zachariah
Decompressing
- Joined
- May 15, 2006
- Messages
- 872
Greetings all, and thanks for the great stories and the nice comments.
Here are my crits for every story. Why should you have to make extra clicks to go to more pages? I'm saving the world's electricity, one thread at a time.
I wrote these right at the start, but have sat on them for more than a week because I was worried some might consider them a little harsh. But then I figured, you're all big boys and girls, you can take it or you wouldn't be putting your stuff out there.
Thread A
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let Down Your Spade
By Victoria A. Rogers/NickeeCoco
I'm going to have to fly in the face of public opinion on this one, I'm afraid.
“A wooden spoon tapped angrily” ...tsk tsk Ms Rogers, spoons don’t get angry. ‘Angrily’ is repeated only a few sentences later. There is heavy adverb usage throughout – try a computer search for ‘ly’ in everything you do and then doing your best to remove the results where applicable. Merrily, gleefully, unceremoniously...purge these descriptors.
Overall, there’s far too high a tell vs show ratio. Don’t tell us the witch is impatient – all witches are, we know that – show us her black fingernails tapping the grain of the door. Don’t use twenty-one words to tell us a man is looking ahead and behind – show us what he’s seeing.
Despite the technical failings, this is a story with immense charm. These are Hobbits, right?
Erebus
by Steve Jones
The opening paragraph is unfortunately the weakest, forcing too much into too few sentences. After that, it’s a tight ride through a compelling story. I’d agree with NickeeCoco’s point that the Blacksmith is way too blasé about the stranger’s confessions and we don’t have any reason to care for him. There’s no reason to sympathise with Remo either, as he’s a nasty piece of work.
Right up to the end I was convinced this was going to be a Hulk-style twist, with the murderous dog turning out to be Remo’s alter-ego. It still could be, if the ‘behind’ of the blacksmith could somehow include the stranger, but I don’t think this is your intent, which is a shame as that would have made this a much deeper and more resonant story.
Morningstar v. Jehovah
by Richard Dickson
It’s very well done, with just the right tone for the material. But there’s already a huge body of work on print and screen depicting scenes just like this, and there wasn’t enough new here to grab me.
The reasoning behind Peter’s dismissal of the case is also clearly faulty – Stan could just have easily countered that God had pre-determined what happened, just like everything else. But then I’m a hard-core determinist, so I was fated say that...
Eye For An Eye
By Venustar
Work on those opening sentences.
Past this hump, it’s much tighter and moves on nicely. My only issue is that there is not enough to the story – the interesting bits are in the flashback. There’s too little to Old Joe/Zero Ops for it to have any bearing, except as a device to shoehorn it into the theme (and it should not be ‘the’ Zero ops, unless you add a qualifier like ‘team’).
Choosing Direction at the Dead End
by PeterWilliam
I applaud the sentiment and the neat ending. There’s a lot of room for tightening up your writing and murdering your darlings.
And then we get the actual story, which is all flashback. Flashbacks are universally frowned upon in crit groups and how-to-write books, for the simple reason they disrupt the flow of the story and take us away from the action. Your story has a great action moment, where the protagonist seizes her opportunity to avenge the death of her parents and simultaneously inspires her people to join the revolt. But you’ve reduced this contest-winning scene to a bookend for some fairly pedestrian back-story.
Trey's Choice
by Max S
Free pass this time for the formatting, as it’s your first submission. Next time, you get marked down!
Nice story, pretty well done (I’ll ignore the missing apostrophes). The ambiguity between the religion and the physical world was interesting – one could interpret the ‘firstflight of seraphs’ as a natural feature integrated into the religion, a more advanced neighbour or as actual angels, all of which could work. Despite the threadbare descriptions (we have no clue what anything looks like) you’ve created a very vivid atmosphere.
The only thing stopping me from really enthusing over this entry is the credibility of Trey’s choice. From what we are given, there is not enough to convince me that a teenage boy would so publically go against his community and a lifetime’s indoctrination.
Joe 2.0
by Rich Matrunick
A lovely story, keenly written. Not been playing Fallout, have you? Well done for coming up with the first story I’ve read that has an optimistic outlook on mutation. I can’t help but feel cheated out of the real story, though. It’s all setup with no payoff.
Thread B
The Trials of El Gordo
By Daddy Darth
Very convincing tour through the mind of a troubled man. Reminiscent of Scanners, in a good way. I really like the way the story is constructed to allow for the powers to be real or part of his delusion.
Good work keeping the POV consistent. But in staying so close to the protagonist without going for first-person, you’ve made for some rather heavy reading. Many sentences and paragraphs are made almost entirely of ‘he did this, then he did this’ with no variation to spice it up.
Colony
By Sean Regan
I like the style, but not the content. The scene is well drawn, the dialogue crisp. But it’s an anonymous couple having an uneventful conversation, which doesn’t really stand on its own as flash fiction.
Balthazar’s Legacy
By Jordan Lanni
Like HE noted, a strong feel of golden-age sci-fi here, with all the boundless enthusiasm for space travel felt by a generation yet to experience the crushing difficulties and setbacks presented by reality. It could be a short from a young Bradbury or Heinlein.
Some editorial nips and tucks I suggest:
I’d also say, as Daddy Darth and txhusker pointed out before me, it was a mistake to put everything in flashback. The exciting events all happen offstage.
These are minor nitpicks. Welcome aboard, and keep writing. There’s lots of promise here.
Level 3
By Carin Marais
It’s good, fast paced, atmospheric. There’s a little problem with the internal logic of the story – these caves, or whatever this refuge is, are so vast and well stocked they can take a large section of society from richest to poorest, yet they are also magical and prone to disappearing at a moment’s notice? And how much protection against a rogue king would they prove if everyone knows about them?
The Prisoner
(The Continuing Misadventures of Kalgon WonderNot)
by Todd Banker
These keep getting better. Unfortunately I couldn’t shake from my mind the scene from X-Men where Magneto escapes from prison, and numerous other super-powered breakout scenarios I’ve enjoyed in the past. But since the series owes its genesis to challenging the clichés of the genre, it’s only fitting you should embrace them and make them your own.
The business at the end could have been clearer – I had to re-read to see if you intended for Bart’s body to be completely empty and Kalgon to be a prisoner inside his own body, or if you meant for them to have completely swapped bodies (it’s only clear when Kalgon shouts out, from Bart’s body – your use of the descriptor ‘Bart/Kalgon’ could be eliminated and replaced with something like ‘Bart, now controlling Kalgon’s body’).
Nice job! I’m waiting for the next instalment.
So this guy walks into a bar...
By Pete Warner
Written to your usual extremely high technical standard and containing your trademark sneaky use of borderline literature-grade asides, I’m still left a little cold by this one. There just isn’t enough between the two branches to justify them both being written out in full, and the Donnie Darko-style ghost interaction needed more to it to really satisfy.
Yin/Yang
by Dan Bieger
I like this one more with each reading. There’s an honesty to it that comes through in the dialogue. That said, there’s not much to chew on here – if the decision had been the opening and the birth the conclusion, we could have had a much more exciting entry (I get enough strained conversations with the wife at home).
Voting was extremely difficult for me this month. I really liked Trey's story, and The Prisoner, so they get it this time, and the only reason I am not using the third vote is because it would be unfair to choose a third from all the others I liked, which was all of them (despite what you may think from reading the above).
Here are my crits for every story. Why should you have to make extra clicks to go to more pages? I'm saving the world's electricity, one thread at a time.
I wrote these right at the start, but have sat on them for more than a week because I was worried some might consider them a little harsh. But then I figured, you're all big boys and girls, you can take it or you wouldn't be putting your stuff out there.
Thread A
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let Down Your Spade
By Victoria A. Rogers/NickeeCoco
I'm going to have to fly in the face of public opinion on this one, I'm afraid.
“A wooden spoon tapped angrily” ...tsk tsk Ms Rogers, spoons don’t get angry. ‘Angrily’ is repeated only a few sentences later. There is heavy adverb usage throughout – try a computer search for ‘ly’ in everything you do and then doing your best to remove the results where applicable. Merrily, gleefully, unceremoniously...purge these descriptors.
You know this sentence should not have survived the edit. ‘Reverted his eyes back towards’ is beyond clunky.
As You Know Bob telling, coupled with a very cumbersome description. How do you glance at someone in ‘one of the most serious ways imaginable’? You can do better than that.
Overall, there’s far too high a tell vs show ratio. Don’t tell us the witch is impatient – all witches are, we know that – show us her black fingernails tapping the grain of the door. Don’t use twenty-one words to tell us a man is looking ahead and behind – show us what he’s seeing.
Despite the technical failings, this is a story with immense charm. These are Hobbits, right?
Erebus
by Steve Jones
The opening paragraph is unfortunately the weakest, forcing too much into too few sentences. After that, it’s a tight ride through a compelling story. I’d agree with NickeeCoco’s point that the Blacksmith is way too blasé about the stranger’s confessions and we don’t have any reason to care for him. There’s no reason to sympathise with Remo either, as he’s a nasty piece of work.
Right up to the end I was convinced this was going to be a Hulk-style twist, with the murderous dog turning out to be Remo’s alter-ego. It still could be, if the ‘behind’ of the blacksmith could somehow include the stranger, but I don’t think this is your intent, which is a shame as that would have made this a much deeper and more resonant story.
Morningstar v. Jehovah
by Richard Dickson
It’s very well done, with just the right tone for the material. But there’s already a huge body of work on print and screen depicting scenes just like this, and there wasn’t enough new here to grab me.
The reasoning behind Peter’s dismissal of the case is also clearly faulty – Stan could just have easily countered that God had pre-determined what happened, just like everything else. But then I’m a hard-core determinist, so I was fated say that...
Eye For An Eye
By Venustar
Work on those opening sentences.
We don’t know who ‘He’ is at this stage, or what it is he’s looking behind. ‘Nondescript, glass door’ is too vague – if the door is so uninteresting and irrelevant to the story, why are you mentioning it? ‘From which he had exited’ almost broke my clunk-o-meter.
Past this hump, it’s much tighter and moves on nicely. My only issue is that there is not enough to the story – the interesting bits are in the flashback. There’s too little to Old Joe/Zero Ops for it to have any bearing, except as a device to shoehorn it into the theme (and it should not be ‘the’ Zero ops, unless you add a qualifier like ‘team’).
Choosing Direction at the Dead End
by PeterWilliam
I applaud the sentiment and the neat ending. There’s a lot of room for tightening up your writing and murdering your darlings.
As DailyRich pointed out, this can easily be shortened to lose the double ‘me’. ‘Suffuse’ in this context comes across as a bit of purple prose. Is this a phrase your character would use in general conversation? Doesn’t sound like it from her dialogue. A semi-colon in your opening sentence is brave to the point of foolhardiness.
This is really purple stuff. Pretty words that convey very little meaning.
And then we get the actual story, which is all flashback. Flashbacks are universally frowned upon in crit groups and how-to-write books, for the simple reason they disrupt the flow of the story and take us away from the action. Your story has a great action moment, where the protagonist seizes her opportunity to avenge the death of her parents and simultaneously inspires her people to join the revolt. But you’ve reduced this contest-winning scene to a bookend for some fairly pedestrian back-story.
Trey's Choice
by Max S
Free pass this time for the formatting, as it’s your first submission. Next time, you get marked down!
Nice story, pretty well done (I’ll ignore the missing apostrophes). The ambiguity between the religion and the physical world was interesting – one could interpret the ‘firstflight of seraphs’ as a natural feature integrated into the religion, a more advanced neighbour or as actual angels, all of which could work. Despite the threadbare descriptions (we have no clue what anything looks like) you’ve created a very vivid atmosphere.
The only thing stopping me from really enthusing over this entry is the credibility of Trey’s choice. From what we are given, there is not enough to convince me that a teenage boy would so publically go against his community and a lifetime’s indoctrination.
Joe 2.0
by Rich Matrunick
A lovely story, keenly written. Not been playing Fallout, have you? Well done for coming up with the first story I’ve read that has an optimistic outlook on mutation. I can’t help but feel cheated out of the real story, though. It’s all setup with no payoff.
Thread B
The Trials of El Gordo
By Daddy Darth
Very convincing tour through the mind of a troubled man. Reminiscent of Scanners, in a good way. I really like the way the story is constructed to allow for the powers to be real or part of his delusion.
Good work keeping the POV consistent. But in staying so close to the protagonist without going for first-person, you’ve made for some rather heavy reading. Many sentences and paragraphs are made almost entirely of ‘he did this, then he did this’ with no variation to spice it up.
Colony
By Sean Regan
I like the style, but not the content. The scene is well drawn, the dialogue crisp. But it’s an anonymous couple having an uneventful conversation, which doesn’t really stand on its own as flash fiction.
Balthazar’s Legacy
By Jordan Lanni
Like HE noted, a strong feel of golden-age sci-fi here, with all the boundless enthusiasm for space travel felt by a generation yet to experience the crushing difficulties and setbacks presented by reality. It could be a short from a young Bradbury or Heinlein.
Some editorial nips and tucks I suggest:
I simply can’t parse this sentence given the context of the paragraph. Cut or re-phrase.
PeterWilliam singled this one out but I would say you both missed the real problem: ‘answering questions with questions’ should have been cut from an already overlong sentence. While that would make it intelligible, this kind of self-indulgent musing should be snipped anyway.
I’d also say, as Daddy Darth and txhusker pointed out before me, it was a mistake to put everything in flashback. The exciting events all happen offstage.
These are minor nitpicks. Welcome aboard, and keep writing. There’s lots of promise here.
Level 3
By Carin Marais
It’s good, fast paced, atmospheric. There’s a little problem with the internal logic of the story – these caves, or whatever this refuge is, are so vast and well stocked they can take a large section of society from richest to poorest, yet they are also magical and prone to disappearing at a moment’s notice? And how much protection against a rogue king would they prove if everyone knows about them?
The Prisoner
(The Continuing Misadventures of Kalgon WonderNot)
by Todd Banker
These keep getting better. Unfortunately I couldn’t shake from my mind the scene from X-Men where Magneto escapes from prison, and numerous other super-powered breakout scenarios I’ve enjoyed in the past. But since the series owes its genesis to challenging the clichés of the genre, it’s only fitting you should embrace them and make them your own.
The business at the end could have been clearer – I had to re-read to see if you intended for Bart’s body to be completely empty and Kalgon to be a prisoner inside his own body, or if you meant for them to have completely swapped bodies (it’s only clear when Kalgon shouts out, from Bart’s body – your use of the descriptor ‘Bart/Kalgon’ could be eliminated and replaced with something like ‘Bart, now controlling Kalgon’s body’).
Nice job! I’m waiting for the next instalment.
So this guy walks into a bar...
By Pete Warner
Written to your usual extremely high technical standard and containing your trademark sneaky use of borderline literature-grade asides, I’m still left a little cold by this one. There just isn’t enough between the two branches to justify them both being written out in full, and the Donnie Darko-style ghost interaction needed more to it to really satisfy.
Yin/Yang
by Dan Bieger
I like this one more with each reading. There’s an honesty to it that comes through in the dialogue. That said, there’s not much to chew on here – if the decision had been the opening and the birth the conclusion, we could have had a much more exciting entry (I get enough strained conversations with the wife at home).
Voting was extremely difficult for me this month. I really liked Trey's story, and The Prisoner, so they get it this time, and the only reason I am not using the third vote is because it would be unfair to choose a third from all the others I liked, which was all of them (despite what you may think from reading the above).
! I was certainly surprised and can understand the need of that in such a community, so it did not detract from my enjoyment of the overall piece.
