SmackDown: MadMike's Revenge!

Round 1 Results

Great stuff for Round 1, guys. I liked how each of you took the prompt in a completely different direction! I was, however, a bit disheartened to see some of you made Mad Mike the villain. Mad Mike doesn't like Cheetos, he likes Dill Pickle– and All Dressed–flavoured chips. The true Mad Mike–heads would know something like that.

General comments that might help you guys in future rounds, if you care to listen:

1. Some of you guys don't hyphenate your compound adjectives when you're supposed to. You might not know when you're supposed to—we're all learning here, after all. A compound adjective is a single adjective made up of more than one word. Two-seater aircraft. Free-range eggs. Three-storey building. Ice-blue eyes. If any of you guys are planning on seeking traditional publication in the future, learn compound adjectives—it'll show the agent you know your shit, which just might be what gets you that representation!

2. Using semicolons instead of colons. Every so often I see something like this. The two are not the same and are used for different things. If you're introducing a list of things, use a colon. Mark grabbed his travel bag, which contained the essentials: toothbrush, toothpaste, a pack of throwaway razors, twelve-inch black dildo encrusted with dried feces. It was gonna be a banger of a time. You also use a colon if you're making some kind of declarative statement. It really is true what some say about life: It sucks harder than Stifler's mom after a night of Jell-O shooters.

A semicolon is generally used to link two or more ideas when a period or a comma really wouldn't do the trick. Some people write on a computer; others write with pen and paper. Semicolons are fairly unpopular these days. You'd be better off not using them at all instead of using them incorrectly—in recently published books, you'll usually find semicolons replaced with periods and commas, so you might as well join the anti-semicolon crusade and be on the right side of history.

You can also use semicolons throughout a list of things, particularly if you need to use commas when describing those things and want everything to look a little neater. Peter examined the test results: angry red ink scribbled beside his answers, etched into the page hard enough to make holes, like the teacher had been furious with him while marking his paper; a yellow-brown, ring-shaped coffee stain at the top of the second page, showing a distinct lack of care; topping it all off were the carefully written words—"fuck you"—at the bottom of the last page, underlined four times and accompanied by a large smiley face beside. Peter looked up from his test in time to see his teacher shoot him with a finger pistol.

3. Dialogue tags. OutrageousOllo goes into this in one of her judgements. "Eat me. I'm Mexican!" He howled. Is he howling the line of dialogue or is he howling like a dog after he delivers that spicy line? If the former, it should be "Eat me. I'm Mexican!" he howled. This is something to learn that will help a lot for people reading your stuff.

"Suck on this, baby," he took a fat dump in her mouth, "Yeah, you like the way it steams?" In this case, those commas separating those two pieces of weirdness should be periods, and he should be He. Or, with some reworking, you could separate the dialogue with emdashes, like so: "Suck on this, baby. Do you"—his face contorted and went red, and a fat dump slid down into her mouth—"like the way it steams?"

I saw in one story someone used parentheses in place of emdashes for a similar bit of dialogue to the previous paragraph. I've yet to see that used in a published book and can't find anything on the internet validating that, so feel free to send me a picture or link me to something that states it's also correct and I will learn something, too.