Chili posted:

Write It Now

Crits for each entry! If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to me directly!

Men Rust Over - It’s impressive what you got done in only a little amount of time. It’s unfortunate that you submitted earlier than you needed to as there are fairly obvious proofing errors that you likely could have caught out if you gave this another pass. But let’s get to the story. The voice of this seems to have flowed out of you well, it’s not too heavy handed and it works for the most part. I also appreciate how directly you handled the prompt, it’s very clear you wrote this thing right the gently caress now. Overall, the imgaery and the concept of coughing up rust/metal itself was visceral and fresh and this is pretty drat effective!



Hate and the artistic temperament - Ehhh, halfway through you got me hoping for a creepypasta twist and then you kinda let me down. What you did really well here was handle the dynamic between room mates who kinda tolerate one another, especially ones who are all struggling. I liked Zanna enough and enjoyed her process but I’m not as much a fan of you introducing a mystery with no solution, and not just not solution, it’s kind of ignored in favor of this pompous statement on art. Anyhow, well done for the most part a pretty enjoyable read.



Feed Your Head - The greatest success of this story is its biggest challenge. You wrote a scattered, disorganized story. But it certainly seemed like that was your intent, so well done. Apart from that, you handle the group dynamic well and I found the protag’s discomfort and insecurity relatable and true. Little difficult to get a bigger sense of what’s actually happening here though or what I’m supposed to be rooting for/expecting. Well done in your handling of the prompt, which you did directly.



Bill Of The Bridge - OK, we got some things to talk about here. If your story is going to be about this bridge, you gotta at least indulge in a bit of worldbuilding. I need to see this thing. You talk about how people interact with it but give me something to visualize the scene. Also, I’m a little hazy on the ending. Did Bill like become one with this thing? There’s major jumps in time with little to no actual kinesis in this story so I’m not sure what has or hasn’t been earned. It’s quite difficult to tell much of what’s going on here. Your voice in this is the strongest part it’s gotta a good feel to it, and it sounds like it’s being told to me outloud as a bit of local folklore.



Orange Blossoms and Cheap Cigarettes - We’ve got a person tied up, seemingly kidnapped, and the majority of this story deals with them trying to escape whatever horrific fate may befall them. This is a tricky one. On the one hand I like that the story is tightly focused on one concept. I also think you do a pretty decent job with the errant musings of your protag. On the other hand, I never found myself caring about your protag. I couldn’t quite identify anything in them to root for nor was I all too worried about the somewhat vague potential outcomes here. Overall, I didn’t ever really buy in to this.



Rusty Feelings - The opening to this is immensely bloated and stogy, I don’t care about this person yet so I don’t need to learn about their preferences. I get that this a story about one person, doing something seemingly mundane, but you spend nearly the entire story just talking ABOUT this person without actually showing much of anything and then they arrive where they were going and you kinda just dive in to describing more stuff. And then very little, if anything happens except a quick cursory glance at the prompt. I really can’t say that I know what you were going for here.



Absolut - Your opening is quite a bit of babble and not much story. As I’m reading this I can’t tell if I’m supposed to already know how this person is achieving absolute zero or not. But I certainly don’t know, and I mostly don’t care. And by the end of this, that’s largely my sentiment, and I’m also confused. I can’t quite follow the barking motif and I really don’t know what’s going on here except this person is, somehow, being pushed to their moral limits but I also don’t really know why or how, and it’s hard to care because I don’t know much about this person at all.



Buoyant - This works pretty well for me, It’s a singular image and scene between two people and even though it’s somewhat surreal and abstract the feelings are real and they pop. The blocking is also relatively solid in that I can tell what’s happening despite it being a tricky thing to portray. Well done.



Gone So - I can’t make heads or tails of the device your using to tell this story or why you would choose to do it this way. It’s also really difficult for me to collow the action or even tell who or what is narrating this thing. Time is a tricky concept in this as well as I can’t quite tell when these things are happening or how much time passes between beats. But, thanks for capitalizing LEVITATING!



The Floating Continent - Boy, does that first sentence need a comma. The whole first beat feels largely superfluous. It’s clunky and loaded down with personal exposition and feeling. All I wanted out of it is “character is going on quest to look for a thing” You spent way too many words getting us there. You earn some points for me from the rest of the story though cos it’s sappy parenting poo poo, and I’m a sappy parent. But there’s quite a few problems here. I’m not sure how Lucretia (whos name you seem to REALLY like to type, like way more than you need to) does to actually earn her kids interest. I think the story plays better if she comes around to him and learns what he’s into. I got feels from this, but again, that’s more from my place than the writing itself. I don’t know how much I believe this story or could really see it happening.



Rustbucket - I’m conflicted on this one. I loved reading it, and then it ended. Like what? It’s this totally unearned windfall that has no relevance to anything. But ugh, you did a good job characterizing your protag and I was bought in hoping for something cool to happen after his shift ended but then… nothing does, just the most obvious happy ending ever? I wanted more from this.



Yogi - I think you probably know you didn’t need to take this long to do what you did. At its corwe we’ve got a duel brewing. It’s a good premise for a piece of flash fiction, You spend a lot of time characterizing your protag in that first beat and though you handle it decently it’s overblown, and frankly that’s kinda the thru-line for the rest of this. Also, what is going on with these hyphens? You’re at your best in this story when you’re working place, you pretty deftly handle evoking the senses.



Eating Your Way - This is one goofball of an entry. I don’t really see what you’re going for here but I did follow everything, which is some kind of achievement given as what actually happened in this story is relatively bananas. Your concepts here are good and something tells me if you had some actual time to sit down and turn this into something you could, maybe?



Untitled - A title would be helpful here! As it stands, I’m getting mighty lost throughout the first beat, it all largeyl seems like unnecessary introductory crap. She made a mistake, seems to be all that matters. And all of that for a mouse that does a small thing? I can’t tell what you’re going for here but it seems to be a laborious tale that indicates something oppressive. That’s how I felt reading it though as there wasn’t much to cling onto or provide intrigue.



Corrosion - Story to beat, as far I’m concerned. There’s a lot to like here. Your protag manages to transcend just being a cantankerous son of a bitch, there’s humanity in him. The pacing is also sound, I like learning about Johnny in the second beat and how it colors reading things onward. This story, given a bit more time and consideration, could be pretty special or at least expanded into something I’d like to read more of. The husband is won over a bit easily by his wife in the end, even though he does breadcrumb that he leans on her in the beginning. I want to see more. Anyhow, I read this one with more rapt attention than most so far.



Affixed - The story improves after all the bickering commences. I’m wondering if we really needed it at all? I can’t quite tell what the person really wanted going to meet the wizard and then once things start it’s often difficult and distracting trying to gauge who is talking. The musings toward the end are somewhat satisfying to read and could very easily have become cloying so there’s at least that.



Sucks to be you - You had me for pretty much all of this. I cared for Carrie and rooted for her. I wanted to learn more and understand her plight…. And I can’t really say that by the end I do. Clearly there’s been something traumatic but it seems like I should be able to infer more and perhaps I’m missing what that is, or maybe you weren’t clear enough. I can tell you that your imagery really worked for me and I did find the experience of just reading the story to be fairly evocative and chilling, I just want to understand more about what’s going on.



Better Late than Never - I appreciate what you’re going for here, but this isn’t a story. It’s an essay. Not necessarily a bad essay and it’s likely going to be one that occasionally pops itself into my head with an idea I hadn’t considered but it’s not a story. I’d like to actually be there with the narrator through some of these episodes and experience them firsthand. You set the stage for that rather nicely, as it happens, by calling into question the nature of reality. That’s a good seed to a story.



The Rust Miner - I feel like what this story has going for it is accomplished in its elevator pitch “what if rust is what’s really valuable?” Apart from that, this is fairly procedural doesn’t invite me to care very much. There’s also a lot of issues with keeping tenses straight and it certainly didn’t help that the lines of the story were all smooshed together. What you end up with here is just a bunch of actions that I don’t really care too much about.



Night - I am utterly lost here. There’s a pensieve mourning thing happening, and a seemingly supportive friendship, then demon hunting, and the world is dead but it isn’t? How did you go about cramming all of this stuff into just 600 some odd words? At its core the story seems to largely be about grief and I’m guessing everything else is somehow a metaphorical representation of that but man, this thing just gets messy. It’s nearly impossible for me to envision any of this actually playing out.


Magical bureaucracy is really no different than regular bureaucracy - Your prose carries this otherwise bore of a story. It’s a hell of a thing to kind of admit, from the outset, that the story will ultimately be boring but that’s kinda what you invoke with your title. The relationship you have between your protag and their pet is well handled and also a highlight of the entry. I really liked the beginning of the way you characterize your protag. Their voice feels consistent with their identity as well.


Rusty box - Well that’s a story I guess. So the person keeps on occupying this space. They find the safe, and then goes down swinging. I mean, I guess I followed it all well enough but I don’t really care about this conflict. I kind of like the imagery of this person digging around trying desperately to find something but then he finds it and the ending doesn’t really land. You cook into the story the detail that Ferdie believes if they find the safe all of their problems will be solved, so once they do, I guess it doesn’t matter and then they take to attacking these other people? I don’t know, it’s fine I guess.