I wondered if you decided not to go on with this story until I went to your portfolio and saw the additional chapters. The biggest reason for that response was that it seems to get kind of sloppy through the "Legends... Chapter 1..." section.
Earlier than that, I spotted a few of those nagging problems that spellcheck won't pick up:
"...ancient sight where..." should be "site," as you used later...
"...ruins lays the..." should be "lies" or "lay" depending on your tense*...
"...were censured, blacked..." should be "censored"....
*---your tense is inconsistent, varying between present and past...
A pretty darned good cross-genre tale.
I am rather surprised to find it sitting with a GP reward for reviews two years after its last modification.
After such a long time, you probably think that any errors must have been long since edited out.
Well, sorry to inform you, but there is still an excess "s" hanging out in your tenth paragraph---" ...Guilds members ..."
Otherwise, I can't find a thing to criticize...
Your bio says you write like you talk and live in Northern California, but, except for the American spelling, your writing sounds rather English to me, which is why I looked at your bio in the first place.
You have a well written story, but you almost started losing me while wandering around at night, until Richard limped back into the picture. I can see only one thing that bothers me a bit: "...only carnival people ever saw..." may usually be so, but you saw it.
Please be forewarned that my attorney will shortly be contacting you concerning the pain and distress that you have caused me by causing me to laugh my ass off.
That is a wonderfully delicious piece of work, entirely deserving of one of my rare 5.0 ratings.
Just because you got one of those stale, "sorry tasting little" cookies, you shouldn't have let it spoil your day. By allowing that, you also allowed yourself to turn a positive piece of prose into one that is ambiguous, at best. Your piece is well written, and it deserves a more positive ending. One should never allow something as trivial as a fortune cookie to cause them to forget God's wonderful daily blessings.
You have a somewhat different telling of a story that has been told and retold.
You started off rather promisingly, but you have quite a lot of problems. There are numerous punctuation errors and two glaring spelling errors that are probably outside the parameters of the spellcheck. The biggest problem, for me, is that your dialogue starts out stilted, and this stiltedness moves into your storytelling.
Read it for yourself, and judge for yourself...
Sorry I couldn't be more positive...
...there motto:... Don't you hate it when you use an homonym that the spellcheck won't ever catch?
...twin otter... Is a DeHavilland model that should have Twin Caps...
Beyond that , it is a pretty good story, except that you have to be crazy to jump out of a perfectly good airplane, be it a DeHavilland Twin Otter, a single engine Cessna, or any other aircraft...
A good story badly told.
Go back and read it, as you should have done before submitting it to the contest.
You have numerous punctuation errors.
You have some misspellings.
You have awkward wordings and phrasings.
Would you have given this a good rating?
Would you have scored it well in a contest?
Yet, as I said in the beginning, it is a good story that could be done well with some more work, effort, and care.
A good story pretty well told. I do have a couple of problems with it, but if you got it published, then they are not my worries. (HA!). However, I felt that your in-the-field dialogue was a bit too formal and slightly (only slightly) stilted. As for example, "Mounted on top of this truck is a .50 caliber heavy machine gun..." would more likely have had some kind of comment abl\out "Ma Deuce," the long-time nickname for the M2 Cal. .50 Heavy Machine Gun.
Also "...We did our job, and we did it well...” is a compound sentence, needing a comma--- a much too frequent ommission in both writing and publishing in recent years...
Finally, you might want to present your work on Writing.com in a larger typeface and with double spacing between paragraphs, making it easier to read for folks with less-than-perfect eyesight...
Although the concept is not exactly new, the telling of the tale is quite original.
I would recommend that you read your own work as if it were that work of another. This should help you to see those problematic punctuation instances and the occasional awkward phrasing,
I usually do not do rewrites, but your pain was so strong that I felt you could use the help.
Maybe you won't like it as much, but I made only minor changes to your words, while redoing the layout.
Thus:
I cut your image out of my mind today.
The scissors worked furiously, around each carefully painted memory that hung in the cobwebbed corners of my imagination.
Each illusion of you I had created--- I snipped it out.
Each laugh, each smile that was tucked away inside did not go untouched by the sharp points as I attacked them.
I screamed with pain, as the scissors gracefully sculpted an image of you that I could crumple in my hands and tear into a thousand pieces.
Now, those pieces are only scraps lying on the ground beneath me.
Maybe the wind will carry them away.
Maybe they will disappear someday.
I have given you such a low rating for the simple reason that words have seemed to fail you by their insufficiency, leaving your loving remembrance much too short. Surely you have much more to say, or you would not have made a beginning. Open the file for editing, take a deep breath, then think back and let what you find flow from your mind to the paper.
Not being qualified to criticize poetry--- I wrote some doggeral years ago & once experimented with tongue-in-cheek haikus--- I will only note that it looks to me like a comma escaped from the first line of the fourth verse and is trying to disguise itself as an apostrophe in the fourth line of the second verse.
Man, oh man! Does this piece need work!!!
Point the first---There is a spell check available, and you really need to use it.
Point the second---Is English not your native tongue?
Point the third---Creation of new words can be quite effective if the new word is sparklingly descriptive, but falls flat if it is merely a banal fill-in for a blank space in the author's vocabulary.
Point the fourth---Because of the forementioned points, I did not read the entire story, so I cannot comment on whether or not it might be a story worth reading when properly edited.
You started of quite encouragingly, but I think you completely lost where you were going with this peanut brittle.
Chewy peanut brittle is not only "absolutely absurd and somewhat oxymoronic" but is very truly absurdly oxymoronic; so much so that I'd rather not think about it.
To maybe, just maybe, find your way back to where you thought you were headed, step back and read it as if you were reading somebody else's writing.
Then, clean it up, eliminating such blunders as climbing a "latter," and maybe your focus will return, or maybe you'll lose total contact with reality...
Ya can't tell 'til ya try...
What? If you haven't revisited your start in four years, did you decide not to write it after all?
If you'd really like pointers, advice, editorial assistance, et cetera, then you must needs stick with it, and there are folks around this here community who will be happy to give it.
Not quite my cup of tea, but an extremely well-written story that pulls on into it.
I doubt that you need much criticism, in that you have already taken awards with this tale.
What I would like to know is, what was the story that beat you out in the contest where you took only second place?
(I am stingy with 5.0's, so you are free to feel complimented.)
Yeah, aren't most of us always chasing somethiing?
Some we catch, and some we dont, and some we wish we hadn't...
You caught it here, and you seem to have caught a winner in Chase
.
A nice story well told.
Not much can be added to that without being picky, picky, picky...
funny...
dated, but funny...
gas for 40cents a gallon...
life was good, whether we knew it or not...
and it's still hard to find a decent job with a degree in Tibetan literature and its influence on anything...
but you gotta just keep plugging...
and being funny...
I, too, just hit that big B-day that none of us wants to see come but none of us want to not be around for, either.
My hair is still full, so I have to shell out the big bucks to get it trimmed by "stylists"who don't know how to follow instructions, because all of the real barbers seem to have gone into hiding or something.
My mind still works like a steel trap (you have to step in it to make it work),and I'm sure that my memory is still good, but I can't remember where I put it in all of the stuff I have in storage.
As poetry, pretty good...
As truth...
Some are...
But too many others are merely one more wanderer among the lost and abandoned of our great society...
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