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Monday, April 28, 2014

Minific Stuff

On Sunday, I took part in a write-off event: write a fanfic under 750 words with the prompt "One Little Mistake."  Writers were supposed to have one day to work on it, but I ended up doing mine in about 30 minutes, and submitting it moments ahead of the deadline.

Go me!

Anyway, there are 21 total entries, which folks can read and vote on over the course of the next week.  Given that all the stories combined total about 15k words, that's not exactly a daunting amount of verbiage.  If you like reviewing, or if you've been looking for a way to try your hand at it in a low-stakes environment, why not try reading and rating these stories?

Also, if you're interested, I've got mini-even-by-the-standards-of-my-mini-reviews-reviews of all the fics here (and PresentPerfect's right below!).  This is actually the sort of thing that got me started on ponyfic reviewing--I used to make a hobby of reading and leaving a one- or two-line comment on every story in the compilation posts on EqD, because I felt bad that many of those stories never got any comments at all... and three years later, here we are.  Anyway, go check it out!

13 comments:

  1. A good way to get eyes on the words :D I am pleased that A) I was not the only one to read them all the day they came out; B) you not only liked my stories, but the stories I rated highly; C) you did not expend any more effort than I to do the review. :V

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  2. Well that was fun! A Simple Prank gave me this really stupid idea where Twilight wants to strangle Pinkie for saying "I'll have this fixed in a gif." And while I'm on the subject of that story, Bad Horse seems a little confused. Pinkie was the one who thought she prevented the library from burning down. She could've easily just imagined it

    Present, I'm gonna have to disagree with you on that hyperbole in Last Day. I might not've used those exact time-frames, but they did their job of conveying Dash's experience

    Unfortunately, I can't vote on these fics; it appears an account is required

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    1. Well make an account, you silly butt! :V It's not hard.

      That kind of exaggeration has never worked, as far as I'm concerned. It starts off too high up the scale, as it were, and expands logarithmically. Not to mention, I can't see Dash doing that kind of thing; Twilight maybe.

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    2. Ugh, people keep taking the computer and making me go places before I can finish my response, leaving me more time to think and now this whole thing's more complicated than it should be

      1) I'm loath to make new accounts, no matter how simple the process (Hell, I was commenting here anonymously for several months before finally making my Oats account)

      2) This would need to be something I'd regularly use, which I initially couldn't see myself doing since I have enough trouble with my reading queue and managing my free time as it is

      3) However, I have been thinking I should shift my focus more on the fanfic side of the community, so I suppose I could get some decent mileage out of it. I'd need to break some old habits, though, 'cause I really need to make more room for other interests besides ponies

      4) I don't feel like going back and re-reading those fics right now, which I'd want to do before voting or reviewing

      I dunno, I'll probably make an account in the future, but not right now. I need to clear up my queue some first. Maybe after TrotCon. I'm hoping to make some decent progress by then

      Agreed that the exaggeration starts too high and expands a mite too fast, but I felt it was an appropriate technique to use. Dash might not write that sort of thing, but she'd certainly feel it; we've all seen how impatient she can be! She'd probably think of it more like hours than decades or centuries, and she'd write it as "... for what felt like hours", but an outside narrator could be little more poetic by dropping the extra words

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    3. You took more time explaining why you don't want to make an account than it would take to make an account...

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    4. And now you know how stubborn I can be :p

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  3. I have to say I'm surprised at the inconsistency in the comments so far. Sure, there are always disagreements in write-offs, but I don't think I've seen them to this degree before. What one person declares as a favorite another has decried as without value, and citing the same characteristics to boot. A line or quote or scene that one says ties things together nicely is called out as the reason for everything falling apart by another. The feedback I've gotten is so all over the map that I don't know if I can make anything actionable out of it.

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    1. Nah, I've seen that before, at least once. I've definitely gotten conflicting feedback before, too.

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    2. I've gotten conflicting feedback before, but never anything so evenly and diametrically opposed. I mean, when one says it's one of his favorites, another says it's worthless, and the rest are pretty noncommittal, it leaves me scratching my head, even after taking into account whose opinions they are.

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    3. This was my experience with The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Good lord I hope that never happens again...

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    4. When one says it's one of his favorites, another says it's worthless, and the rest are pretty noncommittal, it could mean that the first one wrote it. :)

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    5. Or one could just be me being miserable :P

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  4. Darn, I should have been tracking this. I had a great Teaspoon/Tablespoon gag I could have used.

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