| abstract
| - Prompt: For the first time trying this out, why not have something that matches thematically with something new? In 300 words or less, write something that details a first time for a character, whether it's the first time a character takes a life, or comes face to face with the Covenant, or something more personal. An (ineligible) example is provided to give you a guide to how you should format when adding an entry. Have some fun with it! Cutoff for this challenge is the night of Saturday, January 16th, 2015. Entries= |-| Feedback=
* Choice by Sev40
* What I get from this story is that Ania's making a choice, to either spare the Unggoy (and possibly other?) stowaways, or kill them to ensure she saves herself. Naturally, with the word limit, there's not much room for context, but if it were to be expanded, I'd like to know why Ania considers Unggoy lives at all, when some Sangheili we've seen will through Unggoy out an airlock for complaining. Also, the choice she makes is a little unclear. I assume her last line of dialogue means she intends to spare her hitchhikers, but part of me says she could be talking to herself.
* Weakness by The Pale Kestrl
* You're missing some punctuation around the dialogue, there. Periods at the end and commas where they meet the prose. So this is the first time Tal's given his berserker drugs, though I'm not sure if it's Red Sand, given the name and that this substance was injected. Because that's the focus, I'm surprised a larger fraction of the word limit wasn't given to describing it flowing through his body from the injection point. Elites do have two hearts pumping blood, but even then, it seems to take effect very suddenly.
* Vengeance by Andromeda Vadum
* A general piece of advice commonly given for writing is to show, not tell, and I think this entry could benefit very well from that. There's a clear story to it, with Carl's first kills, but very little description to help us see and feel what's going on. For example, Carl's father gesturing; I'm not sure what sort of a gesture says that or what it looks like. Describing how his arm moved would better get across what's going on, using sensory details.
* The Quiet by Chakravartin
* Conversely, here's a piece with very little happening, but a lot of sensory detail. We experience everything through our senses, so describing things in terms of images or sounds or even smells go a long way towards making a reader able to envision something through text. I also want to call out the couple details which hint at other things without needing to take up time in the word limit to specifically state them; mainly that by the wine glasses we know one character's had much more to drink than the other, and that cigarettes are a classic film school technique for implications I'll leave you to discover. Perhaps in part because of I can use the fact these strategies were employed as a teaching opportunity, that makes this one my pick of the week.
* Just A Job by Spartan-D042
* Repetition can be a useful tool to emphasize one particular detail or thought, as seen here. Everything in the piece relates to the first-time act of this character murdering a fellow serviceman, including his justifying it to himself and to the reader, which seems to break down near the end as he realizes he wouldn't, and likely won't, forgive himself. It's also a neat look into how time and length of text can relate to each other, as this uses all 300 words to cover the span of maybe a second or two of in-world time. It's also missing a "could" which would put it over the limit, but I'm gonna overlook that, judge's authority.
* Shot At Dawn by Minuteman 2492
* While the entry is far over the word limit, I can still respond to it. For my part, I usually put thoughts of characters in italics rather than quotation marks, because then the thoughts look exactly the same as dialogue and are hard to distinguish, especially when the dialogue tag, the part that tells who's saying/thinking it, comes after the line/thought, like with Sanok's first thought here. In the same vein, since the thought is stylized in the same way as dialogue, there are a couple instances here where different characters speak (or think) in the same paragraph with each other, which can make it hard to keep track of who's saying what. Something for consideration.
* Graduation Present by Actene
* An excellent choice for the prompt, as it's the first appearance of something fairly major to the character's ongoing story that doesn't demand such an introduction, just found one conveniently in this project's prompt. It also does a neat job of doubling down on the prompt, as it's not just the first time Simon and Jian are introduced to the armor, but the first time Simon has something that he can call definitively his own, at least since he began training, anyway.
* Eclipse by Coolbuddy379
* I feel a bit more show could be done here, but I like that this piece takes the approach of the Covenant being terrifying upon first-time encountering, since Halo 5's opening cutscene kinda cuts down any reason to fear the average Covenant soldier completely. If you wanted to take this even further, I might suggest having it be something as low as Jackals or Grunts that are causing him problems, bringing those guys back to the point of Fall of Reachs beginning where they overwhelmed and slaughtered Helljumpers.
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