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In these next few posts I will be critting both Sebmojo and Muffin’s pieces. Please note that I will not be posting my own story for critique at this time. I’m mostly doing this to sharpen my own reading and analysis skills. I will be doing a blind read of both, sharing my thoughts on the piece as I go through it. After that I will provide a summary of my thoughts and feelings on the work as a whole. The prose will be in italics while my own thoughts and comments will be in bold. I will be starting with Sebmojo’s submission. 1. Home is an arbitrary collection of angles, studded with incongruous items of memory. Home is a handful of chips scattered on the shiny sunburnt bubbles in the porch paint, laid on in long, even strokes by Sally Matherson in her summer frock twenty years ago. Home is a bloody bone-handled knife in a paint spattered outside sink. I’m not too thrilled at the prospect of this line numbering gimmick. Now, I’ll admit that I’m a bit biased against gimmicks from the start, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by gimmicks a number of times in the past. The prose itself is good. 2. Mr Cabel, who works in retail, is at home. 3. It’s a Wednesday on the sandy street that runs along Lyall bay. The air is full of seagulls with heads like armour-piercing bullets. The sand makes corkscrews in the blustering air and slithers in rivulets down the sun-battered dunes. 4. Sally Matherson is dead, of course, a traffic accident happened when she was about to have tea. She died some years later of unrelated causes. 5. The accident was no accident. I quite like your voice here. The traffic accident bait and switch is very British in style, but that’s not a bad thing. The simile that compares the seagulls’ heads to armour-piercing bullets is clunky, though, and that clunkiness is made worse by immediately following it with some rather lovely prose. Also, I know you’re trying to go for the ‘opposite of a story,’ but I have a bad feeling this is going to get pretty tell-y. 6. Meanwhile it was still Wednesday. A man, Anthony Margrave who had drunk three cans of beer was in the passenger seat of his car (Mazda, 2011) singing along to a tune he didn’t know. His brother Phillipe, who he hated, was driving. They were driving to the airport. 7. Nothing happened, or nothing happened out of the ordinary, or nothing happened out of the ordinary right then. Their car crashed but it wasn’t important. Or at least not to Sally Matherson. 8. Mr Cabel, who works in retail, is washing the tea cups, rubbing the brown ring away with his thumb. 9. Anthony Margrave is still young, arms around the shoulder of his brother, who he loves, in a pub in Ponsonby yelling DON’T YOU GO OUT IN THE RAAAAAAAAIN. It’s still Wednesday. This is starting to feel… pretentious. For one, I’m not sure if you’re trying to go with an unreliable narrator with the whole Anthony Margrave hating/loving his brother. I mean, Anthony could have a second brother that he loves, while hating his other brother Philippe. But I don’t feel like that’s what you intended. Also, appending ‘, who works in retail,’ to Mr Cabel’s name does nothing for your story except make me wanna punch you. However, I feel that way when any author, even world renowned ones, try that cheeky bullshit. It just feels like it's trying too hard, you know? 10. The sea is pawing at the beach. Come in here, it says like a sleepy drunk wanting sex. Come on. Come on. 11.It rained last Wednesday, thick sheets of rain draping across the city. Sally Matherson was caught out in it walking home with the fish and chips in their hot paper wrapper. She took shelter in a garage and watched the rain come down across the street. She held on to the memory until she died. 12. Mr Cabel, retail, etc, is opening a grate on the side of his house. He doesn’t have a screwdriver so he uses a bone-handled butter knife to turn the screws. Under the house it smells thick and secretive to him as he sucks the cut on his thumb. ”Mr Cabel, retail, etc,”  Also, I’m really not digging your similes here. A sleepy drunk wanting sex? Eh? Nice to see that bone-handled knife coming back. Also, I actually really do like some of the details you’re slipping in, like the cut on Mr Cabel’s thumb. Oh, one last thing, did Sally die in the garage, or did she die somewhere else while reminiscing about the memory of watching the rain come down while in the garage? Maybe it’s just me but I feel like that bit is really unclear. 13. Anthony Margrave got caught stealing three chocolate bars and a box of orange and mango Just Juice from the corner dairy when he was seven. Phillippe was on lookout but ran away when he saw the shopkeeper lady coming down the aisle, surprised at the horror of discovery that engulfed him, like a dirty shirt being plunged into hot soapy water. 14. The waves on the beach start a long way out to sea even though they don’t know it. A detergent bottle, a piece of driftwood or a floating body is already lying on the beach even though it hasn’t got there yet. 15. Mr Cabel (retail) gently caress you sat on a bench last Wednesday on the way home from work and looked out at the bay. The sun was setting behind the hill and the clouds were moving fast, so at first he thought it was a trick of the light or a dog swimming in the ocean. 16. Phillipe sees Sally Matherson running across the road and his guilty legs pump the brakes hard, the wheels on his Mazda skid on the sand piled up on the road around Lyall Bay, and the car slides into a parked Toyota station wagon with a hissing gentle crunch. ‘Jesus,’ says Anthony Margrave. ‘You stupid fuckhead,’ he says. You have another weird simile, but this one is actually kind of good so I won’t harp on it. You know, we’re halfway through this opposite of a story, and I’m starting to ask myself ‘what’s the point?’ There seems to be some interesting things going on, the dairy store, the people dying, but it's all so vague I scratch my head and wonder ‘why the hell should I care, or even make a concentrated effort in understanding the piece?’ 17. Mr Cabel works in retail, selling furniture, and his house is full of damaged furniture he has taken from his work over the years, subject to an understanding with his employer. His coat is on a chaise longue that has a rip in the fabric. 18. Sally Matherson died of unrelated causes, three years later. She shrieked and stepped back when it started to rain and Mr Cabel (who she did not know) put up his umbrella to keep himself dry, startling her. She was standing on the edge of the rail platform at the time. 19. Thoroughly wrapping a body in plastic using black rubbish sacks, bought in packs of 20 from the Warehouse takes seven sacks to achieve complete coverage. 20. Sally Matherson opens the door to her home with shaky hands and trips on the doorstep. She drops the fish and chips on the porch which is painted bright green. The wet paper tears, and chips spray out on the ground. Well I’m glad we finally got some sort of… payoff (???) for our friend Mr Cabel working in retail. I think a murder happened? I feel dumb reading this story but maybe I’m just not a deep enough intellectual. 21. There is no 21. Cool. This is supposed to be experimental, I get it. I feel like I’d need to read this a few times to get it, and you helpfully posted the story twice, seemingly verbatim, but I don’t have the time nor will to go through it again. Your actual prose is quite nice, save for a few clunky bits here and there. Honestly, even those clunky bits seem to stem from the story trying to be experimental. I’m definitely not the right audience for this, so keep that in mind. Overall, I rate it 2deep4me. I’ll get you sometime tonight or tomorrow, Muffin.
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Nov 21, 2016 20:16
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sebmojo posted:Thanks zeb, I lol I thought you had snuck some subtle changes into the 'second version,' but I decided it wouldn't be worth going over.
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Nov 21, 2016 20:44
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