For Holy Terra Because space is scary

In Which My Writing Is Savaged

I don’t get involved in online contests very often, but the 2010-2011 Winter Contest over at Astronomican.com caught my eye, because it had a fiction category as well as painting and modeling.  I’m not bad with putting pen to paper (or fingers to keys, as the case may be). As I was well into a writing frenzy already, I figured I’d give it a go.  My last post, all 12,000 words of it, was the result of that effort.

Let’s not concern ourselves with why on June 6th I have just learned the results of a contest that ended on February 28th, and get right to what the person judging the contest said about my entry.  I’ve taken the liberty of annotating:

PLOT: 6/10. Something about the set-up screams Brothers of the Snake: there’s heavy storming, there’s unseen daemons lurking, and we spend most of the story waiting in suspense for the action to pick up. They’re even Khornate! The ultimate goal of destroying a portal of apocalyptic potential is also horrendously overused – Mass Effect, DOOM, The Elder Scrolls, Baldur’s Gate… you get my point, really.

I wasn’t going for Citizen Kane. The ultimate goal of destroying a portal is pretty much the way things go every. single. time. the Adeptus Astartes meet Chaos. I wasn’t as concerned with the “what we’re doing” as I was with the “what’s happening while we’re doing it.” I’d also like to point out that I’ve never read Brothers of the Snake, so apologies for coming up with a plot-line similar to another one in the vast 40K universe.

STORY ASPECTS: 7/10. Space Marines are done to death as main characters. Before I go further though, I feel the need to point out that jump packs are most definitely not jetpacks! They are limited to short-range “jumps,” hence the name – you don’t go flying across the fields of battle like a Dragonball character; you leap, screaming at your foe, and then promptly drop atop him, squash him like a cockroach – so needless to say, it doesn’t make for pleasant transport. I would now, however, like to draw attention to the depiction of the Marines, the Blood Angels as they are: they are all named in the very Blood Angel-y fashion I’ve come to know, with that Italian zest in it. However, sarcasm such as that in the beginning, among Marines, is very strange.

Remember that first line, “Space Marines are done to death as main characters.”
Yes, I know what jump packs are. Considering the fluff that I have read about them, and precisely what is described in various Space Marine codexes, I don’t think I used them incorrectly at any point. I may have made a few stretches under dramatic license, but I’d love to see where the judge though I was obviously misusing them. These are the same jump packs that allow Space Marines to drop from Thunderhawks and still have enough fuel to wade into combat, correct?
Finally, Space Marines are not allowed to be sarcastic, apparently. ALL GRIMDARK, ALL THE TIME, and I suppose I have failed at that.

FORMAT: 7/10. Overall, the formatting is good… though I would have a word over the fact that it uses double-spaced page-break. I find it quite painful to format something in such a way, as it practically doubles the size of the story on-paper. I know that the gain there is that it makes things “easier to read” by replacing indentations, but really – anyone who is actually reading attentively should either be able to drop from line-to-line or at least keep track of his place. There are problematic areas from place to place as well, where the layout breaks down: After the second page, the little numbers indicating which part of the story we’re in go from being double-spaced to directly above the next paragraph, which is really sort of strange. The spacing also goes wonky elsewhere, such as a triple-space located just before the start of part 5. Another glaring gear-grinder I have – perhaps a tad personal – is that the ship-naming does not follow standard format, ie. italicizing the ship’s nomenclature.
And, so much is off when the warpgate is introduced: that the observation equipment all operates properly in the presence of warp-beings, that the warpgate is described as a “portal” off the bat, and that the Bloodletters have not come crashing through the walls to kill them..
Know this, though: it took me upwards of four years to realize that I needed to use a comma at the end of a quote. If you’ve really been writing for so little time that you belong in the Acolyte’s category, you’ve definitely got the edge on me. Stupid old me. I suppose this makes up for some questionable uses of the hyphen to form conjunctions, even though the proper usage breaks down at times when mention is not being directly made that a person is speaking.
Lastly, repetition: I saw a couple phrases repeated within mere sentences of one-another.

I use Word 2007 to write. Word doesn’t particularly like single-spacing paragraphs with indentation, hence the double-spacing. The other spacing complaints must have come from the way the story was delivered, because they don’t exist in my copy. Same with the italicization – it’s correct in my copy – although, to be honest, I’m not sure if he’s complaining that I didn’t italicize, or that I did and wasn’t supposed to (which would be wrong on his part).
That part about the warp-gate sounds like it belongs in a different category, and again, I apologize for not using the Black Library-approved descriptions for every last bit of minutae. Damn facts, always getting in the way of my story!
I have no idea what the judge is getting at with his comma at the end of a quote thing. Is he being sarcastic and saying that I’m doing that wrong, or is he questioning if I’ve ever written before? I hope he realizes that it’s possible for someone to be a novice writer and still understand grammar rules. I also get the feeling that there’s a bit of a disconnect between British English and American English, which may account for some of these issues.
I don’t have a professional editor. I do my best, but sometimes things slip through the cracks. Even if I did have a paid editor, they’re not always perfect, either. For instance, I doubt George R. R. Martin actually intended Ser Axell to propose that they “rape their windows and put their children to the sword,” but hey, Martin writes some crazy sex scenes, so maybe Axell is a fenestrophile.

THEME-ADHERENCE: 1/10. The story is about Space Marines – worse than that, Blood Angels. The size and prestige of a Space Marine Chapter guarantees that each soldier is remembered and honored for centuries to come, and the venerability of the Blood Angels leads them to even greater feats of ancestor-worship. Making things so much, much worse… they’re a Space Marine Sergeant and Chaplain! Everyone and their sister’s dog’s puppy is going to know that they did heroic things for the next millennium to come!

This is me crying foul. 1/10?! Remember above, when he said “Space Marines are done to death as main characters?” Yeah, I think there may be some bias here. Out of twelve total fiction entries, mine was one of only two to feature Space Marines. There were assassins, grots, guardsmen, some Fantasy characters, even a sword, but I was stupid enough to use the overused Space Marines. Well, maybe stupid isn’t the right word, because the winning entry in the Master category featured an ULTRAMARINE as the unsung hero. Specifically, the judge said of that character “The Ultramarine may be named a hero by his Chapter, but this fellow was essentially nameless to the Space Marines, and will have no name aside from the courtly gossip of the day among the Dark Eldar.”

Allow me to defend my choice: Name the number of famous grots. Managed to get past three fingers? Probably not (to be fair, they can’t count that high, either). Not to denigrate the great grot-based stories, but the theme was “Unsung Heroes.” That’s basically starting with a 10-point lead. Of course grots are unsung heroes. On the rare occasions when they do manage to get heroic, no one notices. I spent a good deal of time trying to figure out how the most heroic of the heroic in the Warhammer 40,000 universe could ever be an “unsung hero.” Were my characters forgotten? Were the deeds of their service unrecorded? Probably not, but that’s not what my story was about. In their service record, in the Book of Blood, the last entry for all seven of them is “Missing in action, presumed killed, Haerid Prime,” not a five-page litany of the way they bravely sacrificed themselves to save an entire world and most of an entire company. In that moment, in the context of the story, they were heroes and their heroism went completely unrecorded. Of course, if the judge didn’t pick up on that, then I suppose I have failed in that regard, so maybe I only deserved one out of a possible 10 points. Maybe I should have made my unsung hero Marneus Calgar.

OVERALL RATING: 6/10. An interesting read, though I think its length detracts from its value. Halfway through, despite the fact that it should be intensifying, it suddenly becomes much less engaging.

Well, at least it was an interesting read. Yes, it was one of the longer pieces. The minimum allowable was 1,000 words, and while I could easily have told a story in that length, I chose to go longer. I’m not sure why the judge thought it got less engaging at the halfway point, but again, he’s the judge.

My overall score was 27 out of 50. The average out of all seven in the Acolyte category was 30.