Voting and Feedback guidelines

• Please take your time to read through all the entries before voting for your favourite work. The reasons you base your vote on are up to you, as long the vote isn’t based on whether or not you like the author.
  It would be nice if you could share why you voted for a specific work.
• Giving feedback is optional but highly encouraged. When giving feedback you should be respectful and constructive. It’s good to point out any flaws, the things you feel could be improved or why you didn't like something, but don’t be mean.
  Make sure to point out what you liked or what appreciated in the entry too.
• Contestant may and are encouraged to vote for and give feedback about the other entries, but don’t vote for your own entry. If contestants wish to withhold a vote and only give feedback, that is good too.
• The entries are anonymous unless the writer asked for having their name added. That being said, writers may claim their work at any time during or after the voting period.
• The entry with the most votes will win, but in case of a tie a Contest Mod will cast the tie-breaker vote.
• You can vote for entries and post your feedback in this thread, but if you rather have your vote and/or feedback be anonymous you can PM it to @Calle as well.
• The voting period deadline is July 31th, 9:00 CET, which is 7:00 game time (both times are in a.m.).

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There are many entries for this first round of microfiction and poetry, but because several are short poems and every entry is 500 words or less, 8 days of voting and reviewing should still be enough.

If I missed any, let me know and I will edit it in.

Picking one favourite from a diverse set of entries like this may be hard and since we have 12 entries, I will allow two votes if you have a hard time choosing. One for your absolute favourite and one for your runner-up.
Picking a runner-up is not mandatory; if you know without a doubt which one you like best you may just vote for the one.

August 1st the next RPGC will begin.

Enjoy reading these entries. I know I did when I made this post :)

My absolute favorite is Butter Flies. I pictured the whole thing as a Pixar movie in my mind's eye while reading and the last stanza made me chuckle out loud. Well done!

My runner-up is The summer of 20. I don't know much about poetry, but I think I recognized a few actual poetry and rhyming styles and tropes, and the use of language is eloquent and evocative.

I'd like to thank everyone for participating and providing me with some enjoyable reading.

Introduction: So because I couldn’t sleep, I did this with my sleep deprived time instead...

Honestly, I didn’t submit an entry to this one because I thought making something with “The Butterfly Effect” would be too obvious and done by somebody else. Will read and give my thoughts about the entries from top to bottom. (As reviewing these works are nearly impossible in my normal format.)

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Tidbit Thoughts on “Metamorphosis”: Okay, so writing wise, it was decent enough. And I don’t know if this was an afterthought or not. But I’m grateful that there’s someone (other than me) that puts consideration into the structuring of their writing for these contests. As making your story into the shape of a butterfly, is just that little extra detail that shows you put enough care into what you posted. Also the title itself is perfect. (Point being, I appreciate the consideration of your craft, however brief it might’ve been.)

Tidbit Thoughts on “The Lepidopterist’: Ignoring nitpicks about unnecessary descriptors, or questioning if every word was used to its utmost effect. There’s little bits and pieces of writing here that certainly makes me want a longer version of this mini-character study of sorts. And I’ll say that there’s clearly something here. So I think others may like this one more than I did personally.

Tidbit Thoughts on “A bit sappy”: Um, yep. I got nothing.

Tidbit Thoughts on “The Butterfly”: I’m trying to analyze if there’s some other technique present than the sentences spelling out the word. But regardless, it doesn’t really stand out to me.

Tidbit Thoughts on “Butterfly”: Is the missing capitalization on purpose? And if so, why? *Adds ‘Caliginous’ to vocabulary.*

Tidbit Thoughts on “полуденное солнце”: Might be a little too obtuse for me. But this only comes off as being able to use google translator.

Tidbit Thoughts on “Summer haiku”: It’s a haiku alright. I got nothing.

Tidbit Thoughts on “Dreams”: The artsy vagueness of the prompt (as it’s not just outright stating “geddit, it’s a butterfly.”) makes it a little less bluntly obvious than other entries. So that’s a point in its favor.

Tidbit Thoughts on “Butter Flies”: It actually had me, but it lost me. Dragged on a bit long for my taste. But I appreciate the effort to make bad puns.

Tidbit Thoughts on “The Summer of 20”: You didn’t capitalize the word Summer in your hider. 6/10 too much water - IGN No, actually I liked this. (Maybe it’s because it kind of reminds me of mewithoutyou’s short songs about a spider and a leaf.) But I think it’s nicely written.

Tidbit Thoughts On “Sensitivity to Initial Conditions”: I think ‘The Butterfly Effect’ is what’s being mentioned here? (And whether or not it’s a positive that I don’t quite know what it’s going for, is up to how clear you intended to make it.) But ignoring how I feel about the use of punctuation. By feeling alone, I like how it started. But I don’t know if I care for how it ended up. Though the random name drops feel a bit out of place. As it seems more natural to put the character’s name/random philsosophy stuff at the start. But that’s just my two cents.

Tidbit Thoughts On “The fight for acceptance”: This one might be a little hard to argue for fitting the topic of “Butterflies”. But it’s also not edited for spacing, and it has obviously missing words. (And I do apologize for only doing this to you, but I do want to point it out. “From the bugs all (the) way to Mother Nature herself.”)

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Top Three Entries:
1. The Summer of 20 - (Probably my favorite writing wise. And it didn’t need to say “Butterfly” for you to get precisely what was being artfully described.)
2. Metamorphosis - (A very close second for me.)
3. The Lepidopterist - (It didn’t quite grab me. But I respect the effort to make a “full” story.)

@Calle
Voting For: The Summer Of 20.

Edit: (If you're supposed to vote for two, then 'Metamorphosis' would be my other vote.)

I will abstain from voting, but I can definitely provide some feedback. I've taken classes in literary theory, creative writing, and had some training in different schools of criticism, so I hope the contestants find it useful.

Metamorphosis: My favorite wordplay is likening the dead mother's wings as colorful robes, which gives a humanizing aspect to nature. In a prompt that inherently invites ecocriticism, this does well to make us care about the subjects in the work, but it also brings humanity to the forefront of our minds which is in constant conflict with nature. That's a good dichotomy I think. The formatting of the poem adds a cute little visual to the work that, I think, would be most effective if the piece does not explicitly state that it was about a butterfly. Perhaps continue likening it to humanity as a parallel to nature, and the formatting clues you in to the actual nature of the work. That it starts with conception, followed by death, then birth, metamorphosis, and actualization makes it feel like a fully realized cycle of life. Where it falls flat, I think, might be in the final two stanzas. Perhaps it was to keep to the formatting, but keep in mind that structure and rhyme exists to serve the poem, not the poem existing to serve the structure or rhyme. The penultimate stanza is conceptually sound, but it doesn't have the same transitions as the preceding stanza and therefore comes across as abrupt. The final line of the last stanza possibly could've used better word choice as, reciting it aloud, sounds similarly abrupt. This is not to say that abruptness does not have its place in poetry, but having uniform throughout a poem is important to flow. Experiment with more metaphors, symbolism, and "a single unitary effect," which is when an entire poem serves to culminate in one particular feeling or emotion.

The Lepidopterist: There is a lot to love about what was done here, and I personally have a strange sort of fetish for surrealist art and literature and yours definitely begins venturing into that territory by the very end. There isn't a whole lot to decipher until the very end, and even then, it's little so it's difficult to do so -- but even so, sometimes art doesn't require a lot of unpacking, and many pieces of modernist art exist solely to make fun of "high culture." The microfiction feels more like an exercise in description, as the setting and character were beautifully landscaped, only for my expectation of it to be nothing more than that to be suddenly subverted. I can see my old classmates spend a few minutes of pondering what the significance of eating the butterfly is. Does he intend to be like them? Is he just weird? If he smiled at the end, that'd be an interesting parallel to the genus name being "difficult to swallow without smiling" - and speaking of, there's an interesting trend of butterflies being consumed. Between removing the predators of coyotes, birds, creatures biting their bitter wings, swallowing the name, and the character swallowing the butterfly by the very end. Does the character see itself as sparing the butterfly from a harsh fate, and as a kindred spirit, would he too rather be swallowed than live in nasty, brutish freedom? The story gives no answers, but that its able to raise so many questions is a good sign. My personal preference would ask for more weirdness like that sprinkled intermittently throughout, but this does provide a nice and unexpected punch at the end that makes it fine as it is. As much as I'd also like more as another person said, having endings like these allows the story to stick with the reader.

A bit sappy: There's a nice little bittersweetness to the poem that I'm sure many of us are all too familiar with, and I'm sure we've all wondered at some point in our lives what it would've been like to be an animal or part of nature as some kind of reprieve from the burden of sentience. As a disclaimer: I personally don't like monorhyme poems. If you ever played the same key on a piano or the same cord on a guitar repeatedly, it wouldn't sound like music. A rhyme is a tool to denote parallel within a work, and if every line ends with the same rhyme, each line better be tightly bound to one another. As soon as you begin to struggle, and the poem becomes a slave or tool for rhyme, it doesn't work. My recommendation, in order to make the best use of monorhyme, is to experiment with punctuation and enjambment. Enjambment is one of my favorite poetic tools, and in my opinion, poets never use it often enough. It allows you to change the flow of your poetry and still maintain the rhyme. If you have hard stops at the end of each line in a monorhyme, it can sound flat. Instances of enjambment in monorhyme can be found in "Monorhyme in the Shower" by Dick Davis, or the famous song Willy Wonka sings while their boat flies through the tunnel.

The Butterfly: Making an anagram with your poem is cute and clever, and like "A bit sappy," I'm sensing a little bit of envy toward the butterfly. I have a feeling that before the end of the day, I'm gonna pick up a connotation between butterflies and freedom. However, an anagram cannot be the only thing a poem has going for it. You don't necessarily need a rhyming scheme, but try experimenting with metaphors and specificity. Poems are usually short, right? Shorter than stories, at least. In order to make up for that, poems use metaphors to pack even more meaning into their size. Specificity and word choice is important because it can help you paint a more vivid picture. Instead of calling things "colorful" you can use certain colors, or highly specific colors or metaphors with a warm and pleasant connotation, like cherry wine, dry honey, or churning ocean foam. Using multiple colors in your poem implicitly describes the setting as colorful without telling us explicitly -- showing instead of telling.

Butterfly: It's a haiku and it is short, so too will have to be my feedback. Haikus suffer more than any other kind of poetry of being small and, for that reason, need to make every word count. Metaphor is essential to packing as much meaning as possible into 17 combined syllables and having it really punch the reader. Nice job in fitting calignious into a haiku, first of all, and I can see the contrast between the calignious sky and a colorful butterfly -- experiment with words other than colorful, as it lacks in specificity -- and how that might denote hope. A nearly endless, gloomy void? The butterfly is a splash of color I'd love to see in watercolor on a canvas. A good, solid metaphor can really bring this haiku home. "See!" might be a wasted syllable, not that its devoid of meaning, but it doesn't contribute to impact. I already spoke of "colorful." How does "a speck of hope dawns" sound?

полуденное солнце: I don't know any Russian, so I can only appreciate what you have half as well as it deserves, but I wanna start by saying I'm impressed that you managing to keep the syllable count the same in both Russian and English. There doesn't seem to be a rhyme scheme in English, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it does in Russian. I fear that there might be a lack of vocabulary equivalence, as the English translation doesn't seem very cohesive and I have trouble pinning down the relationship between lines. Midnight sun. Gold, glowing gentle blossom. A sleep fantasy. Are they dreaming? Does a sun in the night sky look like a glowing flower? Or is it talking about a sunflower under the night sky? Regardless, I'm not sure how the poem relates to the prompt unless one of the Russian words means butterfly.

I gave feedback to half of the works here, I'm stopping for now, and I'll come back later to give my feedback to the rest of the entries sans myself. Good work so far everyone! Also don't take anything said too personally, because I actually liked reading all of them. I just hope to help everyone how I can along the way. :insert your favorite emoji here:

I would love to share my thoughts on all the entries, but poetry and micro-fiction is not something I have a good grasp of. It would be a disservice to attempt to write a review on any of them.

But I did have a favorite. Lepidopterist stood out to me, so it gets my vote.

We pick 2 this time? Didn't see that.

I'll also vote for Metamorphosis as my runner up. Summer of 20 was close though.

Perhaps I'll elaborate on my choices later. But for now, I prepare for work!

I would like to leave some feedback soon, but my two votes are for



I picked Dreams because I actually had started an entry of my own and it had a similar theme. Something about it's lovely simplicity but very real, vulnerable, and relatable message tugged at my heartstrings a bit.

Metamorphosis I picked because when I read all of the entries, this one stuck around the longest - both the lovely way it was presented, and the gorgeous language.

Well done to all!

I can't vote for this. I have tried and spent an entire night reading through these and watching as each one climbs to the top and then another comes along and knocks it off it's throne. Some left me very contemplative, others in awe. One of them made me laugh and there was one that was just so cute and short and it'd probably be my ringtone. So, instead of giving critiques, I'm simply going to leave a comment on how a few made me feel and why they stuck out to me. There's a loose order here but I'm also half asleep with a terrible cup of coffee trying to pick up where I left off.

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полуденное солнце
It's four lines but there's too much nuance in this. And the way it's been served to me; like a plate from a restaurant with a michelin star. It tastes amazing even if I don't understand all the flavors and it's plated the best by far. It's somber but I have an odd appreciation for poems like this.

The aesthetic tho.

The Lepidopterist
An eerily dark and yet still inviting Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium.

Sensitivity to Initial Conditions
Appreciation for this grew on me after the second read. For being less of a poem and too real a thing. It's really sad in that way. Not because of a concept but because I could walk outside and run into this man.

The more I think about it, the more real it gets and it's too early for that.

Butter Flies
"You're not my dad!"

Oh my fucking god.

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I don't know. I have a few days so maybe I'll come back and actually vote. It seems silly not to.

Great entries everyone, you all did great.

My vote goes to Dreams

Short and sweet, despair and hope. A lot was caught in the short poem. Well done.

I can't pick a runner up as that place would be tied between several but Dreams stood out for me, so that one gets my vote.

@Salenea Well, I figured it was purely stylistic. Though the only bit that would've made that clearer to me personally, is if all three words in the second sentence were capitalized. So it appeared more cohesive and apparent as to what was being done. (Because if you were to emphasis any word in a butterfly haiku, you'd think the butterfly itself would be noteworthy to empathize.) But to each their own.

_{M E T A M O R P H O S I S}

The curve of the poem caught my eye and is lovely like the quaint and unique wording that has been chosen.


_{T H E B U T T E R F L Y}

The acrostic is adorable, and each line offers a promising read.


_{B U T T E R F L Y}

As an haiku, the opening word captured my attention immediately and followed with every bit of excitement for something cheery.


_{П О Л У Д Е Н Н О Е С О Л Н Ц Е}

Slavic folklore meets Japanese intense simplicity ought to have been met with a translation of "fluttering" as opposed to "glowing."

_{S U M M E R H A I K U}

A summer haiku referencing the cycle of growth and the redundant of seasonal reoccurrence is small and nice some sort of halo of life.


_{D R E A M S}

The metaphorical paralleling with plain speech implications for growth is quite lovely.


_{T H E S U M M E R O F 2 0}

The 16th century-inspired poem is quite in-depth and portrays the hardship of not just cheery life but darker side of nature in a twisted manner.


_{S E N S I T I V I T Y T O I N I T I A L C O N D I T I O N S}

A traditional long-suffering struggle of a promise that can be easily broken by modern day standards leaves me with the question of, "Is the glass half-empty or half-full?"

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There is no vote because like @BrokenPromise, I have no proper knowledge of the medium. However, all the entries have their wonderful qualities, even the ones not mentioned in this post. Thank you so very much for the wonderful read.

I'll begin by giving feedback for the ones that stood out to me the most and have the one I voted as my favorite in the hider below.













Thank you to all who submitted. I loved reading through your work! Congratulations to the winner!

It's the last day of voting. Thanks to everyone who has given their vote so far.

Voting for The Fight For Acceptance. It speaks true to the life of a butterfly - from bug to a beautiful winged angel that only lives to find a mate before it vanishes. The life of a butterfly that is a wolf and a wolf that is a butterfly.

3 minutes before deadline and two votes were given through PM.

I will post again to give the final score after the deadline.

The results are in and with 3 votes and 1 runner-up the winner is:
The Lepidopterist

Special mention is for:
Metamorphosis with 3 runner-up votes

And with 2 votes each, a shared third place is for:
полуденное солнце, Dreams, and Butter Flies.

Well done everyone.

I will be making a Hall of Fame thread where the winning entry will be posted. Thanks to everyone who joined. I call this first Microfiction and Poetry contest a success and it will return after the next RPGC.

Speaking of which, tomorrow is August 1st and somewhere between 9:00 and 12:00 CET (7:00 and 9:00 server time) the next RPGC will launch. Keep an eye on this section and the sidebar.