GotWoot Story Contest - Semi-Finals - Round 1

[Sapphire]

Semi-Finals Round 1.

Reminder: All participants in contest must vote! (Unless it's your round.)

Voters should give feedback to our young/seasoned authors~

[Janice]

Where the votes at?!

[Nadouku]

I can't view Uncharted Territory, Sapphy!

For this round, I voted on the updated A Live Arm and Melody of the Past.

A Live Arm: I can see that much effort has been put in to make the story even better. Of course, there are still some flaws... like this run-on sentence:

"I was a bit confused by his question, I mean, it was his dad that made this possible after all, didn’t he know about the experiment?"

Other than that, it was pretty sound, from start to finish. The arm incident remains me of a certain House episode, minus the murdering part.

Melody of the Past: Through the characters' eyes, I could feel their emotions, their pain. The highlight of the story was when Shien met his mother again. It was really good on how the author portrayed the event to the audience. Great imagery.

[Sapphire]

Next round starts 8/5/11. Hopefully I have computer issues fixed by then.

Uncharted Territory

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To everyone else:

Have you not voted yet? Vote.

[SeanW]

Hmm. Yeah, of this batch the strongest were Melody of the Past and A Live Arm.

Uncharted Territory is strangely pointless, except as a build-up to the last line, in which case it's just gimmicky. The whole big spiel about the preacher turns out to be one big red herring, plotwise; nothing whatsoever in it is important to the actual plot development that follows. On a technical note, the quotation marks are consistently misused throughout: multiple paragraphs that form a single quote should not end with a quote mark until the final paragraph. This distinguishes such an extended quote from a series of paragraphs each spoken by a different speaker. Since the story is largely a single quoted speech, this error smacks one in the face over and over and over. I mention this only because the overall grammar and spelling are otherwise fine (as with all the entries in this round).

17th Summer is the same as before, and it's still only a chapter in a longer work, not a story in its own right. The writing is fine (though it's still missing an "of" in the first clause of the first sentence).

Not much to say about Melody; it's a good little story. Like most of these stories, it's a bit overpadded and wordy. Here's an example:

By the time the sun began to set, I was weighing the merits of finding a place to sleep or pressing through overnight to put more distance between us and the only home we'd known for the past 10 years.

That last bit, "the only home...", doesn't belong in this sentence; it's a good fact to throw in but not right here. The whole piece could benefit hugely from more of a taut, lean style. But the story itself is good.

I'm not sure Live Arm really benefited from the additions, except to give a little more motive for the tensions between the narrator and Steve. It still suffers from an excess of sports jargon, at least from a general reader's perspective (one who doesn't read Sports Illustrated); I know perfectly well what performance enhancing drugs are, but I don't recall coming across "PED" often enough to know what it meant without looking it up. And what the hell is a "batterymate"? And who's Michelle? I thought her name was Casca. It's not a bad story, technically, but it's not to my taste.