Timewaster's Guide Archive

Hahahahahah- sorry.

You didn't lose any important data with that laptop, I hope.

I've got a lot of nitpicky stuff to add, most of which seems to me to be highly debatable, and one or two slightly more profound observations.

First off, I'm still a fan of the prologue. I even like this version better, though this is where most of the nitpicking happens.
You mention "a two-second journey from New York to Moscow". I think two cities beginning with the same letters would have fit much better. As it is, I expected some kind of explanation pertaining to the relevance of those two cities, politically or otherwise.
Directly after that, the "strange requests" lead to the birth. You could add one or two more examples of strange requests before mentioning that specific one (marriage on Everest or something equally silly), to make the transition to the next scene less abrupt. Maybe this part also needs an explanation of how the teleportation works, if it fits in there, plot-wise.

Once you reach the birth, your previously omniscient narrator suddenly has only very limited knowledge ("presumably the husband of the woman", etc), and then returns to omniscience.

The sky flashes, "no one ever tied it to the baby girl" - and why should they, I asked myself. Maybe here you should have further reinforced the general assumption that the flashing would be important sometime later on (mentioning that they happened at exactly the same time, for instance), otherwise it could just be judged an interesting coincidence and forgotten by the end of the next chapter.

"The Night the World Blew Up" doesn't sound to me like a name people (i.e. newspapers and other media) would adopt, escpecially as no actual blowing up of the world is involved. These things tend to have concise yet poetic names. Think "Black Friday", "V-Day" and the like.


Right, on to chapter one. In the prologue, you mention the date of the birth, then you mention that "over seven years later" something else happens. Chapter one then begins "17 years later". That adds up to 24.
"10 years and X days after World Blowing Up Day" would work. At that point I could still have done the math, and the first mention of Ashley's birthday isn't that far off.

A thing I don't like in general, not just in your submission, is emphasis through visual means, i.e. underlining, italicising and whatnot. Actually, I completely and totally despise that, because I think it disrupts the natural flow of reading. Mostly the emphasis is completely unnecessary, because it's readily apparent from the words themselves. If it isn't, then the words need changing. I did mention that all this would be highly debatable, didn't I?

I feel the need to throw in something positive again, so I'll state once again how much I liked the prologue, and that the excursion worked very much better than the two classroom scenes one after the other. There would still have been room between the two scenes for something unrelated to school, to show that Ashley has an actual life, but it wasn't as striking as in the previous version.

Another minor thing: the first mention of Kyle's name is a perfect point to insert a brief description of him (along the lines of "a bloke with purple hair").

After they talk about the Crashers in class, Rem says that it was a good "discussion".  I stumbled over that word, because I personally wouldn't have called it that.  It read as if the whole thing took maybe a minute or two, so I think you should let them talk a bit longer. Perfect place for an infodump, if you ask me.

I have one more. Someone mentioned above that they didn't get to know Ashley a lot. I partly agree. The major impression I had in two particular scenes was that the girl must be pretty dense. Walking on snow is better than walking on ice? Did she spend the last 17 years in sunnier climes, or why is this such a major discovery? The same goes for sitting down on ice and then being suprised at wet trousers. Those two scenes really made me question her intelligence, and they don't go very well with the somewhat more educated behaviour she displays shortly afterwards.


In retrospect, I seem to have gone for the "find lots of bad and little good"-approach. In my defense, I'll claim that good parts are naturally elusive because you breeze past them in reading. Anyway. Everything I didn't mention above obviously needs no fixing, and my overall impression is still similar to that of the previous version: I like it, give me more. Ideally combine the best of both drafts, and keep the prologue.

I for one spent the first two rounds more or less deciding which of the stories appealed to me, which of them I'd probably pick up in a bookstore from the general impression, and those I intend to at the very least always read, and preferably always critique as well. I suppose I'm not the only one doing this, so I expect that the number of critiques will stabilise at this level.

I think stretching out his walk through the desert would have been appropriate. As it is, it feels as though the city he finally reaches after days of wearying travels was just around the corner all along, and he doesn't realy seem to have been affected by it all, except for his shoddy clothing. Maybe you could push his grieving over Dantes into the desert, just so that the reader spends more time in the actual desert.

I don't recall whether you mentioned this in the earlier chapters: How exactly did Aermyst's team get into the desert? By  donkey, horse, car? Well, obviously not by car. But mentioning their method of travel (and maybe pack animals slaughtered and/or taken by the bad guys) would have helped better establish the setting earlier on.

I didn't mind the scene with the snake a lot, I think the main problem is the abrupt change in viewpoint. If you intend to put more of that sort of thing in, then by all means keep the snake, it's a good scene.

When Aermyst wakes up in the desert, you never mention that he gets up (unless I just missed it, in that case disregard this), but you do say that he sits back down. After that he turns around and walks, without having got up again. You might want to fix that.

There was one other question I asked myself: why is being soulless an advantage, and does it entail anything specific in your setting? I kept waiting for him to look into a mirror that didn't show his reflection or something.

The scenes in the city were great. You managed to convey your setting very well. You could maybe have described the city itself (for instance as seen from a distance) a bit more, but in general the hints at Aermysts plans, the conversations and also the comments on the monetary system served to give me a better feeling for the setting. One thing wasn't entirely clear to me, though. Is "Angel" merely the inofficial name of the currency, or are the coins also remnants of the previous civilisation?

You might not need to go into the why of the conflict, but you should elaborate on the when and where. The ambiguity of the setting is imo really the weakest point of the story. Karl already explained the conclusions he drew from the text, I drew largely different ones:
For me, the names sounded like the usual fantasy stuff, I didn't pay a lot of attention to them. The fighting strengthened the general impression of the setting being a medieval-style fantasy world. Bayonets never crossed my mind, on the one hand because the fighting style differs far too much from your descriptions (you wouldn't "cut" with a bayonet), on the other hand because bayonets imply guns, guns imply shooting, and not a word of that was mentioned. Then there was the passage about the attack on the caravan. Both the caravan itself, and the fact that its being attacked without uniforms (nowadays a breach of international law) imply a setting that lies at least a few centuries back from our perspective.
So the combat pointed me towards fantasy, a few other things did not. I don't know about cooking in or on ovens and when you did which, but I do know that not too long ago, all soldiers needed to be able to cook (living off the land and all that). Barracks imply a standing army, which in turn implies a more recent setting, as does leaving the army when you don't feel like being a soldier anymore and writing letters to the bereaved. Even the fact that the soldiers are paid (being able to afford a house) seems to point towards a modern setting, as did your overall writing style. Swordfights do not. All of that sort of made the story itself less important for me than trying to figure out the setting.

Jav took the insult in typical good cheer. “pants yourself.” Darin responded with a rude noise, and after a moment, they chuckled together.

This sounded very cheesy to me, btw.

I can, however, only agree with the previous comments about your writing: very poetic. I particularly liked the repetition of waiting being the hardest part in war and cooking both.

Anyway, I'd really like to know what the setting was. Maybe you only have to add one tiny line somewhere to make everything clearer.

I think most of the time a single sentence would suffice: "Frodo finds ring, leaves home."
Next time it'd be "Frodo finds ring, leaves home, meets Strider."
You can't consider writing that little work, but it should be enough to get everyone back on track for the next part. Also, it takes far less time to read that one sentence than to reread everything sent before, or even only the last paragraph (plus it gives more info). Re-sending everything and then saying where the new part begins could be a real timesink, what with ever growing file sizes and all that. Easier to add a one-sentence summary of what happened before.

I can't say how exactly this happened, but somehow I just ended up on a site full of page-long reviews on Star Wars replicas, discussing in detail the differences between stormtrooper helmets made by various people. Problem is, now I want one of those.