The critique thread is dead, long live the critique thread. I'll return the favor to as many people as I can, minimum of ten. Here's a prose poem:
The only west left is the north. Tom Waits For Death By A White Man's Fire Built From The Crossties Of An Abandoned Railroad, He Has A Handle Of Old Crow, Half In His Bag And Half In His Gut, And He Has A Gun, Eighteen Rounds For The Bears, One For The Heartache, And One For The Sky. God if I have to die you have to die.
Well, ants keep slaves and orangutans can paint. And you're lying through your yellow teeth saying you never seen a dog hate. The stars, have you seen the naked stars, have you really seen beyond the white picket graveyards? Go ahead and hang yourself from your calendar and say with the humility of a strip mall's skeleton it makes you better. Go ahead. The cowboys are dead and whores wear their skin, but there's some indians left. They've got the Native American Flu and it has a big sloppy with poison glue stamp "Made In Real America" but they'll be okay, they'll be okay, they never stopped fighting and the cowboys are dead and the borders too will die with time.
The only west left is the north, and the gold is really what the poets said in song, black and corrupting and bubbling up from hell, it pollutes more than men's souls. The miners will rush, and they'll come in chains, they always come in chains, slaves selling themselves for a chance to own slaves, they always come in chains. The aspen will tremble and the snow will melt, ants keep slaves and orangutans can paint, the aspen will tremble and the snow will melt, we're the only apes that kill ourselves. The west was never the west and what an idea to build myth from direction, but the north hasn't been paved yet and wilderness lives in the cracks of eastern asphalt and the stucco palaces of the west will crumble into film and song.
The West Was Never The West And Tom Waits Patiently For Death By The Embers Of A Fire He Watches The Stars Slowly Get Dressed And Tongue Kiss Him Goodbye With A Red Sunrise, You Go Your Way And I'll Go Mine, I've Been Following The Highway West And It's Worked For Me So I'll Go Where It Curves With A Quarter Handle Of Old Crow And A Gun With Nineteen Rounds. The only west left is the north.
here is my review of bloodmeridian
(final countdown intro plays)
bloodmeme ugh, this book was written by corncob tortillas YeCarthy.
I could blame 4chan for making me read this, but I have no one to blame but myself. I wondered what all the memes were about and gave it a shot.
what I found out was, it's a meme for a reason.
it's a book about riding horses. it's about spitting. maybe occasionally killing some injins and taking their hair. then it's about getting wasted and partying.
3 quartets of the book is just about scenery and riding horses. they rode on and on and on and spat and ate some tortillas and spat and rode on and said ye.
corncob describes a lot of nice Vistas that I can't imagine because I'm not a pleb. so basically I could have skipped to the last 70 pages or so when the unkillable outlaw band somehow gets ambushed and all killed. yay it's not boring anymore. blah blah skip to a few years later. oh yeah the judge. he's some guy that's all smart and bad and stuff. well him and some kid meet up again. this is where corncob tortillas YeCarthy let's you chose the ending. it's like a puck your own adventure. wtf happened. who knows. this is what I think happened. I fucking hope you read this book or this review isn't for you. well some shit goes down with a bear and some girl and I think the kid rapes the girl, fuck I don't even know I wasn't really paying attention. well the judge don't like that to much and he challenges the kid to a game of blackjack. the kid bets all his chips on red and loses. he gets pretty pissed so he flips the chess board and pieces go flying everywhere and one actually hits the judge. well the judge he don't like that to much. he stands up and yells habeeb it and socks the kid right in his keister. the kid yells out twinkiehouse and the judge pulls down the kids pants and sticks his flaccid penor in the kids bum. the judge thinks of Margaret thatcher naked and gets a huge boner. like a 6 foot boner and the kid explodes. that's when some dude walks in and is all like "woah fuck this shit I'm out of here".
then there's some blurb about some other shit on the last page that flew over my head cuz I'm retard.
so yeah if you like riding horses and actually subvocalize and picture shit in your head this book might be for you. I thought it was a right snore fest. fuck you /lit for memeing into reading this. I got tortilla'd and I'm a stupid corncobber fuck
So I've been writing a bit, need some input. Two part post, here's (1/2).
You know, I never got why people question other people’s affection for them. When I was in senior year of high school, I got to know this girl, let’s call her Red for now. So Red was known by everyone as a bit of an airhead, but there was more to her than that, she was intelligent but didn’t really show it. Of all the things I loved about her, beyond the beautiful bust, slender hourglass figure, elegant branch like arms and hands like those fancy ladies who wear the white gloves in 30’s era movies, y’know? Beyond the cute face, of all the things that made her such a babe, her hair was what brought it all together.
She had this beautiful, drop dead gorgeous, soft flowing hair that went to just the top of her butt. It was something in between a brown and reddish color and had volume like cotton candy. Everything was just right about it, and I’d play with it when I sat behind her in class, seeing how I was a dunce who couldn’t figure out she might have had an interest in me. My teacher would get mad and joke about how we can go on a date later, focus on the work for now. You know why I didn’t ask her out? Because I couldn’t fathom why she’d have an interest in me. I was a year younger than the other guys in my class, wasn’t driving and going out, didn’t have the money for it, didn’t have all the friends, I was just a chubby kid who was sort of scholastic for the sake of attention and acceptance. Kind of like those fat people who do nothing but joke around with everyone because they know they’re fat shits that no one likes to be around, they hate themselves for it and overcompensate.
Anyway, it all came to an end at prom night. I asked the DJ to play one last Spanish tango song, I had practiced a lot to dance with a partner. She was there on the dance floor, everyone else leaving, and she was looking back with this desire to dance. She really wanted to just dance to that one song, and I was there, and I knew how. I was finally going to dance with the girl of my dreams, this funny, angry, god-like Bolivian beauty from suburban New Jersey. And you know why I didn’t?
>>7962394
(2/2)
Because she had every reason not to. There was no reason for someone like that to dance with someone like me. I was so afraid of the pain of getting shut down by this girl who I practically worshiped, I was so comfortable in my unknowing and excuses, that I watched her walk away onto the prom bus that shuttled us to the country club that night. Everyone had a good time. Everyone danced. Everyone ate, laughed, joked, it was a night to remember for each and every person. The only difference for me, was that it was a night of learning. In that moment, when it seemed whatever Deity that was floating in the starts above had frozen hell and burned down heaven to make this perfect moment, I knew. I knew the truth of what I had done. And I felt pathetic.
When people say they live their life with no regrets, that’s gotta be an outright lie. I will always regret that. That will always scar me. There’s no rationalization you can make up to say it was a good thing. It was cowardice. It was being content with mediocrity. Then I realized I was no better than the welfare leeches and child pageant show mothers. Here I am, in all my egoism. Here I stand, scared and selfish. I loved that girl. I still do. And the thought of another man laying hands on her still opens old wounds every day. But that’s how I know I’m still alive, because I’m still hurting. I’ve stopped hurting once, and let me tell you, there’s nothing worse than not feeling anything. So if I had to choose between nothing and pain, give me pain. I’ll take it.
That was one of my first but many major life lessons, the truth of how people are. That deep, deep down, everyone knows their true nature, even if they use all the mental gymnastics in the world to run from it. An eight ball isn’t going to change that. A twelve pack won’t either. And wishing the past would change sure as hell ain’t gonna make the future a better place. That’s why people question it when you show them affection, because they know just how shitty they really are, but they’re scared you’ll see it too. They’re scared of having something then losing it again, because no one gets used to pain. No one gets used to being alone. Its human nature. So, if I could tell myself one thing from back then, it would be don’t question the shit that happens. Just live. Just act. Just move.
Just dance.
>>7962390
Well, I disagree but if you're trying to be funny I guess it could be depending on your delivery
>>7962381
what the fuck is prose
just a bump and a quick question. What's your favorite thing you've ever written?
>>7962381
Headless mannequins, my head reflected where their's should be. The impression of possible future selves scattering across my psyche like shotgun pellets. That old cliché film shot of the lonely, and or desperate person's head floating above a seemingly idyllic storefront tableau. Above me the vaulted ceiling sliced through with skylights beaming sun down onto tile thwacked with shuffling feet and the softly rolling wheels of floor scrubbers. All this background life, noise to the hypnotic cliff of possible futures set before me. The spectacle of the Paris arcades brought to xeroxed suburbia as the mall
I posted the start of this yesterday and got some great feedback.
Bit more of a short story I started yesterday, would appreciate any comments.
Here's a rough opening I'm thinking about using for my story. It starts with the main character, and this would be a flash forward. The whole book will take place over 30-40 years. Not sure exactly yet.
‘The gods have forsaken us.’ Nebiri could not help as the words whispered chillingly in his ear once he escaped the constricting imprisonment of thick, leafy vines and their army of guardian tree trunks. The words were of his birth mother’s voice, exactly as she had said them several warmings and freezings ago- before he had began his godforsaken pilgrimage of manhood. Nebiri had heard the stories of their people, of the gods, and of Ædin many times and he knew them well. Each passing freeze, a new passage was woven into the story’s fabric. And even those additions, Nebiri remembered all too well. The gods have forsaken us. He could never forget the masked despair peeking through his mother’s soft face as she spoke the words to him for the first, and last, time. For those words were the only new addition this rebirthing. Nothing else.
The prodding tremors and piercing glare carrying across the sky and his vision woke him back to the present. Behind the stream of fire hanging among the white clouds, a scarred sky is torn to the ground by dark plumes of black and grey. Several flocks of birds flee from the forest trees Nebiri had traversed. The screaming thunder radiated by the fireball likely made much nearby life scurry for protection. A demon. Nebiri falls to his knees, the drying grass lightly scraping his black skin, and he weeps. He weeps for his mother. At the shaman’s accuracy. He weeps for his people. And for the dry dirt beneath, the stained waters at home, and for the smoldering ruins along the horizon his sight, shadowed by the crimson sky and setting sun.
This had began as a trial to prove the gods had not yet abandoned Nebiri and his people. Two long years traversing the hellish woods and three lost brothers claimed by its timeless discipline in attempt to prove this. Pain and blood and heartache all endured in hopes of hope, by Nebiri. But now, none remained of his people other than him, and hope seems lost. He's become a hollow shadow carrying the spirits of those who sacrificed to endure and to be spared of suffering brought upon Ædin by the clamoring gods.
— Yeah, I just gotta wonder how my cousin’s doing. It’s his first time in the city, you know, you realize, you feel? You know how these things go.
— It’s not like I’ve ever not been from New York, yo.
— you got a cousin?
*
— Hey, you think you might be... in the wrong place?
Sven shrugs, puts on a great big grin, checks his lapel. A great pink-purple light shines overhead. From the nearest corner:
— I- is it because I say uh-oh-spaghetti-o whenever something goes wrong?
— No, honey, it’s... Yes...
— uh-oh-spaghetti-o...
Sven lifts his chin, assesses the situation, and decides that he must reconcile this most unfortunate conflict between two wonderful ladies. What a waste it would be to have them both go to bed angry!
Sven tightens his suspenders, loosens his collar, raises his pencil-thin tie. Sven approaches.
— Hallo, bövfh auf yü vfundervful vfimmen—
Silence.
Sven tries his hardest to relax his jaw. He really does try. He thinks himself excellent at it. His pronunciation is spot-on. He will get the best grades when he returns home. Now again:
— Hhhhaello, bofh auv yü hwündervfüll hwimmen—
The taller, black-haired one widens her eyes, hangs her jaw down for a moment, then turns and walks away. And good, never-discouraged Sven nods, flashes a wide smile, and says:
— Yyes. I ahm getting hyypph.
The nice, short lady, still here, tears pouring through her eyeliner, biting down on her index finger, barely acknowledges him at first. Then, almost explosively:
— What the fuck are you doing here? What the fuck? Who got you in here?
A tall tattooed woman in a tank top approaches, arms crossed, and begins to ask what the fuck’s the problem until she sees Sven. Then it’s just
— Oi! Whaddyadoinhere? Who told you you could be here? Huh? Who said this okay? Your momma never warned you about us? Oi—
And another spectator sees what’s going on and joins in, and another, and another. And just like that, good Sven is surrounded. He stretches his smile further and further until he can stretch it no more, at which point he eases into a frown. He leaves with a few stains and tears in his perfect jacket—oh, he must see a good tailor one of these days!
>>7963575
Sounds like some nerd shit. Ain't with it.
>>7963414
The tone, the style, the subject matter all scream "adolescent." You're not deep, you're borderline insufferable. At least you don't have any blatant mistakes.
Read more, and read past that Russian golden age that you bow down to so much. Vary your reading. Think outside the angst. It'll be good for you.
One easy stylistic error to correct, at least: don't go crazy on the descriptive terms. They sound like filler at best, purple prose at worse.
>>7962549
I don't get too possessive-like with my writing, but I've gotten a lot of positive feedback on this vignette:
http://pastebin.com/beLNgEgN
It's supposed to be part of a larger thing, but it stands on its own well enough. I dunno, yo. It may be a bit too self-contained.
>>7962381
Sort of a sensory overload, to the point where it becomes incoherent. Are you actually saying anything?
You can obviously write well, but you don't need to shove it down our throats like this. Emphasis on stream of consciousness, not gushing river.
Rough/unedited
He lurches to the toilet door, laiden, and even his shit smells like ash. This one could’ve ripped galaxies, must’ve been the vienna’s, they’ve definitely been downgraded to dog food now, not for human consumption. WHO are to blame(?). With the fire in his mind, he sees an animation of Vienna sausages dancing on a backdrop of resplendent fireworks (if they can be anything but) to something obvious, something plebian, like Beethoven’s 5th or the Overture with cannons.There was no bread tonight, so there was no metamorphosis, but it was not a night for Beaujoulais. No body or blood, only shit, fokken shit. His head tilted, and eyes try to pivot to a horizontal axis, damn near ripped the retinal vein, bounced back to the unlit cabin bathroom. He’d almost fallen asleep. Saxon snores and runs on parks past the beyond, tongue asail and banding.
This smoked night will be short.The bed will be the oblivion for a shattered body, and the host to dreams of dew and petrichor; phatasma take him to the virgin trees of Meghalaya, so it may be wet for him, away from the Black Country’s vivid, but misplaced carnality that only ever wore him down, the son of a thousand wetlanders with no turgor.
5 o’clock and time couldn’t be faster, SNOOZE seems to turn back on a moment after it’s pressed. No milk; cereal is better dry than with water. Coffee isn’t. Saxon avid. The morning’s sky has exhaled a tawny atmosphere off a cheap fag backend, found it in the vineyards, dropped by a worker, you can taste the newspaper in the air. Was that sports section or properties? Turn it round and let me give you blow-back, copper in your teeth, algae flames, take your smog and filth back into the dustbin of space. Oscar’s cigarette leaves him shaking, it was too early, leaves him fragile, but he doesn’t feel rested, like the caucus of the night merely took an interim, passing out in the ditch, with the world spinning.
The ground is tough, baked clay and the trees at the bottom of the hill don’t quiver, but wait, sentinel and stern, ancient genomes far less polluted than the ‘higher’ forms. Fruit will be bountiful next year, if the tree still stands here at day’s end, something hormonal - a signal - has been issued and soon the air will be filled with pollen, a preemptive (not premature) ejactualtion into our ether, this one will be the new climax, because danger is here and this never ending chemical reaction will not be brought back to entropy.
>>7963673
I don't know what you're going for. Stylistically, it's more self-assured than the rest of the thread, the frequent comma-conjoined run on sentences aside. The biggest issue is just that there isn't much going on. It's tempting to dodge subject matter because it's too restrictive or cliched or whatever, but it isn't much fun to read afterwards.
>>7963673
Like come on.
>The bed will be the oblivion for a shattered body, and the host to dreams of dew and petrichor; phatasma take him to the virgin trees of Meghalaya, so it may be wet for him, away from the Black Country’s vivid, but misplaced carnality that only ever wore him down, the son of a thousand wetlanders with no turgor.
It's clear that you know better, so why do you write sentences like this? Drop a fucking period here and there.
>>7963681
i just want to see if the prose isn't running away with itself. not saying anything profound. thanks for the advice
>>7963691
It isn't quite running away but it's on the edge. Practice being succinct for awhile, especially if you don't like it, and strike a happy medium.
Just an idea I had this morning, how could my writing being improved?
>>7963801
missed out a word after crimson, should be 'smeared onto'
Bump?
Any good books on metric? I saw a few the other day but can't find them.
>>7963414
the other reply is wrong about the lack of errors - the mistakes really trip it up. For example, the second sentence needs a hyphen instead of a comma, and "a bit too late" in second to last should either be in quotations, italicized, etc. Aim for more neatness.
I tell you what boys, now you brought me in I'm welling up. What you got to realise, we're five points clear, I've been a season ticket holder for near enough 20 years, I moved to Wales, and I've seen Robbie, I've seen Muzzy, and I've seen Lennon, right? This is the first time, the first time that I've ever seen anything like what I've seen this season. This season is just unbelievable pal, and I mean that Robbie. With all due respect Robbie, loved you to bits, loved you to bits, but I tell you something: Kante, Drinky, and all the boys, are putting it on the next level, and it shows in the league table. We're now five.. hang on a minute.. we're now five clear, five points clear.
I went to Atletico Madrid, I went to Red Star. I have brung my son up, when he was in school, "oh Manchester United, Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool" and I.. I stuck by my guns, I said "listen sunshine, wear the fox, wear the blue.. wear the fox, wear the blue, we will come through." And all of a sudden my son's turned round and said to me and looked me in the eye today - looked me in the eye - and turned round and said to me "Dad, Dad.." Amazing. Absolutely amazing. He's seen players, he's seen class players, like Robbie, l-like.. oh, honest to God..
Now, tell me.. you cannot, you cannot, you cannot tell me we have not got a chance of winning the league Robbie. And listen, th-this is.. I grew up with you Robbie. You cannot tell me, you cannot believe we cannot win the league, please.."
>>7962381
I'm thinking about sending this into a short story contest. THoughts?
Title: In Honour of Hillary Rodham Clinton, My First and Only Girlfriend.
I.
You wont read this,
I didn't even post feedback
To anyone else.
II.
Fuck fuck
Fuck the cuck.
If Donald Trump wins the US Election
I don't know what I'll do
(I truly don't - I don't think that far into the future)
Ever.
I live in the moment.
Like at the moment,
I'd fuck the living shit out Hillary
Just to say I'd done it.
Does anyone else think Rodham
Was kinda hot in her twenties?
Like not hot hot, weird hot
The kinda girl you fuck
Because truthfully you're desperate
And you can't pull anyone hotter hot
But justify to yourself by saying
Maybe she'll be President one day hot?
III.
I forgot to rhyme in this poem
But fuck that, T.S. Eliot doesn't do that shit
All those Modernist poets
Were super creeps.
Not like me.
IV.
[Redacted]
V.
Last night
I dreamt of kissing the girl
Who sits next to me in my Anthropology tute
I dreamt we went to the park near uni
And drunk vodka out of a water bottle
We got drunk so quickly
And started making out
And as she lay on top of me
I could feel
My arm reaching around her waist
And it was tiny and delicate.
Her lips felt so real,
And kissing her felt just like kissing a girl in real life.
When I woke up, I thought:
"My memory of this dream feels just as 'real' as any memory I have of a real life event,
So in a way, my dream is no less real than actual reality."
And then,
"So that means that everything that happened in that dream
Really did happen
If I convince myself enough"
And I thought,
"This is the saddest thought I think I've ever had."
>>7965039
>>7965029
Sorry, missed part 3 and 4
>>7965065
I'm proud of you...
...son.
>>7964621
Spot on mate. It reminds me a bit of Irvine Welsh. I think if you used less commas it would read faster and fit the bloke better
plz respond
>>7963611
I don't even why you'd quote the post just to say 'sounds like nerd shit'.
>>7963414
I liked the first half, didn't care much for it after he died.
Found this today from several months ago and decided to fix it up.pls no bully
>>7965027
>>7965029
Very enjoyable m80. After few paragraphs I even muttered to myself "the edge!" but I love characters like that.
>>7965431
Hard to judge from such a small sample m8. Is it fallout fanfic?
Thanks for your input thouh!
>>7965463
It's not a fallout fanfic though I was cautious in my use of "ghoulish". I'll try fixing up the rest at some point.
gonna try to extend this to 5 pages in order to make it make sense
any suggestions?
>>7965551
It didn't quite capture me and I couldn't figure out what you were trying to convey. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the word choice and the pleasant tone.
These are super short plays that I had to write for a class. The second one probably works better on screen than on stage. I had a character I used (I guess using, since I'm still rewriting) in a novel and I wanted to write about him some more, so I did a couple little stories about him in high school. The warosu link is an excerpt (as of now it's the opening paragraph) from the novel where I introduce the character.
https://warosu.org/lit/thread/S6354505#p6359268
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DBFvEY263U3K9Y5ICqtGBXkHzL3W7Kfh4O5_AxM3EmY/edit?usp=sharing
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pcsemdtqhQkfRkxXW01E5ikgFDIwJxv7XNsCV_Brz-g/edit?usp=sharing
>>7963801
by editing
>>7965174
This is decent. When I realized this was a heightened, "poetic" poem I was ready to zone out but it wasn't as tacky as most poems like this can be. You should delete the last two lines, or at least reword them. That penultimate line is extra clunky. The shift to past tense for stanzas 5 and 6 doesn't add much to the poem. Here's a sample rewrite of stanza 5.
>Light and shadow whirl
>as I squeeze my arms, hard,
>crying for your voice over the hill
My rewrite is still pretty shit. Worse than yours, I think. Poems like these are hard to do.
So, as a context for this, I have a gay friend who recently got expelled from my college for a second rape accusation from two people, the more recent one being a baseball player, and this is to be sung to the tune of "Devil went down to Georgia"
Randy went up to Winston, he was looking for a hole to steal.
He was on a find for a good behind, and he was willing to force a squeal.
Came across this young man, looking for a diddle and feeling hot,
Randy jumped on the first good chump, said, "Boy, I'd get in his cot."
Said "Bet you didn't know it, but I'm a baseball player too,
And if you care to make it fair, I'll take a nut from you.
You pitch pretty good ball, boy, but try my pitching too,
I'll let my diddle unfold inside your hole, because I bet it'll pleasure you.
The guy said, "My man's Jesus, and he said it's a sin,
I won't take your nut inside my butt,
No chance I'll let you in."
Randy do a bit of blow and prepare to diddle hard,
'Cause hell's broke loose inside your head and the young man's shown his guard.
And if you win you'll put your happy diddle in his hole,
But if you lose, you'll be disenrolled!
The young man opened up a case and said "let's get drunk bro,"
Pong balls flew from his fingertips as Randy was aglow,
And Randy put a hand upon his ding and tried to lay a kiss,
And his gland of semen started up and it went something like this.
When Randy started, the man said, "now why's your zipper so undone?"
"Lay down on that bed right there and I'll show you some good fun."
Mire on his mountain, run, boy, run!
Randy's gonna dowse and have his fun,
Dickin' poor man and lickin' his toes,
"Randy it's too tight," He smiled, "No."
Randy hid his head because he'd knew that he'd been seen,
And he knew he had to hold his diddle if he's to get out clean,
The court said, "Randy, you ain't coming back, and do no more cocaine,
We done told you once, then another snitched, we find you in disdain."
Mire on his mountain, run, boy, run!
Randy's gonna dowse and have his fun,
Dickin' poor man and lickin' his toes,
"Randy it's too tight," He smiled, "No."
Going to submit this to a magazine I think. Do you think I've got what it takes?
http://pastebin.com/Tz4YfyMN
http://pastebin.com/FWuWnR21
So this is relatively long and I don't expect anybody to read even half of it, but I've been editing this shit in and out for a month now and can no longer tell if it's any good or not. Would like to hear what people think.
>>7965027
>>7965029
>>7965054
>>7965059
i really like this. very brisk, and minimalist, compared to most styles i read and compared to how i write. i think this does a good job of showing not telling, but also not wasting time. i can learn a decent amount about the world and characters from what little is here. its cool m8.
>>7965551
This was hard to finish. I don't think four more pages would improve anything. Sorry.
>>7965027
The characters and the situations are neato, but the writing is clunky throughout. Get someone smart to mark this up. I don't feel like going line by line since it's pretty long but just some examples
>Earth's glow used to be mesmerizing
How about "Earth's glow once mesmerized" or something?
>towards the airlock
minorly triggering and most people won't care but I prefer toward instead of towards
>Ivan unlocked the heavy door, and then hit the opening switch.
How about "Ivan opened the door after unlocking it" or something. Mine isn't much better but it's definitely clunky as you have it.
>a loud clanking noise
Clanks are loud noises. Just say "a clank" or something.
>>7962635
Syntax doesn't really match the tone. Get rid of all your commas and half your periods.
>>7965630
Whoaaaa, this motherfucker coming straight out the gate with a simile that doesn't even make sense and then he keeps doing it three times after that!
Then he just won't get to the point, IT'S POETIC, GET IT, WORLD WAR 2 WAS HELL DIDN'T YOU KNOW THAT?
DEX WAS 20, AND HE DRANK, WAR WAS HELL MAN.
Then there's this guy who gets good cards in poker and he's got a lot to say about it, wanna know why? Cause War is hell and this man is jaded nigger, war jades people if you didn't know that.
BING BANG PEW CACHOO, but I make fun of myself during so it's not bad to write it this way.
===
But honestly if you were going towards a Tom Clancy market I do think you could have quite the success.
If you want the story to be better I'd suggest just toning it down, the whole thing is overwrought as fuck start with just saying what you mean every now and again.
>>7965630
I just can't get on board with your figurative language. It all feels so stilted and cliche. What would this look like if Hemingway wrote it? Not saying minimalism is always better than purple prose, but pretty much every simile or metaphor in here gives me diarrhea.
>>7965050
I'd probably think this was clever if I did it but if the whole point of your poem is to be clever it should be more clever. That's too obvious to be useful critique. Shit. Everything before part 5 is shit. If you were just smarter with your wording and the jokes landed it would be okay. Like I see what the joke is supposed to be in all of them but they just fall flat.
>>7965725
To be totally honest friend although the prose was purple it wasn't fucking nauseating, I think it's pretty clear you've got talent you're just getting caught up in the whole thing being perfect or impressive.
Too try hard you are right. Just be a chill cunt, let it flow and let whatever talent you actively apply take a more passive role. Think about efficiency rather than impressiveness.
>>7962635
This is almost good but it isn't. I think you will get there. The "my head reflected where Thiers should be" is really clumsy. Think about it, my arm reflected where the amputee's arm should have been: the syntax is extremely inelegant. Don't give up, it takes a love of language to have written what you have, and that love can be turned into a mastery.
>>7965765
forgot to attach image
>>7965768
last one
>>7962381
Best thing I've seen here in a long time. Just keep writing and developing your voice.
>>7965802
No it's very bad. You are silly.
>>7965733
okay. this is good advice, thank you, i think it's just going to take time for my prose to move from insufferable and pretentious to decent. at least i have no delusions about how bad it is
>>7965593
Thank you for the very helpful critique with my poem ("Plz respond"). It is of *rare* quality for this board.
The Warosu paragraph is Hypersphere/TLoTiaT tier. I really hate this kind of writing, I always feel like writing should help us get out of the meme space, but a lot of folks want to capture or say something about the meme space it seems.
You can probably guess how I feel about Kolsti Nguyen from that. It looks like a play, I don't think it's actually a play though.
This is from the second chapter of a novel I'm making slow progress on.
Thoughts?
>>7966025
>envision, conceive
Don't do this. Make me see it, don't fucking tell me to.
>>7966017
Thanks for the response, m8. My first in the thread. Just wondering what you thought about the plays. The warosu paragraph has been posted here so much (mostly not by me) that I wasn't even looking for critique of that and it was a mistake to post it. What did you think of the plays? My name's on it because it's a class assignment but what would you think of them if le parentheses meme teen didn't write them? That's probably a stupid question since authors are inextricable from their texts and the plays a play about a guy with a name like Phuc Stevenson probably makes more since when it comes from a guy with a name like Kolsti Nguyen, but work with me here.
>>7966038
which play do you think is better? I'll give a good read to either of them.
>>7966040
You seem pretty meme-averse (nothing wrong with that but that doesn't mean I can't aspire to write good lit that's vaguely memey) so you should go for the last link because it's pretty damn straight-laced.
>>7966051
I will definitely read it, will post review in this thread in next couple hours. It'll be here when you check back tmrw.
>>7966101
Okay. If you're worried that it's gonna be super arduous or imposing, remember that plays are formatted such that if they were in block text they would be about half the page count and this is only 8 pages anyway. That's still more than what I critiqued of yours but if you point me toward something else I'll do my best with it.
>>7965775
could be cleaner. I would do away with the very first sentence, as i feel it adds little. or simply say 'I looked out the car window'. Later, instead of silhouettes of the human form, i would just say 'people'. 'We were here ungraciously with no intention of staying long' I would change that to 'We would not stay long.' A lot of the language is just convoluted and uses more words than necessary.
>>7966031
McCarthy does it
Victorians did it
>>7966254
if mccarthy sucked dick would you do it, you little bitch?
She moans softly into her gag, as her boyfriend's cock pushes into her, feeling so big and thick. It must be how horny she's become, making her pussy so tight. Or maybe how horny she makes him, his cock getting so big and hard! All she can do is squirm against the tree, moving her hips, trying to wiggle down onto his cock, all to eager to be impaled on his long, thick fuckstick. Only happy to oblige, Futur thrusts up, until the nub of her swollen clit touches the base of his cock - cunt fully stuffed. He unbuttons his shirt, throwing it to the ground. Grabbing the bark either side of her head, he braces himself and pushes up hard. The noises she makes in her covered mouth are turning him on so much, urging him to pound her like the whore she is - tied up and waiting for cock. She must be such a filthy slut, ready to be fucked silly by anyone and anything. Bet she can't go out anywhere without craving cock, getting screwed by strangers.
>>7965607
What needs editing desu?
http://pastebin.com/myZgbFdw
First chapter of novel I'm working on
>>7962381
Very descriptive and vivid, but I feel like the poem is missing something, could have a bit more length to it, but as is the prose makes a nice statement.
>>7962394
>>7962400
I feel like this needs more humor. Reminds me of a story I always tell to my mates but less funny, yet it's very honest and stark. It pairs with the images you provided brilliantly. Just a nice story to tell around some beers with the mates.
>>7963414
Very boring, you make death seem like a middle school play. There's nothing really to learn and after the first set of descriptors it all just sort of plays itself out.
But I see potential in this story, I think it would be great if you held to that defeated expectations and had his fathers each tell him a story of mediocrity that just ends in defeated expectations. So that when the hallucinations end, and he surfaces to look at the 4:36 PM again, he reflects how what sort of story he would be able to tell his son as he dies.
>>7963575
That shit purple as hell son. Generally if you're going to open a fantasy story you don't start with demons and hellfire unless it's a neat ass piece of lore that gives the backstory to the story.
>>7963600
Not sure what you're going for, but you need a stronger start that can captivate someone to finish the absurdity.
>>7963622
You need more detail, I'm not really catching what we are and where we are. I'm just left asking questions and not getting answers through the story.
>>7963673
This is the most stylistic of what I read so far and also the worst. I like the clash of long sentence and quick neat ones, but I'm walking away with nothing, it's definitely rough but I don't honestly know where to push you to refine it the prose is so rough.
>>7963801
Space out your ideas more, not enough detail where it's needed, your story is bunched together, try separating each idea into a paragraph, or just rephrasing what you have. Sentence structure is pretty basic and I'm getting a very dull voice from the writing.
>>7965027
I really want to like this story but the writing is just clunky and a mess. Try reading through a thesaurus and finding new words to use. Or just experiment with new ways to make your sentences. The plot is engaging, but the writing is just distracting. Read some good poetry and look how it flows, then try and emulate that flow into your writing.
>>7965174
Stanza four, line 2 is awkward, doesn't flow right
Stanza five, line 3, same could be rephrased
Overall it's nice, but needs work. A bit overwritten, needs to flow more.
>>7965431
CAn't tell from what's givin but seems too fantastical to critique from such a small slice
>>7965551
Painfully overwritten friend. Try shortening' it into it's core ideas then extending it from there.
>>7966285
50 shades-tier. That means trash.
>>7966285
vaginas get a lot looser during arousal so this doenst make much sense
>>7966574
These are all very good critiques. You should do the rest of the thread.
>>7966597
aww jeez I guess
>>7966574 Here
>>7965624
10/10 This is fucking great, perfect flow perfect characterization, I love this.
>>7965630
This is pretty good, a tad over written in places but the characterization was solid. The flow muddied at times, like I said overwritten, but overall it was a nice experience and an enjoyable read. But not one I would do again.
>>7965763
NO ANDS IN POETRY, quickest way to kill the flow in a poem. Reduce your usage of the as well, this poem is too poetic to be this prose stricken. Take much of what you know of writing and throw it out the window when you start writing poetry, all that matters is scene and flow. Remove thens as well, Then is just an and that you didn't want to place.
Though when you're not murdering your pacing and flow there is some decent imagery and good setting.
>>7966025
Honestly reads like Cormac Mcarthy with none of his grace, The writing is great but find your own style.
>>7966285
I was waiting for the part where you stab her and dress yourself in her intestines you freaky shit. Then again that would be something interesting to read, not like you can manage that.
>>7966677
Wow I'm sorry mate, glanced over it.
First and second paragraphs should be combined, take out the lead in to the second paragraph.
The pacing is remarkable, the characterization is a bit flat but this isn't a story that relies on it so much. I do like the plot, though my biggest complaint is at times the writing can be a bit overwrought.
I do like it, might just need a quick editing session, read it out loud and see if anything comes off awkwardly on the tongue.
Rehash of this sample >>7965431 from last night, I've had a bit more time this morning to add what I left off.
1/4
>>7966574
>Space out your ideas more, not enough detail where it's needed, your story is bunched together, try separating each idea into a paragraph, or just rephrasing what you have. Sentence structure is pretty basic and I'm getting a very dull voice from the writing.
Thanks for your critique anon, I'll get to work on it
>>7966626
>find your own style
Not him but why is this necessary?
Called with hushed lips
Eyes wide as the apparitions appear
out the rain speckeled window I glimpse
a surreal world of golden hues and glimmering lights
and people I don't care to know
my screen reflects the moonlight of dancing elephants and flowers in utter amber
another sleepless night.
Literally the first poem I've written. I know it sucks but any constructive criticism?
Illegible garbage? Completely unreadable? A human experience nobody would want to read about?
I said in another thread that all I care about writing on is naked girls. So here's what I churned out as exercise afterwards.
Momoko
This is a story about a girl taking off her clothes.
While the summary may sound shallow, the symbolism is not. Momoko was a pretty girl, by all appearances a modest girl, with a docile face that occasionally showed a bemused smile, and it was in that smile that a hint of her true self sometimes showed.
She wore baggy sweaters that hung loosely on her shoulders, revealing a tawny collar bone. She wore jeans that fit just the opposite, and her professors would sometimes steal glances at her bottom as she passed in the atriums or left their classrooms. She would never stop to hang out with her classmates, but she was not a loner. Her friends were varied.
Language was the thing making her seem reclusive; she spoke little English. Enough to communicate with others but not enough to have a conversation without a little frustration. In the evenings, she sat in her dorm room, chatting online with a friend back home while her roommate sat in night classes. They would chat in spurts, while browsing the rest of the internet, and drinking something hot. He would ask her if she had gotten fat off American food, to which Momoko one time answered smiling and standing.
>>7967536
cont'd
Leaning down to hit one more key, she turned on her webcam, and saw her face displayed next to the conversation. When she stood, she saw, and her friend saw, just her torso, jeans and sweater. And then no sweater. Her hands left the frame, taking her baggy top with it and leaving her flat stomach in its place, dot of a belly button winking at her friend. There was the rustle of the sweater being tossed to the floor, and then Momoko's face, now wearing the aforementioned bemused smile, hovering close to the webcam as she pulled down her jeans.
When she stood, her hips, her hair, stared back at her lone audience. When she backed up against the wall, she revealed as much of herself to the camera as she could. From her knees to her nose, a pretty image framed, her skin blinding compared to the darkness of her now-shed clothes And perhaps shocking to her friend, for all Momoko saw next to her body was a line of exclamation marks growing.
She stepped up to the the desk again and leaned forward to see, her handful-size breasts looking more endowed when she squeezed her shoulders as she typed.
"Does it look like I'm getting fat off American food?" she typed, and the instant response, "No! No!" showed that sarcasm didn't translate well between the two friends. Her smile grew twofold as she watched the adorations flood her screen.
That screen, between the two friends shared, held an image for the two of them alone. But in the conduits and channels through which the image traveled on its journey, was it perhaps interrupted, intercepted, caught and collected? Or perhaps it was shared after the chat ended, shown in secrecy to other friends, "hey don't show anyone else, but look at this," so that Momoko, in her naked and natural state, might be known not to one, but two, three, or a thousand sets of eyes, as she would be were she born in a world unburdened by modesty, where everyone already knows what everybody looks like, head to toe. As they do already now. And her image may be cherished, yearned over, worshiped. Her smile connects with the eyes passing up her body, saying "this is who I really am," but nobody, save for a few truly know Momoko.
Here's a short story I wrote recently:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4U58MMPhXq-a0NCVm9nUEVuNlU/view
>>7967634
>https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4U58MMPhXq-a0NCVm9nUEVuNlU/view
>>7966574
The demon is a missile. I figured the description would have led to that? Does it genuinely not come off that way? The man it follows is supposed to be a tribal man from a jungle village.
Here's a poem I wrote about wanting to fuck my 17 year old cousin.
I-85
If it is to change you
You will not remember the crash
By the moments during or before.
Your death is not about you,
But everyone else
And what they learn in your absence.
Like your quiet father who
Goes to church but never prays
Begging God, “Take me, instead.”
Or your hopeful mother
Who taught him how to speak to Heaven.
You wake with a damaged body
That hates your old one even more.
But it is forgiven.
I-85 is still dense with moving lights
That cut through your field of vision and
Fade quickly into nothingness.You are no longer one of them
And pull off across the median.
It’s only a gambling problem if you lose
And you’ve been given back years
To burn.
If angels showed your forebears how to love
The devil did the same for you.
You wish you remembered why.
You think about how easy it would have been,
And what it means that
Your brother has seen a decade’s worth of
Old movies more than you.
You think a lot
About what got broken, how everyone says
They’re fucked, and
The one person who thinks they’re fine
Maybe isn’t.
You like hearing voices over the phone
The way they are forced to be honest
Instead of hiding the truth in their faces
Like a white-printed riddle.
Your second-to-last cigarette burns out
But you decide to quit early.
It’s funny.
They would kill you if they knew
That sometimes you wish they didn’t pray
Or that you’re far too old to smoke with
Your cousin.
She conjures up images like
A chemical imbalance would after you
Inhale a ratio you didn’t expect.
But it’s too late, and the drug filters through
Your lungs and the parts of your body that
God touched.
So, you hold it in.
She smiles.
Exhale.
The reality of it all pours from your chest and
Caresses her silhouette
Like a shadow that’s followed you
Into every smokey bar on the block.
You can’t tell left from right, or
Right from wrong, and
You try not to think about it,
How small you must seem.
Instead, you think about space travel
and how you’d like to pass in zero gravity,
Drifting through the black, faced with
The majesty of some distant star, wondering
Which atoms you share, and how even the supermassive
Can seem so very small from the safety
Of the lonely ground.
>>7967536
>While the summary may sound shallow, the symbolism is not
Pass. Don't do shit like this.
>>7967653
>>7966574
Also, this will be a small prelude to introduce this specific character and his aspect of thought. Tbh, the actual 1st chapter will have almost no fantasy references of that sort. Though there will be technology that is somewhat farther along than our actual modern tech. Mostly for a (slightly) more advanced space travel to ours, to name a specific instance.
>>7967654
I like the language. Comes off as pretentious halfway through but it still held me.
Also, hi, fellow Southeasterner.
Fuck it, gonna post the opening to my novel.
"The streets are empty. There’s only silence. The sky-scrapers are veined with spurts of green growth. Blades of grass squeeze through the cracks and flowers bloom. The people are no longer sullen for the state of their world: they’ve slipped so far into “comfort” that all they know is the heavy silence; as if the streets were always empty, the people never there, and the rickety metal skeletons of cars eternally natural, no different to the trees that border the city.
Underneath the streets are the diseased sewers. The water flows, thick as sludge, with a gauzed rainbow surface. It carries through its body the corroded carcasses of fish and rats. Along the walls drip two lines of blood, seeping through the grooves like arteries into concrete – organic, but lifeless. The two lines fall together and form an X, its cross-point unclear."
>>7967655
Yeah I felt like opening it with the narrator talking directly to the reader but perhaps that was a poor choice of words.
>>7967683
Yeah, I was worried about sounding pretentious, I'll probably go back and change up some of the language. Thanks senpai
>>7963633
Thank you anon. Is there a resource I could read or even a book to learn proper parenthetical use, work on my diction and syntax, etc? I think there was a little purple book I had in Uni. I'm 19 now, going back. Had to drop out because of life problems.
>in context
It's a part of a story I'm writing, so I'll try to put my future passages in context next time for the sake of a proper critique.
Could I bother you to point out some stumbly prose? While some of the out of place or strange way of speaking is part of the characters personality, I still need it to flow and if I feel like there's something wrong but can't explicitly see it then I know I'm not writing well enough.
>>7966574
I'm >7962400
Perhaps more humor would help. I wanted to put in a bit describing Red, what she did to catch the attention of the young man. I've written down her character details, personality, etc. she's based off of a real person I've known for a bit, but I changed some aspects here and there to make the flow with the MC more...fluid.
Thank you for the input anon, appreciate the fact that you took the time to read through most of these. I'll try to do the same but seeing how I'm not really a writer or even college educated, I don't believe my input would be of much use.
>>7963801
Did some work on this today, trying to do what >>7966574 said.
Any better or am I trash?
Thanks /lit/
>>7967687
Neat. I like the flow of it. I'd keep reading for what its worth.
I rarely post in these threads, but here's something I wrote a long time ago. This was pretty much the last thing I wrote, back for a writing course I took back in Fall 2012. I personally think my prose is brilliant but I can't write a plot for shit. Anyways, I hope you enjoy it.
_______________________________________
And so the pain starts. As numbly as a newborn babe, his eyes opened with a delicacy seldom seen, even in the most porcelain of caricatures. Smoke seeped up into the atmosphere as the ruins of a once-great home laid all round the nearly-dead shorthair. The hot, shaken groundwork that the broken feline lay in still held a fiery lick; little embers fizzled and shot up in the air like cursed fireflies. And so the once proud member of a now dead family, with ash and blood and the most piteous of tears freckled throughout his scant fur and fusing his two twin eyelids together, making him blind as a bat but without the hearing-eye strength, oh Lord, lay dying, no! cooking, in a grey grave of a once-proud home, until finally those thin membranes of crisped skin parted for such a split second as to see the devastation around him, to feel the smoke dry the tears from his eyes, only to close again in what the cat hoped was a dying breath. Take me, this cat prayed, Whoever is out there, take me away from this. [Hey, what’s a narrator to do?] Pluck! Up goes this cat, heavy with weight and naked without his grey fur, up and up and up he goes, conscious of nothing but of thick, rubbery appendages raising him up through the smoke, and then: oh good Lord, it’s air I breathe now, and jolted by the miraculous Whoever it was up in the sky Who had given this poor creature cool, crisp air to breathe after the hellish grey that so matched his once-divine coat, in a gesture of mercy, for the time being, a respite was given from the agony of burns, and this fat cat fell out of conscious state.
>>7967769
Your prose is not brilliant, it's mediocre at best. Overwritten and pretentious.
Looking out the car window with my eyes closed
I can't touch my own skin—too cold.
Black holes created by supersonic sobs.
Please. Echoes from my father from the fog
do remind me. And God creates rain
which is nice for the flowers flung in the dirt
by gardeners bound to their rakes
like birthdays to cake.
Simple syrup still causes
diabetes and tartar build up.
Here's something that's meant to be the intro to something about really, really elitist primary schools.
http://pastebin.com/J7x32F3N
>>7967769
is this ironic?
>>7967769
Is this a joke?
>>7967859
absolutely awful
Nick has changed quite a bit. The last time I saw him, he was carrying my mother’s severed head, using it as a new prop in one of his increasingly vulgar routines.
“This is what happens to disobedient little kittens!” he said in a deliberately imperfect imitation of her voice, rhythmically opening and closing her mouth with his hand.
His restraint sent a clear message: we have miles to go from here. Play hard-to-get all you want, you’ll break, eventually, and I won’t, ever. Presently, I tried my best to gauge the extent of what he was able to show me, knowing full well that whatever list of awful sights I could come up with would not only be devastatingly incomplete, but it would also by nature exclusively consist of things I wouldn’t get to see. Nick, my dear friend Nicky, had demonstrated the uncanny ability of anticipate my own anticipations, gracefully avoiding them with a creativity that must rival, if not surpass the greatest minds of human history. At that moment, I still held on to the flimsy hope of outwitting him in that way, pushing his demonstrations into the realm of the harmlessly comical by expecting, and thereby preventing, the worst.
“You think you’re so tough, don’t you? You think nothing I can show you will break your silly little will? Well fucking think again! Here’s a clue you dumb faggot: maybe, just maybe, you’re not the only one who sees me. You think you’re so tough, don’t you, do you think everyone’s that tough? You think you won’t break, do you think no one will? All I need is one guy to break so he’ll walk up to your house with the actual head of your actual mother that he’s actually severed from her lifeless, raped corpse!”
At this point he threw my mother’s head to the ground before my feet, leaving stains of half-congealed blood on the pavement as it rolled the last bit of the way.
“Who says I’m not actually that guy right now, actually standing here in front of you? Who says I didn’t choose this appearance because I had already picked someone? Go ahead, give your poor mom’s head a kick, see if it’s really there!”
>>7967859
I don’t want to be mean with you, but I’m afraid that my honesty will pleasant: in the long term honesty and actual constructive advice, however, will prove the better.
First: you need to choose if poetry is really what you want to write. It is the most demanding of all literary forms and it is one where mediocrity and inexperience are most striking and intolerable. Also, poetry has long been out of fashion and loosing space for prose, so I don’t see why would you invest on it if it is really not your thing.
About your poem. There is a myth today that whatever you feel or any image that crosses your head might be collected - like butterflies, moths and mosquitos that come near the light, or in this case, your brains - and glued, without any order, in the paper: the messy result of dust, smashed-bowels and mixed-color can be called a poem, and everybody that tells you otherwise is just old-fashioned or not concerned with the evolution of art. This is wrong. To simply pile up completely unrelated and useless images is only going to produce confusion in the reader; your “poem” will be an arcane jelly, a mess that only you yourself knows what it is supposed to signify. Metaphor and imagery are the greatest and most important things in poetry, but you need to know how to use them.
Also: your poem don’t show any respect for metrics or rhyme. Now, you can choose to write free-verse, and rhyme is certainly not necessary for great poetry (the greatest ever written, the Shakespearean poetry, is mostly unrhymed), but in a small piece like that order will certainly be well recommended. Most poets today simply write things that are like Facebook posts (simple, mediocre prose) that are then chopped into “verses”, just to say that the thing is a poem. I would give you the advice of learning first how to use metric, and to discard it only after you have tested it and decided that it is not for you. Paradoxically, metric might help you to write: it gives a sense of balance and order to your pieces, and helps you to create rhythms.
“Black holes created by supersonic sobs.” You see, that doesn’t work well: the effect is comic. Crying and sobbing being so devastating as to cracking black-holes in reality, and the use of “supersonic” to things that have no relation to it (screams and moans) – it’s exaggerated in a funny way.
>>7968002
“Simple syrup still causes
diabetes and tartar build up.”
This could end up creating a good image, but you need to work it better. You just throw the image in our noses without any relation to the whole (well, the whole is a mess of images tied together anyway): metaphors must serve the purpose of the poem, they must enhance the argument, explain an idea, adorn an emotion.
The problem with your poem is that: 1) we don’t understand what you are talking about; 2) the construction is lazy and disproportioned and 3) the images are all unrelated, all gratuitous and don’t help us to better understand what the poem is all about.
If you can't tell it's >>7966574 gib review
>>7967705
Humor would be your first objective, after you have it so that it makes you chuckle and reflect then add in what you feel is needed, a bit of description isn't needed imo because it allows the reader to insert their own Red in place of yours.
>>7967742
This is way better good job. Tone down your use of 'and' and expand from here, this would make a great first novel.
>>7967532
It reads like a Woody Allen story but even less functioning, it's alright but you can't really expand it from here
>>7967536
>>7967539
Not descriptive enough for what it is.
>>7967654
The first part works well, the second half though doesn't flow as well as the first.
>>7967664
This makes more sense, so, definitely needed more context to properly critique.
>>7967967
Godawful opening, a bit is unattractive.
Entire story, the opening is too rough, the premises is needlessly edgy. This should be an end but to what plot I have no clue. 2edgy4me
>>7968002
>>7968007
the same thing to you:
>>7967525
Called with hushed lips
Eyes wide as the apparitions appear
out the rain speckeled window I glimpse
a surreal world of golden hues and glimmering lights
and people I don't care to know
my screen reflects the moonlight of dancing elephants and flowers in utter amber
another sleepless night.
Especially:
>you need to choose if poetry is really what you want to write. It is the most demanding of all literary forms and it is one where mediocrity and inexperience are most striking and intolerable. Also, poetry has long been out of fashion and loosing space for prose, so I don’t see why would you invest on it if it is really not your thing.
>The problem with your poem is that: 1) we don’t understand what you are talking about; 2) the construction is lazy and disproportioned and 3) the images are all unrelated, all gratuitous and don’t help us to better understand what the poem is all about.
But I liked the potential of this like:
>my screen reflects the moonlight of dancing elephants
I liked the image of dancing elephants, and maybe the association of the moonlight silver color with the grey skin of the animals. But again, the metaphors are just cast upon us without any order or utility. Don’t fall for the modern poetry laziness of making a mashed-potatoes puree of several images and then calling the abortion a poem.
>>7968009
>not descriptive enough for what it is
Something I need practice on: plodding and all-too same physical description vs. vagueness. Thanks.
>>7968049
Aw, you ignored me
http://pastebin.com/J7x32F3N
>>7968084
Link's not loading senpai
>>7968106
I won't forget you! Unless I did...
Opening reminds me of my feelings of my High school's creative writing class. Teacher was a massive prick who felt that gritty realism was the only was to make a story.
On the story, I like the pacing and writing, no characters to play around with but I feel like this is a great opening. Would need some more to really get a grasp on what you're going for but as an opening and set up for plot it's good. You're doing a great job at setting up the bureaucracy of the school.
I have done my duty:
>>7968002
>>7968007
>>7968049
Now can I have a look on this (original in portuguese):
You don’t know anything about me:
Your own nightmares are unable to
Dream with nights as terrible as
The acts that these hands of mine have consecrated.
I have seen death, glutted and full, with the stomach
And the intestines pulsating with victims
- Souls are roundworms whose howls
Pullulate and itch in the bowels
Of the reaper - yes, I have seen death itself
Begging me to stop forcing her
To eat, but in vain, for I have disemboweled the thorax
Of genocide itself and plunge,
In the trough of his purple organs,
The muzzle of death (already nauseated)
For the black sow to choke
In the wash of hot and oily blood.
>>7968106
I will look your stuff now. Just a sec.
>>7968143
Fixed:
http://pastebin.com/ANEqfcTT
I'm only writing poetry because I'm worse at writing prose and feel a natural compulsion to write poetry because of the inherent fluency of rhyme. I know as poetry it's ugly, but I've done better before and this introduction is to be instrumental more than anything. It's mostly a dramatis personae, with some exposition, and laced with references to the idealistic biographies of a particular historical figure. But I'm curious if it's at least tolerable to read, particularly with that context in mind, because if it isn't then I may as well go a little more slowly and refine it before going any further. I may have started this same story half a dozen times over the last year, but I keep second-guessing myself that no one would have any interest in this antiquarian bullshit. If it helps, the theme alluded to in the beginning of the second stanza is actually central to the story, and entails the romanticism of the protagonist, a sentiment that never quite materializes for him due to the obstructive nature of the allegorical sin represented by the three captains.
King Romreich, Master of the Knights of the Flaming Iron,
Had betrothed his dear daughter to a knight from east of Bayern.
Having kept this truth from her suitors, till his untimely death,
"Call for Theuerdank" would be his final breath.
Endangering sweet Ehrenreich, at once Theuerdank was called,
Beseeched from lands quite distant, and of Romreich's death; appalled.
To sooth her noble, mourning heart, Theuerdank did write,
"We will not long be kept apart, for you alone do I plight."
Though to this correspondence, did Theuerdank not correspond,
For all his honeyed words, had any actions yet to spawn,
But Theuerdank was occupied; his borders were alight
With pillaging invaders, wrought by the Green King's might.
The Green King's forces quickly fell, their energy depleted,
Ran out of Theuerdank's mount'nous home, his defence completed.
To Ehrenreich he would depart, soon as his party gathered
But of big head, and bigger heart, a lone departure he rathered.
Firstly came the hunters; Conrad, Wilhelm, and Hans;
While hunting they knew well, they knew not of Theuerdank's plans.
Next came the attendants; Michael, Spreng, and Graff;
Equerry, cupbearer, and barber, with not a smile nor a laugh.
Such was left for the jesters; Kunz, Dywendl, and Bauer;
The bravest fools who ever lived, to no one would they cower.
Now leaving only Theuerdank, but he had already left;
Of their heroic leader was this party now bereft.
In lands low and swampy, home to Theuerdank's consort,
Did three captains now collude, of diabolical rapport.
Fürwittig, Unfalo, and Neidelhart, were the three captain's names;
To confound our hero Theuerdank, they would play dangerous games.
They'd not allow Queen Ehrenreich to marry such a man,
Furtherance for themselves was the focus of their plan.
To the Blue King she would be married, and Theuerdank deprived,
Or else soon she might be buried, lest her betrothed arrives.
Here's a poem I wrote for my ex.
On Spring Days in May
Oh, brown-eyed beauty, where do you lay?
Beyond the grasp of my mind, the craving
For a long-forgotten evening in May:
The two of us enveloped in love’s ravings.
I still see your eyes, shining bright as worlds afar,
As we lay in the grass with endless green scenery.
Now when I’m alone I think back to those stars
That lingered in your brown eyes to haunt me.
And wish that I could see them just one more time.
Just to know what true love tasted like again.
I used to be afraid that my love would cease to rhyme.
Now I’m afraid that my love will always remain.
>>7968143 cntd
>>7968144
That's really good, one of the best poems I've read in a critique threads.
>>7968174
Some good descriptors, but it's very awkward, some paragraphs are stiff. The writing could be improved at points.
>>7968180
the stanzas are too long for a AABB ryhme scheme. Try experimenting with new rhyme schemes as few people respect or like AABB. It has a decent flow but Stanzas 2 and 4 drag on too much. As a classical poem it's nice though.
>>7968234
The flow is awful and the descriptors are cliched. The entire poem is very cliched actually. I would suggest you try approaching the same poem from another angle, rewrite the poem, but as an outsider would, but then go back in and personalize it again. Try to remain as detached from what you're writing as possible, even if it's personal, as that let's you be more critical and subjective of your own work.
>>7968254
Thanks for the advice anon. I'll keep working on it.
>>7966574
>027' here
Thanks for your cirtique, I'm at work but I'll read yours when I get home.
This is not really a piece of my work, but I'm thinking of writing a short novella, about a small Polish village, who's main character is a cat Gabriel and the old church father Jan Lech. The action follows the cat, who never speaks or thinks, in the town, and the life of Jan, villagers, and an old lady called Rozhitza and her husband Sratzimir
The preacher dies, and a replacment from Warsaw is sent, and the people accept him like a brother, respecting the last wish of Jan, but he wants to change every aspect of the villager's lives, and they chase him out the village. It plays on the contrast between Jan, and the villagers and the relationsip Rozhitza-Sratzimir, and the careless life of cats.
Thoughts? I've already written the first three chapters, but they're in Serbian, and I'm not really good at giving a quality translation.
>>7968009
>7967664 (You) #
>This makes more sense, so, definitely needed more context to properly critique
Alright, thanks. That's good to know.
Ironic Bump
The beginning of my latest short story. Can you tell I'm forcing it out?
>The word ‘Redolent’ is one so specific it has no synonyms, so uncommon that I actually had google its definition to find it, and yet so universally meaningful that I’m not really sure why it isn’t common knowledge. It refers more or less to something that smells like a memory. It is a specific combination of air and aromatic compounds which is more pregnant with nostalgia and emotion than any anything I or anyone else for that matter have ever managed to write.
>For me the most redolent scents I can think of are turkish coffee and the stamp glue odor of used paperbacks, neither of which have ever managed failed to remind me of the Katsaros’s Books and Coffee, an element of my childhood that I hope I will never forget.
>>7968009
>This is way better good job. Tone down your use of 'and' and expand from here, this would make a great first novel.
Wow thanks anon, i'll remember that.
I wrote a poem for you /lit/
Curl your lips
and stroke the shaft
suck the tip
and work your craft
Guide me in
and mount me so
slick my skin
and start to go
Baby cutie
harder faster
move that booty
I'm your master
[A lonely desert flower unfurling]
Back on top
pumping thrusting
Don't you stop
I'm close to busting
[A desert flower twitching unfurling beneath a surging sky]
uuuunnghhh. Baby cutie. That was so good.
[Setting in like dusk over an autumn field. Falling into a widening gulf of sadness]
Was that good for you, too?? Was it?
[Stretching over a vast, dark continent of loneliness. Over the ferns and across the rocky valleys, the lamentations of the niggerwomen echo over that steaming jungle of complete, total desolation.]
She washes up in the other room.
>>7968484
Post Ironic bump
>>7969075
First stanza is masterful. Rest is trash. Shouldn't have posted anything else.
>>7966574 still here still critiquing
http://pastebin.com/myZgbFdw
reviews plz
>>7968282
>>7968329
keep working friends, constant practice leads to constant performance
>>7968402
Sounds like an interesting premise, I would make it reflect your culture and not worry about connecting with foreign readers.Make the First Great Serbian Novel.
>>7969075
Remove the 'ands' and stick to the tempo of the start, much like shitty sex you started out great then got lost in the act, just typing away in intellectual masturbation towards the end.
>>7966574
>http://pastebin.com/myZgbFdw
You sure you're ready to write an entire novel in present tense? Also I'm not sure I'm ready to read a novel that describes every bit of scenery in boring detail and via lists, of, everything, you can think of, mostly, just, cliches and platitudes.
>>7969935
Thank you for the criticism, I'm working on how to really explore the scenery and set up the scene without boring myself to sleep.
>>7968689
>Can you tell I'm forcing it out?
Let's see
The word ‘Redolent’ is one so specific it has no synonyms, so uncommon that I actu..
zzzzzzzzz
Mrs. Hamilton I think
Her suitcase felt like old dollar bills.
What kind of work are you going into?
Finance I said, that was my kick then
Just make sure you get a pension.
I let her work the TV by herself
Tasting her Lemon Drop childhood 60 years away.
>>7969955
Yeah always tough to do, I know the feeling, you're writing and you think "but how will readers know where this is, what's happening around them and etc." but then I go and read an author I really admire and I suggest you do the same with scenery in mind because what I find is that usually so much of it is just implied, you'll probably find that your favourite novel's scenery (unless it's a fantasy novel) and what you picture in your head is entirely based off of one or two words that basically gives you the ability to just figure the rest out for yourself while the writer gets down and dirty with what really matters.
>>7969960
yep, thought so. Thanks mate
can someone please make a thread where we discuss craft, because while I do not have the patience to read your shitty writing, I am willing to discuss, analyze and critique story.
>>7969987
you'll have to force yourself to write shit all the time and it's a valuable process but usually this is the shit that doesn't see the light of day and just serves to make you better
“HOLY FUCKIN’ FUCK!”
“Funny, almost everyone says that when they see ‘em.”
“I… knew they were called… but I didn’t actually think that…”
“That the Hoodrats from Tuam were actual rats?”
“Yeah.”
They stood over the corpse of a rat, its guts spilling out over the tarmac. A rat wearing a red hooded cloak. A very big, human sized, rat.
“Christ, man. Didja not read the handbook?”
“That was mandatory?”
“Christs alive, Karl! Ya ever hear of “Workplace Safety”? Fucking fuck, like. Have ya even yer certificate?”
“…Not on me.”
“Well a feckin’ certificate won’t do much good to ya when you’ve a hoodrat trying to chew it’s way through yer helmet to get at yer hairless gowl of a face. You DID pass the exam though?”
“Oh yeah, flying colours. I got 100% like.”
Herman sighed. He knew Karl was lying through his teeth. Not that he had teeth to lie through, he noticed.
“If ya were any greener you’d be a courgette.”
“What’s a courgette?”
“Before yer time. ’Mon.”
Galway used to be nice. Green. Like a courgette, but with the odd rock in it. Herman laughed to himself. Oliver Cromwell told people they could either go to hell or to Connaught. Now they were one and the same.
As their cart rattled down the ex-motorway, Herman looked from the shattered homes to the shattered castles from centuries before. They looked like they belonged in the same era. Fuck it, they might as well do.
“Here, Herman, can we pull over? My legs are fucked. This peddlin’, like. It’s a fuckin’ stones.”
“Christ no, lad. We’re on a schedule.”
Karl huffed. They kept peddling. And peddling. And peddling.
“Here, what’s with all the trees? There’s no… what’s the word, no…”
“Bark.”
“Yeah, there’s no bark.”
“They like to keep their teeth sharp. We’re close. Here, grab yer brake pedal there. Right, on three – one, two, three”
The cart skidded, stopped.
“Karl, get yer ratstick and throw on your headlights.”
“Won’t that… attract the rats?”
“That’s what we want, ya dope. You shoulda read the fuckin’ handbook. Christ. Right, that field there.”
They hopped a barrier and slid down the embankment at the side of the road. The dim light of the nest’s entrance came into sight. Karl lost his balance, fell on his face in the mud. Herman laughed quietly. The little things.
“Sush, ya old prick.”
Too loud. A squeak.
“Fuck.”
Herman dropped next to Karl. A hoodrat. A young’un – standing at four feet. Eyes glowing in the dusk. Teeth. Mangy, matted fur. To think it was once a lad from Tuam… it didn’t bear thinking about, so Herman didn’t do it.
>>7969999
“C’mon. Up. Up.”
Karl was beyond words, terror-locked and covered in shit.
“Ah yer fuckin’ useless you are.”
It hadn’t seen them. Herman was up, running. Karl saw him swing his ratstick at the rat’s head, the glow extinguished. Herman marched back, thick as butter.
“You little fucking shit. First live hoodrat we see and you piss yerself on the ground.”
“I- I-“
“You are a fuckin’ liability is what you are.”
A squeak. This time from Karl. Herman turned. His quarry lived yet, and aimed something… gun-ish to the air. A bolt of fire shot into the sky. Squeaks, in the distance. Many, many squeaks. From the nest.
“Oh for fuck… right, we’re off. This is a bust. Get up.”
“I… I can’t – my ankle.”
“Yer ankle me arse.”
Herman tried to hoist Karl onto his feet. Dead weight.
“Will ya at least try to walk on it?”
“It’s not gonna work… yer gonna have to carry me.”
The squeaks were getting louder.
“Fuck that, lad.”
Herman dropped Karl. Went into his pockets. Came back with a small brick… of something… with what looked like a digital clock on it. Tapped a button or two. Left it on Karl’s chest.
“Wh-what’s that?”
“The mission.”
“You can’t just leave me here!”
“Jesus lad, you really should have read the handbook.”
Herman held his ratsick up.
“You want the coup de grace?”
“Is that like a courgette?”
Herman sighed. Lowered the ratstick.
“G’luck, Karl. Sorry ya had to be such a shite”
Herman bolted up the embankment. Karl started screaming. The Hoodrats from Tuam had begun pouring out from the nest.
Arse in his saddle, Herman began to pedal. It was hard going – the cart was heavy, designed for two pedlars. Karl’s distant screams grew more guttural, gradually drowned out by the sound of the Hoodratpack clawing at his helmet to get at his hairless gowl of a face.
Herman huffed, glanced at his watch-
“Four, three, two…”
Fire lit up the night. Herman kept peddling. And peddling. And peddling.
>>7969995
>reading for plot
Here's a dialogue
http://pastebin.com/kZUy38Sp
The world is newly made, the Age of Dragons had just recently ended. Although the dragons are long gone an ancient evil is rising ..... the demons. Born in the Abyss they are both feared by both things of Light and Dark, the gateway for more demons to come are from the all powerful Archdemons. Archdemons take many forms, whenever it be a plant or a normal human, their strength is enough to wipe out entire kingdoms and almost seem impossible to kill, until they came. The Afflicted, normal people given a gift to take the souls of both demons and any living thing, are the ones who combat the Archdemons and stop the treat, but at the risk they may become Archdemons themselves. Our story follows Elisabeth (shown in picture) a strong Afflicted who despite being blind is was able to fight the demons with her powerful magic abilities and a quiet Afflicted knight named Merek who wears a dishonorable armor of his kingdom who's past is as murky as his future, will they be the one's who end the demon onslaught or will they be succumbed by the power of the Archdemons?
>>7971055
Kill yourself.
>>7971087
lol what have you written then?
>>7971101
Relevant shit, not some childish fantasy.. I bet you do RPGs too, faggot.
>>7971105
uh yeah maybe once you've matured you won't be run by you're insecurities to write 'relevant shit', meanwhile I'm writing what I'm actually pasionate about...
>>7971118
> Thats what university litt class students actually believe
B-but, it's my passion!
Fuck off man, you're in the wrong here. The big issue with fatasy is that it's the world you create that's leading the characters into the sotry, not the characters themselves. Fantasy is a genre that dooms itself, a genre that can never observe the profound components of a character, because that character's constantly shoehorned into events.
>>7971118
In short, your "passion" can never be profound, you'll always touch the surface, but never the true content.
> inb4 Tolkien and Martins
>>7971127
>>7971131
I can't do it anymore, I was just rusing you guys, I got the text from here
http://mr-gasmask.deviantart.com/art/Those-Who-Devour-Demons-potential-cover-491475342
>>7971146
Seriously tho, fantasy a shit.
>>7971154
I know.
I turn my head around and see behind
a barrage of uncounted centuries
congesting in their endless file the course
of history, pages of the almanac,
extending to the furthest reaches of
recorded time, where paper frays and frames
the forms of kings, and mounds of plebeian
ride the backwards-floating wind of time.
In the primal bush in golden sunshine robed,
perspiring blackened topsoil underneath
to cool the crib, the little feet of lizards
now long returned to loam and dirt would drag
their little bellies through the oozing mud
and scrawl across the land in scurried streaks
a city in relief embossed in dirt,
winding its ways through the swaying tallgrass,
until the primal simian learned that if
he tucked his throbbing thumb against the rock
cupped in his foregathered dactyls, it would
repel the haul of gravity and taste
the glassy higher air unsullied still
by smoke and breath, and fly to where it pleased
him that it fly to hammer muck from meat
and speckle red his ragged face through art of
slaughter. The blood of grassland peasantry
made flush the lining of the arteries
that plotted lines awry about his face,
and on his temple set a bony crown,
and fed the marrows of his kingly bones;
the bulbous mouth, the downy cheeks, the squat
phallus resting in its matted nest, like
the monkey-king upon his fleshly throne.
Of morbid curiosity I chase
with eyes the lives of my progenitor,
and deep within my chest the drum begins
to beat at sight of savagery to match
the savagery forever etched upon
my cardiac wall. What in me is human,
whatever masculine, testosterone
trails afire, descended the lines from him.
Is this just straight up edgy and/or cliché?
“There is no total meaning. As in, there is no objective meaning for every human to follow. Nothing like ‘be happy’ or ‘make others happy’. This is also why there is no mutually understood code of ethics among all people. People can make their own meaning for their own life. Whether that is to become rich, have sex with as many women as possible, whatever. To search for an overall meaning is a waste of time, when even if we did discover it, not every single person on the planet would comply. If the meaning was indeed ‘make others happy’, which I highly doubt it would be, we’d still have home invaders breaking into homes and killing whole families for no particular reason. In terms of this planet, the human was cursed with being too intelligent for his or her own good, but too stupid and primal to truly advance. At this point, we’re caught in a loop.”
Alexei looked at the window at the soaked dark streets, only the lights of cars and streetlights bursting through to give the drab landscape any hope.
“One man had the mental state to kill an entire family on a whim. Last week, a baby suffocated because her mother passed out on top of her while shooting up heroin. What purpose would helping others serve if people can’t help themselves?”
As they pulled up at a stoplight, an all-obese family waddled slowly over the crossing.
“Consumption is the closest thing humanity has found to a true all-encompassing meaning. Consume everything you can. Consume until your body gives in. Consume so that no other creature can survive, so that other humans can’t survive. Consume your share, your neighbour’s share, your children’s share. You’ve watched TV and seen billboards. Think about how many advertisements essentially just say “CONSUME” and have a picture of the product for the 30 seconds.”
They were both silent for the rest of the drive back to the station. McKinley didn’t like having the radio on.
“Listen, Alexei. I know you’re fresh out of a small country town where everyone knows everyone and is friendly with each other. I don’t mean to scare you from the city. What I’ve said is just what I’ve learned, and to an extent what I wish I knew when I started. Death is the one true constant in everything. It shouldn’t be avoided, especially not in this line of work. People do horrible things. Some might say the key is perspective, but I believe the key is acceptance. Acceptance that people will do horrible things, we always have in the past and we will continue to do so until we’re extinct.”
They had arrived at the station. It was still raining, not too heavily. They headed inside to get started on the mountains of paperwork.
“One more thing, kid. Learn to enjoy spending time with yourself. You’ll be doing a lot of it”
>>7971348
Yeah it's edgy. Stop trying to justify everyone's fault. Not everything is black and white; add a tint of grey.
>>7971389
To be fair it's only a monologue of a side character to show his change from a practical joker type to a nihilist. Do you think the edginess should be toned down would've been a more specific question
>>7971197
This is also mine:
The razor had a keener edge
this evening; perhaps because
I was out of soap, and thus
forced to rub the gleaming blade
(down, down, down, then up, up, up)
against the flushing strip of flesh,
naked, between nose and lip.
It drew blood, of course; incessant
globules bubbling out to mark
invisible punctures, two
on each side, skirting the philtrum,
like the imprints left by some
nocturnal visiting undead.
Caution creeps with every passing night,
I suppose; in twenty years
my drooping lip would repel
the very approach of the razor
if ungauzed by a lather,
and an ungauzed incision
would probably hurt a lot more
the morning after.
>>7971348
would not read. not because of the subject matter but because of the writing itself.
Beginning of something I started a couple months ago
When you guys write a novel, do you outline/have a general idea of the whole plot first or do you just kind of ride the wave and let the story unfold one page at a time?
>>7973247
When I start I ride the wave then after the wave ends I tend to make an outline and go from there.
The rabbit dropped down into a deep rabbit hole, not necessarily a full one but here was no food left in it either. When the dogs come home, lots and lots of music will fill their mouths and, like bees, dissipate across their respective keyboards, staining and melting all of the 4 keys on each. 3 holes in the sky open and release a smell only comparable to episode 6 of season 3 of Full House. When dinnertime rolls around, only 3 hearts beat- that of the chair, the end table with the painting of an uncharacteristically happy clown laying face down on the surface, and the next-door neighbor. He closes his eyes in order to see a green, grassy field, and walks angrily around the field while his body burns in extreme, scathing pain. Water flows out of the side of a boulder and is carefully shaped into different iterations of each of the sixty-two men that had the nerve to actually do it. Wow, they actually did it. The clock ticks over to the next amount of time, signaling to the stack of books in the corner that this is, truly, their time to shine, and they shed their cowardice and are melted into a smooth, sweet liquor with hints of drano and that time that mom mixed the powder wrong, and even though it was over 30 years ago, a memory continues to live on of the entire vase of it being drunk, but more importantly- the taste, which could be likened to New York before the big crime cleanup by that one mayor. Coughs resonate through the empty halls as they pass it around. They loved to walk around the halls at night, in the pitch black, trying to dodge the numerous traps consisting of elaborate different traps that they can’t even describe, which the crispy neighbor understood, because it was pitch black. 6 beams of light, 2 of which are the same color, converge to create one single brown beam of light, which offers its input on the predicament: “30 years, 220 men all of that, for this? I mean who even OK’d this project, was it Adam? I’ve gotta go” then disappears, leaving an unruly and shameful amount of candy wrappers, which fall and continue to fall in a direction, though no direction in particular, but now that the light is gone, its not like anyone could tell anyways.
Three haibun I wrote after reading The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Basho. I've gotten into writing again this semester at college, but I'm a computer scientist by trade. I'd really love to get better.
To people I review: I have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, but these are my thoughts as an uneducated uninitiated pleb.
>>7973996
Fix the typos and we'll talk about the other problems.
>>7971742
Try to stick with more consistent imagery when describing one topic, person or thing. Paints a better picture.
>>7971547
What makes this a poem and not prose? I think you need to step a little away from the narrative voice or something, make it so it doesn't read like a paragraph.
Different forms exist to suit different content. Make sure you're using the right form for your message.
>>7971419
Cliche characters can be interesting. Cliche monologues, not so much. Trim the fat.
>>7967859
no more
>>7967769
Read more Hemingway, or use the words for poetry and cut 80% of them. Atrocious as it is.
>>7967687
I like this a lot. I don't have any advice other than make more.
>>7965624
Fucking majestic.
>>7965174
Neat. Maybe pay more attention to cadence.
>>7962381
I'm a sucker for prose poetry, and damn this is real nice.
I caught myself canoodling on the beach. In bleak honesty, the spell of it all was quite ethereal. Conspicuously at work I was, canvas, brush and sky adrift. Truly as before, I cannot kid, swallowed into a bloody trance. Iff, now, how dare they interrupt me in my zany, jejune phantasia. And yet, hear this, bypassed by a flock of Willendorfs fiddling what I do hope are their whiskers, taunting me with tiffin butterfingers and mauled cavities, they snipe by an incriminating eye. O’souls of dirt. Why do the daughters of men haunt me so, do I not measure several inches’ praise. Look around, girthround. I would have poked through a vacuum, in truth, by a signature of their stench to leave me unmolested, but who asks for favors nowadays. I stand by my morals, knave of hearts. Ye, rattle me bottles, until the officer catches a glimpse of my protruding hazard galvanized in the warm fury of summer, swift in the west, fleeting to. I swear on that grave yonder, I was only fixing the trigger. They do not understand, never do. Oh reader, frail and stout, let the expats pickpocket yer maw (you’re as much a mendicant as the next underdweller, pay yer tither). Fillet surströmming on schtick with sides milk, toast and wa’whoa-ho loadsome mishegaas, but do leave these Qs to yourself, solemn man: the what-a-bout of whose, the why-could-we-should and the how-does-it. Answers, of course. I can pen Armageddon all’s release, but give me your ear, perhaps a braid of that silk you don. Oh, alright, you’ll owe me shortly. There are infinite English tonguewebs betwixt the grimcracks of this Rubiksphere by Wilkenssburg. Slit’t truth by’r neck and riddim corpses in a muddied bottle. old fashioned trend. This theater, digest what have ye. Quick collapse, one correct way to fall down a stairwell. You may only sit in the stadium and watch like a helpless mother and swoon (more a spiked titillation to the inception of a new complex by inverting Oedipus’s matrices, candid upskirts ahoy) to the melodious rape of her daughters by Vexing Vice and Recruits, no dice. And though I digress heavily, I will begin to explain once I finish off the nymphet in my root chakra. Steadily take, yes I say. A man has priorities. A tug on the slug lovingly, yes just like so. Sunscreen does the trick, but never alone the sin. Ah.
>>7962381
Heres a story by a good friend of mine: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JJ6aqk500lIebJniEnTikh2xuXstoatMQkmyGq8dmKQ/edit?usp=sharing im editing it for him.
wrote this in my diary for practice while hungover
http://pastebin.com/ufrE0TK4
>>7968254
>the stanzas are too long for a AABB ryhme scheme. Try experimenting with new rhyme schemes as few people respect or like AABB. It has a decent flow but Stanzas 2 and 4 drag on too much. As a classical poem it's nice though.
Thanks for the advice, I think you're right. I appreciate the compliment too.
I am going to study The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner's scheme and use that, which would probably be appropriate since it also entails a relatively dark, idealistic, archetypal narrative.
"Oh god, I'm gonna come."
He mumbled to himself as he pumped out his useless semen at 6 am on Tuesday morning. He had slept from 8 am to 10 pm on Monday and was beginning to fatigue as the new day gained momentum. He slowly pulled himself out of bed and shuffled his way to the corner of his bedroom, where he threw the clump of semen in the general direction of the garbage can that his mom made him have in the room. He wiped off the rest, which was most of it, on his three day old pair of loose boxers. He looked through his bottles until he found one with more Mountain Dew than piss in it and polished it off. This gave him enough energy to climb into bed and re-watch the second season of his 18th favorite Japanese children's cartoon for the 29th time. After half-heartedly masturbating to the 12 year-old main character, he rolled over and began his slumber.
Eleven hours later, he was rudely awoken by his bitch mother. She opened the door and turned on the lights, before wading through the piles of dirty clothes, fast food garbage and dirty dishes on the way to his bed where she threw down a change of clean clothes. He kicked his feet out, screeching at her and covering his years as she explained that her work friends were coming over for dinner and she would like him to join them. He looked her in the eyes and called her a bitch, too autistic to see whatever love might have been left drain from her expression, and demand that if he were to socialize with those cunts then he would require chicken tenders. She pleaded with him to eat grown up food, but realized that he wasn't going to budge, both because of his ideals and his disgusting weight, and eventually agreed.
Before reluctantly climbing into the shower, he took his first shit of the week and haphazardly wiped the remnants of what could only be described as a pile of poorly digested, processed foods. The mold under his bed made him cough as he strained to push out the poop and the last survivors of his digestive system clung to the hair that grew from his asshole out of defiance. Once he became bored of wiping, all too soon, he turned on the water in the shower. It was rusty and rarely used, but he hopped in and cleaned himself enough for his mother to not nag him anymore, although her standards had been lowered over the years. After he kind of dried off, he put on his TJ Maxx outfit and ascended the stairs.
He reluctantly opened the door to the rest of the house and entered the dining room. His mother looked up, almost shocked, and introduced him to the three ladies sitting at the table. He sat down and complained about his chicken tenders being cold, even though he had shown up to the meal 45 minutes late. He didn't look anybody in the eye until one of the ladies asked him what he did with his time. His mother shifted nervously in her seat.
"Oh, well, I'm a self-published author. I put up my electronic books on Amazon."
The sun bleeds into the sands, sinking lower into the ground with each labored breath, until it is no more. As it’s life force rises in great invisible waves of heat, the earth cries softly as each inch freezes over. The darkness that remains behind is greater than what preceded it, mighty and loathsome, nipping at the moon's heels with a greedy mouth. Beneath the saguaro, the small animals bed down, waiting and hoping that the darkness will not find them in their holes and snuff them out. Outside, the bobcat cries out in anguish, for all of his friends have gone. He does not know that in the morning it will all be reborn, so he weeps for the fallen day. The city lights are framed against the dead horizon, false gods for those whom they shelter.
On the sharp edge of the curb, in the city streets, they bend the man down and place a gun to the back of his head. His crime is hubris, for which lucifer was thrown from paradise. They ask him if he would like a cigarette, which he accepts, although he does not smoke. Inhaling, he chokes on the foreign air, spluttering blood and ash as the the gun goes off. His head is haloed by blood and brain tissue strewn across the pavement. Michael Arroyo dies as he lived, and as he does so he leaves his body and becomes nothingness.
A short distance away three men stand in a small cramped shop. It smells faintly of mildew and the walls sag inward in a defeated manner. The tall man wears the small jacket. His sleeves are far too short for his lengthy arms. The lapels are pulled tight across his chest, making him appear as if he was stuffed into it. The short man is wearing a jacket at least two sizes two big. It obscures his hands. The shoulders are comically large, he looks as if he is a child trying on his father's suit. The third man, the jacket salesman is wearing an old dusty blazer. The cuffs are adorned with small pearls of questionable authenticity. Below the collar is a spot that has been worn through, revealing a garish pink undershirt. It’s clear that he has been wearing it for a while. The tall man leans towards to the short man and tells a joke. The short man asks him to repeat it, so he does. He laughs, unconvincingly. The salesman pretends that he didn’t hear it, setting his eyes on a crack in the ceiling. All three men leave the room looking disappointed. Everybody goes their separate ways. The sun rises the next morning, reviving all of the life in the desert, temporarily alleviating the existential anguish of the bobcat. The light that is Michael Arroyo is quickly snuffed in a single brutal moment. Very few will remember him, even less fondly. In the end they will all move on as will. The three men sit alone in separate rooms, at the same hotel, wondering if it is too late to get a refund.
This is sort of the prologue to a story I've been working on for a while now.
Under the stairs beneath our house on castlery hills lay the bones of a dead man. His name was Alexander Parker. No one had thought of that name in a long time so truly he was as dead as a man can be.
Long ago when Alexander Parker wasn't a dead man he had been a good man. Why would a good man like Alexander Parker lay, under the stairs beneath our house on Castlery Hills?. My mother wouldn't know. Even if she knew that each night going to bed she walked over the bones of a good man, like Alexander Parker, she wouldn't know why. My father wouldn't know. Even if he knew that each morning going to work he walked over the bones of a good man, like Alexander Parker, he woudn't know why.
Bones are not made for walking over. Alexander Parker, a good man, is tired of people walking day and night over his restless bones.
But the bones of a dead man will find no rest. Laying there, under the stairs, beneath our house on Castlery Hills.
>>7974675
this sounds like something i would find on /r9k/
Little bit of prose to introduce a terrible wizard, any critique of the language is highly welcomed
Pulled from his bed and ordered to dress, he threw a tunic over his chubby torso and managed to jump into a pair of lime trousers. Hurriedly, he made his way to the map room and pushed the door open gently - peering through at two figures sat in the shadow of a bearskin strewn across the wall. Inside, a man sat clad in tattered robes that hung from the back of his balding head. He toyed with a coin, which spun quickly on the oak table with seemingly no intervention. The woman, who sat to his left, seemed overly enthused by the trick and clapped eagerly as the boy crept through, shutting the door behind him with a whisper. Approaching the pair, a wooden floorboard creaked beneath him and he startled the pair, the man in particular, terribly – sending the coin upwards in the air. It hung there in a brief state of unmotion, before at once shooting off to every corner of the room at breakneck speed (and it would have indeed broken a neck, had it not been for the robed man attempting to catch it). He stood cautiously, bowing his head to avoid the coin as it ricocheted across the room, clinking and clanking as it hit across the bronze embellishments adorning the hearth. He reached out towards the speeding trinket, which struck him with such force that – in spite of his catching of it – his fist flew backwards and he punched himself, hard, in the face.
I don't usually write in English, which isn't my first language, but it's hard to find people in my own country to read my stuff, so I started a short story in English. This is how it begins ...
http://pastebin.com/cjVaWgPh
What a shit thread
>>7965593
Go to bed
>>7974883
anybody care to critique this? i don't normaly post in these threads and i could do with some advice
>>7978147
so it sucks but your heart is in the right place. there is a bit of atmosphere to it, a sort of rundown working class family aesthetic with some indication of ancient prominence by way of the choice of "casterly rock." There is also some promise that Alexander Parker will be rising from the grave or there will be some revelation concerning the condition of his death or how he ended up under the stairs.
But really nothing happens. Nothing happens and I'm not moved by the writing and I am unimpressed with the sing-songy repetition.
>>7971547
Could someone please critique this?
>>7975329
Anything on this?
>>7967536
>>7968009
>>7968083
Okay, back. I think I need work on physical descriptions, I guess. I'm taking to practice just writing describing things I see as exercise. So I came up with below. It's a description of pic related.
She's tall, taller than the girl standing next to her. Her hands are on her hips, and she has one of those smiles that looks like she's got chewing gum stashed in her lower lip. Her clothes are just on the borderline for violating the dress code, yet no one could really challenge her for being "indecent." Yet her open blouse, with a form-fitting shirt underneath, revealing midriff, shoulders, collarbone; three points of bareness for the imagination to run wild. The image of her nude in the middle of that gym is almost instantaneous. Somehow those three points, the perfect points, shoulder, midriff, collarbone, are the magical combination for instant mental nudity. Yet no one can says she's indecent. In fact, she is the most decent one there. There is an element of class to her in everything she does.
>>7975329
a bearskin on a wall wouldn't cast a shadow
tattered robes would hang from his back not the back of his head
he's not toying with a coin if he's not touching it (or is he making gestures at it?)
the robed guy trying to catch the coin wouldn't prevent a broken neck since he isn't actually affecting it
>>7979102
Excellent - there's a lot of little idiosyncratic shit I need to get rid of so thank you for that. Anything else?
>>7971547
>>7978371
It is convoluted - doesn't give up its meaning very easily. If you hadn't posted the explanation I wouldn't know. I scanned your poem yesterday, you managed to hook me with your vampiric imagery. Grave shit is always a great hook.
>my drooping lip would repel
>the very approach of the razor
unless you have a big, gross elephant lip that is slapping away the razor, literally repelling it, I would approach this some other way.
In fact, everything following >nocturnal visiting undead. is weak.
>if ungauzed by a lather
you don't gauze your face with cream, nor do you lather your wound with gauze.
I would also argue against the usage of
>puncture
>incision
I would have to go out of my way to puncture something with a shaving razor and incision is a surgical term. Either/or could work: the surgical term in particular, but only if you were using surgical terms throughout as metaphor.
Finally, if the poem is about caution advancing with age, I don't feel shaving is a good example.
>>7974367
>when you do reviews and no one reviews back
pls
>>7979259
Are you a nip or just another weeb?
>>7979222
Thank you for the critique. I can understand why puncturing something with a shaving razor might seem impossible, but I managed to do that very thing to myself two days ago, which is what inspired the poem in the first place.
Also, are you sure "incision" is strictly a surgical term? "Laceration", yeah, but "incision" doesn't seem that strange to my ear. I'll see what I can do, anyway.
>>7979284
1/4th Jap
lived in Japan until I was 5 then my parents moved to the states. I often visit family back home, once or twice a year.
My attemp at a short story. Tell me what you think.
It turns out better that way. Sitting on that bench on a cold winter morning drinking that coffee you'd been looking forward from the momment you'd opened your eyes. Life shouldn't be lived in such measured ways. Day, hours and minutes.
Everything calculated and fragmented in such a way that you start to wonder if it's your own time you're spending or if it was lent to you by someone else.
Time, you say to yourself, has no real meaning anyway. Can we really know that tomorrow will arrive just by looking at the hands of a clock?. That thought is reassuring to you and you feel a sense of calm wash over your body. You drink the rest of your coffee and look above you. Electric blue sky. The kind of blue only a winter day can offer. You look around you. You're alone and that makes you glad. Today, you think to yourself, will be a good day to die.
>>7979292
I'd argue 'incision' implies intent.
>>7962381
A girl with dazzling brown hair, wearing a big, frilly pastel dress stood in the middle of the room.. Her pale, nimble hands laid at her side. I wanted to feel how soft they surely were. I couldn't; I merely watched.
She laughed and talked with the people around her. The house we were in was enormous; a mansion of sorts. Chandeliers swayed from the roof as each table's candle urged their fire to quiver and shiver. The girl's father had organized the event as a reward for her sixteenth birthday. I didn't know why--she had always shied away from anything that exposed her luxurious lifestyle. Still, she seemed to be fine in the situation, giggling with a group of tall, stoic men in suits and a duo of big ladies with long dresses and even longer hats.
She glanced over at me. I had forgotten my own presence. Whenever I saw that girl, I felt as if I didn't exist; her pull drew me in completely. She did not smile, only turned away and resumed being silly and accommodating, albeit less smoothly. I continued watching her.
I knew I shouldn't. Girls weren't supposed to watch other girls lustfully. My hands were clenched, tight, in an effort to try and transfer the tumult inside me elsewhere. It didn't work. It never had. There was one cure to the agonizing, unavoidable pain that latched onto me every time I saw a girl with particularly soft lips, elegant hands, or silky hair: giving in.
Time passed without me. People talked in little groups, chatting about something I couldn't hear from the corner that I hid myself in. I wondered why I'd been invited by the girl. She had never acknowledged me in the time I'd been at the party, and neither had anyone else. I almost wanted to thank her: there was a strange comfort in not being able to affect my surroundings.
Eventually, she did come over to talk to me. People were leaving, saying sweet Goodbye!'s and hopeful I'll see you soon's. Their exit made everything quiet. The girl had her hair down now, no longer in the bun she'd donned earlier. Her eyes slid over me, slowly, as if she were analyzing a painting. I did not move.
"Christina," she said, carefully. "It's a pleasure to see you here." She extended one of her beautiful hands to me. I froze, then reaffirmed my existence by shaking her hand. She pulled away quickly.
"It's a pleasure to see you too, Sandra," I said, looking at her chin instead of her eyes. "You look lovely."
http://pastebin.com/eZEZabzn
Part of my really really long story, I am going for readability the most, and the texture of the prose. Any advice you have on writing combat scenes in general is appreciated.
Oh geez it's been a while since I last posted on one of these threads, here's a first draft of a scene towards the ending of my novel so everything will be taken into account when I rewrite. Will post critiques in separate post so it's not as messy
“I take it that’s her then?” Otho asked after shooing away a few more suitors. The servant grinned at her,“I’m glad she came back for you. True love that might be.”
Sierya started, true love was not something that was supposed to happen away from the Gods eyes, true love was not something she had ever thought would touch her. A life time of tales flooded her. She certainly could not fall in love with a wild spirit, misery tended to fall upon those that did. But. But... how could she deny that she had spent days wasting away hoping for her dragon to come save her. Maybe the stories were wrong. Maybe the princess wasn’t saved by a knight in shining armor, rather saved by a dragon in shining scales who wanted the best for the poor human whose heart longed for adventure. Maybe it wasn’t the dragon who had kidnapped the girl, but the knight instead, trying to uphold years of teaching on the meaning of valor and courage who hadn’t spent a minute being taught the meaning of choice.
Sierya sipped her water, calculating her response. She wasn’t willing to admit that Otho was right, by the Gods was Otho right, but that seemed to her to be admitting a defeat of some sort. No, she wouldn’t admit her affection to any but herself until the night was certain to go in her favor. It was a bit of a matter of pride, but if she told anyone and Mirvhen found out, how was she going to expect being brought back. She was sure that the dragon wouldn’t leave her to be forced in a marriage. That wouldn’t stop her from not taking her back into the cave. Oh, if she said those dreadful words aloud, then it would all become so much more real to her. Words have that sort of magic about them, slipping about in the heart and finding strength in the voice. She sipped her water, draining it and still she held the glass to her lips.
>>7962400
This is a nice story. Relatable. The last sentence of the first paragraph seems a bit clunky to me, more of a structural issue than anything. Nice work mate.
>>7963575
I think you went into a bit too much description, not of the backstory but of the setting. Trust your reader to be able to visualize what you are saying.
>>7966574
I like it so far, however you might run into some problems with the amount of J names introduced in a short period of time. When Jeffery was first introduced, I had a bit of a stumble block. Generally it's not advised to have too many similar names at once, but I think you can work out a way round it.
Got dinner, will be back shortly.
bump. Can I have another look at this. I even got dubs:
>>7968144
>>7969999
hey read this
>>7965027
>"Fuck space" though Ivan, as the peas floated away from his plate
>>7962394
>When I was in senior year of high school, I got to know this girl, let’s call her Red for now.
I loathe this. Why would you make such a suggestion of calling her Red? WHY?
It should be:
"When I was in senior year of high school, I got to know this girl, we'll call her Red for now".
Today I had another one. Red coat, the one she wear in the photo. Asian looking eyes. Another Russian school girl, actually. I told her to wait in front of coffee 1 where I was playing around with Idris. Found her leaning against the door with her face in her phone and ear plugs in. But she lost her cool as soon as we started talking. Made her walk straight to the kitchen counter and made her leave two hours later. Nothing that happened was different, but for some reason I feel different tonight. I don't feel so good now.
She was too hot to be so fucked in the head - that's what I would have said a few years ago. But they are all fucked. Or it's just nature, I don't know. I comes in handy, though. Once you start taking, they start giving. If they start complaining, it means you did something wrong. I didn't to anything wrong up until the point where I made her put on her shoes again. Little red riding hood did not look like a slut, but she sure was easy. But easy always makes me aggressive. And aggressive makes me stupid. So I asked some stupid questions and of course I didn't like her answers. Pretty sure she likes people less now.
I always hope I learned something. "This time is the last time I fuck up so badly!" Feels like today it might actually be the case. I learned something up until the point I met that chick, anyway.
(English isn't my first language)
So I was given an assignment to write a short story. Writing's not my thing, but I'd be glad for any criticism shot my way. The first sentence was asigned, and we had to write around it. It's just the beggining and the end, got to fill the middle:
>beggining
Her name was long forgotten, and the only thing she owned was a silver spoon, an old piece of silverware stolen from her parents cutlery. Why she chose this as the thing to remember her past by was always baffling to me, but I never cared enough to ask. Afterall, we barely spoke of our lives before this, been it either out of our mutual respect for eachother, or for the sense of guilt that was inevitably meant to catch up with us. Sometimes I‘d catch her starring at her reflection in it, pulling her red hair out of the way, her hazel eyes always seemed like they don’t recognize the unfamiliar reflection, like seeing a stranger on a busy street, just an another pale face in a sea of faces.
„Are you drunk again?“ This caught me off guard.
„ Like you ever skip the double vodka appetizer at breakfest“ I manage to blurt out before gracing the pavement with what used to be the most important meal.
„Here, keep it“ she says as she hands me the napkin. „You better pull yourself together quick, the exams start before lunch“.
„Yeah, I was about to do that, but you know what they say about drinking on an empty stomach“.
„It’s the key to academic succes?“ I can’t help myself but to laugh at that, and neither can she. „Come on, let’s get coffee, It might help you sober up and I need to revise a bit anyway.“
As we walked through the city just woken up by the daily routine of everyone’s lives...
>ending
It was the beggining of summer, the days were long and the nights, in our minds, even longer. Putting together the little money we had, it was time to go. We had no direction, no destination, we found ourselves in a fight-or-flight situation and we got carried away by the wind.
..
Don't really know what to do with it
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_gRbK_HwyuPuV6m2gXcmSD7sIgf9FV9mWG8Htwv9MPM/edit?usp=sharing
This is sumshit I wrote over the course of 5 hours on a train going through Germany.
>>7965027
What short story contest do you want to send it to?
>>7962381
My god this is beautiful, OP. Seriously good work.
>>7966025
overwritten
pleasures of conversation and licentious parley makes no sense.. conversation is parley
>>7967532
really solid, really funny. reads like a more developed version of an autistic greentext. autistic, but if you can make that autism funny (that is, if you, the writer, are not autistic) I could read for a while.
>>7967634
when the job was finished she shook the box, the various peanuts mixed with the contents rustled around until she felt satisfied with her job.
This should be two sentences
>>7968144
exremely edgy and gross but well done.
>>7968689
I like it. no fakin
>>7970271
either dumb or pretending to be dumb (even dubmer)
>>7974697
>it’s
>>7974697
>He does not know that in the morning it will all be reborn, so he weeps for the fallen day.
this really struck me. if you polish up your prose and dont' try to be so pretentious, this will be strong
Specks of diamond at the feet
Of this child embraced by summer's heat
Save for my toes resting cool
In the mirky water of a rockpool
Flashes of goldened ember scales
Past the hollow spiral of snail's
Hollowed shell, a homely well
For the naked and scared hermit
The passive circles swam by the captures sole
In a silver ring in the black-rock hole
Waiting for the tide to climb atop the sand
And take them once more to far off-land
Where they'll be free.
A hop-step over the jagged stone
In reply to the shout that I should not be alone
My return signalled with a silent wave of indignation.
But, gazing unto me from the beneath blinding shimmers
Of sunlight dancing upon the wind-made swimmers
A crab shell intact, every bit!
I plunged my calloused hands in to grasp it
But as my finger pierced the bubbling wake
The beast raises up as like a snake
And strikes the worm like tip
Of my opened and flaring digit
The wound filled with feezing brine
I fell back atop the sea grass slime
I held my head back in retching agony
I felt the wetness from my eyes reach the face's end and heard the plop as they joined the red pool.
In the journey home I reflected through the window
It was nothing
This appalling gash was a scratch to anyone else
To be ignored without the slightest notice
I allowed my own weakness and my own selfishness to overcome me and spoiled the day.
I felt like crying again,
And I wished I were dead.
A pipe fish dips lower in the bucket on my lap
In escape of the watery slap
Of a silent tear falling down
from the bottom lip of my permanent frown.
My first ever poem, tell me what you think /lit/
mindless rambling that rhymes with a vague rhythm
grow some kind of spine for my decisions
need some animators to film my dying visions
"life is a prison that charges rent and tuition"
that was just intuition I'm eating on old folk wisdom
I am the king and or the queen and or the god of the aphorism
fuck a physician I'm reversing my own circumcision
explosively fractured my mind warp is a fission
fuck an ism my position is rhythm
keep your petitions and traditions right the fuck out of my kitchen
keep your hands out of my mouth I am my own dentist
fuck pleb/patrician my religion is demolition
fuck The Recognitions I deserve some recognition
fuck an expletive I'm just fuckin with the repetition
fuck Explication at best it's maybe exposition
fuck your mission don't worry about what I piss in
fuck a sentence ending I'm up on all my prepositions
can an ex-musician snub a rhyme with "definition"
that's like an ardent anti-natalist satanist obstetrician
I'm a naturist mixed with an anti-fatalist
smokin basil eatin three-hundred past my basal
product of a playful facial I'm a multiracial navel-gazer
getting blazed to Major Lazer
Ain’t afraid to taze a hater
Dank as fuck I’m hazy two days later.
Deep as craters while you other players flat like planar
Old school like a pager or a Motorola Razr
The flow is ageless big but aimless I’m a fucking scalar
I’m wasted, tasteless, and abrasive and a science major
Uh, and this is straight off the head
Talking about nothing they should call my talks Ted
Asian dads are like engineer, law or pre-med
And I just bought seven Gs with my Lai See bread
That’s Chinese New Years for you mayo motherfuckers
Took your girl to Pluckers then she told me I could fuck her
>>7983558
Please Critique
I just started a new chapter in my science fiction story.
yelly is at this point only just becoming not a minor character, Anome and Paul are much more actual MCs
When they approached the star coursed craft some pale hour of the morning, before Majula would have began its daily becoming to life, Yelly had the lasrifle disassembled and under her robe, and she would weeks’ voyage later when her sandle first pressed sand on Laindsraad I. It was a fragmentary cold against chest and underarm where it hung, casting an irregular weight on her, and casting in her an irregular frame, with only the tall sword’s straight weight at and down the center of her back to even or center her. Eighteen had taken an armful of explosives that morning then as well, all rolling and relic grenades, but she had forgotten about them since and left them behind on Anome’s ship. Anome herself had brought a few extra lasrifles aboard and they sat disassembled and cleaned, and waited indefinitely. Paul kicked up sand, and spit.
The infernal machine, which swung aberrantly yet gently as she skid and slid among that strange Laindsraad dawn’s first grey dunes, had been crafted on some burning iron dwarf moon in Iowa, and had made its way to Trachila through and then from the Aedread, where the farmer woman said it had arrived to, with its others, in the hands of a regiment dispatched directly from the Entuthon Berithon, to maintain an already ongoing terror campaign against the strayed and disparate corinthian forces that hunted slavers and slaver caravans in the now budding regions; and only just before the battle of New Pilate, as well, which and her wife and husbands and husbanders, with their wives and generations, had just barely by a gate’s wait avoided, leaving them to hop from mutilated planet to the next, from charred battlefield to charred and nameless homestead, in their short range pleasure shuttles for years until, desperately, reaching Trachila.
Yelly had listened back there on Trachila as the farmer woman finished with telling that she had had the Entuthon orders themselves, written in actual softscrip, with ink, but it had been too too many years since the wind had carried them cooled by the night and dawn from the bottom of her hearth to, before she paused, and only said as more, too too many years to, too, with an expression much more aged than her decades young face. But she didn’t tell Yelly, or even ever tell Chichi or anybody in her new life, that the young Emperor Alexei, who’d only just arrived Berithonside that day, and maybe for only the second time in his sprouting life, that he knew the new Pilate would fall, soon, and their forces, all concentrated, with it. Many an uncle had taken his hand in some attempt at warmly and told him it was necessary, just as many aunts, and even a male tutor who had to be reassigned to the young sovereign’s sister, were shut up and then barred from council.
>>7983628
>exremely edgy
Yes, it is a very violent and grim tragedy, but in this part of the character is extolling his own role in the war, and is exaggerating his deeds (even for so repulsive things there may be a desire to appear more full of force and fire).
But I have to take care not to sound always so bombastic, otherwise the whole thing will end up sounding silly and childish
>and gross
I'm glad you felt like this: it was the effect that I wanted
>but well done
thank you so much :)
>>7983864
here's some more than i mostly just had fun experimenting with, Super Urizl is becoming one of my favorite characters
Arliend and Loufer were twice half some smaller world away; the giant had brought them by skimkar slowly nearer and nearer the belt. Sky traffic, and what sparing cloud travel, increased, and with it, humming, hulking, an entire world and sky of air and nothing away, atmospheric traffic beyond it. Could she find them should it come to a rapid dash through the belt cities? Would they hide? She had concealed her power, but how well? (She knew how well, hers, but not any of his ‘in a world unarisen, in a fallen world, in a… in a… in… where all action is equivocal, no hero can exist.'
It is here I must interrupt. It is now that I arose and arrived. The red child- not Arliend, even I could see they were no longer a child- was suffering promethean torments, though he might not have known it. This ferocious being. I won’t get too close, or I wouldn’t yet. Instead, in my room’s cold cellar in Aedreus-Pilate, I ranged my books of morality around me, my ironbound years in education, of youth, like some semblance of protection. Detoured to my castle- I was detoured to my castle, tucked away, though I did not like it, maybe because even I, the new prince of the power of the stars, knew that the dialogue with this true titan among earthbound titans must soon occur ‘the wonders of futurity in horrible fear of the future.'
Urizl Super, the ice king before, his court dead now, gone with him, as most courts are. Yard space and clock time and I, the prince of light though I resent it still, left to face the hunt in the wake of his exile. For all the stars’ million states and saints, I am the sole white rudder left against the ruinhowl of the impregnant moons, sole council against the ruin and desolation that threatens to show love in its own dark double, oh, how on some nights I weep still.
sharing renders reality. Time would begin to serve as a consoler and redeemer for the despondent imagination, these are not my words, even now. (at once city and woman
‘That line of blood that stretches across the windows of the morning, the ruined sills,'
From Urizl Super’s court I did not take my books, I knew not how, but I did take with me, as granted without an audience, with me to that second true Laindsraad the brightest of his young guard, the effluviently male Natasha from some border school of the lance. His own hung heavy, irradiately sharp and marked with ocean eyes carved out of the dull blue, from his plated back, the only part of him besides his thin ribboned legs tied up to the top of his thighs, that wasn’t bare, pale and hairless. His gnarled feet did not detract from his graceful and irradiant appearance, however; they were kept clean, heavy scars marked by pale jewels grafted into the ridges.
sorry last one
the rest of this bit
>>7983864
She, herself, woman and now farmer, had only seen the young sovereign six times now, and he’d only spoken directly to her twice before that night, with never of each in person, only across rotate and vasty web comm lines and ears. Her and her wife and husbands, then, lived and operated tiers of deciacres of a farm at the twelfth level of a rippling atrisector, but the screen which gave up for her his soft, pubescent face, his clear skin riddled on it with technostellar distortions, was at an oupost- small, one person only- near a crystal bath on Aedread-Pilate’s surface, in which outpost the urinal, upon receiving urine of a certain scent, achieved by consuming oils of a particular nature not native to this galactic region or Corinthians’, and reading the melody hummed by the urinator, opened up way to a passage that led two miles underground.
She had waited in the dark hall for her husband one above to piss and descend, but before that the small sovereign voice came from the glow at the entrance to the room where his flat portrait awaited her, that voice inquiring over the glow, and requesting, “Darling.”; not her real name, nor her husband’s.
From before her then in the small room he looked at her as if he could know her. He said like an angel: “Forget the formal dinner my uncle ordered.” Her and her husband one and two were assigned to entertain the planetary region’s prominent capitalists and other deneaurocrats, as they had done near monthly for decades on this assignment, so some intel uncle could listen, could then report, and so on, where she was lost. “Don’t even cancel it. It doesn’t matter, Pilate is falling tonight. Tell your husbands if you think you must, the option is yours, but please, leave.” So she did. One husband remained behind to entertain and then poison their impending guests so that they could not leave come the chaos of the initial planetwide breach of regimental fleetlines. It had been the last she ever heard from the Entuthon, and she was content that it would be the last.
The only occasions in which the deformated lasarm ceased to bother her were when Eighteen picked her up and carried her, in flight, in her arms, body and lasrifle pieces apart and all dangling, or otherwise in flight on Paul’s small back, her and her company and her arms all flying freely.
I walked the path with discomfort and determination. The frozen ground crunched beneath my heavy, fast-treading feet. Echoes from my home reached me, as far as their source was. Frozen pines stood all around. I still hesitated, I still considered turning back to my mother's warm and welcoming embrace, but I kept on. I kept on for my future, my existence. I was a man roaming this Earth and the life awaited. A protruding root took my work boot with it as I almost fell. Swiftly, I broke the dry root, put on the well-worn, sand-colored boot and as if I was chased by an unworldly creature, continued running away. Little did I know, there was no one after me. No one before nor beside me, either. I came to this realization and stopped the great momentum I had built up. Although I was gasping for air, exhausted as I was, and the air I rapidly breathed whistled inside my throat, silence became so big inside my head. It was bigger than anything I've ever felt, heard and seen.
Please rate, thanks for reading!!
>>7984086
Replace continued by started, oops.
>>7966574
You're doing god's work by critiquing anon
So this was for that shitty thread that got deleted before I could post it:
It was mostly red, a fold over the front with black buttons. The frame blurs as your sight surfs the floor. You still move. Moving, the only thing you really know how to do right now, "Hey!" "Hey!" Sure, wave the manners, but don't look, it won't see you if you don't see it. Just try to convince yourself of this position you are in, the Queen: not one to say "off with his head" as you try to follow your feet to escape the thoughts. The humidity invades your brain, fists and nails knifing your palms. Your pace increases and you realize you are about to do something that you surely do not want to want to do. That shouldn't have happened, you say this under your skull, it wasn't necessary, it really only takes that much for you to drown, to fall under the waves and lose all sense of direction, nothing to follow, not even hair on her neck as you wait behind her in line to die.
>>7983771
Now rap it and post the recording to Vocaroo. We're waiting
>>7983771
yeah this is pretty dope
The matter of the bodies was another issue all together for the local police to try and figure out. The corpses tended to be mangle beyond recognition, faces rendered in a way that could only be considered a master piece in the most twisted piece of fiction. The wounds inflicted on the victims seemed so bestial in the beginning, that at first the thought was that there was some sort of wild animal that had gone rabid terrorizing the park. But when the killings started happening in the city that opinion vanished. No, it was obvious that there was a murderer on the loose, targeting indiscriminately of any factor. This killer thus far had taken it’s pick of men, women, and children, and they were all treated to the same violent end regardless. That was how the people whispered in regards to the killer. They called the killer ‘it’, having collectively unconsciously decided that someone who had committed such violent acts could not be considered human. They weren’t too far off with that accusation, either. The police had been doing their best, but so far the only lead that they had was that occasionally, there would be bloody foot prints found leading into the forest.
There, just on the edge of that forest, a little girl was skipping about through the leaves and grass with a bag hanging on her forearm, seemingly oblivious to any sort of danger. And there, from the cover of foliage within the forest, a pair of white iris’s followed her every movement. The sclera of these eyes was a pitch black, which contrasted against the snowy white fur of the creature in a rather spectacular way, though the creature itself –himself- thought that the color of blood contrasted much better. Yes, this creature was a he, this much it –he- knew. He didn’t know much about himself, if he was honest, but he didn’t like to tread that line of thinking too often. Doing so brought along empty feelings that he didn’t like to experience. So, he simply stuck with what he knew best.
>>7984542
He didn’t really remember how long he had been using the people of this town to fulfill his twisted desire for carnage, and it ultimately didn’t matter either. All of that was irrelevant. He did remember that he had come to this town for a reason, but what that reason was eluded him. He had gotten distracted, you see. The people here, at least in the beginning, had been very easy targets. They all walked about as if they had never had to deal with any sort of danger before, which certainly couldn’t be true. He was certain that some of the people he had killed had probably been spousal abusers or rapist or child molesters or some other ilk, but then, he had also killed children who would have been targeted by the latter group as well. Was he ilk too?
He pondered this for a moment, the strange tail-esk appendage attached to his lower back twitching back and forth, the bladed end of it cutting leaves here and there. It seemed strange to call all of those people ilk, but then he did spend most of his time killing people. Was there really that much of a difference? Was he ilk too? Did he deserve to die just like them?
He suddenly chuckled, though it came out as more of a raspy cackle. Of course not. It didn’t matter. They were ilk because they were weak, and he didn’t base his kills on whether someone ‘deserved’ it. The concept of good or bad meant nothing to his claws and teeth. Besides, in a sense, he was much more merciful than them. They abused people so that they could feel somewhat powerful or relevant when they got up in the morning. He didn’t really abuse people, unless he was just in the mood for a more prolonged symphony of screaming and begging, but that only went on for an hour or two occasionally, before he ultimately grew bored and ended it so that he could move on to his next target.
There was no real order to how he picked, he didn’t particularly play favorites. Sometimes other people simply looked more appetizing, though he was unsure as to what he really considered appetizing in general, in terms of a scale. He didn’t really know what made him pick some over others sometimes, it could be different characteristics, like their height -for instance he once went after a man who was several feet taller than him. The killer was only about 4’11, and he had decided that he wanted to kill a giant. The man didn’t put up to much of a struggle- Or their weight –If he was honest, he didn’t really like killing fat people only because the fat on the inside of their skin looked gross- or age –he found old people to be boring so he more or less left them alone, but there was something that he did enjoy about chasing a child through the forest before sinking his fangs into the back of their throats- but for the most part, it was somewhat close to random. The bottom line was, if he saw something that he liked, he went after it.
(Part 2/ some more of a snipit)
The Faceless rose, spoke, and so came forth this:
"There lies a land, near, past reach nonetheless,
where mournful peaks glance to ley below,
and roads no feet have tread nor builders kept
in memory of page or scribe. Yet said,
’tis no empty land, though stirs naught within.
Scribes, it has, and builders and fathers and sons.
A King, it had, and courtiers and pipers and drums.
Tables, there are, set beneath still faces,
and no food, though untouched by creature or beast,
but mouldered and rotted to stain.
Those scribes, they hunch, over parchment gone to dust,
their hands stayed, in monument unwilling,
of those deepest crimes for greatest cause
wrought in vain, and none left to lament."
Hey FUCKERS! It's >>7969786 BACK AGAIN!
I Rewrote my shitty story pastebin.com/3UYsa6xS
Critiques appreciated.
>>7969973
I like the flow, feels like a free flow poem. It needs moire though, I feel like there's something missing, expand on this and I feel you might strike gold.
>>7969999
>They stood over the corpse of a rat
It's already established that they killed a rat, this opener is redundant.
>feckin
Character doesn't keep a constant accent, if you're going to have them phrase things accent wise you need to be consistent
OVerall I like the set up, needs a wider vocab and more description, especially when introducing the fantastical elements, when the reader is shown something they've never seen before they need enough detail that they can live the experience but not too much that it bogs them down. The plot was well handled though, but it could use more tension.
>>7970271
Please put effort into your work, all the character's are literal puppets with your voice coming through, not sure if it's supposed to be like that or not.
>>7971146
Pretty obvious from (Shown in picture), feel sorry from anyone gullible to bite your b8 but good show lad.
>>7971197
Very good, there's some real talent in this, incredibly descriptive and the flow is just masterful. I would suggest you submit this to a Poetry magazine.
>>7971547
Not as good as the other, flow is muddled, and you're not spacing you ideas out enough, everything seems thrown together and just sitting awkwardly.
>>7971348
Writing is not good, the ideal is pretty edgy. Have you ever read Sandman? I think you would enjoy it.
>>7971742
I love the setting, you're writing is good, but it's bouncing around, I feel like I either need more or less to fully enjoy this scene. The last paragraph is almost unneeded.
>>7974367
I love the pacing, the characterization is nearly perfect, although this is a poem, I feel like there could be more subtle drops added. Some of the phrasing seems off, otherwise this is very good. I would give it another go over, just read it aloud and really listen for anything that sort of stumbles, specifically from I something just seems off when I read through it.
>>7974438
Reads like a literature major rambling with schizophrenia, love it.
>>7974451
Can't copy and paste anything so my criticism will be sparse.
Avoid first person unless you have a truly unique voice planned or it's a very personal story. Fantastical event specifically suffer in first person as everything seems more staged than in third.
The writing is just boring, there's nothing really interesting to grab hold of outside the plot. It feels like a Ghostbumps story desu and that's not something to be proud of. Young YA fiction tier writing. I would ask you to read this aloud and just listen to what you wrote, how clumsy everything sounds, how your MC just seems awkward constantly. It's a very off putting story.
>>7974481
It's gone nigga
TBC
>>7983937
Definitely far too schizo and completely unreadable. But you do have some images which are pretty strong.
>>7983771
The Immortal Technique Rhyme Scheme
>>7985098
Damn senpai you missed my posts both times. ;_; I'm too autismal to tell you what's mine but I'll critique yours to give you incentive to go check what you missed in the thread.
Your repetition of the phrase "college town" in paragraph 1 is off-putting. You often use commas where periods of semi-colons should be. You use indefinite articles when definite ones would be better, such as in the fourth sentence of what pastebin calls paragraph 7. The descriptions are a little overwrought, what with the swallowed by darkness and the fact that everyone wanders everywhere. It could use some dryness. You're letting the reader in on your subjectivity too much. Just write what's happening and don't be so obvious in what you want us to feel about everything
>>7985098 ctnd
>>7974628
Keep at it man, I definitely see some inspiration from Ballads in work and I suggest you keep experimenting with that structure, you can make some neat poems with it.
>>7974675
Who honestly says to themselves 'I'm going to come'? You need to rethink things how they happen in reality my friend. Read some of Empty Hero's works, this is almost the exact style of humor but fucking terrible.
>>7974697
Very very very purple prose, if you stop trying to impress yourself and start writing to tell stories I feel like you've got some good stories to tell.
>>7974717
It reads more as an opening to the story than as a prologue.I like how it reads, but I feel like I need more of the story to make a solid judgment, I like the character establishment, but she's a bit cliched.
>>7974883
Not sure what to make of this. It's nothing special, nothing terrible. Really bland.
>>7975329
The prose feels wooden, not so much awkward but just stiff. I would say space it out, think it out, and expand it...out.
>>7975380
Not there
>>7979259
Nigga pls
>>7979310
This should be at the ending of a short story, in it's current form it's shitty microfiction. Add in some characters and let this be the summation of their interactions.
>>7979812
Expand your vocab, or reduce it? You're using big words at inappropriate times, and describing things too simply in other parts. You should read through the story again and do some flow editing. Add in some characterization before they even talk, maybe have their dresses reflect their personalities.
>>7980041
Too much talking, most of this should have been handled in a mission briefing. When I see a commando squad I see them silent, efficient, and patient. Most of their talking should be in the emotions on their faces, and their signals to each other. I would recommend The Raid Redemption on how to do this masterfully.
On the action, it's adequate. Could use some expansion, more stakes and tension. Though I might not be feeling the tension just being inserted into the action.
>>7980087
The easiest way to improve this is by spacing it out, make each idea separate and give it room to breath and expand to its full potential.
>>7982186
I can tell. When ever I critique a foreign writer I stress that you should write in your language. Your audience is your people and they will always understand you more than Americans.
I like the tidbit provided, I would like to read more but at the same time it's a bit choppy. Getting a big Catcher in the Rye vibe from this.
>>7983427
Not sure what to make of this, I would say just write the whole thing out in a hurry, then read it out loud to yourself slowly, fixing whatever seems off. If writing is not your thing that's cool, just don't try too hard and do what you want.
>>7983458
It's kinda clever, but I swear I've seen something like this on facebook with a minion.
TBC
>>7985149
I'm not GOING TO STOP
>>7985144
Link me your story senpai I'll put it in my next go around
Thanks for the critique. I saw this thread blew up a bit and I was working on the plot for this story a bit and decide to zoom back and finish the rewrites for the first chapter ASAP and didn't even manage that.
>>7983558
I really like this story, it has a very quaint feeling, your descriptions are spot on and the flow and repetition were very well put. I'm getting a Poe vibe from this story. I would just run through and fix some of the clunky sentences and this would be a grade A story.
