I feel bad for me too.That's a lot of entries.
I feel bad for Mike
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NeoGAF Creative Writing Challenge #149 - "Faux Pas"
- Thread starter Tangent
- Start date
- Status
I feel like I should pay you.
You must read all the stories and vote on a top three to be eligible to win. Critiques and/or comments are optional. If you have time and the inclination, they are appreciated. If you only have time for a few or for very short comments, that's fine too.
I'll note that giving critiques and comments can be extremely helpful for your own writing. I don't always comment these days due to lack of time, but I made a point of always doing it when I started out and it helped me a lot.
If you're not comfortable giving critiques or are not sure what to say, consider these questions for each story:
-what did you not believe?
-what did you not care about?
-what did you not understand?
-what did you think was cool?
It's fine and maybe even preferable to be descriptive--"this part popped me out of the story"--rather than prescriptive--"here is how you should fix this."
I would gladly accept money.
I actually have given half-serious thought toward a career change to being an editor or something, but I lack any formal experience and education, so it's not a viable avenue : /
Wreck-It Ralph
Member
This one asks for a password.
neogaf
Well I'm sure you'd get a lot of references from the folks here. Not that they would count for anything, but still. I always appreciate your insights.
Faux - Man alive, I really liked this one, I got a really good sense of Jessicas character, the other guy sort of fell into the background a bit, but I think the interaction between Jessica, Rob and Quinn was enough to support it. The ending was nice and unexpected.
Pongo - Entertaining, but it would probably be the sort of thing that works better on camera or something rather than a story; as soon as you read the first line of the whats wrong segment, you can imagine the rest, entertaining as it is.
Casual Hamburgers - I have no idea whats going on and I like it.
Dip - Narration structure bothered me for some reason, a little to meta for me I guess, but interesting enough, and I think everyone knows a Pip.
The Differential - hearing the voices of Kevin Spacey and Hugh Laurie in my head reading the lines was great, and its a bit crazy, but the meeting between the two characters is great, their personalities really bounce off of each other in some sense.
Primal Knowledge - I loved this. I adore worlds where something just feels off, and this just felt off all over. Familiar yet strange. The relationship between the guy and his wife has just enough hinting to make me hungry for more.
Faux Pas - I actually grinned at the end, the convergence here is nice. I guess my only criticism is that tonally, I thought the story would probably have been better served with a different, but similar ending if you see what I mean?
MAC and Me in the Mysterious Planet - I dont know if its just because its late or Im dumb, but the tenses used here actually got kind of confusing for me, you sort of flit between present and past tense and it sort of mucks the flow a little. I like the contrast of MACs character though throughout the whole thing.
The Philosophers Widow - Honestly going for the convergence angle probably hurt it a little here if anything, it wouldve been a kind of generic ending I suppose otherwise, but I really would have just preferred if protag and Sophie were in love and she was suffering, though I guess youd have to execute it a little differently.
Workplace Romance - Was an okay sort of spy romance sort of thing, had no major problems with it really. I did like the whole bullshitting about the flowers schtick.
Tea with Rory - Great. Seriously really good, I totally empathise with the protagonist, and you really captured the whole sort of flitting in and out aspect of it. Heavy to light, really well done, repeatedly.
Silbyl Service - The ending is abrupt, but it sort of works really in its favour. Its almost the sort of story I can imagine telling at a pub.
En Los Amigos - An accurate portrayal of a guy beginning to get how to carry himself socially and entertaining too! Perhaps the Cindy bit was a little generic, but I cant fault it too much otherwise.
Blame - Interesting take on the whole refusing to take responsibility aspect of well, life really. You get a good sense of the character, but then, rightly so haha.
Tipping Point - Honestly, I suck at writing chases, so it was nice to see the chase done well, and the sort of fragmented structure works well to exaggerate the frenetic nature of the chase. Good job!
Ranking wise, top 3:
1) Tea with Rory
2) Faux
3) Primal Knowledge
Pongo - Entertaining, but it would probably be the sort of thing that works better on camera or something rather than a story; as soon as you read the first line of the whats wrong segment, you can imagine the rest, entertaining as it is.
Casual Hamburgers - I have no idea whats going on and I like it.
Dip - Narration structure bothered me for some reason, a little to meta for me I guess, but interesting enough, and I think everyone knows a Pip.
The Differential - hearing the voices of Kevin Spacey and Hugh Laurie in my head reading the lines was great, and its a bit crazy, but the meeting between the two characters is great, their personalities really bounce off of each other in some sense.
Primal Knowledge - I loved this. I adore worlds where something just feels off, and this just felt off all over. Familiar yet strange. The relationship between the guy and his wife has just enough hinting to make me hungry for more.
Faux Pas - I actually grinned at the end, the convergence here is nice. I guess my only criticism is that tonally, I thought the story would probably have been better served with a different, but similar ending if you see what I mean?
MAC and Me in the Mysterious Planet - I dont know if its just because its late or Im dumb, but the tenses used here actually got kind of confusing for me, you sort of flit between present and past tense and it sort of mucks the flow a little. I like the contrast of MACs character though throughout the whole thing.
The Philosophers Widow - Honestly going for the convergence angle probably hurt it a little here if anything, it wouldve been a kind of generic ending I suppose otherwise, but I really would have just preferred if protag and Sophie were in love and she was suffering, though I guess youd have to execute it a little differently.
Workplace Romance - Was an okay sort of spy romance sort of thing, had no major problems with it really. I did like the whole bullshitting about the flowers schtick.
Tea with Rory - Great. Seriously really good, I totally empathise with the protagonist, and you really captured the whole sort of flitting in and out aspect of it. Heavy to light, really well done, repeatedly.
Silbyl Service - The ending is abrupt, but it sort of works really in its favour. Its almost the sort of story I can imagine telling at a pub.
En Los Amigos - An accurate portrayal of a guy beginning to get how to carry himself socially and entertaining too! Perhaps the Cindy bit was a little generic, but I cant fault it too much otherwise.
Blame - Interesting take on the whole refusing to take responsibility aspect of well, life really. You get a good sense of the character, but then, rightly so haha.
Tipping Point - Honestly, I suck at writing chases, so it was nice to see the chase done well, and the sort of fragmented structure works well to exaggerate the frenetic nature of the chase. Good job!
Ranking wise, top 3:
1) Tea with Rory
2) Faux
3) Primal Knowledge
Wreck-It Ralph
Member
I'm honestly not comfortable enough in my own writing to criticize others, and I can't really think of much positive criticism besides "This is pretty good I guess," but here are my top three:
1) Primal Knowledge
2) Tea With Rory
3) MAC and Me in the Mysterious Planet
1) Primal Knowledge
2) Tea With Rory
3) MAC and Me in the Mysterious Planet
FlowersisBritish
fleurs n'est pas britannique
I don't mind meaty commentary, I don't thinky anyone would mind meaty things in general.
Hawt.
My copious feedback is fueled by my own insatiable desire for commentary. As anyone who has ever suffered my notes knows, even the amount I share is highly abridged.
FlowersisBritish
fleurs n'est pas britannique
Scotch, depression, and a revolver loaded with a single bullet are definitely a writer's best friends.
Haha, whoops, missed one out.
Nah, I liked it, quite a bit, definitely the bird character was interesting because you're taking almost a character that in the reader's head should look big and menacing like some hooded man, and you're cramming it into a tiny bird. The spirit of the stairs sub-plot interested me too, though I never thought I'd write that sentence in my life haha, but I definitely wanted to go back and see what the fuck initially happened.
----
I think, it's the first time I've done anything like this, and though I kept on reading, I stopped writing for years. More and more I hit this problem where my imagination is crippled by my writing, which is unable to do any sort of small-scale plot interestingly in my opinion. I struggle lol, it's much easier to swing from concept to concept than the alternatives, but that's not how things are written, so to that end, the writing challenge is perfect; almost purely minutae.
Giving feedback only seems polite when I'm wanting feedback and regardless, some of these stories are pretty goddamn entertaining and reading through them perhaps I realise how to put certain tones of moods together that I didn't see before.
I like the something's sort of fucked up with his dad bit. I just didn't like the he's a robot twist lol. I have no idea what I'd do instead, maybe though it's a bit generic a people-swapping plot of some kind instead and dress it up a little with some bells and whistles to make it interesting.
Oh, yeah, gotcha. I totally agree. I had lots of words to work with at the end, but nothing was really coming to me. I just had to get something down since I've been such a slacker the past few weeks
Phew, lol, I'm glad you agree, critiquing for the first time I have no idea how to do it so I just tried to say some shit I liked and shit I didn't liked and prayed I didn't overshoot the mark.
Votes:
1- Zakalwe
2- Mike M
3- Ourobolus
Comments:
ElectricBlanketFire - It's a hard style you're going for, and I think you just barely missed the mark. Feels like it was one editing pass away from working.
MDSVeritas - You need to explain a twist like that, considering Rob is willfully deceiving his friends by passing the boy off as the neighbor's kid. I'd also change the setting as people in Balitmore don't talk like this. It feels more upperclass British to me. Aside from that, the story had a nice sense of pacing, and you do a good job of individualizing your characters. I never felt confused about who was speaking.
Wreck-It Ralph - I thought it was going really great, other than an overuse of the name Pongo, until General Justice showed up. I think if you had kept it in the real world and had a bank robber sensitive about his scars it would have made for a really good story.
ThLunarian - I haven't watched either of the shows referenced, so I think it leans on both a little too much for me. Are the powers also a Heroes reference? Haven't seen that either. It leans on 'what is his power?' but doesn't give me a reason to care.
Zakalwe - It's great. I thought the sci-fi stuff was unneeded, but the end justifies it. I wish the end wasn't so laden with explanation, and that some of it could have been filtered through the body of the story. Also considering how the story is framed you could have done something less traditional with the body of the story. These are minor nitpicks though.
Ourobolus - It's a clever use of the theme and the story is very good, though I think it could have been a little shorter, and hint at the truth of Pa a little better. There's some meandering in the writing that doesn't help the story any.
QuantumBro - Lacking in visual detail for all this new stuff you're starting off with. It's a little hard to place the story When I don't know what any of this looks like. I'm interested in the situation, but you spend a little too much time setting it up, and not enough time on the resolution, which should be the meat of the story.
P44 - As someone who smashed his side mirror, you're not getting that fixed before work. That's a little silly. It's a nice style in weaving together the lives of these different people, though I think the titles are a bit forced, and interrupt the flow of the story. I didn't like that there was no justification for the way Cassandra was even in her own mind. She's a little too much like a paper thin villain in this.
Sober - Internet search that its the wrong color is such an odd thing to say. Why not mention the florist instead? There's a lot of setup here, and the lack of tags sometimes makes it confusing who is speaking. The dialogue, and the rest of the story, is very well written, but it doesn't go anywhere for me.
FlowersisBritish - The format does your story a disservice. You have a really good story here, but its potency is leeched a little by being overwritten. This sort of ending needs an abruptness to it like a face slap. Here it's a little limpwristed.
Mike M - I enjoyed it as much as anyone can enjoy depressing stuff. It's largely expositional without feeling like it's telling me a bunch of stuff, though I wish the backstory had been interwoven sooner and a bit slower. You don't need to give whole chunks, but can break it up a bit more, and tease the reader a bit more.
Cyan - Don't like that you call it out as magic. I was hoping for more magical realism, which ironically doesn't really use the word magic. It's a very well written tale with clever dialogue and a strong mix of both chatter and movement, but I found the ending a little unsatisfying. I don't really feel the main character was changed by his experience.
Osorio - Odd little story about little big problems. I'm not sure what the guy could have done about double chins outside of photoshop, but he was an interesting character study nonetheless.
Tangent - It's a good story that leads to a pleasant conclusion, but if I had one little problem its that the main character is defined by the lifestyle he hates. I know basically nothing else about him, so the change at the end lacks impact a bit because its changing the only thing I define him by.
Nezumi - Cute story. Straight to the meat without any overlong exposition. It plays out well, and ends with a satisfying conclusion.
Charade - A punchy piece with strong atmosphere, though I wish you had lingered in the scenes a little longer before switching, or maybe combined some of these together. It's very movie-like, but I don't think it works as well in a written story.
1- Zakalwe
2- Mike M
3- Ourobolus
Comments:
ElectricBlanketFire - It's a hard style you're going for, and I think you just barely missed the mark. Feels like it was one editing pass away from working.
MDSVeritas - You need to explain a twist like that, considering Rob is willfully deceiving his friends by passing the boy off as the neighbor's kid. I'd also change the setting as people in Balitmore don't talk like this. It feels more upperclass British to me. Aside from that, the story had a nice sense of pacing, and you do a good job of individualizing your characters. I never felt confused about who was speaking.
Wreck-It Ralph - I thought it was going really great, other than an overuse of the name Pongo, until General Justice showed up. I think if you had kept it in the real world and had a bank robber sensitive about his scars it would have made for a really good story.
ThLunarian - I haven't watched either of the shows referenced, so I think it leans on both a little too much for me. Are the powers also a Heroes reference? Haven't seen that either. It leans on 'what is his power?' but doesn't give me a reason to care.
Zakalwe - It's great. I thought the sci-fi stuff was unneeded, but the end justifies it. I wish the end wasn't so laden with explanation, and that some of it could have been filtered through the body of the story. Also considering how the story is framed you could have done something less traditional with the body of the story. These are minor nitpicks though.
Ourobolus - It's a clever use of the theme and the story is very good, though I think it could have been a little shorter, and hint at the truth of Pa a little better. There's some meandering in the writing that doesn't help the story any.
QuantumBro - Lacking in visual detail for all this new stuff you're starting off with. It's a little hard to place the story When I don't know what any of this looks like. I'm interested in the situation, but you spend a little too much time setting it up, and not enough time on the resolution, which should be the meat of the story.
P44 - As someone who smashed his side mirror, you're not getting that fixed before work. That's a little silly. It's a nice style in weaving together the lives of these different people, though I think the titles are a bit forced, and interrupt the flow of the story. I didn't like that there was no justification for the way Cassandra was even in her own mind. She's a little too much like a paper thin villain in this.
Sober - Internet search that its the wrong color is such an odd thing to say. Why not mention the florist instead? There's a lot of setup here, and the lack of tags sometimes makes it confusing who is speaking. The dialogue, and the rest of the story, is very well written, but it doesn't go anywhere for me.
FlowersisBritish - The format does your story a disservice. You have a really good story here, but its potency is leeched a little by being overwritten. This sort of ending needs an abruptness to it like a face slap. Here it's a little limpwristed.
Mike M - I enjoyed it as much as anyone can enjoy depressing stuff. It's largely expositional without feeling like it's telling me a bunch of stuff, though I wish the backstory had been interwoven sooner and a bit slower. You don't need to give whole chunks, but can break it up a bit more, and tease the reader a bit more.
Cyan - Don't like that you call it out as magic. I was hoping for more magical realism, which ironically doesn't really use the word magic. It's a very well written tale with clever dialogue and a strong mix of both chatter and movement, but I found the ending a little unsatisfying. I don't really feel the main character was changed by his experience.
Osorio - Odd little story about little big problems. I'm not sure what the guy could have done about double chins outside of photoshop, but he was an interesting character study nonetheless.
Tangent - It's a good story that leads to a pleasant conclusion, but if I had one little problem its that the main character is defined by the lifestyle he hates. I know basically nothing else about him, so the change at the end lacks impact a bit because its changing the only thing I define him by.
Nezumi - Cute story. Straight to the meat without any overlong exposition. It plays out well, and ends with a satisfying conclusion.
Charade - A punchy piece with strong atmosphere, though I wish you had lingered in the scenes a little longer before switching, or maybe combined some of these together. It's very movie-like, but I don't think it works as well in a written story.
Jesus christ, I think if we ever have this many entrants again, I may just withhold critique unless it's by request. I apparently can't edit myself down to a single sentence or something : /
ElectricBlanketFire: When I was in college, I worked in a Jamba Juice in downtown Santa Barbara that was owned by a franchise organization that was started by a couple of the founding members of the original Jamba Juice company who had left the corporate office/been forced out over ideological differences over where the company was supposed to be going (i.e. community oriented versus maximizing profits, etc.). There was a poster in the front lobby that had "The Jamba Juice Story" on it that had the headshots of the members of the franchise corporation pasted onto cartoon bodies sitting on a banana. One night just before closing, a guy came into the store and placed his order. He saw this poster with the founding members of Jamba Juice and proceeded to regale us with the tale of how he too was one of the founders of Jamba Juice, but that no one remembered him because the CIA had erased the memory of his existence from everyone involved. They were after him because he had invented an internal combustion engine that ran on pine cones and emitted zero pollution that threatened the power of the Jews that ran the world.
This was like reliving that conversation.
MDSVeritas: I feel like the first page has some issues in its consistency that sort of colored my perception of the rest of the piece. Right off the back, we have it declared that Rob knows the cigarette is Terry's because Terry is the only one that smokes. Then in the very next sentence, Rob's certainty is downgraded to a suspicion. Then only a few sentences later, we find out that Terry is in fact not the only one who smokes, because Jessica smokes too. Then a bit further down in the same paragraph his position at the law firm is described as a dream job, but that these two people are the only ones from work that he can stand to speak to. We're just kind of all over the map here, and when we're told to think one thing, we are almost immediately introduced to a contrary piece of information. I did like the interaction between Jessica and Quinn. Though Rob was supposed to be the main character, this pieces was really about those two butting heads. Terry was kind of an extraneous addition, but at least served as a buffer to make it not seem like Rob and Jessica were supposed to be dating or anything, so it's not like he didn't have any reason for existing at all. The twist fell flat for me because I had immediately assumed Quinn to be Rob's son from the get go and felt that it was clear that he was lying about baby sitting. I'm at a lost for recommendations on what could possibly make it more impactful, however.
Wreck-It Ralph: This seems a bit indebted to that one episode of Justice League where Flash just talks to one of his villains and helps him work out his issues. Pongo is a much better choice of character name than Kong : ) I had originally made a note that I thought that the introduction of the cops with the "we know you're in there, come out with your hands up!" seemed kind of cartoonish, but seeing as how the point of the story seems to be a cartoonish morality lesson about respecting the feelings of others with Larry playing the baffled straight man in a world gone topsy-turvy, I guess it actually kind of works in this situation. Compared to your other posting in the writing mega thread, this one definitely had a bit more in the description environment, though once again it's still a bit spartan. I also note that this seems to be completely devoid of metaphor or similes, etc. It's very straight-forward and serviceable, but it doesn't do a lot to kindle the imagination. If you've been following the past several entries, you'll note that there's been an uptick in this sort of comic-book antic pieces, and I have mostly the same comment about them all; comics being a visual medium, it's difficult to appropriate their tropes and conventions into a non-visual form, and I think moreso than other kinds of writing hinges on robust descriptions of imagery.
On a completely unrelated note, my first novel was a superhero yarn. Lemme know if you want to be an alpha reader, and I'll shoot you a copy. Maybe one day I'll fix it so that it doesn't suck.
ThLunarian: I mean absolutely no offense when I say that I can't tell whether or not this is supposed to be parodying bad fanfiction. I don't have any particular prejudices against fanfiction in and of itself (I put it at about the same level as I do about any official novel series in an extended universe of an existing franchise, i.e. Star Wars novels), but crossover stuff starts to flirt with crossing the line with me unless it's a really good match. Aliens vs. Predator, Terminator vs. Robocop, etc. That I like. Star Trek vs. X-Men? Not so much. A straight up House/House of Cards (I see what you did there) would have played better for me without trying to tie it back into the universe you're building. If you were wanting this to be set in your other stories, you'd have been better off filing off the serial numbers. Alternately, you have a missed opportunity for setting this up as House MD of Wild Cards. Putting all that aside, I think you were most of the way there with the characterization of House, though I think he would have been a bit more acerbic and would have put up more of a fight with the various requests being made of him. The biggest thing though was that you were missing the parlor scene where House explains how he came to his conclusion that Underwood was reading his mind. That's crucial to any story involving a detective : D
Aaron: I feel like I may be giving you short shrift by reading this immediately after ThLunarian and writing out my feelings on fanfiction and the fact that the movie just came out recently, but I have a very difficult time trying to remember that this was not Planet of the Apes fanfiction. While the premise of trying to talk his way out of a ticket with an orangutan police officer has good potential for humor, there was far to much time spent on setup and exposition to explain the scenario and not much in the way of laughs in the end. Also, I had bunches of problems with said exposition, probably because you've unwittingly wandered into the turf of what I do for a living. Research animals used in any sort of drug trials would not be released into the wild (apes are not used in drug trials in the first place, I think the last vestiges of ape research is behavioral stuff). If captive apes ever were to be released into the wild, they would not be released into the wild in the US because this is not their habitat. The notion that Dave could somehow forget that Wyoming is run by apes breaks the story, especially after he reads the sign and thinks that he misread it. The correct response would have been, "Oh, that's right, Wyoming is run by apes." And the border crossing is unmanned? I was also bothered by the line about how they couldn't repress the apes because that would be seen as admission of humans descending from apes. How does that follow? I would need the logic of that train of thought explained to me, because I'm trying and trying to see how that conclusion can be drawn and I'm coming up empty. In the plus category, I hope we don't have any members from Wyoming in here, because calling it the only land that the US could afford to lose is a wicked dig, man.
PS: Orangutans are in fact apes (unless it's supposed to be that the orangutan is expressing a preference for how he would like to be referred and is not making a factual statement). And "science" isn't a proper noun.
Zakalwe: Just do the dialogue in the traditional format. Doing the weird thing with the dash and the italics doesn't add anything to work except opening the possibility for engendering confusion, i.e. at first I thought he was having flashbacks to Sophie speaking in the past juxtaposed with the current events until he started talking back to her and I realized that these events were concurrent. I kept looking for the payoff when the sci-fi angle was introduced, but I'm not certain it worked out in the end. The core premise of a woman killing the guy and his brother because of some warped philosophical understanding of the nature of love is a story unto itself, but we needed to see the character of the wife developed so that we could understand what thought processes brought her to these actions. Instead we got some futurism stuff bolted onto the story that didn't add much to the story and seemed to serve only as a means of taking a short cut around the needed character development and to bolster an ending that seemed to come from a different story completely. I really, really liked her fucked up monologue of what love is and was hoping to see more of this deranged psyche, but that was the length and breadth of it : (
Ourobolus: Figured out where you were going with the title a quarter of the way down the second page. Clever, though I was expecting there to be multiple copies of Pa, because otherwise it's just Faux Pa : ). Having the reveal hinge upon a letter from the union seems like a misstep for several reasons. First and foremost, while there are organizations that call themselves farmers unions, these are more analogous to organizations like the NRA than they are to labor unions. They exist to advocate and lobby for legislation and policies that would benefit farmers, they don't serve as an intermediary between labor and management and administer a pension fund to members. Also, the implication was that Pa died five years ago, why would they only be sending a condolence letter now? How would they have known about Pa's death when his own son and neighboring community didn't know about it? Why is the main character's family eking out this hardscrabble life when Ma could make a killing because apparently she's invented Life Model Decoys? You even go out of your way to state that he would still get his pension even though he wasn't dead, so it just becomes this stray thread that when I try and pull it off turns out to completely unravel everything.
QuantumBro: The "Are we fucked?" exchange at the beginning got a guffaw out of me, loved that part. There were a few glimpses along those lines of the promise that this one could have lived up to, but overall it felt half-baked at best. The protagonist being surprised that space pirates would pick on a defenseless vessel, for instance, fell remarkably flat. Radar doesn't make a lot of sense for detection of objects in space, at least in the sense of finding a planet. The planet would be visible long before radar would be of any use, and it wouldn't have any sort of interactivity as to tell you anything about the planet. MAC suddenly having a name whereas previously he had only been "the Robodial" was confusing. You will never be able to sell that a side effect of a sedative is the spontaneous ability to understand beeping robots as though they were speaking English. "I had no idea where it was coming from and yet, I did" is a contradictory statement. Bunches of missing or misplaced commas, use of "emptyness" and "bended" instead of "emptiness" and "bent." The biggest offense, though, is that ultimately nothing happens; a guy and his robot crash land on a planet, are subdued by two creatures that are never described (how did they capture MAC), then escape from a facility (Full of similarly undescribed captives) that that seems to be multiple times the size of the building it was originally described as being within (don't recall anything about going up or down stairs), and just happen to escape in the abandoned vessel of one of the space pirate types because they presumably all fell for the ol' sedative-in-the-mysterious-glass-of-water gag. The core interaction between a foul-mouthed space pilot and his beeping robot companion is a solid one, you just need to build on it.
P44: Henry can't step out of a door unless he was somehow contained within it : ) You've got all the pieces in place here that I can see what you're going for, but I think each individual component could have used a little more polishing. Dennis, Cassandra, and Frank were all distinct characters, but Henry felt almost indistinguishable from Dennis (Or maybe vice versa, since technically Henry came first). Some of the character actions seemed to be somewhat odd when taken with other parts of the story. For instance, Cassandra's internal lament of "Fuck me, not this guy," doesn't make a lot of sense to me in light of the fact that she was the one that had invited Dennis to come out to the restaurant to fire him. Likewise Frank getting upset that Dennis had gotten into the cab and said "follow that car" like he was living in some kind of movie, only to mention that it happens all the time, which would make it a real life thing that actually happens. Then Dennis goes from thinking about how he needs to clean out his cubicle to murdering Frank out of nowhere (What'd Frank do to him?) to run down Cassandra (Had she gotten out of the cab? Was she standing in the street for some reason?). And Frank's first reaction isn't to stomp on the brakes? You've got all the individual story beats situated, but how you're getting from one to the other needs some refinement.
Sober: I misread this title as "Workplace Bromance" and now I'm disappointed : ( I liked this one, though you had multiple parts where you had three people talking with no identifiers, so it became difficult from time to time to discern who was speaking. For a crack team of heisters, their credentials weren't particularly impressive outside of Danny's (I especially liked his background about trying to optimize Google's search algorithms for porn and replacing government files with pictures of cats). A guy who works as security guard for an armored car and occasional hired muscle for washed up celebs is probably someone that I would want to back me up in a bar fight, but maybe not for delicate sneaky spy stuff. June becoming a security master and safe-cracking wunderkind because she had some conversations with a lockpicker while she worked as a cop seemed a bit of a stretch for me, I think I needed some more elaboration on her autocratic education in the criminal element for me to really buy that aspect of her character. June and Rudy are both pretty blase about the fact that they have turned from lives of law enforcement to crime with little prompting or introspection, and none of these people really seemed the type to put their lives on the line for criminal enterprises. Also not entirely sure how one would pocket a lint roller and not notice it/not have it be noticeable. They're not small.
FlowersisBritish: I'm actually kind of a digging the whiplash-inducing turns in the narrative here. You introduce the protagonist, spend the rest of the paragraph on Dan, then smash back to the protagonist, then we're listening to some guy talk about climbing Mount Olympus, and then he has an epiphany of how Scientology must be the One True Religion. Or the section that's entirely in rhyme except for the last sentence which is so deadpan it hurts. It's all incredibly scatter shot, but each individual vignette is so far out there that I couldn't help but be entertained by it and the constant reminders that Joey is actually the protagonist here. My biggest beef would be the part about the double dipping is a little too on the nose with the secondary objective trying to be about emulating the structure of Seinfeld episodes. Grammar and sentence structure could use a bit of sprucing up, but overall I thought this was a pretty good stab at irreverent farce.
Mike M: This one was a hard one for me. Obviously, I'm too close to the subject matter to be an objective judge on it. I'm afraid that it might come across as self-indulgent hand-wringing about first world problems or something when there are people out there in the world who have had it far worse than I ever had. Plus, I made the mistake of leaving a hard copy of one the penultimate revision with my markup notes on it out on the couch where my wife found it Saturday morning and read it thinking it was going to be a comedy : ( Smooth move, Mike.
Cyan: Taking the theme extremely literally, I see. And oooooh shiiiiiiiit, you're dropping some l'esprit de l'escalier literalism in this mess too. French idioms about steps and staircases be all up in this bitch. Really clever use of him taking a literal false step by making a figurative faux pas, and the necessity of invoking figurative staircase wit to summon the literal Spirit of the Staircase. If I must pick nits (and I must, because I can only experience happiness by complaining), I felt that when the second scene after his falling off the Staircase started, there wasn't anything to indicate that he had been running around a while until the second paragraph. I started with the assumption that this was more or less immediately after the fall, and then had to shift gears without the clutch in the second paragraph. Also, there was no description of the immediate effects of the fall itself, which left me questioning how much damage he had done upon landing and to what that he could have left enough of an impact to identify the spot without seriously injuring himself. I think the biggest problem though is that he ran out of water a couple days before he got himself out of the situation. Best case scenario, you can go maybe four days without water if you're not physically exerting yourself and staying out of the sun, which this guy wasn't. I'm not saying he would have died of dehydration by that point, but he wouldn't have been in any sort of condition to be composing clever retorts or marching back home. The notion of the Staircase is a good one though, you should totally stash that away and use it again some day as a fixture in a genre fiction piece or something.
Osorio: This was generally well written, and I liked the description of how Liberty Island functions now as an international tourist trap as opposed to a beacon for boatloads of immigrants heading to the US. Good sense of character crammed into a short length of time. I'm completely bewildered by the ending, however. It reads like it's supposed to be a punchline, but I don't get the joke at all and the story just stops dead in its tracks really abruptly.
Tangent: A nice little comedy of errors, but the pacing is off. You have your set up of the situation, and within half a page our protagonist is rushing from the table to go look at a dog that looks like the one he had as a kid. Alright, off to a good start. But then we go for another half a page before we get to the part about "Dolton." In that space of time, a lot of the momentum you had built has evaporated. But then in the subsequent half a page, you have another, what, three or four instances of lacking social grace? And man, it just keeps going. Then we shift gears entirely at the scene at the restaurant and have the protagonist balls-deep in one protracted cringe-worthy moment that lasts for most of the rest of the story (where Zack is summarily rechristened Zach). I could have lived without the stuff in the restaurant in the last part, just stick with the protagonist for his one day of fucking everything up, but with spacing the individual events out more so that they happen at regular intervals rather than leaving too much time between gags or cramming them all together so fast that they don't have time to register before barreling full steam ahead into the next one.
Nezumi: Super short, but super cute and a good premise. It doesn't overstay its welcome, but honestly the central concept is probably strong enough to support something considerably longer if you plan it out right.
Charade: I saw that title and thought, "Surely this won't be a tipping thread in narrative form..." Well... I guess it wasn't, since GAF tipping threads don't usually degenerate into users shooting at each other in crowded marketplaces, to my knowledge (I don't really read the tipping threads, so I wouldn't know. Maybe they do.). Mostly, this was good. I don't eat at upscale restaurants, but the notion that a waiter would start the interaction with the customer by declaring that the establishment encourages a tip of any percentage seems a bit beyond the pale. Usually that sort of information is on the menu itself down towards the bottom in very small print, in my experience. Also, very surprised that in the spacefaring intergalactic future, we're still dealing with physical money stored in banks that can be robbed (or at least that was my immediate assumption when Quezal is described as a bank robber without further elaboration that he did it digitally), but these are minor nitpicks. I think the biggest oversights in the story were Slaven managing to follow Quezal on the turbolift when it was supposedly an impossible task with no explanation of how he did it, and I didn't see what was so bad about grabbing the waiter when he was angry. What exactly about his species made that a bad idea? All he did was elbow the guy, seems like that could have been accomplished by any species that possessed an elbow joint. Also, Quezal became Queval became Quevel in relatively quick succession there toward the end.
Votes:
1. Cyan
2. Nezumi
3. FlowersisBritish
ElectricBlanketFire: When I was in college, I worked in a Jamba Juice in downtown Santa Barbara that was owned by a franchise organization that was started by a couple of the founding members of the original Jamba Juice company who had left the corporate office/been forced out over ideological differences over where the company was supposed to be going (i.e. community oriented versus maximizing profits, etc.). There was a poster in the front lobby that had "The Jamba Juice Story" on it that had the headshots of the members of the franchise corporation pasted onto cartoon bodies sitting on a banana. One night just before closing, a guy came into the store and placed his order. He saw this poster with the founding members of Jamba Juice and proceeded to regale us with the tale of how he too was one of the founders of Jamba Juice, but that no one remembered him because the CIA had erased the memory of his existence from everyone involved. They were after him because he had invented an internal combustion engine that ran on pine cones and emitted zero pollution that threatened the power of the Jews that ran the world.
This was like reliving that conversation.
MDSVeritas: I feel like the first page has some issues in its consistency that sort of colored my perception of the rest of the piece. Right off the back, we have it declared that Rob knows the cigarette is Terry's because Terry is the only one that smokes. Then in the very next sentence, Rob's certainty is downgraded to a suspicion. Then only a few sentences later, we find out that Terry is in fact not the only one who smokes, because Jessica smokes too. Then a bit further down in the same paragraph his position at the law firm is described as a dream job, but that these two people are the only ones from work that he can stand to speak to. We're just kind of all over the map here, and when we're told to think one thing, we are almost immediately introduced to a contrary piece of information. I did like the interaction between Jessica and Quinn. Though Rob was supposed to be the main character, this pieces was really about those two butting heads. Terry was kind of an extraneous addition, but at least served as a buffer to make it not seem like Rob and Jessica were supposed to be dating or anything, so it's not like he didn't have any reason for existing at all. The twist fell flat for me because I had immediately assumed Quinn to be Rob's son from the get go and felt that it was clear that he was lying about baby sitting. I'm at a lost for recommendations on what could possibly make it more impactful, however.
Wreck-It Ralph: This seems a bit indebted to that one episode of Justice League where Flash just talks to one of his villains and helps him work out his issues. Pongo is a much better choice of character name than Kong : ) I had originally made a note that I thought that the introduction of the cops with the "we know you're in there, come out with your hands up!" seemed kind of cartoonish, but seeing as how the point of the story seems to be a cartoonish morality lesson about respecting the feelings of others with Larry playing the baffled straight man in a world gone topsy-turvy, I guess it actually kind of works in this situation. Compared to your other posting in the writing mega thread, this one definitely had a bit more in the description environment, though once again it's still a bit spartan. I also note that this seems to be completely devoid of metaphor or similes, etc. It's very straight-forward and serviceable, but it doesn't do a lot to kindle the imagination. If you've been following the past several entries, you'll note that there's been an uptick in this sort of comic-book antic pieces, and I have mostly the same comment about them all; comics being a visual medium, it's difficult to appropriate their tropes and conventions into a non-visual form, and I think moreso than other kinds of writing hinges on robust descriptions of imagery.
On a completely unrelated note, my first novel was a superhero yarn. Lemme know if you want to be an alpha reader, and I'll shoot you a copy. Maybe one day I'll fix it so that it doesn't suck.
ThLunarian: I mean absolutely no offense when I say that I can't tell whether or not this is supposed to be parodying bad fanfiction. I don't have any particular prejudices against fanfiction in and of itself (I put it at about the same level as I do about any official novel series in an extended universe of an existing franchise, i.e. Star Wars novels), but crossover stuff starts to flirt with crossing the line with me unless it's a really good match. Aliens vs. Predator, Terminator vs. Robocop, etc. That I like. Star Trek vs. X-Men? Not so much. A straight up House/House of Cards (I see what you did there) would have played better for me without trying to tie it back into the universe you're building. If you were wanting this to be set in your other stories, you'd have been better off filing off the serial numbers. Alternately, you have a missed opportunity for setting this up as House MD of Wild Cards. Putting all that aside, I think you were most of the way there with the characterization of House, though I think he would have been a bit more acerbic and would have put up more of a fight with the various requests being made of him. The biggest thing though was that you were missing the parlor scene where House explains how he came to his conclusion that Underwood was reading his mind. That's crucial to any story involving a detective : D
Aaron: I feel like I may be giving you short shrift by reading this immediately after ThLunarian and writing out my feelings on fanfiction and the fact that the movie just came out recently, but I have a very difficult time trying to remember that this was not Planet of the Apes fanfiction. While the premise of trying to talk his way out of a ticket with an orangutan police officer has good potential for humor, there was far to much time spent on setup and exposition to explain the scenario and not much in the way of laughs in the end. Also, I had bunches of problems with said exposition, probably because you've unwittingly wandered into the turf of what I do for a living. Research animals used in any sort of drug trials would not be released into the wild (apes are not used in drug trials in the first place, I think the last vestiges of ape research is behavioral stuff). If captive apes ever were to be released into the wild, they would not be released into the wild in the US because this is not their habitat. The notion that Dave could somehow forget that Wyoming is run by apes breaks the story, especially after he reads the sign and thinks that he misread it. The correct response would have been, "Oh, that's right, Wyoming is run by apes." And the border crossing is unmanned? I was also bothered by the line about how they couldn't repress the apes because that would be seen as admission of humans descending from apes. How does that follow? I would need the logic of that train of thought explained to me, because I'm trying and trying to see how that conclusion can be drawn and I'm coming up empty. In the plus category, I hope we don't have any members from Wyoming in here, because calling it the only land that the US could afford to lose is a wicked dig, man.
PS: Orangutans are in fact apes (unless it's supposed to be that the orangutan is expressing a preference for how he would like to be referred and is not making a factual statement). And "science" isn't a proper noun.
Zakalwe: Just do the dialogue in the traditional format. Doing the weird thing with the dash and the italics doesn't add anything to work except opening the possibility for engendering confusion, i.e. at first I thought he was having flashbacks to Sophie speaking in the past juxtaposed with the current events until he started talking back to her and I realized that these events were concurrent. I kept looking for the payoff when the sci-fi angle was introduced, but I'm not certain it worked out in the end. The core premise of a woman killing the guy and his brother because of some warped philosophical understanding of the nature of love is a story unto itself, but we needed to see the character of the wife developed so that we could understand what thought processes brought her to these actions. Instead we got some futurism stuff bolted onto the story that didn't add much to the story and seemed to serve only as a means of taking a short cut around the needed character development and to bolster an ending that seemed to come from a different story completely. I really, really liked her fucked up monologue of what love is and was hoping to see more of this deranged psyche, but that was the length and breadth of it : (
Ourobolus: Figured out where you were going with the title a quarter of the way down the second page. Clever, though I was expecting there to be multiple copies of Pa, because otherwise it's just Faux Pa : ). Having the reveal hinge upon a letter from the union seems like a misstep for several reasons. First and foremost, while there are organizations that call themselves farmers unions, these are more analogous to organizations like the NRA than they are to labor unions. They exist to advocate and lobby for legislation and policies that would benefit farmers, they don't serve as an intermediary between labor and management and administer a pension fund to members. Also, the implication was that Pa died five years ago, why would they only be sending a condolence letter now? How would they have known about Pa's death when his own son and neighboring community didn't know about it? Why is the main character's family eking out this hardscrabble life when Ma could make a killing because apparently she's invented Life Model Decoys? You even go out of your way to state that he would still get his pension even though he wasn't dead, so it just becomes this stray thread that when I try and pull it off turns out to completely unravel everything.
QuantumBro: The "Are we fucked?" exchange at the beginning got a guffaw out of me, loved that part. There were a few glimpses along those lines of the promise that this one could have lived up to, but overall it felt half-baked at best. The protagonist being surprised that space pirates would pick on a defenseless vessel, for instance, fell remarkably flat. Radar doesn't make a lot of sense for detection of objects in space, at least in the sense of finding a planet. The planet would be visible long before radar would be of any use, and it wouldn't have any sort of interactivity as to tell you anything about the planet. MAC suddenly having a name whereas previously he had only been "the Robodial" was confusing. You will never be able to sell that a side effect of a sedative is the spontaneous ability to understand beeping robots as though they were speaking English. "I had no idea where it was coming from and yet, I did" is a contradictory statement. Bunches of missing or misplaced commas, use of "emptyness" and "bended" instead of "emptiness" and "bent." The biggest offense, though, is that ultimately nothing happens; a guy and his robot crash land on a planet, are subdued by two creatures that are never described (how did they capture MAC), then escape from a facility (Full of similarly undescribed captives) that that seems to be multiple times the size of the building it was originally described as being within (don't recall anything about going up or down stairs), and just happen to escape in the abandoned vessel of one of the space pirate types because they presumably all fell for the ol' sedative-in-the-mysterious-glass-of-water gag. The core interaction between a foul-mouthed space pilot and his beeping robot companion is a solid one, you just need to build on it.
P44: Henry can't step out of a door unless he was somehow contained within it : ) You've got all the pieces in place here that I can see what you're going for, but I think each individual component could have used a little more polishing. Dennis, Cassandra, and Frank were all distinct characters, but Henry felt almost indistinguishable from Dennis (Or maybe vice versa, since technically Henry came first). Some of the character actions seemed to be somewhat odd when taken with other parts of the story. For instance, Cassandra's internal lament of "Fuck me, not this guy," doesn't make a lot of sense to me in light of the fact that she was the one that had invited Dennis to come out to the restaurant to fire him. Likewise Frank getting upset that Dennis had gotten into the cab and said "follow that car" like he was living in some kind of movie, only to mention that it happens all the time, which would make it a real life thing that actually happens. Then Dennis goes from thinking about how he needs to clean out his cubicle to murdering Frank out of nowhere (What'd Frank do to him?) to run down Cassandra (Had she gotten out of the cab? Was she standing in the street for some reason?). And Frank's first reaction isn't to stomp on the brakes? You've got all the individual story beats situated, but how you're getting from one to the other needs some refinement.
Sober: I misread this title as "Workplace Bromance" and now I'm disappointed : ( I liked this one, though you had multiple parts where you had three people talking with no identifiers, so it became difficult from time to time to discern who was speaking. For a crack team of heisters, their credentials weren't particularly impressive outside of Danny's (I especially liked his background about trying to optimize Google's search algorithms for porn and replacing government files with pictures of cats). A guy who works as security guard for an armored car and occasional hired muscle for washed up celebs is probably someone that I would want to back me up in a bar fight, but maybe not for delicate sneaky spy stuff. June becoming a security master and safe-cracking wunderkind because she had some conversations with a lockpicker while she worked as a cop seemed a bit of a stretch for me, I think I needed some more elaboration on her autocratic education in the criminal element for me to really buy that aspect of her character. June and Rudy are both pretty blase about the fact that they have turned from lives of law enforcement to crime with little prompting or introspection, and none of these people really seemed the type to put their lives on the line for criminal enterprises. Also not entirely sure how one would pocket a lint roller and not notice it/not have it be noticeable. They're not small.
FlowersisBritish: I'm actually kind of a digging the whiplash-inducing turns in the narrative here. You introduce the protagonist, spend the rest of the paragraph on Dan, then smash back to the protagonist, then we're listening to some guy talk about climbing Mount Olympus, and then he has an epiphany of how Scientology must be the One True Religion. Or the section that's entirely in rhyme except for the last sentence which is so deadpan it hurts. It's all incredibly scatter shot, but each individual vignette is so far out there that I couldn't help but be entertained by it and the constant reminders that Joey is actually the protagonist here. My biggest beef would be the part about the double dipping is a little too on the nose with the secondary objective trying to be about emulating the structure of Seinfeld episodes. Grammar and sentence structure could use a bit of sprucing up, but overall I thought this was a pretty good stab at irreverent farce.
Mike M: This one was a hard one for me. Obviously, I'm too close to the subject matter to be an objective judge on it. I'm afraid that it might come across as self-indulgent hand-wringing about first world problems or something when there are people out there in the world who have had it far worse than I ever had. Plus, I made the mistake of leaving a hard copy of one the penultimate revision with my markup notes on it out on the couch where my wife found it Saturday morning and read it thinking it was going to be a comedy : ( Smooth move, Mike.
Cyan: Taking the theme extremely literally, I see. And oooooh shiiiiiiiit, you're dropping some l'esprit de l'escalier literalism in this mess too. French idioms about steps and staircases be all up in this bitch. Really clever use of him taking a literal false step by making a figurative faux pas, and the necessity of invoking figurative staircase wit to summon the literal Spirit of the Staircase. If I must pick nits (and I must, because I can only experience happiness by complaining), I felt that when the second scene after his falling off the Staircase started, there wasn't anything to indicate that he had been running around a while until the second paragraph. I started with the assumption that this was more or less immediately after the fall, and then had to shift gears without the clutch in the second paragraph. Also, there was no description of the immediate effects of the fall itself, which left me questioning how much damage he had done upon landing and to what that he could have left enough of an impact to identify the spot without seriously injuring himself. I think the biggest problem though is that he ran out of water a couple days before he got himself out of the situation. Best case scenario, you can go maybe four days without water if you're not physically exerting yourself and staying out of the sun, which this guy wasn't. I'm not saying he would have died of dehydration by that point, but he wouldn't have been in any sort of condition to be composing clever retorts or marching back home. The notion of the Staircase is a good one though, you should totally stash that away and use it again some day as a fixture in a genre fiction piece or something.
Osorio: This was generally well written, and I liked the description of how Liberty Island functions now as an international tourist trap as opposed to a beacon for boatloads of immigrants heading to the US. Good sense of character crammed into a short length of time. I'm completely bewildered by the ending, however. It reads like it's supposed to be a punchline, but I don't get the joke at all and the story just stops dead in its tracks really abruptly.
Tangent: A nice little comedy of errors, but the pacing is off. You have your set up of the situation, and within half a page our protagonist is rushing from the table to go look at a dog that looks like the one he had as a kid. Alright, off to a good start. But then we go for another half a page before we get to the part about "Dolton." In that space of time, a lot of the momentum you had built has evaporated. But then in the subsequent half a page, you have another, what, three or four instances of lacking social grace? And man, it just keeps going. Then we shift gears entirely at the scene at the restaurant and have the protagonist balls-deep in one protracted cringe-worthy moment that lasts for most of the rest of the story (where Zack is summarily rechristened Zach). I could have lived without the stuff in the restaurant in the last part, just stick with the protagonist for his one day of fucking everything up, but with spacing the individual events out more so that they happen at regular intervals rather than leaving too much time between gags or cramming them all together so fast that they don't have time to register before barreling full steam ahead into the next one.
Nezumi: Super short, but super cute and a good premise. It doesn't overstay its welcome, but honestly the central concept is probably strong enough to support something considerably longer if you plan it out right.
Charade: I saw that title and thought, "Surely this won't be a tipping thread in narrative form..." Well... I guess it wasn't, since GAF tipping threads don't usually degenerate into users shooting at each other in crowded marketplaces, to my knowledge (I don't really read the tipping threads, so I wouldn't know. Maybe they do.). Mostly, this was good. I don't eat at upscale restaurants, but the notion that a waiter would start the interaction with the customer by declaring that the establishment encourages a tip of any percentage seems a bit beyond the pale. Usually that sort of information is on the menu itself down towards the bottom in very small print, in my experience. Also, very surprised that in the spacefaring intergalactic future, we're still dealing with physical money stored in banks that can be robbed (or at least that was my immediate assumption when Quezal is described as a bank robber without further elaboration that he did it digitally), but these are minor nitpicks. I think the biggest oversights in the story were Slaven managing to follow Quezal on the turbolift when it was supposedly an impossible task with no explanation of how he did it, and I didn't see what was so bad about grabbing the waiter when he was angry. What exactly about his species made that a bad idea? All he did was elbow the guy, seems like that could have been accomplished by any species that possessed an elbow joint. Also, Quezal became Queval became Quevel in relatively quick succession there toward the end.
Votes:
1. Cyan
2. Nezumi
3. FlowersisBritish
Thanks a bunch. everything I write will likely have elements of sci-fi or fnatasy, I just don't enjoy writing normal every day stuff. So if a story is rooted in every day stuff it will likely be set somewhere fantastical.
I wanted the body of the story to be as traditonal as possible for a reason, as I'll explain below in my response to Mike.
You're probably going to hate the stuff I post here... I enjoy experimenting with format, and I like to present dialgoue in different ways to the standard. I won't always do it, but sometimes I have an idea I'd like to try. It definitely won't always be successful.
I'll spoiler this in case anyone's not read it yet.
The story is about the AI sitting in space remembering what it was to be human, all the flaws we have but all the reasons why we love each other despite them. The androids had judged us as computers in sci-fi tend to do, as a blight that needs purging for the sake of everything. But in this instance it's because they've misunderstood love, or have interpreted it a different way.
The scientists who put Zeke in the machine tell him to remember what connects all these little moments so he doesn't start to think like they did.The human element in the machine that keeps the machine from turning on us.
And then the faux pas he made that led to his brother being killed. Such a tiny little action that led to an event that held such significance. I tried to use it to show this part of being human, how small events can cause such huge reactions, how they're completely illogical and emotional and a reason why a machine might judge us.
Sophie's words are the words of the androids, the way they've processed the idea of love. It has a cold twisted logic to it because they can't feel it or understand it any other way.
The scientists who put Zeke in the machine tell him to remember what connects all these little moments so he doesn't start to think like they did.The human element in the machine that keeps the machine from turning on us.
And then the faux pas he made that led to his brother being killed. Such a tiny little action that led to an event that held such significance. I tried to use it to show this part of being human, how small events can cause such huge reactions, how they're completely illogical and emotional and a reason why a machine might judge us.
Sophie's words are the words of the androids, the way they've processed the idea of love. It has a cold twisted logic to it because they can't feel it or understand it any other way.
Anyway, that was the idea. It was an experiment again, so it might not have been entirely successful. Maybe it needed more space to develop, I'm too close to it to be able to tell at all, but it doesn't seem to have clicked for you. I understand how the end could feel tacked on reading it from the start (I always thought about it starting at the end so it's difficult to see that perspective), I can see how another story could develop from it too, focused on the exchanges with Sophie instead. Now I'm wondering how I would have handled that...
Thanks for the feedback.
Yeah I really struggled with the word limit to sort of build them well in that space, but that's sort of always been my problem, I can put together concepts but the writing needs work. I think in future maybe pare back the concepts so I can better flesh out some characters might be prudent.
Yeah I was stretching a bit hardcore there, but it was 4 am my time, I wanted to put something in before deadline, I wanted to try and get the convergence angle and I might have gone a bit silly lol.
Yeah, I'll admit I only did a modicum of research involving unions (though they typically will provide a one-time accidental death benefit) and then just made it so that this was a REALLY AWESOME UNION.
As for everything else...>_>; Yeah... *runs away*
Not my best work.
EDIT: man, at this rate I'm going to have to vote and then come back with critiques.
Just some comments/feedback/ramblings
ElectricBlanketFire - "Casual Hamburgers" - This was random and absurd enough to make me chuckle more than a few times. And I think that was your intention so mission accomplished there
MDSVeritas - "Faux" - I had an inkling of the twist as soon as the kid showed up. I did like how Quinn being there made Rob realize his friends were assholes. I think maybe showing more about why he became friends with them in the first place would be beneficial for the story.
Wreck-It Ralph - "Pongo" - I thought this was amusing. I think it could maybe benefit from less telling and more showing (So instead of "Larry defended himself" something like "Larry insisted/implored" or maybe something just describing the volume/intensity of his voice.
ThLunarian - "The Differential" - I liked how it connected to your last piece. Though I am curious, would this be considered canon in that universe? I actually think you could've switched the names and it would still work/I wouldn't have noticed anything (just an eccentric doctor character). Obviously you'd have to tweak some details here and there, like the cane. But as a fanfiction piece, I thought you captured the character pretty well.
Aaron - "Primal Knowledge" - This left me wanting more. But I really like the idea of this aimless guy wandering/having some "adventure" in a Planet of the Apes-esque world.
Zakalwe - "The Philosopher's Widow" - This was interesting. I liked the in medias res back and forth thing going on. The stream of consciousness-like stuff at the end was a little dense, almost too much to process, if that makes sense. I really liked the bit when Frank's head was blown off and the illusion of him having his father's head from the portrait behind him. That was a nice visual. Well, actually fairly gruesome, but you know what I mean
Ourobolus - "Faux Pas" - I liked the twist here. It actually took me a while to work it out, which I felt added to the payoff a little (and that title :O). One thing that stuck out to me was, towards the end, the boy spoke out loud to himself a few times. It felt somewhat jarring to me and I think they would've worked better as just thoughts. But besides that I thought it was well-written.
QuantumBro - "MAC and Me in the Mysterious Planet" - This left me wanting more meat to the story. Like more backstory on the protagonist and maybe some more hints into what was exactly going on in that prison-like place.
P44 - "RED" - I liked what you did with the separate POV characters and their "titles" (and not just because I did something similar) and similarly with the setup. But I thought the convergence itself at the end fell a bit flat. There were also a few lengthy sentences I thought could be broken up.
Sober - "Workplace Romance" - I liked this. I thought you did the casual-conversation-while-action-is-going-on thing quite well (idk what you call it, but I hope that makes sense). Using the Faberge egg they just stole as a blunt object didn't seem too smart though
FlowersisBritish - "Dip" - I really liked the transitioning from one party-goer to the next, so much so that I wanted a little more of it instead of spending most of the time with Joey/Pip at the end.
Mike M - "Tea With Rory" - This felt very personal, and it kinda hit close to home for me. I really admire the amount of detail you put into your writing. All the nuances and tidbits surrounding the tea party were fantastic. Out of the ones I've read so far, this took me the longest to connect to the theme, but once I did I thought it was very profound (on multiple levels).
Cyan - "False Step" - The concepts of the Staircase and the vague war going on were fascinating . I wouldn't have spotted the connection to "staircase wit" if it wasn't for Mike's comment (y'all too clever for me!). But afterwards I went back and reread the conversation between the soldier and the bird and it was really cool seeing what you did there.
Osorio - "Sibyl Service" - This felt like it was drawn from real experiences. That or you have a great imagination. I did find the ending a little odd/abrupt though.
Tangent - "En Los Amigos" - There's something about your writing that I just like. I can't put my finger on it exactly... I guess energetic? Joyful? Happy? Something like that. I never got to say this last week, but you're kinda what inspired me to attempt more happy endings with my own writing (don't know how long that'll last though). Anyways, very amusing story. All his mistakes, his reversal of fortune at the restaurant. I did find the ending somewhat ambiguous, but I assume he's going to continue with his faux pas-ing. I can't imagine his luck lasting long though, hehe.
Nezumi - "Blame" - Short and sweet. And I really like the concept behind it. The part about the Christmas home videos and her voice sounding different was definitely a "omg, me too!" moment
1. Mike M
2. Nezumi
3. Tangent
(count how many times I use "" hehe)
" hehe)ElectricBlanketFire - "Casual Hamburgers" - This was random and absurd enough to make me chuckle more than a few times. And I think that was your intention so mission accomplished there
MDSVeritas - "Faux" - I had an inkling of the twist as soon as the kid showed up. I did like how Quinn being there made Rob realize his friends were assholes. I think maybe showing more about why he became friends with them in the first place would be beneficial for the story.
Wreck-It Ralph - "Pongo" - I thought this was amusing. I think it could maybe benefit from less telling and more showing (So instead of "Larry defended himself" something like "Larry insisted/implored" or maybe something just describing the volume/intensity of his voice.
ThLunarian - "The Differential" - I liked how it connected to your last piece. Though I am curious, would this be considered canon in that universe? I actually think you could've switched the names and it would still work/I wouldn't have noticed anything (just an eccentric doctor character). Obviously you'd have to tweak some details here and there, like the cane. But as a fanfiction piece, I thought you captured the character pretty well.
Aaron - "Primal Knowledge" - This left me wanting more. But I really like the idea of this aimless guy wandering/having some "adventure" in a Planet of the Apes-esque world.
Zakalwe - "The Philosopher's Widow" - This was interesting. I liked the in medias res back and forth thing going on. The stream of consciousness-like stuff at the end was a little dense, almost too much to process, if that makes sense. I really liked the bit when Frank's head was blown off and the illusion of him having his father's head from the portrait behind him. That was a nice visual. Well, actually fairly gruesome, but you know what I mean
Ourobolus - "Faux Pas" - I liked the twist here. It actually took me a while to work it out, which I felt added to the payoff a little (and that title :O). One thing that stuck out to me was, towards the end, the boy spoke out loud to himself a few times. It felt somewhat jarring to me and I think they would've worked better as just thoughts. But besides that I thought it was well-written.
QuantumBro - "MAC and Me in the Mysterious Planet" - This left me wanting more meat to the story. Like more backstory on the protagonist and maybe some more hints into what was exactly going on in that prison-like place.
P44 - "RED" - I liked what you did with the separate POV characters and their "titles" (and not just because I did something similar
) and similarly with the setup. But I thought the convergence itself at the end fell a bit flat. There were also a few lengthy sentences I thought could be broken up. Sober - "Workplace Romance" - I liked this. I thought you did the casual-conversation-while-action-is-going-on thing quite well (idk what you call it, but I hope that makes sense). Using the Faberge egg they just stole as a blunt object didn't seem too smart though
FlowersisBritish - "Dip" - I really liked the transitioning from one party-goer to the next, so much so that I wanted a little more of it instead of spending most of the time with Joey/Pip at the end.
Mike M - "Tea With Rory" - This felt very personal, and it kinda hit close to home for me. I really admire the amount of detail you put into your writing. All the nuances and tidbits surrounding the tea party were fantastic. Out of the ones I've read so far, this took me the longest to connect to the theme, but once I did I thought it was very profound (on multiple levels).
Cyan - "False Step" - The concepts of the Staircase and the vague war going on were fascinating . I wouldn't have spotted the connection to "staircase wit" if it wasn't for Mike's comment (y'all too clever for me!
). But afterwards I went back and reread the conversation between the soldier and the bird and it was really cool seeing what you did there. Osorio - "Sibyl Service" - This felt like it was drawn from real experiences. That or you have a great imagination. I did find the ending a little odd/abrupt though.
Tangent - "En Los Amigos" - There's something about your writing that I just like. I can't put my finger on it exactly... I guess energetic? Joyful? Happy? Something like that. I never got to say this last week, but you're kinda what inspired me to attempt more happy endings with my own writing (don't know how long that'll last though
). Anyways, very amusing story. All his mistakes, his reversal of fortune at the restaurant. I did find the ending somewhat ambiguous, but I assume he's going to continue with his faux pas-ing. I can't imagine his luck lasting long though, hehe. Nezumi - "Blame" - Short and sweet. And I really like the concept behind it. The part about the Christmas home videos and her voice sounding different was definitely a "omg, me too!" moment
1. Mike M
2. Nezumi
3. Tangent
FlowersisBritish
fleurs n'est pas britannique
OH god, can I write all this in time? Sorry if some of these are sparse, but I got off of work so I am pretty tired right now.
Hamburgers- It was funny, but I felt the humor was a little scattershot
Faux- Confused at the location because they were drinking vodka, had a kid, and could see the stars. Child friendly out door bar? I did like the ending though. Revealing the guy was the father in dialogue like that was a good move.
Pongo- it was cute and i liked how it all played out
The differential- You nailed House with your narration, and I liked the continuation from that other story. Side note, i would totes read this whole universe you're creating if it was a book. It sounds fun.
Primal- I liked how straight faced it was, just being a simple story of a guy being pulled over by an orangutan.
The Philosophers Widow- This is going to be a little shallow, but dear god I like that title. It's just a really interesting titles. I liked how the narrative jumped around in time a little.
Faux pas- I think I get the ending. He was secretly a robot! Or the wife claimed him dead and was cashing in on checks. Either or, it was a good story.
MAC- I like how you do very little telling, and instead show everything. Nicely done. Also, I love the dialogue here between the main character and his robot friend. A+ work giving a guy who only talks in beeps personality.
Red- Interesting narrative style, I liked the ways the stories bled into one another.
Workplace Romance- Cute story. I would totes read more of these two interacting and robbing things.
Tea with Rory- This was just really good and sweet. I would've liked to have seen the wife though, she sounds as important and it would have been nice to have more an idea of what she was like.
False Step- I liked the opening. It's a really interesting concept, but I would have liked to know more about the stairs and where exactly the soldier was?
Sibyl- what a good twist at the end!
En Los Amigos- I really like the line "This is my everyday expression." It says so much about their entire relationship.
Red- I love how clever this was. It's not obvious, but once you understand you have to go "OH! THAT'S NEAT!"
Tipping point- This was fun and stayed fun till the end.
Thank for the feedback everyone, and I hoped mine was of some help.
My votes
1. Nezumi
2. Mike M
3. ThLunarian
Hamburgers- It was funny, but I felt the humor was a little scattershot
Faux- Confused at the location because they were drinking vodka, had a kid, and could see the stars. Child friendly out door bar? I did like the ending though. Revealing the guy was the father in dialogue like that was a good move.
Pongo- it was cute and i liked how it all played out
The differential- You nailed House with your narration, and I liked the continuation from that other story. Side note, i would totes read this whole universe you're creating if it was a book. It sounds fun.
Primal- I liked how straight faced it was, just being a simple story of a guy being pulled over by an orangutan.
The Philosophers Widow- This is going to be a little shallow, but dear god I like that title. It's just a really interesting titles. I liked how the narrative jumped around in time a little.
Faux pas- I think I get the ending. He was secretly a robot! Or the wife claimed him dead and was cashing in on checks. Either or, it was a good story.
MAC- I like how you do very little telling, and instead show everything. Nicely done. Also, I love the dialogue here between the main character and his robot friend. A+ work giving a guy who only talks in beeps personality.
Red- Interesting narrative style, I liked the ways the stories bled into one another.
Workplace Romance- Cute story. I would totes read more of these two interacting and robbing things.
Tea with Rory- This was just really good and sweet. I would've liked to have seen the wife though, she sounds as important and it would have been nice to have more an idea of what she was like.
False Step- I liked the opening. It's a really interesting concept, but I would have liked to know more about the stairs and where exactly the soldier was?
Sibyl- what a good twist at the end!
En Los Amigos- I really like the line "This is my everyday expression." It says so much about their entire relationship.
Red- I love how clever this was. It's not obvious, but once you understand you have to go "OH! THAT'S NEAT!"
Tipping point- This was fun and stayed fun till the end.
Thank for the feedback everyone, and I hoped mine was of some help.
My votes
1. Nezumi
2. Mike M
3. ThLunarian
Votes:
1. Nezumi
2. FlowersisBritish
3. Charade
--
ElectricBlanketFire - Seemed absolutely random and just out there. Just not my cup of tea, sadly. Nothing else to say besides that.
MDSVeritas - I found it rather annoying that the adults were just acting like complete dicks to a child even if it was a complete stranger or with only a degree of separation. Well, I guess you did make the point they were just tolerable to Rob. I don't know if the twist at the end was earned; sure the word limit doesn't help but the little bits that were sprinkled into the story were so minor that if it was in fact true, then that especially didn't feel earned. That being said, Rob included didn't really feel like he was behaving properly since he decided to mostly just act inscrutable for the sake of the ending. Wasn't much reaction from him either.
Wreck-It Ralph - Very fun, interesting turnaround there.
ThLunarian - Interesting. Hadn't spent much time with House so I can't comment on that half, though I doubt Foreman at the start would've led off by calling House "Doctor House" at all.
Aaron - I see some inspiration from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes in this. Not much to really say about it other than the weird moment your character forgets something as huge as apes taking over a state.
Zakalwe - Was kind of hoping Sophie would've had more to do in the story, especially what was shown in the beginning and for our main character. Was hoping she had something more to her than feeling like (as your wrote, and also in my opinion) just a template in sci-fi to make the plot go forward.
Ourobolus - Ah yes, the robot father story you were talking about. Just found it mostly odd that he would take regular sized consumer batteries and not have his own power supply or something!
QuantumBro - A few tense changes that were really out of place, especially switching back and forth in the middle of a paragraph. Was a little confused that you didn't introduce MAC properly; for a while I thought he was more of like the onboard computer voice or something rather than a physical thing. Other than the "don't drink strange glasses of water" I don't really see what anyone here learned, unfortunately.
P44 - Pretty cool that you told quite a bit in that little. A few parts were off, like the taxi driver not braking (suggestion: he got choked out really quickly somehow) but for the most part it came together by the end of it.
FlowersisBritish - Really liked how it jumped back and forth between everyone and the tone of the narration.
MikeM - Depressing but still enjoyable to read, if that makes any sense.
Cyan - Some staircase wit for a story about a staircase, I see.
Osorio - As someone who doesn't like smiling (with their teeth, if at all) in photos, I completely understand this story. People that try to get me to SMILE suck.
Tangent - Social awkwardness is always fun, especially when they come out one after another. There is some hilarity to be found when he becomes acutely self-aware that he tries to go the opposite direction and comes out being a social master, at least in everyone else's eyes. (and occasionally true)
Nezumi - Cute story. Probably the right length to it too. Never accused myself (or in essense my reflection) before but I could see how they might take it the wrong way
Charade - Another POV jumping story I see. Very fun, although I don't know if it's just a recent thing but I've gotten very irritable about sci-fi being shoved in for the sake of it. Felt like a lot of unnecessary names of things that just appear other than just because. But don't mind me, I still liked it a lot.
1. Nezumi
2. FlowersisBritish
3. Charade
--
ElectricBlanketFire - Seemed absolutely random and just out there. Just not my cup of tea, sadly. Nothing else to say besides that.
MDSVeritas - I found it rather annoying that the adults were just acting like complete dicks to a child even if it was a complete stranger or with only a degree of separation. Well, I guess you did make the point they were just tolerable to Rob. I don't know if the twist at the end was earned; sure the word limit doesn't help but the little bits that were sprinkled into the story were so minor that if it was in fact true, then that especially didn't feel earned. That being said, Rob included didn't really feel like he was behaving properly since he decided to mostly just act inscrutable for the sake of the ending. Wasn't much reaction from him either.
Wreck-It Ralph - Very fun, interesting turnaround there.
ThLunarian - Interesting. Hadn't spent much time with House so I can't comment on that half, though I doubt Foreman at the start would've led off by calling House "Doctor House" at all.
Aaron - I see some inspiration from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes in this. Not much to really say about it other than the weird moment your character forgets something as huge as apes taking over a state.
Zakalwe - Was kind of hoping Sophie would've had more to do in the story, especially what was shown in the beginning and for our main character. Was hoping she had something more to her than feeling like (as your wrote, and also in my opinion) just a template in sci-fi to make the plot go forward.
Ourobolus - Ah yes, the robot father story you were talking about. Just found it mostly odd that he would take regular sized consumer batteries and not have his own power supply or something!
QuantumBro - A few tense changes that were really out of place, especially switching back and forth in the middle of a paragraph. Was a little confused that you didn't introduce MAC properly; for a while I thought he was more of like the onboard computer voice or something rather than a physical thing. Other than the "don't drink strange glasses of water" I don't really see what anyone here learned, unfortunately.
P44 - Pretty cool that you told quite a bit in that little. A few parts were off, like the taxi driver not braking (suggestion: he got choked out really quickly somehow) but for the most part it came together by the end of it.
FlowersisBritish - Really liked how it jumped back and forth between everyone and the tone of the narration.
MikeM - Depressing but still enjoyable to read, if that makes any sense.
Cyan - Some staircase wit for a story about a staircase, I see.
Osorio - As someone who doesn't like smiling (with their teeth, if at all) in photos, I completely understand this story. People that try to get me to SMILE suck.
Tangent - Social awkwardness is always fun, especially when they come out one after another. There is some hilarity to be found when he becomes acutely self-aware that he tries to go the opposite direction and comes out being a social master, at least in everyone else's eyes. (and occasionally true)
Nezumi - Cute story. Probably the right length to it too. Never accused myself (or in essense my reflection) before but I could see how they might take it the wrong way
Charade - Another POV jumping story I see. Very fun, although I don't know if it's just a recent thing but I've gotten very irritable about sci-fi being shoved in for the sake of it. Felt like a lot of unnecessary names of things that just appear other than just because. But don't mind me, I still liked it a lot.
Votes:
It KILLS me that we can't have 4 people crammed into our 3 votes. I literally wrote these 4 names on pieces of paper and pulled them out in a random order. It kills me!
1. Aaron
2. Cyan
3. MikeM
hm. Nezumi
Short feedback:
ElectricBlanketFire - "Casual Hamburgers": This was so fun to read. Some parts really made me SOL (smirk out loud). I think with some work, you could really polish up this piece and make it 100% hysterical. My favorite part was the part about the cook and his T-shirt and his middle and last name. Why were they obsessed with being so casual? Also, in terms of your casual writing style, I was impressed by how true you kept it to "casual."
MDSVeritas - "Faux": Somehow, I question the British style of talking but I think Ashes would be the best judge of that. What I liked MOST was the dialog; I often get confused as to who is saying what when I'm reading. I feel like it's my own version of dyslexia or something. Dialog dyslexia. But I think you had created characters that were so distinguishable that this wasn't a problem! Well done!
Wreck-It Ralph - "Pongo": I liked the characters of Jessica and Quinn and the twist at the end. I'm not good at writing about more than 3 characters, so I was impressed how you were able to pull it off. It still blows my mind how some authors write about 1000s of characters.
ThLunarian - "The Differential": Wow! This was such a unique read! The characters you created were fun and interactive. I wish I were more privy to the world of fan-fiction to fully understand this story. It's embarrassing how ignorant I am in this area. Nevertheless, this was a very fun story.
Aaron - "Primal Knowledge": OK, so this was AMAZING. I seriously wanted to call you up on an old-fashioned telephone (except I don't know your number) and ask you why the hell you haven't published this amazing stuff for the world to see. Your style actually almost reminds me of Ray Bradbury. The second paragraph rang so true with various conversations I've had with people. And then, your transition to Ape Country with how it came about was concise and hilarious -- like the part about the president's election year. (Though consenting to letting them stay could also be viewed as admitting we are "related" to them... because we don't want to kill them!) I loved the part about the orangutan smashing the tablet and fining for littering. I do question how an orangutan can with "almost human intelligence" could become a police officer but that's besides the point. I liked the line "We not animals." I guess we'll talk like this soon with text-talk! I guess the one thing that got me were the last few lines. Maybe it's just me, but I didn't like the ending all that much. It either seemed unbelievable, or I was expecting more elaboration or something like that... I can't pinpoint what it is.
Zakalwe - "The Philosopher's Widow": My absolute favorite part was Sophie's description of what love is. I'm curious to know how you came up with this weird, creative stuff! I'm (somewhat unwillingly) reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and it was good to reflect on your story and how it relates to themes in this book. I also liked the sci-fi component. I guess, for me, it put me in a well-situated state of mind to hear Sophie's perspective.
Ourobolus - "Faux Pas": Wow you nailed this theme entirely. Heck, it's even in the title! Btw, pretty awesome union!
QuantumBro - "MAC and Me in the Mysterious Planet": I really enjoyed the time that you took to build your world but I think I got confused a little. I think this is just me but I felt there was some good description and then we got hurled into everything at warp speed until the end. This might just be the nature of writing short stories, and perhaps this piece would have worked better as something longer.
P44 - "RED": I think you did one heck of a job of creating something that, to me, really hits on the secondary objective. I think it's very hard to weave together people's lives but I think you were able to do that.
Sober - "Workplace Romance": Very nice set up that was easy to get into. The whole bit about the florist and the red flowers was pretty funny. There were times where I got the two male characters confused, or perhaps, confused as to who was saying what, but this is a common problem I have so it might just be me. I liked it when June said "Still working" when the Rudy kept on asking about Brussels. Also, I liked the names, June, Rudy, and Danny.
FlowersisBritish - "Dip": Wow this was really fascinating with all the different points of view! I really like how extreme the characters were -- or how distinct they were, rather, like with the Scientology stuff vs. the mountain climbing stuff, etc.
MikeM - "Tea With Rory": Wow, what an amazing story. Bonus points on my part because I was reading this while waiting for an appointment -- but the non-stressful kind, but still, it was a good setting for this read. I am hesitant to ask how true this story is, especially given the photo. I really liked how the dad took the perspective of the kid and thought about things I often think about: how long will this kid be happy? how are they able to ignore some advice and not others? where do all these rules come from?! You did a great job weaving in the dad's memories of his biological mother, his new mother, his wife, and his daughter. Is it really like walking on egg shells THAT much?! Sigh.
Cyan - "False Step": You created this story so well that it was so easy to visualize. And, the way you described the fall was beautifully captured with good timing to it. Was there any reason why you chose a bird as the adviser? No matter, just curious. I was enchanted by how you connected the argument with the Spirit of the Staircase and actually getting back on the staircase itself. However, I wish there was a little more elaboration on that. I'm hesitant to say that because I wonder if it would have killed the pace, but at the same time, that was the meat of the story -- for me, at least.
Osorio - "Sibyl Service": Poor Liberty Island. It's name is now so empty! I liked the part about double chins. It made me think of locus of control and how we sometimes make potentially minute problems HUGE, perhaps because we know we can never solve them. It's like a safe way of beating our heads against the wall.
Nezumi - "Blame": This was so awesome. It was so intense, and dark -- discussing the main character in a not-so-likable way -- and yet, so human. And all the while, it was also sort of humorous. I was impressed that you could keep your word count so short and yet create so much. It reminded me of this YouTube video I saw of a little girl who climbed up on the counter and kept on saying "I love you, you are the best, I love my pets, I love my parents, I love my friends, you are so great, everything is so great" while she danced and talked to her reflection. I liked the humorous opening and then how the reflection spun out of control and how the main character tried to explain herself. It was interesting too, to think of how the MC thought she was alone when she had those bad experiences, and alone when she talked in the mirror. I sensed that she was embarrassed by having those moments brought up by "another," the reflection.
Charade - "Tipping Point": I can't believe how the waiter how had to inhibit himself from exploding on these terrible customers?! How is it possible?! I wouldn't have been able to contain myself! I really enjoyed this and I felt like it would have been to fun to watch in an 3D Imax theater.
Comments:
Everyone, thanks so much for the feedback! Really helpful to think about pacing, amount of detail, and characters, etc.
It KILLS me that we can't have 4 people crammed into our 3 votes. I literally wrote these 4 names on pieces of paper and pulled them out in a random order. It kills me!
1. Aaron
2. Cyan
3. MikeM
hm. Nezumi
Short feedback:
ElectricBlanketFire - "Casual Hamburgers": This was so fun to read. Some parts really made me SOL (smirk out loud). I think with some work, you could really polish up this piece and make it 100% hysterical. My favorite part was the part about the cook and his T-shirt and his middle and last name. Why were they obsessed with being so casual? Also, in terms of your casual writing style, I was impressed by how true you kept it to "casual."
MDSVeritas - "Faux": Somehow, I question the British style of talking but I think Ashes would be the best judge of that. What I liked MOST was the dialog; I often get confused as to who is saying what when I'm reading. I feel like it's my own version of dyslexia or something. Dialog dyslexia. But I think you had created characters that were so distinguishable that this wasn't a problem! Well done!
Wreck-It Ralph - "Pongo": I liked the characters of Jessica and Quinn and the twist at the end. I'm not good at writing about more than 3 characters, so I was impressed how you were able to pull it off. It still blows my mind how some authors write about 1000s of characters.
ThLunarian - "The Differential": Wow! This was such a unique read! The characters you created were fun and interactive. I wish I were more privy to the world of fan-fiction to fully understand this story. It's embarrassing how ignorant I am in this area. Nevertheless, this was a very fun story.
Aaron - "Primal Knowledge": OK, so this was AMAZING. I seriously wanted to call you up on an old-fashioned telephone (except I don't know your number) and ask you why the hell you haven't published this amazing stuff for the world to see. Your style actually almost reminds me of Ray Bradbury. The second paragraph rang so true with various conversations I've had with people. And then, your transition to Ape Country with how it came about was concise and hilarious -- like the part about the president's election year. (Though consenting to letting them stay could also be viewed as admitting we are "related" to them... because we don't want to kill them!) I loved the part about the orangutan smashing the tablet and fining for littering. I do question how an orangutan can with "almost human intelligence" could become a police officer but that's besides the point. I liked the line "We not animals." I guess we'll talk like this soon with text-talk! I guess the one thing that got me were the last few lines. Maybe it's just me, but I didn't like the ending all that much. It either seemed unbelievable, or I was expecting more elaboration or something like that... I can't pinpoint what it is.
Zakalwe - "The Philosopher's Widow": My absolute favorite part was Sophie's description of what love is. I'm curious to know how you came up with this weird, creative stuff! I'm (somewhat unwillingly) reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and it was good to reflect on your story and how it relates to themes in this book. I also liked the sci-fi component. I guess, for me, it put me in a well-situated state of mind to hear Sophie's perspective.
Ourobolus - "Faux Pas": Wow you nailed this theme entirely. Heck, it's even in the title! Btw, pretty awesome union!
QuantumBro - "MAC and Me in the Mysterious Planet": I really enjoyed the time that you took to build your world but I think I got confused a little. I think this is just me but I felt there was some good description and then we got hurled into everything at warp speed until the end. This might just be the nature of writing short stories, and perhaps this piece would have worked better as something longer.
P44 - "RED": I think you did one heck of a job of creating something that, to me, really hits on the secondary objective. I think it's very hard to weave together people's lives but I think you were able to do that.
Sober - "Workplace Romance": Very nice set up that was easy to get into. The whole bit about the florist and the red flowers was pretty funny. There were times where I got the two male characters confused, or perhaps, confused as to who was saying what, but this is a common problem I have so it might just be me. I liked it when June said "Still working" when the Rudy kept on asking about Brussels. Also, I liked the names, June, Rudy, and Danny.
FlowersisBritish - "Dip": Wow this was really fascinating with all the different points of view! I really like how extreme the characters were -- or how distinct they were, rather, like with the Scientology stuff vs. the mountain climbing stuff, etc.
MikeM - "Tea With Rory": Wow, what an amazing story. Bonus points on my part because I was reading this while waiting for an appointment -- but the non-stressful kind, but still, it was a good setting for this read. I am hesitant to ask how true this story is, especially given the photo.
I really liked how the dad took the perspective of the kid and thought about things I often think about: how long will this kid be happy? how are they able to ignore some advice and not others? where do all these rules come from?! You did a great job weaving in the dad's memories of his biological mother, his new mother, his wife, and his daughter. Is it really like walking on egg shells THAT much?! Sigh.Cyan - "False Step": You created this story so well that it was so easy to visualize. And, the way you described the fall was beautifully captured with good timing to it. Was there any reason why you chose a bird as the adviser? No matter, just curious. I was enchanted by how you connected the argument with the Spirit of the Staircase and actually getting back on the staircase itself. However, I wish there was a little more elaboration on that. I'm hesitant to say that because I wonder if it would have killed the pace, but at the same time, that was the meat of the story -- for me, at least.
Osorio - "Sibyl Service": Poor Liberty Island. It's name is now so empty! I liked the part about double chins. It made me think of locus of control and how we sometimes make potentially minute problems HUGE, perhaps because we know we can never solve them. It's like a safe way of beating our heads against the wall.
Nezumi - "Blame": This was so awesome. It was so intense, and dark -- discussing the main character in a not-so-likable way -- and yet, so human. And all the while, it was also sort of humorous. I was impressed that you could keep your word count so short and yet create so much. It reminded me of this YouTube video I saw of a little girl who climbed up on the counter and kept on saying "I love you, you are the best, I love my pets, I love my parents, I love my friends, you are so great, everything is so great" while she danced and talked to her reflection. I liked the humorous opening and then how the reflection spun out of control and how the main character tried to explain herself. It was interesting too, to think of how the MC thought she was alone when she had those bad experiences, and alone when she talked in the mirror. I sensed that she was embarrassed by having those moments brought up by "another," the reflection.
Charade - "Tipping Point": I can't believe how the waiter how had to inhibit himself from exploding on these terrible customers?! How is it possible?! I wouldn't have been able to contain myself! I really enjoyed this and I felt like it would have been to fun to watch in an 3D Imax theater.
Comments:
Everyone, thanks so much for the feedback! Really helpful to think about pacing, amount of detail, and characters, etc.
I didn't get it... is it because you write such awesome, extensive feedback, so it means you'd have to write a novel because there were so many entries?
It could be true! I could be Cyan's alter ego! Darn, would have been fun to hear Nezumi's accent! And to try to talk in German! I took German in high school but I think I forgot it all except for maybe a few lines that are completely useless.
Wow I'm so glad that this is what you deciphered from the story. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to convey that.
Wow this is the biggest compliment ever. However, are you actually reading my stories?! I feel like they are often dark and gruesome! Lol! And yeah, I guess I was trying to think of what might happen if this character just let go (in a very "Frozen" sort of way) of all the upper class norms -- and maybe it'd be for the best. But you're right, probably unlikely that his luck would last for long!Tangent - "En Los Amigos" - There's something about your writing that I just like. I can't put my finger on it exactly... I guess energetic? Joyful? Happy? Something like that. I never got to say this last week, but you're kinda what inspired me to attempt more happy endings with my own writing (don't know how long that'll last though
I had the same problem. I've tried to do HMs less since I know some folks don't like it, but sometimes I just can't help it. >_<
Votes:
1. Mike M - "Tea With Rory"
2. Zakalwe - "The Philosopher's Widow"
3. Nezumi - "Blame"
HM: Charade, Ourobolus
QuantumBro
Banned
Sorry for not having any comments, I'll probably get a chance to edit them later today.
1. Charade
2. P44
3. Tangent
1. Charade
2. P44
3. Tangent
I thought I was! Though maybe I'm confusing yours with Cyan's. Y'know, alter ego and all
But seriously, hmmmm. Well the first one I read of yours was that pictograph one. That was pretty dark, yeah. I think I had in mind the stick/twig one and last week's (though last week's had that undercurrent of dark too).
The Results:
1.) MikeM - Tea with Rory
2.) Nezumi - Blame
3.) Cyan - False Step
Vote Count:
MikeM - 19 (3)
Nezumi - 14 (3)
Cyan - 11 (3)
Aaron - 7 (2)
Zakalwe - 6 (1)
Charade - 5 (1)
FlowersisBritish - 5
Sober - 2
MDSVeritas - 2
P44 - 2
Tangent - 2
QuantumBro - 1
Ourobolus - 1
ThLunarian - 1
Congratulation Mike. It is now your honor to present to us the 150th Writing Challenge!
1.) MikeM - Tea with Rory
2.) Nezumi - Blame
3.) Cyan - False Step
Vote Count:
MikeM - 19 (3)
Nezumi - 14 (3)
Cyan - 11 (3)
Aaron - 7 (2)
Zakalwe - 6 (1)
Charade - 5 (1)
FlowersisBritish - 5
Sober - 2
MDSVeritas - 2
P44 - 2
Tangent - 2
QuantumBro - 1
Ourobolus - 1
ThLunarian - 1
Congratulation Mike. It is now your honor to present to us the 150th Writing Challenge!
I may *comment* on my recent prolonged string of 2nd place finishes, but I wouldn't characterize it as *complaining.*
New thread is up.
New thread is up.
- Status