The point of all those numbers is to suggest to the reader that with 5 suns up and 6 more not, there is never night or long shadows without saying that explicitly. Naming the noon sun was probably the waste of words, but I was trying to use the limited viewpoint of the boy with just enough extra to suggest an environment.
With 75 words, saying things explicitly is usually the best way to do things, but in any event I'm sure most of us would have guessed that not all 11 suns would be in the sky at the same time, and anyway you later talk of "perpetual day" so you have said it explicitly!
It is a steep learning curve doing the 75s, learning when subtlety can hinder understanding, and when words can safely be removed. I always prune hard then get my other half to read the story. If he can understand it, I'm fine. If he can't, then I have to revise it until he does.
Please have at it. . . . I'm curious just how on-the-nose forum members expect this kind of writing to be.
Well, first of all, I'm undoubtedly the most nit-picky member doing the Challenges -- chrispenycate will pick up as many (probably more) grammatical errors, but he's more tolerant than I am. Most other members either won't recognise errors or won't care about them if they do -- I'll mark down and discount stories for errors where others might vote for the same stories regardless. So what I'll pull out won't in any way be a mark of what the majority of voters will be concerned about. What we all want, though, is a good story, told well, with a strong beginning and end.
Anyhow, in full nit-picking mode:
- Shichi was at its zenith with four siblings -- this imagery of brothers/sisters confused me. Who is describing them as siblings? It's something that might be done by those worshipping the suns, or with myths about them, but that idea of reverence/familiarity doesn't sit well with the people being prisoners. So here, a word that gave a feeling of dread or hatred would have immediately set up a better atmosphere for us to understand the situation, whereas this "siblings" is fighting against it.
- The woman and boy -- the use of "woman" and "boy" is distancing; names give us connection, and help us to empathise. You might not want that, or might want to depersonalise them for some reason, but there's a danger that if we don't connect with them, we don't connect with the story as a whole. That's particularly the case when we don't even know their relationship. If they're mother and son, telling us will immediately make us "see" protectiveness between them, even if you don't mention it explicitly. If in fact they're strangers, drawn together as they're alone, telling us would again help to humanise them and their predicament.
- had slept -- the pluperfect is distancing, whereas present tense or simple past are more immediate and therefore more gripping. Plus, knowing they'd slept doesn't give us any idea what's happening now, which is the important thing. Something like "they lay on [the ground]" tells us more, and also saves another word. If they can't sleep, because of the light, that would definitely be worth telling us in so many words.
- on emerald food-turf -- we don't need to know what they do for food, and definitely not what its colour is, so again this is wasting words.
- the only variation across the endless plane -- I'm not clear why this turf is a variation, as I'd be happy to assume the whole thing is endless food-turf. But if it is only this part that is turf, I can't see we need to know it. If you want to get over the fact this is completely level place, it's easier just to say so. Another confusion for me was "plane" since I thought it must be the plane of something ie like the planes of a man-made structure, or something like an astral plane. If in fact it's just a large flat area of land, that's "plain".
- Possessing nothing else -- where there's a participial clause of this kind, the subjects of the clause and of the main part of the sentence should agree, so "Possessing nothing else, they..." As it is, strictly you've written that the crook of their forearms possess nothing else.
- the crook of their forearms had broken -- again the pluperfect distances us in time from them, and uses up another word for no reason.
- “You once lived inside your eyes?” -- even now I understand the story this is confusing. Here's where being explicit would have helped the story so something like "But there's no darkness unless we cover our eyes, so how could you live in darkness?" (only better than that) And without a dialogue tag we can't know who is speaking which causes momentary confusion on the first read.
- Hah! -- since you've not given us a POV character, we've no idea who is thinking this. On second read I know it's the woman, but why give us a non-verbal exclamation when there is nothing else from her POV? It's another word that could have been better used elsewhere.
- “No, just in places that had other hiding places from the… suns.” -- this seems a very odd way to describe shade, so it's hard for us to understand what she's talking about. Again, being explicit here would have helped us understand, but to do it justice in dialogue would take too long, so to my mind you'd be better off with something like "She tried again to explain shade and shadow, caves and shelter, night and true darkness. The boy only laughed and called her a liar." (Only, again, better than that.) As a matter of style, the repetition of "places" is ungainly -- "just somewhere" would also have the advantage of saving a word. And the significance of the ellipses passed me by, so that was further confusion as I tried to understand what you meant by it and why it was needed.
- But the smart boy -- whose POV is calling him "smart"? Why is that necessary?
- knew when he was being put on. -- I've never come across the expression "being put on" though for me "being put upon" means being saddled with work unfairly, or being taken for granted, so again there's some confusion. I'm guessing from context that for you it means "having the wool pulled over his eyes" or "being played for a fool". It's always difficult to know if someone else will understand a particular idiom, especially when members come from all across the globe, so unless you're after a specific tone of dialect, it's usually best to go for wording that's common across borders or immediately understandable.
I hope some of that helps. As I say, most voters won't worry overmuch about grammar and stuff, and few if any (not even me!) will sit and analyse a story in this kind of detail before voting. But everyone is likely to pick up on tone and atmosphere without conscious thought, which is why being careful with POV and adjectives can pay dividends. And just to confirm what scarpelius said about titles -- as far as I'm concerned, if you'd called it something like "The Beginning of Myth" that would have helped push it towards bringing it into the genre, even if I couldn't see what myth and how this is the beginning of it, but again, being explicit in the final line could have sorted that out.
By the way, if you haven't done so already, you might find it helpful to read back in this thread and see how members have reacted to other stories in the past. If you go back as far as April 2017, you'll see a couple of practice stories from Joshua Jones, where he had similar problems trying to fit worldbuilding into a small space at the expense of actual story. Three months later, Joshua won the 75 worder.
