(Winter Writing Contest) Reviews

Grammar: Good

Story Flow: Solid flow- kept a certain pace a la detective novels with the whole stream of consciousness to it. There was a point where it all "cooled" over and became a bit of a drag (will discuss further).

Topical/Theme: Yes. Since the topic was "Cold" it certainly fit in with the whole dead thing.

Genre: Old Detective (Film Noire)

Main Perspective: All in a day's work for a horny vampire hunter detective? (will discuss later)

Personals: I want to congratulate you on doing something that you rarely see writing now a days- a film noire style of writing that heavily involves the reader to become the main character and adopt his style of speech. It's a kind of fusion between the 3rd person and 1st person that I do enjoy a lot. You certainly knew what you were doing and you have a great kind of rhythmic touch to it. I certainly read a lot faster than I would normally read. I hope to see more from you. That said there were a few points I wanted to touch on...

1st- the section where he talks about the histories of the families. For some reason, in the context of the story as a whole, it was kind of unnecessary. What does knowing about the families give the reader? What does it do for the main character? All that it showed was basically humans don't care... and we're human... and the main character is human... so we shouldn't care? I was more into the whole "in the moment" parts rather than the history. This is where I found that I lost a bit of interest.

2nd- As Film Noire stories go, usually these kinds of flashback talks to someone involve a lesson at the end- something learned for the reader to reflect upon on future chapters. As there are no future chapters, I can't say there SHOULD have been a lesson, but I would have rather preferred there to be a kind of message that was sent out.

3rd- "Modern Art Masterpiece" - Now I don't know in what context you were thinking about it, but modern art is rarely considered "beautiful" in the traditional sense but more interesting and beautiful to the mind. I have an inkling the line was pulled from a movie called Full Metal Jacket where the Sgt. insults a Pvt. "You look like a modern art masterpiece!"

What I wanted to say is that because those detective novels came from a certain era, I (as a reader), expect the time period to reflect upon that. Something just doesn't seem right when modern references are thrown into this type of narration unless the time period is specified immediately. I found this to be a bit jarring.

Grammar: Not Good - Jarring at times, had to re-read certain portions. It is also the choice of words and placement that is, while technically grammatically correct, is extremely unwieldy and also (using SAT standards) wrong. Also, please capitalize names.

Story Flow: Very... Jarring. (More on Personals)

Topical/Theme: From what I understand, the location was some snowcapped mountains. As for theme, I'd say the general idea of the main character being this cold scientist fell 100% inside the main theme and successfully achieves the topic.

Genre: Detective / Slice of Life

Main Perspective: Taking over the world is tough when things don't always work out.

Personals: Now I can see here that you're trying to achieve something that is usually done in organized blocks of text and chapters. I did like the idea that this cold doctor actually wants to help everyone around him except for the unfortunate pilots that die and really wants to be loved in the end. Will this doctor finally create his death robot? No clue, but will his cold heart be warmed by the love of people? It seems so. That is a decent story plot really. You certainly had an idea of where you wanted to go with the video log concept and it made it kind of comical to know that every vlog before the current one was simply another catastrophic death.

I definitely felt a bit of British humor in here. The dryness of it all reminded me a lot of all those wonderful British TV shows I've seen. You do know what you're doing and I feel like if you had the time to really flesh it out, it would be hilarious.


I do want to touch on a few points...

1st - First of all, were all the characters necessary? Was the communication between the two girls necessary? All the jumps in between multiple people as well as a lack of actual personal perspective made it hard to get into the story. Did I know they were building robots of doom? No. Did I find out? Yes. Was the question, "What are they building?" posed? No. While many genres have different kinds of story flow, something like this seems to be a more light-hearted, quizzical genre that has a simple impetus for reading. Ask the reader a question, then answer it as time goes on while tossing small hints to feed the fire.

2nd - While I knew who the main character was, we never had a chance to get inside his head for even a second until the very ending. Usually the main character is set up (3rd person POV) by allowing the reader to know more about what he/she is thinking more than the other characters.

3rd- Pet Peeve of mine- writing 180 degrees as one hundred and eighty degrees- or any 3+ digit number as words. Why? Its overly verbose rather than effectively enjoyable. While the grammatically, we are told to write 180 as one-hundred and eighty, as a hobby writer, it pains me to see this.

4th- Your choice of words for onomatopoeia. You chose to italicize Crunch and Now I'm Thirsty. What was the purpose of italicization? Was this suppose to be in the head of the character? Why is Crunch in his head? Every literary device, especially things like italicization, bolding, and all caps should be done in a way that makes it a literary device. The concept of bold/vitalization of words may not be a novel concept, but its usage, I believe, is more of a modern process of writing in the digital era. I applaud continuously testing the range of usage, but with testing requires a lot of patience and thought.

Grammar: Not Good. Switch of tense usage made this a little jarring.

Story Flow: I mentally changed all tenses to past tense which made the story flow pretty well. It made me REALLY wish you kept with either present or past since because of these quick mental fixes, it seemed altogether more beautiful. (will discuss further).

Topical/Theme: Yes. Winter? Check. Loneliness and Depression? Double Check Plus.

Genre: Introspective / POV

Main Perspective: Life is Fleeting Like the Seasons

Personals: AGAIN TENSE CHANGES! That aside, I loved this piece. Now stay with me here when I say this, but I felt like the person was actually a representation of the season: Winter. At the same time, it was a kind of push of a person to just keep venturing on which I also love as a subject. This was definitely that flowery piece that speaks more to the soul of things. I saw the best I could in this piece but the result was from a couple of things...

1st- I really... really... don't know what you were doing with all those tense changes. It was like GAHHHH! WHY!? Seriously.

2nd- Cherry Blossoms? Shrines? Are you Japanese? If you're not Japanese or raised in Japan, why even bother? Romanticizing a culture is one thing, but a culture you've never been a part of is a little strange.

3rd- I found myself ignoring entire paragraphs that I personally felt didn't speak to me. What that meant was I lost entire parts of the writing you did. While this isn't always a good thing, this doesn't make it bad. I came upon the conclusion that the main character was actually winter itself because it never stayed in once place and would only see the start of spring before moving on. Even so, it'd see the same things, the old paths of the years prior in the snow of fall or its own wake. It made it seem much more poignant and poetic when I thought of it that way and because of that, I enjoyed the piece a lot more. Something about this just clicked for me and maybe it's my current state of mind or after two cups of coffee, but it was GOOD.

4th- I also kinda understood it was about moving on after death, but for some reason, the spirit of Winter spoke more to me.

Thus, I liked this.... except for the tense changes... GAHHHH!

Grammer: Eh- There were a few portions that I recalled were fuzzy. The part where the knight stops Lucifer is in present tense for some reason. Then the part after about the window. Generally, the issues were scattered around with tense changes. I think one solid way to fix it would be to look up at the "is" in the document and try to figure out if it makes sense.

Story Flow: Jittery. You broke the story flow a lot with the "------" parts where I am to understand a time jump occurred (though it's not clear).

Topical/Theme: Not really. The only cold part is from the girl which she wasn't really that cold to begin with?

Genre: Fan-Fiction?

Main Perspective: In order to find the time and place for the end of humanity, God reincarnates himself into a human every 500 years while Michael and Gabriel help him out.

Personals: Its nice to see a different style of writing when in these contests. It does open your eyes a little in a way that reading the general style over and over again grinds on you after a while. I think you had something going here with the concept and by the sheer number of time skip parts, I can only assume you had a lot to say and very little room to do so in this contest. Try to expand each part and see what magic you can do! It brought a weird taste to my mouth with I thought about God Reincarnate feeling all up Michael.

BUT... there are a few things I can't stand. The dad having a box of hentai seems extremely unreasonable even in the context of the story... that and Japanese "uguu" stuff... It just feels weird.

Grammar: Meh - I would have to agree with Leonard in this sense. I just wanted to clarify that there were a bunch in random passages- here's two of them...
"She kept (going) on and on..."
"All I had to do was to(<-- No) ask questions..."

Story Flow: The flow of the story was actually easy to follow despite the clear cuts of separation. It flowed fairly nicely together and made getting into the story simple.

Topical/Theme: Yes. Winter all around, Main Character has some dark feelings.

Genre: Slice of Life

Main Perspective: Love ain't easy, love ain't quick, if you love someone, do it right.

Personals: First of all, SADNESS. The end of the story hit pretty home for me as that's how I had felt with a girl I once liked after leaving, doing stuff, then going back home to meet her. It just felt all kinds of wrong. I kind of smiled when the friend said, "Physical experiences." The story enjoyable from the start as it was a pretty decent slice-of-life story... that said...

I agree with Leonard's points about the plot. I never got a feel for the main character aside from the fact that he was cold. What of his past, his fears or loves? What did he do that made him enjoy solace so much? Then again we never actually got into the girl's character either. In fact, I was able to gleam more off the friend's character of "Physical experiences" than the other two for some reason. Maybe its because he's more relatable.

I do disagree with Leonard about more intimate experiences. That made a lot of sense especially with that ending. He knew the relationship was a bad idea and he was speaking out of his most primal urges, but that didn't stop him. It makes it kind of sad that he's not even ignorant to what he was doing, but willingly failed.

Finally, I wanted to say your story was good. I enjoyed it a lot. I would say expand on it when you can, clean out the slower parts when you read it, and for the LOVE OF GOD use commas before a quote. I have issues when. "People write about something," said CoffeePrince. "and never finish the thought in a coherant clause.

Grammar: OK. A few easy to fix mistakes and semicolon problems, but generally solid.

Story Flow: WALL OF TEXT. Joking aside, I reformatted the paragraphs for my own viewing pleasure and the story did seem to flow pretty well. It felt like it could have been a continuous flow, but then there were clear time jumps that weren't entirely necessary.

Topical/Theme: Yes. WINTER IS COMING.

Genre: Adventure/Mystery

Main Perspective: Two spirits are locked between winter and summer- and the spirit of winter wants more.

Personals: Very, very interesting concept you have here. Since the others nitpicked you to death already, I'll put up what I thought in terms of your entire concept. I loved the idea that two spirits reincarnate over and over in this endless battle to keep the balance (Avatar Korra anyone?). It had this sort of ambiance of a post-apocalyptic spiritual battle that resonates with me very well.

Arnold who? I wanted to get to this point. What was the point of Arnold? If we were given more backstory as to who this Mark was or if he just silently rowed a boat away from a frozen city while muttering under his breath, it would have given us a lot more information. That would have cut the word count significantly as well as let us get into Mark's head more. While the world is fairly interesting and their abilities are even more so, we know almost nothing about Mark until the last few paragraphs. We should be rooting for Mark to murder Nana by the end of it.

Another thing I noticed is that when you chose to describe things, I felt it lacked a lot of feeling. What I mean by that isn't in terms of metaphorical content or even love of what you're writing, but the actual sense of feeling. It was cold? Describe the cold. The boat rocked? How did it affect Mark? How did things feel. I can't stress that enough (I have this issue myself).

As FGRaptor said, there were a bunch of grammatical errors that could be fixed, but from what I read, it seemed like you generally knew what you were doing. If you went back and read it aloud, I'm sure you would have picked up a lot of the run-on sentences. Generally a compound sentence isn't just divided by AND or BUT, but rather two or more subclauses that complete an idea for that sentence. For example:

"When Mark wrote to Mr. Poe, he knew he had to write something meaningful." You could continue the thought in two ways: "When Mark wrote to Mr. Poe, he knew he had to write something meaningful lest he suffer the wrath of a murder of crows." OR "When Mark wrote to Mr. Poe, he knew he had to write something meaningful. If he did not, he would suffer the wrath of a murder of crows." You can see here that the first one flows better.

However, if I chose, "When Mark wrote to Mr. Poe, he chose his words wisely." Again you could continue the thought in two ways: "When Mark wrote to Mr. Poe, he chose his words wisely and thanked him for all the poems he had written." OR "When Mark wrote to Mr. Poe, he chose his words wisely. He thanked Mr. Poe for all the poems he had written." While these aren't the best examples, you can see that the second one flowed better.

I do want to say the entire concept was a great idea. You had a world already set out in front of you and you wrote to that end goal. Good work!

Grammar: Meh... (FG Raptor is Grammar King) I have to nitpick here though:

Both of them puffing white clouds from the freezing cold, entered through the thick wooden doors of a chapel. Inside was a crowd of people were attending the funeral of dear Grampa Roberts

- Puffing white clouds from the freezing cold, the both of them entered... sounds a lot better grammatically.

The walls and floor was covered in wood

Were. The walls and floor WERE...

There are a bunch of mistakes that pulled my attention away more so than similar mistakes in other people's writings (I'm not entirely too sure as to why, but if it was enough to pull me away from the world of the story, then they need to be addressed)

Story Flow: Aside from the issues, it flowed decently well. I might say it was a little too descriptive of what other people said rather than an inner monologue of James himself. It was consistent, not rushed, and kept me entertained.

Topical/Theme: Mostly. It's Winter.

Genre: Slice of Life/Dark

Main Perspective: Even a funeral is just another social event where people try to one-up each other.

Personals: Now I've gone to funerals... and never have I seen everyone provide a eulogy. The point of the eulogy isn't for everyone to speak their minds about the person, but rather someone close to the deceased to sum up his/her life. I found this part to be a bit unbelievable as its usually the closest of the people that present their side of the story. I did, however, like the political/social games that they were trying to play which really did represent a funeral. There's always someone trying to hook up with someone else, children running around disrespectfully, and the work underlings who just kiss ass.

I do want to say again that less verbal dialogue and more inner dialogue would have helped by leaps and bounds. I want to get to know the characters, not find out about them later on.

As for saying it's not a story, a story is whatever a story needs to be. It has a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning is the introduction to the two characters and the event. The middle is the droning on of eulogies. The ending is the summation of what a certain person was thinking.

All things aside, I found this to be interesting, generally well-written, and realistic.

Grammar: Odd. There are plenty of little errors, but as usual, I could generally ignore them since it was a Leonard-esque thing that flowed fairly well (despite my usual hatred of jumps in time). I have an issue with with word shone as IT JUST BOTHERS ME even though it's technically correct.

Story Flow: Generally solid. The pace was good and kept my attention throughout the entirety of the story. The random ALL CAPS didn't really do it for me as the replacement could have been italics. Why? Because for me, italics implies nuances while ALL CAPS equates to shouting. LOUD NOISES!

Topical/Theme: COLD. Cold. Cold.

Genre: Introspective / POV

Main Perspective: Life seems to end with a bang (not by you), then a whimper.

Personals: Please condense your paragraphs. I don't know why, but I felt that it was too long just because there were a bunch of little paragraphs rather than one solid one that would normally complete a single idea. It felt a lot like "HERE IS WHAT I AM THINKING. ACCEPT IT" rather than an organized thought process.

Even if that is what your writing style is (no problem with that), try to review your splurge over and over again until you personally can create an organized thought process. I agree with the previous posts that it seemed a bit rushed (hence the lack of reviewing). I'd rather not go into the whole reviewing bit about grammar and word usage as everyone's done that to death about now.

In general, the flow felt fairly solid, but the execution of the writing seemed both a bit rushed and unrealistic. Always remember to ask yourself, "Would I think this?"

I did, however, like the white Christmas cause god knows his best friend is giving his girlfriend a white Christmas over and over again.

Grammar: OK. Sentences seem to either cut off. Into small little segments. This is an example. Or they seem to continue on and on as you have a clear idea of what it is you want to do and you don't want the reader to stop his/her train of thought as you lead him/her to an eventuality that you wanted him/her to end up in.

Story Flow: I'd much rather you have run-ons than the cutting off segments as that hurts me when it comes to story flow. The beginning was pretty hard to cut through as you were introducing the world of the story with very little world. I think what got to me was the calling thing. Yes, it was important, but for some reason I felt like there were too many references to calling without any references to how both parties felt.

Topical/Theme: Bitch be cold.

Genre: Slice of Life / POV

Main Perspective: Guy likes girl, girl likes guy, guy calls girl, girl bails.

Personals: Now my last review was about condensing paragraphs. For you, I'd rather you expand on ideas and create new paragraphs. The introduction was a paragraph in of its own while the whole thing about calling should have been one also.

I felt like your ideas were many and too many in this case. The grandfather one didn't really have any significance to the overall story and I would have requested that you axe it out entirely and give more space to breath for the actual plot.

I agree with FGRaptor. ESPECIALLY ABOUT COFFEE. YOU DARE SAY AN AMERICANO IS NOT COFFEE? BITCH DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? I'M THE COFFEEPRINCE! (Just for reference, an Americano is essentially a shot of espresso mixed with water to give it the strength of coffee. I don't really like it since it has an especially bitter taste. I believe it originated from WWII when GIs needed coffee. They just mixed European espresso with water) END RANT.

I rather like the end (VS EVERYONE ELSE), because aside from the random side-plots, it was a justified ending that he would end his own life. I would just wish you expanded more about the feelings of the main character in the ending.