MISC #10 Voting Thread: Once In A Blue Moon

[Kitti]

Oops I forgot to post this with all the excitement

Surrender

People like him, with so many people counting on him, did not surrender
The repetition of these words for two ideas makes the sentence feel stilted and awkward, which is thus my first impression of the story.

Overall, grammatical/sentence structuring choices made this an inimmersive read as stumbling blocks kept throwing me out of the story.

I did like the plot twist since the protagonist accepting the antagonist offer to switch sides is so rarely taken. However, I'd like to know more about the setting, backstory, etc. as to what he wants to accomplish/change at all and how this decision makes sense for him in order to achieve that goal.

You Either Die a Hero

While not everything has to be explained from the get-go, the barrage of new ideas and terms with no real explanation for them turned me off on this one initially. I was not entirely sure what was going on either and waiting as long as it did to clue the reader in means that it was confusing and not especially rewarding to read for something like half of the story. The writing style and tone were fairly individual, which is good since having a strong writing voices helps keep the story interesting. The idea also seems pretty fresh and new. With the gambling, I want to put a note in for a small personal opinion using metaphors and then explaining what the metaphor means comes across to me as an ineffective metaphor.

Weave

The setup of this story is interesting and the setting itself was quite unique. While you mentioned that the couple screwed up and didn't do what they were supposed to, I think something a little more concretely damning might have changed my opinion that the father was a bit of a tyrant for sseparating newlyweds forever for some random failure. How major are we talking? Because not even changing your mind when your kid is a single parent having a breakdown seems like it either must have been massive or he's a dick.

I want to mention something else, too, just that popped into my head while I was reading. So when she leaves the son at home to watch his sisters, the father says it like it's the first time this has happened and a surprise. So was the kid just along with them when they were cooking up some babies? Are they (plot twist) not his kids? The ending seems a bit rushed and they go from having been estranged for like a hundred years to warm and affectionatey so fast that it just feels disconnected from the story for me.

Luck of the Seas

Typos make it hard to stay immersed in the story. Frankly, these stories seem like diffrent ideas stitched together with little in between. The bandits idea is interesting and I have no doubt it could be interwoven with the selkie idea but the way it is here doesn't feel like it flows well and the ideas don't support one another. I also have massive issues with the romance progression.
Man spies on selkie → waits for her to come again → she comes again and tells him she wants to run away with him → she gives him her skin and basically puts her life at his mercy (and implies that they're going to get married) → they remember that they don't know one another's names yet

Expecting Fortune

Overall the story is written well enough. I would have liked more, though. I feel like you were aiming for somewhat happy ending for him here but after listing the like -50 points in his favor, I feel like the +2 for getting given an umbrella doesn't feel like it balances the story. I would have liked to see more of what he does in life, too, rather than a rundown of what his life has been like to give me more feeling for who he is as a person.

Marked by Destiny

I liked this story and I like the idea of the whole hero story having been wrong. My issue comes mainly with the ending and I feel like one of two options would have helped push this one to be even better: either leave off with a stunned Aldus processing the aftermath or make the "origin story" feel like more than a shoehorned idea squeezed into the last paragraph. His beginnings as something greated could be interested, but this feels like it was just crammed in as an aftethought to Aldus's tavern adventure.

When the Stars Align

The idea was interesting, the style and writing made it feel like a written anime. If that's what you were going for, the style came across. Some details irked me a little about it, such as early on:

The only other color on her was her strangely alluring red eyes. an ink black symbol of a peony underneath her eye and most importantly the splash of red leaking from her middle and what was dried on her hands.

The only other color was this, but also this, and this. Small things like that that could likely have been caught on an editing run-through. Another example is the character wearing "a hanfu" (where hanfu's literal meaning is a style of clothing worn by the Han).

A Baby Sun

Not having a single named character but rather unnamed "first, second" without even any identifying characteristics achieves what I assume is an intent for not being attached to any of these specifically but this is a giant double-edged sword because it makes it incredibly difficult for me to care about them and, by extension, what they're doing. You give them names later on but lose half a story's worth of getting to develop them as characters for the reader. For example, rather than telling me how much this meant for the lead scientist, knowing who he was from the beginning could have let you show me through his words and actions over the course of the event.

Legendary

This had some fairly evocative imagery but I struggled to condense a message from it. Here and there, I thought I might be close to synthesizing something out of it for myself but felt like the new stanza or so usually didn't fit it and tried to start over. The words feel good but I couldn't take anything from it.

Brokenhead

This story had a delightfully sinister vibe from the beginning that foreshadowed for me that something was going to be terribly wrong. I liked the story and the largest criticism that I have for it is just that I would have liked to have even more story for an even slower creepy buildup, more detail about the cult activities and beliefs, etc. but time constraints come into play of course. Another note was that the ending leaves off feeling a little weaker than the story as a whole, that she'll maybe talk to the police eventually. Overall a well-executed story.

End of the World

The story here is fairly clear but without much context for anything going on, the ending comes across as abrupt. The form of the poem is fine and the piece doesn't appear to have any grammar or spelling errors. While the message of the piece itself comes across fairly clearly in my opinion, I think that the execution of it makes it too dispassionate and without enough depth to really be moving.

 

[Astaroth]

Apologies for the delay, Important Audit Things slowed this way down (as did computer troubles during MISC).

I wanted to post all of my reviews at once, but since I've had trouble getting the time, I'm going to go ahead and post what I have done now. I will have reviews for Marked by Destiny, When the Stars Align, and Brokenhead done by the end of the week.

Note: These are reviewed in order of how I read them, not exactly the order they're listed for voting. Once again, please don't be upset if I review harshly (I am the Simon); I endeavor to be constructive, but I approach from a very critical viewpoint. I treat these as if I am an editor receiving these for feedback before publishing, so they are not very forgiving for an amateur writer. (These are actually shorter than private reviews I have given in the past, both because I don't have time to write a novel and pick out every error for every entry and because I am attempting to soften up a little for public reviews. So basically I'm being nice. 8D)

The End of the World

I found this piece perplexing. The "rare event" of the prompt is somewhat absent; while the supermoon is certainly a rare event, the poem only mentions it in passing and instead focuses on the ultimately destructive apathy of the narrator, and while a (successful) suicide in fact only happens once to any given person, suicide is (unfortunately) hardly rare. I find myself seriously questioning if it can be counted as fulfilling the criteria.

I also find the "storytelling" component difficult to pinpoint. The supermoon itself, as mentioned, seems to be merely a vehicle to segue into the narrator's suicide--which we are not given clear insight into as regards the cause. The suicide is introduced very abruptly at the end of the poem, and I struggle to connect the dots. How does the supermoon relate? What is the statement this piece is attempting to make? I am left wondering who this narrator is, why they did what they did, and why we care. There's no real emotional connection, which leaves the whole piece feeling very hollow and forced.

As a poem, however, it is fairly successful. It has strong meter and simple but evocative imagery. It's fairly straightforward as poems go; there's not much going on in terms of poetic devices, but it flows and is constructed well. If it were better tied together as far as realizing its conclusion, and if it contained more genuine emotion, it would be quite solid. The only serious weakness I would say it has in terms of poetic construction is that the word selection was a little derivative, particularly in the first stanza, and it's not what I'd call adventurous in terms of structure.

Surrender

One of the biggest issues with this story is the very weighty repetition and occasional awkward phrasing bogging down your prose. You didn't simply make some repetitive word choices, you spent most of the story (especially the setup) reinforcing the same ideas. This could have been toned down and still effectively made the same points, especially the part where you described the copious amounts of blood. Readers are going to grasp this with fewer words; when you repeat too much, you run the risk of making readers feel they are having their hands held, and it is not fun to read.

He couldn't remember how long he'd been fighting. The longer he considered it, the more years that were added to this apparent lifetime of war. He'd been fighting even before he'd realized it. Year after year, battle after battle.

This is saying the same thing in four sentences that could have been said in one, and none of the extra sentences add anything new to the first. You then go on to rehash the same or similar point again in several places. The more you retread old ground, the longer it takes to get to something new and exciting.

A related problem is that there is a lot of telling rather than showing. Reid tells us most of the details about himself (such as that he's an assassin); he also tells us that he and Issa are friends, rather than you showing us that they are friends through the dialogue and body language. Dialogue and body language are great tools for establishing existing relationships, and that is wasted here and undermines your scene. If we are told that something is true, but nothing exists to support that, it is worse than not telling us at all because then you give us expectations and do not meet them.

In other places, you didn't tell enough. Who is Ashild? I almost confused her with Issa because she is brought up so abruptly and then discussed so briefly that I'm given only the shallowest idea of her significance. She comes off as important from Issa and Reid's conversation and Reid's inner thoughts, but there isn't enough to really piece it into a bigger picture.

Tone is something to keep in mind, too, because that can cause awkward moments as much as grammar issues. The joke about Reid being a tool felt very out of place and didn't suit the tone of the story or of the character (who is presented as very serious throughout).

There was one line early on that really threw me: "He walked upon the grass, as red and glistening as rubies." I figured out from the previous heavy description of blood that the grass was bloody, but it's more common for rubies to be compared to the color of blood rather than the other way around and so it just sounds strange. It also doesn't help that from the way this sentence is constructed, "He" is the subject rather than "the grass", so you are saying that He is as red and glistening as rubies. Be careful when you are dealing with multiple nouns to avoid this kind of confusion.

There were also a couple of places where you used unnecessary commas. It's helpful to read your sentences aloud sometimes because commas are supposed to indicate pauses in the prose. If it sounds weird out loud with a pause, then it probably shouldn't have a comma.

I enjoy using one-liners for emphasis, myself, and perhaps use them too often for some tastes. However, there are places where you have three one-liners in a row. At that point, you are actually weakening the emphasis you are trying to make. The lines don't stand out if they aren't surrounded by meatier paragraphs.

The time-skip towards the end felt tacked-on, even though it appears to have been the end goal. Were you rushed writing it? I was confused by the sudden jump in time and more confused when it didn't seem to go anywhere unexpected. It just waxes on a moral soapbox about a point that isn't reinforced by what we've read. I think the scene would have been much stronger if you focused on the relationship between Reid and Issa more, and ended on the note of Reid's decision to change sides. As it stands, I don't really have a good grasp of Reid's character, his relationship with Issa or with Ashild, or why he so quickly agreed to an about-face. I wanted to know more about the characters and the world, not how much blood and how many stairs there were!

You Either Die a Hero

From a technical standpoint, this story had negligible grammatical issues and was written with a very engaging and strong voice. It immediately pulls the reader into the action, though I did have trouble seeing the point of the opening paragraph until the close of the story where it's echoed. Without the knowledge that it's going to circle around, it feels disjointed from the breakneck action and overall pace of the story.

There was a lot of very interesting world lore introduced. I really liked the concepts teased here. The Butcher's Ward and the rather grisly requirements of the spell are the sort of thing that immediately stand out as brilliant. Unfortunately the pacing of the narrative meant that what otherwise might be effective "show and not tell" became "I am having trouble keeping up with what's happening". If you speed through too much, you leave your readers in the dust and give them with very little time to take away an impression. All those great little details end up being distracting from the main plot, which has gone a mile a minute and now we're playing catch-up.

It didn't help that for such a breakneck pace, the "big reveal" was less built up to than it was dropped in all at once at the end. I think if there had been more attention paid to building the plot climax than to the hype worldbuilding tidbits, it would have felt more cohesive. It was a fun ride, but the pacing and descriptive style ultimately feel messy and led to a lot of re-reading sentences to piece together what was going on.

First person is a tricky POV to work with; some people simply don't like it, and I'm one of them. However, I think it is suited to a story like this because it does give an opportunity for such an engaging narrative--and is part of why this succeeds on that front. Unfortunately it can also lead to either really great or really sparse characterization, and in this case it's the latter. Between the pacing and the POV, we're not left with much investment in the narrator because we don't get a clear picture of the motivations; some of the amusing asides also felt more like I was getting insight into the writer rather than the character.

In the end, I wanted to like this one, but it was not solid enough to be really satisfying. Top four though, for sure.

Legendary

Nice uses of consonance and emphatic repetition, although in places it's maybe a little overdone. You made some absolutely lovely word choices, but there were a few that yanked me right out of the flow of your poem. I had to look up "brickbats" because I honestly have never seen the word, and though it's a good word (thanks for making me learn it), it's also apparently uncommon and a secondary meaning... and not obvious what it means here through context, so that threw me for a loop. I also had a great deal of trouble imagining how something "boldly broils". What does that mean? And as a whole--while it may not be true--that final line of the first stanza gives the impression of what I like to call "thesaurus salad". The only other wording issue I had was "its weight weighed me"; that's more a redundancy than purposeful repetition, particularly when you used "weight" to describe the crown once already a few stanzas prior.

While this is a free verse poem, and so structured meter isn't important, meter still matters. In places you've absolutely nailed it, but in others it's choppy. If you read it aloud, you'll probably hear where! The first three stanzas are solid, but after that is where the choppiness kicks in. Poetry should flow, not just meander or jolt, unless it's to an effect.

I'm not a fan of aesthetic italics and bolding (just a personal preference) but you've used it judiciously here and it isn't totally out of place. I think it would read just fine without it, though.

This piece is incredibly visual-rich and evocative. Very emotional and metaphor-heavy. I know it's trying to say something, and there's a complete story, and it makes me feel something is there, but I am just not sure WHAT it's trying to say exactly or what that story is. How do all the stanzas tie together? What is the overall point of this piece? I understand the themes of fame, but it's not at all coherent. So a mix of success there in conveying your conclusion.

While it does not explicitly mention a rare event per se (I'm not counting the thematic play on the prompt title, missy), the imagery is very successful in evoking the feeling of something hugely significant and special taking place--kudos on that, by the way, that's not exactly easy.

Weave

This would have been an excellent story, but there were a few key issues that made it ultimately a very jarring read.

1. The transitions. I initially was really pleased to see something starting off with a memoir framework; I expected, then, to get a compelling character study. What I got instead was abruptly thrust into a completely different character's POV, one with a very different tone than the first-person narration of the memoir, and it didn't help that the first sentence was very awkwardly phrased and practically a run-on sentence. I found that every time it switched back and forth, especially when time skips came into play, that it was a very rough switch between the narratives. The asterisks made it obvious that this was happening, but many of the places at which you chose to close a scene felt more like you got tired of writing than you had actually wrapped up the scene.

2. The mind-reading. I understand after reading your personal thoughts that you considered this integral to the conflict between Weaver and the cowherd, but you draw a lot of attention to the notion that their relationship was born and initially blossomed because he understood and was sensitive to her needs and moods. She never realized it was supernatural, and thought it was simply that they connected and that he was intuitive. I don't feel that that interpretation would necessarily undermine the exact same conflict from playing out between them; he could derive from body language just as easily that she was hiding things, if he is an intuitive person and especially connected to her. What she was hiding wasn't the source of the conflict. It was that she was hiding it.

As it is, it feels superfluous and in some places even distracting.

3. On this point, I feel that both of the above issues could have been alleviated by writing the entire piece from Weaver's POV. The cowherd's characterization, while excellent, could have been done entirely through body language and context clues. This is not, as Weaver tells us in her opening words, the story of a great romance. This is a story of closure. Especially closure for Weaver. This was HER journey. Having his POV takes away from that.

I actually really enjoyed that closing scene, in fact, until that last little bit of conversation. It is fine that they decided to die together; I think it's nice, and I don't think having a bittersweet ending is out of keeping with the more bitter overarching feel. But the dialogue here is violently dissonant with the rest of the piece and loops into just saccharine. It's regressive and frankly weird.

Other than that, I only had a few minor stumbling blocks. The timeline was not well established enough that I didn't get briefly confused over a mention of six months passing, and there was a line where you said "I flung himself into my arms" by mistake. The use of the word "kid" felt anachronistic too, where otherwise the narrative maintained a less modern and less colloquial tone.

What I did think was done very successfully was capturing the very real and relatable issue that having an unequal partnership that lacks communication can create. The kind of pressure that the "caretaker" can put on themselves in a relationship can, in fact, end up ruining the relationship over time--as can the pressure put upon them by a well-meaning other half who doesn't know what is going on in their head and comes to rely on that caretaker, especially when that dynamic is drummed into their heads as an expectation of how relationships work. Both characters ultimately destroy themselves and unknowingly each other. This resonated very strongly with some of my own experiences and I feel you nailed it.

This ended up being one I was happy to see win Community Vote, and also in my top four, but not without some serious flaws.

A Baby Sun

A lot of the sentences near the beginning of this piece are stilted and don't paint a vivid picture. There's a lot of "the first person did this, then the second person did that". It makes it seem like you're trying to be cagey about a twist when you are supposed to be hooking the reader instead, or that you don't have a solid grasp of varying sentence structure. I am honestly confused by the choice of leaving the scientists anonymous at the beginning. It would have read more smoothly and allowed you to tease their personalities if we had some names to work with. The number of typos and other awkward phrases point toward either inexperience or a lack of editing; it is a good idea to go back over and proofread something that you intend to publish (sending it in for a contest counts).

The science of this piece is obviously lacking realism, which was personally a huge struggle for me to get past. Some people have already pointed out a few of the scientific errors in particular, but I will sidestep those and get to what I feel is the more pertinent underlying issue: If it had been more of a humorous take (something in the vein of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or Doctor Who), I think it wouldn't have been quite so difficult to swallow, but the lack of evidence that this was pure science fantasy (other than the obvious) just doesn't work for me. I know that it's not supposed to be realistic. But it's too closely tied to actual observable phenomenon and not off-the-wall campy enough to maintain a suspension of disbelief as it is presented. It didn't help that it wasn't even consistent within its own narrative; why are the scientists out there? Do they know this is going to happen or not? If they do, how, since it is such a huge discovery? If they do, why are they so surprised?

It's difficult to say much about the actual story, because not much really happened. The characters are not fleshed out at all, which leads to the twist ending feeling very flat. You haven't given us enough reason to be surprised by the sudden shift in characterization, nor have you connected us to either character enough to be invested. Effectively, until the very end, the main characters are the suns; the scientists are just a device to allow us to observe them in action--and suns getting together and making a baby is effectively weirdly kid-friendly porn (which again, was a distasteful notion and put me in mind of how children think mommy and daddy make babies, which I don't think is a juvenile comparison you want drawn to your narration).

The ending line especially bothered me because it felt purely present as a nod to the name of the prompt, served no other purpose, and was not needed since your piece made it very clear what the rare event of the prompt was--one that involved a completely different variety of celestial bodies, which muddles the metaphor. It feels excessive and rather heavy-handed. Readers can make connections on their own; you don't always need to do it for them.

Luck of the Sea

It's actually somewhat difficult to convey my issues with this story. There were a number of typos and other grammatical errors ("lead" instead of "led" is a personal pet peeve), some awkward phrasing, missing words, and etc.--and I had to re-read the first four paragraphs to be certain that Drake had in fact kissed the bandit leader's woman and that that was what those paragraphs were driving at--but all of the technical issues were eclipsed by the narrative ones.

The scenes and even Drake's characterization feel very disjointed. At the onset, Drake is a plucky hero with perhaps a bit of an ego, on the run from his own gang because of jealousy over a girl. Then he's scheming to steal the selkie's pelt. At first blush, these seem consistent.

Then we introduce the former gang members, and Drake turns into a character who manages to present as more unlikable than the bandits who are trying to kill him. He easily dispatches them, mocks them, and generally establishes himself as more than just a little full of himself. He doesn't seem to have any qualms about killing his supposed former friends. It makes the reader question the previous scene where he's presented as the victim of a misunderstanding (or a woman's mischief). The character of Ronan is introduced, and then almost immediately dropped--which for me in particular surprised me, since the name Ronan means "little seal" and is one I've seen very closely linked to selkie stories in the past. It feels too coincidental for you to have done this without knowing, which leaves me wondering why it was used at all for a character who wasn't going anywhere. The entire scene with the bandits doesn't ultimately drive the plot or wrap up what was teased at the beginning in any satisfying way--there's a showdown, action happens without any real sense of threat to Drake (making me wonder why he even fled at all), and then it's over.

And then Drake meets with the selkie, and this is where I lost all sense of this narrative. The selkie, a powerful creature, offers her freedom and herself to Drake for reasons I cannot at all glean from what's written. And so not only does Drake not have to steal the pelt at all, tossing another plot thread out the window--he never even makes a real attempt--he is offered something rare and precious for what I can only assume is his informed character trait of being irresistible to women (even supernatural and rare ones, it seems). The selkie herself has no characterization and seems to be simply The Reward, a role female characters typically fall into in fantasy and sci-fi stories from the 1970s and one that often leaves me with little understanding of why the hero has earned them, unfortunate implications of earning a person aside. Since the selkie does not even seem to witness his skill in combat, given the timeskip before he notices her in the water, I cannot even assign that as a potential reason for her to choose him.

I love selkies, I just want to add. I love Celtic mythology in general. I really wanted to like this, but I just don't understand the where or why or what of this story's execution. It feels like the beginning and end points of two separate stories without any of the middle pieces to connect them from A to B, let alone to each other. Not inherently bad in separate pieces, but as a whole it's not making sense to me.

Expecting Fortune

Some of the description for this, while rambling, was very rich and vivid. I enjoyed the bit about his name as well; that was clever.

One thing that made this a little tedious to read was the misuse of commas. There are a lot of commas here, creating long sentences that would be much more effective if they were broken up into smaller ones. When you take a bite of food, it's easier to chew if it's small enough to fit in your mouth; the same principle applies to sentences. Punctuation serves the purpose of breaks, but commas are a "soft" break. Not only are there a lot of commas, there are quite a few places where they are used to connect two completely different thoughts--which is where a semicolon (for separate but related thoughts) or even just a period (to denote a finished thought) should be used. There are also a few commas that are superfluous. A good rule of thumb is to read your story aloud and make an audible pause where you find a comma. If the pause sounds weird, you don't need a comma there.

The description also ends up more of a negative to me than a positive, simply because there's so much of it. The entire piece is description and exposition of backstory, up to the introduction of the qilin, where there is yet more description... culminating in a demonstration of how the qilin changed his life with the first real bit of on-screen action (a kind person gifts Chiaoxiang an umbrella), and then it ends. It was hard to stay engaged. Not all stories have to be action-packed, but the narration here dragged and I found myself starting to skim. More concise description and more things happening in the present would have helped.

The biggest issue for me, however, is that Chaoxiang's happy ending (the fortune he's long since stopped expecting) is handed to him. He suffers for most of his life, but seeing the qilin (misspelled here as Quillin) is not effectively demonstrated as anything other than a very rare chance. It is not by any action of his own that he earns what seems to be unending good luck and people treating him utterly differently for the rest of his life. This retroactively paints all the events of his life as simply bad luck, which robs him and essentially the entire in-story universe of all agency. You're treated well because you're lucky, or poorly if you're not, and what you do means nothing in the long run--not a lesson that sits well with me.

Once again, kudos to everyone who entered. Writing for deadlines is difficult! I'll be back with the rest of those reviews as soon as I can.