Overall, I'm very pleased that we had so many new entrants for this contest. I believe that for most of you, this was your first WWYP, and I hope that you enjoyed the experience and that you'll decide to participate again in the future.
Now on to the scores!
First Place: Claire by DerpDaBerp
Second Place: Pumpkin by Goldshadow
Third Place: The Bensch Device by tekkie
Final63: "Our One True Freedom"
Jam
Score: 20/40
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
Well, the end of the world is shoehorned in eventually. I’ll comment more on that later.
Tone: 3/10
Reading this felt like reading an episode of anime. From the protagonist’s silver hair to the pseudo-Japanese names to the characters staring off into space and the profuse use of ellipses and pauses and internalized exposition, it all just screamed anime. And frankly, anime is terrible. Yes, we can all point to our favorite exception to this rule, but generally speaking, anime is narrative garbage. But despite that, you managed to create a sense of tension as the story continued, and I waited for something to happen. But it never did, and that was a greater failing than the anime tone.
Style: 2/10
The various parts of this story never fully developed, and those parts never came together to form a whole. Somehow, the only things that happened in 9,000 words were two people moving away, Danielle dying and God showing up in the last few pages. What was Rin constantly referring to? Why did she forgive Rei after running? What was the war about? Who was fighting? Basic narrative questions were never answered, and the story never moved from a general level to any kind of specificity. Other than the date on Saul’s tombstone, we don’t even know the time period. And the inclusion of God at the end just didn’t work at all. Nothing happens in this story, not even between Rin and Rei, other than some vague promises.
Enjoyment: 5/10
There are major problems here, but initially I was interested to discover where this story was going, but it never went anywhere. That was a huge letdown, but I’m grading you here on my anticipation, not my disappointment.
El Nino
Adherence to Prompt: 9/10
Tone: 7/10
Style: 7/10 (Small numbers like 16 or 3 should be written out as "sixteen" or "three.")
Enjoyment: 7/10
Total: 30/40
Comments: Your prose is strong and articulate. This story shows that you have a good handle on language. But the prose is wordy in places, and that kind of hurts some of your action scenes. Too much detail can rob a scene of any sense of urgency.
Ex: "Anybody in this time and place knows what they are: fighter planes, made for nothing but total destruction."
Most people know what fighter planes are made to do. They're weapons of war. So it isn't necessary to spell it out like so much.
Rei comes through well as a complicated young person (I appreciate that he isn't a "hero," and he can only stand still in complete shock when faced with violence. That's very real.), an awkward teen who actually acts like an awkward teen. But he could have been fleshed out more as a character. He is a teenage living in a war zone. If he's avoided death for this long on his own, he must have some decent survival skills. Seeing how he survives on a day to day basis (eating, showering, doing homework by candlelight because the electricity keeps going out) would have added more dimension to the character, and it would have helped with the worldbuilding.
On the worldbuilding, it could have been developed more. Rei's home country doesn't have a name, nor does the enemy country. Events and people are sketched in, but there isn't much sense of place.
I sense an anime influence on this story, which is fine. But know that anime is a visual medium, and some of those elements don't work in the text-based format. Funny hair colors are used in anime to help the viewer differentiate between characters that would otherwise look the same. It's a different case with literature.
It feels like Rin was just thrown in there so Rei could have someone to look after. So it comes across as slightly contrived. Rin could have been developed further as a character. I think there's a misrepresentation of female characters in fiction because they almost always appear as naive or innocent in the face of war. But, realistically, I think war hardens everyone. So some of her naive nature is hard to believe.
Try to cut down on the exposition. Instead of info-dumping about Rei's past with Saul, try to think about how the lessons he learned from Saul would affect who he is and apply that to Rei's character. For example, what did he learn from Saul that helps him in his daily survival?
This story has the right elements. The only problem is that everything is kind of sketched in. The setting and characters just need to be developed further and fleshed out.
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DerpDaBerp: "My Claire"
Jam
Score: 35/40
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
A meteorite definitely counts as the end of the world.
Tone: 8/10
This story has a wonderful tone, and I get a good connection with both characters in a very short space. I have two complaints though. The first is relatively minor: when your protagonist remembers his time at war, it reads too dramatically. Maybe that scene can be rewritten so that he’s not condemning himself during the war, but after it instead? That would match up better with Claire’s reassurances anyway, which occur after the war. Second is the major problem of the story: the italicized sections. Tonally, they are completely different from the rest of the story, and while this may have been what you were going for, they seriously detract from the overall mood. They sound needy and desperate, a far cry from the solemn mourning your character exhibits in the regular text. I reread your story and skipped the italics, and it sounded so much better.
Style: 7/10
The language in the story is very poetic, which is fine. However, this is a short story contest, and as much as I don’t want to, I must penalize you for formatting. Form can be an important part of poetry, but in prose we use complete sentences and paragraphs, not stanzas. Aside from that, I think the formatting hurts the story itself. This piece works really well as a short-short story, but having numerous irregular paragraphs (and the attending spacing) makes the story feel longer: the actual physical layout of the text contradicts the story’s greatest strength, which is its succinct remembrance of a lifetime of love.
Enjoyment: 10/10
In the end, none of these issues seriously detracted from my enjoyment of the story. It was good, and with some additional work I think this story could be very good, maybe even great.
El Nino
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
Tone: 9/10
Style: 6/10
Enjoyment: 9/10
Total: 34/40
Comments: I enjoyed this one, but the format was a bad idea. It doesn't read like a poem, and I couldn't find any justification for the line breaks being where they were. It reads more or less like straight prose. Also, ellipses were overused. Grammar nazi: In the last line, "alright" is incorrect usage for "all right."
Besides the bad format, this piece has a deep emotional resonance and uses language well to achieve its atmosphere.
"She went under before the news came about. Before all / the experts and all the authorities assured us we would / be alright. And before they took it back. / My dear Claire, my one and only, would be comatose / during the end of the world."
Maybe "during the end of world" is not a strong finish, but the rest of the passage works very well, imo. The lyricism of the story highlights the characters and the situation. It brings the abrupt and cataclsymic end of the world in direct juxtaposition to a slow, gradual end of a life, a single life, and takes into consideration all the things that a lifetime can entail. It directs the reader's focus not to the destruction of an apocalypse but to the reasons why people value life itself. "We... we may be old, but... but we can't be over," ignoring the second set of ellipses (because it's overkill), that line is a very powerful statement that makes the unnamed narrator comes across as human and very real. It is also such a sharp contrast to the apocalypse because, on the planetary scale, humans are not "old," and the thought that "we can't be over" carries a sense of denial that is almost always the first stage of grieving.
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Camerino1: "The Stars, Our Guide"
Jam
Score: 20/40
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
Fragments of one of Jupiter’s moons ends life as we know it.
Tone: 5/10
It wasn’t that bad, but I never got much of a feel for who your characters were as people, just that they were gay scientists. Zach’s age never played into anything, we never learned anything about Andrew other than his fear of flying (which was irrelevant), and Rory was kind of just a crippled ****-blocker. The story reads like a positive affirmation for being gay. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you want to deliver a pro-gay message, write an essay. Creative writing is about story-telling, and unless everyone being okay with Zack and Andrew’s relationship actually matters to the story, leave it out.
Style: 2/10
The major issue is the length of the story. This piece did not need to be 9,000 words for what is essentially a love story set to the backdrop of the end of the world. Also problematic is the unevenness of the scenes in the story. Some drag on for too long (such as the airplane scene; that can be eliminated entirely) while others feel rushed, such as Rory’s death and the end of the story. I think this story would be much more effective at about half the length. Eliminate all the unnecessary stuff, and don’t make the two month jump that you do later in the story. You papered over some of the potentially most interesting material there.
Enjoyment: 3/10
The plot of the story isn’t particularly compelling, and the other issues (namely pacing and length) seriously detract from the enjoyment. The best part of the story was the conversation about Canadian drivers. That was a really enjoyable scene.
El Nino
Adherence to Prompt: 6/10
Tone: 6/10
Style: 4/10
Enjoyment: 6/10
Total: 22/40
Comments: I like the new title and the changes made from the first draft to the final. I didn't comment on the first draft, but I do feel that the final draft is a drastic improvement on the earlier version. But this story seems like it has two completely different cores, and the two don't exactly mesh together in the narrative. Parts of it aspire to be a sci-fi thriller, but the other parts aspire towards something else. It's like Armageddon and Deep Impact. The first is about an astral body on a collision course with Earth. The second is aboutstuff I have to pay for what consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedrooms.
On grammar, dialogue is supposed to be punctuated like: "Words," he said. I think there were some instances in the story where it appeared as: "Words." He said.
I didn't have time to verify the science behind this story, and I am not knowledgeable about astronomy, but there are some things I question. The details about the destruction on Earth in the regions close to the impact, those things ARE believable to me. But other things seem off, such as the time frame from discovery to impact, considering the distance between Jupiter and Earth. Also, having a meteor/asteroid collide into a moon with enough force to not only alter its orbit, but to overpower the gravitational pull of Jupiter (a planet of considerable mass) and to send that moon on a course towards Earth, that one might need a Jedi mind trick to help it alongor maybe that's what happened to Termina. Asteroids are smaller than moons, so you'd have to consider how fast it was traveling to create the necessary force. I'm pretty sure that astrophysics is not the same as the physics of pool. But then I suck at any form of pool that wasn't a mini-game on Super Monkey Ball, so what do I know.
One way of avoiding problems that come with getting or not getting the science right would have been to make your characters amateur astronomers rather than professionals. You could have swept the details under the rug and that would have left you with more room to work on developing the characters. It would also have explained why your characters only have a week to prepare. For instance, if the government knew about it months or years ahead of time but were hiding it from the public and your characters find out only because they had their own telescopes pointed in the right direction at the right time. It would have been a way to develop suspense, something which could have helped this story.
I think there could have been more time devoted to writing the characters, their backgrounds, and their reactions to the situation at hand. They seem to talk about almost everything EXCEPT the thing of extremely large mass and high velocity headed toward Earth. It's really the only reason why this piece didn't score higher on Adherence. I would have liked to see more of the characters reacting to the imminent end of life as they knew it. As it stands, we unfortunately don't learn too much about them. I'm also not sure about what purpose some of the side characters served.
Some of the events also seem rushed. Major things happen within the span of one or two sentences. I wonder why there's so much traveling. Why aren't they staying by their stations, sleeping in shifts, and keeping an eye on the situation, like the nuclear technicians who stayed at their posts when Japan's reactors went into meltdown? This story could have worked with the two main characters locked inside of a lab and interacting with each other that way.
I was a little disappointed when I clicked on the NSFW buttons. That's false advertising.
My advice to you is to keep writing and to read more. Studying novels and short stories is a good way to improve your writing skills.
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Goldshadow: "Pumpkin"
Jam
Score: 32/40
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
Zombie Apocalypse? Check.
Tone: 8/10
I think Emmy’s sections are great, and the interactions between Emmy and Frank are where the story really shined. The interactions between Frank and Nelsen are far less interesting. I also don’t like the inclusion of Emmy’s mother in the flashbacks. She detracts from the immediacy of their situation.
Style: 9/10
Your writing style throughout is consistently good, and the switches between Emmy and Frank are handled well. I’m subtracting a point for Nelsen’s tech jargon. I guess it’s necessary for the story, but at the point where he starts using it, it really defuses the tension and momentum you’d built up.
Enjoyment: 5/10
The pieces were all in place for a great story, but they get crowded out by Nelsen’s quest. Why the apocalypse began is way less important and interesting than the fact that it is happening, and Nelsen (along with the mom flashbacks) pulls away from the core of the story: Emmy and Frank. We get glimpses of Frank’s true character, and that’s what intrigued me. He’s a great character that gets buried under an uninteresting plot. This story is excellent from the technical standpoints, but it doesn’t give me what I want, which is Frank being a kind of despicable guy during the zombie apocalypse, not Nelsen’s guilt-tripping.
El Nino
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
Tone: 8/10
Style: 7/10
Enjoyment: 7/10
Total: 32/40
Comments: A solid piece of writing. It uses the suspense/thriller approach, and it offers a slightly different take on zombies than what I'm used to seeing. The choice to use a young girl as a viewpoint character in a setting like the one in this story was a good choice. The zombie genre is so played out at this point that anyone who writes it needs to do something different with it. So I'm impressed that the story wasn't just about headshots and exploding corpses.
The prose is mostly clean, though there are some places where the descriptions might have been overwrought:
"Rigor mortis had frozen his face in a permanent grimace—as if, even in death, he experienced some abject horror, and would continue to do so until rot ate him away and left nothing but an expressionless skeleton."
The death grimace is overdone when describing corpses in horror fiction. Though, I think that "Rigor mortis had frozen his face in a permanent grimace" makes for a stronger opening line than what you actually went with. I think the first two sentences could have been reversed in order.
Some other points in brief:
1) There are instances of info-dump that are cleverly disguised ("no, Dr. Nelsen, Daddy always corrected her"), but I think, in the example of revealing Nelsen as a doctor/scientist, it would have been better to clue the reader in through some other way. If he knows how to treat wounds, or something, that would serve as an indicator. If he rambles on about viruses and resistant strains, etc.
2) There might be one too many viewpoint characters. For a short story like this, you probably could have spent all of your words developing one character, or one character and one side character. It felt as though Nelsen's story was fighting for space with Frank and Emmy's story. I think both stories should have been written separately. You would have had more room to develop Nelsen and his guilt. Also, the impact of Frank's actions at the end doesn't rely on Nelsen being the one to die. If Frank were to kill someone so that he and his daughter could survive, the meaning of his actions would have been the same (or perhaps would have been greater).
3) Emmy is a good character, but there are moments when I think she slips into Hollywood-style typecasting of little kids in movies.
4) I'm not sure why they sleep in separate rooms. In a situation like this, wouldn't everyone stay together?
5) It might have been better if the manner by which the pandemic was set loose was kept hidden. Bio labs dealing with infectious agents are very highly controlled. The record log for the autoclave most likely would have been checked and signed by at least two people. It would make more sense for the infectious agent to have spread in an uncontrolled setting. (Outbreaks in recent years have come from industrial agriculture, for example.) And, well, it's more exciting when the characters don't know what's going on or how germs work.
6) Much of the dialogue is good, and some of it rather clever. But take care not to be too clever. It can take a reader out of the story and remind them that a writer is trying to be witty. And be careful not to overuse dialogue for exposition.
It is, overall, a well structured story that manages to tie itself up at the end. I liked that the very last section is in Emmy's POV and ends with the father holding his daughter. Without that, nothing that happens prior would matter much.
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tekkie: The Bensch Device
Jam
Score: 27/40
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
I think this is the only story where the world is literally destroyed.
Tone: 7/10
I don’t have much to say here. I don’t think the tone helped or hurt the story; I actually didn’t hear much of a narrative voice at all. That might be a problem for some readers, but it doesn’t really bother me. However, I can’t award you full points for something you didn’t do, even if it doesn’t detract from the story.
Style: 5/10
The writing is okay, but in a lot of areas you get weighed down with adjectives and descriptive words. In fact, I noted several sentences where you basically listed synonyms next to each other (“A soft whirr, a slight whisper, slipped unnoticed from the blinking machine on the ground.”). You want to choose your words wisely; we don’t need to know every single detail of a scene. And if there’s a simple, straightforward way to describe something, use that. Don’t write something like “The old man connived his body into the driver’s seat,” when “The old man sat in the driver’s seat,” works just as well.
Enjoyment: 5/10
I know we’re not exactly supposed to be judging the veracity of these stories but…why would a scientist leave a device capable of destroying the planet on the floor in a room under construction? That’s a narrative leap that I’m just not willing to take, and without believing the premise for the story, it’s really hard to enjoy it fully.
El Nino
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
Tone: 8/10
Style: 7/10
Enjoyment: 8/10
Total: 33/40
Comments: I enjoyed this one a lot. I don't often see humorous apocalyptic stories, especially ones that end in this way. Makes it somewhat bittersweet that the end of the world is as beautiful as the auroras, not the maggot-infested scenarios you would normally expect.
I think the ending had more potential than what was written. That is, the story had some well drawn characters, even though they mostly function as caricatures. There was an opportunity to make them more three dimensional. They do seem, as one reviewer commented, a little too accepting of their fate. It's good for keeping the lighthearted feel of the piece, but it can ruin the suspension of disbelief. So, maybe you should have found a middle ground. I liked the line: "Tara smiled sheepishly, nervous tears slithering down her face as the energy wave shattered the last glowing yellow bulb behind the van to a million glittering pieces" specifically for the reference to Tara's "nervous tears." You could have done more with that. Are she and Alton holding hands? Is Garry relieved that he doesn't have to put up with the stress of college? Did he want to manufacture narcotics for fun, or did he need the money, or was it an act of rebellion? Does the Professor regret making the device in the first place?
Some other points:
1) The first section can probably be cut without hurting anything. The story would have started better with the scene of the characters breaking into the lab.
2) Stealing chemicals or drugs from a lab makes sense to me. But I'm not sure if it's worth it to steal glassware. You could probably get it for cheap on eBay. And you don't need top of the line equipment to manufacture narcotics. You just have to run it like a ghetto meth lab. Pots, pans, glasses, plastic funnels, stoves, blenders. (Actually, that sounds like a regular professional lab.)
3) "“Ice-nine. A fictional seed crystal that solidifies at body temperature and freezes the world’s oceans.” --Most of the dialogue is good, but this line does not sound like something that someone would say naturally. Someone is more likely to say, "Like in the book by Vonnegut. It turns into a solid at room temperature and freezes every ocean in the world."
4) “Well, it’s nice to meet you all. I’m Professor Bensch. Any of you mechanical engineers? You’ll be taking my finite element analysis class in a few years if you were.” --Given the next line of dialogue, I think you meant "would have been taking my finite element analysis class."
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MARaTHonman: Him
Jam
Score: 26/40
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
You’ve got an alien invasion that destroys most of the planet. I’m actually surprised that this was the only alien story.
Tone: 5/10
I don’t know, the tone was a bit too melodramatic for me, especially in the first-person section. The protagonist speaks in stilted directives (“I have to find them. Or kill them.”), without really explaining why those are his only two choices, or even why he has to do either in the first place.
Style: 5/10
The thing that hurts this piece the most is the jump into first person. It doesn’t really add anything to the story, and that section is where the tone issues really become apparent. In addition, the plot is buried under repetition of the same phrases over and over, and descriptions of the destroyed world. This is a short story, and the plot doesn’t have to be intricate or involved, but it does require sufficient attention, and I don’t think the plot here receives that. There are also smaller issues that crop up, such as your character’s statement that he cannot talk in the beginning of the story, yet he tries to talk near the end. Also, “the One” is pretty much just dropped in, and given no explanation at all.
Enjoyment: 6/10
Still, this isn’t a bad story, and it has the very interesting idea that the aliens didn’t mean to kill us. I like the idea that they started their journey to earth before humans existed, and everything after that was just a series of terrible choices. I think there’s potential there for another story, one that could correct some of the issues this one had.
El Nino
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
Tone: 7/10
Style: 6/10
Enjoyment: 7/10
Total: 30/40
Comments: The premise is good. I liked that the alien viewpoint is ambiguous. He doesn't want to destroy all humans, but at the same time, an atrocity to him is clearly just a mistake and nothing to spend too much time crying over. "Collateral" is the key phrase. I liked the mention of those back on his home planet who would object to enslaving another species, and I also liked
The execution, or the delivery, of the key theme could have been handled better. For one, the capitalized pronoun "He" threw me off because of the religious significance. One option is to give the character a name. Rather than leave his society and culture in the dark, develop his background a little. That will keep the reader interested until the reveal that he's an alien invading Earth.
Grammar and language is awkward in some places: "It wasn’t much before, but it had looked like civilization. He guessed that is what the whole planet looked like now." --Tense confusion. Was/had/is imply different points in time.
Corrected: "It didn't used to be anything much, but it had once looked like civilization. He guessed that this was what the whole planet looked like now."
The first section is filled with mostly description and no action. It's somewhat difficult to get through. One way to write better descriptions of bombed out buildings is to look at news photos of places that have been bombed. But even then, only a few sentences are needed to set the scene. I think the rest of the introduction could have been used to introduce the character, rather than just the setting.
It may be hard to write an alien, but if you had been upfront with the extraterrestrial invasion, you could have written the protagonist as if he were a human from a sci-fi world landing on an alien planet. And then the "aliens" would later be revealed to be humans. The problem with the beginning is that it is surrounded in vagueness. "Him" and "beings" are examples of vague word choice. I think if you were to be more deliberate, to treat the alien character the same way as a human character, the narrative would have been more propelling from the beginning.
The middle first person narration is too out of place. I think the whole thing would have worked better keeping with the alien protagonist's POV.
The story does end on a strong note though.
Now on to the scores!
First Place: Claire by DerpDaBerp
Second Place: Pumpkin by Goldshadow
Third Place: The Bensch Device by tekkie
Final63: "Our One True Freedom"
Jam
Score: 20/40
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
Well, the end of the world is shoehorned in eventually. I’ll comment more on that later.
Tone: 3/10
Reading this felt like reading an episode of anime. From the protagonist’s silver hair to the pseudo-Japanese names to the characters staring off into space and the profuse use of ellipses and pauses and internalized exposition, it all just screamed anime. And frankly, anime is terrible. Yes, we can all point to our favorite exception to this rule, but generally speaking, anime is narrative garbage. But despite that, you managed to create a sense of tension as the story continued, and I waited for something to happen. But it never did, and that was a greater failing than the anime tone.
Style: 2/10
The various parts of this story never fully developed, and those parts never came together to form a whole. Somehow, the only things that happened in 9,000 words were two people moving away, Danielle dying and God showing up in the last few pages. What was Rin constantly referring to? Why did she forgive Rei after running? What was the war about? Who was fighting? Basic narrative questions were never answered, and the story never moved from a general level to any kind of specificity. Other than the date on Saul’s tombstone, we don’t even know the time period. And the inclusion of God at the end just didn’t work at all. Nothing happens in this story, not even between Rin and Rei, other than some vague promises.
Enjoyment: 5/10
There are major problems here, but initially I was interested to discover where this story was going, but it never went anywhere. That was a huge letdown, but I’m grading you here on my anticipation, not my disappointment.
El Nino
Adherence to Prompt: 9/10
Tone: 7/10
Style: 7/10 (Small numbers like 16 or 3 should be written out as "sixteen" or "three.")
Enjoyment: 7/10
Total: 30/40
Comments: Your prose is strong and articulate. This story shows that you have a good handle on language. But the prose is wordy in places, and that kind of hurts some of your action scenes. Too much detail can rob a scene of any sense of urgency.
Ex: "Anybody in this time and place knows what they are: fighter planes, made for nothing but total destruction."
Most people know what fighter planes are made to do. They're weapons of war. So it isn't necessary to spell it out like so much.
Rei comes through well as a complicated young person (I appreciate that he isn't a "hero," and he can only stand still in complete shock when faced with violence. That's very real.), an awkward teen who actually acts like an awkward teen. But he could have been fleshed out more as a character. He is a teenage living in a war zone. If he's avoided death for this long on his own, he must have some decent survival skills. Seeing how he survives on a day to day basis (eating, showering, doing homework by candlelight because the electricity keeps going out) would have added more dimension to the character, and it would have helped with the worldbuilding.
On the worldbuilding, it could have been developed more. Rei's home country doesn't have a name, nor does the enemy country. Events and people are sketched in, but there isn't much sense of place.
I sense an anime influence on this story, which is fine. But know that anime is a visual medium, and some of those elements don't work in the text-based format. Funny hair colors are used in anime to help the viewer differentiate between characters that would otherwise look the same. It's a different case with literature.
It feels like Rin was just thrown in there so Rei could have someone to look after. So it comes across as slightly contrived. Rin could have been developed further as a character. I think there's a misrepresentation of female characters in fiction because they almost always appear as naive or innocent in the face of war. But, realistically, I think war hardens everyone. So some of her naive nature is hard to believe.
Try to cut down on the exposition. Instead of info-dumping about Rei's past with Saul, try to think about how the lessons he learned from Saul would affect who he is and apply that to Rei's character. For example, what did he learn from Saul that helps him in his daily survival?
This story has the right elements. The only problem is that everything is kind of sketched in. The setting and characters just need to be developed further and fleshed out.
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DerpDaBerp: "My Claire"
Jam
Score: 35/40
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
A meteorite definitely counts as the end of the world.
Tone: 8/10
This story has a wonderful tone, and I get a good connection with both characters in a very short space. I have two complaints though. The first is relatively minor: when your protagonist remembers his time at war, it reads too dramatically. Maybe that scene can be rewritten so that he’s not condemning himself during the war, but after it instead? That would match up better with Claire’s reassurances anyway, which occur after the war. Second is the major problem of the story: the italicized sections. Tonally, they are completely different from the rest of the story, and while this may have been what you were going for, they seriously detract from the overall mood. They sound needy and desperate, a far cry from the solemn mourning your character exhibits in the regular text. I reread your story and skipped the italics, and it sounded so much better.
Style: 7/10
The language in the story is very poetic, which is fine. However, this is a short story contest, and as much as I don’t want to, I must penalize you for formatting. Form can be an important part of poetry, but in prose we use complete sentences and paragraphs, not stanzas. Aside from that, I think the formatting hurts the story itself. This piece works really well as a short-short story, but having numerous irregular paragraphs (and the attending spacing) makes the story feel longer: the actual physical layout of the text contradicts the story’s greatest strength, which is its succinct remembrance of a lifetime of love.
Enjoyment: 10/10
In the end, none of these issues seriously detracted from my enjoyment of the story. It was good, and with some additional work I think this story could be very good, maybe even great.
El Nino
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
Tone: 9/10
Style: 6/10
Enjoyment: 9/10
Total: 34/40
Comments: I enjoyed this one, but the format was a bad idea. It doesn't read like a poem, and I couldn't find any justification for the line breaks being where they were. It reads more or less like straight prose. Also, ellipses were overused. Grammar nazi: In the last line, "alright" is incorrect usage for "all right."
Besides the bad format, this piece has a deep emotional resonance and uses language well to achieve its atmosphere.
"She went under before the news came about. Before all / the experts and all the authorities assured us we would / be alright. And before they took it back. / My dear Claire, my one and only, would be comatose / during the end of the world."
Maybe "during the end of world" is not a strong finish, but the rest of the passage works very well, imo. The lyricism of the story highlights the characters and the situation. It brings the abrupt and cataclsymic end of the world in direct juxtaposition to a slow, gradual end of a life, a single life, and takes into consideration all the things that a lifetime can entail. It directs the reader's focus not to the destruction of an apocalypse but to the reasons why people value life itself. "We... we may be old, but... but we can't be over," ignoring the second set of ellipses (because it's overkill), that line is a very powerful statement that makes the unnamed narrator comes across as human and very real. It is also such a sharp contrast to the apocalypse because, on the planetary scale, humans are not "old," and the thought that "we can't be over" carries a sense of denial that is almost always the first stage of grieving.
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Camerino1: "The Stars, Our Guide"
Jam
Score: 20/40
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
Fragments of one of Jupiter’s moons ends life as we know it.
Tone: 5/10
It wasn’t that bad, but I never got much of a feel for who your characters were as people, just that they were gay scientists. Zach’s age never played into anything, we never learned anything about Andrew other than his fear of flying (which was irrelevant), and Rory was kind of just a crippled ****-blocker. The story reads like a positive affirmation for being gay. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you want to deliver a pro-gay message, write an essay. Creative writing is about story-telling, and unless everyone being okay with Zack and Andrew’s relationship actually matters to the story, leave it out.
Style: 2/10
The major issue is the length of the story. This piece did not need to be 9,000 words for what is essentially a love story set to the backdrop of the end of the world. Also problematic is the unevenness of the scenes in the story. Some drag on for too long (such as the airplane scene; that can be eliminated entirely) while others feel rushed, such as Rory’s death and the end of the story. I think this story would be much more effective at about half the length. Eliminate all the unnecessary stuff, and don’t make the two month jump that you do later in the story. You papered over some of the potentially most interesting material there.
Enjoyment: 3/10
The plot of the story isn’t particularly compelling, and the other issues (namely pacing and length) seriously detract from the enjoyment. The best part of the story was the conversation about Canadian drivers. That was a really enjoyable scene.
El Nino
Adherence to Prompt: 6/10
Tone: 6/10
Style: 4/10
Enjoyment: 6/10
Total: 22/40
Comments: I like the new title and the changes made from the first draft to the final. I didn't comment on the first draft, but I do feel that the final draft is a drastic improvement on the earlier version. But this story seems like it has two completely different cores, and the two don't exactly mesh together in the narrative. Parts of it aspire to be a sci-fi thriller, but the other parts aspire towards something else. It's like Armageddon and Deep Impact. The first is about an astral body on a collision course with Earth. The second is about
On grammar, dialogue is supposed to be punctuated like: "Words," he said. I think there were some instances in the story where it appeared as: "Words." He said.
I didn't have time to verify the science behind this story, and I am not knowledgeable about astronomy, but there are some things I question. The details about the destruction on Earth in the regions close to the impact, those things ARE believable to me. But other things seem off, such as the time frame from discovery to impact, considering the distance between Jupiter and Earth. Also, having a meteor/asteroid collide into a moon with enough force to not only alter its orbit, but to overpower the gravitational pull of Jupiter (a planet of considerable mass) and to send that moon on a course towards Earth, that one might need a Jedi mind trick to help it along
One way of avoiding problems that come with getting or not getting the science right would have been to make your characters amateur astronomers rather than professionals. You could have swept the details under the rug and that would have left you with more room to work on developing the characters. It would also have explained why your characters only have a week to prepare. For instance, if the government knew about it months or years ahead of time but were hiding it from the public and your characters find out only because they had their own telescopes pointed in the right direction at the right time. It would have been a way to develop suspense, something which could have helped this story.
I think there could have been more time devoted to writing the characters, their backgrounds, and their reactions to the situation at hand. They seem to talk about almost everything EXCEPT the thing of extremely large mass and high velocity headed toward Earth. It's really the only reason why this piece didn't score higher on Adherence. I would have liked to see more of the characters reacting to the imminent end of life as they knew it. As it stands, we unfortunately don't learn too much about them. I'm also not sure about what purpose some of the side characters served.
Some of the events also seem rushed. Major things happen within the span of one or two sentences. I wonder why there's so much traveling. Why aren't they staying by their stations, sleeping in shifts, and keeping an eye on the situation, like the nuclear technicians who stayed at their posts when Japan's reactors went into meltdown? This story could have worked with the two main characters locked inside of a lab and interacting with each other that way.
I was a little disappointed when I clicked on the NSFW buttons. That's false advertising.
My advice to you is to keep writing and to read more. Studying novels and short stories is a good way to improve your writing skills.
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Goldshadow: "Pumpkin"
Jam
Score: 32/40
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
Zombie Apocalypse? Check.
Tone: 8/10
I think Emmy’s sections are great, and the interactions between Emmy and Frank are where the story really shined. The interactions between Frank and Nelsen are far less interesting. I also don’t like the inclusion of Emmy’s mother in the flashbacks. She detracts from the immediacy of their situation.
Style: 9/10
Your writing style throughout is consistently good, and the switches between Emmy and Frank are handled well. I’m subtracting a point for Nelsen’s tech jargon. I guess it’s necessary for the story, but at the point where he starts using it, it really defuses the tension and momentum you’d built up.
Enjoyment: 5/10
The pieces were all in place for a great story, but they get crowded out by Nelsen’s quest. Why the apocalypse began is way less important and interesting than the fact that it is happening, and Nelsen (along with the mom flashbacks) pulls away from the core of the story: Emmy and Frank. We get glimpses of Frank’s true character, and that’s what intrigued me. He’s a great character that gets buried under an uninteresting plot. This story is excellent from the technical standpoints, but it doesn’t give me what I want, which is Frank being a kind of despicable guy during the zombie apocalypse, not Nelsen’s guilt-tripping.
El Nino
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
Tone: 8/10
Style: 7/10
Enjoyment: 7/10
Total: 32/40
Comments: A solid piece of writing. It uses the suspense/thriller approach, and it offers a slightly different take on zombies than what I'm used to seeing. The choice to use a young girl as a viewpoint character in a setting like the one in this story was a good choice. The zombie genre is so played out at this point that anyone who writes it needs to do something different with it. So I'm impressed that the story wasn't just about headshots and exploding corpses.
The prose is mostly clean, though there are some places where the descriptions might have been overwrought:
"Rigor mortis had frozen his face in a permanent grimace—as if, even in death, he experienced some abject horror, and would continue to do so until rot ate him away and left nothing but an expressionless skeleton."
The death grimace is overdone when describing corpses in horror fiction. Though, I think that "Rigor mortis had frozen his face in a permanent grimace" makes for a stronger opening line than what you actually went with. I think the first two sentences could have been reversed in order.
Some other points in brief:
1) There are instances of info-dump that are cleverly disguised ("no, Dr. Nelsen, Daddy always corrected her"), but I think, in the example of revealing Nelsen as a doctor/scientist, it would have been better to clue the reader in through some other way. If he knows how to treat wounds, or something, that would serve as an indicator. If he rambles on about viruses and resistant strains, etc.
2) There might be one too many viewpoint characters. For a short story like this, you probably could have spent all of your words developing one character, or one character and one side character. It felt as though Nelsen's story was fighting for space with Frank and Emmy's story. I think both stories should have been written separately. You would have had more room to develop Nelsen and his guilt. Also, the impact of Frank's actions at the end doesn't rely on Nelsen being the one to die. If Frank were to kill someone so that he and his daughter could survive, the meaning of his actions would have been the same (or perhaps would have been greater).
3) Emmy is a good character, but there are moments when I think she slips into Hollywood-style typecasting of little kids in movies.
4) I'm not sure why they sleep in separate rooms. In a situation like this, wouldn't everyone stay together?
5) It might have been better if the manner by which the pandemic was set loose was kept hidden. Bio labs dealing with infectious agents are very highly controlled. The record log for the autoclave most likely would have been checked and signed by at least two people. It would make more sense for the infectious agent to have spread in an uncontrolled setting. (Outbreaks in recent years have come from industrial agriculture, for example.) And, well, it's more exciting when the characters don't know what's going on or how germs work.
6) Much of the dialogue is good, and some of it rather clever. But take care not to be too clever. It can take a reader out of the story and remind them that a writer is trying to be witty. And be careful not to overuse dialogue for exposition.
It is, overall, a well structured story that manages to tie itself up at the end. I liked that the very last section is in Emmy's POV and ends with the father holding his daughter. Without that, nothing that happens prior would matter much.
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tekkie: The Bensch Device
Jam
Score: 27/40
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
I think this is the only story where the world is literally destroyed.
Tone: 7/10
I don’t have much to say here. I don’t think the tone helped or hurt the story; I actually didn’t hear much of a narrative voice at all. That might be a problem for some readers, but it doesn’t really bother me. However, I can’t award you full points for something you didn’t do, even if it doesn’t detract from the story.
Style: 5/10
The writing is okay, but in a lot of areas you get weighed down with adjectives and descriptive words. In fact, I noted several sentences where you basically listed synonyms next to each other (“A soft whirr, a slight whisper, slipped unnoticed from the blinking machine on the ground.”). You want to choose your words wisely; we don’t need to know every single detail of a scene. And if there’s a simple, straightforward way to describe something, use that. Don’t write something like “The old man connived his body into the driver’s seat,” when “The old man sat in the driver’s seat,” works just as well.
Enjoyment: 5/10
I know we’re not exactly supposed to be judging the veracity of these stories but…why would a scientist leave a device capable of destroying the planet on the floor in a room under construction? That’s a narrative leap that I’m just not willing to take, and without believing the premise for the story, it’s really hard to enjoy it fully.
El Nino
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
Tone: 8/10
Style: 7/10
Enjoyment: 8/10
Total: 33/40
Comments: I enjoyed this one a lot. I don't often see humorous apocalyptic stories, especially ones that end in this way. Makes it somewhat bittersweet that the end of the world is as beautiful as the auroras, not the maggot-infested scenarios you would normally expect.
I think the ending had more potential than what was written. That is, the story had some well drawn characters, even though they mostly function as caricatures. There was an opportunity to make them more three dimensional. They do seem, as one reviewer commented, a little too accepting of their fate. It's good for keeping the lighthearted feel of the piece, but it can ruin the suspension of disbelief. So, maybe you should have found a middle ground. I liked the line: "Tara smiled sheepishly, nervous tears slithering down her face as the energy wave shattered the last glowing yellow bulb behind the van to a million glittering pieces" specifically for the reference to Tara's "nervous tears." You could have done more with that. Are she and Alton holding hands? Is Garry relieved that he doesn't have to put up with the stress of college? Did he want to manufacture narcotics for fun, or did he need the money, or was it an act of rebellion? Does the Professor regret making the device in the first place?
Some other points:
1) The first section can probably be cut without hurting anything. The story would have started better with the scene of the characters breaking into the lab.
2) Stealing chemicals or drugs from a lab makes sense to me. But I'm not sure if it's worth it to steal glassware. You could probably get it for cheap on eBay. And you don't need top of the line equipment to manufacture narcotics. You just have to run it like a ghetto meth lab. Pots, pans, glasses, plastic funnels, stoves, blenders. (Actually, that sounds like a regular professional lab.)
3) "“Ice-nine. A fictional seed crystal that solidifies at body temperature and freezes the world’s oceans.” --Most of the dialogue is good, but this line does not sound like something that someone would say naturally. Someone is more likely to say, "Like in the book by Vonnegut. It turns into a solid at room temperature and freezes every ocean in the world."
4) “Well, it’s nice to meet you all. I’m Professor Bensch. Any of you mechanical engineers? You’ll be taking my finite element analysis class in a few years if you were.” --Given the next line of dialogue, I think you meant "would have been taking my finite element analysis class."
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MARaTHonman: Him
Jam
Score: 26/40
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
You’ve got an alien invasion that destroys most of the planet. I’m actually surprised that this was the only alien story.
Tone: 5/10
I don’t know, the tone was a bit too melodramatic for me, especially in the first-person section. The protagonist speaks in stilted directives (“I have to find them. Or kill them.”), without really explaining why those are his only two choices, or even why he has to do either in the first place.
Style: 5/10
The thing that hurts this piece the most is the jump into first person. It doesn’t really add anything to the story, and that section is where the tone issues really become apparent. In addition, the plot is buried under repetition of the same phrases over and over, and descriptions of the destroyed world. This is a short story, and the plot doesn’t have to be intricate or involved, but it does require sufficient attention, and I don’t think the plot here receives that. There are also smaller issues that crop up, such as your character’s statement that he cannot talk in the beginning of the story, yet he tries to talk near the end. Also, “the One” is pretty much just dropped in, and given no explanation at all.
Enjoyment: 6/10
Still, this isn’t a bad story, and it has the very interesting idea that the aliens didn’t mean to kill us. I like the idea that they started their journey to earth before humans existed, and everything after that was just a series of terrible choices. I think there’s potential there for another story, one that could correct some of the issues this one had.
El Nino
Adherence to Prompt: 10/10
Tone: 7/10
Style: 6/10
Enjoyment: 7/10
Total: 30/40
Comments: The premise is good. I liked that the alien viewpoint is ambiguous. He doesn't want to destroy all humans, but at the same time, an atrocity to him is clearly just a mistake and nothing to spend too much time crying over. "Collateral" is the key phrase. I liked the mention of those back on his home planet who would object to enslaving another species, and I also liked
The execution, or the delivery, of the key theme could have been handled better. For one, the capitalized pronoun "He" threw me off because of the religious significance. One option is to give the character a name. Rather than leave his society and culture in the dark, develop his background a little. That will keep the reader interested until the reveal that he's an alien invading Earth.
Grammar and language is awkward in some places: "It wasn’t much before, but it had looked like civilization. He guessed that is what the whole planet looked like now." --Tense confusion. Was/had/is imply different points in time.
Corrected: "It didn't used to be anything much, but it had once looked like civilization. He guessed that this was what the whole planet looked like now."
The first section is filled with mostly description and no action. It's somewhat difficult to get through. One way to write better descriptions of bombed out buildings is to look at news photos of places that have been bombed. But even then, only a few sentences are needed to set the scene. I think the rest of the introduction could have been used to introduce the character, rather than just the setting.
It may be hard to write an alien, but if you had been upfront with the extraterrestrial invasion, you could have written the protagonist as if he were a human from a sci-fi world landing on an alien planet. And then the "aliens" would later be revealed to be humans. The problem with the beginning is that it is surrounded in vagueness. "Him" and "beings" are examples of vague word choice. I think if you were to be more deliberate, to treat the alien character the same way as a human character, the narrative would have been more propelling from the beginning.
The middle first person narration is too out of place. I think the whole thing would have worked better keeping with the alien protagonist's POV.
The story does end on a strong note though.
![Terywj [태리]](/data/avatars/l/71/71007.jpg?1555906021){kind=avatar}
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