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sebmojo posted:right bitches who wantsa swap flash rules I'll take characters are all related Sebmojo gets:  an event that is belated
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Sep 13, 2013 16:32
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 06:16 |
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I particularly enjoy the stats/graphs section. Why do the majority of TD stories take place on/involve the day Sunday? Why do we shun the numbers 8 and 9? Why are god and lord the two most common names, but Jesus is trailing behind Jack, mom, Jim and Thomas? 
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Sep 14, 2013 20:00
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There once was a crabbish rock, and of Thunderdome he took stock. he and Kaishai, they tackled this sty, the resulting product of which is certainly not to be mocked ~fin Anyway, here's my thing. Not sure if it works. I'm not sure if any of this post works. At the Seams 971 words Abbys always the talker and Destiny is the sulker and im the watcher. watch this, Abbyll say when shes fixing the world. and shell talk talk talk saying--Junebaby come help me call Momma home. the world can't be fixed without us four which is me and Mom and Destiny and Abby. Abby talks and says--the world is coming apart at the Seams. well be laying in the grass under the grandma oak tree and Abbyll wiggle her hand through the air like shes sewing with a big needle. only Abby and people like Abby can keep the Seams sewn says Abby. me and Des and mom are like Abby. its magic that holds the world together and we pull those seams unknowing of it all the time. says Abby. she goes clanking around every day with the chain of saints and bhodis and ankhs and pentacles around her neck. she dances in the yard and waits under the grandma tree for the crows to drop bones instead of fastfood containers. she holds my arm tight and we stare into the very last and hottest seconds of sunset and she has us say a prayer together right in that moment--bring Momma home. . my name is June cause i was born in june. Des is oldest from when Mom was a dancer. Abby is in the middle from The Marriage. I donno know where I came from but Momma says that no matter what im her summer but here its the end of summer and shes still gone and she already missed my birthday. . Destiny is inside watching TV usually when me and Abby are in the front yard under the grandma tree. today like yesterday Abby says--go get Des to come out and call Momma home. except this time I dont have to go in cause when I get to the front door Destinys already coming out stomping mad. she says--we gotta pay the TV bill Abby gets up from the grass and comes over. she says--I knew momd call you out to come pray with us Des snaps at her--moms off with some gently caress and theres no TV and your scaring June Im not scared I say but the two are arguing and its like I never exist when people argue. Abby says to Des--your the reason mom is gone. it has to be all three of us praying or she wont come home Destiny has a pinched face that’s pretty in a way thats angry all the time. Abby has a babyface and a big forehead because she keeps her hair pinned back with flower clips every day to cover how she doesnt wash it. I don't like her mouth. Destiny is looking at Abbys babyface now like it’s the grossest thing shes ever seen and says--your a broken little fuckup Abby just smiles with her ugly mouth in that way she does where its like she feels bad for you but usually its everyone in the room feeling bad or embarrassed about her. she says--maybe you were too much of a crackbaby to ever learn to feel the Seams. maybe Momma tried to tell you like she told me but your the broken old fat fuckup you can almost hear the sound of Destinys stare over the sound of the woods around the house. then she says--cmon June. come help me look for Moms checkbook. Abby is saying funny things cause she needs her vitamins Abby stands in the yard still just smiling as we go inside. . I dont like the house which is why I like the summer and being outside under the grandma tree where the air smells good. the house still smells like the cats even though we havent had the cats for a while. instead of going to Moms room Des stops me and bends down to my level while holding my shoulders. she says--listen June you gotta be a big girl for me now. the truth is that it might be a long while before Momma gets back around to us. but there are people who wanna take care of us and help Abby and make everything right can they see the Seams I ask Destiny gives me a scrunchy look thats silly on her pinched face and says-- Abby and Momma only see the seems when they haven't had their vitamins Junebaby. its not good to see the Seams cause even if there were such a thing whadya think one person could do by trying to tug at the stuff that makes up the whole world all by themselves I chew on my finger. . a few days with no TV goes by and no Momma and summer is cooling down and theres thunder and the forest whips around in a real frenzy. you can almost hear the storm over Abbys raging when the helpful people come. after asking Destiny a few questions they pick their way into the house on the little trail we girls use to get from the door to the kitchn through the Piles. but how will she find us Abby keeps screaming as they put her in her own special car. how will Momma find us if we arent home we pull away from the house and I turn around to look through the foggy window and already the house looks like a memory. and I wanna cut it out of the grey rainy moment and sew it into my mind like a patch because I feel like this is a forever goodbye. but there are no Seams to cut or pull apart and the house stays put as the strange car bumps its way down the gravley forest road. then we hit a turn and the house is gone and I feel a snip as a different sort of thread is cut forever.
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Sep 16, 2013 00:28
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systran posted:
 In with Seattle Good job Systran!
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Sep 16, 2013 16:52
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yeah newbies gotta wash TD's laundry PLUS the dishes for a whole month to prove they're the real deal get scrubbing, pledges.
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Sep 21, 2013 00:01
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To whom it may concern: 1238 words You don't know me, probably never even seen me, but you saved my life. You were downtown on Pine street on a fall day just like today, only clearer and crisper. I remember the clouds most of all that day, well the clouds and You. They were way up high and the sun was down low on the horizon and the cloud-bellies shined like a puddle of oil or fish scales. I'd been in a really bad way, never mind why, but it was the sort of day where you look up into the empty spaces between buildings where there's nothing but wind and echoes and want to just live there. You know what I mean? Just be nothing but goddamned nothing, clean and cold. But I remember the clouds that day because I'd had a dream about clouds like that, and a different MySelf who could look up at those clouds and be happy, and who felt bad for my waking Self but only in that abstract sort of way, like when you hear about six figure death tolls on the news. But so in the dream MySelf was downtown looking up at these clouds and everything was just O.K., people passing around me like a river of smiles, all of us just so dang happy because there was a sky and clouds to fill it and hearts to swell with the beauty of it all. The morning after the dream as you can probably guess I jumped up and stood on my bed and peeked through the window, so sure that the day was going to be beautiful and O.K.. But it was September in Seattle and that famous grey had come home to roost. The heavy clouds made me think of a man's fat gut drooping down and brushing the tops of the buildings which made me think of a thousand other jagged things. The city is a resigned hooker in the fall and winter, splayed on its back, compliant and muted but only because it's no use to be anything else. And I, well, something about it just broke my mind, that and a few other things, and I’m not too ashamed to tell you that I hurt my Self that day, a little. The day You saved my life, I was going down to 3rd Ave near the fish market. If you don't know about 3rd Ave, it's really two worlds in one. The first world is full of Macy's shopping bags and clean shoes that try to step around puddles and eyes that are always looking into the distance so that they don't see world #2. The second world on 3rd Ave is for people like me and worse. You can get anything there from dope to sex to blunt wraps to DVDs, basically one-stop shopping for people who aren't wearing the right uniform to be in world #1. So I was going down there to blow the last of my SSI check and then after that maybe my brains out. I lived in the old El Capitan apartments, that big brick gulag just outside of downtown-proper right next to the Seattle Counseling Service building where I have to go meet with my Recovery Group, except I'd given all that up at that point and figured I'd take that slippery slope all the way, down to the bottom of relentless addiction to anything that shut my brain up for even a little while. I was there on Pine St., watching my feet carry me down blocks whose numbers got smaller and smaller the closer I got to the bay. My heart was so black with hatred of myself and others that I thought maybe people would see smoke coming out of me. I looked up. It was just before sunset and the sky had cleared mostly except for some wispy cirrus clouds drifting way up in the clean cold empty. And it isn't enough to say they were shiny or prismatic. These clouds caught the soul of sunlight itself and plucked it apart into all of its constituent colors. I could've started jumping up and down 'cause hell, it was just like my dream and how often does that sort of thing happen? But the people around me, there were no smiles there. Hardly anyone else even looked up. Then I heard You. Notes fell from your mandolin like sheets of rain falling onto a pond, ripples on ripples on ripples of cascading sound drifting over the din of shoppers and beggars. Almost like it was just for me. I saw You from behind, all wild black hair and lanky limbs, splitting the flow of humanity on the busy sidewalk, motionless except the slight shifting of your arms as your fingers plucked the strings. But--and I won't kid myself that you knew I was there or anything--as soon as I laid eyes and ears on You, You were off, moving opposite the crowd, almost prancing, everything about You as graceful and exquisite as your song. And You should know, I could only follow You, for better or worse. Your notes fell faster and faster and You pranced faster and faster and I had to work to keep up with You, to keep hearing your song because it was the only thing more beautiful than that seductive empty nothingness between skyscrapers. Faster and faster and faster. We were coming up to an intersection; the light was about to change. I was sure I had You then, and You'd be forced to stand still on the corner and play your sublime song for me. But then at the very last moment, You darted out into the street, just inches and half a second ahead of the front bumper of a moving van. And You must've made it to the other side just fine, but when the van had passed You were gone and so was your music. After I went back to my Recovery Group and tried to tell them what'd happened, tell them about You, no one could understand how some scruffy busker prancing down the street could save a person's life when that person is as low as me. They weren't judgmental, just maybe afraid to believe that sometimes something beautiful can be Enough. But that day, even though You were gone, I chased the afterglow of your song past 3rd Ave and straight down onto the piers on Elliot Bay, sure I would find You, blind from tears of frustration from losing my grip on a rare moment of unlikely gentleness from the world. Now maybe You know as well as me, there's no place in Seattle like the piers on Elliot Bay, where you can look out over the green-grey of the Puget Sound to the comforting permanence of the Olympic mountains far to the west. And I'm not ashamed to say that I cried right there on the pier, surrounded by carnival music and kids with unseasonal ice cream cones. I don't know if I was crying because I had lost beauty or found it, but the tears themselves were enough to prove to me that I was worth not hurting anymore. Anyway, I hope You're out there, still, refracting beauty like trapped light in cirrus clouds, bringing other folk like me back from the clean cold empty like you did for my Self. Yours, truly, MySelf
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Sep 23, 2013 03:58
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SEBMOJO I'M CALLIN YOU OUT FOR REALS THIS TIME BRAWL OF THE CENTURY ITT someone make this happen.
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Sep 24, 2013 02:20
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sebmojo posted:
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Sep 24, 2013 05:39
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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:The twin stars of Thunderdome face each other in single combat. I accept. WHAT SAY YOU MOJO
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Sep 24, 2013 08:58
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get in
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Lord Windy posted:There is two hours left, however I did see that I said the 29th rather than the 28th so I'll extend the date forward a day if you guys need it. I had assumed I had more time, yeah. I was actually thinking you meant midnight your time, so in like 14 hours.
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Sep 28, 2013 01:16
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Sitting Here V. Sebmojo Brawl of the CenturyLord Windy posted:I WILL JUDGE! Meanwhile, in the Fempire 500 Words The boardroom was thick with smoke and tension. A solid thirty seconds had passed with nothing but narrow stares and the clinking of chilled whiskey stones to mark time. Suzanne Summit was reclined in casual defiance, her crisp white Nike Ultimatums propped up on the edge of the long brushed-steel table, her luxero-ergonomic reclining roller chair as horizontal as its manufacture would allow. She let out a long puff of cigar smoke. "This company has values, ladies. Values are--and I'll ask you not to laugh, I'm being candid here--priceless. Here in these walls, this is the one place I feel like I have some autonomy. Some goddamned liberty in this hellhole of a country. Karen--"she jabbed her cigar toward the C.O.O"--I want you to go back to that rear end in a top hat Lorrence at Execusoft and tell him the merger is off if we can't retain the policies, the liberty, that made us great in the first place." Karen Cuddy waved an errant tendril of smoke out of her face. "Madam C.E.O., if I'm understanding you correctly, the fulcrum of this whole deal is a slight change in personnel policy?" "It's cultural imperialism, is what it is. First they make our people dress like them. Next thing, we'll be floating ourselves as a shell corporation while Lorrence and his dogs suck up our market share." Down the table there was a shuffling of defense-grade nylon tracksuits, more clinking of now-warming whiskey stones, and general fidgeting and throat clearing. One by one, all eyes fell on Karen, who sighed, straightened in her seat, and adjusted the elastic holding her ponytail in check. "Suzanne," she said plaintively. Suzanne Summit, who disliked being addressed by her first name, swung her eyeball-rattlingly white Nike sporting shoes down from the table and came to an upright position, fingers steepled, mien dangerous. "Right," said Karen. "What this really comes down to the dress code. We're ahead of our time, Suzanne, that's all there is to it. Our clients call us avant-garde, even aesthetically dangerous. It's Lorrence who's afraid that we're going to be the catalyst that rocks Execusoft's whole paradigm in the long haul. So our grunts wear different shoes--isn't that worth the opportunity to move the battle closer to Execusoft's front doorstep?" Nods and assenting puffs of smoke from around the table. Just then, the door to boardroom swung open; Suzanne's receptionist, a handsome, well-formed man in his early thirties, tottered in on lethal-looking three inch stilettos that matched his burgundy suit vest. He barely had time to breathlessly introduce the woman, one Janet Killjoy, who shoved her way past him through the door to face the board of directors. "I'm not too late to make you an offer you can't refuse, am I?" she said, hands coquettishly on her hips. "Or had you already decided to be the lint in Excusoft's pockets?" Suzanne leaned forward to peer down at Janet Killjoy's footwear, which were the latest in chic but utilitarian all-weather rain bootage, and smiled. "Shoot," she said.
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Sep 28, 2013 05:12
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Well that's what I get for making up fake Nike shoes without googling first I guess
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Sep 28, 2013 08:37
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Requesting a brawl extension until tomorrow due to today being my birthday! A neat present would be to not get DQed due to me being a drunk and an ingrate 
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Oct 5, 2013 01:01
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Crabrock, I can help judge. With the caveat that critting duties be split up, maybe. Sitting Here v. Sebmojo Cosmic Ultrabrawl Prompt was slice of life, spec fic, music Age-Old 1000 "I mean, are we even in the same universe? For all I know you've got us stuck in some hell dimension." Karen berated Verolian 'Greg' S'kthana mal Althone, who had been hemming and hawing for the past several minutes over a small metallic orb and figures on a transparent tablet. "I wanted to do tapas. That's what I wanted for my birthday. Not Pepto-Bismal purgatory." Karen was referring to their present location, which was a plane of slimy, jet-black stone beneath a medicinally pink cloud cover that glowed with the light from the triptych of alien suns above. At least Karen thought they were suns; the occasional cloudbreak revealed a trio of violently pulsating orbs that were closer than she thought celestial bodies ought to be. Verolian looked up with soulful, almost-human eyes and emoted regret and disappointment at Karen. "Use your goddammed words," she said, waving at the air as if she were trying to swat a fly. "You can't make it better by forcing me to feel how sad--" she drew the 'a' out mockingly "--you are." "Fine. I was endeavoring to take you to the edge of the cosmos. Surprise! Sorry my very expensive and nearly inscrutable time-space travel machine got a flat tire. But now the truth has been engendered. So it's probably just best to turn back around and get some Earth tapas." Verolian straightened, dusted itself off, and made as if to use the sphere once again. "It's just," said Karen. Verolian hesitated. "It's just that, you know. I'm an open minded person. I didn't mind the gender-bending space alien revelation. But when you're trying to show me the whole universe three months into the relationship, it feels like, I dunno, you think you need to impress me. And I don't want to owe you anything for all of this." Karen was talking fast. "I think about like, what if we had kids someday? What if you decided that was boring and peaced out to the Gamma quadrant or whatever? I know kids are way off but my point is that--" Verolian closed the distance between them with little more than a thought, cupped her face, and kissed Karen under the Pepto sky, inhuman levels of compassion and understanding pouring from its mind to hers. Karen pulled back, after a while. "I said use your words," she said, breathless, but the edge was gone from her tone. "I know most sublime tapas place in the universe, actually," Verolian said, then laughed at Karen's warning look. "Don't worry, it's on Earth. San Sebastián, little town in Spain. You know, the tapeo. Estupendo. It will be more authentic than anything you could acquire in L.A.." Karen sniffed, misty-eyed from the storm of alien emotions still echoing in her mind. "That would be acceptable," she said in Verolian's dry tone. Together they cupped the sphere, her hands on the top and bottom, its hands on the sides, and after a moment they were gone, and there was only the glowing pink sky and a slight breeze blowing over the wet, glossy stone. - "Erm." "What? Where are we? Where are you? Greg? What happened this time Greg?" "Um." "I feel like I don't have a body. Please tell me I have a body right now." "Well, it's just..." "What?" "The space coordinates were right, but the time axis...and now it can't find a signal. Not even roaming..." "Light! Over there, there's light! At least I think it's light. I don’t feel like I'm seeing it, exactly, but I can't tell it's there. Oh and I hear something--oh god, you should come over here." Karen felt rather than saw Verolian drift up beside her. It emoted curiosity, then alarm. "Stay back," it whispered. "But it's so beautiful," Karen said. There was, indeed, a faint sound: A song, whose notes were light, tiny crystalline arpeggios going round and round, going up and up and up on some transcendent scale and then cascading back down around each other to start again. "It reminds me of something, but I can't quite think of what. Like someplace I've been before, or..." "Karen, we must move away from here. This phenomenon comprises everything that is, or will be. We went back too far. This is a nascent universe. Our universe. Anything you do now might alter things in ways that would make us incompatible with it. We couldn't go back." "Listen," was all she said. The song had changed, a different color and timbre swelling up beneath the arpeggiating melody like loamy earth rising to cradle a crisp blue sky. "It's growing. I think this is it. It's time." It's time. The idea threaded its way into the song, words echoing wordlessly in the photon-less singing light of primordial being, two words finding themselves born again in countless languages on the lips of countless mothers-to-be, words that heralded pain and joy and becoming and ending. "There is nowhere for us to go, Karen. There is also no precedent for this situation, so I don't know what will happen to us if this baby goes off, so to speak." "I never really thought I'd make it back home, to be honest," Karen said, raising her voice over the gradual but unstoppable crescendoing cathedrals of sound rising all around them. "I just wanted a goddammed birthday to go right, for once. I would've loved to see the edge of the cosmos. But how many people can say got everything for their birthday? Joke's on you, life that's about to happen." "Happy birthday, then. To you and everything." The song blossomed into something with dimension and density; legato, brassy undertones became gravity, quivering monotones became electromagnetism, every note describing some shape in creation from quivering wings to hurtling meteors. And into that sound tableaux was woven gratitude, the last echo of the two bickering beings who dissipated into the heart of creation.
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Oct 8, 2013 21:56
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sebmojo posted:PROOOOOOOOMPT
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Oct 9, 2013 03:44
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Please put up more of those and thin out the Swolept ads please.
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Oct 11, 2013 17:38
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I need reasons to procrastinate on the stuff that I am using to procrastinate on still more stuff. So basically, in. Read em and weep.
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Oct 15, 2013 00:28
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Fraction posted:Can newcomers join in anytime? Literally anyone can join up until Friday night or whenever the prompt post says (IDK I don't read prompts). Fresh blood is good. In fact if you for some weird reason lurk this thread, you should sign up RIGHT NOW DO IT please we even made a banner ad  
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Oct 15, 2013 17:36
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Here are like half of last week crits, because I'm a disorganized inebriophile and I hate you. S.Muffin I liked 'Crygenics'. I liked the obtuseness of the narrator. I liked gradually realizing that there was something going on and that it probably wasn't going to result in the narrator getting what she wanted. I liked that she had completely rationalized being deceptive and exploiting a loophole, much like the doctor I'm sure would have rationalized making people cry for SCIENCE. I liked that no one in the story is purely sympathetic and well-intentioned; they read like people, accent issues aside. I liked that you didn't go for the "person relating through dialog a story to another person" approach. I liked how you incorporated the bird thing. I didn't like that, by the end of the story, I'm not precisely sure about your narrator's future or how the events in this story effect her life. I thought the "story in a story" element skirted the edge of being too subtle. Like, it's obvious by the end that the whole situation is a fabrication to make her cry, but it's not clear if her family and coworkers are in on it and playing along, whether they brought her to the lab to divorce/fire her and leave her emotions to science. Reading just a bit more into the story than is actually there in writing allllmost made me favor this one, but I am capricious, and you seized extra words, and while I approve of your gumption, I felt like I should have had a few less questions at the end given your word count. justcola I have a feeling a lot of the crits this week are going to be the same across the board. This is just straightup "this is what happened" dialog with no real story structure to make me care about these people living in this robot sex world. Okay right at the end we learn that they have a stake in it because they're clearly refugee humans surviving on the fringe of a robot dystopia. But it's kind of weird that a kid growing up in the apocalypse would be asking about the inverse birds and bees. Humanity-extinguishing events are the sort of things that work their way into the collective psyche so that even young people have some idea of what's going on. Which, incidentally, how old is the son in this? It reads like HE'S a kid, which means there's one more than 0 children in the world. IDK, when I look through this story for all the usual stuff (defined beginning, middle, and end, inciting incident, tension), it's not there, or is in weird places. I guess the inciting incident would be the 90's? Which, I could buy that the apocalypse has its origins in the 90's. But beyond that, this is nearly the most literally you could've interpreted the various prompt elements, which doesn't do you any favors. All that said, "Beneath the Electric Moon" should be a Phillip K. Dick novel. Saddest Rhino This one was in my top 3. I was worried for a second when I saw the cheesy lyrics, but then I realized they were supposed to be cheesy and relaxed. I like the concept. I like that the last word in the story was RuPaul. I like that chiptunes are basically bitcoins. I also like that the unnamed Ron Paul's quote is apparently derived from a Reddit AMA quote. I would've condensed the bit with the techno-wisdom wizard because, much as the ending made me chuckle, it did feel a little hemmed in by word count. I feel like this piece suffers from something that a lot of flash fiction in this thread suffers from, structurally. The whole piece reads like an inciting incident. You have the setup, a conflict, and somewhat of a resolution, but the ending opens up a larger conflict rather than strictly tying up the coffee shop incident. I also enjoyed "Rhymes transacted cannot be returned." Dirty Communist Oof, laddy. This was a clunker. You've got all these random people talking, only the vaguest nod to setting, and I'm still not entirely sure what's going on. Best I can get is that Lester hosed with his boss and now has to stand around blaring Limp Bizkit and wearing a shirt with (I assume?) David Carradine's autopsy photo? As an aside, much like bro fiction, hipster-mocking fiction is starting to become a real Thing here around the 'dome. But the thing about satire is that it has to be universal; it has to lampoon a specific thing in a general enough way that it's accessible to people who aren't necessarily within/proximate to the group/thing you're satiring. There were some wonky lines: quote:Lester tried to glare and his brows pleaded instead People can plead, eyebrows can't. quote:Lester took a step back from the approaching skinhead. They looked into each other. Those deep, human eyes and soft skin calmed Lester. [no suggestions] quote:Beside him, the nightclub’s obnoxious pinks and oranges swept the footpath and imitated the sunset Ok so what I think you're saying is that the light from the nightclub was illuminating the footpath with the colors of a sunset. It sounds really garbled and passive the way your worded it. The dialog is what one might call slapdash. Like, "Interesting story. I feel for you." does this sound like a thing people say when they've heard an interesting story that they feel for? Clean your writing up. Take more time to think about what each sentence is actually saying, and ask yourself what you would think of it if you read it in a book. Robot Hobo Why. Why always with the beginning of stories with the "now tell me all that once more." Why can't stories ever start with character telling each other things the FIRST time? Especially because the inmate's dialog doesn't read one bit like a guy who's been reciting the same story over and over. Having critiqued a fair number of stories now, I've noticed yet another trend, which is to build the whole story around a reveal or punch line at the end. In this case, it's The Devil. Structuring a story in this way doesn't generally lend itself to a real arc or closure at the end. We're left with no payoff. It's just, people talking about a thing. And then they tell us what that thing is. The end. Symptomless Coma I like this. I want to like it better. It was another one in my top 3. It's one of those stories that makes me hear early 90's Stephen Frye in my head, which on the surface is pleasant but just below the surface is deceptive because then I don't know if I love you or Stephen Frye and I have to lie down in a chilled club soda bath to calm myself. IDK, I like this sort of thing better when it's framed as dialog that we're only getting one side of, rather than a strict monologue. You do it a bit at one point: quote:His gloves, the white ones? They’re different. Where it's implied that the narrator's counterpart interjects. Having him respond more directly to her will make readers feel a little less removed from the scene. Also it kinda skirts story-in-a-story part of the prompt, or rather is too subtle about it, maybe. The voice was good. A lot of TD entries read as almost monotone in my head, but this guy had lots of color. All together it's a bit too cheeky for me, but if it were interspersed throughout a story and mixed in with other characters of equal standoutness, it could be good. As another general aside, I think the lower word counts make people afraid to go for a more typical story format. Luckily this one didn't follow the build-and-reveal non-arc that a lot of stories went for this past week. Tyrannosaurus So for one, if you have a character who's job is basically to go "uh huh? And then? Oh wow, and then what happened" while another character talks, you can probably just quietly block their airways while they're sleeping and save yourself the words. I appreciate that you tried to give Dan somewhat of a stake in the story he's telling considering that he's gotta can one of his assistants. It's a good reason for him to care about the story he's telling, but it doesn't necessarily make it interesting to us that he is telling steve about this, if that makes sense. The presentation of two talking dudebro heads kind of puts a smudgey vaseline film over your story's lens. Those things said, I didn't think this was terrible or anything. It was cute and kept my attention. The question raised by the end about what effect exactly did this Johanson kid have on the rats is the GOOD sort of question to be left with at the end of the piece. The dialog varies from a little to way contrite in some places, but it flows alright enough. You really didn't need to have Dan add "I think it has something to do with Johanson" at the end though, since that is basically the conclusion that the story fully intended us to draw. Systran Grumble grumble this is one of those that is hard to critique much. I liked it. It follows in a pretty well-worn tradition of storytelling, but it does it well, and it's a good take on the age-old question of what makes us happy or content. Minor nitpicks, I feel like, while you've got the voice of the parable down, it gets a little wordy sometimes. Like: quote:...for his body, glimmering like bronze in the sun, sat serene... "His body sat serene" is what jumps out at my eyes. Reminds me of when people write stuff like "his skin felt the cold air." Basically I would have worded it a tiny bit differently. But another person might read it and see nothing wrong with it. Grumble grumble. I think the only reason this one didn't like leap out at me with teeth and claws is because parables about the virtue of poverty and the transience of pleasure are so universal that you already know how the story is going to go. Noah I actually quite liked this, just not enough considering how many extra words you have. I would've preferred you start with Mr. Finnster talking to David's parents. I feel like the most important thing about the exchange between Finny and the principle is the implication that Mr. Finnster is maybe not too competent, having 'lost' students before. This I feel like could be worked into the conversation with the parents. I like the use of tense, mainly when the present tense dialog butts into the past tense narration. Had you cut the bit with the principle, you could've invested more of the story in maybe like expounding on the whole rage boner thing. There. You made me type it. Expounding on rage boners. I like absurd juvenile non sequitur stories. But this one just left me feeling a little unfulfilled, like I missed a joke. It was prompt-germane and attempted to do something with the story-in-a-story format that wasn't just monologing. Which was an accomplishment this week. Helsing Ok so you had tough cards. I am going to be honest, I have no idea how I would have tackled this one. Maybe have Putin moonlight as some sort of bizarro incubus or something. Anyway. This is rough. It's like, the ideas are there, but they haven't been prettied up. It reads like a house where all the wires and plumbing haven't been dry walled out of sight. I get that she had to be traumatized or whatever for this psychic change to happen, but simply setting the story with someone imprisoned by Putin is already pretty implicitly traumatizing. No need for the rape/shooting stuff, and that her father was murdered could've been worked into the present narrative. Sometimes while reading this I feel like people are still attuned to the "hero's journey" structure of storytelling, which is why so many of these read like the beginning of a fantasy novel. This reads like it should be followed by some sort of escape or tension-escalating scene, but instead it's just an orphaned little embryo of flash fiction, like a bit of filament drifting in a black, uncaring abyss. Baggy_Brad Comma splicing is a cool and fun way of changing up your sentence structure. Unfortunately, when it's done wrong, you just have two ideas standing around awkwardly in a small sentence together. Your first sentence is an example. quote:Bodies were down by the wrecked Hewey, the warm air stank of poo poo. is another. Why not a period there? You manage to come close to something sort of touching though, even given your cards. I would've had the whole "wiping her butt, that's how I want to die" be an unspoken thing. Like have Prince say one thing and the narrative tell us that what's really up is that he wishes he could've died wiping his lady's rear end, which is a sweet sentiment if you think about it. ----- More when I'm not doing three other things.
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Oct 16, 2013 23:57
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crabrock posted:*cough* KaishA.I. Next prompt should be 'Kaishai is a robot, discuss'
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Oct 18, 2013 17:25
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Uuuuuuh well if anyone ever wanted to see what totally raw and uncut writing by me is like, presenting my Thunderbrawl with Sebmojo On Getting Down not even telling how many words this is "I just want to go home," says Sasha. Nearby a red plastic cup rocks back and forth on its side. The smell of gin hangs in the still, hot air, piney, like a Christmas wraith. The garbage bin is tipped over, its contents splayed out across the patio, a fan of glass and crushed aluminum. "loving look at me," says MaryBeth. "Are you going to loving cut me or not?" Sasha is facing MaryBeth in the Arizona heat, in the back yard of a timeshare home just outside of Lake Havasu City. The morning sun is climbing the horizon, trying to get a better look at the spectacle. Sasha is not thinking about what is at the end of her extended arm. She's not thinking about how the thing at the end of her arm is glinting in the ascendant sun. She's not thinking about how it's getting slippery because her hand is clammy because her fingers are wrapped around it so tight her knuckles blanch. She's thinking about the tableau of spilled recyclables, how they are just so because MaryBeth kicked the bin just so because Sasha said the wrong thing just when. Time is no longer moving laterally in the concrete and gravel back yard but deepening. The moment is up close and personal, like Chronos himself shoved under an electron microscope. "I," says Sasha when she has still neither cut MaryBeth nor put down the knife in her hand. The cans are there Because. She is there Because. MaryBeth is there Because. The knife is there Because. Up and down the dusty block, sounds and smells of waking humans drift through the heat like a hawk coasting across thermals. Coffee and voices that croak through the film of last night's booze and cigarettes. Time gives a little jump, as if it's only just remembered itself, and lurches into motion again. It occurs to Sasha that, should either of them call for help, she is the one holding the knife. # 'As far from home as possible' turned out to be Pennsylvania State University. Sasha landed at Philly International, took the three hour bus ride to the campus, and for three years it was like she'd been born again. Her brother was the only one to call or write, at least at first, but whatever sibling interface they'd shared years before had long since gone defunct. She had a folder in her email inbox labeled 'Walter', and all the messages were marked as unread. She'd only deleted his voicemails when her school friends complained that there wasn't any room to leave messages on Sasha's phone. Eventually, in the first quarter of her Sophomore year, the correspondences stopped coming, and life went on. # The counselor tapped the cap of his pen against his teeth. Sasha winced at the staccato of plastic against enamel. "I don't think you're depressed," the counselor said after something like three measures of pen-on-tooth percussion. He slid a student-made pamphlet across his desk. "There's a group of students who go out hiking a couple times a month, lot of them wallflowers like you." "I don't hike," said Sasha. "Beats the gym. But, Sasha, we've been talking all quarter. And until you make a change, we've run out of things to talk about." "Look, I hear you. Lets just pick something different." The counselor sat back in his chair. Tap tap tap tap taptap. The top of the pen glistened slightly with saliva, as it always did near the end of their sessions. "Boy, Sasha, I don't think I'd feel too great about letting you off the hook. Ultimately, you came to me to work on you, and I'm telling you that you need to get off campus for a little while. You've accepted that school can't solve all of your problems. It's time to own up, get out there and find your own answers." Taptaptaptaptaptaptap went the pen, the councilor's personal take on the classic Pause For Effect. Sasha supposed she could take the pamphlet and lie about hiking. Or take the pamphlet and never come back for another session. "I'll think about it," she said. # It was after classes on a Friday. Sasha dropped her backpack on one of the benches that lined the walkways between the school buildings and fished out an aggregate of trash and crumpled papers long overdue for the bin. She always used the public bins, since trash tended to pile up on and around the small can in her dorm room. There was a girl nearby smoking a cigarette, watching Sasha. "I always tell myself," said the girl, who was tall and thick-boned and had short, dark hair, "that this is the time that I'm gonna keep my bag clean. And then weeks later you're pulling out essays covered in crumbs, going 'but I just cleaned this,' only 'just' was like three months ago." Sasha didn't look up. "I know, right?" "Hey," the dark-haired girl said, spying certain crinkled pamphlet in the garbage. "You must be chronically avoiding the counseling office too." At that Sasha did look up. "I guess hiking is the guy's pet cure-all. It just wasn't my thing. We hit a wall, so I left." "Did he do the thing with the teeth?" "Oh, gently caress the thing with the teeth. And the pen? Yeah." "I think the whole strategy is to make students realize that there is something worse than our respective personal dramas--" the dark-haired girl tossed her cigarette into the bin, onto the pamphlet "--and that something is teeth. Plastic and teeth." Sasha finished purging her bag and swung it back over her shoulder. "Well cool. See you around or something." "Hey, why don't you come out to the fire tower on Thickhead Mountain with us tonight? It's not really hiking if you're drunk and it's dark." "I don't do hikes," sighed Sasha. "I just don't. It's dumb, and I'm wrong, but I don't." "I just said it's not a hike. Also, my name's MaryBeth." "Sorry MaryBeth," said Sasha. "My name's Sasha, and if you want to do anything aside from hiking, I'd be down." MaryBeth smiled. "Are you familiar with the works of Timothy Leary?" # "Walter! Walter!" Her brother's name had ceased to sound like a word. It was a bird call, spiraling out into the empty air around the cliff face, dissipating across the wind. "Will you shut that girl up? Someone's gonna know we're up here..." "It's her first time, rear end in a top hat. I should've known. Hey Sasha, who's Walter?" Sasha was atop the rickety old Greenwood fire tower with MaryBeth and Jeff. All three were tripping significantly on LSD and possibly some ketamine in at least one case, and Sasha was the furthest gone of all, and her compatriots were having serious considerations about when and maybe even if they were going to be able to get her down before her wailing brought down the park ranger heat. Sasha was also ten years old in that moment, clinging to the side of a sharp incline by the strength of what spindly roots poked through the clay and stones. She'd got too far above Walter, ignored his repeated calls for her to slow down and wait up. And then next time she'd looked down he was back at the bottom, shielding his eyes against the noontime sun. "Come down," he shouted, and Sasha had tried. "Sasha, sweetie, you gotta climb down now," said MaryBeth. Sasha had put one tentative foot on the jutting, football sized stone she'd used as a foothold just moments before and it wiggled. A little more weight and the stone came loose, tumbling down the sharp incline, threading between Walter's legs on its final bounce, and Walter'd only had enough time to look helplessly alarmed as the thing just missed his privates. "The whole drat hill could fall over," Walter muttered. Sasha had never heard her older brother use a bad word. "Hey Sasha," he'd called up, louder. "I need you to stay right there, okay? I'm gonna go get dad or something." "Okay," Sasha had called back down with little kid bravado. She'd been sure she could hold on forever, which was only as long as it would take her brother an dad to come get her, and then things would be fine. MaryBeth: "Look, Jeff, you go. I'm just gonna stay with her up here. If something happened and we'd left her..." "Fine. But I wasn't here. For any of this." Sounds of Jeff receding. Sounds of Walter crashing through the forest, back the way he and Sasha had come. "It's okay. We'll stay up here. You're peaking, I gave you too much." MaryBeth's comforting hand on Sasha's back was the summer wind against that hillside and little Sasha clung and waited, now terrified that even trying to climb down would challenge some brotherly wisdom of Walter's and result in her untimely demise. For the first time in her young life, Sasha's, she thought about being all gone. Tumbling down that hill, bouncing like a stone, her little bones breaking against the indifferent solidity of sun-baked clay. Of laying on the forest floor, empty, all gone, of the wind blowing through the trees above her, continuing on even though she had stopped. She looked northeast out of the fire tower, across the rolling blue-black blanket of the Rothrock State Forest under the cloud-filtered moonlight, but only saw daytime passing in the old logging forests near the old family home in Willemette. In the fire tower, her nails dug bloody crescents into her palms, which was the sensation of her little hands going numb as the sequestered chill beneath the surface of the cliff--for it had become a cliff in the funhouse mirror of Sasha's mind's eye--seeped into dirty fingers locked in what had transformed into a life-or-death battle to stay in precisely the position that Walter had left her in, because she didn't want to fall, and be all gone. "It's called ego-death," said MaryBeth. "It's normal. You feel like you're 'gone', but you're really just discovering that you were never here to begin with." "I remember," said Sasha, hoarse, sitting up on the weathered floorboards of the fire tower. "Whoa, hey. Are you...?" "I haven't talked to my brother in three years," said Sasha, swaying there on her knees way up in the fire house on the mountain. "I never knew why, but. I remember. Things were always different. He never came back. I waited there, and he never came back." "Are you good to climb back down, sweetie? We can talk on the way back. But we should like really leave if you're good to leave." Sasha felt like she was really onto something, though. "I got in trouble. Mom and dad said I went too high, should've listened to Walt. But he left me. I don't know why no one came back." "I'm gonna help you get down onto the stairs here. Can you manage the stairs?" "I got down on my own in the end, obviously. Cut up my knee pretty bad, which ruined my jeans. Which is another reason I got in trouble." Sasha let MaryBeth coax her onto the rickety wooden stairs beneath the cabin of the fire tower, felt her legs start the mechanical process of hefting her body down what felt like an infinity of steps. Near the bottom, park rangers had demolished the lowest two flights of stairs, and Sasha watched herself drop fearlessly to the grass below, marveling at how her body simply did when she herself was too dissolved to man the helm. # Screaming Waaaaalteeeeerrrr became the new insider meme of MaryBeth's inner circle. The so-called Walter Story, for reasons Sasha couldn't fathom, endeared her to a group of people that she would've never even approached under other circumstances. The party goers. The drug doers. Sasha added words like dose, nug, bump, roll, flip, and grams (the metric kind) to her regular lexicon, plus a slough of chemical compounds both organic and designer. By senior year, she was a changed young woman, with a 3.2 GPA and a bright career in impressing other self-styled psychonauts. # The idea to fly to Arizona for spring break came of course from MaryBeth. "Look, if you don't want to..." she said, fiddling with the pens on Sasha's desk. "I mean, I'll do whatever you do, but Lake Havasu isn't really my thing." Sasha was scratching a red bump that had appeared near her tobacco patch, contemplating if that meant that the patch was worse than the habit it was combating. "It's all like, guys with 'Thug' tattooed across their chests and girls in thong bikinis on boats." "We could get mescaline," said MaryBeth, dropping the pens and leaning in conspiratorially. "Possibly. It's like a friend-of-a-friend's hookup. But worst case, we watch a bunch of bros and bro-hos make idiots of themselves. My mom owns a vacation home near town. You down?" "Well, like," said Sasha, "what else am I gonna do? Your friends only like me when you're around." "Maybe if you'd, like, talk more, or had anything interesting to say. They're really intellectual people, you can't just agree with them all of the time. They hate that." "I guess I don't feel like I can talk to them unless you're around," said Sasha, looking down. MaryBeth smiled. # The above passes through Sasha's mind in the amount of time it takes for MaryBeth to realize that Sasha is not going to cut her and run into the house. The cans are peppering the patio because MaryBeth had kicked the bin, because she was angry at Sasha, because they were both coming down off of the mescaline that Marybeth may or may not have hosed some guy to get, and Sasha, she was having second thoughts about everything, about the drugs and the friends and the trip and MaryBeth herself, which she told MaryBeth, there in the early morning desert light in the concrete and gravel back yard, told her, MaryBeth, how she, Sasha, was tired of hanging from cliffs of other people's design. And MaryBeth had tried to say that maybe Sasha put her own drat self up on the cliffs, and it wasn't anyone else's job to get her down, and she shouldn't blame people for not always trying to. Sasha had said, "Maybe you want me up on your cliff." And the rest had sort of followed according to the caustic a-rationality of the college burnout: The kicking, the yelling, the running into the kitchen to grab a knife, the cliché threats and the final staredown on the back patio, and now time is chugging along quite nicely again, Chronos having extracted himself from the microscope and dusted off the indignity of the scrutiny, and gone on his way. Sasha drops the steak knife, a thousand Becauses dispersing kinetically into the ground with the clang of the blade.
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Oct 20, 2013 08:14
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W/e just leaving this here. You can cry or not cry, it's up to you! Michael's Peace 998 words The gravel road to Mom's house is overgrown and filled with potholes. The summer rain's made it into a real quagmire, so I park the car out on 404th and squelch down tire ruts that haven't got much deeper since my last visit in December. It's halfway there that I get this feeling in my stomach. Like I'd swallowed a cold raw egg. There's a turn in Mom's road so that you bump right up against Mr. Sackman's farm, which is to say his oversized yard and its several raised flower beds, and I stop dead right there at the beginning of the path's gentle eastward arc, fixated on that cold egg. Then a purple-scented breeze picks up, stirs something buried, and I remember. . Michael and I surveyed the planetoid kingdom of Shale with the fractal perspective of deities, seeing both the whole and all of its component parts. Travel was as simple as shifting one's attention. We could cup the whole world in our hands one moment, and be the size of a cell the next, which we did often, to visit the denizens of the microcosm. "There should be mountains there," said Michael, pointing at a empty patch of world. "And like really big trees with bridges between them and there'll be these things call Treegars who live in treehouses." And lo, there were, and it was good. Our bedroom door opened, and carefully placed squares of butcher paper fluttered, fracturing Shale into meaningless segments. "Hey guys," said Mom. "We're going to Grandma's for the weekend. Grab your stuff, I'm gonna start the car." "But our drawings'll get crinkled in the car again," I said, gesturing at the carpet of be-crayoned paper surrounding my brother and I. "You can draw it again at Grandma's house," mom said, looking over her shoulder down the hall. The house was quiet outside of our room. Mom's eyes and nostrils were red around the edges. "Grandma only has the little paper," Michael complained. But Mom had turned on her heel and gone sniffling down the hall, walking with the absent hurry of the turbulently preoccupied. . The capital-D-Divorce landed Mom the house and its ten wild acres. Dad was a fleeting figure, glimpsed only rarely when he was on one of his sojourns to retrieve yet more of his things to take back to capital-H-slanty-letters-Her apartment. Mom took pretty much full time responsibility for me and Michael and the house, molded herself like latex around the stark shape of a mortgage and single parenthood. Michael and I adapted, visited Shale as often as we could. We laid big, dog-eared sheets of butcher paper end to end and we drew Treegars and Doliphants and Gnomes and Dragons. We planted the great Life Trees, which produced fruit so rich that no animal had to consume another to live. I remember it was that summer that Mr. Sackman planted the lilacs. "What's our national flower?" Michael asked me one day while we were coloring. "Why don't you make one up?" I said absently. Michael was quiet for a while, considering. "I'm making up a new name for Farmer Sackman's purple flowers that smell like Mom." "The lilacs?" "They'll be--" Michael sat back on his heels, little face scrunched in concentration. "Shallacs. And anyone who smells them is happy. Is why it's the national world flower." When the weather allowed, we could visit Shale by playing on specially designated landmarks. The Big Tree in the front yard was our castle, in whose branches we would sit and describe to each other the sights of Shale from on high. Mr. Sackman's farm and its raised flower beds were the Dragon Plains, previously the site of historic battles for the ultimate fate of the planetoid, now war-free by decree of Michael, who thought it would be much too hard to fight like a real warrior around the happiness-inducing Shallacs. Mr. Sackman'd lost his wife the year before, and where some men would let their home fall into neglect, he went full farmer, expanding gardens, putting up a deer fence, and most impressively, single-handedly building most of a barn, which, had it ever been completed, would've housed the bins of dormant flower bulbs he planted each spring. For two kids who didn't live within ten miles of a jungle gym, the skeletal frame of the structure was the closest thing we had on weekends to play equipment. In the landscape of Shale, it was an ancient ruin, unearthed in the advent of Michael's Peace. We would scramble fearlessly up exposed beams into the rafters and sit there for hours with our legs dangling over the tangled pit of rebar where the barn's foundation was meant to be. Until the day Mr. Sackman came home early. "Car!" shouted Michael at the sound of rumbling from out on 404th street. "Sack-Man is home," I said, already shimmying back across a rough beam. "No--don't try to walk across. Sit on your butt, like this." But then that thick, lilac breeze picked up. I shook my bangs out of my eyes just in time to see Michael begin a long, time-defying arc outward into empty air, one hand still rubbing hair or a spec of dust out of his eye, the other hand grabbing for a handhold that wasn't there. Smack, went his little forehead against another wooden beam. . I don't realize that I've walked the rest of the way to mom's house until I seem him there on the porch. He's fragile and small, half the size a grown man should be, nearly swallowed by the cushions of the dirty patio chair. Michael stares past me as I walk up to the house, grossly there and not there, half of our world locked away behind a door that will never open again. The breeze picks up and fills the space between us with lilacs, but the magic is gone, and I can only kneel down and cry against his bony knee.
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Oct 20, 2013 22:33
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^^^^^^^^^^^^ F U Week 64: Dead or Alive The first part of your prompt this week is simple. I want you to tell me, in 500 to 1000 words, a scifi/fantasy/horror story about Outlaws. Space pirates? Rogue Robocops? Moody mobsters? Brooding anime antiheros*? Bring on the best of the worst. Now there is a second part to this prompt, that I will tell you about later. All you need to know for now is that if you would like to participate in the super exciting secret second portion of this week's Thunderdome, you will need to post your story as a link to google drive, skydrive, etc. Preferably Google Drive with comments enabled, which will also let me comment directly on your story this week.More information this weekend. You may post your story regularly in the thread, but be aware that you may not be able to participate in the second half of the prompt. Will this impact my judgement? Who knows. So to recap: Word Count: 500-1000 (nothing under 500) Signup Date;: 11:59:59 PM on Friday the 25th, PST Submission Date: 11:59:59 PM on Sunday the 27th, PST Judges: Myself, Sebmojo, and whatever unlucky bastard I guilt into helping us Misc: Attention new blooded babbies, I've noticed there are a bunch of you in this fine thread. If you have any questions, feel free to hit us up on IRC. We're on SynIRC, Channel is #Kyrena. Or PM me or email me at citybythelee at gmail dot com for all things writing and Thunderdome related. *not really don't do this, ever Fodder for the Blood God: Dr. Kloctopussy dmboogie inthesto Crabrock Jopoho Quidnose Bad Seafood Tyrannosaurus V for Vegas big business sloth Mirthless Fraction-submitted Noumena-submitted systran Zack_Gochuck TenaCrane Symptomless Coma J Hume Jeza Roguelike Can'tDecideOnAName Haam Dirty Communist Erogenous Beef blue squares-submitted Noah The Swinemaster Ronnie_Long bald gnome error NUBILE CHILLOCK(!) Bitchtits McGee Nikaer Drekin FouRPlaY Helsing Echo Cian docbeard Steriletom Sitting Here fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Oct 26, 2013 |
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Oct 22, 2013 03:10
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Still wanted: Two stalwart judging companions. Preferably anyone who can come up with a good drinking game on the fly.
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Oct 22, 2013 23:23
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Just a reminder that you are always welcome to carry discussion over to the Fiction Advice thread, and you can repost your story for more detailed critique in the Fiction Farm. Remember that in the 'Farm it's generally expected that you'll try to say something constructive about someone else's work, too. But I think a one-post reponse to crits, especially if the crit asked a question of the author, is reasonable. Generally speaking I have always been against rules, cause rules attract rules lawyers, so just realize that this thread is not about workshopping individual pieces, since we have other threads for that.
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Oct 23, 2013 22:31
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Would anyone like a flash rule?
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Oct 24, 2013 00:18
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Responding to critiques on Google docs is fine, it's not making GBS threads up anything to reply to crits off of the forums. I've started going through these first submissions. I will try to have comments on everything up so far within the day. I haven't checked for comments from my other judges (Mercedes, did you say you would judge? I forget) but they are more than welcome to jump in.
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Oct 26, 2013 20:34
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Six-ish more hours for submissions. I will be a little behind on reading due to some lovely IRL personal stuff, but I will be doing comments all tomorrow.
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Oct 28, 2013 01:50
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Submissions closed.
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Oct 28, 2013 08:09
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PART 2 This is not a judgement post. While me and my bedraggled and still somewhat stalwart judges deliberate, I have another assignment for you. Guys, the truth is, I shamelessly stole this prompt from elsewhere. I stole the prompt, and then I forced all you guys to put your stories behind links. Because, you see, you're going to go to http://www.kazkapress.net/713flashfiction/ and submit your story. Please read all submissions guidelines and format your email/story appropriately. quote:Send your submission in an email to kazkasubs[at]gmail.com. Attach your file to the email. Don’t forget to include your cover letter in the body of the email. It is very important that we know for which issue a story is being submitted. PLEASE make sure to note that in your Subject Line. A good sample subject line would be “Kazka Press Submission for the Out of Time issue.” We've goonrushed magazines before and had a lot of acceptances. You might surprise yourself, but the very worst thing that could happen is that you'll get a form rejection, I promise. Post in this thread once you've submitted. Do not loving disappoint me.
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Oct 28, 2013 21:11
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Just as a side note, feel free to edit ANOTHER COPY OF YOUR STORY THAT IS NOT THE ONE YOU POSTED FOR ME TO READ and submit that one. Just submit something, and tell us about it. Judgement coming, realistically, late tonight or early tomorrow. So it's a good thing you guys have something to stay busy with now!
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Oct 28, 2013 21:15
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While I am chugging along on comments on pieces that have them allowed (which not all of them do), I recommend submitting now. Why? Because for lots of us, a big barrier to venturing past writing for our own amusement or posting on, say, certain forums, is the submission process. Honestly, I'm not going to be able to personally edit everyone's work to their satisfaction, and plus this is Thunderdome, and Thunderdome is hardcore, and I see a lot of scared people cowering in terror of the prospect of mean words and rejection, when those are exactly what you need, and will continue to need for your whole writing career*. Just get over it and submit. If you don't like what you submitted, relish that feeling and use it to tackle another story. Rinse and repeat. In addition to getting less poo poo at writing, you will soon notice that you have a backlog of stories that, even if they weren't successful on a first try, you can always go edit and send somewhere else. So go forth and goonrush. loving do it right now go. *I assume, but I don't have a writing career because I never loving SUBMIT anything. A cautionary tale if I ever heard one. EDIT if anyone failed to submit this week and wants to redeem themselves, they may do that by posting a screenshot of sending the submission, and I will beseech the archivists to strike your names from the failure list. Sitting Here fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Oct 28, 2013 |
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Oct 28, 2013 22:50
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This is a judgement post This was a tough week to judge. A lot of new entrants, a lot of good, a lot of bad, a lot of solidly in between. Well done everyone who has submitted, and continues to submit, to the flash fiction contest. Anyway. Your (close) runners up were: Erogenous Beef, J Hume, and The Swinemaster. Noumena also deserves mention for making a pretty big turn around in story quality. There was a lot of back and forth about judgement (which is a good thing), but ultimately by my executive judgely decree, Echo Cian is your winner this week. Echo's story was at the very edge the genre requirement, but I thought in particular it seemed to have the strongest idea of where it was going, and was one of few stories where I thought that multiple characters were given understandable motivations.  Your LOSER this week is, I'm afraid to say, Tyrannosaurus. There was just tooooooo much going on there, buddy. It read like a summary. A lot of big, cool stuff happens, but the action itself was often unclear and there was too much of it with too little context and too little real characterization. Dishonorable mentions: dmboogie, haam, and maybe like Jopoho. We were widely torn over the loser, which is both a good and a bad thing depending on how you look at it. Things I noticed this week: Stories that just kind of ended Clumsy exposition through dialog Pretty much everyone featured the outlaws and their protagonists and/or POV characters "Once upon a time there was a guy who was an rear end in a top hat. Then he died. The End." Cowboys n indians Characters that were fodder/meat shields I'm still chugging through actually commenting on all the pieces. Should be finished by tomorrow. If you would like further discussion or critique, let me preemptively guide you to the Fiction Advice Thread and the Fiction Farm respectively. I don't mind if people respond to google docs comments, but be aware I might not see all of them if I get a bunch. Other people are more than welcome to continue to jump on commenting, as a lot of you apparently have. Your move, Echo. Sitting Here fucked around with this message at 06:51 on Oct 29, 2013 |
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Oct 29, 2013 06:41
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Chairchucker posted:This is an even better judgement post I'll take it! Me IRL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPURxkrl2aE&t=77s
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Oct 29, 2013 16:16
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Here's the first half of my crits while we're waiting. I will do the other half when I am not sandwiched between middle management and wall-eyed customers. Roguelike - Little Drummer Girl Well, I already left some comments on the google doc. Overall, the setting felt a little tacked on, with 'Neo Beijing' and the neon signs everywhere. If scifi fiction is to be believed, at some point all major east asian metropolises are gonna be like "whelp, it's the future now, Tokyo more like NEO Tokyo." But okay so you're William Gibson-ing. I still find it hard to believe that someone who thinks what I'm guessing is contemporary (to us) rock music is devil-worshipping jabber, it's weird that she would be so confident that she could play a whole set on an hour's notice. IDK, IANADrummer so maybe this is possible, but it seems unlikely since we don't actually know anything about Mercy's musical background before her 'reeducation'. The ending could be hopeful, I guess. Maybe she'll go on to subvert the theocracy with the power of music or something. But it could also portend an unremarkable return to the status quo. For making Jair sound like a bad caricature of a 50's hipster I sentence you to listen to this: http://www.howtospeakhip.com/ Yes you have to click the Buddha's forehead to play. STONE OF MADNESS - The Bonedrum So wait was this a Conan the Barbarian fanfic? That makes me grumpy. I was reading through it going "wow Stone this is purple as gently caress" and then I saw 'Conan' and I realized I'd been HAD But the whole like "write elaborate prose and then reveal that it was X Character all along" shtick is eh. I don't even feel like typing out a full crit now because of how unimpressed I am Fraction - The Games So, over in the Fiction Advice thread we were chatting about present tense, and even people who don't hate it all seem to agree that it should be used to give a sense of immediacy to the writing, since it's quote-unquote happening in real time. But in this case, it's very isolating and stifling. You character is more or less a walking camera; even when he's playing the song, he's just imagining other stuff that happened that he has no ability to change or interact with. And then he loses so he just sucks I guess. The conflict in this story is pretty diffuse. Like, two kids are fighting, and then all these other dudes want to win the laurel crown, and it's all just kind of happening in this empty void that I'm kind of mentally filling in with rustic white columns and Socrateses. Yeah, the narrator wants to win, cause WINNING hell yes everyone wants to Win, but that's all I know about him other than he also really likes Apollo. This story sort of hangs on the sort of overload of myth and historical tidbits; if this had been an original world with its own gods, this would be almost incomprehensible and there wouldn't be a whole lot to it. I spent like 10 minutes reading about the Pythian Games though so that was cool. Tyrannosaurus - Slave So like, I got instantly that you were talking about a guitar. But I'm not sure if it's an allegory for something about music, or abusive relationships, or what the point really is with personifying a guitar like this is 50 Strings of Grey. "She" still loves him at the end. A guitar gets fingered, neglected, pissed in, and still loves the guy. I'm not sure what to do with that, Mr. Saurus. BDSM stuff aside, this is better than last week, which was all over the place. Next time maybe you'll write a straight up story, with a beginning, middle, and end, and something that changes as a result of tension and conflict over the course of those parts. I feel like you tried to do something fancy here, and it didn't quite work because the arc is more like a straight line: There is a guitar who's basically a lady, her life is sad, she gets thrown away, the end. Chairchucker - God from the (Tin) Machine Oh man this had everything. Weaponized wheelchair jokes. The Talking Heads. On stage bloopers. David Bowie. 4th wall breaking narration. Mind blown. Close the dome, losertars for everyone but Chairchucker, go home, the rest of you. Quidnose - Etude #44 Hrm. Well this was nice, though I'm not entirely sure it fits within genre requirements. I guess you threw in faeries or whatever near the end, but I assumed that was more metaphorical since it doesn't come up at any other point. Otherwise it's pretty good, if not a little bit of a tired premise (Older guy goes through old stuff, finds something that rekindles his youthful passion, if only for a moment), but you might have benefited a lot from actually including maybe some fantasy element because writing about regretful people looking back on their younger days for whatever reason is pretty well-trodden territory PARTICULARLY here in the 'dome. Erogenous Beef - Sharp Harmony Beef you do this thing sometimes where I'm certain I'm reading a cool thing, and I can even make out all of the action in a general sense, but when I sit down to try and articulate what exactly I read, I can't. So there's like the DJ of fate at the center of the universe, who gets killed, but since fate is apparently music tracks on iPods and his were on shuffle he just pops back into existence after a certain amount of time? And this Parca person is trying to take over the club at the center of the universe by messing with time and music and stuff? It's a little bit unclear what the mechanics of the whole time/music/iPod cosmology are. This was cool, I want to like it, but it was still a liiiittle bit convoluted. inthesto - Duet There was some choppy writing in some places, and it was kind of weird that the story started out with Bach Jr. trying to honor his father but ends up being about him and his wife? Who play a show together and then are dead? This is another story where some stuff happens in a logical order but it doesn't really say anything distinct. I guess it's sad that they Bach'd themselves to death or w/e. But a melancholy series of events doesn't make a plot. quote:Emmanuel was going to write the best string quartet that his father heard from Heaven You switch from future in the past to regular past tense here. Should say something like "...that his father would ever hear..." or something. quote:With an inhale, his lips kissed the back of her hea Why is it always like, "his body part did a thing" even though in normal speech you would say "he inhaled and kissed the back of her head". It almost always sounds really awkward and passive to describe body parts taking action usually attributed to the character. Sitting Here fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Nov 5, 2013 |
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Nov 5, 2013 02:49
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Nubile Hillock posted:in with a FTFY
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Nov 5, 2013 05:36
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^blarg Yep. Say "in" by Friday, submit by usually Sunday night, results come in Monday or Tuesday. Rinse and repeat. People who sign up but don't submit risk anything from benign neglect to full on shame and exhile at the hands of their peers. If you wanna brawl a fucker you step up to that fucker and tell him/her to their face that that face is stupid and you want to hit it, with your fists, which are made of words. Or keep running your mouth and one of our smackdown-layers will be with you momentarily. Your call is important to us. Only judges and really bad dudes can flashrule, and you may or may not have any say in whether or not you get one.
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Nov 7, 2013 20:17
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i think i'll be in i guess
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Nov 12, 2013 00:14
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sebmojo posted:
yes
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Nov 12, 2013 06:55
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WOO FIRST (submission) POST   A Portrait of the Endless Scatalogical Cycle of Life and Death 997 words To look at my brother, you'd think he was out walking a dog. He parked me as close to the Plexiglas leopard cage as he could, what with the melee of children jostling each other for an unobscured view of the pacing animal, and thumbed absently at the touchscreen of his cell phone. Parents noticed me, wrangled children out of the way with gentle tugs and hushed voices. Let the man in the wheelchair have your spot. How kind of me, to show up and offer this teachable moment. My brother whose name is Kyle didn't look up to see that there was a spot for me. I have never touched a smart phone. They didn't exist when I was diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis in 1995. By the time the kids were all sexting and streaming and photo blogging, I'd been reduced to a silent eating and pooping machine, wheelchair-bound with near-total paralysis, my neck constantly at a dystonic angle that I am well aware people find extremely unsettling. The leopard had stopped pacing, was right up at the Plexiglas looking directly at me. I'm in my mom's full time care, but she guilts Kyle into spending time with me. When people take people in wheelchairs out, it's always to feel-good places like zoos and museums. Especially when I can't tell Kyle or whoever, look, just park me in front of some porn. I guessed Kyle was texting a girl by how he didn't even pretend to try to carry on the one sided sort of conversation that always sounds like he's talking to a baby instead of his adult older brother. Lookit this, Bud, they got a genuine Monet here. Man, that guy knew his colors. You see the colors, Bud? He says Monet like MO-nay. The leopard's mouth was open slightly, like big cats do sometimes and housecats don't. He looked dead into my eyes, completely unphased by the U-bendish crook in my neck or the way my face is waxy and unemotive, or how even my eyes have a distant, unfocused look because the right one goes in and out and I never know what sort of day I'm going to have, depth perception-wise. The leopard knew what everyone else tried to ignore, that I was a botched experiment in food-to-crap alchemy. The leopard could look right at me without shame because it was comfortable with that knowledge. Meanwhile, I was still hung up on porno-type thoughts. Being what amounted to a sentient piece of rolling furniture had the effect of making me hellishly, defiantly sexual; the inside of my head was like a fifteen year old boy's unwashed jizz sock. Another wave of families trickled over to the leopard exhibit. The leopard started to pace along the viewing window, back and forth as the kids all shoved at each other to get their tiny, sausagey fingers right up on the print-stained Plexiglas. They were too young to see the animal was a thing that was experiencing their attention, rather than just a curiosity to pay attention to. "You wanna go look at the monkeys, Bud?" It was a rhetorical question that Kyle asked, since he was already disengaging my brakes and starting to wheel me around back to the main zoo path. But before we could go there was a swell of commotion from the leopard-viewers, one part parental objection, two parts squealing, happily grossed out children. No one said anything about giving up a spot so that the wheelchair guy this time, so I knew something really interesting was happening. Some parents were pulling their kids away, saying placating type stuff. "The mommy and the daddy leopard need some quiet time," said one mom to her uncooperative eight or nine year old, who was clearly at that moment more interested in whatever scandal happening in the cage than anything else in the entire zoo. "Oh god, would you look at that," said Kyle, hands still on the handles of my chair. We weren't moving. Reluctantly, but with gathering momentum, the kerfuffle of children peeled away with their parents, opening up once again an unobstructed view of the leopard. Or leopards. One mounted the other with that taut, hunched posture of animal rutting. 'My' leopard flicked his little round ears and stared straight ahead, totally in the moment, doing the one thing in its nature that was permitted and encouraged inside the preservative compassion of the zoo cage. It's not like I'm into animals. I can't explain to you how or why what happened there at the leopard exhibit happened. I can speculate that some combination of my own undersexed desperation and a basic empathy for anything caged had something to do with it. "...the gently caress? Bud, do you realize what's going on in your crotch region right now?" I can speculate that the cosmos was like working through me in that moment to give Kyle his own teachable moment, or maybe years of aggregated rage managed right then to bridge the neurological gap between me and the long-defunct boner centers in my brain. Whatever the reason, there I was, turgider than I'd been in more than a decade, staring at a couple of giant screwing cats. "Lets get you out of here," Kyle said in the same voice as the placating parents. "Maybe the little guy'll go away on his own. It's probably just some MS thing, right? Nerves, and poo poo." He started to wheel me back to the main path, all shamed and embarrassed on my behalf. I felt it then, welling up in the back of my throat. Something in my neck flexed experimentally, like a baby bird spreading its wings for first flight. My dick was a defiant tent pole in my baggy sweatpants. A single syllable ejected itself up through the flapping meat of my vocal cords. My jaw felt unhinged around it. My brother looked at me in horror. "OCK," I erupted. "Ock, ock, ock, OCK!" Sitting Here fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Nov 14, 2013 |
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Nov 14, 2013 05:10
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