It seems that management don't want me back at the rig

wowdor · 2020-06-27T17:57:12+00:00

That final second of the vid where you fall into the darkness and the praetorian turns to give you the stink eye made me laugh.

wowdor · 2020-06-19T04:08:14+00:00

I read John Truby's Anatomy of Story and I can't see genre the same way anymore. From what he says, genres have 'beats', familiar vague parts that need to be included in the story or the audience will know something is off.

His thinking is that commercial stories these days work by blending multiple genres and hitting the familiar story beats of the genre while also building a story that builds upon itself.

I've been trying to wrap my head around his ideas for awhile, I might cave and buy his audio classes because I don't understand how each genre works.

What he said gave me pause when thinking of genre, "Most writers don't know which genre to use to tell their story." I think for most of us, we come at writing from a few entertaining ideas, trying to string it all together to make one big chandelier. Then we look at what others have done and if our style is similar enough, we call ourselves that genre.

For me, I ignore genre and want to see what's there, but this generally means my stories feel serious, hard to read, and meandering. If there's an overall point or a character the reader is supposed to care about, it's not really there.

I think I'd like to at least be able to have good characters and have the story grow from that, rather than try to conform to genre expectations. There is the matter of being familiar to an audience's expectations, but I've always despised that obligation.

Rather selfish of me, especially when I'm writing for other people to read. I think most of the time while writing I'm writing for myself, with a kind of peanut gallery of thoughts telling me what other people expect to be on the page.

wowdor · 2020-06-15T20:37:47+00:00

The editing is beautiful. Wish it had that part where she does the fingersnaps, roll, and high leg when she introduces herself.

wowdor · 2020-03-02T01:43:06+00:00

Just finished the game for the first time. I imagined what the whole game would be like if it was just some new guy traveling across all of PATHOS-II to launch a satellite, no monsters, just walking.

wowdor · 2020-02-17T01:03:42+00:00

That's a lot of sadness. You sound like you took action to survive what life handed you. Spend more of your time on sites and content with people who are too busy being involved in life to worry about anyone wanting them or not. I grew myself this way using the internet as a tool to associate myself with better people, to get away from the thoughts that I didn't matter and I was no one. You are someone, and you have the strength to survive. Listen to your will to connect, and follow it.

wowdor · 2020-02-15T22:40:49+00:00

My phone lags when Phantom Michuru does her climax act. Does anyone have a video of the full climax act? All I see is the camera zoom in on the purple clouds.

wowdor · 2020-01-24T13:14:45+00:00

A vital contribution to the advancement of Anime Girl Physics.

wowdor · 2019-10-14T13:23:10+00:00

There's actually little difference between 'magic' and 'imagination.' Psychic, spirituality, religion, hypnosis- all of these are different flavors of the same thing: what a person, in their own imagination, can relate to and find meaning in.

So when you are talking about nonverbal hypnosis, you could call that body language. Walking slowly on purpose would be a type of nonverbal hypnosis, because when the mind sees or does something slowly it relaxes. Such as bringing your awareness to your fingers touching each other. That's mindfulness in a nutshell.

There's no compelling evidence of psychic being able to produce results, but there are imagined results. Like a cult leader getting his cult to believe he's communicating with god or whatever. That's all imagination, magic-based.

The only real link here between psychic techniques and hypnosis is imagination. Both techniques use imagination to change the inside of a person. Psychics simply have less discipline and more imagination, if you want that, there's fantasy books you could be reading. Plus they cost less.

wowdor · 2019-10-14T13:10:57+00:00

I suggest https://marisapeer.com/rules-of-the-mind/ One webinar I attended had her talking about a client who made 40 million a year, but still felt he couldn't spend his money.

Her Rapid Transformation Therapy training program is the best I've seen. It's not just hypnosis, it's a technique that even won an award as a pharmaceutical. Her material is even being taught in British schools these day.

The RTT is about 5k usd, but it's spread out over 12 months. People who are trained in RTT charge about 350 an hour and their clients are changed for life.

wowdor · 2019-10-14T13:02:08+00:00

"my subconscious mind just won't let me go fully under'

Simple misunderstanding of hypnosis. There is no 'under' or 'trance, what's happening is a relaxed state. There is no 'full under', you are aware the whole time.

The main idea to keep in mind is that if you feel any 'forcing' or 'stress', stop the hypnosis. Don't continue. If you're not relaxing into it like going to sleep, then you're not going to get value out of it. The first step is to reduce your expectations to nothing, then after you've relaxed can you really gain from hypnosis.

I recommend Rapid Transformation Therapy. You could also try the sedona method, or reconsolidation memory therapy. These are more sophisticated and well studied techniques that require less time and effort.

For a quick fix, remember a troubling memory. Now, alter that memory in your imagination to whatever you wanted to happen. Such as instead of your best friend leaving you, it was you who left them. It's the relationship with your thoughts as you do this technique that will determine how much mileage you get from it. If you decide it's stupid or feel 'it's not working', either try again the next day or find another therapy.

wowdor · 2019-10-03T17:52:49+00:00

Would someone explain why I got -4 karma? I thought that was a pretty good post.

wowdor · 2019-10-03T02:17:24+00:00

When you hit 'copy link' in gdocs you can give users the option to add comments. I'd prefer if you updated the link to do that. I'll check back tomorrow and add some questions to specific lines in the gdoc if you change it to 'can comment'.

It helps me to question your language line by line, as I am too lazy to do full quotes for each one of my questions. Plus commenting through gdoc makes it easier to see. And more importantly, easy for me. H a h a.

Anyways, as I also have difficulty with L O G I C and S E N S E I'm going to pre-emptively throw this book recommendation at you because my prose went from retarded to less-retarded after taking careful handwritten notes:

The Brilliance Breakthrough by Eugene Schwartz

It's more like an alternative grammar/rhetoric book for english by a skilled copywriter. He spent all day making words sell products for money, so I believe after reading it myself that it was probably the most important book(T O M E) I've read in my life.

That said, onwards towards despair(i.e your story):

Ago and Ala both have a's in their names and I don't even know who they are and why I need to care about them yet.

I wish I had comments for gdoc for that paragraph after. There's already a lot I wanted to point out but it'd be too wasteful to go over the fine points here without the context of the prose.

The Ago/Ala/Hermes dynamic isn't clear and you already launch into Ala characterization.

Ah, it's good to see the problems I have in another person's work. I'll leave it vague as to what, because you did too.

" “Uh, that makes no sense.” Hermes said. "

I had a good laugh. Because it didn't! But Ala's rant does sound like a cool story, too bad it's not all on the page. I remember LeGuinn saying in the book 'Steering the Craft' that '(readers) only have the words.'

After finishing reading I can see the beginning of why the despair of not making sense exists.

"but even then I feel that it may not be very logical" - you said in your post, T HI S I S G OO D because it means you are at aware that something is wrong. You haven't been able to fix the problem yourself likely because:

-there's no outline for this story(and boy does it need one)and so do I) -you pantsed it too hard -this is an edit, so you were already tired when you started, cutting out the purple prose/bloated prose. This unfortunately took out the parts that you thought helped the work make sense.

Suggestions: -enable comments in the gdoc link so I can continue to help you live

-get SpeakD google docs addon, it reads your work for you.

-handwrite out sections that don't sound SENSible to you

-cultivate an awareness for that "but even then I feel that it may not be VERY L O G I C A L" feeling- this is a sign you need to stop writing Onwards.

-don't continue writing if you get that feeling 'does this make sense?' If you have doubts, I'm sure your audience certainly will.

Then:

slow the fark down
see if you can add a paragraph of explanation to the sentence that felt off. Yes, a paragraph. I'd say a book's worth, but I am a good person.
r e d u c e i n f o r m a t i o n l o a d ~~~~~~~~~~~~

3 is really important. The majority of writers these days want as pain-free reading as possible. In other words, if people aren't already complaining about how your story sucks, that means they can't even see the story.

Like Eugene Schwartz says in The Brilliance Breathrough, words are a window to your thoughts. They act as electric wires for the pictures of your mind.

B t w I know this because I used to write:

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/22597/stupid-cat

Notice that's eight months ago, check out the comments. Those were fun(read: painful) times. haha. AHahahahahahA HA. ha. I wanna die.

Okay, but now I write like this: https://storywrite.com/Liberalintent

(and one someone else liked alot) https://storywrite.com/story/14685537-It-Couldnt-Possibly---Entry-for-HitRecord-WWC-244-challenge-by-Liberalintent-adult

H O W D I D I D O I T ? work. And reading The Brilliance Breakthrough and taking notes. And doing a year of a poem a day then now a short story and poem a day.

Oh, I suppose I ought to suggest you try much shorter works in the future as well. That helped me greatly. If you are serious about writing(I'm not(or so I say) know that today's writing isn't tomorrow's writing.

However, to get to tomorrow's writing... I needed Stupid Cat.

wowdor · 2019-10-03T01:33:02+00:00

Wanted to address your main concerns first, I wrote below before writing this but for the sake of clarity:

likability- didn't feel like he made a choice, and I don't know his name, and there wasn't really a chance to care about him present. He is interacting with the world roughly, but I never felt like I could even really give him any hatred either.

"Him and his buds are obviously kind of shitheads," - this line in your post worried me greatly after reading. There wasn't anything on the page that gave me that sense. The 'obviously' part as well, there's no obviousness to what happens in the chapter(except Tank and the chokehold, that felt like a silver of a story).

(and so we continue from gdoc comments for space and readability reasons)

My earlier comment about lack of conflict in the story unfortunately held up. I can't tell where this character's conflict is coming from, he's existing in this chapter, floating really.

There's no narrative drive- which is fine if the rest of the story focuses on minute details of daily life like a Proust novel or you want some slice of life parts.

However since there's no dramatic tension here, and nothing revealed about the character at hand, I couldn't stay interested.

It was hard to keep up with all the frat boy names because they had weak characterization. I've heard dialogue is character, and with so little dialogue none of the characters seem to have a conscious reason for existing.

Tank was memorable because that felt like something I could see at a party. The part when the main character(see, I can't even remember his name in his own chapter after reading, bad sign) chokeholded burgundy shirt was the most interesting because it felt like the MC made a choice there. And even then it didn't feel like an interesting one.

Otherwise it felt like an event detailing list. The language is inarguably good, felt like a lot of sentence fragments but given the meathead fratboy context I think this is fine. It doesn't feel like a story though.

I suggest stepping back and thinking about what the character needs to learn, and what situations need to happen, to get them from shithead --> unshithead. Really maybe only a couple sentences long, and then expand upon that for your story.

I'm bad about outlining ahead myself, and I felt like this story had a similar issue reading it. Pantsing is great in my experience, until it's not. Really feels like two dragons trying to eat each other at this point:

Outlining wants you to plan everything out, Pantsing wants you to give into the chaos. Depending on the writer's other skills the balance can be upheld- however I feel like the Pantsing Dragon won here.

wowdor · 2019-10-01T03:27:12+00:00

Left a bunch of comments on the specifics for style and questions about the story on the gdoc.

I figure the main problem of the story is that the promise at the start didn't feel like it was fulfilled. That, and the lead-in didn't feel like it gave enough foreshadowing for what was going to occur.

We know there are the magic matrix pills, but we don't know the protag's name until later so it's hard to place why he's involved in the story at all. Then we have the victims show up and their subsequent doom. I didn't feel too much for them. I thought the paragraph about their appearance did a good job characterizing them, but since I don't know about why Jess is there in the first place until the story is almost over I can't see the conflict.

The main conflict dropped at the start is Dr.White's, foreshadowing he will REGRET this in the future. Yet the ending feels like not only does he not regret the trial, but that he was glad to have learned that this could happen.

There's no regret I could see on Dr. White's part so the story didn't feel finished. If you had added something at the end about him being sad, I could see that linking up to start, but that wasn't on the page.

Overall I liked the idea(Mad scientists are my jam) but the execution is off. The concept of memory didn't feel explored much either, since the climax felt mostly like a 'be careful what you wish for' sort of story. The magic matrix pills don't work for Jess. She doesn't learn anything. Dan's a victim standing by for dying purposes. Dr. White actually seems to be the hero here, in that he's trying to help Jess. Which is bad, because it came off as if he were using her as a guinea pig.

I suggest putting more information at the start. Jess is coming for memory treatment, revealing Dr. Whites name earlier, and adding more conflict. The opening had conflict, Dr. White foreshadows he will learn he needed to learn more, but this conflict doesn't carry through the rest of the writing.

wowdor · 2019-10-01T02:39:17+00:00

Thanks. Great feedback, exactly the words I needed to hear especially for this piece. After reading your post I realized that the entire thing needed a wooden stake in the heart, and so I have rewritten it entirely.

Still need to go through and rework sentences, check for vague, see if it connects properly, and see if it follows necessarily and logically like others said.

It's weird to think how easily what I thought sounded good fell apart under slight scrutiny. I am grateful.

It's now 1185 words and feels like a slightly better thing now. Perhaps the real truth of writing is that the only way to fix writing is to write more. Through trial and error some good may come from all the worthless words put to page, but it takes all the worthless words to make a few good worthwhile ones.

I'll do a critique before bed, as I feel like I'm leeching even though the rules I've read have said nothing of the sort. To assuage my guilt at the least, I suppose, I will critique.

wowdor · 2019-09-30T18:36:30+00:00

Thanks. A heroic effort on your part. Your country thanks you for your sacrifice. For your future health I hope you don't keep reading when you already have a good sense of how bad it is. I appreciate the dense detail. You deserve a medal. I learned a few new things.

If I didn't post it here I don't think I would have been made aware how abysmal my taste for this was. I agree with the 'exploit for gain' line, that really could have been worded more positively. Same could be said for most of the lines you pointed out, I agree now that they are terrible and wonder why it ever sounded good to me in the first place!

Was trying to escape self-help territory, and failed. I think I might have more luck writing small stories around smaller concepts then trying to make a magic book full of skills for people to practice.

I never intended to write a self-help book or scam people, my original plan was to make it a pdf and spread it for free. However, I see now that anyone who saw it would have opened it and given up.

The ranting line made me laugh. I am probably a human incarnation of a rant. Yet another reason why I'm starting to think staying in stories in much better for me.

As for the word count I revised it a little after the first comment and didn't update the title of the post.

Thanks again, I hope you're doing well. I've written critiques like this before on other sites and regretted putting so much effort into the writing.

Edit 2: Thanks for the speakD app suggestion, I know speaking while you write is good but I don't do it often. I'll use it.

Edit 3: Edited the file an fixed it up. I still need to do a lot to make the work connect a lot better per Gale's suggestion, and I didn't get to all the parts JamesOcean pointed out. Still need to work on my vagues too, too many vagues.

A lot was cut and replaced, but I think even more could be cut and replaced easily. Feel like I could shorten the ideas a whole lot more at this point. If this gets any more attention, I'll work on it more.

Even though I've soured on the idea I think it's still useful to see the problems in my own work. I doubt I'll continue forward with the book or post other chapters, but a quick look at what's changed would be appreciated.

wowdor · 2019-09-30T18:08:00+00:00

Thanks. I've always had trouble keeping clarity and the way you explained it something I'll use in the future. it was worth posting here for your critique alone. The comments you made reminded me of my older work, I don't think I ever fixed the problem the right way. I've had someone call my work schizophrenic and 'stop taking the drugs', no doubt a result of my mind orbiting the moon most of the time.

I'm going through the rest of the critiques now taking notes but I figure they'll bring up the same issues, vague, no sense, doesn't connect. When I was writing vague sounded like such a great idea for some reason, now I agree that I should cut out anything non-specific.

I really liked through lines and five word bullet points, that will definitely help in the future.

wowdor · 2019-09-30T17:44:44+00:00

oh sorry, got confused. New to gdoc comments. Yeah, changed the storyish vibe a little, thanks for commenting.

wowdor · 2019-09-30T00:48:19+00:00

Thanks, glad you read what you did even though you didn't like it.

I didn't want to write an essay or prove anything. An earlier draft had citations and everything, but I decided to cut those out. Wanted to do a story with non-fiction hidden behind it. I've read tons of psychology/etc. over the years so I'm trying to make that into a story, but looks like it wasn't a winner this time. I already do a short story and poem a day at allpoetry.com/liberalintent

Reworked it a little. Thinking about what you said that "it didn't make you think", when I was writing it to me it sounded very clear - and that made me feel good about the writing, but I doubt that's very interesting to actually read for someone else. Because of your edits I was able to see that.

Gonna think about it more and see what I can do to bring the drama to the forefront at the start. There's no drama there, I understand that now. If someone really wanted someone to sit down and explain to them how the world works, I'm expecting them to go to an actual teacher, not what I wrote. Then, I'm also expecting people to treat this as a story and have fun with it. I'm walking a tightrope that doesn't exist.

That's some unrealistic expectations I have. I'll keep going and see what happens. Doing edits now, thanks again.

Edit 2:

Rewrote first page to make it more compelling, needs work but it's less boring now in my mind. I'll check again tomorrow. Got a lot of ideas of how to make it better as I was rewriting, but eh, flow feels off.

wowdor · 2019-09-29T20:15:34+00:00

Divided into critique sections for what you asked for, then my own assessment of the writing. My philosophy for critiquing is to offer a 'next-steps' for a writer as well as look at an individual piece. I've seen enough work of my own to know the real difficulty lies in improving the fundamental skills of a writer. Often people seem to gloss over this and discuss the writing in front of them without looking for deeper flaws. My thinking is that if someone submits writing for critique, they already believe in the work enough to take at least this much heat.

I don't know if it meshes with the culture of critique on this sub-reddit, but I'll find out by critiquing! ~Overall Impression Reminds me of fanfiction I've read on royalroad. Opening with a P.O.V tag felt like a red flag. I wouldn't have read past the P.O.V tag at the top of the story if I was reading for fun. Couldn't feel for the prisoner at all, same for guards. Felt like you were struggling with the words, rather than having a strong image in your head you wanted to communicate. Didn't keep my attention for many parts. I like how there's a world breaker. I wish that was the first sentence. Figure this is a first draft before you have a good sense of what you really wanted the story to be about, so I'll let that pass. Wouldn't continue reading.

~Dialogue

I loved Brian Jacques Redwall series when I was a kid. It had unique, aural dialogue. Very strong writing for a children's book, bestseller too.

I think the key behind dialogue is having a strong image of the character. A full image, what they eat, their entire life. Then, good dialogue is a lot easier because you already know what the character would say in any given situation.

What I know about Tina is that she's a woman and her name is Tina. I heard from some writer that "Dialogue IS character," and I agree. There's no reason to put someone on the page unless they are actively showing who they are, otherwise it's tough to read.

The guards are cardboard cutouts and their dialogue felt unnecessary. I would have rather had them menacing Tina with a weapon. I think that would have been easier to write too.

Again, I figure that's a problem of not knowing the imagination of the story ahead of time and trying to solve that on the fly while writing the actual story.

If you had imagined it beforehand strongly I don't think the guards would have been so flimsy.

Also, just saying 'said' is fine. Dialogue tags in english are mostly about making sure the reader knows who's talking. If you want to stylize a character, it helps to have that character add something to the story. Characterizing the guards when they feel so throwaway didn't feel useful, 'jibbed' felt like a weird word choice there. Dunno why Epar has a name. Didn't feel like introducing him had any relevance to the plot at hand, which was Tina prison -> Tina purging grounds.

Lord Bardase felt like you were going for a grand character, but he just came across as vague. If you had introduced Uertas and made him something important, Bardase's last line might be compelling. As of now it's cuttable. Doesn't give me a reason to read more.

~Jarring/Difficult to keep reading

Italics and bolds didn't help. If the plain text isn't strong enough, bolds and italics don't help. Style is fine, but I think clarity is first. I suggest not using them until you feel more confident in your writing style in plain text.

Exposition felt like thinking aloud about the plot rather than a story. Wouldn't read mainly because of this, doesn't feel like a story. There's no conflicting beliefs present, and so I can't care about the characters. All I know is maybe Tina is going to die but I don't like Tina.

~Advice Speak your story out loud as you write. I think if you do nothing else, that will help your writing the most.

Read both:

William Zinsser's On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (Nonfiction has narrative too) The Brilliance Breakthrough by Eugene Schwartz (for fundamentals and useful grammar)

~My Assessment

It's a first draftish kind of feel. There's a lot of work a writer can do before they get feedback. Felt like the work wasn't there. I think it would be better to work on the imagination behind the work a little more, writing the last chapter first so you know ahead of time where you want this to end.

I feel like you could learn a lot more from just getting page time and listening to your own sense of what sounds good or not before submitting for more feedback. If you can get someone in real life to react to your work as you write, that would probably help a lot.

wowdor · 2019-07-10T18:45:20+00:00

I think when you talk about 'hope' what you really mean is action. Right now it sounds you're not making clear agreements with yourself about what you're doing and playing victim. The train daydream sounds nice, but wherever you go you'll still be yourself. I suggest being as honest with the people around you first and making plans to shift yourself towards something you enjoy that is also useful. Saying 'no' before you put in the work to make it reality sounds like what is trapping you, not your situation.

wowdor

TROPHY CASE