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Review Requests: ON
1,084 Public Reviews Given
1,107 Total Reviews Given
Review Style
Unsentimental. I focus on the kinds of craft issues that will keep a writer from being taken seriously and prevent them from fully expressing their vision. For more information, see "Writing Hurts: Review Forum" 
I'm good at...
Analyzing the written word and determining where a piece is not accomplishing what it wants to accomplish.
Favorite Genres
Short stories and poetry are my forte. Novels, not so much. Usually I only need to read a chapter or two to determine if it's going to go off the rails. Sometimes I'll keep reading.
Least Favorite Genres
I'll read anything.
Favorite Item Types
Anything.
Least Favorite Item Types
Pieces from authors who have never considered that writing is a craft, who nonetheless think they're great simply because they have penned the words, and who take offense when I don't agree.
I will not review...
Useful things don't always occur to me with a given piece. If I don't think I can offer insight into how the writer might become better at the task, I won't say anything.
Public Reviews
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Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (2.0)
You have an interesting set up and premise, and the development is decent. I didn't believe the narrator's voice as it moved inside Darren's head; it was too flat, not at all the way someone would face the possibility of a schizoid break with reality while still retaining enough cognitive function to actually be aware of their condition and its implications. You need to think that part through, be willing to bring the emotions up to the surface.

But the ending was totally unforgivable. You just gave up. You quit on your readers. After bringing us alon to a point where we want to see a complex situation work itself through its various possibilities, you just throw up your hands and say "Aw, what the heck, let's just kill her and get it over with."

It's not a question of whether or not she deserved it, or whether or not Darren is able to control his reactions, it's about creating a believable, satisfying and entertaining narrative arc that brings a story through a full development. You haven't done this. You need to go back and give this story the attention it deserves, and you need to treat your readers with more respect.
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Review of Apart  
Review by edgework
Rated: ASR | (1.5)
This is not an easy piece to review, and I confess that I stopped twice, feeling that it wasn't appropriate. I will, however take you at your word regarding two things you mentioned on the review request page: 1) you want to be a better poet; and 2) you describe this as bad poetry. Both need to be addressed, and, I will attempt to do so with respect and honesty, for all who commit words to paper deserve both.

I cannot speak to the first statement, but I sincerely hope it is true. As for the second, my response is a bit more complicated. Assuming your first statement is true, then I also assume that you desire a perspective that addresses the field of poetry as a craft and art. That being the case, I'd have to disagree with the second statement, but only to point out that the piece isn't really a poem. It is a collection of emotional observations, and I in no way wish to disparage you, or the depth of feeling behind them. But the intensity of an emotion, while a potential driving force behind a poem, is not, in itself, a poem.

This is not to say that such writing has no place, nor that it cannot be a positive experience for both writer and readers. But if you wish to be a better poet, you will have to dive into the vast stream of poetry that exists in our language, and take it upon yourself to learn the difference between what you have written here, and those poems that survive their own eras and find a permanent place in our literary history, as well as those poems being written now that, for whatever varied reasons, are deemed worthy of publication by this or that editor.

In short, you will have to read poetry, not as a reader, but as a writer, and you will need to understand why a good poem sounds the way it does, why it's lines are broken where they are, what the logic of the line break means to the line's, and the poem's impact, and why lines are the single most important distinguishing feature separating poetry from prose. You will have to undertake an exploration into that difference, discover why a poem needs to exist at all.

For instance, would the sentiments you have chosen to commit to words have been just as effective as a prose paragraph? You need to know the answer to that, and why, in many cases, there is no answer until you come up with one.

You need to read established poets who use rhyme and learn why they probably would not have used apart / heart. You need to learn about meter and metrical feet and how to scan your words to weed out the weak, flabby, prose rhythms. You need to discover the power of an image, a simile, a metaphor; conversely, you need to learn why simply stating an interpretation is never as powerful as finding an image to express it.

You need to read Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, two masters from the early 20th century who had no time for each other's work at all, but who have both transcended their era. You need to read Williams, and Bly and Ashbury, none of whom sound like the others, all of whom have managed, for reasons not always easily articulated, to contribute something permanent to the ever-evolving body of American poetry. You need to get on the internet and check out the online journals, scores of which publish some of the best poetry written today. Read samples from Poetry, Fence, Conduit, DMQ Review. All seek profoundly different styles of writing, all are worth reading and all can be found online.

In short, if you want to be a better poet, you will have to do the same type of homework that would be required were you to desire to play piano on a level greater than picking out melodies on the white keys. Like piano, there is a craft to poetry that must be addressed and, to some extent, mastered, or at least acknowledged, before the winds of inspiration can carry you to your desired destination.

If this is not your intent, please disregard all I've written, with my best wishes. If, however, you want to to scale those ridiculously steep slopes, I would suggest a book that is still available, though its author passed on in the 90s: The Poet and The Poem by Judson Jerome will provide you with the most effective grounding in the craft of poetry that you will find anywhere. I've seen it on Amazon and eleswhere. It's a goldmine of practical information and a good way to orient your thinking. After that, the inspiration's up to you.
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Review of Private lessons  
Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (4.0)
You asked why this poem was accepted for publication. I have found with my own submissions that it is a futile pastime to try and deconstruct the reasons why a poem is either accepted or rejected. Assuming the writing is something more polished than inept greeting-card verse, the reasons really do distill down to variations of "I liked this one, I didn't like that one." In the case of this poem I find several things to recommend it.

What I like most is that you don't tell us what it is about. You are willing to trust your readers to have a brain and to be capable of making connections. Rather than holding our hand and guiding us to all the points you wish to make by stating them outright, you leave all the thematic elements in the background serving as the force field that gives the surface elements meaning, direction and shape. You don't need to tell us what's going on—we're clever lads and lasses, after all—since you've done such a good job of showing us the situation.

Another strong element is your use of the line. However one differentiates poetry from prose, it is the line that makes or breaks the poem; if lines work, sentences don't matter. The death blow to any poem is to recast the stanzas into simple prose paragraphs and determine if the sound and sense remains the same. If so, then the lines really aren't lines, just arbitrary line breaks.

Many of your lines suggest subtleties of meaning that would vanish if the words were reformed into their prose sentence counterparts. Again and again an undercurrent of sexual innuendo remains even when the content resolves itself in the more mundane description of the surface action.

Another strong feature relates to the first one that I mentioned; your language tends always to the concrete. You give us sights, sounds, sensations of touch. There is not an interpretive statement to be found. This allows us to, in effect, step into the poem itself and experience it. It creates a dynamic audience of participants rather than passive observers vicariously indulging themselves as a narrator tells a story.

Since someone already deemed this poem worthy of publication, it's a bit presumptuous of me to offer thoughts on how to improve it, but, as I said, it really comes down to "I like this, I don't like that," and please assess these suggestions in that light.

I think that you can go further in removing the narrative aspect of your language. This is a moment that can be captured in words, not described, or translated, but lifted from time and space, whole, and placed before us on the page so that your experience becomes our experience. You have done that in many places, and it is in those places that the poem is strongest. Think about how the language of immediacy differs from the language of narration and strive to make each line an immediate moment, unfiltered through a narrators recollection and interpretation.

One thing that poetry can do that prose doesn't do nearly as well is to break the linear flow of the content. Poems aren't locked into the need to prove a point, make an argument or keep us oriented in terms of what comes before and after, and where things stand in relation to other things. Poems get to go anywhere they want. What I notice about this poem is that, while much is implied that is not stated outright (a strong feature of the language), at the end of the poem we are precisely where we were at the beginning in terms of setting and action. This isn't a flaw, necessarily, but it may well be a restriction that you are imposing on yourself simply because you don't realize that it's unnecessary. I wouldn't suggest where this poem might go to open up it's internal space, for then it would be me doing the writing. But the possibilities are infinite and limited only by your own vision. You've done a great job of using a specific moment in the world to suggest something the extends beyond the action, to serve a jumping off point. But then, you only take a little jump, a hop, really. I think you can take a poem like this into much broader territory, and I'd encourage you to do so with your next piece.

This is nice writing.
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Review of Lineage and Land  
Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (3.5)
You wanted to know what this is missing. Truth be told, it's missing a lot—of scenes, that is. What you have here is a prospectus for an entire romance novel butchered and hacked up to force it to fit into a short story format. It's not a short story. Short stories are tightly focused portrayals of single elements in a larger context. You've presented multiple elements, and hinted at many more that you didn't actually write, all of which, if expanded, would form the foundation of a dandy novel. But that would mean you're going to have to get in there and write the scenes, and develop the characters and give us an in depth experience of these people's lives.

I think you've got a good start here. You have the tone of romance writing down. But you're going to have to do something about that dynamic between Andrew and Karen. Andrew's got a real serious problem, as you've portrayed him so far: he's too darn nice. He's a good-hearted salt-of-the-earth country boy, honest as the day is long with not a surly word to be had for anyone. Least of all the woman he loves, even though she's obviously no day at the beach.

And Karen's got her own problems: there's no fire in her blood. A woman in a romance novel has to be able to spit nails and stand up to any man that dares to cross her. Except for one, of course, the hero, the one that absolutely refuses to take any crap off her and will tame her whether she likes it or not. (She likes it, but she won't admit it until the last chapter). And along the way, he's got to prove himself to be a rogue and a scoundrel (though not a crook; never a crook. And deep down, he's still the honest, noble country boy; he's just doing it on his own terms, when it suits him.)

Here's something you can take to the bank: folks who are good, decent souls, who have an optimistic outlook on life, who really want only the best for those around them, and who get along with everyone are the kind of folks you want for neighbors, friends lovers and spouses. But don't try to put them in a story because they'll smooth over any problem that comes along, and everyone will be happy by the end of the third paragraph and there goes your story.

A story needs conflict, it needs obstacles, it needs characters who are driven in some way, or who are resisting something with all their might. They need a certain nastiness, an uncompromising stance, a f***-you world, I'm doing it my way attitude. And they need a few flaws. Otherwise there's no conflict, no struggle, no fights, and nothing to fill up your pages.

You've got the makings of a good plot and a good set up, and you've anticipated some of the conflicts inherent in the situation. Karen left her roots and family home long ago and is comfortable in the city. Her path will be to rediscover her family heritage and to develop first an appreciation, and then a love, for the simple beauty of the life she thought she left behind. What you've left out is the fact that she will fight this evolving awareness with claws bared and fangs looking for blood, and she'll try to tear the heart out of anyone who says otherwise.

Karen is the change character, Andrew is the steadfast character. What's necessary is for them to be so hopelessly antagonistic towards each other, to find each other so totally annoying, that the reader will be compelled to keep reading, because, heck, it's a romance story, and you know they have to work it out by the last page. The fun is not getting them together, it's keeping them apart. But if they're ready to jump into each others' arms by the end of the first scene, it's going to be exquisite torture trying to keep coming up with new plot points.

Make 'em work a little; make things difficult for them. I promise, the reader will hang in there for as long as it takes.
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Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (4.5)
This is a decent story. I thought the fight scene was vivid, believable (well, considering a werewolf was involved) and compelling. And as for the werewolf, I believed it too.

Think about the opening passages some more. There's a lot of information there that isn't really developed in the rest of the story, which begs the question whether or not its needed. You give us the impression that keeping the holiday precisely as Mom and Dad would have is an important element, but it's kind of a red herring. You can get away with pruning a good bit of that stuff away; it tells us something about the character, but it really doesn't have a payoff in the plot. And the plot works fine without all those set up facts.

Other than that, it's a good read. Held my interest till the end.
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Review of The Yearly Gambit  
Review by edgework
Rated: ASR | (4.0)
Nice set up and build, though the payoff is a little bit of a letdown, since Bergman did it so memorably in the 50s. But, I think you might get away with it if you didn't work so hard to make sure we "get it."

Playing chess with death is virtually an archetype and needs to be allowed to simply stand on its own as a fact. You need to trust that the attendant associations will be there.

You also need to trust the overall set up more and bring the action to the front. Peel away some of the narrative layers that you've put between the reader and the action. There is a weightiness to the words that grows a little ponderous, whereas the story itself is enough of a fresh take on the theme that it doesn't need as much explanation as you give it.

You fall into a typical trap with stories that catch the action "in progress", so to speak, which are segments of a much larger narrative arc. You have to somehow get the backstory in, or enough of it that we have a context for the present action, but without either confusing the pacing of the current story, or forcing the characters to behave in unrealistic ways just to convey information.

In your case, you've presented this as a situation that has been ongoing for years, maybe decades or more. I think everyone knows each other by now. The entire end segment, where everyone reveals themselves felt forced, as though they were saying their lines because a writer needed them to, not because the situation called for it. When he shakes the boney hand, the point is made. And once his friends are identified as War, Pestilance, Famine, it's just hitting us over the head to remind us that they are The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. You've done a good job of setting up the arrows along the path. You need to let your readers participate and find their way on their own, rather than taking them by the hand and pointing out everything to them.
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Review of Demon hunter  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.5)
This was interesting, not my usual reading fare, and, for that, all the more noteworthy as it kept my attention.

A technical note: you really must delve more deeply into the mysteries of the semi-colon, a marvelous tool for taming the chaos of the run-on sentence. You have a bad tendency to string two (or more) independent clauses together with commas and that's just plain wrong. And then, when a comma would be most acceptable, you fail to let it do its job. This sentence covers both instances:

I mean in theory demons are immortal, the problem with theories is that they don’t always work the way theorists would like them too.

...in theory... should be separated by commas. The clause I mean, in theory, demons are immortal needs a semi-colon after it, as it, and what follows are both independent clauses and could actually stand on their own as sentences.

Here's the correct form:

I mean, in theory, demons are immortal; the problem with theories is that they don’t always work the way theorists would like them too.

You do this sort of thing all through the piece; even when it doesn't completely confuse the sense, it's still wrong. It's such a simple thing to correct, you owe it to yourself to get it right.

Particularly because, that glitch aside, you write nice solid prose, good images and you have an imagination that you seem to be able to tap and translate into words on the page. These are good things.

I could easily see this as the opening to a movie, with the camera panning slowly across a dark, dank, decayed urban landscape with the narration (in suitably somber "This is ultimate reality" tones, a close up on an upturned garbage pail, a rat scurrying about, and the ever present Batmanesque minor chords underlying the whole scene with a air of forboding...

Oops! Guess what? This isn't a movie and you're not a scriptwriter. You don't have a camera, you don't have a slow pan to occupy the audience while the narration tries to catch everyone up on what's happening, you don't have music. What you do have is SCREENWRITER ENVY. You see this story unfolding in your mind as though you were in a theater watching it on screen. (The same could be said for a graphic novel, which, except for the soundtrack, share many of the same qualities and opportunities).

Prose is a different animal and you have to customize your approach to account for the fact that none of those additional moodsetters are there for you to rely on. I can summarize your problem in one step: Every time your characters go off into their thoughts, nothing is happening. Thinking is stasis.

This doesn't mean that your characters can't think, that you can't go into their heads for interior reactions, even interior monologues. But each time you do, whatever is going on in the present-time action of your story gets hit with the PAUSE button until the character gets out of their head. In this case, the interior opening, while entertaining, cannot escape the fact that nothing is going on. The opening line is cute, and, as I said, the entire passage is entertainingly written, but then, when you get to the action... wow! Do things ever turn somber! Serious! Grim, even.

Not a bad, or wrong thing, but it does give the reader a sort of whiplash effect as they're pulled out of the kind of conversational, good humored set up into hellfire and damnation.

Let's assume you know what this universe is about. Let's assume that you've given some thought to the way things work, the kinds of physical, scientific and historical situations that will be at odds with what we think of as normal reality. Let's further assume that you've given enough thought about these issues that you've arrived as an alternative reality that is, nonetheless, internally consistent.

If that is the case, you don't need to tell us ALL about it up front. You neeed only to present characters in the process of acting and reacting according to the laws of the world you've created; we'll get the message, perhaps not in all the detailed specifics, but in our sense that these things conform to some kind of logic. Then, once you've hooked us on the action, let the backstory, the narrator's personality and the details that will make sense of what's going on filter in and through the present time action seamlessly. While that opening line is clever and an attention getter, it would be far more effect were it to follow the actual opening scene of the action. All this fire and brimstone and deadly serious metaphysics suddenly contrasted with that line "Why are demons so inherently stupid?" would far more effectively highlight the personality of the narrator in relation to his story content.

I'm assuming a lot from such a short passage, but I think it's always a problem when you're working in an alternate universe. You need to balance the actual story with the salient details that make this reality comprehensible to the reader and the risk is that you will lose track of the action in order to fit in every thing that you think needs to be explained.
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Review of The Walk  
Review by edgework
Rated: 18+ | (4.0)
This is nice work. You have a masterful way with ambiguous endings. This isn't the first story of yours where I thought, approaching the final paragraphs, I hope she isn't going to cop out with a nice "sweetness and light" wrap-up. I should have known. That's not your style, is it? This was a perfect ending and so believable, sadly, because resolutions are rare in the real world and life seems so often a series of choices between this compromise or that, and situations that aren't satisfying still manage to avoid being intolerable.

You also do a good job of implying the backstory without breaking the narrative flow to "fill us in," so to speak. And you don't tell us everything. Just enough so that the real story has a context. It's harder, sometimes, to know what to leave out.

One stylistic observation: You propel this forward with healthy doses of interior monologue. Those passages, as well as the action/dialogu, both work well. The danger always is that while a character is thinking, time pauses in the story, and so the blocks of time we spend reading the interior monologue can start to seem like awkward bumps to the pacing if care isn't given to the flow of events in present time. You mostly avoid this trap. However, as the tension begins to rise and we become aware of her dangerous situation, you might want to think about paring down the exposition, bringing the camera in close on the action and let her internal thoughts race by as the kinds of impressions that would actually flit through a brain at such a moment. This is a tense scene, and you want to remove as many layers as possible between the action and the reader. I think you can, and should, trust the conflict you've created to stand on its own at the climax, without the narrative assist. It's a solid set-up and the events deliver the payoff handsomely.

And then, as already mentioned, there's that world-class ending. Good writing.
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Review of What's Wrong  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (4.5)
Hmmm. I tell my wife, from time to time, "If I ask you what's wrong, and you say 'nothing,' I'm going to act like there's nothing wrong. I know you're lying, but it's just not worth the effort."

Guess that's a typically black/white guy approach. It wouldn't make a very good poem either, not like this one, so deceptively simple in sound and structure that you actually make it seem easy to sustain a tone and mood through 12 stanzas, and justify each and every words for appearing in precisely that position, with that sound, and all the shades of grey, each clearly separate from the next.

Very nice work!
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Review of Ashling  
Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (3.5)
Hmmm. A story, or not a story? I think it's definitely a story; the question is, "Is it compelling enough to make me want to finish it?"

You clearly don't think so, otherwise you wouldn't have put that plea at the outset which, roughly translated says "Honest, there's good stuff at the end. Really. Honest!! Please keep reading till you get there!!"

The idea behind it all is super. The ways that a child's mind weaves the stuff of life into their own fantasy world. But, as always, the true test is in the telling and you spend a lot of time, effort on what is a detour, a sidetrack. The trap you've set for yourself is twofold. If you make the fantasy compelling enough on its own, you risk annoying the reader when they realize that now they have to suddenly shift gears, that they are now in a totally different story, with neither delivering a sense of completion on its own. On the other hand, if (as is really the case here) the opening situation is meant to be the throwaway fantasy, with the end scene the real point of the story, you've cheated it badly. Most of your effort is expended on the scene we're not meant to take seriously, while the real story, with the truly interesting character, comes off as an afterthought.

Solution? Gosh, I don't know. It's not enough to say "I wouldn't have written it like that." Of course I wouldn't. I'm not you and it's not my vision. Still, one wants more from a critique than an analysis of deficiencies.

The truth is, there is no one way to fix this. There are an infinite number of ways. What seems clear to me is that your real story isn't being told. Ashling is a strong character with tons of potential as the center of a plot. Her proclivity for weaving the world outside into an interior fantasy suggests myriad vignettes. The mistake is in thinking that the chess metaphor is all that's available to you. In my own experience, if a plot point proves too stubborn, and just won't evolve naturally, I'm usually looking at too narrow a field. The chances are, you have a much larger story at your fingertips, this being one potential element.

Just to keep this on the level of craft and structure: were you to take that course in rewriting this, the issue you might then face is how to make it a coherent whole, rather than simple a series of on note scenes? One possible approach is that, despite a wide variety of real world events, the fantasies all find themselves located in the same alternate universe. Your job, as artist, would be to craft a narrative arc for both the real world and the fantasy world, and draw parrallels between them. If, at some point, the fantasy world opened insights that would help bring a solution to whatever problem drives the real world story, then you would have a nice, self-contained whole.

My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Go Noticed" .
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Review of The Delivery  
Review by edgework
Rated: ASR | (3.0)
Okay, so you can definitely write. No contest on that point. But, (the inevitable but) can you tell a story? The evidence would suggest that you can, but that you haven't quite done so. The old adage is "Always leave them wanting more," but in this case, I think you're going to have to provide more to make us want yet more.

I realize the tone is intentially subjective, and interior monologue that owes nothng to the passage of time; that's the point. And there is a sense of present time action, though it's scant. However, it's not completely clear what is happening. You refer to the box as something ...he'd dreamed about since becoming aware of its existence. Just some things, the caller said. Some unimportant things. Yet in the next paragraph it would seem that the items in the box belong to him. I'm not saying the two are mutually exclusive, only that you have not provided enough information for us to connect them.

You are vague about the events leading up to the delivery of this box, but I suspect that's where your story really is, and alluding to it in hindsight, leaving it off stage requires that you make sure that whatever is happening in the present is as interesting and important, if not more so, than the past actions. I don't think that's the case here so we have an interesting enigma, with well crafted words to carry it along, but ultimately, it's a puzzle that resists solving and we leave, unsatisfied.
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Review of Beavers Creek  
Review by edgework
Rated: 18+ | (3.5)
There's a great scene in the movie "The Dirty Dozen" where Donald Southerland, one of the psychopaths being trained for a secret mission, has to masquerade as a general and inspect a crack division of troops. He turns to the Colonel in charge of the division and says, in his most condescending tone possible, "Well... they're mighty pretty. But can they fight?"

My observation to you, regarding your words: "Mighty pretty. But can they scare?"

You clearly don't need any lessons or comments on the craft of words, sentences, paragraphs, descriptives passages and the like. But since you're asking for an evaluation based on your intent to write horror, well... there's just no way to tell.

The essence of good horror is not to just talk about scary things, it's the ability to put the reader in the midst of a situation that allows them the experience of the incomprehensible, and to project themselves into a character's reactions and the need to cope. That makes them wonder, "How would I handle this?"

The experience one gets reading this passage is the experience of reading an article in an encyclopedia. It's pretty; it's well written; but the only truly scary stuff takes 26 paragraphs to reach and then it's safely muted through the gauzy haze of narrative, locked away in a past that can't touch us.

Stephen King included passages like this in "Salem's Lot", but it was after lots of things had been happening. Which is, after all, the essence of any good story. Things happen. To people. People we identify with, people whose perspective we adopt as our own; people whose experiences we vicariously allow to become our experiences. People in the midst of events that make us wonder "Wow! What're they gonna do now?"

You could take paragraph 26, for instance, and make it a prologue, and instead of filtering through the distance of omnicient narration, telling us about it in other words, zoom in on the action, make it come alive, show us the thing happening, put us inside the head of whoever discovers the body... maybe put us in the head of the victim. But give us something to get the adrenalin flowing and the heart pumping. Then your time out for a little background would feel like a much needed intermission. We'd know you can already pack a punch, and we're willing to let you vamp a page or two while we get ready for the next one.
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Review by edgework
Rated: E | (4.0)
This is a beautiful piece of writing. The trick when using rhyme and meter is to make it seem that these artificial affectations rise organically out of the words rather than simply being grafted onto a subject to force the effect. Some structured poems make one wish that they'd just been done in free verse, the rhythm seems to have so little purpose other than to annoy. Here, it's impossible to imagine the impact without that steady rhythm. But one that's never monotonous. Each line has four strong feet, but the interplay between trochee and iamb, anapest and dactyl coming naturally one upon the other makes the meter feel inevitable, that there's no other way this could flow.

I confess to a lack of knowledge regarding specific forms. Is this one, or a variation on one? The repetition of the end words gives it a sense of structure that the content itself does not contain. A perfect example of form and structural elements enhancing and perhaps creating meaning beyond the words themselves.

If I have a complaint, it's that the endwords in each line tend to be rather uninteresting by themselves, in particular the three uses of the word "dream". You get away with it, but just barely. It's hard for dreams, in any context, not to be a cliche. The end word "sea" also calls attention to itself as a cliche. I realize it's hard to avoid the word in a poem about... well, about the sea. But you use "sea/me" twice.

Honestly, it's no crime to use images that have a universal recognizition; but that universality is precisely what makes them cliches. We recognize them because they've been used, many times. I'd love to see you trust your imagination, and apply this formidable craft of yours to language that jumps off the page and says "You never saw this before, did you?" Poetry can do that. I'd bet you can as well.

Still, these are quibbles about parts. As a whole, the poem works, and quite nicely.
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Review of The Return  
Review by edgework
Rated: ASR | (4.5)
You've come up with a nice satisfying read here. I can't give you much of an in-depth review here because there's not a lot to discuss. You do it all well. Dialogue, fading between internal narrative and external action, time flow, pacing, description...

My biggest fear was that I could see where it was going, and that you would take the nilhilist approach and leave things bleak with no redemption or upswing of any kind; or that, recognizing that such an approach would be a cheap trick, you'd give us sweetness and light instead.

You did neither, finding a less than perfect solution for a less than perfect character in a less than perfect world that rang exactly the right tones.

Good stuff.
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Review of Playing House  
Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (4.5)
Nice work. You take your time building into the reality the scene, lots of nice descriptive details along the way.

I only have a couple of suggestion.

1). rethink the title. In a story like this, the effect is achieved by thwarting your reader's expectations. Of course, the understanding is that when they finally realize what's going on, the payoff feels both consistent with the misdirection, and more satisfying because of it. You satisfy both conditions quite effectively, but I think the title comes off as a bit too literal. It's almost as if you are telegraphing your true intent at the outset. Something more ironic would aid in the misdirection.

2). Cut back slightly on the explanatory text in the crucial paragraph that has him looking at his reflection. This is a subjective reaction, I fully acknowledge, one that probably depends as much on how I might do it as how you have done it. But I think, given the tone of narrative voice you've set up, you can make the text a bit more internal; rather than simply telling us what he's experiencing, as a standard 3rd-person narrator would do it, let yourself get closer to the immediacy of the moment, using your words to allow his experience to unfold as he is experiencing it. By the time we get to this paragraph, we already know something's out of whack. We're not sure what you're going to tell is the problem, but whatever it is, telling us doesn't come as much of a surprise. However, letting us inside the moment, letting us experience the shock and horror that comes each time he confronts the truth... that would pack a punch.

Everything else reads just fine as it is, and that particular paragraph certainly isn't wrong, but I think you can heighten the emotional impact.

Nice writing.
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Review of Time Passages  
Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (4.5)
This is a risky story to tell in such a short format, but you pull it off, and it's because you don't try too hard, refrain from telling us everything and resist the impulse to explain for us. The fact that both scenes unfold smoothly certainly helps. You write well, and part of your instinct is the ability to leave empty spaces.

If there is anything that jumps out as clumsy, and this is a quibble, it's starting the second scene with the words The teenager.... Everywhere else you've trusted your straightforward description to let the meaning unfold. It's the old SHOW, DON'T TELL thing. Up until now you've called him "Tommy", and doing so here would keep the sense of the language consistent, while your ability to describe action in a way that allows us to see it would make the point effortless that he's no longer the Tommy we've previously encountered. Other than that, nothing rings false. Particularly powerful was the ending, allowing the focus to shift to the cat to suggest the passage of time. In fact, come to think of it (I just glanced back up at the ending paragraph) I could say the same thing about the phrase She stayed that way for a long time that I said about the opening words of the scene. Your pan to the cat is precisely the passage of time. ...pausing every now and then... moves time ahead quickly, while, we assume, Mom is still standing there. You should trust the images and description that you've chosen. They work well, and do the heavy lifting for you.

Really nice piece.
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Review of Instant Paradise  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.0)
You don't have any problem with the texture of your words. They sound good, the scenes they describe are vivid and believable and you seem like you can move people on and off the stage without much confusion. You need to pay a little more attention to point-of-view, however. The story openes and we are clearly inside Chelsea's head and our perspective is hers and the narrative links are essentially the internal narration of her own mind explaining what is happening to her. So far, so good. When Bea leaves the shop, however, things get just a little bit murky.

On her way out the door Bea stopped and turned toward Chelsea, she couldn't help at smile at this young woman who was making lemonade from the small, green tinted lemons that life had handed to her.

This is Bea's point of view. It's acceptable if you've established a narrative voice that is independent of either character, an omniscient point of view that allows you to roam wherever you wish, but that hasn't been done here. It's only a momentary lapse, but you need to be aware of it because repeatedly switching from one character to another can become not only confusing, it break's the reader's experience of the narrative, forcing them to continually switch gears. Usually, a change of perspective is accompanied by a distinct change of scene. In this case, it just makes the foundations of your narrative a little soft and uncertain.

You ask if this could be turned into a novel? Good question, and only you can answer it. Anything can potentially be the stuff of fiction, but it requires an artistic hand to manipulate the events and characters in such a way that the reader is compelled to get involved with their situation and wonder what's coming next. That means conflict, problems and the effort and difficulty to deal with them. That effort constitutes the actual story.

Based on the above criteria, it's impossible to say from what you've written if you have that in mind, only that it is no where in evidence so far. She seems pretty well adjusted, actually. Her boss likes her, she's got the freedom to pack up and split at will... not a bad situation for a young woman. My point is this isn't really the start of a story at all. The story, if it is there, will hopefully happen at the other end of her trip, when she'll find some obstacles in her way that will require some kind of action on her part to get past them. That means that you will have to do some thinking about the nature of plot and the dynamics that go into making one that will drag your readers along in its wake.

But none of that has been written yet. In the sample provided, there are numerous ways that you could recast this intro to get us involved with your character. Does she owe money; has she borrowed from her boss and now is unable to pay it back? Has a lover jilted her and she's fleeing with a broken heart because she can't stand being in the same town? Is she an aspiring singer (writer, actress, stock broker, teacher, grad student, etc) who's plans have suddenly been turned upside down, and a opportunity she'd been taking for granted suddenly withdrawn, leaving her future in chaos?

Any of those situations and any number of others would provide us with motivation, a reason why she HAS to get out of town. Just figuring that it's time for a change is okay... we wish her well and don't forget to write, but it's not going to keep us up nights turning pages to see what happens next.

The stuff of fiction is a character who for whatever reason, and whatever context, is pushed to the limits of their endurance, and is forced into a position where they HAVE to do something because continuing in the current situation is no longer possible. That's what gets a good story going. That combination of fate working it's dastardly way, and free will fighting back.

Throw a few road blocks in her path and let her figure out what to do about them. You'll have a story worth reading.
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Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (4.5)
After reading this poem I checked out the others you have posted. This is excellent stuff, powerful images that never fall into cliches. I did, however, notice one stylistic repetition that is clearly intentional (I assume) but which both becomes exhausting after a while, and keeps your poems locked into a single type of effect.

You use a lot of words ending in -ing. In this short poem we have fishes, squirming and gleaming
mouth dripping
dough kneading
thighs pumping and skin ripening
berries in the mouth, bursting
hammer beating
hooves splitting
lungs chiming
eyelashes twitching


These in the first two stanzas, whereas in the third, stripped of the modifying phrases we have korina / ...stuffed with glittering air

The same observation holds for the other poems in your portfolio. I don't recall the name of this specific structure but in all cases it recasts a verb into an adjective. Were they to remain in their verb form, say, as in the air is glittering, the implication is that the action has been going on, and is continuing into the present moment, and well may continue in the same fashion into the future; we've sort of caught the action, in progress. Used as adjectives, you end up with a series of snapshots, all highly imagistic, all very direct and present-tense, but with no movement in time. One gets the feeling of a series of perfectly formed dioramas, beautiful to look at, to be sure; it's just that with all those verbal structures hanging around, one longs for a bit of action. Even the last two lines find the dynamic verb swallowed trapped as a modifier for korina.

A few possible rewrites:

your eyes, like fishes, squirm and gleam

your claw-hammer tongue beats like hooves

thighs pump and skin ripens into sweetness


I realize that these lines don't exactly fit into the flow of the lines before or after, and I don't wish to rewrite the whole thing. In some places, the existing construction is vivid and apt: hooves / splitting against stones... for example. But for things to happen, it takes a verb. You provided myriad options for yourself; I think it's worth it to try a few.
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Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (2.5)
You say your word choice is interfering with your rhythm. In a sense that's true, in the same way that saying "He died because he stopped breathing," is true, but it doesn't really get to the point of the matter.

What's actually happening in your poem is that you are writing a series of small prose paragraphs. The essence of rhythm in English language poetry is the metrical foot, which is nothing more than an after-the-fact way of analyzing what goes on with the language when it sounds, well... poetical. In general terms, you want your strong beats to closely equal your weak beats in a natural reading of your lines. Let me do a close analysis of one line in your poem and show you some ways that you might come up with something stronger, that you can then apply to the poem as a whole.

Look at the third line of the first stanza: the argument could be made that the ratio of weak to strong beats is quite close, as in

I'm just that little nagging thing that aggravates you constantly.

Except that's not really how the line flows. A natural reading would sound more like

I'm just that little nagging thing that aggravates you constantly.

That's what the words themselves suggest as their natural rhythm, and it's a prose rhythm. Almost always, when a line is too flabby and you want to put some starch in its spine, it takes more than simply removing this or that word. And the rewrite can often send you into areas that you didn't think of before.

For instance, you use two adjectives in an attempt to bring some life into the word thing. Is there another word, a better word, that might embody the aspects of little nagging thing? The word pest comes to mind.

Then there is the word aggravates. It's a big word, but it's also not very useful in a poem. It's a conclusion word, a short-cut giving me an interpretation of a result instead of showing me the result and letting me come to the conclusion myself. I'd say more or less the same about the word constantly, which raises an additional red flag by being an adverb. Quite often, a verb/adverb pair means you haven't looked for the best verb. You might run very quickly, but those four syllables would be much more effective were they condensed into race, tear, plunge, gallop, sprint, bolt, scamper..., and the words are much more interesting. In this case aggravates...constantly could certainly be distilled.

How's this for a rewrite:

I'm just a little pest that nags incessantly.

Note how nag is no longer an adjective, but has now become the verb, a much better verb than aggravates. Incessantly is included to keep the structure of the rest of the endlines for your other stanzas, but in truth, it's unnecessary. The essence of "nagging" is that it is already incessant, or, as you had it, constant. That's what makes it nagging as opposed to reminding. And the word "pest" tends to incorporate the notion of "little". A flea is a pest. A stalker is not. Having already tossed the redundant "you" (we already know that it's being written to an uspecified "you") we now jettison the unnecessary word "just", and you could rewrite the entire line thusly:

I'm a nagging pest

and not only would the same qualitative point be made, you would have done so using only two strong metrical feet (an anapest and an iamb) and have room left over for an implication, a reaction, an additional element that you had no room for at all in your previous version. True, "nagging" is back to its original status as an adjective, but it's much stronger paired with "pest", and it's worth it for the economy of syllables.

That's the way it always goes when you start to analyze your lines in terms of structure and rhythm, you end up taking your poem in new directions, usually better directions. In your case, you have set up a set of rules that are forcing you to make certain word choices, for reasons that have little to do with the poetic aspects of your words. Keep in mind that poetry is not about WHAT you say, so much as it is about HOW you say it.
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Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.5)
I like this, but I think it's kind of an odd halfbreed.

The first two lines are fun, surprising images, the last two are an unrelated juxtaposition, which is fine in a post-structural sort of way.

There are two specific places where I think you undermind the effect. The last image in line two is simply a repeat of the first two. It's like the old stand-up's maxim: never tell the same joke three times. Add to that the fact that it's not as strong as the first two, and what you have is a wasted opportunity for another sharp juxtaposition.

The other problem is the last line, specifically, the rhyme. A poem like this draws its energy in part from its sharp jagged angles, the unresolved elements, the tension between expectations and what is offered instead. The rhyme is an unnecessary muting of the tensions that came before. We don't know, now, whether it's a bad traditional poem, or a weak post-modern poem. I think your heart is with the latter. I think a wrenching turn into a wholly unexpected quarter in that last line (and, to a lesser extent, in the last phrase of line two), would make this an instantly publishable work in any number of journals that focus on untraditional writing. Surprise yourself, and we'll be glad to follow along.
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Review of The Intervention  
Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
You said you wonder about the pros and cons with this story. Well, there are some of both, but I think the pros definitely outweigh the cons. However, the cons are keeping it in the realm of "an interesting effort" and I think you can make this something far more memorable.

The problem isn't with inspiration, and, for the most part, the problem isn't with technique. The action moves along at a nice pace and the twist is both satisfying and organic to the situation. In other words, you already know how to write a decent sentence, a believable paragaph and a scene that has a firm grasp on the flow of time.

Your problem is with the big picture, how you approach the nuts and bolts problem of using words on paper to tell a story. You are the second writer this week that I've reviewed that seems to have this problem, for the same reason, so I am here coining a new condition that seems to sabotage otherewise decent writers: Screenwriter Envy.

You are telling your story as if it were unfolding in front of you on a movie screen. For straight action and dialogue, this is not a problem, usually, but when you need to feed background information to the reader to make current events meaningful and logical, you stumble.

A screenplay is necessarily involved with what is happening, right now, in the present. To show background information, the writer either has to be deft at working it into the dialogue, without sounding stupid, ("Oh, right, Joe, I remember that your wife was a stripper back in the 80s and you were strung out on junk, but gosh isn't it great that we've cleaned up our act, here in the present?") or else, a flashback can be employed. That's pretty much it.

But you're not a screenwriter. You're a fiction writer and you have available to you a device that almost always sounds clumsy in a movie, but works great in fiction: a narrator, someone whose voice establishes itself as separate from the action (sometimes just slightly separate, sometimes as an objective bystander), who has the ability to narrow the focus to a particular character's point of view, then can go back to the broad picture without breaking a sweat.

Look at your first paragraph (the first paragraph of the flashback). We see Ray the way a camera would, seemingly at rest, watching TV. Then we learn that his back hurts. Then we learn that it's been hurting for a week. Then we learn that he's in training, for (now we learn) his first season of Triple-A baseball.

Okay, nothing really out of line here. However, consider the following hypothetical situation. You are reading a story about a character that you've known only as, say, an accountant, or a teacher. And at some point in the story, it becomes necessary for him to get into a room, or apartment, or house, and the door is locked. And then you read this: Fortunately, in his younger days, he'd been an internationally reknowned burgler, and there were still very few locks able to keep him out. This was not one of them. You'd think CHEAP!!! But this is just a much more extreme (and unforgivable) version of what you've done, not only in your first paragraph, but throughout the story.

We spend a lot of time dealing with Ray's online gambling habit, and his thoughts about CNN (neither of which have an relevance to the story, other than to show him casting about for things to do), then we meet the ghost, have it identified as his son, and only AFTER the ghost leaves do we learn that Ray is married, he's separated, his wife left him because of baseball and his son, as far as he knows is alive. Basically, up until this part of the story, we're operating on inadequate information regarding Ray, what could almost be termed misdirection, except that it's not for a specific purpose or effect.

Assume that readers' opinions will be formed by their tacit assumption that what you put first in your story is what they most need to know. If you wait, allowing them to make unwarrnated assumptions, there needs to be a payoff. In this case, since there is no reason to withhold the information, there is no payoff and instead, you continually are breaking into the present action to catch us up on the background context.

So, let's go back the the journalism metaphor. In a news story, a good writer will alway put the most important thing in the first sentence; that way readers can skim the front page and still get the gist of what's important in the world at that moment. You need to practice this approach. I suggest working your way through the story and deciding what is current action, what is background context. Figure out what is important for the reader to know in order to understand the current action, and tell them that. And forget the camera. That opening scene of yours, in a movie, would have the luxury of panning over a baseball glove tossed on a chair, a team jacket, maybe a close-up of a bottle of pain killers, so that when he grunts and groans each time he moves, we know, more or less, enough to understand it. And if the camera also pans across a picture of Mom, Dad and the little Gipper in happier times, contrasting it with the obviously empty apartment (maybe clothes scattered on the floor, an empty pizza box, or two, or three, some beer cans tipped over on the table), we'll know all we need to know about this guy.

YOU DON'T HAVE A CAMERA. You have words, and you have to tell us what's true in this universe you've created so we can understand the movements and attitudes of the characters. So, scrap the flashback, it's a cinematic device anyway, figure out what needs to be told to set the reader on the right track from the first word, and TELL the story, using your voice, or the voice of whatever perspective you want the story to take, narratively speaking. And when it's time for action, zoom in, and let the action unfold. When you need exposition, zoom back out and make your connecting links.

There's nothing wrong with your plot, and once you create your structure in a way that allows it to unfold without obsticals, it will be a very entertaining piece.
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Review of A Dark Presence  
Review by edgework
Rated: 18+ | (2.0)
In your review request you state "I desperately need honest reviews to improve. Pick it apart." Okay. I'll address your story premise first, then your execution.

You're mining familiar territory here, not a bad thing in itself, but the fact that it's been done well so many times makes it easy to miss the mark in comparison. You present us with an unreliable narrator, and it's up to us to determine, somewhere along the way, that what he's been telling us is not to be taken as valid. Jim Thompson wrote the archetypal novel with this type of character, "The Killer Inside Me" and did a pretty good job; countless movies use the same gimmick with varying results. "Fight Club" did a bang up job; "The Sixth Sense" did it even better. The point is, the premise is valid, as far as it goes. As always, it only goes as far as the writer's ability to create a situation that is compelling in it's initial guise, and which remains consistent, and compelling, when we realize the truth about the protagonist. In your opening paragraph you let us know the house is possessed. Then in the second paragraph, you sort of take it back with Is it the house itself, or is it me who imagines this? So already we know that this guy might not be trustworthy. Again, this isn't a flaw in itself, it simply commits you to a certain course in your development, playing the confusion in the narrator's mind to produce uncertainty in our own interpretation. All is in the telling. Stripped of the excess verbiage, the story you tell consists of your character coming downstairs, finding the bloody remains of his parents, running upstairs, finding the bloody remains of his siblings, then fending off an attack by the mysterious presence that we've been told infests the house. Cut to the ending, where he's already in custody, seemingly charged with the murder of his family. Not awful, by a long shot, in terms of plot points. There's not a lot of action; the remains of his family, however graphically and grotesquely described, are, unfortunately, remains. They don't do much but just sit there and glisten, stink, ooze... They're just static objects. The fight scene gets a little interesting in the way that fight scenes are always interesting, and the fact that we don't know if it's external evil that he's fighting or if it's all generated from within adds to the tension, but then we jump ahead to the final scene, where he's strapped to a cot, and once again the scene is a still-life with nothing going on. The only other action has your narrator coming downstairs and running back upstairs, but the clumsiness of the writhing obliterates any potential tension that might have been present (more on that in a minute). You need only compare your story to Stephen King's "The Shining" (the source of the ideas in your own story) to see what opportunities you passed up.

In fact, you should read that book, or read it again if you've read it already. I don't ususally recommend anyone read Stephen King, but "The Shining" is a rare shining gem amid a plethora of mediocre, bloated tomes. You should read other writers as well, many of them, and keep reading them until you learn to recognize the elements in your words that they long ago learned to edit out of theirs. You can't pretend to be serious about your work if you shove phrases and constructions at your readers that make them stop everything they're doing and think to themselves "Oh my God, did he really say that...?" Here's a list, by no means comprehensive, of things that you have to learn to recognize as atrocious writing:

The morning of next (next morning... the following morning...? Think about how you would really say it, and then say it like that)

A moment in the bathroom relieves my bladder, releasing me of the liquid I feared to last night. (Could be restated in far fewer words, but, then, why bother at all?)

As I progress slowly down the stairs (You don't talk like that and neither does anyone you know, and neither do your readers. A sense of menace comes from situations, not tortured word usage).

It's so close to me I feel its icy breath hovering about my neck, tracing the long bone there. (Which bone was that? And about that hovering... another static image. If you have to have a cliche, make it tickle, or caress, or stroke... something with movement).

Goose bumps distribute from my arms (I don't know, maybe you do talk like that. But believe me, your readers don't.)

Portraits of old characters, who once lived old simple lives, align the halls, their eyes beaming at me. I feel their glassy eyes roaming my sturdy limps, absorbing from me every feature the lack of slumber produced. (The first sentence has no relevance and sounds like a line from a movie overheatd from the theater next-door to yours. The second sentence is frightening, and not because it adds to the mood of your story. Re-read it until you see why.)

It's my mom's cooking, I tell myself as I inhale again; her self-made recipes always possess an odd odor. Once she made green hamburgers that reeked of feces. (Waaaaaaaaay too much information.)

There is liquid beneath my feet, I note; between my toes, an alarming warmth electrifies me. I stop movement, wobbly with anticipation. (Clumsy. How about "The floor feels wet, a squishy warmth oozing between my toes. I freeze, unable to open my eyes.)

I clutch the knob, unlock it, turn it. I yank it, expecting it to release it from its haven. (Same question as before: do you talk this way?)

My feet propel up the stairs to the left. (And what are you doing, while you wait for them to come back?)

My calls for aid resounds in every hall. (I'll bet they also echo through the now lifeless rooms, too)

As I am yanked across ahead, my final mutter wilt. (The words speak for themselves.)

Okay, that's enough. I'm not trying to beat you up. In fact, my point is that if you'd quit trying to sound like a bad impression of Edgar Allen Poe and just tell your story, your idea isn't bad, and you might actually raise a goose bump or two. You spent a lot of time on this; even if you wrote it in one sitting and this is the first and only draft, it still took energy, effort and enough committment to stay in one place long enough to finish it. If you're going to keep doing this stuff, you owe it to yourself to get serious about your technique. Othewise your ideas will remain buried beneath imprecise, incorrect, and inexcusable words that will leave your reader laughing, for all the wrong reasons, at all the wrong times.

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Review of Lost in Life  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (2.0)
You manage your words well. Sentences link together intelligently, forming paragraphs. You have some nice descriptive moments that allowed me to feel and sense the environment and activities that were taking place.

The problem here is that your story has already happened and we're only allowed to tune in on the aftermath, after everything has been determined. For the most part, the action of this story involves James driving up to the shack, walking inside and looking out the window, whereupon he bursts into tears. And let me state clearly, you render these moments with the immediacy that they deserve. Unfortunately, the conflict, the moment of decision, the anguish leading up to it, the comparison and contrast between the life he was living, and the transformation that was required to give it up--all of these you simply tell us about, sometimes in flashback (somewhat immediate, but not as much so, since we already know the outcome), sometimes simply in generalized narritive passages where you condense what should be major elements of your story into quick blurbs.

At twenty-eight, James was on the fast track to becoming one of the most prominent lawyers in New York. Arriving just three years earlier straight out of law school with no professional contacts, James had quickly topped everyone’s A-list. His presence was requested at every major social gathering organized in the tri-state area and he had been personally invited on several occasions to dine at Gracie Mansion by the mayor himself. Life was going according to James’ master plan.

That's a lot of life history to be reduced to such a short paragraph.

Later, when he returns to the penthouse, suddenly filled with self-loathing, we have no reason to know why. You tell us that he feels a certain way, but nothing in your words gives us anything to make it real, to believe that he would have such an epiphany. There is a story locked up in those fast generalizations, but you're going to have to work to find it, you're going to have to get inside the head of your character and feel what he feels. Then, you're going to have to let the reader do the same thing, and get yourself out of the way. As it is, there is no real conflict, either in the present moment action, or in the flashback action. It's push-button plot points, here he's happy BOING here he's discontented BOING here he is running away.

There's nothing wrong with your ideas, and I think YOU think you've told us the story that I'm alluding to. But you haven't. You've taken short cuts that leave us uninterested in your protagonist, because there's nothing for us to discover about him. You've gone ahead and told us everything, and that's not a very interesting process for the reader to engage in.

Go back and rewrite this thing without the flashbacks, tell it sequentially, and write the parts that actually constitute your story, that show James approaching a moment of truth, and struggling to find the right path. You'll have something worth reading then.
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Review of Set Reset  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (4.5)
You say that computer work and writing don't mix. Apparently, taking your poem as an example, this is not necessarily true.

There's not a lot to say here, it's a strong poem, quite polished. I love how you manage long Whitmanesque lines without disintegrating into prose rhythms. The musical undercurrent is never in doubt. The science metaphors are well chosen, making their point without calling attention to themselves. Since Pynchon, we've seen how effective such images and reference points are when evoking the relationship between mere mortals and the surrounding environment. In this poem one senses both knowledge of the science and empathy for the mortals, as well as the craft to draw the connections.

Nice work.
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Review of Pain  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (4.0)
Nicely done, like a quick thrust of a dagger. It makes its point and then echos around the various rooms of your own experience. It leaves you wanting more, and wisely does not give it.

[Sound of applause]
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