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I want to echo the other posters' praise of your work ethic and courage here, and I also like your posting in general, but I do not like this. On one level, this really needs proofreading – it's a Swiss cheese of missing hyphens and commas, moldy with worse errors – but proofreading won't fix the writing. As others have already said, it's labored and overwrought, given to drawn-out, rambling descriptions that add nothing but length. I can see the inspirations, what you're trying to do here (this really wants to be Virginia Woolf), but it just doesn't make it. Page 10 posted:Embedded in the wood were brushed steel flaps that hid network ports hinting there was a cupboard filled with computer hardware somewhere hidden deep in the house. Racks of blinking lights routing bits and bytes to a great world outside. Geena knew if there was a room filled with computers, for what must have been an office before any of the current residents arrived, there must surely be a stationery cupboard for those same office workers. She knew there would be a shelf bearing empty A4 pads, staplers, staples and rulers. If she was lucky there would be bright yellow legal pads, boxes of pens red, blue and black. There would be a stray three or four green pens, for marking accounts and indulging a curly haired women who’d made a special request and Geena’s special request would be for the used whiteboard, hidden, leaning against the wall below the lowest shelf bearing abandoned, cheap, out-of-ink printers. But even as it is, this is still better than the subsequent paragraph, where the Virginia Woolf worship crosses into outright parody: Pages 10-11 posted:She thought on the balance of her hands, to which, she thought how her right hand was empty. There was no balance to the world. She wrapped both sets of her hands’ fingers around the gum bottle, holding it before her as though a chalice. This communion of body parts, holding so tight the mostly empty plastic container didn’t settle her. She shook it again, this time both arms moving up and down, strenuously, but not violently. Her body felt out of place. Her arms felt heavy, or stiff. It all felt pointless. The point of this wasn’t evident to her but for that she was thankful. The point was she knew what she needed to do and her investigating her arms for their connection to herself, and her hands for connection to her arms, and her fingers for their purpose at the end of it all showed her she could easily throw the gum bottle hard against the wall without consequence. It didn’t occur to her until it came as a shock. It’s what she wanted to do. Smashing something would cause action. Doing so would be her fault. No-one would see it but her. No-one would bear the consequences but her. She wanted to throw the bottle. She wanted to find the whiteboard. She wanted to cook. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Apr 12, 2019 |
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Apr 12, 2019 16:50
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I went to the "Normal Changes" section. Lex's "schticks" and "minutiae" are good words for most of what's going on here. Lots of hemming and hawing over specificities that don't warrant the attention. The narration makes a show of considering things very thoughtfully, even though actual thoughtfulness doesn't lay down each of its baby steps on the page itself. Sentence fragments pile up in loose clumps that make each separated detail seem like a hasty afterthought to the one before it, a string of postscripts without a letter. Stephanie and Geena gaze at their navels in self-pitying self-absorption while the narration repeatedly insists at me that Donald is the empty-headed one. I'm not buying it.quote:She looked at the ingredients littering the counter. She didn’t know what they were for. Why she’d put them there. She’d put them their to force herself to cook but she hadn’t. They were ingredients she’d assembled to make into a meal but looking at them now she couldn’t understand what meal they would form into. What tasty meal they could form into, full of richness. Satisfying. Filling. There was an emptiness in her stomach that told her she mattered. She deserved to eat but it would come again the next day, and the next, and the next. It would consume her. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Apr 12, 2019 |
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Apr 12, 2019 23:09
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