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Printed from https://www.writing.com/main/profile/reviews/warmduscher
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24 Public Reviews Given
32 Total Reviews Given
Review Style
Just my personal opinion. Don't expect grammar or spelling help. I usually gloss over formal issues in favor of the general style.
I'm good at...
Blunt honesty. I'll tell you what I dislike.
Favorite Genres
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Cyberpunk
Least Favorite Genres
Erotic, Slash-Fic and Fanfiction in general
I will not review...
Well, anything I can't think of anything to say about. Good or bad, just don't be dreadfully dull. Unless it's so dull that I feel I need to comment about it again.
Public Reviews
1
1
Review by Warmduscher
Rated: 13+ | (3.5)
Hello there,

keep in mind that this review is entirely subjective. Others may and will disagree.

That said I do wonder first what you hope to achieve by copying the glowing reviews on top. It personally scared me more away from reading it then the opposite. This site isn't the back of a book; the reviews you get are hopefully independent from popular opinion or bestseller lists.

To get on topic though, I kinda like it.

It wasn't the first reaction I had to the story, at first I wanted to rip it to pieces with disagreements about the meaning of colors, how he couldn't rely on second-perfect timing and medical concerns about eye transplants.

I then realized that this isn't the point. It's clearly marked as a children story and that role it fulfills very well. I want to call the story heartwarming, but that doesn't fit very well either with another child splattered by a train in the finale.

My honest conclusion is that it works very well only when you don't think too closely about it. So it will work for children.... I think. All in all I'm too old and cynical to judge it fairly.

Take this as you like and keep those 2K GP. I don't regard this as a really in-deapth review myself. I'm too confused about my opinion for that.

Greetings,
Warmduscher
2
2
Review of The Witness  
Review by Warmduscher
Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
Heya, please take into account that this review is very subjective. Others may and will disagree.

That said, this piece very much felt like a trailer to me. What's coming next? A revenge story from the viewpoint of little Andino going into the footsteps and looking into the murder of his father? A Hitman-style story of Mikhaila's expolits and career? Flashbacks how poor Pietro ended up in this situation?

As the stated goal of Flash Fiction though....I don't really know if it works that well. I feel either tossed into the middle or of the start of a story and the final paragraph doesn't do it for me as closure. In terms of grammar, spelling and other formal terms, I got nothing to criticize, but the whole framework doesn't appeal to me.

So in the end I hope you're not angry about a 3-Star judgement as I can't really call it anything but meh.

Greetings,
Warmduscher
3
3
Review by Warmduscher
Rated: 13+ | (2.0)
Hi there,

please take into account that this review is entirely subjective. Others may and will disagree.

That said, I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to do there to be honest. It frankly really isn't an interview. There is no room for your personal opinions and experiences in an interview; the goal is to represent the tales and opinions of the interviewed accurately, steered by your questions to the interviewed.

You spent about 4 lines on your interview with James out of 30 of mostly your own thoughts. I fail to see a point or anything to do with the detective Tag as I can't identify any point that isn't just a retelling of your own opinion.

My most charitable interpretation would be to assume that you only really want to retell your own unhappy experiences under the guise of an interview. Just because of that possibility I can't stomach to give you 1 Star as that would feel rather mean in such a case.

So, in total you might either want to reconsider what you think is an interview or try a less veiled method to cope with your experiences.
Either way, I'm sorry, I can only tear this peace down.

Don't be too discouraged,
Warmduscher
4
4
Review of Veniam: Prologue  
Review by Warmduscher
Rated: 13+ | (3.5)
Hello there, keep in mind that this review is utterly subjective. Others may disagree.

I don't really know if I like it to be honest. Especially in the first part before you cut to Moscow you do something that others referred to as Thesauritis, avoiding common word choices and instead using more poetic ones, especially as you like to repeat the descriptions using different words.

Which leads me to my main hangup on this. You spend a lot of time dwelling on the descriptions and the feelings of the character which sure isn't bad when it's used as emphasis for special situations, but you do that with everything the character thinks or feels about. There's no more room for actual emphasis when his feelings about home get as close a description as the horrible burning death.

I do realize though that it's most likely a matter opf taste here and on the positive side I do like the historical setting and am curios where you're going with this. I couldn't find any formal mistakes either, so it's certainly well-written. I'll most likely check out the next parts.

Greetings,
Warmduscher
5
5
Review by Warmduscher
Rated: 13+ | (4.0)
Hello again. Please keep in mind that this review is as always completely subjective. Others may disagree.

In general I like it and it surely hooked me and motivated me to check out the other chapters.

But I do have some doubts what kind of reaction you're aiming for with the extremely flowery prose. You write in the introduction that you began writing it when you were 19 and it kinda shows. It very much feels like someone with a heavy case of thesauritis as a friend expressed it once. Meaning that you propably tried to avoid too "normal" words on purpose, instead using more sophisticated ones and describing everything in utmost detail to show it off.

Glaring too are the metaphors. Lumbering as "battlles against the mighty lord of the forest."? Seriously? I'm not intending to mock you here, but it sure come off as silly and you continue to describe mundane actions in the most epic light possible. Sometimes it feels like you're writing a poem about the act in question between the prose. It always gets a snicker out of me and I wonder if this is the intended effect.

A very minor thing that irritated me were the parts where you described things in angles. There were only three sentences with that, but it's always a pet peeve of mine as I can't imagine people thinking like that.

I got nothing to criticize about the story. It looks like you're aiming for the strange and fantastic for your characters and it works pretty well. Especially mixing the fantastic characters with mundane taks and acts work pretty well as introduction and as contrast for the combat sequences in the second half.

I got no recommendations how to change the things that bugged me, as it hangs on the general tone and writing style; I'm not sure if you'll even want to change it or if it is working as intended. Or I may just be hard to please again :)

Greetings,
Warmduscher
6
6
Review of Stubborn Hair  
Review by Warmduscher
Rated: E | (3.5)
Got to say I was pretty entertained by this. I'm usually not a friend of poems, especially not such a long one, but this kept me reading until the end. While I liked the archaic tone, the rhyming and rythm felt awkward at times. Also, since I'm not a native english speaker myself it wasn't clear at times if it's simply archaic or if you misspelled or used a wrong word altogether. Especially glaring the the title and first stanca looks like the worst offender:

"Stuborn" (misspelled Stubborn?) Hair

I "repart" (never heard of that word, did you mean report?) a tale,
Full of woe and wail,
Whose foundations lie right "it is" (in it's?) roots,
And though you may doubt,
For "these" (I think you mean those) seek us out,
I divulge that this story be true.

Sorry if this was actually correct as intended. All in all it was an nice and entertaining poem, but wording issues kept tripping me. Hope this was helpful.
Warmduscher
7
7
Review by Warmduscher
Rated: E | (3.0)
Hi there. Please keep in mind that this is a highly subjective review. Others may disagree.

I struggled a lot to be able to explain what is bugging me about this, but it finally dawned me. It is the amount of detail. I had to read this twice and on the second readthrough I noticed that I started to skip a lot of the sentences without skipping the story at all. For me the whole story looks padded; you describe things down to so much detail that you could delete the following sentences:

"With some effort his eyes opened and focused on the small white plastic piece of annoyance."

"A deep breath helped bring his mind fully awake."

Without losing any of the substance. Not to say that you "should" delete those sentences as I don't know if they serve some purpose another time. But what I do try to say here is that the seven paragraphs you spend on describing your character getting out out of bed and out of his room would be almost the length of a short story in itself.

What detail I did like was establishing the personality of the character; those regarding the feelings for the owl hunting the rabbit especially. But again you went into a lot of detail about the owl and I felt compelled to skip foward to reach the more interesting mental reaction of the character instead of following the rather clinical description of the owl's capabilities.

As I don't want to dissect your story sentence by sentence I'm going to skip fowrad here again and say that it's great and I read it gladly, but the issue of very mundane detail breaking the flow somewhat continued until the end.

Even at the coyote chase the detail provided by the character stayed mundane while the coyotes provided a more exciting narrative. Perhaps you could try to imagine a rewrite from the perspective of the coyote pack and think for yourself if that would be more interesting. Again not saying that you should try to rewrite it with a different perspective, but using that as a mental excercise could give useful hints how to improve the perspective of the actual main character. As you seem to aim for a supernatural angle, maybe it would be best to let Seth experience inhuman senses like describing what he smells and hears to a extent reserved for the coyotes?

Taken as a whole I liked the story, but with a but with reservations regarding Kai Alden who seems to serve as mentor figure. I am always suspicious about very powerful characters, but I of course can't judge how it works out in the greater story.

On the technical side I can't find any mistakes or stumbling blocks in the grammar or spelling. It is fluid to read and I can find no fault there.

On a closing note I would sure like to read the rest of the book to make up my mind about it more..
8
8
Review by Warmduscher
Rated: 13+ | (2.0)
This one is pretty hard to judge. While I like the general premise and I'm a sucker for apocalypse scenarios the characters are severely lacking for me. They give the impression of a bunch of drunken frat boys with their antics and tries to outdo each other and I can neither take them seriously nor find much humor in them. I also dislike the sudden fast-foward of 6 months where nothing happened except them just continuing their work; seems like a waste of story opportunities to explore issues with isolation and survival in their fortress, perhaps it would be better to introduce some more setting elements at this point.

There are some technical issues as well. the spelling is pretty good most of the time, but sometimes it looks like the spellchecker didn't catch some issues with words that are spelled right, but not what you mean. Let's take this sentence as example:

"Six months after the elixirs release and the first patient past (you mean passed here, not past) away through natural means, those that were present could not tell you of what happened for they were among the first to become infected, speculation could only assume that that old lady rose the same way all the others do, with that dead look in their eyes and that disgusting need for flesh."

But the most glaring issue is punctuation. Often your sentences lack commas or you place commas where a ";" or even a point would be more appropiate. Try reading your story aloud and let your speech pattern follow your punctuation and you'll realize that it sounds very unnatural. Where one would make short or even long pauses while speaking, your sentences just go on without commas. You too set commas where it really would be more appropiate to end the sentence or at least break it with a ";".

I do hope this was helpful. I do think there is quite a lot of potential in the story, but you do need to decide in what direction you want to go with the characters; make them stupid and fallible for some horror and/or humor aspects or make them badass for a more action vibe. Both doesn't work out at all for me. And the technical issues need some serious attention of course.
9
9
Review by Warmduscher
Rated: 13+ | (5.0)
All in all an excellent first chapter and it sure hooked me on the story. It told me a lot about the background already and did a good job of introducing the characters as well. What I especially liked about it is that the main character is a rather plain, even ugly women. Rare to see a female character (even less so with a main character) in a novel that isn't described as a looker in one way or the other.

A small dislike are the for my taste overblown descriptions of how infamous she is. Wanted on 316 planets with a bounty double of those three below her felt way over the top.

Take care,
Warmduscher
10
10
Review of The Jump  
Review by Warmduscher
Rated: E | (4.0)
All in all a nice and moving piece. What irked me though is the detail you put into describing the background of the war, something that felt quite out of place for me in the thoughts of a soldier ready to go into action.

The speech of the leader was a nice touch and could've been used more effectively to convey the reasons for the war in the speech itself short and to the point instead of devoting whole paragraphs of background in between the speech.

Than you for sharing.
11
11
Review of Third Shift  
Review by Warmduscher
Rated: 13+ | (3.5)
Hmm, nice and well done story but I think the part when he started to investigate the unusual success of the third shift deserves way more detail. Especially as the backstory took quite a bit of room, the rest of the story feels cramped together for me.

That the disappearance of the cousin was handled in a single sentence was a downer as well, this could be drawn out a bit to increase the horror elements and could forshadow more of a threat to the owner.

All in all I think this story just needs a few more horror elements leading to the supernatural conclusion, so it causes a more emotional reaction from the reader. As it is it felt as well told but kinda stale for me as an avid horror fanboy.

But as always only my personal opinion and taken with the usual grain of salt.
12
12
Review of The Bench  
Review by Warmduscher
Rated: E | (4.0)
Hmmm, quite a nice one. The change of style after "But what the Heck!" was a stumbling block for me though.

Also it seems a bit stereotypical, reminds me of the many tv documentaries about this theme.

But maybe thought-provoking for someone who hasn't any real contact with the poor and homeless and in the best case it may encourage people to go out and talk with them and hear their story.
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