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Gloria in excelsis Deo
How It Rates
Description
A Halloween night unlike no other. Kenneth's Halloween plans are dashed when a strange visitor arrives amidst a brutal attack with a shocking message for him. Learn the truth in "Gloria in excelsis Deo."
Comments
Hmmm...there's potential here and I wish this contest had a "potential" thumb choice because I cant give this a solid thumbs up as of yet. Its an interesting idea and a good twist there at the end but I found myself getting thrown out of the story by some of the language, parts were a bit clunky and just need some extra attention. One example would be,
"A Starbucks had completely ignited in flames out of the corner of his eyes."
That doesnt seem to be the best way to describe that moment, maybe something like "Out of the corner of his eye, Kenneth could see a Starbucks had burst into flames." Or something like that, basically what Im saying is a really brutal edit on this would do it a world of good.
I dont want to be discouraging at all and I am constantly amazed by everyone's bravery in submitting there work here so please take this all with a grain of salt and keep writing!
I enjoyed the pacing of the story and all of the colorful characters you used to populate it. The various descriptions, drawn from pop culture and movies, were entertaining. The whole thing felt like an action scene from a movie, which made it fun.
However, the fact that it came across as more of a scene than a story makes me think it needs to be expanded, to have a bit more closure and to delve more into the characters. One thing I noticed is that Bertrand's dialogue tells us virtually everything about the attackers: their motives, etc. There are a lot of great ideas in his exposition that could be better portrayed in some sort of action, and action seems to be your strong suit!
It's not really a full story, but I don't entirely agree with Aaron that it feels like "a scene". There's an opening scene that isn't SF (could be any gay bar on halloween) followed by a stock under-attack scene, then a standard mystery-stranger-helps-protagonist-escape sequence. The stranger then gives a long as-you-know-Bob backstory infodump (in the middle of what seems to be intended as a pitched battle) before the protagonist suddenly turns out not to be what he's clearly been portrayed as up to then. This is a common error when doing "surprise" stories - falling on the wrong side of the line between clever and plain-old-lying. And here it happens twice.
I also kept thinking "oh that's ripped off from..." - there are Cybermen, Terminators, V-ger from the first Star Trek movie, Cylons...
There are some good points, but for me it just didn't work. Sorry.
I'm not going to add to the carnage on this one. You definitely have skill as a writer/editor. I couldn't spot much in the way of grammatical issues at all! The problems are in the story's overall coherence and flow. During the opening party, I kept losing track of who was who and what was going. The rescuer seems to appear suddenly appear in the course of a couple of sentences and then everything goes nuts. The ending works out pretty well, but with the confusion at the start, it just doesn't come together. As it is, I don't feel comfortable up-voting. Still, good work and Keep at it!
Hi everyone,
Thanks for the feedback on this! I appreciate the comments and this opportunity!
There is a good idea at the heart of this, it needs a more coherent story though. It feels a little rushed, the pacing is very fast, though you dump a lot of information in there. I like the idea of the fancy dress party being crashed, and that's a good starting point. I'd take your time to develop the story from there though. Make us care about the characters. Increase the tension - are they going to make it to the transport? Who are these attackers (don't have Bertrand Exposition have all the answers)? The more you work at this the better the outcome will be.