sebmojo posted:

inter prompt: never eat anything bigger than your head

magnificent7 posted:

Is it me or is there no prompt yet.

TLDR: prompt.

CantDecideOnAName posted:

There ain't no prompt yet cuz there ain't no judging yet.
fjgj

BabyRyoga posted:

Each entry is 3 stories to read though, right?

magnificent7 posted:

What holyshit I've been away for awhile.

sebmojo posted:

inter prompt: never eat anything bigger than your head

sebmojo posted:

Wild Yeast
800 words

The sky over Bruges was the color of cornflowers, and the sun was a blinding 20 franc coin someone had tossed up there and gotten it stuck. this isnt a bad sentence and i quite like calling the sky the color of cornflowers, not gonna lie, but as an opener it makes me think hmmmmm who even cares? is this the fabled "cut your first paragraph"???? i think it just might be.

It was brewing day so Maxime was pouring brown beer bottles full of water straight down the drain, one in each hand, gloop bloop. c now here im thinking ah the story seems to start so why is this not the first line? im also a bit of mind to think Gloop bloop should be its own sentence instead of attached to the one before it but idk im not an expert on gloop bloop

"Just like Friday night, eh?" said his father. Maxine smiled because it sounded like a joke, then handed him the two empty bottles to rack up next to the others. im not sure if this is the piss joke tbh The bleach smell made his nostrils sting.

"Brewing is all about cleanliness", said his father. "No contamination." He sucked in a big gust of air, straining it through his moustache like a whale extracting krill slowly_nodding.gif, and plunged two more bottles into the hot sterilising liquid, down, up.

Maxime took the two full bottles, covered in bubbly bleach now u c this is a good adverb. something about the phrase bubbly bleach makes me go . it sounds good but its also a p cool image that i wouldnt normally attach to bleach. The sun in the little stone courtyard was hot, and he raised his arm to wipe the sweat off his forehead. The slippery wet bottle slithered out of his hand. He flung out his foot to stop it from hitting the cobblestones. Instead his foot clipped the bottle in the middle and sent it spinning away to smash against the wall in a thousand spinning shards.

"Klootzak!" yelled his father, face instantly purple. In a moment he was on his feet and towering over Maxime, fist cocked for the first blow.

To be fair, Maxime's father was full of so many hot words that it was only reasonable he had to let them out sometimes. Maxime knew to tiptoe when he'd been sitting at the kitchen table for an evening, the stack of brown bottles beside him growing. Sometimes that helped. But since Mama died the words had become angrier and the blows harder. yeah i mean this kinda stuff has been done a lot that im not rly sure its worth criticizing at this point but it feels kinda generic

Brewing is all about heat, i do like this tho, its a kind of weird transition but not a bad weird more of that nice "hmmm now that i think about it, it does make sense" weird thought Maxime later that evening. He was touching the lump on his head, gently, like stroking a mouse slowly_nodding.gif. Barley is malted with hot air, then soaked in hot water, then boiled with hops. The hot stone of the courtyard wall had met his head like a hammer after his father punched him.

Then, without having made anything he'd call a decision, he saw himself reaching under the bed for his suitcase, and filling it with things. Underpants, shirts, a wallet with some money, a picture of Mama. He tiptoed past his father, who didn't look up, and pushed the door closed behind him gently, like stroking a mouse for the last time im not quite sure about repeating this simile quite so soon after tho.

Twelve years later not quite sure about this time lapse but we'll c i guess Maxime was in a pub in London. It was late, and the air was hot. He held up his pint to illustrate a point he was making, something about beer - there was a girl with pretty eyes, they reminded him of someone . Someone was shouting at the other end of the bar, so he raised his voice.

"Brewing," he said, "it's all about the yeast. Got to be the right one. Very careful, very vigilant. Wild yeast. Floating. It's all around us," he said, gesturing. "But if you let it in, then, pfff." He spread his fingers wide, feeling a hot flush of delight at how her eyes drank him in. "Sour beer!" this is some kinda cute foreshadowing ngl but i also like the way you do this dialogue. it fits v well with a drunk person yelling in a bar to try to impress people

She smiled at him and started to say something but whatever it would have been was cut off by a flying pint glass that clipped her beautiful forehead in a spray of hot red and shattered into a thousand spinning shards. She dropped to the ground, heavy as a sack of grain.

Maxime was instantly suffused with a rage so pure and perfect it made his ears ring. Maxime saw the man who'd thrown the glass, saw his stupid mouth fall open. Without having made anything he'd call a decision, Maxime saw himself running towards the man, fist cocked for the first blow. The man put up arms to shield himself from the blow, and the pint glass Maxime was holding in his hands shattered on them, the sharp edges cutting a deep gash. The beer splattered over the man and over the floor. Maxime took another step and slipped on the wet floor, crashing down on the slick wood. The broken glass was still in his hands, and the floor rammed it into his throat as he fell. The broken glass made a slick, meaty sound as it entered. He gasped at the heat of his bubbling, frothing blood.

Brewing is all about patience, all about waiting to see what time, and heat, and yeast have made. It's not always what you want.

Still; what you get when the bottlecap finally pops off is always, and only, the sum of all the things that you put in.

hmmm im not quite sure i like where this story ended up. i was feeling the beginning a bit but the ending seems to come a bit too quickly. wouldve liked either a build-up to a more pronounced conclusion of the first bit with the dad, or more build up to the actual ending. i c what u were trying to do but in the space of 800 words i feel like both of these events arent given enough justice which is a shame because i think there's a lot in each we can get out of it. i liked all of it but i felt like it needed more room in order to fully come together

i like some of the ideas tho, esp w/ how the language of how the dad hit maxime paralled how maxime hit the drunk dude. and the words themselves flow nicely. so yeah its p alright but with a couple more words i think all the pieces will hang together much more neatly.

Deltasquid posted:

Deltamojo Brawl

At the River Volkhov (719 words)

I remember Father Claes’ words when I considered joining the Flemish Legion im not the biggest fan of character remembering things (why not just have claes tell him it?) because i think it robs the story of action, and im def not a fan of it as a first line. “Good Christians, falling to their knees and thanking you for delivering their souls from the Soviets,” he promised. He reassured me that the nazis ok im p sure this is supposed to be capitalized were the lesser of two evils. At least they were believers.

And so I volunteered, to the Eastern Front.

Our tank was a converted Czech hand-me-down, prone to breaking down if you pushed it too hard, with metal plating thin enough that a well-placed rifle shot could pierce it. But it was all our division had. It used to scare me this is a bit telling ngl, but now I saw the T-34 tanks rolling down the hills, I almost felt at peace. When death is certain, panic seems undignified and petty.

Captain Reimond’s orders were barely audible over the engine’s bellowing. Artillery barrages crept along the Volkhov riverbanks. In the distance, a munitions depot exploded, colouring the winter mist orange. Projectiles from the Soviet tanks missed us by mere meters, but I zig-zagged us between the trees and snowy hills to close the distance for our underpowered gun. yeah idk how i feel about this this jsut feels like generic army description that i cant feel any real attachment

I heard Marcel load a round. “I gotta piss,” he added.

“Wait, what?” I said.

Reimond chuckled, “Don’t make me laugh. Makes it hard to aim.”

“Seriously, Marcel?”

“I am completely ser--”

A muzzle flash to our right. I slammed the brake on the right tracks, angling our armor just in time. The tank emitted a metallic groan.

“Ricochet!” Reimond yelled.

“drat, drat, Goddamn! Nevermind about me needing to piss!”

“Oh, lovely,” I laughed, “the smell will complement the sweat and diesel nicely.” at least the piss joke is more pronounced in this one

I circled the enemy tank with a sharp turn while Reimond cranked the turret handle. When we were squarely behind them, he fired. The hull erupted in a pillar of fire, flinging the turret into the snow.

Our celebrations were cut short by a shot from our left, hitting the tracks. Our tank spun out of control, rolling down the hillside, into a ditch between two rows of poplars.

I pulled myself back into the driver’s seat. “Well, then. Not the glorious last stand I was expecting,” I said.

“We’re not done yet,” Reimond said. Beads of sweat rolled down his cheeks until caught in his six-day beard not sure how i feel about this phrasing. getting caught in his beard idk feels wrong in some sense. Marcel loaded a second round with trembling hands, puffing through his red-flushed cheeks. His raspy, nasal breathing irritated me all the more now I had my hands free this a kind of interesting detail actually.

“Anything I can do, captain?”

“Just keep your eyes open. Whoever fired that shot will want to confirm his kill.”

A T-34 rounded the hill, and Reimond fired. The shell bounced off the front armor.

The Russians returned fire, their shot glancing off our side armor. Deafening reverberations echoed through the tank until the riveting gave up, scattering a buckshot of nuts and bolts through the interior. Behind me, Reimond slumped from his chair and Marcel screamed, clutching his bleeding forehead.

I crawled over them to reach for a jerrycan of diesel. With my free hand, I opened the hot exhaust valve, cursing the scorching heat on my fingertips, then dumped as much fuel into the exhaust as I could. The tank belched forth thick, black clouds which carpeted the land. Helped by Marcel, I dragged Reimond out of the tank through the back hatch, and we ran through the obsidian smog until I slipped down an unseen incline.

Pain seared through my ankle and we tumbled into some shrubs next to the riverbank. Pistol in hand, I lay in wait, ready to fire on the first Soviet to stumble upon us. But they never did. On both sides of the river, tanks and infantry pressed on, pushing our comrades further and further towards Leningrad, until dawn broke the cold air. We were alone.

“Now what, captain?” I said.

When no answer came, I turned, only to see Reimond and Marcel face-down in the snow. Their skin was cold to the touch, and I stopped myself from turning them on their backs. Better this way.

I tried standing up, but collapsed in misery when I put weight on my left foot. On hands and knees this time, I crawled up the riverbank’s incline, towards the smoldering wreck of our tank.

Propping myself up against a poplar tree, I watched the flames dance across the tank’s remains.

“There are no good Christians here, Father.”

hmmm this is an adequate war story about death and poo poo but its also one that ive read or seen or heard about in approx a million different interations. like its not bad i aint gonna say that but theres nothing particularly here that makes this stick out of my head. its like yeah boy ok its a war story but like so what? what makes it ur war story that makes it different from all the twenty billion WWII stories that are already out there

i mean on a technical level its quite ok. nothing stands out to me from either end of the good-bad spectrum, so while i dont have much to complain about i dont have much to say "whoa holy poo poo thats cool." and i mean thats fine and hell even in some brawls that nets the win but mojo knows his way around a story that when the biggest compliment i can give to your story is "it doesnt suck" when thats not enough unforunately

i reread both of these stories with the intention of "ok im gonna look at this more closely and see if any words rly stand out to me" and when i looked at yours i just, i kept saying the same thing in my head "this is completely normal." like its just another war story, on the structural end and the prose end and on the character end. like esp your characters, theyre just generic soldiers w/ not a whole lot of unique personality. and its like, ok, thats fine, but it doesnt rly impress me at all or entertain me that much because its like okay why should i read this over any other war story and i think for this question is uhhhhh there really isnt any reason

magnificent7 posted:

Thoughts and prayers go out to the families and loved ones of those three judges.

sebmojo posted:

you can't spell 'thoughts and prayers fjgj' without 'fjgj'

crabrock posted:

Thranguy posted:

BabyRyoga posted:

Thanks for your hard work with those crits. I'm having a rough time, but no quitting.