NeoGAF Creative Writing Challenge #197 - "Alchemy"

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A

Ashes

Banned
Hey jd entered. Nice.

Comments.

BearFlexington - zeitgeist. I fumbled on the last hurdle and had to trace my path back to the flyer. I'm guessing Americans will readily guess what happened. But I being a Brit, had to google to confirm my suspicion. Give the gift of hope indeed.

Cowlick - heretic. I didn't like the transitions; the unravelling of the plot was frustratingly slow; but I got caught up in the 'lie' from the antagonist's perspective, and liked the non-twist.

Mike M - There was something very familiar about the cast, and it was only when Arcismes the owl dropped in that the pin dropped. There's a bit between the wonderful first paragraph and where the dialogue starts that I had trouble digesting. To heavy handed with the prose perhaps. Dunno really.

Problem Attic - ha! we were just talking about convention in the writing thread. Not really sure why this isn't a script to be honest. [@cyan/flower: I'm not saying PA is wrong!]

Tangent - the gods were kinda dumb; like vampires in a certain teenage vampire novel level dumb. This threw me off but I stayed with it. The story is written well; maybe I am just the wrong audience.

Cyan - present tense shenanigans aside, this was some poetic coitus. I have to say I liked it. It's always nice to see different forms of storytelling or just writing as in this case.

JD - well that escalated quickly. That opening was too much. I couldn't see what I was supposed to get about the story from the opening.

Nezumi - I learned a new word! A solid effort that was nicely thought out. I hope we get another story from the Apprentice.

MC - the natural rythym was off for me from the second scene break on which made it hard to follow. Perhaps reading aloud will help me but that's for next time. As for the story itself, I thought it was interesting and engaging.

Flower - I liked all the little details speckled through out the piece. The middle portion went on a tad much, but I liked the piece overall.
 
M

mu cephei

Member
1. Problem Attic (I laughed for a good minute or so at the line "The dark prince may have a place in science, but it surely isn’t science held in a federal building.")
2. Nezumi
3. Mike M

I thoroughly enjoyed all the entries.
 
P

Problem Attic

Member
Good round everyone!

It's tough picking winners and even harder providing feedback, but here goes:

1 Nezumi – Lehrjahre
2 FlowersisBritish - Girl in the Chase
3 Ashes - The Lady in the Tree

BearFlexington - Separation Anxiety – I think you had an interesting idea, but you spent roughly a quarter of your story setting up the background for it which made everything else seem segmented and rushed. I’d have liked to see what this would have been with a higher word count. Also, this could use a second review since there were words missing.

Cowlick - Age Before Beauty– You add a lot of nice details and they really set up every element in your story. The ending was a little odd since it didn’t make much sense for a woman who has been around for a long time to just 187 a guy with a family and friends, who probably know where he is. I think you could have gone a little more out there (she’s a witch and can do witchy things?), but the details are great.

Mike M - Dubious Dealings – you have a very delicate way of writing, so from a technical standpoint this was enjoyable; each sentence is very smooth. I really appreciate what you do, but this story didn’t seem very creative to me; it just felt like something I have read before.

Problem Attic - Science Fair – okay, so this is what I would call a “popcorn story”. There’s nothing technical about it, and it’s just supposed to be a lot fun. I came up with the idea of doing a t.v. commentary piece a while ago, and maybe that idea isn’t super original, but I’ve never seen it in written form. I think the jokes might be a little cheap (because there’s no real character development behind them) but like I said, it’s a fun piece which makes fun of itself in that regard. Hopefully it reads like satire and it gives everyone a nice chuckle.

Tangent - Sitting on the Dock – I liked the emotion of your Gods in the middle and I wanted more of that; I think the conflict of the Gods gets lost here since it has to compete with the conflict of the guy and his kids. Also, I read the word “gray” three times in the first two sentences which slowed the pacing down a lot for me.

Cyan – Untitled – This was too deep for me so I’m not touching this one.

Ashes - The Lady in the Tree – First read, I didn’t care for this story too much, but it grew on me the second time around. I liked the theme, but I wanted more tension between the two characters, because they have this history and I think we could have been taken deeper into that. Otherwise, the second time through was a nice read, though the last line felt a bit forced due to the theme.

John Dunbar - In the Belly of the Behemoth – I thought you did a really good job with the dialog which made your characters stand out. I couldn’t help but question the motifs of all your characters, but that’s more a “me” thing than it is a knock against the story. The ending was nice as well.

Nezumi – Lehrjahre – I really liked reading this one. It had a fun title, the characters were enjoyable, the scenarios were entertaining. I think we the readers all kind of know someone who is oblivious in a certain way and it made your MC relatable. This story best accomplished the theme for me as well.

mu cephei – Enterprise – You took some risks with this story in the dialog of the two characters perspectives being expressed in multiple ways, which is commendable, but it didn’t quite come together for me. I liked that it was different, but I had to jump around in the story to connect it all and it was a little much.

FlowersisBritish - Girl in the Chase – I really think the song lyrics brought this story together for me. I don’t know if you built the story around them to begin with or just came up with them as you went, but they added depth in all the right places. There were a couple of sentences that were hard to read/understand, but I liked this overall.
 
C

Cowlick

Banned
Y'all are right -- there were a lot of standouts this round. This was tough. But I think I'm narrowing it down to...

1: Nezumi
2: Problem Attic
3: John Dunbar
 
M

Mike M

Nick N
  • BearFlexington: Do you have Scrivner set to automatically add a line after a paragraph? I know Word has that problem where it looks fine on the screen but cutting and pasting it into another format messes things up. Anyway, you had an intriguing concept at the core of this, but I don’t think the pieces came together quite right. For starters, I have great difficulty buying that he would have kept something like that secret from his wife until literally the day before he was going to go to prison for it, both for the logistics of being able to keep that a secret as well as the motivation. The moment we were told that most such cases with happy endings resolve with a dues ex machina, it was immediately apparent that was exactly what was going to happen. As for the actual solution itself, while something so insanely medically unethical might fit into a world in which this Farley Act exists, I was missing a scaffolding of supporting acts of cruelty that would have made it more believable in context.
  • Cowlick: By the bottom of page six, it was easy to see how this was going to all play out, and the rest was going through the motions for me. There was a part that seemed problematic to me: Lydia cites things like parking lots and climate change for moving away from the traditional ingredients of alchemy and spellwork and into cooking. But then in the last paragraph of page seven, she says that she’s been cooking for centuries. Even if she were actually speaking of the difficulties in obtaining a body for her work, what functional difference is there from getting one in the 1600’s versus the 1700’s? It’s not as though forensic science had made any leaps and bounds between then. Also, this line: “She taught me so much despite my age, but even that foundation was not enough.” Well, yeah. That’s why it’s a foundation. By definition it’s not the completed work. Something I’d have liked to have seen explored going off this premise is how an unaging celebrity would deal with or conceal their condition when they spend their entire life in so many facets of the public eye.
  • Mike M: During the sparsely attended Google Hangout last Sunday (The first time I show up in months!), the subject of how alchemy could be worked into a straight sci-fi story came up, and I pitched the idea that maybe the Philosopher’s Stone could be an entire planet. Yeah, I wish that was the story I wrote. This was everything I hate about high fantasy; torturous names, adventuring princes rescuing princesses, magic swords, stupid place names, etc. I tried to spin a bit of a twist at the end by having the presumed antagonist die, but in the process I stepped in every possible trope on the way there. These characters are great and fun to write for the purposes of satirizing fantasy stories, but this didn’t make it up that hill and just wallowed in the mudpit of fantasy drek for 2,500 words. Oh, and there’s not even a proper ending, either.
  • Problem Attic: The bit about the “gender transplant” was over the top enough on its own, let alone the subsequent complications added on to it. Even in a piece that was nothing but over the top lunacy, that particular paragraph was just way too much for me. That aside, my only comment would bet that when a single person speaks for more than one paragraph of dialogue,

    “All paragraphs have an opening quotation mark, but only the last one has a closing one.

    “Like this.”

    Other than that, extremely well done. Wow.
  • Tangent: It suddenly occurs to me that I don’t think I’ve read anything that takes place on Earth in the modern day that features a pantheon of original gods and not some preexisting ones resuited to the purpose. That really threw me, for some reason, I think because a detail like that opens up a pandora’s box of follow up questions, such as: Are these gods worshipped in this world? Do they not care about being worshipped? What are their thoughts on the gods that humans do worship? I know the word count is a harsh mistress, but I think even a single line about how these were gods that humans had never heard of and that they found human religion to be rather silly would have taken the rough edges off. I did like the patter between the three gods and appreciated that the “evil” god was less evil and more about pessimism and negativity, and was trying to help the guy in his own way. The deadpan delivery of the neutral god whispering in the guy’s ear about snacks was great.
    Why would interplanetary gods use our notation for coordinates?
  • Cyan: Not sure if poem or collection of run-on sentences in the style of internal unpunctuated monologue. I didn’t really get it, so I’m going to assume a poem.
  • Ashes: Hey, welcome back. I always dig it when you bring your skill at interpersonal back and forth dialogue with characters to something beyond people dealing with real problems. You really seemed to play up on that expectation of your usual fare, because for much of this it was normal people dealing with normal problems (one of whom happened to be a person of supernatural skill that she worried that she wasn’t very good at and didn’t ever seem to demonstrate), who go to a haunted house to declare that it’s not haunted. But then it’s all a feint leading up to the last scene where we see she’s not so bad at this after all, and that the house posed a genuine danger. Easily my favorite thing I’ve ever seen from you.
  • John Dunbar: The dialogue and dialect is the clear standout on this one, and I especially enjoyed the argument about metallurgy in the same sort of way I would enjoy watching a bird make threat displays to its reflection in the mirror. The momentum kind of peters out in the end, though. It feels like there should be a third scene to this showing the final consequences of Al’s actions, be it that the cartel or whomever gets to him, or that he lives the rest of his days in fear looking over his shoulder. Having him just drive off without knowing what happens next was pretty underwhelming for me.
  • Nezumi: Hubert seems a little dim to be apprenticing to something that is as presumably as complex as alchemy. This is like 3/4ths of a funny joke and is structured well with the part about the apprentices mirroring the part with their masters, but the bit about the salt in soup kind of fizzled as a punchline. I get to the end of this feeling like it’s building to a payoff that doesn’t actually come, but the road there was lovely.
  • mu cephei: I went to go look for a picture of Spaceship Guy from the Lego Movie. Then I watched the spaceship scene on YouTube. Then I watched various clips from the Lego Movie for about half an hour. Then I realized we don’t have a copy and ordered it on Amazon. I was halfway through lunch before I remembered that I was reading your story. Not really relevant, but I found it mildly amusing. This was a little disjointed from me. We went from a Soylent Green-esque revelation about the truth about space travel (though I’m still unclear how the people would be used as fuel that wouldn’t be more efficient if you skipped the whole growing and raising a person part), to them attempting travel with a substitute, only for them to be stranded thousands of years in the future and not really care. Indeed, they want to travel to the end of time, now? Their reaction to their situation was really odd to me.
  • FlowersisBritish: Yeah, you needed more time to edit this. Just on the first page alone I see three wrong word uses and at least one instance of a missing word : P The fact that we were cutting back and forth between the history of their relationship and a car chase managed to keep up the pace throughout the piece, but this didn’t really go anywhere. We knew Mitch was a selfish asshole from the outset, and he never really developed into anything else (hell, he didn’t even start as something else and develop into being a selfish asshole.). Marin just felt like the protagonist of every Dixie Chick song ever made. The whole thing felt like a country song; empowered woman ditching her shitty boyfriend getting revenge involving his pickup truck.

Votes:
Ashes
Problem Attic
Nezumi
 
M

mu cephei

Member
Mike M said:
mu cephei: I went to go look for a picture of Spaceship Guy from the Lego Movie. Then I watched the spaceship scene on YouTube. Then I watched various clips from the Lego Movie for about half an hour. Then I realized we don’t have a copy and ordered it on Amazon. I was halfway through lunch before I remembered that I was reading your story. Not really relevant, but I found it mildly amusing. This was a little disjointed from me. We went from a Soylent Green-esque revelation about the truth about space travel (though I’m still unclear how the people would be used as fuel that wouldn’t be more efficient if you skipped the whole growing and raising a person part), to them attempting travel with a substitute, only for them to be stranded thousands of years in the future and not really care. Indeed, they want to travel to the end of time, now? Their reaction to their situation was really odd to me.
Click to expand...

nRiwr95.jpg
Click to expand...

I think spaceship guy was probably my favourite thing about that film :)
 
F

FlowersisBritish

fleurs n'est pas britannique
Jeeeeez it feels like awhile since we've had a round this good!

1. Ashes
2. Problem Attic
3. Nezumi

hm: Tangent

Some critiques with a line or so that I really liked from each story.

Bear Flexington: I forgot debtor's prisons were things. Beginning was a little bit slow, but you had some interesting ideas in there. The aformentioned prison is a really good stressor to hang over the backdrop of the story, giving real risk to the MC actions. And I thought the ending was an interesting way to solve the problem, though now he has a bunch of medical bills of his own to contend with after this. "There aren’t a whole lot of moves left that aren’t stupid at this point."

Tangent: I really liked the idea of the "evil" god here being kind of a "good" guy in his own way. I dunno, I kinda got where he was coming from and thought it offered a neat spin on his character and the dynamic between the three. It played out well enough that I thought the emotional payoff at the end was really poignant. "Only a hundred or so horrific images from the last one hundred years of events on planet Earth. Zobe watched them and grew sober. Reff smirked. “Exactly. Exactly my good man.” Reff cackled and the wind picked up."

Mike M: I feel like I am reading a novel with these guys in piecemeal, and I am enjoying it. They're a fun trio to follow. I know you're not a fan of this one, but to the credit of how fun these characters were(since I know them already and have a bit of commitment to them) these brief kinda generic lull wasn't terrible. While I really like the characters, i feel the world could definitely use some building, like why the name of the sea, more about this city of alchemy, what's interesting about the place the prince came from? Still, I did enjoy a lot of parts of this. "To transmute base metal, certainly. But we’ve other formulas in Lamania, and the world be made of more than metal now, isn’t it?

Ashes: I'm with problem here. Last line felt forced and almost killed the story for me. Besides that, dug almost everything about this. Everything was interesting to read, and I really liked Jessica both the characters in this. It was all good forward momentum to that amazing joke and the lady in the tree. Your ending sequence was almost perfect if it weren't for that last bit. "There's no Ghost here, Mr Follett. There's no body buried beneath the living room floor. It's just your mind playing tricks on you. Shouldn't have murdered your wife in her sleep. Ha."

Mu Cephei: Didn't really get the com-log(was it?) entries and the purpose they served? I thought they'd lead to somewhere, but they didn't seem to. Your story certainly went some odd places, and I can appreciate the wackiness of the end even if I didn't really get how we got there. "Melah: we need a plan, this will make us, who do we tell, or not tell?"

Nezumi:Really fun to read, and I particularly love how we come to the Master's view of things. The Alchemy masters reaction was the perfect punchline. Honestly, of all the stories this week, I think yours was the one that really stuck the landing. "Did I mention he even borrowed one of his Granny's knitting needles? The look on his face when he tried to put the intestine over the needle without tearing it!"

Problem Attic: This was super god damn funny. I don't like your ending, felt like it was a forced ending for the sake of the word limit(which is fine, we all do that from time to time, but if you do something further with this, I'd recommend continuing to the conclusion of the fair.) Also i felt this would read better in a script format with the names to the side(sorta like Mu Cephei's odd dialogue moments.) Speaking of Mu Cephei, I agree with him, that one line really got me good. "The dark prince may have a place in science, but it surely isn’t science held in a federal building."

John Dunbar: Welcome back! I really liked how you interpreted the theme here. Also really liked the flaking skin, but I thought it would come back to some greater symbolic meaning(though it might have, and just went over my head(also love the bit where the medicine is what gave him away, really clever)) "She told me I gots nothin’ but lead. My whole life, it ain’t ever goin’ to be nothin’ but lead. I just wanted to have some gold, but that ain’t… that ain’t for the like of us."

Cowlick: Love the dark turn the interview immediately took with the 'burn house' thing. Kinda wish the rest of the interview was as neat. Alchemic theory is interesting, but that arson bit really got me interested in the story. Dialogue was strong, and I liked how the guy was constantly going 'bull' in his head, but... I dunno, we(the reader) know what she is saying is probs true, so not having the MC reflect that is a little frustrating. Also, i get the plan, but that guy must have bragged to EVERYBODY about this interview. Pretty easy to trace it back to her. "I dress how I want, I’ve had a car for as long as they’ve been invented, and the only way I’ll make monkeys fly is if I push them out of a plane without a parachute. Reality is much different from fantasy, Mr Golding."

Cyan: Short and sweet. Not really much here, but I thought the writing was strong at least. I'd use the last line, but I'd feel weird about quoting a fourth of your story :p
 
C

Cyan

Banned
1. Problem Attic - "Science Fair" - didn't stick the landing for me, but this was a joy to read anyway. I kept imagining the intonations of all the college football announcers I've ever heard and it just made it 100x better. What I really wanted out of the ending was for Mohammad's follow-up invention to really blow me away (probably because he gets that early mention, building my anticipation), and while it sounded cool-looking a lot of the earlier crazy scifi inventions were much more fun and had some in-depth effect.
2. Nezumi - "Lehrjahre" - I agree with Mike that the punchline doesn't entirely work, but the structure is just perfect, and you pack a lot into a really small space. I think what would've helped this for me is not feeling hit over the head with the kid being dumb. I was willing to fool myself that maybe the kid really was supposed to find this eggshell, but when he mentioned everyone laughing at him it was kind of a hand-tip.
3. FlowersisBritish - "Girl in the Chase" - I like that we hear at the start exactly what we're going to get--a punk-rock-girl revenge song. It's fun and I like the interweaving of the backstory and the sudden realization of what she's actually doing, which is hinted nicely with the station memory change at the start. The ending kind of sputtered. I wanted maybe a callback to the start or something like that (maybe the "girls can't drive" bit?), to round us off. Or whatever. As it was, it felt more like the engine just cut out of the story than the car coming to a deliberate stop.
 
R

Red

Member
1. Ashes
2. Problem Attic
3. Nezumi
hm. Cowlick

Enjoyed everything this time, well done everyone.

I guess that's everyone, right?
 
A

Ashes

Banned
1. Flowers
2. P A
3. Nez

It was close, but flower's story was the more rounded piece, and he landed his ending better, even if PA's was more entertaining. Hope we get more from Nez. Just really liked the central idea.

Comments. I provided crits - read provided feedback - this week. Hopefully it helps. If it's not helping you, just ignore it. It's more about adding to the views on offer than to actually critique.
 
P

Problem Attic

Member
Thanks so much everyone, I'm glad you all had as much fun reading it as I did writing it. Major credit to Nezumi though, that story was really good. Also, you all have a terrible, twisted sense of humor.

I'm going to look through the archives to make sure I don't double dip on a topic, hug my writing degree for finally finding a purpose for it, and then I'll post something in here shortly.
 
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