Okay, a few notes on the judgement. I do want to thank Wicht for an honest and measured approach to judging. This isn't a defense, but rather my own thoughts on ingredient usage and such - if only for future contestants. (and he didn't even mention the entry's definite need for editing - woo hoo!)
The widowed portion of the daughter ingredient was something I was trying to bring in as an active portion of the adventure for the PCs to perform. It is quite possible they will kill him thinking he is the evil wizard, either during the day in the lab or at the pool in the evening.
The breathtaking view was a lousy use IMO, but it fit with the element that tied everything together for me: the catoblepas. But they don't really need to take breath with their gaze or and mine not needing to come into play was poor design on my part.
Typically, in the past most of my entries were very decidedly attempts to tie every single element of the 12 ingredients together. And it cost me, I think, because my adventure was routinely bad afterwards. This time I decided to skip the long knot tying process and take pleasure in crafting something in the form I liked. As to the wonky, sing-song start? I can only claim it was fun when I wrote it.
My usual take on ingredient use is the Vaxalon approach. Specifically, if a reader can simply take out or replace any portion of the ingredient without changing the adventure, it doesn't qualify. That's hard. I thought a good while about using a merMAID as a widow who in fact is still married and in the end just tried to blur the lines. For me, the catoblepas again was why most ingredients had to be as they were: the rabbit ears, the mermaid tail, the widow in sorrow. It was the "click" point for me. But my efforts kind of suck when I take this approach mainly because of the 24 hour time limit, not to mention the word limit is no longer 500 (back when it was only 1 hour). More than some knot tying is really required now.
In the end, I think 2 days and only 2000 words were really both advantages to me. I didn't feel the word crunch at all, but the time limit was still a significant pressure, though much less thankfully.
Again, I appreciate the judgement, I know they aren't easy either. This is all more thoughts on my process than anything else.
