Critique Thread

pastebin.com/WVKVpDGG
I am painfully, fully aware that this needs revision and almost certainly just needs a rewrite, but I was wondering if the ideas in it are salvageable. Fuck me up Veeky Forums.

Mine:
Myrror Myrror

I dream of scalps of forest
hair and alps of elephants.

I see myself in silver spoons
and hope to see myself again,
Curved against that silver dome
and stretched into disfigurement.

I see myself in mirrored rooms
and see this is all of me to see
Flat portals of polished chrome
a portent and a filigree.

I dreamt of dancing well
and wearing artifacts.

I dreamt of dancing well,
but now I dream of elephants.

the enjmabments make this hard to read aloud
consider more frequent endstops as i doubt you want this read at rap-speed

some parts of the grammar are a bit tortured
>a stump to break it shall we drive therein
that's hard to read yo

also i have an issue detecting any sort of volta in this (which is a big deal in a sonnet)

Pretty long, don't have the time to read it all right now. Read the first paragraph and I liked what I read. I'm interested in where it's going and would like to read it all when I have time. I was quickly and clearing picturing what you were describing, which is refreshing compared to many of the harsh visuals that I'm used to dealing with. If your story stays on track as how it started, you may want to focus less on ambient details and make sure you're pushing the story forward as necessary and not fluffing with an excess of detail.
That being said, I didn't read it all, so I may be wrong. It's the best advice I could think to give at the moment. That, and after skipping to the end, the imagery, themes and metaphors seemed general. Which isn't always a bad thing, but with what I saw, I feel I can mentally fill in a good amount of the story inbetween.
I hope this helps.

I'm reporting this because I had one person give advice on it and it was hardly advice. The story is quite short, and is more of a representation of addiction than a real story. All I ask is that you please take your time when reading, because it'll be easy to miss the idea and "point" behind the story if you push through. Thanks in advance.

pastebin.com/PchZbyDn

I climb onto the bed. Mina is spreading her legs as wide as she can and her eyes are closed. I get to her, treading the sheet with my knees, and touch her pussy lips with the head of my dick. Mina flinches at the sensation. The hole is already wet, gaping slightly and drooling.

I tell her, "Open your eyes."

Mina opens her eyes and her gaze moves right onto my huge Celtic dick teasing her vagina.

I hold the shaft with one hand and rub the head on her clitoris. The pace of her breathing is escalating and her cheeks and pussy redden at the same time.

I ask her, "Is it big?"

"Yes."

"Is it bigger than your boyfriend's?"

"Yes. Much bigger."

I bend over her body and steal her lips. I slobber and make her open her mouth with my tongue and taste her saliva. It's sweet like tree sap.

At the same time I finger her. I slide a finger into her hole and sense that it's already hot and slippery with her pussy spit. I straighten my body and aim her hole with the tip of my dick and apply pressure. My full, pinkish dickhead starts to bury its head in her disgusting brown gook vagina. At first there is usual resistance. Then the tightening gets really intense as her hole senses this is something different from what it used to get. I manage to get the head and the beginning of my shaft in her but it is so tight that I have to keep applying pressure to keep it in. Mina squirms in pain.

I ask, "Does it hurt?"

"Yes."

I start moving the dick back and forth in her. She wriggles at the each movement and instinctively tries to close her legs but I gently press on her thighs with my hands and say, "No. You better keep it as wide as you can manage. It is going to hurt."

Having understood, Mina spreads her legs wide open again, closing her eyes. I see a hint of tears between her eyelids.

I keep moving the lower half of my body back and forth. My dick keeps moving, gradually increasing intervals. This will allow her tight gook cunt to adjust to my huge superior white dick. Although she is yet another cum dump, I don't want to hurt her.

I can manage a third of my length into her now. It's funny that I keep touching her cervix every time I push in. Every time her cervix has retreated a bit further, as if to be weary of what will come next. Her cunt is not used to anything like this. My shaft is glossy with her pussy spit. The flesh around her vagina is red.

"Tom. Stop. Can't take it more." Mina moans.

"No. Think about it. Babies come out of this hole. You can surely take the entirety of my dick." I push it in a bit too hard this time. The head of my dick rams into her cervix and she cringes but does not say anything. She knows that resistance is futile at this point. She can't move, impaled by my young and virile superior white cock.

I am pounding Mina. I am plowing her. I surround her little body with my strong white man's arms and keep pounding, up to the hilt, into her gook womb fully tamed to the whole of my masculinity. Her cervix has retreated to the farthest it could but the head is pressing it every time it rams into. I know it adds to the sensation. Good for her.

Mina is crying. She is wincing and frowining and her face is messy with tears. Then, when I least expected it, she cums. She squirts hard several times, showering my crotch with warm and slick liquid. I stop, letting her enjoy the first fews spasms of pleasure without interruption. The wall of her vagina contracts all around my dick at each burst of pleasure. Then I start plowing again. She screams at the heightened sensation. I know that her cervix is open due to the way it feels softer against my glans. I accelerate my pace. Each trust stronger and quicker than the one before. The springs of the bed are moaning all around us. I see Mina's face and her eyes are all white but before I get to worry, pleasure sweeps over me and I close my eyes and drive my cock deep inside her and I cum, cum, and cum with each tsunami of pleasure. The powerful jets of my cum hit her cervix, flood her pussy, and fill her womb through her open cervix. I cum and cum as if Mina is nothing but a plastic masturbation doll. I fill her inferior gook womb with my thick and hot superior white man's cum, gracing her inferior body with superior genes. If she gets a baby, which I am sure she will if she's ovulating, the offspring will be a less inferior being thanks to my mercy.

I keep my dick insife her even after I deposit all my seeds into her, to make sure that most semen gets to rest in her womb.

I embrace her with my whole body. I squeeze hard the little gook slut's body with my arms and legs and lick her face and whisper into her ear, "You are mine now."

She answers faintly, "Yes."

Edginess is not a substitute for quality
2/10, try again

Didn't cum but am getting there
6/10

This is the only thing in the thread that's competently written and it is first person present tense cuck smut with typos. Everything else in English has been garbage.

Keep it up, everyone else read more.

Idiot.

I, Glancing at my jagged finger nails with peeled skin, found myself to be shaking again. It was snowing. However, I’m inclined to believe that what falls upon Brooklyn is nothing I previously knew. Each bit of snow was never white. It was yellow, grey, and a crimson red. If I were to taste each of the spicules, my tongue would be spliced.

Very beginning to my novel

moonrunes
way too sporadic
retarded, erotica also has no literary merit

>2017
>still going on about edginess

that was edgy

check em

...

What if I want my paragraph to drone to create a mods you fucking hack

>don't say very bad
>say terrible
I hate writing advice from idiots

>2016

Once more round our celestial circuit.
Perhaps this time we'll get it right,
And so progress towards fuller beings
But to what end does mankind march?

Conflicted intrests curate chaos,
Convection cells of pro and re gress.
And so we pivot with little translation,
And so we fade with light transmission;
Perverse reflections of mankind's wonder,
In eternal echoes Jerry Springer reruns.

bruh, gross
Lrn2imagery and stop abstracting so much as to be impossibly vague
lines 2 and 4 need to be cut for being both redundant and cliche

the use of head-rhymes and parallelism means your learning though

sincerely,

II
There is nothing so commonplace as a high school talent.
Cooly rolling off the tongue of cheery eyed teachers who may
Wish to forget, or if not forget, believe in that tossup of chance
The hundreds and thousands of unwashed pimply faces
Making scenes and drama things to say "Oh, you could." I could. You could.
But do you remember when you were a student
In this bustling world, this twittering world
Embittering and embattling the tadpoles to ideals, worn ideals
Ideals of revolution and reaction, passivity and inaction
Lenin, Marx, Bakunin, etc, et. al. - all old men. All old men.
Not children, not the everyday man, all old men, pitifully old, halfway senile
Backs breaking under potbellies and beer taken on Sundays. The tree bears fruit.
Such an irony that it bears fruit only when our skeins of time shoot
Up into a spread, starry sky.

Here is the world now. That's how I made my millions. Some made billions.
Some made trillions, quadrillions, iron, steel. Silicon
Computer chips, the transistors, the wheel. So many. How many
Saw it? Not the end goal, because anyone could see it, the vague defined ideal.
Did someone see the numbers, though? Hitler was only seventy years ago
And his ideals have gone through the revisions and decisions of not TS Eliot
But ten thousand men, a hundred thousand, skinheads, Fascists, race realists,
Picked up his banner, liberalists, Marxists, Leninists, were there
to deny it. But even such a monstrosity as that, the wars, the years, the genocides
The meatgrinds, Rzhev, Verdun, could not impede the mass. The ever growing mass
Added onto by millions of life changing innovations and reinnovations
Every path growing more complicated and more moribund, and now, barring a disintegration-
Where do we begin? And how do we end? The twitter grows into a buzz.
The buzz into a screech. One can only wish for the tin-hush
The cessation of vibrations, the utter calm
Utterly lost in all our qualms.

thanks for the tips. I agree with you on the vagueness. I just cant help but lose sight of the fact that other people cant see inside of my head when they read what im writing. i find it tough to read through others eyes. what parts seem overly vague to you exactly?

as far as yours go i probably couldn't give much useful feedback, but give you an idea of what someone with no knowledge of poetry might see in it. parts of it come off to me as being about a man that once wanted luxury but now craves to return to a more challenging adventurous life. if thats way off i wouldn't be surprised

>Conflicted intrests curate chaos,
no imagery generate, it is more than a bit tell-y without warranting it really
>Perverse reflections of mankind's wonder,
this could literally mean anything, and although broadness can easily be confused for universality, it just isn't broham.
my advice for you is to write at least a couple haiku, real haiku, not just a 5-7-5 vomit
take 2 very concrete images, very seperate concrete images and press them together to highlight some subtle similarity and generate meaning through their differences.
don't worry about metaphor, don't worry about meter, worry about images and then use what you've learned to go forward with much more power.
imagery is the key, because whether or not you give it focus, how you handle will show your grip on writing.
here's a haiku i wrote that you can look at, but i encourage you to read imagists like Williams and H.D. to see how someone who is actually good does it:

riverrun psst the
green green holy;
bright-eye child

again, read people who are better than me. just went through all my haiku and remembered how much i hate most of them, but they taught me a lot.

This is me: I know nothing and only offer criticisms so that someone can read the poem that could use a tl;dr.

Good stuff. But then again, there's not too much to comment on. Very end-rhymey.

To convey a sort of emotion or an abstraction, just use a concrete situation that gives off the same feeling or concept.

Plato could've just said "We may not see the whole truth.", but he used an allegory, the cave and chained people, to describe it.

Anything at all on this one? Too meh?

Eh, probably, the only things that get looked over here are the short things or the things which stand out. Or you can self whore yourself out, like I am and like you have done. As for yours, the analogy is a little... disjointed. I don't quite get the tone you're trying to convey.

I can see how that line about reflections seems vague, i was actually thinking about tv signals bouncing around in space being the lasting remnants of humanity. I was trying to refer to the light transmission from the previous line but i guess that double meaning with the word light wasn't clear enough.
anyways thanks ill try that, seems like good practice. i never liked writing haikus cause i could never think of anything to say with so little, but i can see how thats a plus

my rule for poetry is to always have one of mine available to allow someone to gauge the worth of the critique they receive so here's some prose i've been working on that'll hopefully do the same

Lie down and let the flood wash over you (as it often does). You’ll feel the weight of firmament press down on you, only to press into you, only to press through you, only to lift you upward. Yes Here We Heal is a fountain nailed to a telephone pole, leaking manna all over the streets. Come and let me show you what I mean. I hold in my hand a piece of bread, torn by ducks and vultures, crumbling in so many ways. This bread is your flesh rent. Collect it and you can live forever. March through the Nile and you can find some morsel of heaven spilled from a careless ship. The maw of the ocean lay shattered at the delta, where the largest bread shards are found. These shards are your flesh rented out. You suffer weak bird-gods to peck at you, and that pains me. I’ve been around for a long time, and I’ve watched many things. I’ve felt the curse of Enoch once before, and when Uruk dried, I found him and cast him up into heaven. This time, I am too tired to swim.

now as for the critique :

>I,
the only person i've seen do this well (off the top of my head) is Charles Olson in his Maximus poems. It greatly ricks setting up a stammering rhythm that is nearly impossible to make work.
>Each bit of snow was never white.
work on this tonal turn, make it stronger
>yellow, grey, and a crimson red
crimson red is unnecessary,just say red. although the only color i felt did something interesting was grey
>It was snowing.
don't like this as its own sentence. feels like forced import
>If I were to taste each of the spicules, my tongue would be spliced.
the strange language is destroying your attempted tone.

the cadence in this is way too stereotypically spoken word for me, especially with the sporadic rhyming. try gorcing yourself to rhyme more words that don't have the same suffix
(illion, ist, ations) and you'll find your honestly freer in ways to turn the work and understand rhyming without meter is probably the hardest possible thing to do well.

Thanks, I can't believe I missed such obvious flukes. Whore for whore, then. I tried to amend my mood.
>I lay subject to concrete smiles and fleshy warmth upon this sidewalk. Glancing at my jagged finger nails with peeled skin, I found myself to be shaking again. Snow came down like offal shavings. However, I’m inclined to believe that what falls upon Brooklyn is nothing like other cities. Each bit of snow was never white. It was grey falling, yellow on the ground, and red in some parts.

Honestly I can't give a super great critique on this one. There are some bizarre references and analogies, maybe it's hard for a layman to get.

>You suffer weak bird-gods to peck at you, and that pains me

That seemed clumsy in my opinion. It didn't flow so well compared to the rest, I guess?

There's literally nothing wrong about that pic though. It's actually telling you how not to sound like shit

Waking up to a loud BRRAAAAAAAAPPPPPPP rarely means something good is happening. It’s never “BRRAAAAAAAAPPPPPPP! Mom made pancakes!” or “BRRAAAAAAAAPPPPPPP! We decided to adopt a Golden Retriever!”

first sentence metaphor bad sorry man but its bad

this shako shit reminds me of dishonored 2 in a bad way. DUDE EASTERN ORTHODOOOOOXXX!!!

I didn't take this one seriously but what I saw seemed capable. Sorry not my thing, but that's just me

Bro I liked this!

I'm not gonna push through your story m8, sorry, you gotta tune up the accessibility. What on earth kind of a thing is that to say anyway? "Ya it sucks and hurts to read but it's actually super deep cause I'm cool and filled it with deep cool ideas keep reading." Like comon man. My advice is to write something interesting.

>Celtic dick

anyone who thinks of dicks and pussies in these terms is fucking insane and shouldn't be writing erotica at the very least. Erotica is the opposite of abstract it is fucking cONCRETE cummies right there, the realest thing there is, next to death, essentially. So don't describe the real parts with colorless abstractions like nationality, especially if those abstractions are merely descriptive and add nothing. Go on f-list for 400 more hours before u return! Ok too harsh but ya

I lold but I was a little crestfallen when I realized that the Brap was portrayed negatively. And I think it would be funnier if you made the loud pungent girl fart somewhat positive somehow, as that would tease out the absurdity and make the story a perfect cube. But then again, that would also destroy everything.

Not train of thought enough or too much. Stuck somewhere in the middle feeling very forced. Also some of it is just nonsensical like seeing so many faces that you can't distinguish them from a blur of grey. I know what you're trying to say but it's just off. Like why grey? Why would you need to distinguish them from a blur of grey? Surely you mean to say you can't distinguish them from each other, not some "blur of grey" found nearby. Also time, you fuck it up a lot. Just the whole thing feels dishonest like you're trying to squeeze your own simple vision of things into fancy language which you imitate poorly because you haven't read enough of it for it to come naturally to you. The Styx comparison feels completely phony. The sort of information about the time of day tagged on at the end. Just try to write naturally, the way you think rather than what you think you need to write.

This is really poor erotica mate, reads like a doctor's report. Also poor choice trying to assert racial dominance over the lesser races by focusing on the enormous size of your penis and animal concepts like impregnation.

It is no secret to the residents at Apartment Block C (in Complex X, a stone’s throw from the city centre) that Harry Potter’s place smells like total, total, total, shit. It isn’t a smell you smell so much as a smell you feel and, hot dog!, it feels like a cocktail between dampness and lushness, that special composition felt only around the local sewage plant, or the disused outdoor bathrooms at your old school, or a farm, or that Scottish homeless man who wiped his ass with his own hands (who you met whilst on Ketamine at SEVEN IN THE MORNING). The residents know his place reeks of shit (but Rex Johnson does not but -- believe me -- he’s going to find out as soon as he gets his ass out of his automobile, walks across the parking lot, into the apartment block; he’ll probably smell it from the fucking elevator or in the elevator on, like, floor five (Harry Potter lives on floor eight so for Rex Johnson to ostensibly smell Harry’s shithouse apartment from three floors down is still monumentally impressive -- the point is Rex probably won’t smell it like straight away but when he smells it oh boy will he smell it)) because most residents have been within a three floor proximity of floor eight, at least at some point (ergo: visiting friends, getting off at the wrong floor accidentally, going to floor eleven to access the apartment block’s roof in order to jump off and die, meeting a work colleague, etc.) The residents of Apartment Block C, however, it is worth noting, have not seen Harry Potter and, candidly speaking, most of them do not know his name is Harry Potter, or even which apartment he specifically lives in (there is an exception to this rule (at least one I know of) which was when Former Basketball Professional Suicide Jackson, who lived on the eighth floor, went on a coke-fueled rampage, hell-bent on sourcing the smell of the shit -- he broke into every apartment, eventually landing on Harry Potter’s. Suicide Jackson never left Harry Potter’s apartment. He hasn’t been seen since. He was heard screaming Harry Potter’s name, that’s about it. He sounded happy, apparently. I hope he was), all they know is his apartment smells like shit.

You are doing something, rather than nothing, but you are trapped within a generational snare of movie and film. Take a cold, clinical look at all those nanotubes, then ask yourself whether they come back at any point to matter to the story.

In the movie of the opening scene that you see in your head, you can see how the pipes are blocked out, and what they are made of, but the only technique you are aware of to get them to us is to languorously word them out, one by one.

Then the sky mythology. It's like when directors and screenwriters can't think of any way to clue in the audience besides voice-overs and screen titles.

Read the Lottery (Shirley Jackson) forensically. he story, yeah, but look at how she handles what you need to know. Look at what dialog does, in the context of emerging conflict, versus 3rd Omni expo.

Read Sleepy (Checkov) read it in translation, everybody is a pleb where Russian is concerned. Take a look at how societal scenery and conditions get woven in the context of conflict and dialog between characters.

Written word is not primarily a visual medium.

Take another look at To Build A Fire - every element of scenery becomes an element of the crisis - the snow, the sun, the wind, the boots, the dog - all the description is really exposition of the conflict. That's the narrative expectation of those nanotubes - you put them there to substitute for the lack of a screen. Readers expect them to have some meaning beyond that. The same should be true of all description.

"Sky the color of a television tuned to a dead channel." That places us in the character's milieu. That's how he thinks of it. Translation: "You are about to meet a character who is the kind of character who conceives of the natural world in image-rendering technological terms. Also, you are now aware of what the sky looks like right now in this scene."

That's Neuromancer, btw. In which the entire world is recreated in image-rendering technological terms. So introducing a character that way - see?

plase critique my piece of shit.
docs.google.com/document/d/1-5sUPn_Cs3nZHt-fzxS5DR_zYCmWanYOBgXFvAlU1os/edit

I don't do google logins. Give me a paragraph. Or two.

Rob’s face was something out of what should be possible. According to the very few people who’ve ever seen him, five girls have killed themselves after seeing his picture. The FBI interrogated him twice thinking he was an online predator pushing these girls to suicide so he just had to explain how his ugliness has that effect on women. The whole neighborhood spent their lives living close to him, believing the government had spent tax dollars investigating his otherworldly ugliness.
Whether it was true or not doesn't matter just that he was incredibly ugly, looking like some fat abomination that just happened to have a name and a few basic human rights. Most of them including freedom of speech which should totally be abolished as all he does is go on the internet making rude remarks on other’s posts and writing down lengthy paragraphs of his opinion on women which is MISOGYNISTIC and even RACIST ( if you look at it from another angle). This future rapist had just about finished mowing down his last chicken tender (which he'd autistically call tendies when the need for them arose and he had no choice but to call for mommy)

This is the worst I've ever seen out of any of these threads. Nobody will EVER read this shit.

Here's a hefty section that makes more sense in context:

I am sailing downstream through an incandescent channel, as the seraphic waves tower motionlessly above my head, like glaciers hewn from glittering stardust. There is something in the distance. Something intangible. An inescapable truth. I am being pulled towards it, and as I am pulled I see a tear in the fabric of existence, which splits further and further, each thread shredding apart from the seam, until everything falls away and I hurtle through to the other side. Here, it is as if the outer shell has been stripped back to reveal the circuitry beneath; the graph paper onto which the concepts and mechanisms of reality are drawn. What I am now made aware of, and I feel I am perhaps the first person to ever be made aware of it, is an intersection of logic and circular entropy that is superimposed over all things; a system of ratiocination and uniform chaos that is before all else. These two states exist in dissonant equilibrium, two instruments of fundamentality, their notes erupting into the void; a constant, endless stream of conflicted, isolated tones that coalesce into one conscious fervour of sound and fury.

One revolution of the universe occurs as I wait here. A formless, pointless repeating pattern, a blast of white noise, sampled and looped forever.

Two revolutions, and I am no longer able to remember that infinitesimal shade of existence that I fell from.

Three revolutions, and I’m able to follow and predict the pattern. The trajectory of this monumental cacophony is one of rising and falling in a writhing, chromatic mass of impenetrability.

Four revolutions, and now the individual elements become more inseparable and singular, one shattering chord of shapeless misery

Five revolutions, and I’m unsure if the pattern is repeating at all, or if it is one howling drone, screaming without end. Time no longer functions, all is instantaneous. I can no longer distinguish each cycle, I don’t even have the numbing certainty of the inevitable to grasp onto. I begin to sympathise with the crashing disarray of everything, how the sound now seems like an expulsion of sorrow, an unfathomable longing for some absolute end. I can’t help but marvel at this; despite the intricate futility of all things, each individual anomaly in this crushing wave of insanity unites, in a perverse harmony, in order to call attention to its own ridiculousness. It is self-aware, and helpless; a total, boundless embodiment of the deepest fundamental emotion, exploding perpetually across the backbone of totality. It yearns for its quietus to be made. It cries out: ‘no more no more no more no more no more no more no more no more no more no more no more nomorenomorenomorenomorenomorenomorenomorenonomorenomorenomorenomorenomorenomorenomorenonomorenomorenomorenomorenomorenomorenomorenonomorenomorenomorenomorenomorenomorenomorenonomorenomorenomorenomorenomorenomoreno’

plz critique

It's basically Pynchon desu pal

2/10. Too much /pol/. Needs more lulz.

i don't think this is a compliment

Uh. Ok. Experimental is fine, but what do you want me to get here? You should be aware that massive stacks of abstraction which attempt to summarize the meaning of all existence is a thing. Maybe not a meme, but a stage. The archive is full of them.

This is not as completely out of control as is typical, but if the point is to communicate that "I" is having a cosmic experience of despair, then you've communicated, though not in any way that I would shell out for.

"I am trying to write out what it looks and feels like inside my head. I am trying to write an experience that I have had, as a series of mental images."

Got it. The only - I mean the one time in history ever - that this kind of thing succeeded, and only then because of everything around it, was when Clarke did it in the novel of 2001. And I think we all know how that turned out.

One of the five things that have never changed, since the dawn of language itself, is the character. (The other four are act, scene, agency, and motive.)

Act: What happened? What is the action? What is going on? What action; what thoughts?
Scene: Where is the act happening? What is the background situation?
Agent (Character): Who is involved in the action? What are their roles?
Agency: How do the agents act? By what means do they act?
Purpose: Why do the agents act? What do they want?

When you take any of these things away, you are doing something else.

pastebin.com/apBaqGNs

This is part of a much larger story. For context, it is a city that has been under siege for many years, so this is near the end of one of the books. So the idea is one last all-out attack so that the city does not go quietly into that good night, so to speak. I'm trying to make this better because I hate it right now.

Thanks for the criticism. The context around this passage makes that a lot more clear. Our protagonist has a sort of fever dream and I looked at writings on hallucinogenic trips as inspiration. The novel makes it very clear that the protagonist is confused at all points, confused in terms of his past and his present and his beliefs and confused about the nature of existence. I'd say you hit the nail on the head with what I was trying to achieve but if it didn't work for you then that's fair enough; I tried to use music 'imagery' as a way into thinking about the formlessness and entropy of existence (as the character perceives it in this instance, at least), I was listening to a lot of free jazz at the time as inspiration which accounts for it somewhat. And yeah I guess I wanted to capture something that is sort of impossible to explain coherently with words, which is a bit of a paradox and pretty ambitious but there you go. I could post more of the context but I'd basically be putting the first few chapters up and I don't know if it's worth it. Thanks anyway!

First line: gravely

Aside from general admonitions against adverbs, which I generally endorse, with notable exceptions that prove the general rule, dialog tags should be limited, in nearly all instances to "said." Any inflection should be sufficiently carried by the dialog itself. This is always the case. There are cases to be made for "whispered," "hissed," "screamed," etc., but even then, those arguments are best had after the fact as editing questions, rather than composition questions. Until the last draft - "said."

Now consider this question, and consider from the standpoint of "drama." What is the most dreaded part of most working people's work day? If you answered "attending meetings" then you get one gold star. If you answered "reading or writing the minutes of a meeting you get two. See what I'm saying?

I understand - the characters are discussing matters of galactic import for the future of etc. But it's still the minutes of a meeting for the whole first section. Can they, I don't know, refer to the action happening on a screen? A three dimensional holographic record of a battle taken by bodycam, so there can be the information, but in the form of some kind of actual action that we can take an emotional stake in?

Note - No less a genius than George Lucas populated his prequels with: characters having meetings. You are certainly on board with those spectacularly memorable scenes of the Jedi Council deliberating the fate of...

You see what I mean.

The last part, it's not the worst thing ever, and not even the second worst. So let me ask you another framing question- Do you, or anyone you know, ever really go around having perfectly self-aware and honest emotional dialog with yourself? Because if you think about how thinking works, I bet you'll see another opportunity here. Internal mental dialog is kind of a, well, a crutch. I bet, if you get up, and walk through your dwelling, imagining seeing those people, under those circumstances, you can figure out how to do this briskly and sharply. I bet you can see how to make hay out of a finger twitch, an eye blink, a change of stride. I bet you can also think about the tempo you desire the reader to fell, as mimicked in the length of sentences.

Think about that.

I've been in a rut for the past month or so. This and a dozen or so poems is all I've been able to write.

...and I'm retarded. This is the link:
pastebin.com/BrVpayie

I've been
In a rut
For the past
Month
or so.
This
And a dozen
or so
poems
is all I've
been able to write.

You got yourself some contemporary poetry right here family

Damn nigga
Send that shit to a publisher right now

Here's a different, more normal paragraph:

I was allowed to leave a few days later. Exiting the hospital, I felt like a dreary grey sketch discarded and thrown out by the illustrator. The street around me was desaturated, a seeping cauldron of insipid decay, precariously balanced upon itself in a heaving, misshapen mass that felt like it might fall apart at any second. Thick heat stuck to the air, viscous and incendiary in the turpentine night, folding itself into the gaps between flesh and fabric, between corduroy and seersucker and leather and lambswool and between car hoods, where it flared up under gristling, throbbing engines and discharged against iron and steel and aluminium in electrifying bolts before climbing to meet the run-down apartments and the office blocks and factories that lined the streets of the city, and lingered on the vestiges of metal and concrete and rust before seeping in and setting on the people inside like Propofol, omnipotent, willing them to submit to it in a surrender of powerless delirium.

You should probably vary your sentence structures more. This is a bit of a boring read. The first sentence is kind of weird. "only to see so many faces" is oxymoronic but not in a super clever way.

This will get significantly better if you take of all the Is.

Me:

R8 my rap lyricism pls

Listen along

soundcloud.com/kolstinguyen/the-identity-theory-pt-2

Uh, the buildup is long but the payoff is medium
Full version coming soon, when? Don't be greedy dude
I'll never run out of money as long as my mother loves me
I should probably be a better son or something
Ah, fuck me; feel like Gordon Ramsay
Grown child with pubes don't shave but eat candy

Well-meaning white devils acting like they're Macklemore
Fratting with some actors getting wasted like an apple core
Fuck you think I'm rapping for? To crash the fucking SAG Awards? Uh
Is that what you think all the bragging's for? Uh
Like there's a million hapas tryna smash down the back door?
Dad said work smart, not hard like a ten speed
Took a few shots I'm fading, Nowitzki
Damn I feel like David Lipsky, that was in that movie with Jason Segel
You know I've fucked your girl if you catch her doing kegels
Hegel. Hi-gel. Hegel. Bagel?
I'm the Big Dipper you're a fucking ladle, bitch
Know your niche, at best I'm a 6 and I talk with a lisp but hey
I feel like Marco Rubio, the closet is the studio
Now here we go

And I know what I need and what I want
And I know what I am and what I'm not

Uh, semi-pro meme lord bitch call me Igor Stravinsky
Flowing nimbly as if I'm footspeed of Frank Kaminsky
It just hit me, I feel like Jo Embiid, TRUST THE PROCESS
Strawberry skim milk TRUST THE PROCESS
Lai See money bought some carbon offsets,
Le becomes se that's the indirect object, uh
So is he novelty or Socrates, the hapa on the Flocka beats?
White girls on their knees like Aca-please
And it ain't sexist if I only hate white bitches
Yellow light, intersections bitch know the white difference, uh
Is he Pachelbel or Taco Bell, the hapa jock Bianca Del? Uh
Rap game Ricky Rubio, go under on the pick and roll
I need to know what I can't do just turned 19 I'm getting old

I've been uninspired since Big Chen retired
If you're looking for the one now you're done kickin up tires
In the closet studio kicking back with some me time
But who am I kidding, shit it's always me time?
I fuck with cheap wine but not with weak rhymes
When I first heard the beat I said to P, "bruh, that beat's mine"
My raps were coming flat as asses on Boston girls
Closer to Common than Earl I needed to get higher
To tap into the part of the mind that breathes fire
I managed four bowls from one round in my grinder
When I found her on Tinder I was home for the winter
It was 15th of December, damn right I remember
Getting lit with K and cough and her and her tall dude and
Almost ended in lawsuits, she was all over my girl
Next thing you know she's all over me
Next thing you know man they're saying shit about me

Exactly! That's what I meant. Don't click the link, it's drivel.

dude poo lol

pynch me i'm dreamin looney toon

"Very" tends to be nothing but fluff, and simply removing it from a sentence is an improvement just about every time.

The reason is that "very" forces a reader to think in terms of a gradient rather than a clear-cut fashion which is both more concise and more impactful. E.g., if you say that a person is honest, then the reader will accept that she is honest. But if you say that a person is very honest, then one can't help but wonder where on the honest end of the sliding scale of honesty vs. dishonesty she is. Thus, you are actually weakening your claim that the character is honest.

Besides that, it's just adding a needless syllable. Cull all needless words.

In the vast majority of cases, strong nouns and verbs are preferable to adjectives and adverbs.

Green and red
As red as the blood in my veins
I did all I could
But all my work and love was still was washed away in the drain

She pin-pricked my skin and put some love in
Made me feel like a priest ‘cuz she was an angel but I was still full of sin
I am not holy - nor devout but I wish for her to burn in hellfire
As hot as the love we had while i’m as cold as a soldiers feelings before gunfire

Doesn’t matter now, I gotta get away
Tip-toeing through my own mind like i’m playing ballet
I’m an emotional time bomb - no, more like an emotional minefield
Wheel me to every doctors office but my brain won’t be healed

Because i’m sick, and i’m lost, and I thought it was love
Not a praying man but I still threw my wishes to the man above
Just hoping for once I could get a miracle
But that shit never works, and I had a right to be cynical

Tired of this bullshit, everyday life
Always depressed, feelings strike me like knives
I sing, I dance, same old escapism like it’s in my rights

Wanna get away, don’t know why you blocked me from your page
It’s not like I was the one that did the bad shit anyways
I’m better off without you and I know that to be true
I just wish it wasn’t so hard getting rid of the thought of you

Get out of my mind, you annoying self-entitled bitch
Can’t care enough about other people, always giving a bait-and-switch
Dropped so many bombs on me right before the bombs dropped
I had every reason to leave but in the end it was you who left me when the rain dropped

I can’t handle the good, sure as hell can’t handle the bad
They say you never know how important something is that you have
Until you lose it and it’s gone and you’ll never get it back
But honestly you were a burden so i’m a little bit glad
Your a back-stabber, whispering lies in my ear like a snake
Get the fuck away from me, you can’t even chew what’s on my plate
You can’t understand me, I don’t understand either but I understand that ‘we’ were a mistake

Tired of this bullshit, everyday life
Always depressed, feelings strike me like knives
I sing, I dance, same old escapism like it’s in my rights

every hour of gaming is another bottle of gin
And i’ve got a problem, an addiction to escaping this life I can’t win

Can’t tell you to back off enough but you aren’t even coming on to me
Left me in the rain and took the umbrella and car keys
All I could do was lay down and start pondering
On why I thought you were a good idea, I knew you weren’t but I kept wandering

Don’t talk to me again, because you obviously don’t want to
Apologize to me and i’ll explain on why it’s not necessary
I gave up on your lies, you and your weak-ass fake love too
You aren’t even a chapter in my book, you were a line
And ultimately ? you were insignificant in my library
I’m a real page-turner but you made me into a depressed wreck like alchemy

Thanks good advice, thanks for that. I have been trying to avoid "he thought this" and "She felt this" as much as I can, and write almost cinematically. Same with my rule against ever describing characters. Saying "he was a quiet man" is sacrilege to me. But I will work on makign the meeting more interesting, and the internal dialogue a little less... perfect, i guess. Thanks man. I'll have to read your post more indepth tomorrow when I get back to editing.

Do you listen any kind of music when you write? Post suggestions if you do.

I listen to myself

To the people who pitched story ideas, and were summarily shit on by me as I compared you all to "The Girl on the Train", I am sorry.

pastebin.com/t43YBuTu

gleam darkling adown surface of affluvial flowandflow as again might seem garments of laundry reposing a leasward close at hand in full expectation. And as I was jogging along in a dream as dozing I was dawdling, arrah, methought broadtone was heard and the creepers and the gliders and flivvers of the earth breath and the dancetongues of the woodfires and the hummers in their ground all vociferated echoating: Shaun! Shaun! Post the post! with a high voice and O, the higher on high the deeper and low, I heard him so! And lo, mescemed somewhat came of the noise and somewho might amove allmurk. Now, 'twas as clump, now mayhap. When look, was light and now 'twas as flasher, now moren as the glaow. Ah, in unlitness 'twas in very similitude, bless me, 'twas his belted lamp! Whom we dreamt was a shaddo, sure, he's lightseyes, the laddo! Blessed momence, O romence, he's growing to stay! Ay, he who so swayed a will of a wisp before me, hand prop to hand, prompt side to the pros, dressed like an earl in just the correct wear, in a classy mac Frieze o'coat of far suparior ruggedness, indigo braw, tracked and tramped, and an Irish ferrier collar, freeswinging with mereswin lacers from his shoulthern and thick welted brogues on him hammered to suit the scotsmost public and climate, iron heels and sparable soles, and his jacket of providence wellprovided woolies with a softrolling lisp of a lapel to it and great sealingwax buttons, a good helpingbigger than the slots for them, of twentytwo carrot krasnapopp-sky red and his invulnerable burlap whiskcoat and his popular choker, Tamagnum sette-and-forte and his loud boheem toy and the damasker's overshirt he sported inside, a starspangled zephyr with a decidedly surpliced crinklydoodle front with his motto through dear life embrothred over it in peas, rice, and yeggy-yolk, Or for royal, Am for Mail, R.M.D. hard cash on the nail and the most successfully carried gigot turnups now you ever, (what a pairfact crease! how amsolookly kersse!) breaking over the ankle and hugging the shoeheel, everything the best none other from (Ah, then may the turtle's blessings of God and Mary and Haggispatrick and Huggisbrigid be souptumbling all overhim!) other than (and may his hundred thousand welcome stewed

And the winter moves about Illinois
When my sister picks a fight with the Alexander boy
And my father locks the car by the store
Still we figure out the keys and follow him once more

Oh my God, we see it on the floor
The woman on the bed the ankle brace she wore
Stones and sled it could have been some other
The mind that knows itself has a mind to serve the other
And we run back scratching at the door, scratching at the door

If I'm hiding in the sleeves of my coat
When my father runs undressed, he's pointing at my throat
And my brother has a fit in the snow
And the traffic stops for miles, we take him by the elbow

Oh my God, the shuffling at the floor
Oh my God
A mind that knows itself is a mind that knows much more
No one came to our side
So we run back, scrambling for cover
To carry us away from danger
A mind that knows itself has a mind to kill the other
Oh my God, no one came to our side

Oh my God, he left us now for dead
Oh my God
He left us now for dead

This is not meant to be in any way malicious, just (hopefully) constructive criticism.

>Then one day Zipper felt the unique pain of losing a father to the siren call of a dopium den. That was a fresh realm of pain. His mother comforted him as much as she could. She kept him away from the chaos. She tried to make his world small. But he did not want his world to be small. He wanted the world to be expansive and explosive and glorious. He wanted his father’s knowledge. He wanted the stories. He decided that since he did not have a father to look up to, he would to look up to the Sky instead.

This was hard to read. I get a very "anime protagonist" vibe from that paragraph, like One Piece's melodramatic first chapter.

>Zipper did not think of himself as a criminal, but the omnipresent police drones reminded him that he was one.

I'm sure I don't have to explain this one.

>Break-ins and thefts were the most common job for Zipper, and the easiest at that, but his repertoire of skills included sabotage, surveillance, and information extraction, making him an attractive specialist in the eyes of Karadashi’s business elites, who never faltered in their perpetual struggle to gain the upper hand against their competitors. He took the gladly accepted the jobs, as they served as an outlet for the creative energy that naturally bubbled between his ears.

This is when you could've used the fancy, sort of roundabout descriptions that you used for the scenery. The story as is focuses greatly on inconsistent and poorly stitched imagery, while listing off the protagonist in a style akin to that of a work resume. There doesn't feel to be any tone to your work, however I get the impression that you are definitely going for an atmospheric story about a hero caught in a large world around him, one that feels almost ethereal in nature.

The awkwardness of prose instead just leads a bunch of half developed images. There is no connection for the reader.

further stuff, I don't know what the word count is.

>The second blow sobered him, but he was still perplexed. This couldn’t be right. It wasn’t until she hit him a third time that he understood what was happening.
“You dumb piece of shit,” she said. “There is no Sky. If the Sky were real then life wouldn’t be like this. I’m getting tired of hearing nothing but goddamn stories. This is real.”

I'm not a fan of this because it feels very convenient that she just snaps when you decide to introduce her to us. Shouldn't we instead see more of his routine, and not the time when she finally gets fed up, considering all of what was written before and after this? It
also has no real significance to the rest of the story, besides making the setting "grim," but the dialogue is forced and the actions of the characters are abrupt and also forced.

Also, don't try to throw things at us. If you want to make the story natural, introduce things one at a time. Every paragraph is a new list of crimes, lifestyles, tech, and political systems, and the random adjectives only illustrate further how your writing resemblances a grocery list.

>“You must have missed the part where I was passive-aggressively sarcastic towards you.”

Why does everyone talk like teenagers in this story? I mean this for dialogues before and after this line.

>“Ha-ha. Notice my sarcasm.”

>“It’s probably the riskiest job I’ll ever take,” Zipper continued, “but it’s also the smartest given what I stand to gain. I don’t know how this guy found you. If I got any brains at all I won’t even ask.”

Why is everyone monologuing?

>Moments later, Zipper was in the hands of another villain. He didn’t understand why, only how. He bit a hand and bolted out of grasp. No time to think. Hide. Hide. There.

Well, there definitely doesn't feel like time to think. There's also no time to feel anything, either. This reads like an unnecessary part, like you're eager to write the next paragraph, but it is so sudden and poorly executed that I feel no worry for our protagonist, because I have no clue what's going on. The image in my head that I picture is of a silhouette in some murky gray area moving. That should not be your desired intention, I believe. I don't feel anything from this, be it disgust, worry, excitement, etc.

>“Ready to go, kid?”
“You’re only three years older than me,” Zipper groaned.

>“Yeah and it shows.” She smirked that smirk Zipper knew well enough. Pelly was already exceedingly strange in Zipper’s mind, and she constantly gave him reasons to think about her.

Show, don't tell. We don't require all this mindless exposition. Instead of having her say kid (psh, nothing personal), how about she jokingly says "hop on," and winks, for example?

continued

That would show her merry personality, and still hold some sexual and incomprehensible behavior? Say something about how she typically does stuff like this all the time, and that Zipper blushes or something like that every time she does. Everything that you desired to convey is achieved, and you incorporate imagery, style, character, and give a much-needed tonal consistency and contrast.

>“Shit, dude, I don’t know. Show them some technology or something. It’s like magic to them, probably.”

How about you shorten up the sentences? Play with speed. As she would say it, her uncertainty would lead her to perhaps saying quicker or more thoughtless sentences, and this is where you can work with character development. How does your character unconsciously act? We can see that she swears, and does it on reflex. Then, why does she only swear once? Here's what I personally would've wrote:

"Shit, dude, why're you asking me?" she paused, " show them some tech or shit. Shit's like magic. Like, they don't know it"

Of course, I go for a longer overall dialogue, because I feel that your story goes too fast. Other people have handled the later parts, and I mostly agree with them.

nobody critiques anyone else general

A Poem on Being Sick, Sleeping All Day, Masturbating, and Abusing Drugs

I spent most of the day in my bed trying to have a prolonged conversation with at least one person
And I’m writing this poem on a computer running Windows Vista at the tail end of 2016
And it sounds like it will eventually explode and/or give me cancer

I saw a post on Veeky Forums the either day that was a guy complaining that modern poetry is just prose with more line breaks
But, Bob Dylan has the Nobel Prize for Literature
I hope I never win an award

I had a dream this computer began to break
In exactly the same way as my last laptop did
My brain seems to enjoy repetition and cycles
My brain seems to enjoy repetition and cycles
I should get into cycling, show it who’s boss

I want to write a book that reads like a biography of a fictional, relatively normal family. This is my attempt at an opening, how is it?

I guess the merit here is that it's occasionally self-referential. On its own it isn't particularly poignant, but I think I could genuinely see a collection of these having some profundity, like an aphoristic journal.

I think you need to sort out the rhythm of the first paragraph desperately. Don't be afraid of using commas and, throughout the piece, don't be afraid of using simpler words.
Overall, it's pretty good. The opening gives off an overly scientific and almost cyberpunk-y tone, which isn't carried throughout the rest of the piece and so fits in kind of awkwardly.

I feel like this has a lot of telling and not enough showing, as like high school English class as that sounds. For example, the thin road, the tall house, the mother, the money-earner, the monarch of the house. Pound was wrote, about poetry, "Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something." and "Use either no ornament or good ornament." which I think would both be helpful to consider. I did get the biography sort of vibe you were going for tho.

First time faggot Veeky Forums poster.

Need feedback for a script I'm writing that'll eventually be read by a friend for a youtube video. The terms won't make much sense, but I'm writing to a crowd that should have base-level knowledge of the lore. I'm also expecting this to be about half done. Maybe I should've waited to write it all out before asking for help? I'm a dumbass biz student so I haven't taken many writing classes but I am finding out that I enjoy it.

pastebin.com/B6PgG1Lt

Thanks, very helpful advice

these are just sufjan lyrics cucko

A Poem on Sleep

I will not take a xanax to fall asleep
I will not take a xanax to fall asleep
I lost twelve pages of poetry to negligence
And now I post it all anonymously
Trying to see if another human being will just tell me it's okay
I will not take a xanax to fall asleep
I love you, earnestly, anonymous
You are me, I am we
For a site where every user is identity-less
Lots of people seem to care about other people's identities
I didn't even vote, and I live in a swing state
When you take xanax it floods your dopamine receptors to make you think you're having a good time
Or so I'm told, I'm wasting my life away on a literature forum, I'm not a scientist
When I take it makes me fall asleep
So does drinking a lot, and smoking pot
I will not take a xanax to fall asleep
Finnegans Wake is the fever dream of the day of Uylsses
If I finish it all right now, can I go finally fall asleep
And stop writing anonymous poetry
At least when I die I won't have any fart-based poetry for my offspring to profit on
This isn't much of a poem is it
I will not take a xanax to fall asleep
I wrote this on my iPhone at 4AM
Because my computer is shit
If you're going to be vulgar in poetry, make sure it based on anatomy
Cock, cum, and cunt all have good syllables
I will not take a xanax to fall asleep
I will not take a xanax to fall asleep
I will not take a xanax to fall asleep
I will not take a xanax to fall asleep

dude sam hyde loves ur shit lol

I'm not the best person to be responding here because I'm such a bad writer than anything remotely well-written impresses me, but I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed reading both of your excerpts.

the object of "was one of the few periods of my day where I could say I was truly happy" is the behemoth "sitting in the cafe across the street from the steakhouse"

I know its just housekeeping, but you gotta keep things a little more ship shape imo mane.

dis is gay man. stop showing off you noob peacock. and I don't say showing off with a positive connotation, not in the least. Write something actually meaningful or careworthy. Or else write poems.

Not so mad on this one. There's no pattern to the repetition, and the fact that there are no stanzas makes it a chaotic mix of unidentifiable feelings as opposed to recognisable concepts -- if any of that makes sense.

Now with his cheeks flushed red, the keeper gave a grunt of satisfaction and lit his pipe.The spark burned an orange circle into the tobacco. When the grey smoke started trickling away he allowed himself a long drag that shook his body. The fire grinned, the pipes clanked and with the cosy pitter patter of rain lashing on the window panes. The lighthouse seemed like a home. But now it was time to go upstairs. Where he'd been hearing the creaking of wood against footsteps. He lived alone, he lived hundred of miles out of shores way. He knew that there was no possible way for something to be in the lighthouse. But, the keeper was also a pragmatic man.He'd realised that something was waiting for him up the stairs. There was no answer for what or perhaps the prospect that sent the shivers higher up his spine, why?

III

First, he steadied himself to the daunting task by slugging down a tot of black rum. The alcohol spread a golden courage in him and the keeper paced into the living room. Above the fireplace was the gaping skull of a shark.The bone gleamed angrily at him as he approached it. In its mouth rested a harpoon-gun. The keeper picked out the slab of iron and felt its weight strain his arms. It was well kept, lubricated properly and without a single spot of rust within. From a leather bag he pulled out a barbed harpoon, it's tip smiling in the fire's light. And slid it with a click into the gun. A long breath in...and he went to confront the upstairs.

The stairs were plunged in darkness and un-invitingly steep. At the very top of them, the keeper's door. The heavy oak slightly ajar. And though there was no lights lit, some dim yellow presence was casting shadows. He swallowed hard, feeling the rum press against his stomach and lurched onto the first step. The wood creaked in protest. He did so again, and again and again. With each step getting closer to the door. The sounds from behind the door growing louder and louder. Creaks and scuffles and bumps.

He leant against the knob and with a powerful kick sent the door flying in its hinges. Something leapt off his bed. At the sight of the creatures scurry he skipped a breath and discharged the harpoon in fear. The mechanism slammed and sent the steel six inches into the wall. The thing didn't react, but he did once he saw what it was.
A girl, barely out of infancy. Six or seven he would have said. With a gaunt skull covered in papery skin. Wide black eyes with pupils so huge they barely flickered to look around the room. Her body was frail and her bones on display. Her hair was golden and tumbled from her head to her feet. She glowed. It was the only way the keeper had to describe the flickering, ever-changing aura that surrounded the Although she was very nearly human, looking closely at the imperfections made him nearly convulse in repulsion.

I appreciate it, thank you!

Sorry I wasn't trying to I just chose a pretty abstract and weird passage but the more regular one I posted is a bit less flashy if that floats your boat.

The first word that came to mind was "studied."

Are you now or have you ever been, involved in an MFA program? Just sayin.

To my ear, it sounds like the beginning of a Henry James novel, with less intricate lace and less precise period psychology. James, for example, would have pointed out the feminine contradiction that mothers always exhibit between their fear of their daughters marrying wrong, and their simultaneous compulsive desire for grandchildren.

It is an interesting problem. MFA work always bears the scars of having had all traces of anything that could be called "style" beaten out of it with whips and mauls; but then we have the famous "stylists" like McCarthy, who become enslaved by their babies.

Write ten knock-down-drag-out sock-off blower synonyms for "inherent tradition" and work over the implications of each alternative in the context of "who do these characters become by the end?" For example, if one or more ends up in prison, then an incarcerational synonym would be more appropriate, if their fate is to be linked to the mother, in some way. All the threads in the skein should connect, no matter how knotted. That's where "style" used to come from, before we turned it into a thing, instead of a dimension of the thing.

I've ever been involved in an MFA, not that that should discredit your criticism at all. It is interesting that you should bring up style predominantly; I was trying to remove any over-stylised character from my writing and just show things for what they are.

Your advice in the fourth paragraph is particularly helpful, thank you.

You have a compass and a map, and have learned by trial and error how to follow them to a point. This is well.

Specifically with regard to descriptions of bodily sensations, it my belief, and agreement with Chandler, that they should never be attempted by one who has never had them. So, unless you have smoked at least one pipe and tossed back at least one good dram of black rum, you should either change those details to something you know more authentically how to describe, or go do them both then revise accordingly. "Shook" - to a smoker - sounds like he's coughing. "Spread a golden courage" skips at least one step. Somehow. There is a connection to be made that resides in the fact that the esophagus, which perceives a sensation of heat when ardent spirits pass down it, is also the closest tube to the heart.

Does the bone gleam angrily, or the skull? Or the teeth? This is another problem with adverbs - they are easily set adrift from their referents, at the cost of the rendered image. "The shark's teeth angered at his approach." Or something.

I have no objection to a simple "long inhale" - this might even involve the otherwise suddenly disappeared pipe (bodily experience again - if he is old, and smokes a pipe regularly, he is not going to let it just vanish. It's in his mouth, his hand, or carefully placed in a really nice stand/ashtray.)

Infancy, a state of neophyte helplessness, does not resolve with "six or seven" if those are years. An infant would be "six or seven" months. A toddler would be 4 or 5 or maybe 6, but a "six or seven" year old would be an adolescent. Given "leapt off" I would venture that "infant" is the wrong word here, since infants' most athletic form of locomotion is to crawl on all fours.

It's always in the details.

And by the way, though I appreciate the resistance to a time and weather report, which is always a good instinct to obey, I confess that I am missing here a visit to so novel a setting as a lighthouse, because I love lighthouses, with not a single shot-between-the-eyes slug of imagery of the ocean. Maybe from through a double-paned window.

I'm too scared to post here but realize I need criticism because despite my best efforts I can't get anyone to read anything I've written.

Maybe I should go somewhere gentler for my first time...

Have you ever been to Brooklyn?

do you write poetry or prose?

Both, but I care about the prose more. I write shitty poetry as an emotional outlet and nothing more.