11/13/2020

4/19/2024 9:19 AM

991

2

131 wins / 101 losses

Sage

In 3

The Red Church

"In your dreams, you see the crimson spires rise from the fog menacingly... a voice, whispering 'come back' over, and over again."

Author's Notes



Entry for Endmaster's Prompt Contest 3, 2024
Prompt: A story about making a deal with a demon/devil.

This article gives basic information on HTML in the text editor. Things included are paragraph, line breaks, bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, links, and images.

I'd submit it, and let the article mods decide. It reads like a final draft and contains pretty valuable information!

Funny coincidence, I just made Mystic a small unpublished preview explaining my hacky method of viewing it.

See if this helps.

Brilliant! I was excited for this all day. Thank you Mystic for the absolutely massive review, and I'm glad you enjoyed the read.

As I mentioned my notes, I was experimenting with writing a lot less restrained and nitpicky, which helped my pacing but had the unfortunate side effect of my grammar faltering at times(if only I had time to proofread... I wonder what happened there). It's good to hear that overall the writing was conducive to establishing the setting.

Also unfortunately, with the last-week contest rush the story ended up falling short of what I initially imagined it to be. In my intense bouts of thinking about writing I had indeed visualized a sweeping epic spanning more churches than two, and the first half of the story was set up for such a structure. That never got realized, of course, but I tried to stick the landing as gracefully as I could (still trying to figure outhow the whole parents plotline could've been fitted in, no satisfying solution yet haha).

In the end I'm pretty satisfied with the final result and will probably leave it as is. Thanks again Mystic!

If you or anyone else are curious about the article thing

As of writing, all the contest entries have 10+ ratings except for 3, so if you want to rate or maybe review, those are good candidates too.

The Village That Was
The Red Church
The Grand Pharaoh's Tomb

I suggest getting the extension on Brad's profile, it allows you to click sneak-peek stories as links (along with other useful functionalities).

Yup, the score fluctuations were largely due to a high weighted user changing their (joke) ratings around. Ben can expect the current true rating of his story to fall somewhere between its max and the current score (~5).

I wonder how long it will take him to write Rouges

Congratulations to Sherbet, Malk, and GP for the top 3 finish, and all the other contestants who managed to turn something in. Really strong showing this time! I, for one, am decently pleased with what I managed to scrunge up last few days. (Plus, my bet actually went through for a whopping 1000 points...)

I think you need to read it again

Coming back to this after publishing to say that your advice was immensely helpful. I tend to overthink the things that readers would notice when I write ("Oh, a comma splice! What a terrible writer!"). The way I started off writing made me hyperfocused on the fine details and the little 'clues', so much that the first 2k was essentially suffering. Then, I read the post, took a short(lol) break, and came back a lot less concerned about the little things. After all, if I, the writer, can't remember or notice after a break, the readers certainly won't. There's definitely a change in writing style. The last chunk of the story, though rushed due to time, went a lot smoother. To me, it read just as well as the first few thousand if not better. Part of it, as you mentioned, is due to me actually enjoying parts of the story that I was writing about.