Congratulation dialyn! I'm not so surprised, it was a very good piece!

I've just placed my vote, and given some reasons for it... Not very detailed, I admit... but I'm very willing to follow any discussion taking place after the voting is over... (and to join it in the measure allowed by my poor English) BTW I've not problem in receiving critiques, my only problem is that sometimes I feel not very apt to give some. Beeing Italian my first language I can follow only my taste, and I can like more or less the style of a writer but sometimes I'm not capable of giving valid reasons...

I agree Dialyn, here's the hardest part... Just like in the past month, I'm very undecided... I reread at least ten times the 'rules' hoping that they can help me in making a choice... The piece I like most (a mere matter of taste, you know) is Shoshanna third piece... where I have the problem is with the word 'conflict' that appears in the rules... I like very much also how the dialogue flows in Dialyn piece, you can understand everything just from the words said (and unsaid)... On the other side I like also jstro's, it's a very vivid scene... What can I do? I cannot even help myself dropping a coin (only two faces);)... All right, since this vote is not a vital question, I'll follow my taste: SHOSHANNA LAST ENTRY gets my vote! (There are plenty of conflicts after all, even if they are kept inside the characters)

urgh, a painful situation... What about saying it isn't your genre of story?

Oh yes, that happened to me too, a couple of times...

What's behind a name? I have strange habits in choosing names for my characters... As a general rule I try to avoid the names of people I know... If I'm writing a contemporary story, I want quite common names; if I'm writing a fairy tale I go for strange names, usually taken from the calendar, where you can find names of ancient saints now out of use; if it is a totally fantasy story I often generate names choosing letters at random, and rearranging them a bit... When I'm writing something long, which requires a lot of characters, another habit of me is to choose the names in alphabetical order, so it happens that the first character I name begins with 'A' and so on (it's not always the first character the reader meets, but it's the first I've built in my mind)... This makes it easy for me to recognise them when I need to build a scheme of their moving and relationships... Sometimes queer things happen to my nouns... For example once I named a business man Mr White, and the man blackmailing him I called Mr Snow... In the story I never wrote the names jointed, not even in the same page... so I didn't realized the Snow-White thing until a friend of mine, giving me his comment, declared what a clever symbolism and humor were the Snow/White names for such corrupted people... As for the screen names, I know that most of them have a reason, but I don't try to guess things from them, maybe because I've choosen an English male screen name, while I'm an Italian female... With such a misleading screen name, well, I simply cannot trust the other ones...

O dialyn, I'm coming here just to say I like your pic... but a Brian... well, I admit I've tried, but I fear a Brian is asking too much to my knowledge of English...

"Poetastro" is the Italian word, and it's used pretty often here... usually by people who feel the best poets alive and are calling thus every other poet they read...

"... The sweet smell of sugar brought me back to those times when I sat on my grandfather knees on the sundays morning after the mass were finished when he brought his dear grandchildren to the bar at the corner of the old square and I can still see his rough hand smelling of tobacco playing on the marble top of the little round table near the window where tiny black lines follow each other and twist and blend drawing fantastic pictures which seem coming from a fairy world." Okay, it's a quick translation from the book I'm reading just now (I opened it at random, and choose a sentence)... I'm not sure it's the worst I ever read... but, hey! she has been published! Yes, no puntuation in the Italian version, and the flipping from the past tense to the present tense is on the original as well... The book is supposed to be a biography of the author's grandfather, but almost each sentence is similar to the one I tryed to translate... Just to give my contribution... Sometimes I really wonder by which criteria the editors choose the work they publish...

Yes, you are right... Does it ever happen to you? to realize that a character you created cannot do the things you planned in the plot?

Oops, my bad habit of reading threads starting from the bottom not even looking at the title of the first ones... I didn't notice that you had posted the poem too. I was wondering why you said you had written it and were not going to share it. I'm not the one that can criticize the form of a poem, I'm not a poet, and not even an English speaker. I can only say if I like or not... and I like, maybe because I agree with what you say... I'm not sure that can be applied to the clichthing. I noticed that the ones looking for the 'deep dark metaphoric chasm' are the ones more prone to fall into clichimages, but of course they'd never admit this... If you've read my answer on the thread below, the seagulls-poets were all very refined and elaborate... I particularly like the second stanza, with the food comparation, and the close with the slice of bread...

I don't know... I'm Italian, so my idea of clichcan be even different... On the whole I think that there are a few images in poetry, as well as prose, that are truly used a little too much, but you cannot call the image in itself a clich I thinks it depend a lot on how the poet uses it... Yesterday I was at a 'night of music and poetry'... I follow a small literary circle, and sometimes we are invited at such meetings... It was not a bad evening, the music (classical music) was good, and I met a lot of fellow writers (I'm not a poet myself, but I like to hear different voices)... There wasn't a given theme, and the poets gathering there came from different places, and some even never met before; but every, EVERY poem read yesterday had an image of 'seagulls above the sea', sometimes they were 'white birds above the deep water', and they were the metaphore for different things (souls, ghosts, love, peace and whatnot)... But I assured you that by the end of the evening I had paid for being allowed to shout "Clich" in the middle of the performance every time the blessed birds were mentioned... This doesn't mean that there cannot be good poems with seagulls in them, I've read some I really like... There are few images that are used a lot: moonlights, roses, SEAGULLS, eyes reflecting souls, etc. I think they are a difficult material to manage, because a lot of people use them... of course it makes a lot of difference how they are used, but if read in the wrong context... I'm sure that there were some good poems among the ones read yesterday, but after a while I wasn't even listening at them, merely waiting (never disappointed) for the seagulls to come out... Okay, sorry if I intruded in your thread, but after the 'night of music and seagulls' I needed a little rant too. And I'm not even a poet to write a comment in verse. ;)

I hope this falls under the "confrontation". ___________________________________ " Susanna opened the suitcase. A quick glance around the room, to see what she can take as a souvenir without feeling like a thief. ... " - It doesn't work, you know. I won't leave. - You must leave, you are packing... - I'm packing because YOU are making me to do so, but you know it as well as me: it cannot work. - Susanna, dear... - I got it! You can make me wait a little, so that I can say him goodbye... It wouldn't seem so unnatural... - You cannot wait: if you meet him once more a dialogue will follow, and he'll force you to stay. You must leave now, before he's back. - But it is not a natural thing for me to go this way... I won't leave. - Susanna! This is my story, the plot requires you to leave! - Of course I'll do whatever you write, but you know as well as me that my leaving won't fit to the Susanna character YOU created... and you are going for realism, coherency and so on, aren't you? - But this means I have to change the plot, and the final scene, and the whole thing! ... Okay, let's go back to the writing... " Susanna opened the suitcase. A quick glance around the room, to see what she can take as a souvenir without feeling like a thief. Her eyes stopped on the little photograph on the closet. She took a deep breath, closed the empty suitcase and put it back under the bed. ..." ________________________________________ As usual any correction is more than welcome... (as a non English speaker I'm only willing to learn how not to ill-treat too much the English language)

I hope this can help in some galleries, even if it can empty the Hot 20 in some other galleries, we rarely reached the 20 pics when there were 15 days (I'm mainly in Rhino gallery)...