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In. Midwest (Kansas specifically)
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Oct 11, 2016 12:25
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In. Specifically, going for the no-supernatural route.
HereComesEverybody fucked around with this message at 12:36 on Oct 11, 2016 |
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Oct 11, 2016 12:34
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In. Taking Flash Rule #1. Not toxxing myself despite missing last week's deadline, as life has been super unpredictable this month and I'm not sure what's going on this week. Gonna give it my best shot, though!
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Oct 11, 2016 13:00
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I'm in too.
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Oct 11, 2016 13:40
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Thanks for the crits! Next time, I'm getting started earlier so I don't have to cobble something together at the last minute. Speaking of which, I'm in.
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Oct 11, 2016 14:14
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In Ypsilanti, Michigan Guiness13 fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Oct 12, 2016 |
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Oct 11, 2016 14:29
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Muff, grats on dat double tap
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Oct 11, 2016 14:33
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A question, and I'm not even sure if I have time to be in, but just for clarification: Does the story have to actually be set in the city, or can the tale itself take place somewhere else so long as it tells the story of the city?
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Oct 11, 2016 16:53
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I like the word "spooky", sure. In with Silicon Valley Gothic.
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Oct 11, 2016 16:56
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hahaha lol, like I'm not going to be in this weekcrabrock posted:Muff, grats on dat double tap who're u
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Oct 11, 2016 17:20
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Sitting Here posted:hahaha lol, like I'm not going to be in this week just soem guy
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Oct 11, 2016 17:34
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I'll guess I'll join in with Flash #1. Midwest/St. Louis Gothic. Woo!
Kumaton fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Oct 11, 2016 |
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Oct 11, 2016 17:36
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im in im gonna do my hometown of Brentwood, California (no not the fancy one in LA, the one in the East Bay) flerp fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Oct 11, 2016 |
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Oct 11, 2016 17:42
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Ok I'm back and in with Swedish Gothic~! Also flash rule #1 sounds fun!
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Oct 11, 2016 18:01
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Kumaton posted:I'll guess I'll join in with Flash #1. Midwest/St. Louis Gothic. Woo! Well, crap. I didn't anticipate having to go head to head on making St. Louis creepy.
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Oct 11, 2016 18:12
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Thanks for the crits everyone: IN: Milwaukee/Cream City/Brewtown
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Oct 11, 2016 19:20
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Thanks for the crits everyone: IN: Milwaukee/Cream City/Brewtown With Flash Rule #1
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Oct 11, 2016 19:34
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Kumaton posted:I'll guess I'll join in with Flash #1. Midwest/St. Louis Gothic. Woo! Blastinus posted:Well, crap. I didn't anticipate having to go head to head on making St. Louis creepy. Just when I thought I was safe from the creature who lives under Crown Candy...
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Oct 11, 2016 19:49
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Decided to do some free crits for Week 218: 2. Some Strange Flea – Moth Synopsis: A shapeshifting creeper creeps on a woman who is driven paranoid by it. She makes sure it’s not all in her head by traveling to an island and waiting for him to follow her there too. -I prefer to get hooked into the story in the first line or at least the first paragraph. A couple paragraphs in and I’m only motivated to keep reading so that I can properly crit the piece. -Well, Lisa’s animosity toward “Jeffery” does give me some incentive to keep reading and find out the history here. -Your prose, while descriptive, is meandering. Relatedly, the story could benefit from a faster moving plot. Imagery and elegant description is great, but those literary tools are used best when interspersed with interesting story developments. -For a piece that involves stalking, obsession, and paranoia, your story is oddly devoid of strong emotion. It reads like detached intellectualized description. The piece would be stronger if you made the emotional urgency of both characters more strongly felt. We’re in these characters heads for goodness sake, yet it’s hard to empathize with what they’re feeling because of the cold, matter-of-fact style of prose. -Not much development really occurs in your story. Sure the stalking victim has more confidence that it’s not all in her head, but what is she going to DO now? I feel like the aftermath of this story would be more interesting than the events of the story itself. 3. sparksbloom – Glue Trap -The story is thick with the syrup of sentimentality. -“But the next day Lenny’s hands erupted in an angry rash, either from the friction or from touching something he couldn’t.” – I’m not sure what this means. Did you mean “shouldn’t”? -I’m not clear on why Lenny vomited. Two scoops of ice cream ought not to make a thirteen-year-old sick unless there is some sort of allergy. -“Maybe they didn’t tell you this, but Doris suspected there was a time limit on motherly instincts.” Who is the “you” in this sentence? If it’s Doris, it seems like “Maybe they didn’t tell her this…” would be more appropriate. If it’s the audience, then why would “they” have told us anything of the sort to begin with? -Wait, what? Did your story just end with Lenny kidnapping his mom?  -It is nice that (prior to the ending) you highlighted how the disagreement Lenny has with his mom comes from a place of genuinely caring about her, even though the history of friction between them makes that hard for him to express in a consistently gentle way. The kidnapping ending though is bizarrely aggressive given the prior tone of the story. It suggests that Lenny doesn’t care about her but wants to control her or act aggressively due to prior resentments. Was that meant to be a twist? It feels jarring, out of place, and detrimental to what had seemed like the story’s message: that complications arise in relationships even when the people deeply care for each other. I mean, I see that you did build up to the reveal, stating that he’d become more self-centered lately, but this still felt like more of a derail than any kind of a welcome twist. 4. Thranguy - An Argument of Wizards -In the beginning of your story it is confusing to keep track of or to picture the characters because you toss several names at us, but give little initial description into who they are as distinct individuals (i.e., beyond being wizard-professors). Gallpepper, Aurelius, Fistibulus, Liverthatch, Bramblenip, Glistapher. -The prose is lively enough to remain interesting. -Haha, the fig fencing is p. cool. And it’s a good way to punctuate all the dialogue. -LOL at these stiff older wizards having banned tantric sex. Good job making the story funny. -The story is fun, but it has one big problem in that in introduces a mystery (how did Fistibulus produce the soul) but doesn’t solve it in any definitive way. My reading was spurred by the promise of finding out exactly how Fistibulus was so clever, and it was a disappointment not to get satisfaction. The story also could have benefitted from a stronger resolution in terms of what ends up happening to the accused. 5. Beige – Screen test -Nine paragraphs in and all that has happened so far is a dude rides up to an apartment and walks in. It is important to hook readers much earlier than this. Give them something unexplained to puzzle out, a character they will want to root for, an exciting situation to follow, or a unique voice to get to know, for example. -It’s okay for your protag to be unlikable, but only if he is unlikeable in an interesting, more-than-just-mundane kind of way. -Your prose feels old fashioned to me, but I’m afraid that’s not in service to your story. -Please name your characters. -The ending has some problems. “She” leaves to do a favor for a producer who will get “him” an acting role. The favor isn’t specified, but it’s clearly unpleasant, and possibly sexual, since she thinks, “Not again. Anything but that.” The ending suggests that she’s somehow compromising herself for the benefit of her man, and it leaves me thinking: Is that really the story you wanted to tell? Guy won’t change, so the girl ought to take it all on herself and bear the full costs of that? For me the message falls flat. -The main problems with your story are that very little happens, the characters are two-dimensional, there is nothing in particular to catch the reader’s interest, and the ending feels odd. Still, for a first foray into TD it could have been much worse. Please stick around and keep writing.
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Oct 11, 2016 19:55
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Blastinus posted:Well, crap. I didn't anticipate having to go head to head on making St. Louis creepy. Jitzu_the_Monk posted:Just when I thought I was safe from the creature who lives under Crown Candy... Hahaha, don't worry. I'm probably going to focus on the suburbs or even the county across the river, where everything is perfect and anything that doesn't fit that way of life is quietly shoved under the rug and then hacked with an axe.
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Oct 11, 2016 19:56
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In. Ohio. Ohio never changes. Or does it?
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Oct 11, 2016 20:57
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In with Chattanooga Gothic And I'll add a scoop of Flash Rule #1 on that as well.
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Oct 11, 2016 21:39
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sorry forgot to add: let me know where you're from when you sign up. You can edit it into your current signup post if you need to.Chili posted:A question, and I'm not even sure if I have time to be in, but just for clarification: Does the story have to actually be set in the city, or can the tale itself take place somewhere else so long as it tells the story of the city? SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Oct 11, 2016 |
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Oct 11, 2016 22:13
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Week 218 Crits/Comments Honestly, I was way less salty than the other judges this week. Good thing I was in charge or there might have been four or five DMs and more right on the edge. There just wasn't a lot to get excited about. Most of my critical comments are just matter of fact (I don't think I was really angry with any story overall, though aside from Muffin's I don't think I ever want to see any of them ever again). I presented a prompt that was more like a writing exercise rather than a straight up genre prompt, so I hope everyone at least learned a little bit this time around. I read everything anonymously then went back and added some extra comments after the judges meeting. Headhop - Jitzu the Monk Those names are pretty rough. I keep thinking about Kegels, a civil war general, and a herpes medication. What does Headhop do as a corporation? At the very end it sounds like this is a Skynet situation, and I understand that you want to make the corporation a looming faceless presence, but it’s just too vague. That undercuts your point. You should be specific with things like “anti-Headhop slogans.” “They’re coming to take our booze away” is certainly heinous, but bootlegging will persist. The stakes seem higher than prohibition. There’s clearly more to it, but you don’t touch on it at all. Tennis, to me, is a shorthand for upper-class. That’s really what this feels like—upper-class protest songs. If this corporation is so invasive in every aspect of people’s lives then the protest should be far stronger than a sit in and some megaphones. A really dystopian corporation (especially if they control the airwaves and the police) would probably use more force than rubber bullets, or just make these protesters disappear. The real conflict is with the mysterious overlords, not with each other. Even if the brother and sister make amends, Headhop is going to be around to fight. Even Headhop sounds like a derogatory nickname for the authoritarians—like they brainwash people or even directly control minds, but that isn’t addressed and I guess the computer calls itself that. Finally, that last conversation has people spitting out their points of view in plain terms and it’s awkward. If you went all in and had a character(s) talk only in Newspeak rhetoric or really addressed some doublethink this might have been redeemed. Moth - Some Strange Flea Supernatural stalker or is it paranoia? This concept is interesting and you could have done something really interesting from Lisa’s point of view with it. Instead, she seems more curious than scared throughout, and honestly, she’s kind of a jerk. Scratch that, she’s not really curious even. She goes to this island convinced that ?all? the men she meets are the same one and sips tea waiting for him to arrive. If you wanted me to feel that she’s empowered, then making her crazy (and scabby) is a bad place to start. Your guy’s point of view starts out menacingly, but then it just turns into the before guy in a pick-up artist tutorial. I can feel my soulmate out there, and she just doesn’t get me. Jeffrey doesn’t address being called Daryl. He freezes, but then as an audience we’re left hanging on this point. Is this supernatural? The biggest gripe for me is the strange anatomy. This tracking device is where? If you wanted to avoid using the heart as a lodestone, then why put the feeling heart adjacent? If I trace my collar bone down towards my heart there’s a nice little hollow there above the sternum and you could have used that to make something poetic about the feeling midway between a lump in the throat and the classic aching heart. But that’s nowhere near where shoulders meet collarbone. That one’s really easy to work out, so it’s tough to give you a pass. If he felt love near his appendix and you put it on the wrong side of the body, then I might not have even questioned it on first read. I guess I was thinking it was going to be a pendant or something of hers (maybe from a past life, I dunno) and the twist would have been interesting. The conflict ends up being “ugh, every man wants me and I hate them” vs. “m’lady, my heart tells me you’re the one.” There isn’t any resolution, either. I guess these two personality types will probably clash until extinction, but all that build up with a paranoid (possibly apophenic) and a creepo potential stalker ends in a slightly uncivil cup of tea. Glue Trap - sparksbloom drat, Lenny is two scoops of cold at the end of this. He had an odd mama-boy childhood, but seems fairly well adjusted as an adult. Doris doesn’t have much pity for him, but plenty of people are sad sacks after a divorce. It’s a cyclical thing, parent taking care of child taking care of parent, and you present that well, and my old granny was even snarkier and stubborn than Doris in her dementia years. The back and forth between pride and loathing in Doris’s head is realistic and interesting to read, especially considering she is presenting a candy coated exterior. The confrontation is one that happens, but Lenny’s side isn’t presented too clearly. My parents have mice in their house, but they live in the country so it’s inevitable. When you have to go 45 minutes to get ice cream, it sounds like maybe Doris lives out in the middle of nowhere. Their conversation is pretty lucid, and all of Doris’s memories are clear. There’s no misremembering the past or any clue to us that Doris has lost it. It really doesn't seem too bad, aside from skipping the doctor. If she saw the living conditions one way and Lenny saw actual squalor, that would really make the story pop. Why Lenny didn’t take her for ice cream and then end up at a home? Might have been a good callback. Physically picking her up doesn’t seem in character. Yes, he literally uproots her like the flowerbeds, that wasn’t lost on me, but he takes the nuclear option at the end. Mentioning live-in help that couldn’t deal with her and having some assisted care facility brochures crumpled up and stuffed in a mousehole would have gone a long way towards Lenny giving up and finally tossing Mom in a home. “that was before there was any cache in guilty parenting” (in this instance, cachet has a t at the end) An Argument of Wizards - Thranguy You danced around the actual subject of dealing with the AI and instead dealt with the court procedure and complex dueling culture that this school has. As far as a YA story about wizards, it hits formula pretty well, the antagonist gets his comeuppance and the device gets to be a real boy. I guess I was hoping for something a little more thoughtful on the subject, the “device” isn’t freed on its own merits, it’s just that one wizard lawyer is a better chess player than another. Fistibulus and the device don’t really get to have any say in the story. Did he intend to create a living weapon or was the sentient part an accident? Either way there’s a big chunk of story left unaddressed. These wizards are all wrapped up in school politics and don’t really care about the real issue. The whimsy sort of got away from you and good YA should trick you into thinking about something bigger. Screen test - Beige There’s a whole lot wrong here about the world of auditioning. Prose starts out OK then degenerates big time. The audition process doesn’t really start with a screen test. That’s one of the last steps when the execs would watch the top three choices compete. Maybe the first audition is called that in your neck of the woods, but that’s where really bad actors would be weeded out. That bit is forgivable. But this guy’s idea of acting is ridiculous, especially if he went to school for it. Someone doing your version of “real acting” would be a hilarious comedy sketch, but I don’t think that’s what you were going for. If it was, then making this guy a sad, stubborn drunk was a bad move. We get a hint that he might be tanking his career on purpose, and if that’s so, why? Or why push TV? Not sure where this is set, but there’s a great theater scene in London and probably in most areas where TV auditions would occur. You even assign him a “pseudo-thespian” persona. If he started out this way in college, he’d be insufferable, especially to a non-theater person so how did he possibly charm this woman? There are a couple other stage actors floating around Thunderdome and nothing this guy says is accurate to what you’d learn in a stagecraft class. Even taking a bit part in a community theater production would teach him better. I’m taking the phrase “you wouldn’t know good acting when it’s bellowed into your face” with me, though, because that’s a piece of unintentional genius. Your physical exposition is OK. The beginning when you’re talking about the streets and the apartment is pretty clear. There are a few ‘and this and this’ sentences that could be cleaned up, there are more elegant ways to add specificity to the scene. But anytime someone thinks it becomes stilted and “flagrant impetuousness of his youth but as the years passed it was becoming markedly less tangible to him” is just hard on the ear. Either keep it simple or throw some poetry into the phrase. Finally, the point here is lost on me. This career woman has a scummy boyfriend and aside from time, there’s nothing connecting them. She resolves to just keep doing what they’re doing without any growth or change. You present the first half of act one. You set the stage, but now something has to happen to these characters and the other ¾ of the story is missing. First Contact - Daeres This sort of story has been told before. Humans narrowly avoid contact with the aliens and some squabble is what stops first contact. This fell into the trap I specifically asked you to avoid. Keep away from the technobabble and concentrate on the personalities. Your characters work against you: a hive mind and robotic drones are hard to relate to by default. It takes a deft hand to make any of that work. The characters have a juvenile argument for what they are and the mission they’re on, it doesn’t fit. They’re way too casual. Robots losing their temper and a hive-mind giving nicknames is odd. What might have been better is to set the discussion between only the chattering voices of the hive mind. You could have done something really interesting there. Neither of these alien characters are actually alien. They’re just petty kids fighting. That might have been your point, but it’s too childish for adults and there’s too much jargon for a young teen audience. Neither of your civilizations should be worried about losing some drones. They’re both civilization-wide consciousnesses. It’s silly not to send some recon down to the planet rather than having a contained argument without ever taking a look-see at Earth. Would have solved their argument. If they were still confused by what they saw, then that would have been a more interesting scenario. First Contact has been done to death, and there’s like 20 (or more) Star Trek episodes that tackle the issue from many points of view. Kirk is cavalier if he can solve a problem, and Picard tries to stay undetected if they’re not ready, but they always interact somehow with the alien civilization. The near-miss scenario is fine as a premise, but generally it’s because humans are so primitive they’re not even noticed. The twist that we’re confusing to them is good, but explosion aside, as a sci-fi story this ends with a whimper, not a bang. Authorial Intent - Llamaguccii This is a sticky one. Calling Yahweh by name and making him an rear end in a top hat will instantly turn off some readers. I’m not religious at all, but even I sucked a breath through my teeth about the irreverence. A more generic god character might serve you better with Yahweh being just one of its many pen names. That said, the back and forth format works for what you’re doing here. The casual vulgarity in the stream-of-consciousness is polarizing. It felt natural for me, but it’s risky throwing it out there because some people can’t get past stuff like that. Marcus and god are the same but slightly different and the voice is clear. It might be offputting, but it’s decent writing. So I read everything in judgemode and now that I see this is a Llama joint, what gives? Your last entry was about an angry author, too, and I think just about everything I’ve read of yours has an unrepentant jerk or is a little too intense. Taken on its own, this is a solid entry. I liked the parallels between doubting authors, but the nihilism is only good in small doses. I couldn’t read much more of it in one sitting. Anything more than a short story would be overwhelming. Not to be too glib, but I recollect several references to weed throughout your writings, so um, maybe mellow out? POLICE COPS - Entenzahn You take some old TV cop tropes and twist them up, and that could have been good, but ends up with a police chief who can’t read? When you put a button on it by having a character call it silly, it takes the wind out of the joke’s sails. Honestly, it’s too implausible at face value and there’s no explanation of how he got to where he was without being able to read. I mean, there are written tests in cop school. It’s not really funny, and it’s not absurdist enough to be an Adult Swim episode. You could mine some satire out of an illiterate elected official who keeps failing upwards. But even if you accept the conceit, the real story is how McSlate got to where he is. He somehow has to get his police knowledge from TV he watched. That’s interesting. Jack Colby’s adventure is just a man trying to get home in time for dinner. The hot air came out of the Hindenburg as a fireball. That doesn’t describe a resigned sigh. Anyway, this is an unsatisfying read, but it went quickly. It’s pretty dumb, but it flows well enough. The Wet War of ‘99 - Chili Tales of summer camp. The misdirect at the beginning with the fantasy of real war is right out of a kid’s imagination. Could have used even more about Seth, really. He’s introduced as something unique to Davey’s worldview, but then he disappears from the story. He’s definitely the most interesting character introduced. If you take a step back and look at it though, everyone is fascinated with the exotic black kid. His point of view in the camp is never explored. Davey posits a bunch of questions to himself, but never actually talks to Seth about it. And Seth doesn’t care much about the wet war (I’ve done these as a kid and we called them color wars - maybe that’s just coincidence, but it brings a different dimension to the story for me using those words) and Davey is too wrapped up in himself to make a friend. Then the black man gets paid off by the rich, privileged military-industrial family and for whatever reason sticks up for them with a spiel about honor and disgrace. There are some uncomfortable implications when you think about that, especially when they’re trying to buy the victory and probably have every year. So maybe I’m reading too much into this, but you made a point of having an outsider come in to the insular community then didn’t do much with it. Anyway, plotwise: Bert was already captured when Davey devised the plan, so how did Bert know about the scissors? And he was tied up, so it would have been tough to pull them off the flag with his feet and get them up to his hands to get loose. They should have planned this out as brothers. The parlay scene and the battles are nice, but the backstory isn’t so good. ND 52 - SurreptitiousMuffin Nice, poetic open. References to renamed roads paved over with new ones is a good parallel for life carrying on but for this family it’ll be different now. A couple small quibbles: The kid saying Minneapolis is big enough to be two cities is a little on the nose, trying too hard to root the story in the location. You established place plenty well already. I doubt a gov’t agent would come announce the route numbers changing. It just sort of happens. If there’s significance to the man (like an arbitrary god that took Jeanette or something) then it’s lost on me. I think you could leave out the sentence “He needed to believe his son had some innocence left.” We can draw that conclusion just fine without having it spelled out. Hockey is not dumb. HOW DARE YOU You play out the parallel world scenarios elegantly, and it’s satisfying when Will finally decides that he has to go back and deal with the loss of his wife. No matter how many parallel worlds explored, the Sliders were always looking to get back home. It’s not cloying, the sentimentality hits the right balance. And really, the battle of Will (oh, ho ho) is all him wrestling with his feelings. A few things to polish up here, but I really liked this. Vows - Your Sledgehammer He flung the wedding ring two different times. The voice is pretty good for Western writing, but Brett probably could have been fleshed out a little more. He’s a little spiteful, but in the end he’s noble enough that he lets his cheating wife live. That’s a true pulp cowboy (though maybe not hit her in the face with the ring next time). The dialogue is straightforward exposition, but the whole thing fits together clearly. It’s a nice little genre piece. One thing that we appreciated is that you didn’t pad it out to meet a higher wordcount. You told your story and once it was over, you ended it. That restraint is commendable and that went a long way towards earning your HM. Vin - Sitting Here This gets the award for most contentious story in the judges’ chambers. If all of Vin’s dialogue was ripped directly from his movies, this would have been mindblowing to read. Vin the man and vin as in wine. Both bad for Jamie? There’s no build up of abuse that creates the dissociative disorder. Vin is born and they immediately fight back. Not an expert, but reading a couple articles leads me to think the fantasy world would be created and used as refuge, then maybe Jamie could plot an escape in her head. She obviously hasn’t moved on from the childhood abuse, but the story just hits a pause button there and she buried it all in the form of Vin. I suppose it’s possible to have a split personality go undiagnosed, but it seems unlikely. You mention Vin’s simmering anger under the surface; and in the foster system, they probably would have gotten into more than a fight or two which would lead to counseling and her condition coming to light. I can put that aside for the sake of the story, but then the encounter with Cayden happens. Low rent Patrick Bateman, I guess. Jamie gives up all her agency, and Vin Diesel is making arguments about consent and she’s just ‘shut up.’ Vin ends up saving the day (or at least himself), and Jamie is the helpless damsel and it stays that way, or maybe Jamie is even worse off after Vin takes complete control. I don’t know if I like this outcome. It might have been a little more palatable if the head wound had completely wiped Jamie’s personality and Vin was the only one left after that. At least then you could dodge Jamie’s complete and willful surrender. I think Jamie is being sarcastic early on when she says she needs a controlling man, but then that’s exactly what happens, so maybe it’s not. On first read this is interesting and almost fun. Style was good and it reads fine. But the more I think about it, the more distasteful it seems. I sincerely doubt you wanted it to be so, but there are enough openings in the story to make a rather oppressive, sexist interpretation. We bounced around about all this more than any other story, but in the end it generated discussion. Whatever your opinion on the morals of this story, it wasn’t boring. The Art of War - SkaAndScreenplays Tagger battle in a little package. Happy ending. It’s not offensive, just not much to it. Yeah, I just watched The Get Down and liked the graffiti parts. It might have been better to have a single wall be the battlefield and the art become more and more elaborate rather than tags all over town. And the whole thing is just a misunderstanding at the end, anyway. There are some douches who tag over Banksy works to get name recognition when the tourists come by, but I think most of the big names respect the work enough to stay off each other’s art. So I don’t have much sympathy for these two. At least they work together in the end. You have some homophone issues that spellcheck won’t catch. Two, too. Sleight, slight. Some extra quotation marks. I don’t get too bothered by this stuff, but it drives some readers nuts. A Typical Denny’s Lunch Hour - Blastinus All your technicals are clean, and I like most of your prose. Just work on getting your dialogue sounding a bit more natural. I don’t think anyone else would have been kind and let you submit that far past the deadline, so don’t do it again or you’ll get disqualified for the week. There’s no way your milquetoast accountant is going to meet a mystery man for lunch without first knowing who called him. After that, I think the scenario is plausible, either the father-in-law-to-be just showing up at his booth or intimidating the kid into meeting him for lunch. Either of those would have worked better. But the dialogue is pretty over-the-top. The beginning of their conversation is good as they dance around the issues, but the middle is all exposition dump that doesn’t sound like a realistic conversation. The father also doesn’t seem like a guy who would be a cheapskate on tips. That’s a bad joke to end on. Decent submission, be less overt with the dialogue dumps. (I actually disagree with Hammer Bro. and think Nathan is totally believable as a person who could exist. The father’s personality is for sure a real thing, but he speaks like a caricature. I think the waiter is less realistic. Didn’t ask about appetizers, didn’t push the specials.) The Cut of Your Jib fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Oct 11, 2016 |
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Oct 11, 2016 22:19
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gud crittins.
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Oct 11, 2016 23:52
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Thranguy posted:gud crittins. Agreed. Also, muffin I was super into this prompt and had a good idea, but I'm out of town all weekend until Sunday night. So, sign me up to help judge if you'd like.
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Oct 12, 2016 02:44
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In with Appalachian Gothic and flash rule #1.
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Oct 12, 2016 03:20
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Thanks for the crits, folks! Also: IN, Texas Gothic, 
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Oct 12, 2016 04:00
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Thanks for the crits, folks! I'm in with New England Gothic.
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Oct 12, 2016 04:05
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Your Sledgehammer posted:Thanks for the crits, folks!
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Oct 12, 2016 04:36
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:I was hoping we'd see this. Don't let me down. Don't worry, boss - horror is one of my favorite genres, and I'm enough of a Texan to own a pair of cowboy boots. This one's going to be fun 
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Oct 12, 2016 05:05
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***BELATED METALWEEK CRITS (ROUND 2)*** Maigus Man, there's a whole lot of 'people talking about what they're about to do', and very little 'people actually doing'. The action itself is written in a whole lotta passive voice, and consequently has almost no weight to it. I think the big problem is that it tries to go really wide and describe a whole lot of different things happening in broad strikes, when it probably shoulda tried to hammer down on 2-3 major points. You just don't have enough time in such a short piece to go that big, and you end up spread too thin. Jibs A few spelling mistakes here and there ("lets"=/= "let's") that really coulda benefited from another editing pass and I'm not sure I was feeling your tense choice, but overall this was a really solidly-placed win. Some great little descriptions ("All that detachment and hazy fantasy disintegrates like crepe paper in the rain" would be way too much in a normal story, but it works with the craziness) and a real emotion torque beneath it all. Sebmojo This almost certainly would've won if it hadn't DQ'd. It's gorgeously, ridiculously over-the-top. It's also weirdly, intensely sexual for no apparent reason, which is indeed metal as gently caress.
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Oct 12, 2016 06:01
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IN with Pennsyltucky Gothic
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Oct 12, 2016 11:28
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I'm from Pittsburgh. I guess I'm writing yinzer gothic. 
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Oct 12, 2016 12:58
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I'm actually gonna need to drop out of this prompt. Got extra shifts at work and a grad school assignment to hand in. If you need someone to help judge, I'll be free post-Sunday, but otherwise, sorry. Can't do it.
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Oct 12, 2016 18:55
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Blastinus posted:I'm actually gonna need to drop out of this prompt. Got extra shifts at work and a grad school assignment to hand in. If you need someone to help judge, I'll be free post-Sunday, but otherwise, sorry. Can't do it. Thanks for the information that's all super helpful. In. Aro Valley Gothic Halloween flash. sebmojo fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Oct 13, 2016 |
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Oct 12, 2016 20:42
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Just a heads up, we have at least 5 people entering: http://www.fictionwar.com/ It's 35 bucks to enter but there's a 5 dollar promo code you can get by subscribing to their mailing list. Prizes are decently sized. It would be cool to get a bunch of people in, and in case you don't think you're ready/good enough, I'm signing up. So whatever.
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Oct 12, 2016 21:00
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In with South Island Gothic
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Oct 12, 2016 21:20
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Ironic Twist posted:Next THUNDERTOME book, to fit the season: lol I got the date wrong but it's still Friday on the 14th at the same time.
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Oct 13, 2016 01:27
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| # ? Apr 20, 2024 03:55 |
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In with Australian Gothic.
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Oct 13, 2016 04:36
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