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Quick find code: 49-50-177-65292882
Thanks for offering feedback, Chuk! If I may return the favour…
I preferred your original, to begin with. It's dark and violent so naturally I quite like it.
The emphasis on the pain of hearing the scream is nicely made a metaphor out of, although I thought the "hundred kettles boiling" is not as effective or as explicit as the nail-chalkboard imagery; I don't recognise the boiling of a kettle as being a particularly offensive sound. The short sentences at the end round off the piece nicely, however.
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I had to resort to Google to learn that a cicada was not a bird.
I'll see if I can come up with something sometime this week. Great to see such promising activity on this!
I preferred your original, to begin with. It's dark and violent so naturally I quite like it.
The emphasis on the pain of hearing the scream is nicely made a metaphor out of, although I thought the "hundred kettles boiling" is not as effective or as explicit as the nail-chalkboard imagery; I don't recognise the boiling of a kettle as being a particularly offensive sound. The short sentences at the end round off the piece nicely, however.
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I had to resort to Google to learn that a cicada was not a bird.
I'll see if I can come up with something sometime this week. Great to see such promising activity on this!
Snow
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Runescape Stories Forum
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Guildmaster -
The Novelists' Guild
17-Feb-2014 20:47:58
Well, here's this week's token effort to stay on top of the entries before I inevitably leave all the rest of the comments to Sunday. Also, I just looked up the etymology of cicada, and now I'm going to kick myself for the rest of the week that I didn't use the Latinate plural. Anyway:
Well, gee, I wonder where you live, Sam
. Your piece is wonderfully constructed, with the last line giving new meaning to everything that has come before; the initial impression is one of great life (like looking down on an anthill), but the revelation of the fire shows it as more of an anthill after it's been toppled. Even the prompt takes on new meaning -- the heat rising isn't just the sun's -- with the revelation of the forest fire. I suspect I'm taking more from this than our American and European compatriots who aren't as aware of the fires that scorch Australia every summer, but with an understanding of that, it's a very poignant little story.
Matt, your story took a couple readings for me to make sense of it, and I'm still not sure I entirely have - it seems to be a swimming race, but that seems odd both because it's outside and he has team-mates. A relay, maybe? I dunno. As for the aesthetics of the piece, the repetition of "waiting" really weakens the beginning (it makes it feel as if you're just saying the same thing twice). Despite the "did I waste" inverted clause, the rest of the construction seems a little bit too simple, especially considering the prompt; the last one had resulted in a lot of very simple, evocative pieces, and with this one I wanted to steer everything in a slightly different direction. The story also suffers for telling the reader what's happening rather than showing them (which, of course, is a natural problem with an internal monologue). The last sentence, too, seems to suggest as if the bang was something he wasn't expecting (this was my initial reading), but if it is indeed a race, then it's simply not the ideal wording.
Well, gee, I wonder where you live, Sam
. Your piece is wonderfully constructed, with the last line giving new meaning to everything that has come before; the initial impression is one of great life (like looking down on an anthill), but the revelation of the fire shows it as more of an anthill after it's been toppled. Even the prompt takes on new meaning -- the heat rising isn't just the sun's -- with the revelation of the forest fire. I suspect I'm taking more from this than our American and European compatriots who aren't as aware of the fires that scorch Australia every summer, but with an understanding of that, it's a very poignant little story.
Matt, your story took a couple readings for me to make sense of it, and I'm still not sure I entirely have - it seems to be a swimming race, but that seems odd both because it's outside and he has team-mates. A relay, maybe? I dunno. As for the aesthetics of the piece, the repetition of "waiting" really weakens the beginning (it makes it feel as if you're just saying the same thing twice). Despite the "did I waste" inverted clause, the rest of the construction seems a little bit too simple, especially considering the prompt; the last one had resulted in a lot of very simple, evocative pieces, and with this one I wanted to steer everything in a slightly different direction. The story also suffers for telling the reader what's happening rather than showing them (which, of course, is a natural problem with an internal monologue). The last sentence, too, seems to suggest as if the bang was something he wasn't expecting (this was my initial reading), but if it is indeed a race, then it's simply not the ideal wording.
18-Feb-2014 03:39:15
An interesting piece, Bobert, with a neat twist on the prompt. I'm not really sure what the revelation is that horrifies him - that cicadae are somehow the gestational period of some greater insect? Beyond that, the story itself is nicely written, with some novel turns of phrase (the first sentence especially). On a side note, it's always nice to see a new face around here
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Level, you nailed something I was trying to get at in Matt's review -- let the prompt set the tone of your piece (which, it must be said, you also did last week). Your language here is wonderfully crafted (I'm not sure that disremembered is a word, but I'm probably going to start using it even if it isn't), though in the last sentence you use a comma where a caesura would be natural in speech, but isn't grammatically correct. The initial idea I got here was of an old man who built birdhouses, but since birds aren't faceless (nor particularly ephemeral) I'm not sure that this is right. At any rate, it feels very poignant, even without quite picking up on the exact subject.
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Level, you nailed something I was trying to get at in Matt's review -- let the prompt set the tone of your piece (which, it must be said, you also did last week). Your language here is wonderfully crafted (I'm not sure that disremembered is a word, but I'm probably going to start using it even if it isn't), though in the last sentence you use a comma where a caesura would be natural in speech, but isn't grammatically correct. The initial idea I got here was of an old man who built birdhouses, but since birds aren't faceless (nor particularly ephemeral) I'm not sure that this is right. At any rate, it feels very poignant, even without quite picking up on the exact subject.
18-Feb-2014 03:39:26
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