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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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101
101
Review by edgework
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Rated: 18+ | (5.0)
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I'm uncharacteristically at a loss for words here. That's always a good thing since mostly I complain about this or that, suggest this addition or that deletion. But you're hitting all the right notes. You take us deep within the parents' grief without melodrama or sentiment; you provide a sense of time and place without getting bogged down in irrelevant descriptions; you manage the dual time frame effortlessly; and you pack an emotional punch, even as we admire the craft with which you pull it off. I have nothing to suggest, other than that you should be submitting this. Thanks for the opportunity to read it.
102
102
Review of Dreams of Flying  
Review by edgework
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Rated: E | (2.5)
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In this 8 line poem you show strengths and weaknesses.

First, your rhyme scheme. It is ABAB CBCB which may or may not be something specific, or it may just be the way you felt like rhyming. As rhymes, the words are all good. The four "B" rhymes reinforce the content of those lines, giving them stronger emphasis and reinforcing the parallel nature of the various iterations of the soul. So I think that you satisfy the primary justification for rhyme, which is to overly an artificial structure onto your content that fits naturally into the words and embellishes their meaning.

Your meter is consistent throughout, except for the last line. All the other lines scan easily into four metrical feet, whereas the last line can only do so by placing an unnatural emphasis on the first word, "But," which isn't how it reads. The line naturally falls into three feet with a trailing weak beat:

But my soul / has dreams / of flying

However, as an end line, that might not be a bad thing. The variation coming at the end once more calls greater attention to that line, which is a crystalization of all that has come before. So again, whether planned or not, it shows that you have some good instincts at work.

The weakness is in the overall content. There are no images, no subtleties, no shadings, hints, suggestions: it's all right on the table in the most literal and prosaic form possible. What you've done is to cast your theme in fixed meter and rhyme, and offer that to us as the poem itself. Themes are never meant to be content. Rather, they drive the content, give it direction and shape and give us a purpose in reading the piece. But they're never to be spoken aloud.

If this style of verse is your preference, then you need to expose yourself to as much of it as possible, written by the true masters of the genre. This, for example:

  I felt a cleavage in my mind
  As if my brain had split;
  I tried to match it, seam by seam,
  But could not make them fit.
  The thought behind I strove to join
  Unto the thought before,
  But sequence ravelled out of reach
  Like balls upon a floor.
                        -Emily Dickinson

Note that you have to think about it a bit to decide what it's really about. That's because instead of simply telling us what it's about and calling that her poem, she actually gives us a poem that incorporates a variety of experiences, images and activities. I don't know if this is great, obscure or just interesting. The jury's been out on Emily since she started writing.

I do know that there are any number points in this poem (that is roughly the same length as yours) that jump out at me and attract my attention with something for my senses to focus on, or simply a word that causes me to note not just the meaning it conveys, but the sound and music it generates, which is, after all, the essence of poetry. (Cleavage for instance. There's a rich sounding word; at least six distinct sounds: four consonant sounds and two vowels). No one's going to remember a poem because it carries a heartfelt message, no matter how purely conceived. It's the language that causes us to take notice. You are halfway there, incorporating structures like meter and rhyme that have nothing specifically to do with subject and meaning, but which, if used properly, can enhance the meaning in ways that defy prose logic.

But you need to make your language work harder. Don't just coast on the emotional explication of feelings. Just because that's how you feel doesn't make it a poem. Find language that is crisp, imagistic, that stands apart, not because of its message, but because it sounds good, it surprises us, it shows us what words are capable of.

Read other verse masters: Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, to mention two who would be well worth your time. And don't restrict yourself to traditional verse. That may be the style you prefer, but you need to expose yourself to as wide a variety of poets as possible, not because you should write like any of them, but because you need to see what is possible, what areas are being explored, what paths might be open for you to venture down. If you're serious about writing poetry, you have to enjoy reading poetry. It needs to be an end in itself.

So start thinking in terms of images. Get rid of the language of narration, and start exposing yourself to the language of immediacy. Don't offer us interpretations. Evoke the experience itself and leave the interpretation to your reader. Your poems will be stronger, and they'll enjoy reading them a lot more.
103
103
Review of This is the End  
Review by edgework
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Rated: 18+ | (3.5)
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I've changed my mind about this piece several times since I first read it. Initially my advice was going to be to retell the exact same story that you now have, but to do so with half the words. Right now you're coming in at almost 3000. It would be an instructive exercise for you to find the actual story here, and see how effectively it comes across in a more streamlined presentation.

I know, I know, how could you possibly cut a single thing? Easily. You'd have to come up with new ways of saying some of it; you'd have to make some hard choices about what is truly part of your story and what is decoration, and, most brutally, you'd have to start recognize much of that decoration by it's real name: bloat.

That doesn't mean it's badly written, or bad at all. It's just more than the story requires. Woody Allen famously claimed that the best stuff he ever put on film ended up on the cutting room floor when he was editing "Annie Hall." Right now you have a lot of material about the 2012 end of the world predictions, which, while interesting and engagingly presented, impact your story not at all. You could remove all of it and still tell the story that will interest your reader, which is McCormick's journey to self-realization and breaking free of Corrin's hold on him. You have made it look like there's a connection to the end of the world talk, but it's not really there.

So that was my first impression. Then I thought about it some more, and I realized that your problem may be in precisely in the opposite direction, that this may be too skeletal. Rather than cut, you may need to craft those connecting links that would make the Mayans and 2012 relevant. How? Ya got me. It's not my story. However, Plotting—101 offers some useful suggestions to begin your exploration.

Well constructed stories that are memorable tend to have an inner story, which is the main character's arc and the point of entry for the reader's emotional involvement in the narrative, and they have an outer story, which involves the events outside the main character's immediate control, events which impact on his own life, force decisions and actions and create complications. it is in the cross-pollination between the inner conflicts and the external conflicts that one finds the material for a rich plot development that is character driven. You have an inner story. There's no outer story. The end-of-the-world stuff is just begging to be used to provide it, but so far, it's just stuck in the midst of the narrative to give you an opportunity to give McCormick some astute and clever observations.

Why not put him in a situation that hinges on the fact that end-of-the-world hysteria has everyone in its grip, find an issue that arises organically out of that fact, and figure out a way for it to influence his attitudes and decisions about Corrin? That way, you get your Mayans, their calendar, 2012, the whole nine yards, and it will actually mean something in the universe you've created.

Whichever way you go—cut the bloat, or turn it into something meaningful—would be valid, and either choice would result in a far stronger story.

One other thing that I noticed that could trip you up: as it is now written, there isn't a lot going on. McCormick and Reilly sit at a table and talk, then McCormick walks alone, and thinks to himself. Then he looks in a window. That's about it for the actual action in the present. The two scenes with the most engaging action have already happened—they're backstory and they bring their own specific problems to the narrative.

The thing about backstory is that no matter how exciting the events were when they happened, by the time the reader gets to them, they're just stuff someone tells us about. You can never channel the energy of backstory events into the present and expect the reader to respond to them in the same way that they are drawn into events happening in front of them, which is to say, the actual story. In order to give backstory the same type of immediacy, it has to be turned into an actual flashback, which is a clumsy device at best, and in a short story, when you don't have that much time and text available to begin with, it can be certain death. Your account of the lake incident begins as backstory (narrated) but become a flashback in a way that doesn't work. You don't get to slipstream through time like that. Once your reader loses track of what's present, what's past, they'll give up.

The break up scene on Corrin's porch is dealt with more efficiently, but it's still backstory, something that, in the actual time frame of the story, your main character is just thinking about. Whenever a character has such detailed thoughts about their own life, which, we assume, they're already intimately familiar with, we know that those thoughts are not for the character's benefit, or the plot's, but the reader's instead. It's a clumsy way to let the reader know what's going on.

The connection between the various looks of love that form the basis of McCormick's revelation is likewise all off stage. His mom and dad have played no part in the story at all. Bringing them in they way you have is just pulling a rabbit out of your hat. You need to create plot elements that are organically fused to the setup that you've already created. Molly, who deserves better, never appears at all. We get no opportunity to see her in action. We simply have to take your word for it, never a satisfying outcome for the reader. And the third "look," on the homeless man, is simply a mistake. Your POV is third-person restricted troughout, which means that everything we experience is filtered through McCormick. You actually tell us that he didn't see the man's expression. So you've broken your POV in order to give us this information. You're a good writer. You don't want a rookie blooper like that to suggest to your reader that you don't know what you're doing.

I think you may have a problem that I've seen with many writers, not just here but ones who are published as well. You've spent a lot of time thinking about who your characters are, what they've experienced that has influenced them, how they feel about their circumstances. That's all well and good, but they can sit still in a chair, staring at the wall and be who they are. If your concept of your characters doesn't include the elements that will put them in motion, force them to make decisions and take actions, you'll spend your story doing what you've done: they'll talk a lot and think a lot but they won't do much. Stories are about things that happen, things that happen to specific people and the choices they make in response. If you come up with an external story to go with his personal saga, you'll find that who he is will determine what he does; an action... a decision... an unintended consequence... pretty soon, it adds up and you'll have a real story on your hands.
104
104
Review of Breathing  
Review by edgework
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Rated: E | (3.5)
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Weird, quirky piece here. You say you're trying satire and you're new to it.

I don't think you've got the right idea just yet. You're borrowing from the kind of standard satirical sketches that are out there in abundance, mostly deriving from Saturday Night Live and their ilk, but the problem here is that it's not clear what you are satirizing.

In a piece like this, your emphasis on breathing, and pushing that focus to absurd lengths, would work if you were using the process of breathing as a stand-in for some other type of habitual activity over which we have no control and no choice about whether or not we should pursue it.

Sometimes you speak of breathing in the same way one might speak of eating. Other times, it seems like you are relating it to some form of addiction. Still other times it sounds like you're talking about a preference for breathing that's analogous to one's preference for a political ideology.

Unless you are clear about what is being satirized, then we have to assume you are making fun of the process of breathing, which doesn't lead to any place productive.

Still, it's well written and you have some amusing moments. Give it an underlying purpose, you'll be good to go.
105
105
Review of Jack Meet Sophie  
Review by edgework
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Rated: 13+ | (4.5)
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With the exception of the ending, you have a good bit of writing here.

You've handled a difficult task with skill and assurance. Speaking generically, I'd say that putting an entirely imagined sequence of events in your main character's head, while she's actually doing nothing in the present of the story except standing around waiting would be a surefire recipe for disaster and boring reading. And in most cases it would be. Internal monologue seldom serves as a useful substitute for action, dialogue and events in the world.

You've created a context that not only justifies your approach, you show that you have the craft to pull it off. Nothing much to complain about really, except for that last sentence. Yeah, I think that's probably what Emma would do. But just because it's appropriate for the chatacte doesn't mean it's sufficient for the story. I can insert any of a number of reactions for her that would be appropriate and compliment that small physical action; I just don't think you want to leave that type of summation to your reader. I think you need to give us a little more. Not a lot, understand; in situations like this, less is more and you can accomplish much with a gesture, a turn of the head, a comment, a meeting of eyes... I wouldn't know what you would see there, but I do feel that something else is needed, and that you'll be able to see it if you look for it.

This is nice stuff. I'd think you shouldn't have much of a problem finding a place for it.
106
106
Review by edgework
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Rated: 18+ | (3.5)
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You posted this review request a few months back. Sorry for taking so long to get to it. It's not always easy to find the time to deal properly with multiple chapters and it sort got shelved until now. I did read the prologue initially and found it interesting enough that I wanted to get back to it and give it more attention. So now I'll see if I can do that.

Let me get the picky stuff out of the way first. You're putting a lot of time and effort into this, and you have a decent product so far to show for it. The things you're doing well are hard to come by; many never manage it. You owe it to yourself not to get tripped up on the kind of things that you can easily learn just by opening a book.

You have numerous run-on sentences that stick out like bad scars. No excuse for that, not when a comma turned into a semi-colon or a period would shift something clumsy into something effortless. Get a basic text on grammar and syntax and work it out. Or make sure you give it to a professional copy editor before you submit it. You never want to give an editor a reason to think you don't know what you're doing. They are predisposed to think that in their default state anyway. Your job is to prove otherwise, and rookie mistakes like that do you no good.

I wonder if the misspelling of "oracle" is intentional. Perhaps you wish to evoke a sense of some earlier, more archaic version of the language? If so, I don't think it works, particularly since you don't seem to use it as a generalized style. If it's simply misspelled, fix it.

In general, don't stumble over these kinds of issues. Pay attention to your verbs, your punctuation, and all the other simple nuts and bolts stuff that will keep your text from getting in the way of your content.

So far I've read the Prologue and the first three chapters. I don't know where you're going with this, but some points are in order for these opening passages. You're a good writer. You have a delightful sense of character, your dialogue works, your imagination never fails you and your descriptions are vivid and effective; rare as it may be, you seem to be working in a universe that hasn't been mined before. I'll confess up front that, aside from Tolkein in high school I've had little to do with fantasy as a genre, mostly because so much of it seems to be recycled Tolkein. Or The Brothers Grimm. Further, much seems to be more concerned with the processes of the fantasy genre than with placing an actual story with actual characters in the midst of a believable, albeit alternative, universe. You avoid that.

The main structural flaw I've noted so far is the opening scene in your prologue and its focus on The Lady Jaharwynn Almarin. There's nothing much wrong with the scene at all, but you abandon her halfway through and move to Aylane, who then seems to claim center stage, at least through the next three chapters. I wonder if it's really a prologue since it seems to occur in the same general time frame as what follows. At this point I'm left with some questions that really should have been answered by now:

What's the story?
Who's the main character?
Who's the protagonist?

There are more to be answered, of course, but if I'm at chapter three and not clear on those three, you haven't done your job as an author. The way it appears at the moment is you are planning to have a multiple POV structure; you'll move from one character to another, each in their own scenes, during which their POV will be the third-person restricted perspective. This certainly is workable and often used, though it does require you to come up with a fully formed story arc for everyone so treated. So far, based on the amount of face time given them, it is obvious that your primary story is concerned with Aylane, her upcoming transformation, her interaction with the guardian, her relationship with the Keeper and the events that will evolve out of this set of conditions. All of which identify Aylane as your main character, the person through whom the reader gains a personal experience of the events and with whom they identify. Our brief encounter with Jahar does not suggest that we would be nearly as inclined to identify with her, but she seems perfectly positioned to create the kind of external problems and complications for your main character that will allow you to develop your actual plot.

The problem is you have thus far given us no hint of her role. As I say, there are two chapters left for me to review, but you've already missed your window of opportunity. We need to know from the start what's going on, what drives your characters, what they seek, what they need to avoid, what's in the way of them achieving their perceived goals. You don't have to necessarily lay it all out in the first chapter. But if a storm's coming, we should see the clouds gathering on the horizon, and so far there's nothing beyond the charming tale centered around Aylane and the ritual transformation she's about to undergo. That narrative, while well done and captivating, isn't enough to justify a long novel. While it has an arc of its own, it also needs to serve as the defining conditions for the larger plot to unfold, whatever it may turn out to be. I'm assuming that Jahar will have some role in that larger story (otherwise, why lead with her?)

You may want to rethink your sense of what a chapter is. I'm not convinced you have three chapters here. (The prologue is a separate problem, but I think if you rethink your chapters, you'll find that your prologue can be absorbed in the new structure). First of all, you need to approach your chapters the way you would a short story. Unlike a short story, chapters are not self contained, rising as they do out of what has preceded them and feeding into what will follow. But like a short story, they need to be concerned with a specific plot element, and the treatment of that element needs to have an arc of its own, a place where the chapter begins, a series of transforming developments, and a place where the chapter ends, having carried the energy of the plot from one point to another.

Right now, your first three chapters are more or less dealing with the same thing, which is the prep work for Aylane's ritual. You have an arbitrary separation, of sorts, but there's still a seamless quality to the whole sequence that doesn't seem to require three chapters. You might do much better if you broke it up into two larger segments, one focusing solely on the individual responses of Aylane and her guardian as they come together, the other focusing on the influence of the Keeper. In between, you would want to insert a chapter that kicks off Jahar's storyline, whatever it proves to be. If she is going to become either a problem for Aylane, or her ally, you don't necessarily have to present her involvement all at once, but you need to establish her as a presence from the outset, so that when you do need to use her center stage, she's already fixed in our minds as a viable character. After her brief appearance in your opening, she fades from the story and our awareness as well. (Of course, if her ultimate purpose is to be aligned with Aylane, then you'll still have the 'problem' to deal with, whatever it is that they will be aligned against, and that will need to be prepared for in the opening stages as well).

A couple other thoughts off the top of my head. For the most part your story works in it's present nicely, without a lot of reference to backstory. However, what backstory you've found necessary isn't being dealt with as efficiently as you might. Just keep in mind, when you are detailing backstory, your characters are standing around looking at their watches, wondering when you're going to come up with something for them to do. And so are your readers. Backstory is unavoidable sometimes, but you need to feed it into the mix without disrupting the flow of action in the present, because that is where your story is happening.

A good rule of thumb: use the natural pauses and time suspensions of your present action to slip in your back story. If a character needs to fill some water bags at a well or fountain, take that opportunity to give them some internal reflection, a recollection, or simply a narrative intrusion where needed information is imparted. Make it no longer than the activity in the present would seem to require. Pausing to light a cigarette would afford your character enough time for a quick, solitary observation about something. A taxi ride uptown would present an opportunity for a much more involved narrative, but never make the mistake of thinking that you can channel the energy of events in back story into the present action. It can't be done. Back story is never anything other than something someone tells us, whether it be a character or you as author. It's only in the present that action can assume center stage and unfold before us, drawing us into the moment and allowing us to experience events as they happen. Probably the worst way to present back story is through a character's internal reflection. It's their story. They already know it. The only reason they'd be thinking about it now, in such detail, is because you haven't found a more elegant way to clue the reader in on important information. Go the extra distance and figure out how to do it better. Or decide it's not necessary, and just get on with the story. If your characters are behaving believably, based on the circumstances out of which they've evolved (the back story), we may be able to intuit all we need to know just by watching them in action.

Be careful of those Oracles. They strike me as having the potential to turn into a magic hat. You don't want your plots to depend on pulling needed elements out of a magic hat whenever you need them. The Oracles seem to be a little too omniscient and omnipresent for my liking. If they always have the answers, your characters will continually be let off the hook, and you'll be taking shortcuts. And your reader won't be fooled one bit.

So that's all I have for this reading. I'm interested in where you go with this, and I plan on reading further to find out, so in that you've accomplished your one true task as a writer, which is to keep the reader reading. Without that, you got squat. Of course, if you keep them reading with the promise of a compelling development, a gripping conflict and a satisfying ending, you then have to deliver. Oh, and there's the third act. Gotta have a third act. Maybe we'll talk about that when you get to it.
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107
Review of The Ignited Flame  
Review by edgework
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Rated: E | (2.5)
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You say about this: It is a poem that I have put all my current emotion into and is the very piece that has started my writing again. So perhaps it's accomplished its purpose. Perhaps you don't need an objective review of its literary merits, given that you wrote it to express feelings, certainly a valid reason to write and one that inspires many in the same way that this inspired you.

I recognize that the emotions are deeply felt and that the spring from a deep place within; for that reason, I approach those feeling with the utmost respect, and I certainly wish you well with whatever events in the real world inspired you to write this. However, that's not the reason that I'm here. I'm here to tell you what kind of poem you've written, apart from whatever may have inspired it. And so I must point out to you that feelings and emotions don't make a poem, however honestly they are presented. Poems are not, first and foremost, about feelings, nor are they about events, nor artifacts in our lives to which we apply myriad memories and more emotions when we encounter them. Likewise good friend, bad enemies, triumphs and tragedies. None of these things are what poems are about. All can have a place in poetry, and certainly we borrow freely from the elements of our lives and our own imaginations when we write. But poems are first and foremost, about language. It is the language that makes a poem memorable and that insures it will endure, not its subject.

So I must point out that while your subject is heartfelt, the language with which you present it doesn't really rise to the occasion. Even though you have rhyme and a discernible meter, the words either present your responses literally, or they resort to cliché placeholder phrases that need to be jettisoned as soon as you come up with interesting images that will accomplish so much more.

Here's a four-stanza sequence from the middle of the poem:

Then it was so clear
The dimmed light became the moon
The new light became my sun
Rising up so soon

My heart was in my throat
The knot now in my heart
The new sun had ignited
All the moon tore apart

I felt bad for the moon
To be pushed into the dark
Shining no more light
Not even a small spark

It tore me apart
Knowing I had broken
The bond the moon had made
Without even being spoken

Romeo got away with talking about the sun chasing away the moon when he pondered the beauty of Juliette, but that was four-hundred years ago. Since then, both orbs have been fairly well bleached of any potential to surprise us, to make us think anew about familiar things, and to give us an experience of language doing the kind of dance of which it is capable when cut loose from the prose requirement to make strict sense. It doesn't matter that it expresses how you feel. That's the reason Shakespeare used them as images. But if you want to create something besides an expression of feeling, you're going to have to grapple with your language, find ways to make it interesting, make us sit up and take notice. That means that you stop trusting all those easy images and phrases that pop so effortlessly into your thoughts. They've been popping effortlessly into every writer's thoughts for centuries; the good writers know they need to do some real sweat work if they're going to come up with something fresh, something that we haven't heard before, something that has the ability to make us stop a moment and reconsider all that we thought we knew about love and loss.

You toy with a fixed meter, something that is valuable in a poem like this, but you are too inconsistent for it to make an impact. Fixed meter is precisely that—fixed. Here's a sampling of the first lines from different stanzas:

There was a little while

Deep within the pit

And I grew to think

I thought my heart was gone

Then suddenly I saw

I thought to myself

I felt bad for the moon

But I had been honest

That's enough to make the point. I'd say that the rhythm you hear in your head is most captured by the fourth example. Three strong metrical feet, in this case all iambs though that's not a strict requirement. What you have too often are lines that actually scan into two feet, such as the third and sixth examples. Other times, the scansion is ambiguous, as in the next to the last example. One could force it to scan with three feet, but only by a less than natural reading of the words. That's the trick with fixed meter, or with any poetic form. They are their most powerful when they slip effortlessly into a natural reading of the words. In this case,

I felt / bad for / the moon

isn't terrible and you can get away with it, particularly if the rest of your lines are consistent and strong. However, more than likely, were you to simply speak the line normally, it would come closer to

I felt bad / for the moon

When you establish a metrical structure, you set up expectations for your readers, and when you fail to follow through in a consistent manner, it simply comes off as sloppy.

Note this poem from a master of the form, W.H. Auden, who showed how strong meter and rhyme can be used in a poem like this, producing language that is visual, charged with emotion, and never falls into easy phrases. You would do yourself a service to read as much of his work as you can; his is a standard to which all who write serious verse should aspire.

As I Walked Out One Evening
by W. H. Auden

As I walked out one evening,
  Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
  Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
  I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
  'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
  Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
  And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
  Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
  Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
  For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
  And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
  Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
  You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
  Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
  And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
  Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
  To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
  Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
  And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
  Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
  And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
  The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
  A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
  And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
  And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror,
  O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
  Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
  As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
  With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
  The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
  And the deep river ran on.
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108
Review of Day 6  
Review by edgework
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Rated: E | (3.0)
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You say: I know it's not perfect, but I like it. Haha. Also, just looking for some actual feed back, not an "I love it!" from my girlfriend.

Okay, I think it's safe to say I'm not your girlfriend. Nor do I love it. However, neither do I hate it. I just wish I knew what it was.

What's most apparent on first reading is that you are adept with the written form of our language and understand how it needs to look, feel and sound when it jumps off the page as we read it. What I also noted, however, was how long it took me to actually get through it. For such a short piece, it almost aggressively failed to capture my attention. The narrator's internal musings seem to be unfocused stream-of-consciousness, and while he doesn't actually repeat himself in the first three paragraphs, neither does he focus himself, or the reader, in any particular direction, choosing instead to merely circle around the conditions in which he finds himself, neither taking any action, nor making the kind of decisions that would lead to actions. When in the fourth paragraph we finally get to the source of his plight, we think "Oh... I get it." But since he has invested nothing much of himself in the proceedings, neither have we. We note his circumstances with interest, but don't feel the kind of connection that such despair should be capable of evoking.

A story wouldn't hurt. Right now, you have set up and that's it. He's miserable at the loss of a relationship and wallows in the depths of his own self-pity, alternately lapsing into anger, then switching to feigned disinterest as coping mechanisms. We easily recognize his situation. Who among us has not taken our own stroll along those forlorn paths? But so what? That's the question you have to always ask yourself when you come up with a compelling set up: so what? To what necessary complications and developments does this setup lead?

What is important in his life that is impacted, either negatively or positively, by the circumstances in which he finds himself an unwilling participant? Is his job languishing as he chooses to stay home mumbling to himself? Are important clients withering on the vine? Does his true soul mate wait right next door, unnoticed in his lovesick stupor? Does he decide to seek revenge? Does he decide to do anything, at all? That's where stories begin, when a character finds the circumstances of their life untenable and decides to do something about it. Or, at the very least, when the the balance of the status quo comes undone in some way and forces decisions and actions on him. A well-structured story is always going to be a blend of inner and outer worlds and the development and conflicts that arise out of their collision with each other. He needs to have a story for us to care about, something that will make a difference in one way or another, some conflict that he must either rise to or be defeated by; it will be the personal drama within that influences how he approaches this.

The possibilities are infinite. Choose one. Then set him in motion and watch what he does. He'll tell you his story.
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Review of La' Guillotine  
Review by edgework
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Rated: 13+ | (3.5)
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A narrative poem here with a definite story line to it, rendered in verse. The story itself is poignant enough to keep our attention, but, as always with a poem, we have to ask ourselves is the language doing enough on its own, apart from the message and/or content that it is meant to convey, to capture our interest as a poem. A good rule of thumb for crafting memorable poems is to make sure that they're never about what they're "about." Or, at least, that they're never just about their subject. To endure, they need to do whatever task they've set for themselves in language that works overtime, that takes leaps and manages connections and structures that simply aren't available to prose.

With your fixed (for the most part) meter, and rhyme scheme, you've definitely moved beyond the realm of prose. In your treatment of your subject, I'm not sure that you've managed it. In places it's nicely done, and quite touching. For example, this stanza:

She's beauteous in final prayer.
She begs reprieve from Satan’s lair.
She bows her head at God’s own name,
She blesses Him, The Three and Same.
Then bends to meet her God.

Your rhymes are clean, the meter works effortlessly and the content is definitely enhanced by both. A deeper dimension waits beyind those words and it's not just the next world to which she is about to be consigned. The words manage to rise above the action depicted to evoke the higher dimensions of spiritual faith that give those acts meaning.

Unfortunately, the stanza immediately preceding this one manages to falter on the very same points. The meter in the first two lines is close, but in fixed meter, close simply sounds sloppy. The last line of the stanza is almost a non sequitur. It's not wrong so much as irrelevant.

Don't let your rhythms get so careless. Do the extra work required to bring each line into perfect sync. For instance, the first line of stanza five:

My sweet helped them, to England flee,

while certainly not a weak line, with plenty of strong beats, nonetheless arranges those beats in a way that causes it to stand out in contrast to the other opening lines of your other stanzas. The problem is the first four words really don't have any weak beats, unless you force an unnatural reading of them. That's something you never want to do. Poetic forms and structures are at their most powerful when they find expression in words that are read they way they would normally be spoken. Note some other first lines:

I stand, despairing, in the throng.

One by one the line gets smaller.

I hear around me shouts of joy.

She loved too much I fear to say,

These, from the first four stanzas, set up expectations for your reader, expectations that you should thwart only if you have a good reason for doing so. Your rhythm shift is not a good reason, particularly when a simple realignment of the words would have fit much more cleanly:

To England, my love helped them flee.

It's still not perfect, but it's less jarring than your version. A simple thing, you say? Keep in mind, it's called "fixed" meter for a reason.

You are doing one thing that poems are able to do well, which is to expand the scope away from the initial context, embracing deeper ideas, related issues, implications, consequences and even unexpected connections that push the focus of the poem as a whole past the boundaries of it's immediate subject. In your final two stanzas you place your actions in a larger historical context, and you take a stand, giving a moral underpinning to the verses.

However, I fear that you are still doing it in a prosaic way, despite the rhyme and meter. I think you need to get more out of your words, lines and stanzas. Much of what you state outright in the last two stanzas might well have been embedded in images, metaphors, similes and subtext as you describe her march to the scaffold. Less is more in a poem. If you merely suggest something in an essay or a story, people might miss the point. But it is those suggestions laid on top of the surface content that provide the echos, ripples, and deeper interpretations that make for memorable poetry. You have some good writing here, but it sets a course, gets the job done and then it is done. We read it, we think, "Yeah... I get it." And we too are done. Embed more, describe less. That way, when we finish reading, our reaction will be just starting and will linger long after we've set aside the text.
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Review of Patriot's Burden  
Review by edgework
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Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
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Here's what you're doing right in this piece:

• a fairly good choice of end words. They are flexible in that they can be used to complete a thought or support a continuing thought allowing you to break at the word while the ide extends to the next line. A weakness for the purposes of a sestina is the fact that while some lend themselves to multiple meanings or uses, you don't exploit this potential. They're all nouns, and they're always the same noun. Sand is always the stuff we walk on, even though the word could also be a verb. Not sure how you would use it as such, but the variation can embellish the effect of the form, keeping the repetition while varying the impact of the content. Also, shame is always used as the same noun, even though it too can be a verb.

• Your meter is fairly tight—unrhymed iambic pentameter throughout, though in cases you get a little loose or forced. For instance, this line,

Blamed us for the decay of the country.

can only scan as iambic pentameter if the weak word of tries to support a strong beat. The trick with any of the artificial poetic structures is not how successfully you obey the surface dictates of the rule, but how effectively you make the structure invisible, as though a natural reading of the words fortuitously fell into the desired structure.

This line has the opposite problem: too many strong beats.

Eyes closed, they all called themselves patriots.

It can be argued that the opening two strong beats are followed by two weak beats, a spondee/pyrrhic combination that is always effecgtive, but I'm not sure the word all is really deserving of a weak beat. It makes the whole line awkward, whereas, were you to remove the word altogether, you'd have a nice efficient line of five feet:

Eyes closed, / they called / them - selves / pa - ri - ots.

But truthfully, these are quibbles. Your lines are strong, musical, imagistic and quite obviously not prose. You have the makings of a nice poem here.

Here's what you're doing wrong:

It's not a sestina. It's too obviously trying to be a sestina to pass as simple blank verse, so all one is left with is the obvious fact that you made a valiant effort but didn't get it right.

Here are two articles on the specifics of Sestinas the always invaluable "Poetry Forms" :

http://www.writing.com/main/books/action/view/entr...

and

http://www.writing.com/main/books/action/view/entr...

The rotation of the end words from stanza to stanza is fixed, and it is duplicated from one to the next. You haven't followed this sequence.

Sestina's are always a pain to try to manage. It's as if the form is taunting you: "Bet you can't make sense out of this!" You seem as though you could. It's good writing. It deserves to be a good sestina as well.
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Review of Be Good Anyway  
Review by edgework
Rated: ASR | (3.0)
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In one sense, this piece is unreviewable, in that it's primarily a statement of personal belief, and the elucidation of that belief constitutes the major portion of it's content. Reviewers are at liberty to say things like, "Your characters seem to be missing motivation," or "The story appears to be driven by two conflicting themes," or "The rhymes in this poem are trite," or "You might have tried getting a plot started." Things like that. But what is one to say about a personal belief? "You're wrong. You don't really believe that," would sound pretty stupid. Something along the lines of, "You really believe that? Well, I sure don't," would be a bit more acceptable in the right context and could even lead to a robust discussion of the issues underlying particular belief systems, but then we're in the realm of philosophy, religion, or, if one is a cynic, psychology.

The only point I would really find useful in this case is that the word upon which all else hinges—good—is a really slippery concept at best, leaving the notion of "doing good" or "being good" hopelessly subjective. For instance, one person's good deed could well be another person's annoying meddling. In your own mind you are clear enough about what "good" encompasses, and so it certainly works as a standard for your own behavior, but once again we are lost in subjective impressions, not the presentation of a rational argument that an essay of this type would seem to call for.

For instance, you state:

If my child ends up not going to college or receiving any vocational training and working at a minimum wage job his whole life; if he’s ugly, stupid and socially awkward, but he’s a good person with morals who gives life his best shot - I will be content.

Okay. Don't look now, but the argument could be made that you are advocating sloppy, irresponsible pareting in that statement, that it is your job, to the best of your ability, to prepare your child for something more than a career serving fries at MacDonalds, to see to it that they receive the kind of training and education that will prepare them for success, and to make the kinds of decisions for them that they are not responsible enough to make for themselves. In fact, it is debatable that such an attitude would even permit a child to "give life his best shot." Giving the child the opportunity to give life his best shot is pretty much what parents are for.

I'll also note that the quote with which you open the piece:

Do the best you can and be good to yourself, so that you can, above all, be good to others. ~ Jessi Lane Adams

is self contradictory, espousing what amounts to rational self-interest in the first half, as somehow being a precursor to altruism in the second. One can be selfish (rationally or otherwise) or one can altruistic. But unless they suffer from multiple personality disorder, they won't be both; nor does one result in the other.

Still, it's hard to argue with what seems to be your central premise: It's a good thing to be decent to those with whom you come in contact, whether on a personal or professional relationship. Various incarnations of this sentiment fill the mass consciousness: What goes around, comes around, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, Everybody gets what they deserve, as well as myriad thoughts on the idea of karma and how past deeds are a prelude to future conditions on ones life.

In fact, the idea is so pervasive, so commonly accepted, it could be called a cliche. Keep in mind that a cliche attains its exalted status precisely because it is so obviously true. This is the kind of idea that works as a theme underneath the action of a story, but maybe trying to quantify it in an objective essay is both overkill, and, ultimately, impossible.
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Review by edgework
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Rated: 18+ | (2.5)
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(Once again I've submitted a review before finishing it, so this might appear twice. If so, this is the finished product.)

This story has proven to be an interesting challenge for me to review. Quite frankly, I hated it at the outset and almost didn't make it past the first third. I kept going, however, and by the end I'd revised my assessment of both the story itself and the approach you are taking. However, my initial reaction is telling, and you need to learn from it.

Actually, there is much you need to learn to bring you from where you are right now in your development to where you want to be. It's clear what that desired destination is from the writers you reference in your bio block: Poe, Lovecraft and Stephen King. I doubt that any one could approach this genre without having absorbed a major ration of influence from all three, and you've clearly done your homework, in terms of the kind of story you envision here. However, there is a difference between making your readers hate your main character (never a bad thing, particularly in his genre) and allowing them to hate your story (never a good thing); and possibly turning their attention away from your story altogether and begin questioning you and your motives (always a disaster for an author).

Your idea here is a good one, but, inevitably, all is in the telling. Or, to use a cliche more in keeping with the spirit of this tale, the devil is in the details. You need to revisit all your influences, Stephen King in particular. Study his short stories, not as a consumer, but as a student, until you unlock the mystery of believability that he manages to bring to even his most outlandish ideas. That is his stock in trade: the juxtaposition of the incomprehensible and the mundane, the ordinary and the fantastic. For the fantastic elements to work, there needs to be a solid grounding in the ordinary with which to compare and contrast them.

What you've done is deny us that ordinary baseline. Your main character(s) are, essentially cartoons, not real people. I say they are cartoons because, like all good toon characters, they exhibit both exaggerated reactions to normal phenomena, and muted, almost indifferent response to what would, in the real world, cause us to recoil in shock and horror. (The piano falls on Elmer Fudd, crushing him. Bugs mugs for the camera and says, "Oops."). Unfortunately for your victim, he doesn't know he's in a cartoon universe, and so his reactions are quite real-world and believable, but the combination for the reader is simply one of confusion and will cause them to turn away, uncommitted as they are to a full reading before commenting.

Daffy Duck can pull a huge mallet out of thin air and crush the skull of his opponent at the last minute. The process by which your villains get their victim into the coffin is likewise unbelievable and fantastic, yet you've allowed it to take place in the real universe and once we see that they aren't real characters, we think to ourselves, "Oh, that's not possible." And then you've lost us.

Now, maybe... just maybe... in your own world, people beat other people unconscious, nail them in a coffin and bury them alive while their screams fade under the mounting pile of dirt... (which brings us to our questions about you, rather than the story), but I seriously doubt it. I think your world is the same world we all inhabit, and if you want a story like this to work, you'll need to make the universe of that story conform, for the most part, to the real world, which means come up with real world situations for your characters, and real world actions, and real-world complications. That way, when the Devil finally makes his appearance, we'll think to ourselves, "WOW!" instead of "Oh God... now what?" That is, if we're still reading.

One other point: Stop trying to sound like a writer. Just trust the magic of the simple declarative sentence to get the job done for you. If your prose is going to call attention to itself, you want it to do so with an elegant image or turn of phrase. You don't what it to do so like this:

A sulfur-like odor mated with the moisture-laden air to birth problems for Mitt. However chastised he was by the atmosphere wasn’t good enough to force him to steal away from the scene and call it quits. He would see his plan through come hell or high water.

Why not this:

The humid air was thick with the noxious scent of sulfer. Mitt found it difficult to breathe but continued, undaunted. He was too close now to quit.

Or something like that. Say what you mean, and move on. Good writing is about clarity, not finding more complicated wording for what are simple actions.
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Review by edgework
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Rated: 18+ | (2.5)
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This story has proven to be an interesting challenge for me to review. Quite frankly, I hated it at the outset and almost didn't make it past the first third. I kept going, however, and by the end I'd revised my assessment of both the story itself and the approach you are taking. However, my initial reaction is telling, and you need to learn from it.

Actually, there is much you need to learn to bring you from where you are right now in your development to where you want to be. It's clear what that desired destination is from the writers you reference in your bio block: Poe, Lovecraft and Stephen King. I doubt that any one could approach this genre without having absorbed a major ration of influence from all three, and you've clearly done your homework, in terms of the kind of story you envision here. However, there is a difference between making your readers hate your main character (never a bad thing, particularly in his genre) and allowing them to hate your story (never a good thing); and possibly turning their attention away from your story altogether and begin questioning you and your motives (always a disaster for an author).

Your idea here is a good one, but, inevitably, all is in the telling. Or, to use a cliche more in keeping with the spirit of this tale, the devil is in the details. You need to revisit all your influences, Stephen King in particular. Study his short stories, not as a consumer, but as a student, until you unlock the mystery of believability that he manages to bring to even his most outlandish ideas. That is his stock in trade: the juxtaposition of the incomprehensible and the mundane, the ordinary and the fantastic. For the fantastic elements to work, there needs to be a solid grounding in the ordinary with which to compare and contrast them.
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Review by edgework
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Rated: 13+ | (3.5)
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Quite clever. I'm reminded of "Duck Amok," Chuck Jones' masterful battle in animation with Daffy Duck. You've taken the same concept—confrontation between characters and author—and given it a prose treatment that works. It's funny. What more can I say?

Well, obviously, a lot. Or at least, a bit more. Which is what I would suggest from you: a bit more. The thing about Chuck Jones' cartoon was how he found so many different ways to skew Daffy's world, exploding all the conventions of traditional animation as he did so. You've demonstrated that you're willing to thwart expectations, as well as violate most of the laws of Physics, to achieve your goals. So why restrict yourself to the same location? And the interaction between William and the other characters remains the same, as well. They do different things throughout the story, but they're all variations on the same basic thing. This story wants to go elsewhere; I wouldn't want to suggest where, exactly, since it's not my story. But I don't doubt you could figure out a few more options. The framework is in place. Now you just need more variety in the decorations you drape over it.
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Review of The Waiting Room  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.0)
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An odd story, for you. Given that everything else I've read of yours is undeniably "odd" in one way or other, in this case I'm reacting to the fact that you've evoked an actual real world environment with characters that we recognize as people we might encounter in our own lives. Definitely not the norm for one who in the past has used an entire island as a main character.

I've often found your stories perplexing, thinking you shouldn't be getting away with the stuff you try to pull off. Yet, again and again, you do get away with it through a combination of style, craft and quirky imagination. The results have always been entertaining, and, on more than one occasion, laugh-out-loud funny.

So this story is definitely odd, in the context of what you usually turn out: this is serious. Or it's trying to be. Or maybe it's pretending to be serious, and the joke is on us for thinking it is and trying to apply 'serious' interpretations to whatever is going on. The problem is, not much is going on. It's all about waiting. Beckett would seem to have penned the final word on that particular subject, but there's always room for a new take on what we think is familiar. This attempt, however, suffers from a lack of commitment: it refuses to take a stand in any specific direction.

A main character who waits and waits, only for nothing to happen, constitutes one kind of statement. Likewise, waiting and waiting, only to be disappointed. Or waiting and waiting, only to arrive at an outcome drastically different than what was expected. All of these situations would provide enough specificity that a statement in one direction or other could easily be discerned.

A different kind of statement would rise out of an ambiguous ending that suggests one or more of these situations, but which leaves the possibilities open. There's a difference between an ambiguous ending, and one that simply fails to provide the reader with enough information. That's the problem here. Whatever your main character's situation, however important it may be to him, we are given far too little information to share in his perspective. It's just not all that important to us. All we have access to is the fact that he's waiting for some conclusion or other, then discovers that for obscure reasons that we'll never know, he did not make the cut. And he leaves. If he went through an arc of any sort, he did so without the reader being given any experience of it, and so, there really isn't a story here. Not for the reader, anyway. If an ambiguous ending offers several possibilities for interpretation, any of which could be accurate, yours offers no possibilities for interpretation.

You have some examples of 'telling' and also of 'showing' in your narrative. I think you have them precisely backwards, however. For instance, you tell us all about the woman your main character first encounters, all of it presented second hand through your character's internal monologue. This encounter is the proper start of your story and you take great pains to explain her effect on him. A properly portrayed scene between the two of them would have done the job much more effectively, and set the stage for all the follows. The fact that her personality and its peculiar effect on your main character amounts to nothing further in the story is a structural failing on your part, a gun introduced in Act One that never gets fired in Act Three. But that doesn't change the fact that the correct presentation of such an interaction is for it to unfold in front of us, primarily through action and dialogue, so that we can directly appreciate the implications of what is happening, rather than as a reflected bit of back story.

Then you have showing, when a bit of telling would make things much clearer. While he is in the waiting room, you make much of the painting, and music and the other things that he sees and experiences as sense data. This is the movie script version of a scene that needed to be rendered in full prose, with both internal and external experience interwoven to offer us the full tapestry of your main character's situation. The stuff he sees and hears doesn't really give us enough, particularly since you are settling for inadequate prose translations from the language of cinema, second hand results that offer none of the direct visual and aural input that in a movie would make the scene meaningful. What cinema lacks, however, is what your narrative style through this also lacks: the exploitation of language to move effortlessly through time and space, both internal and external. It is here that you would be able to provide us with some additional context to fill in the gaps, the scope that a purely phenomenological rendition cannot encompass. As it is, we're standing outside the full story, gazing through dusty windows at a scene that just doesn't make much sense.
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Review by edgework
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Rated: 13+ | (2.5)
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An interesting exercise you've set for yourself here; writing about your writing. Explorations of the creative process can often be boring, given that so much of the "action" is entirely internal, subjective and relevant only to the one doing the creating.

Peter Shaffer managed to do a decent job in Amadeus, and he did so by exploring Mozart's character and the specific problems he faced in attempting to create the works for which he is famous. Those works themselves were more or less footnotes to the actual storyline. It was Mozart's efforts to tame his demons and to harness his creative energies that was the focus, not any of the particular results of his efforts.

Your assignment for this piece was to create a profile of yourself in the form of a memoir. Generally memoirs are reflections of people who have something significant to reflect upon. Retired generals, presidents, business leaders, spiritual advisors, explorers, survivors of one sort or other—people whose lives were interesting, and whose reflections on those interesting events others would themselves find interesting. So your challenge in writing a memoir is, first and foremost, to make your life interesting.

Ah, but what if I haven't led armies, run giant corporations, influenced the lives of uncounted multitudes, or survived a disaster? So what? All lives are interesting, in that they all reflect daily efforts to make sense of the chaos of existence, do something meaningful and, maybe, just maybe, leave something useful for the generations to come.

Where you falter is in your primary focus. You don't really tell us much about yourself, mistakenly thinking that the nature of the stories you've struggled to write is more important than your struggle to write them. In truth, we don't much care what you've written. This isn't supposed to be about your body of work. It's about you, and what it's meant for you to attempt to create something out of nothing, as is the case with all artists. Your success in this piece will be measured by the degree to which you give your reader a glimpse into the issues you grapple with on personal and intellectual levels.

Right now all you've done is to provide us with a sort of catalog of stuff happening. I wrote this, then i wrote that, then I got tired of that and wrote something else. As I said, who cares? There are other venues for you to market the fruits of your labor, and your stories sound interesting enough that it would probably be worth the effort. But in memoir, you have to make us care about you. That means getting under the surface of what you did and finding a way to tell us how you were affected and changed by the process.
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Review of Her Tears  
Review by edgework
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Rated: E | (2.5)
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Poetry, by virtue of the fact that it enjoys a category separate from and equal to prose, would then seem to be about language doing things apart from what it would do if it were prose. Prose is where one goes for arguments, discussions, narratives, opinions, proposals, rebuttals, as well as descriptions of objects, conditions, situations and delineations of hierarchical relationships both temporal and metaphysical. The one common thread that joins the myriad prose expressions is that the language is meant to convey some element beyond the words on the page. That element, or elements, is what the words exist to serve. Sense, in prose, is the degree to which the words accomplish their task of conveying these external elements to the reader.

So right out of the gate, we are safe in assuming that a poem isn't going to stake its claim to greatness solely on what it's about, whether it has a specific subject or chooses to wander over more obscure linguistic terrains. Nothing's wrong with poems that have a subject, but what makes them memorable is how language is manipulated, coaxed and coerced into places that prose simply cannot go.

So that brings us to the question that must be asked of this, or any poem. Is it simply about what the surface content suggests, or have the internal structures of the language been harnessed to enhance, embellish and expand the scope of that surface content? An honest assessment in this case is made more difficult by the fact that this is clearly a personal expression of remorse and despair, with which we can surely empathize; putting such emotions into words can have a positive effect, objectifying the ineffable, allowing one to gain some distance from the immediate impact of the events that influenced the writing in the first place. However, that personal connection is missing for the larger audience who will encounter your poem. While we can read the content and appreciate the emotions in play, our response remains an intellectualization; we are able to acknowledge another's pain, but we do not feel it ourselves.

In order for a poem to accomplish that difficult feat, there are several devices at your disposal which you have not taken advantage of. First and foremost, you must find a way to get us to engage with the language itself, not just with the content that it is conveying. In a poem like this, rhyme and meter are powerful tools to build added layers of meaning and interpretation into the words. You've adhered more or less to a rhyme scheme, but deviate in too many places for it to be thought of as consistent. Your meter is all over the place, yet, like your rhymes, there is just enough consistency to make one think that was the goal, but a goal unrealized. For example, stanza one now reads:

f a woman cries alone in the dark but no one sees
If she yells out with pain but no one hears
If no one cares as her tears fall
Is she really there at all?

Your first line scans nicely into six beats. Unfortunately, those six beats stick out anomalously when compared with all that follows. Also, the effect of the second line, paring the verb yells with no one hearing is obscured in the first: crying alone in the dark is mostly the type of condition that is also heard, not seen. The fourth line contains an extraneous word, really, the elimination of which would match it to the same line in stanzas two and three, assuming everything was read as two foot lines, not quite an inevitable conclusion:

Is she there at all,

just a haunting memory

until it's missing

The opening lines of stanzas three and four also contain a nice symmetry:

Can you picture, in your mind,

Would you have been so full of pride,

But again and again, you deny us the satisfaction such consistency of rhythm offers, using lines like that six-foot opening, or else lines that, while they scan well enough, do so differently than other lines occupying the same slot in other stanzas.

Likewise your rhymes mostly trip us up. You have these: fall / all, hear / clear, pride / died, which are true rhymes; then you have sees / hears, give / hid, kneel / farewell, which are near rhymes, But then, right in the middle, you drop unheard / missing which causes the entire edifice to crumble. You don't get credit for bits here and there. It's only when the poem as a whole is internally consistent that it can work its linguistic magic and become something more than a simple conveyance of information and data. If you set up our expectations with four line stanzas that seem to want to rhyme and adhere to a fixed meter, and only succeed half the time, our experience will be of a poem that didn't accomplish what it set out to do.

An interesting and useful side effect of forcing your lines to conform to standards that are separate from the surface content is that quite often you mush rewrite them using more precise images to attain your effect.

A more drastic rethinking of the poem would be to trade in the largely narrative language you now use for the language of immediacy. You are not so much narrating a sequence of events as you are describing your state of mind from all angles, describe being the salient term. That's something that prose does well. Poems can as well, but poems, by virture of their line, a structure no where to be found in prose, have the ability to fragment experience, break it into smaller pieces than is appropriate for sentences and paragraphs, juxtapose unrelated elements and, by virtue of their proximity, create links betwen them. Poems are much more at home with such language, conjuring up the experience for the reader instead of merely telling us that it took place.

Or simply describing it. It might not be as clear, but we'll get it much more directly.
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Review by edgework
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Rated: ASR | (3.5)
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This is a polemic cleverly disguised as a conversation. It's not quite a diatribe; still, you take a clearly defined position and set it in opposition to a different position, also clearly defined. I say it is cleverly disguised, because in the course of your conversation you slip in the suggestion of character, and we can almost place the whole event in a real world setting. I call it a polemic, however, because that is not really your intention. Your characters are secondary to the position you espouse, although, were you to simply present your opinion in an essay, it wouldn't be nearly as interesting. Themes never are particularly interesting on their own. It is when they are hidden beneath the surface of the narrated events, guiding your characters and their motivations, that they allow you to make your points without having to work at it. That's what I'd like to see you do with this.

Right now, it's better than mere propaganda, but it's only halfway to a story. You have decent characters in mind. My suggestion: cut them loose from your agenda and discover what's going on in their own lives. They each have a story, one that, for whatever improbable reason, brought them into contact with each other in this moment. Neither story is probably all that dramatic or significant: most ordinary stories in ordinary lives are fairly mundane. It is your job, as author, to uncover the significance locked away in the ordinary, spin it into an arc that transports the reader from one point, drops him off at another, and gives him a sense that, whatever it was that took place in the interim, it was worth the trip.

In the course of uncovering the story here, you will have all the opportunity you need to let your concerns rise to the surface. Of course, it is those concerns that your piece it actually about, as is fitting and proper. But when you offer us characters with something at stake, some goal, some reason for being in motion, you'll place your theme in its proper place, and it will make a much bigger impact.

These are good characters, and it's a decently imagined conversation. Find the story from which it's been lifted and tell it.
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Review by edgework
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Rated: E | (2.5)
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These are two haiku written in what you call Familiar Form.

The notion of an English language Haiku has always been an arbitrary classification. The idea that 17 syllables arranged in a 5-7-5 pattern is in any way analogous to traditional arrangements of sound units in Japanese is pretty much a baseless assumption. Japanese haiku are an organic extension of the structure of the language, the way it is organized, the way it sounds and the relationship between sound and sense. None of those qualities can be directly translated into English. So in a way it's kind of open season for English language poets, and that's the way the form seems to have evolved. Some poets adhere to a 5-7-5 structure; some try to mimic the Japanese practice of a "seasonal" word; some refrain from abstractions and interpretive language, only allowing hard images of objective phenomena from the natural world to appear. Others seem to do whatever they want, dropping the syllable count in favor of an overall brevity of content and structure, losing the need for seasonal references, even dropping the objective imagery in favor of abstract thoughts. In the end, as always, it's about the language, not the form.

So I read these two "haiku" and I have to wonder about the language. The first, in particular, seems plagued by a stubborn refusal to conform to grammar and syntax as we commonly understand them. Not in itself a flaw, necessarily, unless such warping of the accepted rules seems to serve no purpose beyond itself. Effects simply for their own sake are precisely what poetry—any poetry—is meant to avoid. Poetry is about pushing language not only to its limits, but beyond them, allowing it to make connections and conjure up environments that are more linguistic than temporal. When effects are simply sprinkled about, there are no connections, either deep or superficial. Your first line,

I see trees to calm

immediately sets up an expectation of a relationship between the act of seeing trees, and a calming influence this has on... what? Something is implied in the structure of the words, but in your second sentence,

wearing on colorful charms

we are left hanging. Not only does it not complete the first line in any sense—and, in fact, robs the first line of any sense—the line makes no sense on its own.

The last line,

posing a pure form.

is both unrelated to the previous lines, and too obscure on its own to wrap things up into a tidy, linguistic nugget. It's the kind of line meant to sound significant, but which, on closer inspection, is devoid of content.

It's not the lack of clean syntax that is weak; it's the lack of any real imagery. Show us something that we can process as sense data, we'll form connections; we can't help it, that's what our brains do, form patterns in the chaos. But you need to either give us some arresting images, or make the language exceptional in what it strives to accomplish. Instead, what you have given us is an unlabeled container yet to be filled. Nothing much suggests itself in your lines, other than trees. But we don't really see them. All we really have is an idea of trees with some indistinct concepts draped over their branches. Like a blurry, out of focus photograph, we sense that there is something there, but the details are forever beyond our reach.


Your second haiku fares a bit better in the grammar and syntax department. The first line, while a little awkward,

Neighboring trees soft

gives us meaningful content in that we recognize the word soft to be a modifier of the noun trees, even though we wouldn't necessarily speak that way. Likewise, the second line delivers a coherent phrase that conveys an image we can discern:

bending each to each on rock.

So far, you're on solid ground. An actual moment is in the process of being created, a bit of time carved out of the larger flow. Your third line, however, breaks the mood of immediacy—

are about to talk.

This is pure narrative interpretation. In this line the trees fade into the background and the silent observer steps from the shadows and calls attention to himself.

You might retain the POV from within the moment instead of stepping outside it to comment. What is it that they say to each other? What actually happens, in the moment? Give us that hard nugget of reality and spare us the distraction of wondering "Wait, how does he know that? And who is he, anyway, and where did he come from?" That's what happens when you inject a narrator into the midst of what has been a snapshot. It's simply an unnecessary (and weakening) complication.
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Review of Better  
Review by edgework
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Rated: 13+ | (2.5)
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You've come up with a couple of distinct characters, both flawed, always good for plot complications. They have a history and definitely have the potential to gather a plot around themselves. Unfortunately, all you've provided them with so far is a conversation about things they both know and both know that the other knows.

You definitely have a main character in Fowler, and a protagonist in the other guy, who, unless I missed something, you leave unnamed. Let's call him "P", for protagonist. The main character is the point of entry for your reader, the character with whom we identify and whose reactions provide us with the emotional dimension of the story. The protagonist drives the events that impact on the main character's story. The problem is that you've failed to give your main character a story, and the events that you have your protagonist driving are long in the past. Thus, the conversation about things they both already know, offered in the hope that the reader will somehow channel the drama and tension that they are discussing. But that's not going to happen. All the reader experiences is two guys talking.

This isn't to say that your set-up is crippled, only that you haven't exploited it on its own terms. You need to figure out what Fowler wants. Right now he doesn't want much of anything that we can discern. We don't know why he's there. We're told that he has ambivalent feelings toward P, but it would be far more effective were you to give them something to actually do that would allow us to witness Fowler's ambivalence.

While we're on the subject of giving your characters stories, you might give your protagonist one that takes place in the present. Aside from overdosing. That's not a bad thing to have happen, but right now we have no idea why it's taking place. Why are they there, again?

A classic way to approach this would simply be to have P ask something of Fowler and show Fowler's conflict over whether or not he should comply. That way you don't have to keep them sitting on their butts while they tell the reader what to think. You'll show them doing what they do, and you can trust your reader to draw the necessary conclusions. But unless you show us a character forced to make a decision, take an action, and then deal with the (sometimes unexpected) consequences, there will be nothing to draw us in. They're like wind-up toys going through a programmed set of motions. We watch, but there's nothing to make us care.
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Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
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Interesting idea and set-up though it suffers from its brevity. There is more story here than you are able to tell within the self-imposed restrictions you've created for yourself. Your main character is certainly interesting and probably deserves a full story devoted to her. Right now, all you really have is a fragment of a character sketch.

The primary problem with your structure is that nothing much happens. To be sure, lots of stuff has already happened, and we're reasonably certain that just as soon as she leaves the room, some pretty intense stuff will get underway again. But within the parameters of the story's present, she wakes up, goes to the window, thinks about some stuff, has a minimalist conversation with her partner, thinks about some more stuff, then leaves.

What she did six hours earlier, despite your assurances that it was dramatic, and bloody and oh so intense, remains outside our experience. All we experience is the narrator. We don't even get much of an experience of the girl. Not really. We understand that she lost someone to whom she felt close, but we don't know much more than that. Certainly not enough to feel any empathy for her current situation—what little we know of it.

I think you have a character here with potential. Find a story for her, or figure out a way to actually tell us this story instead of simply referring to it and assuring us that a story took place. We'd rather go there ourselves.
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Review of Broken Bird  
Review by edgework
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Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
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You have a decent narrative voice and you use it to turn out well-crafted prose. You've done your homework and paid attention to the "How To Write" stuff: active voice, Show, don't tell, things like that. You call yourself "a relatively young writer." That could cover a wide age range, but I do sense a lack of trust in your own inner voice, relying too heavily on some of those writerly rules instead of just finding the words to say what you intend.

Take the age-old maxim Show, don't tell. Clearly good advice, specifically designed to keep you from settling for something like this:

He was in a bad mood and I was in a bad mood and so we had a big fight and then I left.

It would seem that a lot of things could have been shown in that passage that are now hidden behind that quick, summarized bit of telling, events that would make it far more interesting for the reader. It would seem.

The problem is, no one actually invokes that rule in its full form, which is as follows:

Show, don't tell, except when it's better to tell rather than show.

Some things can't be presented clearly simply by giving us a phenomenological accounting of all the small events that take place in sequence. That's the movie script way of doing things; in a movie script all you have available to you is action and dialogue. The audience, however, has myriad clues both visual and aural that provide context. You don't have any of those. So, when you simply present this passage as a series of things that are shown, we don't really know what's going on. This is immediately after she's been struck and fallen to the ground.

Sweaty hands twisted the rough fabric of my jeans. Only after several deep breaths did I calm enough to see it was my own hands gripping my jeans, my own hands so close to a very vivid square of white. Using all my strength, I scrambled to my knees and grabbed with numb fingers. The note snapped in the wind, making it difficult for my unfeeling fingers to unfold. Upon it was a single sentence in his bold script:

‘Lesson learnt yet, my Raven?’ As I knelt, huddled and staring, blood dripped from my jaw onto the paper, staining it. Only hours later, when it was a bloody ball in my grasp, did my exhaustion take hold and allow me to sleep. I drifted in that world of violent dreams until dawn; it was only then I returned to a world of violent reality.

Each element here is presented in the same way that it would unfold on the movie screen in your mind. Camera close-up on the hands; pull back to reaval whose hands; focus on the note beside her (yes, it's a white square but on screen we'd see that it's a piece of paper). And then there's the voice. It has already been introduced, yet we still know nothing about it. Whose voice? From where? We don't know. Is it a man, woman, child, talking parrot? We don't know. It's simply a voice, one that, on screen, would have clearly belonged to the same person who hit her and it would clearly be a man. The relationship between them would be shown through their interaction, body language, her facial expression.

Nothing is clear here and it's because you're just trying to show us stuff. What you really need to do is tell us what's going on. Those momentary bits of hard experience, while physically accurate, serve only to pull us out of the imaginary universe you've created for us and which we're only too happy to explore. But for us to be able to do that, the words themselves should never get in the way or call attention to themselves. (Great writers' words call attention to themselves all the time, of course, but that's because it's great writing.)

You need to trust yourself to simply tell us what is going on. You don't need a close-up blow-by-blow account of everything. Sometimes you need to use exposition to provide continuity and context. In your opening, for all your "showing," it's still not clear exactly what happened, and in what sequence. Does the unnamed male leave her with the note, then come back for her later. Is anyone with him? Is she a prisoner? You need to tell us these things and they don't all need to be shown.

Style aside, you might want to ask yourself some fundamental questions about why you are writing fiction and what it is you wish to accomplish with it. What are your underlying assumptions? Does your story embody those assumptions? In other words, are you saying what you think you are saying?

Regardless of genre, stories are about characters grappling with events and circumstances, making decisions and taking actions. It is not the events themselves that catch our attention, it is the process your character goes through as they respond to them. If we don't care about your character, we certainly won't care whether or not he/she wins or loses. Conversely, if you've gone to the trouble to create a character that we are able to identify with and care about, it seems like bad form, at the very least, to simply leave her, and us, lost in a pit of despair. Failure and futility make for great plot complications, but when they become the fundamental theme of your story, readers are going to get cranky and wonder why they invested the effort.

Riley is presented as someone who makes her own choices, who is unwilling to simply be part of the status quo, who isn't willing to do what's expected of her simply because that's the way it's always been done. So what does it say about your priorities as an author when you allow her efforts to come to naught? When she is subdued, humiliated and, as your title has it, broken?

Am I saying that all stories have to end with sweetness and light? Heck no. Sidney Carton lost his head in A Tale of Two Cities, yet it was a triumph, a win, an affirmation of some higher principle. The universe you've created is a bleak place indeed, devoid of hope, possibility, and utterly indifferent to individual effort. Sounds a little like real life. Who needs that? We have enough of that already.
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Review of Frank and Betty  
Review by edgework
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Rated: ASR | (2.5)
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There are many problems with this piece but perhaps nothing sums them up better than the fact that your opening paragraph and your closing paragraph are identical. That alone would cause one to wonder if anything actually happened in the course of the proceedings. The actual content of those paragraphs adds to our concern:

Frank and Betty had shared an apartment on the outskirts of town for the past three years without incident. They weren’t lovers. They were just two people that lived together and cared for each other exceptionally well. That was it.

That pretty much says it all. This is not a story, it's a description of a condition or situation. As Frank and Betty's relationship seems to be devoid of incidents, so too the story you have written. I use the word story loosely because the absence of incidents is, by definition, an indication that there is no story.

Still, an examination of a situation, exploiting the potential for revelatory moments, can make for a compelling read. If not compelling, at least we might encounter a kind of prose equivalent of a film documentary, where a camera intrudes itself into a situation in order to capture it as it unfolds.

Alas, you steadfastly refuse to grant your reader access to any of these events. All we get is a summary of what events you would have included in this piece had you chosen to actually write it rather than refer to it. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

Frank had never met anyone with as much energy as she had, nor had he ever particularly wanted to, but he learned to deal with it quickly. She would often leave with friends to scale cliffs, bike down dangerous paths, or backpack through pure wilderness, and at first, she would happily leave Frank to watch the apartment and the cats by himself. Then, one autumn day, she suddenly decided to take him with her. He agreed grudgingly. He couldn’t make it back to the car on his own two feet.

Note the conditional She would often leave with friends to scale cliffs... This is a generic summary of activities that tend to describe Betty. What would have worked here (and everywhere else in the story) would have been to give us an actual scene, containing action and dialogue that unfolds in a specific time frame. Not what she usually would do, but something that she actually does, right in front of us so we can see the actions ourselves and draw our own conclusions.

Later in the same paragraph you have these three sentences:

Then, one autumn day, she suddenly decided to take him with her. He agreed grudgingly. He couldn’t make it back to the car on his own two feet.

Did you catch the missing scene? Neither did I. It's missing. You might consider actually writing it so we can see Frank and Betty interacting, working things out between them, finding some kind of common ground despite their glaringly inconsistent priorities. That's how you get your reader involved. You let them experience the story themselves and then you step aside while they form their own conclusions. When you do all the concluding for us, neglecting to put in any primary material... well, we'll take your word for it, but we really won't care. Your narrative voice isn't enough to make us care. You have to give us Frank and Betty, in the flesh, doing what they do, to engage us.

Then, there's that stuff about ...without incident. Really? Why, then, would you bother to write about them? More to the point, why would we bother to read? We have our own boring lives in the real world. That's the truth about most real world existences: they proceed without incident. It's mostly the same old stuff, day in, day out. Maybe the house next door catches fire. Maybe Aunt Mabel gets sick and dies suddenly. Maybe Momma runs off with the plumber. But usually not. Real life doesn't contain stories. Even when it contains real events, they're pretty much a disorganized mess. This happens, that happens, then something else happens and if you're lucky the bank doesn't foreclose and you live to see the kids grow up. But nothing really organizes itself into a narrative that has meaning.

As an author, your job is to take the raw data of whatever world you've envisioned and create the narrative that carries your characters and your readers from the beginning to the end, with some form of shift along the way that gives a purpose to everything. What you are doing here is avoiding your obligation to your readers. If after they reach the end, and they wonder "What's the point?" you really do what them to come up with something more than "Not much," for an answer.

You've given us the unchanging version of Frank and Betty's relationship. Stories are about "What if?" situations. What if something unexpected happened? What if the smooth surface was suddenly disrupted? What if Betty's anger got out of control one time? What if Frank decided he was tired of being a kept boy? What if someone else invaded their platonically pure space and created (gasp!) jealousy? What if... what if... what if.... You have to try to surprise yourself, your characters and your reader.

That's your job.
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Review by edgework
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Rated: E | (3.0)
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Your first sonnet in nine years, eh? Sonnets are tricky; they've been done so well, for so long, it's hard to find new things for them to do. At least you don't litter your text with dumb stuff like thee and thou and doth. If you're going to make it relevant, you need to use relevant language.

On the other hand, if you're going to go to the trouble of evoking a classic form, you might as well be precise. Your content is okay, but you're going to have to work a bit to get up to speed with your iambic pentameter. One could argue that making a form relevant precludes slavishly adhering to such a fixed meter; I wouldn't agree, but that defense is unavailable to you in any event. It's clear that you are hearing iambic pentameter in your head. You just aren't nailing it.

Here's the trick with any structural form: it's not about how well you follow the rules; it's how well you hide the fact that you're following rules. That means that whatever the form requires, you need to get the job done with language that reads naturally, as though these were the words you would have used in any event and Wow, what a coincidence, they just happen to all rhyme, or every third line repeats, or, as would be your goal, each line scans into five perfect metrical feet. Some of your lines do, in fact. Others manage it only by placing the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABles. And other lines don't scan at all.

Here are some of your lines that scan well:

Un - i- / ver - sal / grav - i- / ta - tion / a law

From cen- / turies past / comes - a / scen - ar / i - o

From ink / in quill / to parch- / ment put, / to keys

on a / board we / write let- / ters to / be read

The spondee / pyrrhic combination (two strong beats followed by two weak) in the last example is nice.


Here is one that works only by resorting to an unnatural reading of the words:

a grand / new vi- / sion that / for New- / ton made

Truth is you wouldn't emphasize that. The natural rhythm trips you up on those three weak beats in a row, which is exactly the kind of thing good scansion is intended to avoid.

This line has a couple of problems:

but some- / thing to / em- brace, / then in time / will come

The word to is taking an unnatural strong beat, whereas then probably is being forced to sound weaker than is natural.

This line scans into four feet:

that know- / ledge gained / is no- / thing to dread

This line can't be forced into any kind of pentameter:

He stood in awe of those whence his ideas came,

Learn to recognize and look for metrical feet and note when they are absent. There are only six that matter. If you're not sure how they appear and are properly used, there are myriad sources on the web and on this site. "Poetic Feet and Meter"  will give you a decent enough intro to the topic. (Full disclosure: I wrote it).

Your end rhymes are good. No moon / swoon / June tripe here. I particularly liked scenario / Galieo.

Tighten up your metre, you'll be good to go.
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Review by edgework
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Rated: 18+ | (4.5)
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A couple of anecdotes from my own life struck me as relevant, as I struggled to collect my thougthts on this piece, and so in a burst of self-indulgence, I'll share them.

At one time, I'd thought I might delve seriously into computer programming as a career and enrolled in a two year curriculum towards that end. Their application contained an interesting section on pattern recognition. Sets of characters, such as Yn3ob, eZ9bX, WsSy3 were accompanied by syntactical rules explaining how elements could be linked together, and then you had to decide which of a given batch of possibilities was the correct set of statements. I passed the test but washed out of the career (the dot-com bubble had just popped); it was, however, a useful exercise in how meaningful results can be derived from meaningless content.

The career I stayed with, image retouching, has long been the source of bizarre images produced through the various effects that programs like Photoshop make possible. One such effect that was popular back in the early days involved creating a basic color palette from an image, then substituting it with the palette of a different image. A desert scene, for example, would have a palette from a woodland scene applied to it, or perhaps an ocean scene might sport the colors of a building on fire. The results didn't make sense, yet there was a certain internal consistency to the content, as though there might perhaps be a parallel universe somewhere in which such an image could make sense.

Both conditions came to mind as i read your piece. It doesn't really make sense, but it sounds like maybe it should, somewhere other than here. Like the image with its color palette switched, we find familiar structures of communication filled with unfamiliar and unrelated content. Actually the content isn't unconnected; motifs appear, reappear, suggest additional motifs which also reappear in different forms. But there are no deeper structures; it is all on the surface. Towards the end there is a hint of a deeper connection, that perhaps this is really about the writer's father, but that is just another surface construct, using the mechanisms of metaphor without actually allowing the metaphor to stand for anything beyond itself.

It's not clear what form of communication is being usurped. There are seventeen blocks of text, each containing a subject line that refers to the previous text's subject, suggesting that we are eavesdropping on an email exchange, and in the beginning we discern statements that appear to be responses to previous statements, though that proves to be a mirage. The initial subject line is {no subject} and each subsequent subject line is {re: no subject}, which could be considered an admirable case of truth in advertising, but, like everything in this piece, one must question all assumptions. I suspect it's simply a recursive logical loop as in the sentence This statement is false, and so challenges our attempts to parse symbolic references and meaning from our texts while laughing at those efforts as well. In any event, the second voice dissipates leaving us with more of a blog than a conversation.

One question that arises with writing like this: how does one know when the end has been reached? There is no arc, only the appropriation of the strategies involved in creating one. We know the end has come since the language takes on the trappings of summing up, of drawing conclusions, of resolution. Also, it stops. But of the material being summed up there has been no logical progression; points are made that refer to events that appear, then vanish. Arguments are suggested that morph into different conversations, all with a fluid movement that, while denying the desire for a subject, definitely offers a content-rich experience. But how does one know that it's come time for the writing to end? For my money, I think it went on a bit too long, but it was never a boring ride.

Writing like this doesn't exist as a puzzle for the reader to unlock. All the "clues" thwart expectations. But the absence of subtext doesn't mean that there has been no room left for the addition of such, only that it is up to the reader to complete the connections, as though we've been placed in a room with lots of oddly shaped blocks scattered on the floor, and the author is saying to us, "Let's see what you can build with these." Those who like their prose to actually refer to external elements that are identifiable and familiar will likely respond, "What, are you crazy?" On the other hand, you might have a go at it. There is much to tease the brain here, and you just might find yourself succumbing to our species' need to find patterns in the overwhelming flow of data that comes to us daily.

But there will be no outside observer behind a mirror taking notes, turning our own reactions into meaningful summaries. Which pretty much sums up the way we function anyway, right? Meaning is where you find it.
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