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Last edited by napalmerski on Sat Nov 06, 2010 5:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
she got a dazed impression of a whirling chaos in which steel flashed and hacked, arms tossed, snarling faces appeared and vanished, and straining bodies collided, rebounded, locked and mingled in a devil's dance of madness.
Robert Howard




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Harry and Eldern stole stealthily through the shadows, without speaking.

When you are stealing through shadows, it's a given that you are being stealthy and silent. Redundancies not only bog down the flow of your prose, but can also irritate your readers.

Harry felt again with self-conscious unease his girl's heart hammering inside his fragile frame. Maybe I get to die from a heart-attack in every life, he scowled to himself.

His thought isn't very clear or easy to understand. It would be clearer if your got rid of his thought and replaced it with something like: "He could just see himself dying of a heart attack one uneventful day."

They passed quickly through the stretch of grassland dotted with the occasional patch of bushes, whom dusk had robbed of their outlines

"Whom" really strikes me as a strange word to use here. Patches are not people.

the first ruts and grooves tried to catch his feet.

Whose feet? Harry's or Eldern's?

Harry darted a look over his shoulder before the trees would cut off blocked the plain from his sight.

Try being more concise; it helps keeps the flow of your writing up to speed. If one word would work as well or better than two or more, use the one word. Also, watch your verb tenses.

He shivered slightly and found out discovered/realized that he felt a certain nausea combined with an aftertaste of Beramaja. Well - he needed the alcohol to think properly, and so this little body will would just have to get used to it.

Who is "he"?

The beams of the young moon outlined it from one side. Thick sturdy roots sank into the ground like a wreath around its base.

I suggest merging these two sentences to vary the sentence structure. Right now, you have a couple of sentences with the same structure, and it makes the flow choppy.

Also, "it's" means "it is" while "its" is the possessive form of "it".

Using his knife, Eldern deftly dug out a shallow, oblong ditch, piling the uprooted tufts of dead grass and clumps of earth all along its perimeter. As soon as Eldern finished, he motioned to Harry to lie down into the fresh soil. Harry gingerly lay down on his back, his legs sticking out (Of what?). Eldern backed away silently.

Was that it? Harry wondered. Apparently. So now he must meet the great Belir...

** ** **

Harry closed his eyes and tried to fall asleep, but he was very, very unnerved. Trepidation edged into every nook and cranny of the nerves and sinews filling up his spindly girlish limbs his spindly, girlish body.

Long, rambling sentences make for difficult reading and unclear meanings.

He thought of his flat back in his previous life, of his brown sofa, on which he had re-learned to loll aimlessly in the last couple of years. He though of his buddies and he thought of tobacco. He was trying to remember that taste of the first hit of a freshly lit cigarette, when clandestinely (Such a large word out of nowhere disrupts the flow. Also, it is improperly used.) his subconsciousness utilized this dear memory, and a few seconds later the scene of a man smoking a cigarette did indeed appeared in his inner gaze (He can see his insides?).


The cigarette appeared to taste fantastically, and the delicate sound of burning plant and paper combined with the wistful beauty of a milky cloud fed by the man's luxurious exhalations. (Way too long and rambling a sentence.) His (Whose?) glass of golden beer stood on a cracked plastic counter with imitation marble veins, and golden oldies played softly in the background.


Then it turned out that he wasn't in a normal bar, but in a dollhouse. It was a shadowy and dusty dollhouse, with dusty plastic furniture. Two plastic dolls of women sat immobile in in the kitchen. A plastic pantry stood with it's door open and small plastic pies waited for someone to turn a gay plastic switch.

Too much "plastic" in one paragraph.

Outside the dollhouse, a huge cat stalked. Its green eyes glowed like stoplights. He heard honking and smelled exhaust gasses. It wasn't really a giant cat: it was a bus passing below his flat's window.


Harry dreamt of closing he closed the window of the dollhouse, and sat down on its pink couch to watch some TV. The screen of the light green box light up, and a man's face with a white beard appeared on the screen. He looked into Harry's eyes. Suddenly, Harry remembered that he was asleep.

Watch your tenses and comma placement.

"You are asleep, yes!"

Why the exclamation point?

Harry thought he felt for a second the pressure of the ground beneath his sleeping body, yet much more real for him was the scene here, inside his dream. He felt dim apprehension. His thoughts swirled in a rather unorganized manner. He remembered that he had had a cigarette just now, but it was nowhere to be found.

Again, vary your sentence structure a bit. Right now, the flow in this paragraph is very choppy.

Harry noticed, that he was suddenly dressed in a jogging gear.

Even asleep, Harry tried to not to fall into the submissive role of the receiving end of one-way questioning.

Way too wordy.

The face on the TV screen glared at Harry.

TVs have no faces.

"Well," he hesitantly began, "it sounds more like a title, than a name. I don't know why..."

Having characters just know things is a cop out. I suggest having all the characters who mention Belir as calling him "the great Belir" and for Belir to respond to Harry's question with something like, "Is the great Belir not good enough for you?" Then it would make more sense for Harry to get the feeling that Belir is more a title than a name.

"You are interesting, Harry. I do have a name, a real name, and you are the first one to ever ask it. It is..." the face waited paused dramatically for a beat, "So-krath-us!"

So much cliche in such a small paragraph. X_x The "you are (insert adjective), (main character's name)," the main character being the first ever to ask, and the dramatic pause (though that's a bit more forgivable since it could be a character trait)...

The room's furniture and walls moved and twirled like images in a mist (There are images in mist?). The dream body of the man Harry vibrated in an abrupt attack of sudden mirth.

Last sentence is way too wordy and obscure in its meaning. "Harry's dream body shook with sudden laughter," is so much easier to understand.

"Sokra-what?" he asked and felt the floor of the room heave. "Your name sounds like Socrates.


The TV in front of Harry suddenly abruptly grew and became twice higher than the height the walls of the house had been just an instant ago.

This was all a little bit too much beyond (beyond what?).

Peaks melted into furrows, depressions widened and deepened, patches of wood sprouted in significant certain places and disappeared in others, and soon the giant face of Socrates was looking back at him.

"You must not lose attention Harry," he croaked benevolently (How do you croak benevolently? O_o), "or we will lose each other here."

Harry looked at the mountain with a thin smile. "I come from the same world as you, man."

What is with the "man"? It comes out of nowhere.

The mountain changed fluidly, what was a portrait made up of mighty jagged battlement of coruscating snowy peaks, crumpled and smoothed out and became a chain of green hills covered with picturesque meadows and unimpressive groves.

Another long and rambling sentence whose meaning has been obfuscated. And since when do mountains or battlements emit light?

"Yes, yes! The cave! The shadows!" boomed Socrates. "But how is this possible?

"Oh yes, more than two thousand, I think.


Harry sipped again from his never ending cocktail and sucked at his cigarette, which he was sure was had been a Camel just a while ago, but was now had turned into a fragrant Marlboro.

"I am afraid I cannot do much to help you out of your confusion, Harry," said Socrates.


"A solar powered Socrates?"

XD

"Yes, by chance an Arjanti hunter slept under this tree, and for some reason this enabled me to communicated with him as he slept.

Vague explanations are vague. I would think Socrates would have at least a few theories on why he was able to communicate with the hunter.

"I contemplate. I think. I conduct my intellectual research. And in return for helping these primitives, I get fresh data."

Realistically, would Socrates use the word "data"? The word is Latin in origin, not Greek. There's a lot of terms Socrates is using that strike me as far too modern, come to think of it.

"Harry, you must let me enter your thoughts," boomed the voice. "I must see all that has come to pass while I have slept, and see how I can help you, if there is any way to help you."

Very wordy and redundant the last sentence is. Try rephrasing it more concisely.

Suddenly he was already in the lake in front of the house, descending, sinking into milky green, with the light above him diminishing progressively, until he reached a dark murky depth with hints of slimy organic things...

"Slimy organic things" feels very awkward. I can't think of any slimy substances that aren't organic, and "things" is a very vague word. What sort of things? Are they creatures? Plants? Unknown structures?

Harry was lying on a hard sofa, while Socrates was sitting sat on a wooden Victorian chair, dressed in old fashioned tweeds. Harry found himself to be in a red v-neck sweater and slacks held by suspenders. Sigmund Socrates and his patient. He looked on with hurt indignation.

Tense shift. Also, there's no need to create a word form when there is already one in existence.

"Never mind. It doesn't matter now, Harry. Thank you for this astounding new information. I feel already, that I will have to contemplate it for many months, before I can fully assimilate it."

This rebound of their tribe is a mystery. I must think about this.

Didn't the decimation happen in ancient times?

"I'm sorry to say, that, for all my sympathies for the Arjanti, they are still uneducated savages."

It is my suspicion, that they helped in the past, just to make certain that all the tribes on this peninsula are equally weak.

I almost cannot bear letting you go Harry. Why don't you do the following - upon waking, carefully break off a bough from the Shogu tree, and put it into a gourd of water. Let it sprout roots, then plant it in soil.

Strange, that, in his desperate dreaming below a tree worshiped by the natives, he would meet another soul from his own world.


Socrates and the whole scene melted away. Harry again felt the ground beneath his body. Cool night air caressed his cheeks. He opened his eyes. Eldern was crouching near by. Harry moved a leg experimentally. Yes, he had returned.

Lots of short sentences with the same structure make for very choppy reading. Try combining some of the sentences and varying their structure.

Overall, learn how to punctuate properly. There were a lot of punctuation errors, most of which I didn't point out simply because if I had, it would take me even longer to finish this critique, and I've already spent four hours doing this much. Another thing you need to watch is your spelling. Some of them were silly mistakes that I'm sure you would catch if you proofread your work more carefully. Others, especially the it's/its and then/than, are basic grammar -- review the difference. In addition, you misused a number of words; dictionaries exist and contain usage examples for a reason.

Basic writing skills aside, in general, you had a lot of unnecessary words that bloated the prose and hindered the flow. Your descriptions also tended to rely too heavily on adverbs and strings of adjectives, and yet, in spite of the amount of space you devote to them, your descriptions often wound up quite vague and unclear. I pointed out the most egregious examples.

In addition, the dialogue was very inconsistent. One moment, your characters are talking in a stilted, formal manner; the next, they're using slang, contractions, and other informalities. Pick one way for each character and stick with it, please. Also, were you trying to make Socrates sound super intelligent? If you were, it didn't work. Cut down on the "intelligent" words and just get his point across as clearly as possible. Socrates was a master communicator; his dialogue should reflect this.

Nest time you post something this long for critique, I suggest breaking it up into several parts; that way, it's more manageable to give an in-depth critique, people will be more willing to look at your work, and so you'll recieve more feedback.
Secretly a Kyllorac, sometimes a Murtle.
There are no chickens in Hyrule.
Princessence: A LMS Project
WRFF | KotGR




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Last edited by napalmerski on Sat Nov 06, 2010 5:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
she got a dazed impression of a whirling chaos in which steel flashed and hacked, arms tossed, snarling faces appeared and vanished, and straining bodies collided, rebounded, locked and mingled in a devil's dance of madness.
Robert Howard




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Gender None specified
Points 72525
Reviews 1220
Once you picked up speed in seeing the mistakes riddling the narrative, I think you kinda bulldozed some things which could have been given the benefit of doubt. Like what glows inside a dream and how a Socrates speaks after being reincarnated some centuries ago in an alien tribal world. (or, how much we really do know about him. This one here is a jazzed up version of Nietzche's fantasies concerning him)

There were a number of things I gave the benefit of doubt because it was a dream sequence; those items I pointed out were those elements that stuck out as particularly jarring. With the glowing mountains, for example, aside from "coruscating" being a word that is often misused, everything else was described as being very much the way they are in real life. Now, if it was mentioned that everything else was also slightly unusual (say, the trees all had purple leaves), then a glowing mountain wouldn't feel as out of place. Also, with the images in mist bit, normal mist doesn't contain clear images, so comparing something to the images found in mist is difficult to visualize.

As for Socrates' speech pattern, aside from being inconsistent, it's very pseudo-intellectual. To put it bluntly, he talks like a person who thinks he's smart but, in reality, isn't, and to someone who knows what he's talking about, he sounds like a pretentious idiot. This impression runs counter to what contemporary accounts we have of Socrates' life.

On a side note, you might consider including a brief overview of the Orphic mysteries so that those not familiar with them won't be put off by the reference.

And it was quite my fault to not spell out in the beginning, that Harry is reincarnated in a girl's body.

I don't believe it needs clarifying for that was obvious to me, at least.

P.S. the mechanics of the subconscious processes, especially when dreaming or falling asleep, are clandestine. Otherwise there would be no wall between the conscious and subconscious, otherwise there would be no defencive mechanisms, which try to hide, to deceive, against which psychoanalytical techniques are employed

Regardless, throwing the word "clandestine" into the narrative when there are no other such words incorporated throughout causes the word to stick out like a sore thumb. There are other more common words with the same connotations that could have been used to the same effect in that context.

And as a person who is acutely aware of their subconscious, I hold little but disdain for psychoanalysis in general. While the concepts are certainly fascinating and can be applied in stories to great effect, I find their application in real life to be questionable at best.
Secretly a Kyllorac, sometimes a Murtle.
There are no chickens in Hyrule.
Princessence: A LMS Project
WRFF | KotGR



If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.
— Mo Willems