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Critiques for Week LXXIX: Noah, Nettle Soup, Martello, Jeep, WeLandedOnTheMoon!, Schneider Heim, curlingiron, docbeard, No Longer Flaky, Paladinus, Lake Jucas, Little Mac, QuoProQuid, Lead out in cuffs, Seldom Posts, Jay O, Jonked, Black Griffon, crabrock, Djeser, and JuniperCake Noah, "The Crawling Statue" Bold move, bringing in your extra words in a week with an overall word count like this one. I admire the chutzpah enough to wish it had worked out better. Extra words are the last thing you needed, because the length above all else kills this. It's overlong, dragged out, bloated. Having to tighten it would have done you a world of good. I love the route you went in turning the angles and structure of bismuth into Lovecraftian horror. I own a bismuth sample, and its geometry does look like something Lovecraft could rave about. You brought your research into play through your Bolivian setting and in the initial mistaking of bismuth for tin, a solid application that didn't hit me over the head with factoids. I wonder at Oliver's thought that bismuth is a better find than tin; that makes me question when this is set. I wouldn't have thought it took place in modern day, maybe because of the Lovecraftian tone, but bismuth's price wasn't all that high until recently. Kind of odd. Your plot makes at least as much sense as this kind of horror ever does, and you do capture--to a degree--a sense of the ominous as Oliver is mesmerized by the living bismuth. The scene you paint is both beautiful and horrid simply because you know it's not going anywhere good; following alien things into caves never does. What happens to him is appropriately awful. It's a sound pastiche of Lovecraft, very much the sort of thing he might write. But oh, the bloat. So much could be condensed. Just as one example: 'It was angular, and mostly square, lacking any sort of curvature or roundness.' For Heaven's sake, 'curvature' and 'roundness' are functionally the same thing, and 'angular and mostly square' already implies the thing isn't round. Lines you could cut altogether include 'Not impossible, but dangerous if he were to fall again from a poor foothold' and possibly 'This was not the first time, nor the last, speculating for minerals would lead him to the rear end end of nowhere'--that doesn't tell me anything about his past I need to know. The conclusion especially drags on and just feels long, so look for ways you can trim there while keeping the essentials. The prose also has technical problems. Several misplaced modifiers: 'Turning to wave at the Bolivians, his next step found no solid ground' tells me his step waved at some Bolivians, and 'After refusing to divulge the mine’s location, or return to the company, Sanderson cut him off financially' says that Sanderson refused to divulge the mine's location when I'm sure that's not what you mean. You put commas before dependent clauses but fail to put them between independent clauses. Sometimes words are missing (as in 'Oliver unclipped his belt flashlight, but found almost no need'--no need for it, I imagine); you refer to a plural subject, segments, as 'it' instead of 'they'; you use 'anyway' where you want 'any way.' Lots of errors. They detract quite a bit. More proofreading and fewer words would be godsends for this one, and the solid heart beneath its flaws makes the effort worth considering. ********************************************************************************************************************** Nettle Soup, "As Good as Gold" Ooooof. Commas. I see five to seven errors in comma usage in your first scene alone. (I say five to seven because punctuation within dialogue gets some leeway; the commas after 'new one' and 'appreciate me' should both technically be semicolons or periods, but you could use commas there if they fit the rhythms of the characters' speech.) The comma after 'hands' should be a semicolon or period too: the following clause is independent, meaning it has a subject and verb of its own. Here is another link to my favorite handy guide on the semicolon vs. comma issue. There should be no comma after 'in his' because the clause that follows is dependent: 'and smiles as she laughs and pulls away' has no subject. The commas after 'garden,' 'away,' and 'laughing' should all be periods. 'Erik takes her hands in his' (for one example) has no speaking verb such as 'says' or 'exclaims'; it isn't a proper dialogue tag. 'Laughing' could potentially work if you were trying to say she laughed the words, but since your phrase was 'still laughing,' not so much. I know grammar isn't the critical element of this or any story, but it's not good at all to start out with so many mistakes. It makes a rotten first impression. I thought I'd be addressing the meat of your entry first, but as soon as I took another look at it the errors distracted me right off the rails. You don't want that to happen for a reader. The gist here seems to be that after Sophie loses her copper ring, it grows into a metallic plant that feeds on blood. You describe the plant as pale yellow, which sounds more like gold than copper, and you don't specify which metal it is until after Sophie theorizes that it needs copper to grow. Sophie becomes addicted to the plant within several days of feeding it her blood. I don't know why. There's no obvious reason she should turn into a cutter for this tree. The premise needs more support to make sense. If copper trees are strange and rare, I wonder why no one notices the metal giant looming in Erik's garden. The shift from present tense to past at the very end bemuses me. Present tense may not have been the best choice anyway. You handle it well enough, but it doesn't add anything. The story would be and would work exactly the same if written in past tense, and past is the default that readers will expect, so deviating from it draws attention to your prose that you'd probably prefer to have focused on the story. Either way, why on earth would you change it in the eleventh hour? Especially in that direction. As I turn this over in my mind I start to wonder if it's all meant to be a metaphor. Whether the tree is a stand-in for something else--but what? Addiction? Cutting yourself to feed a tree is a ridiculous thing to get addicted to. Obsession? An abusive relationship? Sophie's actions are neither logical nor understandably illogical, so the piece doesn't work from that angle either. For all my complaints, your entry wasn't unpleasant to read or anywhere near the bottom of the pile; the contemporary fairy-tale concept would be a good one if it hung together, and the application of copper is creative. Polish up the sentence-level writing and show more of what drives Sophie's behavior and this could be a decent story. ********************************************************************************************************************** Martello, "LOGPAC" "What's the loving point?" A valid question. Boiling all the acronyms and lingo and vehicle specs out of your story gets me this: an improvised explosive is discovered buried in the road. The protagonist is called in to look at it. He does. More specifically, he watches other people disarm it. Then his sergeant shoots the jug of nitrate to blow it up, and the protagonist reflects on how there's no sense to any of it. Hurrah for emulating the action of The Leper Colon V, I guess? You didn't, though, or at least not entirely. "What's the loving point?" applies to this story, especially since you, not being an idiot, had to know filling it with military jargon would limit its appeal to a niche that doesn't include much of the Thunderdome. You'd need a hell of a plot to get away with that, and you don't have one at all. Your main character does jack besides watching other people act. The whole is mechanically competent, but that's never enough on its own. What separates it from the likes of Leper's and magnificent7's famously pointless stories is that 'Why do people do the things they do in war?' is a worthwhile question. Familiar. But worthwhile. There's not much else to say, beyond that if general appeal is a thing you're after then you ought to consider chopping at least half the terms most civilians won't know. ********************************************************************************************************************** Jeep, "Little Things" Overwritten. Technically skilled, but ornate to a fault. That's refreshing in its way amidst a tall stack of entries with mechanical issues, but the first paragraph--I blame 'all those would-be German Supermen customers found the idea quite Kryptonitic indeed' in particular--braced me for fanciful prose at the probable expense of story. You didn't go as far that way as I feared; your lonely protagonist and the fantasy he built out of voices and air were worth the time I spent reading about them, and you presented a character arc, though Esther's speech at the end fell flat and heavy. The choice of present tense added to the impression I had of fancy-for-fancy's-sake. There's not a lot wrong with it, however. You could stand to tone it down and put it in past tense, but that may be and to some degree must be my personal preferences talking. Neon is integral to your piece, and neon lights burning through the night make for a desolate image. They suit the overall mood down to the ground. If anything needs a major overhaul, it's that dialogue of Esther's. You might as well hang a sign on it that says THIS IS THE MORAL OF THE STORY. He's become so absorbed in the minutiae of his fantasy that his real life is suffering neglect. He should detach from Esther and his long nights of work and remember the things that matter. Yes. Good message. Now find a less blatant way to deliver it. ********************************************************************************************************************** WeLandedOnTheMoon!, "Matchstick" I ranked yours ninth of all the stories: not outstanding, definitely flawed, but good and probably not that hard to tune up if you're so minded. You told a touching love story. Your invocation of phosphorus is great. It's in the matches that light Babe's way; it starts the fire that destroys his haven with Claire. That's a nice look at both sides of fire, and it sets me off thinking about fire as passion, which is present as a bright thing (teenage love) and a dark (Joe's anger) also. The message of love overcoming racial prejudices is delivered well and stays on the right side of anvilicious. Babe tells me that her race didn't matter to him, and I see in his viewpoint that this is true. But I don't know what the deal is with Joe. You never let the reader in on what happened between him and Babe to end their friendship. The only hint: "I should kill you for disrespecting my family like this." I have no idea what I'm supposed to take from that. Did they find out they're secretly half brothers? Was Babe dating Joe's sister at one time? What's up with Joe that he's tracking Babe, and why does he destroy Claire's property? 'He's a racist' doesn't answer all those questions. There's a story here under the surface that you haven't brought to light. The question of Joe is too important to the plot to leave unanswered. The question of what happened to Mickey Mint is less important, but I admit that bugs me too. One of my co-judges pointed out to me that Babe's mother also drops entirely out of the picture. Very odd when the first paragraph is all about her. The reference to Kennedy is a good way to set the time, but his mother's pain should have gone somewhere. Your writing is generally good, but 'She added, “and that’s not just because I’m black."' is a worse horror than the thing in Noah's story. Capitalize that 'and,' do. There are other little things: you should capitalize 'Mom' when you use it as a pronoun, the semicolon after 'his voice' should be a colon, you use 'peak' where you want 'peek,' you're missing a quotation mark before 'but I never expected,' etc., etc. I mention these to encourage you to proofread more thoroughly, but mechanics aren't a significant problem for you. ********************************************************************************************************************** Schneider Heim, "The Lightest Metal" I was prepared to grouse at you when I thought the initials of your main characters and the 'light' nature of pop metal were your only connections to lithium, but after looking again, I think I've got it. Are you playing with the weak binding energies of lithium nuclei? Neither Iris nor Lance were linked all that tightly with their prior partner/band, and the bond they form in the story never feels that strong either. I wouldn't be too surprised if you told me they went their separate ways after leaving the bar. It doesn't quite work, because the story is still about two people forming a partnership and that lack of chemistry (I don't mean romantic; they just don't give an impression of being likely to get along past the moment) gets in your way, whether or not it's intentional. The line about burning through the material could be a reference to lithium's reactivity with water, although I'm reaching there. Your prose and mechanics are competent, but the story doesn't stand out in one way or the other. Lance's creepy staring and his line about bands and bitches make him hard to connect to; Iris wasn't the only one cringing. I don't play guitar, so take this with a grain of salt, but I have a seriously hard time believing he taught her to play multiple pop songs in the space of however long they had before the manager shoved them out on stage. Does she have some kind of unusually good recall? Once I hit that point, my interest checked out because I couldn't believe their set went well on the basis of a few minutes' practice. To your credit, you don't try to sell them as a smashing success: 'mild applause' works. They don't actually sound fun to listen to! Their triumph is thin, such as it is, and their connection thinner. It's nice that Iris got past Jane's abandonment and still made music, but I wasn't very invested in her outcome. ********************************************************************************************************************** curlingiron, "No Time Like the Present" You know I originally named a different flash rule for you, which I changed because I thought it told you too directly how to deal with rubidium; what you can't know is that I'd thought of and dismissed two other rules before that. One was that your story had to include at least one ruby. The other was that precise timing had to play a role. It tickled me when you met them all, all unknowing, but that's not the reason I like this story as much as I do--and I like it a lot! You hit just the right notes. Your flash rule is front and center. Your element is too, without being physically present in the story; you explain its properties in a way that teaches without being awkward or pedantic, and your information, so far as I can tell, is accurate. The main character has a personality. She and her love for her parents both feel real. The whole thing is sweet. I love the happy ending. Much as I like it, it's not a powerful story. It's light. It's charming. It's fun. The writing--while good--doesn't impress me nearly as much as God Over Djinn's. The emotion in it doesn't move me as much as crabrock's. Your use of rubidium was great, but other entrants were more clever or creative yet in their approaches, though most by far were less so. And the resolution does remind me of O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi." This kind of is "The Gift of the Magi" without the bittersweet twist, and the similarity takes some strength away from it. I couldn't convince myself it was the best story in the round, but it was the one I enjoyed most. I'm glad I got to read it. Good work! ********************************************************************************************************************** docbeard, "Miss Annabel Yoder Finishes Her Quilt" This deal-at-the-crossroads theme is something you like to explore, I take it! I judged your blackjack-with-the-devil entry too, and that gave this piece a familiar feel that didn't work altogether in your favor. It also reminds me rather of Stephen King's Needful Things. There's a risk in treading such well-traveled ground, but you put enough of your own spin on it to keep it from being a complete clone. The devil (or whatever he is) sitting down to talk more-or-less openly with two clients is new. His used-car-salesman narrative voice is grating to read at times, but it establishes his character. Miss Yoder's quilt is a new twist on the old story as well, but that one is less successful. I assume she made a deal with Mr. Crossroads for time to sew her masterpiece, but why was lutetium thread what she needed to finish? That came out of nowhere for me and made no particular logical sense. This is a less important point, but how did she work on that thing for more than fifty years--far more, if it was 'half done' fifty years ago--without it growing so large it covered the entire town? You met your flash rule in a so-so way: the lute leads Pete to bring up the subject of music and, now that I look at it again, is another clue that Miss Yoder is indeed very old. So it's not shoehorned in, but it feels out of place nevertheless, especially since it falls out of the story relatively early. You could have Pete offer Miss Yoder the lute back closer to the end (after the not-devil asks about the point of creative endeavor, maybe), and I think that would help it feel more relevant. Miss Yoder saying she has no more use for it would be more poignant if she had seen the thread first. Referring to Miss Yoder as 'the old lady who lives in that big house' is a bit of a cheat and stood out immediately on my second read. My suggestion would be 'the old lady of that big house'--it's less of an outright lie, considering Miss Yoder is dead when the story starts. ********************************************************************************************************************** No Longer Flaky, "Alley Deals" Why oh why did your nameless narrator tell Chad about the television at the end? You had me in your corner at least a little; your story rambled and was fraught with pointless details, but the narrator's decision to keep his/her mouth shut because of the good the placebo effect was doing his/her friend was touching, a decent display of true friendship that gave the story a point. Then you ruined the whole thing and ended on a weaksauce note besides. You don't have a real conclusion either, do you? The real story is in what happens to Chad from here, not in the narrator's Craigslist purchase history! But oh, it gets worse than that. I've been doing some research on francium. According to environmentalchemistry.com, 'There is probably less than 30 grams of francium in the earth's crust at any one time.' And: 'Francium is never encountered normally, however, handling it would be very dangerous as it is a powerful source of alpha radiation.' It decays within twenty-two minutes to astatine, radium, or frigging radon, Wikipedia tells me. Nobody is ever making diet pills out of this stuff. So the pills aren't just useless, they aren't francium, and your element is therefore nothing more than a name, and you've failed the prompt. Oooh, are you lucky I didn't check up on you sooner! Now I have to settle for denouncing you here as a promptfudger. Thirty-seven people managed to fulfill the basic requirement to some degree, including the SF writers. You didn't. Way to go. Your punctuation within and around dialogue is sloppy. Check out the links on that subject I've peppered through these crits if you haven't yet. You do better than some on the technical level, but your prose has no zing, and your story has no more point than it has francium. ********************************************************************************************************************** Paladinus, "Of Little Faith." Coming off two losses, you've done very well. You've answered your flash rule and applied your element in a simple, understated way that nevertheless worked and had meaning within the story; the Bible quotation was a perfect fit. The edges of your prose are only slightly ragged compared to some of what I've seen from your competitors. On the other hand, this isn't much of a story, being instead a vignette examining one woman's crisis of faith at length, and what message it has is muddled for me. Is doubt a loss of faith or the heart of faith? The protagonist's thoughts on the matter switch from one view to another, which is probably accurate enough in her situation but doesn't make for the clearest or most concise read. I believe she accepts both her doubt and her faith at the end, but I'm not sure. I'm left with no firm sense of resolution or change. It's an interesting exploration of a theme, but it's not satisfying. Your mechanical mistakes are along the line of failing to capitalize proper nouns ('Father Joseph' would be correct), commas where you want periods sometimes (such as after 'the feast of everlasting joy'), and missing words that skew your tenses ('My meditations turned into sessions [...]' would be better as 'have turned' to stay in the present tense). Little things. Watch for them. I can't tell whether the main character is reciting those Bible verses aloud or thinking them to herself, since you surround them with the same single quotes you use for speech. Single quotes for dialogue would be wrong in American English, but they're correct in British English, and you've used Brit spellings. Fair enough! You should still find some way to differentiate the quotes from what she says aloud. ********************************************************************************************************************** Lake Jucas, "American Werewolf in America" So yeah, the skateboarding werewolf thing. I'm not seeing a lot of chlorine here! You did nothing at all with your element beyond what your flash rule threw at you, which was more a lack of chlorine than anything. Laaaaame. It's the least of your problems, but it's laaaaame all the same. Nothing happens in this. Your protagonist is a skateboarding werewolf and nothing. Happens. He gets invited to skateboard in an empty pool. He skateboards in an empty pool. He flees the pool when the moon comes rises. A girl who's essentially a Twilight joke (in 2014!!) lets him out so he can skateboard some more. The end. Okay, so you were pretty clearly trying for a humor angle where the compulsion to skateboard was so strong for this guy that his werewolf status was an afterthought. That concept had some potential, but in practice, Dan's obsession made him tedious. He had no thoughts besides 'SKATEBOARD' and 'ugh, Jess.' (How did Jess know he was a werewolf, anyway? Did Anthony let it slip?) There was potential too in the setup: oh, dear, the skateboarding werewolf has stayed out too long skateboarding; what will happen at the party now? Your answer--that he goes and skateboards yet more--is the dullest possible resolution to that crisis. Your writing is just weird. Sometimes your prose is technically sound enough to pass, but then you'll throw out an instant cringe like 'who's desperate attempts' or 'It's bowl shape' or 'stared to file in' or 'I was ambivalent to them' (you wanted 'oblivious') or, God help us, 'He was write.' 'One think filled my frenzied brain.' 'Jess's cries where downed out.' I begin to understand how you transformed sebmojo into a creature of supernatural rage. Granted he didn't have far to go, but still. It's ridiculous that Dan claims not to know why Jess is into him when she's wearing a Jacob shirt and he later refers to her werewolf fetish. Seriously, not even Little Mac's protagonist is that dumb. You lucked out in that the foibles of the lowest two stories kept everything else out of contention for the loss. Read up on punctuating dialogue and try again another week, preferably with a plot in tow. ********************************************************************************************************************** Little Mac, "Room to Breathe" Proof positive that solid prose and good mechanics aren't everything, we have here a story that does very little wrong on the technical level but still manages to land in the lower tier. The problem? Your plot and main characters alike are too stupid to live. Chet is the only one whose horrible, agonizing death I regret. Alas, sweet prince, too good by half for this ship of fools! I don't know what you were thinking; maybe you had a fun little story going about two people finding love on a submarine and then didn't know how to end it--I remember that being a problem of yours in the professional mystery week--so you just killed them all? No, that can't be right. You started building up to their death by idiocy before Emmett even sat down for lunch. They sincerely failed to notice the water creeping up to their waists. Esther smiled after Chet pointed out it was her fault. What the hell. She went from being a charming enough character to a lethally oblivious moron in two seconds flat. Emmett didn't panic either, and they died happily together. It's so dumb it's probably killed some of my brain cells through exposure. I have to guess you were trying for humor, but boy howdy did you miss the mark. A touch of sensible behavior would have gone miles toward making the death of your cast either funny or poignant, but as-is it's just inane, and its position after a skateboarding werewolf can only improve it so much by comparison. ********************************************************************************************************************** QuoProQuid, "Self-Fulfilling Prophecy" A lot of factors worked against this one: the Hindenburg was the most obvious possible place to take your element, you used prophetic visions as a major plot device, your exposition was as subtle as a tiger in a tea room, your characters were props to serve a tired premise, and your comma usage was a mess. Knowing you had hydrogen, I could tell where you were going as soon as the first vision appeared. That knocked all the surprise and most of the interest out of the story's unfolding, and then the ending was as basic as it could be. Yep, Emilie's going to cause the Hindenburg Disaster. Maybe Emilie's visions could have worked if you'd loaded them with more sensory detail; you put decent details into her epileptic fit, so you were capable. If you'd made me see the German conquest of London through her eyes, maybe I would have felt her horror and determination, but your exposition--yes, the Nazis were terrible; yes, their zeppelins were vulnerable to ignition, as the Hindenburg proved--didn't deliver any emotion. When I call the exposition unsubtle, though, I'm referring to the doctor asking Emilie the ship's name and the year. If I hadn't guessed what was going on by then, that would still have been a clumsy way to receive the news and an awkward point in the story at which to do it. Everything after that feels drawn out. We know all we need to know, and the last scene with her husband is just dithering. I think you intended more. Emilie's relationship to her husband is genuinely interesting. The line 'Was it love or hate she felt?' was the strongest thing in the story for me. I don't trust her view of him; I suspect he does love her, and that adds a much-needed edge of personal tragedy to what she's planning to do. When she says his name and it's a German name, I wonder whether she resents him for being German, how they got together, what their history is. Emilie herself is a good unreliable narrator, and that's why I wish they weren't going through predictable motions. They deserved a better plot. As for mechanics, sentences like 'She scrambled her legs, trying to get up but only jerked around useless' are harder to read than they should be. Try this: 'She scrambled her legs, trying to get up, but they only jerked around, useless.' Or 'but only jerked around uselessly'; I can't tell whether you mean Emilie's legs or Emilie herself are jerking and useless. 'Breathing stopped, the muscles in her face flexed.' What? Do the muscles in her face flex because her breathing stops? Or do you mean 'Her breathing stopped; the muscles in her face flexed,' which keeps those ideas separated? You don't use commas between independent clauses as much as you should, and you use them around dialogue when you shouldn't, such as in 'He squeezed her wrist and looked at the man next to him, “Paul, [...] fit.' That comma should be a period, because 'He squeezed her wrist' etc. is not a speech tag. Here's that comma link one more time. Your errors didn't render your piece unreadable by any means, but I had to untangle your sentences in my head too often. ********************************************************************************************************************** Lead out by the cuffs, "Heavy Metal Roses" Not bad; darkly amusing in its mockery of PUAs once you get past the awkward beginning. Niche-y, though. Stuff like 'a subtle neg' and 'GradPUAs,' not to mention sizable swaths of the whole chatroom conversation, depend on the reader knowing about pick-up-artist tactics to make any damned sense. That's not a sure bet even on SomethingAwful. It's clear enough that Ted is some sort of womanizing douche, but 'sarging' and 'kino' are not exactly clear in this context. That stuff is as bad as Martello's military lingo in terms of narrowing your audience. Osmium is a clear and dangerous presence here. You've done your research, but since you made the infodump a natural part of the story (sort of--I don't find toxic chemicals a turn-on myself, but what do I know), the facts you share slot into place and don't distract. Everything Ted says is supported by Wikipedia, but his dialogue reads like dialogue and not a Wikidump. Good on you. The plot use to which you put the metal is great. It's a pity that copy-and-paste error spoiled your ending on my first read. How something so weird made it past post preview, I have no idea, but be careful in the future! While we're on the subject of what to avoid, you should have taken out your spoilered text while you were cleaning up: commentary like that gives the impression the entry can't speak for itself. Your writing's solid except for Ted's thoughts. I don't like the use of single quotes for those at all. Italics would have been less obtrusive if you wanted to separate them from the regular text. More than that, they're what mucked up the opening by being obnoxious in the second paragraph. 'Haha, I'll get some work out of her all right!' needlessly and annoyingly underlines his creepiness. Trust me, it's plenty obvious without the help. You've made some small punctuation errors, but they aren't particularly distracting, aside from '"This",' (ugh). For example: ''Julia.' He repeated to himself' should be ''Julia,' he repeated to himself.' This page is a detailed guide to punctuating dialogue and quotations, though you probably know most of what it says. Overall, a good first entry, hindered mostly by your choice to aim for a very slim target. ********************************************************************************************************************** Seldom Posts, "Ultima Thule" Maybe there's a world in which Nazi cyborgs are not science fiction, but that is not the world in which I live. DISQUALIFIED. Thulium lasers exist and are useful for surgery, so your use of your element is decent if you take away the whole thing where the surgery makes CYBORGS. I'm skeptical that the 'only naturally occurring deposit' of thulium would be in Greenland, considering that China has the largest supply of thulium ores. I suspect you stuck it up there for the sake of Uqalik and her final line. It's more of a stretch than I like. Speaking of stretches, you went over the word limit with what I must assume was malice aforethought. It's not a terrible story, but Nazis are a tired villain with or without mechanical implants. You don't resolve your plot lines. Your surviving characters defeat and escape from the Nazis, but what happens to them afterward? What happens to the thulium? Despite the extra words you took, you didn't get any of that into the piece; it just stops at a half-decent break point. Not a winning strategy even if the cyborgs hadn't done you in. ********************************************************************************************************************** Jay O, "Salvage" You know those comments you put at the bottom of your entry? Don't do that. If you need to explain something for the story to make sense, you've screwed up, and if you apologize in advance, that's arguably worse. You had me expecting something tremendously goony when this is actually a touching story about a man reconnecting with his past and finding out the value of his memories. Even though the rusty tin of Martin's old hideaway had "Love Shack" playing through my head as I read, I enjoyed the themes of this one very much. As Martin gathers up the relics of his youth to sell, he notices the little tin figures he once made. They have no monetary value, but he searches for them anyway, remembering as he does the people those figures represented and his own younger self who made them. He isn't willing to abandon the past in his hurry. More than that, he goes out of his way and to some difficulty to find the memento of who he once was. There's no going back to his high-school days, and I don't get the sense he would if he could, but he doesn't want to forget as he moves forward. When the mudslide comes, that desire to keep a tie to his past saves him. I don't know whether this would resonate with everyone, but it does with me--and that just made me frown the more at you dismissing Martin and his friends as 'chubby tabletop nerds.' It's like you missed your own point! This came within shouting distance of an honorable mention, but the exposition about Martin's old group, especially Chris, is so very clunky. That one paragraph in which you talk about Chris as a 'bland-lookin' guy' and throw details about Martin's own role takes a lead pipe to the kneecap of your story. Splitting it into multiple paragraphs might have helped (the mesh of Chris's background and Martin's background is quite awkward); there's no grace in the prose, though, and I can't grimace at bland-lookin' enough. This stuff sits right in the middle of your otherwise decent writing like a rock in a bowl of Corn Flakes. There's nothing wrong with writing about nerdy things when you can infuse them with charm and significance. Just smooth out your infodumps and stop trying to convince the judges your work's not good. ********************************************************************************************************************** Jonked, "Theoretically Hopeful" 'I laid their silently.' Oh, Jonked. It's rarely a good thing when a story is almost all background and exposition. What actually happens here is that a man watches a woman sleep, then goes to sleep, then wakes up, then has breakfast and asks her whether they'll do this again. Everything else is the protagonist telling the reader about his past at length. He goes on about his ex-girlfriends longer than he needs to in order to make the point, and my interest wanes anecdote by anecdote. It perks back up for a moment when he and you finally get to the Island of Stability and unbihexium, but the explanation is so vague. How does 'there's a massive, stable element, and it's double magic' give the poor guy hope? (Stressing that the atom is massive is weird too given that a woman is supposed to represent it. I mean, what, is he going to find love with a giant?) It's a stretch, and he comes off like a bit of a doof for buying into it. As far as the prompt goes, though, this usage works. The prose is ragged enough for it to be noticed. You have 'was laying' where you want 'was lying.' You use the phrase 'just barely' twice within two sentences. 'I swore to myself' ought to be 'I had sworn to myself.' You mix the past and past perfect tenses while your main character is recounting his relationships. 'So now we were at two years, before a terrible betrayal'--what? You slip into third person when you start describing the protagonist's relationship with Marie. It's all enough to unsettle my head as I go. The tense shifting particularly makes it unpleasant to read, though not to the degree of the bottom-tier entries. ********************************************************************************************************************** Black Griffon, "Enforcer" Since yours was one of the last entries and wasn't in the high pile or the low pile, it's only now that I'm checking up on your use of tellurium. The garlic odor you mention is accurate according to Wikipedia. Neither there nor anywhere else yet have I found anything about tellurium as a cure for plague or tellurium as a refining agent for opium. So is the information out there and I haven't found it, or did you make the connection up for the sake of your story? The first would be good research; the latter would be lame as hell. The story itself isn't great shakes. You fulfilled your flash rule with Sloan's low abundance of wits and did a great job showing his less-than-sharp mind in his perspective: you didn't overdo it, kept it credible. But in all other respects, I found the story dull. Rape and murder? A killing spree? That's juicy stuff you're skimming right past to describe the physical tics of men who are otherwise only names. I reached the last paragraph without ever learning who Coran Grand is, why Nander would kill him, why Lozier was a suspect, etc., etc. You wrote a more complete story than El Diabolico or Djeser, but this was still the equivalent of an episode of Scooby-Doo that cut everything but the unmasking scene. I found out whodunnit, but I didn't much care. On the plus side, I don't have many complaints about your prose beyond a couple of typos ('crudgel' instead of 'cudgel,' 'cold' instead of 'could')--Grand was a bad choice of last name, though, considering your reference to 'the Grand plague.' I couldn't help but imagine a plague of Grands, all poisoned by tellurium. ********************************************************************************************************************** crabrock, "Growing Cold Together" So much story exists between your lines, and I love it. You have the most subtle treatment of your element among those that are still effective. You don't say 'silicon' once, nor is your story about the sand, but it's omnipresent. You left the fact of Louis's death for me to infer and did not have him explain it to his wife, nor she to him. Not once does either Louis or Marie say 'I love you.' You show it. This is what 'show, don't tell' is all about. This is a man's heart shown through his quiet actions. Through the way he keeps them secret from his wife, that she won't have to know how much he is prepared for his death. Two paragraphs of your entry have more emotional punch than the rest of the round combined. But emotional power isn't the be-all and end-all. The opening is fairly bad, and I don't just mean the tense problem with your first paragraph. Why did you start with a fit of pique that painted Louis as a petulant manchild? Throwing his chips and bun on the beach? Kicking sand and sulking? Your later material must have been strong if you recovered him from that. I'm not sure what the 'miniature tower of processed meat' is if Marie made him only two hot dogs; that's no one's idea of a tower. He complains about the sand too long. At this point I can only picture him as Hayden Christensen, and that's your own fault. And, yeah, your writing is more mechanically clumsy than it should be. You know better than the tense slip that happens again in the final line (it should have said 'would have liked'). 'Each time the sea looked like it may calm down' makes me wince: 'might' is the past tense of 'may.' You also use a single quote instead of a double quote after 'trip.' Okay, that one's a tiny nit to pick, but the tense shifts aren't; stuff like that drives even some non-pedants mad. Your conclusion, last line aside, is fine and kind of beautiful, but it feels lacking in a way I don't know that I can pinpoint. Maybe it's the grousing about sand beforehand--you had such a powerful effect going, but Sand Sucks Redux cost that some steam. Your story has a strong heart surrounded by ragged edges that take away from its power rather than supporting or enhancing it. If you work on it further until the prose is more in line with what you're capable of, you'll have something wonderful. ********************************************************************************************************************** Djeser, "The Sky" You know what this reminds me of other than Top Gun? That scene in Pearl Harbor when Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are risking their necks in stupid pilot tricks because they're hotshots who don't play by the rules. It's not exactly fresh material. Adding griffons--or gryphons, depending on how you're spelling it in a given sentence--is a cute idea, but you could have done more with that. The animals might as well be machines. The only practical difference is the description of how they fly. You show more cleverness in your use of iodine, which you explain just enough, and which puts a slight spin on the flyboy antics. Then you ended it with a dick joke. Cue an eye roll. It reads like you threw that in at the last minute because you didn't know how to conclude the thing. And you didn't resolve diddly or have a plot to speak of, so you were only a step above El Diabolico in terms of writing an actual story. On the plus side, your prose and mechanics were among the better this week, and your entry didn't make me despair for the future of mankind. There's some cheesy fun to be had in reading it. When all else fails, that will usually get you through. ********************************************************************************************************************** JuniperCake, "Empathy" When I first read your entry, I thought the implication was that the listless dolphin had been subject to toxic levels of mercury. I've since gone looking for information about how mercury affects dolphins, and I've had trouble finding any list of dolphin symptoms. What I've discovered instead interests me: human fetuses are particularly susceptible to mercury poisoning, and the results can include brain damage. Does Kaito represent the effects of mercury too? Should I infer that from the mentions of a family history of fishing in that sea, which suggests that if the waters are tainted, his mother could well have eaten enough mercury in fish to hurt her child? It makes so much sense that it has to be intentional, surely--or some wonderful serendipity. Whichever, it works beautifully. The reference to cinnabar-tinted mist is heavy-handed by contrast. Your prose isn't as elegant as your concept. In the first paragraph you're describing a specific instance of Kaito watching dolphins; this becomes clear as the story goes on, but the sentence that begins with 'I would watch him' takes the story out of the moment and describes an ongoing, general situation. Then you switch back to the specific. Change it to 'I watched him' and all is well. There should be a comma after 'waiting for his dolphins'; the phrase 'dead-bug stiff' should have a hyphen, technically speaking, but I'd prefer another metaphor entirely since that one clunks. Speaking of clunking, 'The last remains of a family so hosed over by the gods must be an interesting thing to look at, or so I had heard' is godawful awkward. Either 'The last remnants of a family hosed over by the gods must have been interesting to look at' or ''The last remnants [...] were interesting to look at, I'd heard' would be my suggestion; each removes some clutter. 'I sat down at my desk with one broken leg propped up by a pile of forgotten engineering textbooks' gave me a very different mental image than the one you intended. I assumed your protagonist had a broken leg on top of all his other troubles! 'Live in the moment I could still have that at least' flat-out doesn't make sense. I think you mean 'Live in the moment: I could still do that, at least.' The colon could be a semicolon if you preferred, but you certainly need punctuation of some kind. Etc., etc.; I see more errors in comma usage than anything, so watch for that and maybe check out those links I gave elfdude and El Diabolico. There are enough awkward sentences and grammatical gaffes to do the piece some damage, which is a shame when its fulfillment of the prompt and emotional core are so nice. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 10:41 on Dec 29, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 08:11
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Reasons (848 words) I thought up the songbird trap myself and put it together out of seeds, a twist tie, and a cage that had once held canaries. Invention was easy on the farm in high summer. I had only too much time to think as I lay on the floor in front of a bellowing fan, listening to the growl of Grandpa's tractor in the fields. Of all the fancies that drifted through my head, the bird trap stuck, because it would be so simple to try. Step one: fill the bottom of the old cage with birdseed. Step two: set it under the feeder, where the mourning doves waltzed and the sparrows fought each other in quest of spilled food. Then wait. I hovered behind the screen door, a sun-browned and bored young vulture. I missed the moment the first bird ducked inside; I noticed her as a flutter of color behind the white bars, at last! I launched myself outside, yelling and waving my arms and making absolutely certain that the poor thing wouldn't fly my way--because that was the clever bit, having the door of the cage face the door of the house so that as long as a bird was trying to get away from me, it couldn't get out. I spun the twist tie about, and the cage door dropped. My grin split my face. It worked! It worked! Exactly as I'd imagined! I danced the cage into the house, my step a hop-skip of pride. I'd caught a house finch. I set her on the ottoman in the living room so my grandmother, who had taught me to love birds from the vantage point of her porch, could get a good look at her. Small and dusty brown, the finch jittered inside the cage and made an impression of glossy black eyes and tiny stick legs. Grandma hadn't expected the trap to work, I could tell by her laughter. But oh, it had, and here was this wild thing inside the house where we could see her so clearly, and what else could have given us the chance? With a dish rag--no mites for me, no skin oil for her--I gathered the finch and took her outside. I felt the beat of her heart against the cloth and my fingers. Rapid and alarmed, alive and strong. I could have hurt her, but I never wanted to. She took flight from my hand. Birds do not, I fear, learn readily from experience or example, and I filled that cage with the bright wings of cardinals and the vivid shoulders of red-winged blackbirds. The same woodpecker--it had to be, the farm orchard only hosted one--fell for it again and again, giving me new opportunities to study the tongue he stuck out at me as though in rebuke. But none lost even a feather. When finches escaped my hold to dart through the house, catching them became the best kind of game. I thought to turn the birds upside down before I opened my hand to let them go, so they lay in my palm, still for a moment before they broke into a flurry and were gone. To feel them rest in my open hand--each was a breathless moment, an awe that wouldn't fade through repetition. As I tried to coax a stubborn white-breasted nuthatch into my hold, my grandfather came out onto the porch. He'd been cutting wood: I could smell the sawdust on him and the tang of fresh-mowed grass along with sweat. His work in the factory had purchased the farm, his work on the house had built it from nothing, and even then, when most of the land was fallow, he worked every day while the sun was up. He'd been a serious provider once, but in his age he had the emotions of a boy. I chattered away at him as I chased the nuthatch around the cage, and he took in my lesson about the bird, drinking from one of his long bottles of Pepsi. He stood at my shoulder as I held my hand out from my body, uncurling my fingers to let the nuthatch go. Only it didn't seem to want to. It lay there very happily, its wiry feet relaxed, its gaze taking in the sights. Behind me, Grandpa chuckled. I bounced my hand a bit to encourage the nuthatch along. It flew--toward the house, toward Grandpa to be precise, and it landed on his boot, sitting there bright-eyed for a second or two before it finally got the idea to make for the trees. "I'll be damned!" Grandpa laughed out loud. His creased and tanned face lit up, the corners of his blue eyes crinkled, and he beamed with our mutual wonder; his joy was just like a child's, just like Grandma's would be when we told her. Pride, curiosity, power, and awe were nothing. I thought, This is why I catch birds. We went inside to share our delight, leaving the cage open for its next visitor.
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Feb 17, 2014 02:07
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Alas, the sting of defeat. All men must face it: I know that more than most. 'Have outran,' Muffin? Have outran? I fear no confection that has not mastered the past participle. I call Dr. Kloctopussy to the top of this pagoda of blood as judge and witness, for my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom as great. Mine shall be the butter knife that spreads defeat across thy scars, forever. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Feb 18, 2014 |
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Feb 18, 2014 08:43
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Realization (19 words) I found out soon what she had known: "I love you" would be her last words to me.
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Feb 25, 2014 02:14
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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:Lo, I have been summoned, and I have responded to said summons and do thusly respond, as follows: Deserts (443 words) Alexander tasted grit as he came to Elena's door. He dragged his hand over his face. Scrubbed the sweat onto his jeans. He knocked, and the wood burned his knuckles. The door opened, and his ex stood there, drawn and sallow. Red lines webbed her wide eyes. He spoke fast. "I'm sorry. I didn't know." "You left." "I didn't know." "You left me," she said with the same edge he'd fled. It crossed his mind to flee again. Inside the mobile home, the baby wailed. Elena shoved at the door, but Alexander blocked it with his boot. "I want to meet her," he said. "You have no right. Get out of here, Sandy. Go back to wherever you went." She bashed his foot with cheap plywood. She cursed him when he stood still for it. The baby's cry got louder, shriller. Drive him away or go to her child: Elena chose the second, and Alexander followed her into the cramped house. She bent to gather the sobbing bundle of pink from the crib. The baby's face was flushed to match her onesie. Elena cradled the girl against her shoulder and swayed, murmuring nonsense. Her eyes were too dull to spit hate at him. Their daughter kept crying. "Let me hold her. Let me give you a break." "She's mine!" Elena tightened her hold; the baby screamed. Elena's face turned white. Alexander held out his arms. "Christ, Elena, no one could take her from you." It cost her to give him the child. The sound she made was like a sob itself. Then his right hand cupped the baby's fragile head, his left her padded bottom, and he drew her in to his chest. She howled at being held by a stranger. She squirmed. Alexander rocked her, stroked a finger along her cheek. Would her wispy hair turn red or dark? "Hush, darling," he said. "Sahara. Hush now." Her wails softened to mews: she was exhausted too. He looked up at her mother. "You should have told me." "You left," Elena said, and he couldn't deny what was true. "She should have a father, and now I'm here. It's not fair to her for you to do this alone." Silence. Elena had always been at least as honest as he. A gust blew baked dust from outside through an open window. Alexander turned, shielding Sahara from it with his body. She snuffled against his shirt, quiet and limp in his hold. Water pricked his eyes for the first time in years. Elena's gaze had a heavy weight. "Maybe," she said at last. "Maybe." It was less than his desire. More than his desert.
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Feb 25, 2014 05:07
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I'm in.
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Mar 8, 2014 03:40
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Silver and Gold (980 words) "You have nothing to worry about," the leader of the U.S. skating team averred. His grin dug into his cheeks. Jason Albright tracked his rivals as they practiced on the ice. That Korean boy--could he really be fifteen when he looked nine?--put three feet of air between himself and the rink on his triple axel. Anthony Dufresne of Canada whirled in a violent blur of blond hair. But he wobbled coming out of his spin. No cause for concern there. And there was Mark Tomlin, his own teammate and his senior by a decade. Despite his age, Mark skimmed past with such easy speed that Jason frowned. Mark raised his right leg up behind his head for his Biellmann spiral. It wasn't a position Jason could reach; few men could. Only Tomlin, of all the Olympians this year. It looked good, dammit. The team leader thumped Jason on the shoulder. He dropped into the skater's ear, "You'll be on top. You're young but proven and a star for the podium. You are just what the judges want." Out on the rink, Mark launched himself into a quadruple toe loop, turned four times with perfect speed--and crashed. He sprawled on the ice, legs akimbo. Relief put a small smile on Jason's mouth. "I'm the best," he swore to his leader, to God, and to himself. "Oh, yes," the team leader supposed, "that too." ### In black velvet spangled with copper and gold, Jason coasted across the Olympic arena as the loudspeakers called his name. He'd come in first with his short program, as expected. Sung-min Hwa, the Korean, had come in second by a hair, Tomlin third by two, and the rest he didn't think about. At worst, they'd threaten Tomlin for the bronze. As long as Jason skated clean. His music began, and he leapt out of his starting pose. A brief, flashy footwork sequence built up the energy of the program, then he was cutting a wide oval, fast, faster, toward the judges and his first quad jump. He drove his toe pick into the ice. He rotated four times in the air. He landed on his right blade--but his left scraped the rink. It happened again on his triple flip, but the audience didn't care; their shouts were louder than the music. "Jaaaasooon I love yooooou!" a woman ululated, her cry wobbling across the arena and into his mind. He grinned, and he entered his sit spin a second too late. He finished a beat behind his music. But he'd landed everything, he'd shown his style, and the people adored him. He scooped up a teddy bear someone had thrown and held it in his lap while he waited for his scores. The loudspeaker blazoned on the air, "The marks for Jason Albright of the United States of America--" He couldn't hear the number over the screaming crowd, but he saw it, and that was more than sufficient. He'd scored higher than even he had anticipated. They didn't deduct enough for the flaws, his pride nagged at him. Jason shrugged on a jacket and moved to the stands to do what few dared: watch his competition. Hwa fell on his third jump, botched the fifth, and didn't complete his final combination. So much for his closest challenger. Tomlin skated last of all the men. He was a living spirit in unrelieved white, sober and slim. He stood poised in the center until the noise of the arena died, long seconds before his music began. Pachelbel's Canon. Tomlin showed his trademark flexibility. As he swirled on his skates, he swayed so low that he caught a handful of shavings from the rink. He scattered them behind him in a trail as he swept along the ice; with the audience so still, Jason heard the hiss of his blades. His opening quadruple lutz was perfection. His left foot stayed high. He kicked into a triple jump without a pause. I am still strong, he cut into the ice, I have practiced, and the result is beautiful. Jason watched Tomlin's feet as he glided through his jumping passes, ignoring his arms, skillful though their gestures were; the feet told the story. Tomlin's skates flashed as he turned, two revolutions, three. The left blade took his weight on its outer edge as he held onto the right in the Biellmann spiral that turned his body into a teardrop. Spirals were worthless for men, they counted for nothing, and yet Tomlin did it. Because he could. He sliced across the rink, There is more than strength in this sport, even for us--there is grace. He inscribed in the tight circles of a spin, Speed and power are part of my art. He lutzed, he salchowed, he split, he danced, This is the performance of my life. Tomlin embraced the unseen sky as his last note died. He held the pose as long as he could before bowing under the weight of all he had done. And Jason tasted silver. Bitter silver, the more bitter for being deserved. But how could he blame Tomlin? With the rest of the arena, he listened for the score. "The marks for Mark Tomlin..." the loudspeaker blared. Again a roar drowned out the number, and the roar was for him, because that score was far lower than his despite everything--their programs had been equally difficult, yet his faults and Tomlin's lack of them had somehow added up to this. Jason Albright, Olympic champion. "I'm the best," he lied in a whisper to himself alone. The officials hung the hollow gold around his neck and raised the stars and stripes. Mark sang along with their national anthem. Jason stood silent on the top of the podium, young and brilliant, a shining star. The commentators for the broadcast misunderstood his tears.
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Mar 10, 2014 03:54
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Thunderdome Week LXXXIV: Who You Gonna Call? Judges: Kaishai, The Saddest Rhino, and Fumblemouse. In tribute to the late Harold Ramis, who delighted many a nerd with his portrayal of Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters, I want to see your most haunting ghost stories. Tell us tales of the recently deceased or of persons long passed, but never gone--but with a caveat: your surviving characters cannot have known the ghost while it was alive. Chill our spines or touch our hearts, if you can. Horror is more than welcome, but it's not a requirement; you can call your spirits from the realms of sorrow or sentiment or even humor if you think you can pull it off. Not from the realm of porn, though: no erotica. And NO FANFICTION. Your ghosts can be historical figures, but the stress is on historical. Hitler's ghost is fine. The ghost of Benny the Snake is not. For this round an additional rule is in effect: Do not ask anyone who has posted in this thread to look at your story before you submit. You must stand or fall alone. Realistically, this is a difficult rule to enforce, and I'm counting somewhat on an honor system, but if I do find out you've asked for help it's an instant DQ for you. On the flip side, while I'll critique your writing mechanics, judging will be lenient on that score as long as there's some sign you gave a drat. This does mean the likes of '18teen' will still be viewed with extreme prejudice. Sign-up deadline: Friday, March 14, 11:59 pm USA Eastern Submission deadline: Sunday, March 16, 11:59 pm USA Eastern Maximum word count: 1,000 Speakers for the Dead: Tyrannosaurus: "Night Lights in Louisiana" QuoProQuid (Flash rule: Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse dead children): "Ghost Stories for Children" Jeza Phobia: "Mud" Cpt. Mahatma Gandhi (Flash rule: The story must take place in India): "Blessed By Yama" Starter Wiggin (Flash rule: The story must be set on the 19th-century American frontier): "Cattle Sam" The News at 5 (Flash rule: At least one ghost was a journalist in life): "Final" Techno Remix Noah: "The Fire in the Night" docbeard (Flash rule: In the teeth of Things forbid / And Reason overthrown): "Spirits Cannot Harm the Living" Whalley: "No Sleep 'Til Richmond" Masonity: "Bonfire Night" Djeser: "Burden" Lake Jucas (Flash rule: The tygers of wrath are wiser than nightmares): "Ghost Stories of the Old World" God Over Djinn: "Ghosts of the Modern World" JuniperCake Nitrousoxide: "Rematch" WeLandedOnTheMoon! (Flash rule: A dead body suffers not injuries): "Silver Necklace" RunningIntoWalls: "Dancing and Drinking" Paladinus (Flash rule: Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of your victims): "A Ghost of Many" Sitting Here: "The Lost Hour" Entenzahn: "Why Rules Are Important" systran: "Empyrean Son" curlingiron (Flash rule: The cut worm forgives the wicked knife): "Finding" Lead out in cuffs: "Sacrifice" Barracuda Bang! (Flash rule: A hideous throng rush out forever / And laugh--but smile no more): "The Throng Song" Nethilia: "Katy's Doll" perpetulance: "Drifting" Bad Seafood: "Captured Memories" SurreptitiousMuffin (Flash rule: Your story must feature or be influenced by a ram's head snuff mull): "Freezing Floor Bolt Gun Blues" Jay O (Flash rule: And the shadow of thy perfect bliss / Is the sunshine of ours.) Chairchucker: "Undying Love" elfdude (Flash rule: Write a story inspired by "The Bonnie Ship the Diamond"): "The call of the Banshee" asap-salafi Anathema Device That Old Ganon: "Rose Tea" CommissarMega (Flash rules: Write a story about the hantu tetek; eternity is in love with the secretions of time): "A Doctor For Mama" toanoradian: "A Thesis on Ghost" Benny the Snake (Flash rules: Your story must promote reading, listening to instructions, and honesty as great virtues): "Untitled" Echo Cian: "Fallen Grace" Some Guy TT: "That Which Is Seen" Cache Cab: "The Baptist" crabrock: "Things That Die" The Sean: "The Tour" Kaishai fucked around with this message at 07:34 on Mar 18, 2014 |
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Mar 10, 2014 20:16
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Cpt. Mahatma Gandhi posted:I'm in and would love a flash rule.  Flash Rule: Your story must take place in India, but the time period is up to you.Starter Wiggin posted:Flash me please! (also an OSC reference oh man it's getting crazy) In the spirit of Alvin Maker, your Flash Rule is that your setting must be the 19th-century American frontier.The News at 5 posted:In. Also flash rule. Flash Rule: At least one of your ghosts was a journalist in life.Further flash rule requests will have to wait a while so my co-judges can have the chance to distribute some, once they know who they are.
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Mar 10, 2014 20:57
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Barracuda Bang! posted:I'm in and would love a flash rule, please. Taking inspiration from the Wisdom of esteemed Fumblemouse, your Flash Rule is this: A hideous throng rush out forever / And laugh--but smile no more.
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Mar 11, 2014 03:40
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Ghost stories? Move over kids, daddy's home. In. Your Flash Rule is not poetry unless, like me, you consider this a poem given physical form. That objet d'art must feature in or influence your story in some way.Jay O posted:In, Flash Rule: And the shadow of thy perfect bliss / Is the sunshine of ours.
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Mar 11, 2014 07:02
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docbeard posted:I'd like a flash rule. Your judge-appointed Flash Rule: In the teeth of Things forbid / And Reason overthrown.Regarding rules by people not judging: contestants won't be held to them, but if you agree to one then you'll embarrass yourself by not meeting it. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Mar 11, 2014 |
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Mar 11, 2014 19:10
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CommissarMega posted:
Rhino has blessed your first flash rule, so it stands. But you get a FURTHER CAVEAT: The nature of the hantu tetek does not grant you an exception to 'no erotica.' Whatever you write about the breast ghost can't be sexually explicit. You'd like to think this would be obvious, but ever since I got three science fiction stories for a round with a 'no science fiction' clause, I take little for granted. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Mar 13, 2014 |
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Mar 13, 2014 16:48
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In for a penny, in for a pound, I guess?
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Unfortunately, yes.
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Mar 13, 2014 17:01
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You've been added to the list, but I'd like to draw your attention to this part of the prompt: Kaishai posted:Realistically, this is a difficult rule to enforce, and I'm counting somewhat on an honor system, but if I do find out you've asked for help it's an instant DQ for you. Keep it in mind, hmm?
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Mar 14, 2014 04:11
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Roughly two hours remain to join in this week's trip to the afterlife.
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Mar 15, 2014 03:11
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Technically so, but I'll add you to the list anyway. Such is my masochistic mercy. Sign-ups are now officially CLOSED.
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Mar 15, 2014 07:00
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CommissarMega posted:Where do you guys get those sayings for the flash rules, if I may ask? Stay tuned: this will be revealed once the entry deadline has passed.
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Mar 16, 2014 18:39
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For the ten of you who have neither submitted yet nor admitted your failure, forty minutes remain.
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Mar 17, 2014 04:22
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Submissions for Week LXXXIV: Who You Gonna Call? are now CLOSED! Techno Remix, Jeza, asap-salafi, and Anathema Device are, apparently, afraid of some ghost: they have failed to submit and are presumed to be cowering under their beds. JuniperCake and Jay O, both subject to  , have declared their intentions to haunt us in a belated fashion. We shall see whether their words are good.Now that we're past the wire, I can reveal the sources of certain flash rules. Those assigned by Fumblemouse were modified verses from William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell." Specifically: Lake Jucas: The tygers of wrath are wiser than nightmares. Original verse: "The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction." WeLandedOnTheMoon!: A dead body suffers not injuries. Original verse: "A dead body revenges not injuries." Paladinus: Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of your victims. Original verse: "Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead." QuoProQuid: Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse dead children. Original verse: "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." curlingiron: The cut worm forgives the wicked knife. Original verse: "The cut worm forgives the plow." CommissarMega: Eternity is in love with the secretions of time. Original verse: "Eternity is in love with the productions of time." My verse assignments came from different poems. Barracuda Bang!: A hideous throng rush out forever / And laugh--but smile no more. Source: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Haunted Palace." Jay O: And the shadow of thy perfect bliss / Is the sunshine of ours. Source: Edgar Allan Poe's "Israfel." docbeard: In the teeth of Things forbid / And Reason overthrown Source: Rudyard Kipling's "Helen All Alone." We'll aim to have results out on Monday as always, but there's a great deal of reading to be done, so the judges require your patience.
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Mar 17, 2014 05:14
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Jay O posted:Don't wanna be JuniperCake posted:Yeah I'm in the same boat and will be late as well so will have to take the DQ. I'll have my story done about two hours after the deadline. I'm starting to be concerned about your senses of time! To avoid the , I suggest posting your stories by 6pm today, USA Eastern.
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Mar 17, 2014 16:39
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Regarding the Benny situation, just so no one needs to wonder: he's disqualified. The judges are still working on the rest of the results!
Kaishai fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Mar 17, 2014 |
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Mar 17, 2014 20:08
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Natural Splendor (32 words) There's a wizard I know, if you please, Who's as old and as strong as the seas, But his only apprentice Is non compos mentis And likes to strip naked for bees.
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Mar 18, 2014 05:00
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Week LXXXIV Results: Who You Gonna Call? If only Harold Ramis were still with us, he could blast most of your ghosts with a proton beam and get them out of my sight. The proportion of truly terrible stories this week will haunt the judges for some time to come. Most of the dishonorable mentions should breathe a sigh in relief, knowing that in any other round they would have been toast. Not all is doom and gloom. A handful of people conjured spirits that did not make us long for the Reaper's sweet embrace ourselves. And among these, three tales, three ghosts, and three storytellers stood proud. THE WINNER: Bad Seafood, come and get your picture taken on the Thunderthrone. You need to work on your proofreading, but despite a couple of slips of the keyboard, your protagonist and her ghostly friendship charmed us. Your characters had character, and I would watch a sunrise with them any time. HONORABLE MENTIONS: Echo Cian finishes second in a close race. We all thought highly of this entry, which mingled romance with gentle melancholy right up to its bittersweet end. One judge even said it gave him goosebumps--high praise considering that Thunderjudging leaves one jaded. SurreptitiousMuffin, you wrote the best horror piece, bar none. Your gore was visceral rather than gratuitous. You handled your flash rule with aplomb. If only you'd put that ram's head on wheels... nah, that would have gilded the lily. THE LOSER: This is where the real contention lay. No two judges agreed on who was worst of the worst. After due consideration and consultation with a Ouija board, we settled on That Old Ganon as the literary sinner with the lowest combined score. Ganon, following your plot was an unpleasant endeavor without any payoff: no laughs, no chills, and certainly no thrills, though I think I heard Rhino snore a couple of times. DISHONORABLE MENTIONS: Paladinus especially should thank the spirits of his ancestors for protecting him from another black mark on his score sheet. There were a decent idea and a decent message under the ghastly prose, but they were still barely enough to save him. Nitrousoxide contended for the loss for a good while. Why was there a robot at a concert? I don't know. Who taught that robot to summon the devil? I don't know. Why did the robot instead summon a wrestler and command him to perform genocide? I don't know, and I don't want to know. RunningIntoWalls wrote a story in which a man ditches his date to chase a fedora. All the inherent problems with that aside, the main character's actions and the ghosts' responses made little sense. perpetulance, you couldn't keep track of your characters, and neither could I. You were vague on too many points, leaving your story less clear than your gratuitous ghost vomit. Some Guy TT, you submitted an entry with a cartoonish dick of a protagonist and an antagonist who cursed him to continue being a dick after death by means of a sloppy full-body kiss. I question your dedication to the no-erotica rule, sir. elfdude, your flash rule was to write a story inspired by "The Bonnie Ship the Diamond," a Scottish sea shanty. You wrote about an Irish goddess without an ocean in sight. Ireland and Scotland are not the same thing! DISHONORABLE DISQUALIFICATION: Benny the Snake. To all of you, our thanks for the nightmares. Crits are in the works. Bad Seafood, you're up! Kaishai fucked around with this message at 07:59 on Mar 18, 2014 |
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Mar 18, 2014 07:43
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In.
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Mar 22, 2014 05:21
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Critiques for Week LXXXIV: RunningIntoWalls, Lead out in cuffs, Masonity, Some Guy TT, Chairchucker, Nethilia, SurreptitiousMuffin, CommissarMega, Echo Cian, Cache Cab, Cpt. Mahatma Gandhi, Djeser, Entenzahn, and The News at 5 'Ghost stories' should have been an easy prompt. No saidisms, no dialects, no demand that your work include the words 'frigorific' and 'mouth-friend'; you only needed to write a story in which ghosts played a critical role. Would you believe several people either made their ghosts incidental or may not even have had them at all? I would, alas, because I've read all the stories several times now and combed through the most dubious for any trace of ectoplasm. All had something that might be a ghost--except maybe for one--but you'll notice that the winner and honorable mentions had clear and undeniable spectral presences. Other than that, the big trend was story elements that made no drat sense. If you want to live on the edge, pour some alcohol and take a shot every time I say 'I don't know' or 'I don't understand' or 'why God why' in these crits. I recommend substituting water or soda so you don't become a ghost yourself. RunningIntoWalls, "Dancing and Drinking" I had trouble making sense of your story, and I believe that's because there's very little sense to be found in it. Why does your main character believe so readily that he's hallucinating? Why is he so calm about going nuts? Why is his answer to auditory hallucinations to knock on the door? Why does he go into a strange, grimy building when he has a party and a date waiting for him? Why does one ghost drink turn him into a dancer? How can his hat have been Doc's hat when Doc's hat was in the safe? Why did Doc give him his hat at all? Why is it 'sparsely populated' even in the present? Whyyyyyyy? The actions of your protagonist--who needs a name--have so little logic that the story is little but a random sequence of events with no plot thread to hold it together. There's no satisfaction, no real resolution. The man who leaves the ghost bar is the same man who entered, only he has a moldy hat now. Nothing he saw or experienced was interesting enough to carry the piece. It ends up feeling weightless, pointless, and very forgettable. For the first several paragraphs you deliver exposition through dialogue without the grace needed to pull it off. '“You wanted to go to a costume party and agreed that we could go as a flapper and gangster.”' Why would he tell her this? How could she possibly need to be told? She knows. 'This dirty old fedora is the best you could do?' isn't quite as egregious, but I still notice you're using dialogue to tell me the hat is a fedora rather than describing it for me. This is a pretty common problem for inexperienced writers. Trying to work exposition into the story in a natural way is a good goal, but always keep in mind what people in a given situation would reasonably say to each other; you've goofed if the reader can tell the information is strictly for his benefit. Your characters have no character to them at all. They don't even have names! The woman is just 'she,' and she doesn't seem to matter a whit to the protagonist. I couldn't tell you anything about him either beyond that he's a crappy date. The only decision he makes for himself without being told is to knock on the door of the warehouse. Sometimes your action isn't clear. 'A sigh. A perfectly timed wind gust blew the cap out of my hand and around the corner.' Wasn't the woman holding the hat? Who sighed? Why are you making this vague? Don't make it difficult for your reader to follow what's going on unless you have a damned good reason. The concept of stumbling across a bar full of ghosts was fun if not brilliantly original. I would have liked to see more time at the ghost bar, less time arguing about a hat. You could have and should have described the place in greater detail! Atmosphere is one of my favorite things about a good ghost tale, but you've left it out of this one altogether. The story is quite bad, but for all my grousing I'll consider myself blessed if it's the worst of the lot. I get the impression you're a new-ish writer trying your wings. If so, you could have done worse. Stick around, punch out a few more stories, and we'll see whether my hunch that you have some potential is right. Writing Mechanics: Poor, but in ways that suggest a shaky grasp on grammar on your part more than a lack of effort. You pass. You have a consistent problem with punctuating dialogue, specifically with failing to end your dialogue clauses with any punctuation at all. On one occasion you close with a period when you needed a comma: '“What a nightmare.” I droned, rubbing my temples.' 'I droned' et al is a dialogue tag and just looks goofy as a separate sentence. While on the subject of 'teased,' 'remarked,' 'droned,' 'exclaimed,' 'responded,' and their regrettable adverbial accompaniment, the time for abusing saidisms like these was last week. Only 'exclaimed exhaustedly' is worth banging my head on my desk over on its own ('exhaustedly' is a horrible adverb and I can't think offhand of a righteous reason to use it, ever), but you have way too many of these things. 'Said' is invisible; 'asked' is more or less invisible; anything else is not, and a heavy hand with alternatives such as these draws a reader's attention from the story to the prose. That's not a good thing in most cases, including yours. I saw one instance of a misplaced modifier: 'After going in separate directions, I chased the hat to a quiet stoop.' Did your protagonist split in two? Are his legs going one way, his torso another? Probably not, so you needed to phrase this a different way, because right now you're saying the protagonist went in separate directions. 'After we went our separate directions' would have conveyed what you intended. Don't think I didn't notice the missing words in phrases like 'I could live being crazy for a night' and 'Should look brand new because nothing opened that box in over 70 years.' That is not a viable way to get around the word limit! You used the past tense throughout this story, but when characters are thinking about things in their past, you should use the past perfect instead. Examples: 'I picked the shittest costume because I procrastinated' should be 'I had picked the shittiest costume because I had procrastinated.' (Note also the correct spelling of 'shittiest.') 'I returned to the bar to find a note and key where Doc was' should be 'I returned to the bar to find a note and key where Doc had been.' This is not technically a writing issue, but formatting Doc's note as a quote was an odd choice that reminded me I was reading a forums post, in effect throwing me out of the story. Putting stuff like that in italics in the future would differentiate it enough from regular text. Overall your mechanics are not too hot, but most of your sentence-level errors are easily fixed and could be avoided in the future without much trouble. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Lead out in cuffs, "Sacrifice" Kaishai posted:Tell us tales of the recently deceased or of persons long passed, but never gone--but with a caveat: your surviving characters cannot have known the ghost while it was alive. This isn't a good week for reading comprehension. You missed this part of the prompt entirely and were disqualified for it. Aside from that, this piece is decent. Not exciting. It feels familiar, like a story I've heard before, though Hans inadvertently haunting his mother to her death was a welcome touch. The mother sells him for gold too easily. It would take a special kind of monster to have her only child buried alive so she can have new thatch and a good door, for God's sake, but you don't show that she's a living horror in any other way--she's instead portrayed as a hardworking woman who lets her son run and play while she breaks her back to earn bread for him. That characterization doesn't support her action, so it feels contrived. I don't get a sense of much time passing between Hans' imprisonment and his death. His starvation ought to have taken days, but it seems like hours. You miss out on a stab of horror here; this is a terrible way to die, but by having him sleep through most of it, you reduce the impact of just what an awful end it was for his mother to arrange for him. It lacks in chill factor as a result. The tone is just too light for the scenario you're trying to portray. If you spent more time on the mother's motives and made Hans' death more grim (I'm not suggesting deep detail here; more emphasis on how long it took him to die might be sufficient), you'd have a better ghost story, IMO. I did like the way Hans waited so innocently by his mother's corpse. His naivete made that scene more horrific, because I knew she was dead and rotting while he waited, but he did not. Writing Mechanics: You pass; your prose isn't technically flawless, but I'm confident you proofread. I don't agree with all your choices regarding commas, but since your usage is generally good I suspect the anomalies are deliberate. You forgot the past perfect in 'This was strange because, when he went to sleep, it had been spring.' Again, though, your tenses are mostly correct. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Masonity, "Bonfire Night" Boiled down to its essentials, yours isn't a bad story. A man gets lost in the woods on a dark night and feels something bumping his legs, but he can't touch or find it. In a panic, he flees back to civilization, but when the memory of his experience won't leave him, he returns to the park and realizes that he met the ghost of a dog strangled by its own choke chain. Aww. The ending is kinda touching, the premise decent--and the execution horrible. You missed the spooky atmosphere you were going for by a mile and loaded your tale down with lard in the form of extraneous thoughts and inconsequential details. Inconsequential details: in your opening paragraph, you tell a lot about the event the protagonist (who needs a name in yours, too--should I start keeping a tally on this?) is trying to leave. But what does that matter? Why is it relevant that there were fire jugglers and weed? None of that tells me where the story is set or what the occasion is, and all I need to know is that the main character was at a festival in a forested area and wandered off on his own. The fireworks are a decent detail because their light and noise contrasts with the dark and silence of the forest, but the rest, enh. Possibly worse is that I presume there's a bonfire, given your title, but you never mention that. More irrelevance crops up when you start talking about stale food. This is bizarre. 'I needed to be out of this park, back in my city. I needed the false dawn of a thousand street lights. I needed the chaotic orchestra of traffic. I needed the smells of grilled onions, week old hot-dogs and month old, hardened buns.' I'm with you for those first three sentences. Then the protagonist is yearning for buns that are not fresh and I have no idea what the hell. I don't know which city this is, you know--am I supposed to be able to tell? Is there somewhere out there especially known for its week-old hot dogs? Extraneous thoughts: oh, Lord, Masonity, the thoughts. Your first five paragraphs all have the protagonist thinking things to himself, and while the first two thought interjections work okay, they start getting obtrusive with the third. If you'd said 'The river ran along the south side of the park, so if I headed in that direction, I could figure out where I was,' without the italics, you'd have delivered the same information in a way that would have melded with the other text and left your protagonist looking like less of a Chatty Cathy within his own mind. The fourth could be blended in similarly. The fifth could be removed altogether. You drop the thoughts for the rest of the story, mostly, and it reads better for it; they turn up again with 'I'm safe. I'm off that terrible path! I thought,' and you could cut this too. We know he's off the terrible path. We just saw him flee the terrible path. Another thing that doesn't work for you is the *pad* *pad* *pad*. If you're going to do sound effects, just put 'em in italics, with proper punctuation for good measure. Pad pad pad pad. If you think that looks silly, I can't blame you, but the asterisks are worse. Maybe you avoided the italics because you used them so often for thoughts? If you cut back on the thoughts, that wouldn't be an issue. I can tell you were out to build an atmosphere, and I appreciate that. It's especially nice to see after two stories that didn't have any. But the sequence starting with 'Then the world turned dark' (terribly cliche phrase, that) isn't effective. The protagonist's mood switches from normal to primal terror waaaaay too quickly. He's not trapped, and he's in a park. Even if he were out in the wild woods, I would believe increasing unease that built into panic, but you've got him going from Where's the river, anyway? to IT IS DARK I AM GOING TO DIE in 0.1 seconds! Then, to compound the problem, he switches back just as quickly: 'With no other option available' is not the thought of a man fighting his hardest not to scream. I don't buy this at all. I don't like the way he pushes fast in first one direction, then the other either. If he's a ten-minute straightforward run from the fairground, if he was never the least lost and could always go back the way he came, his panic attack before looks even more lame. Dude, just turn around. Why did he take the dark, tree-lined path to start with? That doesn't make a lot of sense if he's ten minutes from his bus stop on the main road. The finale with the dog is nice, by far the best part of the story. It's sweet and sad and mildly chilling to think of a dead dog wandering in the night in search of a human to walk beside. Your final beat is good. The protagonist's compassion overcomes his fear. Good for him. You aren't going to lose, but this entry has a whole lot of problems. It might be worth it to try and fix them up since the story at the heart, though simple, is a nice little ghost tale. Writing Mechanics: Weak--but better than last week! Your mistakes are, sadly, consistent, so I think you tried. There is an error that will drive sensitive writers, readers, and editors absolutely mad; they will froth with rage, they will vomit a torrent of hate that would break the walls of the Hoover Dam and drown all the world. That error is the inclusion of an apostrophe in the possessive 'its.' You do this constantly. If you would rather not bring floods of bile down on your head in the future, check out this explanation of the proper uses of 'its' and 'it's,' and take its wisdom to heart. You should hyphenate compound modifiers when they appear before a noun, such as 'over-applied perfume' or 'month-old, hardened buns.' The S in 'GPS' should be capitalized. The past participle of 'broke' is 'broken,' so where you wrote 'I should have broke' you should have written 'I should have broken.' Leaving 'I' in lowercase in 'I explained i was fine' is such a ridiculous error that I'm tempted to rethink whether you proofread at all; your track record saves you. Baby steps. We'll get you to flinch when you see a pronoun in lowercase yet. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Some Guy TT, "That Which Is Seen" This one is all over the place. None of its elements cohere all that well. It isn't a successful tale of poetic justice, though I think you may have wanted it to be; it doesn't deliver a fitting comeuppance to the main character, who started out with the potential for nuance but quickly became a one-dimensional rear end in a top hat. It isn't frightening, though you deliver some solidly creepy imagery. I can't tell exactly what point you were aiming for, but I'm pretty sure you didn't hit it. When the story began, I saw Stevens as a man who did the right thing--putting drug dealers away--for the wrong reason, namely his personal ambition. That quickly changed as he randomly talked down to and then tried to punch a beggar. The hell? Why not have him kick a puppy next? He turned into a caricature of an all-out, idiotic douchebag. I say 'idiotic' because I can't imagine an ordinary man dumb enough to hope to meet vengeful ghosts after death. This was a disappointing change, as it removed all my potential sympathy for Stevens. As for the ghost: as I understand it, in life the beggar was a successful man who also went around punching homeless people, and the woman he punched was a ghost who presumably sucked all the moisture out of him and condemned him to become such a ghost when he died. It's like a curse that must be passed on, leading to an endless succession of undead assholes. There's definite potential in that idea, but I don't think it works well in this particular story because this fate completely ignores Stevens' ruthlessness and his ambition, which do not seem tied to his cartoonish beggar-punching ways. What's more, Stevens doesn't appear to suffer for it in life. He still becomes a judge. He lives a long life. He has children, ungrateful or not. That he's a hateful ghost after he dies isn't very satisfying--especially since he doesn't seem to mind! And what's this revenge he's planning to get? The beggar is long gone. Whoever he meets and kisses or whatever will probably be a stranger to him, and you can't get revenge on someone who never did anything to you. The way the beggar's mouth stretched into a knife of flesh was nicely creepy, but it was completely random. Ditto the infinite rows of teeth, grime, etc. I liked the imagery, but I have no idea why the beggar kissed Stevens to pass the curse on. I have no idea why the ghost had so many teeth if it fed by sucking moisture through Stevens' lips. These things do not go together. The  factor kept the encounter from being horrible in the way you likely intended. I'd like to see you in future rounds since you have solid prose and creative ideas going for you, but this one's a flop. Writing Mechanics: These are quite sound. You need spaces after your ellipses, but no other errors stood out to me. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Chairchucker, "Undying Love" As light as a feather, as subtle as an anvil to the face. This is a weak showing from you. The characters have no depth, there's no plot, and there's next to no humor to cover up for what's missing. There's really nothing here but a moral delivered by drawing a direct parallel between dead people and other groups stigmatized by society. The message is a very obvious one I've seen a thousand times, which doesn't make it a bad message but does make for a tired story. Worse, your parallel doesn't work. A ghost could end up walking the earth forever! That's a significant complication to issues like marriage or the vote, so I'm not thinking How horrible when you tell me dead and living people can't legally marry, I'm thinking No kidding, how would that work? The bigotry of the waiter doesn't make any sense either. What's his objection? I'm not aware of a cultural or religious bias against ghosts--this could be ignorance on my part, granted. Your setup is less effective the more I think about it, and isn't the point of a metaphor like this to think about it? If you wanted to make this more moving or more effective, you'd need IMO to go into a lot more depths regarding ghosts and how they exist in the world. The bit where Sue has to go haunt is good (and the only funny line in the piece); you could build on that. For now it's a wisp of a thing without any punch. I didn't mind reading it at all. But you can do a lot better. Writing Mechanics: You're fine, other than 'school leaving minimum wage earner' needing a hyphen at the very least. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Nethilia, "Katy's Doll" A ghost child coming for the current possessor of its old toy isn't the newest idea under the sun, but there's logic to it, and you use the familiar scenario to tell a cute story about the relationship between two sisters. The ghost isn't the focus here; Ginger's exasperation with and love of Katy are where the tale's heart lies. I do wonder why Katy couldn't get rid of the doll herself. What's to stop her from throwing it into the ocean, or at least putting it on a shelf instead of clutching it at night? That bothers me a bit, and so does Ginger's initial reaction to the doll, which is pretty darned extreme. You don't hint that she's sensing anything particularly sinister about it, so she does look awfully bratty for wanting to smash her little sister's new toy. Another point that didn't altogether work for me came at the end: did Katy never tell their parents over the two weeks that Ginger was grounded that she'd told Ginger to toss the doll? Your final line is a leeetle saccharine, but it does a good job of tying a bow on your theme. On the whole, you did well at showing that Ginger may not always like Katy, but she always loves her, and I enjoyed your piece despite my quibbles above. Something else will take the win this week, but you made me smile. Writing Mechanics: No significant problems here. I don't think 'clinging the doll to her' is proper English, though; 'clinging to the doll' is the phrase you probably should have used. You also need four dots in an ellipsis that ends a sentence, but these tiny issues don't detract from the story. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** SurreptitiousMuffin, "Freezing Floor Bolt Gun Blues" You took on one of my favorite weird objects and crowned it with horrors. Thanks! This story of a slaughterhouse ghost, a horn-headed lord of the slain, was a fine interpretation of your flash rule. You went for visceral horror, and you achieved it. Other submissions creeped me out, but yours actually did that in the way you intended it to. Your imagery was top notch. I thought you chose well which details to give about your ghost: the colors, the limbs, the eyes, but you left room for imagination to work. Details such as the color of Andy's vomit were also effective. That he puked made sense in his circumstances, and that it was yellow meant something. Your gross stuff wasn't gratuitous. But excellent imagery and great lines ('Not even if it cost $3.50 and came with sides'--I had KFC the day before reading this, and I wish it had only been $3.50) were most of what the entry had to offer; the story itself was more bones than meat. All I learned about Andy was that he was a poor junkie. That didn't suggest he was a good man, so his fate wasn't as compelling as bad things happening to good people. It didn't make him a man who deserved to be kicked to death by murdered animals, so it wasn't satisfying to see his agonies. Enjoyable, sure. There wasn't a plot to speak of, but that's not much of a flaw in flash horror--Andy's somewhat shallow character isn't exactly a flaw either, but I do think the story could have delivered a sharper punch if there were more to him. The one thing I don't like at all is your last line. Ugh. Chop it. Andy kneeling is a great final image if you'd just leave it alone. Writing Mechanics: Not a problem for you. Other than a stray line break, this looks great. Your Judder judder works so much better than *padpadpadpadpad* that Masonity should take notes. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** CommissarMega, "A Doctor For Mama" As with RunningIntoWall's quoted note, the choice to put your story within quote tags reminded me constantly that I was reading a forums post. The idea was to enable your joke at the end, probably, which makes me facepalm more rather than less; I got my RDA of blown-off rules early this week. You have my deepest thanks for working with your flash rule and turning it into a story that wasn't the least creepy. I'm not as familiar with the hantu tetek as Rhino, but I've found websites describing her as a hag who goes after children that stay out past sunset, and that all fits your story line. I haven't found any that suggest a personality or human emotions for her, but I'd say you're within the realm of poetic license--and if the alternative was a story of children being smothered by breasts, well, I'll go with a little folkloric inaccuracy. This entry was sweet, almost too sweet, more fairy tale than ghost story, but within the bounds of the prompt. Where was your second flash rule, though? I don't see Eternity is in love with the secretions of time in this at all. The tetek's tears, or Nizam's, might be secretions. But neither of them represent time. The tetek's ghostly existence might be eternal, but she's not in love with anything. I'd have to say you flubbed this, which didn't count in your favor. I didn't like it when the doctor told Nizam that big boys have big responsibilities, because he seemed to be contradicting himself: in bringing a doctor to his mother, Nizam did take on a large responsibility. So how does 'you're old enough for responsibilities' gel with 'don't shoulder adult burdens anymore'? You were still in no danger of losing this week. Your cultural details were good and incorporated well, your main character had a personality, his actions made sense, and you brought everything to a neat resolution. I'm not saying it's impossible to lose in Thunderdome while all of those things are true, but these days it's rather unlikely. Writing Mechanics: Pretty good, but you stumbled here and there. A single hyphen is a bad choice for an em-dash substitute. Two--like this--is more common; that does a better job of keeping dashes and hyphens visually distinct. Whenever you flash back to an earlier event in a past-tense story (as you did in 'One time,' etc.) you should use the past perfect (i.e., 'he had heard one of the neighbours'). 'Is that why the hantu tetek came for him?' should have been in past perfect also. In the phrase 'Her most obvious feature, however, were the pendulous breasts,' 'feature' is singular and doesn't match your plural verb; 'features' would be the way to go. You used a semicolon in the first sentence where you needed a colon. Etc. Your technical skill is nevertheless more solid than not. Worse than those small errors were the three dialogue attributions in the paragraph starting with 'But when' she drew him close.' Auuugh, why? It's the same guy speaking all three times! You only needed one! ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Echo Cian, "Fallen Grace" One thing I like very much is the way you draw the political background. You don't talk outright about the approaching rebellion until it happens, but the hints are there to be seen: a queen's execution, another queen's coronation. This subtlety isn't the most obvious aspect of your writing (well, natch), but its use gives the story a feeling of depth and precision. More is going on in your world than Eloisa's romance. This building tension and its culmination in Eloisa's final choice are where the chills in your story come from. Your ghost isn't frightening at all. As a result, you manage to twine the haunting and the heartwarming together. The elegant balancing job you've done largely justifies the fact that neither the chills nor the heartstring-tugs are very strong. What I mean by the latter is that while Eloisa's and Jaramis's story was sweet, I didn't feel all that engaged by it. I didn't see why they fell in love. Oh, I can guess at Eloisa's end: he's wondrous and strange and doesn't paw at her like that guardsman. He treats her like a lady. And I can guess that when she and he talked by the window, they came to know each other better than the reader ever gets to know them. But with none of those moments or details on camera, the love story feels a little hollow. I have to take it on faith. I certainly can, and it works, and yet.... Fumblemouse had an idea regarding why Jaramis falls for Eloisa: that the maids' story that the ballroom ghost waits for women who look like his lost love and kills them was not far off the mark. That perhaps Eloisa resembles his dead lady--and he may have intended her death all along. That's an intriguing notion, but I've decided I don't agree; Jaramis being anything but a good man would seem to go against the idea that he deserved to be a lord in death regardless of his station in life. I see another possibility in lines that initially confused me: 'She stared at him in wonder. How could she have forgotten, as well?' Is it possible Eloisa is the reincarnation of his lady? Oof. Reincarnation is a well-beaten path in fantasy romance. Not one I particularly like; it usually cheapens the characters' bond. If that wasn't your intention, you may want to change those lines, as they seem nonsensical otherwise. Eloisa is a slightly generic character, a castle maid in need of an escape from the unpleasantness of her station who ultimately dies for freedom and love. I have no problem with any of that, but who is she? What makes her Eloisa? This, I think, is why I was drawn more to Seafood's despite the strengths of this piece. His characters had more individual character, and I was more engaged by the friendship between Erin and Sasha than the love between Eloisa and Jaramis. Another strength of your piece: imagery. 'The drapes stirred, and he was gone in a wave of burgundy and mildew.' I can see this in my mind's eye. You didn't go overboard with description, and you still provided atmosphere. All the 'problems' I had with this piece are things I only thought of when I held it and Seafood's up to the light and tried to figure out why I liked his slightly more. None of them keep it from being a really nice read, an excellent entry, and a credit to you. Writing Mechanics: Excellent. Except for one thing: 'Tattered red velvet curtains swayed in the open windows; dust swirled in her wake.' This is lovely, and I had to read it more than once to figure out it was telling me Eloisa fled the ghost. Too unclear. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Cache Cab, "The Baptist" This entry. Yeah. Discomfiting in ways I'm not sure you intended. The lesser of its problems--and this is saying something--is that you threw random junk-grabbing in for no good reason, as though you perhaps thought that when we said 'no erotica' we really meant Please tell us about your protagonist's genitals, Cache Cab. What the hell? It's like Arkane's naked wizard: it adds nothing but a weird pervy feeling. Next time you're tempted to have characters grope each other's testicles and then act like that never happened, reconsider. The greater source of discomfort is how this story comes across. On the one hand, by establishing that your point-of-view character is a bigot, you also establish that his viewpoint is unreliable regarding the natures of ghosts and men. Aiden quickly becomes the more tolerant of the two, attempting to understand and communicate through the prejudices he's presumably been taught. Your final line emphasizes that Aiden is the better human being. On the other, you show the Jewish ghost and the Moslem ghost being drawn up to Heaven after their baptisms, which in the woman's case was forced--and the suggestion there seems to be that Aiden and his master are right. That these people are unenlightened and need a righteous white man to show them the way. None of the judges knew how to feel about this. Nothing in the text suggests there's anything wrong with dragging that Moslem out of his Garden and pushing him toward Christian Heaven. Not to mention the Jewish woman is supposedly 'reeking of lox'; either the unreliable narrator is having an olfactory hallucination or you're saying that yes, seriously, Jewish ghosts smell like lox. How does that gel with the message in praise of tolerance and compassion that the change in Aiden seemed to be trying to send? Answer: it doesn't, and that makes me think you fumbled the trick of the unreliable narrator and didn't quite pull off an ambition to write characters who were repellent and sympathetic at the same time. If that's the case, the goal was worthy, but the execution wasn't quite there. Writing Mechanics: Largely solid. The errors I see could be typos, but watch for mistakes in your first line; Aiden's question should have ended in a question mark. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Cpt. Mahatma Gandhi, "Blessed By Yama" There's a lot to like about this story, such as the way you folded the Hindu god of death into it, the image of a lake filled with the bones of the dead, the maimed ghosts in the mist, and the double-edged nature of Rajat's 'blessed' status. Unfortunately, I don't know why Lokesh stole that woman's leg or why he wouldn't give it back. It's not valuable to him. It's a creepy thing to keep around the house. I tried to find out whether human relics are much of a thing in Hinduism, and I found instead that Hinduism mandates cremation, which doesn't seem to fit the idea of the lake... in fact, given the Hindu belief in reincarnation, Hindu ghosts are an odd concept. Oh, dear. Either I'm missing something (which is quite possible) or your premise is flawed. Edit: I was missing something! Namely that Roopkund Lake is a real place, really and truly full of human skeletons, and tourists do steal bones from it. That part of the premise isn't flawed in the least. I stand by Lokesh needing a reason to take the leg, though. Well, anyway, Lokesh and the leg--why? And why was Rajat's first priority after accidentally killing his brother to find the leg? You haven't sold this as that crucial to him, especially given that he waited a few days before confronting Lokesh to begin with, and it took me aback when he didn't do anything for his brother's corpse or even try to hide what he'd done--never mind notifying any authorities. The story lost me here. I felt like I'd had the wrong impression of Rajat's character. The theft of the baby felt very coincidental in terms of timing. I admit I wonder too how well baby bones would survive in a lake. Your last line is very good, however. If I'm wrong about the holes in your premise, this story is worth expanding until the actions of Lokesh and Rajat make more sense. Writing Mechanics: Excellent. I didn't notice any errors on a casual read. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Djeser, "Burden" Not a fan of this one, indeed I am not. It would have worked better without the opening paragraph. You could have begun in the dragon's perspective and shown his story as it happened, which likely would have given it more vigor, and if you'd insisted on that wa-wa trumpet ending, at least it could have come as a surprise. You know the end is dumb, right? That it robs the dragon's story of all poignancy without being funny? I'm not into the genre, yet I suspect there's a little bit more to metal than having a dead dragon on the stage. Looked at separately, the dragon's story isn't bad. I enjoy the way the warrior's last words to the dragon backfired on his house: the dragon remembers who sent it to Hell, all right. I started wondering after a while how many Duncans there were that it never ran out of prey--especially once it crossed the sea; how many kids did that one Duncan have?--and why it only attacked the men, but it was still a cool variation on a family curse. The dragon's loss of interest in it all seemed a bit abrupt. Why did it change its mind? What else did it find to think about or feel? Checking the story again, I still don't see. The dragon is full of hate, and then it's just not. That the dragon should have to serve the family it had once hunted is an excellent setup for a story. It isn't a story in itself. And of course you ruined the whole thing with the last paragraph anyway. Writing Mechanics: Good. Where you wrote 'I laid in the shade,' you should have written 'I lay,' since lay is the past tense of lie. You don't always put commas between two independent clauses. These are rather minor errors. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Entenzahn, "Why Rules Are Important" Much though I appreciate your title, it would have helped your story if you'd ever bothered to set up 'must say goodbye to the ghost' as a rule. Something else that would have been a good idea: choosing a tone and sticking to it. Your humor and horror don't blend. 'Isaac McScratchy' makes me think you actually meant the story to be funny, but burning a kid alive? Not amusing! Spelling out his accent on the Ouija board? Not particularly amusing either. Your last line might have worked if you'd played the rest more or less straight. This looks as though you threw it together for the hell of it, which is better than not submitting, but a little bit of thought could have gone a long way. Writing Mechanics: Decent but sloppy. '“Well good going, you cow” Jenna scolded.' You know better than that; don't try to convince me otherwise. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** The News at 5, "Final" Too vague. Too much back story and side story you leave unexplored. The problem isn't that I can't get the gist of your piece. Obviously it's a look at ethics; Brian has cajoled a ghost into helping him cheat his way through his journalism degree, but that ghost, once having been a journalist, rather belatedly considers the ethics of assisting Brian and abandons him at a critical moment. But any details that would make Brian more than a one-dimensional scumbag or Walter other than a complete idiot to have bought his promises of help for four years are missing. Walter wants to find a woman named Polly, and Brian has pledged to assist. Fine. Who was Polly? Who is Brian that he can talk to ghosts and help them cross over? Are such people so rare that Walter was willing to wait four years for any progress on his search? You don't much explain Walter's change of heart, either. Why now? Why didn't he think about the ethicality of his actions before? The conversation he and Brian have on the day of the test should have happened years ago. That it finally occurs on Brian's last day is too much of a contrivance for me. I can see you, the writer, setting up this scene for maximum dramatic impact; it doesn't feel like a natural progression of events. I'm skeptical too that Walter's defection would have that much impact on Brian in terms of getting his degree. If he's been fed the answers to every test up until this point--and what's with that 'haven’t taken a test in four years' line? Hasn't he been taking plenty of tests with Walter's help?--his grades ought to be very good. Good enough that one blown final shouldn't ruin him. Which means that there won't be any consequences to his cheating, he won't change or learn anything, and the point of the story is lost. This was a frustrating story to read, though the core concept of it (a journalist student/medium attempts to cheat with the help of a journalist ghost who ultimately remembers his ethics) isn't a bad one. Writing Mechanics: Fair, for the most part, and certainly good enough to pass the 'Did this person give a drat?' criteria. One thing that drove me nuts though was how hard it was to tell who was speaking at various points. Take this line: '“So is that it, then?” Brian turned back, the sunlight streaming in making it difficult to pick Walter out against the white wall.' There's no dialogue attribution, and Brian is the actor in that paragraph; I have to look twice to untangle the fact that Walter is the one talking there. The same problem crops up with '[...] Just make sure to get the answers by then.” Walter kicked the floor a little harder' and '“I always get them, you know that.” Brian stormed back and stuck his finger in Walter’s transparent face.' Also '“I don’t have them.” Brian took a swipe at Walter, but connected with nothing.' Cut that out! It's easy enough to avoid: either attribute your dialogue or break to a new paragraph before the other character acts. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Jun 19, 2014 |
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Mar 23, 2014 03:46
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Critiques for Week LXXXIV: Nitrousoxide, Starter Wiggin, Tyrannosaurus, Whalley, elfdude, God Over Djinn, Paladinus, That Old Ganon, docbeard, toanoradian, crabrock, WeLandedOnTheMoon!, and QuoProQuid Nitrousoxide, "Rematch" This had my initial vote to lose. It's dreadful. It gives the impression of a bunch of ideas thrown at the screen because they sound cool with little thought given to whether they make any sense or have any natural connective tissue. The sequence of events: within an unnecessary frame story, Frank goes to a rock concert at which, for some reason, there are robots. Guess we're in the future. The robot draws a pentagram and summons evil. (You lost me at this point, by the way--things were already too wacky and random.) The evil it summons is... a dead wrestler. Uh-huh. It commands the wrestler to enact genocide because. The wind conveniently flips the book to just the right page while the wrestler is leaving dead bodies around the pentagram, which evidently is right out in the open; you would have thought someone would have noticed the robot throwing human hands around in that case, but no. Frank can pronounce the words to summon Pachinko perfectly on the first try because. Pachinko beats Pain Train without much trouble. Frank disables the robot. The end. It's all about as coherent as Axe Cop, without the charm. Why was the robot at a concert? Why was your setting a concert to begin with? The concert has nothing to do with anything; all of this could have happened at a wrestling match. Why was there a robot at all? The existence of robots is completely unnecessary for this story. A human sociopath could have done the job of summoning a dead wrestler just as well (if it's possible to do such a thing well). Why did the robot want to kill all humans? Why was a robot able to perform magic? Why would an undead wrestler feel compelled to listen to a soulless entity, and why am I thinking about this? Why can Frank summon Pain Train's nemesis like it ain't no thang? Why did any of this take place? I don't know. I don't really care to, because I don't think there's an explanation that can make reasonable sense of all this. It's interesting that although it's very, very goofy, I get no feeling you were trying to be funny. You just sent your imagination off to town and forgot to tell it to stay sane and plausible. Plausibility seems to be a problem for you, going off this story and your last one. The scenarios you set up aren't believable and read as though you didn't put much thought into them. This one lacks a payoff to boot: random stuff just happens, nobody learns or grows or changes, no message is conveyed, and I am not entertained. Though it's a minor concern in comparison, the introduction didn't work for you. Mileage may vary, but 'It all started when that robot tried to summon the forces of darkness' is not a good first line in my book. It basically tells me, "Buckle up, you're in for some wacky!" Only a very good comic story could redeem it. There's just no reason to have this intro at all, since it adds nothing and is never revisited. Obviously I didn't like it, but I'm curious about what your future entries will be like if you figure out how to fuse your crazy imagination with some kind of logic. Writing Mechanics: Mediocre. Always capitalize the first word of a sentence. Always! You make the same ghastly its/it's error as Masonity, so you get the same link. You wrote 'peaked' when the correct word was 'peeked,' 'heals' when the correct word was 'heels,' and 'decrepid' instead of 'decrepit.' I'm not sure how the latter made it past your spelling checker. Formatting-wise, surrounding your scene-break symbols with blank lines would have made for easier reading. But while most of these errors were easily avoidable, your technical skill is not that shabby. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Starter Wiggin, "Cattle Sam" You mean to tell me the whole town knows Cattle Sam has been stealing their stuff and no one has lynched him? No one sounds afraid of him in that gossiping scene in your second section, so I find it hard to buy that no one's at least kicked his butt so hard he flew ten feet. It bugged me the first time I read the story; it's bugged me every time since, enough to make me like the story less than I would if Sam's life of crime weren't so easy. Other than that, though, it's kind of fun. Your first scene worked all right for me, maybe because it was so short. The question of why Sam 'guessed' he was an outlaw hooked my interest. His first run-in with Heinrich was decently described. I felt a tad sorry for him as he turned into a stooge for the ghost. Not much for brains, that Cattle Sam. The poor, stupid side of him showed up again in his death. A bright man wouldn't look away from a woman holding a gun on him, but a bright man wouldn't be robbing banks because a dead man dared him to. The tone stayed pleasingly light for all the grim things that happened. Since Sam lived on as a ghost, his death didn't seem that tragic, and being stuck with Heinrich forever was a fitting and mildly amusing end for him. This wasn't near the top of the pack, but I enjoyed it. You did a good job with your flash rule, that odd attitude of your frontiersmen toward theft aside. Writing Mechanics: 'Alright' is not a word. 'Alright' is not a word. Aside from that abomination, you're solid. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Tyrannosaurus, "Night Lights in Louisiana" Oh, if only you hadn't run out of words--which is the best theory I can come up with to explain why your story falls on its face in the end. You had a good thing going. The clues are all there that Emelie is a ghost, and I figured that out long before Jack did, but you never made it so obvious within the story that he became a blind fool for not catching on. Your clues just improve on the second read. The walk that was like floating; the cold hands. The old-fashioned ways. There's a sense of foreboding in your piece, emphasized by phrases such as 'pulled him out of the light.' This romance is not wholly innocent. But it starts to fall apart as the end approaches. Emelie's skepticism that Jack loves her struck me as odd. He'd already said he would live in her field weeks ago. The entire 'would you stay' question appears twice, with the later conversation weakened by the earlier. It's repetitive, and that's painful given how you were hurting for words: you wasted them when you needed them badly. Because your finale is too short on detail--I didn't get to see Jack's reaction to Emelie's grave, I didn't find out whether he died in there or whether she had some other reason for dragging him into the mausoleum. I assume he did die, but I don't know whether she killed him, he committed suicide to be with her, or what. The resolution of your love story would be in what happens next. You stopped too soon. You probably would have gotten an honorable mention if the story had stuck its landing. Expand on the conclusion if you come back to it. And you should: it has the delightful, spooky mood to it that so many entries missed. Writing Mechanics: Your proofreading could be better, as the lack of a closing quotation mark after 'tall grass' proves and as 'Its pretty enough' sets in stone. Shudder. Your technical skill is generally strong, which only makes the little-yet-obvious goofs stand out all the more. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Whalley, "No Sleep 'Til Richmond" Combining the ghost-story cliche of motorists encountering a ghost on the road at night with the other ghost-story cliche of he was dead all along! didn't work to your advantage. Your ending is a total gotcha! twist, compounding the problem. It's hokey, and it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. There's no clear reason for Joey to have befriended Matt and hung out with him for who knows how long while keeping his dead nature a secret all the while, and it's pretty contrived that he would go along on this trip, knowing whom he would likely meet. Either that or he's a dick, setting up this reunion with his ex that gets Matt hurt. I gather it's his father who gives Matt a lift, and that's more contrivance: out of all the people Joey could have flagged down, he got his dad? Really? And Matt looks like Joey why? I'd guess you created the resemblance so the father would spill the details that the ghost was Joey's mail-order bride and murdered him. But that whole paragraph reads like an afterthought, and although the info tells me how Joey died, I could wish that info were more relevant to the story itself. That Joey's ex is also his murderer doesn't matter in the piece, and I wish it did. What's the point of all the references to weed? Why would Joey convince Matt to buy some for the sake of the trip? Joey doesn't need it. I swear it's like he's trying to get Matt killed. Now that could have been interesting, a ghost arranging for his living friend to get high and wreck so they can hang out as ghostbros forever. I'm pretty sure that's not what you were going for, so this part of the story is just weird. This isn't a bad read, but doubling down on things that make readers groan--twist endings and cliches--was a very strange choice. Writing Mechanics: Quite good; none of your problems are on the sentence level. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** elfdude, "The call of the Banshee" You landed in the dishonorable pile for doing bizarre things with your flash rule. You were tasked with writing a story inspired by "The Bonnie Ship the Diamond," a traditional Scottish song about a whaling ship and its sailors. Instead you wrote a somewhat muddled story rooted in Irish folklore; Wikipedia suggests that the banshee appears in both Gaelic Scottish and Irish mythology, but the Morrigan is an Irish goddess. Scotland and Ireland are not interchangeable. Even if they were, this story has nothing at all to do with the song other than that it's set in the part of the world the from which the song originated, maybe. I went back and forth on whether you had confused your folklore. The Morrigan and the banshee sometimes play the same role in myth, i.e. warning someone that they will soon die. But there's much more to the Morrigan than that, and as far as I can tell, her death warnings were for warriors. Henry isn't a warrior by any stretch. So is your Morrigan intended to be a regular banshee and not the goddess at all? In that case, why muddle the issue with that name? (And was there a second banshee on site doing the screaming? Why?) I also wonder whether you intended Morrigan to be perceived as a ghost herself rather than a goddess or fairy, since otherwise the ghost content of your story is thin; if so, that's another argument against that choice of name. Shoving aside the issue of Thunderdome technicalities, this isn't too bad. I see evidence of research here, although that just makes the muddled parts all the more bemusing: Wikipedia associates banshees with the Mac name prefix, and what do you know, Henry's a MacRaney. Both traditional banshees and the Morrigan are said to have washed the bloodstained clothes of men about to die. The plot isn't very original; 'someone sees a banshee, then dies' sums up most of the banshee tales I've read. The stepfather is another moustache-twirling bad guy without depth. But there's a logical progression here and a resolution that makes sense, and your prose is decent. Phrases like 'like nails on a chalkboard' and 'waves of conflicting emotions washed over him' are cliche; 'The expression was confusing but intriguing to Henry' is pointless telling, but the story wasn't a chore to read, and believe me, others were. A side note: I can't tell when this is supposed to be set. Henry's dialogue seems anachronistic unless it's a modern story, and it could be, but I'm not quite sure. Your somewhat weak ghost content and the botched flash rule together added up to your DM. It's a poor contest entry. You can take encouragement from this, though, if you like: it's not a terrible story away from the contest constraints. It's an incredible improvement on what you wrote for Elements Week, so if nothing else, you're getting better. You might be about ready to put the chain of DMs behind you. Writing Mechanics: Improving. Neither 'stepfather' nor 'old man' needs a hyphen, your apostrophe is probably in the wrong place in 'villager's stories,' you sometimes use semicolons where you want colons (such as in 'The forest was chilly; damp in the shade, but warm in the summer sun'), you have commas where you don't need them (such as in 'The contradiction between tone and meaning, made him shiver again'), and you overuse -ly adverbs. The adverbs had the most negative impact on my reading experience. 'Laughed nervously,' 'stated dismissively,' 'stated grimly'--in the latter two cases especially the adverb adds nothing that the dialogue didn't already imply. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** God Over Djinn, "Ghosts of the Modern World" Talking heads in unnecessary present tense. Nothing happens in this. Two sisters exposit about their past; a cereal-box ghost shows up; finis. There's a clever trick here in that the physically present ghosts are more or less incidental--especially the cereal-box ghost, proof positive that some voluntary flash rules were made to be refused--and the real specters are memory and expectation, but that take on ghosts isn't enough to justify the amount of talking you ask me to sit through. The talking itself isn't interesting enough to justify the lack of plot. I get what you were going for, or at least I think I do. Miriam and Olympia grew up in a domineering family, under pressure to conform to Thai ethnic culture. Olympia has fully rebelled--and pressures Miriam to rebel too, slightly ironically. Miriam resists. Miriam is haunted by her great-grandfather, representing familial expectation. Olympia is haunted by the mascot on a cereal box, representing... I'm not entirely sure, because I don't think you pulled that part off. It probably has something to do with her rebellious embrace of consumerism. Olympia has cast off any ties to tradition and has largely dismissed her family, but despite her cheerful attitude, she has her own ghosts. Fine. But it isn't a story. Nothing changes for either sister. Neither sister acts. It's all exposition, all tell, although there's some grace in how the exposition is handled. I do largely believe the conversation; it's believable reminiscence and gets heavy-handed only a time or two. ('But no offense, you know, but you can’t just stay in their house and cook khaeng khiao wan for grandma until you’re a grandmother yourself' is one point at which it did.) It's still not fascinating stuff, and it needed to be to make the story worthwhile. I sort of like the way you let the Boo Berry thing inspire you, assuming that it led to the consumerist angle for Olympia. And I like that she's haunted by it, assuming that's the conclusion you wanted me to draw. If it's the specter of her rebellion and the ways she knows it has made her petty, i.e. eating terrible cereal to spite a mother who isn't even aware of it, that instantly adds another layer to her character along with balancing Miriam's more traditional haunt. But. Maybe it would have worked better if you'd left him silent. His cheeky speech makes him too cheesy; ditto the watch-checking. 'People tend to see the ghosts they believe in' reads as though it's meant to Say Something Profound, but in this context, it doesn't. Olympia 'believes in' a cereal mascot? I'm not convinced she believes her choices could or should haunt her, if that's what you were going for. Not consciously. So it just comes off as you trying to be deep. Your prose sometimes puffs out its chest and waves its arms about and shouts Look at me! The present tense? Completely pointless. All it does here is draw attention to itself. The parenthetical dialogue aside? Pointless. Breaking that paragraph into three wouldn't have hurt it at all. I want to be so interested in what you're telling me that the way in which you tell it sinks under the radar, to be appreciated subconsciously or in retrospect. The parentheses gimmick especially is too obtrusive for my taste. Of course, you were nowhere near the bottom tier, as both sisters have personality, their dialogue moves quickly, and there's no way in which the whole was unpleasant to read. Writing Mechanics: Excellent. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Paladinus, "A Ghost of Many" You know, your interpretation of your flash rule is honestly pretty good. Replanting trees in war-wasted land is a cool translation of 'Drive your cart and plow,' which implies agriculture. Instead of literal bones, you put the bones of civilization into the glass ground: pots, knives. It's nicely done. Your basic story idea isn't bad either. The archmage who devastated the land encounters the spirits of those he condemned to death, nameless and faceless to him, and even though he destroyed the staff that had brought that destruction about--through horror at what he had done? Through fear?--he knows he will never be able to forget. It's not much of a plot; once again you've written a vignette rather than a story, but the concept is nice, and side details like the glassland and the tree-planting make it fresh. The execution kills you, though. Yours is the first entry to have such poor mechanics that I couldn't factor them entirely out of my judgment. The nature of your errors made your piece a chore to parse. You have some of the clumsiest exposition of the week in Koltor's whole spiel about being the eleventh Archmage of the Empire, blah blah blah, and that kind of pronouncement is a hack-fantasy cliche besides. How can a man try to cover his face with his hands? Do or do not; there is no try with such a simple action, at least not while his hands are working and unbound. At first the technical problems with your prose cast such a shadow on the story that I ranked it as low as Nitrous's, but I liked yours better after close scrutiny, which was not the case with his entry or Ganon's. Writing Mechanics: You shift tenses with gleeful abandon, from past to present and back again, within the same sentence in some cases. You've got to get that under control. It's obnoxious to have to read, and it's like a neon sign announcing to the world that you don't know what you're doing. Maybe this site can help you. Your other missteps are more in line with the kind of gaffes others made, such as commas used where you wanted periods sometimes, usually in/around dialogue. '[...] nature,’ the Archmage pronounced every word loud and clear' is one example: the comma after 'nature' should be a period, and 'the' should be capitalized as the beginning of a separate sentence. You refer to a ghost, singular, but the ghost speaks with a chorus of voices and refers to itself as 'we.' Are you sure you don't mean ghosts, plural? Your ellipses should have four dots when they end a sentence. This stuff doesn't ruin your work the way the tense shifts do, so worry more about those. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** That Old Ganon, "Rose Tea" 'What is going on and why do I care' are questions I asked myself many times as I read your unclear, contorted, unsatisfying entry over and over to figure out whether it deserved to lose. Your prose took so much extra effort to untangle for so little reward that I hated going back to it, and I'm still not sure I get the whole story, though I think I have the gist. My take: Mia and Sonny are partners of some sort who have been coerced by a witch, Thad, into doing a series of dirty jobs for him. Probably thefts. Their last job--supposedly--is to be the theft of a certain phial from a house nearby. (Very nearby if 'the house up that hill' is an adequate description.) Sonny is ungodly thirsty for some reason. You really overplay that. If he's supernaturally thirsty because the dead witch cursed him, you should have provided some clue; otherwise it's a ridiculous and awkward manipulation of events. When the pair gets to the hut, they run into a woman, who holds the phial. While Mia goes into the shack because you needed her off-camera, the woman hands the phial to Sonny and he gulps down its contents like an unbelievable moron. I can't overstate how dumb the 'Sonny is thirsty' contrivance is. He's so busy swigging tea that he doesn't notice the woman teleporting to behind him somehow. He and Mia return to Thad, but Mia's off-camera again, so the climactic conflict is entirely between Sonny, Thad, and the ghost, who seems to be controlling Sonny's body. I presume it's the tea that allows her to do this. Using Sonny's hands, she pours the tea down Thad's throat and takes over his body instead, possibly killing him, but who can be sure? She-as-Thad burps, "We'll talk later." Why now is not a good time to talk is left as an exercise for the reader. Ugh. Mia is entirely superfluous. Why is she here? You shove her off the stage at every opportunity; it's very obvious and adds to the strong impression the story gives of being contrived as all hell. Sonny is clearly a complete idiot; he swills down liquid given to hm by a stranger in a witch's bottle. Who does that? Who is dumb enough to do that? He hasn't spent the last three days in the freaking Sahara or something, has he? Rrrrrgh. I don't know who Mia and Sonny are, in terms of their personalities--all I get for Sonny is that he's thirsty and cowardly enough to cry at the thought of robbing a dead witch when apparently he's been robbing live ones for a while now. I'm with Mia: I can't believe it. I don't know what their day jobs are or how Thad hooked them into being his lackeys. I don't know why they go along with it. Thad isn't an effective villain; he never seems menacing. The piss-stained robe doesn't help. I have no clue why Thad wants the phial so much. I don't know what relationship Thad and Lane had while they were alive. And hey, what do you know, you technically screwed up the prompt since Thad and Lane did know each other while she was alive! Is Thad dead at the end? Damned if I know. He's slack and cool, but people don't usually die from being force-fed tea. If he's not dead, I'm not sure how Lane took complete control of him. Always assuming that's what happened. I have to assume that because otherwise the final line is empty of all sense. I have no idea why you described the feeling of magic dissipating against Sonny's palm as though it were a York Peppermint Patty, but 'refreshing sensation' is hilariously weak and inappropriate. He's in a fight for his life and he registers an attack as refreshing. Amazing. Why did you wait until the eighth paragraph to name your protagonist? Why did you never set the scene? You wrote 'The witch tasking them' as though I'd have any idea who 'they' were. There was no reason to end the first paragraph where you did; it would have made rather more sense in combination with the next paragraph, and the start of your story is the worst place to be needlessly confusing. I really do not like this at all. It does feel like there's a story somewhere in it. With a great deal of editing and some expansion, that story might even not be terrible. It would be easier to salvage than Nitrous's entry, but Nitrous's was a straightforward read in comparison. Writing Mechanics: Actually, not bad at all. Your problems aren't technical. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** docbeard, "Spirits Cannot Harm the Living" The sticking point for me in this one is that Ela loses her food and pack in death, but she keeps her knife and sparking stones, and the stones create real fire. As much as I love your last line and Ela's decision to take revenge on the Undying Man (cool interpretation of Lazarus, by the by), this gives me pause. It's not logical. It's too convenient. Why would ghost stones create real fire? Also awfully convenient is the speed with which the Undying Man comes for Ela. With all the dead spaces to roam, he happens to be parked right outside the very moment she sets foot outside the camp boundaries. It's possible that the man who kills her isn't the Undying Man and that the wasted lands are full of killers, but that would make the Undying Man irrelevant to your plot, so I suspect that's not what I'm meant to conclude. Letting Ela roam for even a day or two--summed up; I know you were scraping the word count--would have made this part more plausible for me. Something I like quite a lot is the way you scrupulously obeyed the prompt in full despite killing off your main character; the people Ela runs into after death are strangers to her, and the Undying Man is not in his cave when she discovers her body. Very neatly done! You fulfilled your official flash rule, which, admittedly, wasn't the hardest task since all you had to do was make her a rebel. She could have ended up a cliche as the teenager who just doesn't want to be told what to do, but her death prevented that, and when her rebellious side resurfaces in the end, it doesn't feel cliche at all. My reaction was overall positive, putting you in the upper middle of the roster and well within competent-and-pleasant territory. Writing Mechanics: Good. You use a lot of commas, but they suit your narrative tone. The mini-flashback that begins with 'When the old world passed away in fire' would have been better in past perfect, I think, but I didn't notice on my first read. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** toanoradian, "A Thesis on Ghost" Rhino tells me your Muslim elements are better handled than CommissarMega's. I found your religious exposition clumsier, however. Most of the blame for this rests on the as-you-know-Bob infodump in the beginning when Suryati feeds Duko's own theory back to him in detail. This is purely for the reader's benefit, and it shows. Your premise and plot are good up until the point when Suryati finds not-Duko in his apartment. That scene works fine on the first read but bemuses in retrospect. Not-Duko's enthusiasm for his experiment doesn't make that much sense since he's, you know, not Duko. I'm presuming the ghost knows something of the nature of ghosts and probably knew something of the Qur'an in life, and none of what it says with Duko's mouth seems as though it should be a revelation. The idea that it's trying to fool Suryati doesn't fly, because he tells her readily enough what he is a moment later. It feels like a cheat. These issues together kicked the story in the teeth, but lightly; its strong bones are still visible. You could make this a good, creepy ghost story with some tweaking. Writing Mechanics: Most of your errors are words or phrasings that are just a touch off. The title is an unfortunate example: 'Ghosts' should be plural. 'The dull thud rang much louder in the silent graveyard' is an odd sentence because you don't say what it's much louder than. 'The dull thud rang loud' would work. 'As few minutes pass' should probably be 'After a few minutes had passed' to stay in the past tense. 'Crickets still chirp' should be 'Crickets still chirped' for the same reason. 'She seemed to find the ghost' is not a good use of 'seemed': Suryati is the point-of-view character, and she cannot seem to be doing things in her own perspective. 'She saw the ghost between the streetlights' would probably do the job here; the previous line about her imagination would let me infer that what she sees is not necessarily there. The clause 'it were the shadows' puts a plural verb right after a singular pronoun, ouch. The semicolon after 'returned to her' should be a comma, and the 'his' that follows should not be capitalized. Etc. One error--of sorts--was consistent: you put commas outside of single quotation marks in clauses like 'explained your ‘logic’,' and this is incorrect in American English, though it's correct in British. You seem to be writing in American otherwise, so this stood out to me. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** crabrock, "Things That Die" I like the approach of showing your ghost only indirectly, since it was clear despite this that he did exist, but you've written another story with a ghost in it rather than a ghost story. What's more, what story exists here is mostly as off-screen as the ghost. I liked your talking heads more than God Over Djinn's, maybe because you managed to show personality and relationships through the doughnut choices rather than relying entirely on what the characters said to each other, but it was still something like 70% dialogue, and it ended without developing a plot of any kind. You had something in mind, I think. The line 'We just point out the facts and let you choose what to believe' is almost certainly supposed to mean something. Adam's rejection of the doughnut is too. I feel like the father is being hypocritical somehow and that Adam, young as he is, recognizes it, but I get this impression from a certain familiarity the exchange has instead of from the actual words you wrote. Whatever you intended, it's not here, and the story slams into a brick wall: the ghost never amounts to anything, and neither does anything else. I wish I'd seen the other tale. You know, the one of who this ghost was in life, why he lives in this house, and how he came to befriend a little boy. He's a killer and not all that repentant, but he's not too far gone if he'd advise a child to avoid his end. Showing much more of him would have destroyed the obliqueness trick, but it would have made this a ghost story, too. P.S. Adam's mother cries at pictures of ducklings? Dear Lord. Writing Mechanics: 'He said 'while [he] has found plugging somebody to be a useful tool for settling arguments--or just making a point--[he] would recommend against it, given [his] current circusstances.'' The hell? How exactly did Adam pronounce the brackets? Or a better question: how did you miss them before hitting the post button? A couple of your phrases are mangled, too: 'the only reason it ever stopped being Saturday' would make more sense as 'the only reason it should ever stop being Saturday.' Even an eight-year-old would know that doughnuts do not control time and space. There are words missing in 'trying to remove as much of his body from his parents’ view': you need 'as possible' or something much like it after 'his body' to complete the 'as much of' clause. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** WeLandedOnTheMoon!, "Silver Necklace" I'm not sold on this as a ghost story at all. Instead, it appears to be a cursed-necklace story with a side helping of gratuitous gore. The more I look at it the more I wonder whether you should have been on the DM list or DQed for missing the core of a dirt-simple prompt. Your idea may have been that the necklace is host to a spirit who possesses the wearer, but you weren't at all clear about this. Man, I hate looking back over this one to critique it. Your prose is fine, your plot not that hard to follow, but this rests waaaaay too heavily on its gross-out factor. What is it, really, but a showcase for eye-popping squick? You try to get as much mileage as possible out of that, too, what with Miriam sticking her thumbs in a corpse's eye sockets like its head is a bowling ball. None of this--the eyelid-slicing, the popping, the eating, the thumbing--is scary. It's just disgusting. It made me want your story over with. More's the pity, since other elements are effectively creepy, such as the hallucination of flies emerging from the dead girl's mouth and flying into Miriam's ear. That's a horrible image too, but there's a point to it, the visual metaphor for the way Miriam has been infested by the madness connected to that necklace. Your ending is very strange. Miriam is still alive, and yet Sarah's putting her into a morgue drawer? A sealed freezer drawer? So Sarah's thinking her friend's not dead yet and there may be hope as she effectively kills her? Weird. Eerie. Probably not what you intended. Writing Mechanics: Mostly good, but you have a misplaced modifier in 'Opening them with a force, darkness fell across the building.' You're saying darkness opened Miriam's eyes--which is amusingly apt, but it's not correct in context. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** QuoProQuid, "Ghost Stories for Children" Less a ghost story than a story about ghost stories. Yours is the only entry that may not even have a supernatural element. At the end, I don't know whether Sara is being terrorized by the Hutchinsons or by her psychopathic brother--the moan and the footsteps could be sound recordings, likewise the glass and falling chairs. The front door closing on its own is the most powerful suggestion that something supernatural is going on, but doors shut seemingly by themselves in my house all the time for mundane reasons. Your finale heavily suggests that Tommy is at fault. That would be its own variety of creepy, but it would blow the prompt, and maybe that's why you left it ambiguous. Here's a problem with that: a horror story needs to unveil the horror eventually, or else it's a cop-out. 'Something frightening' can only carry you so far. There's no resolution here, of course, and no terrifying final beat. Maybe it's just her brother in the closet, and he may not be ready to kill her and make a skin suit quite yet. The possibility that it's all a fake-out removes much of the thrill. It feels too much like I'm being set up for a twist that would make the story pointless. On another note, Sara comes off as a jerk when she plots to hide until the ghosts go after someone else in her family! I would have understood if she'd hoped they swarmed Tommy specifically, but wishing that on her parents is a dick move. Good going, Sara, now I won't mind so much if you end up eaten and/or a skin suit. You erred IMO in beginning the story with Sara's flight to her bedroom. That made the rest of the story chronologically confusing. It was harder to follow the sequence of events than it needed to be. Writing Mechanics: Critically flawed. You don't use the past perfect consistently during the flashback sequence, and this contributes to the aforementioned difficulty in following the story. Most of the piece taking place in past perfect could have gotten tiresome, but that's another argument against starting somewhere other than the beginning. You start out the flashback describing a general landscape, Tommy's habitual behaviors, but you move directly from that to dialogue that presumably only happened once. Changing the first dialogue tag to 'he'd once said' would fix that incongruity. There are a couple of lesser mistakes: 'Her brother obsessed with scaring her.' 'The only monster that could be in her house now were the Hutchinsons' -- 'monsters' should have been plural. These are probably oversights; your prose is generally competent. Those tense problems actively hurt you, though. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Jun 19, 2014 |
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Mar 23, 2014 03:46
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Critiques for Week LXXXIV: Barracuda Bang!, perpetulance, The Sean, curlingiron, Noah, Benny the Snake, Sitting Here, Lake Jucas, systran, Bad Seafood, and Phobia Barracuda Bang!, "The Throng Song" The best thing about this entry is your interpretation of your flash rule; you made 'and smile no more' quite literal via Botox, but you didn't take it into absurdity. Unfortunately, the premise feels shaky to me. Botox rarely kills, and if these ladies died of other causes, the cosmetic surgery clinic is an odd place for them to haunt. Am I supposed to infer that this clinic shut down because it kept killing people? It's all somewhat tenuous. I'm also taking on faith that they are ghosts rather than zombies or very strange living women (okay, that one's a stretch). You outright called them ghouls, which didn't help. Your excuse for getting Sophia into that clinic is weak, weak, weak. Why the clinic wasn't locked is rather a mystery, and the pocketknife is a poor choice of MacGuffin. Why would Allie have a family heirloom with her on a trip to the strip mall--'exploring' is not a credible reason--and why would she have it in her hand to be dropped? You could have made the object much less contrived. I'd have gone for a piece of jewelry that Allie's mother had handed down to her, myself--it would be easy for her to lose such a thing and easy for you to explain why she had it on her person. An ornamental object would also be a better thematic fit. The pacing is off. The conversation between Allie and Sophia goes on too long. The mention of tickets is a needless non sequitur. You could cut everything in that paragraph after 'You shouldn't have even had that!' and lose a chunk of unnecessary exposition. The last line is almost cheesy, but for me, it worked. Writing Mechanics: Clumsy. I don't like starting with 'Allie rushed into their shared bedroom' when you haven't introduced Sophia yet. I don't love that Allie is the first character you name when she isn't the protagonist, either; in fact, the whole first scene seems to be in her viewpoint, which is bizarre when she proceeds to drop completely out of the story. This should be easy enough to fix: 'Sophia had just started a new chapter in her book when her sister Allie ran into their shared bedroom' is one way you could put Sophia in the central position from the start. You can--and should!--cut 'began to' in 'she began to hear faint laughter'; hearing is something you either do or don't. '"You can't make me!", she said' is appalling. I do not know why I have seen that error twice this week, but it horrifies me more than any of the ghosts. Cut that comma with extreme prejudice. Also appalling: 'squealed a woman excitedly.' Is there ever a good reason to use 'excitedly'? Is there really? ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** perpetulance, "Drifting" I was glad to see you return to the Dome, and I hope you stay for a while even if I have no enthusiasm for this particular entry. It's one more vague, unclear piece with a plotline that's needlessly difficult to follow. I gather that Bernard starts out in a lifeboat, alone except for a gutted corpse that he's keeping around for some reason. Maybe he's been eating the guy. He has oars, but he doesn't seem to be using them for anything until he comes across a drowning man and rescues him. The man's name is Henry, and he claims to have fallen off a ship. Bernard, meanwhile, gives his reason for being out in a lifeboat with a corpse as 'mutiny,' but declines to explain this at all. He also appears to change his name to Henry for a line or two! But it turns out that Henry is in fact a ghost, which is revealed when he... turns into a vomit fountain. Okay. That's random. Bernard, in horror, moves to slash his wrist, but the ghost tells him that he actually committed suicide and that Purgatory is no prize. A miracle bird then arrives to direct Bernard's attention to the ship within shouting distance that he'd somehow failed to notice. None of this holds up to scrutiny. Bernard has oars, but he isn't rowing. He's been out on the ocean for an indeterminate length of time, probably longer than three days, but he's not dehydrated. The first episode with the albatross is probably a bad idea; it opens the door for me to wonder just how long Bernard's been stranded and doesn't accomplish anything else--it parallels the albatross at the end, but to what purpose? None that I can see. Bernard welcomes the man he's saved to paradise, which does not make sense and reads like you attempting to be dramatic rather than like something a person in this situation would say. Bernard buys Henry's story of having fallen off a ship into the ocean. What ship? Shouldn't Bernard have seen any ship that passed nearby, and wouldn't it have had to pass very recently for Henry to still be living if he can't swim? It should still be visible! Meanwhile, Bernard never tells the story of his mutiny, only alludes to it in a way that tells me nothing. 'At least you have a boat.' What? What on earth is that supposed to mean? And who says it, Bernard or Henry? Oh, wait, I think I see now. The lines 'A thin smile marked Henry's face. “What the devil are you grinning at?”' read as though Henry is speaking, which makes a royal muddle of everything that follows; if Bernard is the one talking, then it's Henry who later points out that Bernard at least has a boat, which is considerably less out of nowhere. That's a mess. And it still doesn't tell me what happened on Bernard's ship. Nor does his anecdote about eating rats. I think maybe you were after a parallel between Bernard and Scott, Bernard and Henry: Bernard thought Scott was a bellyaching rear end, and now here he is, bellyaching to someone else who's had it worse than him. Okay, but what's the point of this? Henry's ghost vomit is terribly random. Bernard's attempted suicide, not much less so. I guess the reference before to him playing with the knife is meant to imply in retrospect that he was considering suicide before Henry appeared, and so perhaps Henry's entire purpose in meeting Bernard was to talk him out of killing himself--that could even be the point to the 'it could be worse' message above, though that's a misfire if so. 'It could be worse' is no consolation to a would-be suicide. Anyway, on the first read (and second, and third) the suicide attempt came out of nowhere--I'd thought the mention of the knife might be a clue that yes, he was eating the corpse in his boat. Speaking of which, if he's not eating the corpse, I do not understand why he hasn't thrown it overboard. It must smell godawful. If he is, well, 'gutted' isn't a clear enough indicator. By now it'd be missing more than the guts, right? The magical albatross at the end is one last point of absurdity. If the ship can hear Bernard screaming, he should have seen it. He doesn't seem to have earned this ending. I remember your story for Eurovision Week; I know you can do better than this. Writing Mechanics: Rough around the edges. That albatross flashback should have been in the past perfect. Putting in the present made it confusing on top of unnecessary since it wasn't immediately clear whether the whole story was going to take place 'three days before.' You left the final T off Scott's name at one point. 'mutiny?”, Henry asked' is atrocious to look upon. You don't ever follow a double quotation mark with a comma in American English! This example would be wrong in British English too! That bit where you make it hard to tell who's speaking to whom is lethal; the muddle made the story significantly more exasperating. 'Harried-looking' needed a hyphen. I didn't care for the way you tried to illustrate that Henry's words were being cut off by the water. '“Hel-, -m drown'. -n't swi'"' just looks like punctuation salad or maybe some sort of code. That he's drowning is evident and that he can't swim just emphasizes the whole 'How long could his boat have been gone, then?' problem, so you could cut this wholesale if you decide to keep working with the story. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** The Sean, "The Tour" Good premise; you were the only person to write about ghost science, and it was cool to see some of that in a Ghostbusters-inspired week. I enjoyed your story more the first time than I have on subsequent reads, though. Your idea was neat, but you went on too long with the museum tour. The first paragraph was full of details that didn't matter one iota. Your prose was shaky. And the exhibit controls blew out rather easily. If the exhibit in question had been Billy's and the shorted panel had only released him, I would have found it more plausible. For everything to go down because of one liquid spill was some crappy electrical planning! That first paragraph is also a cheat. Maybe in death the narrator still hates road trips and his wife still loves them, although those are odd emotions to hang on to, but there's no tradition now that can dictate they do anything other than get stabbed for tourists. The best way to avoid this might have been to set everything but your final sentence in the past tense. Some of your phrases were very strange. The words 'melancholy' and 'tantrum' are an odd fit, and a tantrum isn't usually a thing you make; tantrums are had or thrown. You used 'mulled' twice and wanted 'milled' both times. 'We were scurried along by the tour guide' is incredibly passive and easy to fix: 'The tour guide hurried us along.' You can't scurry someone anyway. Although 'the phantasmal knife that the ghost stalked around his cell with' can be parsed, it's awkward as hell. Something like 'the phantasmal knife in the ghost's hand' would be good and simple. If you want to keep the stalking detail, though I don't think you need it, 'the phantasmal knife he held as he stalked about his cell' would work. I still like your basic idea, but now I think the story needs a lot of editing to reach its potential. You made a decent first showing, whatever else. Writing Mechanics: Bad. Not 'You didn't give a drat' bad, not 'I question your grasp of the English language' bad, but more than bad enough. You fall out of past into present in the phrase 'I’ve actually got some enthusiasm for this one'--and if this is purposeful, it's a terrible idea. I can't buy he still has enthusiasm for the place he haunts in his present. 'The tour guide assured us that their technology prevents ghosts' doesn't read well either; either give the tour guide some dialogue or use 'prevented.' He was assuring them about the technology as it was then, remember. 'While the tour guide was exceptionally proud of this exhibit but the hooded youth was noticeably put off.' Ugh. Cut either 'While' or 'but,' and put a comma after 'exhibit' either way. You're often missing commas between independent clauses in your sentences. You also need a comma after 'Asia' in the clause 'a group from Asia each with an expensive camera hanging from their necks'; furthermore, you're using a plural pronoun, 'their,' for a singular subject, 'each [member of the group].' Restructuring the sentence would be the easiest way around this: 'a group of Asians, all with expensive cameras hanging from their necks.' You likewise mix the singular and plural in the clause 'each set of ghosts were grouped.' Each is singular, a set is singular, so each set was grouped. If these points of grammar are unfamiliar to you, you should probably duck your head into the Fiction Farm and ask for a line-by-line. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** curlingiron, "Finding" So Lyla, who is sufficiently cracked in the attic to be suffering audiovisual hallucinations, is wandering around the countryside on her own. Correct? She has no home. She's so out of it that she hasn't looked around herself for days. She has money for a phone with e-mail capabilities, though, somehow. Her therapist let her get away unmedicated and uninstitutionalized. And her grandmother only contacts her semi-weekly and hasn't, I don't know, sent any authorities out to find her dangerously mentally ill grandchild. I'm with Lyla: there's no sign her grandmother cares about her at all. Adelaide's suggestion of a reconciliation thus isn't touching but rather sad. You took the whole situation too far for my suspension of disbelief, certainly too far for the mood of the piece to be anything but bleak. I'm not sure I get where you were going with Adelaide. That she understands what Lyla means by 'different' and says that she, too, wanted to be found suggests her monstrous appearance wasn't all a hallucination on Lyla's part. But why would she look like that? Not to keep people away: she approaches Lyla. Not to scare them off: she's kind from the start. Or... oh. Oh, hmm. Is she some sort of stand-in for Lyla's perception of her mother? In other words, she sees her mother as a terrible monster; really, though, her mother is a woman who wants to be understood as much as Lyla? Maaaybe, but unless Adelaide is Lyla's mother (and dead), this intervention seems random. You know, if Adelaide were the mother that would make me like the story a lot more. I can't determine that without more of an idea of Lyla's relationship with her mother--where is this woman in the picture of Lyla's life? Alive or dead? Present or absent? Bogeyman or abuser? What? Some options would allow her to be Adelaide, some wouldn't. Because you don't narrow it down, I have no idea whether I'm on the right track. Writing Mechanics: Okay; you cut the submission time fine, and it shows. Mostly in 'No I don’t,,'--an abomination before God and Man if I've ever seen one. Adelaide's dialect was a touch heavy, but it sounded fairly authentic to my mental ear. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Noah, "The Fire in the Night" You scraped by on the prompt. There's only a ghost in this story if Billy is right about the will-o'-the-wisp being the soul of his sister and if the will-o'-the-wisp exists. Your nameless main character describes its behavior as though it's real and visible and there, but then he thinks, 'I never saw what he saw.' Is the wisp a hallucination of Billy's, then? A genuine ghost that only he can see? The text doesn't tell me. Even if it is a ghost, this, like other entries, isn't so much a ghost story as a story that may have a ghost in it. It would be exactly the same tale if the ghost were imaginary. The heart of this piece is the choice the protagonist--I wish he had a name--has to make between two ways of being loyal to his friends, two ways to do the right thing, two ways of being a good person that are mutually exclusive; in his own mind, to help Ricky, he has to betray Billy. And vice versa. It's legitimately difficult, and though I have a strong opinion on which choice is right I still feel the protagonist's dilemma. He's young. I get the feeling this decision will age him a little. Especially as the defection that was difficult for him ends up barely noticed by Billy, who isn't much of a friend in his grief. I'm reminded some of Stand By Me by the childhood friendship theme and also of another story that brought that movie to mind, your entry for Pictures and Books. The motif of boys' bonds facing tests is one you do well. The end fell flat on my first couple of reads, but it's growing on me. There's no resolution to the 'ghost' element, and the reunion of the three is anticlimactic considering Billy left Ricky to die. But there's an implication in the final line that the main character still and maybe only wants someone to follow. He isn't ready to stand on his own just because he made an important call when it mattered. That may not be super-satisfying, but it's human, and so it suits the story better. Shame I never found out much about the ghost, though. As was also the case with that Pictures and Books entry, I feel like there's another story going on just out of sight, although I'm less disappointed this time that I didn't get to see it. Writing Mechanics: Generally good, but your tenses got bogged in muck once or twice. 'Every time before Billy would begrudgingly come back' would be fine if you cut 'before,' but the presence of that word means the rest ought to have been in past perfect: 'Every time before, Billy had begrudgingly come back' etc. 'I'd like to think Billy would be angry, but he was already gone' -- present, past. 'I wanted to think that Billy would be angry, but he was already gone' might do. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Benny the Snake, "Untitled" Regarding the episode that landed you your flash rules, suffice to say I was not impressed. Your disqualification was for failing in another way. Not only did Jesus know Diego in life--if that is Diego, and more on that shortly--but I presume Jesus's mother and father knew him also, leaving no doubt that you blew that part of the prompt. I looked up "El Cucuy" since its nature was not clear from your context. The Albuqurque Horror Examiner informs me that it is a monster much like the bogeyman, a shapeshifter that can become whatever it likes in order to terrorize disobedient children. The thing that kills Jesus sounds like El Cucuy to me, right down to the glowing eyes. In other words, it's a monster, not the ghost of Diego at all. As a side note, it's bizarre that you took pains to explain 'Chuy' but left what the heck El Cucuy is a mystery, the more so since an understanding of El Cucuy is necessary to see how you met part of your flash rule. Let's tally the ways you've made a hash of things thus far: 1. You asked for help in spite of the rule. 2. Either your surviving characters knew the ghost in life, or 3. You didn't tell a ghost story. If you're surprised at your DQ, I don't know what to tell you. The Do Not Cross sign is a weak answer to Rhino's first flash rule for you, though it suffices. At first I thought you hadn't met the second rule at all, since while Jesus lies to his mother, I couldn't tell from your text that the lie had anything to do with him getting devoured. Now I know that El Cucuy's appetite increases the more a child misbehaves, and I'm thinking Jesus's lie is supposed to be a final step down that road--although you'd think that shooting his friend would be naughty enough to do him in on its own. This story is not terrible, which saved you from the loss despite your astonishingly poor reading comprehension. If you cut a few of the random Spanish words, it wouldn't hurt; yes, they're Hispanic, we get it. It starts looking egregious around the time Jesus teases Diego about being a jota. A larger problem by far is that until Diego gets shot, he, not Jesus, seems to be the main character. I still have to remind myself which kid survived, and this is after reading it several times. You would have been in the middle if you'd obeyed the prompt in any way. That's progress, I guess. Don't change your title after posting in the future. Writing Mechanics: Not good. 'Eachother' is not a word. You misspell Diego's name at one point. You haven't mastered the mechanics of dialogue. All your mistakes are the sloppy kind that you should have caught by proofreading the thing, which makes them all the more irritating to see. Technically speaking, it's customary to put foreign-language words in italics, and you might give that a try if you're going to continue loading your stories with them. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Sitting Here, "The Lost Hour" Scattershot and muddled. When the story starts, it gives the distinct impression that Mikki and Amaya will be important. You do an effective job of building the spookiness, with the chorus that echoes Amaya's name being a detail I particularly liked, and it seems as though something otherworldly has happened to Mikki and is happening to Amaya as we watch... and then those two all but disappear. Jodi encounters the ghost alone and there's nary a clue of was up with Mikki to begin with. These two shards of story don't meld for me at all. Nor does the ghost first telling Jodi 'You're going too slow' mesh with the message he gives her in a rather blunt way: slow down. Probably a slip on your part, but a bad one. It's neat that your ghost appears in the hour erased from the clock by Daylight Savings Time to remind humanity to be less hasty--one, it's an indictment of DST, which I am completely on board with; two, the ghost has a point. Unfortunately I only know that's your concept because I overheard you talking about it. I can't see it in the text. You mention DST and one specific hour of the year, but the line is drawn much too faintly. Why the ghost showed Jodi the past is a mystery to me. In one sense, she only has to look around to put the lie to 'what was has always been.' There aren't ancient pines in the park anymore. He probably means that in a more metaphysical sense, but his words wouldn't particularly discourage waste, I don't think, because how does waste have meaning when whatever you miss or toss aside will always be there? This is an attempt at depth rather than a success. The rest of his message for her has more sense and heart. Amaya and Mikki reappear at the end, having served small purpose. Mikki is never more than a name. You do atmosphere well. Your character interactions are great. Your prose is competent. Damning with faint praise, I know, but I enjoyed reading your entry even though I wanted more from it, and I think the idea of DST ghosts is one you should play with again. Writing Mechanics: I would have been astounded if this hadn't been submitted at the wire. It's studded with mistakes a thorough proof should have caught. It's only too clear you didn't have time for one. Capitalization was your greatest bugbear, as you both capitalized things you shouldn't have ('She' in 'She said quietly to Jodi' and 'She asked the specter') and failed to capitalize at least one pronoun ('Seward park'). There's no such thing as a 'spec' of light. 'Abrahams Bosom' wants an apostrophe. Ellipses that end a sentence should have four dots, three for the ellipsis and one for the period--this is the one error you made consistently. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Lake Jucas, "Ghost Stories of the Old World" You asked your nine-hundred-plus words to carry a metric ton of back story. The wonder is how close you came to pulling it off. There are unanswered questions that nag me throughout the piece, yet you tell me enough about the world and the resort to build the atmosphere of solitude and ruin. 'Alone in a resort of the dead' is nearly all I need to know. And what a great premise it is. I so wanted a haunted hotel story this week, and you provided the next best thing. You notice how I said 'came close' and 'nearly,' though? It comes back to the nagging questions. I want to know how long it's been since this plague. Kate thinks of 'seven months and thousands of miles,' but you describe the resort as though it has gone years without care. I wonder how fast this plague spread, if people were hanging out in honeymoon bungalows when it came on. I wonder as well about Kate's husband and why she never thinks of him. She had one, right? That's what it means that the honeymoon bed had once been hers? You imply an important thing about her past with that, but it's an empty thing. You keep referring to 'the horrors of being a survivor' and 'true horror in the actions of desperate men,' but these horrors have no bearing on the story at hand. You're out to give a feeling of a wider world outside the resort, I believe, but you overplay it to the point where it feels like this is an excerpt from your novel or something rather than a standalone piece. The vomiting ghosts are rather random. The implication's probably meant to be that the virus made everyone vomit themselves to death. But ye gads, if it was that constant, why weren't the corpses sprawled by the toilet? I don't care for your direct quotation of your flash rule. It's not convincing and doesn't make sense within the world of the story; why would Kate think of tygers? Who ever thinks of tygers-with-a-Y unless they're quoting Blake? Which she wasn't, since the actual Blake line is different. (Also: as far as I can tell Blake wrote book-length poems, but never novels.) I have to admit we didn't say that you didn't have to put the line itself into your piece, and if you were working under that assumption, you took a credible stab at making it fit. As with other entries, your final line feels more like where the real story begins than a conclusion. Writing Mechanics: Decent. Your errors tend to be goofs: 'bedroom suit,' 'dead by damned,' no period after 'she said to herself.' A semicolon would be better than a comma after 'take it all in.' 'At least they went together she thought' needs a comma badly; punctuate thoughts of this type as you would dialogue. You're the second person to use 'shined' as the past tense of 'shine,' rather than 'shone,' which is traditionally preferred. That's not wrong, just odd. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** systran, "Empyrean Son" Considering you rushed this so much that you didn't have time to get a word count, it's quite good! I'm not crazy about the section with the woman. 'I paid for a drink and a woman' sounds he went to a tavern-slash-whorehouse, and you'd think word would get around if a whorehouse employed homicidal corpses. Her true nature is unclear. She could be a spirit of vengeance; she could be a god, or sent by a god; she could be the protagonist's conscience briefly embodied as a dead woman. I don't know, and the scene doesn't bear too much thought. If it were me I would keep it, but I might change the details until he met the woman somewhere less public, so that how she disguised what she was from other people (and how she happened to get a job in the whorehouse-slash-tavern in time for the protagonist to show up) wouldn't even be a question. Your final paragraph doesn't have the same grace as the rest. The prose verges on clumsy. If you replaced 'an answer for my King' with 'it,' you'd lose a repetition of 'King' and a repetition of 'answer.' I'd consider changing 'see the King' in the last line to 'the palace' or some such as well. Especially since he won't be seeing the king, will he? The answer itself is dark and fitting: an eye for an eye is truly just. If you'd spent more time on this, you would probably have snagged an honorable mention. Alas! But how is the protagonist the son of Heaven? Writing Mechanics: I already addressed this, really--the repetitive bits of the final scene are the only missteps of note. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Bad Seafood, "Captured Memories" I like your plot in which a ghost remembers who she was through the companionship of a living woman. I like that your ending is sentimental without being cloying; I like that you went against type and delivered a ghost story that was barely brushed by melancholy. What won me over, though, was the amount of character you gave your characters. Erin and Sasha feel like people, people with quirks and interests who are distinctly themselves. You manage this with a few scraps of dialogue and a handful of actions. The banter between them shows me how they could come to like each other and gives me an impression of their friendship: they tease, they joke, Erin nags, Sasha scolds, and they enjoy one another's company. I see agency in Erin's decision to befriend the ghost in her home. This decision is more implicit than explicit, granted, but it's there. She offers to fix the camera, and she carries it with her to let Sasha see the world outside the apartment. Little choices, little actions. But they matter. Sasha (arguably your true protagonist, viewpoint character or not) lacks agency by default, but the decision to see her niece is still hers. Sasha's relationship to her sister is drawn well in broad, light strokes. I didn't catch the significance of her talk of her sister ('A model child, she was') my first time through the story. You and Nethilia depicted the same sibling bond: Sasha and her sister didn't get on, but Sasha died to save her sister from drowning. You did it so succinctly--it's beautiful, really--that you had room for a much wider story. There's little other than your typos that I don't like here. I do have minor quibbles with your Polaroid. You might do better to have Erin clean it than repair it, though that wouldn't likely take as long. She'd probably need replacement parts if it's broken, and I think these may be hard to get. No point making the reader wonder how plausible a home repair job is. She also snaps a whole lot of pictures, but even when it was common Polaroid film was fairly costly at at least a dollar a picture, maybe two, and nowadays it would be harder to find. I wonder--Erin shows the sunrise shots to Sasha, which means Sasha either wasn't there to see Erin take them or wasn't paying attention; she definitely doesn't need to be there. What if Erin picked up a cheaper camera with which to practice? Something like that or a nod to the cost would make this issue feel less handwaved. I love taking pictures and I love Polaroids, which didn't hurt you a bit, but the magic and your win lay in how much story and personality you packed into a limited space. Tell more ghost stories, Seafood. You're good at them. Writing Mechanics: Not so good at proofreading, though. Between 'the taste of her own breathe crisp on the morning calm' and 'The middle-aged woman signed' and 'bummer her for smokes' (in the latter case, 'bum smokes off of her' would be correct; Merriam-Webster tells me that bummer is not a verb), I would question your level of care if I didn't know you've done worse. ***** ***** ***** ** *** ****** ******** Phobia, "Mud" You almost did it. You almost transformed a decent if cliche spook-story setup into a goofy comedy piece WITH EXTENSIVE USE OF CAPSLOCK and made it amusing. Then, for reasons known only to you, you decided to throw in the detail that Hansel's pants were around his ankles the next morning, and I don't even know what that's supposed to signify, but it's pointless and stupid and he's a kid and there's a no-sex rule and why did so many of you throw in completely needless crap like this! Arrrrrrrrrgh! ...Okay, deep breaths. The pants detail delivered the death blow to your piece. The paragraph beginning with 'Okay, wow?' had already done some damage, however. Your rural boy is suddenly from the Valley, telling a lady, like, she should, like, totally, like, stop being dead and, like, stuff? With inappropriate question marks giving his lines upward inflections? It's weird and dumb? And not funny since it doesn't relate to the situation you've set up in any way. Also, Hansel sneered twice in consecutive paragraphs. The ghost lady should have punched him in the face. You'd only have to alter a small amount of this story to make it entertaining, but man, do you ever need to fix it. Writing Mechanics: Good enough for government work. You missed a word in 'there even rumors,' and 'Later that night, Hansel was locked in the mansion, and all of the doors leading out were locked' is terribly redundant. 'Five thousand' doesn't need a hyphen. A nocturne is a piece of music, so you wanted a different word there unless there's a pianist outside the mansion window. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Oct 28, 2014 |
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Mar 23, 2014 03:46
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Wish You Were Here (1,200 words) January 15, 2004 Dear Grandma, I miss your care packages. The treats you sent reminded me of a different life, and every time I got a box in the mail I knew you remembered me, too. I could do with some goodies right now. I'm so tired from walking home that I can't face getting dinner. This is when you'd tell me to eat something anyway, right? The prof for my Cost Accounting class has the same tone no matter what he's saying to us: resentful. At least I'm going to like Russian, but I'm never going to like getting up at 6am for it. It's so cold! Cold and dark, and no one else is on the street then, so it's just me and the ice and snow. It's beautiful, but it's eerie too. Then I'm in a warm(er) classroom under fluorescent lights, and nothing feels quite real. Maybe I should buy the most cheerful, obnoxious music I can find and play it the whole walk so I won't notice as much. Say hi to Grandpa for me? Love, Marjorie --- January 20, 2004 Dear Marjorie, I'd send you two batches of Krispie treats if I could! You know I remember you, honey, I remember you and think of you every day. Picture me standing in front of you, shaking my head until you eat real food. Somewhere on your campus they ought to serve spaghetti. I was out on my porch one winter morning last year while everything was black and quiet, and I felt like you did. I was the only person alive, and the world was watching me without caring about me in the least. It was like being young again. Then I pictured your mother and you, still asleep and warm. That made me smile, and as soon as I smiled everything was different, even though it looked just the same. Promise you'll smile for me. Love, Grandma P.S. Your father asked me to tell you he misses you. --- February 4, 2004 Dear Grandma, There's spaghetti, but believe it or not, it's possible to make spaghetti so gross I don't like it: college found a way. I haven't had a whole lot to smile about. Professor Moore--Cost Accounting--yells at me more than anyone else. I know which car he drives, and I honest to God thought about slashing his tires last Thursday. Russian's not what I thought it was going to be, either. The prof would rather tell us stories about the Ukraine than teach. I worked on my last set of homework for three hours and got a C for reasons I still don't understand because he never bothered to explain. I'm trying to figure it out anyway, but I keep falling asleep over my papers. But I did see a redbird the other day, and I did smile, and it felt good. Strange, but good. I called Mom yesterday and asked her why she doesn't write to you. She didn't say anything, very emphatically. Should I bring it up again? Love, Marjorie P.S. You can tell that fucker that he should have thought of me before blowing his brains out, then. --- February 7, 2004 Dear Marjorie, LANGUAGE young lady! Don't you write such words to me. You have better manners. I wouldn't have said anything, but it's impossible to lie here. It's something he feels and wanted you to know. When I was younger than you I had a teacher who hated all his students, and back then he was free to smack us around some. He gave a black eye to a boy I fancied. That boy and I gathered up a bunch of rat snakes and drove them over to his house while he was out drinking. We put them in his mailbox. He came to school the next day with bandages on his hands and more hate than ever. He blamed another boy for it and hit him so hard he lost a tooth. The boy I liked didn't say a thing, and I stopped liking him. I didn't speak up either, and for a long while I didn't much like myself. Don't slash any tires, Marjorie. Don't give yourself any more regrets than you have to, because you only have so long to make amends for them, and some of them never go away no matter what you do. I regret a lot that happened between me and your mother, but she's said everything to me she needs to say. We won't talk again until we're face to face. I hope it's a long time from now. All my love, Grandma --- February 26, 2004 Dear Grandma, I didn't cut Moore's tires. He shouted for half a class about a mistake I made. I conjugate Russian verbs in my sleep, but I do it wrong. There's never anything in my mailbox. I know you love Mom. It's so stupid she doesn't know it. She won't talk about you at all. I want to ask her if she'd send me something sometimes, but I know it's selfish, she works so hard, she doesn't have time and she doesn't need to know I'm so unhappy. I try not to let anybody know, but that means I'm not talking to anybody either and it's not just the mornings that are cold and lonely. What's the point in any of this? Why am I getting this degree when you won't be there on graduation day to be proud of me? Your hugs used to make the world okay. I need one so badly sometimes that I think about coming to be with you. Love, Marjorie --- February 26, 2004 DON'T YOU DARE THINK ABOUT THAT. DON'T EVER. Life is when you make all your choices. Life is when you become the person you'll be forever. I'm proud of you already. It's why I'm happy here, because my life led to your mother and you. I love you, I'll always love you, and that's why I won't hug you if you come see me now. I won't speak to you. I won't forgive you. You'll be no better than your father. You will hurt your mother more than he did, and you'll be more of a fool. You are too loved to die. --- April 30, 2005 Dear Grandma, I took my last final today. As I walked back to the dorm a robin landed on a fence a foot away from me. She looked me in the eye, and I knew that you were there with her, with me, even though I haven't written to you in so long. I told Mom that when she called, and she said of course you were. It's taken me this long to be able to tell you I'm okay, I'm fine, you don't have to worry. Even now, some nights the sadness comes back and I wonder whether I made the right choice in listening to you. Then I hear a redbird sing or Mom's voice on the phone, and I know. Keep that hug ready. I'll be along for it. But not yet. I love you, Marjorie
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Mar 24, 2014 03:50
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In.
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Mar 29, 2014 04:00
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Cracks (1,068 words) He could crack a fine crab leg, could Edward Morris, and draw out the flesh still smooth and whole and blushing. He broke open more than three hundred legs a night to fill orders for the crabmeat appetizer at Sienna. "Hey, Ed," a waiter said to him one evening, "Julia's at table nine. She wants your specialty." Edward snapped joints with his cracker, sliced chitin with his knife, and arranged five finger-length tally marks of meat on either side of a ramekin of clear, melted butter; and because it was Julia, he brought the plate out to table nine himself. His favorite cousin grinned at him. She still had on her work suit, and the day had frazzled her hair. Edward matched her grin as he set the appetizer down. He asked, "Twice this week, Jules? Did you get a raise?" "I'm addicted to the filet mignon. You should stage an intervention." Julia snagged his sleeve when he stepped away from the table, and she lowered her voice. "That man playing the piano the other night, and now tonight. He's new, isn't he?" Edward's eyes found the grand piano in the center of the dining area. Greg Tourner sat in front of its ivory keys. The chandelier overhead scattered light over his dark hair, and his grey tuxedo had the off-blue cast of cigarette smoke. His fingers danced through an arrangement of "Puttin' On the Ritz." "He's just here for a month," Edward said. "But he's already made a stir." "That's not surprising." Edward turned back to Julia. She watched the pianist with an interest he hadn't seen in a long time; as always, she'd come to the restaurant alone. There'd been no sign of anyone in her life since her last relationship had ended abruptly for reasons she wouldn't discuss. Instead of returning to the kitchen, he went to the piano and said to Tourner, "The lady at table nine would love to meet you on your next break." Tourner glanced that way--and his gaze lingered. "I think I can arrange that." Edward whistled through his next ten platters. He kept an eye on Julia through the closed-circuit feed that let the kitchen staff watch for unhappy diners. Even on the little screen, her smile was brilliant. He found a note on his windshield when his shift ended: You doll. Greg's promised to arrange a private concert after hours on Friday, just him and me. Will you come and crack some crabs for us? He called her to promise that he would. ### "Headed home soon, Morris?" Tourner asked on Friday; they were the only workers still at Sienna. "Julia didn't say? She asked me to take care of refreshments." "No," Tourner said slowly. "But I suppose it's fine." Julia arrived at half past midnight, her hair newly styled, her soft black dress a far cry from work attire. Edward met her at the door along with Tourner. Tourner offered his elbow, which made her smile, and Edward shepherded them both to the finest table in the house. He produced a bottle of Riesling from his apron and poured them wine. "My treat," he said before either could ask. Tourner raised his glass to Julia. "You outshine the stars this evening," he said. With his free hand he touched her cheek. Did her smile falter? She sipped her wine before Edward could be sure. He collected the crab legs and tools from the kitchen and brought them out on a portable table. Tourner broke off whatever he'd been saying about Beethoven. "What's this?" Julia said, "I love seeing Ed work. Have you ever watched him?" "Oh, they don't let mere musicians into the sanctum sanctorum." Before their eyes Edward turned the thin, hard legs into a soft, pale delicacy, his cracker clicking as efficiently as a knitting needle. Tourner looked away after Edward snapped the second leg in two. He murmured something to Julia, touched her shoulder. Julia's chuckle did not ring entirely true. Edward retreated to polish the counters and the stoves. As he did, he watched the closed-circuit feed. Every time Tourner touched Julia, she became more tense; he could see it from here, so why hadn't Tourner realized? Julia rose and headed for the restroom. And Tourner passed a hand over her abandoned glass. Edward stopped cleaning and stared at the screen. He couldn't be sure--and Tourner left the table, walked to the piano, and began the Moonlight Sonata. Moving quietly, Edward went out and exchanged the glasses. He picked up the empty appetizer plate and had it in his hand when Tourner noticed him. The man didn't miss a note. Maybe nothing had happened. "Ed." Julia stood at his shoulder. "Don't let me leave with him," she murmured. "Please." "Has he done anything to you? Said anything?" "No--no. Nothing." She rubbed her hands over her upper arms. "He plays so beautifully, doesn't he? But... he reminds me of Manny tonight." Manny, her ex. Manny, whom she would not discuss. Not now or ever. He saw that in the tight press of her mouth. "I won't," Edward said. She gave him a small smile. She picked up the glass that had been Tourner's and took a sip, then carried both glasses over to the piano. In the kitchen, Edward watched them talk and drink. Watched Tourner slump twenty minutes after draining the glass that had been Julia's, heard him miss notes with increasing frequency over the next half hour. What Julia said to him before she fled the restaurant was lost under the music. Edward met Tourner at the piano. "What were you going to do to her?" Tourner slurred his words. "Nothing she wouldn't like. A lot. Play the Sonata on her--" He wriggled his pianist's fingers in a way that did not make Edward think of keys. Edward punched him; he fell back onto the piano with a discordant jangle. He slid onto the floor, limp. "You'd think the bitch hadn't been touched before," Tourner mumbled into the carpet. With one hand, Edward grabbed Tourner's wrist. The other held his cracker. ### He can crack a fine crab leg, can Edward Morris, and he'll crack many more when he gets out of prison; his cousin has promised him so. But Greg Tourner won't play piano again, for fingers don't break half so cleanly or smoothly as chitin.
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Mar 31, 2014 03:57
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The Sean posted:Now that the round is over may I go back and make it look nicer (and actually include a goddamned word count) or is this turd forever etched into the walls of the 'dome? It is etched forever into the walls of the Thunderdome, and beyond. No harm in sticking a word count on the thing if you want to, but prettying up past submissions strikes me as a bad precedent to set. Let your entry stand in the form in which it was judged.
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Apr 2, 2014 03:40
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In.
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Apr 5, 2014 00:06
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Angel of the Morning (1,034 words) Read it in the archive. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Jan 2, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2014 02:33
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I'm in.
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Apr 12, 2014 04:16
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Limonadé (913 words) Read it in the archive. Kaishai fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Jan 2, 2015 |
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Apr 14, 2014 04:17
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Drunk Nerds posted:In there like a lizard's penis at a casino bar. For both the Fear and Loathing and the Party stories. Heads up: the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas prompt is for a brawl between Sitting Here and God Over Djinn, and it's exclusive to them.
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Apr 15, 2014 15:23
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I'm in.
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Apr 19, 2014 01:24
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Backdraft (777 words) Soldiers had dragged Ronya from the keep's root cellar and thrown her, gagged and bound, into the wagon that held the goods sacked from her kitchen. It had carried her away from the smoke and the stench of blood and spilled bowels, but as the loot convoy slowed--as the shouts of General Thaksiri's men became clear--she smelled blood again, and such meat roasting on hasty pyres as she would never cook. A man in boiled leather seized her arm and hauled her out; she fell to the dirt. He cut her bonds, knocked her into a daze when she fought him, and pulled her onto her feet. Methodically, he stripped and searched her. He dragged a sleeveless brown shift over her head. Ronya clawed at his hands, and his backhand split her lip. The man marched her toward a tent that seeped more smoke from its top. Heavy footfalls told her other men were following. A soldier in chain mail waited inside, along with an oven. "Ronya of Kamon," her custodian said. He shoved her forward. "Your problem now, Naras." She staggered, and the soldier in chain--Naras--caught her by the bicep. His fingers dug into the soft flesh there. Like the other invaders, he was wiry and dark haired, with nothing in the set of his thin mouth to suggest empathy. Around them, men from the convoy stacked up boxes, bags, and barrels the contents of which she knew. Naras took a rag from his pocket and swiped it across her bloody mouth and chin. "We have other prisoners. If you fight, we'll kill them as well as you." "I won't." The words tasted as foul as the cloth. "The general stayed for a time in Kamon, years ago. Perhaps you don't remember. But he enjoyed your food enough that he's spared you to cook his victory feast." The makeshift kitchen included a barrel of fresh water with a basin and soap beside it, and under Naras's watch--the other men had gone to join their brothers--Ronya scoured her hands. She chose pots from the haphazard pile laid on top of a crate of salted fish. She picked out a bottle of red wine from another box and met Naras's eyes as she took a swig. Ronya fed wood to the stove until sweat broke out on her skin. She dug onions, garlic cloves, and bundles of lemongrass from their boxes and minced them. The knife bit into her finger, staining the pale lemongrass the same color as the battlefield outside. It hurt. How could it hurt? Shouldn't she be beyond hurting? Then she saw, jumbled in with her powdered chilies, the fruit preserves Gaen had helped her make in the autumn. Her husband's handwriting on the labels blurred as her eyes filled. The tears fell into her widest pan and disappeared in puffs of steam. Flames caressed the outside of the cast iron pan; she tipped it, and the fire tumbled inside, there and gone. She scrambled potted chicken with the herbs and vegetables, in wine. Spatters of hot oil blistered her arms. Ronya fueled her cooking with that pain, and with the rest: each chop of her knife was aimed at the neck of the invader who'd killed Gaen, at least in her own mind; each burst of fire was for their homes, their corpses; she shredded pork as she would have liked to shred the man who stood there and ordered her to taste this, taste that, prove she wasn't poisoning a legion that deserved it. Runner boys collected the finished dishes and took them outside, and the laughter of the party kept her food well salted with sorrow and rage. Until it faded. Then stopped. Until a different tone of roar replaced it. The screams were all too familiar, the cries of men killing men, veined with despair. Thaksiri's voice was loudest of all. Naras ran to the opening of the tent, but Ronya stayed at the stove doing what she did best: putting her heart into her food. It didn't take long for a wild-eyed soldier to shove his way in. With his knife drawn and sauce on his lips, he lunged for Ronya. Naras grabbed him. "She's done nothing!" Naras shouted. "I watched her!" The soldier, his belly full of Ronya's hate, threw Naras off and cut his throat so that he had no further chance to protest. Ronya felt regret, too late. She did not regret the knife in her heart, for as she had fed Thaksiri's men her desire for their deaths, she had fed them too her grieving wish for her own.
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Apr 21, 2014 04:22
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| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 06:31 |
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Apr 25, 2014 04:52
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