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SlipUp posted:In flash me bigboi In your story, there are no remaining landmasses.
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Mar 19, 2019 22:45
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apophenium posted:In with a flash pleas Tell me about your Level 20 Paladin.
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Mar 20, 2019 01:39
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The Saddest Rhino posted:in / flash None of your characters can be human.
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Mar 20, 2019 03:09
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cptn_dr posted:You're better than this! There's only room for one inveterate Failure Captain in this dome, and that's me. Captain_Person posted:Lowtax has his spine money. I'll have your blood. Oh captain, my captain, I'm afraid this prompt is gonna be rough sailing. Before the end of the month, PST, you two will have to deliver A steampunk story, but not, and let me stress this, not garbage. Gimme a tale about the people the industrial revolution swept aside, the anxiety of men forced to compete with machine, the runaway ambition of a capitalist clockwork.
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Mar 20, 2019 10:13
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flerp posted:in flash Your story is told as a series of letters.
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Mar 23, 2019 01:56
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Noah posted:Wow that was a great flash rule, I want a flash rule too Your flash rule is you have to write a story from the perspective of a blind protagonist with zero visual description oh and there's a mermaid.
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Mar 23, 2019 02:48
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SlipSoli Brawl Thing about this brawl is, the real goal was to write build up. We know how the story ends, somebody gets punched, and what's left to you is to build an escalating tension and motivation that gets us there. Unfortunately, I look at the start of both stories, and you two could have cut a lot here. Solitair's story starts off awkwardly with a lot of chatter about - the protagonist's poor social life? Times they've gotten shot down? I can squint and see what you're attempting to do here, juxtaposing how they've led an ordinary life up till now and are entirely unprepared for life-and-death decisions. I do get that, but it makes your opening paragraph a waffle, a jumble, an outright bumble. I'm not really getting my bearings even in the second paragraph. Holding a plastic bag doesn't seem like a killing offense to me. But for all my complaints, I walk away from this prologue with a sense of the character and a strong moment, that horrible accident, to be an emotional throughline for the rest of the peace. I'm gonna be honest, your Crusaders are not innately inspiring of sympathy, your reveal they've been kidnapped left me disoriented due to some garden path mistakes, the fight scene, eh. But because the foundation is there, I do feel the desperate, teeth-gritting energy of the punch. SlipUp, I'm sorry to say, your start sucks too. The entrance of the skinless man is solid and had my hopes up but everything after that into alarmingly late in the game is just a mess. In following-up a piece which got a such heavy round of crits and suggestions, I'd expect you to fix it's fundamental errors. Instead you've doubled down; we have the same muddle of names flying at the screen, the main character in Zacharius holding his cards too close to his chest for the audience to get a feel of him, and that essential element, any clue how or why this science stuff meshes up with all this god stuff. You've taken two tries to explain this to me, and man, I dunno, I think I may know less than when I started. Do people become gods just by being close enough to a big sciency explosion? The punch is good. Let's not forget that. The punch is good, in a vacuum. But it's not so well written that it can carry the piece alone, and the build-up, the characters and emotions, are just not there. It's a showy little sucker punch with no wind-up. So, Solitair wins.
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Mar 23, 2019 07:38
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No Matter How Improbable 744 words Everyone knew the bees were disappearing; she hadn’t expected them to take Hugo with them. One day the earth came alive with a single humming note, a symphony of a thousand beating wings lifting into the air. One day he was gone, with a kiss on the cheek and a muttered question, in the unreal hours of the morning when the darkness was thinned to a hazy blue but not yet dissolved into light. Just what and how he said it was forgotten, paved over with a grumbled insistence to let her sleep, and couldn’t be reconstructed in the pitfall moment when she opened her eyes again, sunlight now dappling the pillow, filling the empty impression where her husband had been. Not in the prolonged tumble as she searched through the house, finding his negative in all the spaces he had been, and in the bite missing from a slice of toast still on the kitchen counter. She was in time to see the last of them, a procession of yellow in the red of dawn. The dizzyingly distant blots of human figures among the clouds, some kicking, others walking atop, all buoyed up by golden specks that clustered around their drab bodies. Sofia had met her husband at a murder mystery retreat. He had made a handsome corpse. She had made a good detective, too good not to notice the smile curling up the edges of his deathly grimace whenever she moved towards the hidden painting-vault where the bloody candelabra had been hidden. She was a forensic pathologist, he was an apiarist. Between them they almost made a whole Holmes. The letter had arrived, sparse on details, redacted of incriminating information by means of tiny mandibles chewing the words off the page. A dusting of pollen clung to the envelop, delivered on swift wings in the night. It was enough for one half - the better half - of a famous detective. A distinct cross-pollination, slowly scratching away the few locations on earth that could possibly hide them all. Sofia needed a train, a cruise ship, another train, and finally a sailboat to get there. The faces she saw along the way seemed heightened, deepened, familiar features of the human profile now expected to bear a constellation of cryptic meanings. The world had gone slightly cracked with the opening of possibility: With the impossible thing that was stubbornly true, the absent space in the summer air, in the cup of a flower, in the vacuum where solid impenetrable fact had been, now waiting to be filled with an answer. Why? It was a long journey. The conclusion came together with a gathering momentum; the spray of the sea at the bow; the white sand of the shore thrumming with sun-kissed heat; the weight of doubt lifting in the moment she heard the thronging of wings, and the sudden release seeming to vault her forward in time, accelerating as the phantom of that morning dropped away. The island was small. The town was something out of a postcard, the sunlight drawing every bright color of every stucco wall and shingled roof into a ripe brightness. She found him behind the frosted glass and archaic golden lettering of a flowershop. Fortescue’s. Inside, it was jungle-dense and candy-sweet, lazy with a penned heat. Dewdrops condensed on the clear plastic sabots of firework-clustered flowers. The colors dripped, the few customers seeming muted and hazy in the shimmering atmosphere as she stole upon him. Everywhere, the motion of bees. The air swum with motes of gold, swirling currents of humming wings. She caught him leaning in over a bustle of clover-blossoms. She caught his hand, fingers interlocking over his, thumb tracing over the ring in the moment it took for him to move through surprise - a jump in his shoulder at the first contact - to dawning disbelief - his eyes lifting to meet hers - to pure, giddy happiness. “I asked you to come with me.” “Hugo, you idiot. You said the bees were going to take you away. It was early. I thought you were joking.” “Oh. Oh.” His mouth formed the shape one more time, silently, and began to move to apology as the solitary loss he’d imagined for himself was reconfigured and redoubled into the real and shared hurt. She answered before he could; she kissed him. They had spent too much time apart, and right now, the world was full of flowers.
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Mar 30, 2019 06:57
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flerp posted:that was pretty easy to judge welp that's five brawl wins in a row I guess I'll hand out celebratory crits to anyone who asks for the rest of the day.
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Mar 30, 2019 16:02
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Cowboy Crits Old Bones So when I say this story is boring sci-fi, I don’t mean it’s boring. I mean it belongs to the genre called boring sci-fi. To a fierce tradition of small, dense books about the size of a postcard printed on pulpy yellowing paper and contained within a dog-eared cover. This is not a great story - it slipped my mind as soon as the week ended. But man, that meant I got to read it twice, and both times it was pleasant. Not great. But compactly, satisfyingly pleasant. The pacing in particular kept the piece ticking along. I really like the voice and the use of the narrator to provide a tidy end here. Land in the World of Poseidon What is it, my dude, that draws you to these Greco-roman god-murdering stories? Because this is your third strike out on conveying that to me. There’s nothing wrong with having a leitmotif, but you need to figure out why you like writing this one thing so much, and get better at conveying that basic appeal to the reader. You seem to treat fighting a god as, like, this inherently awesome thing, but it’s all words on a page, amd nothing in this story ever draws me in. Not the so-cursory-as-to-be-comical exposition. Not the nameless flat characters. Not the throwing in of a Kraken so big its name must be capitalized. Not the confusing fight scene where so much happens in so little time that it all carries the weight of paper. I notice you never even describe Poseidon. He just shows up, laughs, dies. Is that a god? The Crystal’s Chosen Oof. This first line has no fire, no tension. Bullets aren’t a river. Rivers are soft, continuous. Bullets are nasty, blunt things, rude interruptions of noise and gunsmoke. A bad metaphor that underplays the situation and the clunky meandering of your first para takes all of the fire out of the in media res open, and by the time you’re taking time out of a loving gunfight to explain your crystal sci-magic woo to me, I’m out. I’m fully ready for this story to be over. The sudden interlude of a talking crystal trying to lure the protagonist into a classical quest while he spits gruff interjections of All-American can-do doesn’t help. It feels like something from another story entirely. The final twist is, eh, I don’t think it’s the bullet so much as the bullet-hole that’d be giving him trouble in that situation. But whatever. I was already checked out and not coming back around. Legend of One Horse Town I’m in the odd situation of recognizing what should be funny about this, but not finding it funny at all. It’s well-executed for sure. Of all the stories this week that were content to play with the tropes of the Western at a surface level, this is the one that works best, the best able to evoke familiar mythology with easy twists of phrase, the most aware of just where the description can stop and let the imagery already planted in my brain by cultural osmosis carry the rest. It’s good. It’s playful. It never quite gets to being genuinely funny. The Vow I see the Vance reference -- unfortunately, I was the only judge who did, and so you DM’d. Even taking away your casually disposable vat-ingenues, even taking away all the mad poo poo that’s in here as homage or parody, I can’t say they were wrong. You never quite capture the smooth technical-yet-crisp imagery of Vance, or his gift for blending the disparate elements into something that feels whole. This is a fantasy story and a cowboy yarn at different times, but never really brings them together and comes into 8ts own. Still. I think it picks up as you gather momentum into the latter half -- you’ve got Vance’s dialogue down, and I laughed. Cactus Conundrum I don’t think this deserved the loss, really. You manage to twist bizarre leaps of dream logic to shockingly, appallingly mundane resolutions, to tell the most boring version of a strange drat story -- and I don’t hate that. The refusal to lean into its own conceits, to tell this as if it was another day at the home depot -- I respect that. It feels like this story came straight from an earlier week in ‘Dome, where nobody knew what they were doing. For that I would’ve spared it the loss but c’est la vie. The Buffalo Mountains, The Pelicans Surreal and unsettling. I’m going to pick one thing to complain about here. Very close to the end of the story, and relatively quietly, you ask the audience to completely reconsider the tale of remorse Robert has been telling when you call his guilt insincere. It adds a lot, I feel, and prevents any easy resolution, allowing the sense of unease to persist even once the story ends. What I’d like is for the story to dig more into his real motivations, into his God-fear, as you put it - to give us something to go on that’s not reversed by the end of the story. But really I’m reaching to complain here. Lucy I don’t even know what Lucy looks like by the end of this. I know almost nothing about almost anyone in this. The protagonist’s desire to keep his animal-friend out of the clutches of the bourgeoisie is a naturally sympathetic situation, so the story skates along despite its lack of characterization or detail, but it leaves no impression. Every good horse-story I’ve read has laid its roots in the reader’s brain with a solidity of physical detail, but here I’m getting nothing. If Lucy didn’t talk this story would be even more featherweight and might have entirely failed the prompt, but I can’t say you ever really pay off on the conceit of him being a real horse-whisperer. It goes nowhere. A Silent Spell You cheat yourself and the reader, I think, with the final turn that makes the boy’s murder the manipulation of the shadow-faced man rather than a genuine act of fear and prejudice. It’s just not as interesting to release your characters from their culpability. I think your writing was actually drat solid, even if you did lean a little heavy on the exposition in places, to the detriment of looser and more emotional moments like Pete connected the boy to the memory of his son. But it was a tight word count, and the fault may be less with the prose and more with what all you tried to squeeze into this - it might have been a better story without the wizard duel, as much as I love a wizard duel, and you left so much on the table by cutting your ending short where and how you did. Dust and Blood You found the guts to go full Rowling, and yet, this story really manages to undersell everything it’s got. It’s dry. It’s got voice but not purpose, a circuitous lack of momentum that the last second splat of violence - and dialogue - draws attention to rather than alleviates. It’s a weak, undercooked concept delivered probably as best as it could be, and I really can’t fault you here on anything technical. The prose ain’t lacking, the sense of place is strong, the mood flavorful. A drat shame the good words are in service of such a meager story. Memory of Water Gosh dude, I dunno. Like I finish this story wondering why I didn’t like it more. It feels like a few small improvements would bring this story forward by leaps and bounds. There’s this flash of real character in the way Doc Cranely dunks on the kid, a mean humor I wish you could fill up the whole piece with -- the prose is crisped and well-paced and it all clicks like clockwork but I think it needs just a touch more voice, just a last push. You’ve probably got the best stand-off of any story this week and I walk away thoroughly convinced the old crone is a character, but not quite sure what kind of character. The kid is even more a cypher. You manage to straddle a bizarre line of getting them both to feel like people without telling me enough about ‘em to make it a proper story. Squirm, Love In some ways this is fantastic. You do a swell job of unfolding this world in ornate, obtuse ways, and only sometimes seem to lose track of where a sentence was going. It’s a gem of gross creativity. But you lose me, a little, with the ‘dart sacs’. Not because I didn’t giggle at a high noon shoot-out with snail dicks for bullets. God no. But because that’s the point where you go a little too far with worldbuilding for worldbuilding’s sake, and bring it all around to a self-defeating point. Cool and weird as they are conceptually, the snail-sacs are just guns by any other name. That’s deeply disappointing. I wish this had managed to weave a little more character and story in among its conceits, and to follow its genuinely quite clever ideas further instead of letting them remain dressing for a mostly standard story.
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Mar 30, 2019 19:37
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Interlude crit for onsetOutsider's nameless story This whole story reads as forced. The basic logic running underneath the surface here just doesn't hold, feels stilted, brings a kind of... fanfic quality, where everything is just cludged together to manufacture the plastic facebump where Ken dolls A and B kiss. It's honestly unsettling. In no world save that of dead-eyed alien bros does 'losing a prank war' add up to 'guess we gotta smooch' and the use of the word pranking, endlessly, becomes a fetishtic focus that's just sorta baffling. I feel like 'prank war turns to romance' should be an opportunity to show why the characters mesh through how they think but, alas, I'm not convinced they think, period.
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Mar 30, 2019 19:58
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Interlude crit for Flerp's The Moth So this is going to be a very short crit. I think you should try to get this published. It's loving fantastic in the worst way. The absolute pervasive need for control, to the point of being, seemingly in absolute earnest, unable to grasp what he's done wrong -- the narrator makes my skin crawl and the ending is shocking its pure petty violence while still following perfectly from everything we've seen before. Thanks. I hate it. I really think you should try to inflict this story on a larger audience.
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Mar 30, 2019 20:24
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Round Up at the Crit Corral A Stand of Trees This was my choice for the loss. It’s a heist with no tension, no action, and the only characters are ‘crimes’ and ‘cop’. You start the story with an offscreen betrayal, and immediately move to a limp banter that I suppose was meant to have me on the edge of my seat wondering if the protagonist will be discovered -- but of course she is. The story is so pared down that even slightly aware readers will grok that, well, there’s no plot if she’s not. The way you set everything up left no room for any story other than the one that unfolds, rote and predictable, and for fucks sake, a crossbow? A story this tenuous in claiming to be a Western should have jumped for the chance to bring in a revolver. Flowers for Sylvester As far as stupid pulp, this is a lot of fun. It takes skill to carry off an action scene in flash fiction, where the very words you’re spending on the punching ‘n whatnot are being taken away from establishing the characters and the stakes - but this carries it off in style. Something just feels cinematic and there’s a nice clean chain of action-to-reaction that gives the whole thing a rhythm. S’good. I feel if you coulda woven a slightly more substantial story into a similar action set-piece, you would've gotten an honorable. The Fool’s Journey I have very little say here. Your intention for this piece is clear as mud, so I can’t offer advice on how better to get there, and as for my own reaction, can’t say I had one. I enjoyed the voice, I suppose, but that’s all this is -- a few flourishes on top of the most staid, cut’n’dry cowboy story possible. The Diary of Lieutenant Hiroaki Sakamoto Not bad. Definitely one of the more structurally complex stories, and near the end you’ve developed an interesting sense of ambiguity. I think the story needed more of that. You have this format, this set of restrictions, and you needed to lean in harder, use the gaps in the letters and the implications at the edges more. This is a very competently delivered story, but it doesn’t do all that much to explore its own strengths. Tugger and Little Yacht Y’know what? I don’t totally hate this. It’s dumb, it’s real brazen simple, and I can almost respect that. A floating drill-rig warship ruled by a bad oilman gets taken down by the last of the polar icecaps. Okay. I can cheer for that hamfisted petro-moral message, I hate a bad oilman as much as any sensible person. The main issue, when I go back to reread this, is that it’s more complicated and cluttered than the story’s core actually needs to be. It doesn’t open with much punch and it doesn’t quite find the right tone, full of over-serious language, dry explanation, the prose generally managing to sap any hint of momentum that gathers. To the gods it may concern I think this story’s biggest problem is how vague and non-specific it all is, how blandly it renders myth. It’s got a fire and a voice and just a drat sense of bigness, but it lacks the small touches, it loses a little charm if you squint at it hard and ask what makes these gods more than just folk. This needed weird. It needed to root itself deep in the richness of mythology, instead of paying lip service. Even without it’s got enough bluster for an honorable. A Friday in Lent You’re a champ in my book for even taking me up on this flash, and I think you made the best of it. This is a richly tactile story and that makes it a shuddering, claustrophobic read, ghoulish and sad to the end. The segment expositing the gun in the desk, in particular, is a nice bit of art out of what could easily have been a very dry bit of telling, hinting at Phineas’ life and submerging the reader into his sense of the world in a way that made the ending sting. Red Demon Black Gun You’re not allowed to be done writing this, because I ain’t done reading it. More, damnit, more. The second time reading this through, I wonder if the last section wasn’t written first. It feels out of joint with the whole, less sure of its tone, and the story overall has a reverse momentum, to the point I’d suggest swapping things around so the train-duel is the final scene. I could do with a touch more nuance to the protagonist too, seeing as she never says a kind thing about her father but, clearly, feels obliged to revenge him. It’s a rough story at the edges but drat does it carry itself with style. The Devil Comes to Morningstar Something about this irks me. It’s slick and shiny and burgeoning with big portentous lines that fail to ever mean anything. I can’t say it’s badly written, but it’s not so great as to make me forget there’s no point to it all. Famous Last Words My big issue here is how hard you broadcast the ending, and how that one dry expository bit saps so much of the energy from the buddy-buddy dynamic you’re unfolding. Frankly, if you just cut the foreshadowing for more banter I wouldn’t mind. Nor would reworking the action to serve as a vehicle for showing us more the characters and their dynamic be a bad idea -- as it is, it comes from nowhere and goes there just as fast, leaving Konishi’s death more of a ‘huh that happened’ than a proper sucker punch. Second Chance This story has about three seperate directions its trying to go at once, with a dash of magic peppered in to no measurable difference to anything. If you were to come back to this, you might not drop the boy out of the picture so quickly, and bring the protagonist’s relations with Simone into more focus before the raid, so you can advance that thread through the action. You might even consider some consequence coming as a result of him taking a shot to the hip, maybe forcing him out of the business and thus recontextualizing his relationships. Actually there’s about a million things you could do, problem being you ran out of words and out of time before doing any of ‘em. untitled For a story that starts on a crude joke, this sure drops its voice and its sense of humor fast, becoming in the very next paragraph a painfully generic little hold-up scene. Well, it’s all over quick enough I suppose.
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Mar 31, 2019 01:42
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sebmojo posted:that's actually legitimately cute I can count to seven just on my multitudinous testicles, thanks. 
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Mar 31, 2019 05:52
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Yoruichi posted:This week appears to be missing a third judge. ... . . . i'm right here.
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Mar 31, 2019 08:00
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The April Fool for ThirdTomi brawl 948 words Here are his signs; A new moon, the month of april, and a throaty burp. The April Fool is carried in by wine-sour wind, bells and belly bouncing on capering footsteps. He comes on a day when the river is ebbing, the waters a dross-treacle trickling through mazes of discards rising into sight as the river shrinks low, low, between spires of potato peel mortared in fat. The oozing ungent spirit of the waters infects the air and the Fool sucks in a welcome breath and he sighs. Bliss. The stuff of humanity is on display in that river and he has missed it. Eleven months a year, a prisoner of paradise, and what a relief imperfection is now. The thickness of a streetlight trying to churn through smog. The rattling, phlegmatic brree-ump of sickly frogs. Today they’ve tried to pretty the streets with flags and flower garlands, but the Fool treasures the bouquet of humanity, the company of flies. It wraps him in a damp embrace of spring wind laced with the hint of the rain, a wealth of the real, the thump-crash-shout of carnival carrying on around him. There is a festival spirit that lifts, in whooping shouts and strains of music, the spirits of the city. It is a giddiness that says gravity has to let go as long as they spin and whirl and your feet flash over the muck of the streets, only fingers interlocked with another dancer tethering them beneath the blue of the sky. They don’t notice who walks among them - there are enough cheap jesters wearing his face that night - but they know his name. Everything is sharp and crisp and the sensations of the world don’t run together, like so much cheap paint; they are limned by an invisible color that draws out the others, the ones they see with their eyes, in bursting brightness, the world a ripe fruit. Here’s his face; wide and wide-smiled and Roman-nosed, with the horns of a goat amidst his curls. Children surround him demanding treats, and he floats above them as a grinning moon, dispensing candies, pretending not to notice the hogtail they’ve pinned to the seat of his britches. A boot comes swinging at his rear and he lets the momentum of the pratfall carry him out of the world; twist himself just so in the last moment before he hits the ground, and misses, slipping voidways. He slides through the meat of things, lets the palpitating heartbeat of the world shunt him to where it needs him. Another fair. Another call to his name. A cosmic fart pl-urp-prps him out. He is everywhere for a day. Lunging with greedy eyes for a purse left on the ground, only for a bit of strings to suddenly snap taut and yank it away to leave him grabbing the dust of the street. A woman holds her baby up for him to kiss, but as he leans in there’s no child under the frilled bonnet. Only an ugly pup that licks his nose and barks with excitement as he reels back, mock-surprise, his own laugh. He has, beneath his prow of fat straining the buttons of his shirt, surprisingly delicate legs. He dances out imitations of clumsiness, of wine-sick teetering, with genuine pride. It was hard for him to learn that. To bend perfection to imitate something as interesting as life. Another step and he’s gone again, smearing a grease of magic where he goes. It’s not an obvious thing. It does not make kings of men. It is most apparent, perhaps, in memory, when all other days begin to fade to grey with the hairs on a man’s head, but one day still lives, sweet and clear, a palace of springtime in a wintered memory. Something not to be remembered but revisited, coming again in dreams. They pull the insubstantial stuff of magic from him with every trick, every jest. He always falls for them. The Fool is the perpetual butt of the joke, and it wears him thin, spreads his being across a hundred hands. He unravels as he capers among a hundred dances, a thousand laughs. He stomps and gallops a dance with a lovely thing in his arms, the revels filling a thatch-roofed barn. Just once he glances up, to see the old impish thing hiding in the straw above, its wizened face dissolving into shadows at the edges; the eyes hot and bright with disdain. It won’t touch them, after this. There are Rules. For his sour-mouthed and beautiful kin, there must always be Rules, or else they’d be called tyrants. Rules are fine things for tyrants who don’t wish to be called tyrants. A beautiful way of saying, alas, the world is cruel, as if the world wasn’t made. But the old imp won’t curdle the milk here anymore, or snatch up children. That’s the Rule. If man wins against faerie, against the world, they will be left be. They didn’t think any of their kind would ever play to lose. The pretty girl is spun into someone’s hands and he slips away again, back to the river. The wine is hot and dense in his belly, brined star-heat thrumming at the back of his ribs. His extremities are cold clumsy orbits, dark to the senses, his fingers fumbling the lace of his breeches to unleash a golden comet-trail across the night sky reflected in the waters. He is worn so thin he leaves no reflection of his own. People have had about as much of him as they can take, and the Fool’s moon is sinking. He slips into unbeing.
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Apr 3, 2019 04:28
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oh its crits Death, of a Sort You know, I like this. I think Steve is maybe a little off-base, a little too fond of saying the quiet part loud instead of entrenching himself in justifications and innuendo as real people, alas, are wont to do. But I really like the ending and I like the clever little loop back to transporters. Mid-High. The Undoing of Hannah McAllister I don’t think you’re getting quite enough out of this flow of consciousness narration, or carrying it well enough, to justify the confusion it adds the narrative. The story itself is a list of petty anxieties, and I know you know that, and I know that’s the joke, and maybe I even cracked a smile at the end -- but the thing about humor stories is they can’t be a boring set-up and a single punchline, they have to justify the whole of their wordcount. Low. Ib-Nebu I know these are real words but that doesn’t stop them from feeling like Fantasy No’uns. I do love how stripped down this is, how effectively it repeats the same touches of description through the cycle of the Sekhm’s days. It’s got that to recommend it but it’s just not enough to break it free from being one of those stories that gets a small grin and passes from memory, for me. Mid. Cutting Huh. Weird that I found this as enjoyable as I did, honestly, but it’s got a pacing and a crisp kind of prose that would make anything at least readable -- and while maybe’s the protagonist isn’t the most interesting soul on the planet, you do a good job of painting him by inference, by small and quiet details, there’s a humor here that go to me. I could imagine passing this guy on the street and never even knowing it. Mid. It Runs in the Family There was a line early on, about Andrew being a headache, a thing that’s blurred unless you squint, that pushed me out of this. The best thing about it is the unaffected, stuttering, real way these characters talk, and that was just a little too affected, a little too author-trying-to-do-author-things. Other’n that man, I really do like the end -- the fact that, more than any overt affection, simply being a brother has shaped their lives. High. Quickening Rough start here, and a rough start is dangerous when your story is supposed to tight and claustrophobic. It took me a little long to settle into that mood, to overcome the initial eye-roll of ‘oh a bad office party’ and start to feel the underlying tension - it’s good once it gets going, and there’s a lot of good little touches that help you paint characters in few words, but, I dunno. For all the time spent in Amanda’s head I didn’t walk away with a good sense of her. Mid. Quiet Room I can’t give this an even vaguely objective crit because it touches on, gosh, a lot of personal experience, actually, but I love it and reading it hosed me up. High.
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Apr 3, 2019 18:38
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ThirdEmperor fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Jan 1, 2020 |
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Apr 21, 2019 13:23
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sebmojo posted:Good fight, ty whalley No, gently caress that on both counts. A good fight ends with the better story winning and that clearly didn't happen today. I refuse to mutter some bloodless anodyne bullshit; I refuse to even try to hide that I am completely, incandescently furious at this godawful judgement. It is a lovely, sour note to end my time in 'Dome on, but I started writing to work on my mental health - and it has helped, until now, so thank you all for that - and I simply don't have left in me the capacity to care deeply about writing here and climb towards a goal if, when I get there, when I write the better story, all I get is spit in my eye. All the worse if I'm expected to mewl out 'good fight' as if it was anything less than a daylight robbery. I'm out.
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May 1, 2019 04:25
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