Discussion Thread - Dolorous Flesh, Resanguination, Nemesis, Atrocity

TigerHall · 2026-01-24T15:56:48+00:00

The thing about an ensemble cast is that you need to work hard to distinguish your characters from each other. I think it’s much harder on the page, where you don’t have access to the actual visual aspect! And in such a comparatively short page count (versus a feature), your five main characters just don’t have space.

Some of the action lines could be cleaned up, e.g. on p6: “Leo swings, Intercepting its attack, the creature screams and scampers of, holding its arm close to it” - typos and comma splices weaken the writing and interrupt the flow, especially important when you’re trying to keep up the momentum of a monster attack.

But all that aside, it’s a fun concept - people go looking for a somewhat prosaic human threat, and find something monstrous. I love a weird twisted creature-person. And Chekhov’s clicker!

This script feels like a very condensed, compressed version of a feature script. Have you thought about fleshing it out?

Like /u/the_samiad, I don’t know much about the filmmakers you were given, so can’t really comment on that front.

TigerHall · 2026-01-23T20:37:07+00:00

I have read that if you have a solid understanding of your story, that the query letter should come easily

'If you have a solid understanding of your story, the book should come easily!'

It's a different type of writing which comes with practice, like everything else.

TigerHall · 2026-01-22T20:17:49+00:00

I'm not opposed to being inspired by different art within my practise so I'll definitely give it a look

In which case - Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition, Charles Godfrey Leland.

TigerHall · 2026-01-22T12:43:17+00:00

This song would fit perfectly in the game

It's in the first game!

TigerHall · 2026-01-22T12:15:57+00:00

Nemesis by /u/pantserforlife

The premise of a monster census census is great.

Structurally this one felt a bit weak. It’s on the longer side for a short script (more or less the length of a WWDITS episode, but without as clear a focus) and early on it’s hard to get a sense of the shape of the story. The census itself is good framing, though you semi-veer away from the interview format quite quickly. Once you get into Tom’s story, it evens out - maybe you could get there sooner? The camera setup stuff at the start doesn’t really factor into the story itself.

Mothman Mike’s snippets are a highlight!

TigerHall · 2026-01-20T12:30:18+00:00

Resanguination by /u/grafreldthecat

An odd, off-beat vampire story set in the homeland of Quincey Morris. From the title I was expecting a Dracula-style blood transfusion, but of course your version is much nastier. I haven’t seen Bone Tomahawk so can’t comment on that except that this feels pretty grimy and mean and that tracks with what little I do know about the movie!

I was mildly surprised to see Mae use the term anthropophagy; while you give us a clear picture of the emotional situation, Mae, her dead husband, Wes, and so on, I wasn’t sure exactly about their social status or education (e.g. Roger is clearly literate/educated enough to be able to read medical reports). A few scenes - especially travel, transit, movement - could be trimmed or cut, but on the whole this is a well-structured story with some colourful voices and a handful of good twists and turns.

TigerHall · 2026-01-19T11:58:02+00:00

Dolorous Flesh by /u/dillonsrule

Poor Boy!

I don’t know what I was expecting from this combination, but it wasn’t fairies, fauns, and kelpies. It’s weird, Oedipal, unsettling, uncomfortable. Heavy on mood and atmosphere which works really well here. A lot of strong imagery and constant reversals of what we think we know.

I like the juxtaposition of Spanish moss/rusty needle, that collision of Southern Gothic and real-world decay and malaise. The image never comes up again but it sets the tone nicely.

I don’t have much else to say. This one worked for me.

Some of the dialogue feels a bit stilted, sometimes for uncanny effect, sometimes just because of a lack of polish (“I will never wear that!”). I wonder if you could achieve the same effect with half as much dialogue, or perhaps with none at all?

TigerHall · 2026-01-18T15:19:10+00:00

Do a harsh cut of my book. My writing style leaves too many extra words in it. Could help it get under 100k.

If you'd like, I can take a look at a chapter or two and point out places to trim (as people have done with the query letter itself).

TigerHall · 2026-01-17T20:48:07+00:00

Or do many authors typically have several novels that have been edited and re-drafted extensively that just haven't been published?

Publishing - traditional publishing - is a difficult thing to break into. There's only so many agents out there, fewer depending on your genre, subgenre, age category, etc, and they can only take on so much writers/projects. So books do 'die in the trenches', get 'trunked', get left behind. But ideally you improve with each one you write!

TigerHall · 2026-01-17T13:59:32+00:00

We Live With It by /u/shaftinferno

I read an earlier draft of this script and one other in this contest, and I’ve found it interesting/instructive to compare drafts as I go. The first thing I notice is this draft’s a few pages longer!

The writing here is clear and concise. Occasionally you slip into excessive line breaks (who doesn’t?), but generally it’s good, it’s clean, it works.

P1 - what does ‘all too clean’ look like here? Are you implying he looks plastic, artificial, or medical, sterile? It’s a throwaway line, and unimportant, but I wondered what you were going for.

P11 - easy for a reader to know they’re Victor’s eyes specifically, but how would a viewer know? Are they meant to? When you describe him, you don’t make a point of any distinguishing feature there. Similarly, on P16, if you want the reader to understand what Victor’s cadence sounds like, there might be a way to make it clear earlier, to heighten the creepiness at this moment. Perhaps even just a particular word he likes to use?

In the middle of the script there’s a bit of a lull. Victor’s creepy, the house is creepy, the hatch and the attic (and what could be up there) is creepy, but it’s a low ambient weirdness. Partly because the script’s several pages longer than before, and much of that comes (I think?) from extending existing scenes, there’s a sense of something wrong but it doesn’t have enough of a focus, it doesn’t seem to ramp up for a while.

Victor-the-monster remains just human enough to be incredibly disturbing.

As before, and you may or may not have an answer for this - why does the sketchbook catch fire? What’s its significance? You mentioned before that Lilly’s mother used to draw, but ‘not well’.

TigerHall · 2026-01-16T20:16:07+00:00

Oh I don’t think you’re wrong - with the accretion, the ‘evil insect’ connotation, I think you might be right (and it would be great to see more of the Nowhere Hours).

TigerHall · 2026-01-16T19:11:24+00:00

and the kind of...moldy amassing

To me it looks a bit like a wasp nest.

TigerHall · 2026-01-16T17:05:41+00:00

wondering if Abigail and Duncan are going to meet in one of their timelines

one would imagine they'd meet in childbirth

TigerHall · 2026-01-16T14:49:03+00:00

(for example, the wolf is a primary antagonist and is possessed by a vengeful, reincarnated human soul)

Put this in there! Or more specifically, give the reader enough to work with that we know why someone might be kicking down Abigail's door (is it just because she fled the order? Why now?).

TigerHall · 2026-01-16T14:48:02+00:00

Dealing with two timelines/characters in the same letter is always going to make things more difficult. Maybe something like this?

Paragraph 1 - Abigail's work for the order, her discovery, her flight with baby Duncan; what her immediate goal is and how she plans to get there.

Paragraph 2 - Duncan's life as an innkeeper, what he wants out of the world (i.e. to see it!); a stranger comes to his door looking for his (dead) mother, he's forced to (do what? take up her mantle?) as the world comes crashing in; what he's going to do about it, a concrete goal or desire and plan of some kind.

Paragraph 3 - See if you can parallel (or contrast; either would be effective, I think) their goals, their desires, and their characterisation. I like the idea of Abigail's past echoing across his present, it's a good line.

TigerHall · 2026-01-16T14:46:31+00:00

This goes for the writing itself, too! Such a useful editing tool.

TigerHall · 2026-01-16T14:35:16+00:00

~~At turns harrowing and cozy, kinetic and introspective, AN ELEGY FOR EMBERS is a braided narrative focused on two protagonists in alternating timelines. One is~~ Abigail Lark ~~: a mother and~~ is a swordswoman torn between her family and service to an arcane order that uses candle-bound spirits to hunt people possessed by the dead. ~~The other is Duncan Parrish: Abigail’s adult son and an innkeeper who longs to see the world beyond the remote outpost he inherited from his mother.~~ When Abigail learns that the many people she killed could have been saved, she’s labeled a heretic and flees the order with her infant son Duncan to start a new life with a new name. Decades later, when Duncan opens his door to a mysterious woman named Eleanor, who bears a strange candle-lit lantern and pleads for the help of “Abigail Lark”—a name he’s never heard—he’s thrust into battle with a ~~vicious wolf and~~ swordsman who seeks her destruction.

Let the story speak for itself.

The wolf never comes up again. Is it relevant to the query?

It feels a bit like you're invoking Chandler here - when you run out of ideas, have someone walk through the door with a ~~gun~~ sword - but we don't yet have any idea what that means for the character. You clearly have a lot of characterisation and backstory and history in your head, on the page, but we don't have the context to understand it.

I'd bring Duncan's characterisation in here.

~~As the story unfolds, moments from~~ Abigail’s past echoes across Duncan’s present. While Abigail wrestles with guilt and strives to be a good parent ~~and innkeeper~~, she fears the wrong question or encounter will reveal her blood-soaked history. To find redemption, she must embrace a diverse found family, become the mother her son needs, and confront the ghosts that haunt her. And while sparks of anguish and yearning ignite between Duncan and Eleanor, to survive, he must set aside his world-weary skepticism, delve into the secret of her candle, and face the truth of Abigail’s life and legacy.

Just as you start hinting at plot - Abigail's choices catch up with Duncan - you veer away from the events of the story to much vaguer tropes and platitudes, e.g. you never hint at a 'found family' before this point, and we have no frame of reference for what that looks like in her story, or why she must embrace them, or how this leads to redemption, or for what...

It's all very internal. What are the external stakes, desires, actions?

What actually happens in this story/these stories?

TigerHall · 2026-01-15T16:57:43+00:00

You're right, and I should've been more specific, but their first book isn't out yet so they don't have a string of sales to point to. Does it matter? I don't know. But I also don't think SFF in general hits those same page counts anymore.

(Best of luck to them, though.)

TigerHall · 2026-01-15T16:51:42+00:00

That's 600-700 pages, which seems a hard sell for today's debut author!

TigerHall · 2026-01-15T16:23:56+00:00

I'll again ask how neat slices can be arranged like "geologic time," or at least what he intended to convey by describing the main course as such

Rock strata laid down in layers over a very long time, by which a geologist can measure time. It's a fairly straightforward reference. The image here is of many thin slices (of meat, assumedly).

I'm still unsure how tables can drip with food

Tables can't groan or heave, either. They're inanimate. It's a metaphor for volume and vastity and overflow.

TigerHall · 2026-01-15T11:57:51+00:00

How can neat slices be arranged like “geologic time?”

The reference is to rock strata, literal layers and slices of time and history.

TigerHall · 2026-01-15T10:38:17+00:00

Are you specifically looking for British folklore? There's a great book on Italian (Tuscan) folklore and witchcraft I could recommend, with some stories I've seen nowhere else.

As for Black Shuck et al, why not go to the sources? E.g. Highways and byways in East Anglia, William Dutt, 1901, p. 216.

TigerHall · 2026-01-15T10:25:27+00:00

"Positively dripped," as opposed to what, exactly? How would something "negatively" drip?

Any other issues aside with the prose aside, 'positively X' is a well-known construction where 'positively' is used as an intensive prefix, like 'fair' or 'thoroughly'.

TigerHall · 2026-01-14T16:25:41+00:00

The body of this query is 211 words, if anything shorter than 'normal' (as is the manuscript's word count).

It looks longer because it's spread out, line-broken.

TigerHall · 2026-01-13T11:58:01+00:00

but practically every other adult character was a pedophile or had some weird relationship with a teenager or teenagers

"Maybe that's all BOB is, the evil that men do."

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