I really loved the sentiment of this piece. It's clear from reading it that you not only miss your Pop-pop, but that you've taken a great deal of time to consider what his loss meant to you and how to live your life as a result. This piece of writing is touching, emotional, and really does a great job of capturing the reader's attention with your excellent and selective use of detail. I particularly like the encouragement toward the end for someone going through a similar experience to talk with a trusted loved one to express how they're feeling and help deal with the loss.

The length of the piece was also a strength. In a lot of cases, I find that emotional writing tends to go on a little too long because the author often wants to include every nuance and detail, but you did a great job of exercising restraint and only including the details that served to illustrate your point and/or paint a vibrant picture. Nicely done!

A few of the transitions between the memories of the past and the actions happening in the present felt a little rough. In particular, the end of the story about when you heard about your own relative's passing feels like it pops up rather abruptly, with the previous few paragraphs having been about your present experience trying to talk to the other kid about his lost. I think the backstory about your own loss might be a bit more effective toward the beginning of the story, where it will add context to your experience and better establish your history with this experience before you get into the particulars of how you tried to talk to this ten year old.

There was only one typo that I noticed. In the second-to-last paragraph, "An after that?" should be "And after that?"

As a whole, I thought this was a good piece of writing that offers some excellent advice and insight, while also carefully balancing the need to provide details and context without going too overboard. I think there's room for improvement in terms of structure that would really help make it stand out, but it's a solid piece of writing as-is.

Overall, I was a little confused by this piece, which I think might be owed to it's classification as an article in the How-To/Advice genre. For me, a How-To/Advice piece usually has some sort of a recommended course of action or insight, but this piece admits in the second sentence that "There is no cure [for writer's block] just a waiting game really."

If the goal is to make this a personal statement on the struggle with writer's block (as the intro description implies), it might be better classified in Personal as the primary genre, and not reference the How-To/Advice genre at all. On the other hand, if you do have additional insights that you can pair with the personal description of your own struggle with writer's block, there's amply opportunity to fill in those gaps and create a longer, more fleshed-out version of this piece.

A couple of technical notes:

"standpoint" (second paragraph) is one word
"shirt piece" (second paragraph) should be "short piece"
"Goodbye" (third paragraph) is one word

There are also a few points where I'd recommend adding some punctuation, particularly to separate clauses from the main body of a sentence, and to separate sentences with two different subjects into discrete sentences. For example, "Good bye writer's block next you come remember this" could be more effectively articulated as "Goodbye writer's block. Next time you come, remember this."

All that said, I really enjoyed the sentiment of this piece, and think you do a great job of providing a reminder to the reader that sometimes a small, simple exercise can help break us out of the writer's block we're feeling. There are a wide variety of ways to combat writer's block and the advice to just write something small is definitely an effective method I've tried in the past. Nice work!

I'm a big fan of crossover fanfiction, as well as big tournaments, so the premise of this item was right up my alley. I think you did a great job coming up with a variety of diverse, familiar characters, and the setup of the tournament made it very clear how events were going to unfold. I was hooked right from the start!

The narrative was intriguing, and you did a great job of setting up a surprise twist in the first chapter as we follow Sora and Link in their own world before being transported to the contest world. You have a knack for writing well-paced, exciting action that keeps the reader engaged. I would have liked to have seen just a little more uniqueness and originality to the story (the evil being who kidnaps people to make them compete in his deadly contest has been done a lot), but overall this was an entertaining story that was relatively well told. Since the item sort of ends abruptly, I'm assuming it's unfinished, but I think it's pretty nice work so far!

Along the same lines as the story, I would have really liked to have seen Thanatos with a bit more development beyond "evil demon contest organizer." Aside from that, though, I thought you did a pretty good job capturing the diverse personalities of all the contestants you brought into the material. There were a lot of characters that weren't utilized very much, but I assume that's in part because this story will be continued at some point.

The dialogue didn't all work for me. Most of the back and forth dialogue between different characters worked fine, but the monologues (especially Thanatos' explanation of the tournament in Chapter 2) tended to drag on a bit and felt a little stale. The concept of this style of tournament is pretty well established at this point, so I think you probably could have pared down a lot of that dialogue with the mechanics of how the contest is supposed to work. Even if a reader isn't familiar with this particular subgenre of story, the rules could be explained during the contest as the competitors figure them out, which would save you a lot of the unnecessary exposition (and words!) before the contest begins.

There were quite a few technical errors in the piece, mostly along the lines of typos and minor issues along those lines. For example:

The two heroes dove behind a bolder for cover. - Typo (boulder)

Sora charged Ganon while Link knocked and arrow. - Typo (nocked)

I'd definitely recommend taking another pass through your story just to polish things up and take care of all those tiny grammatical loose ends. Additionally, due to the language, this item needs to be rated as 18+. For more information on ratings, I'd recommend checking out the "Content Rating System (CRS)"  for more information.

I enjoyed this story. While it does need a fair amount of work, I think it's a really solid first draft and definitely something that you can work with. Some addition focus on developing the antagonist, better pacing the explanation of the rules, and utilizing all the characters you've introduced to the audience will go a long way toward making this item even better. But it was still a very enjoyable read as it currently exists.

I was intrigued by your item's intro description; the concept of a reality traveler immediately captured my interest and made me want to read more.

I was a little hard-pressed to get a sense of what story was transpiring. There are a lot of great visuals in this piece, but it felt a bit more like a random collection of imagery than a cohesive story. There's a lot of potential here to create a consistent narrative, but it needs a little more work to get it there.

Both the protagonist and the woman he initially wakes up next to are interesting, but need to be more fully developed in order to truly give the reader a sense of who they are, what they want, and a reason to root for (or against) them. I know this is a relatively short piece, but the more character development you can squeeze into it, the more engaged your audience will be.

Not applicable.

The short staccato sentences were really effective for a piece this short. I would recommend varying the length of the sentences a bit so that the shorter, snappier ones are even more poignant when contrasted against the longer, more complex sentences, but they're really effective as-is. Also, just a quick note that due to the content of the piece, this is not an E-rated item. For a more detailed explanation of the site's ratings, I'd recommend checking out the "Content Rating System (CRS)" .

While I see definitely potential in this item, I think it needs a considerable amount of work as a piece of prose. The style might almost work as a form of narrative poetry (in which case I'd recommend changing the item type from "Fiction" to "Poetry" to avoid confusion), but under its current label as "Fiction," I think some more work needs to be done in the areas of character and story development in order to really make the most of the premise you've established. Overall, I think it was a solid effort, with room for improvement.

Overall, I think you did a good job with this piece. I liked the pacing of the way it read, and the rhyme scheme helped everything flow nicely. I like the fact that there was a distinct story to this poem and it was easy to see how the prompt informed the entire piece. All in all, I thought this was a solid entry for The Writer's Cramp. Well done!

Positives

I thought you infused this piece with a lot of excellent detail and description. You painted a vibrant picture of the setting, which really added to my enjoyment of the piece. There were some interesting details about Megan and her life, but the environmental details were the real star of the piece.

Negatives

I felt like there wasn't really much of an actual narrative story here. Megan stops at a lodge on a snowy night, but there's not really a sense of where the story goes from there. It's almost a vignette about the location itself, rather than a short story with a character arc or a narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end. I would have loved to have seen the character go on a little more of a journey in terms of where she starts and where she ends up by the time the story is over.

Overall

Overall, I think you did an excellent job with the details and description, but that the short story, structurally, could have used a little more character development and/or narrative development. Still, the quality of the writing itself is quite good and you did a wonderful job of depicting your subject matter in vivid detail. Nice work!