ThLunarian: Had me smiling like a loon the whole time, though it really put the lie to the fact that my D&D characters are suuuuuper goofy and cringe worthy when divorced from their context. Plus, if you ever got around to reading the book I gave you, you’d realize just how unoriginal Val really is : P
For those that are curious/not understanding of Lunarian’s story: I guess you could say we’re both part of a GAF D&D (Well, technically mostly Pathfinder at this point) troupe over in the barren wastes of the Community Forum. We’ve just completed our second play-by-post campaign, each of which have successfully completed from start to finish with a beginning, middle, ending, and everything. They’ll each run you about as long as novel or so (Though there’s a lot of back channel stuff you can just skip over). Most of these characters were brain children of those expeditions. You can read
Quest For the Holy Relics here, and the pseudo-sequel follow-up,
Excalibur here. None of it is my finest hour (I didn’t dedicate as much to refining my contributions as I do to Creative Writing Challenge), but some of the characters are among my favorite that I’ve ever conceived of. It’s me reveling in all the high fantasy tropes I usually poo-poo, but it’s also what got me into creative writing to begin with. Some of my guilty pleasure favorite stories that I’ve written are in there, especially if you manage to stick it out to the end of each campaign : P
Chainsawkitten: Man, when you decide to go outside the lines on your presentation, it almost never fails to impress. That is perhaps the most impressive streak of alliteration I’ve ever beheld, calling to mind (though perhaps not quite as impressive a feat) of that time Cyan wrote and entire story without using the letter “e.” I also really dug the photo composite, the B&W is bleak and reminiscent of the Gashlycrumb Tinies for me. Quite suitable for the subject matter, apparently.
Cyan: Fun fact: I went back to my hometown of Fresno, California to attend my cousin’s wedding a couple weeks ago, and the nickel arcade (where you’d pay an entry fee and then all the credits were only 5 cents) was still around! I didn’t have time to actually go inside and see if they were up to date on their games, but I was impressed that they were still around. Hell, I was impressed that many of the establishments were still around, Fresno always seemed on the brink of collapse when I lived there. I thought for sure that the economic crisis would have done them in, but I guess they survived because they were already at rock bottom? But then just this week, my favorite restaurant down there shut their doors. I should have gone while I had the chance : ( Where was I going with this? I don’t even know anymore. Nice usage of “I’m the goddamn Batman” and finding a way to slip in a “My parents are dead!” bitch slap. Very much in keeping with the terrible, awful, execrable “Legends of Batman” source material. You should probably feel some sense of shame about that. Heh.
Zeitgeister: Read all of this with Arleen Sorkin’s voice in my head. That had the curious side-effect of making some of the Joker’s dialog seem a bit more highbrow than he ever got in the cartoon, which is no fault of yours since it was still in keeping with how he gets on in the comics, where Harley exists as well (even though they keep doing their best to ruin her…
. The part about the Joker getting upset about Harley stealing his thunder hews a bit close to Mad Love, but the concept of “What does Batman do if there’s no Joker?” is an interesting one that I don’t thiiiiink has been explored that much in the fiction (Despite appearances, I’m a pretty terrible Batman fan who actually reads very little Batman). As a reversal of this premise, there was a story arc some decades ago (I don’t remember what year or what it was called. Terrible Batman fan, remember?) where the Joker thought he had killed Batman and decided he could stop and try and live a normal life. But then it turned out that Batman was just recovering from being nearly killed, and when he came back the Joker was upset that he had to go back to being the Joker again. It was a surprisingly empathetic read, in the end you really felt for Joker’s girlfriend. Wish I could remember what it was called/narrow my Google search to find it, it’s totally worth reading.
Rock and Roll: I jumped on the Creative Writing Challenge train in January of 2012 thinking that it was going to be one of those things I get all excited about, but then get discouraged and quit because I’m not good enough. Now I’m going into the third year of this stuff, and I’ve only had to step out for one challenge in that whole time. This shit’s habit forming : P Anyway, I totally did not see the twist of the identity of the narrator coming (Really should have, given the two Jennifer thing), so that was well played in my book. I think the chronology could have used a little reordering, as you have a whole paragraph summarizing his entire life before moving to California, but then you rewind back to high school and go from there in the next. That was a little disjointed. I was also a bit confused by the litany of jobs he worked; I get that these were his major roles, but the way they’re worded I can’t tell if he’s being delusional and think that they actually occurred (a possibility, given the ending), or if you were just trying to be coy about not letting on that they were in fact movie roles. I didn’t go for the ending, honestly. I thought the framing was clever enough on its own without needing to take a leap that far, no need to oversell it.
Azih: At first I was reading this and thinking, “Wow, this reminds me of the kid who got caned in Singapore for graffiti,” and then you drop the mention of the guy getting caned. I’m not sure where exactly this is supposed to be happening, but that forever left an indelible impression of it being Singapore, so it colored my imagination of the events being described, but then we get the reveal at the end that his name is Arabic (I think?). So I guess this is more likely to be Dubai or something? Dude went on a hell of a bender for his birthday, I’ll say that much! I’m not sure how much the punch line really paid off here, as I never really got the impression that this was supposed to be a comedic piece, and even at the end it didn’t elicit anything more than a smirk from me. A smackhead steals a bank card, robs a snooker den, gets caught in a drug den. These are the sort of things that actually happen, and honestly seem more tragic than funny most of the time. For a comedic piece, I would have appreciated maybe another couple notches of ridiculousness beyond what happened here as the guy keeps upping the ante. Apropos of nothing, this is the second time I’ve heard of this game “Snooker” on GAF in like a week, despite having never actually heard of it before. Weird.
Mike M: This was the subject of a small revelation for me. I brought this to my writing group last week, and we had a new member who used to be an editor for a literary magazine who told me that she liked my style, but would have sent me a polite rejection if I had submitted this because there were no stakes in play, making it more of a vignette than a fleshed out story (I subsequently went back and added the bit about Robin fearing that Brad would not pull it off and ruin Madison’s birthday to at least
attempt to mitigate this). I super appreciated this critique, however, because she articulated exactly what had been lurking in the back of my mind that I considered to be a problem with the story, but was unable to figure out on my own. I’ve often found that “slice of life” stories such as this don’t exactly thrill me, and even when they’re well-written they usually don’t get my top vote (there are exceptions of course), and I don’t particularly enjoy writing them that much (again, with exceptions). And I think it’s the fact that there’s usually nothing at stake is exactly why. I enjoy reading and writing funny, snappy dialogue, but if there’s no fail state, there’s no tension. Without tension, all you have is slack that never really goes anywhere. I don’t know if I would say I succeeded in “fixing” the story entirely by bolting on the possibility that Brad might fail, but I think I at least improved it.
Tangent: I tend to agree with Nezumi that there was something about this that rubbed me the wrong way, but I think I’m a little more able to put a name to my pain
and it is Batman. Right from the outset, we have a five year old with an au pair having a birthday party with black bean patties. Right off the bat, that paints him as not only coming from money, but preachy vegetarian money, and makes him hard for me to relate to. Granted, the fact that the kid’s parents are obviously well-to-do is no fault of his own, but I was kind of put out of sorts right from the start with that bit. The eventual plight of the mother seems like a shameless ploy to play on our sympathies and make them not appear like heartless monsters for forgetting their kid’s birthday, but if anything had the opposite effect for me and just highlighted how self absorbed and not vested in their child they are. Not that I don’t sympathize with them, but even when the shit is hitting the fan, you keep track of your damn kid. Or at the very least if you can’t be bothered to get in touch with someone you pay to raise your kid for you to tell them that something is wrong and you won’t be home until late, hire one smart enough to figure out how to make an outgoing call if it’s abundantly clear that something is wrong instead of just staring at her phone like a fucktard waiting for you to call them. Candace’s inaction is just baffling and adds to the whole anger pie I’ve got baking at this whole family. Grrr, now I gotta go punch something.
Charade: Technically sound, but perhaps not as much structurally speaking. I found myself wondering why this hermit was so obsessed with conversation while preferring to live as a hermit, but ultimately the revelation of his crime explained that and left me satisfied. What I’m less satisfied with is Luke’s behavior, or at least I am in the absence of larger context. There’s nothing in the story to suggest that he’s anything but a lone operator vigilante Nazi-hunter, which begs the question of what resources were available to him to locate and identify the hermit that had not been available to, say, Israel’s ongoing efforts. Or are we to assume that he was working under the direction of Israeli or other governmental forces? In which case, why on
earth would he even allow the opportunity for Joachim to point a gun at him? Why is he alone? Why is he on a kill mission instead of capture and rendition? It’s nice and dramatic, but the second you shine the
Batsignal spotlight of logic on it and ask to justify why these events are playing out as they are, it doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny. But the individual components of the dialog, the pacing, the reveal, etc. are good stuff.
Sober: I guess I don’t see what’s so wrong with the actual story of how they met that they couldn’t just tell it straight up? Lord knows it’s a far more interesting story than the one they’re making up about meeting over finding the Zombie Survival Guide in the humor section (is it seriously filed under humor?). The back and forth as they made stuff up was reflective of their original meeting where they were just improving stuff on the fly to impress her ex-boyfriend, but what they were making up was full of the trivial and banal details that make listening to these sorts of stories from people absolutely insufferable to experience. Reminds me of listening to a retelling of something from my sister in law who just forever circles the point and never gets to it, it just drives me batty. In this case, it seems even worse, because there doesn’t seem to be a point to get to. “How did you guys meet?” “We met in a bookstore.” There, question answered, even if you made it up. I don’t care what section. I don’t care what book. I don’t care if they served coffee. I don’t care that you’ve never had the coffee. I don’t care that the coffee is terrible. We’ve already established how you met. Why are you still talking? Why? Oh god, how can I extricate myself from this conversation? *Screams and flings self out the nearest open window.* Now if you want to tell me the story about how you were both faking being in a relationship to get one over on your exes, *that* is something that is interesting and worth elaborating on.
Ashes: Felt weirdly abbreviated to me, which is odd because I reread it and it’s really not. You just seem to cover an awful lot of ground, but not all of it gets equal shrift, so the end result feels like oscillating between time dilation and contraction. When he started going on about how he enjoyed dominating her, I thought we were trending into some sort of enumerated shades of monochrome, but then he realizes that he’s being kind of rapey, pulls up short, and then he’s back in awkward territory. So much building for what felt like no pay off for me; the story ends teetering on a precipice and could fall either way, but we don’t get to find out until the following morning that never comes. But this is probably just me being a speculative fiction guy who’s never satisfied with anything.
FlowersisBritish: Wow, you, uh… You really cranked it all the way up to 11 and then some right out the gate, didn’t you? I feel like this what reading stories about birthdays must be like when you’re hopped up on speed or something. I got the feeling that it was going to go off in a different direction than it did, as I found it evocative of… I’m not sure what you’d call it, but I’m going to go ahead and term it hyper-caffeinated horror? Druggie horror? The sort of setup where someone’s altered perceptions of reality overwrite conventional reality? I was thinking/hoping Man-Bat was some sort of horrible hallucination that was going to kill this strung out little eight year old addict, but that turned out not to be the case. Which is a shame, because I think that left the end result as just an endless string of attempts at shock humor to show how edgy this kid was or something.
timetokill: Oh god, sportsball… My one weakness! Well no, actually I have quite a lot of weaknesses, not least among them cookies and redheads. Anyway… Tonally, I thought this was a bit scattershot. It starts off on kind of an earnest and heartfelt thing, but then when he grabs the bat we deviate into a farcical parody of The Natural for a few moments. Then it levels out and becomes slightly more grounded for a little bit, then it just drops the fact that they won with a callous disregard for Wilbur’s feelings on the matter (though while Azih found that mean-spirited, it got a guffaw out of me). Love the interpretation of the secondary objective, but the implementation primary theme almost seemed like an afterthought.
Nezumi: As per usual, you’ve got the cadence of a fairy tale/fable down pat. The actual story reminds me greatly of an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force where there was a genie that wouldn’t grant any wishes either, or maybe some other story that featured a capering goat : ) I was kind of surprised at the turn this one took towards the end, though, as I didn’t get any sense of motivation from Sosaran during his conversation with Saramun as to why he would undertake what essentially amounted to an elaborate long con to ruin his brother without provocation. Up until that point I thought I was reading something that was going to be wryly comedic or cute, but then it’s suddenly fratricide… Not that I mind violence, it was just… Unexpected for me.
Croll: I e-mail my kid at major milestones and noteworthy events like a goober, so this resonated with me (up until the end, but I’ll get to that in a moment). Course I’ve been a lot more on top of it than once every five years : P The last letter kind of threw me for a loop, though, and I’m not sure how I’m supposed to interpret it. “How is my grandkid doing? Have you decided on a name yet?...When are you gonna bring the little guy over for a visit?” Are we to take it that Jessie has not even shown his father his own kid, but that his kid doesn’t even have a name yet? How often does a baby go without being named for more than, what, a day? So now I’m left where I can’t decide if this is just ungainly writing, or if it’s supposed to be some sort of example about how Jessie and his father have drifted so far apart over the years it’s at the point where Jessie hasn’t even bothered to tell his own father the name of his child. That sort of distance doesn’t just happen naturally without some sort of precipitating event causing such a rift, but there’s no evidence of anything provided here. The prospect of losing my kid to that degree is frankly pretty terrifying.
Ward: Pretty clear from the outset that it’s not going to actually be Batman, what with Batman’s “no killing” code and the highly relevant fact that he recognizes the need to maintain the Bruce Wayne persona to fund his crime fighting shenanigans. I felt lost at the transition to the mental hospital, however; I was unclear if that’s just where he wound up after a while (his justifications for riding a bicycle and not having his cape and all would seem to fit the theory that he actually went and did this sort of thing in the real world), or if it was all a delusion while he was punching out Charlie in the rec room of the mental hospital. Also, he’s pretty clearly violent if he’s punching guys out for playing checkers, which makes the comment that he’s mostly harmless an odd one.
