I highly doubt I'll get anything in either. I liked my plan, but I've been gone all week and just got back yesterday to learn I didn't have the rest of the day to finish. Now it's gone a decent ways beyond the entry period, and I have an extra set of people around.
This was great! I've never had sleep paralysis, but if this story speaks to that reality, that's pretty terrifying o_0 your descriptions were really strong - they gave me a feeling like I was reading Lovecraft (in terms of writing style)
I think a possible area of improvement would be to remove some "nonsense" words out from the voice you create. I don't know if I'm using the right terminology for this, but I have the same issue with my writing.
What I mean is that in this paragraph:
See, I got laid off from a big company around three months ago, so I was lucky to get unemployment which helped a bit and part of our severance was that we'd get to keep our health coverage for six months, so that was a pretty big relief from worry in itself. Still, I was feeling the pinch without that normal income. I was surviving without going into debt, yeah, but it wasn't easy.
There's a couple of words like "See", "so" and "yeah" that aren't doing anything for you, and I think they take away from your narration with their interruptions. I think taking them out gives a nicer flow
I got laid off from a big company around three months ago, and I was lucky to get both unemployment, which helped a bit, and a severance that included health coverage for six months. The health coverage was a pretty big relief from worry in itself. Still, I felt the pinch without that normal income. I was surviving without going into debt, but it wasn't easy.
I am not a native english speaker and I have a writing exam in a few months. I will try to use these challenges as training. Any advice about my grammar is welcome.
Despite not being a native English speaker, you wrote better than most people I know who speak English natively :D I didn't find any serious grammar errors, just a use of "Dramatic" that didn't need to be capitalized, and some interesting uses of comma-seaparated lists I thought were more stylistic choices, but might not hold up in a writing exam.
I liked your story! At first, I was confused when you started tossing around more modern terms like "default option" and "logistics" when at first you were talking about times of antiquity, but then I think I got it, and I started picturing
the creator character working in an office setting, like the creative department of a production studio.
I really enjoyed that mental imagery, and am now thinking that I'd like to see that in a cartoon or show :]
I don't feel like your story had a lot of finality to it, though. Felt like it needed just a bit more to feel like this chapter was done. I'm not too sure I got the ending footnote, either, but that might just be me.
But seriously, it brings me so much joy to see someone likes what I created, having just started to practice this.
EDIT:
Here are my picks. Putting these three in order was a difficult task. They all had a somber tone I really enjoyed a lot and strangely enough, two of them had wrinkly giants in them. But purely on a gut feeling I would put them in this order.
sorry i missed this one, lots of stuff and i feel so bad for not reading either but just out of it, please let me know when next one is up. Ill do my best to participate. Sorry.
Thanks for the feedback!
I liked your story but I think it would have been better if you had not revealed the fate of the protagonist in the beginning imo. the end would be a good surprise after the protagonist acted like an asshole the whole trip.
Here my votes
1. The Last Rest
2. Insomnia
3. On the reading of cards
These stories were such a treat :) I wasn't expecting such an inspired set of short stories, so I'll definitely be back for another challenge, since I can learn a lot about writing well from the group here!
My top 3 are as follows:
Plum - The Last Elephant (that killed me on the inside in such a good way) Conkersbadfurday - Still Breeze (I found the premise very interesting, and in such a small set of words you fleshed out a world so quickly) Pickman - Insomnia (the descriptions of the sleep paralysis were engrossing!)
Thanks for the feedback!
I liked your story but I think it would have been better if you had not revealed the fate of the protagonist in the beginning imo. the end would be a good surprise after the protagonist acted like an asshole the whole trip.