Shining's Day Off

Silver_Linings #1 · May 1st, 2019 · · ·

Um not incest. It's an ok story if a bit of a let down with the no incest twist. I'm not sure a non incest story works for an incest story contest entry but that's obviously not my call.

Johnny Walker

Johnny Walker #2 · May 1st, 2019 · · ·

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9598846
I understand your disappointment, but I did ask about this and this was the response from page 2 of the Contest page.

6833922 [ME]
I have a couple of ideas... Might be a spoiler, but does it count if it's a changeling disguised as a sibling?
6833933 [SHAKESPIRACLES]
Meme Photo: I'm going to allow this.
This qualifies as 'Incestuish".

Now I thought this would be a decent twist and I admit it's not as good a work as I should have made it. It however was accepted as far as I can tell, but I haven't gotten new word back. I do plan to go back and clean this up, even add another chapter.

Silver_Linings

Silver_Linings #3 · May 1st, 2019 · 1 · ·

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9599056
Oh yeah I knew you were accepted. It was how I found your story. My comments were just my opinion. Their contest has created so many new sibling incest works and I couldn't be happier about that and they obviously decided to let your story in. Cant really argue with the people putting up the money lol. Was just putting my feelings out there.

Johnny Walker

Johnny Walker #4 · May 2nd, 2019 · · ·

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9599120
Money was the primary factor for everyone. Getting something awesome for writing good horse porn is sweet.

It's my only chance at getting an Odroid-N2. You have no idea how difficult it is to find good performing, reasonably priced ARM boards with good software support and more than 2GB of RAM. 💟

But still, I'd rather make good porn that other people want to read. This one is my only shot at the big prizes and I'm probably not going to make it. But it'd be worth it to have some notoriety.

xRei

xRei #5 · May 2nd, 2019 · 1 · ·

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Contest Judge chiming in.
This is submitted after the deadline so it may end up DQ'd. Not my call, but it's likely. I still read it anyway though so here's my thoughts:

You mentioned not having an editor. I hate to say it, but it kind of shows. There were a lot of grammar and spelling mistakes throughout the fic. While not the end of the world by any means, it does sully the experience a bit when I have to stop reading and take notice of a mistake before continuing on.

You know.. I've left a lot of notes on these fics and the number one note I've left I'll be leaving here too: consider switching to third person limited point of view. I know omni and head hopping often comes natural, and if it's done extremely well it can work. But for the rest of us mere mortals, I suggest third limited. If you aren't familiar with these concepts you could google them. There's all kinds of articles out there which can explain these concepts better than I could.

But, in short, the lack of a consistent point of view makes it harder to insert myself into the fic and truly feel like I'm there in the scene. As a specific example of some other PoV oddities, there's this line:

A creature, small and slink-like had darted through the opening of the door before the door was shut. Shining seemed completely oblivious.

What's weird is the usage of 'seemed'. Whose PoV are we in right now? It's not Shining. Shining wouldn't think to himself 'I seem completely oblivious'. So is it the intruder? Maybe, but up to this point we know nothing about them or who they are, so it doesn't feel natural to imagine they are thinking to themselves 'Shining seems oblivious'. We haven't established ourselves in that PoV yet(another example where PoV switching hurts the narrative).

So who does that leave? The narrator, I guess. The omniscient narrator who presides over everything. But even that doesn't make sense. Why? Because of the word 'seeming'. The narrator is omniscient. It knows everything about the scene and the characters and the events. It knows whether Shining is oblivious or not, so the word 'seeming' is making even the narrator sound unsure, which feels wrong.

Anyways, that's a lot of whining about a single word in one part of the fic, but I used it because it's en excellent example of how shifting PoV around causes weird things to happen in your narration.

Anyway, apart from the writing mechanics, I was at least intrigued by the premise. Maybe a bit let down that it's not "real"(and I use huge air quotes here) incest. You do at least have them both talk about the taboo, which is somewhat ironic: I've read plenty of actual incest fics that breeze right by the taboo aspect without ever mentioning it at all.

Not sure whether to find that depressing or hilarious.

Either way! This is a strange entry and I don't know its ultimate fate, but I appreciate the time you took to write it anyway.

Best of luck.

Shakespearicles