Thank you all so much for the kind words and comments. I'll be sure to incorporate them shortly
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Originally Posted by adanac061 /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Good read.
Who's the lizard Queen?
ps. As i was reading , for some reason the voice in my head was like Marv from sin-city.
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The lizard queen is any old receptionist in an office building or something. I was trying to paint the picture of these holier than thou women who guard the entrance of these office buildings and think they are on top of the world just because they get to say "yes" or "no" to people to go in. Sort of like bouncers at a club.
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Originally Posted by redshifter /img/forum/go_quote.gif
nice story, and here is my critique:
i am confused about the narrator. is it the wakeful sleeper the narrator, or the writer? it is like the protagonist is telling his own story in the third person, using "he" instead of "i".
good attempts at humor, the "cereal monster" got a laugh out of me. did this actually happen to you? if so, i would write more about things like that, because you express what it feels like very well. i was less convinced about the alcoholic part.
i like how the story is willfully mysterious about the number "3", but unless you have a good payoff for the suspense of the first pages the reader feels let down. you do not have to explain everything, but a short story needs a punchier ending. is he in hell? is he delusional?
you could probably tighten up the prose--especially the descriptions--to improve the story's pace. in fact you could probably lose about a page.
good luck and keep writing.
-edit-
here is a short story i read a while ago that reminded me of your writing:
commcomm
this is the kind of punchy ending i was talking about. at first the story is strange and mysterious, then has a powerful emotional finale. the writer also uses spare descriptions, for effect and as a reflection of his narrator's character.
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The narrator is supposed to be a third person, though it shifts whenever the format is in italics to the protagonist. Both the narrator and the protagonist have to give the feeling that they are ridiculously sure of what is immediately going on, but that they can never be really sure of the nature of what is going on.
As for the alcoholic part, I was trying to subvert that stereotypical male alcoholic. He didn't really drink anything but water - I was trying to comment on how people often speak like that even though they weren't really that drunk just to seem tougher and more authentic. It could be cleaned up, maybe even removed.
And the mystery around the number 3, I was trying to portray a sense of the futility of trying to keep track of time. This happened to me a lot this term at university, where I would go to sleep and wake up at totally incongruous times with the rest of the world, and it completely throws you off. Also, time in the end is just a human construct, which I tried to note when he keeps flip-flopping between being late and being on time. This always happens to me - I think I'm late one minute, I leave, and then I realize I'm on time or even early, and then I'm actually late, or something along those lines. Do you have any suggestions for a punchier ending? I wanted the ending to be sort of self-reflexive and symptomatic of the narration - ie. dazed and confused.
The character is neither in hell nor delusional - he's just in a metropolis, though not living on the same wavelength as everyone else, which causes his interior monologue to replace society's monologue and causes his confusion with time.
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Originally Posted by spacecoyote /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Good point. For instance, the first two sentences that start out the fourth paragraph...
[size=small]"Luckily, his life didn’t require much. Like a nuclear reactor[1], he had trimmed his life[2] down to a self-sustaining, critical mass."[/size]
[size=small]If you remove [1] and edit [2] so as to read "existence" instead of "life", with the new sentence reading-[/size]
[size=small]"Luckily, his life didn’t require much[3], he had trimmed his existence down to a self-sustaining, critical mass."[/size]
[size=small][3] "much" what? ..."much maintenance", for example.[/size]
[size=small]-by doing this you would negate that whole fourth paragraph and give the reader more to think about. The phrase "critical mass" could mean different things to different people, especially those with a limited knowledge of nuclear physics. The "more is less" theory often applied to music is a good example of this. Jazz composer, band leader and pianist Count Basie often employed this effect when improvising. A single note placed here and there leaves all kinds of possibilities in that open space for the listener (or in your case, the reader) to imagine the spaces in between.[/size]
[size=small]Just a thought.[/size]
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Cool, thanks for that - it definitely reads better and allows the reader to interpret it in many different ways. Less is definitely more - I'll go over the story again.
