Nethilia posted:

Less than three hours to sign up!

ETA:



So you and any other skip outs throwing a on that or just gonna sit there like that. I know it ain't official but...

lambeth posted:

As penance for submitting late, I'm offering three line-by-line crits to whomever asks first. If you want to crit my story in return, that would be cool too.

quote:

Our Newest Display

1081 words

Overhead, the mermaids swam through the blue slightly awkward phrasing. Maybe just something like "The mermaids swam overhead,...", languidly following a school of small grey fish. I stared in disgust at the bony emaciated forms that passed by.You should be showing, not telling here. Also, your next line of dialogue basically makes this line redundant. Honestly I think it flows better if you just cut this line and go straight to the dialogue since it does a good job of rejecting reader expectations. “Those are seriously gross,” I whispered to my friend Melissa; misuse of semi-colon. she giggled in response. “Angie, Melissa,” our teacher snapped at us from a few seats over where she’d been giving a lecture. I sighed and slumped down in the red plush bench, pretending like I was paying attention. I, like every other high school-age child, was on a field trip to see the mermaids at the aquarium.I'd find a better way to say this. Establish the setting through interesting details instead of exposition. The teacher had said that it was so we could see the symptoms of the disease, to know what to look for—not so we could gawp gape? at the freaks, though that’s why everybody really went there.
Two years later,Cut this I’d begun It's not a hard and fast rule, but in general, try to stay away from "begin" in all its forms. It just creates unnecessary distance between the action. I'd do a manual break (use the little *** or what have you) to indicate time has passed and open with "I dreamed of the ocean every night..." to dream of the ocean every night, of gliding though the cool water, of grabbing at the small fish which darted around me, tearing into them in a slow floating cloud of red. A few weeks later, I’d found the first few scales on my thigh: glimmering little death sentences. Now, eight months later, I’d been caught and put in a tank to float among the other sick, like a bunch of grocery store lobsters. You are condensing a lot of time here, and this is definitely something you should be fleshing out. What is his reaction to the scales? Is he grossed out, scared someone will find out, or what? It almost feels like a magical realism set-up where the protagonist just accepts his fate (check out Julio Cortezar's "Axolotl" for a great example of this. It even takes place in an aquarium as well!) but the rest of the story doesn't bear this out.


I swam through the tunnel that connected the aquarium tanks to the island that was closed off in the back of the building. Here, the people who could still breathe on land lived until their gills came in. I could see three of them there this morning. The first ignored me when I called, and the second was too busy sobbing to pay attention to me. The third one, though, was new, a teenage girl staring up at the lights in the ceiling. She was tiny, with sunk-in dull should probably be "sunken" and I think "dull, sunken" flows better than "sunken, dull" eyes and stringy blonde hair, large patches of scales glistening on her back and legs. Someone who had been caught in the early stages, it seemed. I called to her, and after a minute, she finally turned her head in my direction.

“I’m Angie,” I said. It hurt to talk nowadays, so I kept what little conversation I made short.

“Laura,” she replied quietly.

“Any news about a cure?” I asked everyone who came in about this, but there was never any good news, any hope. For all the talk of research and cures, the only thing that’d changed in the last seven years was the increasing number of aquariums being built.

“Not that I know of. My brother, Mike,kind of a nitpick, but I feel like in most casual conversations people don't name drop like this. got sick with it, so the doctors examined me as well. He ran away before they could take him too.” Her eyes teared up. “I’d been hiding the scales with long sleeves and pants until then. I was so scared.”

I nodded. I’d done the same with clothes and make-up until my legs had fused down to the point where I’d been unable to walk anymore without falling. Every day I’d woken up and examined every inch of skin in the mirror, feeling as though someone was wringing my stomach out with every new change I found.Here's a bit of reaction that should have come earlier

I continued to visit Laura, and as time went by, we became what could be considered friends, if you consider commiserating about turning into monsters together to be a type of friendship.[awkward. This line has kind of a sarcastic tone, doesn't really fit.[/b] Laura held out hope that one day, Mike would save her. I tried to share her enthusiasm, but I figured Mike was probably dead or in a tank somewhere. I could still breathe out of water for a short time, though it made me feel faint, so I spent what time I could with her on the sand. I was trying as hard as I could to try to stay human, but at times, all I could focus on was the water and my next meal.


We were woken up one night by the sound of running and muffled voices outside. The door outside the island opened and a small group of people came in. They shone flashlights around, whispering to each other as we all peered over at them anxiously cut the adverb and show their anxiety. Are they hiding underwater, ducking behind the rocks, trying to get a read on these people?. Laura perked up when she saw them.

“Mike?” she called quietly "called quietly" reads oddly.. A man in a wool hat came closer. “Oh, Darryl, hey,” she said, smiling. She turned to me and said, “He’s one of my brother’s friends.”

“Laura?” Darryl said. “poo poo, I didn’t expect to find you here.”

“Have you seen Mike recently?” Laura asked. Her webbed hands trembled slightly.

“No, I haven’t. I’m with one of the underground groups. We’ve been rescuing people who aren’t too far gone and trying to keep them alive until there’s a breakthrough. There’s no reason to keep you guys in a zoo; bad semicolon again. I can't think of many times a semicolon would show up in dialogue. If you're not 100% sure it should be a semicolon, just use a period or a comma instead, whatever flows better. Especially with dialogue. we’ve got some scientists who can look after you while they study this.”

“I can still walk—my legs are only fused at the top,” Laura said cheerfullyA lot of Laura's dialogue attribution ends with an adverb. Cut it and show us her eyes lighting up or her body perking up or something.. She glanced at me. “What about her?”

Darryl shook his head. “Too hard to carry, plus she’d probably die before we can get her in water again. You should be ok though.”

Laura shot a desperate look at me. I wanted to cry and scream for them to take me along, but I knew it was hopeless. Instead, I simplyredundant, cut simply just said “Go.” She put her arm around Darryl’s shoulder, and in a few minutes, they were gone.


I returned to the glass and thought only of fish, watching the high school kids snicker at us as they sat and enjoyed their safe, dry lives. All I could do was watch my body continue to shrink, to find myself forgetting details from my previous life. Who was it that I’d sat with at the aquarium that time? They were a complete blank to me.

One day, they hung up a bright red banner nearby. It was hard to read through the glass, but I managed to make out that it was for a new exhibit.

“Mermaid bodies on display…” I trailed off as I noticed the picture beneath it. It was of the head and shoulders of a mermaid girl with stringy blonde hair, the eyes closed and peaceful. Her face was mostly scaly now, but a patch of skin still curved around her left eye like a crescent moon.

I swam off, feeling like someone had driven a hook through my insides. Oh, to be a Siren at this moment. We were forgetting what it was like to be human, but it was clear that humanity had forgotten who we were long ago.Cut this whole last bit, imo. It's just kind of heavy-handed and comes off as preachy. The lines before this are pretty creepy and it's a nice way to wrap everything up.

Djeser posted:

WLOTM expressed an interest in a more detailed crit. If anyone else wants more detail than what I gave in my general crits, just ask.

sebmojo posted:

Grizzled Patriarch and Paladinus, you ed but did not submit. You have 40 minutes and change before that gets called in.

Tyrannosaurus posted:

SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

I'll do two big line-by-line crits for last week's entries. First in, first served. Who wants 'em?

Phobia posted:

Contact me if you want to do crossovers, either in this particular story or otherwise. I also want to request an extension of the word count but I'm not holding my breath and I will talk to the judges privately about that.