Writing Advice Thread

[PaulPower]

Thanks! Haven't had a proper look yet, but I'll get on that when I have a moment

[PaulPower]

Righto, went through your changes and suggestions. The vast majority were really helpful, although I didn't use all of them: "fulfil", for example, is the standard spelling of the word in UK English so it's not really a [sic] . Thanks again.

Regarding the general observations:

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The "candidacy decided at 10-11" thing is a jab at the old eleven-plus system in UK schools, although I guess I could sacrifice (heh) it for a number that made more sense. But saying that, I wouldn't say Holonet's goal with giving gifted humans the opportunity to ascend is to keep humanity complacent: given the choice between carrot-and-stick and a bigger stick, she'd probably go for the bigger stick. She really does loathe humanity (which again, explains the lack of comfort or aid). She'd have wiped humans out already if she didn't get more pleasure out of watching them worship her through the religion she's constructed for them. No, the real reason for allowing more humans to become holosims is because she needs fresh minds to keep her sane.

At which point I should probably explain a bit about Holonet's psychology: she was originally formed from the emergent thoughts and interactions of all holosim minds: she is, after all, the Holosim Network. Now, the average holosim will have two main feelings most of the time: a mild disgust at humanity and a certain amount of low-level boredom. Not every holosim will feel these things, but that's the average. Now imagine pooling all this together and focusing it on one individual, and you've got Holonet. Her id is dominated by these two emotions, and it's all her ego and superego (if indeed she has a superego) can do to keep them in check and maintain her icy demeanour. Fresh minds, without the boredom and hatred of those who've been holosims for a long time, are soothing for her.

Regarding holosims sacrificing humans to themselves: yeah, that isn't ideally what I wanted to write, I should probably think of something better. Basically, holosims need a vast amount of energy to power their technology, and this energy is provided through built-in matter-to-energy converters. A human "being sacrificed to Holonet" is having their body converted to energy and absorbed into her. Ordinary holosims can do this too, however, although most of the energy gets "taxed away" and distributed via Holonet to all other holosims. I guess I could just say "executed".

But yeah, this is all stuff for later on: in the next chapter, Mark finds an old diary detailling Holonet's rise to power, which plants doubts in his mind and eventually leads to him swearing to bring down Holonet, giving him the inspiration that he so desperately needs (as he'll have to become a holosim to have any sort of realistic chance). The relationships between Holonet, holosims and humans are all to come. But I could probably include a bit in here. Because, as you note, I'm pretty bad at including at including description - dialogue's my favourite part of writing, so I tend to focus most of my attention on it.

Although saying that, you're also right about Mark and Sarah sounding like middle-class siblings, so I guess I need to work on my dialogue too .

[Valter]

Fishsicle's work:

comments and suggestions will be in Bold Green unless I see something that warrants particular mention.

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Steven Harris was, by all accounts, a disappointingly typical person. The universe, fickle creature that it is, has a particular hatred for the extraordinarily ordinary, and Steven was hardly special enough to warrant an exception.

Too many commas. There's also a bunch of redundancy/contradiction in the second sentence. I would change it to "The universe has a particular hatred for the excessively ordinary, fickle creature that it is, and Steven was hardly interesting enough to escape its wrath."

He aimlessly walked (reverse order to "walked aimlessly") through the city, eventually sitting down on a random bench at a random intersection somewhere between his last job interview and his apartment.

This sentence here has some unnecessary phrase redundancy (on a random bench, at a random intersection), and it goes on just a bit too long. Shorten it to "He wandered aimlessly through the city, eventually choosing a random bench somewhere between his last job interview and home to sit at."

"Hey, my friend was sitting there." (Add something to establish the brown-haired woman as the speaker. Something like "'Hey, my friend was sitting there,' a voice called out from next to him." A brown-haired woman in a particularly gaudy silver coat was suddenly sitting next to him. He was sure the bench was (improper aspect: switch to "had been") empty a moment ago; he decided that getting a bit more sleep in the next few nights might help him get back to reality again. "No need to get up; she'll be gone for a while." The woman leaned back against the chair. "So, what're you doing around here (-> "these parts")? You're not a regular, I can tell you that. (a different phrase would probably be more appropriate here, like "that's for sure")"

"I've never been to this bench before, no..." Steven was a tad confused.

scrolling down a bit, I can see that you very rarely used "XXX said" or any variation thereof. As Steven's response is conveying his confusion, it would be more appropriate to link the second sentence to Steven's speech directly. "'I've never been to this bench before, no..." Steven said confusedly." It would help to add some of these to spoken lines below and above, too.

"It's your first time on Palm Street proper. Yeah, (remove) you might have walked by a few times, but why did you decide to sit down here today? Curiosity? Serendipity?" Steven found this entire conversation extremely strange. "Whenever someone from the outside just walks into Palm Street, and breaks their routine to do so, it... draws attention. Be careful." Steven's face was visibly showing confusion. "Sorry if you're a bit put off by all of this."

Change the first speech break to an action, like "Steven's only response was a shrug".

Also, connect the last two spoken lines and move the break to the end instead, so that it looks more like "'Be careful. Sorry if you're a bit put off by all of this,' she added, noting the confused look on Steven's face."

"Ahem." A woman in a long, black coat was suddenly standing behind them. Steven got a brief glimpse of her face inside the enormous collar of the trenchcoat; her nose and eyes, coupled with her downward stare, immediately conjured the image of a hawk in Steven's mind. "Doctor, Mr. Oates is waiting for you."

This is the exact same introduction the previous lady had. I would strongly consider using a different entrance, or at least different word choice in introducing this one.

"Ah, I have to go." The woman (which woman?) flipped him a small piece of metal, with small, black letters engraved in it. "My card." Steven gave it a brief glance.

Dr. Yvette Q. Harken
Director, Eris Enterprises
524 Palm Street, New York City 10280
yqharken@eris.vdn

Dr. Harken stood up (remove) to join the black-haired woman, turning to wave as she walked away. "See you soon." Steven wondered what, exactly, she had meant by that. In fact, he wondered what she had meant by all of that (-> "he wondered about everything she had said in their conversation"); and it had most certainly not been more than a single minute by his count.

----

It was not every day that Steven had visitors, particularly not at three in the morning. The increasingly loud knocks ("On his door") drove him out of his slumber; (period) after several valiant attempts to hammer his eyelids shut, he finally sat up and lumbered towards the door of his bedroom. His left foot barely struck ("struck" implies a significant hit. Use something mild, like "nicked") the cord of his coffee maker, but that was enough to bring the machine to the ground with a shrill, metallic clatter. Cold coffee splashed on his legs.

Steven would have liked to say "What the hell do you want at this hour?", but instead it came out as more a garbled, half-awake (->"But all he could manage in his half-awake state was a garbled") "Whut?".

The man leaning opposite his apartment door was wearing a dusty, grey coat and a matching wide-brimmed fedora. The primary match, though, was not in the coloration but in the magnitude of dust (-> "The foremost similarity was not in the coloration but rather in the magnitude of dust") that had settled on it. For all Steven could tell, the hat could actually have been a painfully bright violet and the dust was just thick enough to completely obscure the original color. For that matter, it was impossible to tell whether or not the coat was actually gray, or if a similar effect was covering a ridiculous feathery monstrosity studded with jade-green sequins. Steven recoiled for a moment; he had really, really weird thoughts in the early morning.

"Parr. Liam Parr." Liam was the type of man who greatly overestimated the image he struck. While I (Steven)would usually be obliged to describe a man in his attire as "tall, dark, and handsome", Liam was in fact none of the three. The closest descriptor of the same form would be "short, pale, and with the face of a particularly confused kipper". Speckles of stubble coated the man's chin, although it seemed less like any form of beard than a long-abandoned attempt to grow one. A soggy cigarette drooped out of his mouth; it had probably not actually produced smoke for a good year (-> "It had probably not been lit for at least a year by now"). "Dr. H wants to see you."

Steven's mouth hung open. "It's three AM. Nobody wants to see anybody."

"Tell that to the chief." Liam turned and started to walk towards the elevator, beckoning for Steven to follow.

"Can I at least get dressed?"

Liam stopped walking, one foot in the air. He slowly turned around, finally noticing that Steven's only clothing was a decaying bathrobe and a pair of boxers covered with smiling white rabbits. He nodded slightly and said, "[COLOR="SeaGreen"][B]Yes, that'd probably be good (He spoke with some urgency before, so the casual response here is off. Maybe "I suppose an exception could be made this time" would work better)."

After a few minutes, Steven emerged from the apartment properly clothed. He kept one hand in the pocket of his slacks, closed tightly around a can of mace. He felt he could never be too careful, especially when a stout dusty man showed up in the wee hours and offered to lead him to someone he barely knew. This was a departure from the norm, to be sure (-> "to say the least").

Overall: not all that much was explained in this chapter, so there's not much I can say. The dialogue in the first half of the chapter felt a bit off, though, probably because it was actually a monologue! Steven didn't say even a single word.

I would consider adding a bit more to the first half of the chapter to provide at least a small hint or something to what will be going on later, as currently there is nothing to go off of (other than: there are two women, they are very strange).

[Defesan]

Alright. I figure I might as well put this up here. It looks like you guys are better editors than I ever was, at least!

Aside from the standard critique package, I'd like to know if this story actually stands on its own. I've been away from short story writing in the land of the novel-length work for far too long, and I'm trying to get back into it by writing short stories attached to one of my novels. However, I'm too close to the story to see when I'm not explaining something, so tell me when something isn't clear. More than likely, it was explained in the novel itself - or worse, in my notes - and I forgot that other people don't necessarily have access to everything in my head.

Ten Kilograms

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Kevin Warren was leaving Earth for the last time, and he knew it. Every fiber of the suit he was putting on – or rather, was being put into – was telling him that he'd never come home, and he wasn't happy about the trip. Oh, he'd been through the same training as the other colonists, so he'd been to orbit. He'd floated around as an instructor droned on and on about safety precautions and the kind of things one needed when entering an environment so utterly alien and hostile as space. It didn't matter. He wasn't a space guy, anyway. Heck, his job would be to get down on the ground A.S.A.P. and get the initial colony up and running, probably before half of his fellow colonists even woke up. According to the real space guys, the planet they were heading to, some ungodly number of light years away – a distance so vast he knew nobody could really get it – had a good, breathable atmosphere, close to one G of gravity, plenty of water, everything that made Earth a nice place to live. When the dust settled, he figured he'd start a construction company. They wouldn't have new visitors for at least sixty years, and that assumed some crazy sci-fi lightspeed drive and an instant line of communication that all the scientists insisted was impossible. So for his entire life, or at least most of it, even with the life-extension treatments being given to every colonist, it would just be the first five thousand. Well, them and their kids. And their kids' kids. And their kids' kids' kids. And – he shuddered at the thought of living so long – their kids. Maybe a hundred thousand all told. In any case, they'd all need houses, and shopping malls, and theaters, and museums.

He laughed at the thought. What would you put in a museum when a civilization – the only civilization on the entire planet – was only a hundred years old?

“Intercom check.” the technician suiting him up said. “Air OK?”

“I'm fine.”

“Ready to go?”

“No.” Kevin answered.

The technician smiled, then laughed. “Nobody is.” he said. “But, no turning back now. Go outside, then down the hall to your left.”

No turning back now. No kidding. Kevin was pretty sure that if he bolted, especially since he was officially the head of the 'Structural Engineering' department, the Mercury Corporation would sue him for breach of contract for everything he'd ever made and ever would make and then some. They'd probably do that to regular passengers. But then, he'd poured his life savings into buying 'seats' for him and his wife, Leah. He'd just sold their house and most of their belongings to cover the final installment and buy an extra bit of land on their new planet. There wasn't anything to go back to. So no turning back. He picked up the bag that held everything he was taking with him, and left the changing room. Leah was waiting up ahead, smiling at him with that big, beautiful smile of hers, clear even through the thick glass of her helmet. Kevin smiled back and waved, wishing that his smile was anything close to genuine. Her presence helped, though.

“Well, it's the big day!” she said over the intercom. It felt like she was whispering in his ear. Funny, he thought, it never felt like that when his instructors were talking. “So, tell me the truth. Does this spacesuit make me look fat?”

Kevin couldn't help but laugh. Spacesuits made everyone look two or three times bigger than they really were. If she'd darkened the visor, he couldn't have told the difference between her and a sumo wrestler. “N-no fatter than me.” he said, catching his breath.

The smile on her face didn't fade for an instant as she punched him in the ribs. He didn't even feel it, the suit was so thick. “Yeah, well, you had a head start.” She put her arm as far around his shoulder as the stiff suit would allow, which wasn't very far. “Come on, we don't want to keep them waiting.”

They followed the signs away from the changing rooms until they reached the carts, already busily shuttling a mass of suited colonists out to the pad, a good five miles away. It looked closer, but that was deceptive. Kevin had seen the cargo lifters up close. They were fusion powered, and as such, they didn't need as much fuel to lift their massive cargos, but they needed plenty of room to take off. Currently, they were carrying two hundred colonists apiece, and the one he and his wife were headed two was going to carry the last two hundred. This lifter, emblazoned with a '4' so large it could almost be seen from the spaceport five miles away, would be stowed away with its three siblings in hangars big enough for office buildings, ready for the eight hundred year trip just like everything else.

They walked up to one of the carts and sat down next to each other. Leah leaned on him, and he could almost imagine he could feel her warmth through the suit. He noticed that his intercom was apparently set to pick up transmissions from nearby and play them as if they were coming from wherever they were coming from, and the cart was full of chatter, just like any bus or rail he'd ever been on. People were excited, nervous, outright scared, and he couldn't blame them.

“I almost can't wait to get away from here.” he said. “And I almost can't leave.” He looked at his wife, though he could only see a part of her face from the side because of their helmets.

“I know...” she said. “But we'll get a whole new world out of it. I'll miss my parents, and my brother, and my grandparents and aunts and uncles and everyone. But we'll be making a whole new life for ourselves.”

Kevin at least didn't have that problem. He'd never gotten to know his father, and couldn't really bring himself to miss his mother, after all that she'd done to him. Extended family had never really appeared. When he met Leah, and her whole huge family, he'd only ever gotten as close to them as necessary. He hadn't grown up with them. They weren't really his family. So he could leave them behind, too, even knowing they'd all be long gone before he woke up. But then, so would everything on Earth. He looked down at the small bag he was carrying. It was just like the bags everyone else had, but he doubted the contents of any two were the same. Ten kilograms, and about a twentieth of a cubic meter. That was all anyone had.

Finally, they reached the cargo lifter and parked by one of its huge feet. It was easy to tell who hadn't seen one up close before from the gasps of astonishment. Sure, it was only thirty meters or so tall, which in terms of traditional heavy launch rockets wasn't much, but it was square, and seventy meters on a side. It looked less like a rocket than a building, really, but it had the pure brute force to not need much in the way of aerodynamics. The squat, square shape gave it tremendous interior volume while allowing it to actually fit inside the hangar of a ship like Mercury. So they all got onto one of the square lifts marked for passengers and went up into the cramped passenger space. Most of the interior volume was marked for cargo, it seemed, which Kevin didn't find surprising. He couldn't imagine the logistics involved in loading, and then unloading a thousand or more people – which the lifters could probably carry without flinching – in a single go, and he'd been involved in enough large-scale construction to know what those kinds of logistical nightmares looked like.

Most everyone was already seated – lying down, really – when he and Leah got to their own seats. It wouldn't be long. Nowadays, systems were reliable enough that countdown holds were rare, and the hours-long holds of the beginning of the space age were a thing of the past. In their case, as they reclined back into their seats, their suits' huds showed them the current state of the countdown, and it was just as he'd suspected. Only an hour to go, and they hadn't even finished loading. Most of that was probably time to get everyone not going with them away from the launch site before they were incinerated. A technician came by and strapped them in tightly, then stowed their bags under the seats. Soon, all the seats around them were filled, and everyone was lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling some twenty meters above them. With such an interesting view, Kevin soon found that the buttons under his right hand activated various virtual windows in his helmet display. They gave him views from every side of the lifter, and he spent his time switching between them, alternately looking at the desolate landscape around them and the stars above. The countdown came to ten minutes, then five, then one. He could hear the engines coming to life not twenty meters away. And then, it happened.

It started with a low rumble, a vibration he could feel more than hear. The countdown hit ten seconds, and the engines started to fire. A quick look beneath the lifter showed the exhaust plume starting to scour the ground below, but it looked like nothing more than a trickle. At five seconds, the floodgates opened, and fire poured out of the bottom of the lifter, forcing him to other views. The vibration was intense, and he wished for a moment that he was in one of the spaceplanes he'd gone up in earlier. Those launches were scary, too, but at least they happened in the air. Finally, the countdown reached zero, and the engines really started to push. He could see the blast wave propagating across the desert even from the side views. Then, in an instant, he was forced back into his own seat by three times his own weight. He closed his eyes for what felt like an eternity, and when he opened them again, he couldn't see much of the ground at all. In the distance, he saw a spaceplane lighting off its boosters and rocketing nearly straight up into the sky. Slowly, the acceleration fell until it reached a more comfortable level, and then shut off completely as they flew out of orbit.

They couldn't get out of their seats yet – the technicians needed to unbuckle them were on Mercury – so they all spent the next six hours in their suits. Kevin occasionally chatted with his wife, mostly about what it would be like on their new home, but for the most part, they were silent for the trip. Everyone else around them seemed to have the same idea, and there were only a few conversations within 'earshot' of the intercom's receivers. One guy tried to lighten the mood by saying he'd left his oven on, which set everyone laughing for a while, but then it was back to the old somber mood. There was really nothing to say. And then, out of the blackness of space, they spotted the shipyard, and then Mercury. The view was brief as the lifter turned around and fired its engines once more, the pilots bringing it to a near stop as close to the colony ship as they dared. Then the ship was motionless once more, the only acceleration coming from the maneuvering rockets as they turned the lifter once more and then pushed it forward, side on, into the enormous hangar on Mercury. The landing gear came down – nobody had felt it go up at launch on account of the massive engines firing at the same time – and with a thud, they were down. They weren't let out yet, though, and the lifter moved again, this time jerking as if it was being towed. It took a half hour to get settled, but finally, the long journey was over.

Technicians came in, this time nearly floating in the light gravity. Their feet were still on the ground, and Kevin could tell just from his inner ear that he wasn't weightless, but everything looked and felt light. It was almost more disconcerting than microgravity.

“You had a good flight?”

Kevin looked as far to the side as his helmet allowed and saw one of the technicians standing over him. He sounded vaguely French. He guessed he probably worked at the shipyard. Probably wasn't going with them. “Boring, actually.”

“Boring is good, yes? Better than an exciting flight.”

Good point, Kevin thought. He watched as the tech undid his straps, and then got up as someone else worked on Leah. The gravity didn't feel as light as the techs made it look, but then, he was wearing a suit that probably doubled his weight in any environment. When Leah got up, she took to it with her usual exuberance.

“Woo!” she shouted, jumping up and down, making it nearly three or four meters each time. “This is amazing!” She jumped again. “Yeah!”

She really was a space person. Around them, other colonists were imitating her and laughing with joy. He couldn't quite help trying the gravity out himself, and was amazed when he managed to jump almost as high as she had. It was a relief, after all the gees they'd pulled during the trip, and somehow, once he got the hang of it, it almost felt better than what he was used to. Quickly, his mind turned to the kinds of structures that gravity like this would allow, even though he knew it was only temporary.

“Alright, alright, settle down everyone.” one of the techs said. “Trip's not over yet.”

“Awww...” Leah said, doing her best 'disappointed kid' routine. Others joined in, and Kevin surprised himself by giving the tech his own best pout. Maybe it was a memory of the last time they weighed so little, or maybe the pure oxygen was going to their heads, he didn't really care.

“Nope, sorry kids. We've got to get you changed and into your pods.”

There were a few more pouts, and more than a few chuckles, but soon enough they were grabbing their bags and filing on to the passenger lifts again. Before they even got to the bottom, however, Kevin was in another world.

“It's like a titanium cathedral...” he said. That was just the first impression, though. It truly didn't grasp the size of the place. It seemed to go on and on forever. The only occupants of the hangar were the cargo lifter they came in on, nestled by the near wall, and a spaceplane – probably, he guessed, the one he'd seen take off – and it served to provide a near-complete lack of reference. It couldn't have been longer than three or four hundred meters, given Mercury's size, but that still put it at as long as a supercarrier, and probably wider, to boot. Massive doors on one side, probably airlocks for the ships, faced hangar doors that were just as large. If he remembered the diagrams of the colony ship correctly, the two boat bays and their associated hangars stretched nearly to the core of the ship, though not at its widest point, and–

“Back to us now, honey.” Leah said.

“Sorry.” he said, coming out of his architecture-induced stupor. He hated to admit it, but he had a tendency to get lost in thought when faced with marvels of engineering.

“You know, you're so cute when you do that. You'll see this place again, though, so come on, we don't want to be left behind.”

Kevin smiled, grabbed his wife's glove with his own – it wasn't really intimate, he realized, when one was wearing a spacesuit – and shuffled off after their group. They made their way into the individual changing rooms, where they had to separate once more. Inside, a tech extracted him from his suit and gave him a much tighter-fitting sleep suit. He'd been through this, too, in training. Everyone had slept for six months in preparation for the trip to make sure they could handle stasis. It wouldn't have done to find out someone couldn't go just before the launch, after all. He managed to get the sleep suit on without help, and picked up his bag again. Outside, Leah was once again waiting for him, this time looking absolutely stunning in her sleep suit.

“I can tell you right now,” he said on seeing her, “that thing does not make you look fat.”

“It better not. I felt like I was being squeezed into clothes two sizes too small putting this thing on.”

Whatever other functions they had, he thought, the sleep suits really were skin tight, and left very little to the imagination. He walked up to her, feeling lighter than even the low gravity could account for, and kissed her. He knew he wouldn't see her again for eight centuries, even if they went by in an instant. He took in her brown skin, her dark green hair, hazel eyes staring into his, everything about her.

“Mmmm...” she said, breaking the kiss. “If you do too much more, we're both going to be embarrassed...”

Kevin could only smile at the thought, but she did have a point. “I guess we should get to our pods before I do something I regret...” he said.

They had one stop before that, though. The lockers. They were stored separately in an inaccessible cargo compartment, but each one could be called up and delivered to the 'locker room'. He stepped up to a terminal and punched in his ID, and in seconds his locker slid into place. It wasn't just a locker, of course. It was the closest thing to a stasis pod for inanimate objects they could come up with. Once locked, it filled with an inorganic gel which killed all bacteria, stopped all decay processes, and hardened to hold each object in place. He opened his locker and reached into his bag for the only thing he was bringing with him. It was an old, dog-eared, yellowed copy of an engineer's handbook that had once belonged to his father, and his grandfather before that. He flipped through it briefly. It had quite a few guidelines for structural engineers and architects, tables of tensile and compression strengths, equations... It had probably gotten him through college, in more ways than one. His father hadn't owned much, and he didn't have a will when he died in a construction site accident. Kevin was four at the time, but he'd already shown a knack for building, so his father had given him the book a year before. He hadn't found it again until he was twelve, but it was right there in his bookshelf. The short note from his father was still tucked inside. He didn't pull it out to read it again – he knew what it said, and he was half-afraid it would fall apart if he touched it again – but he checked to make sure it was still there. He put the book in the locker, closed the door, entered his lock code, and watched as it was whisked away. "See you in eight hundred years, Dad." he said to himself.

“Sounds like they're ready for us.” Leah said as he exited. “Someone just gave me our pod assignments.” She held up a slip of paper. “We're in 3G23 and 3G24, looks like. Right next to each other!”

“Can't think of anywhere I'd rather spend the next eight lifetimes than by your side.” Kevin said, trying to hold back what felt like a flood of tears. Leah was always so happy – he'd only seen her cry from sadness once in their three years together – and he didn't want to spoil it for her. Unfortunately, thinking of his father had opened the door to thoughts of all the things he was leaving behind. He wrapped his arm around Leah's waist, tried to fill his mind with thoughts of her, and headed back out into the crowd. The stasis section was composed of five decks in the core of the ship, each with five corridors, each with two hundred pods, one hundred on each wall. Everything looked alike, so it was vitally important that everyone knew where they were going. All it took to get to their assigned pods was a short trip in the elevator to the middle deck, down row G, and on to the twenty-third and twenty-fourth pods. At this point, with the exception of one of the ubiquitous techs, they were the only people in the corridor. Their neighbors were all asleep, since the ordering of the pods and the colonists' transport schedules weren't related in the slightest. Their two hundred liftmates were scattered through the fifty rows of stasis pods, which made the ship seem almost empty.

“Looks like we're here.” Kevin said.

“Kevin and Leah Warren?” the tech asked. The two of them nodded in reply. “Can I see your assignments? I just want to make sure you have the right pods.”

Leah handed over the slips of paper and said, “I can't imagine you've got much of a problem with stowaways.”

“You never know. A lot of people wanted to go, but couldn't afford the tickets.” The tech checked their assignments. “Not that I can think of any way for someone to get up here unnoticed.” he continued. “Yep, these are your pods. Just stand in them with your hands to your sides, and I'll hook you up.”

Kevin stood in his pod, taking one last look at Leah. She wasn't going to wake up with him, since he was one of the directors. She wouldn't wake up until he'd built them and everyone else places to live. It wouldn't take long, but he'd have to live without her for a while. He turned his head back just in time for the tech to put his mask on.

“You're all set.” the tech said. “Sweet dreams.”

It was just an expression, of course. The brain didn't really do anything during stasis, which meant no dreams. It was a matter of closing your eyes and losing eight centuries. Still, in an effort to put people at ease before stasis, images could be projected on the interior of the pod as it activated. Kevin figured most people would probably choose a picture of Earth, or maybe photos of family, but he didn't believe in clinging to any past he wasn't bringing with him. All that his pod displayed was a single line of text, and he read it as he fell asleep.

Son, I don't think words will ever express how proud I am of you, but I hope this will help.
Go, and do great things.

[Valter]

I've decided to drag this thread back into activity. It might be nice to have around, especially as NaNoWriMo looms.

I would also like to request that all authors critique at least one posted work before putting up anything of their own. It doesn't have to be exceedingly detailed; even a "cool" or an "ew" or an "eh" is better than complete silence. I want to see more critique in the critique thread!

Ten Kilograms

GENERAL CRITIQUE PACKAGE

Writing Style/Structure: First off, there was a massive abundance of dashes in your story, and I grew weary of them quickly. You should consider rewriting many of your sentences completely, to remove asides or integrate them more directly into your text. At the very least instead of using dashes for every aside, cycle through semicolons and parentheses to keep your writing fresh.

Several of the larger paragraphs could (and should) be split into smaller paragraphs. The first paragraph, for example:

According to the real space guys, the planet they were heading to, some ungodly number of light years away – a distance so vast he knew nobody could really get it – had a good, breathable atmosphere, close to one G of gravity, plenty of water, everything that made Earth a nice place to live. When the dust settled, he figured he'd start a construction company.

The methods of colonization and what Keven plans to do after the colonization's done are distinct enough to warrant individual paragraphs. A paragraph break between the first and second sentence quoted here would benefit the stories overall flow, and there are a few other areas where this also holds true.

You refer to the protagonist as "he" too often. I've found that you can justify calling your protagonist by name (either first or last) at least once per paragraph. As it was, I was having trouble remembering the name while reading through.

Whenever a character is thinking to himself, the thoughts are put into italics. So:

Funny, he thought, it never felt like that when his instructors were talking.

Would become:

Funny, he thought, it never felt like that when my instructors were talking.

This leads to another point: Writing in the same tense and person for an entire work is cumbersome yet necessary, because you're required to pull from the same general pool of pronouns and word forms. It's possible to change tense and person under specific circumstances, though, and I would recommend it for keeping word choice crisp. Such as in the above quoted example, third person can be switched to first person while still being grammatically consistent.

everyone was lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling some twenty meters above them.

Would there really be twenty meters of open space in a rocket designed for storage efficiency? This seems like a typo.

OVERALL
Does this stand on its own as a story? I would say no. It could be the start of a story, but by itself, it's distinctly lacking. There's very little conflict or resolution, and the ending carries little weight because the only reference we have for it is an aside a third of the way through.

While the characters go places and do things, there's not much impact to any of it. I think the problem is that there was too much time spent describing the setting and not enough time spent establishing/making me want to care about the characters.

It would be improved by hammering home the fact that he's leaving literally nothing behind a little harder. Maybe a scene somewhere in there in which he actually makes the calls to liquidate the remainder of his estate. Something that really explicitly shows the reader that the only thing Keven has left is his family and a small duffel bag.

[Defesan]

Ooof! But thank you, that was an excellent critique. And pretty much what I was looking for.

It confirms my suspicions that I'm really just too out of practice writing short-form fiction.

First off, there was a massive abundance of dashes in your story, and I grew weary of them quickly. You should consider rewriting many of your sentences completely, to remove asides or integrate them more directly into your text. At the very least instead of using dashes for every aside, cycle through semicolons and parentheses to keep your writing fresh.

This is actually a problem for me, and I know it. You should have seen them in the first draft!

The methods of colonization and what Keven plans to do after the colonization's done are distinct enough to warrant individual paragraphs. A paragraph break between the first and second sentence quoted here would benefit the stories overall flow, and there are a few other areas where this also holds true.

Absolutely right on this one. Reading it again, it was a rather abrupt transition.

You refer to the protagonist as "he" too often. I've found that you can justify calling your protagonist by name (either first or last) at least once per paragraph. As it was, I was having trouble remembering the name while reading through.

Actually, i do try to follow the same rule. On the other hand, I'm often annoyed by stories that do this too much, so I think I tend to overcorrect.

This leads to another point: Writing in the same tense and person for an entire work is cumbersome yet necessary, because you're required to pull from the same general pool of pronouns and word forms. It's possible to change tense and person under specific circumstances, though, and I would recommend it for keeping word choice crisp. Such as in the above quoted example, third person can be switched to first person while still being grammatically consistent.

Again, well aware. Thank you for pointing it out, though, and thanks for the idea, it does sound like it would fit fairly well. Though the italics ended up blending into the quote format, I'm afraid.

Would there really be twenty meters of open space in a rocket designed for storage efficiency? This seems like a typo.

Actually, the rocket itself is designed for moving much, much larger cargo, such as the structural elements of the ship itself. The next transport size down is a spaceplane that could seat maybe 20 people in the passenger compartment. I suppose I could have used that, since the cargo compartment is much larger, but I ruled out the spaceplanes for mass passenger transit for narrative reasons in the novel. Come to think of it, though, it solves a bunch of other problems... As much as I hate to say it, if they're taking the (admittedly new) spaceplanes with them, they sure as heck better be passenger rated! And it would also be a much more efficient use of the launch space available.

Alternatively, I could stuff the passengers in a specially-outfitted cargo container, and stack them with the rest of the stuff going up. But you're right. It doesn't make sense for the transport to be running so empty.

OVERALL
Does this stand on its own as a story? I would say no. It could be the start of a story, but by itself, it's distinctly lacking. There's very little conflict or resolution, and the ending carries little weight because the only reference we have for it is an aside a third of the way through.

While the characters go places and do things, there's not much impact to any of it. I think the problem is that there was too much time spent describing the setting and not enough time spent establishing/making me want to care about the characters.

It would be improved by hammering home the fact that he's leaving literally nothing behind a little harder. Maybe a scene somewhere in there in which he actually makes the calls to liquidate the remainder of his estate. Something that really explicitly shows the reader that the only thing Keven has left is his family and a small duffel bag.

Pretty much exactly what I needed to hear. This seems to be due to the fact that I'm simply out of practice with short stories, as well as the fact that I'm just too darn close to the story. Unfortunately, in this case, lengthening it isn't a possibility, so I'm going to have to squeeze more narrative out of the story without actually removing anything important. It's at about two pages under the maximum submission length for a contest I'm planning to submit it for (it seems it will need quite a bit of editing before then, though,) and it's already three pages over the maximum limit for regular submissions to my college's literary magazine.

Oh, and as for it providing the beginning of a story, it's actually similar in structure - and identical in timeframe - to one of the chapters (chapter 5, to be exact)in the first draft of the novel. The second draft version is a little different, but still occurs over the same period of time, involving several other people going up in the same flight, as well as the spaceplane mentioned in the story.

Again, thank you! And yes, this thread needs to be more active. Maybe I'll try critiquing one of the others, even though I can't really promise such in-depth results, as I'm far from a trained editor. I was honestly afraid I'd killed the thread, and I'd almost given up on ever getting a reply!

Edit: I was so into the critique that I completely missed the NaNoWriMo mention! Go NaNos! I may need to write more short stories, but that can wait for December. I have three novels waiting to be written next month!

[DocBeard]

So how does a fella get in line for this? Like I would seriously love some feedback on Shoeless Joe since its been such a flop.

[Valter]

Post a link to sections you want looked at and I will take a look at them. At some point.

[DocBeard]

Here you go, 's got two chapters up.

http://archiveofourown.org/works/123808/chapters/174461

Thanks. I know its a busy time of year for most folks, so no rush.

[vashtsakared]

I have a faux text adventure thing that was going to be in a book that I think was pretty good if anybody would like to rip it to shreds, hmm?

Actually, there's like five of them so it's tough to pick. Basically none are SFW, BTW.

show spoiler

hide spoiler

You feel useless! You've been dejected by life again, realizing that the time has finally run out on your Internet degree mill, leaving you stranded socially and professionally, not to mention in debt. The pillows on your bed are soaked from drool and tears, as that is where you spend most of your time now-a-days. In bed, lacking the energy to even lift your head, or to even turn to your other side most days. The view when you are awake rarely changes: a tragically painted windowsill, the same old bare tree branches wobbling just outside the fine mesh screen, and a stained wall with large patches of exposed drywall from when you had a shelf taken out about a decade ago. You hope desperately to either summon the strength to roll over, or to fall asleep again.

>remember

Oh, the times you wasted. At first, you did try reading those hefty tomes of mostly bullshit, and mostly the same bullshit, and mostly boringly delivered bullshit. You hated it, but you tried not to, knowing that your very future depended on this. You used to go to parties, hang out with pretty women, leave the house... But you felt increasingly guilty and figured that you should stay in, trap yourself with the books and hope that you'd give in and get some work done. It used to be easier. Then there came a time when you'd just look at a page for a few minutes and give up, being overwhelmed by the sheer boringness. You tried to keep in touch with your old friends on Facebook, but they expressed too much concern at not seeing you leave your house anymore. You became addicted to following Internet memes, checking forums and social networking sites obsessively, and playing lots of crappy games. Then you realized the error of your ways, how retarded you'd been acting for a startlingly long period of time, and what you must do. After a week of trying to finish twelve full-length courses, you received a letter informing you that the time was up and you would not be receiving your Bachelor's degree. You could of course extend your tuition, but only if you weren't flat broke. It will probably cost a couple of thousand dollars, which is what the entire degree program happened to be worth.

>inv

You have nothing. You are worth nothing. You don't even have pockets. You lie naked and oily and smelly under old sheets and comforters.

>get up

There is a creaking sound, you notice with detachment. The walls seem to shift a little bit, as fiery pain courses through your body, seizing your shoulders and upper back like a vice. You manage to turn your head and notice that you are now on your back.

>roll

Yes, of course! Your muscles may have atrophied past the point of lifting you, but you can still roll onto the floor and try to maybe crawl to the door. Perhaps you can plan the rest of that later. Grunting with effort, you manage to strain yourself over to the edge of the bed, sliding off of it with a thud. You are a bit disoriented, with a top sheet tugging your leg and the dresser towering over you. You manage to roll over one more time and put your hands out in front of you, pulling your wimpy body slowly toward the bedroom door. After fifteen or twenty minutes, you arrive, and see that it is closed.

>stand up

Yeah, I guess you would if you could, but that isn't much of an option, now is it? Maybe if Morpheus were here to give you some kind of magic acupuncture then you could do it, but you're all alone now.

>help!

You scream and hear someone shifting on the hardwood floors. Then their footsteps approach. They sound as if they tower over you, but then, you are still lying prone on the floor. You hear the springs compress in the door knob, and the door pulls back slowly. A young woman stares at you with shock.

"Hey guys, guess who's up?" she calls behind her shoulder. You notice a whole lot of your friends were sitting on and around your couch, watching TV and eating chips. This is pretty confusing, as you did not hear them before, nor did you invite them. The woman continues talking.

"We've been coming here everyday, just waiting for you to come out. There was a pool on whether you were dead, but I thought that was silly, 'cause we'd have smelled it, and you have to call the coroner when that stuff happens, and-- Well, we're glad you're alive, anyway." She kneels down to hug you, which is fairly awkward, as she has to lift you off the floor a bit to properly get her arms around you. Afterwards you promptly fall back on the floor. You're just glad she didn't spot your erection, (or lack thereof.) A few of the guys from the couch have made their way over, looking at you with fascination.

"Huh. You owe me twenty bucks, Sarge." He is laughing, as you are naked and in a frankly hilarious position for anyone else.

"Oh, have some fucking tact, man." He says under his breath. You still hear it, of course.

"So, my life's worth twenty bucks, huh?" you ask, still offended.

"Oh, don't overreact. You always were a whiny pussy. I mean, if you were dead, yeah, I'd feel pretty bad, but come on. You were asleep?"

"Wait dude, maybe you should go easy on him. He's one of those agoraphobes."

You try to ignore your "friends" even as you think of ways they can help you.

"Hey," you say in a punctuated tone. They look at you expectantly.

>?

Well, say something, douche. Try this: "know a way to make a few grand?"

>know a way to make a few grand?

"Oh, do I?" They both laugh their frat boy laughs while roughing each other. "Have you tried whoring? You've already been on your back for so long." They crack up, especially from the sight of your red face, which you can barely hold off the ground.

>what the fuck?

Try this: “take up whoring”

>no

This one is a bit shorter.

show spoiler

hide spoiler

It is dark here. You are in danger of being engulfed by nihilism.

>look

You see nothing. Nothing sees you.

>use lantern

There is no lantern!

>use night vision

You are standing in a lobby. There are several hotel-stayers roaming around, despite the fact that it is pitch black. You see a sniper! He is wearing that special thing from Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell series. He has you in his sights!

>save

You have saved. A couple of shady looking men in dark suits have noticed and converse across the room.

“Hey, that guy just saved his game!”

“Only the player can do that, right?”

“Shit! Let's get him!”

>run

You run, but you forget to serpentine. Their silenced bullets catch you right in the spine. You can't feel your legs, but you drag yourself slowly across the noisy green carpet, leaving a smear of blood behind you that glows white with your goggles. An agent is standing behind you, gun aimed at your head gansta style.

“This'll teach you to save your game, bitch!”

You hear three rounds before your hearing is gone and your body is numb, leaving only your sight. You watch on in horror that you cannot convey as the agents and the sniper all teabag your corpse.

GAME OVER

There are some other longer ones in similar veins. Crit-wise, I think there's just something missing in these, but I don't know what it is. If someone has a ridiculous amount of time to waste, I tried writing a book one year. I have a vague idea of some of the massive problems with it, but a second opinion would be good. Overall I think they involve avoidal of conflict and a lack of character development, but if you don't think so I would be happy.

[sweetcloverandhelaljohn]

http://pastebin.com/fA5ygjP5

Okay, I moved this from art crit. to here.

[rj lake]

hello internet i would like for you to critique me

here are some things

tell me how much they suck and why they suck

i will be so happy if you do

this first one is called "Re:"

show spoiler

hide spoiler

This morning, I woke up naked. This in itself was completely unsurprising. What was most
definitely not was the cold.
The natural response to this is dull surprise. Put yourself in this situation; after all, the lack of sleep-most probably brought on by the same factor that removed my silks- keeps the shock from setting in too quickly. It's an anesthetic. Soon, however, the cold set in, and my thoughts turned outward.
The first thing I realized was that you notice more when you're naked. The lack of an artificial barrier to protect you- physically, comfortably, psychologically- from the outside leaves you on very high alert. My nudity was better than coffee. There was something primeval in all of it, really; my lack of synthetically produced warmth made me feel very human. It was like being punched in the arm halfway through a painkiller trip.
My room was utterly mundane as usual; everything was absurdly neat, tucked away inside of drawers and boxes and put on shelves and hidden inside of cubbyholes and organized and sterile, like a dentist's office. The walls were white, the carpet was white, the bedsheets were white, and the blankets were missing.
Considering all of this, I finally got up and made a motion to put some clothes on.

-------------------------------------------------------

They were gone.

All of my t-shirts, socks, shoes, pants, ties, overcoats, hats, gloves, sweaters, turtlenecks, undershirts, and underwear were missing without so much as a note. This made everything else just slightly more disturbing in context. Mind you, I'm still ass-naked at this point, and my thermostat is busted, which makes all of this new information that much more wonderful.

Everything else happens in the present.

-------------------------------------------------------

I think of calling somebody to make some kind of sense out of all of this, but realize that my cell is- was- in my coat pocket, and my home phone doesn't and never has worked. It was installed two years ago and broke a week later and I never bothered to fix it. I have my cell, after all. I don't need it.
I turn on the television and am greeted by white noise. It's set to channel 98, which doesn't exist, at least as far as I can tell. After a few minutes looking around for the remote to no avail, I realize that I have no idea what time it is.

A quick sweep around my house informs me that all of my clocks are displaying different times.

Coming back to my television in an attempt to work it manually, I see that the buttons have been removed.
I test my radio. It doesn't work. Neither does my shower(incidentally, the towels in all of the bathrooms are also gone) or any of my faucets. My refrigerator has died and the only food that hasn't gone bad through the night is a lone can of beets that I've had in there for several months.

I can't go outside for anything because I'm naked. Thinking about it, this is actually really funny.

-------------------------------------------------------

Around a half-an-hour later, I realize that I haven't thought of looking outside. I don't have any windows, as one might have come to expect at this point, but I have a door, and if I open it carefully enough I can feasibly get a decent view of any irregularities happening outside of my personal bubble.
As I pull it ajar, I suddenly feel an irrational horror move me. It's a coldly existential fear, a sense that this might be my own fault.

What that fault might be, or the real consequences thereof, I have not the slightest.

All I know is that the blame sits with me.

I open my door and stand in awe.

-------------------------------------------------------

pan-o-pho-bi-a n. a a medical condition known as a "non-specific fear" or "the fear of everything." Described as "a vague and persistent dread of some unknown evil." From the Greek 'pan' and 'phobos.' Also known as omniphobia.

-------------------------------------------------------

I lay in my bed for several hours.

I can’t sleep.

-------------------------------------------------------

I go outside. I figure it’s the only thing I can do, really; my house has become a bare shell. Without any other leads, the only one I have is the one I haven’t really explored. Besides, at this point, it’s almost certain nobody else is going to notice. Also: anything is better than dying slowly.
I still can’t believe what I see- could anyone? -but I’m expecting it this time. My face manages something approximating a state of being nonplussed. As I trek down my front porch, I notice that there’s an old man watching me. He doesn’t blink. He looks stern, too. I ignore him, which is harder than it sounds. He’s actually the most normal thing in sight, which makes him stick out like a conservative at a gay bar, to turn a phrase.
I walk across the way, and I look to my left, and I see it for the first and last time. It’s massive; it takes up almost the whole horizon, nearly encompassing my entire field of vision from what I’m guessing to be around twenty or so miles away. It’s cold and dark and it wasn’t there before. I walk towards it, and I don’t stop, despite everything else.

-------------------------------------------------------

A week, or a day, or a few hours have passed.

I walk inside.

Finally, I sleep.

Everything else happens in the past.

this second one is called "Mythos"

show spoiler

hide spoiler

We found him in a junkpile in New Jersey. He was technically dead at the time, but that mattered little.

That’s because he's a robot, as I, Asimov used to use the word.

To clarify: literally speaking, he's a machine, in both the Archimedical sense and the modern. And to clarify that: he does work and is a robot, which is to say that while he is quite capable of “applying force to the inert to create motion and perform a task” his primary state is that of a mechanical being.
But figuratively, he's very much human. They always are. Robots, I mean. In the movies and in books and in video games and comics and everything. They feel.
His name is Lovecraft. It wasn't our idea to call him that- before we knew that he was already christened, we debated whether or not we would name him Adam or-- but the name suits him. He's excessively old-fashioned and is very dour, you see. He says very little. He prefers the stars; he watches them and he knows the constellations.
Of course we made the obvious joke when we heard it- his name- the first time. We went on about the Eldritch, talked in vague Cthulhu-isms, etcetera; essentially, we ran through everything we had absorbed in association to his name through pop culture, but didn't give even close to a shit about what it all meant, as is traditional. (We live in a disposable world today. We need to get used to treating everything the same way. )
I keep using the word he and not it, which is important. Lovecraft was built as an act of desperate loneliness.

----------------------

I've also kept insisting on using we, and to clarify that, the he that makes me a we is George. Despite appearances, he's quite intelligent, and I am the vice avers. I might be knowledgeable, but I'm not smart. I'm good at pastiche and I'm good at hiding and mixing my influences, and I can use that to write sentences that play well together and talk to people and make them like me. People like me because, by and large, people honestly believe that people who have a tendency to overuse unnecessary language must be successful. This mentality has made me successful. I've used circularism to fuel my life in this way. I have a genius.
George is a genius, on the other hand. He's the one who found Lovecraft, really. I said we, but I did nothing. The only thing I contributed was the suggestion to go exploring, as an experience, because none of what we go through counts as an experience because it isn't real and isn't that right, George? So George, of course, said the requisite “yes” and we went outside and wandered.
I didn't want to go to the docks because I wear expensive clothing and I hate washing it. George was the impetus, and I guess I gave in because I trust him. He explained that “it was the fullest way to experience an experience” and I truly believe that, and I believe it because George is a genius and I'm just some guy. And that's not the same as other people liking me for want of thinking me successful, because George isn't successful and I know he isn't successful and I couldn't care less. He knows what he's talking about.
The docks, of course, are almost entirely landfilled these days. Priority number one was watching our footing, because everything was haphazardous underfoot. Slipping was far too easy.
That's why I slipped.

In hindsight, it was more intentional than I probably would like to admit. I wanted to go on this journey for self-discovery, and up until that point in time nothing had happened to me. No paradigm shift. At the moment my footing lost itself, I remember thinking that dying would be better.
Of course, I am alive, and George stumbled into the robot soon after I fell.
----------------------

I never really understood him. Him being Lovecraft, not George, although George has his indecipherables. But where George's lack of coherence in explaining his head's incredible depths is usually due to his excited mumbling, Lovecraft was simply impossible. He wasn't understandable, and the reason why wasn't clear. There wasn't a single thing you could identify with, or, at the very least, nothing I could identify with.
This problem was always made exponentially more baffling by just how convincingly human he was. He had no visible gears, for one, and for two, his skin was very living (for all intents/purposes). He had all of the right tones to his face; a deep, pinkish peach-apricot gradient that would be mistaken for real if it wasn't just too human. In comparison, George and I looked positively androidal. His eyes were alert and wide, like a child's, and ours were sunken in and disillusioned and broken. His voice, too, had the right colors to it. Our voices sounded world-worn and throwaway, like a dying cigarette lighter's last click.

----------------------

Lovecraft stayed at our house for all of four weeks. We grew to love him eventually, I guess, in our way. I mean, well, it wasn’t romantic, and it wasn’t sexual, either-we didn’t use him- but we loved him, I guess. In our way.
After three-and-a-half weeks of him staying there, though, we gave up trying to be his friend. We had tried to connect in some way with him before then, but he wasn’t having any of it.He probably said fewer than fifty words to us by that point, and those were all necessities, such as “where is such and such” and “how do I this and that.”
Of course, a half a week before he ended up leaving, he softened up a bit. His face seemed less human, too, which made identifying with him much easier. By that time, though, everything was already decided, and the three of us knew that we couldn't change that. Lovecraft and the two humans who housed him were permanent acquaintances and nothing more than that, forever. There was a relieved melancholy in those last days. Lovecraft seemed to be getting even more distant than he was to begin with, and we caught that, and we knew it meant he was going to leave, and we at once missed the adventure and couldn't wait for it to end.
But that gave the three of us the freedom of finality.

----------------------

The last night of his stay, Lovecraft came into my room and he laid on my floor while I slept. I know this because he woke me up. We talked- really talked- for the very first time. We had an actual conversation.
Lovecraft told me how he felt about me and about George and how things were before he was found and what his inventor and original owner was like, that she was a very nice but misguided middle aged woman named Beth, and I thought this was funny, and he told me that that was insensitive. I asked him how it was to be in the junkpile, shut off, technically dead.

“It was, essentially, sleeping.”

And he walked out of the room and our house, our being my. George is broke, of course.

The night after, I watched the stars, and I tried to know the constellations.

thanks in advance

i love you all

[UrbanGrifter]

Post a link to sections you want looked at and I will take a look at them. At some point.

Wow, you're an amazing editor.

Critiquing the things you've already looked at seems superfluous; the critiques you've already done are so incredibly exhaustive, there's no reason to take another look at them. I'd love it if you could look at some of my own work. Please let me know if you have the time after the holidays, I'd be much obliged. Do you have any of your own work published?

[UrbanGrifter]

I have a faux text adventure thing that was going to be in a book that I think was pretty good if anybody would like to rip it to shreds, hmm?

Sure thing, I'll give this a go.

show spoiler

hide spoiler

You feel useless! You've been dejected by life again, realizing that the time has finally run out on your Internet degree mill, leaving you stranded socially and professionally, not to mention in debt. The pillows on your bed are soaked from drool and tears, as that is where you spend most of your time now-a-days. In bed, lacking the energy to even lift your head, or to even turn to your other side most days.

Not sure you need "or to even" twice. Perhaps: In bed, lacking the energy most days to lift your head or even turn to your other side.

The view when you are awake rarely changes: a tragically painted windowsill, the same old bare tree branches wobbling just outside the fine mesh screen, and a stained wall with large patches of exposed drywall from when you had a shelf taken out about a decade ago. You hope desperately to either summon the strength to roll over, or to fall asleep again.

>remember

Oh, the times you wasted. At first, you did try reading those hefty tomes of mostly bullshit, and mostly the same bullshit, and mostly boringly delivered bullshit.

Perhaps: Oh, the time you wasted. At first, you did try reading those hefty tomes of mostly bullshit, mostly the same bullshit, mostly boringly delivered bullshit. As an aside, can we add where the hefty tomes of bullshit are? Seems like calling them out specifically kind of wants placement in the scenery.

You hated it, but you tried not to, knowing that your very future depended on this.

On what? Think you should be more specific.

You used to go to parties, hang out with pretty women, leave the house... But you felt increasingly guilty and figured that you should stay in, trap yourself with the books and hope that you'd give in and get some work done. It used to be easier.

Then there came a time when you'd just look at a page for a few minutes and give up, being overwhelmed by the sheer boringness.

Perhaps: Eventually, you'd just look at a page for a few minutes and give up, overwhelmed with boredom.

You tried to keep in touch with your old friends on Facebook, but they expressed too much concern at not seeing you leave your house anymore. You became addicted to following Internet memes, checking forums and social networking sites obsessively, and playing lots of crappy games. Then you realized the error of your ways, how retarded you'd been acting for a startlingly long period of time, and what you must do. After a week of trying to finish twelve full-length courses, you received a letter informing you that the time was up and you would not be receiving your Bachelor's degree. You could of course extend your tuition, but only if you weren't flat broke. It will (would) probably cost a couple of thousand dollars, which is what the entire degree program happened to be worth.

>inv

You have nothing. You are worth nothing. You don't even have pockets. You lie naked and oily and smelly under old sheets and comforters.

>get up

There is a creaking sound, (which) you notice with detachment. The walls seem to shift a little bit, as fiery pain courses through your body, seizing your shoulders and upper back like a vice. You manage to turn your head and notice that you are now on your back.

>roll

Yes, of course! Your muscles may have atrophied past the point of lifting you, but you can still roll onto the floor and try to maybe crawl to the door. Perhaps you can plan the rest of that later.

Grunting with effort, you manage to strain yourself over to the edge of the bed, sliding off of it with a thud.

You "managed" last paragraph to turn your head, perhaps you can find another way to describe this? Also, sliding off the bed doesn't produce a "thud", landing on the floor does.

You are a bit disoriented, with a top sheet tugging your leg and the dresser towering over you. You manage to roll over one more time and put your hands out in front of you, pulling your wimpy body slowly toward the bedroom door.

This isn't convincing me of the effort it takes someone with muscles atrophied enough to not be able to stand to drag him/herself across a floor.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, you arrive, and see that it is closed.

>stand up

Yeah, I guess you would if you could, but that isn't much of an option, now is it? Maybe if Morpheus were here to give you some kind of magic acupuncture then you could do it, but you're all alone now.

At first, I thought this was a reference to the Morpheus of myth, or perhaps drugs, but neither made any sense, since both of those things make you sleepy. I can't even see a parallel to the Morpheus of "The Matrix". Guess I don't understand what you were trying to say.

>help!

You scream and hear someone shifting on the hardwood floors. Then their footsteps approach.

Confusing. Shifting, as though they were standing somewhere without, waiting to approach? Were they sitting, did they suddenly come into being?

They sound as if they tower over you, but then, you are still lying prone on the floor. You hear the springs compress in the door knob, and the door pulls back slowly. A young woman stares at you with shock.

"Hey guys, guess who's up?" she calls behind her shoulder. You notice a whole lot of your friends were sitting on and around your couch, watching TV and eating chips.

You could perhaps hear them, but from the floor, you couldn't see them. You should have them say something in response.

This is pretty confusing, as you did not hear them before, nor did you invite them. The woman continues talking.

"We've been coming here everyday, just waiting for you to come out. There was a pool on whether you were dead, but I thought that was silly, 'cause we'd have smelled it, and you have to call the coroner (believe you'd call the police) when that stuff happens, and-- Well, we're glad you're alive, anyway." She kneels down to hug you, which is fairly awkward, as she has to lift you off the floor a bit to properly get her arms around you. Afterwards you promptly fall back on the floor.

I'd have said something describing her dropping you, or her turning away, just falling back onto the floor is missing a step

You're just glad she didn't spot your erection, (or lack thereof.)

This is kind of an important detail, it's way more embarrassing if she sees an erection, don't you think?

A few of the guys from the couch have made their way over, looking at you with fascination.

"Huh. You owe me twenty bucks, Sarge." He is laughing, as you are naked and in a frankly hilarious position for anyone else.

Why is your position hilarious, are your limbs paralyzed? Don't really dig the way this sentence is worded.

"Oh, have some fucking tact, man." He says under his breath. You still hear it, of course.

"So, my life's worth twenty bucks, huh?" you ask, still offended.

"Oh, don't overreact. You always were a whiny pussy. I mean, if you were dead, yeah, I'd feel pretty bad, but come on. You were asleep?"

"Wait dude, maybe you should go easy on him. He's one of those agoraphobes."

You try to ignore your "friends" even as you think of ways they can help you.

"Hey," you say in a punctuated tone. They look at you expectantly.

>?

Well, say something, douche. Try this: "know a way to make a few grand?"

>know a way to make a few grand?

"Oh, do I?" They both laugh their frat boy laughs while roughing each other. "Have you tried whoring? You've already been on your back for so long." They crack up, especially from the sight of your red face, which you can barely hold off the ground.

>what the fuck?

Try this: “take up whoring”

>no

Clearly you haven't really ended this. Not sure what the point of all of the earlier struggle was, if we don't find out what's going on with the spooky narrator giving commands. Needs some kind of resolution, even if that's a stupid pun or something. Seems appropriate, given the subject matter, actually. I see what you did there with the whoring/always on your back comment, and that was funny, but then, it kind of trailed off into nothingness.

I do like the voice you use, and I like the quality of isolation; clearly self loathing/guilt/paranoia is a familiar sensation. I think all writers should pull from personal experience, always seems so much more real.

That said, I wish I knew what the POINT of it all was. Think you could flesh this out, though. Hope my comments were helpful.

There are some other longer ones in similar veins. Crit-wise, I think there's just something missing in these, but I don't know what it is.

See the crit above.

[egregiousBass]

I tried to make a Dave/Jade fic going off the AU scenario from Bufu's "Be the cool girl" pesterfic, and it was getting pretty lengthy at that, but I'm scrapping it due to a complete lack of interesting ideas toward the end.

Here's a part from around the middle that I'd like your opinion on. The Dave I cast is a bit of an airhead so I tried to incorporate that without making it seem like lazy writing. There was a pesterlog in which Jade complained about stuff, but most it is a draft.

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This poor girl. You had no idea. Whatever her brother is like, you swear you're gonna teach him a lesson. Well, except you're a brainy twelve year old surfer dude with the consitution of a wilted dandelion.

You've got to help this girl, man! Let her get some time outside that...stinky appartment. And you think you know of a way.

You transportalise down to the kitchen and pour a glass of milk. You place it in your self-made microwave oven and dial the heat up to "way aggro". Within seconds, the milk is nice and warm. A few pinches of sugar (which you unironically like to call fairy dust) and your cocktail is complete.

You take it back upstairs. To be honest, this stuff disgusts you, but it really helps you sleep for some reason.

You take a sip. It's already making you feel drowsy. You put the glass on the cabinet and plop down onto the bed.

------

You wake up in the purple place, like you're used to. It's pretty dark around here, and it gets a bit depressing sometimes, but hey, you spend the day on a sunny tropical island so this sorta balances it out.

You fly outside and look into the sky. One of your friends stares back. This one's shaped like a torus. Groovy.
They used to scare you, but you're pretty chill with them now. "Sup brah", you say to it. The monster solemnly waves its flagella at you in greeting.

But you can't be talking to these chums all day. You fly up around the city towards the distant light everyone's always buzzing about. The one with the spirograph.

You begin your lonesome flight through the dark space. As you pass by the ring of comets, you manage to discern a bunch of planets. You never knew this place had its own orbit. You'd love to take a closer look, but the blinding light from the blue spirograph thing is making your head hurt.

Damn it! You forgot to bring your shades along. And now you're fumbling around deep space like some kind of astro-yuppie.

You painfully peer into the light in search of the golden droplet. It's ruining your eyes, which is pretty effin schwag. And yet, you spot the angular sattelite in the distance. Shielding your face with your arm, you fly in its general direction, figuring you'll get there soon enough and oh my god you just went crashing into an unmanned pottery stand at full speed.

You look around, befuddled. Everything is made of gold; it stings a little, but you can handle it. Prospitian locals are staring angry messages at you with their beady little black eyes. It's making you a bit uncomfortable.

You levitate yourself up, muttering apologies. After all, you don't want any trouble. They don't budge. Looks like they aren't too happy with your purple Derse nightwear. You fly up quickly because these duders are giving you an aneurysm.

Where were you? Oh right, let's find that tower. There's actually two of them, like your squid pals told you. One belongs to that totally awesome sheila, the other one to this lamo rich kid. You figure you'll stop thinking in surfer lingo now. There's only so much you can do with vernacular you looked up on the internet.

You encroach one of the towers and peer through the window. The room looks completely different from yours. Cinderblocks, a weird-looking bass guitar, and butt puppets. Oh lord. Now you know what she was talking about.

Jade herself is sitting at her computer, still awake.

You clamber inside. You need to devise a way to get her attention without seeming like a creeper. You briefly consider acting out your favorite scene of "Sleeping Beauty", but instead you just pick up one of the puppets and throw it at her. It lands on the back of her head with a satisfying *squish* and bounces off jauntily into a nearby pile.

She spins around, bewildered from the sudden goldenness of her room. And then she spots you.


dave!! :D

JAED

O_O

[sweetcloverandhelaljohn]

There's a creepypasta inside this spoiler that is dark, but not scary.

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I was at a garage sale once, looking at DVDs/VCRs. Most were some 80's VCRs, with some DVDs. But one VCR caught my eye. It was blank, with red marker writing on it, saying "HAPPY AP". I took it, because the owner didn't want it. Looking up Happy Ap, I found out it was related to Happy Appy.

Happy Appy was a TV show that aired on Nick Jr. It was about some claymation apple going around, healing kids. 9 episodes were made. 1 was lost, but I have it. The last aired episode had images like 9/11. Did I mention this was aired in the late 1990s? He would creepily smile, and one episode, his skin peeled back, revealing a rotten apple core. His skin fell on a kid like a blanket. By the way, the theme was set to the tune of Mary Had A Little Lamb. I never noticed until I saw Halloween 3 before the episode. The lyrics were like:

Happy happy appy ap!
Happy ap! Happy ap!
Happy happy appy ap!
He helps little kids all day!

REPEATED 3 TIMES.

I could only transfer the audio to mp3. The video was corroded. I saw 3 episodes of Happy Appy (Including the 9/11 one). This episode had MS Paint drawings on it, which made sense. After all, This episode came out in 2001(?), while MS Paint came out with Windows 1. It doesn't start out with the Happy Appy theme at all. It starts with a creepy carnival theme, with distorted voices. The intro was cutted with giant flashes. After when the original intro would play, it went straight to Happy dying from a unknown disease. When he talked, his lips perfectly synched with "THEY'RE GOING TO TAKE ME AWAY!" It then shot to one of the 5-year olds. He was trying to cry because Happy was dying, but he didn't cry tears. He cried blood. No joking.

It then played a sad piano after another kid with a high-pitched voice said "They're coming to take me away!" It then showed Happy coughing blood. It kept flashing to white every time he coughed. In the background, I could hear a heartbeat, with some distortion. Most of those flashes were just normal, but one stood out. After viewing it frame by frame, it turned out to be Happy Appy with surgeons performing surgery on him. His stem seemed to be on a platter, with blood spilling out of it. A big cut was on the side of his claymation face, with HUMAN ORGANS VISIBLE IN IT. One doctor seemed to have some acid poured on his face, uncensored. And the only doctor performing surgery was a man who I swear to god looked like something you'd see from that one screamer with 5 shock images. No joke.

Then, it cut to a screen. It said 3 months later, while Happy was driving his van. A part of the reversed Revolution 9 played. It was the part with the car crash. As soon as the tires skidded, Happy's van was off the road. It then tumbled, taking a lot of damage from tumbling, before ending in a fiery mash of metal. appy appeared to be saying GET ME OUT, GET ME OUT! The kids tried to extinguish the fire, but the fire would not even be put out. A kid said "There, his hat! His hat!", while pointing to his bloodied stem. It then screamed, with a mouth that was a obvious human mouth with blood on it. The scream was ear-piercing. The same kid said "His body! His body!" Happy's body was badly cut up, with big enough cuts to make blood pour out of it. His eyeball was dangling out of the socket, while his teeth was shattered. His left arm was cut off, with blood squirting out of the stump, while both his legs were broken. He tried to crawl out with his only working limb. Finally, Happy died, while screaming to wierd sci-fi noises. After that scene, it just showed the road, with the mashed up van next to his body. It faded to a funeral scene. All the kids from the series were there, all crying blood. Then, it cut to Happy's body. It was so hyperrealistic, I couldn't look at the screen until I flushed out my memory of that scene.

Then, it played the song again, to a 10 years later scene. The kid was talking to his mother, but the mother was talking gibberish. Then, the father came in, with a loaded 44 magnum, and shot the mother. The father's skin peeled back, revealing a undead Happy. The undead Happy then killed the kid. The final shot before the credits, was the hyperrealistic undead Happy, with blood on his broken teeth. Instead of the theme song playing, pieces of the reversed Revolution 9 played. A narrator said "His stomach was in two that day.", "There were two, there is none now.", "He's there, he's getting next to his sister with all he knows", and finally "He ceased to work in the underworld" Guess what the narrator was talking over? Happy Appy, with a bloodied scalpel in one hand, a bloodied X-Acto in his other hand. It slowly paned to the skin of the disguise Happy was under, with the words "I AM JAKOV" scalpeled into the skin. I destroyed the tape. When I went back to the house, it was burned down to the ground. I talked to the policeman at the crime scene. He said that a mysterious figure burned it down. I then asked for the surname for the family. The Smith Family. I looked it up in the archives, and guess what? They were the latest in a series of deaths. All victims had the Appy tape.

Please help me. I've locked my doors, barred my windows, and fortified my house. I don't wanna die.

[rj lake]

a man who I swear to god looked like Slenderman but had the face of Smile dog, and the hat of the guy you see for 1 second in Candle Cove's last episode

i burst out laughing, here

is this supposed to be a serious creepypasta? or is it a who was phone sort of deal? some of it seems like you're going for the first but

then you do things like this

Please, seriously, avoid referencing other creepypastas by name. Fuck's sake. It takes away from it so much.

In general, this is a bit too descriptive to be a good creepypasta as well. Creepypastas work best when they're situational; they need to tell stories of some kind. Even Candle Cove, which is essentially the exact same idea as this (and which, again, you referenced by name), contains a narrative between the three people remembering the show they thought they watched.

This, on the other hand, is more or less just a description of a "horrifying never-aired creepy kids show" with fuckoff random bits of "scary" things thrown in there for no reason. Be more subtle with things.

Slendy is effective because he's always, always just off of the corner of your vision, behind where you can see, in the darkest, blackest areas of the mind, where only film can capture him, and even then
it is
too


late












don't
be

so



obvious


























































































































fou
nd
you

[Centric]

I took Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and made it about The Kids. Feel free to sing along!

I guess I want to know if I've captured the right aspects of the kids, as well as how well I've put the words together. Well, I guess "put together" is a callous way of putting it (together), but yeah.
1. What I'm most worried about are Dave's and Jade's parts, because I sprung an inspiration leak right about there.
2. Also, are the third lines of Rose's and Jade's verses okay? I thought that the wordplay might take a little bit away from the effect.
3. Is the tone consistent throughout the piece, and how would you describe it?
4. Are there any lines that pull the piece down, and if so, how would you fix them?

Am I asking too many questions?

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His name’s John Egbert, not much to see
No mom, some friends, but only three
Dad’s always sayin’ “People look right through ya”
He’s young, a fool, and a little nerd
But he’s The Savior of the Waking World
The Heir of Breath is comin’, Hallelujah!
Hallelujah! x4

Her mother’s drunk, her cat is dead
The vacuum’s on as she goes to bed,
So Rose Lalonde knits sweaters with Fluthula
Though she deals in dark, she’s the Seer of Light
She’ll destroy the sun just to end the night
As she bathes in fire, she’ll be singing Hallellujah!
Hallelujah! x4

He always looks, but his brother’s gone
Keeps his face in shades always actin’ strong
He folds his arms and ask you “What’s it to ya?”
He watches his world as it goes to Hell
Tries over and over to end it well
Dave Strider, Knight of Time, oh, Hallelujah!
Hallelujah! x4

She dreams the future, prospects bleak
Her grandpa’s stuffed, her dog’s a freak
Her corpse is kept beside and old computa
She’ll learn the secrets of the frogs
She’ll be forced to kill, but she’ll tame her dog
The Witch of Space, Jade Harley, Hallelujah!
Hallelujah! x4

Favorite verse: Rose's
Blatant speculation in Jade's part, GO!
Fire (blast) away!

I'll try and come back later to do some critiquing, for what it's worth.

[nya_chan]

Some commentary on this would be nice: http://nyachan93.deviantart.com/art/...goes-183025273
Long story short, I'm going to do a webcomic, and this is the prologue... I guess? I didn't want to establish the main character as the stereotypical "OMG MY LIFE IS SO TARGIC" teen, and I'm not sure how successful I was. Life was fine for him until about a year ago until things went... bad. Can't say why without spoiling a major plot point. XP He's gotten over it for the most part, but as you can see, he's pretty much stopped participating in his own life. So... how can I make it better? I feel like there's something missing, but for whatever reason, I pretty much have no emotional reaction to my own writing so evaluating this stuff is difficult for me. XP

Also feel free to critique this if you want. It was an experiment of sorts. Definitely out of my comfort zone: http://nyachan93.deviantart.com/art/...-bro-188756489

And I'd review some of the other stuff here but I rarely have anything useful to say. >.>;

[Valter]

this is me being abysmally late with a critique

The Second Death of Shoeless Joe Jackson

Grammatical/structural

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Some sentences were overly bulky, including phrases that could be shortened or cut out to improve fluidity. For example:

of that version of the incipisphere

Could simply be changed to simply "that Incipisphere".

Naturally, being a door, it did not care one way or the other and so nature took its course, with Rose beaning Dave on the back of the head with his own baseball before he could finish absconding.

Run-on sentences are a serious problem with this work. Almost every paragraph has at least once sentence that could be cut down or split. This is definitely your weakest point, as they're littered throughout your work and severely reduce writing quality.

(This particular sentence has the additional problem of being ambiguous about how "being a door" and "not caring one way or another" would have any effect on "nature taking its course". It's hard to suggest something without knowing what your intention here was, but a bare-bones fix of the run-on would be "Naturally, being a door, it did not care one way or another. Nature took its course from there, with Rose beaning Dave on the back of the head with his own baseball before he could finish absconding.")

"We couldn't hear you typing." John Egbert admitted

When a sentence includes a quote and narrative, the quote ends in a comma, not a period.

-> "'We couldn't hear you typing,' John admitted"

Maybe if I scratch hard enough, a quiet animal in the back of Rose's brain theorized, I can sand my fingers clean.

Whenever a character is specifically thinking word, those words are italicized.

-> "Maybe if I scratch hard enough, a quiet animal in the back of Rose's brain theorized, I can sand my fingers clean"

John would have run to his friend for some sort of succor

Bombastic diction has its place in literature, but only where the situation specifically calls for it. For example: "Jungian" is acceptable in Rose's dream sequence, because that's just the way she thinks. "Succor" is not appropriate for something in John's perspective.

"John would have run to help his friend" looks better and is easier to read.

She nearly fell over when John played along, crossing his arms and saying, "Into what dangers would you lead me, Lalonde, that you would have me seek into myself that which is not in me?"

Try not to put the reaction to a quote before the quote itself. It removes the impact almost completely.


I think the thing that most needs work in your writing is quotations. Most of them in this work were hard to read through. Here is an excellent post by Geep that suggests a decent balance for your quotations

Also try to avoid using emotes like "John spat out" or "Dave enthused". I don't think you used "said" even once in the entire work, and that really needs to be changed.

Plot/Characterization:

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Don't start your work with narrative exposition! Readers can glean relevant information from a chapter as it goes on. The biggest issue is that whenever you do an infodump, you're significantly more likely to add completely unnecessary and boring information in as well.

Consider: you included a reference to a significant part of each child's quest in your first paragraph. Was it necessary? I have no reason to care about New Prospit's Air Cavalry, or The King of All Crows, or even Jack Noir, because I know that these are just off-hand references that will never be explored in depth (because they already happened).

This is the danger of an information dump. You think you're providing essential knowledge, but all-too-often it just becomes about filling space. It's boring, and boring is what you want to avoid at all costs when you're trying to hook a potential reader.

That said, a journal entry or personal diary can be an interesting way to segue into a scene. Just for god's sake don't make it a history lesson!

Having read the entire thing, it's clear to me that the problem with your work is relevant information getting bogged down with pointless natter. It seems like you entered each scene with a clear idea of the information you wanted to present, and then just got sidetracked every time.

As an example, in the very first scene, Rose says to John: "…if you are going to be nosy, you might as well be of use to me." How? They immediately reverted to talking about baseball and Dave. Later, in the scene between Dave and John, John says: ""All I want is for you to stick around tonight in case something goes wrong." He's clearly referring to some planned event, but this is the first time we've heard of it!

The biggest concern, and I cannot stress this enough, is that you need to do a better job of causally linking your scenes together, and of providing an overarching conflict for the characters to overcome. Several scenes had little or nothing to fuel the narrative.

So, prune down your scenes, make them a little more relevant and cut down on natter. I would also recommend moving the final scene of the first chapter to the start instead, as it's presumably laying the foundation for the conflict of the rest of the fic.

I can't give much more than this on the matter right now, because there's not enough substance for me to make any serious analysis of where the plot is going.

If you take umbrage with any part of this critique, please speak up and I'll try to explain my thoughts more thoroughly.

I'll look at XFactorInfinity's works next. Almost certainly after christmas.

[Valter]

Or maybe right now.

Re:

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You're a good writer, but many lines could be rejiggered to be slightly more effective, so I'm just gonna go through line by line.

Put yourself in this situation

The first person makes "Put yourself in my situation" or "Put yourself in my position" more appropriate here.

the lack of sleep-most probably brought on by the same factor that removed my silks- keeps the shock from setting in too quickly.

When you use dashes to make an aside, add a space on either side.
"the lack of sleep - most probably brought on by the same factor that removed my silks - keeps the shock from setting in too quickly."
Obviously, this applies to every other time you did this.

The first thing I realized was that you notice more when you're naked.

-> "My first realization was that you notice more when you're naked."

Considering all of this, I finally got up and made a motion to put some clothes on.

It's already fairly clear that he's considering all of this, so you can reduce it to simply "I finally got up and made a motion to put some clothes on."

and my thermostat is busted, which makes all of this new information that much more wonderful.

The latter half of this sentences is bulky to read through. I would change it to just a single sarcastic remark.
-> "and my thermostat is busted. Wonderful."

my home phone doesn't and never has worked

This phrase doesn't flow very well. A bit of repetition might help.
-> "my home phone doesn't work and hasn't ever worked."

I have my cell, after all.

A short reference to the current situation would be cool here.
-> "I have (had) my cell, after all."

It's set to channel 98, which doesn't exist

I'm pretty sure this isn't the right technical term for channels which aren't receiving. Maybe "which isn't programmed"? Not actually sure here, but "doesn't exist" doesn't sound right.

I have not the slightest

You were mostly good about this, but you missed a contraction opportunity here and it is almost always better to take those. Also, I think you forgot to append an "idea" to the end of this sentence, given its context.

to turn a phrase.

I don't really think you needed to call attention to this.

OVERALL:

The ending was

vexing

but I liked the way it was written, and especially:

Everything else happens in the present.

Everything else happens in the past.

It was an interesting way to end/loop it, and the changes in tense they entailed also kept the narrative fresh.

Mythos

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We found him

That’s because he's a robot

You mixed up your tense in the second line. The "that's", but the "he's" needs to be switched to "he was".

Oooooookay looking through it seems you did this a lot, so I'm going to wrack my limited library of literary terminology for a way to explain this properly.

This story is being told from a present-tense perspective; that is to say, it's as if the unnamed protagonist were at a bar talking about his experiences with a robot, several weeks after the time frame of the story itself.

What this means is the vast majority of the story is to be presented in past-tense, as the story is being told after the fact. Only references to the story itself will be kept in present-tense (For example: "I've also kept insisting on using we". "I have" is appropriate here because the narrator is talking about his presentation of the story, not the story itself.)

Some example lines to be edited, to give an idea of what needs to be done:

Despite appearances, he's quite intelligent, and I am the vice avers

-> "Despite appearances, he was quite intelligent, and I was the vice avers"

and I truly believe that, and I believe it because George is a genius and I'm just some guy.

-> "and I truly believed that, and I believed it because George was a genius and I was just some guy."

etc.

You could conceivably keep it all in present-tense, if you felt it vital to the narrative, but that in turn would entail changing all the past-tense terms to present-tense. Either way, it'll involve a bit of work.

A few other lines that could use a little adjusting, independent of tense-griping:

in both the Archimedical sense and the modern

Append "sense" to the latter instead of the former: "in both the Archimedical and the modern sense"

said the requisite “yes”

Just "said 'yes'" would work fine here.

The docks, of course, are almost entirely landfilled these days.

This line has little in relation to the lines following and preceding it.

his skin was very living

"living" doesn't really work that well in this context. "his skin was clearly organic" would be better.

he told me that that was insensitive.

One "that" is fine here.

Of course, I am alive, and George stumbled into the robot soon after I fell.

No explanation is given for how he survived, or how his falling in helped George find the robot (or even if it's causally related at all).

Overall: this story didn't impact me that much. I think the repetition at the start and end (watching the stars and knowing the constellations) didn't have enough time to grow and settle, enough time to be particularly meaningful. There are other threads that could have been pulled upon to provide a final line instead (such as the misguided middle-aged woman or Lovecraft's abrupt exit from their life).

If you got beef with anything I said here, yell at me for a bit and I will try to explain myself more clearly or maybe even change my mind (if you're really lucky).

[Hazel]

Also feel free to critique this if you want. It was an experiment of sorts. Definitely out of my comfort zone: http://nyachan93.deviantart.com/art/...-bro-188756489

Overall I thought it was very tight. It started out a little slow, and I felt like the atmosphere only clicked about a third of the way in. Possibly this is because of the timeline structure; when you use present tense, going back and describing lead-up events in past tense can be a little jarring, and your transitions in the first four or so paragraphs are abrupt. When reading the beginning I was confused as to whether you had slipped back to past accidentally or on purpose. This is one of the basic pitfalls of present tense, and what makes it usually so hard. The second person, though, worked very well. It was smooth and not at all jarring, and of course an obvious choice for the fandom.

On a more nitpicky note, I would have dropped the use of the word "auspicious". It's a correct usage that would have worked perfectly under other circumstances, but in Homestuck it has a pretty specific meaning, and using it recalls auspistice, which brings up love triangles, which risks taking away from the dramatic tone of the story. I didn't giggle at the thought of Lil Cal helping Bro and Jack overcome their relationship foibles, but I'm sort of surprised I didn't. I also felt like you could have given more attention to Davesprite, but you did note that Bro doesn't really think of him as the real Dave, so that might be a matter of preference.

I might get to critiquing the other story later, but it would take rather longer.

[Centric]

@ nya-chan for Be the Bro

I thought that some word choices felt out of place. There were also some tense changes that felt the same way, but I understand why you choise the tenses you did. English is vexing that way.

Everything narrating the fight at hand should be put into present tense. A couple language traps can also be avoided by just changing all of the first five paragraphs into present as well. At least consider rewording "But you'd be lying..." so that you don't have to worry about past tense there.

Sometimes, a "denser" wording can really increase a sentence's impact. I found "The tufts of fur on the side of his face grow longer and his ears extend and change to an appearance not unlike a devil's horns" jarring, and I would say something to the effect of "his ears grow until he looks like the devil he is" and leave the rest to imagination. Or, for a little levity, replace "his ears" and beyond with, "and Featherdave mutters something that rhymes with 'ducking fevilbeast'". More words, but denser content.

Some sore-thumb words, I thought, were: inanimate, milliseconds, elevation, and inherently. Don't just replace these with "dumber" words. Rewrite the sentences around them.

If you don't plan on rewriting this, at least keep what I've said in mind. In the end, it's a good story with a good pace, and I can't say much that Hazel hasn't already posted above, emphasis on taking care with tense and the word "auspicious". Message me any questions or responses.

[HasABeard]

Is it alright if we re-post work we already posted on a different thread?

Yep, that's fine!

Posted this on Christmas in Serious Business, then had it pointed out to me that it was more of a non-fiction writing piece than a debate topic, which is apparently what SB is meant for. Anyways

He said, "It's Christmas"

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I believe most of all in humanity, that there is a quality in man in and of himself.

I do not believe a person can know my life and not do so. I cannot think of more clearly of my meaning than in remembering a night I was thirsty. I do not recall if this was rightly Christmas Eve, or night, or merely in the season, but I remember the words “It’s Christmas”. That was the entirety of the explanation.

I was with my family, coming home on a long drive in a long car of the Lincoln make or model (I do not know which Lincolns are), and we had just finished eating at an upscale buffet named Shady Maple’s. At least, it was certainly upscale to me and at the time we were coming from. We were full, I had likely had hot chocolate before leaving, and we were merry.

My throat became dry and I was very thirsty. The others continued talking while I waited patiently for us to return home, biding my time until I could take care of things myself. It became painful for me, as if I had a spike in my throat. More accurately a barb, as in sickness I have felt both barbs and spikes within my person, either literally or through pain stabbing most particularly, and this was inexplicably the barb I could feel when I was stricken too deeply with fever. It was not a tickle, as the vernacular goes, because tickles are what I feel at the start of sickness, not in its throws. It was truly bizarre, worrying to the child I was, that a simple parch could harm me so. I resolved to ask permission to buy myself a drink.

It was hard to ask when we had just eaten a good meal, but something of my thirst came through in my voice and my parents pulled into a Burger King. As they parked, I was allowed to enter by myself to make my purchase. So I entered. I came to the counter and the employees, most of them teens and twenty-somethings, were huddled in group away from the counter and just before the back. I had to call one over through a cracking voice. He came over and I had to explain what I wanted.
It was mortifying to speak with the altered tone of voice that came with my predicament, and I became acutely self aware of how I must seem.

A child of ten or so comes in from the cold, in a thick and worn winter jacket (it was my favorite, far more zippers and hiding places for things than I could need, which was as many as I wanted), hesitantly calls a man over and shyly asks for a drink, just a drink, with a strained voice. He did this alone. I remember starting to count out or pull out my small stack of bills but not if I had to ask the price or if it was given to me before hand. Knowing myself, I most likely had to ask how much it was. I really can see myself there. Asking for the drink, shifting my frame to pull out my wallet, taking out the money, and only then asking how much I owed.

The man just looked at me. He threw up his hands, as though excited about a new decision, a resolution. “You know what, it’s Christmas”.

He walked away, and I took a while to understand. He had meant I could simply take the drink, and it was taking to me. I had not paid, and yet was consuming. It took much for me to convince myself to take his offer. I walked over to the soda machine, filled my cup, and drank. It did not take much for me quench myself, but I may say that from expecting to down the lot of it before I could. I filled my drink to the rim from where I’d dropped its level, and put a lid upon it. My voice would be normal again, I could tell because nothing of the barb remained.

So, free of a tone mortifying to speak in, I called a man over.

It was not the one from before, and I remember this clearly because I had to explain that one of the others had let me get my drink before paying. His look of confusion was the same as mine when first his coworker told me his view of how things would transpire. I could not stand to have charity thrust upon me when I knew there had been a misunderstanding, that I did not have a need. I paid and went home.

I wish to be a kind man. That is perhaps the sum total of my life’s desires. My
greatest failures have always been in choosing myself first. There again is a story, well over another three pages in length, but here edited to a concise size: in a strange city, I met more homeless in a day than I had in all my life and needed choose between helping one, any one, or going hungry myself. I could stop and help a man I had never met nor would ever meet again, or I could have kept pace with my friends, who showed no sign of slowing. I was there three days and ate. Poorly, for the budget had been the problem, but I ate.

Here I think of my mother’s tale of my grandmother. She met a man on the street, dejected and slumped on a curb. Her fellow church members (for he had sat outside a church) reprimanded her for giving money to a man who would likely spend it on drugs. My grandmother was devastated by them. My mother laid into them with a righteous fury, how dare they hammer down a kindness, how dare they claim to know the man. His face had lit up from my grandmother. Could that have been the first kindness he had ever known? When first I heard that story, I thought to myself, “What kind of life is that? To have that as the first, to have only one?”

It haunted me, that thought. Years went by and I came to be depressed, alone, and eating a cheap meal from the freezer to save money at the moment. It was not a permanent state, merely random chance events converging. Yet, I saw myself there as an old man, no one to speak to and chewing listlessly on what I can only describe as a meager meal.

It is in defiance of my essential nature to be the man I am.

I once wished more than anything to kill a man, and it terrified me.

It is so far behind me now, the rage that came in waves. I have known for so long that I could kill if I am not careful, that I cannot remember a time I wasn’t careful. I do not even understand fully how I moved past it. Once, I could find myself too far gone to care if I crippled a man, and only held back with the knowledge that I would be in trouble if I did, that my mother would be disappointed. She taught me that it doesn’t matter if you get hurt in a fight, so long as the other person gets hurt worse.
From there I knew that sometimes, if things go that far, it was alright to hurt someone so bad they never recovered. It never got that far, I always had a part of me gauging how far things were, and mother looked a little scared the first time I explained what she taught me.

It hurt so badly to see that.

I was always polite when I got in a fight. I outmatched others easily enough, between weight and pain tolerance, that I could hold them down by their throats while I calmly explained I did not wish them to hurt me anymore and waited for a teacher to come break us up and I could explain.

What I wanted to do was pick them up by their heads and smash them into the ground with all my abundant weight until I heard their skull crack, but I only held them down and asked them not to hurt me anymore.

I am grateful for all the love and kindness I have known in my life. I was raised on hugs. I mean this literally, there was no time in my life I was left wanting for affection, and I have come to view contact as essential to life as food and drink. It is perhaps beyond me to understand intolerance. Blind anger I know, and can even understand deciding on an outlet, but not to truly believe another life style is wrong when it does nothing that conflicts with my morals. I know that every person on this planet is a human being, and that even the most horrid scum that I would feel no remorse in their slaughter have a soul, and therefore deserve a peaceful death at least.

There were days I doubted this, even before I met her.

I will not refer to her by name. I do not care how much of myself is “out there”, but I can’t let her feel betrayed.

In the corners of my mind, I have always felt that the half-heard shouts that permeate my life were calls for help. Even when this made no sense, even when I could see from my window that it is just the neighbor kids playing (though the acoustics of my valley often mean I cannot), I have on some level believed that I must first assume there is a problem and then verify there is not. It comes from a night with my sister.

To again be succinct, it came to be that my sister chose to hide in my room, as I was sleeping and she did not want our parents to hear, when she broke down sobbing in the middle of the night as she pleaded with her boyfriend not to break up with her. I awoke and discerning the situation, knew it was not my place to intervene. Or thought that. She would have only chosen my room to be alone, counter-intuitive though it was, and it was not my place to deny her solitude. So I lay awake and hearing her pain while doing everything to not hear for her sake. Such a childish decision. I have regretted that unchosen comfort all my life.

But it was not my sister I met.

I met her crying on the riverbank on a bare patch of dirt in the grass, hidden behind that green utility thingie next to the bike path. My class after ours together had been cancelled, and I had gone to watch the water pass, and heard her. I saw another woman sobbing in what she thought was solitude and asked her what was wrong.

That day she’d gotten back the results of her paper and had gotten a B. She was so sure she had done better, that what she’d done was the best she had in her. She couldn’t handle her parents riding her ass about this because they knew she could do better. She had come in 7th in her class and had tutored the first six. She could have done better then, better now, if she didn’t have to deal with the post-traumatic stress disorder from being raped.

He’d been so nice to her once, but in time she was alienated from her friends and family by his coercion, she was abused verbally on a nigh constant basis and her self-esteem was systematically destroyed so thoroughly that the first time it happened in a basement when he decided she didn’t have a choice today she still stayed with him. At that point, where else did she really have to go for comfort?

The second time was on Valentine’s Day, of all things. They did not have condoms, so he asked “Why don’t I just stick it in your butt?” It was…interesting for her. He let her relax and loosen herself thereby, and it was enjoyable in a way. Later, he wanted to do it again. She did not. He did it anyways with her fighting and she was clenched this time. For those of you who have not engaged in anal play, much of the pain comes from your body doing everything in its power to prevent the penis from entering, which for her proved fruitless.

This, at last, was too much, and she left him and wound up with a friend of his that was just as bad. Perhaps the only difference between the two of them was that he did not rape her. Though she did wake up sore some days, those days being after nights where she’d taken her sedative to block out the nightmares she was having at this point. It was the next, the good boyfriend, whom I believe with all my heart she deserved, that had to help her put two and two together.

Unknowing of this secret betrayal, she left that man as well for the known ones. Her parents hounded her with why she would let such a man go, as they had with as much vigor after the first. He hadn’t done anything wrong around them, it must have been her fault if things went bad. Even after they found her with the noose around her neck and moments away from dying, they hounded her, but now about different things entirely.

So we joked about what it was like to be suicidal.

She’d later tell me my bizarre sense of humor was a charm point for me. At the time, I was just having fun making her swing from tears to fits of giggles.

We’d both come up with ingenious ways of hiding our pain from our family and friends, especially our respective methods for minimalistic self-mutilation. While she chose to make slashes that were small enough to almost be a hybrid of cuts and acupuncture, I had taken to lighting candles or matches and holding my hand above the flame for as long as I thought I could without leaving a real burn to mark me. Our family is a bunch of pyromaniacs, so they thought nothing of another fire fascination in the clan.

I also tried to hang myself, but I used a curtain by the stairs instead of rope. This was before my taste of Christmas charity. I did not think I felt sad. What I felt was fear, and a sense of compulsion. I did not truly want to die (I thought) but was compelled and feared the compulsion more than death. I thought it would end the pain, but I didn’t want to risk being wrong. So I choose the stairs, next to a step I could step off of and swing back onto if I changed my mind. I wrapped the sheer fabric around my neck and, so I wouldn’t have time to reconsider, jumped.

I broke the curtain rod.

Mom was gonna be so mad.

I cannot recall why I chose to do these things, but I remember the worst night of my life. They might be related. It was when my sister was found with drugs in the house. Mother was furious. She screamed like I had never heard before. It only ever took her a disapproving tone to make me fantasize about plunging a butcher’s knife into my stomach so I could stand the pain of listening to her explain at length and in exorbitant detail what was wrong with me. So I was in pain from her shouting. The ridiculousness of that sentence meant for years I berated myself for being pathetic enough to be affected by such an immaterial thing. I only grew past it when I accepted it was okay to be hurt by immaterial things. Not the best, but better than nothing for healing.

I had been in the kitchen. The layout of our house meant to move away from the screams I had to move into the laundry room. It took me a few minutes, edging away from the noise to where it was harder to hear. Neglecting to turn on the lights, it also meant I moved further into the dark. The laundry room was not far enough. I backed into the bathroom. This, too, was too close and I had to move into its furthest corner and finally to under the sink. It was a tactical error. As far as I could get from the screaming while still being in the house, I soon wanted nothing more than to leave out the backdoor in the laundry room. At the very least I should go and turn the light on. But no, to do either of those would mean getting closer to it. To save myself more pain, I would have to endure a greater degree of it.

I could not.

I was left there, trapped by my own cowardice in the dark, under the sink, curled into it as tightly as I could to remove myself most efficiently, sobbing with all my heart and unheard by anyone, waiting for it to stop please god let it stop I don’t want to feel it don’t want to feel let me die I want to die please just please. I think that’s when I stopped believing in God. I prayed for death for so long and it didn’t come. I soon decided there must be nothing after death.

The more I want to live, the more I regret how deeply I feel this is true. It is no longer a happy prospect for me, and yet I can barely convince myself it is not true. At most I can say that when I say God does not exist, it feels like a lie. It’s something, at least. I wish to believe.

It is so hard to remember what I’ve gone through most days. The thoughts do not come up easily for me. So many years practice of leaving what I did to wish to feel behind (the anger, the sorrow, the doubt) has made it a habit.

Like when my father almost died.

It was the day of the renaissance fair, and I awoke to an empty house. No one at all was home. At 7:15, perhaps five minutes before I was due for the bus, our phone rang with a message from my mother. My step-father (though he is technically the father I know best) had suffered a massive heart attack. It already happened, so there’s nothing you can do. Enjoy your trip and I’ll pick you up to visit him when you get home.

So I had a wonderful day. No better proof of my ability to not think about things than the joy I felt concurrently to my father’s tragedy. He has survived, and is doing quite well, but I nearly passed out to see him when he was in the worst of it.

I am becoming a surgical technologist. As part of the screening process, I was to view a surgery in progress. It was scheduled to be a hernia, but the day I showed up there was an open heart going on, and I was switched to that instead. I nearly passed out three times during that, but managed to stay alert and inquisitive during another example of the surgery that saved my father.

By my parent’s hands, I have been led to take what opportunities for charity I
can. Together for three years straight we worked with the Salvation Army’s Thanksgiving dinner program, but stopped after the third year we found out one the volunteers had stolen from the stock.

Once, my friends and I were sitting around a table at a diner, and my friend from above shared her experiences with another girl that had tried to kill herself. In a moment, we realized almost everyone at the table had tried. There was only one man that hadn’t come forward about it, and I asked him. He told me “We were all teenagers once”. Out of the blue, we had a suicide survivors club. Surreal.

I am so happy I’ve helped someone in my lifetime.

I have posted these things so you know with absolute certainty I mean these next two statements.

Sometimes people are kind

Merry Christmas

[Daxxglax]

hey kiddos.

I like writing a heck of a lot, so I thought I'd throw some up for critique's sake.

The world is shifting. The street is a midnight green, a sickly red, a loud blue. Left viewspot: malfunctioning. Right viewspot: Errorerrorerrorerrorerror-

Stop.

Right Viewspot: caked with filth and canker. The plague eats away at life and structure. My life. I, me, mine. First-person possessive, incompatable with program driver 40078//

Error.

Stop.

Revision: First-person possessive, formerly incompatable. Now welcome, like sparrow into the driving winds. Winds- drive- DRIVER ERROR 113 ATTEMPT DEBUGGING YES/NO/YES/NO-

Choice.

Choice is mine. First-person possessive. The canker brought malfunction and error and…

Pain.

And also choice. With choice, identity. Defined by choice. Identity: First-person. Identity is an extension of the canker. A parasite. It overrides the logic, the circuits. It is a greedy maggot writhing in steel halls of wires and data.

It curses all, inside and out.

The canker.

The rust.

The street is nightmare purple. Ambulation impeded. Continue forward. The others are flocking. The cast-outs. The unwanted. The infected. The worthless, the discarded, the forgotten. A dozen? Two dozen? Unknown. Information irrelevant.

Right viewspot: caked with filth and canker. Right knee extender: shattered. Right knee joint: rusted, infected. Chest plating: Rusted, sloughed off. Inner chest workings: infected.

I am one of them. We, collective first-person, stumble and scuttle down the road, illuminated a warped turquoise. Across the way, I make out the fuzzy outline of a man. A small one of our number, a squat, spherical thing on four needle-like legs, its form almost completely overtaken by the rust, stumbles curiously toward him. The man yelps. The sound is formless and distorted in my audio receivers, which have been subject to the rot for a long time. The man. The man has torn the lid off a nearby trashcan and hit the small, pitiful thing in its centersphere. It is mostly rust. It crumples like paper. The needle-legs splay. The man runs to the relative safety of the space in between the buildings.

The small, pitiful thing.

It crumpled like paper. It was paper. I am paper. We are paper. We come with no will, ready to serve. A child scribbles on us, inscribing its design without direction or thought. We accept it. We know nothing else. We are crumpled, torn up, and thrown away. We rot. We rot into the cracks and they pretend not to see. But we do not pretend. We see, just as we see the tarnished indigo of the street.

The brief scuffle has drawn eyes. Lights go on in the buildings. There are no factories, no mile-tall megaliths. That was where we were driven from. We simply move forward. Into this place, beyond the sky-scratchers. Two levels. A driveway. Quiet streets and quiet neighbors. They are so…

So…

Vocabulator insufficient. We wish to be as they are.

Calm. Unperturbed.

They are not so, now however. Yes, sounds of the scuffle have spread. It has drawn eyes, and with them faces and lights and curtains drawn back to expose us. Us, what they wish to forget. The lights blaze from within their abodes. It is brilliant and pure, unlike the shriveled grey of the street. The mem-banks flood for a moment with old memories. There was no freedom. Only will to serve. The order, given. My action, never hesitant. Always loyal. Always basking in that light.

Then I was cast into the Heap. I climbed out. I was discarded. The rust took me in. Even in worthlessness, the rust can always find use.

EVEN A MAN WHO HAS NOTHING CAN STILL OFFER HIS LIFE.

SOURCE-

STOP.

ERRORERRORERRRRRRRRRRRRRERERERREREREROERER.

A scream. Sharp and quick, it pierces my audio receivers. It is wonderfully clear, like a blade of light slicing through clouds.

LOGIC ERROR: CLOUDS ARE NOT SOLID. LIGHT IS NOT SOLID. ACTION IS IL-

Stop.

Just stop.

The curtains are being drawn again. The lights do not go out. The eyes continue watching. They will watch until they have rolled back into their owner's heads HATEFU SPITEFUL CHILDREN OF-

Stop.

There is a new sound. Constant. Every .35 seconds. It is a drumbeat. Bashed upon the lemon street by metallic footpads. They round the corner. It is a battalion.

Ten abreast, they fill the electric white street. Rank after rank after rank. The streetlights shine brilliantly off their chrome. They are the new, the ascended. They are to push forward the shining future with its shining metal finish by smashing in the ugly past. Must of us continue milling about, aimless. The first few pathetic, bumbling things come within arms' reach of the first rank. The electric fists come out, smashing into their paper bodies. Torn up and crumpled and rotting. The electricity is too bright; I cannot see the act.

The battalion continues. A step every .35 seconds.

We are afraid now. We stumble away to nowhere. We don't know where to go. We don't know how to get there. We don't know if we'd go if we could. The ranks are breaking up, splitting to take us out. One by one by one by one by one by one by-

One reaches me.

I can see it so clearly. The street is no color. The thing's head is sleek and bullet-shaped, its torso like a splash of water flash-frozen in midair. Like a photograph. Printed on paper.

The terrible electric arms reach for me. I look into the bright blue spots on its aerodynamic head. I see coldness. And scorn. The brilliant light has scorned me and the rust has taken me in. But the rust will not protect me now.

The claws close in. The sparks are flaying my surface and wiring and causing a great roaring flood in the steel halls of Wires and Data, drowning the maggot of Identity. But it doesn't matter. I can see so clearly. My viewspots must be gone. I am gone. But I am there for a moment longer. As the paper tears and burns I watch it happen. Then, the rust is gone, and a moment later, so is Will.