Review time! I've decided to lean heavy on the critical side when looking at these entries, because people tend to learn more from mistakes than being told they did a good job. Each review will first list all the things I thought weren't done well and any major grammatical mistakes (I'll leave the common little ones alone because I'd rather not get bogged down with them), then a paragraph at the end where I give my overall impression and maybe some compliments on things you did well.

[hider=Entry 1]Your hook is weak. Just a mention of strange activity and some grand scheme are not enough to pique my interest. The only thing that kind of grabs me is the term "shishi" because it could mean anything and I'd like to know for sure, but then it becomes apparent that it's just the name for a group of people and it becomes less interesting to me. If I was reading these stories to choose one to vote for rather than to critique them, I would need to be pulled into the story at some point later on (though it should happen as soon as possible) to even consider voting for this entry.

Your protagonist (or at least I'm assuming at this point that the fellow writing the entries is the protagonist) is not at very sympathetic. I find myself by the July 4th entry wanting Shuntaro to win in the end. This is further reinforced by the next few entries.

About half way through the entry I still have no details on what is going on and still lack something to pull me into the story and make me care about it. I know there's a group called revolutionaries and a group opposing them, but I have no idea why they are fighting or why I should care about their fight. As far as I as a reader know, these two guys and their friends might be the only members of this conflict. There have been lots of mentions of death and warriors and so forth, but I have seen none of them.

The July 7th entry finally gives some insight into what's going on, but only about what the grand scheme mentioned at the beginning is. I still have questions, such as why is this shishi group trying to overthrow those in power? Also, this entry cemented your main character as unlikeable, executing Shuntaro and then doing the whole "I am a warrior, no remorse" thing was a moral even horizon for him, so now I'm reading this as a villain protagonist story.

None of my questions were answered by the end of the entry (I had to head to Google to figure out what the hell the conflict was and who exactly the shishi and shinsengumi were), and your protagonist was pushed further into unlikeable territory. I never cared positively about what happened, and my negative caring (meaning I wanted him to die) came late and was not fulfilled because apparently he's so cool that he can fight against a mob of guys and take no injuries. I am left feeling like this story went nowhere, because I started off not really caring about the plot and in the end you still didn't make me care.

Overall, I'm not fond of this entry for the above reasons. You write well and your metaphors and imagery were very nice, albeit sometimes treading into purple prose territory, but they were not enough to overcome the negative aspects as I saw them.[/hider]

[hider=A Crusader's Secret]Your hook is sort of weak and kind of muddled. There's some talk about how the Crusade was not as grand as it seemed, then some mention of the records of it being destroyed, and finally something about the squire's literary skills and loyalty being perfect for something to come. The muddled part is that the cold open of a guy talking with no context is kind of confusing and the squire brings up diaries as if in response to something, but the knight guy made absolutely no mention of it. I had to reread it a couple times to be sure I hadn't missed anything, and I even went and logged on to the WOTM account to see if there'd been some screw up, but there was not and that weird confusion pulled me way out of the story and ruined the hook for me.

The diary doesn't feel like an actual diary. They tend to be written to recount recent events in a very personal way, but this feels like someone writing prose or someone verbally telling the story of these events much later on, which does not make sense for a diary. Also, this guy seems to be rather well spoken and knows a good bit of history, which seems odd to me. Both of these things could be excused if it were the diary of a scholar or some such person, but this is a "lowly country knight" in his own words, so it seems off to me.

It seems strange to me that these diary entries come years apart. Surely there were other entries this guy made between the major events, yet there is no mention of them or any of the events between the dates of the entries. This isn't exactly a problem, just an oddity I noticed, but such oddities do have a way of breaking immersion if there are enough of them.

Well, the Ma'arra entry certainly picked up the slack of the beginning. I was already about halfway through the story before I started to really get interested in what was going on, which is bad, but it's good that something managed to pull me in eventually.

That twist ending was not very satisfying. I get the idea behind it, the truth being lost and all that, but initially on reading it it felt like you couldn't think of a good way to end the story so you decided to kill the two characters off to have some finality. 

Overall, though it took some time to get rolling and had some other issues, I liked this entry. The concept and basic premise of the entry were pretty cool, and the world-weary, cynical knight/Grandmaster was a character I gradually grew to like. Also, though I'm no historian and had only vague knowledge about this stuff before doing a quick Google search, I like that you used accurate dates for the journal entries (and true things like cannibalism at Ma'arra) and the real names of the first and second leaders of the Templars.[/hider]

[hider=Diadochi]The pacing of the story takes a noticeable dive around the accusations of Lysimachus and Antigonus. It's pretty blatant exposition to tell who these guys are, and plain exposition like that always feels like it drags on compared to actual forward movement of the plot. There's not much you could have done to avoid this while still giving these histories and motives, but it's good to keep pacing in mind and maybe shorten or split up the large chunks of exposition.

The only other thing I can find to criticize is the few typos and such you made, and I said I wouldn't bother with those so...

Overall, I rather enjoyed this entry. You write well and infused the story with a tone that suited it well, as it reminded me of epic poems like the Iliad. The twist ending was surprising and made perfect sense, which cannot be said of most twist endings. I was convinced that the priest himself had done it by the middle of the story, but clearly I was wrong. Nicely done.[/hider]

[hider=The Pendulum]Ah, poetry. I have to note up front that I dislike poetry, so I'm a bit biased. Anyway, on with the thing.

The random capitalization is strange and probably unnecessary.

Third stanza, formed and discord is a weak rhyme.

The repetition of the first stanza after every two other stanzas is kind of irritating and doesn't add anything, it's just stuff for the reader to skim over.

First line of the fifth stanza is awkwardly phrased to allow your rhyming pattern to continue.

Sixth stanza, weak and "seeked" is a weak rhyme that only sorta works because weak/seek rhymes. Also "seeked" is not a real word, the past tense of 'seek' is 'sought' because the English language ignores and defies its own rules all the time.

Eighth stanza, grasp and thought don't rhyme in any way. If you're going to set up a static rhyming pattern through your whole poem, make sure you actually have rhymes where they're supposed to go.

Ninth stanza, man and again don't rhyme unless you mangle the pronunciation of 'again.'

Last stanza is kind of a mess. The pendulum goes across a deep... what? Sounds like an incomplete sentence. Third line has a typo, first word. Final line seems to be missing the word 'we,' and if it were to go where it looks like it should go the line would be one of those awful constructs where syntax is broken to put the verb at the end of the sentence for the sake of the rhyme.

Overall, I don't care for this entry. Part of it is the fact that it's a poem, and another part of it is that it's a poem with quite a few problems. The concept was neat though, solid message of "hey look at all this bad stuff that happened in the two world wars we've had, don't start another."[/hider]

[hider=My Dark Savior]There wasn't really a hook here. The first sentence doesn't do anything to grab interest, then it goes on immediately into exposition and such. I remained rather uninterested in the events and characters until the middle of the story, when the kid was told to hide in the hole.

Overall, I liked this entry. It took a while to hook me, but it wasn't bad in any other respect. Good writing and pacing and a concise story with a relatable protagonist more than made up for that one issue. I appreciated that blurb about Timur at the end, since I'd never heard of him before reading this entry.[/hider]

[hider=History Guardian]Your hook is kind of weird, but I guess it works. Materializing on a hill in 10,000 BCE seems weird and I want to know more about it, but then it's hurt a bit by the following confusing things. The perspective character has his eyes closed, but he's looking out over the surroundings? Also, he puts his hands "into" in sides, and that sounds awkward. The beginning of a story is crucial to getting a reader's interest, so having oddities and mistakes here tends to be worse than having them in the middle of a story.

Ellipses. So many ellipses. They're supposed to be used sparingly for very long pauses or for speech or a thought trailing off, not for every tiny pause. I wasn't the one to approve this entry and I haven't checked the WOTM inbox to see if I'm right, but I'm certain I know who wrote this entry just because of the abuse of ellipses. :hehe

This Nyssa lady's personality seems very inconsistent. She's determined and angry and has a cause she's fighting for, but then the History Guardian says "no, don't care, go home" in not so many words and she suddenly concedes and becomes flirtatious. This is not how real people behave.

The Macedonia events being given out of the History Guardian's chronological order seems backwards, especially since the last thing said before jumping to the earlier thing is that they're going to 1504. Jumping around in time is fine, but in time travel stories there needs to be a thread of consistency to keep one cohesive timeline going for the reader to follow. Doctor Who works because you have the Doctor and his companions as anchors for the timeline, where you see events in order of them experiencing them, which allows for a logical plot even though time travel is in play. Doing the Macedonia segment this way for the sake of making the event slightly more interesting breaks that thread of consistency and, in my opinion, does more harm to your story than good.

I'm noticing a bit of a problem with this whole History Guardian idea. So, there are people who go back in time and change things either through malice or naivety. The History Guardian's job is to stop them and send them back to their own time (speaking of which, it's odd that he should know what time they came from to be able to send them back to). What exactly prevents them from doing it again? If someone is determined enough to do something, they'll keep on trying and trying no matter how many times they're stopped. If enough people do that, one guy would never be able to stop it all. There has been no mention of ways to prevent people from travelling back in time again, and in fact Nyssa made it evident that she was confident she could do so many times, so it seems like the History Guardian thing shouldn't even work because there would be too many people meddling with the past for him to stop it. Additionally there are all the general time travel paradox problems, but those are par for the course so I won't list them. There ought to be something by the end of the story that explains how people can be kept from jumping back in time though, else the whole premise falls apart after a little critical thought.

Alright, so the skipping around time with no anchor of an individual's chronological order thing is more than just an isolated incident. That's unfortunate. This undermines a lot of the apparent consistency the plot had, and it adds nothing positive to the story.

The History Guardian dude doesn't have much of a personality, and what I've seen so far isn't very engaging. He's apparently all about doing his job, blah blah blah, but then when you finally show something more than the dude on the job the first thing shown is him being a dick and whining to Miliana about saving history being her job. Then, in another show of inconsistent personalities, she just says "that's unfair" and he concedes and becomes flirty. This kind of turn on a dime tsundere nonsense is really bad even in the anime and manga I'm sure you learned it from, so try to avoid it like the plague when writing stories else you'll end up with these unrealistic and unsympathetic characters you have in the persons of Nyssa and Calan.

A full grown dude and a 12 inch tall fairy being lovers? Oooookay then, if you say so. Also, that phrasing of "that's right, we're lovers" makes it sound like the guy is talking to someone directly, but it's in first person present tense so that makes no sense.

So the fairy lays on his hand and he closes his fingers over her, leaving only her head and the bottom of her legs visible. This dude must have gigantic hands for that to work, probably 10 inches wide. This is the kind of weird inconsistency that totally breaks immersion if the reader takes a second to think about it. 

The end of the story is bad, to put it bluntly, but the entire plot of the entry itself is a problem that only becomes fully evident at the end. You set forth this interesting plot point at the start, the end of humanity in the future and a woman determined to fix it being stopped by the History Guardian, and you proceed to go nowhere with it. Instead you give three irrelevant vignettes to show what this guy does to guard history, then a little bit of him off the job that's mixed with really awkward romance stuff. You should have stuck with just the Italy or France part to show the day-to-day work of the job and dropped the unnecessary romance entirely, and then you should have filled out the rest of the entry by actually continuing the plot you set up at the beginning and coming to some kind of conclusion or hint of a conclusion (by indicating whether the guy would try to save humanity or just keep doing his job, no need to actually show it happening). As written, what little plot there is is entirely unsatisfactory.

Overall, I did not like this entry. The writing wasn't bad aside from the abuse of ellipses, and Miliana was an amusing character. Other than that, well, the criticisms above should have been enough to show my opinion on this entry.[/hider]

If any of you contest entrants want clarification on anything I said in your critique, feel free to ask for it here and I'll gladly give it.