Hot Dang!! Made it to Round 2!

Let me start off by saying, I am shocked that I made it to the next round of the short story challenge.  I really didn't have much confidence in my entry because the prompts were really hard! I did the best I could with what I could think of, but was it enough? I really didn't feel like it was. So, you can imagine my shock when I saw my entry listed among the top five for my group. 

This is how I felt when I saw my group's finalists!

And once I got over that initial shock, I was THRILLED! And I wanted to share that excitement by sharing it with my support team straight away, in spite of the hour. Sorry for the late calls and texts, but I was excited! 

Then today, I received the feedback from the judges on what they liked and what they thought I could do better on this (and future) story(s). They liked my characters and saw humor in the situation, the handling of said situation, and some of the phrasing that was used to really drive it all home. I was really pleased with the feedback and was glad some of my humor really came through in a few of the key phrases/terms that I chuckled at myself as I was writing it. Counting all of those as wins! 

From there it went on to address where I might improve, and that feedback was really solid and also feels like it will be challenging to incorporate. It has to do with how I tend to tell rather than show. It's something one of my friends has commented on before because while the information is helpful, it's not worth the slowing of the pace of the story. So, that's going to be a challenge for me. I like to give a bit of backstory early so you can better understand the importance of specific things that happen early on in the story. Yes, you will eventually get glimpses of that information throughout the larger story, but will it be as helpful at page 200 as it was on page 20? I dunno. I would like to say no, but maybe it's better to have that as part of a big reveal or something later on, though I don't tend to write it in a "reveal" sort of way. It's more of an "oh, that makes more sense now" type of thing. But overall, it's very good feedback that hits on something I know I struggle with, so I am going to have to work harder to address that as I move forward. And, honestly, it's a little off-putting to know that I have that tendency in a short story as well as a novel, because I am so much more pressed for space in a short story. You'd think I'd be in full on "show" mode. The only thing I can think of is that sometimes when pressed up against the word count, I tend to cut out the more flowery language and use shorter, blunter sentences. So rather than describing a character walking through the park, skipping a rock across the pond, and whistling as he runs his hands along the honeysuckle covered fence, I say "he made his way through the park". Haha. Not nearly as romantic or as visual, but damn if that doesn't save some words in the final count! 

All that said, I am going to take the feedback to heart, like I have tried to do with my friend's feedback, and see if I can't do a bit better with it in the next challenge that kicks off tomorrow night at midnight ET. Fingers crossed it's a topic that inspires and I can make a story that shows rather than tells.