Thanks for the feedback!
Well, as for what risk I felt I was taking: I was moving beyond a simple story, ment primarily to entertain, into a story that was ment to communticate a moral, or a theme, or something. I was trying to stay away from the humor of my previous entry(s) and create a surreal feel to the story. I wasn't sure that I could do it, but it worked out, and I think it is probably the best stuff I've ever written for a Ceramic DM competition. Bacially my risk was writing in a style besides what I normally write, going for a feel that I rarely read. I find it easier to imitate a style that I read often, so doing soething more surreal was hard.
And my third round story. All of your criticisms are dead on. I've never been good about writing mystery, especially when I already know the answer. If I make it up as I go along, I'm more likely to keep the secrete, but then it's impossible to see it coming. If I plan it out ahead of time I make it too obvious what the suprise is. If I had another way of linking the pictures together, or another way to tell the story without the weak mystery element, I would have done it. In retrospect, I caught on to the suprise ending as my hook too early in the writing process, I think I could have told the same story without the suprise, and it could have been better.
I was hoping that by hinting at the mysterious ever-present glasses I could make the reader think they knew who the djinn was, then redirect them when the glasses truned out to be just, well... glasses. I knew it might be too easy to tell who the djinn, but I was hoping I could play on the reader's expectations.
And just a little insight into my thought process with this story: the "thread" I found in the pictures was the distortion. I liked the idea that the swimming man was warping reality, not just swimming. In my first mental draft, there were no djinn, there was a government experiment that gave a subject the power to warp reality to his subconscious desires. It would be told from a first person point of view, from the perspective of an agent sent out to track down this subject, who escaped. But, after he cpatured the subject, it would turn out he was the subject, that he had used his powers to create somebody to catch. I liked the idea, but I had no idea why it would happen, and I didn't like the feel of it. I tossed the idea around for a bit, then I happened to think about djinn (I have been reading Neil Gamien's American Gods recently, and even though the djinn interlude was a while back, it was still fresh in my mind), and the story as it turned out developed.
I wish that I had been able to find a metaphoric topic as I did in the second round, but no such luck. I liked my second round story better, and I think this round will be close.
