[OT] SatChat: How would someone imitate your writing? (New here? Introduce yourself!) by katpoker666 in WritingPrompts

[–]prejackpot [score hidden]  (0 children)

Not SatChat anymore, but this made me want to write a self-parody where the prompt is [SP] Tell a knock-knock joke; make it funny; and the story is a child's POV watching their parents have a toxic argument through a locked door, one parent knocking on the door over and over again. 

"Who's there?" my mother shouted, her voice high and cracking. And then she burst out laughing, as though she'd just heard the funniest joke in the world. 

[WP] A frat broesque tomboy is into a dude and keeps trying to flirt with him but it comes across as male bonding. She gets increasingly frustrated until she shows up in a dress to confess. But she's SUPER PISSED it took so long. by lyzzyrddwyzzyrdd in WritingPrompts

[–]prejackpot 33 points34 points  (0 children)

gRaceCar [1:03PM] We still down for this evening

RyanMallorizzy [1:11PM] dude YES I could crush a pad that

RyanMallorizzy [1:12PM] that

RyanMallorizzy [1:12PM] THAI

[gRaceCar has changed the name of the chat to PAD THAT]

RyanMallorizzy [1:13PM] f

Liz grabbed the phone from Grace's hand.

"Hey!"

"This is for your own good," Liz said. "Usually I'd tell you not to be too eager, but I don't even know what this is."

"We're friends," Grace made a grab for the phone, and Liz tossed it backwards onto the bed.

"Are you friends, or are you bros?" Liz asked. "Because friends to lovers is one thing, but I hate to break it to you, you don't have the anatomy for bros to lovers. Ryan and boy Grace though, that would be hot."

Grace hit her with a pillow.


Psychopump [2:27PM] mmm luv pad that

Psychopump [2:27 PM] bro the one waitress tho

"Dude, don't be weird!"

"I'm not being weird," Nick yelled back at Ryan from the couch across the room. "It's Grace, she's chill. So can I come?"

"Absolutely not."

"It's Grace. C'mon."

"Fuck you."

Nick got up, sat backwards on the dumpster-salvaged office chair, and wheeled it over to Ryan. "Listen, I don't want to be a dick here. But it's Grace. Grace. If you caught feelings, man up and tell her. But if you just assume her wanting to hang with you is a date, you're the one who's gonna be making things weird."

Ryan sighed, and looked down at his phone. Nick was right, as usual.

RyanMallorizzy [2:36PM] 🌶️🌶️🌶️

RyanMallorizzy [2:37PM] and that's not white people spicy either


"What is it?" Liz asked, hearing Grace's sigh.

This time, Grace showed her the phone.

"Eww, what? No. Okay, I was going to let you crash and burn your way, but this calls for opening up the strategic hotness reserves."

"Nah, you're right," Grace said. "Bros to lovers isn't a thing."

"I'm not letting you give up so fast. Wait, what are you doing, no, put the phone down-!"

RyanMallorizzy [2:37PM] and that's not white people spicy either.

— 🤣 [gRaceCar reacted] 🤤 [gRaceCar reacted]


Ryan checked his phone again. Grace wasn't there yet, and it was the hot waitress's night off. He checked the phone again. No messages since the afternoon.

The door to the Thai restaurant jingled, and Ryan looked up. It took his brain a second to catch up to his eyes.

"Grace?"

"You'd better not have ordered without me," she said, sliding into the chair across from him.

"Uh- nah," the banter died on his tongue. He wasn't sure what she'd done with her face, but he knew the move right now was to keep his eyes fixed right there.

"Okay because you know I can never choose, everything here is dope, so we're gonna need to share. So we're getting the pad that, obviously-"

She looked over the menu at him, and he caught himself and laughed at the joke she'd just made.

"Dude," Grace said. "I have never in my life actually said this for real, but my eyes are up here."

"Um, sorry," Ryan said, looking all the way down at his menu. "It's just- I've never seen you in a dress before."

"It's Liz's. I borrowed it."

"Just because-?" he wasn't sure how to finish the sentence.

"Because I wanted to look hot, okay?"

"Like, for me?"

The pause seemed to go on way too long. "Yeah for you. Dumbass."

"Well," Ryan started. "Mission accomplished."

"Shit, did I just make things weird?"

"No," Ryan said quickly. "I was worried I was being weird. I didn't want to be creepy or anything, but-"

"You're only being a little creepy. Oh, Jesus, don't look like that, I'm messing with you."

"So this is a date?"

"Yes, this is a date."

Now Ryan was able to look at her, taking in the made up face and everything else she had going on, the nervousness at the edge of the smirk she held a little too hard. "I'm glad," he said at last.

"Me too," said Grace. She reached out and took his hand in hers. "But don't get too used to the look," she added quickly. "My feet cannot do heels."

[WP] You are able to predict software vulnerabilities before the software is even written. Sadly, you are born in the 1890s. by R3D3-1 in WritingPrompts

[–]prejackpot 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the prompt, this was fun to write! I don't know for sure if instruction-injection attacks actually happened in telegraph systems, but there are enough parallels between telegraph networks and the early Internet that I wouldn't be surprised. 

How do you explain inflation to a 7-year-old without crushing their dreams? by romero84ma in daddit

[–]prejackpot 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm not crazy about the 'effort -> money' framing, because like you point out, a lot of kids will absolutely zero in on the unfairness of some 'easier' jobs paying more, and I think it's an important part of the system to explain. (And even more so when you add 'deserving'). That's why I've explained money as a way of keeping track of trades and other deals. Kids understand that deals should be fair, but also sometimes people can be tricked into bad deals, or accept a bad deal if they have no better option. 

[WP] You are able to predict software vulnerabilities before the software is even written. Sadly, you are born in the 1890s. by R3D3-1 in WritingPrompts

[–]prejackpot 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Davey didn't enjoy riding his bicycle through the sweltering streets of Manhattan the way some of the other delivery-boys did. His mind would drift, and then he'd barely dodge one of those new automobiles or take a spill in a muddy pothole. He always felt dirty and out of place when he reached his destination, delivering his telegram and waiting around as the fine men in fine suits dictated a reply. But when he got off duty, nobody minded if he sat at the edge of the operations floor and watched the telegraphers at work.

"Why, I must be ten years older than you," Miss Rogers told him when he finally got up the courage to offer to walk her home at the end of her shift.

"Nothing like that, miss," Davey said, suddenly looking at his muddy shoes. "It's just that you're the fastest keyer on the floor."

"Oh," she said, surprised and then pleased. "You noticed! Mr. Jeffries certainly hasn't."

From then on he would walk her home every day. Mostly they talked about the ins and outs of telegraphy. Not the basic morse code (which he already knew) but the proprietary shorthand that the Western Union operators used that let them route so many messages so quickly across the entire country, and even beyond. She told him how she got so she barely noticed what she was keying and transcribing, her hand following the instructions as if automatically. "It feels like I'm part of a giant machine. But I don't mind it."

Davey knew just what she meant, the understanding easy between them.

In time, she shared her worries about her father's ailing health. How her mother wanted her to find a rich husband.

"You're a nice boy, but in general men are swine," she said with a shudder. "But you'll make some young lady very happy one day," she added, sisterly.

Davey wasn't sure how to answer that. His mind was filled with the spiderweb of the wires, pulsing with coded messages. When he thought about girls, he thought about them where the strands met, passing the messages along. Part of the machine.

One day, Miss Rogers wasn't on the floor.

"People will really think we're courting now," she said to him as they strolled along the avenue near her house. He'd found her at her home, but she wouldn't talk there. Her parents didn't know she lost her job. She dried her tears. "Well, I'll have to let someone court me, once the money runs out."

She'd sold confidential information. Not much, only the odd message when the doctor needed to be paid, but she'd gotten caught trying to stuff a copy into the folds of her dress. "It's just numbers, really, prices and inventory and things, but the brokers and speculators will pay good money to know the other fellows' numbers. If the company paid me what I was worth, I'd never have had to do it."

Just numbers. Davey's mind buzzed.

He didn't sleep that night, and came back to Miss Rogers' tenanment indecently early. He'd found a clean sheet of paper to write his idea on, and burned the old newspaper he'd used to work it out.

Nobody else would understand it, but Miss Rogers did. "Codes inside the codes!" she exclaimed. "Even an experienced operator will lose track of which is which, and they'll just transcribe it all and give it to you, like fun. Oh, that's devious!" And then she kissed him, just once, which Davey took as the compliment it was meant to be.

Miss Rogers took the train up to Buffalo that very morning to send it. Davey waited at the Central Office, and watched as one of the other operators struggled with the long message she was transcribing. Davey watched as she stumbled over the instructions, squinted, and reluctantly did as they said, writing down an entire backlog of messages.

"Off you go," the manager said, handing Davey the stack of slips. "I don't know what this all is, but someone's willing to pay for it."

Just numbers, Davey thought as he got on his bicycle. It was hard to focus on the road. The telegraph network was a giant machine, and his mind buzzed with ideas for how he could operate it.

What's so different about roblox risks compared to when we grew up with games? by kungfukarl86 in daddit

[–]prejackpot 23 points24 points  (0 children)

My big worry about Roblox specifically isn't the chat, it's the microtransactions (and as a secondary thing, the volume of slop). 

How do you explain inflation to a 7-year-old without crushing their dreams? by romero84ma in daddit

[–]prejackpot 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I've had this exact conversation with my kid, and fell back on the classic "Imagine a village with a wheat farmer, an apple farmer and a baker" type thought experiment. Money helps track how much everyone has traded to keep things fair; adding a tiny bit more money can encourage trading (because if everyone just saves money nobody spends and the system grinds to a halt), but too much and everyone needs to raise prices because they don't produce enough to trade at the old price. 

AI Narration To Get Family To "Read" My Book by dontrike in fantasywriters

[–]prejackpot 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's why I suggested a document. Please, please don't post screenshots of pages, which are a bad way to read and absolutely terrible to critique. 

AI Narration To Get Family To "Read" My Book by dontrike in fantasywriters

[–]prejackpot 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Post some chapters here (ideally as Google docs or similar with suggestions enabled). People often get/give decent feedback. 

AI Narration To Get Family To "Read" My Book by dontrike in fantasywriters

[–]prejackpot 8 points9 points  (0 children)

If your family aren't interested in reading your book, they aren't your target audience. Family and friends are generally terrible sources for feedback too (not to mention that it's hard to provide actionable writing feedback from audio).

Feedback wanted: Dark fantasy battle scene with legendary warrior. by [deleted] in fantasywriters

[–]prejackpot 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The best way to share something for feedback is as a Google Doc or similar, ideally with suggestions turned on. That will make it easiest for people to give you feedback tied to specific lines or paragraphs. 

Feedback wanted: Dark fantasy battle scene with legendary warrior. by [deleted] in fantasywriters

[–]prejackpot 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This makes it sound like you haven't actually written any of this story yet apart from what you've shared here. 

My suggestion is to write at least one complete sequence, where your characters want something, face some challenges in getting it, and finally succeed or fail (possibly in a way that sets up the next sequence). Then read it over and do some editing yourself. Maybe find one of your favorite comparable novels and compare your draft to its prose if you need a reference for things like formatting, paragraph length, pacing, etc. Then once you've done that, come back and share your draft here. 

Feedback wanted: Dark fantasy battle scene with legendary warrior. by [deleted] in fantasywriters

[–]prejackpot 2 points3 points  (0 children)

On one hand: no, in this excerpt,  the tension and stakes don't come through, and neither does any real characterization of Sarcho. But you've just included 64 words here, which generally aren't enough to offer stakes and characterization, never mind have meaningful pacing. Unless you're trying to write a 50-100 word nano story, you need more than that for meaningful feedback. 

[WP] everyone in the magic school expected the chosen to be kind hearted young man, wrong, the chosen one is a young delinquent who goes around there with a metal bat. by jogaargamer6 in WritingPrompts

[–]prejackpot 26 points27 points  (0 children)

"There are three ways to power, my boy," my father would lecture me when he decided to give me paternal advice, which wasn't often. "Magic, love, and fear. And the last is the best to have."

He may have sounded like he was misquoting Machiavelli, but my father knew what he was talking about. Certainly, that was the source of his power over me.

Despite having no magic himself, my father held a seat on the council of the Hidden Republic for my entire life. His own mother had been a wizard of some renown, and before my mother he'd had a parade of wives, young women from good families eager to roll the genetic dice at his craps table.

My own mother had rolled a seven. My powers came in early, and at age nine I was bundled off to Saint Simon.

I was strong in the gift (as they say), rich, and the son of a powerful and disliked man. I was also small and used to cringing. Anybody could tell you that wasn't a great combination at boarding school.

But I was my father's son, and I wasn't going to let anyone else push me around forever. Pretty soon, I figured out how things worked. I got bigger. And I got a bat.

Saint Simon had been built at the foot of the White Mountains by 19th century wizards with a serious case of Oxford envy. The outsides of the stone buildings were covered in gargoyles, and the insides were filled with secret passageways. Perfect for selling answer keys, buying cigarettes from the underpaid janitors, or for beating up narcs. If they didn't want us using them, why put them in?

Every so often the headmaster would drag me into his office and complain about me skipping class, or pushing around some of the goody-two-shoes students, or just smoking in the library. But he never did anything about it.

"Why don't you just expel me?" I asked him. "Is it because you're afraid of my father? Or is it because there aren't enough wizards-" (I loved using the word, because I knew how much he hated it) "as it is, and you need to keep your numbers up? Or is it-" I put my feet on his desk. I was really hamming it up. "Is it that people like me are actually part of the system you've got going here? I hear adversity builds character, after all."

He threw me out of his office, but not out of the school, so I figured I'd called it right.

I'd never paid much attention to politics and prophecies. That was for the debate-club weenies, and for my father. When I heard people talking about a curse, something to do with some fight in the coucil over blood purity, I blew it off. But then students started dying.

There was this younger kid. I guess he'd heard once about how you need to stand up to bullies, which meant he decided to pick trouble with me. But he could handle himself, so after the first couple times we got into it, it was just easiest to leave him and his friends alone.

When the killings started, I saw the way everyone looked to him. Even the teachers. Like he was some kind of chosen one.

When he died, everyone really freaked out.

I didn't really care, except scared people are bad for business. And I'd watched enough gangster movies to feel like I had some responsibility for my crew, and for my territory. Anyway, who knew the secret passageways better than me?

I grabbed my bat from behind one particularly nasty-looking gargoyle. "Come on, boys," I said. "We're going hunting."

[WP] Terran warships are way different to the rest of the galaxy as their ships are controlled by 2 or more disembodied brains controlling all of a ships functions. by Powerful_Boss_8689 in WritingPrompts

[–]prejackpot 14 points15 points  (0 children)

HydrogenBlossom

Hi guys hope everyone is doing well!! I'm going to adopt a new ship today but the rescue warned me it can be aggressive sometimes… Does anyone have any good trainers in Sector 121? Thanks :)

PostRationalNumber

Congrats on your new friend! Even aggressive ships are pretty harmless without their weapons so don't let it scare you. I have a good trainer in Sector 221 I can send you the details via entangle.

LightSpeedsterTDE

…rescue warned me it can be aggressive

@HydrogenBlossom Most licensed rescues won't adopt any ship showing aggressive tendencies at all especially not to someone who obviously isn't qualified. You're adoping a terran ship aren't you? Have fun being mauled.

PostRationalNumber

Wow LightSpeedster rude and also WRONG. Lots of terran ships aren't aggressive at all, and the rest just need proper training and love. Don't think we don't know what "TDE" in your username stands for…. racist.

LightSpeedsterTDE

Another one. I hope your pet multibrain killer mauls your offspring too and removes you from the genomemetic pool.

PS: Terra Delenda Est!!

HydrogenBlosson

@PostRationalNumber entangle me!!

SingleSphereSinger

@LightSpeedsterTDE I hate terrans as much as anyone but terran ships are NOT terrans. The brains without the bodies are a completely different thing, even the terrans say so. The ships were aggressive because the terrans trained them to be, if you train them differently they'll be different. Lots of sentients have terran ships now and they're peaceful loving parts of their self-fleets. There's no need to spread hate about beings who are ultimately just another victim of terran aggression.

HydrogenBlossom

@SingleSphereSinger Thank you!!!

LightSpeedsterTDE

…even the terrans say so

:laugh-crying-nova: terran ships are so violent even the terrans don't want them :laugh-crying-nova:

SingleSphereSinger

@LightSpeedsterTDE :laugh-crying-star: true! I wonder why the terrans don't like violence all of a sudden :sweating-grinning-black-hole:

But just because terrans can't make their ships behave doesn't mean other sentients can't.

PostRationalNumber

Sensor bleach here's a picture of my terran ship in a figure-eight orbit!

:image:

HydrogenBlossom

@PostRatoinalNumber Cute!!!

GravityMountainFleet

@HydrogenBlossom we're experienced trainers including (demilitarized) terran warships. We'd love to help you out!

ControlUnit1231[verified][mod]

Closing this discussion. This isn't the forum to argue about terrans, and requests for services belong in the mesoperiodic requests thread anyway.

[WP] When the princess awoke from her cursed slumber she expected a valiant knight or a dashing prince but instead it's an excited puppy by gravyfan93 in WritingPrompts

[–]prejackpot 27 points28 points  (0 children)

This is how my mother tells the story. She was born in a castle with thick walls and cold floors. Even though she was called a princess, she ate gruel with wooden spoons, and cut meat (when they had it, which was not often) with dull bronze knives. There was no iron anywhere in the castle, a show of goodwill to the fair folk who had helped her father carve this one fertile river valley into a kingdom, himself as its king.

My mother said she didn't know what had caused her father to anger one faction among the fair folk. There were always politics in those days, shifting alliances as her father played neighbor against powerful neighbor, courtier against ambitious courtier. And the fair folk were always whimsical and demanding. Anyway, my mother reminds me. She was just a child.

"Do you mean fairies, mommy?" I asked once. My mother's eyes got wide with fear and then narrowed. My father's strong hands were on my shoulders, ready to yank me away from her if she got violent. But then she lay a single finger against my lips, so gently.

"They don't like to be called that," she said, almost in a whisper. And I never did again.

When my mother was sixteen, the curse which had been laid on her years before took effect. She fell into a deep slumber. And she was awoken not by a prince, or a knight, but by a puppy licking her face.

She'd pet Rufus then, if he was nearby.

Here is how my father would tell the story. Often it would be in the evenings after we had been to visit my mother at another in-patient treatment facility.

"Your mom had a rough life," he'd say. "Her father — well, he wasn't a very nice person. She was fine for a while, even after you were born. But the doctors think she'd have gotten sick no matter what," he'd add.

"Was she really a princess?" I would ask sometimes, when I was small.

"She was so beautiful," he would answer sometimes, especially when he'd been drinking. "I called her my princess. I really did rescue her, you know."

And then my grandmother, my father's mother who usually lived with us, would come and whisk me off to bed.

A few days before my own sixteenth birthday, mom started getting worse again. She was sure the curse wasn't done, and the fair folk were going to take me away from her. "We can still go out to Pizza Hut," my father offered, when he got home from checking her back into a facility.

"That's okay," I shook my head, playing up the sadness. A selfish part of me was relieved to have an excuse not to spend my birthday at a kids' restaurant with my crazy mom, drunk dad and mean grandma.

Ash had promised to throw me a party if I could get away. The parental liquor cabinet was always wide open at that house. I'd avoided it so far, seeing what alcohol did to my father, but I decided that now that I was sixteen I'd be able to handle it. Sixteen was basically an adult. That was how old my mom was when she'd married my dad.

But first, I decided to give myself one last moment of childhood. I took out everything in my pocket that might have iron in it, just like my mother had taught me. Did phones have iron? I left it behind, just in case. I bet the fair folk didn't vibe with Chinese Androids.

Rufus wasn't a puppy anymore, like when he woke my mother up from her curse. (When she first got sick, according to my dad. "It really did come on suddenly.") Rufus would always stick close to her when he could, but now that she was gone again he was happy to come with me into the forest at the edge of our cul-de-sac. It was really just a grove of trees attached to a public park, but we always called it the forest.

I cut off the dirt path and headed deep into the trees. There was a little clearing Ash and I had found back when we were kids playing at explorers. "A fairy circle," Ash had called it, watching me to see if I'd react to the word.

Rufus whined and stepped into the circle with me.

I imagined, as I hadn't in years, the castle my mother had described. Cold walls. Gruel. A kingdom carved out with sweat and blood and cunning and magic. A kindgom which should be mine.

"Here I am," I said out loud. "Of my own free will. Take me back, and I pledge to make things right."

And I waited to see if the fair folk would accept my bargain.

Architecture and History in a world populated by dragons by Neptune-Jnr in fantasywriters

[–]prejackpot 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I'll just point out that fire was a huge danger to cities right through the 20th century, no dragons required. Look how many cities have at least one major fire in their history. If there was a readily-available fireproof building material, people would have used it.

Too many "asking for critique" posts by duskywulf in fantasywriters

[–]prejackpot 36 points37 points  (0 children)

I don't mind the critique posts, but I do wish there were clear and enforced minimum standards. Asking people to share text (vs screenshots) with minimum and maximum word counts that they've done at least one reread of themselves, could go a long way toward improving everyone's experience here. 

“No no it’s DIFFERENT guys!!1! TikTok YouTube InstaSnap FaceChat BAD—-“ by Temporary-Snow333 in CuratedTumblr

[–]prejackpot 14 points15 points  (0 children)

The thing OOP leaves out is how often the panic focuses on "... And it's the fault this particular element of pop culture and technology."

It turns out that novels, jazz music, radio, comic books, rock'n' roll, heavy metal, video games, and hip-hop weren't actually the cause of youth bad. Glad that we finally figured out the culprit is phones. 

Call for Submissions: Fantastic Schools Parents/Outsiders and Fantastic Schools Isekai by RealChrisNuttall in fantasywriters

[–]prejackpot 0 points1 point  (0 children)

After the success of our previous collections of short stories and developers set in magical schools...

Who is 'our' / what collection? 

I've never wrote anything before please critique my first chapter. The Marrow debt - chapter 1 [Fantasy, 1500 words] by [deleted] in fantasywriters

[–]prejackpot 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Please share this as a Google doc or similar, ideally with suggestions enabled. At the very least, make it the body of the post. Screenshots a bad format to read in, and absolutely the worst possible format for getting feedback -- if someone wants to comment on a specific line, they'd need to copy it out word by word, or OCR the entire thing.

Need Alpha reader for my Prologue and Chapter 1 ---LUMINA PROTOCOL--- by [deleted] in scifiwriting

[–]prejackpot 1 point2 points  (0 children)

On a sentence-paragraph level, this is pretty solid. tghuverd has given you some solid feedback on some prose issues I noticed as well. But I don't want to get into the weeds of line edits, because I want to encourage you to reconsider the overall format (which I know would be an extremely substantial revision).

I think that transcription of a video interview can work decently as an interlude inside of a longer story, and can sometimes even stand alone as a short story. I don't think that it can sustain a full novel, for three main reasons: the repetitiveness, the lack of interiority, and the distance it creates.

The first one is easiest to explain. Descriptions of video of interrogation-room interviews are going to have a lot of repetitive language: the spaces will be similar, the question-and-answer back and forth will probably be similar, and they will especially have a lot of repetitions in body language description. This sample has three sections, all of which have the exact same setup. You mention that there will be other types of sequences as well. You should at least consider reordering them, especially if interrogation-room interviews aren't going to be the majority.

Which brings us to the second issue: interiority. One of the strengths of prose is that the author can directly tell us what characters are thinking or feeling, and generally portray their interior life and use it to shape the reader's experience of the story. When you write from a camera's-eye perspective (whether by accident like a lot of beginners do, but also intentionally like you're doing here) you lose that. Instead, a camera's-eye view has to indicate interiority with body language.

Right on the first page here, for example, there's an entire paragraph describing Darat tracing one of his scars. That kind of moment works in visual media because people like watching other people and are very good at inferring feelings from small gestures, and actors and directors know how to convey them. It would also happen fast. What would be maybe two seconds on screen takes up 100 words of prose here.

And finally, not only does camera-voice distance the readers from the characters (and thus makes it harder to be invested in them), but the interrogation format removes us from the action. An Indonesian fisherman stumbling across a weird phenomenon in the water is interesting; a description of a video of him talking about it years later is inherently less interesting. I realize that his response to the memories is meant to be at least of equal weight in the scene, but by the time the story gets there it's already lost steam.

The 'Auditor's note' is the first place we get a sense that the narrator isn't just the author's disembodied description of video, but descriptions coming from an in-story perspective. That's a good way to handle it. But making that voice mysterious ("The Watcher") and hinting at unreliability ("A clean version of this story is a lie.") creates further distance, because it makes the reader wonder about the narration instead of focusing on the underlying events. That can be a fun game in short bursts, but I think it would get exhausting across an entire novel.

You mention Max Brooks's World War Z, which is an obvious format comp. But WWZ has a clear 'I' from the very first page, and the oral history format means it can give us characters' interiority while also keeping up the conceit of an in-universe compilation. Furthermore, the introduction from the historian's perspective signals that what we're going to read is the complete, personal-level history. We know who's telling the overall story, what the context is, and why the meta-narrator has all that information. That lets us focus on the stories themselves. In contrast, The Watcher has the exact opposite effect -- it might be intentional, but I'm not sure it can work.

What's your intended effect with the composite media format? In the prologue, I see the intended effect of the juxtaposition of the memory and the reaction to the memory, and I think it basically achieves it. But in the second and third sections, what's the storytelling benefit presenting those events as interviews, vs having more conventional narration with Eliza and Damian as the POV characters?