do think this could be saved with relatively light editing — a lot of the specific clues and wordings above can be addressed without touching the surrounding text, and even the story's major red flag (the pre-dawn opening) could be fixed by just changing the time of day to, say, right after school.

Tier: Almost There

---

Bonus nitpick:

two generous inches of frosting

Oh dear sweet lord of all things, that's like an icing black hole. c_c;

I want to say this is more scene than story, but it does have an arc: Dave's confrontation of the dead body and wrestling with Lynn's questions. It doesn't give him an in-character resolution on that, but the zoom outward at the ending, with the world not caring, closes the arc for the readers by making a statement on the question you brought up.

>>Trick_Question has some useful suggestions to consider, but regardless, this is another story that's firing on all cylinders for me. All-around strongly executed, and nicely done.

It's interesting contrasting my reaction to this with my reaction to Six Candles, because there I had the same reaction Trick apparently did here — getting hit by a lot of details that didn't add up and finding that breaking my immersion. I think to me the difference is that, while Dave's naivete and the other characters' actions may not be realistic, the scenario nevertheless felt real to me — "a rookie cop vomiting upon seeing their first body and struggling with the reality check of their responsibility vs. power" rings true and the other details discussed in this thread are trappings of that. While in Six Candles, the scenario itself is where the logic failed for me, and if I can't buy the story's central premise then the verisimilitude around the edges isn't gonna help that.

Tier: Top Contender

I definitely grok all the tropes of the video games (MMORPGs?) you're using as the source here, and the story was an amusing enough read. The story just seems a little … hollow? There's a lot of implication of meaning (the non-kill streak, the death after getting the hat and then the ending presaging a change, Grom apologizing in a way that hints he's aware of being responsible) but I'm not really pulling anything solid out beyond the surface story, and the surface story doesn't have a lot of emotional grab. So it's not that there's anything wrong here, I'm just not finding enough right to push it up my rankings. If there's a deeper meaning here, you probably want to bring it a little closer to the foreground.

Tier: Almost There

>>horizon
Normally we're on the same level in terms of story judgments, but this time I think we have diametrically-rated slates. :V

The all-dialogue format here is masking a problem: your characters switch viewpoints.

At the start of the story, you have Gwen complaining that the fox tried to kill her, and Penny telling her to stop harping on it. Then after Penny starts agitating for chicken rights, Penny says:

"You're just saying you'll trust a wild animal who'd sooner tear your head off than look at you! That's what you're just saying!"

… so (at least in Penny's summation) the problem is that Gwen is trusting the fox, that she's got "carnivore friends". Which is reasonable in the context of Gwen saying that getting her throat ripped out by a predator "hardly ever happens to anybody!", but not in the context of the argument you started the story with. So I'm really not sure whether Gwen's pro-fox or anti-fox here, which robs the ending of its punch.

Between that and the lack of distinctive character characteristics, the talking-heads format here was a fatiguing read. Points for at least injecting the names at regular intervals, but I can't say that this did a lot for me.

Tier: Almost There

I hate to break the opposition streak >>Trick_Question mentioned, but I pretty much agree with >>Trick_Question: great story on the whole, needs touch-up in the details. There are a few places where the girl's sadness is a key point, but given that our very first description of her is the adverb "cheerfully", we're getting mixed messages that whittle away at your core theme. And this does feel a little too blunt at times.

Regardless, this is near the top of my slate and (based on general comments) probably the odds-on favorite for this round's gold.

Tier: Top Contender

The hitchhiking parts are well described. The angst felt overwrought to me.

This is a kinda nitpicky problem on the whole but seriously broke my engagement, as someone who has both hiked and hitchhiked: the story kind of needs him to be on the move continually to work, but this dude has got to be some sort of robot, to be hitchhiking in the rain and dark, and to get out of the van into the rain again in a coat that's not even waterproof. Where's he sleeping? How is he not dead of hypothermia? Any more than a day or two and he'd have to fall into some sort of rhythm where he's got down time, and if he's trying to score hitches it makes a hell of a lot more sense to sleep at night and hitch during the day.

Eh I dunno? Middle slate. It holds together pretty well, but it's not as good as the good stories I've read and its problems aren't as big as the problematic stories I've read.

Tier: Almost There

I'm trying not to leave reviews since I don't really have time, but given others had issues with this I want the author to know: I really liked this. I doubt it means much from a nincompoop :p For me, it is about the price and reward of telling stories, something I very much believe in. The only question I'm left with is why the stars seem to betray the prince.

I only skimmed other reviews, but for those who might not have caught it, both the bard and grandfather are the fairy prince. At least, they seemed so to me.

Anyway, great job in my book.

This contains some nice worldbuilding, as well a clever resolution. I like it.

The beginning could use a little more exposition. Not necessarily much but mentioning where the characters are would help, because as it is now that's only introduced 9 paragraphs in and until then they might as well sit outside the city in the dust.

On the same note of exposition, it's also not clear at first how the narrator feels about Jeremia. "I wasn't impressed" made it seem to me that they were acquaintances who play together often and the narrator is just annoyed by Jeremia showing off. You describe the stranger's reaction to him, but not the narrator's reaction until a few paragraphs later, which I think should come through from the start.

On the ending I agree with >>Trick_Question. It would be a strong last sentence to end on, and the extra just feels completely unnecessary.

You might consider this spam, but oh well, let's spam kindness...

Congratulations to all who made it this far and through the finals...
with less than ten hours left on the clock, only time can tell who will win.

The competition is rough- there are some really good stories out there...

All in all, I wish you guys luck! May the odds be ever in your favor!

I can relate to >>TheCyanRecluse here. It's not bad, just odd. The absurdity of the premise has its own sort of appeal, I guess. Telling the main character's life was alright. Overall I'm still underwhelmed, though that might not do the story justice because I apparently don't get the deeper meaning (assuming there is any).

The style is interesting, with some tasteful use of repetition which I liked.

Cryogenics Anonymous - A -- Top level material here, it *feels* real while reading even though it is inside a simulation, with the only ding I can think of is the lack of a beginning and endpoint, much like it is a sliver out of a much larger work. Kudos on the immersion in just a few paragraphs.

>>Trick_Question Yeah, I caught the Reboot vibe from it too. And now that those adventurers have tasted the unique loot of a special hat, they'll be lined up fifty deep to kill the poor guy whenever he spawns.

Boned - A -- Another A level fic. Video game characters live fairly shallow 'lives' and I've always wondered what they do while waiting for the next elf or warrior to come charging down the corridor.

>>horizon
Yeah, what Horizon said. Fairy Tale romance is such an abrupt thing that a prince/princess/pauper can fall in love with a *description* of another character. On my first reading through, I could have *sworn* I saw a place or two that could have been improved, but the second reading later shows only the spot where Horizon poked. (Hence my habit of trying to read these twice before commenting. Hey, they're short.)

A+ Top tier.

Sort of sweet. I was still hoping for some supernatural twist at the end, but the actual ending was obvious.

It's an interesting story altogether, but it's lacking the emotional connection for me. You make the reader care about the daughter, but don't set up the conflict for the father, so, while the reveal is tied into the story well as far as the theme of the supernatural goes, it still stands on its own on the emotional level.

Once Upon a Time - B+ -- Extremely good example of escapist literature. What I got out of it was two brothers in WWI who have constructed a fantasy world to keep the horrors of the real world at arm's length, only to have reality strike one of them down. The wasps, the goblins, they all are some aspect of reality where they are fighting real soldiers with grenades instead of throwing rocks, and bullets instead of wasp stings. The hard part of writing something like this is that you are describing *two* worlds and the interactions between them, which can blow away your word count before you even get a good start.

Time, Talent and Treasure - B+ -- Good promise inside it, but a little clunky in the way it flows. The first few sentences are a good example, whiplashing from the grandfather to the ongoing story. It has good pieces, but problems with the way it is supposed to carry you away to the land of Fey and leave you wishing to return, but exiled to the mortal realm.

Let me point out some things the author did that are real problems to overcome. 1) With so many characters, you can't develop any of them, and that includes the main POV character. 2) The POV character does not *feel* anything other than a potpourri of random emotions that seem to get thrown at him. 3) There's no good 'grounding' of the events to make the reader know where the characters are other than the living room.

This is probably the last story I will review for this round as the Sun has just risen in my time zone. Several hours ago actually. I must say that I'm not disappointed. The prose is really neat. I could envision the highway and the rain and the traffic going past.

It's a little hard for a reader to feel strongly for or against the main character if they don't know what his problem is, which I did not get until I read the other reviews. His feelings are only shown as they are, not backed up a whole lot, which I believe is why so many people commented that those are overwrought (which is probably true) or that the protagonist is unsympathetic (which I did not experience personally). The story makes up for the vagueness of his background with a lot of atmosphere, and I didn't have a problem with it while reading, but that doesn't change the fact that it's vague.

On a side note: you know you read too much pony when "washes through my thin coat" makes you think of equine hair rather than a piece of clothing.

I have to say I don’t really get the point of this story. I feel like this story was going for something fairly vast, but I felt kind of left out by it. Why does he think God is the box (or is in the box)? It doesn’t seem to make much sense, really. I mean, I guess there’s >>The_Letter_J’s view, which isn’t wrong (and I suppose you could read it like that, saying that God doesn’t really exist, and you’re crazy to believe in him) but that feels a little… I dunno. On the nose? Not sure what message it is conveying to an audience not already receptive to that message.

What >>Leo said; that tacked-on ending is disappointing but the rest has a nice blend of silliness and intriguing high concept. Also, you get bonus Horizon points for "time cheese," for entirely personal reasons related to my magic work that would take way too long to explain.

The rating here is less an "edit it" than a "finish it."

Tier: Almost There

I have to say that this didn’t really do a whole lot for me. It was just too archetypal, to the point where it didn’t really do anything divergent from the standard soul collector/death/grim reaper/whatever thing. It is ambiguous what exactly the narrator is, but ultimately, what they are doesn’t really matter to the story because the story doesn’t actually end up going anywhere other than with the core idea.

The core idea is good, as proven by the innumerable studies about psychopomps and people who collect the stories of peoples’ lives, but this doesn’t go anywhere beyond that.

The narrator talks about his messed-up life and about how he is going to use time travel to fix it (very possibly causing the original accident in the first place).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm8yG8sBrIE

Nothing wrong with the core plot idea, but that’s all there is here – and it isn’t anything really new, and doesn’t add a new spin on it.

Saw it coming when they knocked on the door, but I smiled at the final tagline anyway.

Though pizza really does make everything better.

Good punchline, but that’s all there really was to this.

I agree with everyone else here; this was the start of a story rather than a story in and of itself. The story could be interesting, but we don’t see it.

I think calling it a dud at the start is cheating; I think having it just do nothing, and implying to the reader that it was a dud, would have worked better. Or better still, having the other character in the scene getting angry over the grenade being a dud, and then the protagonist never correcting them until the end.

I agree with >>Not_A_Hat about bringing in the precog thing earlier. You could even bring it in with the original grenade throw, and the other person being angry at them, like “I thought you said you were psychic” and them blowing them off, then the thing going off at the end and revealing that, yeah, they were and the person wasn’t just shooting off their mouth or something.

I don't have anything to really add on the above discussion, but let me talk for a moment about what dragged this story down for me. Maybe I'm getting tired here, but I just don't understand why (besides author fiat) Pete changes his mind at the end. Karen's enigmatic smile gets him to re-examine what he "really wants", but, uh, he's been putting off social engagements for a year despite his friends' coaxing; if he really wanted to go out, he'd have just done it and this story wouldn't exist. I'm not sure I buy that his friends finally got through, either, what with Brian's selfishness (and his stinger about Karen's legacy provoking a defensive reaction).

The rest of this was pretty smooth reading. Brian's behavior didn't bug me so much because I know some "Brians"; that sort of ridiculous social blind spot isn't entirely unrealistic, and I don't think he's supposed to be sympathetic. ... I guess I did have something to add to the discussion after all. :P

Tier: Almost There

This managed to fit a lot of dialogue into a small space by being an all-dialogue story, and it worked decently enough as we got an idea of what was going on and didn’t really need to know more about the scenery and surroundings than we were told.

The biggest problem with this story was the fact that the two characters didn’t end up feeling like they had particularly distinctive voicing, and in the end, I’m not quite sure what is going on with the foxes. Are the chickens and foxes the only intelligent creatures in their world? I'm not quite sure.

I don’t get why a bard was telling the story, instead of the prince making his living by telling the story in the human lands, thereby implying that Grandfather was the fairy prince. That seems like the correct way to tell the story, and I’m kind of confused why it isn’t that.

This follows the rule of three, and builds up to the emotional climax, but unfortunately, I feel like I’ve seen this story before, and none of the things he said really seemed to really link together as well as they should have. Had they all linked into the mother dying, it would have been stronger, but, nehh…

The core of this one just didn't work for me, and I can't explain why any better than pointing to >>Not_A_Hat. Up until the ending, though, the banter was nice and the reading was smooth. That puts this in about the same boat for me as Six Candles and it'll probably end up in the same medium-low slate position.

Tier: Almost There

I don’t know that the final twist of this story really added a whole lot to the story. It seemed like it was just repeating the idea of one of them getting hurt and the other getting away because they were faster over and over, but there was no real consistent pattern to it, and I’m not really sure why. The final twist didn’t really feel like it added anything to the story either. The original seeming progression of kids to teenagers to heroes seemed to work better than the twist did.

Not a review, just two thoughts:

The trench extends beyond sight to either side of me, labyrinthine, an inverse bulwark mortared with mud and blood and bones, the mute message of the land and the fallen a concrete one: ‘here and no further’.

This prose is awfully ornamental for the thoughts of a narrator amid the "blood, thunder, shouting" of combat.

How come the combat memories are in present tense and the modern action is in past tense? It seems like it would be more natural to do it the other way around.

As a graves fic I felt like I’d already read this story before. There are only so many ways to write these stories, and I feel like I’ve seen entirely too many of them for them to touch me. I also lacked the context necessary to actually feel sad at the end.

There were some good details here – the reuse of the candles, and some of the hints, such as him coming home from the hospital, worked well. But some of it also didn't work as well, and as >>horizon pointed out, some of them felt like lies. Him being home for his birthday and it being his first birthday after he came home might have made more sense (though it would have destroyed the candles thing) in the context of him coming home for his birthday, but I'm not sure that both can really live together in the same story.

This is silly, but I felt like it was slightly lacking. That being said, the skeleton, with his deathless streak and being killed for his hat, amused me, as did the implication that the players would now come back to try and farm more hats from him because now he had some item players would want, even though it was totally useless, because everyone knows players love hats.

Agreed with >>Trick_Question, this gets didactic at the end. Generally smooth reading until then.

Labell just snorted. “A conceit of the living, my friend. You and I are soldiers. We both know that time only heals the wounds of the survivors. Mortal wounds are forever. And I can think of no place on Earth where man has sown as much death as here.”

This is probably one of the most eloquent paragraphs of the Writeoff. I don't think it's saying anything we haven't seen in a dozen other stories, but I like the way it's phrased.

This is very fairy tale-y, and I thought it actually did a fairly decent job of emulating that sort of story; while it isn’t perfect, and the characters do fall in love (or the albatross does, at any rate) quite fast, that’s fairly standard for fairy tales. The whole thing ends up feeling a bit shallow due to its length, but it does seem to sort of hit the form, at least, even if it is imperfect.

This is a pretty solid setup for a story, but I agree with Horizon that I’m not quite clear on the situation here – why is he being exposed to simulations rather than real people? Has he been exposed to real people other than Zae? What exactly is going on here?

That’s the biggest point of confusion – why he is in this situation instead of interacting with real people, and the question of whether or not he has interacted with real people. He seems to be dealing with Zae, after all.

I’m with >>Trick_Question; I liked this story, but the girl’s sadness/false cheer didn’t come through strongly enough to make the ending make sense.

I'd be evaluating this story very differently if it weren't for that last line, which starts a second scene, transforming this from abbreviated-but-complete to stops-dead-in-the-middle.

I have to score it low as incomplete, but what's here is intriguing.

Tier: Needs Work

This is decent, but the two halves of the story – him running away from his family that no longer needs him, and him running away from his accident – don’t fit together. I’d choose one and stick with it, because the combination of the two feels confusing in this small of a space.

I more or less agree with >>horizon’s view of this piece; the overall emotional transition at the end didn’t quite feel justified enough. I didn’t have a problem with his friend being frustrated/clueless; sometimes people really are that way.

A scene in Chernobyl, this didn’t really do a whole lot for me because it didn’t feel like it had anything other than a scene, and while the scene was reasonably well-described, it just didn’t end up touching me or telling me why it was important.

>>horizon
Heh, again we differ. I thought this was hooves-down the best story in the competition. The last line clinches it for me and makes it a complete story, because it confirms the theory.

EDIT: I'm so surprised by your rating (and by how amazingly good the story is) that I suspect you wrote this. But again, for Reasons, I am not author-guessing this time.

Congrats Lise!!! :pinkiehappy:

I no longer have any ability to predict who will do well vs. who will do poorly.

I was doing pretty well myself, but fortunately horizon and TD were there at the last minute to put me in my place. :trollestia:

>>Trick_Question
Huge thanks, Trick! :)
I liked your story a lot (though it made me incredibly sad). :')

>>MonarchDodora
>>Not_A_Hat
>>horizon
>>The_Letter_J
>>FrontSevens
>>TheCyanRecluse

Thanks for the great reviews, all. :)
I'll try to keep things less confusing next time. :) That last section sounded much better in my mind...

(Carmel in this instance is short for Carmichael :))

>>Trick_Question
>>The_Letter_J
>>FrontSevens
>>billymorph
>>Trick_Question
>>Bachiavellian
>>TheCyanRecluse
>>Xepher
>>Everyday
>>Baal Bunny
>>horizon
>>TitaniumDragon

Wow! Thanks for the reviews and enjoying the story so much :)

Trick and Everyday got it right — time as a resource was (intended to be) used to move things back.
Also, sorry for the confusion: while the message was that smiles cure sadness, the girl wasn't sad, she just collected smiles to help those that were (and use herself, when needed as she used time.) I'll try to use better means to express the message in future.

>>MonarchDodora
>>The_Letter_J
>>georg
>>Orbiting_kettle
>>Monokeras
>>Trick_Question
>>Leo
>>horizon

Thanks for the review, all :) Hope you enjoyed.

And in case you're wondering, yes the two are in (the starting phase of) a relationship. They just chose different paths in life. :)

P.S. Trick for best reviewer :D

Congratulations Lise!
And congratulation to the other medallists too.

Thanks to all the reviewers, except myself:

>>FrontSevens >>The_Letter_J >>Not_A_Hat >>georg >>Oblomov >>Baal Bunny >>horizon >>TitaniumDragon

I almost didn't submit this story because I wasn't feelin' it, but I don't think it was awful. It's fortunate that some talented writers were able to take me down a notch at the end (horizon, TD, CiG) because I don't think this was quite medal-worthy.

And a few ponies placed me: last, next-to-last, third-from-last, and fourth-from-last. So apparently there were readers who really did not like it. :raritydespair: But that's okay. :twilightsmile:

To answer some questions, very briefly:

batter and bone = wat

Gelatin is made from bones.

"everything is bad" –horizon

I agree with part of your concerns, especially "spoil the boy". With more time (and more importantly, more words) I would have smoothed the edges so that it wasn't so schizy between suggestion and reality. It was a difficult thing to put in the foreshadowing without being super-obvious.

I also didn't like the number seventeen because it's too large, and worried not following it with "candles" would cause a few readers to miss the point of the entire story. I think making it only a few years from his death would be more believable. I also didn't want to end it with a line that direct and maudlin, but I didn't have time to improve it any.

two inches of frosting = wat

The frosting is almost like a pudding, but it's probably more like one inch. This is actually my personal birthday cake, which I love. It's amazing. And I am spoiled but not dead so far. Except that time I killed myself but those things happen.

>>LiseEclaire
This was one of the most interesting and creative fics in terms of the message within its setting. I liked it better than the one that medaled. :derpytongue2:

>>Monokeras
>>horizon
>>Trick_Question
>>The_Letter_J
>>Not_A_Hat
>>Leo

Thank you everyone for your review.

This was certainly the story I put the most thought into. I prioritized flow and characterization first to ensure that the reader really connected to Chris in this story. Looking back, I probably shouldn't name him "Christopher Walker." I mean, Christopher Walken anyone?

Thanks to Trick for pointing out the technical mistakes in this piece. It's and Its is a constant struggle for me and I didn't send this one to an editor other than me prior to submitting.

In regards to the ending not working, I suppose I don't have anything to comment on. Yeah, Chris could have tried to beat David to the punch regarding the handshake.

I feel like questioning why he's going for a job like this is a bit of a counter-intuitive question. We have been told since children that we should "Follow our dreams" or "Do what we love." In this story, we see Chris go after the job he really wants to do, as any human would, Disability or No. Asking why he didn't give up on his dream is kinda a testament to the character I tried to show. He's trying to rise above his disability and do what he loves. Do we really want to ask people "Why didn't you give up on your dream after your disability?" Perhaps I'm interpreting the question incorrectly, and rather, I didn't properly show off this trait in the character. I was hoping to show this off in the persistence the character has in getting a job.

Through some volunteer work at a Veterans of Foreign Wars, I can attest that this is a real problem some veterans face, and some do give up on their carrier to end up becoming a janitor.etc. I wanted to show that struggle with this story.

Now then, for the social stigma on this disability? Honestly, it's a bit hit or miss. Not every employer would turn away an employee with a disability, because of EEO regulations. But that said, since he has to work with customers, they have to consider how comfortable the customer would be around the worker. We see a person who holds great conversation, is relatible, and seems trustworthy. But, physical appearance throws off the impression. A question I wanted the reader to have was "How would this be different if the handshake was first, rather than at the end?"

Anyway. I think I rambled on for a bit too long. Everyone had great points and it's given me more to think about for when I make the next set of entries for the Original Flash Fiction category. Thank you all so much.

Thanks, folks!

>>Trick_Question, you got it exactly right when you called this a vaudeville routine. I spent the first 12 hours of the writing period researching double sestinas and reformulating the rules for how they worked 'cause the first thing you realize when you research double sestinas is that no one agrees on how to write one. I then wrote the first stanza--on some heavy and turgid subject that I don't even remember now--only to discover that, while a regular sestina's about 250 words long, a double sestina is actually a quadruple sestina. So the thing was going to end up over a thousand words long. That's when I shifted my aim toward something zippy and depthless, and this is what came out.

I did try for a reversal with the chickens changing their minds on the subject during the course of their little talk, but it'd need more work to pull that off. Oh, and >>The_Letter_J, you made my week by saying you could imagine chickens having this conversation. 'Cause verisimilitude is ever my goal in fiction writing. :)

Congrats to our winners! See y'all next time!

Mike

>>Ratlab
>>The_Letter_J
>>Icenrose
>>FrontSevens
>>Trick_Question

I regret nothing.

Seriously. This story was a gas to write. Knowing immediately how I wanted to end this story, it made me bite my lip with every line. But, this is drastically cut down. I wanted to make sure there were red herrings in the early parts to make the reader feel like they didn't know what was going on. However, it seems that the build up lasted for too long, thus, the vagueness.

I gambled that there wouldn't be many comedy based entries, so I felt like this would have either been loved or hated. Based on the voting, it pretty much reflects that. Some people -loved- this. One person even marking this the top of their slate. While numerous others kept it at the bottom.

If I were to redo this, I can't say I'd write this premise at all. The Lego stepping joke itself is a bit dated by pop culture. This story won't have a lot of value 5-10 years down the line.

Thank you everyone for the compliments on the technicality of the piece.

Honestly, what place this story took didn't matter to me. As long as I made someone laugh, or broke up the reviewing process of the sad stories, I did exactly what I wanted to do.

Alright! Finals are now over, so I guess it's time for me to jump in here and start talking about my story. So, as is now obvious, I wrote Second Chance. I'll start with the standard postmortem, then I'll address some of the common criticisms of the story, and then I'll move onto addressing individual commenters for anything they may have said that didn't fit with the common criticisms. Also, for those interested, I recorded an audio version of what I'm about to type here as well. This has been a sort of audio-centric round, what with the fic readings and the Discord server's voice channel being more regularly used, so I figured I'd get some practice in with actually talking and using my voice. You can find it here if you're interested in what I sound like.

So with that out of the way, let's get into the standard postmortem. Before I get into anything else, my motivations for writing this story need to be clear. When submitting this story, my main goal was just to finish a Writeoff to the end. My last Writeoff was Illusion of Choice, all the way back in November. You may remember me better as MDNGHTRDHTLN from that contest, and I disqualified myself and my entry during that round and walked away pretty miffed. It's been a long time, and it's been a combination of finishing licking my wounds and not having any inspiration or time to enter a Writeoff. So with this fic, I just wanted to know if I could do it again and get back into it.

Now with that out of the way, let's get onto the story. The main thing I was trying to do with this story was a sort of "context through imagery"; instead of explicitly confirming why the woman may have been bombed or what she saw, I wanted to indirectly nudge the reader in the direction of their own conclusion by the choices I made with my poetic devices. It's something that I was inspired to do by Toni Morrison's "Beloved", which is a novel that almost bridges the gap between fiction and poetry. She does something similar with her prose, and it's something I wanted to try for myself.

For some people, it went over pretty well; Not_A_Hat told me in private conversation that he thought the woman was a spy of some sort, and that's why she was bombed. For others, it didn't, and they weren't sure why she may have been bombed. In my own head, she was an FBI agent. There was actually a line in the second draft of the story that explicitly said she was an FBI agent, but I cut it out both because it would push me over 750 words and because it would directly undermine what I was trying to do with the imagery. If I'm trying to give context through imagery, why would I give explicit context? It would render the point of the imagery useless.

But, well, that's the standard postmortem. Next, I'll look at some of the common criticisms of Second Chance.

This is more of an introduction than a story.
This is pretty true. I knew that stories being more introductions than actual stories is a very common criticism during Writeoff rounds, and I also knew that I didn't really have the time, dedication, or effort to make a self-contained story, so I just figured that I would play to the story's strengths instead of compensating for its weaknesses. I figured that good in one area but lacking in others was better than mediocre in all of them. If I had more time or space, I may have been able to make something better in all areas, but that's not something I can really say for certain. Still, people said it was at least an interesting introduction that made them want to read more, which is something an introduction is supposed to do, so I'd say I did well on that front.

There's little in the way of description, aside from what she hears.
I don't really have any specific reasoning for this. It started because I was binge-watching Daredevil's second season the same day I wrote this story, and Daredevil is blind, but has a very acute sense of hearing (so acute that it's one of his superpowers). In the original draft of the story, I had a line that described what she saw:

Everything was so hazy. The whites and blues of the hospital room bled together, dripping into each other, slathering the room. She couldn't tell what was where with her eyes. But she could with her ears.

I cut it out for three reasons: one, it was taking up too much wordcount, and I needed all the space I could get. Two, it disrupted the flow of the story and stuck out like a sore thumb. Three, I never really used any other visual description, so it felt like a weird detour that never really went anywhere. It didn't add much to the story, especially since I figured I could get by on the basis that most of us know what a hospital room looks like. If I had more space, I would have almost definitely put more visual description in there, but as the story was looking, there just wasn't the space or the use for it (at least, while I was writing it).

Those were the two big issues people had with the story. Next, I'm going to address anything that I feel needs more attention to specific commenters.

>>Ratlab
Thanks for the kind words! I'm at least glad you thought the descriptions that were there went over well; description has never been my strong suit, so I was worried that it would be a weak point. But, based on what you and some others have said, it was the opposite.

As for the "nitpicky" thing you said, I don't really mind. The devil can be in the details, and I think an important part of any art is how the details support the whole. I don't think pointing out repetitive sentence structure is nitpicky at all, and I appreciate you pointing it out, because I wouldn't have caught it otherwise.

>>The_Letter_J
Vaguely funny story about the reading: I was about to go to bed when Hat said "I'm going to read Second Chance next". I had to catch the reading of my story. I recorded my own reading, but I don't know if I'll put it up unless someone wants to hear it.

Yeah, the guy talking definitely isn't the one who had her blown up. He'd have no reason to visit; she's on the do-not-resuscitate list and no one has fed her in a few days. She's very close to death; he'd just have to wait a bit longer and he'd be out of her hair. I don't really have anything for him in my head, but looking back, I was probably intending for him to sound like some sort of employee for a rival government agency, foreign government, or shadowy corporation. Something off-the-books and clandestine who really wanted access to the secrets of whoever his target is.

I never really thought too hard about the time travel aspect, but the story ending because the timeline ends is an interesting thing to think about. I always have issues with time travel, because whenever you go back and change something, the timeline in which you went back and changed something ceases to exist, so you can't actually go back in time and change something because it never happened. Time just automatically corrects itself. Still, it's an interesting angle to think things from.

>>Not_A_Hat
Yeah, I agree with you on the "settling for banality" bit. I'd much rather try something big and fall short, than be comfortable in mediocrity or what is otherwise expected. That's how art stagnates, I think, and I don't want my art to stagnate.

>>Monokeras
That is a comma splice, but I would consider it acceptable. Comma splices are generally thought to be fine if the spliced clauses are both short and similar enough in structure, and I'd say that both of those sentences are. And you'd still hear footsteps both inside and outside the door; putting the footsteps before the opening door would disrupt the flow of the paragraph and be ambiguous if there was someone already inside her room or not, so I started with the opening door and moved onto the footsteps that were closer and much louder (since they're no longer muffled by the door; even with her hypersensitive hearing, they'd still be much quieter than if they were inside her room).

It's maybe not a "weird" metaphor as much as it is an uncommon one, but there's a reason I picked it. There are a thousand different ways I could have described what it was like to remember the accident, but I chose that because of the connotation of baptismal water. When you're baptized, you're reborn in the eyes of the church, and her dying and going back in time is her own rebirth. She's literally reborn in the sense that she died but is now alive, but she's figuratively reborn in the sense that she has a new chance at life and a new goal in mind.

I don't really know what I could do with it being too long; most people seem to think that it could use more on its bones, what with more visual description and context. I'd venture to guess that you were just bored by it, and I'm not sure there's anything I could do to make it more interesting outside of expanding it.

Advertisements are the new feghoots!
At least, that's what it seems, based on the general reaction to my story. And I am perfectly okay with that.

Most of my thoughts about this story and it's problems can be seen in my review of it over here: >>The_Letter_J. I think the only thing I left out of it, and which a few other people mentioned, is that the dialogue wasn't very realistic. Like I said in the chat while writing the story, "I've realized I have no idea how real people talk." I do regret not making the story read more like an actual commercial, but I'm still happy with how it turned out overall. I was expecting it to completely bomb, so the fact that it even made the finals is amazing to me.

In case anyone was wondering, I did come up with the idea for this story while eating some Domino's pizza. After a few hours of brainstorming, I had decided that none of my ideas were any good, and I decided that I wouldn't try to write anything. Then we had Domino's for dinner, and the tagline came to me. So then I spent the last few hours of the competition writing a story around that line.

>>TheCyanRecluse
I actually really like Domino's. Though to be fair, I'm the type of person who would probably enjoy cheese-covered cardboard if you called it "pizza." I don't think I've ever had a pizza I didn't like. (At least as far as brands go. There are some toppings that I definitely don't like.)

>>Trick_Question

I sensed sexual tension between Amy and Heather,

I believe that's what we call "Seeing Things That Aren't There." Or at the very least, it's not something I was trying to include. But it doesn't really matter for the story either way.

as well as sexual tension between Heather and Dom.

"Dom" was supposed to be short for "Domino's," not the name of the guy delivering the pizza.

Also also, since the timing was perfect, the title is totally wrong.

But time didn't help Heather get over her breakup. Pizza did.

And thank you to everyone else who read and commented as well. I'm glad that you all seemed to enjoy it.
>>Oblomov
>>axis_of_rotation
>>georg
>>Leo
>>Dubs_Rewatcher
>>Orbiting_kettle
>>horizon
>>TitaniumDragon

Well, time for a small post-mortem. Let me begin with thanking all the people the read and reviewed my story. It was, as always, a pleasure to get feedback from you.

Now on to this silly little piece.

I wrote it in about an hour when I was struck by inspiration while preparing an asparagus risotto (which will be my new muse for the time being (Talia has been quite lazy lately and will be assigned to answering business mails for a while).I submitted it with 4 minutes to spare before the deadline, so many of the problems you noted, and which I could see too with a bit of hindsight, came from that. On the other hand that is exactly the spirit of the write-off, so I'm not complaining or anything.

This story was inspired by a paper about how time may be a byproduct of some quantum process. I didn't obviously understand it really, but neither did the characters so we are fine.

The framing device should have been a speech delivered by the narrator a couple of decades after the facts, at some gala or similar celebration. It didn't work. I had to cut too much and with too little time, and the ending suffered under it. I will have to learn that for the next time and dedicate more attention on how I close a story.

>>The_Letter_J
>>Trick_Question
I missed the chance to specify that the underground lab wasn't exactly a secure facility and more haphazardly put together machinery in cellar. I hinted at it in the first draft but axed it because of the wordcount. I see now how that could be confusing. Also, Betsy was simply evil, there was no desire to protect George and only a strong urge to hurt the narrator.

>>FrontSevens
I thought I stayed light on the technobabble, but it seems I was wrong. Also, knocking George out is the natural reaction when you meet someone that takes the Timecube seriously and is surrounded by heavy machinery. I suspect the problem is that that was a reference to a bit of nowadays obscure internet culture of the last millennium.

Thanks again to everyone else for the time and the comments.
>>horizon
>>Xepher
>>PinoyPony
>>Not_A_Hat
>>Leo

Congratulations to Lisa Eclaire, Flutterpriest and horizon for their medal denying skillfully crafted entries.

As far as Boned goes, >>Baal Bunny, >>The_Letter_J, >>Astrarian, >>Trick_Question, >>horizon, >>georg and >>TitaniumDragon, thank you all for your thoughtful reviews. I didn't have many ideas for the prompt, but I did have one that various other bits started glomming on to and it ended up being fun to write.

I'm glad that you (and the other voters) seem to have enjoyed it. As several reviews noted, it's not a terribly convoluted or metaphorical plot, but I don't mind achieving amusing and easy to follow. Some of my goals in the minific rounds are to tell a complete story and actually have some characterization, and I believe I met with some success in both this time.

>>Baal Bunny, I'm glad you liked it and didn't have any trouble getting the reference.

>>The_Letter_J, Glad you liked it as well. The idea wasn't prepared before hand; it was one I came up with brainstorming from the prompt. If I had to tie it together, I'd say it's something like 'respawns heal your wounds, but don't give you your stuff back.' I'm glad you got the implications of the player behavior going forward, though.

>>Astrarian, Thanks and I'm glad you liked what characterization I could fit in.

>>Ratlab, Silly review is silly (but there were no guesses!).

>>Trick_Question, It wasn't intended as a crossover, though it would easily work in that universe, and I have seen reboot (and wreck it Ralph), so I can't claim to have come up with the idea. In my head, Grom and Cromarty are just ye olde random trash mobs in some generic MMORPG dungeon. Glad it worked for you regardless.

>>horizon, I tried for a few layers of humor; the absurdity of the situation, dark humor on how the hat was made, the ironic implications going forward, but yeah, there was no deep profound meaning or weighty topics, just some chuckles.

>>georg, Glad I made the grade, and that you caught the gist of the setup there at the end.

>>TitaniumDragon, I am pleased to see a reader who can appreciate the irrational love of players for hats, and I happy to have amused.

Thanks to all, fellow readers, voters, writers, and reviewers. Until next time!

I will take most of your critiques to heart and try to improve this story. While I don't want to make it too long, another couple of hundred words will probably be a blessing for it.

So, this should have been a ghost story, in the sense that it is a story about dead people and about vengeance well beyond the grave. While I like to put some ambiguity in my stories, in this case that was a central point that should have explained why they were playing the Game and why memories were so important. Once you are dead you have only the memories of when you were alive, and so they become a finite and precious resource. I certainly need to make the nature of the characters clearer as currently it is only implied by the fact that Jeremia (a name I wrote wrong because brainfart and not because I'm subtle) was hanged.

I'm glad the haunting atmosphere came through, but I need really to put some of the things I cut out back in the story again. Among those, at leas a throw away line on how you can remain yourself even when you get memories from others, a little bit more about the origin of the Game, a bit of characterization for the narrator and her quest for vengeance and a bit of a description of the environment and the shadows of the living that surround them.

The ending wasn't satisfying, I agree with that. I will need to work in some stronger closure for the narrator. I will also need to add details tot the two set of memories she bet at the end and why she had to do that.

>>horizon
The siege of Tenochtitlan caused between 100.000 and 200.000 (source disagree, but 100.000 is the lower limit) deaths in 80 days and that's the reason I've chosen it as example of what would probably be a spiritual wasteland filled with suffering and regret. I may need to pick some other location which is emotionally nearer to current readers.

>>Remedyfortheheart
I'm glad you liked it so much, I will see to improve the final version and fix the weak points this one has.

Thanks for your comments and your time, I will try to learn from them.
>>Leo
>>Trick_Question
>>Xepher
>>TheCyanRecluse
>>Hagdal Hohensalza
>>The_Letter_J
>>Icenrose
>>FrontSevens

>>Orbiting_kettle
Are you saying that all three characters were dead? Because if so, I completely missed that and thought that only Jeremia was dead.

Hmm, ok, I think I get it. I did not put that many paragraph breaks because they make the text look really weird, and they look unnecessary, but I'll abide by that in the future.

>>The_Letter_J

"Dom" was supposed to be short for "Domino's," not the name of the guy delivering the pizza.

R_Dash_That's_The_Joke.gif

Oh wow. Am I allowed to be excited (given my scoreboard standing) about a bronze? Because I'm legit excited. :D This is my first minific medal in over a year — the vast majority of my awards and points have come from short stories — and also a great antidote to me feeling like I'm slipping and writing nothing but crap lately.

Congratulations to LiseEclaire and Flutterpriest, both of whom medaled as first-time Original Fiction entrants! A special shout-out as well to Monokeras, who missed the finals cutoff by literally one story, and who wrote two entries this round, both of which did well enough that the second one earned positive points after the multi-entry deduction. You're continuing your rise up the rankings, and I expect you in the finals soon! ^.^ And, as always, congratulations to everyone who entered, for having the creativity and determination to get your work out in the public eye, and I hope the process will lead to a better story once you get some editing time.

---

The Red Forest — Retrospective

This story started life in my backyard, more or less. When the prompt dropped I gnawed at it for a little while and decided I should write something about nearby Malakoff Diggins State Park — during the Gold Rush, there was a big community out here built up around sluice mining, which basically just ripped away massive chunks of earth and used water (and some chemicals) to get the gold to settle out. The debris flowed into streams, permanently shaping the landscape, and the park itself is basically a giant manmade crater that's been mostly reclaimed by nature. You're driving along through the hills and then all of a sudden you see these steep cliffs and the land drops off by 50 feet or so. There are drainage tunnels keeping it from turning into a giant lake, but there are also a bunch of chemically tainted ponds where the water is weird colors and you don't want to risk taking a drink (and some of that gets into the rivers, so water quality is a pretty significant issue here too). There's this very time-heals-most-wounds aesthetic about it: clearly something happened here, and you can still see the scars, but at a surface glance, these days it's basically back to nature like the world around it.

I wasn't 100% on the idea because I felt like it would be too obviously me (a number of other authors here know I live in gold country), but while I was at the con, I pitched the idea to my con roommate and we chatted about it a little. He suggested I take that same nature-reclamation idea and write about the Korean DMZ — one of the world's biggest involuntary parks, a place where people are kept out at gunpoint but animals roam free. I chewed over that, and did a few minutes of web research into involuntary parks, and realized two things: 1) Chernobyl was more iconic, 2) it hit the core theme a little better of having a wound that time can't heal, and 3) it would be much easier for me to write about correctly without extensive research, and because I was at a convention and trying to wedge a story in between con events, I needed to grab at the low-hanging fruit.

I think this story was at least partially a triumph of idea over execution. I was going for a Lost Cities-type effect, since it fit the theme/tone/narrative very well, but it's my first time writing a Lost City and I erred too far into purple prose. (Oddly, the one word that people complained the most about, "wisent," wasn't even introduced as an attempt at prose ornamentation — I used that word because "buffalo" carries very American connotations and I thought that the species name was more common than it apparently is.) If this gets edited I'll definitely dial it back some.

I agree with the common complaint/observation that this doesn't heavily clue to Chernobyl. That was at least partially intentional. The fact that it works as a sort of generic postapocalyptic commentary was very much intentional, and the clues I did pepper in — the wisent and the other particular animals that were chosen; the Russian sign; the concrete chimney-bedecked lump on the horizon; and especially the iconic Ferris wheel of the nearby town of Pripyat — were there as signals to ground it for the people willing to dig a little further. I'm glad that someone caught those early on because having that in comments / the reading's discussion seems to have made a difference to the story's reception.

>>TheCyanRecluse
The sign reads "No admittance". (source)

>>Astrarian
Half yes? I kinda wrote this focusing on the wildlife rather than the human element (though the lack of humans as the unhealed wound is definitely a legit reading). The wounds that were healed were the animals moving back in, and the bioaccumulation of radioactivity is an unhealed wound, and the insect mutation and the crooked beak were explicit additions to reflect that. The prey-predator chain sort of grew organically out of my desire to pull back the focus little by little, but I really like the way that that teases a lot of themes I didn't explicitly name-drop.

Mostly though I'm proud of this because of how briefly I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. This is only 450 words, and I poked at it a bit when I was done to see if there was more detail worth adding, but this didn't even want to expand out to 500. I'm pretty sure this is the Writeoffs' shortest medalist ever, but there's no efficient way of searching that from the public-facing data (the only place wordcount is listed is on gallery pages), so Roger will have to back me up on that.

Thank you all for the reading, and the reviews, and both the kind and critical words! See you next round. :)

>>The_Letter_J
That was the idea I missed to properly communicate.

Congratulations to Lise Eclaire, Flutterpriest, and horizon for their medal-winning stories!

The Faintest Smile - a retrospective.

My goal was to tell a story about three friends taking different paths towards coaxing a grieving widow from his home and join in their adventures for the first time in over a year. Jake takes my usual tactic of boisterous distraction, while Kestrel uses a light touch and plays the carrot to Brian's bludgeoning stick. From your feedback, it seems like I've done a reasonably good job of doing this, though the story is not without its flaws.

The writing process for this story wound up being a tale of life imitating art. I had just finished the main body of the story in the early afternoon when I got a pile of text messages from a group of friends, asking me to head out with them to a couple of bars downtown. Having shut myself away during many of the previous writing weekends for the competition, I figured I should follow my own protagonist's footsteps and join in on the revelry. Fully sated by bar burgers and beer, I wrote the remainder of the story while waiting my turn during several rounds of pool and cutthroat.

This led to the unenviable position of me having to edit the story late into the night while sobering up and racing towards a hangover, but it seems as though I did a reasonable job of it this time around - copy-wise, anyways. There does seem to be some consensus among my reviewers that the story is too crowded for its own good, which I can definitely understand. It is a bit cramped with five people needing to be characterized in 750 words, and I freely admit the word count chafed a bit this time around.

Anyways, let's break from my normal generalizing and address each of you in turn (cuz you're awesome and you deserve it).

>>Trick_Question
The first draft of the story saw things get physical between Jake and Brian, but that version of the confrontation took me way past the word count. I should have turned down the rhetoric a bit to compensate for that, rather than have Jake just roll over and bite his tongue, but I also wanted Jake's silence in the face of such provocative statements (as you so eloquently put it) to imply that on some level he's also growing frustrated with Pete's constant rejection.

My goal with Brian was to not have him be entirely heartless, just impatient and unsympathetic (both intrinsically and towards Pete's melancholy). I think you're right on the money with how to fix it, though - remove the bit about him paling, and have his gaze return to his phone instead of the floor. He's a jerk, not a moron.

For what it's worth, I like the directness of your feedback - I'm here to improve as a writer, and having inconsistencies brought to my attention as well as helpful suggestions on how they can be fixed (in a concise manner, no less) is invaluable. Seriously, thank you for the work you put into providing feedback for the rest of us - I certainly appreciate it.

>>Ratlab
Funnily enough, I'm pretty sure it was the ring bit that made me switch to present tense - I didn't like how clunky the sentences became when I tried to have Pete obfuscate his fidgeting in past tense.

The birthday reference was a means to an end; I wanted to include a reason why Pete's friends were so keen on getting him out and about (and more importantly, not alone) on that particular day. You're right though, I think I could have handled the reference better than I did.

Thank you for your feedback, and I'm glad you liked the story!

>>Monokeras
I can see how having Karen be a Marine (as opposed to a policewoman or a firefighter) could have come off as cliche (especially considering the nature of many of this round's submissions).

There's (to me) a subtext message here, kinda “if you marry a military, then you should expect it to die”

That wasn't at all my intent, but now that you've pointed it out to me, I can see how Pete's friends' persistence (and especially Brian's impatience) could point a reader's attitude in that direction. I'm not certain if it's something I can address directly without significantly changing the story, but if I revisit the story in the future it's definitely something to bear in mind.

Not aiming for the stars, but competent nevertheless.

This was, in fact, precisely my goal when I entered this story into the competition. Overreaching was the root flaw of Thrice in the last OF minific round, so I wanted to make sure I could actually tell a coherent OF story in <750 words. I got the biggest smile when I saw this, so thank you very much for your feedback!

>>Aragon
I was so pleased to read your review of the story itself - I'm flattered! I'm always a bit worried about how my stories may be interpreted or that there's some glaring flaw that I overlooked, so to see so much unabashed praise like this was a pretty neat morale boost. Thank you for your feedback!

P.S. - Pyrrha Nikos is, indeed, best pony. ^^

>>PinoyPony

It's just me, but the language of the dialogue strikes as a bit uncouth, even for casual talk between buddies.

You are correct! My friends and I, particularly while drinking, have a tendency to use swear words as punctuation, so my profanity filter isn't as robust as it should be when writing casual dialogue between chums. And if you're referencing Brian's line about being a third wheel, well, Brian's a jerk, he's supposed to be uncouth. Still, these are important things for me to bear in mind, especially when writing dialogue. And I like your idea to help balance it - not by reining in Brian (his noble spirit must remain unfettered), but by bringing out more of Kestrel, and having her intercede more directly (with words, rather than more smacking upside the head).

Oh, and I do know who Benvolio is. English Lit ftw! /)

Thank you for your feedback!

>>Leo
I'm happy you found the tense of the story unobtrusive - tense is a tricky thing, and I'm glad I seem to have handled it reasonably well with this story.

You were the first, but not the last, to point out the story is on the cramped side, and I agree - five characters is a bit much for flash fiction. Karen's name should have been chosen with more care - having two two-syllable names start with "K" was a poor decision on my part. I'm leaning towards "Lysa" as a replacement. For the purposes of the story-that-could-have-been, Jake and Kestrel could probably have been rolled into one character - Brian still has a foil to play off of, and it would give them all more room to breathe.

Finally, your profile pic is gorgeous. Thank you for your feedback!

>>The_Letter_J
I'm glad you liked the story! I think you're right, I could have been a bit more subtle about things - the description of the picture is pretty blunt - but I'm not certain cutting it all the way back to Pete fidgeting with his ring would still tell the same story.

Having just re-written this paragraph three times though, I think you're right - functionally, it would still be the same story, just not quite as explicit. I like specificity in my stories, but removing the picture would also address Leo and Georg's comments on crowding.

Hmm. Definitely something to think about. Thank you so much!

>>georg
All three of these problems are related to each other - because I had to develop five different characters, it left no room for setting and no space to have Pete do much more than react to his friends' coaxing in turn. Condensing down somewhere would allow me to fix pretty much all of it, and I'm leaning towards J's (implied) suggestion of cutting the picture. Thank you for your feedback!

>>horizon
>>TitaniumDragon

Pete's change of heart is abrupt and under-cooked, and I have no real excuse for it. You're especially right about Brian's dig at Karen's legacy provoking a defensive reaction - that sort of thing doesn't lead to quiet introspection, it leads to flared tempers. I think following that through to its original conclusion of a mild brawl to blow off steam (and perhaps to allow Pete's walls to come down more honestly) would be an ideal change.

I think we've all had a Brian or three in our lives at some point or another. ^_^ Thank you both for your feedback!


Regarding the larger discussion that was started here, I don't know if I'd go so far as to say some of the reviews were callous or unduly harsh. I will say that I noticed an interesting trend - on more than one occasion, I saw multiple reviewers say something along the lines of "this is something I've seen before". Well, yeah. There's a lot of common tropes in storytelling, and as well-read as I suspect most of us are, we'll have seen a great many of them, time and time again. I realize that I'm guilty of saying it myself in previous rounds, but I always try to follow the statement up with "but this is an interesting take on it," or "this is particularly well-executed because of x, y, and z." To me, the phrase "I've seen this before," by itself, doesn't really help all that much - all it does is somewhat damage your credibility by saying "I'm jaded, take all I say with a grain of salt", and it can come off as an underhanded way of saying "your idea is boring and/or unoriginal".


Thanks once again to all of my reviewers for taking the time and effort to help me become a better writer - you guys are the best. Much love, everyone!

You know, I really need to write these things ahead of time.

The Prison Of Our Minds is mine, and flows from the time I picked up a hitchhiker on I-70 just outside of Topeka in a driving rainstorm. No, nothing about the hitchhiker I picked up and the one in the story have anything to do with each other except the pickup and dropoff points, but I have this annoying tendency to pick apart events and generate absurd hypotheticals about them. I’m a quiet house-mouse, and the concept of traveling across the country with nothing more than my thumb in the air would scare me to bits. So I thought about it over the last few years, wondered just who he was and what he was doing, and stored the resulting musings in the big mental closet marked ‘Experiences.’

The original of this story ran 950 words, so I had to trim and prune and sand away rough corners to get it down to 747, or three words under the limit. Generally, I think that was a good thing, because it made me examine every word and throw out anything that did not fit the narrative I wanted to cover, and in particular, *how* I wanted to cover it.

I had a few criticisms I wanted to address that mostly fall along those stylistic lines.

Vagueness: The reason why he no longer had a family was kept vague intentionally, much like adjusting the focus on a movie shot so the main character is in focus and the rest of the scene somewhat fuzzy. It doesn’t matter if they left him, he left them, they drifted apart, she was fooling around, etc… He doesn’t have them any more. He’s not trying to get them back. They only remind him of his mistake, which is one reason he is running away from them too.

Time issues with the family breakup: Note that he stood trial: Twelve men and women denied my fault and set me free. It takes about a year to be dragged through the insufferable hell of a jury trial, being accused of horrible things by the prosecutor, and winding up considerably impoverished even if you win, which he did. Families have broken up for far less, and this one broke up before he even left: all things I have left behind to another person who stepped into my shoes without even waiting for them to cool. Keeping the exact time and circumstances of the breakup vague was also intentional, as the focus should (again) be on the hitch hiker.

Low environment detail, no/little dialogue: Again, keeping the focus on the hitch hiker and his emotions. It doesn’t matter what color the car was, who the driver was, what exactly they said, etc… The only thing that should jump out and stay with the reader is his attempt to flee his past and the cold rain, which is the thread through the whole story.

Turtles as a metaphor: The turtle carries its home as it travels wherever it may. They cannot ‘slip their shell’ as in a cartoon, because part of their spine is actually in the shell. Therefore, turtle. Or tortoise. Besides, the Box Turtle is the Kansas State Reptile.

Protagonist was not very sympathetic: Again, intentional. He is running away from something he sees as his own fault. He’s guilty, at least inside his mind. Trying to portray him as an innocent running away from something he didn’t do would go straight up against that. Note the cues about drinking, driving, his accident, the wailing child in the car he had hit. I did *not* consider having his own family die in the accident (Sorry Letter_J) because A) That’s more cruel than I like to write and B) Seriously? No.

Length: Yes, it could have been longer, and I’ll post the original later in Written Off, my complilation. To be honest, longer was not really that much better and possibly a little worse, but I’ll post it anyway for the curious.

Motive: Really, people. He’s running away from his guilt over the accident he had. He can’t really get away from a mental trauma like that by physical distance, so he’s screwed. He won’t admit to it, because he would have to *face* his fears. It’s as simple as that. Sometimes the monster we fear the most is the one in the mirror.

>>horizon

A special shout-out as well to Monokeras,…

Thanks Horizon you’re adorable! :heart:

A little late here, but congrats LiseEclaire, Flutterpriest and horizon! ...Dorks.

>>MonarchDodora >>billymorph >>PinoyPony >>The_Letter_J >>horizon >>TheCyanRecluse >>Trick_Question >>Orbiting_kettle >>Leo >>TitaniumDragon
Thanks for all the thoughtful reviews guys! Don't have much time here so I'll try to be quick.

I also want to preface this by saying I don't wish to offend anyone. Retrospectives are about revealing the birthplace of a story, so that's only what I wish to do. Also, you're free to read whatever interpretation you want. Here is what I intended.

For me, "A Brown Coffer" is, well, a tragedy. Admittedly, there is no "wound". It was born out of thinking about time, which always makes me think of infinity, which leads me to God, and how well I know or don't know him, and how others know and conceive of him. Namely, I believe many people have an... inaccurate imagining of (the Christian) God, both "believers" and "non-believers". The idea sprung from an old (for me) metaphor: putting God in a box.

The story is specified to Christians, but invites anyone to consider how they think about God. I wanted to comment on what I think is the tragedy of many Christian lives: their understanding of God. Which is, in my totally not offensive opinion, often restrictive, highly depersonalizing, unemotional, and generally not much better than a cardboard box. Their relationship to him isn't that much different either (I say that as the worst of friends). I include in this a wider range of people than you might think.

As many of you correctly pointed out, the box does not do much to prove it is God, and narratively speaking this is a problem. But...it's also the point. For me, the core conflict is between the narrator's sense (and desire) that God ought to be more, and his lack of courage and ignorance of how to get that. He tries, but fails because he never approaches him as anything other than a box. The result is increasing hopelessness and depression. He wants to have a relationship with God, but has no idea how. He thinks he does, though.

This is, generally, what I wanted to convey. The execution has lots and lots of problems, however. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

I wish I had more time to respond to specific comments, but suffice it to say, I appreciated and enjoyed every word :D

>>axis_of_rotation
So I was completely off in my understanding. I honestly don't know what you could have done to make me, specifically, understand it better short of spelling it out, which would have been fatal for the story (in the post-mortem it is fine IMHO).

Oh, well, I like the story a lot anyway.

>>Orbiting_kettle
Actually kettle, I loved your review. You near put me to shame with it :D I totally wanted to say "Er, yeah! That's exactly what I meant, yup! See how smart I am?" But alas.