Writing Contest - Post-Apocalypse/Dystopia - WINNER!

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Re: Writing Contest - Post-Apocalypse/Dystopia - VOTING OPEN

Postby Marcuse » Wed Nov 15, 2017 2:30 pm

Kivutar wrote:Is it against the rules for someone to explain "Juicebox?" It was cool but I'm very confused.


It's a dystopia where the fuel for electric power has run out, and they use people to provide energy for appliances. The guy in the story is "overclocking" his heart by making it beat faster than it normally should in order to get paid more and is killing himself doing it, for the love of someone else.
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Re: Writing Contest - Post-Apocalypse/Dystopia - VOTING OPEN

Postby jbobsully11 » Thu Nov 16, 2017 7:40 am

Marcuse wrote:
Kivutar wrote:Is it against the rules for someone to explain "Juicebox?" It was cool but I'm very confused.


It's a dystopia where the fuel for electric power has run out, and they use people to provide energy for appliances. The guy in the story is "overclocking" his heart by making it beat faster than it normally should in order to get paid more and is killing himself doing it, for the love of someone else.

...Yeah, I wouldn't have figured that one out in a hundred years.

I thought "The Trader" was pretty funny. That, "Red Paper," and "The Vault" were my favorites. I thought that "Deep Breaths" could have used some more explanation. I may have missed something, but why did the narrator decide to mess everything up (especially knowing it would all be fixed soon)? That seemed to come out of nowhere.
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Re: Writing Contest - Post-Apocalypse/Dystopia - VOTING OPEN

Postby KleinerKiller » Thu Nov 16, 2017 8:34 am

jbobsully11 wrote:I may have missed something, but why did the narrator decide to mess everything up (especially knowing it would all be fixed soon)? That seemed to come out of nowhere.


The implication was the death of his wife and child for violating the breathing limit during birth (in the paragraph about how natural birth fell out of fashion), plus built-up stress from watching the world keep going. It's easy to miss, though.
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Re: Writing Contest - Post-Apocalypse/Dystopia - VOTING OPEN

Postby IamNotCreepy » Thu Nov 16, 2017 2:44 pm

I really liked the concept of "Deep Breaths". It kind of reminds me of the movie In Time. I like the idea of something like the oxygen being such a precious resource. The ending was an interesting twist, but I feel like a little more development was needed to make the leap to him wanting to kill everyone.

With "The Trader" I also got big Fallout vibes, which is a good thing. The setup to the joke was good, but I think you tipped your hand too much. I knew the punch line as soon as you mentioned "hard g" and "soft g".

I also found "Juicebox" to be somewhat confusing, but I got the gist of it. I liked the concept (that does seem to be a big theme here).

I like the feel of "Red Paper". I kept expecting it to go in a different direction. I thought the "King of Mice" would be Walt Disney, and it would end up with their world being the inspiration for the Disney stories. Of course, in hindsight Little Red Riding Hood wasn't a Disney story.
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Re: Writing Contest - Post-Apocalypse/Dystopia - VOTING OPEN

Postby sunglasses » Thu Nov 16, 2017 4:36 pm

IamNotCreepy wrote:With "The Trader" I also got big Fallout vibes, which is a good thing. The setup to the joke was good, but I think you tipped your hand too much. I knew the punch line as soon as you mentioned "hard g" and "soft g".



Clearly you have never been in the room when someone who studies Latin starts arguing with a Catholic over the pronunciation of "genuflection"

It gets ugly.
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Re: Writing Contest - Post-Apocalypse/Dystopia - VOTING OPEN

Postby FaceTheCitizen » Fri Nov 17, 2017 10:02 pm

...
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Re: Writing Contest - Post-Apocalypse/Dystopia - WINNER!

Postby IamNotCreepy » Wed Nov 22, 2017 4:48 am

Thank you everyone for the votes. I wanted to give a little bit more background into my story. About 10 years ago I was thinking about how much I had forgotten about what I had learned in school. I thought, what if if my life depended on remembering those things? Or, what if I was in a situation where any of the things I couldn't remember anymore were lost forever?

The problem was I couldn't think of a situation where a) I was the only one who had the knowledge, b) There was no way to relearn the knowledge, and c) There was was a sustainable population.

Earlier ideas included:

-- a teacher who was taking his kids on a field trip to the vault when the bombs dropped (but even if the class had 30 people it would not be able to propagate the human race, and the average 5th grader would probably remember more than I did)

-- a colony ship with frozen embryos (I found it difficult to get the details to work in my head)

I had been kicking this idea around in my head for years, but things finally clicked into place. I was definitely inspired by the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the book Wool.

The part about the 12th Grade English teacher is 100% true. From the very beginning when I had thought up the concept, I knew I wanted to talk about life being a series of losses of innocence.
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Re: Writing Contest - Post-Apocalypse/Dystopia - WINNER!

Postby CarrieVS » Wed Nov 22, 2017 2:16 pm

IamNotCreepy wrote:I had been kicking this idea around in my head for years, but things finally clicked into place. I was definitely inspired by ... the book Wool.


I thought so. I read that book this summer and I definitely recognised the influence.

Congratulations, anyhow. I thought yours was the best.



As regards my own entry, thanks for the votes, people! It didn't really work - I knew it was a bit of a gamble when I submitted it, and I think the concept is salvageable - but it's good to know some people did enjoy it.

I had a great idea last night, which I may actually write. I should have combined the follies of my first two contest entries last year (the Sci-fi and Horror contests) and written from the perspective of a mammal following the Chicxulub impact.
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Re: Writing Contest - Post-Apocalypse/Dystopia - WINNER!

Postby sunglasses » Wed Nov 22, 2017 5:48 pm

The Wool series is definitely fun.

As for people saying they felt a Fallout vibe with mine-heh. "The War was over" is actually an opening line in a niche film I watched when I was kid. I feel like the line could be used to start lots of stories. But yes, I was going for silly at the end of the day as I wrote this after getting in a rather vitriolic fight regarding the pronunciation of gif. I had another, more serious idea, but I never fleshed it out.

I did enjoy reading all of these. I'm glad so many people participated.
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Re: Writing Contest - Post-Apocalypse/Dystopia - WINNER!

Postby IamNotCreepy » Wed Nov 22, 2017 6:17 pm

Regardless of what the creator of the gif says, it's definitely a hard g. The g stands for "graphic".
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Re: Writing Contest - Post-Apocalypse/Dystopia - WINNER!

Postby Ladki96 » Wed Nov 22, 2017 6:39 pm

Yes, but the soft g sounds more nice and warm though, like a friend, jeff ^^
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Re: Writing Contest - Post-Apocalypse/Dystopia - WINNER!

Postby IamNotCreepy » Wed Nov 22, 2017 6:49 pm

Ladki96 wrote:Yes, but the soft g sounds more nice and warm though, like a friend, Geoff ^^


There, fixed that for you.
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Re: Writing Contest - Post-Apocalypse/Dystopia - WINNER!

Postby KleinerKiller » Wed Nov 22, 2017 7:44 pm

Congrats, Creepy, and congrats to everyone else who participated! Hopefully we get consistent turnouts like this the next few times we hold these contests.

Glad people enjoyed the ideas in my story, and I accept the criticisms that it was a little too much explanation, a little too little plot. I wrote it in about an hour based on a rough idea, and was satisfied enough with it to only do basic revisions before sending it in. My goal for the story aspect even before I had the world pinned down was always that there would be a few little nuggets of hints as to the narrator's actions and motives leading up to the last bit, as opposed to a traditional running narrative, but I wish I'd made those nuggets a little clearer. I might do something longer with the same premise, at least.
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Re: Writing Contest - Post-Apocalypse/Dystopia - WINNER!

Postby octoberpumpkin » Wed Nov 22, 2017 8:42 pm

Grats Creepy!
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Re: Writing Contest - Post-Apocalypse/Dystopia - WINNER!

Postby FaceTheCitizen » Wed Nov 22, 2017 10:00 pm

...
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