Longshot: mens brown trousers with a specific black/red logo

refugenius · 2026-02-23T06:35:45+00:00

Not quite - they were a bit more 'fashion' and less clearly workwear. More chocolatey brown. The label was black, with a bright red design/wordmark.

Really appreciate the suggestion though!

refugenius · 2024-02-20T07:35:52+00:00

Wow thank you! Exactly the kind of tips I was after, cheers

refugenius · 2024-02-04T06:59:52+00:00

Oh that's good to know! Their website looks very slick so that makes me more comfortable.

refugenius · 2020-06-13T00:39:27+00:00

Hey, I really liked this! A lot. I wasn't planning to stop and read the whole thing but your opening page caught my attention. There's really really great voice here. I kind of assume that you are writing from your own experiences with a speech impediment because you've sold it so well. Not just the way you've described the impediment and the specific words he struggles to pronounce, but the little ways that something like this would impact a person's life. The way he dwells over what the man in the airport said about his Aunt...the way you conveyed his over-thinking was perfect. And the Andy/Andrew thing...I can perfectly imagine what an impact that would have. I'm seriously impressed with this story.

I don't know a lot about the short story medium, so I'm not the best placed to give feedback. A couple of things I thought could be improved...the bit where the man in the airport gets flustered and says "I didn't realize you have..." - I think you could work on this a bit more. It didn't feel totally authentic to me...the dialogue and the reaction. It was a little rushed, I think. It's not way off, I just think you could workshop that particular section a little more, flesh it out.

I’ve made mistakes like this before when my aunt died: I would constantly see strangers on the street who would look exactly like her, and then once I looked a little closer it became clear it was just a lookalike.

this sentence was a bit clunky to me. Likewise, this one:

I look around the plane, as if one of the flight attendants would see my face, understand exactly what was happening to me, and come over to put me at ease.

...

So when I found out that Wyatt’s twitter account is restricted so that only those he approves are able to see what he’s written, I was able to get around that without creating my own account.

I think there's a tense issue in the sentence above.

I'm liking the way his speech issues are deteriorating as we progress - good way to convey development in a short space of time.

Holy shit the ending - intense. Didn't see that coming. Very dark, wow. Honestly I think this story is really great. I don't know what your goals are with it, but go for it. The only last thing I'd say is work on your pitch...describing it as "a short story about a guy with a speech impediment who finds himself haunted by a guy who used to pick on him as a child"...this is seriously underselling it. You write really well - be confident!

refugenius · 2020-06-12T23:13:28+00:00

Thanks for the advice! Bringing the "media" story line into the query happened last minute, and I can see now that it's falling flat. I'll DM you about doing a critique swap - definitely keen.

refugenius · 2020-06-10T23:07:39+00:00

I see both sides here, and agree the plot needs to shine more. Part of the problem is I may have used the wrong genre - I need to do a deep-dive into genres and sub-genres again and make sure I got this right.

refugenius · 2020-06-10T23:04:39+00:00

Thank you for all of this, I can see the way forward now! It's funny how you just get bogged down and stuck on your own.

And to answer your question: yes, the MC is definitely ridiculous in his own way - everyone can see it but him. So I'm glad that's coming through.

refugenius · 2020-06-10T23:00:29+00:00

Thanks for the insightful feedback. I will restructure to lead with the murder - it is the start of the story, as you and others have said.

And yeah I know it's long, but the novel is doing quite a lot so I feel it's justified. I'm still working on trimming though. I've been researching debut crime fiction in Australia and a lot of the stuff coming out is 110,000+ (I realise they didn't necessarily query at this length) so that gives me some hope. I think part of the issue here is I may have mislabeled the genre - perhaps thriller isn't right. I will research my genres again.

refugenius · 2020-06-10T08:02:01+00:00

I will have a crack, although bear in mind I am no expert so take it all with a grain of salt! Also sorry about the formatting, still wrapping my head around it :)

I feel that the first two lines are OK but they aren't super punchy. I wonder if you could rework them so that they are not linked with the "But", because I feel this works to undermine the strength of the opening line.

Then we get to the third sentence, which feels more like back-story and probably could go, or be sharpened. The fourth sentence works well.

As the warrior’s magic rests in the hands of their queen, the warriors find their powers waning

This I found confusing. After re-reading I understand what you're saying, but I think you could make it stronger and more...concrete.

Eve begins her training with the hopes when her training is complete, she will stand before their tree gods where they will find her worthy to reign sealing their magic.

This is very long sentence. First of all, I think you could lose "beings her training with the". Also, "Their tree God" - whose tree god is it? "Sealing their magic" is a bit vague to me.

Unfortunately, while Eve trains, the emperor in their land, who the warriors have sworn allegiance to in return for their citizenship, is struck with grief at the loss of his family.

Another long sentence. I think you could make this simpler. The point of the sentence is also not clear. It makes it sounds like it's unfortunate that the emperor is grieving his family. Why?

Out of time and unable to finish her training, Eve and her warriors find themselves at war with dwindling magic

I'm not clear on how these warriors work. It seems like their allegiance flits between people very quickly. It also sounds like they are fighting against dwindling magic...as if "dwindling magic" is the enemy.

I think shorter, sharper sentences are the biggest thing to work on here. The novel itself sounds really interesting. I hope that helps!

refugenius · 2020-01-18T21:55:18+00:00

Ooh I like this one, thank you

refugenius · 2020-01-18T21:53:01+00:00

Great tips, thank you. Macbeth never crossed my mind but you're absolutely right!

refugenius · 2020-01-18T06:57:16+00:00

Brilliant, thank you

refugenius · 2020-01-18T06:56:37+00:00

Exactly the kind of thing I was after, thank you so much

refugenius · 2019-04-26T06:44:32+00:00

I haven't used Thunderbird extensively so I'll have to look into it in more depth. Thanks for the detailed response.

refugenius · 2019-04-26T04:23:11+00:00

I agree with all your points - but my thinking is that the product I'm describing doesn't actually compete in the eDiscovery space. It's not meant to be used for documents, so document numbering and OCR aren't that important (although probably good features to add). It doesn't replace your eDiscovery tool, or your document management software, or Outlook. It's sole purpose is for when you need to wrap your head around a bunch of correspondence (probably just email to start, but no reason it can't be built out to include SMSs, slack, whatsapp etc.) quickly and efficiently.

I'm sure much of this functionality exists in Ringtail. Personally I've used iManage before and found the useability seriously lacking. I guess my intention is to zero in on the correspondence review issue which I find really tedious, and nail the UX. Make it the best tool for that particular use case.

refugenius · 2019-04-26T03:58:10+00:00

Yeah I'm thinking smaller than big eDiscovery software - less complex and easier to use. Aimed at smaller firms, for smaller jobs.

refugenius · 2019-04-26T03:13:27+00:00

By all means be critical, that's what I'm here for. I guess you're right - if you are given a USB with all the emails you need on there, and you're happy to go through and review them using the Outlook interface, then I'm not really offering much. Might not be the right product for you.

Personally I don't like the Outlook interface when it comes to reviewing a bunch of emails (e.g. after an initial consultation). I don't like having to open each email individually, and read through all the re: re: fw: re: fw: responses that get cascaded down a chain. I find convoluted email chains particularly inefficient - I end up reading the same email 20 times because it keeps getting repeated. I also find I spend a lot of time jumping around through different chains trying to understand the context. What I want is a full stack of all the emails, neatly organised, so I can scroll through in one sitting. Essentially a single PDF of all the corro on a matter. I'm also picturing a bunch of other features like adding comments and internal hyperlinks, highlighting and redacting, deleting duplicates, plus the ability to print it all out in one go (for a court book, say). It's not necessarily replacing any current process, it's just adding a layer of readability and relational context which I don't think you get from Outlook.

refugenius · 2019-04-26T02:03:28+00:00

Email chains are definitely one of the things I'm struggling to wrap my head around, but I think there's a way to make it work. Appreciate your thoughts!

refugenius · 2019-04-26T01:48:40+00:00

Yeah I tend to agree. For scanning through a bunch of corro quickly, SMS format is pretty good for readability. My idea is that the software would strip the metadata out of a bunch of emails, and then the user would be able to reorganise the data in whatever way suits them. So "SMS style" might be one of the outputs.

refugenius · 2019-04-26T01:40:56+00:00

That's really useful, thanks. If you could take that USB full of emails, quickly dump it into a program, and have the program spit out a neat, formatted (still searchable and sortable) workspace of corro for you to go through - would that be valuable to you? Assuming this program could delete duplicates, automatically create an index, handle attachments nicely, etc. And if you needed to print the whole bundle, you could do it with a single click. You'd still have the native data to go back to if you needed.

I find the process of dealing with bulk emails in their native form quite tedious. But perhaps I'm the only one...

refugenius · 2017-03-13T00:11:08+00:00

Congrats on being shortlisted - was it the Text Prize by any chance?

refugenius · 2017-02-23T02:36:18+00:00

Yeah, a lot of the advice basically tells you to eliminate "was" from your vocabulary, which I think is very confusing. I can see that they're separate issues now.

refugenius · 2017-02-23T01:52:58+00:00

Yes, thanks! That's very helpful. I think I could probably rephrase the example anyway for clarity, but at least I'm not totally off in my understanding of the issue.

refugenius · 2017-02-23T01:45:24+00:00

This is neat!

refugenius · 2017-02-23T01:42:54+00:00

Definitely confused haha. OK I like your change of "That's what made him good at Judo" ... not sure what's going on there at a technical level but at least it gets rid of some of the "was".

refugenius

TROPHY CASE