Okay, now that voting is closed and winners are announced, time for my reviews. :D
These little reviews of mine are going to be brief notes on the things that stood out to me, both positive and negative, about each entry. There were plenty of good and bad things in entries that I did not mention; these are just the things that made the strongest impression on me as I was reading. The negative sections will probably all look larger than the positives, but that's mainly because I'm aiming to offer constructive feedback on those issues, not because I hate everything. Feel free to ask (preferably via PM to reduce thread clutter) if you'd like me to clarify or expand on anything.
Dead Land
Positives: Decent hook, makes the reader want to continue to figure out what is going on. The sass and dry humor in some of the dialogue was entertaining.
Negatives: There's no real follow through on the hook, not much in the way of a plot; there's no real conflict or personal growth or anything, this is just a random weird day in the life of a guy we have no reason to care about. Explicitly saying that the character would not remember any of this made it feel like an irrelevant side bit in a larger story. The only way to fix that would be to drastically alter the story to include some kind of obstacle being overcome or goal being achieved or change being made.
We'll Cast Some Light and You'll Be Alright For Now
Positives: The childlike interpretations of some things ("Are caskets big shoe boxes you bury people in?") were both amusing and sad, good bits to make readers connect with the girl. Good use of descriptive language.
Negatives: I see what you were going for here, a purely emotional story in lieu of a more active plot, but unfortunately it fell flat for me. There wasn't much effective escalation of the sadness throughout the piece; you physically described Malka as growing more distraught, but I would have like to see you give visceral descriptions of how she
felt to really drive it home and make it hurt.
I'm a Present!
Positives: You did a good job with the build up of emotions for the perspective character. Interspersing the quotes from the dead child was a good choice, definitely helped to make the emotion-building thing work.
Negatives: That ending, just... I'm gonna be honest, I laughed the first time I read it. It's just so absurdly goofy. I couldn't help but imagine a kid in a cardboard box in the middle of the road just kind of flailing around to get his brother's attention. This basically killed the climax of the emotional build up you had going, but that may just be a personal thing for me because I have a really morbid sense of humor sometimes. Judging by the number of votes this entry received, it probably was just me being an asshole, haha.
Entry #4
Positives: Initially I was irritated with all the talk with friends about the date, but it ended up working for me because it made me care a little more about what happened to Vincent and it helped make it feel like it was just going to be an ordinary night for the guy; after the accident I felt kinda bad for him because I knew his friends and parents were all off elsewhere and couldn't be there for him at the hospital. You gave some foreshadowing to the car accident, but even so it managed to feel like it came out of nowhere, like this was just a story about a nervous guy and a budding romance and the death was a sudden and unexpected twist, and I enjoyed that.
Negatives: There were a lot of odd phrasing choices and you used the word "would" excessively and unnecessarily in a way that changed the verb tense you were using. You used the past tense for most things, then had things like "Exiting his home, he would lock the doors behind him." You should have just gone with the simple past tense verb form in probably every instance you used "would <present tense verb>" things because you were stating things he
did do, not things he
would do at some point in the future.
Child's Best Friend
Positives: The child logic was pretty great, especially Ivy deciding she needed milk because she'd woken up in the night. It was a really cute little story even though it was about a weird little kid accidentally creating an unnatural abomination. It was a pretty quick read, but there was still a good bit of character development and a complete plot so it didn't feel like it was rushed or lacking anything.
Negatives: The dog died the night before, but it was all rotting and had bones poking out? That is not a normal rate of decay, my friend. Could have been excused as a side effect of the necromancy, but there was no mention of that in the story so I think this was either a mistake in when the dog was supposed to have died or in the author's understanding of how quickly dead things decay.
Repentance
Positives: You get points for originality for submitting a piece in script-like format; it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but I think you used the format well to focus attention on David's monologue rather than the setting and such, though that would have been even better with fewer emotional and physical cues present. You did a good job of putting emotion into the dialogue with stutters and such, so quite a few of those emotional cues actually could have been removed without losing anything.
Negatives: The ending fell flat. You had this whole emotional thing with this guy beating himself up for fucking everything up, he tries to kill himself, and then.. he wakes up with his mistress by his side and thanks his dead wife? Eh, feels like you needed some more stuff to happen to give a conclusion of some sort. Probably sounds callous, but it would have been better if you'd cast this story as a first encounter with death (say he'd never lost anyone close to him before that car crash, never saw a dead body before having to identify his son) and had the dude die in the end, because then it would have felt like some morbid justice to end the story. Your story currently feels like it ends with the bad guy getting away with it, basically, and that's hard to pull off in a satisfying way.
Brush, With Death...
Positives: I was amused by the literal interpretation of the theme name, as well as of the prompt itself. Points for thinking outside of the box there.
Negatives: You used ellipses (...) far too frequently. They can slow the pace of your story down to a glacial crawl or make it feel clunky if you have so many drawn out pauses indicated by ellipses. You can switch them out for speech statements like "he said, then hesitated for a moment" to have that same effect without slowing the reading pace.
The Death of a Relationship
Positives: I liked the interpretation of the prompt, with the main character not being the one who fulfills the criteria but rather witnesses someone else doing so. The little twist at the end wasn't a surprise to me, but it wrapped things up nicely.
Negatives: Cassidy isn't really a likeable character, which may have been your intent, but it left me with the uncomfortable feeling that he's going to manipulate the hell out of Elena after this to keep her within his influence. It felt like he viewed her more as a possession than a friend. Having a more or less evil protagonist is fine, but it felt a little off for a story about a guy coming to the aid of an estranged friend.
Encounter with Life
Positives: You had a neat take on the prompt, emphasizing
experiencing death for the first time rather than simply seeing it happen for the first time.
Negatives: There were some lines of dialogue from different characters in the same paragraph, which is generally a bad thing as it can cause confusion. Also whenever said dialogue didn't end in a question mark there was no punctuation at all, which was jarring and weird. These issues don't detract from the story itself, but they do kill immersion by making the reader pause and notice the problem.
By the Riverside
Positives: There are a ton of different themes and types of conflicts weaved together here from the very start, and they work together well to paint the picture of a dystopian future. Using factually incorrect but thematically fitting words to describe the crusader dudes (like calling their bikes horses, and calling a weapon a dirk despite it probably being a gun) was jarring, but it worked to make them feel kind of monstrous and alien.
Negatives: You front-loaded a looooooooot of exposition before anything of plot significance happened, and that made the early parts drag on; showing rather than telling about a lot of that stuff, say during the bike ride, would have made it feel less heavy-handed. You used a lot of varied and layered descriptions for a single thing or person, and it didn't always pan out well; it was great for the crusader guys, but it felt really clunky when you were describing Iseul breaking down after shooting the guy, for example.
Last Stand
Positives: This story was rather well written from a technical standpoint; the only technical errors I spotted were a couple tense choice issues. You used description of the physical effects of emotion to show it rather than say it bluntly, and you did it well.
Negatives: There wasn't really enough shown to explain why this guard, after so long of seeing prisoner after prisoner go through his prison, suddenly formed some kind of connection with this one guy. This might have been okay if it was a suicidal action that would have changed something, but since it was a futile gesture and he knew it I would have liked to see more justification for it.
Double Date
Positives: Telling the story through a character narrating the events was a great choice; it kept the pacing smooth and let you inject a lot of the narrator's personality into the tale. You also did a good job of showing her emotions with her actions, and that helped a lot to make the story being told feel more personal and real.
Negatives: If I had to guess the character's age based on the way she spoke, I would say 17 or 18 rather than barely out of childhood as she's described. She just seemed to speak with more sophistication than a young girl raised in shitty conditions should have done.
Entry #13
Positives: Going through the explanation of the humdrum normal day in the life of the character was a good way to give readers ways to relate and build a connection. You did a fine job of showing how not everyone can really cope with death and ends up doing less than healthy things to get by.
Negatives: It felt obvious from early on that the husband was going to die, so there was no real emotional buildup to the reveal, which was kind of unfortunate since the entire story revolves around the perspective character trying to deal with the death. This could have been avoided if her eldest son did not show up at home, because then you could have had her freaking out with worry about which one of them had gotten into an accident.
A Death and a Birth
Positives: This was an interesting choice for how to fulfill the prompt, with the brush with death coming in pitched army to army combat rather than a more intimate scenario as others chose to do. You had some interesting bits and pieces of worldbuilding throughout, enough to make it feel like a grimdark crapsack of a world, which worked just fine for the story you wanted to tell.
Negatives: This was a frustrating read for me. Basically what it all comes down to is that, even for this being a clearly fantasy world, the things Ann did were just totally unbelievable because her skills and abilities were never explained. She was supposedly just some orphan girl, but she did things that defied all logic. Most of the obstacles set before her felt weakened by the way that she just pushed through them without any explanation of how she was able to so matter-of-factly defy logic and the expectations of others in the world around (thus showing that this was absolutely some abnormal shit going on), which made those obstacles feel meaningless and her victories unsatisfying, and then the obstacle that finally seemed to take her down a peg was in fact just a jumping board to greater achievements. I must regretfully inform you that you've written a Mary Sue character and your story suffered for it. In the future remember that any skills or abilities that are beyond the normal expected capabilities of a given character (such as an orphan girl somehow being the most badass warrior alive) must be explained in some way or the obstacles and struggles experiences by that character will feel shallow and unfulfilling because they were basically blown away by deus ex machina for all the reader can see.
Death Seeker
Positives: There was a lot of personality injected into the writing, which is always a good way to make readers connect with the perspective character. Also, death as a cheerful punk chick was a fun diversion from the norm.
Negatives: The pop culture references felt very out of place. The Van Helsing one alone I could have forgiven, but a lady named Katniss who is a pro with a bow? >_>
A Viking Hero
Positives: That was a very odd take on the prompt, but I think it worked out well. Most of the other entries have been rather dark even if they end on positive notes, but yours was a nice change of pace.
Negatives: Speaking of pace, your story had a very slow one. It felt like it was dragging its feet to get where you wanted it to go, and you could have cut out a lot of the tedious details of the travel and such to make it smoother.
Brush of Death
Positives: Aha, another literal interpretation of "brush" in the phrase, nicely done. The whole concept of someone dying and becoming a reaper is not new or unique, but it's a fun one and you put your own unique twist on it while using it to fulfill the prompt requirement in neat way.
Negatives: The short scenes of worsening depression at the beginning felt kind of disjointed and choppy to read, might've been better to just go with a shock opening of the guy jumping to his death and having some sort of "life flashing before his eyes" type moment to give those details. After that the story flipped to the opposite problem of feeling too drawn out, too much time spent with people explaining how the afterlife worked and the main character agonizing about killing people despite having been told repeatedly that he's not actually killing anyone.
Life, for a Life; Soul, for a Soul
Positives: Your use of the prompt, with the body dying but the soul living on in another form, was a unique twist; I did recognize this concept from a certain roleplay character of yours, but I didn't catch on to it until very near the end, so kudos for that. Also, this entry was very sound on a technical level, such that I only spotted one minor typo.
Negatives: There's not quite enough detail given about the characters, the culture they're a part of, or the world for the true impact of the body swap to be well understood. Inferences can be made that this is a taboo, last resort effort, but that didn't really come across well in what was actually presented in the story, which weakened the end a bit. A little more information about the world, particularly about the woman who comes and saves him, would have been welcome.
Human
Positives: I really enjoyed your take on the prompt, with the near death event being a suicidal precursor to the story you wanted to tell rather than a climactic moment in it. The main character was rather pessimistic and depressing, but even so I had some sympathy for him and his views; that's not an easy feat since most characters with similar traits end up being irritating edgelords.
Negatives: The entry was framed as taking a peek into someone's thoughts, but there were large parts of if that felt like he was talking TO someone, perhaps the reader, rather than thinking things to himself; this isn't a massive problem, but it could have been solved by either reworking some of those paragraphs and sentences to fix the concept better in tone, or by reshaping the entry as this guy ranting at a therapist. The ending was odd and felt a little rushed, could've done with a more detailed explanation of how and why the mother's words managed to shake up his thoughts.
Isolation
Positives: The tons of details given about Abby to paint a picture of her life and interests was a good way to get readers to connect with and care about her on some level, thus forming a sympathetic connection with Tyler and his grief as well.
Negatives: It felt like there really wasn't anything going on, not much in the way of a plot. Tyler starts off feeling like he's grieving alone, ends up grieving with his mother. There was no struggle, no goal accomplished, etc. You didn't tell much of a story, you just showcased a period of time in a grieving dude's life.
Relic
Poetry is a real pain in the ass to review, so I'm going to discard the simple format I've been using. You've got to know something about poetry to give anything like a good review of it from a technical standpoint, doubly so if it's a freeform poem like this one, and I am not all that well versed in poetry but I can give you my thoughts anyway. This poem did not hit the mark for me. It didn't flow very well thanks to the jarring choices for line breaks and placement of dashes and it didn't make much interesting use of symbolism or metaphor (though I did like the bit about the brush as "a relic, a prize of loss"). You did manage to fulfill the prompt and tell a story in rather few words though, and that's a good thing. The best advice I can give you is that unless you have good reason to make the process of reading the poem kind of unpleasant then you should avoid those seemingly random line breaks and the ill-placed dashes.
Copper Black
Positives: Fight scenes are not easy to write in a way that is both descriptive enough for the reader to have a good idea of what's going on and not boring and dry. I think you managed that here, and you made some great use of descriptive language to give it a rather visceral and emotional depth as well. I also quite enjoyed the way that you gave indications of what the world was like with bits and pieces here and there rather than blunt exposition; the story ended up feeling like a little vignette from a larger story, and it was done in a way that did not feel like I was missing anything vital by being dropped into the middle of it.
Negatives: The ending felt a little too ambiguous. I'm assuming Sera lived thanks to whoever the blond person is, and leaving that as just an implication is fine, but said blond person was a total mystery and that shouldn't have been the case. If they had been shown or mentioned even briefly beforehand it would have felt a lot better. Aside from that the only flaw that stood out was that you were a little too heavy on the description in some places, but not enough to detract from the high points of the entry.
Descending Raven
Positive: There was a lot of solid use of descriptive language and metaphors throughout the entry; I particularly enjoyed death framed as a "dark courtesan of finality". You also threw in tons of worldbuilding bits that gave a good idea of what the post-apoc world was like, even though we only saw a tiny fragment of it. I ended up actually giving a shit about what happened to Cross, which is obviously a good thing for a story centered around the guy being in a predicament.
Negative: The worldbuilding info dropping was a little dense in a couple places near the beginning (the paragraph that first names the princess and queen, and the one starting off explaining the Confederacy of the Scepter of Judah); spacing that stuff out a little more, and giving it in a less directly expository fashion, would have smoothed out those two bumps in the pacing. The ending of the king who had been captured just.. showing up and saving the guy didn't feel great, felt almost like a deus ex machina. It wasn't a
bad ending, it just needed a couple more bits of information about how the king got there from being a captive to feel complete.
She is Pale and Drooping no more
Positives: The characters were a really believable father and son pair, and the kid did indeed seem like a child (aside from his apparently understanding of death at such a young age). Putting most of the dialogue in quick back and forth segments without the need for anything to indicate the speaker and no actions and whatnot mixed in there was a good idea, kept the dialogue feeling quick and natural.
Negatives: The use of only "man" and "boy" to refer to the characters was a little odd and it got to feeling pretty repetitive, which could have easily been avoided by giving them names and using other pronouns sometimes. There was no real sense of plot progress, just a day in the life of this father and son, partly because the kid already seemed to be totally on board with the idea of death; had it ended with him coming to some realization about it then it might have felt more like a fulfilled plot than a sort of aimless slice of life.
A Coward Does It With A Kiss
Positives: That was a very strong hook, definitely snagged my interest. The tone and personality present in the narrator's voice then kept hold of that interest, and it played a major part in keeping my attention throughout the long read. Oh, and there were some not-so-classy but definitely great metaphors thrown in there that tickled my fancy (particularly "The air was turning crisp, with winter trying to slither its fingers up autumn's skirts and failing").
Negatives: The dialogue wasn't great. A large part of that was probably because you chose to use capslock as all-purpose emphasis rather than employing italicized text or more descriptions of vocal tones or body language to get the emphasis across instead of using text formatting, which are things I would highly suggest you make use of in the future. The ending didn't quite come together for me, mainly because it didn't quite link up with that violent fight the entry started with and also didn't give any clear conclusion to that fight.
