Ambitious -- and very well-written from my perspective -- but ultimately too convoluted for its own good.

The conversation between Aaron and Myrmos is where you lost me.  I read it slowly -- really trying to dissect what was going on -- but there were just too many threads introduced and then dropped.  Blood, fathers, machines and philosophers -- it never added up.

While I totally get what you were going for at the end -- particularly given the cloying authorship found on the title page -- the individual pieces of this story do not seem to justify or even support the desired conclusion.

For some nits, I would suggest that the opening scene with the SUV serves no real purpose -- unless I am missing something -- and the introduction of the cave itself was a little too convenient.

But don't get me wrong.  I enjoyed nearly everything the author set down here.  I just think the author was trying to say too much with too much subtlety, subterfuge, and hints of Lovecraft.

And having said that, I also have a fair idea as to who might have written this.

Great dialogue and characterization with Patricia and later Simone. Lots of rich visuals, maybe too much as it borders on overly artistic.

Raindrop against Patricia's eyeball is redundant, the hole in her head already suggests she's dead. We only need to see that raindrop if the eye then blinks, that would be unexpected.

I don't get how Simone ended up in the sedan with Aaron. We see the sedan earlier, she says she hit the mom but didn't kill her, but when did she do that? Why did she take Aaron?

Some grat descriptions with Simone getting puppeted by a very cool tentacle out of the blue, nice twist there. After that it gets very convoluted and way too ambitious. Myrmos is unconvincing with too much exposition, Aaron makes bizarre choices like running deeper into the cave to get help and choosing to save his abductor, and I'm left wondering why it came down to destroying one woman or the world. If it's allegory I'm missing the meaning.

Good effort, enjoyable writing, doesn't quite work for me.

The writing for the most part flowed nicely. I liked the idea of you starting at the Canadian/U.S. border and using Patricia as a hostage to help get past border patrol but things need to get cleared up a bit. Why was Aaron helping Simone and in return why was Simone helping Aaron? Myrmos was a nice touch and unexpected in the cave.

Not bad by any means, just needs a good rewrite to clear up some of the confusion.

Congrats on the OWC.

- Dirk

I like the road trip aspect of this and the way that you progress the protagonist from one character to the next. Forcing the kid to make a choice is strong and the payoff for the world is cool stuff.

Their border crossing is a good opening, but I wonder if we’d get more tension out of it if we knew she had something to hide as it plays out.

It might be that some of the story elements that come in later on in this could be introduced earlier so that we can have a clearer sense of what is at stake throughout the story. As it is they appear when they are needed and even though they are fun, we’re not getting as much mileage out of them as we might have done. Also, by holding back these story elements it felt like some of the more out there things came out of left field, e.g. the tentacle attack.

I'm with the others. This one was confusing.

I guess that can happen when you write a script in a week. The writing is good, but I think this needs a rewrite to clear things up.

I can't really comment on the story since I'm not sure what happened. All I can say, there are some interesting images here, like the melting corpse and the choice of locations. Good job finishing an OWC entry.

Will

Thanks everyone!

I've been obsessed lately with figuring out how little one can get away with explaining before people lose all interest. So I did try to knock this down to the super-subtle level, and obviously went too far (in addition to making some very obvious mistakes).

Sorry for the gun! I have no idea how that one got by me. Just totally blanked on it somehow. Idiot.

I will have a chance to sit down tomorrow and respond to some individual comments. Thanks for all the reads and helpful criticisms.

Okay! Here I go. Thanks again, everybody I'll try to answer everyone's questions by responding to a few that I think sum up most people's comments.

Quoted from DanBall Was Aaron some sort of Christ-like figure? Why was his blood so important? Who else was he saving than Simone? And why did he like her? 8 seems a bit young for him to "like" her.

I'm starting here because I think this gets at the main things that the script obviously fails to convey.

1. Yes, Aaron -- and Myrmos -- are meant to be Christ-like figures. I tried to really use description and visuals to set this up, so the line that I thought would be a big reveal would land and sum everything up. So here're the hints from the script that I was hoping would build up:

"Fucking rich asshole. Go to hell."
"SIMONE DESPOSY..."
"Halfway there, she smiles and waves, then flashes recognition -- oops. Her face changes. Her cheeks redden....She does up a few of the middle buttons on the blouse, hiding her bare breasts, and continues to the car."
"Aaron looks over at her as she pulls out an apple..."
"At the entrance [to the cave], a pile of large, jagged rocks. Their shapes make them look like pieces of a bigger whole."
"It’s as though she’s walking on a pool of her own blood."
"MYRMOS"

And then the line that I thought/hoped would actually seal the deal was:

"With difficulty, Myrmos reaches a three-fingered hand to its wounded chest and withdraws it, dripping black. It slashes a vertical line in the rock, then a horizontal one. A cross.
MYRMOS
The blood. I am...yours, Father."

So I was hoping that this stuff would set up an allusive framing to the Christ story, yeah. And then Aaron sacrifices himself for Simone, and gets crucified:

"A tentacle darts out and lashes round one wrist, then the other. He screams as it stretches his arms out, lifts him. ...A tentacle spears through Aaron’s feet. His blood drips to the ground below. ...It rips the boy into so many separate pieces, the body just disappears."

So I saw that as crucifixion and the subsequent reversion to the pure divine, albeit a little more violent than usual.

2. Actually, maybe the question of blood and who else he was saving would have been answered if the above were written more clearly?

3. Why did he like her? He had very little reason to. She was relatively kind with him, I think, but otherwise she seems to be almost entirely evil. I think he had every reason to hate her, in fact, but he still wouldn't let her be killed. And leading up to that, he was really just stuck with her. Those highways are quiet and scary at nighttime. It was important to me, as relating to the above, that he have every reason to not like her before sacrificing himself for her anyway.

Quoted from ReneC I don't get how Simone ended up in the sedan with Aaron. We see the sedan earlier, she says she hit the mom but didn't kill her, but when did she do that? Why did she take Aaron?

I see that a couple people had this problem. I think because I point out that the family, and Aaron, are African American, it seems like Aaron was supposed to have been taken from the family vehicle. That's not what I intended. Aaron and Simone are in the trunk of Patricia's car the whole time; they just drive past the SUV with another family in there.

I wanted the intro to be confusing in the sense that we don't know where we're staying or who we're focusing on. I also wanted to set up a world that sucked, or, is "going to hell", so I wanted to quickly convey a dissatisfied society -- a black (maybe single) mom with annoying and violent kids in an old run-down vehicle, angrily envious of a white upper-middle-class woman who seems to get special treatment from the border in a couple ways. Trying to sum up class/race conflicts in a couple sentences, haha.

Quoted from ReneC Myrmos is unconvincing with too much exposition, Aaron makes bizarre choices like running deeper into the cave to get help and choosing to save his abductor, and I'm left wondering why it came down to destroying one woman or the world. If it's allegory I'm missing the meaning.

Yes I agree with this. The key choice needs to be set up a lot earlier and be put a lot more front and centre. The line that's sorta supposed to frame the second half is:

"SIMONE
...You mean she’s sad because you’re gone. Of course she is, kid. But you wanna do what’s good for you, or what’s good for everybody else?"

But this needed way more emphasis. There should probably be action early on setting up the idea of sacrifice, which brings me to:

Quoted from pwhitcroft Their border crossing is a good opening, but I wonder if we’d get more tension out of it if we knew she had something to hide as it plays out. It might be that some of the story elements that come in later on in this could be introduced earlier so that we can have a clearer sense of what is at stake throughout the story.

These are absolutely great points. Yes I think one thing everyone agrees on is that the tentacle comes out of left field. I wanted the b-movie monster stuff to feel out of left field, but I also wanted it to seem to fit thematically, so I think you're very right in saying that certain elements need to be introduced or foreshadowed earlier and more strongly.

SOOO, I will definitely rewrite with everyone's comments in mind, and try to get Myrmos' backstory way shorter and less expositional.

Just out of curiosity, if "The Philosophers" had instead been referred to as "The Scientists," would that do anything for anybody? The reason I called them "Philosophers" was that at the time Myrmos is talking about, they would have called scientists "philosophers." But I had a feeling that that might be very confusing.

Anyway. Mark, Dena, Jeff, Johnny, Stevie, Mo, Libby, Bill, Mark, Fountain, Steve, Dan, Eric, Bert, Rene, Dirk, Philip, and Will, thanks so much!

EDIT:

Quoted from bert While I totally get what you were going for at the end -- particularly given the cloying authorship found on the title page -- the individual pieces of this story do not seem to justify or even support the desired conclusion.

This totally got by me. It's a Life of Brian joke. I didn't even mean for it to relate to the story, it's just the first thing that popped into my head.