Discussion -- 300 Word Challenge #6

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Thoroughly deserved Phoenix, one of the things that makes writing these comments so easy is that the overall quality is so good!
 
Whew! I made it with a few hours to spare. I was up until 1:00 am writing it, then did some editing today. I don't like squeaking this close to the deadline!
 
Stormcrow - Not only are we given a strong story that looks at the way the world has been changed, not always for the good, by man, seen through the eyes of creatures that our older and wiser than us, but we also have those creatures being given a clear voice of their own. Not only a unique voice, it is almost a language of their own that is both musical and could well be seen as an ancestor of our own, An excellent attempt that is filled with the scents of the country, freshly mown grass and fairy magic.

Cul - Another condemnation of the world and what man has done to it, and really it is hard to argue otherwise. Being seen through the eyes of someone who has been there and seen it, is a very clever idea, especially when you think that as an artificer he might even have been part of that slow erosion of the natural world. But his is more than just a description of a dying world, it is a tale of hope; hope that man can see the damage he has done, hope that he might rise up and do something about it, hope that even the smallest of actions might be enough to start turning things around.

r j - a story of two sisters that is more than just that of siblings, it is a story of memories, a story of love and a story of loss. As the two sisters meet you can almost feel that there is something not quite right but it is hard to say exactly what, it is only as the story unwinds at its own pace that you begin to realise the tragedy at the heart of the words. That one of the girls grew up, the other died in a terrible playground accident. But that is not the true tragedy, or the emotional punch that is at the heart of this story, it is the heartbreaking realisation that the ghost does not seem to be aware that she is dead and only wants to go home, to which she can never go.

Ursa - As always what is there to say about one of Ursa's tales? There are the inevitable puns, a clever story and some great ideas. In some places it felt as though I was being shot through the eyes by an incredibly bright light, such was the force of the idea being thrown out. One of the first things that hit home was the language used when describing what the chimneys were for. It catches perfectly the sense of the absurd, and wonder that this could be their truth; followed by the method of travel, bodies broken down as streams of consciousness are thrust through space at breakneck speed. Genius. Toast indeed.

jimness - We are introduced to some form of organisation. Something that has been alive for generations struggling to survive in a civilisation that has to survive against periods of intense colds. We could quite easily come to believe that what is being talked about are ice ages, and that the organisation is an advanced iteration of humanity. But no, the truth is a lot clever and perhaps a lot more fun than that we are looking at some lifeform that lives within the chimney stack, thriving in the blistering heat of a lighted furnace, and struggling to survive when the furnace is allowed to be cooled at the start of our week. But to these creatures a week is the lifetime of generations... Brilliant.

TDZ - A complete future history summed up in three hundred words. How brilliant is that. Not only do we get the full climb to power of a man, his personal empire building culminating in his domination of all. And it all came from a horse winning a race... But despite giving all this, the rise to power, the stage after stage that leads to him dominating time, we get a rebellion against his tyranny, the overthrow of his reign before it even happens and, ultimately the setting up of a new temporal domination, based on a trio of bets, perhaps not on the great wins of horses, but by kidnapping those very horses that once made history - or betting on those very horses...
 
TheDustyZebra said:
Whew! I made it with a few hours to spare.
Click to expand...
I see your Whew! and raise you a Crikey! Is that the time??! :D

I actually had the first line of this a week ago, and that's all I had until yesterday -- I kept pushing ideas around but couldn't get anything to gel. Oddly, in view of a thread in GWD, one of the ideas was floating islands, which I now know can't work, so just as well I didn't try. Oddlier yet, a comment from HB this morning chimed in with a title and another idea I'd had yesterday, so I took that as an omen.

I thought I'd go with an upbeat ending. But I've probably let myself in for nul points knowing everyone's love of gloom and doom! :p
 
Crikey is right...I managed to come up with something on the spur of the moment....
if for no other reason than to say I've done it!
 
Poor Perp, just when he's caught up with the comments....:)

Two more excellent entries, but will we see any more? Still an hour to go...
 
I was wrong, and very happily so! We're having a very good number of entries this month.

And if I am not mistaken (I get muddled, over here in a completely different time zone), since we are going by GMT and not Daylight time, there should be a little over two hours to go.
 
Many thanks again for your comments, Perp! Inspiration / plagiarism this time is, I guess, somewhere between Terry Pratchett's Truckers trilogy and Hugh Howey's Wool. Whatever next, eh...
 
Thanks for the kind review, Perp. :)


(And thanks for all those reviews - for 75-worders and 300-worders - that I haven't, until now, thanked you for. :eek:)
 
Don't leave it too late, mosaix, in case the software starts swallowing spaces.

(I transferred mine from Word via notepad, and that seemed to get round that problem, although I can't at the moment make the text Times New Roman. As it happens, the original was in Garamond, a font which I still can apply to my posts.)
 
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