FlowersisBritish Really liked the seemingly tranquil set up here. You created some nice imagery, seeing as I've been playing Alien Isolation lately I think it helped to imagine the ship they were building as the nostromo. Sinister. All round it was a nice and enjoyable insight into these two characters' shared moment.
Mike M Loved it. Was thrown at first by the potatoes with eyes. Would make me think twice to start shredding the skin with a peeler.. I found the concept so cool and all the tibits of backstory. And the finale was mighty satisfying. Well played.
Cyan Another concept I really dug. Nicely paced with the flashbacks. Really like how you finished off the plot with basically a broken paradox. Pretty grim.
mu cephei Really liked the premise here and thought the ending was fittingly bleak. Really nicely written throughout.
Tangent liked the sentiment and enjoyed the short and sweet summary of this mother entering parenting. Good stuff.
Dangerbyrnes I liked the idea here but I found it hard to care why either character carried on doing what they were doing. Of course the protagonist wants her sister to live but there was little to go on to see why either were so relentless in foiling one another. It also left me wondering what it meant to die in the world it was set only to wake up again in the same predicament. Was the protag ever awake? Seemingly cool concept though.
RoyalDuke Sorry to say I couldn't open your link on my phone. :/
1. Mike M
2. FlowersisBritish
3. Cyan
HM. dangerbyrnes
They were all great, voting was very hard.
The Fray by Mike M. Wow. Loved pretty much everything about it.
Youre Doing it Wrong by Tangent This was great. I particularly liked the marsupial thing and lets just not overthink this one to death.
Live Forever by Cyan Idea and execution great. A couple of things that made me pause: the silo thing, why were they the only ones that could have found it? (just explained as slender and foolish that I can see, which counts most kids imo). Also the wiki Sarah and Val pushing her over the edge is probably meant to be intentionally daft, but still.
Ship Wrights by FlowersisBritish Simple and evocative. Reminds me a little of a story I wrote once with similar themes (poor people building spaceships and the work ethic behind it etc) so it covered stuff I find interesting to explore.
Fish Bowl by Ainsz Great idea and ending. The different sections were a bit confusing but unavoidably so I guess.
Twenty Eight by dangerbyrnes I really liked the idea and the way you did it, and the ending was great. The writing is considerably more polished than last entry, however you do mix up your tenses a bit (kinda like me in this comment lol). There wasnt any mechanism for Cara to be doing what she did, that I saw, I would have liked at least a nod towards an explanation.
The Haunter of the Dark by RoyaleDuke I feel bad for not drawing your attention to the word limit. I thought the idea was great, I was interested in where it was going. The writing was pretty scruffy in places, and it switched from third to first person a few times.
Ainsz: I had a difficult time following this one. The first section in particular; you introduce your protagonist, only to state three quarters of the way through that his name is actually something else entirely. The way Lauren greets him and speaks with him after act makes it sound like she has no recollection of what they just did, and its not as though getting handcuffed for a handy and edging even moves the kinky meter needle, let alone rates anything near depraved. The other sections just come across as disjointed and unrelated to each other outside of the second and final ones. The whole thing reminded me heavily of a short story I read long ago (that I cant remember the title or author of) where it kept jumping through different iterations of what the characters life could have been like, and then in the end it turns out he died in a nuclear bomb detonation as a teenager while raking the leaves, and the rest of eternity he dreams of all the ways his life could have gone or something.
Mike M: This is one of those instances where I appropriated ideas from a completely different story idea. Originally I had envisioned the Fray as occurring along routes of interstellar travel as the warping of space eventually wore it down. Then it turns out there was a TNG episode to that effect, so that got back burnered. The notion of reality by consensus is a recurring thing for me, as longtime participants may already know. That is in part owed to Mage: The Ascension and how it handles magic, which I always found infinitely fascinating even if I never actually played the game that much (anyone familiar would recognize the effects of the Fray as a Paradox backlash). The greatest difficulty I had was coming up with ways for the Fray to fuck with things, and even then Im not super satisfied with the variety of outcomes. All the vegetables took on various grotesque human attributes, one guy got sucked through the floorboards while its alluded that Greg was somehow engrained into a wall
dangerbyrnes: Really needs an editing pass. Lots of verb tense problems, the closeness of your point of view varies (at some points were told what Cara is thinking and feeling, others were told that she seems to be in some state or another). More than that, this was an incredibly dry read; it seemed like almost every sentence was a placeholder with a note about what a more descriptive sentence would be about. I did like the core premise, but wasnt a fan of the fact that the resolution essentially happened off-screen with only a summary ending that she was eventually successful, but with no indication of how that was accomplished. We never found out how she discovered the time travel was possible, which I think is not necessarily something that would need to be stated, but the explanation at the end where we find out its not time travel so much as, what, Quantum Leaping across dimensions or something? That was an unnecessary curveball, especially since she never knows about it in the end doesnt know the price of what she accomplished.
Tangent:
No, youre doing it wrong!
This was a large factor in my wife and my decision not to have a second kid. Maybe well adopt down the line.
mu cephei: This was mostly pretty great, though there were a few details here and there that seemed at odds with the story, but that almost certainly comes as the result of decades exposure to all the usual fantasy tropes. Things like the idea of medieval-ish era people going out for lunch together seemed too colloquial, which is completely ass-backwards because that was because eating at home was a luxury for most people at the point in history this is apparently modeled after. Likewise, I was a bit thrown by the idea of the blacksmith have a parlor to meet in, because to my understanding smithing wasnt a particularly lucrative profession, unless hes doing some gold work on the side or something. Or maybe thats just born of my own ignorance of the period. Missing the portion of his story where he actually became wealthy seemed like a pretty significant hole to me, and the ending had a one-two punch of a.) being somewhat unbelievable in that his mastery of sword fighting was such that he could place himself in the way of a killing blow that would be as efficient as possible and b.) I dont think theres a reason for him wanting to die that I can readily believe. He certainly didnt do it for the sake of his wifes happiness (or at least I cant believe that he did) since he said from the start of their marriage that her feelings dont matter.
FlowersisBritish: I found myself wondering a lot about the economy of this world where theyre paid well, but live in a shanty town, and only the super-wealthy can afford to travel by space, yet theres enough of such traffic to justify building huge ships and keep them in work. Ship wrights today are pretty comfortably above the average salary, Id imagine that skilled labor on the edge of space would probably warrant even more money (I mean hell, look at the pay rate differential on people who work on an oil rig versus doing the same jobs on land). Yet theyll never have enough money to travel in space? Outside of that, I thought the details of a space shipyard were well done and set the scene really well. Though Samara was nominally the main character, she never amounted to anything more than hard worker works hard and had very little characterization. Julius completely overshadowed her, it would be nice if there was more there for him to bounce off her. Whatever conflict exists is pretty thin to boot, so this mostly reads as a scene in a shipyard of the future with no plot.
Cyan: From the moment the narrator said they knew Val wasnt going to shoot them, it was immediately obvious that was what was about to happen. And then again, someone says that theres nothing glowing green in the missile silo, but then thats exactly what they find when they head down into its depths. The central premise here seems to run into the same sort of paradoxical problems you get with time travel stories. If Val knew everything, then wouldnt she know Sarah would be the more prominent of the two? That the Wikipedia page would be changed? What the effects of Vals experiments with immortality would result in? It also seems a pretty extreme reaction to go from gee, Im jealous that my girlfriend gets all the attention to Im going to trap her in an eternal hell from her perspective and kill her to all external observations. The motive just wasnt there for me; it makes Val go from zero to sixty on the psychopathy meter in a quarter of a second. It needed much, much more support to be even remotely justified.
RoyaleDuke: I made it through the first six pages, since thats about the word budget, give or take. I can see what youre going for, but therere enough technical errors to drive me to the point of distraction before we even get into things like starting a dozen sentences in a row with He [verb]. Its important to have a firm grasp on the fundamentals of grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure before you can make real headway on the craft part of the equation. Like I said, I could see what you were going for, but its not necessary to file the serial numbers off Miskatonic and Arkham, those have been in the public domain for quite some time, and to change them by only one letter just makes me raise an eyebrow.
Votes:
1.) mu cephei
2.) tangent
3.) FlowersisBritish
I liked these stories the most, a lot of cool ideas that were well executed.
Thanks for the feedback on my story guys, sorry I went over but I am even more sorry I didn't get to finish it and refine some of the errors.
As per Mike M's feedback, I played with the names because they were meant to be passing references to Lovecraft's cities(which do exist in the world of my story).
The idea behind Larkham was more of the idea of people going there "on a lark", a mischievous or pointless journey. This plays into the themes of the city being very xenophobic.
Can you give me some examples of the grammer, etc? I'm pretty bad at such things but usually I am pretty verbose when describing scenes. In the story I was trying to establish a feeling of repetition that would have had more meaning later in the story. That said I really welcome any breakdowns you can provide so I can better understand what you are talking about. Improving my craft is very important to me.
EDIT: Reading through and I didn't get a chance to edit properly, so there are things like Role instead of Roll, etc incorrect usage of some words and mistakes. Honestly all stuff I could fix in later revisions when I finish it.
I liked these stories the most, a lot of cool ideas that were well executed.
Thanks for the feedback on my story guys, sorry I went over but I am even more sorry I didn't get to finish it and refine some of the errors.
As per Mike M's feedback, I played with the names because they were meant to be passing references to Lovecraft's cities(which do exist in the world of my story).
The idea behind Larkham was more of the idea of people going there "on a lark", a mischievous or pointless journey. This plays into the themes of the city being very xenophobic.
Can you give me some examples of the grammer, etc? I'm pretty bad at such things but usually I am pretty verbose when describing scenes. In the story I was trying to establish a feeling of repetition that would have had more meaning later in the story. That said I really welcome any breakdowns you can provide so I can better understand what you are talking about. Improving my craft is very important to me.
EDIT: Reading through and I didn't get a chance to edit properly, so there are things like Role instead of Roll, etc incorrect usage of some words and mistakes. Honestly all stuff I could fix in later revisions when I finish it.
On that note, I heard from a poster recently that they were interested in maybe submitting something to the challenges but were kind of put off by some of the, hrrm, more strenuous feedback. Which is fine, different people have different styles of critique that they prefer to give or receive, not gonna cast judgment or anything. I'm mostly mentioning this in order to say publicly that if anyone wants to submit a story but prefers not to get feedback from us, that's 100% ok, and you can just note in your submission that you're opting out of critiques. Do what you need to do to get your writing flowing.
Gosh y'know I think it was a little bit boorish of me to make the comment I did. I have no idea what your friend is going through and could be something very serious, not make light of! Nevertheless, I'm very relieved to hear that at least it made you laugh!
...
Reading stories...while attending an online conference, so it's hard to give full attention. I'll give this another 45 minutes but I might have to bow out of actually voting if I feel like I can't be a focused reader!
Cyan, I like your idea for those who don't want feedback! Might open the doors to writers with a different style!
Some critiques, and a line or two from your story I really really liked for one reason or another.
Ainsz: So I think you should have opened with the child part, and structured it chronologically. I found it tough to get a bearing on where/what was happening with all the jumps. Though, downside of my advice is that the opening you had was pretty strong. Your ending also left me a little lost as to what was happening within it. "Doggy, who's real name is Floyd, unlocks the remaining three shackles and staggers up on his feet. His arousal diminished, he walks over to his pile of clothes. Lauren sits naked at her round plastic table – Budweiser branded ashtray on top, puffing out a cloud of yellow then blue lit smoke."
Mike M: I am always impressed by your level of detail. After reading "sound of an acton rack" I felt like I knew a little bit more about guns from that tiny detail. Happens all the time when i read your stuff, it's like you have a encyopedia on hand all the time or something... It took a while for the story to resonate with me. I found myself confused in the first part as I tried to catch up to the terminology of the world. Once I got a full grasp of what the Fray was with the confrontation scene with Kate(though i was getting the basic idea around the vegetable scene) this really neat world of yours clicked into place for me. Great action scene too, abstract but surprisingly easy to follow. "t wouldn’t be the first time that food had gotten Frayed; only last month there were the carrots that had screamed when she sliced them, but they cooked up and went down the same as any normal ones"
Dangerbrynes: There are a lot of great stylistic things/ideas within it, even if the story didn't come together for me. What grabbed my attention was the little act of repetition and the use of time travel. I can appreciate the struggle to save someone from depression. It's a valiant goal. I have also always really like the idea of failing at time travel goals constantly. Cause I am generally depressed and like to see people suffer. Especially like the description of all those alternate lives and how the jump didn't go well. Would have liked more of that kind of stuff instead of it being kind of rushed through at the end in a 'moral of the story' kind of way. "Cara stands on the edge of the building, contemplating a bad decision. Was it a decision she made before, or the one she’s about to make."
Tangent: I have always really liked hearing about parents experience with kids; both good and bad. Very informative. "When you become a parent, you learn to hedge every bet. Absolutes are absolute jinxes. Every statement is couched with modifiers: so far, yet, maybe, might... Is she still asleep? So far...."
Mu Cephei: Century Knights is a really cool name. That entire interaction between Finn and the knights as A+(especially the "is that supposed to be a plus?" part). The lead up was pretty heavy considering the pacing overall, it made me think the story was going to revolve around stealing the sword, not jumpcuts through his life. Still, it was pretty interesting through out. "Finn dropped to his knees. He’d wanted to die facing the sea, but all he could see was the massive black rock, and people’s boots. He tipped face-first into the sand."
Cyan: What I thought worked most about this was the pacing. it was very quick, cutting from the shooting, to a short scene, back to the bullet at an even pace. Al lot of interesting pieces at work here that were all synching up nicely. one of my favorites you've written in awhile. "What would happen if I stepped off a bridge?(A lucky landing where nothing was broken.) What would happen if I drank poison? (I immediately and painfully vomited it all up.) What would happen if she stood nearby, perfectly still, nothing around me to twist chance, and tried to shoot me in the head?"
Royal Duke: Too long and too late for me to read completely at the moment. Probably gonna come back with something tomorrow, but for now I would recommend Steven King's advice(I'm sure you know it already) of cutting out 15% of words from a final draft. This was kinda word heavy for me. "The murders were ghastly, strange and for a lack of better words alien."
Gosh y'know I think it was a little bit boorish of me to make the comment I did. I have no idea what your friend is going through and could be something very serious, not make light of! Nevertheless, I'm very relieved to hear that at least it made you laugh.
Don't worry I'm a firm believer in that one should try and find something to laugh/smile in any situation possible and I also released my friend into the care of her parents and she is feeling a bit better, so there really isn't anything to feel bad about
Votes:
1. mu cephei - "The Duel" - Good use of bookends and a few key scenes to tell the story, though I would've loved to see some of the turning point. Did a solid job both setting up the reader to want things to work out and be surprised when she hated him, while also setting up his character flaws that clearly caused that.
2. FlowersisBritish - "Ship Wrights" - Slow and contemplative, but sometimes I like slow and contemplative. I feel like making the owner laugh at him is almost a little too over the top. Not that people don't act that way, but that it hits us over the head with it. Really love the imagery and setting.
3. Mike M - "The Fray" - Maaaaaan. That beginning with the eyes seriously made me go "holy shit" and think I was in for a kind of slow burn horror thing that was going to keep me awake tonight. Then the middle was kind of expositiony and "heroine uses the magic system to beat some bandits," which wasn't really what I had been expecting and hoping for.
Thanks for the feedback guys. Looks like the main criticism is that it didn't make much sense.. That's a pretty big flaw lol. Ehh, for what it's worth I'd like to shed some light on it if anybody is interested.
So musical inspiration (which I'm surprised nobody seemed to pick up on) was Pink Floyd. I really hammered in references and imagery from their music, even a line from their song 'Time'. Each chapter in the story was loosely based on their consecutive albums, from Darkside Of The Moon to The Wall. The epilogue being a play on the album The Endless River.
Basically the idea was that Floyd was a man that lived selfishly to seek a life on the edge. Trying to find what satisfied that need until it seemingly came to him (the apocalypse chapter). He's sort of found his 'heavan' in a hellish and violent world.
Syd on the other hand has found his hell. In an other wise peaceful and tranquil existence by the sea, Syd hasn't been able to leave his brother's corpse and has sat alone in depression.
Both brothers died and both were seemingly caught by the tree from their perspective, while the other hit the ground.. Only Floyd doesn't realise it and Syd does, thanks to the endless bleeding from the gashes in their heads.. Floyd can't see his. And in that, Floyd has subconsciously created a heaven for himself overtime while Syd has consciously created hell for himself.
Obviously not all of that came through but that's the jist of what the story was meant to be. I do need to get better at getting more information down in less words. Anyway, hopefully that summary somewhat clicked with the story and makes some sense .
dangerbyrnes:the closeness of your point of view varies (at some points were told what Cara is thinking and feeling, others were told that she seems to be in some state or another). More than that, this was an incredibly dry read; it seemed like almost every sentence was a placeholder with a note about what a more descriptive sentence would be about. I did like the core premise, but wasnt a fan of the fact that the resolution essentially happened off-screen with only a summary ending that she was eventually successful, but with no indication of how that was accomplished. We never found out how she discovered the time travel was possible, which I think is not necessarily something that would need to be stated, but the explanation at the end where we find out its not time travel so much as, what, Quantum Leaping across dimensions or something? That was an unnecessary curveball, especially since she never knows about it in the end doesnt know the price of what she accomplished.
Not sure how you came to that conclusion, guess that means I didn't explain it well.
But no, its just time travel. she goes back in time, but the timeline she left actually keeps going, rather than dissapearing like in most time travel stories.
I still don't have feel for the word counts, i see 2000 words and I'm like, yeah it'll fit. It doesn't fit.
thanks for the feedback, also i really don't mind if someone wants to be brutally honest about my entries. i feel like if you want to get any better you need that.
Ainsz: I had a difficult time following this one. The first section in particular; you introduce your protagonist, only to state three quarters of the way through that his name is actually something else entirely. The way Lauren greets him and speaks with him after act makes it sound like she has no recollection of what they just did, and its not as though getting handcuffed for a handy and edging even moves the kinky meter needle, let alone rates anything near depraved. The other sections just come across as disjointed and unrelated to each other outside of the second and final ones. The whole thing reminded me heavily of a short story I read long ago (that I cant remember the title or author of) where it kept jumping through different iterations of what the characters life could have been like, and then in the end it turns out he died in a nuclear bomb detonation as a teenager while raking the leaves, and the rest of eternity he dreams of all the ways his life could have gone or something.
Mike M: This is one of those instances where I appropriated ideas from a completely different story idea. Originally I had envisioned the Fray as occurring along routes of interstellar travel as the warping of space eventually wore it down. Then it turns out there was a TNG episode to that effect, so that got back burnered. The notion of reality by consensus is a recurring thing for me, as longtime participants may already know. That is in part owed to Mage: The Ascension and how it handles magic, which I always found infinitely fascinating even if I never actually played the game that much (anyone familiar would recognize the effects of the Fray as a Paradox backlash). The greatest difficulty I had was coming up with ways for the Fray to fuck with things, and even then Im not super satisfied with the variety of outcomes. All the vegetables took on various grotesque human attributes, one guy got sucked through the floorboards while its alluded that Greg was somehow engrained into a wall
dangerbyrnes: Really needs an editing pass. Lots of verb tense problems, the closeness of your point of view varies (at some points were told what Cara is thinking and feeling, others were told that she seems to be in some state or another). More than that, this was an incredibly dry read; it seemed like almost every sentence was a placeholder with a note about what a more descriptive sentence would be about. I did like the core premise, but wasnt a fan of the fact that the resolution essentially happened off-screen with only a summary ending that she was eventually successful, but with no indication of how that was accomplished. We never found out how she discovered the time travel was possible, which I think is not necessarily something that would need to be stated, but the explanation at the end where we find out its not time travel so much as, what, Quantum Leaping across dimensions or something? That was an unnecessary curveball, especially since she never knows about it in the end doesnt know the price of what she accomplished.
Tangent:
No, youre doing it wrong!
This was a large factor in my wife and my decision not to have a second kid. Maybe well adopt down the line.
mu cephei: This was mostly pretty great, though there were a few details here and there that seemed at odds with the story, but that almost certainly comes as the result of decades exposure to all the usual fantasy tropes. Things like the idea of medieval-ish era people going out for lunch together seemed too colloquial, which is completely ass-backwards because that was because eating at home was a luxury for most people at the point in history this is apparently modeled after. Likewise, I was a bit thrown by the idea of the blacksmith have a parlor to meet in, because to my understanding smithing wasnt a particularly lucrative profession, unless hes doing some gold work on the side or something. Or maybe thats just born of my own ignorance of the period. Missing the portion of his story where he actually became wealthy seemed like a pretty significant hole to me, and the ending had a one-two punch of a.) being somewhat unbelievable in that his mastery of sword fighting was such that he could place himself in the way of a killing blow that would be as efficient as possible and b.) I dont think theres a reason for him wanting to die that I can readily believe. He certainly didnt do it for the sake of his wifes happiness (or at least I cant believe that he did) since he said from the start of their marriage that her feelings dont matter.
FlowersisBritish: I found myself wondering a lot about the economy of this world where theyre paid well, but live in a shanty town, and only the super-wealthy can afford to travel by space, yet theres enough of such traffic to justify building huge ships and keep them in work. Ship wrights today are pretty comfortably above the average salary, Id imagine that skilled labor on the edge of space would probably warrant even more money (I mean hell, look at the pay rate differential on people who work on an oil rig versus doing the same jobs on land). Yet theyll never have enough money to travel in space? Outside of that, I thought the details of a space shipyard were well done and set the scene really well. Though Samara was nominally the main character, she never amounted to anything more than hard worker works hard and had very little characterization. Julius completely overshadowed her, it would be nice if there was more there for him to bounce off her. Whatever conflict exists is pretty thin to boot, so this mostly reads as a scene in a shipyard of the future with no plot.
Cyan: From the moment the narrator said they knew Val wasnt going to shoot them, it was immediately obvious that was what was about to happen. And then again, someone says that theres nothing glowing green in the missile silo, but then thats exactly what they find when they head down into its depths. The central premise here seems to run into the same sort of paradoxical problems you get with time travel stories. If Val knew everything, then wouldnt she know Sarah would be the more prominent of the two? That the Wikipedia page would be changed? What the effects of Vals experiments with immortality would result in? It also seems a pretty extreme reaction to go from gee, Im jealous that my girlfriend gets all the attention to Im going to trap her in an eternal hell from her perspective and kill her to all external observations. The motive just wasnt there for me; it makes Val go from zero to sixty on the psychopathy meter in a quarter of a second. It needed much, much more support to be even remotely justified.
RoyaleDuke: I made it through the first six pages, since thats about the word budget, give or take. I can see what youre going for, but therere enough technical errors to drive me to the point of distraction before we even get into things like starting a dozen sentences in a row with He [verb]. Its important to have a firm grasp on the fundamentals of grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure before you can make real headway on the craft part of the equation. Like I said, I could see what you were going for, but its not necessary to file the serial numbers off Miskatonic and Arkham, those have been in the public domain for quite some time, and to change them by only one letter just makes me raise an eyebrow.
I love Mike M's feedback. The integrity and honesty it takes to give it would be useless without the critical acumen which he has in spades. I think we're all pretty lucky to get it. Speaking for myself, it's always been spot on.
