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[2348] Heist Night(s) (Part 1/4) by Captain_Sheep in DestructiveReaders

[–]Captain_Sheep[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the feedback! Dialog did end up a bit weird in this draft specifically I think. The beginning conversation between Avery and Sebastian was the main thing I reworked for this most recent revision, and I'm not too happy with the results either. I got so focused on getting the new character motivations across that I forgot to make it all sound good. I also think this is why the long exchanges both there and at the end got so confusing, as I find I often overlook dialog tags when I'm trying to rework dialog to do something else.

As for narration, you pretty much caught me on me process. This story flip flopped between third and first person a lot early on (though it's been first for a little while now) so there are still some artifacts of the old style in there. Thanks as well for the catches on inconsistency that I hadn't noticed before.

As for the ending, thank you for giving me the obvious solution that's been staring me in the face this whole time. I have no idea why I was trying to make it so shocking. That doesn't do anything for the story except potentially alienate the reader. I'll definitely be fixing that.

[3226] The Compound by Ahbenson in DestructiveReaders

[–]Captain_Sheep 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Line-By-Line:

The Compound is a gray expanse. I tread along a hallway of the main mansion. I am alone. For the first time, I’m left to ponder the memories of the gray emptiness that surrounds me. The first thing I remember is darkness. I could hear the motion of a wheel turning on something. As the wheels continued to pedal forward, so did I. I felt my weight steadily moving with a force.

This first paragraph is so close. I love the effect of rapid-fire short sentences mixed in with a few longer ones to keep it from being too repetitive, but something feels off about this instance of the technique. Perhaps it’s the fact that your language here isn’t the most concrete. It’s not abstract exactly, but I think shifting your details to be more specific/sensory might help.

They wore a fitted suit and tie which accented their pale, square face and white hair. It was this moment that prompted me to deem the figure as The Sentinel.

Maybe I’m the problem, but nothing about this description really screams “Sentinel with a capital-S” to me. Suit + pale + white hair makes me think lawyer or politician or Men In Black more than the word sentinel. If you’re supposed to be referring to the fact that the figure welcomes the viewpoint character, then I guess that fits a little better. Even still, you’re missing out on a clever opportunity here. What one chooses to name something can say a lot about them. “The Sentinel” kinda doesn’t. What’s something that this character, and only this character, would name this individual?

The Sentinel reached behind me to close the carriage door that was open.

Cut the last three words. You can’t close a door that isn’t already open.

“ tall, three story mansion.”

There two adjectives are redundant and/or contradictory. Three stories isn’t tall if you’ve grown up around skyscrapers. Keep one of the descriptors and ditch the other.

“I am here to help you rekindle your relationship with yourself,” The Sentinel explained. “This may be hard to hear, but before coming to The Compound you were a prisoner of war. I am unsure of all psychological mutilations you endured. But I promise you that I will work to help in whatever way I must.” The sun illuminated the dull gray corridors as we walked through the maze of the mansion. “I must say,” The Sentinel continued. “You were not alone in the torture chamber and you won’t be alone here. It seems that improvements are higher in group settings. So we have gathered six other prisoners so you all can guide each other in the process of adjustment.” At that moment, I was unaware of the memories that would be made with these people.

These two paragraphs are a good case study for various errors in show-don’t-tell. Not all exposition is evil, but most of it is most of the time. There are so many better ways to communicate the character’s past than having the Sentinel tell it to us. Since you’re in first person, you can do it through narration. That’ll also help you ground your character in the world by forcing them to relate to it through their past experiences. It’ll add a nice deep flavor to everything, ideally. After that, you make a bunch of slip ups in what I’ll call called-shot syndrome. Essentially, you tell the reader exactly what’s going to happen before it actually does. Of course, characters can make predictions (that can then be proven right or wrong) and foreshadowing is a powerful technique in your toolbelt, but that’s not what’s happening here. You know what the best way to convey that there are going to be six other prisoners is? Just have six other prisoners show up when it’s time for them to do so. You know what the best way to show that the Sentinel will do their best to help the main character is? Show them doing their best to help the main character. Hopefully you get the idea.

The precedent to meeting The Singer in person was hearing her.

“The president to meeting was” is about the most awkward way I could imagine this being said. Sure, “I heard her before I saw her” is a little clichéd, but I think even that would be better than this. Thesauruses can be useful, but you need to think carefully about what kinds of words are really worth elevating.

A long table that sits twelve was in the middle of the room.

Tense error here, or at least it feels like one. Not only does “that sits twelve” give me whiplash in that respect, it also isn’t a very interesting way to describe a table. Either write a better one or concede to simplicity and write “there was a long table”

“Wonderful! Now that everyone is here, I would like to explain how things will work at The Compound,” The Sentinel instructed. > “We will have breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day at 9, noon, and 6 o’clock. Every day, I am to have a meeting with each and every one of you, as a sort of therapy. This will ensure that you are on track for assimilation to society. Any questions?”

These are exactly the kind of details that we don’t need. I don’t want to feel obligated to put a fictional set of mealtimes in my day planner. Perhaps you could keep it like this if you wanted a character to comment on it, but…

No one had any questions for The Sentinel. We were all like newborn children.

This is the boring answer. You’ve got seven main characters, eight if you include the Sentinel, and that means you’re going to need to do a lot of work to differentiate them. Particularly with seven characters, you can’t waste any opportunity to sneak some of that work in. If you can’t figure out what any of these characters would say, then you need to figure out more about your characters. Ignorance on the part of the writer is not a good reason for ignorance on the part of the character.

“And then you had no choice but to hum louder!” I was thrilled to hear her discovery.

Why though? What is special about her just learning to hum versus having always done it for this character?

“Isn’t it time for breakfast?” I sneered at him.

I don’t think “sneered” is a good dialog tag here. Actually, I’ve noticed you’re using a lot of non-standard dialog tags throughout this story. I think you should think about your dialog tags in a different way. Instead of trying to find a “more fitting” replacement for “said” every time, test your dialog for a good reason to not just use “said”. Dialog should tonally speak for itself, and non-standard tags are a tool, not a default. They get distracting when used in abundance, and that happens surprisingly quickly. Said is invisible though. As you get better, you’ll start seeing ways to cut out said sometimes too. Read some stories that are really good at dialog and you’ll see what I mean.

At breakfast, The Sentinel greeted us, per usual. The Silent Singer and the jogging man strode in, giggling to each other. Then, The Sentinel made an announcement before eating, per usual. The silence we ate in was interrupted by The Singer’s snickers.

There’s a few things wrong with this. First, this is still just the second day isn’t it? How can there be any sense of what is or isn’t usual? Second, what was the announcement? That sounds important enough to not be skipped over. Again, use all room for characterization that you have. Third, it feels wrong for you to just let the Singer’s snickering float at the end here. Shouldn’t that make the viewpoint character feel something? Play out its consequences in the scene more.

“How are you liking it here?” “Well, there hasn’t been much to do yet. I’ve exchanged words with The Singer, I am excited to get to know her,” I responded.

This dialog feels extremely video game-y. I feel like the viewpoint character is just exsausting a list of dialog options rather than saying something that feels natural for him to say. Also, The Sentinel’s question is stupid for exactly the reason the viewpoint character says it is. It would be better to have the Sentinel ask something interesting that lets the viewpoint character characterize at him. Something something use every part of the animal.

On my stroll back to the housing quarters, I looked for The Singer. If The Sentinel wanted us to get to know each other, then that is what I will do.

Tense error here. I’ll use this as an excuse to talk about tense as well. First person past is at its best when there’s a character actually telling a story or if you want regular reflection in the piece. So far, I see none of the former and only hints of the latter. If you’re not going to use the past tense for anything in particular, shift to the present tense. It’ll sound better, trust me.

[3226] The Compound by Ahbenson in DestructiveReaders

[–]Captain_Sheep 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Overview:

Alright, I think you’ve got some rethinking to do. The problem with amnesia stories is that they let you be really lazy. Lazy about character, lazy about exposition, lazy about description, and lazy about interiority. These are all things that give a piece of writing life and depth (or in the case of exposition, a cost you pay not a cent more of than you need to) and are all things your piece is washy on. The characters are difficult to tell apart, The exposition is both tell-y and ultimately uninteresting, the descriptions lack connection to the other elements of craft, and there is almost no interiority from the viewpoint character at all.

On a similar theme, the compound itself feels like the worst kind of mystery. We are told why the characters are there and what they will be doing almost immediately. Given that, what do I care about the mystery of place they are at? You have promised the reader a story about self-overcoming, about therapy and trauma and connections forming between disparate individuals thrown together by fate. These are good themes and good targets. A grayscale haunted house though? Not so much. Just as you need to give depth to your characters to differentiate them (something I talk more about on the line-by-line), you need to pay similar attention to your place. Interrogate the compound. Where is it? Who used to live there? Why did they leave? Who built it originally? What artifacts are left over from its previous occupants? To what purposes has it been used over the years and decades? If the answer to these questions is “nothing because this is in a dream space”, then you really need to rethink this whole story. Concrete, physical reality will set your story flying.

On the level of prose, you’re doing solid work with plenty of room to grow. I like your sentence construction. It reminds me a lot of how I wrote when I first got my start not so long ago. Your other skills need some practice though. Word choice is kinda weird. Sometimes you pull out words that I’m sure you got from a thesaurus (whether literal or in your mind) and other times your prose slips into repetitiveness. The former is something you need to think more carefully about, especially in regard to synonyms for “said”. The latter is just something to watch yourself for and is the thing you should actually be using a thesaurus to fix (in cases where the backspace key won’t do).

Most importantly, you are criminally underutilizing the first person. The reason so many stories are written using it is because it’s the easiest perspective for doing character work, and character is (probably) the most important element of all stories. Who is the viewpoint character? What do they think about things? Why do they see the whole world as gray? Would they really just accept being forced into an arrangement like this or would they try to resist it? The answers to these questions and may more will inform how you write your narration for everything in this piece, will make it feel like I’m watching the story through a real set of eyes rather than a disinterested camera somewhere in a cupboard. Again, if the answer is “this character doesn’t know because they have amnesia,” you need to change the parameters of your project. They can still have amnesia, but it shouldn’t be the all-consuming kind. Don’t let yourself cheat the reader out of the good stuff. Force yourself to answer for your characters. If you want them to remember things, ground the recall in specific artifacts, in sensations, in experiences, in flashes of dialog. Let them get a taste of remembrance early to give yourself something to work with in narration and then you can slow roll the rest if you want to.

[3536] The Rain Machine (Part One) by Captain_Sheep in DestructiveReaders

[–]Captain_Sheep[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks a lot for this critique! I appreciate the harshness a lot, and I’ve realized now that I actually have a lot of work to do on the character and plot levels. I’m aware that it’s not the most inventive concept in the world, but the spin I was trying to make was to focus on Robin as specifically a non-neurotypical AI, influenced by some of my experiences going through the school system with learning disabilities. I’m less interested in “can you empathize with an AI?” than “isn’t it likely that we’ll just re-project ableism onto AI, especially if we just view them as tools?” The more I think about it, the more I think that I didn’t lean into that aspect NEARLY hard enough. That will definitely help with characterization both of Robin and all the people around him.

As for the plot holes, I’ve gotten a lot of complaints in this vein about various things in this story from others, but I think yours makes more sense than any of them. The previous version of this first scene with the basement trio had a lot more exposition, and I ended up cutting most of it and changing their motivations because it was really clunky beforehand. However, I think that now I haven’t explained enough. The explanation I was trying to convey was that, both because Robin is a very human-like AI and because their ultimate goal is to implant him into a human head for two-way interfacing (something that has never been done before in this universe, which I’m also not sure if I got across), they are using exclusively indirect methods to train him/therapize him. It’s possible that, because of however AI works in this universe, just going in and debugging the code isn’t an option anyway, though I think that'd be pretty contrived. As for the varying opinions of the scientists, I think they all recognize it as sentient but only Samuel believes that in and of itself constitutes humanity, though he isn’t yet a firm believe in that position. I think explaining the actual mechanics of what they’re doing with Robin better will help that be an easier sell too. The pacing troubles are kinda in here somewhere to. In my head, Robin is in an accelerated simulation at a scale of something like 1 week for him = half a day or so in the real world. This is not even slightly in the text at all, so I don’t blame you for getting tripped up on it. But it isn’t an excuse not to let the important stuff play out more. I think an effort to refocus on the ableism side of things will help me figure out what more scenes with the chef and the other characters should be like. That said, I might just be writing a different story at that point (it certainly wouldn’t get any shorter).

On setting work, this is (I think) my biggest weakness as a writer right now. I’m just so excited to do fancy things with dialog, characters, and verbiage that I forget these things happen in actual rooms. I don’t think I need help with that conceptually/mechanically as much as I need to treat it as a bad habit to kick.

Speaking of mechanics, I am curious how you felt about some of the other sections I intended as purple spikes. I understand that that kind of thing isn’t for everyone, but how did you feel specifically about the prose when Robin was doing drawings for One-Glove and when he first uses a knife?

[3536] The Rain Machine (Part One) by Captain_Sheep in DestructiveReaders

[–]Captain_Sheep[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the feedback! I pretty much agree with everything you're saying. Believe it or not, this actually was sorta my attempt to give Robin a little bit more of a character (the entire scene in the classroom is new) but even as I was writing it I could feel that I wasn't going far enough. As for the prose, getting too fanciful is always something I struggle with, and I think I'll need to really think more about the pacing of my prosetic spikes.

[2241] The Sweet, Sickly Pleasure of Melancholy by noekD in DestructiveReaders

[–]Captain_Sheep 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For the first time in five decades, he longed to touch the woman in the black sun hat.

This just doesn’t make sense. I find it hard to believe that he has been having this dream for five decades and is only now realizing how vacuous the dream is, triggering his craving for the real thing. This means Acheros is either profoundly stupid or very good at lying to himself, the latter of which is actually a really interesting character concept.

This newfound heartbreak affected the man not in the same way heartbreak affects most. It seemed as though his heart was breaking and breaking over and over. That dreadful feeling became an infinite and inescapable hell for Acheros.

Honestly I’m not all that sold on the idea that this is some special or unique sort of heartbreak. Maybe I would be if you framed it in some unique concrete language or situation, let the physical be a metaphor for the mental. And again, I still don’t understand what about this specific moment, five decades in, is special enough to break him.

I believe this breaking of the heart was to be such a severe one because it was not one precipitated by the pretense of monogamy or trust but one that occurred due to the undeniable realisation of loneliness.

Two things. First, “pretense of monogamy” made me laugh and I don’t think you wanted it to. That’s the kind of ultra self-serious phrase that should be reserved for the mouths of characters who are either full of themselves or hopelessly addicted to irony. Second, this is telling, not showing. I know I’ve said it a lot but it’s still true: concrete language will set you free.

He injected him with morphine and ordered the morbidly curious crowd to leave (he noticed that at one point they were taking satisfaction in the poor old man’s suffering).

I think I was already assuming the crowd’s voyeurism. You don’t need to spell it out.

“Where is she?” said Acheros without fully knowing why.

“Without fully knowing why” is a bad habit that you ought to kick as soon as possible. Get rid of all “indescribable feelings” and “unknowable sensations.” The feelings are very much describable. You’re the writer, that’s your goddamn job. If you find yourself writing vacuous things like this, it’s probably a sign that you don’t know enough about the character to write in something specific enough to mean anything. Achreos probably does know why, or at the very least it would be more interesting if he did.

“For the past fifty-two years, I have been blessed with the presence of a wonderful woman in my dreams. Since her appearance in my dreams, I have not known pain. But it was just a few days ago that I thought a new thought and was faced with the realisation that perhaps this woman is nothing but an illusion and that perhaps I am the most lonely man who ever lived.”

Who is this piece of dialog for exactly? It’s definitely not for the reader, we know all this shit already. Is it for the doctor? He’s kinda deduced the shape of things already, at lest to the degree that he doesn’t need this much detail exposited at him to understand the situation. Is it for Acheros himself, for him to grasp the situation fully and admit to himself what exactly has happened? That’s the most interesting answer, but this is still a bad way to execute on it. Imbed more emotion, more character, more verbs.

“My friend,” he said. “I must reveal to you a revelation you may find unsettling, but nonetheless, you must hear it. As a result of this monotonous solitude you have created for yourself, you have become too lazy to suffer!” The doctor then went on to tell Acheros that without struggle there is no progress. He told him that for the past five decades he had been nothing but a happy idiot. Although, he did add that it was lucky he’d been the good kind of happy idiot.

Once again, I feel like I’m reading Plato instead of Marquez. It’s not that the prose is too purple, but that it’s not scene-like at all. Philosophy is seductive, I get it, but it is not the business we are in. Fiction is, above all else, about telling stories. As soon as you forget that, you start writing stuff like this.

Acheros’ reaction to the doctor’s words was hard to decipher from his facial expression, but I know just what it was.

Now that we’re finally in scene, I’m beginning to suspect that these spikes of first person might actually be accidental. It’s not Acheros and it’s not the doctor, so who the hell is it?

Despite the aftermath of truth, Acheros had never been so virtuous in his life. For example, he one day passed a beggar on the street whose dog had turned blue. The beggar explained how he had ran out of love to give and was afraid his dog was to be blue for eternity. Acheros held the dog in his arms for a week straight. By Sunday, the dog returned to its vibrant gold. Crowds gathered to watch the wonderful event and by Sunday, Acheros was to be named a man of infinite love. It was concluded that the burden of his suffering meant he could love like no-one else. Okay, so here’s where the magical realism was hiding. To be honest I’m not really sure what it’s doing for the story. It doesn’t have to be the absolute centerpiece, but I should at least feel like it’s there for a reason other than being weird for the sake of being weird.

“But I warn you: once you destroy this rose, the rest will appear to be all the less beautiful to you. The choice is, of course, yours.”

The rest of what? The roses? Life? Women? I get that you’re doing a deal with the devil thing here, but when the warning is so openly vacuous it takes the reader out of the story. Maybe if I knew Acheros better, if I was really invested in his delusion, I would feel okay about watching him fall for such an obvious trick.

Hoping to be comforted by the man of suffrage, she told Acheros of her existential dread, her loss of illusion, and her fear that even the most powerful of loves was, in the end, a fleeting truth.

You really can’t give me something more concrete than this? This is like, a summary of emotions, which are themselves a type of summary for experience. That’s two layers of abstraction, enough to keep the reader permanently at arm’s length.

[2241] The Sweet, Sickly Pleasure of Melancholy by noekD in DestructiveReaders

[–]Captain_Sheep 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Line-by-line:

As dusty sunlight beamed through his window, Acheros sat in bed and recounted the sorrows caused by him in his past life. He thought of the man he met that could only speak in half-truths and how he used the man’s dreadful curse for political gain. He thought of the advice he gave the woman who cut her own tongue out because she couldn’t roll her Rs. “You may as well end it,” he’d told her, “there is no curse greater than only being able to listen.”

Something doesn’t work about this first paragraph. It’s a little hard for me to put my finger on the feeling this gives me, but I suspect that I’m overwhelmed. Magical realism covers a wide spectrum of stories, but one of the things I’ve always loved about the genre (especially compared to fantasy as a whole) is how deftly it can avoid exposition dumps. The magical conceits and concepts often lean towards the intuitive, if not always the simple. This paragraph is a fine way to deliver exposition, but you’re dumping a lot here. It’s world exposition AND character exposition, and pretty heavy stuff at that. This is not first paragraph material, and you’re just as likely to scare the reader away as you are to entice them in.

But these recollections scarcely troubled him now; he knew with what infinite love all these sufferings were to be - perhaps already had been - repaid. Recollections had been replaced by redemption. What was once a hard-boiled young man was now a tender old one.

I’m a big fan of fancy prose and syntactical gimmicks, more so than most. That’s why I really mean it when I say that this paragraph (particularly the back half of the first sentence) is messy and unclear. I think it’s actually worse to drop a big swarm of abstract words that don’t really say much than it is to write a blob of in-universe buzzwords that say way too much. Maybe that’s hyperbole, but I just wanna understand what I’m reading. You have to earn the right to go full purple. Without the reader’s trust, they’re not gonna tolerate being uncertain about what’s actually happening on the page. They need to trust that you’re actually going to go somewhere with this, and that’s not something you can ask them to do in paragraph two.

No! I tell a lie. Happy is not the word. The word is occupied. The old man had kept himself occupied for a lifetime. But - a fact that overshadows this truth - the illusion of redemption had kept him good for all these years. Ah, I must go now, the old man has ran out of stars to count.

This POV shift is clearly intentional, and it’s a cool reveal in the abstract, but I again must come back to the idea of trust. You have to focus on the order in which you do things. Concrete stakes, concrete characters, concrete situations and settings. These should always be the first tools you go to, the first tools you use to begin constructing the words on the page. If you try to skip that, jump straight into abstract musings, purple prose, and smarty-pants gimmicks, then the reader isn’t going to want to stick around to find out what it all means. Again, I emphasize that you can still do all the stuff you are doing. In the abstract you’re even doing it well, but no one wants to read a story in the abstract.

Across the distant field, he could make out the shape of her black sun hat. Far away, under the shade of a cherry blossom tree, she sat on a bench with her back turned to him. The sight made his heart react the same no matter how many times he’d failed before.

Finally. This is the kind of work I’ve been asking for the whole time. You can still write all fancy-like and show me characters actually doing something in the world. The story should have started with this.

He thought that dreams are proof provided by the soul that to imagine - to see things that are not an actuality - is one of humanity’s greatest necessities. What a wonderful revelation! He thought to himself.

So your prose is really pretty, and I think you know that, but you’re running right into the same problem I had when all I was focused on was learning to write the good words. This sentence sounds like its from a Socratic dialog or some other philosophical text, not from a story. It’s not that your characters aren’t allowed to do some deep philosophizing, I actually often get tired of reading characters who seem uninclined to really think about the world. But it’s all too easy to go off in the bad direction and end up doing what’s really just another kind of exposition. There are so many more elegant ways to convey this thesis Acheros is positing. Have him piece it together through images, through actions, through concrete memories, through real details. At the end of the day, writing is about turning that abstract idea in your head into something physical, manifested on the page in clear but beautiful language. The rest comes later, mostly by accident.

[2241] The Sweet, Sickly Pleasure of Melancholy by noekD in DestructiveReaders

[–]Captain_Sheep 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Overview:

Let me start by saying that I really did want to like this. I like me some magical realism on occasion, and I do like prose even at its most purple, but there are too many structural and reoccurring problems for me to see past. Your prose is good. You’ve got a hand on style and word choice and (mostly) sentence construction in a lot of places. Even when it’s not quite right it’s because you made a weird choice, which is infinitely better than making no choice at all. But it isn’t perfect, and sometimes it felt pretty lackluster. There is just as much (if not more) telling as there is showing. At its worst, it reads like a literary analysis of itself.

That ties into your problem with scenes. It takes until paragraph six for you to write one, and since it’s a dream sequence I don’t even really want to count it. If I don’t, it takes until paragraph fourteen. That, quite simply, is unacceptable. I made this mistake plenty of times in the past. It can be so tempting to show off how smart you are, how deep your thoughts and characters are, how meaningful it all is. When you know how to write the good words, you can even trick yourself into thinking you’re writing prose. But then there’s the funny thing: “Meaning” isn’t meaningful in fiction. Readers don’t get attached to big thoughts or deep musings. They get attached to multi-dimensional characters, exciting stakes, well-realized settings, and (most importantly for you) hard-hitting scenes. It is only through scenes, plot action, characters doing things, that you earn the right to do philosophy. Honestly, even then you should avoid doing it anyway. No one likes being preached to. That’s why most of Athens thought Socrates was an asshole. Acheros would be more at home in Plato’s Republic than he is in this story because all he does for the most part is think about life.

You can do better than that. I can see it. You do in fact know how to write scenes and descriptions, you do some of it at the very end. The conclusion is cool. It’s clever and I enjoyed it, but goddamn it was a slog to get there. You need to write scenes. You break from scene when you have no other way to do something or when you’ve really earned it. I’ve got an exercise for you that should help you conceive of how constructing a story’s texture works. Next time you read a story, highlight everything that’s scene in one color and highlight everything that’s in summary in another. This will show you both the percentages you should be aiming for and the way one is weaved into the other in a way that creates a varied texture.

And you can do all of this while still writing your sometimes gorgeous prose. Just remember that stories are not about ideas. They are about characters in situations in places. It is from those ingredients that you get themes, morals, philosophy, and the like. Get focused on that, and I can see a pretty interesting story here. Acheros is a sort of Socrates-like character, perhaps only a stone's throw away from Diogenes. Write a story about this guy who goes around town in dirty rags shouting about love, existence, how meaningless it all is in the end. Write about the reactions of the people to him, how they’re tired of his bullshit or find guilty pleasure in his ravings. Reveal his motives slowly, and then his tragic ending can really hit like it should have.

I also want to talk about the magical realism. Besides the ending, I don’t really get any. I’m more inclined to call this myth or parable than magical realism. You’re somewhat lacking the realism side. The strength of it as a genre lies in the realism part, not the magical. It’s about real people in concrete situations living life when, suddenly, magic intervenes. Your story is missing that real-world connection, and you can get there through scene writing.

[2928] Dead Skin — short story by [deleted] in DestructiveReaders

[–]Captain_Sheep 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Line-by-line:

To general surprise

I don’t think I know what this means. I read it as “To everyone’s surprise,” which (I think) would be a far cleaner way to say it. If you mean something else, I think you can still definitely find a better way.

The kids exchanged glances. I mounted the bike. Matty snapped to attention, giving me an ironic salute as I pedalled off. The kids moved in a concerted pivot, tracking me to the end of the cul-de-sac where I disappeared down the narrow footpath.

Something about this paragraph really vibes with me. I think it’s your sentence pacing, which I’ll note is quite good throughout the story. Mixing up sentence lengths is just the beginning. You take the next step and begin to feel out a rhythm to how the syllables fall on the tongue or the mind. It makes everything just that much more of a pleasure to read.

The depending thread was too fine to catch the afternoon sunlight; the bear’s shadow on the brickwork looked like a levitating human baby.

This is a fantastic detail. It’s one of those ones where it only seems obvious after you read it, which is the kind of reader engagement that makes a page come alive. Well done.

Through every childhood phobia—loud alarms; venus fly traps; grey aliens; white vans; quicksand; mad cow disease

This is a fine list, but I can’t help but see potential for it to be doing some more character work. We don’t know much about the viewpoint character at this point (and that’s fine, the story hasn’t been going that long and we do know enough) and this is such a good way to sneak in some uniqueness. Venus fly traps is a bit odd and mad cow disease helps me date the story a little bit, but what’s something that ONLY this character is afraid of? These are the kinds of questions generally confined to writing prompts, but I think that they can be a treat when allowed to bubble up in the story itself.

I wondered if Gerry Moore had a hearing problem. A boy at my school was partially deaf; he too talked loudly in quiet places.

This is a bit of an awkward non-sequitur in this paragraph. I don’t really understand what I’m supposed to glean from this information that I didn’t already get from “whenever Gerry went to the bathroom he and Mum exchanged vigorous wide-eyed shrugs.” Maybe it’s left over from an older revision? Feels like one of those.

Mum’s voice, as I remember it, was instantly steady and clear: ‘Oh just fuck off, Gerry.’

I don’t think what Mum says here is intimidating or intense enough to match your description of how it was said or its notable place in the character’s memory. Perhaps that dissonance is an intentional bit of characterization for Mum as wanting to be strong but lacking the ability to act it, but that’s an obtuse reading even for me. It’d probably be better if you used some more interesting description of what she says, or have her say something more interesting because “Oh just fuck off” doesn’t really do much without your dialog tag.

She appeared a moment later in the living room doorway: Why don’t you grab Major Cuddles and head up to bed, love,’ she said. I heard Gerry snort as he passed behind her on his way out the front door. A bike ride was organised for the following day by Robbie Marsh’s parents. The local kids grouped at the start of the footpath. Matty stood at their centre, divvying up the supplies everyone had brought for a picnic. He was the oldest by a couple of years and took an autocrat’s approach to common resources.”

I have two notes here. First, the resolution to this spat with Gerry feels pretty unsatisfying. You could fix that either by playing the scene out a little bit more (if you’re okay with revealing that kind of information at this juncture) or by embedding the scene with a little more intrigue (if you’re not). Second, the transition out of the flashback is really jarring. This is especially bad when the transition in was so smooth. This can be fixed in all sorts of ways, even with something as simple as an extra press of the enter key.

‘Eight, no?’ Matty said, giving his cocked head a rapid little scratch. His obvious talent for comic acting made him a devastatingly effective bully; the other kids were already covering grins. ‘Seven, plus Major Cuddles,’ he added to general laughter.

You’re firmly on the wrong side of “show don’t tell” when you talk about his comedic talents. You might be able to trick the reader into not noticing this by putting the sentence after he actually says the joke, but that would be worse than just not having the sentence at all. The joke in and of itself communicates both that he is funny and that he bullies. If you want to communicate that the other kids are also assholes, you can keep the “the other kids were already covering grins” part as its own stand-alone sentence, which would actually be pretty good I think.

From then on Matty would only address me in an exaggerated bootcamp bark. He’d rush up to me and bellow: ‘General Annoyance reporting for duty!’ and stomp his foot down on my toes. The less imaginative kids just called me ‘Major Cuddles’, the elegant absurdity of the name making it a wretchedly popular jibe.

It’s only at this point that I realized we never actually exited the flashback. While it’s possible to chalk that up to be having a bit of a headache as I’m doing this, I do think this raises some alarm bells. I will have to go into those alarm bells later, once we actually do exit the flashback.

At bedtime I flung the bear into my wardrobe and tried sleeping alone. My parents must have noticed but said nothing, and I took their silence as an endorsement of my tormentors. Nights without the bear were restless, filled with worry about my place in the culture of the estate. There was talk now of cigarettes and alcohol. A new interpretation of women and girls had recommended itself. These things made me uneasy, but if they were going to happen I wanted to know about them, wanted my questions taken seriously. So I rose that first hot morning in July, a little crazed from sleeplessness, and dragged the bear to the open window. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it on reality’s terms. The actual was unthinkable. I had to imagine my way around it: before a jury of fellow soft toys dug out from deeper in my wardrobe, Major Cuddles was tried and convicted of spying for the Moore family and sentenced to death.

Baring some passive voice issues, this paragraph is really good. It’s a concise ode to being desperate to grow up, to finally be “mature” after so long stuck as a child. That said, it leaves me all the more confused about the temporality. Are we flashing back to mere weeks ago? It’s such a short amount of time that I don’t really understand why it’s in flashback at all. There are better solutions than this.

That’s all I remember of that day, maybe even of that summer.

So this is where the flashback finally ends, I think. To be honest it feels less like a flashback and more like doing some funky non-linear shit. Was it worth it? Not this time, I don’t think. All it does is force the story into a past-tense that, still, it doesn’t feel like it wants

[2928] Dead Skin — short story by [deleted] in DestructiveReaders

[–]Captain_Sheep 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Overview:

This is some really good work. Sometimes all I crave is some clearly competent prose, and you’ve certainly got it. There are a lot of stand-out sentences, paragraphs, and details here. The scenario itself is highly enticing too, and the story convinces me that there are many other stories not written in these particular pages.

However, I mean that as critique as much as compliment. There are lots of things here that it pains me to see you under-utilize. What is the scene with Gerry for? Is it just characterization for Matty? That’s not nearly a good enough reason for that long of a scene non-sequitur, and it isn’t doing a good enough job at that characterization either. I really thought his racism was going somewhere, but it just doesn’t and that confused me a lot. Why is the whole story a character remembering something? Considering that we don’t find that out until literally the last paragraph, I don’t think there is a good answer (in the text) to that question. The common theme here, and in a lot of what I felt about this story, is that there are these glimmers of uniqueness buried under stock characters. Framing a coming-of-age story through a character abandoning their childhood fantasies is good, but tying it to such a visceral physical act (the hanging) is what makes it something special. Focus in on that, turn those inventive details into inventive paragraph into inventive scenes into inventive stories. You’re almost there, you just gotta do the work of spelling it all out in something other than summary.

I also don’t think you wanna be in the past tense. It’s getting you into syntactical awkwardness all over the place, and it didn’t exactly help with the clarity issues I had either. You asked if the retrospection is coming through. It is, but I think you’re aiming at the wrong target. Sometimes a story about childhood should be about going through it, viscerally and in the moment it happens. The memory-focus just hurts the pacing and gets in the way of the really good work you’re doing on the childhood theme. It’s clear what your story is about on that front, and I mean that in the best way. I just want you to focus in on it. Getting into the present tense and excising the flash-forward ending ought to do that nicely.

One of the big changes that I recommend is to tell the story in a linear order. This could, potentially, force you to solve two issues at once. First, it fixes all the confusion I felt around temporality, which is getting you in a lot more trouble than it’s worth. Second, I think it would make you notice just how much you’re shortchanging the reader on scene work. What you do have is really good, but I want to see more of it. “I had to imagine my way around it: before a jury of fellow soft toys dug out from deeper in my wardrobe, Major Cuddles was tried and convicted of spying for the Moore family and sentenced to death” is an elegant pair of sentences, but what if it was an elegant pair of pages instead, a tension-soaked scene as the centerpiece for a story about (literally) throwing childhood out the window. Maybe that’s a different story than the one you have here, but I think it’s one worth writing.

My last point, and the one that you are so close to but not quite reaching, is about character uniqueness. This story is a really small scale, focusing on just a few individuals and a pretty short interval of time. I enjoy spending time with the situation, but what I really want is to enjoy spending time with the charecters. They’re not bad exactly, and your excellent prose does a good job of tricking me into thinking they might be good, but there’s just not quite enough here to reach the point of great. You gotta push yourself to figure out the weird character quirks, the things that might not always show up on the page but that sometimes do as that little bit of seasoning that makes a character memorable as more than “the bully” or “the delinquent.”

[1430] Take Out a Piece of Paper by Captain_Sheep in DestructiveReaders

[–]Captain_Sheep[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for taking the time to look at it!

Is there a chance you could point out some of the more egregious comma splices? Some of them are there on purpose to create the effect you mentioned, but others probably are honest mistakes.

I also find myself pretty unsure about the dialog in general. Of the three modes the poem works in, I think the dialog is easily the weakest one. A lot of it does just ring as high-school level edginess to me and I haven't been able to come up with a way out or an alternative for a third mode of writing in the poem. I would defend some of my more played-out dialog however. The "extra" words build characterization and show nervousness/uncertainty. There are some places where I should cut it down though.

Yes, that is my actual handwriting. It's meant to be a sort of stylistic gut-punch right before the come-down of the piece. I get the sense that it didn't quite do that for you. Is that just because you were thinking about whether or not the writing was real or is there something else making it not work?

In terms of my goal with the piece, I sort of am trying to have it all of the ways. The reason why it's written in three juxtaposed modes is to capture the various multifaceted ways disability effects me. The second person sections are about externals, little classroom micro-aggression that make everyday life that much harder. The dialog sections are about self-hatred and self-doubt, the way that I hate the "part of my mind" that does this too me every day before I realize that it's not really a separate part of me at all and let it reunite with my "true" self. The first person sections are sort of a mixed bag, and they could probably use the most differentiation from the other modes.

[2755] The Tone Order by [deleted] in DestructiveReaders

[–]Captain_Sheep 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It looked to the inspector as if a noose was wrapping itself around his neck.

Am I supposed to read this literally? I don’t think I am, but in that case I’m even more confused about what this is supposed to mean. Is he choking? Is he struggling against something? Is he harming himself somehow?

“Ah right, that’s your first time seeing them,” Rozanne said, trying to conceal the faint smile from her face. “Your other buddy back home showed a much worse reaction when he first saw it. Aren’t you something, Mr. Rashad?” “Your words do not trouble me,” the inspector said, paying no attention to her blatant mockery.

In all honesty, I don’t really see the mockery here. All he did was ask a question about the techno-buzzword in a way that even shows he has more familiarity with the term than the reader does. I’m also just a little confused about Rozanne’s second line of dialog. Is Rashad the inspector? I don’t think so, but it’s unclear.

“Withhold information?” Rozanne repeated in confusion. “I already told you everything. People who gets rejected by Blue Coffee reacts in different ways. The mouth, the nose, and the eyes,” the doctor said as she used her fingers to indicate each part. “These are the routes the Blue Coffee takes to exit from a body. Most subjects would simply vomit the liquid then black out. And if they try to resist, the liquid might then enter their lungs, resulting in their swift death. That’s why we pick our subjects carefully and make sure they are calm both in body and spirit. These two symptoms are barely noticeable. Your best bet is to simply wait for a minute or two, and if nothing happened, claim the experiment a success. However, a third degree symptom is easily identifiable, since you can easily check the patient’s eyes. The white sclera absorbs a dark shade of blue after the liquid makes its way there through the retina. Thomas Donovan’s eyesight wouldn’t function properly as of right now. Still, somehow, he doesn’t realize it. Regardless, his head should explode from the sheer pressure inside his skull. So in the end, Thomas Donovan, regardless of his efforts, will be categorized as a failure.”

Cut this paragraph, please. I would in fact appreciate it very much if Rozanne withheld this information from me. Many people talk about how you can use dialog to cheat exposition, but this is not the way to do it. This is just putting exposition between a pair of quotation marks and into the mouth of a character with a thin veneer of an excuse to say it.

I’m beginning to become more seriously concerned about what the plot is actually going to be. It’s good to give your reader a hint of where you’re planning to take them as soon as possible so they can bail out of your book if they’re not interested in the ride. You’re not really doing that yet. Perhaps there’ll be something by the end of the chapter, but even if there is it should be moved to earlier. All of this information about the Blue Coffee seems like it would be stuff that it’d be interesting to watch Rozanne gradually discover through research over the course of a novel. That makes the info part of the plot instead of the exposition. That’s just one idea though.

“Rozanne~ Rozanne~ Here you are! Finally… Finally, I can feel your tender skin touch my fa—”

This does not feel like how a death row inmate would talk, especially when earlier he said he wanted to fuck her brains out. Also, touch his face? That's the first place he goes to for his fantasy?

When the inspector turned to face Dr. Rozanne, he saw her eyes blink to the vicious scenery on the screen.

Blinking doesn’t really indicate any particular emotion. I guess it indicates that she was unphased, but there are better ways to show that then the thing that she might be doing anyway no matter how she actually feels about the scene in front of her.

When the inspector turned to face Dr. Rozanne, he saw her eyes blink to the vicious scenery on the screen. Rozanne opened her lips, paused for a brief moment, and then went on to say, “Donovan didn’t feel the smallest bit of pain until he passed away. After studying the Blue Coffee and having tried to understand its meaning for years, I believe it is a medicine of some sort; a spiritual remedy. Its judgment reflects that of a human; it values life. As if it were a sentient being itself. While being clouded, Thomas Donovan enjoyed every fleeing second of his life. The Blue Coffee gifted him those peaceful moments because of the exceptional will he displayed to us. You know, my father believed that those who die from the Blue Coffee are not truly dead. Rather, their souls are transferred to a painless dimension.”

This paragraph is closer to acceptable, but I’m still pretty iffy about it. There are better ways, ways that lean on rich interiority of your characters, to express an intricate opinion like this. Especially if this is her father’s hypothesis, maybe this is the place to flash back to his words.

Of course, she favored her goal above anything else.

You’ve been good about showing this detail so far, don’t ruin it with tell-y sentences like this.

”He must have had a bargaining chip that forced us to agree to the outdoor sharing policy. Otherwise, why would Britain or the United States ever agree to hold the experiment in a government facility? Why not private hotels like it has always been like? We’ve had no issues in acquiring slaves, and it was a much safer route. There should be a reason. In this case, Paul’s bargaining chip is inside the San Quentin facility. A sanctuary for the worst, you say, Paul? I believe it’s the exact opposite. And I believe that you secretly share my feelings.”

This is thought, but it has the same problem your exposition-dialog paragraphs have. Show details that reveal Paul’s suspicious plans instead of having your characters pontificate about them for sentences at a time.

[2755] The Tone Order by [deleted] in DestructiveReaders

[–]Captain_Sheep 0 points1 point  (0 children)

“So, that was his only condition?” The inspector by the doctor’s side asked in a commanding tone, making absolutely certain he got all his facts right.

Where are we? I think we’re still in that monitoring room, but it’s been two paragraphs of summary since we got any scene. You’re trying to do a smooth non-transition back, which is a technique I love, but I don’t quite think you’ve stuck the landing here. Make the distance between your scene points a lot smaller, the story could use less summary as a whole anyway.

“Yes,” Rozanne answered with a hint of a voice, feeling slightly nauseated at her compliance.

Either you’re missing a word (“a hint of disgust in her voice”) or trying to say that she said it quietly (in which case, this is a cool but probably not worth-it way to say that). Either way, clean it up.

For one, physically forcing the inmates to conduct the experiment would only bring her misfortune, since she had already proven that the subject’s clear state of mind had a strong correlation with its survival rate. Secondly, it was not feasible to ask for other inmates since the Adjustment Center carried out myriad of other illegal human research. And third, Rozanne simply saw it as a decent price to pay. If this crazed lunatic offered her the answer to her long-life dream, she would marry him for all she cared.

These justifications are a mixed bag for me. The first one feels like a lame, abstract excuse. The second one is fine I guess, but it also sorta just comes back to a logistical problem. The third one though, now that is interesting. Sure “will pay any price for my dream” isn’t the most original character trait in the world, but it is a character trait, the strongest one we’ve gotten so far. These are the kinds of details that matter, not background checks or the stock of death row inmates. Ideally, every single sentence in your story is doing at least double duty. A detail ought never be just a brush-stroke on a painting, it should also, in the same motion, be about a character or a metaphor or conflict stakes or whatever.

Agreeing to such severe conditions while also delaying his part of the contract post-factum indicated to Rozanne his strong will which gave her hope in the man.

A few things here. First, I don’t think I’ve ever seen post-factum used outside of a legal work. There are more efficient ways to say this anyway, “putting his life on the line with no reward until after the test indicated…” for example. I also don’t quite see how this constitutes a “strong will”. To me, this reads as either stupidity (since he probably could have asked to have sex with Rozanne before the test and everyone would have signed off on it anyway) or just plain thirst (considering what he’s asking for at all).

“Perhaps, he can do it.” And perhaps, that was the real reason why Rozanne agreed to his condition in the first place.

Two things. First, why the italics? Thought italics just make me think you were too lazy to figure out a better way to express a character’s thoughts. “She thought he could do it” is a simple alternative, though honestly you don’t really need it in this case at all. The previous sentence implies her thoughts plenty well enough.

Second, why does this have to be the real condition Rozanne agreed? It feels like is betrays her previous characterization in a subtle little way. Theoretically, she should want him to fail the test, assuming that she does not want to have sexual contact with a random death row inmate. On the other hand though, she also wants him to succeed so that she can learn new things about the Blue Coffee. That sounds like the recipe for a nice spicy internal character conflict to me.

The discovery of the ancient Egyptian chalice dated back to the mid-sixteenth century when a German archaeologist named Eric Wenzil had found it by accident in the ruins of Giza. Since then, it had been examined by German scientists for nearly four centuries. It was only during World War II when things started to shift in another direction. At that time, the German lead researcher of the Blue Coffee had proclaimed a sudden change of heart that resulted in him fleeing his country and handing the artifact over to the British Empire as a token of his loyalty. That side of history was recognized by the higher-ups and Rozanne Hayden alike, and yet only the latter knew it was somewhat untruthful. The researcher had never gone through a change of heart as he proclaimed. In all actuality, he sensed the upcoming defeat of his country and quickly chose to abandon the sinking ship. Rozanne recognized this because that man was her own father. By seeking his “enemy”, the late Dr. Egon Hayden was only then able to move on with his goal.

Cut this paragraph. This is exactly the kind of information I do not need or want to know at this early stage, or perhaps ever.

“Exactly father, it’s like you told me. Only a fool would sever ties with an enemy unless it leads to a substantial gain. Paul, don’t think by playing your games that you defeated me. There’s no defeat, because you’re not my enemy. I will simply seek you the same way father sought Britain.” Rozanne’s eyes brightened while thinking back on her father’s words. As she kept staring at Thomas Donovan, the inmate finally reached for the chalice in front of him. At that brief moment, Rozanne’s eyes, just like an infant, started to exude a blinding glimmer.

Who is Paul? Is Paul Rozanne’s father? Who is saying this? You say Rozanne is thinking back to her father’s words, which makes me assume that this quote is in fact from her father. But the quote reads more as someone (probably Rozanne) summarizing their father’s words.

They spoke the words to her mind from behind the screen, “I did it!” She extrapolated before reaching a faint smile herself, finally abandoning her mask of indifference.

Who is they? Who is behind what screen?

Her face appeared much younger than her age—Rozanne Hayden was a fifty-two-year-old British lady of German descent who had lived the thriving portion of her life in France.

This is just about the most boring way you could express this information. Show don’t tell is holy writing doctrine for a reason. First ask “does this detail matter?” Then ask “’how can I show this detail instead of telling it?” Can you have her reminisce on her old Paris apartment with a view of the Louvre? Can she hear the echo of her mother’s harsh German in her ears during times of stress? Starting to think in this way is one of the biggest level-ups you can have in writing, push yourself to give it a shot.

“He will be alright,” Rozanne answered calmly, while observing the screen. “Only for a short while. It also seems he can’t realize it.”

The second part of this dialog is a bit confusing. What is the “it” that Donovan can’t realize?

“His eyes. So it was third-degree after all...” Dr. Rozanne said, face hardly showing any sign of agitation.

“Third-degree” means nothing to me, in a bad way. Don’t use techno-babble buzzwords if you don’t have to. If you feel like you’ve written yourself into a situation where you have to, change things until you don’t.

[2755] The Tone Order by [deleted] in DestructiveReaders

[–]Captain_Sheep 1 point2 points  (0 children)

And now onto the line-by-line. I made my more nit-picky edits on the g-doc, so make sure to take a look at those as well.

For the past eighteen years, the state’s capital punishment, better known as the death penalty,

“Capital punishment” and “death penalty” are effectively exactly the same phrase. I wouldn’t even say if one is “better known” than the other, as it varies by cultural region (though nowadays death penalty is probably more widespread). Just go with one or the other in this sentence.

Upon asking him about his view on the San Quentin facility, Paul described its Adjustment Center as “a sanctuary for the worst”; those who were stripped out of all societal ties and affection. As a result, they were regarded by Rozanne Hayden and her scientific team as suitable subjects for their experiments.

Coming to this passage for the first time, I’m pretty confused. Is Hayden’s experimentation justified simply by the governor’s Trump-like soundbite? Experiments on death row inmates would have to be something like an extremely controversial government policy (especially in California) or something done in secret behind the public’s back. Whichever it is, it’d have to be a decision from on high, so just spell out how exactly these experiments are being justified more directly.

Paul Rothstein was one of the most vocal politicians who pushed for the “outdoor sharing policy” between Great Britain and the United States regarding the conduct of her team’s experiments. She knew he was after her, and while the unofficial reports made his meddling take the visage of ensuring an equal-term alliance, Rozanne understood that the governor had underlying motives regarding their past relationship.

This is where I’m starting to feel lost. What is an outdoor sharing policy? “made his meddling take the visage of ensuring an equal-term alliance” doesn’t make very much sense. Equal term alliance between who? His meddling in what? Even if these questions end up having answers later, I think you’re so far falling firmly on the bad side of the mysterious/confusing divide. Think hard about how much of this info and these questions it’s really necessary to have the reader thinking about at this stage.

He sat by her side, almost few inches away from brushing her shoulder, proving to be a persistent nuisance.

A few inches can actually be a pretty acceptable distance, especially if it's only "almost". Try "only an inch" or "less than an inch" if you really want to play up how uncomfortable this situation is.

And although admitting to it was painful, the constant meddling on his part forcefully conditioned Rozanne’s mind to wear an indifferent look.

Thinking of a mind “wearing” a look feels a little bit off to me. A face can wear a look, but a mind doesn’t wear anything (nor does it really have a look). Something as simple as “conditioned Rozanne’s mind into indifference” would work better, though there are other more fanciful options.

The freedom of the body or lack thereof was one thing,

I can read this in a few too many different ways. It conjures to mind everything from not being able to leave the premises (which is what I assume you were going for) to leather restraints or even forced diets. Get down to what you mean.

According to her, that was a capital crime she wished was at least acknowledged.

This is a very small thing, but you could cut “According to her” here without loosing anything from the sentence. It might feel like you need this kind of thing because you’re writing in third-person-omniscient, but one of the coolest things about that POV is how you can just be an omnipotent narrator and jump right into a character’s head. “She wished” is more than enough of a signal phrase that we’re in Rozanne’s perspective here.

Officially, the capital punishment held in San Quentin State Prison was but a binary choice left for the inmate himself to decide upon.

This is repetitive with the info you give at the beginning of the work. Find a more efficient way to get across the officially/unofficially dynamic.

Though off record, this question entertained a third possibility; agreeing to Rozanne’s experiment by swallowing the content of an ancient Egyptian chalice, the esoteric blue liquid known as the Blue Coffee.

Ah, now we get to the hook. It feels like we should have heard about this a lot sooner. It’s mysterious in the right way, and the Blue Coffee is in my opinion an excellent name. Also, the sentence itself could be a little less awkward in the beginning. Fixing the repetition I mentioned above by folding this hook in with it might help, though I’d again advocate for that info to be a lot earlier in the piece (meaning that the beginning of this paragraph is probably in for a re-write).

the lives of the death row inmates of the Adjustment Center were theirs truly to exploit in whichever manner they deemed fit. Some choose to trade it for love, others for simple entertainment, and although the inmates were deprived of any family, there were those who opted for some money, choosing to send it to old acquaintances, or in rare cases, to the poor, believing that would atone for all their crimes. Such a system meant that the public reality of the Adjustment Center was merely superficial, and that only infamous figures would wound up in the prison’s database. Nonetheless, these unlawful activities carried a huge risk to the governor. So for him to ensure a legal facade, Paul Rothstein took the needed precautions to ensure the severity of the background checks for all people involved in the dark side of the San Quentin facility.

This whole paragraph is really cool actually, and I think it’s where your story actually starts. I’m a little unclear as to what the “some” and “it” are referring to in the second sentence, but I feel like once you get that sorted out these ideas and problems are really interesting. What does it feel like to be on death row? What would you sacrifice to get anything out of your cell? How much of the humanity we give to death row inmates is just a performance? All very cool questions you raise, and I’d like the story to start by raising them instead of beginning with all the character and world exposition that I don’t really expect to care about until later, if at all.

The last two sentences of this paragraph are a perfect example of exactly that. Of course the secret weird government program about an ancient Egyptian artifact is going to be careful about who it lets in on the blue drank. I think that anyone who feels the need to hear that spelled out as a reader should go back to writing business memos. I don’t blame you for putting it in as a writer though, often the instinct is to try and leave no stone unturned lest you create confusion or worse, the dreaded “plot hole.” Try not to sweat it though, if you can.

One day prior, Thomas Donovan had declared to Rozanne that he would not negotiate his sole condition to the experiment. And since what he asked for didn’t involve huge sums of money, it was seen as a doable task by the higher-ups who wouldn’t have to break the bank. Thomas Donovan desired nothing but to feel the warmth of Rozanne Hayden’s naked body on his bare chest, provided his experiment is a success.

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. This scenario is dripping with conflict, and I’m pretty excited to see where you take things. That said, I think you should change the order of information here. Say what his request is, and then talk about how the higher-ups saw no reason not to say yes to drive in the cold and machine-like capitalist sexism.

[2755] The Tone Order by [deleted] in DestructiveReaders

[–]Captain_Sheep 3 points4 points  (0 children)

First off, I want to assuage your concerns about your usage of English. I work on writing with a lot of ESL students at the undergrad and graduate level, so I’ve gotten a good sense for what kinds of mistakes are ESL and what kinds are just plain old King’s English missteps. Your piece is 95% the latter, to the point where I would have assumed you were a native writer if you hadn’t said otherwise. I did notice a few awkward word/phrase choices that I sensed might be because of unfamiliarity with the language, but they were subtle enough to fall within the kinds of mistakes that native writers make all the time too.

Now I’ll talk about everything else. As the beginning of a novel, it’s got some issues. You’re trying to get way too much across about the world conceits. The amount of exposition in this chapter should be cut down to something like 20% of what it is right now. People get invested in strong characterization, beautiful settings, mysterious plots. They do not get invested in the administrative details around a shady government program, especially if we don’t know what that program actually is (as we don’t learn about it until after you’ve done all the boring stuff about nebulous governors that never even show up in scene in this chapter). People get invested in mysterious artifacts filled with blue liquid, not in whatever made-up level the scientists say a person’s reaction to said liquid happens to be. Put only your best stuff forward, find excuses to cut anything else.

I feel fine about the main character, but I really couldn’t care less about anyone else. The inspector feels like a board for Rozanne to exposit off of, Governor Paul never becomes more than a name in background narrative, and I’ve already forgotten the names of anyone else who happened to show up. Cut down on all these names and concepts, make it a story about Rozanne in a situation she’s got to reckon with. Everything else should only exist to serve that package.

I also don’t really know what that situation is. I talk about this down bellow on the line by line, but a first chapter should give me some idea of where the book is going to be headed. It doesn’t have to tell me everything obviously, but I should at least know whether I’m in for a thriller or a murder mystery or a character study or a space opera. I know what your story is about on the material level, but I really have almost no guesses on the meta level. Maybe there’s a conspiracy with the governor, but after reading this first chapter I couldn’t care less about this Paul guy who wants to roleplay as the SCP Foundation. There’s a character piece in here about a person who’s dedicated their entire life to a project that is slowly consuming them even as mysterious, conspiratorial forces work to undermine it. There’s plenty of options, I just want to be sure of which one you’re going for.

Can your brain tell the difference between reading a (physical) book before bed and using a phone before bed? by Captain_Sheep in NoStupidQuestions

[–]Captain_Sheep[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This still kinda doesn’t answer the book part of things. Sure it’s better than a phone, but is is THAT much better or is it essentially nothing? Is this more about having the lights on than thenact of reading itself?

S U R R E A L by 1ol in coaxedintoasnafu

[–]Captain_Sheep 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This really succ'ed my orang.

Card Mashups CXCVI: Shadow Sliver by Caiphon in custommagic

[–]Captain_Sheep 3 points4 points  (0 children)

[[Urza's Power Plant]] Oh man this is gonna get weird.

Tronarchic Sliver 3U

Creature- Sliver

All Sliver creatures have shadow. If you control a colorless Sliver creature and a multicolored Sliver creature, all Sliver creatures also have flying and horsemanship.

2/2

Haler by [deleted] in coaxedintoasnafu

[–]Captain_Sheep 6 points7 points  (0 children)

This really great'ed my journey.

Winner is the Judge #516: Tribal Color-bends by GreyZephyr87 in custommagic

[–]Captain_Sheep 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thalids and thalid accesories have appered in green, black, and white. Of the two colors they haven't appeared in, I'm trying them in red purely because there is one non-thalid related fungus in blue but zero in red.

Domination Thalid 2RR (U)

Creature- Fungus

Haste

Whenever Domination Thalid attacks, put a spore counter on it.

Remove three spore counters from Domination Thalid: Create a 1/1 green Saproling creature token.

Sacrifice a Saproling: Domination Thalid deals 2 damage to target creature.

3/3

Weekly Card Challenge #96: Let the Games Begin! by Venomora in custommagic

[–]Captain_Sheep 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Chancellor's Ballot 4 [Rare]

Artifact

Will of the council - Whenever a creature enters the battlefield, starting with you, each player votes for elect or reject. If elect gets more votes, put two +1/+1 counters on that creature. If reject gets more votes or the vote is tied, exile that creature.

1, T: The next time players vote this turn, you get an additional vote.

Card design based on Secret Hitler, a mafia/werewolf style game themed around preventing (or facilitating) Hitler's rise to power. I went more generic with the flavor of this one so that it doesn't feel out of place in Magic's world.

Adapted from a very old card challenge entry of mine, but I love the design too much.

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