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Mrenda posted:This is a story that I wrote last November-ish. I've sat on it for a while, received some nice feedback last February, worked on it again and now I'm looking for some more feedback. I left a bunch of comments on the doc, but my main general comment here is that the emotional stakes feel much lower than they could be -- for all of John's angst about his lost cat, and then the kittens, we don't get to see why these animals are so important to him. Maura's sickness feels like it's setting up a bit emotional climax, but it fizzles when we get there. There's no resolution to the Cilla thing, unless the idea is that John becomes so caught up in these kittens he's found that he forgets about Cilla. The proportions of ink on the page feel a bit lopsided -- there's a lot of imagery that's competent enough, but it generally seems to exist for its own sake rather than building character or advancing plot, and that feels a bit wasteful when I get to the end of a 3800 word story and I still have big questions about character motivation and backgrounds. As far as themes and meaning, I'm afraid I didn't sense a strong thread moving through the story -- it feels like it wants to be a coming of age story where an angsty teenager grows into a nurturing/protecting role, and perhaps comes to terms with the forces in his life that he has control over (asserting dominance over Ian and the lads, the kittens who have survived) and those that he doesn't (his mother's sickness, his lost cat), but if that's the intention I feel like this could have been painted with far thicker brush-strokes and more focus. Profane Accessory fucked around with this message at 15:13 on Apr 4, 2018 |
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Mar 29, 2018 18:38
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 06:27 |
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