This was a long time coming. I started a new story, and I think Naz got jealous and up and left my mind for a while to sulk. But he came back after a couple weeks, which I thank him profusely for. I missed him.
As usual, please don't nitpick this story while reviewing. What I want from reviews are comments and suggestions that will help my overall writing and this story.
Also, as usual, note that these installments are not chapters, so don't treat them as such. They are parts: chunks of writing that I post randomly whenever I need encouragement or have 'enough'.
Enjoy Patchworld 6!
The box was thin, cheap wood, with a rough strip along the side where matches were supposed to be stricken. It had warped a little, felt arched and cool under Naz’s fingers. He turned it over in his hands a couple of times before half-whispering, “Catch,” and throwing the matches across the room, hitting Alden’s shoulder.
It was too light to do any harm, but Alden looked slightly irritated as he picked it up from the ground where it had fallen. “Geez. Somebody’s nervous.”
“What?” Naz tucked a strand of hair behind his ear. “No.”
Alden looked at him skeptically. “Yes.” He paused, sliding the drawer of the matchbox in and out so it made shuffling noises that made Naz wince. Alden rolled his eyes. “He’s not going to wake up,” he said. “Remember? He’s like you. Kid’s not going to move for another couple of hours. At least.” fill in- there is a tiny crumpled kid sleeping right next to the bag Naz took matches from. Just letting you know.
Naz nodded. “I know.”
“Then loosen up. I’d rather not be pelted by rare important supplies.” Alden took a match from the box, holding it between two fingers like it was a cigarette.
He was so grown up, Naz thought. Holding matches like cigarettes. And everything.
Even I wouldn’t hold matches like that. And I’m...older.
“Hey, stop wincing.” Alden struck it and moved to let the flame catch on the pine needles. It promptly died out, and he scowled. Pulled out another. “ Get over here, I can’t get the hang of this.”
“Yeah…” Naz smiled. Some things, he could help with.
But Alden’s proceeding, “I don’t want to waste any more of these,” made the smile droop.
“Loosen up,” He said, picking himself off the ground and padding over to the not-yet fire.
Alden grinned ruefully. “Yeah… whatever.”
Naz took the matchbox and took a match from it’s sliding drawer. He held it between his thumb and forefinger, his nails almost touching the red tip. “Okay, you want to start it like this. I don’t want it to splinter when I strike it.” When Alden nodded to show he understood, he went on. “So then,” he said, moving the match to the rough edge of the box, “ You want to strike away from yourself.”
“Because you don’t want to light your hair on fire,” Alden said, mock serious, flicking Naz’s hair
in front of his face so it covered his eyes.
“Yes. Exactly that,” said Naz solemnly, muffling a giggle. “Because my hair is a haystack. And I need to feed your horses with it. But anyway,” He ran the match across the edge of the box lightly. “When you strike it, you want to move your fingers away from the red part, because it’ll burn you if you don’t.” He struck the match, and his fingers ran down to the pale end of it before the flame caught up to them. “And then you want to get it straight into the pine needles before it-”
Alden interrupted him. “I’ve got it now. I have done this for, you know, two weeks.”
Naz laughed openly at that one, looking into fire that had already begun crawling through the wooden structure and sending out sparks. Like upside down snow. “Yes, but who’s done it for three years? Minus two weeks? Plus now?”
Alden shrugged, half listening, as he too gazed into the face of the newborn heat. “Everyone’s going to be awake soon.”
Oh. “I’ll go and tap them.” Naz started to get up, but paused when Alden shook his head slowly, still staring at the fire. “No, that’s okay. They wake up on their own.”
Naz frowned. Another disruption. It always scared him, the changes that could happen in such a short period of time.
He pressed his mouth together, and persisted. “Well, I’m still tapping them. ”
Alden shrugged again. He didn’t mind. “Yeah, suit yourself. They’ll be glad to see you, anyway. Can’t hurt.” He jabbed a stick in the pyramid, collapsing it into itself.
“You’re right. It can’t.”
“Yep.”
It wasn’t convincing when he tapped Phoebe, because her eyes flew open at the first touch and she began to talk fast, much faster than when she was actually just-awake.
“You’re back! Naz, you’re a lot better at making eggs than Alden. He mixes them all up.”
Naz ruffled her hair, which was blond like his, but paler. “Hey, Bird. I missed you too. But eggs that are scrambled aren’t that bad, you know. The yellow and white are more friendly with each other then my eggs.”
“If they’re happy eggs,” mumbled Phoebe, “then why do they taste so terrible?”
“Because happiness is slimy.” And Naz stuck out his tongue and, before she could duck away, he licked her face from chin to forehead. “See? Happy.”
The little girl squealed and bundled under her grey-green blanket. “Eeewwww…Na-az… ”
Naz sat on her. “Ok, if you help me wake everybody up you can have some angry eggs straight from me.”
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125,008 Literary Works • 672,830 Reviews
Alright, let me start out with a bit of a disclaimer. I'm not complaining about your grammar. These aren't nitpicks. They don't matter. What I am going to complain about is your storytelling, how well I can understand your prose, and characters. A'right, darling?
Let's get to it.
Let me give you a quick little bit of advice about your prose: If you have a paragraph this long devoted to a matchbox then you're doing it wrong. Just call it a matchbox. Which is what your describing. Just don't get it confused with a matchbook, (which is something I do too much) those are the little flip open things of matches where the striker strips are smaller and they don't contain too many matches.
And you can use the argument they don't know what it is, but in reality, they should. It's a box full of matches. 1+1=2 right?
This line of dialogue confuses me, no part of this action feels nervous to me. This feels like a pretty average thing to do. Which is where another major problem with your part/chapter/thing comes into play. There's no why. Why is this happening? Because story. What bearing does this have on anything going on? Because story
This. Chapter. Is. Filler.
Filler is bad. Why do we need your characters to do anything that happens in P-6? We don't.
If your story needs padding, you probably should rethink it, now shouldn't you?
Now, I'm going to use the example of an outliners work:
Bob kills dragon.
>Bob needs [insert magical device here] to kill dragon.
> [Magical device] is being guarded by rabid hobbits.
> Rabid hobits foreshadowing.
> How do you defeat rabid hobbits? Rabies shots.
> Bob gets rabies shots for his dog, and uses one on dog.
>>Dog gets rabies.
This is just a progression of things that need to happen to get to an ultimate goal. There is no difficulty there, just take one or two of the things that need to happen to get from point (A) to point (B) and write a part/chapter/thing getting those two things accomplished. That's an easy way to get what's called a sense of progression which is absolutely necessary to make readers interested in finishing your book.
Alright, next point.
This is so vague. Why do the sounds make Naz wince? There are sounds that do that to people (claws on a chalkboard) but you don't offer any sort of comparison or anything logical that make me believe that the sound is making Naz wince.
What does that mean? I've read this line through a couple of times and it still doesn't make much sense.
Alden holds matches in the same way I hold pretzels. I don't think it looks cool or anything, it's just the way I hold them. Why is this such a big deal?
This is redundant. He pressed his mouth(?) together. I know I said no grammar nitpicks but this is a bit of a problem. This image is of two mouths being pressed together. Lips would create a more reasonable picture. And then he says something about tapping them, which is annoying because he just pressed his lips together which to me usually indicates someone shutting their mouth out of frustration.
This story is...
a mess.
You try so hard to make me care about these people but it just falls flat because they don't care about what's going on. There's no emotion, it's like watching a bad actor on paper.
So if that was the point of the chapter than it failed.
And then there's the fact that I don't come out of it thinking anything has happened.
And if comments on your other works are any indication, this review is for naught, you take advice about as well as Zoe Alexander from the X Factor! I've just wasted a half hour of my time.
Time I could have used to do something with my life! GAH! MY NAME IS LUIS LANGLEY THE THIRD AFTER MY FATHER, LUIS LANGLEY THE THIRD. SO THAT MAKES ME LUIS LANGLEY THE THIRD JR.
[This little conclusion bit wasn't actually too serious at the end. Just thought I'd make sure that was clear. Yep.]
Well, thanks anyway. Glad you could take the time to criticize(and you must have taken a LOT of time)!
I hope it helped
I hope it helped
Actually, while it was helpful, it made me feel really bad. Which is kind of bad. Maybe try saying something positive once in a while??
Hello.
Haven't read previous parts. Just going off what I see here.
To start, here is a suggestion for your writing as a whole that deals with your syntax: you repeat yourself a lot. When you use the same word in very close proximity, you rob yourself of opportunities to craft vivid images that make your story much stronger. Lines like "made shuffling noises that made Naz wince" throw me right out of the story, and you have a few places where words are very close together. If you start catching the repetition and changing it, your descriptions get much better and your skill as a whole improves.
Past that.
This conversation doesn't feel like it has much of a point. Yes, it shows that Naz has certain skill that Alden doesn't, but it seems unnecessarily drawn out for what it is. Part of this is because you have talking heads that need fixing, but part of this is simply because you're not keeping up tension.
Even if you did fix the talking heads and made the characters relatable, weaving in emotion and a setting and a narrator reflecting more on what's being said instead of simply bouncing from action to speech to action to maybe a tiny little bit of narration, you still have the issue that there is absolutely no tension.
I'm not getting any sense of a stake in this situation. What happens if they don't get the fire going? What happens if they run out of matches? The way this story treats it, absolutely nothing will simply because characters aren't worried about anything. The narrative doesn't give us any consequences to their actions, which should be consistent throughout all parts of a story. You can't just think that once we've hit part 6 that the tension can go away. It needs to be present throughout the whole story, from beginning to end, slowly mounting the later in the story we are. Unlike this, where there is absolutely 0.
Overall, give a point to this whole scene. If it doesn't progress the plot, reveal character, or up the tension, it doesn't belong in the story at all.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.
~Rosey
Hi, steampowered here for a review!
First of all, I enjoyed reading this. It’s really well-written, and I certainly couldn’t see any real problems with it. Can I also say that these parts are also a really good length – they’re long enough for me to be able to get back into the story world, as it were, but they’re short enough to make reading and reviewing easy. Since there’s very little wrong with this extract, it’s going to be difficult to not nitpick, but I’ll try and give you some overall feedback.
I think you’ve done a really good job of introducing the characters and building up their relationships, but the story’s somewhat lacking in the actual worldbuilding. In one of your comments to a review I did on an earlier Patchworld part you described a really fascinating-sounding world – why not add some more detail into the story? Even if you don’t want to make it too obvious, it would be nice to know a bit more (or at least hint) about this dystopia labyrinth city. Also, if you give some indication of who these kids are hiding from (I’m assuming they’re hiding anyway…) it might create more conflict and excitement, as well as satisfying the reader more. Just a thought, obviously.
This Phoebe – you’ve barely mentioned her at all so far (she was mentioned very briefly in an earlier part) and yet the way you introduce her, it seems like you’re almost expecting the reader to know quite a bit about her. Naz and Alden should probably talk about her a bit more in conversation (so that by the time she’s introduced the reader immediately thinks “Oh, so this is Phoebe”) or you could introduce her by perhaps having Naz approach the sleeping girl under the blanket, and then call her by her name, so it’s not assuming the reader will remember a minor character who was only mentioned briefly. Again, this is just a thought. Hopefully it makes sense!
I don’t quite understand this, I’m afraid. Is it a reference to something? If so, what are the “horses”? Or is it just a phrase? If the latter, maybe you could make it clear it’s a figure of speech – it feels like he’s referring to something here.
Other than that there isn’t really much else to critique. I really liked it, and I can imagine the scene really clearly. Naz is also very likeable – in fact, all the characters are likeable, and they’re very distinct from each other in terms of personality. Hopefully this review was helpful, and I’m eagerly anticipating the next instalment!
I know about the world building...it's killing me. I'm pretty sure next installment will not take place in a stuffy little boiler-room turned den, though, so watch out!
remember how I said at the beginning that Naz left me because he was sulking? He really did. And I needed to get into the story in as comfortable a place as I could so he would feel more inclined to work with me.
God, I'm talking about him like he's...real and stuff. But seriously, cross my heart, that's what happened. I'll go back and fix it later though, thanks for pointing it out!
the horses thing was a line I really liked, so I kept it, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to remove it sooner or later. Of course horses don't exactly exist anymore, but Alden tells stories and knows a lot, so I'm going to make that come into focus soon enough. there are figurative quotations around 'horses' because Naz has never actually seen a horse, does not know what they are, but he's remembering something that Alden had mentioned about hay and horses, and decided to speak on that(vague, I know...I should really cut that out, but the line was really cute...)
thanks for reading!