Timewaster's Guide Archive

Hrm. I think I can answer these here, which means I need to address them in the chapter.

It's slightly larger than an average male palm. Yes, this does make it difficult to fit inside a body, but surgically speaking, you can make room for it. There's all sorts of room in the abdominal cavity to stick things if you're really ambitious (think about the fact that you can shorten your intestines a little, for instance).  He's wearing overalls, so fitting it in his pocket isn't so hard to do... just think about all those large smartphones people stuff in their pockets. I know mine's larger than my palm, and it fits in my pockets fine.

As for the lights... hrm, might need to check your eyes on that one:

James lay in his bed uncomfortably, staring up at the grimy metal ceiling illuminated by an old mercury lamp outside the door, puzzling through the events that had landed him in prison on a desolate backwater mining planet.

James grew uneasy. His eyes darted to the dark corners between the strung lights, half-expecting an ambush.

Slightly larger than the palm of his hand, the blue-green crystal glimmered from the faint lantern light.

Is there someplace you see light but don't understand its source?

As for the river, yes, it was indeed walled off... until they mined through to it. Deep mines need a source of water, and it's fairly plausible that they would have found it in scans, mined to it, hollowed out the area enough so that they could get water, and then moved off in another direction. Once past the shore of the river, the ceiling is almost sitting on the water. I should probably illustrate that a little better.

At any rate, I really do appreciate the critiques, and I'm happy that my latest has at least garnered more positive reviews. I'm always looking for feedback, though. Hopefully I can keep up with this going into chapter 1.

I think we're less concerned about document macros (and no, you're not going to convince me to send line-level edits via RTF--they're too hard to locate), and more about viruses that get on your computer and hijack your address book. Viruses like these often will just send you spam mail with viagra links and or links to malware-infested websites which just annoys the users on the list more than anything. We tend to trust the users in the list with the documents they send.

As an aside, there are exploits even for RTF files, so you're pretty much hosed unless your document has absolutely no formatting requirements (which is quite rare, given the need for italics, underlining, and such).

Okay, it's been awhile since I harassed you, so I'll give it another go.

I didn't have any particular beef with the chapter as a whole. Now that the little Jin has grown up a little, things aren't so unbelievable for me, although I still found parts of it boring. This is likely due to its length: after 37 pages (when you properly double-space everything), you really don't accomplish much except for a lot of inner thinking. In a normal-sized novel, this is somewhere between 1/10 and 1/20 of the total length, and all you do is have two fights and some chit-chat. The total in-world time of this chapter is probably under an hour.

However, I think the biggest problem I had with it was the actual fight. You have 5 whole pages of building up to the fight, and it's literally over in 2 paragraphs. 2 measly paragraphs. Perhaps you meant it that way; I don't really know. To me, though, it feels like a letdown. I understand that Teruss is really just this sissy who gets his way because he runs away from anything threatening, but the way you portray him it looks like he doesn't even know how to fight. I'm pretty sure you don't get arms the size of someone's legs from doing nothing. I really feel like, if this is going to be the Fight That Changes Jin's Life, it should last more than 223 words and have a little bit of suspense in it.

Now, I'm going to give you a warning that I haven't read all of the previous chapters yet; I've been busy, and yours is one that I generally have to be in a certain mood to critique. However, given your intro, I'm not really seeing how this explains the reason for you spending so much time on their early lives. There's the fight, where he forges and kills his first person, and then another fight, where he forges again with more knowledge about what he's actually doing, and then manages to get away from the Hesk. You have an instructor (the voice), so nothing in his past really comes into play here, except maybe a little bit of Talven's early lessons. Still, It doesn't seem all the necessary, and it could easily be shown through flashbacks or just inferred in the present. So what exactly is the reason you've spent so much time on their early lives?

The Hesk are nifty enough, I suppose. They're pretty standard lizardmen (regenerative powers, scales, etc.), but I'll wait to see what you do with them before passing judgment. Dunno if I'd call them ninjas though.

Your second fight is better by far. Things actually happen in it, and we learn more about the actual process of forging. It was much easier for me to read for this very reason.

If you were to expand the first fight, to give it some substance, I would recommend breaking this into two chapters. One for the first fight and the aftermath (choosing weapons and whatnot), and another for the second fight. 8k for a chapter is getting a bit lengthy. You could even end the first chapter with a good cliffhanger. A good place to cut it would be when the attendant comes in and says "She's dead." Then I *want* to turn the page to read what's happening. I would also recommend cutting down on the amount of Teruss' life that you dump on us in one place. It's quite telly, and only some of it holds relevance at this time.

Anyway, keep it up (not that I could stop you anyway). You'd just better get that ax sharpened, 'cause you're going to need it eventually.

The last tooth I got pulled (3 weeks ago, front incisor) had no pain, afterward. You might not get to enjoy that Vicodin much (incidentally, I got subscribed Percocet, which I never filled because I don't like spending money).

Hopefully your tooth extraction goes as well as mine.

Nothing on my end, either. I got 250 words of Chapter 1 done, but I have to pay for said extraction (and later, the permanent replacement), so it's more work for me.

Guess I'll start your thread for you.

I found the writing to be modern, and very loose. This is probably a good thing.

The prologue... really wasn't doing much for me. Well, let me rephrase: it didn't seem to really fit. Given that your story takes place in Manhattan, 2010, the prologue in 1888 feels a bit lost. If you're going to go back and forth between the two times, that's cool, and I'll address the issue again once I've read more of the past. If you're not, then I'm not sure it's really necessary to bring up 3 characters that have no life beyond the first 1k words. *I* would almost like to see how Gail managed to get into the mess. Starting out with something like:

It didn't work. The board bounced off his skull, causing her to drop it. He screamed bloody murder....

or something.

One other big problem I had was trying to separate Ray's vision from the rest of the story. I can tell it's there, but it's really hard for me to tell when he slipped into it. Perhaps you need to use some sort of differentiation in font, be it italics, or blockquote... something. I guessed it was "the accident" that he was reliving, but I was confused as to why, too. Something with the bridge?

When they get home, I'm a little confused as to why Dan comes out and asks "You were in Jail?" Didn't they just talk about that on the phone? Did he not hear about it somehow? She was rambling for quite some time, it appears. I suppose it could be a rhetorical question, though, and Gail just answers it again because she's a smartass.

A continuity issue: Gail says on the phone that Dan and Ray were asleep at 1 in the afternoon... but in the apartment, Ray says he's been up since 4 (am?). Both of those can't be true. If he's been up since 4pm, then he probably wouldn't be very tired, I don't think.

I'm not entirely sure whether you need to change this or not, but vampires, daywalker or no, don't generally think things like "It was only seven o’ clock in the evening" To most vampires (night creatures that they are), 7pm is really late to be "up". Unless they live normal-ish lives, I suppose. Not sure how much you're trying to break out of the traditional vamp model.

I think what you have is a good start. It's light right now, but certainly different from Twilight (gushy romance) or Blade (full of action). I'm interested to see where you're going with it.

Ah, I didn't realize that you were "interviewing" him (that's kinda what it feels like) around the present day. That makes more sense that he'd know modern-day car salesmen, having witnessed them post death. Perhaps you just need a hint at the beginning about how he's been brooding for over a century, to help place his current time relative to when he actually died.

As for the rape... the only way I could think to show it was not consensual would be in the way the arsonist acts. They're usually very dominant, and like to show it, saying things like "You know you want me" and such. The trick here would be for our dead lover to not see through it in his rage/misery. Unfortunately, if you want a true unreliable narrator, I don't think we're supposed to know the truth if it's only from his perspective, so maybe it's written correctly (and I just don't like it that way). Usually an unreliable narrator is displayed to be such through other viewpoints if the author wants them to know, or by a later event clarifying things (which is what you did at the very end, with the angel).

I had another thought. Since this is 150 years in the future, perhaps the reason why he's vengeful toward his fiancée is because he blames her. Now, it isn't her fault, but a demon with no heart would have to justify his existence... maybe he feels that she should have been stronger, or that she shouldn't have acted like it was consensual. If he had only known, he could have killed only the arsonist, and the old Ba'al wouldn't have been able to trick him into killing them both.  So it's her fault that he's who he is now (which is actually very unreliable, come to think of it).

It has been my experience as well that books, movies, and life all influence new literature. While I wouldn't necessarily condone the "stealing" of a full plot just to rewrite it in another setting with slightly different characters, it would be hard to argue that writing borrows from previous examples. Jordan was influenced by Tolkien, Sanderson was influenced by Jordan, etc. The Wheel of Time is not a retelling of Lord of the Rings, though.

So, I guess you have to ask, are you stealing a plot, or being influenced by it? My dreams are the source of most of my ideas, and they're subconscious representations of wishes, or warping of real life events and things I've seen. For instance, in my latest attempt at a story, Delving is a warped cross between lucid dreaming and telepathy, the former of which is something I do quite often. The actual Heartglass is an idea I got one day looking at a thick piece of glass from a busted computer monitor that I have (CRT monitor glass is like 1/2" thick, and quite smoky). The whole thing came together in a dream of him escaping the prison he's in, after vowing to return the glass.

So let's see, there are thousands of books that deal with prison escape and running from the law, plenty also that have psychics, and even some that use "special crystals" (specifically, the closest I know of is the Crystal Singer saga by Anne McCaffrey). My character is almost your stereotypical rogue, plucked right out of D&D and dropped into sci-fi. But you know what? I've molded them to fit the story I want to tell, with the characters I want to experience it with.

At the end of the day, can you call it your story? Or just someone else's story with your gift-wrap? Most of the common plot lines show up everywhere, but twisted a little, changed to fit your actual story.

Give me a story, and I'll find another story that's similar.