The flavour of this story reminded me of one of my favourite films, Truly Madly Deeply, and the video club ghosts who infested the flat to kill time. Which is a good thing to be reminded of.
A very unsepulchral story and oddly sweet and warming.
This was only too short, and like a snapshot when I wanted the whole movie.
What happened next, and what happened next time bionic!Dan ran into the superhero types?
I'm assuming Dante is an unreliable narrator because he seems a bit bigoted, so I wonder whether the supervillains are the bad guys or the victims of rotten press, so that is a part of the story that has a question mark over it as well.
O bother. You specialise in flash fiction, and I know that you meant this to be a snapshot *adjusts star rating* but I wish you had expanded on this. I don't like Dante much as a person, but the fictional universe he lives in has a lot of story potential.
Poor Watson. From the sound of it, I bet he doesn't even enjoy Grand Theft Auto, either. This was nicely done, even if the computer surveillance made it an almost detective free crime story, and that's tough from a crime-fiction point of view. I wanted to hear more about Holmes and Watson, please.
(Surely you should be fanboying Reginald Hill's Dalziel & Pascoe series instead )
I was in the mood for a ghost story and here this was.
I like the monologue format of this, but can't comment on the regional style. I liked the way it was told but I don't know American-rural enough to nitpick flaws in the dialect if there are any.
I admired the way you handled his dawning awareness of danger as the befuddlement wore off. Your man's a good persuasive storyteller. In your head as you were writing, was he spinning a yarn or telling a true story?
How infuriating, when you were trying to be good samaritans. I hope your lives recovered from that disruption quickly in real life.
I see you have a wordcount up for this - are you trying to stay within a certain limit? Because I think this would be much much better if you expanded it.
The narrative sequence is all there, beginning, middle and end, but told in such a pared-down way that it looks like the bullet points of an excellent story. My immediate thought would be, to write out the conflicts with the landlord in dialogue. Directly reported speech is wonderful for putting a reader right amidst a scene, and fleshing out personalities.
On a presentation note, it makes it easier to read online when you hit enter twice at the end of each paragraph, leaving a blank line. But my big suggestion would be to flesh out the bones of this; it's a great story as I'm sure you're aware, and deserves a couple of minutes from its readers.
What an extraordinary position your hero is in, and how must he feel, to have gone through such highs and lows in his life. What kind of a person could do that, and what kind of regrets would they feel. The information you give in the "he muses quietly" bit is essential to the story, but I think it's a case of a character saying something he already knows (why?), to an audience (himself) who already knows it too (again, why?), for the sake of the reader. And the reader is saying, "why are you telling yourself this?" In short, it's clumsy exposition. Could the same information be give in the text, rather than as his speech?
The unusual thing about this is that the story is about a time after the action-adventure, about the aftermath of a big, questy high fantasy world shaking epic. And your aged hero is Lear, not - trying to think of an action-adventure shakespeare - Macbeth. So it's fresh that you're portraying an old man, with his memories and reflections, rather than a pretty young fighter. That was a big plus in this for me.
Thank you for posting this.
The first sentence is in past, the rest, in present tense. They need to be consistent.
Like many others, I love looking at the portraits in the National Gallery and trying to work out the personalities of the sitters, so this essay was particularly interesting.
I think, given that much of what we infer about her personality is guesswork - the contemporary evidence is either biassed pro or con - I think it might have been worth putting a little wriggle room into the personality-trait statements about what you see in the face in the frame. Some students believe she was ambitious and proud, couragous and politically eager, rather than the picture you paint here. Here, statements like Neat and sweet while playing with the black mysteries
are presented as objective (proven facts) rather than subjective (valid opinions).
In its style this reads as if English was not your first language, and in many ways benefits from that - the turn of phrase is poetic and liltingly beautiful in many places. I loved the line She denied her tomorrow in the name of her daughter.
In other places, there is redundant phrasing, I mean, the same thing put down twice where once is enough - for instance: something rare inside her, typical for no one else, means you call her rare then needlessly define the word you just used. Or this phrase stopped me in my tracks: Serious when not laughing a phrase which made me say, "well, when people aren't laughing they are serious; that's how it works."
I don't know that I'd agree about a successful growing-up, but it's hard to think of Anne Boleyn without being constantly conscious of how her betrayers cut her life so short.
First, sympathies on being in an unsympathetic workplace. It's vile to dislike and dread the place you spend the majority of your waking hours. I hope you find a more supportive employer and colleagues as soon as possible. I had an evil boss once. I outlived her, but she poisoned my life and the lives of all in my workplace for years.
Now, the essay. The topic was emotionally involving. The english was above average for clarity and vigour. The points were being made articulately. Yet my eyes got lost about a third of the way through and slid across the page.
This was because the text was all in a single block, and online, that is hard on older eyes. It sounds like a minor thing to go into the edit field for, but if you stick a blank line between the paragraphs, I believe this will be exponentially more accessable to readers. It sounds almost too minor a thing to bother with, but it does help at the reading end.
Several of the sentences read breathlessly, with multiple clauses before they end. On the plus side, this conveys anger, but on the minus, if they were broken into their constituent parts, I think they would have more impact. I am thinking particularly of the sentence beginning "A manager brutally barking.."
A decent job, in my opinions, should certainly not lack professionalism of managers, never make you feel uncomfortable, and not contain a staff consisting of lazy or dim-witted employees.
For instance, I think this sentence suffers from having too many different thoughts in it, and this phrasing flies past the reader too fast for it to be absorbed.
Grammatically, I'm not sure about the verbs fitted to the word job - the job doesn't contain the employees - involve might work rather than contain, or further on the job lacks properly professional managers. If the sentence started "a decent workplace" I think it would run better.
I never feel comfortable in my surroundings, unwanted comments or touching by drunken men is absolutely not my idea of fun. Again, I think this would come across stronger if there was a breath, a pause, between "surroundings" and "unwanted."
Balancing different lengths of sentences in a piece is a stylistic thing, and a combination of long and short builds up some kind of music. Have a go with mixing long and short - you may find the results interesting (if only in the "not going there again, didn't care for result" way)
It is an odd, faintly morbid custom, and there are a couple of sharply pointed lines in this, in which you pinpoint the oddity of choosing that spot to associate with the departed, above the places they lived. [The paragraph starting What does the place signify..]
I sometimes think of these displays in their secondary role, as accident black spot markers, warning others of danger.
Thank you for researching and posting this. I knew nothing of the subject, so it's an eye opener. The detail is wonderful. I got so caught up in events as they unfolded, that the ending came as a surprise despite the title's hint that it all ended badly for the participants.
I loved the formality and exactitude of the language, which made it sound the more like a voice from the past.
I work as a bookseller, and from a bookshop point of view, this sounds like a vanity press. I don't think a later publisher will despise you for going this route, but it won't win brownie points or qualify as "published author" either.
Shops won't stock books from this kind of press because (a) they are firm sale (b) the books tend to be priced above the going rate (c) the jacket art tends to be uncommercial (which is tactful for "ugly") and (d) the authors are unknowns, which generally means no or low sales. A shop would rather use their precious shelf space and stock budget on things that they know will sell, for simple business reasons.
I think you'd be better off pursuing a traditional agent or publisher. Good luck to you, and to all writers on this site.
Outstanding and illuminating article, which I read with deep interest and, I hope, building understanding. Thank you for the quality of research and the skill that assembled all this data so coherently.
You clearly love them both, Atlantic and Pacific, and this piece shares your experiences of the seas. Thank you, especially for the descriptions of Pacific storms. My own loyalty is to the Atlantic. Its steel grey waters thrash the western coasts of Ireland.
One thing the item hinted at but didn't really go into was how you came to go to sea. You sailed only a little in boyhood, and then you decided to make a life of it - how did one lead to the other?
The infuriating thing is that in this situation the predator relies on a girl's social conditioning to be "nice" and follow others' lead so that she'll be likeable - it really is difficult to speak out. As you put it in this piece, truly a loss of innocence, to lose that trust in authorities, and a painful growing up.
The reflections at the end on how worse case scenarios might have ended, had the group not compared notes, and on how normal an experience this is, are sad but persuasive.
I haven't any useful tips, aside from the thought that so many short sentences, and some sentence fragments, gave a staccato feel to the read. Varying sentence length can do interesting things to the style and rhythm of a piece.
The important point of this is that you covered not only the incident but its aftermath and its implications. I will put this on the public page in hopes of further readers.
All the facts are here, but reading it, I was curious about the emotions you felt. I may be being voyeuristic, but this read too dispassionately.
You say a little in the second half of the item about reuniting with friends, and being excited about all the activities, but I think expanding on your reactions as you list the sequence of events will open up this piece to readers.
What an interesting article about living with a service dog. Mostly one thinks of seeing eye dogs rather than hearing ear ones. Did you already like dogs before you were partnered with this one? Half golden retriever and half collie sounds like two enthusiastic breeds in one animal. What a handful!
People say the silliest things when they aren't paying attention. I hope this response isn't as dumb as the remarks you pillory.
All the dialogue in this makes it very direct and storylike, very readable and involving. The one thing I would suggest, that might improve it, might be to work on the transitions from one mini-story to the next so that they follow on naturally one from another, rather than a series of anecdotes.
I will never eat one of these now I've read you on the topic. That review was not only informative but highly entertaining.
McDonalds increasingly desperate efforts to make themselves look like health food are the stuff of legend. It is hard to let go of strongly flavoured chemical food for its greener veggie brothers.
First I want to say, excellent title. That's the first thing I saw and it worked. The points you make about obesity are unarguable, and I'm afraid in Europe we tend to expect American tourists to be michelin men with poor dress sense.
When you mentioned the Love My Body campaign, I drew up short, because I understood that to be about regular, non-model women resisting the "size zero" pressure of magazines and the other media. I am probably thinking of a different campaign. However, it did raise the issue of your article finding a balance between advocating slimming and sounding so utterly repulsed by curves that you make us plump types sound like freaks. More references to health and fewer to "rolls of fat hanging from their bones" would be a positive thing in my opinion.
All my comments are "in my opinion" and I am sounding defensive even to my own ears.
You mention reduced lifespan. Something else you could dwell on further is the ongoing exhaustion of living in an overweight body, the associated joint problems, the discomfort in hot weather, etc.
Today's parents are significantly more protective of/scared about their children. Hence the way children don't roam or explore. Given this situation, what would be constructive suggestions to make in the article? Are they overestimating the dangers? Or are there safe, attractive forms of exercise you can suggest, available to your average modern family?
minor but distracting department:
You used apostrophes a couple of times on plural words. For instance American's wake up And ever noticed tomato's and other fruits
An apostrophe either means a missing part of the word
You're = You are
or a possessive
Tomato's = belonging to the tomato
The apostrophe thing is not a big deal thing but it's worth fixing.
Overall this was a good and persuasive article, and it read as being very strongly felt. The things I said above are intended as suggestions that might expand on points that you've made.
The knack you have for Significant Capitalisation makes me think Edward Gorey needs to illustrate this series. "Unburdening his soul, shall we say" made me giggle, but I do love creative euphemism.
The hint at the end that your brother is not alone is just the right amount of subtext. (It's hard, isn't it, to hint in a story; you never know how much of a clue is not enough or too much.)
Welcome to w.com. I hope you have fun on the site and that we have fun reading your writing.
For instance, I enjoyed this piece. It was quite unremitting in the way it described panic. What a vivid description of the hallucinogenic effects of phobia and social terror. Even with an audience undoubtedly brooding about their own performances..
The final line really makes the read for me. After all that came before it, so ironic, and as an encouragment to a fellow, so kind hearted.
As the loin’s roar echoed through my mind This typo made me snigger quite a bit, but I am typing this (as you see) from the gutter.
Sweetly told story (okay, the fart was less sweet). It was clear from the outset that Blimp would have a disaster, and so he did.
I especially liked the description of him all nicely dressed and sweating to impress, perched on the edge of a pew. Between the phrase "heart's darling" (a lovely phrase) and his wearing a suit, I mentally set the incident long ago, maybe in the 1950s. But I could be wrong. You didn't say where or when this story happened, and there are probably places where formalwear is the only proper thing for church.
I flip-flopped on this story - not about it being good and well told (and I didn't see the twist coming) but about whether the letter writer was a reliable narrator or not. I can't decide whether the letter was manipulative because the lover was controlling and unrealistic or whether all of that was because of a broken heart. The tense formality and the hurt were right either way.
Thank you for posting this - I'll be over here somewhere brooding about unreliable narrators.
It's a bit of a challenge to have a character who embodies kindness and wisdom in a story, not only because the author is forced to channel all those good qualities and be temporarily perfect, but because such a character doesn't easily fit into a plotty, conflicted action-adventury drama. So when you made Hsiao-tse a convincing virtuous sage, grandfatherly and lovable, that made this piece of writing sing for me.
It's a moral fable with a simple plot and as sound and sweet as a nut. It's not my preferred genre, but I enjoyed reading it. I was very impressed by the way you wrote the hero - perfection is difficult to picture - and the sense of a community of neighbours that was integral to the read.
I'm glad I read that. It read like a blog entry - a particularly good blog entry, that is; a day's adventures recollected in tranquillity. It also had the informality and slight roughness of a blog; casual, stream of consciousness grammar, a bit of gush in the toen.
The bit about micro-managing one's expression when congratulating an actor was priceless.
I was part of a group watching an amateur unedited 3 hour Hamlet (friend playing Laertes) and reached to the playhouse as the bar closed. The horror.
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