Improving our 75 Word Stories -- READ FIRST POST

[Victoria Silverwolf]

I thought this story was quite effective. Maybe I didn't get the self-hate aspect. I interpreted it as someone getting rid of her memories of painful experiences. Either way, the story works well.

 

[The Judge]

This was on my original shortlist, before I had to start pruning to make the list more manageable -- so effectively it was part of my unposted longlist.

I think I understand what's going on, that the new technology literally splits people in half, presumably duplicating the mind in some way, but not the memories -- though I have to confess I initially thought the body was simply copied and it took a while to grasp the significance of hand, eye and foot all being singular, not plural, and the "better half" joke, and I've only now cottoned on to the pun in the title. D'oh! (Though in my own defence the use of "twin" is perhaps a tad misleading, since the other Jen isn't a twin, but a mirror image.) I didn't realise that the pre-op Jen hated herself, though, so if that was important, I think it needed to be brought out rather more.

Anyhow, I did get that the other/left-hand Jen had dumped all the possibly-bad memories on this Jen, which was neat. But without more information, we've no idea what those memories comprise as "didn't want" could simply be embarrassing slips like walking round with her skirt tucked into her knickers, which is humiliating but hardly the stuff of real nightmares. As a result, it seemed a bit too low-key, so when I came to consider my shortlist further I decided that for me didn't really hit the genre, as being insignificantly horrific.

It occurs to me now that the actual cut-in-half bit is meant to be the horror, which it certainly could be, and would fit in with your comment that Jen hates herself. But for that to work the realisation of it would have to be the punchline, not the memories issue.

As an aside, I can't help thinking that as far as semi-believable technology is concerned, my initial duplication idea is a better one. Why would anyone develop a technology to split people in half? And why would people choose to have all the disadvantages of being literally only half a person, even if they hate themselves and/or bad memories could thereby be jettisoned into the unwanted side? If memories can be split somehow, thereby excising them from the dominant personality, surely other techniques would have been developed to facilitate it, less drastic than cutting someone's brain in two. A duplication process would have removed the punning etc in your story, but you could then have expanded on the memory issue to have made the piece more horrific from that angle.

Overall, a neat story, but not quite there for me.

 

[Parson]

@Stable ... It did not come through for me. I thought that what was going on was a kind of mind transfer/clone thing where the original was transferring some but not all of the abilities of the original so that the original could dominate.

For me, I was having trouble seeing a story in your entry. It felt more like waking up from a particularly vivid dream and not being sure of what was real.

 

[Joshua Jones]

I think I know where I went wrong here. Writing this from the perspective of the aliens was a big, novice mistake. I think this idea could have been horror had I written it from the perspective of a human who had been turned into a brain in the box control unit.

Is this an accurate assessment? Are there any other issues that I missed?

Silent Watchers
My, how humanity has grown! Not 40,000 of their years ago, they could scarcely use tools. Now, they have progressed through their stone and metal ages, mastered the atom, mastered their impulses, and taken to the stars. Their nests occupy a thousand worlds. We placed them in a safe creche, and they have emerged as beautiful children.

They are ripe for harvest. Their minds, once free of needless flesh, will make excellent ship control units.

 

[Graymalkin]

I think I know where I went wrong here. Writing this from the perspective of the aliens was a big, novice mistake. I think this idea could have been horror had I written it from the perspective of a human who had been turned into a brain in the box control unit.

Is this an accurate assessment? Are there any other issues that I missed?

Silent Watchers
My, how humanity has grown! Not 40,000 of their years ago, they could scarcely use tools. Now, they have progressed through their stone and metal ages, mastered the atom, mastered their impulses, and taken to the stars. Their nests occupy a thousand worlds. We placed them in a safe creche, and they have emerged as beautiful children.

They are ripe for harvest. Their minds, once free of needless flesh, will make excellent ship control units.

I certainly can't say whether it's a novice writer's mistake as I'm a novice myself and my list of mistakes/things to avoid seems to get longer every day
BUT maybe you could have kept the alien perspective while using an individual human character to demostrate the broad picture. "Harvest ... needless flesh" all bode badly for someone, but I think I would have definitely felt more closely invested in feeling it if there had been a single victim in focus.

maybe:
My, how you haves grown in 40,000 years. You could scarcely use tools. Now, you have mastered the atom, mastered your impulses, and taken to the stars. Your nests occupy a thousand worlds. We placed you in a safe creche, and you have emerged as beautiful children.
Aah - you're awake, my child. Good. Now hold still. Your mind, once free of this needless flesh and blood, will make an excellent ship control unit.

Then again, there is definitely an existential horror in the scale of your story, which in some respects is even more alarming. So, different kinds of horror maybe. I'm a bit confused as to whether it's the mind or the brain being used in the control unit. Nice one.

 

[Stable]

I thought your story was good JJ, for me it just wasn't really horror. You may be right that the alien viewpoint put distance in there - if you made it more visceral and personal I could see the story becoming horror. As it is the only horror components are right at the end in that last line.

 

[Parson]

@Joshua Jones .... For me I wasn't gripped by the story. The aliens seemed completely (if not literally) godlike. Humanity has no chance from the get go giving the story a sense of inevitability, but in so doing tempered the horror aspect.

 

[The Judge]

Yep, for me the voice in the story was too cerebral and distancing to give the gut-wrenching shock required for horror as I was defining it. From the alien's POV there's nothing horrific here, only patience and satisfaction, and that's the vibe that's coming through, even at the end.

I think it is possible to retain this tone and still produce a thrill of horror. For instance, I could see a story told by a self-satisfied doctor as he takes a child in for surgery causing a real shock if it ended with the revelation that the doctor is Josef Mengele. However, in that case the threat and horror is known to us and we can imagine what the operation might entail. Here in your story, the threat is too remote, too removed from our ken to really hit us hard, even for those of us who saw the horrific shadow vessels in Babylon5.

Graymalkin's reworking would certainly be more effective than your version, since it brings the threat closer with that "my child". But to my mind, it doesn't resolve the problem of the extended history lesson -- we don't need to know all of that, we want to feel the shiver of horror and the hell these people will go through. As an exercise, it might be worth re-writing it from the POV of one of the victims to see what that gives you.

 

[Joshua Jones]

Ok, I am going to toss this month's entry in here, and then I promise I will lay off on asking for feedback unless I am completely flummoxed.

I did get a couple votes and 3 mentions, but I can't help bit wonder if I overcorrected a bit on this one. Typically, I have all the subtlety of a 10 pound hammer, but I wanted to try be ing a bit more subtle here. My story is set in the real world, in close 3rd of a 5 year old girl playing dress up. In the other room, her parents have died of a heroin overdose (hence the foaming and gray, cold skin), but she has been desensitized to their addiction/ is so innocent that she doesn't think it is a problem and goes about her day playing. Did that come across? If so, were there any other problems that I missed?

Thanks, as always, for the feedback!

The Ball Couldn't Wait

Camille surveyed her princess dress collection with an intensity indigenous to girls aged five. Prince Charming’s auspicious ball necessitated perfection.

Finally, she found her Cinderella dress and twirled in the mirror. “Next, magical Mommysmakeup from the kingdom of Lavatory.”

Daddy and Mommy were asleep on their bed. She saw syringes about; "magical, adult medicine” that made them sleep. She wiped foam off their cold, gray faces and danced from the room. The ball couldn't wait.

 

[TheDustyZebra]

I shortlisted your story, so you know I liked it.

I will say that the language may have been an issue, as it's rather inconsistent for the POV. The first paragraph is full of fancy five-dollar, not five-year-old's, words, and then the rest goes pretty nicely to Camille's POV. But your idea came across perfectly, and the innocence in the midst of horror was powerful.

 

[Parson]

I have to admit I missed on this story. I thought the little girl had injected her parents and that's why they died. I think I thought that because I thought that was the twist in your story. Overall I would say that the story worked but simply did not appeal to me.

 

[TheDustyZebra]

Oops, maybe not as perfectly as I thought?

 

[The Judge]

I noticed the language issue TDZ mentions, Joshua, and it jarred a little for me, and the gentle humour inherent in the highfalutin' start was also, I felt, at odds with the meat of the story which was more gruesome.

I hadn't grasped that the parents had died of a self-inflicted overdose -- in fact I wasn't sure if they were dead or just unconscious -- since I also thought the little girl had injected them so she could go to the ball. (I don't know if it says something about Parson and me, or about the stories we've seen here over the years, that we both leaped to the same conclusion about a child's culpability!) I think it's the fact that she wipes the foam off their faces, ie she intervenes in some way, that made me see her as an active agent in what had happened to them.

Having read your precis of what it's about, though, I do have to ask what's happened to the twist? To my mind it isn't a twist in the tail of the story just to have her not recognise that her parents are dead if that's what you were aiming for. As Parson has said, it may be that another reason I saw her as the guilty party is because that to me would have been the twist.

Word-use-wise, a couple caused me to raise an eyebrow here. I know "indigenous" is also defined as "inherent" or "innate" but to my mind it's not truly synonymous with them, and should be restricted to eg native plants and people, and "auspicious" also seems out of place, since I can't see how a ball could be seen as favourable or boding well. To me, it felt as if you'd searched a thesaurus and come up with some long words for effect, rather than using them naturally. (I've just checked and I see in US English "indigenous" is also defined as "inborn" so that might be a US/UK split, then, but I'm still baffled about "auspicious".)

 

[Joshua Jones]

Thank you @TheDustyZebra, @Parson, and @The Judge for your feedback. I agree that the language is not consistent throughout. I think I should have reduced the vocabulary significantly at the beginning, and that would have avoided the indigenous and auspicious issue entirely. That said, as this was intended to be a close 3rd, the idea of going to a ball and dancing with Prince Charming would, by definition, be auspicious for a princess obsessed (hence the large dress collection and the particular content of the dress up game) 5 year old. So, while I do think auspicious does have the meaning I was intending, I think it takes the reader too far from words a 5 year old would likely be thinking, and thus too far for the close 3rd. No thesaurus consulted, btw! I simply spent way too much time in primary school reading classics...

Anyway, I think your comments pretty well confirmed my suspicion that I was not clear enough what happened. It didn't help that @Stable entered a story about Cinderella right before mine (truth be told, I hadn't seen his story before posting mine. If I had, I probably would have waited until around the time TDZ posted hers), which primed the reader to think of Cinderella as the killer/malevolent agent when reading my story. Still, I don't think it would have been clear, as the syringes were the only hint that it was heroin, the foaming that they had overdosed, and the cold, gray skin that they had died. The horror I was going for was that this innocent child could possibly go days by herself with the corpses of her parents before anyone found her, possibly without access to food or water. At minimum, she would be deeply traumatized, if she didn't dehydrate or kill herself trying to make dinner. Perhaps it is my proximity to children her age, but I react pretty strongly to the idea of a child left by themselves.

Any suggestions on how I could make it more obvious without switching to omniscient 3rd?

 

[Hugh]

Sorry, I didn't get what was happening, but even if I had it wouldn't have hit the spot for me. As others have pointed out, the first paragraph overdoses on complex words. I didn't understand the point of Lavatory in the second. In the third I was unaware of foam being a feature of overdose.

Edit: Ah! I was composing this during your last post..

 

[Joshua Jones]

Sorry, I didn't get what was happening, but even if I had it wouldn't have hit the spot for me. As others have pointed out, the first paragraph overdoses on complex words. I didn't understand the point of Lavatory in the second. In the third I was unaware of foam being a feature of overdose.

Edit: Ah! I was composing this during your last post..

No worries; the point of the Lavatory was to give a "conclusive" statement that this was a game of dress up rather than a Fantasy genre child bride situation, as well as to move her from her room to where she could see her parents.

 

[The Judge]

... the idea of going to a ball and dancing with Prince Charming would, by definition, be auspicious for a princess obsessed (hence the large dress collection and the particular content of the dress up game) 5 year old. So, while I do think auspicious does have the meaning I was intending

Sorry to belabour the issue, but how exactly are you defining "auspicious"? The fact she has the perfect dress for the ball would be auspicious, because it would be a good omen for what is to come, but the ball itself can't be a good omen of anything, surely.

The horror I was going for was that this innocent child could possibly go days by herself with the corpses of her parents before anyone found her, possibly without access to food or water.

The horror of it isn't a problem, because the genre was open. But again, I can't see a twist here, unless you mean the twist is instead of going to the imaginary ball, she's going to suffer real privation, but I think that's far too remote.

Any suggestions on how I could make it more obvious without switching to omniscient 3rd?

Something like "Mommy and Daddy had used their sleepy-time magic 'jections again, but she'd never seen them lie so still. They were very cold. And she was very hungry. She couldn't reach the cupboard with the food. But she could go to the ball. She danced out of the room." That would take you over word count, so would need pruning, but I think gives the information and avoids any risk of her being seen as the killer.

 

[Joshua Jones]

I almost forgot; @The Judge, the ball/her dancing throughout is how twist in incorporated, as twirl is a synonym. So, I wasn't going for a plot twist as the twist, but the twisting motion of the child.

 

[Joshua Jones]

Sorry to belabour the issue, but how exactly are you defining "auspicious"? The fact she has the perfect dress for the ball would be auspicious, because it would be a good omen for what is to come, but the ball itself can't be a good omen of anything, surely.

The horror of it isn't a problem, because the genre was open. But again, I can't see a twist here, unless you mean the twist is instead of going to the imaginary ball, she's going to suffer real privation, but I think that's far too remote.

Something like "Mommy and Daddy had used their sleepy-time magic 'jections again, but she'd never seen them lie so still. They were very cold. And she was very hungry. She couldn't reach the cupboard with the food. But she could go to the ball. She danced out of the room." That would take you over word count, so would need pruning, but I think gives the information and avoids any risk of her being seen as the killer.

No worries; you aren't belaboring anything. The ball being hosted by Prince Charming is auspicious in that, being she is playing the part of Cinderella, she will get to dance with the prince, get married, and be delivered from her hard life. In this case, it isn't an evil stepmother, but heroin addicted parents. Hence, the ball is auspicious in her mind, because she knows the story of Cinderella and is playing it out in her imagination.

Does that make any sense, or am I still missing a nuance of auspicious?

 

[The Judge]

Ah, I missed the twirl. That is, I saw it, but for me one twirl did not make a twist, not when we're looking at a theme. Perhaps if she twirled out of the room at the end instead of danced that would have made more of it, but I think it would have required a couple of other synonyms in there to make it gel.

As to "auspicious" to be frank I don't think it's a nuance of meaning you're missing, it's the meaning itself. The date of the ball could be auspicious, because the timing is favourable for her, and the start of the ball could be auspicious if she's noticed by all and sundry and whispered about, but the ball itself, nope, I can't see it. Try replacing the word with a synonym -- "the ball was favourable" or "the ball boded well for her" and it doesn't work to my mind, even if she thinks it's a direct line from the ball to living happily ever after. So we'll just have to agree to disagree on this!