Hey team. How are things? Things are good? Alright.

Maybe some people who have been here for a while know that I write stories a lot. It is this weird thing, but whatever. And I am always, always, always looking for people to be mean to my stories.

Well, now I have some urgency behind me--I'm trying to enter a portfolio into a scholarship that would pay for two full years of college. It is kind of a big deal, with a deadline that fast approaches. And no one I know will be mean to my stories. They are saying things like, "Cool story" and I am pulling my hair out and stuffing cushions with it, team. So I am turning to you guys.

I've made Googledocuments of five stories, and if anyone has a spare three-to-seven minutes and could be mean to one-to-five of the stories, I would be over the moon. The first four are under 4 pages double-spaced; they are not crazy-long. Links are here:

Brown As Horses - about embarrassing yourself in front of your cool surfer friends.

Jump - one of my favorites, about a girl who has lived everywhere---with a SURPRISE TWIST at the end.

Amoud's Roofing Ladder - about, well, I don't really know what Amoud is about. About something strange in a park in Philadelphia.

Rooted Blue - prose-poem about how hometowns make you regress.

In the City of Night - about Los Angeles and how hard it is to be happy there.

I'd be more than happy to have a read and see if I can pick out anything (I'll also get my mum to have a nose about- she's a writer) but you need to make your google docs accessible to everyone!

Done and done--they're "published" on googledocs. Thank you so much for offering to look at some (and volunteering your mom!), though I should probably mention that while I welcome critique regardless of deadline, whenever you can get around to it, I've got to send the stories off tomorrow afternoon. So if anyone would like to post or PM ideas on any of the stories, I could use them probably the most tomorrow--though I still want to know what people think anyway, be it tomorrow or a week or a year from now.

So yeah.

(I feel awkward, this is weird. I am all like HEY GUYS GIVE ME IDEAS ON MY WEIRD STORIES and you are all like *crickets* Sorry Matazone! I didn't mean to make things weird!)

Jump's very good, but the first few paragraphs are less confident than the tone of the rest of the piece. It's something in the syntax and their shortness, I think. I've not had time to read any of the others yet. You've got a nice eye for detail.

PM'd you