I'm always open for a critique and this is much more thorough than I was expecting. I didn't think I'd entered this into WAY or anything
Anyway, I should probably point out first that I didn't write any of the editor's notes. Dan Sharp of the Demon Archives wanted to write them because he wanted to keep the voice consistent with the other editors' notes he's written throughout the lore section. It's not so much a framing device for my story as it is a framing device for the whole extended universe thing he's got going on. I would have done them differently, but I didn't see them until after they were already uploaded to the site, and I didn't want to be a pain in the ass and make him change them.
Terotrous wrote:The third paragraph of part 1 has way too many periods. For example, where it says "My Voice was inspired by the undying Voices before me. Surrounding me", that should clearly be a comma, "Surrounding me" is not a sentence on its own. The rest of the paragraph is filled with dozens of other examples, such as "The bombs never came here. Only the fallout, and the wild ones, and the storms." Only is referring to "the bombs", so it has to be part of the same sentence. Luckily there's less of this later on but there are still some instances here and there. I admit that I sometimes have this problem in my own writing, it's a product of "stream of consciousness" storytelling, but you have to watch for it in editing
It's certainly not proper textbook English, but language is malleable when it comes to creative writing, particularly if the context calls for it. Gordon, for instance, wouldn't be able to edit, because he's writing with a limited supply of ink and paper. If he finished a sentence but decided to pursue the thought, he'd end up with a sentence structure like what he has here. That might still rub you the wrong way, and there's nothing I can do about that, but it's a stylistic choice that I stand by.
In Part 5, Gordon describes the rations as "thick bars of some bland but filling substance". This definitely seems like a missed opportunity for him to draw a parallel between the rations and some similar substance in a science fiction novel, as he draws many other such comparisons and many science fiction novels have similarly bland food.
Agreed. Having free license to make a bunch of random literary connections in a story was perhaps the most exciting part of this project for me, but there were points that could have used a connection that I missed, either because nothing in my reading history jumped out at me or because I was focused on another part of the story. I was also concerned about overdoing it and bogging down the story with too many literary references.
Starting at Part 5, the pacing of the story changes drastically, Part 5 is longer than Parts 1-4 put together and is far more thorough, with much longer scenes and more elaborate prose. I also feel at this point it becomes much more interesting, so it may be worth expanding the events in Parts 1-4 to some degree to match this level of detail.
It's funny, I actually think the prose gets less elaborate as the story picks up, because Gordon is trying to relate a series of events rather than just explain his philosophy and revel in his own perceived march toward immortality. It does get more elaborate in the sense that there's dialogue, more characters, and more descriptions (of course, now Gordon is describing things he's never seen, rather than the everyday life that he so despises), so that could be what you're referring to.
Part 9 gradually becomes filled with typographical errors, mostly missing punctuation. Perhaps this is intentional, as per the opening paragraph, but that also states it has been recreated from the original so presumably if there were errors they would have been corrected, and it's kind of distracting to read it like this in a way that doesn't really help the story. It would also help to state who H and B are because one character has both H and B in his name.
Well, recreation is a tricky word that can either refer to copying something or repairing something, and in this case we were using the word in both senses. The words themselves are copied directly and preserved as they are, but the scribbled and disjointed line ordering has been fixed from the original. I was trying to convey Gordon's fury and urgency, but if the readability issues overshadowed this effect, then that's unfortunate. I kinda figured the speakers would be obvious, but it did annoy me that Hermann Brandt has both an H and a B. I just hoped nobody would think that Brandt was having an argument with himself.
There's also no way Thalia's spelling and punctuation could be that terrible, as she's read a lot of complex books that someone whose grasp on written language was that tenuous would never be able to manage. Her writing is so heavily obscured parts of it are hard to understand, which is bad because it's all vital to the conclusion of the story. This is kind of akin to going completely nuts with someone's accent and tossing in all kinds of extra vowels and such, the general consensus is that a little of that goes a really long way and you should never do it to the point that it impedes the readability of the text.
Yeah I was afraid of that. I might just rewrite it and have Dan upload it again.
Anyway, final thoughts. The work definitely finds its Voice in chapter 5, and from then on it's fairly compelling. The earlier parts could probably stand to be fleshed out a bit, in particular I think the setting definitely needs more attention. It took me quite a while to figure out exactly what had happened to the world and thus grasp the notability of Gordon's devotion to his books. There's an important line in the first part where he mentions that Science Fiction gives us a glimpse at a world better than ours which is clearly important but was somewhat lacking in proper impact because it wasn't totally clear at the time how much their world sucked.
I did write it to expand on Dan's fiction, but I also wanted it to be accessible to people who weren't all that familiar with it (not that most people who read it will be unfamiliar with the comic, except for people like you who I've conscripted into reading it blind
). I suppose that didn't really work out.
There's also a number of various little writing issues that could use polishing up, mostly relating to sentence fragments. I considered the possibility that perhaps Gordon's writing is intended to contain some novice writing mistakes to show the fact that he wasn't formally trained, but unfortunately even if this is intentional I feel that it is very difficult to communicate this effectively. Only other writers will properly recognize that these are issues that writers struggle with, most other people will just notice that it somehow feels wrong or stiff but won't quite understand why. I think you'd almost have to have the editor call attention to it so the readers recognize that it's deliberate "Gordon's writing is a little rough, but it's amazing he was able to teach himself as much as he did", but even then I don't really think it helps the story. It's kind of the same as the issue with Thalia's letter, which is clearly intentional but mostly just gets in the way. Having people write and speak better than their level of education should allow is a really common willing suspension of belief issue, to the extent that most people wouldn't pick up on it if you tried to play it realistically.
While Gordon's writing is intended to have some grammatical errors, they're not supposed to negatively impact the readability of the story. I was going for more of a Ray Bradbury-esque style of prose - his writing is a grammatical nightmare, but it reads like poetry. I know I didn't recreate his style exactly, but that was what I - and Gordon - had in mind. Gordon probably could have perfected his sentence structure, although editing would still be extremely difficult, but he wouldn't want to. He doesn't just want to survive through his words, he wants to become something beautiful. Whether he succeeds or not is, of course, up to the reader, and it didn't work for you, but I know it has for most of the people who have actually read the story, so I suppose this is one of those "can't please everyone" situations. I definitely agree with you about Thalia, though. I'm not sure how closely reading levels correlate to writing levels, but for the sake of readability I should just clean it up.
Anyway, I appreciate the detailed response, and thanks for reading!
