Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rodrigo Istalindir" data-source="post: 4281511" data-attributes="member: 2810">[sblock=For Piratecat and Berandor]Thanks for the kind words.  I'm inordinately proud of that first section, especially the 'gravity won' bit.  I like it so much I'm starting to worry if I subconsciously cribbed it from someone else.Unfortunately, I think the first section turned out so well because I spent so much time on it.  I didn't get to start writing until Saturday, and had nothing in the way of an idea, so I kept screwing around on the computer and procrastinating.  Finally, I decided I had to start doing something, and hoped that just putting words down would kickstart things.  Eventually, it did, but I kinda had to rush through the rest and didn't get to flesh it out like I would have wanted.I'd tried to convey the 'outsider' aspects of Charlie -- the old 'politically incorrect' car, eating meat, other things to try and give a sense that he too chafed under the restrictions of the modern world and so might seem to Kelly to be ripe for recruitment.  And of course she misundersands, it's not the end-result of modern restrictions that offends Charlie, it's the elimination of free will, and there's no way he'd trade one totalitarian(ish) regime he could skirt with one he couldn't.A combination of being too subtle for my own good and not having the time to realize that and correct it. I'd intended to insert a scene with Dr. Kelly showing Charlie the bears, to reinforce the later picture use and to provide additional detail on the imprinting process.`I appreciate the tip on the quote formatting, PC; I did not know that.  When I was a young lad in English class, I always had a hard time writing dialogue and avoided it when I could, ad never got a good feel for the rules.  I still have to stop and think about the proper punctuation more than I should and tend to muck it up when I'm not paying attention.  Probably 3/4 of my 'technical' edits are fixing the dialogue. :OPersonally, I like this one (and my first story) much more than 'Hell Freezes Over', which I thought of as gimmicky trifle that only works if you *don't* have pictures, but I'm glad others enjoyed it.[/sblock][sblock=Comments on Piratecat's story]I think it's a reflection on how dagger-sharp your stories usually are that this one felt a little flat.  Perhaps it's a bias against 'dream' stories I've gotten after playing and judging CDM.  But it seemed like your heart was only half in this one, like you really wanted to tell Amy's story but felt compelled by the pictures to tell Ria's.  Amy seems to me to be more alive, and her reactions more resonant.  Ria, despite being the main 'actor' doesn't seem to get the same amount of love, and comes across a bit perfunctory.  I think maybe making her a terminal cancer patient robs her decision of any tension.  Of course she's going to jump at the chance.  Had she had a real, emotionally true reason to stay in the real world, her decision to take on the Amy's mantle might have had a bigger impact.  Imagine instead if she'd been called into the dream-world after falling asleep while reading her kid one of the classic children's stories.  Then the decision to return to the real world (and risk the world losing the 'sense of wonder' <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" />) or stay in dream-land (and sacrifice her own happiness for the greater good) would have been harder.  No 'happier ever after' either way.I dug the ideas behind the story, though I was a little confused by: I get where you were going, but it muddled the message a the story a little.  But the writing is top-notch as always.  I especially liked the back-and-forth of the dialogue.  It was snappy and organic, and accomplished more to establish the characters than the rest of the prose.  And technically perfect (and least so far as I can tell); the polish really shows.  You'd never know it was a Ceramic DM entry, as it's missing all the tell-tale signs of rushed writing and panicked editing.  I think from now on you're only allowed 48 hours, as clearly 72 is no longer a sufficient challenge.  Picture use was excellent; I'm in awe of the corn-stalk interpretation of the coke fountains.  I never in a million years would have seen that, and now I can't see anything else.  Sneaking the 'Wild Things' into a story brought a smile for sure.  And the highway sign was perfectly in tune with the rest of the story, mixing the mystical, the metaphorical, and the virtual.  At first I thought it was kind of weak, but the more I think about it the way it draws the parallel between the virtual world I spend half (or more) of my life in, and the lands of make believe where we spend our youth, the more evocative it became.  Very well done.I don't think this is your best work, even in this competition (the Nazi archeologist showed you at the top of your game), but it was still a clever take on the pictures and well executed.  You're a victim of your own success in that I expect nothing less than having my socks knocked off by each story.  I just hope I don't get eaten by a grue.[/sblock]</blockquote>

Verification