Is this any good?

[hobbsyoyo]

I've been kicking around this idea for a story in my head for years. I wrote up a draft of it in Community College but it wasn't very good and I've since lost the file. I still find myself thinking about the story though and I was recently inspired by a friend to take up work on it again. It's been years since I wrote fiction so I am just posting a few pages here to solicit feedback. I'm mostly interested on whether or not I can write well. Don't hold back, let me know what needs improvement.

Sorry for the bad formatting, I just copypasta'd from MS Word. Thanks for reading.

Every black strand of hair on Victoria’s head was a mini solar oven onto itself, trapping the Arizona sun’s rays and keeping her head uncomfortably hot. Sweat beaded on her forehead and traveled down her nose and seeped into the corners of her eyes. With nothing but the shoulder straps of the blue sun dress she had to dab at the stinging tears, she refused to bow to the indignity and bore the discomfort stoically. She stood with one fist jabbed into her hip and the other holding an umbrella over her friend Alicia who sat beside her in a lawn chair.

“Thanks Tory, I feel so stupid for not bringing sunscreen. This sun is intense-“
“And I’m sure it’s not good for the baby” Victoria interjected.

“Well yeah!” Alicia rubbed her belly, “and not good for me neither.” Alicia looked up at her friend who squinted as she looked toward the sky and said, “Here, have my sunglasses.”

“You sure?”

“I forgot my sunscreen and you forgot your sunglasses. And you’re giving me shade so it’s only fair,” she handed Victoria the black butterfly glasses from face.

“Hold this for sec,” Victoria swapped the umbrella for the sunglasses. They were covered in sweat and makeup from Alicia’s face and this was enough to break her statuesque stance to wipe them on her dress before she put them to her face.

“Here, you’ve got my eyeliner on your pretty dress, take this” Alicia reached below her knees for her purse that sat on the ground and took out a wad of Kleenexes. Victoria first dabbled them around her eyes and forehead and then used the moist tissues to dab at the black stains on the fabric over her tummy. The stains only smudged and would not come out.

“Oh well.” Victoria sighed.

“Sorry, I didn’t think I was sweating that much”

Victoria looked over the rims of the sunglasses to sneer at her friend, “It’s 95 degrees. We’re standing in the freaking desert at,” she checked the small gold watch on her left wrist, “2:30 in the afternoon. If you didn’t think you’d be sweating then I have to tell you hun, that baby destroyed more than your figure, he cost you your good sense too.”

Alicia meekly kicked at her friend’s ankle, “Okay sweat stains!” then she pointed the umbrella in her hand at the dark pools under Victoria’s armpits. “Least I had sense to wear black so I wouldn’t show the waterworks,” then, to head off the tease that she knew that was coming, “And no, I didn’t wear black to hide my fat ass. This happens to be Eric’s favorite maternity dress!”

“This is Alex’s favorite dress too.”

They both turned their gaze skyward. Their husbands were up there, just out of reach, hurtling toward the Earth at god-awful speed.

Elon Musk stood at a small steel and glass podium erected a few miles from the runway at Spaceport America just for this occasion. He was flanked by the Vice President of the United States, the governor of New Mexico and a menagerie of congressmen. Despite the collection of power and the beating, intense desert sun, the man looked downright jovial. He laughed and spoke with his hands that flew around like hummingbirds about a bird feeder. He was the only one of the group of officials that wasn’t wearing a suit, but as the man who half-inspired Shane Black’s take on Tony Stark, he could wear what he wanted.

Victoria had long since stopped trying to peer over the heads and shoulders of the crowd in front of her to get a look at the man who’s Martian Land & Return project had separated her from her husband for six months. At five foot-nine she wouldn’t have had trouble doing so even though she had traded her husband’s favorite heels in favor of more comfortable flats.

Elon spoke to the crowd through speakers that had been set up behind them, telling them that descent vehicle had just entered the atmosphere, “I don’t really care about all these damn speeches,” Victoria told her friend with nervous energy popping through her voice, “I just want Alex back. Like, yesterday.”

“Well if you were listening,” Alicia said, “Elon just announced they’re almost home.”
“How soon is almost, exactly? Another hour?”

A fat, balding man standing in front of the two turned and told them with the precision of a mission planner, “He said they just reentered. I’d expect we should be able to see the fireball in a minute or two-“

“Fireball!” the two women exclaimed.

“Excuse me, I meant the uh, well the, hmm… When they reenter they’ll look like a shooting star, a big fireball, essentially. I didn’t mean to suggest they would blow up or anything,” the pair stared blankly at the man, biding him to continue. “First we’ll see them, then we’ll hear the sonic boom. After that-“ he stopped speaking as a wave of excitement gripped the crowd of people.

Elon began talking excitedly and pointed to the vehicle burning its way through the upper atmosphere off to the west. His words were lost in the claps and whoops of excitement.

Alicia tugged at Victoria’s dress, “This has always been their dream, Tory. Aren’t you proud?”

Entranced by the spectacle, Victoria simply nodded. Her eyes were glued to the orange and yellow streamer tearing through the cloudless sky.

The crowd watched as the furious flames began to shift and move. They twinkled and shot sparks that flew wildly and drug long contrails behind them. What started as a spark here and there turned into the maelstrom of a wielder’s torch. The man in front of them was one of the first to gasp and his alarm caused the people adjacent to him to look to him for reassurance.

A stream of questions from strangers flew at him, “What is that?”, “That’s normal right?” They took an increasingly desperate tone as pieces of the capsule continued to break away and follow their own trajectories. The thump of the umbrella that Alicia dropped was drowned out by a succession of sonic booms, too many to count and only milliseconds apart. Alicia stood from her chair, one hand on her belly and with the other she squeezed Victoria’s arm.

“No, no,” she whimpered. She began to sob and grabbed Victoria’s other arm and tried to spin her around. “Don’t look,” she said.

“I have to look. This is their dream. Now it’s my nightmare.”

“Just, just don’t…” Alicia’s voice trailed off and she buried her face in Victoria’s shoulder.

Victoria kept her swollen eyes fixed on the disintegrating vehicle. There goes my shooting star, she thought, burnt at the altar of his own damned ambition.

EDIT: Holy crap it screwed up the formatting even more than I originally thought. I'll try and fix that.
EDIT 2: It forces everything into left-justify for some reason so the indentations don't show up. I also had to manually space each paragraph to make it easier to read. I hope it was legible!

 

[caketastydelish]

I still find myself thinking about the story though and I was recently inspired by a friend to take up work on it again.

I hope you wouldn't mind mentioning who that friend was.

edit: I'll give you the good news and the bad news, both of which are equally true.

good: Your writing structure/use of adjectives/etc is wonderful. Near-professional level honestly.

bad: (and I say this not to be a dick, but because you seem to genuinely want to improve) A semi-famous writer by the name of Simon Rich (you can look him up) gave me advise one time saying when I write to 'skip the boring parts'. For example (and this is the very example he gave me), if your character is taking a trip from America to Spain, don't bother writing the details of how they pack their bags, go through security, board the plane and land unless genuinely exciting/enjoyable to read things happen along the way. Otherwise, even if your structure is perfectly good, the reader will see it as 'filler' because there are plenty of people that can write with very good structure. It's very good structure in conjunction with exceptionally good content that makes you stand out to the point that you just might get published (supposing that's what you want)

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Thanks for the kind words. I wouldn't call it professional by any stretch, but I appreciate it nonetheless. I was not going to tell the overall story here, I was going to post each piece as I write it if I got feedback on it. But hearing the sound of crickets chirping, I think I won't do that now.

As to leaving out the boring parts - I totally take your point. This is the very first scene in the story, which centers around Victoria. It leaves out quite a bit of how and why everyone came to be there. I simply wanted to set the scene that set in motion the events of the story. Victoria lost her husband in the accident (the events of this scene) and in her grief she takes on her late husband's dream of moving permanently to Mars as her own dream.

She's an unstable character to begin with and the loss of her husband really untethers her. She does make it to Mars (10 years after this scene, the story jumps ahead immediately after this and I don't spend a lot of time on the in-between) and remarries. She leads a 'get rich quick' prospecting expedition out into the wilds hoping to find a supply of valuable minerals to sell the colony on Mars.

While she's out there, she starts taking lots of stimulants and that, coupled with the stress of being cooped up with a small group of people (that she doesn't like to begin with) causes the worst of her to come out. There are arguments over money, over direction and lovers quarrels with her 2nd husband.

After being out in the wilds for months, there is an accident and her 2nd husband is killed. She completely freaks out as all of her paranoia, the drugs, the stress of the expedition and the trauma of having lost 2 husbands to the same dream of life on Mars drive her over the edge. She accuses the rest of the team of killing her husband and they secretly plot to sedate her and bring her back to the colony for psychiatric evaluation.

Then she sneaks into a rover and crashes it into the habitat, killing everyone instantly.

The end.

So anyways, the scene I posted leaves out a whole bunch of the what and why. It's meant to be an exciting day for everyone involved. I don't think I did a very good job of showing that excitement and I'll have to revisit that. I wanted to focus on painting a picture of that day and that tragedy. I wanted to show how excitement turned to horror turned to an ember of psychosis. That's something else I need to work on, I need to show more of her personality and how it's off kilter just slightly, even before her husband died.

But what I intentionally left out was all the details of the mission where her husband died, how he died, what he was doing on Mars, what Elon Musk's Project was about and so on. So I feel like I did leave out quite a bit of the boring parts, I really intended to put a laser focus on just the five minutes we are with Victoria in this scene. Though I do need to make it more dramatic, put in more raw emotions and show her character off more.


If I finish this story, I have a follow up planned. It will be set after she comes back to the colony, alone. The authorities question her about the team and she demurs and lies. Eventually they find out and they have a conundrum. She's the first murderer on Mars and she's barricaded herself inside a private habitat. What do they do? Do they have the right to force entry to get her out when on Mars, unlike Earth, forcing entry means breaching the habitat and venting out the air, potentially killing her? And what do they do with her if she comes out? They don't have a robust justice system, nor do they have procedures for imprisoning her.


Thanks for reading, I really appreciate it and your feedback!

 

[caketastydelish]

Well my advise would mostly come from a marketability point of view, because I'm obsessed with actually *getting* published and I presume you are the same (please correct me if my presumption is wrong!)

The first thing you have to think about is who is going to read this? The nerdy sci-fi people (who will probably have more male readers than the average fiction book... women read fiction books more than men on an average.)

Perhaps the 'trashy romance' readers (nearly all of which are female) would enjoy this? Only of course, your version isn't trashy. That isn't to say there may or may not be sex scenes, but it will have tasteful substance. This isn't a 'guilty pleasure' book with a 'taboo' affair that has steamy sex scenes, it has a dramatic plot that makes the reader cry at the end and perhaps even a real moral.

If humor is added along the way (dry humor, of course) that makes it even better because if they're cracking up throughout the book they may never expect the tragic ending... if the reader sees the ending coming, it's a bad book already (not that I'm saying that's the case for what you've written so far).

If you can manage to get both the trashy romance and sci-fi nerds reading this you're a marketing genius. But you have to literally imagine one of these types of people reading your work. After all, if there isn't a market for it, it won't get published... you don't even need a publisher anymore necessarily. Thanks to the internet/ebooks/kindle/whatever the world has gotten smaller and people are uploading their stuff on their own and it spreads through word of mouth; the information era has changed everything. People that are privileged with connections hate it, those with ambition and talent love it. (even so, connections and such can take you places, but not like they used to.)

So once you've decided what type of person is going to be reading your story, ask people you know that seem to match that description. Tell them to be as honest as possible.

A tactic I like to use is called 'false foreshadowing' (I coined the term myself by adding 'false' in front of foreshadowing). Foreshadowing is when you hint at something that will occur later. Except instead of that, it's a useless detail in reality but the reader thinks you've hinted at something that will happen later on in the story, and you've tricked them.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Sweat beaded on her forehead and traveled down her nose and seeped into the corners of her eyes. With nothing but the shoulder straps of the blue sun dress she had to dab at the stinging tears, she refused to bow to the indignity and bore the discomfort stoically. She stood with one fist jabbed into her hip and the other holding an umbrella over her friend Alicia who sat beside her in a lawn chair.

1. I was not aware that the eyes are located underneath the nose. When sweat starts from the forehead and down the nose, it usually ends up on the mouth, not the eyes. Of course, if you leave the nose out of the equation, it's fine.

2. She may not have any kleenex, handkerchief, or enough dress material to deal with the sweat, but she does have one hand she's not doing anything with. Why doesn't she use the back of her hand?

3. Is it an unusually tiny umbrella that wouldn't have room for both of them underneath it?

 

[rugbyLEAGUEfan]

tl dr

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Thanks everyone for your comments, especially you rugbyLEAGUEfan, you get an A+ for effort.

Good catch Valka, I will definitely fix that. What did you think of it in general terms? Too bland?

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

Not too bad; I agree with letting go of some of the mundane uber-detail parts. Other than that, I do note that sometimes, even if the ending or twist is totally predictable, the reader may still have the same surprised or shocked or sad reaction anyway even on the first read. I'm sure it happens once in a while, but I guess that's a bit rare.

Keep it up.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

So I have definitely considered what everyone suggested and I'll go back and make serious edits later. However, I wanted to press ahead with what I've written this morning as I'm on a bit of a roll. Here's part 2:


"Right, right, right mate,” each word was louder and more agitated as Archie tried to take control of the conversation from an equally agitated Victoria. “Let me stop you just there because –“

Victoria wasn’t about to let someone steer the conversation, “You can’t tell-“

But neither was Archie and he had years of experience in talking over loud drunks in London pubs, “Oye! I’m talking here,” he ignored Victoria’s cross expression, waved it away with his hands and continued, “I fink I know where this is going oright? You’re gonna tell us again why you’re the mission leader, you’re gonna tell us your effing brilliant and so on,” by now Victoria had taken a different tack. She sat still and rigid in the pilot seat of the rover, looking uncomfortably hot in her suit. There was red Martian dust on her forehead from when she had removed her helmet and wiped away sweat – the two substances were mixing together into a thick slick of like coagulating blood that perfectly complimented her piercing stare. Not daunted by her in the least, Archie said, “And you know what? You are brilliant!

“Truly you are, that was a brilliant, first-rate idea you an your husband had to bring up the Spam wif you,” Victoria’s husband Barry, who sat next to her in plainclothes in the co-pilot’s seat nodded, not so much in agreement but because he knew Archie was right – he knew Victoria was going to bring up the fact that they had become instant millionaires when they used their personal-belongings mass-ration to bring along a supply of canned Spam. Every time there was a disagreement amongst the mining crew that Victoria couldn’t out-argue, she used that one truly smart decision she made years ago as her trump card. “Look, I know, we know,” Archie gestured to the other two crew members behind him, “that you single-handedly brought the meat to Mars, such as it were. I’m grateful for it – everyone here is grateful for it because tofu gets sodding boring, oright?”

“But that one business move doesn’t make you an interstellar mining magnate, oright?” Victoria visibly twitched, her mind was racing for a proper retort but Archie pressed his case, “Now I ain’t a magnate either. But you brought me,” he jabbed a gloved thumb at his chest, “to do a job and you ain’t letting me do it mate! I’ve been trying to give you my professional opinion that I fink we need to readjust our prospecting plans to suit our present conditions.”

Now Victoria broke her silence, “If you want to tell me that you think you know a better place to look for fossie then I would listen with a smile on my face. You’re a geologist and you know the maps of this area like the back of your hand. But what you’re arguing has nothing to do with fossie deposits – you want to pull up stakes and head back.”

“No! Torrie that ain’t what I’m saying and I wish you’d just listen to me. I been tellin you –“

Barry, sensing the rising agitation, interjected, “Archie, did you know that the market price for phosphorus has tripled in just the fifteen weeks we’ve been out here? The ag community back at the colony is getting desperate and pretty soon they’ll be shipping the mineral in from Earth. They got to feed everyone and they need fossie to do their job. We’re so close to hitting the jackpot and when we do, little spats like this will seem trivial.”

“Oright, well that’s where you’re both wrong mate. I do know the maps, and I can tell you they’re low res orbital scans from frakking twenty years ago! I’ve been doing my job, oright, I been dutifully taking the samples and analyzing them and we’ve got nofing”

Victoria said, “The orbital maps –“

“Nofing! The orbital maps didn’t even tell us there was water-ice under the regolith here. They missed that completely and there’s enough of it to be bloody dangerous. One of us could die if we drove over it with a paver and it violently vaporized.”
“So now,” Victoria said, while nodding to the mission’s medical officer seated behind Archie, “you’re not only trying to tell me how to run the expedition but you want to tell Sheila how to run mission safety.”

Sheila, who had been trying to avoid the argument by sitting silently now leaned forward and spoke up, “But he’s right Torrie. It is dangerous out here; I’ve been saying that since we came up on the first ice deposit three weeks back.” An icy glare from Victoria reminded Sheila why she had been avoiding the argument in the first place and she leaned back and shut up.

“You see,” Archie said, “I ain’t wrong mate. And I’m not saying we have to turn around neither. The way I see it we got two options and I’m only pressing you to take one of em. We can turn back,” both Victoria and Barry shook their heads, “oright, we can turn back or we can stop paving and press ahead and try and find the deposits before our supply situation forces us to turn back.”

“You realize what you’re asking us to forgo?” Barry asked, “If we find the deposit, we can open a mine and make some cash. But the colony will pay us for each click we pave between the colony and the deposit. It’s practically free money, cash for infrastructure! It’s not like we’re having to put down tarmac a few centimeters at a time either. The microwave pavers melt that regolith down into a hard driving surface at a rate of what,” Barry looked at Todd, the chief engineer of the team who was seated next to Sheila behind Archie, “like a click an hour?” Todd nodded. “And each click is worth nearly a grand in colony fees.”

“That’s fine and dandy,” Archie said, “it really is. But we bof know that the pavers can realistically do a half click an hour – on a good day. Meanwhile you’ve burnt through a small fortune in parts keeping em runnin.”

“Fifty grand and counting,” Todd added.

“Fifty grand mates. That’s a chunk of cash, now it’n it? Meanwhile, we’re bloody thirteen clicks from where we should be if we go by the schedule and we’re low on consumables.”

“I know our consumable situation Archie,” Victoria said, “and we’re fine for a month.”
“Come now, don’t be playin us. We got a month of supplies only if we stop eating in two weeks!” Archie added.

“We’ll have to cut back, sure,” Victoria qualified.

“Cut back? I’ve already lost a stone and a half, maybe two. I can’t cut back any more and still function. I’m bloody hungry mates,” Victoria tried to say something but Archie waved her off with his hands, “Look if we just quit paving and push ahead we might have a shot at finding the deposits we’re looking for out here. Then we can go back to the colony, refit and finish the road then open up the mine.”

Victoria: “Refit how? Without the bounty for paving the road, we don’t have the capital to refit, much less put in a mine.”

“What?” Todd asked.

“What do you mean you don’t have the capital?” Archie added.

“What she means,” Barry qualified, “is that this is a one-shot deal for us. We spent every dime on this mobile hab, the two pavers and the other gear. Not to mention your salaries. So if we don’t connect this road, then we’ll have to either sell the rights to our prospect or turn to the goddamn loan sharks at the colony to finance our play.”

“Well that’s your problem, it’n it?” Archie continued, “And it’s all a moot point if we don’t find the bloody deposits to begin with. We need to push on mates, push on till we find the fossie then worry about all that.”

“No,” Victoria said, crossing her arms.

Her husband laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back in an authoritative pose, “I’m with Victoria; you can’t ask us to forfeit this venture.”

“I’m bloody well not doing that,” Archie motioned to the two seating behind him, then jabbed his thumb into his chest again, “I’m asking you to reconsider. We can vote on it if’n you like, oright?”

“I think we should press on like Archie said,” Sheila added.

Archie turned to face Todd, who briefly met his gaze. Then he looked at his best friend Barry, who was giving him the stink eye and said, “Well. Hmm. Not having capital changes the calculus.”

“But –“ Archie started to say before Todd continued,

“But I’m not quite sure how it changes the calculus. I can’t vote in good conscious till I’ve had time to think it over.”

Archie threw his hands up in the air, “I don’t see how the money situation of these two,” he pointed over his shoulder at Barry and Victoria, “changes the real situation out here on the ground.”

“Archie,” Todd said, “I’m invested in this venture too. So the money situation does change the ground facts for me as well. Let me think it over, okay?”

Now Archie threw his hands up in the air again, this time in defeat, “Alright then, you two ‘captains of industry’, ” he shot over his shoulder at the married couple, “and your little buddy here,” he glanced at Todd as he walked back to the airlock at the rear of the mobile hab module, “win the day. I’m going to de-suit and take a nap before my next turn at the paver.”

As he swung open the airlock hatch, Sheila said to him and Victoria, “when you two come in from outside, please change out of your suits in the airlock. She motioned to the red mist of particles that clung to the air and danced in the eddies cast off by the crew, “This dust is bad for your lungs. It can be lethal even. And you’re making a real mess of things,” she pointed at the pilot’s chair and various surfaces the two suited team members had touched which were now coated in red dust and the coagulated sweat/dust mix.

Victoria sighed and propped her head up with a hand. Everything her elbow touched on the control panel in front of her was coated now and she looked down at the mess, saying, “It’s hard for me to care about my lungs when my wallet hurts. I’ll clean up after I dress down though.”

Archie laughed, “Hey, you think your wallet hurts now, just wait until your belly really starts achin.”

 

[Winner]

Enjoyable, although I kinda know where this is going (you told me)

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Thank you thank you!

Any thoughts on the writing itself? What work does it need?

 

[Winner]

Okay, constructive criticism:

The ending of the first part was... how to put it... too pathetic (as in, full of pathos). Part 2 shows why, but it struck me as unnecessarily excessive. I watched the people's faces in videos of the Challenger explosion, especially the parents of the teacher, and I somehow can't see them saying things like "but it was her dream", not when they see their daughter being blown up with the Shuttle. Perhaps later, when they've grieved and arrived to this as their rationalization necessary for accepting their daughter's death. But not at that moment, I think most people are simply too shocked to think clearly in such moments.

Maybe you thought about that, but imagine it was your wife dying in such an accident - what would you think or feel? Whenever I try to write something, I am trying to picture myself in the place of the character. Sometimes it's quite... disturbing.

Spoiler :

For example, I was thinking about writing a story about an ordinary guy who, through sheer strength of his determination, ploughs through the process of candidate selection for a Mars One-like one-way mission to Mars. He totally devotes himself to that single goal, learns how to fly a plane, self-educates himself in engineering, chemistry, astronomy, medicine, cooking, languages, etc., spends years and years in training, giving his 110% to beat the other, much better educated and otherwise better qualified, candidates. Eventually, he gets a seat on the third flight. Only when he has to break the news to the family and friends, he realizes how frakking hard it will be to actually make the final step and leave Earth forever - in his obsession, he has never considered that in any depth. During the farewell party a few days before the launch, a girl he once was in love with and made a certain promise to, attends and he breaks down in tears, totally paralysed by the decision he has to make.

Well, that's how I would probably react - I model this stuff after my own emotions and reactions to things. Which is basically the point of this rambling, feel free to discard it, I am definitely not a real writer

The second part is quite funny and good. Maybe tone down the accent-in-writing though

 

[hobbsyoyo]

You're definitely right in that a lot of the first part needs to change. However, I am not going to change her basic approach to the disaster. Not that you are wrong - you are quite right in that normal people wouldn't react like that. However, that's the point of her character, she isn't normal, she isn't right in the head. Where I think I really failed is that I didn't show her mental state well enough, I didn't let on how crazy she's supposed to be. That's a huge issue I'm going to have to address and I'm think of a couple of ways to tackle it:

I think I'll add in a physical tick that comes out when she's stressed. I think it'll be a tattoo that she has on her wrist, it's something dedicated to her late husband. In the first scene, she'll just rub at it unconsciously but by the second scene and onward (years after her first husband's death) she scratches at it to the point of hurting herself.

I am also going to have to put more edge into her dialogue, particularly in the first scene. At that point, I want her to come off as aggressive and plainly mean-spirited but because she's with a close friend, she can get away with it. After that scene, her dialogue should be quite angrier and will plainly rub everyone the wrong way.

But certainly the first scene needs a ton of work. I am not sure yet how many details I'm going to cut out (probably a lot, though many of the details are simply there for mechanical reasons aka her hand is here and not there because she's holding this, which means she has to move this way, etc). I wanted to paint that scene for people, to put you in that moment in that place. But I completely failed at putting the reader in the emotional state that I wanted. You can see the picture but it has no feeling, it's mute. So that's going to take work.

I have to say though that I'm pretty pleased with the second scene. The details of the physical location are not nearly as important as setting up the group dynamic and it shows in how sparsely I treated the environment. I also feel satisfied with bringing the reader up to speed on why they are where they are what they are doing and the difficulties they face without flat-out having the narrator (who's basically absent) tell you. I show it through dialogue and for the first time literally ever, I don't feel the dialogue comes off as stilted, though if it is please tell me!

As for the accent, well this one character [Archie] is supposed to be heavily accented and I know exactly how he sounds in my head though I'm probably failing to convey that properly. I'm also sure I'm mixing up many British dialects, but it's worth a shot in my opinion just to differentiate him. I will see what I can do to scale it back though and make it more natural.

Thank you for your feedback, I much appreciate it.

And no one feel the need to hold back at all. Please tell me all the flaws you spot. I've been through the ringer of a couple of creative writing classes and I used to edit my community college's Lit Journal, so I certainly won't take offense at criticism even if it's harsh. I want to know what you think!

 

[Winner]

As for the accent, well this one character [Archie] is supposed to be heavily accented and I know exactly how he sounds in my head though I'm probably failing to convey that properly. I'm also sure I'm mixing up many British dialects, but it's worth a shot in my opinion just to differentiate him. I will see what I can do to scale it back though and make it more natural.

Yeah, but is it really necessary to misspell words to convey it? I think most readers can imagine how this accent sounds, and if you drop a few dialect words here and there to remind us, that's enough. There is in my opinion no need to remind us in every second word with "nofing" and so on, because then the character starts looking like a caricature.

Or at least that's how I perceive it

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Thanks Winner!

Anyone else have thoughts on this? I'd love to hear how dumb it is and how I can fix it if it's a problem.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I meant to add one other thing:

I'm not going to edit the older scenes just yet. Which doesn't mean I'm not listening to the criticism or ignoring it - quite the contrary! I plan on doing a full edit and rework and use everyone's suggestions. For the moment, however, I seem to have a bit of creative juices flowing and since it's a short story I'd like to push through and finish it before I go back and edit the earlier passages. I have something like 8 MS Word pages down from these two passages and I think I finish the whole thing up in under 25 pages so it shouldn't take me too long. I know the story pretty well because I've spent so long thinking about it hehehe.

But once I'm through the bulk of it I'm going to rework it, edit it and post a couple of long pages containing the semi-finished product. After that, if people are still reading and commenting, I'll give a final treatment, throw it up on this thread and be done.

I do hope people are enjoying it.

Does anyone? Is it entertaining or when you read is it more an academic effort that's not so-pleasurable?

 

[Kyriakos]

Actually this wasn't bad... Some of the parts can be altered linguistically, and probably you could improve it by making some changes in the formation of the scenes and limiting the prevalence of dialogue. Still it has potential, at least as an idea and moreover in regads to its relative easyness of flowing as a text.
So yeah, nice i guess Will say more if i read it.

Spoiler :

Joking!!! I won't read it. ( )

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

I like the idea of painting her as truly bleeped up in the head. Although, be wary, since Victoria could too easily wind up as a generic or cliche villain who does bad or weird things just because she feels like it or for no reason.

Take, for example, Khan, from Star Trek. In the TOS shows and subsequent films, Khan had a deep-rooted personal issue with Kirk et al, and IIRC, it made for something the audience can actually relate to, and gave meaning to the character.

However, in the latest Trek film, JJ Abrams decided to do away with that and just make Khan a typical super-villain lusting for omnipotence (I haven't seen it myself, so I can't say for sure; I'm going by what others said in their reviews of the film), and made the character a bit blander.

Dunno if I got that right, but it's something to consider.

 

[Winner]

However, in the latest Trek film, JJ Abrams decided to do away with that and just make Khan a typical super-villain lusting for omnipotence (I haven't seen it myself, so I can't say for sure; I'm going by what others said in their reviews of the film), and made the character a bit blander.

The chief problem with the latest ST film is that it makes zero frakking sense plot-wise. It's a bunch of cool scenes loosely tied together with a plot about as water-tight as a fishing net.

Other than that, the character of Khan isn't totally one-dimensional, they still make it so that he has suffered things anybody would want to take revenge for - but he's still egocentric megalomaniac, so once he gets his revenge, he wants more.

I agree that making villains interesting is rather difficult. One small mistake and they come out as cartoon characters which are more funny than anything else.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Actually this wasn't bad... Some of the parts can be altered linguistically, and probably you could improve it by making some changes in the formation of the scenes and limiting the prevalence of dialogue. Still it has potential, at least as an idea and moreover in regads to its relative easyness of flowing as a text.
So yeah, nice i guess Will say more if i read it.

Spoiler :

Joking!!! I won't read it. ( )

Thank you!

Do you have any thoughts on how I could rearrange the scenes?

Regarding the dialogue, I'll look at cutting it down in the second section. From here on out, while I will still have more dialogue than I did in the first section, I will have less than was in the second section. I don't really see a way to avoid most of it in the second section though. I have to show the audience who the characters are, how they interact, what their problems are and where they are and so on. The only way I know how to do that is through either dialogue or having the narrator simply tell the reader what's going on.

While you can have the narrator tell the reader things, you get to a point where you're just telling the audience instead of showing them, if that makes any sense. Also, it's very hard to develop characters without dialogue - in particular in the short story format where you don't have chapters to spend on their actions and deeds. You can end up being quite hamfisted and find yourself writing things like:

Victoria had her share of issues. She hadn't quite gotten over the death of her first husband and being on Mars, doing the things he died trying to accomplish, wasn't helping her get over the loss.

Which, by itself isn't terrible, but I'd rather show you that in how she interacts with people, how she treats them and the things she does. In the second scene, there isn't a lot being done, so I have to focus primarily on the dialogue. I also had to get the entire back story out of the way so that I could focus more on the characters actions going forward and therefore there won't be so much dialogue.

That said, I really appreciate your feedback and I'm looking forward to your suggestion on how to rearrange the composition. I'm also greatly relieved at least someone finds that it flows nicely. Dialogue has always been my weak-point. I've been truly awful at it in the past and while I won't say this is good by any stretch, I was pleasantly surprised to see that what I wrote wasn't terrible.

I like the idea of painting her as truly bleeped up in the head. Although, be wary, since Victoria could too easily wind up as a generic or cliche villain who does bad or weird things just because she feels like it or for no reason.

Take, for example, Khan, from Star Trek. In the TOS shows and subsequent films, Khan had a deep-rooted personal issue with Kirk et al, and IIRC, it made for something the audience can actually relate to, and gave meaning to the character.

However, in the latest Trek film, JJ Abrams decided to do away with that and just make Khan a typical super-villain lusting for omnipotence (I haven't seen it myself, so I can't say for sure; I'm going by what others said in their reviews of the film), and made the character a bit blander.

Dunno if I got that right, but it's something to consider.

Hahaha yeah she's bleeped in the head but she isn't nefarious, she isn't even a villain either. She doesn't plan to be mean, she just is sometimes and her mental state and her surroundings bring that to the forefront. But I don't plan on having her doing lots of evil things - even the atrocity at the end isn't so much her acting on her evil impulses, she's acting on her crazy paranoid fantasies to protect herself. It's going to be interesting to see what you readers take away from what she does though.

As to Khan's motivations - you're absolutely right and I am disappointed in his character in the latest movie.

Did you read that Valka? YOU ARE RIGHT. hehehe

I'm going to write some more, it'll be up when I'm finished.

Thanks everyone.

The chief problem with the latest ST film is that it makes zero frakking sense plot-wise. It's a bunch of cool scenes loosely tied together with a plot about as water-tight as a fishing net.

Other than that, the character of Khan isn't totally one-dimensional, they still make it so that he has suffered things anybody would want to take revenge for - but he's still egocentric megalomaniac, so once he gets his revenge, he wants more.

I agree that making villains interesting is rather difficult. One small mistake and they come out as cartoon characters which are more funny than anything else.

Well I have to agree that the plot was as holey as swiss cheese. However, I really liked the shades of the Osama Bin Laden raid that went into it, it just should have been tied together better. That said, I don't feel that they developed Khan enough - especially considering how deep the old Khan was. It felt a bit forced is all, maybe that's because he got so little screen time and the screen time he did get he was all uber-man supervillain and not so much a person as it were.