Short Story Contest! [DISCUSSION THREAD]

Why do you assume I can think of really funny jokes.

Stop kissing my ass, I'm not giving you money. :frown:
 
Finally posted! Sulk, it would be a shame if you didn't grace us with an entry!
 
Good read Rimfire. Not sure I completely understand it in terms of pathetic fallacy though, but I've never been brilliant at it.
 
I like some of the entries we have. I was reluctant to show mine because it was simply SO LONG. Which is what she said.

I am not sure if it is worth the reading, but time tells. Keep going, lads.
 
AAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH I DON'T HAVE ENOUGH TIME TO FINISH MINE BECAUSE I'M LEAVING REALLY SOON. A DEADLINE EXTENSION WOULD BE REALLY COOL RIGHT NOW (YEAH, I KNOW I DON'T HAVE ANY ONE TO BLAME BUT MYSELF) BUT I'LL POST WHAT I HAVE AND FINISH IT BRIGHT AND EARLY ON SUNDAY IF THE CONTEST IS STILL OPEN ****.
 
well, I just want to say that my 2nd idea didn't really work out :(
 
Sulk that was a good read, but such a blunt closing statement seemed out of place with the rest of the story. I don't know if that was the point.

Sheepo you **** why did you make me read an unfinished story!?
 
I know, and it's sloppy as shit, and I'm really confused by sulk now, and you should've read the post in this thread before you started it, and ************
 
If you have access to the internet now you can finish it now!
 
I hammered out a little more (it's not in the actual post) but I won't have near enough time to finish until tomorrow or late tonight. But no rush anynore, I guess.
 
I got up this morning thinking 'alright, now with school behind me for now, I'll have all of Saturday to finish.'

And then I realised GB is 8 hours ahead of Vancouver.

And then I realised I had 5 hours.

And then I cried.
 
I wonder if I'll even be awake at that time on Sunday? I might just get in an early night and close it in the morning, especially since many posters are on American time zones. Hell, I don't even know what I'll do. Me, I'm unpredictable like that. I'm wild. Sometimes I surprise even myself.

EDIT: Maybe I'm missing something but some posts read like they're expecting the deadline to fall at midnight tonight. That's not the case since I'm pretty sure the entry thread "Midnight on the 20th September", which is midnight tomorrow. I've always tried to make them dates like that so that people can use weekends to finish. Any previous statements to the contrary are, um, mistakes.
 
I'LL DO MY BEST MOM.

LOVE,

JANE B.

P.S. You need to be clearer on such things. Like 0:01 on Monday. 0:00 can go both ways.
 
Double post time.

I'm going to hold off criticism of my own (because I've got a lot) until people have had the chance to read it. It is with regrettable inevitability that there will be something in it that makes no bloody sense, due to extensive revisions (almost an entire rewrite at one point) and a complete lackluster amount of editing. This is also my insufficient excuse for some parts being silly.

If it gets enough favourable reviews I'll do a proper chop job and smooth it out to the way I like it. For now, it's pretty patchy.

Also; formatting failll. Wish we could use html text formatting in this forum.
 
I quite enjoyed it actually Viper. I didn't notice much overt Pathetic Fallacy and didn't go through it deeply but I liked it.
 
Oh, is that the time?

Entry thread is hereby closed and thanks to all that entered! Voting will begin shortly.
 
Done.

Is it okay with everyone if voting is done via PM? Both polls and 'voting threads' allow people to be aware of what is winning at the point when they vote. I'd rather they voted purely on the basis of what they thought was best, rather than having an awareness that their vote might be a tiebreaker or something.

My only worry with this is that people would be suspicious of me taking in all the votes in secret and counting them up. You could put your choice in your subject line so I can take a screenshot of all the votes. Or you could just, um, trust me.
 
Man, if you really wanted to change the votes you could shoop that screenshot no problem.

I'll trust your honesty since there's not really even a good reason to report falsely.
 
Well if Sulkdodds fakes it when the people who voted read the damn post they can see if he's lying.
 
Sucks. Our uni had a writing group on facebook which has about 18 members in it, all writers. I started a competition like this but with the topic of anthropomorphism, and no one's taking any notice of it, the group is basically dead :(.
 
ríomhaire said:
Well if Sulkdodds fakes it when the people who voted read the damn post they can see if he's lying.
Click to expand...

You're forgetting that every one who submitted an entry is just one of Sulk's many extra accounts.
 
What? Anthropomorphism falls under the category of pathetic fallacy too.
 
I enjoyed Viper's story very much, especially the end, the images of burn and erasure (even though I'm not sure I agree with the message they imply). But like Dek I was unsure, apart from at specific points, where pathetic fallacy came in. Perhaps it was the point of the protagonist's perspective that he looked at a big library building or felt the weather and did not reify them but instead counted the number of pillars and observed the air pressure. This is my current assumption: that moments of fallacy are deliberately suppressed, though flare out at times.

I'd be very chuffed to see people posting appraisments of each other's stories, actually. eg Riomhaire hello
 
I'll have a go at critiquing someone's story, but let me just say that I just found the indentation tool here.
damnit.​
Hmm... I don't like how it adds indentation above and below too. Is there a way of doing it without vertical spacing?
 
A Slug's Rebirth by lame-o
I'm sorry lame-o but I think this is my least favourite story of the bunch (one of them had to be) and it really pains me to say that to a guy with Space Ghost as his avatar. I think it's just your narrator. I didn't like him. I also couldn't escape the notion that his epiphany seems somewhat hollow. There's a voice in the back of my head going saying that nothing will change, all that happened is you got wet. It makes the story totally hollow and doesn't help me like the narrator any more


Buses by Farrowlesparrow
Short and sweet. I don't really understand it but I enjoyed reading it. Why is he banned anyway?


Pathetic Phallusy by dekstar
The pathetic fallacy here is just that everything in his life is crappy and ordinary, yes? He's in midlife crisis mode and the world is doing to best it can to make it worse. The male half of my story is the same idea, sort of. John is pretty hopelessly likeable, conforming greatly to the midlife crisis stereotype, which only makes his snapping more amusing. Thumbs up.


Hypertree by Sulkdodds
A lovely and interesting read. I only have two complaints. The story starts off fine. There's the introductory paragraph describing Santiago getting up and seeing to the work being done in his house. This paragraph makes perfect sense, for the first two sections of the story. IIRC the narrator suddenly becomes a character in the third section. I have no problem with the narrator not just being an omniscient voice, but I had to suddenly readjust my view on the whole story. It also causes the introduction to make no sense at all. Particularly when you add the line "but Don Santiago paid no attention to these details." How exactly did the good doctor learn of them then? I got the distinct impression while reading that you originally planned the narrator to be omniscient but decided to make him a character half way through.

My second complaint is the closing line. It didn't just seem blunt, but in light of the previous romantic story (which contains such things as Santiago's health declining with his reputation and the obvious symbolism of the boy knocking the girl up under the tree) it just seemed mean-spirited. Almost like a dig at the reader. "Ha ha, you felt sorry for a tree." I can't tell how you intended it, but that's certainly how it came across to me. Put a damper on an otherwise delightful story.


Bookes by Viperidae
I was often told "write what you know" in English class and Viperidae (whose name I had previously read of Viperaide and is how I always pronounce it in my head) either knows quite a bit about old manuscripts or is a magnificent bullshitter. It's a very interesting story, though aspects of pathetic fallacy in it seem somewhat tagged on, and to be honest I'm not really sure what the snow is supposed to represent. Maybe I'm just not clever enough for this story.


Housebroken by Corp. Sheepo
It was all good up until the third paragraph. I'm afraid you lost me with the banana and the second man and the house burning down. I don't really feel fit to comment on it seeing as I have no idea what happened in the last few parts.
 
All the pathetic fallacy in my story was meant to point to John having a small penis :p.
 
The banana had absolutely no significance for the story or the pathetic fallacy and I now completely regret its conclusion.
 
It's not that banana I'm questioning, it's that I failed to understand anything that was going on after the banana appeared.
 
i agree with what you said about my story riomhaire, it really sucks that i couldn't think of a better one... i had one coming but it took me way too long to get anywhere with it so i had to scrap it. anyways, i'm gonna try to write something epicly awesome for the next contest. D:
 
Okay, well can you confirm my belief that pathetic fallacy is pretty just an extended metaphor where the literal conflict represents another conflict entirely? That's pretty much what I based my entry off of. If the answer is yes, then I will write a brief explanation of what the hell I was trying to do with my story that I didn't really take the time to edit and didn't have the time to write properly.
 
It's primarily to do with ascribing human characteristics to non human things, to ascribing human sympathy and human meaning to inanimate objects or phenomena. There's a large cross-over with 'externalities reflect internalities' or vice versa. A subtype of what you describe.

I'll be counting up the votes a bit later tonight, before I go to bed. This may be quite late indeed.

First off, Riomhaire, cheers for your comments!

Riomhaire said:
I only have two complaints. The story starts off fine. There's the introductory paragraph describing Santiago getting up and seeing to the work being done in his house. This paragraph makes perfect sense, for the first two sections of the story. IIRC the narrator suddenly becomes a character in the third section. I have no problem with the narrator not just being an omniscient voice, but I had to suddenly readjust my view on the whole story. It also causes the introduction to make no sense at all. Particularly when you add the line "but Don Santiago paid no attention to these details." How exactly did the good doctor learn of them then? I got the distinct impression while reading that you originally planned the narrator to be omniscient but decided to make him a character half way through.
Click to expand...
Aha! Very well spotted. I had not originally planned the narrator be such an active character, although I had planned his conversation under the stars with Don Santiago (or would that be two characters who the narrator commented on? I can't remember...). Details such as this certainly slipped my mind. But I am not sure they are important; if anything they suggest that the narrator was exaggerating things, and making up details, while he told the story. The reason I wanted to have the narrator slowly become a person: so that over the course of the story it became clear that everything said was not viewed objectively by an omniscient eye, but rather, related with bias by a human being. Any meaning he inscribes in events, any detail he includes, comes from him or from other people, not from the universe itself. I'm not sure this worked if it was as jarring as you describe. I intended that he slowly emerge from the text.

Riomhaire said:
My second complaint is the closing line. It didn't just seem blunt, but in light of the previous romantic story (which contains such things as Santiago's health declining with his reputation and the obvious symbolism of the boy knocking the girl up under the tree) it just seemed mean-spirited. Almost like a dig at the reader. "Ha ha, you felt sorry for a tree." I can't tell how you intended it, but that's certainly how it came across to me. Put a damper on an otherwise delightful story.
Click to expand...
Aww, I did want it to be mean-spirited but not as an insult to the reader; more as a sudden drop, with the meanness directed towards all people everywhere. My main concern was actually that it was too obvious, too blatant, that it didn't need to be said, that the reader would get the drop anyway. But it was intended as a sucker punch, so I decided to be as blunt as possible.


Riomhaire said:
It's a very interesting story, though aspects of pathetic fallacy in it seem somewhat tagged on, and to be honest I'm not really sure what the snow is supposed to represent. Maybe I'm just not clever enough for this story.
Click to expand...
The snow looks like pieces of newspaper being burned away to nothing, so I reckon it's about the erasure of texts, the vanishing of information, the ruin of physical artefacts of literature. There are a few other images to this effect: the protagonist's vision of the library crumbling and burning, his observation that "you won't even have to go to Spain" and the early version of the last line, now deleted, which described "the beautiful library receding into the distance" (or something like that). That's why my description of Viper's story in the Lounge thread ("I dreamt of a scanner...") is a nightmare picture of a swallowing mouth. As far as I can see the story is about loss, specifically about losing the romance of the physical artefact (I personaly disagree; the artefact isn't going anywhere). It's told from a perspective that doesn't appreciate the significance of that loss.
 
Well, based on that viewpoint I suppose the Sun would be the most potent symbol in my story, though it was only ever supposed to complement the house. So basically, my story is about a man who has been emotionally destroyed (the details are unimportant) and to cope with the reality of this situation he constructed a superficial structure (a house of cards, if you will). The house represents the all the denial he has which is made out of the three components of his routine (recalling a distorted past, focusing on trivial luxuries, and burying himself in his work). The Sun really doesn't represent much of anything by itself, it's only used to chracterize the man as being afraid of conflict, beauty, and passion. Now, I think the most flawed part of the metaphor is the old man. The meddler, the instigator, the driving force of the plot. The problem is it just doesn't fit, really. You could interpret it yourself, maybe it's his memories, his subconscious, some sort of epiphany. So the rest of the story is basically him falling out of his routine and is gradually beginning to come to terms with the truth of the matter. The final scene ends his last emotional connection, the love for his dog, and the shock of it brought the reality of the other losses to him. The house bursts into flame as the entire house of cards is falling down. By the way, the whole house of cards thing is only to set up a lame and pretty relevant reference:

Arkham3.jpg


So anyway, the apartment obviously represents acceptance and new beginnings. That's all folks.
 
AND THE WINNER IS...
drumroll
Viperidae, with Bookes

applause.gif


Shit was tight...um, I mean, the results were very close, with all authors receiving at least one vote. Here's the breakdown, anonymised:

  • Lame-O, 1 vote
  • Dekstar, 2 votes
  • Riomhaire, 1 vote
  • FarrowleSparrow, 1 vote
  • Sulkdodds, 2 votes
  • Viperidae, 3 votes
  • Sheepo, 1 vote.
Viperidae will soon receive a custom title of his choice. Meanwhile, a new contest will be announced quite shortly as I already know what precise topic I would like to do. Thank you to everyone who participated and who voted!
 
Congrats Viper, good work everyone. I read them all, though I declined to vote.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

-smash-
Valve at GDC 2019
Replies
0
Views
25K
-smash-
-smash-
MFL
Fascinating look at the ongoing psychological evolution of flat hieirarchies.
Replies
2
Views
2K
Tollbooth Willie
Tollbooth Willie
Omnomnick
Dota 2 Short Film Contest 2016 Announced
Replies
0
Views
3K
Omnomnick
Omnomnick
B
Marc Laidlaw releases Half-Life 2: Episode Three's plot
Replies
32
Views
39K
BabyHeadCrab
BabyHeadCrab
B
Valve artist Drew Wolf's new website reveals Team Fortress 2's female cast and more
Replies
0
Views
60K
Barnz
B
Back
Top