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Thanks for staying up late to get it done. I appreciate it although I'm not sure anyone else is in my timezone edit: oof what a snipe Chili posted:Write It Now
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# ? Mar 6, 2021 08:24 |
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# ? Jun 10, 2024 11:49 |
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I will give an in-depth critique to anyone who asks for one.
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# ? Mar 6, 2021 08:24 |
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Chili posted:Rustbucket - I’m conflicted on this one. I loved reading it, and then it ended. Like what? It’s this totally unearned windfall that has no relevance to anything. But ugh, you did a good job characterizing your protag and I was bought in hoping for something cool to happen after his shift ended but then… nothing does, just the most obvious happy ending ever? I wanted more from this.
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# ? Mar 6, 2021 08:27 |
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Ironic Twist posted:I will give an in-depth critique to anyone who asks for one. I think I know what I need to work on, but I'd love another look to tell me holes I'm missing.
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# ? Mar 6, 2021 08:30 |
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i did a bunch of brief judgeburps, but here's a slightly longer one of Men Rust Over for you fishception: My judging crit for this was: effective pitch black horror with a cspam feel to it - the company man was kind of central casting evil guy, probably some room to make them more interesting there but still a nicely honed piece All you can do with a story is give people what they expect, or what they don’t expect - the artistry is deciding which, and when. This is what you might call relatively well-trodden ground thematically, we have the Pit, the old dad saying NO SON O’ MINE IS GOING DOWN THUR and the Evil Company making rust zombies for $$$. Why this works is because of the exacting attention to detail, from the off-hand references to our narrator’s past with his buds, to their decision to get hella pissed before heading down the mine. It’s also a deceptively well-written piece, with a lot of clever work going on in the rhythms and word choices. And, finally, the cut off ending is just right - because we know this kind of story we know exactly what the severed phoneline means, and that’s ok! We’ve seen this movie, and it’s a pretty good one. My only real criticism is of the pure demonic evil of the boss monster (lol). They only have a few lines, and that’s a good place to give us something a little surprising, something we don’t expect, but what we get is just some routine moustache twirling (though coupled with some excellent and legitimately creepy imagery). Still: nice piece and I would totally watch this on netflix.
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# ? Mar 6, 2021 08:40 |
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Ironic Twist posted:I will give an in-depth critique to anyone who asks for one. I would happily accept more criticism. From you or others. I was focused on getting the story straight and incorporating the rust theme in an interesting way. Thank you Chili for the critique. I agree there needed to be more fleshing out of the protag to make it more engaging.
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# ? Mar 6, 2021 08:45 |
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And here are what I call judgeburps, just a couple of lines on each. Note this is giving zero credit for the literally insane timeframe, so regardless of what it says you should feel pumped you got something in. Overall this wouldn't have surprised me as a set of entries for thunderdome, which gives people four days to write instead of two hours. Men Rust Over 8.5 effective pitch black horror with a cspam feel to it - the company man was kind of central casting evil guy, probably some room to make them more interesting there but still a nicely honed piece Hate and the artistic temperament 6.5 starts strong with some nicely tuned images/juxtapositions, but peters out - I don't think saying DO YOU SEE THE ART WAS A METAPHOR FOR HER LIFE was a good choice. not terrible tho. Feed Your Head 7 v charming voice in this where really anything could happen and it sort of noodles along and hey what do you know everything does happen. light enough to lift a couple of millimeters off the ground, but the social observations give it some crunch and the basic charm carries it the rest of the way Bill Of The Bridge 4 some pleasant observations scattered through this, but it's a clunky affair and doesn't have much more to say than B R I D G E which is fine dgmw bridges are cool BUT i find the iconic representation of such kind of tedious rest well Bill of the Bridge, your were dull and then u died Orange Blossoms and Cheap Cigarettes 3.5 someone is tied up and spends a fairly dull time wriggling free while recalling a possibly interesting evening which we don't really get to hear about before falling to their death Rusty Feelings 4.5 this was an honestly fairly dumb recitation of things that are probably quite nice to have but that the narrator does not possess but then it got to the last sentence and i really liked it so idk maybe cut the rest? i'm not your editor, do what you want Absolut 7 This is wonky and weird but i like the evocation of a deeply strange dude and his quest for, well, nothing. it's really nothing but a set of unanswered questions, but I feel satisfied by his strange progression and the final image is a suitably lynchian capper Buoyant 4.5 clunky wordage like 'some heretofore unknown laws of physics' can sometimes work if the're a way of expressing a particular character, but this is just clotted and overblown. there's also not much there, guy starts to float, continues to float, floats away. you had another character you could have sone something interesting with maybe but chose not to poss bc of religious convictions preventing you from being interesting idk Gone So 6.5 i loled, or at least i smiled the whole time i was reading this for its well delivered parody of those oral history things and i could imagine reading it on clickhole or w/e but but but is it a story? i'd go with nearly, but not quite - didn't bring it home in the last line and it really needed to. tbf i don't know what home even looks like for a 21st century parody of a 2010s listicle style article about a 70s pop culture character but poo poo you're the writer that's your job the floating continent 3.5 this is an excerpt from a final fantasy 3 lets play and i claim my $5 rustbucket 4.5 I'm kind of into this person's #burgerlife but I'm not on board with how much they want a terrible car and some part of me is worried about how they're gonna keep up with the insurance and WoF yogi 5 1800 words in two hours, sweet fancy moses. you can tell tbh, this is written in a big coked p manic splurt which fits the vibe of the main character well enough. It's got a good variety of inventive future crap, ,but then it gets to the actual story and it's sort of shamefaced, just a reason to skate your guy past a bunch more future scenery and hit the end. I think you could have done this better by starting it later - I really don't care about his interstellar GPA or how he simulated toucan poop or w/e. Also hyphens? they are a sometimes food. eating your way 2 bafflingly weird combination of baby talk big picture sci fi and intense social realism. [no title] 5.5 i confess i was getting into this story of mundane social advancement by striking a deal with fairies because you cussed wrong while fixing up a steampunk mecha and then! it stopped. which is, not, to be very clear, the same as ending. corrosion 8 aww yeah thats a p sweet landing for this post apoc tale, and it's a believable shift from everythings hosed and i'm incredibly angry to everythings still hosed but at least we're together i guess? affixed 4 lots of large floaty literary conceptions here but i can't shake the feeling that i'm dealing with metaphors rather than people which makes it a bit toothless sucks to be you 5 feel like i'm missing something here, nice feel for language but no real character or events apart from: doesn't want to go to sleep, eventually does? better late than never 3 solid livejournal post the rust miner 4 alien looks for stuff, finds it. it's possible the chemicals at the end are a clever chemical joke in which case: lol night 3 this is an excerpt from a lets play of Diablo 3 suburbia mod and i claim my $5 Magical bureaucracy is really no different than regular bureaucracy 6 a decent well drawn fantasy world with a competent interplay between characters, ending is a little flat but, yeah. competent. missed a trick in not having the golem say some hilarious golem poo poo like, idk, uh... I don't actually know what golems say, but i'm sure it's hilarious. rusty box 7 this has some guts to it, and they mostly live in the endless recurrence aspect - ferdie is not going to save his world with the safe because even with the safe he's still ferdie.
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# ? Mar 6, 2021 08:47 |
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By the way, feedback from the participants would be appreciated. How did you feel about the prompts? Was it better that there were two or did having the choice create more difficulty? What were you expecting the prompt to be and did you find the ones chosen to be condusive to the process? And anything else you got.
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# ? Mar 6, 2021 09:37 |
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I really liked it as I said, I can't tell you at all the process I did because I locked onto Rust and just went with it til the story was done The choice of words I think was narrowing enough to provide a sense of guidance but at the same time were general enough concepts to result in a wide variety of stories which I think is good and neat I wasnt expecting anything from the prompt and honestly I felt I got insanely lucky with how I picked up the prompt and just went with it
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# ? Mar 6, 2021 09:47 |
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I spent over half the time trying to figure out an idea, so i think I probably would have done better with a single prompt. I recorded my brainstorming session in the google doc if you would like a peek at how exactly a broken brain works:quote:Levitation or rust, huh
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# ? Mar 6, 2021 09:58 |
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Sebmojo, thanks. I'm a pantser who looked up, saw the time remaining, and pasted on a final sentence. (This is also why no title.) I'm going to keep working on this; I'm guessing it's really at least 3x as long. Scoping to the scale of 2 hours is a new thing for me and it'll take some time to figure out how.
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# ? Mar 6, 2021 16:33 |
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My biggest takeaway is an underlined statement of what I already know: Writer's write. There's that muscle that needs to be trained, that groove to fit into. The two hours was pure, focused fun. A little nerve-wracking at the start, to be sure. I was not expecting one word prompts, but having less to work with fuels more creativity as the equation goes. And I've passed a barrier of some kind because once I read the critiques I immediately wanted to pack up and flee the forums, but only for a moment! Now I seek out this same rush and will look into Thunderdome asap. A week of allotted time sounds great! Thanks to all the judges for putting this on.
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# ? Mar 6, 2021 17:48 |
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I wouldn't mind a deeper critique, though I think a lot of issues probably revolved around not developing the tension enough and the ending being sorta meh. Also I didn't revise much at all Edit: also the concept might've been way too big for the time limit and my ability Xelkelvos fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Mar 6, 2021 |
# ? Mar 6, 2021 17:54 |
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STAT! posted:And I've passed a barrier of some kind because once I read the critiques I immediately wanted to pack up and flee the forums, but only for a moment! Now I seek out this same rush and will look into Thunderdome asap. A week of allotted time sounds great! Thanks to all the judges for putting this on. Yeah I got my first critique from Thunderdome and I was way more worried about what it was gonna say, but when the critique came out it was way less worse than I expected. I've done three weeks so far and I'm hoping I can do more
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# ? Mar 6, 2021 18:01 |
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STAT! posted:My biggest takeaway is an underlined statement of what I already know: Writer's write. There's that muscle that needs to be trained, that groove to fit into. The two hours was pure, focused fun. A little nerve-wracking at the start, to be sure. I was not expecting one word prompts, but having less to work with fuels more creativity as the equation goes. Follow that instinct! I made that decision about five years ago and I'm so grateful I did!
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# ? Mar 6, 2021 18:41 |
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Ah gently caress I missed it. I hope the next one takes place not on Friday or Saturday, I'm usually busy as hell those days
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# ? Mar 6, 2021 18:53 |
Chili posted:
sebmojo posted:
To me, the "rust" prompt pratically begged to be used for a story of decay, change, and the slow march of time. That's what I aimed at, but I didn't hit it. I couldn't really make this gel the way I wanted to - I was going for a parallel between Bill's stages of life and the bridge's, but it didn't work naturally and I shouldn't have forced it. Every time I tried to give any real description of the bridge, I lost that folklorish tone and started sounding like an engineering manual, and that tone is the only part that actually seemed to work. If I were to rewrite it, I'd axe Bill entirely. Focus just on the bridge and the people who built and used it. Two prompts was a good decision - if the only option had been "levitate" I wouldn't have had any clue at all on an idea, while "rust" gave an obvious course. Think the most obvious change would be to extend it an hour or two, giving 3-4 hours instead of just 2.
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# ? Mar 6, 2021 23:42 |
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Hey thread, the next thunderdome prompt is up if you want to dip your toes in. Luxuriate in a delicious 148 hours to write a story! What will you do with all that time?
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# ? Mar 8, 2021 11:22 |
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# ? Jun 10, 2024 11:49 |
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So, here are the crits for the two people that asked, as well as an additional one that I wanted to talk about some more. Fishception, Men Rust Over I’ll be up front about this, I was not as high on this story as the other two judges. Of course, part of that was that it was the first story from this week I read, and at that point I didn’t know how bad the other stories would be, but nevertheless, it’s a story that has little flecks of promise but ultimately seemed a little flat to me. You already know about the problems with Yosemite Slenderman and how he’s a bit trite as a villain, but that moment with the miners vomiting iron ingots is definitely the sharpest moment in the story, and the problem is you took too long to get there, so that the story just has to end right after that. You always want to start with the interesting thing, not end with it, and everything that leads up to that moment just reads very common to me. The part with his father at the beginning had its own pathos to it, but honestly it didn’t add a whole lot to the story when viewed as a whole and it felt a bit like you thought you had to write it in order to get to the interesting poo poo later. Once you finish the first draft of the story, it’s your job as the author to determine what the interesting and/or important part of the story is, and then build the story around that. Because there’s a lot of wasted space here, especially in the dialogue, which to me reads as very stilted and was my least favorite part of the story. It made me wish there had been no dialogue at all. People very rarely say what they’re actually thinking in dialogue, they usually talk around what they want to say instead. I think I was harder on this story than I needed to be, given the overall quality of this week, but the more you write, the more you’ll be cognizant of how your stories read to other people, because it’s very easy to see the problems with this one. Some of those problems were due to the time limit, but some of them could’ve just been fixed with 10 minutes of editing. Aardvark, Orange Blossoms and Cheap Cigarettes It’s a very rare thing for an ~800 word story to feel padded, but that’s the impression I get from this. You seemed very convinced that the phrase “orange blossoms and cheap cigarettes” was much more interesting than it actually was, to the point where the rest of the story and what actually happens in it was secondary to this noirish vibe and atmosphere and essence that you were desperately trying to push. It’s like you wrote a scented candle instead of a story. Because all that actually happens in the story is “a guy wakes up in a van, remembers some of what happened last night, then falls out of the rusting van, presumably to his death, before remembering everything else.” We don’t find out exactly how the blonde woman died, or how the man ended up hogtied in a van--we never even find out who the driver of the van is! We never find out who the woman is! All those noir stories written back in the day actually had action and tight plotting underneath all of the seedy, smoky atmosphere, and this just has a pale imitation of the atmosphere. If you’re a fan of noir, if that’s what you want to write, then bring that vibe to where you are as a writer, rather than trying to jump feet-first into that world. Take what you like about what you like to read and then apply that to how you already write, and figure out what you can bring to it that nobody else can. Arsenic Lupin, [no title] Conversely, I think I enjoyed this one much more than the other judges. I know that the ending was a bit of a bust, and I didn’t care, because I liked the voice and the world so much and if you actually were able to pull it out of thin air in the space of two hours, then I tip my hat to you. It does also suffer from the problem of “the poo poo you think you have to write at the beginning before you get to the interesting poo poo in the middle”, but the poo poo in the beginning is also well-written and entertaining in its own right, so it didn’t bother me that much. For the purposes of this competition, you could’ve just started the story with her alone in the workshop late at night, have had her curse, and then have had the saint child just appear, and weaved the worldbuilding into the story as it progressed from there. Then the child could have been more of a presence in the story rather than just this spectre demanding a metal mouse. We could’ve learned why a mouse, and not a cat, or a butterfly, or a Roomba. Ultimately, though, it’s a problem that could be solved with actual time to go back and revise, which I’m assuming you didn’t have. Thank you for providing one of the bright spots in this week’s judging.
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# ? Mar 9, 2021 10:32 |