The Juggernaut: My new short

Ok, I’m not entirely sure I’m allowed to do this, as it’s borderline advertising, so if any of the mods dislike it tell me and I’ll take it down but here we go:

Basically, when I was 11-13, I wanted to become a writer, and used to start loads of short things before giving up and starting over, and nothing ever became of any of them. Eventually, I gave up for other dreams (I wanted to become a professional cricketer but that’s another story). But more recently, the combination of my love for SugarVenom’s work and @hazeleyes introducing me to NaNoWriMo, I got writing again. And I recently finished a short, published on my new blog, called The Juggernaut. I would appreciate it if you, if interested, could give it a read.

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Well, crap – I read this last week and meant to comment about it but completely forgot. :man_facepalming:

[ this will be replaced by actual commentary as soon as I finish lunch ] all finished: the pizza was delicious

Okay, my thoughts:

  • I liked it! You established a moody and foreboding setting, created two interesting characters, and told the story of their final battle all in a work of micro fiction – nicely done!
  • I’d like to have seen just a little bit more about why the juggernaut was a threat – it’s implied in the penultimate paragraph that he threatened the ancestors of the men, women, and children who visit the hero’s grave, but why were they threatened?
  • I’m a little unclear on the significance of the name the hero says – is it the hero’s name? The monster’s name? Or someone else’s name?

Keep writing! And please feel free to keep posting links to your work here!!!

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I’m glad you liked it, I keep noticing things I could’ve done better each time I read it, but other people seem to like it so that’s good :smiley:

So originally I hadn’t intended to have him as a real threat, more some monster who spends all his days alone in a cave, but as I wrote the ending I realised I had to make him a slaughterer, which meant changing and adding certain parts slightly. Most notably probably the line in the first paragraph “useless weapons of many innocents dragged to their fate by the beast.” As this was done mostly in retrospect it was a little rushed and therefore not as well written. The final version was a monster who ventures out of his cave to kill nearby locals for entertainment.

To me, it was meant to be the monster’s name, but I left it intentionally vague to let the reader decide themselves. Again though, there was something that got cut in editing, as I was going to have the hero continuously scream the Juggernaut’s name, which the Juggernaut would no longer recognise, and then the hero would eventually have an the idea to scream his own name, which would cause the juggernaut to remember.

A question for feedback: What did you think of the paragraph separation? I was trying to alternate one paragraph from the juggernaut’s point of view and one from the hero’s, was that noticeable, and did you like reading it like that or would you have preferred longer periods in one perspective?

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:+1:

I liked the style – it didn’t feel too jumpy to me at all.

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