back, and finishing up reviews! 

[hider=marble's mission][@luclovers]

So this is a really interesting story with clever, original magical elements. On the creative side you knocked it out of the park, but the writing is a bit sloppy... in like, a somehow-hard-to-diagnose kind of way. I came to the review ready to lay out my simple fix-all solution, thinking 'yeah I totally saw this a hundred times in that story -- fix this one thing and you're golden!' Then I went back up to copy-paste a paragraph in here and [i]couldn't find one single example of what I thought I saw.[/i] Ugh. So then I turned to all the other reviews to see if anyone else saw what I thought I saw -- everybody found different things to work on.

[i]The good news[/i] -- you've already got tons of feedback. It all seems valid. I won't rehash any of that. The bad news -- maybe this isn't accurate after all, but I'll talk about it anyway.

[i]What I thought I saw[/i] when I was reading, the impression I came away with, was that there's a lot of superfluous explanation. Like you might start a paragraph with 'Marble looked tired,' and then spend a whole paragraph talking about how tired he looked. [b](that never happened)[/b]. Forget the crappy example.... style-wise, it [i]felt like[/i] the first sentence of each paragraph was, in essence, the whole paragraph, and the rest was just extra -- almost like an academic paper, where you have a thesis statement and then the rest is proving how right your thesis was. 

[b]I honestly don't know if that was the right impression to come away with on your story.[/b] But here's the take-away -- [i]you have incredible creativity and storytelling powers, but you're not presenting them with your own style yet.[/i] Compare to "Quests of the Glorious Leader." QUESTS is all about style -- it's a near-flawless style showoff. Even though the creative elements -- the plot, the characters, the action, etc. -- in QUESTS are all sorta insignificant, the story works because it's all tied together in this clever presentation. It's an effective creative voice -- I didn't get any sense of your voice here.

I [i]did[/i] get to see your fantasy world. Your fantasy world is [i]amazing[/i]. Freaking [i]brilliant[/i]. If you can develop your own way of sharing that -- your own style, your own voice -- you're gonna do great things.

[i]this is a whole lot of words and it doesn't feel all that helpful[/i], and I'm very sorry about that! On top of being late.... Sincere apologies. It's an area you have to sort of decide your own path, really -- do you want to be the fast-paced, short-sentence action dude, or the descriptive, poetic detail architect? Something in between? You're ready to start really, REALLY thinking about those big-picture things as you write. Focus on finding your style, I guess? God this is an awful review. I'm so sorry.[/hider]

[hider=retribution][@RomanAria]

Girls are mean.

This story is nice and neat and wraps up cleanly, except.... well I don't know quite how Anna died, and the whole 'you ruined yourself to ruin me' theme, and the 'your demise' bits of the letter are therefore confusing, but that doesn't really matter. The encounter with Anna's friend and the police officer feels a little out-of-place, too -- it's sort of setting the stage a [i]little[/i] at the crime scene, but it's alone in that regard, and we don't waste much time at the crime scene anyway, so what do we care if there's one particular sad friend there? 

That's really the one instance where there's anything at all detracting from a perfect pace. My favorite part is definitely characterization -- everybody here is a nice round character, even that friend we only saw once, even Anna writing the hateful-yet-loving vendetta letter (vendetter?) with tears in her eyes. [b]That[/b] is what makes Alex's actions so powerful -- this could've easily been a ho-hum affair about a boy lighting a piece of paper on fire and shrugging at the police, but you made it significant, both with what you actually wrote AND with between-the-lines context. It's very well done![/hider]

[hider=what's wrong with johnny?][@Dark Wind]

Jesus that's strong. I mean.... as expected I guess, but damn though.

Okay. One or two little things to talk about.... First happened first, so let's go with that. "Imagine this place where the road ran straighter than the drawn line in a mathematics textbook." That's a strange image in a story that's really not about mathematics textbooks, or anything remotely close to textbooks for that matter. There are lots of other straight lines that might serve better in this story -- OR, this story needs something else to tie it to (or contrast it from) the schoolbook simplicity, if you prefer it that way. Like maybe Harvey was a bit of a nerd or something, that alone would serve. 

The other thing is similar, weird word choices from time to time. "No need for his name in a hat," or "others longer than others." Few and far between -- but hard to process. WHICH IS OKAY, if you choose to make it that way. Writers are [i]allowed[/i] to challenge readers, hell I go out of my way sometimes to [i]deliberately make myself harder to get.[/i] And this is [i]exactly[/i] the subject matter with which to do something like that. It should serve a purpose though, and in this/these cases I'm not sure the confusion is adding anything worthwhile. 

There go my nitpicks. Friggin' incredible work. I like the story adaptation, I like the poem, let's be frank [i]I like everything you do,[/i] so who am I kidding. Great job.[/hider]