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Critiques for Week CLXXIII: ZeBourgeoisie, anomieatthegates, SurreptitiousMuffin, my effigy burns, Fumblemouse, Sixty Lezcano, Lazy Beggar, newtestleper, Grizzled Patriarch, and Thranguy What a long, strange journey it has been! I'm sorry these are so long overdue. No excuses. I only hope late is better than never. This was one of those rounds in which Thunderdome saw the prompt and decided, for whatever reason, to do the opposite of what it asked. Endings that resolve the story’s major conflicts or questions, I said. Make that conclusion matter, I said. No entry was completely bereft of a conclusion, but resolutions were another matter, and I lost count of the stories that were effectively preludes to a larger tale. Fumblemouse scored a lot of points by presenting a complete package. Enhancing that with a sympathetic protagonist and gentle tugs at the heartstrings, he gave us an easy choice for the win. ZeBourgeoisie, "Madison" Such choices, ZeBourgeoisie. Such strange choices. In the oystermen story, in the butterman story, and here, you made decisions that to a lesser or greater extent transformed a workable premise into a pile of  . I don't mean your odd fascination with edible characters, either. Your beetle protagonist and her pilgrimage to a new tree were cute right up until the moment Madison stopped making any effort to survive and told Cassidy to hurry up and eat her. What child of any species would be that stoic in the face of being injected with acid? Who, reading this, would be satisfied by Madison's fate? Not me! Not even remotely. Madison's shell wasn't the only empty thing in that ending!You've been jerking the steering wheel of your stories hard to the left and sending them careening into the ravine of absurdity. I wonder whether you've been trying to keep your readers from being able to guess what will happen. A story can certainly be too predictable, devoid of surprise and dull because of it, but the way to avoid that isn't to make your characters do weird, confusing things like decide to kill their crushes for unfathomable reasons or resign themselves readily to agonizing deaths. It does a work no good to have unexpected turns of plot if the reason they're unexpected is that no one involved behaves in a credible manner. To focus on the good points of this one, though, the beetle viewpoint stood out in a decent way: I liked the creative pilgrimage, and if you didn't nail an inhuman perspective--what beetle eats meals off a plate?--it didn't matter much while your tone was light. You did have an ending. I didn't think much of it, but at least it existed. An uncanny number of your competitors should have taken a page from your book in that regard. I still have to come back to the problem Madison's death scene presented. The tone of the story to that point was completely wrong for it. I would have sworn you were leading up to Cassidy having a change of heart. Given that she didn't, the point of her describing how Madison would die in detail was lost on me. That whole sequence seemed to exist for the sake of out-of-place vore. Ugh. Then the ending tried to be sweet and sentimental, but it couldn't land when Madison's death had been so easy and meaningless. My advice to you: cut the vore and rein in the loopy twists. Make sure the surprises you work into a text have logic at their roots. * ****** ** * anomieatthegates, "Roots" Your story was one of a young woman coming back to a town and family she'd never known, seeking refuge with a stranger who had no reason but the ties of blood to grant it. Not a bad theme. If Karen had faced any difficulty besides the fibbing townsfolk--a strange difficulty, because why would they lie? That wouldn't and didn't make her go away--then you might have had something decent here, but the feeble conclusion in which Aunt Emily gave Karen a place to stay almost immediately was like a weighted stick taken to the story's kneecaps. That ending was far too pat, far too easy. The tension you'd built up came to very little. The story desperately needed more emotional struggle, if nothing else; you had two hundred words left and probably should have used them all. One of the other judges disliked Karen's stereotypical hooker clothes. They did seem cliche. A T-shirt and pants from the Salvation Army would have gotten the point that she was broke across, while her resemblance to Amy and the baby she had with her would have been plenty to give the locals the impression that she was a walking ball of trouble. It's a shame the end was so shoddy. This was otherwise a pretty good Thunderdome debut as they go. The grandfather's hunting knife was a nice detail, a suggestion that Karen had cared about a family connection before she became desperate. I'd read more stories of yours with the hope they'd be less anticlimactic. * ****** ** * SurreptitiousMuffin, "saline or, the last man alive" Thumbs down for that title formatting. You put the comma in the wrong place for it to look decent on a single line, as it will usually be seen. Adam cried a lot--too early, too easily, and too often to do the story good. He couldn't erase the first impression he made as a big bag of tears. I think I understand what you were going for with his weeping over something as mundane as a seat belt: the mundanity was the point. It was an artifact of a time when a seat belt was no big deal because there were plenty of people to make them, a relic of a lost world that was the more poignant because it wasn't humdrum anymore. It didn't work as you presumably wanted, however. Adam had plenty of cause to be emotional, but the way he began the story crying and choked back tears twice more before it was over made his situation seem less heartbreaking. It also felt like you-the-writer were using his tears the way a sitcom would use a laugh track, to make sure we-the-readers knew how gosh-darned sad everything was. That also took some of the impact away. You're good enough to manipulate emotions with more delicacy. If you revise, I would dial the mood back to melancholy early on and let the grief of Adam's situation build and sink in as much as the story's length allows; give him one shot of tears, maybe after "humanity had already come and gone" if you want to avoid the possibly cliche (but possibly effective, too) tear of hope at the end. A man alone trying to find hope for his mostly dead race is sad as hell without so much gilding of the lily. MEG, now, I liked quite a lot. Her pep contrasted well with Adam's despair. More than that, the sentence "Even when the world was falling to pieces, somebody at NASA had seen fit to program a humour routine into the ship’s AI" was affecting, strong--it said something about humanity. I found it true and touching, and that was when I started to feel a little bit for all the dead people of Earth. You had something here, and I didn't mind where it ended because the journey from despair to hope had been completed, however temporarily. You mostly just needed to pull on the heartstrings with a less heavy hand. * ****** ** * my effigy burns, "Geburtstag" An easy DQ at nearly three hundred words over the limit. You could have trimmed it down without much trouble: if you'd condensed the backstory and reined in Arthur's introspection, you'd have lost a significant chunk of bloat. Cutting the fat in a rewrite might improve the pacing to the point that this would be a decent story. Maybe. It would help if you'd learn to capitalize "American" and "German." And phrases like "One his eyes were nearly swollen shut"? Avoid them. This meandered and dragged too much to be a good read, but there was something compelling under the surface. Arthur bumbled through his life, stumbling onto paths he then followed to the best of his ability, a Nazi almost by accident and a prisoner deemed dangerous because of one joke. His birthday decided his fate. He had limited control of himself, possibly for the best since the choices he did make were so poor. He wasn't too bright and had pity without the moral fiber to act on it. His haplessness would have been frustrating if it hadn't seemed designed, like you were trying to say something about how war or just life could make a mockery of a man's free will. This story contrasted truth and appearance, too, since Arthur was neither a tough son of a bitch nor a die-hard Nazi nor a rabble rouser, but he may have been the only one to know it. How false are our understandings of the people around us? The execution fairly spoiled the food for thought you provided, unfortunately. The whole thing needed to be more focused; we didn't need so much background on Hans and Lucas. The combination of dumb choice and dumb chance that turned Arthur into a Nazi would possibly have been more striking if it had been delivered without embroidery. The end felt rushed in a way it might not have if the earlier sections hadn't gone on so long. So to sum up: learn to edit, don't go over the word limit, and come back to write some more. * ****** ** * Fumblemouse, "Forest Flower" The archaic style you used could easily have been too much, but you handled it beautifully, sculpting a touching and complete fantasy story that glowed in this week of broken offerings. The technical errors didn't do you much damage, though the child's name was important enough to deserve a consistent spelling. I scarcely noticed the gaffes while I was caught up first in Satman and Tanara's romance and then in their danger. The vow of honesty, the extremity that drove Satman to break it, and the possible consequences--possible, but not definite--hooked and held my interest through a conclusion that was somewhat predictable but satisfying nonetheless. I quite liked that I couldn't tell whether Satman's vow had anything to do with Tanara's death or the appearance of the hunter's hut. Maybe the Mountain Gods took her away because Satman intended to lie to her, but maybe not. He nearly told the truth, though he didn't know it; was that why his daughter lived? Did the Gods take stern pity? Did they put that hut in his path in return for his faithfulness for many years? Or possibly Gods had nothing to do with any of it, whatever Satman thought. It was entirely open to interpretation. More certain was that he kept his other vow, to always bring his wife the flower of the forest. I didn't care for the mention of poo poo thrown in when Tanara died. It didn't fit the tone you'd built. The one crass, rough word in an otherwise stylized story gave the moment a bitter tang that suited Satman's emotions, but it reduced Tanara's dignity. In all, an easy choice for the win and a clear contender even before I saw the rest of its competition. Congratulations! Keep track of how you spell your characters' names next time, though, pretty please? * ****** ** * Sixty Lezcano, "Ontonagon Route 28" You took a chance in writing a story of which the question "What was the point?" was the point. Why did Stuart think dragging Matt out into the frozen arse-end of nowhere would make him a man? Why did he insist Matt should stay past his boredom threshold? What was achieved, beyond one punch? What changed? Well, nothing, really. The whole trip was pointless and dumb, because suffering for suffering's sake is inane; they came home early, and Matt was still Matt at the end. On the one hand, that wasn't fascinating reading. Especially raddled by your sloppy punctuation. On the other, it made a point--that such stunts are not magically transformative--and did so with some subtlety. Poor execution kept the risk from paying dividends, but I liked what I thought you were attempting even if what you achieved was so messy I wanted to punch you myself. This does assume the last paragraph wasn't meant to suggest that the aborted camping trip did turn Matt into a total social butterfly and party animal, yo, because that would have been stupid and would have undermined every good thing about the entry. I choose to believe that Matt was never as feeble as Stuart thought, but Stuart succeeded in giving him a story to tell--a decent brotherly gift. Either way, your mechanics blew chunks to a startling degree. A small showcase of your abominable grasp on punctuating dialogue, italicized for visual convenience: Gotta get way out there --", “drat right!”. It was fun.”, “I’ll drive, even.”. was that last one, especially? You approached Baudolino levels of technical mastery, and that says volumes. You left the period off at least one sentence, you didn't consistently separate your paragraphs with blank lines, you punctuated single quotation marks like a Brit but everything else like an American, and you couldn't seem to make up your mind whether Matt or Stuart was the point-of-view character. Those problems are all of the distracting sort. I couldn't appreciate your work to its fullest while mangled mechanics kept catching my eye. Visit the Purdue OWL for some free guidance on the sentence-level nuts and bolts of writing.Why did Stuart slap Matt's hand away from the radio? That's a dumb question, but it stayed with me. If Stuart thought Matt was going to try to make him listen to Evanescence or Taylor Swift or whatever, you should have said so and given Matt's character that little bit of color. * ****** ** * Lazy Beggar, "Saudade" Although your idea of a village of people who announced their emotions at all times didn't stand up to scrutiny, I had a feeling it wasn't meant to. It was more of a problem that the village concept and the core-in-theory story of a woman fleeing the death of her son weren't integrated well--and that's putting it mildly, considering that Karen's struggle to become emotionally overt took over the narrative to the point that I'd forgotten all about her child by the time his doppelganger showed up. One of the reasons the ending didn't work was that the boy's death acted as a set of bookends to the story rather than as a thread running through it. The sudden appearance of a lookalike felt contrived, a clumsy way to bring back that Chekov's gun of grief in order to make some sort of point. What point was it supposed to be making, though? Karen saw the image of her dead child. Karen started crying. Amy pleaded with her to tell the village how she felt. How doubling over in tears was covert I do not understand, but I'll get back to that. The story ended on a line that looked so much like it was intended to be deep and profound, but that wasn't, because Karen said something any five-year-old knows: some things are more sad than other things. Not exactly a revelation. Not a satisfying conclusion. My guess: the idea was that the villagers cared too much about what was said and not enough about what was felt despite their supposed concerns about honesty. Karen was possibly lambasting them for a lack of real compassion or understanding. Amy was claiming to be heartbroken that Karen would have to leave when Karen was clearly heartbroken herself--though to be fair to the villagers, they had no reason to know what was going on with her since they accepted a shallow level of emotional honesty without probing very deep. Am I close? It would be a concept worth pursuing, but it was mishandled here, and the effect was one of two stories getting in each other's way rather than a solid exploration of a theme. An issue that may have bothered me more than it would most readers was the whole notion that not broadcasting your business to the world at large was dishonest and covert. What the heck. The concepts of honesty and privacy seemed to be muddled, and that was a distraction. The only reason I can think of to tangle the two is to pull off the (poor) ending. Oy. The whole work felt contrived, like you'd bent realistic human behavior and realistic human necessities and realistic human thought in order to arrive at a final line that wasn't worth it, and that was more frustrating than C7ty1's mishmash of tones and messages. All that said, the village idea is worth keeping and working with again someday. * ****** ** * newtestleper, "Sea Serpents" Count your lucky stars! Your story of a young woman who traded her ordinary, hometown boyfriend for a more exotic model on the basis of five minutes' acquaintance escaped DMing somehow, though Octavia came off as shallow and fickle and Tom conveniently abandoned his protective, possessive tendencies. Octavia and Tom must have been married to have a single berth on the ship, but he let her go with Tipene without any meaningful struggle. She gave up on the life she'd built to that point because she met a boy who had neat tattoos but was still white, so it was okay. I imagine this was a metaphor for a person's relationship to her homeland: it's possible to find that your soul feels most at home somewhere far from the place you were born, to fall desperately in love with a far land and hitherto-unknown society. It failed because your characters treated each other like countries and not like people, so they seemed inconsistent at best, sociopathic at worst. The romance was not at all convincing. Forgetting to put a period at the end of one of your sentences or an end on another were minor sins in comparison, but they did not help! For frick's sake, the partial sentence was right in the first paragraph! You know better. Dogs know better. Poor Tom; despite one sneer, I cared the most about him and pitied him for having such an unfaithful partner, especially when he'd defended her on the ship. I doubt this was the response you intended me to have. If it were me I wouldn't try making him more hateful in revisions; I prefer the idea of Tom and Octavia both befriending Tipene for his personality--preferably over a longer span than five minutes--and making a life in New Zealand, seeing the taniwha together. You didn't need the ill-conceived romance angle to show love for an adoptive home. * ****** ** * Grizzled Patriarch, "On the Hearth a Little Flower Blooms" You technically met the prompt in both the literal and metaphorical senses of a journey to somewhere far from home, but as in Week 165, I wished you'd played it straight. "War is bad" is a familiar theme. You pulled my heartstrings with the uncertain smile of the man trying to communicate through poetry as he was about to die, yet that one lovely moment wasn't enough to keep the piece from blurring in my mind into the body of all the war vignettes I've read. I could almost have done without the second scene entirely; of course Nelson was haunted by the horrors of war, of course he wanted to go home, and of course his love kept him going in the face of the dark. The break left the story off-balance, I thought. It weakened the impact of the blood on the snow. I dislike saying you should have stopped with the executions since doing so would have made it too pat in a way, even less memorable, and I liked the chant of Ich liebe dich. My suggestion instead: don't blank out the deserters as they die. Don't remove the viscera from the deaths by reducing them to a lingering note and flecks of blood. Have Nelson turn away after the shots, thinking of Helen and whispering his prayer as he walks--away, or to get a shovel, or to resume his march, whatever you think is appropriate. I don't want Nelson or myself to be spared the sight of the bullets hitting and the bodies falling. It's a prettier story for glossing over those details, but maybe that gloss is why it seems so feather-light. * ****** ** * Thranguy, "Knee Deep in the Hoopla" Clever title. I didn't recognize it without the help of a search engine and somehow missed the best thing about it, namely that it wasn't a line from any old Starship song but from "We Built This City." That fit your setting like a rhinestone glove! It wouldn't have helped you if I'd been quicker on the draw; no title could have made up for the flaws in this story, but I appreciate the finesse in hindsight. The concept of a temple for bards in which music was a sacred study was fantastic. The story you built around it, not as much so, possibly due in part to the words you burned on your other concept of a far-future city that had forgotten everything about our time except rock and roll. You tried to play that notion straight, and the story was mangled for the sake of it--or for the sake of including Lani and her plotline. It's difficult to say which did more damage. What I got: Ian came to the Temple of Music as a pilgrim, looking to study the songs of ancient masters before going further out into the world as a traveling musician. On the road he met two other would-be bards, one of whom vanished from the story shortly after her introduction. The Temple required offerings in return for study; Ian's was inadequate, so he took the chance to earn his tuition in a musical competition, in which his other travel companion joined him. Because of his integrity, Ian declined the opportunity to perform a mysterious, anonymous song that he knew as his own. Kass was a less honest man and played Ian's song--but how did he know it? So far, so good, but then it fell down because Ian didn't dwell on that puzzle for even a moment. He went on to study Jimi Hendrix lyrics and solve the far less interesting mystery of what sort of percussionist Lani was. (Why didn't she just tell them she played piano?) Lani had to clue us in that Ian's and Kass's song was a forbidden, "dark song," recovered through "dark arts" of "lectric" and "gital" and ughhhhhh. Nearly half the story in terms of visual space was conversation with Lani, and her only purpose was worldbuilding. I think that even if I'd liked the rock-and-roll twist, the entry would have come off as half baked, its plot buried under setting details. I would personally cut the rock element out wholesale, but maybe you could pull it off if you narrowed the focus to Ian and Kass and had Ian give a drat about the odd circumstance of his secret song turning up in a stranger's mouth. What if the priests gave Ian the prize, and Ian were so puzzled by what had happened with Kass that he sought answers? You could make that business of the "lectric" menacing, I think, if it came up in a confrontation between Ian and a priest instead of a casual conversation between Ian and Ms. Exposition. I daresay there are other approaches you could take if that one doesn't appeal. The idea is definitely worth salvaging to hang on a more sound story structure. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Aug 14, 2016 |
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Critiques for Week CLXXIII: Broenheim, C7ty1, Clavius666, Sitting Here, Killer-of-Lawyers, BoldFrankensteinMir, jon joe, crabrock, XzeroR3, and kurona_bright Broenheim, "The Last Story We Have Together" No, the ellipses didn't work very well. The visual gimmick called attention to itself. I couldn't always fill in the blanks as I read, though hindsight took care of most of them. The structure wasn't worth the distraction it caused, I figure, since it didn't improve on the more traditional one-sided narrative. The story itself wasn't bad. Its central idea that a person shouldn't give everything of himself away, that it was fine and right for him to keep some of his mind and heart and life private, was worth exploring. "Stories" weren't a natural fit for the part of something that was lost by being shared, though, especially not myths and other tales passed down through time. I think I get it: once a story is told it's no longer completely yours, but something like a myth was never yours to begin with, so the metaphor totters. The main character lost me when she grabbed her mentor's rock and threw it away. Tossing her own stone, sure--she didn't want there to be a story of their last day together. That was a good way to show-not-tell her bitter, teenage affection for him. Taking that story away from him when he wanted to hold on to it went beyond denial and into being a brat. It weakened the moral to have it spoken by a selfish person who had stolen what someone else had wished to keep. This is probably worth revisiting, as the flaws wouldn't be that hard to mend. * ****** ** * C7ty1, "Dormant Faith" Was this a remake of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or a bad Monty Python skit? A tense inner journey or a screwball comedy? Did Miriam gain faith or lose it? Were she and Theo on Earth or some other world that possessed, for some reason, orange gym mats? Your story couldn't tell what it wanted to be. Its disparate elements clashed rather than supporting each other. Take the first section, in which Miriam was screaming and praying as she fell but swung right into facepalming and banter as soon as she hit the net as though she'd never been afraid: in trying to fake out the reader you made your main character's emotions too shallow, an issue for a story that was attempting to look at her depths. The humor half of things didn't land. Though I sort of liked Theo, old huckster that he was, I didn't laugh at him. Could it be this wasn't ever meant to be a funny story? Maybe you wanted to look at a serious subject in a way that mingled the earnest and the lighthearted? You know, I could buy that if it weren't for the "lava" test, which tipped all the way over into ridiculous. Now I'm imagining that you were trying to come up with different, essentially harmless trials without copying Last Crusade all the way, and gym mats sounded like a good idea at the time. It showed Miriam's willingness to forsake the ritual path in favor of the straightforward, as was probably the point--but gym mats. Theo could have thrown down some hot coals for her to walk across. Or around, if that would have been more her speed. Those mats and the use of "yadda yadda" bothered me more than they did the other judges. I didn't buy the setting as Earth. It wasn't impossible that some other world would have the mats if not the slang; why confuse the issue, though? Why introduce the question of just where this took place? Were orange mats in place of lava such a good idea that they were worth it? (No.) That was a relatively small nit to pick, but it was symptomatic of the larger problem of a piece struggling against itself. What I appreciated, possibly because of the ambiguity, was the way you ended it. I didn't know whether Miriam had lost her faith and left it buried/marked with that little cairn or had built the cairn out of respect for her god and left her symbol as a new monument for the next seeker. Either might have left her with a smile. I'm not certain you meant this to be open to interpretation, and if not, the story fought with itself here too, but the outcome was beneficial; you gave me something to think about. * ****** ** * Claven666, "The Bargain" Long ago, Charles made a bargain with a supernatural entity to lead his people out of slavery and to a new home in the style of Moses. The Pilgrim wasn't so benevolent, however. In exchange for stitching a thread of life through the barren Unpainted Land, it devoured one of Charles' people every night, forcing Charles to blame himself by giving him an impossible task to complete in order to prevent the slaughter. This was a sound concept that might have had legs, except-- What did the Pilgrim get out of the exchange? A lot of food? The people came back to life at the end, so he didn't get their souls, and he ultimately burned to nothing. It was hard to see how that was a good deal for him. What did he want from Charles? An admission of defeat? Charles not only had to give up in order to solve the riddle, he had to give up because everybody was dead? That didn't make a lot of sense to me either, and that everyone wasn't dead--the story specifically mentioned other people around that fire, if only a few--was another source of bemusement. Were the Unpainted Lands some sort of canvas? Was it all a metaphor for art? Did the Pilgrim represent an artistic block, devouring ideas one by one until the artist stopped trying to force matters and surrendered? Was he a hungry public devouring each vision or story Charles possessed until there were no more, and Charles was free? (Couldn't be that one. The people coming back to life wouldn't fit.) What was the deal? I wanted something to come of the seeming metaphor, but it never did. You had good ideas that didn't consolidate into good fiction. Revision would be worthwhile, but the bargain itself is so broken that you'd have to rethink it from the bottom up. * ****** ** * Sitting Here, "Flotsamson" Beautiful. Incomplete. Everything you had, I loved, but the ending was a ragged wound where the rest of the story had been torn away. Anuun didn't get to react to his dead wife; the Norsemen didn't get to die, nor did I get to see how and why that would happen or what would happen afterward. This should perhaps have been told from the perspective of Sedna, or of the water-wife if they were different entities. Were they? I hope not. The drowned woman's wrath was vaguely understandable if she was a sea spirit protective of the people that acknowledged and spoke to her. That reading also gave Sedna a role in the story past that first section, which she sorely needed. I would guess you did some research for this one, and it was handled well, working in a few details about the indigenous peoples of Greenland without turning the tale into a Wiki article. Whether the setting was completely authentic or not I don't have a clue, but you convinced me. I sank into the words without difficulty. If you hadn't tried to cram too much story into too few words without success and fallen afoul of the trouble with endings that tripped up half the crowd, an HM would have been yours. Maybe even the win, though Fumblemouse did a better job with the prompt by keeping his entry's viewpoint to one of the characters that undertook the journey. Lovely prose, though. I'd read the full-length version any day. * ****** ** * Killer-of-Lawyers, "Lies" It's possible you would still have cracked the low tier if this entry had been the first appearance of those characters and that premise in Thunderdome, given that you wrote about a guy wandering through an unconvincing space desert toward... something; some specific point that might have supplies, maybe. His conversations with his ship's AI were the meat of the piece. When she shut down for want of power, it ended. No resolution and no real background: it read like a fragment of something larger and hopefully more complete. Worse, though, was that I wondered as I read it, Haven't I read this before? You'd written about John and Sarah twice previously, in "Decay," in which Sarah struggled to communicate with John, and in "Dreams of Babel," in which John performed a task in trade for supplies to take back to Sarah. I read those stories again and was struck and aggravated by how similar they were in goals and themes. I actually thought at first you'd rewritten the exact same story from three different angles, though that was short-sighted of me. Each in fact seems to be an incrementally small step in the continuing journey of John and Sarah, who are always trying to reach or return to each other, and each is a story of separation and isolation and the attendant fear. The characters are the same. The premise is the same. The usual risk of serials in Thunderdome--or anywhere--is that the writer will depend too much on familiarity with the original work and deliver something full of holes that can only be filled in by reading a prior submission. That's a fatal error in TD as the judges are neither guaranteed nor likely to humor you by reading any more than they have to, and even if they did, they would judge you on the entry as it stood. Yours was an odd duck, though. It didn't stand alone, but its similarity to your other entries meant it almost depended on us not having read anything else you'd written. (And reading those other stories didn't even fill in any gaps!) The lack of originality galled. We speculated that you might have been using TD as a testing ground for excerpts from a longer work; whatever the motive, you repeated yourself and didn't deliver the goods. Though it was inconsequential in comparison, the blue sun was kind of silly. I checked the Internet for confirmation that blue suns wouldn't allow for life and found out they might, actually, but that life wouldn't have time to evolve into anything complex before the star blew up. The slow humanization of the AI, shown best in its ability to lie for its own gain, was a good sub-story, and if you'd ended with her gone for good without dangling the question of how or whether John would be able to save her, you'd have had a reasonable conclusion. Of course, you couldn't have done that when you were tied to the continuity of the other stories. That just brings us back to square one. If you want to return to characters or a world you enjoy in the future, make sure you don't give the judges a crippling sense of deja vu. I'd avoid desert treks too, personally, and that's advice that goes to everybody. * ****** ** * BoldFrankensteinMir, "Hit the Bricks" My co-judges held this in higher esteem than I did; I ranked it as pleasant but unremarkable. The nameless protagonist broke his village's millstone somehow, I assume--we weren't sure about that, and either reading of the reference to him cracking the stone brought problems with it. If he destroyed the millstone, how did he do it? What happened? And was I supposed to believe that so many people broke millstones that a miles-long road could be made of their millstone fragments? If his sin was something else, why did the village break its millstone to make his penance brick, and what did he do? A glimpse of the pilgrim's life before the road would have been welcome. He could have been more of a distinct, individual person, less a shapeless martyr to his guilt. On the more positive side, this was a good exploration of penance and forgiveness. The brick stood in for his fault. It burdened him physically as his sin, whatever it was, burdened him mentally, and he could only stop carrying it when he found peace--which may have been there all along, waiting for him to be ready to notice it, or which may have been bestowed by divine grace. I fancy the idea that the blue dome of the sky at the end of the road was the West-most temple, made sacred by gods or by nature; take your pick. It was a good ambiguity. The pilgrim's journey finished on a strong note. Given how many people had problems with endings this week, the fact that your work felt complete and satisfying, if slight, set it apart. * ****** ** * jon joe, "Thrown" Your entry definitely had flaws, mispunctuated dialogue and awkward prose ("It was as though they had the happiness strangled out them when they squeezed from my memories to my thoughts"--I get what you were expressing, but there were better ways to do it even aside from the missing word) among them. Nevertheless, I was with you until your protagonist burst into tears. She--or he--was overstressed, out of her depth, and breaking down, but why? Until that moment she seemed confused by and disappointed in her trip to India in a quest for inner peace, but not to the point of weeping, and to cry out of nowhere made her seem either histrionic or unusually frail. Wanting to hug the guide was indeed weird. The story fell over on the landing; it wasn't that stable in the first place. You got a rough shake, though. There was something there, largely between the lines. Inner peace and spiritual harmony, this story suggested, aren't something you can go off to India to find. You can't hire a guru to solve whatever's eating you up inside. Especially not as some sort of meditation tourist, looking for answers in a food stall but rejecting what you get because it isn't what you expected. The main character needed to turn his/her eyes inward, but s/he wasn't willing, and so s/he failed and failed to understand. I dug that. But like its protagonist, the story probably needed more introspection so the reader could understand his/her problem, even if s/he him/herself couldn't--and by the way, the lack of a gender on the main character didn't much hurt this piece, but it didn't particularly help. There's a real argument to be made that the inconclusive, navel-gazing nature of your entry outweighed in tedium what it achieved in meaning. I know, because my co-judges made it. Watch out for being too vague or too clever about your character's mindset or motives. It's so tempting to leave things unsaid and hope the reader solves the puzzle--that moment when a person realizes something about a story he's reading is powerful and can strengthen his engagement with, connection to, and appreciation of the work. The problem is that it's damned difficult to be sure you've left just the right amount of breadcrumbs. In this case, no dice. * ****** ** * crabrock, "The Hackney Comet" Tweaking the judges' noses by putting your title and word count in the middle of the story blew up in your face somewhat because it emphasized the divide between the early going, when a kid and his dad bonded over stars, and the late, when that kid scratched his beard in space. He also hijacked billions of dollars' worth of equipment to strand himself on a moon with unknown quantities, in direct contempt of a regulation about contaminating other planets that probably existed for a reason. Brilliant fellow! I rather liked young Commander Miller, his dad, and their shared love of space, which you drew with your considerable talent for showing human relationships and unspoken affection. It was obvious that father and son loved and respected one another. The son's trip to Jupiter as an adult astronaut could have been a fantastic follow through, except that Miller's actions were so selfish and insensible that my sympathy plummeted despite him being far too good-natured to dislike. The connection to Dad was lost, and the story's heart went with it. I know it ended with Miller achieving his dream of seeing the robot cities. That should have been uplifting. But the emotion wasn't there, maybe because there was too much module-descent action and beard dander and not much sense of wonder. I don't think a facepalm is the reaction you were going for with the last line. The ending also felt like where the real story ought to start, worse luck. If you were to come back to this story, you'd need to let it expand all over the place, building a stronger bridge between childhood Miller and Commander Miller and doing more with the titular comet. What if you replaced Amy with Miller's father, working for NASA? Miller's decision to turn into Space Gilligan would have had more weight, whether his dad argued or approved, and I think with that change the story wouldn't give the impression of being broken in half any more. Something to consider, anyway. * ****** ** * XzeroR3, "Hellstorm" You would have lost if you'd submitted on time. No contest. This was the worst story I'd seen since... since... do you know, I can't recall? Few TD stories these days are bungled in so many different ways. The punctuation, the verb tenses, the choices in words and phrasing, the plot (such as it was), the setting, the circumstances, the length, the ending--all horrendous! Bro, do you even read? I should stop ribbing you, though. It's crystal clear you didn't know what you were doing. Inexperience is the problem Thunderdome is best equipped to solve, so you're in the right place if you're interested in writing more and maybe not sucking someday. Let's go over each of the issues I mentioned above. Punctuation: You have peculiar notions of how and when to use commas. In your first line, you left out a comma where you needed one: since "a tear managed to penetrate my own bloated veil" was an independent clause with its own subject and verb, you should have put a comma after "and." In your second sentence, you used a comma where you needed a colon: "it fell upon my wife’s puffed face" clarified the clause it followed. You needed a second comma in the phrase "in seemingly, the direction" in order to set "seemingly" aside as the nonessential information that it was (so: "in, seemingly, the direction"). You put a comma after a closing quotation mark, for crying out loud. From that I suspect you don't know the rules for punctuating dialogue, though maybe you do; the dialogue was too sparse for me to be sure. Speaking of which, you presented speech and thoughts in an identical manner; that was visually confusing. I'd suggest putting thoughts in italics, e.g. "Death, is that you? I think to myself." Be sparing with interrobangs. Drop the parenthetical asides, at least for now. They were obtrusive in this story, prodding me to make sure I'd noticed a line was supposed to be funny or acknowledging that you knew your narrator was digressing. Don't point that out! Cut it! A thorough line edit could fix the mechanical errors in this specific piece, but from the look of things that wouldn't do you much good. You need to learn the rules for yourself. You should read everything the Purdue Online Writing Lab has to offer on commas. Honestly, you should probably read the whole thing--or at least the sections for mechanics, grammar, and punctuation. Strunk and White's The Elements of Style could be a good resource for you--check your library--and if all of the above is too dry, you should take a look at Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Improving your punctuation won't hurt you even if you're not that interested in writing fiction. Verb tenses: Was this story taking place in its present or had it taken place in its past? Darned if I could tell! Sometimes I thought you were attempting to show that certain things (the tear scene, for example) had taken place before the tedious wandering and kicking that occupied the "present," but I didn't see the point of that; you lost the benefit of the doubt with the lines "I meagerly struggle with vortex of sand that tugs me steadily. I managed to bring myself to scream for help [...]." Good grief. Abuse of adverbs aside since we'll get to that in due course, you wrote the same scene in past and present. Don't do that. In almost all cases, the idea that the exact same action is taking place in the present and the past is nonsense. The OWL may be able to help you again. Check out their verb tense section, especially the page about tense consistency. Words and phrasing: Unless your main character was supposed to be a college professor, a man who affected education to the point of pretension, or both, you should have reined in the vocabulary. When you talk to yourself, does the phrase "in a sympathetic oratory slowness" cross your mind? Probably not. You warned me the main character's voice would be insufferable when he referred to his swollen eyelids as his "own bloated veil," and alas, it was. The high-falutin' words paired especially badly with the mangled punctuation. The problem with the phrasing was similar: you used awkward, overwrought phrases where simple ones would have done, such as "I bring myself afoot" instead of "I stand up." The story you were telling couldn't have carried the weight of so much excess ornament and flourish even if it had been executed well. As it was, the prose all but obscured what the heck was even going on. The plot: After a botched spaceship landing, the protagonist, his wife, and a few other members of the crew attempted to reach a green zone on a desert planet before their supplies ran out. Cue a long sequence of walking across sand that ended in the nameless protagonist (name your protagonists!) kicking... something... and then getting sucked under the sand, into a subterranean cave. Never mind that this made no sense! Never mind that the spaceship shouldn't have been able to see a subterranean green zone! Never mind the weird sound the thing he'd kicked had made, as he himself thought! He was saved! THE END. I've had the displeasure of reading more random stories than that for Thunderdome, but not many. You saved your main character with a mysterious, hand-waved MacGuffin. He accomplished exactly diddly squat. You didn't begin to explain how sand firm enough to walk in was somehow floating over an open cave system. You didn't explain what happened to the rest of the caravan--there were other people walking with him, right? You referred to them as "we" at one point. Nothing that happened was credible, and nothing that happened was interesting, the latter of which is the kiss of death. The setting: Flat, lifeless sandscapes aren't interesting either. If you're going to write a story that mostly just describes some guy walking along, and you shouldn't, put him somewhere else. As this week proved, desert treks are played out. The circumstances: Also not interesting: the bleak and hopeless misery of a character I didn't know and never got to know. Maybe if you'd begun with the crash and shown his choices and losses as they happened rather than starting in the middle of the journey, you could have engaged my emotions a little. Maybe! The ending: For a bland character to be saved from his plight by kicking an object that mysteriously whisked him straight to his objective was abrupt, bizarre, and unsatisfying. My impression was that you didn't know how to get him out of the desert, so you threw logic to the wind alongside the wife, vehicles, and animals and made something up out of whole cloth. That almost never works. The conclusion of a story needs to follow from what has come before, or else what's the point? Don't bother trying to fix this one. Do try again. I know I just went on for an age about problems with your writing, but it's fascinating how quickly a starting writer improves with practice. Write more; read more fiction whether or not you give the style guides I mentioned a go, because fiction can be a fun teacher if you spend some time thinking about why and how your favorite stories work. * ****** ** * kurona_bright, "Sister Apartment Blues" I laughed at the title. That it was pertinent to the story was a pleasant surprise. Although far from perfect, this entry isn't bad. You should have set Charlie up as the point-of-view character from the start instead of naming Lily first, I think; until Lily fled and the PoV stayed with Charlie, I wasn't sure whose perspective I was in. The trouble you sometimes have with backstory flared up in a minor way. You started the story after a major choice was made and then had to describe it for the reader: "Why should I pretend to appreciate those whose only reason for bringing us over the sea was to hire cheaper workers?" Not graceful. I imagine that if you'd begun with Lily and Charlie walking out of their house for the last time, then shown--briefly--the sea voyage, the interview with Mrs. Honet, and the sisters' first sight of the apartment, the work would have felt more sturdy and substantial. Instead you showed one conversation in two parts. It worked, but barely. (Maybe you thought showing the journey was beside the point of the prompt? I can see where you'd get that idea, though a journey story would have been fine, but spending most of the story talking about events prior to the arrival in a new land wasn't a better alternative.) I received a strong impression of the relationship between Charlie and Lily and some idea of the personality of each sister nevertheless, so good show there! In the story's second half, the exposition stopped clunking. Charlie's explanation of why she followed Lily over the sea sounded close enough to natural. I wish you'd cut the sentences "Back then, Charlie had given in [...] anger washed over her instead"; you didn't need them. Charlie's table-slam showed her anger, and establishing Charlie's fear of losing her sister then made some of her later confession to Lily needlessly redundant. Mrs. Honet became Mrs. Monet in the twelfth paragraph. For shame! I would have placed you in the middle of the field. This story felt a little too thin and too talky to shine. On the other hand, I liked Charlie and got a smile out of the sisters' reconciliation, and though I thought the narrative started too late, I didn't come away from it with the sense that important details were missing. Adjusting the time frame of this one and its proportion of dialogue to action could end in a very decent read. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 16:53 on May 12, 2016 |
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May 6, 2016 04:43
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Chernabog posted:Is it ok to post our entry now or do we have to wait until the signups are over? I'm going to be a bit busy during the weekend. You can post any time. If you proof and edit first--an important caveat--you should be no worse off than people who wait until Sunday night.
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May 6, 2016 18:00
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Crits for Week CLXXXV: In the Dark of the Night, Bad Stories Will Find You Judging the first Music of the Night week taught me that true chills are a lot for which to ask. This time around only one person hit the bullseye, a couple of others were within the next ring, a few more landed somewhere on the target, and the rest sailed merrily into the wide blue sky, though almost everyone successfully integrated some element from his or her song. The prompts had little to do with the round's most disappointing motif: copying plots from well-known classics. I don't know whether it's sadder that multiple people went that road or that they thought we wouldn't recognize a blurred clone of Poe or Shelley. SurreptitiousMuffin, "The South Sea Shuffle" Song: Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" Kai's Song Notes: Bubble-gum pop, upbeat and peppy, telling me "Life's gonna life!" with a cheerful shrug. It's "Hakuna Matata" without the animated meerkat. Is the song incorporated? Absolutely. Along with the easy use of the title--Marnie shakes part of herself off, literally--I can spot all sorts of influences. Taylor Swift can't make dates stay; Marnie's doctor always disappears. Marnie never stops moving. The chorus's reference to "haters" and the fact it's Taylor Swift singing could have inspired the social-media celebrity angle, and those lines about people talking and fakers faking show up in the "fans" who won't shut up and are only too glad to watch her destruction. Is it horror? The attempt is clear but not successful. The grossout goes so far over the top and around the bend that it buries everything in brainless, soulless squick. You've pulled off squick horror before, several times, which only makes this all the more disappointing. It reads like you were having so much fun being gross that you just ladled on the cannibalism and rot and flatulence until you drowned the story in it. The hashtags are annoying and nothing else, though I'd rather read two dozen pointless hashtags than pretty much anything else you've written here. Would you believe I was the judge who liked this the most? Two things raise this above the dregs, in my eyes: the sentence-level competence--your prose may be ruinously disgusting, but it's written well--and that it has something to say, drawing a clear parallel between this woman, whose need for attention drives her to consume and be consumed until she's screaming for help while her followers cheer, and modern pop-culture celebrities. There is a story, there is meaning, and the foundation is sound, yet it's by far the most unpleasant goddamn thing to read of the whole lot. Making her a leper from the outset was possibly an error. If she'd been whole at the start and fallen into physical corruption and decay as we'd watched, her followers' lack of compassion might have had a sharper edge, the horror might have been heightened, and you would likely have had to employ the gore with more finesse. The lack of restraint more than anything else makes this entry a sizeable misfire. *************************************************************************************************** CANNIBAL GIRLS, "Lingering Things" Song: Tay Zonday's "Chocolate Rain" Kai's Song Notes: I liked this until the repetition wore out its welcome. That happened after the first minute of five. At that point, my mind numbed by the unending-albeit-melodic drone, I consulted MetroLyrics to see what it was about : hopelessness, a narrow view of the world, and probably race relations. Easy fodder for horror, so the entrant will have no excuses. Is the song incorporated? Technically. Every element beyond the title that appears (a baby, radio) could be coincidental. The title was the absolute worst thing to use; chocolate rain isn't frightening, and chocolate rain as an unexplained monster-creating mutagen... yeah, no. Is it horror? It tries, but it's too mismatched and laden with monkeycheese to reach the level of even a bad Twilight Zone episode. The radio station that can't actually exist is wonderful. Everything else is disastrous. It's like you tossed pieces from several different stories into a box, shook the box, then threw the ungainly amalgam in front of us and called it an entry. The crux is that a woman goes to a small town and gets caught out in evil rain that smells like a Hershey's factory and turns people into monsters because sure why not. That wackiness (unintentional, I figure, as there's no suggestion you were trying for humor-horror) is further burdened by the subplot about marital tension between Miranda and her husband, a DJ who doesn't make enough money to support a family. Miranda's reason for going to Chocolate Rain Town is therefore to rob a bank with a hammer in a sock. Too many words are spent on these subplots given that neither is resolved! Miranda still needs money at the end and Liam is still a DJ; these things have ceased to matter, that's all. The problem is, they never did. I would guess the whole marriage, baby, robbery thing is meant to make Miranda a character instead of a prop to be moved through a schlock horror scenario. The instinct is good. What I would like to see is characterization that connects somehow to the chocolate rain attack. Neither being poor nor being mad at Liam has anything to do with how she acts when the bug monster comes, so none of your buildup is relevant to the story's climax, and it ultimately serves a negative purpose--though Miranda's marriage is more interesting than the bug thing. Suggestion for revision: Keep the marriage drama; drop the robbery. Maybe Miranda is driving to some random town to get away from Liam for a while after another money argument, or maybe she's on the road to her parents' house. The strange rain could work if you stripped out the chocolate smell, so do that. Have the rain transform people into something less disconnected from humanity than bugs. It could melt their flesh or rearrange their bones so they become sickening, shambling shapes that just look wrong, as one idea. Focus on Miranda's fear for her child (and focus on the pregnancy from the beginning), then end on her tuning in to Liam's station to hear his voice as the fetus starts kicking too soon. Miranda's feelings about her husband and her baby make for a stronger punch than bug things out of nowhere. You can capitalize on them while still telling a good old monster tale. You screw up the tense a few times, mostly by using the past perfect even though the story is told in the present tense. (You'll usually want to use the past tense for past events in a present-tense piece; for instance, "She’d asked him as delicately as she could" should have been "She asked him as delicately as she could," or possibly "She's asked him as delicately as she can" if you want to imply that she makes the request often.) Other times the tense is flat inconsistent, such as in "Her cubicle slave wage doesn’t provide much, but it paid more" etc. Last and probably least, the progress reports on Miranda's button pressing go on way too long. *************************************************************************************************** QuoProQuid, "A Stop Along Briarwood Way" Song: Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" Kai's Song Notes: I know this one! I like this one! Themes: gambling, deceit, manipulation, (rough) love, predatory sexuality. Another soft pitch; there's plenty of dark potential to exploit. Is the song incorporated? Not really. You could stretch with all your might and argue that Toby gambles by looking under Jenna's car. You could say he fears being manipulated and deceived; he isn't, though. Even the creature wearing Henry's skin is doing it so badly that I wouldn't call it a lie. Is it horror? Yes! There's more tension and chill here than in almost anything else this week, which makes it a favorite of mine. More competent than groundbreaking, disappointing in its monster-out-of-nowhere climax, this is still an honest-to-God horror story with strong atmosphere and good descriptive details. Toby's building unease as the situation gets more and more unsettling kept me glued to the screen on my first read and has remained good on every read since. It's a cool turn that Jenna is in fact what she appears to be. The slow ramp-up and rushing climax would more likely be weaknesses in another genre, but tension is this story's treasure, and ratcheting it up inch by inch was the right move. The down side is that there isn't even a hint of explanation for what's in Henry or why. He hit an alien with his car, I guess? And the alien ate him without Jenna seeing it somehow? Then it teleported, in his corpse, into the woods? It's all eerie, but it doesn't bear thought. That's a pitfall with this sort of horror. It's difficult to make the reality live up to the fear, as Stephen King has proven only too many times. *************************************************************************************************** spectres of autism, "Analogues" Song: The Weeknd's "Can't Feel My Face" Kai's Song Notes: Almost a horror story already. I could imagine from the lyrics that the singer's lady-love is a vampire, but it would be enough for her to be destructive and potentially murderous (depending on how you read that "forever young" line). Themes: numbness, death, dread, embrace of that which harms and kills, love that destroys. Is the song incorporated? The acceptance of something that could ultimately destroy the self is integral, so that's a yes. Is it horror? No. Not even close. It's all drug use and corporate conspiracy. If it pulled off what it's trying to do it would be a strange thriller, perhaps, but there are no chills to be had. I ought to summarize the story as I understand it, because there's every chance I'm not putting it together correctly. Gail, a male music critic, is concerned when a musician friend decides to go off a drug that has evidently infested the music industry. He's sure that getting clean is ruining Theron's music and tries to convince his boss of this. The boss, Washler, resists. Theron dropping the drug doesn't appear to bother him any. But Gail is determined to prove that quitting Wish is detrimental, and that does worry Washler, because if Gail writes about Wish being good for the brain then... uh... people might want to stay on Wish and that would be bad? Gail goes home and does some drugs and there's a quantum djinn in his head with whom he has an annoying conversation without benefit of quotation marks, italics, or any other visual indicators. The djinn shows fondness for Gail and panics at the thought of Gail's rejection, at which point some men in black burst in and grab Gail's arms. Cut to Washler's office, where Gail assures Washler that dropping Wish has had no negative effect on Theron at all. He seems to have become an automaton. Washler has a heavy-handed thought about "entities taking over everything" and plots to rebel as soon as he has more drug cigars. I don't care for this a jot, I'm afraid. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Going off the drug is bad! It means a break with the music industry! No, going off the drug is good! The music industry wants Theron off the drug! The drug makes decisions for you! It fights with your own thoughts! But quitting is bad! But quitting is good, but everything is controlled by a bunch of corporate suits. drat The Man! FFS. Staying in one, limited, consistent PoV would have been an enormous help in making half of this premise fly, because Gail's view and Washler's view contradict each other so sharply it makes a hash of everything. I've wondered whether one of them might be an unreliable narrator, but which? They're both on the drug. To write it in Theron's PoV would have offered a stronger take on the setting than either. Even though he only appears directly in the first section, even though he has few lines, his is by far the most interesting situation. Imagine: Theron makes the decision to go off Wish. We see what that does to his head and get a contrast in how the world looks with and without the drug. His critics and producers react somehow to his decision, possibly pressuring him to take the proverbial crackpipe up again, possibly following his lead, and ostensibly these controlling entities would have something to say to him. His confrontation with them could be the climax. Hopefully it wouldn't take place offscreen, unlike Gail's. Maybe that story would be worth telling, but this one... I don't think so. Super confusing, deliberately unclear in the beginning (I'm guessing) in order to build suspense, it's too much of a muddle to say anything or to entertain. *************************************************************************************************** Guiness13, "Tuesday Night Lock-In" Song: I LOVE MAKONNEN's "Tuesday" Kai's Song Notes: The drops or wubs or whatever you call them aren't to my taste, but they give the impression of a world warping around you. Could be good horror stuff. The song's about getting drunk and high on the one night off the singer has in his week, so far as I can tell, and the themes of too much work and too little time and too much truth in the time one does have are decent fuel for fear. Is the song incorporated? No doubt. Not only is it set on a Tuesday, in a party, but too little time and too much truth are concepts epitomized by death. Is it horror? No doubt of that, either. Unfortunately the horror takes a very familiar and specific form. "The Masque of the Red Death," revised. It's too derivative to get full marks. I'm sorry for you if you've never read Poe's story, as two judges--self included--rather liked your work, but I have a hard time imagining you wrote this without knowledge of the classic horror tale of partygoers sealing themselves away from a plague only for a strange guest to bring it into their midst. For Heaven's sake, you named your setting Club Divine when "Red Death" takes place in an abbey. Your plague carrier wears a black hood; Poe's has no tangible body; both can be read as Death Itself. If you did this on purpose then count yourself lucky not to have picked up a DQ or DM. There's a little too much room for doubt, but the longer the look at it, the more I frown. It's difficult to comment on anything else; the similarity is overwhelming. That's a shame since the sentences are fine, the descriptions evocative, and the writing style owes nothing to Poe. My complaints beyond concern about your originality are minor. You have an excess of named characters: Joe, Trey, Stacy, Vic, Anita, Luise, and Berto. Anita and Luise are only mentioned once! Surely Joe or Trey could have doubled as the bartender? The second-to-last paragraph could stand to be broken up; you may have meant it to be a rush of impressions, but the choppy sentences that start it off work against any such effect. *************************************************************************************************** hotsoupdinner, "I'll Never Be" Song: Lorde's "Royals" Kai's Song Notes: These opening beats take me back to Belgium's entry in Eurovision 2015. The song's got a good rhythm to it. It tells of people who'll never be rich but are fine with that while they have love and dreams. That's a more difficult idea to turn into horror than some, and I'm interested in seeing how the entrant handles it. Is the song incorporated? In an interesting way, yes; the story goes against the spirit of the song while still taking cues from it. The protagonist wants to be rich and powerful, and she will, in the end, but her queen-bee life won't be what she expected. Is it horror? The genre is right for all that the fear factor falls flat. This could easily be a black-and-white Twilight Zone episode--not one of the good ones, but not as bad as the one in which tiny spacemen land in an American housewife's cabin. The prose doesn't share the song's snappy rhythm. The short, simple sentences feel choppy. The protagonist is to blame for the lack of dread, though, or so my theory goes. She's such a passive, accepting lump of a person that she spends, what, ninety percent of the story sitting and taking whatever "they" do to her? Aside from one attempt to run down a hall, her sole moment of agency is agreeing--off camera, during the part that's told rather than shown--to be Alice Gold's doppelganger. She shows so little spirit or feeling that I can only feel a dim sympathy in turn. Everything about her situation is at a remove. How it will all end becomes too obvious too soon: past the line "I was supposed to become her in the truest sense of the word," the tale has no surprises left to offer, only a tottering march toward the finish. I do like the conclusion after reflecting on it for a while. The protagonist's body is Alice Gold. But herself, her soul? No. That was always impossible. The tragedy is that she doesn't see that truth until she's crossed the Rubicon, though her lack of action makes it a weak tragedy just as it is weak horror. *************************************************************************************************** flerp, "The Fate of the Animals" Song: The Darkness's "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" Kai's Song Notes: What is with that guy's striped, topless jumpsuit thing on the album cover? The song's a lot less terrifying than that outfit! It deals with themes that are familiar, but of which people rarely tire: love and the joyous loss of control it brings. Is the song incorporated? Sure. The wolf loves his mother. The inexplicable hands do a lot of touching, too. A sun even goes down in a fashion; that's a nice touch. Is it horror? No, though it's possible those giant hands squeezing the sun to death are supposed to be frightening. The death of the mother wolf is pure tragedy. (Or it would be, if half the story weren't the cub howling and howling and dear lord shut up!) Bambi, but with blue space wolves. What is it with people emulating classics this week? I'm joking in your case, but you could in fact sum this up as "A baby animal stumbles around crying for his mother, but she's dead." The sci-fi touches, the hands and the incessant colors, are window dressing. Colors! You sure do go nuts with the Crayolas. Blue claws, yellows, yellow and black leaves, blue fur, black sky, purple sky, yellow orb, platinum fur, golden eyes, purple sky (again), platinum fur (again), white fire, pinks, purples, oranges, platinum, blue claws (again), platinum (again), reds, blue--add in some ruby and olive and violet and fawn and you'd have a chorus from Broenheim and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Most of the colors don't appear to have a purpose except as an unimpressive means of making your wolves and world alien. That said, maybe they're meant to do more. I could buy the idea that the little wolf focuses on colors in order to beat back his fear of the darkness, but the execution is tedious reading, and how does a wolf have the concept of platinum? Do the space wolves mine between hunting trips? Man, I would read a story about alien wolf miners hunting space kobolds underground and stockpiling minerals as trophies. Just saying. I can't hate this--the little blue wolf is too sympathetic even if it's some of the cheapest sympathy possible--but it misses on genre and cancels out a creative take on your song by vomiting the rainbow everywhere. *************************************************************************************************** Tyrannosaurus, "I Have to Take Care of Everything" Song: Jay-Z's "99 Problems" Kai's Song Notes: What do you know, someone turned "Rock, Paper, and Scissors" into a song. Themes: conflict, poverty, wealth, dismissal, feelings of persecution, denial of concern, arrogance, race relations, misogyny, resentment. Is the song incorporated? Not in any "gently caress bitches, man" way, thank God, but problems, check; poverty, check; resentment, check; denial, check, sort of. Protagonist-who-needs-a-name is flippant about the weirdness around her. Is it horror? No. The main character is squicked by her weird clone dads, but she's never afraid. Family melodrama gets all the focus. The narrative voice is sassy and defiant and tough for certain values of the word, and Protagonist-who-needs-a-name doesn't really lose composure despite her fainting fits. Her nonchalance fits the song at the genre's expense. The dad is too much the classic goofy, absentminded scientist to be scary either, and I end up wondering whether you've been trying for humor instead of horror all along. There's not much else to say since the genre failure is its downfall. I can't warm to Ms. Nameless. She has good reasons to resent her father, not to mention that teenagers aren't known for being compassionate beings, but Dad is so much more likable than she is that her treatment of him doesn't put her in the best light. I notice that she cares enough to get him food at the end; not checking on him once in three days and taking six years to notice anything odd about him when the most presentable version apparently has twenty-nine baby fingers still colors her as self-centered and blind. If you want to mitigate that effect you could dial the time span down to six weeks or something else less incredible. It would take a complete rewrite to make this horror, but with tweaks it could be a good SF father-daughter story. *************************************************************************************************** Thranguy, "The Mob of Darts: An Oral History" Song: M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" Kai's Song Notes: Drugs. Crime. Robbery. Murder. Threats. You'd think it would be easy to spin horror out of those, but keeping to horror without sliding away into thriller or noir could be a serious challenge. Is the song incorporated? The song title is the obvious link, but the lines "Some some some I some I murder / Some I some I let go" show up in the temporary solution of the Eye Cloaks. Is it horror? No. Non. Nyet. Nein. Iie. Though Twitter mobs made physical is a dreadful concept, I can't imagine a paper plane burying itself in someone's neck without laughing. It's as ineffective as CANNIBAL GIRLS' chocolate rain. The entire story is a series of secondhand accounts, removing immediacy, and lengthy exposition about made-up paper technology puts me to nightmareless sleep. Worst is the happy ending, which takes away any lingering vestige of fear. Flash-length horror can't survive a finale so suggestive of a victory parade. For all that I shake my head over how thoroughly this fails the prompt, it has a worthwhile concept at its root. Something tells me there are already folks who would love to see this technology made real. You could absolutely write a horror story about how readily ordinary people would take censorship to its extreme if they had the means; among other things, though, if horror were your object, you'd have to prioritize creeping out the reader over commenting on society. In this version fear is so far outside the focus that it's scarcely a peripheral blur. The dryness of it and the burdensome infodumps are problems beyond the genre concern. Usually an all-dialogue story at least tries for engaging characters. Yours are interchangeable nonentities. The core concept is good, but it isn't so good that it justifies the story without help from character, setting, description, plot--things happen in this, but no one has a goal or acts toward any purpose--strong voice, strong style, or anything other than basic competence. If you're going to throw the usual ingredients to the wayside, the result had better be grand. *************************************************************************************************** Benny Profane, "Turn Forever Hand in Hand" Song: Gorillaz's "Feel Good Inc." Kai's Song Notes: The picture I'm getting is of a man in the heart of a bleak, broken city, holding on to love as the thing that keeps him standing. My favorite lines are those about windmills, which I think suggest that love--romantic, platonic, whatever: going hand in hand with each other--can be the energy source for an otherwise lifeless land. Is the song incorporated? Here's the broken city; here's the windmill; here's the ghost town. I don't see Dr. McGillicuddy in the lyrics, which is a pity. It would be nice if something explained him. Is it horror? It is the schlockiest Twilight Zone episode I ever did see. A fantastic opening written in elegant prose (a few unwieldy sentences aside; the sixth paragraph is ridiculous) degrades into hokey golly-gee-whillickers dialogue as I watch. My heart sinks. The picture fades to black and white in my mind's eye. The mysterious Dr. McGillicuddy should be a death knell for my hopes, yet I press on, crossing my fingers, wanting something to come of the town's dire apathy. The moldy hot dogs promise dread, but there aren't many words left--the dialogue goes on and on--it ends not with a shriek but with a sigh, and the voice is mine. The dying, fatalistic town is wonderful, as is the narration while John is alone. Mostly. When your sentences start to run long I feel like you're leaping for a literary voice and landing on affectation. Nevertheless, the broken setting delights me, and the false cheer is suitably creepy in concept. Alas for the corny, hammy execution that spoils it! Alas for a villain I never see! These things saw away at the piece's good bones. I've considered whether McGillicuddy is the windmill and the "treatment" is death, but the former makes no sense without the latter--or with; why would the windmill sprout a name and doctorate?--and the latter won't fly. The people who hanged themselves in the past ostensibly didn't come back. There's no reason provided for the rules to change out of nowhere. Moreover, John would need to be dead almost from the start (else why can he see dead people of a sudden?), and if he's already dead, it's pointless for the whistling stranger to encourage him to seek the treatment. Even the hi-de-ho-neighbor dialogue could have worked if you'd given a face or motive to McGillicuddy. Without that the story spins to no purpose in vacant air. *************************************************************************************************** Blue Wher, "Deliver Me From Fireflies" Song: Owl City's "Fireflies" Kai's Song Notes: Cheery techno is much more up my alley. So are these lyrics, celebrating the strange, beautiful warmth of dreams, with a hint of melancholy for the disappointment waiting in the waking world. Is the song incorporated? Indeed. You know, looking at the lyrics again, I'm at least a little impressed by how they're used. Fireflies light the protagonist's world. They take him away. They "hug" him. The song's love for dreams is transformed into a desperate desire for sleep, and the idea is sound even if the execution isn't. Is it horror? "A guy falls asleep, the short story" isn't going to send chills down anyone's spine. If the protagonist dies at the end, possible but unclear, then it makes a legitimate stab at the genre, but the text is only too good at invoking the maddening boredom of being unable to sleep at two in the morning. There's nothing to the main character but sleeplessness and hallucinations. His visions are either generic (tentacle-monster boss) or random (flaming pegasus) and so don't tell me anything distinctive about him. The pace is slow, the early paragraphs large, and my dim curiosity about the fireflies wouldn't carry me through this if I weren't obliged to finish. It's dull. That's its fatal flaw. I'm more or less convinced that he does just fall asleep in the end, and my advice--thinking back to your Domegrassi story and your brawl against skwidmonster--is to give your characters clear goals and make them work toward those goals. This man is absolutely passive; things happen to him. Make things happen because of the people in your story next time. *************************************************************************************************** Grizzled Patriarch, "A Moment of Your Time" Song: The White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army" Kai's Song Notes: What the singer is fighting off is left up to interpretation. Mine is that he's struggling with ghosts from his past, memories that threaten to drive him to Kansas and back home again. Is the song incorporated? No. This is the first and only entry in which I can't find the song at all. Is it horror? Surrealism is horrifying to me, granted... but no. This sketch of discontent, disconnected, isolated humanity is bleak, but it has only slightly more connection to horror than "Joey Romaine's Live House of Wax" has to nonsense. Considering the above, I wonder why I didn't even think about a DM vote. Probably your prose saved you. It couldn't have hurt that the nameless protagonist's memory of hearing another man sob in the bathroom is human, poignant, and real. You evade every challenge the prompt set, though, in the service of detailing a situation and then doing nothing with it beyond making it literal, and an average Dilbert cartoon does a better job of demonizing cubicle work. Twist is right that the protagonist is too passive, although I think that may be intentional, a means of emphasizing how powerless and dehumanized he feels. If the story went anywhere or had a significant payoff, you might pull that off. Since it doesn't--the mystery of the e-mail lends some interest to events, but only for a while. For me, interest dies when the shift manager is behind the protagonist the instant he whispers to Dale. Up until that point the story has been realistic. It loses credibility there. This moment may be meant to start the shift from the real to the surreal, but I would prefer the dome come down without other hints of strangeness in this office. That deep, through-the-nose sigh is the sound I made the first time I reached the end-that-is-not-an-end. *************************************************************************************************** curlingiron, "Night Drive" Song: M83's "Midnight City" Kai's Song Notes: A vaguely dreamy paean to the beauty of a city at night. The midnight of the title offers an easy horror angle. I'll be more impressed if the story this song inspires is shot through with a neon glow. Is the song incorporated? Neon and all! Is it horror? Not quite. It's closer to dream than nightmare despite the apocalypse in the background. I was going to call it dark surrealism, but dark suggests a mood this piece doesn't have; rather than gloomy or grim or bleak or chilling, it's melancholy. I love the setting and all of its brightly lit ambiguities, my personal interpretation being that it is the electrical ghost of a dead city, inhabited by phantasms who can't exist outside its boundaries or under the sun. That probably isn't right. It doesn't explain the man in the car or why the phantasms stay underground at all hours. The dreamy tone and short length leave me room to decide what exactly is going on without frustrating me with the lack of concrete detail, an admirable achievement. The premise is all this has, though, as Twist said in judge chat. Character? No; the protagonist is only a flicker in my mind, appropriately enough. Plot? No. Story? Questionable. The protagonist's motives for dying in the light are more nebulous than the city's nature. Too slight and too ephemeral, this is a pleasure to read but can't hold a neon bulb to the winner. *************************************************************************************************** crabrock, "Whispers" Song: Kanye West's "Gold Digger" Kai's Song Notes: The gist at first seems to be that women want money, but then there's that last stanza, suggesting--I think--that the woman who stays true to a man as he builds his way up from nothing will end up betrayed. It's a sort of rough sympathy that paints both sexes in ugly colors. Is the song incorporated? The title is. I don't see anything else. Write a good enough story, as here, and that choice stops looking uncreative and starts looking wise. Is it horror? One hundred percent. Congratulations on what's probably the fastest and most overwhelming win in Thunderdome history. You alone nail the genre to the floor. Your main character is completely, horribly helpless and struggling against it in every moment, and her instant of victory is destroyed effortlessly by the person who will control her for the rest of her life. It isn't her imprisonment in an unresponsive body that makes the story great. It's that brief flight of hope and the heartless way it dies. Cold. Final. Help. The situation is plausible, too; I've read the article about a woman using facilitated communication to exploit a disabled man. I can believe someone else would do such a thing for money rather than love and sex. I can believe it has already happened, is happening somewhere right now. You deny skepticism any chance to weaken your work--except in one respect. What are the odds she would spontaneously recover control of her eyes? Necessity justifies that development (without it you wouldn't have a story), it's just the one thing I could conceivably call a flaw. Other than "he’d told your parents"--wrong tense--and "After the doctor’s botched your surgery," and "You want to wretch and sob," and possibly other technical errors, that is. I didn't notice most of those until I went looking for them. Something else to praise is your handling of Daniel. The way he becomes careless and sloppy once he decides to use the main character is so telling. She's become an object to him, not a person or even something alive. He probably has to take that view of her in order to get past whatever scrap of conscience he possesses. His all-too-believable humanity turns him into the worst monster of the week. *************************************************************************************************** ghost crow, "Sensorium" Song: Bastille's "Pompeii" Kai's Song Notes: Love the rhythm of this one. There's something Biblical about those tumbling walls that's enhanced by the mention of sin later in the song; that's fertile terror ground. So is the sense that nothing has changed, that everything has always been dark and ruined, that the happier memories were some kind of lie. Is the song incorporated? I count the use of hallucinogens as a vice. Every day is the same for Max, and his sin in designing the faux Matrix made a rubble of real, meaningful existence. Song use: check. Is it horror? The final revelation doesn't have any power to shock or dismay. Am I supposed to be horrified that the people who have hooked themselves to this endless drug world also feel no pain? Should I be appalled that Max programmed this? The no-pain thing is nothing compared to the existence of the drug world, but that's treated as neutral. This is another entry that tries to hit the prompt but flies wide. The Matrix, revised. Strong physical details and one intriguing reference to fads make the tired, familiar setting more interesting than it deserves to be. That isn't saying a lot. A mysteeeerious figure talking to the protagonist in his dreams is old ground too, as is amnesia, and eleventh-hour recall is a shoddy plot device. Everything but the body mods is by the numbers. It was the No pain! reveal that tipped me into agreeing with a DM for this, because that doesn't resolve a thing or add new depth to the Sensorium or explain Max's memory loss; it's ancillary information that should not be the closing beat. What happened to the people in this world who didn't want anything to do with the Sensorium? Why is no one coming back? Where is Max's body? So many questions! Punctuating dialogue gives you some trouble. You missed a hyphen in "top-grade" and wrote "He laid there" instead of the correct "He lay there." Follow this link for pointers on lay vs. lie. These errors are small and suggest unfamiliarity with certain rules rather than failure to proof. The effort you put into your entry shows, even if it didn't pay off. *************************************************************************************************** skwidmonster, "Excerpts From the Journals of Dr. Lorraine Felt and Subject One" Song: Elle King's "Ex's and Oh's" Kai's Song Notes: This woman is begging to star in a horror story as either a victim or a monster. She's a walking addiction and ambulatory heartbreak. Will she or her lovers pay the greater price for it? Is the song incorporated? The story's take on it is at once valid, interesting, and disappointing. Valid: Dr. Lorraine is a monster, all right. She made her baby, and he's going to run back to her. Interesting: She's a cold academic rather than a femme fatale. Disappointing: I would rather she had been a black widow if it would have meant one less story this week that mirrored famous media. Is it horror? Despite its strong resemblance to one of the genre's capstones, maybe not. The events presented are slightly too absurd and want for dire consequences. Frankenstein, revised. The problem I have with Guiness13's entry hobbles this one as well: it's hard to judge this on its own merits when I keep seeing echoes of another writer in Dr. Lorraine's experiments, her abandonment of her first subject, his journal, and the mention of a man on the table being shocked to groaning life. The twist you put on the concept doesn't hold up. It's not clear to me why the doctor thought putting a child's brain in an adult body would create some sort of super-scholar or what the point of that would have been. I'll give it a reluctant pass on the grounds of mad science anyway, but I suspect you threw that in there so you wouldn't only be cribbing from Mary Shelley. I enjoy--now that I've sussed it out after a few rereads--that Dr. Lorraine washed up in a New Orleans carnival. That departure from the familiar is much more interesting. Though a story about a mad, disgraced scientist's fall from respectability to sideshow wouldn't necessarily be horror, it could be worthwhile in a way a lukewarm rehash of a classic isn't. *************************************************************************************************** Lake Jucas, "Candy Shop" Song: 50 Cent's "Candy Shop" Kai's Song Notes: I will never forgive Twist if the writer takes this song as an invitation to write erotica. Is the song incorporated? I don't want to look at the lyrics again to determine whether more than the title is used. If that's the only link, it's for the best. Is it horror? More so than many entries despite the slapdash execution. A boy being taken over by antediluvian aliens at some unspecified point and in some unspecified manner and terrorizing a town to the point that bodies are everywhere, radios are broadcasting about him, and bridges might be closed (??) is ridiculous. Full stop. You don't begin to make it make sense. Yet although I don't know when the silent voice started talking to Marcus, its manipulations creep me out long before blood and bodies show up. The tension builds. Something is very wrong.... It falls apart once you raise the curtain and reveal ancient aliens, never mind the clumsy and pace-breaking flashback, but the last scene still manages to earn a shudder. Speaking of shudders, there's normal Thunderdome carelessness and then there's the level of don't-give-a-drat that presents one with "sidways," "sufrace," "rush-colored," "vaccant," and the phrase "it's hidden nooks." You know what's weird? The egregious errors are front loaded; as the story picks up, the mistakes go down. Good grief, Lake Jucas. Proofread your opening paragraphs most thoroughly, not least! My dislike of the reveal that Marcus is somehow a monster beyond the ability of anyone to destroy can't be overstated. Does the town have no guns? No police? No military? How is he causing so much death by fooling around in a vacant lot? You can't handwave this. "Aliens!" doesn't explain diddly, and you know it. Why oh why did you cook up a chilling atmosphere and then throw a pound of Grade D Twilight Zone Spam into the pot? What a horrifying waste. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Jun 9, 2016 |
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May 12, 2016 09:28
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Entrants, please do the archivists a favor and include your block of prompts in your submission post. Check the two posts above this one if you want examples of good formatting.
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May 15, 2016 17:32
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Crits for Week CXCII: The Voices Talking Somewhere in the House In R.E.M. Week, the Thunderdome hive mind decided it loved the previous round's prompt too much to let it go. Six stories out of seventeen leaned hard on dialogue and came up wanting in other areas. The one-conversation-story thing was an exercise, guys! Not a long-term pattern to follow! The other recurring theme was Weird Stuff Happening, which wouldn't have been so bad if the Weird Stuff had been less random, better grounded, more interesting, or ideally all three. ExtraNoise, "If That's What It Takes" Song: "I Took Your Name" Kai's Song Notes: The words are almost lost in metallic reverberations. Focus is required to make out more than a suggestion of sense. The chorus leads me to wonder whether this is intentional; the song and I are both to blame for my confusion. Identity theft is the theme, but what's interesting is that although the singer says he'll be an albatross--a burden--other lines suggest he's accomplished things the person he's singing to couldn't do for himself. The connection: Specific lines from it appear in the entry; thankfully, the quoted phrases are short and only stick out in one instance ("Is there some confusion?"). I didn't imagine the song to be about marriage, but the interpretation works well. The best part is that the protagonist does accomplish something Alex had found impossible. This is also the worst part. The outsider: Neither the narrator nor Alex fits the bill. The idea may be that the narrator was an outsider in her marriage, but that's a thin branch on which to stand. To your credit, the unusual second-person style mostly works when it doesn't snag on early giveaways that look like technical errors ("You were not the same man I met in college twenty years ago"--I'm inclined to say I should be I'd in that sentence besides, given how precise this lady is in her speech). The voice is fairly good, though not convincing as something spoken rather than written. The connection to the song is almost too clear, but you handle the direct use of lyrics well enough. Then the ending comes along and slaughters it. One can guess as early as the sixth paragraph that Alex is dead. It lends the piece some suspense: how did he die? What will happen next? But interest wanes as the retelling of past events goes on and on, events centered on writing to boot; that sort of thing often has a self-referential tang, and so it has here. Then, wham, it turns out the narrator has murdered Alex to... further his career? Plot twist! If she's serious about that motivation, it's stupid, and if she isn't, to have her claim it is a poor move. I strongly suspect she's making a morbid joke, but the tone shift--especially coming right at the end--is like a whoopee cushion in a hearse, neither funny nor appropriate. I wonder how much Alex was right about her. The more often I read this, the less sympathetic and the more toxic she gets, and the more I lean toward a different answer to her question. *********** DurianGray, "Pre-dawn" Song: "Disturbance at the Heron House" Kai's Song Notes: I don't know whether this song is about the army at all, but that's what I get from the mentions of liberty, honor, grunts, and cogs. I imagine young, green soldiers and older vets assembling after Reveille, with war as the chaos they follow. Valid interpretation? Loony? Probably loony. Summons, crowds, zoos, chaos, loss of interest, and retreat all register as themes either way. The connection: Crowds, chaos, and retreat, check! The riots capture the song's mood. The outsider: Sam, who's left his home world to work on one of its moons during a time of political tension. His accent ensures he stands out. The trouble is that he does very little to become an insider; he does very little, period. His initiation to life on the moon, survival of a riot, involves no action on his part. He doesn't even hide himself. Someone else pushes him down. Sam's lack of agency weakens a story that's already none too strong. The opening has grown on me since my first reading, and now I sort of like it, but the middle stretch between the first exposition block about Pallas and Medusa and the start of the riot is still largely dull. I blame the excess of political details. Why is the Duke's marriage worth mentioning? I'm not clear either on what the riot is meant to accomplish. It would make more sense if a Medusan had been assassinated; rioting because trade agreements will be delayed because someone was murdered doesn't compute. Are the people so angry that they'll take any excuse to be violent? If so, you underplay the discontent. "Palladians were starting to complain" doesn't suggest that level of rage. Technical errors aside--your dialogue mechanics need work, and you should read up on hyphens--you wrote competent sentences and decent conversation. I could see a few revisions and more polish turning this into an okay story. Maybe a good one if Sam faced conflict and did something to overcome it. *********** Maugrim, "Foreign Flower" Song: "The Flowers of Guatemala" Kai's Song Notes: Amanita is the name of some very toxic things. If the "flowers" are poisonous mushrooms, that's grim on a few levels. Mushrooms covering everything suggests rot, or I could read that line as bright colors (that conceal poison) covering up the truth. That verse about looking into the sun supports that, maybe. Go blind. Don't look under the bright, deadly blanket. Themes: Concealment, illusion, denial, blindness, death. The connection: The people who attract Sophia appear accepting but are not, and there's your illusion and concealment. The most straightforward link is to the lyrics "There's something here I find hard to ignore / There's something that I've never seen before" as they describe Sophia's feeling about the signers. The outsider: Sophia can't be part of the hearing world. She tries to integrate into the Deaf world. She's still locked out of both at the end, but she finds a moment of peace with that and has someone to hold her hand. The trouble is that Sophia's outsider status stands on unsteady ground. Why can't she sign? Given her fascination with the language, why hasn't she learned before this? I reckon you went this route in order to set up the conflict between her outlook on the hearing world and the outlook adopted by your subset of Deaf culture, namely that she doesn't view people who aren't deaf as dumb or share their distaste for social interaction with anyone who isn't Deaf. The contrast is fine, but the situation is forced, a problem that could be resolved by rewriting Sophia as a woman who lost her hearing as an adult. Her alienation from each world would make perfect sense in those circumstances. Jonathan's return to Sophia muddles the ending, because as far as I know he still thinks hearing people are inferior and wouldn't want anything to do with Sophia if she weren't deaf. And what about this K figure? The conclusion would be stronger, if bittersweet, if the final sentence weren't there. Alternatively, Jonathan could shift away from his group, toward her, while she was trying to shift toward him, making it feel right for them to meet in the middle. *********** anime was right, "Ain't No Girl Like Me" Song: "The Wrong Child" Kai's Song Notes: The droning music doesn't match the lyrics about laughing, playing children. It's wrong. Probably on purpose. The singer is a sick child, I figure, with cancer or something that leaves him housebound, and this song hits the prompt so square on the nose that it's a total softball assignment. The connection: The nameless protagonist (when did that become the fashion in Thunderdome and whom do I have to set on fire to make it stop?) is a child who may not think, herself, that she's "not supposed to be like this," but Zach certainly does. He and his flunkies look and laugh. My favorite link is between Nameless's struggle to know what to say to Annie and the five questions in the bridge. The outsider: Nameless, a gay teenager surrounded by kids who beat her up, is an outsider, but you'd have a hard time convincing me she wants to become an insider with Zach & Co. Her suggestion that she sing in their band doesn't sound remotely sincere. She wants to bond with Annie, but can you be an insider with one other person? Some clumsy mechanics, but nothing that bad until "I’d bury my face into my pillow and cried until it was damp." Then "'Where’s yours? Noise pollution is a fineable offense', I say." Oof. Why would Annie being kind to Zach make the narrator want to sing? If the idea is that sing really means scream in this instance, it would be better to use the right word. Stories about gay kids being harassed for being gay are a Thunderdome staple, and I'm tired of the one-dimensional villains who don't show more motivation for what they do. For even a stereotypical bigot of a teenager to beat up a girl, a neighbor girl, demands more explanation than "she's gay." I'd buy it a little more readily if Nameless were a guy, but it would still be a better story if Zach weren't made out of cardboard. Bigots are humans with reasoning of their own. They feel more real and more awful when they're written that way. That said, I like the ending very much. I like that Annie's friendship still matters to Nameless even though Annie doesn't share her other feelings. I like that it isn't perfect and sugar-sweet. Acceptance turns out to be more important, or at least as important, as romance, and that's really cool. I put this on my high tier largely for those last two sentences. *********** flerp, "The Beat That's In Every Blast" Song: "World Leader Pretend" Kai's Song Notes: A man works to change himself. His walls could be social, emotional, or mental, but it doesn't matter which. The important thing is that he wants to be different, and the themes of the song are that desire and the difficulty of the task. The connection: It doesn't look likely that the nameless  protagonist raised the mental, emotional, and social walls that separate him from other people himself, but there they are. He lets his machines talk to him in even the least appropriate moment.The outsider: Nameless comes across as downright alien. Everything is song and rhythm for him, including bombs falling and people's pleas to God and a child's admission of guilt. He spends the story trying to understand people as though he weren't one of them; he doesn't seem interested in being one of them, so that part of the prompt isn't fulfilled, but trying to comprehend insiders comes close. I would cut "That's" from the title to make it clunk less. I would replace "rift" with "riff" to make the last sentence of the fourth paragraph less nonsensical. The main character starts weird and stays weird in a manner that's more off-putting than interesting, so I have to consider why I react poorly to him. That he sees the world differently than I do shouldn't be a crime. That his reaction to chaos and grief is to try and find a rhythm underneath it--that's it. He's distant, detached, and low on compassion during his tedious quest for the beat of life. The kid with the hand turkey tries valiantly to save the show by being human and comparatively eloquent, but he can't: the alien in the headphones weighs it down until the end. That ending tries for depth, and there's something to the idea that sobs are the rhythm of human existence, but the main character continues to be an albatross around the story's neck and weakens the notion's poignancy with his narrative voice. You could increase his empathy if you revised this piece for use elsewhere, pull his obsession with rhythm back a notch, and still make your point. The kid's story as an outsider in his family might also be worth telling if you want to play with the different kinds of noise we make. *********** Carl Killer Miller, "Ash Knowledge" Song: "King of Birds" Kai's Song Notes: The singer wants to make his own mark, do his own work, without leaning on the efforts of his forebears. At the same time, he encourages an old man to keep moving--to stay alive, maybe, depending on what's implied by "so still"--and teach. Themes: independence, frustration, dependence, ancestry, lessons, sky vs. ground. The connection: An elderly man tells his grandson a story intended to teach him something, though it sounds more confusing than instructive. His allegory involves birds. Sky vs. ground is a large part of it. This is one thing the entry does right; good show. The outsider: Jerry's no outsider despite the odd reference to bringing him "into the fold," and Pappa/Murphy is, if anything, an insider drifting out. My reading: Gerald Murphy tells his grandson, Jerry, a story about the Dresden bombing, hidden in an allegory about birds to make it appropriate for a small child. On the day of the bombing the elder Gerald realized that rather than destroying factories, he and his men were killing the civilians that kept the town going. He followed his orders that day but lost his certainty of the righteousness of the Allies' actions. His moral for Jerry is that life can be destroyed by uncontrolled fire--probably meaning hate or anger. Boiled down like that it sounds all right, but the execution is bungled so badly that I had this as my loss choice. On the nuts-and-bolts level, the sentence mechanics aren't great. The sentence "The boy showed a preternatural compassion and the captain wouldn't be around forever" should have a comma after compassion, since what follows is an independent clause. Pap/Pappa's nickname isn't consistent. You misspell choked. At one point you don't capitalize the first word of a dialogue sentence; elsewhere you put a comma outside a closing quotation mark. Multiple people speak in the first paragraph of the third section. Frieda becomes "the Frieda" in Section Seven. More aggravating is the device of Pap's allegory. The story skims over it and counts on Jerry's questions to draw an outline. This feels like a way for you to avoid having to come up with an allegory that makes sense, because the bits we see do not. There are two bird kingdoms. They fight. Then one bird kingdom attacks a place where the birds of the other kingdom learn to fly. They see baby birds on the ground and... eat them? Is that what Pap went with? I understand Jerry's confusion. The line about an uncontrolled blaze doesn't go with birds at all. Worse yet, arguably, is all the back-and-forth between 1945 and the present. The present-day scenes interrupt the Dresden scenes; there's at least one too many, probably two. Imagine the story if you cut Section Three and Section Five. You might want to work the point that "someone telling you to do something isn't always a good reason to do it" in somewhere else, but the rest is chaff. If you lost those sections' details about Pap's bird story, you might get away with the allegory schtick. Vagueness would be an improvement in this case. I would suggest losing the entire frame and setting the whole story in Gerald Murphy's viewpoint during the war, except the thump of his dogtags on his old chest is a startlingly perfect finish. It echoes the thumps during the bombing, and more than that, it tells me that either he's still a soldier for all his soul-searching, he wears them to remind himself of what he did, or both. *********** docbeard, "Men Over Mission" Song: "E-Bow the Letter" Kai's Song Notes: If I'm anywhere close to right, this song is one celebrity talking to another. An experienced star warning a new one? Maybe. He's jaded about the drugs, a little frightened by the fans, familiar with that fear and probably plenty more. Stars, sorrow, fear, adrenaline, marks of success, and aversion all put in appearances. The connection: Fear, adrenaline, and sorrow are present, and I can see Jason as an experienced star/gang member talking to newbie Mike if I squint, but the link isn't terribly strong. The outsider: Mike isn't yet a member of Cassie's crew. Whatever he's done to get that money in his backseat is his initiation trial. Are you sure you didn't mean to submit this in the previous week? I was fine with it on my first read until Jason started coughing out exposition and I realized I was trapped in a bog of chatter. It has the classic problems of an 85%-dialogue story: the exposition isn't smooth. Not much other than talking happens. The situation is ill defined; I haven't a clue what Cassie and her crew do, what Reyes wants, why Jason is dying, or how a couple of vets ended up working for a gang. I like Jason and I regret his solution to Mike's problem, but since I don't have a firm grasp on that problem--or on Mike, for that matter; he's all but blank--his death doesn't cut very deep. *********** hotsoupdinner, "Miracle" Song: "New Test Leper" Kai's Song Notes: I read this as a performer reflecting on the judgmental nature of an audience. To his critics, he's deformed and contemptible. The cameras don't respect him. The other celebrities he encounters have become jaded and scarred. I'm not inclined to call him a leper for that, but the song does paint a sort of picture of being shunned and outcast, making this another easy draw. The connection: Ezra's radiation poisoning parallels leprosy. The guardians of the Walled City judge him to be unsafe and unworthy. The outcast: Nehemiah and his companions are determined to keep Ezra outside of their home--for good reason, but he doesn't see it that way. The worldbuilding errs on the side of too vague. That the specifics regarding how the world turned to nuclear slag are missing doesn't hurt the story; all one needs to know is that it's a wasteland now, but I wonder how Ezra survived on his farm as long as he did if things are this bad everywhere. If they aren't, I wonder why he walked toward the battlefield rather than away, Walled City or no. I don't get any sense of the time scale. Has he been walking for years? Has he been mutated into immortality? Knowing that would be vastly helpful in appreciating the last few paragraphs, because I can't imagine a man half dead of radiation sickness managing to kill three healthy men in protective suits without a struggle. Or at all. Even if Ezra is immortal and strong beyond the strength of humankind, it's lame that Nehemiah stands around slack-jawed until it's his turn to die. The shift into Nehemiah's viewpoint is a mistake. My first time through, I had to read that paragraph and the next over again to work out what had happened. The weak, unbelievable handwaving of physical and biological reality in the climax kicks the legs out from under the ending and so the whole thing. More's the pity: "Swirls of blood marble his sputum" is an evocative phrase, and the prose is generally competent at worst. The was in "If there ever was a such thing as a miracle, Ezra has never seen it" should probably be has been, though. *********** Entenzahn, "The Free Radical" Song: "Electrolite" Kai's Song Notes: The lyrics have the distaste for the world that I'm coming to expect from R.E.M., but something--the piano music? The guitar strumming?--makes this a more mellow, nearly cheerful song than most of the ones I've heard today, despite that. It ends up sounding like this guy sees the time he lives in as plastic and fake, but he can't bring himself to mind too much. The connection: Other than electricity, I don't see one. Dominic eclipses the Captain in his moment of sacrifice, I guess? The outsider: Dominic runs around on the fringes of a superhero group so they can keep an eye on him. He finds a way to become a hero before the story is done. Dominic's powers vs. LECTRO's could stand to be more clear. My impression at first is that the computer is oddly pointless, displaying readings I assume relate to electromagnetic fields when those are something Dominic senses internally, but then he shapes its charge into a protective bubble. Is it a portable power supply? It should be presented as such from the start, if so. If Dominic can't sense fields until he looks at some computer graphics, that's strange and calls for some explanation. The story tries, I think, to deliver the magical amount of worldbuilding that is Just Enough to let us understand the setting without being drowned in exposition. A noble goal, but it doesn't work out. The characterization is too weak; the Captain, the Guardians, and the NWO are blank white mannequins, and there's not that much to Dominic beyond his power set. Without engaging characters, I look for setting details to care about and come up short. Dominic's sacrifice gives the piece a little emotional payoff. You keep that sequence interesting enough that I can ignore how obvious it also is. Like in docbeard's entry, though, the bare-bones characters rob a lot of power from the moment. *********** Grizzled Patriarch, "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" Song: "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" Kai's Song Notes: Expectations and understanding. Irony as a restraint. I'd think this were a song about a man figuring out that there was sincere value in things he'd dismissed as false or uncool, or if not value, then a depth he hadn't previously realized; maybe it is, but the final "don't gently caress with me" makes me wonder whether he's figured out anything at all. The connection: Radio and frequencies play key roles in this entry. Phil's dismissal of the idea that his son could hear his dead wife in the bands between stations turns into, not acceptance, but hope. He can't believe but can't not believe. It's arguably the week's strongest use of a song. The outcast: This is more shaky. Kevin is established as a social outcast in an early throwaway reference that doesn't preface any attempt by him to be anything else. Phil tries to bridge the gap between him and his son, but I'm still not convinced getting close to one person is the same as becoming an insider. More present tense. There's been a lot of that this week. The first paragraph is a doozy; the son needs a name earlier to forestall that mess of pronouns. Pronouns continue to be an issue as the third paragraph reads like Kevin had meant to throw the radio out, years ago. Such fuzziness from you surprises me. Phil feels too much. This may be an intentional motif, but it sticks out. He feels heaviness, he feels a mounting presence, he feels something in his chest, he feels like he's standing on a whale, his home feels alien to him, a feeling saps away everything, a feeling comes over him. Is this story nothing more than feelings? (Sorry.) Surely more variety is possible. The repetition is too much like lazy writing, even if that probably isn't the problem. I wasn't keen on an HM for this at the time, but I've warmed to it since. The relationship between Phil and Kevin, Kevin's adolescent obsession, the grief that father and son share, and Phil's hope that the impossible is possible balance the stumble on half the prompt and the unusually clumsy--but still more graceful than 90% of the rest--prose. Find some alternatives to feels and you'll be cooking with petrol. *********** Thranguy, "Titanomachy" Song: "Saturn Return" Kai's Song Notes: I'm not sure, but I think I like the way the vaguely unpleasant prelude to this song breaks into some of the sweeter singing I've heard from R.E.M. so far. The lyrics meld tones similarly. On the one hand, the singer breaks away from his work shift to gaze up at Saturn, and the song emphasizes that the planet is on its own, calling for no one and needing no one. That seems hopeful. The singer could take off and go his own way similarly, except that ladder in the wrist suggests another sort of departure. "Easy to poke yourself, easy as pie / Easy to take off, harder to fly" took on dark connotations once I started seeing this as a suicide song. The connection: Evidently I'm not alone in that. The mood, the roof, and the ladder are all present and accounted for. The outcast: You don't emphasize that people shun Peter for being a murderer's son; you don't have to. That's very well done. Turning "attempts to become an insider" into "attempts to get into a prison" borders on getting cute. I would almost rather that part had been left out, particularly since your otherwise strong entry is done in by the exposition-laden ending. That first paragraph does its job of catching my attention. Minor mechanical flaws afterward distract me more than I would like. Missing punctuation, mispunctuated dialogue, lowercase pronouns, run-on sentences, "dyeing" confused with "dying," and enough dashes to skewer an entire plate of cocktail weenies? You know better. I know you do. I appreciate what this is attempting, but it could use less dialogue--you appear to be trapped back in Dialogue Week with docbeard--and more separation between the dialogue and the exposition. Even when the two aren't one and the same, they're lodged in the same paragraphs in awkward ways, with the tenth paragraph serving as an example. The exposition within dialogue actually reads better, for the most part. The line "I didn't give a drat about what happened to her- no, I was glad she died" rings false (it's that "no" that does it), but otherwise I can believe two teens would talk like this. The last-minute revelation of Peter's plan reminds me of ExtraNoise's entry. The lump of motivation clogs the conclusion, and I wish it were better threaded through the story. Especially since I guessed Peter would either kill her or commit suicide alongside her early on. With that no mystery (and I hope it isn't intended to be one), there isn't much reason to spring his reasons for doing so on us in the eleventh hour. The whole judging team disliked the final three paragraphs to a degree that cost you an HM, so if you decide to revise this one, I suggest you start there. *********** spectres of autism, "Arc" Song: "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite" Kai's Song Notes: I wonder who the singer is singing to. My best guess is that he's broken up with his girlfriend or wife and has left their home for--a cheap hotel? A friend's place? A park bench? Somewhere that only a pay phone can reach. So who's going to wake that woman up? Could be a friend of hers; could be a sister. I want to know the singer's relationship to this person. The connections between these three people are the most interesting thing. The connection: A falling star. A creature on its back. Sleep and dreams. Only sleep of those is a significant part of the song, and sleep matters only briefly in the story. The serpents in the dark could be a callback to sidewinders? The outcast: One of the main characters is crushed under the weight of love. The other is explicitly one with its mother and father. If the "outsider becoming an insider" is the whatever-it-is of the second section falling to a planet, that... hrm. It misses the spirit of the prompt, but it's almost clever enough I don't mind. Almost. Interpretation time. A furred alien is born in its world's winter. It knows what armies and spears and shrouds are, so my impression is of a humanoid. It's obsessed with the falling star it saw at the moment of its birth. Over an indistinct amount of time, it thinks about the idea that has come to it in a dream that the falling star is alive. It wants to find whatever fell, for some reason. That whatever is another kind of alien, its earliest memory of fire on a spaceship or space station or somewhere else with metal walls. Although it's an infant, its reflected eyes pierce it with self-knowledge. It's pushed out... an airlock? Into open space? I swear that's what the words are saying. Maybe it's in an escape capsule. It falls, presumably, to the planet, and that's where the first protagonist finds it. The first protagonist hugs it, and it steals his/her body heat and turns the heat into fireworks. It's death; it's birth; it's the end.  None of this makes sense, not how the furry alien knows the falling star is alive, not how it can find whatever fell after a lifetime, not what happens when it touches the thing, nothing. Nothing seems to happen for a reason. I'm convinced you're trying to say something, but the message is garbled past sure comprehension. The made-up words are obnoxious (and in two cases misspelled!); the alien perspectives are so busy being alien that they don't convey much. The entry reads like a dream, with all of the weaknesses that implies. *********** Sitting Here, "Messiah en Route" Song: "Shaking Through" Kai's Song Notes: The tune is cheerful, as the R.E.M. songs I've heard go. And that's about all I get. Maybe this has something to do with Japan, and maybe the "three" are the Axis powers, but I doubt it. All that makes much sense is the first line: "Could it be that one small voice doesn't count in the room?" It's a good thing that's decent story fodder. The connection: The nameless protagonist--I can't decide whether to complain about this one. A name would humanize him, but would that go against the point? Anyway, he's the one small voice. The question of whether he'll count in the room is up for debate. The outcast: While no one on the bus shuns or recoils from him, I figure Nameless Jesus doesn't fit in too well with his fellow men. On the bright side, I immediately get a feeling of R.E.M. from this entry. On the dark side, I'm verging on sick of R.E.M. at this point. Thoughtful work, if light, and a fun vignette, if an insubstantial one. You do a great job with the magical thinking. Nameless Jesus believes so wholeheartedly in his role in life that I half believe it too; you help me to wonder with the car miracle that may be real or may be his kooky imagination. He's sympathetic and understandable for all the toys that may or may not be in his attic. To make a man who thinks he's the Savior relatable is a heartwarming trick. The major downside is that little changes or is resolved, and you might as well finish with To be continued! It's a more charming scrap of story than most and less flawed than all the rest, but it's about as satisfying as a single Hostess Donette. *********** Tyrannosaurus, "The Cicada, Grief" Song: "Country Feedback" Kai's Song Notes: Another musical break-up. The maddening loop and ill-fitting clothes are evocative of a struggling relationship. Not sure about the bone--could it be a wishbone? I think of a garage sale when I read the line "the lovers have been tagged" (thank you for all these R.E.M. lyrics, Internet), and the psychics, plastics, etc. take on a rural/suburban flavor that might or might not be intentional. At the core, it's about a man who needs to get away and blames his lady for their failure to make it through. The connection: The country twang of the song colors the setting of the story. Dale needs for Cooper to be his brother. It's possible the "bone in your hand" inspired the undeath and/or that the wedding ring is Cooper's or Cindy's. The outcast: I have to wonder again whether just one other person can make you an outcast or an insider, because I think Cooper is meant to be the outsider, trying to reclaim his bond with his brother. Or whatever the thing is that looks like Cooper is trying to become Cooper. Either way it's a little sketchy, but it passes. The title makes me think right away of That Dragon, Cancer. It feels derivative, but that could be a coincidence. Like a corpse at the bottom of a lake, this falls apart. The opening is strong with a great Southern Gothic flavor. I'm instantly hooked by the mysteries of why Cooper came back and how he got in the water. I never get an answer to those questions. Instead you try to introduce doubt as to whether Cooper is Cooper, while I still want to know other things--and I say try for a reason. The text pushes that doubt hard, but I don't see why Dale doesn't accept that Cooper's memory might be vague after he's been dead two years. His zombie brother comes out of the lake and Dale immediately offers him a beer, but his zombie brother can't remember his wedding day and that's what makes Dale look at him askance? Weird. The story tries to ride the uncertainty about who Cooper is all the way to the end without convincing me I should care. How'd he get in the lake, dangit? My final impression is that Weird Stuff Happens without whys or wherefores. That does not a story make. *********** Ironic Twist, "Sightless Eyes" Song: "Texarkana" Kai's Song Notes: I've been through Texarkana twice. I remember the water tower joining the outlines of both states, mostly, and the Texas shapes on the overpasses before the border that became Arkansas shapes after. What this music or these lyrics have to do with that city, I do not know. They have more to do with a lifelong quest for something unknown. Some honest-to-God appreciation of life and an implication of trust make this the warmest song yet. The connection: The song's first stanza sums up Mariani, doesn't it? The stars falling from the sky may be connected to your framing myth as well, I'm not sure, but you're fine either way. The outsider: Mariani is on the outs with criminals. The effort to become an insider isn't there, as he tries to survive their anger more than to regain their good graces. The Sky attempts to cuddle up to Earth in the frame, but at that point the Sky isn't an outsider yet. Twist. Listen. I've run out of fresh ways to tell you to cut out the damnable frames. Or at least reconsider them five times before you run with one, in hope of avoiding disasters like this. Whatever tone you're going in the Sky and Earth saga slips and lands on "trying too hard." Eyes don't have wombs! That metaphor is terrible! The second half of the frame interrupts a scene that's far more compelling. This frustrates me all the more this time because I had you on my high list for the strength of the central story, but the other judges shot down the idea of an HM right quick for good reason: as one of them said, this lives and dies by its structure. A pity, since Mariani's instant of death is one of the best conclusions I've seen in a while. I believe I get what you're aiming to do. The rain is Sky grieving for what Rosales will do to Mariani on one level. On another I think Sky may be a stand-in for Ailin, and Earth is Mariani, and the frame is meant to fill in details about their relationship. Maybe a more folksy voice in the frame would make it less incongrous (and less irritating) than the trying-for-poetic one you use. Maybe then it would work, though I'd rather see the frame chopped altogether and Mariani, Rosales, and Ailin allowed to carry the story on their own. They're up to it; I get enough idea of how Ailin and Mariani were together without the allegorical help. *********** crabrock, "but not me in" Song: "Sitting Still" Kai's Song Notes: I'm shrugging in bemusement again. "Don't waste your time sitting still" is clear enough, and "I can hear you" implies connection, maybe sympathy, but the rest? Who knows. Individual lines have potential, but any overall theme has run right through my mental fingers. The connection: Akona is deaf to mundane sounds, but she can hear Drumphy, unfortunately. She achieves a big kill. I want to throw a fit after reading this. The outsider: Insecure, lonely Akona kills and skins a girl to wear her as a suit. It would be a good twist on the prompt if the tone worked as was probably intended. Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate wackydumbrandom invisible friends with stupid names and stupider tics since I began to live. You're trapped back in Dialogue Week too. Maybe our efforts left psychic scars, and the only way you can purge yourself is by retching Drumphy out and forcing us to suffer through line after line after line of his inane existence. How I detest this character! He ruins the entire story both by being around at all and by yammering through an ending that should shock and horrify. It doesn't. Because that effing elephant is there! Is he meant to be connected to the Dreamtime somehow? You know what, I don't care. He's so grating that nothing he could bring to the story would balance out how much he sucks. Okay, but I should be fair to him and to you. He serves a purpose as the devil on Akona's shoulder, a manifestation of her insecurities, and Akona's sanity suffers from having nothing but him to which to listen. The idea's maybe to make Akona sympathetic and all the more creepy given what her inner voice looks like. But Drumphy is a persistent, over-loud circus clown who never ever lets up on the horn. Not scary. Not creepy. Did you read Muffin's recent entry with the random flatulent ghost? Drumphy's sort of like that. Don't tell me how a person pees someone's skin with precision and skill. I'm confident I don't want to know. *********** Jonked, "Temptations" Song: "Life and How to Live It" Kai's Song Notes: I'm getting a house as a loose metaphor for life, the mind, or both, with those flaw-hiding walls probably social (and emotional, and mental) as well as tangible. Hiding things is definitely a theme. The impossibility of keeping things hidden seems to be one, too. The connection: Joshua tries to hide his discomfort with the movies from Rebecca, unsuccessfully; he tries to hide his love of them from his father, and one imagines that in the long term that will prove impossible too. The outsider: I assume that Joshua's home life creates difficulty for him in connecting to other people this age. This aspect is reasonably well done. Hmm, there hasn't been a story bashing religion yet in this round. Surely we can't have a week without--oh, here we go, right on time. I exaggerate to make the point that this theme is tired, particularly when the religious figure--often a parent--is a crude caricature. Sadly, there isn't much here beyond the equation of religion with excessive taboos and unreasonable guilt. What happens: Joshua defies his father to go see a movie with a girl. The movie makes him cry. He joins the Cinema Club. That's it, though the final action represents a decision to hold on to something he enjoys despite his father's disapproval and move out of the guilt's shadow, so a character arc exists. Yours is one more entry heavy on the dialogue and too light on the other things that make a story. Your strangest maneuver is leaving the title of the film Joshua sees out of the text. I don't know Scorsese's filmography off hand. Wikipedia suggests that Joshua is probably viewing The Last Temptation of Christ, given the line about blasphemy and the story's title; why not say so? What does omitting that detail accomplish? Ultimately all the judges were bored, and that's what did you in. *********** Jopoho, "A Mechanic" Song: "Orange Crush" Kai's Song Note: Is it the tune or my fondness for orange soda that has me liking this one? It's energetic and dryly peppy for a song about going off to war. The words don't whine or rage but still make their point, the soldier of the song serving a conscience that explicitly isn't his. Is "orange crush" a euphemism? Wiki confirms that it is. The catchy music and the bleak lyrics draw a portrait of the singer as a sardonic man, and I want to read about him. The connection: Henry appears to be in some sort of concentration camp, which suggests war. As a prisoner, he's collared, but as a valuable commodity, he's less collared than most. The outsider: Henry sets himself apart from the rest of the prisoners with his lie. He's apart from the other assembly-line workers as a false mechanic. I don't get the sense he wants to be on the inside socially, but he has to look like a real mechanic if he's to survive his gambit. That counts. The pacing's off; the story rambles too long while Henry's standing in his line and then hits a wall at the finish. The Max character is mentioned too late. Nothing is resolved. Overall it reads like the first section of a much longer story that should describe how Henry either escaped from or died in that camp. The parts that aren't dialogue--Henry's conversation with the other prisoner is flat and dull--are just interesting enough that I'd keep reading, so you would likely have ended up in the middle of the pack if the DQ hadn't made it moot. *********** 3.141592653, "War" Song: "Hyena" Kai's Song Notes: The role of the hyena could be to bring fear; if the only thing to fear is fearlessness, then the town is most safe when s/he's done his/her job, and one surmises the singer fears most hurting the woman he loves. That interpretation is sketchy. The fear theme is the only thing of which I'm sure. The connection: "Meager pay, but recognition" is all but quoted. Eric fears the fearlessness of both sides of a war, because it means one or both will have to shatter against the other for the conflict to end. The outsider: Eric's preachy pacifism doesn't make friends of the other soldiers. I figure his enlistment is his attempt to become an insider, a slight fumble of the prompt since that takes place before the story starts. We return to Dialogue Week one last time to see one soldier proselytize about war to another. David's half of the conversation tries to carry the weight of exposition and drops it with unsubtle clunks, while Eric rails to the reader whenever he's not railing to David--all of it Message and all of it familiar. When he talks about his daughter I get a glimpse of a more interesting, conflicted character. I wouldn't bother revising this, but the story of Eric's decision to join up and his good-bye his daughter could be worth telling. You escaped DM contention despite your work having problems in common with Jonked's, and your relative brevity may be to credit. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Sep 29, 2016 |
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May 18, 2016 08:17
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Sitting Here posted:
Prompt: The main character of Muffin's story is from Earth; the physical setting is Earth's interior, so far as I can tell. The characters are completely Earthlike in names, mannerisms, etc. It's a thin "secondary world." Time has come unstuck for the major characters, and they live in a slice of hell and don't remember things coherently either because they're mad or because they would rather be than know the truth. Is there a difference? sebmojo's piece also takes place on Earth. Again the difference is internal more than external, and again I have a hard time calling it a secondary world. It's our world with the love abruptly removed. Both wiffed this one, IMO, but Muffin came closest to the unrecognizable setting the prompt demanded. Point to: SurreptitiousMuffin Subprompt: Muffin has a strong writing style that's distinctive and identifiable in many of his entries. sebmojo is harder to pin down as his strength is less in personal voice and more in range. Muffin's task was the harder one, but that doesn't change that his story reads like a Muffin story while sebmojo's reads like a sebmojo story with a thread of Muffin-ness woven through. Point to: sebmojo Story: Muffin wrote about a situation and the people trapped in it. sebmojo wrote about something that happened, how it ended, and the people who endured it. Muffin's is more visceral and immediately striking, but sebmojo's is a more complete package and just as grim in a more understated fashion. "The person opened its mouth and said 'I’m a person,' but it didn’t make any sense." Yikes. sebmojo's suggestion that love is the force behind hate, care, gravity, health, and everything else that isn't the void feels more meaningful and complex than Muffin's look at madness as an escape from reality and memory, though both these concepts resonate and always will. Point to: sebmojo The Verdict: I would probably give this to Muffin if his setting were more alien, discounting the subprompt since he really was comparatively handicapped there, but as it stands his edge in the prompt is more slender than sebmojo's edge in story. Therefore: Final vote: sebmojo Kaishai fucked around with this message at 07:03 on May 22, 2016 |
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May 22, 2016 07:00
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In.
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May 28, 2016 04:43
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Entenzahn posted:I'm in and Know, thread and judges and mod, that I have seen the draft and this  has been fulfilled.
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May 28, 2016 23:17
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Fuschia tude posted:What is this? Rockers sit, but a crew of rockers sits. Crew is singular. Muffin is correct.
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May 29, 2016 00:47
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On Soft, Dark Wings (673 words) Thistle scraped welts across Ian's legs and summer sweat greased his skin, yet his thoughts were all for the orange flicker in the weeds. Hssst! The edge of his net rasped the grass. The coveted monarch darted away and soared up beyond his highest reach. Other wings spread and danced above the field, pure white and pale yellow, black spotted with blue. Ian dropped the net and caught a cloud-colored butterfly between cupped hands. To prove to himself that he could: he'd brought home plenty of its kind and let them go again, as he let this one go, with pleasure. But what was that, over there? That glint of deep green and gold? Ian waded toward a clump of Queen Anne's lace. The gleam flashed as wings closed and opened. He'd never seen their like, and that was something after two years of dedicated chase and study. The creature clung to its flowers as Ian reached for it, stayed put as his fingers enclosed it. Its inky legs tickled his palm. He ran back to his house, abandoning the net. "Dad! Mom! Come see!" His parents had been sufficiently jaded by his discoveries that Ian had time to coax the butterfly onto his mother's spider plant and fetch his field guide before his father came up from the basement. "Nothing in the book looks like it, Dad. It could be something new," he said. His father was good enough to not quite laugh. "In our old cornfield?" "See the color? It's so dark, and those gold spots don't match any markings in North America." They glittered in the light through the window; so did the dust they'd left on Ian's fingers. "It's crazy calm, too. I bet you could hold it." Ian's father suffered to have the butterfly on his wrist for a few seconds. Ian's mother, when she joined them, let Ian put it in her hair and take a picture before he set it free. Over supper Ian compared its shade of green to scarab beetles' until his parents firmly changed the subject. After supper, he lay curled on bedsheets soaked with his vomit. Cramps grabbed his guts and shook them; he moaned in fever. Cool mother-hands wiped his face the first time and held him while his father changed the bedclothes. The second time Ian soiled himself, he called for those hands, and distant retching was the answer. For the third he was unconscious, dreaming of flutters in the dark. He woke in filth. Hollowed. Weak. "Mommy?" Somehow he peeled himself from the bed and stumbled out to the hall, to the bathroom. "Dad?" His father's body had fallen onto its side beside the toilet, and the fumes of bowel and bile were so strong that Ian gagged as he screamed--with no response, so he knew, knew with all his heart what he'd find in his parents' bedroom, but he still ran there as he once had from other nightmares. And he was wrong, as it happened. His mother hadn't died in there but just outside, on her belly, as though she'd tried to crawl to the phone or to him. Ian knelt by her head and wrapped his arms around it, burying his face in her hair. The beloved brown curls were spangled with gold. Like dust. So were his fingers, still. So was his father's wrist. He staggered out to the field and its Queen Anne's lace, where green flashed in the morning light. Ian snatched the butterfly and tore it apart while it struggled. His strength was enough to ruin the soft, dark wings and scatter them on the ground. To break the frail legs and smash the head. To cry then, bewildered, at what he'd done. Wings fluttered on over the field, pure white and pale yellow, black spotted with blue, gold on deep green. The latter gleamed as far away as Ian could see, too many for one boy to catch and out of his reach far too late.
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May 30, 2016 03:55
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May 31, 2016 00:47
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For Life (613 words) Potato day: Monday Read it in the archive. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Jan 1, 2017 |
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Jun 6, 2016 07:14
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Sitting Here posted:
You can see which stories have received crits so far here! I'll try to keep this up to date as new crits are posted.
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Jun 6, 2016 19:54
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Potato Crits for Carcer and Pippin Carcer, "Stay Warm." "Seemed to cause"? Andy is the perspective character. There should be no doubt regarding whether his shoulders are dropping or not. You have another "seemed" clause in the second paragraph. As much as I like that word in something like a crit, where it acknowledges the possibility of misconception, it's often piffle in fiction. Nothing else has come of Andy's drinking jaunt at this point in the story. There's no seem about it. Your mechanics need work all around. You don't punctuate dialogue correctly; you should spell out numbers below one hundred; the plural of potato isn't potato's. The first two are common errors from inexperienced writers. The last is atrocious, so cut that out! How does Dave know the word "piscatorial"? This entry is heavy on talking and light on everything else. Granted, that's Bad Seafood's fault almost as much as yours. No matter who's to blame, it's unfortunate; the would-be-philosophical blathering goes on and on and dulls a story that didn't shine to begin with. You hit sebmojo's flash rule, more or less: Andy's money problem is more like one secret than two even with multiple contributing factors, but it's close enough for horseshoes. You skipped the anime-genre requirement for Thursday. Did you think Seafood's rule canceled it out? That would be easy enough to do that I'm not inclined to hold it against you. What I do begrudge is Andy setting his whole family on fire out of nowhere. That's bizarre rather than dark and dramatic. Suicide I would have bought, but murder is over the top, and pointing to the prompt in the last paragraph is one more pound of salt on the ground. **************** *************** ******************** * ******************** *************** Pippin, "It's Not Always Black and White" The final beat is so sweet that it nearly makes up for the fact that I just read nearly a thousand words of painstaking description of the setup of a domino chain, but this is still too long for what it is, and what it is isn't much beyond that gentle twist ending. You don't have a lot in the way of story here. A man fussing over dominoes isn't interesting enough in its own right to carry this length. You could cut it down easily--why did there need to be a cat, for example?--and it would probably be sweeter for being shorter. It wouldn't hurt if more happened; Ray spends most of the story checking on dominoes. You could change the focus slightly to show him arranging that chain. Maybe add a conflict: what if Kayleigh called to tell him she was coming home early and he had to race the clock? While I'll be surprised if such a slight entry puts you above the middle of the pack, it's written well enough and has enough charm that I'll also be surprised if you land in the low end. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Jun 8, 2016 |
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Jun 8, 2016 04:31
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 Submissions for Week CCI: Old Russian Joke are now CLOSED! Fuubi, Carcer, ZeBourgeoisie, Mr Gentleman, Ibexaz, Bad Seafood, and astrofig are hereby exiled to Siberia for being caught in failure's shameful embrace. Should any of these struggle back through the snow, critique may yet meet them though glory has passed beyond reach. Everyone else should sit tight: results should be out no later than Tuesday. Stay tuned to this channel for the announcements from our dear General-Secretary.
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Jun 13, 2016 05:21
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In with Honeycomb (130 calories).
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Jun 14, 2016 04:35
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quote:Fuubi hosed around with this message at Jun 17, 2016 around 08:41 People. Don't do this. Edit your story before you post, not after, and if you forget your prompt, put it in a second post.
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Jun 17, 2016 16:17
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Thranguy posted:In case anyone is still interested in critting stuff but tired of potatoes, I'll crit a story of choice from anyone who crits one or more stories out of week 197. Ceighk, "Vegetarian Dreams of Violent Revolution" Oh, jeeze. Right off the bat this looks grimly prophetic now. If you ever write a story about my home town blowing up, I'll take it as a cue to evacuate. You do a stellar job of fitting nearly every element of your prompt into a tale that's more or less coherent and very near complete. Full marks on that. The story itself gets a more mixed grade, as befits its mixed mood. Whether you were trying to write a funny story or not is unclear to me; the complete lack of humor in your inciting incident now could be a contributing factor, as it sets a dark tone you never entirely break despite the streak of absurdity in Buttons' execution in a news studio, his blood on the anchorman's desk, and Patrick's rapid descent into strawmania. On my first read I thought you might be attempting surrealism until I reached the rushed ending in which Patrick undergoes a total reversal in something like three seconds. That finale convinces me you probably aimed to amuse, but in my case, you didn't succeed. The satirizing of PETA et al is too heavy-handed without being fresh. Patrick's introspection hammers home a point that's so familiar we can all sing along. Neither he nor Ruth nor the panda is a terribly interesting character, the premise is thin, and the humor is flat. Your prose does its job and moves Patrick's misadventure along at a reasonable pace, so it's hard to harbor ill will toward the story. There isn't much to like about it, though. Its middle-of-the-road placement appears about right. If possible, I'd like to claim a return crit for Dr. Kloctopussy's "Torn," an uncrit story from Week 38.
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Jun 18, 2016 01:18
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The Science of Honey Cereal: Honeycomb (1,269 words) While Dr. Melles was alive and I was spending most of my weekends helping with her robotic experiments, I'd come in to her kitchen on Saturday mornings and find her daughter Brin scarfing down Honeycomb at the table. One time I picked up the cereal box and rattled it. "The doc says you're into bees. You think if you eat enough of this stuff you'll turn into a beekeeper?" A weedy twelve to my brilliant, mature sixteen, Brin glowered. "I'm allergic, dillweed," she said through a mouthful of puffy hexagons. "Brin!" Dr. Melles reproved. "Sorry, Mom." I figure that's one reason she never liked me. Now, though, I need Brin's help, so I'm driving one more time to the country house I haven't seen since my mentor's funeral. It looks the same from the road--maybe a little brighter, the yellow paint fresh and new shingles on the roof. I worry for a second that Brin's rented out the property. But the mailbox still says Melles, and I turn my truck into the drive. The changes pile up fast as I approach the garage. All the outdoor acreage used to be grass and flowerless shrubs, but tiny white blossoms cover the bushes on either side of the pavement now, and color runs riot past the chain-link fence dividing drive from yard. Those orange stars up front are lilies; foxglove stands beside them. Snapdragons grow under the young fruit trees that shade the shed Dr. Melles used for a lab. Stepping out of the truck, I listen for and hear a soft drone in the garden. A bee glitters on one of the rosebushes framing Brin's door. No one answers my knock or the doorbell. The television's on, though: I hear the Food Network through an open window. I wander over to the fence and through it, telling myself she's probably somewhere outside, but the truth is the sight of the shed has made me miss being sixteen fiercely. I want to see the inside again--and the thumbprint lock is still in place, glowing red. The insectile hum vibrates in my ears. I press my thumb to the pad for old time's sake. The door clicks; I step into a narrow hall between glass hives alive with golden bees. Golden. Each is made of metal, thousands upon thousands of fine-spun legs tapping out music on the glass. They build upside-down wax cathedrals over the table where I learned to work a soldering iron. Real wax, for all I can tell. Some buzz by me to reach the open door, and I catch one to touch its delicate wing lightly, lightly. "Jesse? What the hell are you doing in here? Get out!" Brin's at the threshold, pruning shears in her hand. Her hair's the deep brown I remember, still curly, and she still has the freckles she must have gotten from her father. Ten years have made her less of a stick, but that glower is familiar too. "Dr. Melles made these?" I ask. "Drop that!" Brin lunges to slap my hand; I release the bee. It drifts away unharmed. "You have no right!" "I didn't know the lock would still work." "I should have found someone to reprogram it. Leave my bees alone." I step forward and she steps back until we're both out in the garden. "I assumed you'd found a treatment for your allergy when I heard you were in the honey business," I say. "But that's not it, is it? Your mom--" Brin pulls the door shut and encourages me away from it with a strong grip on my arm. "It's not your business." "She built those bees for you." Brin digs her fingers into my bicep. Then lets go. "Yes. All right? Yes, she did, and you need to never mention them to anyone if you don't want me calling the cops on you for trespassing. Mom pushed herself the last year of her life so I could do what I love to do. If you cared about her, Jesse, don't ruin that." "Do they pollinate like the real thing?" Brin waves an arm at the flowers all around us. "Take a guess." "Can they travel?" She narrows her eyes. "I wouldn't want them to." "My grandfather keeps an orchard to stretch out his lovely disability payments. It's failing--not enough bees for the trees last year or this, and he won't take money from me. I hoped I could rent him some of your bees. Now I'm sure they're perfect." "No way. Anyone who sees Mom's work is bound to want to take them, or go to the news, or--you know how amazing they are." "I promise you that won't be a problem," I say. "I'll swear it on anything you want. My father's soul, my hope of a doctorate--" "The horrible, hopeless, humiliating crush you had on my mom?" My ears and neck are hotter than the sun. "If you insist. It was obvious?" "Definitely." Brin's voice softens a fraction after I look away. "She liked you too much to bring it up. Not that way, mind. She'd want me to help you, probably. So swear, and I guess you can help me box some hives." One dignity-crushing vow and six cratings later, she and I are headed south in my truck, because naturally I couldn't drive off alone with such precious cargo. There aren't many words exchanged. We reach my grandfather's land in the late afternoon, and I drive into the orchard proper, then check in with Granddad before going back to help Brin set the hives up on the grass. Inert, the bees gleam in the soft light. Brin taps one hive, then another. "Wake up, bees," she says, and at the sound of her voice, they do. They pour from the glass to seek nectar in the apple and cherry trees, the peach trees and the pear. Their hum fills the boughs. Footsteps beside us: Brin hears them and turns to get her first look at my grandfather. He's using his white cane on this uneven ground. At the sight of that and his dark glasses, Brin's breath catches, then escapes in a soft sigh of understanding. Only she sees my grin. "We're set, Granddad," I say, taking brief hold of his shoulder. Brin chips in. "They're yours until the end of August, sir. I'll come by to check on them twice a week, and you don't need to do anything but leave them be and make sure they aren't disturbed." "Shouldn't be hard." Granddad is silent for a minute. Listening. He relaxes as he does, a smile creasing his face. "It's been too long since I've heard this kind of beesong. It's the sound of life... now, how much do I owe?" Before I can answer, Brin says, "A bucket of cherries if my bees do their job. I'll collect when they're ripe." She's smiling too, the first smile of hers I've ever seen. "That's not much to ask, considering," I tell her when we're back in the truck. "Considering Mom's patents, I don't need more." Brin looks at me for a while. "I have her notes on the bees," she finally says. "They're Greek to me. Maybe you could make something out of them--for your grandfather." When we stop for gas, I duck into the convenience store to buy a box of Honeycomb. Brin rolls her eyes when I rattle it at her, but she laughs, and we both scarf down dry cereal on the way back to her garden.
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Jun 20, 2016 04:36
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magnificent7 posted:Tell me a tale to crit that hasn't been crit already from 197 and I'll crit the crit out of it. Every story from Week 197 has a crit from Thranguy, but most of them never got another. This page shows the entries most in need--but to make a long story shorter, pick anything not written by Ceighk or Fuschia tude. Scroll up from the results post to find crit fodder.
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Jun 21, 2016 00:11
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flerp posted:i write way too much mermaid poo poo (i blame kai). When I quit this mortal coil, I will do so knowing my life has been worthwhile.
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Jul 4, 2016 16:37
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Jul 9, 2016 03:25
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There He Waits Dreaming Adjective: Mordant (720 words) In the depths of the waters, in this trench where the dark is absolute, only the rock walls hear my song and only the walls reply. They gossip to me of a soft-bodied meal ahead, so I ripple my legs and thrust out a hand. The squid throws a glowing slurry in my face that clings to my gills and skin; I dive deeper with my prize, biting it into quick death. Tearing one limb free for myself, but no more. My mother and brother and son won't forgive me if I come home fed but with no meat to share. It goes into my pouch. I sing again-- Light! Mordant brilliance scalds my eyes. It fills the trench, the sea! I thrash into the wall, and its contours guard me from the violent surge in the water that throws me back, tatters my fins, but leaves me living. The light also survives: I uncover my face and see it still, dimmer and cruel against the blood clouds far above where nothing was protected. Rags of flesh tumble down. Where are my mother, my brother, my son? I cannot tell how long I swim, seeking them. Inchoate time blurs into a forever of ichor and glow. I flash my own luminescence, cutting bright trails across the too-bright world to say I'm here, I'm here, I'm here-- The still and the silence wring wails from my throat that have no answer. And then I taste bloods akin to mine and know that my mother's and brother's voices are gone. Would that I were gone with them, except. Except. The sea carries the thinnest thread of song from far away. The light intensifies as I swim toward the sound, until I cover my eyes; it creeps through my webs and fingers, demanding obeisance. The music has resolved into a drone of identical notes from a multitude of mouths. Now I hear--at last!--the song of my son. I rush further into the light despite its burning. For the first time I glimpse the edges of its source: structures stab up from the ocean bed, teeth in an incalculable jaw. It's from these that the radiance comes, so mordant and green and distant from my comprehension. Living singers glide between these fangs and slip into the holes that riddle them, never emerging while I watch nor responding to my calls. I do not want to sing their song. It shivers my bones. I do not want to go into that city. My son's voice is somewhere inside. The shining teeth close in on me as I flurry through, scraping my skin and drawing more blood for an ocean full of it. The rock has its own skin of ice that embeds itself in my cuts. But there he is! My son floats toward the light's vast heart. His song is jubilant and his eyes are cartilage white and he pushes me away when I wrap my limbs around him. I seize him again and pull. I dive in front of him to shove him back. If I can only force him away to wherever in this world is dark and safe, then--but my thoughts won't go further than that. They struggle against fear as I struggle against my child. His throat swells with a wild note he shares with a thousand other celebrants, and the fangs surrounding us seem to sing it too. And Something sings back. I let go and I bolt, screaming, screaming away from the Voice inside me as surely as the light is inside me as surely as the fear is inside me as surely as all are one and that One knows my anguish and agony and names them Its truest worship. I leave my son to It and Its city, fleeing for the dark. But there is no dark for me, though there should be. I can't see my hands or anything else alive. Those mordant teeth seared my sight away, but they glow before me yet. I would hear the music of their master still if I swam to the sea's furthest reaches. Instead I circle the great jaw ceaselessly, shuddering as I sing for my son, knowing Who will soonest answer. There is no hope left. Only light.
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Jul 11, 2016 05:40
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With Apologies to Rabelais (31 words) Gargantua, a giant's son, Decided it would be great fun To take a French city And make it tres lovely, Which must count as porn for someone.
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Jul 11, 2016 06:50
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Ironic Twist posted:And now, for the next meeting of the THUNDERTOME BOOK CLUB, something a bit less dense, but no less good. Wonderful book. I wouldn't miss it.
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Jul 23, 2016 02:34
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Critiques for Week CXCIV: What For Aren't There Endings? My love for Eurovision will never, ever die, and neither will my love for Eurovision Weeks, even when the results are somewhat less interesting than Belarus's naked wolf holograms. This round offered mildly disagreeable experiences, a couple of disappointments, and no true blazes of glory--much like the 2016 ESC! Some performances still proved to be worth the time they took to watch. Actually, you know what? They were all worth it. I'm grateful to all of you who celebrated the greatest spectacle in song with me this year. That's not to say I'm not going to tear into your stage shows, mind you; an ESC without critical commentary is no ESC at all. Sitting Here, for Ireland 2008: "YOU MADE ME DO THIS" Lyrics: Dustin the Turkey - "Irelande Douze Pointe" Kai's Video Notes: Dustin and his wildly tacky dancers are a mother lode of inspiration. Those feathers! The costuming's just brilliant, but if that doesn't shake your tail, the whole show is also a brazen-but-jovial flipping of the bird at a system. You can't tell me that isn't rich material. Honestly, though, I'm crossing my fingers for characters in glorious feathered clothes. Themes: Ireland, turkeys, puppets, disco, contests, feathers, dancing, outrageousness, mockery, rebellion, Europe, Eurovision itself, drag acts and bad acts and Terry Wogan's wig. Oh, heck no. I did not make you write about a wobbling feathered penis! You did that of your own accord! Maybe it's the turkey dividers, maybe it's the fowl twerking, but something about this entry gives rise to a hunch that you got hung up on the flashing Irish disco and rapping game bird and couldn't get past the zaniness. It's like you threw in the towel in a way you hoped would still entertain. If that's the case, then mission accomplished: I don't appreciate feathered penises as much as you might have hoped, but otherwise the lighthearted playfulness of it all makes me smile. You could have done better, however. There's plenty of potential in Dustin's opus that you don't exploit. That aside, even, the relationship between Cillian and Maria is pointlessly obscure: are they roommates? Siblings? How do they know each other? What exactly makes Cillian think decking his halls out in turkey feathers is a good idea? How does that go with the "I am not illegal"? Which I don't like, by the way; it's a bit of politicking tacked on where it doesn't fit, much like a feather on a penis. The whole thing is super light and underdeveloped. The fun absurdity is somewhat mitigated by the aforementioned decorated dong. You picked an odd audience for which to whip that one out, I tell you what. But I sure can't complain about your grasp on the spirit of Eurovision. The American jury gives you: 5 points. ************ Toxxupation, for Finland: "Realism" Lyrics: Sandhja - "Sing It Away" Kai's Video Notes: You can't go wrong with horses, excessive lengths of fringe, and glitter shoes. The brassy notes in the background suit the singer and her safari-print combination of cropped top and adult diapers, but not the horse or the kids. I'm not convinced the tune is a good match for the words or message ("don't worry, be happy," basically). Maybe it'll work better on the Eurovision stage, since she probably won't bring the horse or sick boy along. Though at this point I know better than to bet. Themes: Hardship, fear, solitude, family, imagination, singing, defeating despair through cheer and will. What I think you were trying to do was illustrate a girl and her decision to pursue art rather than give it up under the demands of rote practice. I believe the idea is that she takes inspiration from Giorgi and his tired mare, seeing something beautiful, or moving, or at least worthwhile in the unspoken bond built between them over hundreds of repeated motions. A parallel is lightly drawn between Giorgi's greetings and Ekaterina's drawings. I would guess she recognized it herself and made her choice accordingly. I'm not 100% sure, but you were probably going for something along those lines since the alternative is that you wrote something that doesn't even begin to have a point. The execution fails you in several ways, all relatively minor but one. The opening recalls your video, but it's slow and not much of a hook. Your meticulous description of the steps of drawing a horse evokes a mechanical process, which is somewhat appropriate, but you don't make it interesting reading. The freshman orientation is more so. I rather like the adolescent dialogue, but even though it's the best part of the story prose-wise, there's too much of it. The only part of the orientation that matters is the moment Ekaterina names her major. Everything else is agreeable fluff. The italicized sections are Ekaterina's daydreams of memories, so it's peculiar they don't take place in her own perspective. They read like she's daydreaming about watching herself draw. Of course, the fatal issue is how and where the character sketch stops. I won't say ends, because it doesn't, and I won't call it a story, because it really isn't. What conflict exists is set up and knocked down within six paragraphs (and calling the sixth a paragraph is generous), with most of the remainder of the text only tangentially related. Ekaterina's choice has no consequences we can see. Her relationship with Giorgi is too briefly shown to have the impact you likely wanted. At the end of the day, even if you ignore the stopping point, who cares? You're trying to say something cool, but you need better characterization and much better pacing to do it. And dropping the ball where you do is suicide. Maybe you wouldn't have shot your own foot completely off if you'd stopped with "'Illustration,' she responded in heavily accented English." That's your real, proper final beat, insofar as you have one. Going on past that point leaves the work looking incomplete, like there was more to say but you got bored and didn't bother. (If "Georgian" and "Giorgi" are meant to be related and this is some sort of subtle underlining of her artistic influence, ugh. No.) It emphasizes too how much the orientation stuff murders the rest: it doesn't matter and wastes time and words that could have been used to give Ekaterina more personality or make her tie to Giorgi more than a flash of exposition. In retrospect I'm almost sorry we didn't choose DurianGray for the loss, but not quite, since that not-end remains a mess no matter how I look at it. You had a better idea, but your narrative structure doesn't support it at all. The American jury gives you: 2 points. ************ Thranguy, for San Marino: "The Final Logs of Doctor Omega" Lyrics: Serhat - "I Didn't Know" Kai's Video Notes: Disco glitter, a fedora, and herky-jerky dancers? Now we're talking. This man's voice keeps the song slow and low-key despite the beat. I shouldn't like that, and I'm not sure I do, but it's distinctive. Is it only me who expects him to crack out a bottle of Dos Equis any moment now? Themes: The seventies, disco, ladies' men, love, the realization of feeling. That first sentence is an anti-hook. It tells me, "Whoa nelly, you're in for some awkward SFnal gobbledegook now!" Two paragraphs in and my teeth are on edge. Three, and I know that this. Is. Not. Working. The technobabble muscles its way in between me and any appreciation of the story, shouting for attention with every capitalized word, killing my interest instead of raising it as you may have intended. The world and people are defined way too much by the omnipresent nonsense terms; since the terms bore me, everything else does, too. Here's what I think is going on: the main character is some sort of mad scientist who has been reduced to micro size during a conflict over a "Tessimal Sphere" with "The Dragon Protector of Earth" and "The Moment." The Moment possesses "Nega Energy," which somehow caused him to shrink and, as the story goes on, maintains his continued existence on her skin. Nega Energy must be amazing stuff since it can apparently do whatever the plot wants it to with no pretense of explanation. Dr. Omega goes into The Moment's brain, and I expect this is when he begins to fall in love with her, as the workings of her mind leave him humbled. A battle ensues. Why? Because the Dragon Protector and The Moment hate each other for no established reason. Dr. Omega is largely passive in this fight, but he manages to make Fafnir flinch at the last minute, allowing The Moment to escape. She floats in space, unconscious. When she hits the ground outside Dr. Omega's lunar base, she does herself enough damage that death is certain, so Dr. Omega somehow restarts her heart with Nega Energy in a suicide maneuver and commands her to avenge him. You make it clear you have no idea how Dr. Omega gives The Moment his energy, just as you have no idea why he shrank. I'm supposed to go along with it and not think about that. You're likely trying for pulp style, in which logic and science and character et al are secondary to compelling adventure--but you've left out the compelling adventure! This is a long sequence of weird science being weird and random super-powered people fighting because they do. It isn't grounded: I don't have any sense of what started all this conflict or why I should care. The characters don't make me care. Dr. Omega is a stock scientist and that's all. The Moment gets less characterization than that, and Fafnir gets none whatsoever. That The Moment is undeveloped is especially detrimental since Dr. Omega's growing appreciation for her is the fulcrum on which the story moves. This attempt at an unusual love story pulls from its song brilliantly, incorporating many lines in a fluid, seamless, and rather clever manner, but it falls over in every other regard except the competence of prose. I do love realizing how "Your eyes never told me lies" (for example) plays out in the story, but that's not something that can save a piece so weak at its heart. The American jury gives you: 3 points. ************ DurianGray, for Austria: "Looking for Paradise" Lyrics: ZOË - "Loin d'ici" Kai's Video Notes: Colorful, sweet, and I enjoy the thing on her head. All those spring flowers and the white dress are trying to give the singer a maiden vibe, but the sheer skirt works against that. It also makes it look as though she were wearing diapers. The screen behind her is doing a lot of the visual heavy lifting; it's a good thing stars and clouds are pretty! A look at the lyrics tells me this is a simple love song bordering on the bland, but the sweet melody and relatively fast pace keep it from being a yawn. Themes: flowers, spring, sky, love, romance, a journey. Give your characters names! "The lieutenant's lover" is incredibly awkward as a replacement for a name, and it also defines this woman entirely by her sexual relationship. Not a plus. Everyone being referred to by titles not only makes this a lot harder to follow than it has to be, it underlines that the people in your story are defined by and as roles. They have very little personality. My take: in a time of drought and starvation, two camps of pilgrims have come to a sacred grove to sacrifice each other to a goddess in holy combat. The main character conspires with her lover to murder the priest--after the sacrifices start and everyone else is dead, not before; one young man seems to escape, but nope! An armored soldier presumably catches and kills the boy, then returns to the meadow to harangue the lieutenant and her lover about hubris. It's the goddess, condemning the rites. And also condemning their decision to stop the rites? The goddess withdraws her "help," which none of these people got much good out of anyway. It's probably meant to be a triumph of atheistic humanity, but it doesn't begin to work as such. That's a whole lot of nonsense in one place. Why don't the "heroes" try to stop the sacrifices before everyone dies? Why does the goddess call the hubris that inspired the sacrifices a sin, considering she's just killed a boy herself? Why does she then withdraw her dubious aid? Why is she such a bitch? She's a pointlessly and hilariously awful strawman, assuming this is meant to be a RELIGION IS BAD MM'KAY fable. I can't see what other intent could have driven it. If the story had hung together, it would have been a solid use of your video, but I'm disappointed in retrospect that you took a happy song down the well-worn Grimdark Lane. The violence was made absurd by the complete lack of an attempt to prevent it. Toxxupation's botched ending saved your bacon, so maybe give him a nice present when his regdate comes around. The American jury gives you: 2 points. ************ CANNIBAL GIRLS, for Azerbaijan 2008: "It's Not the Dark that Kills You" Lyrics: Elnur & Samir - "Day After Day" Kai's Video Notes: You're no Cezar, angel singer, but your costume is as amazing in its way. The angel/devil motif is cool here. Especially when the devil, who lounged in his throne while the angel stood, is saved by the winged ladies and stands tall to warble like a sheep as white fire sprays to Heaven. The song has a powerful message from which the camp detracts just a trifle, yet I wouldn't have it any other way. Themes: angelic and demonic influences, Heaven, Hell, sin, self-control, redemption, salvation. I conjecture the nature of Celine's experiment is being kept vague to try and intrigue me, and that irritates me instead. It's too clumsily done. The physical blocking is no better, using words evocative of water to describe going down to a cellar and being grandiose with its phrases: "lifeless soil," "approach the precipice." I'd rather have clarity than dramatic staging, and the way you're setting the scene bogs things down at the very start because it doesn't strike me as natural or clear. A cellar isn't an ocean; the metaphor doesn't float, so to speak. There's zero excuse either for a TD vet not to capitalize the first word of a dialogue sentence. For all that the prose doesn't win me over, the concept does--until the end when I'm not sure anymore what that concept is supposed to be. I can buy these kids as young siblings. I like the way that "evil" Emmitt runs away from the devil's offer and "angelic" Goff maims the moth without a thought. But did Emmitt break a bone in Goff's hand or crunch the moth? The former would be a severe punishment for Goff's casual cruelty, but it would fit the concept of Emmitt as the actual "good twin," sort of. The latter would put the twins on a more level ground as it would turn out they were both little bastards. (Though maybe killing the moth once it was short a wing was mercy. Was that what you were going for? Probably not, but if so, it's not clear enough.) The third possibility, that the moral of the story is that neither morality nor people are black and white, is perhaps the most likely but is marred by Emmitt showing shades of grey but Goff having no visible goodness to offset his cruelty. He asks whether Emmitt has to go through with the experiment, I suppose, but that very tepid "good" is invalidated by his participation in Celine's prank. Goff's a pure jerk from what we see. I don't think you were going for the crappy twist of both boys being bad, the end, so something is awry. My personal preference would be for Emmitt to be the better brother and show that by protesting what Goff does to the moth, though a broken bone would be overkill, but the shades-of-grey version could be good too with some tinkering to balance the boys' moral scales. The American jury gives you: 6 points. ************ Carl Killer Miller, for Poland 2006: "The Dance, the Dress, their Dream, and the Sun" Lyrics: Ich Troje - "Follow My Heart" Kai's Video Notes: Masks and masquerades are fantastic. As is that woman's twenty-foot satin train. As is Real McCoy! That man's green hair, on the other hand... well, at least he has the world's greatest pauldrons to make up for it. I'd probably like this even more if I spoke Polish, German, Russian, or Italian, but the costumes, pyrotechnics, and melody are more than adequate recompense. What's with him yanking off her skirt at the end, though? Aww, Wiki tells me the couple in the costumes is married and he was celebrating her pregnancy. That's the most adorable thing I've seen on the Eurovision stage. Themes: Masques, weddings, aristocratic opulence, love, anime hair. The core of your story isn't bad, if I ignore certain particulars. Iliona and Beata are two women alone, working together toward Beata's dream of dancing in a competition and presumably winning a purse. The sun of the world in which they live is dying, so to dance is to defy despair--and reality, perhaps, but in a manner that resembles determined hope more than delusion. When Iliona finishes her labors, she reveals an intricate ballerina costume, telling Beata that her persistence was what kept her weaving; the pair pray together, finally daring to believe a stronger sun will rise. That much is decently good. Though the relationship between mother and daughter is a familiar one, and the ending especially verges on cloying, the theme of hope persisting past when it should have failed lifts the story up. You said something here--not every piece of writing has to do that, but a message that resonates with the reader can make up for some ills. On the other hand, your astrophysics are pants. The sun of a habitable planet isn't going to be brown or grey. It isn't going to rise again because one woman's mother made her a pretty dress, either, unless it's ruled by a god with very peculiar priorities. A loom weaves cloth, but it won't shape cloth into a dress, I doubt it will sew on sequins or feathers, and I'm drat sure it won't produce a tiara. Definitely not the gem-studded headpiece I imagine when I hear that word. Where did the sequins or feathers even come from? Why make Beata a ballerina specifically? Why not a form of dance with a more credible costume, one more readily self-taught, or one easier to believe would still exist in a dying-sun apocalypse? Who the hell is running ballets? A story this short shouldn't strain (or break, in the case of the dress directly from a loom) my suspension of disbelief so often. The brown/grey sun is the worst offender in a way, because it isn't necessary. Remove the apocalypse element and ballet becomes less implausible. Your flash rule is responsible for it, I reckon; you took the concept of sunset to an extreme, and colors aside, it would be an interesting idea to spin a different story around. In this one the concept of love as light could have and probably should have been less literal. The decision to hop from Iliona's head to Beata's and back again without the benefit of scene breaks is one I don't fancy. Iliona is the more interesting of the two, her viewpoint the more refreshing to me. This may be worth revising; I'd consider shifting everything to Iliona's perspective if you do. All the faults are somewhat balanced by a storyline I care about and a conclusion that hangs together. This piece desperately needs its impossible edges sanded down, but it has a heart. The American jury gives you: 4 points. ************ Quidnose, for Czech Republic 2009: "Atlanta, 1959" Lyrics: Gipsy.cz - "Aven Romale" Kai's Video Notes: Oh, Supergypsy, why does your costume look so much like bell-bottomed pajamas? Dick Tracy on the guitar is almost as curious. The woman with the violin is the real style star for her hair alone, never mind the stockings or attempt to stick her bow in Supergypsy's eye. The fiddle and drums provide most of the musical enjoyment; the singing--well, this landed in last place in its semifinal for a reason, but I love the chutzpah and off-the-chart goofiness. Themes: Gypsies, superheroes, comics, fun, music. I possibly dislike this more than many readers would due to the use of dialect, which I consider ill advised in a few respects. One, it rings false as a transcription of a Southern drawl. You also give me the impression you're using this drawl to help illustrate these characters as coarse and uneducated, and that's not an endearing move for all that plenty of other writers have made it before you. The nonstandard punctuation isn't effective: clauses rattled out without pauses between them are another false step in the dialect. More than anything else, maybe, I don't buy all this cussin' from two Southern girls circa 1959, and that puts a cap on the voices sounding wrong, wrong, wrong. If this took place in 1989, say... honestly, I still wouldn't buy it. You overdo the profanity, straight up. A more modern time frame would nevertheless be easier to swallow for the story's sake. While my distaste for the above issues may be subjective, I can't imagine any reader looking at what the prompt asked you to do, then at your song, then at your story, and not asking, "What the gently caress?" You blew this so thoroughly that I almost believe there has to be some way the "riddle" actually works. That if I stare at it long enough, I'll be able to puzzle love out of it. Otherwise I have to believe you decided to take the bridge of the song and stick it in the story word for word in a way that ruins everything. Those lyrics weren't written as a riddle and don't serve as one. You did nothing to bend them into a workable form. This is atrocious, wrecking your ending as well as your middle section because, short a suicide note, I'm not convinced Char(e)lene could ever work out why Billie killed herself. The "riddle" drat sure wouldn't tell her. Your central plot device is sheer nonsense and transparently so. (I can't honestly convince myself there's any way those lyrics work, but on the off, off, off, off, off chance you intended us to see an answer--we didn't, so it failed in practice if not intent.) If one manages to ignore that, one's still left with two characters bitching at each other with very little personality-wise to recommend either of them, but the ending does make me sorry for Billie. Her one-sided crush on and caustic relationship with Charlene feels genuine, so that her death has some weight. The suicide is an element I do buy, given the ages in question. It's sort of infuriating that there's a solid cord of story here. The content--gee dee riddle aside ("gee dee" for "goddamn" is one bit I liked)--is potentially worthwhile, but the style choices deform it. That flash of something almost good in the ending most likely spared you a DM. My co-judges liked the story itself more than I did, and even so I had their blessing to hit you for prompt misuse. Convince me I was right not to do so by integrating your future prompts better. The American jury gives you: 3 points. ************ Tyrannosaurus, for Russia: "Medusa or the Lotus Eaters" Lyrics: Sergey Lazarev - "You Are The Only One" Kai's Video Notes: The man in the bed being slowly consumed by stripes is visually offputting. The synthesizer(?) notes get repetitive at about the time his chest collapses into a black hole. But then! He's standing in a TRON geode! He's on an upside-down mushroom made of light! He's conjuring paper art with his mind! The beat picks up from the first "Thunder and lightning," and the song doesn't stop being great past that point. The visual razzle-dazzle is a fire-breathing cherry on the sundae. Themes: Dissolution, circuits, thunder and lightning, storms, the classical elements, love out of reach, dedication, determination, fidelity. The run-on sentence in the first paragraph isn't as effective as I suspect you want it to be: the idea behind it is probably to give an impression of how John's mind is flooded with the sight of his dead wife, with no pauses for thought between what he sees and what he feels, but I think you do need a comma after "Sundays," when the subject changes from she to John. The lack sounds wrong to my mental ear. Not a major problem, but it does trip me up. So does "Online-Reviews-Is-A-Hustle" a bit later--hustle is singular, but in a clause like that you want the verb to match the number of the word it follows. Although you've done a great job in terms of the prompt, I'm more frustrated every time I read this. Decent, potentially good ideas are wrecked by terrible pacing and the inclusion of the weird psychiatrist, who seems to exist to add more dialogue where there's already more than enough and to bring a quirky, "funny" tone to a story that doesn't benefit from that a bit. What is the deal with this guy? Why does the scene in which he takes off his shirt to jiggle at John exist? Who does that? His appearances take away from the poignancy John's grief could have had, never mind John's death. The ending you chose just does not fit a story with Dr. Wackypants as a major factor. Not that Dr. Mitchell is the only issue. The other judges didn't have this problem, but I thought which book Melissa was reading was going to be important. The cover is described twice; the blurred title is mentioned twice. It's set up as a mystery. That's apparently a black-and-red herring, though, because the significance of the book seems to be that either Melissa's genuine ghost tells John where to find it or that John subconsciously knows the book is there (maybe because it keeps poking his posterior when he sits on the couch? I'd like for all the rear end-pinching to have a point) and convinces himself it's a message from Melissa. The ambiguity borders on lovely, but I'm disappointed by the non-reveal of the book. I still want to know what book it is! And how a whole book could vanish between couch cushions, while we're at it. It's the pacing that delivers the deathblow, however, as the story crashes into an eighteen-wheeler with PROTAGONIST DEATH written on the side. John's suicide isn't well supported. The text faffs about with Dr. Mitchell and burns a lot of words on Melissa's and John's post-death sex life, and it doesn't manage to present John's death as a natural conclusion. Honestly, it reads like you killed him off because you didn't know what else to do. I doubt that's entirely true because of the mildly haunting question of whether he conjured those conversations with his wife to give himself an excuse to die. Maybe you wanted it to be abrupt because that's sometimes the nature of death? No, I can't excuse it on those grounds, not with Dr. Mitchell shoved off the stage as abruptly just before, as though you didn't have a better plan for getting rid of him either. The American jury gives you: 5 points. ************ SurreptitiousMuffin, for Ireland 2011: "Brood" Lyrics: Jedward - "Lipstick" Kai's Video Notes: Wait, did I say the Polish man had the world's greatest pauldrons? What was I thinking? Jedward's ruby jackets are the epitome of Eurovision chic. I love these guys--the hair, the dancing. It's terrible. It's wonderful. Who could care whether they can actually sing once the chorus kicks in? Not I. I'm too busy dancing along in my chair. Themes: Twins, rubies, troll hair, shoulders, exuberance, cosmetics, hit-and-run romance, symbols from a video-game controller. A three-hundred-word story casting Jedward as malevolent elves is more or less my favorite thing in the week. Think upon that, ye Thunderdomers, and despair. This tiny legend is absurd and grim and lovely in a similar manner to your tribute to Lordi long ago. I didn't rank this one as a win contender, though it made my top three even as slight as it is; you and Daphnaie are the only two who didn't make any significant mistakes, your sentences have more elegance to them, and you hit my weaknesses for the beautifully absurd and for literal, earnest interpretations of silly source material. Why don't I love it quite as much as "Chainsaw Buffet"? The changeling myth is maybe too familiar to me. I think, though, that something about the end beat is to blame. The final line makes sense, but it doesn't hit the spot. I wish I could tell you why. Maybe it's as simple as you stopping so soon when I'm sure more could be said of cruel, fae Jedward, and I want to read that more. Gorgeous use of the song, though: you capture the predation that lurks in the lyrics of "Lipstick." A win for three hundred elegant-but-not-outstanding words was too hard a sell with more satisfying, more memorable material on the field, but I imagine you accomplished what you set out to do here. The American jury gives you: 8 points. ************ Ironic Twist, for Cyprus: "Peculiar" Lyrics: Minus One - "Alter Ego" Kai's Video Notes: Does that man have a blue puff on his chin for a beard? That... isn't a good look, sir. Stop distracting me from the promising beat of your song. The lead singer's hood is just as distracting, to be fair, but in a good way because it makes me think he's some sort of hard-rock druid. It's interesting to see what a living room arranged on grass looks like in real life instead of in the Sims. On the whole, I dig the music--a flat stage performance could kill it, though, so I hope they bring some of that druid flare. Themes: Wolves, black clothes, intensity, open land, love, captivity, questionable facial-hair decisions. Ridley and Joslyn are siblings; they live in the swamp, presumably together. Two persons trespass in their home one day and make as though to search the place for someone they are seeking while Joslyn's right there at the dinner table. Naturally enough, Joslyn's having none of that and pulls a rifle on them. The pair shift shape into talking wolves. The girl they seek insulted one of the pair, evidently, but Joslyn's not convinced this is a good reason to let them have her and shoots one of the wolves with silver bullets. The other's at her throat when Ridley bursts in and punches the wolf with a silver charm bracelet. It burns him, too: he's a werewolf himself, and he was probably the one who found the girl and hid her in the back room of his and Joslyn's house. Joslyn throws the corpses of the werewolves into the swamp before she and Ridley watch the girl depart for the nearest bus station. This is the story I've put together from the pieces you've presented. I like it--what there is of it, at least, and more on that in a moment. The bayou atmosphere is vivid, and in only a few lines you sketch out an eccentric, interesting brother-sister relationship. Above all else I appreciate the coherent story thread that makes sense and never breaks. I've criticized your stories often for making a jump somewhere along the line and leaving the reader behind, so I was delighted when I reached the end of this and saw the overall shape. That you got my win vote is probably due to that in part, though you might have had it regardless since your story is more lively than Daphnaie's, with more substance than Muffin's. My co-judges were confused, however. And that wasn't their fault. In truth, your entry is to a story as a doily is to a plate: both may have the same shape, but one is full of holes. Who is the girl? What did she do? How did she get hurt? How and where did Ridley find her? Who are the evil wolves? What's going on in this swamp that Joslyn recognizes them right away for what they are? Why do they act like they do instead of trying to pass as human? What is the girl's story? The conflict is over the girl; the plot revolves around the girl; you leave the girl a total enigma and her situation only slightly less obscure. On top of that, the opening in which Ridley appears to have maybe maimed the girl himself confuses the issue further (as does calling her "lady"). That piece of the story still doesn't quite fit with the rest. The jump's short enough that I can make the leap with you, but I wonder whether you had a somewhat different tone in mind initially. A minor issue crops up that I last remember seeing in your previous Eurovision entry, interestingly enough: I assume Where was it? Where was it coming from? are supposed to be Ridley's thoughts, right? The past tense is the wrong choice considering that from his perspective, the blood smell is there now. Treat italicized thoughts--or documents written by a character, like that list in "Sunstroke"--like dialogue, because like dialogue, they're what the character is saying (or thinking) in that moment. It's a little complicated, though. If you hadn't italicized those sentences, the past tense would be fine because the implication that those words were his exact thoughts wouldn't be there. It's a tiny point, but I find Joslyn's age unconvincing. She doesn't sound like she's in her fifties, and for a woman that old to be hanging out in the swamp with her werewolf brother and no visible means of support strikes me as odd. It's one more way in which the piece feels incomplete, as it calls for some explanation that's never provided. You apparently tried to squeeze much too much story into too few words and cut out much too much of the meat to make it fit. Some straightforward exposition might have gone a long way. Don't beat around the bush regarding how Ridley found the girl or why he and Joslyn took her in; tell us straight out why the girl needs protecting, if you have to. More words are probably most of what this needs, but if you expand it, consider dropping the did-he-or-didn't-he ambiguity of the first section and possibly setting the whole thing in Ridley's perspective. The American jury gives you: 8 points. ************ Daphnaie, for Australia: "Silence" Lyrics: Dami Im - "Sound Of Silence" Kai's Video Notes: Oh, Australia, it's your second year in and your second inoffensive pop ballad. One topless male dancer is not nearly enough to mitigate my disappointment. The song's basically okay, but I expect to forget it five minutes after hearing it. Ms. Im's chained rings might stick in my memory, though. Themes: Fog, loneliness, silence, sorrow, a call that goes unanswered. A good story, though not a great one, in a largely lackluster week. It delighted me to discover a piece so thoroughly solid at this point in my reading. It describes the course of a friendship--everything else is ornament--and does a lovely job, especially in the final note of the shattered, mended crow. I'm not convinced a straightforward chronology wouldn't have served it better than telling the most eventful third as backstory, but the form it's in now does the trick. I wish the robots either weren't robots or were at all convincing as robots, though. The protagonist and Ruby are both humans in very thin robot costumes. I'm supposed to believe someone programmed a robot to feed crows? To blow glass ornaments to give as personal gifts? For heaven's sake, the humans are using weapons meant to be "[sunk] into my metal flesh." I'm checking the Eurovision lyrics to see if there are any lines about metal people... no, it looks like their inclusion was your own idea. I don't see a reason there needed to be robots or anything that's gained by this being a robot apocalypse rather than a human dystopia, and the robots-in-name-only nature of the characters is the entry's largest flaw. Nevertheless, your skillful prose and evocation of emotion earned your victory. The American jury gives you: 8 points. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Sep 27, 2016 |
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Jul 28, 2016 06:20
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A yew tree whispers to an archivist: "I feel so scared." In.
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Jul 30, 2016 02:52
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Words of Wood and Blood (930 words) Quote: A yew tree whispers to an archivist: "I feel so scared." Hoofbeats on the forest path were Ansiel's first warning of visitors: the young king and his guards, their horses' coats dark with sweat. The king studied Ansiel, noticing--no doubt of it--his ink-stained cuffs and twig-snagged hair. "You are the Archivist?" Ansiel bowed. "I am, Majesty." "I want to know the long-term causes of this war with Corroba, the entire history of our countries' relationship." Ansiel led the men deep into the Archive wood, beyond broad, towering oaks and fat yews that had gone silent in the presence of strangers. The particular yew Ansiel sought lived a mile in, close to the forest's heart, within sight of an enormous stump marked by words. The tree's lowest boughs curved toward the loam, and Ansiel touched one. Its needles rustled to acknowledge him. "Tell us of Corroba," he said, and the whispering began. The history trees remembered all they'd been told in the thousands of years they had lived. They held the names and sins of monarchs past. They remembered the count of dead on a battlefield long after Time had chewed the written tally to dust. This yew had told Ansiel about diplomatic decisions made ages before his birth, and it relayed them now by shaping the air that blew through its arms into a slow, soft voice that Ansiel loved. The king, however, started pacing half an hour into the recital. "My time is short. I'll come back in three days for a report my advisors can read." He stopped beside the word-scarred stump. "What happened here?" Thank you, Ansiel told the yew with a gentle tap on its branch. "Lightning, Majesty. A sore loss." "We still have the knowledge, I believe," the king said. "Three days. Remember." Ansiel brought his blanket and writing board, bread and lantern, vellum and ink to the foot of the yew and bent his whole mind to the king's order, yet the tree's murmur couldn't be hurried. He filled his pages with small script. He slept for only an hour here and there. On the third day, his report was nevertheless incomplete, and ice sat in his belly. The king brought more men with him on his return visit. "No matter," he said, pushing Ansiel's unfinished work back into his hands. "My grandfather showed me when I was a boy what was done with the dead tree, the pages made from its pulp and the words they already contained. These men will get me what I need." They carried axes. Ansiel threw himself in front of the shivering yew, but a woodcutter grabbed his arms, pulled him to the side, and held him there to watch as limbs were chopped away. The tree screamed while it had the boughs to do it. Its killers shuddered and cut faster, reducing thousands of years to lumber. Sap rose to the surface of the exposed wood in the form of meaningless fragments: Corroba--landslide killed--economic factors--seven dukes voted against-- It took hours. In the end Ansiel heard the head woodcutter mutter to the king, "It'll take so long to haul all this home, treat it, and press it that you won't gain any time, sire. I say it again. This is pointless." "I've no choice now." The king turned and gestured for Ansiel to be released. Ansiel's arms ached, but the tears on his face were for a different pain. "You'll have a copy of the book," the king said, discomfort changing his tone. What did it matter? The king rode away, and his men loaded the yew's corpse onto sledges, and Ansiel was left with a raw stump and hundreds of silent trees that didn't answer when he touched them, begged them to speak. If they never spoke again, he couldn't blame them. So long a life, ended so needlessly. Nor would men remember the yew. A new shipment of vellum arrived at his house in the morning, the crates stamped with the royal seal. Ansiel hunched over the pages, writing his memories of all the Archive's trees. The words seemed dull and inadequate to him. More than that, he began to wonder who would remember the calf on whose skin he wrote. Only one material could tell the world all he knew of the trees. Only one would answer the yew's sacrifice with like kind. Only one would be payment for his failure. The knife he used to scrape parchment was thankfully keen. It sliced a thinner sheet than Ansiel had imagined possible from his left thigh, and the blood that spilled clung to the skin as words describing sinuous boughs and flickering moonlight. The skin of his left arm conveyed the leaf-and-needle chorus. His stomach told of acorns eaten and planted: the saplings that would remember tomorrow. Yet there was more. He pared himself down in layers until muscle replaced epidermis, and the histories went on. There was pain, of course; there was agony while he still had flesh, but the more he cut, the less he felt, until his mind was free to read. Then his native fascination carried him through. He had to stop at the last and gather the pages in what remained of his arms. The ink was red; his bones were white. Ansiel stumbled to the Archive's heart, to the stump of the yew, and laid his book there--for the next Archivist and perhaps the next after, short-lived humans all. Collapsing to the loam, Ansiel closed his eyes. Slow, soft voices whispered above him, telling each other his story.
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Aug 1, 2016 04:59
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Ironic Twist posted:A LIBRARIAN wants to CREATE A SOVEREIGN STATE. Curse you for knowing my weaknesses. In. A DICTATOR wants to MARRY A WHALE.
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Aug 5, 2016 18:45
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Entrants! Kindly don't hide your flash rules, sub-prompts, word counts, or anything else behind spoiler tags unless the judges ask you to do so. This goes for every week.
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Aug 7, 2016 06:27
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323.6, Citizenship and Related Topics Flash rule: A LIBRARIAN wants to CREATE A SOVEREIGN STATE. (1,577 words) The automatic-check-out stations were the last straw. "I didn't ask for these," Ilona said as old Mike wheeled a second machine into the Carnegie Branch Library. "I don't recall a vote being held. I wasn't even consulted, and I guarantee my patrons weren't either." "The whole system's putting them in. It's a budget thing." Mike shoved the Summer Reading Club display aside to make room for the monstrosity, and children's books cascaded to the floor. He grunted an apology. "Surprised they've sent them here, though, considering. How long 'til you close now? A month?" Ilona rescued the fallen books and stroked bent covers back into smoothness. "Two, I'm told." "Must be the bosses want to get you used to the machines, so when you're at your new branch--" Mike glanced over his shoulder, and the pity that flickered across his face told Ilona he'd interpreted her expression correctly. "Aww, come on. You've been here ten years!" "A fact I now regret beyond measure," Ilona said. "There aren't any more openings for librarians in Cavelier." Mike clapped her on the shoulder before he left, streaking her blouse with grime. Ilona let the dirt be and retreated to the back office. She'd lied about her feelings, of course. A decade was too little time to spend mending torn pages, shelving new volumes, handing kids she'd met as babies their first library cards, stopping Mrs. Orbach from smuggling racy DVDs out in her purse... well, she could have done with less of that. She had no desperate need to know about an eighty-year-old's obsession with Jude Law and his butt. But Ilona loved her old building, now due to be demolished; she loved all her volunteer and part-time workers; she loved everything about her library that wasn't its governing board. They could go to the devil and take automatic check-outs with them. After a couple of glasses of the Jim Beam hidden in her desk, it only seemed reasonable to tell them so. On paper filched from the copier, Ilona penned her declaration: We the people of the Carnegie Branch Library hereby announce the secession of our branch from the Cavelier Public Library System. Very good, so far as it went. Her careful script made the letters stark and proud. Yet the board wasn't entirely responsible for the shortage of library funds, was it? We secede likewise from the city of Cavelier, from the state of Texas-- In fact, why not go for broke? --and from the United States of America. As our forefathers did before us, we found on this earth a new nation: Carnegie. Her heart singing, Ilona made three copies, signing each Ilona Morris, President pro tempore, and stuffed them in envelopes addressed to the board of directors, the mayor, the governor, and the White House. She stamped each envelope with Carnegie's date of independence. Eventually she would need a national seal; the date stamp was a fine starting point. The letters went into the mailbox on the corner. The next day, Sunday, Ilona called all her staff in for an emergency meeting. "I did something crazy last night," she told them. "I turned the library into a micronation. None of you know how to break into a mailbox, do you?" Stanley, her best shelver, traded glances with Laurie, who read to children on Tuesdays. Young Morgan picked at her lip. Kevin laughed--well, Ilona couldn't blame him. It was database goddess Sasha who finally spoke. "Can I apply for citizenship?" Together they all moved five beds into the library that night, one for each staffer except Laurie: "Living here would be my dream," Laurie said, "but my kids--" Ilona thought of the operatic toddlers in question and promptly named Laurie the Carnegien ambassador to America, her house the official embassy. No one protested, possibly because the others, too, preferred burrowing under covers with so many books around them to sleeping anywhere else. Possibly because they got their fill of children during the day, though that boded ill for the long-term population of their country. Monday morning saw the doors opened and patrons guided into lines. "We plan to have an open border," Ilona promised Mrs. Orbach, stamping the woman's fresh new Carnegie visa, "but we'll search your luggage if you give us a reason. Please don't cause any international incidents." Mrs. Orbach beckoned for Ilona to lean in close, then whispered, "Does this mean I can check out Wilde a hundred times and the NSA won't know?" "Maybe wait a few days, Mrs. Orbach. We have to tighten our national security." The old lady's eyes gleamed in anticipation. One of the clump of kids that had coalesced around Stanley asked loudly, "Where are the books on making up your own country?" Stanley pointed to the juvenile nonfiction and off they ran, eager to learn something. "Their parents are in for an adventure," Kevin said from Ilona's right. He nudged her arm and nodded toward three preteens tapping on their phones. "I don't suppose you've checked Twitter, you Luddite? Hashtag 'Carnegie.' I'll bet you another bottle of Jim I can get it trending by Wednesday." "Stay out of my desk, Kevin," Ilona said. "But sure. Do your thing." As he explained it later, Kevin's Carnegie blog post was linked and reblogged by other book-centric blogs until library junkies all over the world had the news--and political sites picked it up too, comparing them to Sealand, the Hutt River Province, and even Great Britain. Kevin and Sasha grabbed a web domain and started an official state website. On Thursday, Ilona couldn't make coffee past noon because all the taps ran dry. The power, phone, and Internet blinked out within the hour. Morgan raked her hands through her hair until it stood up on end. "I knew this would happen. Of course it would. The state was paying the bills, and now there's no reason for them to, any more than there's a reason for them to pay us." Sasha put an arm around her. "They never have paid us much, babe. You and Madam President are the only ones without other jobs. We'll keep the lights on with a national tax, and it'll still be cheaper than five sets of rent and utilities." "Until it's illegal for us to work in America," Morgan said. "Oh, there's a ton of information here on applying for green cards!" Carnegie's citizens voted the tax proposal into law unanimously with Laurie abstaining, and during the same meeting most of them volunteered for the National Guard. Ilona helped Stanley build a shooting range in the basement with repurposed automatic-check-out machines as targets. The chief of police rapped on the door so early on Friday that the sky was still grey. Her blouse hastily tidied, her lanyard bright with rhinestones, Ilona went to meet him with a tablet in her arm and the date stamp of state in her hand. The chief shook his head at the sight of them. "This damnfool charade is over. I'm expelling you all from this government property right now, and you, Ms. Morris--" "This government property that was about to be shut down and destroyed?" Ilona asked. "Which would have removed easy access to books from hundreds of people. Most of the books were going to be pulped or recycled, you know, to spare some bureaucrat a bigger headache. The city should be glad it doesn't have to fund any of that process." "It isn't." The chief's eyes flicked to Sasha and Stanley nearby, lingered on the air rifles slung across their backs. "Nobody's happy about this." "I must disagree." Ilona passed the date stamp to Stanley, then displayed her tablet to the chief. "In less than a week, more than fourteen thousand citizens of your nation have signed a petition to allow peaceful secession." "Fourteen thousand people would sign a petition to add a new color to Froot Loops." "True," Ilona admitted, "but there's more. The library has never been so busy. People from out of town are already coming to see us, spending money in your city. Word's spreading. Tourism will grow. Librarians from all over the world will make pilgrimages here and stay in local hotels. Maybe we'll make money from it ourselves, and where else will we spend it if we do? Cavelier's star shines brighter in exchange for a place you didn't want anyway. Think about it, sir." The police chief sighed, folded his arms, and mulled it over for an age before speaking again. "It's not my decision, but the mayor might take your view. Though it doesn't matter since you'll never talk the governor and president around." He departed to consult with his bosses, and Ilona turned to face her people. Her smile had never felt so wide. "A diplomatic tribute every April fifteenth or so should help with the latter, I think. Don't you?" she asked them. Stanley offered her the date stamp. "You're probably right, Your Majesty." Ilona blinked. Kevin thumped his fist over his heart and bent in half a bow. "He's on to something. It's better this way," he said. "Tourists like monarchies." "Then kneel, librarians--" They did so with clear reservations, but frowns turned to laughter as Queen Ilona tapped their shoulders with the date stamp, one by one. "Rise, dames and knights of the Order of the Dewey Decimal. Long live our bibliocracy!"
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Aug 8, 2016 06:36
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Jitzu_the_Monk posted:If you owe no crits, then you must instead crit one story that has never been critted. Anyone going this route should probably avoid stories from last week, since judge crits are likely forthcoming.
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Aug 9, 2016 17:31
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sebmojo posted:I'll do my crits by submission deadline, Hello!
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Aug 10, 2016 01:16
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Critiques for Week CCI: In Soviet Judging Commissariat, the Joke Is on You Why does a request for happy endings turn your livers to water and your minds to mush, comrades? So many of you had trouble sticking an upbeat landing that I'd assume Thunderdome were terrible at everything that isn't doom and gloom if I didn't know better. (Obligatory joke: TD is terrible at doom and gloom too.) The images of skeletons, demons, and whatever is going on here complicated the task, but that was the challenge. Oh, well; we all survived the experience, and that's a darned good ending whenever Russian revolutions are involved. Marshmallow Blue, "The Other Side of the Wall" The key to success with an art prompt seldom lies in spending the first paragraph describing your picture. You give it new context, but I would have preferred something less literal, especially considering the requirement of a happy ending: the grim mood you set here pervades the piece up until the final section, which tries to force a happy tone and ends up feeling tacked onto a story that should have ended two paragraphs sooner. That's a problem several writers have this round, so at least you're in good company. The story could stand to underline its points less and let the reader draw some conclusions on his own: the sentence "The punishment for both was a front row seat to the firing squad" doesn't tell us anything new, for example, and the introspection/exposition level is high enough that cutting redundant information couldn't hurt. Minor mechanical errors are common, e.g. a lack of subject-verb agreement. Dialogue isn't punctuated properly. Check out this link and absorb its wisdom ASAP. That last section could and probably should be cut. The transition is super clumsy. It doesn't add significantly to Alex's story, which isn't itself all that fresh. A firing-squad rifleman has a moment of hesitation, is shot, and feels relief when he can't do his duty anymore. It's a standard "war is hell" piece in which the characters are stock roles. Aside from the errors, though, the prose is serviceable, and there's nothing terrible about it--just nothing exciting. I preferred the energetic-if-absurd adventures of Mr. Chips, but that might be my weakness for a well-timed fist bump talking. ******************* ******************* ****** Chernabog, "Grim callings" A comma splice right in the first line! Oh, dear, and they just keep coming. Comma splices are tools that ought to be handled with care. Fling them every whichaway and the result is awkward rather than artful. Your frequent use of them is more distracting than effective, calling my attention to the prose and away from what the prose says. The odd speech pattern you've given to Death works (or doesn't, as the case may be) similarly; it's not fun to read and doesn't make logistical sense. Death as a woman with a job, known and recognized by the whole village, is a good concept and unusual insofar as she doesn't appear only to a select few at the right time. Everybody knows she's there and what she's up to. Her special relationship to the man responsible for letting her in through the gate is potentially interesting. The execution isn't great, unfortunately. Issues with the prose aside, the bear fight is dull, mechanical and lacking immediacy. There's plenty of step-by-step description of physical actions but little sense of what Yuri feels in the moment. Terrified? Angry? What is his pain like? I don't buy either the central idea that most people don't ask Death for help or mercy. Who wouldn't ask Death to spare a loved one in a world in which Death was right there and available for conversation? I regret the wasted potential, but I'd still say this is relatively all right. You're improving! Keep that up! ******************* ******************* ****** Chili, "Never Again, You Scum!" LEARN TO PUNCTUATE DIALOGUE, EVERYBODY, I MEAN GODDAMN. Oy, the storytelling style you employ here is lethal. Theoretically exciting things happen, but in my mental ear it all sounds like some stranger on the bus droning his life story at me: everything is told in retrospect and at a remove, with details thrown in that add nothing to the narrative but length. For all the exposition about Luca's life, I don't feel any connection to him. He might as well be a robot aside from his childhood fondness for Poparov and the glimpse into his heart that the final three lines provide. His whole revenge quest comes off as mechanical, like he and you are going through the motions--it's a lot less interesting than you'd expect murder-suicide via boat Whac-A-Mole to be. Can we talk about Luca's murder method for a second? Tying a man to a mast and then beating holes in the boat is the sort of thing James Bond villains do! I don't believe for a second that Yuri dies! He completely gets away while Luca is martyring himself for justice; right now he's on a beach somewhere smoking cigarettes and drinking Mai Tais. Luca's suicide isn't even slightly upbeat, because dying needlessly to emulate a man who himself died by chopping down a treehouse full of raiders--not the soundest strategy--isn't heroic, only stupid. Credibly stupid. A traumatized and broken young man might do something like that, albeit by different methods. The credibility makes it bleak, however, as suicide usually is. There were definitely better ways to slant the end of this story upward. Luca might have abandoned revenge, or he might have killed Yuri and then shared a fist bump with Damien, or he might have killed Yuri and then sailed off into the sunrise uncertain of what life held for him next but finally free of the past. Anything like that would have shown the positive forward motion QuoProQuid required. Luca's death couldn't do that. Going back to the extraneous details, why did Luca write his life story? Why did Yuri's boat have a name? Why didn't Luca's godmother take him in immediately, skipping the bit about his life on the streets? Why did Luca spend some of his last moments alive looking at Yuri's porn? Who takes pictures of drinking? These pieces of information may be intended to develop the setting and Luca, but they aren't incorporated well; they don't do their job, so they should have been cut or made to matter. One point in your work's favor is that it has the shape of a story. There are obvious attempts made at plot, action, characterization, and hitting the prompt--which you did so far as the image went, although it wouldn't shock me if you flat forgot the rest. Most of what you did this time wasn't successful, but you have good instincts. What you need most is more practice. ******************* ******************* ****** a friendly penguin, "February" Does everything float in that hill? Naming the monster IT possibly wasn't the best choice. But I sort of like the first section, King flashbacks aside. The terse sentences deliver the right mood. It makes me think of a reversed "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," Ursula K. LeGuin's famous story of the welfare of many vs. the welfare of one. I guessed when I read this the first time that the hidden child had a twin and that was why the speaker thought it would successfully escape, and that was soon borne out; you could have been more clear about it--clarity isn't a strength of this piece, sacrificed for style--but I think I understand the story's general shape. When the switch to IT's perspective happens, the terse sentences no longer work as well. The creature's voice isn't distinct from the villager's. Should it be? IT is in the villager, so echoes might be expected. I'm not convinced the similarity is an intentional choice, though. The ending, like so many others, hits an off note: for it to be upbeat, it would need to be set in the perspective of the child or a villager--someone for whom the boy's escape is a triumph rather than a defeat. Furthermore, IT's loss is strictly temporary. My strong impression is that IT will come back to destroy the survivors eventually. Not a cheerful thought! That conclusion also draws another parallel to the novel It, which isn't a good thing. The monster of King's book preys upon children, lives underground, and is temporarily defeated but destined to return; there's emphasis on how It possesses the town of Derry and has shaped the minds of the people. Sound familiar? Glad as I am that there's no sewer gangbang in this story, I still eye it sidelong. On the off chance you haven't read It yet, check it out: it may be right up your alley. I could have voted for an HM for the first section, but the second half drags the whole down into the swampy middle. ******************* ******************* ****** Black Griffon, "Alika and Marcius" The first line took me three attempts to parse. Two paragraphs in, I'm ready to stamp this with OVERWROUGHT in large, red letters. The phrases don't flow naturally, so the voice doesn't work. By the fourth paragraph I'm wondering whether you're ESL, but I'd guess you're trying for literary style and missing hard--like "fall off the tightrope and break both your legs" hard. Another judge liked what you were doing, so take my complaint with salt if you like, but for me the prose makes following the story difficult and unpleasant without offering any benefit in exchange. From what I can tell, Mercius is a warrior who's ridden five horses to death so far in his quest to kill one man: Alika, lord of a city. The death of the fifth horse drove him to flee, but he's come back to his nemesis one last time to end it, scourged on by the memory of his cowardice. He ultimately wins what feels like an empty, broken battle, washing his cowardice away in blood. This stumbles on the "happy ending" concept. Marcius wins and frees himself of his obsession, but he's right: he's a broken man who has defeated another broken man. Age has weakened both of them. The tone of the fight suggests futility more than joy even though you tell me joy exists. Is Marcius free now? How can he be when he's lived for nothing else to this point? It's all rather depressing, although it meets the prompt when all's said and done: Marcius will move on toward something else, and that's a positive development. ******************* ******************* ****** Entenzahn, "Bystander Effect" Too many dog stories in TD have made me resistant to this one's attempts at pathos. Not your fault, really, but it's still a bit like reading another Newbery medal winner with a dead kid in it. It's a decent story, though. I enjoy the view of the bystander effect from two sides, not to mention the first protagonist of the week with some rounding to him. I like his solution and the way the dog fights against being saved. It adds an extra layer of difficulty to doing the right thing. Even the question of whether the punks' dog victims are ultimately better off complicates the issue in an interesting way--though I don't know whether you meant it to be a question. You've left the violence at the level of a few shoves and slaps, definitely abuse but perhaps not so much for a dog to endure to get out of the shelter and into a bleeding-heart home. I can understand how people passing the scene by can justify doing so to themselves. If that's intentional on your part, good job; if the punks' treatment of the animal is intended to be seen as flat-out torture, you softened the blow too much. What I don't like all that much is the end, which sort of falls over, as though you had no more idea of how to move forward than your protagonist. He's done a good deed. Now what? I'm not certain what else exactly I want from this story, but there's something it doesn't deliver that keeps it insubstantial. This may be what held it back from honors, as all three judges liked it--a rarity, so be proud--but none of us thought it rose above the competent plateau. ******************* ******************* ****** magnificent7, "Untitled" I'm morally obliged to tear this a new one. It's practically a holy vocation. First, though, I want to salute you for your choice to write something, anything, in the face of distraction and too many failures. You knew there was a good chance of loss (dear Heaven, I hope you knew that) but went ahead for the sake of doing what you'd said you'd do. Bravo. I'm glad I got to read this thing, whatever my thoughts on its quality. Okay, warm fuzzies over. You used a screenplay format to have a very obvious, very preachy, somewhat prolonged conversation with yourself about the evils of religious fanaticism. Therefore, the only thing the entry has is dialogue--there's no setting, plot, description, or action; characterization barely exists--and that dialogue is mostly artless and stale. It's no surprise the humor falls flat, given the subject matter. The gilding of story is so cheap and thin that my eyes are turning greener just looking at this. The message isn't a bad one. "Hey, people, stop reading excuses to kill everybody into your holy books" is a sentiment with which it's hard to disagree. There are points to consider when it comes to drawing inspiration from current events, though. You still want to deliver a good experience, if only so your audience will pay attention. A lecture is not usually a good experience when the reader is hoping for fiction. Show your message in the actions of characters and the details of your setting, don't tell it as a game of conversational Pong between talking heads. You may not need that advice in these circumstances--I doubt you wrote the story this way because you thought the approach would be brilliant--but maybe it will serve someone else who's reading this. Toward that same goal: don't misspell the name of one of your characters as FIRSTNAMEFIRSTNAME at any point if you can help it! I wholeheartedly love the last two lines and their brazen shoehorning in of the prompt. More humor like that and less circling around and around a point might have spared you. ******************* ******************* ****** Thranguy, "Mince" The commas are probably left out of the fourth line intentionally, but I don't like it. Nor am I keen on the period inside the parentheses in the sixth or the use of parentheses in the eighth--though I could warm to the latter if it weren't for what they do to the mood; more on that shortly. The long parenthetical digression about the princesses is exactly that: digression. The end of the story feels abrupt and shortchanged, and it's easy to point to the princess paragraph and ask why it's comparatively bloated. The nuts and bolts are altogether rougher than I would expect: "A ruler should have a sense when his men are lying to him." “And his boot-lick were not making sport of your kitten's walk.” Are you trying to give the general strange diction? Why? Then again, "it's walk" appears shortly after. It looks more like you missed more in editing than you generally do. I like the serving boy, although I wish more time were spent on and with him; I like Owyn. I like the general. I feel for Owyn, a boy-king who isn't remotely ready and isn't remotely respected. The problem with the way his tale ends, in terms of the prompt, is that the parentheticals suggest he's in denial to a degree that makes me worry for his sanity. I don't finish reading and think, "Aww, Owyn has a friend." I think, "Owyn is miserable and may be about to crack." That's not happy! The intention is present, but the tone's wrong. He may have met the serving boy and he may get to play with a cat sometimes, but his father has died, he's the king, and he's not coping well. That doesn't seem like a net improvement in his situation. You made top-notch use of the picture, however, drawing elements of the story from it without being completely literal. Since the prompt is no longer an issue, more polish and a little expansion--the general in particular just drops out of the story without word of how he and King Owyn get on--ought to be enough to take this from promising-but-flawed to solidly strong. ******************* ******************* ****** Paladinus, "Funding Cuts" I won't pretend this is good, but I like it anyway. I almost love it. Bickering, alien bats from space fly to the assistance of a blacksmith and accept his tongs as repayment, with which they repair their broken spaceship. It's so completely stupid it ought to be awful. Logic is nonexistent. The prose looks decent only relative to the poor showing this week. But it makes me smile when little else does: it's the only thing with a wholeheartedly upbeat ending. What's the difference between this and the unabashed idiocy of certain stories I've loathed in the past? The picture has to be what makes this funny instead of just dumb, at least in part. You were given a picture of bats flying around a thrashing man with tongs, and that's by God what you wrote, in an unexpected and lighthearted way. Something about taking a peculiar prompt and playing along with it charms me. It probably helps that I'm almost sure you know this is a farce. You had fun, and I have fun reading it. Thanks, Paladinus. I'm glad you stick around. ******************* ******************* ****** Screaming Idiot, "And he had black wings" First section: good. Second section: bad, because it cheats. Yuri isn't still "here" at the story's end, so he shouldn't talk about it in the present tense. Otherwise this part's all right, although it's where the murky metaphysics start. Why does it matter whether the childish hell inspires hope? Do the dead only travel toward what they think they'll find? Third section: part good. Mostly bad. I'm not convinced Yuri has been searching for himself as much as for some place to be that isn't a cartoon hell, so the man with the black wings turning it into a Quest for Self-Realization comes out of left field. It's bad when someone has to tell the protagonist what his goal is, yo. Yuri regains his name and memory too quickly and too easily. What should have been the climactic moment is passive. Effortless. Once the narrative turns into the ending of The Wizard of Oz, it's just a mess, and I wish Yuri had found peace or hope in death rather than returning to life like (very like!) the protagonist of Fallout: New Vegas. I can't tell whether the man with the wings is a stand-in for God the Father. The visual symbolism is all wrong, but the role is right, so...? The metaphysics operate on dream logic--which reminds me that It Was All a Dream. I sincerely like parts of the prose, but the finale ruins everything. ******************* ******************* ****** flerp, "The Monster in the Lake and in My Stomach" Screamed has synonyms that convey subtly different things. Dad screaming at his daughter while they fight works--sort of: screaming is shrill and I'd prefer yelling, bellowing, shouting, etc., but it passes. Dad screaming as she flees the house doesn't, because that suggests a different sort of distress than what I believe you mean to imply, something more along the lines of fear. Then again... could that be your intention? It depends on how I'm meant to see the dad, and that's by no means clear cut. I got hung up on this point on my first read. I'm intrigued by it in retrospect. When Julie first wants to scream but can't--or won't--I see a similarity to her father that she's either rejecting or can't express. Maybe his yelling is what makes her see herself as a monster. Maybe her guilt does that, because it turns out he has reason to yell. She stole a bunch of booze and drank it with a boy with whom she then had some queasy-making sex. It's ambiguous whether her father mistreats her or whether his protective instincts are making him shout at the wrong person (although she earned some shouting by stealing the vodka), but by the story's end I've just about decided that Dad's an all right guy and Julie's inability to act in her own interest is the villain of the piece. There's zero suggestion she loves Derek or wants him. She goes along with his plans because... why? The reason is probably ugly, but what is it? Insecurity? Crippling passivity? Did she think she was a monster before she told a horny teenager she loved him and let him do things that made her sick inside? She takes too much initiative for me to call this a rape scene, but it's uncomfortable as hell. Especially when remembering it makes her want to throw up--and yet she doesn't block his number. If Derek pressured Julie into sex and their tryst made her loathe herself, then for Julie to stop herself from severing with him is about the least happy way this could have ended. It would be different if she wanted to be with him and were defying her father to that purpose, but surely this isn't meant to be a love story. Surely. Julie spends the story nauseated by the decisions she's made but doing nothing to mend them. There's power in her despair, but it's so completely unsuited to the prompt that you're a little fortunate the bottom of the barrel is so low. ******************* ******************* ****** Benny Profane, "1905" Nadya's rise from her grave and view of the changed city are good reading. I can't say as much for the chunk of exposition about worker strikes and current events. You take such pains to ground your entry concretely in time that it reads as though you want to show your work in researching 1905 Russia. Unfortunately, this makes the story slow and dry, and when I reached this part on my first read my hopes of having found a win contender dwindled. I didn't realize then that clunky factoids would remain among the week's least sins. The pace never reaches full steam again. It improves when Nadya drifts toward the women. The contrast between what she expects and what she gets there is more striking since the female social world was hers once, and the exposition is less cack-handed. Her library, still present though decaying, represents the timelessness and relative immortality of the written word. The books there connect the past to the present, and they connect the past and present to the future in the form of Nadya's descendant. I love what this suggests about reading and stories, and I love that in the eye of change, there's stability so long as elders care for children. Some patterns of our lives and hearts are less changeable than our worlds. If only you hadn't felt the need to make a similar idea--that all this change is part of the same cycle as always--explicit! That's another gob of exposition I'd scoop out with a melon baller if I could. The concepts here are stronger than the story itself thanks to the latter's burden of exposition; not much happens, either, but I enjoyed the quiet change in Nadya's perspective on the present year. This isn't your best work. It's good enough regardless that I'm pleased by its victory. ******************* ******************* ****** Tyrannosaurus, "Eden" COMMAS. HAVE MORE OF THEM. The problems I have with the first half or so--the stuff before all the asterisks--are closer to subjective than objective. Walter and Maxine are robots in name only. They banter just like people, and I'm puzzled why they couldn't have been two humans with finite resources wandering together in a post-apocalyptic world; if nothing else, that wouldn't have brought back memories of Robot Week or, more intensely, of Daphnaie's winning story in Eurovision Week III. That's a more significant barrier to my enjoying this: it reminds me of something else I've read recently in concept and emotional gist. The stories aren't clones and the similarity may not be your fault, but your premise doesn't feel fresh as a result. One of the differences from Daphnaie's entry is Maxine's desire to be human. My co-judges liked that characterization better than I did. You want to talk about a robot trope that's too familiar.... Other than that, the prose is solid, the characterization good enough to make me care, the conversation enjoyable; it's familiar ground, but the execution makes it worth reading again. Then everything after the series of asterisks kills it. I can't tell whether Maxine and Walter have died and gone to robo-Heaven or have somehow been teleported into a bank vault in the middle of the Amazon. You'd think, from that sentence, the answer would be obvious, but what would error messages and horrible, lurching gaits be doing in robo-Heaven? I dislike either option: robo-Heaven is too twee and teleportation too WTF. This ending also appears stapled onto the rest of the story rather than organic. (Maybe it's the teleportation thing.) As with others, it seems you wrote a grimdark story and then stuck a happy ending on with crazy glue. You shouldn't have had to do that! You're more than capable of upbeat work! We all disliked the epilogue, as one judge called it, a lot. You would probably have done better to stay with the bittersweet shutdown, which would have fulfilled the prompt about as well as anyone else managed to do. ******************* ******************* ****** skwidmonster, "A New Friend" Things start off a little repetitive with the verb tumble and the phrase my body appearing twice in the first paragraph. Then see and seeing in the second. I'm interested in where this is going, though. Making the protagonist a severed head is a bold choice. The odds of a passive protagonist go way, way up! I'd like more description of Snerb the first time Manya sees him; she thinks of him by name when he's still only a clatter in the darkness, as far as the reader knows. I'd most assuredly like for Manya and Snerb to not be talking in the same paragraph. Why have Snerb and the other heads been waiting for Manya? Why do they know and yet not know each other? The story doesn't end up addressing this, so it probably shouldn't be there--"I just know somehow" on its own is weak. You're vague about the entire rite, and I suggest hinting at mysteries and purpose to it beyond releasing the unfortunate dead is a bad call at this length. You don't have the words to explain, so keep it straightforward. This is my favorite story. Its rough edges are too rough to let it be as good as one could wish. The thing is, it makes me smile, and it does what so many entries failed to do in turning the image that inspired it into something truly upbeat. I love Snerb, especially at the end when he prays as the odd priest of an odd, yet moving faith. You made the right choice of protagonist despite Manya's unavoidable passivity. Snerb works best when seen from outside, and the reader gets to follow Manya to the edge of the light, if not beyond. ******************* ******************* ****** Fuubi, "Legends of War" It may be late, badly formatted, full of errors from the first line on, subject to ill-advised experimentation, purple as a plum, and plain old boring, but this story is sincere. I think. Sincere stories leave hope for improvement in a way women with tomato heads do not, so there's that. But boy, oh, boy, do I hope that improvement comes fast. Your first few paragraphs are a distinctly lilac stereotype of fantasy writing. The melodrama! The adjectives! Would you describe coal, say, as "black and black"? Then why describe anything as "obsidian and raven"? The mechanical flaws in the text don't help you: myth is singular, but you attach it to a plural verb; "there were one" is not an acceptable phrase in this context; you don't capitalize "Queen" consistently; commas are missing; apostrophes are missing; you misspell contrived and whimper. You refer to a character as "the evil one." This isn't a technical error, but ouch. What's interesting is that you almost get dialogue right when half of the rest of Thunderdome screws that up! If it weren't for the misspellings I'd assume you're finding your way still with grammar, and maybe you are. Those, however, suggest you didn't take the time or put in the effort to run a spell check, much less proofread the piece line by line. You need to leave yourself enough time to make your work presentable. That also means putting a blank line between paragraphs, by the way, because otherwise the text runs together on the screen. Consider blank lines the forum equivalent of tabs. When push comes to shove, it's not the technicalities and not the purple prose that sink you--although the latter sets fire to all the bailing buckets and staves in the lifeboats. The narrative style delivers the deathblow. Telling it as a series of excerpts from contemporary accounts makes it read like a school paper, removing immediacy and adding bloat. The story is already basic and somewhat cliche, other than the contrived part--I don't buy for a minute that the queen would regain her lands peacefully when the Spider King dies--and you make it more dull, not less, by putting the reader at a distance from it. The counterargument is that experimentation isn't inherently bad. Trying it out before you've proven you can tell a coherent or enjoyable story is premature, but a corner of my mind approves of going for broke like this. You had an idea and an ambition. This time they didn't work out. With more practice, someday they may. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Sep 5, 2016 |
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Aug 13, 2016 04:57
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That post should suffice as my tithe. In.
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Aug 13, 2016 04:59
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Stormborne (748 words) Read it in the archive. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Jan 1, 2017 |
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Aug 15, 2016 04:56
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sebmojo posted:
Thank you, sebmojo! You've crit twenty-two of my TD entries now, for which I would apologize if I still had ethical constraints or a conscience. You know how it is. It's fantastic how many new crits showed up this week. Sometimes Thunderdome is almost, kind of, nearly, bordering on, in the vicinity of not sucking like a black-hole-powered Hoover. (Critiquers are all wonderful. Thanks for your work.)
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Aug 15, 2016 20:01
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In.
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Aug 20, 2016 04:32
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:So Kaishai thought that I had written some crits and not posted them, but neither of us were sure which week it was for. So, here's all the crits I have sitting in my Drive that weren't put in the right folder for posting. I am not sure which weeks they correspond to. Thanks, Muffin! That first batch is Week 179. The second batch is Week 110.
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Aug 20, 2016 15:43
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