Issue 838 Discussion Thread

[Huntress]

Because non-collab issues deserve some attention too, amirite.

Issue 838

Clara looked up, staring into a massive void that split the sky in two. Dirt, loose pebbles and rocks lifted into the air as if caught in a vortex. The fur on her neck rose, as she could feel the air drifting upwards, threatening to lift her, everyone and everything into the sky, to vanish into the abyss. The corrupted Zafara smirked, now gravity bent to his will. He was done holding back. He was ready to end this fight once and for all.
~shadowknight_72

NTWF entries

Articles
None

Short Stories
None

Comics
The Stamp by trishabeakens
Local Colour by Huntress
Refreshing by Spookie

Series
The Flood that Brought Trouble by Hannah Needle
Lupe Pack Detectives-Copycat:Part Three by Ian Wolf-Park
The Crimson Curse:Part Two by CrimsonShroud


The Editorial continues being the editorial; one of the highlights of information this week is that they'll try and make contest deadlines a full 24-hour period in the future due to this whole timezone business and round-planet-induced disadvantages many of us face when dealing with Neopets events.

***
Hoy, pretty good crop of NTWF entries this week. Including one of mine, meaning I'm now all out of backlog and should get crackin' on some new ones. Bets on whether I can finish and send in a comic about the Brightvale portals before they stop being relevant?

*had the same concern about the wraith plot and look how long that lasted >__>*

[Moni]

I didn't realize you were in this issue, Huntress, but... okay, I really like your comic.

I think that, beyond the joke, which is pretty well-executed, it also gives a lot of flavor to mystery island as well as tying it back to a random event from the main game. Most of the time mystery island is just this fantasy indiana jones thing, but making it more akin to a modern touristy country makes a lot of sense for the attractions that they do have and also tying it to the more moderny-Neopian world. ><

Shad and Saura's differing reactions to both going outside and to the Lupe are also quite a nice touch, and is a more subtle indication of their personalities than in other comics. This isn't necessarily positive or negative, just an observation, though I think it's a good thing given all the other elements; having them be exaggerated would have probably made this particular comic work less.

[Huntress]

Moni , this was pretty much my intention with this comic, so I'm glad that it came across =D My pets have lived on Mystery Island as long as I've had canon for them so I've spent years building it up as this neat tropical network of towns that's actually livable as opposed to the Grass Hut Theme Park that it tends to be onsite. Not that I've, uh, actually been to places I could use properly to base my version of Mystery Island on, but vaguely Southeast Asian seems a decent bet, considering all these dojos and ninja schools that were there before Shenkuu was a thing. So this comic might be a biiit of a prod at the site team in this regard.

(I think MI is supposed to be a Hawaii/Easter Island hodgepodge on-site, except I'm relatively sure that Hawaii doesn't have very many native cannibals running around. The whole coconut bra aesthetic hasn't aged well either.)

I get the feeling that I've started writing Shad and Saura as more markedly different in personalities (and reactions) as time passes. Early on I'd frequently give them the same shocked reaction at shenanigans, but then at some point they started acting more like foils off of one another and turned out to have more potential this way because this way I can cover a broader range of reactions with them. It's good to know that it hasn't turned out too hamfisted, anyway.

Thank you! ^^

[CrimsonShroud]

Oh wow, I did not expect a passage from my story to make Quote of the Week...

Yay!...I guess. XD

Also, you're missing the second part of my story series, The Crimson Curse: Part 2 ;P

[mollyscribbles]

slightly horrifying thought: what if it's not a coconut bra. What if a certain faerie happens to have coconut-patterned patches on her torso, like a water faerie might have scales.

*still a little bitter about Usukicon article vanishing into the ether*

[Huntress]

CrimsonShroud , added your piece :3 I used to be pretty good at remembering NTWFers' usernames, but sometimes stuff slips through the cracks and I'm not all that diligent with checking the author list. It was good QotW material, though; I ended up skimming the story just to see what the deal was with the time-and-space-rending abyss, so it's a good eyecatching quote.

mollyscribbles , the first thing that that reminds me of is keloid scars, which is notably more horrifying than coconut shells >__> Although I can't imagine coconut shells being very good for support either, and the edges would probably dig in something fierce. At least rig something up with palm leaves if you're going with the tiki aesthetic, fercryingoutloud.
(Honestly I've been wanting to do something with Jhuidah for ages, but haven't been able to get enough personality from her to figure out which direction to take it in.)

I've had a few recent instances where an entry of mine got accepted but showed up in the issue after the upcoming one. But any longer than that and I'd find it safe to assume that they went derp and lost it (or even just straight-up forgot that it never got published. Fyora knows that they haven't been running the most professional ship as of late.)

[mollyscribbles]

Ugh. I'll poke them next year and ask if I can resubmit it for that Usukicon. Way too much of a delay now to allow for it.

[Moni]

CrimsonShroud

SPOILER: Click to show

Yeah, so I'll do something I don't normally do and kind of give my reactions to the story without further context. This isn't me like, editing or anything, but a lot of my gripes are going to be with the line-to-line writing, and it's not really helpful to you at all to talk about these things in vague terms

So let's talk about the bit from Wiluite... (first line) to "... crud" (16th paragraph)

Fight scenes, especially ones where you have to manage a lot of characters--and where you want character interactions to really matter--are really difficult to pin down because of all the moving parts. Now, I don't really get that this is supposed to be a super duper dark story or anything--so in other contexts, while I might complain about the characters being all snarky and witty, it actually works here because the tone isn't so dire.

What I do take issue with is the fact that Wil, Parlebb, and Zemia seem to be taking their sweet time talking while Arthur just... vanishes. Like, he's not doing anything while they're speaking--and he didn't seem like he was about to do anything until Wil decides to act as a distraction. The end result is that Arthur--the impending danger--is kind of waiting for his turn to start, stuck in some kind of void. This is a simple problem to fix--have one of the characters manage to disable him, or have lithia stir and arthur refocus his attention to her and have tension build that way.

And if Arthur *isn't* meant to be on the alert all the time--more like a zombie-state there's no reason to get try to redirect his nonexistent attention, and therefore no reason for a distraction, which makes the main point of this scene pointless. The characters shouldn't try to distract him if he doesn't respond unless someone calls his name: they should just stealth-attack him.

Now, the force-choke is pretty cool, but I would again clean up the writing:

“Who, or whatever you are, you better give us our friend back right now! Or else I’ll—Hrrk!”

Wiluite’s throat tightened, as if something gripped his neck. He couldn’t talk. The corrupted Arthur raised his hand. Wiluite lifted off the ground. He lurched back his arm, reeling the Kyrii towards him, powerless to resist. Arthur clutched one hand onto the side of Wiluite’s head. He gasped; his whole body trembled at a sudden sensation that frightened him, he felt the warmth leave his arms, body and heart, freezing cold seeped in, draining him.

You do not need "as if something gripped his neck" because the reader can put two and two together when they read the corrupted Arthur's neck. "He couldn't talk," is also not necessary, because it's already implied by the dialogue cutting off.
There's also this sentence: "He lurched back his arm, reeling the kyrii towards him, powerless to resist," which is wrong grammatically. Because "reeling the kyrii towards him" is grammatically a parenthetical, the core sentence is this "he lurched back his arm, powerless to resist." In this sentence, "powerless to resist" modifies *Arthur*, not Wil, which is not the intended meaning.
Note that I am not criticizing your *choice* of details, but rather how they translate onto the page. You do not strictly put too much detail; you just tend to overstate it.

“Who, or whatever you are, you better give us our friend back right now! Or else I’ll—Hrrk!”

Wiluite’s throat tightened. The corrupted Arthur raised his hand, lifting Wiluite off the ground. He lurched back his arm, reeling the powerless Kyrii towards him. Arthur clutched one hand onto the side of Wiluite’s head. He gasped; his whole body trembled as the warmth left his arms, body, and heart, and freezing cold seeped in, draining him.

The details are almost the exact same; I changed very little about them. What *did* change is how much--for a lack of a better term--filler got in the way. Let your writing breathe without over-explaining it and trust your words to communicate what you want them to.

Again, I'll try to steer away from editing any more (because, uh, it's hard and time-consuming, I hate editing my own stuff pft and I doubt you really *want* me to edit), but with your future writing, keep in mind if you could use the format to make your writing read better and take care to check the subjects/objects of your sentences.

The rest of the fight scene goes very smoothly; the issue of characters kind of dropping out doesn't really rear its head, at least not in a way that I noticed it upon the first reading. Wil is accounted for because he's disabled by Arthur, Zemia's accounted for because he's restrained, and Clara + everyone else but Parlebb is accounted for because of gravity shenanigans. getting people out of the fight by disabling them is a really easy and effective trick, especially in something outside visual media (which has the distinct advantage of just showing you multiple people at a time); so the issue i described before only applies to that scene.

And the aftermath also works. I think the only thing that I would have flipped around is to have Arthur make sure Lithia was okay *first* instead of having him destroying the amulet be sandwiched into her *recovery* scene. That way there's not the issue of "oh arthur and his friends are really concerned! ...ohwaitaminutelemmetakeabreak... remember, Lithia's in big trouble and only arthur can help her!" It breaks the flow of the scene when the main emotional impact was Lithia's "will she or won't she" recovery.

The scene's end around the campfire and Clara's scenes also work well as the conclusion to your previous series; I unfortunately did not really have this context when I first read this so it seemed really out-of-place to me and not in-line with the conflict, but now that I read over the previous series, I'd say it works. I actually really like the idea of the details in Clara's scene and how it inspires Arthur to kind of cope with his dark memories of his trip with the symbolism of him changing the amulet. It's clever and I like it.

Plot-wise I'd say the one main issue with the story is probably Arthur's arc. I still have the same gripe about that opening scene with the appraiser in that the payoff was really inconsistent. When we first meet the appraiser we got the impression that Arthur was *trying* to get power out of it, but at the end it kind of turns around and apparently Arthur didn't think it had any power all along? It's just... really muddled and to be honest I'm just kind of confused by it. The strongest parts of this story is when you're using this one particular instance of corruption to make reference to the past and how they can kind of deal with their haunted woods journey; the weakest is the events that facilitate it.

Now I know I've been harsh--that's kind of my MO with prose fiction, especially longer prose fiction, but I really enjoyed this story even with its flaw. I'm not going to give it a letter grade or anything, but thanks for writing it and putting it out there, and if you ever do something else with these characters, I'd like to read it.

[CrimsonShroud]

Moni

SPOILER: Click to show

Fight scenes, especially ones where you have to manage a lot of characters--and where you want character interactions to really matter--are really difficult to pin down because of all the moving parts. Now, I don't really get that this is supposed to be a super duper dark story or anything--so in other contexts, while I might complain about the characters being all snarky and witty, it actually works here because the tone isn't so dire.

The story wasn’t intended to be super dark. Even so, I’m glad that the snark and wit of some of the characters (primarily Zemia and a bit from Parlebb) didn’t feel out of place in this story. Zemia is quite snarky personality-wise, especially towards Wiluite, despite the tense situation going on around them.

What I do take issue with is the fact that Wil, Parlebb, and Zemia seem to be taking their sweet time talking while Arthur just... vanishes. Like, he's not doing anything while they're speaking--and he didn't seem like he was about to do anything until Wil decides to act as a distraction. The end result is that Arthur--the impending danger--is kind of waiting for his turn to start, stuck in some kind of void. This is a simple problem to fix--have one of the characters manage to disable him, or have lithia stir and arthur refocus his attention to her and have tension build that way. And if Arthur *isn't* meant to be on the alert all the time--more like a zombie-state there's no reason to get try to redirect his nonexistent attention, and therefore no reason for a distraction, which makes the main point of this scene pointless. The characters shouldn't try to distract him if he doesn't respond unless someone calls his name: they should just stealth-attack him.

Ah, you’re right. Now that you mention it, it was quite odd to not state why Arthur didn’t seem to do anything when everyone else was talking. I guess I wasn’t thinking about it when I wrote that segment. I thought it would be assumed that he lost sight of them and was simply looking for them, but it looks like it didn’t come across that way.

Now, the force-choke is pretty cool, but I would again clean up the writing:

You do not need "as if something gripped his neck" because the reader can put two and two together when they read the corrupted Arthur's neck. "He couldn't talk," is also not necessary, because it's already implied by the dialogue cutting off.
There's also this sentence: "He lurched back his arm, reeling the kyrii towards him, powerless to resist," which is wrong grammatically. Because "reeling the kyrii towards him" is grammatically a parenthetical, the core sentence is this "he lurched back his arm, powerless to resist." In this sentence, "powerless to resist" modifies *Arthur*, not Wil, which is not the intended meaning.
Note that I am not criticizing your *choice* of details, but rather how they translate onto the page. You do not strictly put too much detail; you just tend to overstate it. Let your writing breathe without over-explaining it and trust your words to communicate what you want them to.

Once again, you’re right. I tend to put in as much detail as I can when I write, but its clear I’ve got to be a bit more careful not to add in unnecessary filler that ends up bloating the passages. When in doubt, keep it simple, as they say.

And the aftermath also works. I think the only thing that I would have flipped around is to have Arthur make sure Lithia was okay *first* instead of having him destroying the amulet be sandwiched into her *recovery* scene. That way there's not the issue of "oh arthur and his friends are really concerned! ...ohwaitaminutelemmetakeabreak... remember, Lithia's in big trouble and only arthur can help her!" It breaks the flow of the scene when the main emotional impact was Lithia's "will she or won't she" recovery.

Good point. When I wrote the scene, I thought that since Arthur had just recovered from being possessed and he had no memory of what happened while he was under its control, the news of Lithia’s condition would come as a huge shock to him. Naturally, I felt he would have been overwhelmed with guilt when he realized that he nearly killed one of his closest friends, thanks to the cursed talisman, hence the reason why he has his brief moment of grief.

Now that you mention it, the urgency of the scene would have flowed better if it were set up the other way around.

The scene's end around the campfire and Clara's scenes also work well as the conclusion to your previous series; I unfortunately did not really have this context when I first read this so it seemed really out-of-place to me and not in-line with the conflict, but now that I read over the previous series, I'd say it works. I actually really like the idea of the details in Clara's scene and how it inspires Arthur to kind of cope with his dark memories of his trip with the symbolism of him changing the amulet. It's clever and I like it.

Thanks! This was definitely one of my favorite parts of the story to write, connecting the previous stories together and having them come full circle.

Plot-wise I'd say the one main issue with the story is probably Arthur's arc. I still have the same gripe about that opening scene with the appraiser in that the payoff was really inconsistent. When we first meet the appraiser we got the impression that Arthur was *trying* to get power out of it, but at the end it kind of turns around and apparently Arthur didn't think it had any power all along? It's just... really muddled and to be honest I'm just kind of confused by it. The strongest parts of this story is when you're using this one particular instance of corruption to make reference to the past and how they can kind of deal with their haunted woods journey; the weakest is the events that facilitate it.

I totally agree with you here. It’s pretty all over the place in those parts.

Now that I look at it again, I realize that there are a couple of things I could have done differently that would have worked a little better; like writing out the appraiser scene entirely and instead start from where Arthur returns home empty-handed. His frustration with his lack of answers to the questions he sought would lead to his obsession with the talisman that would haunt him for a couple sleepless nights as he struggles to get it out of his mind, until his curiosity gets the better of him and he tries testing it out late one night in a secluded area, discovering its hidden power.
A little too late for that now though.

Now I know I've been harsh--that's kind of my MO with prose fiction, especially longer prose fiction, but I really enjoyed this story even with its flaw. I'm not going to give it a letter grade or anything, but thanks for writing it and putting it out there, and if you ever do something else with these characters, I'd like to read it.

No worries. You’ve been bringing up some very good points and eye-openers. It’s all to help me improve as a writer.

Don’t worry, their adventures are far from over. In fact, they’ve just donned their backpacks and left the house not too long ago. I wonder where they’re headed this time?

Thanks very much for the review, Moni!