Post by rorschalk on Aug 26, 2020 17:54:11 GMT
Dear Mr. Ziemer,
THE WINDMILL did not make it up off the floor. See Rockefeller's critique below. Thank you for the submission and I look foward to doing business with you in the future.
TQR
***
Best thing about this windmill cap was its engineering knowledge. Like most things that go over my head, it lent veracity to the narrative. When it comes to professional stuff, if I can understand you perfectly, I assume you're as full of shit as I am, and lose the ability to suspend disbelief. So the yarn is believable enough in this regard. Its Swedish-ness also felt authentic. Like no one says, "Yes." Everyone always says, "Ja." Also, I had no idea that in Sweden, "the allemansrätten gives every man the right to roam wherever he wishes, on property public or private.” Holy crap! Talk about a nice place to visit, but terrible place to live. Young couple stops screwing and asks, "Hey, who the fuck are you and why are you in our bedroom?" Teacher with a group of students in tow answers, "Health-ed field trip. Don't mind us. Allemansrätten. Please continue."
The writing's okay, too. Not bursting with literary devices. Not particularly droll. But competent enough. The only nit I stumbled across was in, "a gulp of the tepid water he’d brought with from Stockholm," where there's either a superfluous "with" or a missing pronoun, which, yes, could be implied, although such grammatical efficiency isn't really this VC's bailiwick. Sentences like, "Switching off the car, Carl sent a quick text message on his phone and then sat for a minute enjoying the view," while perfectly coherent and correct, employ too many words. Like I don't care if the car is or is not running; I can assume it was a "message" he texted, and that he used his phone to quickly do this instead of, say, a carrier pigeon or smoke signals or whatever. Though it's nice he was able to then enjoy the view. Also, while I'm carping on narrative necessity and grammatical efficiency, 259 of this cap's 10,000+ words are the word, of. E.g.:
the wildflowers of the plain
the cries of gulls
the perimeter of the concrete pad
the bucket of his machine
of which I would guess more than half could be omitted along with at least one preceding "the" by using possessives. E.g.:
the plain's wildflowers
gull's cries
the concrete pad's perimeter
his machine's bucket
for a conservative net saving of, say, 500 words, though probably way more. Like maybe even ten percent, four of this cap's forty pages, could be omitted by judicious use of the apostrophe.
Exacerbating the story's garrulous pace is a lot of repetition. I got that the kvarn was haunted, the vanishing stinky old guy was a ghost, that there was a baby buried somewhere and that bad tidings were afoot long before so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so revealed this lore.
Also, and this is more a personal thing: ghosts aren't scary; the living are scary. Doomey is scary. And if everyone who was ever mistreated or wronged, or died with unfinished business wound up haunting something, well... this would be one haunted place. No-ooooooo-oooooooooooo. Sorry.