Hey Ashes, if you've already read down to the final story in the list, then how come you haven't posted your crits yet? Could it be that your story is near the end? Hmm...
Hey Ashes, if you've already read down to the final story in the list, then how come you haven't posted your crits yet? Could it be that your story is near the end? Hmm...
I didn't realise that my post was the last post on the fifty page thing... (I switched over after that 50 page/100 page thread a while ago.
Ashes1396 said:
Day 4, and the first reviews are slowly creeping in as Wimbledon gets under way. hmm... Is this telling I wonder? Do these reviewers have nothing to lose? Do their stories come in the latter half, or are theirs so obvious that they've just gone and put all their chips in? Crow normally does all his reviews in one go, and here he paused for thought? Cyan seems super duper confident, but I'm not so sure...
I think I'll focus on a few of the wild journeyman, who come into the tavern now and again, in from the mountainous cold...
Bootaaay -
hmm, I thought you wrote the <The Old Man and His Lover> but now I'm not to sure. We'll see I guess... I have another story that might be yours but I'm not sayin yet. Get your crits in first!
Thosedeafmutes -
Oh, science indeed. I thought at first you wrote <Dissonance>. But hang on mo, you stopped at three stories, whilst normally you would have written all of them in one go... what gives... hmm...
Lone_Prodigy -
Funny fact: first thing I thought: Ok, lone_prodigy. Sci-fi. Has to be... but the first thing I thought when reading <summer ale> is you, and I cannot fathom rationally, why though, and so I can't get that out of my head; however that Ronito fellow is doing my head in. I keep switching him around. And he might be a contender for this... so you might still be safe one way or the other. lol
Puddles -
Quite a few people think you wrote <pretending> And I'm in this boat too. Though, dresden, ronito, crow and J.d. and Dnd, would you believe it, is in there with you. Get your crits in dude! I have a second, and third story for you though. Just laying that on the table.
Masque: I dont feel like this story has reached its conclusion when it ends. It think the point of the story party and the effect the woman has on him as they escape into the city on their night of drunken revelry. We also never really get to know the woman. Oh sure, we learn a little about her past, but it never really feels like we really now her. Shes a ghost of the festive come to show our Scrooge what hes been missing. Its a great start, but I think you need to go forward.
I am the Bear Fun. I enjoyed reading this, but it feels like there was a bit too much fluff. Theres a lot of characters but other than Grant and maybe Jack, they dont really feel all that important. Dan and Walt in particular just feel kind of there, despite the fact theyre supposed to be Grants good friends. Still, there were some good lines and a couple amusing bits.
A Change of Heart: Well written with a good tone, but over all, its a bit too cliché and a bit too short to break away from that. We know characters only by their names and roles and very rarely do we actually get to see any of the simple humanity of these people. The main character is built nicely, but I think hes hurt by having him predictably fall for the girl, when I think itd be better for him to just decide that she needs to get home.
An Ancient Tale Retold: I am curious as to how a cloud or the wind could possibly hold one of the jade beads, and Im also a little troubled that there was little punishment Xainyus theft of his brothers wishes. That said, the piece does its job well of demonizing Xainyus all-consuming desire to reach above his station. And both characters are very believable.
The Old Man and his Lover: You have done a good job of making an absolutely detestable man into something pitiable. However, I dont think the tone of the work properly sets up the ending. The situation, the very idea of the story, and the way the old man talks do not seem like they could go anywhere else but towards murder, and yet, there is never really a time while reading this that I feel like the old man is so unbalanced that he has become a danger.
Without Beer: Simple and effective. Its very well written, and the characters are believable.
Fathers Day: Daddy here is kind of a douche. Honestly, Im sure everyone with a kid has dealt with frustration like this, and the story does a good job of presenting the daily frustrations. However, it doesnt really convey a sense that all of this has built up to the breaking point and to where all of the fathers actions are at least explainable, if not relatable.
Summer Ale: You want to shock someone with a first sentence? Thatll do it. Honestly, its a great character study, and you can slowly feel the man beginning to feel the nibblings of change within him. You present him unembellished, unadorned, and unashamed. Hes a right evil bastard, but he doesnt really know that. The only real flaw this piece has is that I do not get the ending. I think he was having a heart attack, but Im not sure.
Dissonance: This one is another good character study, but the ending has me a little confused. I am unsure if it is just another act or if it is around this girl that he can actually let his guard down.
Well I've read through them all now. Some really good stuff in there. Off the top of my head, I'd say that I liked "Me" the most, but I'll have to read them all again. Gotta head out for a few hours, but when I get back I'll post impressions and my top 3.
Just over 13 hours left.
Edit: "Me" kinda reminds me of something by Sandra Cisneros or Esmerelda Santiago. I wonder if the author is familiar with any of those.
I'm not thinking about that story. I'm thinking of Dnd emulating somebody.
Basically, I've gone through the list, and I have one spot open. And it ain't Ron. I think that spot is Dnd emulating somebody.
edit: we have sixteen people confirmed. one missing. We just all presumed it was ron. I'm just throwing it out there.
In the last challenge (the last one where we were emulating people's styles), cyan gave me the task to emulate dnd. And this one story is very similar to him. and not to Ron.
Sorry, these crits will probably be a bit shorter.
I'm the Bear - You know what? That is a damn fine title. Pretty much encapsulates the whole thing. I love the jaded attitude of the MC toward the production, and how he does it anyway just because he's that kinda guy. Of course, in a real high school play they'd never let the guy not rehearse just because he had nothing to do. Tricky that you never said a word,
DumbNameD_
.
A Change of Heart - Straightforward and moves at a nice clip. I like it. Could've used some more clarity on a few things. Clearly these aren't hardened criminals--why did they decide to do this? And why are they shooting each other at the end? That seems like a hardened criminal thing to do. Originally thought this was
Ashes1396__
, but since another one really seemed like his I'm going
Lone_Prodigy
.
An Ancient Lesson Retold - A nice tale, and does exactly what the title promises. Trouble is, you know exactly how it will end up right from the second paragraph. Still, I do enjoy the telling,
John Dunbar
.
The Old Man and His Lover - Some good descriptive work and nifty dialogue at the beginning. The old man gets a bit haranguey, though. And then the ending just comes out of nowhere--really wasn't expecting that. P.S. consider my usual complaint given,
crowphoenix
.
Without Beer - Good dialogue, nice relationship. I like Maya's trick to get her boyfriend to talk. As far as the story goes, the premise is a bit thin--just talking through a problem the dude has. Might be stronger to present it as it happens or something. P.S. The
Masque - Excellent metaphor and descriptive work at the beginning. And smooth dialogue at the end. Somehow, though, the two don't meld into a cohesive whole. It's either too much runway or too much latter emphasis on dialogue. This is the one I originally thought was
ZephyrFate__
; now I'm going
ThoseDeafMutes
.
Father's Day - Cute kid. Love the description of him at the beginning. I can see how this stuff might be frustrating, but ditching the kid at the park seems a bit much. There must be a whole lot of leadup to this that we haven't seen, or the dad is kinda fucked up, because as is, it doesn't feel justified. That is, by the character to himself. Do you have kids,
Bootaay_____
?
Summer Ale - Killer of a first sentence there, dude. Tricky, sticky subject, and almost impossible to have sympathy for the protagonist after that sentence. Which means I'm not that worried about him when something's going on in the middle of the night. Nice interaction with the cop. Solid work,
Lone_Prodigy_
.
Dissonance - Interesting characters, good dialogue. But the bits seem glued together somewhat haphazardly--I'm not sure what connects them. I did enjoy each one individually though,
Dresden_____
.
Votes:
1. I'm the Bear
2. Me
3. Pretending
HM - Dissonance
1: Without Beer: This was very simple and sweet in the best way. It masterfully describes the classic dilemma of the shy person coming across as stuck-up. It pretty accurately gets into the psyche of why and how this comes about
which I can vouch for because even with slowly trying to improve, I'm still a Marco
. I admit it is a personal choice, but this kind of thing is a must read for anyone, for those stuck lacking self-confidence in how they present themselves to learn how to really be themselves, or for the socialites to better understand the shy and detached.
2: Masque: Nice setup in the beginning that mostly stayed out of the way and slowly built up as the focus drew to the characters, both being the reason for why I like the story. This could very easily fall into the noir archetype of dashing man meets sultry woman, and it kind of does, but the characterization was key in making this different. The man doesn't need her, or anything much for that matter, yet he doesn't fall too far into the brooding loner hole, instead relenting to the curiosity of seeing where the night and the festivities take him. The girl, though conveniently being the one to approach him, doesn't really need him either, simply seeing what he is about before inviting him to the streets. It doesn't need to end in sex, necessarily, for their actions to be worth it. They simply flow with the world.
3: "Manifold" or "I am Legion": Switching perspectives as an omniscient narrator can be difficult to pull off without feeling jarring, this was done very well, considering it perfectly fit the flow of the main action (granted, maybe a *** between them would have worked instead of the, dare I say pretentious Shift) . The end reveal (if you can even call it that) is actually a great concept, and I don't think it was executed as badly as some others have said. In fact, it works well because it is as subtle as it is, not ending completely in an
OMG WE'RE IN THE MATRIX
manner. Nevertheless, it did seem a bit sudden and quick, when there could have at least been tiny hints building up to it throughout. Regardless, the great flow of the narration changes and this ending are why it's here.
Edit: HMs: Pretending, I am the Bear, and A Change of Heart were in my top for a while
Also, you may not have noticed yet, Ashes, but I didn't even write a story this time around. Cyan is 100% accurate.
(I guess my ploy to throw off you wily detectives didn't even work in the end. It only made me look like an arrogant douche praising himself. :O . . .)
There's 16 stories. I'm hoping to get at least ten percent correct, 1.6 = 2 stories. I think 3 will be a par score.
Irish said:
It appears to me as if umad.
Yep, I have no freaking idea.
Also, you may not have noticed yet, Ashes, but I didn't even write a story this time around. Cyan is 100% accurate.
(I guess my ploy to throw off you wily detectives didn't even work in the end. It only made me look like an arrogant douche praising himself. :O . . .)
If you don't mind, I'd love to see your working out. i.e. a breakdown of the math involved.
I think J.d. is something do with maths, but I could be wrong...
If you don't mind, I'd love to see your working out. i.e. a breakdown of the math involved.
I think J.d. is something do with maths, but I could be wrong...
There is a 1/16 chance of successfully guessing a single one of them. 1 - 1/16 is the probability of not successfully guessing it (.9375). That number raised to the sixteenth power is the probability of not guessing 16 times consecutively, which is ~0.356. 1 - that number is the probability that you will guess at least once, which is ~0.644.
... unless I stuffed something up really bad there.
Me - Really captures that feeling of dissociation. Feels very Latin American as well. Some marvelous writing in this piece.
Fear Girl - I really like the mood you create early in this piece. There's a very palpable sense of dread that I think could be even stronger with more work. I was hoping that Fear Girl would turn out to be something as terrifying as the build-up implied it to be. The way you went with the story works on a certain level, but it doesn't match the awesomeness of the first half. It does fit the theme better though.
A Day in the Life - Nice scifi-noir atmosphere in this one. Could use polishing, but so could everything we enter in these challenges. I really liked the idea of sensory overload driving someone to suicide. You could develop this into something special, but it would need a longer word count for the kind of world-building you'd want to do.
Pretending - Needed more work.
Manifold - Identity meets Dark City? Some great lines, some not so great ones. An interesting idea, but the execution wasn't as good as it could have been.
Peaks and Valleys - I want to know who lived, but I guess that's part of the appeal of the story. I really liked this one a lot.
Masque - Holy fucking adjectives, Batman.
No seriously, some of the sentences are a little overwrought, but some of them are superb. Just know that "a vision in ______" has probably been done a few hundred times by now.
It really grabbed me towards the end, and the last line was fantastic. I felt like the woman must have found him attractive somehow, because an average guy sure as hell wouldn't pull many girls with the lines he was spouting.
Gonna go ahead and post those now in case my browser crashes or something. Will finish in my next post.
A piece with a bit of romance, we don't often see that in these competitions. I've never been chatted up by a mysterious, masked red-headed woman during a fireworks festival before, so I cannot say with certainty, however I did think it a little odd that the characters just started spilling childhood memories and inner feelings, but the piece was well written so I'll give it a pass on that. Nice to see the masks thing being taken literally, I guess I should have expected at least one like that.
I saw the word CROW no fewer than two times in this story, and therefore, I am going to just assume crowphoenix wrote this, because I have no real idea.
I'm the Bear by ???
I liked it. That said, I went through the thing feeling like I was missing something. Like there was some elaborate joke being played on the protagonist and I just didn't pick up on it, even though I was looking for it (especially around when he had to buy the suit himself). Nobody else commented on this, so I'll just go sit in the dunce corner.
No idea who wrote it.
A Change of Heart by ???
This is one I liked at the start then started liking less as it went on. I think it suffered from an overly condensed narrative and a telling approach, certainly I had no idea the protagonist was supposed to be getting close to the kidnapped girl until the narrator told me he was. At the end I had to double take because I didn't realise what had happened until I quickly rescanned the passage.
Sin - I didn't really get it. But it does capture that feeling of really early childhood when nothing really makes sense. I have vague recollections of being a 2 year old, and this matches up with those pretty well.
I'm the Bear - This was freaking hilarious. Loved the repetition of "You're the bear." You need to polish this one up a bit and submit it somewhere.
A Change of Heart - These are the dumbest criminals in the world. The whole thing developed too quickly. Why did the guy fall for Cindy? It all just kind of happens for no reason. This piece needed to be a lot longer to avoid feeling contrived.
An Ancient Lesson Retold - Loved it. Was wondering why Cao-ren never confronted his brother about the theft, but I suppose that's irrelevant. Good fable.
Without Beer - You could call this "With Weed" and it would describe pretty well the social anxiety I used to get when I smoked weed. So while I've never really had it while sober, I know the feeling. You captured it pretty damn well.
Father's Day - I've wanted to get rid of kids too (not my own, but I've been a teacher before). This was kind of heartbreaking in a way though.
The Old Man and His Love - Best dialogue of any of the stories, but the second half didn't really live up to the first half. Things got out of hand really quickly.
Summer Ale - I felt like this could have been the start of something great, but it ended too quickly. Was he having a heart attack at the end? I loved the moment when he found the picture in his mailbox.
Dissonance - The narrator is not as smart as he thinks he is. But that's another part of the dissonance. He's clearly quite a good actor. He reminds me of my old college roommate who would never stop acting, even when he was with you 1x1 talking about his personal issues. He was always playing a character, and you never saw the real guy. The narrator of this story is basically that guy.
1) An Ancient Story Retold
2) I'm the Bear
3) A Day in the Life
1. The Old Man and His Lover: Has the makings of an exceptional play. Some great thoughts on beauty and age and life and death thrown about here. The ending was not as affecting as it could have been. In fact, I felt myself silently groaning when it turned down that path. Still: in raw food-for-thought terms, this was my absolute favourite. (
crowphoenix
, yo)
2. Dissonance: Nice sense of character interaction and use of repetition. Engaging from top to bottom with a good ending. Very close to being first. (
JD? Dresden?
I'm really unsure on this one.)
3. Without Beer: Maybe a bit of personal bias here. Relate to that guy a bit more than I'd like to. (lulz, so obviously
Tangent
)
HMs: I am the Bear (At first I thought this could be
DND by way of Cyan
but since he can't vote for himself:
DND
, I think), Masque (
Can't get a decent fix
), "Manifold" or "I am Legion" (
Dresden or ronito
, but I'm pretty sure
Dresden
--"Crowbar to the brainpan, motherfuckers." sounds like one of his delightfully violent turns of phrase, although
ronito
is a master of action-writing as his Roker stories have proven!--either way, this was a freight-train of kinetic awesome-sauce).
I'll admit it. I have no idea where Cyan's is.
Sin, maybe?
Also: I see JD didn't vote for Me. Could it be his?
Man, I'm very sorry but I got the days mixed up since I'm in the U.S. with a 3-day weekend, just back from some *ahem* preemptive fireworks. I haven't finished all your guys' great stories and know I won't in the next 8 minutes. So, I only have 2 votes. I don't know if that's allowed but here goes:
1. I'm the Bear
2. Me
p.s. I can't believe how good y'all are at identifying authors! DANG! I'd like to give it a shot too, but won't be able to in the next 30 seconds...
Man, I'm very sorry but I got the days mixed up since I'm in the U.S. with a 3-day weekend, just back from some *ahem* preemptive fireworks. I haven't finished all your guys' great stories and know I won't in the next 8 minutes. So, I only have 2 votes. I don't know if that's allowed but here goes:
Be careful what you wish for, etc, and a bit about power hierarchies not being Directed Acyclic Graphs. Reasonably well told, nothing particularly special.
Author is... DumbNameD. No real reason, I just thought I'd try.
The Old Man and His Lover by ???
Another entry featuring fireworks. Coincidence? You decide. This one went strange places pretty fast, and continued the theme of people sitting down and casually blurting out deep and meaningful dialogue (although I was probably guilty of this too, lol).
This story brought to you by ???
Without Beer by ???
Even more! This theme was really great for self analysis wasn't it? Pretty solid, I think I noticed you forgot to close off the quotation marks when he was mentioning how he was probably looking at his shoes, it was fine otherwise. Also female perspective character? This is madness!
Random guess: Lone_Prodigy
Father's Day by ???
Was written fine, and had some problems with children I can definitely empathise with, but it seemed like nothing really happened. AUTHOR UNKNOWN.
Summer Ale by ???
Was the dude having a heart attack or something? The exchange between the police trooper and the old man kept reminding me of Alfred in TDK, i.e 'Some men just want to watch the world burn. The old guy generally was giving me a bit of a Gran Tornio vibe, which is of course awesome.
I was planning to use the --- scene separators to identify the person who wrote this, but going back like 4 comps I couldn't see anybody. The closest was Visciouskillersquirrels, but he didn't enter.
Dissonance by ???
This was my entry, of course. Ashes got one right it would seem.
Votes:
1. Pretending, by ???
2. I am the Bear, by ???
3. A Day In The Life, by ???
High Confidence:
Fear Girl- =Hero=
Me- Tim the Wiz
A Day in the Life- Elfforkusu
Peaks and Valleys- Ashes1396
The Old Man and His Lover- crowphoenix
Without Beer- Tangent
Summer Ale- Lone_Prodigy
Medium Confidence:
Pretending- Puddles
An Ancient Lesson Retold- vDaedalus
Dissonance- Dresden
Low Confidence:
Sin- Bootaaay
Masque- ThoseDeafMutes
I'm the Bear- John Dunbar (ronito? crow again?)
A Change of Heart- ronito (John Dunbar?)
Father's Day- Irish
Vote Count:
"Me" - 14 (2)
"Pretending" - 12 (3)
"I'm the Bear" - 12 (1)
"An Ancient Lesson Retold" - 6 (2)
"Without Beer" - 5 (1)
"Masque" - 5
"Manifold" or "I am Legion" - 4 (1)
"Summer Ale" - 4 (1)
"The Old Man and His Lover " - 3 (1)
"Dissonance" - 3
"A Day in the Life" - 2
"Sin" - 1
"Peaks and Valleys" - 1
We haven't heard from Ashes or Dresden, so hopefully "Me" wasn't one of theirs.
Tricky that you never said a word,
As far as the story goes, the premise is a bit thin--just talking through a problem the dude has. Might be stronger to present it as it happens or something. P.S. The
