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Sat Jul 17, 2010 5:09 pm
CarnivorousDove says...



As AspiringAuthorA..M.:
I'm at a public library at the moment, so...

Okay, throughout your story your scenic descriptions fluctuate between quite mesmerizing to somewhat tell tell. But they're nothing that is hard to see and quickly adjust. :P

Here is one example of a very blunt description,


He pointed his blaster at a spider and pressed the trigger once, twice, before finally accepting that nothing of our equipment worked here. "Let's run to the river!" he shouted, grabbed my hand and we ran like hell through the grass, over the roofs of the squat spider-houses, and through the grass again. I turned only once, to see if the spiders were behind us. They sure were.


Also, that last phrase sounds a tad better without the "sure".

As for some of the dialogue, such as this for example:

"Probably the shuttle is dead as well."


It would be a lot easier to understand if the order of the words was changed. Something like this:

"The shuttle is probably dead too."

I'll briefly go into praise. :)

He sniffed to show his agreement. "I think they are vegetables."

"Then how do they fly, sir?"

"Maybe they turn sunlight into some sort of gas that fills up their cavities and keeps them afloat. Flight through photosynthesis. Oh damn."


Maybe it's just because I don't read nor watch very many Sc-Fi things, but I found that to be such a fantastic creation. You took the fact that plants need the sun to live and incorporated it into how, if they lived far from human destruction, they could evolve into mobile, yet stirctly limited, life forms.

Okay, onto being picky again. I found a very contradicting detail in Chapter Five (Attack)

First:

These small houses were round, flat, about three feet high and ten feet wide. There were at least two hundred of them, a regular city. A ghost town. They had stuff carved on their flat roofs.


I strained my neck and looked at the roofs of the nearest domes. The carvings on them were not identical, but all seemed to show stylized figures. Each of the figures consisted of a circle with eight beams coming from it.


If the roofs were shorter than her, why did she have to strain her neck? Unless you were meaning to convey taht she had to bend her neck down. In that case, it would be wise to add in that tiny detail. :)

Onto dialogue again:

"They are still working then?" I asked.

"Of course, they are powered by our body's bioelectricity."

"So this planet isn't interfering with our bioelectricity?"

"If it did, we'd be stone dead. Or at least very sick, or insane."

"They are moving!" I said.


The words I bolded would sound a lot cooler as contractions, as well as go with the urgency of the moment.

As for the spiders themselves, I didn't find them very threatening. Maybe if you had details like shelled inscets littering the site, you know, cracked flying insects, dried up worms, shredded, rotting fruits. You get the idea.

But- I do find them creepy here, even though the idea is somewhat comical at first.

One of them gingerly plopped into the water, and held on to the bank with its hind legs. It bobbed on the river surface, its front legs moving awkwardly.
Then another spider climbed on top of the first one and dropped into the water in front of it. The back legs of the second spider were locked with the front legs of the first spider!
Then a third spider climbed down, walked over its two floating comrades, and extended this spider bridge by one more spider.


Yes, it would be very creepy indeed to have cooperating arachnids coming after you accross a river. Oh yeah, since they aren't being dragged by the river's current, I'm guessing the water is calm.
  





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Fri Jul 23, 2010 3:55 pm
AspiringAuthorA..M. says...



*I confirm, that that weird user name guy was indeed me.* As you can see, my original account is up and running again. :)
"Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
-John 11:25-26
  





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Thu Aug 26, 2010 2:47 pm
napalmerski says...



Good feedback Aspiring, thanx. I really have to scatter some more biomass around the planet to make it more convincing. And to go over once more with the 'internal logic detector', to see when stuff happens in contradiction to previous stuff, hehe
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
  








Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
— John Barton