Prose. Prose. And more fucking Prose. I don't care if it is a story about how you used a tide pen to remove a stain from your T-shirt. I will read the shit out of it if you dazzle me with words.

 

Here's a story I'd like to read:

Set in modern times, The Hero finds a clearly magical artifact that allows him to open a portal to another dimension. There are various mythical creatures there as well as humans. You name it, it's there, fairies, vampires, krakens, trolls etc.

Here's the problem (for the Hero): the artifact was damaged and the portal is now opened permanently. While normally you'd think that this is not a big deal, it really is. Earth and the other dimension have different laws of reality and as such should never be connected for a longer period of time. Eventually, both realities start to affect each other, with magic pouring into our world and changing it.

Someone from the magic dimension figures out what has happened and predicts that if the process is not reversed, then eventually both realities will start to merge into one bigger with unpredictable results.

The Hero feels responsible for causing all this and starts his quest to fix it.


Basically a story that has Earth-changing consequences.

 

Stumbled across this beauty. Not sure how I missed it.

https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/blob/master/Stories/American-Dream.md

It's the perfect encapsulation of a post-modernist, god-is-idead kind of short story. A man is stranded in the corporate world and will do anything he can to keep his worthless job! It's the kind of snark that I love. If I were to try writing some kind of original story on my own, I'd probably do something like this, but you know, throw in magic or something fun like that. Maybe something bizarre, like the protagonist discovers that all the mangement heads are quite literally vampires, or something.

 

Hmm, tricky.

One of the big things for me is well the plot (obviously) but i mean that i like the antagonist to have real motives and real goals not just "take over the world for the Evulz"
i prefer for the villain to either have human motive and be mildly sympathetic or an incomprehensible being that by definition can't be understood.

also i like to be able to follow the plotline without too much difficulty if everything is too complicated it is hard to keep track of everything, in my opinion The Wheel of Time and The Malazan Book of the Fallen series are pushing it if you know them.

Finally to agree with other posters i like a fantasy world where magic is used in life and is more subtle than is usually done.