20170123 - The Seeds of Dissolution - Ch2 - Mandamon - 3014

[Mandamon]

Hello all,
Second chapter!
Agaon, this is in the Dissolutionverse series I write, but doesn't require any prior knowledge.

What I'm looking for:
Is the difference between Chapter 1 and 2 too jarring? Or does it pull you in?
Are you interested in both sam and Origon?
Does Sam's agoraphobia work? 
There's a lot of stuff here. Let me know of any worldbuilding confusion.

Thanks!

[rdpulfer]

- Would someone with agoraphobia feel light and feel when he realized he was outside? I would think that would cause instant panic.

- Having read the previous story, it's cool to see Origon again, especially intersecting with someone from our world.

- I like Origon and Sam's interaction, and the way Sam challenges him from time to time.

- There's a lot of world-building, but I like this setting and this character, so I'm definitely interested in seeing where this goes. 

[neongrey]

P.1

You've got some pretty odd sentence construction here; the second, eg, sort of goes in a pretty non sequitorial direction. I'm seeing a lot of weird repitition and contradiction pretty much all over the place. Light, and free, and his joints are locking and he's hitting the dirt and that just does not work.

I definitely feel like you're overdescribing; I just don't think this is very interesting, and so far the dialogue is pretty standard.

P.2

Yeah, my impression I got from just the first page was a pretty bog-standard 'knowledgable person assumes person who has stumbled into mysterious thing is aware of what they are doing' conversation, and this isn't deviating from the standard at all.

I also don't really feel like Sam's panic here is really coming through, in the slightest; it's not actually coming across as affecting what he's doing in any way. If it's something he can just push aside and talk around apparently calmly enough that it isn't even registering with this other person, then yeah, it's not very meaningful at all. I don't expect every person to react the same way to this sort of thing, but it feels like a cariacture to me here.

P.3

Yeah, this scene is still following the standard formula, and the wilful density required to continue assuming that Sam has any idea what's being talked about here is tremendous. If he doesn't care, yeah, that could possibly be interesting but as presented I really don't find it so.

p.4

as above

p.5

Cyrysi's behaving extremely inconsistently here; there's a wild waffle between behaving as though this information is assumed and explanations in aside and there's not a lot of consistency going on here.

This is honestly really tiring to read; it doesn't feel like an actual conversation between people in the slightest.

p.6

this is probably the best slice of conversation so far, but honestly it's so thoroughly undercut by the previous dialogue that I can't begin to care about what's going on here. The fact that we're still stuck in the land of Cyrysi continuing to act like Sam should have every idea what he's talking about, not picking up on that he doesn't, and Sam not communicating this isn't helping either.

P.7

Ah, now we're finally touching on this. I don't think it should take seven pages to get to this point, and I think this still doesn't scan as a conversation, just as obligatory-feeling exposition.

p.8

Yeah. No. Don't use 'schizophrenic' that way. Do not.

I think think that pretty much exhausted my patience with the chapter.

[kais]

It's a good world building chapter, but still lacks a major arc. I think if we dealt with Sam's reactions more, especially his agoraphobia, that would help, or if he had to bumble around some before meeting Majus, that would help, too. Right now its more of a 'look at this stuff isn't it neat' chapter, instead of a 'tension building early chapter working on hook'. I think you can get away with look around chapters later, once the reader is well into the book, but early they might dissuade continued reading.

 

As I go

- The epigraph: people are just leaving soil from all these worlds about? Intergalactic APHIS must be working overtime. 

- the Aunt martha stuff isn't really explored. I feel disconnected from Sam because I'm not getting a lot of his feelings. Also, Martha is pretty clearly dead and he should be reacting to that

- He felt light, free. Outside. It flitted through his mind as his heart raced. Sam’s joints locked and he flattened to the dirt like a squashed toad, trying to hold on, to keep from falling up into the sky. I need some transitions or something here. These two sentences are in complete disagreement.

- halfway through page two is when I start to feel engaged with this chapter. Might cut stuff before to get to this quicker

- first paragraph top of page three: the agoraphobia needs to come out a lot more. Still seems really mild and not really debilitating

- page four is slow. I think you could cut most of it and not lose any context

- page five: 'southern' is not a proper noun

- aunt Martha stuff is better the farther in we get, for sure

- The Majus really takes the agoraphobia thing in stride and offers a tidy solution. It feels convenient. I want Sam to really struggle

[neongrey]

7 hours ago, kaisa said:

- The Majus really takes the agoraphobia thing in stride and offers a tidy solution. It feels convenient. I want Sam to really struggle

 

What. Okay. I'm going back in, because if this is what it sounds, like, then I'm really mad here.

p.9

Okay, so we've spent the past eight pages hammering in that this guy does not care about anything to do with Sam, like, at all, except for this one point of urgency. So I already go into it having a hard time believing that now he's going to stop and patiently hold his hand through this.

Two, okay, you know, maybe Sam's agoraphobia is based off of a simple indoors/outdoors thing. It really doesn't feel like that from how it's been written though the rest of the chapter, and agoraphobia isn't exactly that simple in most cases, but ok, let's go with that.

This particular phrasing here, 'none could help him with one piece of information' is a strong tell to me that you do not suffer from this or a similar condition, that you do not have a serious condition which has not been much helped by therapy, and please do forgive me if I'm wrong. But the way this is framed does not strike me as being framed by someone who's been going through therapy for something like this at all. It especially doesn't strike me as coming from someone who's had a significant issue that's been resistant to treatment. 

Anxiety issues (of which agoraphobia would be one) are not an on/off thing in the slightest, it's not-- 'one piece of information' is wholly and entirely nonsensical. Therapy can have been not much help with getting him outdoors better, he might not have found a medication that works yet, he might have had meds but run out and not been able to get a refill and he's off them, if you need him to be basically untreated at this point there's lots of ways to swing it. But it's not an 'information' thing. It's also kind of a non sequitur to the previous sentence regardless. Information on what? Nothing about the previous sentence suggests anything that would follow from. If you mean information about the cause, that's probably not going to be the focus of the therapy, because the goal there would be to help him figure out how to cope.

I might be reading a bit too much into it, but the 'information' line here strikes me as coming from the cliche that 'knowing the cause' of a phobia is the big ~key~ to 'curing' it. Which is, of course, absolute complete bullpoop, trivializes people with phobias, and trivializes the treatment thereof. I hope my reading on this is wrong.

The way this is framed leaves me desperately afraid that his agoraphobia is going to have some sort of magical source and magically cured. I can only hope that I am wrong.

But all that aside: It feels outdoors to him and he's been reacting as if it's outdoors. His brain's snagged onto the notion of it being outside. He's really treatment resistant. You have not painted a picture where 'no actually it's indoors' strikes me as something that's going to be particularly effective.

If his anxiety is so easily treatable by telling himself he's indoors, then you've wholly invalidated everything stated about his disability up to this point.

p.10

And of course it is. I guess I should be thankful that it wasn't cured entirely, just neatly bundled up and set aside until the next time it's narratively convenient. But solving it even temporarily with just some pat reframing shows a really fundamental failure to understand the nature of an anxiety this deep.

This does not seem like a good start in terms of depiction to me; you're falling into ableist cliche (and that's just with the broad strokes, this sort of ableism is really baked into your phrasing too in some places). This work needs a sensitivity reader, and it needs one very very badly, and you need to follow their advice.

I really appreciate how you consistently crit my stuff even when you're not submitting, but if this is how this is being handled, I can't read further on this story, I can't. This was pretty upsetting on a personal level.

Edited January 25, 2017 by neongrey

[Mandamon]

12 hours ago, neongrey said:

I really appreciate how you consistently crit my stuff even when you're not submitting, but if this is how this is being handled, I can't read further on this story, I can't. This was pretty upsetting on a personal level.

@neongrey this is precisely why I'm submitting. I know this is a problem, and so I am getting reactions from readers. You've given a lot of good feedback here and in the above paragraph, which will help inform my writing. To your question, no, I do not suffer from this anxiety, which is exactly why I need help with getting it right. Hopefully I can get it better the next time around, and thus have a better story.

I've noticed you turn off and disengage from a lot of your critiques, refusing to read any further. If it's triggering something for you, then fine. However I get the feeling you turn off from a lot of critiques more because you disagree with what the writer wrote. If I'm wrong, please let me know. It feels a little disrespectful to me that you stop giving feedback on such a number of issues, including writing skill, abelism (as above), or simply because you have lost patience. If there is a specific reason you will not read something, please let us know on this forum, so we know what to expect from your critique.

Otherwise, I would love to have your continued feedback. It's one of the best ways I know of for writers to get better at writing a variety of characters and settings.

 

EDIT: I apologize for the above, based on some clarity from Kaisa's post below. I need to do some more research and rewrite this chapter. Does anyone have some resources they would recommend for researching anxiety, therapy, and agoraphobia?

Edited January 25, 2017 by Mandamon

[kais]

Woah. Okay okay, I'm going to step in here and thread hijack a bit (with apologies to Mandamon for it). And I'm going to talk about some things that may make people upset, or have gut reactions, and I want to ask you to just take a step back and breathe, and consider. I also want to be very clear here that I am not specifically talking about this thread or the conversation herein. I am discussing threads collectively, throughout my time here on RE. 

If you (I mean collectively you here) will recall, we had a blow up on the board not too terribly long ago, regarding poor representation in fiction, and @neongrey's response. If you will also recall, I stepped in and tried to explain her side, and was met with some resistance, and eventually understanding. So what you didn't see offscreen was me chatting with neon, about how valuable her contribution is here, and how important her voice is, and about critique tone and how we could manage to keep her here without censoring her voice.

After that, you may have noted that she began bowing out of crits at a certain point, (please correct me if I am misrepresenting you, @neongrey) when she was too upset, too angry, or the material was just downright too offensive to deal with. She is doing this because you, the board asked her to do so. 

Reading Excuses is a fantastic forum, with a tight family of writers, and we do great work together. However, there are no people of color here (unless they're lurking and if so hiiiiiii!) Most of the writers are cis-male.  So the feedback we all get on here is from a very, very limited POV, and serves to really reinforce the norm.

Neon and I are queer (and so my examples below are queer, but please insert disability, race, ethnicity, etc in place as needed). Our flavors may differ but as many of you have noted, we tend to be much more vocal about certain forms of representation on here. We are offering windows into worlds many of you do not work in, and, as writers, when these windows are given we should always take a look through. Sometimes those windows come with anger. A lot of times those windows come with anger. They come with anger because cis, het, white authors come to this world and argue with us about our worldview. As if it isn't valid. As if we have to defend how we see the world, because it isn't how they see the world.

Now I want you to imagine that you had to do this (we're all writers, we have good imaginations). Now imagine you had to do this every day. Imagine you want to participate in forums for writing, but every other writer on there is queer, and they don't have any real background in cis het world, and they always write characters that need correcting. And they expect you to do that correcting because hey, you are the one that came to the forum, so instead of doing their own research, they just want you to explain it to them.

Some of us are happy to do that. Some of us are not. But assuming that we have to do it because we are a part of a group isn't okay. Minorities don't owe the world anything, especially the writing world that has for too long diminished their voices. If you write problematic characters (and we ALL do), it is YOUR job to either A) take the critique that is given and fix it or B.) do the work ahead of time so these problems don't occur. You do not get to say you don't like how a critique is delivered, and then get mad when you aren't getting the critiques you want. 

What I'm trying to point out is this: Neon's voice is valuable here. A lot of you don't seem to realize just how valuable that is, because she doesn't deliver her points as gently as I do. You get direct reactions from her and as a writer, that is gold. Please value those critiques, and her attempts to deliver them. She is trying her best to keep her responses palatable, but on the other end, we have to be open to actually hearing what she is saying, and not demanding she do more, especially when the forum has already smacked her hands once. 

You can't have it both ways, RE. That, right there, is the definition of privilege. 

[Mandamon]

25 minutes ago, kaisa said:

Reading Excuses is a fantastic forum, with a tight family of writers, and we do great work together. However, there are no people of color here (unless they're lurking and if so hiiiiiii!) Most of the writers are cis-male.  So the feedback we all get on here is from a very, very limited POV, and serves to really reinforce the norm.

@kaisa I am in agreement with you, and definitely not trying to censor @neongrey. I'm obviously going to need to learn more about this and work on this chapter, and on this issue in the book as a whole. I apologize for the above post--my main point was that I would ask Neon to at least try to give a critique on my next version of this and see if I am getting better at representing anxiety correctly.

[neongrey]

I don't really have a diplomatic response here so in lieu of that I'm going to be really brief. If I bow out on a submission early, it's usually going to be prose or dialogue issues compunded with something else; it's never going to be one or the other. In this case, initially, it was the critical dialogue problems I was discussing followed by the really, grossly uncalled-for usage of 'schizophrenic' as a descriptor for a fabric print (not that 'blind and mad' was much better).

That said, I'd like you to take a look at the timestamps on my post, specifically the distance in time between posting and last edit. They're about five hours apart; I'm not exaggerating when I say that this ruined my evening, and today's not looking great either. I went back in when I saw @kaisa's comments because it kind of left me with the impression that this stuff probably pass without much further comment and after finishing this off, I felt it was really important that it not be let go. But I am in rough shape right now after that.

My recommendation is, once again, to hire a sensitivity reader.

Edited January 25, 2017 by neongrey

[Mandamon]

@neongrey very sorry to hear that. I certainly don't intend anything I write to ruin anyone's evening. Goes to show how much I need to improve.

[neongrey]

I'm not big into spoon theory (for frankly silly reasons, so) but please realize that what you're needing on this is something I really don't have the spoons to go particularly in-depth with. I note this stuff when I see it because in some cases there's pretty much no one else, but I especially don't take being blindsided by this sort of thing well. I might, with no promises, be able to look at this again later on; if nothing else I am pretty much laser-focused for the issue here (to wit, social anxiety that has not responded well to treatment, which is a pretty close cousin of what you're after here) but it's pretty draining for me. There's readers out there who want to see people with similar issues to themselves but for me on this particular issue, it's not a pleasant experience. There's a very valid reading of Lasila as authorial power fantasy in a lot of ways...

My critical lens here is heavily based on style because that's really how I prefer to interrogate works and it's where I personally feel a lot of problems are sourced (and it's a form of crit that I'm frankly desperate to receive); I'm less comfortable using my marginalizations as my primary vector of critique. I can do it, but I'm really not cut out for it.

[Mandamon]

@neongrey thanks for explaining! I feel like I've learned a lot just today. I'm planning to put warnings on chapters in the future that deal more with the anxiety portion. In the meantime, @kaisa has helped me out with a sensitivity reader.

[neongrey]

Yeah, I may need to pass on those (though I suggest that if the problem has been as severely life-affecting as it evidently has been in Sam's life thus far, it's something that's likely gonna to be baked into nearly his every action). Reading's one thing but digging deep for crit about this sort of thing is really taxing. (and skimming over it is of course not an option for crit because any crit that actively skips interstitial slices of text is a fundamentally failed critique; it's discarding context for the following text)

FWIW, if you want to see how I do it, not as a this-is-the-only-way-to-do-it sort of thing, ofc, it's from an external perspective for now but look closely at how I do the character of  Iluya. There's a valid reading that would suggest there's a lot of bad things wouldn't happen if she could work herself up to meeting more people...

Edited January 27, 2017 by neongrey