Remember the last few times when the Win list was longer than the Fail list? Not this time, but that's okay. It's called a "puke draft" for a reason. Not only that, I brought about 3 times as many words as I'd brought before--of course the Fail list was going to be longer!
For the Win
- Folks liked my description of the painful way the protagonist "solved" his problem.
- Those scenes had a "feeling of menace and chaos."
- Praise for how I cashed in on a couple of plot points from the beginning of the story. (It's funny--I had no idea I was gonna do that.)
- The usual praise about dialogue, prose, etc.
- Unresolved question #1: What are the stakes? (Yikes!)
- Other unresolved questions:
- What exactly is the protagonist's motivation for getting involved in this "strange, new world" in the first place?
- Why does he choose such a drastic solution to an unclear problem?
- In fact, isn't he making matters worse?
- What's his sister's motivation, 'cos the way she pushes the protagonist and where she pushes him to makes her look like more of a bad guy than the bad guy?
- What did the bad guy want that was so bad?
- I definitely strayed from the idea of "cultural tension" that I started out with in the beginning.
I've got a good feeling about this story though. I know all the pieces are there, even if they're in a jumble.