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Post by bulldust on Dec 17, 2018 14:58:10 GMT
Getting up in the morning is a bit of a resurrection for the Bull. Although he tends to sleep standing, it is still a chore to take that first step into consciousness. At least the arguments with the vet about coffee consumption have ended in a stalemate. The vet says coffee is not good for bovines. The Bull says screw you bastard and pass me the espresso.
So the Bull sits, semi-comatose, sipping at his now cold coffee, too lazy to go heat it up.
Why did he get out of bed this crappy morning?
Moo. Moo. Moo, moo moo.
And speaking of resurrections, TQR is mostly back up. Stupid internet. Why does technology have to always go at the speed of fuck you?
Today’s cap is “The Elixir of Life”. It starts out as a tale of a snake oil salesman peddling his wares to an unsuspecting old west town, but it takes a bizarre tale. It starts with the Sheriff confronting Dr. Angel as he rides into town hocking his wares. Soon the townsfolk are swept up into his sales pitch and things take off from there. The cap is full of foreboding apprehensiveness by the sheriff, which sets the expectation that something really bad was about to happen. This part was very well-done.
The writing is tight, maybe missing a comma here and there. The style is good. I particularly liked the line:
“Like others, he watched the bottle’s red and green label as the pitchman moved it back and forth like a swaying cobra’s head.”
In fact, I loved the cap until the half-way point, then it lost me.
We have a major POV switch, which in itself is not horrible, but it’s jolting. Then, the whole tone of the cap changes. It becomes something else, transforming from what was a well-spun tale to something harder to follow and less engaging.
My ability to suspend disbelief was trumped by Daniel and his life-saving blood, then further destroyed by the asteroid/alien thing.
Yes, this cap has merit. If it had stayed the course of the first half, I would have given it a resounding “yes”, but it lost me. So, unfortunately, it’s a no for me, which is really too bad.
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Post by rockefeller on Dec 17, 2018 18:31:15 GMT
Through no fault of this VC's efforts, Rocks is in a shit mood. Years of his laborious captiousness, his pithy critiques and reviews, have been lost to some internet provider's carelessness and stupidity, indeed, lost to literature. Poor, fucked literature. Dep's songs and twirls, Boli's, et. al.'s, raging polemics... all gone. Happily, though, so has a lot of cap, which means VCs are now free to resubmit for 1st publishing rights, if they haven't already, which most probably have. 1st print rights. What a joke. Just change the title and the date, and off you go. Just don't re-sub them here. Rocks remembers.
Considering how shit Rocks' mood was, this Elixir cap held his attention pretty well. After
If the visitor recognize his sarcasm, he didn’t show it recognized
Dr. Angel’s deep musical voice stentorian?
The bottle elicited a ripple of laughter from the crowd, which now numbered over twenty. Seems like a lot of people for a street not two sentences ago inhabited by only a mangy dog and some retard with a broom.
Even the town’s minister, Lucius Cane seemed inspired missing 2nd delimiting comma
he stopped nitpicking altogether.
This tale makes Big Promises. But, seemingly unable to deliver on them (e.g., What is this shit? How's it work? Why's it free?) the author veers off into and finishes with another, albeit equally interesting and well done, story and genre.
So Rocks can totally see why the Bull gored it. But really, there was no satisfactory, non cliche delivery of its promise. So maybe the VC simply did what had to be done. Also, Rocks has always been a sucker for experimental efforts. And, for him, there's enough allusion, imagery and metaphor here to warrant further consideration. Yes. Yes there is.
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Post by architext on Feb 4, 2019 17:27:55 GMT
This is an interesting story. Spoiler alert: I'm going to vote no, but I want to give praise where it's due, and punishment where it isn't. Let's start with some mostly positives:
- Bold choice on the POV change, and the elevation of Daniel's character. It is actually effective at creating a greater sense of significance and portent to the latter half of the story.
- And then, just when we're getting settled into the fact that our original main character is dead and we're now in a different narrative point of view altogether, everyone gets whacked with an asteroid! Double bold! Usually I'd say life-disrupting astronomical events should come no later than halfway through the story, especially when we've been given virtually zero evidence that such an event can occur within the logic established by the other elements of the story. But you just go with it, and strangely, it kind of works. We're already in western-fantasy-allegory terrain, so why not throw sci-fi into the mix? Boom. OK, to clarify, I was entertained by this sudden turn of events but that alone doesn't make it viable in the narrative, or "earned" as the MFAs say (see below).
- Miscellaneous quasi-religious stuff (the Garden of Eden thing, character names like Angel, etc.) should be retooled. Well, maybe that's my personal preference at work, but I don't see any allegorical meaning here. The biblical stuff just seems like cheap, tacked-on symbolism, especially when there are also asteroids in play. I say "cheap" because biblical allusion/allegory/whatever is a hacky way to make characters and events seem like they should be significant, rather than actually drawing the reader into caring about those characters/events through ordinary human empathy. That sort of allegory/symbol silliness backfires twice as hard when the reader's a proud atheist or an omniscient, thirteen-dimensional celestial gas entity (I happen to be both). Of course, with any symbolic stuff, the reader's mileage may vary.
- The writer needs to pay a lot more attention to the sentences themselves, particularly in the beginning half. The opening lines are speedbumps. "Halan baked in the sun." We have no foreknowledge of whether Halan is a place or a character. That ambiguity forces us to re-read the paragraph, and not out of pleasure. Shortly after, we hit "Wait—he spotted a man, at least marginally." I'll forgive the "wait" as a signifier of the narrative's voice, but I have no idea what "at least marginally" means here, and I'm not just trying to criticize excessive adverbs (personally I love adverbs and use them frequently). Then Daniel is introduced, the handsome lamebrain, eventually to become the central character but who appears only as background scenery over the next few pages. "Women problems"? That is offensive, not because of chauvinism but because of syntactical clumsiness. Among the early lines, I also found it surprising that a carriage was pulled by a chestnut. Yes, I get it, but it's another case of minor ambiguity where forcing the reader to parse slightly slower snaps them out of the story, albeit momentarily. Honestly most of the first page should just go; we can start with Angel's medicine show, and trim some of Eben's skeptical judgments, none of which ultimately matter anyway.
- I say "in the beginning half" because despite all that, I was drawn in with curiosity about what this magic elixir would do, and what it consisted of. So, the highlight for me occurs in the middle, when the elixir actually seems to be improving lives, leaving the reader to wonder "how does this work? what's the catch?" That's before everything steps into the Twilight Zone.
- The ending, on the other hand, is a bit of a mess. I liked the formal experimention, as I mentioned above, but I was still left wondering "what the hell was that all about? why did THAT happen?" So, like, there are these interstellar, reincarnatable beings that travel through time/space trying to improve mediocre samples of humankind using partly functional, ultimately poisonous chemicals? Uh... why? Now, let's be clear, there are lots of successful far-fetched stories out there. But for the ending to be satisfactory, the logic leading to the ultimate revelation needs to have consistency. We have to be aware of the weirdnesses of the universe from the get-go. It doesn't work if Sherlock Holmes solves the crime on the last page of the novel by telling Watson, "the killer was Mr. Smithrington; trust me, I'm a thirteen-dimensional celestial gas entity, and also omniscient. Maybe I should've told you that before." I don't know that the story needs *much* tweaking early on to get this logic. Maybe just some oddly-colored meteor showers or other irregularities early on, to signal that the territory here isn't just the Western genre, stranger-comes-to-town trope.
- cliche watch: "feeling like a puppet on a string", "as alien as Mars" - anachronism watch: neurotransmitters were conceptually proven in 1921, and the story reads as if it's set around 1910. I know the elixir makes people super-smart, but it threw me off to see a character use a word that probably didn't exist yet and which he couldn't possibly know in any case. (Leaving aside the anachronism itself, one could be super-intelligent and still completely ignorant of any advanced knowledge in scientific fields, and that would make a lot more sense here.) - and of course what my esteemed colleagues said above about proofreading also holds.
So, in the end, it's a no from this Architext, but a valiant effort with a lot of promise.
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