/critique/

I haven't written anything serious yet, not even a short story or a poem. I just want to know if I have some potentials as a writer.

--------

I wake up. Purple light of dawn is filling my room. I get out of my bed and raise the blinds. The city outside the window is still shrouded in the remnant of the night. Some lighted windows of the buildings shine in the gloom. I hear the sounds of cars. A distant siren of a police car.

I get into bathroom without turning the lights on. I only see my silhouette in the quasi-darkness. The average height for a 14-year-old boy. Two hands holding the rim of the washbasin. Two arms upright. Head slightly turned downward.

I hear nothing from the direction of my mother's room. I normally refrain from nearing that realm of the apartment, but the lack of human presence comforts me. I carefully approaches the door of her room. I listen in. Nothing. I am a good listener and our apartment has good soundproofing. I hear no breathing. There is no one inside. The bitch is in some dude's place somewhere in the city, as always.

I plop down on the sofa and turn on the television set. Colors and sounds pervade my consciousness. I respond to none. I just love that they kill the quiet in me, the unbearable silence that haunts me.

Is this autobiographical or the story of an autist?
Either way, decent stuff. Keep it up.

In my experience, even when I try to write at a fast pace, there are many redundant stuff that ends up in the first draft. I like to refer to it as "mud", as music producers refer to the build-up of low frequencies in the "first drafts" of songs. It's raison d'être is, to be removed, obliterated. I think you might profit from this tactic as well. Keep up.

>many
much

I'm French. Excuse my English.

Sounds like a good technique and I think I can identify. "Mud" seems to work like scaffolding. The good work it built up around it and then removed. This first draft of Blood Meridian is a good example. It reads poorly, but all the good elements of the final draft are worked in.

I am an offspring of a racist white loser and a self-hating Asian whore. So I guess it could be autobiographical.

Even better

As someone not one of you two, I do this also. My writing doesn't have a lot of "mud" but it's sort of a clay that needs pushing into the right place. Sculpture feels like a really apt metaphor for it.

Is my English okay? I'm not a native speaker.

I has a kind of stilted, emotionless quality which might belie the fact that it is not your first language - but it's possible you could make that work for you. Like I said, it comes across as almost autistic. Joseph Conrad brought a specifically Polish sensibility to his English prose

Apart from that

> I carefully approaches
should be "I carefully approached"

>"Mud" seems to work like scaffolding. The good work it built up around it and then removed.
Good analogy. It never crossed my mind. Yeah, I tried to write without "mud" once. The resulting draft, while free of redundancies, read very stiff and unnatural. I think we could also refer to the "mud" as "lubricating oil" for machinery. The machinery being the analogy for prose, or the prose in the making.

>"lubricating oil"

Definitely. It's a cure for perfectionism too. If you try to write without Mud then you'll end up in total stasis. Rigid prose, and very little of it.

Thanks. My native language is Korean which is very different from English. I'd like to write in English because it will give me access to more, and better audience.

And I think it should be just "approach" because the prose is in the first-person present tense.

I'd say that your English writing is better than many native speakers in the UK - which unfortunately is a compliment as much as it is a criticism of the UK education system.

On the autobiographical element - I like the intensity, but I would suggest approaching it differently. The character I've written here

williamguppyblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/31/first-blog-post/

is basically an exaggerated parody of myself, or one part of myself.
I'd recommend opening up some distance between you and the character - either with humour or whatever - so that you can write without being too invested. Otherwise you're at risk of writing something painful - an not in the good way.

To be honest, the amount of humor is a bit too much. So the story reads like a farce rather than a novel but I think that's the effect you intended.

It's a personal preference. I lose interest in a story when it loses verisimilitude (the quality of being likely). I don't think there is anyone who would act like that one in real life. We have plenty in TV of course. So it reads like a script for a TV show than a novel.

But yeah my character needs to be independent from me. Even if it's just to protect me.

My biggest fear of being a published writer is that anyone will see my insecurities and all the fucked-up shit in my head through my past writing because even though fiction is fictitious, it contains a great deal of life. As a very self-conscious person, this haunts me. Like, I want to write about how pathetic racists whites husbands and their self-hating Asian wives are, but then people will judge, "he hates himself and his people"

I hope my honest opinions didn't hurt your feelings.

>I hope my honest opinions didn't hurt your feelings.

No, that's fine. I intended it to be farcical. Maybe I do need to inject more realism into it though. I guess its my way of distancing myself from the actions of the character

Maybe it's too farcical, or maybe I'm too depressed. Don't let my opinion change your style. The Infinite Jest is farcical but it succeeded.

The prose really carries me. Humor was nice. The idea and directions I could get behind. But I must ask is this a Full length novel or a Short story of sorts?

I Like it, I get the feeling I would buy this book for the plot since it is interesting.

Is the novel you are writing is of satire? I need more insight.

Picture will be my work I just type a few moments ago.

Decent prose, hated the anger/woe is me paragraphs. It's quite personal, but I can't stand those descriptions of such feelings in dramatic introspective sequences, gets across me as snarky and overused. Not my cup of tea, but would read more to see if he goes the non suicide plot-twistey way.

Your prose seems about par for the course in terms of fantasy (which I assume is what this is). Needs to transition soon to something more concrete, though. The reader needs a grounded scene otherwise they are going to lose interest.

Vary that sentence structure up a bit. Short punchy sentences work well for a natural feeling scene like this, but if you don't break them up a bit it feels like riding in a car with square wheels. Keep working on it.

Not bad. Your dialogue feels natural enough. I'm not crazy about the phrase "perfume assails my nostrils," though.

Eh, just get a better first-liner, waking up is way too amateurish; be creative, describe something obliquely and then jump to the cutting edge realistic ones; the flow is quite good as it is, it has potential as a short story.

Coming home after a binge in the vicinity of Greyhound Peaks and before even addressing the water that dripped off one gallon at a time from her fridge, her cognition finally got what she was trying to conceive for the last eight or so hours: people get quite inconvenient as they lay dying.
Things date back to about when Mrs. Cherie Goldbaum had her ass and tights tightly pressed, and that had the whole department as ocular witnesses, between her chair's arms, what happened just before her, Missy Vann Delle, got into an argument with the other her.
"You're on my chair, Goldie."
"No shite, Dellie."
That's about it, as their Boss, Mr. High Plains Drifterwood, dressed in character, comes out and say you fucks are ruining my (morning) wood, ladies, if you get my drift, and then he chuckles and one or another drone does the same, including intonation. Delle gets quite annoyed by this recurrent behavior, but, eh, the HR have been turning her sexual harassment complaints forever, and every able body remember that time when it was her ass pressed in the luscious ass oppressing pornographic chair and the Boss came into and that was it, he had quite a fast draw, maybe the fastest in the whole un-diagnosed ED world, and those were the days, all agreed: the secretaries, those cunning she-devils, those incestuous step-bosses , ah, they always had the biggest asses and the thickest tights and the most child-bearing hips, that was for sure. Courtesy, mind you, Dellie, of Mr. Boss himself.
But even the finest ass selectors had their final becoming, and Woody couldn't but accept his own on that 1973 hot and humid flyover state trailer park.

I'm a big fan of using subordinating clauses before the subject of the sentence. All of the sentences in this story begin with the subject, which comes across, to me, as without variation. My tip, though not necessarily a good one but a genuine one, is to add more subordinate clauses to make the story flow less with this: I did this. I did that. He did this. It was this. Gravel covered the floor. The walls hid. The shelves....

I truly enjoyed it, user. The way you managed to compress that many memes, while at the same time created a story that is available for an outside reader - meaning someone who hasn't spent time reading green text stories - is impressing. Also, the humor got to me. I get the point made, but I just figured it was your way of underlining the satire.

I'm not sure if I can provide any concrete tips, but some sentences struck me as a bit over-the-top. like:

>The old man had pulled his cap over his eyes and was attempting to ignore Robert.

Do you have to say that he "was attempting to ignore Robert"? Because I think you've made that clear by now.

>as if he had caught them in a post-coital embrace.

If I understand you correctly, you are describing Mr. and Mrs. Morus through the lense of Robert's mind. And the expression "post-coital embrace" is probably the one he would use. So is it intentional that you're blurring the lines between the third person narrative and Robert's thoughts?

Here is mine. This is the first time I've ever posted on Veeky Forums. It's (possibly) the beginning of a novel. I'm not a native speaker, hence the uncertainty in red writing. I will post more if someone thinks it's worth their time.

>is this a Full length novel or a Short story of sorts?

A work in progress. Likely it will be novella length if I plod on with it

Also, not a fan of fantasy so I'm not really in a position to critique, but your prose seems saleable.

Fantastic rich description. You know how to show and not tell

What do you guys think so far?

I was infront of my apartment building, intoxicated with cheap beer (mine) and expensive wine (my friend's) enough to not remember half of the night, but lucid enough to engage in thinking if I strained myself enough. It was around three A.M. and I felt guilty for drinking that long into the night. I saw a red light blinking inside a car. It was my mother's car, a white 2004 Twingo, and the light meant that she had run out of gas. That light always shone like that, a bright red, even when the engine was off. I was always deeply confused when I was little and saw that light blinking by itself, even though my mother was not in the car. That red light is probably why I decided to stop.

I told myself that I had to stay strong and resist the urge to go home, and think here just a little bit, because it would be a sin to blindly follow my urges to go home and lose my lucidity. And so I stood. I looked up at my apartment building and marveled at its presence. It wasn't its color or its shape, and neither the width or the height specifically that made me stare at it, but the fact that it was just there. I was no longer looking at a scene, a 2D image, I was looking at a building and nothing else. It felt as if there was everything - and then there was the building.

As I looked away from it, my way of looking stayed the same. I gazed at my mother's car and I no longer cared for the light, I didn't even realize it was there, because I was looking at the car as a whole, an idea of the car itself. It struck me how close to the floor the car's ceiling was - was this a different car from the one I knew? I looked around and every other car felt as tiny and compact, it was as if I was stripped of all prejudices towards the extensive, speedy and comfy pieces of metal that carried me around and saw them for what they were. I realized, the cars were calling to tell me what exactly it meant to be a car, and when I looked, I picked up the phone. This lasted for a couple of seconds, and then I turned my head left.

There's nothing much I can say than I like it. You should post more

Honestly, I'm feeling a bit of apathy regarding your text. Like *why* did you have to stop and think? Pull me into your mind and the motivation of your character. Also, drop the parentheses.

And ffs, listen to OP and provide some critique before posting your own work.

1/3

As if a dreamlike drunkenness were under my employment, I have schizophrenia to make my life odd, which is not altogether fruitless, for the strangeness of being it presents is quite a fascinating sensation to turn over in my thoughts. Life is, anyway, a terribly nonsensical adventure when the mind is pushed to consider it deeply.

My mental illness is most fortunately a manageable case, nevertheless, one that hinders me socially but as long as I remain fairly alone, excepting for the company of my wife, Jane, I do well enough, always on the outskirts, however, always a voyager in the aberrant surreal, which can be entertaining in its own right nonetheless.

I will never understand what it means to be alive. Full stop. For one thing, I was never alike to anyone else enough to feel normal, though I've had some friends, and I have Jane. I become confused when I'm with people, because something about me is incurably odd. Life taunts me with its well-adjusted ordinariness. I try to smirk, but only to disguise the feeling that I've been snubbed.

More to the point, the earth is a little planet in a vast universe, and I'm quite smaller than the earth. With a trillion massive stars overhead, I feel alone in my mind; with a trillion unimaginably enormous galaxies swirling about wildly in the distance of space, I feel squeezed into a tiny existence all to myself, shared with nobody, as if nobody could comprehend me, not who I really am anyway, not the thing in me that tears up and longs to be well-adjusted like everyone else.

I have socialized and loved as much as I was able, but I still feel as if my mark has been only to sprinkle a light dust on life that will be blown away by the wind like ashes. Eventually, the feeling overtakes me: Everything about living is unutterably strange, far too incomprehensible to fathom.

2/3

And every life has storms. The night comes on thick, with strange aspects like the close proximity of a ghost, or dying flowers, or insensible moments of gazing out at life with no comprehension of why it exists at all. Life tends to storm over often enough for all of us to learn to expect it.

Stormclouds passed over the houses in my neighborhood on the day my mother died. Their dark purple was the first sign that the day wasn't exactly paradise. They streaked lightning from cloud to cloud with a violence, until a moment later it just stopped, the sky went dark, and I began to mourn incomprehensibly. Outside, the cloudscape undulated surreally, throwing down rain. I leaned out the doorway, wondering at the mess, the great fat droplets coming in sheets, the dark street, feeling a despondence take hold of me, sweep over me as if a deathly gloom had descended on the spot I stood.

I felt sluggish, weary, making no noise but sensing something askew, the shoe on the staircase, my mother's shoe. Only one, and thus I began to search for her, overcome by an ominous sense of loneliness in the entire house. It cast a shadow. A gray film came down over the surface of the entryway and spread throughout the rooms. The world was dimmer. And then I thought about how I hadn't heard my mother greet me when I came home from work.

I saw the shoe. I felt older. Her shoe lay there overturned, silent but communicative. I went up the stairs and found my mother lying halfway down the staircase, on her side, and all I felt was absence. I pulled her up and looked into her eyes to find them staring vacantly forward at me, incognizant. I carried her to her bed and lay her down, then called for an ambulance, which came shortly thereafter. She was already dead, nothing could be done, and they wheeled her in a stretcher into the back of the ambulance. A paramedic told me she was dead, which defeated me for a moment.

I sunk onto the staircase, and then watched as, after they had taken care of me, they took her away to the morgue. The world was an opaque darkness. The rain had quieted, but the stormclouds threatened to dismember me and leave me strewn across the world in lonely parts. I had stammered to the paramedics. They didn't understand what I was saying, and neither did I. They offered basic, practical information. I sputtered out nonsense. They spared me any further dialogue as I cried and crumpled further inward.

3/3

A moment of horror came over me, like a terrible note was suddenly struck on an out of tune piano, and it screamed. The world dissolved. My mind spiraled into darkness. A pounding entered, a hard heartbeat, arrythmic. It was terror, the feeling of a dream when the dreamer can't speak. Everything had the appearance of unreality. The moments seemed to be disembodied, belonging with no other moments. I was eighteen years old, having scarcely any experience of the world, and all of the sudden, my mother was gone. No experience in life was like it. It was as if the mortal coil that attached me to the world were cut and I was terrifyingly alone.

I called Jane. She was at the florist's shop, her job. My voice cracked when I spoke, my eyes still dripping with tears.

"Jane, my mother," I said to her, "she is dead. Can you come over after work?"

"I can come now," she said. "I'll be right over. Are you okay?"

Fifteen minutes later, she arrived. She hugged my dragging body. We curled up together on the couch and she held me, my tears finally having subsided, but my emotions in disarray, derailed.

"I'm sorry, Jack."

I was silent, curling up against her, craning my head on her shoulder.

The next day, I contacted my father on the telephone. He was difficult to find. I called his old friends first, to no avail. "That scumbag," one had said. Another, a woman with paralyzed legs, told me that he had stolen her van and crashed it while drunk; she complained that it was her only means of transportation to work and that he had been impossible to find since. I called around expecting more of the same sorts of stories: my father, the scumbag. I got ahold of Sam, his step-brother, a dentist who had once, at no charge, fixed his teeth after they had been broken in a fight, and he had a number where I could reach my father. I called.

"David," I said. I only ever addressed him by his first name. "Mom is dead. I thought you should know."

"Huh?"

"Mom is dead."

"Who is this?"

"This is Jack."

"Jack! Well, son! You're calling to tell me your mother is dead? Look, I haven't heard from you in months and you're calling me now? She was a bitch anyway. What are you calling me for?"

"I thought you should know."

"You thought I should know? I don't care if she's in hell, to be honest."

Somewhere in my mind, the smell of whiskey arose and I remembered smelling it on his breath. My parents had divorced ten years previous. My mother, a good woman, had had enough of my father for several years, but a divorce tends to need the right time. She finally left him after she secured a job that could pay for her own apartment in which the two of us could live decently. I had rarely seen him since, only on occasions that were usually quite awkward, and he was usually drinking whiskey. I was fifteen the last time I saw him in person. I had had enough of him.

He arrived to the cave. It was familiar with its welcoming hole of entrance to the earthly flatlet. So the ropes shredded and pulled in the cave to hold the pots and pans and pottery that was crafted in the night of day in the Stygian cove. The sound of the underground river brushed the walls and vibrated the caves cold floor as to make itself known flaunt its azure strength. It rushed and bubbled like a witch's pot, yet this river was gelid and unforgiving to the human instinct--it was harsh and cruel and would obscure the red of blood as to hide its tracks. The river simply ran on and continued, and melded earth to its own liking, and scraped the walls to write in its own unknown language, and stormed the underlying rocks and pillars as to claim its area. The river breathed and pulsed as one being, and it whispered to the man.

4/3

"Yes, I thought you should know. Goodbye, David," I said, and clicked off the phone. I never spoke to him again.

"Was that your dad?" asked Jane.

"He doesn't qualify."

"You father."

"David. That's all the respect her deserves. He insulted her, like usual. He didn't even ask me how I was doing or how I felt."

My critique is that you use pastebin next time

>Your prose seems about par for the course in terms of fantasy (which I assume is what this is).
It is. is it bad?
>Needs to transition soon to something more concrete, though. The reader needs a grounded scene otherwise they are going to lose interest.
Care to give an example or an explanation?

I also like the rich description of your work. Your showing and not telling promising sign. You more to share or is that all?

>A work in progress. Likely it will be novella length if I plod on with it
Ahh its good then.

>Also, not a fan of fantasy so I'm not really in a position to critique, but your prose seems saleable.
Thanks I guess?

Is erotic allowed?

...

yes. it isn't image its ok

Only if its good

The boy opens his eyes and wakes from fitful dreams. Sprawled on the floor in front of him is his dead mother. She is naked, bloody, and covered in cum.
She has been raped. She has been beaten. She has been killed. Horrified, the boy slaps a fat black spider on the sheets of his bed... And proceeds to fuck his mother's corpse. Cum. Cold, congealed blood. He cums deep in her vaginal cavity and smashes her face against the floor. THUD. THUD. THWAP. He picks her shattered teeth out of the cluster of for and eats them. Teeth on teeth. Chipping and cracking. Gums and tongue bleeding steadily now. Police are just outside now. Sirens or intuition must have awakened him. Muffled crashing at the front door. He puts the gun to his head and squeezes. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Out of bullets...

I am not the brightest but I really don't understand what any of this means

Thank you. What do you think about the writing in red. I mean, what do you think sounds the best out of the options I've written down?

Dirty bit bitumen went over hill and houses went by,
Bush here still steadfast, things built around it
The day said
By being warm
By heavy metal from some backyard
That things were just fine

Salt pans kept a dense buffer on mangroves
Too much of a hassle
Smelled like sewage on hot day
Just go fishin in it

Kids ripped skids, they were hell raisers
They trained tongue and swearing
Piled together silver coins and goldies
Ate hot chips for lunch

>I respond to none. I just love that they kill the quiet in me, the unbearable silence that haunts me.

ebin

On Sundays our bodies sway in the breeze,
suspended by a strand
from a precipice;
every second strains a little more the blanching clasp
of fingers intertwined along the span of the chain;
every second tears a little more the corner
of the slit, of desperate fingertips
pressed together, of ruddy ridges
with ruddy troughs aligned,
between fingers of moments
marshalled forth to die.

The dimming bank of light that scorches white
the stretch of my kitchen window sill
rakes my nape with a pin
and says to me,
“Isn't this a sight to see? I make ivory
of marble, and warm this godless frigidaire,
the lair of loping wolves, the empty nest.
In the ebony loam of the Sundarbans
I haul grass out of the sod,
to give foliage to a flash of amber roaming
in my shadow, leaving its prints behind.
Around boulders at the feet of steep bluffs,
I’m the one that paints milky foam
when a sheet of water plunges
to its continuous dying.”

My fingers are spotted with black iron flakes,
and, clenched around a spiral iron beam
in bloodless fists, with rattling wrists,
bear little crescents of blood
cut a little deeper every second;
I gasp out my voice to the whistling air:
“I see my bedroom from outside
the window; I see wrinkles
wending through my sheets like vipers.
I see the second hand tapping out the time.
Every second, I grow. Every second here
I die a little more, outside my room,
looking in: twelve thousand kilometres
from where I want to be.
What sort of sight is this to see?”

Before my eyes, the blinding beam of light
petrifies to a faded marble threshold.
The whistling air is stuffed now with
the wails of nocturnal ghosts.

Which do you consider a more compelling structure?

1: MC wants X, gets X, and must go through trials to keep X.

2a: MC wants X, but gets Y, the complete opposite of X. MC is at first displeased, but grows to love Y more than he loved X.

2a: MC wants X, but gets Y, the complete opposite of X. MC grows to despise Y to dangerous levels.

3: MC is neutral to X and is given it against his will, growing to either love or hate it.

fuck, second one should be 2b obviously.

Also, I'm sure the most fitting answer is "depends on the story," but I'm sure you have your biases, even if you don't realize it.

>2a: MC wants X, but gets Y, the complete opposite of X. MC grows to despise Y to dangerous levels.
This.
Literature feeds of conflicts.

To me it sounds best like this: in an attempt, the right and the left, leave the car keys and the 'as if it was made by'.

Also, not sure if you noticed, but the 'of' after the dandruff should be an 'off'.

Nobody critiqued my story. :,)

Identify yourself

...

>2a: MC wants X, but gets Y, the complete opposite of X. MC is at first displeased, but grows to love Y more than he loved X.
This one. I like characters that change over the course of the story.

Nauseatingly purple, I'm afraid.

Is it ok if it's just this first section of the book? The other parts aren't really like this.

bump

>I lay in the soft snow and gazed at the light filtering through the gregarious trees
>Confusing "lay" and "lie"
>Gregarious trees
Good god. This romanticist crap was nauseating 200 years ago let alone now.

Thank you! I'll make the changes immediately.

Please give me some constructive feedback on my very real fantasy

Frost gazed into Matt’s trapping eyes
Not forgetting about the other sexy guys
Frost looked around and spotted his friends
Knowing they would soon meet each other’s ends
Bricky from behind spoke a neck-tingly verse
“When I go in, we shall act how we rehearsed”
He stroked his cock and promptly inserted
Proving his dominance was surely asserted
Frost’s eyes closed as his ass filled with pleasure
Bricky chuckled and left some white pleasure
Darkk couldn’t resist, he had to dig deep
Eating Frost’s ass out was within his reach
His tongue reached places Frost didn’t know
This night, Frosty was to be the ho
Within seconds The Brick and Karp went to town,
Removing Darkk from the land of brown
They bent Frost down so they could reach his holes
While Darkk was bored…………HE WENT FOR THE BALLS
Bricky, back to fill Frost full of glue
Matt was also there to start round two
They both strongly thrusted, so very hard
Matt and Bricky were the carries, Darkk was the Bard
Supporting from under, Darkk’s mouth full of sack
Bricky orally shoving, while Matt shoved through the back
Matt and Bricky were both ‘bout to splode
While Darkk was still there, with his big fat chode
Bricky came inside, releasing his sperm
While Matt burrowed deep, like a dirty ol’ worm
He soon came deep within the boy named Frosty
His asshole took damage, his bill would be costly
Darkk stood up with hair on his chin
Said “That’s enough for one night”, with a grin
For that night, you might not know, but Frost could tell
The mitochondria was the powerhouse of the cell

The suspicious group in the corner immediately catches your eye as you enter the squalid interior of the pub. They're not locals, and they're clearly on edge the way they sit with their shoulders hunched over and fingers habitually tapping pockets as if to make sure whatever contents inside are still there. They're making no attempt to hide it and in turn the usual drunks and patrons of the pub aren't making much of an effort to hide their staring either. The strange band's presence isn't making for a great atmosphere and their weird mutterings aren't helping the uneasy mood. They don't seem to have noticed you yet.

With a smile, you make your way over to the corner and catch the eye of the one standing arms crossed against the wall. "The offer's good. When can you leave?"

Other than his eyes flicking in your direction, he doesn't move. "We go no-where 'til you hold up your side of the deal." The others by the table don't even acknowledge your presence, instead continuing to murmur in that odd tongue of theirs.

"It'll be prepared by the time you're ready," you say smoothly with as sincere and trustworthy a smile you can give. He doesn't reply. "So, when can you leave?"

One of the figures by the table slowly stands to face you. Now you see that under the hood it is a woman with scars running down one side of her face to her neck, where the trail disappears into her cloak. You wonder how far down it goes. Never taking her eyes off you, she says something softly, lips barely moving. It takes a moment for you to realise she is speaking to her companion in a different language.

"Alright," the man says, slowly nodding. You can't figure out whether he's saying it to you or the woman, but then he turns to you and says, "We can go today. Your side ready?" The woman grins, her eyes still not having left you. You notice her mouth is full of pointy teeth like a crocodile, and her eyes have the queer, squashed pupils of a toad.

You give your widest, fakest smile in response. "Yes. Be at the square in an hour."

>What do you think about second person?

unfunny, unoriginal, stop stealing things from twitch chat you fucking faggot liberal niggers

I'm personally drawn to 2a and 3 but all these are generally successful formulas. Try all of them and figure out which you're most drawn to/which one fits your style best.

NO

Way too much purple prose man.

2a

Overall I found this to be decent. Keep doing what you are doing.

Rewrite this. and don't starts with waking up of any sorts.

Chapter One: Aldred

It took Aldred’s seventh attempted to write the letter correctly. The candlelight, his only source of light, flickered as he struggled to form the letters he needed to inform his brother of his current predicament. The urgency kept him well past his routines. And the sudden cold breeze that made its way through the cracks in the wall did not help with the matter at hand, as his body shivered in response.

Dear Ernald.
Please forgive me for not writing more often, seeing as we no longer- .

The pattering of footsteps from outside his cell caught Aldred attention. He stopped writing as listening what the guards inevitably uttered in their conversation would be more important than writing his brother’s letter for now. Pressing his ear on the cell door, he vaguely overheard what they were speaking to one another. “You think he’s fine in there?” One of them spoke with mild concerned.

The sound of armor rattling could also be heard as the question that was given before was being answered. “Don’t worry about him. He fought in the war. I’m certain being imprisoned does not compare.” There was a state of quietude before another question aroused from the guards. “He’s been rather silent since his imprisonment. You think he killed himself, for what happened?”

A friend requested a "tragic love story" to me. I don't know shit about romance so this is the result. please help

also this is supposed to be a self-insert

>cryptb.in/c0qFEh

It's shit

Bump

(1/2)

Robert Jensen woke at six fifteen, as he did every morning. The divorce had been made final three months ago, and he had moved out and started living by himself two months before that. It was weird, at first. He had never really lived alone. From his family he had gone to university, where he had lived firstly in halls and then a shared house, and it was at university that he had met Sarah. They had got a flat together shortly after graduating, and had moved into a house a couple of years after that. In the past he had always come home from work or study to find someone else waiting there for him, someone to talk to and unwind with in the evening. Now there was no one. As soon as he got home he was left alone with his thoughts until the following morning when he left the house again. He hated his job, but he found himself staying at work for longer and longer hours just so he had some company.

He yawned and grasped for his glasses, feeling like he would need at least a couple more hours sleep before even feeling remotely fresh and energetic. He was vaguely aware that he had been dreaming of something pleasant, something that made him feel like a boy again. Calm. At peace. The more he tried to put his finger on what exactly it was that he had dreamt, the more impossible it was to remember any specifics. All he had was the memory of a feeling. It was a nice feeling, one that he had not felt when awake for a long time. He supposed he was grateful that his mind was able to play that sort of trick on him. At least that way he was happy some of the time, even if he couldn’t remember it afterwards.

(2/2)
It was hardly surprising that he never felt rested. The bed he slept on was small and uncomfortable, barely big enough to fit him on it. His feet hung over the end when he lay down, and if he tossed over in the night he would fall off the side. The mattress was lumpy, the pillow flat and hard. The room was never silent either; there was always the perpetual low buzz of the traffic, even in the middle of the night. London never really slept. It was a little less frenetic at night, sure, but still wide awake. Maybe if you’d grown up here then the constant noise was second nature and you didn’t really notice it. To him it was still a disturbance, even after ten years in the city.

The rest of the apartment wasn’t much nicer than the bed. It had been advertised on the website as a ‘self-contained studio’. That almost made the place sound attractive, but he quickly realised it had just been an estate agent euphemism for a cramped bedsit that was anything but attractive. It was all he could afford so he knew he couldn’t be too picky, but it was nonetheless a massive step down from the homely semi-detached house that he used to live in and was still paying half the mortgage for. He now lived in what was essentially one small room, maybe fifteen to twenty square metres altogether, which contained the bed, a wardrobe for his clothes, a kitchenette and a dining room table big enough for one person. Adjoined was a bathroom which contained a small shower, a toilet, and a sink. Everything in the flat was old and grotty, and didn’t work as it should. At first this pissed him off, but eventually Robert came to accept it; after all, he too was getting old, grotty and broken. He started to feel an affinity towards these decrepit fittings, as if they were a companion on this road to degradation. Perhaps it was inevitable and natural that someone who loses his human relationships starts to find solace in non-human relationships, or perhaps it was just the first sign he was going mad.

He’ll usually be out the door before seven. If he has time he’ll eat a couple slices of toast and drink a black coffee, but more often than not he’s already late by the time he’d had a shower and changed into his cheap, ill-fitting suit. This was one of those mornings. Hungry and half-asleep, he opened the door to the grey morning and headed for the underground station. It was only a ten minute walk, but he wished it were shorter. He had barely walked a hundred yards before passing two pools of vomit, splattered across the pavement about twenty feet apart. From some drunk probably, a reveller from last night or one of the tens of thousands of homeless in the city. Here was one now. A bedraggled man was curled up in a sleeping bag on a doorstep, surrounded by empty cans of Polish lager. He was sleeping now but no doubt he’d be awake in a few hours, accosting passers-by for their spare change. He walked straight on. Further up the pavement he noticed a couple of bin bags had been torn open, their contents strewn out like entrails of some urban roadkill. It took some careful footwork to avoid it entirely, and he remarked to himself that it was a semi-miracle he had managed to make it to the tube without his freshly polished shoes being completely covered in shit.

Ah, the tube. How he had come to hate the fucking tube. The great cesspool of human disappointment. The place where never will two strangers strike up a conversation, never will a man smile at his neighbour. Everyone is so goddamn miserable. In fairness, he was just as miserable as the rest of the morning commuters. Probably more so. Had he started off that way, or was it a recent development? He couldn’t remember. All he knew was the morning tube must be one of the most depressing places on earth. Dead-eyed wage slaves, all of them. All of us, he supposed. If London was as brilliant as everyone keeps saying then why does everyone look like they’re going to get off the tube and then throw themselves under the next one?

He had grown up in a small town, in the north of the country. Whilst there had been a great degree of animosity towards London, not all of it in jest, there was an unspoken undercurrent of admiration for those who managed to secure a job there. In London there was money. A boy could come out of university and immediately be on a higher salary than his dad who had spent the last twenty years working forty plus hours per week. When the people from his town who had moved to London returned to visit their friends and family they were afforded a certain swagger. Sure, you’d never give them the satisfaction of telling them to their face, but these were the ones who had escaped the provincial life. These were the ones who were going somewhere. These were the ones who meant something. Well just look at us all now, he thought as he surveyed the people around him. Look how fucking happy we are to be living in the capital.

My critique is that you use pastebin next time

I like it. I really wish I had more to say to this.

Thread is dead?

t-thanks

The chat window scrolled palindromes that were not true. The letters 'lol' did not actually signify the act of laughing for any of the hunched-over humans-- hands a-greased with salty snacks-- responsible for typing the acronym. Rather it was meant as an expression of that primordial emotion which was responsible for coup d'etats, crimes of domestic passion and bar room fights-- pride. In this simulated reality, the 'lol' was the taunt of that warriors used to demoralize an enemy. In this specific instance, it meant that the game of capture the flag was nearing it's end.

Scouser: mastered lol
Rounder: lol

This exchange was 21st century variant of taunting captured peasants whose revolt failed; the difference, chiefly, was that the fallen felt rage rather than fear.

[OoK] Sauce: FUCK YOU ASSHOLES
[OoK] McFury: yeah wtf, there's no need to be dicks about it
[OoK] Janus: hacks
[OoK] Janus: I'm gonna report

Scouser: lol, "hacks". You just suck.
Bolt: lol cry some more

A young man put down the headset that had been blaring the rhyming verse of a formerly impoverished, then absurdly wealthy, now dead, African American. He played the music during matches because he felt it imbued him with power. But now... now he felt impotent.

"Fucking goddamn it!"

He smashed his pale hand onto the particle board which supported his computer. What would be a meaningless loss in a meaningless video game for another represented the splintered remains of an arrow in his self-estimation.

He looked at the area of the desk which he brought his fist down. It showed no perturbation.

critique someone

>I wake up. Purple light of dawn is filling my room. I get out of my bed and raise the blinds. The city outside the window is still shrouded in the remnant of the night. Some lighted windows of the buildings shine in the gloom. I hear the sounds of cars. A distant siren of a police car.

>I get into the bathroom without turning the lights on. I only see my silhouette in the quasi-darkness. The average height for a 14-year-old boy. Two hands holding the rim of the wash basin. Two arms upright. Head slightly turned downward.

>I hear nothing from the direction of my mother's room. I normally refrain from nearing that realm of the apartment, but the lack of human presence comforts me. I carefully approach the door of her room. I listen in. Nothing. I am a good listener and our apartment has good soundproofing. I hear no breathing. There is no one inside. The bitch is in some dude's place somewhere in the city, as always.

>I plop down on the sofa and turn on the television set. Colors and sounds pervade my consciousness. I respond to none. I just love that they kill the quiet in me, the unbearable silence that haunts me.

Fix a few words about it

He was alone, and amongst friends.

Thank you, stranger. I really appreciate you taking the time.

My immediate impression is that there is potential here.

As for the critique: Maybe it's just my lack of comprehension of the English language, but

>It took Aldred's seventh attempted

doesn't make much sense to me. Also, is the struggle he's experiencing really to

>form the letters

or is it forming the words? I get that the light makes it difficult to read and write, but is that the reason why it has taken Aldred seven attempts? It doesn't seem likely to me.

I think you also could drop the "And" in the beginning of the sentence about the "sudden cold breeze", and maybe try to work the image of the wind and the cold a bit? It works the way you've written it now, but I believe that if you do some digging inside your skull, you can describe the same thing even better.

Since you end the letter mid sentence, do you have to write explicitly that the footsteps

>caught Aldred attention

since you've already showed it in the writing of the letter? And shouldn't it be *Aldred's attention?*

Is "inevitably" the right word? How can Aldred be sure that what they're talking about is going to be more important than writing to his brother?

In this sentence:

>The sound of armor rattling could also be heard as the question that was given before was being answered

I'd cut "as the question that was given before was being answered". I think the reader understands that without you having to state it in text.

Do with it as you please, these are just my thoughts.

I'm btw

>, and
Not needed.

>>It took Aldred's seventh attempted
>doesn't make much sense to me. Also, is the struggle he's experiencing really to
>>form the letters
>or is it forming the words? I get that the light makes it difficult to read and write, but is that the reason why it has taken Aldred seven attempts? It doesn't seem likely to me.
He's quasi-literate user. He's trying to make his words more intelligible to read. I was going to let this be known later on.

>I think you also could drop the "And" at the beginning of the sentence about the "sudden cold breeze", and maybe try to work the image of the wind and the cold a bit? It works the way you've written it now, but I believe that if you do some digging inside your skull, you can describe the same thing even better.
Thanks. I'll try but I promise nothing.

>Since you end the letter mid-sentence, do you have to write explicitly that the footsteps

>caught Aldred attention

>since you've already shown it in the writing of the letter? And shouldn't it be *Aldred's attention?*

How else will the reader know? For all, they know it could be something else. And I apologize for the mistake in Aldred's attention

>Is "inevitably" the right word? How can Aldred be sure that what they're talking about is going to be more important than writing to his brother?

The current location in which he is in imprisoned, I will not mention right now, is pretty important to him. Any talk between guards will be important to him no matter how minor.

I'm also trying my best to write it as third person limited. Am I succeeding?

Thanks for the answer.

Of course, my critique is limited because this - I assume - is an excerpt from a larger piece. So it's good that you enlighten me!

>He's quasi-literate user
>Aldred's seventh attempted

Ok, I'm sorry to bring that up again, but it's just because I'm struggling to make sense out of it. Aren't you (the narrator) the one who describes this? If so, you don't have to make Aldred's spelling mistakes.

>I'll try but I promise nothing.
I have faith in you, user.

>How else will the reader know?
In my head, it was quite intuitive. You can keep the sentence all the way to "...footsteps outside his cell". My point was that with you stating that A) he's in a cell, and B) he stops writing the letter, it's logical consequence that C) something caught his attention. And of course they are going to be someone else, we already know that he is in a cell alone. So why write it, when you've already shown it in the text?

No need to apologize for that tiny error.

>Any talk between guards will be important to him no matter how minor.

In that case, I would still rewrite the sentence. Maybe it could be something like: "He stopped writing. Listening to what the guards uttered in their conversation would inevitably be more important to him now, than the writing of the letter to his brother was."

>Am I succeeding?
From what I've read, you've only described Aldred's thoughts and sensations, so in that case, the answer seems to be yes.

2a my brother of african origin

Why? It can be easily read in that format and it bumps the thread.

What did Veeky Forums think of this?

cecinestpasundelire.wordpress.com/2017/03/13/ceci-nest-pas-un-portable/
what do you guys think the newest entry of my blog?

This.

It does mess up the flow a bit desu

oh man this is fantastic