neongrey

I'm out.

No, you've been blocked ever since you decided that a commentary on my work was a great place for you to spew MRA talking points, and that hasn't changed. When that died off I was content to leave it at that, but you're at the point of actually causing outright harm to people beside myself, so I'm not at all interested in letting that noxious behaviour continue. This is a frankly bonkers conclusion to leap to. No, my sources on this aren't German-owned newspapers-- they're not newspapers at all. That's downright monstrous. The Center for Research on Prejudice at the University of Warsaw will be glad to hear that from you because their studies have been showing literally the opposite. They're refugees. They wanted to stay home, but couldn't, and turning them away causes nothing but more deaths. Problems at the societal level are the responsibility of a society. Individual action is a different matter entirely. I mean your premise here is based on the fundamentally islamophobic notion that Muslims are responsible for a majority (or even significant proportion) of terrorist attacks. And the statistics don't bear that out-- not worldwide, not in the US, not in the EU. And then the question is straight-up both intellectually dishonest and islamohobic, because it's outright taken as given that terrorist action is a function of an Islamic society. What are you basing that on? You, and I, and everyone else are responsible for the actions of racists because racism (and sexism, and ableism, and all of that) is baked into our societies, because racists have a habit of ruining things for everybody. On a deep, deep societal level.

It's really very disingenuous to pretend there's equivalence between people who have been systemically dehumanized expressing frustration in a frankly inappropriate way and actual, demonstrated acts of systemic violence. Do you really, truly believe that those statements should be given equal weight warrant systemic police violence, that they warrant the murders by police that go unpunished? And really, even that one, single article you're locating, even that isn't calling for people to be killed. I cannot say that for white supremacists and neo-nazis. And let's get something straight here. You're acting as if your being from Poland absolves you of all aspects of white privelege. That Poland has in no way engaged in any systemic oppression of any other people. Poland is a country with a rising tide of anti-semitism (despite having very few Jews), growing islamophobia (despiet having even fewer Muslims than Jews), that recently refused all refugees during a time of humanitarian crisis, and indeed this past fall recently came very close to criminalizing miscarriage. You're very desperately trying to reach for 'but I haven't done anything wrong' but the thing is, this isn't about what any individual has done, it's about what we as a society are doing. You don't get to opt out of that, and saying you have no responsibility fundamentally ignores what a society is. Society empowers white supremacy, and it's empowering neo-nazis, and it's empowering these people who can and do act on their white supremacist beliefs. Sitting on our hands and drawing false equivalences between the people who are doing harm and the people they want to harm only enables them to continue to do harm. It's gross-- it's blaming people who have been hurt for being hurt. My Gigi, a Pole, fought at Stalingrad to help try to stop them the first time. My Pink Baba, a Pole, machine gunned Nazis who were prowling around her property, before she ended up packing up the family and fleeing. I wouldn't be here without both of them doing those things, and I've always been proud of my family and where I came from. You make me ashamed of that heritage. You genuinely repulse me on a moral level, and I'd say that you should be ashamed of yourself, but I don't think you're capable of that. So did you actually have something you wanted to contribute, or did you just want to glibly invalidate a discussion that legitimately involves modern white supremacy and neo-nazis?

Yeah, Jim Frenkel (the known harasser) was fired a couple years back-- this is a little bit dicey because his behaviour was well known long before he actually got canned. I mean, they did the right thing eventually, which was good, but yeah.

Oh wow! What a small world, that's super cool-- yes, that's the one I was thinking of. I thought that was a really fascinating illustrative example of just how pernicious these sorts of things are. It's obviously not a conscious intention for this algorithm to have used race as a factor, and yet that effectively came out that way. That's my primary interest as far as the AI angle goes-- the article I linked interests me primarily from a sociolinguistic angle but it's really interesting watching these sort of issues mushroom up from the AI field. I'm not going to say it exposes problems we don't know about, because we do, but it makes them really clear. I was talking with one of my friends at Google about this about what a huge problem it is in the field. It makes sense that it is, though-- literally anything that is created is going to be a function of the biases and priorities of its creator. There's a pop-culture notion that AI is inherently biasless or strictly objective but that is just straight-up not possible-- they're all created to the biases and priorities of the creator. And then further, when you're creating things to learn from given inputs-- well, like you said, there's no clean data sets. Literally everything is created by a society and that society has its own values and biases. There's no way to escape that being reflected in... well, anything, lol.

You mean you're not sixteen, seventeen? How embarrassing.

You have a really bad habit of getting defensive and making sweeping incorrect assumptions about things. This is fairly normal in kids your age, so don't sweat it too much, but try to keep it in mind. If you don't understand something, better to ask, you know? So, this article is saying something about language, not 'the English language', not 'a language', I'm talking about language, in the linguistic sense, and specifically in the semantic sense. It's about connotation. What the article is discussing is the lines of connotation drawn between x groups of words and y groups of words. Flowers connote nice things, bugs connote bad things, to reiterate the article's example. Snow connotes cold. Rain connotes cloudy skies. Love connotes affection. There's no such thing as a language without connotation and context because it's a property of words meaning things. Language is simultaneously a function of, created by, creates, and requires context. So the things you wave off about clusters of words taking meaning from their proximity to other words-- this is in fact a core component of how language actually works, this is a lot of where meaning is derived from. This is a basic property that makes language function on a semantic (ie, meaning) level. You can understand the sentences I am constructing not because of an intrinsic property of the words themselves but because of the patterns they form and because of the context they arrive from. The thing about language is that it's fundamentally a construct of the people who create and use it. (and indeed this is where its relevance to my own work lies) It doesn't spring up out of nowhere-- the thing about AI work is the way as you give it the tools to parse not only language but just things created in a society in general, it's laying more bare things about those constructs that aren't as immediately visible in ourselves because we just don't think about them. This article is just discussing one of those aspects-- there've been others (that one about, what was it, sentencing done by computer). The thing is, something created by humans is going to be created in a human context-- we can examine what that means both to ourselves and what we create but context is inescapable. As the old hacker koan says:

Here's an interesting article-- at least, I found it so. It's not directly related to writing but it's about biases intrinsic to language usage, which is pretty key to the stuff I'm working on.

Oh, yeah, twenty should be fine.

P.1 'Morphed' feels like an odd word out here; as a verb outside of cinematography it's really only come into usage since the late 1980s or so (and around the 50s for the other); which is not to say it can't be used but it feels a little modern in a way that the rest of the story doesn't. Otherwise, this page just feels a little wordy overall; I feel like you could probably get the same job done more effectively in two-thirds of the space. This is feeling really too explanatory, and not really in a particularly helpful way. P.2 Yeah, I'm really feeling like this is taking a bit too long to go anywhere. P.3 Yeah, you're picking up here, but the 'You're still bleeding' paragraph is a bit muddily-phrased; it's not 100% obvious who's speaking from how you're bouncing around the subjects of sentences. There's a logical answer but it's interrupting the flow to need to put that together. P.4 This again feels a little bit wordy, but not exceptionally so; nothing iteration won't address, I don't think. P.5 Phrasing feels a little bit more awkward around here; I'm not a big fan of noting what's normal. Better to note what's unusual, I think. P.6 The conversation here is, I think, a bit too explanatory. Feels a bit off. I get there's reasons to be talking about other things than the matter at hand, but, ehhh. P.7 It's a bit cleaner here as we get some back-and-forth, but this definitely has a bit too much the feel of this-is-information-being-conveyed, I think. P.8 If corseting is the norm, and riding is a generally done thing, there's probably riding corsets-- probably corded rather than boned for riding, though since you're erring earlier than Victorian and are going for at least some measure of rigor, you're probably looking a bit more at stays or possibly just stiffened bodices if you want to go really early. Either way, there's deffo gonna be some sort of support garment for use when riding even if a full Victorian corset is in play. P.9 The top paragraph is way too distant even for someone forcing themselves into distance. 'had just started to form', I think, is just not a great phrase. And the bottom paragraph, yeah, this is just not working for me here. P.10 one s in pus, and two esses but one y in the other, depending on what you mean by that Otherwise, smoother here. P.11 Again, a bit clunky, but nothing worth uniquely commenting on here. P.12 Pinkie, again, feels a little bit out of tone. Not a period thing, it just feels a little bit out to me. Otherwise-- I dunno, I don't have any specific problems, but it feels off somehow. I think this bit might just be a little wordy too, is all. P.13 I haven't been keeping up with commentary very much so I don't know if this is a dead topic or not, but this is definitely erring younger on Sorin than the early stated age was. Even given lack of experience, this feels young. P.14 This bit is nice, though. P.15 Some of this dialogue feels a bit out, tonally speaking. Magda's bouncing registers a lot early on-- it works better when she eases towards casuality toward the end of the page/paragraph, rather than whatever this is going on at the beginning of it. P.16 Wordy at the start, I think but otherwise fine. Overall, you know, I mostly think this needs a good going at with an axe; once everything gets shaved down, I think this'll be really nice.

1 The first paragraph is too long by half, I think; it's mostly wordy point-blank explanation. The middle two-- this has a good feel in terms of the feel of the movement but you're really muddy in terms of saying who's doing what. Are there two people acting here, or three? When one person is closing a gap between two people, that suggets three people, as does that 'the man' in para 3. That said, this is a nicely-drawn scene, but I don't see this as a piece of flash fiction-- I don't think this stands on its own as a story. Flash still needs a plot, and you don't really have one here. This is definitely the best of the set, though-- with some more clarity of purpose in your writing, this could be really nice. 2 Again, you're expositing clumsily at the start-- other than that this is all right. The tone is actually really fairy-tale, and the repetition works okay with that for me, though I'm not in love with the Middle School section. The ending just fizzles for me; it leaves me feeling that there wasn't a particular point to the rest of the piece. 3 This is way, way too much explanation for flash, and this concept is downright hackneyed to begin with. This ground is really well-trodden and you don't really have anything interesting to say about, basically, yet another trolley problem. This has been done, nearly verbatim, countless times, and it's really tiresome. especially given the handling of the POV character's wife, which is beyond tacky. I don't think this one is worth reworking; I would toss it.

I'm actually no awarding Talons; I hated it, found it absolutely insufferable. That said, I seem to be in a minority there, so no skin off my back if it does well. Otherwise-- looks like most of VD's ninnery seems to have been shut down. One in these categories-- not something I'm going to sweat, even if I'd prefer that not be there at all. Too Like the Lightning is my top pick for novel, personally-- it's a little impenetrable which may hinder it from the spot, but I think the payoff is worth it. I still need to read a couple of these books in the category, so my ranking could change, and she's still got a spot with the Campbell nominees, so, we'll see. I've only barely had time to start Seven Surrenders... I'm honestly a little concerned by Tor.com nearly sweeping the novella category both here and in the Nebulas but they've been one of the only publishers actually publishing them regularly, so I suppose it's unavoidable. Every Heart a Doorway was fine, really; I didn't love it but I can see why it speaks to people. I suspect Dream-Quest is going to be my number one though-- I really like Kij Johnson's work in general. None of my picks on shorts made it, but there's an absolutely huge qualifying pool, so that's to be expected. We'll see what I think of these other pieces when I get to them. Related work should probably go to Hurley, but we'll see if it does. Frankly, I think some of the submissions/publication analysis should have gotten a nod here, but it's not, so what can you do. I have heard a lot of good about Monstress, but just haven't gotten around to reading it.. Long Form Dramatic is where I've finally seen everything in the category already and I have a clear ballot in mind; I liked... most of these works, but Arrival had me crying like a baby for twenty minutes solid.

Fair enough. Thanks!

Yeah, there's cuts to be made in this dialogue, I'm just waiting to get something back on this. It should tighten a lot of this. Though part of it is probably unavoidable. I'm going to chalk that up to it having been... oh wow, nearly a year since we addressed this stuff. Yes, Kathalania was, effectively, sent to reform school run by the Sleeping God's church, ran away to Alia's, killed Alia, and was sent to Savae. This is straight text and recent to the position in the story. That is the chapter that this one is replacing. Is there anything in particular indicating to you that his/her form is changing? (if there is, it needs to go) Thanks!

Despite having the same name and same quote, this is entirely new material otherwise. This wholly replaces the prior chapter 4, which was the original Thalan POV, which is going to get moved back until 13 or 14 or so and will, quite obviously, be rather different. This should help have Aserahin and the actual details of Savae's plot be less out of left field when Savae acts on them. 8 will be getting a similar treatment, but I may or may not sub it; it's at least going to follow the same skeleton as the current version. That said, the conversation in this one meanders some and is due for some shaving, so don't focus on the particulars of that too too much. Since this does involve business dealings and directly addresses honorifics, please see the e-mail for a link to a reference chart (please note, it has been updated since the most recent send I realized I hadn't rolled in more recent condensations yet). As before, this is straight-up my working copy and not intended for presentation as-is, but is offered for reference in lieu of a final version being available. Previously: Savae meets with Varael Ashana, who requires that they procure something of symbolic relevance to one Senator Riruna; Varael will use this to call upon shudkathra magic to kill him, so his wife's brother can claim the vacated Senate seat. A girl named Kathalania brings materials required for a commission to Savae, and reveals that they fear they have killed the goddess Alia. Thanks!

That said, please don't put in for it unless you've actually got something ready to go out on that Monday. If something gets surprise sent on a Friday-- I know I can't get to it. Just speaking for myself, it takes 4-7 hours for me to go through these things, and I can't do it every night. I make as much time as I can on weeks I submit, but there's a reason why I only crit when I submit...

I'll take the 3rd; I've got draft b of 4 done and it's a total rewrite so it'll need eyes.

Yeah, I think it works as a working title, but I think even with the story being about their struggle with people's perceptions, actively misgendering them in the title might give the wrong impression to people both about the character and who are looking someone to relate to in reading. Not that I can help on the title, lol, I either come up with something out of nowhere or I agonize forever on the subject.

so flipping through this, I have to apologize; it's pretty clear at this point that I've been overly harsh on you given your age. I'm pretty used to dealing with adults by this point; I'm not really used to dealing with teenagers anymore. This isn't really all that bad given that lack of experience, but you need a lot more practice, both writing and reading more widely. You should definitely focus on leaving your comfort zone, and working on analyzing what makes that work or not work. Feels a little like class, I know, but honestly there's some good foundational stuff you'll be learning there too. Right now you definitely have a lot of markers in this of just not being familiar with what you're doing, and I can see them in your other stuff in retrospect. No shame in that. That's just one of those things that takes practice to work through. (so, taking that into consideration, I have no particular expectation that you'll go over my submission this week; it opens on a sex scene and I wouldn't want someone underage critting it) So, in light of this, I'm going to step back and go a little more basic than I normally would, and wind back to your general approach to crit, and why I've taken a pass on your stuff before. As a rule you respond to crit with the operating assumption that the work is already correct and the crit is a failure of understanding on the part of the person giving the crit. The thing is, if this were the case, this would obviate the need for crit as a rule. You don't need to agree with everything a reader says and you don't need to follow every bit of advice a reader gives, and you don't need to know how to react to a given crit-- I know I like to think out loud about how to work with crits I receive-- but if your go-to response to crit is to work out ways in which that crit isn't valid, it's disrespectful of the person who's giving the crit, who's taking the time out (I know it takes me hours to do each one of these) to do this for you, and it stunts the potential of your work. The goal of putting a piece out for crit is ultimately going to be to make that piece better. This isn't to say that things that are done well shouldn't be called out, but: if the only thing you're prepared to deal with is praise and spelling/grammar/typo correction, get a pal to read your stuff. No shame in that either; just know what you're looking for and get the help that fits your needs accordingly. So, let's get started. p.1 I talked a bit on one of the other submissions this week about epigraphs on shorts. I'm gonna go into a little more depth here: epigraphs are great for doing things like adding context or giving additional angles to one's story. They're great for painting off the edges of your canvas to suggest there's more going on in the story than what the reader can immediately see. The thing is that shorts need to be concise and they need to be elegant; every stroke you make, so to speak, needs to be done with purpose and it needs to have a specific direction. You're working within constraints, so everything you do needs to be purposeful. So this epigraph is... not doing that. It may have relevance to later actions but right now it's a little lump of explaining a process to the reader that, frankly, is not going to give any meaningful additional understanding of the story or the place where it occurs. It's not even written within the story; this wouldn't look out of place on a Wikipedia page. It's not doing the job that it needs to do, so: cut. So we open off with a declaration that this city is beautiful, and it is apparently shockingly so. This is a really weak opener, so let's pull apart what's going on here: we know we've got a city. We know the POV character's name and that they use 'she'. We know she does not think carefully about things before saying them; this implies a lack of familiarity with her surroundings. We know that she has not up to this point been discussing either this city or beauty. What we're missing, really, is what drove this urge to speak a non sequitur. You're having your POV declare a thing beautiful without saying anything at all about the thing. We the reader are given no tools to address this statement ourselves. We don't know what the POV character considers beautiful: do we agree with her? do we not? You're opening on this so it must be important, but we are provided nothing to gauge this against. This is something you might be able to get away with deeper in on a story, when we already know the POV character, already have concepts of what she may or may not consider beautiful, when we may or may not have concepts about what the city looks like, any of that. But here and now: this doesn't work. We have nothing to go on. We have no extant context, we have no metrics by which to judge. Here is where we start, so it must be important: but this is not being treated as important. In the second paragraph we head-hop. Omniscient POV? Your grammar's out ('short as' should be 'recently') but I'm not going to harp on those sorts of issues too much. So we're getting exposited now at the city's prior decay and sudden revitalization. This is really clumsy, honestly-- what it feels like is that you're glossing over things you don't personally care about. Which, I mean, fair cop, but you're frontloading them and presenting them in ways that suggest this is important and meaningful to the story. If it's not: don't include it. If it is important, you're not providing enough context for the reader on this. What sort of decay has this city been suffering? What was killing it? The city being determined to die doesn't mean anything without the context you're witholding. Expensive as a descriptor here is once more pretty non sequitorial to the sentiment at hand. It could possibly be telling something about the character, that she associates expense with beauty, but you're not really presenting it as such here. We still do not know what Rachel is looking at here. Are we outside the city, looking at it from afar? Are we inside, looking at a public space? A private building? You give us a crumb when she notes that there's no mess, but you're not giving us what about that she expects: what does she consider a mess? It's a sentiment with a lot of meanings in this potential context. But as it is, you're not giving the reader a lot to work with here. Honestly, it feels like you're afraid of description, and this came through in prior submissions that I've read too. Thing is, especially when you're working within a POV, which I am not entirely certain you are doing in this piece (and you should make it pretty clear as swiftly as possible the sort of POV you are using, in the interests of disorienting your reader less), you can use this to filter these sorts of things. Don't say what something looks like, give us what the POV character thinks and feels as they look at something. If we're inside a character's head, we can use their eyes to give us meaning about the place, rather than just point-blank statements like 'the city's beautiful' 'it used to be in bad shape in an unknown way'. Again: we're working within constraints from format when we work to length, and we need to use the space we have to be evocative. The reader doesn't know what you were thinking as you wrote, the reader doesn't go into it with This is really one thing that I think is a critical takeaway for you: the reader is not you. They don't have your knowledge of the underpinnings, they don't have your contexts, and they don't have identical interests. Your role as writer in this is to make the reader interested in something that you are already interested in, but that they don't know anything about. You need to temper your interest in such a way that it invites the reader in, rather that presents a wall that they will bounce off of. Do not assume the reader is already interested; the only person interested in what's inside your own head is you. You're taking the story outside of yuor head, so you need to find what makes this interesting, and share it. It takes until the very last paragraph on the page that we get literally any visual here; this is coming way too late given the length of the piece and given that the entire story thus far has been about the visual. This is what we should be opening on, if we're opening in this scene. Every word counts, in a short. So, we also have the driver, who is apparently of so little import that the story only contextualizes them as a driver of vehicles. The primary piece of information about their identity that you have chosen to provide is their profession: so the fact that they have somehow forgotten their profession prior to this point, when the story does not, cannot forget this... this isn't believable. You have not created a context where this is easily believed. P.2 The dialogue here is flimsy and frankly cliche. I know you like to re-create things you've encountered before, but this is a pretty stock exchange about the coins. This is a conversation that's been done before, following these beats precisely, and you're not bringing anything new to the table. The problem with doing this especially when it comes to conversation is that it doesn't naturally reflect conversation; it comes off stilted and awkward, as if the people involved aren't familiar with conversation. So exchanges like this are a pretty good example of why it's better to come up with your own material. It may be you're playing into something familiar but if you're not comfortable working that familiarity in new directions, it falls flat. And the "And, well, a warning, as well" line-- a repetitious line like that obviously shouldn't make it through your next revision. It's not a big deal; I naturally fall into weird phrasings like that sometimes too, you just need to learn to be aware you do that. This is where other eyes do help. So let's talk about how you're handling giving out information, because this is really clumsy. So Rachel's citing a popular supersition. The only reason we know it's popular is because it's narrated as such: despite this popularity, the driver shows no familiarity. This is at odds with what you're saying here. If you're going to be presenting something as well-known, and if you want that to be believed, it can't be presented in the context of explaining something to someone unfamiliar. The extent to which the driver's looking Rachel up and down is frankly odd. It feels like you don't know how to describe the act of looking at a person from within their own head. If her dress, her braid are worth calling out: what makes them worth calling out? Is there something remarkable about the fact that she's dressed simply? Why's the braid worth remarking? Do people wear their hair like this normally? Is it ordinary to wear a knife openly on your day-to-day? Then you leap right from that to the oracle business: you make mention that context exists but you breeze right past that. It comes off non sequitorial. But really: with the extent to which this scene actively avoids providing context, the way it leans on cliche, and the way we've not actually had any plot: the first scene should also be cut. It's superfluous, not giving the reader anything of particular import. The next scene, then, which starts on this page, is probably where we should start: we've still got issues but here's where a story begins to exist. That said: dwelling on what's ordinary for the POV character (as it appears we're not in omniscient?) just lends to over-explanation. Show us what's unusual about her and what she's doing. Peasants, conceptually, are also fairly at odds with an urban environment. This feels like sloppy worldbuilding more than anything else. P.3 I'm also quite certain at this point that you're not really familiar with haggling in any meaningful sense-- it's an involved process. Whatever's going on here, you're going to want to be calling on a concept other than haggling. As it is, this has the really awkward feeling of someone who's not at all familiar with how negotiable prices work. So the fact that prices aren't being negotiated on being abnormal isn't ringing true, because it's clearly being written by someone who primarily interacts with non-negotiable market pricing. Especially in the context of staple foodstuffs: these things would still typically have a non-negotiable price. Like, this is a clear sign of just not doing the research that you personally don't find interesting. Which, I mean, again, fair enough. But the result is that when you don't know what you're talking about, it shows pretty badly. It just does not ring true at all; it smacks of using RPG sourcebooks as primary research material. But yeah, going onto this page, it becomes really clear that you weren't at all engaged with writing the first scene. That said: pretty much all you're doing is telling. You're devoting a lot of time to saying and repeating what thing is weird, but no time at all to why this is a problem. You're outright telling us Rachel is torn; you're not making the reader feel her conflict. P.4 I am going to start scaling back commentary at this point; if there's anything you'd like me to explain further I certainly will, but I've been at this about four hours already, I have other things I'd like to do with my evening. Yeah, your dialogue is areally awkward; it is very much Here To Do A Job Within The Story, which pretty much prevents it from ringing true as dialogue. This may seem at odds with my harping on how everything within your story needing to be purposeful, but remember too is that one purpose of all this is making the reader care about what's going on and happening. So you need to multitask with this; right now you're neglecting that aspect. You're not really giving either character any sense of internality, any sense that there is an existence beyond what you're showing. Now, what, this is a pie shop owner, they're a bit part in the story, they don't need to exactly have a full life story or whatever. But going into this conversation, they need to have a purpose to themself: what do they want out of this conversation? Right now, all this conversation is doing is serving to point Rachel in a direction; the pie shop owner has no function as a person. You could replace them with a signpost and nothing would change. P.5 So, your POV is sliding around all over the place. The thing to remember when working in POV is to stay within that character's head-- her expression shifting and turning hawklike is definitely an external angle. Then you have here things like 'the local inn'. Again, this is pretty RPG sourcebook worldbuilding, and it's another sloppy cliche. You seem to want to present this as a prosperous market town, but then give us peasants and a single place for people from out of town to stay. You're neglecting demographics, you're neglecting pre-modern urban life in general-- and you're giving us very little actual sense of place. You're also really sort of doubling back on prior things: do people know that this city is unusually efficient? The sense that has been presented prior to now is that no, this is not the case, and Rachel being able to perceive this is somehow anomalous and related to her being something other-than-human. But nah, it's famous, groups of people are coming to try to figure it out. P.6 You are using and overusing the specific word urchin in a way that really bespeaks a lack of familiarity. At this point it feels like you don't know how to paint bit characters. The whole of their existences are subsumed into these miniscule descriptors. And the fact is, you know, to reiterate: when you're working to this length, everything is significant. This means you have no bit parts. You really need to flesh that out. P.7 Greyscale's a really recent term to be using in so nearly the same breath as urchins and peasants, and it's also not an applicable word to what you're describing here; in fact this description here in general is sliding all over the place POV-wise. Remember: if we're in Rachel's head, we can't see her eyes. The rest of the sentence is just grammatically wonky; if one were to be describing her eyes themselves changing, it would be to grey (or black or white, I suppose); if one were describing her own vision losing colour you'd want to actually describe that. Greyscale is appropriate to describing printed images; it's not appropriate to simply any thing that is monochrome black to white. That said, you know, your meaning here is clear so it's not a total loss; the issue is that it's tonally inconsistent and that the word has specific connotations that affect its conversational usage. Same with 'messed with', actually. It's not tonally appropriate either to this character's vernacular or to the general verbiage you've been using thus far. Honestly though this scene c/should be cut and the important information within it slid around elsewhere. This conversation is pure knowledgeable-person-explaining-to-not-knowledgeable-person. Which, you know, again, no shame in doing that, we all do it from time to time. But it means rework is called for. No big deal. P.8 Yeah, so here's one of the markers giving away your age, and it's the name Destinare. Don't, like, feel bad about it or anything. We all have this phase where we go through where boy howdy wouldn't it be awesome if these characters' names meant something deep and cool about what they're like. And, believe me, when I was your age, I did this all the time. The problem is, like, this isn't how names work. Even when people choose a name because they like the meaning, this isn't how names work; a word plopped down like that does not have the feel of a valid name because it isn't, really; it rings falsely to people who are familiar to whatever language you're cribbing, and it rings falsely to people familiar with the language you're writing in. Hate to say it, but this is a phase that the faster you work through, the better for your work down the line. That said: we're literally halfway through your story, we've been in Rachel's head nearly the whole time, and here's the first indicator of what she's actually doing here. This is a problem. And, frankly, this is awfully convenient, that the first time it's come up, she already knows his habits, and poof, he's right there. We've spent this whole time just being told what's going on when we could have been learning along with Rachel. This would have done a lot to create the interest that I've been lamenting the lack of. P.9 I hope this dialogue is supposed to be funny because it's hilarious. Like, again, this is really showing your age here, this sort of dialogue. The problem is that it's basically impossible to take seriously, but it's clear by the trappings that the story requires taking it seriously. Like, this is presented as a conversation between two people, but the dialogue here is straight out of a B-movie or like, Skeletor, or, ugh, I don't know what kids your age have as touchstones for cheese these days. I would scale the whole thing back, look at the goals of the people in this conversation, and use that for a ground-up rework of this exchange. It helps to read your stuff aloud, if you can. It's good for checking natural flow. Head-hopping again toward the end of the page too. P.10 The bit at the top is-- really lazily written, to be honest. You're suddenly leaving POV in the interests of creating drama with the visuals but this honestly reads like you're just transcribing a scene you're watching out of the corner of your eye from a TV show. You're also assuming knowledge you haven't imparted: 'empowering Destinaire' is basically meaningless. You're telling, and it feels like you don't know how to show. And then we drop out of that into more, telling, more explanation, more nothing actually happening. This is page ten of sixteen and we're still getting explanations and outright told what's going on. 'your kind lacks mercy' like this is a statement we have to literally take at face value because we have nothing else to go on. Like, I get you have all these cool ideas in your head that really fascinate you, but you're not translating them to the page at all. P.11 Again, this dialogue and Destinare's POV aspects are so thoroughly cheesy that they're really hard to take seriously; comments as above there. On the one hand, we're finally hitting a point where it seems like you were actually interested in writing. On the other hand, this doesn't feel like you have any meaningful conception of how to make a fight scene have any narrative weight. You're solely focused on the motions, making everything seem really blase. You're not giving the reader any reason to care about what's going on, it's just-- oh hey here's a fight. It feels really purposeless. And your narrative is so unconcerned with the violence, the lack of regard for the people being acted upon-- severely injured. And to be clear, this isn't something that is coming from POV handling of it, it's the actions you're describing; it has the feel of mashing barbie dolls against each other. This feels obligatory, it feels gratuitous; there's no violence to the actions, there's no adrenaline in the motions; it's literally the character taking out some mooks. That's kind of gross. P.12 Yeah, this fight has no narrative presence in the slightest. It feels plastic: and then it proves to have not meant anything at all. Also, it's 'mete'. 'Powers had protected him' is shortcutting, lazy-- describe what's going on, don't just tell the results. What does it feel like to be in his head in this moment? Dialogue here combines cheese and explanation-- it's falling flat. P.13 oh gosh just stop point-blank explaining things please. Probably well over half your wordcount is just outright telling the reader what's going on, it's wasteful and it's obfuscating any story you might have. This is, again, not how names work. and as we go into this, like, a) death by blood loss, which is what the motions you're describing here are, is not instantaneous. It's not even credibly instantaneous. 'cut his own throat, drops dead' just doesn't work. It'll be quicker than a lot of the alternatives, sure. But we're talking minutes, not 'middle of an action scene without skipping a beat' fast. But gosh, we're back into cliche territory; this is pure video game schlock at this point. Like, this is overdone enough to be laughable when video games have their 'end boss' die and reveal their 'true form'. Honestly, your dialogue around here does feel really informed by poorly-translated video game dialogue. p.14 And now that you're done writing the bit that you wanted to write, you're glossing over everything again. 'Using his powers to set the city against her' which is, apparently, setting it on fire but you're giving nothing. But yeah this is definitely dialogue informed by bad translation here. Japanese handles elipses differently than English does; it doesn't work to use them like youre using them here. There's things to be taken from the stories you're liking in terms of overall beats, but in terms of the actual language use, it's really showing a lot how you're not all that well-read. Which is fair; it takes time to read broadly, but translation is always going to have a different flow than a native work. Definitely read more English-language novels; definitely pay attention to how the ones you go over in class are written. You may not enjoy them (I certainly didn't) but it'll help in your mechanics. p.15 This conversation is still too on-the-nose and still too cheesy but with some rework you could probably do something with this; this is the first real inklings of actual personhood in your characters. It's too little too late but you could work with this some. P.16 And the story ends as it began: saying things outright. So, the thing is, this story is not really unsalvageable, much as it might feel like that at this point. You've got some decent seeds-- a place being unnaturally regulated by someone, the person who comes to stop it. Still a little bit facile in the underpinnings, but this is some evergreen concept work, really. But you don't have any characters, you don't-- really-- have a plotline; there's no motivation and there's no drive to any actor. Things happen but the story gives no meaning to them. At no point is the dialogue representative of how people talk and you're really gunshy of your narration; the only times you're really spending any time with them, it's very much like you're just relating a point-form version of scenes you're watching on TV. (this too is another thing showing your age). Your POV is all over the place in ways that are really disorienting. Thing is, there's nothing shameful about these sorts of issues and they're all easy to make. I think if you stripped the story down to its fundamentals and rebuilt it from there you could have a much stronger short, and it'll be good practice. Working in constrained formats is pretty helpful for focusing on specific things to work out in your writing.

P.1 I'm not sold on epigraphs on shorts-- you're working to length constraints, so you need to be elegant. This seems like it's stating outright things the fictional writer would take as given, and it clunks. It also seems like you're outright stating, at the start, the thesis of your story. Give your reader at least a little credit here. Reading down the page, this feels really clumsy to me. Your description's muddy (a blur is by definition silent, eg) and you're just explaining so much that the characters already know, both within the narration and in the dialogue. The entire first page of eight here is sunk into explaining things the POV character already knows, and when there's dialogue it's pure explanation for the reader, not natural dialogue. This doesn't parse as a conversation, and this doesn't parse as someone returning to a place once-familiar that's now foreign. The thing about this is sort of exposition is that it really shows a lot of disrespect to the reader; you're not giving them any credit for being able to pick up things that aren't stated outright and beaten into them. Especially when you're working with a short: you have better things you could and should be devoting the space to. P.2 Write numbers as words. We've now spent 25% of the page count of this story explaining the premise: time dilation. You are at this point actively wasting the reader's time. P.3 It is three and a half pages in to an eight page story before we actually hit story, to wit, that the world is different around the POV character, and they do not know what to do with themself, but they must do something. Description is absolutely wobbly and you've got some very clumsy attempts to break POV here. The same smile is relieved in one sentence and bittersweet two sentences later, without any reason to suspect a change. Your POV character is making laser-precise surmises as to other people's mental states. I have no reason to believe this person is capable of doing this. P.4 I would straight-up trash everything prior to the demarked line break on this page. There's nothing in it of value to the story: it's straight-up giving us the premise, over, and over, and over again. You don't need it. Here, your narration is still heavy-handed and over-explanatory (looking down at the watch is definitely going too far), but here, you've actually got something of interest. P.5 But you're really weak on dialogue. Lots and lots of point-blank explaining things to one another, and boy howdy does this POV character not parse as seventeen years old in the slightest. So the POV character's sister's words are touching their heart: you're not conveying this in any way other than just saying that's the case. You're gonna have to do more than that. P.6 Like above all else, you are just saying things outright way too much. Don't tell me something's moving or compelling because you certainly aren't doing the legwork narratively to make it seem that way, and you're not writing the character as being meaningfully moved or compelled either. The 'forgotten' thing is straight-up a cop-out. The stone hasn't meaningfully existed within the story prior to this point. You can't sell it as having any import now. And frankly, you're not even trying to sell it as having import; it didn't exist before now, and suddenly someone who's crying and profoundly unhappy suddenly is happy and relieved. I have to call BS on this. This isn't emotionally believable. P.7 Honestly, the way you're handling the self-harm feels really cheap, like you're primarily using it as a bid for the reader's sympathy. That's really not cool at all. If you must retain this aspect, you're going to need to do the legwork to make it feel like you're doing anything other than taking really tacky shortcuts. Personally, I would excise that aspect and just do the actual work of making the reader feel like the character's had a lousy life and hasn't handled it well. The same goes for the POV character too. P.8 And then... nothing. So, this is a piece with a lot of problems: among other things, the SFFnal concept doesn't actually interact with the plot or the characters in any meaningful way. You sink so much time and space into going on, and, on, and on about the time dilation aspect but when we get to the meat of the story, there's really nothing about it where the main character leaving for a month and returning eight years later means anything at all. There's nothing about this interaction between the POV character and their sister that wouldn't make exactly as much sense if they'd just literally been gone for eight years themself, and there's nothing about it that requires a secondary world setting. This could happen down the street from me right now. This is not to say your story needs to meaningfully be SF or anything to have value but you're devoting nearly half of your used space to explaining concepts that really have nothing to do with the story you're telling. Your dialogue pretty much never rings true and your narration only exists when necessary to explain something. You're not selling your uses of emotionality, and they come off basically random and they only exist for the moments of convenience within the story. You don't actually have a plot, and your story is thin on the ground because of this: the POV character was away for several years, and when they return, their sister has had a hard go of it. That's basically it. I would say it needs a redraft from scratch; the core relationship between the POV character and their sister has value, but right now, I just don't think this submission actually tells a story.

And here we have the conclusion of this party, as far as we see it, anyway, and the closing of the first third of the story. From here, I'm going to be going back to redo a pair of chapters (Ka/Thalan/ia's first POV is getting moved back until later on, among other things) before moving forward. This is going to be our last multipov chapter for a while, too. For those of you who've been following the whole thing: let's talk about Lasila. What are your thoughts on her overall in this iteration? There were severe issues, last time we hit this point in the story. She's no action hero and this story isn't in the epic genre, but I'm hoping she's better now at commanding the reader's attention. To recap the last little bit: Escorted by Eshrin, Lasila attends the celebration of the goddess' resurrection; she meets the man Iluya's going to marry (Eshrin's brother), has some off-camera sex with Iluya, meets up with Maranthe, who says she needs contracts written in order to rework shudkathra magic for aelin use; she then meets up with a young man, the son of the senator whom her brother is protecting. They head off somewhere quiet. *He* isn't suffering from incredibly-carefully-managed social anxiety, unlike Iluya, so what can and can't occur on the page is somewhat different... Meanwhile, Savae notes Senator Riruna's presence, with the poison earrings they made; they seem satisfied that this is going to kill him... eventually. They meet up with Aserahin, Varael Ashana's right-hand and Senate candidate, and they pass him a decoy token to satisfy Varael's demands. They speak with Maranthe briefly about a minor role they're to have in the upcoming ritual, and wisely spend a decidedly large amount of time antagonizing her instead. This will have no repercussions. This time: Lasila begins a process best described as 'getting religion'. An Always Sunny title card reading "Savae sees some repercussions" Next time: Chapter four.

yeah, I don't mind going over multiple flash pieces.

And here's something that's come out recently about one of Nnedi Okorafor's books-- publisher tried to whitewash her cover.

Well, things are seeming to crowd up fast right now, lol, so I'll take the 20th now. History is still in the shop but 12 is ready to go, and it's pretty much the point at which I need to now double back to patch up the shambling early Savae plot, but I need to take inventory here. It's not nearly so long as before, lol.

tbh I so rarely see free stuff at any cons I go to that anything free at all would stick out to me.