Gee, I wonder what the circumstances around this one were. ;)

In any case, while the desperation and lampshading were amusing, there’s one question you never addressed: Why is Dash in the library? Is there implicit Twidash here? Does her house not have a writing desk in its current configuration? Did she just want to be as close to Spike as possible?

Oh, right, it’s probably that last one. Still, took me a while to figure that out, and the question bugged me throughout the piece. In all, a fun bit of autobiographical metafiction, and it’s certainly a valid use of the prompt… but there’s very little to it, even for a minific.

GEEZ SPIKE WAY TO RUIN ANONYMITY BY PEEKING AT HER FIC. DO YOU READ EVERYPONY'S MAIL BEFORE SENDING IT??

I was hoping there'd at least be a wacky surprise twist.

The prompt drop at the end ruined the story! You had already lampshaded that part.

Writing meta about the contest you're in is always dangerous and cliche terrain. You should have spent more time on making it look like you didn't spend enough time on your story.

The writing is solid from a technical perspective, but I fear the main accomplishment here was the tense joke. A few more moments of that caliber might have made this more of a contender. I get the feeling that the author is capable of adding those.

The “riddling with tense errors” bit actually made me laugh, but the rest was… meh. Meta stories about writing/writers almost never work for me at all, and this story just was bleh. There wasn’t really much here except “lol this entry is something I cobbled together super fast, hope no one noticed *wink wink*” and unfortunately this sort of thing almost always falls flat when it is the primary joke of a piece.

I don't think the fourth wall breaks served you well here, Writer - not the blatant ones, at least. They felt unnecessary, since Rainbow Dash is already a perfectly serviceable stand-in for the author.

Still, I'm on board for what you're going for here. If you really did start this story with fifteen minutes left on the clock, color me impressed - I doubt I'd be able to cobble something half this coherent together in that amount of time.

Final Thought: I Wish I Still Had A Fireplace

“Rainbow Dash … ink stains giving her the appearance of a deep, navy moustache.” → I understand that ink stains make RD look like a moustache. Is that what you mean?

“Spike flumped into an armchair beside her, all tiredness suddenly vanished from his expression because dammit I've only got five minutes to go, I can't keep track of all this character business!” → So you go meta at two different levels?

Well, okay, that was somewhat fun, but it was mostly clichéd. Rainbow Dash as a poor writer, Spike as a sloth…

A fireplace in a library. Geez, I hope you’ve a fire station very near! :P

As >>Calipony notes, this is written at two different meta-levels, and my main impression here is that the story's not certain whether they're the same thing or not.

Spike flumped into an armchair beside her, all tiredness suddenly vanished from his expression because dammit I've only got five minutes to go, I can't keep track of all this character business!

There are a few points where you go all-in on breaking the fourth wall, making your core joke "like Dash's piece, this is a rushed and pointless entry." But it kinda falls flat because, well, it isn't:

"I hope nobody notices that it's heavily rushed, riddling with tense errors, and completely unconnected to the prompt."

This entry (to its credit) doesn't have a single tense error, and the entire point of it is the prompt drop.

I'll give you credit for heavily rushed, with a caveat: I don't believe it was written right at the deadline. If I was tearing out a stream-of-consciousness last-minute entry, you'd better believe I'd have one eye fixed on the clock, but here, In the conversation about Daring Do, you lose five minutes in the span of a single paragraph, and five minutes for pretty much the entire second half of the piece. This might just be OCD/overanalysis speaking, but that timing glitch sort of ruins the joke for me.

So there's this weird dichotomy here that leaves me not sure what to ultimately make of this. It's laughing at bad last-minute Writeoff entries, and it purports to be a bad last-minute Writeoff entry, but it's not quite laughing at itself? If this was written to sound rushed, it would have been great to see things like that addressed -- to feel like this was completely self-aware and inviting us to laugh along with its self-mockery. If this actually was written in fifteen minutes, I suppose that slipshod contruction was inevitable -- kudos on actually finishing something, but "complete" isn't the same as "good" and I don't know how much credit I can give you in the voting for merely crossing the finish line.

Anyway, I doubt this feedback will actually help the story -- it doesn't really have legs outside of this specific context, so there might not be much point to editing. I'm just dissecting it in hopes that it gives Writeoff authors in general something to chew on w.r.t. meta/comedy construction. I feel like I could have liked this as a trollfic if the meta had cohered better, but I'm sorta just left with "eh".

Tier: Needs Work

I didn't mind this, but >>horizon raises a bunch of points making me curious whether this was written in the final 15, or merely made to seem like it. If it was done in the last stretch, good on you, if there was more time for this, it could have been polished more.

Regrets Retrospective:
Well, I wrote this one. And as you can probably tell from the "by Anonymous" thing, I wasn't particularly pleased with it. On the plus side, I did manage to cobble together a story with twelve minutes left on the clock (I did say less than fifteen minutes, didn't I?) which is arguably an achievement. That some people weren't sure if it was written that quickly is pretty much the only praise I'm willing to give this thing. Here, have some responses:

>>horizon
On weird timing aspects: if a time was mentioned in the story, it was because I'd just looked at the clock, which gives a nice countdown of how long I took to write different parts. But bear in mind the countdown is to the official deadline, not the grace period—this story was submitted four minutes post deadline, with exactly 60 seconds left on the clock. This explains why the last section seems to be written a lot faster than it was.

I like that attitude of "dissecting it in hopes that if gives Writeoff authors something in general to chew on", primarily because that's pretty much my approach to reviewing in general. So I'm glad it served some purpose for that.

>>FanOfMostEverything
Actually, I was originally going to have Twilight interrupt Rainbow, and try for elements of TwiDash, but decided that was dumb halfway through the second paragraph. Spike was a much more sensible choice. I probably could have added in something that directly questioned why Rainbow was in the library, but... time constraints? (This is starting to feel a lot more like an excuse than it should be.)

>>Icenrose
The fourth wall breaks served as an easy way to deal with writer's block—I couldn't afford to spend even a minute trying to figure out what was happening, so I just wrote words down and kept going. It's actually a really interesting exercise, as it turns out, 'cos it makes you realise just how much time you normally end up spending trying to figure out why the next sentence won't quite come out right.

>>Trick_Question
If only I had more time to spend making my story look more rushed ;D I'm honestly surprised that it's possible to make something look more like it was written in ~15 minutes than a story that was written in ~15 minutes. As for the prompt drop... eh, fifteen minutes is not enough time to come up with a better way to make it truly clear that the idea was even remotely relevant. I could probably have used a synonymous phrase, but... I decided it could be fun to lampshade this piece for doing things it doesn't actually do. I guess that didn't quite work out, but it was fun enough to toy around with.

>>CoffeeMinion
>>TitaniumDragon
I'll be honest, the tense joke remains the only bit of this I'm remotely proud of. I spent a good portion of my minute's allotted editing time trying to make that joke as effective as possible, so I'm glad it paid off (even at the expense of the rest of the piece).

>>Calipony
Yep! I figured since non-unicorn ponies write with their mouths, ink stains could be a good source of humour. This is probably a thing I'm going to re-use further down the line, because it was a reasonably cute idea.

I don't know why, but I always like the idea of a fireplace somewhere in that old library. Don't quite know where you'd put it, but then again fanfiction tends to make that place a lot bigger than it usually is.

>>Haze
Wacky surprise twists are hard! D:

But yeah, I wasn't really feeling Spike reading the entry as I wrote it—something about it just felt off, but it was the quickest way I could find to bring the conclusion in.

>>Morning Sun
Thanks, I guess? It was, in fact, written in the final fifteen minutes (if we're going by the official countdown, as the story itself does.) This is probably clear at this point, but I felt I could do with saying it again anyway.

Thanks, everyone! Sorry I couldn't contribute something more meaningful this round, but hey—fun was had, things were learned, and I actually entered a round that wasn't General Minific... so I guess that's something.

>>QuillScratch
Oh yes, you're right, I completely forgot this detail. You're right Quill, it's cute and I encourage you to use it again!

Fireplaces in libraries sound perilous. A single ember sputtered out of the fireplace and the whole place risks being set ablaze. Unless, of course, Twilight has protected them with a spell.

>>Calipony
Post Tirek, I'm pretty sure that's something she'd do.

Alternatively, maybe a sort of sitting room that's in the library building but contains no bookshelves?

>>wYvern
A sitting room is generally what I imagine, though sometimes with bookshelves that are a little further away (perhaps on a far wall?)

>>QuillScratch
Works for me... I'd say go for heavy parchment bound in leather if it weren't for the issue that animal skin is required for these, and I don't really see that happening in Equestria.