500 Word Challenge - detailed story feedback

By day, I am an editor at a magazine, and have been for...well, almost longer than some of you have been alive. As a result, I tend to edit everything I see. I'm hoping my comments will help encourage and improve the community's writing.

Some overall things to keep in mind/take away from the entire, awesome writing contest:

1) This is intended as constructive criticism. It was all written before the judging even began so nothing is personal. It's based soley on the stories.
2) Everybody makes mistakes.
3) Like sex, writing is a skill; you only get better by doing it more often.
4) Don’t try to impress anyone with your writing; impress them with your story.
5) We’re cruel bastards. Look at what we did to the subjects of these stories!

In order of appearance:

Click
This one struck me as unrealistic not because of its expansion or mysterious disease setup, but because they kept the camera on her even as she continued to babble. The whole time I’m thinking “they would keep recording but cut away in a live broadcast.” So the setting actually made it not work for me. What she was saying during her expansion seemed unrealistic too, like describing things that people could plainly see. I also thought it was a little light on description, and I spotted a few typos early on (“poring” should be “pouring”; no apostrophe in “run it’s course”) and it got snarled in the affect/effect problem (in this case, they should all be affect). That said, the acronym was a nice touch, and when I showed her the entries, my wife thought I wrote this one!

Compromised
Very well written, and interesting word choice without it being distracting…but I felt a little detached because the characters were. “Popping myself? Just part of the job.” I would have liked to see some more human emotion than just the smile on her face at the end, even if they’re spies on the job. It was like they were clocking out for the day. But the description and pacing was quite nice and there was good command of the language/mechanics throughout – good flow.

Drink Me
I liked it – it’s a bit grisly but it holds together well as a complete story. But the word choice was almost too fancy, and one phrase in particular struck me as a good example of how to write more efficiently. "The glass was completely smooth; no insignia of its craftsman was present on the bottle. It felt chilled against her skin, as though it had been removed from a freezer." That's 30 words in OpenOffice. The second sentence is actually superfluous. Why go into so much detail about what "chilled" means? The word itself is common enough that the simile is unnecessary. But it's important to convey that it's unusually and unnaturally cold to the touch, so hang on to that for a second. Smooth describes the texture, but the bit about the insignia is more visual, so they both should be conveyed too. But "on the bottle" is also redundant -- where else would it be in this context? How about: "The frigid, smooth glass bore no insignia of its craftsman." That's 10 words total; what could you say with another 20 words? When you see yourself using prepositional phrases like "on the bottle," stop and think, is that level of detail necessary? It won't always be possible to remove it or reword it elsewhere in the phrase, but when it is, it often improves the flow and, in this case, saves you words. Even better, when you use a passive verb like "was" to describe something, try to take the subject and make it an adjective. "The bottle was smooth." So…a smooth bottle? Start the sentence over with the condensed form, especially when you’re making every word count. And to further explain that it’s unnaturally cold, follow it with “The cellar air couldn't have chilled it this much.”

Trapped
Whereas I didn’t necessarily like the diabolical/dark tones of most of the stories, for some reason, I got my mean streak on for this – the whole Rube Goldberg/Saw thing struck me as a nice device and I enjoyed reading it with a cruel little “heh heh heh” under my breath. “Plump and turgid” would be better if it were “plump, then turgid” because (in common usage) the former conveys size and the latter conveys pressure – but this is a subtle thing that probably only caught my eye. I thought “A loud hiss filled the air as a rush of air filled Andrea” was a clever turn of phrase. But I really remembered this simply because it did not end the way I expected; the flash-forward structure really worked, and I felt there was more narrative in this 500 words than in the others. The end clearly wasn’t an end, so maybe we’ll see this picked up as a series – but the tale told here is complete, even if I felt like “aw, tease” by the last words.

Room 12
This is mine, and even though I proofread it, “what lied behind” should be “what lay behind.” So there you have it – everybody makes mistakes.

The Biggest Breath
I was hoping someone would do a first-person story because you get so much more description with the inner thought process detailed. It’s actually a very short scene, but we experience all of it with very rich detail. Also, this was in real-time; all the verb tenses are present, not past. That made this a little more exciting than usual, because we were there while it happened…which makes the ending a little surprising.

Rachel the Accidental Creampuff
Mostly this one struck me as not flowing so well – little things that either stopped the telling or simply stopped me as a reader. That first paragraph is a collection of phrases. “It was a bit tight at her waist!” seems like it doesn’t quite need an exclamation point…it’s “a bit” which is minor, but then exclaimed which is MAJOR! That is small but it stopped me. “Her upper thighs distended out with disturbing forced” doesn’t need the d at the end of forced; “bloated beyond believe” is similarly the wrong form of “belief.” Also there were a lot of missed commas, which affected the flow, and the dialogue was pretty lackluster. But I will note that it was in some ways a weight gain story, but it did not mention gaining weight. I guess this makes it a “fat inflation” story which I admit I’m not usually aware of.

Inpractical Magic
“Inpractical” isn’t a word, unfortunately; I was sad to see a misspelling in a story title. Some small structure issues throughout (‘"Em, are you really sure this will work?" She had asked while Emma mixed up the potion in a beaker’ is awkward because there is too much info in the sentence; I’d suggest “She watched Emma mix up the potion in a beaker. ‘Em, are you really sure this will work?’”) where sentences should have been shuffled or separated or split with a semi-colon to improve the flow. But I rather enjoyed it as a fun comic story with good descriptions and likeable, hourglass-shaped characters – it just needs a bit of maintenance.

Cyndi learns a life lesson…
I found the florid word choice extremely distracting. It was as if the author went out of their way to use the fanciest word in the thesaurus rather than the best word for the job. Phrases like “oblivious to her earthly vision,” “a unique happenstance,” and “she had squandered her earthen existence in favor of mediocrity.” really stuck out and removed me from the moment you were trying to capture. I kept reading it thinking that I should be a monocle in my eye and say “I say, good show.” And since the story itself was a tale of moral superiority, maybe this was the author’s point…but the haughty tone and intentionally challenging word choice made me feel like *I* was being scolded, not the character, and I wound up simply not enjoying it.

Pet Balloon
The first paragraph reminded me of some of the problems from Drink Me. “A woman awoke on a large pillow in a gargantuan room that made her look tiny in comparison. Looking around, she found a big bowl near her cushion with her pet name “Princess” embedded across its surface, filled with a generous pile of tan pellets.” If it’s a gargantuan room, the reader understands that she would look tiny in comparison (but for that matter, does she look tiny in comparison to the room or the pillow?) so you can cut that phrase altogether and save some words. Also, you don’t really need to say that Princess is her pet name; they will understand it’s her pet name shortly. How was the name embedded – stones, jewels? Embedded means something is placed inside or set into something else, so I am not sure “embedded across” is the right call here. “Plighted” is the wrong form of the word; I think you were going for “plight” as in “predicament” but “plighted” actually is archaic for “promised” or “pledged,” and there is no adjectival form of the “plight” you want to use. But the killer misspelling here is “placing a leech around her ankle”…did it get a lot of blood out?

One Night Stan
Not my bag, but I was happy to see a male inflation story for the male inflation fans on the site. I was not expecting the author to say this much in a story this short – MS Word tells me it’s just 237 words. Not sure how I feel about the flashback narrative device; we learn the beginning of the story in the middle of the tale. Some of the ellipses and m-dashes should be swapped around for flow reasons. And only after reading it a few times did I wonder where the hose was attached; I wonder if everybody put it somewhere different in their mind’s eye.

Surfer’s Cove
Clever setup that I can’t remember seeing before. Clear descriptions of the predicament, steady narrative pacing. Got a sense of size but not a sense of pressure; maybe that wasn’t the intent. I can’t quite understand the phrase “rolling her around chaotically through spraying” – is there a word missing after spraying? And one other thing I couldn’t figure out: What was the small pop, her belly button going from innie to outie?

The Meadow Encounter
“By the time she felt the sticky moisture touch her fingertips it was too late from the ground to tendrils shot up and wrapped themselves around her wrists.” I think you need an m-dash between “late” and “from” and I’m guessing that’s supposed to be “two” not “to.” “She watched helplessly as it moved along her red satin corset top to loosely wrap itself around her neck and lingered tauntingly before her mouth” – the lingering bit should be split off into a different sentence or the structure should be changed. I’d change “to loosely wrap” to “loosely wrapping” to keep tense throughout, then add commas between phrases. You could take the comma after “more and more” and move it up, since it’s not needed where it is. “Seems” should be “seams” and you’ve accidentally hit my pet peeve in inflation writing: “taunt” when you mean “taut.” But there’s an inconsistency in the emotions; she has “tears of shame” but then “succumbed to the ecstasy” a few lines later. When was she enjoying this? It’s been traumatic all the way through and suddenly turns erotic.