Try to read your own work aloud before posting.
Try to review other people's work before posting.
Even shoddy written reviews can still help an writer understand what their piece does, but you shouldn't force it or think crit for crit is mandatory.
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“Which one are you? Wonder Woman?”
“Which superhero? I don't know. Superman I guess. I only know Superman and Batman and Batman is the rich one so I can't be him,”
“Do you like superheroes? There are a lot of superhero movies coming out now,”
Like wolves, men are, she thinks. Clever, singleminded, opportunistic.
“How old are you?” she asks.
“Superhero stuff is for older people now too. It's not just for kids,”
“I’m thirty six,” she says, “I think superheroes and Supermen and knights on white horses and all that stuff is just make believe. I'm not interested,”
“So what? I’m twenty five. I think superheroes are great. Think about all the real, actual villains in the world. Wouldn't it be great if someone could just swoop in and flush all those bastards down the drain?”
“It’s a good story,” she says, “but it's just make believe,”
“I think we need make believe no matter how old you get. Life is hard. I like the Hulk. You know the Hulk?”
“He's green right?”
“Yeah but he also gets stronger the madder he gets and I like that. I think it's pretty cool. When life is hard I get mad and I just want to be strong enough to make a change. Like smash a building or something, you know what I mean?”
“Why is it that men always need to blow something up when they get upset?”
“Stop. Come on, I was just trying to say I like that the Hulk can do something about being upset. Most of us, we just sit here and have to take it. Or drink,”
“Get out of here,” she says, dismisses him with a wave “I have a job to do,”
“It’s a hard job,” he answers, “I know all about it. I don’t know why I stay sometimes,”
“I don’t know why I stay at all,”
“You should check out some other bar. The place I used to work at, the girl bartenders would make money left and right. Old rich guys, young rich guys, all you have to do is pour them a drink and they’d slide you all kinds of bills. If you went, I would put in my word,”
“You can just walk up and ask?”
“Yeah. You just say you’ve worked in other places and you want a job,”
It’s always easy, isn’t it?
“Can you just get out? I have to do this,”
“Alright. Goddamn. You want me gone so bad, I’m gone. I’ll be back at five,”
She doesn’t thank him again. When she hears the door close she pours herself black coffee and takes the eggs from the carton. She cuts pork roll from the torpedo in the freezer with the bread knife and fries it on the flat top while she toasts bread in its fat.
When she cut the packaging, she held the knife tight. She fried up her sandwich and wiped the sweat off her forehead when she realized she was sweating.
It feels like all the blood in pooling in her feet, but she goes out to the front door, cuts some of the eyeshadow with the knuckle of her thumb, turns the latch and pulls till she sees the faces of the men beyond. She smiles and says,
“Good morning, boys. Don’t you all want to come in?"
>cuts some of the eyeshadow with the knuckle of her thumb
Clarify?
She uses the point of the kunckle of her thumb to make a thick line of eyeshadow a less-thick line of eyeshadow. I thought it would go down as a kind of cutting, quick motion of the hand. I also considered "thins" and "wipes" but I preferred "cuts" after some consideration.
Really good, but more context needed. It's pretty unclear what is going on beyond a woman and man chatting about superheroes, etc. Allegory and deeper meanings aside, it seems the woman is some kind of server (bartender?) and they guy is a customer/regular. But then why does he leave as she opens shop (is that what's happening here?)? Why do you switch from present to past when she cut the packaging? Can you explain to me exactly when and where we are and the relationships between the characters? Nice prose, clean.
Hey I would love context, but the forum has a word limit and this is the new part of the thing I was writing. "Clean" is all I need to hear, it means I'm doing what I should be doing. Thank you.
If you guys post material, just indicate it's yours and I'll critique in turn. Thanks again.
...
I eat the carrot, the orange tissue crushed under my great molars. Well the dentist says they are great at least. His name is Doctor Abdullah. He came from Qatar. As for the carrot, there is little hope left. Soon I will subject it to the acidic fire. The dissolution of a once formidable vegetable sort of turns me on to be honest. It is subject to the torturous chemical bath, a fate which all my meals suffer. I envisage the vile solvents transforming the carrot's flesh, renewing the orange tissue with redemptive fire and think to myself, "damn, I forgot to take my thorazine today." No matter, for evidently, I was fated not to! We men are not too dissimilar from carrots. We are born and grow and die and yet... we are not orange.
bugs. . .
I think the pace would be a lot better if this started as
"Two shapes:
[new line] One is rigid, taller. The other is rounder."
I don't dislike this piece but I think it reads too slow for what I think it's trying to do.
Dash after view, not a colon. Careful with "supine", it's something a person or an animal can do but not a teacup or a Ford unless it's for a very specific reason.
Dash after pillars again, no need for a semicolon. Nice passage "The air is grey..." Well done. Just say "the Vesta of New York".
I don't like "there is a taste of umami". I like the word "umami" it's a great word but I think in this case it's better to break that down into the meaning. "There is a rich taste, salt and sweet and fat but there is more,"
I don't like "gritty screams".
"The grit of the conveyor belts cuts the room with screams" maybe but screams is just not a good word.
"An industrial grade chimney". I don't like this last line at all.
"A smokestack coughs in the night."
I don't know what to do with the rest of that last line. It is just too messy for me. Unless whatever is being burned down there matters I would get rid of it. If the image matters to you, I would refine it.
Here's a Political Fantasy for you guys to review.
figment.com
I'm confident in my story but worried the beginning is too slow or boring.
Also I won't see your feedback unless you comment on the website.
I quickly read the first two paragraphs and despite it being a little by the numbers in terms of the genre's conventions, I have no problems. That said, I would consider flipping the first and second paragraphs in some way to get out to a faster start.
sorry for putting this off
>intoned
don't hear that a lot, but okay I guess
>second paragraph starts with and
I'm not going to act like you can't start on conjunctions, but it feels unwarranted here
>drawn in pencil
I don't think I mentioned this last time because I couldn't think of anything myself, but if you could get a single word for this it would sound better. If you say "everything but us is drawn in pencil" there's a sneaky kind of implication that makes me think the "us" is also drawn in something, just not pencil. You only said it looks that way though, so not a big deal.
You also should think about where the viewers eyes are moving in that paragraph. It's like, if we've got a house in the dark with a beam of light escaping through the cracks, the light is going to be seen first, then followed up to the house, etc. In your paragraph I get the pool, then go up to clouds, then go down to the yard, then back up to "they," the clouds (not the contents, right?), which made everything, below, look some way. Up and down and up and down. There may be a way to streamline or rearrange that. The clouds being the cause of the color scheme may not need to be explicitly stated, etc.
>noise
I still feel like the description of the noise isn't nessecary, but whatever. If you want the previous line to have more noise on its own you could say "cracked open" as opposed to just "opened," and since the line ends on pop the words would follow the sound quite well with the crack-pop.
>next three lines all start with he
I think those were originally two lines and that I told you to split the first one in half. You could take that last half and put it into the next line. They both have a his relation to the sister in common. Though I should warn you and say that making the second sister into a "her" might make the "They" in the next line less clearly refer to her and the father, and instead to the father's eyes. That whole line about the eyes betraying age escapes me honestly.
>Raindrops
>They kept on
I'm not 100% sure these are worth indenting, but I'm not sure they aren't either.
>so as not to be told to leave
I feel like this is pure explanation and not image like most of the other things in this paragraph. Could be cut or at least made smaller.
There's still a big jump between the spiral dialogue and the diving board. I can see you actually cut a confusing part of the spiral dialogue, but you could have kept those details if you'd wanted. It feels abrupt. What was unclear for me the first time through was who was speaking when, since it sounded like a monologue as opposed to a two-step dialogue. Even now it's odd that the father talks first, since he's the one who's feigning appreciation.
Could maybe remove the last indent.
I still don't have shit to post, but I'd said I would review this by the end of today and these threads die fast.
I got up to the part where *spoilers* the old whacko comes out of the streets after killing courier 200 *spoilers*.
- It's kinda boring. It felt nothing short of a grind getting up to that part, and a good book that you want to sell or entertain someone with should never feel like extra work on someone else's life, but hey, this isn't my kinda genre, so maybe that factored in.
- Up to that point it was just useless day-to-day stuff. The plot was nowhere, the direction was nowhere. But maybe that was the point? So when the crazy stuff starts happening, the contrast is more alarming?
- Writing is fine, no prose like Lolita's, but hey, work with what you know and got.
- "Raaaarrgh" is just kinda silly to read. Any kind of onomatopoeia spelt out literally looks kinda silly, childish, but I think it CAN be done (for instance the crossbow sound effects in the first Chronicles of the Black Company book, when they *spoilers* raided the tower to hunt the were-leopard *spoilers*.)
Got two here. I uploaded them at the last /crit/ but I didn't get the feedback I wanted.
Page two of the same story.
>but I didn't get the feedback I wanted
Do you just want someone to praise you? Go to your mother
One inconsistency is when you refer to this "it", you use "its" or "it's"
e.g. "as long as its generator", "it's sensors picked up"
The writing is also annoying, but that may be a personal thing. I get that you use short sentences in action scenes to convey a sense of rapidness, but you don't use it in a consistent manner.
What the fuck is this about anyway?
> Do you just want someone to praise you? Go to your mother
No in the last one I put in the file name "Chained Android," or something to that effect, so it spoiled the story already, and an user pointed it out. No one actually critiqued it however on a deeper scale than that.
> What the fuck is this about anyway?
An adventure story. That's it. Maybe I'll add some /pol/-tier commentary later, but who knows, really.
I hope it was atleast somewhat enjoyable, user.
And thanks for the critique :)
Hey that's good man, congrats
Sorry for being a brainlet and not knowing how to critique you properly, just know that I liked it.
It was a hot night in Houston and it was even hotter in the duplex that San Pecker George called home. All the lights off all the neighbors -- of which there was only one -- quiet. He had a fan going. Reveling in the blue light of his computer monitor, San Pecker George watched. Flickering bits of text, financial data inputs unfounded and unlimited flurried across his computer monitor a white cold light against a white spiritually cold living room. Jumping from stock tab to stock tab watching mortgages paid and lives ruined he wondered why people like himself put so much faith in binary numbers. San Pecker George watched, and San Pecker George felt he was missing out on something as he watched, and the god fucking damned heat wasn’t helping to alleviate those concerns. The cocktease fan just made him wish he could afford to have another fan running simultaneously, or maybe three or four fans, just to cool off, or maybe he could turn on the AC. Power wasn’t cheap and it especially wasn’t cheap when you didn’t know everything in crypto. If George knew everything in crypto, he’d have money. He’d be like these kids pumping the market and profiting off the losses of other or he’d be like some hoarder building his retirement fund in binary coins and bits of data. He couldn’t get any work done thinking like this and so he turned his thoughts to other matters -- he wondered when Michael was going to message him, Michael, stuck in the United Kingdom, associate in hand. That was his priority right now -- an annoying fucker he hadn’t seen face to face in forever messaging him. It was fucking awful.
Fucking awful could describe a lot of things in his life right now. Vaguely Mediterranean, staunch, tight-faced, George was a split man -- he had the drive of a businessman and the debauched aspirations of his London-castaway friend. He dreamt of Bacchian luxury yet never really pursued it as his man across the Atlantic did: two sides of the same coin, their relationship manifold as a parallel. George reclined in his chair, thinking like some statue. At once, the hot silence was interrupted as his speaker buzzed a notification tune. He clicked the corresponding pop-up and a slick black hipsterish messaging app took over the screen.
>using expletives outside of dialogue
"All the lights off all the neighbors -- of which there was only one -- quiet."
Awkward. How about saying something the "only neighbor"
Prefer "flitted" or even "fluttered" to "flurried"
.
Prefer "Jumping from tab to tab, watching stocks, mortgages..."
I'll get back around to the rest of the piece, hope you bought that XLM dip.