NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 1336185" data-attributes="member: 2">Berandor, thank you for analysis! The more constructive criticism the better, I think; feel free to "spoiler" it until judging is done, but I know I can't improve unless people tell me what they don't like about things I write.Interesting confession: what you just read wasn't my original story.My original story - the one I worked on for two and a half days before making the hard call - was a horror tale called "Keepsakes and Souvenirs" that was hoping to be halfway in tone between Lovecraft and Steven King. It was about a little kid who has to go live with his grandmother, and finds out the hard way that she's a serial killer who worships dark powers and grows insanities like secret fruit. It was meant to be tragic.  It had some interesting picture use: one doll head for every person she'd devoured, the "grip" photo as they fought rigor mortus while laying the dead mother's hands against her chest, the frost photo as the boy lay on the cold ground and listened to his shallow grave being dug nearby. I couldn't get it to work, though. I was having trouble keeping to an 11 year old voice, and it would have taken me too long to write before I could get the effect I was aiming for. Last night at dinnertime I finally bit the bullet and started over with my actual entry, writing it in about five hours. The heaving breasts got discarded in the change, although I tried to allude to a throbbing member just on general principle.  Doing this taught me a tremendous amount - mainly that I need more practice writing! But it also showed me that I'm a faster writer when I'm having fun with the story itself. When I'm having fun, the words begin to leap out of me like a greased salmon from a clumsy bear. In comparison, I was trying to drag "Keepsakes" out of me with a tractor pull, and it was painful and not very satisfying.  Switching gears was just what I needed.I'll wait to discuss the qualitative aspects of Sialia's and my stories until after the judging. Lets just say that I'm stealing the mindflayer amalgam for a D&D game.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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