I Feel It Coming
So I’ve been reading this well before the shelf. I was really happy to see @Apes get featured because I feel like she’s always on forums helping people, so it’s nice for her to be recognized. She’s only spent the whole duration of the new forums giving everyone directing help, so yeah, well deserved!
As for her actual story, would definitely recommend it for anyone who wants to see just some really cool directing scenes. When I first read it, I was so excited about the phone/web page thing because I’d never seen anything like it before… then I remember thinking that when tappable overlays came out that it would be perfect for the phone/web page thing. My favourite scene to date is the balloon prank. It’s only small, but I was amazed!!!
Glorious Mess
Only read the first episode. For the most part I found it kinda sad and low-key relatable, but I did think that the drug-taking montage kinda dragged on a bit too much.
VICIOUS
Only read the first episode, but this one also had super amazing directing. Would defs recommend to action-lovers
The Exchange
Again, I’ve only read the first episode. I like the premise of the story - an exchange student coming to America… Not too fussed on the romance with one of the bad boys that I suspect is going to happen, but there were some good funny moments in it anyway.
Saving Amelia
Have been enjoying ghost stories a lot lately, so was looking forward to this one. I was happy to see that there were some of the more less popular genres being represented too.
Actual story? From episode 1 you could be fooled into thinking it was just another girl-starts-new-school story up until the very end of episode one where lady ghost appears. I thought it was a good way to set up the story and a nice cliff hanger to end the first episode on too.
Children of the Damned
Advanced directing, wow! I honestly just want to talk about the first splash because I though it looked so cool.
I reckon I’ve made some wrong choices in this already because it felt like the story you had to pay attention in and my dog was distracting me. I really hope I didn’t miss anything too important though.
Actual shelf itself
I loved the Hidden Gems shelf the first time it was done, and don’t get me wrong, after reading at least the first episode of each story, I agree they all deserve to be there, but something @ShanniiWrites said on the Sept Picks shelf has stuck out to me.
Shouldn’t all of the shelves be hidden gems from undiscovered authors? It’s become so blatantly obvious that we want to see unknown stories on the shelf each week.
Just look at the way this shelf has only been up two/three days and yet there’s more comments here than there is on the Voces Latinx shelf thread, which, keep in mind, has been out for a month and has twice as many stories to talk about! (I’m aware a lot of the comments on here are to congratulate the authors, but I still want to argue that that proves my point)
We clearly like seeing people who deserve the exposure featured. So that’s actually why I’m a little disappointed that this is the third hidden gems shelf (correct me if I’m wrong), when by now Episode should have changed all the shelves to be featuring hidden gems anyway, no matter what the theme is.
Interesting Facts
ALL the stories featured this week are in INK.
MOST stories offered limited CC, though it was actually encouraged to keep the MC how the author envisioned them for those ones anyway.
HALF of the stories didn’t have a single choice in episode one… aside from the CC.