# March 2018 - LM - Locked Inside - Scores



## bdcharles (Apr 1, 2018)

Here we are, here we are, here we are. Four entries this month - not the greatest turnout, I grant you, but perhaps any change in stewardship is bound to cause a little risk aversion. Well, to that I say - don't be shy. Nail that craft! Send that imagination flying!

So to the stories. Myself and moderan were your judges and here's what we said (and apologies for the lack of spoiler tags, my browser seems to have outlawed them for the moment...):


moderan

Thanks to those of you who took the time to write. It takes cojones to  put your work out for public consumption, and to present it knowing that  it WILL be judged. Please remember that I am criticizing story only and  have no idea of your worth as a person. Not many entries this time  around – I read each four or five times to be sure that I wasn’t missing  anything.


Midnightpoet
VR
Spelling/Grammar: 5
Tone/Voice: 5
Effect: 7
Overall: 17

Sometimes you can overcome clichés by unusual treatment. Sometimes they  overcome you. Though on-the-surface-effective, this tale succumbs, in  the end, to mundanity. The subtext is that videogames really ARE bad for  you, and I’m not sure that’s a responsible viewpoint.
There are probably ways to do this cleverly, and to make the plot seem  less like “it was all a dream”. This didn’t make it, though reasonably  well-told overall.

SueC
Locked Inside a Box
Spelling/Grammar: 4
Tone/Voice: 4
Effect: 7
Overall: 15

The box is alive? That piqued my interest. Unfortunately, that promising  thread didn’t get picked up, and instead became a grammatical error.  This again is a reasonably well-told tale, but it too suffers from sheer  conventionality. There’s little to draw me into the tale. The box is  not well-described, leading me to think that the writer has only a vague  image of it and causing me to lose focus on the vision. 

XXX
Neugen Prime
Spelling/Grammar: 5
Tone/Voice: 5
Effect: 8
Overall: 18

Yeah. I like the intimation of a shared private language, shared  incidents. Not sure what’s at the heart of this, whether it be an  abusive environment or simply a child’s misunderstanding, but it’s  ominous all the same. This was a well-done piece and held my interest  throughout.



MousePot
Locked Inside
Spelling/Grammar: 3
Tone/Voice: 4
Effect: 6
Overall: 13

This was a story. It was suffused with run-on sentences and a distinct  lack of commas and it tried hard to be droll and amounted to a ‘grass is  greener’ tale where nothing much happened even though there were some  interesting attempts at backstory and backgrounding but they didn’t get  developed.
Too bad, cuz I liked where it wanted to go. But it got to the top of the fence and fell down.




bdcharles

midnightpoet
"V.R."
Spelling/Grammar: 4/5
Tone/Voice: 2.5/5
Effect: 7/10
Overall: 13.5/20
Review:
Quite a screwed up premise - which is good! It's neat also the way you run the two narratives together - VR and real life. I would say that the voice, dialogue and general writing doesn't have a huge amount of uniqueness to it, and is in places a little stilted. Think of how people speak, and write that in the dialogue. And mix up your sentence length and structure a little in the narration - it can really make alot of difference, particularly in short stories. And watch for those run on sentences ("Why did this happen, how will I free myself?", "The prison was old and dilapidated, he thought he could scrape away the loose concrete and escape.") Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't - it depends where and how they are used. But otherwise SPaG is decent enough.

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SueC
"Locked Inside a Box"
Spelling/Grammar: 5/5
Tone/Voice: 3.5/5
Effect: 7/10
Overall: 15.5/20
Review:
Great, intriguing, well-written start, with this otherwise unremarkable artifact that keeps turning up. Your SPaG and pace is well-controlled from the start. And eesh, a grim secret. The scene is well-depicted with things like Dad's stocks suggesting a life beyond the story without exposition. Watch though for overwriting where it's not needed. For example



> I saw the smallest key taped to the bottom. It looked as if the tape had been pulled off and put back on many times.
> 
> I was anxious to see what was inside and brought the box with the key to my brother in the living room.



You can probably dispense with the second line because you have successfully caused the readers to be anxious to look inside. So just have confidence that your writing conveys that and then have us do what you have made us want to do (namely open the box - if that makes sense the way I've phrased it)


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-xXx-
"Neugen Prime"
Spelling/Grammar: 5/5
Tone/Voice: 5/5
Effect: 10/10
Overall: 20/20
Review:
The voice here is absolutely dead on, in my view. I don't know if Sicily is autistic or very young, but I absolutely bought into her. Is she witnessing a school shooting? Is Neugen Prime the name of the school? I don't know what to say about that. This guts me like a carp. Is this published? It should be. There are a million flash fiction sites and this is so topical that it needs to be read widely today. Thankyou for this.

---



MousePot
"Locked Inside?"
Spelling/Grammar: 5/5
Tone/Voice: 4.5/5
Effect: 8.5/10
Overall: 18/20
Review:
I love the way you have made this simple fence to be the source of all fascination for Jake. And your voice is near-perfect - ypu characterise Jake perfectly by his thoughts from para 1 and don't let up once. I bought in from the get-go.

One point I dropped here was your title. Sorry, but it doesn't do this story justice.  Another was the name choice - "Jake" seems to be a disproportionately popular option for a protagonist. It's easy to take 10 extra seconds and choose another name. But some of your phrases were sublime: "that conversation was becoming a lot less one sided the longer Jake stayed away from other people." was brilliant (if a little "Castaway"-derivative but that's ok), umm, what else? Pretty much every sentence here was on point. I just wanted it to reach a conclusion. It seems, as it is, a fantastic start to something great, rather than the entirety of it.



SCORES:


moderanbdcharlestotalmidnightpoet1713.515.25SueC1515.515.25-xXx-182019MousePot131815.5


Scores are out of 20 so as you can see we have, in joint third place, *midnightpoet *and *SueC*, our runner up is the elusive *MousePot*, but the runaway winner for March's Literary Maneuvers is *-xXx-* with *Neugen Prime*.

Thanks to all the entrants, voters, and to moderan for stepping in to judge. And placings for everyone!


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## midnightpoet (Apr 1, 2018)

Well, bdcharles, I see you got your wish - pardon me while I go hug my teddy bear and have a good cry.  (sniff, sniff).  We poets are So sensitive.:smile:

I'm kidding, I'm kidding.  Congrats to the winner, I seem though to have a habit of being last.


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## PiP (Apr 1, 2018)

Congratulations, -xXx- And thanks to Moderan for once again supporting the LM as a judge! ... and well done to bd for hosting his first LM challenge, thank you


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## MousePot (Apr 1, 2018)

Thanks for the comments! This was a lot of fun and I’m already looking forward to next months  

Congats xXx, a very well deserved win


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## bdcharles (Apr 2, 2018)

midnightpoet said:


> Well, bdcharles, I see you got your wish - pardon me while I go hug my teddy bear and have a good cry.  (sniff, sniff).  We poets are So sensitive.:smile:
> 
> I'm kidding, I'm kidding.  Congrats to the winner, I seem though to have a habit of being last.



Aww man! Don't despair. In my view, to a degree these comps are about knowing your judges and subtly giving the judges what they want/like (sheened in whatever cool stuff you can sheen it in) but also about brute self-reflection and seeing if there is something that needs fixing. For instance, I have the habit of writing, if I may say so, quite well, but frequently falling short in terms of developing a plot and delivering that "woah" moment. Because of that I have been last a number of times. In your case, I would look at SPaG and voice. I am, I admit it, a horrendous grammar pedant. Yes, I know that comma splices can work in dialogue and with a certain character type. Yes, I know that "just write" and plot are king but I still hate such grammar butchery in 99% of cases because they are not right for that character. Yes, in the Robin Hobb novel I'm reading at the moment, she starts, as you do, a dialogue tag with a capital letter in one instance. She gets away with it beause she has 500 plus more pages with which to redeem herself. You have a much tighter margin, and any errors are proportionately greater. So, to me, grammar must be dead on. Others don't seem to mind so much - moderan scored you highly - but all those bases need covering to get a good average.

I also downscored you a bit on voice. Take a look at this 198-word extract:

*Eddie had  been playing the game forever he thought[<- not needed. We are him. Don't belabour the fact or it starts to feel relentless, and if you must do it, make it gramatically correct], and he had successfully  defeated each level.  He now was at the top level[<- repeat of level].  He paced back and  forth across his cell.  Why did this happen,[<- comma splice] how will I free myself?   Looking back[<- ho hum], he was backpacking across a foreign country on foot when  he was stopped by the police.  They accused him of assassinating the  country's president and he would pay.  No matter what he said they  ignored him, throwing him into the back of a squad car.  

Scapegoat, was  all he could think of[<- we *are* Eddie. Who else would be thinking this. Delete.].  His lawyer was no help.  Dig out, that’s what  he would do[<- repetition. This essentially says "Dig out. Yes he would. He would dig out.". Such wording makes a character. Who repeats his thoughts like this, particularly in this situation?]  The prison was old and dilapidated,[<- comma splice] he thought he could  scrape away the loose concrete and escape.  He kept a spoon from one of  his meals and day by day he worked [<- it's just not stressful enough. Make him suffer for easy sympathy  ] at the cell window.

His fingers  were sore and he was sweating profusely.  It was a desert country and  the temps were known to rise into the 100’s daily.  He tried to sleep  but found he [<- not needed. It's implicit] could not - but just when he was making progress he was  taken from his cell to the place of his execution.  *

Voice is basically style and feel and tone. In this situation, the guy has been apprehended, chucked into a squad car, and is facing jail. Get inside his head. Properly, and not by half measures. Here he sounds, at worst, slightly miffed. "How dare they jail me? I am being used as a scapegoat. Why isn't my lawyer doing anything. But it's okay, despite being banged up or murder in the first, I'll just scrape my way out with this spoon." He is not being challenged. He doesn't seem scared in the least, nor bewildered. This feeds directly into what type of person he is. This _is _who he is. He seems (in this VR construct) less like an innocent backpacker and more like a common criminal who thinks the law are to blame and expects peope to jump in and sort him out. How would readers feel about that sort of person? It seems, to me, like the sort of person I just don't care that much about or want to associate with. Let him sit in jail to teach him some manners. But if you emphasise something good, something human and relatable about him, that would help. Highlight his actual innocence. Make us worry about him (or his in game avatar). Express his worry by means of a more stressy, tighter, less ho-hum sedentary sentence structure - rather than "X was such and such" because too much "was" can make text seem very easy, have him struggle against X. I found that stripping some of the wasiness (thus varying the sentence structure in places), taking away his easy methods (the spoon), changing some text here and there seems to maybe nudge things in that direction? These 164 words, 3 was'es versus 10:

*Eddie had  been playing the game forever, and he had successfully  defeated each stage. Now, at the top level, he paced back and  forth across his cell. He had been backpacking across a foreign country on foot when  he had been stopped by the police, accused of assassinating the  country's president, and that he would pay. They  ignored his perplexed protestations before throwing him into the back of a squad car, only stopping when they tumbled him out at this dilapidated jail.  

Scapegoat. He was a scapegoat. Could he dig through the crumbling stonework? It seemed an impossible shot. He had no tools, not even a spoon. His sore fingers stung and sweat dripped into his eyes as the desert temperatures outside topped a hundred.  He tried to sleep  but lay awake, and soon ceased his scratching at the loose concrete. A blanket of despair settled over him

And that was when he was  taken from his cell to the place of his execution.  *

Not only does it give you another 34 words to do something else with, but also it helps your effect score too. Anyway, I hope this is useful. Keep at it. We all have our plusses and minuses. You should see some of my poetry. People don't even dignify it with comment, and rightly so


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## -xXx- (Apr 3, 2018)

oh-my-goodness!
this is so unexpected.
thank you so much for your feedback.
:redface2:
_*recovers from shock*
*in a good way*_


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## SueC (Apr 3, 2018)

Congratulations, xXx! Awesome job.


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