Bummer. Poor guy. I’m confused though – is the girl still there, giving him her number? And why is her phone number 11 digits? (xxx-xxx-xxxx) Even so, you do a nice job with the objects for this challenge.

Too many elements, they don’t feel organic or relevant, too many coincidences stretch the suspension of disbelief. Too short to achieve the intended effect.

Unfortunate for him. I was a little bit confused with the girls number thingy however, and I think that perhaps it wasn’t really necessary. The story would have functioned just as well without it.

I did find this story fun and interesting. I was surprised a little tiny bit. Though I think with a little more work you could have made it better because I’ve definitely seen some killer stuff from you and this is a little below the bar. Not so far below as to deserve a one though.

In response to Mr. Valdes, isn’t the point of story telling in some instances reliant on the suspension of belief? If it was totally believable it wouldn’t be as shitty luck. Stepping it up from believably bad luck to astronomical bad luck is probably what was being sought. I think that because the presentation doesn’t coincide with your writing methods isn’t a justified reason for critique. That’s my humble opinion at least.

Lastly, I don’t think that the semi-colon after the “but then” is necessary.

That is all.

I think actually that Mr Swift was trying a more comedic approach to the challenge – by applying relevance to everything, you’re exaggerating the principle of Chekhov’s gun for humour. And I think that with that in mind it works.

Other approaches will probably be subtler, and I would imagine stretch over several installments for added depth – but on it’s own merits, this wasn’t bad.

Well done and thanks for entering – MH :)

I was angling for humout there, MH.

As for the phone number thing, I live in england. Here, phone numbers are 07xxx-xxxxxx

The semi-colon was a typo and I will fix it.

And as for why it wasn’t killer, probably because I had to purge a lot of characters. I had a whole extra couple of hundred characters.

Pretty good~

Humor or not, it just wasn’t my cup of coffee… there were too many elements for me to be significantly amused or interested.

Perhaps cast your net in a smaller, shallower pool next time and focus on the improbability of it all?

Just my opinion~ ^_

that guy had a terrible day! it doesn’t matter that she is not in the ficly, she is irrelevant! Swift, I like the details, they played like a short film in my head, and I thought they were quite creative. :) Sure you made everything significant, but you gave them implied significance, and then showed the irony of reality.

Thankyou Elsha, Chehkov’s gun says nothing about using applying relevance to every person I introduce

Just thought I’d mention that a .22 is a REALLY tiny bullet. Like they make pencils that can fire them. Not sure how one could be confused for a ring. I think this story may full under Chekhov’s rules, but seems to be ignoring Occam’s Razor. It’s almost like too many things were brought into the story, and then you had to find significance for all of them.

Ok, hows about he was only holding it at a distance, so couldn’t judge the size, and has dyspraxia, so can’t judge by the feel of it. And I deliberately brought so many things into the story to stretch Chehkov’s gun to the point of disbelief for comic effect. In this case, I thought multiplying an entity beyond necessity (to use the wiki definition) was best for my story.

I agree with swift. Occum’s Razor is totally lame anyway.

Well, that would be reduction to the extreme, which falls under satire. In that case, it’s A-OKAY.