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Hollow Stars's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Adherence to Theme | #4 | 3.957 | 3.957 |
| Overall | #22 | 3.478 | 3.478 |
| Flow & Clarity | #43 | 3.087 | 3.087 |
| Concepts & Originality | #44 | 3.391 | 3.391 |
Ranked from 23 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Hello, thank you for participating in the Writing Jam #14! Please email customers@onepagerules.com, to claim your participation minis!
5stars for concept, and one of my personal favorite takes on the theme. It is held back, though, by the large chunks of exposition.
Still, a great read. I had a good time with this.
Pretty fun, moody space story that has a bit of an old school vibe to it. Very classic spooky space story. I loved it!
good old-fashioned “space is wrong and nobody brought the right manual”. the story keeps the horror nicely understated, with the planet, the station, and even the instruments all becoming less reliable the longer it goes. i adored that it never fully explains itself either. the final uncertainty gives the piece a nice little aftertaste. solid work.
One of my favorites from this jam, but then I’m always a sucker for deeply weird sci-fi passing in the night. Well told, and the mood really landed - great work!
Very nice! The Battle Brothers have been cemented across the lore as a menace to both humanity and the wider galaxy, but here they are humbled. When all you are trained to do is fight, you tend to feel useless against a force you can't kill.
Oooh, spooky! Makes me nostalgic for old school Star Trek. Some parts were definitely a bit "He did this and he did that and then he also did this." but overall great atmosphere.
I like the weird distortions happening on the station and the Battle Brothers' acknowledgment that there is really nothing they can do against them. Includes some neat ideas.
Are you looking for any feedback to your story, regarding grammar or prose?
Any feedback is welcome. I find the 1000 word limit challenges me and I sometimes wnd up with awkward prose from trimming.
Alright, here goes, and of course its all just my opinion:
Just to be clear "the impossible" does not refer to the ship's name, right?
In general you have some very awkward phrasing and places where you could be more economical with your words.
3rd paragraph: you call both Ott and his scientist an officer, which while it might be accurate, doesn't sound great and makes me ask if it is Ott or his subordinate who is standing with his hands behind their back.
Also his size doesn't seem to add anything to the scene, he's not 7-foot-tall in comparison to anything, and isn't pointed out that this is otherwise remarkable. Is it just there to point out how large BBs are in general?
4th: You have "looking" in the first and then immediately "gazing" in the second sentence, that is just repetition that doesn't add anything - you could scratch "What you are gazing at is what" completely and just change the tense of the remaining sentence: "Miners here refer to this area as the Hollow Stars."
"We're going in." - this sounds very immediate to me, but then its hours later and Ott is just reviewing some data. The report of space being warped is also very dispassionate. This seems to be an unknown phenomenon that the ship is directly flying into, maybe Tarek could express some worries? The whole scene seems to be there to show the reader that there are some weird things happening, so Ott not commenting on them, just informing his sergeant that they are indeed still going to land and then just sitting there, doesn't add anything and wastes your limited space.
Once you've established the characters names you also don't have to use their full titles every time, the reader has been introduced to them and there is nothing in the rest of the story that makes their rank important enough to warrant that.
So there's easily enough proverbial fat you could trim to improve how easy it is to follow your story, add more tension and gain some space to add more emotions to your character so that they feel more alive. I'd call it an okay first draft, a solid foundation with lots of room for improvement.
Thanks for the thoughts. Some of it was just pure sloppiness on my part, being in a hurry to get something out under 1000 words. I could normally do better. Then other things are really good thoughts I appreciate. Good call-outs.
You definitely don't have to justify yourself to me ^^ I know my first drafts are horrible, and I swear eternal vengeance on all punctuation marks :D - if you are going to do a rewrite I gladly give you some more feedback, only if you want it of course
I think grammar and punctuation are really my strong points, even though it may not show. I am not an expert, but I just didn't spend enough time on it to refine it to where it needed to be. My main areas of wanting to approve is actually writing stories that keep people's interests and flows well overall. I have written stories in the past people like. Maintaining consistency is the hardest part.