|
|
Wk 14
May 23, 2020 20:15:01 GMT
Post by rockefeller on May 23, 2020 20:15:01 GMT
God, I remember this place. Seems kinda empty. Don't remember that fish tank or that whatever-it-is floating upside down in it. I see my little lift top desk is still here, though, and still being used as Dep's cat's (What's his name? Rimbauld or something) litter box. Wonder where she went. Beautiful spirit-creature, one lyrical Francophine. I miss her. Thinking she might've liked this gnome thing (or maybe I just remember her as more of a romantic than she really was) whereas I, personally, found it a little schmaltzy or something. Not YA, but leaning that way. The sort of fantasies I nurtured back in grade school to stave off boredom. Too slow, though. And too predictable. Like the second those two bad guys made to rob the mushroom stand, even before we learn she's ex special forces, I knew they were in for a non-lethal ass-whupping from this chick. I also knew she'd hook up with the MC in some magically wholesome happily-ever-after the moment they met.
Technically, it's fine, and it was refreshing to read prose so clean and flowing. Only saw a couple typos:
outside a a great deal
double "a"
...and had her sit in the chair one he where he rested between sales).
grammatical gobbledygook and a missing opening parenthesis
Definitely not show stoppers. And nothing wrong with a little escapism. But between a slight over abundance of exposition and narrative self-gratification (or just plain pandering) and an admitted genre bias, I'm gonna porthole it. Not rip or chew it up or set it alight or piss on it or anything, but just gently and respectfully feed it back into the deluge, that someone else might love it.
|
|
|
|
Wk 14
May 26, 2020 18:45:23 GMT
Post by rockefeller on May 26, 2020 18:45:23 GMT
There are, of course, exceptions like Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird, but typically a main character's age is indicative of an entertainment's target demographic, as in every Harry Potter and this Wings cap, which is also YA fantasy. Though it's possible, I suppose, with education being what it's become today, with ever larger class sizes and now lock-downs, that young adults are older, and that this yarn about a twelve-year-old boy who protects and befriends a pixie with a broken wing and profound grammatical issues could appeal to readers even up into their teens. I have no clue, but like to think of TQR as a venue for grown-up fiction.
Here's how the pixie talks:
“Keeps it us safe.”
“Fly I will then tomorrow.”
"Family will set free be?"
“You me own?”
“Belong to you I don’t?”
That you, ET? Yoda? Sorry I am, but like this tale I did not.
|
|
|
|
Wk 14
May 27, 2020 1:02:47 GMT
Post by carol on May 27, 2020 1:02:47 GMT
[Carol taps the ash-end of her joint into the gigantoid triangular marble ashtray that sits just slightly left of center upstage on the grand Cherrywood desktop. She breathes]
Paint by Numbers has been Portholed.
[She looks around the floor, can't find Boligard, sees the fish tank, sees the wardrobe, raises her hand to shield the glare from the disco ball, and she pulls a fresh joint from the insides of her jacket. She gives a nod to Dave, who seems really fucking quiet. She watches the other dude in the room. She thumbnails a Swan Vesta and inhales life to the joint, puffing. She leans forward, her elbows landing on the Cherrywood's desktop like lunar landings, and she says to the other dude]
Who the fuck are you?
|
|
|
|
Wk 14
May 27, 2020 13:18:40 GMT
Post by rockefeller on May 27, 2020 13:18:40 GMT
[Rocks sees another has entered the premises and ducks down behind the meganormous Boom Box balanced on his lift-top. Fuck Walkman. Fuck iPod. Size matters. And this baby is Lovecraftian in its immensity. He levers up the volume, adjusts his headphones and karaokes,
Slime 'n rot, rats 'n snot 'n vomit on the floor
Fifty ugly soldiers, man, holdin' spears by the iron door
Knives 'n spikes 'n guns 'n the likes of every tool of pain
An' a sinister midget with a bucket an' a mop where the blood goes down the drain;
An' it stinks so bad
Stones been chokin'...
He wonders if Zappa knew about this place. With his one functioning eye, Rocks peeks around the vibrating Boomer. Whoever it is looks pissed. And wasted. Her (he surmises) lips are moving. But thanks to a lifetime of boom-boom, he's learned to read lips. Luckily she (he surmises) isn't wearing a mask either. Fuck covid. So at least they have that in common.]
No one. Who the fuck are you?
|
|
|
|
Wk 14
Jun 1, 2020 21:35:55 GMT
Post by rorschalk on Jun 1, 2020 21:35:55 GMT
Oh hey kids!
[The Rorschalk slides down from the darkness on a rope, tugs it three times once his feet are on the floor and begins to remove his leather gloves as he paces between the two fronts]
As I was saying, Carol, this is a man who comes to you from above, where the roast beef buffet and candle light suppers are ongoing. Who am I to turn down his ambition to taste the floor?
[about facing, he wink's at the rockster]
Rockefeller, this is Carol. She's held down the fort since Boligard disappeared into the deluge. And [glancing to the side] Dave, caught you on Rogan deconstructing Eddie's ERUPTION, elucidating how the sausage is made.
[Pivoting, facing none of them]
Speaking of sausage...we're all sausage makers down here now. Am I right?
|
|
|
|
Wk 14
Jun 3, 2020 17:37:05 GMT
Post by rockefeller on Jun 3, 2020 17:37:05 GMT
Was only funnin'. No need for introductions here, boss. Carol and I, we've met. And for a beautiful fleeting moment in time, we were even almost close. I addressed her in a playfully misogynistic fashion and she reciprocated by offering to kill my family. I'm not sure who that chisel-featured fellow is, though. Him I have not met. But he seems... special.
I have reviewed Corner's Lady cap and find it ascension worthy. Would I myself pay fifty large (dollars) for it, even in these inflationary times? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. It's an imaginative SF/fantasy hybrid, uniquely envisioned and cleanly crafted, rife even with verse. But it has no sex scene, and I am parsimonious to a fault. Happily, it isn't my decision. (Did Boligard ever struggle thus? I miss him.) I need only decide upon its readiness for further scrutiny, which I have.
[Rocks stands on the boombox balanced on his little lift-top desk and holds the cap high, stretching, waiting, wishing that a cloven hoof will reach down and lift it up to greener pastures. The desk wobbles. Fuck's taking so long? "Mooooooooo!"]
Btw boss, is it written in our hallowed guidelines, as it is in certain lesser venues', that narrative emphasis must be applied by way of underlining instead of italics? If so, please make it stop. It hurts my eye.
|
|
|
|
Wk 14
Jun 3, 2020 17:58:58 GMT
Post by bulldust on Jun 3, 2020 17:58:58 GMT
Off in the distance the sounds of hooves echo followed by a forlorn "mooo". A moment later there is a crash and a lot of f-bombs.
"Just leave it there. I'll get it later..."
|
|
|
|
Wk 14
Jun 4, 2020 0:45:50 GMT
Post by carol on Jun 4, 2020 0:45:50 GMT
[Carol leans into the Cherrywood, lowers her newly bought (eBay) face shield, and she gathers up the capital laid out on the desktop]
You fucking guys, right? Okay, so Ed Turner's The Witch of North something or other has been Port the fucking holed, bitches. And, and....
[Carol scrambles up the under layer of capital beneath the shamed upper-layered capital, and she flicks her bic and fires up the edge of the Portholed capital]
Dave Christenson's Plants Have So Much To Teach Us has been thrown to the universe that exists beyond the Porthole. Bitches.
[The flame flares and sizzles the tips of Carol's nose hairs]
Fuck this.
[Carol pulls out her hand sanitizer and spurts some liquid onto her palms, rubs it over her knuckles, her finger and thumb tips. She stands and walks over to the exit, the fucking door]
|
|
|
|
Wk 14
Jun 4, 2020 18:25:58 GMT
Post by rockefeller on Jun 4, 2020 18:25:58 GMT
Must be because I had the kung-flu for Christmas,
I'm not feeling up to par.
It increases my paranoia,
like looking in the mirror and seeing a po-lice car.
[Rocks pumps up the volume on his favorite Crosby track while another inmate generously slathers alcohol gel on her hands. "Are you trying to fuck up your skin and breed new sanitizer-resistant microbes?" He wishes to be helpful, but then remembers mocking this Indian Facebook guru's koan: Unsolicited advice is violence. "You know it's a hoax, right?" Rocks is impervious to koans.]
I have examined, even actually read, Levenson's novelette about a magic wand. Found it pretty engaging at first. The MC's a Christian soldier whose faith prevents his performing magic, paying tribute to non-Christian deities or enjoying premarital sex. But he can and does kick ass. Tight, easy to parse prose that's well paced. But after being reminded for maybe the fifth or sixth time of his Christianity's preventing his doing this or that, which in some cases (though not sex) he does nonetheless, I began to wonder, as I do about a great many submissions that pass across my little lift-top desk, if it wasn't originally crafted to some other venue's theme, preference or bias. Christian fiction is a very tough sell for me, but even so, had it not dragged on (or perhaps dragged on longer?) I might have swallowed it. It feels like it might have been excerpted from some greater word count. If not, it should be expanded into a novel, a trilogy, whatever the market will bear. Christians, as evidenced by The Holy Bible, suffer from a dearth of readable fiction. This could really go places. Just not here.
[Hands trembling, expression conflicted, slowly, Rocks feeds 61 pages into the Porthole's gaping maw whence, one by one, they are swallowed into the deluge. Then he sits and holds his malformed face in hands unscathed by labor.]
|
|
|
|
Wk 14
Jun 4, 2020 19:43:00 GMT
Post by bulldust on Jun 4, 2020 19:43:00 GMT
So the magic wand wasn't even worth fifteen dollars? MoOOOooooOO?
|
|
|
|
Wk 14
Jun 5, 2020 0:55:30 GMT
Post by carol on Jun 5, 2020 0:55:30 GMT
[Carol settles into the pilot's chair, and she scrunches her lips, she exhales a lungful of weed smoke]
Gardner's Roges and Rue has been motherfucking Terminaled, bitches! We'll see what happens with that. Right?
[Carol goes to her knees in front of the Cherrywood and she pulls some fresh capital from the desktop and throws it all out in front of her]
You fuckers keep sending shit.
[Carol spreads out the current capital. She begins to examine the stuff]
|
|
|
|
Wk 14
Jun 5, 2020 3:44:39 GMT
Post by rorschalk on Jun 5, 2020 3:44:39 GMT
Shit it's like a party down here!
[The Rorschalk pulls his mask up over his silken pantaloons, wearing it like a proper cod piece instead of the hypoxic pox pon their houses and begins to do Floss, not well mind you, skipping the most important beat wherein both his fists complete one parallel line in front of his body, so that he just looks like a spastic clown ...]
Look at me ma, I'm doin' the Dance Macabre! A plage upon your goddamn houses ... hey
[stopping the gyrating on a proverbial and actual dime, he spies the sparkle of the silver dot upon the Simoning disco tiles and bends down to snatch it up in his pecuniary fingers. Holding it twixt his pointer and his thumb, he draws it to his canines and bites it]
Eureka! Say [he deposits the coin in his cod piece and pivots around to face the dingy watered tartarus-like aquarium of the one and future Sturgeon]
Where's the fish?
[He spins his wheels then gets traction, runs and leaps, pulling himself up to the open topped seeming telephone box if it's an acre and dunks his head in the fetid soup]
He should be responding to my whale calls soon, I'll wager.
[He lets himself fall and lands heavy on the cold, tile ground, collapsing there to writhe and roll like a grieving soul who's just been told their winning lottery ticket disintegrated in the laundry]
Ahhhhh, Boli-guard!!!!!!! Where art thou?
[He buries his head in his arms and weeps, snotting, onto the Floor]
|
|
|
|
Wk 14
Jun 8, 2020 16:41:04 GMT
Post by rockefeller on Jun 8, 2020 16:41:04 GMT
When I sub (and don't we all?) I round the word count down to the nearest hundred or so. By informing a publisher that my masterpiece contains, say, exactly 11,103 words, I feel that I'm implying each has been rent from the very fabric of my soul and that not a single precious one is expendable, which, even though each has been and none are, I do not wish to convey. I wish rather to convey that my words, malleable and expendable, flow as water from a bottomless well or pus from a lanced boil. Not sure why.
Anyway, regarding Devit's 4501 word (of which 92 are "Grace") offering: I found compelling prose carrying an uncompelling narrative. Margaret's a good girl who just wants to be liked by her employer and support her family so her little sisters can pick flowers to their hearts' content. Her employer's an eccentric bit of royalty with human resource problems, a nice old lady who just wants to dance with her deceased husband.
Geez, she offered you a donut. Chill.
Perhaps a bit much pluperfect backstory.
Given correct punctuation and grammar, and a reasonably strong voice, acceptance depends more on a reader's intelligence, preferences, interests, biases, and even mood, than on the writing itself. In other words, here I am the wrong reader at the wrong time reading for the wrong market. If I thought there was half a chance the Terminali here would disagree, I'd send it up. But I do not.
Kudos on the crafting though. Saw only one small nit:
Outside a crescendo soared, then dipped down into a sonata, it’s tune slow and melancholy.
|
|
|
|
Wk 14
Jun 8, 2020 19:22:07 GMT
Post by rockefeller on Jun 8, 2020 19:22:07 GMT
[Carol appears to be ignoring Rocks' surreptitious one-eyed scrutinizations. It's hard to say in this light, from this vantage. Could she be? He wants to, but has learned the hard way never to ask.]
My granddaughter was born last September, pursuant to numerous ultrasounds and fetal weight estimates. Despite assurances that all looked well, I worried about Down syndrome and rarer aneuploidies, really anything other than the physical and genetic perfection that was her birthright. So I'm confident that if, instead of a healthy fetus, she'd been a huge bug, someone would have noticed.
But here we have a gruesome viral pandemic that affects only pregnant women. Symptoms include—are actually limited to—the premature (second trimester) delivery of a giant insect that immediately bites off the head of its birth mother. These things' gestation is normal until birth, and no study of their larval growth or genome has been done. What they eventually mature into is not explored either. One can assume that all (not just pregnant women) may be, and probably are, asymptomatic carriers of this virus, else how would it spread? One might wonder why a simple abortion couldn't remedy the situation, a hole the author tries belatedly and unsuccessfully to fill. So, not science fiction, but rather some humor/horror hybrid.
But even so, I found it not credible enough to horrify, and not quite (though almost) funny enough to amuse.
[In shoving Ridings' pages out the porthole, Rocks receives a small but excruciatingly painful paper cut. He howls, then pauses in reflection. Can it be? No. He resumes feeding.]
|
|
|
|
Wk 14
Jun 9, 2020 0:57:07 GMT
Post by carol on Jun 9, 2020 0:57:07 GMT
You are fucking okay, fuckers.
[Carol teethes her lower lip. On the desktop is strewn multiple capitals, but she seems to have it under control. She corrals one of the capital leftward, the other rightward. She's smiling, which is awesome. She tugs on her face screen, leftward, easing the tension behind her ears]
Fuck me!
[So Carol is quaking, her mountain is shaking. I mean she is practically bat-shit crazy]
Okay. So, folks, whoever you are, and I do believe with all my heart that there are no folks out there at all, but we must continue broadcasting. God damn it. The show must go on.
[Carol burps, holds her palm to her chest. She thumbs in NWA's Real Niggers Don't Die. The speakers up in the rafters exude awesomeness]
Fucking heartburn. But, okay., John Leahy's The Madahilm has been Portholed. Portholed it while you fuckers weren't lookin'. Shoved it under the Cherrywood and burned it. Hah! And, oh yeah, I Portholed Margaret Karmazin's Triage. I fucking ate that prose, cousin. Both, gone. And...shit. I do not feel well. But that's normal. You're all going to abhor me, the blessed child. Right?
|
|
|
|
Wk 14
Jun 11, 2020 1:07:44 GMT
Post by carol on Jun 11, 2020 1:07:44 GMT
And now you're all snuffed, pussies. Sad to fuck.
[Carol makes her arms go all magic shit over the top of her desktop, waving and worming]
We got us a new fucking capital, cousins. Joseph's A Sleeping Sickness. And, you know, we tug on our timeline here and there, but, shady, we have already decided the terminal level, ah, yeah, this bitch will land. 'Grats, bitch. Right? In other fucking words, Joseph's A Sleeping Sickness has been Terminaled. It is that good.
|
|
