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Zack_Gochuck posted:In, but I have no ideas. Give me two flash rules.  Flash Rule #2: Your main character needs to have either a son or a father who also appears in the story.
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Nov 5, 2013 18:04
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Noumena posted:I'm in, and gimme a flash rule Flash Rule: The stakes of your gamble must be the fate of a world. Possibilities include the protagonist's inner world, all of Earth, or another planet entirely.
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Nov 5, 2013 22:44
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RickVoid posted:Not necessarily. Your wish for a challenge is granted, gambler. The flash rules are yours. That necessitates a new Flash Rule for Sweet_Joke_Nectar: Precious stones need to play a key role in your plot.
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Nov 6, 2013 18:51
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I'll clarify further, since the last two rounds allowed Google Docs: I don't want to see them. Post all stories in the thread this time.
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Nov 6, 2013 22:04
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Twenty-four hours remain to grab a seat at the table!
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Nov 8, 2013 06:04
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Sign-ups for Week LXVI are CLOSED. Entrants have approximately 48 hours left to play their hands.
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Nov 9, 2013 07:45
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Roughly five hours remain for submissions.
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Nov 11, 2013 01:11
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Twenty minutes and six stories yet to go!
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Nov 11, 2013 05:40
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Submissions for Week LXVI: Know When to Fold 'Em are CLOSED! Eighteen players have laid their cards face up, and we'll shortly learn who had the royal flush and who tried to play a Joker. dmboogie, big business sloth, and Zack_Gochuck folded early; DasNasty, Noumena, and RickVoid lay unconscious under the table, ripe for someone with more fortitude to steal their wallets and possibly their pants. If any of the above post a story within 24 hours, they'll receive a critique even though the pot is out of their reach.
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Nov 11, 2013 06:26
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Week LXVI Results: Know When to Fold 'Em It's a rare week when the losing story is kind enough to jump out so early and shout, "HERE I AM!" The winning piece was more reclusive, but after examining the hands and consulting the rulebook, the judges have ruled in someone's favor. THE WINNER: Quidnose. This week you hit the prompt in the gut, with a touch of magical realism and plenty of Hold 'Em lingo on the side. You've won a seat at the head of the judges' table next week. Was that prize worth playing for? You'll find out! THE LOSER: Surprising absolutely no one, Sweet_Joke_Nectar will don the crown of sculpted feces. Hope you like that losertar. You earned it. DISHONORABLE MENTIONS: Lazy Beggar fought valiantly for defeat with a story so badly put together that it could barely be read; alas, the core plot fit the prompt, so the loss was not to be. stoutfish fulfilled a flash rule, but the grammar, characters, and prose of his/her entry put it in spitting distance of the Losers' Lounge nevertheless. Good work, everyone who didn't write about poo poo geysers! All the judges are working on crits, so keep an eye on the thread. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 08:27 on Nov 12, 2013 |
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Nov 11, 2013 21:35
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Critiques for Week LXVI: The Real Loser Is the House This is a week to remember for just how bad the lower entries were. If the best had been as extreme in quality, publishers would be falling over themselves right now to offer Quidnose seven-figure advances. Still, there were seven or eight stories I actively enjoyed, and I loathed only a few. In a round that began with a poo poo geyser, that's about as much as I could have hoped for. Sweet_Joke_Nectar, "LYSANDER, THE MIGHTY AXE" This story hurts me to read in oh, so many ways. Which is worst: the incredibly tired nerd cliches, the passive phrasing, the bad grammar, the muddled dialogue, screwing up the prompt, screwing up your flash rule, or making me read about a fecal explosion? LOLZ, I CAN'T DECIDE! SQUEE! RUSSIAN ROULETTE ISN'T MUCH OF A GAMBLE WHEN ALL THE CHAMBERS ARE LOADED! Let's turn off the caps lock for a minute and break down the ways this failed. Your flash rule was to make precious stones key to your plot. Pop Rocks are neither stones nor precious in any sane estimation, but this element came closest to working for you; it could have come off as clever or at least smartassed if the story didn't have its head buried in the crap bucket otherwise. The prompt was to write about a life-changing gamble. Mixing Mountain Dew and Pop Rocks in a bucket is not a gamble, with or without feces. They don't explode when mixed, and if they're staples of Lyle's diet, both brothers should know it; either way the poo poo geyser that kills Mark is nonsense on every level. Also, the main character is killed by a poo poo geyser. I really don't have to say anything else, do I? I'm guessing you were going for humor, but this is pure Grade F- monkeycheese instead: a bunch of creaky stereotypes and wacky antics (lolz!) strung together on a frame with all the stability of nitroglycerin. Comedy is difficult, granted. Humor is very subjective. Maybe you had satire or irony in mind, though the aforementioned poo poo geyser casts some doubt. But even if I found exaggerated gamerz or feces inherently funny (nope and nope), I'd want a character I cared about at least a tiny bit, a procession of events that had some logic to it, and a finale that wasn't cataclysmically stupid. Technical errors riddle the piece. In terms of format, putting a blank space between every paragraph would have made for easier on-screen reading; fewer CAPS OF RAGE would have had a similar beneficial effect. It isn't always easy to tell who's speaking. For example, right after “Where the gently caress is my sandwich!” you've got Lyle throwing open the door of his room. That reads as though Lyle is the one screaming about sandwiches. The sentence 'Lyle was interrupted by a smack to the back of the head' is passive and outright bizarre considering Mark is the viewpoint character. You have multiple characters speaking within the same paragraph. '“Gamer fuel, bro”,' is a travesty. Axes don't have hilts. 'Mentos' and 'Pepsi' should be capitalized as proper nouns. 'Saccharine' is not a noun and shouldn't be used as one. Etcetera. Etcetera. Et-bloody-cetera. Reading over past crits in TD or the Farm could help if you want to get better at the grammatical aspect, or you could submit a different piece to the Farm yourself. You've likely realized by now that I haaaate this story. Write something less charmlessly WACKADOO next time if you want a prayer of redemption. ****** TenaCrane, "En Route Mortality" A story from the perspective of a salmon? You have my interest. I would like your salmon protagonist better if he were less similar to a human--you mention salmon 'words' as sounds, you have him feeling satisfaction at outwitting a bear, you have him metaphorically thumbing his nose at said bear, and the other salmon react to his feat as if they know about it and understand it as people would. That contrasts with what I'd call the stronger moments, when Hookjaw's compulsion is described as physical pain and when his body reacts to a change in salinity: I buy him as a fish in these moments. When he squints to see something, less so. Did you write in a screaming salmon or did I hallucinate that? Hookjaw encounters bears twice, and it's hard to see what the first encounter adds to the story besides words. The second encounter is repetitive. A few snips of information don't belong in the story, IMO, such as 'a perfect breeding ground for deadly parasites'--why would a fish know that? Why would he care? Why do I care since that has nothing to do with what's going on? Hookjaw also sees and realizes a lot about the alpha (why would a fish call him that?) grizzly's behavior in a few seconds. It's too much. Limiting details to what he could reasonably notice would make his perspective more solid. Your paragraphs run long. I'd like to see them broken more often. You could break the last paragraph into two after 'take his rage,' for instance, and the new paragraph would begin with Hookjaw past the bears and in his new setting of the spawning grounds. I'd also suggest breaking the sixth paragraph after 'parasites.' Your punctuation and sentence structure are a bit shaky, though it's nothing drastic: 'His tired body no longer feels the absence of sleep, replaced with an unknown excitement' reads as though his body is replaced with excitement; the semicolon in 'the river’s mouth is a deafening torrent; a great beast swallowing any salmon' should be a colon; 'freshwater' is one word as an adjective (such as 'freshwater fish') but two as an adjective-noun combination, as in 'Fresh water is poison.' The good news: this is an entry worth bothering to revise. It needs more work, but it's not so bad. Hookjaw's ploy to outwit the grizzly fulfills the prompt in a creative way that I appreciate. ****** Quidnose, "Hold 'Em" I had some trouble figuring out when this was set, and I'm still not sure: Allan Pinkerton lived from 1819-1884, which I would think is a long time ago to only be a great-grandfather to a man in modern day, but your protagonist (who needs a name!) has a cell phone. The phrase 'Chinese Underground' and presence of a painting had me imagining the 1930s or so. Aside from the cell phone, everything feels a few decades old at least. Thanks to the magical realism touch to the piece, it's hard to say whether a famous person or merely a famous person's image plays a role in your story, but the latter is close enough to fit the bill. Flash rule: fulfilled. Texas Hold 'Em meets the prompt, natch, with the stakes suitably high. I like it that your protagonist is enough of a dick (or in sufficient shock, to be charitable) to calculate the odds of his wife's survival when he sees her wound, and the poker terminology, including the last line, fell on just the right side of too much. What would be an uninspired take on gambling without Mr. Pinkerton is given a lift by his presence. I dig it overall. But watch your proofing. Your errors look like typos (except perhaps for 'ok,' which ought to be 'okay' or maybe 'OK' in that context), so another once-over might have knocked them out entirely. One line I didn't care for: 'My hand shifted from his forehead to his pupil.' Ow! 'My aim' would be less evocative of fingers jabbed in eyes. Good work; your gamble paid off, and you get to do this next week, you lucky thing! ****** ElphabaGreen, "The Heart of the Matter" Too vague. I don't understand how your lottery works. Your protagonist--who's somehow two hundred and twenty-seven years old; is it the replacement of organs that makes it possible? Not clear--has lost organs again and again in this strange ritual, which sounds rather more like an exchange, yet he thinks to himself that the boy will lose nothing but sleep. Until I got to that line I thought the gamble would be what organ/part was taken away in exchange for what was desired, like the would-be recipients had to spin a macabre Wheel of Fortune in that back room. Maybe it is; maybe there's a 'Free Limb' slot on that wheel. I don't really know. It bugs. No one and nothing changes here, there's no plot, nothing is resolved: you've submitted a vignette rather than the full story the prompt specified. The ending kills you, since I never find out whether the old man receives his lung or what he loses. Instead he's telling the story of the younger man... but he doesn't know anything about the young man or his life or what exactly goes on for him behind the door. He can only conjecture. There's really nothing to this but the lottery idea, and that's so thinly drawn that it's barely present either. Your sentence-level writing is decent, if lilac, so I want to see you bring more meat to the table in a future round. ****** Erogenous Beef, "Missed Connections" God, but James is an rear end. For him and Kris to end up drinking together would be a happier ending if I didn't suspect she'd be better off running, running so far away. "We're both better off, right?" Yeesh! There's no doubt in my mind that his horribleness is intentional on your part. But his moment of redemption is too abrupt--what changes his mind? He knew he'd made her unhappy when he decided to tail her, didn't he? Now he's willing to give up 1,800 pounds?--and comes too late in the story for me to develop any fondness for him. You needed more space or at least a touch less assholery on his part. James' choice to max out those credit cards on the chance of getting his scoop is a gamble, and he quits his job and reconnects however briefly with Kristina as a result of the decision to follow her, so you've met the prompt, albeit without capturing the feeling of high stakes. James folds too readily for it to feel like a difficult decision. A higher word count might have given you room to make James less of a towering dickhead. As is, the story is complete, technically sound aside from a couple of minor snafus, satisfies the rules you set for yourself, and reaches a satisfactory conclusion, but it's too thin. No emotional impact. It's not the first time your idea has been too big for the word count. Everything in this story makes sense, though, and that's always good. ****** Lazy Beggar, "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" It's aces for you that Mr. Nectar submitted what he did this week, because your writing is incredibly rough. You've made so many technical mistakes that your entry is unpleasant to read--but the story isn't horrid, and that's why you'll live to fight another day. You should work on your mechanics, however. Gifts like that one don't come along twice. (Who am I kidding? It's Thunderdome; if it's not poo poo geysers, it's piss guitars. Or reluctant gay janitors. Still.) Your main character's name changes from paragraph to paragraph, first Jurek, now Jarek. You shouldn't capitalize 'Autumn' or 'Sun' as you do. Multiple people speak within the same paragraph several times in the piece; this should never happen. In the phrase 'The way he whistled when saying monsieur,' 'monsieur' should probably be either italicized or in quotes (single quotes for American English, double quotes for British), and 'he' should definitely be 'Del Mulino' or some other epithet for the professor; as is it looks like you're still referring to Jurek/Jarek. The comma after 'recognised him at once' should be a period. '`Certo, certo! Very eloquent, I must say.' Jurek twice had to suppress a wince' could also be clearer in terms of who is talking. The period after 'cancer of friendship' should be a comma, and 'whipped sardonically' may or may not be a valid manner of practicing sadism, but it's definitely not a valid manner of speaking. Etcetera; it would take a full line edit to find all the problems and hours to explain them. The prose generally feels limp--you have a couple of nice bits, such as 'headless thanks to time,' but you rely on adjectives and adverbs to describe things too often. Some of your phrasings are quite passive, such as 'Jurek found his nostrils filled with a stench.' I pick on technical mistakes with everyone, but sometimes they're small gaffes that don't do much damage to the reading experience. In this case, the lack of good grammar is lethal. I can barely parse the last paragraphs at all. If all this is new to you, then hey, you're in good company. Nobody starts with perfect grammatical knowledge, but get thee to the Farm and ask for help there, or pick up a copy of Strunk and White's Elements of Style. The core of the story isn't that bad! Both Jurek/Jarek and Del Mulino arguably gamble on something. You took a fair shot at sebmojo's flash rule for you. The setting is credible to me, although my lack of expertise on the French Revolution means that's not saying a ton. Someone else will eat the loss this round. Now go forth and polish your skill. ****** V for Vegas, "Midnight in Tangiers" Not loving the trick of using your title as part of your opening sentence without repeating it. Your grammar has slipped some since the last time I saw you, enough to be noticeable and mildly grating, not enough to ruin the story. You took an interesting path in that your protagonist is an entirely passive figure, initially without choice in the matter of the gamble. Afterward his choices matter a lot to the monkeys and not at all to whether he wins or loses. He's never in control of himself. But you make it work. Half the horror is that he sits by and watches this bloodsport without doing anything. He gains by it through no action of his own. Is it the fighting or himself that makes him so ill in the end? Whether the gamble is life-changing is a bit arguable since it's not clear how Gregor's life will change. I'm willing to take on faith that his experience will alter him, but thinking about this has made me realize that I know very little about Gregor besides that he's easily led when he's high; the story could have more power if he had a vestige of personality, passive or no. Still good work. Don't let your technical abilities get rusty, though--you're a better writer than the errors here would suggest. ****** Roguelike, "The Terrorist with the Tell-Tale Ticker" You start off heavy-handed with the sci-fi trappings. Intergalactic councils and octopus aliens had me imagining the likes of Mass Effect--you never really break free from cliche here, including the ruthless councilor who puts the needs of Earth above everything else except her own. (Also, what's with that acronym? Why leave B out and put W in? It doesn't even spell anything cute!) The better news is that within the familiar environment, you tell an okay story of a truly high-stakes gamble. One thing I don't get no matter how many times I read is why Ana's willingness to let the universe burn if they don't fix her is an acceptable trait in a councilor, much less a prerequisite. I'm not that clear on what's wrong with her to begin with: what's a 'magnetic replacement heart' and what's its relationship to the bomb? I expect it's part of the test, but what does Ana think it is before she knows the truth? Everything about the heart throws a wrench into the story's works. This one doesn't wear well on rereading. When I think about the entire conceit of the bomb, it falls apart. I can't believe the ploy would work; I can't believe everyone involved spent a year acting this out for Ana--for once it might make more sense as a dream sequence, and that would be more forgiving to the lack of logic in the concept, maybe. The way it stands, Ana comes off not only as amoral but as rather thick. ****** Nikaer Drekin, "I Told You So" A great choice of gamble, and I enjoyed all the action on Amelia's cyclone journey more than I did many of the other entries. Your description of her trip let me picture everything and ride along with considerably less chance of death. But although Amelia is a character and I wish her success on her ride, she doesn't develop any depth beyond her risk-taking, storm-loving ways; more importantly, the gamble doesn't change her one iota. When the blood drains from her face and she's staring at her own death, you imply an epiphany to come. Her flight and her rescue by the water are moments that could--ought to--engrave themselves on her very being. It's all implicit, but it's there--until the last line comes, Amelia promises herself to hit Joey upside the head if he talks about safety, and I realize she's the exact same woman who went into that buggy. Facing death had no effect on her. So why should I care about it? This is what kept you out of my top three even though I tagged you as a contender on my first read. The story's missing something in the essentials. It's a jaunt. There's no significant impact for either character or reader. Now, I kind of think those implicit epiphanies are where you meant the story to go, else why would they be there; and if you had wrapped it up differently... it's so close to being strong. It just doesn't make that final step. It falls on its arse, and here we are. You've come a long way since writing otherwise-intense stories that danced sideways into Hokeyland. Here you only set one foot over the line, which should make it comparatively simple to fix. Your grammar is good, your writing polished smooth on the sentence level; I looked for errors and found almost none. ****** Ronnie_Long, "The White" Seeing Peter Frampton as a main character had me 1.) braced to not like the story, and 2.) confused, as I'd never heard that Mr. Frampton was any more bugscrew bonkers than your average rock star. It took me quite a while to catch on to the fact that the protagonist is not who he believes himself to be. 'Til the last paragraph, in fact. That's a tad slow of me, but you never do know what celebrities could get up to. I immediately warmed to your entry once I knew it wasn't Real Person Fanfiction, which left me looking for two things: did you meet your flash rule? Yes. Probably. I suspect your depiction of madness is more true to White Wolf than the DSM-IV. Did you meet the prompt? No. Peter Frampton (as I'll call Mr. Jersted) isn't going to any particular risk. He expects to be caught; the question is when. He's not chancing anything by ducking out to chug some toothpaste, at least as far as we know, and that makes his noon on the town nothing at all like a gamble. That right there kneecapped you. Of everyone who flirted with prompt failure, you're the only one who embraced it and took it on a spin around the dance floor, a sad tango that landed you a few rungs closer to the loss than you otherwise would have been. Since your story is coherent and sane (more or less), you still weren't in much danger. Technicalities: your sometimes-missing commas give the piece a more stream-of-consciousness feeling without being nearly as obnoxious as the full thing. They get a pass. Your first sentence tells me Peter Frampton is sipping the sophisticates' tea; the repetitions of 'box' and 'the boxes' in the third-from-final paragraph turn into an irritating drone. On the whole, your grammar is either sound or flawed in ways that suit your purpose. I think this one could grow on me with time. If anything, I'd advise looking hard at the Malkavian insanity and asking yourself whether there's any place you could tone it down: it never becomes too much for me--quite--but it rides the edge. ****** Fumblemouse, "The Quiet Soul" Expository dialogue ahoy. The conversation Sarah and James have before he takes himself off the mortal coil is one they surely should have had long before this, yet it doesn't read like an old argument with the edges worn off. I can tell it's a means of delivering information to me; I notice this too strongly. The emotions of the scene are lost. James' dialogue in particular pontificates, and I wonder whether I'm meant to read him as an arrogant man who is about to receive a postmortem comeuppance. It happens again when Sarah first addresses the AI: she's telling the computer something it should surely know when she explains about James' personality being uploaded to the 'Net. I would rather have gotten this info through other means, including straight exposition. If you'd just set aside the line 'James’ was the only personality that they managed to copy and sustain,' it would have improved that section, IMO, as everything else sets up her question regarding James' soul in a more believable way. Unfortunately, that crippled the whole piece for me. The prose is otherwise good, as one would expect. Your protagonist isn't the one who gambled, but her life is still changed by it, a fine twist on the prompt. I further appreciate the fact that he lost. AIs gaining sentience is a worn story. AIs remaining AIs? Now that's novel. But I couldn't get over the shouty dialogue in the end, leaving this piece below several others in my ranking. ****** docbeard, "Went Down To The Crossroads" 'This was so completely ridiculous.' That line from your protagonist sums up the reason your story ended up in the middle of my list. The idea of mortal police arresting the Devil is ridiculous. The tone you set until the point when the cops show up is too serious to support the absurdity: a silly premise needs to be in a slightly silly story, else the dissonance can be too much to take. The law = game concept is clever in theory, but you don't sell me on it. That the Devil plays along strips the menace from him, makes him little more than a con artist in a snazzy suit. And what about that game of blackjack? I wish they'd finished it before the police showed up--or after, maybe, but I want to see the results. If Detective Philips' soul is forfeit, let him know it before he brings the Devil in. Aside from the last line, which is cute, your final paragraph is anticlimactic and drains much point from the rest of the story: what did any of it matter, then? It's still not a bad piece so much as flawed. I loved the "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" reference. The writing itself is solid. The stages of Philips' personal bargain with the Devil are, if not fresh, still sinister--talky, but I see how that's for the benefit of the wire--and I had a sense of the peril he was in as a man who didn't fully believe in the desperately dangerous thing he was doing. Maybe there was a way to pull off the whole 'cops arrest the Devil' thing without losing that sense of the ominous, but it needed something... more of a struggle, more of a risk, more consequences for individuals instead of a vague reference to the police force going to poo poo. ****** sebmojo, "Mateship" In terms of technical merit and pure writing, you're probably on the top of this batch despite the errant 'thumbrint'; you did something interesting with the prompt in that the story has a card game that isn't the real gamble. You've got the trappings of gambling, you've got high stakes, and these things are separate from each other. The stakes you chose are more personal and emotional than what most people went with. It works. Your take on the flash rule is straightforward, and that's fine. All the necessary points are met with competence and style. Thing is, it doesn't have enough feeling to it despite the nature of the stakes. There's a bit: when Jock trails off, teary-eyed, and he repeats 'mate' in a way that could mean friend or could mean love or could mean both, that's actually a sound dose of emotion in just a few words, but it's not enough to keep the twist from reading like a Brokeback Van gimmick. Surprise for the sake of surprise, done because we wouldn't expect it. And without emotional power, the story is a sterile example of how well you can write. It made my top four and was second overall with the judges; good writing was at a premium this round. I just couldn't work up any enthusiasm for it. ****** Tyrannosaurus, "Buzzards" 'The coffee was cold and it reminded him of his marriage. He had forgotten about them both on his drive to work.' This is an excellent opening. The story that follows it is rather good, too, one of my favorites of the week and a massive step up from that much-abused guitar. Flash rule: check! Prompt: check! Sort of. Maybe? We'll get back to that. This is the story of James' relationship to his wife; her struggle to save the Panther site is only the surface narrative. He stops forgetting his wife as he looks into her work and (re)learns respect for her. I assume he helps her with her final, desperate gambit--and then he's left alone to study their wedding picture as he did in the beginning, a repeated scene that evokes the same emotion, regret, with a much-changed shading. I do like a cyclical story, I like a layered story, I like complexity in relationships, and you deliver it all. I wish that Ester's solution made more sense. Or that you had explored it. A faked terrorist explosion is too complicated to hand-wave as you do. What exactly did she attempt? Her death, but did she blow up part of the site with it? What was James' role? How did she frame religious extremists for the crime? What were the consequences of that? There had to be some--is it Ester and James who didn't consider that, or you? It's too empty to have the dramatic weight it ought to. You were two hundred words under the limit, so you had more space to use. You were in contention for my winning vote for a while, but the ending flat didn't work, and this is what I meant when I said 'sort of' re: meeting the prompt. Ester's staking her life in order to save the Panther site. It's a gamble because it may not accomplish her goal. Okay, that's good, but what she does is so vague it almost doesn't register. ****** ThirdEmperor, "Render Unto Caesar" Ouch, inappropriate 'it's' in the first sentence. You're keeping my expectations low, I'll give you that. The doubled periods in the third paragraph and the sixth from last are probably typos, other small errors likewise, but I see the 'it's' thing in at least two places. Bad Emperor! No laurels for you! If there's one rule to learn to keep grammar sticklers off your back, its/it's is probably it. That and proper tense use. 'Had fell'? Yikes. Try 'had fallen.' On to the actual story. You met your flash rule, although you didn't do anything special with it. I can't tell your Caesar's Palace from any other casino, and in fact I'm taking it on faith that this is Caesar's Palace at all. You met the prompt: the old man's gambling probably changes his life, and it certainly changes David's. Oops, though! Jeza reminded me that in blackjack, an ace can be either high (eleven) or low (one), and a six, an ace, and a seven would be fourteen. That breaks your conclusion badly. It's easy to fix: make that ace a king, queen, jack, or ten, and you're set. The old man is a character; I want to know more about him, how he has such luck and what makes him so sad, why he'd go all in on one hand. David's just okay. He's got a clear arc. He's a material young man who sees misery in an old man's face and gives up his job to give happiness to a stranger. Maybe it's a little cliche, but I like it--I'd forgotten about his car by the time I got to the end, though; his need for money didn't stick with me. The first paragraph seems extraneous on the first read, more meaningful on the second, necessary on the third since without it David wouldn't have any personality at all. If David were more of a presence in the narrative, the conclusion would be stronger. Right now this actually reads more like the old man's story. Condense the stretch where the old man builds up chips (you've got some good details in there, but it runs long), do something to make David as interesting as the guy he deals for, and you could raise this story from 'decent' to 'good.' ****** Nubile Hillock, "A story about dogs." Steampunk. Not my favorite fad. Never got the obsession with gears and water in its gaseous form, personally. I wonder whether you get it either, because you dive cheerfully into the business of slapping cogs on everything and spout Victorian technobabble 'til I feel like I'm reading Steam Trek fanfic, and when I get the point when Cornelius makes a dagger jet steam for absolutely no reason before slamming it into some dude's trachea, I know you have to be taking the piss. Have to be. God bless, Hillock. Your story may be nonsense spackled over a cheesy and by-the-numbers plot, but reading it was fun. The crazy bits--time travel via aetheric generator? Okay, Scotty, if you say so, but steam hash?--obscure things that are at least slightly clever, such as Delilah's line, 'You can’t second guess yourself after casting the dice.' This points helpfully toward your use of the prompt in case we might have missed it. Moreover, it foreshadows Delilah's actions in a manner that's clearer on the second read-through. Nice. This would be more impressive if Delilah's treachery weren't predictable without help, I admit. Grammar pointers: Cassiacus should be italicized as the name of a vessel. You miss a comma in '“It’s time” she said.' You needed another proofing pass, I suspect. There are no serious technical problems aside from the promise of dogs in the title that you failed to fulfill. '[...] as the world turned to black' is a horrid closing clause, and you should be ashamed. ****** stoutfish, "Dead Bear" Where do I start. This is incredibly rough. Literally all that saved you was the existence of a poo poo geyser, although I would have fought for Lazy Beggar's loss over yours if it had come to that, since your entry, though poorly written, is much easier to read. You took on a flash rule and you did technically address it, though I've a hunch Jeza wanted more from an Eastern European setting than rusty Russian stereotypes. The plot here is thin and cliche, as are the characters. Nesti, the Hunter, the bartender--they're flat as paper. Nesti at least has some scribbles on him. His gun is an interesting detail, and I wonder what exactly it means to him, why it's been in his family so long without being fired (assuming that's what 'virgin' means in this context). Other than that, however, he has no traits beyond 'doesn't want to die'--that's about as thin as a character gets! The Hunter is a smug bully out for money, a.k.a. a stock stereotype. The bartender barely exists. As for the plot--oy, random Russian dudes being held up for nuclear secrets makes me cringe. Note: if Nesti's more than a random dude, you failed to establish that. You didn't have to interpret 'post-Soviet' so literally, but even if you did, there were many more ways to go than nuclear espionage. But you do have a clear gamble, and even if it's a bit obvious given your setting, I'm glad someone used Russian roulette. What slaughters you above and beyond anything else is your writing. The grammar, the word choices, the terse paragraphs, the lack of meaningful description, the dialogue, it's all bad. The good news is that mechanics can be learned, and reading fiction as well as writing it will teach you. The bad news is that if you don't already know drat well these problems are here and what they are, you've got a lot of learning ahead. For starters: in your first sentence, the comma after 'Europe' should be a period as the clause that follows is a complete sentence, but it isn't related enough to the 'unusually warm day' for a semicolon to be appropriate. I don't know what a 'dusky, dim light bar' is. Do you mean 'dimly lit bar'? The comma after the next 'bar' should be either a period or a colon. 'Another, an even older man working as a bartender continually wiping a glass' is a badly structured fragment; try 'An even older man working as a bartender continually wiped a glass.' (You may want to set 'working as a bartender' apart from the rest with commas. It depends on whether this information is essential or not. I think it is, but it's up to you.) The Russian life expectancy line is odd, particularly considering people can go grey at any age. The comma after 'bar' at the start of the next paragraph should be a period or semicolon. There should be a comma after 'proclaiming,' but 'proclaiming' is a bad choice of words here. These things are called 'saidisms' by some: words authors use when 'said' or 'saying' would do just as well or better. In this case, 'saying' would be an improvement; 'proclaiming' is too melodramatic to suit the context. 'Nesti the burly drinker, slowly rotated with weary eyes to face whoever interrupter his drinking time.' Oh, lord. Try this: 'Nesti, the burly drinker, slowly rotated to face whoever had interrupted his drinking time.' Mention his weary eyes in a separate sentence if you feel the need. 'Nesti Opened his arms wide'--this rampant capitalization happens again with 'The Suited man.' Stop that. 'Self-satisfied' needs a hyphen. 'Black gloves began adjusting each other'--so they're enchanted gloves, then, capable of independent movement? Probably not. 'He adjusted his black gloves' would be better. 'Hunter' should be capitalized as it seems to be a proper noun. Nesti doesn't speak broken English for the most part, so 'What business you have with me' is likely missing a word. 'Hunter walked over to the bar, he slid his fingers across the counter repeatedly. “I've come to take you, and your secrets or leave you as a corpse.” He said somewhat in a sing-song manner.' The comma after 'bar' should be a period or semicolon again. There should be no comma after 'you.' A comma after 'secrets' is optional. The period after 'corpse' should be a comma, and 'he' should not be capitalized; 'somewhat' makes no sense where it is. I'd cut it, but at the very least it belongs before 'sing-song.' I think you get the idea in terms of how many errors there are. This level of roughness makes the content of a piece almost irrelevant. Picking up a few rules would get you past this point and to an area where you may still make mistakes, but those mistakes won't necessarily ruin the prose. Here is a decent quick-and-dirty guide to joining sentences with commas, semicolons, or colons, for example. You could also do as I advised Lazy Beggar earlier: check out books such as Strunk and White's Elements of Style or ask for help at the Fiction Farm. If all else fails (or in addition to the rest), reading TD crits of the past may be of use; believe you me, you're not alone in getting shredded over grammar. You tried to tell a story instead of throwing a bunch of poo poo and Pop Rocks on the thread, so I hope you can sand the jagged-as-hell edges from your prose as you continue to shed blood on the Thunderdome sands. ****** crabrock, "Storm" If I had kept your flash rule at the forefront of my mind, maybe I wouldn't have pictured Harriet as a birthday-party fairy princess at the outset and carried that image through so much of the story. This is mostly my fault, though I also blame the bouncy castle. You mention the top hat; it should have been a dead giveaway. I won't take as much blame for being thrown off by the interwoven flashbacks. You jump around chronologically without any visual cue beyond a change in tense. Each jump interrupts the main narrative. Harriet's day also feels divided. The goings-on at the party are distinct from her time at home with her boyfriend and the question of her scars. Too distinct, perhaps, because on the first read the narrative seems to change course entirely. Maybe it's a pacing thing? The bus ride is longer than it would strictly have to be; cut the whole 'strategies' line (please, please--no ending a sentence in a colon, no, ugh), trim or cut the paragraph where she watches the wipers, and you've lost some decent description that nevertheless does little for the story. You want the lightning and the storm, but you don't need to describe them to such an extent. Here's the thing, though: this entry improved so much once I reached the end that it was almost as though lightning struck, bringing new energy into everything and fusing the disparate pieces. Once I could see the whole, I really liked the core of it. Now I understand Harriet's racing heart, her edginess, and what exactly happened when the sheet collapsed in the first line. That moment of epiphany is strong. I think with some finessing this could be a powerful and elegant work. The prompt is addressed in a subdued, understated way by Harriet's gamble on acceptance when she joins her boyfriend in the bathroom. This is good, but it feels slight, which goes back to the problem of the story's halves not fully cohering: her risk here comes off as an afterthought. If it were me, I'd make it clearer that Harriet is a magician, italicize the flashbacks, and streamline the sequence before she reaches the house in some way. You should hang onto this one, whatever else. You've caught electricity in a bottle. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Nov 13, 2013 |
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Nov 12, 2013 23:14
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Thunderbrawl Results for Mercedes vs. Bad Seafood: Let the Music Play THE PROMPT: Write a story of regret that incorporates elements of a self-chosen music video. THE WINNER: Bad Seafood, due in part to cleaner prose, in part to better use of his song and video, and in part to infusing his story more thoroughly with regret. That's not to say his piece was perfect or Mercedes' didn't have good points; full crits lurk below. Mercedes, "Perfect" Summary: A boy's magical device leads to the murder of his sister at the hands of soldiers. Years later, a soldier himself, he returns to his old house and retrieves this device. By using its powers, he first saves a woman from execution, then tries to save his society by handicapping all its lawmakers when he is brought before them. I should admit I don't know that your protagonist is a boy; he could well be a girl, but for the sake of moving this crit along I'll guess that he's a he. Your song is Peaches' "New Heights," and the theme I see in its words is finding the strength to stand on your own, not necessarily alone, but no longer begging or kneeling to anyone. You drew more on the "Love Language" video, specifically on the deafness of the girl--her handicap appears in the protagonist's sister--and on the video's message that such an 'imperfection' doesn't take away from someone's beauty as a person. You echo one line of the song itself ('Daylight's coming, the sun is blazing') in the moment in which the protagonist nearly blinds himself with his augmented vision. Choice? Coincidence? It's a neat callback either way. That's enough to meet half of the prompt, though it's a tad thin. I see regret very clearly in the first section, and I see a flicker of it in the second section, but the third section and so the climax aren't about regret at all. This isn't a story on the theme of regret so much as a story that has some regret in it. I'm torn on what I think of your magical mystery orb. On one hand, it's cheap. It's an unexplained gimcrack the protagonist found 'in the mines,' off-camera, and it does amazing things because it just does. The protagonist never treats it as a wondrous, monstrous thing! Only a curiosity. I don't care for that--but then I think of how the protagonist uses the orb in different ways to cause or solve his problems, and that part I like; you explore modified senses with it, and I like that too. Without this device, you wouldn't have the same story at all. So, okay. I still want more explanation for it than 'uh, we found it in a hole.' Prose: You use the wrong tense a few times. 'I laid' should be 'I lay' (lay is the past tense of lie, and if this were a present-tense story you would have written the phrase as 'I lie on the bed'); when the protagonist remembers finding the orb, those verbs ('stole,' 'made,' 'there's,' etc.) should be in past perfect ('had stolen,' 'had made,' 'there was,' etc.). Sentences early in the second section are a mess o' tenses: 'In the instance when the upgrade failed, like the woman who sobbed and knelt before us, they are hunted down and killed. I was thankful this was the only house we will visit today in our cleansing crusade, I could only stomach so much violence.' Oof. The first sentence mixes past and present; the second mingles past and future. Try this: 'In the instances when the upgrade failed, such as with the woman who sobbed and knelt before us, they were hunted down and killed. I was thankful this was the only house we would visit that day in our cleaning crusade; I could only stomach so much violence.' Tense use is a problem throughout the piece. It's disruptive enough to hurt you. The writing is generally rough, I'm afraid. Lots of missing commas; you've got sentences like 'If you would be so kind burn this place down' where words seem to be missing too. '[...] it's smooth surface'--yagh! 'To those watching me, they must have thought it was simply nerves' doesn't make sense; go with either 'Those watching me must have thought it was simply nerves' or 'To those watching me, it must have seemed like simple nerves.' And so on. If you want a full line edit, yodel at me and I'll see what I can do, but for now it's probably enough to say the errors affected my reading experience more than either of us would prefer. Here's what I like: your last line. I like that very much. I like your general plot and your interpretation of the 'You're still beautiful' message in the vid. This needs to be fleshed out a lot to become a strong story, but there's potential in the concepts. Bad Seafood, "Goodboy" Summary: Officer Maxwell Harrison steps into a bar to stare at bottles and reflect on the women in his past. He has not been a good boy at all. Why is the title one word? You write the phrase as 'good boy' elsewhere. This bothers me inordinately. Your song is "Dog Police," by Dog Police, and the theme I see in it is dog police. Getting any deeper than that is a difficult endeavor since it makes no sense. A half-woman, half-dog is pursued by half-man, half-canine popo, but that doesn't stop her from peeing on the singer's speakers. What a wonderful world. You've leaned heavily on the lyrics and video imagery rather than the meaning, which is wise of you. References to the song are absolutely everywhere in your story. Your protagonist is a figurative dog and a literal police officer. A lone star is the symbol of the Bar. Your bartenders are the video bartender and his waiter, given canine names. A special brand of dog police puts in an appearance in the person of Alexei Sayle. Harrison's mistress's hair is blue. Whether 'mistress' is an intentional pun or not, it amuses me. She's a real strange beast. 'Where are you coming from?' 'Nobody knows who you are.' The blind date of the song steps in at the end to ask Harrison his defining question. One cannot doubt you've milked the ever-living bejayzus out of your source of inspiration. Somehow you've wrangled a true story of regret out of all those references. Plot-wise, this is nowhere near as ambitious as Mercedes' piece. Nothing happens in it but a man looking at bottles and answering the question of his life; the story is all flashback and memory, but when the theme is regret, memory has to be key. You've draped your narrative in the heavy gloom of could-have-been, should-have-been. In most respects your nods to the song are just restrained enough to let the story be serious and real. One exception: calling a man 'Toto' is an excess egg in the pudding, to borrow and mangle a phrase from Fumblemouse. I can't help but think that the 'tall glass of water' bartender would have been a better Duke, anyway. I'm incredulous that Harrison never learned his lover's name. How does that happen? As for prose, you're solid if not flawless. Harrison's still remembering the sequence of events that starts with 'He retreated to his lover’s embrace,' so those verbs should be in past perfect. (Except 'So that was the story behind the ring in his pocket,' which I believe is indirect discourse and fine as it stands.) The contractions in 'She’d quit when they had kids, and he’d work harder to make up the difference' are confusing; they read like 'she had' and 'he had' when you mean 'she would' and 'he would.' I'd spell them out if I were you. Many of your sentences are short, and the rhythm is terse. I think this is intentional. For my taste, you take it perhaps a shade too far. Nailing both halves of the prompt in a well-written story would have been enough to take the win, and it's icing on the cake that you've done it with a video that didn't lend itself to any meaningful narrative. I do not, truthfully, like your song. I sure do admire what you've done with it. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 08:40 on Nov 13, 2013 |
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Nov 13, 2013 07:41
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Nov 15, 2013 06:03
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A week or so ago, Bad Seafood posted:HOMEWORK: Two people speaking different languages misunderstand one another through their music. 300 words ought to be enough. Seaside (300 words) The flautist left the famous market and its babble of a thousand tongues, none of them his. He stumped down to the docks to hear the ocean speak. A man sat on a hummock there, old to the flautist though his hair had as much black as grey; his palms pounded thunder out of a deep-bellied drum, such a wild beat that the flautist forgot the ocean and danced. The old man surged up, drum tumbling away, and punched the flautist so hard in the jaw that he crashed into the sand. The old man was on him then, hitting his shoulders, shouting nonsense through a red face wet and crazed with tears. The flautist yelled words that the old man couldn't know. But the beating ended, and his attacker rolled away to sit with his knuckles shoved into his eyes. The flautist felt in his sack for his flute, brought it out, and untied a handkerchief wrapped around it. He offered this to the old man. Instead of taking it, the drummer pointed first at the flute, then at the flautist in clear request--or demand. The flautist grimaced at the soreness in his arms and jaw as he brought the wood to his lips. He blew a sharp song; the notes had once followed his sister into her crypt, not far from a different sea. They tasted of salt. Before he'd finished, the old drummer laughed. His shoulders shook with humor now; he clapped the sand and grinned, though another tear streaked down his cheek. Whatever he saw in the flautist's face killed his smile. The song died, too, and the flautist gripped his flute as he would a weapon... then made himself let go. Two men sat on the beach for a time, companions in silence.
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Nov 15, 2013 06:49
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The Worth of What We Love (896 words) She always loses the remote. That canary of hers never shuts up. Inconveniences rattled through Neil's mind as he drove to work in the pre-dawn. The Golden Oldies station started up with Sonny and Cher, and he mashed the power button. No sense putting up with that when Ashley wasn't there to smile and bop around in the passenger seat. She doesn't like Italian food, he thought, pulling in to the zoo's employee lot. The apartment's too small for two, his mind whispered as he walked the dim, empty path to the barn enclosure. But that concern tightened his chest, unlike the petty differences that were so easy to dwell on. He'd felt the same way at the jewelry store the night before: the tension hadn't gone away, and he'd left without a ring, and if he had any sense he'd call Ashley right now and tell her they would never work and he was sorry. The Shetland pony in the barn whinnied for her breakfast. Neil shoveled feed into a bucket for her, then saw to the goat, the sheep, the pig, the chickens, and the rabbits. He gathered their night's leavings into a wheelbarrow while they grunted and clucked over their meals; the sky had brightened by the time he came back from adding their contributions to the compost, and a squeal of bus brakes cut the air from the direction of visitor parking. Senior citizens, school classes, and families with strollers trickled through the gates. Only the youngest and most-citified children forgot about lions and camels long enough to get excited by creatures from a farmyard. Neil held the pig still so little hands could slap his fat sides. "Boaris doesn't mind at all," he told the kids. A toddler boy looked up at him with eyes just like Ash's and grinned. "Oh!" Neil looked over his shoulder. The cry had come from a girl of twelve or thirteen, and he laughed to himself because he knew what had put that rapt look on her face. He let Boaris go and took hold of the Shetland pony's halter. Leading the animal to the girl earned him a sunrise smile, and she offered the pony her hand. The Shetland knew the score. She shoved her nose into the girl's palm and won a lifelong friend. "Want to walk her around a bit?" Neil snagged a lead rope and snapped it to the halter. He handed its end to the girl without needing a verbal reply. Her expression said everything. "What's her name?" the girl asked, stroking the pony's dusty neck; her hand came away grey and she didn't seem to care. "Dolly. I call her Dolly Madison for long, 'cause she's sweet." Neil watched them at first, but as they walked together in slow circles within the enclosure, the girl murmuring things to the animal that he didn't try to hear, his attention turned more to the children who wanted to hug a chicken or feed trash to the goat. It eventually registered with him that an hour had passed and the girl hadn't left the pony's side. "You're going to miss seeing the fancy animals," he half joked with her. "There are penguins, you know. Gorillas! A Komodo dragon!" She said, "None of those are ponies." And she seemed perfectly blissful to go around and around a tiny paddock while all her schoolmates were off elsewhere. Neil let her use a brush and currycomb on Dolly's rough sides, let her tell the younger children trivia about ponies. Ashley could and would rattle on that way about the penguins, given the chance; all he ever had to do to make her light up was talk about the birds in his Morgan Freeman voice. He'd come to love them a bit himself. The girl surrendered Dolly's lead at a quarter past three. Neil hadn't looked closely at her in hours. Now he saw the red hives all over her face, on every exposed bit of skin. "We've got to get you to the infirmary, hon," he said, keeping his voice calm, low. No use panicking the others. "No, no, no! I'm fine!" She held up her grimy hands. "I'm just allergic, it's not contagious, it doesn't hurt or anything. It'll be gone in about a day." "You know horses do this to you?" Neil stared at the vivid rash. "What are you doing here?" "It's no big deal. It's worth it." The defiance in her tone denied argument. "I wouldn't have missed Dolly for anything." She wrapped her arms around Dolly's neck, hugging the pony and getting more hair, sweat, and dander on herself for the sake of the moment. Then the girl was gone, running down the path to meet up with her class before they came out in search. She always loses the remote, Neil thought while he swept up, hours later, his shift nearly ended. She loves those stupid songs. I'll have to watch Happy Feet every year of my life. He set the broom aside and fished his cell from his pocket. "Hey, love," he said when Ash answered his call. "I've got a stop to make first, but will you have dinner with me tonight? Somewhere nice, maybe?" He scratched Dolly behind her jaw as he listened for the answer, smiling a sunrise smile.
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Nov 17, 2013 03:18
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You read my mind, Rhino. I'm likewise in with: * A sumptuous buffet of hideous delicacies. * A beard that does not stop growing. Ever.
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Nov 20, 2013 03:03
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These Fragments Your main character finds a box of scorched human hair. Whose is it? How did it get there? (270 words) It's burning, the Lilly is burning, throwing gouts of smoke from its roof to brown the sky, and I think of Lincoln's life mask melting into a pool of wax across Shakespeare's quarto. Somewhere in all that heat and rage the cylinders of music run. Wire scorches. Tape dissolves to cinders. I listen for the songs, but human voices drown them, and I wake. I push through the doors, arms covering my eyes. The ash of forty thousand years presses itself to me. I suck it in as Audubon's birds lift themselves from pages on wings of red and gold. My hand reaches for a pelican, touches its beak and screams for the touching. There is the staircase. Down and down. Cool metal shelves, before they were molten. Clean light, before the bulbs shattered. What history is in the air I breathe? There is one thing I might save. A box. My hands crack against it. I fight the ghost of James Bond for the right to escape, and he is too busy elsewhere to have much power here. I cannot find the stair. I am baptized in water filthy with treasures. Hands grab me, raise me up. I forget how to inhale on the way back to life; fists pound me until I remember. It isn't only the fire that sounds angry with me now. But I have preserved the past. Do they see? I open the box: look, look. All Plath's hair, her mother's gift, scorched and stinking, loss and madness rescued while brilliance dies. Meanwhile, Erogenous Beef saves diddly squat because he's busy eating dicks.
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Nov 22, 2013 02:52
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Tasting and Judgment Prompts: A sumptuous buffet of hideous delicacies and an ever-growing beard. (1,102 words) In Cheylsim in the far south, they keep their Emperor in a lamplit crypt. He has been dead for many hundred years. When he lived he was a strong man, a strong mind, such a strategist and judge and ruler that his people could never submit to any other. So his servants say. They know it by the taste of his beard, which only they may eat. It grows from the bone of his jaw, and the servants must harvest it often to keep it from spilling through his ribs, over the sides of his bier, to cover all the world. Something has to be done with that hair. In Cheylsim, they will not waste it. ### Devere stopped on the front step of Miyosen's mansion, where the light shone brightest through the open doors, to let the household guards look their fill at his cotton coat and trousers. He gave them a moment, then held out his hand and his signet ring. The man on the left waved him inside. Without any houseboys to guide him, he relied on a path of candles: every turn away from the feast led to darkness. Every door along the way was shut. Miyosen's head manservant stepped out from an alcove near the dining hall, taking hold of Devere's arm and shepherding him firmly into the banquet. The murmurs of the other guests died. Miyosen met Devere's eyes from the head of his table. He smiled. "Why, Lord Devere," he said. "You were almost late." A platter of red meat lay between two candelabra; the glow brought out a glint from the soft body hairs that furred the slices, mingled with the juice of the animal in expert proportion. A blonde's, surely. And a young one, to shed so fine. The long, sugared strands of the hair 'nests' that held egg custard could have come from anyone. Pale crescents of nail gave scales back to white fish flesh. Rare skin cracklings dusted the asparagus, and lashes curled at the bottom of the wine. The dishes covered the great table completely. Devere swallowed his saliva. "I wouldn't have wanted to miss this." The manservant led him to the only empty seat. All the others were filled with peers in their finest shirts and robes woven from the Emperor's beard, garish with poisonous dyes. Miyosen's robe had such a silver luster that Devere couldn't look at it directly without dazzling himself. He let his eyes range over the rest of the lords instead, tallying up who looked at him with small smiles, who with scorn, and who bothered to try and hide those things. Miyosen clapped. The lords reached as one for the platters in front of them. Devere took the fish, the steak, a nest for dessert. He refused a dish of meatballs that his right-hand neighbor pressed on him. The man's voice held an edge; Devere suspected the meat included hairs too short and too curly for his personal taste. Plates filled, the diners waited. Miyosen drove his fork through a scallop and held it up so all could see the strands wrapped around it. "Strength of our enemies, wisdom of our allies, through their relics, ours to share." He popped the scallop into his mouth and raised his wine glass to toast the feast. Whose nails did Devere chew, marinated to softness in white wine? What woman had given her virtues to the steak? He couldn't know, and it had been too long since his last such meal to care. Each sip of wine sharpened his mind, so perhaps the lashes in it had been a scholar's. He filled his glass again and stole a glance at Miyosen. The man ate heartily. Until his plate was clean--then Miyosen stood again, his robe threatening to blind them all. "I have a treat for you, my friends. And in fact, it is why each of you is here." He gestured: the manservant brought him a covered porcelain dish. "I have a lock of the Emperor's beard. Undyed. Unpoisoned." Where Devere had tasted cream sauce, egg, and sugar, now he tasted a memory. Miyosen knew. His faint smile was for Devere, even if they alone knew it. His black eyes dared Devere to protest such an offering while he wore a cotton coat, a testimony to a suspicion of which he had never been cleared. Devere's right-hand neighbor said, "That's highly illegal." "Of course," Miyosen agreed. "To eat it would be a death sentence." "Of course. If it could be proven." Miyosen inclined his head Devere's way. Only slightly. But surely they all saw. "His strength and wisdom--his servants partake, and it does the country no good at all. We live outside of crypts. Cheylsim is ours... or may be." Miyosen opened the box and lifted out a coil of silver duller than his vestments. He divided it carefully: three strands per man at the table. Including Devere. Who looked at the hair he held and gulped down wine; the scholar's eyelashes tickled his throat. Devere pinched one of the strands and touched its end to his lips. He drew it in, staring at Miyosen, whose expression had become unreadable. He tasted hints of the strengths the hair held. Hot blood. Adrenaline. Vitality; purpose; vision; desire! But none of them the Emperor's. The noblemen watched him. He rolled the hair around in his mouth, tucked it in his cheek and sucked, studying the tension in Miyosen's knuckles. How the man wagered on Devere's self-interest to support his gambit. The taste slowly changed. Phlegm. Infection. Blood from an inner battlefield. Devere spat the hair onto his plate. "False!" His lungs sloshed for a horrid second. "Your source has deceived you, Miyosen, or you would deceive these men. This never came from the Emperor." "How would you know, Lord Devere?" Miyosen's voice was all hardness and heat. "You were acquitted." Devere drew in a breath. "I swear by the Eight Gods and my mother's soul that I have tasted the Emperor's beard. You all witness. Do not eat that hair--its strength is lies." They took him to the crypt, of course, to face the justice of the servants, whose judgment was unmatched by any man save perhaps himself. The servants cut his hair to the scalp. They trimmed his eyelashes and his nails. A woman shaved his body, taking care not to taint the hair with blood. She pressed the razor to his skin. "Honesty. Self-sacrifice. Redemption." As she sliced his throat, she said, "I will watch your skeleton and pray its beard grows."
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Nov 25, 2013 03:00
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Helsing posted:Flash Rule Your story must begin with the protagonist dying. In with this. Flash Rule: Your protagonist is mute.
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Nov 27, 2013 03:38
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Passage Fare (997 words) (Flash rule: Your story must begin with the protagonist dying.) Kenneth had time to realize he'd lost control of the car, time to see the gully waiting for him. He shut his eyes tight, he screamed his prayers, and metal and plastic and safety glass drove into his body just the same. The white flash of pain left him senseless; that was mercy. Then he stood in a field of grey grass, under a grey sky, in no pain at all and so well able to realize what had happened. "Well, poo poo," Kenneth said. He hung around for a while, but his death remained a silent and empty country, and his restlessness ran soul-deep. He walked for God knew how long across the same terrain. Everything flat, everything monochrome except himself. He waved his hand in front of his eyes now and then to remember what color was. He'd never known true black until the field broke on the bank of a river that made ink seem pastel. A boat sat half-grounded there, a man standing inside. "Hey!" Kenneth called. He jogged to the vessel, only to be stopped by the end of the boatmaster's pole in his chest. He staggered back. Message received: he wasn't welcome aboard. "Hello there! Check your pockets!" Kenneth swiveled his head toward the shout. Another man--a thin, grey figure--waved to him and pointed at Kenneth's jeans. Kenneth jammed his hands into the pockets; the right closed on a round object. He pulled out an Eisenhower dollar minted in something other than copper and nickle. It gleamed gold. Brilliantly so, even on that shore. "Just one?" The colorless man stood at his shoulder. "I'm sorry. That's all many people save up, but the ferryman wants two." Kenneth flipped the coin over and ran his thumb over the moon and bell. "I don't know where this one came from. How do I get another?" The colorless man's chuckle had a hollow sound. "If I knew the answer to that...." He produced a coin from his rough trousers. The features of the woman on its face had blurred from much handling. He turned it and showed Kenneth the obverse: 1 DOLLAR 1888. "Yours is dated later, I expect," the man said. Kenneth checked: 1973, the year of his birth. "Holy hell," Kenneth said. "You've been here all this time?" "I try to help the people who turn up. A few arrive with two coins. I'm always hoping to meet a soul with three, but... not yet. After a while, the wait is--tolerable." Kenneth looked again at the man's grey clothes, grey skin, grey eyes. He shuddered hard. "Any chance you're a gambler?" The colorless man smiled slightly. "I was, once." "You can pick the game. I'll try anything. Winner gets both coins." The man clasped his hands together as though in prayer, his coin hidden between them. "All right," he said at last. "My name is Christopher. How are you at skipping stones?" Christopher went to the edge of the river. He stooped and took up a flat rock. Kenneth joined him, doing the same. "I was great at it as a kid," he said. "It's been a while now." "I skipped them whenever I had something on my mind. Before my wedding. After funerals," Christopher said, and he sent his rock sailing: six, seven, eight skips, then it sank. "Best total after three stones wins, that's the game." Kenneth launched his stone. It disappeared after four skips. Christopher picked up another rock and weighed it in his hand. "How did you die?" Kenneth asked him. Distraction might be his only chance. "Typhoid. It took my little girl first, so do you know, I didn't even mind that much. I've never found her on this side of the shore." Six skips. A solid plunk. "Who would you look for across the water?" Kenneth threw before he answered and watched the rock bounce seven times. "I'd like to see my mother and tell her--" He broke off. "Well, what would you tell your mother? Your wife?" "That I haven't forgotten them," Christopher said quietly. "That I'd be with them if I could. My brothers, too, and my sons. Did they grow up? Did I have grandchildren? I've been standing in this damned field for so long, and I might never know." He cast a stone over the water: it struck nine times before it fell. Kenneth tossed his last stone from hand to hand. He closed his eyes before he threw. Six skips. Seven. He felt hollow under the ribs he didn't have anymore. Nine. Ten. He imagined himself turned thin and grey. But it was the twelfth skip that made him cold all over. A part of his heart sank with the rock. Christopher held out his dollar. "If you would do me a kindness," he said in a steady voice. "If you meet a woman named Katherine Devine. Ask her about her husband, and if she gives you my name, tell her I'll be over someday yet." Kenneth squeezed both coins in his fist. Would the other side have days as bright as the gold? Could he find his own love even now? He grabbed Christopher's wrist and pressed the coins on him. "Take them and tell her yourself." "No, I can't--" "Don't make me think too hard about this, man, just get on that boat and throw these in the ferryman's face." Joy brought color back to Christopher: his hair took on a touch of red, his eyes a touch of blue. "God bless you," he whispered. "I doubt you'll wait long." He ran to the ship to give the ferryman his due. When the boat was almost out of sight, Christopher cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled, "Check your pockets!" Bemused, Kenneth did. Each hand came out holding a shining coin, golden, dateless. He laughed and kissed them and waved across the water, then sat down to wait for the ferry's return.
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Dec 2, 2013 04:37
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I'm taking I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it before anyone else can.
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Dec 3, 2013 01:32
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Grant Me an Empty Road (Verse: I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it.) (1,568 words) Alene only had to pull the reins in by an inch to convince her hard-used mare to stop. The animal bowed her head until her neck was parallel with the sand, shaking all over from the exertion of breathing. On the ground, Alene staggered away, her own legs no more steady, but by force of will she kept her feet and stood before the road to Mosul-Munye. The diamonds paving the way seared the eye, millions of them rolling out in a cold white band. Surely the desert should have buried them. Alene attempted to kneel and fell onto her knees, lurching forward-- Her whole body recoiled from the bolts of fear that drove in between her eyes and beneath her breastbone: she hit the sand on her back. So all the legend of this cursed place was true, she thought. That was good. Horror would not make her weep or turn away. She'd lived with it too long. She fought her way up to stand again, and she held her hand out, her fingertips hovering at the edge of brilliance. "Ghosts! Don't drive us out. Don't kill us. I'll give to you freely." Alene took the knife from her belt and slashed her wrist across an old scar, a shallow gash that still splashed red onto the diamonds. They drank her blood on contact, burning the colder for it. She trembled and paled before she dared wrap her other hand tight around the cut. One step forward. Two. The diamonds pressed into the worn soles of her boots. No fresh fear touched her. "More blood, every day you let me breathe," she said to the silence. The Jeweled City waited beyond a mile on the diamond way. The towers of Mosul-Munye had been possible in another world, another time. Past aquamarine gates, they reached toward Heaven as fingers carved from topaz, from amethyst, from opal and carnelian. The moonstone tower had metal for mortar, silver woven around uncountable cabochons each larger than the hollow of Alene's palm, cut like the pupil of a feline eye. Bricks of cherry amber lay on each other in a courtyard wall. A dome of seamless emerald guarded a spring-fed pool, warm but clear. Alene supported herself on one palm as she guzzled the green-lit water, noticing the absence of plant life only afterward. Yet she survived the drink; her mare survived. She sought orchards and soil worth tilling within the City's walls. She sought them without, but not for long, for the towers cast long afternoon shadows. Alene hurried the horse into a low lapis tower. Its opaque walls would shield them in darkness, come nightfall. She climbed spiral stairs to see through a window before the light was gone. How still it was: for the past few days sand had hissed in her ears, blown by wind that didn't stir the City. Her heart beat. The mare fidgeted below. That was all the motion in or above Mosul-Munye. When the sun died, when the sky was black, when the white ribbon of diamonds below was mirrored by a white swath of stars above, the dead magi walked out of the towers and milled on the street they'd laid. Cloudy memories of jewels weighted their brows and breasts. Whispering a prayer, Alene ran down to walk among them. She stared into blind, milky eyes and into black hollows where eyes should be. "Sanctuary," she pleaded. Again and again; she knew they heard, they looked at her, and they left her living. Was that itself assent? She drifted back to her tower before sunrise and slept curled up against a gold-veined wall. The mare lipped up the last few oats in the morning and drowsed again without calling for more. Alene cut herself a second time for the diamonds, and vertigo blinded her before her bleeding stopped. She sought vigorously for food. But nothing grew on the sand or bare rock for miles in either direction, if it ever had. Water filled her belly, but she nodded off while watching the empty road. She rushed out past midnight. "Let me stay, gods, let me stay where he can't reach me," she begged the ghosts now, "and leave me enough blood to live on." One woman--her eyes were only holes--touched Alene's shoulder, chilling her to the marrow. Alene whispered, "Do you understand?" The ghost disappeared without answering. Dawn touched the garnet tower, tallest of all, and brought out the deep red of it. Alene sat by her mare all the day, stroking her neck and humming the soft lullabies she'd learned from her grandfather. She caressed the curve of the horse's ribs, stark in her sides. She endured the City's terror until the mare's eyes rolled with it too, until the animal flung her head up, squealing, and tried to stand only to collapse, and it was mercy to them both to draw the knife and cut her throat--so Alene told herself through her tears. Blood splashed her arms and legs. Blood sank into the lapis floor. "Take your bribe!" Alene shouted. "Give me a few days for this much!" She let go of the corpse and walked away from it on leaden legs. Through the door of the tower she saw the evening stars forming their milky band. Before the dead walked, or at least before she lost much time, she must make some kind of light and butcher the meat; she tested the knife's edge on her thumb and closed her eyes. The cuts across her wrist burned. She turned back to her horse. Night fell. Dead men streamed into her tower. Dead women poured down from above, rose up from below. The mare's carcass disappeared under pale, translucent limbs that firmed after lifting gobbets of flesh to ghostly mouths, and it was done before Alene's scream had stopped. All the food she needed--gone, as the ghosts were gone, not even bones for soup remaining. Numb, she pressed her back to stone and pressed her forehead to her knees. The fear she'd brought to this place in her gut had only waited for her to know herself helpless. She jammed her fingers into her ears to block out the quiet, but she heard her own thin keen. Then--sound from outside, still far away. Pounding hooves. His voice. "Alene!" Even here. Even here, he would not let her be. She crawled up the stairs to the window. Though her husband was just a snag of flesh in a stream of ghosts, his bulk--alone, his horse fled--filled her eyes. Magh's heavy boots and heavy hands didn't belong on the diamond way. The dead surrounded him, swirling and turning; he walked as though blind to them. The hilt of her knife warmed her clammy fingers. Alene left the window and the tower on her feet. The spectral crowd drew apart before her. She saw Magh clearly, the mad spittle glittering in his beard, and he saw her, surely saw the weapon glinting in her hand because his laughter bellowed through Mosul-Munye. Alene made two short, halting steps. Magh closed the rest of the distance in five easy strides. She stabbed at his belly, he struck her knife aside with a sweep of his arm and seized her shoulder, tightening his hold until her collarbone snapped. "Alene," he said, baring his teeth. "You craven bitch." Fire punched through her gut. He carried a blade, too. He shoved her to the ground; she howled as the impact drove his dagger back out of her by an inch, blood spilling out with it. Magh kicked her side. She rolled away from the blow, gasping for air to sob with. His boot hit her back next. The cartilage of her knee shattered the second time he stomped on it. Then--his curses and chuckles together faded; he'd moved back to admire his work as he would a blooming bruise. Alene scrabbled at the knife in her belly. The pain when she pulled at it was beyond her bearing. A pale figure knelt before her, lay a hand on her torn skin. The cold of the touch killed all pain as it killed all feeling. The ghost woman held Alene's ruined knee, and the leg was useless, but it didn't hurt. Alene stared into the holes the woman had for eyes; the ghost nodded once. Alene gripped the knife and slid it free. She supposed there was more blood. Her husband's boots approached again. She felt very little as she braced her good knee against diamonds, rolled up and lunged, driving the knife into what she could reach: his groin, and up, cutting a scream out of him until she lost leverage and let go. She screamed too as Magh staggered: "Take him!" He tried to run from the ghosts--his blood soaking their road. He made it past her sight before the dead closed on him and the City lived in the sounds of devouring. Not her. They left her, for now. She had paid for the night already. Soon, they would allow her to stay. Sprawled on her back, Alene considered the white path the stars paved across Heaven. Exquisite. Empty. Its light burned clean; it led far from ghosts or men, and with her mind, with her soul, she walked it as she died.
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Dec 8, 2013 20:17
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crabrock posted:'Tis the season. Strike a DreamingofRoses vs. crabrock Seasonal Thunderbrawl: Mermen at Work I don't know whether either of you is aware, but there's an entire world of glittery mermen out there. Glittery merman ornaments. With professions! They raise all sorts of questions in my mind, such as: what fires are there to fight underwater? What is the point of merman camo? And why in God's name does this dude have a pair of boxers under his tail? Never mind the mer-stripping, though, because your prompt is to write a story about mermen doing jobs. What those jobs are is up to you, but I expect these stories to take place in the ocean, so you may wish to adjust your premise of a mer-cowboy accordingly. The 'no fanfic' rule still applies, so refrain from writing about mer-Christian Grey despite the undoubted temptation. Maximum word count: 1,000 words Deadline: Wednesday, December 25, 11:59pm US Eastern. Merman ornaments after Christmas are just tacky. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Dec 17, 2013 |
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Dec 17, 2013 07:52
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In for this week.
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Dec 19, 2013 22:15
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Fighting Time (995 words) I'd have done anything for my son. Anything. I'd have punched his cancer in the face, only it was too sneaky and cowardly for that kind of fight. All the brawling was up to my boy, and at eight he hadn't gotten his good right hook yet. He'd already lost on that June morning. "I just wish--" he said. "What, Danny?" I held his hand lightly, lightly. It would bruise anyway. "I wish I could see another Christmas." His thin shoulders jiggled in the best shrug he could muster. Trying to play it off like no big thing to him. Nothing had ever made him happier than the whole season of lights and carols and goddamn fruitcake, he loved fruitcake, he'd gotten that from his mother. So I did what any father would: I stayed until he slept, then I booked a flight to the International Date Line to pick a fight with Time. I was waiting on Caroline Island when Wednesday strolled up at midnight. I didn't bother explaining anything, I just planted my fist in his jaw, wham! and sent him flying backwards into the ocean. When he surfaced, my kicking boots were ready. I laid him out cold on the coral rubble. "Nothing personal," I told his unconscious body. "If you had a kid, you'd understand." Then I tied him up. I'd brought a lot of rope. Didn't seem like any time before Thursday showed up for the same treatment, and soon I had Friday, Saturday, and Sunday all sprawled in a row. Monday was a mean-rear end son of a bitch who hit like a hangover. Could be I kicked him in the balls 'fore I added him to the pile. I sucked on bleeding knuckles after taking out Tuesday. All the days were accounted for, I reckoned; what came next? July came next. Half her hair was golden sun, half white as frost. She smelled to me like green growth and baked dirt and lemonade, and she was as beautiful as my wife had been--looked a lot like Molly, too. I'd danced with Molly for the first time under a summer moon. I'd buried her under a hot blue sky. My hands were fists, but I hesitated. July hit me so hard I fell back onto the bound-up days and drove a new curse out of Monday. She said in a voice full of birdsong and amorous crickets, "You won't get me out of the way with a punch, Darrell. Go home." "Can't," I said, and I swung. She caught my fist in a grip as hot as the breath of a star. "Then it's time for you to meet the boss," she said, and she kissed my cheek before spinning around and around, whipping my feet off the ground--then flinging me up, up, through the clouds and beyond, with my hands grabbing for purchase. I found some: I caught a handful of white stuff that had some substance. It dangled from somewhere higher still. For lack of better ideas, I climbed it. I reached a cloud that held my weight, and I learned right off that I was holding the beard of a very old man. His platform, his throne--hell, his whole cloud was made of beard. I dropped his beard-hair in a hurry, and he beckoned me forward. I approached him. "I guess you're Father Time, and I guess you know what I want, and I don't like to hit my elders, but I will if that's the only way. Please. Let Danny have his last Christmas." "Would you arm wrestle for it?" Time asked. The beard-cloud shifted, forming a table and two chairs. Dropping into a seat, I rolled up my right shirtsleeve. "Absolutely." "Good, but I'm old for such contests. My brother will be my proxy." The skeleton in the black cloak and hood hadn't been standing beside the throne a second before, I knew he hadn't. But Death's good at hiding until it's too late to get away. The Reaper sat in the second seat and placed his elbow on the table with a clack. I thought of Danny and gripped Death's cold and narrow hand hard enough to crack ordinary bones. "You have five minutes," Father Time told us. "Starting now." The muscles of my arm became rock as I bent their power on the bastard in front of me. I hated his grin, so I fixed on his forearm, willing it to break. The skinny limb held me off without effort, without a single fracture. So I tried harder. I grit my teeth and got stabbed with pain as a filling broke loose. Sweat dripped into my eyes. My hand started hurting--it didn't like being driven against diamond-hard bone--but I told it to shut the hell up and shoved 'til I couldn't feel my fingers at all. Nothing. I didn't budge him. But he didn't slam my hand down, either, and he could have done it that first second. We were still where we'd started when the old man said, "Time's up." Death let go of my hand, and my arm dropped to the table. "Best two out of three," I said. Father Time shook his head. "July's walking the Earth now, and August will come after her. She set the days free. Wednesday is already at your house." "Please," I begged. "Please." "You didn't lose," Death said. I looked at him, into the hollow eyes darker than his cloak. He said, "You fought. We tied. Time will go on, and Danny will see December." Then he vanished like he'd never been there, except I could still feel him in my arm. Only him and nothing else. When I got back to the hospital, Danny jumped out of his bed to hug me tight. My dead arm makes punching things harder, but I'd still do anything for my son. We're going to have a great Christmas.
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Dec 22, 2013 19:16
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Kaishai posted:
Reminding DreamingofRoses and crabrock that they owe us some mermen within an hour and twenty minutes. Merry Christmas, thread!
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Dec 26, 2013 04:45
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The Leper Colon V posted:And Dreaming of Roses loses by default! That's for me to decide, stranger. There's always the remote possibility I'll show mercy in the spirit of this holiday season. Or the probability that I just want to see more mermen stories.
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Dec 26, 2013 07:31
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 Thunderbrawl Results for DreamingofRoses vs. crabrock: Mermen at Work THE PROMPT: Write a story in which mermen perform their jobs. THE WINNER: crabrock, but barely. You two took the prompt in different directions, though you still both ended up with dead mermen in the end. It's like glittery mer-dudes inspire visions of blood in the water for some people. Neither of you wrote what I'd call a solid story. crabrock's comedy was significantly marred by an ill-fitting economic angle, and DreamingofRoses dawdled through a fishy cattle drive before rushing through the end with such haste that I barely noticed when the main characters died, much less cared. crabrock flirted aggressively with prompt failure. DreamingofRoses submitted late(r) and went over the word limit. Did you cover yourselves with glory? No, but you gave me the gift of dazzling mermen this holiday season, and that's what counts. Individual crits follow. crabrock, "Shark Week" You managed to both glory in and clip all the corners of the prompt, which is impressive in its way. You brought the actual glittery mermen into play and made them characters. I loved that--it's by far the best element of your piece, it's hilarious to me, and it made it impossible for me to dislike the story unless you made a complete dog's dinner of the prose. You didn't; the prose doesn't particularly sparkle, but it serves. However, you didn't show these would-be mer-durers (sorry) going about their professions. Nor were they hired to kill Barry, so your interpretation of 'job' is stretched. You didn't adjust their regular jobs much to suit undersea life. Your decision to use the actual figurines handicapped you there. Another aspect I'm not crazy about is the random economic talk. Tax brackets? 'Value the contributions of all'? 'Another satisfying day of contributing positively to society'? It's dull in contrast to the bit where the mermen are shocked and appalled that Barry doesn't even try to be a model, which is a lot more funny. The fashion-model element and the blue-collar economics element didn't fuse for me at all. I'd suggest you cut out the latter if you were going to work further with this story, although I suspect you won't, because it's a story about glittery merman Christmas ornaments. The dark ending is a daring route to take, but did Donovan really just murder a friend with almost no provocation? Really? He wants Barry dead that badly? Not buying it. You don't have as much room to be absurd with tragedy as with comedy. (If Donovan stabbing Toby was supposed to be funny, that's a definite miss.) I like the last scene--and I need that last scene to make sense of what happened and who died--but why didn't the sharks eat Toby's tail? (Also: 'Toby “But it is murder. The second greatest crime.”' Rrrrgh.) It's the humor that gives this piece its shine. Everything else is crooked. I still enjoyed it most, but you came close to a loss here. As is, you're winning more because of what DreamingofRoses did wrong than because of what you did right. DreamingofRoses, "Mamas Don't Let Your Spawn Grow Up To Be Fish-Herders" Your first line is ghastly! The phrasing is labored, and you'd likely do better to make Triton (terrible, cliche name; this had me expecting bad things) the subject of the opening sentence rather than dedicating it to fish flashers. I didn't like Triton's whistling for the dolphins, either, although I'll grant that's a weird nit to pick given that mermen talking underwater doesn't bother me. I pictured a guy pursing his lips and blowing a lot of useless bubbles. Should I have imagined something more like a whale's song? A touch of description here would have helped. So unlike crabrock, you made a bad first impression. Also unlike crabrock, you did exactly what the prompt asked, no more, no less: you wrote a mer-cowboy whose work was much flavored by the underwater setting. The plot revolved around him performing his job. Details like Triton's spear, Aric's seaweed-braided hair, bioluminescent algae, etc. were good: your ocean life felt more genuine. Although you rode the line between colorful and heavy-handed with your mer-slang and your prose was clumsy in places, there was a point--right before the scene break--when I thought you could take this fight. What you didn't have in laughs you made up for in atmosphere. Your pacing and your ending killed you. Even going over the word count, you left yourself no room for Triton's and Aric's deaths. The squid's barely seen at all before your characters are shark bait. Triton doesn't struggle. If you hadn't mentioned shredded shirts, plural, I wouldn't know Aric had died. After the conclusion I felt cheated of real horror, real meaning, real anything. Triton and Aric seemed nice enough from the little I saw of them, but I didn't get attached to either one; their deaths had no emotional weight; if you couldn't make me care about them as people, you needed to make me fear that squid for the story to be worth telling. I mentioned clumsy prose. 'It turned to lunge at the merman through the water only to be stopped by Triton’s spear appearing in its side.' That has to be the dullest way you could have described Triton stabbing a dolphin. It's not active at all. Something more like 'It turned to lunge at the merman, but blood gouted from its body as Triton's spear punched through its side' would have had more verve: 'punched' is a lot more visceral than 'appeared.' If the spear just magically teleports into the dolphin, you lose all the energy of a fight. 'Maybe if you get some sleep you’ll lose that stick in your drat spawner,” the merman began chewing on a jerked piece of fish meat and began swimming the perimeter of the school, glancing out into the surrounding water as' -- First off, the comma after 'spawner' should be a period, with the following 'the' capitalized. Second, there must be more than a word or two missing from this sentence. I have the sense that I'm missing an entire brief-but-important scene. 'The tense trip away from the wild dolphin pod and towards the ‘current’ in the south proved fairly calm' -- Is it calm or is it tense? They're mutually exclusive. 'Uneventful' may be a better second adjective. You spelled Aric's name 'Arick' at one point; 'fairly-clear' doesn't need a hyphen. I'm not calling out all the tiny grammar errors. They're generally minor. Take your time if you decide to work further with this one. Waiting until Christmas to finish didn't do either of you any favors, but by the look of things, it hurt you most.
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Dec 27, 2013 05:59
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It's been a pleasure hanging out here this year, getting to know the taste of some of your livers while fighting to keep my own intact. May 2014 bring us just as much blood, weeping, and glory. But fewer poo poo geysers. Please, Baby New Year, I've been so good. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Dec 31, 2013 |
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Dec 31, 2013 05:44
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sebmojo posted:Hello "brawl queen". Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of sebmojo, I will fear no cyberpunk; for CMoS is with me. I'll meet you on the fresh, unbloodied ground of the new thread, seven-times lord. Contain your avarice. The skulls are quite comfy, and I intend to keep them.
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Dec 31, 2013 07:03
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See you on the top of the pagoda, Muffin. In the meanwhile: I In 'conditioning,' The PUA is subtle. "Hello!" Points to schlong. II In search of more words Thunderdome cries to heaven: "Beef can eat a dick." III Our pens rise, proud, strong, To spear the world with our words And leave it replete.
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Dec 31, 2013 07:46
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