Through the Mirror /P

Removed.

great, awesome, superb, great book. if it is a short story it is awesome, if it is a novel it is awesome.

You are so great at first-person narrative, Brad. The exploration of self and everything in this is brilliant, and I adore this piece. Often I've felt alienated from your prose in the past, but not here -- here I felt attached, because the story and the character drew me in so well.

avidreader10--


Thanks for taking the time to read and respond. It is a short story.


Jack,


I am surprised this received any positive feedback. Besides being written in a slightly drug-induced state, I had also been awake for about a 28-hour stretch and fading quickly.

My voice, I think, alienates a lot of potential readers. Not the intended effect, but I can't please everybody (and make no real attempt to do so, as it were). I'm glad you liked this, though.

I usually consider the degrees of difficulty of writing the same way Faulkner did: poetry is hardest, followed by the short story, followed by the novel. Of course, the novel is still hard to write. So this was sort of an experiment--by some divine inspiration I was driven to stay awake and write it, and by my own will I made it a short story. I'm sure it fails at the latter attempt.


Thanks again,
Brad

Gorgeous, Brad. Truly wonderful. I spotted one typo--I think you inserted a comma instead of a period--but I can't find it now... Really, this is great. Your protagonist is so easy to become attached to, so young and naive as he is, and your prose is just as fluid as your poetry. Bravo!

Fand

Incan, even you modesty has an air of vanity to it.

Okay at first I didn't realize why this story was in the science fiction section and then I went back and realized the main character had destroyed his love interest. How could I have missed that! Maybe I've been reading so much bad work that I took it for a metaphor or something.

Anyway, the dialogue is good. I hesitate to say great, but the exchanges between Jake and his female lover are quite entertaining. The self-exploration, as Jack states, is brilliant and of course shocking, but in a very good way.

I normally am not one for first person narratives as most people butcher them, but this was, for the most part, well done. I can't really form an opinion about the end. At first I didn't really think much of it, but then I re-read it and grew to like it a bit better. I think this piece gets better after you read it more than once.

Contrary to Trident's opinion, I actually think the dialogue could use some fine tuning. It irritated me, especially the parts that were repetitive, albiet deliberetely so. Eg, "Hey--hey--hey you, Kaley? What...what are you doing?"

Also, the last exchange between Jake and the woman, while excellent in the sense of content, bores me with the constant repetition of 'love'.

As to the story itself, well I'm not one of the alienated readers, but nor am I a fan. I stand in the middle somewhere; at times I was into it, others I phased out, was disaffected. Still, great writing.

I read this...last week and meant to say what came to mind. Naturally, my time skipped out on me.

Your first person narrative, Incan, is almost painfully engaging. It's intense--and for the most part--precise in its use of language and emotion.

My impression in the end: It went on a long time, and the dialogue got vague for how much its theme was repeated. There's nothing technically lacking in it. What it lost was its immediacy with length, and with how self-involved the character's voice got. In brevity, such a tone and tendency would strike, make its point, and finish--it needs to be tighter, I think, to contain itself.

That aside, when it was to the point, it was deftly, aptly so. First few paragraphs left a sharp impression, myopic for first person in the best sense--and both characters, narrator and his 'friend' were real.

I don't even need to, impishly, say 'how'?


IMP

It was too rushed. Try giving more of an explanation as to his disappearance.

Wow!!!
That was amazing!
Have you ever thought of continuying that story of yours?
Write more! Write more!
Please!!! You are awsome!
Maybe yoy can give a tip or two for my own stories?
Reply please.
Thanks!!! (and that was awsome by the way, nothing to improve on there!)

Incandescence -

Wow. Your prose is almost as amazing as your poetry. And considering that you wrote this an a drug-induced stage - by the way, don't do drugs - this is like, a masterpiece.
It's a little mature for me, but it's not like anyone demanded that I read it. I chose to. Anyways, on to the nit-picks.

I press the Deactivate button, and he explodes into a million particles in the air.

I don't like that last bit very much. Maybe you should just stop the sentence after 'particles'.

"It's okay"--her breath is rancid--"I drink too."

I'm not completely sure, but I think there should be a comma after 'okay'.

I can tell she wants to jump my bones. I let her anyway.

There are a couple things wrong with this: firstly, 'anyways' isn't a real word. It's okay to use it when just chatting, I guess, but not in actual literature. But maybe it's simply a matter of personal opinion. *shrugs*
And secondly: okay, so she wants to erm...'jump his bones'. *shudders* Any ways. You never say why he doesn't want her to, but you suggest that he isn't exactly thrilled with the idea in the next sentence. You dig so far?
I think you should add a something subtle that explains why he doesn't want her to do that, for example; he's already 'engaged' with someone else, or something like that.

told her it was pretty, she laughed.

You need to tie those two actions together with a word like 'and', so that it would be:
I told her it was pretty, and she laughed.

The glittering, evening sky hovered closely overhead as I jumped from my car and ran to the spot where we last kissed.

I don't think the comma after 'glittering' is wholly necessary. It kind of makes the sentence a bit awkward to read. But nice imagery.

Despite my will to remain unbreakable, I feel every muscle in my body release its tension causing small spasms, my slack jaw.

This kinda confused me. Maybe you should re-word it:
Despite my will to remain unbreakable, I feel every muscle in my body release its tension, causing small spasms.
Notice how I didn't include the 'slack jaw' bit...that's because I didn't understand it. >.<

I sit awake and I watch the world become monotone.

...promise me you'll be okay.

The first sentence; well, I think it needs to be re-worded to something like this:
I sit awake and watch the world become monotone.
As for the second sentence: I love it. It's striking and it's just the perfect ending for this kind of story.

Now that I've pointed out those little things, I can move onto some of the larger issues.

Is the narrator homosexual?
Oh god, that sounded very offensive. I have no problem with gays, but in this story I'm a little confused. It is a man he's fallen for, right? But a man that he needs machinery to communicate with?
However, I kind of like the way you made that unclear, because it leaves my mind open to all sorts of possibilities.

This also seemed a bit vague. He doesn't react very strongly to this woman's intrusion to his life, and in the beginning we have no idea where he is.
But as with the above issue, I like the way you've made this kind of mysterious. It makes me wonder, makes me think of possibilities.

Overall, I congratulate you on a pice well done.
My above comments are just, well, comments. I hope they weren't completely unhelpful.
Cheers,
Camille

I really like the way you wrote this, but it's a little too vague, especially toward the end. There are also a few parts that detract from the overall feel of the piece, but for the most part it was excellent. There are also a number of typos and little specific things that could use changing.

First of all, what the hell is a "cigarette-bent wrist?" I assume that it means he's smoking, but I still don't get it.

Personally, I would change the semicolon after "I don't know" right at the beginning with a period. Obviously, it's not wrong, but I just don't think semicolons belong in dialog. Nobody talks with semicolons.

The whole deactivate button thing was a little confusing (I thought it was a holodeck type deal), especially in combination with the fact that he goes from standing to driving without there being a car in between.

In the hotel room, it sounds like he goes into the bathroom to sleep. The pixellation in the mirror left me wondering about that deactivate button again (does it operate of mirrors or something?), as well whether or not it's actually a mirror or some sort of screen, or maybe he's just fucked up and can't really see right. The looking into the mirror thing is something that's generally retarded, but it really is necessary here, and I think you made it work pretty well.

After he meets the woman, he has a "flood of memories...[he] doesn't remember having." I'm assuming this is for effect, because I don't really see how that's possible in any conceivable way.

You might want to change "jump my bones" to something else, but I can't think of anything that would fit better with the style of the narrative, so that's sort of a useless suggestion.

When he starts looking for "the piece," I think you missed a "going" before "from pawn shop to pawn shop." "Less-classy" should be changed to "shadier" or something.

When he finds the woman in his room and gets up for the second day, you switch tenses from present to past, and then back again. You do this a couple of times in various places, so watch out for that.

All the talk of love with this strange woman who picked him up in a hotel seems rather odd to me, but that's the point, isn't it? By now it's obvious that this kid is seriously messed up on something. Perhaps he's been doing too much....love?

After he sleeps with Kaley the second time, there's a typo. "...felt the worst than I'd ever felt before." Either "worse than I'd ever felt before" or "worst I'd ever felt." That's also in past tense, by the way.

When he's talking to the clerk about renewing his reservations, "I would like" should probably be "I'd like," because no one ever talks like that unless they are a robot. You're missing an "away" a little down from there, too ("pull from her").

Skipping a whole lot of lines to the parts that I think actually need some work... When he's talking to the policeman, the vixens thing could stand to be cut out. Just say that the woman drugged him and robbed him. It doesn't fit that everything else is vague and unexplained, except for the fact that she's a vixen and this is specifically what they do. Also, the exclamation mark in that paragraph is really out of place and should not be there.

In order to make it all a little clearer, when he's going to store and realizes that time is almost up, change "point" to "date." It took me until just now to realize what you meant my "expiration point."

"I return to my car which I left at the city parking garage" could stand to be changed. It's kind of a bad sentence.

There's another typo where he's hitting the button; "present" for "presence."

The dialog with the hallucination of the woman isn't the best, because a lot of it isn't really any sort of thing that someone would actually say.

At the very end, "the night has proven a worthy opponent" shouldn't be there. Since when was he having any sort of conflict with the night? Also, it sounds really cheesy. You wrote cannot as can not, but I would change both instances there to can't.

Like I said, it was really good, and I liked the fact that there really wasn't much information given about anything at all, but of course it isn't perfect.

wonderful, I really must say! You definantly should continue that... I would love to see what happens next!

Damn Brad, that almost made me cry. I love it .

Do you have a book published yet?