Fuschia tude fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Feb 13, 2018

curlingiron fucked around with this message at 09:03 on Feb 17, 2018

take the moon fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Feb 14, 2018

• Opening line: functional. Introduces our (presumed) protagonist in the middle of actually doing something, which tells us something about her.
  
• “She landed with their father’s EMP rods drawn” is kinda tricky to parse.
  
• That’s some blunt-force setup. Borrowing heavily from the song, I see.
  
• The minute I read Haruku didn’t get picked I thought, “I bet he does something stupid,” and immediately skimmed down the page and saw I was right.
  
• “Since their parents died” is kind of a big detail to casually drop on us here.
  
• Your setting in general feels pretty sparse. I can’t really picture it.
  
• Clear action scenes, for the most part.
  
• So this feels like a bit of a bait and switch. I assumed the reason Haruki was upset earlier was because his sister got picked to do the cool thing and he didn’t, but now he’s trying to fulfill a vow to his parents? I feel like if that were his motivation he would’ve behaved differently earlier.
  
• Following his thoughts feels a bit like cheating as well, since thus far we’ve been seeing everything through his sister’s perspective.
  
• TO BE CONTINUED (I’ll be the rooooooundabout)
  
• Honestly, this thing feels more like it just ends - as opposed to actually concluding. It’s the first chapter in a longer story, the first scene of a film.
  
• Yoshimi and her brother very much feel like Young Adult Literature protagonists, with all the good and bad that implies. They’re active characters, which is nice, and you attempt to give them a complicated dynamic, which is good, but the execution is a little bland.
  
• RANKING: Low-Mid

• Opening line: goes on a bit longer than it should.
  
• “Her eyes spotted a glinting of blazing sun reflecting like earthbound starlight, a hard point of reflection in a diffuse sea of brown,” AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-
  
• Seriously, it wasn’t until the next line I realized she saw something shiny on the ground.
  
• A description, laden with commas, that just kept going, without knowing when to stop, which you, dear reader, will keep reading, looking for a period, but you will find none
  
• A lot of your sentences are hard to parse my dude.
  
• Commas after dialogue, my dude.
  
• The right place certainly...what? Or do you mean it was the right place, certainly?
  
• This dude talks like a quest-giver in an RPG.
  
• Saying your protagonist “Went on her way” suggests she left the store already, except she hasn’t because the dude is still talking to her.
  
• Also, where’d she get the book (Vortex GPS Coordinates Inside)? Did she always have it? Did she pick it up? Is she buying it? Shoplifting? She just has it, and this dude can read its presumed subtitle with his eagle eyes which is weird.
  
• Your protagonist seems really not interested in the only thing she’s shown any interest in this whole story.
  
• Cold, Cold Heart
  
• Vortex of Mystical Power Grade VII is my favorite JRPG.
  
• So I’m guessing this is supposed to be one of those things where the protagonist doesn’t really believe in this thing except maybe they do, just a little, and are willing to go to great lengths to check for peace of mind, but it doesn’t really work here since there’s no build-up, no history, no misspent youth listening to your grandfather’s stories.
  
• That skull is totally gonna be haunted.
  
• Nothing happened, then some time passed, and nothing happened.
  
• This bit where she screams in frustration, then screams for real, is the first ACTUAL bit of characterization you’ve bothered to give this character. Up until this point she was just an actor doing things because the plot said so. Granted, she’s still that, but now she has definition.
  
• Also how is ZUUUUUUUU supposed to be distinctly Sumerian? It could just be a sound effect.
  
• Scared out of her mind by improbable events, eventually, she slept.
  
• What is this, the Twilight Zone?
  
• Your faceless protagonist goes to inconvenient lengths to do things for no discernable reason in order to set up a reveal that ultimately comes to nothing.
  
• RANKING: Low

• Opening line: vague and unhelpful, like a tech support rep.
  
• Starting your story off with several lines of (essentially) unattributed dialogue is always a risky prospect. It can work, but doesn’t here; not with everything so ambiguous.
  
• You try for something of an elegant description of the shadow creature here, but it’s a bit half-hearted.
  
• Your protagonist’s kind of a dick, which may be the point. We’ll see.
  
• Creepy manifesto in the middle of your story.
  
• It’s it it’s, though that last one should be its.
  
• Where is any of this even happening? There’s the sun, which your protagonist is looking at for some reason, but everything else might as well be taking place in some infinite expanse of nothingness.
  
• This bit where your protagonist unmakes the shadow reads like every TV show where two people with psychic powers stand and grimace at each other while their invisible powers wreck havoc around town.
  
• UNLEASH THE POWER OF THE SUN
  
• Your dedication to vague symbolism is killing me. I’d have quit reading this by now if I were a casual reader.
  
• I becomes it.
  
• No wait, we’re someone else now? I have no idea what’s going on.
  
• This story of smacks of you trying to communicate some manner of philosophical think-point, but it’s so sparse and confusing I feel like I could read it every day for a year and still never understand it.
  
• RANKING: Low

• Opening line: strong.
  
• “Raw chicken” works, but kinda detracts from the somber nature of the scene. The “Gashed-open” bit fits better, and also suggests something about our protagonist.
  
• You do a lot with a little here. It’s restrained, yet revelatory.
  
• The opening bit of this flashback took me a second read to get.
  
• Two deserts started dating, what?
  
• There’s a lot of character here, which is good, but it also feels disconnected from the rest of the story, which is bad.
  
• All the jumping around here feels like an attempt to replicate a rush of memories and emotions, but I’m not sure how well it works.
  
• The longest, most windingest sentence.
  
• I feel like I understand the desert thing from earlier now.
  
• Despite how disjointed this all feels, I do think I’m getting a clear picture of your protagonist’s relationship with her dead husband.
  
• So there’s a lot to unpack for this one. Your protagonist’s arc, coming to terms with the loss of her husband, is poignant and effecting, and you do their relationship a service by making it complicated rather than picturesque.
  
• However, I feel like the disjointed, semi-stream of consciousness narrative hinders more than it helps. I get what you were going for, and a lot of the issues I had with its structure resolved by the ending, but it leaves a bit of an odd aftertaste in my mouth. I know that’s rich coming from me, the guy who regularly writes stories with time skips without telling anyone, but still.
  
• RANKING: Mid-high

• Opening line: simple, but attention-grabbing. Someone needs something. Always a good start.
  
• Little awkward on the follow-up, though. Double focus on the eyes, telling, etc.
  
• “But it was where I belonged” is a genuinely good line. It communicates a lot about our protagonist immediately. This man is already the most fully-fleshed out character of yours I’ve come across.
  
• You get a bit too vague for your own good here. I can make out the general shape of what these folks are about, but I need more concrete details.
  
• I like the interplay between this privileged kid and their marginalized mentor...is what I’d like to say, but you skip over a bunch of that to get to the Hallmark card.
  
• “Full of wonder as the a star.”
  
• What’s the meta with you?
  
• And that gunman was ME, DEAR READER.
  
• There’s some good stuff around the edges on this one, but the story itself tanks once you realize how much of it is in service of a clumsy metanarrative. “It’s a story about stories!” sure, okay, but what are you actually saying here? I’m actually pretty open to metanarratives as a device, as a method of examining how we create, communicate, and consume stories, but here it reads very rough and rote. You can work hard on something and still get shot down for it. Someone could steal your ideas. Yawn.
  
• For the briefest of moments I thought this was a story about some naive urbanite getting acting lessons from hobos because “Their lives are more real, they’ve experienced things,” which is both kinda exploitive and reckless but also an actually interesting seed for a story - which you waste. Not that you specifically had to write about that, but the tiny bit of humanity you managed to weasle in there is wasted on a bumbling metaphor that’s nowhere near as poignant as the ending seems to want to be.
  
• RANKING: Low-Mid

• Opening line: atmospheric! But lose the semicolon, my dude, and everything after it.
  
• Evocative writing that nevertheless gets a little long in the tooth. You do a good job painting this claustrophobic world with its skittering inhabitants in only a few quick strokes, only to suddenly drag your brush along the page.
  
• There’s a lot of care and character here with this woman and her clocks, but where’s the story? Where’s the humanity?
  
• This whole thing reads like a powerful bit of flavor text accompanying an interesting RPG campaign setting, but I’m not sure I see much cake beneath the icing.
  
• Still, there’s some good language and imagery here. I enjoyed reading this a lot more than most of the rest of this week.
  
• RANKING: Mid-High

• Opening line: confusing, but in a way that makes me want to read on to determine what the narrator means.
  
• Do you think we’re the only ones who think? Because it’s me. I’m the only one who knows anything.
  
• The most precocious child in human history.
  
• You know, for someone lecturing the reader on empathy and being connected to the universe, your protagonist certainly seems lacking in both categories.
  
• Yeah, okay, I officially dislike this little twerp.
  
• Pretentious and precocious.
  
• Your protagonist is an inhuman computer.
  
• More Twilight Zone shenanigans? At least I can bear reading about our new lead.
  
• So it was all a disorder then? A false protagonist implanted in the real protagonist’s head? I’m not sure what this is trying to say about either of them. There’s a clear theme of empathy here, but your trees are making me miss the forest.
  
• RANKING: Low-mid

• Opening line: good.
  
• Getting some very Vonnegut-esque vibes from these early paragraphs. There’s a particularity to the setting and details, hints of an alternate future/present, and a high-end event undercut (effectively) by a dirty joke.
  
• For some reason I had to read the bit about the canoes twice to parse it.
  
• “On the barrels of his binoculars,” nice use of words.
  
• This orderly and structured event being invaded by the seemingly absurd has my full attention.
  
• What.
  
• Yep, this is very Vonnegut. And Lehrer.
  
• Ha ha ha can’t say no.
  
• Some delightful dark comedy, though it’s lacking a little something I can’t put my finger on.
  
• The whole thing is polished, like a stage piece. The characters are more actors than humans, though that’s not a complaint in this case. Really, the thin veil of artificiality over the whole thing works to heighten the sense of unreality.
  
• I think the only thing that bugs me, in retrospect, is the bit with the puppy dog eyes. With the way the rest of the narrative is set up, it feels a bit like cheating to rely on a Looney Tunes gag instead of...you know, I’m not sure. In any case, it’s not enough to detract from the story in a significant manner, just enough to give me pause.
  
• RANKING: High

• Opening line: thanks for reminding me how alone I am on Valentines day. *Cries.* Really though, it’s functional.
  
• You keep reminding yourself to put spaces after commas.
  
• “She smiles like a predator,” I like this line. It reverses the momentum built up by the proceeding dialogue, where your protagonist is presented as the instigator. Whether he is or isn’t, it’s
• fair to assume this lady’s the one holding the cards.
  
• This is the first story to employ vague language this week that didn’t annoy me. Though the typos annoy me, so rest assured I am still annoyed.
  
• Faustian bargains, a classic.
  
• I like this choice, how it’s present, how it’s justified. A penny for your revenge?
  
• It’s a little late in coming, but there’s some good character work here.
  
• The first time I read this ending, I thought it was a cop-out. The second time around, I can see it as a sort of rejection of false comforts like revenge and empty revisionism. Still, I might’ve seen it the first time around without the second-person gimmick.
  
• I actually don’t mind the second-person gimmick, but typically associate it with CYOA books and visual novels. You set me up to think I was going to make a choice, only to remind me the protagonist isn’t actually me, despite being referred to as such.
  
• RANKING: High

• Opening line: 1.
  
• I know Huitzilopochtli is an actual mythological figure and that’s how you spell his name, but man is it a humdinger of a proper noun to kick things off with.
  
• The sound of the tree splitting sound.
  
• Every time I have to stop to google one of these words is a time I might stop and never read this story again.
  
• Another you story, but somehow I get the feeling I won’t like this one as much as the last one.
  
• I’d like some more context for what’s going on, if possible. I know I probably won’t get it, but I’d like it all the same.
  
• You know, a good tip for when you want to use a foreign word to describe something that exists in a foreign culture, like here when you try to describe a traditional weapon, would be to say something like “He raised his X, his Y,” where X is the foreign word and Y is a simple English equivalent.
  
• I know you mentioned Rahui once before this but it’s weird how he’s still kind of a total non-entity in the story until just now when he appears. The way you phrased it earlier I thought he was already dead (like me).
  
• This thing sounds like a Zelda boss, by the by. You know the type, with the stone face and the hands. Dies about as easily as one too. Not sure I get the hype.
  
• 2.
  
• I think Rahui has hunting down just fine, chief.
  
• You’re referencing a lot of things off-handedly here. Done well, this sort of thing can make the world of the story feel larger than it actually is. You kinda just do it though, and it’s kinda just there.
  
• RIP Rahui.
  
• 3.
  
• Wait, so all this was so they could fight each other in the afterlife, or something?
  
• I’m not having a very good day today.
  
• Yeah, no idea what the point of any of this was. I connect with your protagonist’s desire to live on an instinctual level, but there’s nothing else here for me to grab on to.
  
• Still more competent then a lot of other stories this week, strangely.
  
• RANKING: Low-Mid

• Opening line: striking.
  
• Some solid set dressing here. I know who and what this story is about, where it’s taking place, and under what circumstances.
  
• It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
  
• “Although as time goes on and there remains no sign of lie beyond the two of them,” is pretty awkward to read.
  
• You do a good job showing us the differences in the girls’ reactions, by way of how they discard (or hold onto) their backpacks, only to ruin it a little by directly telling us what you already just implied successfully. Have a little more faith in your visual metaphors.
  
• The description of Ami as the dreamer, shedding her bag, makes it sound like she likes it in this bizarre hellscape.
  
• Although I can accept people getting used to anything, it feels a bit soon for these two to more or less settle in after a week of everyone and everything they know vanishing.
  
• Feels a little late to start dropping character descriptors.
  
• This whole story strikes me as a protracted metaphor for being cast out alone, together, by the world at large. Ami is happy she can finally be herself, Shannon misses the structure of her previous existence. In the end Ami disappears (dies, probably; suicide, possibly), and Shannon is implied to follow. It’s a mix of happy and sad since the uncertain nature of the world around them, the two bleeding into it, seems to sugget they’ll find some closure and closeness in death.
  
• RANKING: High

• Opening line: paints a solid picture. You know immediately how old our protagonists are, and you probably have pretty good idea what they’re up to.
  
• Unseasonable southerly?
  
• Getting some Stand By Me vibes here.
  
• Bit of an odd jump here, though at least we’ve settled on Simon and Dean being the story and not the fence.
  
• Dialogue seems a bit stilted here, and a bit different. Gonna guess this is supposed to be a time skip, though it’s not as clear as it could be.
  
• Ultima IV?
  
• “Sipping his beer,” does a much better job communicating the time shift.
  
• This dialogue has a very “As you know” feel to it, which I don’t care for.
  
• In the future we will have reality distorters, and our dialogue will become even more stilted.
  
• It took going to jail for the dialogue to get good again.
  
• So the focus of this story is clearly Dean and Simon’s friendship, with all its twists and turns, but beyond that it feels a little...disjointed? More like a collection of (important) anecdotes than a unified story. The two have their friendship, support one another in the hard times, then Simon passes and the world’s a little more empty. I suppose one touchstone might be each memory serving as a key “Turning” point, but hmm…
  
• RANKING: Mid

• Opening line: Functional.
  
• Your protagonist is strangely unperturbed considering how sketchy this all is.
  
• There’s a soft sense of a creeping atmosphere here, but it’s a little too threadbare to take hold.
  
• Okay I like this bit where he’s going over his own show notes.
  
• Third time you’ve mentioned the director’s voice in particular. I’m sure this will be important.
  
• Your protagonist remaining unperturbed remains preturbing. There’s certainly something to be said for a layer of unreality in a story like this, but after having that humanizing moment with his show notes I feel like he should be at least a little bit more inquisitive and less passive considering this mysterious director is possibly the devil or someone like him. Especially since his only real vested interest in this meeting is a sounding board for his little speech. Dude’s risking a lot for a little.
  
• I scoffed at my potential paycheck.
  
• Okay this part is legitimately creepy, and I can believe it’s too late for him to do anything about it...even if he should’ve known this was coming earlier.
  
• It was all just a dream?
  
• Another Twilight Zone ending, which I might’ve liked better if it were implied the protagonist sacrificed anything else other than a moment of his time.
  
• RANKING: Mid

• Opening line: good. Short, tense, and immediate.
  
• Oh boy, a plateful of jargon. Hopefully not important. (Me From the Future: it is and it isn’t, in a good way.)
  
• You do a good job communicating your protagonist’s mental load, his stress and fading, sickly demeanor.
  
• Another Dean and Simon, what.
  
• You do a much better job than many of your peers at threading in quick flashbacks and imagined conversations.
  
• This is a real, raw moment my man.
  
• And so our protagonist escapes from the confining maw of the rat race, of meaningless lists and words that need other words to define them, throws up his consumer breakfast, and finds himself renewed in the presence of a friend (or the memory of one), nature, and warm uncertainty. It’s not a bad story, nor one that suffers from the retelling, nor even from the (welcome, actually) complexity of Dean and Simon’s relationship not being entirely positive nor nostalgic. But there’s something…missing. I can’t put my finger on it exactly - and it might just be a personal thing - but there’s something not there that feels like it needs to be.
  
• In any case, a sure hand and confident prose.
  
• RANKING: High