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Message: <blockquote data-quote="carpedavid" data-source="post: 1662537" data-attributes="member: 6971">Berandor & BSF, thank you for the critique. In my comments below, I'll touch on some of the things you pointed out. I figured out very early on that I had a Lovecraftian tale on my hands, and, at that point, chose to use one of the formulae common to this type of story: 1. Academics set out to explore an exotic location.2. Upon arriving in said location, they discover "things that should not be."3. On the journey home, the narrator loses any ability to verify the discovery, which may take the form of (usually a combination of):a. losing any physical evidence the group may have securedb. losing all of his adventuring companionsc. suffering some sort of trauma4. Once home, the narrator convinces himself that the events never took place.5. The narrator then uncovers some form of evidence that proves the events were real. I think I managed to successfully fulfill all but point number 4, which I believe is the reason Berandor felt that the ending wasn't as effective as it could be. After I posted the entry last night, I realized that I should have restructured the framing story to stress the narrator's doubts about the version of events at the beginning of the story. As it was, I really only made this point clear at the very end, so the tension of "Is it real? Is it not?" only lasted for a few lines. *Sigh*, I guess that's what I get for posting a first draft. Oh! I almost forgot. BSF - I *did* initially attempt to write the story in verse form, but only got as far as the midpoint of the introduction before realizing I would need ten times as long as I had in order to write it in that form. It's a darn shame, really <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification