sully: camera obscura (prologue) - (UR)

Going Under Major Reconstruction

My complaints are mostly along the lines of spacing. You space it so much that it just gives it the appearance of being overwhelming and way more difficult to read. Also, like you point out, a lot of cliche points (hard to avoid in romance writing I bet) that you should try to avoid. Oh, and one more thing that really just seemed to bug me...

Shocking, I tell you.



Even I was.

You were shocking? Why were you shocking? Sorry, that's just the way it sounded to me. I would revise it to say something along the lines of "Even I was [shocked/amazed/surprised/etc]."

Other than that, sounds like an interesting character and this plot could go somewhere if you avoid the cliches and add a twist or two to give it a surprise. Good luck!

First of all, I'm sorry for like jumping on all of your submissions. I read your earlier one as well, though I forget if I critiqued it or not. Anyways, I'm going to pass on some advice from my creative writing teacher. I don't like him, but I thought that this point of his made sense and so I try to stick to it as much as possible.

The point is this: your writing should stand alone. You shouldn't use all the fancy embellishments on the form that you do. The spacing, the 'summary', the 'notes'... we don't need that at all. We need to see your writing, read it, and give you our suggestions. xD It's just frivolous and a little pretentious. It might be a habit from another site or something, and I understand that, but in general, you don't need it. Also, if you submitted something like this in a manuscript with all those hyphens for spacing, it would probably get rejected or at least yuck-ed at. Spaces are all you need. You make the spaces extra big to denote that the sections aren't related.

The reason this is especially revelant for this piece of work is that you might need to use different formatting to specify which entries were written at which times, if pieces were added, things like that. For example, the part where you talk about a word being crossed out and later replaced, you could use the strike-out code to do that (which is s instead of b or i for bold or italics). And, for items written in later, maybe make those italic. I think in writing a journal, instead of italicizing something, the writer might emphasise the words by bolding or tracing over. You know what I mean? Just working in the journal format and trying to use things like later write-ins, you'll probably need to rely on a little formatting like that so that the reader doesn't get confused.

BUT make it as SIMPLE as you can. Make the writing stand out. Not the form.



Also, I'm waiting to be impressed by this piece.

(I told you this would be cliché. See Warning.)

If you keep telling us this, why do we want to keep reading? So far, it looks like it's the 'love against all odds -- opposites attract' shtick, with a little bit of an interesting character to get us just the tiniest bit interested. If you actually DO make it cliche... why are you writing it? I'm not actually saying that, I'm just asking you to consider that and make sure that somehow this works in like reverse psychology or it's a case of narrator unreliability where he describes what happened and it's not so cliche after all.

Lastly,

Hm, well, that's all I have time to write. I have to go help fix the car (which is so unbelievably beat up).

You put a couple of those in so far. Aside from the fact that I don't write my journals as if speaking to someone (which I can forgive -- this is a different character), I don't think that everyone says exactly what they're going to do EVERY time they put the journal down. I'm not saying you have, but in these two entries, you have both times (the chores and the car). So, try to avoid doing that all the time.

Um, that being said, I'm interested to see where you're going with this. You have a unique voice, and there's NO doubt about that, but you have to live up to it with your writing and not just with pretty form or ideas!

PM me if you have questions!

-Hannah-

i can't say much but i like the way you think. keep making this journal of yours, it deserves continuation... after reading this, i thought you have interesting viewpoint and i hope that goes for all topic not just love, so, i end up wanting to ask you a question, what do you think of death?