Psyche--contest entry

This was a very well written short Story.

To my back, the mattress sags as if beneath the weight of a reclining body, the box springs creak silently, a human warmth that is partially remembered and partially imagined, none of which is there, makes the hair on the back of my neck stand erect. #FF0000 ">One, "to my back" is so not the right phrase. oo' It doesn't quite ring right to me, and I think the sentence would be better without it. Second, this is actually a bunch of sentences all jumbled into one. Plus, I don't really get it...? o-o I'm not big on poetry, though, sooo. ^^" Honestly, I didn't understand that. Lastly, note the words I highlighted in green. As if. Why is it only as if? This implies it's not really so, and therefore maybe the narrator isn't real? This is the only interesting thing I've seen so far. oo" The bed isn’t #FF0000 ">really big enough for two people. The sheets don’t pull #FF0000 ">taught taut as another body curls beneath them, though I think that I can feel his breath on my bare shoulder. #FF0000 ">Okay. If they don't pull taut, then why are you mentioning it to us that way? ^^" With prose, you'll want to try to avoid the negatives. Use forget instead of doesn't remember, relax instead of not working, etc. Why? Pink elephant effect. If I ask you not to think about a pink elephant, what's the first thing you think of? :] Exactly.

His fall#FF0000 ">ing into place beside me is graceful and light and surreal as the landing of a feather, nonexistent if I couldn’t see him so clearly in my mind’s eye: hair the color of warm honey, #FF0000 ">skinsun-kissed#FF0000 "> skin, #FF0000 ">and eyes shimmering with the sheen of brushed nickel.

#FF0000 ">How poetic. Not really working, though, because of your major lack of flow. oo"

Henry. #FF0000 ">Be aware this name carries heavy literary connotations. It's like naming a character Edward. You're gonna have a lot to live up to. Even worse, this one comes from the Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger, where Henry really does pop in and out of places randomly. Given what just happened, it's entirely possible this would be mistaken for Time Traveler's Wife fanfiction. ^^" I suggest you change the name, or at least the manner in which he "arrives".

My eyelids peel open #FF0000 ">Erm. No, thank you. ^^" Just say what he/she saw, never mind telling us his/her eyes opened. Also, avoid using the words peel open in reference to eyes. o.e, pupils dilating from the stimulus of the cool blue glow of a night light plugged into the corner socket. #FF0000 ">Let's take a step back. Do you think like this? Does a doctor think like this? oo Does /anyone/ think like this, especially when he/she's just woken up? oo There's no precedent for this. If this is your narrator's voice, make it constant. =D (I never could sleep without shadows.) #FF0000 ">??? As my eyes adjust to the pale light, a shadow #FF0000 ">Word repetition. passes through my peripheral vision and from it forms a skeletal appendage, an embrace. #FF0000 ">Skeletal appendage = embrace? o-o

“Sorry to bother you so late,” he says, and his voice slips through my head like syrup drizzled over clean black text, bolded or underlined or italicized in such a way as to inflect masculine depth, gentility, a smile. #FF0000 ">Yeaaaap you're definitely going for poetic, I think. oo" I'm kind of a failure when it comes to poetry, but I'm fairly sure good flow is important to it. ^^" You can't have good flow if your rhythm is constantly off because you're wandering about making metaphors that strive too hard to be ~deep. oo" Try to focus on the way the words feel and sound first before moving on to making the words dance. =D

I shut my eyes again, but find that the warmth dims a bit when I do so, and so I open my eyes once more, for as much as I would like to bask in the comfort of this connection, doing so requires effort of my mind’s part. #FF0000 ">You're fond of very long sentences, and this kind of throws me off. Try to alternate between long and short sentences, yeah? 8]

I think, Late night? #FF0000 ">Some authors use "I think" even when it's in first person. I'm kind of against it, though, because it pulls the reader out of the piece. It's best to go about assuming the reader knows every comment in the piece is within the confines of the narrator's mind unless stated otherwise.

#FF0000 ">There are Several scenarios #FF0000 ">that rush through my head in a fragmented stream of images and ideas#FF0000 ">, like a spliced movie reel overlaid with bits of random audio. #FF0000 ">Pare every word you can afford to get rid of. The half-conscious thoughts eventually congeal into something coherent, and so Henry replies, “Yeah. We had another job to take care of. The cleanup ran a little long. You know how the others can get when it comes to playing with their toys.”

I don’t know if I’m seeing the images in his head, or he is seeing them in mine and I’m reading them in turn, but whatever the case, there’s a lot of blood in that memory.

Yeah, I think drowsily. Did you enjoy yourself? #FF0000 ">Mmmh. Strange. :/

He chuckles softly, and I imagine his grip about my shoulders tightens, another distant whine of a spring. #FF0000 ">Makes it seem like she's made of springs. ^^" “Well, I wish I could say I did, but you know how I am. I don’t have the stomach for needless violence #FF0000 ">Telling. As-you-know-Bob dialog. X] "I don't have the stomach for this stuff" might work better., and when it comes to those mob thugs…Well, sometimes we have to get a little aggressive in order to get the job done.”

I smile to myself, already falling back into the dark whirl of unconsciousness, and the torrent of half-remembered dreams threatens to suck away Henry’s comforting touch down into the depths of my mind. #FF0000 ">If something is threatening to take away your comfort, I don't really think you'd be smiling? o-o

Tell me more about the job, Henry, I instruct him#FF0000 ">in my head, about how you and the boys filled them all with lead. But before he can begin another sentence about the adventure of him and his partners in crime infiltrating some #FFBF00 ">fantasized mob base, he’s gone and I’m gone soon after. #FF0000 ">The part highlighted in green is super stilted. Revise. The bit in orange/yellow is odd. Fantasized? Meaning it's not real in Henry's world?

>>

Scritch, scritch, scratch.

The lead of my pencil breaks as I tackle yet another logarithm, and I sigh, violently rubbing away the stray mark of graphite on the graph with my worn down eraser. Huffing, glaring at the assignment, I frown and look up into the horizontal rays of sunlight easing through the blinds above my desk. #FF0000 ">Let's be really honest with ourselves. Do we think like this? oo" Is it possible anyone thinks like this? Or at least, has flashes of thinking like this? oo The inconsistency is jarring. I can feel Henry’s metallic gaze ricocheting off my shoulder blades #FF0000 ">What's wrong with the word back? oo" from where he sits Indian-style on my bed.

“Stop staring at me,” I hiss, keeping my voice down lest my mom hear#FF0000 ">s me talking to myself from out in the hall. #FF0000 ">I will be honest with you. At this point in time, she sounds schizophrenic. Not at all like a writer. >.O

He doesn’t look away, and when I’m about to snap at him again#FF0000 ">for his disobedience he retorts, “If you really wanted me to stop staring at you, I would. You know#FF0000 ">that I live to serve.” #FF0000 ">More As-you-know Bob conversation. oo" I peer over my shoulder at the man sitting on my comforter, spine straight #FF0000 ">This really seems like you have a strong aversion to the word "back". and his wide mouth curled in a cheeky grin #FF0000 ">This last bit sounds really awkward and strange., and I frown at him.

Don’t get smart with me, jerk. I can kill you whenever I please, you know. I run the tip of my tongue across the front of my teeth, preoccupying it from its wriggling inside my mouth as it forms the phantom words I’m thinking at Henry. #FF0000 ">o-o Lots of this just sounds really awkward and like you're pushing really hard for a poetic way of saying things, but it just comes out a jumbled mess.

His smile tips a little, and he scratches the side of his face with a long finger. “I’m aware. You threaten me with that enough; I would hope I could remember.”

Reluctantly, I turn back to my homework and try to focus on math rather than the fictional character lounging on my bed as if he lorded over the place, but it’s hard not to hear him talking to me, thinking in my direction, even harder not to respond. #FF0000 ">Mrh. Not big on that part. It still makes her sound schizophrenic. I know, I've heard of the saying that goes, "Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." However, I think you seriously don't want to make it seem as if she's schizophrenic unless she really is, because schizophrenia is a whole disease that will open up a huuuuge can of worms you're going to have to deal with if you're going with the writers-are-schizophrenic theme. It annoys me, this codependence, and I find it distracting and self-centered; not only am I talking to myself, but I’m ogling #FF0000 ">at the creation of my own imagination.

His unrestricted cackling jerks my head up from my hunched position over my desk #FF0000 ">This bit sounds really awkward., and I twist around #FF0000 ">at my waist to see Henry reclining on his palms with his chest heaving in delighted laughter, all at my expense.

Shut the hell up, I snap#FF0000 ">inside my head. I don’t mean that as a compliment, you ass.

“Oh ho,” he sighs, slowly reigning in his giggles, and his eyes open into slits #FF0000 ">Major awkward reporting for duty. , blades peeking out beneath his fringe of yellow hair. “Don’t be rude. It isn’t my fault you had a cruddy day at school, now is it? Besides, the year will be over soon, and you won’t have to deal with that boy in your English class for a while.”

My eyes widen, but I glance away, thoughts swarming for a moment. #FF0000 ">Taking into consideration the fact that this is first person, I'd like to see/read said thoughts. ^^

You don’t know anything.

“Don’t I#FF0000 ">, though? Isn’t the nature of this relationship that we know absolutely everything about one another? It’s a wonder we don’t hold more animosity.” #FF0000 ">First, very very very very stilted dialog. Doesn't flow right. Second, this is as-you-know-Bob conversation again.

I blink a few times, bitter thoughts slithering through my head, through our heads, and we’re both filled like water balloons pregnant with the sludge of my aching regrets and insecurities #FF0000 ">Oo" Erm. No thanks. Your metaphors grow more contrived with each paragraph. Perhaps it's time to take a break? , the loneliness. Out of the corner of my vision, Henry explodes into a coruscating cloud of multicolored glass shards that simultaneously glow and reflect the natural light before amassing on#FF0000 ">ce more into his smug form. #FF0000 ">You really, really, really don't want to push imagery too hard. It should come naturally. oo"Only his grin still seems a little broken.

“Get the hell out of my head,” I whisper.

Not until you get out of mine, he fires back, his face motionless while his eyes glint and swirl like disrupted pools of liquid mercury. I smell blood for a brief moment, feel the heat of a dodged bullet, hear the sound of panicked, dying voices echoing off the arched walls of a warehouse, a screeching of harpies felled in their custom suits and snake-skin dress shoes. #FF0000 ">>.O Give it a rest. Seriously. I experience these things through Henry, from the perspective of a tortured soul created for my entertainment, punished simply for being available to punish #FF0000 ">Awkward.. I want to feel worse about these things than I do, and this knowledge passes between us, between character and creator in a colorful code of images and words.

His image hums and pixilates like a hologram. His smile has fallen away.

We hold one another’s glare until my concentration snaps, and he’s gone, and all I see is the blank slate of my closet door across the room. I bite my upper lip and reflexively attempt to conjure him back onto my bed. #FF0000 ">Making less sense by the moment, because first she wants him gone, but now, with no hints whatsoever that she actually /wanted/ him around, she wants him back? o-o I will discuss first person narratives in a while. I can think gold and silver all I like, but I can’t see past the curves and slants of letters arranged into the words, can’t think through the clean black font. #FF0000 ">? ._. I'm not a poet, so maybe there's some deep meaning there I'm not getting. >>" He’s gone, but I’m still here.

>>

I can’t sleep. The mattress feels as if concrete had been poured onto the bedframe, a block of bed-shaped pavement beneath my sheets. #FF0000 ">Last part is redundant. You can do without it. It’s stuffy in my room, and I can’t decide if it’s too bright or too dark. Tossing, turning, twisting in discomfort beneath my comforter, I will myself to be tired, to be blank. I close my eyes and count my breaths.

Inhale, exhale. One, two, three...

The sheets retract back off my shoulders #FF0000 ">o0 So they kinda like shrunk away on their own? Cause they have legs and can totally move. oo" Pick a different verb, please., allowing the chill of midnight in the drafty house to lick #FF0000 ">atmy exposed skin, allowing another body to slip beneath them on my narrow bed. Moaning, the mattress sinks, and my entire body clenches like an opossum feigning death. #FF0000 ">Definitely take that last simile out. I'm getting so tired of seeing them tacked on all over the place.

(Be still, and it won’t hurt you.) #FF0000 ">This does better in a paragraph of its own.


My breaths quicken into the panicked whistles of a scared animal #FF0000 ">Whistles are high-pitched and kind of keening, and I can't imagine breathing like that unless you're about to have a violent asthma attack. Panic only brings about shortness of breath and maybe gasping sounds., and I’m forcing my eyes to remain shut, to keep me ignorant of the intruder. But then the figure lays down at my back, a foreign head falls onto my pillow, and confusion laps over me like salt water on pale shores. #FF0000 ">Please. We all know she knows it's Henry. :/

The warmth radiating from the visitor makes my heart hurt, and when an arm#FF0000 ">, long and encompassing, wraps about me, it’s all I can do to keep from gasping and flinching away in self-preservation. Or perhaps, in embarrassment. #FF0000 ">That sounds so wrong. Almost like he's a creeper. >.O Definitely a perv? It's the way you describe it.

“You couldn’t sleep.” His voice is rich and smooth like languidly dripping molasses into my ear,#FF0000 ">If I see one more simile, I'm going to...=.= against my neck.

“No,” I try to say, but my lips only mouth the strangled reply as it exits my throat in a squeak. I can feel his head tilt in a nod before he relaxes a little closer as if trying to calm me through osmosis. #FF0000 ">kfhafhasfhashfoadshf >.< Finally, I have gotten my cardio-respiratory systems #FF0000 ">Hahahah no. ._. No. Seriously, no. What is she, a med student who compulsively reviews her notes in her thoughts? o0" more in check, and I sag into his arms like a ragdoll. I consider making the effort to turn and look at him, but this idea seems taboo, eyes set upon a resting figure not meant to be seen and a dripping of hot wax to break the spell. This last bit dangles. Definitely misplaced.

A breathy laugh escapes him, tickling my back, and I know he’s amused by my drowsy, fanciful thoughts. “Just go to sleep. I won’t leave like I did earlier today,” he assures me, his sweet voice turn#FF0000 ">ing vaguely bitter. I think about nodding, and am half sure I do, but as I drift, the border between waking and dreaming drip and blur like water colors blending and seeping over pencil lines. #FF0000 ">This last one could have been decent, but I'm so annoyed by similes right now I just kind of want to throw a tantrum because there's another one.

I open my eyes long enough to register the blue glow of the night light, the wavering shapes of overlapping shadows, a hand raised up to my face and trailing fingertips across my forehead in a familial gesture to brush back stray hair, but then my eyelids thicken, grow heavy as stone, and they’re closed. I’m gone, but Henry is still here. #FF0000 ">Makes it sound like she's dead.

I have a looooot to say about this.

Let's start with the fact that this is first-person and I positively do not care for the main character. This has little droppings of voice, here and there, always attempting to be poetic but never quite succeeding. Smooth it out. Make it consistent. You want her to sound like a medical textbook? By all means, go ahead. Just be consistent. Don't make her sound like a poet-wannabe in one paragraph and then a schizophrenic doctor in the next. oo" Decide on one, then stick with it. Also note that she does not think in the way a normal person does. A first person POV demands you write everything down from the point of view of your character - meaning you don't get as many liberties with how you describe things.

For example, you could probably wax poetic about a table, but would your main character be liable to do so? Would you, as a person, do so if you weren't writing? No? Didn't think so. You'd probably think of it as a table, maybe make a comment or two about the color. That's the way your MC will think as well. No one thinks of how the rays of sunlight slant when they've just woken up, unless they're some amazing poet who lives, breathes, eats poetry, and probably is poetry incarnate. And even then, that's a stretch. ^^"

Another note is that your imagery? Yeaaaaaah it's all over the place. I wish you'd painted the world here in soft pastels, but I'd be lying if I say that. You tried, however, and points for the effort? ^^" To be honest, your imagery tries so hard it kind of smashed into my face like a brick, and not even one baked into a pie. >.O It wasn't beautiful, and it most certainly was not pleasant. There was just too many similes in this, and almost every single one of them grated on my nerves due to sheer weirdness value. You tried too hard. Understand that similes and metaphors and language that flows through your mind like water comes naturally. You cannot force it, otherwise you risk ruining the flow of the piece.

Speaking of flow, your flow is terrible, but that's because of all the similes and metaphors you crammed in. If you want this to sound remotely poetic, you'll have to be brutally honest with yourself as you reread the piece. Read it out loud, and slaughter whatever doesn't work. Whatever knots your tongue has to be rooted out, never mind if you adore the line. Also, again, metaphors must not be forced, nor should they look like a brain surgery. >.O You have to make it seem effortless and clean, not bloody and difficult.

You tend to stray towards As-you-know-Bob conversations as well. As-you-know-Bob conversations are horrible things, and must be avoided at all times. Think about it. Do you tell someone something you know they already know? The point of a conversation is to exchange ideas. Maybe you'd like to remind them, but you sure as hell won't tell them something they're currently aware of.

In addition to as-you-know-Bob conversations, your dialog tends to be very stilted. Listen to people talk, and you'll realize they sound nothing like your characters. Dialog is smooth and has a lot of contractions; unless you want a character to come across cold and formal, you don't use super-formal, non-contracted language. There's also a rhythm to things that you should go about, and this applies to your whole piece.

Rhythm and Flow = essential for good prose and poetry alike

Read this out loud and then tell me what you think of it. I daresay you won't love it so much yourself. >.O Or you might, but your tongue won't. Vary your sentence patterns as you tend to stick to super-long ones. Also, please don't force yourself to check the thesaurus for synonyms of words that you obviously want to use. Sometimes, the words you want to use are so obvious but you determinedly go around it and refuse to use the correct word.

Mark Twain once said, "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."

So true. Use the word you need to use; don't pick another word because you think it'll sound more ~poetic.

Also important to note: if I didn't realize this was for Lily's contest, I would've thought your writer was a schizophrenic, not a writer.

Another note: you tell your characterizations as opposed to showing them. It hides behind a curtain of show, but it's mostly tell. 'Can't stomach needless violence.' 'mob thugs'

It goes on, the list.

Anyway, I think that'S all I have to say for now. If anything else occurs to me, I'll be sure to edit it onto this. I know this seems a bit harsh, but I'm only trying to be as honest as possible. Please PM me if you have any questions, and I hope you find this helpful in your revisions. ^^

Sincerely,

Octave

Heya A/B. Well, it's been a while since I've done a real review for you, so I suppose this is a good time and place to remedy this situation.

So I didn't really like this. As I had pointed out before, part of the reason why I usually enjoy your writing so much is because of the lush imagery you weave into it. However, this time around, it went a little bit... over the top. Cases in point:

...makes the hair on the back of my neck stand erect.

There is only one connotation I have with the word "erect", and it certainly has very little to do with hair. Now, this is an additional problem because this sentence appears in the very beginning of your story - the part that's supposed to set the tone for the rest of the piece. Words like this help set the tone, and by using that word, you imply that this piece will either be about pride (i.e. erecting the tower of Babylon, kinda conjures up phallic imagery and all the "stronger sex" jazz that usually goes with it), or erotic. So I plunged into the story half-expecting an orgy somewhere down the line, but instead was treated to... well, whatever this is. I'm not really sure, honestly. (And yes, I've read the contest rules, they didn't help very much.)

My eyelids peel open, pupils dilating from the stimulus of the cool blue glow of a night light plugged into the corner socket.

Oh boy. First off, I know that eyelids "peeling" open is an acceptable and mildly popular way to describe it, but I've never been a fan of it. Peeling reminds me of, you know, peeling an orange or something. So when it's used together with eyelids, I imagine someone carefully pulling and ripping them off. Gross.

After that bit, you just kind of lost me. "Pupils dilating from the stimulus of the...." Argh, have mercy on my poor brain. I can't keep up with this train of thought. At all. Why even use "stimulus" instead of, say, "light"? Why specify that the colour of the night light was, in fact, "cool blue"? I know you like to go into details, but this does not add neither subtract from the crispness of this particular image. It's simply making the sentence difficult to read.

Finally, tone. You start off talking about eyes, then you lose me about halfway into the sentence, and then you finish with the word "socket". Right off the bat I make the connection between eyes and sockets. Tone is created by weaving all images together, so even if troglodytes such as myself read this and fail to understand something, individual words will still connect and create a bigger picture. Here, we connect "eyes" and "socket"... so, is this person a doctor?

Moaning, the mattress sinks, and my entire body clenches like an opossum feigning death.

Uh. That's a really unusual simile. Again, connotations: you compare the narrator's body to an opossum. Specifically, a dead one (yes, I know that it's FEIGNING death, but you should also know that "death", along "kill", "fuck", "sex", "die" and a few others, is a power word. That is, it gets imprinted into and processed by the subconscious before the rest of the sentence does. So even if you specify that the animal simply feigned death, I am still left with a faint image of week-old roadkill, bringing all the wonderful sights and smells that go along with it). That is really not something you would want to compare a human (female, I take it) body to, unless it's a filthy villain or a mangy hobo or things like that.

That aside, wouldn't feigning death involve relaxing the body rather than clenching it? But those are just thoughts of someone who's never traumatized an opossum into feigning death. If I was an animal scientist person, maybe I'd think differently - but neither I nor a large portion of your readers will know the exact mechanics of opossums' death feigns, and will just assume, based on the context, what it is like. So the word "clenched" kind of makes me o_O a little.

Okay, I'll stop with the particular examples here. I'm sure you see what I mean and will be able to pick out other examples based on what I said. I'd like to go into the plot at this point.

My problem with this is that there is very little build-up going on over a lot of text. We've discussed this before, I think, and I even said that with your writing it is generally not a problem, because you use the extra text to conjure up wonderful images -- so it is like looking at a really beautiful painting, where the content of the image can often be secondary to just how damn pretty it is. But this is not a piece that should rely on textual beauty. This is an introspective, cerebral piece, which should be more about the characters themselves than the setting. And in order to make it a character-driven work, you would have to give your narrator a definite, crisp voice (I believe Octave had talked about that). Aaaand it should focus much more on thoughts and feelings and emotions and all that wonderful stuff instead of images.

The ending twist (it was a twist, yes? that the narrator was Henry's character rather than vice versa?) didn't make much sense to me, either. I mean, it had an effect: I was quite shocked, because I didn't expect it. But after thinking about it for, oh, two minutes, it just kind of fell through. One: if the narrator is an imagined character, where does she go when she un-imagines Henry (though I figure that it was actually the other way around, what with her being Henry's character)? Some kind of an imaginary character world? Why does she not just... stop existing? Two: what would a mobster be doing with an imaginary character? Gee, I sure hope his mobster buddies don't find out about this, because it's... well, kinda gay, unless he was a writer on the side. (But he wasn't, right? His imaginary character was a writer, who was writing about Henry and.... gack. My brain broke. )

So that's that. Revisions, dear A/B, revisions, and more revisions. It's what made "Valuable" so good, and it's what this piece sorely needs. Right now it's a mess, but it's a mess with lots of potential. Bring down the hammer on it, again, as Octave said, be brutally honest with yourself - and you can turn this into one hell of a piece. Because I really do love the twist, it just... needs more ground to stand on.

Your fantasy,
cC