My Ballot from the "Outside Insight" Contest · 4:26am Aug 31st, 2014
With the:
"Outside Insight" contest rapidly coming to its conclusion, I thought I'd just do a quick blog to talk about the stories I voted for. This was the first time I'd ever been a judge in a fiction contest, and I quite enjoyed the experience. I'm not going to go through all 111 stories--I'll direct folks to PresentPerfect and InquisitorM for that--but these are the stories I picked from the Final 23 as my Top 10.
Oooo! I should try to put a "page break" in here! Experiment time! 
10. Not in Bluff nor Bravado nor Loneliness by Vivid Syntax: A character study of Iron Will, really, showing how he got to be the guy we met in the show and how he might not really like being that guy. This was one of the 28 stories in the first bracket I read for the contest, and I'm glad to see it stuck through to the end.
9. Pride by InquisitorM: M has a very particular style--strong in sensory detail but purposefully distant when it comes to what's going on in his characters' heads. When he's got a story where it works--like "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"--he can knock me right over sideways, building the tension till everything explodes at the end. Here, though, it didn't work for me. Osvald, the griffon who's our point of view character, never came into focus, and that kept me from being able to figure out who was doing what to whom in the pony village where Osvald finds himself recuperating. Still, I liked it enough to squeeze it into my Top 10...
8. Veni, Vidi, Verti by thesecret1: This one just beat out the other dark changeling story, "Queen of Queens," for a place on my list--"Queen of Queens" has a lot of really lovely stuff in it, but I found myself thinking it needed more room to stretch out. "Veni, Vidi, Verti" goes places that I was not at all expecting, but every step is perfectly logical and consistent. Its need for some judicious editing, though, put it here on the list.
7. The Last Trumpet's Call by Cold in Gardez: CiG is one of my favorite authors on this site, and this narrative displays all his virtues. My problem with it--and this sounds weird even to me--is that I found it to be insufficiently fictitious. One the many semi-useless ideas rattling around my head about writing is one that says, "Fiction is different from non-fiction because fiction has to make sense." CIG introduces plot elements here that are drawn from current events in Africa and from his own career in the U.S. military, but he doesn't fictionalize them enough to make them fit together as a story.
6. Gazebo by NotARealPonydotcom: One of my many failures as both a writer and a reader involves the way I can like dark stories, but I can only love light stuff. So the top picks on any list I put together are likely to be adventure, romance, comedy and stuff of that ilk. This story just charmed me in nearly every way a story can--I would've gone with Irving Berlin's "Isn't it a Lovely Day to be Caught in the Rain" for the chapter title, for instance, but that's neither here nor there. I coulda used more interaction between the two characters, but a very nice story.
5. Let Them Eat Grass by Cloudhammer: Ever since that one throw-away gag in "Sisterhooves Social," we've had the specter of sapient sheep being herded and corralled in Equestria. This story shows how and why that would work. Simple, straightforward, funny, and a little thought-provoking: what's not to like?
4. Old Friend by Bad Horse: You can always count on Bad Horse to try kicking the supports out from under the whole concept to storytelling in order to tell a story, and this is an admirable example of that. It gets a little cloying here and there, following a narrator who has only a rudimentary idea of what nouns and verbs are, but definitely a favorite of mine.
3. Moonlight Palaver by Carabas: This story takes a look at several things I've been thinking about lately with regard to Foreigner--how ponies are viewed by the other sapient beings of Equestria--and I love everything the author comes up with regarding the other hoofed and mythological folks. Great gobs of fun, this one.
2. Cranky Doodle Donkey's Bad Asssssss Day by Einhander: Just about everything here--the voice, the storyline, the humor, the descriptions, the use of the contest prompt--it all works. This would've been my favorite story in the contest if it hadn't been for the next one...
1. An Outsider's Perspective by Kavonde: One of the things that draws me to silly stories is that I'm not very good at writing them. And this one is such a fine example of high silliness--Lovecraftian monster comes to Ponyville and makes friends with the ponies--it just cut straight through to the very innards of me and lodged there. This was, I believe, the second story I read for the contest, and it stayed my choice for first place the whole time.
The only story on the final ballot that I couldn't finish, I should note, was "I am Demon" by Aquaman. Whatever was going on there, I couldn't figure it out, and I gave up after a couple pages.
Mike
To combine your top 10 with PresentPerfect's:
16 Moonlight Palaver
12 Cranky Doodle Donkey’s Bad Asssssss Day
12 An Outsider’s Perspective
11 Pride
10 Queen of Queens
10 The Last Trumpet’s Call
7 Old Friends
7 Changeling: The Movie
6 Let them Eat Grass
5 We Who With Songs Beguile
5 Gazebo
4 I Am Demon
3 Veni, Vidi, Verti
1 Rise
1 Not in Bluff nor Bravado nor Loneliness
Heh. Figures that the one time I write something that PP does 'get' and you don't. Can't win 'em all I guess. Still, much funnier is how none of your top six were stories that I even considered for points-scoring position, so that says a lot in itself. At the most extreme, Moonlight Palaver was the last of 26 in both story and prompt when I scored it, and my top three don't even appear in your list.
I don't think it gets and clearer than that!
I think I might be about to shed some tears for Rise, though.
I'm curious. Didn't figure it out in what capacity? What was going on in the story, or how to get into the document it was hosted in? I've heard some people have had issues with the latter.
2419186 He said 'gave up after a couple pages' so I'm assuming it wasn't the latter.
As folks will see:
In a couple hours when the results go up at EqD, I'm as usual something of an outlier in my judgments...
2416135
As for "Rise," I had three story-based problems with it: I couldn't believe the Apples would have been running over and otherwise killing so many breezies for so long without even noticing; I couldn't believe that Apple Bloom took the breezie she captured to Twilight instead of Fluttershy; and I couldn't believe the main character's father's sudden change of heart at the end--unless I want to take the ending as the main character's hallucination at which point the whole story becomes very, very dark indeed.
2417163
Thank you for writing the story!
2419186
It was the story itself, I'm afraid--or rather, judging by the praise for it that I've been seeing from other reviewers, it was my brain not connecting with what you were doing. My brain is like a troublesome puppy: a constant problem, but I still love the little scamp...
Mike
2419688
That seems to be the main complaint against it.