Submission Deadline: Friday, April 19th by 11:59 PM Pacific.
Voting begins Saturday, April 20th, and goes until Monday, April 22th at 11:59 PM Pacific.
Optional Secondary Objective: opposite sex protagonist
If you're male, make your protagonist female, and vice versa.
Submission Guidelines:
- One entry per poster.
- All submissions must be written during the time of the challenge.
- Using the topic as the title of your piece is discouraged.
- Keep to the word count!
Voting Guidelines:
- Three votes per voter. Please denote in your voting your 1st (3 pts), 2nd (2 pts), and 3rd (1 pt) place votes.
- Please read all submissions before voting.
- You must vote in order to be eligible to win the challenge.
- When voting ends, the winner gets a collective pat on the back, and starts the new challenge.
Thanks for making my brain work extra hard! Got to try to narrow the theme down first so I can conceive a plot idea. The secondary objective is great, I haven't written many female leading characters in the past.
Well, I rather have too much ideas than not enough, so the theme is fine by me. Secondary object is not a problem as well, since most of my protagonists already have been male so far... I actually think that writing a female protagonist might (for some strange reason) be harder for me.
I decided not to do any procrastinating this time. I think that an idea I had some time ago might actually work for this theme, so I will just go with that and have my story finished before the coming weekend is over! If not... well I guess I will be very disappointed with myself.
Who lives to love, lives to learn lessons of longing and bond.
Those who are emissaries of hope. Have whole hearts all on their own, lonely though.Two souls, are born on earth at different times. A biblical Shepard and a snake, converting each other into adam and eve. Odd and even. The sound of their voices will trigger emotions. The sights of an even love. A dance made of steps with long and short moves patterned in symmetry.The greek throw an apple, their gods made man incomplete. So is the myth. So is how it feels. If all I find is my love unavailable. Than why have I this code. Love is something even, to share and behold. A perfect match, a pair, a truth, a tie, a balance,a level between two. I have always been noble as a lion. I have fought and growled my beliefs, but my heart is in a cave. One day, one day it might be free.Someday it might be tamed.
I actually wrote something for the last challenge, but work got crazy and I didn't have time to revise it before the deadline. It was also pretty dark. It involved cannibalism. And not the fun kind.
spot reserved. don't really have time for it, but I'll see how much I can cobble together here and there. Here's a quick start/teafer:
Ruf'f Affault or the Furrender of the Felf
When Ruf (pronounced Roos) agreed to a matter, fhe faw it all the way to the end. Af fhe extended her armf for balance and inched to the edge of the talleft building in the entire nexuf, the violently upward drafting guftf of wind tore painfully at the nail driven through her left hand, and tugged at the heavy glaff tube encafing a man'f fpleen in the other. The fearing pain fent electrical fignalf fhooting to her mind and, there, chemical deliberationf amongft a network of neuronf organized thoughtf deeply guarded and reminded her that even though fhe had gathered woundf, forrow, and fhame, Ruf had yet to contract or conceive even a follicle of regret.
spot reserved. don't really have time for it, but I'll see how much I can cobble together here and there. Here's a quick start/teafer:
Ruf'f Affault or the Furrender of the Felf
When Ruf (pronounced Roos) agreed to a matter, fhe faw it all the way to the end. Af fhe extended her armf for balance and inched to the edge of the talleft building in the entire nexuf, the violently upward drafting guftf of wind tore painfully at the nail driven through her left hand, and tugged at the heavy glaff tube encafing a man'f fpleen in the other. The fearing pain fent electrical fignalf fhooting to her mind and, there, chemical deliberationf amongft a network of neuronf organized thoughtf deeply guarded and reminded her that even though fhe had gathered woundf, forrow, and fhame, Ruf had yet to contract or conceive even a follicle of regret.
Ah OK. Now That I finished the storymode I'm ready to check out multiplayer. I have yet to add most of the people on the list, once I've done it I'll send you a pm
Apparently I used the long s (aka, f) a little incorrectly. The 's' at the end of plurals or possessives should still look like a modern day 's'. And if the first sentence of the word starts with an 'S' it should also resemble the modern, capital 'S'.
e.g. Salutations and thanks for the furfeit years of fervice.
Well I can relax a little bit now that my Toastmasters contest is over. (It was a Tall Tales competition--I came in second to a dude who wrote this spectacular poem in the vein of The Cremation of Sam McGee. I ain't even mad, it was really good. And it turns out he's a published poet.)
Back to some proper fiction writing! How's everyone's work coming along? Any catchy ideaf?
I wrote fomething utilizing characterf I had previoufly envifioned for a kind of abfudift epifodic fci-fi... thing... but it didn't turn out efpecially funny.
My favorite of the characters if even in it, but there's nothing funny about him, becaufe I didn't really have time to get into anything. Once again, I feel like I've written the start of something much much longer : /
And again it is friday night before the deadline and I'm still writing my story. Well at least this time I more or less have an idea what I'm writting and don't just make stuff up as I type along.
I ended up not being able to pare my story down from 2900 words with a rewrite, so I had to pare one scene down to its bare essentials. I think the story is worse for it, but it still works.
LibreOffice tells me I hit 2345 words exactly, and I did the optional secondary objective (if you don't count... well, you'll see).
God, I've overwritten the PDF file of this half a dozen times because I won't stop tweaking it. I'm just going to call it good and walk away now. Let the chips fall where they may.
Wow, how in the world did you manage to get 2345 wordf?
Well here's my ftory: "Zero Understanding" (1854 words). I was juft excited that my word count had at leaft fome fort of order to it fince 1 + 8 = 5 + 4.
"Words" is plural, so that stays. I done goofed on the "is" though.
Critique time!
SirIgbyCeaser -- Untitled: Or was that first line just a lengthy title? I wasn’t able to tell : ( I know in the past I’ve despaired my ability to critique poetry (and if this wasn’t intended to be freeverse, maybe you ought to consider it? Heh : )), but I think I’ve been exposed to enough of it over the past several challenges to at least come to the conclusion that presentation is a big component in its appeal to me. Spacing between lines would help the flow and readability, even though the content might remain the same. Really, my hope is that one day I see one of the fans of unconventional formatting and rule breaking that post here just go nuts on the presentation sometime.
Iceman -- Ruf'f Affault or the Furrender of the Felf: Well you spawned the s=f running gag for the thread, so that’s something : )
Chainsawkitten -- On Beauty: Every bit as well-written as your previous entry, which as you might recall was my top pick last round. This piece is an even darker work, downright categorically transgressive. That being said, while the arrangement is different, it has quite a few notes in common with the last entry. You’ve clearly got talent, go beyond creepy people lusting after children ; )
John Dunbar -- To Make an End: Well, the ending to that first paragraph is definitely an attention grabber, I’ll grant you that. It was an inversion of social mores, though I think you may have gone a biiiiit too far with the rape squads and how they’re heroes to be idolized. I think just the notion of having licensed rapists operating on the level of, say, licensed gun owners would have been a better tack to take. If anything I think taking it to the degree that you did kind of diminished the sinisterness of the whole concept by taking it past “legitimate rape” satire to almost silliness. I also would have gone with actual transcript formatting for the transcript to smooth over the jumps between speakers without narration. You were cagey enough to call out each speaker in turn in the dialog, at least : ) Actually that kind of raises the question, in the event that one of us *does* do a script, do things like character names at the header of dialog count against the word count?
multivac -- The National Color: I think the regulations on the portrait could have been more stringent, specifically it probably could have used precise measurements or aspect ratio. The fact that it’s merely a rectangle that’s taller than it is wide makes the subsequent exchange about the canvas being the “wrong sort of rectangle” kind of strange. It’s a blank canvas, just rotate it 90 degrees to make it the right sort : ) A relatively solid piece of work, but the subject matter has been well traversed over the years. Makes it hard to come up with a new angle of approach to set something apart from all of 1984’s multitude of offspring.
Mike M -- Maintenance Work: Once again, the word count is my enemy : ( I never even had opportunity to name the beehive do lady... \Status Quo is something I’ve had rattling around in my head for a couple years now, but this was my first actual attempt at doing something with it. I may do more with them in the future.
Tangent -- Zero Understanding: The dog’s level of insight and understanding seems to vary wildly. He knows about the significance of being sent to the principal’s office so frequently, knows what autism is, but doesn’t know why Laura won’t come back. That said, his total blase attitude toward everything is hilarious. He just doesn’t give a shit about any of the abuse he gets and loves everyone regardless which makes him strangely endearing. Or, you know, a dog.
Nezumi -- Before the Battle: I liked the perspective of the perpetual failures of a fantasy big bad from the perspective of the cannon fodder asking the equivalent of “Why didn’t the eagles just fly Frodo to Mount Doom?” I would have liked to have seen a bit more analysis of the Master’s tactics and possible alternatives. We got a solid build up to the discussion, but the discussion itself was a bit brief and resolved quite quickly. Bunch of little technical errors sprinkled throughout, but I can overlook that.
Ashes1396 -- order unto chaos: I’m a little surprised that you were so conventional in your presentation this time out : ) It was sparse and spartan in its description of things, but at the same time I had a vivid mental image in my head of the Headmistress’ bicycle journey through the village to try and save the girls from their father. Nice work.
Cyan -- On a Fine Spring Morning They Came: Either this is a fictionalized allegory of Nazi Germany, or your knowledge of German villages is scary specific and you know of villages and rivers that Google does not. Dühren is a real village which threw me, so now I don’t know what to think : / I don’t think we delved enough into the world to explore how it’s different from our own to have warranted it, actual German villages probably would have sufficed. It’s a small deal to get hung up on and spend a whole paragraph writing about though. Liked that the ending was so ambiguous though.
Picks:
1.) Ashes1396
2.) Cyan
3.) Tangent
HM: Iceman, just for the “s” thing.
SirIgbyCeaser -- Untitled: Not sure what to make with this. Is it a poem? Or just philosophical rambling? Also I don't see what this has to to with order.
Iceman -- Ruf'f Affault or the Furrender of the Felf: This may have become something interesting... if you had finished it and maybe dismissed the s to f thing that is
Chainsawkitten -- On Beauty: Wow... and I thought your last piece was disturbing. Man was I wrong. Again very well written. The problem I had was that I didn't agree with the initial definition on beauty at all so I could never really get into the mindset of the main character... which, looking back, might not be a bad thing at all
John Dunbar -- To Make an End: I think I get where you wanted to go with this, but I think that the idea is just to extreme to work well.
multivac -- The National Color: I think for that story to work better it would have needed a bit more background to the workings of that society but I know that the word limit can be a bitch sometimes and taking that into consideration I actually quite enjoyed your story.
Mike M -- Maintenance Work: The overall concept and idea was really cool. At some places your word choice threw me off a bit though. Egress instead of exit for example. I thought it didn't really go with the overall tone of the story.
Tangent -- Zero Understanding: Nice twist with the title. All in all I really enjoyed the story. My favorite part was how he described what happend to the boy by identifying all the different smells.
Ashes1396 -- order unto chaos: Loved it. You do interpersonal relations really well.
Cyan -- On a Fine Spring Morning They Came: While I enjoyed the overall story I thought that at least in the first half you did go a bit overbord with all the names. I think Judith calling here friend by her first name in almost every sentence comes off a bit unatural.
It's interesting that a lot of the stories from you guys featured women as victims in someway or another. If I were interested in gender studies or a feminist I would have a field day with this. Luckily I'm neither.
SirIgbyCeasar: I was reminded of Tart Toter's speech from Adventure Time. I don't know what it means, but far out.
Iceman: I have conflicting emotions: on the one hand, it's a nice start for a story. On the other, I'm glad I don't have to read 2,000+ words of thif.
Chainsawkitten: Don't let these peeps tell you to change your subject matters, you got your twisted thing going, and a certain restriction of theme never hurt anyone. In comparison to your last story, the ideas presented were more fascinating, while the main character was less interesting. Probably because the object of lust this time felt like the main dish, so to speak.
multivac: I know nothing of painting outside Bob Ross videos, but is it really possible to complete a portrait in an hour? I've always been under the impression that painters can take months or even over a year to finish one. Maybe it just wasn't a very good one. Other than that, I rather enjoyed the story, and since the main character is confined in a cell through it all it's not that bad we don't get a clearer picture of the world. I assume the missing scene would have dealt with that?
Mike M: Having read a lot of Pratchett I've always been fond of the idea of things existing (or not existing) if people believe in them, and parts of this story captured some of that, though the monkey felt random for the sake of being random. Generally speaking it was well written, but I found some of the stylistic choices questionable. At times I felt there were too many adjectives, and phrases like "prior to their departure" just make me wonder what's wrong with "before leaving".
Tangent: Made me miss my poor dead dog. That bastard didn't understand a thing, and he was great. There are some consistency issues with what Zero does and does not know, but despite that I found the story very effective.
Nezumi: I don't know were you going for it, but at times I got the vibe of religious folks (and possibly a latent atheist) arguing the nature and possible non-existence of God, but the effect came and went, so it wasn't very consistent if it was intentional. Stories from "the other side" have of course been done many times, but the characters and the exchange were enjoyable enough to stand out.
Ashes1396: A nice story, but it also felt a bit bare bones to me. If you ever feel like fleshing out one your stories from these challenges, this would be a good candidate.
Cyan: You captured the feeling of (faux) Nazis fucking shit up rather nicely, though it was perhaps a bit too predictable that a fair judge would not be handling this case. My main gripe is not believing that Curt, having been in the army, would not be aware exactly how deserters are handled.
I was away last week so...