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Now that the prompt's out--thanks, judges! Writing a CYOA was challenging, but enjoyable. I appreciate the crits. Thank you for the crit for last week, too, Sitting Here.Sitting Here posted:My grudging choice for victor....just remember that 'Mojo only has ONE nemesis in his life. I'm not ready to fight you for that honor, Blood Queen. Yet.
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# ? Jul 15, 2013 23:09 |
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# ? Dec 4, 2024 00:08 |
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I am in! I love color. I love them all, too much to pick just one. Color me, judges!
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# ? Jul 15, 2013 23:09 |
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I'm in. Choose me my doom.
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# ? Jul 15, 2013 23:10 |
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CantDecideOnAName, you'll be working with Granny Smith Apple. Noah, your fate is Mango Tango.
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# ? Jul 15, 2013 23:16 |
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In with Brown.
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# ? Jul 15, 2013 23:20 |
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In please. Colorize me.
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# ? Jul 15, 2013 23:21 |
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Piggy Pink seems right up your alley, The Swinemaster!
Kaishai fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Jul 16, 2013 |
# ? Jul 15, 2013 23:43 |
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In. Can't go wrong with Gold.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 00:18 |
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Kaishai posted:CantDecideOnAName, you'll be working with Granny Smith Apple. I see my past comes back to haunt me again.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 00:25 |
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I'll join in with Macaroni and Cheese.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 00:41 |
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I'd love to be a part of this Thunderdome, and I'm open to any dang color.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 00:51 |
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gently caress competition is tough around these parts. I'm in as black. Edit: I forgot another drat comma. Mercedes fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Jul 16, 2013 |
# ? Jul 16, 2013 00:58 |
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I am IN with Unmellow Yellow.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 01:25 |
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Whalley, Robin's Egg Blue is the color for you.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 01:46 |
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I'm in with Bittersweet Shimmer.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 01:47 |
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Mercedes I was hoping someone would take what was a traditionally young adult genre and re-work it into something darker. Good work on that front. Although lawyer = shark is a little trite, I was willing to see where it went. Intro – OK start. Heavy on exposition right out of the gate, but that is kind of par for the course in CYOA stories. It sets up a young man out of law school, but it is too vague on who or what Jameson is. I was actually surprised to read in the choices that he was from the Mafia. Reading back I saw you dropped ‘Family Attorney’ in there, but after all of the heavy-handedness earlier on, that subtlety passed me by. Probably something to remember when you are writing that exposition can dull a reader’s senses. If they feel they are being spoon fed information, they will pay less attention to the text because there is precious little thinking required to extract meaning from the story. Conversely, oblique writing will make them work harder, and they will feel rewarded for joining the dots. An old saying – make a reader realise that 2 + 2 = 4 and they will love you forever. However, having been given the option of working for the mafia, I plumped for that. I am glad I did because the two mafia trees were quite satisfying. I don’t know if you chose this deliberately as some kind of mental jujitsu, but choosing making Jameson talk first, and then going back and reading what happened if you didn’t was great. I’m not sure it would have worked the other way around. But I would say 9 times out of 10 a reader would choose the proactive choice first and that worked out really well. At the end of it, I felt there were two different Isaaks who had been changed by the experience. Unfortunately, the LA entertainment lawyer stories felt light-on. The choice there didn’t feel that urgent, and Isaak was still Isaak at the end of it. Moreover, you throw away Jameson altogether and these stories have nothing to do with the intro. A much better choice would have been to make the 2nd limb of stories about Isaak working as a prosecutor putting Mafia types in gaol. Golden opportunity missed there. Finally, Isaak never dies! There should always be one ending in a CYOA story where you come to a grisly end. Kaishai My first read through, Jimmy goes to Siberia and is left dead in the snow at the mine. Loved it! This was a delight to read. When I set this topic I was looking forward to some more gritty interpretations of a young adult genre, but this played a straight bat and embraced the genre with gusto. It paid attention to the little details of a CYOA story that really paid off; like having two intros before you get to a decision tree, starting off with a mundane everyday scenario that quickly spirals into international trips and gruesome deaths, the double crossing character. Then you have a really good spread of outcomes: bad, bittersweet, satisfying and great. All those little details added up and got me quite nostalgic while I was reading it. After each ending I wanted to go back and see what the other line went – always a mark of a good CYOA. Only negative mark – you only used posts from TD for your stories. I found it very amusing to see what other threads people had been posting in and for random excerpts of stories to be posted in those threads. Cancercakes. There was some contention amongst the judges about this piece. It was not generally liked, however I went into bat for it because I was hoping someone would play around with the structure of the stories and the decision trees. Having a link at the end of a story back to the beginning again was great. I would have liked it if you played around with that some more. Unfortunately, while the structuring of the story was original, the writing let it down. You really needed to go over this a couple more times and revise. For example, in the intro the first exasperated ‘again’ was OK. But when you used ‘again’ again, I was the exasperated one. Using tricks like that work because they are a subtle hint at a past that happened before the story began. But going back to that well just removes the subtlety and it sticks out, destroying whatever effect it had. I liked the baboon heart reveal, and the narrator. I also liked that you switched up the choices so that a passive response was a good response the first time, but then a more aggressive choice was better the second time. But in the end the stories got a bit ‘video-gamey’. Certainly not to any hereticMIND levels, but there was a lot of running down corridors fighting identikit henchmen. Contrary to Mercedes, all of your endings were bad endings involving death. Although you really made a rod for your own back with this because there are no relationships in the story to riff off. Maybe one good ending, living a life amongst a tribe of baboons would have been an option.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 01:57 |
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I wanna thank all the judges again for their crits! Making me a better writer one insult at a time :-)
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 02:21 |
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I distinctly remember when Purple Mountain's Majesty was added and thinking it was the most ridiculous name for a color. In with that.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 02:23 |
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In. I want to go with Prussian blue, but turns out it's not there anymore. So give me one, judges.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 02:26 |
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toanoradian posted:In. I want to go with Prussian blue, but turns out it's not there anymore. So give me one, judges. Discontinued colors are acceptable, so you get a choice: you can stick with Prussian Blue, or you can accept Atomic Tangerine. Edited to add: Thank you for the crit, V for Vegas! Kaishai fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Jul 16, 2013 |
# ? Jul 16, 2013 02:32 |
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Kaishai posted:Discontinued colors are acceptable, so you get a choice: you can stick with Prussian Blue, or you can accept Atomic Tangerine. Geez, both are renamed colours! I'll stick with Prussian blue then, thank you very much.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 03:06 |
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In, with a since I missed the last one. Judges: assign me a colour. Requiring a toxx if you failed to submit for your previous round seems like a good 'dome rule actually.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 03:43 |
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sebmojo posted:In, with a since I missed the last one. Judges: assign me a colour. You may be able to do justice to Periwinkle, so it's yours.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 04:09 |
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Razzamatazz me, suckers
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 04:31 |
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In with Antique Brass.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 05:07 |
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I'm actually in this time, I swear it you guys. I've got Wild Blue Yonder.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 06:17 |
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I will be judging, but don't feel that means you need to pander to my capricious whims. Having said that; in honour of the delicious orange cake I just baked last night, FLASH RULE the next person to sign up gets to write us all a story that significantly involves food.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 06:50 |
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Chairchucker posted:I will be judging, but don't feel that means you need to pander to my capricious whims. Having said that; in honour of the delicious orange cake I just baked last night, FLASH RULE the next person to sign up gets to write us all a story that significantly involves food. in with
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 07:53 |
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I'm in (and new to the thread; hi!). Color me up!
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 15:53 |
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Besesoth posted:I'm in (and new to the thread; hi!). Color me up! Welcome! I look forward to seeing what you do with Key Lime Pearl.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 16:18 |
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I was a brat and picked Brown, can I change it to the more fun shade of Vivid Tangerine?
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 17:06 |
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Sitting Here posted:I was a brat and picked Brown, can I change it to the more fun shade of Vivid Tangerine? Yup. This goes for anyone: until sign-ups close, you can switch your colors around with gleeful abandon. Unless your color was judge-bestowed, of course, in which case you ain't getting out of it that easily. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Jul 16, 2013 |
# ? Jul 16, 2013 23:38 |
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Dammit!
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# ? Jul 17, 2013 00:06 |
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I love Granny Smith apples, just so you know. I'm expecting great things.
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# ? Jul 17, 2013 00:44 |
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I feel foolish for asking, but it's driving me nuts. While reading the CYOA's, I would sometimes scroll through the page, just to see where the author chose to edit their post. On one page, one of you judges were doing a crit and gave a link that was super awesome (I think the link was given on account of grammar) and helpful and I wanted to read more but I forgot to bookmark it. I've been looking for far too long and I'm getting frustrated. Does anyone know which website I'm looking for?
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# ? Jul 17, 2013 01:49 |
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Kaishai posted:I love Granny Smith apples, just so you know. I'm expecting great things. Wow, that is some outrageously bad taste in apples my fellow judge has.
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# ? Jul 17, 2013 06:26 |
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Chairchucker posted:Wow, that is some outrageously bad taste in apples my fellow judge has. If they name a crayon Red Delicious, the kiddies will get all the wrong ideas.
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# ? Jul 17, 2013 07:25 |
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Mercedes posted:I feel foolish for asking, but it's driving me nuts. One of the judges from this week or just someone who judged in a previous week? Can you remember more detail about the link? Kaishai had judged quite a few times and has a lot of bookmarked grammar links, just to throw that out there.
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# ? Jul 17, 2013 12:09 |
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Hi, I'd like to try my hand at this with white.
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# ? Jul 17, 2013 12:44 |
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# ? Dec 4, 2024 00:08 |
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systran posted:One of the judges from this week or just someone who judged in a previous week? Can you remember more detail about the link? Kaishai had judged quite a few times and has a lot of bookmarked grammar links, just to throw that out there. It was Kaishai! Thanks so much systran. The website is here if anyone else is curious.
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# ? Jul 17, 2013 13:01 |