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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mythago" data-source="post: 1872410" data-attributes="member: 3019">Maldur MacBeth vs Orchid Blossom  Now that is a nifty idea, MacBeth. OB, another fine story, I esp like the use of the herb crushing ballbearings.  Hard but I would say: MacBeth     Berandor      Macbeth: "Writer's Block" On November 15th, 2004, a South-African writer participated in an online writing contest. A day later, he disappeared. Only his laptop has been found. A Ceramic DM story about a Ceramic DM story. First of all, I wonder how much of what you attribute to your protagonist corresponds with your own approach. Do you wait 24h before writing? Do you google ideas? You start off strong, the recognition of the contest draws me in, the following metaphor sealing the deal: "...a writer's road block manned by police wearing bullet-proof vests who (the vests?) blow out my tires every time I make a break for anidea." The good thing about your story is that the woes of a Ceramic competitor ring true. "It's just a story, just some stupid competition,..." Calling in sick is a little too much, though. It shows me the protagonist is willing to go to great lengths for his story.  The danger with a story like yours is the same as with the repetitive phrases - you must be careful to use it for good measure, lest it becomes a gimmick and not much more. I guess the comment about the pics ("Hands. Stones.") was inevitable, though. I think this story runs close to becoming a gimmick (especially when you include smack-talk to orchid blossom in it), but it veers off just in time.  What I find interesting is that your stories often include technopaganism (or what I would call technopaganism). Here, Ted "prays to [his] DSL connection... A blessing of ones and zeroes." And if web utilities are modern Gods, then Google is the head of the pantheon.  By the time Ted heads off to the park (and we see the pic a second time), I'm getting impatient. So when do you stop talking about the tournament and give us a story? Thankfully, you introduce us to shared memory. I think the short explanation was enough to understand what you were getting at, and the long version was neither to the point nor detailed enough to earn its existence. I think that you actually missed explaining the nature of said memory in a way that corresponds with your story. At first, it says that "whatever enough people learn, everybody knows", and then Ted goes searching for some obscure knowledge. At first, it seems as if the shared memory was just a repository of archetypes and common knowledge, but then it's more like a giant shelf with myriad bowls, each bowl representing one specific item of knowledge, and the amount of people who know it filling the bowl; as soon as enough people know it, the knowledge spills.  So then Ted discovers his error, and he reaches the village, where "the dome ends just at the first hut." Huh? What dome? Is it a dome of light? A dome of fibreglass installed by the police? Of course, I think it is a dome of light thanks to the pics and the following events, but at first it isn't clear because all we know is that Ted sees "a glow", not a giant dome of light. Then, the Meme Keeper. "I don't know what the Meme Keeper is, but I'm not sure I want to find out." Sounds dangerous, mysterious - good. But the very next sentence is "With nothing better to do, I got to the hut." Wait a moment? I thought Ted didn't want to find out? and "nothing better to do"? There's a dome of light coming probably from his laptop, he's got a writing deadline, and he's got nothing better to do? "It's not as bad as I thought." Well, what did he think? What did he expect? Anyway, so the Meme Keeper speaks with a "regal voice": "So, you know something of this?" / "You know, the Meme, the racial memory." / "Damn." That's really not how I would expect a Meme Keeper to speak,especially not one with a "regal voice." That's more how I would expect Giles to speak. (And later on he's very much rooted in time: "*Now* do you see? He is nothing *now*, but all his memories are part of the meme *now*."  So then our hero finds out he's brought about the end of the world. And his reaction is "Crap!"? That's the worst word he can think of? I don't think this is bad, I just wanted to point it out in case you just chose then word for the language filter.  Of course, your story is about an internal conflict having external repercussions, and you write in a very reflective voice, but when Ted sacrifices himself, "I think about my wife" is not enough for me. That's simply not very dramatic. What does he think of? Her name? Her hair? The look in her eyes when she wakes up and sees him in the morning? Her warmth lingering after she has gotten up to make breakfast? Her smell coming to him when he's on the phone with her? Her nasal voice complaining that he didn't put down the toilet seat? Of course, the final paragraph is somewhat illogical in Ted's self-awareness after he's gone, but that's all right with me as it works to give us a good ending. And the post scriptum works exceptionally well, even if I wonder how Ted died.  In the end, I enjoyed the part about the Meme, but I wasn't too keen on the references from a purely objective point of view. Personally, I smiled at a lot of them. Once more a nice entry, Macbeth.  orchid blossom: "Untitled" A totally different story. I particularly enjoyed the joking conversations between Carlene and Aidan, with all their pot shots and comments - I got the impression these two had been at it for a long time. I also liked the background behind the plot, and hunting sick people when a Plague killed most humans seems almost sensible if not for the inherent cruelty.  Normally, your prose is flawless almost to a fault. This time, however, it didn't come out as well. There were several sentences that were rough or ungainly, for example "...as she danced from one song to the next and drank the home brewed beer that had been one of the first things people figured out how to make for themselves." Which home brewed beer? Oh, *that* home brewed beer. You'd be better off with two sentences here. "Kieran. You should be sleeping. You've been gone for weeks, and then all that unloading yesterday." sounds more like exposition than like something somebody would say, especially someone with an irreverent touch like Carlene. "Aidan pulled back as he saw the wolf's eyes. For a moment, he thought they weren't there, ..." He thought the eyes weren't there? I'm still not sure I understand that sentence after reading the story three times. Other things are when Carlene "confirms her diagnosis", a diagnosis we didn't know she'd made, or when it's not clear whether the Morticians are known or not (the villagers don't seem to know who he is - Aidan sure doesn't - but Kieran says "You don't say no to a Mortician.", suggesting that people obey him because of his reputation).  Now, your plot is fine, with the mortician hunting sick people and Carlene as a healer defending them. However, this plot doesn't receive a lot of detail, while we get information about other things that don't really deal with it (Carlene's training, the whole background about the village and retrievers, the market). The mortician is always "the man in the suit" and remains nameless, faceless and in a way harmless (not even the wolf gets a name). All we know is the mortician wears a black suit and drives a car, but we do know where the family lives that finally adopts the sick boy and where he is playing. We do not know whether the picture of a boy as "shingle" is symbolic of something or not, but we do know Mrs Kennedy thinks by drawing a human body you can memorize the muscles better. I got the impression you wanted to tell us about Carlene and Aidan, and just threw the sick people and the mortician in to create a little diversion and some tension.  It's a nice story, but you can do much better.  The Pics montmartre (Yes, I can finally see the pic's name again) - orchid blossom has Aidan give Carlene a bas-relief to use as a shingle for her house. Whether the image of a boy signifies something to the post-apolcalyptic society she lives in, we don't know. - Macbeth's Meme Keeper has a coin on a chain, given to his grandfather by colonists in exchange for, well, a *lot* of land. (a strange, square coin or a framed coin, I guess). The Keeper uses the coin to show us what the Meme does to the world, ridding it of its information.  light shines in - Macbeth shows us the Meme Keeper's hut, with said Keeper in the foreground and his family huddling in the back. The dome's light shines through. - orchid blossom's sick survivors have sought refuge in the retrievers' hut. There are three people in there, led by a man in "African printed cloth". Sadly, the woman to the left is already dead.  rowing - orchid blossom's mortician approaches the hut in a rowboat manned by retrievers. Fortunately, Carlene notices the boat and manages to hide just in time. - Macbeth's river scene is vitally important for the story, so important that we are treated to it four times. This highlights the surprise when suddenly the view from the other side of the river is still the same, but I wouldn't want to read a short story where over 7 pages, one illustration accompanies the text four times.  wiley - Macbeth's gives Ted quite a fearsome looking dog to take with him to the river. Pooch - a fitting name for the slavering beast - is not quite as important as the river itself, so we only see this pic twice. Still, the loss of the dog's self showcases the Meme's danger even more than a blank coin does. - orchid blossom gives the mortician a hunting wolf, trained to sniff out sickness. From a certain angle, the wolf doesn't have any eyes, and it sneezes when it catches Carlene's oils, but it is the morticians most important hunting tool.  montage - orchid blossom gives us Carlene's medical bag, filled with various utensils and the drawing Carlene made of Aidan. The strange contents derive from Carlene's hastily packing and enable Aidan to recognize the bag and understand the danger, prompting him to get one of the retrievers to lie. - Macbeth gives us a grab bag packed by Ted in a state of confused frenzy. Everything possibly helpful to connect with the Meme is thrown in, and Ted even scribbles a very competent drawing of the human bodyto go with it. The contents of the bag are perhaps Ted's moment of true inspiration in the story, as he seems to use everything to finally connect with the Meme.  The Judgement Both stories have their share of things to like, but also some things that didn't work for me. I was not impressed with either pic use (though both used the "montage" reasonably well), especially not with Macbeth's recurring pic use - it took me out of the story as I had to click on the link (or think of what the pic was, as it were, since I read a printed version). In the end, I felt that orchid blossom's writing was a little off, whereas Macbeth consciously chose the way he wrote the story. "Writer's Block" seems to be more coherent, better focused, and orchid blossom's pic use is not superior enough to make up for that. POINT TO [spoiler].............MACBETH[/spoiler]        mythago    Macbeth - "Writer's Block"   Okay, let's be honest--writing a story about having writer's block is always a very big risk. Sometimes the story works anyway. A lot of the time it veered towards not working at all. There are interesting elements--the writer's seeking the mass consciousness leading to unexpected consequences, the loss of identify of the dime and the dog. Overall if felt very forced, though. The bracketing telling us how this story was found kills the suspense and really clunks. The dialogue suffers from the "Amber effect," where the characters all pretty much talk alike, as if to make a point of telling us that hey, it's only a story, so don't get too caught up in us. And we don't. Ted isn't interesting. The Meme Keeper is a plot device. Ted's wife is a reference. The tension of the story is in the end of the world, but we already know that never happened, or we couldn't have found Ted's laptop, right?     There are bits and pieces of some really interesting ideas in there, but the overall sense is of a story the writer didn't much like. The repetitious use of the pics doesn't come across as thrifty or creative, just repetitious, to show us that they can be used more than once. (This could have worked well, in the contrast between the animated Pooch and the meme-struck Pooch, but it isn't convincing. The montage picture was just awful, and honestly I was sick of references to the same river shot.) I kept looking for more of those good ideas but found the story, and picture use, ultimately frustrating.      orchid blossom -      The characters here are interesting, if not terribly inspired (they honestly seem more like types than interesting, individual people; their interactions are slightly more interesting than they are). The world is--or could be--a good setting. The pictures are used well; I particularly like the use of Carlene's bag with its disparate elements. The main problem I had with this story is that it overexplains everything. We're repeatedly told things that are, or could be, obvious (the fact that electricity is rare, the wastefulness of gasoline). The characters don't know things they should so that somebody else can explain it to them, and us.     I was puzzled by the herbs throwing off the wolf. Has nobody done this before? Did the Mortician really think the sick woman crawled in and died all by herself?     I particularly liked the dynamic of the Retrievers going to get sturdy items for trade and sale, but again felt this element was over-explained. It's hard to walk that line between leaving the reader scratching his or her head and telling all, but that's the sweet spot a writer needs to hit.     My vote this round for orchid blossom, for an overall stronger story and far better use of pictures.     Winner for this round is [spoiler]Macbeth[/spoiler], who moves up to Round 3.</blockquote>

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