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 Thunderdome 176: Florida Man and/or Woman  As some of you know, this year I moved from the Pacific Northwest (arguably the best place in the USA) to Florida (definitely the worst place in the USA). This week, you’re all coming to visit! Yay! Your instructions are to select a Florida headline as a prompt for a story -- this can come from anywhere, but the Florida Man twitter feed is filled with gold. Post your headline when you enter. Your story need not be set in Florida. Hiaasen fan-fic will be frowned upon. Most of all, what I’d like to see in stories this week are characters with clear motivations. Characters need not be relatable (because Florida), but I do want to be able to follow their thought process as they work themselves into absurd situations. Word Count: 1200 Entrance Deadline: 11:59PM EST December 18th Submission Deadline: 11:59PM EST December 20th Judges:
Florida People:
Profane Accessory fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Dec 19, 2015 |
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Dec 16, 2015 02:49
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The last plane for Florida leaves in less than three hours
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Dec 19, 2015 03:07
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WEEK 176 JUDGEPOST  To paraphrase John Oliver: OK, Thunderdome, just because Florida is shaped like some combination of a gun and a dick, doesn’t mean you have to write that way. There were a lot of guns this week. There were a lot of dicks this week. This is expected for Florida week. But one story in particular towered fully erect and loaded above the others, and truly embraced the gleeful misanthropy of Florida. That story was Dare To Be You, by crabrock, which earns our first Honorable Mention. To me, this story was the most truly Florida story of the week: feel free to take that however you please, but for this judge at least it’s a compliment. Our next Honorable Mention goes to Broenheim, for What You Learn When You’re Robbing a Store as Darth Vader. This story took a little while to get to where it was going, but ended up in an exploration of the motivating spark responsible for Florida Men and Women, and ends on the uplifting note that, deep down, there’s a little Florida Man and/or Woman inside each and every one of us. This brings us to our Winner, which was chosen by consensus: every judge had Every Rising Tide by Grizzled Patriarch in their top pile, earning it the sole dry patch of turf above an angry sea of aquatic tigers. This piece was well written, incorporated its absurdist elements seamlessly, and had a strong narrative flow. All of the judges thoroughly enjoyed this story, and it’s well deserving of the top spot this week. But: for every Florida man hopped up on bath salts who stops his truck in the middle of the interstate to wrassle a gator, there are those Florida people whose actions are merely disappointing and predictable, Florida people who are content to merely commit basic and tired crimes against their fellow humans and literature, and this brings us to our Lo…. wait! What’s that?  It’s a Floridian Christmas Miracle! This week, as an early Xmas present for the ‘Dome, the judges give the gift of No Negative Mentions. Across the board, the entries this week, despite their various flaws, never failed to at least bring a smile to these judges faces, or at the very least an incredulous shake of the head. Perhaps it’s the season, perhaps it has something to do with the fact that some Florida people (well, people located in Florida, at least) just managed to land a rocket safely at Cape Canaveral: well, in Thunderdome they say, the judges’ small hearts grew three sizes this week. Detailed crits to follow. The throne is yours, Grizzled Patriarch.
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Dec 22, 2015 14:34
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 I'll find a spot for you nearby, Mojo. 
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Dec 22, 2015 22:47
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Florida Week Crits / HateBrawl Warmup Alright, ‘Dome. I’ve got a hatebrawl with ‘mojo to prep for in exchange for not drawing any blood this past week, so consider this my training montage. Here’s Everything I Hated From Florida Week. *********************************************************************************************************** ZeBourgeoisie - The Alpha Man What I Hate About This: Broenheim already covered some of the problems with this story, but in case you don’t want to slog through his barely coherent word diarrhea, here are the big take homes:
How to Fix It: I think we both know you’re not going to fix this. It’s a complete teardown. In future work, you probably want to
Had I not (possibly ill-advisedly) gotten caught up in the spirit of the holiday season, this would have been a strong contender for the loss. Your stocking contains: Five Lumps of Coal *********************************************************************************************************** klapman - A Day at the Meat Shack What I Hate About This: You’re hiding behind a fortress of overwrought similes and metaphors to try and distract your readers from the fact that you don’t actually have a story under all of that. It doesn’t work. When I read a line like: “The morning air bit hard, like a pack of wolves with fangs of sharpened ice”, I don’t think Oh poo poo, that sure does sound cold, I start thinking about how asinine the idea of a wolf with ice teeth is. And I’m not cherry picking here: your entire story is chock-full of this crap. Cut it out. All of it. What are we left with? A guy with obvious rage issues gets some chile in his eye, overreacts, gets into a car accident, then tries to fight the guy in the other car, and gets shot. That’s a lot of ground to cover, but you’re too busy trying to come up with cool sounding lines to actually advance your plot coherently or even bother to establish your characters beyond a lazy caricature. How to Fix it: Quit the bullshit “style” stuff and let your stories actually breathe. Your words should act in service to your characters and your plots, not the other way around. And next time you write about a wolf with ice teeth, think to yourself: “That’s dumb, I should take that out.” Your stocking contains: Four Lumps of Coal *********************************************************************************************************** Ceighk - The Night of the Goat What I Hate About This: This story takes a lot of work to read, and for basically zero pay-off. If I’m going to spend a bunch of time unravelling the relationships between your characters, make it worth my while. I’ve read this story more times than I’d otherwise care to at this point, and here’s what I know: an unlikely candidate for a political position leverages some kind of sexual history with an old classmate to get access to a goat so that she can conduct a blood sacrifice and gain political power. This backfires when her old classmate then conducts a blood sacrifice of his own to gain power over her. Why are there three dead goats at the end? I don’t know, and more importantly, I don’t really care that I don’t know. It’s not a mystery I feel any compulsion to solve. To just get that barebones synopsis out, I had to read this story twice, and pick through a junkyard of irrelevant details to find the few little morsels that actually revealed what was going on, like a lovely Where’s Waldo with words. How to fix it: Imagine you are telling your story to a friend, whose time you actually value. Is it important that Jake wears a Megadeth T-shirt? No? Then leave it out. If you want to play with mystery, or do some flashy stuff with a last-minute reveal, then actually do the work and craft a decent set of dead-end threads. Peppering me with bullshit window-dressing isn’t interesting or intriguing, it’s just annoying. Your stocking contains: Four Lumps of Coal *********************************************************************************************************** crabrock - Dare to be you What I Hate About This: The first half, starting with “I hunger for flesh.” How to fix it: The second half, starting with “I hunger for flesh.” Your stocking contains: Two Lumps of Coal *********************************************************************************************************** Jocoserious - That Furry Son of a Bitch What I Hate About This: It’s a story about a goddamn talking dog. It’s lazy, and it’s dumb. It feels like a cross between that Seth MacFarlane movie with the foul mouthed bear and some latter day Tim Allen movie in which Tim Allen goes on wacky adventures with a CGI dog. That’s not a good combo. How to fix it: Next time, when you write “Talking Dog?” into your ideas book, cross it out and put a big “NO” next to it. Your stocking contains: Three Lumps of Coal *********************************************************************************************************** Broenheim - What You Learn When You’re Robbing A Store As Darth Vader What I Hate About This: The title for starters. That is one lovely, lovely title. Then, you take an inherently awesome concept (robbing a store in a Darth Vader costume) and do precisely nothing with it. Does the Vader costume matter? No? Well, that was a bit of a waste, don’t you think? Furthermore, your dialog sucks, to the extent that it makes me question whether you’ve actually ever listened to how people talk to each other in real life. Oh, and what was that bit in the prompt that I’m forgetting… it was important… oh yeah: characters with clear motivations. Looks like you forgot that too. The only reason this HM’d was that one of my co-judges really liked the stuff about “bits”. How to fix it: Learn to use dialog as a narrative tool. The dialog between a scared store clerk and a robber dressed as Darth Vader should be goddamn amazing. Keep rewriting the dialog until it is. Then, if you want to go off on some exploration of “bits”, you should A) think of a better way of describing the concept than “bits”, and B) work it in as part of your now amazing dialog exchange. Your stocking contains: Three Lumps of Coal *********************************************************************************************************** Jagermonster - The Florida Man and the Sea What I Hate About This: Oh man, with that title this could have been amazing. Like, if you’d actually committed to doing Hemingway with Florida Man, that… that would’ve been something. But it’s worse than that. You not only squandered a great title, you took an inherently awesome headline about a man hellbent on catching and eating the shark that bit him, and the shark appears for the middle act and then disappears. And before you start with the whole Jaws thing, Jaws did not feature a whole poo poo ton of boring dialog before the shark showed up, and then end with a long epilogue in which the characters discussed what they learned today over a joint. How to Fix It: Actually write “The Florida Man and the Sea”. Or write “Jaws: Florida-style”. Hell, just write an actual story, instead of “Father and Son Bond Over Rustic Sushi, Joint”. There’s potential all over the place here. Stop faffing about and commit. Your stocking contains: Three Lumps of Coal *********************************************************************************************************** Entenzahn - Late Night Pit Stop What I Hate About This: You took a concept about a guy who got shot getting dropped off at a Walmart instead of a hospital, and tried to play it grim and dark and oh-so-serious, with a whole bunch of hardboiled prose and drawn-out similes about razor blades and jenga towers. Here’s the obvious question raised by the headline: Why’d the guy get dropped off at a Walmart instead of a hospital? Did your story answer that question? No. It’s going to be hard to pull a satisfying story out of that, no matter how many pretty words you throw at it. How to Fix It: This is so close to being good, but you seem to be so distracted by the style you’re aiming for that you lose sight of the story you set out to tell. Work out what motivates your characters and let that drive the plot, then let the style fill in the gaps. Your stocking contains: Two Lumps of Coal *********************************************************************************************************** jon joe - Yorick What I Hate About This: I came here to read a story about a guy who brings a human skull to the grocery store, and what I get is some paint-by-numbers domestic dispute. The Hamlet stuff is just window dressing that doesn’t have any concrete effect on the story: you could tell this exact same story without the play and without the skull. And the story that’s left over is pretty bog-standard, which is disappointing. Also, the dialog is pretty stale. How to Fix It: Next time you get a prompt like this, weave and adapt your plot to fit it, instead of writing some other story you felt like writing and chucking the prompt materials in to meet the basic requirements. Also, pick an author who writes dialog that you like, and study them. Emulate until you’re comfortable, then branch out. Your Stocking contains: Three Lumps of Coal *********************************************************************************************************** WeLandedOnTheMoon! - Labels and Liars What I Hate About This: The labels. Don’t do the strikethrough crap, it’s stylistically clumsy and completely breaks the narrative flow. The violent ending is a cop-out, and isn’t really believable given the characters you’ve established. Also, it feels like you couldn’t decide if you wanted to do a Trading Places fish-out-of-water story or a Doppelgänger style horror story, and landed somewhat awkwardly in the middle. Finally, the characters themselves are all two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. How to Fix It: What would help the most here would be to flesh out your characters a little more, and then, once you have actual interesting characters, let the reader inside their heads. And also, establishing motivation is key: for example, why is Ullrich so into being the mayor? That’d be good territory to explore, don’t you think? Your stocking contains: Three Lumps of Coal *********************************************************************************************************** Grizzled Patriarch - Every Rising Tide What I Hate About This: The fact that there’s almost nothing you could call “action” in a story about a literal flood of tigers. How to Fix It: Just a sprinkling of conflict would help sell the terror of a malevolent tiger flood a little better. Your stocking contains: One Lump of Coal *********************************************************************************************************** C7TY1 - The Proper Care and Feeding of Your Bobcat What I Hate About This: There’s a fair bit here: you didn’t proofread, your characters are paper-thin, your dialog is stilted and incoherent, the plot stumbled about drunkenly and without purpose, and, most damning of all, for a story about a man who almost gets mauled by a bobcat, there’s essentially no conflict. At all. How To Fix It: Start by proofreading your submissions. Seriously, when I have to read a line about a “horse powered car” several times, and then go back to try and work out if I missed something important about a literal horse powered car, and then finally realize it’s an easily caught typo, that’s just annoying. Next, think about what makes your characters interesting, and actually make the effort to generate some conflict between them. Your stocking contains: Four Lumps of Coal *********************************************************************************************************** kurona bright - Moist Cotton Hands What I Hate About This: You effectively took your prompt headline and made it longer and kind of boring. When you get some gold like “Florida Man With Socks on Hands Denies Burglarizing Home, Says He Was Invited in For Gatorade” and you turn in a story about a burglar who uses socks for gloves and finds a bottle of Gatorade during his misadventures, you’re giving us the least interesting interpretation of the prompt that you possibly could. How To Fix It: Next time, when you’re planning a story, write out all the obvious ideas first and cross them out. Use the next one that comes to mind. Your stocking contains: Four Lumps of Coal *********************************************************************************************************** Mercedes - Marching to the beat of your own drum What I Hate About This: I feel like you’re delighting in making the plot completely inscrutable by burying it in hyperbolic dialog delivered by unreliable narrators. I mean, I bet it was fun to write, but poo poo was it hard to read. How To Fix It: Throw your reader a bone every once in awhile. Also, submit before the deadline. Your stocking contains: Two Lumps of Coal
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Dec 23, 2015 02:28
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Kaishai posted:Grinchbrawl: O Christmas Tree As I Stood Dying 994 words They come for me just after noon. There are four of the beasts, two large and two small, wrapped in bright colors like summer flowers, trudging through the snow. Three walk past me, but one of the small ones, lagging behind, stops before me. It bats snow from my branches, tugs at my foliage with a wrapped paw, and bleats to its packmates. The other three turn and shuffle back towards me. One of the tall ones extends a flat yellow tendril from my root to my crown, then nods to the other tall one. That one tightens its grip on a toxic orange weapon, an arc of metal with a jagged blade stretched across it, and kneels in the snow by my trunk. The metal teeth bite cold and deep into my flesh. I am only ten years old, and my bark is still thin. The pain is beyond anything I have ever experienced, like a hundred beetles boring though my green wood. When the blade strikes my tender cambium, I feel the fragile conduits to my roots snap like twigs, and the pores on my leaves clamp closed. The saw bites further, and soon my cambium is completely severed, my lifeline to the soil ended, and throughout my body I feel a horrible shriveling pain. The saw approaches the opposite edge of my trunk, the pain distant and dull compared to the electric shriek in my leaves, and I am falling into the soft snow. Its whiteness melds with the sky, and I feel the world lengthen. When I become aware again, I am far from my home and my roots. My severed trunk has been affixed by means of sharp metal spikes to a pair of crossed boards, formed from the trunk of one of my kind. The snow is gone from my branches, and I stand in the corner of a stuffy warm cave. All around me stand strange objects fashioned from the corpses of other trees, horrible geometries rendered in polished trunk wood. The beasts call to one another in alternately harsh and gulping tones as they open containers filled with pliable tangles of dark green tendrils and brightly colored globes. These are draped ceremoniously from my branches. Tiny metal hooks crumple my leaves, and the tendrils are used to bind my limbs at uncomfortable angles. One object seems to have special importance to the beasts, covered in cruel-looking points and gaudy flaked metal; as one of the tall beasts removes this from its container, the other beasts bare their teeth and clap their forelimbs together. The tall beast takes this final decoration and with slow, horrible force presses it down upon my crown, crushing the partly desiccated tissue of my meristem, my most delicate and sensitive organ, with its terrible metal talons. The light abruptly dims within the cave, and then tiny flames spring forth from the green tendril along its length, and for a moment I am terrified that I am on fire. But the flames are cold and contained: I do not burn. My initial relief quickly gives way to confusion: if I am not to burn, then for what purpose have these beasts brought me here? They form a circle around me, their voices thrumming crudely, their tones somewhere in between those of a bird and those of a frog. When their ritual is complete, they leave me, alone in the darkness, festooned with lights, burning coldly in the corner. # Many days have passed. Still I stand. Still I am not dead. My leaves have lost their water. The beasts visit me each day to sit at my base or adjust the position of the baubles they have hung on my slowly dying body. And yet, for all the time I have spent among these creatures in their lair, I feel that I have gained no understanding of their purpose. Why have they brought me here? Why do they delight so much in observing my death? I understand the beetle; it would destroy me so that it might live. But what purpose do I serve for these hairless animals? Why do they delight in my gradual, horrible death? # My awareness comes and goes, and I am no longer certain of how much time has passed, only certain that I have little left. The ritual of my death has progressed; I am surrounded by wrapped blocks, their colors impossibly bright. My leaves are thin and papery. My branches are weak. It is before daybreak, and as the sun rises I pray, once again, that today might be the day that I die. The beasts descend to my chamber. The little ones shriek and tear into the blocks savagely, like bear cubs digging for termites. One of the taller ones kneels before a stone alcove, setting flame to a pile of rough hewn limbs of my kind. As the flame takes those dismembered trunks and branches, I yearn with all of my being that I could join them, to finally bring an end to this horrible farce. I wish with the shriveled remainder of my livelihood for an errant spark to jump from the burning pile and land among my dried limbs, that I might become engulfed in flames, and burn the lair of these horrid creatures, and achieve some small revenge against them. I imagine the beasts wreathed in flame, clawing at the walls in a futile attempt to escape from my righteous blaze. But no spark comes. # I am dying, finally. The ornaments have been stripped away, and the ground below me is littered with broken pieces of my body. I am carried outside, across a tiny snowy plain. I am laid down on my side, and the snow feels wonderful and soothing. And, for a time, I am alone in the cold, and happier than I can ever remember being. All is quiet. As the light of the day fades, I drift away alongside.
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Jan 4, 2016 04:55
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