Oh good, I'm glad to see other people enjoy puns as much as I do. This was a ton of fun to write...I really wanted to be able to write for my SSC, and this is my way of doing it. Enjoy!
Arc of Fire
I’m sitting in a sidewalk café in my flight suit, and a girl named Jeanne is staring across the table at me with a look of bemused curiosity. I fish into my breast pocket for the pack of Lucky Strikes I left there before we lifted off from Liverpool this morning. I extend a cigarette to her, and she smiles and waves it off. She doesn’t speak any English, which is kind of a surprise. Rouen is one of the more metropolitan cities in the area. My cigarette lights easily. The weather is completely different than it was this morning- the mist and fog that was all over earlier has been replaced with rich, warm sunlight that seems to hang in the air. I decide to try talking to Jeanne again. I fish out my chit and look for the words I want. “Where are the Germans? Où sont les Allemands?”
“Allemands?”
“Oui.” Either Jeanie is playing with me or I’m talking to a crazy. Either way it’s a waste of my time. I take a drag from my cigarette and start walking down the street. Eisenhower’s boys must have blown right through here after we hit it, because there’s no sign of any military activity. It should be pretty safe to shack up for a while, and then I ought to look for a radio to make contact with Liverpool for a pickup. Just my luck to run into one of the last squadrons of Messerschmitts that Jerry threw up before we hammered the runways.
This is my first time flying into combat, and I’m jumpy. The B-17 is a hell of a plane, and the hop down from Iceland was pie, but we don’t have any sort of escort and the Limeys have a lockdown on the night sorties. I’m sitting in the briefing room with the other pilots, staring as the major runs his walking stick up and down a map of Europe. Our target is a factory block in Hamburg, which means a few hundred miles of flying in broad daylight without any sort of protection. I hope my gunners are up to a little work. I step out of the briefing room and start heading down the flight line to my bomber, stopping to admire her from a fair distance. She’s ugly as sin, bristling with fifty-cals and sporting a tail the size of a small building, but she’s tough and reliable. I walk up to the beast and kick out the chocks. A mechanic is tinkering on the number one engine, and he looks up. “Going for a spin?”
“Yeah, just a quick jaunt across the continent.” The quaver in my voice makes it sound anything but easy.
“Well, it looks like these clouds should hold, so flak shouldn’t be a problem today. First sortie?”
“Yeah.”
“Best of luck, mate.” He nods quietly and claps me on the shoulder. It doesn’t make me feel any better. I climb up into the cockpit and start the takeoff checklist. The mechanic drives off in his cart as the motors roar to life. An assistant is guiding me to my place in the flight line. The lead bombers are lining up at the end of the runway and my hands are shaking. I close my eyes and pull the throttle.
My cigarette is about finished, and Jeanne is walking down the street behind me. I turn and let her catch up. She’s dressed in rags, which isn’t much of a surprise these days on the continent. As soon as she meets me, she tugs on my sleeve and beckons me to follow. I oblige as she jogs around a corner. A few steps later and I’m standing in front of an alleyway. A man steps out of the shadows, a rifle cradled in his shoulder. My hand flickers to my sidearm, but Jeanne swats me down. The soldier steps into the warm light and I recognize the olive drab of an American uniform. “You one of Eisenhower’s boys?” I ask.
“Eisenhower? Never heard the name…I fight under Pershing.” I suddenly realize how old his uniform is.
“How long have you been in Rouen, soldier?”
“Couldn’t say, mate…bit of a time, though.”
Life in Liverpool has become a routine. I head back to my quarters after a staff meeting outlining this month’s targets and planned sorties. I’ve shacked up in a fairly nice tent with Havermeyer, my bombardier, and he’s set about making it into something really classy. I’m just thankful we don’t have to shoot any rats out of it like some of my squadron mates. Havermeyer is sitting on his cot, scribbling on a note pad. “Letter home?” I ask.
“Nah, just writing down names I thought up.”
My crew and I have six red bombs painted on the nose of our beast, and it still doesn’t have a name. Blanchard, my copilot, wants to name her Bella May, after a girl of his back home, but the rest of us don’t particularly like it. Then again, I’m not sure any name will really cut it for the lady that takes us to the jaws of hell and back. I still get the shakes every time we spin up our engines. We’re slated to fly over Hanover tomorrow, and the last raid there took out half a squadron. “Well, we ought to come up with something, it’s bad luck if she flies nameless.”
“Well, we’ve done okay so far. Why should we get to it now?”
“Supreme Command wants another raid on Hanover.” Havermeyer looks up at me.
“They can’t be serious…Jerry chewed up half a flight the last time we tried to hit that place!”
“I know,” I say grimly, “evidently we didn’t hit it hard enough for them.”
“Of course we couldn’t hit it hard! There must have been at least three squadrons of fighters around the factory we were gunning for!”
“Well, nothing we can do about it except to name our bomber and make sure our guns are all cleared.” Havermeyer stares at me, shakes his head, and fishes in his pocket for a cigarette.
The American’s name is Harvey, and he does his best to explain what’s going on. We start walking, him on my left and Jeanne on my right. Evidently there are a number of soldiers in this town, milling about for who knows how long. Jeanne is something of a local, having been here longer than anyone else. The weather is always sunny, the days are always warm. It’s like some sort of soldier’s paradise, a Fiddler’s Green for the grunts. I’m introduced to Meyer, a German corporal who was slated to leave his tour of the trenches in 1915, hopped in a truck, and stepped out onto the streets of Rouen. Hicks is a British private who was fighting against Napoleon’s forces when he stumbled into town one night. Follette was a French soldier who was assigned to guard Rouen by Robespierre. One night he went to sleep and woke up in a new village. For whatever reason, this town seems to call soldiers out from the surrounding countryside and gives them a place to live. I could get used to it here. Jeanne smiles at me. The sun hangs in the air like water.
A mile above Hanover and the air is on fire. Thousands of tracer rounds tear through the sky and we’re twirling through it like some sort of suicidal dancer. The voice of Jacobs, my tail gunner, crackles in my headphones. “Jerry on the six!”
“Copy that, copy that,” I say as I thumb my intercom, “Havermeyer, how close are we to getting out of here?”
“Gimme thirty seconds, Cap.”
“I don’t know if we have thirty seconds,” I growl. Tracers are whipping by either side of the cockpit. I key Jacobs and get no response. “Havermeyer! Open the bays, we gotta get out of here!”
“Roger.” The plane shudders as two thousand pounds worth of explosives comes pouring out the belly. I pull the B-17 up into a tight corkscrewing climb, trying to shake the fighter that’s clinging to my tail. I scream on the radio for help, I scream to Jacobs, I scream to God. Bullets scream through my left wing, blowing out the number one engine. The Messerschmitt peels past us as we go into a stall. The plane rolls, and I look up and see the city above me in minute detail. I catch my breath, goose the throttle, and finish the roll, leveling out the plane. The enemy fighter pulls away, and starts to go into a lazy turn to finish us off. Havermeyer hops on the nose gun and opens fire while my turret gunner joins suit. Jerry throws himself into a tight barrel roll and jerks around to face us. For a brief second we are flying headlong at each other, guns blazing. Then Havermeyer rakes his gun across the Messershmitt’s engine and it goes up in a sudden blast. A mile above Hanover and I’m alive in a nameless bomber.
Jeanne is staring at me with a strange look in her eye. I turn to Harvey, who nods reflectively. “Have you learned the long and short of this place, mate?” He asks.
“What are you talking about?”
He chuckles. “I guess not. There are secrets in this town, and it’s time for you to learn them. Follow her.”
Jeanne walks down the main boulevard, heading towards the center of town. I catch a whiff of smoke on the air, biting at my tongue. As we get closer to the town square the smell of smoke thickens and coalesces until wisps of ash are visible. I turn to Jeanne, who meets my gaze and takes my hand. We walk to the middle of the town square, and now the smoke is too thick to see anything. I stumble through the haze, and realize I can no longer feel Jeanne’s hand. For a brief second, the smoke clears. Through the hole in the smoke I see a large pile of branches and brush- an unlit pyre. The smoke has a life of its own, lazily tracing circles around me and the pyre. Now I see Jeanne from a different time and place. She is dressed in a simple shirt and trousers, her hair cut like a man’s, and iron shackles are on her hands and legs. She is being led by two men in helmets and spears. As they lead her to the pyre, a priest intones a list of crimes. The look on her face is calm, tranquil, beatific. The realization hits me.
Jeanne.
Joan.
The pyre fades and I see the flaming wreck of a B-17.
High above Rouen, I’m smiling to myself. Jerry is on the run, and we have a cloud of P-51’s to fly cover for us. This war looks winnable, and already bomber crews are getting letters from Supreme Command saying they’re deactivated. My radio crackles. It’s Bluth, the point bomber. “Looks like I missed the target. Wings, line up for another pass.”
“Copy that. I’ll set this one up.” The rest of the squadron peels off and goes to a higher orbit. I drop a few thousand feet and start cruising in. Out of nowhere, my plane shudders. “Gunners, gunners! Eyes open!”
My ball-turret gunner responds. “Messershmitts on the seven!”
This isn’t good at all. Three planes come streaking up from below, and peel around to line up a second pass. I break out of the bomb run and attempt to roll some evasive maneuvers. The rest of my squadron is coming around to assist me, but it’s too late. I can hear my heart beating as a Messershmitt’s cannon pounds through the bomb bay.
The blazing corpse of my plane tears a streak of fire across the sky.
MoFo: Arc of Fire
Adherence to Prompt: 4.5. Joan was wearing basically a smock when she was burned, and had been shaved ;).
Spelling/Grammar: 5/5. No problems I caught. Though technically, I think the rule for foreign languages is you italicize them. Not a big deal or an important rule tho.
Characterization: 7/10. The characters are all quite believable and such, but they don’t change much. There’s nothing dynamic to them. Your protagonist is scared, and stays scared until he dies. Then he doesn’t do much at all but get given a tour.
Plot/Structure: 6/10. The structure is interesting, jumbled but not nonsensically so. The plot is fine, but lacks any sort of explanation or exploration of the phenomenon of Rouen claiming lost soldiers. Why only some, and what do they do there? Is there any escape from the place? What is life like there? It’s an interesting premise, but without further exploration, it seems rather without a point.
Style: 8.5/10. You do like your jumbled narratives, don’t you, MoFo? My only real complaint here is, I thought we were tracking two characters at first, because the first section, with a soldier talking to Jeanne, gives no real indication the character is American, and by mentioning Liverpool caused me to assume he was a Brit. You just need to establish a little more strongly that the two narratives are about the same person.
Creativity: 7.5/10. Valhalla or purgatory, with Joan the primary citizen, eh? I can’t say I’ve read or heard of anything like it before, but you don’t fully explore the concept enough for a higher mark, in my mind.
Total: 38.5. Enjoyable, and the WWII era was evoked quite well, but the nature of the undead soldier commune in Rouen needs to be further explained rather than just, ‘this is how it is.’ Why would Joan be the first? I’m sure earlier battles were fought near there. Why would she have not learned English in all this time, or does time not work the same way? How did the dead soldiers get there, and why? In all, seems like a lot of potential, it just needs to be fleshed out more.
Adherence to Prompt: 5/5 - This is by far the most clear example I've seen of research. I appreciated all the references and little easter eggs you put in, like Pershing. Such a subtle use of research is exactly what I was hoping to see.
Spelling/Grammar: 5/5 - There are several very minor grammar mistakes, but nothing I saw fit to penalize for.
Characterization: 7/10 - Not bad, but here we see the problem with structure. The characters were great for what they were, but they needed room to breathe. Also, I didn't understand how language worked in your world. Could they communicate or not?
Plot/Structure: 3/10 - Unfortunately, this was your weakest part. There isn't a plot here. Your only plot point is when the main character dies, and one plot point can't support a story. You need something after he dies. Something needs to happen in this beautiful city you've created. Also, the structure felt forced. I didn't realize you were skipping around until halfway through, and the jumbled storyline just drew attention to the confusion. I can see how a nonlinear structure would work, but the plot would have to be expanded first. Also, the Joan/Jeanne revelation was too abrupt. Everything in your story was so subtle and beautiful, and then in the end you got nervous and gave everything away.
Style: 7/10 - Your style is solid. Not much else to say I'm always skeptical of the present tense, and I think it almost works here. Unfortunately, using present tense and a disjointed storyline is just begging for trouble. I think that contributed a lot to my trouble following the timeline.
Creativity: 7/10 - Great idea, but you need to use it somehow. I'm very excited to think about what your second plot point might be.
Total: 34 - I'm curious if you read that story I linked to a few contests ago. This reminds me a lot of "A Brief History of the Dead."
In other news, Bruce Willis was actually a ghost the whole time!
Comments
I wanted to love this story more than I ultimately did. Your sense of mood and style great, evocative of great pulp writers. You can establish an atmosphere quite well, and more importantly, it feels as if you're truly comfortable with what you're doing, leaving you free to concentrate on story.
The reasons my love dimmed are twofold: A) a lack of real suspense or surprise – as a twist, the village of the dead is almost as familiar as the stranger in a strange land, and is unfortunately way too easy to predict for a modern reader. B) I could forgive the lack of suspense if you didn't repeat the same twist at the end that we've already figured out – the narrator is dead.
Your writing is technically solid, better yet, you've got the stylistic chops to make your writing compelling. Now you need to develop characters that we truly care about, and add some plot and movement in terms of characters changing and growing.
0-5 Adherence to Prompt: This isn't just "Is Joan of Arc in the story." This is "Does she seem like Joan of Arc?" Historical innacuracies will come out of here, though I'll likely be the only one to dock for that.
3.5
Joan was window dressing here, but the way you used that window dressing was cool and creepy. I would have liked to see her act as more than a will-o'-the-wisp.
0-5 Spelling and Grammar: Sefl-esplanator.y Don't neglect this - Scavenger had a few spelling errors, and lost last round by half a point. These are not hard points to get, so don't take them for granted.
4
No complaints here, except that it was never clear to me whether the protagonist was British or American ("Jerry" strikes me as fairly British – "krauts" might have been a better choice, but other things made him seem American).
0-10 Characterization: How well are your characters (all of them) developed? Are they believable? Do they come alive to the readers, or are they just flat archetypes?
6
The lead character was nicely characterized though he didn't go through much in the way of change (if you don't count going from "living" to "dead" as change). Joan was a bit one-dimensional. There seemed little at stake for the hero, perhaps if he (and the reader) had been left hanging a bit more about the lead's ultimate fate, he could have developed more, and so could Jeanne/Joan.
0-10 Plot and Structure: Does everything flow well? Does the story make coherant sense? Do we care about what happens, at the same time as not being able to see everything coming?
5.5
Technically, something more to denote the breaks between The Town of Lost Soldiers and the lead character's last flight would help avoid confusion. I wanted to see the protagonist get more involved with the mystery town before he figured it all out—the Pershing-era soldier might have been revealed a bit later, for example, to build suspense. Those scenes in the town might have been a little less mystical in contrast with the flight scenes, so that the hero's death in action isn't so clearly spelled out before the end of the story. There's nothing more painful than a shock that doesn’t shock in any way.
0-10 Style: How effective your words are. How well you use symbolism, imagery, voice, and all those other mystical writing concepts.
9
You have a confident and comfortable writing style that will only get better as you keep writing. I docked a point for world-building, many of the locations were fairly generic (although the description of the bomber was excellent).
0-10 Creativity: Just because you have to use a well-documented historical figure, doesn't mean you can't be creative about it.
4
This story has a twist worthy of a Twilight Zone episode—on the other hand, I think I actually *have* seen this twist, or something like it, on a Twilight Zone episode. That's not necessarily bad, as long as you find ways to create suspense and uncertainty—once the American said he'd served under Pershing, I felt like I was just watching the dots get connected for the rest of the tale.
I’m sitting in a sidewalk café in my flight suit, and a girl named Jeanne is staring across the table at me with a look of bemused curiosity. I fish into my breast pocket for the pack of Lucky Strikes I left there before we lifted off from Liverpool this morning. I extend a cigarette to her, and she smiles and waves it off. She doesn’t speak any English, which is kind of a surprise. Rouen is one of the more metropolitan cities in the area. My cigarette lights easily. The weather is completely different than it was this morning- the mist and fog that was all over earlier has been replaced with rich, warm sunlight that seems to hang in the air. I decide to try talking to Jeanne again. I fish out my chit and look for the words I want. “Where are the Germans? Où sont les Allemands?”
“Allemands?”
“Oui.” Either Jeanie is playing with me or I’m talking to a crazy. Either way it’s a waste of my time. I take a drag from my cigarette and start walking down the street. Eisenhower’s boys must have blown right through here after we hit it, because there’s no sign of any military activity. It should be pretty safe to shack up for a while, and then I ought to look for a radio to make contact with Liverpool for a pickup. Just my luck to run into one of the last squadrons of Messerschmitts that Jerry threw up before we hammered the runways.
This is my first time flying into combat, and I’m jumpy. The B-17 is a hell of a plane, and the hop down from Iceland was pie, but we don’t have any sort of escort and the Limeys have a lockdown on the night sorties. I’m sitting in the briefing room with the other pilots, staring as the major runs his walking stick up and down a map of Europe. Our target is a factory block in Hamburg, which means a few hundred miles of flying in broad daylight without any sort of protection. I hope my gunners are up to a little work. I step out of the briefing room and start heading down the flight line to my bomber, stopping to admire her from a fair distance. She’s ugly as sin, bristling with fifty-cals and sporting a tail the size of a small building, but she’s tough and reliable. I walk up to the beast and kick out the chocks. A mechanic is tinkering on the number one engine, and he looks up. “Going for a spin?”
“Yeah, just a quick jaunt across the continent.” The quaver in my voice makes it sound anything but easy.
“Well, it looks like these clouds should hold, so flak shouldn’t be a problem today. First sortie?”
“Yeah.”
“Best of luck, mate.” He nods quietly and claps me on the shoulder. It doesn’t make me feel any better. I climb up into the cockpit and start the takeoff checklist. The mechanic drives off in his cart as the motors roar to life. An assistant is guiding me to my place in the flight line. The lead bombers are lining up at the end of the runway and my hands are shaking. I close my eyes and pull the throttle.
My cigarette is about finished, and Jeanne is walking down the street behind me. I turn and let her catch up. She’s dressed in rags, which isn’t much of a surprise these days on the continent. As soon as she meets me, she tugs on my sleeve and beckons me to follow. I oblige as she jogs around a corner. A few steps later and I’m standing in front of an alleyway. A man steps out of the shadows, a rifle cradled in his shoulder. My hand flickers to my sidearm, but Jeanne swats me down. The soldier steps into the warm light and I recognize the olive drab of an American uniform. “You one of Eisenhower’s boys?” I ask.
“Eisenhower? Never heard the name…I fight under Pershing.” I suddenly realize how old his uniform is.
“How long have you been in Rouen, soldier?”
“Couldn’t say, mate…bit of a time, though.”
Life in Liverpool has become a routine. I head back to my quarters after a staff meeting outlining this month’s targets and planned sorties. I’ve shacked up in a fairly nice tent with Havermeyer, my bombardier, and he’s set about making it into something really classy. I’m just thankful we don’t have to shoot any rats out of it like some of my squadron mates. Havermeyer is sitting on his cot, scribbling on a note pad. “Letter home?” I ask.
“Nah, just writing down names I thought up.”
My crew and I have six red bombs painted on the nose of our beast, and it still doesn’t have a name. Blanchard, my copilot, wants to name her Bella May, after a girl of his back home, but the rest of us don’t particularly like it. Then again, I’m not sure any name will really cut it for the lady that takes us to the jaws of hell and back. I still get the shakes every time we spin up our engines. We’re slated to fly over Hanover tomorrow, and the last raid there took out half a squadron. “Well, we ought to come up with something, it’s bad luck if she flies nameless.”
“Well, we’ve done okay so far. Why should we get to it now?”
“Supreme Command wants another raid on Hanover.” Havermeyer looks up at me.
“They can’t be serious…Jerry chewed up half a flight the last time we tried to hit that place!”
“I know,” I say grimly, “evidently we didn’t hit it hard enough for them.”
“Of course we couldn’t hit it hard! There must have been at least three squadrons of fighters around the factory we were gunning for!”
“Well, nothing we can do about it except to name our bomber and make sure our guns are all cleared.” Havermeyer stares at me, shakes his head, and fishes in his pocket for a cigarette.
The American’s name is Harvey, and he does his best to explain what’s going on. We start walking, him on my left and Jeanne on my right. Evidently there are a number of soldiers in this town, milling about for who knows how long. Jeanne is something of a local, having been here longer than anyone else. The weather is always sunny, the days are always warm. It’s like some sort of soldier’s paradise, a Fiddler’s Green for the grunts. I’m introduced to Meyer, a German corporal who was slated to leave his tour of the trenches in 1915, hopped in a truck, and stepped out onto the streets of Rouen. Hicks is a British private who was fighting against Napoleon’s forces when he stumbled into town one night. Follette was a French soldier who was assigned to guard Rouen by Robespierre. One night he went to sleep and woke up in a new village. For whatever reason, this town seems to call soldiers out from the surrounding countryside and gives them a place to live. I could get used to it here. Jeanne smiles at me. The sun hangs in the air like water.
A mile above Hanover and the air is on fire. Thousands of tracer rounds tear through the sky and we’re twirling through it like some sort of suicidal dancer. The voice of Jacobs, my tail gunner, crackles in my headphones. “Jerry on the six!”
“Copy that, copy that,” I say as I thumb my intercom, “Havermeyer, how close are we to getting out of here?”
“Gimme thirty seconds, Cap.”
“I don’t know if we have thirty seconds,” I growl. Tracers are whipping by either side of the cockpit. I key Jacobs and get no response. “Havermeyer! Open the bays, we gotta get out of here!”
“Roger.” The plane shudders as two thousand pounds worth of explosives comes pouring out the belly. I pull the B-17 up into a tight corkscrewing climb, trying to shake the fighter that’s clinging to my tail. I scream on the radio for help, I scream to Jacobs, I scream to God. Bullets scream through my left wing, blowing out the number one engine. The Messerschmitt peels past us as we go into a stall. The plane rolls, and I look up and see the city above me in minute detail. I catch my breath, goose the throttle, and finish the roll, leveling out the plane. The enemy fighter pulls away, and starts to go into a lazy turn to finish us off. Havermeyer hops on the nose gun and opens fire while my turret gunner joins suit. Jerry throws himself into a tight barrel roll and jerks around to face us. For a brief second we are flying headlong at each other, guns blazing. Then Havermeyer rakes his gun across the Messershmitt’s engine and it goes up in a sudden blast. A mile above Hanover and I’m alive in a nameless bomber.
Jeanne is staring at me with a strange look in her eye. I turn to Harvey, who nods reflectively. “Have you learned the long and short of this place, mate?” He asks.
“What are you talking about?”
He chuckles. “I guess not. There are secrets in this town, and it’s time for you to learn them. Follow her.”
Jeanne walks down the main boulevard, heading towards the center of town. I catch a whiff of smoke on the air, biting at my tongue. As we get closer to the town square the smell of smoke thickens and coalesces until wisps of ash are visible. I turn to Jeanne, who meets my gaze and takes my hand. We walk to the middle of the town square, and now the smoke is too thick to see anything. I stumble through the haze, and realize I can no longer feel Jeanne’s hand. For a brief second, the smoke clears. Through the hole in the smoke I see a large pile of branches and brush- an unlit pyre. The smoke has a life of its own, lazily tracing circles around me and the pyre. Now I see Jeanne from a different time and place. She is dressed in a simple shirt and trousers, her hair cut like a man’s, and iron shackles are on her hands and legs. She is being led by two men in helmets and spears. As they lead her to the pyre, a priest intones a list of crimes. The look on her face is calm, tranquil, beatific. The realization hits me.
Jeanne.
Joan.
The pyre fades and I see the flaming wreck of a B-17.
High above Rouen, I’m smiling to myself. Jerry is on the run, and we have a cloud of P-51’s to fly cover for us. This war looks winnable, and already bomber crews are getting letters from Supreme Command saying they’re deactivated. My radio crackles. It’s Bluth, the point bomber. “Looks like I missed the target. Wings, line up for another pass.”
“Copy that. I’ll set this one up.” The rest of the squadron peels off and goes to a higher orbit. I drop a few thousand feet and start cruising in. Out of nowhere, my plane shudders. “Gunners, gunners! Eyes open!”
My ball-turret gunner responds. “Messershmitts on the seven!”
This isn’t good at all. Three planes come streaking up from below, and peel around to line up a second pass. I break out of the bomb run and attempt to roll some evasive maneuvers. The rest of my squadron is coming around to assist me, but it’s too late. I can hear my heart beating as a Messershmitt’s cannon pounds through the bomb bay.
The blazing corpse of my plane tears a streak of fire across the sky.
Adherence to Prompt: 4.5. Joan was wearing basically a smock when she was burned, and had been shaved ;).
Spelling/Grammar: 5/5. No problems I caught. Though technically, I think the rule for foreign languages is you italicize them. Not a big deal or an important rule tho.
Characterization: 7/10. The characters are all quite believable and such, but they don’t change much. There’s nothing dynamic to them. Your protagonist is scared, and stays scared until he dies. Then he doesn’t do much at all but get given a tour.
Plot/Structure: 6/10. The structure is interesting, jumbled but not nonsensically so. The plot is fine, but lacks any sort of explanation or exploration of the phenomenon of Rouen claiming lost soldiers. Why only some, and what do they do there? Is there any escape from the place? What is life like there? It’s an interesting premise, but without further exploration, it seems rather without a point.
Style: 8.5/10. You do like your jumbled narratives, don’t you, MoFo? My only real complaint here is, I thought we were tracking two characters at first, because the first section, with a soldier talking to Jeanne, gives no real indication the character is American, and by mentioning Liverpool caused me to assume he was a Brit. You just need to establish a little more strongly that the two narratives are about the same person.
Creativity: 7.5/10. Valhalla or purgatory, with Joan the primary citizen, eh? I can’t say I’ve read or heard of anything like it before, but you don’t fully explore the concept enough for a higher mark, in my mind.
Total: 38.5. Enjoyable, and the WWII era was evoked quite well, but the nature of the undead soldier commune in Rouen needs to be further explained rather than just, ‘this is how it is.’ Why would Joan be the first? I’m sure earlier battles were fought near there. Why would she have not learned English in all this time, or does time not work the same way? How did the dead soldiers get there, and why? In all, seems like a lot of potential, it just needs to be fleshed out more.
Trades
Articles
Winner of SSC 1 & ">3 & 6
Spelling/Grammar: 5/5 - There are several very minor grammar mistakes, but nothing I saw fit to penalize for.
Characterization: 7/10 - Not bad, but here we see the problem with structure. The characters were great for what they were, but they needed room to breathe. Also, I didn't understand how language worked in your world. Could they communicate or not?
Plot/Structure: 3/10 - Unfortunately, this was your weakest part. There isn't a plot here. Your only plot point is when the main character dies, and one plot point can't support a story. You need something after he dies. Something needs to happen in this beautiful city you've created. Also, the structure felt forced. I didn't realize you were skipping around until halfway through, and the jumbled storyline just drew attention to the confusion. I can see how a nonlinear structure would work, but the plot would have to be expanded first. Also, the Joan/Jeanne revelation was too abrupt. Everything in your story was so subtle and beautiful, and then in the end you got nervous and gave everything away.
Style: 7/10 - Your style is solid. Not much else to say
Creativity: 7/10 - Great idea, but you need to use it somehow. I'm very excited to think about what your second plot point might be.
Total: 34 - I'm curious if you read that story I linked to a few contests ago. This reminds me a lot of "A Brief History of the Dead."
By The Motley Fool
In other news, Bruce Willis was actually a ghost the whole time!
Comments
I wanted to love this story more than I ultimately did. Your sense of mood and style great, evocative of great pulp writers. You can establish an atmosphere quite well, and more importantly, it feels as if you're truly comfortable with what you're doing, leaving you free to concentrate on story.
The reasons my love dimmed are twofold: A) a lack of real suspense or surprise – as a twist, the village of the dead is almost as familiar as the stranger in a strange land, and is unfortunately way too easy to predict for a modern reader. B) I could forgive the lack of suspense if you didn't repeat the same twist at the end that we've already figured out – the narrator is dead.
Your writing is technically solid, better yet, you've got the stylistic chops to make your writing compelling. Now you need to develop characters that we truly care about, and add some plot and movement in terms of characters changing and growing.
0-5 Adherence to Prompt: This isn't just "Is Joan of Arc in the story." This is "Does she seem like Joan of Arc?" Historical innacuracies will come out of here, though I'll likely be the only one to dock for that.
3.5
Joan was window dressing here, but the way you used that window dressing was cool and creepy. I would have liked to see her act as more than a will-o'-the-wisp.
0-5 Spelling and Grammar: Sefl-esplanator.y Don't neglect this - Scavenger had a few spelling errors, and lost last round by half a point. These are not hard points to get, so don't take them for granted.
4
No complaints here, except that it was never clear to me whether the protagonist was British or American ("Jerry" strikes me as fairly British – "krauts" might have been a better choice, but other things made him seem American).
0-10 Characterization: How well are your characters (all of them) developed? Are they believable? Do they come alive to the readers, or are they just flat archetypes?
6
The lead character was nicely characterized though he didn't go through much in the way of change (if you don't count going from "living" to "dead" as change). Joan was a bit one-dimensional. There seemed little at stake for the hero, perhaps if he (and the reader) had been left hanging a bit more about the lead's ultimate fate, he could have developed more, and so could Jeanne/Joan.
0-10 Plot and Structure: Does everything flow well? Does the story make coherant sense? Do we care about what happens, at the same time as not being able to see everything coming?
5.5
Technically, something more to denote the breaks between The Town of Lost Soldiers and the lead character's last flight would help avoid confusion. I wanted to see the protagonist get more involved with the mystery town before he figured it all out—the Pershing-era soldier might have been revealed a bit later, for example, to build suspense. Those scenes in the town might have been a little less mystical in contrast with the flight scenes, so that the hero's death in action isn't so clearly spelled out before the end of the story. There's nothing more painful than a shock that doesn’t shock in any way.
0-10 Style: How effective your words are. How well you use symbolism, imagery, voice, and all those other mystical writing concepts.
9
You have a confident and comfortable writing style that will only get better as you keep writing. I docked a point for world-building, many of the locations were fairly generic (although the description of the bomber was excellent).
0-10 Creativity: Just because you have to use a well-documented historical figure, doesn't mean you can't be creative about it.
4
This story has a twist worthy of a Twilight Zone episode—on the other hand, I think I actually *have* seen this twist, or something like it, on a Twilight Zone episode. That's not necessarily bad, as long as you find ways to create suspense and uncertainty—once the American said he'd served under Pershing, I felt like I was just watching the dots get connected for the rest of the tale.
Total: 32