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Even though I don't read a lot of sci-fi actiony stuff, I enjoyed your story a lot. I particularly liked the way that a lot of details suggested the world the story exists in without begging questions. As an example I was perfectly happy to accept that there was a greater meaning to their mission than just "seeing the sky" even though we knew little of it. I also thought the pacing was excellent, and the action was depicted in such a way that I could easily make sense of what was happening, which I think is very difficult. I don't have any higher level criticism to give you, but there were some phrases that didn;t seem quite right to me. "Babar was content on sitting and sulking." Should be "content to sit and sulk" or "content to continue sitting and sulking" "Most of her team reciprocated her call to arms." I don't think the word reciprocates is quite right here. There are simpler words that would be more effective (echo?) "death as a fussy bastard." I like the idea of this motif a lot, but fussy doesn't seem like the right word. I think a central phrase like this needs to work perfectly and this doesn't quite get there for me.
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Aug 31, 2014 01:35
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Cache Cab posted:
My problem with this is that it felt like I was being beaten around the head with the moral.
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Oct 28, 2014 21:15
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hubris.height posted:I think I fell victim to trying too hard trying to be too deep. There is no depth here at all. It's very shallow Depth implies complication and complexity, surprise and unexpectedness.
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May 6, 2015 11:59
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Ofaloaf posted:story fragment I like this a bit! There's some characterization, and it's enough of a mild twist on zombie stuff to be interesting. One easy improvement is to remove said-bookisms. Basically you should just use the word "said" for dialogue attribution unless you have a really really good reason. Google the term and there are dozens of sites talking about them. One other thing is that if you want the conflict here to be the bureaucracy of their meeting it will need to be introduced earlier or fleshed out more. This feels like the start of a story, rather than a story in its own right. I think you should remove the last line and keep writing... If you're interested in writing more then the thunderdome is a great place to do it, so long as you are somewhat resilient to criticism. From what you've written here you are definitely ready! http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3691539
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Jul 8, 2015 23:54
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mr meowzers posted:three unrelated paragraphs Your said-bookisms and overuse of adverbs are jarring. There's also a trite "monkey-cheese" randomness to your writing, especially the first paragraph. In the second paragraph you are telling us too much, and showing us very little. The third paragraph is basically meaningless without any context.
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Aug 22, 2015 07:45
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mr meowzers posted:Hm. Kinda wondering if I could get away with putting the reveal of her being a ghost at the end, or is that still trying too hard to be clever? I know that under 1000 words means being more direct and more telling rather than showing, but I feel like saying she's a ghost at the beginning is like explaining a joke before you tell it. This is not a clever idea, It's an amateur mistake. You're writing a story, not a joke.
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Sep 17, 2015 09:53
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Chernabog posted:Good examples these rewrites are 100% better - a very good example of fixing the extremely robotic feeling prose. You have a lot of characters in such a short space- maybe cutting the number in half would mean you don't have to keep repeating their names over and over? Chernabog's examples show a couple of other basic mistakes - "Exclaims MD eagerly" here you're making two at once - using book-saidisms and adverbs. Googling should be able to find some information on why these are bad and how to avoid them.
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Oct 26, 2015 22:34
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lemonslol posted:
Okay I started to do a crit of this but I only got halfway through because I couldn't get past the clunky prose. The saidisms struck me as particularly bad. If either of you guys are serious about writing have a think about joining the thunderdome. It's weekly flash fiction, and from crits on your work and others' it's a really good way to learn the basics well.
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Apr 22, 2016 01:10
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