Today I Learned I Still Can't Write

Via a contest that the present author has previously mentioned on this very blog - whose existence continues to exacerbate precisely nobody, on account of nobody reading it - this hereto author has received a a rather meaty amount of critiques for a poorly written short story which had been previously submitted to said short story contest of relative repute. And while the present author was in 49th place out of 356 entires after round one, round two was decidedly less kind, as the author of both this blog and the submitted piece was ranked 107th out of 119. The present author was criticized in many ways that are valuable and are absolutely constructive, that we will not delve too deeply into here; but perhaps most excitedly, the piece was called "self-consciously pretentious that it feels like a spoof of a pretentious submission to a lit mag" which is, perhaps, an astute observation. With regards to the other criticism; much of it was to disagree with the stream-of-conscious structure, the relative lack of plot, and some of the simile, all of which, particularly the 2nd and 3rd, occurred to the present author to be true relatively shortly after submittal. Alas, to catch every mistake in a story is impossible, or at least, to a degree of improbability that it is remarkably hard to ever wish to accomplish such a feat. Perhaps it goes without saying that the present author should try a story in which more takes place, less time is spent meandering about weird post-modern metaphor, and, without doubt most importantly, is written to a degree of quality that is slightly more befitting to the general populace, as the previous degree of quality was very arguably decidedly not.