Anonymous Writing Group II: criticism thread

We sowed the seed here: Anonymous Writing Group II: submissions thread, deadline 31 October Now reap the harvest. It's not clear yet how many submissions I have - I think eleven, it may yet be one or two more. I'm going to put them up in three lots - five today, the rest next week.

This thread is for the criticism. imo that's the really important part of the exercise - every piece is already at least pretty good, the idea is to make it better. I'd encourage everyone to get stuck in, whether you've written a piece or not. No need to be nice, just make it constructive. And nothing personal obviously, even if it is anonymous.

These are some of the things I'll be looking for, but obviously ymmv:
• Word Choice - did every word have an impact? If it takes two words to describe something, could you have done it in one?
• Mood - how long does it take to come through, is it maintained?
• Believability - would this character really act that way?
• Pace - did you have me hooked from start to finish?

Har-De-Har-Har

by Phil Johnson

Charlie and Eddie sat in the out of service hotel room. The sounds of the party in full swing could be heard through the floor. They provided a stark contrast to the drab surroundings, because this particular room was being redecorated. A decorator's ladder was propped against one wall. Dust sheets were draped over the various bits of furniture to protect them from paint splashes.

All except two chairs, on which the two men sat. Charlie was a small time cocaine dealer, and Eddie was his cohort. Between the two of them, they made a reasonable but dishonest living selling cocaine to City business types. But in the current economic climate, people weren't buying as much powder. Competition uptown had become fiercer, resulting in an increase of violence between dealers.

Charlie considered the last run in that he and Eddie had been involved with. A larger rival dealer had sent round some heavies to warn them off what the rival considered to be his turf. Nothing physical had happened, but it had been plainly stated that if Charlie and Eddie didn't stop dealing in that area of the city, then things would get nasty.

Eddie had wanted to quit the business immediately and get out of the city. But Charlie had kept a cooler head and convinced his less experienced partner to stay. Though they needed to get another patch in which to deal. Hence the reasons the two men were now sitting in this hotel room. Charlie's cousin was the foreman with a firm of interior renovators. Their contracts included the Pressburger Hotel. Pulling in a favour, Charlie had got a copy of the key to the room. It was the perfect place to hide out while the heat died down. No-one would consider looking for them in such an expensive high class location, much less in a room that wasn't even available to the public.

The other reason for hiding out in the hotel was because Charlie had come up with an alternative “patch”. The hotel was always fully booked. Mainly business people, but also some celebrities. Whoever the guests were, they were always high rollers with money to spend. Charlie knew that people like that more often than not enjoyed a bit of coke. Of course these people were invariably from out of town, so they had the dangerous prospect of trying to score in an unfamiliar city.

It's like selling insulin to a diabetic, he thought to himself. This was the answer to their problems. These people were rich, and wanted cocaine. Money was no object to them. By offering a very discreet service, he could make a lot of money. And the risk of unpleasantness was low, these people didn't want bad publicity or trouble with the police, so everyone tended to keep their mouth shut. And right now he and Eddie were able to work right out of the hotel, although neither their clients nor the hotel staff knew that.

The only downside, as far as Charlie could see, was that these clients were used to the top quality gear. Charlie wouldn't be able to cut the merchandise as much as he had done. Which meant that he had to pay more in relation to how much money he made. That had rankled with him a bit, but after a bit of reflection, he realised that the advantages of this new situation heavily outweighed the minor disadvantages.

Eddie sat opposite Charlie, playing patience with a deck of cards. They weren't able to put the light on in the room, as it was supposed to appear empty. But the light from a small battery powered lantern provided just enough illumination for him to see the cards.

He thought to himself about what they were both about to do. Downstairs was a party for an internationally famous celebrity. There were people down there who wanted top quality cocaine, and didn't want to have to go to some dodgy back alley or deserted car park to get it. Charlie and himself would slip into the party. They would wear suits and clip on radio earpieces, and try and pass themselves off as perhaps minders of one of the guests. This way they could walk around the party without actually having to talk to anyone, thereby reducing the possibility that someone would realise that they didn't belong there.

Then they would locate people who looked as though they were looking for cocaine. These people were usually quite easy to spot, Eddie thought to himself. Then either he or Charlie would make the deal, and arrange to meet the client somewhere out of site to make the exchange of money for drugs. Earlier in the day, Charlie, while dressed in decorator's overalls, had located an ideal place – a corridor just beyond the kitchen adjacent to the main reception room. It was perfect, the corridor lead to a fire exit, so they could even make a quick getaway if something went wrong.

.

Detective Inspector Norman sat back of the van and lit another cigarette. Technically this was illegal, as the van was police property and therefore this was a working environment. But Norman didn't care, he needed a smoke. Besides, the windows were tinted so no-one would have been able to see in anyway. In addition, he wasn't going to get out of the van and risk missing the moment when the plain clothes officer stationed in the hotel signalled that the criminals had been located.

Sitting next to Norman in the driving seat of the van was a uniformed police sergeant. He hadn't worked with this particular man on an operation before, which made the DI a little nervous. However, he had worked with several of the other officers involved. The uniformed officers were sitting in the back of the van, while the plain clothes officers were already in the hotel, stationed around the building.

All this effort just to bring in a couple of small fry dealers, he thought to himself. But he knew that this was just the start of a bigger catch. These two would give him information that would lead to the arrest of one of the big dealers, and also hopefully more information on the network of suppliers that brought drugs into the city.

Just then, the radio on the dashboard of the van chirped into life.

“DI Norman, are you there? Over.”

.

Charlie and Eddie's first foray into the party had been successful. Now many of the great and the good of the music industry were stuffing white powder up their nose. So much so, that Charlie had returned to their commandeered room to fetch some more from the stash.

But as he was leaving to return downstairs, he noticed a quick movement out of the corner of his eye, some way down the corridor. The person was now hiding in the shadows, hoping that they had not been seen. But Charlie recognised the face, even from that brief glimpse. He didn't know the detective constable's name, but he knew that the evening had now taken a decided turn for the worse.

Calmly but rapidly, he returned downstairs to alert Eddie.

.

The unmarked police van was now parked in the hotel's underground car park. DI Norman got out, and turned to the sergeant.

“Wait here with the boys until I signal you by radio.”

“Right you are, sir.”

Norman looked around the car park. There were a lot of expensive cars parked there. Quickly he located the lift, and briskly walked towards it. As he got there, he noticed that Detective Constable Hackett was already waiting for him.

“Follow me, Hackett, these uniformed officers will watch the car park now.”

Norman and Hackett both got into the lift and ascended upwards.

.

Charlie opened the door to the room, after some effort. The lock appeared to have got jammed somehow. Eddie was behind him. They both walked into the room and shut the door.

Eddie spoke first. “I don't understand, if the place is crawling with the old bill, why are we risking coming back here. Why didn't we just leave?”

“Because I'm not leaving several grands worth of gear for the coppers to have a party with down at the station. And also, genius, you left your playing cards up here with your fingerprints all over them! Anyway, get your bits and pieces, and I'll get the stash. And don't forget the money.”

The two men went around the room gathering up their incriminating items.

“Right, that everything?”, said Charlie, indicating the small bag of assorted items that Eddie was holding.

“Yeah.”

“Good. Now let's get out of here.”

Just then, there was the sound of several pairs of footsteps outside the door.

“Eddie, hold this”, whispered Charlie, as he passed the other man the bag containing the cocaine and half of the money.

Charlie crept forward, and put his eye to the keyhole. He couldn't see anything.

Suddenly, the door exploded with a crash, knocking Charlie sideways as the doorknob hit him squarely in the eye. He sat back on the floor and cupped his rapidly swelling face. “Ow!”, he cried.

DC Hackett charged through the open door, followed by several other plain clothes officers.

“Right, no-one move! You're all nicked!”

Behind him, DI Norman shook his head in disbelief.

Kid's seen too many episodes of The Sweeney, he sighed.

On the Difficulties of Confessional Art and Turtles

by Johan Evans

I wrote a song in 1995 that dealt with the thoughts and emotions I was processing at that time about the diminishing presence of the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles in the evening television schedules- a subject that had been the cause of several deep and very personal disagreements in my household and among my wider peer group (I had already been suspended for writing pro-Splinter slogans on school whiteboards in permanent marker some weeks before, much to the chagrin of the chairman of the school board- whom I had long suspected to be a Power Rangers sympathiser using his influence to ill effect in that regard).

The song was a poor thing, but pithy in its more lurid scatological qualities, and it proved popular enough that one or other of my drinking companions of that period thought it worth recording (in somewhat amateurish fashion though I say it myself) on a Sony double deck one night. One thing leading to another, it gained significant traction on the underground copied-cassette market that served as the neural pathways of the countercultural hivemind in rural Ireland back in those days. Within three months I had appeared on local radio. Within six months I had gone national. By the time I ought to have been sitting my Intermediate exams in June 96 I was Assistant Head of Political and Current Affairs at RTÉ (although there was obviously loud clamour to situate me in light entertainment that I might address the long-running Turtle issue, which I regret to note runs to this day as an acknowledged farce).

But I digress.

To focus on the immediate and specific, the song itself made lyrical reference to one parent, two brothers and several notable parishioners as ‘mindless philistines’ (among other things I prefer not to recall in full detail) and, rather unfortunately, early local exposure led to its being the subject of a running three-part sermon delivered around the parishes by Fr. O’Brien- the themes being, jointly, the rashness and insolence of youth and the lamentable decline of faith-based programming in the plum 6-9pm weekday slot.

Never dreaming of the successes to come, Father (my personal one, not the good O’Brien) leathered the shite out of me three Sundays from four in October, forced me to recant publicly in seven separate public houses on the island (which I did by ironically penning my fulsome regret in the style of An File Rafteiri to the air of ‘Mo Ghuile Mear’, performing the composition sean-nós to what Hot Press was later to describe as ‘stunning effect’) and banned all Turtle paraphernalia from the house.

I carried on or about my person for some several years two miniature plastic sai, the only items I managed to withhold during the monthly searches for contraband that he carried out from that time until I finally moved out. Our relationship never fully recovered, and when he passed a few years back I threw them in with his coffin- in token of I don’t know what. Rebellion. Regret. Disillusionment with the direction that the franchise had taken.

Perhaps all three.

Richard Ashcroft later used the Turtle song as the basis for the orchestral backing to ‘Lucky Man’. After the troubles he subsequently encountered with the sampling in ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ his people made contact with me, plainly anxious to sort something out about the rights. I signed what they sent me, refused all incomes. Left them to it.

Some things are best left buried.

Andrew

by Hector de Costa Dias

After his third suicide attempt, Andrew returned from the hospital a more relentless optimist than ever. This was quite the feat for a person who, since high school, was accustomed to hearing – usually as part of purportedly well-meaning “advice” – that his aggressively positive life outlook had been described as “insufferable,” “repellant,” or some similar thing by a third party, who would remain anonymous, but who the speaker was inclined to agree with, although they were careful to point out that they wouldn't have phrased it in quite the same way. “Dial it back,” – I am paraphrasing here but these conversations all followed the same general pattern – “you know I wouldn't want you to change, but you have to know your audience and have more.... awareness, buddy. Awareness,” they would repeat. To this, Andrew would usually reply with a noncomprehending shrug or nod, unless he was speaking to his mother, in which case he would say “I thought I wasn't supposed to care what people thought,” to which Andrew's mother would reply with a noncomprehending shrug or nod.

In point of fact, Andrew cared a great deal about what people thought. Not what they thought about him, necessarily – his ego was roughly scaled to his degree of social self-awareness – but what they thought in general. Andrew conceived his role in most conversations as primarily evangelical. He usually seized on something you said early in the conversation and from this deduced your entire belief system. He would then explain how this belief system was hurting the general cause of human happiness and encourage you to replace it with a system more in keeping with nature, the harmony of the cosmos, or whatever facile God term he happened to favor at the moment. He was here to help, always to help; to free you from the scourge of what he referred to vaguely but with conviction as your “negativity”. Maybe it's hard to understand if you haven't met him. My point is that talking to Andrew was the most exhausting thing in the world and this was the reason that, God forgive me, I did not visit him in the hospital.

I hadn't talked to Andrew for nearly four weeks when I received a message from him on Facebook chat around 2am one night in early March.

“Yo.” said Andrew.

I hesitated a bit before replying “Hey.” When he didn't respond after thirty seconds I followed this up with “Are you home right now?”, “Sorry I didn't visit you in the hospital” and, worst of all, “I've just been so busy.”

Andrew wasn't one to take offense. After around ten minutes he said “Sorry, I was afk. Boathouse?”

“It's really cold. Come to my house. I still have two bottles of 90 minute IPA in the fridge in the basement.” I considered following this up with a grinning emoticon, possibly with sunglasses, but didn't.

“I have things I need to tell you. About the band and other things. Your house wouldn't be the right setting. I couldn't speak honestly at your house.” Andrew followed these cryptic messages with “Boathouse” and then signed off of Facebook.

Having no other option, I left for the boathouse, which was an abandoned, barnlike structure on the bank of the Delaware River that contained only one boat, an old three person canoe made out of what I'd always imagined was aluminum. Andrew and I started frequenting the boathouse in high school because it was a convenient, discrete place to use drugs. It was located maybe a mile from my parent's house but I decided to drive there. It was something like twenty degrees outside and windy so I dressed in layers.

I parked my car in the gravel clearing right off the wooded, twisting road and thought, for the first time maybe, that the existence of this clearing was weird. I wondered what the purpose of it was and almost immediately realized that it was at least originally intended for police cars, a speed trap. The fact that I had been parking my car here while I trespassed on private property, sometimes to use illicit substances, semi-regularly for the past seven years filled me with a half-sarcastic sense of panic. Maybe this was a long game. Maybe they had been keeping tabs and would hit me with hundreds of counts of trespassing at once and put me away for good. This didn't seem impossible to me at that time, but it also didn't seem very frightening. “It's too late to worry about these things,” I thought, but then wondered in what sense, precisely, I meant “too late” and this filled me with a non-sarcastic sense of panic.

“Hey.”

I screamed.

Fragment

by Mrs McCloskey

Aliens don’t have names, generally, because they are all psychically linked to one another, so what would be the point? However, this particular alien was called Mrs. McCloskey and was proprietor of McCloskey’s Used Car Emporium. The fact that she drooled profusely and often spoke of devouring all of humanity did not raise any suspicion among her employees that their boss was an extraterrestrial; they thought it was some new sales motivational tactic, and it wouldn’t have been a bad guess since those behaviors were exactly the same as those espoused in the recent bestseller, “How to Increase Your Sales by Drooling Profusely and Threatening to Devour Humanity” by Beatrice D’xzgrx-Andromeda-Strain McCloskey.

Grendel

by Leonard Marcks

Out on the streets of Horshead, Alan Grendel is struggling with the heat. It finds him in ways unprecedented - the newspaper he scatters across his windscreen itself seems to be emitting malevolent rays - and it menaces his air of homicidal calm, which grows haggard and squawkish, quite unrendering any instinct for observation. He decides to go for a beer and a screw. Rolling out of his van, which is parked in its favourite habitat - the mouth of a side-street - he lollops into The Steam Wheel, an establishment coated with dusty flyers and late-afternoon indolence. It also happens to be the pub that birthed England, and it is only by mischance (ascribable to the insidious effects of sunstroke) that Alan does not happen to walk in while Vanessa and her girls are present. Other than that, he is on track, as he strides to the bar and asks the barmaid for a pint of Old Brew and leans onto a high-chair, brutal jokeplay at the edge of his lips.

“Alright love,” he settles upon, “bloody scorcher innit”. She looks up.

“Yeah tell me” she says.

“And as for the weather…” Ahh, she’s smiling at least. G’wan, laugh. He laughs himself a little to get the momentum going. She isn’t his target, of course, just the pre-match kickabout.

“That’ll be three sixty, please.” He gives her a look and reaches deep into his pocket.

“Got change for a twenty?”

“Oh there’s always one. I’ll have a look…” She flips out the till. He stares down her cleavage and makes the faintest of gurgling sounds - faint enough that she can’t hear, but can, possibly, detect the guttural waves pawing her skin - she palms out his change and scurries away without looking even slightly in his direction. Lovely bum.

“Mm-hmm” muses Alan, adjusting his seat. Now look, there’s a lonely old bird, probably hasn’t had any in weeks. He knocks back around two-thirds of his pint and physically shuffles his chair a foot closer to her. She’s sitting in a corner, reading a book - no, it’s an e-book - same bloody thing really. Alan isn’t overly concerned with the literary world, but now’s as fine a time as any. “Alright love, whatcha reading?” He looms above her, the space behind him rapidly filled.

“Oh! Er, Jodie Whishert, just a short-story collection. You know her?” She peeks up. Good. Interested. Spread ‘em you tart. He licks the insides of his cheeks, liquid peeling off and sloshing beneath his tongue. Gimme your fucking muff-box.

“No I haven’t. You should read me some.”

“What, now?” Seems a bit flighty. Gonna have to nail her down.

“Not now! In the fucken pub for everyone to hear? Might start a bloody riot.” He smiles knowingly and hushes to a clotted whisper. “Nah, I’m talking about a private reading. I’m only passing through town - if there’s a book by Jodie whatsherface being read out, I don’t want it ruined by” and he looks back over his shoulder “all of them lot”.

The woman chuckles. Got her. “Jodie Whishert! Well, if you really want to find out about her I could write down…”

“No, love. I want to hear it from you.” A single, slow nod. She will nod too. They will wander out to his van. It will be established whether her husband’s at work. If so, bingo. If not, he’ll drive her to the woods and they’ll fuck in his van for a bit. Then he’ll drive her back and drop her at the shops.

“I’m sorry, but I actually have to go,” she says, shrugging on her coat and practically jogging away, glass of white wine barely touched. Alan doesn’t follow her - waste of fucking time. He swivels back to the bar and makes wordlessly suggestive dialogue with the barmaid’s tits. They don’t say much but fuck he’d like to stick his balls between them as she sucks him off. What else have we got. Some young tarts over there. Show ‘em a thing. Don’t know what a real fucking is. He rolls his arse a bit. Aching. Fuck it’s hot. Things I do for the fucken MOD, right? Get ‘em their cunt. Need a screw first. Fuck. Long day.

Alan is interrupted by the book woman re-entering the pub and steaming right over to him. A bright ecstasy bursts onto his face. “You fucken want it, right?” he mutters to himself. She walks up and flips open her e-book. It’s on Page 75 of Jodie Whishert’s novel Borderline Panjandrum. An extract of two paragraphs has been highlighted.

“Read this,” she says with a certain fury.

Alan likes them frisky. “Whoa! Easy, girl. Maybe tell me how you” drops his voice “want my cock first.”

“Just read it. Then I’ll tell you.”

Fucken hard work, love. “Ok...The boat was five feet long and three wide, barely enough for Ivy let alone her bags. But that was ok. She stowed the heaviest snug in the bow, other two at the stern, and after a sighing glance back at the cottage, pushed off with an oar and began to row. She hated herself more than anything else, more than the memory she could at least pummel with each row-stroke, its face the water she streamed down. But after a few minutes, even the oars, heavy in her arms, were…what is this bollocks, woman?...were hateful, invasive prongs by which the river was breached and corrupted. She cried aloud and in a great shudder threw both overboard, where they floated peaceably in the current, gradually drifting away from her boat’s sides. One beached amongst flotsam on the next bend, but the other followed her for nearly an hour as she wound down towards Hackmouth, sobs gradually decreasing as she surrendered to the movements of Wind and Wave, into whose protection she felt entrusted. That remaining oar was a problem, however, and it was only with the summative powers of her courage that she stood up amidships and began to recite her curse. I, River, swallow you up and spit you to oblivion. I, River, bend your grain and warp your craft. You are unmade in a spirit alien to your making - torn slowly by my silent power, rotted out of view in an unseen corner of my borderlands. I, River, see to it that you are unpurposed and left to perish uselessly and without mourners. I, River, am the reality of your fate, and you the fiction your fate has abandoned. And so, before her eyes, the oar drifts from view into the estuarine salt-flats, where it will waste unremarked by wading-birds and their watchers, slowly to disintegrate over centuries, down into the silt, as she, Ivy, passes from River to Sea and its greater promises of spirit unconquerable.” Alan looks up over the e-reader, but he has unaccountably lost his vigour. In any case, the woman’s eyes are absent as she withdraws her device, folds it, and walks slowly out of the pub. Alan orders another beer, and later another, but the shag has sycamore-drifted from his mind’s loin, and after a desultory pass at a 15 year-old on a fake ID (spot ‘em a mile away the horny little cunts) he lumbers to his van, debating whether to paper the windows again and have another wank. It turns out that he papers the windows but doesn’t wank, instead sitting there with his cock out, staring at it with obvious frustration, as if a dog that won’t heel. “Fucken mate” he mutters. It’s no good. Unwilling to witness his own welling tears, he punches himself to sleep like what they do, honest guv, in the SAS.

Believability is irrelevant in most fictional pieces, word choice is a purely personal preference which v often feeds into or takes from mood, all three (and many other things more important besides imo) will give and grab as individual components to contribute to a finished piece that either works for an individual reader or does not but in either case shall not be judged in any reasonable way by dint of a breakdown into these components.

iow klata out

ioow, if the spellings and grammar are correct, continue straight to yr arbitrary opinions of the work

if not, ask yrself if any errors might be intentional and consider why, then continue straight to your arbitrary etc etc

otm

Is the first one meant to be taken seriously? I mean, given the title? I feel like it's toying with our politeness, if that's not rude to say.

Is it not better to do these thread-by-thread rather than all at once?

I'm happy to delete everything but the first one if you think it would be easier, strikes me we'll have everyone talking over one another as it stands. (Even more than usual, I mean).

I'd be more than happy with putting one up daily if that'd make it easier. I reckoned we could cope with a feast, but tbh I hadn't given it much thought beyond eleven being too much.

On the Difficulties of Confessional Art and Turtles

this made me laugh, enjoyed it. felt the ashcroft reference was too much of a leap but other than that it was good spoofery.

'Andrew' i liked. Nice flow, good riffs, tight.

Fragment- ok. decent teenage satire kinda vibe, small piece obv hard to say much more about it but stylewise consistent with similar stuff ive read and certainly no worse than much of that.

Grendel, im afraid i didnt like at all. Tripping over phrasings from the start, characters imo not much more than ciphers for an overarching Point, some of the language was nice and it kept a nice consistent level of seedy tone from entering pub til the re-entry of our heroine but not my cup of tea, sorry anonymous writer xxx

First one- its boiled-down but without, imo obv, obv, the snappiness or style that makes for good boiled-down...it's a bit 'these things happened' fin.....

xps idk i think its fine to have it all in the one thread tbh...

Yeah, the first one was too on the nose for me, like it didn't have any points of view, there were parts where it could have expanded and said something more.

The fact it's called Har De Har Har makes me think someone is taking the piss though.

The genie's out the bottle now anyway xp. Depending how this plays out, I'll maybe revert to daily postings from now on (and depending on length of piece).

'On the Difficulties of Confessional Art and Turtles' - has a genuine sense of being in a realistic setting, despite the slightly fantastical events.

'Andrew' - in the first half it's difficult to work out if the reader is supposed to sympathise with the title character or think of him as a bit of a dick. The second half is better and actually made me want to read more.

'Grendel' has a good seedy pub atmosphere, twist at the end was intriguing.

btw any authors can out themselves and explain/respond on-thread - anonymity isn't a hard-and-fast rule.

Alternatively if you want to remain anonymous, drop me an email and I'll post your response for you.

I'm not really sure what the first piece is supposed to be either. If it's meant to be an excerpt from a crime story then it's very forced and I wouldn't want to read much further - the slang feels dated and sub-Eastenders and there's a lot of tell-don't-show going on. It reads almost exactly like a cops-and-robbers subplot from John Lanchester's Capital, which isn't really a recommendation.

But then the last sentence undercuts that, so maybe it's a parody, but in that case I'm not sure the intention is that clear. If it is a parody, it could perhaps be sharper.

Well turtles was an ilx post so no pretence here tbh

on phone atm so sorry if thoughts on other pieces are too brusque btw, will prob have more to say on grendel when i get a chance without it being a headline 'rave or pan' restriction

re: word choice

i remember delillo once saying something to the effect that he spent a long time on the SHAPE of his sentences, they way they actually sat on the page, and that consideration of this very often conditioned the word choices he made - like picking a less obvious word for the sake of symmetry or typographical neatness.

think some of the writers above might profit from this approach - give it a go!

I liked the Turtles piece, nice George Saunders-esque quality to it, I hope it's an introduction rather than the entirety of the piece, as I would like to see something more happen to the character. There's definitely the kernel of a really enjoyable story there.

xp to ward, yeah my first post hammering against ik's dictatorial opener touches on that i think, that the 'right word' impacts descriptive, mood, consistency, rhythm/cadence, i dunno a dozen things, its a very blunt instrument to use 'word choice' in a set of analytical tools. A 400 word piece is 400 word choices, no more than that, if one were so inclined to critique.

first piece is baffling

'andrew' is effective fare. i haven't read 'the catcher in the rye' but this is kinda how i imagine it to be (except with more computers)

feel that too many have been posted at once but idk we can handle it

Re: Andrew - cracking first line, to the extent that I was actually a bit disappointed when it turned out to be a first-person narrative. Presumably the writer is making a point about their narrator's character by starting off like that, if not, you need to reconsider the word 'relentless', but I hope not, because that's a great start.

i remember delillo once saying something to the effect that he spent a long time on the SHAPE of his sentences, they way they actually sat on the page, and that consideration of this very often conditioned the word choices he made

Not just the shape on the page, but the rhythm of the sentences themselves - most great writers are great at prose rhythm and it's a difficult thing to get right. The second sentence in Andrew is very long and unwieldy, all those subclauses, it could be broken up a bit. No reason why you can't write long sentences, of course, but you have to be absolutely on top of the rhythm and flow of them and I'm not sure this is.

I hadn't talked to Andrew for nearly four weeks when I received a message from him on Facebook chat around 2am one night in early March.

Likewise this would benefit from being reshaped and reworked, you can convey the same information with almost exactly the same words, but give the sentence a lot more shape and momentum, just by reordering it a bit. As it is it's a bit flat.

Still, I'm intrigued as to where this is going and would like to continue reading. Taking a character to an abandoned boathouse in the middle of the night in the pouring rain is full of potential - if something terrible is about to happen, you can probably take more time and have more in the way of description and atmosphere to build the tension. You might not need to, depending on what's going to happen next.

That said, I don't know what a sarcastic sense of panic would be, or even a half-sarcastic sense of panic.

Good post, that. Had a nice punchy feel, the words did the heavy informational lifting while still keeping a good clipped stacatto tone, 7/10 would def like to see it as part of a fuller analysis

I think the Andrew piece could afford to leave more things unsaid - it chews through analyses (usually psychological) of the titular character where it can perhaps show rather than tell. It's quite stodgy in its rhythm (as Matt says), even if the ideas are well-considered and the characterisation sensitive

Fragment - really like the first line once again, but it veers a bit quickly into self-conscious wackiness. The humour misses the mark, there's enough comic potential in the premise that the writer shouldn't have to resort to wacky names.

Also, why is the alien running a used car business? And if so, why are they drooling and talking about world domination, rather than trying to be a bit less conspicuous? I know you've written this:

The fact that she drooled profusely and often spoke of devouring all of humanity did not raise any suspicion among her employees that their boss was an extraterrestrial; they thought it was some new sales motivational tactic, and it wouldn’t have been a bad guess since those behaviors were exactly the same as those espoused in the recent bestseller, “How to Increase Your Sales by Drooling Profusely and Threatening to Devour Humanity” by Beatrice D’xzgrx-Andromeda-Strain McCloskey

... but that reads a bit like a jokey way of getting yourself out of the logical problem you've already created for yourself.

Sorry if this sounds a bit harsh, but there isn't really much to go on here. What is here is quite Douglas Adams, and I don't really like Douglas Adams, even less so fiction that is going for the same thing.

For me the first one would be massively improved by developing different plot seeds that are already there.

The detective/bust scenario is a generic story that we've seen a thousand times, and so is naturally going to generate cliches. On the other hand, two small-time crooks crashing a music industry party to try and sell sub-par cocaine to drunk celebrities.... better. Potential for lots of mayhem, conflict + characters.

I like "Andrew" – you want to know more about the character and the situation pretty quickly. And the basic premise of a guy who can't live with himself because he's too positive... great.

Grendel - reading this you get the sense that the writer isn't very comfortable with the basic skeeziness of the character they've created, and it shows in the bluntness of the interior monologue here.

The sight of a creepy bloke chatting up a girl in the pub is universally recognisable enough for you not to worry about including lines like "he decides to go for a beer and a screw" or "gimme your fucking muff-box". It works best if you read it in a cartoonish Viz kinda way, and great if that's what you're going for, but there needs to be more pay-off at the end. Otherwise I'd be tempted to kill the interior monologue stuff altogether and convey the creepiness and misogyny in other ways.

I'm not quite sure what the intention of the piece is either, if it's to be taken as a whole (the mention of a Vanessa suggests not). Without knowing more about the girl in the pub, it's hard to know what to make of her - that she hangs around after "tell me how you want my cock first" stretches credibility a bit, even if she's deliberately fucking with him (which would be my guess).

Got more time now as I'm working from home an I've done all my work.

So Har-De-Har-Har for me has a few probs, it seems at the start like it's set in America then switches to Britain, only definitively by choice of dialogue at the end. I also think you need to know who the celebrity is, or they need to be made up. I still think it's a joke though.

I felt like Grandel was a bit stereotypically grim - it'd be nice to have more neutral insight into somebody like that and their mind - rather than an internal monologue that becomes a bit predictable.

I liked the plot device with the novel but it did feel a bit like a joke - a shorter paragraph would have been better.

Some of the language was a bit unnecessarily flowery for my liking.

I like Andrew, it feels like something that could be expanded upon. I didn't like the opening line though, contrary to others. Maybe personal preference but it feels like too much early exposition, I'd have saved the suicide bomb or wrapped it up into the positivity stuff, even later in the same paragraph, cos the two things make a nice contrast.

You could finish the opening paragraph after expanding on some of the positivity stuff with something like "it was even stronger after his third suicide attempt". Like a sort of grim punchline.

Or just ignore me if that's not helpful!

btw the turtles one - is that darragh?

It's the perspective on the Grendel story that's confusing... You feel like the narrative voice should be a little bit more of an observer after the first para which is nicely drawn.

Stephen King (love him or hate him) does these kind of detached-omniscient bad guy descriptions really grippingly. Needful things is probs a good example.

(sorry if that's lowering the tone)

Kings a good writer of exactly that imo

Ya im turtles.

add me to the idgi chorus re charlie and eddie; I'm a pretty uncritical reader, I like pretty much everything (this should be borne in mind when reading my "critiques" of the other ones, also I'm not v bright) but this story just isn't justfying itself to me at all, like why does it need to be told? If I have to read banal clichés like "in full swing" "in stark contrast" "while the heat died down" &c one after another after another, I want it to be in the service of a more interesting story than "there is a drug bust", or failing that, more interesting characters. Would suggest reading more (better) crime fiction, seeing what the best authors manage to do with economy, memorable characters &c. Soz if that sounds harsh.

Andrew reminds me of treezy talking about tao lin kinda? Not that I've read tao lin but something about the way certain emotional states are described very painstakingly evokes hazy memories of that thread. I like it.

Deems is having fun and so am I.

Fragment is a joke, and if it isn't funny it isn't anything, and I personally don't find it funny.

Grendel is probably the closest to my own literary preferences - I love this sort of overripe, vivid prose when done well and on a sentence level this had the most bits I went back and re-savoured. Things like adding a redundant "physically" to "physically shuffles his chair a foot closer to her" will stretch some patiences but it worked for me. I do agree though that the author goes a bit too far into grotesquerie with Alan's character (at least until I read Matt's Viz comment and began to like it twice as much, esp wrt the guy sitting looking at his todger going "fucken mate")

*by redundant I meant to write "redundant" as it's obv been inserted deliberately to convey extra um physicality

not sure if it's tacky to be the first to out myself, but i want to thank everyone for their supportive comments and constructive feedback for "andrew". i think i might actually try to finish that novel now, maybe. i have a very clear sense of everything i want to happen in the book (it's like, a condensation of a bunch of autobiographical stuff really, with fictional stuff added in) but i am afraid of putting too much time into it if there are no publication prospects.

i have ideas for comments for the other ones that i will post later when i feel more capable of concentrating, and giving them the attention they deserve.

also xp snoball, you're right that the main character is a dick, but only because his best friend whom he loves is unraveling before his eyes and he has no idea how to deal with it.

also, nb. wtf was i talking about the novel isn't autobiographical, really. just the locations and some scenes are... the characters aren't based on anyone specific. i think everyone who said i need more work on the rhythms of my sentences are otm... i have something very specific in mind in terms of the tone i want to convey but i think it only intermittently comes across, and it can sometimes get clunky. ok i'm done now.

ok, i really only have comments on two of the pieces. deems' piece is incredible and i agree with whoever said that there is a strong sense of place (ireland) even though it is a saundersian whimsical piece. it seemed at one level a good natured satire of ireland's sense of itself as being behind-the-times, or provincial culturally (with the way this silly turtles song led the narrator to national fame and later a government post) and i was reminded of an interview with kevin shields where he said that when he moved to ireland from queens, ny he felt for a while that he had left the real world and was hiding out in some alternate, purgatorial type space where nothing every really happened, due to the fact that pop culture and television at that time were so america-centric. in general, it was delightful and i want to read more. in terms of tone, pacing, etc. it was A+

"grendel" i also liked as an exercise in tone. i also liked how the title reinforces your sense of the main character as a grotesque figure who occupies seedy environs. it reminded me of william s. burroughs.

aha, called it!

Har-De-Har-Har - I don't fully get the disdain for this one. A bust is a brilliant subject to write about. Yes it's been done to death, but there's so much potential conflict that it will always make for good fiction. I don't read enough crime for it to be anything other than promising ground.

The trouble imo is that this piece doesn't stretch the conflict out enough. There are maybe four separate relationships that you could have a bit of fun with - between Charlie and Eddie; between them and the big-time dealer; between them and the guests; and between the two cops - but they're all too sketchy. Have them really hate each other, see how the bust develops differently.

its boiled-down but without, imo obv, obv, the snappiness or style that makes for good boiled-down

This is otm. An obvious improvement would be by paring it down to the minimum - The two men sat among the dustsheets. A party in full swing boomed up from the lobby. It contrasted sharply with the ladders and crusted paint. Charlie was a small time dealer, Eddie his cohort. They picked a living selling cocaine to City types. But now powder wasn't selling. Competition uptown had become fiercer; so had the violence. - still not great, but much punchier.

The trouble is pulp is itself a cliche, so it's got to be done right. You can't really have 'City' and 'uptown' in the same intro (not that I could think of anything better); you don't have the time to explain what dust sheets do. You have to reflect how people talk, but without cliches - it's really hard to pull off.

Would suggest reading more (better) crime fiction, seeing what the best authors manage to do with economy, memorable characters &c.

By complete chance, immediately before turning to yours I read the prologue to Robert Crais' L.A. Requiem, which is also a hotel bust with tension between old and young cops. I'd take a look at that - it's only eight pages, but it's extraordinary how much tension and backstory can be wrung out of economy, slow revelation, and switching points-of-view (the latter being a big strength of your piece btw).

Good comments imo so far.

When are we getting next batch?

Turtles - I'm not sure the rhythm of this piece fits. It seems to be a longwinded gasbag - that first sentence could be four separate sentences - but towards the end he gets quite snappy. Maybe he's getting tetchier by that point, but it didn't quite sit with me. Agree that the Richard Ashcroft thing, while lolsome, is an unnecessary whimsy.

Otherwise there's lots of threads packed in there; ripe for development should you so choose.

Sorry for not pitching in with my crits yet, I'm at a convention, will be home tomorrow night so hopefully catch up then.

Not sure I agree on the Turtles opening line, I think the writer is just in enough control of his material to pull it off, and if you're going to do the multiple sub-clause thing then crowbarring three separate scenes into your opening line is a good way of doing it. It could be tightened up rhythmically (those first 20 words especially) but I don't otherwise have a problem with its length.

Andrew - this is very good. I was going to offer the same comment on sentence structure, but in fact you (both) do it very well; and in Andrew's case the 'exhausting' makes very plain that it's deliberate.

You could trim out a few words here & there - 'of Facebook' and 'they would repeat' are unnecessary. You also use double-adjectives - 'abandoned, barnlike' and 'twisting, wooded'. Those break the spell for me, making me aware that this is a piece of writing rather than a monologue - choosing only the right one would let the story carry on.

Fragment - I agree that this reads like a piece of sub-Hitchhiker's whimsy. Now I loved Hitchhiker's when I read it; the trouble is it completely scratched that itch, so that every time I've encountered similar later, it's set my teeth on edge. So I don't know that I can be very constructive tbh. The piece seems fine (silly name apart) - and the opening line is a good one - it's the genre I can't hack.

I'm guessing this would be better if it were to develop in an unHitchhiker's way. The ultramundane setting could work I think - but it'd be a hard job to suspend reality enough to make an alien working there seem perfectly natural.

Love the "Andrew" story best out of the whole lot. It intrigues me, its well-written and I'd love to read more.

Hi, I wanted to answer as Mrs. McCloskey but could not make an account in time. To me, though, the first line is the most cringe-inducing and contrived (everything else is pretty much straight-up reportage of the story as it was revealed to me) so I'm wondering what is it that people would rather see extended from it?

I've fabricated more on the used-car angle/alien takeover viability if that helps:

Mrs. McCloskey had taken a human lover, who also happened to be her worst salesman, in whom she confided the details concerning her species' plan for world domination: "ON THIS PLANET, FIRST YOU GET THE TRANSPORTATION, THEN YOU GET THE POWER!" The salesman was covered with drool, and failed to make his quota for that week. He wondered if there wasn't something odd, dare he say, alien, about the way Mrs. McCloskey's cilia-infested tendrils snaked into his orifices and drained his life force. Then he remembered the advice given on page 54 of Mrs. McCloskey's book: "MY #1 MOTIVATIONAL TIP: TAKE YOUR PSYCHIC TENDRILS AND DRAIN LIFE FORCE, DO IT!" He remembered it because of the motivational poster hanging on the wall with that very same slogan in large block letters captioning a smiling, but mostly drooling Mrs. McCloskey giving a tendrils-up sign.

re: "half-sarcastic sense of panic," I think it's fine, and is a better choice than "ironic sense of panic" in efficiently describing someone faking an emotion to ward off its full-fledged emergence.

re: RDRR, I agree the drug dealers are more compelling than the bumbling cops, but I disagree that that's necessarily a mistake.

i think your fragment just needs to be longer. we don't really have time to lock into the groove of your story, the universe you are creating, which is the key thing for any kind of sci-fi, even playful sci-fi.

Agree with most (gratifyingly small) criticisms of turtles, the beginning needs reworking, the ending is merely a punchline but not fitting. Signs of it being a post vs a piece i shaped (an ability im not sure i have tbph).

as for accusations of gasbaggery- i hesitate to be sure, but it's probably fair to assume that it did start out in a rather grand tone of indulgent reminiscence before i found myself getting my teeth into it- useful observation, that, and worth pondering if i revisit it.

it's kind of interesting to think about whether just letting gasbaggery take on a life of its own is a good way to start something, or whether to plan before putting pen to paper. i started something this weekend that i thought of in the shower, just pure gasbaggery, a gasbag character, whereas before i've really thought about the character before i got going. feel like either way has its advantages, the whole process for me is a bit like inspiration followed by writing followed by doubts about quality and where it's going, then repeat, then you get to an end and edit. what i'm realising now is that maybe after cutting things down they could then be grown again from the trimmed root, if that makes sense. as i often am ending up with v short pieces by the time my chopping is done.

Running with yr gasbag while the juices are flowing- good for tone imo

Pruning afterwards good for structure etc perhaps.

Certainly (evidently) i wouldnt advocate trying to edit while writing.

Re yr specific q, i guess a longer piece of work needs some thought or direction early on, whether it grows from a kernel or starts with a plan. Nice to have a promising passage or five in place to which you can look back for a quick reset tho (tone consistency again here, sorry if i fixate). Looking back on a dry chart of concept or scene plan might bend you to finish in the shape aimed for, my own gut feeling would be as you wonder about above i think? Write organically, cut into the shapes revealed by that, fit as works for what you have.

Gonna depend on where the focus on the work is obv, if concept and design are an important part of how its going to work etc

that piece definitely warms up as it hits its stride, i like the reminiscence and the way it develops. for once i'd say the language, especially at the beginning, is a bit too pared down. i needed more description, more of a feel for the location being described. i don't know if that line by line layout is as intended, i don't know if it works for me - adds to the over-sparseness maybe. basically i want more of the good bits of this piece tho, i want it richer and lol fishier.

The church was some bricks and mortar and wood that some men stuck together in a field.

Grandad’s corpse was in a box.

And one day some people who knew him and weren’t dead yet came to stand around the box and then bury the box.

And the singing was like the busker, those weak elderly voices crackling in a half-empty chilly church. This tiny building removed from everything else happening in the world at that moment. And this whole thing was meant to steel you against death or make you forget granddad was rotting in a box with white cushions in it and probably smelled like rubbish.

see this is good for me. first the sparseness, the emotional numbness, and then the expansion into the sensory. is nice. but some of the early attempts to catch that emotional blankness and its impact on the relationship - i think they need working up a bit. the blankness perhaps shd be more oblique and the girlfriend perhaps shd be more fleshed out.

It came with the explanation that it's conceived as a spoken-word piece, which to my mind explains the short paras.

that's interesting, at any rate. performance cd obviously fill out some of the stuff i'm talking about, tho i still think it needs development.

that's excellent.

i'd maybe lose or tone down the few pieces between moving to the city and the schoolkid's question, just the bits where he seems to spiral into mental fisherman outfit cliche- i think it could have gone that way but tbh it returns to the outside normality (or close to it) that inhabits the rest of the piece.

but that's a small quibble in a really good piece of writing imo.

this one was me. i think nv sort of otm - it's actually the product of quite a lot of work, and as i said upthread i trimmed it a lot. there was originally a lot more fishing stuff. ideally i'll prob have a separate monologue for the wife which precedes this one, maybe two or three more each, alternating, that's my plan anyway, so this will be the end of the play.

i think performance should add a bit given i wrote this for my own strengths (and weaknesses turned into strengths, awkwardness, weird body, etc, lolz) but i do agree it could be fleshed out a bit more, again. as i said earlier, "what i'm realising now is that maybe after cutting things down they could then be grown again from the trimmed root" - seems like that kind of tallies with nv's views and that's probably a good thing.

thanks for feedback btw.

Obv it was you tbh, and long before any geographical mentions.

Rather you than i leading the charge for 'one item for everyone's scrutiny' new rollout tactic

oh that one's really good, my word

the only bit I'd drop would be the three words 'the internet says' - it's good to give your character a little bit of worldly knowledge he doesn't have to coyly explain

other than that it's a really concentrated piece of unwinding alienation, relationships breaking down without really knowing why. entropy.

don't think the wife needs fleshing out. to flesh her out is beyond the capabilities of the narrator - he's lost her - he cannot find her - he lets her slide off the face of his comprehension

Agreed on that, on first reading. There's a sparseness that fits the distance that i'd be wary of overworking.

it coheres more for me on a second. but i wdn't be shy of exploring those stumps that cd become branches, can't hurt.

It's essentially a very, very good "the interior life of..." ILX monologue played more for emotional bafflement & entropy rather than laughs (although there are a few funny lines). The Roy Orbison tape bit is plain stunning - sad & funny all at once. It's also devoted to this mysterious & vulnerable character, not caricature - messrs Keane, Scholes & Gallagher are all established self-parodies who require little embellishment save a new imaginative escapade.

I have to remind myself that these can be extracts or fragments, I analysed too much on that basis last time round. I keep wanting them to stand alone. I think this piece does, but it's useful to know it'll have bits before & after - a lot of colour will come from there.

I have a difficulty in general with pieces that launch right into 'she says', all pronouns, in lieu of a proper introduction; but your 'I' is strong enough and the first sentence has enough momentum to make that not a problem here. You really get inside his head, the monologue works so well I feel.

the only bit I'd drop would be the three words 'the internet says'

I wasn't sure about this whole sentence. The rest of his persona is so domestic, so oldmannish, that the Maori reference didn't sit right for me. The sentence after shows that's the point, but it broke the spell a bit, is that worth it for a gag?

I look at the photo of Father Damien, taken just before he died of leprosy

This is a fine black joke, but I could see it coming and was kind of hoping for an absurd death instead. But would that work out loud? Not sure it would.

wherever the carpark he illegally parked cars was

This struck me as clumsy. It stands out more because the rest is so tight.

I don't know what the ringing phone is; it might relate to the next part, or I might well be missing something.

I wasn't sure about this whole sentence. The rest of his persona is so domestic, so oldmannish, that the Maori reference didn't sit right for me. The sentence after shows that's the point, but it broke the spell a bit, is that worth it for a gag?

this wasn't really a gag at all, more a sign of his interest/obsession. there was more about this tho originally, a few more maori references.

This is a fine black joke, but I could see it coming and was kind of hoping for an absurd death instead. But would that work out loud? Not sure it would.

This is the Father Damien: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Damien - you learn about him at school in Ireland, or you did in my time.

With the phone it doesn't really relate to anything, I just imagine it as an interruption. It could be his wife. It could be someone else.

Carpark line is a bit clumsy, I agree.

Heard this afternoon this wasn't accepted for one monologue comp I sent it to, so it's good to get feedback here.

feedback is the standard would want to be high in that comp imo

re: fragment length, sci-fi universe building,
I think the complaint was about the universe itself, one where improbably wacky situations and names dominate, rather than its depth. To stay true to the contours of that universe, it would just get progressively wackier.

It is meant to stand alone (I didn't pick the title "fragment" though it was originally part of a series of equally short and improbable vignettes), so feel free to critique it as such. I appreciate the politeness of "this isn't my cup of tea, so I can't judge" but I'd prefer the engagement of a dissatisfied customer so I can learn to trick others into drinking and enjoying this tea without realizing they actually hate it.

I am a little taken aback by the idea that there was a wave of Douglas Adams-styled SF that ruined people's appetites for it. The closest SF to Adams I could think of is Ballard.

Terry Pratchett was who I had in mind fwiw

re. Har-De-Har-Har, idk how serious it's meant to be but nobody gains anything from dismissing it so - I am assuming that this is not a complete piece, as it doesn't contain any real resolution; stuff just happens; however it could be a useful set-up of a situation. As an opening set-up it doesn't engage me much tbh, as both the content and the style are a little clunky. The sentence fragments are not always effective. The break between the first two paragraphs, followed by a fragment, was particularly jarring. It didn't feel like the author had spent enough time considering the salient details of the environment or the characters. I would rewrite this using full sentences, vivid description etc., and then pare it right back down to match the required tone.

re: Pratchett, he strikes me as being earnestly invested in the characters in his worlds where the wackiness is more like window dressing or a structure for them to inhabit, whereas with Adams/Ballard, it's the wackiness that uses characters as a substrate.

re: Kennesh, I like the idea of letting the reader/listener figure out Kennesh is actually Kenneth.

mods can we get a SPOILERS up in this pls

re. Turtles, I liked this a lot. I enjoyed the varied sentence lengths, especially the long and complicated one that makes up the first para. I would have liked more hints at the emotional weight behind the narrative. There's a darkness there that's intriguing and isn't explored. Idk. It's fine how it is, rather slight, entertaining, but I think it could carry more quite easily & wld be more rewarding.

Shame Garda outed himself so early, it's good to be able to read these without knowing the author, as soon as you know who it is you instantly start reading other things into it.

Still, I really liked this piece, although more so when I thought it was a short story - the terseness has the potential to drag in monologue form, not quite sure it fits the speech patterns of even very introverted or uncommunicative people. There's a lot of very well-chosen detail that gives it a lot of its emotional heft - that Roy Orbison tape, the mud from the fishing trip all over the carpet. And the phonecall at the end is a very nice touch.

Not so sure about Kenneth, and I don't think that "probably smelled like rubbish" is powerful enough for what's going through yr speaker's mind at that point, even as devastating understatement.

Also probably just because I knew this was LG but I couldn't read Real fishing men. Real. When will you be back. Fishing. Men. without thinking of the Interior Monologue of Paul Scholes. But overall I really like it.

re. Andrew; lovely concept. I'm not sure I have much to add, so ditto to folks above re. the run-on sentence, 'non-sarcastic' not really working, prose could generally do with a nip & tuck, but it is pretty good. Best of all, I have absolutely no idea what's going to happen off the end of it, and I would like to know. Would read more.

what doesn't work about 'non-sarcastic'?

Panic is surely one of the most inherently sincere emotional reactions there is? You can *maybe* sarcastically effect panic if you're with someone, but on your own? I'm not sure I really get it.

Exactly. It seems like a contrived way to avoid saying 'genuine panic', which may seem banal but has the advantage of clarity. If it's pitching for something more nuanced, whatever it is idgi.

re. Fragment - much improved by the expansion, mildly amusing, lacks any element of surprise or sufficient pathos to take it to the next level (I have probably read too much quirky SF).

I think 'non-sarcastic' used to contrast with the sarcastic panic referenced earlier, which I argue is a genuine thing that happens, often when you've got a deadline.

1 day before paper is due-
half-sarcastic panic: "ohh shit, my paper. get it together, self"

10 minutes before paper is due-
non-sarcastic panic: "OH SHIT, MY PAPER. GET IT TOIFDFMKSLF"

I feel like a horrible person now - I think I'm doing these too fast and I need to slow down and think about them harder, give more positive comments and not just pounce on the most obvious flaws. I'm throwing out the kind of notes I make for myself when I'm reading slush, and that's not fair.

What I like about anonymous reviews is a greater tendency towards honesty, and frankly negative stuff seems more helpful, even if to resolve whether "sarcastic panic" is a real phenomenon.

Sarcasm - to say the opposite of what you mean in order to convey contempt, y/n?

Because that is my understanding, and therefore an emotion can't be sarcastic - it can be feigned, enjoyable, self-mocking maybe, but not so much with the sarcastic. The use of half-sarcastic just about slipped through for me, but non-sarcastic drew more attention to it and jolted me out of the story.

I think the stumbling block is a philosophical difference of opinion whether emotions can be allowed their own character and volition, arriving to their host wearing many hats, among them the backwards-baseball cap of sarcasm.

Maybe a way to avoid this is to show the sarcasm via an exaggerated shake or an eyeroll, while also mentioning a chill, though this tends to emphasize sarcasm as a separate coping mechanism rather than being an integrated full-hatted sensation visited upon the narrator.

Grendel - I really liked this. I didn't think I was going to because it seemed at first like it was going to be just too nasty, but it turned silly and mocking instead. I liked him being schooled by his quarry in an inexplicable and humiliating way; we've all been there. Reminded me lots of the pub scenes in London Fields by Martin Amis; idk whether that's a direct inspiration for this?

It did make me swoon at Amis' prose though, how much work it must take. This is on not-dissimilar territory tbf, but it'd need a lot of honing to get it as sleazy and faux-spontaneous as he does. It starts off too literary is the thing - 'ways unprecedented', 'unrendered' or 'coated with ... indolence' don't suit this unpleasant fellow. Keep it for the Jodie Wishert extract imo, and let Grendel stew in his anglosaxon.

I liked Grendel too. I loved the use of the quotation, didn't think it was too long at all. I kind of agree about it being too literary, but perhaps not as strongly as Ismael Klata puts it - I think having some literary phrases can highlight the unpleasantness, but I'd use them most when the narration is at its furthest distance from Grendel's POV, to imply a sense of contempt for his... monstrosity.

Also probably just because I knew this was LG but I couldn't read Real fishing men. Real. When will you be back. Fishing. Men. without thinking of the Interior Monologue of Paul Scholes. But overall I really like it.

louis obv sort of said similar - i think it's prob the case that that style is something i'd developed ages ago (mainly from silly things online, like youtube comments) but have started honing a bit more lately.

i have been reading a lot of carver and i really like the idea of the "punchline" that need not be funny. just the idea of rhythmic set-ups i guess.

oh it's a literary style when done well, don't worry about that

v impressed. unfunny punchline - little cumulative payoffs - crucial to the momentum of the thing. would like to see more.

that were right good, that were, imago thought

thanks lj. i am working on that as a whole play, i'm sure there'll be another chance to share more here. really appreciate all the feedback, this is the first two months ever where i have been finishing creative writing rather than bouncing the one idea around inside my head and never starting it (10 years or so of this) so it helps to just have encouragement. all that matters is to keep doing it and not lose the momentum.

xpost but what would bonehead think?

keep doing it

i wanted to say- it's very clear, imo, that it's a piece that has been worked on- and in a good way, not because the joins are showing. it has precision and structure in a way that doesn't compromise the rhythm or voice of the entire, and is definitely well worth working more on.

xp what would rock fly? what would tree walk? what would water run uphill?

what would bonehead think, indeed.

Fragment: given this is intended as an improbable vignette, I think the basic idea could be made more complex. When Borges or Barthelme does something like the conceit is like a little puzzle you have to unpick. In those cases the short form complements and seems natural for the content, because the idea becomes too contradictory to be drawn out in depth.

For e.g. the idea of an alien taking a human name despite being part of a non-individualistic telepathic community is comic and meaty in itself... why not develop that. How does an interconnected extra-terrestrial society react when a part of itself is suddenly called Mrs McCloskey? What difficulties does it represent for the customer when they go to partake in a simple transaction, (buying a car) and are faced with an unlimited repository of cold, inhuman, malevolent logic from across the void of space... The situation is inherently comic and odd, but would be especially so if it were taken really seriously.

On the monologue: I like the Maori and Father Damien details. Could have done with more of this IMO, we'd get more a sense of the character if the viewpoint was narrower, more focused on his obsessions. It's the details, the unexpected things, that make him unique, not the existential dread, the sense of being outside himself, the feeling he's not really living. Those are all fairly familiar post-modern sentiments that are certainly powerful, but would be more so if anchored in the unusual and specific.

Sea Nettle
by Elizabeth Cranfield

That was the year
We couldn't remember anything
But only felt nostalgia.

Everything shimmered and was out of focus,
All odors carried an erotic charge.
Life ran its course, coursing elsewhere
But we were inside it.

That was the year
We didn't care about anything,
And felt alternately liberated and imprisoned
According to what music was playing.

We laughed at how familiar this all was,
And understood familiarity as a feeling
But not a concept,
And we worked hard at our forgetting.

Blackfriars
by Elizabeth Cranfield

When your brother had
The words “empathy” and “patience”
Tattooed across his eyeballs,
I lost the will to live.

Later, in response to a McGriddle sandwich,
It returned, spurring a series of reflections about
Blood sugar, and our enslavement thereto,
Which became a treatise.

Alone and afraid, at the podium
Naked, I address the audience.
Look me in the eyes to see my eyes.
My doctors read my will to live.

Black
by Kate Hamill

Mr. Black, currently clutching a coffee, nervously adjusting his tie, pulling at his collar, is very fond of numbers. After all, they have been kind to him: from an early age he has used them to count his blessings, and other people’s shortcomings. Now, as he settles into his desk, he is luxuriating in them, almost unconsciously totting up the details of his surroundings. His new terminal, which arrived, shining, at his enclosure last week, normally takes between eight and ten seconds to start up. Today it takes six, which is very good. He has 27 new emails to read, which is normal for Mondays, on average, but rather high for a day in June. The company has ordered him a box of 50 new biros, which he predicts will last for 45 days, given his previous difficulties in keeping hold of them. He found a grey hair on his chest this morning, which makes three altogether. On the whole he still feels he looks three to five years younger than his actual age.

Mr. Black performs these quiet calculations in the manner of an athlete stretching – practiced, languid, a little bit drowsy. His glasses are so perfectly balanced on his face that they look like they’ve been drawn on, in thick, permanent marker. His suit fits his slim body impeccably. (It’s semi-bespoke, and Mr. Black asked the tailor for an extra half-inch of ease below the armpit, so that when he reaches for the calendar on the far wall of his enclosure, the seam is just a couple of millimetres away from touching the trimmed hair he has there). Soon, when he has finished adjusting his chair (an alien-looking, back-supporting designer number, which must have cost the company something in the region of 900 pounds), he will take a running leap at the figures buzzing away on the screen.

Mr. Black has a good job. He spent years working late nights, bringing the right people coffee, attending the right pubs and acquiring the right accent and wardrobe to get it. It’s a position that was incredibly difficult to attain, but is incredibly easy to do. When people ask him what his job is – that is, the people on the other side of the 700 glass windows that make up the office building’s façade – he tends to say something like “Oh, I won’t bore you by explaining – I’m a numbers man.” Then he chuckles. “Two and two is four, that kind of thing, ha.” People rarely question him further. Most mornings his main duties appear to be drinking coffee and clicking happily through a spreadsheet, watching the figures breed, the money rolling in.

Today is different. Hazily, over the rim of Mr. Black’s styrofoam cup, a plump, fertile-looking numeral 8 (the resemblance of which to the symbol for infinity Mr. Black has always particularly appreciated) appears to melt into a hawklike 7, then sighs and sags into the dumpy, bottom-heavy curves of a 6. Mr. Black blinks. He has issues, associated with a childhood loss, which he seldom goes into, that are typified by a paranoia about entropy. In isolation, then, this ugly numeric progression is enough to upset him. But it is also happening elsewhere. Mr. Black’s perspective deepens, Hitchcock-style, as he lowers the cup to the table. As his eyes are fixed on the screen – suddenly, vertiginously, trembling with falling numbers – the ridged bottom collides clumsily with the wood surface, and four drops of coffee spatter onto the table. This has never happened to Mr. Black before.

The phone rings. It has an idiosyncratic tone – three short bleeps and then a longer, growling blast. Mr. Black waits two and a half seconds before picking it up, noting the call’s origin before doing so. It is his friend and colleague, who is also called Mr. Black. “Are the figures looking right to you, Black?” says the caller (whose one failing, if Mr. Black is being particularly critical, is his rather pompous, brusque manner of addressing his co-workers). “No, not at all. Not at all, Mr. Black” replies Mr. Black. “Must be a mistake, Black,” barks the caller. “No?” Mr. Black pauses to look over the spreadsheet once more. “Well, if it isn’t then we’re in trouble, Mr. Black,” he says.

One of the first things Mr. Black remembers counting are his teeth, which he has had since birth. “It’s a boy, and boy, what a smile!” reads the energetic caption beneath the first baby photos, collected in a 72-page album his mother put together for him when she was expecting his younger brother, who is also called Mr. Black. On the upper jaw, one of the incisors is roughly one and a fifth times as long as the other one, something that’s barely noticeable to the naked eye but that gives Mr. Black’s face a slight cast of wonky jocularity, contrasting somewhat adorably with his overall neatness and earnestness.

As he hangs up the phone, that smile is frozen in place, but now it seems a little sickly, a little clenched. Above it, Mr. Black’s neat nose is pushing air around slightly faster than usual. His eyes, glued to the monitor, say most of all: two deepening black holes; a small galaxy of panic.

Now THAT is Douglas Adams pastiche

Nah, better than that, but perhaps a little kookier than it needs to be. The numbers thing is overdone. I get the feeling that the writer is quite eager to impress. Stuff like Hitchcock-style is plain clumsy

Cranfield poetry the sort of earnest self-important wonder I can never love, sorry

i just wanted to say gtf i like both those poems and especially the first. i don't have much in the way of practical critique to add at the mo, tho.

First one not so bad but still comes off like blogosphere confessional post-art handwring hipsterrunoff reaching. The obnoxious 'we'.

i'm a fan of mr black. more than anything else here so far i wouldn't be surprised if that turned into a book that sold.

id be surprised if i weren't right about the author too.

the poetry beforehand, i'm not in poetry processing mood tbh, i haven't really any feedback. poetry is harder to help along, it exists more fully in the head of the writer than a longer written piece like a story, that must usually stand on something concrete.

The "we" isn't obnoxious if it's addressing a specific person.

How are the numbers thing overdone if it is about a dude with a mania for numbers?
I agree there's something off about Hitchcock style in that I don't remember Hitchcock doing the fixed object size, perspective zoom trick a lot, but as with sarcastic panic, you would lose something (maybe something crucial) with a less offensive word choice.

I like "Hitchcock-style" , I am imagining a very specific scene in rear window that may be a false memory. In general, I think the best, most concrete images in writing often come across as "awkward" because they are distant from cliches, which sound as natural as ordinary words.

I like both of those poems too. The "we" is only obnoxious if you assume it's a Guardian We, and I don't think it is. Intrigued as to the relevance of sea nettles. I'm not great on critiquing poetry but the first first of Blackfriars is terrific.

Mr Black piece now coming off a bit The Curious Incident Of The Lanchester In The Night-Time. It doesn't work so well for me but others should definitely elucidate me on what draws them to it

Mr Black is pretty good, I think. The numbers thing isn't particularly overdone but there's a danger of making that yr character's defining characteristic and crowding out other elements. I agree that "Hitchcock-style" is a bit off, because it reads like the author is using it as convenient shorthand for the sort of effect they want to create, and I'd be wary of that.

But the writer writes well, the only issue I have with the writing itself is that there are a couple of action, action, action lines - the opening line would be a lot punchier if it were just "Mr Black is very fond of numbers", the rest doesn't really illuminate very much and gets in the way of the sentence. Ditto this line:

He spent years working late nights, bringing the right people coffee, attending the right pubs and acquiring the right accent and wardrobe to get it

^^^ This also suffers from the same problem of feeling a little like a list, I'm sure you could find a more elegant way of conveying something similar.

Second line is great and there's a lot to like in this piece. The voice on the end of the phone is short on personality though, if something is about to go wrong then that person needs to be a lot less mild.

Vertigo, guys.

Oh it was you then :P

Haha no I didn't submit anything

Half-sarcastic sense of coyness

LJ I'm pretty sure the point is to critique the work for the author's benefit not to justify liking it to you.

Nothing wrong with a list, nothing wrong with mr black #2 lacking personality, both v much harmony to the melody imo

xp no difference

re: the opening line would be a lot punchier if it were just "Mr Black is very fond of numbers"
I agree it would be punchier, but if the idea is to simultaneously communicate the visual of what Mr. Black is doing in the opening, there's really no getting around it, and raising Hitchcock suggests that the cinematic approach is fully intended.

re: "How does an interconnected extra-terrestrial society react when a part of itself is suddenly called Mrs McCloskey?"
In a Borgesian universe, they'd all be Mrs. McCloskey and therefore the name is once again meaningless as having no name at all. In this universe, they react by drooling, which I think achieves the same thing by showing rather than telling.

re: "What difficulties does it represent for the customer when they go to partake in a simple transaction, (buying a car) and are faced with an unlimited repository of cold, inhuman, malevolent logic from across the void of space..."
I like where this is going, but this doesn't require that Mrs. McCloskey be an alien or even a robot. This works better if Mrs. McCloskey is an inanimate rock, e.g.

"Always reject the first offer... Always reject the first offer..." but Mrs. McCloskey, not offering anything, just stood there, as did the sticker price.
The pamphlet full of advice the prospective buyer memorized quickly revealed itself to be powerless against Mrs. McCloskey's firm negotiating strategy.
"Walk away, and they'll be sure to crumble." She walked away, and turned back to see if Mrs. McCloskey was crumbling. Nope. Mrs. M was a literal rock. Across the way, though, she spied Mrs. McCloskey's son, Leroy, crumbling from the repeated assaults of an irate couple, apparently fed up with the McCloskey family brand of hard bargaining stoicism, which by now must have been rubbing off on her as well, since despite witnessing erosive violence visited upon Leroy, she felt no sediment.

haha amazing post! Writer continually adapting story in response to interrupting critics is a good idea for a piece in itself...

I agree it would be punchier, but if the idea is to simultaneously communicate the visual of what Mr. Black is doing in the opening, there's really no getting around it

But why convey this right at the start though? I'm not saying you shouldn't, but I don't get the sense that it's necessary, especially as they're fairly standard everyday things to do. The nervous adjustment of the tie I like, but that stuff can be later in the paragraph. There's something about the rhythm of three of these things one after the other that stretches the sentence out - you need to have a really good reason for doing that otherwise you're unnecessarily deadening the impact of the first line.

I am entirely pro-list writing but the best lists have great rhythm to them, or what Ward Fowler upthread calls the shape on the words of the page - the explanation of how Mr Black got where he is today lacks that kind of shape and rhythm. It could even be a bit more anecdotal.

The cinematic element is a tricky one - you don't really need to write camera angles into this, but equally there's loads of terrific visual interest in the shapes of the numbers and then the sudden cliff drop as they start falling.

I'd probably avoid using paranoia and entropy in the same sentence, there's something a little Pynchon thesis about it - just straight out fear or terror might be better than paranoia. I can see where you're going with the entropy though (I think).

Harold Lovell Stands At The Edge Of The Water

by Malik Rehman

Harold Lovell stands at the edge of the water. The water looks black, from above, shaded by the trees that fringe it, and the cliffs on the far side. Reflected on its surface is the ruin of the research facility Harold used to work in, before the fire that closed it down, before motorbike accident that cost him his fiancée, before the deaths of his parents and the creeping despair that prevented him from rebuilding his life. He scratches absently at his ear, letting his eyes wander up to the buildings perched on top of the cliff, close-windowed and splashed with red warning signs, not really seeing them. The cold rubber of the glove on his hand reminds him that he came here with a purpose, and it’s one he’d better act on quickly, or risk losing his nerve.

Slowly, he reaches into his pocket and draws out the trap. Inside, the tiny brown house mouse scrabbles unhappily, looking for a way out it hasn’t found in six hours of trying. Harold looks away from the mouse and down into the water, hoping to see the silver flash of a passing fish, or any other sign of life, but today nothing moves. The air between the trees is quiet and still; no birds or insects make these dark pines their home. His hands tremble.

One desperate plunge and the trap is immersed. He pulls door of the trap open enough to let the water in, without letting the mouse escape. Panicking, the mouse struggles, fighting for life. He holds the trap and forces himself to watch as the water closes around the mouse. The cold liquid closing around its head, the last breath of air burning in its lungs, no way out. No way out. But that’s how it is with death, sooner or later there’s no way out. Better a quick death by drowning than a lingering death from cancer or heart disease, better than feeling your body and mind atrophy and fail. And there’s a chance, just a chance, that for this mouse drowning isn’t the end. Be brave, he whispers. He’s heard that drowning is painless, but it seems nobody’s told the mouse that. With a gasp, it expels that last precious pocket of air, and takes in water. Harold can feel the fear slithering in the pit of his stomach. He almost changes his mind, but he steels himself and keeps the trap submerged until the mouse gives a final kick and stops moving, eyes still open. The moment of truth. Holding his own breath, he waits. Breathing because his body won’t let him go without oxygen, he counts his pounding heartbeats. A hundred. Two hundred. His arms ache from holding the trap at full extension. His eyes start to water, and he fights the urge to vomit.

A twitch. The mouse twitches, twitches and moves. Begins to fight again. For five minutes he watches in awe as the mouse swims frantically, paws sliding against the plastic. He was right. They were all wrong, and he was right.

Still shaking, he draws the trap from the water and drains it. Exhausted, his tiny victim, bedraggled and shivering, coughs liquid and collapses. He walks back to his car, making slow progress as he stops every few seconds to check it hasn’t died. Triumph courses through him, but cannot quite banish the nausea. Harold drives home.

It takes three days for the mouse to die. He has decanted the creature into a small cage, which he watches like a cat. On the first day, it doesn’t eat and moves little. Harold opens the cage and strokes the mouse every so often, feeling for warmth and life beneath the soft fur. On the second day, there’s a marked improvement: the mouse is eating and making a proper nest for itself, though when it retreats inside to sleep, Harold panics and prods it awake again. On the third day, though, its breathing is laboured and its movements are stiff. Its fur starts to fall out. By nightfall, the flesh has started to drop from the bones in a black slough. Harold notes the details in his diary, vomits freely in the downstairs bathroom, and buries the remains in a ziplock bag beneath the camellia on his back lawn. The poem Helen had read at their mother’s funeral comes into his mind and he chuckles, saying the last line aloud: May God hold you in the palm of His hand. Inside, he flicks on the kettle and the loneliness catches him, a lurching feeling as if he’d been walking and encountered a step down that he hadn’t seen, the world fallen away beneath him. His tears are brief.

The second mouse he leaves in the water. He doesn’t dare transport the liquid to his house, so he rigs up a fish tank beneath the surface of the lake and transfers the mouse into it. He visits twice a day. Four days in, it’s conclusive: the death of the first mouse was triggered by its removal from the water; this one lives. After a week, stricken with sympathy, he releases it into the lake, reasoning that if it stays in the water it will continue to live, but a mouse doesn’t reason the same way as a man. It scrambles up the shore and disappears beneath the trees. Stupid mouse, thinks Harold, and then Sorry, mouse, under his breath. He wipes something from his itching cheek with an angry arm, and curses how lachrymose he’s become, these last few years.

Three months, two more mice a squirrel and the neighbour’s chinchilla later, Harold stands poised once again at the edge of the water. His affairs are in order. He has made his last purchase at Tesco, he has listened to his last episode of The Archers, he has visited the graveyard and said his goodbyes. He has sat for a long moment by the camellia bush, feeling the grass beneath his hands and remembering its extravagant blossoms. He leaves no notes or messages. The only person to leave one for is Helen, and he doesn’t want to tell her he’s dead, and he doesn’t want to tell her he isn’t, so he says nothing. It will be months before she notices his absence, anyway.

Without the rubber gloves encasing his arms to the elbow, he feels naked already, but he unbuttons his jacket. Steps out of his jeans. Peels off his underwear. The breeze feels unfamiliar as it lifts the hairs on his legs and chest. The air is cold: it’s October and the leaves are falling, and the water is even colder. Standing ankle-deep, Harold looks down at his feet, white and distorted in the shallows. If he turns back now, he knows, he will he lose only them. Could he bear it? For a moment he’s paralysed, but remembering the blackening flesh of the animals he drives himself onwards. The mud is thick between his toes, cold and sucking and full of sharp objects that slice at his feet. Every inch deeper brings the thought of retreat: knees, thighs, balls, belly, chest, shoulders, neck. The trees and sky are shivered by his body as he passes gently through the mirrored surface, step by cautious step, and into another world.

Oh yes, season six. Yes.

First sentence of next one needs dicing but it too was brilliant besides.

season six was brilliant alright, just kind of enchanting and amusing at the same time. i write a lot of tv summaries for my job and i find them weird and interesting in themselves, love the idea of using them in this way.

i liked Season Six but sort of wished there'd been more movement in it - one could have swopped episode 18 with episode 2 without any particular effect. it wouldn't have had to be a movement towards greater loopiness, but... towards something. (also the way that the poem was always in a relationship with an A-name made for a strange feeling of substitution)

Also really into Harold Lovell but thought the lyricism was a bit too reflex on occasion - "step by cautious step", scratching "absently" at the ear - and that got in the way of what's a very neat use of cliché/set-phrase to express thought (be brave, fight again, it's conclusive, marked improvement, steels himself, full extension, etc). it's also missing a "the" before "motorbike accident" imo.

Harold is great, intriguing and evocative.

Would lose this exposition though:

" the research facility Harold used to work in, before the fire that closed it down, before motorbike accident that cost him his fiancée, before the deaths of his parents and the creeping despair that prevented him from rebuilding his life."

could be changed to "the research facility Harold used to work in, before the fire." – the rest is implied obliquely and/or you can bring in the other details later, feeding the reader little bits of plot at a time.

Also a little unsure about the "But that’s how it is with death," bit. Get that these few sentences are highlighting a key idea in the piece but it seems a bit HELLO MESSAGE HERE.

I liked Harold too - though I agree it could have some paring. I think Stephen King wrote one of those oft-quoted (tweeted) bits of advice that I've seen loads of times, saying to go through your pieces and remove all adverbs. One of those "rules" that is worth keeping in mind, in that piece I reckon you could lose a few and it makes it stronger. Like "scrabbles unhappily" - prob all scrabbling is unhappy?

I feel like stylistically you could maybe allow more tinkering too, like it is quite straight up in its telling of the story, I feel like some twists in how things are revealed might boost this a bit - sorry if that's vague advice, just my two cents.

I'll happily scrabble to disagree on the last part- the weird is in the happenings, no harm at all stylistically in the telling being straight imo, contrast/tension doesnt strike me as an issue there.

King's version of adverb advice is coloured by his anecdote of his first article on a junior basketball team game coming back to him practically halved by redlined adverbs and his realisation of how much better it was by their omission. Would always agree. An adverb or pronoun is almost always a copout when i try to use it.

Ismael couldn't live without pronouns

It's not even contrast/tension - I just think some sentences could benefit from being fleshed out a bit, I guess.

EG "It takes three days for the mouse to die. He has decanted the creature into a small cage, which he watches like a cat."

I feel like here you have scope to do something with that, but as is it's a bit on the nose, watching like a cat is sort of a cliché that you could turn to your advantage with a bit of tinkering, especially given it's a mouse that's being watched.

I'm not sure what Season Six is, but I'm not sure I mind about that. Is it a short story? Presumably a poem? Either way I really like it - I agree with C# it could benefit from a bit more forward motion or narrative direction but the meta/poem bits are fantastic.

There's a fine line between this sort of thing and Charlie Brookerism and this piece only really slips over that line with the masturbation bit. Otherwise it reminds me of Barthelme's Will You Tell Me?, which the author should definitely read if they haven't already.

Benson puts a gun to his head. Erica has to dispose of a body.

great work bobby s

Quite liked - nay, really liked Harold's epiphany. Agree that if anything it's underwritten, but it gripped me with its succession of ideas & its fusion of the commonplace & absurd - the surreal spirit shining out. 900 more pages of that and who knows, perhaps you have synthesised a universe

I mean, it covers about 40 pages in 1000 words. As a short story or vignette it's good but expand it and it could be amazing, although countering this, perhaps it works best as a vignette because we don't have time to work out Harold's eventual design before he himself is barefoot at the water's edge

It's interesting that we've had three mental anguish/water's edge incidences.

Four, mine is implicit but 'turtles' is a joycean callback/hint

so who wrote the "mr black" story then?

"but I don't get the sense that it's necessary, especially as they're fairly standard everyday things to do"
let's break it down:
"Mr. Black, currently clutching a coffee"
coffee drinker, narrows down the age a bit; he's not just holding the coffee -- he's clutching it -- high strung dude

"nervously adjusting his tie, pulling at his collar,"
works on office job likely, probably not the boss, though, and he's already at work, not drinking coffee at home

"is very fond of numbers"
dude is the fastidious sort, and because of the preceding info, we already have some idea why he likes numbers, and his job is likely number-based.

If it's just "Mr. Black is very fond of numbers", then you're left thinking Mr. Black is some kind of number pervert at first.

i would like to read a story about a number pervert

These are I think the last three pieces I have. If I've missed any give me a shout.

...
by Zak Evans

brevity, in parts: a new hermeneutic

(lively)

in september of last year a letter was penned by a resident of the okarns state correctional facility in purple crayon. struck through with schizophrenic allusions it was addressed to a nearby judicial functional whose job it was to oversee first amendment issues as they related to the local incarceration community. she had recently scribed a sweeping response to three pressing appeals concerning prisoner hygiene as objet trouvé, radical emancipation from Cartesian dualism, and the prolific use of highly specific threats in fictional texts. in each case she had ruled for a restricted reading of civil rights - finding that the state's right to punish criminals took precedence over their self-expression. naturally this made a number of people very unhappy. a civil rights litigator promised to defame her in the press. a certain academic leftist philanthropist withdrew funding from her "pet" project - papier-mâché crafted birds, cats and fish for the prisoners meant to substitute for traditional animal-assisted therapy. "for fuck's sake, mandy," he texted her after the local okarns press ran excerpts from her manifesto. "if they can't make true art what good are sloppy wet paper dogs?"

for the benefit of their disposition, she might have answered, but the poorly scribbled letter had fastened her attention.

five lizards have tacken control of local authority
beware they shapeshift
feds can't be trusted - part of the lunar conspiracy
eject all anticipations imminently

the prisoner had spent the last decade quietly serving time for the stickup of a neighborhood electronics shop. he had made it down two blocks with an armful of discmen when a nearby beat cop overtook him. the weapons charge, stolen merchandise, and handful of industrial grade laxatives and cannabimimetic schedule I cigarettes gave him fifteen years. not a peep before yesterday, and now a paranoid letter that did not quite seem like poetry. it was unsettling. plus, she could sense a fever coming coaxed along by the anxieties of her work.

the phone rang - caller-id indicated a former lumberjack savant turned state prosecutor; her mentor.

"you screwed the pooch now," he cooed over the phone. they always fell quickly into tense banter. "the prisoner's union is up-in-arms, leaders are calling for your head."

"we gave it to the air-controllers so i'm not going to let a few grifters tell me what to do."

the lumberjack picked up on some fear behind her bluster. "you don't sound so sure."

"they took away my animal money," she said mournfully, and then, as though it were an afterthought, "what do you think about lizards?"

"cold blooded, scaly, poisonous?" he offered.

"assuming the roles of important government figures?"

"stay away from the psilocybin," he cautioned and then he was gone, the line dissolved into static, blocked by a tunnel or a water tower.

Breathe
by Caroline Vareilles

The needle pricks. I feel metal scratching on bone. Pain to prevent pain. Why do this? Weakness, vanity?

Take that out. There's no danger here. I'm in good hands. Making myself more important than I really am. Painting myself in the centre of a tragedy. The anesthetic is local, I'm numb.

I weighed him up when I saw him. How he spoke, how he spoke back. Not trust exactly - I trust no-one except myself - more a guy who looked like he knew what he was doing, and didn't care that much about selling it to me. He looked along his straight nose at me, through his expensive glasses, drawled in whole sentences. He didn't say it, but if he wasn't treating me, he'd be treating someone else and it was the same to him. The loss would be mine.

They closed in, wrapped me in cotton, swaddled me. Deliberate of course, regressing me, putting me in their care. It's because I see it that it works. They know what they're trying to do. I choose to submit, let my muffled ears believe they're underwater. Sink down, only my blind face exposed.

Swabs on my eyelids, but even so the spotlights alarm. A needle can only reach its length, but this bright white light spears through everything. I go to screw up my eyes but they're already screwed up. While I'm taking this in I find out it's begun. My head jerks sideways. The wrong senses are telling me the wrong things. I don't feel the impact; the shadow tells me I'm on my side. He's cut me already; but I learn this from the taste of blood. When he saws bone I can hear it.

It goes on. I realise I no longer know for how long. I can't tell where they're at. We talked about nose. It can't be anything else. I make to ask but the cotton fills my mouth. Something tells me my jaw is clamped shut. I don't even know if it's me or them.

Breathe, squat on the bottom, deal with it later. Strong arms take my legs and press them down, and tell me things I don't hear. Breathe.

Dolly

by Karine Fitzroy

Wristphone back on the table and duvet restored - at least able to sleep through irresolution and the botched wisdom of second thoughts now - Dolly dreams and wakes on the morning of her second date with Victor, although it might be more accurate to call it a ‘ramble’, as Victor has done repeatedly, with a marked avoidance of any romantic jargon. Poor kid’s trying way too hard. Course, Dolly does that too - tries to live a plotted life with some kind of narrative cogency - and she now realises with God’s clarity that what she really wants to do is stop caring about herself in any way whatsoever. Call it the inverted drunkenness of the death-row prisoner or the masochism of an intelligent duchess - Dolly is not Victor’s date but his clown - she is others’ entertainment, and her fall is the commodity sought most ardently by every admirer, him included. Her fall! as she dives headlong from the bed and crashes noisily amongst shoes. Her fall, as she kicks the floor, gets up, spin-dives again, flattening loose rolls of carpet and almost breaking her knee. Her window, which she runs to and in lieu of herself or of Genevieve flings through her best hat, looping stupidly onto the head of a neatly-suited schoolboy who gives a great whoop and begins dancing the dance of a cruel cunt, performed at the pavement, as if marauding it or preparing to inflict his arse-boils on it, threatening each paving-slab with some form of occluded extortion, firing porn-rays out of his socks as his shoes fly off and he begins actively moulding his environment into mounds of greasy beef that he can penetrate not with his cock but his pointing, wagging fingers - no you can’t! - and so as cars and telegraph poles are reckoned into patronised nothingballs of sexual ignominy, the Shamer in the Hat is farting his way into the sky, spasmodic leg-flicks reminding us all he still wants to dance, preferably upon our faces or our excised urogenitary tracts, or both, all while singing the song of his alma mater or perhaps one of the shittier hymns. “Bahb” he flaps, “Bahb, gahb flohg.” He gits in Dolly’s bathroom sink now, gits right in her face, only 16 but already has 51% of her assets, so he lowers his balls into her face-cream and hugs himself. “Jurrr” he thinks aloud. His head cranes around and his eyes fuse shut - now he only responds to the fear-pheromones, and wherever they are found so will be his fingertips and the lists they massage unwanted employees out of and frot algorithms against possibility into. Laughing down Dolly’s pussy he begins to fade from view and the hat, still rotating with the sort of jaunty inertia that gets children murdered by home invaders, settles over her crotch. She whips it away with irreplaceable showgirlship and tears into her clothes drawer. It’s a beautiful day! and she’s dressed for the fucking heath and its stupid horny trees.

But there aren’t any conditions that come with not caring about oneself and soon Dolly is dangling her legs out of the window, covered in yoghurt, wondering how many pigeons will feed by noon. Remembering belatedly that she has to be outside Victor’s house by eleven, she shoos away a pair of wasps (but not before allowing one of them to sting her hand) and skips to the shower, flecking her room white, as if some slight mould has chosen this day to envelop and claim the materials of her life. Showering is brief, rusty and badbacked, and Dolly falls uncertainly into a gorgeously mottled green and brown summer dress that she can’t remember wearing before (but can remember receiving, from her mother, whom she didn’t speak to last week). Feeling the delicious stink of guilt she gathers her transport pass and wallet, pops them into her neoprene slingbag before gazing for the final time from the window, just in case there’s anything, she supposes, that might do her the wrong kind of mischief out there in the sunny world.

This is why we fantasise about jetpacks: Dolly has this, two more and then a short walk; she does not like walking. She gazes out, perpendicularly, shopfronts and branches darting back into a staid history, curses the slightest pause between stops, makes room for the neatly-suited schoolboy who noisily mock-barfs into her lap, twice, before she turns around and puts her fist through his head and out the other side. This only seems to encourage him, however, and now with pieces of brain raining down over Dolly he gets up and produces a long-barreled revolver from his inside pocket, with which, pants around ankles, tie still immaculate, he embuggers himself. “Gubb. Covcov.” His erection grows and then falls off, becoming a larva of some sort - no, a queen termite, engorging itself on the grease of the bus floor, shivering with forces beyond its power and then exploding in a ricy granule-burst - a million tiny penis-termites converge upon Dolly leaving trails of stale pus, stop an inch short of her foot, rise vertical and salute, before pouring up the schoolboy’s leg, across his blazer, single file up his neck and now into the hole in his head where they replace his missing brain-matter. His eyes, which have been boggling around on the floor of the bus, ricocheting from shopping-bags and walking-boots, gathering flyshit, bounce fortuitously up to where his penis used to be and affix themselves, a second pair of balls, ocular and erotic, pulsing, bulging towards Dolly, pupils dilating...and this is where he pulls the trigger, the bullet flashes forward through his rectum, reduces both ball-eyes to blood-soup, smashes the front of his bladder off, as all the seminal fluid in his prostate ejaculates at once all over the roof of the bus and he falls backwards over the railing, down the stairs with a bump, in his final action managing to press the stop request button. Of course, nobody wants to get off or on, but the bus stands there anyway, for at least eight seconds.

The rest of Dolly’s journey proceeds more or less in the same manner, excepting for a blissful interlude waiting for the number 387 which is full of ladybirds and swifts catching the ladybirds and some ladybirds surviving by crawling up her dress, which she encourages. Inside her dress, she supposes, a dream of some kind is occurring, where ladybirds escape forever into eternally-enclosing leaves or each other’s shells, stacking up into a giant polybird which can never be killed. She looks up now at the swifts and wishes to grasp one by its tiny feet and fly to nowhere in particular except high. Perhaps so high she won’t have to let go. At this point-

Zak Evans piece shot through with a lysergic & unsteady intensity that I very, very much enjoy. its writer shouldn't worry about quality & just keep churning this stuff out until it congeals. really spry, really charged. bloody excellent. again, a sense of the surreal (papier mache prisoner pets!) intruding in on the paranoid metarealist swirl of a prison-complex its guardians & paymasters no longer know how to handle. strikes me it could grow into something important. n.b. fyi I know who wrote this but I'm not telling

Breathe is a terrifying & really well-written experience of cosmetic surgery; a concern apposite to my own writing, and done superbly here, conveying the weird mix of confusion & precision that accompanies the experience of being sedated & altered. "I go to screw up my eyes but they're already screwed up" is a brilliant line. Today's stuff is great, what can I say?

Id read a zak evans novel, i think.

Not gotten to rest yet.

Sea Nettle - 'course, coursing' doesn't work for me because the two meanings (if indeed there are two) aren't distinct enough. Every word counts more in poetry than anywhere else, and here repetition misses a chance to enrich that stanza.

The lines 'And understood familiarity as a feeling / But not a concept,' are too self-consciously analytical imo - we already know the speaker is like that from the rest of the poem. What I'd like is to throw in something more recent, or from the present; it's not clear whether this is a contented look back or a wistful one, and imo in this case the ambiguity actually isn't helping because it leaves the possibility that the time spoken of is inconsequential. I think just a hint of bitterness, tragedy, regret or whatever would add a layer of tension.

Argh Ismael you are rolling these out too quickly!

I don't have much to say about Harold except a) I really enjoyed it and b) that is one hell of a hardy mouse, possibly unrealistically so.

Shades of DFW about the Zak Evans story - loads of long sentences here but the writer is absolutely in control of their material. Lizards taking over the government is a cliche, but maybe that's the point and the note-writer can be blamed for that. I'm not convinced that the dialogue feels particularly natural, though.

I think I know who Zak Evans is as well.

b) that is one hell of a hardy mouse, possibly unrealistically so.

shaking my head @ u here matt

Flippin' 'eck, I'm MILES behind on these!

Haha oh dear, I just read it again. I am clearly not in the right frame of mind for close reading today.

Right, the poems. I liked them both, stylistically, rhythmically, but I thought 'Blackfriars' was by far the stronger of the two. 'Sea Nettle' is a fab title, but the poem lacked specificity. Everything was relateable in a general way, but there wasn't a single image or sense to bring you deep into the teller's experience - you couldn't see, smell or taste it, and with a title like 'Sea Nettle', I was expecting something tangy. What was the music that was playing? What did the nostalgia centre on, what did it feel like?

'Blackfriars' I loved, especially 'look into my eyes to see my eyes'.

Shades of DFW about the Zak Evans story

pynchon surely

Blackfriars is my favourite of the two poems. I love the first two stanzas, get the HRO connection, whoever raised that, but I think the author makes the bathos of it work in an amusing way. I think the last twist in the sonnet is somehow in the wrong direction though – it's obviously supposed to take the reader somewhere else but it's a little general. Maybe it's just "Alone and afraid... Naked" I don't like... It feels much less wise than what precedes it.

I'd like to see where the Zak Evans story goes... the prose is so inventive that the narrative (reasonably straightforward) buckles under it a little bit. But I think that's probably an unfair criticism given such a short excerpt.

Dolly, I found a little difficult to bite into but after the second read it's difficult not to appreciate the intensity of some of these images & descriptions. I think it would be helped by more of a focus on rhythm and the music of it... Made me think of Burroughs. I imagine not everyone would agree on this but I feel that when you get those kind of body horror semantic orgies in Naked Lunch there's a real swing to it... The sounds and pace of images overlapping each other grips you and makes it easier to suspend the need for a straightforward narrative. Could this be improved by slowing down the action in some places, including pauses, contrasting complex with simple, etc. etc. Could be I just need to read this at 10am with some more caffeine in the blood

Wow, still processing most of these. The standard has been crazy high esp for WIPs as I guess many of these are.

Dolly was otm I think in its depiction of a partic emotional state, that fatalistic abandon that's kinda despairing and jubilant at once? Liked how she's constantly besieged by capering, malevolent boy-children, that rang true as well; and of course the imagery is wonderfully pungent.

Feel like there used to be more stories in this vein, when you read anthologies from the 70s eg vs today you see a lot more of this kinda balls out surrealism. If its being produced now I don't know it, anyway. Would like to read more.

Blackfriars - I don't understand this at all I'm afraid. I liked the middle, the idea of being revived straight into an argument about the thing that revived you is pleasing to me. But it's just floating there in a puddle of custard, I can't work out the connection between the bits.

Mr Black - this is fabulous, I love it. The numbers thing not overdone at all imo, because you've managed to introduce them all in different and interesting ways. It isn't quite the 'appeal to all the senses' rule, but it's something close to it by drawing on all different contexts to serve the story - the three grey hairs, the sensual shapes, the 700 windows.

The other guy also being Mr Black was something I liked at first, but now I'm not sure I do. The story is jammed full of dry humour as it is, I don't know that a funny name gag is necessary.

The first line - clutching, nervously adjusting - looks like a mistake once you reach the end of the piece. Surely he starts off at ease, then becomes clutching as the market drops? The nose pushing air around is a great line - it captures quickening breath as well as the nervous energy of a cornered rat.

Hitchcock-style doesn't seem to me to fit either - it is the looking-down-the-stairwell thing in Vertigo though, wins is surely right. I think it's the right image, it just seems like wrong way to capture it.

In a similar vein, is he a pubs man? If I'm right and he's not, you could recast this detail to add a little extra colour to the character.

"his perspective shifted, like in that bit on the beach in Jaws"

His perspective shifted, like that meatloaf song about objects in the rearview mirror

"The other guy also being Mr Black was something I liked at first, but now I'm not sure I do. The story is jammed full of dry humour as it is, I don't know that a funny name gag is necessary."

If you imagine the story being narrated by Alec Baldwin, this is not a gag but dry statement of fact.

Me
q

I've been meaning to say that your posts in particular have been exactly the type of criticism I'd been hoping for from this thread; but tbh I'm not so sure about that last one.

It's a short poem. Written by my phone, in my pocket, all by itself.

(Apologies)

re. Mr. Black, I agree with whoever said that he shouldn't seem tense at the beginning - it's a much more satisfying character arc if he starts out ultra-confident and then gets this massive shock. I liked the repetitions, esp. of 'Mr. Black', liked the brother also being Mr. Black - just the kind of obviousness of it. I'd have liked a bit more context for the falling numbers, though not necc. an explanation as such. I think the tension could be amped a bit - spend a bit more time, perhaps only a few words, on his reaction to the change.

Season six, uh, I'm clearly in the minority here, but I bounced off it. The poem thing is interesting, but too many characters, too much randomness, not enough forward motion. And I think the second to last episode is a better ending than the last one - the poem is the body, and the bathtub and the acid - this is much more interesting and evocative (to me) than it dreaming the whole thing.

I agree with these but at the same time, making mr black ultra confident or introducing forward motion really alter the pieces beyond the point where I suspect the respective authors were intending to go. Maybe there's a way to show a certain cockiness the numbers have afforded mr black while still emphasizing fundamental nervous anxiety of the character. Maybe not numbering the episodes would remove the expectation of a season-arc. The bathtub ending seemed more ending shot to me as well but it also struck me as deliberately placed not at the end, maybe as commentary that real endings of series are always before the last episode?

One thing I'm not clear about is whether every line is a reference to a specific show. I only spotted three.

there are more than three but they are less than half of the lines

i like the idea of replacing the 'episode _____' with bullet points but i feel like that won't work much at readings; i sort of agree that it needs some kind of 'movement towards' but at the same time i don't want to give it, like, actual narrative progress; i'm not sure if the joke is about 'television' or 'quality television'; the bathtub thing was like three-fifths of the way through, originally

i have read that barthelme story, it turns out, but i had to check

I don't think the forward motion has to make sense, if that helps. An impression of narrative, doesn't actually have to have a pat plot progression. I would enjoy being asked to work a little to try and make it make sense, I don't think failing would bother me as much as the feeling that there is no sense to be made (perhaps there is more than I can grok, being a bear of little brain?)

Harold is mine. Thanks for the comments. It's actually part 1 of a 3-part story which has been driving me up the wall because I can't make the ending work, and although I love part 2, your reactions are making me wonder if I shouldn't just hone this bit some more and call it a short-short.

post 2 to the next round! :P

I agree re: forward motion on season six though I do like it without it, and it would be a shame to change the piece too much.

I think what is really interesting here is the subtle differences between the different genres you're pastiching. On the one hand you have the language of TV plotting. On the other there's this idea of Allegory and meta-commentary. The missing link here is that both of these are essentially abstracted ways of explaining reality to people, one (allegory) is medieval, the other (TV) contemporary. If either slipped for a moment into a more direct, realistic style it would be supremely startling.

I like the idea, which is at the core of this, that allegory allows you not only to understand but to empathise with something that is abstract, that doesn't have any feelings. That could be pushed more here and provide a climax at some point along the line without necessarily adding plot...

And now my brain hurts. Sorry if that's a ramble.

Mr. Black was mine – thanks to all who commented, it's been incredibly helpful. Agree that "Hitchcock-style" is something of a clanger, the parodies illustrate that hilariously. I think my original intention in it was to invoke that perspective shift as a kind of visual cliché that over-dramatised the action (essentially, he's just looking at a spreadsheet, in silence). But it does come across as a bit of a lazy shorthand.

Other criticisms otm too – will definitely be working on consistency of the character and being more careful about the lists, which are a troublesome tic for me in general.

Have had a lot of fun reading + engaging with all these great pieces, roll on round III !

poll

Do we dare? I kind of think we should. What would the question be though?

I haven't finished critiquing anyway. For anyone else still working through them, I'll leave the pieces up for the rest of the week and then one or two will be getting deleted (only where specifically requested).

Nah i dont think so, really, not since one or two came along that were better than mine, like

voted

(for garda, mordy/zora close behind)

i vote for treeship

Agree that "Hitchcock-style" is something of a clanger

I've been trying to pinpoint why, and have come to the conclusion that using cinema as a descriptive shortcut is something one just can't do. I'm reminded of Dan Brown's description of Langdon as 'looking like Harrison Ford' in The Da Vinci Code (which had the added cringe of clearly pitching the movie at the same time) and I think it's a breaking-the-fourth-wall thing. Characters can be into films and it's fine, and it's great when dialogue crackles like its on-screen; but going that step further is more telling the reader what you're trying to do than actually doing it, and for me it always breaks the spell.

i think it depends what you are describing as well as the tone/concept for the piece, and what cinematic references and language you are using

Season Six is one of those things that I suspect is very clever and very good, and that I even get a certain enjoyment from; but ultimately it leaves me cold because I'm on the outside. I don't properly get it, in short. It's an american indie rock of a poem.

I feel like my criticism is probably useless here because it's doing all the meta things that I don't care for - I rarely read for playfulness with language, I don't despair at trite tv plotting, I can't deal with characters as ciphers. I can see there's all that and more going on, and I think it's done well, but it cannot reach me. Certainly don't change on my account, I'm unqualified to judge is what I suppose I'm saying. And for once that's not sugaring a pill, I honestly can't see how it could be better.

"I'm reminded of Dan Brown's description of Langdon as 'looking like Harrison Ford' in The Da Vinci Code (which had the added cringe of clearly pitching the movie at the same time)"

I must have skipped over this! I'm now picturing Dan Brown as a kid asking for a han solo action figure for xmas and his dopey parents get him forest gump instead.

haha idk if 'dan brown does it and it doesn't work there, ergo it's a bad thing to do' is a great argument!! 'dan brown does it, ergo it must be bad' is a little better but i don't know. but like, comparisons to (among others) clark gable and fay wray in gravity's rainbow work fine.

i think the first reason "hitchcock-style" doesn't work is because the human eye doesn't do depth of field like a camera lens does; it seems like it'd only be an acceptable description of something in the human visual field if the subject were undergoing migraine type hallucinations. in a story about someone who was having that happen, sure, but maybe more so if the character's a film buff, and there are probably better phrasings.

--

thanks to everyone with words on season six, sorry i've been to busy to engage with other people's work this week

I could've given other citations even less eminent than Dan Brown! I do remember cinematic descriptions coming up a number of times in my old writing group, including efforts by me, and it never worked, but we never bottomed out why.

now we dolly back, now we fade to black

I don't think it's true that they NEVER work. If the narrative voice is close to the character, and the character likes films, it should be ok.

I can even imagine it could be used as a device, if emphasised enough... a disconnected character who sees everything in terms of what he's seen on TV and in cinemas would probably be pretty fun to write.

In that case it would definitely work, but I see a lot of writing where it's obvious the author has a TV series or movie in their head and is trying to write that down, and that almost never works. Action scenes and physical comedy are really, really difficult to get down in prose, which is what makes the writers who CAN do that so good.

I find action scenes and physical comedy difficult to read as well fwiw, it's one of the reasons I don't like the Major Marvy sections of Gravity's Rainbow.

read a bad attempted demolition of pynchon once that used them sort of metonymically as a demonstration that p was Not Funny and A Bad Prose Stylist and like, hm, not sure about that

limerick spattered deathrace thru SS tunnels = beyond mfing classic. mistaken id castration = ditto. terrifying racist banter = terrifying

(for garda, mordy/zora close behind)

― imago, 11 November 2013 14:50 (Yesterday)

wait what was mordy's

also y u h8 rural cozy reminiscences u savage

Mordy's shd b obv given a close reading

eh didn't spot any of them particularly down on palestinians and/or minority rights tbh? maybe i missed some bible code shit tho, will re-check

thought i'd have a bite before now, tbh, disappointing.

" I see a lot of writing where it's obvious the author has a TV series or movie in their head and is trying to write that down, and that almost never works."
Even in the dan brown example it's actually kind of charming, though, and I think much more engaging than a writer who deploys it as a purposeless affect, or even one that puts a lid on such tendencies for fear of revealing crass and embarrassing ambitions at a franchise.

read this and was reminded of 'season six': http://theamericanreader.com/especially-heinous-272-views-of-law-order-svu/

still working through these, very slowly...

Harold Lovell is absolutely great. I actually think I agree with all of the criticisms of it, but only in retrospect - at no point was I thinking 'it needs to lose x' or 'how the author should've done it was y'.

I love how unsettling it remains. By which I mean it's making me pose the fundamental questions right up to the end. 'When did this stop being real?' 'What happened before?' 'Is he dead already?' I don't know the answers to these - if the piece were less skilfully poised either I wouldn't care, or my questions would be less riveting. This way it could be either a realist piece of science fiction or a straight-up piece of horror, and either way I'm gripped.

the SVU piece certainly commits to its thing in far more depth than i did

I actually think I agree with all of the criticisms of it, but only in retrospect - at no point was I thinking 'it needs to lose x' or 'how the author should've done it was y'.

imo this p much means that these criticisms are- well, not invalid, but not more than suggestions of difference than anything else. stands for most of the criticisms itt imo- fine thoughts and not bad angles from which to look again, but v eh tuomas-like in their 'i would have done it like this'iness ifgwim

I suppose that must be right. I was going to say that just because there's two valid choices, that doesn't necessarily mean they must be equally valid - but then we're into whether there's such a thing as *objectively* better. I'm inclined to say there is tbh, but whose objectivity counts? For this thread I suppose it's got to be the writer's.

The anonymous nature of it though makes feedback here much more useful as market research.
It's harder to tailor suggestions to help fortify what the author wanted to do if the author isn't necessarily there to confirm what it is.

The Zak Evans piece - only one substantive critique, which is that the lizards letter doesn't seem to be sufficiently remarkable to produce the unsettling effect described. I feel like you need either something really outrageous (the easy option) or else something that chimes horribly with the officer (hard to do) to take me with you along that development. The scenario is good though, a prison functionary creating unstable enemies has rich potential.

Other than that, I want to see capital letters at the start of sentences. You rely heavily on double adjectives at the start, and my eye needs help breaking the flow. I had to go back and read twice, which might be acceptable in a slower piece but I feel this one needs a wilder ride.

Dolly is kind of nasty I feel - not the intensity of any particular image so much as the sheer volume of them. I don't recognise the emotional state being described, and I don't believe I want to. I assume Dolly is the character experiencing it, but the horny schoolboy, who is he? Is a player, or a mere figment of her disturbed imagination? I hope the former, the latter is too vile.

I expect the aim is somewhere near The Naked Lunch, but it actually reminded me more of Nabokov's Ada, in that it retains a whimsy or olde worlde charm even through its horror.

And finally, Breathe is my own. I wasn't going to submit one, but as it happened I had aforesaid surgery that morning and dashed it off (via several drafts) to preserve the moment. Some interesting interplay between faith, confidence, vanity and the unseen that could maybe be developed further, though in pretty happy with what came out of it.

One lovely detail that I couldn't use - when it was over and they lifted the swabs from my eyes, the first thing I saw was the surgeon stretching back his latex gloves and pinging them across the theatre into a bin against the far wall. But that would've made it a different sort of story.

different but still good IMO. That's kind of a terrifying detail, definitely worth using I would have thought...

Any interest in a 'secret' I Love Writing board? Could be set up like 77, any ILXer can be let in but with anyone just trashing things for the sake of it would get access revoked.

Might do, might do

i thought the idea was mooted a little while ago but the mods weren't for it, was the decision

I very much like the sound of this.

would like this. i have been deep in expanding the piece that was here but i have a few other going concerns that i'd like to share. this thread was great reading too.

i would quite like this! i think if it were a secret board i might... actually post a thing.

do it!

It's difficult. The anonymity part of this was my way of giving a bit of privacy - which is good for getting the criticism started, but the disadvantage is that it's hard to get into a longer discussion about the piece (particularly why the author made the choices she did). A private board, so long as it got decent traffic, would be better for the latter - also providing it didn't inhibit honest criticism.

Another thing is whether the 'event' aspect of having a thread every six months would become just a couple of posters shouting into the ether. Not that I know whether this thread was an event, but it must've given some motivation I reckon - certainly I was delighted that people kept stepping up. If the board was just 'there', maybe that wouldn't happen?

would read an ilw board, but would miss these threads

Anonymity is pretty essential if anyone's going to get any useful feedback I think, though it is good to know who wrote what afterwards so there can be a conversation. TBH as it's fragments we're posting it's not such a problem having a public board, but a private one would be useful for longer/complete pieces.

Not that I have anywhere near enough stuff at the moment but, where ever it happened, I would do this monthly if everyone else could be bothered – would be a good incentive to write and improve! Six month gap kills momentum a little bit...

Unless the new board is a goer, I'm going to aim to get group III up in February. That way we can cash in on people's New Year resolutions.

Any ideas meantime for how to tweak the format? Having one piece per day seems like it might work better than posting them in batches.

I'm a bit busy right now but I'd hope that if the new board IS a goer, it'll be up before February. There's quite a bit more admin involved in private boards so Christmas is pretty much the worst time to do it, but early January should be okay?

If I set the submissions thread up in the new year, then it could also act as advance publicity/a register of interest for the new board. Then if it happens, we can kick it off with the criticism thread in February and let it fly from there?

Ya

I'd be really into the i love writing board. It could be a really great thing.

Me too.

I'd also be up for some kind of email-based thing where people send bits of writing around a group, although that might be a bit forward of me.

Anyone writing SF/F want to join a short story group? I'm part of a challenge group for 2014 where we commit to writing and submitting to market one short story every month. If you get enough stories in and you have one or more decent unsold short stories at the end of the year, they'll be considered for an anthology to be published in 2015.

There are 8 of us so far. Most people in the group are offering critiques as the stories come in, and help identifying suitable markets.

Ask for an invite to astoryamo✧✧✧@yahoogro✧✧✧.c✧.u✧ if you want to join in; say you're from ILX. I'm the list admin. You get a free pass for January, obviously.

it's auto-garbled that email address - the missing letters are nth ups o k

i was looking through my google drive and found a draft document titled "Anonymous II" that was apparently intended for this thread. i barely even remember writing it, but at least if there is an Anonymous III i'll have something to build off of

similarly i was looking through my googdrive and did not ever remember writing it ever but actually didn't hate it??? and would totally submit to this if it were to happen again if a certain amount of others would also submit

er *found something i wrote that i did not ever remember writing

who knows what happened there

karl malone alias, cunningly disguised with his real first name

NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, although interest in it seems to have fallen off the past couple of years here at ilx.