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Public Reviews
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Review by Lipless
Rated: 13+ | (4.5)
To the author: Though I'm fairly new to the site and haven't written many personally involved things in a while (which is a reason I decided to join WDC) I LOVE to write and am very good at writing and my reading comprehension is fantastic. I consider this a talent which can be shared and taught and so incidentally I also enjoy giving friendly advice to other writers a great deal when I feel it would be a benefit to them. Normally I will point out plot holes and errors in technique and may even rewrite a sentence or two slightly to show examples of proper grammar or technique. I can write four thousand words of advice and encouragement before I even realize it sometimes. In the case of your prologue I only have one true piece of writing advice, and it's a simple one. You tend to use numerals a lot in your writing when you are speaking of numbers instead of writing them out as words. I think this is a mistake for you. When you mention what time the character's meeting begins I believe it's fine, though you should've used a colon in between the eight and the zeros. It works in that case because you're using the initials AM, which you would not spell out, and writing "eight AM" seems odd. If you were to have said "eight o'clock" on the other hand, it would have been better to spell it out. You used it well in that case as far as I'm concerned. My issue is with the next paragraph. There are many numbers in it, and they are all numerals as you currently have them written. This just looks odd when you look at the paragraph as a whole, and if the numbers were spelled out instead I think it would look a lot better and the reader's flow through the words would not be interrupted by numbers where words should be. That's all the advice I have, but I would like to encourage as well, which is very easy to do in this instance. Call me jaded, but when I start to read something these days and it starts with "New York City, September 11, 2001" my eyes naturally start to roll. I'm sure you don't have to ask why this happens, at least if you've seen the movies, heard the songs, and read any of the books themed on 9/11 since the day actually occurred. A lot of it is just generic junk with the dramatic, high-selling backdrop of a great tragedy. So anyway, I start to read. I roll my eyes at the firs sentence, but continue to read because I make assumptions sometimes but don't let them stop me from giving fair chances, and soon realize that there was a reason I continued past that first sentence. This "Association" isn't something I expected to run into while exploring he halls and floors of the World Trade Center, and its intrigue was compounded by the lack of detail as to what it was. We are left with the knowledge that this group in some way manipulates global affairs as if rulers of the world, and nothing more. Above that, being that the setting is the tragedy that it is, we all know exactly what is going to happen to them before we even reach that point in the prologue, which creates an odd sort of suspense knowing what powerful people they are. I leaves me wondering if the disaster was incidental and they were just meeting in the wrong place on the wrong day, or if the meeting was the direct reason for the attack. Given the scope I'd have to guess that the attacks were meant specifically for the Association, but as with the reader knowing their fates before they read the end, it doesn't stop my immersion or enthrallment, and in fact is part of what keeps me gripped. This must be the result when someone with talent takes a story that you know very well (and after over thirteen years who couldn't at this point?) and seemingly begins changing it and tweaking it as you read it. You, sir or ma'am, may be writing the Mixed-Up Mother Goose of 9/11 stories, and I applaud the very interesting prologue and would be interested in reading it in full once it was completed. Maybe you could send me a message when that happens. :)
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Review by Lipless
Rated: 13+ | (3.5)
When I read the title and began the story I was expecting story about a gross, overly-obese man who eats himself to explosive proportions. I'm glad you didn't take it in in that clichéd direction. In fact, I never actually ran into any of the problems I expected to have with this story. The story stayed interesting, though the writing itself seems a bit explanatory. I feel as though I'm just being told an anecdote instead of being led through an immersive story. We know Harris (whose name it seems is used a bit too many times, I got over-used to it) is a gluttonous slob, but maybe his gluttony has been so over-pronounced that it at a point it stops being disturbing and becomes uninteresting. That, or the author should try harder to pinpoint the perfect words and descriptions to really get that disturbing effect. The overeater character is used a lot in gross-out roles and a lot of common words are used to describe the way in which they eat and love their food, and some of them have become dull overtime, so to make those sorts of descriptions the focal point in the entire first half of the story seems like a mistake to me, that is unless they were amped up another level or two or three on the disturbing scale. Really I think the story could be done more a service if it were longer, if the characters had some speaking lines, some more personality traits, and if it was just fleshed out a bit more in general. It's a good story, so it should be used more to its potential. Morbid moral stories based on the deadly sins are nothing new, so you really need to give it some zing, make it stand out, which really just means making your characters, settings, and situations stand out a bit more. Overall, it's a good story, or a great basis for an even better story. I enjoyed reading it but wish it went further. There was one more thing I wanted to make mention of; the waitress, the true antagonist of the story, needs to be even more disturbing than the main character, that way the ending really pops. Time should definitely be spent working up the weird/creepy factor around her, because we've already got the idea that she's feeding him something gruesome way before he ever reads the article in the paper. In other words, you either need to get rid of that predictability somehow, or really work with it by making her transition from sweetest-waitress-ever to the killer she actually is a more detailed ride. Also, all the meats she fed him were human so while possibly seasoned differently they would probably be easily identified as the same kind of meat from a veteran eater who would surely know a human being from chicken at least. So maybe work on believability in that segment somehow. Good luck author!
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