I have a friend

I have a friend who won't be honest with me about what he thinks of my book. I'm pretty sure its a steaming pile but the fact that he doesn't have the balls to tell me whether or not it sucks really pisses me off.

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he probably didn't even read it

If all that really mattered is what you thought of your own work why would anybody right? What kind of egotistical megalomaniac would insist that his garbage should be bought without inquiring as to what people wanted or what they liked?

does that make him a bad friend or just a lazy cocksucker?

Post here for honest review

You mean he actually says "I won't tell you my opinion," or he says he likes it and you don't believe him?

I mean he always changes the subject and pretends to be upset every time I bring it up. If I push him he goes apeshit and disengages himself by whatever means necessary.

nigga plz, you aren't going to read a 500 page novel from someone you ain't never heard of just cause someone posts it on /lit

I'm always that guy. Being the Veeky Forumsest of my friends I have always encouraged them to keep writing when they ask me to read their texts, maybe it is about friendship condescension... Or maybe it feeds my ego, the fact that, doesn't matter what they write and how much effort they put on it, I'll always be better... I had many keks with highschool essays desu

*tips*

I honestly need someone to tear me a new one. I don't think I can get better if everyone keeps blowing me off without telling me what I did wrong.

I get that some people don't read, others don't read science fiction, but I had one rule and it was "don't be boring".

If it was boring, I need to know why, and if it wasn't I need to know why nobody finished it.

I will

So basically your just trying to sabotage your friends to protect your own ego from any sort of legitimate criticism?

How do you expect to grow as a writer?

maybe he just is a really slow reader

Or maybe your story sucks so hard he's embarrassed for you and just thinking about it pisses him off

stupid user and his gay fucking novel

alright then, how do you want to do this then?

if it sucks then roast me, faggot

Post a Dropbox/Mega link desu

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Not quite man. I've already published some short stories in magazines, and I'll most likely be getting my own poetry section on December. I'm not trying to hide my work for criticism, I have received it and it worked out for me. Having said that, if I'm such a douche with my own friends is because all of them are tryhard pseuds who think -im serious- books like the martian and the book thief are quality literature, and then they come to me expecting to hear wonders about they work. (Which I do, for the lulz of seeing how others treat them as what they are).

If he won't give you good feedback then his opinion is worthless. Move onto someone else.

Just copy and paste the first page on here

It was dark. He was covered in something slimy, something sticky. He could not see or hear, he did not know where he was or how he got there. His body was suspended in mid air, weightless. Try as he might, he could not remember his name.
The answer came from a digitized voice that made his teeth buzz, his nerves rattle. “Prisoner Raydin Hiroshima-Phoenix, tier twenty-four, red sector, district eight, correction and rehabilitation facility. Release date, week ten, fourth quarter, fiscal year two-thousand, three-hundred twenty-four, tock ten, tick zero, numetric standard time.” The voice grated on him, made him want to gnash his teeth against the bit in his mouth.
He remembered he was inside the isolation chamber, surrounded by synthetic embryonic fluid, connected to the machine through a neural interface, being kept alive by breathing apparatus and feed tubes. Tiny clips on his fingers stimulated sensation throughout his whole body. Raydin struggled to remember why he was here and what he was supposed to do. He fought to keep his eyes open, until he finally lost the battle and drifted back to sleep.
Air bubbles floated up through his oxygen tank, his eyes were open, but he could not see. Sedatives dripped through the needle in his arm. His mind slowed to a crawl as the drone of command hypnosis faded into the background, catching scraps of dialogue such as, “…I will be a productive citizen, I will respect the sovereignty of my corporation, I will obey the law…”
Attached to his forehead was a green headband, its inner lining etched with yellow circuitry. The neural uplink linked his brain to the conditioned response program administering his punishment. The pins buried in his nerves sent a surge of electricity through him after every command phrase. After the first hour, his mind began to disassociate, until he felt nothing. His body continued to respond, twitching slightly each time an electrical current passed through his nervous system.

Time deprivation was part of the program, but he knew how to beat the system. Raydin’s own monotone counting had already faded back into his unconscious, continuing even as he slept. Raydin counted one-thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine ticks since his last communication. Raydin struggled, trying to think while half-asleep. “Twenty tocks to every day, a hundred ticks to every tock and a hundred pips to every tick.” Raydin’s sub-conscious mind panicked, making random associations, trying to remember why it had to wake up. “Three weeks to every month, ten days to every week. Seventy-two minutes to every tock, forty-three point two seconds to every tick, point forty three seconds to every pip. Ten pips are called a burst- a burst!” He suddenly knew the last infoburst would be coming soon. With that dawning awareness, he woke up, and braced himself.
A scientist lectured to a group of students outside the chamber. Raydin couldn’t hear them, couldn’t see them, but somehow, he knew they were there. He spoke from outside the chamber, “Sleep deprivation is a necessary part of the program. Without it, the subject might consciously perceive the control stimulus. The first few hours are the worse, extreme care must be taken that the painful electrical shocks do not physically traumatize the patient as they send him into a dissociative state. Once this state is achieved, the brain no longer consciously feels pain, which leaves the subject more receptive towards hypnotic suggestion.”
“The Himler-Mengal method is over ninety-nine percent effective, almost anyone can be programmed using conditioned response therapy. The problem is regression. C.R. programming degrades over time. Some subjects do not respond to positive reinforcement, they will not report in for reconditioning and will revert back to their old behavior within months or years. I am afraid that without this treatment, these animals will simply become more and more prone to acts of violence. He might try to commit suicide, or, worse, hurt someone else.”
“The infoburst will hit him any second now.” He tried to speak over the hum of the generator. “The neural uplink is bombarding his brain with compressed iconography, thousands of images, animations, symbols, and text messages playing too fast to consciously perceive. The program decompresses inside his mind, flooding it.”

Raydin clenched his teeth on his bit at the intense white noise. Raydin focused, ignoring the video clip of a man injecting a needle into his eye. His mind raced, the needles on the diagnostics board pushing into the red. “It doesn’t work, I’ll be out of here in less than an hour, C.R. is all bullshit!” Raydin breathed deep, starting over. “Focus, man, you have to time it just right, feel it in your gut… don’t want to end up just like everybody else...” He focused on the flashing images and slow, scrolling, blinking texts. He held his breath, feeling the rage burning in his chest. “Fuck You!” he thought. “Fuck You! FUCK ALL OF YOU!”

fucking niggers.

can't follow through on anything, can you /lit?

nobody even cares enough to tell you it's shit
fuck off

This

First line is unappealing. You want to hook the reader any way you can. You try and do this over the next couple of lines, but it fails. "He doesn't know how he got there" is an overused trope, overused opener.

>made him want to gnash his teeth againt the bit in his mouth

Change to: "his teeth gnashed against the bit in his mouth." or better yet, revise the second half of that sentence. "Against the bit in his mouth?" What are you going for? How about: "His teeth gnashed." Shit man, idk.

After reading your third paragraph, I'm getting this feeling that you are seeing something entirely different than what the reader is. Not like, different images, but you have to describe it better. You can totally cut these first paragraphs down into one, and if the prose is good enough we can get a better image.

You do okay enough at varying your sentence structure (but it could use work), but I'd venture to say you need to vary sentence length too. Advice on how to go about that naturally? Read more. Read the greats. If you binge on one author, Nabokov, Joyce, Hemingway, then you'll start to see their writing in your writing. That's a good thing. It's a sign you know how to sense style. Read more.

Shortly into the second post I stopped reading. It's too boring. Sorry, user. Maybe if the prose was better or if something was at stake I could go on.

>MCs name is Raydin Hiroshima-Phoenix

why

>some nigger talking like 'ey 'der m8'ies 'ow 'ou 'oin' t'day

why

Holy fuck. This naming. "RAYDIN HIROSHIMA-PHOENIX" What the fuck is this. Oh my god. This alone would turn me away from your novel. I think your friend is just mad you keep pushing this shit on him.

>Spigo Fox floated in the orange jelly of his containment chamber. They'd nailed him again for his gun-running, the technocrat bastards. He had a few more days in the jam and then it was back to laying low, playing cool, and pretending he'd forgotten every contact he'd ever made. Until then, he was stuck with his thoughts, suspended in jelly, surrounded by three inch plexiglass. And there was only one thing on his mind: that fine, fine space ass belonging to one Delron Kway.

There OP, I tried to keep the spirit of your writing intact, only instead of making it boring, I made it captivating and fun. Feel free to steal it as a springboard as you revise your novel.

First line is boring.
>Prisoner Raydin Hiroshima-Phoenix, tier twenty-four, red sector, district eight, correction and rehabilitation facility. Release date, week ten, fourth quarter, fiscal year two-thousand, three-hundred twenty-four, tock ten, tick zero, numetric standard time.
Cringy, just say his name.
>Twenty tocks to every day, a hundred ticks to every tock and a hundred pips to every tick.
sounds like a nursery rhyme, I chuckled but wasn't sure if it was intentionally funny

"Darkness enveloped the room. He was covered in something that felt like the semen he once accidentally coated his upper thigh with while he masturbated as a boy. His hearing and vision gone, he was unaware of his present circumstances. His body was suspended, weightless. He tried to no effect to remember, to remember his past, his name. The answer came from a robotic voice that made his teeth grind, his spine wrench. "Prisoner John Monroe, tier twenty-four, district eight, correction and rehabilitation facility. Release date, week ten, fourth quarter, fiscal year two-thousand." The voice grated him like a cheese grater, it grated him almost as much as the gerbil he had grated once before, however literally it was then it is not so now."

There I fixed it for you now do what you will with it.

Not a fan of OP's but you managed to make it worse.

>enveloped in darkness

Planning on mailing it somewhere, user? No one would willingly advance beyond the first sentence.

This one on the other hand has potential in a wacky, cartoonish space noir kind of way:

no, you.

Gotta agree here. You're joking a bit at the end but this was infinitely more fun than OP's. It's that light, Ready Player One type popcorn that knows its audience.

Drawfag here. Friends and "positive" sites like DA are terrible for input.
Somehow people have this "He worked hard on this and I should only say positive things". People don't want to hurt feelings and people take "If you don't have anything nice to say, say nothing at all" too serious. I used to ask friends honest opinions and feedback on my art and I would only get "amazing"s and "awesome"s and "I really like it"s even if I KNEW it was shit. I could post shit full of fucked up angles, non-functional anatomy weird tentacle finger Hands and broken necks and NOBODY would mention it. Most people are too afraid to be dicks. So yeah, Post it to Anons or your chance of gaining usable criticism are near nil.