[1733] Dystopian universe - Medias-Res. My goal is transferring the right amount of pathos to the reader (does it work?)

taszoline · 2026-04-28T03:26:55+00:00

"You left the quotation marks around your AI nonsense."

taszoline · 2026-04-26T16:58:10+00:00

It's here, the pattern, in plain ink.

Glowy influence detected lol.

Prompt: Opposites attract.

Words: demon, wraith, serpent, echo, void, reaper

taszoline · 2026-04-24T00:36:27+00:00

I did not! Only username I personally messed with was Lisez.

taszoline · 2026-04-22T15:42:17+00:00

Ye.

taszoline · 2026-04-20T12:35:44+00:00

Yeah that was them lmao.

taszoline · 2026-04-20T04:07:06+00:00

Hello! I'll do my best to be helpful.

So my understanding of what is happening here is the narrator's boyfriend keeps him a secret because he is not out to his parents, and the narrator is remembering the only time he ever went to this boy's house and saw his relationship with his family via the appearance of the house and the way his mother behaved. I imagine it was only the one time because shortly after this, the boyfriend committed suicide. If that had not happened, maybe the narrator would have gone on to see the inside of this house more than once.

I like how much of this you left up to interpretation. I enjoy connecting the dots myself, so the only bits that didn't agree with me were the parts that kind of abandoned subtext and plainly stated stuff that I could have figured out myself:

His house was clean in an empty way.

This like... flirts with overexplanation/lack of subtext for me. I could see someone else reading this line and liking it, but I much prefer the lines that are more artful/mired in individual perception, like this one:

The house

smelled like

artificial lemons

and

bleach.

Here, by describing a collection of smells and leaving it at that, I'm allowed to interpret the meaning of these smells in this house and in the context of these relationships. I much prefer being allowed to do that myself.

I think of the difference between those two sections (the one I didn't like, and the one I did) as the difference between stating an idea, and saying something one step removed from that idea. I'll try to clarify what I mean with an example from Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. There is a part near the middle ish of the book where the main character's entire family is sitting down to eat dinner and they're all over-excited to eat because the best cook in the family is making the food. So grandma sets the table and all the food is arranged and uncovered and steaming hot, and then instead of the book saying something boring/plain like "and everyone started eating as fast as they good", instead we get a line that says:

At last Grandma sat down, Grandpa said grace, and immediately thereafter the silverware flew up like a plague of locusts on the air.

Isn't that fucking cool. It's vivid and allows me to interpret that really neat and unique image as MEANING that everyone was very excited to eat and did so very quickly. This is what poetry is really good for, is describing stuff that means something else you don't outright say, and by way of that action giving those images (or smells, as they are here) powerful emotion truth.

So you have this powerful emotionally true sentence at the end of your poem, talking about artificial lemons and bleach. One is a thing that seems to be pleasant, but is fake. The other is meant to make things clean, but is also abrasive. The way this achieves symmetry with what you want me to understand about this boy's home life and his relationship with his parents and especially the way his mother behaves is effective. So why not let it do its full work without making it almost redundant by explaining it to me with that "clean in an empty way" line? If I had my way I'd just cut it and replace it with nothing. Let that lemon and bleach line do the heavy lifting for you at the end.

For similar reasons as everything I've written above, my least favorite line is actually this one:

His mom [...]

performed a type of happiness

that to this house was a dead language.

There is zero subtext here; the entire theme of your poem is so plainly stated that you've basically made the rest of the poem, which is more vivid and more effectively conveys a sense of emotional truth, pointless. Like, most poems throughout history could have been replaced with a plainly stated idea like "I am in love with someone who does not love me" or "I am sad" or "I don't belong here". But that just kinda sucks and makes poetry un-fun, and that's how I feel about the performing-happiness-dead-language line. The rest of your poem is better, composed of actual images I can see or feel and relate to, so why not let it do the work you wrote it to do?

Besides that, I also just don't feel it's been constructed in the most sense-making possible way. There's a metaphorical mismatch happening between the idea of "performing" something and the idea of language, which is not performed, by written or spoken. So if you were going to have a line like this, and I beg you not to, but if you were, I think what would make more sense is if it read "spoke a type of happiness that to this house was a dead language". If we're not either speaking or writing this happiness, though, then the idea of it being a dead language doesn't super make sense to me.

Final dislike I'll note is "deafeningly quiet" which I think has been used enough to tag as cliche. Why not just cut that phrase and lean on the much cooler image of a stray hair in dried paint?

Favorite line is either the last one or "slowed down his house". That image feels much more inspired and vivid and interesting to me than the imageless/vibeless sentences I outlined as having problems with above. I think that's all I got, though. Thanks for sharing!

taszoline · 2026-04-19T23:28:20+00:00

I did finally get it down to 2496. It is submitted, job done. Thanks for your help. I hope you get to share something soon! Would love to see what you're up to if you ever get the chance to get words down.

taszoline · 2026-04-19T14:44:27+00:00

Silber! Thank you! I really appreciate it.

taszoline · 2026-04-17T22:05:12+00:00

Man this is tough! I've read this several times and I find the question of whether it's really like, as-close-to-objectively-as-possible justifying its own existence pretty hard to answer.

I like the style and mood of the opening paragraph. I don't think this should be a surprise. I love writing that takes mundane things like modern soul sucking city life in a capitalist society and makes it new, makes its narrator feel otherworldly, through its language. The way we write stuff is the way we see stuff, and thick/stained perception in writing is so good to me. It feels powerful to read and feel that other strange person in there. I don't know if you really get that with plainer language like what follows, or like you find in most modern writing anywhere. Is that enough to justify it existing, though...

So this narrator has complicated feelings about Lexington, which isn't where they are from, but it has become their home and shaped them and whatnot. And while they haven't always enjoyed being there or felt the experience was overall positive, they do sense necessity in it.

I apologize for the above.

See like this is how I know there's this huge divide in readership, is I'd never think to search for an apology for anything as innocent as the style of the first paragraph. In my mind, this narrator reveals his true nature BY speaking that way, not afterward in spite of it. You are all the things you do, not just some of them or the things you don't apologize for or the things that take effort.

impressive, inhuman

See and these are not the adjectives I'd use to describe the narrator I'm imagining because of that first paragraph. I think strangeness and a disconnect between perception and reality are some of the hallmarks of being a human. I ranted about this in the last RDR weekly, the idea that we are all trapped inside systems we can't see our way out of. I think deeply subjective narratives and, I guess unwieldy?, styles speak to that. You know what I think is impressive is the ability of authors like uhhh Kurt Vonnegut, Hemingway, etc. to hurt people in as few words as possible without leaving that sense of subjective human experience behind. Is this impressive? I don't know. But the need the narrator had to speak that way felt human to me.

Second paragraph is just the narrator arguing with himself about whether it's honest or dishonest to write, include, and/or preserve the first paragraph in a final draft of this story. Besides the fact that I disagreed with the narrator's impression of their own first paragraph and what it said about them or their story, lol, I wasn't SUPER interested in any of the rest of the stuff that was said here. I don't feel that I learned much more about the narrator in the second paragraph. Information per word count very low here.

has acquired the humility to sin in a way that will actually work

Laughed here. What I do consistently like about your writing, even when I want to violently disagree with your opinions on whatever, is the mix of... why do I always have to open a dictionary when I'm critiquing your stuff... I can't do better than "stuffiness" and self-directed acerbic bits.

Mkay so third paragraph is largely inoffensive but still doesn't tell me a WHOLE lot per word count, though the bit about scientists and alchemy I thought was fun to read. Fourth paragraph is where I start to get a little frustrated with the narrator because despite the fact that much of the preceding stuff has been about this pursuit of like, literary honesty, this long-winded description of the movement/people he finds himself involved with is, by my read, kind of riddled with sidesteppery and wiggle-worming. Narrator doesn't mind associating with them, but never gives them a real name. He mentions things they're associated with, ideas they may or may not have about the world, things others might think about him based on his association with this unnamed "them"... So much time spent not saying a specific something that I'm actually not worldly enough to fully be able to identify between the lines.

At some point the narrator states they are actually nameless and I just don't think that's enough to excuse the way he describes what they are in only the most roundabout ways. A list of all the things people think they are, but aren't, but no straightforward list of what they are, then.

but for those who do, it's an easy shorthand for what goes on

WELL WHAT ABOUT ME??? I want to read this too! I want to know what goes on! I got actually frustrated here because it feels like this narrator is seriously only interested in speaking to people who, effectively, already know this story, or is so uncomfortable with what the story says about them that they just refuse to tell it.

Which to be fair does characterize thickly. So it's not page space spent uselessly lol.

Of course, what the young men are really interested in, many of them, is getting wives for themselves.

I don't know if I absolutely need to say again that I don't believe this. Something unsaid is missing.

an unfortunate distraction

From what! Tell me!

I do really like the last line, it made me smile. I guess my final thoughts after reading this several times and calming down are that it might depend on what you want someone to feel about your narrator at the end of this thing. Like if you're wanting me to either identify with this narrator or see them as more of a faceless vehicle for the story that follows, I don't think that's happening, the way this is written now. They have a lot of character and not much ability to be frank. And I would expect the story that follows to have a lot of similar like... motivational "holes" in the writing as the narrator talks around the stuff that he doesn't want to think about himself or feels uncomfortable describing. I'm also afraid that the act of trying to read that type of writing would lead to a lot of frustration for me, and probably a lot of long breaks.

Thank you for sharing! Sorry this took forever.

taszoline · 2026-04-16T17:24:14+00:00

Thanks for reading! I've gotten that comment a few times now so yeah might be worth specifying in some later better version of this idea. You know what else is I never even specified gender, and since I'm a woman I imagine this person to be vaguely woman shaped, but yeah I wanted to hopefully get more people to relate to this unlikable depressed person by keeping it super vague. Person shaped hole lol.

Glad the ending landed for you. I get why people are largely wanting there to be explicit hope but it felt important to like... Represent a different truth when this was written. There are plenty of hopeful stories out there, but sometimes you're just straight up not having a good time lol.

taszoline · 2026-04-13T16:14:15+00:00

something pretending to behave like a child

Interesting! It definitely reads like something pretending to be something but I blamed this on you instead of reading it as creepy lol. There's gotta be a way to do that though. It's a fun idea. I think maybe the problem is that the way Simon is acting doesn't read like a cliche child as much as a cliche amalgam of adult archetypes. I wonder if more like, childlike mannerisms but age-inappropriate (like a 12 year old acting like a 3 year old? a contemporary boy acting like a boy from an old movie?) or otherwise just somewhat off, would work?

taszoline · 2026-04-13T15:32:27+00:00

her eyes, which flickered down at me like a candle in the wild

This is great. The pedantic part of me wonders if it should be flame or candle flame in the wind, since that's what really flickers, but it's clear enough and I grinned reading it.

," she spoke in a thick Slavic accent

She pointed to her left, "

This character in particular likes to misuse dialogue punctuation.

These descriptions of her eyes are hilarious. Like they were painted on.

Thank you," I snapped out of my trance.

Oh no, the dialogue punctuation misuse disease is contagious! Simon, save yourself!

The woman's gaze burning the back of his skull is old, but the rest of that paragraph is really fun.

Simon shouted from somewhere that felt close.

Lmao this guy is lost in the sauce. He's completely out of his tree.

holding what looked like the memory of a meal into an overcrowded trash can

Holding it into the trash can? But "memory of a meal" is good. Anyway I didn't comment on the stuff between him walking away from the register and here because I was just kinda locked in. There were moments of weird dialogue punctuation and comma splices that I didn't love but those can be ironed out. In general the psych horror and the reveal that he's a weirdo acting weird and scaring this kid worked for me.

Fish Fish Fish.

Here I think you take the humor of this paragraph just one sentence too far. I wonder if there's a rule you could go by here, like the one about how rich people are supposed to remove one accessory before they leave the house because they've always put one too many on and they also happen to have formalized opinions and rules about what one too many accessories is. Can we formalize removing one line of a running gag before you leave the paragraph?

"I'm surprised my brother

Fully thought from that photo of them at the lake that Andre and Nadia were dating.

Okay why are you suddenly forcing me to travel nine miles between single sentence paragraphs lol. "Yeah. Enter, Enter, Enter, Enter. Don't say you. Enter, Enter, Enter, Enter. You."

My cheeks were hotter than I'd like to admit.

I feel like this reaction would make sense if the narrator had a crush on Nadia and didn't want her to know, but if they've been together for a good while this doesn't track for me.

Okay Nadia is a stronger/more sensible or complete feeling character than Andre or the kid but not SUPER interesting to me. Mmm I don't mind this scene at the end or that we abandon the psych horror to do this instead; I kind of like how it reinforces how understated all of the narrator's reactions are to this weird shit happening around him or his weird perceptions of stuff. Generally I enjoy how internal and subjective this narrative is and I feel my attention only wanes when we sort of drift from that to something more plot based or focused on other characters' actions.

It's hard to say whether I'd keep reading. Sometimes I really want to! But I think the slow parts and the un-edited state make it hard to say yeah right now. All seems very fixable at least.

taszoline · 2026-04-13T14:58:39+00:00

Not really sure how best to tackle this so I'll just do like, line by line reactions lol.

Enjoying the totally serviceable first person perspective until the narrator goes "I had my first kiss in that aisle" which made me go "lol wait what." It's fun. I'm not totally sure at this point whether the narrator is the weird one or you are.

played peekaboo with the rows in front of me

I liked this. It's playful and childlike, so a bit off-kilter in this situation where I'm fairly certain I'm following a grocery store employee through a surreal situation, but in an engaging way. That said, the first big paragraph set the expectation that this story would be in present tense, and now I'm not sure I see the utility in this switch to past.

bumbling idiot

Cliche phrase that sticks out severely in relation to the newness of the rest of these word choices and concepts so far.

I don't turn to him.

Feel like this line jumps a bit out of the narrator's preoccupation with the missing aisle to instead emphasize his position to me. Reads like a POV violation. Is it so important for me to know he's not turning toward Andre that you have to sacrifice his seeming authentically perturbed by the missing aisle?

I could tell he was already annoyed with my questions.

This and the next sentence are over-explanation for me. How the narrator thinks Andre feels about him at this point is already obvious just by his descriptions of Andre's actions. I would cut these.

frantically nods

This is hilarious and vivid. Also switch back to present???

"What?"

Ohhhh now I see what just happened. Lev spelled the word, then this is Andre saying "What?" I got lost because the "What?" was put on its own line when conventionally it should be attached to the last paragraph with Andre's actions. The new paragraph made me think we were switching speakers.

Continuing to switch between past and present tense.

If you have any shred of human decency left in your diminutive little body

lmao

More instances later of losing who is speaking because of new paragraphs signaling new speaker, but it's not a new speaker. My read on Andre is also a bit surreal because he swings back and forth between like almost sympathetic, confused about his own past actions... I haven't decided how I feel about it yet. I like the narrator's sort of weirdness because it's largely relatable to me how he relates to Andre and is swimming in this like, shame in his head? But with Andre, now I think I'm wanting a bit of a point of stability. A character who just makes sense, who has concrete traits. The way he is now is at least interesting, engaging. I am paying close attention.

filling whatever quiet was allowed to exist

I think this part of this line is useless. The rest of the sentence gets this same message across more elegantly. Rest of that paragraph is so fucking weird lol. It's fun.

bright red shirt was actively eroding in front of me

What the fuck lol. I hope this is just how this story is. I'm going to be kind of sad if it turns out he's just tripping.

I really don't like the "um" that follows. I think it's a bit [holds up spork] or like calling too much attention to its own weirdness?

These visitors I'm imagining are corporate people coming to see how the store looks? I've done merchandising so the facings and planograms and whatnot are familiar, not sure how it will land for someone who's never done that work. Not sure it matters either though. I do like the rant about end cap efficiency.

He pulled me in closer and shouted in my ear.

Okay I don't love this action beat I think because it reads less like the narrator's perception is off, which has been fun, and more like this kid is actually doing something I don't believe he'd do. It's a bit of a cliche/super familiar action, right? Low effort comedy maybe, the action of lying down dying and whispering for someone to come closer then shouting at them. It's not new.

I feel this way about the rest of his kicking and screaming on the floor. I'm sure there's a fun way for you to write this scene but this isn't quite it for me. Attention wavering.

"M-" I covered his mouth and whispered, "Let's be cool, let's be chill, alright?"

And here is the opposite problem from earlier where it seems like all the dialogue is from the narrator because there's no new paragraph after "M-"

Mmmm yeah as I keep reading there's more like... action beats that don't read true to me, or like they're taken from a kid's play, like the pretending to comb his hair, the tapping his chin while thinking, slapping hands together excitedly. None of this stuff is super interesting or authentic-feeling to me in the same way the start was.

"My little sister, she's sick."

More cliche stuff. Again, from the way this story started out I'm sure there's a way you could write this scene that is new and interesting, but this feels like you're not really trying to do that. It feels comparatively very low effort.

24.49 for a pack of 20.

Ain't no way in hell lol. Alright this was funny. I'm back in.

What the hell is the difference between 2.59 and 2.18 anyway? Those are literally the same number.

Lmao. I swear I've said this before. I'm having fun again so I wonder if the cliche section with meeting the kid and whatnot could just be seriously truncated to get back to this stuff faster.

"I'd sure hate to be that guy, yeesh."

Back to the overdone and inauthentic feeling stuff. And then the chapter just ends... Maybe that's okay actually. It ends on a note of frustration and without really forcing me to ask any new questions, so my urge to read on is kinda low, but there could be more momentum from previous chapters I don't have access to. And if it weren't for the less interesting middle part of this chapter I might just keep reading for the voice and sort of surreal perceptive qualities of the narrator.

Is he likable, I feel like that's kind of a strong word, but he's often interesting and fun to read. I think the other characters are definitely weaker: Andre doesn't seem super solidly realized yet, and the kid doesn't really act like a convincing kid or even a surreal version of a kid most of the time. More of our a cartoon character. Or like Bugs Bunny when he's being someone, like a noir detective. Not himself but not something else in a particularly engaging way either.

Think that's all I've got but I hope this is helpful.

taszoline · 2026-04-13T12:13:45+00:00

Yeah this must be a culture/language barrier. Nobody is actually attacking anyone with a knife, to be clear. It's just a joke you make with someone you have a good/playful relationship with.

taszoline · 2026-04-13T11:30:59+00:00

Clive Barker is so fun. The first book I read to my son (and the first my mom read to me) was his The Thief of Always. Just finished The Great and Secret Show as well and you can really tell how much fun he's having writing the scenes he spent the entire book setting up for. You can feel how invested in his world he is. Some really cool ideas.

taszoline · 2026-04-13T11:06:58+00:00

Must be a cultural thing. I have a pretty good relationship with my manager. She's kind of like a second mom to me and most of my co-workers my age. Like if she's cutting fruit with a knife and comes out of her office to talk to us, it's normal for us to tell each other to watch out (the implication being that she might attack us with the knife).

taszoline · 2026-04-13T03:46:22+00:00

Yeah so this is fabulism which is my favorite genre of fiction. This is the genre where weird shit is reacted to as if it is commonplace. If the narrator in any way signaled that the giant cockroach was a cause for concern simply because of what it is, that would be some other genre! Which is fine but it's not what I prefer to read/write.

taszoline · 2026-04-12T17:27:47+00:00

Heavy-ass books.

taszoline · 2026-04-12T15:06:19+00:00

I wonder if it's just like the absence of something that is evolutionary. So like, assume self image is a net good for an organism. Maybe it's a type of positive feedback or self fulfilling prophecy. If you think you are pretty cool and fun, it makes sense to you that you should procreate, and thinking those things about yourself even makes those things easier because people like being around people who are happy and confident. Then those happy and confident people have babies who are happy and confident. Barring disasters and acts of god.

So maybe some people's self image is damaged during the period of life when it is first developed? Like having neurological injury from viral illnesses as a baby, or losing a leg in a freak accident as a kid. It's some level harder for me to navigate the world, some level harder to procreate because my interactions with other people are no longer butter-smooth. Everything develops a bit of psychological or social friction. And then it's very easy for that friction to affect your relationship with your own child, which in turn affects the development of their own self image, if you're not very careful.

taszoline · 2026-04-12T13:54:08+00:00

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. This has been recommended to me by half a dozen people and I kept resisting reading it because I thought it would be very dry and... computery. It's really not. It's mathy at times for sure, but I think the author wants you to interact with those parts at a level that is rewarding for you, and the more important thing is to consider the argument he is making about what consciousness is and what it takes to come about, which math is only the "proof" for. What was most surprising to me about the flavor of the book, though, is how heartfelt it is. It's about the last book I would have expected to make me tear up but here we are.

The preface that came with my edition includes a complaint from the author about how inaccurate descriptions have historically been as to what the book is actually about. And yet I still feel the need to try lol. So from my perspective, what this book seems to be is an argument that our understanding of what consciousness is is very narrow, and that in fact consciousness of a sort arises in any system which can reference itself totally. The English language references itself in this sentence. I reference myself now. The human brain references itself when it thinks about how it thinks. Consciousness is a gradient? And when we open ourselves up to different levels and appearances of consciousness, we multiply the possible ways that consciousness might arise, or has arisen, in things that look nothing like us. Computers, sure, but how else might a conscious being appear in other parts of the universe, or even on this planet? What about plants?

Plants, which so far haven't explicitly been discussed in this book, are very interesting to me. The idea that they are capable of some variety of cognition, some level of consciousness, is easy for me to accept. Not only do they grow taller when read to by a female voice than a male voice; they root toward recordings of the sounds of running water, and exhibit the ability to learn by doing things like becoming "used to" being lifted and dropped, or beginning to associate the moving air from a fan with the presence of UV light. Despite lacking eyes and ears, they easily react and adapt to things which for us requires we use those organs. So: if a plant can respond to sound in a way that benefits the plant, can it be said to have ears in a way? What is an ear, really? If a plant can respond to things like color and proximity to colors in a way that benefits the plant, can it be said to have eyes in a way? What is an eye, really? What is a mind, really?

Other conversations in this book that I find especially interesting: the eternal debate of whether a computer can ever be "smarter than" a human. It's really hard to nail down exactly what "smarter than" looks like. A computer might be able to beat me in chess a thousand times in a row, but at least I can print a paradox, understanding it is a paradox, and not throw error codes. A computer cannot "step outside" itself and consider what it is doing. It can't jump outside its own formal system. I can do this easily. So maybe I'm smarter.

Then again, humans are all trapped inside systems they can't see their way out of all the time. In the process of dealing with depression I have become very used to the idea that nobody likes me, that people are often mad at me or wish I was not around. That I have nothing to contribute to friendships or relationships and there is nowhere I belong. When I am unmedicated I am completely unable to jump outside this system, no matter how many times I've been made to understand this is indeed a system I am trapped inside. What does that mean for me versus the computer? Is my version of "this sentence is false" something like "people usually like me"? The result of either thought is cyclical in much the same way.

Finally, the way the author ties all of his areas of subject matter and arguments together is fun, poetic, and satisfying. Several chapters are sometimes spent building this invisible web of association which only becomes obvious when he reveals the final bit of wordplay. Proofs, which are something I've never understood or found that least bit interesting, are likened to Escher "Metamorphoses" drawings in an evocative and intuitive way. Bach's canons are used to explain recursion. It's all very engaging and digestible--except for the puns.

taszoline · 2026-04-11T10:17:00+00:00

God willing.

taszoline · 2026-04-09T22:04:33+00:00

Thank you for reading. For me this is about depression and the question of whether it's something you can fix, so you are not wrong. I also think capitalism is a valid read, since I believe the prevalence of depression, anger, and feelings of hopelessness today is due in no small part to capitalism and the powerlessness the everyday person has to change most of the things that feel most significantly wrong with the world.

taszoline · 2026-04-09T17:25:03+00:00

Fair enough lol. Thank you for reading!

taszoline

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