• Author: Marshmallow Blue
  
• Plot: The leader of a firing squad gets shot by his intended victim for being too awkward with a gun. Later, he gets released from prison and everything is cool again?
  
• Thoughts: Opening two paragraphs give me a clear, if unsubtle, sense of what is happening but the prose is awkward and stilted. A lot of your imagery is discordant or doesn’t make sense.
  
  I can imagine you imagining this as a movie in your head. The ruggedly handsome lead leans against a bloody wall with a pile of bodies next to him (because that’s what ruggedly handsome leads do in gritty movies), reminiscing on the carnage around him. Unfortunately, this is not a movie and you can’t rely on cinematography to tell the story for you. The killings imagined by Alex would be better told as action sequences. It would be more interesting to see Alex kill these people than to listen to him dispassionately list their deaths. My mind strays to the book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, which manages to capture the numb “it’s me or them; I have no choice” mentality that perpetuates mass killings.
  
  The attitude of your characters to violence is a bit off. The dialogue (“Break is over, there is a rebellion to crush.”) is too flippant to give the violence meaning, but Alex’s internal monologue is too serious to suggest depersonalization. Mass death tends to drive people into severe depression (because they are unable to justify what they are doing) or it becomes a kind of game (because they are able to justify what they are doing too well. See: Rwanda, Bosnia.) Writing suggests a lack of familiarity with mass atrocities, but I don’t begrudge you for trying something difficult.
  
  Okay, so the purge victim manages to steal Alex’s gun. Seems to me that either Alex is extremely incompetent or the purge-victim is a superhero. Being shot in the gut is not something you just bounce back from. Rest of the story is pretty bland and predictable, but the worst is Alex’s lack of agency. He makes no choices or decisions and spends the entire story being ordered around by other people. He’s a passive observer in his own life who makes no decisions whatsoever.
  
  The ending seems tacked on to fulfill the requirements of the prompt. The line, “Alex walked from prison,” has me confused. Did Alex get sent to jail for his participation in the crackdown? Was the rebellion put down or was it successful? I don’t have enough details to really care about it either way (the people could be revolting over cookies for all I know) but it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.I’m not sure I really want Alex, a man who has participated in war crimes, to live happily ever after. Your story leaves me feeling hollowed-out but that’s probably because I spent a lot of time thinking about the Holocaust.
  
  
• Story Elements to Improve Upon: Show don’t tell. If you are going for grim-dark, I would rather see all these crazy atrocities than have someone tell me about them. Also, give your characters agency. Have them make a choice that affects the ending of the story. Otherwise, I have no reason to care what they do.
  
• Recommended Reading: Girl at War by Sara Novic talks about acts of extreme violence and their impact on people.
  
• Rating: 3.5/10 (I wanted to DM this story. Thank kaishai and sparks that it didnt)

Author: Chernabog
Plot: A man ventures out into the woods to save someone, with a little help from Death.
Thoughts: Opening paragraph is mildly interesting, if a bit awkward. Aim for shorter, more readable sentences. Also remember that a comma is not a semicolon and cannot bind two independent thoughts together. Unfortunately, I don’t have any sense of what your central conflict is going to be yet. A bad sign.

The second paragraph leaves me a little confused as to what is happening. Is the narrator remembering a past brush with Death or are they witnessing what is happening in the present? Third paragraph could be chopped down to just the first sentence. You dwell on the narrator’s thoughts on Death too long instead of showing me that respect in action.

Moving forward, you lean on your picture too much,. An outside reader would have absolutely no sense of the scene’s blocking. “A gunshot broke the silence of the night,” comes out of nowhere because you don’t explain whom is shooting whom. Who is dying? What’s going on? Again, the only hint I have is your picture. Don’t assume that the reader can read your mind. I should have a firm understanding of the scene using only the text.

Okay, now we are getting somewhere. I have to reread several times to understand what is happening (seriously work on descriptions/scene-setters) but at least we have a plot. It’s buried almost halfway in, but it’s a conflict. You should have cut out the entire first half of the story and started with the ***. Death doesn’t have much of a personality, but the little colour you give her is nice. I think the concept of Death giving someone her vorpal blade is interesting. Death actively rooting for people to defy her is also rather cool. Wish you had developed the character more instead of inserting a completely tangential scene with the mayor. It adds nothing to the piece and muddles the flow.

The action sequence is really confusing. I am particularly flummoxed by: “I turned to see her raising up and fired the musket instinctively, getting her at the side of the neck.” Did… did the bear try to shoot the protagonist with a rifle? I have no idea where people are in this cave. I don’t even know who is being attacked. It’s an absolute slog to get through. I’m a little mad by the next scene, where the rifle inexplicably displays qualities that it has not before. Why didn’t it emit “a blue mist-like substance” when the protagonist used it?
Skills to Improve Upon: There are fundamental issues with your sentence structure that leaves me confused about what is happening. It’s an issue that can only be resolved with more reading. I would also try to improve your blocking. Try to envision your scene before you begin writing and be sure to give your reader enough information to see that same mental image.

• Recommended Reading: Not really sure about this one. Maybe the Elements of Style?
  
• Rating: 2/10 (hi, i also would have dmed this story. please thank the other co-judges that it didnt come to that.)

• Author: Chili
  
• Plot: A man seeks vengeance against his father’s killer.
  
• Thoughts: Your opening sentence has my attention. Your second paragraph, not so much. Phrasing is a little clunky and awkward and your vocabulary seems a bit odd. There’s at least one place where you made a typo or forgot a word (seriously, proofread). I had to reread to understand what was happening. The unattributed dialogue doesn’t really help clarity at all. Had I written the story, I would have killed my darlings and started with, “Luca loved his father’s stories...” as it gives me a good sense of the father’s personality from the start.
  
  Moving onward, you forecast the father’s death too much for it to have much of an impact. I’m also a little confused about the kid’s dynamic in all this. Do the men know who he is and what is relationship with his father is? Are they just ignoring him? What’s the story there? Yuri should have been introduced at the beginning of the story. Otherwise, I have no idea why I should care about this particular goon.
  
  Oh, so the kid is watching all this from a balcony or something? Rereading, I can see where that might have been suggested but it should have been made more clear.
  
  There’s a short interlude here that could have been cut without losing anything. Frankly, you haven’t given me any reason to care about his godmother or the owner of the Lucky Oyster. I would encourage you, in the future, to cut out any character whose importance could be summarized in a single sentence. I would also encourage you to not introduce characters in Act III of the story.
  
  Okay, jesus christ, there’s more loving characters who have no dialogue and only tangential story importance. Why are you wasting so much time on these people of passing importance? Why not consolidate? You only have 1,200 words. Why didn’t you spend more time explaining why he’s committing these acts? Or, better yet, show what’s happening instead of making it all happen off-screen. There’s no reason why your protagonist couldn’t have been the one to tie Yuri to a mast.
  
  Last few paragraphs are rushed. I was hoping for some confrontation or vindication, some Count of Monte Cristo-style reveal. Instead, Luca’s interaction with Yuri takes up like two lines of dialogue. The actual revenge scheme is absolutely ridiculous, almost to the point of parody. Also, how does Luca’s henchman friend feel about this whole murder-suicide thing? I have no idea how this is meant to be a happy ending.
  
• Story Elements to Improve Upon: Cut out tangential details. You do not have enough time to dwell on a bunch of characters and events that don’t drive the story forward. Stay focused on the end game and don’t get distracted on the way there.
  
• Recommended Reading: It’s required high-school reading, but I never feel bad recommending The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. It’s one of my favourite novels and a wonderful story about revenge.
  
• Rating: 2/10

• Author: a friendly penguin
  
• Plot: I think some humans are plotting against a monster?
  
• Thoughts: I can appreciate unconventional storytelling, but, lol, I had to read your story four times to understand what you were going for. Having understood that, I do like your piece. It has some really awful clarity issues but once you understand that this is a monologue/warning/story being told to a child, your intention becomes much clearer. Tone is nice. There is a sense of menace that pervades your sentences. Again, though, I’m not sure how to interpret certain segments. Is the monster magical? Does it reside within people? I think it is snatching up and eating children but I’m not sure.
  
  Okay, phew. A section break. Hopefully you can wrap matters up and clarify.
  
  Ehhh, I think you wrote yourself into a hole in the first part and realized there was no way to resolve the central conflict using the perspective used. The sudden shift to the monster comes off as really jarring. Nonetheless, there’s some lovely prose here and I have a slightly clearer sense of what is happening through the next few paragraphs. Unfortunately, I quickly lose that clarity by “The day grows late.” I think the monster is being hunted at the end, though, so I guess it’s technically a happy ending?
  
• Story Elements to Improve Upon: Uhhh… clarity. I have no idea how to interpret large segments of this story.
  
• Recommended Reading: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner might be helpful if you really want to pursue unconventional story structure. (my mother is a fish.)
  
• Rating: 4/10

Barnaby Profane fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Jun 16, 2016

Chili fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Jun 14, 2016

take the moon fucked around with this message at 08:24 on Jun 14, 2016