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living off the light
spcmnspff
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Posts
At no point did I think there was a sentence or an image that didn't work. The only thing that got me was the name Agnes - it just doesn't seem to fit with all the other names - and a little typo in the second last paragraph. I struggled with the needle and the water process, but once I reached the end of it I had figured it out and didn't need to re-read it, but it might need a little tightening.
And the ending. The very last paragraph just didn't quite seem to fit, at least not with how I imagined the characters would act. I think Adam's awkwardness earlier when he brought his father the water was perfect, but the way he treated his father's actions earlier (defending them when questioned by Dylan, etc.) just didn't match up with his embarrassment at the end. I liked that his father reacted to the neon/artificial lights, but maybe you need to hint at that motif of the modern replacing the natural a bit more earlier on, it seemed like it was just tagged on rather than a natural conclusion to your otherwise totally awesome story.
I found the thing with the needle and water to be pretty confusing, but that might just be 'cause it's three thirty in the morning. Other than that, man. Loved it.
And actually I disagree about Adam's embarrassment at the end with his father - he was defensive about him earlier in the story, but the "He felt as though the ridicule might break him" line made sense to me...I can understand being defensive of someone, or even admiring them, but still being bothered by others' reactions and wanting to escape them. Or something like that. The last paragraph was actually my favourite.
Good job, man!
I get that it's supposed to be determining whether the water is good/safe for Stan to drink, but I don't get why it's supposed to work (even in the context of the story), or why Adam's mom did that when he was little. Is there some meaning I'm missing?
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
Fantastic story, spaceman. A beautiful offering.
Thank you, Rubacava!
Possibly personal preference, but the "yet" there annoys me. Slender and powerful in the context of sports bikes aren't commonly mutually exclusive, and I think it kills the sentence flow by popping too many consonants in there. I'd replace it with "and" - it flows better and is more neutral.
You lean into corners, not the bikes themselves.
Too many pronouns starting your sentences in this paragraph. "He", "His", "His", "She", "His". Mix it up a bit.
Should be capitalised.
This too.
Nice cadence there.
I'd fiddle with the sentence to replace "while" with "and" here, too. "And" suggests a closer relationship between the two events than "while", which is more appropriate here, IMO.
Nice.
"Embarrassing."
That grammar's a bit funky. Can't quite put my finger on why it sounds off, sorry.
You could probably go a bit stronger than "deliberate". "Forced?"
These "basements" so close to Stan's basement has the potential to be a bit confusing. Could the kids be hanging out somewhere else?
"new constellations of subject matter"
Brilliant paragraph.
Also a bit grammatically wonky.
A somewhat weak sentence structure for an earth-shaking revelation.
"Meandering" probably isn't the word you're looking for.
This scene transition is a bit too abrupt for my liking.
Wonderful image, but "oversized" is superfluous.
Mr. Brand, or men in general?
Awkward sentence.
Brilliant image.
"Dogged" seems like the wrong word
--
A few more little word choices that seemed a bit off to my ear, but nothing else major.
Aside from that, I agree with the raves - I completely loved it. I'd love to read the other interlinked stories.
I still think there's room to expand on Adam a bit more - flesh him out just a tad more. He's very passive at the moment, which I what you were going for, I know - but I think you could make him a bit less reactive. Possibly by expanding the story into another direction if you're so inclined.
Otherwise, I really enjoyed it. Thanks.
Also, spiff, you've been rocking the fantastic fiction lately. Kudos.
Thank you, Rubacava!
This is bloated, unoriginal tripe and it's without doubt the most backwards piece in spaceman's writing history. I can name at least six... no, seven stories that use the exact same premise but are of a significantly higher standard of writing.
See, apparently my critiques are "too nice" so I thought, fuck that, I'll lie through my teeth this time.
I thought this was great. There're spelling and formatting issues, such as text being bunched together even though individual paragraphs are not (but the latter can be blamed on the forum, I suppose) but the actual story itself is masterful. The disparity between the two families is very cleverly illustrated- for example, when the call from the hospital came through, I assumed it'd be Stan in casualty rather than Mr Brand- essentially tying up the fact that the two men are dealing with their midlives in radically different (but equally bizzare) ways, just as their two sons are dealing with their fathers' respective eccentricities in radically different ways.
Look forward to seeing what your next foray with these characters/themes produces. Nice.
For starters, pretty much the entire first half seems very... I don't know. Passive? Bored, almost? It's not bad writing by any stretch, and is still better than most of the stuff on this forum, but in comparison to your other work, and even to the second half of this story, it just seems somewhat weak. I can't really point to specific examples, partly because I'm (as I've said before) not a good editor, and partly because there aren't really specific examples of things that don't work. It's just a general feeling.
Also, there are several places where it was hard for me to tell right away that you'd moved on to a new scene. The best example of this is the paragraph that begins, "The street began to look like a motorshow;" I was a couple sentences in before I realized that there was a big temporal shift between that paragraph and the last, and it was jarring.
Expanding on this, the disjointed movie-trailer style is cool, but it seems to carry on too long, and it actually made me somewhat weary by the end of the piece. In small chunks, it's very effective, but by the end, I wasn't quite so taken with it. It seemed like the story needed to be either shorter or longer - that you needed to either cut out a few bits so that the style wasn't forced to carry on so long, or that you needed to make it longer by expanding on more scenes to give the reader more breaks from the BAM-BAM-BAM of three-sentence scene after three-sentence scene. It was sort of like a five-day tour of Europe - it makes you wish you could either spend more time at each stop, or have fewer stops, or something. Even though there's a lot of awesome sights to see, seeing them all in that fashion is exhausting. I assume that if you expanded this into a longer story or a book, you wouldn't maintain this pacing all the way through, but it's not really working for me even as-is.
There's a lot to like about the story, of course, which others have touched on. A lot of your imagery is fantastic, the concept is great, and the resolution is satisfying. But reaching the end felt not so much like scaling a mountain as like scaling a broken escalator; there's a satisfaction in reaching the climax, but also a sense that your journey was made unnecessarily difficult.
That said, I'm pretty much the only person who had these issues, so you may well just want to ignore me.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
zstrek, i agreed with just about everything you said. thank you. i will continue tightening the language.
eljeffe, i think pacing is the single biggest issue i have with this story (and with my writing in general). thank you for pointing it out. at the moment i see no easy way to fix the pacing problem, especially in the second half of the story when it really starts jumping and racing through the "21 days" of the fast. the characters could also be fleshed out, as someone mentioned, and i suppose making the thing longer solves both characterization and pacing issues, but i'm scared of having the story blow up into a novella.
so is everyone too damn literary to pick up on my penny-arcade allusion?
i plan to develop the needle ritual in the proceding stories; i did not want to write any exposition about it at this point. basically it's an old polish ritual used to determine if a particular food or drink is good for you. there's a wonderful scene in a short film about love by k. kieslowski where a woman dangles the needle over the body of her sleeping lover.
I did notice the PA reference, but I don't really think it belongs there. It made me smile when I read it, but it distracted me and broke up the flow of the story at a point when I think your pacing was going really well. Though I suppose it wouldn't be an issue for someone who doesn't read PA.
Stories should be as long as they need to be, no shorter, no longer. If turning it into a novella would make it too long to use for your thesis, then the best thing you can do for the story is to not use it for your thesis.
I mean, you have some brilliant work in there, and you should do with it what it wants. I'm firmly of the "stories are discovered, not created" mindset, so I generally believe that the story pretty much determines its own length. It's your place to either tell it as it's meant to be, or tell a crippled version of it that's artificially shortened or lengthened to meet some predetermined goal.
If this turns into a 40k word piece, I mean, I can think of worse things. I think it could probably be good at its current length, but fantastic as something longer.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"